Canadian Revieer Weekly Roundup - 5/14- 5/20

Apple goes transparent with the Beats Studio Buds+

Google’s Magic Compose lets you personalize your texts

Unreal Engine 5.2 brings native support for Apple Silicon

Report: How Amazon plans to make Astro smarter

Toyota admits location data breach affecting 2.15 million customers

Xbox Sunkissed Vibes controller: A dazzling collaboration with OPI

Dry and straighten your hair in one go with the Dyson Airstrait

Phone Link app brings iOS support to all Windows 11 users

Report: Apple reportedly registered 'xrOS' wordmark 

Amazon’s new Echo Show 5: Faster, louder, same look

Amazon Echo Show 5 Kids gets a space makeover and more fun features

Sony to showcase PS5 and PS VR2 games on May 24

Disney’s 'Star Wars' hotel to shut down in September 

Twitter Blue lets subscribers upload two-hour videos

HP's recent software update bricks some OfficeJet printers

Samsung halts rumoured plans to switch to Bing on its mobile browser

Meta’s first custom AI chip to launch in 2025

Western Digital to release firmware update for faulty SanDisk SSDs

Western Digital to release firmware update for faulty SanDisk SSDs

Photo: Western Digital

Western Digital has announced it'll release a firmware update to fix a reliability issue with its SanDisk Extreme and Extreme Pro SSDs. Some customers have reported that their 4TB and 2TB Extreme V2 and Extreme Pro V2 portable drives erased their data or became unreadable. The issue seems to primarily affect the 4TB drives made since late 2022.

The company said it resolved the issue for the 4TB models and will publish the firmware update on its website soon. It did not mention the 2TB models or offer refunds to customers who lost their data. Western Digital asked customers to contact its customer support team for assistance. SanDisk drives bought before late 2022 are likely not affected by the issue. 

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Meta’s first custom AI chip to launch in 2025

Image: Muhammad Asyfaul / Unsplash

Meta recently announced that it is developing its first custom chip for running artificial intelligence models. The chip—called Meta Training and Inference Accelerator or MTIA—is designed to handle inference workloads more efficiently and faster than CPUs. Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that AI agents are a vital opportunity for the company to serve billions of people. The chip and other infrastructure plans revealed Thursday could help Meta compete with other tech giants in the AI field.

The MTIA chip is expected to offer more compute power and customization for Meta’s internal workloads. It will work with GPUs to deliver better performance, lower latency, and higher efficiency for each workload. However, the chip is not expected to be ready until 2025.

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Samsung halts rumoured plans to switch to Bing on its mobile browser

Samsung has reportedly put on hold its plans to replace Google with Bing as the default search engine on its Internet Browser app. The Wall Street Journal claims that Samsung was considering the switch. But it decided to pause the review due to potential backlash from Google and the market. Samsung’s Internet Browser app, which comes pre-loaded on its phones, has always used Google as its default search engine. And this move could risk the USD 3 billion in annual revenue that the search giant gets out of the deal.

The reason behind Samsung’s interest in Bing is unclear, but it could be related to Microsoft’s advances in AI technology. However, Google has also been investing heavily in AI features for its search engine and has recently launched its Bard chatbot to the public. Samsung may still revisit the idea of using Bing as its default search engine. But for now, it seems to have shelved the proposal. 

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