Hardware

Apple's new iPhones launch this week, and unlike last year, every one of the new devices comes equipped with the TrueDepth sensor array originally found in the iPhone X. Most consumers who are interested in Apple's products know that piece of technology drives Face ID (an authentication method by which you log into your phone just by showing it your face) and Animojis, those 3D animated characters in Messages that follow your facial expressions.

To get an idea of how small the electronic elements are on the Apple A12 Bionic chip at the heart of the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR, first squint really hard at a human hair.

It's thin, obviously. But it's still thick enough that you could fit about 10,000 of an A12's electronic components across its width. That miniaturization is a "huge breakthrough," Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller boasted on Wednesday, saying the A12 is the industry's first chip to be built using a 7-nanometer manufacturing process.

Pre-orders for the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max start tomorrow, Friday, September 14, at 12:01 a.m. Pacific, with the XR going on sale a month later. If you want to be sure of getting a new handset on Day One, you probably need to be quick with your pre-order. If not, you could be faced with waiting for Apple to fill the backlog of orders before you finally get a new iPhone sometime near Christmas.

Every year, there’s a bit of a frenzy as Apple fans set out to pre-order the latest, greatest iPhones. Some models inevitably sell out within minutes.

Lidars and cameras are two of the three standard sensors (along with radar) on almost all self-driving cars being tested today. Lidars and cameras both operate by detecting reflected light, but cameras are passive, whereas lidars actively send out laser pulses and measure the light that gets reflected back. Cameras produce a flat two-dimensional image, while conventional lidars produce a three-dimensional "point cloud."

Shared by OnLeaks' Steve Hemmerstoffer in a post to Twitter on Monday, the high-resolution renders, created in conjunction with tech blog MySmartPrice, claim to reveal a vastly redesigned iPad Pro model widely expected to debut this fall.

At its big RTX event at Gamescom, NVIDIA made some bold claims about its new Turing RTX cards. First and foremost was that the GeForce RTX 2080 offered performance "six times faster" than current 1000-series Pascal-based GTX cards. That's in large part because of new ray-tracing tech that helps the GPUs calculate complex game lighting much more quickly. "This is a new computing model, so there's a new way to think about performance," said CEO Jensen Huang.

Nvidia revealed its next-gen RTX video cards in an event on Monday, and it has spent the rest of the week taking preorders for the cards that launch September 20. But enthusiasts that jumped at the chance to get in on the new chips from Nvidia found an unpleasant surprise when they saw the price that they would actually have to pay.

L33tdawg: "basically ten 1080 Tis dedicated to doing one thing: artificial intelligence," <--- Sounds awesomely tasty!

Ahead of Nvidia's pre-Gamescom keynote on Monday, Internet retailers spilled the beans on the existence of the company's next consumer-grade graphics cards: the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti.

L33tdawg: Google Wifi has essentially the same functionality.

Monitor-IO is a $100 IoT gadget that tells you whether your Internet is working well, poorly, or not at all. The idea is you put this little black box next to (and plugged directly into) your router, and a quick glance at its color-coded screen will let you know if the Internet's working solidly,  if it's having some problems, or if everything is just plain out. Monitor-IO even promises to tell users granular details like how long a connection has been up, or sketchy, or out.

Nintendo may be considering an entry into the VR market if a recent report from Ars Technica is any indication. According to the outlet, hackers have managed to dig up a
"VR Mode" hidden within the Switch's software.

Interestingly, this mode is nothing new - it's been tucked away for well over a year. Whether this is because Nintendo has actively been developing the feature in that time frame, or because the company has decided to abandon it is not known at this time.