Innholdsfortegnelse for #531 i Techlife News

With 2021 coming to a close, all eyes are on where Apple is headed next. This year has been a bumper one for the Cupertino company, breaking records and delivering cutting-edge hardware and software to users. The path ahead, however, could be even more exciting. A NEW ERA FOR APPLE The rumor mill is in overdrive, with journalists, analysts, and insiders all suggesting that 2022 could be the biggest year yet for Apple. It’s thought that Apple will update virtually every product in its catalog, including launching five new iPhone models, three new Apple Watches as well as a redesigned MacBook Air with M2 chip, an iMac Pro, and the launch of Apple’s first new product category in years: an AR/ VR headset, tentatively called Apple Glass. Of course, all…

Ask for a roast beef sandwich at an Arby’s drive-thru east of Los Angeles and you may be talking to Tori — an artificially intelligent voice assistant that will take your order and send it to the line cooks. “It doesn’t call sick,” says Amir Siddiqi, whose family installed the AI voice at its Arby’s franchise this year in Ontario, California. “It doesn’t get corona. And the reliability of it is great.” The pandemic didn’t just threaten Americans’ health when it slammed the U.S. in 2020 — it may also have posed a long-term threat to many of their jobs. Faced with worker shortages and higher labor costs, companies are starting to automate service sector jobs that economists once considered safe, assuming that machines couldn’t easily provide the human contact…

At its August AI Day event, Tesla founder Elon Musk made the next leap forward for mankind, announcing the firm was working on a prototype humanoid robot that could revolutionize the way we live. Designed to replace manual workers in dangerous, repetitive, and boring roles, the bot sets a new standard for 21st-century living. The future is coming. INTRODUCING THE TESLA BOT Although many were expecting Tesla’s AI Day event to focus on the artificial intelligence element of its self-driving cars, the company took a slightly different approach. Of course, there was news on upgrades to the Tesla operating system that would make driving your Model X even better, the star of the show was undoubtedly the announcement that the firm was working on a humanoid robot that could change…

Over the past 18 months, consumers have spent more time at home than ever before, not only working, but socializing, learning new skills, and playing games. Video gaming as a whole saw a significant increase during this period and the gaming platform Steam recorded an all-time high of 23.6 million average concurrent users in April 2020. A year later, rival firms want a slice of the pie. Following Apple’s expansion into gaming with Arcade, Netflix is the latest player entering the game, announcing its intention to launch its own gaming titles. NETFLIX EXPANDS INTO GAMING After months of rumors and speculation, Netflix confirmed mid-July plans to expand into mobile games, revealing that new titles would be available to play as part of a standard Netflix subscription. Days before its announcement,…

When Mark Zuckerberg announced ambitious plans to build the “metaverse” — a virtual reality construct intended to supplant the internet, merge virtual life with real life and create endless new playgrounds for everyone — he promised that “you’re going to able to do almost anything you can imagine.” That might not be such a great idea. Zuckerberg, CEO of the company formerly known as Facebook, even renamed it Meta to underscore the significance of the effort. During his late October presentation, he effused about going to virtual concerts with your friends, fencing with holograms of Olympic athletes and — best of all — joining mixed-reality business meetings where some participants are physically present while others beam in from the metaverse as cartoony avatars. But it’s just as easy to imagine…

The $1 trillion infrastructure plan that President Joe Biden plans to sign into law has money for roads, bridges, ports, rail transit, safe water, the power grid, broadband internet and more. The plan promises to reach almost every corner of the country. It’s a historic investment that the president has compared to the building of the transcontinental railroad and Interstate Highway System. The White House is projecting that the investments will add, on average, about 2 million jobs per year over the coming decade. The bill cleared the House on a 228-206 vote Nov. 5, ending weeks of intraparty negotiations in which liberal Democrats insisted the legislation be tied to a larger social spending bill — an effort to press more moderate Democrats to support both. The Senate passed the…

Tesla might be the first company that springs to mind when you’re in the market for a new electric vehicle, but California-based startup Lucid should not be underestimated. The firm unveiled its breathtaking Lucid Air vehicle last year, offering up to 1065bhp and a claimed maximum range of 517 miles, and last month teased its proprietary operating system that will connect drivers across the United States and around the world. The future is coming. THE WORLD’S MOST AERODYNAMIC LUXURY CAR Lucid’s debut model, Air, has been described by its engineers as the world’s most “aerodynamic luxury car,” with a drag coefficient of just 0.21; that’s 0.01 less than the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class to give you some perspective. The model offers an unrestricted top speed of more than 230 miles per…

A REVOLUTION THAT WILL HAVE IMPLICATIONS FOR ALL OF OUR LIVES It won’t exactly be news to many of our readers that the coronavirus crisis has truly upended our world – and in the process, threatened to bring about not only significant changes in many areas, but outright revolution. One of those areas is our relationship with technology, as anyone who has attended work meetings or yoga classes via Zoom since the onset of the pandemic can attest. But has the COVID-19 era been a story of dramatic digital transformation for all of us, or just some of us? And what’s next? Certainly, if your experience of the pandemic has largely been one of being confined at home hammering away at a laptop many miles from your employer’s brick-and-mortar office,…

Teams working on two continents have marked similar milestones in their respective efforts to tap an energy source key to the fight against climate change: They’ve each produced very impressive magnets. Scientists at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor in southern France took delivery of the first part of a massive magnet so strong its American manufacturer claims it can lift an aircraft carrier. Almost 60 feet (nearly 20 meters) tall and 14 feet (more than four meters) in diameter when fully assembled, the magnet is a crucial component in the attempt by 35 nations to master nuclear fusion. Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists and a private company announced separately this week that they, too, have hit a milestone with the successful test of the world’s strongest high temperature superconducting magnet…

Although our smartphones were already transforming the way we shopped and consumed, the COVID-19 pandemic undoubtedly served as rocket fuel for the delivery industry. Whether you want dinner or a brand new car delivered to your home address, there’s an app for that. OPERATION DELIVERY Most of us depended on apps like DoorDash and Amazon Prime to have dinner and goods delivered to our homes pre-pandemic, but 2020 changed the way we think about spending for good. At a time when consumers were asked to stay at home and avoid socializing, food delivery became a treat during huge uncertainty. The global food delivery market has grown to $150 billion and counting, tripling since 2017. And according to McKinsey & Company, the market more than doubled during the pandemic as more…

With Apple reportedly expressing an interest in streaming rights for the National Football League’s “Sunday Ticket” package, there’s never been a better time to sign up for Apple’s streaming service. With a raft of award-winning TV shows and movies, and perhaps soon live sporting events available to stream from your iPhone, Apple TV+ is coming into its own. A TURBULENT START FOR APPLE TV+ Whether you’re an Apple die-hard with shares in the company or you’re a casual fan of the firm and its hardware, there’s no denying that the Cupertino company’s foray into services has been challenging at best. Although Tim Cook and Co have found great success in some services like Apple Music (which recently launched its new lossless streaming feature, much to the concern of Spotify) and…

A crucial U.N. climate summit amid papal appeals for prayers and activists’ demands for action, kicking off two weeks of intense diplomatic negotiations by almost 200 countries aimed at slowing intensifying global warming and adapting to the climate damage already underway. As U.N. officials gaveled the climate summit to its formal opening in Glasgow, the heads of the world’s leading economies at the close of their own separate talks in Italy made pledges including stopping international financing of dirty-burning coal-fired power plants by next year. But much of the agreement was vague and not the major push some had been hoping for to give momentum to the climate summit. Government leaders face two choices in Glasgow, Patricia Espinosa, head of the U.N. climate office, declared at the summit’s opening: They…