Tech
iPhone 12 and 12 Pro 5G
|
This story is part of Apple Event, our full coverage of the latest news from Apple headquarters.
Apple’s iPhones just got a lot faster. During its virtual event Tuesday, the company unveiled its iPhone 12 lineup — and all four new devices come with 5G, including the ultra-fast millimeter wave version. The company’s 5.4-inch iPhone 12 Mini, 6.1-inch iPhone 12, 6.1-inch iPhone 12 Pro and 6.7-inch iPhone 12 Max pack in some of the biggest advances Apple has made in years.
The two middle phones go on sale next week (preorders begin this Friday), while the Mini and Max arrive in mid-November. The starting prices range from $699 for the Mini — making it one of the cheapest premium 5G phones on the market — to $1,099 for the Max. All international versions of the iPhone come with 5G, but only the US versions have mmWave (Verizon has been the technology’s main proponent).
The entire iPhone 12 lineup features a new design, reminiscent of Apple’s iPad Pro tablets. The flatter sides give the iPhones a new feel for the first time in three years. All models come with a new, ultra-strong, Corning-designed front cover display, dubbed “ceramic shield.” It’s “tougher than any smartphone glass,” Apple said, and is four times less likely to crack if you drop it. The new phones come with Apple’s updated A14 Bionic, the same chip that’s in the new iPad Air. They also get bumps in their camera capabilities.
Apple has nixed the free EarPods and power adapter that previously came with iPhones. But the new devices do support Apple’s revamped MagSafe charger, which uses magnetic pins to connect the charging cable with the back of the gadget. It’s not just for charging but serves as a magnetic attachment system for different accessories, all of which can snap right onto the back of the iPhone 12. Included in the box with each new iPhone is a Lightning to USB-C connector.
The addition of 5G connectivity is a first for Apple’s device lineup. (No, your older AT&T phones that say “5G E” can’t connect to the new 5G networks.) The most noticeable improvement with 5G over what the iPhone offers today is faster download speeds, hence Apple’s “Hi, Speed” event invite. 5G can run between 10 and 100 times faster than your typical 4G cellular connection, making downloads and video streaming snappier than ever. It’s also more responsive than 4G, making gaming, video streaming and other tasks much smoother.
Overall, 5G is expected to change the way we live, much like 4G brought about apps like Uber. But it’s still early days with the technology, and most consumers aren’t using 5G. As of Tuesday, all three major US carriers now have nationwide 5G networks, though they’re built on the slower version of 5G. Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg appeared on stage at Apple’s virtual event to announce that the country’s largest wireless carrier now has a low-band 5G network, which offers dramatically more coverage — at lower speeds — than the previous flavor of its superfast, mmWave 5G.
The iPhone seamlessly switches between 4G and 5G to conserve battery power. When 5G is needed — like for high-def video streaming — it’ll automatically tap into that network. Otherwise, the device will activate 4G connectivity. 5G processors, which are still new, are power hungry, and they’ve also caused early devices to overheat. By switching between 4G and 5G, Apple aims to prevent those problems.
Apple showed off its new products Tuesday during a virtual event, much like its iPad and Apple Watch Series 6 launch in October. It unveiled a new $99 HomePod Mini smart speaker before talking about its 5G iPhones.
The full iPhone 12 lineup
The premium iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max devices feature stainless steel bands and come in four finishes: silver, graphic, gold and Pacific blue. The 12 Pro packs in a 6.1-inch display, while the Pro Max features a 6.7-inch screen.
Both devices have three rear-facing cameras and have LiDAR for depth mapping, AR and low-light autofocus. The 12 Pro gets a new telephoto lens with an optical zoom of 2.5X, while the Pro Max gets a 5X optical zoom, a big jump from the 2X optical zoom of older generations. Both get other camera tweaks and come with 128GB, 256GB and 512GB storage options.
The iPhone 12 features an aluminum frame with new antennas all around the device to connect to the 5G networks. It’ll come in black, white, green, blue and Product (Red), and it features a 6.1-inch, Super Retina XDR OLED display with smaller bezels than its predecessors. And the iPhone 12 is 11% thinner, 15% smaller and 16% lighter than the older iPhone 11. There are 64GB, 128GB and 256GB storage options. The iPhone 12 also has dual, 12MP camera lenses with an f2.4 ultra wide and f1.6 wide. It also can capture photos using Night Mode, as well as night time lapse.
The 5.4-inch iPhone 12 Mini is nearly identical to the iPhone 12 aside from its screen size and weight.
The iPhone 12 Pro will start at $999, while the 12 Pro Max will retail for $1,099. Apple kept the prices of its premium phone the same as last year’s models, despite packing in 5G connectivity and other improvements. The new iPhone 12 will retail for $799, which is $100 more than last year’s model. Apple also unveiled an iPhone 12 Mini, which has a 5.4-inch display and will cost $699.
Preorders for the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro — Apple’s two 6.1-inch phones — begin Friday, with availability Oct. 23. The 12 Mini and 12 Pro Max arrive a few weeks later, with preorders beginning Nov. 6 and the devices hitting stores Nov. 13.
Last year’s new iPhone lineup included the $699, 6.1-inch iPhone 11; the $999, 5.8-inch iPhone 11 Pro; and the $1,099, 6.5-inch iPhone 11 Pro Max. Apple also introduced its $399, 4.7-inch iPhone SE in April, appealing to people looking for a budget iPhone with a small screen. That device runs only on 4G networks.
iPhone delay
The company’s new iPhones are arriving about a month later than normal, a delay attributed to the pandemic. The novel coronavirus, which causes a pneumonia-like disease called COVID-19, quickly spread across the globe this year, causing cities and entire countries to issue lockdowns to slow its advance. China, where COVID-19 was first detected, in late 2019, shut down first, jamming up production of iPhones and other products. The rest of the world soon followed suit, and the global economy all but ground to a halt. Since then, the coronavirus has infected over 37 million people and killed more than a million. While many regions have begun reopening, life isn’t back to normal.
As a result, consumers have been postponing phone purchases in favor of other work-from-home equipment. But Apple is likely to see huge demand for its newest iPhones. The company hasn’t changed the overall design of its phones since 2017’s iPhone X, its first device that ditched the physical home button in favor of a bigger screen and Face ID. By expanding into 5G, Apple is likely to see a surge in sales for its latest smartphones.
The iPhone “has never been more indispensable than it is now,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said Tuesday. “Today is the beginning of a new era for iPhone.”
5G boom
5G started rolling out across the globe last year and picked up speed in 2020. Virtually all new Android phones arriving in the US today offer 5G, and the country’s biggest carriers have been talking nonstop about the connectivity. Now that Apple is jumping into the fray with its 5G-enabled iPhone 12 models, the buzz about 5G is only going to get louder — even if consumers in places like the US aren’t exactly clamoring for 5G devices.
Apple is expected to immediately be a huge player in 5G. This year, the company will likely ship 50 million 5G iPhones, according to Strategy Analytics, making it the second biggest 5G vendor in 2020. That’s with less than three months of sales. By comparison, Samsung shipped about 6.7 million Galaxy 5G smartphones from May 2019 — when its first 5G phones hit the market — to the end of that year. Next year, Apple will be the world’s biggest 5G phone vendor, Strategy Analytics said.
“There’s a so-called Apple effect,” Strategy Analytics analyst Ville-Petteri Ukonaho said. “Whatever Apple does, it almost immediately becomes a success.”
Though many people believe their current iPhones can connect to 5G — about half of Americans think so, according to a survey by wireless benchmarking tracker Global Wireless Solutions — that isn’t the case. To get on the superspeedy new networks, Apple fans will need to upgrade to a device in the iPhone 12 lineup.
Source:- CNET
Tech
A Space Balloon Will Host The World's Most Expensive Meal For Nearly $500k – Yahoo Movies Canada
An evening dining at high altitudes with unobstructed views of the heavens and Earth sounds like something only possible on “The Jetsons,” but with space travel on the rise, this can now be a reality. SpaceVIP, a luxury space travel company, and Space Perspective, a carbon-neutral spaceflight experience company, have teamed together to offer an out-of-this-world experience for only $495,000.
Set to launch in 2025, the exclusive experience will take off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The space balloon will travel 100,000 feet above sea level, at which passengers will be served while the sun rises above the Earth’s curvature. Taking place on Space Perspective’s Spaceship Neptune craft, the balloon will carry six lucky (and wealthy) passengers for a unique dining experience hosted by Rasmus Munk. Munk is the co-owner of Michelin-starred Alchemist Restaurant, a Copenhagen fixture known for its avant-garde dining practices and 50-course meals.
In a press release obtained by Robb Report, Munk says he hopes to create a menu that represents humankind’s shared interest in space. “I want to highlight food as a common thread in our human existence, and it will be truly meaningful to serve it while gazing down at the Earth’s curvature,” he says in the release. Although the six-hour trip won’t take place until next year, test flights are set to start in April 2024.
Read more: 30 Healthy Snack Ideas That Won’t Ruin Your Diet
The Space Balloon Features Luxuries Beyond Food
While the promise of incredible dishes from a chef with two Michelin stars is certainly part of the draw, the space balloon has its own perks. Spaceship Neptune has 360-degree windows, allowing the passengers a full view of the Earth from above. The balloon is also fitted with a cocktail bar with fresh herbs, plush reclining chairs, and Wi-Fi.
Once they hit 100,000 feet above sea level, the passengers’ attentions are sure to be turned to whatever Munk is serving. Although the menu is yet to be released, his award-winning Holistic Cuisine at Alchemist shows the space experience is worth the $495,000 price tag. While Rasmus Munk has a full kitchen at his disposal at Alchemist, Spaceship Neptune has a much smaller one, so he’ll have to prepare part of the dishes before the aircraft takes off. With this barrier, Munk may have to use similar techniques that mirror the clever ways NASA astronauts cook and bake in space, using the kitchen mainly to heat and top off the dishes.
Munk’s meals must also account for the flavor changes at higher altitudes. Food tastes different on an airplane at only 42,000 feet above the ground, so it’s sure to be altered at 100,000 feet. Whatever Munk decides to make, we hope the passengers use their Wi-Fi connection to show us what we’re missing.
Read the original article on Tasting Table.
Tech
Apple in talks to let Google's Gemini power iPhone AI features, Bloomberg News says – theSun
Apple is in talks to build Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence engine into the iPhone, Bloomberg News reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the situation.
The negotiations are about licensing Gemini for some new features coming to the iPhone software this year, the report said, adding that the terms or branding of an AI agreement or how it would be implemented have not been decided.
Alphabet shares jumped more than 6% in early U.S. trading, while Apple was up 2.5%.
It is unlikely that any deal would be announced until June, when Apple plans to hold its annual conference of developers, and the iPhone maker also recently held talks with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI about using its model, according to the report.
Apple, Alphabet-owned Google and OpenAI did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
A potential deal between the firms could help Google expand the use of its AI services to more than 2 billion active Apple devices, boosting the search giant’s efforts to catch up with Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
It could also help allay investor fears about the slow roll-out of AI apps by Apple, which has lost the crown of the world’s most valuable firm after a 10% decline in its shares this year.
The firms have a years-long partnership that makes Google the default search engine on Apple’s Safari web browser, and a genAI tie-up may help the Alphabet unit navigate fears that services like ChatGPT could threaten its search dominance.
But the agreement could also invite sharper scrutiny from U.S. regulators, who have sued Google on grounds that it unlawfully stifled competition by paying billions of dollars to Apple to maintain its monopoly in search.
“This strategic partnership is a missing piece in the Apple AI strategy and combines forces with Google for Gemini to power some of the AI features Apple is bringing to market,“ said Daniel Ives, an analyst at Wedbush.
“This is a major win for Google to get onto the Apple ecosystem and have access to the golden installed base of Cupertino with clearly a major licence fee attached to this,“ he said, referring to Apple’s California headquarters.
Google in January partnered with Apple’s rival Samsung to deploy its genAI technology in the South Korean firm’s Galaxy S24 series of smartphones, as part of its efforts to boost the use of Gemini after some missteps during its roll-out.
Apple CEO Tim Cook said last month that the company was investing “significantly” in generative AI and would reveal more about its plans to put the technology to use later this year.
The Bloomberg report said Apple was planning to use its own homegrown AI models for some new capabilities in its upcoming iOS 18, but was seeking a partner to power genAI features, including functions for creating images and writing essays based on simple prompts. (Reporting by Jahnavi Nidumolu and Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D’Souza, Janane Venkatraman, Varun H K and Susan Fenton). – REUTERS
Tech
PlayStation 5 Pro rumored to beef up GPU and ray tracing, bring AI acceleration
|
The PlayStation 5 launched in late 2020, though it feels like it arrived later due to supply issues. A Pro model will reportedly arrive four years later with a much improved GPU, AI acceleration and other enhancements.
The GPU will be the biggest upgrade on the PS5 Pro. Rumors claim up to 45% higher rasterization performance and 33.5 TFLOPs of compute power. Future SDK versions will support resolutions up to 8K and higher frame rates with 4K @ 120fps and 8K @ 60fps being possible.
Ray tracing performance is set to include 2-3 times, even 4 times on some occasions. This is thanks to a massive increase from 18 BVH4 work groups to 30 BVH8. The so-called “Bounding Volume Hierarchies” help speed up ray intersection calculations (i.e. does this ray of light hit this object or not?). We will skip the technical details, but the digit after BVH means that each individual work group will be able to do more work.
The Pro will also feature the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution upscaling and antialiasing technology (PSSR for short). This will be especially helpful for ray tracing, which sees computation demands explode as resolution goes up.
The PlayStation 5 Pro will also bring a custom machine learning architecture. An AI Accelerator will offer up to 300 TOPS of 8-bit and 67 TFLOPS of 16-bit floating point computation. This might be the most interesting part as modern generative models can create realistic textures and speech, write out text based on a prompt and so on – what can developers do with this?
The console will also come with a modest boost to the CPU, which will have a “High CPU Frequency Mode” that goes up to 3.85GHz (from 3.5GHz), a 10% increase. By the sound of it, the PS5 Pro is very close to thermal limits, so this mode will drop GPU frequency by 1.5% (resulting in 1% performance loss).
The Pro model will have faster RAM that does 18 gigatransfers per second, a 28% increase from 448GB/s to 576GB/s. This is needed to feed the beefier GPU.
The audio subsystem will also get a boost with 35% more performance that can be spent on higher quality sound effects.
The PlayStation 5 Pro is expected to have 1TB onboard storage and a detachable Blu-ray drive similar to the slim models. Sony might release the Pro model in Fall 2024, but there has been no official acknowledgment of the console.
-
Media17 hours ago
Supreme Court leans against limiting Biden administration contacts with social media platforms
-
Science16 hours ago
Global wildlife study during COVID-19 shows rural animals are more sensitive to human activity
-
News14 hours ago
Brian Mulroney's sons thank Canadians, politicians for outpouring of support – CBC.ca
-
Science15 hours ago
New England College of Optometry Issues Safety Advisory for Solar Eclipse – New England College of Optometry
-
Sports15 hours ago
Sault duo celebrates historic perfect season for university hockey team – SooToday
-
Art17 hours ago
Banksy Goes Green With New Street Art That's Like An Optical Illusion – HuffPost
-
Tech13 hours ago
PlayStation 5 Pro rumored to beef up GPU and ray tracing, bring AI acceleration
-
Media15 hours ago
Struggling Sports Illustrated inks deal to stay afloat following partnership – NBC News