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Apple's 2022 iPhone SE Has 5G and a New Chip. But We Wanted These Features, Too
Apple's 2022 iPhone SE Has 5G and a New Chip. But We Wanted These Features, Too
Apple's 2022 iPhone SE represents a notable upgrade over its predecessor: It has 5G support, the same processor as the iPhone 13 and longer battery life compared to the 2020 model. But there are still some features we hoped to see that didn't make it into the third-generation iPhone SE.
Apple announced the new iPhone SE during its first product launch event of the year on March 8. It hits stores on March 18 and starts at $429, making it slightly more expensive than the 2020 version.
The iPhone SE hasn't become part of Apple's annual product cycle yet, but the company is closing the gap between release dates. Apple introduced its original iPhone SE in 2016 as a low-cost alternative to its marquee iPhone, but didn't release a new version until 2020. Now, the newest model has arrived just two years after that, in 2022. It's the latest sign that smartphone-makers like Apple are increasingly catering to budget-conscious customers.
While it's a shame the iPhone SE is missing the features below, Apple's new phone does include other upgrades that were on my wishlist like 5G support and longer battery life.
More storage in the base model
The 2022 iPhone SE got its debut at Apple's Peek Performance event.
screenshot/Apple
Apple increased the iPhone 13 lineup's base storage capacity up to 128GB from 64GB. Unfortunately, that approach didn't trickle down to the new iPhone SE, which starts at 64GB of storage. You could argue that the 128GB iPhone SE, which costs $479, is hundreds of dollars cheaper than the base iPhone 13. But Apple is still behind its competitors in this regard: Samsung's $400 Galaxy A42 5G, comes with 128GB of internal storage, as does Google's $449 Pixel 5A with 5G.
A sharper front camera for selfies and FaceTime calls
FaceTime gets a bunch of significant upgrades in iOS 15, such as a Portrait Mode.
Patrick Holland/CNET
Like its predecessor, the new iPhone SE has a 7-megapixel front camera. Apple's new A15 Bionic processor will bring some improvements to the selfie camera, like the addition of Deep Fusion, which processes individual pixels to improve detail and reduce noise. But still, it would have been nice to see a bump in resolution to go along with these improvements.
Read more: Best Apple SE Case for 2022
Samsung's phones that come close to the iPhone SE's price range have Apple beat when it comes to resolution. The $500 Galaxy A52 5G has a 32-megapixel front camera, while the $400 Galaxy A42 5G has a 13-megapixel front camera. Apple introduced several new FaceTime features last year in its iOS 15 update, so it's surprising that the front-facing camera wasn't a bigger area of focus for the new iPhone SE.
Night Mode for taking better photos in the dark
Night Mode on the iPhone 11.
Apple
Given the iPhone SE's cheap price, I wouldn't expect it to have a camera that's on par with the iPhone 13 or even the iPhone 12. But if there's one feature I would have appreciated, it's Night Mode. Across the industry, smartphone cameras have gotten a lot better at taking photos in the dark. I hoped Apple's low-cost iPhone would reflect this progress, too.
It's possible that it would have been too challenging in terms of size and cost to include the iPhone 11's upgraded wide camera sensor in the new SE. (The iPhone 11 family was the first of Apple's phones to get Night Mode.) But Google has found a way to bring Night Sight to its similarly priced Pixel 5A with 5G... and considering the iPhone SE lacks a secondary ultrawide lens, the quality of the standard wide-angle camera is more important than ever.
That said, Apple says the iPhone SE should be able to take better videos in low light thanks to the A15 Bionic's newer image signal processor. And the camera is getting other upgrades, such as the pixel-by-pixel Deep Fusion processing technique.
Overall, the new iPhone SE reiterates the different ways Apple and Samsung view what matters most in a budget smartphone. Samsung's cheaper phones usually have more camera lenses, sharper selfie cameras and larger screens. Instead of those, Apple's iPhone SE gets the latest mobile processor, which should hopefully keep the phone feeling relatively fast for years to come.
A year has 525,600 minutes. Matt Suda spent 206,989 of them -- more than a third of last year -- listening to Spotify.
Suda was one of the earliest customers to get his hands on an invite-only release of Car Thing, Spotify's first-ever hardware device, which goes on sale Tuesday. Unlike him, you probably didn't spend more time streaming music than sleeping last year. But Spotify is betting that Suda and about 140 million of you have something in common: Your car doesn't have a fancy infotainment system to rival a Tesla's.
"I was just interested in seeing Spotify's take on actually building their own hardware," said Suda, a 26-year-old student in Houston, who drives a 2012 Honda. "I wasn't expecting a whole lot. But getting the device and using it -- you can understand more the problem they're going after."
Spotify's main listening location is the home, but the car is a close second, said Gustav Söderström, Spotify's chief research and development officer. He says Americans spent an "insane" 70 billion hours a year on the road pre-pandemic. But while roughly 50% to 70% of cars on US roads may be able to connect to a phone, they're not so fresh-off-the-line as to have an entertainment display that easily streams tunes and podcasts.
To Spotify, that meant drivers in roughly 140 million cars might stream Spotify more -- or start paying for it if they don't already -- if a device could replicate Apple's Car Play or Android Auto for them.
"Why would we do something ourselves here?" Söderström said. "If this already existed, we wouldn't have."
Enter Car Thing.
Sarah Tew/CNET
It may look like a bit like a sideways Zune, Microsoft's failed music player that launched in 2006. But with a credit-card-size touchscreen, mics to pick up voice commands, five buttons and a dial, the $90 Car Thing is a souped-up Spotify remote control for your ride. It mounts to your dash, with the goal of bringing a better way to safely stream music to drivers missing one of those fancy infotainment systems -- no dashboard teardown or new car required.
When Spotify first unveiled Car Thing in April, more than 2 million people signed up for its waitlist. The earliest people invited to try it got it free; by fall, people had to start paying $80. On Tuesday, it's finally going on sale in the US, with a $10 price hike to $90.
Currently, Car Thing works only with Spotify's premium tier. That means on top of the $90 you pay for the hardware, you also must pay for a Spotify membership. Its standard subscription is $10 a month, though it comes as cheap as $5 a month for students.
So Car Thing is only for Spotify -- but only for now.
Its software is on track for an update in "a few weeks" that will unlock it to control other audio apps, Söderström said. If you love Audible, Car Thing will be able to play, pause, skip and adjust volume for your audio books. The update will even allow Car Thing to work for services that are Spotify's direct competitors. "We want to be an open platform," he said.
That openness could, eventually, extend to "deeper integrations with potential partners" if Car Thing takes off, he added. While Spotify wouldn't elaborate on future partnerships, a Car Thing that could toggle between Spotify and Google Maps or Waze would give it the one-two punch of both music navigation and, well, literal navigation.
Broadening Car Thing may be wise, because those 140 million cars may be a more niche market than it seems, according to Tatiana Cirisano, a music industry analyst and consultant at researcher MIDiA. Just 22% of US consumers stream music in the car.
"Streaming services are battling for market share over this relatively small demographic," Cirisano said.
With sales opening in the US on Tuesday, Spotify is about to start learning: Is Car Thing tapping into a caravan of unmet need for millions of drivers? Or is it driving headlong toward a dead end?
But as vehicles steer toward a future of being more autonomous, anything Spotify can do to solidify itself as the must-have music service in the car may pay dividends down the road.
"Full autonomy is probably the most elusive goal of all, but the dream is: You get into your car and all the windows turn into displays," said Edward Sanchez, a senior automotive analyst at Strategy Analytics. "That's what everyone's salivating at the prospect of."
Sarah Tew/CNET
Getting to mile one
The concept for something like Car Thing had been percolating at Spotify for a while, but the device's date of conception might be marked in 2018, when it got its name. First proposed over dinner among a handful of Spotify hardware designers and brand agents, Car Thing was a semi-serious placeholder that the design team adopted for a code name. The name was funny, very literal and a bit childish, said Andreas Cedborg, Spotify's head of hardware product.
"People think, 'Hey, you can't name it like that,'" Cedborg said. "But, yeah, you can."
Hints about Spotify making hardware for the car soon trickled out. In 2018, some marketing materials made their way to a smattering of Spotify users, advertising a voice-command device you could mount on your dash and pay for as an add-on to your Spotify subscription. Images showed a round device with a lit-up text display with a green circle border. Spotify declined to comment on images at the time, but the company now says it was just a test; it never produced the device pictured.
By May 2019, Spotify came clean it was experimenting with a device called Car Thing. It was different from the device in the leaked test images, but it was also a long way from what Car Thing would become.
Spotify's first iteration of Car Thing.
Spotify
The first Car Thing's screen was too small, its dial too big, Cedborg said. Its green accents, a nod to Spotify's flagship color, made it stick out from the rest of the dashboard rather than blending in. It also had its own battery, which the current version eschews in favor of a cable that connects to your car's USB port or 12-volt socket. While a battery would make Car Thing more self-sufficient, freezing temperatures inside a car during winter would ding battery life, and scorching heat with a car baking in the sun risked explosion. A battery also adds weight, making it trickier to mount well.
The Car Thing team's eureka moment was combining a hat-trick of voice commands, touch screen and physical inputs like buttons and dials. Drivers needed all three, working in concert, they realized. A touchscreen is impossible for typing each letter of a song title while driving, but voice commands handle long titles easily. Yet voice commands are a frustrating way to get to the bottom of a long playlist; a physical dial makes that simple. This three-prong approach was "the user interface that we didn't see anywhere in the car world," Söderström said.
After three more years of testing, redesign, user research and pandemic delays, Car Thing was ready for its unveiling. In April, Spotify published a blog post that yes, Car Thing was real. Yes, Car Thing was the name. And yes, it had arrived -- sort of. Spotify introduced the waitlist, and people who signed up for it could potentially get it free.
The current design of Car Thing.
Sarah Tew/CNET
"We just can't make enough of them," CEO Daniel Ek said in October about getting Car Things into the hands of waitlisted customers. Progress was crimped by global chip shortages, a problem that halted carmakers' assembly lines, made Apple's iPhone 12 launch weeks late and turned finding a Sony's PS5 game console into a Christmas miracle. (Ek wasn't available to discuss Car Thing's US launch.)
But this slow seeding of the device allowed Spotify to gather feedback about Car Thing in the wild, figuring out what needed change or improvement.
Sarah Tew/CNET
Road ahead
The version of Car Thing on sale Tuesday is the same physical device purchased off the waitlist. What's changed is the software. And the price.
In pricing Car Thing at $90, Spotify is straddling two worlds. On one side, Car Thing isn't meant to be a revenue engine. Hardware "is a means to an end," Söderström said. Spotify hopes you'll pay for its service more so than its hardware. But on the other side, Spotify doesn't want to sell Car Thing at a loss just to make back the money on memberships. It wants to get Car Thing in as many cars as possible, but it will gauge Car Thing's success by the new subscribers and higher listening rates from existing members it attracts.
Despite the price hike, Spotify wants to get the price down. The $10 price increase was the result of the rising cost of chips, the company said. One thing that could help bring down price is selling Car Thing, eventually, outside the US, since scaling production can bring down the unit cost of making them. Spotify isn't committing to international expansion, but there are clear markets where Car Thing could go next, Söderström said, pointing theoretically to parts of Central and South America and Europe.
The company could also pursue bundles and deals that could make Car Thing a stronger value, he said.
Gustav Söderström is Spotify's chief research and development officer.
Spotify
Söderström likens Car Thing to the Kindle, Amazon's hit e-reader. As Amazon's play to keep Apple from dominating digital books, Kindle was a means to an end, too. When the Kindle first launched in 2007, it was $399. Today, coincidentally, Kindles start at $90, the same price as Car Thing.
Car Thing also comes at a time when Spotify's public image has been buffeted by drama over its most popular podcast, the Joe Rogan Experience. The debate pits accusations of dangerous COVID-19 misinformation against advocacy of freedom of speech. Spotify declined to comment on the Rogan debate.
Though 2 million on the Car Thing waitlist is a big number, it may have included flocks of people looking to score a freebie and a gaggle who were enticed by the hype around Spotify's first hardware. Sara Kayden, the marketing lead for Car Thing, says Spotify's conversion rate -- the amount people who actually buy Car Thing when they get off the waitlist -- was "healthy," without specifying further.
The buyer reaction to Car Thing so far runs the gamut. Social media is dotted with both raves and regrets by people who got one off the waitlist. One Redditor mounted Car Thing to his Harley Davidson motorcycle and paired it to his Bluetooth headphones. Before Car Thing, switching tracks or adjusting volume was "nearly impossible" with his phone in his pocket and leather gloves on.
But others have complained Car Thing was overpriced even when it was $80.
Suda, the Spotify power user who scored Car Thing early and free, is still using the gadget every time he drives, nine months later. He's noticed that Car Thing's software has gotten zippier. "To me, it just makes it easier to listen and it's actually safer, if you don't have CarPlay or any of that fancy stuff," he said.
In 2019, when Spotify revealed its first iteration of Car Thing, it also brought to light the possibility of a "Voice Thing" and "Home Thing." It was hardware that never materialized. Still, "it wasn't vaporware," Söderström said. "I've tried it. But it's not something we're launching right now." Spotify declined to comment on what its next thing in hardware would be. Regardless, they should definitely code-name it Next Thing.
And if Next Thing is ever to become a Real Thing, Spotify must pray Car Thing follows the roadmap of Kindle rather than Zune.
Pokemon Go Halloween 2021: Pumpkaboo, Misunderstood Mischief Research and more
Pokemon Go Halloween 2021: Pumpkaboo, Misunderstood Mischief Research and more
The second leg of Pokemon Go's Halloween 2021 event is coming to an end in a couple of days. Until Oct.31, certain ghost- and dark-type Pokemon are appearing in the game more frequently than usual, and you have your first chance to get four new ghost Pokemon from the Kalos region. On top of that, the next portion of the Misunderstood Mischief Special Research story is now live, and you'll earn extra candy for catching, transferring and hatching Pokemon. Here's everything you need to know about Pokemon Go's Halloween 2021 event.
New ghost Pokemon
As part of the Halloween event, four new ghost Pokemon have arrived in the game: Phantump, Trevenant, Pumpkaboo, and Gourgeist. All four were originally introduced in Pokemon X and Y for the Nintendo 3DS, making this your first chance to catch them in Pokemon Go.
Alongside Pumpkaboo and Gourgeist, a new size mechanic has been added to the game. Just as in mainline Pokemon titles, Pumpkaboo and Gourgeist can appear in various sizes, and the ones you encounter in Pokemon Go will visibly vary depending on how large or small they are. The game is also holding a new Collection Challenge tasking you with catching a Pumpkaboo of every size.
Featured Pokemon
In addition to the aforementioned new ghosts, the following Pokemon will appear in the wild and in raid battles throughout the Halloween event. The mythical Pokemon Darkrai has also returned to five-star raids, while Mega Absol has made its debut in Mega Raids.
Wild spawns
Halloween Mischief Pikachu
Halloween Mischief Piplup
Gastly
Haunter
Murkrow
Misdreavus
Shuppet
Purrloin
Yamask
Litwick
Phantump
Pumpkaboo
One-star raids
Murkrow
Yamask
Galarian Yamask
Phantump
Pumpkaboo
Three-star raids
Alolan Marowak
Banette
Halloween Mischief Drifblim
Lampent
Five-star raids
Mega Raids
7 km eggs
Spinarak
Misdreavus
Shuppet
Litwick
Golett
Phantump
Galarian Yamask
Misunderstood Mischief Special Research
Another leg of the season-long Misunderstood Mischief Special Research story is now live in Pokemon Go. You can see the full list of tasks and rewards below.
Stage 11/16
Earn 3 candies walking with your buddy - 10 Yamask Candy
Catch 30 ghost-type Pokemon - 10 Phantump Candy
Catch 30 dark-type Pokemon - 10 Pumpkaboo Candy
Reward for completing all three tasks: Pikachu encounter, 15 Ultra Balls, 40 Gengar Mega Energy
Other event bonuses
Just as during the first part of the Halloween event, a new Special Research story called What Lies Beneath the Mask? is now live in the game. The following bonuses are also still active;
2x transfer candy
2x hatch candy
2x catch candy
Guaranteed candy XL when walking with your buddy
Pokemon Go's Halloween 2021 event runs until 8 p.m. local time on Oct. 31. You can read up on everything else happening in the game this month in our Pokemon Go October events roundup.
Apple Watch: It's been 5 years since my original review, and it holds up
Apple Watch: It's been 5 years since my original review, and it holds up
I'd love to say that when I first put on the Apple Watch, I'd never seen anything like it before. But of course, that's not true. By late 2014 I'd been surrounded by smartwatches for a few years. So when Apple announced it was making its own watch, my thought (as so often with Apple) was: finally.
The first smartwatch I reviewed at CNET was the Martian Passport, an analog watch that could make phone calls. It sounds so primitive now, but it was cool in early 2013. The Pebble Watch followed, and the Steel version became my favorite: It was like a Casio watch turned into a useful little pager-assistant. It was simple and had long battery life, and it was great.
There were others, too: Samsung's first smartwatches were ambitious (a camera?). Google's first Android Wear watches arrived in 2014. Meanwhile, there were Fitbits and Jawbone trackers galore.
I say this to lay the groundwork for the Apple Watch and what its impact was. Like the iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, the Apple Watch wasn't the first smartwatch... but it made the biggest footprint. It was another step validating that a world of wearables was here to stay.
I was able to wear the Apple Watch a month before it went on sale. I spent a ton of time with it, getting used to both how it handled phone calls, and the activity tracking rings. I looked at my heart rate measurements. I accidentally ordered an Xbox One with an early Amazon app.
The Watch was, much like the first iPhone, sometimes feature-limited. But it also had some features that already stood out.
My original review was updated a year later, which you can read here. Some parts have changed, clearly, and Apple has updated the OS. But I'll comment on what I wrote then, and how I felt, and how that's evolved. Quotes from the original review are in italics.
The gold Apple Watch, way back when.
James Martin/CNET
An excellent design, with luxury overtones
Apple wants you to think of the Apple Watch as fine jewelry. Maybe that's a stretch, but in terms of craftsmanship, there isn't a more elegantly made piece of wearable tech. Look at the Apple Watch from a distance, and it might appear unremarkable in its rectangular simplicity compared with bolder, circular Android Wear watches. It's clearly a revamped sort of iPod Nano. But get closer, and you can see the seamless, excellent construction.
The first Apple Watch came in aluminum, steel and ramped all the way up to a gold model costing more than $10,000. Compared to other smartwatches, it screamed luxury.
Certain touches felt luxurious, too: the fine-feeling Digital Crown, which spun ever so smoothly like a real watch part, for instance. The OLED display, which was a first for an Apple product, looked crisp and bright.
The most amazing part, maybe, were the watch bands. Apple created a really nice series of specially designed straps, from a steel link to a clever magnetic Milanese mesh that were extremely expensive and impressively engineered.
Its watch face designs were great, too, and they integrated some information from the iPhone that aimed to add at-a-glance ease of use. There was a Mickey Mouse watch face that danced! The Solar face showing sunrise and sunset, and the astronomy face that showed planetary alignments and moon phases, felt like magic. I wanted more, but Apple's assortment of watch faces was limited, and it didn't allow for third-party watch face design. That's still the case now.
A lot of the Apple Watch reminded me of the strides Apple began with the iPod Nano, which also had watch mode... and a Mickey Mouse watch face.
Sarah Tew
New technologies at first: fantastic haptics, a force-sensitive display
All Apple Watches have a new S1 processor made by Apple, that "taptic" haptic engine and a force-sensitive and very bright OLED display, which is differently sized on the 38mm and 42mm models. The watch has its own accelerometer, gyrometer and heart-rate monitor, but no onboard GPS. It uses Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11b/g/n 2.4GHz Wi-Fi to connect to your phone or your home network. There's a built-in speaker and microphone, but no headphone jack.
As I wore the watch on the first day, I felt a rippling buzz and a metallic ping: one of my credit card payments showed up as a message. Apple's "Taptic Engine" and a built-in speaker convey both a range of advanced taps and vibrations, plus sounds. Unlike the buzz in a phone or most wearables, these haptics feel sharper: a single tap, or a ripple of them, or thumps.
Sometimes the feelings are too subtle: I don't know if I felt them or imagined them. My wrists might be numbed from too many smart devices. I set my alerts to "prominent" and got sharper nudges on my wrist.
The first watch introduced some ideas that eventually made their way to other iPhones. A "taptic engine" delivered on some amazingly refined vibration effects, ranging from a purr to a ping to a gentle tap. These were way ahead of what anybody else was doing -- and they weren't just a gimmick. The notification types associated with unique vibrations felt distinct. Sometimes, the vibrating taps on the first Watch weren't as powerful as I wanted. But with later updates, the haptics made parts of the interface seem real: virtual wheels, clicking as if moving with invisible gears.
The more advanced haptics made their way to the iPhone next, making us used to them now. Other phones, game consoles like the Nintendo Switch, and VR accessories, have evolved haptics since, but the Apple Watch was the first mainstream device that upped the haptics game.
Force Touch was another wild idea: Apple made its watch display force-sensitive, meaning a deeper press could work like pushing a button. Though this idea was refined further into 3D Touch on the iPhone 6S, 3D Touch was a technology that never became as necessary as expected, and current iPhone models have dropped the pressure-sensitive display tech completely.
The Apple Watch still has Force Touch, though, and I think it always will.
Digital Touch: I never used it much after that.
Sarah Tew
Lots of features. Too many features?
As you can see, this is a lot of stuff. Did I have fun using the watch? Yes, mostly, but there are so many features that I felt a little lost at times. There are so many ways to interact: swiping, touching, pressing harder into the display, a button and a clickable digital crown-wheel. Plus, there's Siri. Do I swipe, or click, or force touch or speak? Sometimes I didn't know where an app menu was. Or, I'd find getting back to an app I just had open would require an annoying series of crown clicks, swiping through apps, then opening the app again.
There's a reason I used the word "complicated" to describe my feelings using that first Apple Watch. Setting up bits of information, called complications, was slow and not always intuitive. Apps took a while to load, and were sometimes so slow that it was easier to check my phone instead. Quick glances and notifications, and phone calls, were fine. Apple Pay on the watch was clever, but would I use it? I wished the watch had more battery life.
I didn't like the overcomplicated feel. The design of the OS, and the card-like swappable mini-view apps that used to be on the Watch like a dock, changed over time. It's gotten better since.
Storing music on the watch, while it took a while to sync, was easier than attempts on Samsung Gear or Android Wear. Of course, I had to hunt for a good pair of Bluetooth headphones to connect with the watch.
Today I still forget to dive into and make the most of the apps on the watch. I just dusted off Walkie Talkie: it's cool. There's noise monitoring. One app lets me remote control my iPhone camera, which has been a huge help for my stay-at-home self-shot videos. The Remote app helps me when I lose the Apple TV remote every other day.
Third-party apps, and the grid of options? It turns out I don't use them much at all. I don't dig down deep into the layers of functions. I prefer what's on the surface: watch faces, and their readouts. But I've come to appreciate the watch's surprising number of options and settings. It's better than not having them at all.
The rings were the beginning.
Sarah Tew/CNET
Fitness: The ring idea was just the beginning
The Apple Watch doesn't work any fitness miracles that the rest of the wearable world hasn't already invented, and it doesn't ship with any new magical sensors that change the game. But the Apple-made integrated fitness apps, Activity and Workout, are far and away the best fitness apps on any existing smartwatch that isn't a dedicated "fitness watch" (Samsung Gear, Android Wear, Pebble and the like). A clever three-ring method of tracking daily activity, which simultaneously measures and rewards daily calorie burn, active exercise and standing up, feels like a fusion of rewards and metrics seen on the Nike FuelBand, Jawbone Up, Fitbit and others.
I appreciated Apple's complete-the-ring motivational activity tracker, which felt inspired by wearables like the Nike FuelBand (not surprising, since Apple's head of fitness, Jay Blahnik, arrived from Nike). For the red ring's daily goals, it's great. It felt too easy to complete the blue Stand ring, and it still does.
There are tons of fitness advancements Apple has made on the Watch in the last five years: GPS, resting heart rate, workout controls, social sharing, third-party app integration, swimming, modes for accessibility, activity trends -- and I haven't even discussed Apple's massive health aspirations like adding ECG, checking for falls, monitoring elevated or irregular heart rate or women's health tracking. There is some form of coaching and motivation, too. But I'd still love to see more of that. I hit a wall when trying to be fit, and there's only so much watches seem to help.
The first Apple Watch was more of a Fitbit. Now, it's more of a health companion. Those two worlds still feel like they need to dovetail and grow. There are missing features, too, like sleep tracking, which feels like the inevitable next step.
You still need an iPhone, just like in 2015.
Sarah Tew
It was, and still is, an iPhone accessory
Much like most other smartwatches, the Apple Watch isn't a standalone device -- it's a phone accessory. Android Wear, Samsung Gear, Pebble and others work the same way. But here, you must own an iPhone 5 or later to use the Watch. A few Apple Watch functions work away from the phone, but the watch primarily works alongside the phone as an extension, a second screen and basically another part of your iOS experience. It's a symbiote.
One thing I noted back then was that you needed an iPhone to use the Apple Watch. Unlike other wearables that can pair with Android or iOS, or even sync with a computer, the Apple Watch was always designed to live symbiotically with the iPhone.
That's still the case now. Even with independent cellular options, and an on-watch App Store, you can't use the Watch without pairing to an iPhone. And it still won't work with Android. It's a shame, because a fully standalone watch could be a really helpful tool for many people who don't have iPhones, and it could even be a phone alternative (for kids, maybe).
Apple's AirPods created a gadget trinity where the Watch, the iPhone and AirPods can all work seamlessly together. But that trinity is an expensive one. The entry price of the Apple Watch has dropped, at least. But it feels like an extension of the iPhone more than its own device, even now.
The Apple Watch Series 5: much better, with a few similarities.
Sarah Tew/CNET
Today: the best watch in a war of attrition
You don't need an Apple Watch. In many ways, it's a toy: an amazing little do-it-all, a clever invention, a possibly time-saving companion, a wrist-worn assistant. It's also mostly a phone accessory for now. In the months and years to come, that may change: with Apple's assortment of iPads, Macs, Apple TV and who knows what else to come, the watch could end up being a remote and accessory to many things. Maybe it'll be the key to unlock a world of smart appliances, cars and connected places. In that type of world, a smartwatch could end up feeling utterly essential.
I think back to what the Apple Watch was competing against back then: Jawbone, Pebble, Fitbit, Google's Android Wear, Samsung's watches, the Microsoft Band. A lot of competitors are gone now. Fitbit was acquired by Google. Samsung still has watches. Garmin makes lots of dedicated fitness watches. There are still plenty of more affordable relative newcomers, too.
The original Apple Watch, with the Pebble Steel, Moto 360 and the original iPod Nano with wristband (clockwise from top left).
Sarah Tew
In a field of fewer alternatives, the Apple Watch's consistent addition of new features and ongoing performance improvements has made it the best option. It's Apple's commitment to gradual improvements that has made it a stand-out watch now, especially compared to the struggles of Google's Wear OS.
The Apple Watch is still an iPhone accessory. And it's still not an essential product. But it's become a really fluid and useful device, one with lots of key upgrades that work, and one that's a lot easier to use.
What's the best smartwatch now? The Apple Watch. That doesn't mean I don't want to see improvements: battery life, sleep tracking, a watch face store and most importantly, Android support and true standalone function. If the last five years are any indication, Apple will tackle these problems on its own... time.
Apple's M1 Ultra Shows the Future of Computer Chips
Apple's M1 Ultra Shows the Future of Computer Chips
If you want a glimpse of where the processor business is headed, check out Apple's new M1 Ultra processor.
To deliver speed and performance, the consumer electronics giant married two of its older M1 Max chips using advancements in a once humble aspect of chipmaking called packaging. Packaging no longer just provides a protective housing but now also offers cutting-edge communication links.
By combining the two chips, Apple's M1 Ultra delivers a stunning 114 billion transistors that make up 20 processing cores and 64 graphics cores. By comparison, AMD Ryzen desktop processors use something like a tenth that number of transistors.
The M1 Ultra highlights the progress chipmakers have achieved in keeping Moore's Law alive. A dictum in the chip industry, Moore's Law predicts that the number of transistors on chips doubles every two years. Transistors, the basic circuit elements that process data, have been harder to miniaturize, which has slowed the progress initially charted by chip pioneer and Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. Advanced packaging offers a new way to bump up those transistor counts.
Apple isn't the only company working on advanced packaging technology to link chips together. Intel, AMD and Nvidia also have technology to combine multiple chip elements, called dies or chiplets, into a single larger processor. The M1 Ultra is arguably the most advanced example of the concept so far, but it won't be the last.
"You'll see it in mainstream PCs over time," said Tech Insights analyst Linley Gwennap, not just the Mac Studio systems costing $4,000 and up.
Chip packaging advances
Packaging has been around for as long as chips have been. Initially, it involved a housing to protect a processor and provide it with the electrical links to memory, communications and other elements of a computer. Over the years, it's gotten more and more complex. Now chipmakers see advanced packaging as a crucial element in sustaining computing progress.
Fine lines in these Intel Meteor Lake test chips show how multiple chiplets make up the whole processor.
Stephen Shankland/CNET
Apple's UltraFusion, the name of its packaging technology, uses a narrow silicon slice called an interposer that resides beneath the two M1 Max chips, linking them with 10,000 wires that can carry 2.5 terabytes of data per second over a very short distance. That enormous speed is necessary so chip cores on one die can reach memory that's connected to the other. Graphics processing units in particular have an insatiable appetite for data stored in memory.
Interposers historically have been large and expensive. Apple's custom approach involves a narrower slice that only traverses the connecting edges of the M1 Max chips.
Intel has developed a similar packaging technology, which it calls Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge. Intel hasn't used EMIB in any chips that are on the market yet but expects to begin selling one, a high-end server chip codenamed Sapphire Rapids, later this year. Sapphire Rapids will use EMIB to link four chips and four big memory modules, too.
UltraFusion's more expensive, densely packed wires lets Apple send data from one die to another roughly twice as fast as Intel does with Sapphire Rapids, said Real World Technologies analyst David Kanter.
Advanced packaging doesn't solve every problem. At twice the size of an M1 Max, the M1 Ultra consumes about twice the power and throws off twice the waste heat, a big design constraint for computers. Don't expect to see it in laptops.
Mix and match chiplet assembly is unusual today, but it'll become more ordinary. An alliance of almost all the world's top chipmakers should make it easier by developing standardized interfaces chiplets use to talk to each other.
Advanced chip packaging on the way
Apple's M1 Ultra is only one instance of new packaging methods. Larger interposers have been used for years, in particular by a very flexible but very expensive type of chip called an FPGA. More recently, it's taken steps toward the mainstream.
Intel's Sapphire Rapids chip, the next-gen Xeon model for the thousands of servers that pack data centers from companies like Google and Facebook, will include a model with four chips married into one. Its chiplets are connected with EMIB, which like interposers is a packaging approach called 2.5D since it's a step beyond the purely two-dimensional packaging used before.
Last year, AMD Chief Executive Lisa Su showed off a packaging technology that stacks chiplets one atop another, called 3D packaging. The first chips using the technology will be Ryzen 7 5800X3D gaming PC chips expected in coming weeks. AMD uses its approach, called 3D V-Cache, to bond high-speed memory chips into a processor complex for a 15% performance boost compared with conventional data links.
Intel, too, plans to use its 3D stacking technology, called Foveros, with 2023 PC chips code named Meteor Lake.
Both EMIB and Foveros also figure into this year's Ponte Vecchio processor, Intel's gargantuan graphics and AI chip geared for the Energy Department's Aurora supercomputer. "Ponte Vecchio is the apotheosis of advanced packaging," Kanter said.
Advanced packaging's high costs
Ponte Vecchio also embodies one of the problems of advanced packaging: expense. Designing, sourcing, aligning and bonding chiplets all adds complexity and expense to chip manufacturing. That means extra cost.
AMD CEO Lisa Su holds a prototype Ryzen chip with 3D V-Cache memory chiplets bonded on top for faster performance.
AMD video; Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET
Apple's Mac Studio computer is a case in point. It has a starting cost of $1,999 with the M1 Max processor but costs $3,999 with the M1 Ultra. If you want the most powerful version of the chip, with 64 GPUs, add another $1,000 to the price tag.
"Yes, it's possible to keep Moore's Law going, to continue to pack more and more transistors into a package, but we're not doing anything to address the cost," Tech Insights' Gwennap said. "A lot of practical issues need to be worked out before we get to this utopia where you buy a lot of chiplets, plug them together, and everything just works."
For more, take a look at everything else Apple announced Tuesday, including the iPhone SE 3 (here's how it compares to the 2020 model and why it's for people "who just want an iPhone"), new iPhone 13 colors, and the upgraded iPad Air, as well as the Mac Studio and Mac Studio Display. The products arrived alongside iOS 15.4, Apple's latest iPhone operating system update. You can explore all those products and more with CNET's event recap.
When I first heard of a new social media app called BeReal, I knew I had to try it.
The app bills itself as the "anti-Instagram." It takes the basic concept of the 'gram -- an endless-scroll feed of your friends' slice-of-life photos -- and revamps it into something more gamified and (a little) less phony. Lately it's become wildly popular.
Here's how it works: Every day, at a random and unpredictable time, the BeReal app sends you and everyone else on the app a push notification: It's "Time to BeReal." You then have two minutes to take a photo simultaneously using both your front and back camera and post to the feed. If you don't post, you can't look at your friends' posts either. If you post late (or retake the shot several times to get the right angle), the app will rat on you to your friends. When the next day's notification comes in, everyone's previous photos disappear.
The gamification comes from BeReal's once-a-day posting restraint; the authenticity comes from the fact that you don't get to pick where or when you post, and you can't use a filter to smooth your skin or correct the color of your avocado toast or whatever.
It actually sounded a lot like Wordle to me: A two-minute break from your day to complete a fun little task on your phone before returning to the grind or the doomscroll or, most likely, one of your other social media apps. And crucially, like Wordle, BeReal can only be "done" once a day.
What it's like to use BeReal
A sampling of my BeReal posts.
Karisa Langlo/CNET
I started recruitment by putting feelers out in a couple of my existing group chats. I had a hunch the app would be more of a fun group activity than a true social feed, for the same reason I sometimes still exchange Wordle (or Worldle, Heardle, or Antiwordle) results over text but can't understand why anyone is still tweeting them.
Not being a member of Gen Z myself, I knew it would be difficult to convince enough friends to join me. My invites had about a 50% success rate. One friend couldn't get past the usual AI-training paranoia around novelty photo-sharing apps. Another friend: "This feels like a trap." My own spouse left me on read.
The friends who did take the bait began posting gamely, often photos of their laptops or cats or protein powder. More often than not, my own BeReal front camera photos were unflattering ones of my weary, grumpy face while my back camera captured my son smearing ketchup around his highchair tray. Once, I posted the same view from my balcony that a dinner guest Instagrammed (and filtered the heck out of). Hers definitely looked better.
You can't technically win BeReal like you can Wordle, but I soon came to understand the particular satisfaction of achieving the trifecta: capturing an interesting tableau, taking a flattering selfie and posting it all on time. There's an element of luck, too, if you happen to be somewhere cool when it's time to be real and not on your couch or, as one of my friends feared, on the toilet.
"Hoping that I get the notification during my exciting moments and not when I'm pooping," he texted me one day. The daily anticipation around when it would arrive, he added, is "like a Jack in the box."
BeReal notifies you every day at a random time, with only two minutes to post a photo.
Sarah Tew/CNET
I "lost" BeReal several times: when the notification arrived after I'd gone to bed, was presenting during a camera-on Zoom meeting or was driving on the highway. But I totally won on the day the two-minute window coincided with the "greatest two minutes in sports," and I got a snap of my Kentucky Derby fascinator and Rich Strike crossing the finish line on TV.
Read more: After Today's Wordle, Try These 21 Other Puzzle Games
How real is BeReal, really?
Of my BeReal friends, 100% have plans to delete the app after this article publishes. They all took issue not with the app's spurious claims to authenticity but with its demands on their time.
"Getting the alert, especially during the workday or at night when I wouldn't normally be taking photos or posting anything, was a little stressful," one friend said.
"This app kind of highlights that ideally I want control over social media and not the other way around," another friend told me.
"I felt a little guilty if I didn't post every day," a third admitted.
If Wordle tried to dictate what time we all solved the puzzle every day, would the masses have turned on it by now? (Look what happened to HQ Trivia.)
But I'm personally more interested in the "Real" than the "Be."
The vibe on BeReal is actually more nostalgic than authentic. More early-Instagram than anti-Instagram. My favorite part of BeReal was the permission – nay, obligation – to post goofy selfies and capitulate to the adolescent egocentrism that still lurks beneath my now over-orchestrated grid. People don't give a crap what I ate for lunch, but I want them to know, dammit! One of my first Insta posts was just a photo of some Finger Hands finger puppets I found at a joke shop and thought were funny, and I miss posting stuff like that.
There doesn't seem to be an appetite on Instagram anymore for the detritus of daily life. Instead of Instagramming the places we visit, we now just visit Instagrammable places. Whereas Instagram has been taken over by influencers and "creators" posting Reels and memes, BeReal takes a different tack, as stated in its app store listing: "If you want to become an influencer you can stay on TikTok and Instagram."
Then again, "casual posting" and photo dumps are enjoying some popularity as the pendulum swings in favor of a rawer aesthetic. And many of the memes clogging my Insta feed are of the behind-the-scenes, "Instagram vs. Reality" persuasion. Plus, maybe the ephemerality and informality of Stories already kind of satiates that desire for the "real."
When you think of it that way, BeReal is more of a gimmick than a harbinger of social media change. And that's a shame, because even if no one on this side of 30 agrees with me, I kinda love it! Like Snapchat or TikTok, maybe it'll eventually be subsumed or reproduced within Instagram itself as an optional feature.
Or like Wordle, maybe it's nothing more than a digital curiosity that we'll one day describe as "fun while it lasted."
