Kalakshar US

Apple is shifting more iPhone production to India ahead of next month’s iPhone 17 launch, Bloomberg reports. The company will build all four iPhone 17 models there, and for the first time US-bound shipments for the entire lineup will come from India at launch.

The shift comes amid production expansion across five factories in India, including two plants that recently opened. Apple has been working to decrease its reliance on China for the manufacturing of US-bound iPhones.

According to Bloomberg, factories controlled by Tata Group, an Indian multinational headquartered in Mumbai, will account for as much as half of India’s iPhone output over the next two years. Apple’s longtime partner Foxconn Technology Group is also involved through its production hub in Bangalore.

The iPhone 17 lineup is expected to be unveiled in September, though the exact date is still unknown. We expect to see the usual iPhone 17, 17 Pro, and 17 Pro Max models announced, with the added possibility of a slimmer premium model in the form of an iPhone Air. The iPhone 17e, the next generation of Apple’s budget-friendly model, is more likely to arrive in early 2026 if it follows the same pattern as the iPhone 16e.

In the United States, the Trump administration had threatened Apple with tariffs on iPhones if it continued manufacturing the devices overseas. More recently, however, Apple announced from the Oval Office that it would invest an additional $100 billion in the US as part of a new “American Manufacturing Program.” This was announced as part of a $600 billion overall investment by Apple to produce more components domestically.

While India is among the many countries facing the Trump administration’s ever-changing tariff landscape, Bloomberg reported earlier this summer that iPhones imported from India have so far evaded tariffs as the US Commerce Department works to determine what sectors it deems vital to national security. With that in mind, it’s not surprising to see Apple shipping as many iPhones to the US from India as possible, at least for now.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/apple-is-reportedly-manufacturing-all-four-iphone-17-models-in-india-145528499.html?src=rss 

Google didn’t need to make its own smartphone. Even though the company spent several years having other manufacturers build phones it could slap its “Nexus” branding on, selling hardware is not core to Google’s business. Things like advertising and Search still handily dwarf the inroads the company’s made as a smartphone manufacturer, and that will likely remain true for the foreseeable future.

Compared to the contributions the iPhone makes to Apple’s bottom line, the Pixel has always, in some sense, been a hobby. Which means Google finds itself in a familiar place heading into the launch of the Pixel 10. It’s better than it’s ever been at the business of building phones, but the task for the Pixel remains the same: get people to use Google software (especially Search).

The first smartphones “made by Google”

Google sold its own hardware, including a lineup of phones, under the Nexus brand from 2010 to 2016 — but it was always known that hardware manufacturers like HTC and Samsung were actually building the hardware. 

That changed with the Pixel, the first time Google started using the now-ubiquitous “made by Google” phrasing. Ever since the first Pixel phone arrived in October 2016, Google’s phones have been defined by their camera skills. Google’s significant breakthroughs in computational photography influenced the entire industry, and continue to do so today. The original Pixel and Pixel XL featured a single 12.3-megapixel camera and let anyone take great HDR photos without any fuss. Purchasing a Pixel or Pixel XL also unlocked unlimited full-resolution backups of your photos in Google Photos for free, a strong incentive to consider switching to Google’s smartphone in its own right.

The company’s glass and aluminum phone was more than just its camera sensor, though. A big part of Google’s early pitch for the Pixel, and other hardware like Google Home, was that it could serve as a vehicle for Google Assistant. The AI-powered voice assistant had shades of Siri, and voice control features previously available in Android. But it was far more integrated into Google’s software and services and had a deep well of knowledge to draw on from Google Search. An “OK Google” could let you set a timer on your phone, but it could also answer trivia or tell you about an upcoming calendar event.

Google continued to lean on software for the release of the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL, which put Google Now-style proactive information on a new always-on display, along with a refined design with pressure sensitive sides that could activate specific functions on the phone. In terms of the camera, Google’s major improvements over the original Pixel were the addition of optical image stabilization for video and a custom imaging chip, dubbed the Pixel Visual Core, that handled the image processing for both first-party and third-party camera apps. Besides being the first instance of Google sneaking some of its own custom silicon into its phone, the Pixel 2 was also was a significant challenge to Apple’s dominance in the photography department

That pattern continued with the release of the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL, which again featured a slightly modified design, wireless charging and a collection of new camera features. The biggest was Night Sight, Google’s software solution for taking really good photos when there’s barely any light available. The feature was released after the Pixel 3 came out, and gave the phone the ability to capture more or less light at night depending on the shakiness of your hand. The third-generation Pixel was also paired with the introduction of Google Assistant’s Call Screen feature, a mixture of visual voicemail and audio transcription that allowed users to see why someone is calling and only pick up if they wanted to.

Google would go on to introduce the first budget version of the Pixel a few months later with the Pixel 3a, a practice that continues to this day. In the following years, the company’s releases were mostly memorable for gimmicks like the Pixel 4’s Motion Sense feature (using radar to detect hand gestures to launch shortcuts) and the adoption of industry trends, with the Pixel 5’s support for 5G.

The company followed up those phones with a few releases that were only memorable for gimmicks like the Pixel 4’s Motion Sense feature (essentially motion controls for specific apps) and the adoption of an industry trend, with the Pixel 5’s 5G support.

Say hello to the camera bar and Tensor chip

It would take the radical new design of the Pixel 6 to snap things back into focus for Google. Not only did the Pixel 6 have a massive, shelf-like camera bar on the back, but the phone was also the first to be powered by a custom SoC developed by Google. Rather than focus on raw power, the Google Tensor chip was designed to handle on-device AI tasks like Magic Eraser for editing photos, Live Translate for converting text to another language as you type and Direct My Call, which lets the Pixel navigate phone trees on your behalf.

The splashy launch of the Pixel 6 in 2021 marks the new path Google’s smartphones have been heading for the last four years. They’re still good at taking photos, but their main role is to be a showcase for whatever AI feature the company has cooked up most recently. Google continued to refine the idea with the release of the Pixel 7, which was paired with the first Pixel Watch following Google’s acquisition of Fitbit in 2021. 2023 brought the Pixel 8 as well as the company’s first foldable, the Pixel Fold.

The move also matched internal shifts at Google itself. The teams developing the Android operating system have long been separate from the teams building Pixel phones out of respect for Google’s partners who make their own Android phones. That changed in 2024 when Google announced a reorganization that placed Pixel and Android under the same “Platforms & Devices” umbrella. The stated motivation was that aligning software and hardware would let the company release new AI features even faster, which bore out in the various Gemini features on the Pixel 9 lineup and whatever the company has planned for the Pixel 10. On some level the intimate role smartphones play in people’s lives makes them an obvious venue for AI, something the company clearly wants to take advantage of based on in-development features like Project Astra.

Google clearly experimented throughout the life of the Pixel, but the phone has always been a tool to sell software ideas. Demonstrating the potential of computational photography had early success, and now the company is trying to do the same thing with generative AI and Gemini. Competition remains fierce — OpenAI shared in December 2024 that ChatGPT had 300 million weekly users, making it a real threat to Google’s core business. Google has never been a hardware company, nor has it needed to win at hardware. But with stiffer competition in software than ever, using the Pixel series to get people to use Google’s many services is arguably more important than ever.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/10-pixels-in-the-purpose-of-a-google-made-smartphone-remains-the-same-160007404.html?src=rss 

Is it finally happening? Team Cherry just announced a livestream for the long-anticipated sequel Hollow Knight: Silksong. It takes place on April 21 at 10:30AM ET. The company says it will be making a “special announcement” about the game. We don’t exactly know what this announcement will be, but it’s starting to feel like a release date or at least a release window.

Rumors have been swirling that the title would finally be getting a release date during this week’s Gamescom festivities, with Geoff Keighley offering a tease a couple of days ago. This is all happening more than six years after the game was first announced.

It’s possible that the special announcement won’t involve the release date at all, but will instead offer new game modes or a deeper dive into the story. It’s worth noting that reports have indicated that the game would finally see the light of day this year, though we’ve been fooled by that kind of thing before.

For the uninitiated, Hollow Knight: Silksong is the followup to Hollow Knight, which was an indie Metroidvania that absolutely took the world by storm. It actually started as DLC for the original game before the developers realized the scope of their ambitions would take nearly seven years to see through.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/theres-a-hollow-knight-silksong-livestream-on-april-21-at-1030am-et-153220983.html?src=rss 

Whether you love or hate them, PDFs are an inescapable part of the job for many of us. In fact, it’s safe to say the format isn’t going away anytime soon, with Adobe reporting there are 3 trillion PDFs in circulation worldwide. However, there’s no denying they can be a pain to work with, and in an effort to make it easier to manage projects involving multiple PDFs, Adobe is launching a new product today called Acrobat Studio. And wouldn’t you know it, the company is marketing the inclusion of generative AI tools as a major selling point of the suite.

The main feature of Acrobat Studio are hubs Adobe calls PDF Spaces. Here, you can upload up to 100 files — including PDFs of course, alongside public web pages, RTFs, DOCXs and more — and Acrobat Studio’s built-in AI assistants will help you make sense of everything. To start, the hub will generate a summary of all the documents, with a few pre-populated prompts to help with further analysis. Accompanying each bullet point from the AI is a citation you can use to verify the model’s summary by quickly jumping to the document it pulled the information from. Sharing your PDF Spaces with colleagues is built right into Acrobat Studio.

In addition to chatting with Acrobat Studio’s AI assistant, you can create custom assistants to carry out specific tasks. By default, Adobe offers three of these — analyst, instructor and entertainer — to get you started. The names do a decent job of communicating each assistant’s purpose. For example, the instructor will attempt to explain complex topics. You can create your own by writing a set of custom prompts.

There are some notable limitations to PDF Spaces. For one, the hub’s generative AI features currently only work with documents written in English. Adobe says it will add support for other languages “over time.” Similarly, the hub can’t analyze videos, handwritten notes and password-protected files.

Outside of PDF Spaces, Acrobat Studio offers access to Adobe Express built right into the app, meaning you can use Adobe’s Firefly AI models to generate commercially safe images for your PDFs. As you would expect, the suite also comes with Adobe Acrobat and all the tools you might need to create and edit your own protected documents.

Pricing for Acrobat Studio starts at $25 per month for individuals, with a 14-day trial available.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/acrobat-studio-is-adobes-new-ai-powered-hub-for-pdfs-130003264.html?src=rss 

Qualcomm revealed its latest mobile platform for more affordable smartphones and devices called the Snapdragon 7s Gen 4. Compared to its predecessor, the new Snapdragon chips have overall improved performance, support for more detailed displays and a feature that allows for better video quality in low-light situations.

We were able to test the Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 with smartphones like the Nothing 3a and 3a Pro, but this next-gen chipset represents a seven percent improvement with both the Qualcomm Adreno GPU and Kryo CPU. The Gen 4 specs also show higher peak CPU speeds of up to 2.7 GHz, compared to the previous generation’s 2.5 GHz. On top of the overall performance boost, Qualcomm added support for WFHD+ displays that have a 2,900 x 1,300 resolution and a 144Hz refresh rate. For better video in dark scenarios, Qualcomm infused the Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 with the Low Light Vision feature, which was previously reserved for the company’s more expensive chips.

Beyond these upgrades, the fourth-generation Snapdragon 7s chips keep the AI-powered ability to take 200-megapixel photos, Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 4+ Technology that can recharge a device from zero to 50 percent in five minutes and support for real-time translation and transcription with multiple languages. It’s a minor upgrade from the Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 that was announced last August and Qualcomm hasn’t announced any phone makers who plan to use this chip yet. However, we could see the latest chip being used by companies like Honor and Vivo, who previously used Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 models.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/qualcomms-latest-snapdragon-chips-offer-slight-power-up-for-budget-smartphones-130017850.html?src=rss 

NVIDIA is working on a new AI chip meant for the Chinese market that’s more powerful than the H20, according to Reuters. It will reportedly be based on the company’s latest Blackwell architecture, which can produce chips between seven and 30 times faster than its previous AI platform. Reuters says the product is tentatively named B30A and will have a single-die design, putting all its main components on a single piece of silicon. It will apparently be capable of half the computing power of NVIDIA’s Blackwell Ultra GPUs, which have dual-die configuration. The product will also come with high-bandwidth memory and the company’s NVLink technology for speedier data transmission between processors. 

It’s possible that NVIDIA is developing the chip after the Chinese government discouraged local companies from using the H20, especially for government and national security purposes. Chinese regulators even reportedly ordered big tech corporations, including Alibaba, Bytedance and Tencent, to suspend their purchases from NVIDIA until the government is done with a national security review. China’s warning to local companies came after the US government lifted its export restriction on the company’s H20 chips. 

If you’ll recall, the US blocked the company from selling its H20 chips to China back in April over concerns that the Chinese military could use the chips to develop AI technology. In July, NVIDIA announced that the government has assured the company that it will approve licenses to ship and export H20 chips to China. The Financial Times then reported in August that the government had agreed to grant NVIDIA (and AMP) export licenses in exchange for 15 percent of their profits. 

Reuters says NVIDIA is still finalizing the specs of B30A, but it’s hoping to deliver samples to Chinese clients for testing as soon as September this year. Trump seems to already be aware that NVIDIA is working on a chip based on Blackwell for the Chinese market, but whether it gets regulatory and export approval remains to be seen: The president told reporters that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huan is “coming to see [him] again about that.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/nvidia-is-reportedly-developing-an-ai-chip-for-china-more-powerful-than-the-h20-130057520.html?src=rss