Apple dropped under $400 for its latest iPhone introduction Wednesday, a $399 model (64 GB) that replaces the iPhone 8 in the company’s smartphone lineup. The most affordable phone in the Apple portfolio, available for preorder Friday, comes when customers can expect little hand-holding while upgrading phones. Apple stores are temporarily closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Best Buy, Apple’s largest authorized service provider, is selling product online, with stores providing only curbside pickup and no in-store sales assistance. Verizon's website urges customers to shop online and go to stores only for “appointment-only critical technical support.” The Verge called the latest SE “essentially an iPhone 8 with a better camera and processor." The 4.7-inch SE -- available in black, white and red bodies -- has the A13 Bionic chip that’s in the flagship iPhone 11 and 11 Pro models, said Apple. The Retina HD display supports Dolby Vision and HDR10 playback, and the phone has a home button like on previous-generation iPhones with a steel ring to detect fingerprints for Touch ID. The SE has a single-camera design with a 12-megapixel f/1.8 aperture lens and 4K video support; the selfie camera is 7 megapixels. Buyers get a free year of Apple TV Plus.
House Infrastructure Committee ranking member Sam Graves, R-Mo., and Economic Development Subcommittee ranking member John Katko, R-N.Y., filed the Eliminating Barriers to Rural Internet Development Grant Eligibility (E-Bridge) Act (HR-6491) Tuesday in a bid to ease access to Economic Development Administration grants for broadband projects. HR-6491 would remove regulatory barriers to EDA grants for broadband deployments in a way that would allow localities to partner with the private sector on such projects and give communities more flexibility to comply with EDA funding match rules. “This bill will help spur projects under EDA programs to give rural and poor communities more online access to medical care, schools, the workplace, food, and other essential services,” Graves said. Beyond the pandemic, “Providing more avenues to develop broadband will also help these communities attract more jobs and business.”
WWE is furloughing a portion of its staff, cutting executive compensation and putting off a buildout of its headquarters for at least six months due to the pandemic's effects on business (see 2004100003), it said Wednesday. Asked for specifics about furlough size, it didn't comment.
Charter Communications' annual shareholder meeting this year will be held virtually due to the pandemic, it said Tuesday. It meets April 28, it said.
Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, lauded the Federal Bureau of Prisons Wednesday for agreeing to make inmate phone calls and videoconferencing services free during the COVID-19 pandemic. BOP responded to a push by Klobuchar, Durbin and 10 other Democratic senators for a waiver of phone and video call fees due to the suspension of in-person visits during the epidemic. They cited language in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act that allowed BOP to waive phone and video fees for inmates if the attorney general determines emergency conditions will materially affect the bureau’s functioning. Phone calls “were made free for the inmate population” effective April 9, BOP Director Michael Carvajal said in a letter to the senators. Video conferencing was made free the same day, though only for female inmates. “We increased each inmate’s monthly telephone time to 500 minutes per month to help compensate for the lack of visits," Carvajal said. BOP’s Trust Fund Limited Inmate Computer System added a feature to its instant messaging service that will allow prison staff to filter out inmates' messages to attorneys. Durbin tweeted he’s “glad to see” BOP has “taken our advice” to “make phone & video calls free for federal inmates.” Klobuchar noted her push.
Verizon said its May 7 annual shareholders meeting, at 12:45 p.m. EDT, will be virtual because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Best Buy will furlough about 51,000 hourly store employees due to the coronavirus, said the company Wednesday. The retailer said sales since March 21 plunged 30% from a year earlier after the company began restricting in-person sales to curbside pickup. Fiscal Q1 ends early May. COVID-19 sent March retail sales at electronics and appliance stores plunging 15.1% from February and 16.2% from March 2019, reported the National Retail Federation Wednesday. Executive salaries are being cut. Furloughs will affect hourly store employees and nearly all part-time employees, Best Buy said. It's keeping 82% of its full-time store and field employees on the payroll, including most in-home advisers and Geek Squad personnel. “The situation we are all facing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic is truly unprecedented,” said CEO Corie Barry. All of Best Buy’s U.S. stores are closed to customer traffic, with 40 closed completely, mostly in the Northeast, “for at least 10 days at our discretion,” Barry said. Online domestic sales are up more than 250%, with half of those sales coming from customer pickup at stores, Barry said. The situation remains “very fluid and there is still a great deal of uncertainty,” Barry said, referencing depth and duration of store closures “and consumer confidence over time.” Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter emailed investors that upcoming tech innovations the retailer expected to benefit from near term “will be delayed by supply chain disruptions and muted by a looming recession.” That could extend the timeline for the retailer to meet long-term targets, said analyst Michael Pachter. Shares Wednesday closed down 7.3% to $64.76.
Verizon's Hans Vestberg said he was among CEOs and other executives who spoke with President Donald Trump Wednesday about how to restart the U.S. economy once the widespread shutdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic ends. Vestberg is among six executives Trump named to a telecom-specific industry group advising the White House on reopening the U.S. economy (see personals section, this issue). The others are Liberty Media’s John Malone, Comcast’s Brian Roberts, Charter’s Thomas Rutledge, T-Mobile’s Mike Sievert and Altec’s Lee Styslinger. A separate tech sector group of 15 executives includes Apple’s Tim Cook, Qualcomm’s Steven Mollenkopf, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Google parent Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Broadcom’s Hock Tan and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. The call with Trump “was very useful,” Vestberg said in a statement. “Verizon and many other companies across the country are committed to finding ways of effectively doing business in the ‘new normal,’ and we're equally looking forward to doing our part to help bring back a strong and vibrant U.S. economy.”
Participants in NTIA’s software transparency initiative multistakeholder group should aim to make “progress” over the next six to eight weeks in its software bill of materials work ahead of the next expected meeting, said Office of Policy Analysis and Development Director-Cybersecurity Initiatives Allan Friedman during a Wednesday conference call. Group members noted continued progress on SBOM issues, including how to create an interoperable format for software companies to use to aid understanding of common data sets used in different software programs. The Framing Working Group released a naming-focused use cases document and noted identification issues as a major factor in their work. The Formats and Tooling WG focused on considering how automation could be helpful in making sense of software company-generated data are generating and finding knowledge gaps in current stakeholder-drafted SBOM documents. The Awareness and Adoption Working Group said its work has shifted away from earlier plans to do outreach to the technical community amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The group is creating an FAQ to answer questions about the SBOM process and encourage stakeholders to adopt NTIA’s coming end product. The group released a draft version of the FAQ ahead of the meeting. The Healthcare Proof of Concept WG said it’s been working on a proof of concept to share information collected from medical devices. The healthcare industry created its own proof of concept document before NTIA released initial SBOM documents last year. The NTIA-developed proof of concept includes input from hospitals’ security providers and software tool providers that collaborate with medical device manufacturers, the subgroup said.
House Science Committee leaders and an industry group urged the FCC to pull the orbital debris draft order from April 23's agenda. The agency got increasing resistance to its proposed satellite rules update (see 2004140052), in docket 18-313 Wednesday. A satellite executive told us the agency seemed surprised by the amount of industry criticism.