Ars Technica

Enlarge / The Fossil Gen 6 smartwatch. (credit: Fossil)

Fossil was the only brand keeping Google's Wear OS alive for years, but now the fashion brand is quitting the smartwatch market. Just before the weekend, the company confirmed to The Verge: "We have made the strategic decision to exit the smartwatch business." The company says existing smartwatches will continue to get software updates "for the next few years" while it refocuses on traditional watches and jewelry.

Wear OS is out of the dark ages now, but for years Fossil was the OS's only lifeline. Back in the days when Qualcomm was strangling the OS with lackluster SoC updates, Fossil was the only company that kept the dream alive. Fossil jumped into the Android Wear/Wear OS market in 2015 and has been the only steady source of Android smartwatch hardware since then. All the big companies like Samsung, LG, Sony, Huawei, Motorola, and Asus made watches for only a year or two and quit.

In 2021, despite years of loyalty, Google dropped Fossil like a rock when Samsung offered to come back to the Wear OS ecosystem. Google lured Samsung away from its in-house Tizen OS with preferential treatment, including exclusive rights to the new "Wear OS 3" release and exclusive apps. That year, 2021, featured head-to-head August Wear OS releases of Samsung's Galaxy Watch 4 and Fossil's Gen 6 smartwatch. Samsung's watch had a faster, Samsung-made SoC, ran Wear OS 3, and cost $250, while Fossil was stuck with Wear OS 2, a slower Qualcomm chip, and a $300 price tag. Fossil would barely be able to compete with Samsung if the playing field were level; but add to that Samsung's exclusive chips and Google's preferential treatment, and Fossil's watches never stood a chance. The Gen 6 will be the company's last smartwatch release.

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Enlarge / Our two main heroes so far, Buck and Bucky. Or possibly Bucky and Buck. I forget which is which. (credit: Apple)

I'm writing this article under duress because it's not going to create anything new or try to make the world a better place—instead, I'm going to do the thing where a critic tears down the work of others rather than offering up their own creation to balance the scales. So here we go: I didn't like the first two episodes of Masters of the Air, and I don't think I'll be back for episode three.

The feeling that the show might not turn out to be what I was hoping for has been growing in my dark heart since catching the first trailer a month or so ago—it looked both distressingly digital and also maunderingly maudlin, with Austin Butler's color-graded babyface peering out through a hazy, desaturated cloud of cigarette smoke and 1940s World War II pilot tropes. Unfortunately, the show at release made me feel exactly how I feared it might—rather than recapturing the magic of Band of Brothers or the horror of The Pacific, Masters so far has the depth and maturity of a Call of Duty cutscene.

Does this man look old enough to be allowed to fly that plane? (credit: Apple)

World War Blech

After two episodes, I feel I've seen everything Masters has to offer: a dead-serious window into the world of B-17 Flying Fortress pilots, wholly lacking any irony or sense of self-awareness. There's no winking and nodding to the audience, no joking around, no historic interviews with salt-and-pepper veterans to humanize the cast. The only thing allowed here is wall-to-wall jingoistic patriotism—the kind where there's no room for anything except God, the United States of America, and bombing the crap out of the enemy. And pining wistfully for that special girl waiting at home.

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Amazon will no longer pursue a $1.4 billion acquisition of iRobot, maker of Roomba robot vacuums after the companies announced today that they have "no path to regulatory approval in the European Union."

On the same day, iRobot announced an "operational restructuring plan" in which 350 employees, or 31 percent of iRobot's workforce, will be laid off. CEO Colin Angle, one of the company's cofounders, will also step down, and the company has hired a chief restructuring officer for its "return to profitability." The company will refocus on its core cleaning product lineup, pausing efforts in air purification, robotic lawn mowing, and education.

As part of the deal's terms, Amazon will pay $94 million to iRobot, most of it earmarked for paying back a three-year, $200 million loan the company took out when the Amazon acquisition was announced in August 2022. iRobot stated in its release that it expected to report losses of "between $265 and $285 million" in the fourth quarter of 2023.

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Enlarge (credit: Gilbert Flores/Golden Globes 2024 / Contributor | Getty Images North America)

After explicit, fake AI images of Taylor Swift began spreading on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter has attempted to block all searches for the pop star.

"This is a temporary action and done with an abundance of caution as we prioritize safety on this issue," Joe Benarroch, X's head of business operations, said in a statement to Reuters.

However, even this drastic step does not seem to be an effective solution, as "Swift" was trending Monday morning on X. The temporary block also does nothing to stop searches using misspellings of the singer's name.

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There's plenty of old familiar faces in the latest trailer for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.

Every good comedy needs a villain audiences love to hate, and the original 1984 Ghostbusters gave us William Atherton's sneering, nosy-parker EPA inspector, Walter Peck. That film turns 40 this year, so it's fitting that Sony is releasing Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, its latest sequel, in March, a follow-up to 2021's Ghostbusters: Afterlife. We're getting even more of Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, and Ernie Hudson this time around, along with the welcome return of Janine Melnitz (Annie Potts) as well as Peck.

(Some spoilers for Ghostbusters: Afterlife below.)

As we previously reported, Afterlife introduced us to a new generation of ghostbusters descended from Egon Spengler (the late Harold Ramis)—namely, the science-loving Phoebe (McKenna Grace) and her mechanically inclined brother Trevor (Finn Wolfhard). Mom Callie (Carrie Coon), aka Egon's daughter, moved the family out to Oklahoma when she inherited Egon's old house. The kids discovered their grandfather's old ghost-busting gear just in time to battle the attempted return of none other than Gozer the Gozerian from the original film. Afterlife grossed over $200 million at the box office against its $75 million production budget. Sony announced the sequel the following spring, with a script by Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan. Kenan would eventually replace Reitman as director. Per the official premise:

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Enlarge / Canon’s FPA-1200NZ2C nanoimprint lithography machine. The company has been developing technology to stamp chip designs onto silicon wafers rather than etching them using light. (credit: Canon)

Canon hopes to start shipments of new low-cost chip-making machines as early as this year, as the Japanese company best known for its cameras and printers tries to undercut longtime industry leader ASML in providing the tools to make leading-edge semiconductors.

The challenge from Canon comes as Western governments attempt to restrict China’s access to the most advanced semiconductor technologies and as global demand for chipmaking machines has soared. If successful, Canon’s “nanoimprint” technology could give back Japanese manufacturers some of the edge they ceded to rivals in South Korea, Taiwan and, increasingly, China over the past three decades.

“We would like to start shipping this year or next year... we want to do it while the market is hot,” said Hiroaki Takeishi, head of Canon’s industrial group, who has overseen the development of the new lithography machines. “It is a very unique technology that will enable cutting-edge chips to be made simply and at a low cost.”

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Enlarge / Galaxies in a sea of interstellar dust. (credit: Chris McGrew)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's January 29, and today's image features a pair of galaxies.

Located in the middle of the image, Bode's galaxy is the beautiful spiral and is named after its discoverer, German astronomer Johann Elert Bode. To its right is the Cigar galaxy, also discovered by Bode. The origin of its colloquial name is rather obvious, I think.

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Enlarge / An image from Ingenuity, looking down at the surface of Mars. That's its shadow. (credit: NASA/JPL)

Much has been written about the plucky exploits of NASA's small Ingenuity helicopter on Mars. And all of the accolades are deserved. "The little mission that could" did, flying 72 sorties across the red planet and pushing out the frontier of exploration into the unknown.

Yet as impressive as Ingenuity's exploits were over the last three years, and though its carbon fiber blades will spin no more, its work has only just begun.

Ingenuity was groundbreaking in two significant ways that will ripple through the culture of NASA and its exploration efforts for decades to come. Although it is impossible to know the future, both of these impacts seem overwhelmingly positive for our efforts to divine the secrets of our Solar System.

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Enlarge / The Framework Laptop 16. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Specs at a glance: Framework Laptop 16 OS Windows 11 23H2 CPU AMD Ryzen 7 7940HS (8-cores) RAM 32GB DDR5-5600 (upgradeable) GPU AMD Radeon 780M (integrated)/AMD Radeon RX 7700S (dedicated) SSD 1TB Western Digital Black SN770 Battery 85 WHr Display 16-inch 2560x1600 165 Hz matte non-touchscreen Connectivity 6x recessed USB-C ports (2x USB 4, 4x USB 3.2) with customizable "Expansion Card" dongles Weight 4.63 pounds (2.1 kg) without GPU, 5.29 pounds (2.4 kg) with GPU Price as tested $2,499 pre-built, $2,421 DIY edition with no OS

Now that the Framework Laptop 13 has been through three refresh cycles—including one that swapped from Intel's CPUs to AMD's within the exact same body—the company is setting its sights on something bigger.

Today, we're taking an extended look at the first Framework Laptop 16, which wants to do for a workstation/gaming laptop what the Framework Laptop 13 did for thin-and-light ultraportables. In some ways, the people who use these kinds of systems need a Framework Laptop most of all; they're an even bigger investment than a thin-and-light laptop, and a single CPU, GPU, memory, or storage upgrade can extend the useful life of the system for years, just like upgrading a desktop.

The Laptop 16 melds ideas from the original Framework Laptop with some all-new mechanisms for customizing the device's keyboard, adding and upgrading a dedicated GPU, and installing other modules. The result is a relatively bulky and heavy laptop compared to many of its non-upgradeable alternatives. And you'll need to trust that Framework delivers on its upgradeability promises somewhere down the line since the current options for upgrading and expanding the laptop are fairly limited.

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Enlarge (credit: AndreyPopov via Getty)

Spreadsheet blunders aren’t just frustrating personal inconveniences. They can have serious consequences. And in the last few years alone, there have been a myriad of spreadsheet horror stories.

In August 2023, the Police Service of Northern Ireland apologized for a data leak of “monumental proportions” when a spreadsheet that contained statistics on the number of officers it had and their rank was shared online in response to a freedom of information request.

There was a second overlooked tab on the spreadsheet that contained the personal details of 10,000 serving police officers.

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