The Morning After: Was Black Friday 2021 quieter than usual?
As you might have suspected this Cyber Monday morning, the big stories on Engadget involve good deals or even an all-time low price on gadgets, accessories for said gadgets or services to run on them. (We’ve linked to the best deals we’ve found down below, but stock and prices may have changed since the time of writing.)
That said, according to early figures, it might have been a more muted Black Friday online than in previous years. Adobe estimates its combined Black Friday and Thanksgiving Day internet sales were less than last year, for the first time ever — even if it was only a mere dip from $9 billion in 2020 to $8.9 billion last week.
Adobe thinks the dip reflected the multitude of internet deals out there that began ahead of Black Friday — some as early as October.
— Mat Smith
They analyzed the data collected by the seismometer installed by NASA’s InSight lander.
NASA
A team of scientists have created the first detailed image of what lies right underneath the planet’s surface, showing three billion years of its history, by listening to Martian winds.
More precisely, they analyzed the ambient noise (in the absence of marsquakes) collected by the seismometer that was installed by the InSight lander. On Earth, that kind of ambient seismic noise is generated by the ocean, human activity and winds, but only the last one is present on Mars.
Is that better than a giant plastic soda cup?
AMC is extending its fondness for the blockchain to the freebies you get with ticket pre-orders. The theater chain and Sony Pictures are giving away 86,000 NFTs to Stubs Premiere, A-List and Investor Connect members who buy or reserve tickets for Spider-Man: No Way Home showings on December 16th. Redeem a code through a special website and you’ll get one of 100 designs. Will it be worth millions? My limited-edition Jurassic Park cup I got from a movie theater in the ‘90s suggests not.
China’s crypto mining ban may be partly to blame.
Reuters
The Financial Times reports the country’s electrical grid operator KEGOC said it would start rationing electricity for 50 registered miners after their demand reportedly invoked an emergency shutdown mode at three power plants in October. They’ll also be the first users disconnected if there are grid failures. The energy ministry estimated electricity demand has jumped by eight percent so far in 2021 versus the more typical one or two percent. There have been blackouts in six regions since October.
There’s no word on a corresponding upgrade elsewhere.
Electrek has learned Tesla is shipping the electric crossover in China with an AMD Ryzen processor running the infotainment system instead of the usual Intel CPU. Performance variant owners have noticed the swap so far, but Tesla has historically used the same computing platform for all trim levels of a given model.
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