Apple surprised everyone yesterday by introducing an updated iPad mini. What was less surprising was the package itself. It has the same look and feel, but it’s doused in a few new colors and riding atop the might of A17 Pro silicon to enable Apple Intelligence.
“Built for Apple Intelligence,” says the company in its press headline. The tablet’s 8.3-inch screen has been blessed with support for Apple Pencil Pro, which bestows tricks like pressure recognition for strokes, hover, barrel roll, haptic feedback, and Find My support.
The asking price is still $500 for the Wi-Fi variant, while the cellular version will have you spending $649. Thankfully, the base storage capacity is now 128GB, not 64GB. That’s the end of the story for upgrades, and it leaves me awfully confused about what the point of the new iPad mini is — and who should buy it.
In hindsight, that also means the iPad mini doesn’t improve on any meaningful aspects that also held back its predecessor. Ever since Apple introduced the sixth-generation iPad mini with its flashy redesign, I’ve often asked myself a question: “Just how fast do I want my small tablet to be, and how deep should I dig into my wallet for it?” Yes, it’s small. A darn near perfect size for reading e-books. Maybe a bit of video watching and some casual games. The build quality is astonishingly great, too.
In Apple’s ad and some really well-shot independent videos, it looks like a fantastic device to put on the desk or shelf. Maybe as a secondary screen for controlling music playback or smart home devices, too. But spending half a grand for that kind of utility has never made sense to me.
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Some would say it’s a perfect little device for sketching and note-taking. Once again, that’s too much to pay for a digital notebook, especially when you pay dearly for that white pen. Or, in this case, $129 for the Apple Pencil Pro.
Or you could get one of Boox’s fantastic e-ink (color or monochrome) tablets, that are nearly half as slim, feel fantastic to write upon, and cost much less. Or get the Remarkable Pro, if you’re that serious about note-taking, and nab a free pen while you’re at it.
As far as creative work goes, I am not sure how many people go for the iPad mini as a serious work machine. Maybe, as an on-the-go, stop-gap slate. Or maybe an enthusiast hoping to get a feel for tools like Procreate before jumping to something like the iPad Air or Pro.
Earlier this year, while testing a Wacom tablet with a 13-inch OLED screen, I asked architects and fashion designers about their take on the thin slate. They loved the sleek machine but said it’s still not the best size for serious sketching or illustration work.
The iPad mini offers a considerably smaller 8.3-inch screen and a far less appealing LCD panel. The panel is identical to its predecessor, which itself was not really a benchmark in the category. To its credit, the screen was sharp and contrasty but not particularly bright.
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“I constantly have to run the iPad mini at max or near-max brightness just to work with it on a daily basis, and I’m sure that adversely affects battery life,” said Digital Trends’ review of the 2021 iPad mini. Apple hasn’t made any changes in that department for the seventh-gen iteration. I won’t unearth the jelly-scroll demons from 2021.
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Battery life is purely subjective as far as the mini tablet goes. For me, I regularly went past a whole day on the 2021 model. But my use-case scenario was “conditional” at best. A bit of reading, a couple of short OSINT lessons, and checking emails.
I won’t call it demanding by any stretch of the imagination. I tried working on the sixth-gen iPad mini. And by work, I mean my daily routine that I would otherwise ask my $500 OnePlus Pad 2 to handle. It wasn’t great.
I started by hunting for a keyboard accessory because Apple doesn’t make one for the iPad mini. I got the well-received HOU keyboard folio for a sweet $50, but I sorely missed the convenience of a trackpad. Despite my best attempts, the keyboard layout proved too cramped to race past a draft.
I’ve seen some folks editing videos on the iPad mini. I tried it, but I couldn’t handle the constant squinting at the screen. I just can’t imagine handling a timeline with even half a dozen audiovisual effects interspersed across the length of an 8-inch panel.
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Casual tools like Capcut? Maybe. Something like LumaFusion? Hell no! It’s just funny that the processor can handle short videos with ease. With the 2024 iPad mini, I don’t see the story changing.
Once again, you get a processor that would smoke the benchmark charts but is dramatically held back by the screen size. And while you’re pushing it, the battery will trickle down a little too fast for your liking.
I can confidently predict that fate after spending a few months with DaVinci Resolve and LumaFusion on the 13-inch iPad Pro with M4 silicon. And yeah, it definitely hurt handing over the 2021 iPad mini to my sister, less because I was feeling generous and more out of sheer frustration.
I don’t see how the 2024 iPad mini will change any of that. The silicon is fast. I reckon it goes toe-to-toe with the best that Android has to offer. I am just unsure what I will get out of all that firepower. Future-proofing? Certainly.
Then comes the question of Apple Intelligence, which many see as the Trojan Horse that would redefine the iOS and iPadOS experience. So far, that hasn’t happened in whatever little capacity Apple Intelligence has arrived.
In 2025, the AI toolkit is predicted to take its final form, with all the fancy bells and whistles such as ChatGPT integration. So, you’re essentially buying into the promise of features well into the future, but getting the payment slip before Christmas comes this year.
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Functionally, however, I don’t see how Apple Intelligence will make a practical impact. Priority and summarized notifications, voice transcription in Notes, and smart reply? Well, how impactful they are depends on how many “work” apps you’ve got running on the tiny tablet.
Image Playground and text-to-image Genmojis? Not exactly intelligent features, I’d say. Also, I don’t know many people who are psyched about a more conversational Siri and enthusiastically look forward to using it more frequently because it’s now a bit more chatty.
Interestingly, despite all its pitfalls, there’s an audience ready to lap up the iPad mini. It has a legion of ardent fans. Most of them adore its small form factor, and this tiny tablet just works for them for whatever utility it delivers.
I am just not sure the 2024 iPad mini offers anything meaningful to that audience — or to those still sticking to the older version with bezels as thick as a cocktail sausage. Why run to the nearest Apple Store for the new one when the old horse is still kicking and galloping?
Given the choice, I’d rather splurge on a used or refurbished sixth-gen iPad mini and save some cash to spend on an Apple Pencil to accompany it. The 2024 version doesn’t solve any problems associated with its predecessor.
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Unless you’ve been holding on for a refresh, the 2024 update won’t blow you away. It’s just the same car with a faster engine, with all the flaws of its predecessor still riding with it. If you’re OK in that driver’s seat, cheers to you. For the rest, side with gritty patience or look elsewhere.
When Hurricane Helene hit Asheville, North Carolina in September, the city’s police department reached out to public safety drone startup Paladin for help. The startup’s 30-member team jumped into action working nights and through the weekend to assist Asheville’s police department with locating people and dropping off supply.
Asheville was a Paladin customer and its team was able to help because its software could control drones remotely from the company’s Houston headquarters, Paladin founder and CEO Divy Shrivastava told TechCrunch. This allowed Paladin’s tech to make a big difference in spite of Asheville’s closed roads and lack of cell phone or internet service on the ground.
“I think it has painted a clear picture for me of what the future of the drone industry will look like,” Shrivastava said. “We were grateful that Asheville trusted us to help.”
While able to help in a natural disaster, Paladin was launched as first responder technology meant to help to reduce the time between a 911 call and help being on the way, Shrivastava said.
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Paladin’s software is designed to work with any drone, and to be easy to use, Shrivastava said. When a 911 dispatcher gets a call, a Paladin-powered drone is dispatched within 90 seconds to the scene of the call. The public safety department can then see the situation from its office to determine what kinds of resources need to be sent, if any.
The motive behind Paladin is a personal one. When Shrivastava was 17 years old and living in Ohio, his friend’s house caught on fire. While 911 had been called right away, first responders took a while to get there. The house ended up burning to the ground and the experience stuck with Shrivastava.
“I got really obsessed with this problem of not having modern infrastructure for public safety,” Shrivastava said. “It seemed obvious at that point, the problems were slow response times and lack of situational awareness. A drone has a camera and can bridge the gap in information. You’ll be looking at a live feed of exactly what the emergency is.”
Shrivastava began working on the idea in college before dropping out to do the Thiel Fellowship, an incubator program led by Peter Thiel. He formally launched the company in 2018 and started selling in 2021. Since then the company has landed contracts with dozens of public safety departments, it says, and is seeing its revenue nearly double quarter over quarter.
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Paladin recently raised a $5.2 million seed round led by Gradient, Google’s early-stage AI fund, with participation from Khosla Ventures, 1517, and Toyota Ventures, among others. The raise will be used to continue to build out Paladin’s software capabilities, and to put resources toward getting the company’s name out there more, Shrivastava said.
In addition to the funding, the company also announced a host of new capabilities for its drone software including the ability for drones to drop off supplies at a 911 call, like Narcan or life vests, and the ability for drones to spot and navigate around other aircraft.
Shrivastava said that the company has not only been able to help reduce the time between a 911 call and its response but also help clear 10-25% of 911 calls that are either false or miscalls that don’t require a response at all. He added that clearing unnecessary calls makes a huge difference because many police departments are short on officers and resources.
“The majority of departments, they have less than 50 sworn officers,” Shrivastava said. “One piece of technology that is making you 25% more efficient is significant. What is sometimes easy to forget is the majority of the country are very small towns with limited resources. These are problems they see all the time.”
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Shrivastava knows what some people will think when they hear Paladin is helping equip police departments with drones — that they will be used for surveillance or for patrolling in general. He said Paladin was really intentional about its software’s use cases and said its designed to only activate in response to a 911 call.
He added they are also compliant with drone regulations in all 50 states and that the drones won’t start taking video until they arrive at their destination.
Using technology to make public safety work better is an area seeing more interest from entrepreneurs as of late. Prepared is another startup building in this space with a similar mission. Prepared is building a system to help 911 dispatchers by giving them a more complete picture of what is happening at the site of a call using video. Prepared has raised more than $70 million in venture capital.
Shrivastava said that demand is there from public safety departments and that the startup is now getting multiple inbound requests for the tech a week.
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“We are still early in terms of the entire market,” Shrivastava said. “We are in dozens of cities right now and have scaled pretty quickly, but that is less than 0.1% of the market.”
It’s been just over twenty-four hours since the launch of the Donald Trump-endorsed digital coin “WLFI,” and the token is failing to deliver on the ambitious fundraising goals set by its founding team.
World Liberty Financial — which bills itself as a crypto bank where customers will be encouraged to borrow, lend and invest in digital coins — began its token sale on Tuesday morning. On Monday, project co-founder Zachary Folkman bragged in a pre-launch stream on X that “well over 100,000 people” were whitelisted to invest.
“We knew that this project was highly anticipated. We knew that there was a lot of excitement in the marketplace,” said Folkman to the 12,000 people tuning into the event on X. “However, these numbers are just, in my opinion, unheard of, and I think we’re setting all sorts of new records in crypto.”
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But blockchain data tracked by Etherscan shows that about 9,050 unique wallet addresses hold the token as of Wednesday morning, representing roughly 9% of the total number of people who registered.
Trump pumped the coin in a video post on X on Tuesday evening, promoting the World Liberty website and telling his followers that the token sale was live and that “crypto is the future.”
In a roadmap given to prospective investors first viewed by The Block, the WLF proposal says the coin is looking to raise $300 million at a $1.5 billion valuation in its initial sale. The platform says, so far, it has sold more than 788 million tokens at $0.015 per token.
That is less than 4% of the 20 billion tokens made available for public sale and amounts to around $11.8 million, still well off the $300 million fundraising target.
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WLF did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Part of the problem was that the project website, the exclusive marketplace for the new coin, suffered regular, lengthy outages frequently showing a page saying, “We are under maintenance.”
But there are other roadblocks that may have impacted the coin’s debut. WLFI is a Regulation D token offering, which means retail investors have largely been cut out of the process.
This provision makes it possible to raise capital without first registering a security with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, but certain conditions must be met, such as limiting the size of the sale and restricting it to accredited investors, defined in part as having a net worth of more than $1 million. While the offering is one way to reduce legal exposure, it cuts down on the size of the potential investor pool.
The World Liberty team has also been specific in calling WLFI a governance token that allows holders to vote on decisions regarding the protocol, but would not signify equity in the venture itself.
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As of now, however, there’s nothing for WLFI token holders to vote on since the crypto bank connected to the digital coin doesn’t yet exist.
Last week, WLF began the crypto bank approval process with Aave, one of the longest-running and most-trusted crypto lending platforms.
World Liberty has not released an official white paper or formal business plan to the public. A 400-word proposal posted to Aave’s governance forum, which is used to discuss and vote on proposed projects such as WLF, is nearly all that’s been disclosed.
Coin holders get a sort of I-O-U until the platform is approved and goes live. In the meantime, investment in the coin goes to the platform’s treasury.
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WLF’s website adds in the fine print that Trump and his family members may receive tokens from World Liberty Financial and that they are “entitled to receive significant fees for services provided to World Liberty Financial, which amount cannot yet be determined.”
Users on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac are having trouble downloading apps from Apple’s App Store right now. When users tap “Get” to download an app, the icon swirls briefly to indicate that it’s loading, but then it reverts to “Get,” leaving them unable to install the app they want.
Even though users are experiencing issues downloading apps, it seems the App Store can still update them.
Apple’s status page still indicates that its App Store services are operating normally. The Verge reached out to Apple with a request for information about the App Store issues but didn’t immediately hear back.
By understanding how skin develops researchers hope to slow the signs of aging
Researchers have made a scientific discovery that in time could be used to slow the signs of ageing.
A team has discovered how the human body creates skin from a stem cell, and even reproduced small amounts of skin in a lab.
The research is part of a study to understand how every part of the human body is created, one cell at a time.
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As well as combatting ageing, the findings could also be used to produce artificial skin for transplantation and prevent scarring.
The Human Cell Atlas project is one of the most ambitious research programmes in biology.
One of the project’s leaders, Prof Muzlifah Haniffa, said it would help scientists treat diseases more effectively, but also find new ways of keeping us healthier for longer, and perhaps even keep us younger-looking.
“If we can manipulate the skin and prevent ageing we will have fewer wrinkles,” said Prof Haniffa of the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
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“If we can understand how cells change from their initial development to ageing in adulthood you can then try and say, ‘How do I rejuvenate organs, make the heart younger, how do I make the skin younger?’”
That vision is some way off but researchers are making progress, most recently in their understanding of how skin cells develop in the foetus during the early development stage of human life.
When an egg is first fertilised human cells are all the same. But after three weeks, specific genes inside these so-called “stem cells” switch on, passing along instructions on how to specialise and clump together to form the various bits of the body.
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Researchers have identified which genes are turned on at what times and in which locations to form the body’s largest organ, skin.
Under the microscope and treated with chemicals they look like tiny fairy lights.
Genes that turn orange form the skin’s surface. Others in yellow determine its colour and there are many others which form the other structures that grow hair, enable us to sweat and protect us from the outside world.
Alain Chédotal and Raphaël Blain, Inserm
A developing human foot, on which dots of different colours are genes building bone, muscle and cartilage
The researchers have essentially obtained the instruction set to create human skin and published them in the journal Nature. Being able to read these instructions opens up exciting possibilities.
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Scientists already know, for example, that foetal skin heals with no scarring.
The new instruction set contains details of how this happens, and one research area could be to see if this could be replicated in adult skin, possibly for use in surgical procedures.
In one major development, scientists discovered that immune cells played a critical role in the formation of blood vessels in the skin, and then were able to mimic the relevant instructions in a lab.
They used chemicals to turn genes on and off at the right time and in the right places to grow skin artificially from stem cells.
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So far, they have grown tiny blobs of skin, out of which have sprouted little hairs.
BBC News
Green light is used to illuminate a tiny blob of skin grown in a lab. The finger points to hair follicles
According to Prof Haniffa, the eventual aim is to perfect the technique.
“If you know how to build human skin, we can use that for burns patients and that can be a way of transplanting tissue,” she said.
“Another example is that if you can build hair follicles, we can actually create hair growth for bald people.”
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The skin in the dish can also be used to understand how inherited skin diseases develop and test out potential new treatments.
Megumi Inoue Alain Chédotal Institut de la Vision
A Human Cell Atlas image of the developing lung
Instructions for turning genes on and off are sent all across the developing embryo and continue after birth into adulthood to develop all our different organs and tissues.
The Human Cell Atlas project has analysed 100 million cells from different parts of the body in the eight years it has been in operation. It has produced draft atlases of the brain and lung and researchers are working on the kidney, liver and heart.
The next phase is to put the individual atlases together, according to Prof Sarah Teichmann of Cambridge University, who is one of the scientists who founded and leads the Human Cell Atlas Consortium.
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“It is incredibly exciting because it is giving us new insights into physiology, anatomy, a new understanding of humans,” she told BBC news.
“It will lead to a rewriting of the textbooks in terms of ourselves and our tissues and organs and how they function.”
Genetic instructions for how other parts of the body grow will be published in the coming weeks and months – until eventually we have a more complete picture of how humans are built.
Facebook and Instagram parent company, Meta, has come under legal scrutiny in the US over allegations that its social media platforms are dangerous to teenagers’ mental health because they are overly addictive.
A federal court in California has now declined to grant the request made by Meta for dismissal of two lawsuits which were filed last year.
Both lawsuits, backed by more than 30 US states, accuse Meta of exploiting young users through addictive algorithms, raising concerns about mental and physical health consequences.
It’s not an entirely black and white case – although the judge determined that Meta would be covered by Section 230, a federal law regulating online platforms, which in this case would afford the company protection from some claims, she noted that the states had presented enough evidence regarding misleading statements, therefore much of the case could proceed.
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California Attorney General Rob Bonta commented: “Meta needs to be held accountable for the very real harm it has inflicted on children here in California and across the country.”
Meta has expressed disagreement with the ruling, stating that it has developed tools to support parents and teens, including Teen Accounts on Instagram with additional protections.
The ruling also affects other social media giants. Meta, along with TikTok, Snapchat and the Google-owned YouTube, have sought to dismiss related personal injury lawsuits brought by individual plaintiffs, however the judge has since rejected their motions, allowing those claims to continue as well.
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A Meta spokesperson told TechRadar Pro in an email:
“While we welcome the Court’s decision to limit the focus of some claims, consistent with prior rulings on Section 230, we disagree with the overall ruling. We’ve developed numerous tools to support parents and teens, and we recently announced that we’re significantly changing the Instagram experience for tens of millions of teens with new Teen Accounts, a protected experience for teens that automatically limits who can contact them and the content they see. We believe the evidence will demonstrate our commitment to supporting young people.”
José Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, told us:
“Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work. In collaboration with youth, mental health and parenting experts, we built services and policies to provide young people with age-appropriate experiences, and parents with robust controls. The allegations in these complaints are simply not true.”
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TikTok and Snapchat did not immediately respond.
If you are concerned about screen time and social media usage, why not take a look at the best parental control apps.
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