Category: Laptops

But what about the hardware inside that makes the “spatial computing” magic happen?

Understandably, most people aren’t racing to break open their new headsets, especially after shelling out $3,500 for them.

Fortunately, a new video from the tech repair experts at iFixit offers an inside look at the cogs and gears inside the headset.

It gives us a closer look at the Vision Pro’s display layers, lenticular lenses that make the headset’s stunning visuals possible, some cameras and fans, and a whole lot of screws, brackets, and connectors.

Judging by how complex the engineering is, it makes more sense why it costs a small fortune to repair.

Check out iFixit’s teardown of the Vision Pro here:

• Speaker Mike Johnson on Sunday dismissed the idea that Trump was “calling the shots” in the House.
• On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Johnson defended the House GOP conference’s position on border security.
• The Senate is set to unveil a border security plan this week, but House conservatives panned it.

House Speaker Mike Johnson on Sunday rejected the idea that former President Donald Trump was “calling the shots” on border security.

Johnson made the remarks on NBC’s “Meet the Press” after he was pressed by anchor Kristen Welker about Trump’s continued influence on legislative affairs on Capitol Hill and whether the former president was dictating the party’s approach to tackling immigration reform.

“Of course not. He’s not calling the shots. I am calling the shots for the House,” Johnson said. “That’s our responsibility.”

“And I have been saying this far longer than President Trump has,” he continued. “I have been saying what the requirements are to fix the problem. I don’t care if they call the legislation HR 2 or not. What we’re saying is you have to stem the flow.”

Johnson during the NBC interview insisted that President Joe Biden had the executive power to curtail illegal border crossings at the US-Mexico border, a huge point of contention for Republicans since the president’s first year in office. HR 2, the hardline immigration bill passed by the House GOP majority last year, is the only piece of legislation that many conservatives will embrace — but it is a nonstarter with the White House and Senate Democrats.

“The president has executive authority right now,” the Louisiana Republican said. “As Congress does this negotiation and the debate and the discussion, the president could stop it.”

“He could close the border literally overnight,” the speaker continued, referring to Biden.

The president last month said that if the Senate passed a bipartisan border security bill, he’d “shut down the border” whenever it was overwhelmed with attempted crossings.

Trump, the GOP presidential frontrunner, has staked his 2024 candidacy on immigration, arguing that Biden has refused to secure the southern border properly. The former president has encouraged Republicans to walk away from the Senate’s border security plan, which will be paired with additional funding for Ukraine and is set to be unveiled this week.

Mayorkas, who was born in Cuba, noted during the interview that he had immigrated to the United States while also remarking on the immigrant background of Lulu Garcia-Navarro, the reporter who interviewed him for the magazine.

“We are two immigrants in positions of responsibility,” he said. “You have significant responsibilities as a journalist. I have a serious set of responsibilities as a secretary of homeland security.”

“What a wonderful country this is,” he added.

Since leading the Homeland Security Department, Mayorkas has become a lightning rod for Republicans frustrated with President Joe Biden’s immigration policies. GOP lawmakers argue that the president’s policies have led to a surge in crossings along the US-Mexico border.

In December 2023, illegal border crossings from Mexico led to an all-time monthly high of nearly 250,000 arrests, according to the US Border Patrol.

Earlier this week, the Republican-led Homeland Security Committee voted to send impeachment articles for Mayorkas to the House for a vote, arguing that the secretary has failed to secure the border.

Mayorkas has blasted the impeachment effort and said he is fully focused on pushing Congress to strengthen the nation’s immigration laws.

“There isn’t a week that has gone by that we haven’t discussed new solutions, new ideas,” he told the Times. “And I have to return to this: Fundamentally, we are working within a broken system, and Congress, most importantly, needs to pass legislation that fixes it.”

The video of the AN/MPQ-64 shows the system actually mechanically functioning with moving parts, an impressive feature that helps sell it as a real radar. And the IRIS-T SLM has a realistic-looking launcher able to lift up into position, giving the appearance of a legitimate air defense system.

As the footage of the decoys was shared online, reports of a successful Russian strike on a Ukrainian air defense system spread across Russian Telegram channels. Milbloggers praised the strike, sharing a video online of what they claimed was a real hit against an IRIS-T system in the village of Lisne in the Kharkiv region.

Ukrainian sources countered that the strike hit a decoy, not a real IRIS-T SLM, which had been placed there after the air defense site had been abandoned.

According to a Telegram post from Insider UA, a Ukrainian news outlet, Russia had launched an Iskander ballistic missile at the IRIS-T system. It compared the cost of the decoy weapon — roughly $10,000 — with the $3 million price tag of the missile.

Business Insider was unable to independently verify the claims that either side made, but Russia has definitely claimed victory after striking nothing more than a decoy in the past.

The Ukrainian decoys seen in the recent photos and videos — fakes that appear a lot better than earlier attempts, such as wooden HIMARS, howitzers made out of pipes, and radar systems from oil barrels — are the latest examples of how both sides have employed decoys to trick and deceive force their enemy into wasting expensive missiles and drones in these attacks.

Back in December, Ukraine got Russia to expend a munition on what looked like a fake Su-25 ground-attack aircraft.

Russia has likewise used decoys. Satellite images have shown fake aircraft painted on the flight line at its airbases. In September 2023, Ukraine’s 116th Mechanized Brigade published a video of an inflatable Russian T-72 decoy. At first, the tank looked somewhat deceiving, although the unit said they were able to identify it as a fake.

An expert previously said there’s a “decoys arm race” underway in Ukraine, explaining to Business Insider that technological advancements are pushing Ukraine and Russia to make fakes appear as real as possible in order to fool the enemy, not always the easiest of tasks.

“I think they said ‘enough, enough.’ Enough saying horrible, slimy, terrible things about me,” Carroll told “CBS Mornings” of the second Manhattan federal jury, which read its verdict into the record Friday.

That jury ordered Trump to pay Carroll the bulk of his total legal debt to her, $83.3 million, after he spent years rattling off defamatory remarks and attacks against her.

This most recent trial differed from last year’s, at which Carroll sued Trump for both the sexual abuse and defamation. Last year’s jury found Trump liable for not only sexually assaulting her, but for defaming her by denying it in an October 2022 Truth Social post. He called Carroll’s allegations a “hoax,” a “lie” and ranted that she wasn’t his “type.”

The jury awarded Carroll $5 million in total damages in that trial. The largest portion of the awarded damages in that case was the $2 million for sexually abusing her in 1996, as well as another $20,000 in punitive damages.

For defamation, that jury also awarded Carroll $1 million in damages, $1.7 million to help repair the reputational harm caused by Trump, and $280,000 in punitive damages.

Compensatory damages are an amount that the jury finds equivalent to what the plaintiff suffered. Punitive damages are awarded to punish the defendant for behavior the jury found was negligent or intentional.

This recent trial, which wrapped up Friday, centered on defamation claims Carroll brought against Trump involving two statements he made in 2019, while he was president, disparaging Carroll by calling her a liar and insulting her appearance.

“I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, OK?” Trump told The Hill, denying Carroll’s claims.

Since Trump was already found liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll, jurors in the most recent trial only needed to determine any additional defamation damages.

The jury in that case returned the stunning verdict last week after less than three hours of deliberation, awarding Carroll a whopping $65 million in punitive damages and $18.3 million in compensatory damages.

Trump’s refusal to cease his attacks on Carroll in the wake of the first jury’s verdict is likely why a new jury came back with stiffer penalties, defamation experts told Business Insider.

Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Business Insider on Thursday afternoon.

Punitive damages made it a headline-grabbing number

The compensatory damages concerned Trump’s false 2019 statements. Chris Mattei, a defamation attorney best known for winning a $1.5 billion jury verdict against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, told Business Insider that jurors may have believed those statements caused more damage because Trump made them from the White House, where they were broadcast around the world.

“That afforded Donald Trump a different kind of platform from which he could direct his followers to harass and further defame Ms. Carroll,” Mattei said.

The punitive damages — which comprised the lion’s share of the jury award — allowed jurors to take into account subsequent remarks by Trump, who continued calling Carroll a liar even throughout the trial. That became a substantial focus of the January 2024 trial, where jurors saw numerous statements from Trump attacking Carroll, including a clip from a press conference held during the trial itself, where he called Carroll a liar.

Trump didn’t attend a single day of the first trial. But in the second one, held in the same lower Manhattan federal courtroom, he was attentive and was in constant communication with his legal team (not always in a good way — Carroll’s lawyers complained to the judge that the jury could hear his loud mutterings).

He testified on the stand, if only briefly. At times Trump acted out in court, and even as he and Carroll faced off in the courtroom, his Truth Social account blasted out more posts attacking her.

Defamation experts told Business Insider that the jurors in the latest trial were clearly sending a message by awarding such an eye-popping amount to Carroll. They had eyes on Trump this time, and they clearly didn’t like what they saw.

“Donald Trump did not attend the first trial, as he did here, and did certain things that the jury was able to observe,” Mattei said. “And that may have motivated them in a way that the first jury wasn’t.”

Carroll “did everything she was supposed to do in going through the course in the first case and getting her award,” according to J. Erik Connolly, a defamation attorney at Benesch Law.

“And that should have brought her peace of mind, and it didn’t, and this is perhaps the only way the jury says, well, the normal course didn’t bring her the peace of mind and the deterrence that she was entitled to as a victim,” Connolly said. “This, second time now, maybe this will.”

Carroll’s lawyers argued that Trump showed flagrant disrespect for the rule of law. First by ignoring the earlier verdict and continuing to defame Carroll — even bragging on CNN that his poll numbers went up. And, second, by disrespecting courtroom procedures while attending the second trial.

“At that point, you are compounding the wrongdoing or the misconduct that the jury would want to deter,” Connolly said.

Only a massive punitive damages verdict, Carroll’s lawyers argued, would get Trump to actually stop.

“While Donald Trump may not care about the law, while he certainly doesn’t care about the truth, he does care about money,” Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan told jurors in her closing argument. “As a result, your decision to award a large amount of punitive damages may be the only hope that E. Jean Carroll has to ever be free from Donald Trump’s relentless attacks ever again.”

That strategy appeared to work. While Trump vowed to appeal the $83.3 million jury decision, as he did with the first verdict, and has complained that the trial was unfair, he hasn’t publicly called Carroll a liar since last week’s verdict.

• Driver and passenger each get a screen in the Wagoneer S.
• The all-electric Wagoneer gets a sleeker design than the gas-powered SUV.
• Wagoneer S is expected to go on sale this fall.

The first all-electric Jeep is on its way to dealer lots in 2024, and we just got our first look inside the swanky SUV.

Jeep released the first interior shots of the electric Wagoneer S this week, which appears to be packed to the gills with tech.

This screen-laden interior is made possible by parent company Stellantis’s BEV-specific platform, which will underpin the Wagoneer S. This platform is also engineered to deliver performance, reaching zero to 60 mph in roughly 2 seconds at the top end, the company said.

The Federal Aviation Administration quickly grounded 171 other Max 9 planes with the same door plug, mostly flown by United Airlines and Alaska.

Four critical bolts used to secure the door plug were missing from the jet when it left Boeing’s assembly line, The Wall Street Journal reported, representing a massive quality control lapse.

This oversight has cast renewed scrutiny on Boeing’s family of Max airplanes, which already saw 346 fatalities after two Max 8 jets crashed in 2018 and 2019.

Three weeks after the blowout, however, the Max 9 is carrying people once again. Alaska’s COO Constance von Muehlen was on board the carrier’s first passenger flight since the grounding and took the seat by the door plug, CNN reported.

The green light comes as regulators approve new inspection and maintenance processes in relation to the door plug. But questions surrounding Boeing’s safety and quality control still remain on the minds of travelers.

Here’s what to know about the Max 9 inspections, and how aviation experts view the return to service.

The Max 9’s enhanced inspection process will take up to 12 hours

Last Wednesday, the FAA announced an “enhanced maintenance process” to be completed on the 171 grounded Max 9s before they could return to service.

This includes visual inspections of the left and right mid-cabin door plugs, as well as inspection of specific bolts, guide tracks, and fittings to ensure all critical components are correctly installed.

The agency also said it would cap production of the 737 Max, have “increased floor presence at all Boeing facilities,” and ramp up oversight of the planemaker and its suppliers — particularly Spirit AeroSystems (not related to Spirit Airlines), which installed the door plug.

“The exhaustive, enhanced review our team completed after several weeks of information gathering gives me and the FAA confidence to proceed to the inspection and maintenance phase,” FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker said in a January 24 statement. “However, let me be clear: This won’t be back to business as usual for Boeing.”

So far, carriers including United, Alaska, and Panama’s Copa Airlines have re-launched their Max 9s after the required inspections, with Copa being the first to do so on Thursday, Reuters reported.

According to aviation analyst and president of Atmosphere Research Group, Henry Harteveldt, these inspections are “extremely thorough.”

“There were at least four revisions to the inspection process before the FAA, Boeing, and the airlines agreed on the final procedure to be done to inspect these planes,” he told Business Insider on Tuesday. “The initial inspection procedures were taking two to four hours; the agreed process takes between 10 and 12 hours.”

Alaska noted the same 12-hour timeframe in a January 26 statement.

Not all experts agree on the Max 9’s safety

It wasn’t long after the Alaska Max 9 blowout that airline customers started voicing concerns about the safety of the plane after its return to service — with some travelers even opting to pay more to avoid flying on the jet.

According to the Washington Post, the travel booking website Kayak said its filter for the 737 Max significantly increased in the days after the incident.

Former Boeing senior manager-turned-whistleblower Ed Pierson told the LA Times in an interview published Tuesday that he would “absolutely not fly on a Max airplane.”

“I’ve worked in the factory where they were built, and I saw the pressure employees were under to rush the planes out the door,” he said. “I tried to get them to shut down before the first crash.”

Joe Jacobsen, a former engineer at Boeing and the FAA, gave the paper a similar take: “I would tell my family to avoid the Max. “I would tell everyone, really.”

In a statement to Business Insider, Harteveldt expressed confidence in the Max 9.

“I understand why people may be concerned about flying on the 737 Max 9 right now, but those planes would not be back in the air if the FAA did not think they were safe,” he said. “No airline is going to dispatch a plane that it does not know to be 100% safe.”

Harteveldt further explained that the Max 9 problem is not as complex as the fatal Max 8 crashes, which involved flawed flight-control software and a faulty sensor.

“The [Max 9] problem is isolated; the mechanics and engineers know exactly where to focus — and they did that — so it’s a very different kind of problem for the plane,” he told BI. “All of this certainly undermines the trust we place in Boeing, but, personally speaking, I would not hesitate to fly on a 737 Max 9 if the schedule and fare met my requirements.”

However, Harteveldt emphasized that those who are concerned about flying on a Max 9 do have options. For example, Alaska and United currently allow passengers to switch their flight from a Max flight to a non-Max flight for no extra charge — similar to what carriers like Southwest Airlines did after the Max 8 crashes.

Passengers have more control over their personal safety

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University associate professor and air crash investigator, Anthony Brickhouse, told BI that passengers should focus less on the aircraft they are flying on and more on their personal safety.

He listed things like wearing a seatbelt at all times, listening to the safety briefings, and leaving personal items behind in case of an emergency evacuation — the latter two helped save the lives of the 379 people on board a Japan Airlines Airbus A350 that caught fire in December.

“The federal regulators and the NTSB are going to do their job and make sure the aircraft we fly on are as safe as possible,” Brickhouse told BI. “But passengers need to do more to impact their own safety at the end of the day.”

This was the scene of havoc and tragedy that a federal jury was plunged into in New York on Monday, as testimony began in the 2002 cold-case murder of the Run-DMC star.

Two men, Karl “Little D” Jordan Jr. and Ronald “Tinard” Washington, are on trial in Brooklyn’s Eastern District of New York, accused of shooting Mizell in the head, execution style, more than 20 years ago in a dispute over 22 pounds of cocaine.

The trial’s first witness was one of the first police officers at the scene, Detective James Lusk. He told jurors he responded to the shooting minutes later, running up the stairway to Mizell’s second-floor recording studio to the sound of cries and screams. 

It was early evening, October 30, 2002, and behind the studio’s glass door, in a cluttered, narrow room lined with couches, it was bloody bedlam.

“I saw a male lying, head toward the window,” against a green couch, Lusk testified of Mizell.

Another man “was kind of scrunched up on top of that couch,” Lusk said of a second victim. The man, Tony Rincon, had been shot in the leg and was screaming for help.

Within earshot, maybe in the hallway, a woman was “crying hysterically,” Lusk testified.

A television set, which Lusk described as “old school,” not a flat screen, “was showing video games.”

Mizell had been playing video games when Jordan and Washington, both armed, had been buzzed inside, prosecutors allege.

The shooting happened so fast, Gonzalez said in openings, that Mizell had no time to reach for the .380-caliber pistol beside him, on the armrest of the green couch.

The two “killed a world-famous musician,” Gonzalez said. Then, “as quickly as they came, they fled,” she told jurors.

“Did you have the opportunity to observe Mr. Mizell’s body before and during when EMS arrived?” the detective was asked by prosecutor Artie McConnell.

“Yes I did,” answered the detective.

Mizell “had a tremendous amount of blood already pooled on the floor,” the detective told jurors. “He was unresponsive” to being shaken.

“I did see blood to the back of the head and assumed that was the injury,” he added, as the jury viewed a photo of Mizell’s slumped body, displayed for them on a screen.

Mizell’s killing remained a cold case until Jordan and Washington were charged in 2020 in connection to his murder. Both Jordan and Washington have pleaded not guilty.

Another man, Jay Bryant, has also been charged in the DJ’s murder and has pleaded not guilty. He will be tried separately at a later date.

“The defendants allegedly carried out the cold-blooded murder of Jason Mizell,” the then-acting US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Seth D. DuCharme said at the time Jordan and Washington were charged.

DuCharme called it “a brazen act that has finally caught up with them thanks to the dedicated detectives, agents and prosecutors who never gave up on this case.”

Federal prosecutors allege that Mizell was in his studio in Jamaica, Queens, on October 30, 2002, when Washington and Jordan, armed with firearms, burst into the studio.

The prosecutors say that Washington pointed his gun at a person inside the studio and demanded that they lie on the floor, while Jordan approached Mizell and fired two shots at close range, with one hitting Mizell in the head, killing him.

The second bullet struck Rincon in the leg, according to prosecutors.

Gonzalez promised jurors on Monday that prosecutors would prove that Jordan later boasted “I would kill him again,” and Washington told his girlfriend he was the second shooter and was proud he’d got away with it.

A lawyer for Jordan, John Diaz, meanwhile predicted in opening statements that the government will fail to prove his client was there at the murder or involved in narcotics dealing.

“This case will be about 10 seconds, 21 years ago,” a lawyer for Washington, Ezra Spilke, said in openings, highlighting the difficulty in proving a murder that happened so quickly and so long ago.

“Their version is one version of many,” he said of the government’s case.

Prosecutors have alleged that Mizell was murdered out of anger stemming from Mizell cutting Washington out of a drug deal.

“It was an ambush, an execution, motivated by greed and revenge,” Gonzalez told jurors.

The investigation, according to prosecutors, revealed Mizell had acquired about 20 pounds of cocaine from a narcotics supplier in the Midwest and that the plan was for Washington, Jordan and other co-conspirators to distribute the drugs in Maryland.

Prosecutors allege that before Mizell’s death, Mizell told Washington that Washington would not be involved in the drug distribution in Maryland, which led the suspects to plot to kill Mizell.

Mizell’s family has maintained that the DJ was not involved with drugs, according to the Associated Press.

Washington and Jordan face at least 20 years behind bars if convicted in the case.

The success of the IPO is contingent in part on the state of the IPO market, which has struggled in recent years. Reddit’s valuation is estimated below the $5 billion figure in private markets, Bloomberg reported. When Reddit first began preparing to go public in late 2021 — a record-breaking year for venture capital — some thought the company could be valued as high as $15 billion in an IPO.

Investors are hoping that 2024 will be a more active year for the IPO market. IPOs began showing signs of life again last year as profitable tech startups like Instacart and Klaviyo filed to go public. This year’s IPO market may also be helped by the Fed’s promised rate cuts and a weak M&A market. The last time a social media company went public was in 2019. That was Pinterest, and it was valued at $10 billion.

Reddit’s current target shows that those days of sky-high valuations are gone, for now. Reddit declined Business Insider’s request for further comment.

Reddit, which some have dubbed “the front page of the internet,” was launched in 2005 by University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian, and Aaron Swartz.

A year later, it became one of the biggest sites in the world in terms of unique visitors. The founders then sold it to Condé Nast for just $10 million. Ohanian went on to launch venture firms Initialized Capital and Seven Seven Six, but Huffman stayed close to the company and has been CEO since 2015 — seeing it through an explosive period of growth during the pandemic, when it birthed the meme-stock craze.

Still, even Huffman is shocked by how far Reddit has come since its launch. He once said the business felt like a “homework assignment that got out of hand.”

Spotify chief executive Daniel Ek said in an X post on Friday that Apple’s changes represent a “new low, even for them.” This cam after Spotify released a statement calling out the iPhone maker for acting like “they don’t think the rules apply to them.”

Apple announced it will for the first time allow developers to create and distribute apps on third-party marketplaces once it releases iOS 17.4. The changes will only take effect in the EU, which has forced Apple to comply with the Digital Markets Act — a European law aimed at curtailing tech giants’ hold over the digital economy.

While this may sound like a victory for app developers since it will open up more channels for distribution, many are complaining that Apple will not only retain control over which third-party marketplaces end up on its system but will also charge fees for downloads on those other marketplaces.

“A masterclass in distortion”

Ek said Apple’s reaction to the Digital Markets Act is “a masterclass in distortion.”

Under Apple’s new changes, apps with over one million downloads will need to pay a “core technology fee” for “each first annual install per year.” That puts an app like Spotify — which Ek said has more than 100 million downloads in the EU — in an “untenable situation” because it drastically increases the cost of acquiring new customers.

In a statement, Spotify described the fee as “extortion, plain and simple.” The company says the fee will likely hurt developers, potential start-ups, and those offering free apps who might not have the funds to pay Apple — especially if their app suddenly goes viral.

That means that even a multibillion-dollar company like Spotify will need to “stick with the status quo” to remain profitable, Ek said.

For its part, Apple said in a statement that it seeks to support developers, including Spotify, which it acknowledged as the world’s “most successful” music streaming app.

“The changes we’re sharing for apps in the European Union give developers choice — with new options to distribute iOS apps and process payments,” a spokesperson for Apple told Business Insider by email. “Every developer can choose to stay on the same terms in place today. And under the new terms, more than 99% of developers would pay the same or less to Apple.”

While Apple’s tight hold over the iOS ecosystem has helped it reap billions in revenue, it has also caused it to run afoul of regulators who believe its tactics stifle innovation and suppress new entrants. Ek, too, is a longtime critic of Apple’s tactics and has previously said the company has a ways to go before it becomes an “open and fair platform.”

Apple’s App Store change not only falls short of that ideal, but “mocks the spirit of the law and the lawmakers who wrote it,” Ek said.

The good news for him is that Apple’s new changes aren’t set in stone until they pass muster with the EU. And Ek said he’s hoping the EU “recognizes this for exactly what it is and stands firm and doesn’t let their work over the years all be for nothing.”