While it likely started as an April Fools Day prank, Twelve South is committing to producing its newest product Stone r a marble base for your iPhone s MagSafe charger.
Stone r is described as an elegant marble charging base for your iPhone 12 device when using MagSafe. Your MagSafe puck is inserted into the Stone r which holds onto the puck. That allows you to pick up your phone without picking up the charging puck with it.
How Stone r holds your MagSafe puck
By keeping your MagSafe puck in Stone r, it also stops the puck from sliding off your desk or nightstand and onto the floor.
Early Thursday, Eve Systems started rolling out a new firmware update to its Eve Aqua that enables support for Thread on the smart HomeKit watering system.
The update is available to download now for users via the free Eve app for second-gen Eve Aqua devices. Users unsure of whether they have the first or second-gen device can identify it using Eve s web tool.
Speaking to
AppleInsider, Eve said its goal was to get the update out the door ahead of the lawn and garden season.
With Eve Aqua, you can automate your watering schedule for your lawn or garden. You can create schedules in the Home or Eve app, pause your watering if it rains via Siri shortcuts, or turn your water on or off using Siri.
Chip designer Arm Ltd. has announced its new v9 architecture, a design that could eventually appear in the Apple Silicon powering future iPhones, iPads, and Macs.
The new Arm v9 focuses on three areas: performance, security, and machine learning (ML) capabilities. Arm says the design will provide more than a 30% CPU performance boost over the next two generations of mobile and infrastructure CPUs.
AI is another critical area Arm targeted with its v9 design. The architecture s new Scalable Vector Extension 2 (SVE2) technology will enhance ML and digital signal processing (DSP) for future devices.
Arm s SCE2 can improve processing for 5G systems, ML, voice AI assistants, and virtual and augmented reality. Apple s Arm-based chips include a Neural Engine that handles ML tasks, and the company is reportedly developing a mixed-reality headset and AR glasses.
Apple is researching how to detect environmental noise levels and user voice patterns so Siri can respond with a yell or a whisper as needed.
Siri has been widely criticized for its lack of feature parity with rivals. The discontinuation of HomePod has again placed Siri in the spotlight as the smart assistant approaches its tenth birthday.
A patent application published on Thursday shows one area Apple seeks to improve with its assistant environmental awareness. Currently, Siri will respond with the same voice, volume, and inflection regardless of how noisy a room is or how the command is given.
Other voice assistants like Alexa can respond in a lower volume and a whisper voice when a command is given quietly. Siri lacks this feature and can respond to commands at sometimes jarring volumes.
A third-generation iPhone SE model said to launch in 2022 could retain a 4.7-inch LCD display but may have 5G support, according to a source familiar with Apple's display supply chain.