The best computers for students

What would a back-to-school guide be without a healthy dose of computer recs? Other than a small dorm TV, perhaps, it’s the single most expensive investment you’re likely to make as you begin college — and if you’re graduating or pursuing an advanced degree, it’s possible you’ve been waiting patiently for a reason to upgrade.

As you can imagine, our guide includes a slew of laptops and convertibles (eight, to be exact), along with a detachable (that would be the new Surface Pro) and a pair of desktops, in case you’re content to work just in the dorm. And that’s not counting the three gaming notebooks we recommend in our shopping guide for PC gamers! With starting prices ranging from $469 to $1,550, and screen sizes running the gamut from 12 inches to 27, we found something for just about every use case.

Source: Engadget’s 2017 Back to School Guide

‘Enhanced’ security screenings begin for travelers flying into the US

If you breathed a sigh of relief when the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would not be extending its laptop ban to US inbound flights from Europe, we’ve got some not-great news for you. Starting today, people flying into the US from another country should expect a much longer wait at security due to increased scrutiny.

The so-called “laptop ban” — which actually extends to anything larger than a smartphone — was put into place because of worry of terrorists’ increased interest in airlines combined with the concern that a bomb could be placed within a laptop or tablet. Last month, the DHS decided it would not extend the laptop ban, but it would increase security measures for flights originating outside the US. Those enhancements are going into effect starting today.

If you’re flying into the US, you can expect a greater scrutiny of your electronics. You may be asked to unpack your carry on bags so security officials can examine these devices. You can also expect more swabbing and bomb-sniffing dogs. And it’s going to take longer: CNN reports that Mexican airports are advising that travelers arrive three hours prior to scheduled flights in order to ensure passengers have time to get through the screenings. Yeesh.

Via: The Verge

Focusing on business might resurrect Google Glass

It’s hard to believe that it’s been more than five years since Google first announced Project Glass, its wearable-glasses-mounted computer. What I remember most about Google Glass was hype: The company’s demonstration at I/O 2012 was perhaps the most dramatic thing I’ve ever seen at a tech conference. It featured skydiving and BMX bikers wearing Glass, broadcasting their first-person experience straight to the people in the room.

It was wild and impressive, but Google misjudged how that hype would translate into actual consumer usage. The look of someone wearing a camera on her face was too alienating, and Google never presented a complete vision of what Glass could do. That was part of the plan: The Explorer Edition that Google sold to early adopters was mostly meant for developers to use and figure out what apps made sense for it. But Glass never progressed beyond that experimental phase, and it was taken off the market in Jan. 2015, before a consumer edition even shipped.

Google never said Glass was dead, but it was clear the company’s vision of a mass-market consumer product wasn’t happening. So the company spent two years retooling and refocusing, and now Glass is back — as an enterprise product meant to help workers get tricky jobs done. It’s a rare example of parent company Alphabet significantly pulling back the ambition and scope of a product to serve a small market. In doing so, Google may give Microsoft’s Hololens some unexpected competition in the augmented reality space.

The company is also finally doing what it should have done with Glass in the first place: giving a concrete reason for it to exist. As much of a flop as Glass was with consumers, it appears to have been a modest, underground success with businesses. Glass project lead Jay Kothari (from Alphabet’s X team) wrote that more than 50 companies have been using it in the two years since it was pulled off the market, including big names like Boeing, DHL and Volkswagen. All the feedback that Alphabet received from those partners in the past few years is what’s led to today’s release. But rather than sell Glass directly to businesses, Alphabet has enlisted partners that work with companies to customize the product for their needs.

With this narrow, enterprise focus, Alphabet may have figured out how to make Glass into a viable business. It doesn’t have to sell consumers on the wild fantasies it dreamed up with the first Glass, and it doesn’t have to worry about retail sales — something that’s long been an Achilles’ heel for the company. Instead, it can keep making inroads with companies, slowly recouping what was surely a massive investment made in Glass many years ago.

It’s a strangely Microsoft-like strategy. Google’s competitor in Redmond has had no problem focusing on enterprise and making products to fit various niche markets, often with little to no consumer crossover. On the other hand, Google wants everyone using its services. Its most popular products — Android, Chrome, Search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube and Play — all have more than a billion users, while Drive and Photos have more than half a billion. Not coincidentally, they’re also Google’s best products. But that’s probably why Glass has moved out of Google proper into one of Alphabet’s more mysterious and experimental groups, the X team.

Google may have given up on making Glass a mainstream product, but what it does next may go a long way toward defining the augmented reality scene. Companies big and small are trying to figure out AR’s place in the world, but none have been terribly successful thus far (with the notable exception of Niantic’s Pokemon Go).

By focusing on businesses, Alphabet could get ahead of the many other companies selling augmented reality hardware, simply due to its unmatched scale. There’s also Google’s existing relationships with many massive companies through its G Suite set of products. Of course, Microsoft has a similar set of advantages, but Glass is a more unobtrusive and lightweight product when compared to Hololens, which makes it more suitable in a lot of situations.

As for the consumer future of Glass, it still feels like a long shot. Snap’s photo-taking Spectacles didn’t incite the same outrage that Glass did, though interest in them seems to have dropped since their splashy launch last fall. But lest we forget, smartphones first found success by catering to a business market, with BlackBerry first succeeding with enterprise before tapping into the consumer market. Apple then flipped the script entirely with the iPhone, but it wouldn’t have been as successful if ordinary users weren’t coming face-to-face with devices like the BlackBerry and Palm Treo.

But even if consumers never adopt Glass, the product seems to have finally found a home. Gone is the pie-in-the-sky, do-anything future that accompanied its introduction, replaced instead by a more humble role in the sprawling world of Alphabet. But if Glass can find success inside big companies, it might just shed its label as one of the biggest tech flops of the past decade.

Julia Roberts strikes two-season Amazon TV deal with ‘Homecoming’

Streaming services have been able to shell out the money to attract pretty high profile actors for their original TV shows, and Amazon Prime Video just may have nabbed the biggest one yet. Amazon has greenlighted two seasons of a series called Homecoming starring Julia Roberts.

The show is based on a podcast of the same name, which featured stars such as Catherine Keener, Oscar Isaac and David Schwimmer. The podcast’s second season premieres today. It’s a thriller set at a secret government facility. Roberts will play a caseworker at the organization; her interest in the role was first reported back in early June.

The half-hour drama will be written by the creator of Mr. Robot, Sam Esmail, who will also serve as executive producer. Bidding for the show was incredibly competitive, according to Deadline. Roberts will also serve as an executive producer on the series.

Via: Variety

Source: Deadline

Google Play wants to help users find apps with curated lists

With so many new apps constantly hitting the market, it can be really difficult for users to find what they want and for developers to get their product noticed. To help solve that problem, Google Play has added a new feature to its Editors’ Choice section — editorial pages that compile selections of apps, hand-picked by Google Play editors. These pages will highlight apps that offer the best experiences on Android, which will be grouped by themes like fitness, video calling and puzzle games. And the selections will come with descriptions as to why the editors liked them.

The move towards curation is something Apple has adopted as well. Its App Store redesign includes curated and personalized selections of apps, blog posts and lists, all of which are meant to help users find apps they actually want. And to help developers, description pages were tweaked to allow for longer, more blog-like notes.

Google Play’s new editorial pages are up today in the US as well as Australia, Canada, the UK, Japan and South Korea and will be made available in other countries soon.

Your Amazon account is all you need to pay at retail shops

If you’ve ever wished you could use your Amazon account at physical stores (outside of Amazon’s), we’ve got good news. The internet giant is trotting out a Pay Places feature that expands Amazon Pay to make purchases at brick-and-mortar shops. So long as you have Amazon’s mobile app, you can order ahead using an online account you’ve likely had for years.

The feature is only available at TGI Friday’s restaurants in the US right now, and then only in a handful of cities (Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, Richmond, Washington DC and Wilkes-Barre). It’ll take a long while before you can regularly lean on your Amazon account for your weekly shopping routine.

When it does expand, though, it could represent a big step toward Amazon’s dreams of being as influential in retail as it is online. It’s technically competition for PayPal’s in-store solution, but Amazon’s sheer size and rapidly growing retail presence could make it relatively commonplace. The tricky part for Amazon is simply convincing partners to sign up. After all, many retailers see Amazon as a threat — why would they support it? Jeff Bezos and crew may have to bend over backward to persuade shops that this could lead to more purchases in the long run.

Source: TechCrunch

Trump endorses FCC’s plan to roll back net neutrality

After last week’s heavily participated in Day of Action, where thousands of companies and groups spoke out against the FCC’s plan to roll back regulations put in place in 2015, Press Secretary Sean Spicer was asked during a press briefing what the president thought of net neutrality. Spicer said he didn’t know, which is a rather ridiculous response given all of the current attention the topic is getting.

Spicer did say he would get more information in regards to Trump’s position and yesterday, Principal Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Sanders provided the administration’s stance. Sanders said that it believed that the “rules of the road” were important for everyone to abide by, but added, “With that said, the previous administration went about this the wrong way by imposing rules on ISPs through the FCC’s Title II rulemaking power. We support the FCC chair’s efforts to review and consider rolling back these rules, and believe that the best way to get fair rules for everyone is for Congress to take action and create regulatory and economic certainty.”

In light of the FCC’s plan, in May, the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) filed a FOIA request for the 47,000 net neutrality complaints the agency has received since June of 2015 and requested that the FCC extend the comment deadline for its proposal to 60 sixty days after it complies with the FOIA request. As Ars Technica reports, The NHMC says that those complaints are necessary for properly analyzing the rollback proposal.

The FCC denied the extension to the initial comment period, which closed earlier this week, and said that the FOIA request is too burdensome, therefore it won’t be releasing all of the complaints. The Department of Justice FOIA guide says, “[The] fact that a FOIA request is very broad or “burdensome” in its magnitude does not, in and of itself, entitle an agency to deny that request on the basis that it does not “reasonably describe” the records sought. The key factor is the ability of an agency’s staff to reasonably ascertain exactly which records are being requested and then locate them.” But it also cites a federal appeals decision that says broad requests, regardless of how easy it is to find the information, can “impose an unreasonable burden upon the agency.” So, it’s unclear whether the FCC is in the wrong by not releasing all of the complaints.

Instead, the FCC released just 1,000 of the complaints which the NMHC said, “It’s important to remember that the 1,000 complaints received were incomplete and included nothing about the carrier response or how the complaints were resolved.”

As we move through the consideration stages of the FCC’s proposal, this lack of transparency in regards to potentially persistent net neutrality issues doesn’t bode well for the decision-making process. The FCC will be accepting reply comments on the proposal until August 16th.

Source: White House, Ars Technica

Questionable Rumor Says Apple May Introduce New iPhone SE at Event in Late August

A questionable rumor has surfaced today suggesting Apple could unveil a new iPhone SE next month, but it might just be more noise in iPhone silly season.

The rumor comes from French-language blog iGeneration, which cited an unnamed source claiming Apple will hold a product event in late August to introduce an updated version of the 4-inch smartphone.

Mickaël Bazoge, the author of the article, told MacRumors that he received the info from a “new source” with an unproven track record. He expressed some skepticism, but added that the source “seems reliable.”

The timeline is immediately questionable given Apple has never introduced any new iPhone model in August. Beyond the current iPhone SE and iPhone 4s in March 2016 and October 2011 respectively, Apple has officially debuted all other iPhone models at events in June or September each year.

Moreover, given the current iPhone SE essentially has iPhone 6s tech specs, the next model’s tech specs would likely be closer to the iPhone 7. And if that happens in August, then the new iPhone SE would be nearly as powerful as the iPhone 7 with a much cheaper price tag, potentially cannibalizing Apple’s sales.

There have also been few if any rumors about a new iPhone SE. Back in November 2016, KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said it was unlikely that Apple would release a new iPhone SE in the first half of this year. That claim proved to be accurate, but Kuo hasn’t outlined any new predictions since then.

When introducing the iPhone SE, Apple acknowledged that some people simply love smaller phones, and revealed that it sold 30 million 4-inch iPhones in 2015. The device looks like an iPhone 5s, but it has newer tech specs, including a twice-as-fast A9 chip and a 12-megapixel rear-facing camera.

iPhone SE remains Apple’s cheapest smartphone, starting at $399 in the United States. Today’s rumor claims the next-generation model could start at €399 in Europe, down from €489 currently. The rumor also says Apple will hold a second event in October to introduce the supposedly delayed “iPhone 8.”

Apple doubled the current iPhone SE’s storage capacities to 32GB and 128GB, up from 16GB and 64GB, in March.

Related Roundup: iPhone SE
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Buyer’s Guide: iPhone SE (Caution)
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‘Amazon Pay Places’ Lets You Make Real-World Purchases, Starting with TGI Friday’s Pickup Orders

Amazon today announced a new feature coming to its iOS and Android apps called “Amazon Pay Places,” which will let users pay for in store items and order ahead meals using the payment information saved in their Amazon accounts (via TechCrunch).

Amazon is opening up the feature with a small scale launch, however, and only enabling pay-ahead food orders through one restaurant, TGI Friday’s, at locations in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Richmond, Virginia, and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

To use Amazon Pay Places, users on the Amazon iOS mobile app can tap on the hamburger icon to find “Programs and Features” in the navigation tab, where Amazon Pay Places will be located. When tapped, users will be able to browse TGI Friday’s menu, place an order, and pay directly within the app.

Amazon is today introducing a new feature called Amazon Pay Places, that allows customers to pay for in-store and order ahead shopping experiences using their Amazon app. That is, instead of using cash, check, credit or debit while shopping out in the real world, you can just use your Amazon account information instead.

According to TechCrunch, Amazon Pay Places will eventually encompass multiple in-store and “physical world” retail applications in the future, placing the Amazon iOS app as more of a potential Apple Pay competitor than the initial launch’s focus on ordering ahead. Amazon didn’t mention when new partners will be announced for Pay Places, or when the feature might launch in markets outside of the United States, where it will currently only be supported.

Amazon Pay Places is an expansion on the company’s current “Amazon Pay” checkout option, which allows retailers to place a button on their websites to give users an easy checkout option, similar to PayPal. With Pay Places, the company is now looking to slowly expand the use cases of Amazon Pay out into stores and restaurants in the real world, although it remains unclear how such in-store transactions will work.

Tag: Amazon
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Apple Releases iOS 10.3.3 With Bug Fixes and Security Improvements

Apple today released iOS 10.3.3 to the public following several weeks of beta testing with six betas provided to developers and public beta testers. iOS 10.3.3 comes more than two months after the launch of iOS 10.3.2, a minor bug fix update.

iOS 10.3.3 is a free over-the-air update available to all users with a compatible iOS device. It can also be downloaded and installed on iOS devices using iTunes on a Mac or PC.

No outward-facing changes or features were discovered during the short beta testing period, so it appears iOS 10.3.3 focuses on bug fixes, security enhancements, and other minor improvements, much like iOS 10.3.2.

Apple’s work on iOS 10 is winding down as the company prepares to launch the next-generation version of iOS, iOS 11, which first debuted at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June. iOS 11 will see a release in the fall following a summer of beta testing. With work shifting to iOS 11, iOS 10.3.3 is likely to be one of the final updates we see to iOS 10.

Related Roundup: iOS 10
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