Technologies
AT&T Says It Continued to Grow Despite Giving Promotions the Boot
A second carrier warns that there will be fewer wireless deals in the future.

AT&T ended the year with more phone and internet subscribers, according to results from the last fiscal quarter.
The Dallas telecom company reported its earnings on Wednesday, noting 656,000 postpaid net phone additions in the fourth quarter, a metric used by the industry as shorthand for success and dependable revenue. AT&T said it gained customers even though it had less generous phone promotions and deals than its competitors.
Despite inflation and worries surrounding a recession, AT&T CEO John Stankey was cautiously optimistic about the company’s forecast for the year.
«The good news is, I think we’re through the worst of it,» Stankey said on a conference call, though he noted that geopolitical disruption could be a swing factor changing the carrier’s 2023 outlook.
The results come at a time when wireless carriers are tightening their belts through layoffs and pulling back on the kind of promotions and freebies they once offered to lure in new customers. On Tuesday, Verizon also said it was moving away from aggressive promotions even if meant short-term losses. Consumers can expect to see fewer wireless deals going forward.
AT&T also ended the year by surpassing its goal of covering 130 million people with its midband 5G, with the telecom company hitting the 150 million mark. Midband spectrum runs on a frequency of 5G that brings wider coverage and higher speeds to more places. The spectrum was mostly in its C-band frequency range, which AT&T paid $27 billion to acquire in 2021 and started rolling out last year. AT&T wasn’t clear about whether this number includes the 3.45 GHz frequencies of 5G midband that the carrier paid $9.1 billion to acquire a year ago. The carrier set a new target to cover 200 million people with midband 5G by the end of 2023.
AT&T lost 13,000 net prepaid phone subscribers in the last quarter, including customers for AT&T’s Cricket brand that rivals T-Mobile’s Metro and Verizon’s new Total affordable prepaid offerings.
The carrier posted 280,000 broadband fiber net additions, noting that its fiber customers now outnumber customers with older DSL and other internet services. AT&T touched on its Gigapower fiber joint venture with private equity company BlackRock Alternatives, announced just before the end of 2022, which Stankey likened to an opportunity in the early race for wireless phone service. The venture aims to harness government subsidies to deploy multi-gig fiber in new areas to reach 1.5 million customers.
«The possibility to help close the digital divide and focus on access to affordable high-speed internet is a top priority of AT&T,» Stankey said.
The carrier acknowledged that it will have a new offering this year for fixed wireless, an internet frontier that AT&T effectively ceded to Verizon and T-Mobile in the early days of 5G. In the past, AT&T has confirmed it won’t expand into fixed wireless except on rare occasions to meet specific business needs. So long as fixed wireless delivers less bandwidth than fiber, AT&T isn’t excited about it as an alternative to wired broadband, Stankey said, noting any deployment would have a narrow niche where fiber can’t easily reach.
«I don’t see [fixed wireless] place long-term in dense metropolitan areas, and I don’t see it in reasonably well-populated suburban areas,» Stankey said.
AT&T reported revenues of $31.3 billion, which is around the revenue for the same period last year and slightly under the $31.39 billion expected. The carrier reported 61 cents of adjusted earnings per share, which was better than the 57 cents earned per share expected by analysts polled by Yahoo Finance.
At the start of the new year, AT&T expects wireless revenue growth of 4% and broadband revenue growth of 5% through 2023. The carrier noted it expects to spend around the same for capital expenditures this year, which hit a record $24 billion in 2022 due to expanding midband 5G and fiber rollouts.
AT&T’s stock was up a tenth of a percent to $19.18 in after-hours trading.
Technologies
Tariffs Explained: Latest on Trump’s Shifting Import Tax Plan, and What It Means
Technologies
Apple, I’m (Sky) Blue About Your iPhone 17 Air Color
Commentary: The rumored new hue of the iPhone 17 Air is more sky blah than sky blue.

I can’t help but feel blue about the latest rumor that Apple’s forthcoming iPhone 17 Air will take flight in a subtle, light-hued color called sky blue.
Sky blue isn’t a new color for Apple. It’s the featured shade of the current M4 MacBook Air, a shimmer of cerulean so subtle as to almost be missed. It’s silver left too close to an aquarium; silver that secretly likes to think it’s blue but doesn’t want everyone else to notice.
Do Apple employees get to go outside and see a real blue sky? It’s actually vivid, you can check for yourself. Perhaps the muted sky blue color reflects a Bay Area late winter/early spring frequent layer of clouds like we typically see here in Seattle.
«Who cares?» you might find yourself saying. «Everyone gets a case anyway.» I hear you and everyone else who’s told me that. But design-focused Apple is as obsessive about colors as they are about making their devices thinner. And I wonder if their heads are in the clouds about which hues adorn their pro products.
Making the case for a caseless color iPhone
I’m more invested in this conversation than most — I’m one of those freaks who doesn’t wrap my phone in a case. I find cases bulky and superfluous, and I like to be able to see Apple’s design work. Also, true story, I’ve broken my iPhone screen only twice: First when it was in a «bumper» that Apple sent free in response to the iPhone 4 you’re-holding-it-wrong Antennagate fiasco, and second when trying to take long exposure starry night photos using what I didn’t realize was a broken tripod mount. My one-week-old iPhone 13 Pro slipped sideways and landed screen-first on a pointy rock. A case wouldn’t have saved it.
My current model is an iPhone 16 Pro in black titanium — which I know seems like avoiding color entirely — but previously I’ve gone for colors like blue titanium and deep purple. I wanted to like deep purple the most but it came across as, in the words of Patrick Holland in his iPhone 14 Pro review, «a drab shade of gray or like Grimace purple,» depending on the light.
Pros can be bold, too
Maybe the issue is too many soft blues. Since the iPhone Pro age began with the iPhone 11 Pro, we’ve seen variations like blue titanium (iPhone 15 Pro), sierra blue (iPhone 13 Pro) and pacific blue (iPhone 12 Pro).
Pacific blue is the boldest of the bunch, if by bold you mean dark enough to discern from silver, but it’s also close enough to that year’s graphite color that seeing blue depends on the surrounding lighting. By comparison, the blue (just «blue») color of the iPhone 12 was unmistakably bright blue.
In fact, the non-Pro lines have embraced vibrant colors. It’s as if Apple is equating «pro» with «sophisticated,» as in «A real pro would never brandish something this garish.» I see this in the camera world all the time: If it’s not all-black, it’s not a «serious» camera.
And yet I know lots of pros who are not sophisticated — proudly so. People choose colors to express themselves, so forcing that idea of professionalism through color feels needlessly restrictive. A bright pink iPhone 16 might make you smile every time you pick it up but then frown because it doesn’t have a telephoto camera.
Color is also important because it can sway a purchase decision. «I would buy a sky blue iPhone yesterday,» my colleague Gael Cooper texted after the first rumor popped online. When each new generation of iPhones arrive, less technically different than the one before, a color you fall in love with can push you into trading in your perfectly-capable model for a new one.
And lest you think Apple should just stick with black and white for its professional phones: Do you mean black, jet black, space black, midnight black, black titanium, graphite or space gray? At least the lighter end of the spectrum has stuck to just white, white titanium and silver over the years.
Apple never got ahead by being beige
I’m sure Apple has reams of studies and customer feedback that support which colors make it to production each year. Like I said, Apple’s designers are obsessive (in a good way). And I must remind myself that a sky blue iPhone 17 Air is a rumored color on a rumored product so all the usual caveats apply.
But we’re talking about Apple here. The scrappy startup that spent more than any other company on business cards at the time because each one included the old six-color Apple logo. The company that not only shaped the first iMac like a tipped-over gumdrop, that not only made the case partially see-through but then made that cover brilliant Bondi blue.
Embrace the iPhone colors, Apple.
If that makes you nervous, don’t worry: Most people will put a case on it anyway.
Technologies
Astronomers Say There’s an Increased Possibility of Life on This Distant Planet
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers are working to confirm potential evidence of life on a distant exoplanet dubbed K2-18b.

Astronomers are nearing a statistically significant finding that could confirm the potential signs of life detected on the distant exoplanet K2-18b are no accident.
The team of astronomers, led by the University of Cambridge, used data from the James Webb Space Telescope (which has only been in use since the end of 2021) to detect chemical traces of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and/or dimethyl disulfide (DMDS), which they say can only be produced by life such as phytoplankton in the sea.
According to the university, «the results are the strongest evidence yet that life may exist on a planet outside our solar system.»
The findings were published this week in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and point to the possibility of an ocean on this planet’s surface, which scientists have been hoping to discover for years. In the abstract for the paper, the team says, «The possibility of hycean worlds, with planet-wide oceans and H2-rich atmospheres, significantly expands and accelerates the search for habitable environments elsewhere.»
Not everyone agrees, however, that what the team found proves there’s life on the exoplanet.
Science writer and OpenMind Magazine founder Corey S. Powell posted about the findings on Bluesky, writing, «The potential discovery of alien life is so enticing that it drags even reputable outlets into running naive or outright misleading stories.» He added, «Here we go again with planet K2-18b.Um….there’s strong evidence of non-biological sources of the molecule DMS.»
K2-18b is 124 light-years away and much larger than Earth (more than eight times our mass), but smaller than Neptune. The search for signs of even basic life on a planet like this increases the chances that there are more planets like Earth that may be inhabitable, with temperatures and atmospheres that could sustain human-like lifeforms. The team behind the paper hopes that more study with the James Webb Space Telescope will help confirm their initial findings.
More research to do on finding life on K2-18b
The exoplanet K2-18b is not the only place where scientists are exploring the possibility of life, and this research is still an early step in the process, said Christopher Glein, a geochemist, planetary researcher and lead scientist at San Antonio’s Southwest Research Institute. Excitement over the significance of the research, he said, should be tempered.
«We need to be careful here,» Glein said. «It appears that there is something in the data that can’t be explained, and DMS/DMDS can provide an explanation. But this detection is stretching the limits of JWST’s capabilities.»
Glein added, «Further work is needed to test whether these molecules are actually present. We also need complementary research assessing the abiotic background on K2-18b and similar planets. That is, the chemistry that can occur in the absence of life in this potentially exotic environment. We might be seeing evidence of some cool chemistry rather than life.»
The TRAPPIST-1 planets, he said, are being researched as potentially habitable, as is LHS 1140b, which he said «is another astrobiologically significant exoplanet, which might be a massive ocean world.»
As for K2-18b, Glein said many more tests need to be performed before there’s consensus on life existing on it.
«Finding evidence of life is like prosecuting a case in the courtroom,» Glein said. «Multiple independent lines of evidence are needed to convince the jury, in this case the worldwide scientific community.» He added, «If this finding holds up, then that’s Step 1.»
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