Facebook Gets Dubious Honor; New Apple Displays; GM Delivering Hummer EV PUs; Chip Could Extend Battery Life; Waze Adds EV Charge Stations

In something akin to getting a Razzy, Facebook (Meta) is worst company of the year, in a survey from Yahoo Finance. Yahoo.com reports that the best company title went to Microsoft for 2021. The survey was conducted for Yahoo Finance by Survey Monkey, and there were some 1541 participants. This all goes to show that when you have a lot of bad PR, even a name change doesn’t really fake people out these days. Facebook got 50% more thumbs down votes than the #2 bad company, Alibaba out of China.

It’s been years since Apple has marketed its own monitors…save for the five grand Pro Display EDR. Now, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says he ‘strongly believes’ Apple will launch a new line of monitors for its latest Macs. It appears that both 24 and 27 inch ones are in development right now (which will be made for Apple by LG.) LG currently has the only Apple-approved monitors in the UltraFine 4K and LG UltraFine 5K.

The first electric Hummers are on the roads and in the garages of the first buyers, according to General Motors. The 1,000 horsepower EVs that feature 329 miles of range are the ones you might have seen in videos that can ‘crab walk’ sideways a bit to avoid big rocks, and can raise the suspension 6 inches to clear objects in rough terrain. The first Hummer EV Edition 1 models cost an eye-watering $110,295, and have GM’s advanced Super Cruise. There will be a cheaper model (relatively…$79,995) by Spring of 2024. The Edition 1 is already sold out.

It’s not imminent, but IBM and Samsung are working on a new chip tech that could dramatically extend smartphone battery life. Bgr.com says the so-called VTFET chip stacks transistors vertically in increase the number of them in a chip. This not only increases performance, but cuts down on power use. IBM and Samsung say the chips could offer twice the performance of current designs and use 85% less energy. They would be based on 2 nanometer tech, a level no one has quite reached yet. Besides making its own smartphone chips, Samsung also produces chips for Google. Imagine only having to charge your smartphone once a week, and getting more blazing performance than ever from it! With this going on between IBM and Samsung, you can bet that Apple is not asleep at the switch with this type of tech. We could see it in actual phones in the next few years. 

Google’s Waze navigation app has now picked up a new feature…it will show EV charging stations. Mashable.com notes that as more EVs hit the road, this will eventually become as important as gas station locations. The move is in partnership with VW, which has a slew of EVs on the way, and now has the ID.4 on the highways. Putting the charging stations on the app does make one think that Google might be getting closer to rolling out commercially its long-tested self-driving cars as EVs sooner not later.