Tech Industry

Update: In an earnings call, CEO Mike Sievert told investors and analysts that the idea has now been completely abandoned – statement below.

A reported move regarding some older T-Mobile unlimited plans got the carrier into hot water, and the company’s CEO said that it never intended to proceed with this – rather, it was just carrying out a small-scale test. But even the test has now been abandoned …

Tens of millions of teens actively want their parents to track their locations using tech like Apple’s Find My and third-party apps like Life360, says a new survey.

More broadly, the survey reports on Gen Z – representing those aged 11 to 26 – being more anxious than previous generations, and having a different mindset to location tracking …

When Apple chipmaker TSMC was granted federal subsidies for building its first US plant, creating jobs for American workers was one of the key arguments. But with hiring well underway, a new report says that almost half of the TSMC Arizona plant hires are from Taiwan.

Additionally, plans for a six-step expansion program – intended to allow the Arizona plant to rival the production volumes of those in Taiwan – are now said to be unlikely to proceed ….

Sure, current iPhones can send data via satellites in emergencies, but two new demonstrations show that we might soon be able to routinely make voice phone calls via satellite connectivity. You can watch the call and 5G demo in the video below.

The test phone call – along with a separate 5G data download – was made from Maui, Hawaii, to Madrid using a new low Earth orbit satellite …

Update: In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple said:

“The App Store was designed to be a safe and trusted place for users to download apps, and the goals of the DSA align with Apple’s goals to protect consumers from illegal and harmful content. We are working to implement the requirements of the DSA with user privacy and security as our continued North Star.”

We learned back in April that Apple was one of 19 companies that would be subject to the Digital Services Act. The law comes into force today, and it’s not clear whether or not the iPhone maker is complying.

Indeed, many are saying that this is the big problem with the act: There’s a lot of subjectivity involved in determining whether a company is breaking the law, making enforcement tricky …

Intel’s planned acquisition of Tower Semiconductor has failed, after the US chipmaker was unable to get the necessary regulatory approval.

The abandonment of the $5.4B deal is a setback to Intel’s hopes of competing with Apple chipmaker TSMC …

A United Nations report has argued that we should ban smartphones in schools, noting that one in four countries around the world already does so.

UN education and science agency Unesco says that there three strong reasons to implement the policy …

The White House has announced a plan intended to improve the security of smart home tech. The government will test everything from smart speakers to Wi-Fi routers, awarding a US Cyber Trust Mark logo to products which pass the tests.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will set the standards to be met, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will manage the program …

A Supreme Court affirmative action ruling that bans race-conscious admissions into higher education will end up hurting US companies, and the economy as a whole – according to Apple and many other US brands.

An amicus brief arguing in favor of continued affirmative action by colleges was filed by Apple, Adobe, Airbnb, Cisco, Dell, Google, Ikea, Intel, Lyft, PayPal, Salesforce, Uber, and many other major corporations …

The Federal Trade Commission in the United States has proposed a handful of changes that it says will make it easier for consumers to cancel recurring subscriptions and memberships. The FTC believes that its “Click to Cancel” provisions “would go a long way to rescuing consumers from seemingly never-ending struggles to cancel unwanted subscription payment plans.”

A web developer has created a Siri GPT-3 mashup that is intended to demonstrate the potential for a truly smart voice assistant.

The AI system was able to make sense of conversational speech – including some in which the required action was implied rather than directly stated …

CNN has pointed to upcoming tech earnings reports from Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Twitter – and suggested that they aren’t going to be pretty.

The site argues that this may be the quarter in which tech giants reveal that their seeming immunity to the broader economic climate is at an end …