Issue 2329 - Monday 12 May 2025

We’ve had a small issue with newsletter topics auto-posting to the forum but it should be fixed now!

The News

What’s after the phone? Here’s how Apple and ex-Apple are trying to figure it out

What’s next after the phone? For Ex-Apple design chief Jony Ive, his work on an OpenAI post-phone device is inspired “unintended consequences” of the damage caused by smartphone use (The Verge). For the place he left, Apple, it’s about figuring out how to prove it hasn’t grown lazy after the iPhone’s stratospheric success and that it can still make cool, new things. In practice this means, according to Apple oracle Mark Gurman, that the company is planning on bringing the following devices to market by 2027: a foldable iPhone, a curved, bezel-less iPhone, smart glasses, a proper Apple Intelligence and something robotic (Bloomberg, $). I’m still convinced the device that will replace my iPhone will first be used with my iPhone: something like a combination of smart glasses, headphones, maybe even the Apple Watch that lets me keep my phone in my bag — until I don’t need it any more. Curious to hear what you think?

Bluetooth update makes it harder to track you

At the moment, your phone probably changes its Bluetooth address every fifteen minutes (or another regular interval). This is supposed to make it harder for someone with a bunch of scanners to track the movement of your phone and, therefore, you. However, the fact that this address changes on a regular interval makes it possible to guess it might still be you. For example, if a scanner picks up address A at 12:00, then address B at 12:15, and there’s no other device around, then it can probably assume that address A and B are the same device. Bluetooth’s latest update, 6.1, changes this interval is random lengths of time to thwart this technique (Bluetooth). The updated specification, which also has the benefit of improving battery life, won’t be seen in chips until at least 2026 (Bleeping Computer).

Australia’s anti-money laundering agency got handed data about 50 million transactions from the big banks

Staying below the $10,000 mandatory deposit reporting cut-off isn’t stopping Australia’s money laundering regulator from catching criminals because it has gotten access to a lot of bank data (AUSTRAC via my Google Docs). AUSTRAC says its “Fintel Alliance” has given it access to “50 million data points” of cash deposits from the big four banks that it has analysed to catch people money laundering below the threshold. A write-up in Nine papers said the data has helped it catch people who would tour around the same area, putting amounts of money just below the threshold into ATMs (SMH, $). Very sad to hear about the government putting these small business owners out of work like this!

Leftovers

Oh, Also

LegoGPT is actually, honestly, cool

OK, even the AI skeptics can’t deny that this looks cool: a bunch of Carnegie Mellon University researchers have built a transformer model that turns your prompts into Lego designs that can can be built using real pieces (GitHub). Honestly, it’s less about the technology behind it — I don’t know if this is a breakthrough with broader applications or just a simple application — and more about the presentation: there’s cool spinning videos of Lego and robotic arms putting them together. I haven’t been able to use it but there is a model of the demo hosted online if you want to have a go (Hugging Face). I wish I got to build Lego for work.

Bargains

Electrical & Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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