The latest tech news you need to know
The world of tech is moving at an increasingly fast pace, these are stories you may have missed but need to know.
iPhone 7 Pro images leak
The next generation iPhone is to due arrive in September and, alongside the releases of the 7 and 7s, a new model is reportedly going to sit alongside them. This is the 7 Pro, images of which leaked earlier this week on MacRumours. The highlight new feature of the kit is rumoured to be a dual lens camera.
Essentially, this means there are two cameras, that’ll take two photos and blend them together to create a single DSLR-quality image. Everybody’s Instagram feeds are going to get a whole lot better come the end of the year then.
The Apple car could be here in 2021
Gene Munster, an analyst at investment bank Piper Jaffray whose role involves focusing on Apple, reckons the Apple Car will be arriving in 2021 for a price of $75,000. That price point puts it in competition with Tesla, and Munster notes Apple have a “sizeable team” working on the operation code-named Project Titan.
Nike debuted its first self-lacing shoe
Back to the Future’s self-lacing shoes are here and coming to the wider public, although they look nothing like the film’s MAG trainers. Named the HyperAdapt 1.0, Tiffany Beers, senior innovator at Nike, explains: “When you step in, your heel will hit a sensor and the system will automatically tighten. Then, there are two buttons on the side to tighten and loosen. You can adjust it until it’s perfect.”
Instagram is having a major update
The Facebook owned photo-centred social network is making a change to the way it displays posts on the timeline. Rather than displaying posts in chronological order, posts will be ordered in terms of what it thinks you’ll like more — similar to Facebook. According to Instagram:
“You may be surprised to learn that people miss on average 70 percent of their feeds. As Instagram has grown, it’s become harder to keep up with all the photos and videos people share. This means you often don’t see the posts you might care about the most. To improve your experience, your feed will soon be ordered to show the moments we believe you will care about the most.”
Soon you’ll be able to pay for your Amazon order with a selfie
Amazon seems to be have a hankering to innovate at the moment, no matter how harebrained the idea. Autonomous drones is understandable, delivering to someone’s car seems innately flawed, but the latest idea is the most bizarre of the lot. The e-commerce giant just filed a patent for a “Pay By Selfie” technology, essentially, photo identification will be used instead of a password input.
According to the patent, the camera “can prompt the user to perform certain actions, motions or gestures, such as to smile, blink, or tilt his or her head”. These actions are so the computer can prove that it’s a real person, and not an impostor holding up a photo or video.
Samsung unveiled its very own social network
Facebook is dominating the social network scene with its eponymous flagship and the growing influence of Instagram. Even Twitter is starting to really feel the weight of Zuckerberg’s enormous presence, but Samsung have decided to take the billionaire on at his own game as the mobile company is developing its own social network, Waffle.
The idea works around the action of building a grid around an original photo, with connected users submitting their own contributions to fill out what the company describes as “a communal graffiti wall”.
Apple signed a huge contract with Google
Apple has reportedly signed a contract worth between $400 million (£260m) and $600m (£414m) to use Google’s Cloud Platform. Details are unclear over the contract, but either way that’s a huge amount of money and one that leaves Amazon, whose cloud services Apple used to use, hugely out of pocket. Apple reportedly used to spend close to $1bn a year with the e-commerce behemoth.
DeepMind’s AI beat the human world champion in a game of Go
Google-owned DeepMind, the artificial intelligence developers, have built a system that has defeated the human world champion, Lee Sedol, in a game of Go, taking the tournament 4-1. This is a major milestone for AI as Go has perpetually provided a challenge for computers to get a handle on because of the sheer number of potential moves.
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