Source: Ian Zelbo
NVIDIA officially scraps deal to acquire ARM
The official news today begin with Nvidia, ARM and deals going sideways. If you remember, couple of weeks ago we reported how Nvidia was considering pulling out of the deal they started back in 2020 and that's exactly what ended up happening. On Tuesday, NVIDIA and Softbank announced the termination of their previously announced transaction. As per the agreement, NVIDIA will have to pay 1.25 Billion dollars to Arm's parent company for not going through with the agreement, but then on an interesting twist, Arm's CEO also decided to step down. The documents say that the deal ended up being scrapped because of "significant regulatory changes preventing the consummation of the transaction, despite the good faith efforts by both parties" and which honestly had me personally skeptical because of how important ARM is to so many industries today. To a certain degree I'm glad it didn't happen, but then again if Softbank is getting paid for not having it bought, it's clear that they want to sell, and that's not fun.
EU officials see no problem with Meta shutting down Facebook and Instagram
Moving on, let's talk about Meta and their controversy with the European Union as things just got very interesting. On the last Pocketnow Daily we talked about Meta pretty much telling the SEC that they didn't want to comply with the new EU rules and kinda threatened that they might be closing Facebook and Instagram in the whole continent of Europe and that would affect both large and small business. Well, yesterday two EU officials commented on the possibility of Facebook and Instagram being shut down, and both of the statements are hilarious! The German Economy Minister says that life without Facebook has been fantastic for the past 4 years. And that the EU is such a big internal market with so much economic power, and they won't be intimidated by this. The French Finance Minister says that he can confirm that life is very good without Facebook, and that anyone can live like this. Finally, he says that Digital Giants must understand that the EU will resist and affirm their position. So to put it in Layman's Terms, the European Union just told Meta that they don't care if the company decides to shut down their services in the whole continent and if Meta doesn't abide by their regulations, they won't be bending the rules for them. This soap opera is getting so Good.
New M2 MacBook Pro may arrive next month
Now let's talk about Apple for the first time today and more information on their Spring event. On the last show we had a Mark Gurman report mentioning that Apple would be releasing at least one Mac during the Spring but, he didn’t provide a model or a date and now we have a new report. This one actually comes from DigiTimes so let's take it with a grain of salt but, they're claiming that Apple's supply chain partners kept production lines running over the Lunar New Year holiday for a new MacBook Pro which is set to launch in "early March". According to their sources, Apple is planning to launch a new MacBook Pro with the M2 processor, a 5G iPhone SE and a 5G iPad. They're claiming that besides from the processor, most of the other components in this new MacBook Pro will be nearly the same to the models that feature M1 chips. We just hope they're talking about the Pro variants because 2 USB-C ports for a Pro machine continues to be a joke. This report doesn't mention the size of this computer but, other reports from trusted sources claim that it'll be a 13-inch model. Now, this computer has been in the leaks lately but, it was tipped to come out in the second half of the year, and I'm more inclined to believe in those rumors as having a new Mac without an official M2 announcement just doesn't make sense, but we'll see.
Apple’s new AR/VR headset could arrive with its own ‘realityOS’
And finally for the hottest news today, let's continue talking about skepticism, but let's shift gears on to an Apple product I've debated for a bit, and yes, I'm talking about their AR headset. According to different reports, Apple is working on at least 2 different AR projects that include an AR headset and a pair of AR glasses that are coming later. Now we got a couple of new tweets that show references to a "Reality OS" in the App Store's upload logs and Apple's open source code. This operating system has been mentioned before as rOS, and like other alternatives like watchOS, it is expected to be specific to these devices. The two new references pretty much confirm that it has its own binaries and that it also has a Simulator. Mark Gurman claims that Cupertino wants to create a dedicated App Store for their AR headset with a focus on gaming, streaming video content and video conferencing. Bloomberg's describing it as an "all-encompassing 3D digital environment" for those 3 purposes. If you're wondering about the headset, Ming Chi Kuo recently said that it'd be powered by Apple Silicon M-style chips and it'll offer an innovative experience with seamless switching between AR and VR modes. This headset could drop this year but it could also be delayed until 2023.