That’s the milestone Amazon just crossed. As The Wall Street Journal notes, it’s coming up fast on the company’s total human workforce, which the paper estimates at 1.56 million people right now, and as Amazon’s CEO has said is likely to go down over the next few years.
The million includes the new touch-sensitive Vulcan robot unveiled last month, though probably not Amazon’s rumored work on autonomous humanoid delivery robots.
Android Headlines says it has the specs for the two new Pro Pixels, a week after dropping the details of the base model.
It sounds like not much is changing from last year on the hardware side, but the XL model will reportedly start from 256GB of storage, double the 10 Pro’s 128GB, suggesting Google is trying the same ploy Apple used to justify the iPhone 15 Pro Max price jump in 2023.
[androidheadlines.com]
The Guardian reports that a letter was sent to executives last month, representing more than 200 Amazon employees, accusing the company of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Complaints center around last year’s revamp of the company’s work-from-home policies for disabled employees, which workers also claim have been processed using AI automations. They further allege that the deletion of some Slack messages infringes their rights to organize.
That’s what Apple is working on next, at least according to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. The more affordable MacBook would use the same A18 Pro chip found in the iPhone 16 Pro series, and pack a 13-inch display and colorful finishes like silver, blue, pink, and yellow.
Apparently Apple is aiming to sell 5-7 million of them too, making up more than a fifth of its overall laptop sales.
The Brad Pitt-starring racing drama opened to more than $55 million in the US this weekend, and $144 million worldwide. That’s still a ways short of the movie’s $200-300 million production budget, but it’s easily on track to beat the $221 million-earning Napoleon as Apple’s biggest film yet.
Sadly we may never know how many of those ticket sales came from the unexpectedly pushy ads in Apple Wallet notifications.
The Magic V5 will launch in China on July 2nd, and we know almost nothing about it except that Honor says it will be the slimmest around, allowing the company to reclaim the super-thin title it held with last year’s Magic V3.
That means it must be thinner than the Oppo Find N5’s 8.93mm when shut, but will it beat Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 7, also launching in July and tipped to be slim?
The ex-Apple designer, now working on AI hardware for OpenAI, just joined the British Museum’s board of trustees. The London museum is going through a huge redevelopment, ominously dubbed “The Masterplan,” and it sounds like Ive will give guidance on how tech could be a part of that. No word yet on who he thinks should have the Parthenon sculptures.
[britishmuseum.org]
Yesterday Google announced updates to its Gemini models, including a new 2.5 Flash-Lite, but didn’t mention a bigger change: the Gemini app apparently now lets you upload videos for analysis, asking Gemini to describe clips or answer questions about video content.
I say “apparently” because the option hasn’t appeared on our devices yet, though 9to5Google says availability “varies,” so you might be lucky. It’s only for iOS and Android, with no web support yet.
[9to5google.com]
Sydney-based Vow is the first lab-grown meat manufacturer approved to launch Down Under. Vow, which has sold its meat under the Forged brand in Singapore since last year, offers quail foie gras and pâté, plus a quail-based candle you can dip food into as it melts.
They say they “craft entirely new, never before seen (or eaten) meats,” which is certainly one way to get around how hard it is to make a lab-grown steak.
