Enlarge / The "Sword of Damocles" head-mounted display, the original augmented reality headset, circa 1968. (credit: Ivan Sutherland)

Apple may delay the launch of its first mixed reality headset, according to Bloomberg.

Multiple sources had previously claimed that the device was likely to launch in 2022, and Apple seemed poised to introduce its new mixed reality platform to developers at the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) this June.

But according to "people familiar with the situation" with whom Bloomberg reporters Mark Gurman, Takashi Mochizuki, and Debby Wu spoke, the announcement of the new headset could fall to "the end of 2022 or later, with the product hitting shelves by 2023."

Enlarge / The PinePhone Pro is "the fastest mainline Linux smartphone on the market (credit: Pine64)

Pine64 is launching a major hardware upgrade in its quest to build a mainline Linux smartphone. After the launch of the original PinePhone in 2019, the organization is now taking preorders for the PinePhone Pro, a new smartphone it's calling "the fastest mainline Linux smartphone on the market." The phone was announced in October, but now you can secure a unit yourself. The MSRP is $599, but it's up for preorder now at an introductory price of $399.

Since Pine64 wants to make an open source Linux smartphone, its choice of hardware components are limited. Most big chip companies like Qualcomm or Samsung don't want to share open drivers or schematics, and you saw that with the original PinePhone, which was based around a 40 nm Cortex A53 SoC made by Allwinner. The PinePhone Pro is upgrading things with a Rockchip RK3399 SoC. This sports two Cortex A72 CPUs and four Cortex A53 CPUs, and Pine64 says it worked with Rockchip to get the chip "binned and voltage locked for optimal performance with sustainable power and thermal limits." Pine64 doesn't list a process node, but other companies list the RK3399 at 28 nm. If that's true and you're looking for something roughly comparable in Qualcomm's lineup, the Snapdragon 618/650 (a mid-range chip from 2016) would seem to fit the bill.

The phone has a 6-inch, 1440×720 LCD, 4GB of RAM, 128GB of eMMC storage, and a 3,000 mAh battery. There's a USB-C port with 15 W charging, a headphone jack, a 13MP main camera, and a 8MP front camera. The back cover pops off, and inside the phone you'll find a removable battery (whoa!), MicroSD slot, pogo pins, and a series of privacy dip switches that let you kill the modem, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, microphone, rear camera, front camera, and headphones.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Google recently released a feature that allows users to quickly send data, like photos or documents, to a nearby person with a Chromebook or Android device. Now, it appears developers are working on updating that feature so users can easily send data across their own devices.

Nearby Share came to Chrome OS devices in June and competes with similar technologies like Apple's AirDrop. On Sunday, Chrome Story, a Chrome and Chrome OS-focused blog, spotted an "add feature flag" in the Chromium Gerrit referencing an addition to Nearby Share called Self Share. The feature "enables seamless sharing between a user’s own devices," the flag reads.

Self Share would allow you to send data to yourself without the use of email or third-party cloud drives. Using Bluetooth, WebRTS, or peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, data should transfer to a nearby Chrome OS or Android device in seconds.

Enlarge / The Pixel 6 Pro. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Google is getting back on the update horse for the Pixel 6. After numerous delays and a recalled update, the company finally got caught up on patches for its flagship smartphone this past weekend. Assuming everything goes well, this will be the first Pixel 6 update that has stuck since November.

Software updates are supposed to be a major selling point of the Pixel line, but Google hasn't been doing so well delivering them. The phone shipped with the "November" Android security patch, and in the middle of November, Google patched the fingerprint reader. Early December should have brought the December security patch to the Pixel 6, but Google delayed that update to the middle of the month, saying that a mile-long list of bug fixes would be included with it. The December Pixel 6 update launched in the middle of the month, but Google didn't push the update to most users. The company ended up pulling the update due to connectivity issues and some broken features. January rolled around with more security patches and a fix for Android's emergency call issues, but the Pixel 6 didn't get that patch on time, either, with Google saying that the update would be out in "late January."

Well, the time has finally come. This past weekend, Google started releasing the January security patch out to Pixel 6 users. For most users, this will be the first patch since November. The update includes everything in the November and December Android security bulletins, plus these two sets of Pixel 6-specific bug fixes. The list goes on forever. The update is rolling out now, and I was able to pull it down on demand by hitting the "check for updates" button.

Enlarge / Logitech Signature M650 in the rose colorway. (credit: Scharon Harding)

Specs at a glance: Logitech Signature M650
Sensor	Optical (model not disclosed)
Connectivity options	Bluetooth Low Energy or 2.4 GHz dongle
Programmable buttons	3
Onboard profiles	0
Lighting	None
Size	Standard: 4.22×2.43×1.49 inches (107.19×61.80×37.8 mm) Large: 4.65×2.58×1.63 inches (118.19×65.65×41.52 mm)
Weight	Medium: 3.57 ounces (101.2 g) Large: 3.92 ounces (111.2 g)
Warranty	1 year
Price (MSRP)	$40
Other perks	AA battery included

Many mice offer very basic functionality—left-click, right-click, scroll wheel, and not much more. Others boast a range of programmable buttons, premium sensor specs, USB-C charging, and other features for power users. But what if you don't need that extreme level of functionality but don't want something cheap and bare-bones, either?

Released this past week, the Logitech Signature M650 wireless mouse is a middle-ground device that supports Windows, macOS, Linux, Chrome OS, iPadOS, and Android. It doesn't have the most advanced features, but it isn't basic, either. And by skipping some add-ons, like multiple Bluetooth profiles, the mouse is able to maintain an affordable $40 price point.

Logitech's latest cord-free mouse also comes in three different versions: a standard size, a large size, and a large left-handed version, providing something for everyone—unless you have a smaller left hand, that is.

We all found our coping strategies for riding out the pandemic in 2020. Biomedical engineer Gough Liu likes to tinker with tech—particularly vintage tech—and decided he'd try to recreate what it was like to connect to the Internet via dialup back in the late 1990s. He recorded the entire process in agonizing real time, dotted with occasional commentary.

Those of a certain age (ahem) well remember what it used to be like: even just booting up the computer required patience, particularly in the earlier part of the decade, when one could shower and make coffee in the time it took to boot up one's computer from a floppy disk. One needed a dedicated phone line for the Internet connection, because otherwise an incoming call could disrupt the connection, forcing one to repeat the whole dialup process all over again. Browsing the web was equally time-consuming back in the salad days of Netscape and Microsoft Explorer.

So much has changed since then, as the Internet has gone from a curiosity to a necessity, reshaping our culture in the process. As Liu noted on his blog:

Enlarge / This phone is receiving a 2G signal. (credit: Getty Images)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is celebrating Google's addition of a 2G kill switch to Android 12. The digital rights group has been campaigning against the dated, insecure 2G cellular standard since 2020, and Android is the first mobile OS to take the group's advice and let users completely disable 2G.

In the US, carriers shut down 2G years ago, and the 3G shutdown is already underway. Phones have not really gotten the message, though, and modems still try to connect to any nearby 2G signals automatically. The problem is that 2G is very old, and it's a lot like connecting to a WEP-secured Wi-Fi hotspot—the security is obsolete, so it's easy to crack. If you're in a country where legitimate uses of 2G are long dead, the standard only serves as an attack vector via fake cell phone towers, so why not just shut it off?

The EFF explains the issues:

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

One of the hallmarks of Boost Mobile prepaid phones in the early 2000s was their push-to-talk (PTT), or walkie-talkie, feature, which allowed you to play your voice through another Boost Mobile user's phone speaker with the push of a button. Microsoft is now bringing a similar feature to iOS and Android devices via its Teams app. However, Microsoft isn't using rappers and athletes to try to make PTT seem "cool," as Boost Mobile did. Instead, the company is positioning the feature as a way to use technology to aid frontline workers.

In a blog post on Wednesday, Emma Williams, corporate VP of modern work transformation at Microsoft, announced that the walkie-talkie ability in Teams is now available "on all iOS mobile devices, such as iPhones and iPads, in addition to Android mobile devices."

Williams also said the feature will come to some Zebra Technologies devices, such as rugged phones or scanning devices. Such products may even have a button you can press to connect instantly, just like real walkie-talkies and Boost Mobile's old PTT phones.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The very first Android 13 developer previews won't be out until at least March, but that isn't stopping Android 13 leaks from popping up already. Of course, more features will be revealed in the coming months, but Android 13 is already shaping up to be a solid release.

More Material You color options

The headline feature of Android 12 was "Material You," a top-to-bottom redesign and dynamic theming system that automatically changed the UI colors depending on your wallpaper. Set a primarily yellow background and Material You will apply various yellow hues to your app backgrounds, notifications, buttons, icons, and more. I think it looks great, but it might not be for everyone.

Android 13 looks to be expanding on the color system and giving users more options. Android Police's Ryne Hager has screenshots from a prerelease build that show four different theming algorithms to pick from. There is "Tonal Spot," which just seems to be the current Android 12 color system, and then three new color systems called "Vibrant," "Expressive" and "Spritz."

Ever have a microwave with buttons that don't work properly? If you hit the keys at the right angle, maybe the microwave will respond. Or perhaps, no matter how you push them, the microwave stays silent. What if you could fix the issue without calling a repair company—and simultaneously make pressing the microwave's keypad more enjoyable?

Kailh, which makes mechanical keyboard switches, shared a tweet on Tuesday highlighting a use for its switches that the company had never seen before. A Reddit user employed some Kailh Box Blacks to make his microwave usable again.

The Reddit user, who goes by gregschlom, wrote that his 9-year-old microwave started malfunctioning, and instead of settling for cold leftovers and unpopped popcorn kernels until repairs could be done, he hardwired the device to Box Black switches. Based on the shared image, the new switches can be used to add 30 seconds, add a minute, cancel the operation, and access the settings menu.

Enlarge / The humble volume indicator, reimagined for Windows 11. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Improving Windows 11's visual and functional consistency is shaping up to be a major priority for Microsoft this year, as evinced by the continued updates to core apps like Notepad, Paint, and Media Player, as well as the ongoing effort to move advanced settings out of the old Windows 7-era Control Panels and into the modern Settings app. Restoring some flexibility to redesigned areas of the OS like the Start menu and Taskbar has also been a focus.

The latest Windows 11 Insider build released to Dev channel users continues this work, updating the overlays for volume, brightness, and other settings to match Windows 11's more rounded look. The new indicators pop up in the bottom center of your screen rather than the top left, will match your light or dark mode setting, and, like the Start menu and taskbar, they use Mica styling to match the color of your desktop wallpaper.

The other changes in this preview build are pretty small; "Apps and Features" in the Windows + X shortcut menu has been relabeled as "Installed apps," the Voice Access accessibility feature can be pinned to the Taskbar and Start menu, and the Clock app can be uninstalled. Exciting times!

Enlarge / The 2021 MacBook Pro needs an emulator to run Dropbox's app. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Dropbox is working on its promise to support M1-based Macs natively, as a recently released beta version of Dropbox for macOS supports Apple Silicon in the current MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, 24-inch iMac, and Mac Mini.

Apple debuted its M1 silicon in 2020. Since then, Dropbox has yet to offer a version of its file-hosting service that runs natively on computers using Apple's chips, frustrating some professional users who rely on and pay for the program for work.

Without the beta, M1 users are required to use Rosetta 2, a software that translates apps with x86_64 instructions for Apple's Arm-based silicon, in order to use the Dropbox app. Running Rosetta 2, however, can generally have an effect on battery life, memory, and performance. For most, Rosetta 2 is a sufficient solution for running Intel-based applications. And it's possible that some lesser-known apps will never get transitioned to M1 systems at all.

Enlarge / TSMC Fab 16. (credit: TSMC)

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company plans to raise its capital expenditure by almost a third this year as the world’s largest contract chipmaker defies analyst warnings of softening demand for technology gadgets.

TSMC expects capital expenditure to reach $44 billion this year, a 32 percent increase from the $30 billion spent in 2021 and triple the amount in 2019, the company said on Thursday.

The push underscores the outsized role semiconductors are coming to play in goods far beyond classical electronics products, from cars to factory equipment. It also reflects TSMC’s dominance of global chip manufacturing.

Enlarge / The Sony Xperia 5 III, in green. (credit: Sony)

Sony is bringing a $1,000 flagship smartphone, the Xperia 5 III, to the US market. Calling the device "new," however, is a bit of a stretch, as the phone was announced nine months ago.

As you'd expect from the price, the Xperia 5 III is a high-end flagship. It has a Snapdragon 888 SoC, 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, a 4500 mAh battery, and a 6.1-inch, 120 Hz, 2520×1080 OLED display. There are three rear cameras, a 12 MP main camera, a 12 MP ultrawide, and a 12 MP 3x telephoto. At just 68 mm wide, the Xperia 5 III is one of the more compact Android phones on the market. It has a very tall, 21:9 display, but in terms of width, it's only 4 mm bigger than an iPhone 13 Mini. Although it ships with Android 11, an Android 12 update is due sometime soon.

Enlarge / The PCIe 6.0 standard's ability to interoperate with all older versions of the standard is a point of pride for the PCI-SIG. (credit: PCI-SIG)

The PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) has finalized version 6.0 of the PCI Express standard, the communication bus that lets all the stuff inside your computer communicate. The new version of the spec comes roughly three years after the PCI Express 5.0 spec was finalized, and version 6.0 once again doubles the bandwidth of a PCIe lane from 32GT/s (8GB/s in total, or 4GB/s in each direction) to 64GT/s (16GB/s, or 8GB/s in each direction). For a full 16-lane PCIe 6.0 connection, that's as much as 256GB/s of total bandwidth, compared to the 32GB/s or 64GB/s of now-common PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 connections.

Like past PCIe versions, PCIe 6.0 will "interoperate and maintain backwards compatibility" with all existing PCIe versions, so your PCIe 4.0 GPU or SSD will continue to work in a PCIe 6.0 slot and vice-versa. The PCI-SIG bragged about the specification's longevity in a blog post by PCI-SIG board member Debendra Das Sharma: "An interconnect technology is considered successful if it can sustain three generations of bandwidth improvement spanning a decade. PCIe architecture has far exceeded that mark."

To boost its speeds, PCIe 6.0 uses a new kind of signaling called "Pulse Amplitude Modulation 4" (PAM4), which allows for faster data transfers than the previous Non-Return-To-Zero (NRZ) signaling at the expense of a higher error rate. To compensate, PCIe 6.0 includes technologies like Forward Error Correction (FEC) to correct errors and Cyclic Redundancy Checking (CRC) to ask for packets to be retransmitted when errors can't be corrected. The PCI-SIG says that this combination of technologies should catch all errors without adding latency to the connection.

Enlarge / Image from the City of Austin's warning to ignore QR code stickers on parking meters. (credit: City of Austin)

Scammers in a few big Texas cities have been putting fake QR codes on parking meters to trick people into paying the fraudsters. Parking enforcement officers recently found stickers with fraudulent QR codes on pay stations in Austin, Houston, and San Antonio.

San Antonio police warned the public of the scam on December 20, saying that "people attempting to pay for parking using those QR codes may have been directed to a fraudulent website and submitted payment to a fraudulent vendor." Similar scams were then found in Austin and Houston.

The Austin Transportation Department started examining their own meters after being "notified of a QR code scam by the City of San Antonio in late December—when more than 100 pay stations were stickered with fraudulent codes," Fox 7 Austin reported last week. Austin officials checked the city's 900 or so parking pay stations and found fraudulent QR codes on 29 of them, according to a KXAN article.

Enlarge (credit: Samsung / Ron Amadeo)

So here's a crazy story. Samsung was supposed to have a big SoC launch today, but that launch did not happen. Samsung didn't cancel or delay the event. The January 11 date was announced, and we even wrote about it, but when the time for the event came, nothing happened! Samsung pulled a no-call no-show for a major product launch. It's the end of the day now, and the company has yet to respond to what must be hundreds of press inquiries that are no-doubt flooding its email inbox, including ours! Samsung stood up the entire tech industry, and now it won't say why. Nobody knows what is going on.

The Exynos 2200 was (?) shaping up to be a major launch for Samsung. It is, after all, the first Samsung SoC with the headline-grabbing feature of having an AMD GPU. The two companies announced this deal a year ago, and we've been giddy about it ever since. The Exynos 2200 is (or was) going to debut in the Galaxy S22. That launch event is currently scheduled for February 8, assuming Samsung doesn't ghost everyone again.

Samsung announced the Exynos 2200 event just 12 days ago, saying, "Stay tuned for the next Exynos with the new GPU born from RDNA 2. January 11, 2022." (RDNA 2 is an AMD GPU architecture). In addition to a tweet from the official, verified, @SamsungExynos account, the company also cut a promo video ending with the January 11 2022 date. You can still watch it at archive.org. The closest thing Samsung has done to communicate about the status of the Exynos 2200 is to delete its tweets promoting the show.

Enlarge / The full Polestar 3 design isn't revealed yet, but Volvo released this camouflaged photo. (credit: Volvo)

Volvo, Qualcomm, Google are teaming up to make car infotainment even more smartphone-like than ever. If Wintel (Windows plus Intel) is the default software+hardware combo of the PC era, then the smartphone equivalent has got to be Android and Qualcomm (Andcom? Qualdroid?). Volvo is bringing this combo to the upcoming Polestar 3 electric SUV, which is due sometime in 2022. We also got a sneak peek at what the new interface would look like.

Volvo's Polestar 2 was the first to ship Google's Android Automotive OS in a car. Unlike Android Auto or Apple's CarPlay, which run on your smartphone, Android Automotive OS has a custom version of Android preinstalled on the car, as the main car infotainment OS. Even if you have an iPhone, your car still runs Android. The Polestar 2 used an x86 chip (an Intel Atom A3900), but now Volvo is pairing a Qualcomm smartphone chip with its Google smartphone OS. The Polestar 3 will ship with Qualcomm's "Snapdragon Cockpit Platform Gen 3," and while that sounds unique, it is really just a repackaged smartphone chip with a few extra features.

The integration of cars with computer technology is always tough. Car development takes around five years, which can seem almost incompatible with the development pace of smartphones and computers. That's still true of the 2022 Polestar 3. Qualcomm's Gen 3 automotive platform was actually announced back in 2019, but design wins for the platform are just now being announced at CES 2022. Qualcomm says the Gen 3 automotive platform is based on the Snapdragon 820 SoC, an ARM flagship smartphone chip from 2016. You may remember this chip from phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S7 and the Google Pixel 1. The Polestar 2's Intel Atom was also from 2016.

Enlarge / Hackintoshes are PCs that run macOS, which means you can do whatever you want with the design. (credit: Dan Counsell)

Apple hasn't stopped selling Intel Macs just yet, but it's safe to say that we'll never see a Mac with one of Intel's 12th-generation Core processors in it. But that minor detail isn't stopping the Hackintosh community from supporting new Intel and AMD processors and platforms. The developers behind OpenCore, the most powerful and actively maintained bootloader for loading macOS on standard PC hardware, improved its Alder Lake support in this month's release, version 0.7.7. In a blog post over the weekend, the developers also detailed their efforts to update OpenCore and its associated software to work with Intel's Z690 chipset.

The key to building a functional Hackintosh is normally to build a PC that's as close as possible to actual Intel Mac hardware—most crucially, the CPU, GPU, and chipset. OpenCore's job is to bridge whatever gap is left between your PC and real Mac hardware so that macOS boots and works properly. It adds support for reading and booting macOS filesystems, loads kernel extensions to support additional hardware, tells macOS how to handle your system's audio outputs and USB ports, and spoofs hardware to take advantage of macOS's built-in support (if, for example, your PC has a GPU that is similar to but not quite identical to a GPU included in a real Intel Mac).

As OpenCore has developed and matured, it has gotten better at bridging larger and larger gaps between PC hardware and "real" Macs. It can get old versions of macOS like Tiger (10.4) and Snow Leopard (10.6) up and running on old hardware, and it can even be used to run newer macOS versions on real Macs that Apple has dropped from the official support list. It can even run macOS on AMD processors, albeit with some caveats for software that relies on Intel-specific functionality. The still-active Hackintosh Reddit community is full of people running macOS on all kinds of different hardware.

Enlarge / Apple Watch Series 7. (credit: Apple)

Uber has gone the way of Lyft, canceling support for its app on Apple Watches. As spotted by MacRumors Monday, the Uber Apple Watch app is still available but won't let you hail a ride if installed.

We checked on an Apple Watch Series 7 and got a message reading, "Please switch to the Uber mobile app. We no longer support the Apple Watch app. Sorry for the inconvenience," followed by a crying-face emoji.

Like Uber's app for iPhones and iPads, the Apple Watch app let you call a ride from your device, but some features, like Uber Pool, fare splitting, and the ability to contact your driver or share your estimated time of arrival with contacts, were disabled.