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Andrew Cunningham

A rose gold iPhone SE (left) next to an iPhone 5S.

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Have you ever held an iPhone 5? How bout an iPhone 5S? If you have, you really probably don't need me to tell you what it's like to hold an iPhone SE. They're close enough that you'll have trouble telling them apart if you don't know what you're looking for.

Let's focus on the physical differences: the chamfered edges of the phone, previously shiny, are now matte. Those shiny edges were prone to getting scratched and losing their finish in extended use, so a change to a matte finish may help out a bit. Also, the Apple logo on the back is now a separate, inset piece of metal rather than a shiny patch of finish as it is on the 5 and 5S. This is the end of the list.

And that's not really a bad thing; by sticking with an iPhone 5-era design, Apple has avoided some of the common complaints about the 6 and 6S design. There are no awkward visible antenna cutouts, because the wireless signals can escape through the glass cutouts at the top and bottom of the rear case. There’s no camera bump, since the phone is a little thicker. There are no slippery rounded edges, making the phone a bit easier to hold.

Ars checks out Alt.Ctrl.GDC (video link)

Panels, exhibits, and demonstrations at the annual Game Developers Conference tend to err on the wonkier side of the industry, but recent years have included a major exception. Now in its third-annual iteration, GDC's "Alt.Ctrl" showcase has quickly gained a reputation for having the conference's weirdest and (sometimes most fun) content.

But is it actually fun to stare into your own soul by way of a confusing phone call or to control on-screen characters by licking candies or even to make friends with an iPad-loaded toy by offering it colorful pieces of paper-food? Kyle Orland and I took to the GDC show floor with video cameras in hand to find out.

The yellow bar represents the Punch Club piracy rate for Brazilian players—which the dev TinyBuild says spiked the day the game launched in the region with Brazilian Portuguese translations. (credit: TinyBuild)

While triple-A video game publishers tend to hide their sales data with great vengeance and furious anger, indies have become pretty liberal about their stats. You don't have to look very far and wide to find a smaller-fry game studio coughing up sales numbers or even piracy estimates.

In the case of Punch Club game maker TinyBuild, the development team went one further than usual on Monday with a news post that connected the dots between game sales, game piracy, and localization. What happens in a country-by-country basis after translating a game's text and officially launching and promoting it?

TinyBuild found that the most intense piracy impact came the day that it launched Punch Club in Brazilian Portuguese. On that day, the devs tracked a whopping 11,627 pirated users from Brazilian IP addresses, compared to only 373 copies selling to Brazilian users that day. Conversely, TinyBuild CEO Alex Nichiporchik noted that Chinese players were already pirating the game in droves when the game launched in English, meaning they didn't wait for a localized version to dive in.

Apple VP Jeff Williams revealing CareKit. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Today, Apple introduced the open source software framework CareKit, which can be used to develop healthcare apps. Apple plans to release the software in April, and the company said the software is aimed at making things easier for users to track their health and monitor symptoms, medications, and treatment responses and then quickly share that data with medical professionals and loved ones.

The company hopes that CareKit will see the same success as the similar platform ResearchKit, a framework for developing medical research apps. So far, developers and researchers have already started using the ResearchKit platform to develop apps that help diagnose and monitor autism symptoms in young children, help Alzheimer’s patients personalize their care plans, and collect data from epileptics to one day be able to sense an oncoming seizure. Last week, Harvard researchers announced a ResearchKit app to help professional football players track their mental and physical health.

To coincide with today's event, 23andMe announced a new ResearchKit module that will allow its customers to easily share genetic data directly with researchers—streamlining the consent process and securely transferring data directly from 23andMe to a research institution.