Month: September 2017

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CUPERTINO, Calif.—At Apple's headquarters today, the company announced a new Apple Watch Series 3, which will have standalone LTE service. This feature breaks the necessary connection between the wearable and an iPhone, allowing it to receive messages, download apps, stream music, and connect to the Internet without help.

The new Apple Watch with cellular, as it's called, will be available on September 22 in nine countries and start at $399. A separate version without LTE service will be more widely available and start at $329. The older Apple Watch Series 2 will now start at $249. Pre-orders for the new models will start on September 15. Apple says the Watch with cellular will work with Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile in the US; Verizon and AT&T say it'll cost an extra $10 a month to add the new device to an existing mobile plan. 

Standalone LTE service was the primary rumor swirling about the Apple Watch before today's event. Apple released the Series 2 smartwatch last year, which updated the device with onboard GPS and a water-resistance mechanism for swim tracking. The Series 3 may only have one major hardware update, but it's a significant upgrade that turns the Apple Watch from an iPhone accessory into more of a standalone device.

Enlarge / Apple Watch Series 2. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

CUPERTINO—Apple revealed details about watchOS 4, its newest update to the Apple Watch's operating system, back at June's WWDC keynote. Now we know when the update will be pushed to the public: September 19. This comes on the heels of Apple announcing the Apple Watch Series 3 model with standalone LTE service at today's event as well.

WatchOS 4 will change the look and feel of the Apple Watch slightly with aesthetic updates, a new vertical app dock, and a few redesigned apps. The Music app has an entirely new look in watchOS 4, the Workout app has a new color scheme as well as more "tap and go" button options, and the News app can now be used to receive headlines on your wrist and save articles for later reading.

WatchOS4 will also bring the new Siri watch face to the device, which proactively gives you information on your wrist based on where you are, the time of day, upcoming calendar events, and more. The Apple Watch already has Siri capabilities, but Siri's AI and machine learning technology is used in this watch face to provide more personalized information to those who use it. Other new watch faces include a "kaleidoscope" design and Toy Story characters Woody, Jessie, and Buzz designs.

Enlarge / Is this shot from Episode VII or freshly taken for Episode IX? Either way—JJ is back, baby. (credit: Lucasfilm)

One week after firing Colin Trevorrow as the director of Star Wars: Episode IX, Lucasfilm has emerged with a big-name replacement: JJ Abrams. You may have heard of him. He created a little show called Alias.

Oh, and then went on to work on roughly 4,000 major pop-culture things, including the series-redeeming Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.

The announcement, posted officially by Lucasfilm on Tuesday morning, added that Abrams will also co-write the upcoming film—and that his writing partner is Chris Terrio. That name will undoubtedly be less familiar to Star Wars fans, but the writer's legacy in film is a little more mixed, containing equal parts good (Argo won him a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar) and the bad (he had the unenviable job of dragging the awful Batman V Superman script to the finish line).

Enlarge / The Tesla Model S following its recovery last year from the crash scene near Williston, Florida. (credit: National Transportation Safety Board)

On Tuesday the National Transportation Safety Board met to discuss 2016's fatal Tesla Model S crash in Florida. NTSB did not have any major new findings beyond those we reported in June, nor did its findings differ from a National Traffic Highway Safety Administration investigation into the event. At this point the facts are clear: Joshua Brown was overly reliant on Tesla's Autopilot function and interacted with the car only seven times in 37 minutes—while traveling at 74mph.

The crash occurred on May 7, 2016, on US Highway 27A near Williston, Florida. The road in question is a four-lane highway with the eastbound and westbound lanes separated by a grass median, but it's important to note that it is not a controlled access or divided highway. As Brown was traveling east, he failed to notice a tractor trailer making a left-hand turn across his path onto a side road, and the truck driver failed to yield to the oncoming car. The Tesla hit the trailer roughly in its middle, a collision that sheared the roof from the electric vehicle, which continued another 300 feet (91m) down the road before slamming into a utility pole and coming to rest a further 50 feet (15m) in someone's front yard.

As NHTSA found, the Automatic Emergency Braking feature on the Tesla—in common with just about every other AEB fitted to other makes of cars—was not designed in such a way that it could have saved Brown's life. The machine learning algorithms that underpin AEB systems have only been trained to recognize the rear of other vehicles, not profiles or other aspects. The NTSB report did find that a Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication system (V2V) could have alerted both vehicles to the potential danger, but as we have discussed ad nauseam, V2V is still absent from new cars even though the spec is almost 20 years old.