Tech

ifixit-says-new-arm-surface-hardware-“puts-repair-front-and-center”

iFixit says new Arm Surface hardware “puts repair front and center”

how things have changed —

Both devices make it relatively easy to get at the battery and SSD.

Microsoft's 11th-edition Surface Pro, as exploded by iFixit. Despite adhesive holding in the screen and the fact that you need to remove the heatsink to get at the battery, it's still much more repairable than past Surfaces or competing tablets.

Enlarge / Microsoft’s 11th-edition Surface Pro, as exploded by iFixit. Despite adhesive holding in the screen and the fact that you need to remove the heatsink to get at the battery, it’s still much more repairable than past Surfaces or competing tablets.

For a long time, Microsoft’s Surface hardware was difficult-to-impossible to open and repair, and devices as recent as 2019’s Surface Pro 7 still managed a repairability score of just 1 out of 10 on iFixit’s scale. 2017’s original Surface Laptop needed to be physically sliced apart to access its internals, making it essentially impossible to try to fix the machine without destroying it.

But in recent years, partly due to pressure from shareholders and others, Microsoft has made an earnest effort to improve the repairability of its devices. The company has published detailed repair manuals and videos and has made changes to its hardware designs over the years to make it easier to open them without breaking them and easier to replace parts once you’re inside. Microsoft also sells some first-party parts for repairs, though not every part from every Surface is available, and Microsoft and iFixit have partnered to offer other parts as well.

Now, iFixit has torn apart the most recent Snapdragon X-powered Surface Pro and Surface Laptop devices and has mostly high praise for both devices in its preliminary teardown video. Both devices earn an 8 out of 10 on iFixit’s repairability scale, thanks to Microsoft’s first-party service manuals, the relative ease with which both devices can be opened, and clearly labeled internal components.

Beneath the Surface

To open the Surface Laptop, iFixit says you only need to undo four screws, hidden beneath the laptop’s rubber feet; at that point, the bottom of the machine is only attached by magnets, rather than breakable retention clips. Opening the bottom of the laptop provides easy access to the battery and an M.2 2232 SSD. Labels inside the device indicate which screws need to be removed to replace which parts, and what kind of screwdriver you’ll need to do the job; scannable barcodes also make it easier to find repair manuals and parts on Microsoft’s site. Most other parts are easy to remove and replace once the bottom of the laptop is off.

The Surface Pro’s best repairability feature remains its easily accessible M.2 2232 SSD, present under a pop-off cover on the back of the tablet. From there, things get more difficult—accessing the battery and other components requires removing the screen, which is still held in place with adhesive rather than screws or magnets. This adhesive needs to be removed—iFixit cut it away with a thin plastic tool, and closing the tablet back up securely would likely require new adhesive to be applied. Once inside, the parts and screws are still labeled clearly, but you do need to remove the entire heatsink before you can replace the battery.

iFixit uses slightly different criteria for evaluating the repairability of laptops and tablets since tablets are more tightly integrated devices. So despite the identical repairability scores, the Surface Pro remains slightly more difficult to open and fix than the laptop; iFixit is just comparing it to devices like the iPad Air and Pro rather than other PC laptops, and the Surface Pro still looks better than other tablets by comparison despite the use of adhesive.

The teardown video didn’t detail exactly why iFixit knocked points off of each device’s repairability score, though iFixit took note of the soldered-down non-upgradeable RAM and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth modules. Both devices also use way more screws and clips than something like the Framework Laptop, which could also be a factor.

We’ve been using the new Snapdragon-powered Surface devices for a few days now, and we’ll have more thoughts to share about the hardware and its performance in the coming days.

iFixit says new Arm Surface hardware “puts repair front and center” Read More »

$200-ish-laptop-with-a-386-and-8mb-of-ram-is-a-modern-take-on-the-windows-3.1-era

$200-ish laptop with a 386 and 8MB of RAM is a modern take on the Windows 3.1 era

blast from the slightly more recent past —

Pocket 386 supports external accessories and will just barely run Windows 95.

  • The Pocket 386, a new-old laptop that can run MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, and (technically) Windows 95.

    DZT’s Store

  • The Pocket 386 isn’t sleek, but it’s a lot smaller than an actual 386 laptop would be.

    DZT’s Store

  • The system in clear, plus the included dongles for adding external ports.

    DZT’s store

Of the many oddities you can buy from Aliexpress, some of the weirdest are the recreations of retro computer systems in semi-modern designs. We’re most intimately familiar with the Book 8088, a recreation of the original 1981 IBM PC inside a chunky clamshell laptop. The people behind the Book 8088 are also responsible for the Hand386, which is a bit like a late-80s PC stuck inside an old Palm Pilot or Blackberry, and a second revision of the Book 8088 with more built-in ports and a VGA-capable graphics adapter installed instead of a basic CGA adapter.

Whoever is selling these systems is now back with the Pocket 386, which combines Hand386-style internals with a clamshell design similar to the Book 8088. The result is the kind of IBM-compatible system that would have been common during the Windows 3.1 era, when MS-DOS still dominated (especially for games) but Windows was on the upswing.

The heart of the laptop isn’t a genuine retro 386 but an Ali M6117 embedded processor. This is a newer chip that integrates a 40 MHz 80386SX CPU core along with an ALi M1217B chipset. The system also includes 8MB of RAM, one of three different replaceable VGA adapters (either a Cirrus Logic CL-GD542X, a TVGA9000i, or a CHIPS F655x5), a Yamaha OPL3 sound card, an 800×480 IPS display panel, a 4,000 mAh battery, and a CompactFlash slot for storage. There’s no built-in trackpad, though the arrow keys can be used to simulate a mouse. The system also includes a USB port, though as with the Book 8088, it may be usable for mass storage but not for typical USB accessories.

The Pocket 386 supports standard ports like PS/2 and VGA via a number of custom ports and external dongles.

Enlarge / The Pocket 386 supports standard ports like PS/2 and VGA via a number of custom ports and external dongles.

DZT’s Store

For accessories, the laptop includes a few ports on the back that can be attached to external dongles; included dongles can be used to add PS/2, VGA, parallel, and serial ports to the system. The Pocket 386 is available in both a semi-translucent black finish and a clear finish, and though its normal list price is $300, it’s currently listed for $187. An adapter for adding external ISA expansion cards is sold separately.

This system could technically run Windows 95, and the seller will send you a working Windows 95 disk image (in the GHO format used by the ancient Norton Ghost backup and restore software, so you’ll need to figure that out). The Pocket 386 is just over the minimum requirements for Windows 95, which wanted a 20 MHz 386DX processor or better and at least 4MB of RAM. But even running off of a CompactFlash card instead of an ancient spinning HDD, expect Windows 95 support to be slow at best, particularly because of the technically inferior 386SX processor and the still-pretty-scanty 8MB of memory.

This system will work best if you stick to Windows 3.x and MS-DOS, though the extra CPU speed and RAM will make it infinitely more useful for retro apps and games than the Book 8088 running the same MS-DOS and early Windows software.

Listing image by DZT’s store

$200-ish laptop with a 386 and 8MB of RAM is a modern take on the Windows 3.1 era Read More »

40-years-later,-x-window-system-is-far-more-relevant-than-anyone-could-guess

40 years later, X Window System is far more relevant than anyone could guess

Widely but improperly known as X-windows —

One astrophysics professor’s memories of writing X11 code in the 1980s.

low angle view of Office Buildings in Hong Kong from below, with the sky visible through an X-like cross

Getty Images

Often times, when I am researching something about computers or coding that has been around a very long while, I will come across a document on a university website that tells me more about that thing than any Wikipedia page or archive ever could.

It’s usually a PDF, though sometimes a plaintext file, on a .edu subdirectory that starts with a username preceded by a tilde (~) character. This is typically a document that a professor, faced with the same questions semester after semester, has put together to save the most time possible and get back to their work. I recently found such a document inside Princeton University’s astrophysics department: “An Introduction to the X Window System,” written by Robert Lupton.

X Window System, which turned 40 years old earlier this week, was something you had to know how to use to work with space-facing instruments back in the early 1980s, when VT100s, VAX-11/750s, and Sun Microsystems boxes would share space at college computer labs. As the member of the AstroPhysical Sciences Department at Princeton who knew the most about computers back then, it fell to Lupton to fix things and take questions.

“I first wrote X10r4 server code, which eventually became X11,” Lupton said in a phone interview. “Anything that needed graphics code, where you’d want a button or some kind of display for something, that was X… People would probably bug me when I was trying to get work done down in the basement, so I probably wrote this for that reason.”

Getty Images

Where X came from (after W)

Robert W. Scheifler and Jim Gettys at MIT spent “the last couple weeks writing a window system for the VS100” back in 1984. As part of Project Athena‘s goals to create campus-wide computing with distributed resources and multiple hardware platforms, X fit the bill, being independent of platforms and vendors and able to call on remote resources. Scheifler “stole a fair amount of code from W,” made its interface asynchronous and thereby much faster, and “called it X” (back when that was still a cool thing to do).

That kind of cross-platform compatibility made X work for Princeton, and thereby Lupton. He notes in his guide that X provides “tools not rules,” which allows for “a very large number of confusing guises.” After explaining the three-part nature of X—the server, the clients, and the window manager—he goes on to provide some tips:

  • Modifier keys are key to X; “this sensitivity extends to things like mouse buttons that you might not normally think of as case-sensitive.”
  • “To start X, type xinit; do not type X unless you have defined an alias. X by itself starts the server but no clients, resulting in an empty screen.”
  • “All programmes running under X are equal, but one, the window manager, is more equal.”
  • Using the “--zaphod” flag prevents a mouse from going into a screen you can’t see; “Someone should be able to explain the etymology to you” (link mine).
  • “If you say kill 5 -9 12345 you will be sorry as the console will appear hopelessly confused. Return to your other terminal, say kbd mode -a, and make a note not to use -9 without due reason.”

I asked Lupton, whom I caught on the last day before he headed to Chile to help with a very big telescope, how he felt about X, 40 years later. Why had it survived?

“It worked, at least relative to the other options we had,” Lupton said. He noted that Princeton’s systems were not “heavily networked in those days,” such that the network traffic issues some had with X weren’t an issue then. “People weren’t expecting a lot of GUIs, either; they were expecting command lines, maybe a few buttons… it was the most portable version of a window system, running on both a VAX and the Suns at the time… it wasn’t bad.”

40 years later, X Window System is far more relevant than anyone could guess Read More »

apple-intelligence-and-other-features-won’t-launch-in-the-eu-this-year

Apple Intelligence and other features won’t launch in the EU this year

DMA —

iPhone Mirroring and SharePlay screen sharing will also skip the EU for now.

A photo of a hand holding an iPhone running the Image Playground experience in iOS 18

Enlarge / Features like Image Playground won’t arrive in Europe at the same time as other regions.

Apple

Three major features in iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia will not be available to European users this fall, Apple says. They include iPhone screen mirroring on the Mac, SharePlay screen sharing, and the entire Apple Intelligence suite of generative AI features.

In a statement sent to Financial Times, The Verge, and others, Apple says this decision is related to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). Here’s the full statement, which was attributed to Apple spokesperson Fred Sainz:

Two weeks ago, Apple unveiled hundreds of new features that we are excited to bring to our users around the world. We are highly motivated to make these technologies accessible to all users. However, due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act (DMA), we do not believe that we will be able to roll out three of these features — iPhone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements, and Apple Intelligence — to our EU users this year.

Specifically, we are concerned that the interoperability requirements of the DMA could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security. We are committed to collaborating with the European Commission in an attempt to find a solution that would enable us to deliver these features to our EU customers without compromising their safety.

It is unclear from Apple’s statement precisely which aspects of the DMA may have led to this decision. It could be that Apple is concerned that it would be required to give competitors like Microsoft or Google access to user data collected for Apple Intelligence features and beyond, but we’re not sure.

This is not the first recent and major divergence between functionality and features for Apple devices in the EU versus other regions. Because of EU regulations, Apple opened up iOS to third-party app stores in Europe, but not in other regions. However, critics argued its compliance with that requirement was lukewarm at best, as it came with a set of restrictions and changes to how app developers could monetize their apps on the platform should they use those other storefronts.

While Apple says in the statement it’s open to finding a solution, no timeline is given. All we know is that the features won’t be available on devices in the EU this year. They’re expected to launch in other regions in the fall.

Apple Intelligence and other features won’t launch in the EU this year Read More »

win+c,-windows’-most-cursed-keyboard-shortcut,-is-getting-retired-again

Win+C, Windows’ most cursed keyboard shortcut, is getting retired again

What job will Win+C lose next? —

Win+C has been assigned to some of Windows’ least successful features.

A rendering of the Copilot button.

Enlarge / A rendering of the Copilot button.

Microsoft

Microsoft is all-in on its Copilot+ PC push right now, but the fact is that they’ll be an extremely small minority among the PC install base for the foreseeable future. The program’s stringent hardware requirements—16GB of RAM, at least 256GB of storage, and a fast neural processing unit (NPU)—disqualify all but new PCs, keeping features like Recall from running on all current Windows 11 PCs.

But the Copilot chatbot remains supported on all Windows 11 PCs (and most Windows 10 PCs), and a change Microsoft has made to recent Windows 11 Insider Preview builds is actually making the feature less useful and accessible than it is in the current publicly available versions of Windows. Copilot is being changed from a persistent sidebar into an app window that can be resized, minimized, and pinned and unpinned from the taskbar, just like any other app. But at least as of this writing, this version of Copilot can no longer adjust Windows’ settings, and it’s no longer possible to call it up with the Windows+C keyboard shortcut. Only newer keyboards with the dedicated Copilot key will have an easy built-in keyboard shortcut for summoning Copilot.

If Microsoft keeps these changes intact, they’ll hit Windows 11 PCs when the 24H2 update is released to the general public later this year; the changes are already present on Copilot+ PCs, which are running a version of Window 11 24H2 out of the box.

Changing how Copilot works is all well and good—despite how quickly Microsoft has pushed it out to every Windows PC in existence, it has been labeled a “preview” up until the 24H2 update, and some amount of change is to be expected. But discontinuing the just-introduced Win+C keyboard shortcut to launch Copilot feels pointless, especially since the Win+C shortcut isn’t being reassigned.

The Copilot assistant exists on the taskbar, so it’s not as though it’s difficult to access, but the feature is apparently important enough to merit the first major change to Windows keyboards in three decades. Surely it also justifies retaining a keyboard shortcut for the vast majority of PC keyboards without a dedicated Copilot key.

People who want to continue to use Win+C as a launch key for Copilot can do so with custom keyboard remappers like Microsoft’s own Keyboard Manager PowerToy. Simply set Win+C as a shortcut for the obscure Win+Shift+F23 shortcut that the hardware Copilot key is already mapped to and you’ll be back in business.

Win+C has a complicated history

Win+C always seems to get associated with transient, unsuccessful Windows features like Charms and Cortana.

Enlarge / Win+C always seems to get associated with transient, unsuccessful Windows features like Charms and Cortana.

Andrew Cunningham

The Win+C keyboard shortcut actually has a bit of a checkered history, having been reassigned over the years to multiple less-than-successful Windows initiatives. In Windows 8, it made its debut as a shortcut for the “Charms” menu, part of the operating system’s tablet-oriented user interface that was designed to partially replace the old Start menu. But Windows 10 retreated from this new tablet UI, and the Charms bar was discontinued.

In Windows 10, Win+C was assigned to the Cortana voice assistant instead, Microsoft’s contribution to the early-2010s voice assistant boom kicked off by Apple’s Siri and refined by competitors like Amazon’s Alexa. But Cortana, like the Charms bar, never really took off, and Microsoft switched the voice assistant off in 2023 after a few years of steadily deprioritizing it in Windows 10 (and mostly hiding it in Windows 11).

Most older versions of Windows didn’t do anything with the Win+C, but if you go all the way back to the Windows 95 era, users of Microsoft Natural Keyboards who installed Microsoft’s IntelliType software could use Win+C to open the Control Panel. This shortcut apparently never made it into Windows itself, even as the Windows key became standard equipment on PCs in the late ’90s and early 2000s.

So pour one out for Win+C, the keyboard shortcut that is always trying to do something new and not quite catching on. We can’t wait to see what it does next.

Win+C, Windows’ most cursed keyboard shortcut, is getting retired again Read More »

citing-national-security,-us-will-ban-kaspersky-anti-virus-software-in-july

Citing national security, US will ban Kaspersky anti-virus software in July

banhammer —

US cites Russian government’s “capacity to influence Kaspersky’s operations.”

Citing national security, US will ban Kaspersky anti-virus software in July

The Biden administration will ban all sales of Kaspersky antivirus software in the US starting in July, according to reporting from Reuters and a filing from the US Department of Commerce (PDF).

The US believes that security software made by Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab represents a national security risk and that the Russian government could use Kaspersky’s software to install malware, block other security updates, and “collect and weaponize the personal information of Americans,” said US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

“When you think about national security, you may think about guns and tanks and missiles,” said Raimondo during a press briefing, as reported by Wired. “But the truth is, increasingly, it’s about technology, and it’s about dual-use technology, and it’s about data.”

US businesses and consumers will be blocked from buying new software from Kaspersky starting on or around July 24, 2024, 30 days after the restrictions are scheduled to be published in the federal register. Current users will still be able to download the software, resell it, and download new updates for 100 days, which Reuters says will give affected users and businesses time to find replacement software. Rebranded products that use Kaspersky’s software will also be affected.

Companies that continue to sell Kaspersky’s software in the US after the ban goes into effect could be subject to fines.

The ban follows a two-year national security probe of Kaspersky’s antivirus software by the Department of Commerce. It’s being implemented using authority that the government says it was given under a national defense authorization act signed during the Trump administration in 2018.

The ban is the culmination of long-running concern across multiple presidential administrations. Kaspersky’s software was banned from systems at US government agencies following allegations of the company’s links to Russian intelligence operations. A month after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, the US Federal Communications Commission went one step further, adding Kaspersky to a security threat list that included Chinese hardware makers Huawei and ZTE. Adding Kaspersky to that list didn’t ban consumer sales, but it did prevent Kaspersky from receiving funding from the FCC.

For its part, Kaspersky and its representatives have always denied the US government’s allegations. CEO Eugene Kaspersky called the 2017 reports “BS brewed on [a] political agenda,” and the company similarly accused the FCC in 2022 of making decisions “on political grounds” and “not based on any technical assessment of Kaspersky products.”

Citing national security, US will ban Kaspersky anti-virus software in July Read More »

dell-said-return-to-the-office-or-else—nearly-half-of-workers-chose-“or-else”

Dell said return to the office or else—nearly half of workers chose “or else”

Return to office —

Workers stayed remote even when told they could no longer be promoted.

Signage outside Dell Technologies headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, US, on Monday, Feb. 6, 2023.

Enlarge / Signage outside a Dell campus.

Big tech companies are still trying to rally workers back into physical offices, and many workers are still not having it. Based on a recent report, computer-maker Dell has stumbled even more than most.

Dell announced a new return-to-office initiative earlier this year. In the new plan, workers had to classify themselves as remote or hybrid.

Those who classified themselves as hybrid are subject to a tracking system that ensures they are in a physical office 39 days a quarter, which works out to close to three days per work week.

Alternatively, by classifying themselves as remote, workers agree they can no longer be promoted or hired into new roles within the company.

Business Insider claims it has seen internal Dell tracking data that reveals nearly 50 percent of the workforce opted to accept the consequences of staying remote, undermining Dell’s plan to restore its in-office culture.

The publication spoke with a dozen Dell employees to hear their stories as to why they chose to stay remote, and a variety of reasons came up. Some said they enjoyed more free time and less strain on their finances after going remote, and nothing could convince them to give that up now. Others said their local offices had closed since the pandemic or that they weren’t interested in promotions.

Others still noted that it seemed pointless to go in to an in-person office when the teams they worked on were already distributed across multiple offices around the world, so they’d mostly still be on Zoom calls anyway.

One person said they’d spoken with colleagues who had chosen to go hybrid, and those colleagues reported doing work in mostly empty offices punctuated with video calls with people who were in other mostly empty offices.

Many interviewed admitted they were looking for work at other companies that aren’t trying to corral employees back into the office.

Dell is not the only company struggling with this. For example, we’ve reported several times on Apple’s internal struggles and employee revolts over remote work.

Executive management at the companies trying to restore in-person work culture claim that working together in a physical space allows for greater collaboration and innovation.

Research on this topic has offered mixed insights, but there does seem to be some consensus that remote work is accompanied by very modest drops in productivity—for example, a working study at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research suggested around a 10 percent drop in productivity, even as it noted that the cost-saving benefits of remote work could make up for some of that.

Dell said return to the office or else—nearly half of workers chose “or else” Read More »

reports:-apple-is-halting-its-next-high-end-vision-in-favor-of-something-cheaper

Reports: Apple is halting its next high-end Vision in favor of something cheaper

Vision Pro strategy shift —

Finding a lower-price replacement for its high-end displays could be difficult.

Vision Pro, seen from below, in a display with a bright white light strip overhead.

Samuel Axon

A report by tech news site The Information suggests that Apple is shifting its augmented reality priorities. The next high-end version of the Vision Pro has purportedly been canceled while work continues on a more affordable version with a reduced feature set.

Citing both an employee in Apple’s headset supply chain and one working in headset manufacturing for Apple, the report claims that the cheaper Vision product—perhaps around the $1,600 mark—is due before the end of 2025. Apple had originally intended to present this headset alongside the Vision Pro, similar to the models available in each iPhone release. The more affordable model would likely have fewer cameras, smaller speakers, and weigh less, though Apple has struggled to bring down the cost of the unit’s displays.

Apple’s efforts in augmented reality are closely watched by other players in the headset space, so even a momentary, situational step back from high-end headsets could have significant repercussions. The Information cites current and former Meta employees in describing how the company had killed plans for its own higher-end headset in January 2023, but it then began work on a new premium model five months after Apple’s Vision Pro debut.

The Vision Pro will launch in China, Japan, Australia, and many European countries later this month. The Information’s sources suggest that Apple has produced roughly 500,000 Vision Pro headsets and will not make significantly more, despite the entry of these new markets.

Apple has not responded to The Information or other outlets. Ars contacted Apple for comment and will update this post with any response.

In Senior Editor Samuel Axon’s extensive experience with the device, the home theater aspect of the Vision Pro, and specifically its high-quality display units, is the “one use case that’s a slam dunk.” Reducing the quality of the Sony micro-OLED displays in the Vision Pro, and their “staggering 3,386 PPI (pixels per inch)” density, would seemingly cut at a solid selling point for the device. It is otherwise not made for walking around, and while working in the Vision Pro is possible, it’s not ready to replace anyone’s standard setup yet, especially if they have regular web meetings.

Reports: Apple is halting its next high-end Vision in favor of something cheaper Read More »

windows-11-24h2-is-released-to-the-public-but-only-on-copilot+-pcs-(for-now)

Windows 11 24H2 is released to the public but only on Copilot+ PCs (for now)

24h2 for some —

The rest of the Windows 11 ecosystem will get the new update this fall.

Windows 11 24H2 is released to the public but only on Copilot+ PCs (for now)

Microsoft

For the vast majority of compatible PCs, Microsoft’s Windows 11 24H2 update still isn’t officially available as anything other than a preview (a revised version of the update is available to Windows Insiders again after briefly being pulled early last week). But Microsoft and most of the other big PC companies are releasing their first wave of Copilot+ PCs with Snapdragon X-series chips in them today, and those PCs are all shipping with the 24H2 update already installed.

For now, this means a bifurcated Windows 11 install base: one (the vast majority) that’s still mostly on version 23H2 and one (a tiny, Arm-powered minority) that’s running 24H2.

Although Microsoft hasn’t been specific about its release plans for Windows 11 24H2 to the wider user base, most PCs should still start getting the update later this fall. The Copilot+ parts won’t run on those current PCs, but they’ll still get new features and benefit from Microsoft’s work on the operating system’s underpinnings.

The wider 24H2 update rollout will also likely enable the Copilot+ PC features on Intel and AMD PCs that meet the hardware requirements. That hardware will supposedly be available starting in July—at least, if AMD can hit its planned ship date for Ryzen AI chips—but neither Intel nor AMD seems to know exactly when the Copilot+ features will be enabled in software. Right now, the x86 version of Windows doesn’t even have hidden Copilot+ features that can be enabled with the right settings; they only seem to be included at all in the Arm version of the update.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, the Copilot+ PC program (and, to a lesser extent, the 24H2 update) has become mostly synonymous with the Recall screen recording feature. Microsoft revealed this feature to the public without first sending it through its normal Windows Insider testing program. As soon as security researchers and testers were able to dig into it, they immediately found security holes and privacy risks that could expose a user’s entire Recall database plus detailed screenshots of all their activity to anyone with access to the PC.

Microsoft initially announced that it would release a preview of Recall as scheduled on June 18 with additional security and privacy measures in place. Microsoft would also make the feature off-by-default instead of on-by-default. Shortly after that, the company delayed Recall altogether and committed to testing it publicly in Windows Insider builds like any other Windows feature. Microsoft says that Recall will return, at least to Copilot+ PCs, at some point “in the coming weeks.”

Aside from the Copilot+ generative AI features, which require extra RAM and storage and a PC with a sufficiently fast neural processing unit (NPU), the main Windows 11 system requirements aren’t changing for the 24H2 update. However, there are older unsupported PCs that could run previous Windows 11 versions that will no longer be able to boot 24H2 since it requires a slightly newer CPU to boot.

Windows 11 24H2 is released to the public but only on Copilot+ PCs (for now) Read More »

proton-is-taking-its-privacy-first-apps-to-a-nonprofit-foundation-model

Proton is taking its privacy-first apps to a nonprofit foundation model

Proton going nonprofit —

Because of Swiss laws, there are no shareholders, and only one mission.

Swiss flat flying over a landscape of Swiss mountains, with tourists looking on from nearby ledge

Getty Images

Proton, the secure-minded email and productivity suite, is becoming a nonprofit foundation, but it doesn’t want you to think about it in the way you think about other notable privacy and web foundations.

“We believe that if we want to bring about large-scale change, Proton can’t be billionaire-subsidized (like Signal), Google-subsidized (like Mozilla), government-subsidized (like Tor), donation-subsidized (like Wikipedia), or even speculation-subsidized (like the plethora of crypto “foundations”),” Proton CEO Andy Yen wrote in a blog post announcing the transition. “Instead, Proton must have a profitable and healthy business at its core.”

The announcement comes exactly 10 years to the day after a crowdfunding campaign saw 10,000 people give more than $500,000 to launch Proton Mail. To make it happen, Yen, along with co-founder Jason Stockman and first employee Dingchao Lu, endowed the Proton Foundation with some of their shares. The Proton Foundation is now the primary shareholder of the business Proton, which Yen states will “make irrevocable our wish that Proton remains in perpetuity an organization that places people ahead of profits.” Among other members of the Foundation’s board is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of HTML, HTTP, and almost everything else about the web.

Of particular importance is where Proton and the Proton Foundation are located: Switzerland. As Yen noted, Swiss foundations do not have shareholders and are instead obligated to act “in accordance with the purpose for which they were established.” While the for-profit entity Proton AG can still do things like offer stock options to recruits and even raise its own capital on private markets, the Foundation serves as a backstop against moving too far from Proton’s founding mission, Yen wrote.

There’s a lot more Proton to protect these days

Proton has gone from a single email offering to a wide range of services, many of which specifically target the often invasive offerings of other companies (read, mostly: Google). You can now take your cloud files, passwords, and calendars over to Proton and use its VPN services, most of which offer end-to-end encryption and open source core software hosted in Switzerland, with its notably strong privacy laws.

None of that guarantees that a Swiss court can’t compel some forms of compliance from Proton, as happened in 2021. But compared to most service providers, Proton offers a far clearer and easier-to-grasp privacy model: It can’t see your stuff, and it only makes money from subscriptions.

Of course, foundations are only as strong as the people who guide them, and seemingly firewalled profit/non-profit models can be changed. Time will tell if Proton’s new model can keep up with changing markets—and people.

Proton is taking its privacy-first apps to a nonprofit foundation model Read More »

after-a-few-years-of-embracing-thickness,-apple-reportedly-plans-thinner-devices

After a few years of embracing thickness, Apple reportedly plans thinner devices

return to form —

Thinness is good, as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of other things.

Apple bragged about the thinness of the M4 iPad Pro; it's apparently a template for the company's designs going forward.

Enlarge / Apple bragged about the thinness of the M4 iPad Pro; it’s apparently a template for the company’s designs going forward.

Apple

Though Apple has a reputation for prioritizing thinness in its hardware designs, the company has actually spent the last few years learning to embrace a little extra size and/or weight in its hardware. The Apple Silicon MacBook Pro designs are both thicker and heavier than the Intel-era MacBook Pros they replaced. The MacBook Air gave up its distinctive taper. Even the iPhone 15 Pro was a shade thicker than its predecessor.

But Apple is apparently planning to return to emphasizing thinness in its devices, according to reporting from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman (in a piece that is otherwise mostly about Apple’s phased rollout of the AI-powered features it announced at its Worldwide Developers Conference last week).

Gurman’s sources say that Apple is planning “a significantly skinnier iPhone in time for the iPhone 17 line in 2025,” which presumably means that we can expect the iPhone 16 to continue in the same vein as current iPhone 15 models. The Apple Watch and MacBook Pro are also apparently on the list of devices Apple is trying to make thinner.

Apple previewed this strategy with the introduction of the M4 iPad Pro a couple of months ago, which looked a lot like the previous-generation iPad Pro design but was a few hundredths of an inch thinner and (especially for the 13-inch model) noticeably lighter than before. Gurman says the new iPad Pro is “the beginning of a new class of Apple devices that should be the thinnest and lightest products in their categories across the whole tech industry.”

Thin-first design isn’t an inherently good or bad thing, but the issue in Apple’s case is that it has occasionally come at the expense of other more desirable features. A thinner device has less room for cooling hardware like fans and heatsinks, less room for batteries, and less room to fit ports.

The late-2010s-era MacBook Pro and Air redesigns were probably the nadir of this thin-first design, switching to all-Thunderbolt ports and a stiff-feeling butterfly switch keyboard design that also ended up being so breakage-prone that it spawned a long-running Apple repair program and a class-action lawsuit that the company settled. The 2020 and 2021 MacBooks reversed course on both decisions, reverting to a more traditional scissor-switch keyboard and restoring larger ports like MagSafe and HDMI.

Hopefully, Apple has learned the lessons of the last decade or so and is planning not to give up features people like just so it can craft thinner hardware. The new iPad Pros are a reason for optimism—they don’t really give up anything relative to older iPad models while still improving performance and screen quality. But iPad hardware is inherently more minimalist than the Mac and is less space-constrained than an iPhone or an Apple Watch. Here’s hoping Apple has figured out how to make a thinner, lighter Mac without giving up ports or keyboard quality or a thinner, lighter iPhone or Apple Watch without hurting battery life.

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TDK claims insane energy density in solid-state battery breakthrough

All charged up —

Apple supplier says new tech has 100 times the capacity of its current batteries.

man wearing headphones

Enlarge / TDK says its new ceramic materials for batteries will improve the performance of small consumer electronics devices such as smartwatches and wireless headphones

Japan’s TDK is claiming a breakthrough in materials used in its small solid-state batteries, with the Apple supplier predicting significant performance increases for devices from wireless headphones to smartwatches.

The new material provides an energy density—the amount that can be squeezed into a given space—of 1,000 watt-hours per liter, which is about 100 times greater than TDK’s current battery in mass production. Since TDK introduced it in 2020, competitors have moved forward, developing small solid-state batteries that offer 50 Wh/l, while rechargeable coin batteries using traditional liquid electrolytes offer about 400 Wh/l, according to the group.

“We believe that our newly developed material for solid-state batteries can make a significant contribution to the energy transformation of society. We will continue the development towards early commercialisation,” said TDK’s chief executive Noboru Saito.

The batteries set to be produced will be made of an all-ceramic material, with oxide-based solid electrolyte and lithium alloy anodes. The high capability of the battery to store electrical charge, TDK said, would allow for smaller device sizes and longer operating times, while the oxide offered a high degree of stability and thus safety. The battery technology is designed to be used in smaller-sized cells, replacing existing coin-shaped batteries found in watches and other small electronics.

The breakthrough is the latest step forward for a technology industry experts think can revolutionize energy storage, but which faces significant obstacles on the path to mass production, particularly at larger battery sizes.

Solid-state batteries are safer, lighter and potentially cheaper and offer longer performance and faster charging than current batteries relying on liquid electrolytes. Breakthroughs in consumer electronics have filtered through to electric vehicles, although the dominant battery chemistries for the two categories now differ substantially.

The ceramic material used by TDK means that larger-sized batteries would be more fragile, meaning the technical challenge of making batteries for cars or even smartphones will not be surmounted in the foreseeable future, according to the company.

Kevin Shang, senior research analyst at Wood Mackenzie, a data and analytics firm, said that “unfavorable mechanical properties,” as well as the difficulty and cost of mass production, are challenges for moving the application of solid-state oxide-based batteries into smartphones.

Industry experts believe the most significant use case for solid-state batteries could be in electric cars by enabling greater driving range. Japanese companies are in the vanguard of a push to commercialize the technology: Toyota is aiming for as early as 2027, Nissan the year after and Honda by the end of the decade.

Car manufacturers are focused on developing sulfide-based electrolytes for long-range electric vehicles, an alternative kind of material to the oxide-based material that TDK has developed.

However, there is still skepticism about how quickly the much-hyped technology can be realized, particularly the larger batteries needed for electric vehicles.

Robin Zeng, founder and chief executive of CATL, the world’s biggest electric vehicle battery manufacturer, told the Financial Times in March that solid-state batteries did not work well enough, lacked durability and still had safety problems. Zeng’s CATL originated as a spin-off from Amperex Technology, or ATL, which is a subsidiary of TDK and is the world’s leading producer of lithium-ion batteries.

TDK, which was founded in 1935 and became a household name as a top cassette tape brand in the 1960s and 1970s, has lengthy experience in battery materials and technology.

It has 50 to 60 percent global market share in the small-capacity batteries that power smartphones and is targeting leadership in the medium-capacity market, which includes energy storage devices and larger electronics such as drones.

The group plans to start shipping samples of its new battery prototype to clients from next year and hopes to be able to move into mass production after that.

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