The design elements in iOS don't often change – and when they do, it's not usually by much – but the upcoming iOS 18 software could indeed have a significantly updated look, according to one well-placed source.
According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman (via 9to5Mac), Apple "is indeed working to update the design of iOS as early as this year". That doesn't give us much detail to work with, but it does suggest there will be noticeably different visuals.
Gurman – usually reliable when it comes to predicting Apple's moves – was in part responding to rumors that iOS 18 would borrow some design inspiration from visionOS on the Apple Vision Pro. That "total overhaul" isn't happening, says Gurman, though it sounds as though Apple may get part of the way there in 2024.
New versions of iOS are usually unveiled at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, so we don't have too long to wait to see what Apple's been working on – and how much different in style it is to iOS 17.
An "ambitious and compelling" update
iOS 18 will be coming to the iPhone 15(Image credit: Future | Alex Walker-Todd)
The biggest visual overhaul we've ever seen for iOS came with iOS 7, launched back in 2013: skeuomorphism (where digital elements are designed like their real world equivalents) was out, and a much more modern look was in.
In the decade since, app icons and menus have been tweaked and adjusted, but there hasn't been what you would describe as a full-scale redesign. We'll have to wait and see what iOS 18 brings when WWDC 2024 gets underway.
Gurman has previously gone on record as saying that iOS 18 is going to be an "ambitious and compelling" upgrade, so it sounds as though there's a lot to look forward to. As with everything else in tech lately, generative AI is likely to play an important role – with Siri and iOS set to be updated with some big new AI-driven capabilities.
According to Gurman, a visual refresh is also coming to macOS, though it'll lag behind iOS: the updates Apple is planning to the macOS design are apparently still in the early stages, and won't be completed until 2025 or 2026.
It's hard to imagine the notch on the iPhone 14 or the Dynamic Island on the iPhone 15 looking any different than they currently do, but of course there will have been a full design and review process behind them – and some unused ideas just leaked out.
According to information obtained by MacRumors, a variety of different designs were explored before the ones that we now have got finalized. Some mockup images have also been put together to show how the rejected ideas would've looked.
One of the ideas apparently under consideration was a pop-up sidebar down the right of the screen, to go alongside the notch – a sidebar that would be used to show the time, signal strength, battery level, and other bits of key information.
Apple also reportedly thought about extending the notch all the way across the top of the screen – so less a notch, more an Android-style status bar – which may have had the added benefit of giving users a little bit more battery life.
A design for life
Dynamic Island ideas that didn't make it(Image credit: MacRumors)
Apple's design team was busy when it came to introducing the Dynamic Island too, which first appeared on the iPhone 14 Pro and the iPhone 14 Pro Max. One of the rejected ideas here was a full row of status icons underneath the selfie camera.
It seems that Apple designers also toyed with the idea of having a Dynamic Island that was permanently elongated – so just an island, in that case – before deciding that it should change shape and size depending on context.
Head over to MacRumors to see the full set of mockups and imagine what might have been. It's possible that some of these ideas might appear again in the future, as Apple continues to tweak the look of its iPhone series.
It's also possible that both the notch and the Dynamic Island will eventually disappear altogether, if Apple can figure out how to get the selfie camera and the sensors next to it to sit under the display somehow (as Samsung has with the Galaxy Z Fold 5).
You might not be too familiar with Loongson, but it has been developing computer processors since 2000, and in China the company is widely viewed as the grandfather of domestic CPUs.
The launch of Loongson 1 in 2002 was China's first independently developed general-purpose CPU, using the MIPS III instruction set. in 2020 Loongson transitioned from the MIPS instruction set to its independent instruction set, LoongArch (which is widely viewed as being a clone of MIPS). The first LoongArch-supported processor, the 3A5000, debuted in 2021, marking the beginning of the Loongson ecosystem's Dragon architecture era.
The 3A6000, a follow-up product of the 3A5000, is the second-generation processor using the LoongArch instruction set. Fabricated on a 12nm process it has four cores and eight threads capable of boosting to 2.5GHz under a 50 watt TDP. It has an L2 cache of 256KB and an L3 cache of 16MB, and is compatible with DDR4-3200 RAM.
Hit and miss performance
In a recent video review by Geekerwan (Geek Bay), Loongson's 3A6000 demonstrated substantial progress in its Instructions Per Cycle (IPC), nearly on par with the latest architectures from Intel and AMD. While it still lags behind the latest x86 and Arm CPUs in raw performance, the high IPC suggests a promising future, provided Loongson can attain higher frequencies.
In SPEC 2017's integer and floating point performance test with all CPUs locked to 2.5GHz, Loongson's chip impressed. It surpassed the Zen 3-based Ryzen 9 5950X and was just slightly behind the Zen 4-powered Ryzen 9 7950X and Raptor Lake Core i9-14900K. Tom’s Hardware has more on the test results.
However, the 3A6000 can't truly harness its impressive IPC due to its low clock speed and its limitations in core count and cache size. The company's next-generation 3A7000, rumored to use a 7nm process, may improve on these points, potentially boosting clock speeds and allowing for more cores and more cache.
While the 3A6000 demonstrates considerable progress, it still falls behind Intel and AMD's performance when operating at silent frequencies above 5GHz. However, the rapid improvement in Loongson's architecture design, coupled with its high IPC, suggests a promising future for China's homespun CPU.
Japanese tech giant Dynabook has unveiled a new 14-inch notebook, the Dynabook R9.
Available in a stylish Dark Tech Blue color, the new device is powered by a Core Ultra 7 155H CPU and Intel Arc Graphics GPU, and weighs only 1.04kg/2.29lbs, potentially making it the lightest laptop of its kind.
The new R9 sports a 14-inch display (1920 x 1200) and comes with 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and a 512GB NVMe SSD. It features a range of ports, including two USB 3.2 (Gen1) Type-A, two Thunderbolt 4 (USB4) Type-C, HDMI, microSD card slot and audio input/output. Connectivity is provided in the form of Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.3.
Copilot ready
There’s a 920,000-pixel (VGA) webcam with privacy slider and a fingerprint sensor. Plus the keyboard includes a dedicated Microsoft Copilot key so you can summon Microsoft's new AI assistant with a single tap.
The R9 comes with four Dolby Atmos compatible speakers and, for a bit of variety, there are twin microphones at the top of the screen rather than at the side of the webcam. AI noise cancelling reduces unwanted background sounds during Teams and Zoom meetings.
As with other Dynabook products, the laptop features Dynabook Empower Technology to optimize heat dissipation, and maximize the performance of the Core Ultra.
The Dynabook R9 runs on Windows 11 Home, and comes with Office Home & Business 2021 and one free year of Microsoft 365 Basic.
The main downside of the new laptop? It’s only going to be available for sale in Japan. Priced at around 290,000 yen ($1932.56) it’s expected to go on sale there in late April.
Many of the most popular laptops and smartphones in use today could be vulnerable to two major security flaws that could result in identity theft, data exfiltration, business email compromise (BEC) and other risks, experts have warned.
This is according to cybersecurity researchers at Top10VPN and Mathy Vanhoef, who found two separate vulnerabilities - one tracked as CVE-2023-52160, and another tracked as CVE-2023-52161.
With the latter, a threat actor would be able to join an otherwise protected Wi-Fi network, and target other devices connected to it with malware or infostealers. The former, on the other hand, is found in the default software Android uses to handle logging into wireless networks and allows hackers to create a malicious clone of legitimate networks. If a victim gets tricked into joining this malicious clone, their traffic can be hijacked.
Patches available
While the vulnerabilities sound ominous, they’re not that easy to exploit. For the first one, the target’s Wi-Fi client needs to be configured not to verify the certificate of the authentication server. Furthermore, the attacker needs to know the SSID of the Wi-Fi network the victim usually connects to and needs to be close enough to be able to connect to it.
"One possible such scenario might be where an attacker walks around a company's building scanning for networks before targeting an employee leaving the office," the researchers explained.
CVE-2023-52161 was said to affect any network using a Linux device as a wireless access point.
Most Linux distributions (Debian, Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu), have all released patches, and so has ChromeOS. An Android fix is still pending.
"In the meantime, it's critical, therefore, that Android users manually configure the CA certificate of any saved enterprise networks to prevent the attack," Top10VPN said.
The Sphere, a music and entertainment arena east of the Las Vegas Strip, is a staggering technological achievement, standing approximately 366 feet tall and 516 feet wide, making it the largest spherical building in the world.
If you've seen any photos of it, you'll know the exterior is coated in 1.2 million fully-programmable puck-sized LEDs that allow for the creation of stunning, dynamic 360-degree image displays.
The interior is just as cutting edge however. With a seating capacity for up to 18,000 people, it hosts various events such as concerts and performances and features a 160,000-square-foot, 16K wraparound LED canvas, making it the world's largest and highest resolution LED screen with 256 million rendered pixels.
Enter Matrox
To manage this, multimedia system designer and integrator Fuse Technical Group, developed a system capable of handling 16K resolution, running on a complete SMPTE ST 2110 backbone, a standard they were not accustomed to.
"It took five years to build the Sphere, but we had only five months from the initial contact to deliver a 100% reliable solution in time for the first show — using a standard and workflow we weren't accustomed to. It was definitely no small feat to do something like that in such a compressed timeline," said Ryan Middlemiss, Fuse Technical Group's director of media servers.
To manage this, Fuse chose technology from Matrox Video, one of Nvidia’s earliest rivals, for the SMPTE ST 2110 routing, orchestration, conversion, and control inside Sphere.
"The jaw-dropping spectacle at Sphere sets a new gold standard for video in live entertainment,’ Francesco Scartozzi, vice president, sales and business development at Matrox Video said. "We're honored to have worked with Fuse on this unparalleled project and that our technology and our people played a role in its success."
The technology behind such an endeavor is, naturally, on the bleeding edge.
Critical Matrox products used for the workflow are:
Matrox ConvertIP for SMTPE ST 2110 Conversion - Fuse deployed 23 Matrox ConvertIP DSS dual-channel SFP SDI-to-IP devices to convert high-resolution SDI from the media servers into SMPTE ST 2110 and deliver content to the IP video backbone for display on the LEDs. Fuse selected ConvertIP for its 12G SDI and 4K (DCI) support, its low latency, and its 25G speeds. Fuse subsequently requested 6G support, and Matrox Video added the capability to ConvertIP.
Matrox ConductIP for Routing and Orchestration - Fuse uses Matrox ConductIP to route and orchestrate SMPTE ST 2110 sources on its internal network, a critical part of the workflow.
Matrox Extio 3 for Remote Operation and Control - The production system uses 30 computers, with one programmer and two technicians in the control room handling all the video for the show. Fuse deployed Matrox Extio 3 IP KVM extenders so the operators can access multiple computers from one remote workstation with one keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Users can move between Extio 3-equipped computers at once just by dragging the mouse.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 could come with a flatter and square-aspect-ratio inner display, potentially making for a phone with a wider inner screen and cover display.
That’s according to reliable smartphone tipster Ice Universe, who claimed on X that the next Galaxy Fold could be wider and have screen edges that are closer to a true right angle. If this turns out to be the case, as noted by SamMobile, the Galaxy Z Fold 6 could have a screen design that’s not unlike the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.
A wider cover display would translate to a wider overall design, which would likely see the cover screen expand, perhaps offering a similar amount of screen real estate to the OnePlus Open. While Samsung has made improvements to the cover display of its Fold phones, they're arguably still too narrow to be used easily, especially if you have larger hands.
In the post, Ice Universe compares this to the screen design and middle frame of the rectangular Nubia Z60 Ultra, while including a close-up of that phone to illustrate the proposed look.
Galaxy Z Fold 6 is not as wide as the patent picture, but it is also relatively wide, and the screen R angle is close to the right angle. If you look for a mobile phone for analogy, it is more like the screen R angle of Nubia Z60 Ultra.And the middle frame is similar, which is a… pic.twitter.com/wWKCM0teMbFebruary 20, 2024
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This would represent a departure from the established look of most Samsung foldable phones, including the Galaxy Z Fold 5, which usually feature softer curved edges. Ice Universe’s tip matches up with a previous post from August last year that showed what was claimed to be a prototype Samsung Fold sporting a similar angular look.
Go bold with Fold
The past few generations of Galaxy Fold models have featured only iterative design changes over their predecessors, and while these have added up to making the Fold 5 one of the best foldable phones, there’s still scope for change.
We’d like to see titanium get used on the Galaxy Z Fold 6 to help make it stronger and lighter, perhaps opening up the way for more design tweaks. However, no rumors have hinted at this happening so far.
Instead, a recent rumor was camera-focused and has the Galaxy Z Fold 6 sticking with another 50MP camera instead of the much more impressive 200MP shooter used in the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, which many fans were hoping for.
The rest of the camera setup on the Galaxy Z Fold 6 is tipped to feature the same 12MP ultra-wide, 10MP cover display front camera, and 4MP under-display camera that was included in the Galaxy Z Fold 5’s load-out.
If you like memory foam, chances are you’ll like the Nectar mattress. It’s been a mainstay within the online space for years, but up until recently, it was only available as an all-foam bed. In this review, I’ll cover everything you should know about the new hybrid version.
Notorious Israeli commercial spyware company NSO Group was reportedly offering a way to exfiltrate sensitive mobile phone data unlike anything ever seen before, experts have revealed.
A new report from telecom security specialists Enea discovered the method while recently sifting through the documents filed during the court case between WhatsApp and NSO Group.
According to ENEA, in late 2019, WhatsApp committed into evidence a copy of a contract between an NSO Group reseller, and the telecom regulator of Ghana. In the contract, one of the features and capabilities NSO Group offered was called “MMS Fingerprint”.
Blocking malicious MMS messages
This feature, as it later turned out, was exploiting a vulnerability in both Android and iOS (but also in BlackBerry devices, apparently) to exfiltrate some sensitive data from the device.
After a bit of digging, ENEA managed to recreate the flaw, and then explained how it worked. Allegedly, the attacker could create a unique, malicious MMS message, which the victim didn’t even need to open (or otherwise interact with). That message would trigger the device to return two unique pieces of information: the MMS UserAgent, and the x-wap-profile.
The former is a string that usually identifies the operating system and the device of the victim, while the latter points to a UAProf (User Agent Profile), that describes the capabilities of the target device.
This information, ENEA argues, could be used to profile the victim and prepare for more concrete attacks: “Both of these can be very useful for malicious actors. Attackers could use this information to exploit specific vulnerabilities or tailor malicious payloads (such as the Pegasus exploit) to the recipient device type. Or it could be used to help craft phishing campaigns against the human using the device more effectively,” the researchers explained in the report.
While being able to steal data without victim interaction sounds ominous, the victims aren’t utterly helpless, ENEA adds. Mobile subscribers could disable MMS auto-retrieval on their handset, which would prevent the malicious messages from reaching their devices. Also, most mobile operators today filter these kinds of messages from being sent in the first place.
The best Chromebooks are all physically different from Windows laptops in one important way: they all have Google’s iconic ‘Everything’ button. It’s essentially a search button that can be used to access everything on your laptop and beyond; from your own files and apps to online query results.
However, a new unique button could soon be coming to Chromebooks everywhere: a dedicated key for Google Assistant. As spotted by ChromeUnboxed, a file found in the Chromium Repositories (an open-source code base behind many of the features of ChromeOS and the Chrome browser) makes reference to an upcoming Chromebook model that features a hardware-mapped Assistant key.
The new Chromebook, codenamed ‘Xol’ – a rather oblique reference to Destiny 2, while past codenames have openly referenced everything from The Witcher to Skyrim – has scant other information about it, only that it will apparently run on one of Intel’s 13th-gen CPUs. That’s an odd move, given that Intel’s 14th-gen ‘Core Ultra’ chips are already on the table. But as ChromeUnboxed points out, we might not have seen the last of Intel’s 13th generation just yet.
Return of the king?
More intriguing is the fact that we have seen a dedicated Assistant button before - but only ever on Google’s own first-party Chromebooks, the venerable Pixelbooks. The Pixelbook Go remained in several of our laptop rankings even after Google axed the product line, and I even prayed for a Pixelbook revival that sadly didn’t materialize during last year’s Google I/O event.
Does this mean ‘Xol’ could be a new Pixelbook? Unfortunately, the answer is ‘probably not’ - Google seemed pretty committed to moving away from first-party Chromebooks when it killed off the Pixelbook back in 2022, fully dissolving the team responsible for it and encouraging third-party laptop makers to go all-in on ChromeOS with the recent Chromebook Plus initiative. There’s likely a far more straightforward explanation: artificial intelligence.
'Hey Google' might soon become 'Hey Gemini'...(Image credit: Google)
With AI on the rise just about everywhere, from OpenAI’s new Sora video generator to the seemingly ever-present ChatGPT, it makes sense that Google (and other Chromebook manufacturers) would want to push AI features as a key selling point for new laptops.
A dedicated button for accessing your on-board AI companion is the logical conclusion; and would you look at that, Google has a new suite of AI tools for us to play with.
AI for the Google guy
Yes, Google Gemini is here, a powerful selection of AI software – some new, some rebranded from Google’s own previous Duet and Bard AI models – that seems like it would be right at home on a new AI-focused Chromebook. Google promises that Gemini will be able to do all sorts of stuff, from simple chatbot functionality to writing-assistant tools that rival Microsoft Copilot.
Most importantly, Gemini will be replacing Google Assistant, although not just yet - it seems there are still some teething issues to work through, and Assistant remains present on all compatible devices at the time of my writing this. But for a Chromebook in early development, the inclusion of an Assistant key when Google is preparing to deprecate the virtual helper feels… off.
So, could this be a Gemini button instead? ‘Gemini Key’ has a nice ring to it. Paired with the Everything button for accessing all your stuff, a dedicated key to instantly summon the full might of Google’s AI software suite could be a worthy addition to the ChromeOS roster. Google has consistently put ease-of-use at the forefront when it comes to Chromebooks, so this could prove to be a good way to introduce less tech-savvy users to AI tools.
There’s just one problem.
'Chromebook Plus' is a step up from your everyday Chromebooks, and could benefit from a fresh injection of AI.(Image credit: Future)
As I mentioned above, ‘Xol’ runs on a 13th-gen Intel CPU - meaning it won’t have access to the powerful Neural Processing Units (NPUs) found in Intel’s new Ultra processors. You can click that link for the full rundown, but an NPU is essentially a dedicated chip for running local AI workloads; that's something you’d probably want in an exciting new AI-focused Chromebook Plus, no?
Whatever ‘Xol’ is, it might never see the light of day; Chromebooks spotted like this don’t always make it to final production, so this one might simply be a project that ends up half-finished. In any case, I’m still excited to see what Gemini means for ChromeOS – and I’m not the only one.
