This afternoon, AMD released their financial results for the third quarter, which ended September 27, 2014. While revenue was down slightly from Q2, the net income was positive for this first time this fiscal year. non-GAAP Earnings Per Share was $0.03, which missed analysts’ projections of $0.04. Earlier in the quarter projections were as high as $0.07 per share, but the Computing and Graphics segment was mixed this quarter due to “challenging market conditions” according to AMD.

Starting July 1st, 2014, AMD reorganized their reporting structure into two groups. The Computing and Graphics group focuses on desktop and notebook processors, chipsets, discrete desktop GPUs, and workstation GPUs. The Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom group includes server processors, embedded processors, dense servers, semi-custom SoCs, engineering services, and royalties, which is pretty much every market AMD is in other than the traditional desktop/notebook market.

AMD Q3 2014 Financial Results (GAAP)   Q3'2014 Q2'2014 Q3'2013 Revenue (Billions) $1.43 $1.44 $1.46 Operating Income (Millions) $63 $63 $95 Net Income (Millions) $17 -$36 $48 Earnings Per Share $0.02 -$0.05 $0.06

Revenue for Q3 2014 was $1.43 billion, down just under 1% from Q2 2014’s $1.44 billion. As compared to Q3 2013, revenue was down 2%. Operating Income was $63 million (non-GAAP $66M) for the quarter, which is also down from the previous quarter and year-over-year. Net income was $17 million (non-GAAP $20M) for the quarter which is up from the $36 million loss last quarter, but down from $48 million profit in Q3 2013. Gross margin was flat from last quarter at 35%.

AMD Q3 2014 Financial Results (Non-GAAP)   Q3'2014 Q2'2014 Q3'2013 Revenue (Billions) $1.43 $1.44 $1.46 Operating Income (Millions) $66 $67 $78 Net Income (Millions) $20 $17 $31 Earnings Per Share $0.03 $0.02 $0.04

The Computing and Graphics segment revenue decreased 6% from last quarter and 16% year-over-year. AMD states the primary decrease is due to by lower chipset and GPU sales as compared to last quarter, and decreased notebook processor and chipset sales as compared to a year ago. The Operating Loss for the division was $17 million, which is up (or down, depending on how you look at negative numbers) substantially from the $6 million loss last quarter and $9 million loss in Q3 of last year.  The Average Selling Price (ASP) of CPUs/APUs actually increase sequentially and year-over-year. Discrete GPU ASP decreased over last quarter, but increased over the same period last year. The Computing and Graphics segment is a tough market for AMD right now. Intel is moving to 14 nm while AMD has to rely on Global Foundries and other fabs to attempt to catch up. This hampers their ability to match Intel on the performance per watt metric certainly. On the GPU front, NVIDIA just released the Maxwell based GTX 980 and 970, as well as the mobile counterparts which have shown impressive performance, and efficiency. Hopefully AMD can counter with some new products in the near term.

The Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom division fared much better for Q3, with a 6% sequential gain in revenue and 21% year-over-year. Operating income for the quarter was $108 million which was up from the $97 million of Q2, and $92 million of Q3 2013. As with the last couple of quarters, AMD attributes the gains primarily due to increased sales of semi-custom SoCs. Their embedded revenue grew by “double digits” as compared to last quarter. Clearly AMD has found a niche here where they can use their expertise in new markets to shore up the company, and so far, it has been successful. In addition, AMD has closed two new Semi-Custom SoC designs this quarter which should help this division continue its growth.

Results Per Division   Q3'2014 Q2'2014 Q3'2013 Computing and Graphics Revenue (Millions) $781 $828 $925 Computing and Graphics Operating Income (Millions) -$17 -$6 $9 Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom Revenue (Millions) $648 $613 $536 Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom Operating Income (Millions) $108 $97 $92

In addition, AMD is also trying to cut costs by reducing their workforce by about 7% Currently, they have 10,149 employees as of the end of Q3, which means around 710 people will be cut from the company. Most of these cuts should be done by the end of Q4. AMD will then adjust their real estate footprint to accommodate the smaller workforce, which could mean additional infusions of cash from the sale of buildings. They are hoping to have savings of $9 million for Q4 and $85 million for FY 2015.

Their forecast for Q4 is not rosy either. AMD is expecting revenue to decrease 13% from Q3, plus or minus 3%. However they are also hoping to drop expenses from the current guidance of $420 to $450 million, to $385 million, which means they are hoping for a positive non-GAAP free cash flow.

Although AMD did miss investor earnings, they did not miss by much and the net result was a quarter where the company managed to turn a tiny profit, which is in stark contrast to the first couple of quarters for 2014. Unfortunately, AMD’s losses all stem from the desktop PC industry. Intel just had a record quarter, so there is certainly money to be made in this sector. We will have to see how Dr. Su, the new CEO of AMD, addresses this for the next quarter.

 

These days, most patent lawsuits are filed by so-called "patent trolls," which can't be counter-sued because they have no business other than litigation.

When a company files a patent lawsuit against a competitor, it can expect to be met with a counter-suit. That's exactly what happened when Sprint used 12 VoIP patents to sue Comcast in 2011. Yesterday, Comcast's counter-punch landed, hard.

Sprint got slapped with a $7.5 million jury verdict (PDF) for infringing three Comcast patents, after a Delaware trial ended. That's less than the $16.5 million Comcast lawyers had asked for, but simply by sticking it out through trial and winning, Comcast's point has surely been made: we're not an easy target, and we will hit back.

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Quick-snap! Now, Kinect-less Xbox One owners can do a few more cool system functions on the fly.

Microsoft's near-monthly streak of Xbox One updates continued on Wednesday with a substantial October update. The console maker had already teased the update's most intriguing feature in August when it announced a media-player app set to handle a staggering number of codecs—particularly the MKV container—and DLNA streaming from other devices on a home network.

XB1's new media player, like the system's Blu-ray player, must be loaded as a separate app. We were able to test it during a beta period, and it worked as advertised, meaning it allowed us to watch all of our favorite, legitimately acquired TV shows and films in crisp MKV format.

The update's other major addition, a quick-snap menu, can be accessed with a double-tap of the controller's home button. It focuses largely on functions that were formerly locked to voice control, including quick loads of previous games and apps and the ability to record your last 30 seconds of gameplay—which should make it easier for players who snapped up a cheaper, Kinect-less XB1 to multitask with the system.

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Microsoft is replacing a whole set of its IT-oriented conferences—TechEd, Management Summit, Exchange Conference, SharePoint Conference, Project Conference, and Lync Conference—with one new event: Ignite.

The first Ignite conference will be a five-day event in Chicago, running May 4-8, 2015. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will give the keynote speech with Brad Anderson (CVP Enterprise Client & Mobility), Joe Belfiore (CVP Operating Systems Group), Dave Campbell (CTO), Peggy Johnson (EVP Business Development), Chris Jones (VP), Julie Larson Green (Chief Experience Officer of "My Life and Work"), Gurdeep Singh Pall (VP Skype), and others.

With the announcement of Ignite, Microsoft has announced its full set of major 2015 conferences. The year will kick off with business event Convergence in Atlanta, March 16-19. Next is Build, once again in San Francisco, April 29-May 1. After Ignite, the final event will be Worldwide Partner Summit in Orlando, July 12-16.

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The other big announcement for the day is of course Apple’s new iPads, the iPad Air 2 and the iPad mini 3. As signaled by their names, neither is intended to be a massive departure from their (still for sale) predecessors. But both of them, the iPad Air 2 in particular, pack a number of improvements over the 2013 models.

In-hand, the iPad Air 2 is not as significant a departure from its predecessor as the original Air was from earlier iPads, but if you are familiar with the original Air then you can appreciate the fact that Apple has taken it down from 7.5mm thick to 6.1mm thick. The weight is roughly the same (437g vs. 469g) so it’s not much lighter in the hand, but handling it makes the change in size more apparent.

Perhaps more readily apparent is the anti-reflective coating, a first for an iPad. While Apple’s controlled demo room doesn’t give us the opportunity to introduce too much light, in what testing we could do there’s definitely a difference. Whatever it is that Apple is using, the coating doesn’t seem to have changed the clarity at all; it is seemingly still as clear as the non-coated iPad mini 3.

Meanwhile the A8X inside presents us with a new mystery. This is a new chip, and we know very little about it besides Apple’s claims of 40% better CPU performance and 2.5x better GPU performance. The CPU performance points to a dual core “Enhanced Cyclone” configuration like A8, while the GPU performance number is well in excess of what we saw going from A7 to A8. So comparing A8X to A7, we are most likely (finally) looking at a hex-core Imagination PowerVR GX6650 GPU. However, this alone does not explain where the roughly 1 billion additional transistors compared to A8 have gone. Most likely there are additional surprises to be found.

Gallery: iPad Air 2 Hands On

Moving on, we have the iPad mini 3. Unlike the iPad Air 2, Apple isn’t overhauling the hardware by nearly as much, so the iPad mini 3 is a smaller upgrade over its predecessor than the iPad Air 2 is. Size and weight stay the same, so the new mini feels the same in your hands as the old one. The display is also once more a 2048 x 1536 pixel display, though it did look a bit better than we recall the iPad mini 2’s display being, so it may be a new panel (but this is something we’d need to test).

Apple hasn’t replaced the SoC or WiFi radio – it’s still an A7 and 802.11n respectively – so performance isn’t any different either. What’s left to set apart the new mini from the old then is the inclusion of Apple’s Touch ID sensor along with a larger 128GB storage option. It’s admittedly not much, especially when the iPad mini 2 is now $100 cheaper. On the other hand it is available in Gold, and as we’ve seen with the iPhone that has proven to be a very popular option at launch.

Gallery: iPad mini 3 Hands On

Two activist groups have filed an appeal in their lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department to access one week’s worth of license plate reader data. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California (ACLU SoCal) lost their case before a Los Angeles Superior Court judge last month.

In May 2013, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the law enforcement agencies in an attempt to compel the agencies to release a week’s worth of LPR data from a particular week in August 2012.

The judge in the lower court ruling found that the law enforcement agencies could withhold such license plate reader (LPR) records through a particular exemption under the California Public Records Act that allows investigatory records to be kept private.

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We just got done with our hands-on time with Apple’s new products, and we’ll start with what’s likely the sneakiest of them, the iMac with Retina Display.

Why “sneaky”? The answer is all in the HiDPI display, which Apple calls the “Retina 5K Display”. The retina display is definitely the star of the new iMac, as the rest of the hardware is largely a minor specification bump from last year’s model. In fact turned off you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between the 2013 (non-retina) and new retina models, but the screen is immediately evident once on.

At 5120x2880 pixels, the new Retina 5K Display is precisely 4x the pixels of the 2560x1440 panel in last year’s model. What this means is that Apple can tap their standard bag of tricks to handle applications of differing retina capability and get all of it to look reasonably good. This also means that 2560x1440 content – including widgets – will scale up nicely to the new resolution. Apple does not discuss whom they have sourced the panel from, but given the timing it’s likely the same panel that is in Dell’s recently announced 27” 5K monitor.

Much more interesting is how Apple is driving it. Since no one has a 5K timing controller (TCON) yet, Apple went and built their own. This is the first time we’re aware of Apple doing such a thing for a Mac, but it’s likely they just haven’t talked about it before. In any case, Apple was kind enough to confirm that they are driving the new iMac’s display with a single TCON. This is not a multi-tile display, but instead is a single 5120x2880 mode.

This also means that since it isn’t multi-tile, Apple would need to drive it over a single DisplayPort connection, which is actually impossible with conventional DisplayPort HBR2. We’re still getting to the bottom of how Apple is doing this (and hence the sneaky nature of the iMac), but currently our best theory is that Apple is running an overclocked DisplayPort/eDP interface along with some very low overhead timings to get just enough bandwidth for the job. Since the iMac is an all-in-one device, Apple is more or less free to violate specifications and do what they want so long as it isn’t advertised as DisplayPort and doesn’t interact with 3rd party devices.

Update: And for anyone wondering whether you can drive the 5K display as an external display using Target Display Mode, Apple has confirmed that you cannot.

Meanwhile driving the new display are AMD’s Radeon R9 M290X and R9 M295X, which replace the former NVIDIA GTX 700M parts. We don’t have any performance data on the M295X, though our best guess is to expect R9 285-like performance (with a large over/under). If Apple is fudging the DisplayPort specification to get a single DisplayPort stream, then no doubt AMD has been helping on this matter as one of the most prominent DisplayPort supporters.

The rest of the package is very similar to the 2013 iMac. It comes with an Intel Haswell desktop class CPU paired with 8GB or more RAM, 802.11ac support, and Apple’s SSD + HDD Fusion drive setup. Apple now offers a higher speed CPU upgrade option that goes up to 4GHz (4.4GHz Boost) – likely the Core i7-4790K – that should make the high-end iMac decently more performant than last year’s model by about 10%.

Gallery: iMac with Retina Display

CUPERTINO, CA—Apple’s media event today was light on surprises. Apple really didn’t show anything that hadn’t already been leaked by the rumor mill (or by Apple itself), but that doesn’t mean that the upgrades to the iPad and Mac lineups are unwelcome.

We spent some quality time with the hardware after the announcement, and our impressions are below. As for the software, you can already grab OS X Yosemite for yourself now, and iOS 8.1 and Apple Pay will follow on Monday (at least for iPhone 6 and 6 Plus owners).

The Retina iMac

Andrew Cunningham

The new Retina iMac.

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CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});The new iMac is the result of a simple equation: Current 27-inch iMac plus Retina display equals Retina 5K iMac.

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Even in the download-only era, it's easy to make yourself offline OS X install media. Andrew Cunningham

It was 2009 when Apple last released a new operating system on physical media. Things have proceeded remarkably smoothly since version 10.7 switched to download-only installers, but there are still good reasons to want an old, reliable USB stick. For instance, if you find yourself doing multiple installs, a USB drive may be faster than multiple downloads (especially if you use a USB 3.0 drive). Or maybe you need a recovery disk for older Macs that don't support the Internet Recovery feature. Whatever the reason, you're in luck, because it's not hard to make one.

As with last year, there are two ways to get it done. There's the super easy way with the graphical user interface and the only slightly less easy way that requires some light Terminal use. Here's what you need to get started.

• A Mac, duh. We've created Yosemite USB from both Mavericks and Yosemite, but your experience with other versions may vary.
• An 8GB or larger USB flash drive or an 8GB or larger partition on some other kind of external drive. For newer Macs, use a USB 3.0 drive—it makes things significantly faster.
• The OS X 10.10 Yosemite installer from the Mac App Store in your Applications folder. The installer will delete itself when you install the operating system, but it can be re-downloaded if necessary.
• If you want a GUI, you need the latest version of Diskmaker X app—we wrote this article based on version 4 beta 2, but if a "final" version is released alongside Yosemite we'll update the article. This app is free to download, but the creator accepts donations if you want to support his efforts.
• An administrator account on the Mac you're using to create the disk.

The easy way Diskmaker X remains the easiest, most user-friendly way to get this done. Andrew Cunningham

Once you've obtained all of the necessary materials, connect the USB drive to your Mac and run the Diskmaker X app. The app will offer to make installers for OS X 10.8, 10.9, and 10.10, but we're only interested in Yosemite today.

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CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});John Siracusa's gigantic review of OS X Yosemite tells you everything you need to know about the new operating system. The biggest, most noticeable change is the revised user interface, which has been redesigned in the image of iOS 7 even though it remains distinctly Mac-like.

When the first Yosemite Public Beta was released, we ran through a bunch of apps and compared them side-by-side with their Mavericks iterations to show just what had changed, and by how much. Apple continued to tweak the look of the interface throughout the beta period, addressing a few of our initial gripes.

Below is a comprehensive visual tour of Yosemite's new changes. Many of these screenshots are similar to what shipped with the Public Beta, so we'll be sure to highlight those elements that have changed significantly since then.

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When the book is finally closed on the product line known as OS X, last year’s release of OS X 10.9 Mavericks may end up getting short shrift. Sure, it brought tangible energy saving benefits to Mac laptop owners, but such gains are quickly taken for granted; internal changes and new frameworks are not as memorable to customers as they may be to developers and technophiles. And while Mavericks included many new user-visible features, and even new bundled applications, the cumulative effect was that of a pleasant upgrade, not a blockbuster.

But for all its timidity and awkwardness, Mavericks marked a turning point for OS X—and in more than just naming scheme. It was the first OS X release from the newly unified, post-Forstall Apple. If iOS 7 was the explosive release of Jony Ive’s pent-up software design ethos, then Mavericks was the embodiment of Craig Federighi’s patient engineering discipline. Or maybe Mavericks was just a victim of time constraints and priorities. Either way, in last year’s OS X release, Apple tore down the old. This year, finally, Apple is ready with the new.

To signal the Mac’s newfound confidence, Apple has traded 10.9’s obscure surfing location for one of the best known and most beautiful national parks: Yosemite. The new OS’s headline feature is one that’s sure to make for a noteworthy chapter in the annals of OS X: an all-new user interface appearance. Of course, this change comes a year after iOS got its extreme makeover.

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Organizations supporting Linux operating systems commonly have a need to build customized software to add or replace packages on production systems. This need comes from timing and policy differences between customers and the upstream distribution maintainers. more>>

The news of Samsung's SSD 840 EVO read performance degradation started circulating around the Internet about a month ago. Shortly after this, Samsung announced that they have found the fix and a firmware update is expected to be released on October 15th. Samsung kept its promise and delivered the update yesterday through its website (download here). 

The fix is actually a bit more than just a firmware update. Because the bug specifically affects the read speed of old data, simply flashing the firmware isn't enough. The data in the drive has to be rewritten for the changes in the new firmware to take place. Thus the fix comes in the form of a separate tool, which Samsung calls Performance Restoration Software. 

For now the tool is limited to the 840 EVO (both 2.5" and mSATA) and will only work under Windows. An OS-independent tool will be available later this month for Mac and Linux users, but currently there is no word on whether the 'vanilla' 840 and the OEM versions will get the update. Samsung told me that they've only seen the issue in the 840 EVO, although user reports suggested that the 'vanilla' 840 is affected as well. I'll provide an update as soon as I hear more from Samsung.

The performance restoration process itself is simple and doesn't require any input from the user once started. Basically, the tool will first update the firmware and ask for a shut down after the update has been completed. Upon the next startup the tool will run the actual three-step restoration process, although unfortunately I don't have any further information about what these steps actually do. What I do know is that all data in the drive will be rewritten and thus the process can take a while depending on how much data you have stored in your drive. Note that the process isn't destructive if completed successfully, but since there is always a risk of data loss when updating the firmware, I strongly recommend that you make sure that you have an up-to-date backup of your data before starting the process.

The restoration tool has a few limitations, though. First, it will require at least 10% of free space or the tool won't run at all, and there is no way around the 10% limitation other than deleting or moving files to another drive before running the tool. Secondly, only NTFS file system is supported at this stage, so Mac and Linux users will have to wait for the DOS version of the tool that is scheduled to be available by the end of this month. Thirdly, the tool doesn't support RAID arrays, meaning that if you are running two or more 840 EVOs in a RAID array, you'll need to delete the array and switch back to AHCI mode before the tool can be run. Any hardware encryption (TCG Opal 2.0 & eDrive) must be disabled too.

In regards to driver and platform support, the tool supports both Intel and AMD chipsets and storage drivers as well as the native Microsoft AHCI drivers. The only limitation is with AMD storage drivers where the driver must be the latest version, or alternatively you can temporarily switch to the Microsoft driver by uninstalling the AMD driver. Samsung has a detailed installation guide that goes through the driver switch process along with the rest of the performance restoration process. 

Explaining the Bug

Given the wide spread of the issue, there has been quite a bit of speculation about what is causing the read performance to degrade over time. I didn't officially post my theory here, although I did Tweet about it and also mentioned it in the comments of the original news post. It turns out that my theory ended up being pretty much spot on as Samsung finally disclosed some details of the source of the bug.

As most of you likely know already, the way NAND works is by storing a charge in the floating gate. The amount of charge determines the voltage state of the cell, which in turn translates to the bit output. Reading a cell basically works by sensing the cell voltage, which works by increasing the threshold voltage until the cell responds.

 

However, the cell charge is subject to multiple variables over time. Electron leakage through the tunnel oxide reduces the cell charge over time and may result in a change in the voltage state. The neighboring cells also have an impact through cell-to-cell interference in the form of floating gate coupling, which is at its strongest when programming a neighbor (or just a nearby) cell. That will affect the charge in the cell and the effect becomes stronger over time if the cell isn't erased and reprogrammed for a long time (i.e. more neighbor cell programs = more interference = bigger shift in cell charge). 

Because cell voltage change is a characteristic of NAND, all SSDs and other NAND-based devices utilize NAND management algorithm that takes the changes into account. The algorithm is designed to adjust the voltage states based on the variables (in reality there are far more than the two I mentioned above) so that the cell can be read and programmed efficiently.

In case of the 840 EVO, there was an error in the algorithm that resulted in an aggressive read-retry process when reading old data. With TLC NAND more sophisticated NAND management is needed due to the closer distribution of the voltage states. At the same time the wear-leveling algorithms need to be as efficient as possible (i.e. write as little as possible to save P/E cycles), so that's why the bug only exists on the 840 and 840 EVO. I suspect that the algorithm didn't take the change in cell voltage properly into account, which translated into corrupted read points and thus the read process had to be repeated multiple times before the cell would return the correct value. Obviously it takes more time if the read process has to be performed multiple times, so the user performance suffered as a result.

Unfortunately I don't have an 840 EVO that fits the criterion of the bug (i.e. a drive with several months old data), so I couldn't test more than the restoration process itself (which was smooth, by the way). However, PC Perspective's and The Tech Report's tests confirm that the tool restores the performance back to the original speeds. It's too early to say whether the update fixes long-term performance, but Samsung assured that the update does actually fix the NAND management algorithm and should thus be a permanent fix. 

The EVO has been the most popular retail SSD so far, so it's great to see Samsung providing a fix in such a short time. None of the big SSD manufacturers have been able to avoid widespread bugs (remember the 8MB bug in the Intel SSD 320 and the 5,000-hour bug in the Crucial m4?) and I have to give Samsung credit for handling this well. In the end, this bug never resulted in data loss, so it was more of an annoyance than a real threat.

Andrew Cunningham

Apple announced a new generation of its tiny Mac mini desktop computer today at an event in Cupertino, California. The new version includes a Haswell CPU and PCI-e flash-based storage, among other features.

The 4th-gen Intel processors will have Intel Iris and HD 5000 GPUs, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and two Thunderbolt 2 ports. Apple referred to the Mac mini as "the world's most energy efficient desktop." The base model includes a 1.4GHz dual-core Intel i5 processor, and the top-end end model can be specced with up to a 3.0GHz dual-core Intel i7 processor. By default, the new Mac mini models are equipped with Apple's Fusion Drives, but customers can upgrade to fully-flash-based PCIe drives for a price.

The company has not updated the Mac mini since late 2012, when it added USB 3.0 ports (the new model retains 4 of these, in addition to Thunderbolt 2). The new machines will retain the design of the 2012 model.

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CUPERTINO, CA—On Thursday, Apple followed its announcement of the iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3 with price drops across the board for older models in those lines, which will continue to be produced alongside today's newest models.

"Our lineup has the lowest price point ever for iPad," Apple Senior VP Phil Schiller said while standing in front of a slide revealing the price points. The original iPad Mini price has dropped to $249 at its smallest memory configuration of 16GB, followed by the iPad Mini 2 at $299 and the iPad Air at $399 (also set at 16GB). Each of those price drops is $100.

In terms of competitive pricing, the original iPad Mini now costs only $50 more than Amazon's Kindle HDX 7 without advertising offers and Google's Nexus 7.

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One of the big "tentpole" announcements from Apple’s event this morning was the long-awaited arrival of iMacs with "retina" displays. The flagship 27-inch iMac form factor has been updated with a high-resolution, high-DPI screen, and it's now known as the "iMac with Retina Display." It runs at a resolution of 5120x2880.

The updated iMac with Retina Display keeps the same external form factor as the existing iMacs, so externally, things are unchanged. However, the new internals include an updated LED backlight, an updated oxide TFT display panel, and an updated timing controller to push around the display's 14.7 million pixels.

Apple also says that although the display is brighter and denser than the 27-inch 2560x1440 panel on older 27-inch iMacs, the panel uses 30% less power thanks to the efficient LED design.

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Andrew Cunningham

CUPERTINO, CA—Apple has officially announced its new iPad Air 2 at today's media event on its campus at 1 Infinite Loop. The iPad Air 2 was inadvertently outed yesterday in an iBooks listing for the iPad user guide.

The new device is only 6.1 mm thick, and Phil Shiller told the audience, "In every iPad, there's been an air gap between glass and display. Now they've been bonded together. There's no air gap. Makes it thinner, and the images sharper."

The screen also has an anti-reflective coating," Shiller added, which "reduces reflections by 56 percent."

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Yosemite is here. Apple

CUPERTINO, CA—Today at a product event, Apple announced that it would be releasing OS X Yosemite to the public. The eleventh major release of OS X was announced back in June at WWDC, and Apple began sending public beta builds to interested parties in July. Though it includes other new features, the operating system's most noticeable change is its redesigned user interface, which echoes the overhaul Apple gave iOS 7 last year.

Yosemite's brighter, flatter applications and icons, its heavy use of translucency, and its switch to Helvetica Neue will be familiar to anyone with an iPhone or iPad, but as we saw in our coverage of the first public beta, Apple has been careful to preserve shadows and depth in many places throughout the OS. Along with the design overhaul, Yosemite also ushers in newly redesigned versions of OS X staple apps like Safari and iTunes.

Yosemite will be available as a free download from the Mac App Store later today, and it can be installed on any supported Mac running OS X 10.6 or later. If your Mac can run either Mountain Lion (version 10.8) or Mavericks (version 10.9), then it can run Yosemite. The full list of supported machines is as follows:

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Apple Pay is the most important thing to launch with iOS 8.1. Apple

Apple has just officially announced iOS 8.1, the first major update to iOS 8. The majority of the update's new features have already been announced, but for one reason or another weren't ready to be included in iOS 8 when it shipped last month. The update will be released on Monday.

In the update, Apple plans to add back the "Camera Roll" album in iOS 8 with 8.1 to help users find their recently taken shots. The new version will also include a beta of iCloud Photo Library. iCloud Photo Library offers users the option of either backing up their photos to iCloud or using the service as primary storage to clear up space on their devices, only downloading photos when necessary.

8.1 will also mark the formal release of Apple Pay, the contactless payment system Apple teased when it unveiled the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in September. The new iPhones can store credit card data locally in what Apple calls the "Secure Element," which also contains a Device Account Number unique to each phone. Stored cards can then be used to make purchases by using TouchID to authenticate and NFC to transmit the data. The Device Account Number and randomly generated per-transaction codes are used to obfuscate your credit card data, which isn't exposed directly to retailers or to Apple. App developers can also integrate Apple Pay buttons into their apps to be used in lieu of credit card numbers. Apple stated that it plans to roll out Apple Pay in November.

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