MacBook Air & Pro Refresh, Price Drop; Facebook Takes Cut-Fan Subscriptions; Prime Day Warehouse Strike; Tesla NOT Working on Model S or X Refresh

Apple has updated the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. The new Air will have a TrueTone display. Also, according to cnbc.com, the renewed entry level Pros not only have the TrueTone Display, but also get the Touch Bar and Touch ID. Best of all The MacBook Air drops to $1099, but will be offered to college students for $999. The configurations stay the same…128 Gigs of storage. Apple has also updated the much maligned keyboard design (which already showed up on the MacBook Pro in May.) A 13 inch MacBook Pro will now cost $1299 ($1199 for college students.) The entry level one gets a quad core processor and better graphics performance. Touch ID now comes on all 13 inch MacBook Pros. You can order up to 2TB of storage, too.

In 2018, Facebook rolled outran subscriptions. The program allows creators to charge their fans $4.99 a month, with the fans getting exclusive content and a fan badge. Up to now, that money has all flowed to the creators…but not anymore. Techcrunch.com is reporting that Facebook will start taking a 30% cut off the top, starting the 1st of next year. Happy New Year from Facebook! Apple has charged off the top for years on apps and the like, and google also has for mobile subscriptions, so this just follows along with them. Actually, Apple’s 30% and Google’s 30% for YouTube are less than the 50% fee collected by Amazon owned Twitch. Note: any subscribers a creator already has will still be at the no-fee rate.

Prime Day is coming, and is a huge, huge sales time for Amazon. Now, a fly has appeared in the ointment. Geekwire.com says warehouse workers at Amazon’s Shakopee, Minnesota warehouse plan a strike for 6 hours on July 15th…the 1st day of Prime Day. The workers are calling for Amazon to convert more temp workers to full time employees, plus reduce the brutal pressure for meeting quotas Amazon is infamous for.

there have been rumors flying around for weeks that Tesla is working on a refresh of the Model S and Model X. Engadget.com is reporting that Elon Musk has quashed those rumors today in a Tweet.

There is no “refreshed” Model X or Model S coming, only a series of minor ongoing changes. Most significant change in past few years was to use high efficiency Model 3 rear drive unit as S/X front drive unit. That went into production 3 months ago.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 9, 2019