Chrome OS 70, which Google plans to release in the second half of next month, will include native support for SMB file shares, giving it built-in access to files stored on Windows servers. With this, Chrome OS users can add SMB file shares to the Files app and use them to store and load documents. From a report: Currently, using these network resources requires the use of an extension that adds a similar ability to add file shares to the Files app. Google has been working to make Files a more capable application. As well as integrating support for networked files, the company is also experimenting with giving it more access to Android files, something that will streamline the use of Android applications by exposing their data files to Chrome OS apps. The SMB support helps smooth a pain point when mixing Chromebooks with other systems: it makes it easier to use Chrome OS with corporate file servers, home networked storage devices, and of course, Windows PCs. Instead of needing the extra extension to be installed, these things will just work out of the box.

David Pogue: Apparently, a lot of people hang their identities on what phones they carry. An iPhone person might feel personally affronted when a Samsung Galaxy gets a great review, and vice versa. Apple and Samsung just introduced their new fall 2018 smartphones, and it's clearer than ever: all smartphones have pretty much the same features. Therefore, it strikes many people as searingly important to remember which brand had those features first.
OS Features: Apple invented the touchscreen phone as we know it. The original 2007 iPhone brought us multitouch (pinch to zoom), an on-screen keyboard, auto-rotate, lists that scroll as though with momentum, and the apps-on-a-Home-page design that we all use to this day. Not surprisingly, then, Apple wins this category, having introduced 13 ideas, compared to Android's 10 (and Samsung's 1). The screen is the first thing you notice when you turn on a phone --how big, bright, and gorgeous it is. You can read the full review here. The final verdict: Apple leads the invention category, with 44 innovations, according to our calculations. Google's Android comes in second, with 31. And Samsung brings up the rear with 12 innovations. Now, if you count the number of times each company is listed as a Follower in the spreadsheet, you discover that Apple also seems to have stolen the most ideas. In part, that's because I'm pitting Apple against Google/Samsung (its phones use Google's software). As a result, no feature ever lists Google and Samsung as innovator+follower, or vice versa; they're always a single team.

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for Motherboard: In 2016, Apple's head of security surprised the attendees of one of the biggest security conference in the world by announcing a bug bounty program for Apple's mobile operating system iOS. At the beginning, Apple struggled to woo researchers and convince them to report high-value bugs. For the researchers, the main issue was that the bugs they discovered were too valuable to report to Apple, despite rewards as high as $200,000. Companies like GrayShift and Azimuth made an entire business out of exploiting vulnerabilities in Apple products, while other researchers didn't want to report bugs so they could keep doing research on iOS. But two years later, some researchers are finally reporting vulnerabilities to Apple, and the company has begun to award some researchers with bounties, Motherboard has learned.

[...] Adam Donefeld, a researcher at mobile security firm Zimperium said that he has submitted several bugs to Apple and received payments for the company. Donefeld was not part of the first batch of security researchers who were personally invited by Apple to visit its Cupertino campus and asked to join the program. But after submitting a few bugs, Donefeld told me, an Apple employee asked him if he wanted to be part of the bounty program in a phone call. "I know Apple pays people," Donefeld said in an online chat. "I'm certainly not the only payout." Another researcher, who asked to remain anonymous because they are worried about souring their relationship with Apple, said that they have submitted a few bugs and been awarded bounties, but has yet to be paid. [...] Two other researchers told Motherboard they also have concerns with or have had trouble with the program. One said they weren't paid for a bug they submitted (Motherboard could not independently confirm that the researcher did not get a payment), and another said they didn't want to participate in it at all, even after being invited. Further reading: Google Bug Hunter Urges Apple To Change Its iOS Security Culture; Asks Tim Cook To Donate $2.45 Million To Amnesty For His Unpaid iPhone Bug Bounties.

OnePlus CEO Carl Pei confirmed to TechRadar that the OnePlus 6T won't have a headphone jack. Instead, it will feature a larger battery that will be "substantial enough for users to realize." From the report: Our first line of questioning was obvious. Why? Why ditch the jack? Why ditch it now? For Pei, it's about timing, and creating the best smartphone experience. "When we started OnePlus, we set out to make the best possible smartphone, but making a great phone doesn't mean putting every component available into the device," he said. "You've got to make decisions that optimize the user experience, and understand that at times things that provide user value can also add friction. "We also had to think about the negative side [of removing the headphone jack] for our users. We found 59% of our community already owned wireless headphones earlier this year - and that was before we launched our Bullets Wireless headphones. "If we were to do that [remove the jack] two years ago, the percentage [of wireless headphones owners] would have been much lower and it would have caused a lot of friction for our users."

Pei went on to explain that there are user benefits to the removal of the port, which should bring some comfort to OnePlus fans already pouring one out for the headphone jack. "By removing the jack we've freed up more space, allowing us to put more new technology into the product," he said. "One of the big things is something our users have asked us for, improved battery life." Pei wouldn't be drawn on what the "new technology" will be, but we already know the OnePlus 6T will feature an in-display fingerprint scanner, which will eat up some of the space left by the exiting jack. Pei did mention they will include an adapter in the box to allow users to use wired headphone.

Rachel Metz reports via MIT Technology Review: Imagine a box, similar to a Wi-Fi router, that sits in your home and tracks all kinds of physiological signals as you move from room to room: breathing, heart rate, sleep, gait, and more. Dina Katabi, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, built this box in her lab. And in the not-so-distant future, she believes, it will be able to replace the array of expensive, bulky, uncomfortable gear we currently need to get clinical data about the body. Speaking at MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Wednesday, Katabi said the box she's been building for the last several years takes advantage of the fact that every time we move -- even if it's just a teeny, tiny bit, such as when we breathe -- we change the electromagnetic field surrounding us.

Her device transmits a low-power wireless signal throughout a space the size of a one- or two-bedroom apartment (even through walls), and the signal reflects off people's bodies. The device then uses machine learning to analyze those reflected signals and extract physiological data. So far, it has been installed in over 200 homes of both healthy people and those with conditions like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, depression, and pulmonary diseases, she said. Katabi cofounded a startup called Emerald Innovations to commercialize the technology and has already made the device available to biotech and pharmaceutical companies for studies.

Three years ago, Apple introduced 3D Touch for the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, a pressure-sensitive feature that uses capacitive sensors integrated into the smartphone's display to sense three degrees of pressure in a user's touch and respond differently based on the amount of pressure exerted. It's a neat idea as it has allowed users to interact with the user interface in a completely new way. Now, with the release of the new iPhone XR, Apple seems to be on the way to phasing it out. The Verge reports: While both the new iPhone XS and XS Max include 3D Touch, Apple has chosen not to include the feature on the iPhone XR. Yes, that phone is cheaper, and Apple had to strip out some features, but 3D Touch has been included on iPhones in that price range since it was introduced not too long ago, so this feels less like necessary cost savings and more like planned omission. There have always been a few core problems with 3D Touch. For one, its use often amounted to the right click of a mouse, which is funny coming from the company that famously refused to put a dedicated right button on its mice or trackpads. And selecting from those right click options was rarely faster or a substantially more useful way of getting something done than just tapping the button and manually navigating to where you needed to go. People also didn't know the feature was there. The iPhone did little to train users on 3D Touch. And even the people who knew it was there had no way to tell which icons supported it without just 3D pressing everything to see what happened.

Apple isn't entirely removing the concept of 3D Touch from the iPhone XR. Instead, the phone will include something Apple is calling Haptic Touch, which will make a click when you activate a button's secondary feature by pressing and holding it. But that replacement underscores just how useless 3D Touch has really become: it's not more than a very, very fancy long press. That's something phones have always been capable of. And despite the name, I've found long press features to be faster and easier to use than their 3D Touch equivalent. Instagram, for instance, lets you preview photos with a 3D Touch on the iPhone or a long press on Android. I find the Android version to be simpler and quicker. Here's what Apple's marketing leader, Phil Schiller, had to say about the feature back in 2015 when it was first introduced: "'Engineering-wise, the hardware to build a display that does what [3D Touch] does is unbelievably hard,' says Schiller. 'And we're going to waste a whole year of engineering -- really, two -- at a tremendous amount of cost and investment in manufacturing if it doesn't do something that [people] are going to use. If it's just a demo feature and a month later nobody is really using it, this is a huge waste of engineering talent.'"

Veteran journalist Om Malik writes: iPhoneXsMax -- When I heard the name and saw it up on the stage, I shuddered. Apple's name for its newest, biggest iPhone made one [Microsoft employee] quip on Twitter: "And I thought we sucked at naming. #AppleEvent iPhone Xs Max September Refresh CTP1"

Microsoft and other technology companies were mocked by Apple veterans for their naming conventions. But now Apple is doing the same -- fighting hard to come up with names that are fighting Samsung, Huawei, and many others when it comes to being tongue twisters. It is pretty sad to see that a company that took pride in its ability to communicate clearly and succinctly about its products, the company that was able to name them with such elan and made them memorable, has come. iPhoneX(s)Max.

The new iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max will use eSIM technology to allow users to use two phone lines on a single device. You could have a work or personal number, or an American and Canadian number if you travel across the border frequently. The reprogrammable SIM card is "soldered onto the iPhone's motherboard directly," and measures just 6 millimeters by 5 millimeters," reports Ars Technica, citing GSMArena.com. From the report: These handsets will have a new "dual SIM dual standby" option, one of which will be a nano SIM. In other words, they will have two distinct phone numbers. (Chinese models will have two SIM slots instead of the eSIM option.) Since their debut in 1991, traditional, physical SIM cards have decreased dramatically in size. eSIMs have already been around for nearly a year, since they were introduced into the Apple Watch and Google Pixel 2, among other devices.

When Apple unveiled the iPhone Xs and Xs Max earlier today, it said they will contain the A12 Bionic chip -- the first smartphone processor to be made using 7nm manufacturing technology. But, as IEEE Spectrum points out, Huawei made the same claim late last month when it unveiled the Kirin 980 system on a chip. From the report: Apple's new A12 Bionic is made up of four CPU cores, six GPU cores, and an 8-core "neural engine" to handle machine learning tasks. According to Apple, the neural engine can perform 5 trillion operations per second -- an eight-fold boost -- and consumes one-tenth the energy of its previous incarnation. Of the GPU cores, two are designed for performance and are 15 percent faster than their predecessors. The other four are built for efficiency, with a 50 percent improvement on that metric. The system can decide which combination of the three types of cores will run a task most efficiently.

Huawei's chip, the Kirin 980, was unveiled at the IFA 2018 in Berlin on 31 August. It packs 6.9 billion transistors onto a one-square-centimeter chip. The company says it's the first chip to use processors based on Arm's Cortex-A76, which is 75 percent more powerful and 58 percent more efficient compared to its predecessors the A73 and A75. It has 8 cores, two big, high-performance ones based on the A76, two middle-performance ones that are also A76s, and four smaller, high-efficiency cores based on a Cortex-A55 design. The system runs on a variation of Arm's big.LITTLE architecture, in which immediate, intensive workloads are handled by the big processors while sustained background tasks are the job of the little ones. Kirin 980's GPU component is called the Mali-G76, and it offers a 46 percent performance boost and a 178 percent efficiency improvement from the previous generation. The chip also has a dual-core neural processing unit that more than doubles the number of images it can recognize to 4,500 images per minute. Apple will be the first to bring the 7nm chip in volume to market, as Huawei is expected to to start shipping its Mate 20 series phone (with the 7nm chip) a month or two later. Qualcomm also announced late last month that it's begun sampling its 7nm next-gen Snapdragon SoC. As IEEE Spectrum notes, the real winner is TSMC, which is making all three processors.

Apple just killed the iPhone's headphone jack for good. Not only is the company no longer selling iPhones with headphone jacks, as they've removed the iPhone SE and 6s from their website, but they're no longer including a Lightning to 3.5mm headphone jack adapter with the purchase of a new 2018 iPhone. The Verge also reports that the company is discontinuing the iPhone X with the introduction of its three new iPhones today. From the report: With the iPhone XS starting at a price of $999, and the addition of the cheaper $749 iPhone XR announced today, the iPhone X has become redundant. [...] There's no longer a good reason to shell out for the more expensive iPhone X, except maybe the exclusivity of owning a phone that was ushered in with the 10th anniversary of the original iPhone. It was the first to introduce the now-ubiquitous notch that's influenced the entire mobile industry with a wave of copycat designs, and the first iPhone with Face ID. It introduced intuitive gesture controls and with the phone came wireless charging, plus AirPods.

Apple has unveiled its next-generation Apple Watch Series 4 smartwatch, featuring a larger display with smaller bezels, a 64-bit processor that's twice as fast as the previous generation, and electrocardiography (ECG) support. 9to5Mac reports: In terms of hardware, the Digital Crown has been completely reengineered with haptic feedback. For instance, as you flip through content in the Podcast application. The speaker is also over 50 percent louder, according to [Apple COO Jeff Williams]. As we reported earlier this week, the Apple Watch Series 4 uses a new 64-bit processor that offers performance up to two times faster performance. There's also a next-generation accelerometer gyroscope, which Williams says allows Apple Watch to detect a fall. When a fall is detected, Apple Watch will send an alert prompting you to call emergency services. If it senses you are immobile for more than 1 minute, the call will be started automatically.

As for heart features, Apple Watch is now capable of detecting a low rate. The device will also now screen your heart rhythm, allowing it to detect atrial fibrillation. As expected, Apple Watch Series 4 also now supports ECG -- which measures the electrical activity of the heart. With Apple Watch, you can take an ECG directly on the Apple Watch by putting your finger directly on the digital crown. The feature -- as well as irregular heart rate detection -- has received FDA clearance. Williams says that all health and fitness is encrypted on-device and in the cloud. Battery life on Apple Watch Series 4 is the same, 18-hours as before. Outdoor workout time is now 6 hours. In terms of pricing and colors, the Apple Watch Series 4 will start at $399 for the GPS model and $499 for the cellular model, with preorders starting September 14th. The aluminum model will feature space gray, silver, and black color configurations, while the stainless steel model will feature gold, polished black, and space black color configurations.

Apple on Wednesday announced its 2018 flagship phones: the 5.8-inch iPhone Xs and 6.5-inch iPhone Xs Max. From a report: As the direct sequel to the iPhone X, the iPhone Xs retains its predecessor's marquee features: a stainless steel frame and 5.8-inch, edge-to-edge Super Retina display, interrupted by a depth-sensing Face ID camera inside a black "notch." The new model promises the best liquid resistance in any iPhone, with a screen that's now HDR10 and Dolby Vision-certified.

As expected, Apple also introduced a larger version of the iPhone Xs called the iPhone Xs Max. While the iPhone Xs packs a 5.8-inch OLED screen into a footprint roughly the size of its former 4.7-inch iPhone 6, 6s, 7, and 8 models, the Max version includes a 6.5-inch screen within a chassis sized like the 5.5-inch-screened iPhone 6 Plus and its successors. [...]

The iPhone Xs has a 2436 by 1125 screen, while the Xs Max has a 2688 by 1242 screen, the largest ever in an iPhone. Apple's calling it "Max" because it's bigger than the iPhones' past Plus-sized displays. Apple also says that the new phones have wider stereo sound fields than before.

[...] The handsets are powered by A12 Bionic, a 6-core, 7nm CPU with 2 performance cores that deliver up to 15 percent speeds and 40 percent lower power, with 4 efficiency cores running at up to 50 percent lower power. Apple is touting a 50 percent GPU performance improvement over the A11 Bionic, as well. It also has a second-generation Neural Engine, and can process 5 trillion operations per second, up from 600 billion the year before. Both the new iPhones sport a dual-camera system:12MP wide-angle+12MP telephoto. The new iPhones can accommodate up to 512 GB of internal storage. The base models of iPhone Xs and iPhone Xs Max start at $999 and $1,099 respectively. More on this here. On the sidelines, Apple said it was inching closer to selling its two-billionth iOS device.

The company also announced the iPhone Xr, the cheapest among the three handsets announced today, that sports a 6.1-inch LCD display (instead of OLED screen) and does not offer 3D Touch functionality. Its base model starts at $749. All of these handsets go on sale later this month.

T-Mobile and Ericsson have signed a multi-year $3.5 billion agreement to build out T-Mobile's 5G infrastructure. The telecommunications company "will deploy Ericsson's Radio System portfolio, including 5G New Radio and NR hardware and software compliant with 3GPP standards," reports ZDNet. From the report: According to the companies, the contract also encompasses Ericsson's digital services solutions, including dynamic orchestration, business support systems or BSS, and Ericsson Cloud Core. Meanwhile, T-Mobile's already installed base of Ericsson Radio System radios will be able to run 5G NR technology via remote software installation. T-Mobile and Ericsson rival Nokia also announced a $3.5 billion 5G deal back in July. Add it up and T-Mobile is investing $7 billion in 5G between the two companies. As part the Nokia agreement, T-Mobile said it would use Nokia's 5G network technology including software, services and hardware. The carrier also said Nokia would help make its "600 MHz and 28 GHz millimeter wave 5G capabilities compliant with 3GPP 5G New Radio (NR) standards" -- echoing its current plans with Ericsson. In other 5G-related news, Verizon will begin offering installation of its 5G home broadband in select markets on October 1st. "Customers [in Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Sacramento] will be able to begin ordering service once the installation is complete, with pricing set at $50 for Verizon Wireless customers and $70 for non-VZW customers," reports PhoneDog. Network speeds are expected to be around 300Mbps, with peak speeds nearing 1Gbps. There will also be no data caps.

A new poll of 1,141 teenagers shows that teenagers prefer to text their friends than talk in person. The findings come from Common Sense Media's 2018 Social Media, Social Life survey. Fortune reports: Only 15% of teens said Facebook was their main social media site, down from 68% in 2012. Snapchat is now the main site for 41% of teenagers, followed by Instagram at 22%. In addition, this year's survey saw texting (35%) surpass in-person (32%) as teens' favorite way to communicate with friends. In 2012, 49% preferred to communicate in person, versus 33% who preferred texting.

[M]ore teens said that social media had a positive effect on their levels of loneliness, depression, and anxiety than those who said it had a negative one, but it seems to have the opposite effect on teens who score low on the authors' social-emotional well-being scale. Of those, 70% said they sometimes feel left out when using social media, 43% feel bad if no one likes or comments on their posts, and 35% said they had been cyberbullied. They were also more likely to say that social media was "extremely" or "every" important, compared to their peers who score high on the scale.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Researchers at KU Leuven have figured out a way to spoof Tesla's key fob system, as first reported by Wired. The result would let an attacker steal a Tesla simply by walking past the owner and cloning his key. The attack is particularly significant because Tesla pioneered the keyless entry concept, which has since spread to most luxury cars. This particular attack seems to have only worked on Model S units shipped before June, and in an update last week, Tesla pushed out an update that strengthened the encryption for the remaining vehicles. More importantly, the company added the option to require a PIN password before the car will start, effectively adding two-factor to your car. Tesla owners can add the PIN by disabling Passive Entry in the "Doors & Locks" section of "Settings."

The attack itself is fairly involved. Because of the back-and-forth protocol, attackers would first have to sniff out the car's Radio ID (broadcast from the car at all times), then relay that ID broadcast to a victim's key fob and listen for the response, typically from within three feet of the fob. If they can do that back-and-forth twice, the research team found they can work back to the secret key powering the fob's responses, letting them unlock the car and start the engine.

Qualcomm has unveiled the long-awaited successor to its Snapdragon Wear 2100 smartwatch chipset, the Snapdragon Wear 3100. The new high-end chipset is "based on a brand-new architecture Qualcomm claims is the most efficient it's ever created, optimized for wearables-specific use cases like step tracking, heart rate monitoring, and always-on connectivity," reports VentureBeat. From the report: [T]he company's engineers stuffed the Snapdragon Wear 3100 with a four A7 cores and two secondary chips -- a digital signal processor (DSP) and an ultra-low power coprocessor (QCC1110) -- in what Qualcomm calls a "big-small-tiny" arrangement. The "big" A7 cores handle intensive, complex tasks like switching between apps, while the "small" and "tiny" DSP and coprocessor perform sensor fusion and other background chores. The way Pankaj Kedia, senior director and business lead at Qualcomm's Smart Wearable division, tells it, the coprocessor -- a diminutive 5.2mm x 4mm chip that's the product of more than five years of research -- is the inarguable showrunner. It taps a Qualcomm-designed memory module that draws a mere 0.6 volts of power, and it's altogether 20 times more power-efficient than the A7 cores.

It's principally meant for light workloads like listening for the wake phrases that precede voice commands ("OK, Google"), streaming music in the background, and updating digital watch faces. However, it's designed to be extensible -- OEMs can tap the coprocessor for real-time sleep and activity monitoring, for example, or for heart rate tracking. The coprocessor -- along with the DSP and A7 cores -- drive three smartwatch operating modes intended to boost battery life. Enhanced ambient mode displays a basic watch face UI in up to 16 colors, with a smoothly animated second hand, live complications, and ambient brightness. Traditional watch mode dispenses with those bells and whistles in favor of a basic analog watch face. Dedicated sports mode -- which isn't available at launch, but will arrive later with sports OEMs, Kedia said -- enables core features like heart rate and GPS tracking, but nothing else. When compared to the Wear 2100, the Wear 3100 offers significantly improved battery life. Here's a comparison (from Qualcomm) of the Wear 3100 and Wear 2100's power consumption:

-Lowest power mode: 67 percent lower
-GPS and location batching: 49 percent lower
-Keyword detection: 43 percent lower
-Clock update once per minute: 35 percent lower
-MP3 playback: 34 percent lower
-Voice queries over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi: 13 percent lower

"The translates to gains of about four to twelve hours in practice (depending on the form factor), or between a day and a half to two days of battery life," reports VentureBeat. "In traditional watch mode, Wear 3100 devices can last up to a week on a charge with 20 percent battery (or up to 30 days with full battery), according to Qualcomm, or 15 hours in dedicated sports mode (with a 450mAh battery)." Some other features include a new more-accepted NFC chip, an improved 4G LTE modem, and a new power management system to improve the efficiency of charging. We can expect the 3100 to appear in smartwatches "this holiday season."

Antarctica has become the best-mapped continent on Earth with a new high-resolution terrain map showing the ice-covered landmass in unprecedented detail. From a report: According to the scientists at Ohio State University and the University of Minnesota who created the imagery, Antarctica is now the best-mapped continent on Earth. The Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica (REMA) was constructed using hundreds of thousands of satellite images taken between 2009 and 2017, Earther reports. A supercomputer assembled the massive amounts of data, including the elevation of the land over time, and created REMA, an immensely detailed topographical map, with a file size over 150 terabytes. The new map has a resolution of 2 to 8 meters, compared to the usual 1,000 meters, says an Ohio State press release. According to The New York Times, the detail of this new map is the equivalent of being able to see down to a car, or smaller, when before you could only see the whole of Central Park. Scientists now know the elevation of every point of Antarctica, with an error margin of just a few feet.

Apple is recalling a "small percentage" of iPhone 8 devices due to an issue with the logic board. The affected devices may suddenly freeze or restart -- symptoms that may show up at any time. Digital Trends reports: Apple has launched a repair program for the iPhone 8, and whether your device is exhibiting issues or not, it may be a part of the recall. It's important to note that only iPhone 8 models are being recalled here -- the iPhone 8 Plus seems to have sidestepped the issue completely. Specifically, it seems like some iPhone 8 models manufactured between September 2017 and March 2018, and sold in the U.S., New Zealand, Australia, China, India, and Japan, are affected by the issue. If you bought your phone during that time and in one of those regions, you may well be affected. If you have an iPhone 8, you can copy and paste the serial number in Apple's iPhone 8 checker tool. There are a few ways to get your device fixed if it is affected. "First, you could go to an Apple Authorized Service Provider -- you can find one here," reports Digital Trends. "Second, you could go straight to an Apple Store. Last but not least, you could contact Apple Support, and they'll send you a prepaid shipping box for you to send in your iPhone for repair."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple, the world's most valuable company, said proposed U.S. tariffs on $200 billion worth of products imported from China will raise prices for some of its popular consumer goods such as the Apple Watch and AirPods headphones. The Mac mini desktop computer, Apple Pencil stylus accessory for iPads, various chargers and adapters and tooling equipment used to manufacturer and design some products in the U.S. will also be affected, the Cupertino, California-based company told the Office of U.S. Trade Representative in a letter dated Sept 5.

The company said the tariffs would "show up as a tax on U.S. consumers" and "increase the cost of Apple products that our customers have come to rely on in their daily lives." Beyond the core products, Apple said accessories like the HomePod speaker, some Beats speakers, AirPort and Time Capsule internet routers, the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad, and leather cases for the iPhone, iPad, MacBook and Apple Pencil would be affected. It said some of the parts it relies on for product development, including processors and research equipment, would also be hit by the tariffs. On Friday, President Trump said he's prepared to impose tariffs on an additional $267 billion in Chinese imports, which would affect almost every category of consumer goods, according to analysts. He cites unfair trade practices as a reason for the tariffs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Twitter is showing some users of its desktop website a new user interface that is designed to be faster and to feature support for the recently added bookmarks feature (supported in the iOS and Android clients but not, currently, the main website), a data-saver mode, and a night mode. These users have been selected at random and moved over to the new interface so they can test the interface and provide feedback. The new interface isn't all that different from the old one: it's organized a little differently, with a two-column layout instead of the three columns currently used, but overall it will feel familiar to anyone who has used the microblogging platform before. What makes this move interesting isn't the specifics of the interface itself, but the technology it's built on.

The new interface isn't actually new at all. It has been available for some time now as mobile.twitter.com, Twitter's mobile-friendly Web interface. In turn, that same Web interface is used to drive the Windows 10 app, the KaiOS platform for "smart feature phones," and the recently released Twitter Lite app for Android. This is why it has the data-saver mode; it has been designed with an eye on those users who suffer from poor or expensive bandwidth or have underpowered devices. This mobile site is perhaps one of the most prominent instances of what could be a new breed of Web application: the Progressive Web Application (PWA). PWAs are Web applications that build on certain modern browser features to provide an experience that is much more like that of a traditional application. For example, PWAs can support offline operation using service workers (a way of running JavaScript in the background that can respond to events and make network requests that degrade gracefully if the network is unavailable); they integrate with platform features such as notifications; they're also designed so that they could be pinned to app launchers and home screens and treated as if they were "real" applications rather than merely webpages.