Apple has offered a few different variations of Center Stage — its photo tracking and enhancement suit — over the years, but with the iPhone 17 line and iPhone Air the company has designed the feature to solve a small (albeit annoying) problem with modern smartphones. Now there’s no need to change how you hold the device to shoot portrait- or landscape-oriented selfies. It’s vintage Apple: a seemingly simply melding of hardware and software in a way few other companies excel at.

The reason it can do this is because Apple has paired a square front-facing camera sensor with its latest machine learning-assisted image recognition software. This allows the iPhone 17 and its siblings to capture high-resolution selfies and videos in any orientation.

Apple

I hope it’s also the start of a new trend toward more thoughtful and useful AI features. For years, machine learning algorithms have powered many of the most significant software advancements in our phones and tablets. For instance, Apple’s Photonic Engine technology wouldn’t be possible without machine learning. If you need a refresher, whenever you go to snap a photo with a modern iPhone, the device will capture a burst of stills before and after you press the shutter and fuse these images to reduce noise and improve sharpness. 

However, as I wrote following the end of I/O 2025, sometime in the last few years machine learning and AI went from a means to an end to an end in and of themselves. With large language learning models now all the rage, most companies appear to have forgotten these technologies exist to enable new experiences (or reduce friction in existing ones). Apple, perhaps more so than any other company, has had trouble navigating this new era of tech with its usual foresight and vision, with Apple Intelligence among its most disappointing releases in recent memory. Center Stage is an example of the company remembering the best use of AI: A way to solve actual problems.

It’s too soon to tell if Apple will be able to build on its work with Center Stage to deliver other similarly useful AI features. After all, we’re still waiting on the new, more personal Siri to arrive. In the meantime, I look forward to every Android manufacturer copying Apple’s camera design. Maybe it will even inspire them to rethink their approach to AI.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/center-stage-is-a-better-vision-of-the-apple-intelligence-era-160428405.html?src=rss

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It’s official: Spotify finally supports lossless audio. The company made the announcement in a blog post on Wednesday, revealing that the high fidelity audio option will begin rolling out to Premium subscribers in “select markets.”

That means if you live in one of those select markets and pay for Spotify, you’ll be able to enjoy your music in up to 24-bit/44.1 kHz FLAC. That’s quite the jump: Previously, Spotify Premium supported up to 320kbit/s on its apps, and only 256kbit/s on the web.

How to take advantage of lossless audio

What the change means for you is a better listening experience, assuming you’re using high quality headphones or speakers. 320kbit/s audio sounds good enough, but it’s compressed, which means you’re losing audio data in the name of lowering storage or streaming sizes. Lossless audio, on the other hand, keeps all the original audio data during compression, so with the right equipment, you’ll be able to hear more details in your music than before.

That doesn’t mean these other quality configurations are going away. 24-bit/44.1 kHz FLAC likely uses a lot of data, whether you’re streaming or downloading the lossless files. Spotify hasn’t shared what those file sizes are yet, so we can’t know for sure what the difference will be. But if you have a limited cellular data plan, or a device with limited storage, streaming or downloading in lossless might not be feasible.

You might not actually notice a difference anyway, particularly if you typically use Bluetooth headphones or speakers. Bluetooth is convenient, but the technology is limited when it comes to audio quality: It can support high quality audio playback, but not lossless, so anything above that 320kbit/s will likely be compressed before it reaches your ears. As such, Spotify recommends you used wired audio outputs when playing back lossless tracks.

I’m not sure exactly what took Spotify so long to roll this out. The company has been teasing the option since February 2021, while other streaming services—notably, Tidal and Apple Music—jumped on the bandwagon years ago.

Spotify plans to roll out lossless audio to over 50 markets, but is starting with the following: Australia, Austria, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, the U.S., and the U.K.

How to stream lossless on Spotify

Credit: Spotify

Spotify says you’ll need to manually enable lossless on each device you listen on. When the feature rolls out to you, you will have to do the following:

1. Open Spotify, then tap your profile in the top left.

2. Head to Settings and privacy > Media Quality.

3. Here, choose Lossless.

4. You can also choose how you want to experience lossless, including over cellular, downloads, or wifi.

Vimeo is set to get a new owner. Bending Spoons — the parent of Evernote, WeTransfer, Meetup and fellow video streaming platform Brightcove — plans to take the company into private ownership in an all-cash, $1.38 billion deal. Stockholders will receive $7.85 per share, quite a bit more than the $4.82 Vimeo closed at on Tuesday (the price jumped significantly after the announcement, of course). 

Vimeo’s directors unanimously approved the takeover. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of the calendar year, pending shareholder approval, closing conditions and regulatory approval. 

Once seen as a competitor to YouTube, Vimeo has shifted focus over the two decades it’s been around. It used to be a go-to hosting option for filmmakers, but these days it’s more oriented toward business users. Vimeo does not permit content scraping or generative AI models to train on any video it hosts without the uploader’s permission, perhaps making it an enticing video-hosting service for enterprise users. More recently, Vimeo started bringing back its TV apps, two years after killing those off in an ill-advised move.

Bending Spoons, meanwhile, has a track record of gutting the companies it takes over. It bought Evernote in 2022 and laid off most of the note-taking service’s workers the following year. Bending Spoons bought WeTransfer last year and a few weeks later, it announced plans to fire three-quarters of the file-sharing platform’s staff.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/evernote-and-wetransfer-owner-bending-spoons-is-set-to-buy-vimeo-for-138-billion-155602681.html?src=rss

Microsoft’s Office 365 suite will soon incorporate AI models from Anthropic alongside existing OpenAI technology, The Information reported, ending years of exclusive reliance on OpenAI for generative AI features across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.

The shift reportedly follows internal testing that revealed Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 model excels at specific Office tasks where OpenAI’s models fall short, particularly in visual design and spreadsheet automation, according to sources familiar with the project cited by The Information, who stressed the move is not a negotiating tactic.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to Ars Technica’s request for comment.

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Amazon’s Zoox has announced that its robotaxi service is now available on and around the Las Vegas Strip after months of testing. The autonomous rides are free and can be booked through the Zoox app for iOS and Android devices. This is the company’s first official service launch after Amazon acquired the self-driving startup in 2020.

The Las Vegas service will operate at select pickup and drop-off locations along the Strip, and riders will enter and exit the vehicles at each destination’s ride-hail zone. Though the company didn’t provide an exhaustive list of locations, Resorts World Las Vegas and AREA15 are official partner destinations. They will both feature dedicated areas just for Zoox riders, with an on-site concierge service to walk riders through the app and answer questions.

The company’s autonomous vehicle is an odd duck, with two bench-like seats facing each other and no steering wheel. (Tesla is working on a similar “Cybercab” with no steering wheel or pedals, which is supposed to go into production before 2027.) Its self-driving tech bears more similarity to existing vehicles though, with cameras, lidar, radar and long-wave infrared sensors.

Competition in the robotaxi market has been heating up as existing players continue expanding into new markets and newer players join the space. Waymo now operates in five cities with a goal of 10 by the end of 2025.

The launch of self-driving taxis hasn’t been without incident though. Zoox issued a software recall in May after one of its vehicles collided with a passenger vehicle in Las Vegas. In another instance one of its taxis kept moving after a scooter-riding pedestrian ran into it. Waymo has issued a number of recalls, and was the subject of a NHTSA probe. Earlier this summer, a Tesla robotaxi made light contact with the tire of another parked vehicle before stopping. Most famously, one of Cruise’s robotaxis pinned a pedestrian under its wheels, eventually leading to the program being shuttered.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/amazons-zoox-launches-its-autonomous-robotaxi-service-153750246.html?src=rss

Britain’s road death rate has declined 22-fold per mile driven since 1950, dropping from 111 deaths per billion miles to approximately 5 today, according to new analysis from Our World in Data. Annual road fatalities fell from 5,000-7,000 deaths in the 1920s and 1930s to 1,700 in recent years despite a 16-fold increase in vehicles and 33-fold increase in miles driven.

The UK now ranks among the world’s safest countries for road travel at 1.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Key interventions included mandatory breathalyzer tests in 1967 that reduced drunk-driving deaths by 82%, the introduction of motorways beginning in 1958, conversion to roundabouts that cut fatal accidents by two-thirds, and 20-mph speed zones around schools. If global road death rates matched Britain’s current levels, approximately one million lives would be saved annually from the current 1.2 million road deaths worldwide.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Yesterday, Apple announced its newest flagship earbuds: AirPods Pro 3. The new earbuds seem like a solid improvement over the previous generation of Pros in a number of ways, including the built-in heart rate monitor and redesigned shape.

But the feature that really stole the show for me was live translation. Here’s how it works: When you’re talking to someone who speaks a language you don’t understand, you’ll hear a live translation of their words through your AirPods. Your buds will even boost noise cancellation to lower the volume of the speaker, so you can focus on the translation. When you speak, your words are translated live as well, only on your iPhone’s display. That way, the other person can understand what you’re saying, too. If it works the way it seemed to in Apple’s demo, it feels like the future, and is sure to be a reason people buy these earbuds when they go on sale.

But here’s the thing: You don’t actually need AirPods Pro 3 in order to use live translation. While Apple showcased the feature during the AirPods Pro 3 segment, the company conveniently forgot to mention that customers who own AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation can also use the feature. You can see that from Apple’s own AirPods comparison tool: All three models support live translation.

If you take a look at the fine print, you’ll see the reason: Your AirPods themselves aren’t really doing the translating. Instead, the feature is powered by iOS 26 and Apple Intelligence. You’ll need an iPhone that can run both—which means an iPhone 15 Pro or newer—as well as the latest AirPods firmware. Assuming you have a compatible iPhone and AirPods, both running the right software, you can use the feature.

Live translation isn’t the only new Apple feature available on older devices. When the company announced new Apple Watches yesterday, it advertised new hypertension alerts and sleep scores, and made it seem like those feature were exclusive to the new watches. As it turns out, hypertension alerts are available on Series 9 and newer, while sleep score is available on Series 6 and newer. I get that Apple wants to show its newest features running on its newest devices, but this is more than a little misleading.

Earlier this week, Ars spent some time driving the new Nissan Leaf. We have to wait until Friday to tell you how that car drives, but among the changes from the previous generation are door handles that retract flush with the bodywork, for the front doors at least. Car designers love them for not ruining the lines of the door with the necessities of real life, but is the benefit from drag reduction worth the safety risk?

That question is in even sharper relief this morning. Bloomberg’s Dana Hull has a deeply reported article that looks at the problem of Tesla’s door handles, which fail when the cars lose power.

The electric vehicle manufacturer chose not to use conventional door locks in its cars, preferring to use IP-based electronic controls. While the front seat occupants have always had a physical latch that can open the door, it took some years for the automaker to add emergency releases for the rear doors, and even now that it has, many rear-seat Tesla passengers will be unaware of where to find or how to operate the emergency release.

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