Backstory

This year, Apple’s largest competitor, Samsung, the Korean tech giant, is moving into the sixth generation of its foldable device lineup. Apple is nowhere to be seen. Even the rumors that surfaced online earlier pointed to the company opting for a foldable iPad rather than an iPhone.

For that part of the story, leaks pointed to a 2026 release date. However, with new, more believable information, it looks like the world’s largest phone company will be stepping into the foldable category, but not for any of its phones or tablets.

Analyst Ming Chi-Kuo Says Apple is Planning a Foldable MacBook

On Thursday, Apple analyst Ming Chi-Kuo revealed in a rather short tweet that only one of Apple’s foldable products has a clear release schedule: the MacBook, specifically a 20.3-inch model.

“Recently, I’ve received many inquiries about whether Apple plans to mass-produce the foldable iPhone or iPad in 2025 or 2026. My latest survey indicates that currently, Apple’s only foldable product with a clear development schedule is the 20.3-inch MacBook, expected to enter mass production in 2027,”

That is not to say that Apple won’t be looking toward the smartphone segment, too. There are two derivations that one can make from this tweet, that are important to understand. One, Kuo only mentions that the foldable MacBook has a clear development schedule. He doesn’t state that the iPad or iPhone won’t be getting their fold models.

Secondly, Apple hasn’t and probably won’t comment on the matter, so since there is no official confirmation, especially with news targeted three years from now, it is too early to jump to conclusions right now.

“MacBook Fold” Will Technically NOT be the First for Its Kind

If you’re wondering why Apple is stepping into the laptop category just because it’s something new, well, you would be wrong, in a way. At this point, a lot of Windows laptops feature dual screens, the concept of which is partially similar to that of a Fold. While they don’t physically fold in half, the underlying idea is similar, and some companies have executed this concept quite well.

This year alone, we’ve seen a range of options like the Zephyrus Duo and ZenBook Duo series. This highlights that the MacBook Fold, if it comes to fruition, wouldn’t be the first of its kind.

This is all we know for now, but rest assured that we will keep you updated as new information becomes available.

The post Apple’s First Foldable is Allegedly a 20.3″ MacBook, Not an iPhone appeared first on Appuals.

This feature is particularly interesting because it could potentially merge VoIP calls from across the Android platform into a single log. This would include calls made through apps like Skype, Signal, Viber, etc. It’s important to note that rumors about this integration have been circulating for quite some time.

Last Year, a Reddit User Also Spotted a WhatsApp Call in the Phone App

Last year, a Reddit post seemingly showcased the very same thing. The user noticed one of their WhatsApp calls recorded in the Phone app. This could have been an early beta test version that Google rolled out for a limited time to a select group of people, or more likely, an accident.

Google has not yet commented on when they plan to release the update that integrates WhatsApp calls into the Dialer app. However, based on what has surfaced online, it appears Google is actively working on bringing this update to consumers.

Regarding the feature itself, calls made through the Google Phone app typically display the SIM name you’re using for the call. However, for VoIP calls, like those from WhatsApp, the app name appears below the number.

VoIP Integration May Not Affect ‘ALL’ Android Phones

It’s important to understand that this feature may not be available on all Android smartphones. It will only work on devices using the Google Phone app. Phones from manufacturers like Xiaomi, Samsung, and OnePlus typically come with their own proprietary dialer apps, and so they might not see the same integration, at least based on what we know now.

This is all we know for now, but rest assured that we will keep you updated as new information becomes available.

The post Google Dialer May Soon Show WhatsApp Call Logs in the Phone App appeared first on Appuals.

While not being a full-fledged reveal or announcement, we can get a glimpse of what’s coming from Team Blue. Moreover, AMD will host a similar event a day earlier on the 3rd of June where we’ll hear more about Zen5 from Dr. Lisa Su.

Intel to Host Keynote at Computex 2024: AI-Acceleration in Intel Xeon, Intel Gaudi, and Intel Core Ultra Families

Following Computex’s general theme of AI, the focal point of this keynote will be Intel’s vision of AI for everyone. With the introduction of its own NPU, Intel is looking to make strides in the AI market, seeing NVIDIA’s success.

The event focuses on Intel’s AI portfolio including data center Xeons, Gaudi Accelerators and Core Ultra CPUs for the mainstream market. A key takeaway should be Arrow Lake’s NPU performance. If we’re lucky, we might even see a Lunar Lake sample in action as well.

• Arrow Lake
• Intel 20A + TSMC N3B Process Nodes
• Lion Cove P-Core + Skymont E-Core architectures
• Up to 24 Cores / 24 Threads
• No Hyperthreading
• Supported on the LGA 1851 Socket
• Support for DDR5-6400 Memory (JEDEC)
• Launch Expected in H2 2024

Aside from the consumer market, efficiency improvements offered by next-gen Xeon processors will also be highlighted. This is a given since Granite Rapids, tipped to offer 132 P-Cores, is built using a refined Intel 3 process with a significant performance/watt lead over Intel 4.

• Granite Rapids
• Intel 3 Process Node
• Redwood Cove P-Core architecture
• Up to 132 Cores (AP) or 88 Cores (SP)
• Support for DDR5-6400 Memory (12 Channel)
• Launch Expected sometime in 2024

The event is set to take place from the 4th of June to the 7th at Nangang Exhibition Center Halls 1 and 2 at Taipei, Taiwan. Apart from Intel, other notable presenters include AMD, Qualcomm, MediaTek, NXP, Supermicro, and Delta who will share their goals and ambitions in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

Source: COMPUTEX

The post Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger to Showcase Next-Gen Granite Rapids and Arrow Lake Processors at COMPUTEX 2024 appeared first on Appuals.

Nothing Phone (2a) — Reviews

Reviewers have had differing takes on what this phone represents and where it stands in the market. Here’s what they had to say:

The Verge touched upon the feature set and the price point that Nothing had chosen, and how both of these could be (2a)’s strong suits.

…$349 is an extremely reasonable asking price. Sure, the outer frame and back panel are plastic, it’s only splash-resistant, and the Glyph Interface is still mostly a curiosity, but it’s only $349. It’s easier to understand why certain features like a more robust IP rating aren’t here.

That price tag also makes it easier to appreciate what is here: the Glyph Interface feels like a fun extra, and the informative always-on display is one of my favorites on any phone.

The Guardian also appreciated the price discrepancy between the (2a) and Nothing’s previous phones. It also talked about how this could be a great mid-range killer.

I’m in love with everything I see on paper with the Nothing Phone 2a, including how it retains the brand’s identity with its peculiar design and iconic Glyph Interface. In a sea of slates, its design is a refreshing one made better by the fact it’s under that $500 threshold of what most consumers deem as budget phones.

Frankly, the Google Pixel 7a and iPhone SE (2022) — two phones I’ve spent a great deal of time using as my daily drivers — should be afraid.

Engadget made a case for how Nothing Phone (2a) was more than just an ordinary midrange device.

Nothing also pays attention to small details like the phone’s crunchy pseudo-analog sound effects that help marry its distinctive design with its custom UX and dot-matrix-inspired widgets.

PCMag highlighted the other side on how the Glyphs did more harm than good.

I like the idea of the Glyph system since it encourages you to turn your phone over and focus on whoever or whatever is in front of you. But, in practice, I find Glyphs unnecessary and sometimes more distracting than a regular banner notification. You also have to remember what each notification pattern means for the system to be useful.

Ratings

Here’s how the reviewers rate Nothing’s first budget smartphone, the Nothing Phone (2a):

Videos

Here’s what some of YouTube’s top tech creators had to say about the phone.

1. Mrwhosetheboss

2. MKBHD

3. Tech Spurt

4. ORBIT

The post Nothing Phone (2a) Review Roundup: What Does the Community Think? appeared first on Appuals.

Meta experienced a massive outage late on Tuesday, affecting all of its platforms, namely Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Users worldwide who are attempting to access their accounts have been logged out of the service.

Downdetector Sees a Spike in Outage Reports Concerning Meta Platforms

Downdetector, a real-time outage monitoring service, has reported a surge in outage reports around 8:20 PM GMT+5. Currently, it shows over 200,000 reports. Users who are trying to log back in are coming across an “unexpected error occurred” message.

At the time of writing, Meta has not issued a public statement regarding the situation. However, given the rare nature of the outage, it’s understood that the team is likely working to fix the issue as soon as possible.

Users are also Reporting Issues with WhatsApp

Alongside Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, some users have also noticed WhatsApp not working. However, the issue with WhatsApp is limited to specific regions only.

The last instance of such an outage was seen back in 2021 when Meta’s platforms were down for nearly seven hours. As of now, reports are coming in indicating that the situation is improving in some regions. Therefore, it is only a matter of time before the service is fully restored.”

Elon Musk Mocks Meta Outage on X

Facebook and Instagram’s rival platform, X apparently saw the opportunity and joked about the whole situation when CEO, Elon Musk tweeted “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working,” which the official X account retweeted captioning “we know why you’re all here rn.“

This is all we know for now, but rest assured that we will keep you updated as new information becomes available.

The post Facebook, Instagram and Messenger are Down Worldwide, Thousands Suddenly Logged Out appeared first on Appuals.

Despite retaining the services of an attorney, Tropic Haze has come forward in favor of Nintendo saying, “Yuzu is primarily designed to circumvent and play Nintendo Switch games.” Additionally, the company also agrees that it will permanently part ways with Yuzu in terms of working, hosting, distributing code or features, promotion, or doing anything that violates Nintendo’s copyright protection.

If that wasn’t enough, the company will also give in the yuzu-emu.org domain name to Nintendo, delete all copies of Yuzu or circumvention tools used for developing it such as Hekate, TegraRcmGUI, Atmosphere, Lockpick_RCM, NDDumpTool, nxDumpFuse, and Tegra Explorer.

Apart from the digital tools, Nintendo has also asked to hand over physical circumvention devices and modified Nintendo hardware of any kind. There’s a lot more to it and if you want you can read the entire proposed final judgment and permanent injunction, but they are still waiting for approval from a judge.

We still don’t know whether Yuzu is actually circumventing Nintendo’s protections since it doesn’t contain Nintendo’s keys and is a “bring-your-own-BIOS” emulator. However, Nintendo and Tropic Haze are asking a federal judge to acknowledge that Yuzu’s functionality involves circumventing Nintendo’s copyright safeguards, regardless of whether the encryption keys are used with the software or not.

Developing or distributing software, including Yuzu, that in its ordinary course functions only when cryptographic keys are integrated without authorization, violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on trafficking in devices that circumvent effective technological measures, because the software is primarily designed for the purpose of circumventing technological measures.

As Yuzu is an open-source emulator, it’s not easy to put a nail in its coffin as copies of both the emulator and its source code are still out there. Some users have also mentioned backing up the code after hearing about the legal case two weeks ago.

That’s all we have for now, let us know your thoughts below about the future of Yuzu and whether this result could impact other emulators!

Yuzu is Shutting Down

Bunnei from the Yuzu team has now confirmed that both Nintendo Switch and Nintendo 3DS emulators will be shutting down; “Yuzu and Yuzu’s support of Citra are being discontinued, effective immediately.”

While Yuzu never intended to promote piracy in any way, their projects can circumvent Nintendo’s copyright protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, leading to extensive piracy. Yuzu has also said that they will be shutting down their code repositories and will be discontinuing their Patreon accounts, Discord servers, and website.

The post Yuzu Lost Against Nintendo And Will Have To Pay $2.4M appeared first on Appuals.

Changing The AI Game With Claude 3

While Claude 3 has three different models, the star of the lineup Opus is more capable than any other AI system currently on the market. According to Anthropic cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei; “Opus is capable of the widest range of tasks and performs them exceptionally well.”

On top of that Amodei also explains how Opus outstrips top AI models like GPT-4, GPT-3.5, and Gemini Ultra on academic benchmarks like GSM-8k for basic mathematics, MMLU for undergraduate-level expert knowledge and GPQA for graduate-level expert reasoning. Amodei says “It seems to outperform everyone and get scores that we haven’t seen before on some tasks.”

Despite not fully disclosing how powerful their AI model Opus is, the reported benchmarks are a clear giveaway that Opus is head-to-head or even above major alternatives like GPT-4 and Gemini Ultra in complex tasks that require advanced reasoning. This establishes Opus at least on paper as a new high standard for commercially accessible conversational AI.

Rest of the Lineup

Apart from Opus, Claude 3’s Sonnet is the mid-range model that offers businesses a cost-effective option to perform routine tasks like data analysis, knowledge work, and more. Meanwhile, Haiku is designed to be fast and affordable, ideal for uses like customer chatbots where speed and cost matter most. Although Haiku is not publicly out yet, the startups expect it to launch “in a matter of weeks, not months.“

The Visual Improvements

The Claude 3 AI models are not only efficient in text-based queries but also showcase extraordinary computer vision capabilities on par with other models. This gives users the option to extract text from images, documents, charts, diagrams, and a lot more.

A lot of [customer] data is either highly unstructured or in some sort of visual format. Just the process of having to manually copy that information to even be able to have it interact with a generative AI tool is quite cumbersome.

Daniela Amodei

The Future of AI

Anthropic’s launch of the Claude 3 lineup is a testimonial to how companies are pushing boundaries to introduce models like Opus capable of outperforming big names like GPT-4 and Gemini Ultra. This is all we have for now, let us know your thoughts on Anthropic’s Claude 3 in the comments down below!

The post Antrhopic’s Claude 3 Outperforms GPT-4 and Gemini Ultra in Benchmark Tests appeared first on Appuals.

SF to Use NVIDIA’s Tech to Tone Down Defective Production Numbers

IFS aims to increase its production volumes and capture the second position in the foundry business. To counter this threat, Samsung is planning a rather unique solution to address its low-yield situation more cautiously. The company reportedly plans to implement NVIDIA’s “Digital Twin” technology in its factories starting next year.

NVIDIA’s Digital Twins (Based on Omniverse Replicator)

Digital Twin technology, like the name suggests creates a controlled and safe virtual space within which a virtual simulation of real-world situations and scenarios for a factory can be run.

A digital twin is a virtual representation — a true-to-reality simulation of physics and materials — of a real-world physical asset or system, which is continuously updated.

What is a Digital Twin — NVIDIA

The simulation uses AI and big data to analyze the production process, searching for trends and variations. This flexibility also allows engineers to experiment with different methods with minimal resource loss, leading to better optimization and efficiency within the whole process, potentially improving yields.

Samsung to Present its Plans for Digital Twin Semiconductor Factories at NVIDIA’s AI Conference this Year

The Digital Twin technology is built on NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform. Samsung will announce its plans for the first Digital Twin-based semiconductor factory at the upcoming NVIDIA GTC 2024 conference, held from March 18-21. Yun Seok-jin, Executive Vice President of Samsung Electronics DS Division Innovation Center, will present the company’s plans during the event.

This initiative is not new. In fact, Samsung established the Digital Twin Task Force in 2022 and subsequently appointed Lee Young-woong, a field expert, as the task force leader. If everything proceeds according to plan, Samsung could potentially begin pilot operations as early as this year, and develop the world’s first Digital Twin Level 5 factory within two years. For reference, this is the highest level among smart factories.

Digital Twin will surely allow for defective product prevention and product and production analysis via AI, but to still counteract the threat of IFS and TSMC stomping over its position in the market, it’ll still have to satisfy clients and solidify customer relationships.

This is all we know for now, but rest assured that we will keep you updated as new information becomes available.

The post Samsung Foundry Turns to NVIDIA’s “Digital Twin” Technology to Counter Yield Issues and Competition from TSMC and IFS appeared first on Appuals.

According to a recent YouTube video by Everything Android, a new tool called APatchLite provides a much quicker and shorter approach to rooting your Android device. This new tool simplifies the procedure, particularly for people who are rooting their phones for the first time.

The video author was able to install the software and root his phone in just 3 minutes, as opposed to the previous lengthy process. While the software has received little feedback due to its recent launch, it is an open-source project built on KernelSU that is accessible for download on GitHub. 

How to Root Your Phone Using APatchLite?

Before you see the steps, if you’re new to rooting entirely then there are other things you need to do before following this procedure. This guide assumes you’re aware of the basics and have already extracted your boot.img, along with having installed a custom recovery like TWRP.

1. Make sure the option to install apps from unknown sources in enabled in Settings. This will be different depending on what you use to download the APK.
   

   

2. Download APatchLite as an APK from GitHub.
3. Tap on it to install it, allow all necessary permissions if it asks.
4. Open the app after installation where you will see the option “Patch.”
   

   

5. Find the boot.img file in your phone and tap on it. The example picture is using a MIUI-based custom ROM which has its boot image in the Documents folder:
   

   

   Wait for the patch to be complete. Before the next steps, make sure your APatchLite is properly Installed!
6. Now go to your custom recovery and tap on Install.
   

   

7. Select Downloads from the list.
   

   

8. Tap on Install Image in the bottom-right.
   

   

9. Select partition as Boot, and Swipe to confirm flash.
   

   

   Select Boot as the partition
10. After a few seconds the flash will be successful.
    

    

11. Reboot your device and enjoy.

After following the above-given directions, you will easily be able to grant root access to apps that require them. You can install apps like “MRepo” to grant root access and successfully use your rooted phone without any problem.

As seen by the steps, the process was really simple and straightforward. This new app is genuinely a marvelous feat after the lengthy process of Magisk and similar software. Do let us know what you think about APatchLite in the comments below.

The post APatchLite: How You Root Your Android Without Magisk in 2024 appeared first on Appuals.

Qualcomm’s Next Flagship Mobile SoC Could Match Clock Speeds to that of its High-Performance Laptop Processor

This transition to in-house cores grants Qualcomm greater flexibility in fine-tuning the chip’s performance and efficiency. While initial rumors suggested the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 might be the first mobile SoC to break the 4GHz barrier, newer rumors hint at the possibility of it reaching a staggering 4.3GHz clock speed, which is notably on par with Qualcomm’s high-performance laptop processor, the Snapdragon X Elite.

In a previous report, we highlighted that due to Qualcomm’s decision to abandon low-power efficiency cores, it could potentially result in a TDP of nearly 14W, with each of the two L-cores (large cores) consuming up to 5.47W. This time, it is projected that each of these L-cores could escalate to 10W.

A Jump to 4.3GHz Would Likely Push TDP Numbers Through the Roof

Taking a step back and comparing this to the last-generation Gen 3 SoC, which operated at 12.7W, the 8 Gen 4 would elevate the TDP to a whopping 24-25W, marking a whole 100% increase in power consumption, draining the efficiency numbers right through the ground.

While an ideal scenario might involve heavily cooled custom water-loop setups in flagship phones from every manufacturer, the reality is that such solutions are highly unlikely and would require substantial investment in R&D. While we saw some cooling advancements in flagships like the Samsung Galaxy S24U, it’s still insufficient to consistently handle such high power demands.

Therefore, Qualcomm will likely need to significantly reduce the frequency of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4. The ideal number being discussed within the community is 3.8GHz, which aligns with the default clock speed of the Snapdragon X Elite and the maximum boost clock of the Apple A17 Pro.

This is all we know for now, but rest assured that we will keep you updated as new information becomes available.

via: Nguyen Phi Hung on X

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