Category: Tech

In what financial types refer to as a “pull-forward,” a lot of spending that would otherwise have been spread out over several years was piled into one.

Anticipating the dip in demand, Best Buy CFO Matt Bilunas told investors in November 2020: “We don’t expect sales trends to remain at the levels we experienced during Q3.”

The thing about computers, tablets, TVs, and other household electronics — unlike, say, apparel or accessories — is that most people don’t need to replace them each year.

For companies that specialize in this area, like Best Buy, that has contributed to several years now of sluggish sales.

Given that many of these products have a typical replacement cycle of about three to five years, things should be starting to pick up as people look to upgrade the aging tech they may have paid for using their COVID stimmy check.

Beyond the pull-forward effects, Best Buy CEO Corie Barry laid some of the blame for the continuing sales lull at the feet of tech brands.

“Right now there isn’t any massive current innovation that would spur you to go buy a new laptop,” she said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday.

“There’s a little bit,” she added, “We’re expecting more as the year goes on.”

Indeed, tech companies haven’t exactly inspired shoppers to race into their nearest Best Buy for an upgrade, especially when they could buy tickets to a Taylor Swift concert instead.

For example, some of the most celebrated changes to Apple’s recent laptops were essentially the undoing of a prior model’s innovations.

Apple added back additional ports, ditched the controversial butterfly keyboards, and removed Touchbars from many of its MacBooks in recent years.

Apple’s laptops are certainly faster than ever now thanks to its custom-made M-series chips, but the first MacBook with an M1 chip debuted back in 2020, which means most people with an M-series MacBook probably won’t need to upgrade anytime soon.

Barry also said laptops are more frequently replaced than other big-ticket products, so she expects improvement there to precede upgrades of other increasingly high-tech items like appliances and TVs.

Truist retail analyst Scot Ciccarelli (whose question Barry was responding to) said in a note that his team expects Best Buy to benefit from brands offering more innovative products and services this year and next year “after a substantial lull during the pandemic.”

Like mobile phones, laptops may now be encountering the hard limits of physics within the conventional form factor, but perhaps that’s where new platforms like Apple’s Vision Pro come in.

Other tech companies are tossing some bold ideas at the walls too. This week, Lenovo unveiled a design decision of questionable usefulness in the form of the world’s first transparent laptop screen, but it’s a concept prototype and not even for sale.

Either way, whatever the next buzzy tech may be, Barry says Best Buy would love for you to come check it out in their stores.

If any, the factor most likely to spoil that view and knock the economy off its feet right now is the labor market, Schumacher said. 

But the job market has shown signs of strength lately, with new job additions in January coming in well above estimates, and unemployment staying near historically low levels. However, Schumacher said a sudden shift could threaten the US’s chances of dodging a downturn.

“Labor markets are fickle and they can go from robust to really weak to unpleasant in the span of three to six months,” he said.

Schumacher continued: “The underlying economy is pretty good, but it’s not hot enough yet to spook the Feds. So [it’s] a good comfort zone for a lot of people.”

Still, not all economists are so optimistic. In a research note on Tuesday, David Rosenberg highlighted five inidicators that suggest the economy is not as strong as many think.

“We’ve just signed big deals with Big Pharma and on real drug programs. And I expect in the next couple of years, we’ll have AI-designed drugs in the clinic, in clinical testing,” he added. “And that’s going to be an amazing time. And that’s when people will start to really feel the benefits in their daily lives in really material and incredible ways.”

Clinical trials help assess if a new drug or device is safe and effective for human use. Drugs that make it to the clinical testing phase of development can still take years to reach the market, if they do so at all.

While some experts say AI can help accelerate the drug discovery process and offer patients personalized care, they also warn of the risk of bias if these models aren’t trained on diverse data sets.

AI doesn’t always get things right, as Google knows. Hassabis recently spoke of Google DeepMind’s fiasco with its Gemini AI image generator. After users pointed out it created historically inaccurate images, including racially diverse images of the Founding Fathers and Nazis, Google paused Gemini’s ability to generate images of people last week.

“That, which is a well-intended feature, was applied, it turns out, too bluntly,” Hassabis said of the image generator while speaking at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona. “We care of course about historical accuracy and so we’ve taken that feature offline while we fix that, and we hope to have that back online in very short order.”

• GOP Rep. Byron Donalds on Sunday affirmed the need for IVF for families across the US.
• “It helps them breed great families,” the congressman said of IVF on NBC News.
• Some Republicans have put some distance between themselves and fellow conservatives on the issue.

Last week, Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos have the same rights as born, living children, quoting the Bible in their opinion.

Since then, Republicans nationwide have been scrambling to clarify their opinion on IVF, the fertility treatment that allows women to have multiple eggs fertilized outside the womb to better the chances of a successful pregnancy.

On Sunday, Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida took to NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where he stated that he fully supports IVF, which helps people “create great families, which is what our country desperately needs.”

“The IVF procedure is very important to a lot of couples in our country,” Donalds said. “It helps them breed great families. Our country needs that.”

Despite the support of IVF from conservative lawmakers like Donalds, 125 of his fellow House Republicans co-sponsored a bill to establish that life begins at conception with no exceptions for the procedure. The expensive and time-consuming procedure can include the discarding of some fertilized eggs.

Donalds is not among the 125 House members pushing for the bill, telling MSNBC that he wanted to “see the devil in the details.”

However, the congressman’s comments reveal the wide scope of GOP reproductive theories, oscillating from “adoption is an option” on the subject of abortion to the desire to “breed great families” with IVF.

“I believe, as President Trump has also said, we really want the Alabama legislature to make sure that that procedure is protected for families who do struggle with having children,” Donalds said during his interview.

Last week, former President Donald Trump spoke of the need for IVF availability on his Truth Social platform.

“We want to make it easier for mothers and fathers to have babies, not harder!” the former president wrote. “That includes supporting the availability of fertility treatments like IVF in every State in America.”

After the conservative-leaning Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, it escalated the stakes of issues involving abortion and family planning as individual states now play the paramount role in governing reproductive rights.

Republicans have largely struggled to counter Democratic messaging on abortion rights, with the issue playing a major role in a slew of races across the country since the 2022 midterms, when Democrats performed better than expected in what was forecasted by some to be a GOP “red wave” election.

Even in a conservative state like Kentucky, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, a moderate, effectively campaigned on the issue last year by needling his GOP opponent over past support for a strict abortion ban without exceptions for cases involving rape or incest.

Beshear was reelected to a second term by 5 points in a state that Trump had won by 26 points in 2020.

Basic income programs, which offer segments of society no-strings-attached payments, are gaining traction across the nation as a way to address the wealth gap and reduce poverty.

The bill’s author, Republican Rep. Lupe Diaz, has compared such programs to socialism, calling the payments “unearned.” Diaz did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

The legislation bans “any program where persons are provided with regular, periodic cash payments that are unearned and that may be used for any purpose.” It doesn’t include work or training programs.

The bill still needs to pass the state Senate before it can become law. The state Senate consists of 30 members, 16 Republicans and 14 Democrats.

Guaranteed basic income programs typically support qualifying families or individuals, often those living at or near the poverty line, with regular government payments for a set period. They are a more targeted version of a universal basic income, which gives funds to entire populations regardless of their income or other considerations.

Dozens of cities and states have toyed with various styles of no-strings-attached cash assistance in recent years.

In Baltimore, the Young Families Success Fund, for instance, gives young mothers $1,000 a month. A program in Oregon gives $1,000 monthly payments to youth living below the poverty line.

A senior director at Point Source Youth, a national youth homelessness nonprofit that helped facilitate the Oregon program, told Business Insider that participants said they used the funds to obtain housing, enroll in school, and purchase cars.

Another program in Austin that gave $1,000 monthly payments to low-income families found that participants were “substantially more housing secure” one year into the program than when they enrolled. The report found that participants, on average, said they spent more than half of the payments they received on housing.

Yet despite the apparent success of the programs, some state lawmakers — largely Republicans who say the programs discourage recipients from working — are trying to ban them.

One basic income program in Harris County, Texas — where Houston is located — is under constitutional review by the state’s attorney general after a Republican state lawmaker requested a review. The Uplift Harris program is using $20.5 million of COVID-19 relief funds to support $500 monthly payments for low-income families.

Republicans in other states have also introduced bans similar to the one proposed in Arizona. In Iowa, Republican state Rep. Steve Holt introduced a bill to ban basic income programs last month, calling them “socialism on steroids.”

Another basic income ban in South Dakota passed through a committee 8 to 1 along party lines on February 5 and is now headed to the state senate.

The bill’s sponsor, Sen. John Wiik, said basic income programs are a “socialist idea” during a committee meeting on February 5.

“Guaranteed income programs, also known as basic income, undercut the dignity in earning a dollar, and they’re a one-way ticket to government dependency,” Wiik said in the hearing.

The bill does not include any exception for in vitro fertilization (IVF), a reproductive treatment that allows mothers to fertilize several eggs outside the womb in order to increase the chances of a viable pregnancy.

Several healthcare providers in Alabama have already halted IVF programs in the wake of the ruling, given that IVF treatments may include the discarding of fertilized eggs, which may now violate the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.

The lack of an IVF exception is notable, given the carveout contained within a previous version of the Life at Conception Act introduced by Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky in 2017.

“Nothing in this Act shall be construed to require the prosecution of any woman for the death of her unborn child, a prohibition on in vitro fertilization, or a prohibition on use of birth control or another means of preventing fertilization,” reads the 2017 bill.

Republican Rep. Alexander Mooney, the main House sponsor of the bill, did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment on why that exception was not included.

Neither did spokespeople for Speaker Johnson, who largely controls the House floor and whose evangelical Christian views have entailed staunch opposition to abortion in the past.

“When a woman is pregnant, science tells us the new life she carries is a completely separate and fully new human being from the moment of fertilization,” Johnson said during a 2021 hearing on Texas’s 6-week abortion ban.

In the wake of the Alabama ruling, some Republicans have scrambled to declare their support for IVF treatments, recognizing the unpopularity of any potential ban.

That includes GOP Senate candidates in competitive battleground states, who quickly moved to issue pro-IVF statements on Friday with the encouragement of Senate Republicans’ campaign arm.

Some House Republicans in swing seats who have previously cosponsored the Life at Conception Act have done the same, including current cosponsor Reps. Michelle Steel of California and past cosponsor David Schweikert of Arizona.

But Democratic groups have quickly moved to point out their sponsorship of the bill, noting the lack of an IVF exception.

“House Republicans have made clear they will stop at nothing — including outlawing in vitro fertilization — to reach their ultimate goal: banning abortion and restricting reproductive rights nationwide,” said Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesperson Courtney Rice. “Their anti-family agenda, which elevates these dangerously out-of-touch positions into the mainstream, will cost them their majority this fall.”

House Majority PAC, an outside group aligned with House Democrats, distributed a memo on Friday noting that several other vulnerable Republicans have supported the bill, either currently or in previous Congresses.

That includes Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who told Axios that her office is “drafting a resolution” to express support for IVF.

“The fact is that ANY vulnerable House Republican who cosponsored the Life at Conception Act supported putting IVF and fertility treatments at risk,” reads the memo from the Democratic group. “HMP can guarantee that their support will be used against them over paid media in competitive House districts across the country this fall.”

• In 1987, astronomers recorded the only supernova visible to the naked eye in the last 400 years. 
• Astronomers have since wondered about what the massive explosion left behind in its wake.
• Using JWST, astronomers finally have the answer to the question they’ve been chasing for decades.

In a nearby galaxy, 160,000 light years away, a massive star exploded in a brilliant supernova, spewing its guts across the universe. The explosion was so bright that humans could see it with the naked eye.

That was 37 years ago, and astronomers have been studying that same patch of sky ever since, chasing down the answer to a single question: What’s left?

There are two possible scenarios for what went down after the explosion. Now, armed with James Webb, the most powerful telescope ever built, scientists finally think they know what happened.

David Malin AAT

Research published today in the peer-reviewed journal Science has settled the decades-long mystery. It offers the most compelling evidence, to date, that what lurks behind the clouds of residual gas and debris is one of the densest objects in the universe — a neutron star.

A neutron star is the collapsed core of a supergiant star that’s gone supernova. It’s essentially a city-sized sphere of densely-packed neutrons, co-author Patrick Kavanagh, an experimental physicist from Maynooth University, said in a press briefing.

“It’s more massive than the sun. A teaspoon of it weighs more than Mount Everest,” he said.

NASA / Wikimedia Commons

If the supernova of 1987, aka SN 1987A, hadn’t created a neutron star, the other possible scenario was that it produced a black hole. But Kavanagh seemed pleased with the outcome.

Identifying the neutron star left behind by SN 1987A, he said in the briefing, will now give astronomers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study one in the early stages of its life.

“It feels absolutely amazing,” Kavanagh said.

The most studied supernova in history

Explosions like SN 1987A don’t happen often. The last time Earth witnessed such a brilliant cosmic event was about 400 years ago.

So, when SN1987A lit up the skies, astronomers studied it with as many instruments as they could including Hubble, Chandra, ALMA, and much more.

Eventually, SN 1987A became known as the most studied supernova in history.

“It’s the gift that keeps on giving,” Kavanagh said in the briefing.

Studying SN 1987A has deepened astronomers’ understanding of supernovae and the role they play in our ever-evolving universe.

ESA / Hubble & NASA / Wikimedia Commons

For example, SN 1987A’s proximity to Earth allowed astronomers to track the remnant molecules and dust that are essential for the formation of life-sustaining planets like Earth, Kavanagh said.

But all those years of observation were limited by the technology of the time. Before JWST, astronomers lacked a telescope powerful enough to observe the compact object that SN 1987A left behind.

Hunting for a neutron star

To discover what lies at the center of SN 1987A, astronomers needed a telescope big enough and advanced enough to detect evidence of radiation from a hidden neutron star.

Enter the James Webb Space Telescope: the largest, most powerful telescope ever launched into space that is already revolutionizing our understanding of the universe within its first two years of operation.

J. Larsson

With JWST, researchers led by astronomer Claes Fransson of Stockholm University were finally able to see past SN 1987A’s gas and debris at infrared wavelengths, using spectroscopy to examine the composition and movement of the gas cloud surrounding its center.

“During the initial scan through the data, a bright feature right in the center of 1987A jumped off the screen,” Kavanagh said. It was radiation emission lines from argon gas.

P.J. Kavanagh / J. Larsson

The presence of these emission lines could only be explained by a neutron star, not a black hole, Kavanagh said.

“We interpreted this as being conclusive evidence that the emission lines we were seeing were the result of radiation from the neutron center,” Kavanagh said.

Supernovae happen about every 50-100 years, or so, in our galaxy. And they need to happen close enough to Earth for astronomers to be able to observe their remnants.

“Our great hope is that these observations and future observations will simulate more developed and detailed models for supernovae,” Kavanagh said.

One of the line’s most popular scents, as pointed out by perfume TikToker @zachdeparfum, is called Not Another Cherry.

Fans of the perfume say it smells just like Tom Ford’s famous scent, Lost Cherry, which includes notes of black cherry, tonka bean, and almond.

Target’s version, which is vegan and made without parabens and phthalates, has similar notes: wild cherry, almond amaretto, and Turkish rose.

But whereas a 1.7-ounce bottle of the designer scent retails for $395 at Sephora, the 2.02-ounce Fine’ry perfume at Target costs $30.

Other Fine’ry scents are said to be dupes of beloved perfumes like Santal 33, YSL Black Opium, and Baccarat Rouge, the famously luxurious fragrance loved by celebrities and wealthy beauty fans.

Target shoppers also say that many of the Fine’ry versions smell better and last longer than the pricier options.

“I have Not Another Cherry and I swear I can smell it on my clothes for DAYS! Best money spent,” one TikToker commented on a video from @zachdeparfum.

“I have the real one and think they nailed this,” a Target reviewer wrote about Fine’ry’s The New Rouge scent, a supposed dupe of Baccarat Rouge.

So, the next time someone smells expensive, remember that it might not be luxury perfume on their skin. It might just be one from Target.