38 h. ago Get Apple TV+ for £2.99 per month in rare 'limited time' price drop

Stream hit shows like Severance, The Studio, Ted Lasso and Slow Horses for less as Apple cuts 66% off its streaming subscription

Economics

63 h. ago Make America make again? Trump’s tariffs will only be manufacturing pipe dreams | John Naughton

The president’s gambit to bring the production of goods such as iPhones back to the US ignores huge supply chain complexitiesDonald Trump’s tariff strategy has at least one biblical connection: like the peace of God, it “passeth all understanding” (Philippians 4:7). Rival attempts to extract a rationale from the chaos include the idea that he is trying to devalue the dollar, or that he is seeking to “reshore” the manufacturing capacity that the US lost through decades of globalisation. My own hunch is that he just wants to show who’s the big boss around here – or as British science fiction author Charles Stross puts it, that he “expects individual nations to come to him, hat in hand, like terrified shopkeepers pleading for mercy from a mafia don”.Cue the UK’s very own Trump whisperer, Keir Starmer, who, according to Politico, plans “to put a review of online safety rules on the table in trade talks” with the US. Which, translated, means that things such as the Online Safety Act and ...

Economics

4 d. ago Rare Apple discounts: AirPods Pro 2, Apple Watch 10 and AirTags all slashed in Amazon deal

Apple rarely drops prices – but this trio of bestsellers has just been slashed in a surprise Amazon sale, from wireless earbuds to trackers.

Economics

9 d. ago Genetic data is an another asset to be exploited – beware who has yours | John Naughton

The bankruptcy of genealogy company 23andMe has resulted in a fire sale of millions of people’s genetic information – and there’s no shortage of eager buyers with questionable motivesEver thought of having your genome sequenced? Me neither. But it seems that at least 15 million souls have gone in for it and are delighted to know that they have Viking ancestry, or discombobulated to find that they have siblings of whom they were hitherto unaware. The corporate vehicle that enabled these revelations is called 23andMe, which describes itself as a “genetics-led consumer healthcare and biotechnology company empowering a healthier future”.Back in the day, 23andMe was one of those vaunted “unicorns” (privately held startups valued at more than $1bn), but is now facing harder times. Its share price had fallen precipitately following a data breach in October 2023 that harvested the profile and ethnicity data of 6.9 million users – including name, profile photo, birth year, location, family s...

Events

2 w. ago When the physicists need burner phones, that’s when you know America’s changed | John Naughton

US academics, fearing persecution by their own government, are becoming ideological refugees. Europe, and Britain, must offer them sanctuaryAt international academic conferences recently, one sees an interesting trend. Some American participants are travelling with “burner” phones or have minimalist laptops running browsers and not much else. In other words, they are equipped with the same kind of kit that security-conscious people used to bring 15 years ago when travelling to China.So what’s up? Well, these academics have a finger on the pulse of Trump’s America, and are concerned about what might happen when they return home. They’ve read on Robert Reich’s Substack about the French scientist who was prevented from entering the country because US Border Patrol agents had found messages from him in which he had expressed his “personal opinion” to colleagues and friends about Trump’s science policies. Continue reading...

Events

3 w. ago Did AI mania rush Apple into making a rare misstep with Siri? | John Naughton

The company that prides itself on announcing products only when they’re ready grossly underestimated the demands of personalising its virtual assistantAfter ChatGPT broke cover in late 2022 and the tech industry embarked on its contemporary rendering of tulip mania, people started to wonder why the biggest tech giant of all – Apple – was keeping its distance from the madness. Eventually, the tech commentariat decided that there could be only two possible interpretations of this corporate standoffishness: either Apple was way behind the game being played by OpenAI et al; or it had cunning plans to unleash upon the world its own world-beating take on the technology.Finally, at its annual World Wide Developers’ Conference (WWDC) on 10 June last year Apple came clean. Or appeared to. For Apple, “AI” would not mean what those vulgar louts at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Meta raved about, but something altogether more refined and sophisticated – something called “Apple Intelligence”. It ...

Politics

last month You don't need code to be a programmer. But you do need expertise | John Naughton

AI is so good at writing software that one father asked it to organise his kids’ school lunches. But that doesn’t mean it’s taking overWay back in 2023, Andrej Karpathy, an eminent AI guru, made waves with a striking claim that “the hottest new programming language is English”. This was because the advent of large language models (LLMs) meant that from now on humans would not have to learn arcane programming languages in order to tell computers what to do. Henceforth, they could speak to machines like the Duke of Devonshire spoke to his gardener, and the machines would do their bidding.Ever since LLMs emerged, programmers have been early adopters, using them as unpaid assistants (or “co-pilots”) and finding them useful up to a point – but always with the proviso that, like interns, they make mistakes, and you need to have real programming expertise to spot those. Continue reading...

Politics