Giles Martin, the senior vice president of sound experience at Sonos who mixed the first-ever spatial audio album, and Sonos CEO Patrick Spence joined Nilay Patel for a Vergecast interview about the company’s new speakers and make a case for spatial audio.
Martin:
...we can project sound and because we have channels of projection. Spatial audio is multichannel, stereo is two-channel, mono is one-channel.
And we’re back! It’s not MWC anymore, but we can still discuss old phones on The Vergecast’s most recent episode (shout out to Windows Phone 7, RIM, and Steven Sinofsky), as well as how Meta’s VR strategy is looking very 32X-ish.
Also, has anyone seen Elon’s Twitter Blue revenue sharing? Let me know if you have.
On Thursday, the developer of BlueMail — who has squared off with Apple over its App Store policies before — said the company held up an update adding ChatGPT-powered email generation and other features.
A reviewer said his app needed to add content moderation or else restrict access to ages 17 and up, but then later, the same update was approved, unchanged. The App Store doesn’t have policies about AI specifically, so we can only wait and see if it tightens restrictions further,
It must be MWC, because every old mobile grievance was revisited, even as we celebrated what is surely our phone of the future, Motorola’s rollable Rizr concept.
We also dug into Alex Heath’s big scoop exposing Meta’s hardware roadmap, TikTok’s unsettling new filter, and talked a little about Elon Musk. Not too much.
Reuters investigators embedded AirTags in sneakers donated around Singapore to find out if they were getting turned into “new playgrounds and running tracks” like the program backed by US petrochemicals giant Dow Inc and the Singaporean government promised.
Spoiler: None of the 11 tracked pairs appear to have been recycled. Out of the ways trackers can be used (or abused), exposing greenwashing sounds like one of the best examples.
Japanese blog Mac Otakara shares, based on a Weibo post (via MacRumors), a whisper that Apple will launch a new yellow iPhone 14 variant this spring.
Last year’s Peek Performance event added a new green option to the iPhone 13, so who knows, at the end of this game of telephone, there might actually be a phone. In yellow.
[Mac OTAKARA]
If you’re trying to keep pace with what’s happening in generative AI, look no further than Microsoft’s Bing Blog, which has posted details of what’s new in the preview release of its ChatBot and promises regular updates to summarize what they’re learning.
That includes the Chat Tones to tune its personality, Turn Counters, and other changes this time around, but my main question is, do they use Bing AI to write up the summaries?
[blogs.bing.com]
This Reddit post shows an email announcing an event in four days time, and I think you can guess what we expect to see.
Namely, a spatial audio-focused Era 300 that should cost around $450 and an Era 100 speaker priced around $250, both with Bluetooth audio playback and USB-C line-in.
Read Chris Welch’s full report here for the details we have so far, and if you’re looking for current Sonos hardware check out their ongoing sale.
Musk’s latest claim was said about three months ago, but this Reuters report about the FDA rejecting Neuralink’s application has skepticism the issues can be worked out in another 90 days.
The agency’s major safety concerns involved the device’s lithium battery; the potential for the implant’s tiny wires to migrate to other areas of the brain; and questions over whether and how the device can be removed without damaging brain tissue, the employees said.
And that’s aside from the federal probe over allegedly transporting contaminated devices removed from monkey brains.