Apple quietly released new iPads and an Apple TV. The 10th-gen iPad gets a case design like the Air and Pro, USB-C, a landscape front facing camera, A14 SoC, Touch ID on the power button and comes in multiple colours. Weirdly it only supports the 1st-gen Apple Pencil. There's also a Magic Keyboard Folio specifically for the 10th-gen iPad. The 6th-gen iPad Pro is essentially a MacBook Air without a keyboard. Besides the M2 SoC and Wi-Fi 6E support it's pretty much the same as the previous iPad Pro. The Apple TV has an A15 SoC in it that provides HDR10+ support and removes the fan. The 64GB model only has wi-fi. If you want Ethernet that's on the 128GB version, which also supports Thread to act as a hub for Matter compatible smart devices. They're both 4K and the remote has a USB-C port for charging. macOS Ventura and iPadOS 16 will go public on October 24th.
The UK's equivalent of the ACCC told Meta a year ago that its purchase of GIF repository Giphy, "would reduce competition between social media platforms" and ordered it to sell Giphy. Meta argued in September that nobody would buy Giphy "due to a general waning of user and content partner interest in gifs" with "with younger users in particular describing gifs as for boomers and cringe". The Competition and Markets Authority didn't buy that argument and dismissed Meta's appeal, with Meta now conceding it'll have to sell Giphy - probably at a loss. Giphy and Meta are both US companies so they could just stop offering their products in the UK and not have to sell, but Meta knows there's more profit in operating in the UK than whatever competitive advantage or revenue Giphy would ever contribute to Meta's overall business.
NBN has announced it will be using Nokia gear to upgrade its fixed wireless network to 5G mmWave and cmWave technologies. The mmWave equipment will be "capable of gigabit speeds for premises within a 7km radius of a radio base station", which Nokia reckons is a world first. Nokia also said that the "CPE comprises an outdoor unit installed on the roof of the premises and an indoor unit providing user interfaces for the customer, connecting to the outdoor receiver with a 2.5Gbps Power over Ethernet connection". NBN also announced a fresh group of suburbs and towns eligible for a free FTTN to FTTP upgrade if they order a a 100mbit or faster service. These additional 300,000 premises should be able to put an order in "by the end of 2023". NBN's website has more info if you're keen to ditch that ancient FTTN.
DuckDuckGo released a public beta of its Mac web browser. It's based on WebKit so it's super quick on Apple Silicon machines and easier on the battery for those on a laptop. Being a DuckDuckGo product it's obviously heavy on privacy protections, blocking pretty much everything you want blocked - ads, tracking, cookie popups - you name it (except perhaps Microsoft's tracking, for now), they block it or at least find a way to minimise the damage. I installed it on my Mac and like how snappy it is, but it really needs 1Password integration and a handful of extensions for it to be my full-time browser. Hopefully they figure out a way to get Chrome and Firefox extensions working like Orion did for its Webkit based browser. A Windows version of DDG's browser is currently in "friends and family" beta.
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