Category: Technology

Apple is gearing up to source chips from a factory in the US within the next couple of years, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Company CEO Tim Cook reportedly made the revelation during a meeting with local engineering and retail employees in Germany, telling them that Apple “already made a decision to be buying out of a plant in Arizona.” As Gurman notes, it would lessen Apple’s reliance on factories in Asia, particularly Taiwan, where 60 percent of the world’s processor is produced. “Regardless of what you may feel and think, 60 percent coming out of anywhere is probably not a strategic position,” Cook added.

The CEO is most likely talking about Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s Arizona plant, which is currently under construction. TSMC is Apple’s exclusive chip-making partner, though it also counts NVIDIA, MediaTek, AMD and ARM as some of its customers. The Arizona plant is expected to start running in 2024, with an output of 20,000 chips a month and the ability to produce 5-nanometer processors. 

According to previous reports, Apple plans to adopt TSMC’s new 3-nanometer chipmaking process, which is its latest and most advanced yet, for future devices. The Financial Times says the A17 mobile processor Apple is currently developing for its 2023 iPhone lineup will be mass produced using the new technology. It’s unclear if Apple only intends to use the Arizona plant for older and less sophisticated chips or if TSMC has plans to update the factory. TSMC is already thinking of building a second plant next to its $12 billion facility in Arizona, but it told Bloomberg that it hasn’t made a final decision yet. 

As the publication previously reported, TSMC has been expanding to other countries over the past year in an effort to meet the needs of customers in countries encouraging domestic semiconductor production. President Joe Biden, for instance, recently signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law. Under the new law, the US government is offering $52 billion in funding and incentives for firms building chips in the country.

In addition to revealing that Apple will start sourcing US-made processors, Cook also reportedly told staff members: “I’m sure that we will also source from Europe as those plans become more apparent.” While that’s all he shared at the meeting, Bloomberg previously reported that TSMC is in talks with the German government to open facilities in the country. Europe, like the US, also looking to entice semiconductor manufacturers to open plants in the region and introduced the EU Chips Act in April to “bolster [its] competitiveness and resilience in semiconductor technologies and applications.”

 

NASA is once again preparing to launch Artemis 1 after technical issues and hurricanes upended previous attempts. The next launch window for the uncrewed test flight around the Moon will be open for two hours, starting at 1:04AM ET on November 16th. In case NASA has to scrub it once again, the agency has scheduled another backup launch window, which opens at 1:45AM on November 19th.

The agency had penciled in a launch attempt for November 14th, but Hurricane Nicole forced a slight delay to those plans. NASA kept the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft on the launch pad as the hurricane battered the Kennedy Space Center. They sustained minor damage, but not enough to force a lengthier delay.

NASA first tried to send Artemis 1 into space on August 29th, but engine issues and a hydrogen fuel leak forced the agency to scrub the initial launch attempts. The next stab at a launch in late September didn’t work out either. NASA took the SLS and Orion back to the Vehicle Assembly Building to protect them from Hurricane Ian. Here’s hoping NASA can finally send them on their way this time.

You can watch a livestream of the latest launch attempt below. Alternatively, you can watch the launch in virtual reality. If you happen to be in Florida or the south east region of Georgia, you may be able to see the SLS and Orion soar into the skies by going outside, if conditions are favorable enough.

 

AI-generated art is a new frontier rife with potential. But for every thorny question about copyright and the potential for widespread manipulation, generated art can also inspire wonder and awe. For example, look no further than this AI-powered experiment that creates kaleidoscopic visual landscapes for composed music.

A collaboration between quirky synth and hardware brand Teenage Engineering and design studios Modem and Bureau Cool, the project draws inspiration from the neurological condition synesthesia. This rare phenomenon leads the brain to perceive sensory input for several senses instead of one. For example, a listener with synesthesia may see music instead of only hearing it, observing color, movement and shape in response to musical patterns. Conversely, a synesthetic person may taste shapes, feel words from a novel or hear an abstract painting.

The audiovisual experiment uses the Teenage Engineering OP-Z sequencer as the music source that is then translated into AI art. In real-time, Modem and Bureau Cool’s “digital extension” translates musical properties into text prompts describing colors, shapes and movements. Those prompts then feed into Stable Diffusion (an open-source tool similar to DALL-E 2 and Midjourney) to produce dreamy and synesthetic animations.

Modem co-founder Bas van de Poel sees the experiment as fuel for artists’ imaginations. “With the project, we see the potential for musicians to explore new forms of creativity, facilitating a joint performance between human and machine,” van de Poel told Engadget today.

If you’re a musician who owns Teenage Engineering’s OP-Z, you can’t yet use the extension yourself — but that may eventually change. Van de Poel tells Engadget that the companies are “exploring the potential of launching a public version.”

This AI-based project isn’t the first to bring synesthetic properties to the masses. Last year, Google Arts & Culture created an exhibition that flipped the concept around, bringing machine-learning-produced sound to Vassily Kandinsky’s paintings.

 

Elon Musk has set a new date for Twitter Blue’s paid verification to return: November 29th. The new date comes just a few days after the company paused the roll out and halted new sign-ups after the site was overrun by pranksters and scammers impersonating brands, celebrities and other high-profile accounts.

Musk said the return date was set to give the company enough time “to make sure that it is rock solid.” Musk didn’t say what changes may come with Blue’s relaunch, but the company has already brought back “official” labels in an effort to reassure advertisers. Musk added that verified Twitter users will be unable to change their display names without losing their checkmark “until name is confirmed by Twitter to meet Terms of Service.”

Twitter, which was losing advertisers even before paid verification launched, has seen even more brands pull back from the platform since the botched rollout of Twitter Blue. In addition to the “official” labels, Musk has proposed other was companies may be better able to identify official accounts, including a suggestion that organizations will be able to “identify which other Twitter accounts are actually associated with them.” It’s unclear how that idea might fit into Twitter’s revamped verification plans.

We’ve reached out to Twitter for more information, but the company no longer has a communications team.

 

New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) has voted to increase the minimum pay rates for Uber and Lyft drivers. Per-minute rates are going up by 7.4 percent and per-mile rates by 24 percent. In practical terms, that means a trip of 7.5 miles that takes 30 minutes will earn a driver at least $27.15 — an increase of more than $2.50 compared with current rates.

The commission also agreed to increase yellow and green cab fares (for the first time since 2012) by 23 percent. The new rates are scheduled to go into effect by the end of the year.

The Uber and Lyft pay bump is in addition to a 5.3 percent increase drivers received earlier this year, the TLC confirmed to Engadget. Drivers sought higher pay amid higher inflation rates and increased operational costs.

Uber and Lyft drivers will receive another rate bump in March. The increase will be “based on inflation comparing December 2022 to September 2022,” the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) said in a statement. The union said this was part one of a drive to ensure drivers receive at least $25 per hour in take-home pay, after expenses. “We’re going to take the momentum of this driver raise which comes despite company opposition and after a long delay, and use it to power our fight for a job with dignified incomes, job security and retirement,” NYTWA executive director Bhairavi Desai said.

“Raising taxi fare rates and minimum pay for high-volume drivers is the right thing to do for our city,” TLC commissioner David Do said. “This is the first taxi fare increase in ten years, and these raises will help offset increased operating expenses and the cost of living for TLC-licensed drivers. We are confident that today’s unanimous commission vote will keep our taxi and [For-Hire Vehicle] fleets sustainable and ready to serve New Yorkers.”

 

Lucid had more to show today than its less expensive Air models. The auto startup has finally teased its second EV, the long-in-the-making Gravity SUV. The vehicle will share the swooping visual language of the Air while offering up to three rows of seating that can accommodate seven people. It should also have a next-gen version of Lucid’s touchscreen-heavy cockpit, and purportedly offer more range than “any other EV” outside of the Air.

The company cautions that the Gravity design and specifications aren’t final. What Lucid is showing now is largely what you’d expect, however — it’s a big people-hauler with perks like a panoramic roof. As with Tesla’s Model X, the three-row configuration doesn’t leave much room in the back for either passengers or cargo. The rear space is “flexible,” according to Lucid, so you might not be stuck if you need to carry a large load.

You will be waiting a while to buy the SUV. Reservations for the Gravity open in early 2023, and it won’t reach the US or Canada until 2024. Customers outside those countries will have to be more patient, and the firm hasn’t disclosed pricing. It’s safe to presume the EV will be expensive, though, when even the ‘entry’ Air starts at $87,400. This is more for customers who would otherwise consider a Model X, Mercedes EQS SUV or Polestar 3.

The Gravity could be Lucid’s most important EV to date, whatever it costs. The Air may be fast, but its sedan form factor limits its appeal in an increasingly SUV-centric market. The new model could help Lucid reach a wider audience, even if the clientele will still be limited to wealthy buyers willing to take a chance on a young brand.

 

Competition in the robot dog market is getting ugly. As The Robot Reportexplains, Boston Dynamics is suing Ghost Robotics for allegedly infringing seven patents linked to its Spot quadruped. The Spirit 40 and Vision 60 (shown above) purportedly borrow key technologies from Spot, including systems for self-righting and climbing stairs.

Boston Dynamics says it asked Ghost Robotics to review Spot-related patents in July 2020, five months after the launch of the Spirit 40. After that, Boston claims to have sent two cease-and-desist letters asking Ghost to stop marketing its robot canines. Ghost was thus well aware of what it was doing, according to the lawsuit.

We’ve asked Ghost Robotics for comment. In a statement, Boston Dynamics claimed it “welcome[s] competition” but would crack down on companies violating its intellectual property rights. The Hyundai-owned firm is seeking unspecified damages as part of the suit.

A lawsuit like this isn’t unexpected. Boston Dynamics initially focused on research, but it has increasingly turned to commercializing robots like Spot and Stretch. Rivals like Ghost Robotics could pose threats to Boston’s still-young business, whether or not they’re copying technology in the process. Even if the suit fails, it could deter other companies from making robot dogs of their own.

 

It’s been less than a month since Elon Musk began his chaotic takeover of Twitter but, to many, the platform already feels like it’s entered an inevitable death spiral. Advertisers are fleeing. The few remaining top executives are also leaving. Musk’s Twitter Blue rollout was a complete disaster. The FTC says it has “deep concern” about the company. Musk told employees bankruptcy is a real possibility. Former engineers say the site could break at any moment.

Unsurprisingly, the uncertainty has inspired many users to explore Twitter alternatives. Among them, Mastodon, a decentralized platform founded in 2016, has emerged as one of the top destinations for Twitter quitters. The service saw an earlier uptick in April, when Musk’s buyout was announced, but it’s seen an even bigger flood of new users since Musk’s takeover was completed.

Between October 27th and November 6th, Mastodon gained nearly half a million new users, almost doubling its user base, according to founder Eugen Rochko. Data from Similarweb, shows that the two most popular “entry points” to Mastodon, the mastodon.social server and joinmastodon.org, are getting more than four times the amount of daily traffic compared with the end of October prior to Musk taking over the company.

It’s not the first time upheaval at Twitter has driven new users to the “fediverse,” but it’s the largest exodus. And even many of those who haven’t quit Twitter entirely have begun promoting their Mastodon accounts.

But not everyone is ready — or able— to give up on Twitter. And many don’t see Mastodon as a viable substitute for what Twitter has provided.

For Beth Hyman, executive director of the SquirrelWood animal sanctuary in New York, Twitter has for years been a vital source of donations thanks to the rescue’s popular “Crouton & Friends” account. She began to grow SquirrelWood’s Twitter presence in 2018 by posting nightly videos of Crouton, a baby cow living at the sanctuary.

Now, Twitter, where Crouton has more than 65,000 followers, is one of the sanctuary’s biggest, and most reliable, sources of donations. For example, she was able to raise $30,000 for a used horse trailer in just three days in 2021, and frequently shares other fundraisers for the sanctuary. She worries about how Twitter’s current instability could affect them. “I don’t want to see the income that helps keep this sanctuary going, and all these animals fed, dry up,” Hyman tells Engadget.

She says she signed up for Mastodon as well as CounterSocial after noticing a dip in her followers in the days after Musk’s takeover, but she’s skeptical she will be able to recreate her Twitter account’s success on a new platform. “Our main home base has always been Twitter. A lot of work goes into this, and it’s not like you just flip the switch and walk away and reignite it somewhere else,” she says.

She’s also found that it’s just not as easy to share photos and videos of SquirrelWood’s animals — the main draw for her social media followers — on Mastodon due to its file size constraints. “We’re taking care of 70 animals, I need something that I can do on the fly very easily,” she said.

For others, the decentralized nature of Mastodon has other drawbacks. Eric Feigl-Ding is an epidemiologist who grew his Twitter following at the start of the pandemic when he was among the first to go viral tweeting about the potential threat posed by the novel coronavirus. He now uses his Twitter account, where he has more than 700,000 followers, to share updates about the pandemic and to promote public health policy.

He says he tried to sign up for the mastodon.social server only to find that it was full, and that he and some colleagues are now debating starting their own server, But he worries he won’t be able to reach the same people as he can on Twitter.

“I knew I wanted to reach policymakers, members of Congress, and journalists,” he says. “Basically, people who have the power to shape public opinion, and change policy, and to move the needle on this pandemic. And Twitter is that platform. Twitter is the platform to get your message out. They’re not sitting on Mastodon.”

Feigl-Ding, who has spent a lot of time debunking COVID-19 misinformation, also worries about the consequences of leaving. “You do not want to cede the town square to misinformation, to disinfo, to slanted views on things,” he said. “You want to be there to engage, you want to show up at the debate.”

Others worry about losing the friendships and community they’ve formed on Twitter. Steven Aquino, a tech journalist who covers accessibility, says that Mastodon isn’t a realistic alternative for many people with disabilities because it lacks many of Twitter’s accessibility features. It also just wouldn’t be the same, he says. “The whole point of social media is to be social, and for a lot of disabled people … social [media] is how they interact with other humans,” he tells Engadget.

At the same time, the fact that Musk cut Twitter’s accessibility team makes him worried Twitter itself could become less usable. “The fact that they laid off the entirety of the accessibility team says a lot about what they think about people like me, and where they want the service to be,” he says.

“There’s so much being written about what Elon is doing, and hiring and firing, and those are all important things. But there is no respect for what is the real impact on the people who use the service.”

 

Qualcomm has announced its latest flagship mobile chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Along with making it more powerful and efficient than Gen 1 chips, Qualcomm says it has packed more AI smarts into the new platform.

The Snapdragon 8 will tap into the latest Qualcomm AI Engine and upgraded Hexagon processor to offer “faster natural language processing with multi-language translation and advanced AI camera features,” the company claims. The processor has architectural upgrades that will enable up to 4.35 times the AI performance of Gen 1 chips, according to Qualcomm. There will be support for an AI precision format called Int4, which the company suggests will lead to a 60 percent performance/watt improvement over the previous-gen chipset for sustained AI inferencing. Meanwhile, the Sensing Hub will have dual AI processors, which can support features such as custom wake words.

Qualcomm notes that the upgrades will enable new camera-focused features as will. It says Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will enhance photos and videos automatically and in real-time using semantic segmentation. This harnesses an AI neural network to make the camera aware of and individually optimize elements such as faces, hair, clothes and skies. Qualcomm has tuned the chipset to support new sensors, such as Samsung’s 200-megapixel Isocell HP3. Meanwhile, this is the first Snapdragon model with an AV1 codec that supports 8K HDR playback at up to 60 frames per second.

There’s an intriguing feature for mobile gamers: Qualcomm says there will be real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing, which should improve the visuals on supported games. The company claims the latest Adreno GPU and Kyro CPU deliver over 25 percent faster performance and 40 percent more power efficiency than the Gen 1 chip. Qualcomm adds that it will offer the first mobile-optimized support for the Unreal Engine 5 Metahumans Framework, claiming that this will let players “experience photorealistic human characters in their games.”

On the connectivity front, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will use AI to manage 5G download speeds, latency, coverage and power efficiency. There will be support for dual 5G SIMs as well as WiFi 7 (with speeds of up to 5.8 Gbps). In terms of audio, phones that use the chipset will be able to offer spatial audio with dynamic head tracking, 48kHz lossless music streaming and latency as low as 48ms.

Qualcomm notes that the first phones with the Gen 2 chipset should be available by the end of the year. Partners including ASUS Republic of Gamers, Honor, Motorola, OnePlus, Oppo, Sharp, Sony, Xiaomi and ZTE plan to use the chip in their devices. There’s likely to be more news from Qualcomm in the coming days, as the company is hosting its Snapdragon Summit this week.

 

In YouTube’s latest move to woo TikTok creators onto YouTube Shorts, the streaming giant announced today that short-term video creators would soon be allowed up to a minute of copyrighted music in their Shorts. The change is a significant boost from the previous 15-second limit for any licensed song.

YouTube says its short-form creators will be able to use between 30 and 60 seconds of licensed music “for most tracks.” However, some songs will remain on the previous 15-second limit, with licensing agreements determining which tracks fall in which window. Creators can quickly see how much time each song allows in the YouTube app’s audio picker. The new song-length options begin rolling out today and will continue “over the next few weeks” on iOS and Android.

As user-created videos have exploded during the past decade, aggressive DMCA takedown notices have become a headache for streamers on all platforms. Record labels often automate their copyright enforcement, leading to overzealous claims. For example, creators have seen their videos flagged for accidentally including a few seconds of copyrighted audio from a passing car’s stereo. Some police officers have even exploited the DMCA to their advantage, blasting Taylor Swift songs to prevent bystanders from sharing their legally recorded videos.

The song-limit boost is YouTube’s latest attempt to woo TikTok creators (and therefore viewers and ad dollars) onto Shorts. In September, the company announced an ad-revenue sharing program to give qualified creators a 45 percent cut of ad revenue, regardless of whether they use music. TikTok launched a similar sharing program earlier this year following widespread complaints about its previous “static pool of money” approach.

YouTube’s aggressive approach appears to be paying off, with Shorts tallying views from over 1.5 billion logged-in users per month. As of September 2021, TikTok had racked up 1 billion monthly users. However, given YouTube’s overall dominance in the video space, those numbers likely include people who were already on YouTube watching other content. TikTok’s numbers, on the other hand, more clearly include people looking for its distinctive short-form videos — an audience that YouTube and other media giants like Meta are continuing to chase.