Comment on Adidas Is Hot on Nike's Heels in China

Enlarge (credit: FT/Getty Images) TikTok’s Beijing-based owner ByteDance tightened its grip over its US operations over the past two years, according to company insiders, even as momentum to ban the short-video app grew in Washington. The US government passed legislation this week aimed at forcing TikTok to divest from its parent or face a countrywide ban, but prising the viral video app from its $268 billion parent company would present a formidable challenge. More than two dozen current and former employees told the Financial Times that TikTok has only become more deeply interwoven with ByteDance as tensions over the app’s ownership escalated.

Enlarge / The author tries not to crash a lunar rover. (credit: Eric Berger) As a SpaceX engineer working on the Starship program about five years ago, Jaret Matthews could see the future of spaceflight quite clearly and began to imagine the possibilities. For decades everything that went to space had to be carefully measured, optimized for mass, and serve an extremely specialized purpose.

Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm) Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series of chips promises to be the company’s first that can go toe-to-toe with Apple Silicon, and the PC ecosystem is reacting accordingly. Microsoft reportedly plans for the Arm version of its next Surface tablet to be the flagship, and major apps like Chrome and Dropbox have recently released Arm-native Windows versions for the first time. Ahead of the chips' launch late this year, Qualcomm announced a new lower-end model destined for cheaper devices.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson) “Gadgets aren’t fun anymore,” sighed my wife, watching me tap away on my Palm Zire 72 as she sat on the couch with her MacBook Air, an iPhone, and an Apple Watch. And it’s true: The smartphone has all but eliminated entire classes of gadgets, from point-and-shoot cameras to MP3 players, GPS maps, and even flashlights.

Venice, the historic Italian city known for its canals, would like to draw a balance between its residents who live there and help to keep the place running and its visitors, an important source of economic revenue but increasingly also a burden on social services and the livability of the city. In recent years, the balance has shifted: in the 1970s, Venice had some 175,000 residents; as of last year, its population dipped below 50,000—and the number of tourist beds outnumbered residents for the first time.