Technology

Apple’s new TV calibration feature, which uses the iPhone’s front-facing sensors to sense and tweak the output of the Apple TV, works with the company’s older streaming boxes, 9to5Mac reports. The new feature will arrive with tvOS 14.5, which is due to release “early next week” for the 2017 Apple TV 4K and 2015 Apple TV HD. Apple says viewers will see “much more accurate colors and improved contrast” after calibration. The calibration feature was announced alongside the new Apple TV 4K. It works by having you hold up the front of your iPhone to your TV, so it can sense how the screen is outputting different colors. If the phone’s light sensor sees that color is being outputted inaccurately, the Apple TV can adjust its output to compensate. The process only covers the Apple TV’s content, an...

Apple is getting ready to announce a raft of software updates for the iPhone and iPad in June according to a new report from Bloomberg, including “the most significant update to the [iPad’s] Home Screen since first launching the product in 2010.” The new versions of iOS and iPadOS — iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 — will be unveiled at Apple’s upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 7th, says Bloomberg. Last year’s iOS 14 update was announced at WWDC on June 22nd, before becoming available for download on September 16th in time to accompany the iPhone 12 release. Bloomberg’s story has a host of details about what to expect from the latest versions of Apple’s mobile software, but here are the biggest points: New notification filters based on user status. From a new menu accessible from...

Sony has announced a follow-up product to the Reon Pocket, the app-controlled “wearable air conditioner” it released last year after crowdfunding it on the company’s own platform. The Reon Pocket 2 looks more or less the same as the original model, but the newly designed internals can achieve up to twice the level of heat absorption, according to Sony, resulting in more powerful cooling performance. Sony also says that it’s improved the sweat-proofing in the Reon Pocket 2, making it more suitable for light exercise situations. The prior model was mostly marketed as something to wear with a special undershirt to make summer commuting more bearable, but this time around Sony is emphasizing more versatile use cases — particularly golf. The company has partnered with sportswear brands includin...

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has announced a new series of virtual sporting events that will take place ahead of the Tokyo Olympics, called the Olympic Virtual Series. No, this doesn’t mean that League of Legends just became an Olympic sport — what’s happening is that the IOC is partnering with five international sports federations to host virtual competitions in games featuring their sports. The Olympic Virtual Series will kick off on May 13th and will run through June 23rd. Here’s the lineup of federations and what games they’ll be hosting events for, as we know it so far: Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile will host a Gran Turismo competition Union Cycliste Internationale will host a competition for Zwift, which offers virtual cycling and running courses to use with ...

Fujifilm and Nintendo have announced a new collaboration. The camera company is releasing a new Switch-themed version of its Instax Mini Link photo printer, as well as a new app that’s designed to let you edit Switch screenshots and print them out onto Fujifilm’s Polaroid-style Instax film, or add Nintendo characters to your photos. You can transfer screenshots from your Switch to the new “instax mini Link for Nintendo Switch” app with a QR code. The app contains filters and 59 new frames from games like Super Mario, Animal Crossing, and appropriately enough the upcoming New Pokémon Snap. Here’s how some of the frames look: The actual printer hardware itself is identical to the existing Instax Mini Link, but it comes in Switch-inspired red and blue trim and there’s a bundle with a frankly ...

Apple has been targeted in a $50 million ransomware attack following the theft of a trove of engineering and manufacturing schematics of current and future products from Quanta, a Taiwan-based company that manufactures MacBooks and other products for Apple. The leak, first reported by The Record, was carried out by REvil, a Russian hacking group that’s also known by the name Sodinokibi. The group had already begun posting the stolen images on April 20th, timed specifically to coincide with Apple’s latest “Spring Loaded” event, after Quanta refused to pay the $50 million ransom for the data. The group is now hoping to get Apple itself to pay up by May 1st, promising to continue to post new images from the leak daily until it does. Quanta has confirmed that its servers were breached in a sta...

In the battle royale of battle royale games, there doesn’t need to be a single winner. Call of Duty: Warzone now has 100 million players, the same number Apex Legends achieved just a week ago. They can share a victory royale with Fortnite, with its 350 million-plus players (as of May 2020), as well as the original PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, which has sold north of 70 million copies on console and PC, and its free-to-play PUBG Mobile variant reportedly raked in $5 billion last year ($7.4 million per day). If you’re counting, Warzone is growing faster than Apex, though. It took two years for Apex to hit 100 million, but it’s been just over a year since Warzone’s March 2020 release. Apex Legends will kick off a beta for its own mobile game later this month, as well as jumping onto the Nin...

Hyundai is discontinuing its first mass-market electric SUV, the Kona EV, in South Korea following a massive recall due to a fire risk in the battery pack, the Yonhap news agency reports. The automaker will instead turn its focus to the forthcoming Ioniq 5 (and the EVs that will follow it), though Hyundai will still sell the Kona EV in the United States, according to Roadshow. More than a dozen reports of fires in Kona EV battery packs have been documented since 2019, and so this February, Hyundai finally decided to spend nearly $1 billion to recall 76,000 Kona EVs across its home country (though battery supplier LG Chem is contributing a big portion). It also recalled some Ioniq sedans and electric buses that used the same battery technology. Sales of the Kona EV dropped dramatically foll...

For years, tech companies like Facebook and Amazon have faced the brunt of antitrust criticism by Congress, and Apple has gotten far fewer questions. But that changed on Wednesday, when Congress finally sunk its teeth into Apple as part of a hearing titled “Antitrust Applied: Examining Competition in App Stores.” The hearing brought in representatives from companies like Spotify, Tile, and Match Group, a dating app company, to explain how Apple’s App Store fees and walled-garden business strategy harms their companies. All three companies gave harsh testimony, accusing the iPhone-maker of anti-competitive behavior over the burdensome fees it charges some app developers on its App Store. “If Apple turned on us, it can turn on anyone.” The timing couldn’t be worse for Apple, coming just a da...

President Biden’s pick for NASA administrator, former Sen. Bill Nelson, breezed through his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday, as expected. Facing questions from his “old buddies” about NASA’s commercial partnerships, climate change, and workforce diversity, Nelson’s hearing was uneventful and garnered bipartisan praise. He backed the agency’s current plan to send its first crew of astronauts to the Moon on a SpaceX rocket and emphasized NASA’s role in studying climate change. Just over a month after being tapped by Biden for NASA chief, Nelson told lawmakers he supported the president’s 2022 summary budget request for NASA and defended the $2.3 billion it set out for the agency’s Earth sciences wing — a 15 percent increase from the prior year. “It’s a very important increase. You c...

The US plans to officially ratchet up its climate commitments going into Earth Day tomorrow, but many advocates are skeptical that it will be ambitious enough to balance out the nation’s inordinate role in creating the climate crisis. “No possible ethically justifiable story in which the United States does not do more” Biden is expected to commit the US to slashing its greenhouse gas emissions by at least half compared to what they were in 2005. That’s already a significant ramp-up compared to the trajectory the US was on before. (Barack Obama committed the US to a roughly 27 percent cut by 2025.) But there’s still somewhat of a mismatch between what the US is willing to commit to and what some say it owes to the rest of the world. “There exists in my mind no possible ethically justifiable...

Facebook Reality Labs has offered more detail about a virtual reality remake of Resident Evil 4, following Capcom’s original announcement last week. The game will launch later this year exclusively on Facebook’s Oculus Quest 2 headset, although the exact date is still a mystery. As Capcom’s first trailer indicated, it’s a first-person VR adaptation of the 2005 third-person game, with a focus on making weapons and movement feel more natural with Oculus Touch motion controllers. Resident Evil 4 for VR uses the game’s original levels and animations, revamped with remastered textures, and Oculus says cutscenes will be rendered “in their original format.” But developer Armature Studio has added VR-friendly locomotion options like the ability to teleport or walk around a room-scale environment, ...