Enlarge / Preparing to install the floppy disk edition of FreeDOS 1.3 in a virtual machine. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Two big things happened in the world of text-based disk operating systems in June 1994.

The first is that Microsoft released MS-DOS version 6.22, the last version of its long-running operating system that would be sold to consumers as a standalone product. MS-DOS would continue to evolve for a few years after this, but only as an increasingly invisible loading mechanism for Windows.

The second was that a developer named Jim Hall wrote a post announcing something called “PD-DOS.” Unhappy with Windows 3.x and unexcited by the project we would come to know as Windows 95, Hall wanted to break ground on a new “public domain” version of DOS that could keep the traditional command-line interface alive as most of the world left it behind for more user-friendly but resource-intensive graphical user interfaces.

Read 25 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / A Vision Pro on display at an Apple Store in Tokyo. (credit: Apple)

Apple's Vision Pro headset went on sale outside the United States for the first time today, in the first of two waves of expanded availability.

The $3,499 "spatial computing" device launched back in February in the US, but it hasn't taken the tech world by storm. Part of that has been its regional launch, with some of the biggest markets still lacking access.

Apple announced that the product would be sold internationally during its keynote at the Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / A movable robotic face covered with living human skin cells. (credit: Takeuchi et al.)

In a new study, researchers from the University of Tokyo, Harvard University, and the International Research Center for Neurointelligence have unveiled a technique for creating lifelike robotic skin using living human cells. As a proof of concept, the team engineered a small robotic face capable of smiling, covered entirely with a layer of pink living tissue.

The researchers note that using living skin tissue as a robot covering has benefits, as it's flexible enough to convey emotions and can potentially repair itself. "As the role of robots continues to evolve, the materials used to cover social robots need to exhibit lifelike functions, such as self-healing," wrote the researchers in the study.

Shoji Takeuchi, Michio Kawai, Minghao Nie, and Haruka Oda authored the study, titled "Perforation-type anchors inspired by skin ligament for robotic face covered with living skin," which is due for July publication in Cell Reports Physical Science. We learned of the study from a report published earlier this week by New Scientist.

Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / The logo for PaLM 2, a Google large language model. (credit: Google)

Google announced today that it has added support for 110 new languages to Google Translate, nearly doubling the number of languages that can be translated.

The company used the PaLM 2 large language model to facilitate these additions.

In a blog post, Google Senior Software Engineer Isaac Caswell claimed that the newly added languages are spoken by more than 614 million people, or about 8 percent of the global population.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Apple has a lot to say about the third-party battery market in "Longevity, by Design," specifically about how many batteries fail to meet testing standards. (credit: Apple)

Earlier this week, Apple published a whitepaper titled "Longevity by Design." The purpose, Apple says, is to explain "the company's principles for designing for longevity—a careful balance between product durability and repairability." It also contains some notable changes to Apple's parts pairing and repair technology.

Here is a summary of the action items in the document's 24 pages:

• The self-service diagnostics tool that arrived in the US last year is now available in 32 European countries.
• True Tone, the color-balancing screen feature, can soon be activated on third-party screens, "to the best performance that can be provided."
• Battery statistics, like maximum capacity and cycle count, will be available "later in 2024" for third-party batteries, with a notice that "Apple cannot verify the information presented."
• Used Apple parts, transferred from one to another, will be "as easy to use as new Apple parts" in select products "later this year."
• Parts for "most repairs" from Apple's Self Service Repair program will no longer require a device serial number to order.

Changes timed to "later this year" may well indicate their arrival with iOS 18 or a subsequent update.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

• 

  The streaming-only Xbox would have looked like a smaller, squarer relative of the Series S. [credit: Microsoft ]

Microsoft's mid-generation plans for the Xbox Series S and X consoles looked a whole lot different a couple of years ago than it does now. A leaked slide deck from the FTC v. Microsoft case last year outlined detailed plans for a spruced up Series S, an overhauled Series X, and even a redesigned controller. Another part of that roadmap included a streaming-only version of the Xbox, codenamed Keystone, that was designed to connect to Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming servers rather than rendering games locally.

Microsoft has talked openly about this version of the Xbox before. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer told The Verge that the Keystone console was designed and fully functional, but that it wasn't launched because Microsoft had a hard time getting the price down low enough that it made sense next to the $299 Series S (which already occasionally goes on sale in the $200 to $250 range).

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / The app lets you invoke ChatGPT from anywhere in the system with a keyboard shortcut, Spotlight-style. (credit: Samuel Axon)

OpenAI's official ChatGPT app for macOS is now available to all users for the first time, provided they're running macOS Sonoma or later.

It was previously being rolled out gradually to paid subscribers to ChatGPT's Plus premium plan.

The ChatGPT Mac app mostly acts as a desktop window version of the web app, allowing you to carry on back-and-forth prompt-and-response conversations. You can select between the GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and GPT-4o models. It also supports the more specialized GPTs available in the web version, including the DALL-E image generator and custom GPTs.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / The 2024 iPad Pro. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple has added the ability to format external drives in iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, the major software updates for iPhones and iPads due later this year.

While the feature likely won't be tapped by all that many users, its inclusion is fascinating in that it shows just how far Apple has moved away from its original sensibilities with the iPhone and the iPad.

The feature was discovered in the iPadOS 18 beta by artist and developer Kaleb Cadle, who posted about it to his Substack ByteBits a couple of days ago. It was later found in iOS 18 as well.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / A PC running Windows 11. (credit: Microsoft)

One of Windows 11's more contentious changes is that, by default, both the Home and Pro editions of the operating system require users to sign in with a Microsoft account during setup. Signing in with an account does get you some benefits, at least if you're a regular user of other Microsoft products like OneDrive, GamePass, or Microsoft 365 (aka Office). But if you don't use those services, a lot of what a Microsoft account gets you in Windows 11 is repeated ads and reminders about signing up for those services. Using Windows with a traditional local account is still extremely possible, but it does require a small amount of know-how beyond just clicking the right buttons.

On the know-how front, Microsoft has taken one more minor, but nevertheless irritating, step away from allowing users to sign in with local accounts. This official Microsoft support page walks users with local accounts through the process of signing in to a Microsoft account. As recently as June 12, that page also included instructions for converting a Microsoft account into a local account. But according to Tom's Hardware and the Internet Wayback Machine, those instructions disappeared on or around June 17 and haven't been seen since.

Despite the documentation change, most of the workarounds for creating a local account still work in both Windows 11 23H2 (the publicly available version of Windows 11 for most PCs) and 24H2 (available now on Copilot+ PCs, later this fall for everyone else). The easiest way to do it on a PC you just took out of the box is to press Shift+F10 during the setup process to bring up a command prompt window, typing OOBE\BYPASSNRO, rebooting, and then clicking the "I don't have Internet" button when asked to connect to a Wi-Fi network.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Linux and its code are made by people, and people are not with us forever. Over the weekend, a brief message on the Linux kernel mailing list reminded everyone of just how much one person can mean to a seemingly gargantuan project like Linux, and how quickly that person can disappear.

Denise Finger, wife of the deceased, wrote to the Linux Wireless list on Friday evening:

This is to notify you that Larry Finger, one of your developers, passed away on June 21st.

LWN.net reckons that Finger, 84, contributed to 94 Linux kernel releases, or 1,464 commits total, at least since kernel 2.6.16 in 2006 (and when the kernel started using git to track changes). Given the sometimes precarious nature of contributing to the kernel, this is on its own an impressive achievement—especially for someone with no formal computer training and who considered himself a scientist.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Microsoft's 11th-edition Surface Pro, as exploded by iFixit. Despite adhesive holding in the screen and the fact that you need to remove the heatsink to get at the battery, it's still much more repairable than past Surfaces or competing tablets. (credit: iFixit)

For a long time, Microsoft's Surface hardware was difficult-to-impossible to open and repair, and devices as recent as 2019's Surface Pro 7 still managed a repairability score of just 1 out of 10 on iFixit's scale. 2017's original Surface Laptop needed to be physically sliced apart to access its internals, making it essentially impossible to try to fix the machine without destroying it.

But in recent years, partly due to pressure from shareholders and others, Microsoft has made an earnest effort to improve the repairability of its devices. The company has published detailed repair manuals and videos and has made changes to its hardware designs over the years to make it easier to open them without breaking them and easier to replace parts once you’re inside. Microsoft also sells some first-party parts for repairs, though not every part from every Surface is available, and Microsoft and iFixit have partnered to offer other parts as well.

Now, iFixit has torn apart the most recent Snapdragon X-powered Surface Pro and Surface Laptop devices and has mostly high praise for both devices in its preliminary teardown video. Both devices earn an 8 out of 10 on iFixit's repairability scale, thanks to Microsoft's first-party service manuals, the relative ease with which both devices can be opened, and clearly labeled internal components.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

• 

  The Pocket 386, a new-old laptop that can run MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, and (technically) Windows 95. [credit: DZT's Store ]

Of the many oddities you can buy from Aliexpress, some of the weirdest are the recreations of retro computer systems in semi-modern designs. We're most intimately familiar with the Book 8088, a recreation of the original 1981 IBM PC inside a chunky clamshell laptop. The people behind the Book 8088 are also responsible for the Hand386, which is a bit like a late-80s PC stuck inside an old Palm Pilot or Blackberry, and a second revision of the Book 8088 with more built-in ports and a VGA-capable graphics adapter installed instead of a basic CGA adapter.

Whoever is selling these systems is now back with the Pocket 386, which combines Hand386-style internals with a clamshell design similar to the Book 8088. The result is the kind of IBM-compatible system that would have been common during the Windows 3.1 era, when MS-DOS still dominated (especially for games) but Windows was on the upswing.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: Kaspersky Lab)

The Biden administration will ban all sales of Kaspersky antivirus software in the US starting in July, according to reporting from Reuters and a filing from the US Department of Commerce (PDF).

The US believes that security software made by Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab represents a national security risk and that the Russian government could use Kaspersky's software to install malware, block other security updates, and "collect and weaponize the personal information of Americans," said US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

“When you think about national security, you may think about guns and tanks and missiles,” said Raimondo during a press briefing, as reported by Wired. “But the truth is, increasingly, it's about technology, and it's about dual-use technology, and it's about data.”

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Often times, when I am researching something about computers or coding that has been around a very long while, I will come across a document on a university website that tells me more about that thing than any Wikipedia page or archive ever could.

It's usually a PDF, though sometimes a plaintext file, on a .edu subdirectory that starts with a username preceded by a tilde (~) character. This is typically a document that a professor, faced with the same questions semester after semester, has put together to save the most time possible and get back to their work. I recently found such a document inside Princeton University's astrophysics department: "An Introduction to the X Window System," written by Robert Lupton.

X Window System, which turned 40 years old earlier this week, was something you had to know how to use to work with space-facing instruments back in the early 1980s, when VT100s, VAX-11/750s, and Sun Microsystems boxes would share space at college computer labs. As the member of the AstroPhysical Sciences Department at Princeton who knew the most about computers back then, it fell to Lupton to fix things and take questions.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Features like Image Playground won't arrive in Europe at the same time as other regions. (credit: Apple)

Three major features in iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia will not be available to European users this fall, Apple says. They include iPhone screen mirroring on the Mac, SharePlay screen sharing, and the entire Apple Intelligence suite of generative AI features.

In a statement sent to Financial Times, The Verge, and others, Apple says this decision is related to the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA). Here's the full statement, which was attributed to Apple spokesperson Fred Sainz:

Two weeks ago, Apple unveiled hundreds of new features that we are excited to bring to our users around the world. We are highly motivated to make these technologies accessible to all users. However, due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act (DMA), we do not believe that we will be able to roll out three of these features — iPhone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements, and Apple Intelligence — to our EU users this year.

Specifically, we are concerned that the interoperability requirements of the DMA could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security. We are committed to collaborating with the European Commission in an attempt to find a solution that would enable us to deliver these features to our EU customers without compromising their safety.

It is unclear from Apple's statement precisely which aspects of the DMA may have led to this decision. It could be that Apple is concerned that it would be required to give competitors like Microsoft or Google access to user data collected for Apple Intelligence features and beyond, but we're not sure.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / A rendering of the Copilot button. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is all-in on its Copilot+ PC push right now, but the fact is that they'll be an extremely small minority among the PC install base for the foreseeable future. The program's stringent hardware requirements—16GB of RAM, at least 256GB of storage, and a fast neural processing unit (NPU)—disqualify all but new PCs, keeping features like Recall from running on all current Windows 11 PCs.

But the Copilot chatbot remains supported on all Windows 11 PCs (and most Windows 10 PCs), and a change Microsoft has made to recent Windows 11 Insider Preview builds is actually making the feature less useful and accessible than it is in the current publicly available versions of Windows. Copilot is being changed from a persistent sidebar into an app window that can be resized, minimized, and pinned and unpinned from the taskbar, just like any other app. But at least as of this writing, this version of Copilot can no longer adjust Windows' settings, and it's no longer possible to call it up with the Windows+C keyboard shortcut. Only newer keyboards with the dedicated Copilot key will have an easy built-in keyboard shortcut for summoning Copilot.

If Microsoft keeps these changes intact, they'll hit Windows 11 PCs when the 24H2 update is released to the general public later this year; the changes are already present on Copilot+ PCs, which are running a version of Window 11 24H2 out of the box.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Signage outside a Dell campus. (credit: Getty)

Big tech companies are still trying to rally workers back into physical offices, and many workers are still not having it. Based on a recent report, computer-maker Dell has stumbled even more than most.

Dell announced a new return-to-office initiative earlier this year. In the new plan, workers had to classify themselves as remote or hybrid.

Those who classified themselves as hybrid are subject to a tracking system that ensures they are in a physical office 39 days a quarter, which works out to close to three days per work week.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)

A report by tech news site The Information suggests that Apple is shifting its augmented reality priorities. The next high-end version of the Vision Pro has purportedly been canceled while work continues on a more affordable version with a reduced feature set.

Citing both an employee in Apple's headset supply chain and one working in headset manufacturing for Apple, the report claims that the cheaper Vision product—perhaps around the $1,600 mark—is due before the end of 2025. Apple had originally intended to present this headset alongside the Vision Pro, similar to the models available in each iPhone release. The more affordable model would likely have fewer cameras, smaller speakers, and weigh less, though Apple has struggled to bring down the cost of the unit's displays.

Apple's efforts in augmented reality are closely watched by other players in the headset space, so even a momentary, situational step back from high-end headsets could have significant repercussions. The Information cites current and former Meta employees in describing how the company had killed plans for its own higher-end headset in January 2023, but it then began work on a new premium model five months after Apple's Vision Pro debut.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

For the vast majority of compatible PCs, Microsoft’s Windows 11 24H2 update still isn’t officially available as anything other than a preview (a revised version of the update is available to Windows Insiders again after briefly being pulled early last week). But Microsoft and most of the other big PC companies are releasing their first wave of Copilot+ PCs with Snapdragon X-series chips in them today, and those PCs are all shipping with the 24H2 update already installed.

For now, this means a bifurcated Windows 11 install base: one (the vast majority) that’s still mostly on version 23H2 and one (a tiny, Arm-powered minority) that’s running 24H2.

Although Microsoft hasn’t been specific about its release plans for Windows 11 24H2 to the wider user base, most PCs should still start getting the update later this fall. The Copilot+ parts won’t run on those current PCs, but they’ll still get new features and benefit from Microsoft’s work on the operating system’s underpinnings.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

As the Intel Mac era has wound down over the last couple of years, we've been painstakingly tracking the amount of software support that each outgoing model is getting. We did this to establish, with over 20 years' worth of hard data, whether Intel Mac owners were getting short shrift as Apple shifted its focus to Apple Silicon hardware and to software that leveraged Apple Silicon-exclusive capabilities.

So far, we've found that owners of Intel Macs made in the mid-to-late 2010s are definitely getting fewer major macOS updates and fewer years' worth of security updates than owners of Intel Macs made in the late 2000s and early 2010s but that these systems are still getting more generous support than old PowerPC Macs did after Apple switched to Intel's processors.

The good news with the macOS 15 Sequoia release is that Apple is dropping very few Intel Mac models this year, a much-needed pause that slows the steady acceleration of support-dropping we've seen over the last few macOS releases.

Read 33 remaining paragraphs | Comments