Apple Will Absorb Tariff Costs for Now; Pixel 3 $300 off Before 4 Rolls Out; Man Crosses English Channel on Hoverboard; Cloudflare Whacks 8chan; Tesla Lease Partner Sells 60% Stake

Well known Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says Apple will absorb any extra cost tacked on by tariffs on China for now. 9to5mac.com reports that Kuo is also saying that Cupertino will be investing in non-Chinese production in the meantime. He believes that most of Apple’s production bound for the US will be made in non-Chinese counties within 2 years. Apple has already been building iPhones in both India and South America. The new iPhones and probably updated Apple Watch should roll out the third week of September.

If you don’t have to have the very latest and greatest, but you want a great phone and a relative bargain price, here’s your chance. According to 9to5google.com, Google has gone live with special offers on the Pixel 3. You can pick one up at a $300 discount until September 28th, when the Pixel 4 rolls out. the 3 has arguably the best camera of any smartphone (at least until the new iPhones and the Pixel 4 roll out in September), so you can grab a 3 right now with 64 gigs of storage for $499. Compare that to an iPhone XS at a grand!

French inventor Franky Zapata successfully crossed the English Channel over the weekend on a overboard he designed. The jet powered board flew at speeds of up to 106 mph during the 22 mile trip. It’s worth noting, that Zapata did have to land once halfway across to refuel….he only could carry a 10 minute supply of fuel on his back! Theverge.com says this was Zapata’s 2nd attempt at crossing the English Channel. The 1st time was the end of July when he missed a landing on his refueling platform and ended up in the drink!

Apparently, Cloudflare has had enough…as of midnight, they cut off notorious site 8chan. The El Paso shooter apparently posted a racist manifesto on the image board, and that made the third time this year that a mass shooter had ties to the notorious site. Arstechnica.com notes that in 2017, Cloudflare dropped the white supremacist site the Daily Stormer. Cloudflare says they expect that 8chan will find another hosting service, as Daily Stormer finally did, but just decided the site should be someone’s problem. Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO notes that there is no First Amendment involved here, since they are a private company and not bound by that. In addition, he pointed out that more than 50% of their revenue comes from outside the US anyway. Finally, he said that while this solved Cloudflare’s problem with hate speech for now, it doesn’t solve the internet’s problem with it. No one seems to have a solution for that thus far.

MUSA Auto Finance was apparently overwhelmed by its Tesla leasing business last fall, and burned through its capital resources. According to autonews.com, 60% of the relatively small company has been sold to PowerBand Solutions of Canada. The tech company seems mostly interested in the tech MUSA has developed for automated decision-making software. The MUSA programming can provide an approval for a lease back to a dealer partner and profile a lease contract accurately in less than 8 seconds! With the average Tesla lease almost double the cost of other dealer cars the company had been leasing, they wiped out their $157 million line quickly. Another partner had been brought in, but now, it looks like with PowerBand picking up 60%, they will begin leasing again within 60 days.