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Doppler Labs, a startup that aimed to turn earbuds into computing devices, shut down in 2017 before bringing its vision to market. Many of the features it pioneered, such as audio augmentation and smart in-ear controls, later appeared in Apple's AirPods and competing products from other companies.
Billionaire investor Vinod Khosla is recruiting a new chief of staff, posting the opening on X to nearly two million views. The role requires in-person work in Menlo Park, California, availability from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. including nights and weekends, and a three-year commitment. Khosla's post did not list a salary, though Indeed data shows Bay Area chiefs of staff typically earn a median of $175,000.
A new alpha tool called Mac.apk enables Android applications to run directly on Apple Silicon Macs without an emulator, virtual machine, or underlying Linux kernel. Apps appear as native macOS windows in the Dock, use the Mac's GPU and CPU directly, and support light/dark mode switching. It requires macOS 26.4 or newer and is distributed as a signed, notarized disk image.
Apple marketing chief Greg Joswiak criticized the most ambitious players in the AI race, labeling them the 'lunatic fringe' of Silicon Valley. He argued Apple's slower, privacy-focused approach to AI features is deliberate, prioritizing useful tasks for everyday users over rapid, unconstrained advancement.
A former WIRED editor recounts how Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos secured favorable coverage across major outlets, starting with a 2013 Wall Street Journal opinion piece and followed by WIRED's own 2014 Q&A profile, plus features in Fortune, The New Yorker, and Inc. The piece traces how Holmes was repeatedly framed as the 'next Steve Jobs' before Theranos was later exposed as fraudulent.
A new documentary focused on Elizabeth Holmes, the convicted founder of blood-testing startup Theranos, is set to be released, prompting discussion over how it portrays her. Details of the film's content and distribution have not been fully disclosed in available reporting.
Apple's upcoming macOS 27 (Golden Gate) will automatically remove Rosetta, the translation layer that lets Intel-built apps run on Apple Silicon Macs, with full support ending in macOS 28. IT admin Bradley Chambers notes that while most traditional apps will prompt users to reinstall Rosetta, some menu bar utilities from vendors without native Apple Silicon builds are failing silently with no warning.
A developer built siltop, a terminal-based system monitor designed specifically for Apple Silicon Macs, after finding that btop could not read chip-level data like watts, GPU usage or cluster clocks. Siltop reports CPU, GPU and ANE power draw, per-cluster clock speeds, temperatures and fans without requiring sudo access, pulling data from macOS's SMC, IOReport, Mach and sysctl interfaces. The tool reportedly uses about 1.3% of one CPU core at a 1-second refresh interval, less overhead than btop and comparable to macmon.
Apple released a new version of its MLX framework that can run the frontier-class Muse Spark Open model, which has nearly a trillion parameters, locally on Mac Studio hardware. Apple reports that a cluster of four Mac Studios with M5 Ultra chips achieves over 36 tokens per second using tensor parallelization, and that single machines with up to 512GB of unified memory can also run the model, scaling to multiple units via an RDMA over Thunderbolt driver.
Microsoft's new Surface Laptop Ultra, built with an Nvidia RTX Spark N1X chip, starts at $2,599 and can be configured up to $5,899 depending on processor and memory. The base 24GB unified memory model ships with Windows 11 Home, while higher-tier configurations come with Windows 11 Pro and up to 64GB of memory. During a review briefing, Microsoft gave only a vague answer when asked whether the 24GB base model has enough memory for tasks like running AI models locally.
Sill is a free Mac menu bar utility that mirrors a single window or the entire desktop to an iPhone or iPad, letting users interact with it via touch, trackpad, keyboard or Apple Pencil. It captures the screen with ScreenCaptureKit, encodes video using the Mac's hardware HEVC encoder, and sends input back over the same network, USB, Direct Wireless Connection, or a personal VPN like Tailscale, without any account or intermediary server.
Local authorities in Milpitas, California have ordered operators of the 342-acre Newby Island landfill to deploy drones and install monitors to track chemicals causing persistent bad smells, and to automate collection of landfill gases. Residents, including engineer Chia-Ling Kong who has campaigned against the odours, say smells have lasted hours daily despite recent improvements. The landfill's operators say they are committed to safe operation and protecting air quality.