Category: Consumer Tech

Tesla’s electric Semi trucks are being recalled over a faulty electronic parking brake, according to a notice posted online by the NHSTA. The recall comes after Tesla made its first deliveries of the highly anticipated Semi to PepsiCo and Frito Lay this past December.

“A parking brake that is not engaged as expected when the driver releases the brakes may allow the vehicle to rollaway, increasing the risk of crash,” the NHSTA said in its recall notice.

The recall covers just 35 vehicles, another testament to how few of these have been delivered so far. Tesla will replace the faulty brake free of charge, according to the NHSTA.

The all-electric Tesla Semi garnered a lot of attention when it was first announced during a splashy ceremony by Tesla CEO Elon Musk in 2017. But it took many years to finally become a reality, with production of the vehicles starting in October 2022 and deliveries to customers beginning in December.

The Tesla Semi has an impressive range of 500 miles on a single charge and attracted pre-orders from a number of companies, including Walmart, Anheuser-Busch and UPS. PepsiCo reportedly hopes to have 100 Tesla Semi trucks on the road by the end of this year.

As CNN notes, there have been a number of social media posts showing the Tesla Semi broken down on the side of the road during its relatively short life. But Tesla is known for fixing problems with software updates after cars have been introduced. In the case of the brake recall, it’s clear this wasn’t something that could be fixed with an over-the-air update.

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday, probably because the electric vehicle company shut down its PR office in 2020. Musk has an adversarial relationship with the press and shut down Twitter’s press office when he took over that company late last year. I’ll update this article if I hear back, but I’m not going to hold my breath on that one.

Former president Donald Trump started running Facebook ads on Friday calling his upcoming indictment “the darkest chapter of American history.” And it’s an interesting strategy, considering Trump was banned from Facebook until very recently.

“BREAKING: I’VE BEEN INDICTED! We are living through the darkest chapter of American history,” the new ad campaign reads.

Trump was banned from Facebook following the attacks of January 6, 2021, when he told his followers to descend on the U.S. Capitol in an effort to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election. Trump falsely claimed the vote had been rigged and that he was the real winner, urging his Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election results.

Trump was subsequently banned from Facebook on January 7, 2021, but parent company Meta announced this past January that it would be lifting the ban “with guardrails.”

“In the event that Mr. Trump posts further violating content, the content will be removed and he will be suspended for between one month and two years, depending on the severity of the violation,” Meta explained in an announcement from Jan. 25, 2023.

Other social media networks like Twitter and YouTube also lifted their bans on Trump in recent months.

But where does that leave Trump’s latest Facebook campaign? Trump’s new ad is filled with incendiary language, including his claim that this is somehow the darkest chapter of American history. U.S. history is obviously filled with dark chapters, including the assassination of four sitting presidents, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, September 11th, and that whole Civil War thing, just to name a few.

“The Radical Left – the enemy of the hard-working men and women of this country – have INDICTED me in a disgusting witch hunt,” the new Facebook ad, which started running on Saturday, reads.

“This Witch Hunt will BACKFIRE MASSIVELY on Joe Biden,” the rambling ad continued.

Another ad, which started to run on Friday insisted shadowy dark forces were at work to harm Trump and his followers.

“The Deep State will use anything at their disposal to shut down the one political movement that puts YOU first,” the ad reads.

While these Facebook ads might read as perfectly normal to most Americans, given the way that Trump has changed politics over the past eight years, but using words like “enemy” and “disgusting” to talk about your political opponents was unheard of in mainstream political ads before Trump entered the scene.

The ad also asks Facebook users to contribute money to his campaign. Trump apparently raised more than $4 million in the day after it was announced a grand jury in New York had voted to indict him, according to NBC News. Trump is widely expected to surrender to authorities in Manhattan on Tuesday, where he’ll be fingerprinted and a mugshot will be taken.

Incredibly, Trump has surged in the polls among Republicans after news of his indictment was made public. When Republicans were asked who they preferred between Donald Trump and his presumptive Republican challenger, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump won by a huge margin. Trump was preferred by 57% of Republicans compared to just 31% for DeSantis, according to Yahoo News. That’s a big swing from two weeks ago, before news of Trump’s indictment broke, when the split was 47% for Trump and 39% for DeSantis.

Facebook did not respond to a request for clarification on its rules Saturday morning. I’ll update this article if I hear back.

The RTX 4070 is expected to launch in April and the latest rumors also point at the RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti launching a month later in May. However, what could be the final RTX 40-series launch – the RTX 4050 – could happen a month later in June.

Videocardz stumbled upon a post by Twitter user @zed_wang supposedly with information about 4050 and 4060-series GPUs. Currently, the cheapest RTX 40-series card is the RTX 4070 Ti, which has a launch price of $799. The RTX 4070 is predicted to hit shelves at $599, but the RTX 4050 would be significantly cheaper given that at least one other graphics card – either an RTX 4060 Ti or RTX 4060 or both will sit between it and an expected RTX 4050.

The post suggests the RTX 4060 will launch in May as other rumors have suggested, while the RTX 4050 could launch in June. Such a tight launch schedule wouldn’t fit Nvidia’s activity this year, though, with the RTX 4070 Ti reviews having landed just after New Years and the RTX 4070 predicted to launch in early April.

Still, Nvidia could be looking to capitalize on AMD’s absence in the mid-range market with RX 7000-series cards, with its RX 7900 XT trading blows with the pricier RTX 4070 Ti. The RTX 4050 is a much talked-about graphics card, given how Nvidia has re-spun the RTX 2060 and the apparent high prices and low value of many models out there, especially at the low end.

Only 6GB of VRAM?

Maybe we were spoiled with the likes of the GTX 1650, which sits atop of Steam’s Hardware Survey as the most popular discrete GPU, but there are some concerns over the RTX 4050’s specifications too. Firstly, it’s rumored to have just 6GB of VRAM, which is no more than the aging RTX 2060. This could be an issue in modern games, many of which require more than this to run smoothly or to make use of HD textures.

Even at 1080p, having at least 8GB of VRAM can be beneficial and less than this a disadvantage in modern games. It’s possible Nvidia is banking on RTX 40-series features such as better ray tracing performance, frame generation and DLSS 3 to increase frame rates and boost interest here and there’s certainly a good reason to be excited about these features coming to cheaper graphics cards. However, the tech savvy out there will be right to be concerned about the baseline memory for Nvidia’s cheapest RTX 40-series card being just 6GB as opposed to 8GB. Only time will tell if this is true and what impact it has.

Having established itself last year as a serious player in the home projector world with its impressive and aggressively priced AURA 4K Ultra Short Throw laser projector, XGIMI is now targeting the more casual projector market with a pair of HD models designed with ease of use and value in mind.

Set to cost just $399 and $599 respectively, XGIMI’s MoGo 2 and MoGo 2 Pro portable projectors are designed from the ground up to appeal to users who don’t have either the time or the knowledge to mess around manually setting their projector up every time they move them from room to room or house to house.

The MoGo 2 Pro in particular goes the extra mile in this respect by shipping with XGIMI’s new Smart ISA 2.0 system built in. The ISA in this system stands for Intelligent Screen Adaptation, reflecting the fact that it enables the MoGo 2 Pro to get its pictures looking crisp and correctly proportioned completely automatically.

Automatic keystone correction, for instance, gets the image’s edges perpendicular by correcting for both vertical and horizontal angles, while Intelligent Screen Alignment automatically makes sure the projected image matches up with the edges of the screen. There’s Intelligent Obstacle Avoidance too, to work around potential obstacles when calculating how best to present the MoGo 2 Pro’s pictures, and the ISA 2.0 system even includes a new Intelligent Eye Protection feature that can dim the projector’s light output automatically if the projector’s built in combination of a 3D depth sensing module and high-precision CMOS detects a child or pet passing in front of the lens.

As I found from spending time with Samsung’s unique The Freestyle ultra-portable projector last year, it’s hard to overstate just how useful these sorts of automatic set up features are when it comes to making portable projectors truly portable. If you have to spend minutes, even tens of minutes setting a projector up every time you move it, then you’ll soon stop moving it.

The non-Pro MoGo 2 uses a Smart ISA 1.0 auto set up system that isn’t as sophisticated as the premium version, and lacks the Intelligent Eye functionality. It still delivers, though, everything most people will need to get a picture up and running that enjoys straight edges and crisp focus without the user having to lift a finger.

The MoGo 2 and MoGo 2 Pro reinforce their portability by both enjoying compact and lightweight designs, and both being the first XGIMI projectors to support power supply from portable power banks.

Looking at other shared features, both of the new MoGo 2 projectors benefit from an impressive (by portable projector standards) 400 ISO Lumens of brightness, and improved DLP colour systems that XGIMI claims give them coverage of up to 90% of the DCI-P3 commercial cinema colour gamut, resulting in more colour subtlety, vividness and naturalism.

Both models also sport built in Android TV 11 smart systems, giving users access to way more streaming and gaming apps than you might normally expect to find on such affordable projectors. Each MoGo 2 model features an upgraded audio system compared with XGIMI’s debut MoGo models, with two 8W speakers and double-sided sound outputs combining to create what should be a much larger and more balanced sound stage than you get with the sort of puny audio systems typically built into projectors.

XGIMI is so proud of the MoGo 2’s audio system, in fact, that it’s even put a transparent window over the bass diaphragm on the projectors’ rear so that you can – if you really want to – watch the diaphragm going through its low frequency producing motions.

The main difference between the two MoGo 2 projectors apart from the Pro models’ more advanced auto setup system is that the Pro model carries a full HD resolution while the cheaper MoGo 2 only carries an HD Ready 720p resolution.

You can pre-order the new MoGo 2 models now from Amazon or XGIMI’s own website, ahead of them hitting stores (including Best Buy) on April 25th.

Taking a look back at seven days of news and headlines across the world of Android, this week’s Android Circuit includes leaked Galaxy S24 Ultra details, Pixel Tablet details, new OnePlus Nord CE 3 Lite details, Oppo and OnePlus staying in Europe, Nothing Phone (2) listings, foldable phones sales figures, and Android 14’s practical security update.

Android Circuit is here to remind you of a few of the many things that have happened around Android in the last week (and you can find the weekly Apple news digest here).

Looking At The Galaxy S24

The Galaxy S23 may still be riding very high in its post-launch retail glow, but there are already broad details on what comes next – after all, its likely approaching the end of the development phase in Samsung’s South Korean labs. Given Samsung Display’s recent moves, the Galaxy S24 screen looks to be a key selling point:

“…the Galaxy S24 series will feature Super AMOLED screens with a 144Hz refresh rate. Starting with the Galaxy S20 series, Samsung used 120Hz Super AMOLED screens in its high-end phones. And while some gaming phones and high-end smartphones from rival brands offered screens with a 144Hz refresh rate, Samsung has so far stayed away from 144Hz screens. If this report is correct, it could switch to 144Hz Super AMOLED screens for a smoother experience while scrolling, swiping, and gaming.”

(SamMobile).

Pixel Tablet Dock Leaks

We know that Google’s Pixel Tablet is on its way, most likely at the I/O developer event later in Spring. Now we have a few more details about the Pixel Dock it will use, which will help lift the tablet towards its ‘home Hub’ mode:

“Effectively, the dock resembles the bottom portion of the Nest Hub Max and may even use the same power connector. The dock will hold the Pixel Tablet in place with several magnets and will charge it via four pogo-pin connectors. It is unclear whether the dock shown is ‘korlan’ or ‘yuzu’, although the fabric cover implies that it is the former rather than the latter.”

(NotebookCheck).

OnePlus’ Next Focus Is The Screen

OnePlus’ next Nord device will arrive on April 4th, but ahead of next week’s launch we know a few more details about the OnePlus Nord CE 3 Lite, with COO Kinder Liu confirming key specs in a recent interview:

“Liu told us that the CE 3 Lite would indeed pack a “120Hz 6.72-inch large screen;” …Paired with the Lite’s one-two punch of a large battery and promisingly-rapid fast charging, the company president continued, “[these are] features usually seen in our premium models.”

(TechRadar).

Oppo, OnePlus, and Europe

Early this week, it was suggested that both Oppo and OnePlus would be leaving the European markets, in part due to patent litigation. Both companies addressed the suggestion with public statements:

OnePlus Global PR Manager James Patterson: “OnePlus will not exit from Europe and the UK and maintains stable operations in local markets. OnePlus will continue to invest in Europe and provide more innovative product and solutions to its users.”

Oppo EU Press: “We had a great start in 2023 with the successful launches of several products in Europe and have a line-up of upcoming products for the rest of the year. As always, Oppo will continue to provide more innovative products and the best-in-class service for users moving forward.”

(GSMArena).

Nothing Phone (2)’s Indian Listing

Indian regulatory authorities have listed Nothing Tech’s next phone, the titular Phone (2). Nothing has already confirmed the major details of the handset – including the SnapDragon 8+ Gen 1 processor will drive it, but nothing about release dates. With listings now available, we can infer a release, at least for India, is drawing close:

“As seen in the BIS certification image above, the Nothing Phone (2) (with the model number Nothing AIN065) has recently been certified by the Indian BIS certification. Though the BIS certification listing does not tell us anything about the specifications and features of the device, it sure suggests that the launch of the device is imminent.”

(91Mobiles).

Folding For Growth

The latest IDC report looks at the growth of foldable in the smartphone space. Given the investment by brands such as Oppo and Honor, they will be delighted to know that the market is going to carry on with the growth it has seen over the last twelve months:

“…worldwide shipments of foldable phones, including flip and fold form factors, to reach 21.4 million units in 2023. This represents an increase of more than 50% over the 14.2 million units shipped in 2022. An updated IDC forecast projects that foldable phone shipments will reach 48.1 million units in 2027 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27.6% from 2022 to 2027.

(IDC).

And Finally…

Looking ahead to Android 14, a new quality-of-life feature has been spotted in the code. It will make it harder for someone to read your PIN number as you enter it by disabling some of the visual feedback:

“The description for this toggle reads “disable animations while entering the PIN”, meaning that the animation that normally plays when you tap any number on the keyguard won’t be shown. This will make it harder for shoulder surfers to watch you enter your PIN, because the Android lock screen won’t show an obvious visual cue for each number you tap.”

(XDA Developers).

Android Circuit rounds up the news from the Android world every weekend here on Forbes. Don’t forget to follow me so you don’t miss any coverage in the future, and of course read the sister column in Apple Loop! Last week’s Android Circuit can be found here, and if you have any news and links you’d like to see featured in Android Circuit, get in touch!

New details have emerged concerning a huge camera upgrade coming to the iPhone 15 Pro Max — but not to the smaller Phone 15 Pro.

In a recent report, respected industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reveals that Largan Precision will be the sole supplier of a new periscopic telephoto camera destined to appear only in this year’s flagship iPhone 15 Pro Max.

Here, Kuo doubles down on previous reports stating that the all-new lens will skip the iPhone 15 Pro before appearing in both the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max next year. Leaving the new lens out of the regular iPhone 15 Pro will create an unusual differentiation between Apple’s two flagship models, so pricing will be key if the smaller model is to remain competitive. Furthermore, with the iPhone 16 Pro expected to pick up the new camera tech next year, it will become tempting for would-be iPhone 15 Pro owners to skip a year instead.

While the current iPhone 14 Pro Max camera is a stellar performer, it still suffers from loss of detail when taking pictures at long range, as revealed in Dxomark’s recent test report. Fixing this one shortcoming would therefore propel the next-gen iPhone 15 Pro Max camera to new heights.

The new camera is expected to include a 1/3-inch sensor with optical image stabilization and a magnification of 5-6x and will greatly improve the long-range zoom performance of the flagship iPhone, bringing it in line with the best of the Android-based competition which have been using similar periscopic lenses for some time.

It remains to be seen what effect this omission will have on iPhone 15 Pro sales, but I suspect that iPhone fans with smaller hands won’t be happy.

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A pro-Trump Twitter troll who spread disinformation about how to vote in the 2016 election has been found guilty on Friday of Conspiracy Against Rights in federal court, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York. And the verdict is already being denounced by prominent right-wing media figures.

Douglass Mackey, a 33-year-old who went by the name Ricky Vaughn on Twitter, distributed images on social media in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election that encouraged people to vote by text. It’s not possible to vote by text in the U.S., but at least 4,900 people tried to do just that.

“Avoid the Line. Vote from Home. Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925,” one of Mackey’s tweets read, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Mackey, along with other co-conspirators, produced many social media posts like this, including at least one in Spanish. The tweets often included the hashtag #ImWithHer, a popular slogan from Hillary Clinton supporters at the time.

Mackey was found guilty of Conspiracy Against Rights a federal offense that makes it a crime to “injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person” attempting to exercise a right found in the U.S. Constitution, including the right to vote.

The case received attention from many media figures on the far-right, including Tucker Carlson of Fox News, who argued that Mackey was clearly making a joke and that his posts were protected speech under the First Amendment. But after a one-week trial in Brooklyn, a federal jury clearly believed otherwise.

“Mackey has been found guilty by a jury of his peers of attempting to deprive individuals from exercising their sacred right to vote for the candidate of their choice in the 2016 Presidential Election,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said in a statement after the ruling was announced.

“Today’s verdict proves that the defendant’s fraudulent actions crossed a line into criminality and flatly rejects his cynical attempt to use the constitutional right of free speech as a shield for his scheme to subvert the ballot box and suppress the vote,” Peace continued.

Mackey, who lives in West Palm Beach, Florida, was an incredibly popular figure on Twitter in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton, with roughly 58,000 followers.

Mackey faces up to 10 years in prison.

In February, I reviewed the HD Max – a mid-sized portable Bluetooth speaker from Treblab with 50W of power and some heavy duty bass output. The company’s latest release takes a different approach, featuring an upright “lantern” style form factor with a folding handle, a slew of drivers and bass radiators, plus integrated RGB lighting effects. Like the HD Max, the Treblab HD-Force is also rugged, water resistant and equipped with plenty of power.

Could the HD-Force be a contender for the best affordable portable party speaker? It certainly makes a strong case…

Audio Performance

This speaker’s upright form factor and impressive collection of drivers and radiators (I believe there are nine in all) are designed to disperse sound in all directions. That’s not the same as surround sound or stereo (you need two speakers for that), but the HD-Force does manage to output audio with a wider presence than many portable speakers.

Music playback sounds decent – at least so long as you don’t crank the volume too loud – but it is on the bright side. That’s a little surprising, given the driver arrangement, which includes a downward facing 3-inch driver and an array of six bass radiators. Unlike the company’s HD Max speaker, there is no bass boost mode so if you prefer audio that’s a little warmer and with a little more emphasis on the low end, you’ll need to rely on your phone’s EQ.

With 60W of peak power, this speaker can get pretty loud. Outdoors is a little more forgiving, but crank it up too loud indoors and the higher frequencies can painfully overwhelm the mix. To put all this in some perspective, this is a $140 speaker, so I wasn’t expecting spectacular audio performance. At that price it does alright, especially in the sweet spot of 20% to 60% volume.

If you do want stereo sound, you can wirelessly pair a second HD-Force.

Besides Bluetooth 5.0 and a 3.5mm AUX input, Treblab included a Micro SD card slot. I don’t know anyone who uses Micro SD cards for their music, but if that’s you, this speaker has you covered.

Portable Plus: Handle, Water Resistant, Rugged, Long Battery Life

Like most portable speakers, the HD-Force has an integrated mic so you can use it with your phone as a speakerphone.

Treblab says the rugged design is both shockproof and dustproof. It certainly seems well put together and durable. It has an IPX6 water resistance rating, which means it can survive high pressure water streams from any direction. I used it outdoors in rain and melting snow and had no issues. At 8.74-inches tall and 3.2lbs this is what I would consider to be a mid-sized speaker. It has a pop-up handle for easy carrying.

Inside is a 10400 mAh lithium ion battery. It’s rated for up to 25 hours of battery life, assuming you keep the volume at a reasonable level. In my experience, that estimate is pretty much spot-on. You can sacrifice some of that battery life to keep a smartphone going with the ability to plug into the speaker’s USB Type-A port for a charge. The speaker itself charges via a USB-C port. Treblab includes the USB-C cable in the box, but you’ll need to supply your own charger. Using my iPad charger, it took about four hours to fully charge.

Light Show

Your $140 also gets you an RBG light show. There is a thin strip of LED lighting around the top of the speaker. It can display one of five different RGB effects, which you can cycle through by double-clicking the play button. I found the pulsing effect that keeps time with the music was a little too jerky, but the slower effects were nice enough. It’s not a massive display, but provides some nice ambient lighting in darker environments. You can also turn the lighting off altogether.

Treblab HD-Force Key Specs:

• Portable Bluetooth speaker

• “Lantern” form factor with handle

• Multi-driver design with 2 x 2-inch drivers, 1 x 3-inch driver, 6 bass radiators

• Frequency response 80 Hz – 16 kHz

• 60W peak power (50W RMS)

• Bluetooth 5.0

• LED ring with 5 RGB lighting modes

• Rugged design (shockproof and dustproof), IPX6 water resistant

• Micro SD card slot, 3.5mm AUX input

• Battery rated for up to 25 hours

• Power bank function with USB Type-A output

• Integrated mic

• Four on-device multifunction buttons + LED battery indicator

• Charges via USB-C

• Supports TWS mode for two speaker stereo sound

• 8.74 inches tall, weighs 3.2 lbs

• MSRP $139.99

Treblab HD-Force Recommendation

The Treblab HD-Force is a decent choice as an affordable, rugged, water resistant portable speaker. For around $140 (often less if you take advantage of discount codes or check amazon), you get a portable speaker with extended battery life that can take exposure to the elements. Its sound is not going to impress audiophiles, but it sounds pretty decent so long as you stay within the volume sweet spot. The RGB light show is an added bonus that not many speakers offer. It also has a few additional features including Micro SD card support, TWS stereo pairing capability, and the ability to be used as a power bank.

Put all those features together and the Treblab HD-Force is well worth its $139.99 asking price.

Disclosure: Treblab provided a speaker for evaluation purposes but had no input into this review.

Taking a look back at another week of news and headlines from Cupertino, this week’s Apple Loop includes the latest leaked iPhone 15 Pro specs, display problems for new iPhone, WWDC dates announced, massive OS updates, MacBook Air updates, RealityPro speculation, and a new way to use Apple pay.

Apple Loop is here to remind you of a few of the very many discussions that have happened around Apple over the last seven days (and you can read my weekly digest of Android news here on Forbes).

When The iPhone 15 Pro Is Off

One of the visible changes to the iPhone 15 Pro, when it launches later this year, will be the removal of the Alert Slider, and the replacement of the volume buttons with solid-state buttons. Normally these buttons need a phone to be on to work, but Apple is planning a new chipset to allow for the buttons to continue to be registered, even when the main battery is dead:

“The insider states that this functionality is all down to an all-new micro-processor coming to the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, which will replace Apple’s ‘Super Low Energy Mode’ used on current models. Super Low Energy Mode is currently capable of using Apple Pay and activating Bluetooth for the Find My Network when the battery is dead.”

(Forbes).

iPhone 15 Facing Display Issues

The iPhone 15 displays look to be causing a bit of a headache. The small changes to the front-mounted sensors from the iPhone 14 to the iPhone 15 have seen Apple switch from BOE to Samsung for the initial order of OLED panels.

“The OLED panel being planned for the standard model of iPhone 15 is similar to those used in iPhone 14 but now it has a hole at the top for the front camera and various sensors. BOE is facing light leak problems around the hole and has missed the chance become one of the initial suppliers of the hole-display panels.

(Gordon Kelly via The Elec).

WWDC Dates Announced

Apple has announced the dates for 2023’s Worldwide Developer Conference, which will take place between June 5th and June 9th. The vast majority of WWDC will take place online, but there will be an ‘in-person’ keynote and a handful of special events:

“We’ll host a special all-day experience at Apple Park to kick off an incredible week of online sessions, labs, and activities. Join us in person to watch the keynote and State of the Union videos together, meet some of the teams at Apple, celebrate great apps at the Apple Design Awards ceremony, and enjoy activities into the evening.”

(Apple).

The Important OS Update Bullet Point Is…

Apple released point updates across its board of operating systems this week; (deep breath) we now have iOS 16.4, iPadOS 16.4, macOS 13.3 Ventura, watchOS 9.4, tvOS 16.4, and HomePod Software 16.4 But the biggest news?

“Is it weird that Apple’s release notes for iOS 16.4, iPadOS 16.4, and macOS 13.3 Ventura lead off with the fact they include 21 new emoji? The only appropriate response is to channel my inner teen by rolling my eyes and muttering, “Whatever.”

(Tidbits)

Looking Closely At The MacBook Air

The MacBook Air is expected to be refreshed with the new M3 Apple Silicon chip, but the supply lines suggest that the bigger change, and one that will have a significant impact on the laptop, will not happen at WWDC, but later in the laptop’s life.

“The new model featured a bigger display compared to the 13.3-inch M1 MacBook Air. Now, display analyst Ross Young states in a tweet with his super followers that Apple will launch a new 13.4-inch model of the MacBook Air with an OLED display. The machine will sit in the middle of the previous and the new model in terms of display size.”

(WCCFTech).

Maybe There’s No Headset At WWDC

Tim Cook has marched his virtual army up the mixed reality hill. While the geekerati may be happy if no Mixed Reality headset shows up at WWDC – and there’s a strong argument that Apple releases the SDK and software tools ahead of the headset – the narrative set in the press is expecting the magical hat to arrive. What if it’s not ready?

“[Apple Analyst Ming-Chi] Kuo explained that Apple “isn’t very optimistic” about whether the headset will be able to create an “iPhone moment.” As a result, the company has chosen to delay the device’s mass production schedule to the middle to the end of the third quarter of 2023. Kuo believes that the delay adds uncertainty around “whether the new device will appear at WWDC 2023, as the market widely expects.”

(MacRumors).

And Finally…

Apple has increased the option of Apple Pay users to obtain credit lines with Apple Pay Later, which allows for single purchases to have payments spread over a fixed number of months – in this case four months:

“Apple today introduced Apple Pay Later in the U.S. Designed with users’ financial health in mind, Apple Pay Later1 allows users to split purchases into four payments, spread over six weeks with no interest and no fees.2 Users can easily track, manage, and repay their Apple Pay Later loans in one convenient location in Apple Wallet”

(Apple).

Apple Loop brings you seven days worth of highlights every weekend here on Forbes. Don’t forget to follow me so you don’t miss any coverage in the future. Last week’s Apple Loop can be read here, or this week’s edition of Loop’s sister column, Android Circuit, is also available on Forbes.

As we move into April, all eyes are in Nvidia with its imminent launch of the RTX 4070, but with a rumored price tag of $599, plenty of gamers will be wondering when the highly-anticipated RTX 4060 models will appear. We may have our answer as according to Wccftech’s sources, the anticipated launch month for the RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti is May.

This is a key battleground, not least of all because it’s where the majority of gamers spend their cash, with mid-range graphics cards such as the GTX 1060, RTX 2060 and RTX 3060 dominating the likes of Steam’s Hardware Survey. Nvidia finds itself in a good position too, with AMD not expected to launch more graphics cards any time soon.

The key aspect, though, will be the price. The RTX 4070 is slated to retail for $600 and will likely be on shelves for slightly more than that, potentially offering RTX 3080 levels of performance according to the latest rumors. The RTX 4060 Ti could finally bring prices down to below $500 and the RTX 4060 further still.

Performance is completely unknown, but with the RTX 4070 supposedly aiming for RTX 3080 performance levels, it’s reasonable to assume the RTX 4060 Ti will sit level with the RTX 3070 Ti, but consume far less power, with the RTX 4060 likely to aim for RTX 3070 performance. This is outside of ray tracing, DLSS and frame generation of course, where there RTX 40-series cards with their newer architecture offer considerably more performance.

The RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti will bring RTX 40-series specific features such as DLSS 3 to lower price points too and if RTX 4070 rumors are anything to go by, there may be plenty of models that use standard 8-pin power connectors too. Combined with a likely lower power consumption than their predecessors, you certainly won’t need to upgrade any other parts of your system.

Both RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti are expected to use 8GB of GDDR6 memory, which has caused a stir in forums with many users saying they’d want more, even from from mid-range cards such as these. Indeed, this is no upgrade over their predecessors with the RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 Ti both using 8GB in their standard configurations and there was even a 12GB variant of the RTX 3060 Ti.

Specifications are still very much rumor-based, though, so we’ll know more closer to the launch, but it certainly looks like Nvidia is aiming to launch its highly-anticipated mid-range models in time for the summer break.