The week that was (TWTW) takes a look back at the week’s most prominent tech stories from around the world.
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Lastly you can find a full transcript of this week’s episode below.
In the week that was July 8th to July 14th, 2018:
Intro
Hey everyone, my name’s Raj Deut and it’s time to take a look back at the tech news in the week that was:
July 8th to July 14th, 2018.
Stories
Microsoft announced a new addition to their Surface lineup this week unveiling the new Surface Go. The Go is a smaller 10″ version of the Surface Pro that also brings USB-C to the product family for the first time.
Available to pre-order now for delivery in August, the Surface Go starts at A$599, which gets you a 64GB eMMC drive & 4GB of RAM. A second, more expensive version with a 128GB SSD & 8GB of RAM will set you back A$839.
Microsoft also confirmed that An LTE equipped version of the new Surface Go would be coming later this year however we’re without any pricing information of final dates as yet.
Social media nostalgia service Timehop was hacked over the weekend, with a partial backup of the company’s system believed to have been stolen.
The backup included the private information of 21 million users including names and emails, with 4.7 million of those also including phone numbers.
Further to that the authenticated OAuth tokens of users’ social media accounts were also stored allowing hackers to pose as these people and access their Facebook, Twitter and other connected accounts as if it were them.
Magic Leap’s long awaited Augmented Reality unit was finally showed off to the public this week in a live Twitch stream.
By all reports the unit shown was largely disappointing based on the years of hype and reviews given by those deemed worthy enough to experience the tech first hand.
It was revealed the first iteration of the headset is being powered by Nvidia’s Tegra X2 chipset and will be available to purchase by the end of the American summer through a retail partnership with AT&T.
Amidst highly speculative rumours of a complete hardware revamp Apple dropped an update to their MacBook Pro lineup this week.
The new 13 & 15″ Touch Bar equipped MacBook Pros received a long overdue speed bump now including Intel’s latest generation of mobile CPU’s.
In addition to the bump the new laptops now include Apple’s True Tone displays, making the leap from the iPad Pro to the laptop world as well as a new version of the heavily criticised butterfly keyboard and introduce DDR4 RAM.
Available immediately the new MacBook 13″ starts from A$1799 with the 15″ version starting at A$2399.
And finally, sticking with Apple. A former engineer who was working in Apple’s highly secretive autonomous vehicle division was arrested by the FBI at San Jose International airport before boarding a flight to China.
Xiaolang Zhang had quit Apple months before, leaving for a new position with electric car manufacturer Xiaopeng Motors, however on returning his company appointed laptop it was revealed that network activity had been alarmingly high, which led to an investigation.
Later CCTV footage showed Zhang removing items from the lab and when questioned by the FBI has admitted to copying large amounts of data from Apple’s servers to take to China.
Outro
And that’s it for another week!
The new episode of “I don’t quite know” is finally here! For our wonderful Patreon supporters you can listen to myself and Jeff Cannata talk all about the world of online dating and how he accidentally stumbled upon the love of his life when he really didn’t mean to.
If you’re not a Patreon supporter and you’d like to hear the episode, head over to reckoner.com.au/patreon and join now to instantly get access to the full episode.
Lastly, over on the website for everyone to enjoy, we continue bringing you everything E3 with hands on impressions for Media Molecule’s Dreams, Marvel’s Spider-Man & indie darling The Spectrum Retreat.
Have a great week and bye for now.
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