Month: July 2022

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  The 16-inch MacBook Pro with its lid closed. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

Second-generation refreshes of the current 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro design could arrive as soon as this fall, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The updated laptops will feature more powerful chips based on Apple's M2, he claims.

In his weekly Power On newsletter, the journalist—who has accurately reported on upcoming Apple products before—wrote that the overall design of the MacBook Pro is "likely to stay roughly the same," with no major new visual changes or features beyond what comes with the M2 generation of system-on-a-chip.

Gurman predicts that, unsurprisingly, the two new MacBook Pro models will offer buyers a choice between an M2 Pro and an M2 Max chip. These chips will be much faster and more oriented toward heavy-duty workflows than the M2 that shipped over the past couple of months in the 2022 refreshes of the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro.

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  The 16-inch MacBook Pro with its lid closed. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

Second-generation refreshes of the current 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro design could arrive as soon as this fall, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The updated laptops will feature more powerful chips based on Apple's M2, he claims.

In his weekly Power On newsletter, the journalist—who has accurately reported on upcoming Apple products before—wrote that the overall design of the MacBook Pro is "likely to stay roughly the same," with no major new visual changes or features beyond what comes with the M2 generation of system-on-a-chip.

Gurman predicts that, unsurprisingly, the two new MacBook Pro models will offer buyers a choice between an M2 Pro and an M2 Max chip. These chips will be much faster and more oriented toward heavy-duty workflows than the M2 that shipped over the past couple of months in the 2022 refreshes of the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro.

Enlarge / If GameStop's NFT business is gonna go "to the moon," total trade volume on the platform has been bending in the wrong direction so far...

Last week, when Ars analyzed the first day of NFT sales on GameStop's heavily hyped crypto marketplace, some boosters were quick to suggest that this was just a starting point and that interest and trading volume might increase as time goes on and more people discover the trading platform. Over the marketplace's first week, though, interest in trading GameStop NFTs seems to be declining when compared to that launch day performance.

An Ars-exclusive analysis of the GameStop NFT marketplace now shows that it has been responsible for about 5,254 ETH in total trading volume in its first week (worth about $7.8 million at current exchange rates). That's a daily average of about 750 ETH ($1.117 million) in total trade volume. GameStop takes a 2.25 percent fee for all those trades, representing a daily average of 16.9 ETH ($25,113) in direct revenue to the company. All told, six of the over 300 collections on the platform are responsible for a majority of that trading volume.

(Note: Ever-volatile ETH prices have increased about 38 percent since last Tuesday, when Ars did its launch day analysis of the marketplace. Unless otherwise noted, we're using the current ETH spot price—$1,488.06 as of this writing—for conversions here, even though transactions earlier in the week likely took place at lower dollar/ETH rates.)

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Photo by Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

Elon Musk urged the Delaware Court of Chancery to reject Twitter's motion for an expedited trial, saying he needs extensive time to analyze Twitter's spam-account data. While Twitter's motion sought a four-day trial to be completed in September 2022, Musk's court filing on Friday said the trial should begin on or after February 13, 2023.

"Twitter has engaged in tactical delay for two months by resisting Defendants' information requests... Twitter's sudden request for warp speed after two months of foot-dragging and obfuscation is its latest tactic to shroud the truth about spam accounts long enough to railroad Defendants into closing," Musk's motion said. Musk's legal team argued that the "core dispute over false and spam accounts is fundamental to Twitter's value," and that resolving "these issues will require complex, technical discovery—including the forensic review and analysis of large swaths of data."

Twitter sued Musk on July 12, demanding that he complete the $44 billion purchase he agreed to in April. Twitter's motion for a September 2022 trial cited the contract's "presumptive drop-dead date of October 24, 2022 for completion of the merger."

Enlarge / Dr. Anthony Fauci attends the National AIDS Update Conference as it meets at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium on October 12, 1989. Fauci at the time was based in Maryland, but he became a frequent voice for Bay Area residents following the AIDS crisis, even before he became director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1984. (credit: Getty | Hearst Newspapers)

Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the US, says "you can guarantee" he'll step down from his position by January 2025, ending a more than five-decade career as a federal scientist.

In addition to being the current chief medical adviser to the president, Fauci is the long-standing director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), an institute within the National Institutes of Health. Fauci, who is 81 years old, has held the NIAID director position since 1984. He initially joined the institute as a clinical associate in 1968.

In his nearly four decades as NIAID director, Fauci has advised every sitting president since Ronald Reagan, as well as every administration and every Congress, on infectious disease threats. In his first meeting with the Trump administration in 2017, two years before a novel pandemic coronavirus mushroomed out of Wuhan, China, Fauci provided the same advice he provided to every new administration: We’re likely to see an infectious disease emerge out of left field. Expect the unexpected.

Enlarge / Asahi Linux is now up and running on the Mac Studio and the first M2 Macs. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Unlike Intel Macs, Apple silicon Macs were designed to run only Apple's software. But the developers on the Asahi Linux team have been working to change that, painstakingly reverse-engineering support for Apple's processors and other Mac hardware and releasing it as a work-in-progress distro that can actually boot up and run on bare metal, no virtualization required.

The Asahi Linux team put out a new release today with plenty of additions and improvements. Most notably, the distro now supports the M1 Ultra and the Mac Studio and has added preliminary support for the M2 MacBook Pro (which has been tested firsthand by the team) and the M2 MacBook Air (which hasn't been tested but ought to work).

Preliminary Bluetooth support for all Apple silicon Macs has also been added, though the team notes that it works poorly when connected to a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network because "Wi-Fi/Bluetooth coexistence isn't properly configured yet."