When news first broke that the FBI wanted Apple to build an insecure version of iOS to help the agency access the iPhone used by San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook, I wrote that Apple needed to be careful to avoid the government’s clever public relations trap. It seemed that law enforcement officials wanted to use a high-profile act of terrorism as a way to create political pressure on Apple to comply with its demands and set a precedent for future cases. While I believed Apple was right to resist such demands, I also thought there was a chance this could backfire since no one wants to be seen as impeding an investigation that could prevent future terrorist attacks.

However, Apple stared down the FBI and won this fight for the best possible reason: It had the facts on its side.

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From the start, I was skeptical that the FBI had really exhausted all avenues for unlocking Farook’s iPhone 5c. After all, the FBI wasn’t even asking Apple to break encryption on the device or anything nearly as complicated. Rather, it was just looking for a way to bypass the security protocol that would have erased all of the device’s data after more than 10 incorrect passcode entries.

Given all the things that the NSA has proven itself capable of, I couldn’t believe that none of its hackers could figure out how to crack a three-year-old iPhone. It seems, however, that the NSA doesn’t like to share what it actually knows even if it’s sharing this knowledge with other government agencies.

Even without the NSA’s help, I still thought that some company out there in the private sector would have the know-how to help the FBI bypass the device’s security protocols. And sure enough, it looks like Israeli company Celebrite has stepped up to the plate with a solution to help the FBI that doesn’t involve forcing Apple to make an insecure version of its own software.

While I’m sympathetic to the need to gather as much intelligence as possible while investigating terrorist attacks, the precedent that the government was trying to set in this case was truly dangerous. If it had succeeded in using the All Writs Act as a justification to force Apple to design a “GovtOS,” it could have done the same thing to other companies and pretty soon there would be compromised versions of every operating system out there.

All that said, I tend to agree with Mark Cuban that this case shows that Congress needs to step up to the plate pass laws that offer specific guidelines for what law enforcement officials can and cannot ask tech companies to do to help with terror investigations. Given how badly our legislators have been at doing their jobs lately, however, it’s unlikely we’ll see anything like that occur.

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After a report said earlier this week that Apple is readying ultra-thin 13-inch and 15-inch MacBooks for the second quarter, possibly similar in design to the 12-inch Retina MacBook, code discovered inside OS X suggests there’s at least one new MacBook in the works, supposed to be launching soon.

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Listed as “12-inch MacBook (Early 2016)” in Apple’s System Image Utility feature (see the following image), the device is yet to be unveiled. The same MacBook model is also spotted in the OS X Server application under the NetInstall section, 9to5Mac reports. Other new MacBook models have not been listed at this time.

The fact that Apple calls it an “Early” model might suggest the device will launch in the first four months of the year, MacRumors says.

Additional investigation of OS X 10.11.4 by Pike’s Universum unearthed details about the low-power Intel Skylake processor Apple will probably use in the new 12-inch MacBooks. Here are the purported Intel Core M chips supposed to go inside the new laptops:

Intel® Core™ m3-6Y30 Processor (4M Cache, up to 2.20 GHz)
Intel® Core™ m5-6Y54 Processor (4M Cache, up to 2.70 GHz)
Intel® Core™ m7-6Y75 Processor (4M Cache, up to 3.10 GHz)

Apple launched the first 12-inch Retina MacBook laptops last year, during a special event, but it might quietly upgrade the laptop this year, given that it made no mention of upcoming MacBook models at this week’s iPhone event.

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It’s been years since anyone was excited about a small-size iPhone, but Apple managed to recycle the 4-inch form factor into a device that’s on par with what the larger iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus have to offer.

Aside from 3D Touch support, a second-gen Touch ID sensor and the front-facing camera, the iPhone SE is practically a version of the iPhone 6s packed in a smaller body.

Announced on Monday, the iPhone SE is available for preorder. Similarly, the new 9.7-inch iPad Pro, the first such device, is also ready to be ordered.

DON’T MISS: All the best new iPhone and iPad features in iOS 9.3

Available in four colors, including gold, silver, gray and pink, the iPhone SE costs either $399 (16GB) or $499 (64GB), making it the cheapest new iPhone you can buy. In case you want to trade up to iPhone SE, you might pay as low as $10 per month for the iPhone SE, but you have to go to an Apple retail store to do it while carrier financing starts at $13.30 per month, Apple’s website says.

The iPhone SE will be available in stores on March 31st.

The new iPad Pro, meanwhile, is also available for preorder today. But it will hit stores on March 31st only.

The tablet is available in the same four colors as the iPhone SE, and comes in three storage versions, including 32GB, 128GB, and 256GB, which retail for $599, $749 and $899, respectively. You can add cellular support to either model for an extra $130.

Both devices will be available for purchase from other retailers and carriers in the U.S. and various other international markets.

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If you’ve heard Tim Cook speaking about virtual reality lately, you might not think that Apple as plans to dive into VR anytime soon. Like with many of its other product launch decisions, Apple might play it safe when it comes to launching VR products – say, a VR headset similar to what Oculus, HTC or Sony propose.

That said, Apple has a sneaky way that it could get into VR without releasing a new product and it all has to do with the iPhone.

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Investment firm Piper Jaffray’s analyst Gene Munster, who believed for years that Apple would make an HDTV of its own, now says that Apple will indeed include both virtual and agumented reality features in its plans, but it’ll do so at first with the help of strategic partnership.

The company will not make a Gear VR headset of its own like Samsung did with its top Galaxy devices, but it might partner up with other third parties to enable iPhone-powered VR headsets, Munster explained in a note seen by AppleInsider.

The analyst believes that Apple will extend its Made for iPhone accessory certification program to include VR headset makers in the next two years. Even without official Apple support, these manufacturers are expected to release iPhone-ready VR headsets this fall.

“Although it’s too early to say what the transition to VR/MR will mean to Apple’s model, we are confident Apple will be a significant player in creating the next computing paradigm,” he wrote.

At the same time, we’ll note that Apple is rumored to have a dedicated team in place already working on “next-generation headset technologies,” according to a late January report.

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Of all the original content scheduled to hit Netflix this year, there’s one movie that has me more intrigued than anything else: Special Correspondents. Written and directed by Ricky Gervais, Special Correspondents is about a radio journalist and his sound tech faking war reports from Ecuador while holed up in New York City.

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It’s the first feature length production from Gervais since Cemetery Junction in 2010, at which point he transitioned to cameos and secondary roles in several movie and TV projects, as well as becoming a regular host of the Golden Globes.

In that time, he was developing two projects — Special Correspondents and Life on the Road. You can see exactly what Special Correspondents is about in the trailer below, but Life on the Road is a movie about David Brent, Gervais’s clueless boss character from The Office. That movie won’t release until the summer at the earliest.

Special Correspondents, on the other hand, releases exclusively on Netflix on April 29th. It stars Eric Bana, Vera Farmiga, Benjamin Bratt, America Ferrera and several other big names. You can watch the official trailer for the movie below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kKTFAEQgSY

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One of the things Apple unveiled during its iPhone SE event on Monday was a cute WALL-E-like robot that knows how to do just one thing: Fully disassemble old iPhones into their base components so they can be recycled.

At the time, we thought the video Apple showed was pretty interesting, but it looks like Liam is more than an eco-friendly gimmick. This smartphone-disassembling machine was something so secret inside Apple that only a few engineers who were hired specifically to build it knew about it. Furthermore, it’s a machine so unique that no other companies have it.

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A few days before Apple’s keynote, Mashable got an early access to Liam at a secret location close to Apple’s headquarters in California. First, we learn that Liam for the time being is only able to take about the iPhone 6s, although it will be programmed to take apart older models in the future.

We also learn that Liam isn’t an acronym — rather, it’s just the name the robot was given while it was in development.

The robot was designed by a group of engineers, while a second team wrote the code for the disassembly process. The robot is still in development, and Apple is looking to improve it so that it can take apart other gadgets that it makes. Plans to deploy a Liam in Europe are also underway.

Three years in the making, Liam is a large-scale robot that has 29 freestanding robotic arms which help it take apart various components of the iPhone 6s with high precision. These elements are then stored in bins, and they can be recycled in a more efficient manner than standard recycling practices.

Liam can complete an iPhone disassembly process in 11 seconds, with dozens of units running through the system at all times. Some 350 units are turned out each hour, or about 1.2 million per year.

Mashable’s full inside look at Liam is worth a read – check it out at this link.

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Apple is a company that usually likes to maintain as much control over both its hardware and software as possible. Given this, you’d expect that the company would want to build out its own cloud infrastructure so that it wouldn’t have to rely on the likes of Google, Amazon and Microsoft. However, as a new report from The Information’s Amir Efrati and Steve Nellis makes clear, Apple isn’t even close to having that kind of independence from its biggest rivals when it comes to cloud infrastructure.

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The report reveals that Apple has no problems buying up the necessary infrastructure to build out a world-class cloud of its own. The problem, interestingly enough, comes on the software side.

“The scale of Apple’s cloud infrastructure needs means that off-the-shelf gear and software from conventional vendors like Cisco or H-P run into performance problems,” they write. “Apple’s iCloud, by the estimates of two people familiar with it, requires storing many exabytes of data, meaning that there is no ready-made software on the market that is adequate to handle it. Google and Facebook have similar needs and similar challenges, but both have spent years developing custom hardware and software to address them.”

This is interesting because online services have long been Apple’s biggest weakness. Apps like Apple Music and Apple Maps have definitely improved as they’ve aged but they’ve also generally launched well after competing services have grown more popular and they’ve come with several hiccups along the way.

So for now, Apple will have to rely on Google and others to fulfill its cloud needs. In fact, The Information says that it will take years for Apple to catch up, if it ever does.

Check out the whole report at this link.

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Another day, another big Android vulnerability revealed. A report from security firm Lookout informs us of a new threat that can permanently “compromise” a device, including Google’s Nexus handsets and tablets that usually run the latest version of Android. However, while the new threat can compromise many Android handsets, it’s likely it’s not actively used in attacks at this point.

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Millions of Android handsets are at risk, Lookout discovered. The problem lies with a Linux vulnerability that was patched in April 2014. But even so, Android developers did not fix it even after the vulnerability received vulnerability identifier CVE-2015-1805 last February, Ars Technica reports.

Google is very much aware of the problem and it looks like at least one rooting app that could take advantage of the flaw has been discovered in the wild. Rooting Android devices is popular among power users, as the procedures gives them the liberty of further customizing their Android experience.

“An elevation of privilege vulnerability in the kernel could enable a local malicious application to execute arbitrary code in the kernel,” said an Android security advisory last week. “This issue is rated as a critical severity due to the possibility of a local permanent device compromise and the device would possibly need to be repaired by re-flashing the operating system.”

The vulnerability is present in Android devices that use Linux kernel versions 3.4, 3.10 and 3.14, including Nexus 5 and Nexus 6 devices, as well as a large number of handsets coming from major manufacturer brands. Kernel versions 3.18 or higher are not susceptible to such attacks.

As Ars points out, the good news is that this vulnerability requires a local exploit, meaning that drive-by web attacks are “infeasible if not impossible.”

Google has updated the Verify Apps feature to make sure that devices block the installation of rooting apps that exploit the vulnerability, and the rooting app that can take advantage of the security hole is not available from Google Play.

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“Lukewarm” would be a charitable way to describe the reaction to Man of Steel. Comic book fans and general audiences alike were turned off by Zack Snyder’s dark, gritty take on Superman in 2013, so you might not be surprised to learn that it looks like they feel the same way about Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

SEE ALSO: 5 reboots that managed to surpass the original movies in every way

At the time of writing, Batman v Superman is sitting at a paltry 41% on Rotten Tomatoes and has garnered a depressing Metascore of 47 on Metacritic. Those are both lower than the respective Man of Steel ratings, but to be fair, they’re still in flux as reviews will continue to trickle out throughout the week.

Let’s check out a few of them, shall we?

Entertainment Weekly’s Chris Nashawaty had some kind things to say about Ben Affleck’s turn as Batman, but was mostly underwhelmed:
“Dawn of Justice starts off as an intriguing meditation about two superheroes turning to an all-too-human emotion: hatred out of fear of the unknown. Two and a half hours later it winds up somewhere very far from that—but at the same time, all too familiar. It’s another numbing smash-and-bash orgy of CGI mayhem with an ending that leaves the door open wide enough to justify the next 10 installments.”
Andrew Barker, reviewing the movie for our sister site Variety, had a more positive theater experience, praising the excitement and bombast of the film:
“As a pure visual spectacle […] “Batman v Superman” ably blows the hinges off the multiplex doors […] As overblown as the lengthy showdown might become, Snyder gets closer than ever before to the chiaroscuro palette of classic comics, and even if his scrupulous efforts to avoid reopening “Man of Steel’s” collateral damage debates are a bit on the nose, at least he’s clearly received the message.”
Finally, one of the harshest reviews I read comes from Joshua Rothkopf at Time Out New York. Other than the score, he couldn’t find a single thing to commend:
“Shamelessly, Batman v Superman lunges for a funereal mood in its final stretch, but come on: We all know superheroes don’t die, not when there are reboots in the balance. After this one, you’ll wish a few of them did.”
Ouch.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice releases in theaters on March 25th.

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At first glance, it’s easy to see why many people are overlooking the significance of Apple’s new iPhone SE. After all, the device doesn’t feature a crazy new form factor nor does it offer up any technologies we haven’t seen before. In fact, the iPhone SE by all accounts is simply an iPhone 5 jam-packed with technologies Apple originally introduced on the iPhone 6s six months ago.

Nothing special here, right?

Wrong.

The iPhone SE is not only poised to be Apple’ sleeper hit of the season, it’s just the device Apple needs to breathe a bit of life into slowing iPhone sales.

DON’T MISS: The 5 best things about Apple’s new iPhone SE – and the 2 worst things

Even though Apple’s iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s models set new sales records over the last two years, Apple’s foray into larger screened devices left many iPhone users out in the cold. The reality is that many iPhone users find Apple’s 4.7 and 5.5-inch iPhone models too clunky and unwieldy to use. As a result, there exists a surprisingly large pool of iPhone 5 and iPhone 5s users who opted to stick with their current device and not upgrade to Apple’s bigger iPhone models.

Just last month, research data from Mixpanel found that 38% of all iPhone users were still using iPhone models that were released before the iPhone 6. The research specifically that Apple’s lineup of 4-inch iPhone models (5s, 5c, 5) accounted for 32.54% of active iPhones with iPhone 4s and iPhone 4 models accounting for approximately 5.7% of active iPhones.

What’s more, Tim Cook earlier this year said that a whopping 60% of iPhone owners who owned devices before the iPhone 6 was launched still haven’t upgraded to either the iPhone 6 or iPhone 6s. And driving home the point that there’s an immense market for 4-inch iPhones, Apple yesterday said that it sold 30 million 4-inch iPhone models in 2015 alone. In short, the pool of iPhone users on the verge of upgrading is remarkably large.

All that said, it’s overwhelmingly clear that Apple, in its zeal to catch up to Android and release larger screened devices, either inadvertently or purposefully ignored a large contingent of users who find the 4-inch form factor ideal. With the iPhone SE, Apple is finally providing an advanced smartphone option for this large group of users.

As we detailed yesterday, the iPhone SE is jam-packed with Apple’s most advanced technologies. From its A9 processor and advanced camera to faster Wi-Fi and LTE components, the iPhone SE is finally a device content iPhone 5 and 5s users can get excited about. Clearly, Apple learned a thing or two from its missteps with the iPhone 5c.

With a March 31 release date, the iPhone SE obviously won’t have an impact on current quarter iPhone sales, but it will extremely interesting to see how iPhone sales during the upcoming June quarter stack up against the previous year.

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