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Apple Expanding Footprint in Israel

Charlotte Henry ·

Apple is expanding its R&D footprint in Israel, AppleInsider reported. It is taking a lease one significant site in Herzliya Pituach, a city north of Tel Aviv. The company looks to be placing itself at the heart of the booming tech scene in the country (although many startups operate in Tel Aviv).

It’s not clear whether Apple will lease the entire building, but it is taking a reported 44,000 square meters, plus 650 parking spaces. This adds to the existing 31,000 square meters above ground, reports Globes, and 27,000 square meters underground. The original site housed 800 staff who worked for flash memory producer Anobit, and motion sensing company PrimeSense, both of which had been acquired by Apple. The mid-2015 expansion was reportedly intended to give those staff more room, rather than to make space for more employees.

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Qualcomm Sets Out Apple Silicon Competitor

Charlotte Henry ·

Qualcomm is preparing for battle with Cupertino and its M-series chips. It laid out its competition to Apple Silicon for Windows device, which will launch in 2023, The Verge reported. Perhaps most interesting of all is the fact that those working on this project used to work for Apple.

Dr. James Thompson, Qualcomm’s chief technology officer, announced the plans for the new chips at the company’s 2021 investor day event, with the goal of getting samples to hardware customers in about nine months ahead of product launches with the new chip in 2023. The new chip will be designed by the Nuvia team, which Qualcomm had bought earlier this year in a massive $1.4 billion acquisition. Nuvia, notably, was founded in 2019 by a trio of former Apple employees who had previously worked on the company’s A-series chips.

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Get Ready For Apple vs Meta in the AR Headset Wars

Charlotte Henry ·

Over the years, Facebook and Apple have become involved in an increasingly tense relationship, normally over issues of privacy. We’ve got used to snide comments about tracking and new privacy products. However, in the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg News‘s Mark Gurman suggests we may not have seen anything yet. The fight over the AR headset space is set to be the real battleground, as Apple and the newly rebranded Meta go head-to-head in the hardware space for really the first time.

Meta has shipped headsets for several years, but 2022 is when the market is set to heat up, both in terms of hardware capabilities and competition. Last month, Meta previewed Project Cambria, its first true mixed reality headset. To date, Meta’s headsets have focused on virtual reality, enveloping users completely in the digital world. That compares with augmented reality glasses, which overlay digital information on top of the real world. The Cambria headset mixes both, adding full-color AR overlay abilities to VR. The Cambria headset also has far more advanced processors, sensors and lenses compared with previous Meta devices. That brings us to Apple, which plans to launch a similarly high-end mixed reality headset next year, perhaps within a few months of the Meta device. Apple’s offering will probably be in the $2,000 range, whereas I expect Meta’s to be quite a bit cheaper. Still, the two products will be direct challengers for users looking to jump into the metaverse.

Podcast

Apple's Not Wrong to Avoid Crypto (for Now), Apple Small Business Support, with Jeff Gamet - ACM 560

Bryan Chaffin · · Add Comment

Bryan Chaffin and Jeff Gamet discuss Bryan’s thought that Apple isn’t wrong to avoid cryptocurrency, at least not for now. But, there are lots of things coming in the crypto world that will change that. They also talk about Apple’s new Small Business Essentials service that helps companies manage their employees’ devices.

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Veterans Use Apple Technology to Update Approach to Trauma Medicine

Charlotte Henry ·

Various Apple products are increasingly used in medical settings, and health is clearly an area the company is very interested in. Normally the focus is on general health monitoring, but on Wednesday it posted a feature highlighting one perhaps overlooked use case – trauma medicine. Of particular interest is how veterans used products to help change approaches, via a product called T6.

T6 allows medical teams to input and analyze patient data in real time through iPad. In a hospital setting, data such as vitals and injury details are entered into the app and displayed on a large screen for the entire trauma team to see, along with standard-of-care guidelines and alerts. In the field, whether that’s in an ambulance or medical helicopter, or if T6 is being used by a military team or medic, the iPad app will allow real-time virtual communication between the person administering care and a trauma team in another location.