Apple Likely to Expand Apple Watch Supply Chain Following Third Quarter Sales Growth

Apple is likely to expand its supply chain for Apple Watch, following significant unit growth for the wearable over the third fiscal consecutive quarter this year (via DigiTimes).

Apple Watch’s overall shipments are expected to reach at least 25 million units in 2018 and most of the sales will be contributed by first-time buyers instead of replacement demand from users of previous-generation models, the sources estimated.

During last week’s earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook said Apple Watch had seen unit growth of over 50 percent for the third consecutive quarter and “continues to be the best selling and most loved smartwatch in the world”.

The fiscal quarter ended September 30, so it’s not clear how many Apple Watch Series 3 units were included in the recorded growth and Apple doesn’t provide a breakdown of numbers. The Apple Watch Series 3 was released on September 22. Cook also revealed that Apple’s entire wearables business was up 75 percent year over year in the fourth quarter, and in fiscal 2017, already generated the annual revenue of a Fortune 400 company.

Apple’s upstream suppliers include Quanta Computer, Universal Scientific Industrial (USI), Career Technology, Kinsus Interconnect Technology and E&R Engineering, all of which are expected to see increasing orders for the Apple Watch, according to sources.

Foxconn affiliate ShunSin Technology has also recently landed orders for providing SiP (system in package) packaging services to Apple Watch and are said to begin the supply in March 2018. The fact that ShunSin is entering the supply chain means Foxconn may also have interest in obtaining Apple Watch assembly orders, according to market watchers.

Related Roundups: Apple Watch, watchOS 4Buyer’s Guide: Apple Watch (Buy Now)
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Interactive fiction for smart speakers is the BBC’s latest experiment

Smart home speakers have quickly become the hot gadget people didn’t know they wanted. They can answer your movie trivia questions, call a cab, turn your heating on and do your shopping for you. They’re gaining new features every day, but are more than just a utility product. These speakers are a ripe platform for all kinds of screen-free entertainment, and I’m not just talking about streaming a Spotify playlist. Earplay is a popular Alexa skill that tells interactive stories, for example, and never one to be late to a fledgling medium, the BBC has taken note. In one of its many experiments outside the bread and butter of broadcast TV, the BBC is releasing its first immersive audio tale today: The Inspection Chamber.

Like any good sci-fi story, The Inspection Chamber drops you into a disorientating situation without feeding you much context beforehand. A voice that sounds a lot like GLaDOS from the Portal games simply explains you are being held… somewhere for cataloguing. The sinister overtones quickly dissipate as we meet the rest of the supporting cast: A guy and girl (not that I’m assuming species here) with all the enthusiasm of workers stuck in a monotonous, dead-end cubicle job.

Jaded by what, to them, is the humdrum, repetitive task of categorizing yet another thing for addition to an intergalactic database of sorts, they seem vaguely keen to get your processing over with as quickly as possible. After all, you’re the final entry that needs making before this loosely defined job is complete and they can, for lack of a more descriptive phrase, move on. And the fact that the auto-tuned AI assistant is getting progressively glitchier and more useless by the minute isn’t exactly speeding up the process. The human-sounding characters have to put you ‘on hold’ occasionally while they deal with this or that. Over the muffled elevator music an automated message congratulates you on being near the front of the queue, and that you should be dealt with any decade now.

I won’t spoil the whole, nearly 20-minute experience by running through it scene by scene, as it’s genuinely fun and entertaining should you get the chance to listen yourself. It’smore Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy than dark and twisted Twilight Zone. Story-telling isn’t playing second fiddle to experimenting with a new format here, either. The voice acting is well done, the narrative tiptoes a line between menacing and comedic throughout, and as a listener you get this strange sense of power slowly shifting in your direction as the AI character, mid-meltdown, begins to take a, err, liking to you.

Rosina Sound, the audio production company that originally approached the BBC with a collaboration in mind, went through many iterations of The Inspection Chamber before settling on the finished article. The attention paid to the story arc and dialogue shows. The Inspection Chamber isn’t a ‘choose your own adventure’ type deal. You can’t win, or die, or complete it, or restart it multiple times and head down different paths. In fact, the story only branches at a very obvious point towards the end of the story. The goal wasn’t to create a game, but something in between that and an audiobook; something more immersive and engaging, but not competitive. You’re a character in the story, but don’t steer it.

The way you actually interact with the narrative is quite clever in that respect. During the 20-minute playthrough, you are asked questions pretty regularly. Early on, when the AI is glitching out, you’re asked to pick a best-fit category for yourself from a silly, nonsensical list. These type of interactions don’t take the story down a different path, though. Instead, your choice forms part of a punchline later down the road. At other times, you’re asked an open-ended question with no right answer. Your responses are of absolutely no importance. They are there, in part, to keep you involved and playing along, and also because the Alexa skill guidelines state something like The Inspection Chamber needs to have at least one interaction point every 90 seconds. I thought I had more than multiple-choice answers to offer my scripted co-stars, but ignorance is bliss as they say.

The Inspection Chamber launches today for Amazon’s Echo devices, so head to the Alexa skills store to check it out. The plan is to bring it to Google Home speakers and the Google Assistant in the near future, and perhaps some other smart speakers later down the line. As is always the case with BBC Taster projects, it’s very much an experiment in storytelling. Maybe the BBC will commission more, or maybe it won’t. The BBC is effectively mandated to test creative boundaries, and I was told everyone involved was also keen to make the experience topical: Toying with the idea of a rogue AI, preying on fearfulness of the future.

From a practical point of view, the BBC wants to assess how people respond to the content, and whether a smart speaker in the home is the best delivery device for interactive audio. How engaging or off-putting are different styles of questioning, and where exactly is the sweet spot on the scale between a story and a game? The Inspection Chamber also feeds into a bigger-picture exploration the BBC is undertaking, looking at how these newfangled smart speakers might help the broadcaster serve its audience. Will they become more important in how people consume news, for example? Or, one day, will you vote for the winner of a reality TV show live, by merely shouting enthusiastically in the direction of your bookshelf?

Source: BBC Taster

Apple Obsoletes 2010 Mac Pro, Time Capsule (4th Gen) and AirPort Extreme (5th Gen)

Apple has updated its vintage and obsolete products list with three additional products: the Time Capsule (4th generation), AirPort Extreme (5th generation), and the Mac Pro (Mid 2010).

The Mac Pro and two wireless routers listed above are now classified by the company as vintage in the United States and Turkey, and obsolete in the rest of the world. Apple defines vintage products as those that have not been manufactured for more than five but less than seven years. Macs and other products on the vintage and obsolete list are generally no longer eligible for hardware service.

Apple radically redesigned the Mac Pro in 2013, but a new high-end high-throughput modular Mac Pro machine is in the works and will debut after 2017. As customers wait for a new Mac Pro, current machines have seen a significant price drop. The 4-core Mac Pro has been discontinued, and the 6-core machine is now available at entry-level pricing.

Apple dismantled its wireless router division last year, sending engineers who worked on the AirPort line-up into other product teams, including one that works on Apple TV. Currently, Apple still sells the AirPort Express ($99) and high-rise 6th-generation AirPort Extreme ($199) wireless routers. The company also sells one wireless router with built-in network-attached storage – the AirPort Time Capsule in 2TB ($299) and 3TB ($399) capacities – but the device hasn’t seen a refresh since 2013.
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Watch three iPhone X torture testers push Apple’s new handset to the limit

Why it matters to you

You’re unlikely to accidentally to whack your new phone with a hammer, but the tests can tell us something about the quality of the materials and construction.

Oh boy, how some folks love to drop, whack, burn, bend, and even freeze a new gadget when it hits the market.

Under the guise of testing durability, though more often than not simply having fun smashing stuff up, creatively made torture test videos for Apple’s just-launched flagship iPhone X are beginning to land on YouTube.

First up (above), we have experienced phone destroyer JerryRigEverything. Conceived by YouTuber Zack Nelson, his videos feature an entertaining blend of brutal handset testing and a delightful deadpan delivery that’s likely to raise a smile.

The scratch tests are suitably harsh for a video of this nature, with Zack doing his utmost to engrave permanent marks onto the display of the $999 iPhone X. After much effort, he finally succeeds, commenting that the display offers pretty much the same scratch resistance of other high-end smartphones.

The good news, however, is that the screen “is not going to be scratched by your normal keys or coins.” Zack noted that unlike previous iPhones, the iPhone X offers no home button to scratch test as the device now uses face recognition to unlock it, “and I’m not going to scratch test a face to see if it still works.”

Next, the tester takes a box cutter to the phone’s metal earpiece grill, tearing across seemingly with great enthusiasm. While slightly damaged, the grill manages to hold its shape and remain in place, though we’d still suggest that you don’t try this at home.

Zack’s video also features burn and bend tests, with the iPhone handling the latter better than the former.

Knife and hammer

Next up is TechRax. Yes, this is the guy who tested the iPhone 6S out by placing it into a pan of boiling, melted crayons. The wacky experiment resulted in the pan catching fire, though happily his home didn’t burn down.

For the iPhone X, TechRax leaves the burning crayons to one side and instead opts for a knife. Stabbing the back of the iPhone repeatedly in this somewhat unscientific test, TechRax is impressed to see the glass holding its own, noting that with previous iPhones it’d shatter pretty quickly using the same method.

Clearly intent on inflicting some serious damage to the phone, the tester then picks up a three-pound hammer and whacks it repeatedly on the iPhone’s display. The first two blows see the device remain intact, but the third results in a nasty spider crack at the very bottom of the display. Continuous blows and, well, it gets really ugly.

Freezing test

Finally, we have a less common “freeze test” from EverythingApplePro, presumably for folks who in the past have accidentally left their phone in a bowl of water before inadvertently placing it in a freezer. After leaving it to freeze overnight, we’re left with an iPhone X encased in a solid block of ice, which of course means it has to be dropped from a high place so we can see if it still works. Impressively, it did. Yes, this is despite the iPhone X having an IP67 rating (good for submersion in up to a meter of water for 30 minutes), as well as being frozen and dropped, the device continued to function.

While the tests are all good fun, they can also tell us something about the quality of the materials and construction. But for peace of mind, we really suggest you buy a decent case to protect your pricey iPhone X. And don’t hit it with a hammer.

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‘Stranger Things 2’ premiere was watched by 15.8 million people

Netflix’s original shows feel like must-watch TV, but how many people are actually watching? The streaming giant won’t divulge its viewership data, so it’s fallen on Nielsen to plug the hole. Now, the audience-tracking firm is offering its first insights into what a hit Netflix show looks like — and, the numbers are big. Fittingly, the initial set of Netflix ratings are for Stranger Things 2 — the follow-up to the ’80s throwback thriller that remains ingrained in the cultural zeitgeist. According to the results, the first episode of the second season was watched by 15.8 million people in the US within the first three days. Binge watchers also tuned in, with 326,000 people streaming all nine episodes on the first day.

Compare that to the current crop of TV behemoths, and it looks like Netflix has a legit hit on its hands. For example, the season seven premiere of Game of Thrones seized 16.1 million viewers on its first night. Meanwhile, the first episode of season eight of The Walking Dead was watched by 15 million people. For something closer to home, season five of Netflix’s House of Cards was streamed by 4.6 million people this spring, according to Nielsen.

Netflix would likely be pleased with the data if it didn’t think it was drivel. The company previously told The New York Times that Nielsen’s figures are inaccurate, and “not even close.” The audience measuring company collates its numbers from TVs using audio recognition software. Yet, with the absence of desktop and mobile streams, we can only assume that the audience size may even be larger.

What we know for sure is that more Stranger Things is in the pipeline, along with $8 billion worth of Netflix originals. If they too turn out to be hits on this scale, the streaming service may not miss Disney after all.

Nintendo’s long-lost Flash games are returning to the web

A Nintendo enthusiast is busy rescuing the company’s treasure trove of Flash games. The titles, which served as promotional tie-ins for releases like Donkey Kong 64, Metroid Prime, and Mario Kart: Double Dash, have long been missing from the internet. But, thanks to the efforts of a modder known as Skelux they’re making a comeback. You can sample a selection of the games, dating from 1999 to 2010, on his website (as spotted by Motherboard).

Flash once powered much of the web, including games. And, Nintendo wasn’t alone in harnessing its power. Companies ranging from Marvel to Nickelodeon used the plug-in to build interactive games that served as marketing fodder.

Skelux’s ultimate goal is to find and restore all of the Nintendo spinoffs. That may turn out to be tricky, as Nintendo quickly yanked the curios from the public by shutting the sites. According to his YouTube vid, Skelux dug up the mini-games piece-by-piece using the Wayback Machine to scour the Internet Archive. As a result, around half of the 31 titles are currently incomplete, with Skelux offering a $50 bounty to anyone who can track down the files. Still, the ones that are available pack some charming distractions.

Source: Skelux (YouTube), Origami64

Corkscrew light beams could lead to practical quantum computers

Who said light only had to travel in boring waves or particles? Not Harvard. Its researchers have found a way to spin light into complex states that promise breakthroughs in multiple fields. They’ve built metasurfaces whose elaborate optics combine two kinds of light momentum (orbital angular and spin angular) to send light into corkscrews, spirals or even fork-like shapes. If you want to change the light state, you just need to change the polarization of that light.

They’re not just for show, of course. The research team envisions these complex light states being very helpful for quantum optics and data, which could help quantum computers become a practical reality. They could also lead to high-powered imaging where a hole in the center of a light vortex could be changed to refocus on a subject. And it could also lead to better free-space optical communication that can transmit through turbulent air and other conditions that scatter light. While it’s very early days for this exotic light manipulation, it could prove instrumental to computing in the long run.

Source: Harvard

Sprint’s owner increases its stake after failed T-Mobile merger

Now that Sprint’s would-be merger with T-Mobile has been called off, how is it going to fend for itself? By getting a little help from its parent company. SoftBank has revealed plans to increase ts stake in Sprint, whether through stock deals or other means. It’s not saying when it will up the stake or by how much, but it doesn’t expect to boost its stock share to 85 percent or more. The Japanese tech company isn’t shy about why it’s making the move, at least: it’s about giving Sprint a long-term future.

Sprint is a “critical part” of SoftBank’s plan for the US, SoftBank chief Masayoshi Son said. His company wants to be ready for a world where connected devices are everywhere, and owning a “world class” wireless network is key to making that happen.

The increased stake answers a lingering question: if Sprint couldn’t count on the T-Mobile merger, was SoftBank willing to go the extra mile and make sure its American network was in good financial shape? Clearly, the answer is yes. In theory, this gives Sprint more breathing room as it gets its house in order and improves its network to compete with fast-moving rivals.

Source: BusinessWire

Twitter will fix broken searches for LGBT material

More than a few LGBT Twitter users were alarmed this weekend when searches for relevant terms (such as #bisexual and #gay) no longer produced results, regardless of what their content settings were. At the least, it made discussions unnecessarily difficult; some even accused Twitter of deliberately silencing LGBT voices. However, it looks like those queries will go back to normal soon. Twitter said it has pinpointed an “error” with search results for key terms and hopes to fix the problem as soon as it can. The social network didn’t have more to say beyond the tweet when we reached out, but it should have more to say in the future.

Whatever the cause, the incident isn’t likely to allay critics who accuse Twitter of struggling to filter content. It’s slow to respond to abuse and hate, they’ve argued, but it seems to have had no trouble breaking searches for common keywords used in LGBT discussions. While early indications suggest this really was an accident, Twitter may have to go the distance to restore the trust it had from gay and bisexual communities.

We’ve identified an error with search results for certain terms. We apologize for this. We’re working quickly to resolve & will update soon.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) November 5, 2017

Source: Twitter Support

‘Warcraft’ goes home after a cosmic conflict, but is the excitement still there?

World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth embraces its war, but that may lead it back to overly familiar territory.

Anyone who knows World of Warcraft has a solid idea of what the game is. More than a decade into its life and with six expansions down, WoW has gone through significant, deep changes — and yet, there’s a distinct overall feel to the massively multiplayer online game that has come to define, and dominate, the genre.

Blizzard announced its seventh expansion to World of Warcraft, dubbed Battle for Azeroth, this weekend at its annual Blizzcon conference in Anaheim, California, and gave us a crack at it. Spending about an hour with a WoW expansion, a game many players will put thousands of hours into, can give us only a brief glimpse at what will be offered. Our Battle for Azeroth hands-on preview focused on a whirlwind tour of the Alliance starting zone, Drustvar.

New expansion, familiar war

Battle for Azeroth brings the game’s conflict back to its roots — the ongoing, endless war between the Horde and Alliance factions. While previous expansions tended to funnel players toward uniting to defeat one big supervillain enemy bent on world domination and destruction, Battle for Azeroth should focus more on the war, and on the characters on each side.

The core experience of WoW, after all, is about questing across the world of Azeroth.

For people who have a serious commitment to WoW, their affiliation with either the Horde (which includes races like orcs, trolls, the minotaur-like tauren, and the undead) or the Alliance (a faction that includes humans, dwarves, gnomes and night elves) is a big part of the experience. Bringing that conflict back to the forefront has the potential to remind players of their allegiances. It will also bring the conflict back down to earth – or, rather, Azeroth – after Legion, an expansion that eventually asked players to invade another planet.

The core experience of WoW, after all, is about questing across the world of Azeroth, and that’s what the demo available at Blizzcon focused on. We had time in Drustvar, a zone of Kul Tiras, one of two new continents added in Battle for Azeroth. As players move into the new expansion, their faction will send them to one of the two continents to seek out additional allies for the war effort. The Alliance heads to Kul Tiras, while the Horde makes for Zandalar, home of the Zandalari trolls, which have appeared – usually as villains – at various times in the game’s past.

A dark and stormy zone

Drustvar is a dark forest full of wolves and boars. In the demo, players started out near a small village called Fallhaven. The place has been cursed when you arrive, with all the villagers frozen in place, and a giant, foreboding wood and wicker effigy standing in the center of town. With nearby desolate farms and quizzical ravens everywhere, studying your every move, the entire area carries a shadowy, foggy, Halloween vibe.

The first order of business was figuring out how to deal with the curse. With nobody capable of speaking to the player, that requires some detective work as you wander around town, reading people’s correspondence and journal entries to develop a picture of who’s attacking Fallhaven. As that happens, the typical MMO quests are part of the parcel — you’ll kill eight wolves and 10 ravens as a matter of course, while you also break cursed effigies to earn a bonus objective that dumps more gold in your hands when you complete the quest.

As it turns out, the cursed village has turned some of the farm animals feral, and once you’ve cleared them out, you’re free to seek out a woman who lives outside of town — your suspected local witch. She turns out to be the one behind it all and absconds to the woods, warping from a normal-looking woman into a powerful red-hooded crone. Pursuing her lets you face her down in the woods in a tougher-than-normal battle, and finally gives you the wherewithal to break the spell.

While the quests at the start of Drustvar carried a lot of atmosphere, they certainly weren’t anything WoW players haven’t seen before. That, admittedly, felt discouraging. Legion’s leveling zones were excellent, packed full of goodies to unlock, rare enemies, and fun questlines. The last expansion did a good job of shaking up the experience with new twists and conclusions to old storylines. Drustvar feels like what Blizzard says Battle of Azeroth will be – a return to classic themes. Yet our initial impression left us wondering if those themes will be as exciting as Legion, which saw players finally prevail against a long-standing villain in the Warcraft universe.

To be fair, we only tried the zone for an hour. World of Warcraft is a game about gaining power and prestige in context of a broader world, and that doesn’t come across when playing a pre-generated character for a slice of time. Still, Blizzard would’ve done itself a favor by picking a more exciting slice of its new expansion.

The gameplay goes deep

The most interesting ideas of the new expansion are the gameplay changes that make WoW more fun to play, both for returning players, and for anyone who might be interested in venturing into the game for the first time. World of Warcraft is pushing the idea of “scaling” zones, which means the game world around players adapts to the characters’ current levels. You’ll face formidable creatures in Drustvar, for instance, but you could also venture to one of Battle for Azeroth’s other areas and be just as challenged. The game’s enemies adapt somewhat to your level, which means you can work through the expansion content however you see fit.

Blizzard introduced that scaling element in Legion, the last expansion for WoW, but it was for that expansion’s continent only. Now, it’s spreading throughout the entire game, including the old world. Players will eventually out-level these areas, but they will scale within a broad range. Currently, players trying to start anew level so quickly that outgrow zones before they complete their quests, leaving players with many loose ends, and no closure.

It’s the most significant shake-up of legacy content since Cataclysm, the third expansion, altered zones and changed quests forever. Battle for Azeroth isn’t set to change how older areas look, but it will make them more interesting to play. That’s good news if you’ve never tried the game, or you stopped playing years ago.

The most interesting ideas of the new expansion could be behind the scenes.

There’s more on offer in Battle for Azeroth that we didn’t have time to see, including new “Allied races” that players can choose for new characters. They’re an interesting addition to Battle for Azeroth, as well. Instead of just being readily available when you buy the expansion, Blizzard said players will have to work through the story content of Battle for Azeroth and earn the allegiance of the six new races (three for each faction) to use them. Other games, like Star Wars: The Old Republic, have used similar ideas to turn a character’s in-game race into a badge of distinction. See someone playing a Zandalari troll? Then you know they’ve conquered a big chunk of what Battle of Azeroth offers.

We also didn’t get to try either Warfronts or Islands, two key new features in the expansion. These are likely to be a major part of the expansion’s end-game content, but neither was ready to test yet at Blizzcon. That suggests Battle for Azeroth won’t be ready for quite some time, as Blizzard is generous about letting fans try content early at its convention.

So far, it seems players must make an investment of time to get the more interesting content Battle for Azeroth has in store for players. We hope that the new zones receive love between now and the expansion’s unannounced release. Otherwise, players who aren’t already committed may bounce off the new expansion.

Highs

• The new zones are beautiful
• Old world zones will again be relevant
• Six new races, including many fan favorites

Lows

• New zone’s gameplay was uninspired
• Core conflict is less exciting than last expansion

Editor’s Recommendations

• Blizzard gets back to basics with ‘World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth’
• Blizzard’s Jeremy Feasel is putting the war back in ‘Warcraft’
• Blizzcon 2017 News Round-up: World of Warcraft Expansion, Overwatch hero, more
• Blizzard teases ‘World of Warcraft’ expansion news coming at Blizzcon 2017
• Here is our list of the 10 best free MMORPGs to play right now