Weekly Digest - 2021.13

Weekly Digest - 2021.13

WWDC 2021

Apple announced WWDC 2021. The conference will take place June 7 to 11. Like last year, this will be an online event. What's interesting each animated avatar promoting a conference has glasses. This prompt a lot of speculations about Apple Glasses or AR/VR Headset announcement during the conference. I personally doubt it, and I believe the avatars have glasses just to show a conference date, but who knows, maybe Apple is teasing us.

Crew Dragon with a nice view

It's not a secret that SpaceX is counting on a space tourism. Relaying on government contracts is a one thing, but space tourism is also a very lucrative business. Especially when you can limit the cost of such expedition. SpaceX has not only made rocket launches affordable, but now they are offering an unforgettable experience, for future space tourists by adding a glass dome on Crew Dragon for 360 views of space.

Hey Google car

Fiat and Google collaborated and made a special version of a Fiat 500.  The car has not only Google's branding but also deep integration with Google Assistant. It will allow users to monitor and control the car through the phone or Google Nest Hub.

Users will be able to check  fuel level, lock status, switch on emergency lights, or find the closest Fiat service station. System can also alert the owner if the car exceeds a certain speed or leaves a certain geographic area.

Image credits: Apple

Weekly Digest - 2020.34

Weekly Digest - 2020.34

The war continues

The conflict between Epic and Apple is escalating. Epic informed that Apple is terminating all of its developer accounts and cut Epic off from iOS and Mac development tools. Apple left 2 week notice on that matter, and is planning to terminate the accounts on August 28th, which is strange, normally account would be terminated immediately without any warning, so here is another example that not everyone is treated the same.

In a meanwhile, Epic is trying rally allies in battle against Apple.  If they succeed, they might get support from giants like: Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Valve.

Weekly Digest - 2020.11

Weekly Digest - 2020.11

iOS 14,  iPadOS 14, watchOS 7 details leaked

Couple of details leaked about upcoming operating systems and new Apple's products:

iOS

iPadOS

watchOS

  • Sharing watch faces with friends & family,
  • Watch face with tachymeter,
  • Watch face with country flags,
  • Photo watch face could be made not only out of single photos, but entire albums as well,
  • Parental controls,
  • Sleep tracking app,
  • Blood oxygen tracking,
  • WatchOS apps will be no longer be based on extensions.

New MacBooks

According to Ming-Chi Ku, couple of new MacBooks will be released in upcoming months:

  1. 14- inch MacBook Pro and MacBook Air with Scissor Keyboards will come in second quarter,
  2. MacBooks with ARM processor will come in late 2020 or early 2021.

Google Pixel 4a

New details regarding upcoming budget phone have surfaced:

  • 5.8-inch (2340 x 1080) display,
  • Snapdragon 730 CPU,
  • 4GB or 6GB of RAM,
  • Hole-punch selfie camera,
  • Single 12-megapixel rear camera,
  • Fingerprint sensor on the back,
  • 3.5mm headphone jack,
  • support for dual-sim in 6GB model,
  • 3080mAh battery,
  • Phone will be available in April starting  at $399.

Coronavirus vs conferences #3

This week another conferences have been affected by coronavirus:

Image credits: the Hacker 34

Weekly digest - 2019.22

Weekly digest - 2019.22

Deepfakes becomes real

Researchers from Samsung’s AI Center have figured out a method to train the AI to animate a person's face from an extremely limited dataset, like a single photo. They achieved this by training algorithm for detecting facial features and face landmarks, like shape of the face, eyes, mouth shape, etc. They used 7,000 images of celebrities gathered from VoxCeleb to train the model and achieve realistic results.

What they achieve is really impressive and scary at the same time. I'm afraid that soon we will have problem to tell the difference between what's real and what's fake.

Facebook & cryptocurrency

According to BBC, Facebook plans to launch its own cryptocurrency in 2020. New digital currency, named GlobalCoin, will be launched in 12 countries and it suppose to make money transfers easier for Instagram and WhatsApp users.

This is an interesting approach, and it's completely different from Apple's "traditional banking" route. I'm curious how it will be adopted by users. Maybe, finally, the cryptocurrency money transfers will become widely used.

iOS 13 and macOS 10.15 rumors

One week before WWDC, Guilherme Rambo revealed screenshots of some upcoming iOS 13 features. So far, the following changes will released with new operating system:

  • Dark mode,
  • New toolbar for screenshots editor,
  • Redesigned Reminders app,
  • Find my iPhone and Find my Friends apps are united into one app called Find My.

On the macOS side, we got screenshot of new Music and TV apps.

Those features align with previous rumors about iOS 13 and macOS 10.15, so there is high chance that we will see the rest of anticipated features on Monday.

New iPod Touch

Apple has quietly updated the iPod Touch with new A10 Fusion chip. Beside new CPU, iPod got new version with  256GB of storage. And that's it. This update is strange as Apple didn't even use latest generation of  A11 or A12 chips.

I'm surprised that Apple even bothered to upgrade iPod Touch, but apparently  they are convinced that users need more performance. Maybe they think that people will use iPods to play games, for example from Apple Arcade. Well, iPod Touch, with starting price at $199, is definitely chipper than the iPhone, so they might be people who like mobile games, but cannot afford a new iPhone. In that case, iPod Touch is reasonable choice.

Image credits: Egor Zakharov