Las Vegas Exteriors And Landmarks - 2024

View from inside the Vegas Loop (Aaron P./GC Images)

Tunnel Vision

Tesla gets permit to test autonomous cars in Nevada as autonomous driving heats up there

Amazon’s self-driving Zoox launched service this week, and Google’s Waymo is testing there.

9/12/25 9:49AM

Tesla now has a permit to test its autonomous vehicles in Nevada, according a report yesterday from Tesla influencer Sawyer Merritt that was confirmed by TechCrunch.

Nevada, which has a lower barrier to entry for autonomous driving than states like California, is about to become a new hotbed for autonomous ride-hailing services.

Earlier this week, Amazon launched its self-driving Zoox service to the public for free at several locations along the Strip.

Google’s Waymo, which already has an operational autonomous vehicle service in five cities, announced at the beginning of the year that it would begin testing in Vegas in 2025.

Tesla currently operates a ride-hailing service with a regular human driver within four miles of tunnels below the city called the Vegas Loop, dug by the Elon Musk-founded Boring Company. When Sherwood News tried the service earlier this week, only two drivers were available to shepherd ride-seekers between several nearby resorts. After waiting about 15 minutes for our ride to arrive after being quoted three minutes, we wound up stopped at a red light underground behind the only other operational Tesla.

Took a Tesla ride through the Boring Company tunnels in Vegas. Only two cars were running. Got stuck in traffic behind the other car. pic.twitter.com/uSbqkPiYI0
— Rani Molla (@ranimolla) September 9, 2025

Tesla has been working on expanding the tunnels to more locations, including the airport, but had to suspend that activity yesterday after a worker “sustained a crushing injury.” A Vegas Loop employee told Sherwood it plans to open the route to the airport in January.

Tesla, which already sends cars autonomously through Boring Company tunnels at its factories, recently began testing supervised Full Self-Driving within the Vegas tunnels, though the driver we rode with had doubts the cars could employ Full Self-Driving tech properly in the tight tunnels underground.

Tesla currently operates only about 30 autonomous vehicles with a safety monitor in the passenger seat in Austin, Texas. It has autonomous testing permits now in Nevada and California (with a driver), and has applied for such permits in Arizona.

Tesla of course has big hopes and a rapid timeline for its autonomous deployment, which the company has said is central to its future.

“I think we’ll probably have autonomous ride-hailing in probably half, half of the population of the US by the end of the year,” Musk said during the company’s second-quarter earnings call in July. “That’s at least our goal, subject to regulatory approvals.”

Rani Molla20h

Meta pushes deeper into AI robots with acquisition

Meta just bought robotics AI startup Assured Robot Intelligence, Bloomberg reports, doubling down on its push into humanoid tech. The team will join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs to build models that let robots “understand, predict and adapt to human behaviors in complex environments.”

The goal, Bloomberg says, is to be the Android of robots: building the software and hardware foundation others can use.

The move comes right after China forced Meta to let go of its acquisition of agentic AI startup Manus.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg joins Tesla’s Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos in racing into AI-powered robots.

Meta Acquires Robotics AI Company to Help Build Humanoid Technology

CEO Mark Zuckerberg joins Tesla’s Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos in racing into AI-powered robots.

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Apple’s capital spending is heading the opposite direction of Big Tech

The big story in Big Tech has been just how much they’re spending on capex to furnish their AI futures. Not only are Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft spending more than ever, they’re also spending more than they said they would just a quarter earlier. In total, their 2026 capital expenditure bill is now slated to surge beyond $700 billion.

Apple, by contrast, continues to take a different approach. The company has lagged peers in developing its own frontier AI models and has leaned more on partnerships. The strategy certainly doesn’t seem to be hurting Apple yet. The company posted record revenue in the March quarter that beat analysts’ expectations this week, even without a robust AI offering.

Apple’s capex actually fell in the March quarter. Its payments for acquisition of property, plant, and equipment totaled about $1.9 billion in its fiscal second quarter, down 36% from roughly $3 billion a year earlier. So on a year-over-year basis, Apple’s capex declined while everyone else’s jumped sharply.

Tesla’s related party transactions in 2025

Elon Musk’s companies more than doubled their spending on each other last year

And that’s before Tesla invested $2 billion in xAI, which it has since converted to a stake in SpaceX.

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Tim Cook: Popular Mac mini and Mac Studio will be constrained for “several months”

Apple may have missed out on the first wave of generative AI when it comes to software, but its hardware is another story.

The current OpenClaw craze — where users run their own AI agents on a dedicated computer in their homes, and chat with it via messaging apps — has made the once sleepy Mac mini and pro-level Mac Studio an unlikely hit.

Reports of shortages are not lost on Apple.

During this week’s earnings call, outgoing CEO Tim Cook acknowledged the supply constraint of the popular desktops:

“On the Mac mini and the Mac Studio, both of these are amazing platforms for AI and agentic tools, and the customer recognition of that is happening faster than what we had predicted. And so we saw higher-than-expected demand.”

Cook noted that the Mac mini was the top-selling desktop computer in China last quarter, where the DIY agentic AI boom is especially popular. In addition to strong customer demand, Cook cited supply chain constraints adding to the problem, which “may take several months to reach supply/demand balance.”

The Mac mini is one of the products that Apple will be making in the US starting later this year.

Apple Says Mac Studio and Mac Mini Will Be in Short Supply for Months

Reports of shortages are not lost on Apple.

During this week’s earnings call, outgoing CEO Tim Cook acknowledged the supply constraint of the popular desktops:

“On the Mac mini and the Mac Studio, both of these are amazing platforms for AI and agentic tools, and the customer recognition of that is happening faster than what we had predicted. And so we saw higher-than-expected demand.”

The Mac mini is one of the products that Apple will be making in the US starting later this year.

Rani Molla5/1/26

Apple’s iPhone is the top-selling smartphone in urban China

Apple’s second-quarter earnings beat expectations and underscore its growing strength in China, where it is closing in on the top spot in the smartphone market.

“We are thrilled with the performance in Greater China,” CEO Tim Cook said, noting that the iPhone was “the top-selling model in urban China.” Cook first called the iPhone the rather than a top-selling model there during the company’s first-quarter earnings earlier this year.

Data from IDC and Counterpoint Research shows Apple accounted for 19% of smartphone shipments in China in the first calendar quarter of 2026, just behind Huawei at 20%. Analysts say Apple is poised to take the lead soon, helped in part by rising memory chip costs, which are pushing up competitors’ prices.

Apple’s China revenue rose 28% in the March quarter, ahead of analyst estimates, and is up 33% in the first half of the year.

Apple is on its way to becoming the biggest smartphone seller in China