The recent launch of Airtags and iOS version 14.5, which uses Apple Watch to unlock an iPhone when the user is wearing a mask, again highlights Apple’s vocation for creating product ecosystems where the differentiating feature is the interconnection between different elements of the range.

The feeling of using not one product, but an ecosystem made up of several devices that “talk” to each other is by no means new. …

Few stories in the business world are really about good guys and bad guys. There are always nuances, shades of gray, different interpretations that tilt the analysis one way or the other.

But no matter how hard I probe Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) initiative, launched on Monday on iPhones updated with iOS 14.5, all I see is crystal clear, without nuances of any kind: Apple is trying to give users choices so they can make decisions about their privacy and about the exploitation of their data. …

Launched in 2017, Substack is a service for monetizing newsletters sent via email. Basically, it’s a platform with some similarities to Medium with work by people who write about the topics you’re interested in to whom you can pay a subscription for a minimum of $5 a month or $30 a year, which writers receive in full, minus the company’s 10% commission.

In the first year of its launch, Substack attracted 25,000 users who began to use it to pay for their content subscriptions. That number has since grown to 500,000, leading many authors, in many cases well-known, to leave…

On April 17, when NASA revealed the result of its competition to develop a spacecraft to take astronauts back to the moon, it was clear that Elon Musk’s strategy of leveraging economies of scale had passed yet another milestone.

The competition pitted three proposals: Dynetics, a regular supplier to the Department of Defense; Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ aerospace company, which had partnered with usual suspects in the aerospace world like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper; and Musk’s SpaceX.

Usually, NASA chooses more than one company for this type of arrangement, so as to cover its back and avoid any…

One of the fundamental questions we need to be asking as we emerge from the pandemic is whether we will continue to practice the habits we adopted during lockdown.

The most obvious is teleworking: when the first lockdowns were imposed, many people suddenly found themselves having to work from home. Commuting was banned except for people with jobs that were considered essential. Some companies asked employees to pick up their desktop computer, monitor and mouse and find space at home on the basis that this was a temporary measure.

The same thing happened in education: teachers and students found themselves…

On Thursday — almost six months after Donald Trump, a hard denialist who doesn’t understand the difference between weather and climate, officially pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement (condemning the world to climate catastrophe had he been re-elected) — newly elected president Joe Biden, who rejoined the agreement immediately as his first presidential decision, committed his country to halving its 2005 emissions levels by 2030 at an online meeting of 40 world leaders.

After China, the United States is the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, so Biden’s pledge is more ambitious than that signed by Barack…

It’s the big post-pandemic question: how and from where are we going to work when it’s all over. And in some places, such as San Francisco, an answer is taking place at great speed: a large number of people who used to live in the Bay Area, paying ridiculously high prices, have packed their bags and gone to colonize reasonably close (about 300km) but more pleasant areas such as Lake Tahoe, which has experienced a rapid process of gentrification and has seen property prices of its properties soar and real estate agents in the area make a fortune.

This is…