List of All Articles with Tag 'tech'

At long last, Apple is killing its proprietary Lightning port in the iPhone 15 and embracing a charging cable that's compatible with non-Apple products. That's one less extra cord cluttering your nightstand. One less thing to forget when packing for a weekend getaway.

Apple has revealed the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus, its new cheaper phones. The new handsets borrow a host of features from last year’s more expensive, Pro models. It gets the “Dynamic Island” at the top of the screen, its predecessor’s processor, and upgraded cameras. But it packs that into a cheaper and brighter design. Apple said it is the first time that anyone has made the colour run all the way through the glass, and that it has used “metallic ions” to build colour into the material itself. It comes in five different colours: pink, yellow, green, blue and black. The design is changed ever so slightly, too. Apple said that it should feel “even nicer in your hand” because of a “new contoured edge” on the side of the phone. But the main upgrades from the iPhone 14 appeared to be in the camera. That will now be 48 megapixels – compared with 12 in the previous model – and new machine learning tools that will improve those pictures. The iPhone 15 also comes with a new ultra-wide band chip for finding other devices. That can be used to find other people: using the Find My app, the phone will show precise directions for finding people in busy places, for instance. Phone calls are also due to improve, Apple said. That should filter out distracting noises from the background to make them clearer. That was part of a host of connectivity improvements, which also added new features to Apple’s satellite features. If drivers have trouble with their car, they can use that extra satellite connectivity to get in touch with roadside service, for instance. Read More Apple is changing the plug on the bottom of your iPhone Apple to stop using leather in all new products Here’s the brand new Apple Watch

Apple will stop using leather, it has announced. It will offer no new products using materials taken from animals, it said. That includes iPhone cases and Watch bands, both of which make heavy use of leather. Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, noted that leather is a popular material for accessories. But it has considerable environmental impact, she noted, especially at the scale that Apple uses it. As such, it has committed to phasing out those materials. Instead, it will rely on new materials that have been especially developed. For the Apple Watch’s sport loop, for instance, it has changed the material to use 82 per cent recycled yarn. For the straps that are currently made out of leather, it will rely on a new seemingly custom developed material called “FineWoven”. That will presumably also be used for the cases made for the new iPhone 15. And Apple has developed new straps with Nike and Hermès. The latter collaboration has relied heavily on leather – but recently Apple has been rumoured to be selling off those products cheaply. The new materials will help make the new Apple Watch Series 9 the first carbon neutral product the company has made. Read More Here’s the brand new Apple Watch Apple is about to reveal the new iPhone – and a lot more Here’s when you will actually be able to get the new iPhone

Apple has unveiled its new Watch, with a new, faster processor and hands-free features. The Apple Watch Series 9 brings an updated chip that makes the phone up to 30 per cent faster, Apple said. That should make animations and effects smoother, it said, as well as allowing for new features. In addition to those new tools, the Watch Series 9 is Apple’s first carbon neutral product. That has been achieved by a range of changes, including dropping leather from its bands and all new products. Those include a new feature called “Double Tap”, which lets people control their Watch without actually touching it. By clicking their two fingers together – the same gesture as on the upcoming Vision Pro headset – users can click buttons on the screen. :: Follow our live coverage of the Apple event here. Apple said the feature would be useful when the other hand is occupied, such as when carrying a coffee or walking the dog, for instance. It may also be helpful for accessibility, and Apple has already rolled out similar features as part of those tools. The new feature relies on the machine learning smarts within the new chip, Apple said, which are able to analyse data from the sensors “in a completely new way”. It watches for the changes in movement and “blood flow” that happen when people bring their fingers together, and then uses that to click. The new processor will also allow Siri requests to be processed on the Apple Watch itself, which should make them faster and more secure. The most common requests no longer have to go to the cloud, Apple said, so that they should not be impeded by slow WiFi or data connections. Apple will also let people ask Siri for health data, which it said was powered by the new hardware, though did not explain exactly why. Users can ask how much they slept, for instance. Dictation will also be improved by that chip. It can run a more smart machine learning model, which should make dictation up to 25 per cent more accurate. The chip will also make the Watch better at finding its paired iPhone. Apple has always offered the option to ping the phone, but the Watch will now offer the distance and direction to the iPhone. A similar feature will work with the HomePod. When the Apple Watch comes close to that smart speaker, it will offer media suggestions for what to listen to. The Series 9 also brings a new display. It now goes up to 2,000 nits – making it easier to see outside – as well as going all the way down to one nit, for dark situations. Read More Apple Watch 7 pre-order: How to buy the new smartwatch in the UK Apple introduces new version of Watch with complete redesign iPhone 13 - live: UK contract deals and prices for Apple, EE and O2 Apple to stop using leather in all new products Apple is about to reveal the new iPhone – and a lot more Here’s when you will actually be able to get the new iPhone

TikTok is officially kicking off its US e-commerce efforts with the launch of TikTok Shop.

US prosecutors opened a landmark antitrust trial against Google on Tuesday with sweeping allegations that for years the company intentionally stifled competition challenging its massive search engine, accusing the tech giant of spending billions to operate an illegal monopoly that has harmed every computer and mobile device user in the United States.

"You'll never be successful," Errol Musk in 1989 told his 17-year-old son Elon, who was then preparing to fly from South Africa to Canada to find relatives and a college education.

A new study has revealed that black holes could be lurking much closer to Earth than anticipated. A black hole in space is when "gravity pulls so much that even light can not get out," NASA explains. "The gravity is so strong because matter has been squeezed into a tiny space. This can happen when a star is dying." Due to no light being present, they are invisible. Only special tools can pick up on them. There are said to be around 10 million to 1 billion mass black holes in the Milky Way, according to Science Alert. However, astrologers only know of about 20 of them. Now, a recent study has revealed that they could be a lot closer to Earth than previously thought after investigating the Hyades cluster, "a group of stars located 150 light-years away". In a statement, astrophysicist Stefano Torniamenti of the University of Padua explained: "Our simulations can only simultaneously match the mass and size of the Hyades if some black holes are present at the centre of the cluster today (or until recently). The Hyades with hundreds of stars is said to be approximately 625 million years old. Due to its packed environment, "higher rates of collisions and mergers" are expected. At 153 light-years away, it is considered the closest star cluster to Earth. Researchers were able to observe two or three black holes in the Hyades, which are either still present or ejected less than 150 million years ago and hovering around the outskirts. "This observation helps us understand how the presence of black holes affects the evolution of star clusters and how star clusters in turn contribute to gravitational wave sources," Professor Mark Gieles of the University of Barcelona said. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

By Paul Lienert and Nick Carey New investments in the United States and Europe aim to challenge China’s

By Diane Bartz WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The United States argued on Tuesday that Google did not play by the rules in

By Max A. Cherney (Reuters) -Intel said on Tuesday it has agreed to sell a stake of about 10% in

Wahoo has launched the Kickr Move, a new indoor cycling trainer aimed at improving the experience of riding indoors - and overcoming a range of problems experienced by home training companies in recent years. The new Kickr Move adds movement to indoor cycling. Until now, riding a bike indoors has almost uniformly meant mounting a bike onto a smart trainer that allows for little movement, either sideways or forwards. That lack of movement in turn leads to problems with comfort, as well as realism, given that riders are stuck in the same position. In recent years, indoor cyclists have undertaken increasingly complicated ways of solving that problem, including putting their bikes and turbo trainers onto large “rocker plates” – essentially big wooden platforms intended to allow them to move a little more. Wahoo said that building a system like that was never on the table. While those rocker plates showed there was clearly an "unmet need", the company's founder Chip Hawkins told The Independent that "doesn't make any sense at all" and that the company therefore set about building a new kind of solution. Without that kind of movement, the forces that usually move a bike do not happen on a fixed trainer, which leads to "unnatural pushing and pulling", Hawkins said, which can make long rides inside uncomfortable and unrealistic. Fixing that added a completely different appeal that aims to make indoor riding more appealing, he said. Wahoo did so by taking its existing smart trainer and essentially mounting it on a track, to allow movement back and forth, with about 14cm of space back and forth. If a rider gets out of the saddle, for instance, the bike will drop back and then forward again – something that’s so natural in the real world that it hardly takes any thought, but which has been almost entirely missing in indoor cycling. (Wahoo’s rival, Tacx, released its own “Motion Plates” last year, but they are added on to the trainer separately.) The Wahoo Kickr that is on the market today looks almost identical to the one sold ten years ago, though there has been the addition of new technologies such as built-in WiFi; the new Move is the first noticeable different smart trainer Wahoo has released in years. Even in the new release, the changes are minimal: the Kickr Move takes most of the components from Wahoo’s existing smart trainer and puts them in that track. At the same time, it has also announced a new, cheaper version of its premium Kickr Bike, an entire indoor bike, aimed at broadening the appeal. But even if the changes are humble, the new Kickr Move marks the first major change to the design of indoor bike training equipment in years. And, perhaps more importantly, they come at a time when the future of indoor cycling's future is being decided. Indoor cycling as an industry and an activity has been no stranger to dramatic movements in recent years. When the pandemic began, early in 2020, many took to working out indoors, and the connected fitness and indoor training industry experienced a surge in demand so strong that it became a problem. For the first year, Wahoo and other indoor training companies couldn't make enough stock to sell, and as soon as turbo trainers appeared on retailers' websites they would disappear again. Orders came in and shops stocked up heavily, to avoid any similar difficulties in the years to come; factories were coming back online and were ready to make those smart trainers. "And then everyone went outside," Hawkins recalls. All of the indoor training equipment that had been ordered had nowhere to go. "Our sales took a horrible nosedive." Prices were reduced to clear out those now full shelves at bike shops, and sales fell too. "It was a really, really tough year last year," Hawkins says. This time around, as the autumn approaches and trainer season begins again, the industry is having the opposite problem: for the most part, that glut of trainers has been sold, but bike shops are anxious about ordering too much to replace them. What's more, the effect of the pandemic on bikes was much the same – bikes were impossible to buy, so more were made, and they are now stuck on shelves – meaning that those shops might not have space or money to buy trainers even if they wanted to. At the same time, things were looking especially shaky at Wahoo. At the height of covid – when people wanted indoor fitness equipment, and investors wanted the companies that make them – Wahoo was sold to a private equity firm. Wahoo commanded a chunky valuation as the lockdown sales rolled in, benefiting from the same excitement that also sent the share price of rivals Peloton soaring. Then lockdowns eased, and people started leaving the house. Interest in indoor cycling started to fall away. Peloton’s stock plummeted; it has lost 97 per cent of its value since its highs in early 2021. Wahoo’s financial analysts started to use words like “unsustainable” about the company, and it looked as if its debt problems could lead the company to collapse. Some 18 months after a sale built on frenzied excitement about indoor cycling, Wahoo looked in peril. The debt taken on to support the sale was called in and the company was taken over by the banks, and the "shareholders lost everything", Hawkins said. Wahoo's marketing activities went away, product development slowed, staff were let go, and the company looked in danger. Then Hawkins stepped back into buy the company, along with three other strategic investors. It was a "fresh start", he says, and the company was free of its debt. Wahoo's operations "never really missed a beat" throughout the financial chaos, and so the company was able to get back to work again. "We're not trying to raise quick bucks or anything – I'm really trying to set us up for long-term success, which is exciting", he says. The Kickr Move and the Bike Shift are the first major new products to come out of Wahoo since all of that happened. As well as the new products, it comes with a new approach: more sustainable packaging, and a new setup experience – as well as a new, higher price. The Kickr Move costs £1,399 – £300 more than the existing Kickr smart trainer, which will stay on the market. Encouraging people to pay that extra might be difficult, given so many cyclists have just bought trainers in recent years, especially through the pandemic. But Hawkins says that while the market might look mature, there are still plenty of people out there still to be reached. Hawkins' instinct is that indoor cycling is a mature market, but Wahoo's data suggests that only 11 per cent of "committed cyclists" have a smart trainer. "There is still a tonne of people that haven't discovered smart training yet – I don't know exactly where they are, but it seems like there is a lot of room for kind of continuing to expand the category". The Kickr Move is another attempt to reach those people, as well as being extra innovation intended to make those with older trainers upgrade. In use, the Kickr Move is considerably more comfortable: it is hard to understand how much discomfort is caused by a lack of movement until you're able to move back and forth. And the relative lack of innovation elsewhere means that setting up the new trainer is familiar and simple, and that it works easily with Wahoo's other products. (The only problem is Wahoo's Kickr Climb, which allows people to tilt the front of their bike up and down as if they were ascending and descending, and which needs an extra foot to be compatible with the Kickr Move, sold separately.) The new trainer is far from the only innovation planned by Hawkins in the time to come. "You've got other things coming besides this launch," he teases; "we are 10, 12 years old in this market, compared to 150-years or something for cycling. So I think we've got a long way to go." Read More Apple is about to launch what could be the most controversial iPhone in years Apple is about to reveal the new iPhone – and a lot more Here’s when you will actually be able to get the new iPhone Apple is about to launch what could be the most controversial iPhone in years Apple is about to reveal the new iPhone – and a lot more Here’s when you will actually be able to get the new iPhone