Daily Tech News 19 October 2025

• Solar car maker Aptera is about to go public and I'm worried. (Elektrek)
  
  Also, prescient. This article was posted ten days ago.
  
  Aptera listed on NASDAQ last week with a share price around $20.
  
  Three days later it's trading below $6.
  
  Aptera has spent 19 years and an untold amount of money - something like $150 million - trying to build what has been unkindly but accurately described as an electric tricycle, and all it has to show for its efforts is a handful of shiny prototypes.
  
  Though given how similar the protypes have all appeared over the years it's not unimaginable that they just painted a solar cell pattern over the original diesel/electric model and called it a day.
  
  Production was originally scheduled to start in 2008.

• Scaling Kubernetes to a million nodes. (GitHub)
  
  Why?
  
  As John F. Kennedy famously said of the Apollo Program: We choose to go the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy.
  
  I suspect that applies equally to the engineers at Aptera. Maybe more than equally.
  
  
  
• People apparently don't want ultra-slim phones. (Mac Rumours)
  
  Apple has reportedly cut production of the iPhone Air - at the same time it has boosted production of other models - and Samsung has cancelled the follow up to its competing S25 Edge.
  
  I wouldn't mind a slimmer phone, but it's far down the list of problems with current models, most of which were self-inflicted by the companies making them.
  
  
  
• Presenters prevented a tragedy at the Wikipedia conference taking place in New York when they tackled an armed pedophile who threatened to kill himself. (NBC News)
  
  I fully understand. The cleaning crews in New York conference spaces are all union and those overtime rates will blow your budget into another dimension.
  
  
  
• Migrating from Amazon to Hetzner Cloud. (Digital Society)
  
  And getting nearly three times as much (virtual) hardware for a quarter the price.
  
  Wait, didn't an entire Hetzner datacenter burn to the ground not so long ago?
  
  No, that was OVH.
  
  Oh. Carry on then.
  
  
  
• A big small PC from Minisforum. (Liliputing)
  
  It measures about 9" x 9" x 4", which is big for a small PC but small for a big PC, and offers four (SODIMM) memory slots, four M.2 slots, and three PCIe slots, and a Core Ultra 9 285HX (8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores). Plus two USB4v2 ports (80Gbps) and a USB4 port (40Gbps), two 25Gb Ethernet ports, one 10Gb Ethernet port, one 2.5Gb Ethernet port, one HDMI port, and the usual bunch of USB3 ports.
  
  Given the size and power constraints (it has a 350W power supply) you're not going to fit a high-end graphics card in it, but a low-profile Nvidia 5060 or an Intel Arc Pro B50 should work fine.
  
  
  
• Anbernic is preparing to launch the RG DS, a dual-screen gaming device selling for less than $100. (Notebook Check)
  
  It's designed to emulate the Nintendo DS and 3DS. It can play games made for older consoles but it's clearly aimed at those two since it looks exactly like them.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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