An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Proteins in the blood could warn people of cancer more than seven years before it is diagnosed, according to research [published in the journal Nature Communications]. Scientists at the University of Oxford studied blood samples from more than 44,000 people in the UK Biobank, including over 4,900 people who subsequently had a cancer diagnosis. They compared the proteins of people who did and did not go on to be diagnosed with cancer and identified 618 proteins linked to 19 types of cancer, including colon, lung, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and liver.
The study, funded by Cancer Research UK and published in Nature Communications, also found 107 proteins associated with cancers diagnosed more than seven years after the patient's blood sample was collected and 182 proteins that were strongly associated with a cancer diagnosis within three years. The authors concluded that some of these proteins could be used to detect cancer much earlier and potentially provide new treatment options, though further research was needed.
The File Explorer in Windows 11 has been having a rough time. The initial redesign from Windows 10 displaced familiar features and the right-click menu was truncated, as were the options in the ribbons menu.
A couple of updates later, things have improved somewhat, and Windows 11 finally added tab support in File Explorer. But if you’re annoyed by the lack of consistency in File Explorer, there’s a free, open-source, community-supported alternative that's a lot more customizable. It's simply called the Files app.
How to download the Files app for free
You can buy the Files app from the official Microsoft Store for $8, but it's also available completely free of cost from the developer's website, though it's a bit hidden: After opening the link, click the Classic installer button at the bottom of the page to start the free download.
But before you do that, I suggest you create a backup of your computer and all your important files just to be safe, given this is an app with permissions to directly edit all files on your computer.
The Files app wins with its design
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
There's no shortage of File Explorer alternatives (XYPlorer being a popular choice), and this was the case even before Windows 11. But none of them feature as modern or polished a design as the Files app. It takes its cues from Microsoft's Fluent design system, and looks even better on Windows 11 than Microsoft's own File Explorer, which feels like a cheaply re-skinned version of the Windows 10 File Explorer.
This emphasis on design continues with its customization options, of which there are plenty. You can choose from a couple of default themes, or have fun choosing color and transparency effects that work for you. And the dark mode is divine.
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
If you're looking for a form factor closer to macOS, you can switch to the Column view. Like Finder on Mac, this app also has a quick preview feature that allows you to peek into photos and PDFs by pressing the Space bar (doing this in the File Explorer requires a third-party app.)
My favorite part though, is the fact that you can make the icons and previews extra, extra large, so you can see what's in an image, or a PDF without even going through the quick look menu —something that's just not possible with the native File Explorer app.
The Files app is a great file manager
The intuitive UI in Files app also translates to the functionality. The tabbed browsing is fast and easy to navigate, and it has Dual Pane support (you can add a pane to a tab from the Menu button). This feature splits every single window into two. The second pane shows quick shortcuts, and allows you to browse to any folder. From there, simply drag and drop files, rearrange, or edit however you like.
The dual-pane layout makes transferring files a breeze, and you won't need to worry about window management either. The Details button is yet another nice touch. The sidebar can show a preview, and details of the selected file.
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
As mentioned above, the Column view is another useful way to navigate deeper into a complex folder structure without losing context, as you can see the parent folder to the left.
Another macOS Finder feature that works well in the Files app is Tagging support. Tags can be created from the sidebar, and multiple tags can be assigned to an single file. When you open a tag from the sidebar, it will show all the files related to the tag. This is a great way to pool in files from different folders, without actually moving them.
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
The Files app works with OneDrive and Google Drive by default, you can see all the files stored in your cloud storage account, and it can preview and unzip files. You can add support for other services like iCloud Drive and Dropbox.
Added functionality comes at a cost
From the Advanced settings, you can make the Files app your default file management app if you like. It can be used to open folders from Search, and even when downloading files. (Because of a Windows limitation, it can't be used when you're uploading files in the browser, but it can be the default file manager all everywhere else.)
But the question is, should you use Files as the default app? That will depend on your computer. The Files app is modern, and feature-rich, but it can also be a drag on your resources. It's slow to boot up the first time, and it can be really slow when you're batch-renaming files. But if you have a fast enough desktop PC, you won't feel the pinch.
Overall, its intuitive design, added navigation features, and the fact that it's available for free (competitive apps in the space usually cost $25), makes it well worth trying out—and a lot better than the Windows 11 standard.
Buried under the news from Google I/O this week is one of Google Cloud's biggest blunders ever: Google's Amazon Web Services competitor accidentally deleted a giant customer account for no reason. UniSuper, an Australian pension fund that manages $135 billion worth of funds and has 647,000 members, had its entire account wiped out at Google Cloud, including all its backups that were stored on the service. UniSuper thankfully had some backups with a different provider and was able to recover its data, but according to UniSuper's incident log, downtime started May 2, and a full restoration of services didn't happen until May 15.
UniSuper's website is now full of must-read admin nightmare fuel about how this all happened. First is a wild page posted on May 8 titled "A joint statement from UniSuper CEO Peter Chun, and Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian." This statement reads, "Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription. This is an isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally. This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption and taken measures to ensure this does not happen again."
In the next section, titled "Why did the outage last so long?" the joint statement says, "UniSuper had duplication in two geographies as a protection against outages and loss. However, when the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription occurred, it caused deletion across both of these geographies." Every cloud service keeps full backups, which you would presume are meant for worst-case scenarios. Imagine some hacker takes over your server or the building your data is inside of collapses, or something like that. But no, the actual worst-case scenario is "Google deletes your account," which means all those backups are gone, too. Google Cloud is supposed to have safeguards that don't allow account deletion, but none of them worked apparently, and the only option was a restore from a separate cloud provider (shoutout to the hero at UniSuper who chose a multi-cloud solution).
Enlarge/ This is essentially the kind of water heater the author has hooked up, minus the Wi-Fi module that led him down a rabbit hole. Also, not 140-degrees F—yikes. (credit: Getty Images)
The hot water took too long to come out of the tap. That is what I was trying to solve. I did not intend to discover that, for a while there, water heaters like mine may have been open to anybody. That, with some API tinkering and an email address, a bad actor could possibly set its temperature or make it run constantly. That’s just how it happened.
Let’s take a step back. My wife and I moved into a new home last year. It had a Rinnai tankless water heater tucked into a utility closet in the garage. The builder and home inspector didn't say much about it, just to run a yearly cleaning cycle on it.
Because it doesn’t keep a big tank of water heated and ready to be delivered to any house tap, tankless water heaters save energy—up to 34 percent, according to the Department of Energy. But they're also, by default, slower. Opening a tap triggers the exchanger, heats up the water (with natural gas, in my case), and the device has to push it through the line to where it's needed.
Enlarge/ Google continues to change what it means to be the "Google" search engine. (credit: Aurich Lawson)
Google I/O has come and gone, and with it came an almost exclusive focus on AI. Part of the show was an announcement for Google Search that was so huge it was almost hard to believe: the AI-powered "Search Generative Experience (SGE)" that the company had been trialing for months is rolling out to everyone in the US. The feature, renamed "AI Overview," is here now, and it feels like the biggest change to Google Search ever. The top of many results (especially questions) are now dominated by an AI box that scrapes the web and gives you a sometimes-correct summary without needing to click on a single result.
AI Overview is a bit different from the SGE trials that were happening. First is that AI Overview is a lot faster than SGE. For some popular queries, it seems like Google is caching the AI answer, which should help with the high cost of running generative AI. For queries with cached overviews, you'll see the AI box load instantly, right along with the initial search results pop-in. SGE responses would come in word by word, like they are being typed by a person. When you aren't getting a cached result, you'll see a blank AI overview box that loads with the search page, which will say "searching" while it loads for a second or two. Other times, Google will try loading an AI Overview and fail, with the message "An AI overview is not available for this search." (As if anyone asked.)
When Google decides you have an AI-appropriate query, it now takes a lot of scrolling to see web results. Google scrolls infinitely, so there are no "pages" anymore, but let's consider a "page" to be a full browser viewport height: The first page is an AI overview that takes up half the screen and then another answer box extracted from some website. Page two is a "People also ask" box suggesting other queries, then one search result, then a box for videos. Page three is the bottom half of the video box, then a "Discussions and forums" section with Reddit and Quora posts. It's not until page four and miles of scrolling that we get the traditional 10 blue links. This list isn't even counting an ad block, which would appear first normally. I've yet to see an ad block and AI overview at the same time, but I'm sure that's coming. Despite pushing AI Overviews live into production for everyone on the most premium spot on the Google Search page, Google still notes that "Generative AI is experimental."
It's amazing, and a little sad, to think that something created in 1989 that changed how people used and viewed the then-nascent Internet had nearly vanished by 2024.
Nearly, that is, because the dogged researchers and enthusiasts at The Serial Port channel on YouTube have found what is likely the last existing copy of Archie. Archie, first crafted by Alan Emtage while a student at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, allowed for the searching of various "anonymous" FTP servers around what was then a very small web of universities, researchers, and government and military nodes. It was groundbreaking; it was the first echo of the "anything, anywhere" Internet to come. And when The Serial Port went looking, it very much did not exist.
The Serial Port's journey from wondering where the last Archie server was to hosting its own.
While Archie would eventually be supplanted by Gopher, web portals, and search engines, it remains a useful way to index FTP sites and certainly should be preserved. The Serial Port did this, and the road to get there is remarkable and intriguing. You are best off watching the video of their rescue, along with its explanatory preamble. But I present here some notable bits of the tale, perhaps to tempt you into digging further.
Intel this week announced new Thunderbolt software made for connecting two PCs. Thunderbolt Share will require Intel-licensed hardware and is looking to make it simpler to do things like transferring large files from one PC to another or working with two systems simultaneously.
For example, you could use a Thunderbolt cable to connect one laptop to another and then configure the system so that your keyboard, mouse, and monitor work with both computers. Thunderbolt Share also enables dragging and dropping and syncing files between computers.
The app has similar functionality to a KVM switch or apps like PCmover, Logitech Flow, or macOS' File Sharing and Screen Sharing, which enable wireless file sharing. But Thunderbolt Share comes with Intel-backed Thunderbolt 4 or Thunderbolt 5 speeds (depending on the hardware) and some critical requirements.
RealVNC will soon end its "Home" plan that's free to use to remotely control up to three users and five devices. If you still wanted a non-commercial just-in-case plan, there is one, but you're going to have to hunt a bit.
RealVNC users with Home subscriptions will likely receive an email from the company with the subject line: "Important changes to your Home subscription." The email notes that the firm is "Retiring our Home plan" as of June 17, 2024.
After "launching a wider range of tiered plans designed to better cater to more users" and to "maintain a cohesive set of plan options," the email states, Home must be retired. RealVNC, asking itself FAQ-style, "What do I need to do?" notes that the easiest way to avoid disruption is to upgrade to a paid plan. Switch now and you can save 20 percent, after hitting the big blue button labeled "SAVE MY ACCOUNT," RealVNC suggests.
Enlarge/ The San Francisco 49ers' star quarterback Brock Purdy celebrates during a blowout 35-7 win over the Tom Brady-led Buccaneers. (credit: Getty Images/Thearon W. Henderson)
Hey, football fans! You're already watching the NFL on CBS, NBC, Fox, ABC, ESPN, ESPN Plus, Peacock, Amazon Prime Video, NFL Network, and YouTube TV, right? Well, get ready for one more: Netflix! The biggest streaming provider that wasn't showing NFL games is now jumping into the pile. The NFL and Netflix have signed a three-year deal that will put exclusive Christmas games on the streaming service.
The first Netflix Christmas games will be this season, on December 25, 2024, (that's a Wednesday, by the way). Netflix will get two Christmas games this year, Chiefs at Steelers and Ravens at Texans, with exact times to be announced later tonight at the NFL's live schedule unveiling extravaganza (even the schedule release is an event now). The NFL says 2025 and 2026 will see "at least one" game on the service each Christmas. The exact terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In the quickly changing landscape of TV, the NFL has long been one of the few things left that is still appointment television. Of the top 100 highest-rated US TV broadcasts in 2023, 93 percent of them were NFL games. In the hyper-fragmented world of streaming, landing a few exclusive NFL games is a great way to hook people into your service. NBC's exclusive Peacock playoff game brought in 23 million viewers last year. And even if that was a bit low by NFL standards, NBC called it "the most streamed event ever in US history" and "a milestone moment in media and sports history." You might think NFL fans would immediately cancel after the final kneel-down, but one study showed a shocking 71 percent of users that signed up for the NFL game were still on Peacock seven weeks later.
In an ironic twist, cable TV and Internet provider Comcast has announced that it, too, will sell a bundle of video-streaming services for a discounted price. The announcement comes as Comcast has been rapidly losing cable TV subscribers to streaming services and seeks to bring the same type of bundling that originally drew people away from cable to streaming.
Starting on an unspecified date this month, the bundle, called Streamsaver, will offer Peacock, which Comcast owns, Apple TV+, and Netflix to people who subscribe to Comcast's cable TV and/or broadband. Comcast already offers Netflix or Apple TV+ as add-ons to its cable TV, but Streamsaver expands Comcast's streaming-related bundling efforts.
Comcast didn't say how much the streaming bundle would cost, but CEO Brian Roberts said that it will “come at a vastly reduced price to anything in the market today" when announcing the bundle on Tuesday at MoffettNathanson’s 2024 Media, Internet and Communications Conference in New York, per Variety. If we factor in Peacock's upcoming price hike, subscribing to Apple TV+, Netflix, and Peacock separately would cost $39.47 per month without ads, or $24.97/month with ads.
Enlarge/ The Android 15 logo. This is "Android V," if you can't tell from the logo. (credit: Google)
Google's I/O conference is still happening, and while the big keynote was yesterday, major Android beta releases have apparently been downgraded to Day 2 of the show. Google really seems to want to be primarily an AI company now. Android already had some AI news yesterday, but now that the code-red requirements have been met, we have actual OS news.
One of the big features in this release is "Private Space," which Google says is a place where users can "keep sensitive apps away from prying eyes, under an additional layer of authentication." First, there's a new hidden-by-default portion of the app drawer that can hold these sensitive apps, and revealing that part of the app drawer requires a second round of lock-screen authentication, which can be different from the main phone lock screen.
Just like "Work" apps, the apps in this section run on a separate profile. To the system, they are run by a separate "user" with separate data, which your non-private apps won't be able to see. Interestingly, Google says, "When private space is locked by the user, the profile is paused, i.e., the apps are no longer active," so apps in a locked Private Space won't be able to show notifications unless you go through the second lock screen.
Broadcom's acquisition of VMware last year has led to widespread upheaval at the company, including layoffs, big changes to how it approaches software licensing, and general angst from customers and partners. Broadcom also discontinued the free-to-use version of VMware's vSphere Hypervisor/ESXi earlier this year, forcing home users to find alternatives.
Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro certainly aren't the only free-to-use virtualization products—VirtualBox has existed for years, and there are many indie projects that make use of Apple's virtualization frameworks for macOS. But VMware's products are a bit more polished and easier to learn than some of those alternatives, and VMware's file formats are also commonly used when redistributing virtual machines for retrocomputing purposes.
Ars Technica AI Reporter and tech historian Benj Edwards has co-written a book on the Virtual Boy with Dr. Jose Zagal. In this exclusive excerpt, Benj and Jose take you back to Nintendo of the early '90s, where a unique 3D display technology captured the imagination of legendary designer Gunpei Yokoi and set the stage for a daring, if ultimately ill-fated, foray into the world of stereoscopic gaming.
A full list of references can be found in the book.
Nearly 30 years after the launch of the Virtual Boy, not much is publicly known about how, exactly, Nintendo came to be interested in developing what would ultimately become its ill-fated console. Was Nintendo committed to VR as a future for video games and looking for technological solutions that made business sense? Or was the Virtual Boy primarily the result of Nintendo going “off script” and seizing a unique, and possibly risky, opportunity that presented itself? The answer is probably a little bit of both.
As it turns out, the Virtual Boy was not an anomaly in Nintendo’s history with video game platforms. Rather, it was the result of a deliberate strategy that was consistent with Nintendo’s way of doing things and informed by its lead creator Gunpei Yokoi’s design philosophy.
A new program, backed by Cornell Tech, M.I.T. and U.C.L.A., helps prepare lower-income, Latina and Black female computing majors for artificial intelligence careers.
The Break Through Tech A.I. program provides young women with learning and career opportunities in artificial intelligence.
Google's "code red" demands that AI be part of every single Google product and that includes Android. At Google I/O, the company announced a "multi-year journey to reimagine Android with AI at the core" but only demoed a few minor AI enhancements.
Gemini can soon be brought up via the power button as an overlay panel, where it will have access to whatever's on your screen. The demo involved opening a PDF in Android's PDF reader, summarizing it, and answering questions based on the content. You can do something similar with a YouTube video. The demo also showed generating images based on a text prompt and then sending those images in a text message. Another demo involved Gemini understanding a chat log and suggesting future actions.
Talkback, Android's system for low-vision users, will soon be able to use AI to describe images that lack descriptive text.
Enlarge/ A video still of Project Astra demo at the Google I/O conference keynote in Mountain View on May 14, 2024. (credit: Google)
Just one day after OpenAI revealed GPT-4o, which it bills as being able to understand what's taking place in a video feed and converse about it, Google announced Project Astra, a research prototype that features similar video comprehension capabilities. It was announced by Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis on Tuesday at the Google I/O conference keynote in Mountain View, California.
Hassabis called Astra "a universal agent helpful in everyday life." During a demonstration, the research model showcased its capabilities by identifying sound-producing objects, providing creative alliterations, explaining code on a monitor, and locating misplaced items. The AI assistant also exhibited its potential in wearable devices, such as smart glasses, where it could analyze diagrams, suggest improvements, and generate witty responses to visual prompts.
Google says that Astra uses the camera and microphone on a user's device to provide assistance in everyday life. By continuously processing and encoding video frames and speech input, Astra creates a timeline of events and caches the information for quick recall. The company says that this enables the AI to identify objects, answer questions, and remember things it has seen that are no longer in the camera's frame.
Enlarge/ "Google will do the Googling for you," says firm's search chief. (credit: Google)
Search is still important to Google, but soon it will change. At its all-in-one AI Google I/O event Tuesday, the company introduced a host of AI-enabled features coming to Google Search at various points in the near future, which will "do more for you than you ever imagined."
"Google will do the Googling for you," said Liz Reid, Google's head of Search.
It's not AI in every search, but it will seemingly be hard to avoid a lot of offers to help you find, plan, and brainstorm things. "AI Overviews," the successor to the Search Generative Experience, will provide summary answers to questions, along with links to sources. You can also soon submit a video as a search query, perhaps to identify objects or provide your own prompts by voice.
AI in Gmail summarizes recent emails. [credit:
Google ]
Google's Gemini AI often just feels like a chatbot built into a text-input field, but you can really start to do special things when you give it access to a ton of data. Gemini in Gmail will soon be able to search through your entire backlog of emails and show a summary in a sidebar.
That's simple to describe but solves a huge problem with email: even searching brings up a list of email subjects, and you have to click-through to each one just to read it. Having an AI sift through a bunch of emails and provide a summary sounds like a huge time saver and something you can't do with any other interface.
Google's one-minute demo of this feature showed a big blue Gemini button at the top right of the Gmail web app. Tapping it opens the normal chatbot sidebar you can type in. Asking for a summary of emails from a certain contact will get you a bullet-point list of what has been happening, with a list of "sources" at the bottom that will jump you right to a certain email. In the last second of the demo, the user types, "Reply saying I want to volunteer for the parent's group event," hits "enter," and then the chatbot instantly sends an email. We thought it was interesting that the demo never showed a confirmation step, but a Google rep contacted us later to say the production version would show you the message before sending it.
Apple has released the latest updates for virtually all of its actively supported devices today. Most include a couple handfuls of security updates, some new features for Apple News+ subscribers, and something called Cross-Platform Tracking Protection for Bluetooth devices.
The iOS 17.5, iPadOS 17.5, macOS 4.5, watchOS 10.5, tvOS 17.5, and HomePod Software 17.5 updates are all available to download now.
Cross-Platform Tracking Protection notifications alert users "if a compatible Bluetooth tracker they do not own is moving with them, regardless of what operating system the device is paired with." Apple has already implemented protections to prevent AirTag stalking, and Cross-Platform Tracking Protection implements some of those same safeguards for devices paired to non-Apple phones.
Enlarge/ The 2024, M4-equipped 13-inch iPad Pro. (credit: Samuel Axon)
The new iPad Pro is a technical marvel, with one of the best screens I’ve ever seen, performance that few other machines can touch, and a new, thinner design that no one expected.
It’s a prime example of Apple flexing its engineering and design muscles for all to see. Since it marks the company’s first foray into OLED beyond the iPhone or Watch, and the first time a new M-series chip has debuted on something other than a Mac, it comes across as a tech demo for where the company is headed beyond just tablets.
Still, it remains unclear why most people would spend one, two, or even three thousand dollars on a tablet that, despite its amazing hardware, does less than a comparably priced laptop—or at least does it a little more awkwardly, even if it's impressively quick and has a gorgeous screen.
The new 13-inch iPad Air with the Apple M2 processor inside. [credit:
Andrew Cunningham ]
The iPad Air has been a lot of things in the last decade-plus. In 2013 and 2014, the first iPad Airs were just The iPad, and the “Air” label simply denoted how much lighter and more streamlined they were than the initial 2010 iPad and 2011’s long-lived iPad 2. After that, the iPad Air 2 survived for years as an entry-level model, as Apple focused on introducing and building out the iPad Pro.
The Air disappeared for a while after that, but it returned in 2019 as an in-betweener model to bridge the gap between the $329 iPad (no longer called “Air,” despite reusing the first-gen Air design) and more-expensive and increasingly powerful iPad Pros. It definitely made sense to have a hardware offering to span the gap between the basic no-frills iPad and the iPad Pro, but pricing and specs could make things complicated. The main issue for the last couple of years has been the base Air's 64GB of storage—scanty enough that memory swapping doesn't even work on it— and the fact that stepping up to 256GB brought the Air too close to the price of the 11-inch iPad Pro.
Which brings us to the 2024 M2 iPad Air, now available in 11-inch and 13-inch models for $599 and $799, respectively. Apple solved the overlap problem this year partly by bumping the Air's base storage to a more usable 128GB and partly by making the 11-inch iPad Pro so much more expensive that it almost entirely eliminates any pricing overlap (only the 1TB 11-inch Air, at $1,099, is more expensive than the cheapest 11-inch iPad Pro).
The Pixel 8a and its speedy 120 Hz display. [credit:
Ron Amadeo ]
SPECS AT A GLANCE: Pixel 8a
SCREEN
6.1-inch, 120 Hz, 2400×1080 OLED
OS
Android 14
CPU
Google Tensor G3
One 3.0 GHz Cortex-X3 core
Four 2.45 GHz Cortex-A715 cores
Four 2.15 GHz Cortex-A510 Cores
GPU
ARM Mali-G715
RAM
8GB
STORAGE
128GB, UFS 3.1
BATTERY
4492 mAh
NETWORKING
Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, GPS, NFC
PORTS
USB Type-C 3.1 Gen 1 with 18 W USB-PD 3.0 charging
CAMERA
64MP main camera, 13 MP Ultrawide, 13 MP front camera
SIZE
152.1×72.7×8.9 mm
WEIGHT
188 g
STARTING PRICE
$499.99
OTHER PERKS
IP67 dust and water resistance, eSIM, in-screen fingerprint reader, 5 W wireless charging
Somehow, Google's midrange phone just keeps getting better. The Pixel 8a improves on many things over the Pixel 7a—it has a better display, a longer support cycle, and the usual yearly CPU upgrades, all at the same $499 price as last year. Who could complain? The Pixel A series was already the best bargain in smartphones, and there's now very little difference between it and a flagship-class device.
Year over year, the 6.1-inch, 2400×1080 display is being upgraded from 90 Hz to 120 Hz, giving you essentially the same experience you'd get on the "flagship" Pixels. The SoC is the same processor you'd get in the Pixel 9, a Google Tensor G3. That's a 4 nm chip with one Arm Cortex X3, four Cortex A715 cores, four Cortex A510 cores, and a Mali G715 GPU.
Previously, the 120 Hz display was the primary thing A-series owners were missing out on compared to the more expensive Pixels, so its addition is a huge deal. Any comparison between the "midrange" Pixel 8a and the "flagship" 6.2-inch Pixel 8 will now just be splitting hairs. The flagship gets an extra 0.1 inches of display, 2 percent more battery, and Wi-Fi 6E instead of Wi-Fi 7. The cameras are technically newer, but since they all run the same image-stacking software, the images look very similar. Are those things worth an extra $200? No, they are not.
Against all good sense, my old ass has been getting into mountain biking over the last few months. It’s a fun hobby, but I find the part of mountain biking where you ride up the mountain to be less fun. Miserable, even.
It's not just hard on my body. Being confronted with how out-of-shape I am is hard on my soul. So I'm grateful for my personal deliverance: Canyon's Spectral:ON CF 7. This all-carbon electric mountain bike takes the misery out of the sport, leaving riders free to enjoy themselves and/or fear for their lives, even if they aren't in peak condition.
The CF 7 isn't really a beginner's bike, though, so to get fuller perspective on it, I asked O.G. mountain biker and mountain bike instructor Colin Wedel to put the CF 7 through a more punishing set of paces. More details below, but overall, both the beginner and the ringer were impressed.
Overview of the Canyon CF 7 e-Mountain Bike
Credit: Stephen Johnson
On the mountain bike continuum. On one end, there are cross-country bikes designed to be pedaled uphill. On the other, there are "that's what ski-lifts are for" downhill bikes. The CF 7 is right in the middle, a trail bike that aims for a "does anything" sweet spot in terms of geometry, suspension, weight, and flexibility—it's designed to get you both up and down hills with (relative) ease.
Instead of getting granular about how smoothly the gears change or how well the brakes perform, I'll just say this: The CF 7 features high quality components and was built by a company that's been making mountain bikes since the 1990s. It's a $4,000 bike—far from the priciest on the market, but a "serious" ride anyway, and everything about it lives up to the level of performance you'd expect at that price.
How the Spectral:ON CF 7 rides: An experienced perspective
Credit: Stephen Johnson
Collin Wedel is a mountain bike instructor who has been riding both analog and e-mountain bikes all over the west coast for decades. He took the Canyon CF 7 out for an afternoon ride in the mountains over Simi Valley recently, and reported back. "When you first look at it, you're like, 'Man, this looks like a bulky bike,'" he said. "But when you get on it, it feels super agile, super nimble, very playful. It feels so much lighter than it actually is."
"On the trail, it just comes alive," Wedel added, "It feels great on the fast flowy, and it corners phenomenally. Man, it just, it just ate up the corners. You can really sit and press into them, especially banked corners. It really settles in super nicely. I even hit a big jump, a 20-footer, and it just sent it perfect."
As for more technical sections of the trail, Wedel noted: "On the chattery bits, there's a little bit too much vibration in my hands. I don't know if that's because I'm a little over sprung in the shocks, especially in the fork, so I could probably adjust that with some fine tuning from air pressure standpoint."
How the CF 7 rides: A beginner's perspective
Credit: Stephen Johnson
I was happy with this bike's ability to drag me up a hill, but that's basically what I expect from the "e" part of any e-bike. The surprising thing was how much fun I had going down.
The CF 7 seems like a behemoth compared to the lighter mountain bike I've been riding. Even though it's all fiber, it still weighs over 50 pounds (mostly battery). I expected that a bike this heavy would feel unwieldy or hard-to-control on the downs. But the first time I hit the button that drops the CF 7's saddle, stood up on the pedals, crossed myself, and went down, those fears disappeared. It feels like something clicks into place, and you're in in a stable, in-control position, where the heft of the bike disappears. You realize, "oh, it was designed for this," and relax into the ride. Don't get me wrong: It's still terrifying, but less so on this bike.
Are you a beginner? I know $4,000 is a lot for a bike, but if you can manage it, it's an excellent ride to learn on. This is only the second mountain bike I've ridden for any length of time, and the difference between my decent, but nothing special hard-tail and this one is night and day, mainly in terms of how safe it feels. The CF 7's 160mm of travel in the front fork and the 150mm in the rear suspension is not only great for burly warriors landing big jumps, it's forgiving if you're like me, white knuckling it over rocks and obstacles and praying you don't break your neck. Getting down a trail in one piece is much easier if your suspension can eat your mistakes.
The bike is responsive in turns and holds traction well too, even if your technique is lacking. Like most beginners, I tend to ride the brakes too hard on downhills. While I didn't take it down any black diamond runs, the traction and control I felt on the drops on the gravel or fire-roads I frequent was excellent.
The "electric" part of this electric mountain bike
Credit: Stephen Johnson
I may not have a ton of mountain bike experience, but I've ridden a ton of electric bikes, and the CF 7's Shimano EP8 motor is excellent. The mid-drive, torque-based assistance delivers 400% pedal assist so smoothly it doesn't feel like a motor is helping you as much as it feels like your legs have suddenly become super-strong.
In keeping with the "it's a mountain bike" vibe, the full-color screen is unobtrusive, small, and "just the facts." It tells you how fast you're going, what your level of pedal assist is, and how much battery you have left. There's also anti-theft GPS tracking built in, and your bike can be paired with Canyon's app,
The battery is removable, but embedded in the downtube to keep the weight balanced and the center of gravity on-point. This is a minor gripe, but I found removing it to be complicated and fiddly. I did it exactly once, then charged it without removing it. I'm lazy like that.
There's no throttle—this isn't a ride for touring around town—but the bike's five assist levels mean you can sprinkle in as much or as little help as you want, from "just a little extra" eco-mode to "haul my fat ass up this mountain for me" turbo mode. How long the battery will last depends on how you use it of course, but it provides enough power that your legs are likely to tire out before the battery does.
Overall: A fun bike for any
Collin says the ideal rider of this bike is the "weekend warrior," someone who's not a pro, but still wants the performance of a high-end bike. I aspire to weekend warrior status, but I also think it's a great bike for people starting out. With a high quality ride, the learning curve is less tortuous, especially since you don't have to pedal up hills.
MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.
Thanks to the boom in artificial intelligence, the world of chips is on the cusp of a huge tidal shift. There is heightened demand for chips that can train AI models faster and ping them from devices like smartphones and satellites, enabling us to use these models without disclosing private data. Governments, tech giants, and startups alike are racing to carve out their slices of the growing semiconductor pie.
Here are four trends to look for in the year ahead that will define what the chips of the future will look like, who will make them, and which new technologies they’ll unlock.
CHIPS Acts around the world
On the outskirts of Phoenix, two of the world’s largest chip manufacturers, TSMC and Intel, are racing to construct campuses in the desert that they hope will become the seats of American chipmaking prowess. One thing the efforts have in common is their funding: in March, President Joe Biden announced $8.5 billion in direct federal funds and $11 billion in loans for Intel’s expansions around the country. Weeks later, another $6.6 billion was announced for TSMC.
The awards are just a portion of the US subsidies pouring into the chips industry via the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act signed in 2022. The money means that any company with a foot in the semiconductor ecosystem is analyzing how to restructure its supply chains to benefit from the cash. While much of the money aims to boost American chip manufacturing, there’s room for other players to apply, from equipment makers to niche materials startups.
But the US is not the only country trying to onshore some of the chipmaking supply chain. Japan is spending $13 billion on its own equivalent to the CHIPS Act, Europe will be spending more than $47 billion, and earlier this year India announced a $15 billion effort to build local chip plants. The roots of this trend go all the way back to 2014, says Chris Miller, a professor at Tufts University and author of Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology. That’s when China started offering massive subsidies to its chipmakers.
SIMON & SCHUSTER
“This created a dynamic in which other governments concluded they had no choice but to offer incentives or see firms shift manufacturing to China,” he says. That threat, coupled with the surge in AI, has led Western governments to fund alternatives. In the next year, this might have a snowball effect, with even more countries starting their own programs for fear of being left behind.
The money is unlikely to lead to brand-new chip competitors or fundamentally restructure who the biggest chip players are, Miller says. Instead, it will mostly incentivize dominant players like TSMC to establish roots in multiple countries. But funding alone won’t be enough to do that quickly—TSMC’s effort to build plants in Arizona has been mired in missed deadlines and labor disputes, and Intel has similarly failed to meet its promised deadlines. And it’s unclear whether, whenever the plants do come online, their equipment and labor force will be capable of the same level of advanced chipmaking that the companies maintain abroad.
“The supply chain will only shift slowly, over years and decades,” Miller says. “But it is shifting.”
More AI on the edge
Currently, most of our interactions with AI models like ChatGPT are done via the cloud. That means that when you ask GPT to pick out an outfit (or to be your boyfriend), your request pings OpenAI’s servers, prompting the model housed there to process it and draw conclusions (known as “inference”) before a response is sent back to you. Relying on the cloud has some drawbacks: it requires internet access, for one, and it also means some of your data is shared with the model maker.
That’s why there’s been a lot of interest and investment in edge computing for AI, where the process of pinging the AI model happens directly on your device, like a laptop or smartphone. With the industry increasingly working toward a future in which AI models know a lot about us (Sam Altman described his killer AI app to me as one that knows “absolutely everything about my whole life, every email, every conversation I’ve ever had”), there’s a demand for faster “edge” chips that can run models without sharing private data. These chips face different constraints from the ones in data centers: they typically have to be smaller, cheaper, and more energy efficient.
The US Department of Defense is funding a lot of research into fast, private edge computing. In March, its research wing, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), announced a partnership with chipmaker EnCharge AI to create an ultra-powerful edge computing chip used for AI inference. EnCharge AI is working to make a chip that enables enhanced privacy but can also operate on very little power. This will make it suitable for military applications like satellites and off-grid surveillance equipment. The company expects to ship the chips in 2025.
AI models will always rely on the cloud for some applications, but new investment and interest in improving edge computing could bring faster chips, and therefore more AI, to our everyday devices. If edge chips get small and cheap enough, we’re likely to see even more AI-driven “smart devices” in our homes and workplaces. Today, AI models are mostly constrained to data centers.
“A lot of the challenges that we see in the data center will be overcome,” says EnCharge AI cofounder Naveen Verma. “I expect to see a big focus on the edge. I think it’s going to be critical to getting AI at scale.”
Big Tech enters the chipmaking fray
In industries ranging from fast fashion to lawn care, companies are paying exorbitant amounts in computing costs to create and train AI models for their businesses. Examples include models that employees can use to scan and summarize documents, as well as externally facing technologies like virtual agents that can walk you through how to repair your broken fridge. That means demand for cloud computing to train those models is through the roof.
The companies providing the bulk of that computing power are Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. For years these tech giants have dreamed of increasing their profit margins by making chips for their data centers in-house rather than buying from companies like Nvidia, a giant with a near monopoly on the most advanced AI training chips and a value larger than the GDP of 183 countries.
Amazon started its effort in 2015, acquiring startup Annapurna Labs. Google moved next in 2018 with its own chips called TPUs. Microsoft launched its first AI chips in November, and Meta unveiled a new version of its own AI training chips in April.
AP PHOTO/ERIC RISBERG
That trend could tilt the scales away from Nvidia. But Nvidia doesn’t only play the role of rival in the eyes of Big Tech: regardless of their own in-house efforts, cloud giants still need its chips for their data centers. That’s partly because their own chipmaking efforts can’t fulfill all their needs, but it’s also because their customers expect to be able to use top-of-the-line Nvidia chips.
“This is really about giving the customers the choice,” says Rani Borkar, who leads hardware efforts at Microsoft Azure. She says she can’t envision a future in which Microsoft supplies all chips for its cloud services: “We will continue our strong partnerships and deploy chips from all the silicon partners that we work with.”
As cloud computing giants attempt to poach a bit of market share away from chipmakers, Nvidia is also attempting the converse. Last year the company started its own cloud service so customers can bypass Amazon, Google, or Microsoft and get computing time on Nvidia chips directly. As this dramatic struggle over market share unfolds, the coming year will be about whether customers see Big Tech’s chips as akin to Nvidia’s most advanced chips, or more like their little cousins.
Nvidia battles the startups
Despite Nvidia’s dominance, there is a wave of investment flowing toward startups that aim to outcompete it in certain slices of the chip market of the future. Those startups all promise faster AI training, but they have different ideas about which flashy computing technology will get them there, from quantum to photonics to reversible computation.
But Murat Onen, the 28-year-old founder of one such chip startup, Eva, which he spun out of his PhD work at MIT, is blunt about what it’s like to start a chip company right now.
“The king of the hill is Nvidia, and that’s the world that we live in,” he says.
Many of these companies, like SambaNova, Cerebras, and Graphcore, are trying to change the underlying architecture of chips. Imagine an AI accelerator chip as constantly having to shuffle data back and forth between different areas: a piece of information is stored in the memory zone but must move to the processing zone, where a calculation is made, and then be stored back to the memory zone for safekeeping. All that takes time and energy.
Making that process more efficient would deliver faster and cheaper AI training to customers, but only if the chipmaker has good enough software to allow the AI training company to seamlessly transition to the new chip. If the software transition is too clunky, model makers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral are likely to stick with big-name chipmakers.That means companies taking this approach, like SambaNova, are spending a lot of their time not just on chip design but on software design too.
Onen is proposing changes one level deeper. Instead of traditional transistors, which have delivered greater efficiency over decades by getting smaller and smaller, he’s using a new component called a proton-gated transistor that he says Eva designed specifically for the mathematical needs of AI training. It allows devices to store and process data in the same place, saving time and computing energy. The idea of using such a component for AI inference dates back to the 1960s, but researchers could never figure out how to use it for AI training, in part because of a materials roadblock—it requires a material that can, among other qualities, precisely control conductivity at room temperature.
One day in the lab, “through optimizing these numbers, and getting very lucky, we got the material that we wanted,” Onen says. “All of a sudden, the device is not a science fair project.” That raised the possibility of using such a component at scale. After months of working to confirm that the data was correct, he founded Eva, and the work was published in Science.
But in a sector where so many founders have promised—and failed—to topple the dominance of the leading chipmakers, Onen frankly admits that it will be years before he’ll know if the design works as intended and if manufacturers will agree to produce it. Leading a company through that uncertainty, he says, requires flexibility and an appetite for skepticism from others.
“I think sometimes people feel too attached to their ideas, and then kind of feel insecure that if this goes away there won’t be anything next,” he says. “I don’t think I feel that way. I’m still looking for people to challenge us and say this is wrong.”
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A British toddler has had her hearing restored after becoming the first person in the world to take part in a pioneering gene therapy trial, in a development that doctors say marks a new era in treating deafness. Opal Sandy was born unable to hear anything due to auditory neuropathy, a condition that disrupts nerve impulses traveling from the inner ear to the brain and can be caused by a faulty gene. But after receiving an infusion containing a working copy of the gene during groundbreaking surgery that took just 16 minutes, the 18-month-old can hear almost perfectly and enjoys playing with toy drums. [...] The girl, from Oxfordshire, was treated at Addenbrooke's hospital, part of Cambridge university hospitals NHS foundation trust, which is running the Chord trial. More deaf children from the UK, Spain and the US are being recruited to the trial and will all be followed up for five years. [...]
Auditory neuropathy can be caused by a fault in the OTOF gene, which makes a protein called otoferlin. This enables cells in the ear to communicate with the hearing nerve. To overcome the fault, the new therapy from biotech firm Regeneron sends a working copy of the gene to the ear. A second child has also recently received the gene therapy treatment at Cambridge university hospitals, with positive results. The overall Chord trial consists of three parts, with three deaf children including Opal receiving a low dose of gene therapy in one ear only. A different set of three children will get a high dose on one side. Then, if that is shown to be safe, more children will receive a dose in both ears at the same time. In total, 18 children worldwide will be recruited to the trial. The gene therapy -- DB-OTO -- is specifically for children with OTOF mutations. A harmless virus is used to carry the working gene into the patient.
In addition to being visually stunning, the appeal of the Northern Lights also has to do with their unpredictability. Even with the most advanced technology, it can be difficult for forecasters to pinpoint precisely when and where the colorful displays in the sky will be seen until shortly before the show begins. On top of everything else, there's the weather, and the fact that a few too many clouds could turn what was supposed to be a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle into spending hours in the bitter cold for no reason.
While there's nothing you can do about the weather, if you happen to be in a location where the Northern Lights were forecasted to be visible, but you can't see a thing—or can maybe barely make out something in the distance—your phone might be able to help, according to an expert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC).
How to use your phone to see the Northern Lights
To clarify, you can't just walk outside on any clear night, anywhere in the world, and capture images of the Northern Lights with your phone. This only works when a potential aurora display was forecasted in your area, or slightly to the north of it.
According to Brent Gordon, chief of the space weather services branch for the SWPC, developments in smartphone technology have improved their ability to capture images of the Northern Lights. "With some of the recent events, we've been seeing some amazing aurora images as far as south Texas and even a couple down in Central America—things that the human eye can't see," he said in media briefing call on May 10.
No special skills are required: Simply aim your phone at the sky, and snap a picture. "You may be surprised when you look at that image later—there might be a nice little treat there for you," Gordon says.
That said, the goal here isn't to produce high-level photos of the aurora display. In this scenario, your phone is acting more like a telescope than a camera, helping you see something you otherwise couldn't.
Why can phones see the Northern Lights when we can't? Simply put, "cell phones are much better than our eyes at capturing light," Gordon says. "Because they're much more tuned to a visible wavelength than our eyes are, that's how we're seeing these images the aurora so far south."
OpenAI is eventually coming for the most popular website on the Internet: Google Search. A Reuters report claimed that the company behind ChatGPT is planning to launch a search engine as early as this Monday, but OpenAI denied that Monday would be the day.
The company recently confirmed it's holding a livestream event on Monday, though, but an OpenAI rep told Ars that "Despite reports, we’re not launching a search product or GPT-5 on Monday." Either way, Monday is an interesting time for an OpenAI livestream. That's the day before Google's biggest show of the year, Google I/O, where Google will primarily want to show off its AI prowess and convince people that it is not being left in the dust by OpenAI. Google seeing its biggest search competition in years and suddenly having to face down "OpenAI's Google Killer" would have definitely cast a shadow over the show.
OpenAI has been inching toward a search engine for a while now. It has been working with Microsoft with a "Bing Chat" generative-AI search engine in Microsoft's search engine. Earlier this week, The Verge reported that "OpenAI has been aggressively trying to poach Google employees" for an upstart search team. "Search.chatgpt.com" is already being set up on OpenAI's server, so it's all falling into place.
Enlarge/ One of many human-created objects destroyed in Apple's "Crush!" ad for the iPad Pro. (credit: Apple)
Earlier this week, Apple took the wraps off of a thoroughly leaked iPad Pro refresh with a 1 minute and 8 second ad spot wherein a gigantic hydraulic press comprehensively smushes a trumpet, an arcade cabinet, a record player, paint cans, a piano, a TV, sculptures, a bunch of emoji, and plenty of other tools that one might loosely categorize as "artistic implements."
At the end of the ad, the press lifts away to reveal a somewhat thinner, somewhat faster version of Apple's iPad Pro. The message of the ad, titled "Crush!" and still available via Apple's YouTube channel and CEO Tim Cook's Twitter account, is obvious: look at all of the things we've squeezed into this tablet!
"Just imagine all the things it'll be used to create," wrote Cook.
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
The human brain is an engineering marvel: 86 billion neurons form some 100 trillion connections to create a network so complex that it is, ironically, mind boggling.
This week scientists published the highest-resolution map yet of one small piece of the brain, a tissue sample one cubic millimeter in size. The resulting data set comprised 1,400 terabytes. (If they were to reconstruct the entire human brain, the data set would be a full zettabyte. That’s a billion terabytes. That’s roughly a year’s worth of all the digital content in the world.)
This map is just one of many that have been in the news in recent years. (I wrote about another brain map last year.) So this week I thought we could walk through some of the ways researchers make these maps and how they hope to use them.
Scientists have been trying to map the brain for as long as they’ve been studying it. One of the most well-known brain maps came from German anatomist Korbinian Brodmann. In the early 1900s, he took sections of the brain that had been stained to highlight their structure and drew maps by hand, with 52 different areas divided according to how the neurons were organized. “He conjectured that they must do different things because the structure of their staining patterns are different,” says Michael Hawrylycz, a computational neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Updated versions of his maps are still used today.
“With modern technology, we’ve been able to bring a lot more power to the construction,” he says. And over the past couple of decades we’ve seen an explosion of large, richly funded mapping efforts.
BigBrain, which was released in 2013, is a 3D rendering of the brain of a single donor, a 65-year-old woman. To create the atlas, researchers sliced the brain into more than 7,000 sections, took detailed images of each one, and stitched the sections into a three-dimensional reconstruction.
In the Human Connectome Project, researchers scanned 1,200 volunteers in MRI machines to map structural and functional connections in the brain. “They were able to map out what regions were activated in the brain at different times under different activities,” Hawrylycz says.
This kind of noninvasive imaging can provide valuable data, but “Its resolution is extremely coarse,” he adds. “Voxels [think: a 3D pixel] are of the size of a millimeter to three millimeters.”
And there are other projects too. The Synchrotron for Neuroscience—an Asia Pacific Strategic Enterprise, a.k.a. “SYNAPSE,” aims tomap the connections of an entire human brain at a very fine-grain resolution using synchrotron x-ray microscopy. The EBRAINS human brain atlas contains information on anatomy, connectivity, and function.
The work I wrote about last year is part of the $3 billion federally funded Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, which launched in 2013. In this project, led by the Allen Institute for Brain Science, which has developed a number of brain atlases, researchers are working to develop a parts list detailing the vast array of cells in the human brain by sequencing single cells to look at gene expression. So far they’ve identified more than 3,000 types of brain cells, and they expect to find many more as they map more of the brain.
The draft map was based on brain tissue from just two donors. In the coming years, the team will add samples from hundreds more.
Mapping the cell types present in the brain seems like a straightforward task, but it’s not. The first stumbling block is deciding how to define a cell type. Seth Ament, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, likes to give his neuroscience graduate students a rundown of all the different ways brain cells can be defined: by their morphology, or by the way the cells fire, or by their activity during certain behaviors. But gene expression may be the Rosetta stone brain researchers have been looking for, he says: “If you look at cells from the perspective of just what genes are turned on in them, it corresponds almost one to one to all of those other kinds of properties of cells.” That’s the most remarkable discovery from all the cell atlases, he adds.
I have always assumed the point of all these atlases is to gain a better understanding of the brain. But Jeff Lichtman, a neuroscientist at Harvard University, doesn’t think “understanding” is the right word. He likens trying to understand the human brain to trying to understand New York City. It’s impossible. “There’s millions of things going on simultaneously, and everything is working, interacting, in different ways,” he says. “It’s too complicated.”
But as this latest paper shows, it is possible to describe the human brain in excruciating detail. “Having a satisfactory description means simply that if I look at a brain, I’m no longer surprised,” Lichtman says. That day is a long way off, though. The data Lichtman and his colleagues published this week was full of surprises—and many more are waiting to be uncovered.
Now read the rest of The Checkup
Another thing
The revolutionary AI tool AlphaFold, which predicts proteins’ structures on the basis of their genetic sequence, just got an upgrade, James O’Donnell reports. Now the tool can predict interactions between molecules.
And in 2017, we flagged the Human Cell Atlas project, which aims to categorize all the cells of the human body, as a breakthrough technology. That project is still underway.
All these big, costly efforts to map the brain haven’t exactly led to a breakthrough in our understanding of its function, writes Emily Mullin in this story from 2021.
From around the web
The Apple Watch’s atrial fibrillation (AFib) feature received FDA approval to track heart arrhythmias in clinical trials, making it the first digital health product to be qualified under the agency’s Medical Device Development Tools program. (Stat)
A CRISPR gene therapy improved vision in several people with an inherited form of blindness, according to an interim analysis of a small clinical trial to test the therapy. (CNN)
Long read: The covid vaccine, like all vaccines, can cause side effects. But many people who say they have been harmed by the vaccine feel that their injuries are being ignored. (NYT)
Asahi Linux, the project that aims to bring desktop Linux to Apple hardware with Apple silicon—the M series of chips—is out with Fedora Asahi Remix 40. More hardware features of Apple devices are supported, the Fedora Linux 40-based distro ships with KDE's new Plasma 6 desktop, and untold numbers of bugs are squashed, to be replaced with reams more.
Fedora Asahi Remix is a "fully integrated distro," according to the Asahi team, and you can "expect a solid and high-quality experience without any unwanted surprises." It supports all the M1 and M2 devices in the MacBook, Mac Mini, Mac Studio, and iMac lines. It's OpenGL 4.6 and OpenGL ES 3.2 certified, and comes with "the best Linux laptop audio you've ever heard."
So, should you install it on your Mac? Keep scrolling down Asahi's release page and check the "Device support" section. Still missing from most M-series Apple devices are support for Thunderbolt and USB4, built-in microphones, and Touch ID, as well as USB-C display support. Speakers are not supported on the iMac. And HDMI audio is in rough shape, being able to "break audio on the system completely."
I've had an e-ink tablet—specifically, the reMarkable 2—for a couple of years now. There are a few products like it on the market: devices with black and white, Kindle-like e-ink screens and some sort of stylus that gives you the ability to take notes and mark up existing PDFs and e-books. They exist somewhere between an iPad and a pad of paper.
Most of the time when I use the reMarkable in public, people don't realize, or don't care, that it isn't just a pad of paper. I love that—part of the appeal is that this sort of device comes between me and the people around me less than an iPad or laptop would. Those who are familiar with the e-ink tablet category, however, often do notice, and want to know: How do you like it? What do you use it for? Can it completely replace something like an iPad? And that's what I want to talk about today.
My answer to such questions, typically, is that e-ink tablets are very good at replacing paper-based workflows, and very bad at replacing computer-based ones. On some level you have to think about it less as a computing device and more as a pad of paper with infinite pages. It's not quite that simple, of course; most e-ink tablets sync your notes with other devices and convert your handwriting into plain text. Some can even run apps. But in my experience, an e-ink tablet works best when you treat it as virtual paper.
That limited functionality doesn't mean they cost less than a tablet. The reMarkable 2 starts at $400, which isn't cheap. The Chinese company Only BOOX is well known in the space, and sells e-ink tablets starting at around $400 (for the Note Air 3). The Kindle Scribe is a little cheaper, at $240. Meanwhile, the iPad starts at $350 and is arguably more capable. All of this to say, if you're buying an e-ink tablet, it needs to be for a specific reason.
People who love paper know that lined, blank, and gridded paper all have different uses. So do dedicated notebooks and day planners. My favorite part of the Remarkable is that this single device offers all of these types of paper, in one place, and that I can add even more flexibility by finding purpose-built PDFs. With that in mind, here are the things I tend to use my e-ink tablet for the most.
Brainstorming
Almost all of my writing workflow happens on my computer, with one main exception: brainstorming. Whether it's trying to come up with new article ideas or thinking through the way an article should flow, I find that sitting down at a table with a pen and paper works better than sitting at my laptop.
There are a couple reasons for this. First, it's too easy to be distracted at my computer. Another, though, is that brainstorming is less linear than writing, and non-linear thinking is easier for me to do with a pen. I can write things wherever I want on the page, draw little arrows connecting them, and generally just make a mess. It's this combination of focus and open-ended writing that works for me, and e-ink is perfect for it.
Reading and marking up documents
Every once in a while something I'm working on requires that I parse an academic text or a dense article. There's nothing stopping me from doing such reading on a computer, but I find I grasp the content better if I read away from my laptop. At one point in my life I would print out documents out for exactly this reason, but now I just use my e-ink tablet. I send the PDF to the device and switch between the highlighter and pen to mark it up. When I get to my computer all my annotations are synced over.
Taking notes during a meeting
Once upon a time I was the person in the corner of the meeting constantly typing away. I'm a loud typer, so that was distracting for everyone, and it also meant there was a screen between me and the other people in the room. A e-ink tablet doesn't feel tas obtrusive. I can occasionally jot things down while also feeling fully present in the room. My notes are waiting for me when I get back to my computer, and I can even convert them quickly to text.
Planning my day
Credit: Justin Pot
Don't get me wrong: I love digital to-do list and calendar apps, and couldn't live without them. When it comes to blocking out the current day's and week's projects, however, they never really click. That's why I love the day planner templates in the Remarkable—they allow me to quickly block out what I'm going to work on and when. There is something about physically writing this on a calendar that works for me. This process got even better when I found this PDF day planner, which uses the link functionality in PDFs to make it easy to jump between days, weeks, and months, and even notes that are tied to a particular day.
Playing Dungeons & Dragons
Credit: Justin Pot
I love playing DND and hate every smartphone-, tablet-, and laptop-based system for managing a character. Try as they may, none are quite as flexible as a paper character sheet. But paper has some clear downsides, mostly because I tend to scuff them up so much I need to replace them every few sessions. My Remarkable doesn't have this problem, and also makes it easy to quickly add more pages when I want to write something else down. I even created a separate document with all of my character's race, class, and spell information, saving me the trouble of digging through the Player's Handbook constantly during the play session.
If you want to do anything else—all the stuff you'd usually use your tablet for—e-ink tablets range from adequate to incapable. There are a few obvious downsides: There's no color (unless you pay through the nose color a color e-ink tablet, but the tech definitely isn't quite there yet, producing colors that look muddy and dull). You generally can't watch videos or play games on them (though newer tablets with higher refresh rates make this technically possible, it's never pleasant). But they also aren't a full replacement for a note-taking application.
Anything you want search or indexing for
I journal every day, but I don't use the reMarkable to create my entries. Part of this is habit: I've been using Obsidian as my journal for years, and I don't want to switch. But I also really enjoy being able to search, and index, my journal, and I haven't found a great way to do that with an e-ink journal—none that I know of can index handwriting by default. You can work around this by converting your handwriting to text every day, granted, but at that point you might as well just type things out in the first place.
Integrating with other apps
Many e-ink tablets can't open apps or even browse the web. There are some exceptions that can run apps—the Boox Note Air 3, which runs Android, is among them—but even in these cases, the experience is going to be lessened by the inherent limitations of e-ink. Put simply, scrolling and browsing isn't exactly sleek on these devices, and you'll experience problems like grainy images, lag, and ghosting. They work best when they're being used like a sheet of paper.
Now, limited app support isn't all bad—a big part of the appeal of e-ink, for me, is that the distractions of the internet aren't as readily accessible. But if you're trying to decide between an e-ink tablet and an iPad, and access to your usual applications is a priority, you should get the iPad.
Quickly sharing your files
If you type something in a document, you can quickly email or text it to someone, or even post it in a Google Doc. You can kind of do this with an e-ink tablet, but you've got got to use one of two workarounds. There's the built-in optical character recognition (which, you are going to need to clean up whatever it outputs first—typos are common) or you can just send an image of your handwritten text. Neither is ideal, and in both cases, you're probably going to need to do so from a computer. It's probably easier just to start on a computer.
None of these cons are to suggest e-ink tablets aren't useful or that the downsides I've noted are universal. It's more that they're only useful in particular context, and that these are the contexts I keep in mind. Your experience may vary. But hopefully reading my thoughts give you the context you need before dropping big bucks on a device that may not do what you dream of it doing.
You can get the BirdBike eBike on sale for $699.97 right now (reg. $2,299.99) with free shipping while supplies last—and presently, only the white or gray V-frame models are available. The BirdBike has three riding modes: standard without any electric power, pedal assist for climbing hills with a 50-mile range, and e-boost mode to reach speeds up to 20mph for a 20-mile range. The bike has a 500W motor, carbon drivetrain, and a 36V removable battery. You can also view speed, distance traveled, remaining battery life, and more on the backlit dash display, and enable the 120-decibel anti-theft alarm when you leave the bike parked.
You can get the BirdBike eBike on sale for $699.97 right now (reg. $2,299.99) with free shipping while supplies last, though prices can change at any time.
Motorola's latest phone is the 2024 Moto G Stylus 5G. For fans of pen input there isn't much out there other than this and the Galaxy S Ultra line, but for $400 you can get a phone with a stowable stylus.
The design is just a bit interesting thanks to the "vegan leather" (that's a type of plastic) back, which gives the phone some personality. You get flat aluminum sides, a flat screen, and a hole-punch camera. Android does not have a lot of built-in stylus features, so you'll mostly be relying on whatever Motorola has cooked up; the website only shows a "Moto Note" app and the ability to send your drawings over instant messaging, plus there's whatever you can find on the Play Store.
This is a mid-range phone, so for the SoC, we have a Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 1. That's four Arm Cortex A78 cores and four Cortex A55 cores, built with a quite modern 4 nm process. There's a 6.7-inch, 120 Hz, 2400×1080 OLED display, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a 5000 mAh battery with 30 W wired charging and 15 W wireless charging. Pictures will come from a 50 MP main camera, 13 MP wide-angle, or a front 32 MP camera. There's a MicroSD slot, headphone jack, in-screen fingerprint reader, stowable stylus (of course), and NFC. Wi-Fi only goes up to 802.11ac. That's "Wi-Fi 5" and is pretty old, but it will get the job done, I guess. The "IP52" dust- and water-resistant rating is also not great, promising only protection from some water drops at certain angles.
Enlarge/ Many different Apple stickers from many different products and eras. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
As a noted sticker enthusiast, I’m always on the lookout for news at the intersection of stickers and technology. Which is why this report from 9to5Mac caught my eye: Apple is apparently starting to wind down its decades-long practice of including Apple logo stickers in the box with all of its products.
If you buy a new iPad Air or iPad Pro, you’ll be able to get some stickers if you ask the people at the Apple Store to include them (stores will get a “limited quantity” of stickers they can distribute on request). But the little sticker insert that has come with Macs, iPods, iPhones, iPads, and other devices and accessories for as long as I can remember will stop being one of the default pack-ins.
Apple is apparently cutting down on its sticker distribution to help meet its environmental goals. The stickers are some of the last bits of plastic included in most modern Apple packaging; in recent years, even the plastic backing layer for the stickers has been replaced with wax paper instead. This happened around the same time that the inner layer of packaging wrapped around new Apple devices also shifted from plastic to paper and when plastic-sealed boxes gave way to tear-away paper adhesive strips.
Sometime this summer, US customers will be able to buy a subscription to Max, Disney+, and Hulu together for a discounted price. The Wednesday announcement from respective owners Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) and Disney comes as the streaming industry combats a competitive subscription marketplace burdened by constant cancellations.
WBD and Disney didn't provide a specific release date for the package but said that people will be able to buy it from "any of the three streaming platform’s websites offered as both an ad-supported and ad-free plan.”
The companies didn't confirm a price, but the bundle should be cheaper than all three services combined, which would start at $47.97 per month for no ads and $25.97/month with ads.
Enlarge/ A screenshot of the Apple iPad ad. (credit: Apple via YouTube)
An advert by Apple for its new iPad tablet showing musical instruments, artistic tools, and games being crushed by a giant hydraulic press has been attacked for cultural insensitivity in an online backlash.
The one-minute video was launched by Apple chief executive Tim Cook to support its new range of iPads, the first time that the US tech giant has overhauled the range for two years as it seeks to reverse faltering sales.
The campaign—soundtracked by Sonny and Cher’s 1971 hit All I Ever Need Is You—is designed to show how much Apple has been able to squeeze into the thinner tablet. The ad was produced in-house by Apple’s creative team, according to trade press reports.
Enlarge/ The new Chord Track feature. (credit: Apple)
If you watched yesterday's iPad-a-palooza event from Apple, then you probably saw the segment about cool new features coming to the iPad version of Logic Pro, Apple's professional audio recording software. But what the event did not make clear was that all the same features are coming to the Mac version of Logic Pro—and both the Mac and iPad versions will get newly numbered. After many years, the Mac version of Logic Pro will upgrade from X (ten) to 11, while the much more recent iPad version increments to 2.
Both versions will be released on May 13, and both are free upgrades for existing users. (Sort of—iPad users have to pay a subscription fee to access Logic Pro, but if you already pay, you'll get the upgrade. This led many people to speculate online that Apple would move the Mac version of Logic to a similar subscription model; thankfully, that is not the case. Yet.)
Both versions will gain an identical set of new features, which were touched on briefly in Apple's event video. But thanks to a lengthy press release that Apple posted after the event, along with updates to Apple's main Logic page, we now have a better sense of what these features are, what systems they require, and just how much Apple has gone all-in on AI. Also, we get some pictures.
Enlarge/ A still image of a robotic quadruped armed with a remote weapons system, captured from a video provided by Onyx Industries. (credit: Onyx Industries)
The United States Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) is currently evaluating a new generation of robotic "dogs" developed by Ghost Robotics, with the potential to be equipped with gun systems from defense tech company Onyx Industries, reports The War Zone.
While MARSOC is testing Ghost Robotics' quadrupedal unmanned ground vehicles (called "Q-UGVs" for short) for various applications, including reconnaissance and surveillance, it's the possibility of arming them with weapons for remote engagement that may draw the most attention. But it's not unprecedented: The US Marine Corps has also tested robotic dogs armed with rocket launchers in the past.
MARSOC is currently in possession of two armed Q-UGVs undergoing testing, as confirmed by Onyx Industries staff, and their gun systems are based on Onyx's SENTRY remote weapon system (RWS), which features an AI-enabled digital imaging system and can automatically detect and track people, drones, or vehicles, reporting potential targets to a remote human operator that could be located anywhere in the world. The system maintains a human-in-the-loop control for fire decisions, and it cannot decide to fire autonomously.
Enlarge/ Huawei's Intel-powered Matebook X Pro has drawn criticism from US China hawks. (credit: Huawei)
The US crackdown on exports to Huawei now includes even stronger restrictions than the company has already faced. The Financial Times reports that Intel and Qualcomm have had their Huawei export licenses revoked, so Huawei will no longer be able to buy chips from either company.
The export ban has been around since 2020 and means that any company wishing to ship parts to Huawei must get approval from the government on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes these come with restrictions, like Qualcomm's license, which allowed it to ship smartphone chips to Huawei, but not "5G" chips. That led to Qualcomm creating special 4G-only versions of its 5G chips for Huawei, and the company ended up with 4G-only Snapdragon 888 phones in 2021.
Since then, Huawei has been working on its own Arm chips from its chip design division, HiSilicon. In April, the Huawei Pura 70 smartphone launched with an in-house HiSilicon Kirin 9010 SoC made at SMIC, a Chinese chip fab that is also facing export restrictions. With what is probably still a 7 nm manufacturing process, it's more of a 2020 chip than a 2024 chip, but that's still fast enough for many use cases.
When Apple announced the Apple M4 chip during its iPad Pro event yesterday, it mentioned that the chip came with "up to" four high-performance CPU cores.
Those short, easily missable words always mean that there's a lower-end version of the chip coming that doesn't include that many CPU cores, and the tech specs page for the new iPad Pro has the full details: iPad Pros with 256GB or 512GB of storage use a version of the M4 with three high-performance CPU cores and six smaller efficiency cores. Only the models with 1TB and 2TB of storage have an M4 with all four high-performance CPU cores enabled.
The 256GB and 512GB models also ship with 8GB of RAM, where the 1TB and 2TB models come with 16GB of memory installed. Though these changes are clearly spelled out on the Tech Specs page, the actual configuration page for the iPad Pros in Apple's online store doesn't give any indication that upgrading storage also upgrades your CPU and RAM.
Most of Beats by Dr. Dre's lineup of headphones and earbuds are on sale right now, coinciding with the release of the new Beats Solo 4. The brand has been slow to release new products since the acquisition of Apple back in 2014, but they do usually have solid deals every now and then. At the moment, you can get the Beats Studio Pro, Beats Fit Pro, Beats Studio Buds, and the Beats Powerbeats Pro for up to 49% off.
You can get the Beats Studio Pro for $179.99 (originally $349.99) after $170 off its listing price. This is matching the lowest price it has ever been after Black Friday, according to price-checking tools. The Studio Pro has been around since the summer of 2023 and is the premium headphones from Beats, offering active noise canceling (ANC), spatial audio with head tracking, hands-free Siri access, one-touch pairing on iOS and Android devices, and a transparency mode. You can read more about them from PCMag's review.
The Beats Fit Pro can be a great alternative for Apple users who don't like Airpods for $159.99 (originally $199.95) since they have Apple's H1 Headphone Chip and have one-touch pairing with iOS devices. Android users can also take advantage of some features that many Apple users enjoy as long (as long as you download the Beats app), like the ear fit test, listening mode controls, and firmware updates. You just won't have support for Spatial Audio with head tracking, hands-free Siri, Find My compatibility, audio sharing, and automatic switching between paired sound sources, according to PCMag.
The Beats Studio Buds at $79.99 (originally $149.95) is matching its lowest price after a 47% discount. Like the Fit Pro, the Studio Buds have ANC, Spatial Audio on certain Apple Music tracks, and one-touch pairing for both iOS and Android devices. You can read more about them in PCMag's review.
The Beats Powerbeats Pro also sports the Apple H1 chip along with the mentioned features for Apple users that come with it. They're also a great alternative over AirPods, since they have a stronger audio performance, easier controls, and a more secure fit, according to PCMag. You can get them for $159.95 (originally $249.95), matching the lowest price they have been after Black Friday.
Amazon Prime Video subscribers will see new types of advertisements this broadcast year. Amazon announced today that it's adding new ad formats to its video streaming service, hoping to encourage people to interact with the ads and shop on Amazon.
In January, Prime Video streams included commercials unless subscribers paid $3 extra per month. That has meant that watching stuff on Prime Video ad-free costs $12 per month or, if you're also a Prime subscriber, $18 per month.
New types of Prime Video ads
Amazon has heightened focus on streaming ads this year. Those who opted for Prime Video with commercials will soon see shoppable carousel ads, interactive pause ads, and interactive brand trivia ads, as Amazon calls them. Amazon said that advertisers could buy these new displays to be shown "across the vast majority of content on Prime Video, wherever it’s streamed." All the new ad formats allow a viewer to place advertised products in their Amazon cart.
Enlarge/ Raspberry Pi Connect looks like a good reason to make a Pi account, at least if you're not running your own DynDNS, VPN, and other remote-access schemes. (credit: Raspberry Pi)
One Raspberry Pi often leads to another. Soon enough, you're running out of spots in your free RealVNC account for your tiny boards and "real" computers. Even if you go the hardened route of SSH or an X connection, you have to keep track of where they all are. All of this is not the easiest thing to tackle if you're new to single-board computers or just eager to get started.
Enter Raspberry Pi Connect, a new built-in way to access a Raspberry Pi from nearly anywhere you can open a browser, whether to control yourself or provide remote assistance. On a Raspberry Pi 4, 5, or Pi 400 kit, you install Pi connect with a single terminal line, reboot the Pi, and then click a new tray icon to connect the Pi to a Raspberry Pi ID (and then enable two-factor authentication, of course).
From then on, visiting connect.raspberrypi.com gives you an encrypted connection to your desktop. It's a direct connection if possible, and if not, it runs through relay servers in London, encrypting it with DTLS and keeping only the metadata needed for the service to work. The Pi will show a notification in its tray that somebody has connected, and you can manage screen sharing from there. The Pi's docs site has a lot more on the particulars.
Enlarge/ Apple's latest iPad Air, now in two sizes. The Magic Keyboard accessory is the same one that you use with older iPad Airs and Pros, though they can use the new Apple Pencil Pro. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
Apple has a new lineup of iPad Pro and Air models for the first time in well over a year. Most people would probably be hard-pressed to tell the new ones from the old ones just by looking at them, but after hands-on sessions with both sizes of both tablets, the small details (especially for the Pros) all add up to a noticeably refined iPad experience.
iPad Airs: Bigger is better
But let's begin with the new Airs since there's a bit less to talk about. The 11-inch iPad Air (technically the sixth-generation model) is mostly the same as the previous-generation A14 and M1 models, design-wise, with identical physical dimensions and weight. It's still the same slim-bezel design Apple introduced with the 2018 iPad Pro, just with a 60 Hz LCD display panel and Touch ID on the power button rather than Face ID.
So when Apple says the device has been "redesigned," the company is mainly referring to the fact that the webcam is now mounted on the long edge of the tablet rather than the short edge. This makes its positioning more laptop-y when it's docked to the Magic Keyboard or some other keyboard.
Today is a big event day for Apple, but that doesn't mean Google is going to fade into the background: It's announcing the Pixel 8a today. The big news is that the Pixel a series is still $499 despite some upgrades.
What are those upgrades? How about a 120 Hz display on Google's mid-ranger for the first time? The 6.1-inch, 120 Hz, 2400×1080 display is closer to a flagship than ever, even if it is a smaller phone. You also get flagship-class support with Google's industry-leading seven years of OS updates, so the phone should be good until 2031, if you can hold out that long. Together, these two upgrades make the Pixel 8a an incredible value.
Major news with last year's launch of the Pixel 7a was the older Pixel 6a, which got a big price drop down to $349 when the 7a came out. When asked about a potential Pixel 7a price drop, Google says it "will continue to sell the Pixel 7a" but also that it has "nonews to announce today on a pricing change." It did feel like the Pixel 6a's price drop stole some of the 7a's thunder last year, so maybe Google is giving that announcement some breathing room. For now, you'll have to think long and hard at checkout and decide between a $499 Pixel 8a and a $499 Pixel 7a. The base model Pixel 8, at $699 with nearly the same specs, is also a tough sell in the face of the Pixel 8a.
With new iPads come new keyboards and pencils, and the big news today is the "Apple Pencil Pro," a souped-up version of Apple's iPad stylus. The Pencil Pro is $129 and works with the new iPad Pro and iPad Air.
How much can you improve a stylus? How about rotation detection via a new gyroscope embedded in the pencil? Apple calls this a "barrel roll," which provides rotation input in your iPad apps. If you're drawing and are using a brush that isn't symmetrical, a barrel roll will change the rotation of the brush. If you have a 3D item out in Procreate, a pencil rotation will rotate the 3D item. Devs can cook up whatever app interactions they can think of with this new feature.
The Pencil is also squeezable now, which can bring up a context menu. It also has haptics embedded in it, so you'll get feedback whenever you squeeze or rotate an item. The Pencil magnetically clips on the side of the iPad for charging, but if you happen to lose it, it will also show up in the Find My app next to all your other Apple things.
Apple is lowering the price of its 10th-generation iPad from $399 to $349, the company announced at its Let Loose event today.
The 10th-generation iPad did away with the top and bottom bezels that previous iPads carried. The 10.9-inch tablet also doesn't have a home button, showing Apple, under pressure from European Union regulations, moving from a Lightning port to USB-C. It debuted with a $449 starting price in 2022 with an A14 chip.
However, Apple is also doing away with the $329 9th-generation iPad, effectively increasing the price of entry for an iPad.
Apple's newest iPad Pro puts an M4 chip inside a thinner frame and is available in new 11-inch and 13-inch sizes, while also upgrading the screens on both to "tandem" OLED displays for more brightness.
Compared to the last iPad Pro, released in early 2022, Apple is highlighting how thin and light these new Pros are. The 11-inch model is 5.3 mm thick and weighs less than a pound, while the 13-inch is 5.1 mm, which Apple says is its thinnest product ever, at 1.28 pounds.
The tandem OLED design, dubbed Ultra Retina XDR, delivers 1000 nits at full-screen brightness, and 1600 nits at peak HDR, equivalent to a high-end Samsung TV. The screens are "nano-texture glass," which is essentially a matte display finish.
Enlarge/ M2-based iPad Airs come out next week. (credit: Apple)
Apple today announced the first 13-inch iPad Air. The company is also releasing a revamped 11-inch iPad Air next week, meaning the tablet will be available in two sizes for the first time.
The 13-inch iPad Air has 30 percent more screen real estate than its smaller counterpart, so Apple is marketing it as being for multitasking and applications like iPadOS' Split View. During its Let Loose event today, Apple said it decided to release a 13-inch iPad Air because "about half" of iPad Pro users opt for the larger (12.9 inches versus 11 inches) size," Melody Kuna, director of iPad product design at Apple, said as part of the presentation.
In addition to a larger screen, the 13-inch iPad Air will offer better sound quality than the 11-inch version, Apple says, due to it offering twice the bass. Both tablets have landscape stereo speakers and Spatial Audio support.
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