Verizon Sells Yahoo, AOL, Etc.; Apple 8” Folder iPhone in 2023; iPhone Blood Sugar & Pressure Monitoring; Neuralink President Leaves

Verizon is spinning off its media assets including Yahoo and the various AOL sites…Huff Post, TechCrunch, & Engadget…to Apollo Global Management for $5 billion. According to techcrunch.com (one of the aforementioned properties being spun off), Verizon will keep 10% of the company. When the deal closes, it will be branded just as Yahoo. Verizon originally paid a combined $9 billion for the properties when they bought AOL in 2015 and Yahoo in 2017. That sounds like quite a hit…but the media companies…particularly Yahoo Sports, have thrown off good income. The media division generated $1.9 billion in sales in just the first 3 months of 2021, a 10% gain over 2020. 

A little more info on Apple’s rumored folding phone. Ming-Chi Kuo had aid the gadget would have a screen of 7.5 to 8 inches. Now, he says you can plan on an 8 inch (unfolded) screen. It will be OLED, and will be out in 2023. 9to5mac.com says that, although others have already plowed the folding phone ground to mixed results, Apple’s robust cross-product ecosystem should make the handset a hit. He predicts they will sell between 15-20 million of them. 

Another Apple update involves what we reported a couple weeks ago regarding Cupertino looking at making an Apple Watch that will check blood sugar without skin pricks. Some sleuthing by both The Telegraph and Forbes indicates that UK health tech Rockley Photonics has had Apple as their biggest customer for the past two years. Rockley is not only working on blood sugar monitoring sensors, but also blood pressure and blood alcohol level monitoring. It’s unlikely we will see all three by September, but it’s quite possible at least one will make it into the next Watch.

Max Hodak said in a Tweet over the weekend that he’s out as prudent of Neuralink, the company he co-founded with Elon Musk. Theverge.com reports that he didn’t say if he quit or not, but said “I learned a ton there and remain a huge cheerleader for the company! Onward to new things.” The firm was working on brain-machine interfaces. Lately, some scientific and medical communities have criticized the company and expressed skepticism regarding its claims. MIT Technology Review called the company “neuroscience theater,” and said “most of the company’s medical claims remain highly speculative.”