I’ve mentioned this before, but in June 2023 TheElec reported that Sony, the exclusive supplier of the high-resolution OLED displays in Vision Pro, only has the physical capacity to manufacture 900,000 units per year, and with two displays per Vision Pro, that put a maximum capacity on Vision Pro production at about 450,000 headsets for the year. That’s only slightly higher than the actual sales estimate The Information cites from Counterpoint Research, of 420,000 units.
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The Register concludes that proponents did not show that [...] permitting off-premises access to video games are likely to be noninfringing. She also notes the greater risk of market harm with removing the video game exemption’s premises limitation, given the market for legacy video games.
“I’m gutted by this result,” Albert wrote on Bluesky, adding that it seemed the Copyright Office didn’t bother to consider evidence from some video game publishers — who testified that granting limited remote access wouldn’t impact the market for their video game re-releases.
The pulse-oximetry feature—which is central to Masimo’s own patent-infringement allegations that have troubled the Apple Watch for more than four years—"has nothing to do with this case,” Desmarais said.
That model — codenamed J575 — had been on a similar schedule as the MacBook Air, but now it’s likely to come after a March software release, putting its debut between March and June. Apple also continues to work on an M4 version of the Mac Pro, its most expensive computer.
The M4 chips will bring major updates to the Mac Studio and Mac Pro, including the addition of ray tracing — a key technology for graphics in gaming. They also will enhance the Neural Engine, a chip component for processing AI tasks, which is key to the new Apple Intelligence platform.
During the same spring product release cycle, Apple is planning to launch a revamped iPhone SE, fresh iPad Air models and upgraded iPad keyboards. In that same window, Apple is also now aiming to release 11th-generation entry-level iPads codenamed J481 and J482, the people said.
Apple has sharply scaled back production of its Vision Pro mixed reality headset since the early summer and could stop making the existing version of the device entirely by year end, according to multiple people directly involved in building components for the device.
The move suggests that Apple has enough inventory built up to meet demand for the foreseeable future. It follows Apple’s decision earlier this year to focus on building a model that’s cheaper than the current version—which retails for $3,500—for possible release by the end of 2025, as The Information has previously reported.
The Takeaway • Apple could suspend Vision Pro assembly as soon as November • Suppliers have made enough components for roughly 600,000 headsets • Vision Pro assembler Luxshare has halved production to around 1,000 units a day As part of that decision, Apple suspended work on a second-generation version of the high-end device for at least a year, according to another person directly involved in the company’s supply chain.
Members of Congress are raising the alarm about new technology at supermarkets: They say Kroger and other major grocery stores are implementing digital price tags that could allow for dynamic pricing, meaning the sticker price on items like eggs and milk could change regularly.
They also claim data from facial recognition technology at Kroger could be considered in pricing decisions.
Kroger denied the claims, saying it has no plans to implement dynamic pricing or use facial recognition software. Walmart also said it had no plans for dynamic pricing, and that facial recognition was not being used to affect pricing, but the company did not specify whether the tool was being used for other purposes.
Paul Otellini, Intel’s chief executive at the time, presented the board with a startling idea: Buy Nvidia, a Silicon Valley upstart known for chips used for computer graphics. The price tag: as much as $20 billion.
Some Intel executives believed that the underlying design of graphics chips could eventually take on important new jobs in data centers, an approach that would eventually dominate A.I. systems.
But the board resisted, according to two people familiar with the boardroom discussion who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because the meeting was confidential. Intel had a poor record of absorbing companies. And the deal would have been by far Intel’s most expensive acquisition.
On Wednesday, Apple rolled out developer betas of iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS 15.2, which run Apple Intelligence features previously seen only in Apple’s own marketing materials and product announcements: Three different kinds of image generation, ChatGPT support, Visual Intelligence, expanded English language support, and Writing Tools prompts.
Intel Corp. won the latest round of an epic legal battle with the European Union over a case that led to a once-record antitrust fine of €1.06 billion ($1.1 billion).
The EU’s Court of Justice ruled that regulators failed to prove the US company doled out illegal rebates to PC makers that agreed to buy most of their chips from Intel.
Apple announced a trio of major new hearing health features for the AirPods Pro 2 in September including clinical-grade hearing aid functionality, a hearing test, and more robust hearing protection. All three will roll out next week with the release of iOS 18.1, and they could mark a watershed moment for hearing health awareness. Apple is about to instantly turn the world’s most popular earbuds into an over-the-counter hearing aid.
There is one idea that encapsulates the approach to innovation that makes all of it possible—and it’s maybe the closest thing to a grand unified theory of Apple. It’s a philosophy of just four words that describe Apple’s past, present and definitely its future. Four words that help explain why this was the year the company plowed into spatial computing and artificial intelligence. During one of those epochal years when it feels like everything is about to change again, I heard them over and over, in conversation with Apple executives and Cook himself: Not first, but best.
Franklin’s “electrostatic motor” uses alternating positive and negative charges—the same kind that make your socks stick together after they come out of the dryer—to spin an axle, and doesn’t rely on a flow of current like conventional electric motors. Every few years, an eager Ph.D. student or engineer rediscovers this historical curiosity. But other than applications in tiny pumps and actuators etched on microchips, where this technology has been in use for decades, their work hasn’t made it out of the lab.
Electrostatic motors have several potentially huge advantages over regular motors. They are up to 80% more efficient than conventional motors after all the dependencies of regular electric motors are added in. They could also allow new kinds of control and precision in robots, where they could function more like our muscles.
And they don’t use rare-earth elements because they don’t have permanent magnets, and require as little as 5% as much copper as a conventional motor. Both materials have become increasingly scarce and expensive over the past decade, and supply chains for them are dominated by China.
These motors could lead to more efficient air-conditioning systems, factories, logistics hubs and data centers, and—since they can double as generators—better ways of generating renewable energy. They might even show up in tiny surveillance drones.
+++ATH0: Ward Christensen, co-inventor of the computer bulletin board system (BBS), has died at the age of 78. Christensen, along with Randy Suess, created the first BBS in Chicago in 1978, leading to an important cultural era of digital community-building that presaged much of our online world today.
Google just netted a small but key victory in its Epic legal battle. Last week, the company asked Judge James Donato to press pause on his November 1st deadline to drastically alter its Android app store rules. Today, he did just that, Epic and Google confirm to The Verge, granting Google a temporary administrative stay on all but one specific piece of his ruling.
That means Google may not have to open up its Play Store for years, if at all, while it appeals the verdict. In December, a jury unanimously decided that Google’s Android app store, the Play Store, had become an illegal monopoly, though Google is now appealing that jury verdict as well as the court’s order.
Penguin Random House (PRH) has amended its copyright wording across all imprints globally, confirming it will appear “in imprint pages across our markets”. The new wording states: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems”, and will be included in all new titles and any backlist titles that are reprinted.
On May 29, Graham-Cumming ran the program and stepped away to eat a breakfast of scrambled eggs. Twenty-three minutes later, the program finished. He’d broken the encryption and unzipped the file. The workings of Jenkin’s cryptosystem were exposed. It had been nine days since he first exchanged emails with Jenkin.
The next step was to actually run the code, which Graham-Cumming did using an emulator of the ancient version of MS-DOS used in the Toshiba T1000. It worked perfectly. Jenkin had feared that a professional coder like Graham-Cumming might find his work hopelessly amateurish, but his reaction was quite the opposite. “I’m pretty amazed, given the limitations he had in terms of knowledge, in terms of hardware, that they built something that was pretty credible, especially for the time,” says Graham-Cumming. Even more impressive: It did a job in the wild.
Jenkin, who has spent the past few decades in South Africa as a computer programmer and web designer, has now uploaded the code to GitHub and open-sourced it. He plans to unzip and upload some of the messages exchanged in the ’80s that helped bring down apartheid.
“The code itself is a historical document,” says Graham-Cumming. “It wasn't like, ‘Oh, I'm going to create some theoretical crypto system.’ It was like, ‘I’ve got real activists, real people in danger. I need real communications, and I need to be practical.’”
On Thursday, Apple celebrated 10 years with Apple Pay and announced how the service will evolve in the future, including features like redeeming rewards and expanding installment loan options. In addition to Apple Pay’s newly added support for loan options from Affirm in the U.S., and Monzo Flex in the U.K., the iPhone maker shared that starting today, support for Klarna will go live in the two countries, including both at checkout online and in-app with Apple Pay.
Worldcoin, the identity and cryptocurrency venture co-founded by Sam Altman, is rebranding itself as World (and World Network) to reflect what it says is a broader mission.
Why it matters: World is pitching its technologies as key to helping distinguish bots from humans in an increasingly AI-dominated society.
Driving the news: In addition to the new name, Altman and co-founder Alex Blania used a San Francisco event to unveil a series of updates including a new version of its Orb iris-scanning technology.
World said the new version of the Orb is powered by Nvidia's latest Jetson chipset and has nearly five times the AI performance and also uses fewer parts. The venture says the new Orb will allow for a broader roll-out including self-service kiosks.
Google will block election ads across all of its platforms after the last polls close on Nov. 5, according to a memo sent to its advertising partners Thursday and obtained by Axios.
Why it matters: The policy, first introduced during the 2020 election, is meant to prevent misinformation about voting, including candidates prematurely claiming victory before a race is called.
Google is implementing the policy "out of an abundance of caution and to limit the potential for confusion, given the likelihood that votes will continue to be counted after Election Day," per a spokesperson.
The U.S. auto safety regulator on Friday opened an investigation into 2.4 million Tesla vehicles equipped with the automaker's Full Self-Driving (FSD) software after four reported collisions, including a 2023 fatal crash. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA) preliminary evaluation is the first step before the agency could seek a recall of the vehicles if it believes they pose an unreasonable risk to safety.
As Facebook owner Meta Platforms has backed away from news, Microsoft’s LinkedIn has leaned into it.
LinkedIn is doubling down on its long-standing efforts to promote news articles and work with news publishers, in hopes of driving both usage and ad revenue. In the latest sign of that, in the next few days it will start testing a new News Banner atop the feed on its mobile app, highlighting news stories that are developing online, a LinkedIn spokesperson said.
On Thursday, the FCC approved new regulations requiring all phone makers to make their handsets compatible with hearing aids. With the number of Americans 65 and older expected to balloon by nearly 50 percent by 2050, the rules will ensure those with hearing loss don’t have to worry about which phones will work with their hearing aids.
“Under the new rules, after a transition period, Americans with hearing loss will no longer be limited in their choice of technologies, features, and prices available in the mobile handset marketplace,” the FCC wrote in a press release.
Netflix posted third-quarter earnings Thursday that beat on the top and bottom lines. The streamer’s ad-tier memberships jumped 35% quarter over quarter. Netflix is projecting revenue for the full year of 2025 to be between $43 billion and $44 billion, as it improves its core series and films offerings.
On Wednesday, social network X (formerly Twitter) updated its Privacy Policy to indicate that it would allow third-party “collaborators” to train their AI models on X data, unless users opt out. While X owner Elon Musk trained xAI’s Grok AI chatbot on X user data, leading to an investigation by the EU’s lead privacy regulator, the company hadn’t yet amended its policy to indicate its data may also be used by third parties.
Elon Musk's X has updated its terms of service to steer any disputes by users of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter to a federal court in Texas whose judges frequently deliver victories to conservative litigants in political cases. New terms of service that will take effect on Nov. 15 specify that any lawsuits against X by users must be exclusively filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas or state courts in Tarrant County, Texas. It is common for companies to include venue clauses in their terms of service directing what forum would hear any disputes filed against them. But the choice of the Northern District of Texas stands out because X is not even located in the district. Following a move from San Francisco, X is today headquartered in Bastrop, Texas, near Austin, whose federal court is in Texas' Western District. The Western District has far fewer Republican-appointed judges than the Northern District.
A handful of changes coming to X may be pushing users to its competitor. Bluesky, the decentralized social platform, says it added 500,000 new users in a day this week. The new wave of signups could be related to several controversial changes on X in the last few days.
This week, X users got a pop-up message notifying them that their posts will be visible even to users they’ve previously blocked. Those accounts still won’t be able to interact with their posts, but it’s a substantial change to how the block feature works that could open users up to harassment.
“Today, block can be used by users to share and hide harmful or private information about those they’ve blocked,” an official X account posted. “Users will be able to see if such behavior occurs with this update, allowing for greater transparency.”
It goes without saying that blocking is a safety issue, particularly for users facing harassment on a platform or people wanting to create distance between themselves and someone else in their life. But Elon Musk has expressed his disdain for blocking, and this change to blocking was teased last month. After users got an explicit notification about it this week, Bluesky wasted no time in using it as a recruitment
Prabhakar Raghavan, the most senior Google executive overseeing its search engine and ads products, is leaving the role after a four-year tenure leading the company’s core moneymaking business.
Raghavan will be succeeded by Nick Fox, a longtime Google executive who has worked in the search organization. Raghavan will have a new role as Google’s chief technologist working with Chief Executive Sundar Pichai.
The shake-up comes as the Alphabet unit faces unprecedented pressure on its search business from the courts and artificial-intelligence products such as ChatGPT. Google’s search advertising business is expected to dip below a 50% market share in the U.S. next year for the first time in more than a decade, according to the research firm eMarketer.
AWS announced it has signed an agreement with Dominion Energy, Virginia’s utility company, to explore the development of a small modular nuclear reactor, near Dominion’s existing North Anna nuclear power station. AWS, Amazon’s subsidiary in cloud computing, has a massive and increasing need for clean energy as it expands its services into generative AI. The agreement is also a part of Amazon’s path to net-zero carbon emissions. Amazon is the latest large tech company to buy into nuclear power to fuel the growing demands from data centers. Google and Microsoft have announced similar plans.
The Court of Appeal ruled that children's general interest was "an overriding consideration which may justify infringement of other rights such as freedom of expression or communication."
"Giving priority to the protection of the private lives of adult consumers, by ruling out age verification, is incompatible with the protection of minors," the court said.
Justine Atlan, managing director of e-Enfance, one of the two associations that sided with the plaintiffs, called it "a landmark decision."
The sites have 15 days to implement effective age controls, Atlan said, and otherwise will see the blocks extended until their age control systems are up and running.
Google has asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to halt the imminent changes required from Judge James Donato’s recent ruling in Epic v. Google. The company already asked Judge Donato to do the same, but it’s not waiting till Friday to find out if the judge who vowed to “tear the barriers down” will let Google press pause on his ruling.