Month: September 2018

Valentina Palladino

CUPERTINO, Calif.—Apple ushered the Apple Watch Series 4 into the world today, just one year after introducing its first smartwatch with LTE. Rumors proved to be true: the Series 4 forgoes a complete overhaul (sorry, no round Watch yet) and instead sports a larger, edge-to-edge screen, improved hardware to make it a better calling device as well as a better health device.

After Apple debuted the Watch and the newest iPhones, we had a chance to go hands-on with the new Series 4 Watches. We played with its edge-to-edge displays, examined its new ECG electrodes, and learned more about its new "fall detection" feature.

(credit: Valentina Palladino)

Throw away your ejector pins and paper clips, iPhone users.

On Wednesday, Apple announced that its new iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max will use an eSIM—a purely electronic SIM that allows users to maintain a secondary phone line in a single device. That line could be a secondary domestic line (say you’re a journalist and don't want to have separate personal and work iPhones) or could have an American and Canadian number (if you travel across the border frequently).

These handsets will have a new "dual SIM dual standby" option, one of which will be a nano SIM. In other words, they will have two distinct phone numbers. (Chinese models will have two SIM slots instead of the eSIM option.)

Enlarge / Hello dongle, my old friend. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple will no longer include a Lightning-to-3.5mm headphone jack adapter with new iPhone purchases.

The removal of the headphone dongle listing on Apple’s iPhone product pages was first spotted by The Verge. A quick look through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine appears to confirm the change. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The change looks like it will apply to the three new iPhone models launched on Wednesday—the iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR—as well as the older iPhone 8 and iPhone 7.

While much of the tech world was focused on today's Apple event, Google dumped the news that it is killing another product. This time on the chopping block is Google's other email client, Google Inbox. Google announced today that its trailblazing, experimental email client will be shut down "at the end of March 2019."

Inbox launched in 2014 as an experimental alternative interface to Gmail. Inbox used the same account and showed the same data, just in a special interface that totally rethought email management. Inbox would automatically group emails into helpful categories like "Updates" for shipping notifications and "Purchases" for receipts. Instead of dealing with an email right away, you could snooze it, just like an alarm. If an email was really important, you could pin it to the top of your inbox. After reading an email, you didn't delete or archive it, you just marked it "Done." Eventually Inbox got "Smart Reply," which used machine learning to write short replies for you.

Google says that it "learned a lot about how to make email better" from Inbox, and now with the "popular Inbox experiences" ported over to Gmail, the company wants to "focus solely on Gmail." Gmail did gain a few features from Inbox. Mail categories in Inbox do roughly the same sorting and organizing that Inbox did, just in a tabbed interface instead of the "bundles" introduced in Inbox. Snooze made the jump to Gmail with the big redesign. Smart Reply is now all over google products, and besides existing in Gmail, it's part of Wear OS and Android P. A new feature in Google's ML Kit APIs will soon allow any developer to put smart replies in their app.

Enlarge / Conflicted demon Michael (Ted Danson) prepares for his first visit to Earth in The Good Place Season 3. (credit: NBC/Universal)

There are still two weeks until NBC's hit sitcom The Good Place returns for its third season. But Entertainment Weekly snagged a sneak peek at the first scene of the premier episode. And we're pleased to report that the show's trademark razor-sharp witty dialogue, bad puns, and keen eye (and deep love) for the absurdities of the human condition are very much intact.

(Spoilers for first two seasons below)

The Good Place has always kept us guessing, from the pilot episode where Eleanor (Kristen Bell) realizes she's been admitted to paradise by mistake, to that shocking twist in the Season 1 finale that turned the original premise on its head.

Enlarge (credit: JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/Getty Images)

With Hurricane Florence bearing down on the East Coast, Tesla has temporarily given some customers extended battery range using a software update, Electrek reports.

"We are temporarily enabling your car to access additional battery capacity, as well as free Supercharging, in preparation for Hurrican[e] Florence," a notice inside some customers' cars says.

Tesla did the same thing last year as Hurricane Irma was bearing down on the coast of Florida. Tesla is able to do this because it shipped some Model X and Model S cars with 75kWh batteries to customers who had only paid for the 60kWh version of the vehicle. The extra capacity was locked in software, with customers having the option to pay to unlock it.