Hello and welcome to Thursday. Hope you’ve had an OK week so far. Let’s jump in….
1. Money, Money, Money
It’s earnings day with basically my entire inbox serving financial report after financial report. Thankfully, Reuters has done the heavy lifting. To summarise, DoorDash posted its highest revenue since its IPO in December 2020, Etsy had a bad quarter, PayPal users spent a lot of money, but it wasn’t enough to give the platform a healthy profit, AMD shares fell, Qualcomm isn’t having a great time, and even Apple felt the heat, with it largest third-quarter revenue drop since 2016 as iPhone sales slow (of course, the iPhone 15 is merely weeks away).
2. Twitter payers can hide their shame
It wouldn’t be a morning news briefing without at least one mention of Elon Musk. Today, Twitter—which Elon Musk has desperately tried to convince users is now called “X”—wants users to display their $US8 a month blue checkmark prominently on their page. Unfortunately for those who pay up, that checkmark has become a kind of Scarlet Letter analogue that many app denizens use to denote a Musk bootlicker, or worse, or much worse. Now Twitter is telling those folks who want to support Musk plunging the platform into hell that they can hide their mark of shame.
3. Musk vs Cook (again)
Lol jokes, we’ve got one more Muskism. The X-Man himself took to X to say he was gonna speak with @tim_cook to see if the Apple CEO would adjust the 30 per cent commission it takes on in-app purchases.
4. EV sales increase (by a lot, actually)
The Electric Vehicle Council’s annual State of EVs report showed 46,624 electric cars were sold between January and June 2023 in Australia. It’s a massive number, especially when compared to the 39,353 that were sold the year before. Per the ABC, this makes 8.4 per cent of all new car sales in 2023 electric when including forecasted sales for the rest of the year.
5. Reddit goes down
Over to The Verge and it’s reporting that Reddit has recovered from some big issues that lasted for about an hour. While this happened while we were sleeping, reports indicate pages weren’t loading when users were logged in. Being logged out, however, it was business as usual. Downdetector showed a peak of nearly 30,000 user reports.
BONUS ITEM: In case you missed it IRL.
See you tomorrow.