Month: October 2022

Enlarge / A still from Ted Lasso, one of the most popular shows on Apple TV+. (credit: Apple)

Starting today, Apple is raising the monthly subscription costs of its music and TV streaming services for the first time. The Apple One bundle is also going up in price.

An Apple spokesperson announced the change in a statement, quoted in 9to5Mac:

The subscription prices for Apple Music, Apple TV+, and Apple One will increase beginning today. The change to Apple Music is due to an increase in licensing costs, and in turn, artists and songwriters will earn more for the streaming of their music. We also continue to add innovative features that make Apple Music the world’s best listening experience. We introduced Apple TV+ at a very low price because we started with just a few shows and movies. Three years later, Apple TV+ is home to an extensive selection of award-winning and broadly acclaimed series, feature films, documentaries, and kids and family entertainment from the world’s most creative storytellers.

Apple Music previously cost $9.99 monthly for an individual account and $14.99 for a family account. Now, it's $10.99 and $16.99. The annual subscription has changed, too; an individual annual sub used to cost $99, but now it's $109. Likewise, Apple TV+ has gone up from $4.99 monthly or $49.99 annually to $6.99 and $69.

Enlarge / The offending wheel in question. (credit: Volkswagen)

It can sometimes feel like the arc of progress only moves in one direction and that it's always making our lives worse. As car makers get turned on to technology—pushed by customers begging to see smartphone-like features in their cars—we've been foisted some clangers, like pure touchscreen interfaces or not-very-secure connected cars. Which is why it's refreshing to see an OEM admit it got something wrong.

In this case, I'm talking about Volkswagen Group and its not-great multifunction steering wheel. First introduced with the Mk. 8 Golf, but also seen on the new electric ID.4 and ID. Buzz, VW kept basically the same control layout for the new wheel. But instead of having discrete buttons for each of those functions—adaptive cruise control on the left spoke, media playback on the right spoke—the controls are now capacitive touch panels with some haptic feedback.

Now, multifunction steering wheels are a good thing in the 21st century, because they let you control things like media playback or even the entire infotainment system without taking your eyes off the road or your hands off the wheel. And in a car that uses a touchscreen infotainment system, that's a huge boon.

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  The OnePlus Nord N300. [credit: OnePlus ]

OnePlus is showing off a new low-end smartphone, the OnePlus Nord N300 5G. This is a $228 phone you can get at T-Mobile starting November 3. The highlights include a surprisingly handsome design for this price point, 33 W charging, and a 90 Hz display.

First up: specs. The SoC is a MediaTek Dimensity 810. That means a 6 nm chip with two 2.4 GHz Cortex A76 cores, six 2 GHz, Cortex A55 cores, and an ARM Mali-G57 MP2 GPU. There's 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage and a 5000 mAh battery. The display is a 6.56-inch, 1,612×720, 90 Hz "HD+" display. A 90 Hz display on a phone this cheap sounds impressive, but this phone's predecessor, the Nord N200, didn't have the power to reliably ship 90 frames per second to the 1080p display, making it a bit of a waste. The downgrade to 720p (and maybe a slightly faster SoC) means OnePlus might actually hit 90 FPS this year, but it's not clear the resolution drop will be worth that.

33 W charging means this will charge faster than an $1,100 iPhone. There's a side fingerprint reader in the power button, and you get a microSD slot, NFC, and a headphone jack. For cameras, you get one rear 48MP main camera and a just-for-looks 2MP "depth" camera. The front camera is 8MP. The phone ships with Android 13, and OnePlus' usual update timeline for these cheap phones is one major update and three years of semi-regular security updates.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it would be releasing new hardware to encourage more developers to start using and supporting the Arm version of Windows. Dubbed "Project Volterra," all we knew about it at the time was that it would use an unnamed Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and NVMe-based storage, that it would support at least two monitors, and that it would have a decent number of ports.

Today, Microsoft is putting Volterra out into the world, complete with a snappy new name: the Windows Dev Kit 2023. The Dev Kit 2023 will use a Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3—essentially the same chip as the Microsoft SQ3 in the new 5G version of the Surface Pro 9—plus 512GB of storage and a whopping 32GB of RAM for the surprisingly low price of $599.

The Dev Kit 2023 is powered by a Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, similar to the Microsoft SQ3 chip in the Surface Pro 9 with 5G. (credit: Microsoft)

We don't know exactly how fast the 8cx Gen 3 will be (Qualcomm says "up to 85 percent faster" CPU performance than the 8cx Gen 2, which would put it somewhere below but within spitting distance of modern Core i5 laptop CPU). But 512GB of storage and 32GB of memory should make the Dev Kit 2023 useful as a development and testing environment.

Enlarge / Separating out different wavelengths of light lets us track the movement of material toward and away from Earth. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI)

A team of researchers is publishing a paper based on new images taken by the Webb Space Telescope. The images reveal a dense concentration of matter in the early Universe, potentially indicating early stages in the formation of a galaxy cluster. And thanks to the spectrograph present, Webb was able to confirm that several galaxies previously imaged by Hubble were also part of the cluster. It even tracked the flow of gas ejected by the largest galaxy present.

Graphing the spectrum

The key hardware for this work is NIRSpec, the Near Infrared Spectrograph that is part of Webb's instrument package. While the instrument itself is highly sophisticated, it works along principles that are important for the operation of things like your cell phone's camera.

In these consumer cameras, the sensors register the brightness of three different areas of the visible spectrum: red, green, and blue. The images that result are made by combining this information, with different areas of the image having distinct intensities of each of these colors.

If you asked me to tell you all the most exciting things that happened to the Mac in the last two years, I'd start with hardware, not software.

The transition from Intel’s chips to Apple silicon has been transformative, ushering in huge battery-life boosts and allowing MacBook Airs and Mac minis to do the kind of work you would have needed a MacBook Pro or 27-inch iMac for a few years ago. The Mac Studio ably fills the longstanding gap between the Mac mini and Mac Pro in Apple’s desktop lineup, and new function-over-form redesigns for the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air seem purpose-built to address criticisms of the Mac hardware lineup circa 2016. These Macs would be exciting upgrades whether they were running Big Sur or Ventura.

On the software side, it's not as though nothing has happened to the Mac in the last two years. It's getting new features. I still find it comfortable to work in, even as Windows 11 has introduced some genuinely handy window-management features that I miss when I'm not using it (especially in multi-monitor mode).