Shocking as it may seem, it’s been nearly a decade since the first Apple Pencil was announced, way back in 2015. The stylus hasn’t seen much in the way of updates since then. The most significant arrived in 2018, bringing magnetic charging to the line. Last year, meanwhile, saw the arrival of a less expensive […]
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As anticipated, Apple’s iPad Pro was the star of Tuesday’s “Let Loose” event. The arrival of the seventh-generation device marks the first major upgrade to the premium tablet since 2022. “We’re not only going to push the limits of iPad,” Apple SVP John Ternus noted during the event, “we’re going to crush them.” The new […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Three years after Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPad, sales reached an all-time high. According to Canalys, iPad shipments hit 26 million in the last quarter of 2013. With those numbers, Apple secured more than one-third of the tablet market. As a category, tablets represented a hair under 50% of the entire PC market for […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Today is Apple iPad Event day, and we’re ready to bring you all the iPad goodness you can stand, including if some of the rumors are true of what’s coming, like a new iPad Pro, iPad Air, Apple Pencil and a keyboard case. Don’t have time to watch? That’s ok — we’ve summed up the most important parts of the event below.
Image credit: Apple
The iPad lineup is getting a facelift today, and one of the most important additions is that it now comes in two sizes, the 11-inch display and a 13-inch display. The cost is $599 for 11 inch and $799 for 13-inch. You can preorder today, and it will be available “next week.” Read more
And, as a special bonus, Apple finally places the front-facing camera on the landscape edge of the iPad. Read more
Image Credits: Apple
The iPad Pro is being touted as the thinnest iPad ever. Features include a visual experience with an OLED display in two panels called Tandem OLED. It also has a nanotextured glass option for less glare. And, it features the next generation of Apple silicon called M4, a jump from M2. It also has a 12.9-inch iPad Air and new gestures for the Apple Pencil.
In the U.S., the 11-inch iPad Pro starts at $999 for the Wi-Fi model, and $1,199 for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model. The 13-inch iPad Pro starts at $1,299 for the Wi-Fi model, and $1,499 for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model. Read more
Image credit: Apple
The M4 chip is the fourth generation of its custom SoCs. They feature a new display engine, as well as a significantly updated CPU and GPU cores. The base M4 chips come with 10 CPU and 10 GPU cores.
Apple claims that the new CPU is 50% faster than the M2 chips which powered the last generation of iPad Pros, while the GPU will offer a 4x increase in rendering performance, all while still offering the same performance per Watt as the M3. Apple stressed that the new GPU architecture features dynamic caching, hardware-accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing, something that’s a first for the iPad. Read more
“We’ve always envisioned iPad as a magical sheet of glass,” said John Ternus, SVP, Hardware Engineering during Apple’s iPad event in Cupertino on Tuesday. “And with the new iPad Pro, we wanted to give customers an even more remarkable visual experience.”
The company did that by bringing OLED to iPad for the very first time, suggesting that the technology helps get the light and color accuracy that iPad Pro owners want – but that it lacks the brightness. The company solved that by creating the Tandem OLED screen, which can support an incredible 1,000 nits of full-screen brightness for both SDR and HDR content, and 1,600 nits of peak HDR brightness. The company says no other device delivers this level of display quality. Read more
Image credit: Apple
Shocking as it may seem, it’s been nearly a decade since the first Apple Pencil was announced, way back in 2015. The stylus hasn’t seen much in the way of updates since then. The most significant arrived in 2018, bringing magnetic charging to the line. Last year, meanwhile, saw the arrival of a less expensive model with fewer features and USB-C charging.
It comes in at $129. Many of the new features with the Apple Pencil Pro comes from the squeeze. You can take animations, move and rotate the object and even lens blurring. Read more
Image credit: Apple
Apple announced a new and improved Magic Keyboard, its keyboard accessory for iPad. This is the first major revision since 2020.
The Magic Keyboard has been “completely redesigned” to be much thinner and lighter, Apple says, and now includes a function row for quick access to controls like screen brightness. Beyond that, the new Magic Keyboard features aluminum palm rests and a larger trackpad. Plus it’s more responsive, Apple says, with haptic feedback.
In the U.S. the new 11-inch Magic Keyboard is available for $299 and the new 13-inch Magic Keyboard is available for $349. It comes with layouts for over 30 languages. Read more
Image credit: Apple
The latest version of Final Cut Pro introduces a new feature to speed up your shoot: Live Multicam. It’s a bold move from Apple, transforming your iPad into a multicam production studio, enabling creatives to connect and preview up to four cameras all at once, al in one place. From the command post, directors can remotely direct each video angle and dial in exposure, white balance, focus, and more, all within the Final Cut Camera app.
The new companion app lets users connect multiple iPhones or iPads (presumably using the same protocols as the Continuity Camera feature launched a few years ago). Final Cut Pro automatically transfers and syncs each Live Multicam angle so you can seamlessly move from production to editing. Read more
Much of Tuesday’s unveiling had to do with hardware, however, there was some teasing of new AI improvements. This included the upgraded M4 chip, which you can read more about above, which features a neural engine that’s “dedicated to the acceleration of AI workloads.”
The company also hinted that improved AI capabilities would soon be in the hands of iPadOS app developers, noting that the operating system software offers advanced frameworks, like CoreML, and that developers would be able to tap into its neural engine to deliver “powerful AI features right on device.” Read more
Image Credits: Apple
Apple just updated its two high-end tablets: the iPad Air and the iPad Pro. While the entry-level iPad didn’t receive an update, the company lowered its price, too. And of course, yes, the iPad mini is still around.
Not sure which one is for you? That’s ok. We have a rundown of all of the iPads and what make them different. Read more
Yeah, you can put an OLED screen in an iPad, but then you lose the brightness that iPad Pro users are used to. What is a poor computer maker to do? You stack two of them, of course.
“We’ve always envisioned iPad as a magical sheet of glass,” said John Ternus, SVP, Hardware Engineering during Apple’s iPad event in Cupertino on Tuesday. “And with the new iPad Pro, we wanted to give customers an even more remarkable visual experience.”
The company did that by bringing OLED to iPad for the very first time, suggesting that the technology helps get the light and color accuracy that iPad Pro owners want – but that it lacks the brightness. The company solved that by creating the Tandem OLED screen, which can support an incredible 1,000 nits of full-screen brightness for both SDR and HDR content, and 1,600 nits of peak HDR brightness. The company says no other device delivers this level of display quality.
As a bonus of using OLED, it enables the company to deliver sub-millisecond control over the color and luminance of each pixel, which means that highlights in photo and video can appear brighter, while blacks can be deeper and more true, with a huge additional responsibility boost in moving content.
Together, the company calls it the Ultra Retina XDR, built into both the brand new 11 and 13 inch models.
Previously seen on the company’s high-end studio displays, the new iPad Pro also gets a nanotexture glass option to iPad Pro for the very first time: Nanotexture glass is precisely etched at a nanometer scale, maintaining image quality and contrast while scattering ambient light for even less glare.
Announced earlier this year, Roku revealed today that its Pro Series TVs, the lineup of high-end televisions, are now available for purchase in the U.S.
Starting today, Roku Pro Series TVs are being sold at Best Buy stores and online. There are three sizes to choose from — 55, 65 and 75 inches — with prices running from $899 to $1,699.
Compared to the first Roku-branded smart TVs — the Select and Plus Series — the Pro Series has a slimmer design that can be flush-mounted to the wall. (Roku also sells a Wall Mount Kit for $100.) Audio has also been enhanced thanks to new side-firing speakers that provide improved sound clarity, spatial effects and deeper bass. Like the Roku Plus TVs, the Pro Series has HDR10+ and Dolby Vision for a cinematic viewing experience, as well as 4K QLED displays and local dimming.
In addition to the Pro Series launch, Roku announced new software updates coming to all Roku TVs that aim to enhance the viewing experience.
The most notable feature is “Smart Picture,” which uses AI and machine learning to automatically adjust picture quality based on content. For instance, when watching a basketball game, the Roku TV recognizes it as sports content and selects Sports mode, adjusting the brightness and colors to provide the best experience.
“Think of Roku as the Smart TV assistant that automatically selects the best picture mode for you,” Lei Yu, a product lead at Roku, explained during a demo briefing with the press last week.
Smart Picture mode is on by default, however, you can adjust the preferences in settings. For example, you can tell it to automatically adjust the contrast when watching movies.
Roku also introduced “Backdrops,” a decorative background that replaces the boring blank screen on your television when not in use. You can choose from a variety of art pieces as well as upload a collection of your favorite family photos.
In the coming months, Smart Picture and Backdrops will launch on all Roku TV models in the U.S.
Other upgrades to the Roku TV experience include rolling out IMDb ratings and trailers within the details page of a TV show or movie. Plus, there is a smarter Save Lists feature, with new badges on the upper right-hand corner of titles to indicate price drops or new episodes or seasons.
Lastly, Roku unveiled details about its second edition Voice Remote Pro, such as a bigger battery and USB-C charging. It’s the first Roku remote to have touch-activated backlit buttons.
There are also two new buttons: a Live TV Guide button to quickly jump to more than 400 free live, linear channels, local news and live sports, and a programmable shortcut button that you can program to access search, connect Bluetooth headphones or turn on your favorite channel.
The new remote is included with the Pro Series, which has a dedicated remote-finder button on the side of the TV. It’s also available as a standalone accessory for $30. The remote will become available at other major retailers in the coming months.
Gemini 1.5 Pro, Google’s most capable generative AI model, is now available in public preview on Vertex AI, Google’s enterprise-focused AI development platform. The company announced the news during its annual Cloud Next conference, which is taking place in Las Vegas this week.
Gemini 1.5 Pro launched in February, joining Google’s Gemini family of generative AI models. Undoubtedly its headlining feature is the amount of context that it can process: between 128,000 tokens to up to 1 million tokens, where “tokens” refers to subdivided bits of raw data (like the syllables “fan,” “tas” and “tic” in the word “fantastic”).
One million tokens is equivalent to around 700,000 words or around 30,000 lines of code. It’s about four times the amount of data that Anthropic’s flagship model, Claude 3, can take as input and about eight times as high as OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo max context.
A model’s context, or context window, refers to the initial set of data (e.g. text) the model considers before generating output (e.g. additional text). A simple question — “Who won the 2020 U.S. presidential election?” — can serve as context, as can a movie script, email, essay or e-book.
Models with small context windows tend to “forget” the content of even very recent conversations, leading them to veer off topic. This isn’t necessarily so with models with large contexts. And, as an added upside, large-context models can better grasp the narrative flow of data they take in, generate contextually richer responses and reduce the need for fine-tuning and factual grounding — hypothetically, at least.
So what specifically can one do with a 1 million-token context window? Lots of things, Google promises, like analyzing a code library, “reasoning across” lengthy documents and holding long conversations with a chatbot.
Because Gemini 1.5 Pro is multilingual — and multimodal in the sense that it’s able to understand images and videos and, as of Tuesday, audio streams in addition to text — the model can also analyze and compare content in media like TV shows, movies, radio broadcasts, conference call recordings and more across different languages. One million tokens translates to about an hour of video or around 11 hours of audio.
Thanks to its audio-processing capabilities, Gemini 1.5 Pro can generate transcriptions for video clips, as well, although the jury’s out on the quality of those transcriptions.
In a prerecorded demo earlier this year, Google showed Gemini 1.5 Pro searching the transcript of the Apollo 11 moon landing telecast (which comes to about 400 pages) for quotes containing jokes, and then finding a scene in movie footage that looked similar to a pencil sketch.
Google says that early users of Gemini 1.5 Pro — including United Wholesale Mortgage, TBS and Replit — are leveraging the large context window for tasks spanning mortgage underwriting; automating metadata tagging on media archives; and generating, explaining and transforming code.
Gemini 1.5 Pro doesn’t process a million tokens at the snap of a finger. In the aforementioned demos, each search took between 20 seconds and a minute to complete — far longer than the average ChatGPT query.
Google previously said that latency is an area of focus, though, and that it’s working to “optimize” Gemini 1.5 Pro as time goes on.
Of note, Gemini 1.5 Pro is slowly making its way to other parts of Google’s corporate product ecosystem, with the company announcing Tuesday that the model (in private preview) will power new features in Code Assist, Google’s generative AI coding assistance tool. Developers can now perform “large-scale” changes across codebases, Google says, for example updating cross-file dependencies and reviewing large chunks of code.
A few months after its launch, how is Apple’s Vision Pro faring? The company’s ambitious bet on computers that nestle on your face instead of sit on your desk made a huge splash when it was announced and later release. However, the hype has since seemingly come back down to Earth.
I am a long-term bull on augmented reality, virtual reality, and face-computers in general. I still recall my first session with what became the Microsoft Hololens project as one of the most impactful moments for my excitement for technology. So it is to my partial chagrin that the hype around the Apple Vision Pro has faded more rapidly than I anticipated.
Of course, with its Pro moniker, expensive price tag, and uneven developer support thus far, the new Apple device has a long road ahead of it. But I anticipated the Apple brand to keep the hardware in the news — and atop our collective minds — longer than it managed after its launch.
For now, we remain mostly in the dark regarding the device’s popularity. Sure, some folks returned theirs and TechCrunch’s own review was middling-to-positive in its view, but that doesn’t mean that most folks took their Apple Vision Pro back, or that some users are enjoying the gadget more than we did.
Here’s hoping that Apple and Meta, with its Quest line of VR headsets do not give up until they crack this particular nut. I find it archaic that my monitors are akin to digital chalkboards when they should be built into my glasses. Hit play, let’s have some fun.
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