Hasta La Gadget!

Get ready for a tricky Wordle puzzle. Though it has a repeated vowel, the word isn’t very common and you may have to think hard to figure it out.

Probably the biggest change Apple announced with iPadOS 16 earlier this year is Stage Manager, a totally new multitasking system that adds overlapping, resizable windows to the iPad. That feature also works on an external display, the first time that iPads could do anything besides mirror their screen on a monitor. Unfortunately, the feature was limited to iPads with the M1 chip — that includes the 11- and 12.9-inch iPad Pro released in May of 2021 as well as the M1-powered iPad Air which Apple released earlier this year. All other older iPads were left out.

That changes with the latest iPadOS 16 developer beta, which was just released. Now, Apple is making Stage Manager work with a number of older devices: it’ll work on the 11-inch iPad Pro (first generation and later) and the 12.9-inch iPad Pro (third generation and later). Specifically, it’ll be available on the 2018 and 2020 models that use the A12X and A12Z chips rather than just the M1. However, there is one notable missing feature for the older iPad Pro models — Stage Manager will only work on the iPad’s build-in display. You won’t be able to extend your display to an external monitor.

Apple also says that developer beta 5 of iPadOS 16. is removing external display support for Stage Manager on M1 iPads, something that has been present since the first iPadOS 16 beta was released a few months ago. It’ll be re-introduced in a software update coming later this year. Given that some of the iPad community has been pretty vocal about issues with Stage Manager, particularly when using it with an external display, it makes sense that Apple is taking some extra time to keep working on it. 

Obviously, we’ll need to try Stage Manager on an older iPad Pro before we can say how well it works, but the A12X and A12Z chips are still plenty powerful, so the experience should hopefully not be any different than on an M1 iPad. It’s a bummer that external monitor support isn’t included, but this should still be welcome news to people who bought Apple’s most expensive iPads in the last few years.

Apple provided Engadget with the following statement about this update:

We introduced Stage Manager as a whole new way to multitask with overlapping, resizable windows on both the iPad display and a separate external display, with the ability to run up to eight live apps on screen at once. Delivering this multi-display support is only possible with the full power of M1-based iPads. Customers with iPad Pro 3rd and 4th generation have expressed strong interest in being able to experience Stage Manager on their iPads. In response, our teams have worked hard to find a way to deliver a single-screen version for these systems, with support for up to four live apps on the iPad screen at once.

External display support for Stage Manager on M1 iPads will be available in a software update later this year.

Fast Company readers who subscribe to updates from the business publication via Apple News have received a couple of obscene push notifications with racial slurs on Tuesday night. The messages caught a lot of users off guard — they truly could induce a spit take if you weren’t expecting them — and people took to Twitter to post screenshots. In a statement, Fast Company has told Engadget that its Apple News account was hacked and was used to send “obscene and racist” push notifications.” It added that the breach was related to another hack that happened on Sunday afternoon and that it has gone as far as shutting down the whole FastCompany.com domain for now.

The publication said:

“Fast Company’s content management system account was hacked on Tuesday evening. As a result, two obscene and racist push notifications were sent to our followers in Apple News about a minute apart. The messages are vile and are not in line with the content and ethos of Fast Company. We are investigating the situation and have shut down FastCompany.com until the situation has been resolved. Tuesday’s hack follows an apparently related hack of FastCompany.com that occurred on Sunday afternoon, when similar language appeared on the site’s home page and other pages. We shut down the site that afternoon and restored it about two hours later. Fast Company regrets that such abhorrent language appeared on our platforms and in Apple News, and we apologize to anyone who saw it before it was taken down.”

Apple has addressed the situation in tweet, confirming that the website has been hacked and that it has suspended Fast Company’s account:

At the moment, Fast Company’s website loads a “404 Not Found” page. Before it was taken down, though, the bad actors managed to post a message detailing how they were able to infiltrate the publication, along with a link to a forum where stolen databases are made available for other users. They said that Fast Company had a default password for WordPress that was much too easy to crack and used it for a bunch of accounts, including one for an administrator. From there, they were able to grab authentication tokens, Apple News API keys, among other access information. The authentication keys, in turn, gave them the power to grab the names, email addresses and IPs of a bunch of employees.

A user called “Thrax” posted in the forum they linked on the publication’s website, announcing that they were releasing a database containing 6,737 employee records. These include employees’ emails, password hashes for some of them and unpublished drafts, among other information. They weren’t able to get their hands on customer records, though, most likely because they’re kept in a separate database.

Update 09/27/22 11:43PM ET: Edited the post to add Fast Company’s new and more detailed statement.

Nothing is back, but not with another phone. Instead, the company will expand its audio portfolio with a new product it cryptically refers to as Ear (Stick).

Samsung may not have left its battery troubles completely in the past. YouTuber Mrwhosetheboss (aka Arun Rupesh Maini) and others have noticed that batteries in Samsung phones are swelling up at a disproportionately high rate. While this most often affects older devices where ballooning batteries are more likely, some of them are only a couple of years old — the 2020-era Galaxy Z Fold 2, for instance. It’s usually obvious (the phone back pops loose), but it can be subtle enough that you may not realize your battery is in a dangerous state.

Battery swelling isn’t a new problem, or unique to Samsung. As lithium batteries age, their increasingly flawed chemical reactions can produce gas that inflates battery cells and increases the risk of a fire. This author has had two non-Samsung phones meet their ends this way. It’s more likely to happen if you leave a battery without charging or discharging for a long time, and many companies (such as Apple) recommend that you keep batteries at a roughly 50 percent charge if you won’t use a device for extended periods.

The concern is that swelling appears to affect Samsung phones of the past few years more than other brands, and that the power packs are rated to last five years without hazards like this. Tech video creators are uniquely well-suited to track issues like this — Maini and people like him often store dozens or hundreds of phones in identical conditions, although they don’t necessarily keep the handsets at appropriate charge levels.

It’s not clear just how broad the problem is, or how systemic it might be. We’ve asked Samsung for comment and will let you know if we hear back. However, it’s safe to say the company would rather not deal with more battery woes. The Galaxy Note 7’s fire-prone battery led Samsung to conduct a massive recall that (temporarily) tarnished the firm’s reputation. With that said, the crisis also prompted a focus on battery safety and served as a warning sign to the phone industry. If nothing else, the swelling reports could educate users and manufacturers.