I first arrived in Silicon Valley in 1977 — 45 years ago. I was 24 years old and had accepted a Stanford fellowship paying $2,575 for the academic year. My on-campus apartment rent was $175 per month and a year later I’d buy my first Palo Alto house for $57,000 (sold 21 years later for $990,000). It was an exciting time to be living and working in Silicon Valley. And it still is. We’re right now in a period of economic confusion and reflection when many of the loudest voices have little to no sense of history. Well my old brain is crammed with history and I’m here to tell you that the current situation — despite the news coverage — is no […]
What yesterday’s Apple satellite announcement really means
I took the summer off to move with my family from California to Virginia, thus escaping the inevitable fires of doom. I deliberately left my Apple/Globalstar column up so it would be still staring at readers when Apple made its eventual announcement, which was yesterday. That was a gutsy move on my part, but clearly I was correct. Today’s column — my first from our new home in Virginia — looks at specifics of the Apple satellite announcement, placing it in a more informed context.
Apple spent only five out of 65 minutes in yesterday’s product announcements talking about satellites, yet the title of the event — Far […]
Starlink is a global ISP built at ZERO COST to SpaceX, enabling NASA’s Artemis launch
There is lots of good news lately for SpaceX, especially NASA choosing the Hawthorne, CA-based company to build a $2.89 billion lunar lander for NASA’s Artemis Moon landing slated for 2024. Key to that single-source contract, which eliminates two competitors including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, was SpaceX’s willingness to restructure payments to fit the $750 million appropriated by Congress this fiscal year for the project. Already the lowest Artemis bidder, Elon Musk’s company was willing to make the deal work for the customer, which is unusual thinking for space contractors, with many asking, Where did SpaceX get the money?
They got the money from your phone bill.
This Artemis win for SpaceX […]
Apple knows 5G is about infrastructure, NOT mobile phones
With Apple shares down more than 20 percent from their all-time highs of only a few weeks ago, writers are piling-on about what’s wrong in Cupertino. But sometimes writers looking for a story don’t fully understand what they are talking about. And that seems to me to be the case with complaints that Apple is too far behind in adopting 5G networking technology in future iPhones. For all the legitimate stories about how Apple should have done this or that, 5G doesn’t belong on the list. And that’s because 5G isn’t really about mobile phones at all.
Just to get this out of the way, I see Apple […]
The Google Lunar X-Prize wasn’t extended, it was ENDED
Google recently extended its Google Lunar X-Prize deadline to March 31, 2018, apparently giving the five remaining teams a little longer to vie for the $20 million top prize. But there’s a mystery here that suggests two vying reasons for the change — one sincere and the other cynical. The final answer may turn out to be a combination of both.
The Google Lunar X-Prize was announced in 2007, giving teams five years to put their landers on the Moon and drive around, sending back live HD video of the action. Though 30 teams eventually signed-up, none of them made it to the Moon by 2012. Or 2013, […]