Report says Microsoft will require SSDs for new PCs soon, but is it a big deal?

Research manager for IDC Mobility and Consumer Device Trackers, Jitesh Ubrani, said:

“Supply shortages have plagued the industry for a while and the recent lockdowns in parts of China continue to exacerbate the issue as factories struggle to receive new components from upstream suppliers while also facing issues downstream when it comes to shipping finished goods. While the restrictions are expected to ease soon, worker sentiment within the supply chain remains muted, and backlogs of deliveries will persist for the remainder of the year.”

While PC shipments are going to be down this year, they will return to positive growth in 2023, however, the compound annual growth rate between 2021 and 2026 will still be -0.6%. Tablets won’t fare as well over the same period with the CAGR coming in at -2%.

In terms of actual shipments, IDC says 321.2 million PCs will be shipped this year while the figure stands at 158 million for tablets. In 2026, there are expected to be 339 million PC shipments and 152.5 million shipments of tablets.

IDC expects PC shipments to decline 8.2% in 2022 due to lockdowns, war, and inflation

Last April, Smartlabs switched off its cloud servers, leaving users of its Insteon smart home system without app or voice control of their connected switches, plugs, thermostats, and other devices paired to its smart home hub. It happened overnight with no warning, and now, the same thing has happened in reverse: someone suddenly turned the switch back on.

As first reported by Stacey on IoT, numerous Insteon users across the country say that their hubs are up and working again today, with the Insteon app now functioning and voice control through services such as Amazon Alexa also working. Because Insteon devices used a proprietary wireless radio protocol, many Insteon users’ homes were able to continue running in some fashion. It was only remote access and app and voice control that relied on a cloud connection that was gone. However, the app has been removed from app stores, so users who deleted it have no easy way to get it back.

Considering Smartlabs publicly stated that the company was experiencing “financial difficulties” and that as no buyer had been found a financial services firm had been appointed to sell its assets — the big question is: who flipped the switch back on?

When it comes to cloud-connected services, caution should be exercised when you don’t know who is pulling the strings. As Redditor Western_Tomatillo981 pointed out in a comment on the initial Reddit post about the revival: “are you sure we should celebrate some unknown entity re-enabling access to our secure home networks now that the company we had a privacy agreement with is now bankrupt and defunct?”

Hopefully this is a sign that Insteon has been rescued and its users are not being left in the dark. But until we know more, they should proceed with caution. And whoever is behind this needs to make their intentions known right away. We’ve reached out to Smartlabs and will update this post with any new information.

Someone turned Insteon’s lights back on

In January, Protocol revealed that Google was working on a cheaper Chromecast video streaming dongle that would top out at 1080p resolution, which could possibly be sold as the “Chromecast HD with Google TV.”

Now, a new Google filing with the Federal Communications Commission (via Droid-Life) suggests that device is indeed on the way.

Mind you, the FCC filing doesn’t straight-up confirm a Chromecast. For now, it’s simply designated the “Google G454V.” There aren’t any juicy leaked pictures; the filings simply describe as a “wireless device” with dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11ac Wi-Fi plus Bluetooth LE.

But if you’ll let me direct your attention for a moment to this diagram, friends, I think it will all become clear:

The EUT (Equipment Under Test) appears to connect directly to a monitor with no intermediate cables, as well as a wireless remote controller and Bluetooth earphone. Image: FCC

The “EUT” is the gadget we’re talking about, and this diagram is supposed to be a map of all its connections. Notice how it’s behind the LCD display? Notice how it is not connected to the LCD display with any cables? Notice how the only cable plugged into it is a power cable, and that power cable is USB?

Also notice how it has a remote controller, and — in a related part of the filing below — it was tested streaming video at 1080p?

The device streams 1080p video while charging from a USB cable. Image: FCC

Now, I suppose there could be some other kind of gadget you’d put behind a screen instead of a Chromecast... but it seems pretty likely we’re not talking about a Nest wireless speaker. And while you might possibly pipe streaming video to a wireless soundbar or something of the sort which could pass video to the TV and have a remote control, there’s no HDMI cable connected to the device in the test setup. Plus, Google has consistently favored barrel jacks for power across its Nest smart device lineup.

But Google does have a gadget with a remote controller and USB power that gets directly plugged into a screen with no other cables involved. So I’ll be very surprised if this isn’t exactly the Chromecast that Janko at Protocol uncovered.

Not every device that hits the FCC gets released, but typically manufacturers don’t submit them until they’re relatively close. I’d bet the price of a cheap Chromecast we see it this fall. I do wonder how low Google will go, though: the current Chromecast with Google TV already does 4K HDR for $50 (currently $40 on sale).

Looks like Google’s cheaper Chromecast is becoming a reality

The idea behind the move is to promote sustainability and reduce e-waste by empowering consumers to reuse their old chargers instead of buying new, and often different types of chargers for their devices.

Currently, this legislation applies to the following portables that require a cable for charging:

• Mobile phones
• Tablets
• E-readers
• Earbuds
• Digital cameras
• Headphones and headsets
• Handheld video game consoles
• Portable speakers
• Keyboards
• Computer mice

All of the aforementioned electronic categories will be required to have a USB-C port by autumn 2024. Interestingly, the legislation will also be applicable to laptops around 2026.

Additionally, the EU has stated that consumers will be clearly informed via product documentation about whether their existing charging cables are supported for their new purchases or not. Consumers will also have the option to purchase new devices with or without charging accessories.

The European Parliament's rapporteur Alex Agius Saliba stated:

Today we have made the common charger a reality in Europe! European consumers were frustrated long with multiple chargers piling up with every new device. Now they will be able to use a single charger for all their portable electronics. We are proud that laptops, e-readers, earbuds, keyboards, computer mice, and portable navigation devices are also included in addition to smartphones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones and headsets, handheld videogame consoles and portable speakers. We have also added provisions on wireless charging being the next evolution in the charging technology and improved information and labelling for consumers.

The EU hopes to save Europeans €250 million a year on needless charging accessory purchases and also reduce e-waste by 11,000 tons annually.

Apple is among the companies most affected by this legislation because it uses its proprietary Lightning cables for many of its products. However, we have heard reports that it is considering transitioning iPhones to the USB-C standard by 2023. We will likely hear confirmation about this in the coming weeks or months.

USB-C to become charging standard for most electronics in EU by 2024

Speaking to the Washington Post, ESA president and CEO Stan Pierre-Louis confirmed the return saying:

"We’re excited about coming back in 2023 with both a digital and an in-person event. As much as we love these digital events, and as much as they reach people and we want that global reach, we also know that there’s a really strong desire for people to convene — to be able to connect in person and see each other and talk about what makes games great."

"I think what’s great about all this experimentation is that companies of all sizes are trying to figure out what works best to promote the product and the content that they are looking to share with consumers," said Pierre-Louis about the focus on digital events by most parties nowadays. "And I think there is a space for a physical show; I think there’s an importance of having digital reach. Combining those two, I think there is a critical element of what we think E3 can provide."

In E3's absence this year, many major publishers are hosting their own showcases throughout June, loosely held together under Geoff Keighley's Summer Game Fest umbrella. This includes a myriad of digital shows, including from Microsoft, Devolver Digital, Capcom, and others.

E3 to return in 2023 as a digital and in-person event

In traditional neural networks used for image recognition, the image of the target object is first formed on an image sensor, such as the digital camera in a smart phone. Then, the image sensor converts light into electrical signals, and ultimately into the binary data, which can then be processed, analyzed, stored and classified using computer chips. Speeding up these abilities is key to improving any number of applications, such as face recognition, automatically detecting text in photos, or helping self-driving cars recognize obstacles.

While current, consumer-grade image classification technology on a digital chip can perform billions of computations per second, making it fast enough for most applications, more sophisticated image classification such as identifying moving objects, 3D object identification, or classification of microscopic cells in the body, are pushing the computational limits of even the most powerful technology. The current speed limit of these technologies is set by the clock-based schedule of computation steps in a computer processor, where computations occur one after another on a linear schedule.

To address this limitation, Penn Engineers have created the first scalable chip that classifies and recognizes images almost instantaneously. Firooz Aflatouni, Associate Professor in Electrical and Systems Engineering, along with postdoctoral fellow Farshid Ashtiani and graduate student Alexander J. Geers, have removed the four main time-consuming culprits in the traditional computer chip: the conversion of optical to electrical signals, the need for converting the input data to binary format, a large memory module, and clock-based computations.

They have achieved this through direct processing of light received from the object of interest using an optical deep neural network implemented on a 9.3 square millimeter chip.

The study, published in Nature, describes how the chip's many optical neurons are interconnected using optical wires or "waveguides" to form a deep network of many "neuron layers" mimicking that of the human brain. Information passes through the layers of the network, with each step helping to classify the input image into one of its learned categories. In the researchers' study, the images the chip classified were of hand-drawn, letter-like characters.

Just like the neural network in our brains, this deep network is designed in a way that allows for rapid information processing. The researchers demonstrated that their chip can perform an entire image classification in half of a nanosecond—the time it takes traditional digital computer chips to complete just one computation step on their clock-based schedule.

"Our chip processes information through what we call 'computation-by-propagation,' meaning that unlike clock-based systems, computations occur as light propagates through the chip," says Aflatouni. "We are also skipping the step of converting optical signals to electrical signals because our chip can read and process optical signals directly, and both of these changes make our chip a significantly faster technology."

The chip's ability to process optical signals directly lends itself to another benefit.

"When current computer chips process electrical signals they often run them through a Graphics Processing Unit, or GPU, which takes up space and energy," says Ashtiani. "Our chip does not need to store the information, eliminating the need for a large memory unit."

"And, by eliminating the memory unit that stores images, we are also increasing data privacy," Aflatouni says. "With chips that read image data directly, there is no need for photo storage and thus, a data leak does not occur."

A chip that reads information at light speed and provides a higher degree of cybersecurity would undoubtedly have an impact in many fields; this is one of the reasons research into this technology has ramped up in the past several years.

"We aren't the first to come up with technology that reads optical signals directly," says Geers, "but we are the first to create the complete system within a chip that is both compatible with existing technology and scalable to work with more complex data."

The chip, with its deep network design, requires training to learn and classify new data sets, similar to how humans learn. When presented with a given data set, the deep network takes in the information and classifies it into previously learned categories. This training needs to strike a balance that is specific enough to result in accurate image classifications and general enough to be useful when presented with new data sets. The engineers can "scale up" the deep network by adding more neural layers, allowing the chip to read data in more complex images with higher resolution.

And, while this new chip will advance current image sensing technology, it can be used for countless applications across a variety of data types.

"What's really interesting about this technology is that it can do so much more than classify images," says Aflatouni. "We already know how to convert many data types into the electrical domain—images, audio, speech, and many other data types. Now, we can convert different data types into the optical domain and have them processed almost instantaneously using this technology."

But what does it look like when information is processed at the speed of light?

"To understand just how fast this chip can process information, think of a typical frame rate for movies," he continues. "A movie usually plays between 24 and 120 frames per second. This chip will be able to process nearly 2 billion frames per second! For problems that require light speed computations, we now have a solution, but many of the applications may not be fathomable right now."

With a piece of technology that has many applications, it is important to understand its abilities and limitations at more fundamental levels, and Aflatouni's current and future plans for this research will do just that.

"Our next steps in this research will examine the scalability of the chip as well as work on three-dimensional object classification," says Aflatouni. "Then maybe we will venture into the realm of classifying non-optical data. While image classification is one of the first areas of research for this chip, I am excited to see how it will be used, perhaps together with digital platforms, to accelerate different types of computations."

Source

The idea of an Apple car has been around as long as that of an Apple TV, and it looks doomed to the same fate. Much as the Apple television became a little set-top box of software that attaches to a commercial TV, Apple's car dreams look like they're shrinking to the latest version of CarPlay, a replacement for existing cars' dull and disconnected instrument panels.

There's a long Wikipedia article(Opens in a new window) about the now eight-year history of the Apple car, capping with leading analyst Ming-Chi Kuo saying that if a vehicle exists, it might not be launched until "2028 or later." MacRumors agrees(Opens in a new window) in an in-depth rundown. Apple's problem with building a physical car is that it only appears to want a build a truly, fully autonomous vehicle, and that's turned out to be far harder than either Apple or Tesla thought it would be in 2015. The car division keeps losing executives, most recently just a few weeks ago(Opens in a new window).

So what's left? Although Apple isn't using the word, call it not CarPlay but "CarOS"—a fully Apple-fied navigation, instrumentation, and entertainment software experience that gets laid over other manufacturers' cars (none of which drive themselves). Coming from Audi, Acura, Honda, and others starting in late 2023, the new CarPlay requires deep integration with a vehicle, as it takes over your instrument panel, climate control, and other features.

Many automotive brands have signed on to Apple's plans.

The new system can put navigation right into the instrument cluster behind the steering wheel and control your smart home from a distance, according to Apple's brief demo at WWDC.

In that way, Apple helps existing carmakers catch up with Tesla and its curiously iPad-like interface. Some drivers love that and many hate it, but everyone agrees that Tesla is cutting-edge when it comes to software.

But it also shows the trouble Apple has had recently with its ambitious plans to enter major new hardware categories. At WWDC this year, we expected to hear something about RealityOS, the software that would power Apple's future AR and VR headsets. Rumors as late as 2021 tagged 2022(Opens in a new window) as the year for Apple's VR glasses, but now we're hearing at least 2023.

The car, meanwhile, remains Apple's absolute white whale. Without these new product categories coming, Apple must remain the Mac, iPhone, iPad and watch company. It's not a bad place to be, at all; it's just less than some people expect.

Source

Alyssa Blackburn, a data scientist at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has spent several years performing digital detective work with her trusty lab assistant, Hail Mary, a shiny black computer with orange trim. She has been collecting and analyzing leaks from the Bitcoin blockchain, the immutable public ledger that has recorded all transactions since the cryptocurrency’s launch in January 2009.

Bitcoin represents a techno-utopian dream. Satoshi Nakamoto, its pseudonymous inventor, proposed that the world run not on centralized financial institutions but on an egalitarian, math-based electronic money system distributed through a computer network. And the system would be “trustless” — that is, it would not rely on a trusted party, such as a bank or government, to arbitrate transactions. Rather, as Satoshi Nakamoto wrote in a 2008 white paper, the system would be anchored in “cryptographic proof instead of trust.” Or, as T-shirts proclaim: “In Code We Trust.”

The practicalities have proved complicated. Price turbulence is enough to induce the Bitcoin bends, and the system is environmentally destructive, since the computational network uses exorbitant amounts of electricity.

Ms. Blackburn said her project was agnostic to Bitcoin’s pros and cons. Her goal was to pierce the scrim of anonymity, track the transaction flow from Day 1 and study how the world’s largest cryptoeconomy emerged.

Satoshi Nakamoto had presented the currency as anonymous: For Bitcoin transactions (buying, selling, sending, receiving et cetera), users employ pseudonyms, or addresses — alphanumeric cloaks that hide their real identities. And there was apparent confidence in the anonymity; in 2011, WikiLeaks announced that it would accept donations via Bitcoin. But over time, research revealed data leakage; the identity protections weren’t so watertight after all.

“Drip-by-drip, information leakage erodes the once-impenetrable blocks, carving out a new landscape of socioeconomic data,” Ms. Blackburn and her collaborators report in their new paper, which has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Aggregating multiple leakages, Ms. Blackburn consolidated many Bitcoin addresses, which might have seemed to represent many miners, into few. She pieced together a catalog of agents and concluded that, in those first two years, 64 key players — some of whom were the community’s “founders,” as the researchers called them — mined most of the Bitcoin that existed at the time.

“What they figured out, just how concentrated early mining and use of Bitcoin was, that’s a scientific discovery,” said Eric Budish, an economist at the University of Chicago. Dr. Budish, who has conducted research in this realm, received a two-hour video preview with the authors. Once he came to understand what they had done, he thought, “Wow, this is cool detective work,” he said. Referring to those early key players, Dr. Budish suggested that the paper be titled “The Bitcoin 64.”

The computer scientist Jaron Lanier, an early reader of the paper, called the investigation “important and significant” in its ambitions and social implications. “The nerd in me is interested in the math,” said Mr. Lanier, who is based in Berkeley, Calif. “The techniques used to extract information are interesting.”

The demonstration of blockchain leakage, he noted, will be surprising to some, not to others. “This thing isn’t hermetically sealed,” Mr. Lanier said. He added: “I don’t think it’s the end of the story. I think there’s further innovation that will take place, extracting information from these types of systems.”

One of Ms. Blackburn’s tactics was simple perseverance. “I kicked it till it broke,” she said, recalling how the principal investigator, Erez Lieberman Aiden, an applied mathematician, computer scientist and geneticist at Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University, characterized her method.

More precisely, Ms. Blackburn developed hacks for the period of time that was of particular interest: from the cryptocurrency’s start to when Bitcoin achieved parity with the U.S. dollar in February 2011, which coincided with the establishment of the Silk Road, a Bitcoin-based black market. She leveraged human lapses such as insecure user behavior; she exploited operational features inherent to Bitcoin’s software; she deployed established techniques for linking the pseudonymous addresses; and she developed new techniques. Ms. Blackburn was particularly interested in miners, the agents who verify transactions by engaging in an elaborate computational tournament — a puzzle hunt, of sorts, guessing and checking random numbers against a target, in search of a lucky number. When a miner wins, they earn Bitcoin income.

Whether 64 seems like a small or large number of key miners depends on one’s proximity to the crypto undertow. Scholars have questioned whether Bitcoin is truly a decentralized currency. From Dr. Lieberman Aiden’s perspective, the population under investigation was “even more concentrated than it seems.” Although the analysis showed that the big players numbered 64 over two years, at any given moment, according to the researchers’ modeling, the effective size of that population was only five or six. And on many occasions, just one or two people held most of the mining power.

As Ms. Blackburn described it, there were very few people “wearing the crown,” functioning as arbiters of the network — “which is not the ethos of decentralized trustless crypto,” she said.

Finding treasures in the data

Credit...Annie Mulligan for The New York Times

For Ms. Blackburn and Dr. Lieberman Aiden, Bitcoin’s data — 324 or so gigabytes archived in the blockchain — presented a cache of temptation. Dr. Lieberman Aiden’s lab does biological physics and widely applied mathematics; one focus is three-dimensional genome mapping. But as a scholar, he is also intrigued by the use of new kinds of data to explore complex phenomena. In 2011, he published a quantitative cultural analysis using more than five million digitized books from 1800 to 2000, with Google Books and collaborators. “Culturomics,” he called it. For instance, the team introduced the Google Ngram Viewer, which lets users type in a word or phrase and observe its usage plotted over the centuries.

In the same spirit, he wondered what treasures might be submersed in Bitcoin’s data lake. “We literally have a record of every single transaction,” he said. “These are remarkable economic and sociological data sets. Clearly, there’s a lot of information in there, if you can get at it.”

Getting at it proved nontrivial. Ms. Blackburn was barred from the university’s supercomputing cluster — with her file folder labeled “Bitcoin,” she was suspected of mining the cryptocurrency. “I objected,” she said. She said she tried to convince an administrator that she was conducting research, but “they were completely unmoved.”

A key tactic of Ms. Blackburn’s was to trace patterns in plots of numbers that in theory should have been random and meaningless. In one case, she was chasing the “extranonce,” one piece of the mining puzzle: a short field of 0s and 1s tucked within a longer string that encodes each block, or bundle, of transactions. The extranonce leaked information about a computer’s activity. This led Ms. Blackburn to reconstruct the miners’ behavior: when they were mining, when they stopped and when they started up again. She speculates that the extranonce’s leaky behavior was tolerated because it allowed Bitcoin’s creator to keep an eye on miners; the source code was modified to plug this leak shortly before Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared from the public Bitcoin community in December 2010.

Once Ms. Blackburn had put various toeholds to use — allowing her to erode the identity-masking protections — she began merging addresses, linking nodes on a graph, consolidating the effective population of mining agents. Then she cross-referenced and validated the results with information scraped from Bitcoin discussion forums and blogs. Initially, the catalog of agents who mined most of the Bitcoin tallied a couple of thousand; then it hovered for a while around 200. Ultimately, Hail Mary spit out 64. (Eventually, Hail Mary’s brains were incorporated into the lab’s computer cluster, Voltron.)

The study’s purpose was not to name names; it’s the job of the F.B.I. and the I.R.S. to bust Bitcoin criminals. But the researchers pinpointed the identities of a couple of the top players who were publicly known Bitcoin criminals: Agent No. 19 is Michael Mancil Brown, a.k.a. “Dr. Evil,” who was found guilty of a 2012 fraud and extortion scheme involving Mitt Romney, then a candidate for president. Agent No. 67 is associated with Ross Ulbricht, a.k.a. “DreadPirateRoberts,” creator of the Silk Road. Naturally, Agent No. 1 is Satoshi Nakamoto — whose true identity the researchers did not try to determine.

Mark Gerstein, a professor of bioinformatics at Yale University, found in the research implications for data privacy. He recently stored a genome on a private blockchain, which allowed for a secure and tamperproof record. But he noted that in a public setting, as with Bitcoin’s blockchain, a data set’s size and subtle patterns made it susceptible to breaches, even as the data remained immutable. (Ms. Blackburn wasn’t tampering with the Bitcoin blockchain’s records.)

“That’s the amazing thing about big data,” Dr. Gerstein said. “If you have a big enough data set, it starts to leak information in unexpected ways.” Even more so when data from different sources are connected, he said: “When you combine one data set with another to make a bigger data set, nonobvious linkages can arise.”

‘Decentralization theater’

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Once Ms. Blackburn had assembled the catalog of agents, she analyzed the income they had reaped from mining. She found that within a few months of the cryptocurrency’s introduction — and contrary to Bitcoin’s egalitarian promise — a classic distribution of income inequality emerged: A small fraction of the miners held most of the wealth and power. (Mining income demonstrated what is called a Pareto distribution, after Vilfredo Pareto, a 19th-century economist.)

The lab unintentionally replicated this dynamic when they invented “CO2 coin,” a cryptocurrency that could be used to buy snacks from a student-run store. In due course, some CO2 miners became more successful than others, and the store marked up snack prices catering to the tastes of the rich.
“The people who had a lot of crypto resources had very strong control over what the store would acquire, which other people didn’t feel great about,” Dr. Lieberman Aiden recalled. The economy collapsed — that is, there was a revolt — when the shop began charging in CO2 to use the coffee machine.

In the formal study, Ms. Blackburn also observed that the concentration of resources threatened the network’s security, with a miner’s computational resources being directly proportionate to his or her mining income. On several occasions, individual miners wielded more than 50 percent of the computational power and, as a result, could have taken over like a tyrant using what’s called a “51 percent attack.” For instance, they could have cheated the system and repeatedly spent the same Bitcoins on different transactions.

Sarah Meiklejohn, a cryptographer at University College London, said that the investigation’s findings‚ assuming they were error-free, provide empirical confirmation of an “intuition that has been floating around in this space for a while.” (Dr. Meiklejohn developed some address-linking techniques used in the investigation and recently devised a technique for tracking a type of transaction flow called a peel chain.)

“We all kind of knew that mining was fairly centralized,” she said. “There aren’t that many miners. This is true even today, of course, and it was even more true at the beginning.” As for what should be done about it, “we do need to really examine that question,” she said. “How do we make mining more decentralized?” She thought the results of this investigation might encourage the field to take the issue more seriously.

But to add a twist, Ms. Blackburn found that while some miners had the power to execute 51 percent attacks, they repeatedly chose not to. Rather, they acted altruistically — preserving the cryptocurrency’s integrity, even though the decentralization-based fraud-prevention mechanism had been compromised.

In parsing this finding, Ms. Blackburn’s team turned to the tools of experimental economics. They gathered human subjects online to participate in game-theory scenarios that modeled the “social dilemma” faced by the founders — that is, how people behave when they find themselves as the trustee of an appreciating good.

“In scenarios like this, it appears that people don’t like to kill the golden goose — they don’t like to spoil it for the group,” Dr. Lieberman Aiden observed. Whatever you believe about the motivations of the “Bitcoin 64,” he said, the fact that the network was vulnerable to individual decision makers changes the understanding of its security.

“Sure, decentralization protects the blockchain,” he said. “But even on occasions when the mining pool became centralized, the dominant miners declined to attack it. That is a very different picture than the idealized model people have for why these cryptocurrencies are secure.”

As the authors concluded in the paper: “Although Bitcoin was designed to rely on a decentralized, trustless network of anonymous agents, its early success rested instead on cooperation among a small group of altruistic founders.”

For Glen Weyl, an economist at Microsoft Research who was consulted on the research, this finding demonstrates how decentralization played a rhetorical rather than substantive role. “And that rhetorical role was very powerful — it bound together this community, much as other myths have bound together other communities, like nations,” Dr. Weyl said. But the myth and the promise, he said, were in tension with the reality that emerged. “It’s just fascinatingly ironic, and also predictable, repeating the historical patterns it aspires to erase.”

Mr. Lanier called it “decentralization theater.” Cryptocurrencies create an illusion: “‘Now we’re in utopia. Everything’s decentralized. Everybody’s equal.’ There’s this notion of democracy without annoyance.”

But, he said, these systems end up hiding a new elite, which is probably just an old elite in a new arena. And the technology cuts both ways. “Whatever you think you can achieve using new algorithms, or big data, or whatever, can also be used against you,” Mr. Lanier said. “The same algorithms can be used by scientists to interrogate and investigate these castles that are put up by the new elite.”

One moral of the story, Ms. Blackburn said, is simply: “You have to be careful.” There is a limited timeline for encryption, “a horizon beyond which it will no longer be useful. When you are encrypting private data and making it public, you cannot assume that it’ll be private forever.”

Source

Apple revealed a ton of exciting news at WWDC 2022, giving us a glimpse at the highly-anticipated macOS Ventura, iOS 16, the M2 chip, a new MacBook Air, and much more.

If you weren’t able to catch the conference live, here’s a list of Apple’s biggest announcements.

Apple introduces iOS 16 with customizable lock screen, updated notifications, and more

Apple has announced iOS 16, and the update brings a totally revamped and customizable lock screen interface. This lets you add custom wallpapers, change the date and time’s font and color, as well as add new widgets for weather, activity rings, calendar events, and more. Apple is also pushing updates to notifications and its Focus feature.

iOS 16’s Live Activities let you control apps from the lockscreen 

iOS 16 brings Live Activities that let you pin and manage notifications, like live sports scores, on your lock screen. Apple is also introducing hideable notifications that appear at the bottom of the lock screen.

Apple is making texts editable and unsendable in Messages 

With iOS 16, you’ll get the ability to edit any messages you send in the Messages app, as well as undo any messages you sent by mistake. Apple is also introducing the ability to mark a message as unread so you can easily find it later.

Apple Pay is getting a Pay Later feature in iOS 16 

Apple is getting in on the “buy now, pay later” trend that lets you make a purchase and pay it in a series of installments. The new Pay Later feature is coming to Apple Pay with iOS 16.

Apple announces Safety Check for abuse survivors

Apple’s new Safety Check feature is designed to protect individuals in abusive relationships. It allows abuse survivors to view and manage who has access to their apps, passwords, and more.

CarPlay may soon bring Apple’s widgets to your car’s instrument cluster 

Apple announced a major update to CarPlay that allows for deeper integration with your vehicle. It can replace your car’s instrument cluster with Apple’s own, displaying speed, trip info, fuel and battery levels, and more.

watchOS 9 comes with a slew of new health-tracking features 

Apple has added a number of new health-tracking features such as new running metrics, atrial fibrillation tracking, and medication reminders. In addition to all these new features, watchOS 9 also adds four new watch faces.

Apple’s Fitness app is coming to all iPhone users 

Apple is bringing its Fitness app to all iPhone users. Previously, it was only available to those who had an Apple Watch.

Apple’s Home app gets a new look 

Apple has overhauled its Home app, allowing for more efficiency as you manage the devices around your smart home. The update introduces new categories specifically for climate, lights, and security and also lets you view four security cameras at once.

Apple has announced the next-gen M2 chip 

After months of rumors, the next generation of Apple silicon is finally here. Apple says the new M2 chip delivers an 18 percent performance upgrade when compared to the M1.

The redesigned MacBook Air is the first to feature the new M2 chip

The new MacBook Air trades in the M1 chip for an upgraded M2. But that’s not all — it’s less than half an inch thick and is available in four colors: silver, space grey, starlight, and midnight. It also comes with a larger 13.6-inch display, thinner bezel, and a tiny charger with two USB-C ports, with prices starting at $1,199 for an M2-equipped model.

Apple’s new 13-inch MacBook Pro also comes with an M2 

Like the new MacBook Air, the 13-inch MacBook Pro is also getting an M2 upgrade. It comes with up to 24GB of RAM, up to 2TB of storage, as well as up to 20 hours of battery life — and it still has a Touch Bar. The new 13-inch Pro will be available next month and is available to preorder now, starting at $1,299.

macOS Ventura adds Stage Manager multitasking tool 

With the newly announced macOS 13 Ventura, you can expect an improved multitasking tool called Stage Manager. There are also new updates coming to Spotlight and Apple’s Mail app.

Apple Passkeys replaces passwords with your iPhone 

macOS 13 Ventura is also adding support for something called Apple Passkeys in Safari. This new feature essentially replaces the password, letting you sign in to various websites with just your iPhone or Mac.

Continuity Camera lets your iPhone function as a webcam 

You’ll soon no longer have to rely on your Mac’s webcam. Apple announced that macOS gives you the ability to use your iPhone as a webcam by attaching it using a specialized clip coming later this year.

iPadOS 16 brings new features focused on multitasking and collaboration 

iPadOS 16 comes with a new collaboration feature that lets you work with others within office apps, such as Pages, and is also getting a handy new whiteboard tool called Freeform. Apple also announced improved multitasking features with Stage Manager, allowing you to resize and overlap windows on your iPad. Oh, and the iPad is finally getting the Weather app with iPadOS 16.

Apple WWDC 2022: the 16 biggest announcements

Apple

Apple announces its next-gen M2 chip, promising 18% faster performance than M1

Apple refreshes 13-inch MacBook Pro with the M2 chip, but the design stays the same

Apple’s MacBook Air gets a radical design and new M2 chip

HP has launched its Dev One Linux Laptop, a $1,099-priced 14-incher that runs on AMD CPU and Pop!_OS.

Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS (made by System76) aside, the HP Dev One is built around a 14-inch 1920x1080 screen with 800-nits of maximum brightness, packed in a 0.75-inch chassis.

HP went for AMD's Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U, a 15W 8-core/16-thread Zen 3 CPU with 4MB of L2 and 16MB of L3 cache, running at 1.9GHz base and up to 4.4GHz maximum boost clock. It has Radeon RX Vega 8 graphics with 8CUs, running at up to 2000MHz.

HP has paired the AMD CPU with 16GB of DDR4-3200 memory, upgradable to 64GB, and 1TB of PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD storage. The battery, which should keep it alive for around 12 hours, is a 3-cell 53Whr one. It also gets a 720p webcam, ambient light sensor, stereo speakers, dual multi-array microphone, Realtek's RTL8822CE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac (2x2) Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5, glass clickpad with gesture support, HDMI 2.0 output, two USB-C and two USB-A ports.

There is also an optional HP Dual Point Backlit spill-resistant Premium Keyboard with the "Super Key", something developers coming from Linux would surely appreciate.

The HP Dev One starts at $1,099 and is currently available for purchase only in the US. HP has made a dedicated HPDevOne.com website where you can check it out and order the laptop.

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Microsoft Edge gaining momentum

This time, we will start with news about Microsoft Edge. The Redmond tech firm's latest browser is slowly gaining popularity with each passing month. Edge is solidifying its second place in the desktop market and currently commands a share of 10.11% globally. Of course, there's still a long way to go to even pose a threat to Chrome (66.1%), but the browser still has a lead of almost one percentage point compared to Apple Safari at the third place.

This week, Microsoft also rolled out Edge 102 to the Stable channel. Surprisingly, the only updates mentioned in the changelog are related to policies, with functional updates nowhere to be found. That doesn't mean that you won't spot anything else either. In fact, the latest release also packs a Windows 11 UI and Mica effect that can be toggled, find out how to do so here. That said, Edge 102 seems to have broken printing for many users too so if that's a critical part of your daily workflow, be a bit cautious.

There were a bunch of updates for Edge Insiders too. Edge Canary now has a capability that allows the browser to pull data from Chrome each time you launch it. The same channel also has a feature that enables users to share files and notes across devices seamlessly.

Meanwhile, Edge 103 has landed in the Beta channel with better profile switching controls and enhanced security. And Edge 104 has arrived in the Dev Channel with a new group policy and a whole lot of bug fixes, check out the details here.

New Windows 11 Dev Channel build

Microsoft rolled out Windows 11 build 22531 to the Dev Channel recently. Interestingly, this release primarily contains a bunch of bug fixes and an updated Microsoft Store experience with faster navigation, better app updates, and more. If you are an active Microsoft Store customer, you should also check out the list of all Microsoft Store App Awards winners. And if you're a Spotify subscriber on a Windows on ARM device, you'll likely be pleased to hear that a native version of the app is now available as well.

It is important to note that build 22531 is a version 23H2 Sun Valley 3 (Copper) build and some information about its kernel leaked this week too.

Last month's Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA) update has also made its way to all Windows 11 Insiders. Pertinent features include Android 12.1, a redesigned Settings app, better integration with Windows, and improved input.

Windows 10 Insiders haven't been left in the cold either. The Release Preview ring for the OS received build 19044.1741 (KB5014023) which contains a bunch of bug fixes and improvements. The same build is also available as an optional "C" release for those running a generally available and supported version of Windows 10.

Exploits, exploits, exploits!

These have been a tricky past few days for Microsoft when it comes to cybersecurity. We recently learned about a zero-day vulnerability that can enable malicious Office documents to invoke Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT), which can lead to unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE). All supported versions of Windows and Windows Server are affected and while a fix is still not available, there are some mitigations that should be deployed in the interim.

We also found out about a separate vulnerability related to protocol handling. The flaw can combine multiple other flaws to allow a Word document to trigger Windows Search and perform unauthenticated actions, practically without user interaction. We are still waiting for a fix for this too, but in the meantime, check out the mitigations here.

It's not all bad news when it comes to Office apps, though. Simple Markup view and Dark mode for Word on the web are coming soon, text predictions for the Mac client will be available within a few months. That said, Excel is losing a few features due to low usage and Microsoft not renewing partnerships with some partners.

On Teams side, you might have noticed that the desktop client is faster in some areas than it was a year before. You will soon be able to set your preferred directory for downloads of Teams files too. And if you missed all the features that graced Teams in the past month, check out a recap here.

Git gud

Windows 11's market share among Steam users is growing steadily with the OS now commanding a share of almost 20%. Of course, Windows 10 is still the undisputed leader at 73.89% but the bottom line that will likely matter to Microsoft is that over 95% of all Steam gamers surveyed are using its operating systems.

And while this is not related to gaming hardware, if you're rocking Nvidia's enterprise RTX or Quadro graphics cards, you'll want to check out a new driver that supports Windows 11 version 22H2.

Meanwhile, if you're an Xbox Games with Gold subscriber, you should know that this month's offerings have been revealed. The latest selection includes Project Highrise: Architect's Edition, Raskulls, Aven Colony, and Super Meat Boy. In fact, you can grab the latter two titles right now. However, if this doesn't tickle your fancy, check out the latest discounts on offer via this week's Deals with Gold. Also, the latest Xbox Game Pass offerings include Assassin's Creed Origins, Ninja Gaiden, and more.

While we are on the topic of Xbox gaming, you can now reveal secret Xbox achievements across multiple platforms and hardware.

If you're purely a PC gamer, don't forget to grab Wolfenstein: The New Order for free via the Epic Games Store for a limited time. And as always, don't miss out on the list of best gaming deals across multiple storefronts, curated every weekend by Neowin's Editor Pulasthi Ariyasinghe.

Dev Channel

• The $599 Surface Laptop Go 2 is now official
• Microsoft plans to embrace unions as tech workers push for better conditions
• The next version of Exchange Server has been delayed to 2025

Under the spotlight

A few days ago, I penned my thoughts on how giving consumers more visibility over the Windows development process would encourage proactive engineering rather than reactive. While it's not a perfect solution, it could solve some existing problems and complaints that people have with Microsoft's operating system. Read my thoughts on the topic here.

Logging off

Our highlight for this week relates to a critical vulnerability in Atlassian Confluence Server and Data Server. The issue affects practically every version of the products (except those hosted on Atlassian Cloud), leading the vendor to urge customers to immediately restrict internet access and turn off instances of Confluence and Data Server.

The vulnerability can lead to remote code execution and if you're an IT admin or a security professional at an organization which uses either of the aforementioned products, it is recommended that you apply patches as soon as possible and check out other mitigations here too.

Microsoft Weekly: Edge on the rise, exploits, and a Windows 11 build

Let’s talk about a DDR4 RAM with CL16 latencies. The same 32 GB capacity kit price is around 137 USD, so it is a smarter purchase option, of course, as long as you have or are going to have an Intel processor, Alder Lake (12th Gen), or Intel Raptor Lake (13th Gen) since both DDR4 and DDR5 RAM can be used.

On the opposite side, the Ryzen 7000 series processors based on the AMD AM5 platform will only support the DDR5 RAM, making the jump to said platform significantly more expensive and more so if we want to acquire high-performance memory modules that outperform DDR4 RAM. Although currently in well-known stores like Amazon, over 3,000 different kits of DDR4 RAM are on sale and only 213 of DDR5 memory, and if we go beyond the conventional 32 GB of RAM @ 4800 MHz CL38, be ready to spend at least $220; 5600 MHz CL36 are around $290; the 6200 MHz CL38 for over $399; while the most advanced modules already are selling between $499 and $599, the new models with low latencies at frequencies above 6000 MHz are not even listed yet!

Yes, DDR5 memory is falling in price, but DDR4 memory has also suffered price drops. In both cases, the drops are very slight every week, so it is not expected that DDR5 memory to be affordable in the short term. If you’re looking for a high-end Ryzen 7000 build, be prepared to open your wallet wide for memory that won’t drag down system performance.

Price development of DDR5 memory in the last 6 months – Via: computerbase

Remember that in 2023, with the launch of Intel Meteor Lake, Intel will complete the transition to a platform that only uses DDR5 memory, so the company hopes that by the end of next year, the prices of DDR5 Ram will be affordable enough to generate more interest.

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Apple has been demoing AR for years but has never really shown us how it’s supposed to work. Image: Apple

Apple’s software is very good, generally speaking. Even as the company has spread its focus among more platforms than ever — macOS and iOS and iPadOS and tvOS and watchOS and whatever software Apple’s building for its maybe-possibly-coming-someday car and its almost-certainly-coming-soon AR / VR headset — those platforms have continued to be excellent. It’s been a while since we got an Apple Maps-style fiasco; the biggest mistakes Apple makes now are much more on the level of putting the Safari URL bar on the wrong part of the screen.

What all that success and maturity breeds, though, is a sense that Apple’s software is… finished — or at least very close. Over the last couple of years, the company’s software announcements at WWDC have been almost exclusively iterative and additive, with few big swings. Last year’s big iOS announcements, for instance, were some quality-of-life improvements to FaceTime and some new kinds of ID that work in Apple Wallet. Otherwise, Apple mostly just rolled out new settings menus: new controls for notifications, Focus mode settings, privacy tools — that sort of thing.

This is not a bad thing! Neither is the fact that Apple is the best fast-follower in the software business, remarkably quick to adapt and polish everybody else’s new ideas about software. Apple’s devices are as feature-filled, long-lasting, stable, and usable as anything you’ll find anywhere. Too many companies try to reinvent everything all the time for no reason and end up creating problems where they didn’t exist. Apple is nothing if not a ruthlessly efficient machine, and that machine is hard at work honing every pixel its devices create.

But we’re at an inflection point in technology that will demand more from Apple. It’s now fairly clear that AR and VR are Apple’s next big thing, the next supposedly earth-shakingly huge industry after the smartphone. Apple’s not likely to show off a headset at WWDC, but as augmented and virtual reality come to more of our lives, everything about how we experience and interact with technology is going to have to change.

Apple has been showing off AR for years, of course. But all it’s shown are demos, things you can see or do on the other side of the camera. We’ve seen very little from the company about how it thinks AR devices are going to work and how we’re going to use them. The company that loves raving about its input devices is going to need a few new ones and a new software paradigm to match. That’s what we’re going to see this year at WWDC.

Remember last year, when Apple showed that you could take a picture of a piece of paper with your iPhone and it would automatically scan and recognize any text on the page? Live Text is an AR feature through and through: it’s a way of using your phone’s camera and AI to understand and catalog information in the real world. The whole tech industry thinks that’s the future — that’s what Google’s doing with Maps and Lens and what Snapchat is doing with its lenses and filters. Apple needs a lot more where Live Text came from.

Live Text is an AR feature through and through. Image: Apple

From a simple UI perspective, one thing AR will require is a much more efficient system for getting information and accomplishing tasks. Nobody’s going to wear AR glasses that send them Apple Music ads and news notifications every six minutes, right? And full-screen apps that demand your singular attention are increasingly going to be a way of the past.

We may get some hints about what that will look like: it sounds like “use your phone without getting lost in your phone” is going to be a theme at this year’s WWDC. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, we could see an iOS lock screen that shows useful information without requiring you to unlock your phone. A more glanceable iPhone seems like an excellent idea and a good way to keep people from opening their phone to check the weather only to find themselves deep down a TikTok hole three and a half hours later. Same goes for the rumored “interactive widgets,” which would let you do basic tasks without having to open an app. And, if Focus mode gets some rumored enhancements — and especially if Apple can make Focus mode easier to set up and use — it could be a really useful tool on your phone and a totally essential one on your AR glasses.

I’d also expect Apple to continue to bring its devices much closer together in terms of both what they do and how they do it in an effort to make its whole ecosystem more usable. With a nearly full line of Macs and iPads running on Apple’s M chip — and maybe a full line after WWDC if the long-awaited Mac Pro finally appears — there’s no reason for the devices not to share more DNA. Universal Control, which was probably the most exciting iOS 15 announcement even if it didn’t ship until February, is a good example of what it looks like for Apple to treat its many screens as part of an ecosystem. If iOS 16 brings true freeform multitasking to the iPad (and boy, I hope it does), an iPad in a keyboard dock is basically a Mac. Apple used to avoid that closeness; now, it appears to be embracing it. And, if it sees all these devices as ultimately companions and accessories to a pair of AR glasses, it’ll need them all to do the job well.

The last time Apple — hell, the last time anyone — had a truly new idea about how we use gadgets was in 2007 when the iPhone launched. Since then, the industry has been on a yes-and path, improving and tweaking without ever really breaking from the basics of multitouch. But AR is going to break all of that. It can’t work otherwise. That’s why companies are working on neural interfaces, trying to perfect gesture control, and trying to figure out how to display everything from translated text to maps and games on a tiny screen in front of your face. Meta is already shipping and selling its best ideas; Google’s are coming out in the form of Lens features and sizzle videos. Now, Apple needs to start showing the world how it thinks an AR future works. Headset or no headset, that will be the story of WWDC 2022.

Glasses or no glasses, this year’s WWDC is all about AR

New York state passes first electronics right-to-repair bill

Bloomberg reports that IHI Corp, a Japanese heavy machinery manufacturer, has successfully tested a prototype of a massive, airplane-sized turbine that can generate electricity from powerful deep sea ocean currents, laying the groundwork for a promising new source of renewable energy that isn't dependent on sunny days or strong winds.

Kairyu is the company's most recent prototype, which weights 330 tons. A large fuselage connects two counter-rotating turbine fans, allowing the entire equipment to float while attached to the sea floor, hovering between 100 and 160 feet below the surface.

It draws electricity from one of the world's strongest ocean currents off Japan's eastern coast to power its massive turbines.

The business was able to generate roughly 100 kilowatts of steady electricity during demonstrations earlier this year. IHI Corp plans to generate two megawatts during subsequent testing, with commercial operations beginning in the 2030s, according to Bloomberg.

Japan is also looking at other options for generating energy from the sea, such as tidal power and ocean thermal energy conversion, which uses the temperature difference between cold and warm ocean water to generate electricity.

Engineers now have the difficult task of growing the process to the point where it is profitable, which is no simple task.

According to Angus McCrone, a marine energy specialist, "the major difficulty for ocean current turbines is whether they could design a system that would generate electricity cheaply out of currents that are not especially powerful."

Source

While we wait for that, Team Blue has also started enabling support for its succeeding 14th Gen Core architecture dubbed "Meteor Lake (MTL)". Twitter user and leakster momomo_us spotted the following references for the upcoming architecture inside Intel's Management Engine (ME) driver. In fact, there are also references to the one that comes after that, which is, 15th Gen Lunar Lake (LNL) already present.

The leak suggests that Intel is adding or has already added 13th Gen Raptor Lake (RPL) support in ME 16.1, and the following editions are receiving support for mobile Meteor Lake-M (MTL-M), Meteor Lake-P (Meteor Lake-P) as well as desktop version Meteor Lake-S (MTL-S).

Back in 2021, Intel disclosed the first details about Meteor Lake stating that the core was versatile capable of scaling all the way from 5W to 125W. During this, the company has introduced its updated naming scheme for its process technologies and later on, earlier this year, it announced that Meteor Lake will be using the Intel's new "Intel 4" process. It will be shipping next year, probably in the second half seeing how Raptor Lake is yet to release.

Source and image: momomo_us (Twitter)

Support for Intel 14th Gen Meteor Lake, successor to Raptor Lake, has kicked off

HP releases its $1,099 Linux laptop for developers

Capcom is continuing its trend of remaking classic Resident Evil games with the fourth mainline entry in the survival horror series. A remake of Resident Evil 4 will be hitting the PS5, Xbox Series X / S, and PC on March 24th, 2023, bringing the action-focused game to modern platforms. Capcom also says the game will feature some kind of support for the next iteration of PlayStation VR. You can check out the first trailer above to see what a next-gen Leon Kennedy looks like.

“We aim to make the game feel familiar to fans of the series, while also providing a fresh feeling to it,” Capcom wrote in a blog post. “This is being done by reimagining the storyline of the game while keeping the essence of its direction, modernizing the graphics and updating the controls to a modern standard.” Additionally, Capcom shared that “many team members” from the excellent 2019 Resident Evil 2 remake have worked on this title.

Similarly, Capcom revealed that Resident Evil Village is also in the works for PSVR2, and it sounds terrifying. Here’s Capcom:

In addition to the PS VR2 headset, you’ll use the PlayStation VR2 Sense controllers to represent each hand in-world. Try guarding using both of your arms and Ethan will guard in the same way; hold up a gun and Ethan will hold up his. You are also now able to execute dynamic actions such as firing your gun while holding a knife with the other hand, or holding a handgun with one hand and a shotgun with the other. These advanced controllers increase the player’s immersion with the game.

Here’s the first teaser:

The developer previously released modern remakes of Resident Evil 2 (2019) and Resident Evil 3 (2020), while RE4 most recently made its way to VR platforms.

Updated 7:22PM ET, June 2nd: Capcom’s press release for Resident Evil 4 shared that the game is also coming to Xbox consoles and PC, so we’ve included that in the post.

Resident Evil 4 remake is coming to PS5, Xbox, and PC in March 2023

It’sIt’s once again time for Apple to hold its annual Worldwide Developers Conference, or WWDC, where it shows off the latest versions of its operating systems for iPhones, Macs, watches, tablets, and TVs.

But what new features will Apple’s new software bring, and is the company planning any big surprises? Hardware, perhaps, or even — dare I say it — a VR headset? We’ve combed through the rumors to get an idea of what to expect when Apple’s keynote premieres on June 6th at 1PM ET / 10AM PT, and here’s what we found:

iOS and iPadOS 16 could get a new coat of paint and better notifications

Noted Apple rumor reporter Mark Gurman has predicted that iOS 16 will come with “fresh Apple apps,” though it’s a little unclear whether that means new apps from Apple or a new look for existing apps. Gurman also predicts “new ways of interacting” with iOS — I’m hoping that’s a reference to interactive widgets.

For iPadOS 16 he specifically pointed to multitasking improvements that could make the lineup a little better at being a laptop substitute.

It’s also possible that Apple will overhaul the notifications system, which could mean that the company’s building on the Focus modes it introduced with iOS 15.

While Apple almost certainly won’t say anything about the iPhone 14, the software features and APIs the company talks about at WWDC usually offer at least some hint as to what its future hardware could look like. If Apple starts telling developers to prepare for a dynamic status bar, that’d be a very strong hint that rumors about the iPhone 14 Pro ditching the notch are correct.

Gurman has also said that iOS 16 could bring an always-on lock screen. That also feels like something that may be locked to the next-gen iPhone but that there’ll be hints about in the code and APIs. If his predictions that the lock screen is getting “widget-like capabilities” are correct, I’d see that as a pretty strong indicator about the iPhone 14 having an always-on display. (In theory, the iPhone 13 Pro’s LTPO screen might also be okay for that particular feature, but Gurman predicts it’ll be exclusive to the iPhone 14 Pro.)

One thing that’s worth watching is which devices are supported by iOS 16 — the iPhone 6S has gotten six updates, but that’s bound to end at some point. Also, keep an ear out for any mentions of the accessibility updates Apple recently announced. While they’ve already been pretty thoroughly detailed, they’ll probably at least get a mention and possibly even a demo. (It’d be great to see someone actually using live captions or door detection.)

New versions of watchOS and macOS

As usual, there aren’t a ton of rumors about watchOS, but Apple’s pretty consistent with what it adds to the Apple Watch every year: some new fitness / health features, new workouts you can track, and new watch faces. 9to5Mac also reports that there could be an iPhone-like low-power mode that would offer more usability than the current power reserve mode (which basically just shows the time).

Apple has already shown off a slew of upcoming accessibility features. Image: Apple

We could potentially see the accessibility features that Apple previewed earlier this month, including expanded Assistive Touch gestures that’ll let you move your fingers to do things like ending a call, taking a picture, and controlling media or workouts. Apple also showed off a mirroring mode that lets you see and control your watch’s screen from your phone. Apple said that these features will be coming in software updates this year, and it seems likely that means they’d be in watchOS 9.

As for what the next version of macOS will bring, the rumors have been very few and far between. There’s speculation it could get the iPhone’s Focus Mode feature and that it may be called macOS Mammoth. Other than that, the only thing we’re truly expecting to see is support for...

Two new Macs

The current rumor (also coming from Mark Gurman) is that Apple will introduce at least two new computers “around the middle of the year.” That prediction came alongside a whole list of computers that Apple’s reportedly working on, including a new Mac Pro, an entirely refreshed laptop lineup, and a Mac Mini or two.

Apple’s current M1-powered MacBook Air could be on its way out.

There have been rumors of a redesigned MacBook Air floating around for a while, and Apple has promised to introduce a Mac Pro with Apple silicon. The latter definitely seems ripe for a WWDC announcement. It’s the conference where Apple gathers a big chunk of its pros and enthusiasts (e.g., the folks that would love a Mac Pro), and it’d be weird if it teased the hardware at one event and didn’t announce it at the next.

As one of Apple’s more popular computers, the Air wouldn’t be out of place either. But then again, neither would a Mac Mini, especially given the rumors that Apple’s looking to equip it with an M2 Pro processor.

Oh yeah, about that...

The M2 could make its debut

In the report that detailed the potentially in-progress Macs, Bloomberg also said that they’re likely to feature Apple’s next-generation silicon. While there aren’t a ton of details on what kind of improvements the M2 will bring, where better to go over all the technical details than at a developer conference?

While Apple’s continued to pump out new variations of its chips, they’ve all been expansions of the M1 design it announced over a year and a half ago. The company said that it’s done introducing new M1 chips, so it seems possible that new computers would have to come with a new generation of chips (though noted analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has predicted that the new Air could still have an M1 chip).

A drawing The Information made of Apple’s headset based on what it’s heard. Image: The Information

Apple might announce its long-rumored AR / VR headset

Okay, so maybe you shouldn’t exactly “expect” this one — it’s more of a “don’t be surprised if it shows up” pick. Pretty much every year, people predict that Apple will show off a headset, currently rumored to be capable of virtual and augmented reality, featuring an array of cameras (for passing through video of the real world), a chip that’s about as powerful as a Mac, and dedicated software called RealityOS.

It’s never actually happened, but rumors are swirling that Apple’s getting close to announcing one after years of reportedly chaotic development. According to this report from a couple of weeks ago, Apple’s board of directors recently got to try out the headset, something that historically happens shortly before consumers get to see it.

That report said that Apple was planning on introducing the headset at WWDC but that there may have been delays that would prevent that. Apple could always tease it, though — some people suspect it’s already done so by including a person wearing glasses in its Memoji iconography for the show.

At the very least, you should expect Apple to talk a lot about AR and VR. It’s clearly a focus for the company, even if it’s not ready to show off the hardware. And who knows? Maybe 2022 will be another One More Thing kind of year.

Saying this is a headset hint is probably a stretch — unlike saying that it looks like the poster for 1995’s Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie. Image: Apple

iOS 16, Notifications, and Macs: what to expect at WWDC 2022

Wardens, Inquisitors, Champions, it’s time to break out the whisks. Today, in a surprise announcement, BioWare revealed the name of the next installment in the Dragon Age series: Dragon Age: Dreadwolf.

The reveal pretty clearly establishes what’s been known for a while now; that Solas, one of the companions in Dragon Age: Inquisition, will be the main antagonist of the new game.

If you did not play Dragon Age: Inquisition and have no idea who Solas is or why whenever his name is mentioned people like me start reaching for frying pans and spatulas, let me explain.

Spoilers for Dragon Age: Inquisition follow:

Solas was one of the least interesting of companions in Dragon Age: Inquisition — or the least interesting initially. He was a mage — but not as cool as the necromancer Dorian or the enchantress Vivienne — and an elf, though also not as cool as the archer Sera. He was also a huge dick, constantly making racist jabs at the team’s qunari and dwarven companions, and if you got fed up with him and his passive-aggressive, “holier-than-thou” behavior, the game gave you the option to punch the shit outta him.

Despite his overtly asshole behavior, there was a quiet confidence about him that some players found attractive enough to want to romance him. He’s one of the game’s many romantic partners, although he would only date you if you’re a female elf. If Solas had a Tinder bio, I imagine it’d contain the phrase, “Sorry, it’s just my preference.”

Solas is a lone-wolf (heh) mage obsessed with returning the elves to their former glory as rulers of the lands of Thedas. This is all well and good until you find out exactly how he intends to do that, which is by amassing enough power to commit a magical war crime so massive it will kill every sentient species except elves.

Naturally, the Dragon Age fanbase didn’t like that. Solas, for a lot of players, was an ally, a trusted friend, and even a romantic partner. Then, he betrayed them, helping them save the world only to turn around and promise its destruction for anybody who doesn’t look like him. Because of his perfectly smooth, white, and round bald head, Solas earned the nickname Egg, and because of his sudden, spectacularly executed betrayal, a lot of Dragon Age fans are now in the business of making omelets.

This is why the reveal of Dragon Age: Dreadwolf is so exciting for a lot of fans. Dragon Age games, up until this point, haven’t been direct sequels to one another. They’ve always been in different places with separate tangentially connected stories, and Dreadwolf seems to offer a more direct follow-up to Inquisition. And while we probably won’t be able to play as our Inquisitor characters again, I take great, gleeful pleasure in the knowledge that I’ll be able to get some revenge on her behalf.

BioWare stated Dreadwolf would not be released this year but promised to reveal more about the game in the months ahead. Me and my egg recipes continue to wait patiently.

BioWare reveals official title of Dragon Age 4

As disruptions in China continue, Apple will start making iPads in Vietnam