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Apple rumoured to release top secret new gadget ‘by the end of this year' – here's everything we know so far

Apple rumoured to release top secret new gadget ‘by the end of this year' – here's everything we know so far

The Irish Sun7 days ago

APPLE will reportedly release a brand new gadget later this year - and it will be the first of its kind from the iPhone maker.
Rumours about the fabled device have been circulating since 2022.
1
Amazon's Echo Show hub
Credit: Amazon
But a new report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman suggests Apple could be releasing its long-awaited smart home hub before the end of 2025.
The product was expected to rely heavily on
However, a delay to some of the more advanced features inside Apple Intelligence - such as a smarter
Apple has been working on making Siri understand queries based on personal context - for example, "What time does dad's train get in?'
READ MORE ON APPLE
In a statement to
"It's going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year."
It's likely, therefore, that the secretive gadget could be released around the same time as the super-smart Siri later this year.
While Apple has said very little about the smart home hub, here's everything we've heard so far:
Most read in Tech
Apple Home Hub
Apple's smart hub is expected to mirror rivals, like Amazon's Echo Hub, in style with a 7inch square display and thick bezel (the frame that goes around the screen).
Rumours suggest it could be like a HomePod and iPad combined - with a starting price of $1,000 (£738).
Apple shows you tips and tricks on the new Iphone 16e with Apple Intelligence
It's reported to have a camera at the top, with a heavy focus on video apps like FaceTime.
Other Apple apps, including Apple TV, Apple Music and Photos, may also feature.
It will also adopt a new operating system, dubbed homeOS, according to reports.
The Apple hub is designed to control other smart home gadgets.
Consumers should be able to move it around the house as they please, with Apple expected to build in a rechargeable battery.
Apple is reportedly planning a more advanced smart home display with a robotic arm for the future.
This one-armed bot will apparently have a "unique AI personality," according to reports.
However, that product has also been subject to delays.
According to Gurman, this product will launch a "year or two later".
To meet this release window, Apple will reportedly ditch some of its "bolder features".
But those features could be pushed back to later models instead.
APPLE TV SIRI TRICKS
Apple has revealed some clever Siri commands you can try with your Apple TV...
Navigation:
'Open App Store'
'Launch Paramount+'
'Play PBS KIDS Video'
'Go to Photos'
Playback:
'Pause this'
'Play from the beginning'
'Skip forward 90 seconds'
'Jump back 10 minutes'
'Turn on closed captioning'
'Turn on French subtitles'
'What did she just say?'
Information:
'Who stars in this?'
'Who directed this?'
'What's this rated?'
'When was this released?'

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Revenues soar by €1bn at Amazon's Irish web services arm
Revenues soar by €1bn at Amazon's Irish web services arm

Irish Examiner

time9 hours ago

  • Irish Examiner

Revenues soar by €1bn at Amazon's Irish web services arm

Revenues at the Irish web services arm of online giant, Amazon soared by €1bn or 16.5pc to €7.09bn last year. New accounts show that pre-tax profits at data centre firm, Amazon Data Ireland Services Ltd (ADSIL) increased by 23% from €15.16m to €22.96m on the back of the soaring revenues in the 12 months to the end of December last. Currently, Amazon web services firm, Universal Developers LLC has plans before An Bord Pleanala for three planned data centres with a combined power load of 73MW for the AWS data centre campus on a 65 acre land-holding at Cruiserath Road, Dublin 15. The directors for ADSIL state that the company operates several data hub facilities and at the end of last year employed 1,682. The directors state that the data hubs are currently supporting the Amazon group activities. The company recorded comparatively low operating profits of €57.04m after its total operating expenses amounted to €7.03bn made up of €6.04bn in administrative expenses and cost of sales of €997.23m. The company recorded the pre-tax profit of €22.96m after net interest payments of €50.18m off-set by a €16.1m gain on the disposal of an asset are taken into account. The firm last year did not pay out any dividend after paying a dividend of €600m in the prior year. Last year, Amazon in marking its 20 year anniversary in Ireland revealed that its spend here since 2004 amounted to more than €22bn Staff costs at ADSIL last year declined from €216.24m to €196.93m that included share based payments of €29.43m and salaries of €146.32m. The average number of employees in 2024 of 1,634 was made up of 1,128 in operations and 506 in management. The profits last year take account of non-cash depreciation costs of €1.25bn. The company's spend on 'utilities' last year declined from €612.1m to €595.8m. The pay package for directors last year totalled €1.34m that was made up of €451,000 in emoluments, €870,000 in shared based pay awards and €22,000 in pension contributions. Underlining the expansion of the firm in 2024, the book value of additions to tangible assets totalled €1.77bn that included €967.46m under 'construction in progress'. Shareholder funds at the firm last year increased from €4.6bn to €7.66bn that arose mainly from the value of 'other reserve' increasing from €4.6bn to €7.6bn. The company last year recorded post tax profits of €3.1m after incurring a corporation tax charge of €19.78m. Revenues at another Amazon firm operating here, the Cork based Amazon CS Ireland Ltd (ACSI) - which operates a customer service centre at Cork Airport Business Park – last year increased marginally from €298m to €303.92m. The company's administrative expenses totalled €311.44m which was the main contributor to the company recorded a pre-tax loss of €11.17m. The average numbers employed by the company last year dipped by 23 from 2,183 to 2,160 made up of 1,682 in operations and 478 in management. Staff costs decreased slightly from €136.16m to €135.33m that included share based pay awards of €18.8m. At the end of 2024, numbers employed had grown to 2,351. The directors state that during the year 'administrative expenses increased in line with expectations across all areas of the business'. At the end of December last, the company's shareholder funds totalled €76.3m. The pay to directors at ADSIL last year totalled €800,000 made up of €311,000 in remuneration, €474,000 in share based payments and €15,000 in pension contributions.

What the hell happened to Google search?
What the hell happened to Google search?

The Journal

time12 hours ago

  • The Journal

What the hell happened to Google search?

LET'S SAY YOU want a list of Irish ministers. So you google it, of course. The fact that it's its own verb sums up pretty neatly Google's total dominance of online search. 'I'll Bing it,' said no-one, ever. (Sorry, Microsoft.) is the world's most used website . Ninety percent of internet searches go through the company's search engine. It's the front door to the internet, and a navigational tool on which we have become entirely dependent. Who among us has typed out a url in the last decade? Whether you have an Android or an Apple phone, that's Google search you're using when you open your browser. But something has gone wrong. Search for 'Irish ministers' and the top result is… Pat Breen? ( The Journal checked this on several users' desktop browsers with the same result.) Breen was never a minister. He was a junior minister – and that was a while ago now. He lost his seat two elections ago, in 2020. A government website with a full list of current government ministers is quite a bit down the results page. Pat Breen, the Platonic ideal of an Irish minister, according to Google. Google Google Sponsored posts The utility of the search engine has been particularly eroded when it comes to anything that could be sold to you, with top results likely to all be from companies that have paid to skip up the ranking to a position where they would not have organically surfaced. These paid-for top results, which take up more and more space on the search engine results page, are also partly based on your browsing history rather than what you are currently looking for. So a search from an Irish location for 'the best place to buy children's shoes', for instance, can contain sponsored top results for (a) shops that don't sell children's shoes or (b) British online-only retailers. (Good luck buying children's shoes without trying them on.) There are useful results amid the debris of sponsored links and below the paid-for top table, but it feels like harder work than it once was to find them. This isn't helped by the fact that sponsored links are not very visually distinct from organic results. It's hard not to click on them. Ads on search are how Google makes most of its money. ChatGPT's challenge to Google And then, of course, there's the new AI Overview that, for the past year, has appeared in response to certain types of queries. Now, the integration of AI into search is about to be turbocharged as Google goes on the offensive against ChatGPT. It may not be its own verb yet, but for many people, OpenAI's chatbot is becoming as automatic and intuitive a go-to as Google. Liz Carolan, a tech consultant and author of The Briefing newsletter, says that while Google hasn't shared data on the drop-off in people using its search engine, all the signs are that the switch to ChatGPT has been 'profound'. Where once we would have googled, 'what time is the Eurovision', now we are asking chatbots. So Google is becoming a chatbot too. In May, Google began to roll out the next step up from AI Overview. AI Mode, which has been launched in the US, will deliver customised answers to users' questions, including charts and other features, rather than serving up a lists of links. These answers will be personalised based on past browsing history. You will even be able to integrate it with your Gmail account to allow further personalisation. At first, AI Mode will be a distinct option in search, but its features and capabilities will gradually be integrated into the core search product, Google has said . Carolan says this will be as fundamental a change to how we interact with the internet as the original arrival of Google search. 'Instead of navigating between links, we're going to end up using a single interface: a chatbot querying the websites that exist and delivering back to you its interpretation of that, in a conversational style,' she explains. An example of an AI Overview result in Google. Google Google AI nonsense The first problem is, Google's AI results can be nonsense . Kris Shrisnak, a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties working on AI and tech, says people need to understand one fundamental point about the large language models (LLMs) on which chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google's Gemini AI are based: they are not designed to be accurate. 'When they're accurate, they are coincidentally accurate,' Shrisnak says. 'They're accurate by accident, rather than by design.' For example, Carolan recently wanted to check how many working days there are in June. Google's AI-generated top result helpfully explained that there are 21 working days and no public holidays in June. If you specify 'in Ireland', Google says there are 22 working days and no public holidays. Both answers are wrong. There are 20 working days in June, and the first Monday is always a public holiday. ChatGPT didn't know that either. It counted the bank holiday twice. Google isn't planning to take Monday off. Google Google 'It's just blatantly inaccurate,' Carolan says. 'People are relying on it, and it's giving them inaccurate information.' Aoife McIlraith, managing director of Luminosity Digital marketing agency, says Google had almost certainly released its AI search product sooner than it wanted to. 'There's huge pressure on them. It's the first time they actually had competition in the market for search. It will definitely get better, but it's going to take some time,' McIlraith says. Google defended AI Overviews, telling The Journal that people prefer search with this feature. It said AI Overview was designed to bring people 'reliable and relevant information' from 'top web results', and included links. Advertisement Enshittification Even setting aside the incorporation of undercooked AI answers into results, Google's traditional search product does not seem to be working as well as it once did. Journalist Cory Doctorow coined the term 'enshittification ' in 2022 to describe the pattern whereby the value to users of platforms – be it Amazon, TikTok, Facebook or Twitter – gradually declines over time. Doctorow argued that platforms start by offering something good to users (like an excellent search engine), then they abuse their users to serve business customers (search results buried under ads), and then they abuse both users and business customers to serve their shareholders. Documents released in 2023 as part of a US Department of Justice antitrust case against Google gave a rare insider view of the top of the company, revealing that in 2019 there were tensions over the direction of search. The documents suggested a boardroom struggle over whether Google's search team should be more focused on the effectiveness of the product, or on growing the number of user queries (a better search engine would mean fewer queries, and therefore fewer ads viewed). In one email, the head of search complained his team was 'getting too involved with ads for the good of the product'. Google said this weekend that this executive's testimony at trial had 'contextualised' these documents and clarified the company's focus on users. 'The changes we launch to search are designed to benefit users,' Google said. 'And to be clear: the organic results you see in search are not affected by our ads systems.' Carolan says it's impossible to know exactly what has happened within Google's algorithm, but the quality filters that were once in place to keep low-quality results further down the ranking seem to be struggling to hold back the tide. Visibility on Google can be gamed using certain practices known as search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO is the reason why, for example, online recipes often contain weird, boring essays above the list of ingredients. All publishers use SEO, but the quality of search results is degraded when low quality websites are able to abuse SEO to boost their Google ranking. 'Maybe investment within search engines are going more towards AI than they are towards just sustaining the core search product,' Carolan says. 'It's very hard to say because all of this is happening in very untransparent ways. Nobody gets to see how decisions are being made.' McIlraith says it's widely believed in her industry that recent changes to Google's algorithm – in particular an August 2022 update called, ironically, 'Helpful Content' – have corrupted results. She believes this is having a bigger impact in smaller markets such as Ireland, with more . websites appearing in Irish users' results, for example. 'A lot of people in my industry have been shouting about this, particularly in the past 18 months,' McIlraith says. Google said it makes thousands of changes to search every year to improve it, and it's continuously adapting to address new spam techniques. 'Our recent updates aim to connect people with content that is helpful, satisfying and original, from a diverse range of sites across the web,' it said. For what it's worth, Shrisnak doesn't use Google now, favouring DuckDuckGo, an alternative search engine based on Google that feels a lot like the Google of old. It doesn't collect user data (and is capable of correctly identifying the current government of Ireland). What happens next? Google says AI is getting us to stay where it wants us: on Google. CEO Sundar Pichai has suggested that AI encourages users to spend more time searching for answers online, growing the overall advertising market. Google says AI Overviews have increased usage by 10% for the type of queries that show overview results. Soon, Irish users are likely to see advertising integrated into AI Overview. The company is telling advertisers this will be a powerful tool, putting their ads in front of us at an important, previously inaccessible moment when we are just beginning to think about something. But AI raises existential questions for the production of content for the web as we know it, both in its ability to generate content and as it's being applied in search. In the jargon of digital marketing, the problem is known as 'zero click'. You ask Google a question and get an answer – maybe an AI-generated one – without ever having to click on a blue link. McIlraith says: 'The biggest challenge for all of my clients and the wider industry is that Google is flatly refusing to give us any data around zero click. We cannot see how much our brand is showing up in search results where no click is being attributed.' Until now, there was an unwritten contract: websites provided Google with information for free, and benefited from Google-generated traffic. This contract is broken when Google morphs into a single interface scraping the web to feed its AI in a way that negates the need to click through links to websites to find information. 'The challenge then really becomes, why would I create content?' McIlraith says. 'Why would I create content on my website just for these AIs to come along and scrape it?' Already there are challenges to ChatGPT's practices, with publishers led by the New York Times suing OpenAI over its use of copyrighted works. News/Media Alliance, the trade association representing all the biggest news publishers in the US, last month condemned AI Mode as 'the definition of theft'. 'Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue,' the alliance said. 'Now Google just takes content by force.' Google CEO Sundar Pichai was grilled about this by US tech news website The Verge last week. He said AI Mode would provide sources, adding that for the past year Google has been sending traffic to a broader base of websites and this will continue. He did not give a definitive answer when asked by whether a 45% increase in web pages over the past two years was the result of more of the web being generated by AI, stating that 'people are producing a lot of content'. Carolan speculates that in the single interface, linkless future, with the business model of web publishing broken, the risk is that the internet starts to eat itself: regurgitating AI slop rather than sustaining the production of original material. The information Google's AI Mode and ChatGPT and the rest are feeding off will then degrade. Late stage enshittification. AI search itself may improve, but these improvements will be undermined by this disintegration of the information environment. Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... Our Explainer articles bring context and explanations in plain language to help make sense of complex issues. We're asking readers like you to support us so we can continue to provide helpful context to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. Learn More Support The Journal

Sales at Amazon's Irish web services unit surge to €7bn
Sales at Amazon's Irish web services unit surge to €7bn

RTÉ News​

time14 hours ago

  • RTÉ News​

Sales at Amazon's Irish web services unit surge to €7bn

Revenues at the Irish web services arm of online giant, Amazon soared by €1bn or 16.5% to €7.09bn last year. New accounts show that pre-tax profits at data centre firm, Amazon Data Ireland Services Ltd (ADSIL) increased by 23% from €15.16m to €22.96m on the back of the soaring revenues in the 12 months to the end of December last. Currently, Amazon web services firm, Universal Developers LLC has plans before An Bord Pleanála for three planned data centres with a combined power load of 73MW for the AWS data centre campus on a 65 acre land-holding at Cruiserath Road, Dublin 15. The directors for ADSIL state that the company operates several data hub facilities and at the end of last year employed 1,682. The directors state that the data hubs are currently supporting the Amazon group activities. The company recorded comparatively low operating profits of €57.04m after its total operating expenses amounted to €7.03bn made up of €6.04bn in administrative expenses and cost of sales of €997.23m. The company recorded the pre-tax profit of €22.96m after net interest payments of €50.18m off-set by a €16.1m gain on the disposal of an asset are taken into account. The firm last year did not pay out any dividend after paying a dividend of €600m in the prior year. Last year, Amazon in marking its 20 year anniversary in Ireland revealed that its spend here since 2004 amounted to more than €22bn Staff costs at ADSIL last year declined from €216.24m to €196.93m that included share based payments of €29.43m and salaries of €146.32m. The average number of employees in 2024 of 1,634 was made up of 1,128 in operations and 506 in management. The profits last year take account of non-cash depreciation costs of €1.25bn. The company's spend on 'utilities' last year declined from €612.1m to €595.8m. The pay package for directors last year totalled €1.34m that was made up of €451,000 in emoluments, €870,000 in shared based pay awards and €22,000 in pension contributions. Underlining the expansion of the firm in 2024, the book value of additions to tangible assets totalled €1.77bn that included €967.46m under 'construction in progress'. Shareholder funds at the firm last year increased from €4.6bn to €7.66bn that arose mainly from the value of 'other reserve' increasing from €4.6bn to €7.6bn. The company last year recorded post tax profits of €3.1m after incurring a corporation tax charge of €19.78m. Revenues at another Amazon firm operating here, the Cork based Amazon CS Ireland Ltd (ACSI) - which operates a customer service centre at Cork Airport Business Park – last year increased marginally from €298m to €303.92m. The company's administrative expenses totalled €311.44m which was the main contributor to the company recorded a pre-tax loss of €11.17m. The average numbers employed by the company last year dipped by 23 from 2,183 to 2,160 made up of 1,682 in operations and 478 in management. Staff costs decreased slightly from €136.16m to €135.33m that included share based pay awards of €18.8m. At the end of 2024, numbers employed had grown to 2,351. The directors state that during the year "administrative expenses increased in line with expectations across all areas of the business". At the end of December last, the company's shareholder funds totalled €76.3m. The pay to directors at ADSIL last year totalled €800,000 made up of €311,000 in remuneration, €474,000 in share based payments and €15,000 in pension contributions.

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