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Third Generation AirPods Likely to be 'Unleashed' at Apple Event

Charlotte Henry ·

As I, and many others, suspected, it seems we will finally get the third generation of AirPods at the ‘Unleashed’ event on Monday. Leaks from Chinese social media site Weibo, picked up by MacRumors, suggest the earbuds will have an updated design.

Now, as Apple has confirmed its likely last event of the year for this coming Monday, October 18, all the indications suggest that new ‌AirPods‌ will also be announced alongside redesigned MacBook Pros. Weibo leaker @PandaIsBald, which accurately reported the launch of the baseline ninth-generation iPad for Apple’s last event, has claimed that alongside “M1X” Macs, the third-generation ‌AirPods‌ with an updated design will also be announced…The refreshed ‌AirPods‌ are expected to take design cues from the ‌AirPods Pro‌ and leaked schematics and images but appear to confirm those design changes. However, what remains unclear is whether the new ‌AirPods‌ will feature silicone ear-tips, like the ‌AirPods Pro‌, or feature the same in-ear design as the first and second-generation ‌AirPods‌.

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The New York Times Invites Beta Testers for its Audio App

Andrew Orr ·

The New York Times is building an app for audio journalism and it’s inviting beta testers to try it out.

“New York Times Audio” will provide an accessible and authoritative way to understand the world, pulling from Times podcasts, Times articles, premier magazine publishers like New York magazine and Rolling Stone, new audio formats from The Times newsroom and more. The product will also feature the archive of “This American Life,” encompassing 25 years worth of episodes from the iconic show that pioneered a new form of audio narrative journalism.

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Apple ML Study Compares Supervised Versus Self-Supervised Learning

Andrew Orr ·

A research team at Apple published a study in October examining supervised and self-supervised algorithms. The title is “Do Self-Supervised and Supervised Methods Learn Similar Visual Representations?” From the abstract:

We find that the methods learn similar intermediate representations through dissimilar means, and that the representations diverge rapidly in the final few layers. We investigate this divergence, finding that it is caused by these layers strongly fitting to the distinct learning objectives. We also find that SimCLR’s objective implicitly fits the supervised objective in intermediate layers, but that the reverse is not true.

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Time For The Apple Watch to Separate From The iPhone

Charlotte Henry ·

The Apple Watch Series 7 became available to order on Friday. In the latest edition of his ‘Power On’ newsletter, Bloomberg News‘s Mark Gurman noted how the wearable has got closer to breaking free from the iPhone but isn’t there yet.

Seven years into the Apple Watch era, one of Apple’s most promising device categories still does things the old way. As any Apple Watch owner knows, an iPhone is required for activation and setup, syncing data and day-to-day operating. The Apple Watch doesn’t meet the Jobs vision for every Apple device being able to operate and exist on its own. Apple has taken some steps over the years to push the Apple Watch in that direction, though… Despite those enhancements, you still can’t buy an Apple Watch, set it up from the device itself, and move over all of your content from the cloud. That limits the potential user base of the Apple Watch—and excludes people who might want to only own an Apple Watch and a Mac or iPad and no iPhone. Or, one day, people who want an Apple Watch as their only device.

Bring Dark Mode to all Websites With ‘Noir’ Safari Extension
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Bring Dark Mode to all Websites With 'Noir' Safari Extension

Andrew Orr ·

Noir is an iOS | iPadOS 15 extension that generates a custom dark style for each website you visit, based on the colors that are used on a page. You won’t even notice this happening in the background – that’s how fast it is – but you’ll certainly appreciate the end result: a beautiful dark mode tailored for each website, where contrast is preserved and highlights still pop. Noir works with any website you visit in Safari, automatically. By default, Noir is linked to your device’s Dark Mode, so websites will only go dark when you want them to. But you can easily customize this to your liking, even per website.