Month: December 2018

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Aurich)

AT&T will start charging customers for the full month after they cancel TV or Internet service, ending its customer-friendly practice of providing a prorated credit for the final month.

Even if you cancel on the first day of a new billing period, you'll be charged for the full month and service will continue for the rest of the month whether you want it or not. To avoid paying for a month of service that you don't want, you'd need to cancel by the last day of the previous billing period.

The change will take effect on January 14, 2019 and apply even when a customer is paying on a month-to-basis and no longer under contract.

Enlarge / US President Donald Trump speaks during a post-election press conference on November 7, 2018. (credit: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)

Late last week, as the country would be focusing on antacids and shopping, the Trump administration released a report on climate change prepared by its own scientific agencies. The hope was that the report, and its expectations of a huge financial and human toll, would be ignored, and the administration could go back to pretending that it was perfectly justified in pursuing policies like pulling out of the Paris climate agreement and attempting to resuscitate coal.

That didn't quite work out. Coverage of the report's dramatic conclusions about the pace and costs of climate change continued to drive headlines over the weekend, and they were a featured topic on Sunday news talk shows. As the following week arrived, Trump and other officials were peppered with questions about the report.

But as the week unfolded, the administration stuck to a number of different strategies in an attempt to disavow the work of its own experts. And to further muddy the situation, television news outlets handled the situation poorly, allowing themselves to be used as a source of misinformation during their attempts to cover the new report.

Enlarge / Siri on Apple's HomePod speaker. (credit: Jeff Dunn)

Today, Apple published a long and informative blog post by its audio software engineering and speech teams about how they use machine learning to make Siri responsive on the HomePod, and it reveals a lot about why Apple has made machine learning such a focus of late.

The post discusses working in a far-field setting where users are calling on Siri from any number of locations around the room relative to the HomePod's location. The premise is essentially that making Siri work on the HomePod is harder than on the iPhone for that reason. The device must compete with loud music playback from itself.

Apple addresses these issues with multiple microphones along with machine learning methods—specifically:

Enlarge / The first generation AirPods. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

The approaching new year may bring updated AirPods sooner than we thought. A report by 9to5Mac cites noted Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo's predictions that Apple may release a new model of its truly wireless earbuds with "wireless charging support" in the first quarter of 2019.

The upgrade may only refer to the AirPods' charging case rather than the earbuds themselves. Kuo claims the upgrade case will have a new "rigid-flex board" internal component, redesigned hinges, and support for better thermal management. He also notes that these changes will make the case more expensive to produce, possibly leading to a higher price tag for the new product.

However, Kuo also suggests that the new AirPods themselves will have upgraded Bluetooth specs (possibly Bluetooth 5.0, no word on a new Apple-made, W-series chip). This may mean that Apple will debut an upgraded set of AirPods with internal improvements that comes with the new wireless charging case, but it may also make that wireless charging case available as an add-on for current AirPod owners.