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.
Microsoft added more to its latest Windows 11 release candidate than just a Bing AI shortcut button that launches the chatbot in an Edge browser window.
As Tom Warren pointed out, it also includes the tabs in Notepad feature that leaked on Christmas Eve, and for some people, that might be the biggest deal. (Even if you’ve already heard of Notepad++.)
If you missed Tesla’s Investor Day event last night, you can get the highlights of its new “Master Plan” in just four minutes, then read about what Musk did and didn’t announce.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released the Intelligence Community’s assessments after investigating reports by US diplomats in Cuba of suddenly suffering from symptoms that range from hearing loss, vertigo, and nausea to concussions.
Despite rumors of sonic or energy weapons as the cause, the agencies are unconvinced, as ”most IC agencies have concluded that it is “very unlikely” a foreign adversary is responsible for the reported anomalous health incidents.”
The autonomous car unit shares its parent company, Alphabet, with Google, which in January cut over 12,000 jobs or about six percent of its workforce. The Information reports that after a new round of layoffs affecting primarily engineers, Waymo has let go of about 8 percent of the people working there.
Like the other recent tech layoffs, it’s a sharp turn from a few years ago — in 2017, Bloomberg reported some Waymo staffers were quitting because the jobs paid so well.
[The Information]