No, Russia didn’t hit Google with a $23 million fined. It fined Google the equivalent of 23,809,523 times all of the money that exists on Earth. The Kremlin slapped Google with a $2.5 decillion fine, according to The Moscow Times. That’s $2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or for the nerds among us, 2.5 × 1021. Yes, I had to pull out the scientific notation just to wrap my head around the number.
In probably the grossest example of an understatement of all time, The Moscow Times says that Google is “unlikely to ever pay the incredibly high fine,” noting that Google parent company Alphabet reported revenue of just $307 billion last year. I guess when we’re dealing with phony numbers that have no right to exist, 307 billion really doesn’t seem like much.
The burning question — why? State-run media, of course. In response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, YouTube blocked several Russian news accounts, including Channel One, Moscow Media, and Public Television of Russia. A Russian court ordered Google to restore the accounts and imposed a fine of $1,029 — or 100,000 rubles — every day that Google kept the channels down. That number doubled every week that Google kept the channels down, according to RBC.
Things have clearly snowballed since then, with exponential growth showing up in the nastiest way to create the monstrosity of a number that Google now owes, according to the Russian government. That money will never show up, of course, considering it’s astronomically larger than the $105 trillion or so that makes up the gross domestic product (GDP) of the entire planet, but its fine will only continue to grow over time. Clearly, Google isn’t interested in paying it, and it probably never plans to.
Google has almost entirely pulled out of Russia, in fact, with the Russian subsidiary of the company declaring bankruptcy more than a year ago.
Still, Russian media that originally sued Google are trying to get the company to cough up some sort of fine. RBC reports that Russian media companies have filed lawsuits against Google in Spain, South Africa, Turkey, and Hungary to enforce the Russian fine, and earlier this year, South Africa actually granted a motion to seize Google’s assets in the country. Google has responded with lawsuits in the U.S. and U.K. in order to keep these Russian lawsuits confined to, well, Russia.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.
Two new highly requested iCloud plugins just got added to ChatGPT, giving people who rely on Apple’s Mail and Calendar services a way to search emails, check appointments, and manage their schedules directly through the chatbot.
The integration is rolling out to all ChatGPT plans, including the free tier. You can access it on the web, desktop, and iOS.