Month: June 2022

Enlarge / The image Apple shared alongside the WWDC 2022 announcement. (credit: Apple)

June 6 marks the beginning of Apple's annual developer conference, WWDC. The week-long event will kick off with a keynote at 10 am PST on Monday loaded with announcements about new software features across Apple's various platforms.

For the first time since before the COVID-19 pandemic started, there will be a significant in-person audience for WWDC, too. And there will be countless sessions during the week on programming APIs, Swift features, and so on. But for most people around the world, new operating systems and hardware announcements are the main draw—and we'll see a few of those during the keynote on Monday.

It's important to note that WWDC isn't typically focused on product announcements for consumers. It's a place where Apple introduces new technologies and tools to developers.

Preparing for the next pandemic at Ars Frontiers. Click here for transcript. (video link)

Human beings have made tremendous scientific and technological breakthroughs, but our continued social and cultural advancement has come at the expense of our planet's ecosystems, endangered by human-driven global climate change. Ars Science Editor John Timmer joined climatologist Michael Mann of Penn State University (moving to the University of Pennsylvania this fall) and Sally Benson, deputy director for energy and chief strategist for the energy transition at the White House of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), for a spirited discussion about the existential threat of climate change; viable—and ethical—solutions to that threat; and the need to face the grim reality the planet faces without giving in to so-called climate "doom-ism."

The discussion took place in the wake of the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—technically the third and final section of the 6th Assessment Report—concluding that the next few years are a critical window of opportunity if we hope to limit global warming to the benchmarks of 1.5° C or 2° C. The good news: There are signs of clear progress, most notably an acceleration in the growth of the clean energy sector. The bad news: We are at the peak of the so-called emissions curve, so emissions must begin declining now. Jim Skea (co-chair of the group behind the report), described it as a "now or never" scenario.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Google is stirring up the pot again and removing helpful features from users for no discernible reason. Through various channels, the company announced that reminders for the Google Assistant will soon be a lot less useful.

First up, Google Assistant is losing the ability to create location-based reminders. These were incredibly useful commands you could tell Google Assistant, like, "remind me to take the trash out when I get home," and your phone, which is always tracking your location, would ping you when you walked in the door. You could also say things like, "remind me to buy milk next time I'm at Walmart," and it would just work.

Google is sending out notifications telling users the feature is dead. A message on a Google support page says: "The option to create reminders for a certain location is going away soon. You can still create reminders at a certain time and set routines for a location." Suggesting routines as a replacement is a ludicrous suggestion, since routines are, well, routine, and want to repeat after a set period of time. They also are meant to trigger smart-home automation or alarm clocks; they aren't simple notifications.

Enlarge / Sega's Mega Drive Mini 2 includes Sega CD games and, for a little extra, an adorable recreation of the Sega CD attachment. But it has only been announced for Japan, at least for now. (credit: Sega)

Sega's Genesis Mini console was one of the only officially licensed retro emulation boxes that came close to the NES and SNES Classics' combination of software quality and hardware authenticity, even if its emulation wasn't quite perfect and its game selection was missing some heavy hitters. The company's mini-Game Gear was also the first device to make the mini-console fad portable.

Sega is going back to the well one more time with the Mega Drive Mini 2, which will be released in Japan this October (the Mega Drive was what the Genesis was called outside of the US). The console will cost 9,980 yen before tax; at just under $80, this is in line with the pricing of earlier mini-consoles.

The Mega Drive Mini 2 will include an entirely different 50-game lineup, anchored by Sega CD titles like Sonic the Hedgehog CD and Shining Force CD. New Mega Drive games have also made the cut, including Virtua Racing and Thunder Force IV, and a version of the Sega arcade game Fantasy Zone has also been thrown in for good measure (the original Genesis Mini includes Super Fantasy Zone, the Genesis-native entry in the franchise).

Enlarge (credit: MSI)

MSI refreshed its Titan laptops on Thursday. Coming in at $6,000 for a maxed-out configuration, the 17.3-inch Titan GT77 represents one of the most expensive and power-hungry consumer laptops available.

MSI's Titan laptops are built to be powerful enough to replace your desktop. In the case of the GT77, the first new Titan since 2019, that means offering Intel's Core HX-series CPUs, which have the same dies as Intel's 12th Gen desktop CPUs.

The Titan GT77 is 6.82 lbs and 0.9 inch thick. (credit: MSI)

MSI's GT77 comes with an i7-12800HX and starts at $3,200. The top-end model has an i9-12900HX with eight performance cores (2.3–5 GHz) and eight efficiency cores (up to 3.6 GHz). The chip is supported by up to 150 W of max turbo power and is paired with an Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti (16GB GDDR6) laptop graphics card. With MSI's "Overboost" feature, the clamshell supports up to 250 W of power delivery to the CPU and GPU. The GPU gets 175 W, MSI said.

Enlarge (credit: Dyllan Furness)

As solar and wind energy ramps up in the United States, the industries have gotten better at installing and operating their facilities. This experience can be seen in how the facilities are financed. According to new research, people working in the fields—and adjacent ones—have learned to be more efficient, reducing the overall cost of power. Further, according to Mark Bolinger, a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and one of the authors of the paper, this so-called learning rate can be extrapolated into the future, and it spells good news for the two renewable sources of energy.

“The people who operate these turbines naturally get better over time as they do more of it. They get more efficient, and it allows them to lower their costs a bit,” Bolinger told Ars, adding that the same holds true for the workers manufacturing the facilities. “Some of them have been doing it for a really long time… All things being equal, that should lead to a reduction in manufacturing costs.”

There’s a large amount of literature on learning rate and learning curve theory, he said. Moore’s Law, which pertains to the power of silicon computer chips, says that the number of transistors per silicon chip doubles each year. Bolinger said that the learning rate in these renewable energy operations is similar to that. Learning rate is a measure of how much cost declines for each doubling of cumulative output, he said.

Enlarge / Tesla charging station at the Chesapeake House Travel Plaza off I-95 in Maryland on March 11, 2022. (credit: Getty Images | Tom Williams )

Tesla CEO Elon Musk wants to cut 10 percent of jobs at the electric carmaker because he has a "super bad feeling" about the economy, he wrote in an email to executives, according to Reuters.

Musk sent the message on Thursday with the subject line "pause all hiring worldwide," according to the report. Musk "did not elaborate on the reasons for his 'super bad feeling' about the economic outlook in the brief email seen by Reuters," the news organization wrote.

Tesla stock was down more than 8 percent during Friday's trading as of this writing and down more than 40 percent in 2022.