Research In Motion’s BlackBerry, the thing people used before Steve Jobs gave the world the seminal iPhone, gets the “Social Network” treatment in Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton’s new movie. John Semley for Wired: Now, it’s a relic. An also-ran. Or, as one character puts it in BlackBerry, a new movie about the early smartphone empire’s rise and fall, it’s merely “the thing people used before they used the iPhone.” But as this fresh, thoughtful comedy makes plain, BlackBerry is more than just a bleak cautionary tale. It’s a story of how tech culture, as we know it today, took root, bloomed, and died on the vine. Loosely based on the 2016 book Losing the Signal, BlackBerry seems at first blush like a familiar, Social…

Starting with iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma, users with an Apple ID will automatically be assigned a passkey, allowing them to sign into their Apple ID with Face ID or Touch ID instead of their password on various Apple sign-in pages, including icloud.com, appleid.apple.com, appstoreconnect.apple.com, and more. Passkeys are a more secure alternative to passwords. Apple explains:A passkey is a cryptographic entity that's not visible to you, and it's used in place of a password. A passkey consists of a key pair, which—compared to a password—profoundly improves security. One key is public, registered with the website or app you're using. The other key is private, held only by your devices.Passkey support for Apple IDs will also be available…

Spotify is planning a more expensive subscription option that’s expected to include “high-fidelity” audio in an effort to drive more revenue. Apple Music began offering lossless audio in June 2021, along with Spatial Audio (that Spotify does not offer), all at no additional cost to Apple Music subscribers. Spotify plans to charge extra for “HiFi” audio quality Ashley Carman for Bloomberg News: Dubbed “Supremium” internally, according to people familiar with the strategy, the new tier will be Spotify’s most expensive plan and likely offer a HiFi feature the company first announced it was working on in 2021. Spotify delayed that product’s rollout after two of its competitors, Apple Music and Amazon Music, began offering the feature for free as part…

Apple’s iPhone 15 will likely see an specification upgrade of ultra wideband (UWB), with the production process moving from 16nm to more advanced 7nm and, in 2024, iPhone 16 is likely to upgrade to Wi-Fi 7, according to TF International Securities’ analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. iPhone 15 Pro Max (iPhone 15 Ultra) rendering based on CAD. (imagevia @UniverseIce) Ming-Chi Kuo via Twitter: Apple will aggressively upgrade hardware specifications to build a more competitive ecosystem for Vision Pro 1. The ecosystem is one of the key success factors for Vision Pro, including the integration with other Apple hardware products, and related main hardware specifications are Wi-Fi and UWB. 2. iPhone 15 will likely see an specification upgrade of UWB, with the production…

Sam Esmail’s years-in-the making adaptation of Fritz Lang’s classic 1927 sci-fi film “Metropolis” has been permanently shut down due to labor unrest against the background of economic headwinds. “Metropolis” – Fritz Lang 1927 Nellie Andreeva for Deadline: The big-budget UCP [Universal Content Productions] series for Apple TV+, which had been prepping in Australia, has permanently shut down. The crew was just notified that the ambitious project will not move forward with production, which had been targeting a summer start. UCP confirmed to Deadline that Metropolis has been scrapped. “Push costs and uncertainty related to the ongoing strike led to this difficult decision,” a rep for the studio said. Metropolis had been in limbo for the past seven weeks. Since production…

Opera One, the new version of Opera browser, got its official public release today, boasting native artificial intelligence integration as the standout feature among its rivals. Opera One introduces Aria, "the first truly native browser AI," according to the developers. Aria can be invoked via a command line, as well as from the browser sidebar, and leverages OpenAI's GPT technology to optimize web search. From the press release: Aria is both a web and browser expert that allows users to collaborate with AI while looking for information on the web, generating text or code, or getting their product queries answered. When it comes to customer support, Aria is knowledgeable about Opera's entire database of support documentation and uses the company's…