Innehållsförteckning för #693 från AppleMagazine

Before a wildfire ravaged their street in northwest Altadena, Louise Hamlin and Chris Wilson lived next door to each other in nearly identical houses. “I chose an old home in an old neighborhood because it has soul,” said Hamlin, a 51-year-old single mom with a teenage boy, who bought her 1,500-square-foot home 10 years ago. Today, gone are their charming English-style cottages built in 1925 with the welcoming porches and Palladian windows. Amid the rubble and ash, little is left of their historic neighborhood. In the weeks since the Eaton wildfire took their homes, Hamlin and Wilson have been stumbling through the layers of business, bureaucracy and emotional trauma of surviving a natural disaster, with their sights firmly set on rebuilding. How they’ll navigate rebuilding is a story of contrasting…

Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott issued a ban on Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek for government-issued devices, becoming the first state to restrict the popular chatbot in such a manner. The upstart AI platform has sent shockwaves throughout the AI community after gaining popularity amongst American users in recent weeks. The governor also prohibited popular Chineseowned social media apps Xiaohongshu, or what some are calling RedNote, and Lemon8 from all state-issued devices. “Texas will not allow the Chinese Communist Party to infiltrate our state’s critical infrastructure through data-harvesting AI and social media apps,” Abbott said in a statement. “Texas will continue to protect and defend our state from hostile foreign actors.” The governor’s office declined to comment further for this story. AI startup DeepSeek has rocked markets upon demonstrating its…

The website of the Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek, whose chatbot became the most downloaded app in the United States, has computer code that could send some user login information to a Chinese state-owned telecommunications company that has been barred from operating in the United States, security researchers say. The web login page of DeepSeek’s chatbot contains heavily obfuscated computer script that when deciphered shows connections to computer infrastructure owned by China Mobile, a state-owned telecommunications company. The code appears to be part of the account creation and user login process for DeepSeek. In its privacy policy, DeepSeek acknowledged storing data on servers inside the People’s Republic of China. But its chatbot appears more directly tied to the Chinese state than previously known through the link revealed by researchers to…

Nintendo’s profits tumbled as sales of its Switch console lost momentum, prompting the Japanese video-game maker to lower its full-year forecasts. Kyoto-based Nintendo Co., which created the Super Mario franchise, reported an April-December profit of 237 billion yen ($1.5 billion), down 42% from the same period the previous year. Nine-month sales dropped 31% to 956 billion yen ($6 billion), according to Nintendo, which did not break down quarterly results. The company now expects to rake in a 270-billion yen ($1.7 billion) profit for the fiscal year through March, down from the previous forecast for 300-billion yen ($1.9 billion). Sales of Nintendo machines for the nine-month period fell to 9.54 million units from 13.7 million last year. Nintendo now expects to sell 11 million Switch consoles for the full fiscal year,…

Google’s digital ad sales continued to grow at a healthy clip during the holiday season, but that wasn’t enough to offset investors’ worries about whether its big bet on artificial intelligence will be lucrative as once envisioned. The October-December results released Tuesday by Google parent Alphabet Inc. showed the company is continuing to reap even more profits from its dominant search engine and other peripheral services. Alphabet earned $26.5 billion, or $2.15 per share, during last year’s final quarter, a 28% increase from the same time during the previous year. Revenue rose 12% from the previous year to $96.5 billion. The earnings eclipsed analyst forecasts of $2.13 per share, but the revenue fell slightly below projections, according to FactSet Research. More importantly, revenue growth in the Google Cloud division tethered…

A new player has taken the tech world by storm, climbing to the top of the App Store charts and surpassing even established giants like ChatGPT. DeepSeek, developed by Chinese hedge fund manager Liang Wenfeng, has garnered significant attention for its unique approach to artificial intelligence. Experts think it could set the AI race on an entirely different path. INTRODUCING DEEPSEEK The growth of DeepSeek, particularly its chatbot underpinned by the R1 model, has taken the world by surprise. Out of nowhere, the app topped the download charts, overtaking even widely-known applications like ChatGPT and causing market turmoil along the way. This remarkable feat has raised eyebrows, particularly among those in Silicon Valley, where larger models with massive compute resources have long been considered the gold standard in AI development.…

Google went to appeals court this week in an attempt to convince a three-judge panel to overturn a jury’s verdict declaring its app store for Android smartphones as an illegal monopoly and block the penalties imposed by a federal judge to stop the misbehavior. Video game maker Epic Games, which brought the case alleging Google’s Play Store has been abusing its stranglehold over the Android app market, countered with arguments outlining why both the verdict and punishment should be affirmed to foster more innovation and lower prices. In a nearly hour-long presentation in San Francisco’s Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Google lawyer Jessica Ellsworth explained why the company believes the judge overseeing a month-long trial in 2023 improperly allowed the market in its case to be defined differently than it…

The Chinese government’s move to open an antitrust probe into Google is the latest development in a long and tangled relationship that goes back to the early 2000s. The investigation was one of a flurry of Chinese retaliatory measures announced this week in response to a 10% tariff imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump on imports from China. Others included tariffs on American liquified natural gas and other products, and the placing of two other American firms on an unreliable entity list that could bar them from investing in China. Here is a look at Google’s history in China and what the antitrust probe could mean for the company: WHAT IS GOOGLE’S RELATIONSHIP WITH CHINA? Google launched the Chinese-language search engine google.cn in 2006. It was censored to comply with…

Apple disclosed its iPhone sales dipped slightly during the holiday-season quarter, signaling a sluggish start to the trendsetting company’s effort to catch up to the rest of Big Tech in the race to bring artificial intelligence to the masses. The iPhone’s roughly 1% drop in revenue from the previous year’s October-December period wasn’t entirely unexpected, given the first software update enabling the device’s AI features didn’t arrive until just before Halloween, and the technology still isn’t available in many markets outside the U.S. The countries still awaiting Apple’s AI suite include China, a key market where the company continued to lose ground. Although he didn’t mention China, Apple CEO Tim Cook told investors on a conference call that a software upgrade enabling the AI features in more European markets, as…

Apple has chided a newly available pornography app available in the European Union, and warned that the bloc’s digital rules opening the way for third-party app store downloads undermines consumer confidence in the tech giant. AltStore PAL, an alternative app marketplace made possible under Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), unveiled the Hot Tub iPhone app this week, which is described as an adult content browser. The digital rulebook forces Big Tech companies to open their services up to more competition, including allowing phone users to download from alternative app stores instead of being limited to the official app stores from Apple and Google, for example. AltStore PAL said in a social media post this week that Hot Tub is “the world’s 1st Apple-approved porn app.” Apple rejected that description, saying…

Toyota is developing and making electric vehicles and EV batteries in China, the Japanese automaker said Wednesday, under a new partnership with the Shanghai government. Toyota Motor Corp. also announced it will start producing batteries for EVs, hybrids and plug-ins at a new $14 billion facility in North Carolina, with shipping starting for North American models in April. The moves highlight Toyota’s aggressive push in electric cars, a sector where some critics have said it’s fallen behind rivals like Tesla and BYD at a time when the Chinese EV market is booming and the world’s concerns about sustainability are increasingly crucial. Toyota is setting up a company in Jinshan district in southwest Shanghai for that effort, with production of the new Lexus EVs starting in 2027. Initial production capacity there…

China announced retaliatory tariffs on select American imports and an antitrust investigation into Google on Tuesday, just minutes after a sweeping levy on Chinese products imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump took effect. American tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico were also set to go into effect Tuesday before Trump agreed to a 30-day pause, as the two countries acted to address his concerns about border security and drug trafficking. Trump planned to talk with Chinese President Xi Jinping in the coming days. “It is being scheduled and will happen very soon,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said. Screenshot 2025-02-04 at 9.01.02 PM.png This isn’t the first round of tit-for-tat actions between the two countries. China and the U.S. engaged in an escalating trade war in 2018, when…