Daily Tech News 6 June 2023

• Apple today announced its new Vision Pro XR headset, a revolutionary augmented / virtual reality device at $349. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The crowd at Apple's Developer Conference was rendered speechless in amazement.
  
  

• Live video of the announcement.
  

  You won’t find a better pre-sale indicator than this sound from the audience pic.twitter.com/gERziGaQp2

  — Ramp Capital Guy (@RampCapitalLLC) June 5, 2023

  
  
  Oh.

• Apple also announced the new 15" MacBook Air starting at $1299. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though the real price is much higher because it is physically impossible to upgrade current MacBooks after purchase. At that price you get a paltry 8GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD.
  
  Now, not long ago I bought an HP laptop with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD, but that's because they're not solder in place and the laptop glued shut, and I already had spare SSDs and RAM I could drop right in.
  
  And the MacBook maxes out at 24GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD, at more than twice the price of my HP with 64GB and 4TB. And it lacks the Four Essential Keys.
  
  
  
• Apple also also announced the new M2 Mac Studio starting at $1999, and the Mac Pro starting at $6999. (Serve the Home)
  
  You can actually add storage to the M2 Mac Pro, which is a relief because its seven PCIe slots are basically useless for anything else.
  
  As for the Mac Studio - no.
  
  It's beautifully-designed hardware, but it's much easier to make hardware beautiful when you can hermetically seal it to keep nasty, dirty customers out.
  
  
  
• Online marketplaces - Amazon, Walmart, eBay - are filled with fraudulent storage devices. (Ars Technica)
  
  Lots of other junk too, but it's a particular problem with storage devices, because they look like they work at first.
  
  What the scammers do is take a cheap 64GB microSD card (which used to be a lot), reprogram it to think it is much larger, and put it in an enclosure so you can't see the card.
  
  You can write 64GB of data to it and everything will be just fine. Everything after that, though, will silently disappear.
  
  The companies all know this, and when alerted to a specific fake product they will remove it, but it's back an hour later with a different brand name.
  
  
  
• Dozens of the largest communities on Reddit plan to go private next week in protest over the company's rapacious API charges. (The Verge)
  
  Since the largest communities on Reddit are universally awful - the site is only useful at all because of vibrant small communities that haven't been snuffed out by communists yet - nothing of value will be lost.
  
  But since Reddit is run by community-snuffing communists who love those large valueless "subreddits", it's possible they will take notice.
  
  
  
• And probably make things worse.
  
  
  
• French startup Escape has raised $4 million to use AI to automatically scan APIs for security flaws. (Tech Crunch)
  
  This is actually a good use for the current Large Language Models like ChatGPT. Its something they can be trained to do, and the worst that can happen is they fail to prevent a disaster that other measures also failed to prevent.
  
  I have no idea if this particular company is producing a good product, but there is at least a chance that they are producing a good product, unlike most of the other big announcements which are basically computational cancer.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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