Month: February 2024

Some Apple Employees: Doomed Apple Car Project is a “Titanic Disaster”

CompuScoop Staff February 29, 2024 0

Throughout its existence, the car effort was scrapped and rebooted several times, shedding hundreds of workers along the way. As a result of dueling views among leaders about what an Apple car should be, it began as an electric vehicle that would compete against Tesla and morphed into a self-driving car to rival Google’s Waymo.

By the time of its death — Tuesday, when executives announced internally that the project was being killed and that many members of the team were being reassigned to work on artificial intelligence — Apple had burned more than $10 billion on the project and the car had reverted to its beginnings as an electric vehicle with driving-assistance features rivaling Tesla’s, according to a half dozen people who worked on the project over the past decade.

The car project’s demise was a testament to the way Apple has struggled to develop new products in the years since Steve Jobs’s death in 2011… Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, approved the project in part to prevent an exodus of engineers to Tesla.

Via: The New York Times

 Apple expands Self Service Repair for Mac

Dan Uff February 29, 2024 0

Apple expands Self Service Repair for Mac, adds Diagnostics, and updates System Configuration.

Apple today announced an expansion of Self Service Repair for MacBook Pro and iMac models powered by M3, with support available today. Since April 2022, Self Service Repair has given customers access to the same manuals, genuine Apple parts, and tools used at Apple Store locations and Apple Authorized Service Providers.

Apple is also making Apple Diagnostics for Self Service Repair available for MacBook Pro and iMac models powered by M3 in the U.S. early next month. Launched late last year for iPhone and Mac, Apple Diagnostics troubleshooting sessions give customers the same ability as Apple Authorized Service Providers and Independent Repair Providers to test devices for optimal part functionality and performance, as well as identify which parts may need repair.

In addition, Apple is updating the System Configuration process for all Mac models to streamline the repair process and make it more efficient. Mac users will no longer need to contact the Self Service Repair support team to run the final step of a repair, but the team will still be available to assist as needed. The updated process will become available early next month in all countries where Self Service Repair is supported.

Self Service Repair is part of Apple’s efforts to expand access to repairs. Widespread repair access plays an important role in extending products’ longevity, which is good for users and good for the planet. For the vast majority of users who do not have experience repairing electronic devices, visiting a professional authorized repair provider with certified technicians who use genuine Apple parts is the safest and most reliable way to get a repair.

In the last five years, Apple has nearly doubled the number of service locations with access to genuine Apple parts, tools, and training, including more than 5,000 Independent Repair Providers and a global network of approximately 5,000 Apple Authorized Service Providers.

How to Recover Unsaved Word Documents on Mac

Dan Uff February 29, 2024 0

Many newer Mac word processing apps have the ability to auto save themselves after a certain number of minutes. But sometimes, something will go wrong that you may have to exit the app before it can auto save the current document.

If you use Microsoft Word for Mac, then you probably know that it will auto save your document every 10 minutes so (god forbid) something happens with your Mac and/or Word, you can recover the last 10 minutes.

There are two ways to recover a document. I'll go over the easiest way first and then get into a technical way.

How to recover a crashed document (The easy way):

When MS Word crashes, relaunch it.
The document should re-load itself.
That's it.

How to recover a crashed document (Techie way):

Go into Finder.
Select the “Go” menu at the top and select “Go To Folder”
Optionally, hit Command+Shift+G from the Finder to bring up Go To Folder.
Enter this command: ~/Library/Containers/com.Microsoft/Data/Library/Preferences/AutoRecovery/
Press [Return].
Open the document(s) or file(s) found in the AutoRecovery directory, search for the file that you're looking to recover.
That's it.

How did Google Gemini Get Created?

Dan Uff February 28, 2024 1

Have you ever wondered how Google Gemini came to be? Read below to find out.

Google Gemini is the product of a large-scale collaboration between various teams across Google, including Google Research [1]. While specific details about the development process are likely confidential, we do know a few key things:

Joint effort: It wasn't created by a single entity, but rather through the combined efforts of multiple Google teams and researchers.
Foundation: It's built upon Google's leading research in two areas: Transformers, which are a specific type of neural network architecture, and Mixture of Experts (MoE), a technique for improving efficiency in large models [3].
Multimodal capabilities: A key focus during development was making it "multimodal," meaning it can understand and work with different information types like text, code, audio, images, and videos [2].

While the specifics of its creation remain under wraps, understanding these aspects provides a glimpse into the collaborative effort and focus on advanced AI techniques that led to the birth of Google Gemini.

Via: Google Gemini