Category: News and Views

What Apple Forgot to Reveal at its iPhone 13 Event | Digital Trends

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Apple’s California Streaming event was full of product reveals, including the new iPhone 13 range, the Apple Watch Series 7, and more. But there were several other announcements I had hoped to see but didn’t — in fact, Apple might have missed a golden opportunity with some of them.

Sure, Apple was always going to save its Mac update for another event later this year. But that’s not what I’m talking about. No, there are some things that felt perfectly timed to make an appearance at the company’s September show, but for whatever reason, Apple decided to keep them under wraps. Here’s what we all missed out on.

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What bosses really think about remote work | BBC Worklife

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Many managers are itching to get staff back to the office, despite employees championing alternative set-ups. Why – and how will this change workers’ futures?

Leaning across their desk to ask a colleague a quick question, spontaneously heading out for a walk-and-talk brainstorm and knowing that everyone’s logged on to a stable Wifi connection. These are just a few of the reasons James Rogers, 26, loves managing their team from the office, instead of the kitchen table.

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Fake Walmart news release claimed it would accept cryptocurrency | BBC News

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Cryptocurrency Litecoin saw a sudden surge in price on Monday over a press release about Walmart accepting it for payment – which turned out to be fake.

The release, published through a legitimate press channel, claimed that Walmart would accept the currency through all its digital stores.

Walmart later told US media outlets the announcement was “inauthentic”.

By that time, several major news websites and press agencies had spread the supposed news.

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Apple Won Its Case With Epic Games. Why It Wasn’t Worth It | Inc.com

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On Friday, Judge Yvonne Gonzales Rodgers issued a highly anticipated decision in the Epic v. Apple antitrust case. With one major exception, the judge found in Apple’s favor, declaring that the company isn’t a monopoly, and ordering Epic Games–the maker of Fortnite–to pay Apple 30 percent of the revenue it generated when it implemented its own in-app payment (IAP) system in August of 2020.

Still, Judge Gonzales Rodgers had harsh words for Apple, especially about the company’s anti-steering provisions, which prohibit developers from pointing customers to other ways to pay for subscriptions or transactions. She issued an injunction that bars Apple from:

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Apple secures first states to support digital driver’s licenses, but privacy questions linger | TechCrunch

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Apple’s plan to digitize your wallet is slowly taking shape. What started with boarding passes and venue tickets later became credit cards, subway tickets, and student IDs. Next on Apple’s list to digitize are driver’s licenses and state IDs, which it plans to support in its iOS 15 update expected out later this year.

But to get there it needs help from state governments, since it’s the states that issue driver’s licenses and other forms of state identification, and every state issues IDs differently. Apple said today it has so far secured two states, Arizona and Georgia, to bring digital driver’s license and state IDs.

Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Utah are expected to follow, but a timeline for rolling out wasn’t given.

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Facebook Quietly Makes a Big Admission | WIRED

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BACK IN FEBRUARY, Facebook announced a little experiment. It would reduce the amount of political content shown to a subset of users in a few countries, including the US, and then ask them about the experience. “Our goal is to preserve the ability for people to find and interact with political content on Facebook, while respecting each person’s appetite for it at the top of their News Feed,” Aastha Gupta, a product management director, explained in a blog post.

On Tuesday morning, the company provided an update. The survey results are in, and they suggest that users appreciate seeing political stuff less often in their feeds. Now Facebook intends to repeat the experiment in more countries and is teasing “further expansions in the coming months.” Depoliticizing people’s feeds makes sense for a company that is perpetually in hot water for its alleged impact on politics. The move, after all, was first announced just a month after Donald Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, an episode that some people, including elected officials, sought to blame Facebook for. The change could end up having major ripple effects for political groups and media organizations that have gotten used to relying on Facebook for distribution.

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Cars have been guzzling leaded gasoline for 99 years. Not any more | CNN

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Nearly a century of leaded gasoline use on roads around the world has come to an end, the UN Environment Programme announced Monday, after Algerian service stations stopped selling the fuel last month.

Leaded gasoline — which contains the compound tetraethyllead and is linked to serious health problems — was first patented for use in 1922, allowing cars to use higher compression ratios, making them more powerful. By the 1970s, it was present in almost all gasoline worldwide.

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Afghanistan: US orders civilian jets to join evacuation | BBC News

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Commercial planes will be used to help with the evacuation of people from Afghanistan, the US says.

Eighteen aircraft will transfer people to third countries from safe sites outside Afghanistan, the Pentagon said.

Many thousands of Afghans are crowded outside Kabul airport, desperate to flee the country after the Taliban swept to power on 15 August.

President Joe Biden said on Sunday that the US had evacuated nearly 28,000 people in the past week.

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Ample raises $160M to scale its battery swapping service | TechCrunch

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San Francisco-based Ample has raised a $160 million Series C to scale its battery swapping service, the largest round yet for the 8-year-old startup that wants to completely rethink how we use electric vehicles.

Ample’s approach is relatively straightforward: Cars equipped with the company’s modular battery pack can drive into one of Ample’s automated charging pod locations and swap out their depleted batteries for ones that are fully charged. The swapped-out batteries are then recharged in the pod and ready to be reinserted into another vehicle.

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