An antitrust-based lawsuit accusing Amazon and Apple of colluding to keep Apple products priced higher in Amazon's store is moving forward after a judge declined to dismiss the case on the companies' motions. (credit: Getty Images)

A federal judge has rejected Apple's and Amazon's motions to wholly dismiss a consumer antitrust lawsuit, one that accuses the tech giants of colluding to eliminate all but the highest-price Apple products in Amazon's online store .

Writing in Seattle (PDF), Judge John C. Coughenour noted that Apple and Amazon do not dispute the existence of their agreement, which was publicly touted by the companies in November 2018 . Nor do they argue that it had an "effect on interstate commerce," as required by a lawsuit making a complaint under the Sherman Act . The issues pushed in the defendants' motion for dismissal is whether the Global Tenets Agreement (GTA) signed by the companies has an impact on "a relevant market" and whether it "imposes an unreasonable restraint of trade."

Coughenour dismissed one aspect of the plaintiff's lawsuit. He disagreed with Apple's and Amazon's positioning of themselves as competing to sell Apple products "at a horizontal level." Instead, they are, under their GTA, "vertically situated" as a manufacturer and distributor. But, given the "complex nature of the business relationships between the parties," Coughenour wrote, and the fact that the plaintiffs agree that not all resellers of Apple products were removed from Amazon's marketplace, a "per se" finding of antitrust violation could not be sustained.

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  The Amazon Fire Max 11, with the keyboard and stylus attached. [credit: Amazon ]

Amazon's biggest tablet is the Fire Max 11 . It has an 11-inch screen, a fingerprint reader, and an optional keyboard and stylus package. Usually, Fire tablets are cheap consumption devices, but now maybe you can be productive on one?

The tablet starts at $229.99, with the "productivity bundle"—the tablet plus the keyboard and stylus—clocking in at $329.99, or exactly the price of a 9th-gen iPad. For specs , the display is an 11-inch, 2000×1200 60 Hz LCD, and it has 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage (with an option for 128GB), and a "14-hour" battery of unknown size with 15 W charging (you'll only get a 9 W charger in the box, though). The SoC is a Mediatek MT8188J. That's an 8-core chip with two Arm Cortex A78 CPUs (those are the "medium" size CPUs in 2021's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1) and six junky Cortex A55 CPUs for background duty. The GPU is an ARM G57 MC2.

The fingerprint reader is on the side power button. There's also a MicroSD slot for extra storage. The keyboard connects to the tablet via pogo pins that power the keyboard and provide communication. The keyboard isn't backlit. It supports Wi-Fi 6 and sports front and back 8 MP cameras.

Enlarge / Coming 2 America may be coming to a platform besides Prime Video. (credit: Amazon Studios)

Following its acquisition of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. (MGM) film studio, Amazon is launching the Amazon MGM Studios Distribution unit, which will be responsible for distributing Amazon original movies and TV shows, including the massive library it got through MGM.

In March 2022, Amazon closed its $8.5 billion purchase of MGM, giving it power over 4,000 movies, including 12 Angry Men , Creed , Robocop , Rocky , and Stargate and 17,000 TV shows, including The Handmaid's Tale , which has been a hit for Hulu, and Fargo , which has aired on FX, plus upcoming releases.

Amazon MGM Studios Distribution will also seek to distribute Amazon original content previously limited to Amazon Prime Video, including the Coming 2 America movie and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel TV show.

Enlarge (credit: Amazon )

Amazon is discontinuing its Halo project , including the Band and View fitness trackers and the Rise bedside sleep tracker, making the devices useless on August 1. Amid the company's largest-ever wave of layoffs and reports that even the popular Alexa voice assistant has failed to bring in money, this wasn't surprising. It's still sad, though, to realize that countless devices will become obsolete and at huge risk of becoming e-waste (despite Amazon telling customers to recycle devices through its recycling programs, all costs covered).

But perhaps it's just as well, because a report from The Verge today claims to peer into Halo's last attempts at survival. And the Halo that Amazon reportedly tried to realize is one we're happy not to encounter.

Halo reportedly creeped out its own creators

Reported plans for Halo could have pushed products to gather more data on how users exercise in order to provide virtual rewards, to offer recommendations, and to track performance. However, the features Amazon is said to have explored sound potentially invasive, collecting uniquely personal data.

Enlarge / Fire TVs give Alexa hope, but the future still feels grim. (credit: Amazon )

Alexa, how can you continue to be relevant and stop sucking money from Amazon?

That's not an easy question to answer, and the future of Amazon Alexa has never felt so uncertain. In November, Business Insider reported that Alexa “and other devices” were expected to lose Amazon $10 billion in 2022. Such large losses spotlight an enduring question: How are voice assistants supposed to make money? It’s a dilemma other voice assistants are struggling with, too.

In the case of Alexa, which has been integrated into various Amazon-branded products, from speakers and smart displays to a home robot and microwave, its best shot at survival has been under our noses—or in our living rooms—all along.

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Amazon has plans to lay off at least 27,000 workers this year, including 9,000 that were announced in an internal email yesterday morning. One unexpected casualty: Digital Photography Review, also known as DPReview, is losing its entire editorial staff, and the site will stop publishing on April 10 .

The announcement post, written by DPReview General Manager Scott Everett, says that new pieces will continue to be posted through April 10, and "the site will be locked" afterward. It's unclear what will happen to the site's content afterward—the post promises only that the site's articles "will be available in read-only mode for a limited period afterwards." Any photos and text that readers have uploaded to their accounts can be requested and downloaded until April 6 , "after which we will not be able to complete the request."

Former site editor Gannon Burgett said on Twitter that the decision to lay off the staff was announced in January and that " Amazon hasn't yet come up with an archival plan " for the site. Cameras, even digital ones, tend to have a pretty long shelf life, and there's an active used market for lenses and camera bodies—if DPReview.com goes offline entirely, that would be a huge blow to anyone trying to research older products.

Enlarge / Amazon has announced 27,000 layoffs since November 2022. (credit: Nathan Stirk/Getty Images)

Amazon will fire another 9,000 workers in the coming weeks. The news was delivered in an email from company CEO Andy Jassy to employees this morning and follows large cuts in November and again in January .

In his email to staff, Jassy wrote that most of the job cuts will come in four parts of the company: Amazon Web Services or AWS; "People Experience and Technology Solutions"; advertising; and the game-streaming platform Twitch, which has been owned by the Internet behemoth since 2014 . Those areas of the company were also heavily affected by the earlier layoffs, which involved 18,000 workers.

"This was a difficult decision, but one that we think is best for the company long term," Jassy wrote.

Enlarge / Satellite broadband user terminals designed by Amazon's Project Kuiper. (credit: Amazon)

Amazon has designed three satellite broadband user terminals and will start offering Internet service in 2024, the company announced today . The standard terminal, designed for residential and small business customers, is expected to cost Amazon less than $400 to make; Amazon did not say what it will charge customers for the terminals or for monthly service plans.

The "standard customer terminal measures less than 11 inches square and 1 inch thick," Amazon said. "It weighs less than five pounds without its mounting bracket. Despite this modest footprint, the device will be one of the most powerful commercially available customer terminals of its size, delivering speeds up to 400 megabits per second (Mbps). Amazon expects to produce these terminals for less than $400 each."

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  Amazon's standard terminal for residential and small-business customers. [credit: Amazon ]

Whether customers actually get those speeds in practice will depend on the satellites and how congested the network is in each region, as the experience of SpaceX Starlink customers shows. Amazon didn't differentiate between download and upload speeds in its announcement, but upload speeds are likely to be slower than downloads.

Enlarge (credit: Anadolu via Getty Images )

It has been more than a decade since Jeff Bezos excitedly sketched out his vision for Alexa on a whiteboard at Amazon’s headquarters. His voice assistant would help do all manner of tasks, such as shop online, control gadgets, or even read kids a bedtime story.

But the Amazon founder’s grand vision of a new computing platform controlled by voice has fallen short. As hype in the tech world turns feverishly to generative AI as the “next big thing,” the moment has caused many to ask hard questions of the previous “next big thing”—the much-lauded voice assistants from Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and others.

A “grow grow grow” culture described by one former Amazon Alexa marketing executive has now shifted to a more intense focus on how the device can help the e-commerce giant make money.