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  • How to Shop Like a Pro During Amazon Prime Day – July 2024

    How to Shop Like a Pro During Amazon Prime Day – July 2024

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    Amazon Prime Day is arguably one of the most confusing shopping holidays in existence. It’s not even a “day”—the members-only event spans 48 hours. Amazon also promises “millions of deals,” but the displayed discounts are often misleading—or outright false. Some deals are actually available to people who don’t subscribe to Prime. Add in the frenzy of limited-time Lightning Deals and you’ve got a recipe perfect for spending too much money.

    Fear not! We’re here to help. WIRED’s Gear team is familiar with common shopping pitfalls, and I’ve been a deals writer for nearly a decade. What time do sales start and end? How do you tell whether a deal is actually a deal? We pooled our collective knowledge to get you prepared for Amazon Prime Day.

    Updated June 2024: We’ve updated this story with additional details about Prime Day, which is set for sometime in July 2024.

    If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.

    When Is Amazon Prime Day?

    Amazon has officially announced that Prime Day will be held in July. We believe, based on past sales, that Prime Day 2024 will take place on a Tuesday and Wednesday sometime in the middle of the month.

    When Do Prime Day Deals Start?

    The event officially begins at 3 am Eastern time and runs for 48 hours. WIRED will cover the best Prime Day deals from both Amazon and retailers that have competing sales. Some deals and sales will begin ahead of the official start time. (We’ll be covering those too.)

    Are Prime Day Deals Only for Prime Members?

    Officially, yes. You must be an Amazon Prime member to shop for Amazon’s Prime Day deals. There is a free 30-day trial available for new accounts. (Prime membership comes with a lot of perks, and we’ve rounded up all of them here.) The trial will let you get in on the sale—just remember to cancel your membership to avoid any subsequent renewal charges.

    There are some discounts available if you’re not a subscriber (those deals might not be that great). But other major retailers like Best Buy and Target usually hold concurrent sales during Prime-exclusive sales events. Their prices are often close to what Amazon is offering on the same products, and sometimes they match the price. This is a good way to take part in the Prime Day Sale if you don’t want to support Amazon.

    Walmart is launching a rival Walmart+ Plus Week sales event for members, running June 17–23, 2024. Like Amazon Prime, Walmart+ gives you free express delivery and some other perks, but costs just $98 per year. The deals include 20 cents off a gallon of gas at Exxon & Mobil stations nationwide, so you could pay off your entire annual Walmart+ membership by buying just 490 gallons of gas!

    Is Prime Day Worth It?

    It depends. For some items, Prime member-exclusive event prices tend to be some of the lowest we see all year. That’s especially true for Amazon hardware, like Kindles, Fire Tablets, Fire TV Sticks, and Echo devices, but there are other factors to consider. Prices fluctuate throughout the year, and some products are discounted quite often. Even if the price is good, a deal on a product that goes on sale all the time diminishes the overall quality of that deal.

    The sheer volume of deals promoted by Amazon during sales like Prime Day is a blessing and a curse. The truly good discounts can be difficult to pinpoint—there’s so much stuff on sale that the overall selection can feel overwhelming. But there’s a good chance that the item you want will be on sale. We’ve seen some fantastic Prime-exclusive discounts in the past, ranging from dirt-cheap Kindles to elusive price drops on the Nintendo Switch. The tricky part is to find the diamonds in the rough.

    WIRED covers legitimately good deals all year long, including during the Prime Day event. Our tips below will help you find those great discounts on your own.

    How Do I Know Whether a Deal Is Good?

    ABC: Always be checking (prices, that is). Researching an item’s price is the most important aspect of determining the quality of a discount. Don’t fall prey to deceptive marketing language and inflated MSRP prices—our tips only take a few moments. The easiest step is to take a second to Google the items you’re considering so you can see the price across multiple stores.

    One tool we like to use is Camelcamelcamel, which tracks Amazon’s prices over time. Paste the Amazon link or ASIN (found in the Product Information section on the Amazon product page) into Camelcamelcamel’s search bar and you’ll be able to see an item’s lowest recorded price, its average price, and how frequently the price fluctuates. Some deals, such as Lightning Deals, are excluded from the pricing history, but it’s useful to see what an item has sold for in the past. We also like Keepa, which has an extension (available for multiple browsers) that shows the recent price history for products directly on the Amazon page so you don’t have to open a new tab.

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  • Sellers Call Amazon’s Buy Box ‘Abusive.’ Now They’re Suing

    Sellers Call Amazon’s Buy Box ‘Abusive.’ Now They’re Suing

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    The latest UK class action, brought by the retailers, seeks financial compensation for the company’s alleged historical practices. “The most obvious and principal effect is a loss of revenue and profits. Amazon is taking sales away from merchants, having been able to use competitor data to bring to market its own products,” claims Boris Bronfentrinker, partner at law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher and counsel to the plaintiffs. “When companies acquire market power, they have to act with a certain responsibility. It’s not free and open to them to do what they want.”

    But despite the numerous existing investigations and allegations that thread a similar line, the retailers face hurdles. Bronfentrinker claims the case is “nailed on,” because the commitments made to the EC and CMA amount effectively to an acknowledgement by Amazon that it violated competition law: “The smoking gun is their own admission that they are going to stop doing it,” he says. But in practice, says Kathryn McMahon, an associate professor of law at the University of Warwick, the retailers will have to build a case from scratch, because no formal violation by Amazon has yet been recorded. “The whole advantage in entering into the commitments is that there is not an admission,” she says.

    Therefore, the retailers will first have to establish that Amazon is dominant in the UK market, something the company is likely to contest, says McMahon, and then prove that Amazon abused that position in a way that caused damage to sellers on its platform. “That’s the tricky point,” she says.

    The case that Amazon abused its dominance is built atop a little-tested principle of competition law: self-preferencing. The idea is that large digital platforms should not be allowed to abuse their strength in a particular market—say, e-commerce—to advance other areas of their business at the expense of potential competitors. In 2017, the EU found Google had violated its antitrust law by engaging in self-preferencing—specifically, using its dominance in the advertising business to give prominent placement to its own shopping services. In May, the UK put in place new rules built to prevent damage caused by self-preferencing. But there is limited precedent around which the claimants in the Amazon case can build their argument. “Self-preferencing has been prominent as a theory of harm only in the past ten years,” says Niamh Dunne, associate professor of law at the London School of Economics. “It’s an area still somewhat up for grabs.”

    In the absence of a wealth of legal precedent, the case will hinge to some degree on the interpretation of the difference between sensible business strategy and anticompetitive self-preferencing. It is not illegal in itself for Amazon to run an online marketplace, use it to sell its own products, and deliver the goods through its own logistics service, even though doing so might give it a competitive advantage. “One of the complications with self-preferencing is that vertically integrated organizations do it all the time. It can have negative effects for competitors, but it’s also such a natural thing for firms to do,” says Dunne. It may be open to Amazon, then, to argue that it has simply been following “the law of the jungle,” she says.

    Before these kinds of arguments can play out, the retailers’ lawsuit must first be certified by the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal, which is not expected to reach a decision on whether the case can proceed until early next year.

    The retailers are content to wait for their day in court. “If this class action reinforces the changes recommended by the European Commission and CMA, and companies like Amazon realize they cannot treat partners in this way, then we’ve achieved something,” says Goodacre. “[Amazon is] quite an avaricious company. I say that with a grudging admiration. But it comes at a cost to someone.”

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  • What Is Matter? We Explain the New Smart Home Standard (2024)

    What Is Matter? We Explain the New Smart Home Standard (2024)

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    The ideal smart home seamlessly anticipates your needs and instantly responds to commands. You shouldn’t have to open a specific app for each appliance or remember the precise voice command and voice assistant combination that starts the latest episode of your favorite podcast on the nearest speaker. Competing smart home standards make operating your devices needlessly complicated. It’s just not very … well, smart.

    Tech giants try to straddle standards by offering their voice assistants as a controlling layer on top, but Alexa can’t talk to Google Assistant or Siri or control Google or Apple devices, and vice versa. (And so far, no single ecosystem has created all the best devices.) But these interoperability woes may soon be remedied. Formerly called Project CHIP (Connected Home over IP), the open source interoperability standard known as Matter arrived in 2022. With some of the biggest tech names, like Amazon, Apple, and Google, on board, seamless integration may finally be within reach.

    Updated May 2024: Added news of the Matter 1.3 specification release, progress with the major players, a section on what you can do with Matter, and more details on potential functions.

    If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.

    Table of Contents

    What Is Matter?

    Matter enables different devices and ecosystems to play nicely. Device manufacturers must comply with the Matter standard to ensure their devices are compatible with smart home and voice services such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, and others. For folks building a smart home, Matter theoretically lets you buy any device and use the voice assistant or platform you prefer to control it. (Yes, you can use different voice assistants to talk to the same product.)

    For example, you can buy a Matter-supported smart bulb and set it up with Apple HomeKit, Google Assistant, or Amazon Alexa—without having to worry about compatibility. Right now, some devices already support multiple platforms (like Alexa or Google Assistant), but Matter will expand that platform support and make setting up your new devices faster and easier.

    The first protocol runs on Wi-Fi and Thread network layers and uses Bluetooth Low Energy for device setup. While it supports various platforms, you must choose the voice assistants and apps you want to use—there is no central Matter app or assistant. Because Matter works on your local network, you can expect your smart home devices to be more responsive to you, and they should continue to work even when your internet goes down.

    What Makes Matter Different?

    The Connectivity Standards Alliance (or CSA, formerly the Zigbee Alliance) maintains the Matter standard. What sets it apart is the breadth of its membership (more than 550 tech companies), the willingness to adopt and merge disparate technologies, and the fact that it is an open source project. Interested companies can use the software development kit (SDK) royalty-free to incorporate their devices into the Matter ecosystem. This is much simpler than certifying devices individually with each smart home platform.

    Growing out of the Zigbee Alliance gives Matter a firm foundation. Bringing the main smart home platforms (Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings) to the same table is an achievement. It is optimistic to imagine a seamless adoption of Matter across the board, but it has enjoyed a rush of enthusiasm with many smart home brands jumping aboard, including August, Schlage, and Yale in smart locks; Belkin, Cync, GE Lighting, Sengled, Signify (Philips Hue), and Nanoleaf in smart lighting; and others like Arlo, Comcast, Eve, TP-Link, and LG.

    When Did Matter Arrive?

    Matter has been in the works for years. The first release of Project CHIP was due in late 2020, but it was delayed to the following year, rebranded as Matter, and then touted for a summer release. After another delay, the Matter 1.0 specification and certification program opened in 2022. The SDK, tools, and test cases were made available, and eight authorized test labs opened for product certification.

    The first wave of Matter-supported smart home gadgets went on sale in the fall of 2022, and we have seen a steady trickle since then. The first update to the specification, Matter 1.1, arrived in May 2023 and consisted largely of bug fixes. Announced in October 2023, Matter 1.2 added support for nine new device types, including refrigerators, robot vacuums, and air purifiers, alongside improvements to existing categories.

    The Matter 1.3 specification was published in May 2024, adding energy management, EV charging, and water management alongside support for new devices, including ovens, cooktops, and laundry dryers. It also brought improvements to Matter Casting, so on top of being able to cast from your phone to your TV, other smart devices—like your robot vacuum—can send messages to your TV to warn you if they’re stuck, for example.

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  • The Big-Tech Clean Energy Crunch Is Here

    The Big-Tech Clean Energy Crunch Is Here

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    Big Tech’s appetite for energy is just about visible from the east coast of Scotland. Some 12 miles out to sea sits a wind farm, where each of the 60 giant turbines has blades roughly the length of an American football field. The utility companies behind the Moray West project had promised the site would be capable of generating enough electricity to power 1.3 million homes once completed. That was before Amazon stepped in.

    In January, Amazon announced it had struck a deal to claim more than half the site’s 880 megawatts of output, part of its ongoing attempt to slake its unquenchable thirst for power. As the world’s biggest companies race to build the infrastructure necessary to enable artificial intelligence, even remote Scottish wind farms are becoming indispensable.

    In Europe last year, $79.4 million was spent on new data center projects, according to research firm Global Data. Already in 2024, there are signs that demand is accelerating. Today Microsoft announced a $3.2 billion bet on Sweden data centers. Earlier this year, the company also said it would double its data center footprint in Germany, while also pledging a $4.3 billion data center investment for AI infrastructure in France. Amazon announced a network of data centers in the state of Brandenburg as part of a $8.5 billion investment in Germany, later dedicating another $17.1 billion to Spain. Google said it would spend $1.1 billion on its data center in Finland to drive AI growth.

    As the tech giants rush to build more data centers, behind the scenes there is panic around how to power them. Microsoft, Meta and Google all plan to be net zero before 2030, while logistics-heavy Amazon has targeted 2040. In pursuit of that aim, the past decade has seen those companies hoover up renewable energy contracts with wind or solar companies. But all these projects rely on electricity grids, which are buckling under increased demand for clean energy. That’s forcing the tech giants to think about their energy-intensive futures and consider how they might operate their own off-grid power empires, outside the system.

    “There is a recognition that as power demand increases, the industry will have to find alternative energy sources,” says Colm Shorten, senior director of data center strategy at real estate services company JLL, explaining that server farms are increasingly looking for “behind-the-wire” power supply, whether that’s gas or diesel generators or more innovative technology such as green hydrogen.

    Data centers need power for two primary purposes. The first is to power the chips that enable computers to run algorithms or power video games. The second is to cool the servers, to stop them from overheating and cutting out. Initiatives such as using liquid to cool the chips instead of air are expected to make modest energy savings. But forecasts still expect data centers’ demand for power to as much as double by 2026, according to the International Energy Association, thanks in part to the demands of artificial intelligence.

    For the past five years, tech companies have been on an increasingly frenzied shopping spree for renewable contracts known as power purchase agreements (PPAs), which can enable data center operators to reserve power from a wind farm or solar site before the projects have even been built. In Denmark, there are solar farms paid for by Meta. In Norway, there are wind farms bankrolled by Google. As early adopters of these types of deals, tech companies have helped fuel Europe’s now-thriving PPA market, says Christoph Zipf, spokesperson at WindEurope. This month, Microsoft struck the world’s biggest renewables energy deal, signing a $10 billion contract for clean power across Europe and the US.

    Yet renewables still need to run through the electricity grid, which is becoming a bottleneck—especially in Europe, as a surge of renewable producers try to connect to feed green transition demand across a multitude of sectors. “We’re going to run into energy constraints,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted on a podcast in April. At Davos this year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also warned that the status quo was not going to be able to provide AI with the power it needed to advance. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” he said at a Bloomberg event.

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  • Android Now Lets You Edit Text Messages

    Android Now Lets You Edit Text Messages

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    Hey u up? I miss u babbe.

    That’s the kind of immediately regrettable text you’ll now be able to salvage on Android Messages. This week, Google announced a bunch of new features coming to its Android mobile platform, and perhaps most useful among them is the ability to edit messages after they’ve been sent.

    The update is for Google’s default Messages app, and works pretty much the same way the edit option functions in other messaging apps like WhatsApp. Once a text is sent, tap and hold on the message, then when the menu pops up, tap Edit. There, you can fix your frightening textual faux pas and help to cultivate a world of clearer communication.

    Courtesy of Google

    There are a couple of caveats. You can only edit messages within 15 minutes after sending them (just like in WhatsApp) and once you do a small bit of fine print will appear by the timestamp saying that the message was edited. Of course, the recipient will still see all your embarrassing typos if they are prompt enough to view the message before you can change it.

    The other Android updates Google announced this week include better smart home controls, the ability to switch between devices mid-call, and more WearOS controls for devices like Google’s Pixel Watch.

    Here’s some other news from around the consumer tech world.

    Car Thing Refunds

    Spotify says it will refund any of its users who bought a Car Thing, the company’s first and only hardware device that was released in 2022. Spotify discontinued the Car Thing just a few months after its launch, and it announced this month that it would be disabling all the devices by the end of 2024. The company initially said it wouldn’t be offering replacements or refunds for the dashboard-mounted music streaming box, but after significant customer backlash, Spotify relented. Or at least has softened its stance, even though it hasn’t exactly guaranteed refunds for the $90 device. (Instead, the company says customers can contact customer service and request a refund.)

    It’s not a great look for Spotify, which is now facing a class action lawsuit from Car Thing users who are frustrated the company decided to stop supporting the device entirely.

    Amazon’s Drones Take Off

    Amazon’s delivery drone program had all but crashed and burned in recent years, as it has struggled with slow or botched deliveries and an inability to convince the Federal Aviation Administration to let it expand. But the Everything Company’s drones may be able to find some new lift at last, as the company says it has successfully gotten FAA approval to fly some drones out of line of sight of the operator, which could significantly expand their operations.

    Amazon’s quest for delivery dominance has caused it to make some questionable ethical decisions, like making it more complicated for users to opt out of Amazon Prime or making its employees work so hard they have to pee in bottles.

    Even with this green light for takeoff some problems still exist that may keep the drones grounded, like the fact that there might not even be much customer interest in the program, or the fact that the drones struggle to fly on especially hot days.

    Richard Mille Scores an Ace

    Richard Mille watch

    The new new RM 27-05, a collaboration between Richard Mille and tennis star Rafa Nadal.

    Photograph: Richard Mille

    Let’s be honest, collaborations between watch brands and celebrities are usually pointless. But no such criticism can be aimed at what Richard Mille and Rafael Nadal have been doing for the last 14 years. The original RM 027, the pair’s collaboration that launched in 2010, started things off as they were destined to continue, showcasing increasingly audacious missions to go ever more lightweight, rugged, and just plain technically crazy. The RM 027 weighed less than 20 grams, then the RM 27-01 just 18.83 grams. In 2015 came a new case architecture. The 2017 RM 27-03 boasted 10,000 gs of shock resistance. Then, in 2020, the RM 27-04 punched this shock resistance up to 12,000 gs.

    The new RM 27-05 continues the lightweight battle—remove the straps and it comes in at 11.5 grams. This is thanks in part to the monoblock case made of Carbon TPT B.4, a material previously used in Formula 1 race cars. Compared to normal Carbon TPT, B.4 is denser, the fibers are stiffer, and the resin is around 30 percent tougher. What does this mean? Thinner pieces can be machined, so you get weight reduction without losing rigidity. The manual movement inside has been shaved down to be lighter, too, and is 0.6 millimeters thinner.

    Finally, to make sure all was well, the RM 27-05 underwent a series of tests no watch should be subjected to: vertical and horizontal shocks, and 300 g accelerations. Yes, it’s limited to 80 pieces, but when you consider each one costs $1,150,000, Richard Mille should recoup the considerable development costs.

    WIRED’s Jeremy White contributed this writeup of the RM 27-05.

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  • The Daylight Tablet Returns Computing to Its Hippie Ideals

    The Daylight Tablet Returns Computing to Its Hippie Ideals

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    “Do you mind if I hug you?” asks Anjan Katta. This is not the usual way to wrap up a product demo, but given the product and its creator, I wasn’t really surprised. Katta, a shaggy-haired, bearded fellow, he’d shown up to the WIRED office in San Francisco dressed like he was embarking on a summertime mountaintop trek. He had immediately began rhapsodizing about the idealistic early days of personal computers and the amazing figures who produced that magic, knowledge he gathered in part through my writings. And he seemed like the hugging type.

    The device Katta pulls out of his backpack—an electronic-ink-style tablet called the Daylight DC1—is very much a reflection of its creator, a spiritual object driven more by ideals than commerce. “It’s almost trying to bring back the hippie into personal computing,” he says, bemoaning the loss of that spirit. “It’s been replaced by shareholders—what’s happened to that bicycle-for-the-mind idealism?” Katta’s device wants to put us back in that saddle, pulling us out of the mire of unsatisfying empty interactions with our phones and junky apps. All he has to conquer is Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok, and a public unlikely to take a monochrome gadget that costs more than $700 out for a spin. No wonder he needs a hug.

    Alan Kay, the visionary who imagined the way we’d use portable digital devices, once said that Apple’s Macintosh was the first computer worth criticizing. I think Katta wants to make the first computer worth meditating with. He hopes to join the ranks of early tech heroes by stipulating what Daylight doesn’t do—multitasking, mind-numbing eye candy, or distracting floods of notifications.

    Courtesy of Daylight Computer Co.

    Instead, the sharp “Live Paper” display quietly refreshes, a page at a time. (Katta’s team worked up its own PDF rending scheme.) The accompanying Wacom pencil lets users scrawl comments and doodles on its surface as easily as they do on their latest Field Notes memo book. Web browsing in monochrome may not have pizzazz, but it seems to lower one’s blood pressure. Daylight strives to be the Criterion Collection of computer hardware, making everything else look like The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

    To fully understand the Daylight device, look to Katta’s own origin story. He describes himself as “a very ADHD person who’s been a dilettante his entire life.” He was born in Ireland, where his parents had emigrated from India, and then the family moved to a small mining town in Canada. Katta couldn’t speak English well, so he learned about the world from books his father read to him. Even after the family moved to Vancouver and Katta became more socially deft—and discovered an entrepreneurial streak—he retained that wonder. He loved science, games, and books about early computer history. The only college he applied to was Stanford, because it symbolized to him the creativity of Silicon Valley people like Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell. “It was the place where mischief makers were doing cool stuff,” he says. “Stanford was the place where I’d finally be accepted.”

    But during the years Katta attended Stanford—2012 to 2016—he became disillusioned. “I expected irreverence and innovation, but it felt like McKinsey-Goldman Sachs banker energy, because you could get rich that way,” he says. While his peers did internships at Google and Facebook, Katta spent summers climbing Kilimanjaro and trekking to Everest base camp. He loved to hang out at the Computer History Museum in nearby Mountain View, soaking up the tales of the early PC pioneers and being appalled by how the narrative of tech had shifted from charming geeks to rapacious bros.

    “What happened to everything I read in those books?” he says. “After graduation I was like, Fuck this, and went backpacking for two years.” He wound up back in his parents’ Vancouver basement, massively depressed. Katta stewed for months, reading about science—and fixating on how our devices had turned into what he saw as engines of misery. “They are dopamine slot machines and make us the worst versions of ourselves,” he says.

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  • Amazon’s Delivery Drones Won’t Fly in Arizona’s Summer Heat

    Amazon’s Delivery Drones Won’t Fly in Arizona’s Summer Heat

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    How Amazon’s service fares in the desert could end up underscoring the natural barriers to making a solid business out of drone deliveries, at least absent technological advances. “We won’t take orders when the temperature gets above 104 degrees,” Calsee Hendrickson, a director of product and program management for Amazon Prime Air, told Phoenix’s 12News in a broadcast interview late last month. “We realize that is going to limit some of our operations in the afternoon hours in the summertime, but you’ll still be able to get your packages in the morning.”

    Asked for comment for this story, Amazon spokesperson Sam Stephenson told WIRED that the company’s “plans for Tolleson include regular deliveries during the summer months so customers can shop with drone delivery year-round. Any claim to the contrary is wrong.” Stephenson did not dispute that Arizona’s summer climate would limit delivery periods.

    Unique Climate

    Amazon met virtually with Tolleson officials a year ago to begin the process of vetting the city as a potential drone site. Tolleson’s economic development director signed a nondisclosure agreement last March barring the city from talking about the discussions, according to a copy WIRED obtained through a public records request.

    At a city council meeting last month after Amazon unveiled its plans, Tolleson Mayor Juan Rodriguez said the company chose the West Valley city out of 1,000 options, according to the city’s transcript of the session. Amazon representatives at the meeting donated $12,500 to a local nonprofit that helps fund education and basic aid initiatives and posed for a photo with an oversize check, Rodriguez, and other local leaders .

    Drone delivery proponents such as Rodriguez tout its potential to take vehicles—and the emissions and accidents that come with them—off the road. For consumers, under an hour from order to delivery can be an attractive proposition for items that are suddenly needed at home ASAP, or to fulfill whimsical desires.

    No organized opposition to the drone plans in Arizona has emerged so far. But in other communities where Amazon and other drone delivery programs have tested, local residents have worried about noise pollution from the buzzing machines, along with the potential for them to become surveillance tools—though leading operators say that’s not their intention.

    As one Tolleson city council member asked at last month’s meeting, the potential loss of driving jobs to the flying bots can also be concerning. For now, Amazon’s project will see the company add to its staff of 750 full- or part-time employees in Tolleson, hiring personnel to watch over the four drones that could be flying at once, a company representative told the council. But as the technology matures and regulations ease, so could manual oversight.

    The MK30 drone that Amazon is seeking permission for is smaller and lighter than its predecessors, with more sensors and software to navigate around obstructions and into denser areas on the preplanned routes it would fly. It can venture out up to about 7.5 miles from its home base, hit a maximum speed of around 65 miles per hour, and soar as high as 400 feet in the air. Light rain shouldn’t be a problem.

    Other cities with drone deliveries have been more temperate. Weather data compiled by Time and Date show summertime daily highs tend to average under 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or 38 degrees Celsius, in College Station, Texas, where Amazon has ongoing drone operations, and Lockeford, where Amazon last month said it is giving up on drones. Alphabet’s Wing locations in Australia and Texas have similar climates.

    Amazon has said it is eyeing expansion to Italy, as well as a return to the UK this year after abruptly winding down large parts of its project there in 2021. Scorching temperatures also shouldn’t be a season-long issue in those countries.

    Rodriguez, Tolleson’s mayor, couldn’t be more excited about the drones and the boost in sales tax revenue if they increase shipments out of his city. “They’re pretty awesome, to be honest with you,” he told fellow council members about the drones, citing his deep dive into the technology on YouTube. It seems Amazon could have at least one eager customer—weather permitting.



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  • Google Fires Twenty-Eight Workers for Protesting Cloud Deal with Israel

    Google Fires Twenty-Eight Workers for Protesting Cloud Deal with Israel

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    Google fired twenty-eight employees Wednesday after they participated in protests against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud contract with Israel’s government that also includes Amazon.

    Workers at both companies have claimed the deal makes advanced technology available to Israel’s security apparatus that could contribute to the killing or harm of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The Intercept and Time have reported that Project Nimbus provides services that can be tapped by the Israel Defence Forces.

    The twenty-eight firings, confirmed by Google, come hours after nine employees were detained by police late Tuesday for sit-in protests in the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in Sunnyvale, California, and a company office in New York. All nine of those workers were fired, in addition to nineteen other protest participants.

    Google spokesperson Anna Kowalczyk said in a statement that the employees were terminated after internal investigation” concluded they were guilty of “physically impeding other employees’ work and preventing them from accessing our facilities.” She added that “after refusing multiple requests to leave the premises, law enforcement was engaged to remove them to ensure office safety.” The Nimbus contract is “not directed” at classified or military work, she said.

    Tuesday’s action against Project Nimbus comes after the reported death toll from the IDF’s offensive on Hamas in Gaza climbed to more than 34,000 Palestinians. The military offensive began after Hamas killed about 1,100 Israelis on October 7.

    The sit-ins at Google were accompanied by protests of more than 100 people—including many Google workers—outside company offices in New York, Sunnyvale, and Seattle. Google’s Kowalczyk characterized the participation by employees as “a small number.”

    Google’s workforce comprises the vast majority of employees of parent Alphabet, which reported a headcount of more than 180,000 at the end of 2023. Several protesters at Google’s New York office told WIRED they have support within the company beyond those who directly participated in Tuesday’s protest.

    Jane Chung, a spokesperson for No Tech for Apartheid—the coalition of tech workers and Muslim- and Jewish-led activist groups MPower Change and Jewish Voice for Peace that organized the protests—says that some workers who were fired were involved in much less provocative action than those who occupied offices.

    Some, she said, had simply attended an outdoor protest and taken a t-shirt handed out by organizers. Others were “flyering outside, standing near the protesters for safety.”

    Zelda Montes, a now-former YouTube software engineer who says they were arrested after occupying Google’s New York office for more than ten hours, accuses the company of breaching US legal protections for workers.

    “It’s so clear that Google is engaging in illegal behavior to deter our labor organizing by retaliating against workers who weren’t arrested,” Montes says. “I’m disappointed at just how evil Google can be, but not surprised—they’re more outraged by employees peacefully sitting in, than at how their technology is murdering people.”

    Kowalczyk of Google said that the Nimbus contract is “not directed” at “workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”

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  • ‘Fallout’ Nails Video Game Adaptations by Making the Apocalypse Fun

    ‘Fallout’ Nails Video Game Adaptations by Making the Apocalypse Fun

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    Nolan tasked Fallout showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet with threading that particular needle. The pair chose to center the series around three protagonists, played by Walton Goggins, Ella Purnell, and Aaron Clifton Moten, all of whom enter the story at a turning point in their lives. As a cowboy movie star turned ghoul, Goggins’ character is cold and lawless, a set of emotions you have to imagine stems from the loss he’s felt in the 219 years since the first bombs fell. Moten is Maximus, a former orphan who joins up with the paramilitary tech protectors in the Brotherhood of Steel and stumbles his way into a chance at greatness. Purnell is Lucy MacLean, a naive Vault Dweller who sets off into the Wasteland in pursuit of her kidnapped father (Kyle MacLachlan).

    “All of the dilemmas the Brotherhood of Steel has faced over the years, the sort of quagmire of it all and the different angles they’ve taken, that’s all interesting,” Wagner says. “In most of the Fallout games, you start as a Vault Dweller, so that made total sense since, with the series, you start in a very small space and get to explore a crazy new world just like they are.”

    The showrunners also made sure to include The Ghoul, an unplayable character in the games. “That just felt like something we all wanted to see, because they’re sort of the untouchables of the Fallout world,” Wagner says.

    As a property, Fallout has always played with a sort of gallows humor, a satirical take on how awful and complicated life could be after total nuclear annihilation. That’s certainly true with the series, which balances heart-wrenching kid-delivered dialog about encroaching mushroom clouds with “aw, shucks” sex jokes and an almost comical amount of carnage. Wagner says setting the series’ tone was a bit of a tightrope act, since they knew it had to be a little bonkers sometimes and, at other times, deadly serious.

    “We did edits of episodes where there were long stretches without comedy because that was what we felt like the story needed, and it was just like, ‘Gosh, that’s a lot of apocalypse,’” he jokes. “We wanted to make the apocalypse a place we all wanted to go to.”

    For some viewers, though, it might feel like 2024 is already apocalypse-adjacent, making some of the show’s references and scenarios seem all too prescient. That’s all coincidental, Nolan says, since the show entered development in 2019, pre-Covid, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and prior to renewed hostilities in the Middle East. Still, he adds, making the series “always felt like an opportunity to poke a finger into a bit of an open wound for humanity, which is the fact that we still haven’t figured out if we’re going to make it or if we’re going to blow ourselves to smithereens.”

    Humanity, Wagner says, is almost always in its “end is nigh” era. The apocalypse is a relative concept. For some people, the apocalypse happened when women got jobs or started wearing pants. “The world is constantly in a state of ending, and we’re constantly talking about it,” he says. “We’re all just narcissists who think we’re going to be there when the final curtain goes down.”

    Presuming the world doesn’t end any time soon, though, Nolan says that the Fallout team does have a plan in place for where they want the show to go, if they’re lucky enough to get a second season.

    “In television, though,” Nolan says, “you have to be careful not to leave too much down the road,” something he knows all too well as the creator of HBO’s beloved-then-canceled Westworld. “We just want to concentrate on making one great season of television. If it works well and there’s an opportunity to go again, I very much hope we get that chance.”

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  • Welcome to the Age of Technofeudalism

    Welcome to the Age of Technofeudalism

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    The tech giants have overthrown capitalism. That’s the argument of former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, who became famous trying to defend debt-laden Greece from its German creditors. Varoufakis has never quite regained the notoriety of 2015. But he has remained a prominent left-wing voice. After a failed campaign for a seat in the European Parliament in 2019, he plans to run again this June. This time, his adversary isn’t Berlin or the banks. It’s the tech companies he accuses of warping the economy while turning people against one other.

    Technofeudalism What Killed Capitalism book cover

    Courtesy of Penguin Random House

    Varoufakis is also a prolific author; his 17th book, written as a letter to his techno-curious father, chronicles the evolution of capitalism from the 1960s advertising boom, through Wall Street in the 1980s, to the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic. In its most compelling stretches, Technofeudalism argues that Apple, Facebook, and Amazon have changed the economy so much that it now resembles Europe’s medieval feudal system. The tech giants are the lords, while everyone else is a peasant, working their land for not much in return.

    To Varoufakis, every time you post on X, formerly Twitter, you’re essentially toiling Elon Musk’s estate like a medieval serf. Musk doesn’t pay you. But your free labor pays him, in a sense, by increasing the value of his company. On X, the more active users there are, the more people can be shown advertising or sold subscriptions. On Google Maps, he argues, users improve the product—alerting the system to traffic jams on their route.

    The feudal comparison isn’t novel. But Technofeudalism attempts to introduce the idea to a wider audience. Its US release, launched the month before regulators in the US and European Union simultaneously initiated antitrust actions against Apple, also had impeccable timing.

    Over Zoom, I spoke to Varoufakis, from his home near Athens, about how the tech giants have changed the economy—and why we should care about it.

    This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

    WIRED: That word, technofeudalism, what does it mean? How is the feudal system relevant here?

    Yanis Varoufakis: Profit drives capitalism, rent drove feudalism. Now we have moved [from one system to the other] because of this new form of super-duper, all-singing, all-dancing capital: cloud capital, algorithmic capital. If I’m right, that is creating new digital fiefdoms like Amazon.com, like Airbnb, where the main mode of wealth extraction comes in the form not of profit but of rent.

    Take the Apple Store. You are producing an app, Apple can withhold 30 percent of your profits [through a commission fee]. That’s a rent. That’s like a ground rent. It’s a bit like the Apple Store is a fiefdom. It’s a cloud fiefdom, and Apple extracts a rent exactly as in feudalism. So my argument is not that we went back from capitalism to feudalism. My argument is that we have progressed forward to a new system, which has many of the characteristics of feudalism, but it is one step ahead of capitalism. To signal that, I added the word techno.

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