Charlotte Henry

5G is on the way, probably including a compatible iPhone in 2020. ArsTechnica has a good rundown of the state of the rollout of the superfast network.

The first thing to know about 5G is that it’s a family affair—and a sometimes-dysfunctional one. Wireless carriers can deploy 5G over any of three different ranges of wireless frequencies, and one of them doesn’t work anything like today’s 4G frequencies. That’s also the one behind the most wild-eyed 5G forecasts. Millimeter-wave 5G occupies bands much higher than any used for 4G LTE today—24 gigahertz and up, far above the 2.5 GHz frequency of Sprint, hitherto the highest-frequency band in use by the major US carriers.

The 16-Inch MacBook Pro arrived with relatively very little fanfare. At Forbes, Ewen Spence asked why the device is not being more heavily promoted.

Following its launch event in October 2018 for the new MacBook Air, Mac Mini, and iPad Pro models, Tim Cook was expected by many to hold an October event. This could have amplified the launch of the iPhone 11, given the iPad a springboard into the festive gift-buying period, and allowed the 16-inch MacBook Pro a moment in limelight as the largest screened MacOS laptop launched in the last seven years. But there was no event. Apple declined to push forward its hardware, instead focusing on the launch of Apple TV – one of the many services that Apple’s management believe is the future for the company. Reinforcement of the iPhone 11 was not a necessity and Apple snuck out the seventh generation iPad in late September. It was the MacBook Pro that lost out on a significant push with the mainstream media.

Rumors emanating from Japan suggested that the much-discussed iPhone SE 2 may actually be called the iPhone 9. AppleInsider took a look at this somewhat unlikely claim.

Japanese site Macotakara is reporting confirmation from its sources within manufacturers in the supply chain, that Apple is readying a cheaper, smaller ‘iPhone SE 2’ to replace the iPhone SE. It may be released in spring 2020, but Macotakara also claims that it may be called the iPhone 9. “Since the consecutive design has been used from iPhone 6 to iPhone 8,” says the site in its own English-language translation, “it is difficult to be thought that the name of iPhone SE would be succeeded.” The word “design” there is most likely to be a mistranslation of what the site probably meant was the iPhone naming convention.

Libra, Facebook’s attempt to get into cryptocurrency, has suffered a number of setbacks. On Wired, European Data Protection Supervisor Wojciech Wiewiórowski highlighted the privacy issues with the project.

In the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the ePrivacy Directive guarantee privacy and personal data protection as fundamental rights for every individual. There can be no doubt that Libra would be subject to these laws. It is clear that payment and transaction data convey a lot of information about the user, facilitating profiling. The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) mainly examines potential data-sharing that may be triggered by Libra facilities on a previously unseen scale. Even if sharing would be conditional on user consent, the long-term implications may be the further loss of control over data.

T-Mobile turned on the U.S.’s first-ever nationwide 5G Network this week. Venturebeat gave it a test-drive.

Thankfully, my initial testing of T-Mobile’s low-band 5G network revealed a more complex reality than the company’s conservative figure. The good news is that low-band 5G downloads peaked at 227Mbps, 2-4 times faster than T-Mobile’s LTE service at the same locations, and far higher than the aforementioned 20% estimate. But the bad news is that you won’t always achieve the peak speeds, and — surprise — early T-Mobile 5G phone adopters can’t actually use 5G for tethering, only smartphone service.

There are plenty of firms and products that were with us a the start of the decade that are no longer around. CNET compiled a list of some of those that have disappeared or never even existed. This includes Apple’s much-hyped AirPower charging mat, that never got shipped.

Sometimes they just feel dead because a company doesn’t update or even mention them for a while. The Apple iPad Mini, Mac Mini, MacBook Air, Mac Pro and iPod were on our endangered list for years before Apple surprised us with upgrades to all. On the other hand, the company’s AirPort router line and Time Capsule backup drive also were on a long death watch until they finally landed on Apple’s vintage and obsolete product list this year. You just never know… Apple, with its much-hyped-but-never-shipped AirPower wireless charging pad is my Could’ve Been King of the decade. Google’s Project Ara modular phone and Theranos’ unproven blood-testing tech are other rivals for the position, but while highly newsworthy, neither felt as eagerly anticipated by the tech world as the AirPower.

On Tuesday, Google’s parent company Alphabet announced that Larry Page and Sergey Brin were stepping aside and that Sundar Pichai was the new CEO.  On The Verge, Dieter Bohn looked at what this means for the future of the company.

I see the founding of Alphabet in 2015 as an explicit attempt to start Google’s third era. But what it really was was a midlife crisis. Splitting off experimental divisions into separate companies inside an umbrella corporation might have made sense in theory, but in practice everybody knew the truth: it was all Google and so-called “other bets” on the side. It didn’t really start the new era, is what I’m saying. But now that Pichai is running Alphabet officially alongside (above? contiguous with?) Google, he can do the same product cleanup work for the Alphabet companies. That is, if Page and Brin will let him. They did promise to “continue talking with Sundar regularly, especially on topics we’re passionate about.” It’s something to watch out for in the future, but it’s also not the most important job Pichai has right now.