Axiim launches the first wireless audio transmitter for Xbox

Xbox made its commitment to WiSA known in October when it became the first gaming brand to join the Wireless Speaker and Audio Association, so it was a race against the clock for AV brands to be the first to deliver supporting gear. Axiim is first past the post, having just announced its Link HD speaker system for Xbox One and Windows 10 PC.

The Link transmitter is a compact and fuss-free way to tap into up to 7.1 wireless audio channels, and guarantees reliable, uncompressed transmission to wireless speakers. Its inherent function means it eliminates the need for speaker wires, but it also has a magnetic base, so you can sling it on the back of your TV out of sight. It’s a neat way to enjoy premium audio while gaming, and works with all WiSA compliant brands, so you’re not restricted when it comes to speaker choice. It’s also the first Wireless Speaker and Audio Association endorsed multi-channel product for Xbox, but the company’s recent move into this sector means it certainly won’t be the last.

Armed robbers steal $1.8 million worth of cryptocurrency

The Manhattan District Attorney has charged a man with robbery and kidnapping after he swiped a digital wallet containing a fortune in ethereum cryptocurrency. Louis Meza and an associate allegedly held up the victim at gunpoint after luring him into a vehicle, then stole his keys, wallet and cellphone. Meza used the keys to enter the victim’s apartment and make off with his digital wallet. Shortly afterwards, he transferred $1.8 million in “ether” cryptocurrency to his own wallet.

According to the DA’s press release, Meza knew the victim and knew he had a large amount of ethereum. After meeting the victim on the evening of November 4th, “Meza insisted on ordering a car service for the victim, who entered a minivan after parting ways with Meza,” the DA stated. The perpetrator was also charged with computer tampering, criminal possession of stolen property, and computer trespass.

The DA notes that the crime is a vivid illustration that hacking isn’t the only way crooks can get their hands on your Bitcoins and other crypto-cash. “This case demonstrates the increasingly common intersection between cyber and violent crime,” said NY County District Attorney Cyrus Vance. “We can expect this type of crime to become increasingly common as cryptocurrency values surge upward.”

Via: Coindesk

Source: New York County District Attorney

Logic Pro X Optimized for iMac Pro as Motion and Compressor Updated to Support 360º VR Video, HEVC, and More

Alongside the release of Final Cut Pro X version 10.4 today, Apple has updated its other pro software Logic Pro X, Motion, and Compressor.

Logic Pro X has been updated with optimized performance for the iMac Pro, with support for up to 36 cores. Version 10.3.3 also includes performance and stability improvements, including a fix for an issue which could cause user-created content to become unavailable on macOS High Sierra.

Motion has been updated with support for 360º VR motion graphics. Users can now import 360° video and design 360° titles, generators, and effects, and later output the 360° video to a connected VR headset. Version 5.4 also supports import, playback, and editing of HEVC video and HEIF photos from Apple devices.

Compressor has also been updated with support for 360º VR delivery and HDR and HEVC video on macOS High Sierra.

Apple’s new versions of Final Cut Pro X, Logic Pro X, Motion, and Compressor are available from the Updates tab in the Mac App Store.

Tags: Logic Pro X, Motion, Compressor
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AppleCare+ for iMac Pro Costs $169, Same Price as Regular iMacs

Apple today released the iMac Pro, its all-new powerful desktop workstation aimed at professional users with demanding workflows.

While the iMac Pro starts at $4,999 for the base model, and costs up to $13,199 for a maxed-out, 18-core configuration, fortunately the price of AppleCare+ for iMac Pro isn’t any more expensive than for a regular iMac.

AppleCare+ for iMac Pro can be purchased for $169 in the United States, which is the same price Apple charges for its 21.5-inch and 27-inch 4K and 5K iMac models. We’ve confirmed this is the price shown during checkout.

AppleCare+ extends an iMac Pro’s warranty coverage to three years from its original purchase date and provides up to two incidents of accidental damage coverage, each subject to a service fee of $99 for screen damage or external enclosure damage, or $299 for any other type of damage.

iMac Pros are also covered by Apple’s standard one-year limited warranty and 90 days of complimentary technical support by phone.

Related Roundup: iMac ProTag: AppleCareBuyer’s Guide: iMac Pro (Caution)
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Pandora Grants Free Tier Listeners Access to On-Demand Features if They View 15-Second Ad

Pandora today announced that it will now let those who use the company’s free, ad-supported tier access on-demand listening after viewing a 15-second video ad. Listeners can search for a specific song, album, playlist, and then they’ll have an option to view the ad in question, after which a Pandora Premium listening session will unlock.

Previously, users on Pandora’s free tier had to listen to whatever song appeared next on the radio station or playlist they were currently tuned in to. With the new update, these listeners can now get an experience that’s slightly closer to traditional on-demand streaming music services like Pandora’s own Premium service, and Apple Music and Spotify, albeit after being forced to view an ad.

Crucially, Pandora’s press release doesn’t clarify how often free listeners have to view these 15-second ads in order to retain their Pandora Premium on-demand listening sessions.

“Our ad-supported listeners’ top request has consistently been the ability to directly play the specific songs, albums, or playlists they want,” said Roger Lynch, President & CEO, Pandora. “These new features address that need by marrying rewards-based advertising with the best-in-class on-demand experience we’ve created with Pandora Premium. This unrivaled experience will drive listeners to Pandora and drive awareness for Premium, while also creating new opportunities for artists, labels, publishers and advertisers.”

Pandora Premium launched earlier in 2017, combining the existing radio features with a new on-demand service that serves up personalized recommendations for each user. In total Pandora has the free tier, Pandora Plus ($4.99/month), and Pandora Premium ($9.99/month). Plus offers unlimited skips and replays but also lacks on-demand abilities, so the new functionality will also be available for Plus subscribers.

The Pandora app is available to download from the iOS App Store for free [Direct Link].

Tag: Pandora
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Apple Releases VESA-Compatible Mounting Bracket Kit for iMac Pro

With the iMac Pro now available to order, Apple has released a VESA mount adapter kit for the computer on its online store around the world.

The kit comes with everything you need to replace your iMac Pro stand with a mounting bracket, which lets you attach your iMac Pro to any VESA-compatible wall mount, desk mount, or articulating arm to customize your workspace.

With the VESA Mount Adapter attached, your iMac Pro complies with the VESA FDMI (MIS-D, 100, C) version specification. This adapter supports iMac Pro and cannot be used with any other iMac or display. Use the adapter only with a VESA mount that can support the weight of your iMac Pro.

The kit is priced at $79 in the United States and is currently estimated to ship in 2-3 weeks, so deliveries should begin in January.

While ordering the iMac Pro on Apple’s online store, the kit can also be added for $79 as part of a custom configuration.

Related Roundup: iMac ProTag: VESABuyer’s Guide: iMac Pro (Caution)
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LG’s refreshed Gram laptops get a quad-core processor bump

Ahead of CES, laptop makers are hurriedly unveiling the hardware they’ll be showing off at the trade show. Yesterday we got the lowdown on Samsung’s Surface-challenging Notebook 9 range, and now it’s fellow Korean titan LG’s turn to talk up its 2018 Gram line-up. As always, the company is emphasizing the portability of the lightweight ultrabooks, which hopefully won’t come at the expense of a decent display this time round. The new batch includes a 13.3 inch model weighing in at 2.1 pounds, a 14 inch variant at 2.2 pounds, and a 15.6 version coming in at 2.4 pounds.

The trio have the Dell XPS 13 in their sights with 8th-gen Intel Core chips, a full HD display, and carbon magnesium alloy bodies that are MIL-ST 810G tested for durability. The company claims to have packed more display into the 14-incher by trimming the bezels, making it the same size as a standard 13 inch laptop. We’ll be able to check out the difference for ourselves when we roll through CES.

Unlike Dell’s ultrabook, LG claims it’s still managed to cram the webcam above the display, and it’s again touting (frankly unbelievable) day-long battery times. Optional features include a fingerprint sensor, a touchscreen, and Thunderbolt 3. Alas, LG is keeping the lid on the price for now. The 2018 LG Gram range will be available in the US next month, with more markets to follow.

Source: LG

The iMac Pro is fast, but who is it for?

Today marks the release of the iMac Pro, Apple’s first all-in-one desktop aimed at professionals. The question isn’t how it looks (like the regular iMac, but in Space Gray) or how it runs (fast), but who it’s for. It would be tempting to just say “creative professionals” — the term we tech writers always fall back on when describing Apple users — but that doesn’t suffice here. For starters, the sort of photographers, videographers and audio engineers we assume would appreciate the iMac Pro might already be well served by the regular 27-inch iMac. And besides, not all of the use cases are even creative. Other professionals likely to tax their machine include scientists, radiologists and developers, to name a few.

As I’m sure you’re aware, I am none of those things. Neither are my colleagues nor any other tech journalist I know. So it probably wouldn’t disturb you, then, to learn that although I saw the iMac Pro in action this week, I did not personally use it. I’m well trained in reviewing laptops meant for everyday use, but a workstation-class machine that could be used to edit 8K video or render an automotive design? Not so much. Instead, Apple assembled a motley group of developers to perform hands-off demos of their apps on the iMac Pro. Rather than tell you what you already know — that this is the fastest Mac ever made — let’s talk about the people for whom it might make sense to spend $4,999 on a desktop.

What you get for the money

But first, let’s recap why the starting price is so damn steep. For that staggering entry-level price, you get an 8-core processor from Intel’s workstation-class Xeon W series, paired with a Radeon Vega Pro 56 GPU, 32GB of 2666MHz DDR4 ECC RAM and 1TB of solid-state storage. Included is a Space Gray keyboard and matching mouse, though you can order it online with a Magic Trackpad instead of or in addition to the mouse. Regardless of your configuration, the display is a 27-inch 5K (5,120 x 2,880) panel with 500-nit brightness, a billion colors and support for the T3 color range. If those specs sound familiar, it’s because that’s the same panel used on the regular 27-inch iMac. In fairness, it really is a stunning display.

Instead of traditional VRAM, Apple packs in 8GB of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), wherein the memory is built on to the same package as the graphics chip, allowing for that greater bandwidth. Upgrade and you get a Radeon Pro Vega 64 GPU with double the memory.

Apple didn’t discuss this during its initial iMac Pro announcement earlier this year, but under the hood, the machine also makes use of a custom T2 security chip — not dissimilar from the T1 chip in the MacBook Pro that stores your Touch ID login credentials. In this case, the T2 oversees a number of the machine’s components, including audio control, the controller for the FaceTime camera, the SSD controller and system management controller, and the image signal processor. Similar to the T1, it too has a secure enclave for storing things like passwords. It also has a hardware encryption engine, which takes the burden of encrypting data off of the CPU.

If that base model isn’t enough, you can upgrade to a 10-core, 14-core or 18-core processor. (The 14-core option wasn’t known before today.) If 32GB of RAM isn’t enough, you can opt for 64GB or 128GB. Keep in mind that even if you play it safe and get 32GB or 64GB, you can always add more RAM later, though not without the help of a service professional. For storage, you can upgrade to 2TB or — and this is a first for the Mac — 4TB.

All of those configurations are available to order today, but the 14- and 18-core models won’t ship until January. And if you want to see it up close before buying (reasonable), Apple says the iMac Pro will start showing up in retail stores next week.

Who is this for?

I saw the iMac Pro used in eight demos over the course of roughly three hours. Some, but not all, of the use cases were creative. The app Gravity Sketch, which is already available on PCs through Steam, is making its debut on the Mac. I watched co-founder Oluwaseyi Sosanya don an HTC Vive and proceed to flesh out the wireframe of a Renault-style car. I followed his progress on a nearby TV as he laid out base curves and drew in some firmer lines. At one point, he duplicated elements by clicking a button on the Vive controller. The experience seemed smooth (a refrain you’ll hear from me a lot today), with no latency that I could see.

Many of the demos I saw centered on virtual reality — both the experience and the creation of. Twinmotion 2018 is a real-time, 3D visualization software for architects (or Sims nerds like me). The virtual worlds you create there can be viewed on the desktop, in VR or as a 360-degree videos on mobile devices. A new version of the app is being released today, with the ability to control the finest of details — even changing the weather and time of day in a scene. Make it nighttime, and the lights in your building automatically turn on, as do the buildings in the distant skyline. From there, you can drag and drop elements like trees and even people. Then, you can decide how they look and how they’re moving. Yes, we ended up with a dancing man in the departures terminal. What of it?

In a guided demo, I watched as we explored an international airport, rotating, panning out and, at other times, zooming in on the finest of details. As you can imagine, a virtual airport feels about as sprawling as the real thing, but I didn’t notice any lags as we wandered around. No ghosting as we zoomed in and panned out. No waiting for the edges of this virtual world to load. It felt more like being inside a video game than a testing ground where the app was rendering changes in real time.

Later in the day, I found myself wearing an HTC Vive of my own, playing a new game called Electronauts. It’s a music-creation tool specifically for the iMac Pro, wherein you use the controllers to select beats, instruments and even “beat grenades,” not unlike the way you’d choose drawing implements in an art app like Tilt Brush. Survios, the developer behind the app, believes even non-musical types like me might enjoy it (my electronica sounded pleasing enough), but the team also sees it as a space for immersive DJing. As fun as this was to experience, it wasn’t as clear why it wouldn’t perform respectably on lesser hardware. I’m sure Electronauts runs better on an iMac Pro, but I remain unconvinced that caliber of machine is necessary. I think the success of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift on other systems proves that.

Even with its own apps, Apple is taking pains to show it’s doubling down on VR. An updated version of Final Cut Pro X, due out today, automatically recognizes when you’re working with 360-degree video. From there, you can play back the somewhat flattened-out footage, or export it to a VR headset. Of course, Apple admits that most of its Final Cut Pro X (FCPX) users aren’t currently working with 360-degree video. To the extent that the company needs to appeal to traditionalists, it also demonstrated playback of 4.6K raw video shot on a Red camera, with visual effects already added in FCPX. Playback was smooth and the colors, of course, looked vibrant on that billion-color screen. Apple says you can preview 8K video, too, but concedes that you can’t yet expect smooth playback at full resolution on the computer itself.

There were many other experiences, too, that involved heavy rendering. Adobe Dimension, out today, is a design app first teased at the company’s Max developer conference this fall. It brings a relatively simple interface and lots of templates for people who work on things like packaging — but who don’t know a lot about design tools and don’t necessarily care to learn. (The demo I saw was for food packaging.) As with so many other demos I saw that day, the rendering happened instantaneously with logos wrapping around 3D objects like bottles.

And, by the way, not all of the use cases tax the GPU specifically. OsiriX, an app for surgeons and radiologists, loaded an MRI image set containing 1,200 files. Scrolling through a separate CT scan, the app created the illusion that this was always a moving image, as opposed to a series of stills. As someone who has had to wait patiently for doctors to analyze bone scans, I can appreciate how faster rendering will mean faster diagnoses for anxious patients.

Meanwhile, a couple of the demos showed the CPU being heavily taxed. I saw a new version of Logic Pro X (also out today) playing back a project with 83 tracks and only reaching 10 percent CPU usage. A bigger project with 120 tracks and 32 plug-ins sent the usage up closer to 80 or 90 percent, but even then, the machine got the job done. In a different demo, I saw our tester simulating a heavy developer workload, with three instances of iOS running in an emulator; VMWare running Ubuntu in the background; an older version of macOS running in a separate VMWare container; and the Chrome browser on Windows 10 running in yet another background window. Everything ran unabated, and the machine stayed quiet the whole time.

That partially settles the question of who this is for: not just creative professionals (whatever that means), but developers, doctors, scientists and builders. Basically, anyone whose bottom line depends on fast rendering and indefatigable multitasking. The harder question is whether the regular iMac, even a tricked-out model, would suffice. I can’t answer that question for you, and I’m not sure Apple can either. I just assume that people who buy $5,000 computers are a self-selecting group.

Apple Final Cut Pro X is ready to edit VR video

Apple isn’t just making the iMac Pro available to order — it’s also updating the creative software you’ll likely run on that iMac. A new upgrade to Final Cut Pro X adds support for both newer video technology and some key color editing tools. Most notably, the editing tool now handles VR video — you can edit 360-degree footage at high resolutions (8K “and beyond”), complete with motion graphics. And if you need to see how your work looks, you can preview it in real-time on an HTC Vive or other compatible headsets.

There’s plenty if you have no intention of producing a VR masterpiece. FCPX now allows editing two key HDR formats, Rec. 2020 HDR10 and Rec. 2020 Hybrid Log Gamma, and gives you both HDR-compatible scopes (to identify how bright your video will get) and HDR monitoring on external displays through an I/O device. And there’s now some advanced pro color grading tools built right into the app — you can fine-tune brightness, hue, luminance, saturation and white balance through an inspector.

Need more? You can edit HEVC and Cinema RAW Light video, import iMovie for iOS projects, create slow motion footage using the speedy Metal framework and fix audio using Logic Pro plugins. All told, FCPX appears to be much more ready for the realities of modern movie creation.

There’s an accompanying Logic Pro X update that isn’t nearly as dramatic, with one exception: it’s optimized for the iMac Pro and can handle up to 36 cores, which is a rather curious number when the iMac “only” has up to 18 cores. It’s clearly adding a degree of futureproofing.

Source: Apple

Two million identities stolen for fake net neutrality comments

As many as 2 million identities were stolen to leave fake comments in support of the FCC’s decision to kill net neutrality, according to the New York Attorney General’s Office. Based on the 5,000 or so complaints filed with the office, some of the victims are senior citizens, some are minors, while some are already dead. “This is a 13 year old child — she did not post this comment, nor did anyone else in her household,” a report filed by a New Yorker said. A Chicago resident who also filed a complaint called the fake comment made under their mother’s name “sickening.” Their mother passed away several years ago from cancer.

While it’s still not clear how the identities were stolen, the Attorney General’s Office has at least figured out where the fake comments came from: New York, Florida, Texas and California produced 100,000 fake comments each. It has released the details of its investigation along with a letter from Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman criticizing the FCC’s decision move forward with its net neutrality vote. He’s urging the commission to postpone the vote, which is scheduled to take place today at 10:30AM Eastern, and to help further his team’s investigation.

He wrote:

“Millions of fake comments have corrupted the FCC public process — including two million that stole the identities of real people, a crime under New York law. Yet the FCC is moving full steam ahead with a vote based on this corrupted process, while refusing to cooperate with an investigation. As we’ve told the FCC: moving forward with this vote would make a mockery of our public comment process and reward those who perpetrated this fraud to advance their own hidden agenda. The FCC must postpone this vote and work with us to get to the bottom of what happened.”

Schneiderman once called out the FCC for refusing to look into the issue. His office apparently requested for FCC’s records nine times between June and November, but it never received any concrete response. Earlier this month, the commission finally agreed to cooperate with the New York Attorney General, giving Schneiderman’s team a way to finally start analyzing all the anti-net neutrality spam that flooded the commission’s website.

Source: New York Attorney General’s Office