Your device may be able to call emergency services if you get into trouble. It’s a genuine technological leap in a field where innovation is in short supply
Once, the launch of a new iPhone was a fulcrum around which my work calendar pivoted. A launch like that of the iPhone 14 last week would dictate the shape of the week, and not just because at least one member of the tech team had to be in San Francisco to cover it.
Even at the peak of its importance, it was a delicate dance. Each new iteration of the bestselling smartphone in the world is clearly an important event in the sector. New features and capabilities announced by Steve Jobs and, later, Tim Cook, can make or break billion-dollar industries overnight.
One smartphone is the same as the next. It has a camera, a screen, it plays music, runs apps and games, shoves the internet in the palm of your hand and forms a conduit for all your life to flow through. But if you broke it and bought a new one, it would do more or less exactly the same, perhaps in a dazzling new colour.
Andy Baio built a search engine to let you examine (a tiny portion of) the images used to train Stable Diffusion, one of a crop of groundbreaking image-generation AIs. It’s useful for sharpening the discussion around copyright and these technologies, and it doesn’t come out well for the tech.
“It is concerning that … in 2018 streaming platform YouTube started an ‘enhanced partnership’ with the Met, which has since facilitated a pervasive system of content moderation for drill rappers in the UK,” writes the Electronic Freedom Foundation.
My colleague Samuel has written a comprehensive guide to Apple’s iOS software updates for the iPhone and Watch – you can finally edit your messages post-send, for starters.
Instagram created Reels to try and kill TikTok. It’s not going well, as per this piece from the Wall Street Journal (£). Users spend a collective 17.6m hours per day watching Reels, far below TikTok’s 197.8m hours and, in the meantime, the site is alienating its core users.
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