An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Riding a bicycle in New York City is often a harrowing journey across a patchwork of bike lanes that leave cyclists vulnerable to cars. The dangers came into focus this year after 25 cyclists were killed on city streets -- the highest toll in two decades. Now Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City Council have agreed on a $1.7 billion plan that would sharply expand the number of protected bike lanes as part of a sweeping effort to transform the city's streetscape and make it less perilous for bikers. Its chief proponent, Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, calls it nothing less than an effort to "break the car culture.'' Such ambitions show how far New York has come since around 2007 when the city, under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, started aggressively taking away space for cars by rolling out bike lanes and pedestrian plazas.

Under pressure from the City Council, the city would be required to build 250 miles of protected bike lanes in the coming years, along with a dizzying list of other street upgrades that safety advocates have long called for. The city now has about 1,250 miles of bike lanes, including 126 miles on city streets that are protected, meaning that a barrier separates the lanes from vehicles. The bill calls for the Transportation Department to release a plan every five years to make streets safer and to prioritize public transit, starting in December 2021. The city must hit targets every year, including building 150 miles of bus lanes that are physically separated from other traffic lanes or monitored by cameras over five years.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players will no longer be able to trade container keys between accounts because the trade was part of a massive worldwide fraud network. From a report: Players earned cases in Counter-Strike containing weapons and cosmetic upgrades, but had to purchase the keys to open the boxes. Developer Valve runs an internal marketplace on Steam where it allowed players to trade the boxes and the keys. Valve patched the game on October 28 and explained the problem in its patch notes. "In the past, most key trades we observed were between legitimate customers," the statement said. "However, worldwide fraud networks have recently shifted to using CS:GO keys to liquidate their gains. At this point, nearly all key purchases that end up being traded or sold on the marketplace are believed to be fraud-sourced."

Rei writes: After two profitable quarters last year, Tesla was hit by a perfect storm of filled U.S. backlog, S/X cannibalization by Model 3, a botched international launch, and price cuts due to U.S. tax credit phaseouts, leading to a very poor Q1 showing. While cashflow went positive in Q2, profits remained elusive, and -- relying on lower-cost Model 3 variants with minimal U.S. tax credits -- expectations for Q3 weren't much better.

Instead, Tesla posted a blowout quarter: $5.3 billion record cash on hand, profits ($143M GAAP, $342M non-GAAP), margins rising from 18.9% to 22.8%, and sizeable growth in both solar and storage. Across the board, the company ran ahead of schedule: volume production of Model Y is pulled forward to next summer; Gigafactory 3 in Shanghai is producing cars and awaiting final sales certification after being built up from a muddy field in 10 months at a third the capital cost per vehicle; Semi (previously suggested as slipping to 2021) is back to 2020 production; and the production version of the solar roof tiles will be launching at an event on Thursday. The new, shipping crate-format Megapack energy storage products start being installed this quarter. As for vehicles, the company continues to be production constrained, with significant wait times on new orders in all markets; annual production and sales guidance of 360-400k was reiterated. Model S/X production is being raised to make up for new demand for the "Raven" update. On the self-driving front, while the company launched Smart Summon at the end of Q3, only $30 million of revenue was recognized because of it; half a billion dollars of unrecognized Full Self Driving (FSD) revenue remains on the books for future quarters. The company reiterated guidance of FSD being "feature complete" (handling all driving from driveway to destination, with supervision) by the end of this year at least as a limited prerelease, and capability for unsupervised driving by the end of next year, limited by the rate of regulatory approvals. Also announced as upcoming in the next few weeks: OTA upgrades for range on new Model S/X vehicles, a 3% OTA performance improvement to S/X, and a 5% performance improvement for Model 3.

During the earnings call, Musk credited the surge in progress in Tesla's non-core divisions to being able to dedicate more engineering and financial resources to them after stabilizing Model 3 production rates and costs. Tesla's stock surged 20% in aftermarket trading, equivalent to the company's second-highest percentage gain ever, and its highest in absolute terms. Electrek, The Financial Times, and CNBC are reporting Tesla's third-quarter earnings.

Five years after CBS publicized the fact that the Air Force still used eight-inch floppy disks to store data critical to operating the Air Force's intercontinental ballistic missile command, the aerial and space warfare service branch decided it was time to officially retire them. Ars Technica reports: The system, once called the Strategic Air Command Digital Network (SACDIN), relied on IBM Series/1 computers installed by the Air Force at Minuteman II missile sites in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite the contention by the Air Force at the time of the 60 Minutes report that the archaic hardware offered a cybersecurity advantage, the service has completed an upgrade to what is now known as the Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS), as Defense News reports. SAACS is an upgrade that swaps the floppy disk system for what Lt. Col. Jason Rossi, commander of the Air Force's 595th Strategic Communications Squadron, described as a "highly secure solid state digital storage solution." The floppy drives were fully retired in June.

But the IBM Series/1 computers remain, in part because of their reliability and security. And it's not clear whether other upgrades to "modernize" the system have been completed. Air Force officials have acknowledged network upgrades that have enhanced the speed and capacity of SACCS' communications systems, and a Government Accountability Office report in 2016 noted that the Air Force planned to "update its data storage solutions, port expansion processors, portable terminals, and desktop terminals by the end of fiscal year 2017." But it's not clear how much of that has been completed.

The Seattle Times: Seven weeks after the second fatal crash of a 737 MAX in March, a Boeing engineer submitted a scathing internal ethics complaint alleging that management -- determined to keep down costs for airline customers -- had blocked significant safety improvements during the jet's development. The ethics charge, filed by 33-year-old engineer Curtis Ewbank, whose job involved studying past crashes and using that information to make new planes safer, describes how around 2014 his group presented to managers and senior executives a proposal to add various safety upgrades to the MAX. The complaint, a copy of which was reviewed by The Seattle Times, suggests that one of the proposed systems could have potentially prevented the crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people. Three of Ewbank's former colleagues interviewed for this story concurred.

The details revealed in the ethics complaint raise new questions about the culture at Boeing and whether the long-held imperative that safety must be the overarching priority was compromised on the MAX by business considerations and management's focus on schedule and cost. Managers twice rejected adding the new system on the basis of "cost and potential (pilot) training impact," the complaint states. It was then raised a third time in a meeting with 737 MAX chief project engineer, Michael Teal, who cited the same objections as he killed the proposal.

"After years of countless reviews, discussions, and code rewrites, Linus Torvalds approved on Saturday a new security feature for the Linux kernel, named 'lockdown'," reports ZDNet: The new feature will ship as a LSM (Linux Security Module) in the soon-to-be-released Linux kernel 5.4 branch, where it will be turned off by default; usage being optional due to the risk of breaking existing systems. The new feature's primary function will be to strengthen the divide between userland processes and kernel code by preventing even the root account from interacting with kernel code -- something that it's been able to do, by design, until now.

When enabled, the new "lockdown" feature will restrict some kernel functionality, even for the root user, making it harder for compromised root accounts to compromise the rest of the OS... "When enabled, various pieces of kernel functionality are restricted," said Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel creator, and the one who put the final stamp of approval on the module yesterday. This includes restricting access to kernel features that may allow arbitrary code execution via code supplied by userland processes; blocking processes from writing or reading /dev/mem and /dev/kmem memory; block access to opening /dev/port to prevent raw port access; enforcing kernel module signatures; and many more others, detailed here.

The new OnePlus 7T was officially announced earlier today, bringing a speedier Snapdragon 855+ processor, 90Hz display, and more camera sensors for $599 -- nearly $100 less than the base model OnePlus 7 Pro. From a report: There are more upgrades found in the OnePlus 7T's display. The OP7T's 6.55-inch 2400x1080 AMOLED screen includes a 90Hz refresh rate, helping to make the screen feel smoother, and OnePlus has also upgraded the in-display fingerprint sensor on its new device. OnePlus claims that the OP7T has the "fastest, smoothest fingerprint unlock anywhere." Another major upgrade of the OnePlus 7T is on its backside. OnePlus has given the 7T a triple rear camera setup, up from the dual cameras found on the OnePlus 7. The triple rear cam system on the OnePlus 7T includes a 48MP main sensor with f/1.6 aperture and OIS, a 16MP ultra-wide camera with a 117-degree field of view, and a 12MP telephoto camera with a 2x optical zoom.

OnePlus has included ultra-wide Nightscape support for low-light shooting and Super Stable Video to better stabilize your video captures, and 4K video capture at 60fps. Slow-mo video recording is available at 1080p at 240fps or 720p at 480fps, and soon OnePlus will be slowing things down even more, adding 720p video recording at 960fps through a future software update. Around front there's a 16MP selfie camera in a waterdrop notch that OnePlus says is smaller than the notch found on last year's OnePlus 6T. OnePlus has packed the OP7T with 128GB of built-in UFS 3.0 storage, 8GB of RAM, USB-C, stereo speakers, Bluetooth 5.0, NFC, and Android 10 running out of the box. The OnePlus 7T launches on October 18 at a price of $599. The device will be sold exclusively by T-Mobile, though Verizon and AT&T users can buy an unlocked version from OnePlus' website.

MojoKid writes: Gamer-targeted smartphones are beginning to pop up more often now, with devices like the Razer Phone 2, Xiaomi Black Shark, and the ASUS ROG Phone making waves in the market with performance enthusiasts. The latest release from ASUS, the ROG Phone II sports a specially binned chip from Qualcomm called the Snapdragon 855+. The higher performance SoC sports an octa-core CPU clocked at 2.96GHz, paired with an overclocked Adreno 640 GPU that can boost its performance up to 15 percent above spec. A generous 12GB of RAM, 1TB of storage and a 120Hz 6.59 FHD display trim out the rest of the ASUS ROG Phone II's specs. In addition, an enhanced on-board cooling system features a 3D vapor chamber, heat spreaders, and cooling pads that efficiently dissipate heat from inside the phone to the outside. It is designed to be above spec for the Snapdragon 855 chipset and necessary to keep 855+ stable during long gaming sessions. In benchmark testing, there's no question these system upgrades put up significantly better numbers than the average high-end Android phone on the market these days, such that the phone is about 10% faster than devices like Samsung's Galaxy Note 10 or the OnePlus 7 Pro. The ASUS ROG Phone II will be available later this month but pricing is still being determined.

Apple today unveiled the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max, its new smartphone lineup. While the 11 is the cheaper alternative following the iPhone XR -- there are a few design changes, like a "surgical-grade stainless steel" case and matte finish, but the iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max are more focused on cramming in as much power as possible. About the iPhone 11: Like last year's model, the iPhone 11 includes a 6.1-inch display, and the design is almost identical to last year, too, with the notch at the front for the Face ID camera. Apple is adding new color options, with purple, white, green, yellow, black, and red all available. Apple's biggest design changes are in the camera at the rear of the device. Last year's iPhone XR had a single 12-megapixel wide-angle camera, but the iPhone 11 now includes a dual-camera system with an additional 12-megapixel ultra-wide camera that supports 2x optical zoom. There's even a new immersive camera interface that lets you see outside the frame, so you can see the details of the photos you're taking with the ultra-wide camera. [...] Inside the iPhone 11 is Apple's latest A13 Bionic processor, and naturally it's the "fastest CPU in a smartphone" and also the "fastest GPU in a smartphone." Apple demonstrated the performance on stage with a game called Pascal's Wager, which is launching on the App Store next month with some pretty impressive looking mobile graphics. Other than the gaming demo, Apple didn't reveal any additional performance improvements with the A13. It starts at $699. The 5.8-inch iPhone 11 Pro and 6.5-inch iPhone 11 Pro Max: Despite the number change, the two phones look pretty similar to last year's iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max, but with one major change: a third rear camera. Apple's also upgraded the display to a new OLED panel, which goes up to an even brighter 1,200 nits, a 2 million to 1 contrast ratio, and is 15 percent more energy efficient. Apple calls it a Super Retina XDR display (similar branding to the Pro Display XDR that the company announced earlier this year). Apple also claims that the glass here is the "toughest glass in a smartphone." Just like the standard iPhone 11, the new iPhone 11 Pro models will feature Apple's A13 Bionic chip which Apple says has both the fastest CPU and GPU ever in a smartphone. Apple also touted improved machine learning performance ("the best machine learning platform in a smartphone," it says).

Apple says that with all the improvements to efficiency, the 5.8-inch iPhone 11 Pro should get up to four hours better battery life than last year's XS, and the larger iPhone 11 Pro Max will get up to five hours better battery than the XS Max. The new camera system is one of the standout upgrades (quite literally, as it dominates the back of the phone in a gigantic square camera module). The new lens is a 12-megapixel ultra-wide lens with a 120-degree field of view, joining the wide-angle and telephoto cameras Apple has offered in the past. The telephoto camera also is getting an upgrade with a larger Æ'/2.0 aperture, which Apple says will capture up to 40 percent more light compared to the XS camera. And like the iPhone 11, the front-facing camera is now a 12 megapixel sensor, and can shoot both 4K and slow-motion videos. The iPhone 11 Pro will start at $999, and the iPhone 11 Pro Max will start at $1199.

A new study released by Strategy Analytics reflects the current state of the smartphone industry. Apparently, consumers in the US -- Baby Boomers, in particular -- are increasingly delaying their smartphone purchase for three or more years. From a report: In addition, the average iPhone now remains active for 18 months, while the average Samsung phone remains active for 16.5. The era of yearly phone upgrades is over. Smartphone shipments have been dropping around the world over the past year, and some analysts even believe the industry is bound to suffer its worst decline ever in the coming months. Strategy Analytics conducted an online survey with 2,500 smartphone owners aged 18 to 64 years old in the US. Company SVP David Kerr explained that there are several reasons behind consumers' decision not upgrade as quickly as they did in the past. To start with, buyers perceive newer phones' offerings as marginal upgrades not worth getting a new device for.

Alphabet' Google has shut down a service it provided to wireless carriers globally that showed them weak spots in their network coverage, Reuters reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter, because of Google's concerns that sharing data from users of its Android phone system might attract the scrutiny of users and regulators. From the report: The withdrawal of the service, which has not been previously reported, has disappointed wireless carriers that used the data as part of their decision-making process on where to extend or upgrade their coverage. Even though the data were anonymous and the sharing of it has become commonplace, Google's move illustrates how concerned the company has become about drawing attention amid a heightened focus in much of the world on data privacy. Google's Mobile Network Insights service, which had launched in March 2017, was essentially a map showing carriers signal strengths and connection speeds they were delivering in each area. The service was provided free to carriers and vendors that helped them manage operations. The data came from devices running Google's Android operating system, which is on about 75% of the world's smartphones, making it a valuable resource for the industry. [...] Nevertheless, Google shut down the service in April due to concerns about data privacy, four people with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters. Some of them said secondary reasons likely included challenges ensuring data quality and connectivity upgrades among carriers being slow to materialize.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: British Airways announced that it is testing out virtual reality headsets for the rest of this year on flights between London's Heathrow and New York City's John F. Kennedy airport. The airline is tapping SkyLights for the VR eyewear headsets that will be available for its first-class passengers. The AlloSky hardware can present 3D views even when the viewer is lying flat. As far as programming, British Airways will have options. The VR headsets will offer visual entertainment in 2D, 3D, or 360-degree formats. The airline will also provide more therapeutic programs to help people who have a fear of flying. These VR experiences include guided meditation and sound therapy. This marks the first time British Airways is bringing virtual reality onto its aircrafts. The company also used SkyLights' hardware at its ticket counters in Heathrow to show passengers the experience of its first-class travel in an effort to encourage upgrades.

At the Flash Memory Summit today, Toshiba introduced a new form factor for NVMe SSDs that is small enough to be a removable alternative to soldered-down BGA SSDs. "The new XFMEXPRESS form factor allows for two or four PCIe lanes while taking up much less space than even the smallest M.2 22x30mm card size," reports AnandTech. "The XFMEXPRESS card size is 18x14x1.4mm, slightly larger and thicker than a microSD card. It mounts into a latching socket that increases the footprint up to 22.2x17.75x2.2mm." From the report: XFMEXPRESS is intended to bring the benefits of replaceable storage to devices that would normally be stuck with soldered BGA SSDs or eMMC and UFS modules. For consumer devices this opens the way for aftermarket capacity upgrades, and for embedded devices that need to be serviceable this can permit smaller overall dimensions. Device manufacturers also get a bit of supply chain flexibility since storage capacity can be adjusted later in the assembly process. XFMEXPRESS is not intended to be used as an externally-accessible slot like SD cards; swapping out an XFMEXPRESS SSD will require opening up the case of the device it's installed in, though unlike M.2 SSDs the XFMEXPRESS socket and retention mechanism itself is tool-less.

XFMEXPRESS will allow for similar performance to BGA SSDs. The PCIe x4 host interface will generally not be the bottleneck, especially in the near future when BGA SSDs start adopting PCIe gen4, which the XFMEXPRESS connector can support. Instead, SSDs in these small form factors are often thermally limited, and the XFMEXPRESS connector was designed to allow for easy heat dissipation with a metal lid that can serve as a heatspreader.

On Sunday, Intel held a five-hour event, where 100 attendees from startups, venture capital, and tech giants drank in semiconductor-themed cocktails and detailed explanations of how sand is processed into silicon chips. It was a celebration of how exponential upgrades from the chip industry have propelled progress in technology and society over the past 50 years -- and an argument that the party's not over. From a report: "It's going to keep going," said Jim Keller, a semiconductor rock star who joined Intel last year as senior vice president of silicon engineering, and a cohost of the event. "Moore's law is relentless," he added, referring to the 54-year-old assertion by a former Intel CEO that the number of transistors that could be fit onto a silicon chip would double on a predictable schedule.

Intel still dominates the market for server chips that power cloud computing, but its two most recent generations of chip technology arrived late. [...] "The working title for this talk was 'Moore's law is not dead but if you think so you're stupid,'" he said Sunday. He asserted that Intel can keep it going and supply tech companies ever more computing power. His argument rests in part on redefining Moore's law. "I'm not pedantic about Moore's law talking just about transistors shrinking -- I'm interested in the technology trends and the physics and metaphysics around that," Keller says. "Moore's law is a collective delusion shared by millions of people."

Keller said Sunday that Intel can sustain that delusion, but that smaller transistors will be just one part of how. On the conventional side, he highlighted Intel's work on extreme ultraviolet lithography, which can etch smaller features into chips, and smaller transistor designs based on nano-scale wires due to arrive in the 2020s. Keller also said that Intel would need to try other tactics, such as building vertically, layering transistors or chips on top of each other. He claimed this approach will keep power consumption down by shortening the distance between different parts of a chip. Keller said that using nanowires and stacking his team had mapped a path to packing transistors 50 times more densely than possible with Intel's 10 nanometer generation of technology. "That's basically already working," he said.

MojoKid writes: NVIDIA just launched three new GeForce RTX gaming GPUs to battle against AMD's forthcoming Radeon RX 5700 series. The GeForce RTX 2080 Super, GeForce RTX 2070 Super and GeForce RTX 2060 Super will all be shipping this month. GeForce RTX 2070 Super and RTX 2060 Super cards are out making the rounds in benchmark reviews, while the RTX 2080 Super will arrive in a couple of weeks. The GeForce RTX 2070 Super is more than just an overclocked RTX 2070 but actually based on the GeForce RTX 2080's TU104 NVIDIA Turing GPU with 40 active SMs, for a total of 2,560 CUDA cores at 1,605MHz and 1,770MHz base and boost clocks, respectively. The RTX 2060 Super is still based on the original TU106 GPU, but it has four additional SMs enabled, which brings the CUDA core count up to 2,176 (from 1,920) at a somewhat higher 1470MHz base clock and boost clock 30MHz lower at 1,650MHz.

There is an additional 2GB of GDDR6 memory on the card too for a total of 8GB now. Performance-wise, both cards are significant upgrades over the originals, with roughly 10 -- 23 percent gains, depending on the resolution or application. The GeForce RTX 2070 Super is often faster than the pricier AMD Radeon VII, especially at 1440p. At 4K, however, the Radeon VII's memory bandwidth advantage often gives it an edge. The new GeForce RTX 2060 Super is faster than a Radeon RX Vega 64 more often than not. It will be interesting to see how these cards compete with AMD's Radeon RX 5700 Navi-based card when they arrive later this month. NVIDIA could have just thrown a wrench in the works for AMD.

AmiMoJo shared this post from one of the ACLU's senior technology policy analysts about what happens when security cameras get AI upgrades: [I]magine that all that video were being watched -- that millions of security guards were monitoring them all 24/7. Imagine this army is made up of guards who don't need to be paid, who never get bored, who never sleep, who never miss a detail, and who have total recall for everything they've seen. Such an army of watchers could scrutinize every person they see for signs of "suspicious" behavior. With unlimited time and attention, they could also record details about all of the people they see -- their clothing, their expressions and emotions, their body language, the people they are with and how they relate to them, and their every activity and motion...

The guards won't be human, of course -- they'll be AI agents.

Today we're publishing a report on a $3.2 billion industry building a technology known as "video analytics," which is starting to augment surveillance cameras around the world and has the potential to turn them into just that kind of nightmarish army of unblinking watchers.... Many or most of these technologies will be somewhere between unreliable and utterly bogus. Based on experience, however, that often won't stop them from being deployed -- and from hurting innocent people...

We are still in the early days of a revolution in computer vision, and we don't know how AI will progress, but we need to keep in mind that progress in artificial intelligence may end up being extremely rapid. We could, in the not-so-distant future, end up living under armies of computerized watchers with intelligence at or near human levels. These AI watchers, if unchecked, are likely to proliferate in American life until they number in the billions, representing an extension of corporate and bureaucratic power into the tendrils of our lives, watching over each of us and constantly shaping our behavior... Policymakers must contend with this technology's enormous power. They should prohibit its use for mass surveillance, narrow its deployments, and create rules to minimize abuse.
They argue that the threat is just starting to emerge. "It is as if a great surveillance machine has been growing up around us, but largely dumb and inert -- and is now, in a meaningful sense, 'waking up.'"

It's pretty much a given that next week's Apple Worldwide Developer Conference will bring new versions of MacOS and iOS. The real question is just how much convergence there will be between the 2 operating systems. From a report: The Mac remains popular even as the bulk of Apple's business is now selling phones and tablets, both of which have been increasing in computing power. Apple has long said it doesn't plan to merge its mobile and computer operating systems, but the two have been moving closer together recently. Apple offered a "sneak peek" last year at its multiyear effort (known internally as Marzipan) to allow programs written for iOS devices like the iPad to run on Macs with minimal changes.

Last year, the company said it was testing the technology first with its own apps, like Stocks and Voice Memos, and would offer other developers a chance to adapt their apps over time. Developers are champing at the bit for their taste of Marzipan, and WWDC could offer them a way in. Apple is likely to preview upgrades to its TV and watch operating systems and perhaps give a few more details on some of its new services, such as Arcade, a subscription iOS game service due out this fall.

Google "officially declared Kotlin the go-to language for Android development last week at its Google I/O developer conference," reports Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column, "and the company is backing that up with a couple of initiatives around making it easier (and free) to learn the language now used by a majority of Android developers." Google teamed up with Udacity to offer Developing Android Apps with Kotlin , a free, self-paced online course on how to build Android apps with Jetpack and Kotlin, meant for people who have programming experience and are comfortable with Kotlin basics. Google also announced "Kotlin/Everywhere, a series of community-driven events focussing on the potential of Kotlin on all platforms," which it is putting on in conjunction with JetBrains.

Of course, this leaves the question that has been asked many times before -- why Kotlin? -- and IT consultant Kristen Carter offers a take on how Android app development became Kotlin-first. Carter offers some business angles, such as the 2010 lawsuit against Google by Oracle, which predates Kotlin by just a year, and she speculates may have been the impetus behind the language's development as "Google has always wanted to get away from the [Java] ecosystem." At the same time, Carter offers some language-specific reasoning too, such as the comparably succinct nature of Kotlin, the absence of Java's NullPointerExceptions, and the ease with which Java developers could transition to Kotlin. Carter ends her piece by posing the possibility that Oracle "knows the significance of Java in android app development" and could "ship Java with a few upgrades in its next version to take on Kotlin."

In interviews with Bloomberg, current and former Apple employees say brand building became more important than serving shoppers. From the report: In interviews, current and former Apple employees blame a combination of factors. They say the stores have become mostly an exercise in branding and no longer do a good job serving mission shoppers like Smith. Meanwhile, they say, the quality of staff has slipped during an 18-year expansion that has seen Apple open more than 500 locations and hire 70,000 people. The Genius Bar, once renowned for its tech support, has been largely replaced with staff who roam the stores and are harder to track down. That's a significant drawback because people are hanging onto their phones longer these days and need them repaired. [...] Meanwhile, retail chief Angela Ahrendts (who was hired in May 2014) began moving sales and service onto the web -- encouraging staff to tell customers to "get in line, online." Customers were to make an appointment on Apple's website and then pick up the product at a store. Apple was "trying to streamline things," says one employee, "but in the process made things more difficult for some customers."

Before her arrival, the Apple Store excelled at three key tasks: selling products, helping customers trouble-shoot their devices and teaching them how to get the most out of their gadgets. "Steve Jobs was really keen on stepping into the store and knowing what to do," recalls a former Apple retail executive, who requested anonymity to speak freely. Mission shoppers who wanted to pick up a pair of headphones or an iPhone could get in and out quickly; those who wanted to learn more about their purchase could spend an hour getting trained by a Creative. If someone brought in a busted iPhone, a Genius would sort it out. Over time, according to several current and former employees, Ahrendts upset that finely tuned balance. "You don't feel like there is much engagement at the front of the store, there isn't a push to people," says the former executive. "The store should be a place where you see upgrades happening."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Wireless customers are hanging on to their old phones longer than ever. That's the message from Verizon, which said its upgrade rate fell to a record low last quarter -- a harbinger of tough times ahead for the iPhone and other devices. Faced with $1,000 price tags on moderately improved phones, consumers may be waiting to hear more about new 5G networks before committing to new models. The faster, more advanced services won't roll out in earnest until 2020. "Incremental changes from one model the the next, hasn't been that great, and it hasn't been enough of an incentive," Verizon Chief Financial Officer Matt Ellis said in an interview Tuesday after the company reported fewer-than-expected new customers for the first quarter. He expects replacement rates to be down for the year.