Apple closes in on $1 billion deal to buy Intel’s modem business: report

Apple closes in on $1 billion deal to buy Intel’s modem business: report

By Jill T Frey
5G / apple / Intel / Policy / Qualcomm / Tech

Enlarge / Apple CEO Tim Cook. (credit: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Apple is in the final stages of negotiations to buy the bulk of Intel’s modem chip business, The Wall Street Journal reports. The Journal says the deal, valued at $1 billion or more, could be finalized in the next week. The deal would involve the transfer of talent as well as modem-related patents.

Intel’s wireless efforts date back to at least 2011, when the company bought Infineon Technologies for $1.4 billion. Intel hoped to become a major rival to Qualcomm, which has long played a dominant role in the market for wireless chips.

But Intel has struggled to gain traction. That’s partly because Qualcomm negotiated restrictive contracts with potential Intel customers that effectively blocked them from considering a second supplier. After Apple began shipping iPhones with Intel chips inside them in 2016, Qualcomm declared war on

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Nvidia RTX 2080 Super hands-on: The result when AMD is out of striking distance

Nvidia RTX 2080 Super hands-on: The result when AMD is out of striking distance

By Jill T Frey
AMD / Gaming & Culture / geforce rtx / GPUs / NVIDIA / rtx super / Tech

  • It’s neither bird nor plane, but rather a new RTX Super GPU from Nvidia. Behold: the RTX 2080 Super, shipping as of today. [credit:
    Nvidia ]

Earlier this month, Nvidia kicked a stool out from under AMD’s feet, just as the graphics-card sector began heating up anew. AMD was set to land a serious blow with new RX 5700 cards in the “pricey but reasonable” range—a range that Nvidia had failed to capture with its “entry-level” RTX cards, the 2060 and 2070. Nvidia responded to AMD’s news by unveiling and launching a surprise pair of solid “Super” cards. AMD responded with its own price cut (and a claim that this price-war dance was its plan all along).

As these similarly specced cards jostled for the “$400ish” crown, the winner was ultimately consumers. At every price point, new GPU buyers can expect a solid bang-for-buck quotient between the $349

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Apple releases iOS 12.4, watchOS 5.3, macOS 10.14.6, and more

Apple releases iOS 12.4, watchOS 5.3, macOS 10.14.6, and more

By Jill T Frey
apple watch / iOS 12 / iOS 12.4 / ipad / iphone / iPod touch / Mac / macOS 10.14 Mojave / macOS 10.14.6 / Tech / watchOS 5 / watchOS 5.3

Enlarge / The Apple Watch series 4 running watchOS 5. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

As it often does, Apple has released updates for all of its device operating systems at once. iOS 12.4, watchOS 5.3, macOS 10.14.6, and tvOS 12.4 all arrive on supporting devices today.

iOS 12.4’s tentpole feature is the ability to directly and wirelessly transfer all your data from one iPhone to another when setting the latter up. Onlookers are also speculating that it includes yet-to-be-activated support for the Apple Card credit card. This Goldman Sachs-driven consumer credit card will have a number of smart features and iPhone tie-ins, and, per Apple’s announcement earlier this year, is due to launch by the end of the summer.

There are also some quality-of-life and UX improvements for Apple News+. These are Apple’s iOS 12.4 release notes:

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Asus’ ROG Phone II features a 120Hz display, a new SoC, and a giant battery

Asus’ ROG Phone II features a 120Hz display, a new SoC, and a giant battery

By Jill T Frey
Tech

  • The ROG Phone 2. It looks a lot like the ROG Phone 1. [credit:
    Asus
    ]

Asus is still trying to make gaming phones a thing with the release of the Asus ROG (Republic of Gamers) Phone II. Just like last year, this is a high-end smartphone with a hyper-aggressive “gamer” design and a light-up back logo, but there are also genuinely impressive specs here that you won’t find on any other smartphone right now.

The Asus Republic of Gamers Phone II is the first device to launch with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 855 Plus SoC. This 855 “Plus” is a mid-cycle upgrade for the Snapdragon 855 with higher clock speeds for the CPU and GPU. The SoC’s single “Prime” CPU core gets bumped from 2.84GHz to 2.96GHz, while the GPU gets a 15% boost from 585MHz to 672MHz.

You’re going to need that extra horsepower since the ROG

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Amazon warns customers: Those supplements might be fake

Amazon warns customers: Those supplements might be fake

By Jill T Frey
Science / Tech

Enlarge (credit: Getty | John Greim)

On the second evening of Prime Day, Amazon’s annual sales bonanza, Anne Marie Bressler received an email from Amazon that had nothing to do with the latest deals. The message, sent from an automated email address Tuesday, informed her that the Align nutritional supplements she ordered two weeks earlier were probably counterfeit. “If you still have this product, we recommend that you stop using it immediately and dispose of the item,” the email reads, adding that she would be receiving a full refund. It’s not clear how many other customers may have purchased the fake supplements. Amazon confirmed that it sent out the email but declined to specify the number of customers impacted.

For years, Amazon has battled third-party sellers who list knockoffs of everything from iPhone charging cables to soccer jerseys on its site. Nutritional supplements are another popular target for

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Can Disney’s Circle really deliver a porn-free Internet?

Can Disney’s Circle really deliver a porn-free Internet?

By Jill T Frey
circle / content filtering / Disney / Features / Tech

Enlarge / Can the Mouse keep your house safe from the sketchy parts of the Internet? (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

Filtering out the bits of human knowledge you don’t like and leaving all the bits you do is a deceptively difficult task; it’s one of the classic “I may not know art, but I know what I (don’t) like” problems. If you have a family with small children and absolutely any adult member of that family is not a complete libertine, though, it’s a problem you’ll need to address. The latest edition of the Disney-backed Circle filtering platform aims to help, via either a standalone IoT gadget ($35) or a service embedded in higher-end Netgear routers and mesh kits, such as Orbi RBK50 ($300) or Nighthawk R7000P ($160).

  • Netgear’s Orbi RBK-50 (left two items) offers embedded Circle functionality, or you can purchase a standalone IoT gadget (right).

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Netflix lost US subscribers in Q2 over price hikes; how can it win them back?

Netflix lost US subscribers in Q2 over price hikes; how can it win them back?

By Jill T Frey
movies / Netflix / streaming / subscriptions / Tech / television

Enlarge / Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. (credit: re:publica)

If you’ve been grumbling about the rising cost of your Netflix account, it seems you’re not alone. Netflix shared its second-quarter financial results and the company indicated that higher prices may have led to dips in the platform’s subscriber counts.

Revenue for the video streaming service totaled $4.92 billion in the second quarter, up 26% year-over-year. Net income was $271 million, with $0.60 earnings per share. Both those figures were down from Q2 in 2018 and from Q1 of 2019.

Netflix added 2.7 million paid members during the period, a big cut from the 5 million it expected to see and from the 5.5 million recorded in the year-ago quarter. “Our missed forecast was across all regions, but slightly more so in regions with price increases,” the shareholder letter read. The company insisted that competition from other platforms was

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Chrome 76 prevents NYT and other news sites from detecting Incognito Mode

Chrome 76 prevents NYT and other news sites from detecting Incognito Mode

By Jill T Frey
Biz & IT / Google Chrome / incognito mode / Tech

Enlarge / The Boston Globe and some other news sites prevent non-subscribers from viewing articles in a browser’s private mode. (credit: Boston Globe)

Google Chrome 76 will close a loophole that websites use to detect when people use the browser’s Incognito Mode.

Over the past couple of years, you may have noticed some websites preventing you from reading articles while using a browser’s private mode. The Boston Globe began doing this in 2017, requiring people to log in to paid subscriber accounts in order to read in private mode. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and other newspapers impose identical restrictions.

Chrome 76—which is in beta now and is scheduled to hit the stable channel on July 30—prevents these websites from discovering that you’re in private mode. Google explained the change yesterday in a blog post titled, “Protecting private browsing in Chrome.”

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Microsoft closes fiscal 2019 with revenue spikes driven by cloud services

Microsoft closes fiscal 2019 with revenue spikes driven by cloud services

By Jill T Frey
microsoft / Microsoft Azure / Surface / Tech

Enlarge / Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, speaks at the Microsoft Annual Shareholders Meeting in Bellevue, Washington, on November 30, 2016. (credit: Jason Redmond / Getty Images)

Microsoft has reported its financial results for the final quarter of the 2019 fiscal year. The tech giant saw notable gains in sales for Azure in its Intelligent Cloud division and for Surface in the More Personal Computing unit.

Revenue for the the company reached $33.7 billion, an increase of 12% from the last quarter of 2018. Microsoft’s operating income rose 20% to $12.4 billion while net income jumped 49% to $13.2 billion, with earnings of $1.71 per share.

Each of Microsoft’s three reporting segments saw its revenue grow compared with the fourth quarter of the previous year. The Intelligent Cloud group saw the biggest jump, rising 19% to $11.4 billion.

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Dropbox silently installs new file manager app on users’ systems

Dropbox silently installs new file manager app on users’ systems

By Jill T Frey
Tech

  • This is what Dropbox looks like now. It used to be a folder, now it’s a file manager. [credit:
    Ron Amadeo ]

Hey Dropbox users, how has Dropbox been for you lately? Major changes are coming to the Dropbox desktop app. The company announced its “New Desktop Experience” in June, and previously it was opt-in. Recently, though, a number of users on Twitter and at the Ars Orbiting HQ have reported silently being “upgraded” to this radically different version of Dropbox.

This new version of Dropbox wants to be… a file manager? Instead of the minimal sync app, the Dropbox icon now opens a big, multi-panel, blue and white window showing all your Dropbox files. It kind of looks like Slack, if Slack was a file manager. You can now “star” folders as important so they show up in the left panel (again, like a Slack chat room). The middle

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