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At SXSW, Fast Company asked festival goers why pizza parties fall flat as employee rewards.
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Always-on internet connections have become as essential as running water, heat, and power. But a massive outage affecting Africa, Asia, and the Middle East in recent days underscores the fragility of the infrastructure that keeps us online. Some 15 subsea cables run through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea, and four were reportedly severed, significantly disrupting internet traffic. Hundreds of subsea cables lie on the sea floor, carrying nearly all global internet traffic (an estimated 99%). We had cuts in the Red Sea last year, and now were in the same boat again, so to speak, says Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik. When capacity is lost, providers must reroute traffic to the remaining links, creating latency and reliability issues. The continent-affecting internet outages, which are likely to persist because of issues accessing the area affected, have led to a renewed debate about the reliability of subsea cablesand whether there are alternatives, such as satellite-based links provided by the likes of Starlink. Although past cable outages have sometimes been deliberate, this one is widely believed to be accidental. The Red Sea is a kind of problematic area because you have all the maritime traffic coming through the Suez Canal, and theyre waiting their turn to get to the Suez, Madory explains. They have to drop an anchor while they’re waiting, and when you have a lot of ships dropping a lot of anchors in shallow water, its just a recipe for disaster. Cable cuts are often repaired quickly, but this case is more complicated because of its location off the coast of Yemen, where conflict involving the Houthis slows repair efforts. With as many as 200 incidents reported annually, the frequency of disruptions is prompting renewed interest in alternatives. One option is satellite internet, such as Starlink, which Ukraine has relied on to avoid Russian sabotage of cables. Other competitorsincluding Project Kuiper and Eutelsat OneWebare also expanding rapidly, according to a new report by equity research firm MoffettNathanson. Starlink has already amassed more than six million subscribers across countries around the world, and in regions like sub-Saharan Africa, it has become an important backstop when terrestrial connectivity fails. The theory is that outages such as the Red Sea cuts could speed up adoption in markets where consumers and businesses are willing to pay a premium for resilience. However, the service remains expensivekits cost several hundred dollars and monthly fees run higher than many local providersputting its reach beyond mass consumer adoption in lower-income areas. Still, satellites cant yet compete with fiber optics. Starlink, or any satellite service, is just not going to be able to re-create the capacity that you get on a fiber optic cable, Madory says. Subsea cables can carry three petabits of data per second, compared with 150 terabits via satellites. That gap may narrowplanned launches over the next three years could boost satellite capacity to 800 terabits a secondbut for now, subsea cables remain the backbone of the global internet.
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E-Commerce
Another year, another iPhone event. But the iPhone 17 lines introduction was one of the more significant in some time, with Apple making major hardware changes that look to have resulted in a competitive, highly differentiated lineup. While the higher-end models will grab most of the headlines, some of the biggest upgrades have come to the base iPhone 17, as well as new features that apply across the entire range. I would not have considered using an iPhone 16 as my daily driver, but the 17 looks like a great buy at $799. The upgrades The top upgrade is ProMotion, or 120Hz variable refresh rate, which enables smooth on-screen motion thats impossible to go back from once youre used to it. Apple first introduced it on the iPad Pro before bringing it to the iPhone and MacBook Pro, but a high refresh rate has long been table stakes for Android phones that cost well below the iPhone 17, so its introduction at this level is both overdue and welcome. The feature uses LTPO screen technology, which also enables an always-on display on the 17. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/multicore_logo.jpg","headline":"Multicore","description":"Multicore is about technology hardware and design. It's written from Tokyo by Sam Byford. To learn more visit multicore.blog","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.multicore.blog","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}} Other upgrades for the iPhone 17 include a 48-megapixel ultrawide camera, in line with the Pro models. Storage on the base model has also been doubled to 256GB without a corresponding increase in price. The whole iPhone 17 lineup is getting new features that trickle down to the base iPhone 17. Charging speeds have been boosted, the Ceramic Shield 2 glass promises to be sturdier, and the screen has an anti-reflective finish. The addition that will get the most use is undoubtedly the new 18-megapixel Center Stage selfie camera, which uses a square sensor to intelligently switch between portrait and landscape photos without you needing to physically rotate the phone. While the iPhone 17 might not be all that exciting, I think Id be happy enough using one as my main phone. Apple has ticked off a lot of boxes here, making the iPhone 17 much more competitive with similarly priced devices like the Google Pixel 10. The vibrant color options help, too. The MacBook Air of phones But the $999 iPhone Airnot the 17 Air, surprisinglyrepresents a whole new take on iPhone design. Most of the phones computing components have been crammed into the camera bar, allowing Apple to fill the rest of the ultrathin device with battery cells. Its an inspired approach, but there are two obvious trade-offs. You only get one camera lens, much as Apple likes to pretend that its digital zoom system gives you four, and the battery capacity is still diminished compared to the other iPhone 17 models. On the other hand, Apple is claiming 27 hours of video playback time on the Air, which is what it rated last years iPhone 16 Plus and 16 Pro at. Thats a little hard to believe, but well have to wait until the phones are in hand to see how they perform in practice. It is worth noting that Apple is selling a new $99 MagSafe battery pack that works with the Airand only the Air. The SIM card slot is another casualty of the Airs constrained dimensions. Apple has already been omitting the physical slot from iPhones in the U.S. for a while, but this is the first time its doing so on any model across the worldwhich is particularly notable in China, where only a single carrier, third-placed China Unicom, even offers eSIM support. The Air might be cooked in China, then, but itll be fascinating to see how it performs elsewhere. Earlier this year I speculated that the goal should be to create something like the MacBook Air of phones: impressive design with unspectacular specs that are good enough for most use cases and I think Apple might just have pulled that off. Adventurous colors The iPhone 17 Pro, meanwhile, has gone in completely the opposite direction. Its muscular redesign adds a little more thickness, a little more weight, and a chunky new camera bump that runs the full width of the phone. Apple has returned to aluminum on its Pro phones, this time in a unibody build with a glass cutout to enable wireless charging. Thats a notable backtrack after the company made a big deal out of shifting to titanium two years ago, a move widely blamed for the iPhone 15 and 16 Pros poor thermal performance. Apple is also using a new vapor chamber cooling system on the 17 Pro, which should further alleviate that issue. One way to express confidence in your industrial design is to release it in bright orange, and thats what Apples done this year. Equally as out of character is the decision to eschew a black model; the only other two iPhone 17 Pro colorways are white and dark blue. If that boosts the sales numbers of the orange version and promotes more adventurous colors in the future, Im all for it. The 17 Pro comes with a significantly upgraded telephoto camera setup. The focal length is now 4x the main camera, down from 5x in the 16 Pro, but the 1/2 sensor is much larger than before and Id expect it to perform better at 5x and beyond. While this still doesnt quite compete with the best from Chinese companies like Xiaomi and Oppo, it should be comfortably the best smartphone zoom camera available in the U.S. Finally, the RAM has been boosted by 50% to 12GB. Apple Intelligence did not exactly set the world on fire, but if its going to be the impetus for Apple to stop shipping miserly amounts of memory on its highest end phones, Ill take it. This is looking like a really strong iPhone lineup. Each model has its clear strengths and I honestly think Id be happy to use any of them. This is going to be the first time in a long while that a lot of upgraders will have to think hard about which one to go for. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/multicore_logo.jpg","headline":"Multicore","description":"Multicore is about technology hardware and design. It's written from Tokyo by Sam Byford. To learn more visit multicore.blog","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.multicore.blog","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}}
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