Month: September 2019

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  I was petrified that Audi would somehow make the second-generation RS7 not as good to look at or drive as its predecessor. I was wrong to be worried, because the new car hits both of those bases at once. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

FRANKFURT, Germany—Earlier this month, we checked out the new Audi RS6 Avant, a 591hp (441kW) station wagon that is finally—after much pleading and begging—coming to America. But Audi Sport's big reveal at the Frankfurt auto show was actually that car's mechanically identical but even better-looking twin: the RS7 Sportback. And since we were going to be in Germany for the auto show anyway, Audi invited us to spend the day driving the RS7.

Unlike the sporty station wagon, the RS7 is no stranger to our roads. The first-generation car was sold in the United States, and it was really good. Probably the best car in Audi's lineup, in fact. You see, Audi has earned a reputation for building cars that are elegant to look at and luxurious to ride in, but they are often boring to drive. As the company frequently tells me, boring luxury is what its customers want, or at least most of them. For drivers who want something pulse-quickening, there's Audi Sport. Based in Neckarsulm, Germany, it's Audi's in-house tuning and race shop, and it's gotten pretty good at adding excitement to otherwise staid cars down the years.

The recipe is straightforward. In this case, take the attractive but dull-to-drive A7 fastback and give it a twin-turbo V8, uprated suspension, and a clever torque-vectoring rear diff, then build a few thousand each year. This recipe worked extremely well in the first-generation RS7, and I'll admit I was terrified that the sequel wouldn't quite live up to expectations. So finding out the new RS7 is actually even better is a great relief.

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  This is the new Porsche Taycan Turbo, the first battery electric vehicle from the storied German car maker. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

HAMBURG, Germany—When a new car is as anticipated as the Porsche Taycan, it's easy for assumptions to grow in advance of anyone actually getting to drive the thing. Car makers are generally reticent about sharing too many details before a model is officially launched, so it's only natural that speculation fills the gaps. And since this is the first battery-electric vehicle from the storied German car maker, pre-launch chatter went from 0-60mph fast.

With few facts to go on, the bench-racing over the Porsche Taycan was rampant: It's a "Tesla Model S killer" we were told by people with as little info to go on as the rest of us. Others claimed it was no more than a Panamera sedan minus the internal combustion engine. But forget all of that; after driving the new Porsche battery electric vehicle for a couple of days across Northern Europe, those comparisons are misplaced. Porsche says it set out to make a four-door electric sports car, and it did. What's more, the Taycan is every bit as good as you'd expect of a Porsche that will cost you at least $150,000, which is to say it's very good indeed. It's just that this car uses electricity to get you where you're going, too.

To show off its latest creation, Porsche's press office decided a big road trip was in order. Some people are scared to consider BEVs because of range anxiety, so how better to show that long distances are no problem than by driving a circuitous route that started in Oslo, Norway, and ended in Stuttgart 18 days and 4,001 miles (6440km) later? Our briefing was simple: join up with the convoy in Denmark and drive Taycans from Copenhagen to Hamburg over the course of two days and several hundred miles. We got to experience the Taycan Turbo ($150,900 before tax credits and the infamous Porsche options list) and the even faster, even more expensive Taycan Turbo S (which starts at $185,000) on all manner of roads, from narrow country lanes and low-speed urban streets to stretches of straight, smooth, derestricted autobahn. Plus, such a road trip meant a chance to check out the Taycan's fast-charging ability when connected to an 800V DC charger.

Enlarge / iPadOS on the new iPad. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple released three major new operating system updates today, following the release of iOS 13 for iPhones and iPods last week. iPadOS brings the changes and features of iOS 13 to the iPad, plus a plethora of new tablet-specific functionality as the iPad's operating system officially branches away from the iPhone for the first time. iOS 13.1 fixes numerous bugs and brings a few features to iPhones that were originally planned for iOS 13. And tvOS 13 adds Apple Arcade, new game controller support, multi-user functionality, and more to supported Apple TV devices.

Table of Contents

• Major changes in iOS 13.1
• Share ETA in Maps
• Audio Sharing
• Shortcuts Automations
• AirDrop with the U1
• iOS 13 bug fixes
• Major changes in iPadOS
• A separation from iOS
• Expanded multitasking
• Widgets on the Home Screen
• Apple Pencil improvements
• Other additions
• Major changes in tvOS
• Future Ars coverage
• iOS 13.1 update notes
• iPadOS 13.1 update notes

Major changes in iOS 13.1

Share ETA in Maps

There's now a "Share ETA" button in Apple Maps while you're navigating with directions. Tapping it will bring up a share sheet so you can send your status to a friend, partner, family member—whoever needs to know your ETA.

The recipient will get a text that includes your destination and your estimated time of arrival. If your ETA slips due to traffic, a route change, or some other circumstance, the recipient will also get an automated text letting them know your updated arrival time.

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  Joel's back in The Last of Us Pt. II. [credit: Naughty Dog / SIE ]

Sony's latest "State of Play" video event ended with a release-date unveil for the highly anticipated PlayStation-exclusive game The Last of Us Part II: February 21, 2020.

The release date came at the end of a new, revealing trailer for the Naughty Dog game, which finally showed original hero Joel in real-time gameplay, as opposed to his brief cameo in a 2016 Part II teaser. Every trailer since the game's 2016 reveal has focused on Ellie as the lead character, and Tuesday's trailer opened up with more backstory about Ellie and her apparent new partner, an unnamed woman, surviving in a snowy outpost.

After embarking on horseback and taking on apparent open-world missions, Ellie suffers a vague setback, prompting her to return to the jungle-overgrowth cities that marked so much of the 2013 original. The trailer includes a smattering of new, dangerous foes, human and monster alike, along with a vague call by Ellie to face a rising, unexplained threat: "I have to finish it. You can't stop this." Once Joel appears, he seems to be in agreement with this plan: "You think I'd let you do this on your own?"

Jesse Pinkman is on the lam and looking for revenge in the first full official trailer for El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, Vince Gilligan's much-anticipated coda to his seminal TV series, Breaking Bad. The series won multiple Emmys during its five-year run, among other awards, and the series finale, "Felina," has been touted as one of the best series finales of all time by critics. The spinoff prequel series, Better Call Saul, saw national treasure Bob Odenkirk reprise his role as shady lawyer Saul Goodman and has also enjoyed critical acclaim. So it's not surprising that there was considerable interest in further exploring Breaking Bad's fictional world.

(Major spoilers for Breaking Bad TV series below.)

Breaking Bad starred Bryan Cranston as high school chemistry teacher Walter White, who is diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer. Assuming his death is imminent, he frets about providing for his wife and kids, especially his oldest son, Walter Jr. (RJ Mitte), who suffers from cerebral palsy. So he decides to put his chemistry expertise to use making methamphetamine, with the help of his former student, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul).

Enlarge / Add a Bluetooth keyboard to an iPad Air 2 running iPadOS 13 and you've got a surprisingly capable device for browsing and shooting off emails and Slack messages. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Starting today, iPads run something called “iPadOS” rather than iOS, but the change has more to do with branding than functionality. Apple’s tablets might get a few more keyboard shortcuts and some multitasking features; maybe they’ll diverge more in the future. But for right now, iPadOS is still fundamentally iOS.

That means, as with iOS, Apple is in total control of what hardware can run the new operating system (unlike the Mac, where you can occasionally get around Apple’s restrictions and run new software on unsupported Macs or hardware that isn’t Apple’s at all). The original iPad Air and the iPad Mini 2 and Mini 3 have all been dropped, because of their slower Apple A7 processors and (more importantly) their 1GB of RAM. Today, the iPad Air 2 and the iPad Mini 4 are the oldest, slowest tablets that run iPadOS 13.

The Air 2 was Apple’s first iDevice to include 2GB of RAM and the first iPad to support multitasking features like Split View that were introduced in iOS 9 (the first iPad Air got a more limited subset of those features, but its 1GB of RAM wasn’t enough to support two apps running side by side simultaneously). It was arguably over-powered at the time of its release, but its forward-looking specs have helped it bridge that gap between the full-screen, one-app-at-a-time model that still existed in iOS 8 and the still-limited but generally more computer-y iPadOS experience.

Enlarge / The European Court of Justice, Luxembourg, in June 2019. (credit: Arne Immanuel Bänsch | picture alliance | Getty)

The Internet is forever, we tell social media users: be careful what you put online, because you can't ever take it back off. And while that's gospel for US users, there's some nuance to that dictum across the Atlantic. In Europe, individuals have a right to be forgotten and can request that information about themselves be taken down—but only, a court has now ruled, within Europe.

The Court of Justice of the European Union, the EU's highest court, issued a ruling today finding that there is no obligation under EU law for a search service to carry out a valid European de-listing request globally.

"EU law requires a search engine operator to carry out such a de-referencing on the versions of its search engine corresponding to all the Member States," the Court wrote in a statement (PDF), "and to take sufficiently effective measures to ensure the effective protection of the data subject's fundamental rights."