Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

After YouTube TV and NBCUniversal announced a “short” extension on Thursday to keep more than a dozen channels on the live TV service, YouTube TV and NBCUniversal say they have finalized a deal — meaning NBC-owned channels will stay put on YouTube TV.

“We’re thrilled to share that we’ve reached a deal to continue carrying the full NBCUniversal portfolio of channels,” according to a Saturday update to YouTube’s blog. “That means you won’t lose access to any of their channels, and YouTube TV will continue to offer 85+ networks for $64.99. We appreciate NBCUniversal’s willingness to work toward an agreement, and we also appreciate your patience as we negotiated with them on your behalf.”

With a deal reached just days after it looked as though the channels could get dropped, YouTube TV users will still have access to a dozen-plus channels that include:

NBC
Bravo
CNBC
E!
Golf Channel
MSNBC
Oxygen
SYFY
Telemundo
The Olympic Channel
Universal Kids
Universo
USA Network

Plus, regional sports networks:

NBC Sports Bay Area
NBC Sports Boston
NBC Sports California
NBC Sports Chicago
NBC Sports Philadelphia
NBC Sports Washington
SNY

YouTube TV had said that should the service lose the channels, it would have lowered its prices by $10 per month. But with a deal reached, the price will stay the same — and YouTube TV users will still be able to find their TV within one app without needing to subscribe elsewhere to get coverage from NBC-owned properties.

Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge

Tesla has bucked the wider trend of declining sales brought on by the global chip shortage in the third quarter this year, as it sold 241,300 cars — a total of 102,000 more vehicles than the same quarter last year. It’s the most Tesla has ever sold in a quarter (and for some added perspective, the company sold 367,500 in all of 2019).

The company managed to deliver more vehicles once again despite the fact that major automakers saw huge drops this past quarter. General Motors, the largest automaker in the US, said Friday morning that it only sold 446,997 vehicles in the third quarter — a 33 percent drop from the same period last year.

Tesla has avoided similar problems in part because it has been sourcing different semiconductors and rewriting software on the fly to make those chips work in place of the ones not currently available. Beyond that, the company continues to see strong sales in China, where it started making and selling vehicles in early 2020. The Model Y SUV has also become a popular option in the United States, and Tesla just started selling them in Europe, too.

Even more production is set to come online in the coming months, too, as Tesla has built an enormous part of its factory in Austin, Texas and is finally making it through some of the last approvals to start operating its new plant outside Berlin, Germany. That’s despite delaying some products, like the Cybertruck and second-generation Roadster.

Microsoft’s next version of Windows, Windows 11, is coming October 5th. In many ways, it’s already here — the free update has been available for Windows Insiders to download and test for months, and recent versions like the Release Preview will likely be indistinguishable from the final operating system.

We’ll have a full review from Tom Warren next week, but in the meanwhile we thought we’d give you a look at how The Verge at large feels about upgrading to the new OS — by asking every other prominent Windows user on the team to install the most recent version on their own home computers, and gathering their impressions.

Here’s how it’s going so far.

On a home-built desktop (Core i7-7700K, RTX 3060 Ti) and a 2017 Dell XPS 15 laptop (Core i7-7700HQ)

Windows 11 insists my desktop’s 7th-gen Intel CPU isn’t good enough, despite having practically every feature (and quite a bit more performance) than the lowest end 8th-gen chips on the company’s compatibility list. But that didn’t stop me from installing a copy of Windows 11 right over my copy of Windows 10 by using the ISO image — I just needed to turn on my TPM module and enable Secure Boot in my motherboard’s BIOS, and click through a scary warning message. (Windows disqualified my 7th-gen laptop and forced me to do a clean install, though, so I did a dual-boot there.)

Since then, it’s been a practically painless upgrade. Almost everything was exactly where I left it, and almost everything works just the way I’d expect, including PC games. (Wallpaper Engine did forget how to load new wallpaper at first, and there were a few times my system failed to wake from sleep.) My XPS 15’s fingerprint reader and nose-hair webcam are still terrible, but they’re no worse than they were on Windows 10 — Windows 11 pulled down all the drivers I needed automatically once again.

But nothing feels much better, either, so I don’t see any reason to upgrade. HDR is still a mess, and I’m with Tom on the Windows 11 taskbar: it’s a giant step back. It’s annoying to have to launch an app before I can pin it to my taskbar, and annoying to have to manually toggle on every icon I want in my system tray. Why do I have to launch an entire new window to adjust the volume mixer? Is there a reason why my audio devices are in a different place?

But I haven’t found enough wrong with Windows 11 to bother uninstalling it and going back. — Sean Hollister

On a 2019 Dell XPS 13 7390 laptop (Core i7-10710U)

I had a particularly bad time upgrading my last computer from Windows 7 to Windows 10 — I ended up having to wipe the system and start from scratch — so I was relieved and, to tell the truth, a little surprised at how smoothly this upgrade to Windows 11 went. Everything still works, and continues to work, so there’s no reason to do a panicked return to Windows 10. The only glitch I’ve experienced so far is that, just after upgrading, both the Chrome and the Edge browsers refused to show Facebook, but a reboot fixed that.

That being said, I am not thrilled with the new taskbar and Start menu. While I never got around to really customizing the Start menu the way Tom does, I did like the look of the tiles, and because I’m a rabid organizer, I really liked the way I could group the tiles to reflect the way I was working, and regroup them whenever I needed to for my current projects. This new taskbar, with its real lack of customization options, feels a little like Microsoft no longer trusts its users to be knowledgeable enough to handle a more complex menu system.

I’m just starting to explore Windows 11, so it’s possible I’ll find more things to like or dislike. But so far, it’s working fine for me — I’m just not sure I like it better. — Barbara Krasnoff

On a home-built desktop (Core i7-4770K, GTX 980 Ti)

I jumped through many hoops to install Windows 11 on my very unsupported, pre-TPM, non-Secure Boot personal desktop. I built this machine in 2014, upgraded it to a 980 Ti in 2015, and it has been my sole everyday personal computer for gaming and photography ever since. It’s been a solid performer on Windows 10 all these years, still meeting or exceeding minimum requirements for the games I play — of which I ask no more than 60 fps at modest settings.

To get Windows 11 installed, I used a Windows 10 ISO that I modified using part of the Windows 11 ISO, essentially tricking Windows 10 into upgrading to 11. The OS thought it was running a Windows 10 update, up until a Windows 11 login screen suddenly appeared. It all felt a bit dicey and very nerve-wracking, but it worked! It didn’t even require a wipe or clean install.

So how does Windows 11 run on a seven year-old unsupported machine after going through a process like that? Surprisingly, a whole lot like Windows 10. If you covered up the user interface changes and aligned the Start Menu on the left, I might have a hard time telling the difference. Lightroom Classic runs about as fine with my full frame camera RAW files as it normally does, which is just a notch or two above infuriating, but passable. Fall Guys still runs at a solid 60 fps. Diablo 2 Resurrected is usually between 55-60 fps with a mix of low and moderate settings. There were a few small hiccups here and there when I first booted up some of those games, but Windows 10 was not without the odd gremlin. Now that I got through that iffy update process, I can summarize my feelings toward Windows 11 with one big shruggie. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I don’t dislike it. I don’t love it either, but it looks kinda pretty. Sometimes a fresh coat of paint is all you need, annoying start menus and taskbars notwithstanding. — Antonio G. Di Benedetto

On a home-built desktop (Core i5-9600K, RTX 2070)

Okay, so I had a feeling that installing on my DIY PC was going to be a process. I failed the PC health checkup. “But doc! I feel fine,” I felt like my PC was saying. As if I had zero things to do on this particular day, I decided I’d try pretty much anything to get my PC to pass the test so it wouldn’t put up a fight during the installation process.

The big hurdle I (and my PC) had to overcome was converting the boot drive’s partition table type from MBR to GPT. Do I remember choosing MBR when I installed Windows 10? Not at all. Thankfully, Microsoft made a handy MBR2GPT.exe tool that can execute within Command Prompt, swiftly doing the lord’s work to my SSD while I poke around online. It might work for you. It did not work for me.

I kept failing the disk validation. Over and over. Running out of options, I made a bootable USB drive with GParted on it, with the hopes that it can do what this other tool couldn’t, so I could get on with my day. But at this point, I had already grown impatient at how long this stupid process was taking. I’m the only one who uses my PC! I don’t really need Secure Boot!

In my fervor for trying to wrap it up quickly, I, you know, deleted my entire OS. Of course there were important files on it. No, I don’t remember what they are just yet (and I hope to never remember so that I don’t feel regret for my impatience).

The good news, I guess, is that I have Windows 11 now. It’s fine, but I was content with the idea of using Windows 10 for the rest of my life. It ran well, and I just didn’t really think about what could be since it did everything I wanted it to. I guess I took it a little too seriously when Microsoft said that Windows 10 was the last version of Windows. — Cameron Faulkner

On a Lenovo ThinkPad T480 laptop (Core i5-8250U)

Since my Windows 10 install is filled to the brim with things that would be a pain to re-set up and various hacks that keep everything running, I decided not to risk anything and installed Windows 11 on a separate partition. Switching between them, I can say that Windows 11 looks much nicer to my eye — except for the fact that you can’t put the taskbar on the top, because Microsoft hates me.

I don’t have hours and hours of stability testing, but throughout the beta it’s been mostly fine except for one infuriating bug — if I plug or unplug my computer from power, it’ll freeze for a few seconds, and the screen will flash black a few times. This doesn’t happen in Windows 10, and it’s been a problem since I first installed the preview. I’ve also just recently started having issues with my LG UltraFine 5K as well. It’ll go black for a few seconds every minute or two, though Windows doesn’t seem to register that it’s dropped off. I get that it’s a Thunderbolt display mostly made for Macs, but these issues haven’t cropped up in Windows 10. Until they’re gone from my test install, I’d really rather not upgrade to Windows 11 on my main partition. Other than those issues, though, it’s been like using a prettier version of Windows 10.

One last quick note though: one of the things I was most excited about for Windows 11 was Visual Studio’s Hot Reload feature, where you’d be able to quickly test changes to your code without having to rebuild it. It turns out that I have it on Windows 10 now, and it hasn’t worked the few times I’ve tried to use it. Ah well. — Mitchell Clark

On a 2015 Surface Pro 4 (Core i5, 4GB RAM)

My Windows 11 journey was a bumpy ride. I started out with an outdated Windows 10 preview build on my Surface Pro 4, which meant I couldn’t get Windows Update to check my device’s eligibility for Windows 11. My device is from 2015 so it’s definitely out of the 5-year scope that Windows recommends for Windows 11.

Since I don’t have anything of value on this device, I decided to wipe this puppy with a clean install of the Windows 11 Release Preview. I downloaded the ISO from Microsoft, then used Rufus to format my USB drive and create the bootable USB. I plugged in the USB and my little machine did the rest.

The most notable difference between Windows 10 and Windows 11 for the SP4: my touchscreen is quite laggy if not entirely useless, especially at start-up. I have to use my mouse and keyboard to navigate the login, when I usually can swipe up to enter my password (now my Windows Pin). While some of the new features like Windows Snap work well, I was disappointed (though not surprised) that my default web browser Firefox doesn’t support it yet. Also, where is my list of apps? — Gloria Sin

On an Alienware R10 (Ryzen 5600X, RTX 3070, 32GB RAM), a 2020 Dell XPS 13 (Core i7-1165G7, 16GB) and a 2015 XPS 13 (Core i5-5200U, 8GB)

One of my machines is old enough that it originally shipped with Windows 8, and I was surprised to find it didn’t meet Microsoft’s minimum supported specs for Windows 11. It has Secure Boot and TPM 2.0, but the Core i5 CPU is a few generations too old for their liking. Despite that, performing a clean install was as easy as ever and it flew by without so much as a warning. Windows 11 performs just as well on that old laptop as Windows 10 ever did — and much better than Windows 8 — despite the limitations imposed by just 8GB of RAM.

On a more modern version of the same XPS 13, I never looked back after installing a beta version of Windows 11. Other than that minor snafu with the Start menu disappearing one night, it didn’t have any problems. On that machine more than any other I appreciate the various tweaks to the UI, it feels at home and performs like it.

On my desktop is where I ran into the biggest snag — Tom’s pet issue about the lack of clock display on all monitors — but also one of the most significant benefits. A new Snap Layouts feature makes it much easier to align Tweetdeck, Chrome, and Slack on my main screen.

The only thing that made me regret upgrading wasn’t on these computers, and it’s not a problem with Windows 11. While trying to downgrade back to Windows 10 on a different computer I was giving to a friend, the installation process ran into a still-unfixed driver issue with the Windows 10 setup process and blue screened. If there’s a chance you might have to roll back, then don’t forget you’ll be doing it to an older/finickier OS, and one that annoyingly pops up Cortana for some reason. Otherwise, I didn’t see any problem with updating right away. — Richard Lawler

On a home-built desktop (Ryzen 9 5900X, RTX 3090)

Compared to some of my colleagues’ tribulations, my process to upgrade to Windows 11 was mercifully simple. Outside of making sure that all my files were backed up on an external hard drive and then securely locked away in a shielded bunker and a certain amount of trepidation, everything from start to finish mostly went off without a hitch.

The now Cortana-less setup is definitely an improvement, but I’m still peeved by the amount of preferences and services I need to opt in/out of. C’mon Microsoft, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times, stop trying to make OneDrive work for me, it’s not going to happen. I could understand this barrage of questions if I was performing a fresh installation, but if I’m upgrading, I would’ve expected it to remember my preferences.

Once I’d finally gotten my preferences where I wanted them and booted up, the most apparent change was the default placement of the start menu. Having the little Windows icon in the center of the taskbar took a little getting used to, but after using it for a while, I can’t imagine putting it anywhere else.

While I’m glad that the start menu is far less cluttered I wish Microsoft would give us more freedom to customize that space. Why let me get rid of the recommended tab if I can’t use that space for something else?

These are all minor quibbles of course, considering the hoops that some of my colleagues had to jump through. But all things considered, I’m glad I upgraded to Windows 11, and I’m happy with the direction Microsoft is taking. — Alice Newcome-Beill

On a home-built desktop (Ryzen 5 5600X, RTX 3080) and a Razer Blade 14 laptop (Ryzen 9 5900HX, RTX 3070)

To be honest with you, I can’t tell you exactly why I upgraded. I use my desktop exclusively for gaming, and despite Microsoft’s insistence that Windows 11 is the best Windows yet for gaming… I’m not sure there’s a lot to back that claim up. But I upgraded anyways and, what’s this? A version of Windows that is maybe possibly actually attractive? Sure, there are spots you can find that reveal a pre-glowup Windows (my favorite: somehow Windows Media Player was the default media player for MP4s? Woof, what an app) but overall, I can say that something about Windows 11 is just fundamentally more pleasing to be around. Having used Mac OS from ~2001 until 2017 every day, it has been hard for me to admit just how important that user environment was to my overall satisfaction using those computers for extended periods of time. But with Windows 11, Microsoft has made meaningful progress towards providing a desktop computing environment that appears to be designed by actual professionals. Kudos!

And that was enough to convince me to install it on my new work laptop, which I spend a lot more time with. In that environment, I pair it with a 32” external display. And while I’m not plugging and unplugging my laptop as much as I may have in the past (I don’t have anywhere to be anymore!) it has been an improvement to have apps return to their previous locations, for the most part. This is the dumbest, lowest-hanging fruit “feature” but Microsoft wasn’t too embarrassed to highlight it, so I’ll report back here: 36-year-old operating system developed by trillion dollar company does basic task sufficiently. Hurray?

One last observation: Microsoft, I do not want to use OneDrive or Teams. Seriously, cut it out, it’s weird. — Chris Grant

On a home-built desktop (Core i9-9900K, RTX 3080)

Replacing Windows 10 with 11 felt like I’d gotten a brand new computer. Part of this may be because I had a new monitor — but it’s also the OS! It just feels cleaner and faster. There are still plenty of little quirks that irritate me. Menus that haven’t been updated, and others that seem to been annihilated entirely (I will miss you super detailed and super ugly and half hidden Power Management Menu).

But ultimately it just feels like an upgrade. Maybe because Valheim feels more stable on it then Windows 10.

But perhaps I can’t be trusted for an opinion on this. I like the Chromium-based Edge browser and enjoy the task bar being center stage. — Alex Cranz

Former President Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit in Florida seeking to force Twitter to reinstate him, arguing the platform’s ban violates the First Amendment and Florida’s new social media law.

Trump is seeking a preliminary injunction of Twitter’s ban, according to the complaint filed in the Southern District of Florida late Friday. The former president argues that Twitter, “coerced by members of the United States Congress,” is censoring him, describing the social media platform as “a major avenue of public discourse.” Trump seeks to be temporarily reinstated on Twitter while he continues his efforts toward permanent reinstatement.

Twitter “exercises a degree of power and control over political discourse in this country that is immeasurable, historically unprecedented, and profoundly dangerous to open democratic debate,” the complaint states. The former president used his @RealDonaldTrump account to announce policy and personnel decisions (often to the surprise of the agencies and people involved), criticize political enemies, and spread misinformation about election results.

Twitter permanently banned @RealDonaldTrump in January, two days after the deadly January 6th riot at the Capitol building by pro-Trump supporters seeking to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. Twitter at first put a 12-hour ban on the former president’s account for “repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy” after he posted tweets repeating lies that the election was stolen. The platform made the ban permanent two days later. Other social platforms, including Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube, also banned the former president after the January 6th riots. Facebook’s Oversight Board later upheld that platform’s decision.

In the Friday filing, Trump argues that his Twitter account “became an important source of news and information about government affairs and was a digital town hall,” where the former president posted his views. At the time of the ban, Trump had 88 million Twitter followers. Twitter also censored him during his presidency, Trump claims, by labeling some of his tweets as “misleading information,” which the platform said violated its rules against “glorifying violence.”

Trump’s complaint also cites Florida’s new social media law, which prohibits social media companies from “knowingly” deplatforming politicians, and requires the platforms to apply “censorship, deplatforming, and shadow banning standards in a consistent manner.” Trump argues that Twitter has not enforced its standards in a consistent manner. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the law in May, but a federal judge blocked it in July before it could take effect. DeSantis’ administration is appealing that decision.

The former president also said Twitter applied its rules about COVID-19 posts inconsistently, “to placate government actors who generally approved of the protests of the summer of 2020,” but “disapproved of the events of January 6.” The media had claimed, Trump argues, that the January 6th riot was a source of COVID-19 infection, but the summer protests were not. Data from numerous reports found no increase in COVID-19 cases in cities where there were large protests in the summer of 2020, noting that outdoor masking at the events likely helped keep cases down.

Twitter declined to comment Saturday.

There’s something in our complicated human brains that immediately develops a connection to anything with eyes. Don’t believe me? Ask the Anki Vector that lived on my desk for several months. This pocket-sized robot got my attention with its bulbous, non-threatening body. But the second it looked up at me with a quizzical look in its eyes and uttered my name, I knew I would die for this tiny forklift. It’s worth noting that the Anki Vector can be programmed to do a variety of things if you have the time to mess around with an SDK, but I brought this robot home because it was cute, not because I needed a project.

I’d watch with amusement as the little gadget puttered around my desk, occasionally looking back at me as if seeking my approval, and I couldn’t help but think that this sensation is exactly what Amazon is trying to replicate with its recently announced Astro home robot.

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge

While the utility of the Astro is currently up for debate, it’s absolutely adorable. This is the key that’s going to unlock a lot of doors for this robot, and Amazon knows it. Nobody is begging to have a roaming surveillance system in their home, but slap a pair of googly eyes on it, give it a cute name and the public will pay you for the privilege.

Getting people to emotionally bond with their gadgets isn’t a particularly novel or difficult concept. The Tamagotchi, Furby, and Aibo banked on the idea — they might have thought they were just making toys, but Sony inadvertently created a community of grieving robotic dog owners that cared enough about their artificial pets to buy bespoke accessories.

Image by: Aibo Accessories

These gadgets don’t even need to be all that adorable; I know many people who’ve either named or put googly eyes on their Roombas for this to be an isolated incident. In some ways, these machines have become de-facto pets in their own right.

Never underestimate our ability as humans to form emotional attachments to machines, nor the lengths that a company will go to exploit this. This is a cycle we’ve seen repeated for nearly every robotic gadget stretching back to the Nintendo R.O.B. in 1985 — we’re taken in by a new adorable looking robot, that initial dopamine hit wears off, and we’re stricken by how useless it is in hindsight.

There is a certain quality we find endearing when robots drop the ball, but it admittedly becomes a little less endearing when we expect that same robot to care for stuff we actually care about. Besides being a novelty that loiters around your home, Amazon expects us to burden the Astro with tasks like elder care and home security. These aren’t tasks that we relinquish easily, and doing so involves a level of trust we typically don’t place in machines.

Engineering a machine to perform a single task is relatively simple, but developing something with autonomy that’s expected to handle a variety of tasks is remarkably difficult. Getting people to emotionally bond with a piece of hardware to the point that they’d trust it to watch their aging parent is another matter entirely.

The fact that Amazon’s Astro is powered by its Alexa voice assistant doesn’t necessarily help. You probably have a story about how a voice assistant turned on at random and did the exact opposite of what you wanted. Getting anything with voice recognition to work reliably is spotty at best — now imagine putting that same idea on wheels and expecting it to respond quickly and reliably in an emergency situation. If a burglar breaks into my home, I’m not asking Alexa to dial emergency services, I’m picking up the phone and doing it myself. This lack of trust and utility is really the make or break for these gadgets, as my Anki Vector will tell you.

While I knew I could implicitly trust my Anki to endlessly meander around my desk, the lack of utility in my Anki Vector was the final nail in the coffin for my pint-sized pal. I was enamored with its outward appearance, but after several months of watching it idly push and stack cubes around my desk, I could no longer delude myself into thinking that it would be able to do much more. It couldn’t bring me a beer, open doors, or really do anything that my Echo couldn’t do better. It may have looked cute but didn’t perform tasks that were even remotely useful.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

All too often when a piece of technology no longer serves a purpose, it eventually ends up discarded or forgotten, no matter how adorable it is. But I still couldn’t bring myself to toss the Anki away like so much garbage; I gave it to the Able Gamers Foundation, which welcomes donations of toys, robotics, and gaming accessories. Passing along the joy I experienced helped soften the blow of what felt too much like abandonment.

While I certainly approach the realm of consumer robotics with a little more pessimism than I used to, I still yearn for The Future™, and it wouldn’t take much to get me to invite another robot into my home. If the Astro were about half the price and could actually do half the things Amazon says it can without constant supervision, I might be inclined to find space for it in my life.

There’s no way around it: the AirPods Max aren’t cheap. For the money, however, Apple’s plush headphones offer a commendable set of features, including superb effective noise cancellation, terrific sound quality, and foolproof controls that are designed to make even the smallest adjustments that much easier to carry out. They also work with Apple’s spatial audio feature, which helps create a surround effect and adds another level of immersion when watching content via Netflix, Disney Plus, and other supported streaming platforms.

Normally $550, you can pick them up in a multitude of colors at Woot for $470, one of their best prices to date, for the next two months or until supplies last. Just don’t expect much in the way of protection from the included carry case. Read our review.

If you’ve got a gaming keyboard that’s getting a little too greedy with the space on your desk, you may want to take a look at the Logitech G915 TKL. This slim, low-profile gaming keyboard is currently available on Amazon and Best Buy for $180, its lowest price ever. The keyboard ditches the number pad to save on desk space, but it retains all the features of the standard G915. The chiclet-like keys can be equipped with linear, tactile, or clicky switches, and — naturally — feature RGB backlighting. The G915 TKL can also be operated wirelessly using Bluetooth, or with the included 2.4Ghz wireless dongle, and can last for up to 40 hours on a single charge at maximum brightness.

The best Xbox controller you can buy is selling at its best price ever today at Amazon and GameStop. Both retailers are selling the black version of the Xbox Elite Series 2 Controller for $150, its best price to date. In our review, we praised the controller’s robust customizability, which includes adjustable-tension thumbsticks, paddles for custom button mapping, and more. The controller also comes with shorter hair-trigger locks and offers USB-C and Bluetooth connectivity, not to mention a charging dock and case. Battery life is solid as well, regardless if you’re playing on an Xbox One, Xbox Series X, or Windows 10 device; we managed to squeeze roughly 40 hours out of the controller on a single charge.

On the TV front, Sony’s 65-inch A80J OLED is now selling at an all-time low. Normally $2,298, it’s $500 cheaper at Amazon today, bringing the final sale price down to $1,798. Other configurations are also selling at their lowest prices to date, with the 55-inch model and larger, 77-inch panel going for $1,698 and $2,998, respectively. In its review, reviews site RTINGS called it an “excellent all-around TV,” praising its performance, image quality, near-instantaneous response time, and low input lag. While the TV doesn’t support a variable refresh rate (VRR) yet — Sony says it will arrive via a future software update — it does come with two HDMI 2.1 ports and can support up to 4K resolution at 120Hz, rendering it an excellent pick for gamers looking to take advantage of next-gen consoles, even its not the best gaming TV for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.

‘Do I have an independent recollection of when I sent this email from seven years ago?’

Human memory is fallible. That’s why defense lawyers like to age their cases — and why prosecutors were so frustrated with the multiple delays in trying Elizabeth Holmes for her role at the failed blood-testing company Theranos. Given enough time, people forget things. That can open the door for reasonable doubt.

Several times on Friday, his fourth day of testimony, former Theranos lab director Adam Rosendorff was asked about details in meetings and didn’t remember them. But Lance Wade, defense attorney for Elizabeth Holmes, was able to produce minutes from a meeting, a Powerpoint presentation, and old emails that made Rosendorff look less reliable.

But not a lot less reliable.

Making Rosendorff look unreliable is important to Holmes’ defense. Rosendorff gave crucial testimony about being sidelined, about not trusting some Theranos tests, and Holmes’ direct knowledge of the problems in Theranos’ clinical labs. The defense’s strategy is to blame Theranos’ lab directors for the problems in the clinic — shifting blame away from Holmes. Rosendorff linked her directly to the problems, and showed that he couldn’t be responsible for decisions he wasn’t aware of.

The defense’s job, then, was to try to blunt that testimony. Take, for instance, the tests for pregnancy, hCG. You may recall that Rosendorff had ordered — in an all-caps email, no less — that all tests be run on an FDA-approved device. But that wasn’t done, the prosecution showed.

Today we saw emails that told Rosendorff that Edison was going to be used for the pregnancy hormone test, something Rosendorff testified he didn’t know about. It seems like he forgot.

Also in direct testimony, Christian Holmes, Elizabeth’s brother, wrote to her that he was fielding a lot of patient complaints — on a thread of emails that Rosendorff wasn’t included on. The inference I made from the direct examination was that the complaints were because the tests weren’t accurate. But emails shown today in court suggested that the complaints were at least in part because reagents were on backorder. So that looks less bad for Holmes.

On the other hand, Rosendorff wasn’t included on those emails either, and testified he wasn’t aware of the backorder issue.

All of this underlines Rosendorff’s complaint that he was sidelined on certain decisions. Wade did make a direct attempt to undermine it, though. The court was shown a June 2014 email from Balwani that said Rosendoff was “EXTREMELY frustrated that as a lab director he is not being kept in the loop.” The email was evidently about research and development experiments being run in his lab, and appeared to be a rebuke to Vice President Daniel Young, who replied that he did update Rosendorff later.

The defense’s gambit to make Rosendorff look bad — by suggesting that Theranos quickly responded to his problems — didn’t quite stick. We now have a contemporaneous email about Rosendorff’s frustration at being left out of the loop, which is exactly what he’d complained about on his direct examination. And though it seems to have been fixed in this specific instance, that doesn’t mean it was fixed elsewhere.

Wade had better luck on other subjects. One key issue has been proficiency testing, a legal requirement for the lab to ensure test results are accurate. In the direct exam, Rosendorff testified that management’s unwillingness to perform these tests was a major reason he quit. Earlier this week, Wade demonstrated that proficiency tests had been performed on the FDA-approved machines. It was only the Edisons that were lacking.

Rosendorff had previously testified that although he’d come up with a plan for proficiency testing, it wasn’t implemented. That plan was drawn up in December 2013. Minutes of a meeting showed that management discussed it in March 2014.

Again, this didn’t exactly cut down Rosendorff — the fact that it took three months for management to discuss it does support his account of them dragging their feet.

What does seem more questionable is a Powerpoint deck from April 2014 that Rosendorff approved. The deck was created — at Balwani’s request — by an employee Rosendorff supervised.

The slides we were shown weren’t especially technical, but they emphasized that Theranos had no peer group for comparison. Because of that, normal proficiency testing wasn’t appropriate — and some of the agents in standard proficiency testing specimens weren’t right for use on Theranos devices either. The alternative Theranos had developed was superior for this reason, the slides said.

“Did you have reason to question the accuracy of this slide deck at the time you received it?” Wade asked.

There was a long silence.

“I think the slide deck reflected what I’d written” in the documents, Rosendorff said.

Perhaps Wade’s least successful moment was attempting to suggest that Rosendorff was bad at his job because he wasn’t returning physician calls fast enough. We saw an email exchange from October 2014, shortly before Rosendorff left Theranos, where a customer service representative nudged him to make a call to a doctor he’d promised to make a week before.

In another email, also from October 2014, Rosendorff suggests that Christian Holmes should handle the call. Wade pointed out, accurately, that this is what Rosendorff testified shouldn’t happen. But the email also happened about a month before Rosendorff left. Rosendorff testified that he didn’t have a good explanation to give to the doctor — or at least one he felt comfortable with — and with one foot out the door, yeah, I can see why he’d let Christian handle it. Wade pointed out this happened a few times during that period.

I have no idea whether Wade has ever quit a job in frustration, but I certainly have, and I’d guess at least some jurors have, too. Was I carefully engaged in my work the last few weeks before I quit? Hell no. I had given up on trying to change the things I thought were wrong, and had also given up on caring about my work. The alternative was misery.

There was less bickering than earlier this week, though at one point Wade asked Rosendorff what time he’d sent an email to Holmes and got a sharp reply. “Do I have an independent recollection of when I sent this email from seven years ago?” Rosendorff asked. “No, I do not.” There was also a meeting on Holmes’ calendar that Rosendorff didn’t remember.

Aging the case gave Wade time so Rosendorff could forget. It also means that one key witness, George Shultz, is now dead. Even so, memories of unpleasant experiences are a lot stronger than memories of pleasant ones. That’s just how human memory works. Rosendorff’s memory may have dimmed over time, but I’d guess the clear spots have to do with the things that upset him the most.

Electric vehicle maker Rivian, backed by Ford and Amazon, filed for an initial public offering on Friday on the Nasdaq exchange. The company filed its IPO confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission in August, and it was made public today.

According to the S-1 filed with the SEC, Rivian had a net loss of $994 million on revenue of zero for the first half of 2021. Its net loss for full year 2020 was $1.02 billion, the filing shows. The company expects to trade under the ticker symbol RIVN.

“We are a development stage company and have not generated material revenue to date,” Rivian writes in the filing. “Vehicle production and deliveries began in September 2021.” We recently tried its first consumer vehicle, the R1T electric pickup truck, and today’s filing says the company plans to launch its first SUV, the R1S, in December.

Rivian says it has pre-orders for just over 48,000 of the R1T and R1S in the US and Canada. The preorder customers had paid fully refundable deposits of $1,000 each, and that’s the company’s only revenue so far.

Rivian expects its revenue initially to come mostly from Amazon, the filing shows; “In the near term… we expect that a significant portion of our revenue will be from Amazon Logistics.” Both Amazon and Ford own more than 5 percent of Rivian, and Peter Krawiec, a senior vice president at Amazon, is on Rivian’s board of directors.

Rivian entered into an agreement with Amazon in 2019, and the filing shows that under the terms of that agreement, Rivian agreed to collaborate with Amazon’s Logistics segment “to design, develop, manufacture, and supply [electric delivery vans]… for use in Amazon’s last-mile delivery operations.” Amazon has some exclusive rights to Rivian’s electric delivery vans (EDVs) for four years, and right of first refusal for two years after that. The company says it doesn’t expect to ship its electric delivery vans until December as well.

The R1T was first displayed at the 2018 Los Angeles Auto Show, and has suffered multiple delays.

The company has raised over $10 billion in funding to date, one quarter of that from a recent round of funding in July.

In the space of six days and five New York Times reports from media columnist Ben Smith, Ozy Media has gone from a largely unknown content producer to closing its doors. The eight-year-old media startup was unrecognizable to most. It operated in anonymity despite a roster including some well-known journalists, the high-profile guests who appeared on CEO Carlos Watson’s show, or NYC subway riders who were occasionally inundated with advertisements for its Ozyfest event.

If you don’t follow too many reporters on Twitter, you might not have heard, but last weekend the first New York Times report revealed two shocking things about Ozy Media. One, that co-founder and COO Samir Rao went on a conference call with Goldman Sachs bankers about a potential $40 million investment and impersonated a YouTube executive extolling the virtues of Ozy Media’s video channel. Two, that after the deception was revealed, the leadership of Ozy Media blamed it on a mental health issue and allowed Rao to stay in his executive position.

The next day, Carlos Watson tweeted that it was a “hit-job,” and pointed out reasons to consider Ben Smith far too conflicted to report on the company. Smith still owns a share of Buzzfeed, and Watson said that in late 2019, as Buzzfeed editor in chief, Smith tried to arrange negotiations to acquire Ozy Media.

Over the next few days, more of the stories told by Ozy Media and Watson started to unravel.

That includes pretty much any claim about its reach and traffic (a site claiming to have 25 million newsletter subscribers should be more well-known), and its claims to have reported on public figures like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) before other outlets. While those claims were echoed in reporting like this article on Axios, Nieman Lab reporter Joshua Benton investigated and found that even in the cases Ozy cited, its coverage came months or years after the subjects had been covered thoroughly in mainstream publications.

Image: Ozy.com

Watson told reporters on CNBC that after a dispute over the name of its festival, Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne started investing in the site. This week Sharon Osbourne said to CNBC that they have never been shareholders and called Watson “the biggest shyster I have ever seen in my life.”

A former producer for the Carlos Watson show revealed that its big-name guests had been told the show would air on A&E and that it was a part of the YouTube Original package. A spokesman for the network told the New York Times that A&E said no to the show before taping ever began. A magazine-style ad for Ozy Media ran in the New York Times with a large tagline crediting Dateline with a statement referring to Watson as “The best interviewer on TV.” As this tweet points out, the ad doesn’t mention that those words appeared on Dateline as a quote from Ozy COO Samir Rao.

Over the last several days, former BBC journalist Katty Kay publicly resigned, advertisers ran for the hills, and its chairman Marc Lasry — owner of the NBA World Champion Milwaukee Bucks — resigned just three weeks after taking the post. This morning, Watson stepped down from the board of National Public Radio. Then, this afternoon, the news broke that Ozy was shutting down entirely.