systems

The last proprietary minicomputer, now in ‘deskside’ form if you fancy that

IBM has again teased small hardware, this time in the form of an update for its smallest POWER server.

The model S1112, teased Tuesday in a customer announcement, is a 2U, single-socket POWER11 server IBM offers in rack-mountable and what the company calls “Tower/deskside configuration.”

The rackable model can handle a ten-core POWER processor. The Tower/deskside form factor machine must make do with a four-core engine

IBM seems to have two roles in mind for the new machines: edge deployments and standalone use by those who are taking their first strides into using the last remaining proprietary minicomputer ecosystem.

One is edge deployments. The other is as an entry-level box, with the description of the tower unit suggesting its very existence means “even the smallest customers” can use it as an on-ramp to more POWER implementations.

News of the S1112 marks the second time in a week that IBM has gone low with modest hardware. Last week Big Blue teased the z17 ME2, a rackable mainframe that it said completed its range by offering a smaller and cheaper piece of hardware.

The twin launches continue IBM’s policy of creating smaller versions of its enterprise hardware, albeit well after launch of big iron: the first POWER 11 boxes landed in July 2025 and the first z17 series mainframes debuted in April of the same year.

The S1112 includes a quartet of DIMM slots and can handle up to 512GB of DDR5 memory. The box runs IBM i, AIX, and Linux – or all three because it supports IBM’s PowerVM virtualization tools.

In an almost certain non-coincidence, Big Blue on Tuesday also announced upgrades for PowerVM including improved automation and support for the S1112.

Big Blue has also looked after users of bigger POWER fleets, by expanding the number of Spyre accelerators – IBM’s neural processing units – that POWER servers can support from eight to twelve. IBM pitches POWER as a capable AI platform, so allowing it to use more accelerators can’t hurt.

IBM plans to start selling most of the kit described above on July 24, although customers who crave the S1112 to deploy in Taiwan will have to wait until September. 15. Would-be buyers in South Africa, India, and China must wait longer still, until December 11. ®

Tesla has said Cybercab employee rides are starting soon at its Texas factory. The announcement came with a clip of a gold Cybercab, butterfly doors up and no steering wheel or pedals, driving itself across the outbound lot, Mashable reports.

Note the tense. Tesla said the rides are “starting soon”, not that they have started, and several outlets have already reported it the other way round.

That is the whole announcement. No route, no fleet size, and no word on whether the rides happen on public roads or entirely on Tesla’s own property.

What we are actually looking at

Strip away the framing and a car drove itself around a car park. Autonomous vehicles have managed that on private land for well over a decade.

Giga Texas is an enormous site with real internal roads, so a genuine campus shuttle would mean something. A loop across the outbound lot would not.

Tesla has not said which it is. Electrek, which broke down the announcement, concluded it could not tell either.

What it is definitively not is the thing people are waiting for. The Cybercab has not joined Tesla’s paying robotaxi fleet in Austin, which still runs on Model Y vehicles.

The hardware is not the problem

It is worth being fair to Tesla here, because the manufacturing is genuinely impressive. Its unboxed assembly process works, and the Cybercab is the most efficient vehicle the company has built.

More than a hundred finished Cybercabs are reportedly stacked in the Giga Texas lot. Tesla can make these things.

The bottleneck is software, and it is a brutal one. With no steering wheel and no pedals, there is no fallback, so if the self-driving system fails the vehicle simply cannot be driven.

That is survivable at walking pace in a car park. It is a different proposition on a public street.

The record so far

Tesla’s autonomy numbers remain difficult. TNW has reported that its Austin robotaxis crash roughly every 57,000 miles, about four times worse than the human average.

The scale gap is starker still. Tesla has 42 vehicles authorised for driverless ridehailing in Texas against Waymo’s 577, which is a matter of public record rather than opinion.

Progress is real, though, and worth saying plainly. Tesla began on-road engineering tests of the production Cybercab in Austin at the end of June, with a safety monitor riding in the passenger seat, and it now runs robotaxis in Miami with no safety monitor at all.

The story that matters

Here is what got buried under the video. On 9 July, two days before the clip appeared, the NHTSA administrator said the agency would “absolutely” consider scrapping the rule requiring driverless vehicles to have steering wheels and manual controls.

That is the constraint that has kept the Cybercab in a legal grey zone. A car with no controls is difficult to square with federal standards written on the assumption that a human might need to take over.

The dismantling is already under way. Washington has proposed dropping the brake pedal requirement for autonomous vehicles, and is now weighing the steering wheel rule too.

Tesla’s strategy suddenly makes sense in that light. It has pointedly refused to apply for individual exemptions, which are capped at 2,500 vehicles a year, betting instead that the rules themselves would move.

So far, that bet is paying off. Musk has been explicit that broad regulatory approval, not exemptions, is how the Cybercab reaches scale.

Why the car park video exists

A company mass-producing a vehicle it cannot yet legally or reliably deploy needs to show motion. A gold Cybercab gliding past the factory doing something, anything, is motion.

It is not dishonest, exactly. It is just a much smaller milestone than the reaction suggests, and Tesla left the framing conveniently vague.

The serious test is unchanged. Get a Cybercab carrying paying passengers on public roads in Austin, with nobody in the front seat.

Until then, the most consequential thing happening to this vehicle is not being filmed in a car park. It is being written into the Federal Register.

iOS 27 public beta rolled out this afternoon and the rebuilt Siri is the reason most people will install it on day one. After years of half-steps and delays, Apple has delivered a version that actually reaches into your email, messages, calendar, and the stuff on your screen to get things done without forcing you to open half a dozen apps first.

Early testers who have been using developer builds for a month have detected a very small but significant shift. You don’t find yourself reaching for the browser or, for that matter, Spotlight as frequently as you formerly did. Now, a simple swipe down from the top of the screen feels quite intuitive and is frequently the quickest method to go where you need to go. When you ask Siri about the order of bands at a free concert you found online, she will search through the page, double-check the primary sites, and tell you who is closing out. Or, better yet, ask it to grab all of your WWDC briefings from your email and convert them into individual calendar events, which it does, complete with all of the appropriate times.

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The real magic happens with personal context, but you must allow the phone some time to get a hold on all of your data, which can take several days depending on how much you have stored. Once everything has been indexed, Siri will be able to be extremely intelligent about what is hidden in Mail, Messages, Notes, Reminders, and Calendar. Want to know what’s happening this week? Just ask, and it’ll surface that TikTok Shop order that’s coming in the mail, the tickets your friends were talking about in that group chat, a birthday party, and a live show, all without you having to recall all the specifics, and it’ll even remember your partner’s food preferences based on notes and past messages, then remind you they don’t do salad.

Onscreen awareness turns the whole phone into a smarter surface. Look at a concert page and say “remind me to buy tickets to this when they go on sale” and Siri understands you mean the event in front of you. Scroll past a post about a singer’s comments and ask “where did she say this?” and it pulls the festival name and source links. Point the new Siri mode in the Camera app at a membership barcode and it offers to turn the photo into a Wallet pass. Visual Intelligence also works for quick identification: snap a clip from an old show and it names the actor, then answers follow-ups about recent roles.

Responses now appear directly inside Siri on Messages and Notes, so you can try it out by specifying the tone you desire and watching an entire paragraph appear, ready to send. Answers are now available within the Dynamic Island. Pull down on any of them, and the entire discussion will open up, allowing you to continue where you left off without having to start over. There is also a specific Siri app that allows you to save all of your history and sync it privately via iCloud. You can pick how long all of these chats stay on your phone, 30 days, a year, or forever, and those with the correct hardware receive added speech options like changeable pace and expressiveness sliders, allowing your assistant to sound even more natural.

If you grew up in the 1980s or ’90s, you likely remember shaky home video footage, taken with a handheld camcorder, of family gatherings, vacations, and other events.

Camcorders combined a camera with a video recorder. They included a rechargeable battery, a slot for a videotape, and a shoulder strap. Most were outfitted with an optical zoom lens and a small, articulating screen—a display mounted on a hinge that could tilt and rotate. The operator could check the screen to view what was being recorded.

The user’s natural hand and body movements when filming led to jittery footage. The best way to get a steady shot was to place the camcorder on a tripod or a gimbal: a motorized stabilizer.

There were fewer poor-quality recordings after Panasonic introduced its PV-460 VHS camcorder in 1988. It was the first video camera to include an optical image stabilizer, which compensated for movements. Stabilization features are now standard in today’s cameras including ones found in smartphones and drones.

The PV-460 camcorder was honored as an IEEE Milestone on 9 July. The dedication ceremony was held in Kadoma, Japan, at the Panasonic Museum, which displays the company’s past products.

The IEEE Kansai Section in Japan sponsored the Milestone.

“The release of the PV-460 fundamentally transformed personal videography, enriching the way people captured travel, events, and family memories,” section members wrote in support of the Milestone nomination. Their proposal is available here.

“Its image stabilization features democratized video creation by dramatically lowering technical barriers, allowing ordinary people to express themselves with newfound creative freedom,” they wrote. “Beyond the home, image stabilization technology found critical applications in specialized fields, contributing to advancements in areas such as educational media and telemedicine.”

The history of camcorders

Before the camcorder was invented in 1982, people filming events in the 1970s and early 1980s used two pieces of equipment: a video camera and a separate video cassette recorder (VCR), which were connected by a multipin cable. The camera was about the size of a toaster, and the VCR could be as large as a suitcase. To record, the person operated the camera with one hand and carried the VCR in the other or rested it on a shoulder. The cable transmitted the images from the camera to the cassette.

The PV-460 was made possible by several groundbreaking innovations, according to the Milestone proposal, one of which dates back to the 1950s.

In 1956 Italian manufacturer Durst released its Automatica, considered one of the first cameras to use automatic exposure technology. By combining a light meter with the camera’s internal mechanical systems, the technology removed the necessity of calculating exposure settings by hand when the lighting shifted or other conditions changed. The innovation enabled amateur photographers to take decent pictures.

The next breakthrough technology—autofocus—was invented in 1973 by Norman Stauffer, a manager of research for Honeywell in Littleton, Colo. It uses a sensor, a control system, and a motor to focus on a selected area. The invention led to the development of early electronic autofocus cameras, which eliminated the need for photographers to manually adjust the lens. Stauffer received the 1990 IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Technology Award for his invention.

“The release of the PV-460 fundamentally transformed personal videography, enriching the way people captured travel, events, and family memories.” —Milestone sponsors

U.S. inventor Jerome Lemelson is credited with developing technologies that underpinned the camcorder, according to MIT. In the 1950s and ’60s, Lemelson filed several patent applications related to video and audio recording devices. In 1980 he was granted patents related to a portable video camera system. In 1982 JVC and Sony used the technologies to develop what they called the camera/recorder, which became known as a camcorder.

Sony released the first handheld camcorder in 1983: the Betamovie BMC-100P. It used the Betamax videocassette format and could record up to 3.5 hours of footage on 1.27-centimeter cassette tape. The operator rested the 2.5-kilogram camcorder on top of a shoulder to shoot footage. It sold for around US $2,000 at the time (roughly $33,400 today). The machine couldn’t rewind or play back tapes; it could only record.

Other electronics companies including JVC soon introduced their own models using the VCR format, which eventually replaced Betamax.

Over time, camcorders became more compact.

But none of the companies could fix the shaky-footage problem.

Solving a shaky problem

A team at Panasonic led by researcher Mitsuaki Oshima took on the task of image stabilization: detecting and correcting small camera movements, referred to as camera shake, according to the proposal. Oshima, an IEEE life senior member, is now an honorary Fellow at Panasonic.

“The movements that needed to be detected and corrected included horizontal, vertical, and rotational motions—specifically pitch, yaw, and roll,” the Milestone sponsors wrote. “Rotational motion, in particular, becomes the dominant factor affecting image stability during high-magnification shooting. Therefore, the development team focused on detecting rotational motion and began developing an angular velocity sensor.”

An AVS, essentially a gyroscope, detects how quickly an object is changing its orientation in space.

Sensors capable of detecting angular velocity were large and expensive at the time, making them unsuitable for consumer video cameras, the sponsors wrote. What was needed, they said, was a compact and inexpensive version.

Oshima and his team built a high-performance, small, low-cost vibration-type gyroscope. The stabilization mechanism included a miniaturized sensor paired with an optical-axis correction mechanism.

The mechanism adjusts the lens or image sensor to counteract physical shifting and vibrations, ensuring that the light path remains centered on the sensor—which is crucial for maximizing sharpness and quality, the Milestone sponsors wrote.

“The system detects lens displacement caused by camera shake and immediately compensates for it, ensuring stable video footage,” they wrote. “As a result, the effects of camera shake are minimized, allowing users to capture smooth and steady videos with ease.”

Without Oshima’s image stabilization technology, the PV-460 wouldn’t have been developed and released in 1988.

The technology was patented and broadly licensed by other companies. It has become a standard feature in a variety of imaging applications.

Awards and accolades

The PV-460 gained instant popularity when it debuted in June 1988. It received rave reviews at that year’s Consumer Electronics Show.

Panasonic received a 100 Award in 1989 from R&D World magazine for “the development of a VHS camcorder with an antishake mechanism.”

Oshima’s research paper, “VHS Camcorder With Electronic Image Stabilizer,” and others are available in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

To learn more about historical figures in engineering, IEEE Milestones, and IEEE History Center programs and events, check out The Institute’s IEEE Tech History collection. IEEE Spectrum also covers aspects of tech history.

Milestone plaque display

The Milestone plaque is to be displayed on the ground floor of the Panasonic Museum, which is open to the public. The museum is located near the now-shuttered Panasonic research lab where the technology was developed. The plaque reads:

“In 1988 the pioneering PV-460 camcorder equipped with image stabilization for enabling smooth and steady video capture was introduced by Panasonic. By pairing a miniaturized vibrating-structure gyroscope sensor with an optical-axis correction mechanism, the PV-460 eliminated the jitter caused by hand motion. Broad international licensing of this patented scheme made it a standard feature in film and digital cameras, smartphones, and related imaging devices.”

Selected by the IEEE History Committee and endorsed by the IEEE Board of Directors, IEEE Milestones recognize outstanding technical developments around the world that are at least 25 years old. The Milestone program is administered by the IEEE history and heritage group.

E Ink is cool. It’s easy to read, doesn’t drain the battery and looks like real paper (kind of). Having more than just one phone screen is also cool. The new Hisense A10 fits both those bills, and that’s why it’s piqued my interest.

Hisense — a Chinese company known for consumer electronics, primarily televisions and appliances — officially announced the A10 on Monday. As posted by reputable insider Experience More on Weibo, the phone’s main screen uses E Ink, and it also has a detachable color LCD screen on the back. Hisense had teased the A10 last month. 

Available initially in China at around $600, it’s unclear when it might reach US markets. Gagadget said it’s possible that US buyers will have to go through AliExpress, eBay or other specialist traders.

The insider said the detachable magnetic screen might not be included with the phone and will be sold separately. It could be similar to the Vamvo screen that can be attached to iPhones and Android phones.

A10 could offer customers a lot of flexibility. They could take just their main E Ink phone with them for simple calling and texting, keeping their battery life strong, or they could attach the second screen for videos, gaming or other apps that need color and graphics. Hisense didn’t specify how the two screens would communicate data.

In terms of specs, Experience More said the A10’s main screen measures 6.13 inches and is a black-and-white E Ink display. With Android 16, the phone runs on 5G and uses a 4nm Qualcomm octa-core chip, which is not quite as powerful as the Snapdragon 8 Elite.

A Hisense representative didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Drawn toward E Ink

I’m fascinated by Hisense’s unique twist on the trend of “the more screen, the better,” as foldables take center stage and the Apple Ultra or Fold potentially debuts this fall. But I’m even more interested in a second screen being paired with an E Ink main screen.

E Ink phones are a small market gaining big traction. By replacing harsh, glowing screens with paper-like displays, they eliminate glare, reduce eye strain and significantly boost battery life. The major trade-off is that they aren’t built for fast scrolling or watching videos. But for fans, that distraction-free simplicity is the main attraction.

I’ve used Amazon’s Kindle and a Kobo e-reader — two of CNET’s most highly reviewed brands — and it’s amazing how easy it is to read books on them. With glare-free screens and matte finishes, they even look and feel like real paper. I’m liking the combo of E Ink phone simplicity with video and app versatility.

Tech tester Austin Evans, who has nearly 6 million subscribers to his YouTube channel, said the Hisense A10 offers a nice return to a more minimalist phone experience without sacrificing useful apps.

Though most of us know we spend too much time on our devices, going back to a flip phone means losing access to convenience and social connection, Evans told CNET. 

“An E Ink phone is generally compatible with the apps you rely on, but the screen quality and refresh rate are too limited for extended doom scrolling.” In other words, an E Ink phone could give us the functionality of a smartphone without the addictive nature of a smartphone.

Nous Research, the startup behind the open-source Hermes agent, is finalizing a new round of funding led by Robot Ventures, with significant participation from USV and other prominent investors at a $1.5 billion valuation, according to three sources with knowledge of the deal. The company is raising at least $75 million, and fielded a high level of interest from investors, according to the people.

Nous Research declined to comment. USV and Robot Ventures didn’t respond to our request for comment.

The company was founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, Shivani Mitra. Before this round, it had raised a total of $70 million in funding from investors including Paradigm, Robot Ventures, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital, and Balaji Srinivasan, according to Crunchbase.

Weeks after Openclaw’s agent went viral, Nous Research released its own competitor called Hermes. OpenClaw is an agent that runs locally on a PC and can perform tasks on behalf of the user. One key difference is that Hermes shipped with built-in “skills,” such as web search, coding and image understanding. Furthermore, it was designed to automatically learn from people’s usage and build more skills without manual intervention. Additionally, the startup has released language models focused on coding and math.

Just like Openclaw, users can automate tasks with Hermes and chat with these agents or receive messages from them in apps like Telegram and Discord. These tools have become increasingly popular as they allow users to run their AI agents remotely and around the clock.

Open-source and widely adopted, Hermes has amassed a massive following on GitHub, boasting roughly 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks. Developers can run Hermes on a desktop or on a virtual private server.

But Nous Research also offers a cloud-hosted version, which some users may find to be more user-friendly, avoiding any setting up on their own machines. The hosted version is available via various paid tiers ranging from $20-$200 a month.

Sources say the new funding will help to expand Hermes’ products and business model further.

• Xiaomi reveals its first extended-range electric vehicle
• SkyNomad will sit separately from its pure EV Xiaomi Auto company
• The 1.5-liter engine is manufactured by Changan’s subsidiary Harbin Dongang

Xiaomi is set to enter the hotly contested luxury SUV sector with an all-new business that it has dubbed SkyNomad.

Fresh off the success of both the SU7 and YU7, the former of which has outsold the Tesla Model 3 in the Chinese market, smartphone-maker Xiaomi sees a gap in the market for its first extended-range electric vehicle (EREV), which sees a gasoline engine act as a generator to charge battery packs on the move.

Try the new Siri AI and system-wide performance improvements.

Siri and Apple Intelligence

Apple

Speed boosts and more features

watchOS 27, macOS 27 Golden Gate and iPadOS 27

Apple

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