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L’application de l’OSDM devrait connaître une accélération considérable en 2025 auprès des acteurs ferroviaires européens. Ce nouveau standard promet de simplifier la vente de billets de train à l’échelle transnationale et pourrait avoir impact positif sur l’augmentation des voyages en train pour la clientèle corporate.  Le modèle ouvert de vente et de distribution (OSDM) est une initiative B2B du secteur ferroviaire, dont l’objectif est de faciliter les services de distribution en ligne au profit des voyageurs. Concrètement, ce nouveau standard fonctionnera comme un adaptateur et permettra aux voyageurs ou aux entreprises de réserver des trajets via plusieurs compagnies ferroviaires sur un seul billet, avec des conditions après-vente et des tarifs clairs. Que cela soit via Trainline, SNCF Connect, Rail Europe ou le site de la Deutsche Bahn, les voyageurs et entreprises auront la possibilité de réserver un ticket unique, incluant une ou plusieurs compagnies européennes. > A lire aussi : Après Railcoop, Midnight Trains… Le ferroviaire français est-il accessible aux nouveaux acteurs ? Un standard plus ouvert pour la distribution ferroviaire, conçu dans un souci d’intermodalité, comme nous le précise Blaz Pongracic, Senior Policy Adviser Passenger au sein de la CER (Community of European Railway and Infrastructure Companies). Il ajoute : « L’OSDM conduira à une expérience voyageurs transparente lors de la recherche, de la sélection et de l’achat, y compris le transport du premier et dernier kilomètre en disposant d’une API standardisée à l’échelle européenne. L’objectif est également de réduire la complexité et les coûts de distribution pour les détaillants, les distributeurs et les transporteurs ».  Un standard élaboré par et pour les acteurs du ferroviaires Porté par les membres de la la Communauté des entreprises ferroviaires et d’infrastructures européennes (CER), l’Union internationale des chemins de fer (UIC) et d’autres partenaires de l’industrie ferroviaire, dans le cadre du CER Ticketing Roadmap, son lancement officiel aura lieu d’ici la fin de l’année pour un déploiement à grande échelle en 2025. A ce jour, plus de 30 entreprises ferroviaires, représentant 94% du trafic passagers en Europe, y participent. En revanche, comme nous le précise Blaz Pongracic, l’OSDM ne sera pas une obligation légale, même si « de nombreuses parties prenantes souhaiteraient qu’elle le soit afin de garantir que tous les acteurs concernés s’y conforment et éviter de futurs changements ou obligations imprévues ».  La SNCF prépare sa standardisation Pour la SNCF, l’OSDM permettra de mettre à disposition un accès standardisé aux offres de la compagnie, en particulier pour les distributeurs qui n’ont pas eu les moyens d’implémenter leur API. D’un point de vue technique, le groupe nous assure que les équipes sont déjà mobilisées « pour appréhender et implémenter ce standard ». La compagnie précise que deux projets sont en cours de développement pour distribuer à la fois selon le standard OSDM et vendre des offres d’autres compagnies ferroviaires étrangères selon ce même standard. En avril dernier, la Suède est devenue le premier pays européen à adopter ce système pour ses trajets nationaux et internationaux.  > A lire aussi : Ferroviaire : Paris-Berlin direct en LGV, ce sera possible en décembre Vers un report modal de la clientèle affaires vers le train ?  Selon Laurent la Rocca, co-fondateur de The Treep, ce nouveau standard est une bonne nouvelle pour le développement des trajets en train en Europe, notamment pour la clientèle corpo. « La simplification de l’intermodalité est un vrai sujet et la complexité des systèmes de distribution ne doivent plus être un frein pour privilégier le train plutôt que l’avion », explique-t-il. En revanche, l’entrepreneur se dit conscient que le temps de trajet reste un sujet important pour la clientèle affaires : « Pour un voyageur corpo, l’allongement du temps de trajet peut être rédhibitoire. Il faut voir le voyage comme une journée en TT, envisager le train comme un environnement propice au travail ». Si le « temps » est un critère de choix important, le prix l’est également, tout comme les modalités de modifications ou d’annulations des billets. Ce nouveau standard devrait ainsi permettre de gommer certains points de friction et rassurer les entreprises qui décident d’opter pour des trajets transfrontaliers ou transnationaux. Et c’est un fait, de plus en plus d’entreprises et collaborateurs décident de délaisser l’avion en faveur du train, quitte à accepter de partir plus longtemps ou d’allouer une journée/nuit à leur trajet. Pour le co-fondateur de The Treep, le développement des trains de nuit sera déterminant pour augmenter le report modal de la clientèle affaires vers le ferroviaire, tout comme la qualité de service proposée à bord. Comme le rappelait Frédéric Laurent-Miel, directeur Entreprises et Agences “TGV-INTERCITÉS” lors du Congrès Manor, le report se fait aujourd’hui sur des trajets de 3h-3h30 de TGV, des trajets qu’il n’imaginait pas il y a encore quelques années. Une bascule aérien/train, rendue possible par l’amélioration des conditions de travail, notamment grâce au WIFI à bord.

Pour la première fois, les équipes du planning stratégique de Lonsdale à Paris, Singapour et New York dévoilent les tendances clés de 2025, qui traverseront la culture, les marques, la créativité et le marketing. Une étude intitulée « Brand Shifts 2025 » décryptée ici par Félix Mathieu, patron du planning stratégique.

EVS ARE PRACTICALLY worthless secondhand, because the huge batteries will need expensive replacement after a few years. At least, that’s what some articles or forum discussions in recent years may lead you to believe. However, while secondhand prices for EVs have been plummeting, evidence is building that their batteries could last longer than the eight-year warranties most come with. In fact, they could still be very usable even after 20 years, potentially giving full-electric cars a longer useful life than many fossil-fuel equivalents. “There is an immense amount of consumer concern around the state of the battery that you buy in a secondhand vehicle,” says James Wallace, cofounder of Fortescue’s battery intelligence division Elysia. His company, formerly Williams Advanced Engineering prior to the Fortescue acquisition, has been developing software to optimize battery performance in intensive-use situations such as motorsport (including Formula E), mining, and for automaker JLR. Wallace is hoping Elysia’s technology will filter down to the mainstream, to help “give consumers more transparency on the secondhand batteries that they buy.” ADVERTISEMENT Gear Newsletter: Reviews, Guides, and Deals Upgrade your life with our buying guides, deals, and how-to guides, all tested by experts. SIGN UP By signing up, you agree to our user agreement (including class action waiver and arbitration provisions), and acknowledge our privacy policy. People base assumptions on existing experience. When it comes to battery longevity, that’s mostly likely going to be their smartphones. Most of us see the battery life of our handsets start to drop after a couple of years. Apple’s Batterygate likely won’t have helped with the popular image of the durability of lithium-ion cells, either. Built to Last But there is growing indication that EV batteries are much sturdier than those in smartphones. Just for starters, you don’t tend to recharge your EV every day like your handset. It might be as infrequently as once a week or less. Real-world studies show how this affects an electric car’s battery. Consulting firm P3 recently analyzed 7,000 fleet electric vehicles, in partnership with Austrian battery testing specialist Aviloo. Their report showed that, on average, EV batteries have 90 percent capacity after 100,000 kilometers of driving, and at 300,000 kilometers they still have 87 percent of their original kilowatts left. FEATURED VIDEO Historian Answers Samurai Questions Similarly, data from fleet telematics company Geotab has revealed that battery depletion is much lower than originally predicted over time. While the P3 research is based on vehicles between three and five years old, mapping remaining battery capacity against mileage, the Geotab analysis looks at age. “We did a study in 2019, and then we did a more recent study as well,” says Charlotte Argue, senior manager for sustainable mobility at Geotab. “The most recent study was 11 different models and brands. Our 2019 study included 23 different models with multiple generations.” In both these reports, Geotab was tracking the state of charge and measuring the energy flow of the vehicle in use, which was also the approach taken by P3 and Aviloo. “Using that we can estimate at any given time what the total battery capacity is in that vehicle's life,” says Argue. “Plotted over time, we can start to look at trends of how battery capacity is changing. In the most recent study, we looked at over 5,000 vehicles, and many trips.” Geotab saw that the average degradation rate was just 1.8 percent per year. In Geotab's 2019 study, it was 2.3 percent per year. “This most recent study didn't have as many of the early-gen vehicles,” says Argue, “telling us that battery management systems are getting better, and batteries are lasting longer.” If this 1.8 percent annual degradation continued in a linear fashion, after 10 years an EV would still have 82 percent of its battery capacity, much more than the 70 percent most batteries are warrantied for after eight years. MOST POPULAR GEAR The DJI Mic Mini Is Tiny, Wireless, and Doesn't Compromise on Sound BY JULIAN CHOKKATTU GEAR Carv 2 Digital Coach Is the Best Ski Teacher Money Can Buy BY CHRIS HASLAM GEAR Roland’s Latest MicroKorg Is Great, but It No Longer Reigns Supreme BY TERRENCE O’BRIEN GEAR The Asus Vivobook S 14 OLED Is a Respectable Laptop With a Good Price BY DANIEL THORP-LANCASTER ADVERTISEMENT Dial that forward 20 years and the car would still have 64 percent. If a vehicle started off with 300 miles of WLTP-rated range (the standard test cycle used in Europe), it could have 192 miles of range 20 years later. That remains quite usable, and now there are lots of cars on the market that begin with well over 300 miles of WLTP range. We Don’t Know How Long EV Batteries Will Last … Yet Of course, there is still guesswork involved here, because there are no 20-year-old mainstream EVs, and precious few even over 10 years. Many of the latter are Nissan Leafs, which lacked the thermal management that keeps batteries in their best health, so they probably aren’t the best guide for more modern EVs. But BMW i3 cars from a decade ago are reportedly faring well, with most still providing over 80 percent of their original capacity. BMW, which has conducted its own studies, confirmed to WIRED that i3 batteries have lasted considerably longer than the company expected. Indeed, in 2023, BMW UK purchased the oldest i3 the company could find in its Approved Used network for testing. It was a 2013 BEV model fitted with a 22.6-kWh battery, chosen purely on age. The car had 83 percent battery capacity after almost 10 years on the road. Tesla Model S vehicles from 2013 show a similar capacity, according to Plug In America results reported by Nimblefins. Tesla even has a 2015 Model S in its UK press fleet with more than 250,000 miles on the clock, on the same battery, with approximately 86 percent of its original capacity remaining. However, Argue advises caution. “We can't predict the future. It's 1.8 percent per year to date,” she says. “There is an argument that there could be what we call a heel curve towards the end of the life of the vehicle, where the battery starts degrading faster than it did for most of its life. We haven't observed enough bad vehicles hitting that heel to be able to predict or analyze when that will happen. All we can say right now is if it continues to degrade at the average rate that we're seeing, these batteries should last 20 years or more.” MOST POPULAR GEAR The DJI Mic Mini Is Tiny, Wireless, and Doesn't Compromise on Sound BY JULIAN CHOKKATTU GEAR Carv 2 Digital Coach Is the Best Ski Teacher Money Can Buy BY CHRIS HASLAM GEAR Roland’s Latest MicroKorg Is Great, but It No Longer Reigns Supreme BY TERRENCE O’BRIEN GEAR The Asus Vivobook S 14 OLED Is a Respectable Laptop With a Good Price BY DANIEL THORP-LANCASTER ADVERTISEMENT “We do see variation across different vehicles and models,” continues Argue. There are other factors as well. “So far, we haven’t seen a significant impact from high mileage on degradation rates, so you shouldn't be afraid to use your EV.” This finding is in line with P3’s research. “But we have seen a correlation with the frequency of DC rapid charging,” warns Argue. “Cars that frequently rapid-charged did have an observable increase in degradation rates.” Hot weather is also a factor that affects durability. “The worst case was three times more for a particular model driven in hot climates and using frequent rapid charging,” says Argue. This would mean losing 5.4 percent of battery capacity per year. However, “the best had on average 1 percent degradation per year. It's definitely a positive trend we're seeing.” “When the electric vehicle market started, there was a large concern around the factors that can lead to increased battery degradation,” says Neil Cawse, CEO of Geotab. “For example, discharging completely, charging in cold weather versus warm weather, using high-speed charging versus low-speed charging. But battery tech has gotten much better, particularly around management systems—for example, making sure that lithium-ion cells charge properly when cold.” This better battery performance could provide longer warranties for a higher remaining capacity. Toyota already offers a 10-year warranty on its EV batteries, and MG has been experimenting with a lifetime guarantee in Thailand. “You still generally have warranties that promise 70 percent state of health at eight years, but the degradation that we're seeing on those batteries is much less,” says Wallace. Your EV Could Still Be Good After 20 Years However, research so far has been based on how the car’s systems report the battery’s state of health. “I would take all those values with a pinch of salt,” says Wallace. “The reported state of health on the dashboard that the customer sees is often significantly different from what the actual state of health is from that battery.” According to a report published by Elysia in 2023, the true state of health can be up to 9 percent different from what is reported. Another issue is the buffer that manufacturers leave in their batteries, which is the difference between the net and gross capacity in kWh. “OEMs are oversizing these batteries,” says Wallace. However, Argue explains that “there must be some safety buffer, because what we know from battery science is that if a battery sits completely full or completely empty for a prolonged period, that causes more stress. Having a buffer protects the battery from degradation.” Wallace reckons this buffer is overly conservative, given the low degradation being seen with EV batteries. “They don't need as much excess capacity,” he says. “Smaller buffers mean smaller batteries, bringing down the cost of EVs.” Trouble is, Wallace believes many traditional automakers don’t yet have the necessary data about their own batteries to take this step. Still, if batteries continue to last like the studies from P3 and Geotab imply, EVs could well be in better condition than combustion engine vehicles of the same mileage and age. The rest of an EV is less expensive to run as well. “The cost of maintenance is significantly lower,” says Cawse. “You maintain the brake pads and change the wipers—and that’s about it.” A 10-year-old EV could be almost as good as new, and a 20-year-old one still very usable. That could be yet another disruption to an automotive industry that relies on cars mostly heading to the junkyard after 15 years.

DEATHS IN THE southwest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from an as-yet unidentified disease are continuing to rise. So far there have been 71 confirmed fatalities, with 27 recorded in hospitals and 44 in communities in the southern province of Kwango. The World Health Organization (WHO) has sent a team of experts to the field to collect samples and conduct laboratory tests to try to identify the pathogen responsible. The results of testing should be available either later today or tomorrow, Jean Kaseya, head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a press conference earlier today. “Initial diagnoses lead us to think it is a respiratory disease, but we have to wait for laboratory results.” Of the hospitalized patients, 17 died due to respiratory problems. Kaseya stressed that there are many aspects still unknown about the disease, including whether it is contagious and how it is transmitted. About 380 cases are thought to have been identified so far, with nearly half involving children under 5. People infected with the mystery disease present with flu-like symptoms, such as coughing, vomiting, “high fever and severe headaches,” Remy Saki, deputy governor of Kwango province, and Apollinaire Yumba, the DRC’s provincial minister of health, told Reuters. Authorities are urging citizens to exercise caution and avoid contact with dead bodies to avoid potential contagion. The number of infected people, however, continues to rise, as does the alert level. FEATURED VIDEO Doctor Answers Lung Questions From Twitter This area of the DRC is highly fragile from a health perspective, with 40 percent of residents suffering from malnutrition, and access to medical care being difficult for many, with medicines in short supply. This new outbreak is coinciding with the DRC grappling with an epidemic of mpox, which the WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern in August.

GOOGLE, META, AND Microsoft, as well as startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, all had well-developed strategies for generative AI by the time Apple finally announced its own push this June. Conventional wisdom suggested this entrance was unfashionably late. Apple disagrees. Its leaders say the company is arriving just in time—and that it's been stealthily preparing for this moment for years. ADVERTISEMENT Plaintext Newsletter by Steven Levy WIRED editor at large Steven Levy draws on his unmatched list of contacts to provide the long view on tech. Delivered on Fridays. SIGN UP By signing up, you agree to our user agreement (including class action waiver and arbitration provisions), and acknowledge our privacy policy. That’s part of the message I got from speaking with key Apple executives this fall about how they created what is now called Apple Intelligence. Senior vice president for software engineering Craig Federighi is a familiar character in an ongoing web series in the tech world known as keynote product launches. Less publicly recognizable is senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy John Giannandrea, who previously headed machine learning at Google. In a separate interview, I spoke with Greg “Joz” Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president for worldwide marketing. (These conversations helped prepare me for my sitdown with Tim Cook, which I did the next day.) All of the executives, including Cook, emphasized that despite the massively disruptive potential of AI, Apple was going to handle this game-changing tech with the same clarity and meticulousness the company is known for. To paraphrase a song by some musicians who also formed a company called Apple, the crew at Cupertino was always waiting for this moment to arise. This is an edition of Steven Levy's Plaintext newsletter. SIGN UP for Plaintext and tap Steven's unique insights and unmatched contacts for the long view on tech. “We were doing intelligence in 2015, like predicting which apps you would use next and helping predict routes in maps,” says Joswiak. “We didn’t always talk about it publicly, but we were there and ahead of the curve.” FEATURED VIDEO The Fight Against Surveillance Capitalism: A Conversation with Meredith Whittaker In 2018, Apple poached Giannandrea from Google, a move that Cook told me showed that Apple anticipated the coming AI transformation. The company created a new senior VP position for him, an unusual move for Apple that broke with its traditional hiring norms. Upon arrival, Giannandrea was struck by how much Apple was already exploiting cutting-edge AI in some of its most popular products. “Face ID is a feature you use every day, many, many times a day to unlock your phone, and you have no idea how it really works,” he says. “There’s a lot of deep learning going on privately on your phone just to make that feature work. But to the user, it just disappears.” Federighi says that experimenting with OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, which was released in 2020, stoked his imagination. “Things that seemed on their way to becoming possible suddenly appeared eminently possible,” he says. “The next real question was whether it was possible to take advantage of the technology in an Apple way.” Apple soon had multiple teams working on transformer-based AI models. So when ChatGPT captivated the world in November 2022, there was no need for Apple to assemble an internal task force for developing AI products—work was already underway to create features that would similarly “just disappear.” “We have ways of drawing together functional expertise across the organization to accomplish larger product transformations,” says Federighi. “When it came to making a bigger step in a public way, we pulled together many of those threads, in a way that's just very familiar to us at Apple.” MOST POPULAR GEAR The Best Diffusers for Curly Hair BY LOURYN STRAMPE GEAR The Best Wireless Meat Thermometers for the Perfect Meal BY SAL VAGLICA POLITICS Meet the Conspiracy Filmmaker Who Claims to Have Red-Pilled Tulsi Gabbard BY DAVID GILBERT GEAR General Motors Cuts Funding to Cruise, Nixing Its Robotaxi Plan BY AARIAN MARSHALL ADVERTISEMENT Apple also had reportedly moved some AI-savvy engineers from its discontinued smart-car project to the Apple Intelligence effort. When I brought this up, Federighi gave me a shrug that signaled, “Hey, I’m not going there.” Not that any of this was easy. “This is a spot along a journey,” says Giannandrea. “Computer science is changing. For more and more of the things that we want to do, like speech recognition, language understanding, and summarization, the only way to do it is to build. And so this is a progression.” Apple decided early on that Apple Intelligence wouldn’t be a separate product, but instead something implemented on a systems level. Unlike a number of its competitors, Apple had no interest in producing artificial general intelligence, a quest that to the company seems unrealistic and almost frivolous. “The most credible researchers in the field believe there are many unsolved problems and breakthroughs required,” says Giannandrea. “The idea that you’re scaling up these technologies to go to AGI is very naive.” He says that Apple may very well be involved in important breakthroughs—not to kickstart the Singularity, but to improve its products. “We probably have more engineers working on what we call ‘investigations’ than we do working on what’s going to ship next year,” he says, referring to what is apparently the company's term for basic research.“I would say that people working at Apple are slightly more interested in what the impact of their work is going to be with consumers.” “Apple is laser focused on things that are going to make your day-to-day life better,” says Joswiak. That ultimately involves making use of personal information, whether it's knowing who your close contacts are when you search for a specific photo, recalling places you’ve visited when you use maps, or keeping track of what you’ve downloaded from Safari. To fully make use of AI, Apple would need to organize the personal information of its users in a comprehensive fashion—a scary proposition the company felt it was uniquely qualified to pitch to its customers because of its very public focus on privacy. Protecting that privacy, however, turned out to be a major technical challenge. “We had to innovate at the data center level, at the system level, at the OS level, at the cryptographic and security protocol level, at the distributed AI inference level … at every level up the stack to do what no one had done before—extend an on-device processing level of security that you have on your phone, to advance processing in the cloud,” says Federighi. “I hope it is the future of how everyone does this kind of process.” His conviction is so strong that he says he hopes other companies mimic the achievement, even if it means Apple losing its competitive advantage. “There are lots of cases where we have very mixed feelings about people copying what we do, but when it comes to our privacy practices, we were happy to set an example and encourage,” Federighi says. MOST POPULAR GEAR The Best Diffusers for Curly Hair BY LOURYN STRAMPE GEAR The Best Wireless Meat Thermometers for the Perfect Meal BY SAL VAGLICA POLITICS Meet the Conspiracy Filmmaker Who Claims to Have Red-Pilled Tulsi Gabbard BY DAVID GILBERT GEAR General Motors Cuts Funding to Cruise, Nixing Its Robotaxi Plan BY AARIAN MARSHALL ADVERTISEMENT Only when it built those privacy systems did the company unveil Apple Intelligence, and then small groups of features were released in waves to much fanfare. But the reality is that the first public iteration of Apple Intelligence isn’t quite blowing people away. Critics complain that its inbox summaries, email rewrites, and photo search, as well as a more conversational Siri, don’t seem much different than the gen-AI offerings already unveiled by competitors. But just as Apple crashed its rivals’ parties when it came to digital music streaming and smart watches, the company is confident, if not hubristic, that its Apple-tude will ultimately prevail. “This is a multi-decade thing,” says Giannandrea. “I was very excited about the stuff that we've announced this year, but I think Craig and I are much more excited about, like, what's in the next 10 years.” Naturally, I asked the two executives to share details of what those future products might be. And also naturally, they refused. “You know us better than that,” says Federighi. Even if some competitors release similar innovations first, Apple will take it in stride. This crowd prides itself on being not first, but best. Generative AI may be the ultimate test to see if that philosophy still works. Time Travel This is not the first time I got an exclusive look at Apple’s AI journey. In August 2016, the company gave me a peek into how it was implementing the latest techniques in AI during a day of interviews with Federighi as well as executives Phil Schiller and Eddy Cue, and scientists Tom Gruber and Alex Acero. The message then, as now, was that Apple was on it, but doing AI in its own way. Even as Apple is bear-hugging machine learning, the executives caution that the embrace is, in a sense, business as usual for them. The Cupertino illuminati view deep learning and ML as only the latest in a steady flow of groundbreaking technologies. Yes, yes, it’s transformational, but not more so than other advances, like touch screens, or flat panels, or object-oriented programming. In Apple’s view, machine learning isn’t the final frontier, despite what other companies say. “It’s not like there weren’t other technologies over the years that have been instrumental in changing the way we interact with devices,” says Cue. And no one at Apple wants to even touch on the spooky/scary speculations that invariably come up in AI discussions. As you’d expect, Apple wouldn’t confirm whether it was working on self-driving cars, or its own version of Netflix. But the team made it pretty clear that Apple was not working on Skynet. MOST POPULAR GEAR The Best Diffusers for Curly Hair BY LOURYN STRAMPE GEAR The Best Wireless Meat Thermometers for the Perfect Meal BY SAL VAGLICA POLITICS Meet the Conspiracy Filmmaker Who Claims to Have Red-Pilled Tulsi Gabbard BY DAVID GILBERT GEAR General Motors Cuts Funding to Cruise, Nixing Its Robotaxi Plan BY AARIAN MARSHALL ADVERTISEMENT “We use these techniques to do the things we have always wanted to do, better than we’ve been able to do,” says Schiller. “And on new things we haven’t been able to do. It’s a technique that will ultimately be a very Apple way of doing things as it evolves inside Apple and in the ways we make products.” Ask Me One Thing Luana asks, “Can Intel resuscitate, or is it going to become Xerox?” Thanks for the question, Luana. When I was watching supremely confident Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at this week’s WIRED Big Interview event, I kept thinking about the plight of Intel, which once stood atop the chip world with similar triumphalism. It invented the microprocessor! Building on that innovation, Intel became the default chip for the personal computer revolution. But ultimately, it fell victim to the Innovator’s Dilemma. The failures of its awkward attempts to elbow its way into the media world could be shrugged off, but not its big misses—the mobile revolution and the importance of graphic chips, earth-shattering events that its rivals exploited. Perhaps the coup de grâce was the rise of custom silicon by companies like Apple and Amazon, which further decreased their reliance on Intel’s offerings. At this point, who needs Intel? MOST POPULAR GEAR The Best Diffusers for Curly Hair BY LOURYN STRAMPE GEAR The Best Wireless Meat Thermometers for the Perfect Meal BY SAL VAGLICA POLITICS Meet the Conspiracy Filmmaker Who Claims to Have Red-Pilled Tulsi Gabbard BY DAVID GILBERT GEAR General Motors Cuts Funding to Cruise, Nixing Its Robotaxi Plan BY AARIAN MARSHALL ADVERTISEMENT I wouldn’t equate Intel with Xerox, though. The advances of the latter’s PARC division were never really exploited. The clueless top brass at Xerox’s headquarters sat by while Apple, and eventually everyone else, copied its graphical user interface. Intel, in contrast, built a fantastic business—so successful that it was easy to fall into complacency. I can’t say whether resuscitation is possible. (If twice-former CEO Pat Gelsinger can’t figure it out for a huge paycheck, don’t expect me to do it for free.) But Intel does have incredibly valuable expertise and assets, notably its chip fabrication plants. At least until Trump pulls the plug, it also has billions of dollars in funding from the Biden administration to produce those chips in the United States. If Intel doesn’t get bought by one of its competitors, maybe it can hang around until the next big opportunity arises—and a hungry new CEO is smart enough to bet the farm on it. Meanwhile, Huang might consider embroidering the Intel logo in the lining of his famous leather jackets as a persistent reminder of how the mighty can fall.