Sam Machkovech writes via Ars Technica: Our "Facebookening of Oculus" series continues today with the announcement of the Facebook Connect conference as a free, live-streamed event on September 16. You may remember years of "Oculus Connect" conferences, which focused on the company's efforts in virtual reality and other "mixed reality" mediums. That conference is dead. It's Facebook Connect now. In a Tuesday announcement, Facebook exec Andrew Bosworth cited the company's broader product portfolio as a reason to expand its conference's definition beyond Oculus. To back that claim up, however, he only cited two Facebook products: Spark AR, the camera-software toolset used to identify faces and add silly effects and filters, and Portal, the company's webcam-chat hardware platform. Having attended many Oculus Connect conferences, I can safely say neither of those product lines received much focus (and attending VR-interested developers didn't express interest in it either).

What's more, Facebook used the Tuesday announcement as an opportunity to rename its entire Oculus VR division: Facebook Reality Labs. That name may sound familiar, since it was given to a number of skunkworks teams working on experimental VR-like features and hardware (including years of focus on 3D spatial audio at its Seattle-area office). Facebook isn't shy about explaining why it is renaming everything: to collate and combine its disparate entities in order to "build the next computing platform to help people feel more present with each other, even when we're apart." That sure sounds like a bold admission of the so-called "Facebook operating system" that I keep hearing rumors about, with VR, mixed reality, and smartphone cameras at its core. Facebook has spent months hinting at mixed computing systems being combined in the workplace, which the company has conveniently summarized in a new Facebook Reality Labs post from today.

"Much like Facebook's recent corporate rebranding, our emphasis is on clarity -- visually identifying us as a part of Facebook while looking toward the future of the next computing platform that puts people at the center," Bosworth writes in today's announcement. But I would argue that this smushing of seemingly unrelated products -- VR headsets, webcam chat platforms, funny-face filters, and the smorgasbord of social media content that is an average Facebook feed -- only serves to obfuscate what Facebook is trying to sell to consumers. Previously, you could expect to purchase an Oculus headset, then buy, download, and install preferred VR software (or even attach it to more open sales platforms like SteamVR and Windows Mixed Reality). As we've recently learned, that kind of "whatever software you want" freedom may not be in the cards for Oculus hardware much longer, since Facebook will soon start mandating Facebook logins for all brand-new hardware -- and I've previously predicted that new hardware will be a centerpiece of the company's next major VR event (which we now know is happening on September 16).

The Register reports that Toshiba has transferred its remaining shares of Dynabook to Sharp, thus ending the company's time as a PC vendor. From the report: [...] As the 2000s rolled along Toshiba devices became bland in comparison to the always-impressive ThinkPad and the MacBook Air, while Dell and HP also improved. Toshiba also never really tried to capture consumers' imaginations, which didn't help growth. As the PC market contracted and Lenovo, Dell and HP came to dominate PC sales in the 2010s, Toshiba just became a less likely brand to put on a laptop shopping list.

By 2018 the company saw the writing on the wall and sold its PC business unit to Sharp for a pittance -- just $36 million changed hands - but retained a 19.9 percent share of the company with an option in Sharp's favor to buy that stock. Sharp quickly renamed the business to "Dynabook," a product name Toshiba had used in Japan, and set about releasing new models and reviving the brand. Which brings us to June 30th, 2020, when Sharp exercised its option to acquire the 19.9 percent of Dynabook shares it did not already own. On Tuesday, Toshiba transferred those shares and announced the transaction on Thursday.

In T-Mobile's Q2 2020 earnings call today, the company says that it has surpassed AT&T in total branded customer count to become the second biggest carrier in the U.S., trailing only Verizon. PhoneDog reports: In Q2 2020, [which is the first quarter that includes Sprint following the merger of the two carriers] T-Mobile added 1.245 million customers, giving it a total subscriber count of 98.3 million. To compare, AT&T finished Q2 2020 with 93 million postpaid and prepaid customers.

T-Mo also shared some good news regarding its 5G network today. The magenta carrier's 2.5GHz mid-band 5G is now live in Atlanta, Dallas, and Washington DC. That 2.5GHz 5G coverage is also live in parts of Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, and Philadelphia. T-Mo touts that its average download speeds on 2.5GHz 5G is around 300Mbps with peak speeds of 1Gbps.

Last month, Microsoft removed the option to purchase 12 months of Xbox Live Gold from the Microsoft Store, leading many to believe the company could be planning to phase out the service altogether with the launch of the Xbox Series X. When asked about the plans by The Verge, Microsoft said: "We have no plans to discontinue Xbox Live Gold at this time. It is an important part of gaming on Xbox today, and will continue to be in the future." The Verge's report also notes the company isn't planning to rename Xbox Live: Rumors of an Xbox Live rename appeared this week, after Microsoft announced changes to its services agreement. The software giant started referring to Xbox Live as the "Xbox online service," prompting some to assume Xbox Live was going away. "The update to 'Xbox online service' in the Microsoft Services Agreement refers to the underlying Xbox service that includes features like cross-saves and friend requests," says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. "This language update is intended to distinguish that underlying service, and the paid Xbox Live Gold subscription. There are no changes being made to the experience of the service or Xbox Live Gold."

While it's clear Xbox Live Gold isn't going away, Microsoft's statement doesn't mean the service won't be made free at some point in the future. Microsoft still requires Xbox One owners, and potentially Xbox Series X owners, to purchase an Xbox Live Gold subscription to play multiplayer games online. Windows 10 players of Xbox Live-enabled games do not require the same subscription, however. This split gets especially tricky for games like Halo Infinite, which Microsoft has promised will have a free-to-play multiplayer mode. If Microsoft does continue Xbox Live Gold as a paid service on Xbox consoles, then PC players will get totally free access to Halo Infinite and Xbox players will not.

At Microsoft's Ignite conference in late 2019, the company said it was planning to shut down its standalone Cortana mobile apps as it refocuses on business users. Microsoft today is following through with that plan, announcing that it will shut down the current Cortana iOS and Android apps, end Cortana support for the Harman Kardon Invoke smart speaker, and remove the original Cortana functionality from the first-generation Surface Headphones starting in 2021. The Verge reports: These changes are still a few months away, but it marks another big step for Microsoft in pivoting Cortana away from a Google Assistant or Alexa alternative to a more specialized, productivity-focused assistant -- changes the company has already started making on the Windows 10 version of Cortana earlier this year. (To that end, Microsoft also put a September 7th date on the already-announced sunsetting of third-party Cortana skills for Windows.) Instead, Microsoft will be focusing on its productivity features that repurpose Cortana as a part of the Microsoft 365 suite of software, citing the revamped Windows 10 functions and integrated Cortana features in the Outlook and Teams apps as replacements. It's not as full-featured as the original Cortana -- which offered additional functions like smart home controls and music integration -- but by offering a less broad set of features, Microsoft is hoping to create a product that better complements its existing software and competes less directly with established players like Google and Amazon.

Microsoft is also offering a consolation offer of a $50 gift card for Harman Kardon Invoke owners, who'll be most impacted by the removal of Cortana -- which effectively will turn the formerly smart device into a pricey Bluetooth speaker when the firmware update arrives next year. Owners of the original Surface Headphones (who will also see their Cortana experience removed) are also being offered a $25 gift card to make up for the missing service.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple agreed in 2016 to halve its App Store fee for Amazon as part of a deal to put the e-commerce giant's Prime Video app on Apple's mobile devices and TV set-top box. Eddy Cue, an Apple senior vice president, and Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos negotiated directly on the deal, according to emails released Wednesday as part of a congressional hearing on anticompetitive behavior. The companies agreed to a 15% revenue share for customers who signed up through the app and no revenue share for users who already subscribed via Amazon or elsewhere, the emails showed.

The deal, announced in December 2017, also allowed Amazon's video service to integrate with Apple's voice-activated digital assistant, Siri, and the iPhone maker's TV app, which launched in 2016. In addition, the agreement gave Apple a 15% cut of subscriptions to Amazon Prime partners like Showtime for users who signed up originally through Apple. Apple generally receives a 30% cut for the first year of an app's subscriptions made through the platform. That fee drops to 15% after the first year. The agreement with Amazon is similar to a program Apple announced earlier this year letting select developers avoid the 30% fee in exchange for integrating with certain features. Amazon is part of that program. The report also reveals that Apple once considered taking a 40 percent cut from some subscription apps, according to documents shared today by the House Judiciary Committee.

Qualcomm's Q3 earnings report might indicate a delay for Apple's upcoming 5G iPhones, with the company highlighting a "partial impact from the delay of a global 5G flagship phone launch" for its fourth quarter projections (which covers July, August, and September earnings). The Verge reports: Looking at the calendar of upcoming phone releases, it's hard to imagine that Qualcomm is talking about any device other than the upcoming 5G iPhones, which are expected to arrive this fall. Typically, Apple releases its new iPhone in September, and it's one of the few upcoming devices that would sell in large enough numbers that Qualcomm might need to disclose the material impact on an earnings call. There are already rumors circulating of delays for Apple's 5G lineup due to production slowdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In an interview with Reuters, chief financial officer Akash Palkhiwala indicated that the delay likely wouldn't be too long for the unnamed phone, describing it as "a slight delay that pushes some of the units out from the September quarter to the December quarter for us." (Qualcomm's December quarter covers the months of October, November, and December, so if the phone was slated for September, it might only be delayed into the following month.)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: At the "Online Platforms and Market Power" virtual antitrust hearing today, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos spoke about a policy that is meant to prevent the company from using seller specific data to help it determine what products it should manufacture and sell itself. "What I can tell you is, we have a policy against using seller specific data to aid our private label business," Bezos said. "But I can't guarantee you that that policy has never been violated." In July 2019, an Amazon lawyer told the subcommittee that the company didn't tap data from individual third-party merchants to determine what new products to create. In April, the Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon did just that. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), who was the first to question Bezos at the hearing, cited the article. "I'm familiar with the Wall Street Journal article that you're talking about," Bezos said. "And we continue to look into that very carefully. I'm not yet satisfied that we've gotten to the bottom of it, and we're going to keep looking at it. It's not as easy as you would think because some of the sources in the article are anonymous, but we continue to look into it."

Bezos then tried to play up the fact that Amazon didn't have to have such a policy. "The fact that we have such a policy is voluntary," Bezos said. "I think no other retailer even has such a policy. We would treat that like any internal policy, and if we found that someone violated it, we would take action against them." "Well, there's numerous reports, and the committee has conducted interviews with former employees who confirm that there are employees who do have access to that data and are using it," Jayapal responded. "So my next question was going to be: If you thought you were actually enforcing these rules, do you think that that's working? And again, I would just say that there's credible reporting that's documented breaches of these rules that you have put into place. And the committee has interviewed employees that typically say that these breaches typically occur."

Later in the hearing, Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) asked whether Amazon allows the use of aggregate data to inform its private label brands when there are only three sellers for a product and then again when there are only two competitors. Bezos said "yes, sir" to both. Armstrong then asked about Amazon's internal investigation on the use of third party data. "We're basically trying to understand some of the anecdotes that we saw in the Wall Street Journal article," Bezos responded. He committed to informing the committee on the outcome of that investigation.

Cambridge Engineering alumnus Hal Evans has built a fully-functioning replica of a 1930s Polish cyclometer -- an electromechanical cryptologic device that was designed to assist in the decryption of German Enigma ciphertext. The replica currently resides in King's College, Cambridge. TechXplore reports: Work on the hardware-based replica began in 2018, as part of Hal's fourth year Master's project under the supervision of King's College Fellow and Senior Tutor Dr. Tim Flack. The aim was to investigate further into cryptologist Marian Rejewski's cyclometer -- an early forerunner to Cambridge University mathematician Alan Turing's machine, known as the Bombe, which was used to crack the German Enigma code during the Second World War. Hal said he chose to work on the cyclometer as it was the very first machine used to assist the decryption effort. To his knowledge, the replica is the first fully-functioning hardware-based electromechanical cyclometer to exist since the years preceding the Second World War. The original machines would have been destroyed in 1939 to prevent them from falling into the hands of German invaders.

Rejewski's cyclometer exploited the German's procedure at the time of double encipherment of the Enigma message key, and semi-automated the process for calculating what were known as 'characteristics' for every possible Enigma rotor starting position. There were more than 100,000 of these rotor starting positions, and they each needed their characteristic to be calculated and catalogued in a card index system. The cyclometer therefore eliminated the arduous task of calculating these characteristics by hand. The machine consisted of, in effect, two interlinked Enigma systems side-by-side -- one offset by three positions relative to the other -- and 26 lamps and switches to cover the alphabet. On operation, a certain number of bulbs illuminated, indicating the lengths of the characteristics. These were recorded for every single possible rotor starting position to create an immense look-up catalogue. Once this was completed, obtaining the daily Enigma rotor starting settings to decode messages was a simple matter of intercepting enough messages and referencing the catalogue, taking only a matter of minutes.

Google announced that Android is seeing the fastest adoption rates of any version of Android. The Verge reports: According to Google, Android 10 was installed on 100 million devices five months after its launch in September 2019 â" 28 percent faster than it took the company to reach a similar milestone for Android Pie. Google credits the faster adoption rate to improvements the company has been making over the years, like Android Oreo's Project Treble and Android 10's Project Mainline, which makes it easier for hardware companies to create new updates.

But while those numbers are impressive, Google's post is notably missing some crucial information, like what percentage of Android devices are running Android 10 -- a number that's sure to be lower than Google would like. In fact, Google has effectively stopped publishing the breakdown percentage of which Android devices are running which version of Android entirely, following a similar announcement last August that looked back at Android 9 Pie adoption rates. (At the time, Android Pie had been installed on 22.6 percent of Android devices ahead of the release of Android 10.)

Apple's Find My tracking feature in iOS 14 will allow users to find third-party devices. Engadget reports: A draft specification for hardware makers is available now, although you'll clearly have to wait until both the general release of iOS 14 and finished implementations for those gadgets. A completed spec should be available by the end of 2020. This could be a boon for many hardware manufacturers, not to mention anyone who has a habit of leaving devices behind. However, it could be particularly useful for item trackers that, until now, have had to rely on third-party apps with limited iOS integration.

New submitter wb9syn7 writes: The last two days have seen a variety of Samsung Blu-ray players worldwide suddenly cease working. The symptom is that they turn on when power is applied, whereupon they reboot themselves every few seconds endlessly. The power and eject buttons are ignored and all attempts at resetting them fail. After many owners contacted Samsung support and were told they needed to send their players in for hardware repair, Samsung appears to have admitted there is a common problem, not individual player failure. As they are all out of warranty and the reboot cycle precludes the normal software update process, we are awaiting a solution from them. A community post has hundreds of users confirming the issue across various models. We've reached out to Samsung but they have yet to comment on the matter.

STERIS Corporation, a company that makes sterilization and other medical equipment, sent a letter to iFixit claiming their online database of repair manuals for ventilators and medical equipment violates their copyrights. Motherboard reports: "It has come to my attention that you have been reproducing certain installation and maintenance manuals relating to our products, documentation which is protected by copyright law," the letter said. The letter then went on to tell [Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit] to remove all Steris copyrighted material from the iFixit website within 10 days of the letter. As Motherboard reported in March, major manufacturers of medical devices have long made it difficult for their devices to be repaired through third party repair professionals. Manufacturers have often lobbied against right to repair legislation and many medical devices are controlled by artificial "software locks" that allow only those with authorization to make modifications.

"I'm disappointed that Steris is resorting to legal threats to stop hospitals from having access to information about how to maintain critical sterilization equipment during a pandemic," Wiens told Motherboard in an email. "No manufacturer should be stopping hospitals from repairing their equipment," Wiens said. "The best way to ensure patient safety is to make sure that equipment is being maintained regularly using the manufacturer's recommended procedures. The only way to do that is if hospitals have up to date manuals." With regards to the letter sent by Steris, Wiens said iFixit has not removed any material from its website. "We explained to Steris that what we did is a lawful and protected fair use under the U.S. Copyright act," Wiens said. "iFixit is protected by Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows online platforms to host content contributed by users provided they comply with the Act's requirements, which iFixit does," a letter to Steris from the Electronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of iFixit said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Flat solar panels still face big limitations when it comes to making the most of the available sunlight each day. A new spherical solar cell design aims to boost solar power harvesting potential from nearly every angle without requiring expensive moving parts to keep tracking the sun's apparent movement across the sky. The spherical solar cell prototype designed by Saudi researchers is a tiny blue sphere that a person can easily hold in one hand like a ping pong ball. Indoor experiments with a solar simulator lamp have already shown that it can achieve between 15 percent and 100 percent more power output compared with a flat solar cell with the same total surface area, depending on the background materials reflecting sunlight into the solar cells. The research group hopes its nature-inspired design can fare similarly well in future field tests in many different locations around the world.

Testing with the solar simulator lamp showed that the spherical solar cell provided 24 percent more power output over a traditional flat solar cell upon immediate exposure to sunlight. That power advantage jumped to 39 percent after both types of solar cells had begun to heat up and suffered some loss in power efficiency -- an indication that the spherical shape may have some advantages in dissipating heat. The spherical solar cell also delivered about 60 percent more power output than its flat counterpart when both could collect only scattered sunlight under a simulated roof rather than receiving direct sunlight. Additional experiments with different reflective backgrounds -- including an aluminum cup, aluminum paper, white paper, and sand -- showed that the hexagonal aluminum cup background helped the spherical solar cell outperform the flat solar cell by 100 percent in terms of power output. The new work is detailed in a paper submitted for review to the journal MRS Communications.

MojoKid writes: AI and Machine Learning performance benchmarks have been well explored in the data center, but are fairly new and unestablished for edge devices like smartphones. While AI implementations on phones are typically limited to inferencing tasks like speech-to-text transcription and camera image optimization, there are real-world neural network models employed on mobile devices and accelerated by their dedicated processing engines. A deep dive look at HotHardware of three popular AI benchmarking apps for Android shows that not all platforms are created equal, but also that performance results can vary wildly, depending on the app used for benchmarking.

Generally speaking, it all hinges on what neural networks (NNs) the benchmarks are testing and what precision is being tested and weighted. Most mobile apps that currently employ some level of AI make use of INT8 (quantized). While INT8 offers less precision than FP16 (Floating Point), it's also more power-efficient and offers enough precision for most consumer applications. Typically, Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 powered devices offer the best INT8 performance, while Huawei's Kirin 990 in the P40 Pro 5G offers superior FP16 performance. Since INT8 precision for NN processing is more common in today's mobile apps, it could be said that Qualcomm has the upper hand, but the landscape in this area is ever-evolving to be sure.

It's no secret that 5G networks drain battery. "To rectify that grim side effect, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Lille in France have developed a new radio-frequency switch they say is 50 times more energy efficient than the current solid-state switches," reports Popular Mechanics. From the report: The solution is actually rooted right in the problem. Because smartphones are packed with switches that perform duties like hopping back and forth between different networks and spectrum frequencies (4G to LTE, to WiFi, to Bluetooth, etc.), batteries drain much faster. State-of-the-art radio-frequency switches are constantly running in the background on your iPhone or Android device, consuming not only battery life, but processing power. So when the limited number of 5G-enabled smartphones on the market are constantly bouncing back and forth between 4G and 5G communications, for instance, the problem is amplified.

"The switch we have developed can transmit an HDTV stream at a 100GHz frequency, and that is an achievement in broadband switch technology," lead researcher Deji Akinwande, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a prepared statement. And the premise is simple: the switches stay off most of the time. Unless the radio-frequency switches are actively helping the device jump between networks at that precise point in time, they stay off, preserving precious battery life for other processes.

To build it, the scientists used a nanomaterial called hexagonal boron nitride, a newcomer in the materials science field that comes from the same family as graphene, a honeycomb-lattice sheet of carbon atoms used in everything from bike tires to cleaning up radioactive waste. According to research in Semiconductors and Semimetals, hexagonal boron nitride is only as thick as a single layer of atoms and is the thinnest known insulator in the world, with a thickness of 0.33 nanometers (for comparison's sake, a human hair is about 100,000 nanometers thick). In this case, these scientists used a single layer of boron and nitrogen atoms in a honeycomb pattern. Then, they sandwiched the layers between a set of gold electrodes. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Electronics.

Well-known leaker Universe Ice on Twitter, along with dozens of other users, have discovered that simply setting an image as wallpaper on your phone could cause it to crash and become unable to boot. Android Authority reports: Based on user reports, many models from Samsung and Google are affected, while we've also seen some reports from users of OnePlus, Nokia, and Xiaomi devices (it's not clear if these latter devices ran stock software or custom ROMs). From our own testing and looking at user reports, Huawei devices seem to be less exposed to the wallpaper crash issue. There are a few solutions, depending on how hard the phone is hit. Some users were able to change the wallpaper in the short interval between crashes. Others had success deleting the wallpaper using the recovery tool TWRP. But in most cases, the only solution was to reset the phone to factory settings, losing any data that's not backed up.

The issue affects up-to-date phones running Android 10, but as it turns out, it's not actually new. Users have been reporting similar problems for a couple of years, and just last month Android Police reported on what appears to be a closely related issue specifically impacting Pixel phones running the Google Wallpapers app. [...] An issue with a very similar description has been reported in Google's Android issue tracker back in 2018. At the time, Google developers said they were unable to reproduce the issue and closed it out (Hat tip: inverimus on Reddit).

"Amazon is discontinuing its Echo Look camera, a standalone device that gave owners fashion advice using artificial intelligence and machine learning," reports The Verge. The gadget raised eyebrows when it was first announced as it included a virtual assistant with a microphone and a camera specifically designed to go somewhere in your bedroom, bathroom, or wherever the hell you get dressed. From the report: The Look's companion app and the device itself will stop functioning on July 24th. Between now and July 24th, 2021, Look users can back up their images and videos by making a free Amazon Photos account. (People with existing Photos accounts will have their media backed up automatically.) Anyone who wants to delete all their existing photos and videos will have to do so before the July 2020 deadline; otherwise, they'll have to call Amazon's customer service to have them deleted. They can currently delete them through the Look app.

Amazon points out that much of the Echo Look's functionality is now included in the Amazon Shopping app, including Style by Alexa, which involves the AI offering fashion pointers. The company says people should download the app to keep consulting with Amazon, and they should also recycle their Look through Amazon's program.

According to CEO Kyle Wiens, teardown and repair website iFixit has just posted "the most comprehensive online resource for medical repair professionals." The Verge reports: The new database contains dedicated sections for clinical, laboratory, and medical support equipment, in addition to numerous other categories of devices. It also provides more than 13,000 manuals from hundreds of medical device manufacturers. Wiens says the effort began with a crowdsourcing campaign to collect repair information for hospital equipment, with a focus on "ventilator documentation, anesthesia systems, and respiratory analyzers -- devices widely used to support COVID-19 patients." But the effort grew from there, spanning more than two months as iFixit added dozens more staff members to the project; began talking to more biomedical technicians, doctors, and nurses about their day-to-day needs; and started collecting and cataloging information from libraries and other sources.

The medical repair database is split up into nine categories, with each containing countless subcategories for basically any type of device you'd find in a medical setting. For instance, the clinical equipment category contains 53 subcategories for everything from anesthesia systems and Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure (BiPAP) machines to respiratory analyzers and ventilators. The database also has medical training manuals, information on medical furniture like decontamination systems and hospital beds, and an exhaustive section on surgical equipment repair and maintenance. Wiens explains in iFixit's announcement post that some medical device manufacturers make this information more easily available online than others. "But for their day-to-day work, biomeds have long relied on a rag-tag set of web resources to get the job done. Among the most popular is Frank's Hospital Workshop, a Tanzania-based site that hosts hundreds of medical device manuals -- it's the unofficial biomed bible," Wiens writes. The goal was not to outdo that website or try to overtake it in popularity, but to add new documents and manuals that weren't available before to a database including existing resources. Another bonus: the website will not make money on this project. "We are providing hosting and curation free of charge, and free of advertising, to the medical community," Wiens says.

Apple has purchased virtual reality company NextVR, Apple confirmed to CNBC. From the report: The purchase is further evidence of Apple's plans to enter virtual reality and related augmented reality technologies as a new product category, although the company has not announced firm plans or a new hardware product, aside from AR software for iPhones. An Apple spokesperson provided the the company's boilerplate statement when it makes an acquisition: "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans," the spokesperson said.

The Newport Beach, California startup previously focused on broadcasting and producing live and recorded events in virtual reality, like sporting events and concerts. The company had a deal with the NBA to broadcast virtual reality highlights of the 2019 NBA Finals, for example. Apple did not specify a price or terms for the transaction, but 9to5Mac, an Apple-focused website that first broke the news, estimates the transaction to be worth $100 million.