Enlarge / System76 Lemur Pro. (credit: System76)

System76 has refreshed its thin-and-light take on Linux laptops, the company announced Tuesday, as spotted by Tom's Hardware. The revamped 14-inch Lemur Pro, like its predecessors, prioritizes a longer battery life, with the latest model claiming up to 14 hours of use.

Backlit keyboard. (credit: System76)

System76 didn't detail how it tested the laptop's battery life (we've asked and will update this article if we hear back). But the Lemur Pro has a proven reputation for solid battery life. In our Lemur Pro review in 2020, when the machine was offered with an Intel Core i7-10510U, it lasted at least one hour longer than any other laptop we reviewed around that time when playing BBC's "10 Hours of Relaxing Oceanscapes" at 1080p resolution and max brightness.

The PC has a 180-degree hinge. (credit: System76)

It was clear that System76 had fine-tuned the machine more for longevity between charges than productivity performance.

• 

  Official renders of the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro. [credit: 91mobiles / Evan Blass ]

Samsung's Wear OS 3.0 launch device, the Galaxy Watch 4, is almost a year old now, so it's time for a new version. Evan Blass at 91Mobiles has scored a huge amount of imagery of Samsung's upcoming smartwatch, including official 3D rotation animations that show the two models from every angle.

Samsung is also going with a bit of a model number change. The Galaxy Watch 5 "Pro" will replace the Watch 4 "Classic" as the high-end model, while the Watch 5 replaces the Watch 4.

The big news this year is that Samsung is doing away with the unique rotating bezel that was a staple of the high-end model. The lower-end version's capacitive touch bezel is now the standard across all models, allowing you to run your finger around the watch face perimeter to scroll.

Enlarge / Acer's 2022 Swift 5 laptop. (credit: Scharon Harding)

The Acer Swift 5 ($1,500 MSRP) may not be your dream ultralight laptop, but it's not a bad one. You won't squeeze the most performance out of the Swift, and its touchpad still bothers me after weeks of use. But with perks like a good port selection and a strong keyboard, the laptop is worth a look if you want to save some money. Even though there are some compromises, it's a decent option with a lower price tag than similarly specced alternatives.

Colorful design

The Swift 5 is priced lower than other ultralights with 12th Gen CPUs, a fact that is apparent when you hold it. According to Acer, the chassis is made from 6053 aluminum alloy with a 75 HV hardness and anodization to fight degradation (its gold accents are double-anodized). But instead of a luxurious metallic-like finish, like Lenovo's Yoga 9i carries, it looks and feels like lightweight plastic that can still fall victim to scratches.

Subtle texturing helps the design, though, and prevents the laptop from feeling too slippery during use. The keyboard showed subtle flex when I typed aggressively, and that flexing became more apparent when I pressed down on the keyboard.

• 

  The screen on Apple's new MacBook Air. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

According to a new blog post by the company, Apple will begin taking orders for its newly redesigned 13.6-inch MacBook Air this Friday, July 8, at 5am PDT. The laptop will arrive at buyers' doorsteps and become available for same-day retail purchase one week later on Friday, July 15.

It will be the second Mac to launch with Apple's second-generation M2 system-on-a-chip, which follows 2020's M1 with substantially faster memory bandwidth and graphics and moderately improved CPU performance.

It's the same chip as that found in the 2022 13-inch MacBook Pro, which we recently reviewed. We found that the M2 offered 10 to 15 percent improved CPU performance compared to the M1 and as much as 40 percent faster GPU performance with the 10-core GPU configuration. Unlike the 13-inch MacBook Pro, the MacBook Air defaults to an eight-core GPU configuration with an optional 10-core upgrade.

Enlarge / Glance's ad copy promises "authentic engagement" with its lock screen billboard. (credit: Glance)

Android smartphones can be a rough market, and in an effort to squeeze as much profit out of a phone as possible, carriers often sell every square inch of a phone to the highest bidder. Packed-in, often un-installable crapware apps fill your app drawer and advertise their services. The rules are a lot looser for packed-in apps compared to Play Store apps, so data-hungry companies like Facebook often pay for a spot where they can more easily harvest data.

According to a report from TechCrunch, one new startup is inventing an all-new, more invasive form of crapware: lock screen ads! The company, "Glance," is a subsidiary of Indian ad tech company InMobi, and TechCrunch reports the lock screen "content" company is "planning to launch its lockscreen platform on Android smartphones in the U.S. within two months."

Glance's app is a full-screen takeover of the lock screen. It looks a lot like a generic swipe-heavy social network, like TikTok or Snapchat Discover, but it only shows content from Glance. Imagine if every time you turned on your phone, you were first presented with an auto-playing video from a popular off-brand TikToker, and you get the idea. The company's website promises "unparalleled reach" and "authentic engagement" from its captive audience. Naveen Tewari, founder and CEO of InMobi, gave a rather dystopian description of his company's strategy to Forbes India, saying, “Consumers will move from seeking content to consuming what is shown to them.”

Enlarge (credit: Meta)

Meta will shut down its pilot of the Novi digital wallet, one of the last remnants of the company's beleaguered cryptocurrency push, in September, Bloomberg reported this week.

Novi users in parts of the US and Guatemala will no longer be able to log in starting on September 1.

And as of July 21, they won't be able to add to the wallets. In fact, Novi's website urges users to empty their accounts "as soon as possible." Novi says it will "attempt to transfer your balance to the bank account or debit card you’ve added to Novi" if you still have money in your account after the pilot ends.

Enlarge / YouTube thinks the dark and creepy "Local58TV" series is for kids. (credit: Local58TV)

Google's wonderful content moderation bots are at it again. After previously doing things like including suicide instructions in a children's video, and the whole Elsagate problem, YouTube is now flagging a horror video as "for kids." Worst of all, this is against the creator's wishes. The video was previously flagged as for ages 18 and up, and YouTube decided it was for kids and won't let the creator restore its content rating.

The video in question is from horror series Local58TV. The creator, Kirs Straub, checked his account over the weekend to find that his not-for-kids content has been spotted by YouTube's content moderation AI, and automatically marked for kids.

congrats @youtube on the decision to auto-designate @LOCAL58TV’s “show for children” as FOR KIDS despite my having set it as inappropriate for kids. i also can’t change it voluntarily without an *appeal* pic.twitter.com/dnhmzL9hbi

— Kris Straub (@krisstraub) July 5, 2022

"For kids" in this context means Google has flagged the video for inclusion in the "YouTube Kids" app, which is a separate interface for YouTube that is supposed to only show a "safe" curated slice of YouTube. The "Kids" flag also means the video is forced to comply with US Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), so comments are turned off.

• 

  The new Gmail. It's blue and has a big sidebar, but there are options for both of these big changes. [credit: Google ]

The new desktop Gmail design started rolling out this weekend. If you use the default theme, you'll know it has arrived when your entire Gmail interface turns blue. Gmail's new design first entered an opt-in preview in February, and after gathering feedback and fixing a few things, Google is pushing the design out to everyone. Everyone dislikes Gmail changes, so let's talk about what's different and how to turn it back.

A few things have changed between now and the February preview. The most striking change is the all-blue color scheme. Google's blog post says: "You’ll notice the new navigation now features Material You, our updated, fresh look and feel for your Google apps." "Material You" launched with Android 12 as a color-coordinated theming system that matched your OS color scheme with your wallpaper. There's no color-matching with Gmail's "Material You," though, just the blue color scheme.

Gmail still has a theme system, so you can change the color to whatever you want. Click on the settings gear in the top right and then under the "theme" section, click "view all." The background closest to the old Gmail is the solid "soft gray" background option. To truly match the Old Gmail background, you would want "white," but that's not an option. (You can also pick from your Google Photos collection via a "my photos" link at the bottom, and I tried uploading a solid-white background, but trying to apply it only brings up an error message). This "theme" screen is also where you can apply Gmail's weirdly hidden dark mode: Just pick the black background option, and everything will switch over to light text on a dark background.

Enlarge / The Oculus Quest 2.

A recent media release from market research firm IDC predicts that Meta (the parent company of Facebook) may not be able to compete in the mixed-reality business in the long run if its strategy remains unchanged.

The media release offers a bird's-eye view of the virtual reality hardware marketplace. In the release, IDC research manager Jitesh Ubrani said that, while "Meta continues to pour dollars into developing the metaverse, [the company's] strategy of promoting low-cost hardware at the expense of profitability isn't sustainable in the long run."

A similar concern was raised by tech industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo late last month. Kuo predicted that Meta would make moves to scale down investment in virtual reality, creating an opening for Apple and other competitors. He also wrote that Meta's practice of selling VR headsets at a loss is unsustainable.

Enlarge (credit: RISC-V International)

The world's first laptop to use the RISC-V open source instruction set architecture (ISA) will reportedly start shipping in September.

The Roma laptop is available for preorder on Xcalibyte's website, but the site merely takes interested parties' information without providing much detail or any pricing. According to a report from The Register on Friday, the laptop will start shipping in September, according to spokespeople from Xcalibyte, which did system tuning for the laptop; a company called DeepComputing, which engineered the laptop; and RISC-V International.

According to the announcement from DeepComputing (which shares the same CEO with Xcalibyte, The Register reported), the Roma uses an unspecified quad-core processor with a 28 nm or, for the "pro" version, 12 nm node in a system-on-module (SoM) package. There's also an Arm SecurCore SC300 security enclave processor, an unnamed GPU and neural processing unit, and a feature accelerator.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto | Getty Images)

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

The day after Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner sent a letter to Google warning it to be on alert for “exploitation of your platform by Russia and Russian-linked entities,” and calling on the company to audit its advertising business’s compliance with economic sanctions.

But as recently as June 23, Google was sharing potentially sensitive user data with a sanctioned Russian ad tech company owned by Russia’s largest state bank, according to a new report provided to ProPublica.

Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallup | Getty Images)

Google had a pair of high-ranking executives leave this week. The first was Bill Ready, Google's "President of Commerce, Payments & Next Billion Users," who left to become CEO of Pinterest. The second big departure is Javier Soltero, who was vice president and GM of Google Workspace, Google's paid business app, and was the leader of Google Messaging. Both executives made big changes to Google in their nearly three-year stints at the company. Now that they are leaving, it's unclear what the future of their respective products holds.

Ready was only at Google for two-and-a-half years, where his highest-profile move was presiding over the disastrous rollout of a significant Google Pay revamp. The new Google Pay app was spearheaded by Ready's payments team, led by another recently ousted executive, Caesar Sengupta. The Google Pay revamp brought an app originally developed for India to the US, where the requirement for phone number-based identity came with a huge list of downgrades: The Google Pay website had to be stripped of payment functionality, the app no longer supported multiple accounts, and you couldn't be logged in to multiple devices.

The rollout of the new app was also clumsy. Slowly, over a month or two, users were kicked out of the old Google Pay and had to transition to a new app. The new identity system wasn't backward compatible with the old Google Pay, though, which meant users still on the old app couldn't send money to users on the new app.

Enlarge / Smart contact lenses don't work quite this easily yet. (credit: Getty)

Since 2015, a California-based company called Mojo Vision has been developing smart contact lenses. Like smart glasses, the idea is to put helpful AR graphics in front of your eyes to help accomplish daily tasks. Now, a functioning prototype brings us closer to seeing a final product.

In a blog post this week, Drew Perkins, the CEO of Mojo Vision, said he was the first to have an "on-eye demonstration of a feature-complete augmented reality smart contact lens." In an interview with CNET, he said he's been wearing only one contact at a time for hour-long durations. Eventually, Mojo Vision would like users to be able to wear two Mojo Lens simultaneously and create 3D visual overlays, the publication said.

According to his blog, the CEO could see a compass through the contact and an on-screen teleprompter with a quote written on it. He also recalled viewing a green, monochromatic image of Albert Einstein to CNET.

Enlarge / A customs officer inspects imported lithium carbonate at Longwu Branch Terminal of Shanghai İnternational Port Co., Ltd. (credit: VCG | Getty Images)

The industrial port of Kwinana on Australia’s western coast is a microcosm of the global energy industry. From 1955, it was home to one of the largest oil refineries in the region, owned by British Petroleum when it was still the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. It once provided 70 percent of Western Australia’s fuel supplies, and the metal husks of old tanks still dominate the shoreline, slowly turning to rust in the salt air.

The refinery shut down in March 2021, but it isn’t just oil below the region’s red soil: Australia is also home to almost half of the world’s lithium supply. The trucks and machinery are humming once again, but now they’re part of a race to secure the clean energy sources of the future—a race being dominated by China.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

When macOS Ventura was announced earlier this month, its system requirements were considerably stricter than those for macOS Monterey, which was released just eight months ago as of this writing. Ventura requires a Mac made in 2017 or later, dropping support for a wide range of Monterey-supported Mac models released between 2013 and 2016.

This certainly seems more aggressive than new macOS releases from just a few years ago, where system requirements would tighten roughly every other year or so. But how bad is it, really? Is a Mac purchased in 2016 getting fewer updates than one bought in 2012 or 2008 or 1999? And if so, is there an explanation beyond Apple's desire for more users to move to shiny new Apple Silicon Macs?

Using data from Apple's website and EveryMac.com, we pulled together information on more than two decades of Mac releases—almost everything Apple has released between the original iMac in late 1998 and the last Intel Macs in 2020. We recorded when each model was released, when Apple stopped selling each model, the last officially supported macOS release for each system, and the dates when those versions of macOS received their last point updates (i.e. 10.4.11, 11.6) and their last regular security patches. (I've made some notes on how I chose to streamline and organize the data, which I've put at the end of this article).

Enlarge / The Rufus tool will offer to modify your Windows 11 install media when you create it. The workaround for the Microsoft account requirement is new to the 3.19 beta. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

One of the new "features" coming to the Windows 11 22H2 update is a Microsoft account requirement for all new installs, regardless of whether you are using the Home or Pro version of the operating system. And that's too bad, because the 22H2 update corrects a few of Windows 11's original shortcomings while adding some nice quality-of-life improvements.

An easy workaround for this requirement is the Rufus USB formatting tool, which can create USB install media for Windows and all kinds of other operating systems. Rufus has already offered some flags to remove Windows 11's system requirements checks from the installer, removing the need for clunky Windows Registry edits and other workarounds. But the beta of version 3.19 will also remove the Microsoft account requirement for new installs, making it easy to set up a new Windows PC with a traditional local account.

When setting up Windows 11, make sure not to connect your PC to the Internet before creating your user account. This trick worked to circumvent the Microsoft account requirement in Windows 11 Pro and some of the later versions of Windows 10 but is being removed entirely from Windows 11 22H2. The Rufus tool merely reverts to the pre-22H2 status quo.

Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple made its Community+ Program common knowledge this week. Similar to other tech companies like Dell, HP, and Microsoft, Apple has been rewarding the knowledgeable volunteers who frequently contribute to its online support community.

As spotted via iClarified on Wednesday, Apple launched the Apple Community+ Program webpage, which details a program that annually invites a small number of forum members to enjoy special rewards. An Apple rep told Ars Technica that while the webpage is new, the program "has been around for a few years." It's likely that since only a small number of people get to participate in the program, there hasn't been much chatter about it before the page's launch.

The Community+ members receive "special perks, white-glove experiences, and more," according to the program's page, but Apple didn't specify what that means, and the company declined to provide Ars Technica with more details about the rewards.

Enlarge / The Raspberry Pi Pico W adds Wi-Fi to the $4 Pico board for an additional $2. (credit: Raspberry Pi Foundation)

The Raspberry Pi Zero series is the smallest version of the popular single-board computer that most people have experience with, but there's one Pi that's even smaller: the Raspberry Pi Pico. Launched in January of 2021 for just $4, the Pico's RP2040 microcontroller incorporates a pair of 133MHz Arm Cortex-M0+ CPU cores and 264 kilobytes (not megabytes) of memory. The low specs and low price make it well-suited for single-purpose devices that don't need much processing power instead of running general-purpose software like the larger Pi boards.

To help support companies who want to use the Pico as a basis for Internet-connected smart devices, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is introducing a few new variants of the Pico today. The most notable, the Raspberry Pi Pico W, adds built-in Wi-Fi connectivity to the board while increasing the price from $4 to $6.

Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton writes that the Infineon CYW43439 Wi-Fi chip being used for the Pi Pico uses the old 2.4 GHz-only 802.11n (or Wi-Fi 4) protocol. That chipset also includes built-in Bluetooth support, like most other wireless Pi products, but Bluetooth support is currently disabled. Adding Bluetooth to devices typically requires another layer of Federal Communications Commission certification in the US, and other territories have their own rules, which could explain the omission. Upton says that Bluetooth support could be enabled "in the future."

Enlarge (credit: iFixit)

The iFixit and Google partnership that was announced in April is now live. iFixit says that genuine parts for Google smartphones are now for sale in "the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and European countries where Pixel is available."

It looks like iFixit is offering screens, batteries, and rear camera assemblies for most models of the Pixel phone, along with smaller odds and ends like adhesive and cooling graphite tape. Despite the official partnership with Google, we wouldn't call the iFixit Pixel store a comprehensive source of Pixel parts. For the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro—which are currently in production and should have tons of available parts—you can't buy replacement glass back panels, charging ports, front cameras, or any of the delicate cables you could accidentally rip while you're taking the phone apart. Just compare the official Pixel 6 Pro parts list, which has only six items, to any of the iPhone part lists, which have about 30 parts, and you can see there are a lot of missing items.

iFixit says it's just getting started, though, and that it will "continue to add more types of parts to our catalog" for the Pixel 2 and later. For the Pixel 6a, which comes out at the end of July, iFixit is promising "a full selection" of parts "as soon as possible."

Enlarge / The Arm Cortex X3 brings some modest improvements. (credit: Arms)

Fresh off a dramatic journey of not being bought by Nvidia, Arm announced its latest flagship CPUs. Coming soon to your 2023 Android devices, we have the Cortex-X3 and Arm Cortex-A715 CPUs.

As usual, these designs will be part of a system-on-chip CPU cluster. Assuming the normal layout, Arm's proposed design would have a 2023 SoC with one big Cortex-X3 core, three medium-core Cortex-A715 CPUs, and four little Cortex-A510 cores, which are returning from the current generation.

Arm is promising the X3 CPU will 25 percent performance improvement over the X2, while the Cortex A715 is claiming a "20 percent energy efficiency gain and 5 percent performance uplift" compared to the current-gen Cortex A710. Arm claims the A715 is as fast as the Cortex X1 CPU from 2020. The A715 also drops 32-bit support, making it the last part of our theoretical flagship SoC to go 64-bit only. The smaller A510 CPU is returning, but Arm says it is "an updated version" with a 5 percent power reduction.