Apple's designer exodus continues as product design chief Tang Tan is leaving the company and joining Jony Ive's design firm LoveFrom, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. There, he'll reportedly work on a new artificial intelligence hardware project backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman with aim of creating devices deploying the latest deep learning technology. 

Tan was in charge of design for Apple's main products including the iPhone, Watch and AirPods, so his departure leaves a sizable hole. As part of LoveFrom, Tan will act as hardware design lead for the new AI project, with Altman providing the software running underneath. All products are supposedly in the early concept phases, with a focus on devices for the home. None of the parties (OpenAI, LoveFrom or Apple) have commented on the news. 

It was already known that Tan would be likely be leaving Apple, but it hadn't yet been revealed where he'd go. Earlier this year, Jony Ive's successor Evans Hankey left the company after just a few years in the product design chief role. In all, about 14 members of Ive's former team have left Apple since 2019, with only a half dozen or so remaining. Ive worked as a consultant for Apple until 2022, and more than 20 former Apple employees have joined Ive under LoveFrom. 

Altman was recently fired (and then rehired) by OpenAI, in part because he was raising funds for other endeavors. One of those was the team-up with Ive to create AI hardware backed by Softbank, according to a previous Bloomberg report. 

Amazon has started notifying Prime Video subscribers that they have to pay extra if they don't want their viewing experience interrupted by commercials. In an email the company has sent to customers, it said that it will start showing "limited advertisements" with its service's movies and shows starting on January 29. Those who want to keep their accounts ad-free will have to pay an extra fee of $3 a month on top of their Prime subscription or their standalone $9-a-month Prime Video membership. 

The company first announced that it was going to serve ads with its content — and that the initial regions to be affected are the US, UK, Germany and Canada — back in September. Customers in France, Italy, Spain, Mexico and Australia will have to make the decision whether to endure the advertisements it serves or pay extra by late next year. Amazon mentioned back then that it's aiming to "have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers." While "meaningfully fewer" is pretty vague, Variety said at the time that four minutes per hour seemed to be the lowest amount of ad time for a streaming platform. 

Amazon reiterated that goal in the email it sent to subscribers. It also explained that introducing ads to its service and charging more for an ad-free viewing experience will help it invest "in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time." The company told subscribers that they'll automatically start seeing ads by the end of January and linked to a website where they can pay for ad-free viewing. In an information page about the change, Amazon clarified that it will not be showing ads with rented or purchased content. It also said that Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam, the Mariana Islands and American Samoa are excluded from the rollout for now. 

National Amusements, CBS and Paramount’s parent company, reported a year-old hack this month affecting 82,128 people. TechCrunch first covered the breach, revealed in a company legal filing with Maine’s Attorney General under a 2005 state digital privacy law. National Amusements hasn’t commented publicly on the intrusion outside of the legal filing, and it isn’t clear if customer (or “only” employee) data was stolen.

Maine’s data breach notification says the hack occurred over a year ago, from December 13 to 15, 2022. It states 82,128 people were affected, 64 of whom were Maine residents. National Amusements’ senior vice president of human resources filed the notice, which may suggest (but not confirm) that it revolved largely or entirely around internal employee data. The filing says the company began notifying customers in writing on December 22, 2023 — 372 days after the breach.

“On or about December 15, 2022, National Amusements became aware of suspicious activity in our computer network,” the notification letter to victims reads. “We immediately took steps to secure our network and minimize any disruption to our operations.”

However, that last sentence contains an inconsistency, as the notice posted by Maine’s Attorney General’s office lists the “date breach discovered” as August 23, 2023. That suggests the company didn’t know about the intrusion until eight months after the incident, hardly qualifying as “immediately” taking steps.

The filing says hackers accessed financial information, including “account number or credit/debit card number (in combination with security code, access code, password or PIN for the account).” National Amusements wrote in Maine’s notice that it’s offering victims 12 months of Experian credit monitoring and identity theft services to customers whose social security numbers were taken.

Engadget contacted National Amusements for confirmation or additional info. We will update this article if we hear back.

National Amusements gained a controlling stake in Paramount and CBS in 2019 following the Viacom-CBS merger. This hack appears separate from one Paramount disclosed in August through Massachusetts’ Attorney General’s Office. The company listed that breach’s date as “between May and June 2023.”

If you’ve been planning on spending the tail-end of your holiday break revisiting the original Splatoon for Wii U or Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS, you could be out of luck. It looks like Nintendo has already begun to restrict the Wii U and 3DS’s ability to play online, according to multiple users and media outlets like Nintendo Life. This started just before Christmas Eve, which is a real Bowser move.

We knew this was coming, but Nintendo originally said the shutdown wouldn’t happen until early April. This may not impact every player just yet, so head online with your console to give it a shot. Jonathan Barrow of Pretendo, an “open-source Nintendo Network replacement," wrote that this is part of a “slow rollout” of Nintendo’s April plans. Pretendo hopes to eventually bring the two consoles back online.

To be fair, Nintendo never actually said that the April end-date was set in stone, as the company suggested that it could discontinue online services “earlier than planned.” It could’ve warned folks, however, so they could get one last round of multiplayer Kid Icarus: Uprising in.

This news follows Nintendo closing its 3DS and Wii U eShops back in March. So, now, you can’t buy new games or go online with your old games. The company’s silly-yet-engaging Miiverse social network, which operated on both consoles, was shut down in 2017, though there’s a post archive.

This is sad, but it happens. Out with the old and in with the new, and all of that. Being a gamer is weird that way. Entire generations of games simply disappear, like Goomba tears in the rain. On the plus side, maybe we’ll be able to shell out full-price for some more remakes, with a Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon refresh coming to the Switch next year.

Apple has filed an appeal to the International Trade Commission (ITC) attempting to reverse a ban on US sales of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2, according to court records. The company’s also requesting an emergency stay on the ban until a decision is reached regarding proposed redesigns of both smartwatch models.

The company spoke to Reuters and said it’s “taking all measures to return” the smartwatches to US store shelves. The appeal is just one part of that. The matter even went before President Biden, with Apple hoping in vain for a veto. The ban officially goes into effect today, though Apple started pulling smartwatches from its digital and physical storefronts last week.

In today’s filing, Apple claims it will “suffer irreparable harm” if the ban continues. The Exclusion Order Enforcement Branch of U.S. Customs and Border Protection is scheduled to make a decision on Apple’s redesigned versions of the smartwatches on January 13.

This all started when the ITC ruled that Apple infringed on blood oxygen saturation tracking technology patented by a health tech firm called Masimo. This led to Apple scrambling to issue a software fix before a ban went into effect. However, the ITC and Masimo agreed that this is a hardware issue involving the actual sensor, so software fixes wouldn’t cut it. As such, Apple is busy redesigning the sensors for the two smartwatch models. The Apple Watch SE doesn’t have a blood oxygen sensor, so it remains unimpacted by the ban.

Masimo sued Apple back in 2021 over the aforementioned patient violations and even alleged that the company poached employees with high-level knowledge of blood oxygen monitoring capabilities. It’s still possible the two companies will come to a financial agreement, putting this issue to bed.

So what does this mean for consumers looking for a bit of wrist candy? You can still buy the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 in other parts of the world, as the ban only impacts the US. You can also buy the watches from third-party retailers in the US until the stock dries up. You cannot, however, purchase one of these smartwatches directly from Apple.

Apple Watch sales account for around half of the entire smartwatch market. So when the company says the ban will cause “irreparable harm”, it isn’t kidding.

Microsoft’s Copilot tool, the company’s AI chatbot that can do everything from help you write code to draft a marketing email, has made its way onto Android mobile devices. Copilot, which is powered by OpenAI's latest models GPT-4 and DALL-E 3, can also be used to generate images from simple text descriptions and requests. The app is available on the Google Play Store, is free to download and does not require a Microsoft account to sign in.

The rollout of a mobile version of Microsoft’s Copilot (formerly Bing Chat) was quiet — with little buzz and no formal announcements, unlike what we saw with the release of Bing Chat on mobile devices. The new Copilot app was released earlier this month and was initially spotted by Neowin when X users noticed it in the Play Store. Copilot is still not available on iOS though, and the company has yet to make any promises for a release date.

It only makes sense that Copilot has made its way to mobile devices (or at least on Android to start). Microsoft’s previous move to bring Copilot to Windows 10, after launching on Edge, Microsoft 365 products and Windows 11 — added an additional 1 billion devices that are eligible to use the AI assistant, signaling Microsoft’s deadset view on expansion. This coincides with the company’s recent updates to Copilot which include its video summarization capability and song creation feature.

The impressive-looking Fallout: London mod has been on our radar for a couple of years, and now the fan-made adventure has an official release date of April 23. The development team says the game's already finished, but it requires these last few months for testing, according to Eurogamer.

This is a “DLC-sized mod” for Bethesda’s Fallout 4, so it was built from the bones of the 2015 sequel. As you can guess, it gives players free rein over a post-apocalyptic London. The release date trailer shows iconic locations like Big Ben, Shakespeare's Globe and Trafalgar Square, among others. Of course, these areas have been warped by nuclear fallout and decades of chaos. You know the drill.

Developer Team Folon says the game’s European location isn’t just window dressing. The mod will lead players down story paths that “explore pre-war European history” and take a look at how Fallout’s Resource Wars impacted the “class structured society” of the region. It’s also a direct sequel to Fallout 4, being advertised as a “continuation of the base game.” So you’ll need a PC version of the original title to play the mod.

Fallout: London has been in development for more than three years and was expected to launch in 2022 or 2023. Team Folon says the delay was unavoidable, as many team members “come from a region affected by conflict”, potentially referring to Ukraine.

While the release date may have little significance to those of us in the good ole USA, April 23 is St. George’s Day across Britain. It’s a day filled with celebrations and parades, though not an official bank holiday. It’s also just a week after that Fallout show drops on Amazon Prime Video. In other words, April’s a big month for fans of Vault Boy.

This year, tech companies have made concessions that would have once been unthinkable. Apple agreed to adopt the RCS protocol, allowing for text message interoperability with Android devices, and, after more than a decade it ditched the lightning port in its latest iPhone. Meta offered some users the choice to opt out of targeted advertising for a monthly subscription. TikTok, Meta, and Snap allowed some users to opt out of their recommendation algorithms entirely.

None of these concessions would have happened without pressure from the European Union. The bloc has long taken the lead in regulating “Big Tech” (or attempting to), but 2023 saw some of those efforts finally come to fruition.

The most immediate result of increased EU regulations this year came with the arrival of the iPhone 15 lineup, which was the first phone from Apple to support USB-C rather than its proprietary lightning port. The company may have eventually made the switch on its own, but it came in 2023 as a direct result of a European law that made USB-C the common charging standard.

"We have no choice as we do around the world but to comply to local laws," Apple exec Greg Joswiak said about the rules last year. (The regulation requires all new phones and other mobile devices to adopt USB-C by the end of 2024.)

Likewise, it’s widely believed Apple’s decision to finally agree to support the RCS standard in iMessage was the result of political will within the EU. Apple had long been resistant to supporting RCS, which would finally modernize text messages between iPhone owners and their “green bubble” friends.

Apple hasn’t publicly said why it changed its stance. But Google and other companies were pressuring EU authorities to regulate iMessage like other “gatekeeper” services that fall under its authority thanks to the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Apple’s surprise announcement that it would support RCS after all came on the same day as the deadline for companies to challenge the EU’s gatekeeper rules. So Apple’s about face on RCS could reasonably be interpreted as an attempt to pacify EU regulators who could have taken more aggressive measures, like requiring iMessage to be fully interoperable with other chat apps like WhatsApp.

Notably, both of these changes will also benefit US users, even though they are a consequence of EU-specific regulations.“There's definitely a higher degree of protection to the consumer in Europe than there is in the US,” Carolina Milanesi, a consumer analyst with Creative Strategies, told Engadget. Those protections, she noted, often “cascade down” to other regions because it can be impractical to implement different standards across geographies.

In addition to the gains made under the DMA, most of the major social media apps — including Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram — fall under the purview of another EU law that went into effect this year, the Digital Services Act. Under this law, these companies are required to make detailed disclosures about disinformation and other harmful content, and explain how their recommendation algorithms work.

“If you force the social media industry to explain itself, to reveal to some degree its inner workings, it will have an incentive to not misbehave and/or incentive to self regulate more vigorously” explains Paul Barrett, deputy director of NYU’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.

Whether these measures will actually make these services better for those using them, however, is less clear. There are still open questions about how the rules will be enforced. But there have been a few notable changes for EU-based social media users.

Snapchat, Meta and TikTok all now allow European users to opt out of their recommendation algorithms entirely. Snapchat also ended most targeted advertising for 13- to 17-year-olds in the bloc. Additionally, Meta was forced to allow EU users to opt-out of targeted advertising or choose no advertising at all (in exchange for a hefty monthly subscription.)

While these may not seem like monumental changes, they do strike at the heart of all of these companies’ business models. And it’s unlikely, if left to self-regulate as US policymakers have been content to allow them to do, that any of these companies would have voluntarily acted against their own self-interest.

Every time Microsoft launched a major AI feature this year, I couldn't help but feel more skeptical about the company's new direction. Here's Microsoft, a notoriously conservative and slow-moving giant, reshaping its products around artificial intelligence not long after most people learned generative AI existed. The last time it made such a dramatic shift we got Windows 8, a failed attempt at making its flagship OS tablet and touchscreen friendly.

Now, the company is bringing AI right into the heart of Windows and I'm left wondering: Is Microsoft jumping into artificial intelligence to actually make its products better? Or is it just trying to stake a claim as an AI innovator and pray that the technology actually lives up to the hype? At this point, it's genuinely hard to tell.

As the Zune, WebTV and Windows Phone have shown, Microsoft isn't so great at timing. Its products often either land too early to be useful (as in the case of the sluggish WebTV), or arrive far too late to make an impact (like the genuinely great Zune HD). But when the company unveiled its AI-powered Bing Chat earlier this year, it was perfectly positioned to coast on the success of ChatGPT, which by then had reportedly reached 100 million users in just two months. According to UBS analysts, that would have made ChatGPT the fastest growing consumer application in history. What better time to mate the power of generative AI with one of its notoriously beleaguered products? Microsoft had nothing to lose.

Justin Sullivan via Getty Images

After investing a total of $13 billion in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI (and acquiring a 49 percent stake in the process), Microsoft was probably eager to show off its shiny new toy ahead of Google and others. The introduction of Bing Chat officially kicked off Microsoft's year of AI: Copilot launched on Edge, Microsoft 365 products like Word and Powerpoint and eventually made its way to Windows 11. Even more surprising, the company recently announced that Copilot is coming to Windows 10 — a sign that it wants AI features in front of as many people as possible. (Windows 11 reportedly accounts for 26 percent of Windows installations, while Windows 10 still has 69 percent. By targeting both platforms Copilot could potentially reach up to 1.4 billion users.)

There's no doubt that Copilot makes a great first impression. Type in a few words (or speak them aloud), and it returns with direct answers to your questions, like a whip-smart assistant. There are no ads to wade through, and you only have to engage with additional links if you want. It's a glimpse at a world beyond search engines, one where AI could help guide us through an increasingly chaotic media landscape. Microsoft's Copilots can also help out in specific applications: In Edge it can summarize the webpage you're looking at; it can help to transcribe and generate action points in Teams Meetings; and it can help unearth hard to find settings in Windows (for example, you could just type "How do I turn on Night Mode?" to flip that on).

But Copilot's confident veneer hides the fact that it often makes errors and can occasionally misunderstand your questions entirely. It's far less responsive than using a typical search engine, as there's a lot of opaque AI processing happening in the background. And in my testing, it also crashes more often than you'd think, which requires a “reboot” of your session (but at least it doesn't flash a blue screen like Windows).

Microsoft

In an effort to temper our expectations, Microsoft has a helpful note emblazoned atop Bing's AI chat: "Bing is powered by AI, so surprises and mistakes are possible. Please share feedback so we can improve!" Microsoft appears to show a bit of humility here by acknowledging that its AI chat isn't perfect, and it's trying to earn some brownie points by saying it's listening to your feedback. Mostly, though, that warning serves as a way out for Microsoft. It can tout Copilot's ability to write essays for you and hold vaguely realistic conversations, but the minute it screws up, the company can just say, "It's just a beta, LOL!"

The big test for Microsoft's Copilots and other generative AI tools comes down to one thing: trust. Can a user trust that it'll deliver the relevant information when it asks a question? Can we be sure Copilow will even understand our query correctly? Aaron Woodman, Microsoft's VP of Windows Marketing, tells us that trust will ultimately come down to users "kicking the tires" for themselves and seeing how well Copilot performs. "I think that type of organic growth is one that we're going to see over time," he said in an interview with Engadget at the Windows Copilot launch in September. "And I bet it'll be explosive because the value is there, and I think customers will see that very quickly."

Microsoft

Woodman also believes that users will understand that Copilot won't always be perfect, especially during these early days. "I weirdly think we're probably more empathetic with people and understand where they're at with growth than we are with technology," he said. "I think the best thing that we can do is honestly own that, be transparent about it. At some level, every conversation we're in, we're trying to lean into [that] this is a growth process. We want to make sure you understand reference materials. I think people will understand that we're trying to accelerate bringing [new] technology to them."

I’ve been using Microsoft’s AI solutions since Bing Chat launched earlier this year, and while it’s helpful for simple tasks, like creating a specification table comparing two products, it hasn’t exactly changed the way I work. Microsoft also had to seriously restrict Bing Chat’s capabilities early on after it started arguing with users and issuing disturbing responses. In Windows 11, Copilot can sometimes help me find settings like dark mode, but it can’t always pull up the controls within the Copilot pane, and sometimes it just sends me to general settings menus if it can’t figure out what I’m asking for.

More recently, I’ve had disappointing conversations with Bing when I asked if it was a good time to buy a Nintendo Switch (it took some prodding for it to bring up rumors of a potential Switch follow-up coming next year), and its ability to answer questions around images is still less useful than Google’s image search.

When I took a photo of my kid’s baby monitor and asked “What is this?,” Bing was aware of its function, but it got the actual model and manufacturer wrong. That query also took five seconds to complete. The Google Image Search took half a second and correctly identified it as the Eufy Space Monitor. Score one for traditional search (and yes, I know it’s also powered by its own set of computer vision models).

Microsoft

We can look to Microsoft's Github Copilot, which launched in November 2021, as one way users can learn to work with AI. It's mainly meant to serve as a partner alongside an experienced programmer: It'll look out for potential issues and it can even whip up some simple code.

According to developer Aidan Tilgner, Github Copilot can be genuinely useful for coders, so long as you keep your expectations in check. In the paper "GitHub Copilot AI pair programming: Asset or Liability?" authors Arghavan Moradi Dakhel, Vahid Majdinasab, Amin Nikanjam, Foutse Khomh, Michel C.Desmarais, and Zhen Ming Jiang found Github Copilot similarly useful, but note "it can also become a liability if it is used by novices, those who may not be familiar with the problem context and correct coding methods."

"Copilot suggests solutions that might be buggy and difficult to understand, which may be accepted as correct solutions by novices," the authors add. "Adding such buggy and complex code into software projects can highly impact their quality."

By leaning so much on Copilots in the future, Microsoft may also be tying itself too closely to OpenAI, a young company that recently went through one of the most volatile weekends in Silicon Valley history. OpenAI’s board fired CEO Sam Altman, but after a significant amount of internal pressure (and some cajoling from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella), it ultimately re-hired him a few days later. If OpenAI goes through another tumultuous event, it won’t just be Microsoft’s $13 billion investment in danger: It’ll be the company’s future plans for practically all of its products.

According to Windows Central, Microsoft’s next major Windows update, “Hudson Valley,” may arrive next year with a slew of AI enhancements in tow. That includes the ability to analyze content being displayed in video chats, an improved Copilot that can remember everything you’ve done on your PC, and better system-wide search. Some features may also require CPUs with NPUs, like AMD’s last batch of chips and Intel’s new Core Ultra hardware. That’s similar to the Windows Studio Effects features like background blurring and auto-framing, which also require NPUs.

The one constant around AI these days is that everything is changing quickly. Since I started writing this piece, Microsoft announced Copilot would be upgraded with the more powerful GPT-4 Turbo and Dall-E 3 models, which will make them even more capable. Perhaps Microsoft and OpenAI will eventually be able to fix all of the issues I’ve seen with Copilot so far, and ultimately deliver a transformative AI tool that’s easily available to everyone. But I also hoped for the best when it came to the company’s dual-screen Duo and Neo plans, and all I got in return was disappointment.

A video of Taters the cat beamed across 19 million miles of space because NASA had to try it. It was a successful demonstration of new laser communication technology, through which NASA beamed an ultra-high-definition video across deep space, from the Psyche spacecraft back to Earth. The signal from the video, sent on December 11, made it to Earth in 101 seconds.

That data speed — through space — is faster than most broadband connections on Earth.

— Mat Smith

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Apple reportedly wants to team up with news publishers to train its AI

It’s offering publishers deals worth at least $50 million, according to The New York Times.

Apple has apparently started negotiating with major publishers and news organizations to use their content to train its generative AI system. The company doesn’t expect to get its hands on content for free, though, and The New York Times says it’s offering them multi-year deals worth at least $50 million. While some of the publishers are reportedly concerned about the repercussions of letting Apple use their news articles throughout the years, the company is building goodwill simply by asking for permission and showing willingness to pay.

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Humane Ai Pin orders will start shipping in March

The next-gen wearable, which taps into artificial intelligence, starts at $699.

Humane

The Humane Ai Pin is expected to start shipping in March. On Friday, the company posted on X that “those who placed priority orders will receive their Ai Pins first when we begin shipping in March.” The company previously gave an “early 2024” estimate for the screen-less, $66 wearable device, which Humane believes is the next-gen hardware to replace smartphones.

Instead of a screen, the Ai Pin relies on voice cues and a projector that beams info onto the user’s hand.

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Mint Mobile says hackers accessed customer information during a security breach

Affected customers have been notified by email.

Mint Mobile, the prepaid mobile carrier backed by Ryan Reynolds, notified customers via email this weekend that their information may have been stolen in a security breach. That information includes names, phone numbers, email addresses and SIM and IMEI numbers. Hackers did not access customers’ credit card information, which Mint says is not stored, nor were passwords compromised.

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