Saturday, August 31, 2024
Friday, August 30, 2024
When to expect each iPad model to get its next update
When to expect each iPad model to get its next update
“If you’re in the market for a new iPad, you’re probably wondering when the best time to buy is. That all depends on which model you’re interested in. New iPads are expected to arrive as soon as September, while some models will be waiting a long while for another update. Here’s when to expect updates to the full iPad lineup.
iPad mini
Release expected: Very soon
The iPad mini is usually the least-updated iPad. It can go several years between updates—as evidenced by the most recent iPad mini 6 debuting in September 2021. Fortunately, all indications are that Apple is prepping an iPad mini 7 for release very soon—likely with a jelly scrolling-free display and Apple Intelligence support. The update was always expected to launch in 2024, but now it seems especially close. With stock of the current iPad mini running lowat the Apple Store, Apple may surprise us with a September 9 debut alongside the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro.
- Buy: the iPad mini 6 is discounted to $379 on Amazon (down from $499)
iPad
Release expected: Soon
Apple’s base model iPad is also overdue for an upgrade, as the last update released in October 2022. The 10th gen iPad brought USB-C, a landscape front-facing camera, and a design refresh. Expect to see the 11th generation iPad launch some time this fall, either in September or October. Changes are expected to be minor, as this will be more of a spec bump update. An Apple Intelligence-compatible chip would be great, but it’s a wildcard.
- Buy: the iPad (10th generation) is discounted to $299 on Amazon (retail $349)
iPad Pro
Release expected: Not soon
The most powerful iPad, the iPad Pro, won’t be receiving an update any time soon. The current M4 iPad Pro debuted this May, and there’s often an 18-month gap between iPad Pro revisions. It’s always possible Apple could release the next Pro a little sooner, with spring 2025 the earliest date. But late 2025 or even early 2026 is a safer bet. So if you’re interested in getting an iPad Pro today, the M4 model is a great buy.
- Buy: the M4 iPad Pro (11-inch) is discounted to $899 on Amazon (retail $999)
- Buy: the M4 iPad Pro (13-inch) is discounted to $1,194 on Amazon (retail $1,299)
iPad Air
Release expected: Not soon
The iPad Air, similar to the iPad Pro, was just updated this spring. As a result, don’t expect another revision until spring 2025 at the earliest. The current M2 iPad Air packs a lot of powerful tech at a lower price point than its Pro siblings. It’s also available in two sizes for the first time: 11-inch and 13-inch. If you’re looking forward to Apple Intelligence this fall, the iPad Air’s M2 chip will provide plenty of computing power for the new AI features.
- Buy: the M2 iPad Air (11-inch) is discounted to $586 on Amazon (retail $599)
- Buy: the M2 iPad Air (13-inch) is discounted to $729 on Amazon (retail $799)
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Elon Musk’s X Is Leaving San Francisco. City Officials Say ‘Good Riddance.’ - The New York Times
Elon Musk’s X Is Leaving San Francisco. City Officials Say ‘Good Riddance.’
"The company, founded in the city as Twitter, is moving its headquarters to Texas as a shadow of its former self.
San Francisco’s long relationship with X is nearly over — and city officials are far from heartbroken.
Elon Musk is shuttering his social media company’s headquarters in a gritty downtown neighborhood in the coming weeks and will move its last employees based there south to offices in Palo Alto and San Jose. New headquarters will be set up in Texas.
But city officials are not lamenting the exit. X bears little resemblance to the company that San Francisco wooed with a tax break more than a decade ago, when it was Twitter, to help anchor a budding tech hub in a downtrodden neighborhood near City Hall known as Mid-Market. The pandemic, and Mr. Musk’s 2022 acquisition of the company and subsequent gutting of its work force, reduced the headquarters to a ghost town.
“I share the perspective that most San Franciscans have, which is good riddance,” said City Attorney David Chiu, who as a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors backed the tax break that lured Twitter to Mid-Market in 2012.
Twitter once symbolized San Francisco’s status as a start-up capital. But the city’s nonchalant response to the move — amid public posts from Mr. Musk about San Francisco’s inflexible tax policies and liberal politics — shows officials are now less willing to cater to companies considering a move.
Mr. Musk and X did not respond to requests for comment.
Twitter was founded in San Francisco in 2006. In 2011, it threatened to forsake its hometown for tiny Brisbane, just over the city’s southern border, which wouldn’t levy payroll taxes.
San Francisco’s mayor then, Ed Lee, coping with the lingering effects of a recession and a nearly 10 percent unemployment rate, proposed a so-called Twitter tax break. The deal would erase the 1.5 percent payroll tax on new hires for certain companies in Mid-Market. Those companies would, in turn, create jobs and enliven a neighborhood that struggled with crime, vacancies and homelessness.
After Twitter moved into the new headquarters at 1355 Market Street, its payroll swelled from a few hundred to a few thousand people. The cavernous ground floor became home to upscale bars and restaurants — where people could eat antelope, elk and pig ears.
By 2017, 59 new companies had set up shop nearby, including Uber, Square and Zendesk. Several luxury apartment buildings went up. The boom helped expand the city budget, but also contributed to spiking housing costs.
Many of the tech companies also provided free food, so workers didn’t spend as much at local businesses as city leaders had hoped. The Twitter tax break ended in 2019, with politicians considering its success mixed.
Then came the pandemic. Offices emptied, and foot traffic dried up. Jack Dorsey, a Twitter co-founder and its chief executive at the time, announced that employees could work from home forever.
In October 2022, Mr. Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion and soon slashed jobs. Last year, he renamed the company and erected on the roof a giant “X” sign that flashed at night, upsetting neighbors and landing him in trouble with the city.
“It’s like a zombie version of the old Twitter, and I think what a lot of people are feeling is: Just put this bird out of its misery,” said Yao Yue, a software engineer who worked at Twitter for 12 years and was let go after Mr. Musk’s takeover.
Mr. Musk, who clashed with state regulators over pandemic stay-at-home orders and has increasingly enmeshed himself in right-wing politics, recently indicated that he was souring on San Francisco. In July, he posted online that he had been trapped in the company’s garage “because a gang was doing drugs in the street and wouldn’t move!”
Mr. Musk said in July that he would move X’s headquarters to Austin, Texas, after California passed a law that bans school districts from requiring teachers to notify parents if their children change their gender identification. He also blamed San Francisco’s gross receipts tax, which taxes local businesses for transactions that take place outside city limits.
He said the tax unfairly penalizes businesses that process payments — something he hopes X will do. “X could not remain in SF and launch payments, as it would immediately fail,” he posted in July.
Mayor London Breed said she met with Mr. Musk once several months ago and had texted with him. She said she had not offered X anything to stay, but wanted to maintain good relationships with all chief executives in her city.
“I’m not going to beg anybody,” Ms. Breed said. “But I made it very clear that my goal is to ensure that companies succeed.”
She said she thought Mr. Musk’s political agenda had driven him out of San Francisco, but did not elaborate.
Mid-Market is looking better than it did in the depths of the pandemic, but its office vacancy rate is 46 percent, 10 points higher than the city as a whole. Uber and Square moved out, and Zendesk retains a small footprint but has bigger offices downtown. Already, X’s lobby is empty, and most businesses in the building have shuttered.
The city’s chief economist, Ted Egan, said X had shrunk so much already, its departure would matter little to the city’s coffers.
“In many respects, they were already gone,” he said.
Heather Knight is a reporter in San Francisco, leading The Times’s coverage of the Bay Area and Northern California. More about Heather Knight
Kate Conger is a technology reporter based in San Francisco. She can be reached at kate.conger@nytimes.com. More about Kate Conger"
Tuesday, August 27, 2024
Can upstate New York become the next Silicon Valley? This ex-Nvidia founder thinks so | Technology | The Guardian
Can upstate New York become the next Silicon Valley? This ex-Nvidia founder thinks so
"Curtis Priem has a vision for a quantum computing future and believes the area along the Hudson valley is fertile for the next tech boom
The “quantum chandelier” that sits within a glass box in the chapel at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s campus in Troy, New York, is the symbolic centerpiece of an ambitious effort to turn upstate New York into an advanced technology center – what Silicon Valley is to social media or Cambridge, Massachusetts, is to biotech.
The silver sci-fi object, named for interior gold lattices that suspend, cool and isolate its processor, is the heart of a “quantum computing system” that could herald a new age of computing. It’s the centerpiece of the dream Curtis Priem, a co-founder of Nvidia, the $2.8tn artificial intelligence hardware and software company, has of turning Rensselaer, or RPI, into an advanced computing hub and refashioning this area of upstate New York into a new Silicon Valley.
Priem has invested a sizable chunk of his fortune into building the Curtis Priem Quantum Constellation – a workshop for RPI students’ vision of a quantum computing future. Just as his partners at Nvidia, where he was the company’s first chief technology officer, gave him the freedom to imagine graphics chip architecture that powers the AI revolution, he hoped his investment will spark a new era of computer-powered innovation in the region.
Priem is betting that the area along the Hudson Valley, from Yorktown Heights, home to IBM’s quantum lab, up to Troy, home to RPI and Suny’s NanoTech complex, and west to Syracuse, where Micron is building a $100bn megafab complex, is US computer technology’s future home.
To do so, he’s thinking beyond concerns about artificial intelligence, and the success of Nvidia’s H100 graphics processing units (GPUs) that underpin as much as 90% of generative AI systems.
Wall Street has turned more skeptical on tech. AI has lost billions as Wall Street has soured on the idea that the new technology is about to change the world. But the same was true for the internet overbuild in the 1990s, leading to a boom and crash, before finally paying off.
In theory, quantum technology will be able to solve in seconds problems that would take today’s supercomputer decades, if at all, unlocking secrets about the behavior of molecules, genetic codes, weather prediction and – the latest anxiety – breaking the encryption systems that underpin the internet.
The technical, and financial, challenges are mighty. Rensselaer’s IBM-built quantum computer is so advanced that it must be cooled to close to absolute zero, (−273.15C, −459.67F) to operate at all. To program a quantum computer is challenging, to say the least. Traditional computers work in a binary code of ones and zeros. Quantum mechanics is judged to be one of the most difficult areas of physics because values exist in multiple states at once. In a computer, quantum bits, or qubits, are “entangled”, meaning the properties of one depend on the properties around it.
For Priem, at 66, that means giving the febrile minds of Rensselaer’s sciences student body the freedom to imagine a new computing world. “It’s exciting to see these kids with no blinders and constraints put on them and given this technology that no one else has,” he says. “All of a sudden, they’re like, ‘Wow! I can invent the future.’”
The development comes as the US is racing to advance computer science and repatriate chip manufacturing from Taiwan and China as a matter of national security. The pandemic taught US manufacturers and consumers that supply chains are fragile. In 2022 Congress authorized the $280bn Chips Act to bring chip innovation back home and protect the US against future disruptions.
“We have to look at everything,” Priem says. “The whole thing can fall apart. We thought we were friendly with the Chinese and then it turned out that it depends on who our leaders are.”
Priem, Martin Schmidt, a former MIT provost who is now Rensselaer president, and Kathy Hochul, the New York governor, believe a good chunk of that cash should be directed to upstate New York, an area that has four essential qualities: land, water, power and an intellectual “brainbelt”.
AI is notoriously heavy in its demands for water and power: Goldman Sachs predicts that demand from US data centers will grow from 3% of energy usage today to 8% in six years. And then there’s demand for water needed to cool the chips.
Because Priem is known for the architecture that underpins AI, people inevitably ask him what he makes of it and whether they should be worried. He tells them that whatever is coming with AI, the experiment has already begun with social media.
“Only 1% of our existence is based on reality, and 99% on belief,” he reasons. “So you have people talking to each other on social media and that’s the mess AI will represent. The big companies try to detect what’s true and what’s fake, but when you look at social media you can’t tell.”
Artificial reality is OK for a Marvel movie where we accept fake as better than reality, but outside the theatre, he says, “everybody hates each other”.
Priem sold off most of his Nvidia stock when the company was valued at $2bn. It’s now worth $2.5tn. If he had not sold, he would now be one of the world’s wealthiest individuals. Former partner Jensen Huang’s stock was recently valued at $103bn – but even that is down from Nvidia’s June peak.
Priem doesn’t sound too disappointed. The stock he sold, he reasons, may have in turn helped a family buy a house or put their kids through college. He remains, he says, “Nvidia’s No 1 fan. The other founders played the game and I’m cheering them on from the stands.”
Divorce caused him to sell off his Nvidia stock, but he stays in touch with his former Nvidia partners, Huang and Chris Malachowsky. Priem says that at times it’s been awkward, but he texts, most recently when the Huang family dogs had diarrhea, and about their kids.
“All I can do is help from outside. The last shares I held were in 2006. It’s phenomenal what they would be worth, but I wouldn’t be able to monetize them without taking down Nvidia’s price,” he says.
The shares could receive a further boost this week when Nvidia announces second-quarter earnings. It is expected to reveal another surge in profits on the back of doubling revenues as it benefits from the rapid adoption of generative AI.
If Nvidia hits $210 a share, the three co-founders would be worth a trillion dollars. “Everybody thinks that’s how we value success because they have no other way of doing it,” he says, “but my $200bn is what I’ve infused into the US economy.”
“I’ve got to be one of the luckiest guys on the planet – what those guys did for me was to trust me to design this architecture (now called Cuda) for the GPU. I’ve never seen that level of trust in any other engineer in our industry,” Priem says. “I gave them the framework, the rules, and I’m a happy camper.” When he recently met Huang at a fundraiser at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Huang turned to him, shaking his head, to say, “I can’t believe we’re still using the same architecture.”
His time at Nvidia also gave him unrivaled contacts. Like most businesses, technology is one of relationships. Priem and Schmidt prevailed on IBM’s director of research, DarÃo Gil, to send over the quantum computer which might otherwise have been ground up. Gil and John Kelly, former head of IBM, sit on the board at Rensselaer. Among the big chiefs of technology, Priem says, “there’s a certain level of trust about how to do this stuff”.
Schmidt says it takes 40 years for a region to fully develop into a technology hub. It was true for MIT after James Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery of DNA in the 1950s opened up the field of molecular biology around Kendall Square. “Creating eco-systems creates a virtuous circle,” Schmidt says.
“The assets of this region lock into prototyping, packaging and EUV, or extreme ultraviolet, chip fabrication. What’s different about this technology is everyone has to share a fab – a fabrication plant – because no one can afford to have their own facility.”
The focus on turning upper New York state into a tech hub, he says, demands looking at what other areas are doing wrong. Silicon Valley, which started around Stanford University, has run out of space and is in any case now mostly focused on social media. San Francisco has quality-of-life issues. Taiwan’s TSMC is looking at Arizona, but the state lacks water. Another contender is central Ohio but it lacks workforce training.
“My goal is to teach New York politicians about what they have here,” he says. “They don’t even know they have a nanotech center. I don’t think there’s another state that can do this. But time is of the essence. Priem says he was a little disappointed when Hochul recently said she was interested in AI. “We were like, be careful because that’s almost old news.”