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Tag: apple

  • Apple Quadrupled Its Autonomous Driving Testing Miles Last Year

    Apple Quadrupled Its Autonomous Driving Testing Miles Last Year

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    Apple’s secretive vehicle project doesn’t have much to show for its six years of work, at least publicly. But records submitted by the company to a California agency show that Apple went on an autonomous testing jag last year, almost quadrupling the number of miles it tested on public roads compared to 2022 and jumping 2021’s total by a factor of more than 30.

    The data covers December 2022 to November 2023. The majority of the testing miles were in the second half of the reporting period, with miles tested peaking in August at 83,900.

    Apple has a permit to test autonomous vehicle tech on California’s public roads only if the company has a safety driver behind the wheel—a first step that allows autonomous vehicle companies to collect more data on streets and determine how their software handles itself in traffic.

    A handful of other companies, including Alphabet’s Waymo and Amazon’s Zoox, have the state’s permission to test without safety drivers. California allows just two companies—Waymo and autonomous delivery firm Nuro—to deploy commercial self-driving technology in California.

    Apple’s testing totals are well below those of more advanced autonomous vehicle developers’, though the state’s reporting guidelines make them difficult to compare directly. Waymo drove 3.7 million testing miles in California with a safety driver behind the wheel and 1.2 million testing miles with no one behind the wheel. The company drove more than 1.6 million additional miles with passengers in the car, according to separate government documents. (Waymo is also operating a driverless service in Phoenix and is testing in Austin, Texas; its operations in those cities aren’t covered in this data.)

    Even Cruise, General Motors’ troubled autonomous vehicle division, which had its permit to deploy in California suspended in October and halted nationwide testing soon after, drove almost 2.65 million testing miles in the state in 2023—almost 2.2 million more than Apple.

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  • Apple’s Vision Pro Is Trying to Solve a Nearly Unsolvable Problem

    Apple’s Vision Pro Is Trying to Solve a Nearly Unsolvable Problem

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    Netflix didn’t come to play. Neither did YouTube. Following the Apple Vision Pro’s big preorder rollout two weeks ago, news slowly started to trickle out that neither of those video services would have native apps on Apple’s new spatial computing device. Netflix’s co-CEO, Greg Peters, went on a podcast and wondered aloud if the Vision Pro was even “relevant to most of our members.” Ouch.

    In fairness, the concept of spending $3,500 for souped up snorkeling goggles in which to watch Netflix isn’t a relevant expense for a lot of people. The Apple Vision Pro might be “magic, until it’s not” or maybe “bulky and weird,” but even if it’s the perfect device of the future (future perfect?), it still probably isn’t the best place for the thing Peters sells: hours-long movies and series people want to binge-watch.

    The reluctance of Netflix and YouTube to go all-in on the Vision Pro actually highlights a problem that’s plagued virtual reality and mixed reality—specifically the former—for a long time: Watching long-form video in a headset sucks. James Cameron might find using one to be “religious,” but those who study headsets advise against keeping one on for the length of Avatar.

    Mixed reality “shouldn’t be used for hours at a time. Its strength has always been in its ability to provide us with special experiences, not with unending engagement,” says Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, which just published a paper on the psychological implications of using mixed-reality devices with pass-through video technology like the Vision Pro’s. “MR is a special and intense medium.”

    Emphasis on the intense. Believe me when I say that I initially found the idea of a piece of technology that could sit on my face and envelop me in fantastical worlds to be thrilling. Almost 10 years ago to the day, while at the Sundance Film Festival, I tried my first VR film experience and marveled at the possibilities. Theoretically, at some point, Mark Zuckerberg did too. Then he dropped a cool $2 billion on Oculus and set a path to lead us all into the metaverse.

    The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.

    But that part where people just chill in their headsets has always felt just out of reach. For years after that Sundance festival in 2014, I wrote about virtual-reality films. Oculus, after being acquired by Facebook, launched a filmmaking wing called Story Studio and made an animated short so good it made me cry. The idea of VR filmmaking became a hot topic at film festivals. Director Alejandro González Iñárritu won a special Oscar for a VR experience. Henry, that movie that got me teary, got an Emmy. Still, the highlights had run times that were shorter than the delivery time on a pizza.

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  • Google Parent Alphabet’s Spending on Acquisitions Cratered in 2023

    Google Parent Alphabet’s Spending on Acquisitions Cratered in 2023

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    Pennies were pinched in Mountain View last year. For much of its existence as a public company, Google had made a headline-grabbing acquisition at least once a year as it used the profits from its surging ads business to bet on new frontiers. Billions of dollars went to scooping up Motorola, Nest, HTC, and Fitbit to build up it hardware business. Apigee, Looker, and Mandiant rounded out Google’s cloud computing unit. But Alphabet’s latest annual report reveals that the splurging stopped in 2023.

    Alphabet omitted a section describing acquisitions over the past year in the annual report filed this week to the US Securities and Exchange Commision, meaning any dealmaking wasn’t significant enough to flag to shareholders. New financial results released by Amazon and Meta Thursday showed their own spending on acquisitions also dipped significantly in 2023.

    The slowdown suggests pressure from antitrust regulators concerned about corporate power and investors who demanded cost cuts as interest rates jumped is forcing tech giants to pull back from one of their signature strategies. The European Commission and other regulators have increasingly challenged deals that they view as a threat to fair competition, forcing companies such as Amazon and Adobe to abandon planned purchases. Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta each laid off thousands of workers last year.

    “Deals from mega cap companies are being much more scrutinized,” says Angelo Zino, who studies tech stocks as vice president and senior equity analyst at CFRA Research. “In addition, 2023 was more of a cash preservation year.”

    Google and Amazon declined to comment. Apple and Meta did not respond to requests for comment.

    Chilling Effects

    Since Google first went public in 2004, the company has never until 2023 had a year without a section in its annual report on acquisitions. The new filing says Alphabet did spend $495 million net in cash on acquisitions or “intangible assets” last year, an outlay that is the company’s lowest since 2017. Intangible assets could reflect standalone purchases of patents or trademarks.

    Apple has also pulled back. It spent $306 million in cash on acquisitions during the year ended September 2022, but had so little to disclose for the year ended September 2023 that it removed the line item about deals from its annual report and instead bundled any such spending into a line called “other,” where spending fell 36 percent.

    The latest financial results released by Meta and Amazon Thursday suggest that cost cutting can help boost profits, though that may not be their primary motivation. At Meta, cash investment in acquisitions or tangible assets dropped by half to $629 million in 2023, after two years of growing spending. Those savings along with layoffs and additional cutbacks led Meta’s profits to soar about 69 percent in 2023.

    Amazon’s results show that it swung to a $30.4 billion profit in 2023 from a $2.7 billion loss the year earlier. The fact that net cash spending on acquisitions “and other” dipped from $8.3 billion in 2022 to $5.8 billion last year certainly contributed after years of ups and downs in those expenditures.

    The dive in acquisitions comes after several years of increasingly aggressive enforcement of antitrust laws from Washington and EU regulators and threats from lawmakers to impose new restrictions. While companies still consider acquisitions, they have in some cases decided that the potential pushback could be too much to bear.

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  • The Apple Vision Pro Lives Deep in the Uncanny Valley

    The Apple Vision Pro Lives Deep in the Uncanny Valley

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    Apple’s first ever mixed reality headset, the Vision Pro, arrives tomorrow. Apple has a knack for revitalizing and legitimizing a product category—something that the face computer market really needs right now. But there are some hangups that could limit its initial success: the Vision Pro’s exorbitant $3,499 price tag, the tethered battery pack, and the mere handful of apps available on the device at launch. These issues point to this headset being more of a development kit than a fully realized product for now. It’s a beautiful machine, but its true potential may not be realized for some time.

    This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED reviews editor Julian Chokkattu joins us to chat about the Apple Vision Pro and whether it’s going to be the device that finally kicks off the face computer revolution. We also talk about the ways Apple is trying to make the headset disappear as part of the experience, both in the virtual space and in the physical realm.

    Show Notes

    Read Julian’s hands-on experience with the Apple Vision Pro. Read Lauren’s story about the Apple Vision Pro’s battery pack. Read Boone Ashworth on the current situation with apps and developers.

    Recommendations

    Julian recommends Thumbtack, a platform to connect homeowners with service vendors. Lauren recommends butter lettuce. Mike recommends the Scottish police show Shetland.

    Julian Chokkattu can be found on social media @JulianChokkattu. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

    How to Listen

    You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:

    If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for Gadget Lab. If you use Android, you can find us in the Google Podcasts app just by tapping here. We’re on Spotify too. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.



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  • Apple and Google Just Patched Their First Zero-Day Flaws of the Year

    Apple and Google Just Patched Their First Zero-Day Flaws of the Year

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    Later in January, Google released Chrome 121 to the stable channel, fixing 17 security issues, three of which are rated as having a high impact. These include CVE-2024-0807, a use-after-free flaw in WebAudio, and CVE-2024-0812, an inappropriate implementation vulnerability in accessibility. The final high-impact vulnerability is CVE-2024-0808, an integer underflow in WebUI.

    Obviously, these updates are important, so check and apply them as soon as you can.

    Microsoft

    Microsoft’s January Patch Tuesday squashes nearly 50 bugs in its popular software, including 12 remote code execution (RCE) flaws.

    No security holes included in this month’s set of updates are known to have been used in attacks, but notable flaws include CVE-2024-20677, a bug in Microsoft Office that could allow attackers to create malicious documents with embedded FBX 3D model files to execute code.

    To mitigate this vulnerability, the ability to insert FBX files has been disabled in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook for Windows and Mac. Versions of Office that had this feature enabled will no longer have access to it, Microsoft said.

    Meanwhile, CVE-2024-20674 is a Windows Kerberos security feature bypass vulnerability rated as critical with a CVSS score of 8.8. In one scenario for this vulnerability, the attacker could convince a victim to connect to an attacker-controlled malicious application, Microsoft said. “Upon connecting, the malicious server could compromise the protocol,” the software giant added.

    Mozilla Firefox

    Hot on the heels of its market-dominant competitor Chrome, Mozilla’s Firefox has patched 15 security flaws in its latest update. Five of the bugs are rated as having a high severity, including CVE-2024-0741, an out-of-bounds write issue in Angle that could allow an attacker to corrupt memory, leading to an exploitable crash.

    An unchecked return value in TLS handshake code tracked as CVE-2024-0743 could also cause an exploitable crash.

    CVE-2024-0755 covers memory safety bugs fixed in Firefox 122, Firefox ESR 115.7, and Thunderbird 115.7. “Some of these bugs showed evidence of memory corruption and we presume that with enough effort some of these could have been exploited to run arbitrary code,” Mozilla said.

    Cisco

    Enterprise software giant Cisco has patched a vulnerability in multiple Cisco Unified Communications and Contact Center Solutions products that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on an affected device.

    Tracked as CVE-2024-20253 and with a whopping CVSS score of 9.9, Cisco said an attacker could exploit the vulnerability by sending a crafted message to a listening port of an affected device.

    “A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system with the privileges of the web services user,” Cisco said. “With access to the underlying operating system, the attacker could also establish root access on the affected device,” it warned.

    SAP

    SAP has issued 10 new security fixes as part of its January Security Patch Day, which includes several issues with a CVSS score of 9.1. CVE-2023-49583 is an escalation-of-privilege issue in applications developed through SAP Business Application Studio, SAP Web IDE Full-Stack, and SAP Web IDE for SAP HANA.

    Meanwhile, CVE-2023-50422 and CVE-2023-49583 are escalation-of-privilege issues in SAP Edge Integration Cell.

    Another notable flaw is CVE-2024-21737, a code injection vulnerability in SAP Application Interface Framework, which has a CVSS score of 8.4. “A vulnerable function module of the application allows an attacker to traverse through various layers and execute OS commands directly,” security firm Onapsis said. “Successful exploits can cause considerable impact on confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the application.”

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