Hasta La Gadget!

It’s a major Apple update day, as the company is rolling out new versions of its iPhone, iPad and Mac operating systems. While iPhone users at large have already had a taste of iOS 16, this will be the first time that most folks will get their hands on iPadOS 16 and macOS Ventura.

Apple delayed the release of iPadOS 16 amid reports suggesting it needed more time to polish up the Stage Manager multitasking feature (which we felt was unrefined in an early iPadOS 16 beta). In fact, Apple said it was skipping a public release of iPadOS 16 and going straight to version 16.1 — just in time for the company’s latest iPad Pro and entry-level iPad shipping this week.

The latest version of the iPad operating system will include many of the same updates as iOS 16, including significant changes to Mail, Safari, Messages and other key apps. There are more collaboration-centric features, while the Weather app is finally coming to iPad.

Stage Manager is also the main attraction of macOS Ventura. During our hands-on with the beta, we felt that the feature improved the multitasking experience on Mac. The Continuity Camera feature, which offers a native way to use your iPhone as a Mac webcam, sounds intriguing, as does the introduction of shared tab groups and passkeys to Safari.

As for iOS 16.1, that offers shared photo libraries through iCloud and a clean energy charging function, which optimizes iPhone charging times depending on when the power grid is using greener energy sources. Apple Fitness+ is now available on iPhone without the need for an Apple Watch. Also new are an improved battery life icon, Live Activities and per-app copy-and-paste permissions, which should mitigate iOS 16’s irritating paste prompts.

iPhone won’t connect to Wi-Fi? It can be frustrating, but there are several ways to fix the problem, so here’s how to reconnect your iPhone to Wi-Fi.

“I wasn’t ready to be Queen of the Seven Kingdoms,” Rhaenyra tells her young son Jacaerys, speaking about when Viserys first named her his heir, all those years ago. “But… it was my duty. And in time, I came to understand I had to earn my inheritance.” What Rhaenyra doesn’t know much more she’ll need to do to earn…

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McLaren’s multi-million dollar 2022 Formula 1 car and the e-reader you keep on your bedside table now have something in common: they each feature an electronic paper display. But while your Kindle helps you fall asleep each night, McLaren Racing is instead leveraging the unique display technology to help revolutionize …

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Put horror movies and games aside for a few minutes to listen to something truly unsettling this Halloween season. The European Space Agency has released audio of what our planet’s magnetic field sounds like. While it protects us from cosmic radiation and charged particles from solar winds, it turns out that the magnetic field has an unnerving rumble.

You can’t exactly point a microphone at the sky and hear the magnetic field (nor can we see it). Scientists from the Technical University of Denmark converted data collected by the ESA’s three Swarm satellites into sound, representing both the magnetic field and a solar storm.

The ethereal audio reminds me of wooden wind chimes rattling as a mass of land shifts, perhaps during an earthquake. It brings to mind the cracking sounds of a moving glacier as well. You might get something different out of the five-minute clip.

“The team used data from ESA’s Swarm satellites, as well as other sources, and used these magnetic signals to manipulate and control a sonic representation of the core field. The project has certainly been a rewarding exercise in bringing art and science together,” the university’s Klaus Nielsen, a musician and supporter of the project, said. “The rumbling of Earth’s magnetic field is accompanied by a representation of a geomagnetic storm that resulted from a solar flare on November 3rd, 2011, and indeed it sounds pretty scary.”

If you happen to visit Solbjerg Square in Copenhagen this week, you may be able to immerse yourself in the magnetic field’s low rumble. More than 30 loudspeakers are pointed at the ground there. They’ll broadcast the audio three times daily until October 30th. “We have set it up so that each speaker represents a different location on Earth and demonstrates how our magnetic field has fluctuated over the last 100,000 years,” Nielsen said.

This isn’t the first time researchers have turned data from otherwise silent forces into sound. Last year, NASA released an audio representation of magnetic field activity around Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. More recently, we got to hear a terrifying depiction of what a black hole sounds like.