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European Union has decided to sue Ireland for not collecting taxes on Apple. Ireland had 12 months to recover taxes that were unfairly avoided by Apple. The bill totals at $15.3 billion and was originally due on January 3rd.

While Ireland claims that the decision is unnecessary, the EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager told Bloomberg that member states need to pursue the money effectively even when it can be very complex in some cases.

EU had a long-lasting investigation into Apple's tax rate that lead into discovering unfair benefits granted by Ireland that reduced the effective tax rate of Apple's subsidiary to mere 0.005 percent. Thus Apple avoided paying nearly all the corporate tax.

The EU Commission considers the situation to be an illegal advantage until resolved. The tax deal allows Apple to get unfair advantage compared to other companies whom are not offered the same tax breaks. This is considered to be a state aid that are forbidden and illegal in the EU.

Apple has continued to have a strong relationship since the 80s with Ireland where many of its European operations are centralized.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk told last month that the upcoming semi-truck will be revealed late October. Now, the front man of both Tesla and SpaceX has pushed the event back a little bit.

Originally unveiling of "the beast" was meant to be 26th of October but after issues with Model 3 as well as a possible new initiative with Puerto Rico the semi-truck event has been pushed back to mid November.

Elon Musk says the new date is November 16th, as Tesla is "diverting resources to fix Model 3 bottlenecks and increase battery production for Puerto Rico and other affected areas."

Puerto Rico's officials have engaged Elon Musk on Twitter about replacing the hurricane devastated island's energy supplies with Tesla powered battery and solar systems.

Analysts expect the semi to hit the streets in 2020 and cost $100,000 with additional costs for replacing batteries.

Tesla Semi unveil now Nov 16. Diverting resources to fix Model 3 bottlenecks & increase battery production for Puerto Rico & other affected areas.

-- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 6, 2017

Google introduced a new type of product this week. It's a camera that employs one of their core fields of expertise, AI, and decides for you when to record video and snap pictures.

Creepy, right? Well, it might be if you are extremely worried about privacy but the ease of use and smarts it has inside might win you over, especially you have kids or a puppy, according to Google.

You just set it up on the table, strap it on your kids stroller, or take it with you to the dog park. As long as you point it towards the subject you'll automatically get pictures and video on your mobile device (read: Pixel smartphone's Google Photos).

Everything is done under the hood thanks to AI and machine learning. The camera has a custom processor developed by Movidius called Myriad 2, The Verge reports. The so-called VPU, or visual processing unit, takes over all the calculations instead of having to transmit it to cloud processing.

This saves battery and makes the product more secure and privacy oriented than other AI applications that need to transfer data constantly.

As The Verge notes, this type of specialized processing units are becoming more and more popular among consumer electronics. Not long ago Apple introduced a neural engine on the new A11 chipset inside new iPhones, and soon Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei is set to unveil their newest flagship which they promise is going to deliver impressive AI features.

While we reported yesterday that Netflix is raising its prices in United States, the company didn't say anything about prices in Europe.

However, now it seems that prices have been raised in several European markets, too.

Reports from Finland and Ireland show that the pricing has gone up for both Standard and Premium plans.

The cheapest option, Basic plan, remains at €7.99 in both countries, but the Standard plan has increased from €9.99 to €10.99. The Premium plan that allows four streams to be watched simultaneously and supports UltraHD, has increased from €11.99 to €13.99.

Netflix prices in Ireland for new customers - 6th of October, 2017

Netflix hasn't contacted its existing customers yet about the price hike and it is unclear when the prices will change for those customers. Previously Netflix has kept the old prices for existing customers for quite a long time, but yesterday's announcement made no such concessions to the U.S. customers.

Google's yesterday's press event's beef was definitely in the Pixel 2 launch but there was plenty of other new products on display as well. Two of them improved Google's smart home lineup.

Google Home got two new siblings with Home Mini and Home Max. Unlike we expected, Google didn't release a smart screen (a smart speaker with a display) to combat Amazon's Echo Show. Instead Google has focused on audio only I/O.

Home Mini is essentially an Echo Dot. It's a smaller Home device that costs only $49. There's no audio out but you can use Chromecast to play music on Cast supported speakers. Mini will come available on October 19th.

The bigger speaker, Home Max, is meant for a more serious music enthusiast, Google says. According to the company it produces 20 times more powerful audio than the regular Home. The audio is produced by dual 4.5" subwoofers and custom tweeters.

However, Home Max does not come cheap. At $399 it's more expensive than Apple's HomePod, although you do get 12 months of YouTube Red (with music subscription) free.

Netflix has been getting pricier ever so slowly. In the recent years the company has been both raising the prices in different markets as well as adding new tiers to make the platform more profitable. Now there's another price raise ahead, Mashable reports.

The streaming giant is raising its prices on two of its payment tiers in the U.S. starting next month. The subscribers that are currently paying $9.99 for the standard streaming and the ones paying $11.99 for premium tier will have to shell out some extra cash from November on.

Standard service will rise from $9.99 to $10.99 and premium from $11.99 to $13.99. Basic service, which includes only standard definition and one screen at a time, stays at $7.99 for now. Standard tier includes 2 screens at time and HD resolution and Premium 4 screen and UHD resolution, as shown below.

Customers affected will be notified shortly by email and are given at least 30 days notice about the increase.

Price increases are meant to finance the increasing content, especially the expensive original produced by Netflix themselves. The company is spending $6 billion this year on content alone. Next year the figure is expected to be closer to $7 billion.

Google has announced a new laptop product yesterday in its October event. The super slim and extremely lightweight device runs, of course, Google's own Chrome operating system.


Named Pixelbook, the new laptop has a 12.3 inch 2400 x 1600 resolution touch screen that means a nice 235 pixels per inch density. You can get it in three different configurations, with either Core i5 or i7, and 8 or 16 GB RAM. The SSD ranges from 128GB to 256GB and 512GB.

The notebook weighs only 2.4 pounds and is 0.4 inches or 10 mm thin.

One of the more hyped features of the new Pixelbook is Instant Teathering which allows moving from WiFi to smartphone teathering a breeze. When you move out of WiFi's range the laptop automatically changes to your mobile data. Unfortunately you'll need a Pixel phone to use the feature.

Google also introduced a stylus developed with Wacom to work perfectly with the Pixelbook. Pixelbook Pen is the only Google Assistant supported stylus.

Pixelbook starts at $999 (i5/8GB/128GB), and the top of the line i7/16GB/512GB configuration will retail for $1649 when it launches later on. You can order the two cheaper models starting now.

As anticipated, Google today revealed two new powerful Pixel smartphones with considerable camera improvements, Google Assistant, Google Lens and more.

Google celebrates the fact that there is essentially feature parity between its new Pixel 2 and larger Pixel 2 XL. The differences are in display, battery, color and of course, price. The Pixel 2 handset packs a 5-inch OLED screen at 1920x1080, whereas the larger Pixel 2 XL upgrades to a 6-inch pOLED display at 2880x1440. For battery, the smaller handset includes a 2,700mAh battery and XL upgrades to 3,520mAh.

Pixel 2 color options include Just Black, Clearly White and Kinda Blue, while Pixel 2 XL is available in Just Black and Black & White.

Under the hood, both pack a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chip, 4GB of RAM and a choice of 64GB or 128GB internal storage. They are water and dust resistant handsets and support fast charging (15 minutes provides up to 7 hours). Both run Android 8.0 Oreo (not 8.1 as predicted). A noticeable change is the lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack with the new Pixels, but each does come with a USB-C adapter so you can keep using your headphones.

Another interesting feature is an always-on display which lets you see notifications at a glance on Pixel's screen without having to touch the power button, while a new "Now Playing" feature, exclusive to Pixel 2, automatically identifies the music playing around you and displays the information.

WhatsApp has released a new beta version of their world-leading messaging app. You might not immediately notice anything new after downloading the new app on to your smartphone but there's definitely something that you'll notice once you start typing messages.

See, the messaging platform has updated their emojis. Before WhatsApp has been using default emojis from Apple's iOS mobile platform. Now the company has removed the dependency and moved on to use emojis designed in-house.

Well, I say designed in-house but really they are just copied from iOS emojis with a few details changed.

Most of the emojis are very similar to the Apple's but WhatsApp has tried to make the pictures even more lighthearted. However, while in many smileys it might be hard to even notice the difference, there are definitely differences.

Emojipedia has highlighted some of the differences, like the ones in the picture attached.

Currently the new emojis are only used in the pre-production version of WhatsApp on Android but will soon come to stable versions on both Android and iPhone/iPad.

Spotify has added its streaming service another AI powered features. This time around Your Time Capsule brings you songs from the past according to your personalized music history.

The feature tries to guess what type of music you've listened when you were a teenager, basing the selections on what you've been listening lately. Your own Time Capsule is approximately two hours of music that is automatically generated for each individual users.

You can access your Time Capsule from your mobile app or visiting timecapsule.spotify.com on your browser. In my case at least a few dozen songs were spot on, or at least fairly appropriate, but there are definitely a few misses.

Anyways, check out yours and let us know how well Spotify knows you!

The company synonymous with action cameras, GoPro, has unveiled their newest HERO series camera. The new HERO6 Black is the successor of HERO5, obviously, and brings along a couple nice to have features.

The upgrades aren't anything revolutionary, though. The identical design perhaps reveals that this is definitely an iterative upgrade. There is no 6K or 5K recording, but GoPro has included an all-new GP1 custom chip that provides better performance.

HERO6 Black can now record 4K and Full HD 1080p with twice the framerate. That means you have the option to record 4K@60fps or 1080p@240fps, both of which are rare in even more expensive cameras.

One thing you have to keep in mind is that the top tier resolution and framerate combinations (4K@60fps and 1080p@240fps) do not support electronic image stabilization.

In addition if you'd like a little bit of a slow motion but need more resolution you can choose 2.7K@120fps. Of course GP1 image processor is said to improve the picture quality as well.

Like the predecessor, HERO6 Black supports voice commands, so you can start (and stop) recording without touching the camera. It also now supports touch zoom in case you don't hate digital zoom.

Apple, without fanfares or even a special announcement, released today the iOS and macOS kernels to the public as open source.

What we are talking about here are the cores of Apple's operating systems, known as XNU (which is an acronym for XNU is Not Unix), that are used in iPhones, iPads, and in the case of macOS all the Mac computers. XNU has been Apple's kernel of choice since the early 2000s.

Now all the latest kernel versions can be found straight from Github, an online repository and cloud storage mostly used for code, with the exception of the newest mobile platform version, iOS 11.

With the open source releases Apple hopes to educate developers about the relations between kernel and software working on top of it.

The software is released under Apple Public Source License 2.0, which isn't exactly a free for all. You can read more about the license here.

Earlier this week Amazon revealed a bunch of new Alexa powered smart speakers. A day before that it was also revealed that Amazon's high-end smart speaker (smart screen?) Echo Show no longer supported one of its most important features.

On Tuesday Google had blocked YouTube access from Echo Show (pictured). While Amazon claimed that Google had not issued any explanation why this had happened, Google told reporters that Amazon's experience was against the YouTube policies.

Already at that point it seemed a little fishy. After all Amazon had a product that clearly took advantage of YouTube, although one could still see why it would be in Google's interest to let it show YouTube videos.

Well, now new report from TechCrunch claims that Google is developing a Echo Show competitor that is called codename Manhattan. It's said to have a display in the same size range as Echo Show (7 inches) and feature of course YouTube viewing among other Google Home features.

Space geeks garthered this week in Adelaide, Australia as the International Astronautical Congress 2017 had its liftoff on Monday. On Thursday Elon Musk spoke in front of the media and a crowd of space travel enthusiasts.

The SpaceX frontman's speech included revisions of plans to colonize Mars and to setting up a Moon base but perhaps the most intriguing idea came in the form of intrastellar travel. This was the concept of a new rocket, named BFR – of course.

The Big Fucking Rocket is Elon Musk's newest vision of space travel but even though it could travel back and forth to the Moon, delivering ISS some mac n' cheese while at it, according to Musk it would revolutionize traveling within our planet.

Tesla and SpaceX billionaire suggested that it could be as inexpensive as a plane ticket and would travel from New York to Shanghai in 30 minutes. Or anywhere else on the same planet within an hour.

How is this all possible, you say? Well, if one chooses to believe Musk, the BFR is as reliable as an airplane and can function normally even if one of its six Raptor engines shuts off. It is also fully reusable so most of the costs would come from fuel.

Of course BFR is a far-off idea still. SpaceX has yet to launch even the Falcon Heavy, which is minuscule compared to the aptly named rocket. If, however, Musk is more correct about this than, say, about Hyperloop, then we indeed might have something that would change traveling forever.

UK Prime Minister says that the decision by TfL not to renew Uber's license to operate in London is disproportionate.

Theresa May weighed into the row over the decision by Transport for London (TfL) not to renew Uber's license to operate as a taxi service in the city, saying she felt the ban was disproportionate. May made her comments in an interview with the BBC ahead of the annual Conservative Party conference.

"Yes there are safety concerns and issues for Uber to address, but what I want to see is a level playing field between the private firms and our wonderful London taxis, our black cabs, our great national institution," May said.

"I want to see a level playing field. I think a blanket ban is disproportionate."

May went on to say that London mayor Sadiq Khan had put 40,000 jobs at risk, and disrupted the lives of an estimated 3.5 million Uber users, with the stroke of a pen. Khan, who is a member of the Labour party and chairs the TfL, had backed the decision not to renew the license over safety fears. The TfL finds that Uber is unfit to run a taxi service in the city.