After reporting on Nintendo’s tease of a new Switch a couple weeks ago or so, now they have announced a date. Bgr.com reports that there will be a Nintendo Direct event on April 2nd at 9am Eastern time. The company promises a close look at the new Switch 2. They didn’t share if there would be a reveal of new games for the updated platform, including the widely expected Mario Kart 9. We should learn more deets on the Switch 2 at the event…including if it will have an LCD instead of OLED screen, and maybe that all-important info about pricing and when you can actually have it in your hands.
With the new Trump administration tariffs in effect on China, the Chinese have come back with the threat of investigating Apple’s App Store practices. Of course, tariffs imposed on China will be paid by US businesses and consumers, not China or any other foreign country. But they mean higher prices for Americans, which will mean a decrease in sales, so China has been announcing retaliatory measures. According to appleinsider.com, China is talking about reviewing Apple’s App Store fees and practices…with particular interest in the 30% commission on in-app purchases. China had previously ruled that the fee was in line with other companies’ fees. They are also looking at Cupertino’s restrictions on third-party payment services and app stores. Apple shares dropped 3% on this report.
Reddit has put a 72 hour ban on the subreddit r/WhitePeopleTwitter after complaints from Elon Musk. Engadget.com says Reddit is applying the ban due to “a prevalence of violent content.” Apparently what set off Musk was that users on the subreddit were discussing the identities of the individuals with ties to Musk who have reportedly played a key role in the takeover of technical systems within the federal government. In another action, Reddit also permanently banned a subreddit called r/IsElonDeadYet for breaking its rules around violent content, according to a notice posted to the community. Many Reddit users have grown increasingly frustrated with Musk, who was once a popular figure on the site. Last month, dozens of subreddits announced that they were banning links to X following Musk’s speech at President Donald Trump’s inauguration in which he made an apparent Nazi salute.
Austin, Texas Uber users will see something new when they open the app….an invitation to show their interest in a Waymo robotaxi. TechCrunch.com notes that right now, that doesn’t mean a Waymo could be picking them up…but that such a service is coming. The ‘interest list,’ is part of a partnership between Uber and Waymo to run a robotaxi service in Austin and Atlanta. The service is expected to start soon in Austin…but no firm date has been announced yet. The service will be available on a 37 square mile zone of Austin…including downtown, Hyde Park, and Montopolis. The cars are Waymo’s Jaguar I-Pace vehicles. Uber claimed that riders who take a Waymo will pay the same rate as human driven vehicles via UberX or Uber Comfort.
The folks that used to make Twitterrific, the Icon Factory, have just launched a new app that pulls social media and web feeds together in one place. 9to5mac.com reports that with Tapestry, you can now see your feeds from Bluesky, Mastodon, RSS, YouTube, and more in a single timeline. It’s all in chronological order, with no algorithm deciding what you should see or not see. Tapestry is free for download at the App Store, but you can also pay to remove ads, unlock custom timelines, mute content, and customize themes. The fees for the upgraded service run $1.99 a month, $19.99 a year, or you can get them for a one-time purchase at $79.99.
Apple has rolled out a new app called ‘Invites,’ which is supposed to let user plan events like birthday parties, graduations, vacations, baby showers, and more. In other words, Apple has invented Evite! Snark aside, according to macrumors.com, the Apple app lets you grab images from your Photos library, set an emoji background, and will automatically add info from the Maps and Weather apps, so that is useful. You can use their AI Image Playground to create original images using text-based descriptors. The app has a built in method that lets the sender track who has responded. To use the app, you will need to be an iCloud Plus subscriber and be running iOS 18 or later on your iPhone.
Meta, in a new policy document, says it may not release some for its AI systems that fall under what it terms ‘high risk’ or ‘critical risk’. Techcrunch.com says the document is called Frontier AI Framework by Meta. Under their definition of ‘high-risk’ and ‘critical-risk’, they mean systems which are capable of aiding in cybersecurity, chemical, and biological attacks, the difference being that “critical-risk” systems could result in a “catastrophic outcome [that] cannot be mitigated in [a] proposed deployment context.” High-risk systems, by contrast, might make an attack easier to carry out but not as reliably or dependably as a critical risk system. If Meta determines a system is high-risk, the company says it will limit access to the system internally and won’t release it until it implements mitigations to “reduce risk to moderate levels.” If, on the other hand, a system is deemed critical-risk, Meta says it will implement unspecified security protections to prevent the system from being exfiltrated and stop development until the system can be made less dangerous. That’s thoughtful of them, isn’t it. Let’s hope the critical systems don’t get hacked by some bad foreign actor!
If this doesn’t make your hair catch fire, I don’t know what will. A 25 year old whiz-kid engineer put in place by Elon Musk…who is not any kind of government official…despite the White House calling him ‘a special government employee’ today apparently has administrative access to the computer code that directs Social Security payments, tax returns, and other payments owed to Americans. Rawstory.com notes that folks inside the Treasury Department and now Democrats and some Republicans in Congress are freaking out. The engineer, Marko Elez, formerly worked for a couple of Musk companies. The Treasury Secretary nominee assured Congressional Republicans that he only has ‘read only’ privileges. Some insiders at Treasury say the kid has already made some rather substantial changes to the code. It should be noted that the old Treasury computers run on COBOL, which is what I would describe as more squirrelly and brittle than more modern codes, so this kid could inadvertently do irreparable damage the payment system of the United States, that handles some $6 trillion in funds! Are you nervous yet?
After the big shake up in AI with the introduction of DeepSeek out of China, OpenAI has responded with the release of the o3-mini reasoning model. Arstechnica.com reports that the faster, more accurate STEM-focused model will be free to all users. OpenAI crows that o3-mini ‘advances the boundaries of what small models can achieve. The model has been optimized for STEM functions and shows “particular strength in science, math, and coding” despite lower operating costs and latency than its predecessor o1-mini, OpenAI says.OpenAI says testers reported a 39 percent reduction in “major errors” when using o3-mini, compared to o1-mini, and preferred the o3-mini responses 56 percent of the time. Subscribers to OpenAI’s Plus, Team, or Pro tiers will see o3-mini replace o1-mini in the model options starting today.
Apple continues to bring in big bags of cash. According to 9to5mac.com, the Cupertino giant released first quarter earnings (Apple’s quarters don’t follow the calendar’s quarters) with $124.30 billion in revenue. That compares with $119.58 billion for the same quarter a year ago, up 4%. As usual for the last many years, iPhone brought in the bulk of it with $69.14 billion. Services revenue…subscriptions and the like hauled in $26.34 billion. Wearables, Home, and Accessories amounted to $11.75 billion, while Macs generated $8.99 billion and iPads $8.08 billion.
Having had a couple of family members who had it, I can tell you that macular degeneration sucks. It hits millions of people worldwide, generally folks over 60. The drop outs and vision loss…a lot of it in straight ahead vision….really make things tough. Now, a firm called Soliddd Corp has shown some smart glasses that may be a big help. Bgr.com notes that injections can slow one type of macular degeneration, but there isn’t a cure. Soliddd’s smart glasses fill a gap, though. They use tiny cameras on each temple that capture images of the environment and send them to displays inside the lenses. The displays have 64 micro-lenses, each projecting a miniature image on the healthy peripheral part of the retina. They basically remove the blind spots the disease causes. The glasses were shown at CES, and are expected to be on the market by the end of the year. No pricing has been released as yet. Since they are glasses, and not a medication or an implant, no FDA approval is needed.
A recycling startup called Prism Worldwide which was started by Bob Abramwitz, who did bottled water for Costco, just scored $40 million from Costco’s co-founder Jim Sinegal. Geekwire.com reports that Prism uses patented tech that can turn the used tires into a polymer that can be used in a variety of applications. Right now, only a fraction of the over 300 million used tires in the US are recycled…mainly ground up and used in components of sports fields, asphalt, or back into new tires. They are also burned in power plants…but the dirty secret is that most end up on landfills. Prism’s recycled polymers are being used in rubber car mats, plastic tote containers, racks for shipping goods and other applications. They hope to expand to even more reuse for their polymers from the recycled tires.
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