Unfortunately, all of the GS66’s upgrades added a bit more heft to the machine. It’s now 4.6 pounds, instead of the previous model’s 4.1 pounds. That does take away from Stealth brand’s luster a bit, especially when you consider a machine like the Zephyrus G14 weighs just 3.5 pounds. Still, MSI is competitive — Razer’s Blade 15 clocks in at the same weight as the GS66. And given its size, it also offers most of the ports that you’d want, including two USB-C ports, one of which supports Thunderbolt 3; three USB 3.0 Type-A; full-sized HDMI; and a 2.5 gigabit Ethernet connection. You can also upgrade the RAM and two NVMe SSD slots by removing the bottom of the case. It takes a bit of fiddling to pry the bottom off, given the tight fit, but at least you can add more hardware down the line.
MSI also crammed in a 99.9 WHr battery, the largest size possible that still fits under the FAA’s regulation for in-flight usage. During our battery test, which involves looping an HD video, it lasted a respectable seven hours and 29 minutes. While that’s more than the seven hours we saw on the GS65, it’s less impressive considering we just clocked 12 hours and 45 minutes on the Zephyrus G14. I wouldn’t expect any high performance laptop to last that long while gaming, but it’s still nice to get more uptime for productivity work.
Devindra Hardawar/Engadget
Even though it’s not quite the knockout that the GS65 was, the GS66 Stealth is still a decent option if you’re looking for a premium gaming notebook. It starts at $1,499 with a Core i7-10750H, RTX 2060 and 16GB of RAM — $50 more than a similarly specced Zephyrus G14. Our review unit goes for $2,249 with an RTX 2070 Super Max-Q and double the RAM. You’d have to shell out $2,600 to get that GPU on the Razer Blade 15 Advanced with 16GB of RAM. So all things considered, the GS66 is actually a bit of a deal.
While it’s a shame MSI couldn’t hit the same high note it did a few years ago, the GS66 isn’t a bad machine by any means. It’s more like the industry has finally caught up to its high benchmark.
On the other end of the ambition spectrum, serial entrepreneurs like Santiago Merea are also throwing their hat into the subscription ring. A behavioral economist whose last company was acquired by recipe app Yummly, Merea’s now all-in on food for babies. His company Raised Real delivers flash-frozen, plant-based “supermeals” for kids aged six months to two years.
Where Parkes presents himself as a Luddite, Merea is fluent in tech-startup buzzwords. From day one, he’s conducted surveys and led focus groups to research the perfect subscription model, with the goal not of maximizing the number of customers (like many startups) but rather becoming profitable as soon as possible.
When Merea and his wife had twins a few years ago, he realized how out of sync most baby food is with our current cultural norms: The traditional purees are uber-processed and sold in plastic pouches. Millennials, who make up more than 50 percent of current parents, with numbers quickly rising, instead want those buzzwords Marea loves to use: “super clean, super unprocessed, super transparent.”
When he says “transparent,” he means it literally: The meals come in clear, recyclable plastic pouches as whole foods (well, whole foods diced into tiny pieces) so that you can literally see the ingredients, whether they’re butternut squash and bananas or white quinoa and sacha inchi oil. Heat them up with a splash of water in the microwave for a minute or so and serve them as finger food for older kids, as a puree for true babies or as a mash for anyone in between.
As a subscription business, Merea sells the kind of product that’s both needed regularly and can be pulled out of the freezer without a second thought.
I thought only annoying foodies on the coasts, like me, were buying turmeric, lucuma powder and coconut butter, but Raised Real says most of its customers come from parts of the country like Texas and Florida, with an average household income of $80,000. They might eat meat and potatoes for dinner, but they want their children to get the most nutritious food possible.
As a subscription business, Merea sells the kind of product that’s both needed regularly and can be pulled out of the freezer without a second thought. The company offers different packages for different age groups, so it can cater to six-month-olds as well as two-year-olds, meaning that as some of Raised Real’s customers age out of its program, more babies are aging in. This is quite different than a subscription to chocolate, which is often given as a gift and not necessarily renewed. The company has tried to optimize for profits by breaking with the subscription-industry standard of offering trials, discounts and free products — thus attracting fewer customers overall, but more who will pay for an average of 110 meals.
So far Raised Real has been working with its investor Schwan, which acts as a national distributor for its frozen meals. In March, Raised Real saw an increase in business as families stockpiled food for a few weeks. “This is another advantage of having a frozen product and supply chain,” Merea said. “Things stay good for a long time.”
Merea is currently exploring other ways to expand, including selling his products at hotels and grocery stores. That doesn’t mean he’s abandoning the direct-to-consumer model; rather, he sees these placements as a way to attract new customers who will test out a meal and then subscribe.
According to Wolf, that’s the hardest part of the direct-to-consumer route. “Growth is the biggest challenge,” he said, because discovery is more difficult when products are going straight to consumers’ mailboxes. There’s no chance that someone will happen to see it in a store and try it out.
Of course, not that many people are hanging out in stores, at the moment, or going out to a nice restaurant for date night. It might be that regularly delivered food to the doorstep is more vital right now than these subscription services first anticipated. Melanie Bartelme, a global food analyst at Mintel, also thinks that as people are increasingly limited in their ability to go out due to the coronavirus, subscriptions that “help consumers feel like they are getting a special experience at home” will be successful. “Subscription services can give consumers a sense of fun and something to look forward to,” she said. “Especially in uncertain times.”
The changes were widespread and dramatic. Facebook’s iconic shade of blue was stripped from the top navigation bar, for instance, and an overhauled Groups tab made it easier to find and keep up with communities that were relevant to you. Facebook started rolling out the mobile version immediately and promised that the desktop equivalent would be available later in the year. A small group of web-based users were granted beta access last October, followed by a slightly larger group in January and “the majority of people” last month.
The redesign is long overdue. While Facebook’s website is constantly changing, its general look and navigation have remained the same for many years. The old design, known as “Classic Facebook” feels clunky and chaotic in 2020, with cramped sidebars that bury new features such as Watch and Facebook Gaming. Various sections have multiple entry points, too, which adds to the site’s clutter and complexity.
How to activate ‘New Facebook’ on the web.
Facebook
The website’s slow decay can be traced back to 2011. At the time, Facebook’s smartphone apps were built on HTML5, the same web-based language as the mobile website. It was an efficient way of working, but the mobile apps were known for being horrifically slow and buggy. In early 2012, Zuckerberg told his engineers to stop and start over with native apps. While embarrassing and time consuming, the do-over worked. The native apps were a huge success and helped Facebook establish a “mobile first” culture that could stave off rivals such as Twitter and Snapchat.
“We shifted a lot of our attention to really catching up on mobile,” Tom Occhino, director of engineering for the Facebook app, told Engadget.
Facebook continued to maintain and update its website. The platform was a lower priority, though, which inevitably affected its design and performance over time. “The site became pretty slow and cluttered from a user-experience perspective,” Occhino said. “The technology stack that supported it didn’t receive a lot of love, and a lot of the updates and modernization that we were seeing in the mobile technology stacks.”
Five years later, the company stopped and reconsidered its approach. The bulk of Facebook’s traffic was coming from mobile devices, but a large sum of people were still visiting via the desktop site. Some extra digging revealed that a number of users had neatly split their Facebook usage between the two platforms. They might use their phone for most things — scrolling through the News Feed and checking comments they’ve been tagged in, for instance — but prefer a larger screen for discrete tasks such as managing private groups and buying big-ticket items from Marketplace.
“The site became pretty slow and cluttered from a user-experience perspective.”
Not everyone forks their usage so neatly though. And there will always be some who use one platform exclusively. But in general, Facebook realized that select features were still popular on the web and should, therefore, be prioritized. The inverse was also true. Lots of pixels on the homepage were “being taken up by features that don’t get a lot of usage at all,” Occhino explained. Similarly, the areas that had become important — or that Facebook expected to become pillars of the desktop experience — were buried because they didn’t fit into a design structure established years ago.
The old Facebook.com design.
Facebook
“Our [old] website, which was designed for the old stuff that you would do on Facebook.com, didn’t really fit the new patterns that people were using their desktop for,” Occhino said.
Facebook ramped up these conversations and formalized the redesign project in 2018. The team established three principles for the revamp: fast, modern and relevant. The latter meant emphasizing the parts of Facebook that desktop holdouts use most often and raising elements that the company wants more people to know about. Balancing the two, the company hoped, would make the site a more compelling and useful place to visit.
Facebook’s answer hinges on the top navigation bar. It’s no longer blue, which is visually refreshing but also necessary so that the team could experiment with more colorful iconography at the top of the page. “The new white chrome really enabled us to draw attention to the things in the interface that we needed to draw attention to,” Dan Lebowitz, lead product designer at Facebook, told Engadget. It was also necessary so the site could support an frequently requested dark mode. “Going with a simpler set of colors enabled us to just quickly switch from white to black,” Lebowitz added.
The slither at the top of the page is a little taller than before and has five centrally-aligned icons, which represent Home, Watch, Marketplace, Groups and Gaming. The search bar, which used to dominate the top navigation, has been condensed and shuffled to the left with the new-but-still-blue Facebook icon.
The Facebook redesign with dark mode enabled.
Facebook
Clicking the Home icon will take you to Facebook’s familiar News Feed. Ephemeral Stories now sit above the post box, which is no doubt to increase their visibility and adoption. (The format is hugely popular on Instagram, but doesn’t seem to have found the same success on Facebook.) The text and iconography in the sidebars are larger, making them more noticeable and easier to read, and the margins on the far-left and right sides have been removed entirely. The middle column, which contains the News Feed itself, is the same width as before, though. It’s now a “flexible” element, according to Occhino, and the team has experimented with a focus mode that hides the sidebars as you start scrolling. For now, though, individual posts will appear as they normally do in the feed.
“You can’t just take, say, a portrait image and just stretch it all the way across the screen,” Lebowitz added. “So we have to be very careful with how wide we go.”
The homepage feels like Facebook’s anchor. A touchstone that can mitigate some of the company’s more ambitious changes. Next to the Home icon, for instance, is Watch. Facebook’s relationship with video has changed over the years. Around 2015, Facebook prioritized video in the News Feed and publishers — desperate for audience growth and anything resembling a business model — dogpiled the format. That same year, Facebook added video calling to Messenger and launched a Periscope rival called Facebook Live.
Ephemeral Stories now sit above the post box.
The news industry’s “pivot to video” didn’t last though. In January 2018, Facebook tweaked the News Feed algorithm so it would prioritize content posted by friends and families. Publishers were already struggling to monetize views — which had been artificially inflated anyway — and quickly wound down their social video efforts. Eight months later, Facebook expanded Watch, a place for higher-budget web shows and independent content normally found on YouTube, from a US pilot to a global service.
Facebook Watch has its own dedicated feed.
Facebook
For now, it’s unclear how successful Watch has been. Facebook has canceled two of its biggest exclusives and reportedly slashed its budget for original content. Still, Watch’s placement in the navigation bar signals its importance to Facebook. And it’s possible that Watch’s previous placement in the sidebar hampered its growth. Video streaming is a massive part of the internet, and industry-wide viewership will only increase as the coronavirus pandemic wears on. It’s understandable, therefore, that Facebook doesn’t want to give up and forfeit the potential traffic just yet.
The Watch section itself has been subtly redesigned with the same typefaces and iconography established on the homepage. It’s a big improvement and should persuade more people to sift through the company’s programming. “Fullscreen and immersive premium experiences are just better, I think, on a bigger monitor,” Lebowitz said. The interface still pales in comparison to a platform like Netflix, though. Facebook Originals, for instance, are promoted with tiny thumbnails in the Shows sub-section. You can hover over them for an expanded preview but it’s less dynamic and engaging than what you would find on services like Apple TV+ and Disney+.
Next to Watch is Marketplace, a fee-free alternative to Ebay and Craigslist that lets users buy and sell secondhand goods. According to Occhino, the majority of Facebook’s e-commerce traffic comes from mobile. Smartphone and tablet purchases only represent a third of total spend, however. That means many people are happy to make a quick purchase on their phone but prefer to buy more expensive items on a desktop.
According to Facebook, many Marketplace sellers like the option of using a laptop or monitor. They might send some quick messages on their phone, but it’s easier to compare offers and bulk-respond on a larger screen. “You can manage your [Marketplace] listings and chat simultaneously with potential buyers,” Lebowitz explained. “That’s just impossible on a mobile app. You can’t have a chat tab open and manage your listings at the same time, you have to hop back and forth.”
Groups have been shifted to the Facebook nav bar, too, and given a dedicated feed that algorithmically sorts recent activity. The elevation of the feature isn’t a huge surprise, given Groups’ popularity and functionality as modern message boards. Smaller communities have found other places to prosper, such as Discord and Reddit, but Facebook remains a popular place for people to gather in groups — large and small, public and private — and discuss a particular topic or interest together.
The Facebook redesign has revamped admin tools.
Facebook
Group administrators will find a revamped sidebar with useful management and moderation tools. These include member requests, auto-flagged and member-reported content, group rules, and various draft, pending and scheduled posts. There’s also an “insights” section which offers various growth and engagement metrics. Page managers, meanwhile, have a slightly different set of options that includes job listings and applications, an advertising hub, and a unified inbox for Messenger and Instagram Direct messages, as well as Facebook and Instagram comments.
The final icon in the navigation bar is dedicated to Gaming. Facebook has a history, for better or worse, of being a destination for so-called ‘social games’ like FarmVille. It’s still possible to play casual titles on the social network, including Instant Games — a library of cross-platform titles that were once part of Messenger but are now restricted to the core Facebook platform. The company has pivoted, however, toward being a game livestreaming platform in recent years. A dedicated portal was launched in 2018, followed by a tab in the mobile app and, just last month, a Gaming-branded Android application.
“We’re really investing in the Facebook Gaming brand,” Lebowitz said.
Early versions of the redesign had seven icons in the middle portion of the navigation bar.
The initiative is a direct competitor to Twitch, YouTube Gaming, Mixer, and smaller streaming platforms such as Caffeine. Facebook isn’t the market leader at the moment — streaming specialist StreamElements estimated that it had an 8.5 percent market share last year — but the company clearly wants a bigger slice of the ever-growing audience. Over the last 12 months, Facebook has signed a number of exclusivity deals with high-profile streamers including Jeremy “Disguised Toast” Wang, Gonzalo “ZeRo” Barrios, and WWE superstar Ronda Rousey.
Early versions of the redesign had seven icons in the central portion of the top nav bar.
Facebook
Early versions of the redesign had seven icons in the middle portion of the navigation bar, rather than five. Shortcuts for Messenger, notifications and the user’s profile page were eventually shuffled back to the top right-hand corner, though, similar to their positioning in the old version of Facebook. “We realized pretty quickly that people were maybe missing notifications or not seeing them because we had moved where they appear on the interface,” Lebowitz said. A shortcut for Gaming was added to the top later.
On the right-hand side of the top navigation bar, next to the user’s picture and name, is a new button with a “+” symbol. It’s a Create shortcut that helps users quickly get started with a new Page, Advertisement, Group, Event, Marketplace Listing or Fundraiser. Each of these areas also has a brand new WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor with various text fields that update the preview in real time. You can also switch to a mobile preview, too, to see how your page or party invite will appear on phones.
These editing tools are approachable and should, therefore, encourage more people to be creative and create something both personal and unique. “This is just one of those things that we know is better on a desktop computer where you can really take advantage of the screen real estate,” Lebowitz said.
The website should also feel slightly snappier than before. That’s because the visual redesign was supported by a massive infrastructure revamp. “We know from tons of data and research that every time we make our products faster or simpler, people use them more,” Occhino said. “They share it more, they have a more rewarding experience. And so that was table stakes. The most important feature was that this thing is going to be fast and responsive.”
Facebook’s new creation tools offer a real-time preview.
Facebook
All of these improvements have led to a site that, Facebook hopes, doesn’t feel like an afterthought. It’s now similar to the mobile app — both visually and from an engineering perspective — and reflects how desktop usage is evolving.
Public reaction has been mixed, though.
“I want to meet the person in charge of the recent Facebook business redesign so badly,” Scott Chasen, a reporter for 247Sports, tweeted. “I just want to meet them. I want them, in words, to explain to me how they thought it was a good idea and didn’t ruin every single functional thing that previously existed.” Some think the design is a shameless copy of Twitter. “Just saw Facebook’s redesign,” Twitter user @PEAJAEwascher said. “Guess it should be a compliment they decided to replicate Twitter.”
User backlash is common whenever a company as large as Facebook redesigns one of its products. Many could change opinion, too, once they’ve used the new version for a few months and overcome the initial shock factor. Not everyone is upset though. Troy J. Thomas, creative director of design studio A Small Team, said: “Cheers to the Facebook design team! I’m sure I’m late to the party, but I can only imagine the work that went into the new update. Such a needed evolution of the product. Well done!” Another Facebook user tweeted: “The new Facebook is the first website redesign that I haven’t formed a protest group about.”
Public reaction has been mixed.
The much-needed revamp could give the site a small traffic boost. However, it’s unlikely that desktop usage will ever come close to rivaling native app traffic again. But that’s perfectly fine. Facebook’s redesign isn’t some wild swing for hyper growth. Instead, it’s meant for the people who still enjoy loading up the website every day or who don’t have a mobile device capable of using the company’s apps. It’s recognition that the legacy portal — the one that started Facebook’s colossal empire — deserves more than the bare minimum. If nothing else, the new foundation should help the site age gracefully for many years to come.
If you like tracking your accomplishments, the latest update now includes a player journal and collections. The player journal tracks everything you’ve collected, including blocks, items and mobs, letting completionists fill out their collections and tick them off the list.
Finally, the update includes ten new mob variants for chickens, cows, pigs, sheep and rabbits. That enhances the aforementioned collections and, again, gives players more to do and look for. Microsoft has also included more in-depth profile stats, remembers more settings between sessions and brings new adventures. The changelog is here, and the new updates should be available for play now.
Going to the movies was a thing we used to do — and may do again in the future. However, if you’re going to an AMC theater anywhere in the world, you won’t find any Universal films. The theater chain declared war once NBCUniversal execs told The Wall Street Journalthat they plan on continuing a premium VOD release strategy even after the coronavirus pandemic subsides and theaters reopen.
It’s one of the trickiest components to get for your PC.
Shopping for a new PC monitor? Do you need it to be 4K compatible? Does it work with HDR? How much are you willing to spend? Steve Dent lays out what you need to know (there are more questions…) and offers several recommendations, from sub-$200 up to $4,000 options for the pros and the one-percenters. Oh, and you can’t always trust the listed specs. Continue reading.
Ford pushes back its self-driving taxis to 2022
COVID-19 has put autonomous driving on hold.
Ford
Ford revealed during its quarterly earnings that plans for a commercial service based on autonomous vehicles have been delayed. This is apparently due to the effects of the coronavirus, shaking up where self-driving cars will exist in a world hit by a pandemic. Ford COO Jim Farley warned that it could influence society for “many years to come,” with people seeking out more ways to avoid unnecessary human contact. Continue reading.
Pentagon officially releases ‘UFO’ footage
They’re still unidentified.
US Navy
The Department of Defense has officially released three video clips showing “unidentified aerial phenomena” (aka UFOs) darting around the skies above US military bases. The footage had previously been released in 2007 by a private company. The department decided to release the clips “in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos.”
In the clips, you can hear the pilots who captured the footage express surprise at how quickly the objects are moving. These reports resulted in the Pentagon running an official UFO identification program for five years until 2012, when funding ran out. Continue reading.
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Apple will pay $18 million to settle broken-FaceTime suit
Each class action member is only getting $3, though.
Apple
Apple has agreed to pay $18 million to settle a case accusing the company of intentionally breaking FaceTime on iOS 6. The class action lawsuit, filed in 2017, argued that the tech giant disabled the video-calling application on the iPhone 4 and 4S as a cost-saving measure.
Due to a patent dispute involving the peer-to-peer method with VirnetX, Apple had to rely more on third-party servers, costing it millions of dollars. Apple eventually released new peer-to-peer tech with iOS 7, and the plaintiffs claimed that the company broke the app on purpose, forcing users to upgrade their platforms.
None of the plaintiffs will have a massive payout — each class action member is only getting $3 per affected device. Don’t spend it all at once. Continue reading.
And Spotify’s big-budget gamble on podcasts and podcasting appears to be paying dividends in the new normal we find ourselves in. Almost a fifth of Spotify’s users engage with podcasts on the platform, of which there are now more than 1 million shows on the service. And, most importantly, more than 60 percent of them are powered by Anchor, the “make your own podcast” platform Spotify bought in early 2019.
It looks like plenty of people are taking their lockdown / shelter-in-place orders as justification to start a new podcast of their own, too. According to Spotify, “Anchor-powered shows accounted for more than 70 percent of new podcasts launched on our service.” But naturally, COVID-19 has caused a shock to the advertising market, with Spotify recording a 20-plus-percent dent in ad revenue towards the end of March.
Spotify is clearly providing some measure of comfort to folks in these stressful times, and saw a spike in searches for “chill” and “instrumental” playlists. It also reported an “uptick in consumption of podcasts related to wellness and meditation over the last few weeks.” The company expects to see growth slow, a little, over the coming months, but thinks that it’ll break the 300 million user milestone in short order.
Apple has agreed to pay $18 million to settle a case accusing the company of intentionally breaking FaceTime on iOS 6. The class action lawsuit, which was filed in 2017, argued that the tech giant disabled the video-calling applicationn on the iPhone 4 and 4S as a cost-saving measure.
See, Apple uses peer-to-peer direct connection and another method that relies on third-party servers for FaceTime calls. However, due to a patent dispute involving the peer-to-peer method with VirnetX, the tech giant had to rely more on third-party servers, costing it millions of dollars. Apple eventually released a new peer-to-peer tech with iOS 7, and the plaintiffs claimed that the company broke the app on purpose to force users to upgrade their platforms based on an evidence submitted as part of the VirnetX case.
For NBCUniversal, being locked out of the company’s theaters worldwide may be an acceptable trade, it has many ways to get customers its movies, with Comcast boxes, Peacock, Vudu and more.
However the letter is very clearly written as a threat to others who might follow in its footsteps (Warner Bros. will release Scoob! to home on May 15th, and Disney plans a Disney+ premiere for Artemis Fowl), thanks to the following section that was highlighted in bold:
“It is disappointing to us, but Jeff’s comments as to Universal’s unilateral actions and intentions have left us with no choice. Therefore, effectively immediately AMC will no longer play any Universal movies in any of our theatres in the United States, Europe or the Middle East. This policy affects any and all Universal movies per se, goes into effect today and as our theatres reopen, and is not some hollow or ill-considered threat. Incidentally, this policy is not aimed solely at Universal out of pique or to be punitive in any way, it also extends to any movie maker who unilaterally abandons current windowing practices absent good faith negotiations between us, so that they as distributor and we as exhibitor both benefit and neither are hurt from such changes. Currently, with the press comment today, Universal is the only studio contemplating a wholesale change to the status quo. Hence, this immediate communication in response.”
The National Association of Theater Owners also issued a statement (PDF) in support of the traditional release windows, claiming that without accounting for marketing costs and the special circumstances of stay-at-home orders, there’s no reason to believe this marks a shift in consumer habits.
NBCUniversal — which retweeted a link to the Wall Street Journal article — said in a statement that “going forward, we expect to release future films directly to theatres, as well as on PVOD when that distribution outlet makes sense. We look forward to having additional private conversations with our exhibition partners but are disappointed by this seemingly coordinated attempt from AMC and NATO to confuse our position and our actions.”
Google’s experimental Area 120 unit launched Shoelace in mid-2019 as a way to help people get together in real life. Unfortunately, the fledgling social network won’t make it out of the experimental phase — the tech giant has announced that Shoelace is shutting down on May 12th.
The service was geared towards people looking for group activities with other locals who share the same interests. Say, people interested in photography who want to meet up for a shoot or those looking for buddies to see concerts with. It was only ever available for iOS users in NYC, though, and never quite made its way to other regions.
ESPN broke the news of the switch, and stated that Sinatraa needed to switch teams instead of staying with NRG, the organization that owned his OWL team, because of league rules that barred retiring players from signing with an organization that competes in the league. The Sentinels announced their new competitive roster featuring Won, Jared “Zombs” Gitlin from its Apex Legends team, plus two Counter-Strike: Go players in Shahzeb “ShahZaM” Khan and Hunter “SicK” Mims.
Just a month ago, Sinatraa was featured on the game’s official channel showing off its latest hero Echo, but in an announcement and on a stream, said that several of the game’s recent changes drained his passion. Won said “the game is just not for me anymore…I’m very happy with my life but I just wasn’t having fun with Overwatch anymore,” but expected the league will keep going. He cited the new 2-2-2 role lock format as an issue or perhaps its new system of hero bans, but whatever the reason, he’s taking his talents to a new — and very popular — place.
