If he hasn’t already, it’s past time for Apple CEO Tim Cook to gain a reputation for dry wit when it comes to handling preconceived opinion — he ladled out several helpings of this during Apple’s second-quarter fiscal call on Thursday. Though the company’s financials were down, they were still ahead of what Wall Street had anticipated. Revenue for the quarter was $90.8 billion, down 4% from the same quarter last year, but Apple’s gross margins increased to 46.6%, mainly on the strength of solid services increases. Cook states the facts  For me, one of his best lines during the presentat ..read more

Seven years after the launch of Teams, Microsoft has outlined plans to retire the initial, “classic” version of the team chat app. Support for Teams classic will end on July 1 and it will be discontinued a year later; atthat point, users will be unable to access the legacy client.  Microsoft released the new 2.1 version of Teams last October after several months in preview, claiming the new app is twice as fast and uses around 50% less memory than its predecessor.  The move represents the biggest change to the collaboration applicat ..read more

In the latest set of tweaks to bring itself into compliance with a new European Union law, Apple has confirmed significant changes to the deal originally offered to developers in the EU. Not only will it open up the iPad in the same way as it is opening up the iPhone in Europe, but it is making significant changes to its Core Technology Fee that should benefit smaller developers. Europe’s iPads will be opened up this fall iPadOS will be opened up in Europe starting this fall, the company said in a statement on its developer website. “This week, the European ..read more

Citing the surge in layoffs nationwide, particularly within the IT workforce, online technology learning platform Udacity is offering a free trial to access its entire catalogue of courses for the next 30 days. The courses includes certifications in skills such as programming, data science, artificial intelligence, digital marketing. “Layoffs have affected hundreds of thousands of people in the United States in the past year,”  Udacity COO Victoria Papalian wrote in a blog post. “Unfortunately, the unsettling trend continues. According to the Challenger Report, US job cuts in March ..read more

Some of the most influential influencers on social media sites aren’t people, but computer-generated digital creations. And soon digital “people” will be commonplace in business.  In the past, fabricated fake folks were built the old-fashioned way — using Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) AI technology (the process behind video deepfakes). Nowadays, phony friends are build using LLM-based genAI tools. One early digital influencer on Instagram, named Lil Miquela, has been 19 years old since 2016, is worth millions of dollars and was named one of the 25 most influential ..read more

As companies are scramble to get ahead in the artificial intelligence (AI) arms race, one problem the face is finding and retaining AI talent. For example, Meta has been extending job offers to candidates with AI experience without even interviewing them, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg went so far as to email researchers at Google’s DeepMind unit to recruit talent. According to a recent study led by the Oxford Internet Institute, “AI skills are particularly valuable as they have high levels of skill complementarity, increasing worker wages by 21% on average.” Foote Partners, a recrui ..read more

Atlassian has developed a new search tool  —  Atlassian  Rovo — that can surface data from a variety of third-party apps. Rovo, currently in preview, provides a chatbot interface to help workers access information across their organization,and even decipher workplace jargon.  “Atlassian Rovo is designed to unlock knowledge discovery and accelerate action across the organization,” said Jamil Valliani, head of product AI at Atlassian. “Think of Rovo as a large knowledge model for your company that allows team members to move and act faster.” There are three k ..read more

Hot on the heels of Jamf’s introduction of new compliance tools for Apple admins, Mosyle and Fleet have rolled out improvements to their own competing device management offerings.   What all these solutions have in common is that they meet an enterprise market that is rapidly adopting Macs, iPads, and iPhones, prompting fast-paced service enhancements across the Apple device management industry. Like art, business technology also seems set on reflecting life. “Apple Macs, iPhones, and iPads are now commonly used as productive business tools in enterprises across many industrie ..read more

Both Windows 11 and Windows 10 are full of advertisements and other Microsoft-provided messages that pop up seemingly everywhere and can get in the way of your day-to-day routines. And then there are things that aren’t exactly ads — noisy notifications about viral online articles on MSN, for instance, where Microsoft gets a cut of the advertising.  Want to get rid of all the annoying ads and pop-ups you can? After a few tweaks, Windows will quiet down and stop bothering you so much when you’re trying to get work done. (Alas, Microsoft doesn’t make it possible to turn off everything, so ..read more

For all of the promise of LLMs (large language models) to handle a seemingly infinite number of enterprise tasks, IT executives are discovering that they can be extremely delicate, opting to ignore guardrails and other limitations with the slightest provocation.  For example, if an end user innocuously — or an attacker maliciously — inputs too much data into an LLM query window, no error message is returned and the system won’t seemingly crash. But the LLM will often instantly override its programming and disable all guardrails.  “The friction is that I can’t add a bazillion lines ..read more