BMW's plan to offer CarPlay as a subscription service is user-hostile

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

When buying a new car, the Apple CarPlay or Android Auto infotainment system, and the rights to use it, are usually factored into the vehicle's price or offered as an option. In many cases, it is an expected major feature and convenience that simplies a user's buying decision. Once you've purchased the vehicle, you can access CarPlay and its features all you want as a natural extension of your smartphone.

BMW, it seems, has other ideas. The German carmaker, which just recently added CarPlay to their vehicles, wants to charge a yearly subscription fee of US $80 for users. Apple CarPlay is already a $300 option when configuring a new Bimmer and while the first year to use CarPlay is free, customers will need to cough up $80 a year afterward

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Microsoft's newest Surface Book 2 devices coming to Canada

Microsoft os opening pre-orders for the larger 15-inch Surface Book 2 to 17 countries including Canada. The new and improved Surface Book 2 line improves many features in the company's flagship 2-in-1 line, including the latest Intel processors plus the ability to play high-end games as well as power VR experiences.

The larger 15-inch Surface Book 2 is the latest model and a larger form factor that will delight power users and pros looking for a versatile desktop replacement. The Surface Book comes to United Kingdom, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland this month and will be made available to even more countries in the next two months.

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Microsoft's new A.I. can read and comprehend documents as accurately as humans

Big news from Microsoft regarding A.I. and Machine Learning. A team at Microsoft Research Asia reached the human parity milestone using the Stanford Question Answering Dataset, known among researchers as SQuAD. It’s a machine reading comprehension dataset that is made up of questions about a set of Wikipedia articles.

According to the SQuAD leaderboard, on Jan. 3, Microsoft submitted a model that reached the score of 82.650 on the exact match portion. The human performance on the same set of questions and answers is 82.304. On Jan. 5, researchers with the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba submitted a score of 82.440, also about the same as a human.

The two companies are currently tied for first place on the SQuAD “leaderboard,” which lists the results of research organizations’ efforts. 

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Apple CarPlay coming to even more cars and trucks at NAIAS 2018

Apple's CarPlay infotainment and smart app integration platform is one high visibility at the North American Auto Show in Detroit. Toyota and Lexus confirmed all their new models would be CarPlay compatible. Kia has also confirmed CarPlay in its new Forte motor cars and even offers wireless charging and various trucks, which are the strongest category in North America, will be featuring the Apple CarPlay technology as well.

2019 RAM and Ford trucks will also feature CarPlay. In many cases, CarPlay integration is a major feature and not an afterthought.

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