Amazon Buys MGM Studios; Microsoft Working on Next Version of Windows; Valve Making a Switch Clone-‘SteamPal?’; Tesla Dumps Radar from Models 3 and Y

Amazon has just announced the second biggest purchase in their history…second only to the swallowing of Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in 2017. According to CNBC, Amazon is buying MGM Studios for $8.45 billion! This will bring Amazon Prime some 4,000 movies and 17,000 TV shows….to say nothing of bring some new (old) blood to amazon Studios. The purchase should put Amazon in a better position to compete with the likes of Disney and Netflix, as well as Discovery’s merger with the WarnerMedia spinoff from AT&T. The deal will need to clear some antitrust hurdles before being finalized. 

At Microsoft’s Build 2021, CEO Satya Nadella announced that they were working on the biggest and most significant update to Windows in the last 10 years. Engadget.com reports the CEO said “Soon we will share one of the most significant updates to Windows of the past decade to unlock greater economic opportunity for developers and creators.” Nadella went on to say he has personally been testing the new build over the past several months. This announcement comes just after Redmond admitted that it was killing development on Windows 10, the ’skinny’ version of its OS designed for dual-screen devices. Some of the elements of Windows 10X will be rolled out in regular Windows 10 later this year. 

Valve has been working on building a Switch type portable gaming platform on the down low, which is designed to run a large number of games on the Steam PC platform using Linux. Arstechnica.com says the system could launch by the end of the year. Some new hardware related code has been spotted in the latest version of Steam, which further indicates that the new box…dubbed ‘SteamPal’…is on the way before long. The project had formerly been named Neptune in code. It is expected to run on a system on a chip from Intel or AMD. No details about battery life, or price…but many observers think it will be a notch above the $299 list price for the Nintendo Switch. 

On the heels of backpedaling about using lidar, which we just reported, now Elon Musk says Tesla will drop radar from the Model 3 and Model Y. According to thenextweb.com, the Muskman claims they will be able to do just fine with only TeslaVision…that is, cameras, when it comes to self-driving. Actually, as has been noted by people inside the auto business and out, cars will really need a combination of cameras, radar, and lidar if they are ever to be fully self-driving. Tesla is keeping radar on the Model S and Model X, so it really appears to be purely a cost-cutting move.