It’s unclear whether it’ll actually come to market, but 9to5Mac reports that Apple is working on a new display with a built-in Apple A13 Bionic processor.
Why does a display need the same processor that powers the iPhone 11? One possibility is that it will be a smart display that blends the capabilities of an Apple TV with an ordinary display (sort of like TVs with built-in Roku or Amazon Fire TV software). But 9to5Mac suggests that it’s more likely the display will use the SoC to “deliver high-resolution graphics” without relying solely on the resources of the Mac it’s plugged into.
Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.
- Exclusive: Apple testing new external display with a dedicated A13 chip and Neural Engine [9to5Mac]
Apple is allegedly developing a display with its own built-in A13 chip and Neural Engine, possibly as a way to offload some of the graphics workload from a connected computer to the external display itself. - Apple to Pull ‘iDOS 2’ DOS Emulator From App Store [MacRumors]
Apple will remove DOS emulator iDOS 2 from the App Store for violating policies regarding the ability to launch executable code from outside the app itself… even though it’s been doing that since last year and iDOS 2 has been in the App Store since 2010. - Pico 2G Expansion: Establish Global Connectivity with Pico [Kickstarter]
SB Components 2G expansion board for the Raspberry Pi Pico adds GSM/GPRS/GNSS communications to the tiny microcontroller board. It’s up for pre-order for £35 and up through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign and should ship in October. - InfiniTime 1.3.0 “Purple Fig” : PineTimeStyle! [GitHub]
InfiniTime 1.3.0 firmware for the $27 PineTime smartwatch brings support for the LittleFS file system, a new watch face called PineTimeStyle, and the ability to send battery level info to your phone a Bluetooth LE notification. - UBPorts plans to bring VoLTE and Voice over WiFi support to Ubuntu Touch [LinuxSmartphones]
Most modern smartphones have the hardware to support voice over LTE calling, but that’s not much use without corresponding software. Now the developers behind Ubuntu Touch want to bring an open source implementation to their operating system, likely beginning with the Volla Phone (a device that already supports VoLTE when running Android). - Mali-G78 GPU’s Valhall instruction set documentation released after reverse-engineering work [CNX Software]
Collabora has begun reverse engineering owrk on ARM’s Mali-G78 GPU and has released documentation and tools that should bring support to the open source Panfrost graphics driver.
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