The tablet market has now declined year-over-year for 16 quarters straight. According to new estimates from IDC, "Q3 2018 saw an 8.6 percent year-over-year decline: 36.4 million units shipped worldwide, compared to 39.9 million units in the same quarter last year," reports VentureBeat. From the report: The only silver lining is that the Q3 2018 decline wasn't double digits again. While 2017 quarters only saw single-digit declines, Q1 2018 and Q2 2018 were in the double digits. The estimates come from IDC, which counts both slate form factors and detachables, meaning tablets with keyboards included. Apple maintained its top spot for the quarter, with Samsung and Amazon rounding out the top three. Huawei was the only company in the top five to ship more tablets than the year before. The top five vendors accounted for 68.4 percent of the market, up from 67.1 percent last year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: For years, analysts and journalists watching Apple have talked up the growing importance of services, as opposed to hardware sales, to the company's top line. But it's only now that Apple's business model truly appears to be shifting toward collecting rent from the company's ecosystem and increasingly relying on gadget sales to perpetuate this rent rather than drive growth. Apple's decision to stop reporting iPhone unit sales underscores the shift. Services have been steadily growing in importance for Apple since 2016, while the share of revenue provided by the flagship gadget, the iPhone, has gone up and down depending on the popularity of different models.

There's a lot of potential for Apple to squeeze a higher rent directly out of its captive user base. Goldman Sachs estimates that only 10 percent of Apple's user base pay for iCloud Storage; in terms of price and service quality, iCloud has been a poor competitor to services provided by Google and some smaller companies such as Dropbox, but that only means Apple can increase revenue from it exponentially if it bothered to compete more aggressively, as it does with another key service, Apple Music. Even that streaming service has relatively low penetration, though, with only about 35 million users last year. Goldman Sachs predicts that number will grow to 83 million by 2020. Goldman's proposal for Apple is to create a services bundle similar to Amazon Prime; for $30 a month or so, subscribers would get access to music, video, 200 GB of storage and phone repair. The investment bank calculates that with just 50 million subscribers, such a bundle could add $18 billion in services revenue in 2019. "Rent extraction from a user base that finds it hard to go away may sound a bit like extortion," Leonid Bershidsky writes in closing. "But it's more honest and upfront than extracting data from users in ways they often don't understand and then making money off the data, as Facebook does. That honesty is in itself a competitive advantage for Apple as it gradually reimagines itself as more of a services company."

The challenge, Bershidsky writes, "is to grow the services offering fast enough to make up for potential iPhone revenue losses; gadget prices cannot keep going up forever without hurting the top line, and in the end, a phone is just a phone. We only need it to gain access to all the nice digital stuff out there."

Yesterday, during the company's Q4 earnings call, Apple's chief financial officer Luca Maestri said the company will no longer report unit sales of its main hardware divisions, including iPhones, iPad, and Mac. "This is the same as protocols Apple already follows for its smaller devices, such as the Apple Watch, AirPods, and HomePod, which are bundled under the 'Other Products' category," The Verge reports. From the report: The announcement comes after iPhone unit sales percentage was unchanged year over year, despite a revenue bump of 29 percent. The decision to stop disclosing unit sales is because that figure is "not representative of underlying strength of our business," Maestri said. "A unit of sale is less relevant today than it was in our past," he says, adding that unit sales increase are still a clear part of Apple's goals. While unit sales may not accurately represent Apple's business performance, it's a figure that analysts and journalists have used to calculate a product's average selling price. For example, that number can provide insight into how well different iPhone models are selling, as newer iPhones like the XS, XS Max, and XR are priced higher than older models like the now-discontinued SE, 6S, and 6.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: For decades, health experts have struggled to determine whether or not cellphones can cause cancer. On Thursday, a federal agency released the final results of what experts call the world's largest and most costly experiment to look into the question. The study originated in the Clinton administration, cost $30 million and involved some 3,000 rodents. The experiment, by the National Toxicology Program, found positive but relatively modest evidence that radio waves from some types of cellphones could raise the risk that male rats develop brain cancer. But he cautioned that the exposure levels and durations were far greater than what people typically encounter, and thus cannot "be compared directly to the exposure that humans experience." Moreover, the rat study examined the effects of a radio frequency associated with an early generation of cellphone technology, one that fell out of routine use years ago. Any concerns arising from the study thus would seem to apply mainly to early adopters who used those bygone devices, not to users of current models.

The lowest level of radiation in the federal study was equal to the maximum exposure that federal regulations allow for cellphone users. That level of exposure rarely occurs in typical cellphone use, the toxicology agency said. The highest level was four times higher than the permitted maximum. The rodents in the studies were exposed to radiation nine hours a day for two years -- far longer even than heavy users of cellphones. For the rats, the exposures started before birth and continued until they were about 2 years old. Some 2 to 3 percent of the male rats exposed to the radiation developed malignant gliomas, a deadly brain cancer, compared to none in a control group that received no radiation. Many epidemiologists see no overall rise in the incidence of gliomas in the human population. "The study also found that about 5 to 7 percent of the male rats exposed to the highest level of radiation developed certain heart tumors, called schwannomas, compared to none in the control group," the NYT reports.

It's worth nothing that the rats were exposed to radiation at a frequency of 900 megahertz, the frequency used in the second generation of cellphones that prevailed in the 90s, when the study was first conceived. For comparison, fourth generation (4G) and fifth generation (5G) phones employ much higher frequencies, which are "far less successful at penetrating the bodies of humans and rats," the NYT reports.

Apple is introducing a new "Repair Vintage Apple Products Pilot" program that will extend the period of time customers can receive repairs for older devices. "The new program at first will include the iPhone 5 and other Apple products that are about to become obsolete, and in the coming weeks will add more products to the list for devices that previously lost repair support," reports 9to5Mac. Some of the devices that will be included on the list include the iPhone 4s and MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2012). From the report: Apple has long had a 5-7 year lifespan for repairing its products, meaning that owners of an iPhone, iPad or Mac can have repairs performed through Apple or an authorized service provider even when not under warranty. Usually after 5-7 years, products are then classified as "vintage" or "obsolete" (depending on the country and local laws) and Apple staff no longer offers parts or repairs. The company maintains a list of products that are classified as vintage and obsolete on its website.

For the new Pilot program, Apple will only be offering repairs for vintage devices based on part availability. Otherwise customers will be told that inventory isn't available because the product is considered vintage. So the new program doesn't guarantee you a repair, but it's a nice change from Apple's previous policy where it stopped offering repairs entirely after classifying devices as vintage.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Buried in Apple's latest range of MacBooks -- including the MacBook Pro out earlier this year and the just-announced MacBook Air -- is the new T2 security chip, which helps protect the device's encryption keys, storage, fingerprint data and secure boot features. Little was known about the chip until today. According to its newest published security guide, the chip comes with a hardware microphone disconnect feature that physically cuts the device's microphone from the rest of the hardware whenever the lid is closed. "This disconnect is implemented in hardware alone, and therefore prevents any software, even with root or kernel privileges in macOS, and even the software on the T2 chip, from engaging the microphone when the lid is closed," said the support guide. The camera isn't disconnected, however, because its "field of view is completely obstructed with the lid closed." Apple said the new feature adds a "never before seen" level of security for its Macs, without being quite so blunt as to say: Macs get malware too.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A U.S. government network was infected with malware thanks to one employee's "extensive history" of watching porn on his work computer, investigators have found. The audit, carried out by the U.S. Department of the Interior's inspector general, found that a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) network at the EROS Center, a satellite imaging facility in South Dakota, was infected after an unnamed employee visited thousands of porn pages that contained malware, which downloaded to his laptop and "exploited the USGS' network." Investigators found that many of the porn images were "subsequently saved to an unauthorized USB device and personal Android cell phone," which was connected to the employee's government-issued computer. Investigators found that his Android cell phone "was also infected with malware." The findings were made public in a report earlier this month but buried on the U.S. government's oversight website and went largely unreported.

Apple is currently investigating a report that Apple Watch supplier Quanta Computer relied upon illegally employed students to help manufacture the company's exceedingly popular wearable. "Originally brought to light by The Financial Times, the report details how dozens of students were ostensibly working as interns, but in reality were working assembly line shifts, often throughout the night. Some students even reported working six days a week in 12-hour shifts," reports BGR. From the report: The allegations stem from a report put together by SACOM, a workers rights group based out of Hong Kong. In compiling its report, SACOM notes that it interviewed upwards of 28 students. The FT report reads in part: "The alleged abuses echo the labour violations uncovered last year in Apple's iPhone supply chain at its Foxconn Zhengzhou factory, where both Apple and Foxconn acknowledged that student interns had illegally worked overtime. The two companies said at the time that they would end the practice of student interns working extra hours." In a statement on the matter, Apple said that it is "urgently" looking into the aforementioned claims and that they have a "zero tolerance" policy for companies who try to skirt around Apple's workplace guidelines.

Bloomberg highlights all the big announcements expected to be made next week at Apple's October hardware event, such as an iPad Pro with a USB-C port instead of a Lightning port, a MacBook Air successor, and a new Mac Mini. From the report: The update to the iPad Pro will be the most significant in the product's history. The device was originally launched in 2015 in part as a counter-measure to Microsoft's Surface Pro, which gained a following with business users seeking large tablets with support for attachable keyboards and styluses. The iPad Pro models, which have larger screens, better cameras, and faster processors, are more expensive, which has sustained revenue growth. [Some of the new features, according to people familiar with the plans, include a nearly edge-to-edge display with slimmer bezels, a USB-C connector, Face ID, Animojis, a faster processor (variant of the A12 Bionic chip), a custom Apple graphics chip, and an updated Apple Pencil.]

For the Mac, Apple is planning its first wide-ranging upgrades since June 2017. The MacBook Air and Mac mini, a small desktop machine without a screen, have gone several years without notable changes. This, combined with interest in larger smartphones and competing PCs, led Apple to report the fewest Mac sales since 2010 in its fiscal third quarter. [Apple is reportedly planning a new entry-level laptop to replace the aging MacBook Air. It's expected to have a higher-resolution 13-inch screen, as well as slimmer bezels around the display. The Mac mini will have new processors and features for professional users. Apple's also working on refreshed iMacs, iMac Pros, and 12-inch MacBooks with faster processors, and at least some of these updates could be ready for the October launch.] The event's theme is "making," and it will take place in New York City on Tuesday at 10:00am EST.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Librarian of Congress and U.S. Copyright Office just proposed new rules that will give consumers and independent repair experts wide latitude to legally hack embedded software on their devices in order to repair or maintain them. This exemption to copyright law will apply to smartphones, tractors, cars, smart home appliances, and many other devices. The move is a landmark win for the "right to repair" movement; essentially, the federal government has ruled that consumers and repair professionals have the right to legally hack the firmware of "lawfully acquired" devices for the "maintenance" and "repair" of that device. Previously, it was legal to hack tractor firmware for the purposes of repair; it is now legal to hack many consumer electronics.

Specifically, it allows breaking digital rights management (DRM) and embedded software locks for "the maintenance of a device or system in order to make it work in accordance with its original specifications" or for "the repair of a device or system to a state of working in accordance with its original specifications." New copyright rules are released once every three years by the U.S. Copyright Office and are officially put into place by the Librarian of Congress. These are considered "exemptions" to section 1201 of U.S. copyright law, and makes DRM circumvention legal in certain specific cases. The new repair exemption is broad, applies to a wide variety of devices (an exemption in 2015 applied only to tractors and farm equipment, for example), and makes clear that the federal government believes you should be legally allowed to fix the things you own.

In addition to the foldable smartphone that's currently in the works, Samsung says it is also working on foldable laptop displays. "Like foldable smartphones, Samsung is collaborating with display makers to develop laptops with foldable displays that will not just simply fold in and out but create new value and user experience, amid the changing market trends for laptops," said Lee Min-cheol, vice president at marketing for PCs at Samsung, during a laptop event in South Korea earlier this week. The Verge reports: Foldable displays in laptops could transform the market for 2-in-1 devices. Existing convertible laptops attempt to flip and twist into tablet and media modes, but a foldable display would certainly help create new designs. Samsung hasn't revealed which companies it's working with, or any expected date for a prototype or retail device. Still, laptops like HP's new Spectre Folio would be an ideal candidate for a flexible and foldable display, or even potential devices like Microsoft's "pocketable" Surface.

YVRGeek shares a report: Earl Bakken, an electronics repairman who created the first wearable external pacemaker and co-founded one of the world's largest medical device companies, Medtronic, has died. He was 94. Bakken, who also commercialized the first implantable pacemaker in 1960, died Sunday at his home in Hawaii, Medtronic said in a statement. It didn't give a cause of death. Bakken and his brother-in-law, Palmer Hermundslie, formed Medtronic in 1949 and turned it from a struggling company they ran out of the Hermundlie family's Minneapolis garage into a multinational medical technology powerhouse.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's Pixel 3 smartphone is shipping out to the masses, and people hoping to take advantage of the new Qi wireless charging capabilities have run into a big surprise. For some unexplained reason, Google is locking out third-party Qi chargers from reaching the highest charging speeds on the Pixel 3. Third-party chargers are capped to a pokey 5W charging speed. If you want 10 watts of wireless charging, Google hopes you will invest in its outrageously priced Pixel Stand, which is $79.

Android Police reports that a reader purchased an Anker wireless charger for their Pixel 3, and, after noticing the slow charging speed, this person contacted the company. Anker confirmed that something screwy was going on with Google's charging support, saying "Pixel sets a limitation for third-party charging accessories and we are afraid that even our fast wireless charger can only provide 5W for these 2x devices." Normally we would chalk this up to some kind of bug, but apparently Google told Android Police that this was on purpose. The site doesn't have a direct quote, but it writes that, after reaching out to Google PR, it was "told that the Pixel 3 would charge at 10W on the Pixel Stand [and that] due to a 'secure handshake' being established that third-party chargers would indeed be limited to 5W." In an update, Google said the reason has to do with the "proprietary wireless charging technology" it has via its Pixel Stand and other select wireless chargers. The Pixel 3 only supports 5W Qi charging; "Google's 10W proprietary wireless charging technology" is what will allow the phone to charge at faster speeds.

"Google says it is 'certifying' chargers for the Pixel 3 via the 'Made for Google' program and pointed us to one such device, a Belkin charger called the 'Boost Up Wireless Charging Pad 10W for Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL,'" reports Ars Technica. "Belkin's description is very enlightening, saying 'Made with the Google Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL in mind, this wireless charging pad uses Google's 10W proprietary wireless charging technology. It's certified for Pixel, so you know that the BOOST UP Wireless Charging pad has been made specifically for your Pixel 3 and meets Google's high product standards.'"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PC Magazine: Intel is denying a new report that claims the chipmaker is abandoning its 10 nanometer manufacturing process following years of delays. "Media reports published today that Intel is ending work on the 10nm process are untrue," the company tweeted on Monday. Hours prior to the tweet, semiconductor news site SemiAccurate claimed that Intel was pulling the plug on the chip-making technology over the company's ongoing struggles to bring it to full production. Chips built with the 10nm process were originally slated to arrive in 2016, but the company has repeatedly pushed that launch date back. During Intel's last earnings call, executives said they now expect 10nm chips to officially drop during the 2019 holiday season.

In response to SemiAccurate's report, Intel said it continues to make "good progress" on the 10nm technology. "Yields are improving consistent with the timeline we shared during our last earnings report," the chipmaker added in its tweet. The next-generation silicon will supposedly offer a 25 percent performance increase over 14nm-manufactured technology. The 10nm chips will also be able to run on 50 percent less power when clocked at the same performance of a 14nm processor. Intel will hold an earnings call on Thursday, so expect company executives to elaborate on 10nm's progress then.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, followed Apple's lead in calling the for the retraction of Bloomberg's story about spy chips being embedded in servers. "They offered no proof, story kept changing, and showed no interest in our answers unless we could validate their theories," Jassy wrote in a tweet on Monday. "Reporters got played or took liberties. Bloomberg should retract."

Apple CEO Tim Cook told Buzzfeed on Friday that the scenario Bloomberg reported never happened and that the October story in Bloomberg Businessweek should be retracted. Bloomberg alleged data center hardware used by Apple and AWS, and provided by server company Super Micro, was under surveillance by the Chinese government, even though almost all the companies named in the report denied Bloomberg's claim. Bloomberg published a denial from AWS alongside its own report, and AWS refuted the report in a more strongly worded six-paragraph blog post entitled "Setting the Record Straight on Bloomberg Businessweek's Erroneous Article." Further reading is available via The Washington Post.

"Sources tell the Erik Wemple Blog that the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and The Post have each sunk resources into confirming the story, only to come up empty-handed," the Washington Post reports. "(The Post did run a story summarizing Bloomberg's findings, along with various denials and official skepticism.) It behooves such outlets to dispatch entire teams to search for corroboration: If, indeed, it's true that China has embarked on this sort of attack, there will be a long tail of implications. No self-respecting news organization will want to be left out of those stories. 'Unlike software, hardware leaves behind a good trail of evidence. If somebody decides to go down that path, it means that they don't care about the consequences,' Stathakopoulos says.'"

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from The Economist: Events about making new things are ten a penny. Less common are events about keeping things as good as new. Maintenance lacks the glamour of innovation. It is mostly noticed in its absence -- the tear in a shirt, the mould on a ceiling, the spluttering of an engine. Not long ago David Edgerton of Imperial College London, who also spoke at the festival, drove across the bridge in Genoa that collapsed in August, killing 43 people (pictured). 'We're encouraged to pride ourselves on all being innovators and entrepreneurs,' he said. Maintenance is often dismissed as mere drudgery. But in fact, as he pointed out, repairing things is often trickier than making them.

It is also more difficult for economists to measure. The discipline's most prominent statistic, GDP, is gross (as opposed to net) because it leaves out the cost of wear and tear. To calculate these costs, statisticians must estimate the lifespan of a country's assets and make assumptions about the way they deteriorate. [...] And how much do economies spend fighting decay? No one knows, partly because most maintenance is performed in-house, not purchased on the market. The best numbers are collected by Canada, where firms spent 3.3% of GDP on repairs in 2016, more than twice as much as the country spends on research and development. In closing, the report mentions the tyrannies of the ancient East where people were forced to maintain fragile irrigation systems. "In those societies, to repair was to repress," the report says. "But some people today have the opposite concern. They see maintenance and repair as a right they are in danger of losing to companies that hoard spare parts and information too jealously."

Essential Products, a startup founded in 2015 by Android creator Andy Rubin, was started to create a smartphone with high-end design features that wasn't associated with a particular operating-system maker. Unfortunately, reaching that goal has been harder than anticipated as the company has laid off about 30 percent of its staff. Fortune reports: Cuts were particularly deep in hardware and marketing. The company's website indicates it has about 120 employees. A company spokesperson didn't confirm the extent of layoffs, but said that the decision was difficult for the firm to make and, "We are confident that our sharpened product focus will help us deliver a truly game changing consumer product." The firm was Rubin's first startup after leaving Google in 2014, which had acquired his co-founded firm, Android, in 2005.

Essential's first phone came out in August 2017, a few weeks later than initially promised. It received mixed reviews, with most critics citing its lower quality and missing features relative to competing smartphones, such as a lack of waterproofing and poor resiliency to damage. The company dropped the price from an initial $699 within weeks to $499, and offered it on Black Monday in November 2017 for $399.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: [N]ew research published in ACS Applied Energy Materials shows that it's possible to 3D-print lithium-ion batteries into whatever shape you need. The problem that has stood in the way of 3D-printed lithium-ion batteries (at least, until now) is that the polymers traditionally used in this kind of printing aren't ionic conductors. The goal was to find a way to print custom-sized lithium-ion batteries in a cost-effective way using a regular, widely available 3D printer. In order to make the batteries conductive, the team led by Christopher Reyes and Benjamin Wiley infused the polylactic acid (PLA) usually used in 3D printing with an electrolyte solution. The researchers also incorporated graphene and carbon nanotubes into the design of the case to help increase conductivity. After these design modifications, the team was able to 3D print an LED bracelet, complete with a custom-sized lithium-ion battery. The battery was only able to power the bracelet for about 60 seconds, but the researchers have ideas for how to improve the capacity. For those interested, Engadget has a short video on the subject.

A couple months ago, it was reported that the dearly departed mobile brand known as Palm would be making a comeback. That day has finally come. Yesterday, Palm announced The Palm, a credit card-sized Android smartphone that's supposed to act as a second phone. Droid Life reports: The Palm, which is its name, is a mini-phone with a 3.3-inch HD display that's about the size of a credit card, so it should fit nicely in your palm. It could be put on a chain or tossed in a small pocket or tucked just about anywhere, thanks to that small size. It's still a mostly fully-featured smartphone, though, with cameras and access to Android apps and your Verizon phone number and texts.

The idea here is that you have a normal phone with powerful processor and big screen that you use most of the time. But when you want to disconnect some, while not being fully disconnected, you could grab Palm instead of your other phone. It uses Verizon's NumberSync to bring your existing phone number with you, just like you would if you had an LTE smartwatch or other LTE equipped device. Some of the specs of this Verizon-exclusive phone include a Snapdragon 435 processor with 3GB RAM, 32GB storage, 12MP rear and 8MP front cameras, 800mAh battery, IP68 water and dust resistance, and Android 8.1. As Kellen notes, "It does cost $350, which is a lot for a faux phone..."

We've already seen a number of gadget fans perplexed by this device. Digital Trends goes as far as calling it "the stupidest product of the year."

The "real version" of Photoshop is coming to the iPad next year, complete with a user interface similar to the desktop application and all the main tools. Ars Technica reports: Photoshop for iPad has a user interface structured similarly to the desktop application. It is immediately familiar to users of the application but tuned for touch screens, with larger targets and adaptations for the tablet as well as gestures to streamline workflows. Both touch and pencil input are supported. The interface is somewhat simpler than the desktop version, and although the same Photoshop code is running under the hood to ensure there's no loss of fidelity, not every feature will be available in the mobile version. The first release will contain the main tools while Adobe plans to add more in the future. Cloud syncing is a key element of Photoshop on iPad. Edits made on the iPad will be synchronized transparently with the desktop -- no conversions or import/export process to go through. Using a feature not available in the iPad version should then be as simple as hitting save and then opening the file on the desktop, picking up where you left off. Adobe is also reportedly building a tablet painting app called Project Gemini, which "simulates real brushes, paints, and materials as well as the interactions between them," reports Ars. "It combines raster graphics, vector drawing, and the Photoshop engine into a single application designed for artwork and illustration."