Microsoft’s OneDrive will stop supporting older Windows operating systems next year; repairing the iPhone 13’s display on your own disables Face ID, and BMW is removing the touchscreen in some of its cars due to the chip shortage.
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That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now, welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Monday, November 8th, and I’m your host, Tom Li.
Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage will start dropping support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 starting early next year. In a blog post, the company explained that it’s to divert resources on new technologies and operating systems. Starting on January 1, 2022, Microsoft will no longer provide updates to those older operating systems, and the desktop application will stop syncing to the cloud altogether on March 1, 2022. Windows 8 is now over 9 years old and Windows 7 is over 12. As support for key services continues to dwindle, it looks like users will finally have to upgrade to Windows 10 and 11.
Repairing an iPhone 13 may have just become a whole lot more difficult. As teardown site iFixit discovered, Face ID will stop working if the user replaces the screen on their own. iFixit pinned the issue to Apple’s Service Toolkit 2, which requires the technician to register the new display’s serial number in the cloud. This gives Apple the ability to approve or deny each individual repair. There is a workaround to this, though, and that is to desolder a chip from the original screen and install it onto the new screen. It’s not only highly technical and risky, it just seems needlessly complicated overall.
The chip shortage will cause some to be literally out of touch. As another year of chip shortage looms over December, some BMW cars will be dropping touchscreens in favour of buttoned dashboards. Affected cars include the 3 series sedans, and X5, X6, and X7 SUVs. They will also lose access to the backup assistant feature. According to a forum post on BimmerFest, BMW will apparently provide a $500 credit as compensation and require the customer to acknowledge the missing features in the contract.
What’s better than herbicides? Lasers. One robot manufacturing company is bringing tactical precision weed neutralization to the agricultural world. The Laserweeder, developed by Carbon Robotics, looks like Zamboni and can zap over 100,000 weeds an hour autonomously. A Forbes article noted that herbicides have reduced vegetable’s nutritional content by 40 per cent over the last two decades. Not only do they hurt profitability, but they also wreak havoc on the environment and ecosystem. Today’s weeds are also harder to kill as they become resistant to herbicides. But no matter how tough they are, they won’t ever be a match for the Laserweeder’s powerful 150W lasers.
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home daily briefing. Make sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire Newsletter to get all the news that matters directly in your inbox every day. If you have a suggestion or tip, please drop us a line in the comments or via email. Thanks for listening, I’m Tom Li.