Enlarge / The iPhone 15 Pro. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Some owners of the new iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max have reported over the last week and a half that they've noticed their phones running a bit warmer than older iPhones. We observed that the phones could run hot while working on our review, "sometimes to the point that they were uncomfortable to hold without a case," and other reviewers and users have noticed the issue as well.

The problem is real and serious enough to have merited an official response from Apple over the weekend, shared with MacRumors and other outlets. Apple says the main culprit at first is "increased background activity" that occurs as users set up their new phones for the first time (which I've also noticed in other iPhones and iPads and is pretty typical).

But Apple also says it has identified "a bug in iOS 17 that is impacting some users" and that specific apps like Uber, Instagram, and the game Asphalt 9: Legends are all "overload[ing] the system" and causing heat problems. The company is working with those apps' developers on fixes that will be distributed via the App Store.

Enlarge (credit: Google)

Google is introducing the Chromebook Plus badge. ChromeOS devices with the moniker have minimum hardware requirements and will be granted exclusive software and AI features, with Google promising a higher level of performance. On October 8, eight new laptops with the Chromebook Plus branding will be released in North America, starting at $399.

In a blog post today, John Maletis, VP of ChromeOS product, engineering, and UX at Google, said Chromebook Plus laptops have "double the performance" when compared to the top-selling Chromebooks from July to December 2022. Most of that somewhat vague claim comes from the Chromebook Plus' minimum hardware requirements:

• Intel Core i3 12th Gen or AMD Ryzen 3 7000-series processor
• 8GB of RAM
• 128GB of storage
• 1080p IPS display
• 1080p resolution webcam with temporal noise reduction

Some Chromebooks released before today meet those minimum requirements already. A Google spokesperson said that owners of such laptops "will get upgraded to the Chromebook Plus software experience in the coming weeks."

Enlarge / The Galaxy S24 render. This sure does look familiar. (credit: OnLeaks×SmartPrix)

It's Galaxy S24 leak season! The phone, which won't be out until early 2024, is already being detailed by OnLeaks and SmartPrix. The two have dueling posts for the S24 Ultra and another for the cheaper S24 and S24 Plus. As usual, these are CAD-derived renders that are usually passed around to accessory makers, so while all the important bits are in the right spot down to the millimeter, don't read too much into the unconfirmed finer details.

First up are the cheaper Plus and base models, which share a design. The first thing you'll notice this year is a switch from rounded color-matched sides to a flat metal band that wraps around the perimeter. The new flat band makes the S24 awfully close to an iPhone design, with only the camera block and lack of a dynamic island as the differentiators. Would you believe Samsung has also discovered an affection for titanium and upgraded the phones with slimmer bezels? I swear I've heard all this before somewhere recently.

The titanium band has a big oval cutout on the right side of the phone, and that's reportedly for a UWB (ultra-wideband) antenna. Previously, this was reserved for the Ultra and Plus models, but now even the base model is getting it. Samsung, and seemingly everyone else in the Android ecosystem, is working on coming up with Bluetooth tracker competitors to the AirTag, and UWB's directional location features will be a core part of that. UWB is not on many Android phones, though, so this is progress.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A few years before Microsoft went all-in on a ChatGPT-powered Bing search engine, the company had another idea for its perennial, also-ran search engine: sell it to Apple.

A report in Bloomberg, sourced from people familiar with the early theoretical sales talks, states that Microsoft pitched Bing as a way for Apple to replace Google as the default search provider on iPhones, MacBooks, and other devices.

The deal didn't make it past the conversation stage, according to Bloomberg. Microsoft executives approached Eddie Cue, Apple's senior vice president of services, who brokered Apple's deal with Google—purportedly worth between $4 and $7 billion in 2020—for Google's long-standing default placement. Google's paid presence on Apple devices has been reviewed in court recently as part of the Department of Justice's antitrust trial over Google's search business.

Enlarge / From left to right: iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max. (credit: Samuel Axon)

It’s been six years since the iPhone X hit store shelves, but at a glance, 2023’s iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro aren't all that different. Thanks to a few steps of iteration, though, these smartphones still feel like a big step up—maybe not compared to last year’s iPhone, but certainly compared to 2017's, or even 2020’s.

Though I don’t have any insight into what’s coming next year, the iPhone 15 seems like the final form of a product that has gone through a multi-year cycle. It sees Apple cementing a likely long-term strategy of treating the cheaper model as a rerun of the previous year’s pro model, it addresses one of the longest-standing complaints about iPhones (even if Apple’s hand was forced by regulation), and it refines a tried-and-true design.

The iPhone 15, its pricier siblings, and its strong competitors on the Android side make the case that for better or worse (mostly better), we’ve reached peak smartphone.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

RIP to one of my favorite loopholes: Microsoft quietly announced earlier this month (via Neowin) that users will no longer be able to install and activate Windows 10 or Windows 11 with old Windows 7 and Windows 8 product keys.

At least for now, though, it seems like this change will only apply to future Windows versions. We were able to activate a fresh Windows 11 Pro 22H2 install with a Windows 8 Pro product key as of this morning, as was Neowin. But Neowin was unable to activate a newer Insider Preview build of Windows, suggesting that the change will mostly affect newer Windows versions. We've asked Microsoft for clarification and will update this story if we receive any.

When Windows 10 originally launched in 2015, it did so as a free upgrade to all users of Windows 7 and Windows 8—the vast majority of the Windows user base at the time. Microsoft wanted to encourage developers to use its new technologies by giving them the largest possible install base of people on the newest version of Windows. Not only would people running Windows 7 and Windows 8 be offered the option to upgrade-in-place to Windows 10, but product keys from those versions of Windows would activate the analogous editions of Windows 10.

• 

  The Google Jamboard was a big, red touchscreen.

Even more Google products are getting the ax this week. Next up is Google Jamboard, a $5,000 digital whiteboard (and its $600-a-year fee) and software ecosystem marketed to schools and corporations. Google has a new post detailing the "Next phase of digital whiteboarding for Google Workspace," and the future for Jamboard is that there is no future. In "late 2024," the whole project will shut down, and we don't just mean the hardware will stop being for sale; the cloud-based apps will stop working, too.

Most people probably haven't ever heard of Jamboard, but this was a giant 55-inch, 4K touchscreen on a rolling stand that launched in 2016. Like most Google touchscreens, this ran Android with a locked-down, custom interface on top instead of the usual phone interface. The digital whiteboard could be drawn on using the included stylus or your fingers, and it even came with a big plastic "eraser" that would remove items. The SoC was an Nvidia Jetson TX1 (a quad-core Cortex-A57 CPU attached to a beefy Maxwell GPU), and it had a built-in camera, microphone, and speakers for video calls. There was HDMI input and Google cast support, and it came in whimsical colors like red, gray, and blue (it feels like Google was going for an iMac rainbow and quit halfway).

Google's secret sauce here was that Jamboard was heavily integrated with Google Workspace, so it could pull in items from Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, and all your whiteboard work was saved in a filetype called "Jams" in the usual Google storage. Like the other Workspace apps, this all worked live over the Internet. People not in front of the touchscreen could launch the "Jamboard app" instead, letting them get in on the whiteboard action remotely, complete with live handwriting.

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

Like Netflix, Disney+ is getting more stringent about sharing account login information. Disney+'s subscriber agreement already says users can't share account information, but the streaming service on Tuesday informed its Canadian users that it is “implementing restrictions on account sharing.”

As spotted by MobileSyrup Wednesday, Disney+ emailed Canadian subscribers informing them of updates to the subscriber agreement as of November 1, including the addition of an "account sharing" section. Although the rules seem to be launching with Canada first, it's likely they'll eventually roll out to other geographies, like the US. Netflix initially tested its password-sharing crackdown in other countries before bringing it to the US.

MobileSyrup reported the update to Disney+'s Canadian agreement as saying;

Enlarge / Meta's AI characters feature Snoop Dogg playing a dungeon master that dispenses gaming advice. (credit: Meta)

On Wednesday, Meta announced its consumer-friendly entry into the crowded AI chatbot landscape, The Verge reports. During a presentation at Meta Connect 2023, the company said it is launching its own "Meta AI" chat assistant and a selection of AI characters across its messaging platforms, including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.

Meta's new AI assistant will likely feel familiar to anyone who has used chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude. It is designed as a general-purpose chatbot that Meta says can help with planning trips, answering questions, and generating images from text prompts. The assistant will also integrate real-time results from Microsoft's Bing search engine, giving it access to current information—similar to Bing Chat, ChatGPT's browsing plugin, and Google Bard.

During demos, The Verge says that Meta's AI was able to quickly generate high-resolution images from short text descriptions using an "/imagine" prompt, and the feature will be free to use. While Meta did not disclose full details of the new AI assistant's training, the company said it's a custom model that is partially based on the company's LLaMA 2 language model, released in July.

Enlarge / A new report claims that last year's iPhone 14 could be the foundation of a new iPhone SE in 2025. (credit: Apple)

I've got a soft spot for Apple's budget phone, the iPhone SE. It has never been technologically impressive, but it has always been a way to get most of what's good about the iPhone ecosystem—an active App Store, Apple services like iMessage, and prompt software updates delivered for a respectable number of years—for several hundred dollars less than whatever the current flagship is.

The downside has been that you need to put up with an older design. In the case of the current iPhone SE and the one before that, that has meant a phone with the same 4.7-inch screen and basic dimensions as the iPhone 6, a design that will be a decade old next year. The SE has waterproofing, wireless charging, a better camera, a faster chip, and some other features that the iPhone 6 never had, but the body-to-screen ratio is much worse than pretty much any other modern smartphone.

For the last year, people who are normally mostly right about Apple rumors have been saying that the next iPhone SE is the one that will graduate to an iPhone X-style design, with a much larger screen and a display notch for the FaceID sensor and webcam. MacRumors published a report yesterday that purports to fill in a few more of the gaps.

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Reddit rolled out some changes this week as its continues its push for revenue and profitability jumpstarted by its API rule changes in July. Among the most controversial, the company will no longer allow users to opt out of ad personalization based on their Reddit activity and started a program that lets users exchange virtual rewards for their posts for real money.

On Wednesday, Reddit announced plans to "improve ad performance," including by preventing users from opting out of personalized ads except for in "select countries." Reddit didn't specify which countries are excluded, but the exceptions could include countries falling under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. Reddit spokesperson Sierra Gamelgaard declined to provide further clarification when reached by Ars Technica for comment.

Reddit's announcement, authored by Reddit's head of privacy, going by "snoo-tuh" on the platform (Reddit has refused to confirm the identity of admins representing Reddit on the site), said that its advertisers look at "what communities you join, leave, upvotes, downvotes, and other signals" to gauge your interests.

Enlarge / The Raspberry Pi 5's custom I/O chip, the RP1, is the result of $15M in investment over seven years. It unlocks far more data and storage capabilities in the single-board platform. (credit: Raspberry Pi)

Nearly everything on the Raspberry Pi 5 has improved over the 4 model, particularly the way you can buy it. In a first for the single-board company, the 5 is available for preorder today from approved resellers before it's generally available by the end of October.

Perhaps most importantly, the 5 is being prioritized for individual buyers rather than commercial partners.

"We’re incredibly grateful to the community of makers and hackers who make Raspberry Pi what it is; you’ve been extraordinarily patient throughout the supply chain issues that have made our work so challenging over the last couple of years," writes Raspberry Pi founder and CEO Eben Upton. "We’d like to thank you: we’re going to ringfence all of the Raspberry Pi 5s we sell until at least the end of the year for single-unit sales to individuals, so you get the first bite of the cherry."

Enlarge / Ex-Apple designer Jony Ive (left) and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (right). (credit: Getty Images)

Ex-Apple design star Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have been discussing the design of an unspecified new AI device, reports The Information, citing two people familiar with the talks. It's unclear what exactly the device may be, but the report has many people on social media and the press guessing about a re-imagining of a smartphone that relies heavily on generative AI. Others think the device may be something else entirely.

The news, originally broken by The Information and later covered by The Verge and Reuters, is admittedly thin on details. As The Verge points out, it's unclear if the proposed device would be an OpenAI product, a device produced by a different company, or even whether the device will actually happen at all. (OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) But the lack of specifics and the fervor of hype over AI in the tech industry have already created a vacuum that people are filling with speculative ideas.

"Given Ive’s involvement, it’s most likely to be some sort of consumer device, like a reimagined phone," write Jessica Lessin and Stephanie Palazzolo for The Information. "One possibility is OpenAI is building its own operating system... Imagine an AI-native operating system that could generate apps in real-time based on what it believes its user needs, or one that listens to nearby conversations and automatically pulls up relevant information for its user."

Enlarge / It's what you signed up for. (credit: Intercept Games / Private Division)

When it comes to early access games, the only thing harder than code and quality assurance may be setting expectations.

Kerbal Space Program 2 was initially announced for 2020, then, after a whole bunch of development shifts, arrived in early access in February 2023—a bit too early, as suggested by player feedback. There were complaints about missing features and missing tutorials, but now there's an issue with having too much of something: Windows registry entries.

As detailed in a bug report, Kerbal Space Program 2 (KSP2) drops lots and lots of "PqsObjectState" entries into the Windows registry. The initial bug report offers a 322MB text file of them, to the point that the game started throwing "PlayerPrefsException" errors and refusing to load. The issue seems to be with how the game is using the Unity engine's PlayerPrefs game preference storing system.

Enlarge / The Quest 3 release date is unveiled at the Meta Connect conference.

Following a small tease in July, Meta has announced an October 10 release date for its Quest 3 headset. The follow-up to 2020's hot-selling Quest 2 and 2022's overpriced Quest Pro will start at $499 for a 128GB model or $649 for a 512GB model.

The lower-end model comes bundled with a copy of Asgard's Wrath 2 (available in winter 2023), while the higher-end model also includes a six-month subscription to the Meta Quest+ software subscription service.

The new headset upgrades the Snapdragon XR2 line powering previous Quest headsets to a "Gen 2" chipset, according to specs posted online. That means double the processing power and 30 percent more total resolution than Quest 2 (2064×2208 pixels per eye; 25 pixels per degree). The Quest 3 also sports 8GB of RAM, up from the 6GB of the Quest 2 but down from the 12GB on the Quest Pro.

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Intel’s Meteor Lake processor architecture promises to be its most interesting in recent history, but we’ve known for a while now that Intel isn’t planning to launch a version for socketed desktop motherboards like the ones you’d find in a self-built PC or an off-the-shelf mini tower. For those systems, Intel plans to release a second consecutive refresh of the old Alder Lake architecture, the one that first came to desktops in 12th-generation Core CPUs in 2021.

In an interview with PCWorld (via Tom's Hardware), Intel Client Computing Group General Manager Michelle Johnston Holthaus said that Meteor Lake chips would be coming to desktops after all. But the company backpedaled a bit a couple of days later, clarifying that these Meteor Lake desktop chips would be of the soldered-to-the-motherboard variety, not intended as high-performance replacements for current desktop Core i7 and Core i9 chips.

This kind of bifurcation isn't totally unheard of, especially when Intel is in the process of shifting to a new manufacturing technology, as it is with Meteor Lake. Chips for high-performance desktops tend to be physically larger and also need to be able to scale up to higher clock speeds, two things that are harder to do when a manufacturing process is new. And Meteor Lake is nothing if not complex to manufacture, using new Intel Foveros packaging technology to combine four different silicon dies produced on three different manufacturing processes by two different companies.

Enlarge / The Pixel 7 Pro camera layout. Between the first two lenses, you can make out sensors for laser autofocus and a color sensor.

Canalys has some gruesome new numbers out for the North American smartphone market in Q2 2023, detailing what it's calling the "worst quarterly performance for over a decade." Q2 has plummeted 22 percent, year over year, and with these numbers, Canalys is predicting the smartphone market will be down 12 percent overall in 2023.

Apple is down 20 percent for Q2 and still in a dominant position with 54 percent market share. Samsung is down 27 percent, in second place overall with 24 percent market share in Q2 2023. Motorola is next with a 25 percent decline and only 8 percent market share. TCL, a TV company that feels like it only briefly dabbled in smartphones, is the single biggest loser, down 30 percent, with 5 percent market share.

(credit: Canalys)

Only a single company survived this quarter unscathed, and it's actually Google! The company might be at the bottom of the smartphone charts, but Pixel phone sales are up 59 percent, earning Google 4 percent of the market. It was the same story last year, when Google jumped from 1 to 2 percent. In a few quarters, the company might hit fourth place.

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On Monday, Spotify rolled out a limited pilot program that uses AI to automatically translate podcasts into various languages, using voice synthesis technology from OpenAI to preserve the original speaker's voice. The feature aims to offer a more authentic listening experience compared to traditional dubbing. It could also introduce language errors that are difficult for non-native speakers to detect, since machine translation is far from a perfect technology.

In its press release announcing the program, Spotify says it is a platform that allows creators to share their work around the world. Then it asks a question: "With recent advancements, we’ve been wondering: Are there more ways we can bridge the language gap so that these voices can be heard worldwide?"

Spotify's answer is Voice Translation, which can reportedly translate English voices into Spanish, French, and German while retaining the distinctive vocal characteristics of the speaker. The feature is currently being used with only select podcasters, such as Dax Shepard, Monica Padman, Lex Fridman, Bill Simmons, and Steven Bartlett.

Enlarge / Google is looking pretty dilapidated these days. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Google is killing off so many products lately we need to do a roundup or we won't get anything else done today. First on the docket is the inevitable death of Google Podcasts. We've been side-eying Google Podcasts ever since Google's new podcast platform, YouTube Podcasts, launched in April. YouTube has been slowly consuming all of Google's media properties, and podcasts completes the trinity along with videos (both amateur and scripted Hollywood content) and music.

Google does not need two podcast apps, so Google Podcasts must die. This was announced on the official YouTube blog, if there was any question about the responsible party. Google Podcasts is getting shut down "later in 2024," but before that, we'll see an expansion of YouTube podcasts, which is currently only available in the US. YouTube says its podcast platform (which is built into the YouTube Music app) will be out "globally" before the end of the year.

The Google Podcasts app. (credit: Google)

Google Podcasts was Google's third podcasting service, after the Google Reader-powered Google Listen (2009–2012) and Google Play Music Podcasts (2016–2020). Google Podcasts technically started in 2016 as a bizarre podcast player that was only accessible via a mobile Google Search. Searching for a podcast in the Google app would show a play button next to episode search results, but there was no way to subscribe to a podcast. Android Google Podcasts finally got podcast-defining subscription support a whopping two years later, but you couldn't really call the service viable until an iOS app finally launched in 2020.

Enlarge / Dave Limp discussing Amazon's coversational AI abilities at Amazon's devices event last week. (credit: Eric Lee for the Washington Post/Getty)

Amazon thinks that in the near future, its Alexa voice assistant will offer enough value that customers will be willing to pay a subscription fee to use it.

After Amazon's devices event last week, when the company showcased generative AI features it's developing for Alexa, Bloomberg asked Dave Limp, SVP of devices and services at Amazon, if there will be a time when Alexa's AI features will require a subscription.

"Yes, we absolutely think that," the executive responded.