The Boring Company

You’ve got to hand it to Elon Musk. He has built up such a reputation and fan base over the years, that with a mere video and a few tweets, he can sell millions of dollars’ worth of novelty toy flamethrowers in a few days. The Boring Company has managed now to sell more than 15,000 flamethrowers with shockingly little detail about what they are or how they work. Boring Company’s website gives you a picture and a two-line description and then asks for $500.

With only the barest of descriptions to go by, people’s imaginations are running wild. One California politician wants to block the sale of the flamethrower, saying, “We don’t allow people to walk in off the street and purchase military grade tanks or armor-piercing ammunition… I cannot even begin to imagine the problems a flamethrower would cause firefighters and police officers alike.”

Enlarge / Do the math! (credit: Nintendo)

Nintendo’s latest earning report includes a breakdown of lifetime hardware sales for the Nintendo Switch, Wii U, and Nintendo 3DS family of consoles. Its “as of December 31, 2017” figure places the Nintendo Switch at a current lifetime sales count of 14.86 million units, surpassing the 13.56 million Wii U units sold in a little over five years. The Nintendo 3DS (and its 2DS and “New” variants) have combined to sell 71.99 million pieces of hardware since launching nearly seven years ago.

Originally, Nintendo had told its shareholders to expect first-year Switch sales of 10 million; the company revised that estimate in October, following its last earnings report, to a first-year tally of 14 million worldwide. That has now been exceeded a little earlier than expected. The traditionally slow game-hardware months of January and February will likely pad the Switch’s first true 12 months of sales data, if only a bit, due to a lack of major or exclusive Nintendo software during that span of time. Nintendo fans will have to wait until March for a new Kirby game and April for the weird, build-your-own-cardboard experiment of Nintendo Labo.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft announced a number of updates to its suite of Office apps for iOS today, better integrating them into Apple’s ecosystem. Arguably the most anticipated update is OneDrive’s new integration with the iOS Files app and support for drag-and-drop gestures on iPhones and iPads.

OneDrive now natively supports the Files app on iOS, letting users upload, share, and save content to OneDrive or SharePoint from apps that support the Files app, which Apple debuted with iOS 11. Users can tag OneDrive or SharePoint documents in the Files app to make them easier to find as well. Microsoft also redesigned the OneDrive app with a new list view and support for more than 130 file types for previews, letting users open, edit, and share Photoshop and other file types from directly within the app.

Drag-and-drop is a popular new feature of iOS 11 and makes working with documents—particularly on iPad—much easier, and now the OneDrive and Office apps for iOS support drag-and-drop. Users can move files into various apps more easily by dragging and dropping them into the desired program, which will be especially useful while in Split View on iPad. The new support lets customers move files in between OneDrive and Office apps as well as Microsoft’s apps and other sources, such as Messages.