Month: June 2023

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  The color options (left to right): midnight, starlight, space gray, and silver. [credit: Apple ]

CUPERTINO, Calif.—It's common for Apple to refresh its various MacBook models more or less annually, but it's not so common that an entirely new screen size is introduced. That's what happened today during the company's WWDC keynote: Apple announced a 15-inch variant of the traditionally 13-inch MacBook Air.

It's something that has been rumored for years on end, and now after many false starts, the rumor has proven true.

The 15-inch MacBook Air is in most respects identical to its 13-inch counterpart and has Apple's M2 chip. The star is the 15.3-inch screen, with 5 mm borders and a 500-nit brightness claim. Apple hasn't provided the exact resolution for the screen yet, but it was rumored that the 15-inch MacBook Air would have the same resolution as the 14-inch MacBook Pro, 3024×1964. The 15-inch MacBook Air will be available with up to 24GB of RAM and 2TB of storage, Apple said today.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Christopher Furlong )

Twitter's US advertising revenue plunged 59 percent year-over-year during a recent five-week period, The New York Times reported today. The firm's US ad "revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88 million, down 59 percent from a year earlier, according to an internal presentation obtained by The New York Times."

Owner Elon Musk said in an April BBC interview that "I think almost all advertisers have come back or said they are going to come back." But internal projections are grim, according to the NYT report. One internal forecast cited by the NYT predicted that Twitter's US ad revenue in June "will be down at least 56 percent each week compared with a year ago."

Twitter "has regularly fallen short of its US weekly sales projections, sometimes by as much as 30 percent," and that "performance is unlikely to improve anytime soon, according to the documents and seven current and former Twitter employees," the NYT reported. "Twitter's ad sales staff is concerned that advertisers may be spooked by a rise in hate speech and pornography on the social network, as well as more ads featuring online gambling and marijuana products, the people said."

Enlarge / This Diablo II Resurrected screenshot looks pretty unremarkable until you zoom into the top-right and see that it's running on an Apple M2. (credit: CodeWeavers)

Apple has made a tiny bit of progress in the last year when it comes to getting games running on Macs—titles like Resident Evil Village and a recent No Man's Sky port don't exactly make the Mac a gaming destination, but they're bigger releases than Mac users are normally accustomed to.

For getting the vast majority of PC gaming titles running, though, the most promising solution would be a Steam Deck-esque software layer that translates Microsoft's DirectX 12 API into something compatible with Apple's proprietary Metal API. Preliminary support for that kind of translation will be coming to CodeWeavers' CrossOver software this summer, the company announced in a blog post late last week.

CrossOver is a software package that promises to run Windows apps and games under macOS and Linux without requiring a full virtualized (or emulated) Windows installation. Its developers announced that they were working on DirectX 12 support in late 2021, and now they have a sample screenshot of Diablo II Resurrected running on an Apple M2 chip. This early DirectX12 support will ship with CrossOver version 23 "later this summer."

Enlarge / The NASCAR/Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 leads a Ferrari 499P and assorted other racing cars at a test day at the Circuit de la Sarthe in Le Mans, France. (credit: Chris Graythen/Getty Images)

When Le Mans renovated its facilities in 2012, it built 55 pit garages for regular entrants in its annual 24-hour race and one more for entrants that want to demonstrate something new (there are actually a total of 62 entrants this year, but the special one is still called Garage 56).

These have included the pint-size Nissan Deltawing in 2012 and the closely related electric Nissan ZEOD RC in 2014. In 2016, quadruple amputee Frédéric Sausset did something neither of those two Nissans could manage, finishing the race in a specially modified prototype with the SRT 41 team, which repeated the feat with a pair of paraplegic drivers in 2021. And there have been attempts to run a hydrogen-powered racer from Garage 56. But this year's entry is a bit different—and a little more familiar to Americans. It's a NASCAR stock car.

It was certainly an incongruous sight as the NASCAR stock cars took to the track this weekend with the normal prototypes and GT cars at a test held before next weekend's race at Le Mans. NASCAR stock cars are not exactly small, and they're known for going fast in a straight line, not for their cornering prowess. There was even talk of trackside marshals waving a white flag—for a slow car ahead—to warn other competitors if they were going to encounter the stock car in one of the track's more curvy sections.