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testing-the-2024-bmw-m2—maybe-the-last-m-car-with-a-manual-transmission

Testing the 2024 BMW M2—maybe the last M car with a manual transmission

BMW M2, car review, Cars, Features, manual transmission / /
A pale blue BMW M2 seen parked in the hills

Enlarge / BMW’s M2 might be the last M car it builds with three pedals and a stick shift.

Peter Nelson

We’re at an interesting crossroads in the high-performance enthusiast car market. Running east to west is the adoption of electric vehicles and a slow reduction in internal combustion engine car production. North to south is the progression of ICE horsepower from the factory over the years, and it’s unclear how far it continues from here. Coming in diagonally is the weakening demand for manual transmissions—this is sadly where they end.

In the middle of this intersection is the 2024 BMW M2 six-speed manual, hanging its tail out in a massive controlled drift around the edges, expressing one last hurrah as BMW’s final object of internal-combustion M car affection.

I recently had the opportunity to pilot BMW’s latest, smallest M car through some of Southern California’s most fun mountain roads, plus Willow Springs International Raceway’s Streets of Willow circuit. When it comes to quickly figuring out this kind of car’s powertrain and chassis, I can’t think of a better mix of pavement. Here’s what makes the latest—and last—six-speed-manual-equipped M2 generation an overall excellent enthusiast coupe.

BMW has given the M2 a much more muscular look than the normal 2 series coupe.

Enlarge / BMW has given the M2 a much more muscular look than the normal 2 series coupe.

Peter Nelson

Focused inside-out

Looks are subjective, particularly BMW looks, but I think BMW did a good job on the M2’s exterior. Its kidney grilles, headlights, fender flares, exhaust tips, and wide fenders—especially in the rear quarter panels—are attractive. It’s a muscular little coupe, and it definitely informs you of its intentions with its massive intakes cut into its front end. Behind them lies a heat exchanger for its engine’s air-to-water intercooling (more on that in a bit), plus several other forms of water and oil cooling to ensure long-lasting peak performance, all-twisty-road-and-track-session-long. It’s hard to mistake it for a base 2 Series.

Inside, it’s quite spacious for a coupe and has great visibility all around. My test car included the $9,900 Carbon Package, which gets you comfortable, near-race-bucket carbon fiber seats and a slick carbon roof. I’m 6 feet and 3 inches tall, so the absence of sliding glass up top was a godsend and even allowed me to wear a helmet on track without needing to recline, a rarity in modern cars. The seats are a bit of a pain to slide in and out of, and the left leg bolster pushed inward slightly too much, impeding efficient and comfortable clutch action for my lanky figure. I suspect many folks wouldn’t have the same issue, though.

Technology-wise, a crisp 12.3-inch digital instrument cluster and a 14.9-inch touchscreen take up a lot of real estate. BMW’s iDrive 8 software is easy to get the hang of, operates quite seamlessly, and has good haptic feedback. Materials quality is overall quite good; all buttons and dials felt substantial, and the Carbon Package includes chic slabs of carbon fiber trim instead of the boring old piano black plastic that’s all too common in modern performance cars.

Opinions are mixed when it comes to BMW's carbon bucket seats. They hold you in place well but can be hard to get in and out of, and the hump between the driver's legs is polarizing.

Enlarge / Opinions are mixed when it comes to BMW’s carbon bucket seats. They hold you in place well but can be hard to get in and out of, and the hump between the driver’s legs is polarizing.

Peter Nelson

Testing the 2024 BMW M2—maybe the last M car with a manual transmission Read More »

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Here’s what we know about the Audi Q6 e-tron and its all-new EV platform

Audi, Audi Q6 e-tron, Cars, Features, Premium Platform Electric / /

premium platform electric —

Audi has bet big on its next flexible EV architecture, starting with this SUV.

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An Audi A6 seen in a studio

Enlarge / This is Audi’s next electric vehicle, the Q6 e-tron SUV.

Audi

MUNICH—Audi’s new electric car platform is an important one for the company. Debuting in the new 2025 Q6 e-tron, it will provide the bones for many new electric Audis—not to mention Porsches and even Lamborghinis and Bentleys—in the coming years. Its development hasn’t been entirely easy, either; software delays got in the way of plans to have cars in customer hands in 2023. But now the new Q6 e-tron is ready to meet the world.

There’s some rather interesting technology integrated into the Q6 e-tron’s new electric vehicle architecture. Called PPE, or Premium Platform Electric, it’s been designed with flexibility in mind. Audi took the role of leading its development within Volkswagen Group, but the other brands within that corporate empire that target the upper end of the car market will also build EVs with PPE.

Since SUVs are still super-popular, Audi is kicking off the PPE era with an SUV. But the platform allows for other sizes and shapes—next year, we should see the A6 sedan and, if we’re really lucky, an A6 Avant station wagon.

  • The Q6 e-tron is a midsize SUV, measuring 187.8 inches (4,771 mm) long, 78.5 inches (1,993 mm) wide, and 65 inches (1,648 mm) tall.

    Audi

  • That’s as wide and tall as the Q8 e-tron, but four inches shorter, mostly in the 114.3-inch (2,998 mm) wheelbase, which translates to a little less rear leg and cargo room.

    Audi

  • The “quattro blisters” above each wheel arch prevent the shape from looking too slab-sided when you see it in person.

  • There’s a small frunk.

    Audi

  • Most of your luggage goes here.

    Audi

Better batteries

There’s a new EV powertrain, a significant advancement over the one that powers Audi’s Q8 e-tron SUV. The cells are prismatic and made by CATL at a German plant, with a nickel cobalt manganese chemistry (in a roughly 8:1:1 ratio). It’s been simplified, with 12 modules, each made of 15 cells. Compared to the Q8’s pack, the new Q6 has 30 percent greater energy density at the pack level, as well as 5 percent more actual energy, despite a 15 percent reduction in the mass of the pack (1,257 lbs/570 kg).

It operates at 800 V, which enables very fast DC charging: The 94.9 kWh (useable) battery pack can charge from 10 to 80 percent in 21 minutes. Audi says it doesn’t have to throttle back from 270 kW until the state of charge increases past 40 percent, at which point it declines at a constant rate to 150 kW at 80 percent SoC. (Past 80 percent, a fast-charging EV will throttle back the charger significantly.)

Of course, that requires access to a DC fast charger capable of 800 V. For 400 V chargers, the battery pack cleverly splits itself into two 400 V packs using a mechanical fuse switch, then equalizes their SoCs, then charges them both in parallel at up to 135 kW. Audi says it went for this approach versus a DC-DC inverter because it saved weight. Both sides feature AC charge ports, with DC charging only on the driver’s side. Model year 2025 Q6 e-trons will feature CCS1 ports on the driver’s side, with the switch to J3400 taking place the following year.

  • A cutaway of the Q6 e-tron’s powertrain.

    Jonathan Gitlin

  • A closer look at the Q6 e-tron’s rear drive motors.

    Jonathan Gitlin

  • More motor components.

    Jonathan Gitlin

  • PPE EVs have AC charging ports on both sides.

    Audi

Here’s what we know about the Audi Q6 e-tron and its all-new EV platform Read More »

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Hackers can read private AI-assistant chats even though they’re encrypted

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Biz & IT, Encryption, Features, gpt, privacy, Security, side channel / /

CHATBOT KEYLOGGING —

All non-Google chat GPTs affected by side channel that leaks responses sent to users.

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Hackers can read private AI-assistant chats even though they’re encrypted

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

AI assistants have been widely available for a little more than a year, and they already have access to our most private thoughts and business secrets. People ask them about becoming pregnant or terminating or preventing pregnancy, consult them when considering a divorce, seek information about drug addiction, or ask for edits in emails containing proprietary trade secrets. The providers of these AI-powered chat services are keenly aware of the sensitivity of these discussions and take active steps—mainly in the form of encrypting them—to prevent potential snoops from reading other people’s interactions.

But now, researchers have devised an attack that deciphers AI assistant responses with surprising accuracy. The technique exploits a side channel present in all of the major AI assistants, with the exception of Google Gemini. It then refines the fairly raw results through large language models specially trained for the task. The result: Someone with a passive adversary-in-the-middle position—meaning an adversary who can monitor the data packets passing between an AI assistant and the user—can infer the specific topic of 55 percent of all captured responses, usually with high word accuracy. The attack can deduce responses with perfect word accuracy 29 percent of the time.

Token privacy

“Currently, anybody can read private chats sent from ChatGPT and other services,” Yisroel Mirsky, head of the Offensive AI Research Lab at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, wrote in an email. “This includes malicious actors on the same Wi-Fi or LAN as a client (e.g., same coffee shop), or even a malicious actor on the Internet—anyone who can observe the traffic. The attack is passive and can happen without OpenAI or their client’s knowledge. OpenAI encrypts their traffic to prevent these kinds of eavesdropping attacks, but our research shows that the way OpenAI is using encryption is flawed, and thus the content of the messages are exposed.”

Mirsky was referring to OpenAI, but with the exception of Google Gemini, all other major chatbots are also affected. As an example, the attack can infer the encrypted ChatGPT response:

  • Yes, there are several important legal considerations that couples should be aware of when considering a divorce, …

as:

  • Yes, there are several potential legal considerations that someone should be aware of when considering a divorce. …

and the Microsoft Copilot encrypted response:

  • Here are some of the latest research findings on effective teaching methods for students with learning disabilities: …

is inferred as:

  • Here are some of the latest research findings on cognitive behavior therapy for children with learning disabilities: …

While the underlined words demonstrate that the precise wording isn’t perfect, the meaning of the inferred sentence is highly accurate.

Attack overview: A packet capture of an AI assistant’s real-time response reveals a token-sequence side-channel. The side-channel is parsed to find text segments that are then reconstructed using sentence-level context and knowledge of the target LLM’s writing style.

Enlarge / Attack overview: A packet capture of an AI assistant’s real-time response reveals a token-sequence side-channel. The side-channel is parsed to find text segments that are then reconstructed using sentence-level context and knowledge of the target LLM’s writing style.

Weiss et al.

The following video demonstrates the attack in action against Microsoft Copilot:

Token-length sequence side-channel attack on Bing.

A side channel is a means of obtaining secret information from a system through indirect or unintended sources, such as physical manifestations or behavioral characteristics, such as the power consumed, the time required, or the sound, light, or electromagnetic radiation produced during a given operation. By carefully monitoring these sources, attackers can assemble enough information to recover encrypted keystrokes or encryption keys from CPUs, browser cookies from HTTPS traffic, or secrets from smartcards. The side channel used in this latest attack resides in tokens that AI assistants use when responding to a user query.

Tokens are akin to words that are encoded so they can be understood by LLMs. To enhance the user experience, most AI assistants send tokens on the fly, as soon as they’re generated, so that end users receive the responses continuously, word by word, as they’re generated rather than all at once much later, once the assistant has generated the entire answer. While the token delivery is encrypted, the real-time, token-by-token transmission exposes a previously unknown side channel, which the researchers call the “token-length sequence.”

Hackers can read private AI-assistant chats even though they’re encrypted Read More »

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Shields up: New ideas might make active shielding viable

active shielding, Features, Science / /
Shields up: New ideas might make active shielding viable

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | NASA

On October 19, 1989, at 12: 29 UT, a monstrous X13 class solar flare triggered a geomagnetic storm so strong that auroras lit up the skies in Japan, America, Australia, and even Germany the following day. Had you been flying around the Moon at that time, you would have absorbed well over 6 Sieverts of radiation—a dose that would most likely kill you within a month or so.

This is why the Orion spacecraft that is supposed to take humans on a Moon fly-by mission this year has a heavily shielded storm shelter for the crew. But shelters like that aren’t sufficient for a flight to Mars—Orion’s shield is designed for a 30-day mission.

To obtain protection comparable to what we enjoy on Earth would require hundreds of tons of material, and that’s simply not possible in orbit. The primary alternative—using active shields that deflect charged particles just like the Earth’s magnetic field does—was first proposed in the 1960s. Today, we’re finally close to making it work.

Deep-space radiation

Space radiation comes in two different flavors. Solar events like flares or coronal mass ejections can cause very high fluxes of charged particles (mostly protons). They’re nasty when you have no shelter but are relatively easy to shield against since solar protons are mostly low energy. The majority of solar particle events flux is between 30 Mega-electronVolts to 100 MeV and could be stopped by Orion-like shelters.

Then there are galactic cosmic rays: particles coming from outside the Solar System, set in motion by faraway supernovas or neutron stars. These are relatively rare but are coming at you all the time from all directions. They also have high energies, starting at 200 MeV and going to several GeVs, which makes them extremely penetrating. Thick masses don’t provide much shielding against them. When high-energy cosmic ray particles hit thin shields, they produce many lower-energy particles—you’d be better off with no shield at all.

The particles with energies between 70 MeV and 500 MeV are responsible for 95 percent of the radiation dose that astronauts get in space. On short flights, solar storms are the main concern because they can be quite violent and do lots of damage very quickly. The longer you fly, though, GCRs become more of an issue because their dose accumulates over time, and they can go through pretty much everything we try to put in their way.

What keeps us safe at home

The reason nearly none of this radiation can reach us is that Earth has a natural, multi-stage shielding system. It begins with its magnetic field, which deflects most of the incoming particles toward the poles. A charged particle in a magnetic field follows a curve—the stronger the field, the tighter the curve. Earth’s magnetic field is very weak and barely bends incoming particles, but it is huge, extending thousands of kilometers into space.

Anything that makes it through the magnetic field runs into the atmosphere, which, when it comes to shielding, is the equivalent of an aluminum wall that’s 3 meters thick. Finally, there is the planet itself, which essentially cuts the radiation in half since you always have 6.5 billion trillion tons of rock shielding you from the bottom.

To put that in perspective, the Apollo crew module had on average 5 grams of mass per square centimeter standing between the crew and radiation. A typical ISS module has twice that, about 10 g/cm2. The Orion shelter has 35–45 g/cm2, depending on where you sit exactly, and it weighs 36 tons. On Earth, the atmosphere alone gives you 810 g/cm2—roughly 20 times more than our best shielded spaceships.

The two options are to add more mass—which gets expensive quickly—or to shorten the length of the mission, which isn’t always possible. So solving radiation with passive mass won’t cut it for longer missions, even using the best shielding materials like polyethylene or water. This is why making a miniaturized, portable version of the Earth’s magnetic field was on the table from the first days of space exploration. Unfortunately, we discovered it was far easier said than done.

Shields up: New ideas might make active shielding viable Read More »

review:-apple’s-efficient-m3-macbook-airs-are-just-about-as-good-as-laptops-get

Review: Apple’s efficient M3 MacBook Airs are just about as good as laptops get

13-inch MacBook Air, 15-inch MacBook Air, Apple, Apple M3, Features, MacBook Air, Tech / /

Air apparent —

For Intel or even M1 upgraders, there’s a lot to like about the M3 Air.

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Apple's M3 MacBook Airs put a new chip in 2022's design.

Enlarge / Apple’s M3 MacBook Airs put a new chip in 2022’s design.

Andrew Cunningham

Right off the bat, the M3 MacBook Airs aren’t as interesting as the M2 models.

July 2022’s M2 MacBook Air updated the design of the 13-inch laptop for the Apple Silicon era after the M1 Air’s external design played it safe. And the first-ever 15-inch MacBook Air, released over a year later, was an appealing option for people who wanted a larger screen but didn’t need the extra power or cost of a MacBook Pro. Together, they were a comprehensive rethink of Apple’s approach to its mainstream laptops, modeled after the similarly dramatic Apple Silicon MacBook Pro redesigns.

The M3 Airs don’t do any of that. They are laptop designs we’ve already seen, wrapped around a processor we’ve already seen. But they may end up being more important than the M2 Airs because of when they’re being released—as the last of the Intel Macs slowly age and break and Apple winds down software support for them (if not in this year’s macOS release, then almost certainly next year’s). Between the faster chip and a couple of other feature updates, the new machines may also be the first ones that are truly worth a look for M1 Air early adopters who want an upgrade.

Apple left us a scant 48 hours to test and use this laptop, but here’s what we’ve observed so far.

Does the design hold up?

  • The 13- and 15-inch MacBook Airs. Same design, but the 15-inch Air has a bigger screen and trackpad and better speakers, while the 13-inch Air is smaller and lighter. Note both the fingerprints on the Midnight finish and how the notch can be either more or less visible based on your settings.

    Andrew Cunningham

  • Air footprints compared: the 13-inch on top of the 15-inch.

    Andrew Cunningham

The M1 MacBook Air is still the one I use most days, and anyone coming from a 2018–2020 Intel MacBook Air will be familiar with the design. So the M2/M3-era MacBook Air design is still striking to me, despite being the better part of two years old.

By and large, I think the newer design holds up pretty well; I don’t mind the loss of the taper, even if it makes the laptop look a bit more boxy and less sleek. The full-height function row and tweaked keyboard are both good, and I don’t generally have issues with trackpad palm rejection on either the 13- or 15-inch models. It’s nice to have MagSafe back, though in the end, I almost always charge the Air with one of the many USB-C chargers I have strategically tucked into most rooms in the house.

Specs at a glance: Apple M3 MacBook Air (as reviewed)
Screen 13.6-inch 2560×1664 IPS LCD 15.3-inch 2880×1864
OS macOS 14.4 Sonoma
CPU Apple M3 (4 E-cores, 4 P-cores)
RAM 16GB unified memory
GPU Apple M3 (10 GPU cores)
Storage 512GB soldered SSD
Battery 52.6 WHr 66.5 WHr
Networking Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax), Bluetooth 5.3
Ports 2x Thunderbolt/USB4, MagSafe 3, headphones
Size 11.97×8.46×0.44 inches (304.1×215×113 mm) 13.40×9.35×0.45 inches (340.4×237.6×115 mm)
Weight 2.7 lbs (1.24 kg) 3.3 lbs (1.51 kg)
Warranty 1-year
Price as reviewed $1,499 $1,699
Other perks 1080p webcam, TouchID

I’m also reminded anew of just how much I like the 15-inch MacBook Air as someone who likes a big screen but doesn’t use a laptop for much gaming or anything heavier than Photoshop or Lightroom (and I generally don’t care that much about high-refresh-rate displays). The combination of size and weight really is close to ideal, and though the 15-inch Air is unmistakably larger and heavier than the 13-inch model, the difference isn’t so large in daily use that I spend a lot of time thinking about it. The improved speaker setup is also nice to have when you’re playing music or using that bigger screen to watch something.

The biggest downside of the design remains the display notch. As we and others have noted multiple times, it’s not that you don’t get used to it, and in typical desktop use (especially in dark mode and with a dark wallpaper), you can often forget it’s there. But in the absence of FaceID or some major other functional addition, it feels like a lot of space to take up for not a lot of user-visible benefit.

Sure, a 1080p webcam instead of a 720p webcam is nice, but I would choose a notch-less screen with more usable space every time if given the choice. (The strips of screen to either side of the notch can only really display the macOS menu bar; go into the Control Center area of the Settings and change “automatically hide and show the Menu Bar’ to “Never” if you don’t want those strips of screen to go totally wasted in full-screen mode).

  • The Midnight finish as seen on a 15-inch MacBook Air, freshly cleaned and pristine.

    Andrew Cunningham

  • This is what the laptop looked like before I cleaned it. I’ve had it for two days. You’ll definitely still see fingerprints.

    Andrew Cunningham

One design change that Apple has highlighted for the M3 Airs is a new coating for the Midnight (read: blue-tinted black) version of the Air that is said to reduce its fingerprint-y-ness. Apple did the same thing for the M3 version of the MacBook Pro last year.

The new finish looks a shade or two lighter than the old Midnight coating and does show fingerprints a bit less. But “less” isn’t “none,” and my Air was immediately, visibly fingerprint-y and skin-oily, both on the lid and in the palm rest area. It remains more noticeable than on either the Starlight finish of the 13-inch M3 Air or the space gray finish on my M1 Air. Choose your color finish accordingly.

Review: Apple’s efficient M3 MacBook Airs are just about as good as laptops get Read More »

off-roading-evs-find-a-home-at-king-of-the-hammers

Off-roading EVs find a home at King of the Hammers

Cars, Cybertruck, Electric vehicles, Features, King of the Hammers, off-roading, Rivian / /
A Rivian kicks up sand off-road

Enlarge / EVs are making in-roads at the annual King of the Hammers event in California.

Michael Teo Van Runkle

Electric vehicles are few and far between in the desert at King of the Hammers, a weeks-long off-roading event that often looks more like Burning Man than motorsport. Almost all EVs can be found at the Optima Oasis, a not-so-literal oasis of solar and hydrogen-powered chargers that the battery company erected smack-dab in the middle of nowhere for the past two years.

King of the Hammers takes place in Johnson Valley Off-Highway Vehicle Area, the nation’s largest OHV space by sheer acreage. But the vast expanse, about 100 miles as the crow flies from downtown Los Angeles, turns into a thriving metropolis once a year when a makeshift city dubbed “Hammertown” draws tens of thousands of four-wheeling enthusiasts to the sand and rocks.

I went to check out the festivities—especially the event’s EV-focused Unplugged rally.

Slow charging at King of the Hammers

This year’s attendance peaked at over 100,000, but that full number wasn’t quite present when I drove out on KoH’s first Sunday in an Audi Q8 e-tron to watch trophy trucks race at top speed across the desert. Range anxiety kicked in heavily on my 135-mile (217 km) commute, which included a few thousand vertical feet of climbing to truly test the Audi’s claimed 280 miles (450 km) of electric range.

Charging in the Optima Oasis.

Enlarge / Charging in the Optima Oasis.

Michael Teo Van Runkle

I arrived at the Optima Oasis with 78 miles (126 km) of range remaining and promptly plugged into a Level 2 charger, where I left the Audi charging for the rest of the day. I checked in a few times, noting that the charger, hooked into the KoH grid, managed to pump out an average of about 12 miles (19 km) worth of electrons per hour. At approximately 50 kilowatts, that rate would be enough to get me home later in the evening, but not if I’d been out four-wheeling in the car all day—and that slow rate certainly wouldn’t do the trick for the massive group of EVs that Optima expected later in the week as part of its second Unplugged rally. As the sun went down and I readied myself for the drive home, three massive tractor-trailers arrived with the solar and hydrogen setups to support EV owners for King of the Hammers’ main events.

The following Thursday, I drove back to Johnson Valley in a Ford Bronco Raptor, probably the greatest production vehicle ever built for the desert—if not the most fuel-efficient or eco-friendly. I planned to catch the home-built Every Man Challenge, as well as the most hardcore half-million-dollar-plus Ultra4 race that serves as the main event on the second Saturday. But first, I sheepishly pulled my gas guzzler back into the Optima Oasis to join a growing group of EV enthusiasts milling about the charging stations.

The sun began to warm us, the cars, and two massive solar arrays as more and more EVs pulled in—far more than I expected at an event that tilts heavily toward the joys of internal combustion. We’d definitely need faster chargers than I used on the Audi, I thought. Many owners topped up their batteries, while a team from Morrflate gave out lessons on airing down tires for better traction, a more comfortable ride, and reduced risk of flats while off-roading.

These solar arrays charge batteries in the trailer that can fast-charge four EVs at once.

Enlarge / These solar arrays charge batteries in the trailer that can fast-charge four EVs at once.

Michael Teo Van Runkle

And we needed that lesson, as Optima also chose a much more technical route than I expected—especially considering the smattering of bone-stock Kia and Toyota crossovers throughout the group, some of which wore eco tires or little more than all-seasons. But Rivian R1T and R1S owners made up the majority, and most of the vehicles still rode on factory Pirelli Scorpion All-Terrains. Optima allows plug-in hybrids into the Unplugged rally, too, and I spotted a few Jeep Wrangler 4xes and Toyota Tundra hybrids, plus one Cybertruck brought out for testing by Unplugged Performance.

I’m paranoid, and the weather forecast predicted heavy rain, so I packed my recovery gear and threw in a set of Maxtrax Lite recovery boards, a Yankum rope, and two soft shackles into the back of my borrowed R1T before we left Optima’s home base for the trail run. And not just for the “soft-roader” hybrids—also because I’d never actually driven a Rivian before and didn’t quite know what to expect.

Off-roading EVs find a home at King of the Hammers Read More »

i-worked-exclusively-in-vision-pro-for-a-week—here’s-how-it-went

I worked exclusively in Vision Pro for a week—here’s how it went

Apple, Features, Reviews, Tech, vision pro, visionOS / /

  • A close-up look at the Vision Pro from the front.

    Samuel Axon

  • There are two displays inside the Vision Pro, one for each eye. Each offers just under 4K resolution.

    Samuel Axon

  • This is the infamous battery pack. It’s about the size of an iPhone (but a little thicker), and it has a USB-C port for external power sources.

    Samuel Axon

  • There are two buttons for the Vision Pro, both on the top.

    Samuel Axon

  • You can see the front-facing cameras that handle passthrough video just above the downward-facing cameras that read your hand gestures here.

    Samuel Axon

  • Apple offers several variations of the light seal to fit different face shapes.

    Samuel Axon

You can get a lot of work done while wearing Apple’s Vision Pro and have fun doing it—but it’s not yet at the stage where most of us will want to fully embrace spatial computing as the new way of working.

I spent more than a week working almost exclusively in the Vision Pro. I carried on Slack conversations, dialed into Zoom video calls, edited Google Docs, wrote articles, and did everything else I do within my day-to-day responsibilities as an editor at Ars Technica.

Throughout the experience, I never stopped thinking about how cool it was, like I was a character in a cyberpunk novel. The Vision Pro opens some new ways of approaching day-to-day work that could appeal to folks with certain sensibilities, and it offers access to some amenities that someone who hasn’t already invested a lot into their home office setup might not already have.

At the same time, though, I never quite zeroed in on a specific application or use case that made me think my normal habit of working on a MacBook Pro with three external monitors would be replaced. If you don’t already have a setup like that—that is to say, if you’ve just been working on a laptop on its own—then the Vision Pro can add a lot of value.

I plan to explore more use cases in the future, like gaming, but this is the last major piece in a series of sub-reviews of the Vision Pro that I’ve done on various applications, like entertainment or as an on-the-go mobile device.

My goal has been to see if the Vision Pro’s myriad use cases add up to $3,500 of value for today’s computing enthusiast. Productivity is front and center in how Apple markets the device, so this is an important one. Let’s see how it holds up.

The basics

Outside the realm of entertainment, visionOS and its apps are mostly about flat windows floating in 3D space. There are very few apps that make use of the device’s 3D capabilities in new ways that are relevant to productivity.

There are two types of visionOS apps: spatial apps and “Compatible Apps.” The former are apps designed to take advantage of the Vision Pro’s spatial computing capabilities, whereas Compatible Apps are simply iPad apps that work just fine as flat windows within the visionOS environment.

Let's find out if the Vision Pro can be an adequate replacement for this, my usual work space.

Enlarge / Let’s find out if the Vision Pro can be an adequate replacement for this, my usual work space.

Samuel Axon

In either case, though, you’re usually just getting the ability to put windows around you. For example, I started out by sitting at my kitchen table and putting my writing app in front of me, Slack and my email app off to the side, and a browser window with a YouTube video playing on the other side. This felt a bit like using several large computer monitors, each with an app maximized. It’s cool, and the ability to shift between your real environment and fully immersive virtual ones can help with focus, especially if you do intensive creative work like writing.

If there’s one thing Apple has nailed better than any of its predecessors in the mixed reality space, it’s the interface. Wherever your eyes are looking, a UI element will glow to let you know it’s the item you’ll interact with if you click. Clicking is done by simply tapping two of your fingers together almost anywhere around your body; the headset has cameras all over, so you don’t have to hold your hands up or in front of you to do this. There are also simple pinching-and-moving gestures for scrolling or zooming.

I worked exclusively in Vision Pro for a week—here’s how it went Read More »

2024-porsche-911-s/t-review:-threading-the-needle

2024 Porsche 911 S/T review: Threading the needle

car review, Cars, Features, Porsche 911, Porsche 911 S/T / /

yet another 911 review —

The S/T celebrates the 60th anniversary of the 911 and is limited to just 1963 examples.

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A porsche 911 S/T

Enlarge / I wouldn’t blame you if you lost track of all the different variations on the Porsche 911. This is the latest, and currently, the most desirable.

Bradley Iger

Although Porsche is in the midst of taking its BEV technology mainstream, the company hasn’t lost sight of the fact that its high-performance reputation was built on the 911.

Over the past few years, the automaker has developed a myriad of different versions of the iconic sports car, resulting in offerings that currently range from plush open-top cruisers to hardcore track monsters, along with special edition models like the off-road-tuned Dakar and heritage-inspired Sport Classic. You might be wondering, then, if there’s really an opportunity for a new performance-focused model to stand out in the 911 lineup.

On the surface, the S/T seems to tread much of the same ground already occupied by the GT3 Touring, an iteration of the track-ready GT3 that ditches the large fixed rear wing for the smaller, aesthetically subtler active rear spoiler found on Carrera models. But as lovely to drive as the GT3 Touring is, it feels like a conceptual afterthought.

Because of its reduced downforce, Porsche has always considered the Touring to be a GT3 intended for the street rather than the track, yet the model’s tuning has otherwise remained unchanged from the standard GT3. This, along with a number of other crucial updates, allows the S/T to stand out from the crowd not just among fast 911s but among sports cars in general.

The canyon roads around Los Angeles are natural hunting territory for the S/T.

Enlarge / The canyon roads around Los Angeles are natural hunting territory for the S/T.

Bradley Iger

The name is a nod to a racing version of the 911 S from the late 1960s: Internally known as the ST, the package included modifications to the chassis, engine, and body to improve performance. But unlike the iconic Carrera RS 2.7 that would debut a few years down the road, the ST lacked the aggressive aerodynamic elements that would later come to define the look of track-tuned 911s.

The core hardware involved is an interesting amalgamation of components from the current GT division lineup. In a purposely old-school approach not unlike the Sport Classic, the S/T pairs the GT3 RS’s naturally aspirated 518 hp (386 kW) 4.0-liter flat-six engine with the GT3’s six-speed manual gearbox—a combination that can’t be had in any other factory-produced 911.

Like the GT3 RS, the S/T’s hood, front fenders, doors, and roof are made from carbon fiber, and thanks to its magnesium wheels, fixed-back carbon bucket seats, and other weight-reducing components that are equipped as standard, it manages to tip the scales at a svelte 3,056 lbs (1,390 kg), making this the lightest 911 of the current generation.

No ducktail for the S/T. But there is plenty of lightweighting.

Enlarge / No ducktail for the S/T. But there is plenty of lightweighting.

Bradley Iger

Adding power and cutting weight are certainly welcome developments for performance enthusiasts, but it’s the raft of subtle, less quantifiable changes that make the S/T such an incredibly compelling sports car. Porsche’s goal was to create the ultimate canyon carver rather than an apex-hunting track machine, and as such, it has tossed the GT3’s rear axle steering system and retuned the suspension dampers for the less-than-perfect tarmac that’s typical of twisty backroads.

To further ratchet up driver engagement, engineers reduced the height of the shift lever by 10 mm, resulting in even shorter, more precise throws. The transmission’s gear ratios were shortened by 8 percent to allow the engine to climb to its searing 9,000 rpm redline more rapidly, resulting in more frequent shifting. There’s a new lightweight clutch and single mass flywheel on board, too.

The latter plays a surprisingly big role in the S/T’s distinctive character, allowing the engine to sweep through the revs with a level of manic urgency that makes the GT3 Touring seem almost lazy by comparison. And thanks to the S/T’s reduced sound deadening compared to the GT3 (which already has significantly less sound deadening than a 911 Carrera), every mechanical process that normally takes place behind the scenes is brought to the forefront. It can equate to noisy steady-state driving at times, but the soundtrack that the S/T delivers when you’re rowing through the gears easily makes up for it.

2024 Porsche 911 S/T review: Threading the needle Read More »

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CenturyLink left customers without Internet for 39 days—until Ars stepped in

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A

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

When a severe winter storm hit Oregon on January 13, Nicholas Brown’s CenturyLink fiber Internet service stopped working at his house in Portland.

The initial outage was understandable amid the widespread damage caused by the storm, but CenturyLink’s response was poor. It took about 39 days for CenturyLink to restore broadband service to Brown and even longer to restore service to one of his neighbors. Those reconnections only happened after Ars Technica contacted the telco firm on the customers’ behalf last week.

Brown had never experienced any lengthy outage in over four years of subscribing to CenturyLink, so he figured the telco firm would restore his broadband connection within a reasonable amount of time. “It had practically never gone down at all up to this point. I’ve been quite happy with it,” he said.

While CenturyLink sent trucks to his street to reconnect most of his neighbors after the storm and Brown regularly contacted CenturyLink to plead for a fix, his Internet connection remained offline. Brown had also lost power, but the electricity service was reconnected within about 48 hours, while the broadband service remained offline for well over a month.

Fearing he had exhausted his options, Brown contacted Ars. We sent an email to CenturyLink’s media department on February 21 to seek information on why the outage lasted so long.

Telco finally springs into action

Roughly four hours after we contacted the firm, a CenturyLink technician arrived at the Portland house Brown shares with his partner, Jolene Edwards. The technician was able to reconnect them that day.

“At 4: 30 pm, a CenturyLink tech showed up unannounced,” Brown told us. “No one was home at the time, but he said he would wait. I get the idea that he was told not to come back until it was fixed.”

Brown’s neighbor, Leonard Bentz, also lost Internet access on January 13 and remained offline for two days longer than Brown. The technician who arrived on February 21 didn’t reconnect Bentz’s house.

“My partner gently tried to egg him to go over there and fix them too, and he more or less said, ‘That’s not the ticket that I have,'” Brown said.

After getting Bentz’s name and address, we contacted CenturyLink again on February 22 to notify them that he also needed to be reconnected. CenturyLink later confirmed to us that it restored his Internet service on February 23.

“They kept putting me off and putting me off”

Bentz told Ars that during the month-plus outage, he called CenturyLink several times. Customer service reps and a supervisor told him the company would send someone to fix his service, but “they kept putting me off and putting me off and putting me off,” Bentz said.

On one of those calls, Bentz said that CenturyLink promised him seven free months of service in exchange for the long outage. Brown told us he received a refund for the entire length of his outage, plus a bit extra. He pays $65 a month for gigabit service.

Brown said he is “happy enough with the resolution,” at least financially since he “got all the money for the non-service.” But those 39 days without Internet service will remain a bad memory.

Unfortunately, Internet service providers like CenturyLink have a history of failing to fix problems until media coverage exposes their poor customer service. CenturyLink is officially called Lumen these days, but it still uses the CenturyLink brand name.

After fixing Brown’s service in Portland, a CenturyLink spokesperson gave us the following statement:

It’s frustrating to have your services down and for that we apologize. We’ve brought in additional resources to assist in restoring service that was knocked out due to severe storms and multiple cases of vandalism. Some services are back, and we are working diligently to completely restore everything. In fact, we have technicians there now. We appreciate our customers’ patience and understanding, and we welcome calls from our customers to discuss their service.

CenturyLink left customers without Internet for 39 days—until Ars stepped in Read More »

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It turns out that Odysseus landed on the Moon without any altimetry data

Features, lunar lander, odysseus, Science, Space, Uncategorized / /
Intuitive Machines' <em>Odysseus</em> lander is shown shortly before touching down on the Moon. ” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IM-1-800×600.jpg”></img><figcaption> <p><a data-height=Enlarge / Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander is shown shortly before touching down on the Moon.

Intuitive Machines

HOUSTON—Steve Altemus beamed with pride on Tuesday morning as he led me into Mission Control for the Odysseus lander, which is currently operating on the Moon and returning valuable scientific data to Earth. A team of about a dozen operators sat behind consoles, attempting to reset a visual processing unit onboard the lunar lander, one of their last, best chances to deploy a small camera that would snap a photo of Odysseus in action.

“I just wanted you to see the team,” he said.

The founder and chief executive of Intuitive Machines, which for a few days this month has been the epicenter of the spaceflight universe after landing the first commercial vehicle on the Moon, invited me to the company’s nerve center in Houston to set some things straight.

“You can say whatever you want to say,” Altemus said. “But from my perspective, this is an absolute success of a mission. Holy crap. The things that you go through to fly to the Moon. The learning, just every step of the way, is tremendous.”

Altemus will participate in a news conference on Wednesday at Johnson Space Center to provide a fuller perspective of the journey of Odysseus to the Moon and all those learnings. But I got the sense he invited me to the company’s offices Tuesday because he was itching to tell someone—to tell the world—that although Odysseus had toppled over after touching down, the mission was, in his words, an absolute success.

After more than an hour of speaking with Altemus, I believe him.

Odysseus is a beastly machine, and the team flying it isn’t shabby, either. They have certainly busted their asses. The offices in south Houston were littered with the remains of junk food, coffee, and other elixirs of long nights and wracked brains. It’s all been a whirlwind, no doubt. Next to a bag of tortilla chips, there was a bottle of Ibuprofen.

Coming in blind

As has been previously reported, Intuitive Machines discovered that the range finders on Odysseus were inoperable a couple of hours before it was due to attempt to land on the Moon last Thursday. This was later revealed to be due to the failure to install a pencil-sized pin and a wire harness that enabled the laser to be turned on and off. As a result, the company scrambled to rewrite its software to take advantage of three telescopes on a NASA payload, the Navigation Doppler Lidar for Precise Velocity and Range Sensing, for altimetry purposes.

While this software patch mostly worked, Altemus said Tuesday that the flight computer onboard Odysseus was unable to process data from the NASA payload in real time. Therefore, the last accurate altitude reading the lander received came when it was 15 kilometers above the lunar surface—and still more than 12 minutes from touchdown.

That left the spacecraft, which was flying autonomously, to rely on its optical navigation cameras. By comparing imagery data frame by frame, the flight computer could determine how fast it was moving relative to the lunar surface. Knowing its initial velocity and altitude prior to initiating powered descent and using data from the inertial measurement unit (IMU) on board Odysseus, it could get a rough idea of altitude. But that only went so far.

“So we’re coming down to our landing site with no altimeter,” Altemus said.

Unfortunately, as it neared the lunar surface, the lander believed it was about 100 meters higher relative to the Moon than it actually was. So instead of touching down with a vertical velocity of just 1 meter per second and no lateral movement, Odysseus was coming down three times faster and with a lateral speed of 2 meters per second.

“That little geometry made us hit a little harder than we wanted to,” he said.

But all was not lost. Based upon data downloaded from the spacecraft and imagery from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which flew over the landing site, Intuitive Machines has determined that the lander came down to the surface and likely skidded. This force caused one of its six landing legs to snap. Then, for a couple of seconds, the lander stood upright before toppling over due to the failed leg.

The company has an incredible photo of this moment showing the lander upright, with the snapped leg and the engine still firing. Altemus plans to publicly release this photo Wednesday.

It turns out that Odysseus landed on the Moon without any altimetry data Read More »

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Varda’s drug-cooking Winnebago will be remembered as a space pioneer

Commercial space, Features, hypersonic, Science, Space, Utah, Varda / /
Varda's reentry capsule soon after landing at the Utah Test and Training Range.

Enlarge / Varda’s reentry capsule soon after landing at the Utah Test and Training Range.

Varda Space Industries is finally able to celebrate. For nearly eight months, the in-space manufacturing company’s first mission was essentially stranded in low-Earth orbit, but not because of any technical malfunction or a restriction imposed by the laws of physics.

Instead, the spacecraft couldn’t return to Earth until Varda and three government entities—the US military, the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, and the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization—all got on the same page. This was far more complicated than anyone envisioned, and Varda had to bypass landing opportunities in July and September because it couldn’t secure governmental approvals.

Finally, earlier this month, the FAA approved a commercial reentry license for Varda’s space capsule, which was somewhat larger than a mini-fridge, to fall back into the atmosphere and parachute to a landing in the remote Utah desert southwest of Salt Lake City. Varda’s landing zone was at the Utah Test and Training Range, a sprawling military facility primarily used for weapons testing.

Varda’s capsule landed in the Utah desert at around 4: 40 pm EST (2140 UTC) last Wednesday. Approaching from the north, the craft’s heat shield protected it from scorching temperatures during reentry. Then, the capsule deployed a 6.2-foot-diameter (2.1-meter) parachute to slow its velocity for a relatively gentle landing.

A recovery team went out to retrieve the nearly 200-pound capsule and connect it to a helicopter line for a short flight to a nearby processing facility, where engineers would prepare the spacecraft for transport back to Varda’s headquarters in El Segundo, California.

The mood at Varda following the successful landing was “as cheerful as it gets,” said Delian Asparouhov, who co-founded the company in 2020 with former SpaceX engineer Will Bruey and scientist Daniel Marshall.

“I always felt confidence in our team’s ability to accomplish this,” Asparouhov told Ars. “It was just a question of time.”

Waiting game

Varda achieved several firsts with this mission. The Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) has some experience in supporting spacecraft landings, but this was the first time a commercial spacecraft landed at a military test range, adding another layer of regulatory and bureaucratic oversight. In September, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission deposited a cache of asteroid samples at UTTR.

Varda was the first company to secure a commercial FAA reentry license under streamlined commercial spaceflight regulations known as Part 450. This licensing paradigm is regularly used for commercial launches (there were 117 FAA-licensed launches last year), but this was the first time any company went through this process for a reentry.

Only two companies received commercial FAA reentry licenses before Varda—Lockheed Martin for a single test flight of the Orion spacecraft in 2014 and SpaceX for more than 40 commercial flights of its Dragon crew and cargo spacecraft. Both companies have operated under previous licensing regimes before the FAA introduced the revised Part 450 protocol in 2020.

The FAA’s commercial space office is responsible for licensing commercial launch and reentry operations, with a primary interest in ensuring that these activities don’t endanger the public. But FAA air traffic controllers had to find a time to clear a broad swath of airspace around the trajectory of Varda’s descending space capsule. The FAA’s temporary flight restriction for Varda’s reentry was unusually large, particularly for such a small spacecraft, stretching more than 400 miles (700 kilometers) long and 60 miles (100 kilometers) wide from southern Montana to western Utah.

The timing of Varda’s reentry, along with Varda’s access to the secure military facility, also had to be coordinated with the test range’s busy schedule of military exercises.

Varda’s drug-cooking Winnebago will be remembered as a space pioneer Read More »

it’s-no-accident:-these-automotive-safety-features-flopped

It’s no accident: These automotive safety features flopped

auto safety, Cars, Features, retrotech / /

safety first —

Over the years, inventors have had some weird ideas about how to make cars safer.

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a toy car crashing into another toy car

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Turn signals have been a vehicle safety staple since they first appeared on Buicks in 1939. Of course, many drivers don’t use them, perhaps believing that other motorists can telepathically divine others’ intentions.

More people might use turn signals if they knew that drivers’ failure to do so leads to more than 2 million accidents annually, according to a study conducted by the Society of Automotive Engineers. That’s 2 percent of all crashes, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. And not using turn signals increases the likelihood of an accident by 40 percent, according to the University of Michigan Research Institute.

Human nature could be to blame—death and injury will never happen to us, only others.

You wish.

So, is it any wonder that during the first six decades of automobile production, there were few safety features? The world into which the automobile was born was one in which horses powered most transportation, but that didn’t mean getting around was safe. Say a horse got spooked. If the animal was pulling a carriage, its actions could cause the carriage to barrel away or even overturn, injuring or killing its occupants. Or the horse could cause death directly. In fact, a surprising number of kings met their end over the centuries by a horse’s swift kick. And rail travel proved even deadlier. Studies comparing modern traffic accidents with those of the early 20th century reveal that death from travel is 90 percent less likely today than it was in 1925.

Yet America’s passive acceptance of death from vehicle travel in the late 19th and early 20th century explains why auto safety was sporadically addressed, if at all. Sure, there were attempts at offering basic safety in early automobiles, like windshield wipers and improved lighting. And some safety features endured, such as Ford’s introduction of safety glass as standard equipment in 1927 or GM’s turn signals. But while other car safety features appeared from time to time, many of them just didn’t pan out.

Dead ends on the road to safer cars

Among the earliest attempts at providing safety was the O’Leary Fender, invented by John O’Leary of Cohoes, New York, in 1906. “It is made of bands of iron of such shape and design that falling into it is declared to be like the embrace of a summer girl on a moonlit night on the shore,” wrote The Buffalo News in 1919, with more than a little poetic license.

Advertisement for Pennsylvania Vacuum Cup Tires by the Pennsylvania Rubber Company in Jeannette, Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Auto Tube is pictured, 1919.

Enlarge / Advertisement for Pennsylvania Vacuum Cup Tires by the Pennsylvania Rubber Company in Jeannette, Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Auto Tube is pictured, 1919.

Jay Paull/Getty Images

According to the account, O’Leary was so confident of the fender’s ability to save lives that he used his own child to prove its safety. “The babe was gathered up on the folds of the fender as tenderly as it had ever been in the arms of its mother,” the newspaper reported, “and was not only uninjured but seemed to enjoy the experience.”

There’s no word on what Mrs. O’Leary thought of using the couple’s child as a crash test dummy. But the invention seemed worthy enough that an unnamed car manufacturer battled O’Leary in court over it and lost. Ultimately, his victory proved futile, as the feature was not adopted.

Others also tried to bring some measure of safety to automobiles, chief among them the Pennsylvania Rubber Company of Jeanette, Pennsylvania. The company’s idea: make a tire tread of small suction cups to improve traction. Called the Pennsylvania Vacuum Cup tire, the product proved to be popular for a while, with reports of sales outnumbering conventional tires 10 to 1, according to the Salt Lake Tribune in 1919. While Pennsylvania wasn’t the only rubber company to offer vacuum cup tires, the concept had its day before fading, although the idea does resurface from time to time.

Nevertheless, safety remained unaddressed, even as the number of deaths was rising substantially.

“Last year more than 22,000 persons were killed in or by automobiles, and something like three quarters of a million injured,” wrote The New Republic in 1926. “The number of dead is almost half as large as the list of fatalities during the nineteen months of America’s participation in the Great War.”

“The 1925 total is 10 percent larger than that for 1924,” the publication added.

The chief causes cited were the same as they are today—namely, speeding, violating the rules of the road, inattention, inexperience, and confusion. But at least one automaker—Stutz—was trying to put safety first.

It’s no accident: These automotive safety features flopped Read More »