To date, Google has released three Assistant Smart Displays. 9to5Google can now report that the company is working on a new Nest Hub for 2022 with a dockable tablet form factor where the screen detaches from a base/speaker. From the report: According to a source that has proven familiar with Google's plans, the next Nest Smart Display will have a removable screen that can be used as a tablet. It attaches to the base/speaker for a more conventional-looking smart home device. This new form factor comes as Google has spent the last few months adding more interface elements to the 2nd-gen Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max. Swiping up from the bottom of the screen reveals a row of "apps" above the settings bar. You can open a fullscreen grid of icons from there. Applications and games on the Nest Hub are essentially web views, so this is technically a launcher for shortcuts.

Speaking of the web, Google also spent the end of last year adding a more feature-rich browser that even features a Gboard-esque keyboard. You can also send sites directly to your phone and enable text-to-speech. Both of these additions can be seen as laying the groundwork for a tablet-like experience, with web browsing obviously being a popular task on big screens. Many questions about the implementation remain unknown, including what OS/experience the undocked tablet will run. Chrome OS is likely too power-hungry (and as such costly) considering the affordability of Nest devices, while Android would open the door to existing apps and the Play Store.

Andrew Cunningham writes via Ars Technica: Microsoft's DirectStorage API promises to speed up game-load times, both on the Xbox Series X/S and on Windows PCs (where Microsoft recently exited its developer-preview phase). One of the first games to demonstrate the benefits of DirectStorage on the PC is Square Enix's Forspoken, which was shown off by Luminous Productions technical director Teppei Ono at GDC this week. As reported by The Verge, Ono said that, with a fast NVMe SSD and DirectStorage support, some scenes in Forspoken could load in as little as one second. That is certainly a monstrous jump from the days of waiting for a PlayStation 2 to load giant open-world maps from a DVD.

As a demonstration of DirectStorage, though, Forspoken's numbers are a mixed bag. On one hand, the examples Ono showcased clearly demonstrate DirectStorage loading scenes more quickly on the same hardware, compared to the legacy Win32 API -- from 2.6 seconds to 2.2 seconds in one scene, and from 2.4 seconds to 1.9 seconds in another. Forspoken demonstrated performance improvements on older SATA-based SSDs as well, despite being marketed as a feature that will primarily benefit NVMe drives -- dropping from 5.0 to 4.6 seconds in one scene, and from 4.1 to 3.4 seconds in another. Speed improvements for SATA SSDs have been limited for the better part of a decade now because the SATA interface itself (rather than the SSD controller or NAND flash chips) has been holding them back. So eking out any kind of measurable improvement for those drives is noteworthy.

On the other hand, Ono's demo showed that game load time wasn't improving as dramatically as the raw I/O speeds would suggest. On an NVMe SSD, I/O speeds increased from 2,862MB/s using Win32 to 4,829MB/s using DirectStorage -- nearly a 70 percent increase. But the load time for the scene decreased from 2.1 to 1.9 seconds. That's a decrease that wouldn't be noticeable even if you were trying to notice it. The Forspoken demo ultimately showed that the speed of the storage you're using still has a lot more to do with how quickly your games load than DirectStorage does. One scene that took 24.6 seconds to load using DirectStorage on an HDD took just 4.6 seconds to load on a SATA SSD and 2.2 seconds to load on an NVMe SSD. That's a much larger gap than the one between Win32 and DirectStorage running on the same hardware.

Nvidia, one of the largest buyers of outsourced chip production, said it will explore using Intel as a possible manufacturer of its products, but said Intel's journey to becoming a foundry will be difficult. From a report: Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said he wants to diversify his company's suppliers as much as possible and will consider working with Intel. Nvidia currently uses Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and Samsung Electronics to build its products. "We're very open-minded to considering Intel," Huang said Wednesday in an online company event. "Foundry discussions take a long time. It's not just about desire. We're not buying milk here."

Despite being easily removable since it is not soldered down, the Mac Studio's SSD storage is not currently user-upgradeable due to a software block, YouTuber Luke Miani has discovered. MacRumors reports: Initial teardowns suggested that the Mac Studio's storage could be upgradeable since it is not soldered in place. Each Mac Studio contains two internal SSD slots, and the SSDs themselves can be freely swapped between the connectors. In a video on his YouTube channel, Miani tested if the Mac Studio's storage is user upgradeable in practice. Miani wiped the SSD of a Mac Studio, removed it from the machine, and inserted it into an empty SSD slot in another Mac Studio, but the Mac's status light blinked SOS and would not boot.

The Mac Studio recognizes the SSD, but Apple's software prevents it from booting, suggesting that this is a conscious decision by Apple to prevent users from upgrading their storage themselves. On its website, Apple claims that the Mac Studio's SSD storage is "not user accessible" and encourages users to configure the device with enough storage at the point of purchase. It now seems that the purpose of the easily replaceable storage is to aid repairs performed by authorized technicians, who likely will have software tools that enable the Mac Studio to boot from different internal storage. Since the prevention of user-upgradeability appears to simply be due to a software block, Apple could enable users to upgrade their own storage in the future via an update.

New submitter Dru Nemeton shares a report from 9to5Mac: Apple's new Studio Display officially hit the market on Friday, and we continue to learn new tidbits about what exactly's inside the machine. While Apple touted that the Studio Display is powered by an A13 Bionic inside, we've since learned that the Studio Display also features 64GB of onboard storage, because who knows why... [...] as first spotted by Khaos Tian on Twitter, the Studio Display also apparently features 64GB of onboard storage. Yes, 64GB: double the storage in the entry-level Apple TV 4K and the same amount of storage in the entry-level iPad Air 5. Also worth noting: the Apple TV 4K is powered by the A12 Bionic chip, so the Studio Display has it beat on that front as well. Apple hasn't offered any explanation for why the Studio Display features 64GB of onboard storage. It appears that less than 2GB of that storage is actually being used as of right now.

One unexciting possibility is that the A13 Bionic chip used inside the Studio Display is literally the exact same A13 Bionic chip that was first shipped in the iPhone 11. As you might remember, the iPhone 11 came with 64GB of storage in its entry-level configuration, meaning Apple likely produced millions of A13 Bionic chips with 64GB of onboard storage. What do you think? Will Apple ever tap into the A13 Bionic chip and 64GB storage inside the Studio Display for something more interesting?

The New York Times reports that "After more than three weeks without being able to leave the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, 64 workers were able to be rotated out, the plant said on Sunday." Staff at the plant, which includes more than 200 technical personnel and guards, had not been able to rotate shifts since February 23, a day before Russian forces took control of the site, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which serves as a nuclear watchdog for the United Nations. In a Facebook post, the plant said that to rotate the 64 workers, 46 volunteers were sent to the site to make sure operations at the plant could continue.

It was unclear whether the remaining workers would also have an opportunity to be rotated.

For weeks, the International Atomic Energy Agency, known as the I.A.E.A., has expressed concern for the workers at the Chernobyl site, calling for the staff to be rotated for their safety and security. Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the I.A.E.A., said last week that he remained "gravely concerned about the extremely difficult circumstances for the Ukrainian staff there." The I.A.E.A. said on March 13 that workers were no longer doing repairs and maintenance, partly because of "physical and psychological fatigue...."

Workers at the site have faced a number of issues recently, including a power outage and limited communication. Ukrainian government officials said on March 9 that damage by Russian forces had "disconnected" the plant from outside electricity, leaving the site dependent on power from diesel generators and backup supplies. Power was restored a few days later, and the plant resumed normal operating conditions.
Earlier this month a former commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (from 1998 to 2007) argued in the Wall Street Journal that "An unappreciated motive for Russia's invasion of Ukraine is that Kyiv was positioning itself to break from its longtime Russian nuclear suppliers, as the U.S. was encroaching on Russia's largest nuclear export market...."

"The project was intended to allow Ukraine to store this fuel safely without shipping it back to Russia for reprocessing. The processing and storage facility was completed in 2020, and Holtec and SSE Chernobyl were loading the canisters to be stored when the war began on February 24..." By taking over Chernobyl, Russia gives itself control of the disposal of its spent fuel, which it can store in canisters at the site or ship to a reprocessing facility in Russia. Either way, this represents hundreds of millions of dollars for Rosatom, the Russian state-owned nuclear enterprise....

The timing is telling. In November 2021, Ukraine's leaders signed a deal with Westinghouse to start construction on what they hoped would be at least five nuclear units — the first tranche of a program that could more than double the number of plants in the country, with a potential total value approaching $100 billion. Ukraine clearly intended that Russia receive none of that business.

Tom's Guide tested a Mac Studio workstation equipped with an M1 Ultra with the Geekbench 5.4 CPU benchmarks "to get a sense of how effectively it handles single-core and multi-core workflows."

"Since our M1 Ultra is the best you can buy (at a rough price of $6,199) it sports a 20-core CPU and a 64-core GPU, as well as 128GB of unified memory (RAM) and a 2TB SSD."

Slashdot reader exomondo shares their results: We ran the M1 Ultra through the Geekbench 5.4 CPU benchmarking test multiple times and after averaging the results, we found that the M1 Ultra does indeed outperform top-of-the-line Windows gaming PCs when it comes to multi-core CPU performance. Specifically, the M1 Ultra outperformed a recent Alienware Aurora R13 desktop we tested (w/ Intel Core i7-12700KF, GeForce RTX 3080, 32GB RAM), an Origin Millennium (2022) we just reviewed (Core i9-12900K CPU, RTX 3080 Ti GPU, 32GB RAM), and an even more 3090-equipped HP Omen 45L we tested recently (Core i9-12900K, GeForce RTX 3090, 64GB RAM) in the Geekbench 5.4 multi-core CPU benchmark.

However, as you can see from the chart of results below, the M1 Ultra couldn't match its Intel-powered competition in terms of CPU single-core performance. The Ultra-powered Studio also proved slower to transcode video than the afore-mentioned gaming PCs, taking nearly 4 minutes to transcode a 4K video down to 1080p using Handbrake. All of the gaming PCs I just mentioned completed the same task faster, over 30 seconds faster in the case of the Origin Millennium. Before we even get into the GPU performance tests it's clear that while the M1 Ultra excels at multi-core workflows, it doesn't trounce the competition across the board. When we ran our Mac Studio review unit through the Geekbench 5.4 OpenCL test (which benchmarks GPU performance by simulating common tasks like image processing), the Ultra earned an average score of 83,868. That's quite good, but again it fails to outperform Nvidia GPUs in similarly-priced systems.
They also share some results from the OpenCL Benchmarks browser, which publicly displays scores from different GPUs that users have uploaded: Apple's various M1 chips are on the list as well, and while the M1 Ultra leads that pack it's still quite a ways down the list, with an average score of 83,940. Incidentally, that means it ranks below much older GPUs like Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2070 (85,639) and AMD's Radeon VII (86,509). So here again we see that while the Ultra is fast, it can't match the graphical performance of GPUs that are 2-3 years old at this point — at least, not in these synthetic benchmarks. These tests don't always accurately reflect real-world CPU and GPU performance, which can be dramatically influenced by what programs you're running and how they're optimized to make use of your PC's components.
Their conclusion? When it comes to tasks like photo editing or video and music production, the M1 Ultra w/ 128GB of RAM blazes through workloads, and it does so while remaining whisper-quiet. It also makes the Mac Studio a decent gaming machine, as I was able to play less demanding games like Crusader Kings III, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and Total War: Warhammer II at reasonable (30+ fps) framerates. But that's just not on par with the performance we expect from high-end GPUs like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090....

Of course, if you don't care about games and are in the market for a new Mac with more power than just about anything Apple's ever made, you want the Studio with M1 Ultra.

"Asahi Linux aims to bring you a polished Linux experience on Apple Silicon Macs," explains the project's web site.

And now that first Asahi Linux alpha release is out — ready for testing on M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max machines (except Mac Studio): We're really excited to finally take this step and start bringing Linux on Apple Silicon to everyone. This is only the beginning, and things will move even more quickly going forward!

Keep in mind that this is still a very early, alpha release. It is intended for developers and power users; if you decide to install it, we hope you will be able to help us out by filing detailed bug reports and helping debug issues. That said, we welcome everyone to give it a try — just expect things to be a bit rough.... Asahi Linux is developed by a group of volunteers, and led by marcan as his primary job. You can support him directly via Patreon and GitHub Sponsors....

Can I dual-boot macOS and Linux?

Yes! In fact, we expect you to do that, and the installer doesn't support replacing macOS at this point. This is because we have no mechanism for updating system firmware from Linux yet, and until we do it makes sense to keep a macOS install lying around for that. You can have as many macOS and Linux installs as you want, and they will all play nicely and show up in Apple's boot picker. Each Linux install acts as a self-contained OS and should not interfere with the others.

Note that keeping a macOS install around does mean you lose ~70GB of disk space (in order to allow for updates, since the macOS updater is quite inefficient). In the future we expect to have a mechanism for firmware updates from Linux and better integration, at which point we'll be comfortable recommending Linux-only setups....

Is this just Arch Linux ARM?

Pretty much! Most of our work is in the kernel and a few core support packages, and we rely on Linux's excellent existing ARM64 support. The Asahi Linux reference distro images are based off of Arch Linux ARM and simply add our own package repository, which only adds a few packages. You can freely convert between Arch Linux ARM and Asahi Linux by adding or removing this repository and the relevant packages, although vanilla Arch Linux ARM kernels will not boot on these machines at this time.
The project's home page adds that "All contributors are welcome, of any skill level!"

"Doing this requires a tremendous amount of work, as Apple Silicon is an entirely undocumented platform," the team explains. "In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and developing an open-source driver for it." But they're already documenting the Apple Silicon platform on their GitHub wiki. We will eventually release a remix of Arch Linux ARM, packaged for installation by end-users, as a distribution of the same name. The majority of the work resides in hardware support, drivers, and tools, and it will be upstreamed to the relevant projects....

Apple allows booting unsigned/custom kernels on Apple Silicon Macs without a jailbreak! This isn't a hack or an omission, but an actual feature that Apple built into these devices. That means that, unlike iOS devices, Apple does not intend to lock down what OS you can use on Macs (though they probably won't help with the development). As long as no code is taken from macOS to build the Linux support, the result is completely legal to distribute and for end-users to use, as it would not be a derivative work of macOS.
An interesting observataion from Slashdot reader mrwireless: It once again seems Apple is informally supportive of these efforts, as the recent release of OS Monterey 12.3 makes the process even simpler. As Twitter user Matthew Garrett writes:

"People who hate UEFI should read https://github.com/AsahiLinux/... — Apple made deliberate design choices that allow third party OSes to run on M1 hardware without compromising security, and with much less closed code than on basically any modern x86."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: A simple electrical circuit has learned to recognize flowers based on their petal size. That may seem trivial compared with artificial intelligence (AI) systems that recognize faces in a crowd, transcribe spoken words into text, and perform other astounding feats. However, the tiny circuit outshines conventional machine learning systems in one key way: It teaches itself without any help from a computer -- akin to a living brain. The result demonstrates one way to avoid the massive amount of computation typically required to tune an AI system, an issue that could become more of a roadblock as such programs grow increasingly complex. [...] The network was tuned to perform a variety of simple AI tasks. For example, it could distinguish with greater than 95% accuracy between three species of iris depending on four physical measurements of a flower: the lengths and widths of its petals and sepals -- the leaves just below the blossom. That's a canonical AI test that uses a standard set of 150 images, 30 of which were used to train the network.

Companies including Highland Electric and Thomas Built have fleet-as-a-service offerings for U.S. school districts that struggle with the high upfront costs of electric school buses and the charging equipment needed to keep them running. Jeff St. John from Canary Media writes: On Thursday, the Massachusetts-based startup and the North Carolina-based school bus manufacturer announced a plan to offer "electric school bus subscriptions through 2025 at prices that put them at cost parity with diesel." This is essentially a nationwide extension of Highland Electric's "turnkey solutions provider" business model, backed by a big bus maker as its partner. Highland provides the buses and charging infrastructure, pays for the electricity to charge them, covers maintenance costs and manages the other complexities of going electric. The school district or transit authority pays an all-inclusive subscription fee, one that's structured to be lower than its current budget for owning, fueling and maintaining its existing diesel fleets.

Highland, which has raised $253 million in venture capital funding, has projects in 17 states and two Canadian provinces, including one of the largest single electric school bus deployments in the U.S., in Montgomery County, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C. While most of its projects have started small, CEO Duncan McIntyre sees the Montgomery County project -- now at 25 electric buses and set to expand to 326 over the next four years -- as the model for the future. "We are in the business of helping communities that want to complete a full fleet-electrification effort," McIntyre said in an interview. "They don't have to commit to that upfront -- but there's usually an interest in going beyond a few-vehicles pilot."

Other companies are also pulling together private-sector financing to tackle this public-sector market. Nuvve, a publicly traded EV-charging and vehicle-to-grid provider, has formed a financing joint venture that's teamed up with school bus manufacturer Blue Bird Corp. to offer similar electric bus leasing and infrastructure offerings with school districts in California, Colorado, Illinois and other states. And Canadian EV maker Lion Electric has teamed up with Zum, a San Francisco-based startup offering transportation-as-a-service for a number of school districts, in a project aiming at replacing half of Oakland, California's school buses with electric models in the coming year. Such large-scale electric bus projects remain the exception rather than the rule, however. Out of the roughly 500,000 school buses in the U.S., only about 0.2 percent -- just over 1,000 -- were electric as of the end of 2021, according to data from the World Resources Institute's Electric School Bus Initiative. And of the 354 U.S. school districts that have committed to buying electric buses, only 28 plan to deploy 10 or more, according to WRI data.

This relatively low rate of adoption is bound to accelerate as the economics of electric school buses grow more attractive, however. A 2020 study (PDF) conducted by Atlas Public Policy for Washington state indicated that falling battery costs and rising manufacturing volumes should bring electric school buses within total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) parity with fossil-fueled buses by 2030. Total cost of ownership -- a metric that bundles long-term fueling, operating, maintenance and insurance costs and a vehicle's residual value into one single figure -- can be brought down with structures that reduce costs or open up revenue-generating opportunities for the fleets in question, Nick Nigro, Atlas Public Policy's founder, said in an interview. The right combination of structures could allow electric buses to come into TCO parity with diesel buses as soon as 2025, he said.

Maserati announced on Thursday that it will offer electric versions of its entire vehicle lineup by 2025 and is starting its efforts off with the GranTurismo EV, a 1,200 HP roadster slated for release next year. Engadget reports: The GranTurismo "Folgore" will be the first entry into Maserati's new line of electric vehicles. Its thousand-plus horses will translate into a limitered top speed of 190 MPH and a sub-3-second 0-60. It will be joined by an electrified version of the new Grecale SUV and Grancabrio GT in 2023 followed by EV variants of the MC20, the Quattroporte and the Levante SUV by 2025. The company also announced its intention to halt production of internal combustion vehicles and go fully electric by 2030. The company, a subsidiary of the Stellantis Group, did not elaborate on the expected MSRPs for the upcoming vehicles, but given Maserati's current offerings, interested buyers will likely be looking to pay anywhere from the high five-figures to the mid-sixes.

Microsoft brought DirectStorage to Windows PCs this week. The API promises faster load times and more detailed graphics by letting game developers make apps that load graphical data from the SSD directly to the GPU. Now, Nvidia and IBM have created a similar SSD/GPU technology, but they are aiming it at the massive data sets in data centers. From a report: Instead of targeting console or PC gaming like DirectStorage, Big accelerator Memory (BaM) is meant to provide data centers quick access to vast amounts of data in GPU-intensive applications, like machine-learning training, analytics, and high-performance computing, according to a research paper spotted by The Register this week. Entitled "BaM: A Case for Enabling Fine-grain High Throughput GPU-Orchestrated Access to Storage" (PDF), the paper by researchers at Nvidia, IBM, and a few US universities proposes a more efficient way to run next-generation applications in data centers with massive computing power and memory bandwidth. BaM also differs from DirectStorage in that the creators of the system architecture plan to make it open source.

An anonymous reader shares a report:When Apple introduced the M1 Ultra -- the company's most powerful in-house processor yet and the crown jewel of its brand new Mac Studio -- it did so with charts boasting that the Ultra capable of beating out Intel's best processor or Nvidia's RTX 3090 GPU all on its own. The charts, in Apple's recent fashion, were maddeningly labeled with "relative performance" on the Y-axis, and Apple doesn't tell us what specific tests it runs to arrive at whatever numbers it uses to then calculate "relative performance." But now that we have a Mac Studio, we can say that in most tests, the M1 Ultra isn't actually faster than an RTX 3090, as much as Apple would like to say it is.

"A little noticed side effect of all the sanctions Russia is under for its invasion of Ukraine is that related to IT," writes Slashdot reader quonset. "U.S. sanctions prohibit any technology transfers to the country, including computer chips. However, another issue is Russia is now cut off from cloud storage companies in the West. As a result, Russia is two months away from using up all its domestic storage capacity. Four options have been proposed to counter this issue. BleepingComputer reports: Last week, the Ministry of Digital Development amended the Yarovaya Law (2016) to suspend a yearly requirement for telecom operators to increase storage capacity allocations by 15% for anti-terrorist surveillance purposes. Another move that could free up space would be to demand ISPs abandon media streaming services and other online entertainment platforms that eat up precious resources. Thirdly, there's the option of buying out all available storage from domestic data processing centers. However, this will likely lead to further problems for entertainment providers who need additional storage to add services and content. Russia is also considering seizing IT servers and storage left behind by companies who pulled out of Russia and integrating them into public infrastructure. There is one more option mentioned in the report and it has to do with China. Russia could "tap into Chinese cloud service providers and IT system sellers," reports BleepingComputer, although China has yet to decide how much it's willing to help Russia.

A team of researchers from Cornell University used a computational aesthetic system to teach an AI robot "to not only determine the most pleasing picture in a given dataset, but capture new, original -- and most importantly, good -- shots on its own," writes Engadget's A. Tarantola. The project is called AutoPhoto and was presented last fall at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. From the report: This robo-photographer consists of three parts: the image evaluation algorithm, which evaluates a presented image and issues an aesthetic score; a Clearpath Jackal wheeled robot upon which the camera is affixed; and the AutoPhoto algorithm itself, which serves as a sort of firmware, translating the results from the image grading process into drive commands for the physical robot and effectively automating the optimized image capture process.

For its image evaluation algorithm, the Cornell team led by second year Masters student Hadi AlZayer, leveraged an existing learned aesthetic estimation model, which had been trained on a dataset of more than a million human-ranked photographs. AutoPhoto itself was virtually trained on dozens of 3D images of interior room scenes to spot the optimally composed angle before the team attached it to the Jackal. When let loose in a building on campus, as you can see in the video above, the robot starts off with a slew of bad takes, but as the AutoPhoto algorithm gains its bearings, its shot selection steadily improves until the images rival those of local Zillow listings. On average it took about a dozen iterations to optimize each shot and the whole process takes just a few minutes to complete.

"You can essentially take incremental improvements to the current commands," AlZayer told Engadget. "You can do it one step at a time, meaning you can formulate it as a reinforcement learning problem." This way, the algorithm doesn't have to conform to traditional heuristics like the rule of thirds because it already knows what people will like as it was taught to match the look and feel of the shots it takes with the highest-ranked pictures from its training data, AlZayer explained. "The most challenging part was the fact there was no existing baseline number we were trying to improve," AlZayer noted to the Cornell Press. "We had to define the entire process and the problem." Looking ahead, AlZayer hopes to adapt the AutoPhoto system for outdoor use, potentially swapping out the terrestrial Jackal for a UAV. "Simulating high quality realistic outdoor scenes is very hard," AlZayer said, "just because it's harder to perform reconstruction of a controlled scene." To get around that issue, he and his team are currently investigating whether the AutoPhoto model can be trained on video or still images rather than 3D scenes.

Chip designer and licensor to the stars, Arm, has reportedly dropped around 1,000 workers onto unemployment queues. The Register reports: An email to staff from Arm CEO Rene Haas, seen and reported by the UK's Daily Telegraph, states: "To stay competitive, we need to remove duplication of work now that we are one Arm; stop work that is no longer critical to our future success; and think about how we get work done." Haas, who has been in the chief exec's chair for about a month, added Arm needs "to be more disciplined about our costs and where we're investing." "I write this knowing that although it is the right thing to do for Arm's future, this is not going to be easy," he added. Between 12 and 15 per cent of staff will be let go as a result globally. The biz employs 6,400 worldwide. The job cuts come just a month after the collapse of the company's $40 billion sale to Nvidia. ARM is now pursuing a potential IPO, according to Bloomberg.

Does Apple have a "Pro" problem? "[Y]ears of Apple and competitors slapping the name onto wireless earbuds and slightly fancier phones have made it hard to tell what 'Pro' even means," argues The Verge's Mitchell Clark. It could be the reason behind Apple's recently-launched Mac "Studio." From the report: From the jump, Apple made it clear who the Mac Studio and Studio Display were for. It showed them being used by musicians, 3D artists, and developers in its presentation, and the message was clear: these are products for creative professionals or people who aspire to be creative professionals. You know, the same exact crowd it's targeted with MacBook Pro commercials for years. "My first thought was, 'Oh, I wonder when the iPhone Studio comes out,'" says Jonathan Balck, co-founder and managing director of ad agency Colossus, in an interview with The Verge. "Pro was exclusive, and it was about one way of doing things, but the whole culture is moving toward creativity," he adds while musing whether we could see Apple's Pro branding shift to become Studio branding instead.

[T]o me, the Mac Studio line is a clear successor to Apple's iMac Pro. Both computers are powered by monstrous CPUs and come standard with 10Gb Ethernet and a healthy crop of Thunderbolt and USB ports. I'm convinced that, had Apple released the new Studio even two years ago, it would've put "Pro" in the name. (Though, to play devil's advocate, I'm not as sure it would've done so for the Studio Display.) Some marketing experts tell me that the word "Pro" is starting to get long in the tooth, and not just from overuse. "The previous term Pro is, in my opinion, outdated and dry," says Keith Dorsey, founder and CEO of the creative marketing group and management company YoungGuns Entertainment. Balck agrees; "If you look at the word Pro, that is in many ways restrictive," he says in an interview, explaining that when you say a product is "professional," it evokes ideas like job interviews, portfolios, and standoffishness. Pro products, he says, come across as just for those who use creativity to get a paycheck.

The reason Apple may need to, though, is because it led the industry in thoroughly overusing the word "Pro" to the point where it's lost all meaning. It's hard to pinpoint where exactly this started (though, in my mind, it was with the two-port MacBook Pro model), but now the word gets slapped on everything. Want to sell wireless earbuds for even more money? Those are Pro earbuds now. Want to have a regular and fancy version of your phone? No problem, call the nice one the Pro. [...] But Apple's new word, "studio," seems to come ready-made to excite the company's target audience.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Foxconn, the biggest assembler of Apple iPhones, is in talks with Saudi Arabia about jointly building a $9 billion multipurpose facility (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source) that could make microchips, electric-vehicle components and other electronics like displays, according to people familiar with the matter. The Saudi government is reviewing an offer from the company, formally known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., to build a dual-line foundry for surface-mount technology and wafer fabrication in Neom, a tech-focused city-state the kingdom is developing in the desert, the people said. Discussions over the project started last year, they said. The Saudis are conducting due diligence and benchmarking the offer against others that Foxconn has made for similar projects globally, one of the people said. Besides Saudi Arabia, Foxconn is also talking with the United Arab Emirates about potentially siting the project there, one of the people said.

The Taiwan-based company has looked to diversify its manufacturing sites amid rising tensions between China and the U.S. that put it in a potentially vulnerable spot. Riyadh wants the company to guarantee that it would direct at least two-thirds of the foundry's production into Foxconn's existing supply chain, one of the people said, to ensure there are buyers for its products and the project is ultimately profitable. Foxconn is seeking large incentives including financing, tax holidays and subsidies for power and water in exchange for helping set up a high-tech manufacturing sector in the kingdom, the people said, as Saudi Arabia seeks to diversify its economy away from oil. The Saudis could offer direct equity co-investment, industrial development loans, low-interest debt from local banks and export credits to compete with other jurisdictions that Foxconn might consider, said another person familiar with the talks.

The Verge reports: Ford will soon start selling and shipping some Ford Explorers without the chips that power rear air conditioning and heating controls, according to a report from Automotive News. The automaker will instead ship the missing semiconductors to dealers within one year, which they will then install in customers' vehicles after purchase.

Ford spokesperson Said Deep told The Verge that heating and air condition will still be controllable from the front seats, and that customers who choose to purchase a vehicle without the rear controls will receive a price reduction. According to Deep, Ford is doing this as a way to bring new Explorers to customers faster, and that the change is only temporary.

The automaker originally had plans to ship partially-built, undrivable vehicles to dealers last year, but now, the unchipped vehicles will be both driveable and sellable. As pointed out by Automotive News, Ford's decision comes as an attempt to move the partially-built vehicles crowding its factory lots. Last month, hundreds of new Ford Broncos were spotted sitting idly in the snow-covered lots near Ford's Michigan Assembly Plant, all of which await chip-related installations....

Other automakers have also had to make sacrifices due to the chip shortage, with GM dropping wireless charging, HD radios, and a fuel management module that made some pickup trucks operate more efficiently.

Power blackouts and rising electricity costs have inspired "a small but growing number of Californians" to leave the power grid altogether for their own home-generated energy, reports the New York Times.

And thanks to "a stunning drop" in the cost of solar panels and batteries, "Some homeowners who have built new, off-grid homes say they have even saved money because their systems were cheaper than securing a new utility connection...." Nobody is quite sure how many off-grid homes there are but local officials and real estate agents said there were dozens here in Nevada County, a picturesque part of the Sierra Nevada range between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. Some energy experts say that millions of people could eventually go off the grid as costs drop....

People going off the grid argue that utilities are not moving fast enough to address climate change and are causing other problems. In Northern California, Pacific Gas & Electric's safety record has alienated many residents. The company's equipment caused the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed dozens and destroyed the town of Paradise, about 70 miles north of Nevada City. The utility's effort to prevent fires by cutting off power to homes and businesses has also angered people. One of those residents is Alan Savage, a real estate agent in Grass Valley, who bought an off-grid home six years ago and has sold hundreds of such properties. He said he never loses power, unlike PG&E customers. "I don't think I'll ever go back to being on the grid," Mr. Savage said.

For people like him, it is not enough to take the approach favored by most homeowners with solar panels and batteries. Those homeowners use their systems to supplement the electricity they get from the grid, provide emergency backup power and sell excess energy to the grid.

The appeal of off-grid homes has grown in part because utilities have become less reliable. As natural disasters linked to climate change have increased, there have been more extended blackouts in California, Texas, Louisiana and other states.... Installing off-grid solar and battery systems is expensive, but once the systems are up and running, they typically require modest maintenance and homeowners no longer have an electric bill. RMI, a research organization formerly known as the Rocky Mountain Institute, has projected that by 2031 most California homeowners will save money by going off the grid as solar and battery costs fall and utility rates increase. That phenomenon will increasingly play out in less sunny regions like the Northeast over the following decades, the group forecasts....

Some energy experts worry that people who are going off the grid could unwittingly hurt efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That is because the excess electricity that rooftop solar panels produce will no longer reach the grid, where it can replace power from coal or natural gas plants. "We don't need everybody to cut the cord and go it alone," said Mark Dyson, senior principal with the carbon-free electricity unit of RMI.... Scott Aaronson, a senior vice president for security and preparedness at the Edison Electric Institute, a utility industry trade group, said that while off-grid living might appeal to some, it was "like having a computer not connected to the internet.... You're getting some value but you're not part of a greater whole," he said. "When something goes wrong, that's wholly on you...."

Off-grid systems are particularly attractive to people building new homes. That's because installing a 125- to 300-foot overhead power line to a new home costs about $20,000, according to the California Public Utilities Commission. In places where lines have to be buried, installation runs about $78,000 for 100 feet.
The article ends by pointing out that off-the-grid residents will soon also have a handy alternative to the giant electric batteries that store the excess energy from their solar panels: electric cars like the Ford F-150 Lightning and the Hyundai Ioniq 5.