Hello and happy Wednesday – let’s dive into some tech news.
1. BOO!
Kicking things off today is Apple, which has announced it’ll be holding a scary fast event called Scary Fast. The Cupertino company announced it’s set to hold its second “fall event” of 2023. It’ll be a more tolerable 11 am Tuesday October 31 (the iPhone event was 3am, welp) pre-recorded and online-only event where Apple should reveal new Mac products that could include a new iMac desktop or MacBook laptop.
2. California suspends self-driving taxi trial
Staying in California and the state Department of Motor Vehicles has suspended Cruise driverless taxis from operating on state roads, following a hit-and-run incident in San Francisco, which the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is now investigating. The DMV said that “the manufacturer’s vehicles are not safe for the public’s operation”, and Cruise was notified that it would need to remove cars from roads effective immediately. “Ultimately, we develop and deploy autonomous vehicles in an effort to save lives. … Our thoughts continue to be with the victim as we hope for a rapid and complete recovery,” Cruise spokesperson Navideh Forghani said in an emailed statement to Gizmodo.
3. Uber <3 EVs
Cars are a nice segue into cars, I guess, so it’s now over to Uber, which in Australia is ramping up its EV play. In an email this morning, the local outpost of Uber said it was adding more than 10,000 BYD electric vehicles to its fleet (well, that they’ll be made available via a vehicle partnership between Uber Australia and EVDirect (EVDirect is the company that sells the Build Your Dreams cars in Australia) – as part of the partnership, drivers and delivery folks on the Uber platform can access EV financing options on the BYD Atto 3, with more models to become available as they arrive in Australia. Uber also said Uber for Business riders can now choose a guaranteed ride in a premium EV across Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, the Gold Coast, and Adelaide.
4. NBN achieves 20 Gbps speeds in live network technical trials
Still down under and the company responsible for rolling out the National Broadband Network has announced the results of technical field trials with partner Nokia, where the pair used “using “multi-gigabit technologies on NBN fibre” “in which we have achieved speeds of 20Gbps (symmetric) on 25GS PON and 8 Gbps (symmetric) on XGS PON”. That’s a mouthful, but the takeaway, NBN Co said, is that these sorts of results have only previously been seen in a lab setting and “demonstrate the technical feasibility to support future multi-gigabit services and is an important step in delivering NBN’s long-term network strategy”.
5. Opensignal praises Optus for 5G experience
The last item is another smooth segue as we stay in the telco space. Opensignal has published its Australia Mobile Network Experience Report, which gives Optus a pat on the back (and some awards). The telco won six awards outright and was a joint winner in a further three categories. The operator takes home four out of five 5G experience awards either jointly or outright. Takeaways from the report are that “Optus users enjoy the best on-demand and live video experience in Australia” and the telco also wins the 5G Download Speed (for the fifth time in a row).
BONUS ITEM: Your bonus item today comes from my dear friend David from Kotaku Australia.
Enjoy your day!