New Macs, Metaverse Tax, Musk’s Twitter, And AI Tattoos: What Happened This Week?

Technology is going up a notch every week, and I’m about to tell you how in this week’s news roundup. You may soon have to pay 50% Meta tax for using Facebook’s Metaverse. Not only that, you can now get a tattoo designed by artificial intelligence.

While that’s about the unfair and weird news, this weekly tech news roundup is to tell you about everything noteworthy from this past week. So without further ado, let’s start with big tech and move on to the weird and weirder.

New Macs at WWDC, foldable iPhone coming soon

Apple is on a roll with Apple silicon, and it is likely to continue with the streak in 2022. Mark Gurman has predicted the new MacBook Air debuting at the WWDC 2022. Not just that, developer Steve Troughton Smith also spotted an Apple Studio Display code that hints at a new Mac Mini.

The new Macs could also dent the market as recent reports say Apple computers kept selling when others took a dip. Apple has also won over 60 patents for a foldable iPhone and some for a game controller. So we can expect a foldable iPhone somewhere in the next 2 to 5 years, but not before that. And if you missed it, Tim Cook blasted the DMA his IAPP Summit speech.

Facebook to lose $10 billion and tax you for it

Speaking of a dip, Apple’s cross-site tracking changes will cause Facebook $10 billion worth of losses. If that doesn’t say Facebook is a creepy stalker, I don’t know what could. While Facebook hasn’t issued a plan to recover from these losses, it has plans to cover up for them.

Zuckerberg has been crying foul over App Store commissions forever now, but his own company seems to be forgetting that. Meta, earlier Facebook, will levy a 50% commission in the Metaverse. How’s that for a weekly news roundup? More expensive VR life.

Musk offers to buy Twitter, T-Mobile offers hackers to buy back user data

This roundup has started to look like an Elon Musk and Twitter roundup now. Musk made it our last week’s weekly coverage too. This week, Musk has offered to buy Twitter, and if the platform refuses, Musk has threatened to cash out his shares. A Twitter shareholder earlier sued Musk for delayed disclosure of his stake in the company.

Twitter has been reversing its decisions lately, like the embedded tweet changes. At this point, we think Twitter would like to reverse its decision of letting Elon buy its shares.

While that’s one way of making an offer Twitter can’t refuse, T-Mobile has dialed it up a notch. Vice reports that T-Mobile tried to bribe hackers to return the data trove of over 100 million users. While the hackers sold T-Mobile a copy of the data, the leaked information is still at large.

AI tattoo, dead features, Google’s puppy fraud rebuttal

Open AI’s Dall-E2 artificial intelligence has designed the world’s first AI tattoo, and someone got it on them. The guy even added a little cross to ward off any evil juju. In other satisfactory news, Google has acted on reports of puppy fraud. The platform is now suing actors that scammed people online using Google services like Gmail.

While that’s one good news, there’s a bad one. This week, YouTube has killed off the iPhone PiP mode. The unreleased feature will probably come out sometime in the future, but it is dead for now.

Robot surgeons and Netflix ratings

I said in the beginning that this was going to go from weird to weirder. Engineers at MIT have designed a robot that can perform remote surgery. No, it won’t be operating of its free will yet; doctors can remotely control it to save crucial moments and treat seizures.

We’ll rate robot surgeries when they become a reality, but let’s go to Netflix ratings for now. Netflix is testing a two-thumbs-up review system. This will tell the algorithm what you like vs. what your LOVE to watch.

Weekly tech news roundup

Heere are some other stories deserve mention here. One of the sadder ones is that Unacademy laid off over 1000 employees. It has become more or less a trend in the Indian ed-tech scene, and we expect the situation to get better soon.

On the bright side, Apple has started making the iPhone 13 in India. With this development, Apple can now price its iPhones more competitively in the Indian market. The Clubhouse app has also made it to the headlines this week. It first introduced in-room games and then launched a dark mode for the app.

While that’s all for this weekly tech news roundup, do let us know which story you liked the most from this roundup. We’re also open to suggestions and would love to hear if you think we missed something.