US-made chips will cost Apple more, despite govt subsidies
Apple has pledged to buy US-made chips once TSMC’s Arizona plants come online, but the company may have to pay more for them. TSMC’s chief exec has said that it plans to charge customers more for chips made outside of Taiwan, due to the higher production costs … more…

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Apple to invest over $250 million to grow its Singapore campus
Apple on Wednesday announced new expansion in Singapore, with plans to invest over $250 million to grow its campus in Ang Mo Kio… The post appeared first on MacDailyNews.

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Add this classy radio to your emergency arsenal
The Eton Elite Executive may be small, but it’s a great multiband radio to have on hand. This leather-clad beauty is on sale for 40% off. (via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

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Apple AirPlay now available in select IHG Hotels & Resorts properties
Starting today, guests staying at select properties from IHG Hotels & Resorts, including Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, Hotel Indigo… The post Apple AirPlay now available in select IHG Hotels & Resorts properties appeared first on MacDailyNews.

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AirPlay streaming launches today on TVs at IHG hotels and resorts
Beginning today, more than sixty IHG Hotels & Resorts locations will support the new iOS 17 AirPlay feature, allowing guests to easily stream to the TV in their hotel with no additional hardware required. Just like you would stream to an Apple TV at home, guests are able to seamlessly select their hotel TV as the AirPlay output to watch videos, view photos and stream music from their iPhone or iPad. more…

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Adobe Express mobile app for iOS ships with Firefly generative AI smarts
The Adobe Express mobile app is now out of beta, with iOS Creative Cloud users now able to access the design tool with Firefly generative AI elements.Adobe Express on iPhone gets FireflyAdobe Express is the creative suite's simplified design tool that lets users quickly create flyers, posters, and documents with little effort.On April 18, the new Adobe Express mobile app exited beta and became available for iOS. Additions this time around include Adobe pushing the use of Adobe Firefly, its generative AI tool. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

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Apple say it’s reduced overall greenhouse gas emissions by more than 55 percent since 2015
Apple has reduced its overall greenhouse gas emissions by more than 55 percent since 2015, the company shared today in its 2024… The post appeared first on MacDailyNews.

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Beatbot AquaSense Pro: Just in Time for Summer, the Ultimate Robot Pool Cleaner
Mark Vena reviews the Beatbot AquaSense Pro, detailing its advanced features and performance in automated pool cleaning. The post appeared first on TechNewsWorld.

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Latest romance scam tactic uses two phones with face-swap app
Romance scams are getting a whole lot more convincing with the latest tactic: using two phones, one running a face-swap app, to conduct live video calls with victims … more…

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Apple boasts that it has cut greenhouse gas emissions in half
As part of its annual report on its environmental efforts, Apple has announced that its overall greenhouse gas emissions are now down 55% since 2015.Apple is working to use alternative energy supplies including windAhead of Earth Day on April 22, Apple has issued its now annual Environmental Progress Report. It says the 55% cut represents important progress in its intention to become carbon neutral by 2030."The proof of Apple's commitment to climate action is in our progress," said Lisa Jackson, Apple's vice president of Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives in a statement. "We've slashed emissions by more than half, all while serving more users than ever before." Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

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Apple touts halving emissions and increased recycling rates in 2024 environmental progress report
Apple has an ambitious goal to create a fully carbon neutral value chain for its products by 2030, and every year it charts its progress in its annual Environmental Progress Report. The 2024 report published today highlights a milestone achievement for emissions. Apple says its overall greenhouse gas emissions have more than halved since 2015, down 55%. However, there is still more work to be done as the company will need to attain a 75% reduction to meet its 2030 targets. more…

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A new app is the surest sign that the Apple Vision Pro will launch in China very soon
The launch of the Apple Vision Pro in China seems imminent, after a major retailer launched a 3D shopping app designed for the headset.A screenshot from Taobao's visionOS app [Weibo]The Apple Vision Pro is currently only available in the United States, but an international expansion has been speculated to occur ahead of WWDC 2024. It now seems that China could be one of the first major markets to receive the headset.Alibaba's Taobao online marketplace has launched a new shopping app in the country, reports the South China Morning Post. The app, released on Friday, is made specifically for the Apple Vision Pro. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

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100,000 iPhones stolen instead of scrapped; Apple accused of shredding usable devices
Almost 100,000 iPhones which Apple paid a contractor to scrap were instead stolen and shipped off to China, according to an in-depth report. Apple sued the company concerned, but now appears to have abandoned the lawsuit, with the report suggesting this is to avoid publicly admitting that it orders the shredding of perfectly usable devices, in stark contrast to the company’s environmental stance … more…

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This app tries to do what Apple couldn’t: Multiple Mac monitors on Vision Pro
New "Splitscreen" app works around the limitations, but it's not perfect.

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Satechi 145W USB-C 4-Port GaN Travel Charger review: Plenty of power on the go
Macworld At a glanceExpert's Rating ProsPowerfulGood design Several adaptersFour charging portsConsRelatively heavyOur VerdictThe Satechi 145 W USB-C Gan Travel Charger makes life easier when traveling. You can replace all your chargers with this one. It’s also just as perfect to keep at home on your desk. Plenty of wattage and ports (as well as different plugs) make it a great buy. Price When Reviewed$119.99 Best Prices Today: Satechi 145W USB-C GaN Travel Charger Retailer Price $119.99 View Deal Satechi $120 View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket The best thing about the USB-C standard is that not only does it reduce the amount of e-waste, but it also makes traveling easier–but you may still need multiple chargers when on the road. Your iPad requires one, your iPhone another, and your computer a third. While it’s possible to charge them individually with one charger, the problem is if you need to charge multiple gadgets at the same time. Enter the Satechi 145W USB-C GaN Travel Charger. Satechi’s latest addition is a relatively compact charger with a charging capacity (as the name gently alludes) of 145 watts. For those who don’t know what a GaN charger is, it’s technology where that uses Gallium Nitride, a semiconductor material that has excellent conductivity and resistance to high temperatures. That means that chargers can be more compact and also benefit in power conversion and energy output. When a regular charger gets hot, it is because the current “leaks” and is converted into heat. A GaN charger stays much cooler, even when you put a heavy load on it. It doesn’t take up much space. It doesn’t take up much space.Petter Ahrnstedt It doesn’t take up much space.Petter Ahrnstedt Petter Ahrnstedt The Travel Charger’s 145 watts are distributed across four different ports. If you only connect one device, the first two ports deliver 140 watts, while the last two deliver 45 watts. The ports that provide more power support PD 3.1, while the other two support PD 3.0. If you connect four devices, the ports deliver 65, 30, 25, and 20 watts respectively. That’s quite enough to charge a MacBook Pro, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch at the same time. You can easily use your computer or tablet while charging. This is how the charge is distributed when you connect multiple devices. Adapters for the whole world The Travel Charger is space gray, slightly rectangular, and has a small button on the top. This is so you can change the plug itself. Along with a small woven nylon bag, the package includes four different plugs: 1x UK adapter 1x EU adapter 1x AU adapter (Australia) 1x USA adapter The device doesn’t have a USB-A connection. But at least since the iPhone 12, Apple has included a USB-C to Lightning cable and the iPhone 15 has USB-C. Should you buy the Satechi 145W USB-C 4-Port GaN Travel Charger? The Satechi 145 W USB-C Gan Travel Charger is a powerful charger that you can use at home as well as when traveling. The format is flexible and you get plugs that work in most corners of the world. If I’m going to complain about anything, it’s the weight, but then I’m a whiny journalist who needs to find something to complain about. This article originally appeared on Macworld Sweden and was translated by Roman Loyola. Docks and Hubs, Mobile Phone Accessories, Mobile Phone Chargers, Power

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Apple Singapore campus getting two more buildings for new AI work
We’re expecting 2024 to be the year Apple builds generative AI features into iOS 18, and the company has announced a $250M investment to support ongoing work in this field. The Apple Singapore campus is growing from one building to three, to provide space for ‘new roles in AI and other key functions.’ Apple says that the expansion and refit will allow for greater collaboration between its growing teams in the country … more…

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To help win an iPhone antitrust suit, Apple is again demanding commission data from Valve
Apple says it needs business records from Valve in order to contest an ongoing consumer antitrust case about the App Store, and has turned to the courts to get it.App Store iconGame developer Valve is not involved in the antitrust case that consumers have brought against Apple. However, Apple has now filed a subpoena request asking a federal judge to compel Valve to provide data that it says is "core" to its defense.Apple is accused in a class-action suit of forcing up app prices because of its 30% cut, and how it operates its App Store. The case is also not related to Apple's previous one against Epic Games, but the company is citing that legal battle in its reasons for wanting Valve's data. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

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iPhone 17 Plus might sport a smaller display than iPhone 15 Plus
A new rumor indicates Apple could use a smaller display on the 2025 iPhone 17 Plus, further widening the gap with its Pro Max model. (via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)

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This is the A18 Pro: The speed and smarts to expect from Apple’s next iPhone chip
Macworld When the iPhone 16 line launches this September, we expect it to usher in a new A-series processor. As has been the case in the last few years, the top-end “Pro” models will get a new processor while the regular iPhone 16 non-Pro models will likely get a version of the A17 Pro chip found in this year’s iPhone 15 Pro. As we do every year, we’ll look at the history and performance of the A-series processors from the last several years, along with the recent rumors and overall industry trends, to anticipate what we might expect from Apple’s new iPhone silicon this fall. As always, this is all just guesswork; Apple is a famously secretive company, and the details about its products are often not fully revealed until they are released. To “Pro” or not to “Pro”? Last year, Apple introduced what might be an all-new wrinkle into the expected upgrade pattern. Changing the name from “A17 Bionic” to “A17 Pro” for the first time, the implication is that there would be a new non-Pro chip each generation too. That hasn’t yet come to pass, but we might see something different this year. There are three likely possibilities for what Apple may do in addition to making a new A18 Pro for the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max: Make a new A18 for the regular iPhone 16 and 16 Plus that is essentially the A17 Pro given a new name. There might be minor technical differences but performance and features would be the same as the A17 Pro. Apple makes a newly-designed A18 chip for the non-Pro iPhones. It’s based on the same architecture as the A18 Pro but with lesser performance in some areas (perhaps due to lower clock speed or reduced active core count). Apple keeps using the A17 Pro for the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus; the A18 Pro is the only “new” iPhone chip this year. This is what Apple did in the iPhone 14 and iPhone 15 generations. It’s hard to say which is more likely, only that the high-end chip will probably once again carry the “Pro” name instead of “Bionic” and launch only in the iPhone 16 Pro models. We’ve heard rumors that the lower-end chip in the iPhone 16 will be called “A18” this year, but even if that’s true we don’t know if it will be an truly new chip or just a rebranded iPhone 17 Pro. And we heard similar rumors last year that didn’t pan out. Our analysis here is targeted at the A18 Pro, what we assume Apple will call the higher-end version of the chip powering this year’s iPhones. Still made with a 3nm process The A17 Pro was the first mass-market consumer chip to use a 3nm manufacturing process. And while TSMC is on track with the 2nm chips that come next, we don’t expect to see an Apple product using that process until next year a the earliest. So the A18 Pro will be made with TSMC’s 3nm process again. The 3nm process used for the A17 Pro was known as N3, and as the first iteration of 3nm technology from TSMC it was pretty expensive. The company has a newer process known as N3E, which is far easier to manufacture at scale. It should be slightly more power efficient than the original N3 process but also slightly less “dense”, which means a chip built using N3E would be slightly larger than an identical chip made with N3. There are rumors that the A18 Pro will be a physically larger chip than the A17 Pro—the switch to N3E may be one reason, but we expect Apple will also increase transistor count to more then 20 billion (A17 Pro is a 19 billion transistor chip). To put that in perspective, a modern Intel “Raptor Lake” generation laptop CPU is estimated to have a transistor count around 26 billion transistors, which the top-tier large Nvidia GeForce 4090 RTX desktop GPU is a 74 billion transistor chip. CPU performance will probably improve All the rumors have focused on AI performance, and why not when that’s the hot topic of the day? But Apple is always concerned about CPU performance, and shares core designs between its A-series iPhone/iPad chips and it’s M-series Mac (and iPad Pro) chips. Just look at this chart of single-core Geekbench 6 performance for iPhone chips all the way back to the A11. Foundry Foundry Foundry What strikes me as most remarkable is just how steadily single-core performance has increased. We’ve estimated the A18 performance by continuing the trend from the last several chips, and it gives us a single-core Geekbench 6 score of almost 3,200. That’s just a touch faster than an Intel Core i9-13900KS, a very high-end desktop CPU. Of course, powerful desktop and laptop CPUs have many more cores than a phone processor. We think the A18 Pro will have the same core configuration as most recent A-series chips: two performance cores and four efficiency cores. Foundry Foundry Foundry Faster cores, cache, and memory will push up the multi-core score even if Apple uses the same number of cores. We’ve seen a pretty steady performance trend for multi-core performance as well, and don’t expect that to suddenly change. A multi-core score of over 8,200 would put the A18 Pro in the same territory as a mid-tier Intel or AMD laptop CPU from about three years ago. GPU performance always goes up Using the modern 3DMark Wild Life benchmark in Unlimited mode, we get a good idea of how much GPU performance has improved over time. Frame rates have more than quadrupled since the iPhone X days. It’s not quite as steady as CPU performance–some years the uplift is 10 percent or less and in others years it’s closer to 30 percent. Foundry Foundry Foundry We don’t have any reason to believe that GPU performance won’t be better this time around as well, though the rumors say Apple isn’t adding more GPU cores. Architectural efficiencies can go a long way. Our guess is a 10-15 percent improvement in real-world CPU performance. The 3DMark Solar Bay test stresses ray tracing performance, so you see much lower frame rates overall. Foundry Foundry Foundry Performance took a huge jump up with the A17 Pro in this test because Apple added hardware to help accelerate ray tracing. There may be some tweaks this year, but we don’t think a similar jump can be expected in this test in the A18 Pro–again, we’re probably going to see a 10-15 percent boost. Neural Engine may get a big upgrade The Neural Engine is Apple’s name for it’s NPU or “Neural Processor Unit”—specialized hardware made to optimally run neural networks for machine learning, deep learning, and AI software in the same way the GPU is made for graphics processing. Apple is said to be all-in on AI this year, with big AI features coming to iOS 18 and the iPhone 16 line. I think that means we can expect a big improvement in Neural Engine performance. But the Neural Engine has been getting faster at a regular pace since it was first introduced in the A11 (found in the iPhone 8 and iPhone X). That first Neural Engine could perform 600 billion operations per second, while the Neural Engine in the A17 Pro is touted as able to handle 35 trillion operations per second (TOPS). Here’s how that performance increase over time has manifested in performance using the new GeekBench ML benchmark, targeting the NPU only. Foundry Foundry Foundry Geekbench ML is a relatively new benchmark, only on version 0.6, that runs a suite of machine learning tasks like image recognition, object classification, image super resolution, and language processing to assess the performance of CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs. When running the test only the the Neural Engine, we see a more than 8-fold improvement over the last six years, and an average yearly speedup of roughly 20%. Notably, the score did not double from the A16 to A17 generation even though Apple said Neural Engine performance jumped from 17 TOPS to 35 TOPS. The claimed maximum performance specs often don’t match real-world performance numbers. Apple’s Neural Engine already delivers much better performance than competitors like the NPU in the Snapdragon 8+ gen 1 (around 2,800 points depending on which phone it’s in) or Google’s Tensor G3 (under 2,400 points). Simply taking the past performance gains and projecting it forward would give us a score of almost 4,100 points and a commanding lead over most competitors. I think we can safely ignore this chart for the A18 Pro, however. Recent rumors suggest that Apple will dedicate more silicon to the Neural Engine and push for a big performance boost in order to power more advanced AI features entirely on-device. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple touted a really big number for its Neural Engine this year–over 50 TOPS is almost certain—and we could see a Geekbench ML score closer to 5,000. RAM, 5G, and more Of course, there’s more to the A18 Pro than the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine. Then there are related chips that aren’t technically part of the A18 Pro but are still important to iPhone users, like the cellular modem. The new LPDDR6 memory standard is still too new to make it into this year’s iPhones, but Apple could move from LPDDR5 to LPDDR5x—providing for slightly more memory bandwidth and while using less power. The A17 Pro made the leap from 6GB to 8GB of RAM and it feels too soon for Apple to jump up again. On the other hand, AI models tend to be very memory-intensive and we could see Apple increase RAM just to enable bigger and more sophisticated AI models on the new phones. On the wireless front, we should expect an upgrade to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X75 modem for faster and more reliable 5G connections. Apple has been working on its own wireless chips for years but is having a hard time getting them to a point where they provide a good enough experience. There have also been rumors of an upgrade to Wi-Fi 7, and of course, we can expect Ultra Wideband, Bluetooth, and NFC features that are similar to those in the iPhone 15 line. CPUs and Processors, iPhone

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Comcast launches NOW plans, focuses on affordable/prepaid internet, TV, and mobile plans
Comcast on Wednesday launched NOW, a new tier of low cost and prepaid connectivity offerings, with speeds up to 200 Mbps as well as unlimited 5G data for mobile plans along with access to more than 40 networks for live and on-demand content. The new plans function as low-cost, no-contract options for customers, as details […] Source

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