CarPlay is fantastically useful, but new research reported on by AppleInsider suggests that it could severely limit your reaction time.  The study for UK road safety charity IAM RoadSmart showed that in-vehicle infotainment systems can impair drivers’ reactions even more than cannabis or alcohol do.

Regardless of the infotainment system, all users showed significantly slowed reaction time. Undistracted drivers typically showed a one-second reaction time. Those who used the voice-controlled Apple CarPlay saw a 36% increase in their reaction time, which rose to 57% when they used the touch interface. Android Auto users faired only slightly better—a 30% increase in reaction time when using voice control, and 53% when using touch controls. For comparison, those who drive under the influence at the drink-drive limit showed a 12% increase in reaction time, and those who used cannabis saw a 21% increase.

Netflix and YouTube are going to reduce their streaming quality for the next month, CNN reported. They are aiming to help reduce strain on networks as more-and-more people are forced to work from home due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Both companies said the measures will affect all video streams for 30 days. “We estimate that this will reduce Netflix traffic on European networks by around 25% while also ensuring a good quality service for our members,” a Netflix spokesperson said in a statement. A spokesperson for Google (GOOGL), which owns YouTube, said: “We will continue working with member state governments and network operators to minimize stress on the system, while also delivering a good user experience.” The changes follow appeals from EU officials for streaming services and individual users to ditch high definition video to prevent the internet from breaking. With so many countries on forced lockdowns to fight the spread of the virus, hundreds of millions working from home and even more children out of school, the officials were concerned about the huge strain on the internet.

Time at home making you fancy a new games console? Wired has put what we know about the forthcoming devices head-to-head.

Several of the Xbox Series X and PS5 specs sound similar. They have fast all-SSD storage, 16GB GDDR6 RAM and both a CPU and GPU made by AMD. But if you a little deeper, their differences become apparent. To simmer it down to a reductive analogy: the PS5 is nimble while the Xbox Series X is out to win with brute force power. The PS5 uses incredibly intelligent hardware optimisation and custom silicon to tease remarkable performance out of its core components. But the Xbox Series X has a more powerful GPU, which is the first metric by which any console is usually judged. Their hardware belongs to the same family, though. They have AMD Zen 2 generation CPUs and AMD Navi-based graphics chipsets. The latter will share some hardware with PC graphics cards not even released yet.

Apple’s Senior Vice President, Software Engineering, Craig Federighi stars in a new video, published on The Verge. In it, he demonstrates trackpad support in iPadOS. The way the cursor changes is particularly clever, I think.

The iPad’s UI is powerful, but in many ways it’s difficult to learn, in part because so many of us still have desktop UI paradigms in our heads. One interesting thing you can’t do is just have a bunch of traditional windows like you’re used to having on a desktop or even a Windows tablet. Apple is sticking to its guns on its attempt to rethink how we move and rearrange windows on the iPad screen, with stuff like split screen and Slide Over. For better or worse (and I think for the better), the new trackpad features don’t turn the iPad into a Mac. Whether any of that radically changes this year with iPadOS 14 is anybody’s guess. Federighi himself recently said, “If you like what you’ve seen us do with iPadOS, stay tuned, we’re going to keep working on it.”

Apple seeded the golden master of watchOS 6.2 to developers on Wednesday. MacRumors had a look at what it contained.

watchOS 6.2 introduces ‌Apple Watch‌ App Store support for in-app purchases, which will allow developers to create and sell ‌Apple Watch‌ apps that offer in-app purchase options and subscriptions. Apple’s release notes for the update are below: watchOS 6.2 includes new features, improvements, and bug fixes: Introduces in-app purchases for ‌Apple Watch‌ apps. Fixes an issue where music playback could pause when switching from Wi-Fi to Bluetooth connectivity. ECG app on ‌Apple Watch‌ Series 4 or later now available in Chile, New Zealand, and Turkey. Irregular heart rhythm notifications now available in Chile, New Zealand, and Turkey.