CultCast #298 - iPhone 8... keynote date! 🙌🏼

The CultCast - A podcast by America's favorite Apple Podcast - Fridays

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Technology

This week:
  • Even more juicy details leak on iPhone 8, plus a report says the keynote reveal is right around the corner.
  • Leander shares the strange twist in Apple’s autonomous car project
  • Why the 13” MacBook Pro might soon become your favorite Mac
  • Story time with L Kahney - he’s going to share the highlights from his whirlwind tour of Japan and other defenseless Asian lands.
  • Plus Erfon recalls what it’s like in the darkness of a total solar eclipse.
 
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Thanks to Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com for the great music you hear on today's show.
 
On the show this week
@erfon / @bst3r / @lkahney
 
This week’s intro (thanks Nick Bracken!)
 
The shadows take on the sun's new shape
 
We might know the iPhone 8 keynote date
  • Hot on the heels of Samsung’s grand unveiling of the Galaxy Note 8 today, carrier sources have supposedly informed Mac4Ever that Apple plans to unleash its device in just a few weeks.
  • Apple’s keynote is allegedly slated for September 12 where the company will reveal three new iPhones. While we haven’t been able to verify the accuracy of the report ourselves, Apple usually hosts its iPhone keynote in the middle of September so the date could make sense.
  • The French Apple blog claims that carriers have been informed by Apple to expect the device announcement on the second Tuesday of next month. Carriers usually receive a heads up so they can start planning marketing and to organize pre-orders to ensure inventory.
  • And get this, the minimum storage capacity for Apple's OLED iPhone is said to be 64GB, with a 256GB option offered as the mid-tier capacity and a 512GB option at the highest tier, while 3GB of RAM is claimed to be included across the board.
 
iPhone 8’s amazing facial recognition is super quick, works in the dark
  • The iPhone 8’s facial recognition feature will work in a millionth of a second, and be more secure than the existing Touch ID sensor, and even work in the dark, a pair of new reports claim.
  • In addition to the regular iPhone sensors you’d expect to find, the upcoming handset will reportedly boast a new “structured light” sensor, which uses bounced infrared light to work out the depth of different points on the face.
  • That information is then used to build a 3D mesh of objects, which is compared to the one recorded when setting up the new iPhone. Calculating the timing between when infrared light is sent out and recorded coming back will let the iPhone work out accurate depth measurements. This, in turn, means you won’t be able to trick the handset using a 2D photo.
  • The facial recognition is reportedly powered by tech Apple acquired when it bought Kinect motion sensor maker PrimeSense several years ago.
  • The speed that the iPhone 8 facial recognition sensor will reportedly work is particularly impressive. The new handset will allegedly be able to do all of this within “a few hundred milliseconds,” which would make it a faster means of unlocking your iPhone than the current-generation Touch ID, Apple has been using Touch ID since 2013’s iPhone 5s.
 
Apple’s 3D sensing tech is two years ahead of the competition
  • According to a new report from KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple competitor Qualcomm is working on its own 3D sensing tech, but it’s at least two years behind. And handset-makers aren’t in a rush to embrace it quite yet.
  • "While Qualcomm is the most engaged company in the R&D of 3D sensing for the Android camp, a number of issues plague Qualcomm that prevent its tech from being ready for mass-market products. Immature algorithms, and thermal problems"
 
Apple autonomous car morphs into self-driving shuttle bus for employees
  • According to the New York Times, Apple’s secretive “Project Titan” self-driving car project has switched gears, transforming into an effort to build a self-driving shuttle bus. Called Palo Alto Infinite Loop, or PAIL, the shuttle would carry Apple employees between buildings.
  • The project may serve as a test bed for Apple’s autonomous car research. But a customer-focused vehicle built by Apple is for now reportedly out of the question. Instead, Apple’s self-driving technology will likely be used by other carmakers eventually.
  • The newspaper claims a leadership clash hampered project. Steve Zadesky, an Apple executive initially in charge of Titan, wanted to build semiautonomous technology. Meanwhile, Apple design chief Jony Ive “believed that a fully driverless car would allow the company to reimagine the automobile experience.”
  • Apple reportedly investigated several innovative ideas for the project. Those included motorized doors that opened and closed silently, augmented reality displays for the interior of the car, new ways of incorporating the light sensor essential to driverless cars, and a total lack of steering wheel and gas pedals. Apple also researched the possibility of using globelike wheels for the vehicle, “because spherical wheels could allow the car better lateral movement.”
 
Intel Launches First Eighth-Generation Core Processors, Paving Way For Quad-Core 13-Inch MacBook Pro
  • The first four eighth-generation processors launching today are U-series chips suitable for the 13-inch MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini. They're all 15W chips with four cores and eight threads, paving the way for a quad-core 13-inch MacBook Pro should Apple choose to release one.
  • The eighth-generation Core i5 and Core i7 chips are up to 40 percent faster than the equivalent seventh-generation Kaby Lake processors
  • First MacBook Pro with Touch Bar uses a 6th gen Skylake processor.
  • Intel also boasted that its eighth-generation Core processors are up to twice as fast as its equivalent five-year-old Ivy Bridge chips. It said users can output a 106-second 4K video in as little as three minutes with a new PC, for example, versus up to 45 minutes on an equivalent five-year-old PC.
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