waves Nokia sues Apple for patent infringement

Nokia announced Wednesday it is suing Apple in German and US courts for patent infringement, claiming the US tech giant was using Nokia technology in "many" products without paying for it.

Finnish Nokia, once the world's top mobile phone maker, said the two companies had signed a licensing agreement in 2011, and since then "Apple has declined subsequent offers made by Nokia to license other of its patented inventions which are used by many of Apple's products."
"After several years of negotiations trying to reach agreement to cover Apple's use of these patents, we are now taking action to defend our rights," Ilkka Rahnasto, head of Nokia's patent business, said in a statement.
The complaints, filed in three German cities and a district court in Texas, concern 32 patents for innovations related to displays, user interface, software, antennae, chipsets and video coding. Nokia said it was preparing further legal action elsewhere.
Nokia was the world's leading mobile phone maker from 1998 until 2011 when it bet on Microsoft's Windows mobile platform, which proved to be a flop. Analysts say the company failed to grasp the growing importance of smartphone apps compared to hardware.
It sold its unprofitable handset unit in 2014 for some $7.2 billion to Microsoft, which dropped the Nokia name from its Lumia smartphone handsets.
Meanwhile Nokia has concentrated on developing its mobile network equipment business by acquiring its French-American rival Alcatel-Lucent.
Including its 2013 full acquisition of joint venture Nokia Siemens Networks, Nokia said the three companies united represent more than 115 billion euros of R&D investment, with a massive portfolio of tens of thousands of patents.
The 2011 licensing deal followed years of clashes with Apple, which has also sparred with main rival Samsung over patent claims.
At the time, Apple cut the deal to settle 46 separate complaints Nokia had lodged against it for violation of intellectual property.

List of speech editing software

(geekkeep)-voice editing software has become tools that people has come to work with. The military, hackers, hosts, animators , up to an ever increasing list of people has come to rely on for achieving their aims.

 Animating studios has come to use these applications in productions of character lines without relying on hiring voice artists( this has become beneficial to rising studios)In this age the security of some units uses bio scans, speech recognition units is prey common and that brings the downside. Agents, buggers, military infiltration rely on speech editing software to bypass these systems hence gaining unauthorized access to the units.

you must have seen the ever rising artificial intelligence struggle in the tech market or hubs. AI like Deep-mind, Cortana,Clever bot, Virtual Assistant Denise,    Verbots,    MadomaVirtual Assistant,

DesktopMates,     Braina,      Syn Virtual Assistant   uses these speech recognition softwares to make the voice of these assistants or artificial intelligence.

lists of speech recognition software are

 WavePad audio editing software                                                                                                            This audio editing software is a full-featured professional audio and music editor for Windows and Mac. It lets you record and edit music, voice and other audio recordings. When editing audio files, you can cut, copy and paste parts of recordings, and then add effects like echo, amplification and noise reduction. WavePad works as a wav or mp3 editor, but it also supports a number of other file formats including vox, gsm, wma, real audio, au, aif, flac, ogg, and more.               

 free audio editor

Free Audio Editor can digitize sound recordings of your rare music cassette tapes, vinyl LPs and videos, creating standard digital sound files. Timer and input level triggered recording are included. There is a button to activate the system Windows Mixer without visiting the control panel. The recording can be directly loaded into the waveform window for further perfection.

You can edit audio using the traditional Waveform View or the frequency-based Spectral Display that makes it easy to isolate and remove unwanted noise. Intuitive cut/copy/paste/trim/mute and more actions can be performed easily. The selection tools make the editing operations performed with millisecond precision.Enhance your audio with more than 30 native signal and effects processing engines, including compression, EQ, fade in/out, delay, chorus, reverb, time stretching, pitch shifting and more. It significantly increases your audio processing capabilities. The real-time preview enables you to hear the results before mixing down to a single file.This free audio editor supports a large amount of input formats including MP3, WMA, WAV, AAC, FLAC, OGG, APE, AC3, AIFF, MP2, MPC, MPGA, M4A, CDA, VOX, RA, RAM, ARW, AIF, AIFC, TTA, G721, G723, G726 and many more as source formats. Any audio files can be saved to the most popular audio formats like MP3, WMA, WAV, OGG, etc. Furthermore, it is available to control the output quality by adjusting the parameters & our software also prepares many presets with different combinations of settings for playback on all kinds of software applications and devices.

Audacity  

Audacity can record live audio through a microphone or mixer, or digitize recordings from other media. With some sound cards, and on any recent version of Windows, Audacity can also capture streaming audio.

• Device Toolbar manages multiple recording and playback devices.
• Level meters can monitor volume levels before, during and after recording. Clipping can be displayed in the waveform or in a label track.
• Record from microphone, line input, USB/Firewire devices and others.
• Record computer playback on Windows Vista and later by choosing “Windows WASAPI” host in Device Toolbar then a “loopback” input.
• Timer Record and Sound Activated Recording features.
• Dub over existing tracks to create multi-track recordings.
• Record at very low latencies on supported devices on Linux by using Audacity with JACK.
• Record at sample rates up to 192,000 Hz (subject to appropriate hardware and host selection). Up to 384,000 Hz is supported for appropriate high-resolution devices on Windows (using WASAPI), Mac OS X, and Linux.
• Record at 24-bit depth on Windows (using Windows WASAPI host), Mac OS X or Linux (using ALSA or JACK host).
• Record multiple channels at once (subject to appropriate hardware).

Power Sound Editor

Power Sound Editor Free is a visual audio editing and recording software solution, which supports many advanced and powerful operations with audio data.
You can use Power Sound Editor Free to record your own music, voice, or other audio files, edit it, mix it with other audio or musical parts, add effects like Reverb, Chorus, and Echo, and burn it on a CD, post it on the World Wide Web or e-mail it.

mp3DirectCut

mp3DirectCut is a fast and extensive audio editor and recorder for compressed mp3. You can directly cut, copy, paste or change the volume with no need to decompress your files for audio editing. Using Cue sheets, pause detection or Auto cue you can easily divide long files.

Music Editor Free

Music Editor Free (MEF) is a multi-award winning music editor software tool. MEF helps you to record and edit music and sounds. It lets you make and edit music, voice and other audio recordings. When editing audio files you can cut, copy and paste parts of recordings and, if required, add effects like echo, amplification and noise reduction.

Wavosaur

Wavosaur is a free sound editor, audio editor, wav editor software for editing, processing and recording sounds, wav and mp3 files. Wavosaur has all the features to edit audio (cut, copy, paste, etc.) produce music loops, analyze, record, batch convert. Wavosaur supports VST plugins, ASIO driver, multichannel wav files, real time effect processing. The program has no installer and doesn’t write in the registry. Use it as a free mp3 editor, for mastering, sound design.

Traverso DAW

Traverso DAW is a GPL licensed, cross platform multitrack audio recording and editing suite, with an innovative and easy to master User Interface. It’s suited for both the professional and home user, who needs a robust and solid DAW. Adding and removal of effects plugins, moving Audio Clips and creating new Tracks during playback are all perfectly safe, giving you instant feedback on your work!

Ardour

Ardour is a digital audio workstation. You can use it to record, edit and mix multi-track audio. You can produce your own CDs, mix video soundtracks, or just experiment with new ideas about music and sound. Ardour capabilities include: multichannel recording, non-destructive editing with unlimited undo/redo, full automation support, a powerful mixer, unlimited tracks/busses/plugins, timecode synchronization, and hardware control from surfaces like the Mackie Control Universal. If you’ve been looking for a tool similar to ProTools, Nuendo, Pyramix, or Sequoia, you might have found it.

Rosegarden

Rosegarden is a well-rounded audio and MIDI sequencer, score editor, and general-purpose music composition and editing environment. Rosegarden is an easy-to-learn, attractive application that runs on Linux, ideal for composers, musicians, music students, and small studio or home recording environments.

Hydrogen

Hydrogen is an advanced drum machine for GNU/Linux. It’s main goal is to bring professional yet simple and intuitive pattern-based drum programming.

Sound Engine

SoundEngine is the best tool for personal use, because it enables you to easily edit a wave data while it has many functions required for a mastering process.

Expstudio Audio Editor

Expstudio Audio Editor is a visual music file editor that has many different options and a multiple functionality to edit your music files like editing text files. With a given audio data it can perform many different operations such as displaying a waveform image of an audio file, filtering, applying various audio effects, format conversion and more.

DJ Audio Editor

DJ Audio Editor is easy-to-use and well-organized audio application which allows you to perform various operations with audio data. You can create and edit audio files professionally, also displaying a waveform image of audio file makes your work faster.

Eisenkraut

Eisenkraut is a cross-platform audio file editor. It requires Java 1.4+ and SuperCollider 3. It supports multi-channel and multi-mono files and floating-point encoding. An OSC scripting interface and experimental sonagramme functionality are provided.

FREE WAVE MP3 Editor

Free Wave MP3 Editor is a sound editor program for Windows. This software lets you make and edit voice and other audio recordings. You can cut, copy and paste parts of recording and, if required, add effects like echo, amplification and noise reduction.

Kangas Sound Editor

Fun Kangaroo-themed program that allows the user to create music and sound effects. It uses a system of frequency ratios for pitch control, rather than conventional music notation and equal temperament. It allows instruments, both musical and percussion, to be created.

Ecawave

Ecawave is a simple graphical audio file editor. The user-interface is based on Qt libraries, while almost all audio functionality is taken directly from ecasound libraries. As ecawave is designed for editing large audio files, all processing is done direct-to-disk. Simple waveform caching is used to speed-up file operations. Ecawave supports all audio file formats and effect algorithms provided by ecasound libraries. This includes JACK, ALSA, OSS, aRts, over 20 file formats, over 30 effect types, LADSPA plugins and multi-operator effect presets.

Audiobook Cutter

Audiobook Cutter splits your MP3 audio books and podcasts in a fast and user friendly way. The split files can easily be used on mobile MP3 players because of their small-size. Their duration allows smooth navigation through the book. The split points are determined automatically based on silence detection.

Jokosher

Jokosher is a simple yet powerful multi-track studio. With it you can create and record music, podcasts and more, all from an integrated simple environment.

LMMS

LMMS is a free cross-platform alternative to commercial programs like FL Studio, which allow you to produce music with your computer. This includes the creation of melodies and beats, the synthesis and mixing of sounds, and arranging of samples. You can have fun with your MIDI-keyboard and much more; all in a user-friendly and modern interface.

Mp3Splt

Mp3Splt-project is a utility to split mp3 and ogg files selecting a begin and an end time position, without decoding. It’s very useful to split large mp3/ogg to make smaller files or to split entire albums to obtain original tracks. If you want to split an album, you can select split points and filenames manually or you can get them automatically from CDDB (internet or a local file) or from .cue files. Supports also automatic silence split, that can be used also to adjust cddb/cue splitpoints. You can extract tracks from Mp3Wrap or AlbumWrap files in few seconds.

Qtractor

Qtractor is an Audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer application written in C++ with the Qt4 framework. Target platform is Linux, where the Jack Audio Connection Kit (JACK) for audio, and the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) for MIDI, are the main infrastructures to evolve as a fairly-featured Linux desktop audio workstation GUI, specially dedicated to the personal home-studio.

ReZound

ReZound aims to be a stable, open source, and graphical audio file editor primarily for.

Sweep

Sweep is an audio editor and live playback tool for GNU/Linux, BSD and compatible systems. It supports many music and voice formats including WAV, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis, Speex and MP3, with multichannel editing and LADSPA effects plugins.

Wavesurfer

WaveSurfer is an Open Source tool for sound visualization and manipulation. It has been designed to suit both novice and advanced users. WaveSurfer has a simple and logical user interface that provides functionality in an intuitive way and which can be adapted to different tasks.

methods to detect dishonesty online

A new study by Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, associate professor of information systems and cybersecurity and Cloud Technology Endowed Professor at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), describes a method for detecting people dishonestly posting online comments, reviews or tweets across multiple accounts, a practice known as "astroturfing."

The study describes a statistical method that analyzes multiple writing samples. Choo, a member of the UTSA College of Business, and his collaborators found that it's challenging for authors to completely conceal their writing style in their text. Based on word choice, punctuation and context, the method is able to detect whether one person or multiple people are responsible for the samples.
Choo and his co-authors (two former students of his, Jian Peng and Sam Detchon, and Helen Ashman, associate professor of information technology and mathematical sciences at the University of South Australia) used writing samples from the most prolific online commenters on various news web sites, and discovered that many people espousing their opinions online were actually all linked to a few singular writers with multiple accounts.

Credit: University of Texas at San Antonio 

 

"Astroturfing is legal, but it's questionable ethically," Choo said. "As long as social media has been popular, this has existed."
The practice has been used by businesses to manipulate social media users or online shoppers, by having one paid associate post false reviews on web sites about products for sale. It's also used on social media wherein astroturfers create several false accounts to espouse opinions, creating the illusion of a consensus when actually one person is pretending to be many.
"It can be used for any number of reasons," Choo said. "Businesses can use this to encourage support for their products or services, or to sabotage other competing companies by spreading negative opinions through false identities."
Candidates for elected office have also been accused of astroturfing to create the illusion of public support for a cause or a campaign. For example, President George W. Bush, the Tea Party movement, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump have all been accused of astroturfing to claim widespread enthusiasm for their platforms.
Now that Choo has the capability to detect one person pretending to be many online, he is considering further applications for his top-tier research. Stressing that astroturfing, while frowned upon, is not illegal, he's now looking into whether the algorithm can be used to prevent plagiarism and contract cheating.
"In addition to raising public awareness of the problem, we hope to develop tools to detect astroturfers so that social media users can make informed choices and resist online social manipulation and propaganda," Choo said.

Helping guide urban planing trough combining cellphone data with perceptions of public spaces

Researchers used sample images, like the ones on the top row, to identify several visual features that are highly correlated with judgments that a particular area is safe or unsafe. The left side shows a low level of safety while the right shows a high level. Highlighted areas on the middle row show “unsafe” areas while the bottom row shows “safe” areas in the image. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

For years, researchers at the MIT Media Lab have been developing a database of images captured at regular distances around several major cities. The images are scored according to different visual characteristics—how safe the depicted areas look, how affluent, how lively, and the like

In a paper they presented last week at the Association for Computing Machinery's Multimedia Conference, the researchers, together with colleagues at the University of Trento and the Bruno Kessler Foundation, both in Trento, Italy, compared these safety scores, of neighborhoods in Rome and Milan, to the frequency with which people visited these places, according to cellphone data.
Adjusted for factors such as population density and distance from city centers, the correlation between perceived safety and visitation rates was strong, but it was particularly strong for women and people over 50. The correlation was negative for people under 30, which means that males in their 20s were actually more likely to visit neighborhoods generally perceived to be unsafe than to visit neighborhoods perceived to be safe.
In the same paper, the researchers also identified several visual features that are highly correlated with judgments that a particular area is safe or unsafe. Consequently, the work could help guide city planners in decisions about how to revitalize declining neighborhoods.
"There's a big difference between a theory and a fact," says Luis Valenzuela, an urban planner and professor of design at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Santiago, Chile, who was not involved in the research. "What this paper does is put the facts on the table, and that's a big step. It also opens up the ways in which we can build toward establishing the facts in difference contexts. It will bring up a lot of other research, in which, I don't have any doubt, this will be put up as a seminal step."
Valenzuela is particularly struck by the researchers' demographically specific results. "That, I would say, is quite a big breakthrough in urban-planning research," he says. "Urban planning—and there's a lot of literature about it—has been largely designed from a male perspective. ... This research gives scientific evidence that women have a specific perception of the appearance of safety in the city."
Corroborations
"Are the places that look safer places that people flock into?" asks César Hidalgo, the Asahi Broadcast Corporation Career Development Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and one of the senior authors on the new paper. "That should connect with actual crime because of two theories that we mention in the introduction of the paper, which are the defensible-space theory of Oscar Newman and Jane Jacobs' eyes-on-the-street theory." Hidalgo is also the director of the Macro Connections group at MIT.

Jacobs' theory, Hidalgo says, is that neighborhoods in which residents can continuously keep track of street activity tend to be safer; a corollary is that buildings with street-facing windows tend to create a sense of safety, since they imply the possibility of surveillance. Newman's theory is an elaboration on Jacobs', suggesting that architectural features that demarcate public and private spaces, such as flights of stairs leading up to apartment entryways or archways separating plazas from the surrounding streets, foster the sense that crossing a threshold will bring on closer scrutiny.
The researchers caution that they are not trained as urban planners, but they do feel that their analysis identifies some visual features of urban environments that contribute to perceptions of safety or unsafety. For one thing, they think the data support Jacobs' theory: Buildings with street-facing windows appear to increase people's sense of safety much more than buildings with few or no street-facing windows. And in general, upkeep seems to matter more than distinctive architectural features. For instance, everything else being equal, green spaces increase people's sense of safety, but poorly maintained green spaces lower it.
Joining Hidalgo on the paper are Nikhil Naik, a PhD student in media arts and sciences at MIT; Marco De Nadai, a PhD student at the University of Trento; Bruno Lepri, who heads the Mobile and Social Computing Lab at the Kessler Foundation; and five of their colleagues in Trento. Both De Nadai and Lepri are currently visiting scholars at MIT.
Hidalgo's group launched its project to quantify the emotional effects of urban images in 2011, with a website that presents volunteers with pairs of images and asks them to select the one that ranks higher according to some criterion, such as safety or liveliness. On the basis of these comparisons, the researchers' system assigns each image a score on each criterion.
So far, volunteers have performed more than 1.4 million comparisons, but that's still not nearly enough to provide scores for all the images in the researchers' database. For instance, the images in the data sets for Rome and Milan were captured every 100 meters or so. And the database includes images from 53 cities.
Automations
So three years ago, the researchers began using the scores generated by human comparisons to train a machine-learning system that would assign scores to the remaining images. "That's ultimately how you're able to take this type of research to scale," Hidalgo says. "You can never scale by crowdsourcing, simply because you'd have to have all of the Internet clicking on images for you."
The cellphone data, which was used to determine how frequently people visited various neighborhoods, was provided by Telecom Italia Mobile and identified only the cell towers to which users connected. The researchers mapped the towers' broadcast ranges onto the geographic divisions used in census data, and compared the number of people who made calls from each region with that region's aggregate safety scores. They adjusted for population density, employee density, distance from the city center, and a standard poverty index.
To determine which features of visual scenes correlated with perceptions of safety, the researchers designed an algorithm that selectively blocked out apparently continuous sections of images—sections that appear to have clear boundaries. The algorithm then recorded the changes to the scores assigned the images by the machine-learning system

Breaking the fourth wall in human-computer interaction: Really talking to each other

Hold a conversation with Harry Potter! Interactive Systems Group, The University of Texas at El Paso, CC BY-ND

Have you ever talked to your computer or smartphone? Maybe you've seen a coworker, friend or relative do it. It was likely in the form of a question, asking for some basic information, like the location of the best nearby pizza place or the start time of tonight's sporting event. Soon, however, you may find yourself having entirely different interactions with your device – even learning its name, favorite color and what it thinks about while you are away.

It is now possible to interact with computers in ways that seemed beyond our dreams a few decades ago. Witness the huge success of applications as diverse as Siri, Apple's voice-response personal assistant, and, more recently, the Pokémon Go augmented reality video game. These apps, and many others, enable technology to enhance people's lives, jobs and recreation.
Yet the potential for future progress goes well beyond just the newest novelty game or gadget. When properly merged, computers can become virtual companions, performing many roles and tasks that require awareness of physical surroundings as well as human needs, preferences and even personality. In the near future, these technologies can help us create virtual teachers, coaches, trainers, therapists and nurses, among others. They are not meant to replace human beings, but to enhance people's lives, especially in places where real people who perform these roles are hard to find.
This is serious next-level augmented reality, allowing a machine to understand and react to you as you exist in the real physical world. My colleagues and I focus on breaking the fourth wall of human-computer interaction, letting you and computer talk to each other – about yourselves.
Bringing computers to life
Our goal was to help people build rapport with virtual characters and analyze the importance of "natural interaction" – without controllers, keyboard, mouse, text or additional screens.

To make the technology relatable, we created a Harry Potter "clone" by using IBM's Watson artificial intelligence systems and our own in-house software. Through a microphone, you could ask our virtual Harry anything about his life, provided there was a reference for it in one of the seven books.

Since then we have also built a museum guide that helps visually impaired people to experience art. Our prototype character, named Sara, resides in a gallery in Queretaro, Mexico, where people can talk to her and ask about the artwork also on display.

We also created a "Jeopardy"-style game host, with whom you can play the popular trivia game filled with questions about our university. You talk to the character as if he were a real host, choosing the category you want to play and answering questions.
We even have our own virtual tour guide at the Interactive Research Group laboratory at UTEP. She answers any questions our hundreds of yearly visitors may have, or asks the researchers to help her out if it is a tough question.
Our most advanced project is a survival scenario where you need to talk, gesture and interact with a virtual character to survive on a deserted island for a fictional week (about an hour in real time). You befriend the character, build a fire, go fishing, find water and shelter, and escape other dangers until you get rescued, using just your voice and full-body gesture tracking.

A researcher interacts through speech and gesture with Adriana, the jungle survival virtual character. Credit: Interactive Systems Group, The University of Texas at El Paso, CC BY-ND

Understanding humans
These projects are fun to "play" for a reason. When we build human-like characters, we have to understand people – how we move, talk, gesture and what it means when you put everything together. This doesn't happen in an instant. Our projects are fun and engaging to keep people interested in the interaction for a long time.
We try to make them forget that there are sensors and cameras hidden in the room helping our characters read body posture and listen to their words. While people interact, we analyze how they behave, and look for different reactions to controlled characters' personality changes, gestures, speech tones and rhythms, and even small things like breathing, blinking and gaze movement.
The next steps are clearly bringing these characters outside of their flat screens and virtual worlds, either to have people join them in their virtual environments through virtual reality, or to have the characters appear present in the real world through augmented reality.
We're building on functions – particularly graphic enhancements – that have been around for several years. Several GPS-based games, like Pokémon Go, are available for mobile devices. Microsoft's Kinect system for Xbox lets players try on different clothing articles, or adds an exotic location background to a video of the person, making it appear as if they were there.
More advanced systems can alter our perspective of the world more subtly – and yet more powerfully. For example, people can now touch, manipulate and even feel virtual objects. There are devices that can simulate smells, making visual scenes of beaches or forests far more immersive. Some systems even let a user choose how certain foods taste through a combination of visual effects and smell augmentation.

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A vast and growing potential
All these are but rough sketches of what augmented reality technology could one day allow. So far most work is still heavily centered in video games, but many fields – such as health care, education, military simulation and training, and architecture – are already using it for professional purposes.
For now, most of these devices operate independently from one another, rather than as a whole ecosystem. What would happen if we combined haptic (touch), smell, taste, visuals and geospatial (GPS) information at the same time? And then what if we add in a virtual companion to share the experience with?
Unfortunately, it's common for new technology to be met with fear, or portrayed as dangerous – as in movies like "The Matrix," "Her" or "Ex-Machina," where people live in a dystopian virtual reality world, fall in love with their computers or get killed by robots designed to be indistinguishable from humans. But there is great potential too.
One of the most common questions we get is about the potential misuse of our research, or if it is possible for the computers to attain a will of their own – think "I, Robot" and the "Terminator" movies, where the machines are actually built and operating in the physical world. I would like to think that our research as a community will be used to create incredible experiences, fun and engaging scenarios, and to help people in their daily lives. To that end, if you ask any of our characters if they are planning to take over the world, they will tease you and check their calendar out loud before saying, "No, I won't."

Apple planning major MacBook Pro refresh with AMD Polaris GPUs, Touch ID, and OLED function keys

The rate at which Apple refreshes its hardware has come under fire in recent weeks. While we’ve noted that the company’s laptops are mostly reasonably new, there are some old MacBook Pros in need of a refresh and the Mac Pro desktop is now nearly three years’ old.
A new report from Bloomberg claims that Apple will refresh its entire MacBook Pro line this fall, with a new design and a number of new features. The company is supposedly working on a new programmable strip of OLED-based function keys that can be switched to perform different functions depending on which application you’re using. Apple’s goal is to simplify shortcuts and allow it to reprogram hardware buttons to add capabilities with software updates, rather than refreshing internal hardware.
Other changes supposedly include a thinner body (but not a tapered one like the MacBook Air), a smaller footprint with shallow curves around the edges of the device, a slightly larger trackpad, and integrated Touch ID support. Some systems will reportedly offer GPUs based on AMD’s Polaris architecture, while the lower-cost models will use Intel’s integrated graphics. USB Type-C is also rumored to be on the way and Thunderbolt 3 is logically expected, though whether Apple will use USB Type-C for it is a matter of debate. Previously, the company used DisplayPort to provide Thunderbolt capability.
We haven’t seen the mobile SKUs for Polaris yet, but it’s generally assumed that they’ll resemble the desktop chips AMD has just launched. At present, only one MacBook Pro uses an AMD GPU, the R9 M370X. That chip is a 640:40:16 configuration with an 800MHz core clock and a 128-bit memory bus. A mobile variant of the RX 460 could make a potent upgrade for that particular chip. It’s an 896:56:16 GPU with 4GB of RAM instead of 2GB and 112GB/s of memory bandwidth, up from 72GB/s.

AMD’s larger Polaris GPU (pictured above) powers desktop chips, while the smaller Polaris 11 is likely intended for mobile.

Mobile chips typically have to operate at lower TDPs than desktop processors, which might require AMD to tweak the RX 460’s power envelope. But we’d still expect Polaris to offer substantially better performance compared to the old GCN 1.0 / Cape Verde GPU that Apple has relied on to anchor its top-end hardware. AMD would undoubtedly relish the halo win, but the impact on its bottom line is likely to be small unless Apple breaks with its own history of offering a limited number of GPU-equipped SKUs.

Image by Bloomberg

Apple may be turning back to the Mac line as a way to bolster flagging revenue from the iPad, as Bloomberg notes. While the iPad outstripped the Mac in 2012 and 2013, total revenue from the tablet business has been declining for years, despite Apple’s attempts to renew it with new variants of the iPad and the iPad Pro. One common criticism of the iPad Pro has been that Apple didn’t make the software changes necessary to turn the tablet into a serious productivity system. That kind of adaptation takes time, and it’s clear that the iPad Pro isn’t offsetting the general decline in tablet sales.
Apple isn’t expected to unveil this new hardware at its September 7 iPhone event, but the new systems will likely debut this fall, possibly alongside Intel’s Kaby Lake 14nm refresh.