Month: November 2025

After years of saying no, Tesla reportedly adding Apple CarPlay to its cars

Almost half of US car buyers won’t consider a car without Apple CarPlay.

Apple CarPlay, the interface that lets you cast your phone to your car’s infotainment screen, may finally be coming to Tesla’s electric vehicles. CarPlay is nearly a decade old at this point, and it has become so popular that almost half of car buyers have said they won’t consider a car without the feature, and the overwhelming majority of automakers have included CarPlay in their vehicles.

Until now, that hasn’t included Tesla. CEO Elon Musk doesn’t appear to have opined on the omission, though he has frequently criticized Apple. In the past, Musk has said the goal of Tesla infotainment is to be “the most amount of fun you can have in a car.” Tesla has regularly added purile features like fart noises to the system, and it has also integrated video games that drivers can play while they charge.

For customers who want to stream music, Tesla has instead offered Spotify, Tidal, and even Apple Music apps.

Read full article

Comments

Google will let Android power users bypass upcoming sideloading restrictions

Google will preserve sideloading for power users, but it hasn’t decided how that will work yet.

Google recently decided that the freedom afforded by Android was a bit too much and announced developer verification, a system that will require developers outside the Google Play platform to register with Google. Users and developers didn’t accept Google’s rationale and have been complaining loudly. As Google begins early access testing, it has conceded that “experienced users” should have an escape hatch.

According to Google, online scam and malware campaigns are getting more aggressive, and there’s real harm being done in spite of the platform’s sideloading scare screens. Google says it’s common for scammers to use social engineering to create a false sense of urgency, prompting users to bypass Android’s built-in protections to install malicious apps.

Google’s solution to this problem, as announced several months ago, is to force everyone making apps to verify their identities. Unverified apps won’t install on any Google-certified device once verification rolls out. Without this, the company claims malware creators can endlessly create new apps to scam people. However, the centralized nature of verification threatened to introduce numerous headaches into a process that used to be straightforward for power users.

Read full article

Comments

Google will let “power users” continue to sideload apps from unverified developers

Most phones, tablets, and other devices that ship with Google’s Android operating system come with the Google Play Store pre-installed. But as long as Android’s been around, there’s also been a feature that lets you install apps downl…

Most phones, tablets, and other devices that ship with Google’s Android operating system come with the Google Play Store pre-installed. But as long as Android’s been around, there’s also been a feature that lets you install apps downloaded from other sources through a process generally known as “sideloading.” But this summer the company announced that […]

The post Google will let “power users” continue to sideload apps from unverified developers appeared first on Liliputing.

Valve says it’s still waiting for better chips to power Steam Deck 2

Even a 50 percent performance-per-watt improvement wouldn’t be enough, engineer says.

Yesterday’s announcement of new living room and VR hardware from Valve obviously has many gamers clamoring for any news of a more powerful version of the nearly 4-year-old Steam Deck. In a new interview with IGN, though, Valve Software Engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais says that portable gaming silicon still hasn’t advanced enough to justify brand-new benchmark hardware.

“The thing we’re making sure of is that it’s a worthwhile enough performance upgrade [for a Steam Deck 2] to make sense as a standalone product,” Griffais told IGN. “We’re not interested in getting to a point where it’s 20 or 30 or even 50 percent more performance at the same battery life. We want something a little bit more demarcated than that.”

“So we’ve been working back from silicon advancements and architectural improvements, and I think we have a pretty good idea of what the next version of Steam Deck is going to be, but right now there’s no offerings in that landscape, in the SoC [System on a Chip] landscape, that we think would truly be a next-gen performance Steam Deck,” Griffais continued.

Read full article

Comments

Tracking the winds that have turned Mars into a planet of dust

Tracking winds across Mars’ surface and their association with dust storms.

Mars is cold, parched, and extremely dusty. Powerful gusts of wind kick up literal tons of reddish dust that often takes the form of whorls known as dust devils. These winds also shroud the planet in dust by lifting material from the surface and blowing it into the atmosphere (what little Mars has left of an atmosphere), sometimes creating dust storms that rage for days.

Researcher Valentin Bickel wanted to know just how intense winds can be on the red planet. Using data obtained by the Mars camera CaSSIS (Color and Stereo Surface Imaging System), the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, and stereo camera HRSC (High Resolution Stereo Camera) on board ESA orbiter Mars Express, he and his team used deep learning to analyze stereo images that were taken seconds apart at the same location. These images can track the motion of dust devils, and the researchers use them to infer how the winds behind the dust devils move and lift dust from the surface. That dust goes on to have a big influence on the Martian weather.

Bickel, of the Center for Space and Habitability at the University of Bern, noticed that the tumultuous Martian winds are even faster than previous observations had made them out to be. They carry more dust than was previously thought. “Our observations show that strong near-surface winds are abundant on Mars and play an important role in atmospheric dust sourcing, directly informing more accurate models of Mars’ atmosphere, weather, and climate,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Science Advances.

Read full article

Comments