Paul Stenhouse: Facebook is breaking up with news, Apple ditches self-driving car project - Saturday Morning with Jack Tame

Facebook & News are breaking up 

The "news tab" is no more and Meta is basically trying to get out of the news business altogether. 

Meta says it will “deprecate” Facebook News in the US and Australia in April and has removed the News tab in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Meta says it will not do any new commercial deals for news and “will not offer new Facebook products specifically for news publishers in the future.”  

In Australia, the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code prompted Meta to do huge licensing deals worth an estimated $70 million with publishers like News Corp, Seven, Nine, and Sky News. But no more! 

Threads and Instagram have been pushing as far from news as they possibly can, trying to deemphasize news content. Meta says: “news makes up less than 3% of what people around the world see in their Facebook feed".  

Apple's car stays in the garage 

Dubbed one of Silicon Valley's "worst kept secrets", Project Titan is no more. Apple had planned to produce a fully electric and self-driving vehicle and has spent billions on research and development. By all accounts it was a very real project.  

In 2017, it got a permit to test self-driving vehicles in California and purchased a startup in the car space. One analyst said Apple is following investors’ appetites, with enthusiasm for electric vehicle investments waning amid the frenzy for all things AI. Apple still hasn't commented on anything related to the car project. 

In the past five years, Apple has spent $113 billion developing new tech ($22b a year!).  

What's next? The guess is that Apple will evolve the CarPlay offering to become an operating system for cars. 

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