The Model S was Tesla's first "real car," and it was an immediate hit. Introduced in 2012, it won Motor Trend's Car of the Year award, and this year, Motor Trend named the Model S its greatest-ever Car of the Year.

All good, but the Model S is getting long in the tooth, and consumers aren't as thrilled by it as they used to be. Sales have been flagging, partly because the cheaper Model 3 is fresher, but also because the Model S, brilliant as it is, has become dated.

Seven years is at the outside edge of what most car makers would allow for a model. Designs are typically all-new every five to seven years, and there are usually a few refreshes in a model's cycle.

Tesla has tweaked the Model S a few times, and the automaker said that over-the-air software updates could give owners the impression of a brand-new car. But still, an early 2010s design is gonna get boring by the end of a decade, even it was conceived to last.

Here, then, are nice features I'd like to see on an all-new Tesla Model S:

You have $400 set aside for a pair of headphones, and Bose just happens to release the new NC 700 wireless noise cancelling headphones.

Serendipity? Fate? Perhaps.

I've been using the new Bose NC 700 ever since they came out, and they're great headphones.

But then I placed a pair of old favorites upon my ears — the Nuraphone, by boutique audio company Nura — and I stick by my original assessment of the Nuraphone from my 2018 review: "If you've made the decision that you're going to spend around $400 on a pair of wireless headphones, the Nuraphone should be at the top of the list."

Scientists have been listening to whispers from below Mars' surface.

NASA's InSight lander, which touched down on Mars in November 2018, gave scientists the unprecedented ability to detect and monitor quakes on Mars. The lander's built-in seismometer detected its first quake in April, and since then, researchers have recorded dozens more potential Mars quakes.

The nature of this shaking is changing what scientists thought they knew about the red planet.

An artist illustration of the InSight lander on Mars. NASA/JPL-Caltech

So far, the biggest surprise is that seismic waves on Mars more closely resemble moon quakes than earthquakes — which probably means Mars' crust is more dry and broken up than we thought.

"So far, we have assumed that the crust of Mars is similar to the Earth's crust," Simon Stähler, a Mars seismology researcher at ETH Zurich, said in a press release. "The fact that the wave form of the Mars quakes resembles the moon quakes gives us for the first time a picture of how the Martian crust is internally structured. Until now, we could only look at it from the outside."

NASA

Mars, the moon, and Earth quake for different reasons

Studying seismic activity helps scientists piece together the history of how rocky planets formed in our solar system. On Earth, for example, tracking how seismic waves move through the planet's interior helped researchers calculate the size of its core.

Reading the seismic waves on Mars, scientists hope, will reveal clues about what the plant's inside looks like and how it's changing.

"Seismology is how you get the details," Mark Panning, a seismologist on the NASA InSight team, told Business Insider.

Not all quakes are created equal. When the Earth shakes, it's because tectonic plates in the crust are clashing at fault lines. Mars doesn't have tectonic plates, though. So scientists think Mars quakes probably come from a constant internal-cooling process, which happens inside most rocky planets. As the core cools, the material contracts, which causes stress to build. This eventually cracks the crust and causes a quake.

Earth's tectonic plates meet at fault lines, where their activity can cause earthquakes.NOAA

Seismic waves from quakes — regardless of the cause — also travel on different paths and at different rates, depending on what type of material they're moving through.

On Earth, the source of seismic waves is easily detectable, since the crust is comprised of relatively uniform, solid rock (which has been melted and re-paved by volcanic activity over millions of years). That rock also has water in it, which absorbs energy, causing waves to die out faster. That's why earthquakes last for just a few minutes.

On the moon, however, quakes can last longer than an hour.

Apollo astronauts installed seismometers on the moon.NASA

"A moon quake builds up for minutes, then decays away for an hour or more. So it looks very different," Panning said. "The reason moonquakes look that way is because the moon's surface is really dry and really broken up. It's been basically sitting there for billions of years and getting hit by meteorites."

Still, researchers expected quakes on Mars to fall more on the Earth-like end of the spectrum. That's because they thought the planets had similar crusts, given that Mars once had plenty of volcanic activity and water.

But the initial data suggests that may not be the case.

How Mars quakes are changing scientists' understanding of the red planet

Mars' polar ice cap.NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

So far, the length of Mars quakes seems to fall somewhere in the middle of the moon's and Earth's, at about 10 to 20 minutes. Mars also appears to be a little more seismically active than the moon, but a lot less than Earth.

Mars' seismic waves also reverberate more than waves on Earth, and more similarly to moon quakes.

"It's bouncing off all of these broken-up bits, so that gives you something that lasts a long time," Panning said.

This suggests that Mars' crust has layers of rugged, dry, broken-up rock like the moon's.

The artist's representation below shows how seismic waves from a Mars quake might move through the red planet's interior.

The animation, made by an InSight seismologist at ETH Zurich, shows the different types of waves the InSight team is studying. The blue waves are the initial bouncy pulses that spread out quickly from the quake's source. The red ones follow as a result, and seismologists can use the lag between them to calculate how far away the quake's source is.

The long waves of red and white that spread along the sides of the animation are surface waves that bounce through crust material — their reverberations suggested the moon-like qualities of Mars' crust.

The researchers expected Mars' crust to be more dry and broken than Earth's, but not quite this much. They don't know yet what to make of the new finding.

Much more to learn

A few dozen Mars quakes aren't enough to reveal the red planet's secrets, however.

"The biggest thing that we can do with the pretty small number of events we've seen so far is really understand how active Mars is now," Panning said. "That's telling you a lot of information on how Mars is evolving over time."

So far, the signals from Mars quakes have also been too faint to offer information about the internal structure of the planet below its crust. A person standing on Mars would not have been able to feel any of the shaking InSight's tools picked up.

In fact, a team of InSight seismologists in Zurich had to amplify those seismic signals by a factor of 10 million in order to accurately simulate the shaking on the scale of an earthquake.

For these reasons, the InSight team is still waiting for a big quake that travels through the planet's core.

"Then we can start actually making detailed pictures of what the Martian interior looks like," Panning said. "There's a waiting game right now. We're going to be listening for another year and a half, so we're expecting to see a lot more things."

In the meantime, the InSight team trying to fix the lander's "mole," a tool that's supposed to dig down 16 feet and take Mars' temperature. The mole stopped working properly in February.

In the future, Panning would like to see sensors on every planetary body that quakes, especially Enceladus, a moon of Saturn from which plumes of water shoot out. Even better than one seismometer: a whole network of them.

"Seismology on Earth is almost entirely built on networks of data," Panning said. "I'd love to put seismometers everywhere."

Google's update on its cloud revenues on Thursday caught investors by surprise, providing a rare peak behind the curtain from a company famous for saying very little.

Is this the start of a new, more open Google?

The financial analysts who follow the $137 billion revenue company certainly hope so. In the wake of Thursday's cloud surprise, Business Insider asked some of the top Google analysts what other information they'd like the tech giant to start disclosing now that it's in a sharing mood.

James Lee, an analyst at Mizuho Securities, told us that if he could pick any numbers to be included consistently in Google-parent company Alphabet's earnings report, he would put YouTube revenues at the top his list.

Second on his wish list, Lee said he would like to see actual cloud revenues — not just the annualized "run rate" Google provided Thursday — as well as cloud profit margins; and third, he'd like know pricing for mobile and desktop search ads.

Alphabet shows investors only how its ads business is performing, lumping the rest of its businesses into fuzzy categories called "Other Revenues" and "Other Bets," which covers separate companies under the Alphabet umbrella, like its self-driving-car company, Waymo.

And even within its ads revenue line item, analysts are left scratching their heads.

YouTube, the world's top video streaming site, for instance, makes most of its money from ads and is the company's second-largest revenue generator. But nowhere on the company's income statement will you see YouTube as a line item.

REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Instead, YouTube's ad revenue is combined with Google's search ads to make up the company's overall ad revenue segment. For a business that's estimated to bring in between $16 and $25 billion annually, that's a major puzzle piece missing for analysts and investors.

Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter and Jefferies' Brent Thill told us as well that they think the YouTube number would be one of the most important to break out. Pachter also wished search ad revenues were a stand alone line item.

The two also agreed with Lee that seeing regular numbers for its cloud business — which appears to be growing in significance at Alphabet — would be a top ask.

"I think Google should break out search, YouTube, third party and cloud as separate line items," Pachter said. "Apparently, Ruth Porat [Google's CFO] disagrees with me."

"Thanks, but we still want more"

Dan Ive, who is also an analyst at Wedbush, described Google's cloud reveal as a step in the right direction.

As it stands now, Google's cloud business results are obfuscated within a line item on Alphabet's income statement known simply as "Other Revenues." That line item contains all the revenue Google generates that doesn't come from ads, including things like the app store and hardware sales.

So when "Other Revenues" are up or down — on Thursday it was up 40% year-over-year — it's impossible to know how much of that was due to the cloud business or to sales of gaming apps in the Google Play Store. The last time the company shared actual numbers from its cloud business was in Q4 2017 when it said it had reached $1 billion in revenues for that quarter.

"As its cloud business ramps, the Street will demand more transparency and run rates," Ives said.

His sentiment was consistent with most analysts we spoke to about the one-off cloud reveal — "Thanks, but we still want more."

Dan Morgan, a senior portfolio manager at Synovus Trust Company, put consistent cloud revenue at the top of his wish list. After that, he pined for information about hardware sales, such as the Pixel smartphones (Google said sales of its Pixel phones more than doubled in Q2, but provided no specific numbers that would give the statement any real meaning).

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Like others, Morgan wants YouTube revenue too. But given that YouTube now has a nascent premium business, for streaming TV and streaming music, Morgan says a breakdown of the various YouTube revenue-generators would be appropriate.

If they told us, they'd have to kill us

There is legal precedence ( TSC Industries v. Northway) for companies being forced to provide information in its earnings report that a "reasonable shareholder might consider important."

In 2017, the SEC actually looked into why, specifically, Alphabet was not disclosing its YouTube revenues. But after the company reportedly said, among other things, that its overall goal was to sell online advertising — not just ads on YouTube — the commission backed off and no changes were demanded of the tech giant.

Morgan thinks it would actually be in Alphabet's interest to be more open.

As the company's core ad business matures, it becomes more difficult to post bombshell growth numbers. In the second quarter, for instance, Alphabet's advertising revenues beat analysts predictions and its Q1 numbers, but were still way down from the same period last year (Ad revenues grew 16% year-over-year in Q2 2019 compared to almost 24% in Q2 2018).

"[New disclosures] would give you something to get excited about in terms of the stock," Morgan said. "All of a sudden, the spotlight goes off your maturing ad revenue growth, and the spotlight goes on these new, exciting businesses in GCP [Google's cloud business] and YouTube. More clarity would really light it up."

Still, even though pulling the curtain back on more of its business might make strategic sense for Alphabet, some are not convinced that it will actually happen. Analysts have been calling on the company to give more transparency into the business for some time now to no avail.

"I don't understand them at all," Wedbush's Pachter said. "They treat us like if they told us anything, they'd have to kill us."

Got a tip? Contact Nick Bastone via Signal or WhatsApp at +1 (209) 730-3387 using a non-work phone, email atThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Telegram at nickbastone, or Twitter DM at@nickbastone.

In the US, 37 million people have chronic kidney disease, and it's the ninth leading cause of death.

Because such a significant part of the population is affected, and because treatment can be so expensive, the government covers the medical expenses of people with end-stage kidney disease through the Medicare program. In 2016, Medicare spent about $114 billion caring for people with chronic and end-stage kidney disease.

Earlier this month, Trump released an executive order to transform kidney care in the US, reducing costs and improving outcomes for patients by encouraging more home-based kidney care. The order also outlined the need to provide better access to kidney transplants and to prevent kidney disease from progressing.

Read more: Trump just announced a new approach to caring for millions of people with a devastating disease, and it could upend a $114 billion market

To address the high cost of kidney care, the goal is to target dialysis, a procedure that filters the blood for people whose kidneys are failing. Currently, 88% of patients receive their dialysis in centers. They must go three times a week for hours at a time. By 2025, The Trump administration wants 80% of patients who are newly diagnosed with kidney failure to be able to get care at home or get a kidney transplant.

Home-based dialysis treatment can be better for patients, as patients can perform their own dialysis more frequently, leading to improved health and potentially lower costs.

"Home dialysis has a lot of advantages in terms of quality of life, convenience, and control of one's schedule," said Dr. Leslie Wong, the vice chairman of the Department of Nephrology and Hypertension at Cleveland Clinic. "I've been in the field for 15 years and physicians have been supportive of home dialysis since I began practicing."

For-profit companies DaVita, Fresenius, US Renal Care, and American Renal Associates operate centers where people can get dialysis. Currently, Fresenius and DaVita control about 75% of the market, according to an analysis from S&P Global. US Renal Care has about 5% and and American Renal Associates has 3%, S&P said.

Startups like Somatus, Outset Medical, and Cricket Health, which offer different types of kidney care, including home-based dialysis, are trying to break in. CVS Health, which operates in-store clinics and owns the health insurer Aetna, is now investing in home-dialysis technology, too.

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There are two types of dialysis: hemodialysis and peritoneal. Hemodialysis pumps blood out of the body to an artificial kidney machine and returns the clean blood to the body via tubes connected to the patient. That's the type of dialysis you'd usually get at a center. Peritoneal dialysis fills the abdomen with fluid and uses the membranes in the body as a filter. Most home dialysis is peritoneal, which is easier to do.

Medicare spent $28 billion on hemodialysis and about $2 billion on peritoneal dialysis in 2016, according to the US Renal Data System. Peritoneal dialysis is cheaper on a per-person basis. It cost about $76,000 for each recipient, while hemodialysis cost about $91,000.

Business Insider talked to top executives at CVS Health, Cricket Health, Outset Medical, and Somatus, which are all seeking to reshape kidney care. We also checked in with DaVita and Fresenius. Here's what they told us about how the Trump's administration's moves could affect the market and their companies.

The Federal Trade Commission would like to have you believe that its settlement with Facebook over the latter's alleged privacy violations was a great deal.

And it was — for Facebook.

The FTC — or at least its Republican majority that approved the agreement announced Wednesday — touted the "record" $5 billion penalty the company will pay as part of it and the "unprecedented" new restrictions the agency is putting in place to oversee the social media giant's privacy practices going forward. The agency also argued that the settlement was far better than it could have gotten — and agreed to much sooner than would have happened — if it had gone to court.

Maybe so. But the deal is much more show than substance. And, given the scope of Facebook's alleged misdeeds, is far too lax on the company and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The $5 billion penalty is all-but-inconsequential to a company as profitable as Facebook. The new oversight structure has some major flaws and weaknesses. The settlement does little to limit Zuckerberg's power and doesn't hold him personally accountable for the actions of a company that he alone controls. And the agreement does almost nothing to stop the collection and sharing of data — or the use of it for targeted advertising — that was at the heart of the company's privacy violations.

The agreement "lets Facebook off the hook," said FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra, who joined with fellow Democrat Rebecca Kelly Slaughter in voting against the deal, in a written dissent. "The fine print in this settlement," he continued, "gives Facebook a lot to celebrate."

Chopra wasn't the only one lambasting the agreement. Consumer groups including Free Press and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which for years has been criticizing Facebook's privacy practices, blasted it as inadequate. So too did Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, a frequent Facebook critic, who called it disappointing, saying that it "utterly fails to penalize Facebook in any effective way."

Facebook can easily afford $5 billion

For all the patting on the back the FTC's majority gave itself for the agreement, it's not hard to understand why many see it as a bad deal.

Take the monetary penalty. A $5 billion fine sounds like a lot, and the FTC's majority certainly trumpeted it as such. After all, the biggest prior penalty the agency had imposed in a case like Facebook's was the $22.5 million fine it slapped on Google in 2012.

But compared to Facebook's revenue, profits, cash flow, market capitalization, or cash on hand, $5 billion is fairly small. In its second quarter alone, for example, Facebook posted $16.9 billion in sales, generated $8.6 billion in cash from its operations, and ended the quarter with $48.6 billion in cash and marketable securities. It "only" posted a profit of $2.6 billion for the period, but that amount included a deduction for the FTC fine. In other words, even with the fine, it earned billions of dollars of profit in the period.

Read this: The FTC's $5 billion fine for Facebook is so meaningless, it will likely leave Zuckerberg wondering what he can't get away with

And that was just one quarter. Facebook's alleged violations date back years, meaning that over the period in question, it's generated easily hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue and tens of billions of dollars in profits.

Meanwhile, comparing the fine to past penalties is not actually supposed to be part of the FTC's methodology, as Chopra noted in his dissent. The FTC has a well defined set of factors it's supposed to take into account when determining financial penalties. Among other things, the agency is supposed to take into account a company's ability to pay, its good or bad faith in dealing with the agency, and the profits it made that can be attributed to its offending conduct.

"In my view, a rigorous analysis of unjust enrichment alone ... would likely yield a figure well above $5 billion," Chopra said.

The company can keep on collecting consumer data

But it's not just the penalty where the agreement is far less than it seems on the surface. The new privacy oversight Facebook will have to put in place as part of the deal is also more impressive in the abstract than it's likely to be in reality.

Under the deal, the company will have to set up a new privacy committee comprised of independent directors. It will also have to establish a new nominating committee, also composed of independent board members, that will name people to the privacy committee.

FTC Chairman Joe Simons announces the penalty. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

Facebook's new chief privacy officer, Michel Protti, whose naming was also required by the agreement, will have to give quarterly reports to the privacy committee about the company's privacy practices under the deal. It will also have to name an independent person to assess its compliance with the privacy program laid out in the deal on a biannual basis to the FTC.

What's more, Facebook will have to assess and report on the risk to privacy of each new product or service it launches.

All of that sounds pretty onerous. But it's likely to be more of a bureaucratic headache than a meaningful restriction on Facebook's activities. That's because the order generally doesn't preclude Facebook from implementing new products and services that infringe on users' privacy or from collecting their personal information.

Under the order Facebook can no longer use members phone numbers that they've supplied it for the purpose of its two-factor authentication feature to target them with ads. It also has to get their express consent before applying its facial recognition technology to pictures of their faces. But other than those exceptions, it's free to continue collecting, using, and sharing whatever personal data it wants on its users, as long as it makes an assessment of the risks involved and describes what safeguards it puts in place — if any — to mitigate them.

"The order allows Facebook to evaluate for itself what level of user privacy is appropriate, and holds the company accountable only for producing those evaluations," Chopra wrote. "What it does not require is actually respecting user privacy."

The agreement doesn't check Zuckerberg's power

The new governance structure similarly seems more about trying to give the semblance that the FTC was doing something rather than meaningfully constraining Zuckerberg's power. For all the talk in the order about "independent" directors, it's hard for any Facebook board member to be truly independent when Zuckerberg controls the company.

Thanks to his ownership of a special class of stock that give him 10 votes per share, Zuckerberg has about 58% of the voting power at Facebook. By himself, he can determine the outcome of any shareholder vote or board election. The agreement did nothing to limit that fundamental power.

The agreement purports to limit that control by barring the removal of any member of the privacy committee without the support of shareholders representing two-thirds of the voting power at the company, or more than what Zuckerberg alone controls. But that's not really a meaningful constraint.

As Chopra noted in his dissent, it's rare for corporate directors to be removed from office midway through their term. Generally, they get replaced when their term is up, when companies hold a vote for directors at their annual shareholder meeting. If Zuckerberg doesn't approve of a supposedly independent director's work on Facebook's new nominating or privacy committees, he could name and vote in alternative board members at the annual meeting all by himself.

"The proposed settlement ratifies Facebook's governance structure instead of changing it," Chopra said. "The 'Independent Privacy Committee' has little independence, no meaningful powers, and no buy-in from shareholders."

The FTC let Zuckerberg off the hook — without interviewing him

But perhaps the worst part about the settlement is that with it, the FTC is essentially wiping the slate clean for Facebook and its executives unnecessarily and before it even finished its work.

The agency could and probably should have held individual Facebook executives and directors responsible for allegedly breaking the terms of the 2012 agreement. But it didn't. Even though Zuckerberg, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, and the company's directors were responsible for ensuring that Facebook hewed to that agreement, the settlement doesn't hold any of them personally accountable for allegedly failing to do so. That's in sharp contrast to the actions the FTC has taken against smaller companies, including Cambridge Analytica. In that case, which the agency settled on the same day, it did actually hold the company's executive personally responsible.

Relatedly, despite investigating Facebook for 16 months, the agency never interviewed Zuckerberg. The agency's enforcement director said the FTC feared Facebook would have gone to court rather than allow Zuckerberg to be deposed and that the agency felt it had all the information it needed without him.

But that assertion seems ludicrous on its face. Zuckerberg controls the company. He was the one who announced or was intricately involved in the major steps that affected the ability of companies including Cambridge Analytica to access the personal data of Facebook users without their knowledge.

The agency likely could have learned at least something about his involvement and thinking in those decisions by interviewing him. And even if it still chose not to hold him personally responsible for those decisions, the interview itself would have been a way of holding him accountable.

Given Zuckerberg's control over Facebook, the FTC failure to uncover his role in the company's myriad alleged privacy violations — including by interviewing him — was a "critical" missed step in the investigation, Chopra said.

"It is hard to imagine that any of the core decisions at issue were made without his input," he said. "The FTC Act," he continued, "does not include special exemptions for executives of the world's largest corporations, but this settlement sends the unfortunate message that they are subject to another set of rules."

And that's precisely why they're likely celebrating at Facebook's headquarters.

Got a tip about Facebook or the tech industry? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., message him on Twitter @troywolv, or send him a secure message through Signal at 415.515.5594. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

One of YouTube's most popular, yet controversial, couples is getting married Sunday, and the entire event will be filmed for their more than 20 million combined fans to see.

Tana Mongeau and Jake Paul — who have referred to themselves as "two of the internet's biggest sociopaths" — will be getting married this weekend in Las Vegas to tie the knot on a relationship that some fans and YouTubers believe to be completely fabricated for views.

Since getting together in late April, the two got engaged at Mongeau's 21st birthday party, then announced at online-video convention VidCon they would be getting married July 28.

The two YouTubers have been long immersed in drama and controversy, both as a couple and separately, so what takes place at their wedding is anyone's guess.

Here's everything we know about about Tana Mongeau and Jake Paul's wedding taking place Sunday:

Locals at the southern tip of Texas took in an otherworldly sight on Thursday night: A giant mirror-polished machine roared to life near a beach, and through a cloud of orange smoke, rose six stories into the sky, hovered, and then gently landed.

Though the launch lasted less than a minute, the late-night spectacle was the first true flight of SpaceX's Starhopper rocket ship. It represents a key step in company founder Elon Musk's quest to send people to the moon and Mars, though Starhopper isn't designed to fly into space. Instead, it's a test bed for technologies that could eventually power a much larger and more powerful launch system known as Starship.

Though it was difficult to see the hop through the smoke, Starhopper appeared to move, and Musk confirmed on Twitter that the flight was "successful." The launch did appear to start a brush fire that was still being contained nearly a half hour after the launch (at the time of writing).

Musk envisions Starship as a nearly 400-foot-tall, fully reusable system that can ferry about 100 people and more than 100 tons of cargo at a time to Mars.

Starhopper, meanwhile, stands more than 60 feet tall and about 30 feet wide, has three landing legs, and is made out of stainless steel. It uses one Raptor rocket engine; a full-scale Starship headed for deep space could use more than 40.

Read more: How SpaceX's new Starship launch system compares to NASA's towering moon rockets

Musk's eventual goal is for Starship to be capable of launching and landing many times with little to no refurbishment required. This, he says, may reduce launch costs by 100- to 1,000-fold compared to traditional, single-use rockets.

"Full and rapid reusability is the holy grail of access to space and is a fundamental step towards it, without which we cannot become a multi-planet species," Musk recently told Time's Jeffrey Kluger in an interview for CBS Sunday Morning. "We cannot have a base on the moon, we cannot have a city on Mars without full and rapid reusability."

But getting to that stage will likely require years of testing, and Wednesday's launch was a crucial first step.

A hard-won hop-and-hover flight

SpaceX's Starhopper rocket ship prototype sits on a launch pad in south Texas in July 2019.SpaceX via dearMoon

SpaceX began constructing Starhopper near Boca Chica Village, Texas around November 2018. Musk showed off the vehicle in January, and then SpaceX launched it on its first "hops" (as Musk calls them) in early April.

Those initial tests anchored the rocket ship to the ground via huge chains on its legs, so Starhopper lifted no more than a few feet into the air.

On Wednesday, there was a failed launch attempt around 8:32 p.m. ET (7:32 p.m. CT). Just seconds after ignition, the vehicle's engine abruptly shut down. The launch on Thursday, however, was deemed a success.

"It appears as though we have had an abort on today's test," Kate Tice, certification engineer at SpaceX, said during a live broadcast. "As you can see there, the vehicle did not lift off."

But SpaceX rallied and tried again on Thursday.

Amid a blast of sand and rocket-engine exhaust, Starhopper flew about about 65 feet (20 meters) into the air at around 11:45 p.m. ET (10:45 p.m. CT). It then hovered for a moment, traversed sideways, and touched down on a concrete landing pad a few hundred feet away.

The whole flight lasted roughly 20 seconds and appeared to be successful, based on a flight plan that Muk described earlier this month.

The videos below, from a live broadcast recorded by Tim Dodd, who runs the Everyday Astronaut channel on YouTube and LabPadre, run by a group of locals, shows the entire launch from start to finish.

Thursday's flight showed that SpaceX has successfully developed a new rocket engine capable of powering, maneuvering, and landing a large spaceship. Critically, the engine burned liquid methane, which makes up most natural gas on Earth and is also a fuel Musk hopes to manufacture on Mars.

What's in store for Starhopper and Starship

SpaceX's current government license permits the company to launch experimental vehicles like Starhopper on flights lasting no more than six minutes and up to a maximum altitude of 3.1 miles (5 kilometers).

However, the company is now building a roughly 180-foot-tall (55-meter-tall) prototype, called Starship Mark 1, which Musk says could fly from Texas or Florida in two to three months and reach orbit by the end of the year.

A comparison of SpaceX and NASA rocket systems. Yutong Yuan/Samantha Lee/Business Insider

Musk tweeted in March that SpaceX is "working on regulatory approval" for orbital flights of those prototypes, which will have three Raptor engines each instead of one.

SpaceX plans to launch a full-scale Starship before the end of 2020. Then sometime in 2021, Musk says, the company may trying landing a full-scale, uncrewed Starship on the moon (perhaps as a bold demonstration to NASA).

Around 2023, SpaceX plans to launch Starship's first human passengers, a Japanese billionaire and his hand-picked crew of artists, on a voyage around the moon.

An illustration of SpaceX's Starship vehicle on the surface of the moon, with Earth in the distance.Elon Musk/SpaceX via Twitter

SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell has reportedly said the company hopes to send its first uncrewed payloads to Mars by 2024. Following that, perhaps in 2026, SpaceX may try to put boots on the red planet.

During the groundbreaking ceremony for the Boca Chica launch site in September 2014, Musk said, "it could very well be that the first person that departs for another planet could depart from this location."

SoftBank has closed $108 billion for its second Vision Fund — a mega-sized fund that the Japanese giant intends to invest in startups.

Confirming previous reports, the Japanese telecom giant's Vision Fund II counts Apple, Foxconn, and Microsoft as backers from the tech industry, in addition to several international banking partners.

SoftBank's first Vision Fund backed some of the biggest names in tech, including Uber, Slack, and soon-to-be-public WeWork. Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son personally led the $100 billion first fund since its launch in 2017.

According to the release, Mizuho Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui, MUFG Bank, Dai-ichi, Sumitomo Mitsui Trust, SMBC Nikko, Daiwa, National Investment Corporation of National Bank of Kazakhstan, and Standard Chartered Bank are among the banking partners expected to back this new fund.

Read More: SoftBank wants Microsoft to invest in its next VisionFund, and it offered to encourage its startups to ditch Amazon's cloud for Azure

SoftBank itself will also commit $38 billion to the second fund, less than the expected $40 billion that was previously expected.

Goldman Sachs and Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, a sovereign wealth fund, were both backers of SoftBank's first Vision Fund, but were not listed as confirmed backers for Vision Fund II. However, the release only includes companies that have signed on to the fund, and does not exclude others from joining the fund at a later date.

Previous reports indicated that SoftBank was negotiating a deal with Microsoft that included promoting its cloud service Azure over Amazon's Web Services for its portfolio. It's not clear if the finalized deal includes such a provision.

SpaceX is about to launch a stubby steel rocket ship called the Starhopper above the southern tip of Texas.

An attempt this evening would be SpaceX's second in as many days, following a try on Wednesday that engineers cut short right after ignition of Starhopper's single rocket engine.

To make sure everyone can follow SpaceX's flights in Boca Chica, Texas, a group of local residents plans to broadcast the attempt live on YouTube. SpaceX may also post its own live-streaming video closer to the time of the test. (We've embedded video players toward the end of this post and will update them as needed.)

The rocket ship is called Starhopper, and it stands more than 60 feet tall and 30 feet wide. A single Raptor rocket engine is attached to its base, and SpaceX test-fired that engine on July 16. The test was successful, even though it resulted in a big yet brief fireball.

On Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration also issued a flight restriction for airspace over SpaceX's launch pad to "provide a safe environment for rocket launch and recovery."

Road closures for the area outline SpaceX's flight window, and the most recent notices suggest the company will attempt a launch on Thursday between 3 p.m. to 1 a.m. ET (2 p.m. to 1 a.m. CT).

SpaceX will use that protected space to fly the Starhopper vehicle about 65 feet (20 meters) into the air, hover, move sideways, and land back on its launchpad near Boca Chica Beach, according to a tweet from founder Elon Musk.

Read more: Elon Musk's SpaceX is developing giant Mars rockets in a sleepy town in southern Texas. Here's what it's like to visit.

Starhopper isn't designed to fly to orbit; rather, it's designed to test technology for a far larger and more powerful launch vehicle called Starship. That system could stand nearly 400 feet tall and be capable of sending about 100 people and more than 100 tons of cargo to Mars or the moon.

An illustration of SpaceX's upcoming Starship spaceship (left), Super Heavy rocket booster (right), and an integrated Starship-Super Heavy launch system (center).© Kimi TalvitieThe launch system is also being designed for full reusability, which may vastly reduce the cost of accessing space. Other versions could be built to deploy hundreds of satellites at a time or rocket paying passengers halfway around the world in about half an hour.

SpaceX fired up Starhopper for the first time in April. That test secured the rocket ship with giant bike-chain-like tethers on its legs, and the vehicle lifted just a few inches off the ground. A subsequent test lifted it farther, but not by much. This week's test will launch the rocket ship completely untethered.

A SpaceX spokesperson told Business Insider in an email that the hop-and-hover test is "one in a series of tests designed to push the limits of the vehicle as quickly as possible to learn all we can, as fast as we safely can."

The launch is not guaranteed to happen, or even go well, though: "As with all development programs, the schedule can be quite dynamic and subject to change," the spokesperson said.

When a Twitter user asked Musk if there would be livestreaming video of the launch, Musk said "sure." On Wednesday night, SpaceX shared a broadcast recorded from an aerial drone.

The company is likely to follow through again (we'll update this story if it does), but in any case a group of locals has also set up a moderated live feed of Starhopper's launch site.

Watch Starhopper's biggest hop attempt yet on YouTube

Maria Pointer, who lives near SpaceX's Texas launch site, said she teamed up with fellow local Louis Balderas to create the two-camera broadcast below, which runs nearly 24 hours a day.

The LabPadre video feed has one camera that can rotate 360 degrees and is on the Pointers' property; it shows the launchpad from about 1.8 miles away (though it has a powerful zoom). The second camera is on top of a building in South Padre Island, nearly 6 miles away from SpaceX's launchpad.

Pointer told Business Insider that the feed's slogan was "showing the valley to the future" because "kids in Brownsville need to see what's going on" at SpaceX's launch site.

The cameras often switch between views, show live weather and launchpad conditions, and display other information.

As another option, Tim Dodd, who runs the Everyday Astronaut channel on YouTube, is also live-streaming a view of the launch site (below).

Both feeds showed Starhopper's test-firing and subsequent fireball last week. Musk said the flames were caused by methane fuel that leaked.

But because Starhopper is made of a rugged stainless steel similar to the kind used in pots and pans, the accident caused "no major damage," he said.

"Big advantage of being made of high strength stainless steel: not bothered by a little heat!" Musk added.

What time SpaceX may try again to launch Starhopper

If the activities and timeline of Wednesday's attempt are any indication, SpaceX will likely try again to fly Starhopper sometime after 6:02 p.m. ET. That's when the company is supposed to launch an uncrewed cargo spaceship for NASA from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Called Commercial Resupply Services-18 (CRS-18), the rocket was supposed to lift off on Wednesday, too, though 1,000 miles away in Florida. Poor weather conditions foiled that launch attempt, so now SpaceX will try again today to launch that mission.

Since tracking antennas for CRS-18 are located in Boca Chica, Texas, SpaceX will likely focus its resources on that mission first — then get back to Starhopper's test flight an hour or two after a liftoff or scrub.

This story has been updated with new information. It was originally published on July 16, 2019.

Intel is essentially giving its technology away in selling its failing smartphone modem chip business to Apple for $1 billion, but the chip giant had no choice in order to get rid of a thorn in its side, analysts say.

"At $1 billion, they are basically giving the IP away," Bernstein Research analyst Stacy Rasgon told Business Insider. Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives echoed this view in a note to clients: "The $1 billion is below the 'few billions' that were initially contemplated."

Under the agreement, Apple will acquire the majority of Intel's smartphone modem business. About 2,200 Intel employees will join Apple, as well as intellectual property, equipment and leases. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year.

Analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group said Intel found itself in a a "horrid bargaining position," against Apple, at a time when the chip giant is also struggling to regain its footing in other key arenas, particularly the data center market.

The big problem: Intel's smartphone modems simply weren't seen as being on the same par as those from Qualcomm and other smartphone component manufacturers. A lack of customers led to a big drag on the business, with Intel finally deciding to cut its losses and get out of the business earlier this year.

Ives said Intel's smartphone modem chip business "was at one point losing roughly $1 billion annually."

So when Apple came calling, Intel likely felt forced to enter into a deal — even if the price was lower than what executives and analysts alike were looking for. Still, the short-term frustration of taking a suboptimal deal may fade with the freedom that comes with removing this metaphorical albatross from around its neck.

"Intel's probably happy just to get out of it," Ragson said.

'No clear path to profitability'

The sale ends months of speculation on the future of that business after Intel surprised the tech world in April with word that it was getting out of the 5G smartphone-modem business. "It has become apparent that there is no clear path to profitability and positive returns," Intel CEO Bob Swan said then.

It was a stunning move from a dominant player in the chip industry, which is also known as a major technology powerhouse.

The announcement also turned the spotlight on Swan's background. He took over as full-time CEO only in January after serving as interim chief after the sudden departure of ex-CEO Brian Krzanich last year. Unlike most of Intel's past CEOs, Swan, who used to be Intel's chief financial officer, has a background is in finance, not technology.

However, some analysts have noted that Intel's problems emerged long before Swan took over, which caused the chip giant to fall behind in an important market, as it struggled to adapt to a changing tech landscape.

With the PC market shrinking, Intel has focused more on the more lucrative datacenter market. But it has recently wrestled with a slump in that market. Intel also has struggled with production issues and stiffer competition from rivals AMD and Nvidia. The sudden leadership change also didn't help.

"Intel is digging itself out of the hole … and this is part of that process," Enderle told Business Insider. "Now that Intel really doesn't have an interest in this space it makes sense to sell it."

Savings from the sale

And Apple was widely seen by analysts as the logical buyer. Buying the Intel business is key to Apple's 5G strategy, Ives said: "This a clear 'doubling down" on 5G which remains at the centerpiece of the company's smartphone future with these chip assets giving Apple further control over its supply chain and core chip design."

For Intel, the sale could give make it more profitable in 2020, Ives added.

In fact, on a call with analysts on Thursday, Intel also said it expects even bigger savings from the transaction. "We are now expecting 2019 savings from our modem exit to rise to approximately $400 to $500 million dollars from our earlier estimates of $200 to $300M dollars," Chief Financial Officer George Davis said.

Still, despite the bargain price, "Intel will be stronger after this is done and from their perspective, that'll be a good thing," Enderle said.

Got a tip about Intel, Apple or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., message him on Twitter@benpimentel. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

The Amazon Web Services cloud business continues to be a major source of growth, as its revenue jumped up 37% from this time last year — Amazon announced on Thursday that AWS did $8.38 billion in its most recent quarter, up from $6.1 billion a year ago.

That's impressive, but there are reasons for AWS to hold off on popping the champagne: Not only did that revenue figure miss Wall Street targets of $8.5 billion, but it's also the lowest quarterly growth rate that AWS has shown in more than 5 years.

That being said, Amazon senior vice president and CFO Brian Olsavsky said on the earnings call that AWS saw a year-over-year growth in run rate from $24 billion to $33 billion. He says that $9 billion increase is second only to the fourth quarter of last year in Amazon's history.

"We're seeing a pick up from customers and their usage, their increased pace of enterprise migration, increased adoption of our services, especially our machine learning services," Olsavsky said on the call. "And continually, again, AWS is being chosen as a partner to many companies because of our leadership position both in technology, our vibrant partner ecosystem and also the stronger security that we offer."

The previous quarter, AWS jumped 42% year-over-year in net sales, which was itself down from 45% in the quarter before. That makes this the second quarter in a row where AWS saw a slowdown in sales growth. Since the first quarter of 2017, AWS had grown at an annual clip of between 40 and 50%. This was the first quarter since at least 2013 that AWS grew at an annual rate of less than 40%.

It's not immediately clear what caused this relative slowdown, but it's entirely possible that it's simply because AWS, which leads the cloud computing market, is so big that it's hard to keep up that pace of aggressive growth.

Still, AWS comprised of more than two-thirds of the company's operating income in the quarter, reflecting the massive size of the business.

Overall, Amazon's profit this quarter and projected operating income for next quarter was shy of Wall Street's expectations.

Read more: Amazon's Q2 misses on the bottom line, and it warned its profit will disappoint again in Q3

In comparison, Google Cloud announced Thursday that it was on an $8 billion annual revenue run rate, a measure of the revenue it expects to generate over the next year if current conditions hold steady.

For its part, Microsoft said at its own earnings last week that its cloud Azure grew 64% from the previous year, although it did not break out specific revenue numbers. However, it did say that its Commercial Cloud revenue, which cuts across product likes like Office 365 and the Azure cloud, was $11 billion in its most recent quarter.

Campaign workers for the 2020 US presidential hopefuls are expensing plenty of Uber and Lyft rides as their bosses canvass the company in hopes of securing the Democratic nomination for commander-in-chief.

In total, the leading 20 candidates have spent $87,631 on the two main ride-hailing services this year, according to spending data from the Federal Election Commission analyzed by Business Insider.

California Sen. Kamala Harris's campaign handily outspent the rest of the pack, expensing 81 Uber and 73 Lyft rides in the first six months of 2019, totaling $8,835 and $5,873, respectively.

Campaigns are averaging about $4,800 each on the apps, with the front-runners all spending near $10,000 for rides in the filing period.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who was been outspoken in her support of a driver strike in March, had the third-most Uber and Lyft expenses, the data shows, with Andrew Yang only slightly ahead.

Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke and billionaire activist Tim Steyer notably had no expenses reported for Uber or Lyft rides. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, meanwhile, spent just $921 on Lyft rides, and nothing with Uber.

It's important to remember that many candidates did not kick off their campaigns until the second quarter was already well underway, and so many amounts could rise quickly when the candidates file their third-quarter reports in August.

Here's how the candidates rank, without those who haven't filed any disbursements to Uber and Lyft:

Recent reports have suggested that YouTube's dominance in internet video is eroding, but Google leadership quashed those claims during parent company Alphabet's second-quarter earnings on Thursday.

The company stuck to its convention and didn't break out YouTube's revenues separately, but said that regulatory and advertiser scrutiny had not affected YouTube's earnings.

"YouTube revenue growth was strong in the first quarter, and again strong here in the second quarter," Google parent Alphabet's CFO Ruth Porat said during the company's earnings call. She said the video giant was the second largest driver of revenue growth across Alphabet.

Alphabet exceeded analyst expectations, reporting total revenues of $38.9 billion, up 19% year-on-year, driven by mobile search, YouTube and Cloud.

YouTube has come under fire from advertisers whose ads have repeatedly ended up next to unsavory content. It is also facing regulatory scrutiny, with the Justice Department opening up an investigation into Google's market power and the Federal Trade Commission reportedly considering asking YouTube to disable ads against kids content, Axios reported.

Google's core advertising business also bounced back. After a bad miss in the previous quarter, ad revenue grew over 16% from the same period the year prior, beating analysts' predictions of just over 15% growth. Porat attributed that to direct-reponse advertising becoming more key in recent quarters.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai also said that YouTube continues to be an important investment, having seen strong growth in several areas.

He said that creators were continuing to flock to YouTube, and that channels with more than 1 million subscribers had grown by 75% year on year. He also pointed out new monetization products like SuperChat, Channel Memberships and Merch, which he said had allowed "thousands of channels" to double their total monthly revenue.

He also said YouTube was building momentum with its subscription services — YouTube Music and YouTube Premium — which are now available in over 60 countries, up from five markets at the start of 2018.

Microsoft is a bona-fide cloud computing giant these days.

While it is still considered the second-place player in terms of market share against leader Amazon Web Services, most large companies today are using more than one cloud provider.

And when they do, the most common combination is AWS and Azure (although, as we previously reported, the distant number-three Google Cloud is just starting to show up in that mix a bit).

Read: There's a growing list of signs that new CEO Thomas Kurian is starting to make Google Cloud more successful with big companies

Microsoft is particularly winning business from its own enormous cadre of enterprise customers — the companies that already use its Office software, Windows Server, databases, Active Directory or other popular products designed for corporations and other large entities, according to market research giant Gartner.

The company is doing a good job convincing its customers to move their Microsoft-related IT apps and data to Microsoft's cloud, and once there getting customers to try more of its cloud services.

Gartner particularly praises Microsoft for its Internet of Things (IoT) cloud, where the data from sensors embedded on lots of devices can be tracked and analyzed. And Gartner applauds Microsoft Azure for its open arms towards partners, even those that have historically been competitors. Azure has brought in Red Hat, VMware, NetApp, Cray Computer, and a lot of open source software to its cloud.

But Gartner has dinged Microsoft Azure's overall standing in the market this year. While it's still ranked as the number-two player, the market researcher has downgraded Microsoft as farther behind AWS this year than last.

The downtime problem

Top among Gartner's criticisms is too much downtime.

"Microsoft Azure's reliability issues continue to be a challenge for customers, largely as a result of Azure's growing pains. Since September 2018, Azure has had multiple service-impacting incidents, including significant outages involving Azure Active Directory. The nature of many of these outages is such that customers had no controls in order to mitigate the downtime," the report says.

Read more: Market researcher Gartner has 3 warnings for Amazon cloud customers: Beware of prices, new features, and Amazon's competitive behavior

For instance, in May, Azure had a global outage that lasted nearly two hours. In February, Microsoft accidentally deleted some database records as part of a mass outage. It later restored nearly all the deleted records.

Azure's reputation for outages has grown so serious that earlier this month, a top Microsoft exec publicly promised changes in the engineering team to improve the situation. He also apologized for three big outages that occurred since September, including the one in May.

More expensive than anticipated

But Gartner has found another interesting problem, with some Azure customers complaining about cloud projects that take too long to implement and run over-budget. This is intriguing because cloud computing has historically been hailed as the faster, less expensive alternative than classic IT, where companies buy the software and hardware and hire consultants to help them with custom coding and installation.

(Those classic enormous projects were renowned for running past deadlines and budgets and generating their fare share of lawsuits by frustrated customers.)

Gartner points fingers as Microsoft's overzealous Azure sales teams, who are creating "unreasonably high expectations for customers."

The market researcher says this has downstream consequences because customers "frequently lament the quality of Microsoft technical support." They also aren't happy when their costs for technical support increase. Ergo, "this negatively impacts customer satisfaction, and slows Azure adoption and therefore customer spending," Gartner says.

Now read: Microsoft chairman John Thompson explains why CEO Satya Nadella is poised to win the cloud wars

Despite these growing pains and the kick in the shin from Gartner, there are a lot of indications that Microsoft Azure is queued up for a big growth spurt.

As we previously reported, a lot of Microsoft's customers are being force to give up old versions of Windows, as well as old versions of its database, as support for these software products end. And Microsoft's salesforce and partners will be offering good deals to jump to the Azure as part their upgrade.

That's all good news for Microsoft, especially given that Azure growth is showing signs of decelerating— though that may just be a function of maturity, and experts don't seem especially worried about it.

A Microsoft spokesperson tells us, "While Gartner continues to recognize Azure as a leader in the IaaS market, we believe our execution capabilities exceed Gartner's current assessment. Azure continues to invest in adding new features, functionality, and services to help our customers make the most of their digital transformation. We're making tremendous progress in even further increasing the reliability of our platform."

In 2003, Garmin produced the first wrist-worn GPS unit designed specifically for runners: the Forerunner 101. Dozens of technological generations and improved models later, the very latest watch with Garmin's running technology is the Forerunner 935.

We had competitive distance runner Ted Westbrook put the Forerunner 935 and Running Dynamics Pod to the test. Starting with the Forerunner 205, Ted has over a dozen years of experience using GPS running watches to reach his mileage goals and keep him within his goal paces.

After three months and more than 1,000 miles of running — both in training and in races — Ted told us that the Forerunner 935 is "far and away the best training tool I have ever used." Below, we will take a closer at Ted's experiences with this excellent device.

Specs

The Forerunner 935 is a mid-sized watch for the average man and a large watch for the average woman. It is, however, lightweight (49 grams), comfortable to wear, and absolutely packed with technology. The band, which is made of a slightly stretchy rubberized plastic, is an improvement in comfort over its predecessor, the 920XT. It also looks nice in the dark gray color. The face is protected by tempered glass that is very scratch-resistant — another substantial improvement over the 920XT. The watch has an incredible battery life of up to 24 hours with GPS enabled.

In addition to providing real-time feedback like pace and distance, the 935 can do a host of other things. Integrated into the back of the watch is an optical heart rate monitor that works remarkably well and very quickly, allowing you to glance down and get a useful indication of how hard you are working. Many runners can benefit from setting target heart rates, particularly for easy-effort runs where the goal is active recovery and not to over-stress the body.

Garmin

The 935 is also waterproof to 5 ATM and has a mode entirely devoted to swimming. The watch will even keep stroke counts. The watch is also great as a cycling computer, with devoted outdoor and indoor cycling modes and the ability to connect to ANT+ bike speed and cadence modules. There is even a dedicated triathlon mode that tracks each leg, providing custom information for each sport, along with transition times.

There is a built-in barometric altimeter to provide irrefutable scientific confirmation that your last run was hillier and more extreme than your friend's last run, or that your combined elevation gains for the last year would get you to the International Space Station (unlike your Florida-based flatlander friends).

Set-up process

Setting up the Forerunner 935 was easy and fast. The Garmin Connect app walks you through the setup, and the settings are imported to the watch through Bluetooth. You can count on it taking you five minutes or less to get up and running, longer if you need to download the Connect app and set up an account.

Special features

You can connect the Running Dynamics Pod sensor to your Forerunner to get more data on your running form. Amazon

The Garmin Forerunner 935 collects and displays data. Generally, while running, you'll want it to show three or four different parameters at a time so each is readable. For instance, you might want lap pace, distance, and heart rate on one page. The 935 allows great customization so that you can move your chosen parameters to where you want to see them and add or remove data screens.

Ted loved this functionality: "I have one screen that I use most of the time and a second that is available at the push of a button for data that is more specific to running interval workouts, like lap time and lap distance. Customization is easy and intuitive."

Accessories can push the 935's limits further. Add the Running Dynamics Pod, which is a tiny sensor that attaches to the back of one's shorts, and the watch provides data like vertical oscillation (how high you're bouncing between steps), ground contact time, and left-to-right ground contact time balance. With the addition of a downloadable app, the Pod also allows the unit to display the newest single metric being used by coaches: power in watts. All of these can be used to help fine-tune your running form for better efficiency.

Whether on an indoor track, treadmill, or running at breakneck pace through the Mall of America, the watch maintains solid functionality indoors, through indoor running modes that use the watch's precise accelerometers to estimate pace and distance. While generally less accurate than GPS is outdoors, Ted confirmed on indoor tracks that the non-GPS mode still gives data that is accurate to within 2-3%, which is remarkably good.

Read more: The best fitness trackers you can buy

Many of the 935's advanced features are more accessible post-run through the Garmin Connect system, which is available as a mobile device app and a web interface. This is where the 935 is unique. It allows a serious runner to truly geek out on data analytics while enjoying a post-run beer in the supine position.

The 935 takes heart rate, pace, and distance data and makes magic with it. Armed with information about your height, weight, age, sex, maximum heart rate, and the exercise data it collected, it can estimate your VO2max and lactate threshold — the two most important metrics of running fitness and potential. It can also tell you how stressful your run was for your anaerobic and aerobic systems on scales of 0 to 5.

Taking data over time into account, the 935 and Garmin Connect can give indications of whether your training overall is productive or unproductive through the Training Status feature.

Cons to consider

Garmin/Facebook

Many, if not all, of the advanced training functions of the 935 and Garmin Connect rely on assumptions and formulae that aren't always going to produce accurate results. At one point, the Race Predictor feature of the 935, relying on calculations of VO2max from Ted's running and personal data, predicted that he could run a marathon in two hours and 28 minutes. Ted told us, "This was flattering but about 7% faster than reality." VO2max can only truly be measured in a lab environment.

By the same token, even the formulae are subject to user-induced error. For example, it is important to have accurate weight data. Ted shared with us a recent experience where the watch told him that his lactate threshold pace had worsened by a few seconds per mile after a moderate run while pushing his baby daughter in a running stroller on hilly terrain. "The watch just can't correct for that added effort," Ted said. "It can only assume you're having a bad day or are getting old, which I am not."

With all of the advanced data available — that's potentially most useful for high-mileage competitive distance runners who are out on the pavement or track every day — it's fair to question whether a new or occasional runner should go for a lower-shelf model than the $499.99 Forerunner 935.

While the answer could depend on one's budget and just how much of a runner they want to be, new runners are likely to appreciate just how well the 935 does the basics of near-instant GPS acquisition, pace, distance, and heart rate, and the more advanced data analytics would still be there when the runner wants them. A beginner isn't going to outgrow the 935, and the basics are intuitive enough in use that they won't intimidate anyone who is used to dealing with smartphones. The 935 is an investment that pays dividends in fitness motivation and hardcore data.

The bottom line

Overall, caveats notwithstanding, the 935 is the running geek's dream come true. It works in competition and training, plus it gives a huge array of analytics to inform your training approach. We asked Ted if he would continue to use the 935 once done testing it. He said, "Most certainly. And, I would buy another if this one got lost."

Pros: Long battery life, waterproof, durable glass face, built-in barometer and thermometer, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections, and the ability to measure more metrics than we can list here

Cons: Expensive, reduced GPS accuracy when running on a track, built-in thermometer only measures temperature right above your skin

Buy the Garmin Forerunner 935 Running GPS Watch on Amazon for $494

Buy the Garmin Forerunner 935 Running GPS Watch on Garmin for $499.99

Buy the Garmin Running Dynamics Pod on Amazon for $68.50

Buy the Garmin Bike Speed Sensor and Cadence Sensor $59

Marketers may increasingly see Amazon as a threat to the duopoly of Facebook and Google, but Amazon's growth rate is slowing down.

Amazon reported $3 billion in "other" revenue during the second quarter of 2019, which is primarily advertising, a 37% year-over-year increase. To compare, Amazon's growth rate during the second quarter of 2018 was 64%.

Amazon's ad growth has slowly dropped over the past year. Amazon made $2.7 billion in ad revenue in the first quarter, a 34% year-over-year increase. In the fourth quarter of 2018, Amazon made $3.4 billion, a 97% year-over-year gain.

An Amazon spokesperson said the wide gap in ad growth rates from last year to this year stems from an accounting change that Amazon rolled out last year, resulting in a one-time boost. After adjusting for the accounting change, Amazon's fourth quarter growth rate was 38%.

According to eMarketer, Amazon's ad business is expected to make $11.33 billion this year, up from $10 billion last year. That still trails Facebook, which reported $16.6 billion in ad revenue during the second quarter alone, and Google's parent company Alphabet, which reported $32.6 billion in the same period.

Amazon's ad business is comprised of ad formats including sponsored products and sponsored brands on Amazon's website and a programmatic arm that places display ads on publishers' sites and Amazon's video properties. Amazon doesn't break out revenue by ad format, but new research from Merkle suggests that most of its ad revenue is going towards a sponsored products format that displays an image of a product in search results or on product pages.

Read more: Inside Amazon's growing ad business: Everything we know about how the e-commerce giant is making inroads with marketers

Merkle reported that 86% of clients' spend on Amazon's non-display inventory went towards sponsored brands in the second quarter, up 12% year-over-year.

There are signs that Amazon is building its programmatic advertising arm. In May, the e-commerce giant agreed to acquire Sizmek's ad server and Dynamic Creative Optimization tools to compete with Google in ad-tech. Amazon is also hiring for a "stealth advertising" engineering team that's aimed at programmatic advertising for gaming.

During the earnings call, head of investor relations, Dave Fildes, suggested that Sizmek's business and clients will stay the same under Amazon's ownership.

"Customers are going to be able to use those proven products and services," he said. "We're looking forward to working with that team."

Amazon also is spending more on its own advertising, spending $8 billion in the first half of the year, up from $5.6 billion in the year-ago period.

A lot of that went into promoting its annual Prime Day, according to research firm Kantar and ads-tracking firm MediaRadar.

Read more: Amazon is pumping money into Google to promote Prime Day, and it could be a brilliant way to also boost Amazon's own ad business

According to Kantar, Amazon spent $13.2 million on TV ads from July 1 to 16, incuding $8.1 million to promote Prime Day. The company spent another $5.9 billion on digital advertising that promoted Prime Day.

MediaRadar found that Amazon's ad spending rose 28% year over year in the second quarter.

Google Cloud reached an annual revenue run rate of over $8 billion, Google announced Thursday after announcing its quarterly earnings. Annual run rate is a measure of how much revenue the business will generate in the next year, assuming that everything about the business stays the same.

The Google Cloud business includes Google Cloud Platform, its rival to the market-leading Amazon Web Services, and G Suite, which competes with Microsoft Office. This $8 billion run rate figure is the first hint we've gotten about Google Cloud revenue since February of 2018, when Google said it was a $1 billion-per-quarter business.

On the earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai also reinforced Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's previously announced plan to increase Google Cloud's sales and go-to-market strategy by taking pages from the book of Oracle, Kurian's previous employer.

"We continue to build our world class Cloud team to help support our customers and expand the business, and are looking to triple our salesforce over the next few years," Pichai said on the call.

Read more: The new CEO of Google Cloud explains the updated master plan for taking on Amazon Web Services

Pichai said on the earnings call that customers are turning to Google Cloud because of its reliability and uptime, flexibility, data management and analytics features, and artificial intelligence.

Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat said on the earnings call that Google Cloud was the company's third largest driver of revenue growth for Alphabet overall — behind search ads and YouTube — and it was the largest driver within its Other Revenues segment.

Alphabet beat Wall Street's expectations on Thursday with a net revenue of $31.7 billion, and after the bell, its stock rose 8%.

Just April, Google Cloud announced Anthos, which allows customers to run their applications and data not only on Google Cloud, but also private data centers and even rival clouds. Google also recently built three new data centers and launched a cloud region in Japan. It plans to build an additional cloud region in Las Vegas.

Master & Dynamic has been one of the most interesting headphone companies over the past few years. Its headphones are beautifully designed, sound great, and offer a ton of features. However, the company's headphones are quite expensive. Luckily, Master & Dynamic's MW60 wireless over-ear headphones are on sale for $170 off at Best Buy and $150 off at Amazon.

The Master & Dynamic MW60 headphones have a lot going for them. They have a classic over-ear design, with subtle silver accents and leather earcups. The silver and black leather pair is the only one that's $170 off at Best Buy — the other colors are only about $10 off.

On Amazon, every colorway is on sale, but the discount is only $150 off. However, if you want a different color, the extra $20 might be worth it to you.

Design aside, these headphones sound awesome. The headphones have a nice, rounded bass, along with well-tuned mids that offer plenty of warmth, and a ton of detail and clarity in the high-end. If you're a music lover, these headphones are a great choice.

Between their awesome design and excellent sound, these are easily some of our favorite wireless headphones. At this price, they're an even better buy than normal, and they're much more accessible.

Get the black and silver Master & Dynamic MW60 headphones at Best Buy, $279.98 (originally $449.98) [You save $170]

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