Apple admits to slowing down your old iPhone. A beverage company’s stock nearly quadruples after it announces a pivot to blockchain. And in a year with The Emoji Movie, Netflix has apparently produced the worst film of 2017.
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First, trending on Reddit: Apple has confirmed an observation many Redditors and Geekbench developer John Poole had made – that it’s been slowing down old iPhones with low-capacity batteries. Poole tested the theory, which originated on Reddit, using an iPhone 6S and iPhone 7, and concluded that the iOS 10.2.1 and 11.2.0 updates introduced a feature that throttled device performance to extend battery life. Apple confirmed as much to the Verge, though as Poole observes, it’s easy to imagine this “feature” leading users to think, “my phone is slow, so I should replace it,” rather than, ‘my phone is slow, so I should replace its battery.”
Next, trending on Facebook: the New York-based Long Island Iced Tea Corporation – a beverage company – saw its value rise from $23.8 million USD to $92 million on Wednesday after announcing that it would be shifting its primary business to the blockchain. It even plans to rebrand itself as the Long Blockchain Corporation. As of Thursday the company said it was still in the preliminary stages of evaluating opportunities to grow its business, but that it would continue producing its Long Island iced tea and Long Island lemonade products.
Finally, according to Twitter, Netflix has produced the worst movie of the year.
the silver lining of seeing THE EMOJI MOVIE is that it granted me an almost divine authority to declare something “the worst film of 2017.” so please don’t take my BRIGHT review as mere hyperbole. https://t.co/TygJQQ3Dxw pic.twitter.com/Qa8pff6z2i
— david ehrlich (@davidehrlich) December 21, 2017
That may be hard to believe in a year that subjected critics to The Emoji Movie, but apparently the streaming service’s big winter release, Bright – an urban fantasy starring Will Smith as an L.A. cop and Joel Edgerton as his partner, the first orc to become a police officer – is, quote, “an astoundingly bad” “fresh slice of hell” “awkward enough to make Cowboys & Aliens look like a stroke of genius” that should be “officially stricken from the Will Smith canon.”
The reviews for Netflix's 'Bright' are in — and critics say the Will Smith movie is 'astoundingly bad in virtually every way' https://t.co/8f2XKlkoLr pic.twitter.com/ZE4l6qksRm
— INSIDER (@thisisinsider) December 21, 2017
Bright [32] Netflix https://t.co/lBodVt3uWS
IndieWire: "From the director of Suicide Squad and the writer of Victor Frankenstein comes a fresh slice of hell that somehow represents new lows for them both — a dull and painfully derivative ordeal…" pic.twitter.com/8LboP6ShOs— metacritic (@metacritic) December 21, 2017
#Bright review: "A genre mashup awkward enough to make 'Cowboys & Aliens' look like a stroke of genius" https://t.co/BWLkuZGEfB pic.twitter.com/uGKAdfx0Zy
— Hollywood Reporter (@THR) December 21, 2017
please sign my petition to have BRIGHT officially stricken from the Will Smith canon
— demi adejuyigbe (@electrolemon) December 21, 2017
While the Hashtag Trending crew will be taking the holidays off, we’ve recorded a series of new year’s predictions that will run daily, starting with self-driving cars on Boxing Day, so stay tuned for those. We’ll be back to our usual trending content on Jan. 3.
Hashtag Trending is produced by IT World Canada. Today’s episode is sponsored by Cogeco Peer 1, the company that enables businesses to unlock their IT potential. Learn more at CP1.com.