Month: October 2020

Enlarge / The Beats Powerbeats Pro (left) and Apple AirPods Pro. (credit: Jeff Dunn)

Tuesday marks the start of Amazon Prime Day, Amazon's annual Black-Friday-style sales event for members of its Prime subscription service. Though it arrives a few months later than usual after pandemic-related complications, Prime Day remains at once a manufactured celebration of an increasingly problematic giant and a nice perk for 150 million people looking to save a few bucks on nice things.

However you slice it, Prime Day is also one of the rare occasions where we see several good deals on Apple devices. We can safely rule out instant discounts on the just-announced iPhone 12 lineup, and in general, it's entirely possible that Black Friday will bring better offers. That said, we are seeing a few good prices on AirPods, iPads, MacBooks, and various third-party accessories for Apple devices.

So because significant sales on these devices are uncommon, and because we know many would-be shoppers are specifically looking for Apple hardware this holiday season, we've rounded up those top Prime Day Apple deals below. We'll be sure to keep this post updated as more offers become available. As a reminder, these offers are only open to users of Amazon's Prime membership service, and Prime Day itself will last until 12am PT on October 14. For a complete rundown of deals, we're maintaining a more general roundup as well.

Today, Apple announced the iPhone 12 with 5G wireless capability. The phone is an aluminum and glass sandwich that looks a lot like the iPhone 4.

The iPhone 12 has a 6.1-inch display, but it's the same size as the iPhone 11, so it's 15 percent smaller, and 11 percent thinner than last year's iPhone 11. The screen is an OLED display, and Apple has teamed up with Corning to make a new display cover material called a "Ceramic Shield." Apple claims it is tougher than any other smartphone glass.

One of the headlines additions to the new iPhone is the addition of 5G connectivity, which has been hyped up by the carriers as the next big thing in smartphones. The quick primer is that there are two kinds of 5G: a potentially very fast "mmWave" network (Verizon calls this "Ultra Wideband") that is short range, has poor signal characteristics, and is hard to roll out, and a "sub 6GHz" 5G, which is closer to an iterative step of 4G, with better signal characteristics, and a better shot of a world-wide rollout but with less of a revolutionary speed increase.

Enlarge / Richmond, the capital of Virginia, looking scenic as seen from across the James River. (credit: Sky Noir Photography by Bill Dickinson | Getty Images)

Today is the last day to register to vote in the commonwealth of Virginia, so of course the official website for updating or managing voter registration is offline. Unlike in Florida, however, Virginia's site did not crash from high traffic but instead was rendered inaccessible because a vital fiber connecting the state's digital infrastructure was physically cut.

Twitter users began to notice the state's voter registration page was failing to load sometime after 8:30 this morning, and at 9:00, the state's IT agency confirmed that a severed fiber optic cable was the root of all the problems.

"A fiber cut near Rt. 10 in Chester near the Commonwealth Enterprise Solutions Center (CESC) is impacting data circuits and virtual private network (VPN) connectivity for multiple Commonwealth agencies," the Virginia Information Technologies Agency wrote in a tweet, adding, "Technicians are on site and working to repair the cut; updates will be provided as work progresses."

• 

  Like HomePod, but smaller (and cheaper).

It took a couple of years, but Apple has finally announced HomePod Mini, a smart speaker that's priced to compete with affordable offerings from competitors Google, Amazon, and Sonos. The revised HomePod is a cheaper, less powerful cousin to the steeply priced HomePod that Apple released in 2018, arriving on November 16 at $99.

Instead of breaking down exactly how the HomePod Mini downgrades from the original, larger model, Apple's announcement talked up its use of an Apple S5 chip to drive "computational audio," which will dynamically adjust audio depending on the room it's in. Apple made its usual promise of "a full-range dynamic driver that delivers high output while keeping distortion to a minimum," which we look forward to testing.

The hardware includes a touch panel on its top for play/pause and volume options, along with a light-up display to indicate use of Siri. And if you hold an iPhone close to a HomePod Mini, its top panel will reflect this—and you'll be able to access wacky options on the phone.

Enlarge / NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine speaks during a State of NASA address on Feb. 10, 2020. (credit: NASA)

NASA appears to be making good progress in building international support for a plan to return humans to the Moon in the 2020s.

On Tuesday, during the virtual meeting of the International Astronautical Foundation, the space agency signed "accords" with seven other countries that will establish norms for cooperation among nations to explore the Moon, Mars, and other destinations in the Solar System.

Signing the Artemis Accords alongside the United States were Australia, Canada, Japan, Luxembourg, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates. Essentially, partner nations agreed to 10 basic norms as part of their space activities, such as operating transparently and releasing scientific data.