Day: March 9, 2022

Imagine this: It’s September 2015. You are out for a walk down a lonely dirt road, and you fall into a well. Your phone breaks. No one can find you. Death beckons. Luckily, the water supply is fresh, and there’s a dry ledge to sleep. You discover the moss and algae lining the bricks of the well shaft are edible. Sometimes, you even catch a lizard. You survive for seven long years. Finally, you’re rescued! After receiving medical attention, showering, reuniting with loved ones, et cetera, you decide to watch television. “What is ‘Peacock’?” you ask, looking at a screen crowded with unfamiliar apps. “Is HBO Max like HBO Go? How does the Discovery channel have enough shows for a whole streaming service?” Everyone tells you to relax already and pick a show. So you choose Hulu’s new limited series The Dropout.

You only vaguely remember Theranos—something to do with blood?—and its young, blonde founder, Elizabeth Holmes, from magazine covers in your Pre-Well days. You watch Amanda Seyfried, her eyes widened, her voice lowered, her hair criminally frizzy, as she transforms from a dweeby but dedicated Stanford freshman to a wildly successful, wildly immoral fraudster peddling medical vaporware to the unsuspecting American masses. You are rapt. The acting is sensational. The plotting is thrilling. Your mind boggles at how Theranos unravelled. After you finish The Dropout, you post on Facebook, telling the world about what a great show you just watched. Barely anyone responds—people don’t check Facebook anymore?—but your aunt writes: “Eh. I already listened to the podcasts. And watched the documentary. And read the book.”

Book? Documentary? Podcasts? You soon discover that any story worth telling in 2022 is worth telling as many times as possible, in as many mediums as possible. Before watching The Dropout, people could read Bad Blood, the non-fiction book by reporter John Carreyrou documenting Theranos’ fall. Or they could listen to the podcast about Holmes, also titled The Dropout. Or they could watch the HBO documentary The Inventor. And this isn’t the end of Theranos content. There’s a feature film in pre-production starring Jennifer Lawrence, and an upcoming docuseries from Real World purveyors Bunim/Murray Productions.

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Why make a series about a story everyone already knows? You’re confused, but you soon make another discovery: most of the stories apparently worth telling these days are a subgenre of true crime focused on scammers. In addition to The Dropout, you see Shonda Rhimes’ Inventing Anna on Netflix, which is about a wily Russian girl who called herself Anna Delvey conning her way into New York’s art idiot scene. Inventing Anna was adapted from a New York magazine article; there’s already a Vanity Fair piece and memoir about Delvey’s escapades published by a writer she tricked. Then there’s the BBC podcast “Fake Heiress.” On HBO Max, the docuseries Generation Hustle, which explores ten different modern scammers, also has an Anna Delvey episode.

Documentaries about con artists are enormously popular right now. Netflix has The Tinder Swindler, a documentary about an Israeli man who cons several Scandinavian women out of small fortunes, and The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman about a British man who essentially kidnaps college kids and a single mother by pretending to be a spy. It also just released Worst Roommate Ever, an anthology series featuring scammy roommates based on a New York magazine article. Amazon Prime has LulaRich, a docuseries about the multi-level marketing scheme LulaRoe. If you somehow run out of recent scam content, the dueling 2019 documentaries about incompetent party promoter Billy McFarland’s Fyre Festival, titled Fyre and Fyre Fraud, respectively, are still available on Hulu and Netflix.

And there’s more to come. Netflix is releasing a documentary about a scamming vegan called Bad Vegan later this month. When a dorky rapping entrepreneur named Heather Morgan was arrested with her boyfriend earlier this year in connection with laundering billions of dollars in Bitcoin, Hollywood announced three separate projects within a week of the arrest of the instantly-notorious “Crypto Couple.” As the crypto market continues its expansion, there will no doubt be many more outrageous stories about blockchain con artists scooped up and dumped into the crime-news-to-scam-TV pipeline soon enough.

Scam stories have flourished within the larger true-crime boom, and like true crime, they are usually ripped-from-the-headlines, reliant on pre-existing intellectual property. If they are dramatizations, they often feature stunt casting. In the case of both Inventing Anna and The Dropout, they provide the lead actress an opportunity to play a narcissist with a huge, idiosyncratic way of speaking, and notably bad hair. (This trend will continue with Apple’s forthcoming WeCrashed, where Jared Leto plays WeWork CEO Adam Neumann with a lank bob and Israeli accent, as well as The Thing About Pam, an NBC limited series starring a barely-recognizable Renée Zellweger as a Midwestern schemer. Both shows are based on other accounts of real-life events.) And their narratives hew to a well-worn rise-and-fall track: watch the person fool everyone, until suddenly they don’t.

True-crime stories are appealing, in part, as much for the perverse sense of comfort they can give their audiences as the vicarious thrills they offer. If you’re watching the crime, you can’t also be its victim. Consuming crime as entertainment, then, can feel like a prophylactic against disaster. In the same way, our appetite for scam stories reflects a cultural anxiety about becoming marks ourselves. In this age of grifters, the prevalence of stories examining how rip-offs happen gives us an opportunity to observe hoaxes unfold from a safe distance.

With so many streaming services jostling over so much content, leaning on this type of story makes business sense. Like a heist movie or a slasher flick, scam tales are a known quantity, and because they are based on already-successful projects in other formats, they’re a known quantity twice over. But this enthusiastic embrace of grifter tales has resulted in an oversaturation that makes it difficult for new entries to the Scam Show Canon to avoid a sense of staleness. Even The Dropout, by far the most accomplished new offering, has its dazzle dampened by this overfamiliarity. At some point, choosing to spend our finite time in this world watching the same story over and over raises a question: Who, exactly, is getting ripped off here?

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Apple surprised the tech world today by unveiling the M1 Ultra, its most powerful chip yet. Powering the new Mac Studio, the Ultra sits at the top of the stack ahead of the M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max.

Apple explained how using two separate processors on a motherboard is inefficient. With the M1 Ultra, the company fused together two M1 Max dies using a custom-build architecture, a technique that results in roughly double the performance. Apple calls this architecture “UltraFusion” and it connects with 2.5TB/s of interprocessor bandwidth between the two die while using less power than the alternative. Apple claims the chip, which has 114 billion transistors, is around 8x faster than M1.

This multi-die architecture supports memory speeds of up to 800GB/s, or more than 10 times the latest PC desktop chip, and can be paired with up to 128GB of unified RAM. As for the specs, this new hero chip has 20 cores comprised of 16 performance and 4 high-efficiency cores along with a 64-core GPU and 32-core Neural Engine for AI processing.

Apple made some eye-opening performance claims at its “peek performance” event. When compared to the fastest 16-core desktop PC chip, the M1 Ultra supposedly delivers 90% faster performance while using 100W less power. When it comes to graphics, Apple says it delivers faster speeds than the best discrete graphics cards around while using 200W less power. If accurate, those are some groundbreaking figures.

The M1 Ultra will debut in the Mac Studio, Apple’s new high-performance compact desktop, but will likely make its way to other premium products, like the Mac Pro or high-end iMac. We will hopefully receive a Mac Studio to review in the coming days or weeks (the computer launches on March 18), at which point, we will put this M1 Ultra to the test and compare it against the best from AMD and Intel.  

Americans drive a lot. Collectively, we put, on average, more than 13,000 miles on our cars each year according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Because of this, a vehicle’s ability to travel long distances without major problems is a huge consideration when it comes time to purchase a new one.

It’s also worth remembering that keeping an older car on the road instead of trashing it and buying new can be considered an eco-friendly decision. After all, it takes a lot of resources to build a car.

iSeeCars.com, a website that aggregates used car listings from all around the country, recently ran through the numbers on millions of vehicles that are currently on the road to determine which last the longest. Alternatively, you could choose to look at this list as vehicles likely to be driven by owners who travel long distances. Either way, we’ve laid out the top 15 vehicles most likely to hit or even surpass the 200,000-mile mark.

It’s important to note that while these are the vehicles that have stood the test of time up until today, we can’t guarantee future results if you decide to opt for one of these from a current model year. That said, unless we specifically say so in the text below, we’ve used pictures of current models for illustrative purposes.

Now, with all of that out of the way, scroll on down for the top 15 vehicles most likely to crest 200,000 miles.

15: Toyota Sienna

14: Honda Odyssey

The 15th spot and 14th spot on the list of the top 15 vehicles most likely to surpass 200,000 miles are both minivans. Spoiler alert: They will be the only two minivans on the list. According to iSeeCars, 3.2% of both of these family haulers crest the 200,000-mile mark, making them the best bets for families looking to put a ton of miles on their machines.

13: Honda Ridgeline

12: GMC Yukon

The next spot on the list is occupied by the Honda Ridgeline pickup truck with 3.7% lasting past 200,000 miles. Unlike any of the other midsize trucks it competes with, the Ridgeline is based on a unibody chassis. Opting for this more car-like structure — as opposed to a traditional body-on-frame layout — allows Honda’s hauler to ride and drive more like a car.

Up next is the GMC Yukon, also with 3.7% past the 200K mark, and the first, but very much not the last, big traditional SUV you’ll see on the list. In fact, get ready to see a whole bunch of ’em, including several from GMC parent General Motors.

11: Toyota Highlander Hybrid

10: Toyota Prius

The next two positions on the list are, perhaps unsurprisingly, also the only hybrids on the list. In 11th spot sits the Toyota Highlander Hybrid with 3.8% surpassing 200,000 miles. Interestingly, the standard non-hybrid Highlander doesn’t crack the top 15. It’s also worth noting that the Toyota Highlander is the only unibody-based crossover you’ll see on the list.

In 10th spot is the Toyota Prius. The long-running and fuel-sipping hatchback is most certainly the most efficient vehicle to make the long-haul list. “The Prius attracts practical buyers who keep their vehicle on the road as long as possible to take advantage of its low maintenance costs and high fuel efficiency,” says iSeeCars Executive Analyst Karl Brauer. To that we’ll add that the Prius is also a popular choice for taxi and ride-share drivers.

9: Toyota Avalon

8: Toyota Tundra

Have you noticed how many Toyotas there are on this list? Without spoiling out the remainder, we can say that 8 out of the top 15 vehicles most likely to surpass 200,000 miles wear Toyota badges. That includes number 9, the Toyota Avalon (3.9%) and number 8, the Toyota Tundra (4.0%).

The Avalon is the only traditional four-door sedan on the list, but it’s worth mentioning that the Avalon shares a lot of its major components with some other Toyota and Lexus sedans, including the Camry and ES. The Tundra is the highest-ranked pickup truck on the list, which, if you’ve been paying attention, means there aren’t any American pickups represented. In case you’re wondering, the top-ranked American truck is the Ford F-150 with 2.6% cresting the 200,000-mile benchmark.

7: Chevy Tahoe

6: Ford Expedition

Two big American SUVs land in the next two spots, with the Chevy Tahoe (4.4%) in the seventh spot and the Ford Expedition (4.5%) in sixth. And we’re not surprised. Big SUVs are often used as family haulers for big road trips, for obvious reasons. They are also used as tow rigs for families who like to experience the outdoors. In other words, get used to seeing more SUVs as the list continues.

5: Toyota 4Runner

4: GMC Yukon XL

See? More SUVs. In fifth sits the Toyota 4Runner (4.6%) and in fourth is the GMC Yukon XL (5.2%). The 4Runner continues the Toyota trend, and it’s worth noting that this is a smaller utility vehicle than the rest of the models that sit in the top spots. It’s also available in a wide variety of models, some of which are strongly biased toward off-roading.

You may remember seeing a GMC Yukon earlier on the list; this is the extended XL version that adds more space for passengers and cargo. It’s fundamentally similar to the next vehicle on the list … drumroll please!

3: Chevy Suburban

That’s right. The Chevrolet Suburban. We’ll present the top 3 by themselves, leading with Chevy’s biggest brute ‘ute with the bronze. As was the case with the Yukon, Yukon XL and Tahoe, GM’s line of SUVs is popular with families and is often used as a machine that eats up the miles. And the Suburban is the king of ’em on this list, with 6.6% of them cresting the 200,000-mile mark.

“All manufactured by General Motors, the Chevrolet Suburban, GMC Yukon, GMC Yukon XL, and Chevrolet Tahoe share a platform and many common parts, confirming why these popular family vehicles are all likely to last 200,000 miles,” said Brauer. 

2: Toyota Sequoia

Back to the Toyota show. The Sequoia that you see above is actually from the 2011 model year, but it looks exactly the same in 2021. There’s a new version of the Sequoia coming out sometime during the 2022 calendar year, and it’s a completely different machine from the old tried-and-true V8-powered model pictured here. We’ll just have to wait and see if the new SUV is as adept at piling up the miles as the old one. Honestly, we’ll be surprised if it is … with 14.2% surpassing 200,000 miles, the old model we’re talking about here is going to be hard to beat. Except, of course, but for one other SUV from Toyota. 

And now, for the high-mileage winner:

1: Toyota Land Cruiser

The Toyota Land Cruiser. With an impressive 18.2% surpassing 200,000 miles, Toyota’s legendary off-road luxury machine is more likely to pass the mileage landmark than any other vehicle. Considering its impressive longevity, it’s a shame that 2021 was the final year the vehicle was sold in the United States. A new Land Cruiser debuted for some markets around the globe, but here in the United States, the Lexus LX 600 will take over as the Japanese automaker’s top-shelf off-roader.

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