By Thomas Macaulay Klarna’s CEO has warned that software engineers risk being left behind in the AI era — unless they’re also business-savvy. Speaking at SXSW London, Sebastian Siemiatkowski said the talent “who have really accelerated their careers at Klarna” are “business people who have learned to code.” The reason? “They can take their business understanding and turn it into deterministic or probabilistic statements with AI.” This shift, he warned, poses a threat to engineers. “A lot of them have allowed themselves to be isolated with technical challenges only, and not been that interested in what the business actually does,” he said. His message…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Siôn Geschwindt European tech leaders are pushing back against high-profile VCs urging founders to work seven days a week — slamming the grindset mentality as everything from “toxic” to “childish.”  “Calling on founders to work insane hours nonstop is just bad advice,” Suranga Chandratillake, general partner at Balderton Capital and former CEO of video search engine Blinkx, told TNW. “Even sprinters don’t sprint all the time — rest and reflection is just as important as putting in the work.” His comments follow a LinkedIn post on Saturday by Harry Stebbings, podcast host and 28-year-old founder of London-based venture firm 20VC. “What European…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

Adobe Photoshop was released for iOS in February, and now the popular image editing program is available in a beta version for Android. Users will have access to most of the features in the desktop version, though some tools are hidden until you might need them, according to Ars Technica.

Notably, filters are absent, but users do get a number of AI features that make it easy to delete unwanted objects from an image or create content from a text prompt.

To use the app, a user must first create an Adobe account and have a mobile phone running Android 11 or later. As long as the app is classified as a beta version, it’s free to use; expect some features to go behind a paywall eventually.

Source:: Computer World

By Hisan Kidwai Discord’s Game Overlay feature is pretty amazing for users who want to game and chat with…
The post How To Turn Off Discord Overlay? appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Deepti Pathak Hugging Face, an artificial intelligence and machine learning company, is entering the robotics space with two…
The post Hugging Face Launches Two New Humanoid Robots at $3000 appeared first on Fossbytes.

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Generative AI (genAI) is enhancing worker value and productivity, not replacing people — and that’s true even for roles that are vulnerable to automation, according to new new research by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

Analysis by PwC of nearly 1 billion job ads throughout the world showed that genAI-exposed industries have tripled revenue per worker since 2022, proving genAI investments are paying off. Overall, the report showed that AI is transforming jobs, boosting productivity, wages, and skill demands, rather than causing widespread job losses.

The report flies in the face of comments by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who told Axios AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to between 10% and 20% in the next one to five years. Anthropic also just made generally available a version of its Claude AI assistant (Claude Code) that can write, edit and debug code, making it nearly as good as a human developer. Known as “vibe coding,” the use of natural language to develop software is expected to boom over the next few years.

Last month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI now writes up to 30% of the company’s code, and that’s expected to quickly increase.

A report from MIT Technology Review Insights found that 94% of business leaders now use genAI in software development, with 82% applying it in multiple stages — and 26% saying they used it in four or more.

“Software developers are evolving into strategic technology orchestrators who harness AI to drive unprecedented business value,” said Kye Mitchell, head of tech staffing firm Experis North America.

The impact of genAI on hiring has been stark, as companies grapple with cleaning, organizing, and sharing data stores for potential use by the technology. Demand for database architects skyrocketed, leaping 2312% in the past year, Mitchell said. Jobs for statisticians also rose sharply, up 382% in the same time frame.

“AI isn’t replacing jobs — it’s fundamentally redefining how work gets done,” she said. “The break point where technology truly displaces a position is when roughly 80% of tasks can be fully automated. We’re nowhere near that threshold for most roles. Instead, we’re seeing AI augment skillsets and make professionals more capable, faster, and able to focus on higher-value work.”

Not surprisingly, PwC also found AI use increasing across all industries, including traditionally low-tech ones like mining and agriculture. The firm also found that wages in AI-exposed sectors are rising twice as fast as in less-exposed sectors. Workers with AI skills earn a 56% wage premium, up from 25% last year.

And AI-driven changes to worker skills are accelerating, with a 66% faster shift in skill requirements in AI-exposed roles.

AI job postings continue to rise, despite a softer job market, showing persistent demand for talent. The information and communication sector leads AI skill demand, while construction and healthcare lag behind, PwC reported.

In the US, jobs with high AI exposure have seen a slowdown in job postings between 2019m and 2024, but greater skill evolution, highlighting how “AI reshapes roles more than it eliminates them,” PwC said.

Employers have continued to pursue skills-based hiring strategies over the past three or so years. About one-half of all April tech job postings did not specify a need for a four-year academic degree, according to CompTIA, a nonprofit trade association that issues professional IT certifications.

Jobs with high gen AI exposure in the US have seen a decrease in degree requirements, falling from 63% in 2019 to 53% in 2024. Jobs exposed to automation now require degrees less often today (41%) than they did in 2019 (56%).

While degree requirements in white collar job listings have markedly decreased over the last several years, the shift toward more AI-based job roles has affected employment – especially in IT-related positions. In April, the tech industry lost 214,000 positions as companies shifted toward AI roles and skills-based hiring amid economic uncertainty, according to an evaluation of the US Bureau of Labor Statistic’s latest jobs report.

Source:: Computer World

It has taken just three years for the GenAI generation of AI to reach the level of use the Internet itself took 23 years to achieve, says legendary US investor Mary Meeker in her latest Trends report. 

That’s why, unless Apple has viable plans we don’t yet know about, it needs make an AI-related acquisition soon. It needs to do so because the new generation of AI is already achieving a global resonance we’ve never seen before. 

With the impact of generative AI (genAI) now spreading across tech, finance, social, politics, and employment, Apple needs to be part of the convergence to maintain relevance.

Where the puck is going

Meeker’s report gives you a solid sense of this, and in doing so shows the extent to which genAI is being deployed across developing economies in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.  That matters more because many of these areas have not enjoyed ready access to the internet before, which means they aren’t starting with Usenet and scaling to FaceTime – they are beginning their internet adventure with AI. These first-to-AI cohorts will soon become the first “AI-native” populations, driving economic growth in those geographies.

Speed and execution

This is a fast game – more Blink than Bridge. Meeker’s report points at the extent of this disruption. “Seem like change happening faster than ever?” it asks. “Yes, it is,” the report responds, providing a range of metrics to show it — not least the swiftness with which genAI has achieved 800 million weekly active users since October 2022. 

“Rapid advances in artificial intelligence, compute infrastructure, and global connectivity are fundamentally reshaping how work gets done, how capital is deployed, and how leadership is defined – across both companies and countries,” the report says.

Smarter than nothing

Apple, stung by slow development of Apple Intelligence, needs to maintain a place in the race — but the speed of this race underlines the huge risk the company has been forced to take as a result of its well-publicized AI failures.  Apple can’t keep making these errors. It should, perhaps, have been faster to embrace OpenAI when it emerged, rather than permitting Microsoft to get there first.

That error gave Microsoft Copilot wings Siri still can’t match.

Apple may be on the cusp of repeating that mistake with Samsung, which is allegedly looking to take a position with Perplexity. Apple is already working with Perplexity, but recent reports claim Samsung is preparing a wide-ranging deal to use Perplexity AI to provide search on Samsung smartphones. Some wire reports this morning suggest Apple is also interested in Perplexity, citing an older statement Eddy Cue last month made during his testimony at the Google Search trial: “We’ve been pretty impressed with what Perplexity has done, so we’ve started some discussions with them about what they’re doing.”

Grab your partners

The risk is that Perplexity goes with Samsung, leaving Apple in need of a strong AI partner. Apple’s approach might be to become polyamorous, with partnerships with OpenAI, Google Gemini, Perplexity, and others providing some of what its devices need to be part of the AI deployment party. That may even be enough, for a while.

But as competitors begin to chip away at the Android/Apple duopoly with their own alternative hardware capable of running AI (i.e., precisely the kind of hardware former Apple designer, Jony Ive is working on with OpenAI), Apple has too much to lose — far too much to lose.

Existential crisis

That’s why one recent leak claiming Apple’s management has adopted a “by any means necessary” approach to bringing its platforms up to speed for AI is reassuring. After all, it’s not such a huge step, once you accept the need for partnerships with AI service providers, to figure out that perhaps there’s a good reason to acquire one of those providers. 

Not only does Apple have the cash to do it, but just as its huge investment in processor maker PA Semi eventually drove decades of hardware design, so too will AI drive the coming decades in computing. It’s an existential necessity. 

But does Apple need to acquire one of the larger household names in AI?  Probably not. 

Raise them up

There are other firms, some small, some large, that may already have some of the tech that Apple needs. Many of these may lack the infrastructure to deliver their services at a big enough scale to meet the needs of Apple’s billion-plus users. 

Apple might be able to help with that. It has, after all, been making significant investment in Private Cloud Compute — to the extent we’ve even heard it has production lines churning out servers to support that service.

Why make so many servers? With 1 billion users, it might just be to support Apple Intelligence. It could also perhaps enable Apple to offer developers an AWS-style B2B service for secure and private AI. But it could also become an infrastructure on which to host any AI solution Apple might eventually acquire, enabling promising tech to swiftly reach an audience of millions at a time when AI adoption is absolutely spiking.

Will this happen? Even Bloomburg’s Mark Gurman doesn’t seem to know just yet.

Should it? Probably. 

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.

Source:: Computer World

By Siôn Geschwindt Britain’s new military tech strategy will fail unless startups are given clear pathways to adoption, experts have warned. Their concerns follow the government’s announcement that defence spending will increase to its highest level since the Cold War. Prime Minister Keir Starmer set out the aims in the new Strategic Defence Review (SDR), which includes plans to boost investment in technologies such as AI, drones, robots, laser weapons, and submarines.  The review outlines ambitious goals for military innovation, but defence tech insiders say the real challenge lies in translating funding into front-line deployment.  Tanya Suarez, who leads the dual-use accelerator Janus…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Adarsh Verma Looking at how the business environment is set up today, choosing the right Business Process Management…
The post How to Select the Best BPM Software for Your Business appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Thomas Macaulay War is being redefined by technology. Drones now swarm where soldiers once marched, AI can detect threats faster than spies, and cyberattacks are disrupting critical infrastructure without a single shot fired. To prepare for the battles of tomorrow, NATO is turning to startups.  In June 2023, the Alliance launched DIANA, an initiative that funds and facilitates defence innovations. Across a network of over 200 accelerator sites and test centres, DIANA brings together universities, industry, and governments to work with startups on new defence capabilities. At the helm is Jyoti Hirani-Driver. A former counter-terrorism policy advisor for the British government, Hirani-Driver…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Deepti Pathak Fortnite’s ranking system is kind of like a map that guides you through the competitive universe…
The post Explained: All Fortnite Ranks List in Order appeared first on Fossbytes.

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Facing huge fines, Apple on Monday began a legal challenge to the European Commission’s “unreasonable” demand that it open up its platforms to rivals, arguing any such move threatens the foundations of its platforms with a costly process that also undercuts its ability to serve customers.

The company is, in a word, furious. It argued that it has cooperated with the Commission’s demands under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and points to the investments it has already made in complying with that act.

What Apple said

“At Apple, we design our technology to work seamlessly together, so it can deliver the unique experience our users love and expect from our products,” the company said in a statement. “The EU’s interoperability requirements threaten that foundation, while creating a process that is unreasonable, costly, and stifles innovation. These requirements will also hand data-hungry companies’ sensitive information, which poses massive privacy and security risks to our EU users.”

The company also noted that there is a real risk that people’s most sensitive information could be accessed, partially because it becomes so much harder to defend. These attempts are already taking place, Apple said.

“Companies have already requested our users’ most sensitive data — from the content of their notifications to a full history of every stored Wi-Fi network on their device — giving them the ability to access personal information that even Apple doesn’t see. In the end, these deeply flawed rules that only target Apple — and no other company will severely limit our ability to deliver innovative products and features to Europe, leading to an inferior user experience for our European customers. We are appealing these decisions on their behalf, and in order to preserve the high-quality experience our European customers expect.”

A one-sided approach

What seems to really upset Apple is that some aspects of the demands mean the company will effectively be forced to hand its innovations out to businesses with which it is in direct competition — at no charge. That means Apple does not get to draw the full benefits of its work and makes it far more difficult to introduce products in Europe.

What makes matters worse is that while Apple is being forced to open up in ways that advantage competitors, quite literally at its expense, it is not being given the opportunity to do the same back. Apple is the only company that these demands have been made of, meaning it is being forced to give its intellectual property away to others who do not need to play by the same rules.

Some data hungry companies are already attempting to exploit the DMA to gain unfettered access to sensitive customer data. All the while, Apple is left alone and isolated in its quest to ensure user privacy consistent with GDPR regulation. It’s attempts to protect privacy are about protecting customers.

Compliance? We are compliant

While critics will continue to sneer and jeer at the company in their quest to rid the world of the “Apple Tax” only the world’s largest developers actually pay, Apple would argue that it has been making serious efforts to comply with the DMA. The company has opened up a portal developers can use to request additional interoperability with hardware and software features inside iPhones and iPads. Apple consistently opens up API access to iPhone, including opening up SMS messaging to RCS, HomeKit features and messaging services support.

It has also put in place numerous other enhancements in response to the DMA, and while the warning messages it places when using third-party stores may be stark, this makes them no less true. Europe seems to want customers to use third-party stores with no warning at all that this is what is going on, which seems weird.

Malicious regulatory compliance

There is a degree to which much of the situation seems to reflect political, rather than economic or moral pressures. The fact that Europe is using Apple as a high profile example, while also refusing to be totally transparent about what it wants before levying any fines, suggests that the Commission is not so much deciding on facts as implementing a political decision using a set of laws that seem designed almost solely to punish one company.

That’s the kind of malicious regulatory compliance Apple is furious about — a compliance regime that will now be tested in the courts.

Will it make a difference? 

Who knows? But the existential battle will decide the future of technology in Europe, and if the market is worth doing business in when compared to the cost of doing so. It will also determine the future of Apple, which will use its considerable resources to find some way to change the nature of the game.

One group it seems unlikely to help will be those of Apple’s European customers who are happy and accustomed to the Apple ecosystem, and don’t particularly want to use third-party services, as Apple’s right to offer that “pure Apple” experience seems a likely sacrifice to Europe’s politically-driven zeal. That is, unless cooler heads do curtail the Commission’s attacks.

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.

Source:: Computer World

Windows administrators stung by a faulty Microsoft update in the May Patch Tuesday releases now have fixes for the problem.

Over the weekend, Microsoft released out-of-band updates to correct the failure of Windows 11 computers running versions 22H2/23H2 of the operating system, mainly in virtual environments, to start.

The problem: While installing the May Windows security update (KB5058405) on some of these computers, the OS thinks a crucial file – ACPI.sys – is missing. The Advanced Configuration and Power Interface is a critical Windows system driver that enables Windows to manage hardware resources and power states. Lacking the file, Windows won’t load, and an error message with the code 0xc0000098 pops up listing the missing file.

Microsoft notes there are also reports of this same error occurring with a different file name.

“This issue has been observed on a small number of physical devices,” Microsoft says, “but primarily on devices running in virtual environments, including Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Virtual Desktop and on-premises virtual machines hosted on Citrix or Hyper-V.”

The fixes  –  KB5027397 for PCs running version 23H2, and KB5062170 for PCs running version 22H2  – are only available through the Microsoft Update Catalog.

If for some reason you are among the few who haven’t yet installed the May 2025 Patch Tuesday security fixes and run a virtual desktop infrastructure, apply the out-of-band update instead.

The out-of-band update contains all of the improvements and fixes included in the May 2025 Windows non-security preview update, in addition to this issue’s resolution, says Microsoft. Since this is a cumulative update, admins don’t need to apply any previous update before installing KB5062170. That’s because it supersedes all previous updates for affected versions. Installation of this update will require a device restart.

Users of Windows Home or Pro editions are unlikely to face this issue, says Microsoft, because they aren’t likely to be running virtual machines.

Human error or edge case?

Microsoft, like other major software vendors, does a lot of testing of patches before they are released. Still, says Tyler Reguly, associate director of security R&D at Fortra, they can’t catch everything. “It’s impossible to test every edge case and scenario,” he said in an email. “On top of that, at some point testing at a large scale requires humans – and humans make mistakes.

“The question I always want to have answered [when a vendor has to fix a fix] is whether it was human error or an edge case that was deemed unlikely. Unfortunately, very few vendors are willing to publish the results of their Root Cause Analysis (RCA). Instead, the best we can hope for is a quick fix and a mutual understanding that it won’t happen again.

In the case of human error, ensuring it won’t happen again may mean process or policy changes, he wrote, while edge cases could be the result of any number of variables. “When we talk about hardware and virtualization on top of hardware, we’re talking about a lot of things that can go wrong,” he pointed out. “In that case, while we hope vendors catch everything, we need to recognize that as an unrealistic expectation.”

Someone will tout AI as the solution to ensure this doesn’t happen, he added, but as long as our technology exists outside a walled garden, and as long as users have choice in their technologies, problems like this will continue to arise. IT leaders just need to figure out how to respond quickly and calmly.

“If I were a CSO, this is where I would look at my organization and, if we were impacted, I would look at how we responded and how quickly we recovered,” Reguly said. “This is why business continuity planning exists and, if errors like this are hugely impactful, you need to wonder if your BCP is as robust as it needs to be.”

A complexity problem

Even extensively tested code can fail on first contact with production systems, observed Gene Moody, field CTO at patch management provider Action1.

“This isn’t a QA failure, it’s a complexity problem. Test environments, no matter how thorough, can’t replicate the quirks of real-world systems, undocumented changes, legacy software, obscure drivers, or corrupted system states. A patch may behave differently depending on what’s running, what’s been previously installed, or how the system was maintained and managed. Timing issues, environmental drift, and configuration edge cases are almost impossible to predict in labs. And in production, security tools, compliance agents, or even partially failed updates from the past can all sabotage patch behavior,” he said.

“This is why progressive ringed rollout, strong telemetry, and fast rollback are more critical than any lab test. Real-world variability is the wildcard no simulation can fully cover; admins need to be familiar with their own environments to be able to test and recover from unforeseen circumstances caused by unstable patches.”

Source:: Computer World

By Siôn Geschwindt Europe has a unique chance to lead in software — but only if it improves its ability to turn startups into profitable businesses. That’s the conclusion of a new report from McKinsey and Boardwave, which warns that unless the region tackles structural barriers, its startups will continue to lag behind global rivals. The report, Europe’s Moonshot Moment, found that the continent has over 280 software companies generating more than €100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). These scaleups include the likes of Spotify, Revolut, Adyen, and Vinted. However, European software businesses that reach the €100 million ARR threshold take 15…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Hisan Kidwai Roblox is home to millions of experiences, each offering its own unique gameplay and challenges. One…
The post Grow a Garden Codes (June 2025) appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes

Perplexity this week released Perplexity Labs, a new tool for Pro users that can craft reports, spreadsheets, dashboards, and visual representations, to meet users’ increased demand for AI productivity tools with greater autonomy and ever more sophisticated capabilities. The platform, a rival to Anthropic Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google Gemini, can even work on its own for 10 minutes (or more) as it reasons through complicated assignments.

“Labs underscores a broader shift toward multi-agent AI systems that plan, execute, and refine full workflows,” said Thomas Randall, research lead for AI at Info-Tech Research Group.

Designed to handle more complex assignments

Perplexity launched Perplexity Search, its proprietary search engine, in December 2022, just after ChatGPT dropped, and earlier this year released Deep Research (now to be rebranded as Research), which scours the web, reads papers, reasons through materials, and creates comprehensive reports for users.

The company says that Perplexity Labs is like “having a team” that can bring projects from ideation to reality. The platform creates reports, spreadsheets, dashboards and simple web apps. It can perform at least 10 minutes of self-supervised work, uses web browsing, writes and executes code to handle tasks like organizing data or applying formulas, and can create charts and images.

“In some respects, this is a continuation of Perplexity’s original capabilities as an AI-driven search engine that provides deeper answers,” said Hyoun Park, CEO and chief analyst at Amalgam Insights.

Indeed, Perplexity explained that Labs was designed to handle more complex assignments than Deep Research.

“While Deep Research remains the fastest way to obtain comprehensive answers to in-depth questions —  typically within 3 or 4 minutes — Labs is designed to invest more time (10  minutes or longer) and leverage additional tools, such as advanced file generation and mini-app creation,” Perplexity wrote in a blog post. “This expanded capability empowers you to develop a broader array of deliverables for your projects.”

With its longer research workflow, Perplexity Labs can generate spreadsheets, visual representations, and high-quality reports, the company said. It iteratively searches through hundreds of sources, reasons about that data, and refines its approach as it gets deeper into a project, similar to the way in which a human researcher might approach a new area of study.

To create interactive dashboards without the need for coding expertise or external development tools like Ploty and Dash, users just describe what they’re visualizing in natural language, and Labs will generate it in real-time. Dashboards could, for instance, visualize business finances or other complex datasets, incorporating clickable elements to allow non-technical users to quickly act on insights.

In one example from the blog, Perplexity prompted Labs from the position of a leader at a tech consulting firm looking to create a potential customer list. It specified that it wanted to partner with US B2B companies in seed, series A, or series B stages, and asked Labs to list 20 relevant companies and include key details including contact information.

Labs compiled a comprehensive dataset of potential customers, organizing them by stage (A, B, or seed) and identified their core focus, intended customers, and funding to date. The platform cited links from Forbes, YCombinator, and Exploding Topics that it had used as sources. When further prompted, it crafted introductory emails to the CEOs of the series A startups.

To simplify workflows, Labs arranges generated files in a dedicated tab for easy access, supports integration with other tools such as Google Sheets, and allows users to pull out and format citations to bring credibility to its research. Finished materials can be exported as PDFs or documents, or converted into a shareable Perplexity Page.

Pro subscribers ($20 a month) can now work with Labs on Web, iOS, and Android; Mac and Windows apps are coming soon.

A good fit for enterprise users?

This new capability joins an increasingly competitive space, as users look for AI productivity tools that are ever-more performant and can handle more and more tasks autonomously.

Park pointed out that Perplexity Labs is a response to tools and models such as OpenAI o1-pro (launched in March), Claude Opus 4 (released in May), and Google’s recent Flow and Firebase announcements.

“There is a massive Hunger Games in the AI world right now,” said Park. “Every major vendor is ferociously trying to one-up each other in providing more functionality, either in a native model or with an agency of AI agents designed to work together and create digital assets such as documents, apps, and videos.”

However, Perplexity Labs does provide differentiation from other providers in the market, Info-Tech’s Randall noted. In particular, Perplexity is betting that users will prefer a “low-cost, open, tool-agnostic sandbox” for web crawling, code execution, and the creation of finished artifacts including mini web apps.

“These capabilities cannot yet be found in other enterprise platforms, such as Microsoft or Google offerings,” said Randall.

But enterprises should approach Perplexity Labs with a governance-first mindset, he emphasized. Assets live in Perplexity’s cloud and, for now, lack the private data grounding and compliance controls that CIOs expect, and that they find in tools such as Microsoft Copilot or Google Gemini.

From an enterprise perspective, Park noted, the biggest challenge is that every asset-creating model and agent is “still opaque” when it comes to understanding the assumptions, training, and reliability of assumptions used to create a document or app. He compared it to the way the iPhone bypassed BlackBerry and Windows through “sheer consumer delight.”

“At some point, AI vendors seeking serious business usage will need to provide more transparency and governance tools to the business world, just as mobile device management and mobile security solutions eventually came to the iPhone,” said Park.

Otherwise, businesses may be compelled to build their own clunky but secure versions of Perplexity Labs, “which are guaranteed to be less accurate and useful just [based on] the history of business apps trying to imitate viral consumer apps,” he said.

Source:: Computer World

What’s a company to do when it faces a multitude of existential crises and seems unable to regain control of the media message? It throws a few dead cats on the table to distract everybody.

This aeons-old approach to public relations has recently been rechristened as “flooding the zone” — and it is what I think Apple is doing as news surfaces that it plans to announce a change to the way it names its operating systems in June at its big developer event, WWDC.

That means we won’t ever see iOS 19 but will see iOS 26 instead.

It also means:

A new Apple OS order

iPadOS 26

macOS 26

tvOS 26

visionOS 26

watchOS 26

homeOS 26

You can see the pattern, I hope. The 26 refers to the main year in which an operating system exists, which is a little confusing, as it means we need to look forward to iOS 27 (et al.) in 2026. 

I don’t think there’s anything particularly contentious about this change: it’s great for me, as it makes it far less likely I’ll use an incorrect OS version number in my work. But for Apple it’s led to a tidal wave of reports around the decision, and while not all of those are positively spun, the fact that the yarns are being worked at all restores some of Apple’s control over the narrative.

Existential threats

That’s a degree of media management the company needs, given that almost every other story being written about it at this time involves tariffs, regulation, or its problems with artificial intelligence. Even its bigger stories that should have been good news are delivering unexpected results — for example, what should be seen as huge success in pivoting its manufacturing to India is being seen through the lens of nativist US regulation and tariffs. 

Also in politics, Europe’s regulators seem to want to turn Apple regulation into a weapon for use in negotiations over US trade. And in the background, the company’s former Chief Designer Jony Ive’s move to get to work on new devices with OpenAI raises all the ghosts of Expos past.

What’s Apple to do? Well, right now it can’t ask Siri for comfort, but maybe that will change next year — and we don’t want people paying too much attention to AI, do we?

Apple certainly doesn’t seem to want to discuss any of these challenges too much. The decision by Apple executives not to take part in John Gruber’s traditional WWDC ‘talk show’ represents a company whose leaders feel the need to manage the messaging. Apple has participated in these conversations for a decade, so the change is noteworthy.

Waiting for the sun (in the Solarium)

That Apple chooses these moments just before WWDC to use its official unofficial news and speculation reporters at Bloomberg to share news about the future of its operating system names represents something similar.

First, it gets people talking about something else in the here and now.

Second, it begins to set relatively low expectations for Apple’s big developer event. The operating systems will get a facelift (Solarium) designed to make them all work a little more similarly, the iPad will gain tools to make it more Mac-like, and Apple will adopt a new nomenclature culture for its operating system names.

What is Solarium? This is a UI update that changes the look of icons, menus, windows, buttons, and more. The idea is to deliver a consistent visual interface across all the devices, intentionally a little translucent like sitting in a glass-walled room dappled by sunlight. Which sounds nice, and probably also means rounder icons, floating controls, spatial depth, and visual cues strongly reminiscent of visionOS 1.0. 

Prepare for more shocks

Will any of this be enough for Apple to regain control of the narrative? I don’t think so.

There’s an outside possibility that Apple will introduce exciting digital health tools and maybe other services that provoke deep interest. But, assuming these do not transpire and Solarium is the hot spot for WWDC, then I strongly suspect Apple will play for time (and control of the media narrative) by throwing a few more dead cats into the ring — at least until Siri is at last capable of telling it when to stop. 

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.

Source:: Computer World

By Deepti Pathak If you thought Chromebooks weren’t meant for gaming, think again. Chromebooks are showing that they can…
The post Best Games to Play on Chromebook In 2025 appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Hisan Kidwai Slap Battles is a popular Roblox game where players have to slap their opponents off the…
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By Siôn Geschwindt While Europe races to phase out fossil fuels and electrify everything from cars to heating systems, it’s turning a blind eye to a reliable and proven source of clean energy lying right beneath our feet.  Geothermal energy offers exactly what the continent needs most: clean, local, always-on power. Yet, it only accounted for 0.2% of power generation on the continent in 2024. Something needs to change. The recent blackout in Spain, triggered by a failure in the high-voltage grid, serves as a warning shot. While solar and wind are vital pillars of decarbonisation, they’re variable by nature. Without steady, around-the-clock…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web