[embedded content] At the AAAS 2018 conference, Loon’s Sal Candido shared this video aid when the time came to explain how Project Loon functions. “The team back in Mountain View knows presentations aren’t my strength.” Project Loon, the Internet-delivering balloon system that grew out of Alphabet’s Project X division, has announced its first commercial deal. […]
Enlarge / The keyboard on the 2016 Touch Bar MacBook Pro. Andrew Cunningham While Apple’s redesigned keyboards in the new MacBook Pro models are made to be quieter, they also appear to be designed to prevent another problem. According to a document sent to Apple Authorized Service Providers and obtained by MacRumors, the new keys have a […]
Julien GONG Min / Flickr Microsoft has posted the results of the fourth quarter of its 2018 financial year, running up until June 30, 2018. Revenue was $ 30.1 billion (up 17 percent year-on-year), operating income was $ 10.4 billion (up 35 percent), net income was $ 8.8 billion (a rise of 10 percent), and […]
Enlarge Walmart Walmart may be the next giant to enter the video streaming wars, according to a report from The Information. The retailer is reportedly considering launching its own video streaming service to battle Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. But Walmart wants to undercut its competition by pricing its service at $ 8 per month—or […]
USB Type-C, the most exciting boring connector in the industry right now. Andrew Cunningham Future generations of virtual reality headsets for PCs could use a single USB Type-C cable for both power and data. That’s thanks to a new standardized spec from the VirtualLink Consortium, a group made up of GPU vendors AMD and Nvidia […]
Here’s the Android interface. Just tap on the second icon in the top right to get the card feed. Google Travel time cards are back! Google Upcoming appointments are back! Google Upcoming trips and recent orders are back! Google Stocks and a few Assistant discoverability things. Google Popular Assistant commands. Google There’s a big update […]
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. JD Lasica Netflix missed its subscriber growth targets by about a million subscribers in the three months ending in June, sparking concern among investors that there might be a saturation limit for the streaming platform. The company’s stock price fell 14 percent on the news, the BBC reports, although that came […]
The Essential Phone. The back is all ceramic. The screen goes all the way to the edge, but there’s that camera notch. The bottom has a chin. On the back, you’ve got the LED flash, a dual-camera setup, two contact points for the modular system, and a fingerprint reader. Here you can make out the […]
Enlarge / Skype 8.0. Microsoft Skype’s development history is a bit checkered; a wide range of clients has been developed with disparate features and a lack of clarity over direction. This has been especially true on Windows, where two different clients were available—the “Classic” client is a Win32 application that can trace its heritage back […]
Enlarge Eric Bangeman As the managing editor of Ars Technica, one of my duties is to monitor the daily torrent of news tips and PR emails. The overwhelming majority of them is deleted after a glance, and the news tips and story ideas are passed along to the appropriate writer. Sometimes a product announcement will […]
The new Chrome design. We get new tab shapes, a white tab background, rounded address bar, and more. A single tab window has a white background, and with a white current tab, the tab and tab background blend together. With multiple tabs open, the background changes to gray allowing for some tab separation. Still, background […]
Enlarge / The 10.5-inch iPad Pro. Andrew Cunningham Adobe is working on a full version of the popular photo-editing program Photoshop for Apple’s iPad, according to a Bloomberg report. Sources claim the software company plans to announce the new app at its annual MAX conference this October, with the app’s launch scheduled for sometime in […]
Enlarge Thomas Claveirole PC sales were up year-on-year in the second quarter of 2018, the first such increase since the first quarter of 2012. Market research firms Gartner and IDC both reported growth in the market, of 1.4 and 2.7 percent, respectively. The two companies track numbers differently: Gartner includes Windows-based tablets but excludes Chromebooks […]