No such thing as bad press?
Apple’s new Crush! ad for its latest iPad received such a negative reaction that the company issued an apology just 2 days after its release, ditching plans to run it on TV, with Apple’s VP of marketing communications Tor Myhren conceding that the promo had “missed the mark”.
The one-minute video features various instruments of culture and creativity — a guitar, books, turntables, cameras, antiques — being pulverized by an industrial crushing machine, leaving only the new, admittedly very thin, iPad Pro in its wake. Some people wrote long indictments of the ad, outlining why it represented all that was bad about big tech, while others were more economical in their damnation: “Worst. Commercial. Ever.”
Rage bait
The tech giant now has an interesting opportunity to take the old “all publicity is good publicity” maxim out for a test drive. Preliminary Google Trends data suggests this might be the most buzzy bit of promotion that the iPad product line, quarterly sales of which peaked back in 2014, has had in years.
Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a world where Apple’s marketing execs didn’t see some kind of strong reaction to a striking visual of creative objects being destroyed. The fact that they’ve pulled the ad, however, weakens the deliberately provocative argument. It’s also just not very Apple — which has found success with upbeat, uplifting ads in days gone by.
For now, the ad still sits on CEO Tim Cook’s Twitter feed, having racked up nearly 60 million views and thousands of enraged replies.
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Amazon raises the price for ad-free Prime Video to $4.99
Amazon is giving consumers more — for more. The e-commerce giant is raising the price of its ad-free Prime Video tier to $4.99 a month, up from $2.99.
On April 10, the service, now rebranded as Prime Video Ultra, will allow more concurrent streams (five instead of three) and up to 100 downloads, up from 25. Ad-free Prime Video had been included with a Prime membership until 2024, when Amazon added ads and began charging $2.99 a month to remove them.
For what it’s worth, ad-free Prime Video is still cheaper than the other increasingly expensive streaming services — if you don’t include the cost of Prime.
For what it’s worth, ad-free Prime Video is still cheaper than the other increasingly expensive streaming services — if you don’t include the cost of Prime.
Uber relaunches robotaxi service with Hyundai-backed Motional in Las Vegas
What happens in Vegas, keeps happening in Vegas.
Uber users in Las Vegas can now be matched with an electric Motional IONIQ 5 robotaxi along parts of the Strip and at select casinos, resorts, and the Town Square shopping district near the airport, the companies said. For now, each vehicle includes a human safety operator monitoring from behind the wheel, who the companies say will be removed by year’s end.
Uber and Hyundai-backed autonomous tech company Motional previously tested a service there in 2022. “Motional is ready to put our extensive ride hail experience to work with Uber again,” said David Carroll, vice president of commercialization at Motional, which paused its commercial deployments in 2024 to refocus on its core driverless technology after scaling back operations.
This time around, the companies will be joining a much more crowded field. Amazon-owned Zoox has been offering free rides along select destinations on the Strip since last year, and both Tesla’s Robotaxi and Alphabet-owned Waymo have plans to open up shop there in the near future.
Thanks to a spate of recent AV partnerships, Uber, which sold its own autonomous unit back in 2020, is finding itself at the center of the nascent robotaxi boom.
Musk says “xAI was not built right” amid executive departures, Cursor hires
There’s been a lot of turnover lately at xAI, with numerous executive departures and, yesterday, news that the SpaceX-owned company was hiring two senior leaders from Cursor, an AI coding startup that’s raising funds at a $50 billion valuation.
The reason? “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,” CEO Elon Musk posted on xAI-owned X yesterday, in response to a post about the Cursor hires. Earlier this month, Musk told a conference audience, “Grok is currently behind on coding.”
The news amounts to an admission of a reset inside xAI and an acknowledgment that the company is trailing AI peers like Anthropic and OpenAI in one of AI’s most commercially important applications: coding.
xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 12, 2026
Same thing happened with Tesla.
War in the Middle East halts Meta’s undersea fiber project
Meta’s massive undersea cable project connecting Africa and the Middle East to Europe has run into an unexpected obstacle — not under the sea, but in the sky and land above: the war in the Middle East.
According to a report from Bloomberg, France’s Alcatel Submarine Networks, the company that is laying the cable, notified customers that it can no longer safely operate in the area.
The 2Africa project consists of a 45,000-kilometer chain of undersea fiber-optic cables that encircles Africa and runs through the Red Sea, up through the Gulf of Oman, where the Strait of Hormuz sits. Iran has declared the strait — a crucial choke point for oil and natural gas tankers — closed for traffic.
Meta is building the network in partnership with Bayobab, China Mobile, Orange, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone, WIOCC, and Center3.
The 2Africa project consists of a 45,000-kilometer chain of undersea fiber-optic cables that encircles Africa and runs through the Red Sea, up through the Gulf of Oman, where the Strait of Hormuz sits. Iran has declared the strait — a crucial choke point for oil and natural gas tankers — closed for traffic.
Meta is building the network in partnership with Bayobab, China Mobile, Orange, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone, WIOCC, and Center3.