News written by Matti Robinson (October, 2016)

Apple unveiled this week the next generation MacBook Pro. As you might imagine it is more smaller, thinner, lighter and more powerful than ever before. It also has one completely new feature, the Touch Bar.

Apple celebrated the 25th anniversary of their first notebook by releasing a new MacBook. The new MacBook Pro comes in 13-inch and 15-inch variants with lots of customizability as expected. One thing that separates the cheapest 13-inch version from the other is that there is no Touch Bar in it.

But what is Touch Bar? The Apple's new groundbreaking feature is a touch screen above the updated keyboard with new flatter butterfly mechanism keys. The Touch Bar replaces the old function keys – which are still available on the Touch Bar by pressing the function button – and shows different functionality depending on the application and even inside the applications.

For example, in Safari the Touch Bar can show bookmarks, open tabs or quick links to most used features. In Mail app the Touch Bar shows for example CC suggestions or autocomplete depending what you are doing. The software developers can obviously use Touch Bar in their own way to make the application more intuitive.

Tesla has been sneaking in autonomous driving feature to its cars for a while now. Depending on the model and what options you choose a Tesla car might already have a capability for fully autonomous driving.

In addition, Tesla has recently announced that all upcoming cars will be given the new autopilot mode that will enable fully automatic driving from start to finish. Now Elon Musk and the Tesla team has released a video showcasing what to expect from future autopilot.

In this impressive video the car drives completely without any aid from the passenger from the garage it starts to the parking spot it ends up picking at Tesla HQ. It even drops off the passenger before continuing the search for a free spot and doesn't choose the vacant spot meant for the handicapped.

It seems clear that this is what the future of transportation will be – at least when it comes to personal transportation. Soon you don't even have to pay the very premium price of the car in question (Model X starting at $74,000 and going as high as $150,000). Even the more affordable Model 3 (starting at $35,000) launching next year will have this feature.

The mobile industry's own trade show in Barcelona packs the most influential manufacturer's and developers every year but there's always at least one major name missing every year – Apple. The Cupertino giant has never attended the show, at least not with their own booth, but this is about to change, reports suggest.

According to a leak published by MacRumors Apple is listed as an exhibitor for he next years Mobile World Congress. Held in Feb 27 through March 2, the MWC 2017 seems to be the first trade show Apple is willing to give a pass in a long while.

After the information came public Apple's name was removed from the exhibitors list. It is unlikely however that this was a mistake or that Apple cancelled after the information was leaked to the public. It probably was intended as a surprise that unfortunately for the company didn't last because of a human (or computer) error.

The listing has it that Apple would be located in the App Planet in Hall 8.1 which suggests that we might hear more about the Planet of Apps television series and/or App Store updates. It's unlikely that we'll see any major product launches (or maybe an iPad?), as even most of the other manufacturers have decreased the number of significant launches at MWC.

Netflix has been steadily increasing their investment in original content, often dubbed Netflix Originals, and other exclusive programming. This year the company expects over 600 hours of original programming but even that is nothing compared to what's planned for 2017.

The streaming giant's execs have previously said that they aim to have original programming count for half of the new content. Next year they are going to get close to the goal by featuring more than a thousand hours of exclusive content.

In just two years Netflix would have increased the amount of said content from 450 hours to over 1000 hours. That is over 40 straight days worth of shows, documentaries, animations, and movies. Pretty much anyone that has seen the likes of Orange is the New Black, House of Cards, as well as the newest critically-acclaimed show Stranger Things would agree that new original content is a good thing – maybe even if the price increases a dollar or two.

Samsung's fiasco with the Note7 reached new heights when couple days ago US Department of Transportation banned all Note7s from all flights. Now it is illegal to carry a Samsung Galaxy Note7 to an airplane whether it is on or off.

The smartphone has a battery problem which can result in a fire which is obviously a huge hazard in a plane. Washington Post reports that Samsung is now setting up booths at airports to get more defect phones off the market and make sure people won't be fined for taking a prohibited item on board.

Samsung will be helping customers that still haven't returned their Galaxy Note7 even after two recalls and tons of media coverage. Samsung had to cancel the smartphone model's production and sales altogether after failing to relaunch late last month.

The booth are located before the TSA security screening and offer to copy your data to a new phone. Unfortunately Samsung probably won't be offer replacements from other manufacturers so you might have to choose a Galaxy S7 to enter your flight. Then again there are far worse options than the S7.

Windows 10 has definitely been one of the more successful OS launches for Microsoft and even the growth after the initial launch has been decent thanks to free upgrade for a full year. Development however continues, and some clues have been found that we might see a major update in early 2017.

A twitter user has found clues of upcoming major update in a test version of Windows 10. The update is called Windows 10 Version 1703 which would suggest March 2017 launch as Microsoft names the version after year and month of targeted launch (Anniversary Update this July was 1607).

What can we expect to see in March? Well, at this point it is unknown what kind of features Microsoft is bringing to Windows in the so called Redstone 2 (RS2) update but according to The Verge we might see HomeHub software which enables remote control over smart home technology. We will keep you posted of any reliable sounding rumors which we'll most probably get during the upcoming months.

Samsung's battery catastrophe with the Galaxy Note7 smartphone is going to cost billions of dollars. The company has not only had to issue recall two times but had to stop the production and the selling of the model altogether. Now it seems that even this is not the entire extent of the damage.

Recently a survey asked current Samsung customers about their feelings towards Galaxy phones after the battery issues. Majority were still willing to stick with Samsung but a huge portion, nearly 40 percent, are going to look into competitors' devices when the time comes to replace their phone. Not surprisingly there's been an increase as a survey found after the first recall 34 percent were looking to change their smartphone brand.

Of these 40 percent nearly a third were thinking of switching to Apple's iPhones and the rest were going to look at other Android manufacturers.

Clearly this is not a good sign for Samsung which is trying to do some damage control with $100 vouchers for the people that stick with them. Hopefully, for Samsung, the people will see the problems as a one off and move on. As time goes by people will surely forget.

Mozilla has initiated what is called Project Mortar and aims to replace the current plugins with a new solution. It hopes to decrease the cost of development and maintenance of Firefox.

One of the ways is using other browsers' solutions and the company is already experimenting by porting a couple popular ones. It has ported already the PDF viewer PDFium and the Flash player Pepper Flash.

In order to enable stronger focus on advancing the Web and to reduce the complexity and long term maintenance cost of Firefox, and as part of our strategy to remove generic plugin support, we are launching Project Mortar.

Project Mortar seeks to reduce the time Mozilla spends on technologies that are required to provide a complete web browsing experience, but are not a core piece of the Web platform. We will be looking for opportunities to replace such technologies with other existing alternatives, including implementations by other browser vendors.Senior director of engineering at Mozilla, Johnny Stenback to Betanews

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has approved the new Ethernet standard proposed by the NBASE-T Alliance lead by Cisco and other industry leaders. The new standard improves the speed with current cables.

The standard IEEE 802.3bz allows up to 2.5 and 5 gigabit traffic in what are now one gigabit networks using Cat 5e and Cat 6 cables. According to Cisco, in the past 15 years, Cat5e and Cat6 cables have been installed in excess of an estimated 70 billion meters – that's more than 40 million miles.

The new standard allows networks to be upgraded without massive rewiring which brings obviously costs. As wireless connections have evolved to challenge the wired connections it is important to get wired connection a speed boost if they want to survive.

Even though the new standard doesn't require new cables, the networking equipment has to replaced with a new one that supports 802.3bz.