Microsft pledged to become carbon negative by 2030 on Thursday. It made the declaration in a new blog post. Led by Lisa Jackson, Apple has made strides in this regard too, including financing a carbon-free aluminum smelting process.

By 2030 Microsoft will be carbon negative, and by 2050 Microsoft will remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975. We recognize that progress requires not just a bold goal but a detailed plan. As described below, we are launching today an aggressive program to cut our carbon emissions by more than half by 2030, both for our direct emissions and for our entire supply and value chain. We will fund this in part by expanding our internal carbon fee, in place since 2012 and increased last year, to start charging not only our direct emissions, but those from our supply and value chains.

Ever since the iPhone 11 emerged there have been lots of rumors about its successors. Forbes rounded up everything we know about one that is attracting a lot of attention.

The iPhone SE2 will use the same 12MP primary camera as the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max, but it will not feature ultrawide or telephoto sensors as Apple looks to save costs. The iPhone 12 will have an exciting new long-range 3D camera, but don’t expect that functionality to reach the iPhone SE2 at its affordable price point. Perhaps the one area where the iPhone SE2 may disappoint is its design. Rather than copy the iPhone X-inspired looks of current models, the iPhone SE2 will look like an iPhone 8, complete with a Touch ID fingerprint sensor and no Face ID. That said, this will make for a very portable device you’ll easily be able to use one-handed. It will also feature a glass back to support wireless charging.

Apple needs to dive headfirst into the smart home industry, with hardware at the center of the strategy. That’s according to Jason Snell, who laid out his argument for MacWorld.  He argues for the creation of a new product, a kind of hub, that will sit at the heart of it all.

Apple can contribute to the smart-home industry and its own bottom line by doing what it does best, namely creating a new product that’s a fusion of hardware, software, and cloud services. It’s time for Apple to build a product that makes your home smarter and more secure. It’s time for Apple Home. Apple got out of the home router game a while ago, with the discontinuation of the AirPort line. I’m recommending that Apple bring it back, because today’s smart homes require rock-solid wireless connectivity, and while Apple’s two biggest competitors have home-network offerings, Apple’s got nothing. An Apple-built mesh networking system a la Amazon’s Eero seems like a natural.

Popular LGBT dating app Grindr shared personal user data with thousands of advertising partners. Bloomberg News reported that the data included users’ location, age, gender, and sexual orientation.

The service — described as the world’s largest social networking app for gay, bi, trans, and queer people — gave user data to third parties involved in advertising and profiling, according to a report by the Norwegian Consumer Council that was released Tuesday. Twitter Inc. ad subsidiary MoPub was used as a mediator for the data sharing and passed personal data to third parties, the report said. “Every time you open an app like Grindr, advertisement networks get your GPS location, device identifiers and even the fact that you use a gay dating app,” said Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems. “This is an insane violation of users’ EU privacy rights.”

A recent regulatory filing indicated that a new MacBook Pro could be on the way in the coming months. Apple only released the 16″ model in November 2019. AppleInsider took a look at what’s in the document

The new filings with the ECC include just one new model number, A2289, which is identified as an Apple-branded portable computer and associated spare components. No other details are made public about the model, aside from it being capable of running macOS 10.15 Catalina. It is unknown what the model indicates, as this could refer to an update to any of the MacBook variants available to date. The model number is accompanied by filings for two Apple TV models, using numbers that relate to already-available models. These are most likely to indicate the use of tvOS 13 on the Apple TV and Apple TV 4K. Another line is dedicated to the rackmount variant of the new Mac Pro, which has yet to be made available to purchase by Apple.

Apple introduced Ultra Wideband technology with the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro. Barclays Analysts believe Android smartphones are going to in their footsteps, according to a note seen by MacRumors.

In a research note obtained by MacRumors, the analysts said Android smartphones will be equipped with an all-in-one Ultra Wideband, NFC, and Secure Element chip introduced by Dutch chipmaker NXP Semiconductors last year. It is unclear which Android smartphones will adopt Ultra Wideband first, but Samsung did join a consortium with NXP last year to help develop the technology. In a press release last year, NXP said Ultra Wideband will give mobile devices several new and interesting capabilities, such as being able to unlock a car’s doors when the device comes in close proximity of the vehicle, potentially foreshadowing a feature that could come to the iPhone down the road.

A system transcribing and vetting audio from Skype and Cortana was run for years with “no security measures,” according to a former Microsoft contractor. The Guardian revealed that workers could access recordings through a simple Chrome web app.

The recordings, both deliberate and accidentally invoked activations of the voice assistant, as well as some Skype phone calls, were simply accessed by Microsoft workers through a web app running in Google’s Chrome browser, on their personal laptops, over the Chinese internet, according to the contractor. Workers had no cybersecurity help to protect the data from criminal or state interference, and were even instructed to do the work using new Microsoft accounts all with the same password, for ease of management, the former contractor said. Employee vetting was practically nonexistent, he added.

Mythic Quest will launch on Apple TV+ on February 7. Variety spoke to Rob McElhenney, who he acts in and wrote the show, about what viewers can expect.

The show will be Apple’s first straightforward comedy since launching its streaming platform in November — and a successful launch would be welcome. The platform’s flagship series, “The Morning Show,” recently received three Golden Globe nominations but was widely panned by critics. Other Apple shows, like “Dickinson,” “For All Mankind” and “Servant,” have found modest critical success, but it remains unclear if any of them have truly broken through the crowded pop culture landscape. Apple no doubt hopes that gamers, who collectively spent a record $43.4 billion in the sector in 2018 in the U.S. alone, will flock to the series given its subject matter and the pedigree of its creators.

Jimmy Grewal is not just an ordinary Apple fan. Based in Dubai, he has one of the world’s most impressive collections of the company’s products. Cult of Mac had a chat with him.

Is this heaven? The world’s greatest Apple Store? Nope, it’s Dubai, actually. Home to Jimmy Grewal, a collector of vintage Apple computers and one of the most impressive collections you’re likely to find anywhere. “Dubai is not exactly the hotbed of vintage Apple collecting,” Grewal told Cult of Mac. “Although Apple computers were sold and used here from the early 80s, a lot of those old computers are not [around any more.] The dealers who used to sell them have gotten rid of their inventory and their spare parts. What I don’t already have, I have to import.” Fortunately, Dubai’s geographical location makes this reasonably easy. Grewal has sourced computers from everywhere from the U.S. to Australia and Europe. He scours eBay and Facebook Marketplace, and relies on word-of-mouth to clue him on possible deals.