Apple dismisses Microsoft monopoly comparisons

A week after finding itself at the business end of a landmark lawsuit from the United States Department of Justice, Apple is staunchly denying any parallels between itself and Microsoft in the 1990s. It’s a comparison into which the U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland leaned heavily in last week’s filing. While portions of the United […]

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Understanding humanoid robots

Robots made their stage debut the day after New Year’s 1921. More than half-a-century before the world caught its first glimpse of George Lucas’ droids, a small army of silvery humanoids took to the stages of the First Czechoslovak Republic. They were, for all intents and purposes, humanoids: two arms, two legs, a head — […]

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Oregon signs right to repair into law

Oregon Governor Tina Kotek on Tuesday signed Senate Bill 1596 into law, joining California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts and Minnesota in a growing list of states embracing a right to repair for citizens. The law is set to go into effect January 1. The bill’s coauthors Janeen Sollman and Representative Courtney Neron took inspiration from California’s […]

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Orchard vision system turns farm equipment into AI-powered data collectors

Agricultural robotics are not a new phenomenon. We’ve seen systems that pick apples and berries, kill weeds, plant trees, transport produce and more. But while these functions are understood to be the core features of automated systems, the same thing is true here as it is across technology: It’s all about the data. A huge […]

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Apple WWDC 2024 set for June 10-14, promises to be ‘A(bsolutely) I(ncredible)’

Apple SVP Greg “Joz” Joswiak just confirmed via the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that the company’s annual World Wide Developer Conference is set for June 10-14. In what is no doubt a nod to the company’s artificial intelligence ambitions, the exec is promising that the event will be “Absolutely Incredible.” Mark your […]

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Apple WWDC 2024 set for June 10-14, promises to be ‘A(bsolutely) I(ncredible)’

Apple SVP Greg “Joz” Joswiak just confirmed via the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that the company’s annual World Wide Developer Conference is set for June 10-14. In what is no doubt a nod to the company’s artificial intelligence ambitions, the exec is promising that the event will be “Absolutely Incredible.” Mark your […]

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Viam looks beyond robotics with its no-code automation platform

Since the last time we spoke, Viam didn’t pivot exactly, according to founder and CEO Eliot Horowitz — it’s more of a “rebrand.” Roughly six months ago, the Manhattan-based startup made a concerted effort to broaden its focus. The no-code development platform previously focused its outreach on robotics firms. It’s a large and rapidly expanding […]

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Large language models can help home robots recover from errors without human help

There are countless reasons why home robots have found little success post-Roomba. Pricing, practicality, form factor and mapping have all contributed to failure after failure. Even when some or all of those are addressed, there remains the question of what happens when a system makes an inevitable mistake. This has been a point of friction […]

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Here’s what the DOJ suit could mean for Apple Watch

Apple’s ecosystem play has — at once — been the envy and bane of the consumer electronics industry for decades. Following a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday, it’s now also at the center of strong antitrust charges levied against the hardware giant. The sweeping lawsuit, jointly filed with the attorneys […]

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