Technology news

Instead of the usual California-based event in March, this year, Apple took its team to Chicago to make its spring announcements, most of which revolved around a new iPad geared toward the education market. Additionally, the company also introduced updates to iWork, a new app for teachers, and a new stylus called Crayon that’ll also work with the new iPad.
Since the event took place at a high school, we didn’t get the normal live stream of the keynote until after it was over. So if

The Federal Circuit has ruled for a second time in Oracle v. Google, the software copyright lawsuit over Google’s Android platform. The new decision reverses the district court yet again and sends the case back for a third trial to determine damages for Oracle. In the last trial, Oracle sought almost $9 billion in damages.The litigation has been dragging on for about eight years now, bouncing up and down through appeals and two whole jury trials. It all started because Google wanted to ma

Dopamine is one of the most hyped brain chemicals, supposedly linked to everything from sex to gambling. It’s common to read, as Business Insider claimed last week, that dopamine is “the pleasure chemical” — but that’s not true, and the idea was overturned long ago.“I have friends who have dopamine tattoos because they think it means pleasure,” says Arif Hamid, a Gray Fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and postdoctoral researcher at Brown Uni

Google has acquired the GIF platform Tenor for Android, iOS, and desktop, the company announced today. Tenor is going to help Google bring up GIFs inside Google images and other services like Gboard more easily. Notably, Tenor is a GIF platform that Facebook has used in its Messenger service to let users send GIFs more easily. It’s unclear if this acquisition will change that.
A blog post from Google notes that Tenor will remain a separate brand, and the company will help Tenor find more

Best friends Milo and Lola are dead. They’ve gone straight to hell, and their only chance to return to Earth is to challenge and beat Satan himself in a drinking contest. It sounds like the setup for the worst hangover of all time, but Night School Studio’s new game, Afterparty, includes one more diabolical layer: Even in hell, everyone uses Twitter. Or, as it’s called in the game, Bicker.Set to release in 2019 from the creators behind Oxenfree, Afterparty’s underworld i

Apple is likely to release redesigned Apple Watch Series 4 models in the fall, according to a report from KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. As 9to5Mac notes, the updated watches should have larger displays, enhanced health monitoring, and a longer battery life.
While Kuo is vague on some details surrounding the redesigned watch, he says it will have a 15 percent larger display, and a “more trendy form factor design.” The firm says that these details, combined with expected new se

Google Maps is now available in 39 new languages, the company announced today in a blog post. These languages — including Afrikaans, Danish, Filipino, Hebrew, Icelandic, Mongolian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Turkish, and Vietnamese, to name a few — are spoken by around 1.25 billion people.Keep in mind there are a total of 6,909 living languages recorded in the Ethnologue catalogue. Many of the languages Google chose to add today are spoken by large populations. Swahili, in particular

Apple’s education pricing, which usually knocks around 10 percent off the price of most Apple products, is available to the following people:Current and newly accepted college students and their parents.
Faculty and staff of all grade levels.
Homeschool teachers.If you’re one of those people, you can get Apple’s new iPad for $309, instead of the $329 list price. The special $299 price Apple announced today is for schools, not individual buyers.
It’s fairly easy to prove

Logitech’s Rugged Combo 2 keyboard case for the iPad is not likely to be something you’ll want to buy. It’s just too big for most. It’s very, very rugged, surrounding the device in a huge plastic block that feels like it could protect the glass inside from nearly anything. (Logitech says it’s good for up to a four-foot drop, but I bet it could handle more.) You won’t really be able to buy it anyway; it’s designed for the education market.But I am here t

We just got a look at the new iPad accessories Logitech announced today: the $49 Crayon and the $99 Rugged Case. They are really nice, but they are not for you. Both accessories are specifically designed to sell to the education market and will not hit general retail.
Let’s start with the Crayon because it’s fascinating. It’s half the price of the Apple Pencil and works a little bit differently. It does not need to be paired via Bluetooth. Instead, any Crayon can work with any

Today, Apple refreshed its iPad lineup with a new 9.7-inch iPad with Pencil support that comes with a student-focused $30 discount. The device is designed to replace last year’s $329 base model iPad, and it sells for that same price to regular consumers. Apple’s race to beat Google in the classroom is a good thing for everyone, resulting in cheaper price points and more options. However, one product category that still remains stubbornly unaffordable in Apple’s new education a

Google realizes that you don’t always want to buy or rent a movie or TV show, so today it’s updating the Play Movies & TV app for Android with a helpful feature that will show which apps are currently streaming whatever it is you’re trying to watch.This works for many of the popular go-tos like Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, HBO Go / Now, Showtime, and a slew of cable-authenticated apps like ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, HGTV, Comedy Central, and others.Unfortunately, you'll notice that

A few months ago, I detailed my process for setting up a Pixelbook to code on. It wasn’t easy or simple or straightforward, but it worked in the end: I had all the power and flexibility of Linux, access to my favorite code editor (VS Code), and, of course, the slick web browsing experience that Chromebooks are known for.
Around that same time, I attempted to set up an iPad for coding. I failed miserably. I love using the iPad for writing and other creative work. It’s super portable,

Nvidia will suspend its autonomous vehicle testing on public roads in the aftermath of Uber’s fatal crash in Arizona, Reuters reports. Uber is a customer of Nvidia’s, using the chipmaker’s computing platform in its fleet of self-driving cars.Nvidia had been testing its self-driving cars in New Jersey, California, Japan, and Germany. The company is hosting its annual GPU Technology Conference in San Jose this week, where it is expected to make several announcements regarding it

It took a few months after the launch of its very expensive, professional all-in-one iMac Pro, but Apple is now individually selling the space gray Magic Keyboard, Magic Trackpad, and Magic Mouse that debuted alongside it. The accessories quietly popped up after today’s event, as Federico Viticci helpfully pointed out. Previously, they could only be had with Apple’s top-of-the-line Mac.The added charge for the darker color of each device is $20, putting both the Magic Keyboard and T

Apple took its annual spring event out of California and hosted it at a high school in Chicago this year, promising to focus its newest products toward the education market that’s been dominated by Google and Microsoft. The keynote was condensed into just one hour, most of which revolved around all the things you can do with a newly announced iPad. Here’s a look at all the biggest news today.
An “Education” iPad
The star of today’s announcement was the new “a

Formula E is now three and a half seasons old, meaning it’s been around about three and a half seasons longer than many racing fans and critics thought an all-electric motorsport series could last. The mix of racing largely unproven technology with only semi-recognizable drivers has somehow resulted in more excitement than anyone expected. Big-name manufacturers have joined in droves. And yet, this early success is beginning to feel more and more like a prequel of sorts. That’s beca

The launch of NASA’s upcoming deep-space observatory — the James Webb Space Telescope — is being pushed back by about a year, from spring 2019 to May 2020. The delay is likely going to push the program over its congressionally capped $8 billion development budget. And it’s yet another setback for the long-delayed telescope, which has been in development for more than two decades now.
The postponement was expected. An audit from the Government Accountability Office earlie

We just spent some time with Apple’s new $329 iPad, announced here in Chicago at its education event. It’s... an iPad.
The new iPad is very familiar. It has the same basic 9.7-inch screen size, bezels, Touch ID sensor, button placement, and cameras. The big new features are Apple Pencil support, which works the same as it did on the iPad Pro, and an update to the A10 processor. As with the previous iPad, it has 10 hours of battery life, an 8-megapixel rear camera that supports 1080p

Futuristic “light field” camera maker Lytro is shutting down, according to a statement posted online. The company says that starting today, it will stop “taking on new productions and providing professional services,” as it prepares to “wind down” the company over an unspecified period of time. “We’re excited to see what new opportunities the future brings for the Lytro team as we go our separate ways,” says the statement. “We would li

Moment is going back to Kickstarter with another series of add-on phone lenses and accessories, but this time, they’re aimed directly at filmmakers, not photographers.
The product launch is headlined by a single new lens: a $149 anamorphic, which allows filmmakers to capture extra-wide images with long, streaking lens flares, providing a look frequently used in blockbuster movies. Like Moment’s prior lenses, the anamorphic is designed to go on top of the existing camera lens on your

The first trailer for Eli Roth’s The House with a Clock in its Walls was released today by Universal Pictures. The movie is based on the 1973 children’s book of the same name written by John Bellairs.The House with a Clock in its Walls is about a boy named Lewis (Owen Vaccaro) who goes to live with his warlock uncle (Jack Black) in a mysterious, magical house. In the trailer, Lewis meets the witch who lives next door (Cate Blanchett), and generally looks alarmed by his new living si

Apple is making a big push into education, and part of that is through apps. At its event today, the company announced a tool called Schoolwork, which will allow teachers to assign digital handouts to students — Apple compared it to writing an email: teachers will be able to write notes, send PDFs, and include links to the web. And since this is all on an iPad, they’ll even be able to assign students activities that live inside of other apps.
One of Apple’s big selling points

Huawei’s new P20 flagship has a notch. That’s okay — loads of phones have launched with notches this year. What Huawei has done different is introduce a feature that lets you turn the notch “off.” Very simply, this setting changes the status bar to black, which effectively camouflages the cut-out containing the phone’s front-facing camera and speaker.It’s not completely seamless, but as the pictures below show (tweeted by Stefan Constantine) it’s

Apple today announced a cheaper, Logitech-made stylus for its iPad family of devices called Crayon. The device, announced onstage at Apple’s iPad-focused education event in Chicago this morning, will cost $49 and join the $99 Pencil in Apple’s current stylus lineup. Alongside the stylus, Apple also announced a new rugged Logitech iPad case and keyboard combo. There are no pricing details for the case, and we don’t yet know when either device will be made available.Apple’

Rackspace,which was taken private in a $4.3 billion deal in August 2016 by private equity firm Apollo Global Management, is reportedly in consideration for an IPO by the firm, according to a report by Bloomberg.
The company could have an enterprise value of up to $10 billion, according to the report. Rackspace opted to go private in an increasingly challenging climate that faced competition on all sides from much more well capitalized companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Despite getting

Apple’s education event today is focused around the new $299 iPad, designed as its most “affordable” device with Apple Pencil support. It’s also updating its Pages app to bring a new digital book creation tool to let educators and students make books together, including the use of handwritten notes and drawings. Previously, a similar feature on the Mac was the iBooks Author app.
Instead of calling it iBooks Author, however, Apple is now calling it Digital Books. Students

Apple significantly updated iWork today for the people who haven’t yet transitioned to Google apps, particularly in the education space. At its event today in Chicago, Apple announced that there will be new versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, all of which support Apple Pencil. This goes hand-in-hand with Apple’s announcement of a new iPad that also supports Apple Pencil. Students will be able to add drawings to reports in Pages or Keynote. They’ll also be able to write in

Apple is introducing a new iPad today at its education event in Chicago. Rumors of a new, cheaper iPad emerged recently, and Apple is making it official with a refreshed 9.7-inch iPad with Apple Pencil support. The updated iPad will be available in Apple stores today, insilver, space gray, and a new gold finish. The tablet will include Touch ID, a HD FaceTime camera, 10 hours of battery life, an 8-megapixel rear camera, LTE option, and Apple’s A10 Fusion chip.
Apple previously lowered the

Last week we caught a rumor of a Huawei phone with 512GB of built-in storage, but it didn’t look like it was the P20 Pro. Well, mystery solved: Huawei just introduced the Porsche Design Mate RS, which is sort of a blend between its new P20 Pro (triple rear cameras) and the Galaxy Note 9 (no notch, huge curved screen).
But this phone isn’t just a luxury rebadge for Huawei. The phone is the company’s “new flagship,” and has the specs to match. In addition to the 512G

Google is launching a new AI voice synthesizer as part of its suite of machine learning cloud tools. The service, named Cloud Text-to-Speech, will be available for any developer or business that needs voice synthesis on tap, whether that’s for an app, website, or virtual assistant. But what’s particularly interesting about this news is that Cloud Text-to-Speech is powered by WaveNet, software created by Google’s UK-based AI subsidiary DeepMind.Google doesn’t want DeepMin

LA-based space startup Relativity has raised $35 million in Series B funding, in a new round led by Playground Global, and including existing investors Social Capital, Y Combinator Continuity and Mark Cuban. The funding will help the startup expand its automated, 3D-printing process for manufacturing rockets quickly and with greatly reduced complexity, with the ultimate aim of making it easier and cheaper to send satellites into space.
Relativity’sgoal is to introduce a highly automated ro

Assuming you haven’t completely erased Facebook from your life and have instead chosen to carefully inspect your privacy settings and limit what Facebook has on you, I’m going to offer another piece of optional advice. If you’re generally distrustful of the social network, you might want to think about disabling the company’s face recognition technology. Facebook has been using face recognition for years to make suggestions of who should be tagged in photos you share. Bu