Obsolescence

Comparison of innovation front number n(0) approximations. Credit: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2312468120 In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, the Red Queen tells Alice, "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." The race between innovation and obsolescence is like this. …

A new probe from regulators in France will challenge Apple over alleged planned obsolescence in its products.The investigation, which started in December 2022, looks into Apple's approach to repairs, where the company ties the serial numbers of parts to the serial numbers of its products.The initial complaint, filed by the Halt Planned Obsolescence (HOP) association (opens in new tab), claimed Apple is "associating the serial numbers of spare parts to those of a smartphone, including via microchips, giving the…

Apple has released four new software updates designed to help make older devices more secure following a pair of exploits that are said to have been used in the wild.The updates, which followed similar ones for more modern devices including the iPhone 14 and the latest M2 MacBook Air, are built with something much more classic in mind. The iPhone 6s is the oldest phone supported by the iOS 15.7.5 update. MacBooks all the way back to 2013 get the macOS Big Sur and macOS Monterey releases as well.It's of course vitally…

Recently, I watched a fellow particle physicist talk about a calculation he had pushed to a new height of precision. His tool? A 1980s-era computer program called FORM.Particle physicists use some of the longest equations in all of science. To look for signs of new elementary particles in collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, for example, they draw thousands of pictures called Feynman diagrams that depict possible collision outcomes, each one encoding a complicated formula that can be millions of terms long. Summing…