Apple Store workers in Oklahoma City vote to unionize

The Apple Store workers who’d been planning to unionize since at least early this year have come long way from using encrypted chats to organize in secret. In June, an Apple Store in Maryland became the first location to unionize in the US. Now, another retail location in Oklahoma City has voted in favor of unionization, becoming the second Apple Store in the US to organize officially. According to The Wall Street Journal, the group is calling itself the Penn Square Labor Alliance, because the store is located at Oklahoma City’s Penn Square Mall.

Around 100 employees are eligible for union membership in the store. Based on the information released by the National Labor Relations Board, 56 of those workers voted in favor of forming a union, while 32 voted against. The group is now planning to join the Communications Workers of America, which also represents workers from companies like AT&T and Verizon. Charity Lassiter, an employee at the Oklahoma City store and a member of the organizing committee, told The Journal: “Now that we’ve won the election, it is our hope that management will come to the table so that we may collectively work towards building a company that prioritizes workers over profit and encourages employees to thrive.”

Meanwhile, an Apple spokesperson told the publication in a statement: “We believe the open, direct and collaborative relationship we have with our valued team members is the best way to provide an excellent experience for our customers, and for our teams. We’re proud to provide our team members with strong compensation and exceptional benefits.”

Previous reports indicate that Apple has been finding ways to dissuade workers to unionize. Just a few days ago, Bloomberg reported that the tech giant is offering its employees new perks, such as additional health benefits and funding for educational opportunities. However, the tech giant will reportedly withhold those benefits from unionized members who’ll now have to negotiate for them. Back when talks about worker’s organizing efforts started heating up, the company reportedly armed its managers with anti-union talking points. Employees formally accused the tech giant of union busting, and the NLRB found merit in the claims that Apple surveilled staff, limited access to pro-union fliers and help captive audience meetings to deliver its anti-union messaging. A hearing is scheduled to take place in December before an NLRB judge unless all parties involved agree on a settlement. 

Nikola founder Trevor Milton convicted on three charges of fraud

Trevor Milton, the founder and former executive chairman of Nikola, has been found guilty on three counts of fraud for misleading the electric vehicle company’s investors about its business and technology.

In total, he was found guilty on one count of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud. He was acquitted on one charge of securities fraud. His sentencing has been scheduled for January 27th. He faces up to 20 years in prison.

Milton was indicted by a federal grand jury on the charges last year, with prosecutors citing numerous alleged lies, including many made on Twitter, in podcast interviews and other media appearances. Prosecutors alleged he had lied about “nearly all aspects of the business” in an effort to boost the stock of the EV maker.

The SEC began investigating the company in 2020, after Hindenburg Research publicly accused Nikola of staging an “elaborate ruse” to mislead the public about the status of its electric semi, Nikola One. While the company had published a video purporting to show the truck “cruising on a road at a high rate of speed,” Hindenburg said the truck had actually been “towed to the top of a hill on a remote stretch of road and simply filmed it rolling down the hill.” The company ultimately paid $125 million to settle civil charges with the SEC in 2021.

During the trial, Milton’s defense lawyer argued that the video was merely “special effects” and that “it’s certainly not a crime to use special effects.” But prosecutors raised several other false claims by Milton, who was extremely active on Twitter. According to The Times, prosecutors said Milton also lied about having “binding contracts with trucking companies” that in reality were cancelable reservations for vehicles. Prosecutors also cited Milton’s claims about making “green hydrogen” when the company had not yet produced any.

Meta is killing off its Instant Articles format for news stories

Meta will end support for Instant Articles by mid-April, the company confirmed to Engadget. It introduced the format to Facebook in 2015 to help news articles load quickly on mobile devices. However, the company is said to be restructuring and directing more resources into its core products — including video-focused features like Reels.

“Currently less than 3% of what people around the world see in Facebook’s Feed are posts with links to news articles,” a Meta spokesperson told Engadget. “And as we said earlier this year, as a business it doesn’t make sense to over invest in areas that don’t align with user preferences.” The company pointed out that its users are spending more time watching videos, especially short-form ones, and that they want to see less news and political content on Facebook.

Axios, which first reported the news, noted that Meta has been reducing its investment in news content, such as by ending the payments it gives to US publishers for including their articles on the News tab. The company also said last week that it will shutter the Bulletin newsletter platform by early 2023.

The mid-April timeline for winding down Instant Articles support will give publishers six months to reassess their Facebook strategies. After that, when you tap a link to a news article on Facebook’s mobile apps, you’ll be taken to publishers’ own websites.

Meta noted that since it debuted Instant Articles, the mobile web experience has broadly improved due to faster internet speeds and more powerful devices. As such, it suggested that these upgrades have rendered Instant Articles unnecessary for many people who access text-based stories. However, you may soon find that some articles take longer to appear on your screen, depending on the page load of publishers’ websites.

Google effectively made a similar switch last year when it no longer made its AMP format worthwhile for news publishers. The company said it would stop prioritizing news articles that use the format in its search rankings.

Even Tetris players don’t know what the future holds for competitive Tetris

When you think of esports, Tetris likely doesn’t come to mind. Let alone NES Tetris played on original hardware. Yet, this weekend at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo a new Classic Tetris World Champion (CTWC) will be crowned, and it’ll likely be the most hotly contested, highest-viewed tournament in the game’s almost 35-year history.

Classic Tetris has seen an explosion of interest in the last few years but it’s fast approaching a crossroads. It needs to either professionalize or accept its destiny as a curious, if cozy, corner of the gaming world.

The trouble is, even the top players aren’t sure a professional league is realistic. “Do I think this could become a viable esport? Absolutely not.” Fractal161, a competitor with a very real chance of winning this weekend’s World Championships, told Engadget.

The annual event in Portland remains the game’s most prestigious tournament, but for the rest of the year, Classic Tetris fans can be found at CTM – Classic Tetris Monthly – a more informal, but arguably more important competition for the game.

“CTM was created by a streamer called Friday Witch in December 2017, and it was more just a casual kind of community thing.” Keith “vandweller” Didion, CTM’s current organizer and perennial host told Engadget. He took over the tournament organization in October 2018.

Since then, CTM has gone from barely scraping together enough players for a bracket, to hundreds of players competing in multiple skill levels every single month. The original concept was one 16-player tournament, but that meant anyone that wasn’t good enough would never get to play. “When I took it over my kind of pledge to the community was everybody who submitted a qualifier will get to play” Didion said.

Both CTWC and CTM offer prize pools but they are modest in comparison to the seven-figure worlds of something like Fortnite. If you win CTWC outright, you’ll take home $3,000 with the rest of the $10,000 purse being divided between the next 15 placements. CTM, on the other hand, typically rewards the top eight placements, but the purse is entirely user contributed, so it varies month to month. Typically the pool reaches around $3,500 with half that going to the overall winner.

“I think for a lot of top players, since we’re all kids, we see this as a lot of money. Regardless of whatever it ends up being.” Fractal added. This may be so, but once these players are old enough to start having to pay their own rent or insurance premiums, that perspective is likely to change.

The fact that CTM’s purse relies on donations might present a problem longer term: “We have someone called ShallBeSatisfied that contributes $1,000 – $2,000 in the month. So you have this other person dogwatchingtetris, the same thing there. This individual ScottGray76, he contributes a good amount on a monthly basis.” Didion said. In short, the financial incentive of playing in CTM lies broadly in the hands of a few individuals.

Right now, CTM effectively runs at a loss. Didion certainly doesn’t pay himself. There is some income from Twitch and YouTube but that’s used to pay community members for restreaming games and other contributions they make. “We are starting to explore sponsorships and things like that. But I’m not very good at it. So I’m trying to bring in people that know more than I do, or are just better at that kind of stuff than me,” he added.

Two pro Tetris players compete on Twitch.
Classic Monthly Tetris

As Didion explains, so far there’s only been one from an enthusiastic fan who reached out asking if they could sponsor last month’s tournament for $100. “Sure. Let’s do it. I’m excited by that just because that’s how I want the sponsorships to be, like something I care about, or people in our community.”

Didion obviously cares deeply about the community he’s built and competitive NES Tetris generally. Even his players think he should be more open to making it profitable. “He says that he runs this at a loss and that’s just ridiculous to me.” Fractal said. “I think that he is entitled to a share of the prize pool, if he desired, this is standard for lots of tournaments.”

This is where the next, slightly more delicate issue comes in. CTWC aims for absolute authenticity: All games are played in person (bar the pandemic years) on original NES consoles plugged into CRT televisions. The game is played exactly how it was the day it launched.

With CTM, Didion’s unwavering commitment to making the game accessible means he doesn’t have the luxury of making sure everyone has their own NES and CRT and copy of the game. The tournament happens exclusively online, so he has to allow competitors to play with what they have. Standardizing would be a massive expense.

What’s more, In 1989, when NES Tetris was released, level 29 was most likely designed to be the end of the game. The speed increases so much it’s unplayable earning it the name “killscreen.” Today’s players have mastered techniques to carry on well past level 29 and that requires light modifications to the game for the score to display correctly as the original never expected anyone to accumulate more than 999,999 and thus it cannot display a number higher than that.

Likewise, CTM is where many world records are broken. With players now able to go on almost indefinitely, and new records harder to achieve, not all spectators are enjoying the marathon matches according to Fractal. “I’ve heard a lot of testimonials about how they don’t really watch the killscreen anymore because it’s just not fun. I think it’s different when you catch it live personally.” Didion agrees. “I think for this esport to grow I don’t think that we can continue to have endless chase downs, post killscreen.”

With the game effectively playable forever, matches have gone from a place where records are broken to sometimes, feeling like a broken record. To address this, and make matches more exciting, CTM has modified the game for its highest bracket so that at level 49 it doubles in speed – something known as “double killscreen.”

Other small changes have been added too. Early matches were really just two people playing Tetris at the same time, with the victor being whoever recorded the highest score. More recently, CTM has added the ability for games to use the same random number “seed.” This ensures both players get the exact same pieces in the same order making it a true like-for-like showdown.

It’s these modifications that could pose the real issue for CTM’s growth as an esport. The use of emulators generally has always been something of a legal gray area when using copyrighted games. Modifying and distributing ROMs is a slightly darker shade of gray (no money is changing hands for the ROMs in CTM). Nintendo is famously aggressive against any fan versions of its games being made available online, but ironically, the bigger barrier might be The Tetris Company itself.

Formed by Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris, in 1996, the Tetris Company holds the worldwide rights to both the game and the brand. Didion described the company’s relationship with the community as “mostly benign neglect,” while Fractal is said it had a history of “somewhat aggressive takedowns.” The Tetris Company, for its part, is a major sponsor of CTWC and is actively encouraging new ways to play the game via Tetris Effect Connected on modern consoles.

Ironically, a lot of the challenges competitive NES Tetris faces – clunky old hardware, glitches in the game and a true online multiplayer mode are theoretically solved by Tetris Effect Connected’s Classic Score Attack mode. It’s essentially a modern yet faithful reproduction of NES Tetris playable on Xbox and PC. It supports native two-player battle modes and was even developed with a legendary player from the Classic Tetris scene – Greentea.

I asked Fractal why players don’t migrate over to the “official” version that could still be used for CTM competitions. “mainly we’re all comfortable with the status quo, so there’s no big incentive to change,” he told me over Discord. “and the negative feedback loop of nobody wanting to play because there’s nobody to play against.”

In many ways, this sums up the paradox neatly. Authenticity appears to be crucial to the lure of the game. Despite some practical concessions from CTM to make NES Tetris more accessible and interesting to watch, the original game with all its hidden quirks and secrets is as much a part of it as the scoring and gameplay is.

But this need for authenticity is also what’s preventing Classic NES Tetris from being able to grow into itself as an evolving esport. CTM’s loyal host does see some ways around this. “There could be a team element to it in the future. If we were to continue, and this would allow the teams to market themselves or their franchises as owners of these teams, I don’t know.”

He had toyed with building “characters” around the players, similar to other sports. “One of the problems is everybody’s so young, so they haven’t been around long enough to have stories you’re just like, ‘Oh, I was born in Michigan and now I’m 16.’ Okay, all right, great.” But it’s clear that whatever happens next and however it evolves, Didion will likely be the person making it happen.

Right now, the community CTM has created appears to be far more special and interesting to everyone involved than any financial incentive. It’s hard not to get the feeling that it’s less about preserving the integrity of NES Tetris, as it is about keeping this collaborative, genuinely connected community as it is, without letting the pressures of professional play or the looming specter of Mountain Dew-style sponsorships from taking that away.

Or in Fractal’s case, good friends and questionable fried chicken is all you need. “I’m not going to CTWC to win the prize pool. I’m going to hang out with a bunch of people that I only know online. And go to Raising Cane’s with like a bunch of people who really love Raising Cane’s for some reason.”

NVIDIA cancels the 12GB GeForce RTX 4080

Were you confused when NVIDIA introduced two GeForce RTX 4080 models with significantly different capabilities? You’re not alone. NVIDIA is “unlaunching” the 12GB RTX 4080 over concerns they’re confusing. While the company still believes the 12GB version is a solid video card, it said the lower-spec model is “not named right.” The company didn’t say if or how it might relaunch the card, and didn’t elaborate further when reached for comment.

The 16GB RTX 4080 is still on track to launch November 16th at a price of $1,199 for NVIDIA’s Founders Edition. This effectively raises the base price for RTX 40-level hardware. This might not be as bad as it sounds, mind you. The 12GB edition was supposed to start at $899, although its dependence on third-party manufacturers was likely to raise real-world pricing higher.

The muddled messaging largely stems from differences beyond RAM quantities. Where the 12GB model includes 7,680 CUDA (general-purpose processing) cores and a 192-bit memory bus, its higher-end counterpart offers 9,728 cores and a 256-bit bus. You’re getting a considerably slower GPU with the 12GB unit despite the RTX 4080 branding, and the gaps are sometime huge. NVIDIA’s own benchmarks showed the 12GB board trailing its 16GB sibling by up to 30 percent in well-known games. That could be more than a little disappointing if you bought the 12GB card expecting similar performance outside of RAM-dependent situations.

The cancellation won’t necessarily create much of a headache for NVIDIA. The RTX 4090 launch reportedly created lines at stores, and the 4080 could easily be the go-to GPU for gamers who can’t quite justify the $1,599 flagship. Still, it’s rare to see a misstep like this — NVIDIA misjudged the market to the point where it had to axe a graphics card before it reached customers.

Acer’s cloud gaming Chromebook is a solid laptop, even if you don’t game

Earlier this week, Google and hardware partners ASUS, Acer and Lenovo announced a somewhat surprising initiative to build Chromebooks expressly for cloud gaming. While many Chromebooks are a riff on the classic 13-inch laptop, the first round of these …