Connect with us

Published

on

Apple CEO Tim Cook (L) looks at brand new Apple products during an Apple event on September 12, 2023 in Cupertino, California. 

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Apple released iOS 17 for iPhones on Monday. It’s Apple’s biggest software update of the year, and is available for anyone with an iPhone from 2018 or later.

Apple releases a big update to the iPhone’s operating system every year alongside new iPhones, and you don’t necessarily need to buy a new device to get access to the latest software.

This year’s update has a lot of improvements to some of the most-used apps, including the Phone app, Messages, and Safari.

There are a lot of changes, but here are some of the highlights you need to know about:

Apple’s Contact Posters in iOS 17 will change the way your phone looks when you recieve a call.

Apple

  • Contact posters. One of the biggest changes will be a new feature that allows iPhone users to choose a picture and font to change how they appear when they call other people’s iPhones. With iOS 17, users can create your own “contact poster” in a very similar way to how users can customize their lockscreen.
  • Better autocorrect. Apple’s autocorrect has been improved with a transformer-based language model, a relative of the technology that is used in ChatGPT. Users can also automatically finish their sentences using autocorrect by tapping the space bar if there’s a suggestion.

Apple SOS Assistance.

Source: Apple Inc.

  • Roadside assistance. The feature will let users with recent phones call AAA in the U.S. through satellites, if there’s no cell service. It requires a phone with Apple’s satellite service called SOS, so will only work on last year’s iPhone 14 or this year’s iPhone 15.
  • New iMessage interface. Apple’s text messaging interface has gotten a remodel, moving hidden apps such as stickers or the camera to a menu on the left-hand side of the screen, as opposed to above the keyboard. The Messages app can now also automatically transcribe short audio messages. Searching your old texts is also significantly improved.

Kif Leswing/CNBC

  • Stickers. While the iPhone has had stickers — little images you can place on top of chats — for a few years now, in iOS 17, Apple has put all of the sticker features in a new piece of software that can be accessed through the new iMessage interface. The new “experience,” as Apple calls it, can use machine learning to automatically cut subjects — like your cat’s face — out of photos to make new stickers from them.
  • Automatic “got home safe” notifications. A feature called Check In can send automatic notifications to friends and family based on if you got home safely or if you’ve tapped a button after a period of time.

StandBy Mode in iOS 17

Todd Haselton | CNBC

  • Standby dock mode. iPhones charging horizontally on a magnetic MagSafe dock now turn into a sort of dashboard that can display the time, your photos, upcoming appointments, information in Widgets, or even a “Live Activity” such as a tracker for your Uber Eats delivery.
  • Offline maps. Users can now save parts of Apple Maps for offline in case they don’t have internet access, like when driving to a remote location. It’s also handy to save your metropolitan area in your phone for faster and more reliable routing.
  • Drop the “hey.” Just “Siri.” It’s cleaner. Apple’s voice assistant no longer requires a “hey” in front of “Siri.”

Apple Voicemail transcription.

Source: Apple

  • Live voicemails. Now, when users receive a call, they can send it directly to voicemail with a button on the iPhone’s lock screen. If the caller leaves a voicemail, it will be transcribed in real time, allowing the user to decide if it’s something they might want to pick up, after all.
  • Better two-factor authentication. Users who use both Apple’s Mail app and the Safari browser will find an extremely handy feature: When a log-in code is sent to your email, it will automatically show up above the keyboard. Also, codes sent via text message are now automatically deleted after you’ve input them, saving you from seeing a bunch of unread-message notifications that are actually just log-in codes.
  • Password-protected private browsing. Apple’s on-phone private browsing mode, which doesn’t save web history, now can be password-protected and unlocked with Apple’s Face ID.
  • A new business card. Trading information with other iPhone users is now as simple as bumping two iPhones together. Apple’s AirDrop feature will trade specific phone numbers, contact posters, or email addresses with the user’s permission.

How to install iOS 17 on your iPhone

Continue Reading

Technology

Brazil supreme court unfreezes assets of Elon Musk’s Starlink, X after taking fines

Published

on

By

Brazil supreme court unfreezes assets of Elon Musk's Starlink, X after taking fines

Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, July 24, 2024. 

Samuel Corum | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Brazil’s supreme court announced Friday that it ordered banks to transfer funds from Starlink and X accounts to pay fines the court levied against Elon Musk’s social network.

The court’s top justice, Alexandre de Moraes, and a panel of five other justices, found that X had repeatedly violated Brazilian law when it refused to appoint a legal representative in the country, and when it refused to remove content or profiles from its platform that the court determined to be harmful towards democratic institutions in Brazil.

The court had nearly 18.4 million Brazilian reals, or approximately $3.3 million, transferred out of the accounts. Musk acquired X, then known as Twitter, in 2022. Starlink is the satellite internet service run by SpaceX.

Following the transfers, the court ordered that the frozen bank accounts and assets of X and Starlink be released, saying there was no longer any need to keep them.

The court suspended X at the end of August, and the suspension remains in place. 

Musk and his businesses have said they view the actions of de Moraes as “illegal,” and his court’s orders as having been issued without due process. X and SpaceX did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday.

Brazilian news agency UOL reported earlier this month that some of the accounts de Moraes ordered Musk to suspend at X belong to users who allegedly threatened federal police officers involved in a probe of former right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro has been accused of instigating Brazil’s Jan. 8 riots and of attempting to stage a coup there.

Musk is a proponent of Bolsonaro, in part because the former Brazilian president authorized his business Starlink to operate in the country.

Musk has been ramping up insults and calls to impeach de Moraes since April. On Sept. 5, his long-time collaborator at the helm of SpaceX, COO Gwynne Shotwell, also took shots at the Brazil supreme court online.

She wrote, “@Alexandre, please stop harassing Starlink and let us keep serving the people of Brazil.”

Backers of de Moraes and the STF have seen the orders against X Corp. as an assertion of Brazilian sovereignty.

WATCH: New data shows Musk’s Twitter takeover is worst deal for banks since 2008 financial crisis

New data shows Musk's Twitter takeover is worst deal for banks since 2008 financial crisis

Continue Reading

Technology

Tesla Semi fire in California took 50,000 gallons of water to extinguish

Published

on

By

Tesla Semi fire in California took 50,000 gallons of water to extinguish

Tesla Semi

Courtesy: Tesla

A single-vehicle collision last month involving a Tesla Semi electric truck took 50,000 gallons of water to extinguish and required aircraft to dump fire retardant overhead, according to a preliminary report on Friday from the National Transportation Safety Board.

The crash, which occurred on California’s Interstate 80 west of Lake Tahoe, is being investigated by the NTSB. CAL-Fire’s efforts put out the flames cooled the vehicle’s massive battery to keep it from reigniting and prevented the fire from spreading beyond the crash site, the NTSB said.

The Tesla truck, driven by an employee, was headed to the company’s battery factory in Sparks, Nevada, from a warehouse in Livermore, California, the report said. The incident closed down part of the I-80 for 15 hours.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk first showed off the Semi truck design at an event in November 2017, promising it would come to market in 2020. The company still hasn’t started producing the trucks in high volume, but it’s building out production lines at its Nevada facility.

“Preparation of Semi factory continues and is on track to begin production by end of 2025,” Tesla said in its second-quarter earnings report in July.

The NTSB report confirmed that Tesla’s driver assistance systems, which are marketed as Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (Supervised) in the U.S., were not “operational” at the time of the Semi collision and fire.

Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.

WATCH: The Tesla Semi is here

The Tesla Semi is finally here

Continue Reading

Technology

Oracle’s Larry Ellison briefly tops Jeff Bezos to become world’s second-richest person

Published

on

By

Oracle's Larry Ellison briefly tops Jeff Bezos to become world's second-richest person

Larry Ellison, chief technology officer of Oracle (L), and Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon.

Reuters

Oracle‘s best week on the stock market since 2021 has bolstered Chairman Larry Ellison’s net worth, briefly edging him past Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on Friday to become the world’s second-richest person.

Ellison’s net worth reached $208.4 billion shortly after the market open, then fell to $199 billion, according to Forbes’ real-time billionaires list. Bezos, who has claimed the title of world’s second-richest person on and off over the years, is worth $205 billion. Only Tesla CEO Elon Musk, at $252 billion, is currently above him.

Oracle shares gained 1.2% to $163.38 on Friday after the database vendor bumped up its fiscal 2026 revenue guidance and issued a rosy forecast as far out as fiscal 2029. The company issued the forward-looking revenue figures at its annual CloudWorld conference in Las Vegas.

The stock rallied 11% on Tuesday after the company reported quarterly results that topped expectations. Oracle shares continue to reach new highs and are now up about 56% this year, behind only artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia — up 139% — among large-cap tech stocks.

Ellison, who co-founded Oracle in 1977, has been the biggest beneficiary of the boom. He owns about 40% of the outstanding stock, making him the company’s biggest stakeholder. His company’s revival in recent years has been sparked by its improving position in cloud infrastructure and growing adoption of its cloud databases.

Bezos, 60, and Ellison, 80, are jockeying for the title of world’s second-richest person three days after their companies forged a new partnership. On Monday, Oracle said its database software will become available for AWS customers to use atop Oracle hardware sitting inside of Amazon data centers.

Over the past year, Oracle has also forged similar partnerships with Microsoft and Google, the other two leading cloud infrastructure companies. Ellison told analysts on this week’s earnings call that Oracle is now in prime position in the cloud and in traditional data centers.

“With Oracle Database to be able to run AWS, Microsoft and Google, is incredibly important,” Ellison said on the call. “It will absolutely accelerate database growth in the public cloud. But we expect that private clouds will greatly outnumber public clouds as companies decide they don’t want — they want the Oracle Cloud behind their firewall, in their datacenter, with no neighbors.”

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet and Ari Levy contributed reporting.

Don’t miss these insights from CNBC PRO

Oracle has been a 'hidden story' as they shifted to the cloud, says Bernstein's Mark Moerdler

Continue Reading

Trending