Decentralized social app Bluesky announced on Thursday that it has raised a $15 million Series A round, following its $8 million seed raise last year. This funding comes as Bluesky sees increased growth, in part from X users who are troubled by recent changes to the block feature, as well as the move to allow third parties to train AI on users’ public posts. Within the last month alone, Bluesky has added around 3 million new users, bringing its total user base to about 13 million.

Bluesky was initially incubated inside Twitter as former CEO Jack Dorsey’s vision for what the future of social media should look like. But the social network and developer of the open source AT Protocol is no longer affiliated with Dorsey, who left the startup’s board earlier this year. Still, many of the initial goals for Bluesky remain consistent: like Mastodon, Bluesky’s AT Protocol is decentralized, meaning that individual people will be able to set up their own social servers and apps, and people outside of the company have transparency into how and what is being developed.

“With this fundraise, we will continue supporting and growing Bluesky’s community, investing in Trust and Safety, and supporting the ATmosphere developer ecosystem,” Bluesky’s blog announcement reads. “In addition, we will begin developing a subscription model for features like higher quality video uploads or profile customizations like colors and avatar frames.”

The Bluesky team has been quick to tell users that this paid tier will not be like X, where subscribers get exclusive blue check marks and algorithmic up-ranking, making their posts more visible.

“The way twitter did subscriptions was basically a blueprint for how bluesky shouldn’t do them,” Bluesky developer Paul Frazee posted. “‘Pay to win’ features like getting visibility or having a bluecheck because youre a subscriber is just wrong, and ruins the network for everyone.”

The Series A round is led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, SevenX, Darkmode’s Amir Shevat, and Kubernetes co-creator Joe Beda. The presence of a crypto-focused firm might alarm skeptics, especially since CEO Jay Graber used to be a software engineer for a crypto company, Zcash, but Bluesky has proactively assured users that the company is not pivoting to web3.

“Our lead, Blockchain Capital, shares our philosophy that technology should serve the user, not the reverse — the technology being used should never come at the expense of the user experience,” Bluesky said in its announcement. “This does not change the fact that the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.)”

Graber also announced that Kinjal Shah, a General Partner at Blockchain Capital, will be joining the board of Bluesky.

“[Shah] shares our vision for a social media ecosystem that empowers users and supports developer freedom, and it’s been a great experience working with her. With her support, we are well positioned to grow,” Graber wrote.

Bluesky is working on a premium subscription that will add features like higher-quality video uploads and some profile customization options. Unlike the premium subscription offered by X, however, Bluesky’s paid tier won’t boost the visibility of your posts, nor will it give your account a “verified” status. Bluesky, in a post on its blog, also notes that Bluesky “will always be free to use.”

“Subscription revenue helps us improve the app, grow the developer ecosystem, and gives us time to explore business models beyond traditional ads,” Bluesky chief operating officer Rose Wang wrote in a post. “Paid subscribers won’t get special treatment elsewhere in the app, like upranking premium accounts or blue checks next to their names.”

The iKOOLCORE R2 Max is a compact yet powerful mini PC that comes with either the Intel N100 or the more powerful Intel Core i3-N305, making it capable of handling various tasks such as content creation, virtualization, and office work.

Despite its small size, measuring just 15.7 x 11.8 x 4 cm, the R2 Max is well-equipped with four high-speed Ethernet ports – two 10GbE ports powered by Marvell AQC113C-B1-C chips and two 2.5GbE ports running on Intel i226-v controllers.

Tech billionaire Jared Isaacman became the first civilian to conduct the spacewalk on Thursday. Teaming up with SpaceX, the five-day Polaris Dawn mission was launched into space with a four-member crew on Tuesday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 

Joining the small elite group of spacewalkers, Isaacman and his crew waited until the capsule was depressurised before opening the hatch. 

ALSO READ | Polaris Dawn mission: Blast off! SpaceX launches all-civilian crew for first privately-funded spacewalk

All the crew onboard wore SpaceX’s new spacewalking suits, as the entire capsule was exposed to the vacuum of space. The suits offered protection to all the crew members from the harsh vacuum. 

“From here Earth sure looks like a perfect world,” said Isaacman after the spacewalk.

The orbit was reduced by half to 458 miles (737 kilometres) for the spacewalk.

ALSO READ | Human health in space: Charting the unknown on Polaris Dawn mission

Testing the spacewalking suit was one of the important tasks for the team. The spacewalking was expected to last for about two hours. Rather than the exact walking, it mostly involved stretching and movement of limbs. 

Isaacman had his hand or foot always attached to the capsule as he flexed his arms and legs. The hatch sported a walker-like structure for extra support. These are considered EVA- extravehicular activities, any activity done by an astronaut in outer space outside a spacecraft. 

According to experts, due to the microgravity situation nobody really ‘walks’ on the space. Any activity outside the spacecraft can be considered as spacewalking as there is movement outside the capsule in space, experts pointed out. 

After about 15 minutes outside, Isaacman was to be replaced by the SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis to go through the same motions. 

So far about 263 people have conducted a spacewalk representing 12 countries. 

When pushed into the tiniest of cracks, water can be used in unexpected ways. A new battery design that relies on tiny amounts of water confined within layers of clay could eventually offer sustainable power in places as extreme as Mars.

Vasily Artemov at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and his colleagues built the battery with components similar to conventional batteries, including two electrodes, one with a negative and one with a positive charge. But instead of making these electrodes metal, they used the carbon-based material graphene. Instead…

Apple is on the cusp of announcing new Macs equipped with its latest M4 chip, bringing more powerful performance and extra features to its computers. But this won’t be the first time the M4 has made an appearance — it’s already out in the latest iPad Pro.

But is the M4 chip any good? Should you upgrade your Mac or iPad to take advantage of it? And what new features will it bring to your devices? We’ve set out to answer these questions and more, blending together what we’ve learned from the M4 iPad Pro and information that has been leaked ahead of the M4 Macs launching this year. That should give you everything you need to know about Apple’s latest chip.

Price and release date

Apple has opted for something of a staggered approach for the M4 chip’s launch. Unlike most years, where Apple first releases its new chips in Mac computers, this time the company opted to put the M4 chip in the iPad Pro first, which arrived in May 2024.

As for Macs equipped with the M4 chip, those are expected imminently. Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman has claimed these computers will go on sale on or around November 1, which is just days away now. There could be an online event announcing these Macs a few days beforehand, Gurman believes.

We’re expecting to see the M4 chip in the MacBook Pro, the iMac and the Mac mini (the latter of which is due for a total makeover with a new, smaller design). Apple often launches new Macs in the fall, so the unveiling of these devices in a few days’ time makes sense.

That’s not the end of the M4 releases, though. The MacBook Air is due out in early 2025, with the Mac Studio and Mac Pro following later in the year. The MacBook Air will almost certainly be limited to the M4, while the Mac Studio and Mac Pro will come with more powerful variants (such as the M4 Max or M4 Ultra).

As for the price of the M4 Macs, we wouldn’t rule out an increase here. When Apple launched the M4 iPad Pro, it increased the price of both the larger and smaller models by $200 each. Granted, it changed other things (such as doubling the starting storage and introducing a new Tandem OLED display) that would have contributed to the price, but the fact remains that the cost to the consumer went up. That means we might end up seeing a similar price hike when the M4 chip comes to the Mac line.

Performance and features

Normally, assessing the performance of an Apple chip before it comes to the Mac would be mostly guesswork, but everything’s changed this time around. That’s down to two main reasons: the iPad Pro and a series of massive leaks of the M4 MacBook Pro.

Starting with the iPad Pro, we can infer how the M4 Macs might perform based on this tablet’s abilities. The M4 chip in the iPad Pro comes with a 10-core CPU and a 10-GPU (up from the 8-core CPU in the M3 chip), which helps to give it a bit more oomph in all sorts of workloads.

In our review, we saw significant improvements over both Apple’s past iPad Pros and rival tablets. Part of that improvement will be due to the second-generation 3nm process used to manufacture the chip, which Apple says is more efficient than its previous efforts. The M4 also contains an updated 16-core Neural Engine that can perform up to 38 trillion operations per second (TOPS). Apple says it’s more powerful than any neural processing unit in any AI PC today.

But what about Mac performance? Well, we have an inkling of what to expect here too, and it’s all thanks to a series of monumental leaks that saw the M4 MacBook Pro fall into the hands of various YouTubers well ahead of schedule, who proceeded to benchmark it and reveal its performance chops.

One of the YouTubers was a popular Russian tech reviewer named Wylsacom, who put the M4 MacBook Pro through its paces using a series of Geekbench tests. Here, the M4 chip in the MacBook Pro got a single-core score of 3864 and a multi-core result of 15288, which are roughly 27% and 31% better than those achieved by the M3 chip, respectively. That’s a sizable improvement.

As well as that, benchmarks for Apple’s Metal API have also surfaced on Geekbench, and these shed light on the upcoming MacBook Pro’s graphical capabilities. In these tests, the M4 chip scored 57603, which is about 20% ahead of the M3 chip. Again, that’s an encouraging result.

There’s one more thing revealed by the M4 MacBook Pro leaks: Apple is likely to upgrade the starting memory in these laptops from 8GB to 16GB. That’s a long-overdue change and should enable the devices to better handle multitasking and demanding workflows.

Many of these improvements — the RAM increase in particular — are likely to help Apple’s devices handle artificial intelligence (AI) duties. With the launch of Apple Intelligence, Apple has finally entered the AI mainstream, and it needs its devices to perform well in this increasingly important area.

When it comes to the most powerful chip in the M4 range (the M4 Ultra), there’s a potentially momentous change that might be on the way. As claimed by YouTube channel Max Tech, the M3 Max reportedly does not feature Apple’s UltraFusion tech. This is what has previously allowed Apple to stitch two M2 Max chips together to create the M2 Ultra.

If the M3 Max doesn’t have this feature, it suggests that the M4 Ultra could be its own standalone chip rather than two M4 Max chips fused together. That could mean better performance scaling compared to previous generations. Alternatively, the M3 Max may have lacked UltraFusion because the M3 Ultra never launched, and thus there was no need to fuse two M3 Max chips together for a non-existent higher-end chip. We might not know for sure until the M4 Max and M4 Ultra launch in 2025.

Which devices will get the M4?

We can make an educated guess as to which Macs will end up with the M4 chip, as well as which will get the higher-end variations like the M4 Pro, M4 Max and M4 Ultra.

Starting with the M4, this is likely to land in the MacBook Air (both 13-inch and 15-inch sizes), the 14-inch MacBook Pro, the iMac and the Mac mini. Given the chip will be at the lower end of Apple’s hierarchy, it makes sense to expect it in more consumer-facing devices. That said, it’s in the new iPad Pro, which Apple touts as a very powerful device.

Moving onto the more pro-grade chips, we can expect the M4 Pro to end up in the 16-inch and 14-inch MacBook Pro and the Mac mini as an upgrade variant. The M4 Max, meanwhile, should come to the 16-inch and 14-inch MacBook Pro and the Mac Studio.

Finally, look for the flagship M4 Ultra inside the Mac Studio and Mac Pro. Those aren’t expected until some point in the second half of 2025, though, so there will probably be quite a wait until we see them in action.