Science and Technology

When Apple released the Apple Watch in 2015, it was business as usual for a company whose iPhone updates had become cultural touchstones. Before the watch went on sale, Apple gave early versions of it to celebrities like Beyoncé, featured it in fashion publications like Vogue and streamed a splashy event on the internet trumpeting its features.But as Apple prepared to sell its next generation of wearable computing, the Vision Pro augmented reality device, it marched far more quietly into the consumer marketplace.The company said in a news release this month that sales of the device would begin Friday. No…

Jan. 19: This article was updated to include information from a news conference the day after it was first published.A spacecraft that was headed to the surface of the moon has ended up back at Earth instead, burning up in the planet’s atmosphere on Thursday afternoon.Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh announced in a post on the social network X that it lost communication with its Peregrine moon lander at 3:50 p.m. Eastern time, which served as an indication that it entered the Earth’s atmosphere over the South Pacific at around 4:04 p.m.On Friday, the United States Space Command confirmed the destruction…

Apple said on Wednesday that it would begin selling its flagship smartwatches without the ability to detect people’s blood-oxygen levels.The tech giant will drop the feature starting Thursday after losing a patent case over its blood-oxygen measurement technology two months ago. The court ordered Apple to stop selling its Apple Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2 devices. Rather than discontinue sales, the company sought permission to continue selling the devices after removing the infringing technology.People who buy a new watch in the United States will still see Apple’s Blood Oxygen app on the devices, the company said. But if…

I’m not especially powerful; it doesn’t matter which in-jokes include me and which dinners I’m invited to. But it’s instructive to think of the digital rooms being constructed by those who are. We often get glimpses of such group chats in court filings, the familiar blue-and-white bubbles of iMessage screenshotted and laid out as evidence. A chain of messages among Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson, for instance, was one of many chats at issue in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit against Fox News. The tone is amusingly familiar; they complain, gossip, co-process the news. Carlson admits something he’d…

California has long championed renewable energy, but a change in the state’s policies last year has led to a sharp decline in the installation of residential rooftop solar in the state.Thousands of companies — including installers, manufacturers and distributors — are reeling from the new policy, which took effect in April and greatly reduced incentives that had encouraged homeowners to install solar panels. Since the change, sales of rooftop solar installations in California dropped as much as 85 percent in some months of 2023 from a year earlier, according to a report by Ohm Analytics, a research firm that tracks…

For more than a decade, Apple was the stock market’s undisputed king. It first overtook Exxon Mobil as the world’s most valuable public company in 2011 and held the title almost without interruption.But a transfer of power has begun.On Friday, Microsoft surpassed Apple, claiming the crown after its market value surged by more than $1 trillion over the past year. Microsoft finished the day at $2.89 trillion, higher than Apple’s $2.87 trillion, according to Bloomberg.The change is part of a reordering of the stock market that was set in motion by the advent of generative artificial intelligence. The technology, which…