While an earlier report today claimed that Volkswagen and Apple were working on integrating Apple products into future Volkswagen models, reader Chris Bangle notes that Apple may have been working on control interfaces for at least one upcoming luxury car.
The interview concludes with Callum talking about the new Jaguar's gearshift mechanism ("JaguarDrive"), and claims that Apple has had some involvement with their design:
Step inside and the starter button starts to pulsate like a heartbeat. Press it and the car comes to life. The air vents rise up and the JaguarDrive Selector pops up. We took so much comment on the old J-gate change and felt it was time for a change. The dial takes up less space, too. We have been working with Apple on control interfaces.
A description of the JaguarDrive Selector describes it as follows:
The JaguarDrive Selector replaces a conventional gearstick. Sitting flush with the centre console, it rises electrically when the ignition is turned on. It's a metallic rotary dial (not dissimilar to BMW's iDrive control) that twists to change gear on the standard six-speed automatic box, rotating easily between P, R, N and D. We've tested it and its action is pleasant and seamless. Importantly, it frees up oodles of extra space on the console.
Apple was also the focus of an earlier rumor that Apple was working on car navigation and sound systems in partnership with Mercedes for a 2009 launch.
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
