Apple just unveiled its augmented reality headset, the Apple Vision Pro. After showing the potential use cases for the device, the company said a bit more about the technical specifications.

From the outside, the Apple Vision Pro looks a bit like ski goggles. On the front of the device, Apple is using three-dimensionally formed laminated glass. The glass flows into the frame, a bit like the Apple Watch.

There’s a digital crown on the top of the device that you can use for adjustments. The main body of the device is made of a custom aluminum alloy with some holes for ventilation. There are a ton of chips, sensors and displays in the device.

The rest of the device is a modular system. You can swap the part that rests on your face so that it rests well on your face whether you have a big head or a small head.

At the back of the device, there is a flexible headband that attaches magnetically so that it can also be easily swapped. It looks a bit like the Alpine Loop on the Apple Watch Ultra.

On the side of the device, there are two speakers next to your ears that deliver spatial audio. Apple has developed a technology called audio raytracing for spatial audio.

Inside the headset, Apple has partnered with Zeiss for glasses that magnetically attach to the lenses, with vision correction if needed.

When it comes to the main system on a chip, Apple uses its own Apple M2 chip. The display system uses micro OLED so that Apple can fit 44 pixels in the space of an iPhone pixel. Of course, those pixels will be much closer to your face so that will be an important factor as well.

Each pixel is 7.5-micron wide and there are 23 million pixels across two panels that are the size of a post stamp. For reference, a 4K TV features a bit more than 8 million pixels.

Apple promises video that can be rendered at “true 4K resolution with wide colors.” And text is supposed to “look super sharp from any angle.” We will have to check that if we can get some hands-on time with the Apple Vision Pro.

Overall, there are 12 cameras, five sensors and six microphones. On the outside, there are two cameras pointing at the real world, and two cameras pointing downward to track your hands. There’s a LiDAR scanner and a TrueDepth camera.

Inside the device, there are two IR cameras and a ring of LEDs to track your eyes. With this eye-tracking technology, Apple can display your eyes on the outside of the device thanks to a 3D display that sort of make the device look transparent. Apple calls this feature EyeSight.

There’s also a new R1 chip that has been specifically designed for real-time processing of the real world. It is also supposed to reduce motion sickness.

Finally, yes, the device works with an external battery pack that you can put in your pocket for instance. It looks like an iPhone 11 with no display and no camera — a smooth rectangle pebble. It uses a proprietary connector that attaches to the side of the headset.

The company expects to sell the Apple Vision Pro for $3,499 and it will be available for purchase in early 2024.

The Apple Vision Pro features an M2 chip, a ton of sensors and a new R1 chip by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

I swear, the Apple TV remote is designed, specifically, to slip between cushions and fall into the black hole of a couch. The remote is tiny, thin, and so smooth. But I have great news. Today, during Apple’s 2023 World Wide Developer’s Conference, a quick mention brought hope to my life: Siri will soon be able to locate your lost Apple TV remote.

Details are light at the moment. It’s unclear what model Apple TV and iPhone will gain this feature. It’s also unclear specifically how the system will work. Will the Apple TV Remote beep? Will the iPhone display an arrow like when locating a nearby Airtag? And does this system work specifically through Siri or will remotes be added to the Find My app with the rest of an owner’s Apple products.

I don’t have the answers to these important questions yet.

This feature has long been request from users. Apple’s not alone in designing tiny, easily-losable remotes. Everyone from Roku to Google ship tiny remotes with their streamers (I’ve lost all of them). Remember the old Comcast remotes with 500 buttons? In 2009 a TechCrunch writer called them Fisher Price remotes, which is accurate in a way. Those remotes were terrible, but at least they were hard to lose.

This feature will be added to Apple TV through an update this coming fall.

Siri can finally find your lost Apple TV remote by Matt Burns originally published on TechCrunch

Apple today unveiled the latest version of iPadOS. Called iPadOS 17 the new version builds on the past generation but adds several vital upgrades. For example, widgets are improved to feature better live interactions, the Home Screen can be customized similarly to the iPhones, and there are new native apps, including the Health app and an improved Notes app.

The iPad has long played second fiddle to the iPhone. This year’s update is no different. Today’s announcements should sound familiar. The iPhone received many of these features last year. With iPadOS 17, Apple is bringing the iPad to parity with the iPhone.

“Our users love personalizing the iPhone lock screen so we’re bringing that experience to iPad,” said Apple Craig Federighi during today’s presentation. He was speaking while a video demonstrated the new Home Screen background functionality. Like the iPhone, users can customize the Home Screen to feature a rotating gallery of images, different clocks, and improved widgets.

Users can now interact directly with apps through their Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets. This basic widget functionality has long been missing from Apple’s implementation. It was a strange omission for so long, but now, with iPadOS 17, users can finally check off to-do items directly from the widget.

The iPad’s Lock Screen now features Live Activities, too. Like on the iPhone, an Uber Eats Live activities widget will now show the most up-to-date status of an order without the user refreshing the app.

The Health app is coming to the iPad with iPadOS 17. This new native app for the iPad is a welcomed addition. It will sync with the Health app on a user’s iPhone and Apple Watch, serving the information on the iPad’s larger screen.

Apple announced several other minor additions and adjustments in iPadOS 17. When connected to an external monitor with a webcam, the iPad can now access and use the camera on the monitor. Stage manager was also updated with new layouts. Freeform, the iPad’s collaborative white board app, gained new tools and a workflow tracker allowing users to follow the development of the project over time. The Notes app can now autofill PDFs, too.

The new operating system will be released in Fall 2023.

iPadOS 17 adds upgraded widgets, customizable Home Screen, and new native apps by Matt Burns originally published on TechCrunch

On Monday, Apple is more than likely going to reveal its long-awaited augmented or mixed reality ‘Reality Pro’ headset during the keynote of its annual WWDC developer conference in California. It’s an announcement that has been tipped or teased for years now, and reporting on the topic has suggested that at various times, the project has been subject to delays, internal skepticism and debate, technical challenges and more. Leaving anything within Apple’s sphere of influence aside, the world’s overall attitude towards AR and VR has shifted considerably — from optimism, to skepticism.

Part of that trajectory is just the natural progression of any major tech hype cycle, and you could easily argue that the time to make the most significant impact in any such cycle is after the spike of undue optimism and energy has subsided. But in the case of AR and VR, we’ve actually already seen some of the tech giants with the deepest pockets take their best shots and come up wanting — not for lacking of trying, but because of limitations in terms of what’s possible even at the bleeding edge of available tech. Some of those limits might actually be endemic to AR and VR, too, because of variances in the human side of the equation required to make mixed reality magic happen.

The virtual elephant in the room is, of course, Meta. The name itself pretty much sums up the situation: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg read a bad book and decided that VR was the inevitable end state of human endeavor — the mobile moment he essentially missed out on, but even bigger and better. Zuckerberg grew enamored by his delusion, first acquiring crowdfunded VR darling Oculus, then eventually commandeering the sobriquet for a shared virtual universe from the dystopian predictions of a better book and renaming all of Facebook after it.

Meta has had its kick at the can — in fact it’s been kicking furiously for the past half-decade at least. The last two efforts of note were the Meta Quest 3, which it revealed earlier this week to mild applause, and the intensely overpriced Meta Quest Pro, which landed with a thud that was anything but virtual. The best that you can say for Mark’s metaversal ambitions is that the Meta Quest and Quest 2 lured in a decent number of VR-curious casuals — but not nearly enough to build a sustainable business on at the scale of Facebook or the iPhone.

Looking around for a second-place finisher to supplement Meta’s thin dossier in support of AR/VR being the platform of the future, we come up pretty short on candidates. HTC ended up going all-in on VR when it offloaded its smartphone division to Google, but that’s hardly made it a household name. Sony launched a second generation of its PSVR this year, but that seems, by most accounts, to have been less enthusiastically received than the first. Steam has a VR headset, which I mention mostly in case you forgot (for which you’d be forgiven).

But this is Apple. It’s the company that basically invented the MP3 player, and the smartphone. Except that it didn’t actually invent either of those things, it just made them better. And the things that it was working from were already actually pretty well-loved and universally adopted (any number of generic MP3 players in the former case, and the BlackBerry in the latter). Apple has never actually had to deal with a cold start problem — it’s always been a refiner, not an inventor, nor a rescuer.

AR and VR headsets are not analogs to early MP3 players or smartphones — no matter how much companies spend in developing them, no matter how advanced the technologies they offer on board (or, conversely, how many concessions they make to comfort and convenience) consumers regularly stand up more or less in unison and say ‘ neat, but no thanks.’

Apple’s entry seems unlikely to land any differently, despite what you may think of the company and its track record. AR and VR have fundamental problems when it comes to accessibility, with huge swaths of the population who find it nausea-inducing regardless of what mitigation strategies are put in place. A huge chunk of people just simply don’t like having to wear something on their face, period. In these cases, there’s probably not a value threshold that even exists that can overcome that objection — and certainly not one demonstrated by any of the existing attempts that have made it into people’s hands, well-funded and varied though they may be.

The internet is littered with blog posts penned by authors who underestimated Apple at their peril, deriding the iPhone as a “toy” or claiming the Apple Watch would become a high-profile failure. It’d be dumb not to admit the possibility that, as in those other areas, Apple might be able to come through with a surprise success that does end up striking a chord with a mass-market audience. AR and VR however, is a very different part of the technosphere, and the Apple of today is just literally quite a different company from the Apple that introduced the iPhone — or even the one that brought us the Apple Watch.

There’s a tremendous amount of anticipation around this launch, to be sure, but it’s different from the anticipation around other Apple launches. This time, the big question is ‘why’ — and for once, Apple can’t look to other examples for answers.

No one has done AR or VR well. Can Apple? by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch

Lenovo’s Yoga Book 9i drew both appreciative and skeptical stares at CES earlier this year when it made its official debut: With two 13-inch OLED screens attached with a central hinge, it’s one of the most unusual laptop designs to ever make it into actual production. The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i ($2,099) is building on a long tradition of dual-screen notebook and portable device concepts (along with some shipping hardware), but it’s the first that proves the paradigm can work — and work well — for a lot of people.

Basics

The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i is defined by one feature in particular: Instead of having a hardware keyboard and trackpad for its lower half, it has a second 13.3-inch OLED screen to match the one on top. These are connected by a remarkable hinge that allows for use in a number of orientations, and which also packs in a speaker array powered by Bowers & Wilkins (more on this later, but spoiler: it works really well).

In the box, you also get a separate Bluetooth keyboard, a stylus (Lenovo’s Digital Pen 3), a Bluetooth mouse, and an origami-style folding stand that also doubles as a case for the keyboard and stylus. The sticker price of $2,099 definitely can seem steep at first glance, but Lenovo has at least done right by customers by including everything they need in the box instead of making accessories like keyboard, stylus and mouse available piecemeal as add-on purchases after the fact.

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch

Of course, the Yoga Book 9i is powered by Windows 11 under the hood — with a layer of surprisingly low-key and unobtrusive Lenovo software included to ensure that all the dual-screen magic just works; which it mostly does, albeit with the software seams still showing a bit here and there, something that’s fully expected in a first-generation device running early software. None of these hiccups prove annoying or distracting enough to compromise the overall experience of using the Yoga Book 9i, however, which is excellent on balance.

Hardware and Design

The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i is, top to bottom, a very well-made piece of kit. Both of the screens are gorgeous, which makes sense given that they share the same panel and specs, and they’re enclosed in a very durable-feeling metal shell with rounded edges that are nice to touch and look great with shiny reflective finishes. The Yoga Book 9i only comes in one color, at least at launch, which is a teal that wouldn’t normally be my personal pick but that works very well for distinguishing the novel machine at a glance even when it’s closed. My one complaint here is that while the included keyboard is color-matched to the case, the stylus and mouse come in a plain grey that feels a little aesthetically incongruous when working with the entire combined setup.

Luckily, aside from some questionable accessory colorway choices, Lenovo gets everything else pretty much exactly right. The upper and lower halves of the Yoga Book 9i close with a satisfying sticky click, and the hinge maintains them at whatever angle you choose to use them at. This is especially important because the Yoga Book 9i can be used in quite a few different ways, including a standard laptop orientation with or without the hardware keyboard magnetically attached to the bottom display; with the screen flipped all the way around in a single screen tablet mode; with the displays stacked on top of one another and propped up on the stand in a horizontal dual-screen mode; with the displays side-by-each in a vertical dual screen orientation; or with both screens active and facing two different users on either side in tent mode.

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch

The hinge that allows all of that flexibility is a wonder itself — it’s entirely covered in a grill and has speakers throughout, which provide sound in whatever direction it’s needed. The hardware and the tuning by Bowers & Wilkins results in actually surprisingly great sound from notebook speakers — it’s more than capable of providing a great movie or video-watching experience, and it even works adequately well for playing back music if you’re stuck without headphones or an external speaker.

The built-in camera has a 5MP sensor and IR so that it works for Windows Hello facial recognition login, and there’s a hardware disable switch on the side of the laptop’s lower display for those who value extra privacy assurance. In use, the camera was more than adequate for video conferencing, and seemed to deal well with a range of different lighting conditions, both indoors and out.

One additional note here on the quality of the hardware — it’s very durable as well, a fact I can attest to because of two highly unusual but ultimately handy random accidents: First, the Yoga Book 9i fell from a standing desk I was using outside when my patio umbrella accidentally blew into it and toppled it off. It survived this with no discernible damage or marks whatsoever. The second accident happened when the hook keeping my massive dining room chandelier gave out overnight, allowing the all-metal light fixture to swing, wrecking ball-like, directly into the back of the Yoga Book 9i’s back top surface, knocking it from my dining room table to the ground. This last time resulted in very, very tiny (like you almost can’t see it) surface scratching to the paint finish, but had no other impact on the machine either physically (ie. no dents) or in terms of function. It’s built like a tank, which is actually a really useful feature for a laptop like this that you’ll want to handle a lot, flip around, travel with and change working orientations.

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch

Performance

The Yoga Book 9i is powered by a 13th generation Intel Core i7, comes with 16GB of DDR5X RAM, has integrated Intel Iris X graphics and a 1 TB SSD. There are three Thunderbolt 4 ports (one on the left and two on the right) and there’s Bluetooth 5.1 and Wifi 6E in terms of connectivity. The two OLED screens have 2.8K resolution, are HDR-capable with 400 nits max brightness and 60Hz refresh rates.

While it doesn’t have amazing specs on paper compared to some of the latest ultrabooks out there, performance in practice from the Yoga Book is more than sufficient for most people. It’s a speedy machine that feels fast and nimble, and it can handle Photoshop and Lightroom flows with relative ease. I didn’t use it for video editing, so your mileage may vary there, but it’s an excellent workhorse for anyone who works mostly in Office/Google’s work suite, email and light media.

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch

As for media consumption, this is definitely one of its fortes. The displays are both fantastic for watching video, and the second screen means you have built-in options for multitasking, including doing things like browsing the web or using Twitter while you’re watching something, or doing digital drawing/painting on the lower screen while viewing a reference on the top.

Aside from the performance of its components, one key to the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i’s success is just how good it is at taking advantage of its unique physical design. As you’d expect, there are compromises when it comes to using a notebook with two screens instead of just one with a hardware keyboard and trackpad permanently installed in the other.

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch

Lenovo has actually done an amazing job mitigating most of these, with multitouch gestures to easily call up the software keyboard and trackpad whenever you need them instantly, and a clever magnet-based docking mechanism for the included hardware keyboard that means you can easily plop it into place whenever you need to dive into a focused session of rapid WPM output. The fact that the stand works so well, but also doubles as a case for both the pen and the keyboard that makes both those and the computer an extremely portable package.

If I had one significant complaint about the Yoga Book 9i when it comes to performance, it’s battery life. The two displays obviously draw additional power vs. just one in more traditional machines, and it’s a very high-quality, fairly bright screen. In practice, I’ve been averaging about 6 hours of use per charge — and that can drop considerably if you’re doing things that are taxing like long video meetings. It’s a throwback to much earlier days amid a sea of very long-lived portable powerhouses, but given the extra screen real estate you’re working with, it does also make sense as a trade-off.

Bottom Line

The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i looked a bit like a stunt when it made its official debut earlier this year — ambitious, certainly, but practical? That didn’t seem likely. Now that it’s here, though, I can say that is actually eminently practical, and in fact ranks as my favorite notebook to use, period. That’s factoring in the relatively meager battery life I mentioned, and some other very minor concessions to the form factor like not being able to close the lid on the hardware keyboard when it’s magnetically attached to the bottom display.

I’ve eschewed most form factor shifts in the PC world — hybrids, 2-in-1s, tablets with detachable keyboards, etc. The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i has broken through with its unique hinged dual-screen approach, which works well both at home and on the road, and which offers something no other competitor, regardless of brand, can claim to match.

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch

Lenovo’s Yoga Book 9i realizes the full potential of a dual-screen laptop by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch

Arm CEO Rene Haas

Just ahead of CEO Rene Haas’ keynote at Computex in Taipei today, Arm launched two new products designed to increase smartphone performance. The first is the Arm Cortex-X4, its fourth-generation Cortex-X core. Arm said the Cortex-X4 is the fastest CPU it is made so far and will bring 15% more performance than its predecessor, the Cortex X-3, with a focus on enabling artificial intelligence and machine learning-based apps.

The second new product is the Arm Immortalis-G720, which is based on its fifth-generation GPU architecture. Its predecessor, the Immortalis-G715 GPU, is currently inside flagship devices from OPPO and vivo through a partnership with MediaTek. Arm’s fifth-generation GPU architecture was created with high geometry games and real-time 3D apps in mind, in order to replicate the feel of console gameplay on mobile devices.

Arm said the Cortex-X4’s microarchitecture consumes 40% less power than Cortex-X3 on the same process, increasing responsiveness and app launch time.

Arm also announced a new platform called for mobile computing called Arm Total Compute Solutions 2023 (TCS23), which will include IP like the Immortalis GPU, Armv9 CPUs and software enhancements. With their packages of IP, the company’s Total Complete Solutions series were created for System on Chip (SoC) designers who are building their own compute subsystems. TCS23 is meant for premium smartphone models and build on Arm’s new Armv9.2 architecture. Its GPUs are based on fifth-generation architecture, including the newly-launched Immortalis-G720, Mali-G720 and Mali-G620. The Armv9.2 compute cluster includes the new Cortex-4, Cortex-A720 and Cortex-A520 CPUs, and the DSU-120, Arm’s latest DynamiQ shared unit.

In his keynote today, Haas said Arm has traditionally been an IP supplier, but then started to see how long it was taking for IP to integrate with other IP. So to help SoC designers, it started to build CPU, memory systems and compute blocks before integrating, configuring and validating them to deliver a full system.

Arm is continuing its partnership with TSMC by “taping out the Cortex-X4 on the TSMC N3E process,” which it calls an industry first.

Owned by the SoftBank Group Corp, Arm announced last month that it had filed in the U.S. what will be this year’s largest initial public offering. It plans to raise between $8 billion to $10 billion in its IPO on Nasdaq.

Arm’s decision to make its stock debut comes as U.S. IPOs, excluding SPACs, are down about 22% to just $2.35 billion year-to-date, reports CNN.

Arm launches new chips for faster smartphone performance during Computex by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

UK medtech startup Acurable has gained FDA clearance for a novel wireless diagnostic device for remote detection of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). A formal launch into the US market is slated to follow this summer. Its wearable is already being used by a number of hospitals in the UK (where it launched in 2021) and in the European Union, after obtaining local regulatory clearances in the region.

The startup, which was founded back in 2016, is the brainchild of Imperial College professor Esther Rodriguez-Villegas, director of the university’s Wearable Technologies Lab, who spent some 1.5 decades conducting research into using acoustic sensing for tracking respiratory biomarkers to diagnose cardiorespiratory conditions — work that underpins the commercial hardware.

The London-based startup raised an €11 million Series A round (~$11.8M) back in October with its eye on the US launch. Prior to that it received £1.8M (~$2.2M) across three different grants from Innovate UK, a national body which supports product commercialization. Private investors in the medtech startup include Madrid-based Alma Mundi Ventures, London’s Kindred Capital and KHP Ventures, a healthcare-focused venture fund also in the UK which is a collaboration between two NHS Hospital Trusts (King’s College and Guy’s and St Thomas’) and King’s College London.

OSA refers to a chronic respiratory condition characterized by pauses in breathing caused by the person’s upper airway being obstructed during sleep. It’s thought to affect a small percentage of adults — around 1.5 million adults in the UK; and some 25M in the US (with many more people affected across the world) — and while not immediately life-threatening it can be linked to serious health implications since it can contribute to conditions such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, dementia and even heart attacks, making treatment or management important. 

Healthcare services often struggle to manage chronic conditions, given the expense of long term monitoring. But Rodriguez-Villegas explains that in the case of sleep apnea there is even a challenge for healthcare services to diagnose the condition — since traditional polysomnography tests are inconvenient and/or costly. (The patient is either asked to sleep overnight at a special center, where they’re fitted out with a bunch of wired sensors. Or else they are trained how to fit the various electrodes themselves at home, with the associated risk that the test will have to be repeated if sensors are incorrectly fitted or get detached during sleep.)

Acurable’s tiny, self-applied wearable has been designed to offer a far more patient-friendly (and cost effective way) for diagnosis of the condition — allowing for the testing to be both remote (in patients’ homes) and super simple so patients can self-administer it.

One early adopter of Acurable’s product — Dr Michael Harrison, a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital at UCSF — offers strong praise, writing in a supporting statement that the device has been “game-changing for our patients, as it is a much simpler and comfortable experience”, as well as talking up how it “enables clinicians to conduct multiple night studies at a time, improving patient outcomes by giving them a much speedier diagnosis”.

For her part, Rodriguez-Villegas says she saw a role for developing technologies to solve problems with a significant social impact by addressing healthcare bottlenecks associated with chronic (and often under-diagnosed) respiratory conditions, starting with sleep apnea. So the plan is for her startup to bring more wearables to market in future, for other respiratory conditions, such as COPD and asthma — all based on the core acoustic sensing IP developed for the first device.

“What I realised early on was that [chronic cardiorespiratory conditions] will not be something that could be solved if we continue with [traditional healthcare] processes — that it’s not a matter of pumping money into the system. Because there is also human resources. So you need the clinicians, the nurses, you need to understanding. So that’s where my journey started with tech,” she tells TechCrunch. “Deciding how do we create techs that can solve the bottlenecks and make patients’ lives better?”

While core research underpinning the product has taken well over a decade, designing, prototyping and building the actual product took around six or seven years, according to Rodriguez-Villegas — so working on things like miniaturizing the hardware and designing a UX with high accessibility so it’s easy for patients of all ages (and tech abilities) to use which she says was a huge priority for her.

“The app is designed so that there is no room for a stress or failure,” she says, explaining how she pushed her design team to avoid assuming users would know how to navigate traditional software menu structures. “I had had to have lots of conversations with my UI people in the beginning because they couldn’t understand where I was coming from.”

A patient self administering the AcuPebble with guidance from the app (Photo credit: Acurable)

As for the hardware, the startup’s one-shot sensing device, which is called the AcuPebble, looks a bit like a coffee pod that’s been colored an Apple-esque shade of shiny white. So sleek and minimalist looking is it that it resembles some kind of consumer device, rather than a medical instrument, with no utility grey plastic or scary bundles of cables in sight.

This purist look is entirely by design — reflecting Acurable’s overarching mission to rethink a convoluted diagnostic bottleneck using sensor-driven automation.

Patients use the AcuPebble at home where it’s worn overnight stuck to the the skin of their neck (using a patented adhesive). It’s also a single-use medical device — gathering and uploading enough data across one night’s tracking of the sleeper’s breathing to produce a diagnosis. (So to borrow another piece of Apple lore, you could say it’s designed to ‘just work’.)

The kit works by using tiny, high performance piezoelectric MEMS microphones to — in simple terms — listen to the patients breathing as they sleep. Although Rodriguez-Villegas is guarded with the exact details of how it works, saying the product is only partially patented so protecting IP remains a concern.

Acoustic sensing as a diagnostic tool in healthcare is of course nothing new — just think of the stethoscope. But what’s novel here is the understanding of the sonic landscape associated with cardiorespiratory conditions that Acurable has been able to develop through years of research to isolate relevant biomarkers.

“The hardware is designed to detect particular biomarkers we are looking for and those biomarkers are very different to the conventional ones. And how do we know this? It’s again because it’s been almost two decades in the making,” says Rodriguez-Villegas.

The data the device captures is uploaded the cloud where it’s processed by Acurable whose algorithms produce an automated diagnosis which is sent to (human) clinicians for review. So much of the research which underpins the hardware was focused on understanding the specific ‘signal in the noise’ of the human body by winnowing down noisy human biology into the respiratory biomarkers of interest for diagnosing the particular cardiorespiratory conditions it’s focusing on.

The algorithms it’s using for diagnosis of sleep apnea are not machine learning or any other form of artificial intelligence. Nor is its approach data driven, per Rodriguez-Villegas, who emphasizes it’s using algorithms that are “fully traceable”. Although she does not entirely rule out using AI in the future — but is categorical that AI is unnecessary for this product and, indeed, that explainability in healthcare is an essential component; that there must be no black boxes for medical diagnostics.

“In this product — and the product in the market now — there is no AI. This is physiological signal processing based on very unique physiological modelling that we are experts on,” she says. “Everything in the algorithms happens for a known reason so the algorithms are fully traceable… Again, this is based on the research that we did in respiration for many years. That led us to that. It is not data driven. It’s really not data driven. I cannot really tell you exactly what it is. Because that’s part of the computational IP.

“But I do understand that everybody nowadays because AI is in everybody’s mind it’s almost like that is the default thought, right, that things are AI or they are data driven. No, no. We know why every single thing is happening. So in the same way, as you might know, you know, why your heart beats and [the steps in the cardiac cycle that take place around that] this is gonna be like that.”

Founder professor Esther Rodriguez-Villegas (Photo credit: Acurable)

Demonstrating the efficacy of its diagnostic algorithms was a core part of obtaining regulatory clearance for AcuPebble. And details of one clinical trial of the device, which was carried out at the Royal Free NHS Trust with a sample size of 150 patients — comparing usage to at-home multi-channel polygraphy followed by sleep specialist manual signal interpretation — can be found here.

Acurable says it was the first wearable medical device to obtain the CE mark in Europe for the automated testing of OSA at home. So, in its home region, it has regulatory clearance for fully automated diagnoses. But, in practice, the product has been set up so that the data (and diagnosis) are sent to a clinician — which helps keep these essential users comfortable with a novel tool — so there’s still a human in the loop.

Over in the US — where Acurable’s device will be officially launching at some point this summer — it’s obtained 510(k) clearance from the FDA for OSA evaluation in adults for two variants of the device customised for the American healthcare market. (Rodriguez-Villegas explains it did not file for de novo clearance since there is no existing device on the market that does automated diagnosis for OSA.)

The US versions of the product send data to a clinician to review and provide a diagnosis. So, in that market, it’s being strictly positioned as a clinical support tool. But that’s down to differences in the regulatory environment, rather than any technical difference in capability in the different per-market versions of the product.

It’s still early days for Acurable — with “tens” of hospitals using the AcuPebble at this stage. But it’s expecting usage to step up as it launches in the US and predicts it will be expanding its team by around 300%.

Rodriguez-Villegas also says it intends to expand into selling consumer products too “eventually” — but not before clinicians have been able to get comfortable with using the device and the data it provides.

She’s dismissive of current-gen consumer wearables — which can pack a range of health-tracking claims and even offer sleep apnea detection style features, such as by tracking nighttime SPO2 — saying a lot of these consumer wearables generate data that’s “very, very misleading” and creates “enormous amount of stress” for consumers. And indeed for the doctors faced with patients bringing in their own unreliable, non-medical grade health data.

“So that’s a situation that we totally want to avoid,” she adds. “Anyone can check our results. Is it is very, very good. It’s very, very reliable. But there is a lot of scepticism in the medical community when it comes to wearables. And that’s why we decided to go down [this regulated medical device] route.”

Meet the tiny, wireless sleep apnea diagnostic wearable headed for the US by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

Apple has sent out official invitations to select media to attend its WWDC 2023 keynote in person at the company’s Apple Park headquarters in Cupertino, California. The keynote is set to take place at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET on June 5. It’ll also be streamed live at the same time for anyone to watch from home.

The WWDC keynote is the kick-off event for Apple’s annual worldwide developers conference, and typically includes a number of software announcements, including the reveal of major new updates to iPhone’s iOS, iPadOS, macOS and more. This year, the headline rumored announcement is said to be the unveiling of Apple’s augmented reality headset, a long-awaited device (which Apple has not officially acknowledged, of course) that marks the company’s first major foray into the world of ‘mixed reality,’ which is the term many use to describe both AR and VR.

The AR headset is thought to run a new version of Apple’s mobile operating system potentially known as ‘xrOS’ and could carry ‘Reality One’ branding. Rumors suggest it’ll be relatively slim and light compared to most competitors on the market, use OLED displays inside and feature a display outside for communicating with others IRL, and run a variant of the M2 processor. It should support iPad apps to some extent out of the box, and cost around $3,000 when it eventually goes on sale.

There are still many question marks around the headset — including whether it will actually break cover at this event, but the graphics around this event are suggestive of some kind of mixed reality announcement, and developers will need time to build with this new platform if Apple wants it to be ready for consumers at its eventual launch.

Apple invites media to WWDC 2023 keynote, where AR headset is expected to debut by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch

Apple today announced a multi-billion dollar deal with Broadcom to build some wireless components in the United States. Under the terms of the agreement, Broadcom will design and build 5G components, including FBAR filters, in its America-based facilities.

In a statement, Apple CEO Tim Cook stated “[Apple] is thrilled to make commitments that harness the ingenuity, creativity, and innovative spirit of American manufacturing. All of Apple’s products depend on technology engineered and built here in the United States, and we’ll continue to deepen our investments in the U.S. economy because we have an unshakable belief in America’s future.”

This deal is part of the previously-announced commitment to American manufacturing Apple announced in 2021 in which it committed $430 billion to the U.S. economy over a five year period. Apple says in today’s announcement it’s on track to hit that goal.

Apple already partners with component manufacturers in the United States. Each year the company publishes a supplier list, detailing the supplier and its locations where Apple components are manufactured. According to the 2022 report, the majority of the manufacturing facilities were located in Asia, but 32 were located in America — including Broadcom, which already supplied Apple with components from its Colorado and Pennsylvania facilities.

Apple, like many American gadget companies, are always under pressure to source parts and assemble products in the United States. The Mac Pro desktop was the last product to receive its final assembly in America, thus earning the right to wear a badge that says “Made in the U.S.A.”

Apple partners with Broadcom to build 5G components in the United States by Matt Burns originally published on TechCrunch

Logitech is moving forward with its handheld gaming console focused on cloud gaming as the company is about to launch its device in Europe. In addition to this release, the company is still actively releasing software updates for the Logitech G Cloud.

The Logitech G Cloud will become available gradually between May 22 and June 22 in the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland for €359 or £329. As a reminder, it costs $349 in the U.S. but it is usually on sale for $299.

European customers will get up to six months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate (with Xbox Cloud Gaming), one month of Nvidia GeForce Now (Priority subscription tier) and one month of Shadow PC.

When Logitech announced the Logitech G Cloud in September 2022, many people didn’t really understand why people would spend $350 for a portable Android console. Unlike the $299 Switch, you can’t play Zelda on it. Unlike the $399 Steam Deck, you can’t play PC games on the go.

But the answer lies in the name of the device. The Logitech G Cloud has been designed specifically for cloud gaming. By default, the device comes with the Nvidia GeForce Now and Xbox Cloud Gaming apps pre-installed. Logitech even says on its website that its console “requires a cloud subscription service sold separately to work as intended.”

Alternatively, the Logitech G Cloud can be used for remote play. If you already have an Xbox or a PlayStation, you can use the device as a second screen so that you can play outside of your living room. Or it can be used to play PC games streamed from a gaming PC.

Shadow becomes an official partner

The Logitech G Cloud has a familiar design with a touchscreen surrounded by gamepad controls. It has just the right amount of computing power to run cloud gaming services, but nothing extra.

It means the the Logitech G Cloud doesn’t have a powerful APU, a ton of internal storage or a fan to cool the device. Instead, what you get is a nice 1080p 7-inch display, a microSD card slot, a USB-C port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, speakers, microphones and all the buttons that you would expect from a modern gamepad.

Under the hood, the Logitech G Cloud features a mid-range Qualcomm system on a chip (the Snapdragon 720G), 4GB or RAM, 64GB of internal storage, Bluetooth 5.1 and WiFi 5 support — yes, WiFi 6 support would have been nice.

I reviewed the Logitech G Cloud back in October, and it has quickly become my favorite way to play games. In particular, I praised the flexibility of the Logitech G Cloud paired with Shadow PC, a cloud computing service that lets you access a high-end PC in a data center near you.

With this setup, you can install any game on Steam and play them flawlessly while on the couch. The Logitech G Cloud weighs 463g, which is roughly 30% lighter than the Steam Deck. It remains cool and quiet. And the best part is that you don’t have to worry about battery life as all the intensive computing tasks take place on the remote server.

Over the last few months, Logitech has shipped software updates with new features, such as virtual button mapping for touch-based mobile games, customization settings when it comes to sensitivity and dead zones for the analog sticks and L2/R2 triggers, and official support for Shadow PC.

The Shadow PC app will be pre-installed on the Logitech G Cloud in the near future and the built-in controller is now fully supported by Shadow.

Once again, the Logitech G Cloud isn’t for everyone. It works well for people who are already into cloud gaming or who are looking for something designed specifically for this purpose with a large 7-inch display. It’s arguably a niche market, but the Logitech G Cloud fills that gap very well. And now, more people will be able to buy one.

Logitech launches the Logitech G Cloud gaming handheld in Europe by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

Dutch social enterprise Fairphone is best known for its mission to build ethical smartphones via a brand that promises fairer wages for supply chain workers and design choices that encourage consumers to cherish and repair the hardware rather than toss last year’s model thanks to modularity and a web shop selling replacement (and upgradeable) spare parts.

Today it’s taking the leap into a new device category — applying the same principled approach to shipping the most sustainable and fair consumer electronics it can, within limits imposed by wider industry practices which set the availability (and compatibility) of electronics components, to a pair of its own-design, over-ear Bluetooth headphones. The latest repairable Fairphone product is called Fairbuds XL.

Confusingly, Fairbuds XL are very much not (in-ear) earbuds. So the choice of name is evidently a bit of a pun. Fairphone tells TechCrunch there was hot debate internally over what to call the headphones. We can only imagine what other options were toyed with and rejected. But, clearly, naming a pair of over-ear headphones “buds” will cause some to howl in disbelief. Still, at least they sidestepped the obvious (yet alluring) pitfall of calling the cans Fairphones (see what we did there!). The final name choice was favored for being “unique”, as they tell it.

The Fairbuds XL are available to buy through Fairphone’s website (and select retailers) from today — retailing for €249 in the EU. (As with the company’s smartphones they’re mostly only shipping to Europe at present so US readers are out of luck, or else will have to find their own creative shipping solution.)

The repairable headphones come in a choice of two colors: Speckled black (pictured above); or speckled green with some snazzy orange detailing (shown in non-exploded view below):

Image credits: Fairphone

Fairphone is remaining tight lipped on projections of how many pairs of headphones it expects to ship. And clearly it’s taking a bit of a leap here.

That said, fans of the company may have noticed it does already sell a pair of wireless earbuds (with the more vanilla name of “True Wireless Stereo Earbuds“), so it has been dabbling in the audio accessory space for a while. However Fairbuds XL represent a new category for the device maker, according to Fairphone’s head of product management, Miquel Ballester, and audio product manager, Bob van Iersel, a more recent addition to the team. This is because — unlike with the (actually) earbuds it sells — they’re not working with off-the-shelf components for the over-ear ‘phones. Rather they’ve designed this new audio product from scratch themselves. And designed the headphones to be easily dissembled for repairability.

As with Fairphone’s eponymous (screwdriver-friendly) smartphones, Fairbuds XL are comprised of modular parts that connect up to support ease of repair and promote function longevity — furthering the core mission of shipping more sustainable electronics (vs the built-in-obsolescence industry modus operandi that quickly leads to heaps of environmentally unfriendly e-waste).

“The level of modularity is similar or even more than the phones,” says Ballester, discussing Fairbuds XL in an interview with TechCrunch. “All the [replaceable] parts will be available on the website. And [there are] more specific components that we’ve also designed to be easy to replace — those specific small parts we will not be offering at the beginning on our website. Later, based on need, and what we see on the market, we might want to make all these other parts available.”

“The headphones are built up out of nine modules slash spare parts,” continues van Iersel. “Some of these parts are really relatively simple mechanical parts. Think about the ear cushions, the headband, the hinges. And there are also more complex parts — like the right speaker module which also has the buttons, the Bluetooth chipset and whatnot. So that’s the more comprehensive spare part.

“But in theory, all of them are replaceable. So there is not one single part that defines what the base of the headphones is, let’s say. So even if your Bluetooth module breaks down for whatever reason it’s not the case that you can’t use all the other ones — it’s easy to simply order replacement parts for that and the rest of the headphones will work as they are supposed to.”

“With this product, we truly design it from the ground up,” van Iersel also tells us. “That’s reflected in the modularity, the repairability of the design… With the headphones we saw an opportunity to enter a market which could could benefit a lot from the Fairphone approach — with making products that are more repairable, more durable and really designed to last a long time. That’s that’s what we set out to do with these headphones and what we think that we achieved as well.”

“For us, the headphones is a way to bring to the market what we do in the supply chain in the design of our products,” rejoins Ballester. “So this is kind of a proof that it can be done. And — for me — we are closing a gap in the market… There are no other companies doing, in this case headphones, as an artefact for changing the industry.”

Other elements that check Fairphone’s core ethical electronics mission are a “living wage” pledge applied to the headphone’s suppliers to encourage them to provide fairer working conditions for workers in their factories. There’s also fairtrade gold integrated into the Fairbuds supply chain. While recycled materials make up over 80% of the plastic weight of the headphones — with 100% recycled aluminium in structural parts, too.

Some non-recycled plastic has been used in areas where acoustic considerations are more sensitive, per van Iersel. So there’s an element of Fairphone needing to balance core product performance against sustainability targets. But Ballester says they’ll continue seeking to push the boundaries of what’s possible on the recycled materials front.

Designing such a bespoke audiophile product necessitated Fairphone bringing audio expertise in-house (to supplement its existing mobile hardware smarts). They also worked with partners on tuning the audio — touting a “signature sound” for the Fairbuds XL, as van Iersel puts it. On the audio performance side, he expresses confidence that the sound quality is reflective of what consumers can expect for over-ear headphones retailing at this price-point. (Cheaper Beats cans are in the same sort of price range, for example.)

“Fairphone did not originally have the audio expertise in house to build these kinds of projects so we made sure to partner up really well — with both hardware suppliers as well as on the software side. We have partnered to ensure the great sound quality that we managed to achieve in the end. Because, with this product, we didn’t want to just offer a ‘fair’ version of what headphones could be; but they should also be able to carry their weight when it comes to sound quality,” he tells TechCrunch.

“On the hardware side, there are different things that make up for the sound quality. It’s not only the components that you put in but also how you put them in. So we’ve chosen a chipset that supports… a high fidelity audio codec to make sure whenever you throw at it from your phone it gets processed in a Hi-Fi definition. And next to that we use 40 millimetre dynamic drivers, which is comparable to what anything in this category would have. But also, we made sure not just to select the right drivers but also to have our partner carefully design the acoustic chamber in which they are placed inside the headphones themselves — because that’s massively affects the final sound as well.”

Other sound quality considerations van Iersel says the Fairbuds’ designers have paid attention to include the clamping force of the headphones and the material for the ear cushions to ensure a proper seal. As noted above, it also worked with a third party audio calibration partner, called Sonarworks, to tune the sound.

“We developed a custom Fairphone sound signature that is part of these headphones. And it’s even something that we could carry on over to future audio products as well,” says van Iersel, noting Sonarworks created a selection of audio pre-sets Fairbuds’ users can choose from in a companion app which is launching with the headphones (both for iOS and Android).

“We also intend to reach different or new target audience with this,” he adds. “Because with the phone there’s obviously a huge threshold for consumers to switch brands, to go for something that they don’t know yet. But we do have a lot of fans of Fairphone that like our mission and would be happy to support it but aren’t willing to take that leap to buy a smartphone. But this could be a much more like the entry level Fairphone [product].

“That’s also why we chose to develop the application not just for Androids but also for iOS. So we’re not just targeting current Fairphone customers… It’s really a product that’s meant to compete with all other headphones — and not just be seen as a Fairphone accessory because that’s absolutely not what it is.”

The need to build up the necessary expertise in new product category goes some way to explaining why it took Fairphone a (fair) bit longer than it had originally expected to get the Fairbuds XL to market (circa four months). But, well, hardware is hard and its repairable Bluetooth headphones are juggling both swappable mechanical (moving) parts and higher tech chipsets, as well as shipping with the aforementioned companion apps to let users custom-tune the sound. So there’s perhaps more work involved in Fairphone delivering decent modular cans than you might consider at first glance.

A range of spare parts are available to buy for the Fairbuds XL on its web shop from launch — such as new ear cap covers for a few Euros or a new battery for around €20. Consumers of the product get a two year warranty on purchase, so any component breakages in that time are likely to be covered by Fairphone (well, unless you damage the product by sitting on it or something).

Given Fairphone offers a five year warranty on its new smartphones, a two year warranty for Fairbuds XL may seem a little low ball for a brand that centers sustainability. And Ballester admits they had wanted to be able to offer the same five year pledge. But he says uncertainties attached to shipping a device in a new category, and specifically needing to see how the headphones stand up to real world daily use/abuse, led them to opt for the less risky choice of a shorter warranty at launch. He adds that they hope to be able to extend it in the future as they see how the Fairbuds perform in the wild.

One neat longevity feature he highlights is the product has been designed so it can always function as wired headphones — meaning that, even many years hence, when it might finally be impossible to get a replacement battery for this particular Fairbuds model (even from Fairphone’s own web shop), the headphones will still function without a battery by plugging them in — at least assuming there’s a USB-C socket to hand. (Regionally at least, that’s a fairly safe bet since EU lawmakers are pushing for USB-Type C to be the charging standard for consumer electronics.)

Talking of supportive policymaking, the EU is working on right to repair legislation that looks set to give Fairphone’s approach considerable regional uplift in the years to come. And Ballester welcomes the planned expansions to EU ecodesign legislation. Discussing this, he also suggests lawmakers could go further, too — flagging the need for them to pay greater attention to consumer electronics business models and find more ways to support models that aim to sell consumers on sustainability, rather than sticking with the dirty old gadget-makers’ game of driving resource-hungry hardware upgrade cycles.

In Fairphone’s home market of the Netherlands, it’s now offering a smartphone subscription service, called Fairphone Easy, that lets users rent its handsets for a flat monthly fee which covers the cost of any necessary repairs and/or replacement. When the lease expires or the device breaks the handsets are returned to the company for reuse (refurbishment) or else for recycling components at end of their useful life to maximize resource utilization and minimize e-waste.

“I think it’s two models that will have to coexist,” suggests Ballester, tracking where sustainable consumer electronics may be headed in the years to come. “You will have the type of consumers that are more convenience driven. Like ‘I am very sustainably minded but I don’t need to repair a product myself.’ [Who] will buy into a service proposition because [they] don’t get the burden of ownership. And that’s totally fair. And there will be a type of consumers that will be fine with that burden of ownership because they know they need to recycle at the end of life. They need to keep their device as long as possible. They know that they need to repair.

“So for me these two models will coexist in the future. And we’ll have to divert more convenience-driven consumers to our service propositions… And I think companies should be smart enough to create the business models that really unlock sustainability for any type of consumer. And I think service propositions have a role there.”

Fairphone gets its audio groove on with repairable over-ear BT headphones by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

Shortly after last week’s joint announcement which saw Apple and Google teaming up on Bluetooth tracker safety measures and a new specification, Google today introduced a series of improvements coming to its own Find My Device network, including proactive alerts about unknown trackers traveling with you with support for Apple’s AirTag and others.

The news, detailed today at Google’s I/O developer conference, follows Apple and Google’s recently announced plan to lead an industry-wide initiative to draft a specification that would alert users in the case of unwanted tracking from Bluetooth devices.

The companies’ larger goal is to offer increased safety and security for their own respective user bases by making these alerts work across platforms in the same way — meaning, for example, the work Apple did to make AirTags safer following reports they were being used for stalking would also make its way to Android devices.

Today, Google is building on that announcement by noting that its own Find My Device network will soon automatically notify users if their phone detects an unknown tracker moving with them. The feature, arriving later this summer, will work with Bluetooth trackers, including Apple AirTags, and all the other trackers that are already compatible with Google’s Find My Device network.

In addition, Google is updating its Find My Device experience to make it easier to locate devices by ringing them or viewing their location on a map — even if they’re offline, it says.

This, too, will arrive later this summer, along with new support for Bluetooth trackers from Tile, Chipolo, and Pebblebee, as well as audio devices like Pixel Buds and headphones from Sony and JBL.

It seems the technology in the draft specification around trackers proposed by Apple and Google will be making its way to Android devices ahead of the production release — which is expected to arrive by year-end, the companies previously noted.

Their draft had been submitted as an Internet-Draft via a standards development organization, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Other interested parties were invited to review and comment over the next few months.

Apple and Google said other tracker makers like Samsung, Tile, Chipolo, eufy Security and Pebblebee had also expressed interest in their draft.

Google’s Find My Device network to warn about unknown AirTags with you by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch