Rachel Barkman’s son started accurately identifying different species of mushroom at the age of 2. Together they’d go out into the mossy woods near her home in Vancouver and forage. When it came to occasionally sharing in her TikTok videos her son’s enthusiasm and skill for picking mushrooms, she didn’t think twice about it — they captured a few cute moments, and many of her 350,000-plus followers seemed to like it.

That was until last winter, when a female stranger approached them in the forest, bent down and addressed her son, then 3, by name and asked if he could show her some mushrooms. 

“I immediately went cold at the realization that I had equipped complete strangers with knowledge of my son that puts him at risk,” Barkman said in an interview this past June. 

This incident, combined with research into the dangers of sharing too much, made her reevaluate her son’s presence online. Starting at the beginning of this year, she vowed not to feature his face in future content. 

“My decision was fueled by a desire to protect my son, but also to protect and respect his identity and privacy, because he has a right to choose the way he is shown to the world,” she said.

These kinds of dangers have cropped up alongside the rise in child influencers, such as 10-year-old Ryan Kaji of Ryan’s World, who has almost 33 million subscribers, with various estimates putting his net worth in the multiple tens of millions of dollars. Increasingly, brands are looking to use smaller, more niche, micro- and nano-influencers, developing popular accounts on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube to reach their audiences. And amid this influencer gold rush there’s a strong incentive for parents, many of whom are sharing photos and videos of their kids online anyway, to get in on the action. 

The increase in the number of parents who manage accounts for their kids — child influencers’ parents are often referred to as “sharents” — opens the door to exploitation or other dangers. With almost no industry guardrails in place, these parents find themselves in an unregulated wild west. They’re the only arbiters of how much exposure their children get, how much work their kids do, and what happens to money earned through any content they feature in.

Instagram didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment about whether it takes any steps to safeguard child influencers. A representative for TikTok said the company has a zero-tolerance approach to sexual exploitation and pointed to policies to protect accounts of users under the age of 16. But these policies don’t apply to parents posting with or on behalf of their children. YouTube didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

“When parents share about their children online, they act as both the gatekeeper — the one tasked with protecting a child’s personal information — and as the gate opener,” said Stacey Steinberg, a professor of law at the University of Florida and author of the book Growing Up Shared. As the gate opener, “they benefit, gaining both social and possibly financial capital by their online disclosures.”

The reality is that some parents neglect the gatekeeping and leave the gate wide open for any internet stranger to walk through unchecked. And walk through they do.

Meet the sharents

Mollie is an aspiring dancer and model with an Instagram following of 122,000 people. Her age is ambiguous but she could be anywhere from 11-13, meaning it’s unlikely she’s old enough to meet the social media platform’s minimum age requirement. Her account is managed by her father, Chris, whose own account is linked in her bio, bringing things in line with Instagram’s policy. (Chris didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

You don’t have to travel far on Instagram to discover accounts such as Mollie’s, where grown men openly leer at preteen girls. Public-facing, parent-run accounts dedicated to dancers and gymnasts — who are under the age of 13 and too young to have accounts of their own — number in the thousands. (To protect privacy, we’ve chosen not to identify Mollie, which isn’t her real name, or any other minors who haven’t already appeared in the media.)

Parents use these accounts, which can have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers, to raise their daughters’ profiles by posting photos of them posing and demonstrating their flexibility in bikinis and leotards. The comment sections are often flooded with sexualized remarks. A single, ugly word appeared under one group shot of several young girls in bikinis: “orgy.”

Some parents try to contain the damage by limiting comments on posts that attract too much attention. The parent running one dancer account took a break from regular scheduling to post a pastel-hued graphic reminding other parents to review their followers regularly. “After seeing multiple stories and posts from dance photographers we admire about cleaning up followers, I decided to spend time cleaning,” read the caption. “I was shocked at how many creeps got through as followers.”

But “cleaning up” means engaging in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole to keep unwanted followers at bay, and it ignores the fact that you don’t need to be following a public account to view the posts. Photos of children are regularly reposted on fan or aggregator accounts, over which parents have no control, and they can also be served up through hashtags or through Instagram’s discovery algorithms.

The simple truth is that publicly posted content is anyone’s for the taking. “Once public engagement happens, it is very hard, if not impossible, to really put meaningful boundaries around it,” said Leah Plunkett, author of the book Sharenthood and a member of the faculty at Harvard Law School.

This concern is at the heart of the current drama concerning the TikTok account @wren.eleanor. Wren is an adorable blonde 3-year-old girl, and the account, which has 17.3 million followers, is managed by her mother, Jacquelyn, who posts videos almost exclusively of her child. 

Concerned onlookers have pointed Jacquelyn toward comments that appear to be predatory, and have warned her that videos in which Wren is in a bathing suit, pretending to insert a tampon, or eating various foodstuffs have more watches, likes and saves than other content. They claim her reluctance to stop posting in spite of their warnings demonstrates she’s prioritizing the income from her account over Wren’s safety. Jacquelyn didn’t respond to several requests for comment.

Last year, the FBI ran a campaign in which it estimated that there were 500,000 predators online every day — and that’s just in the US. Right now, across social platforms, we’re seeing the growth of digital marketplaces that hinge on child exploitation, said Plunkett. She doesn’t want to tell other parents what to do, she added, but she wants them to be aware that there’s “a very real, very pressing threat that even innocent content that they put up about their children is very likely to be repurposed and find its way into those marketplaces.”

Naivete vs. exploitation

When parent influencers started out in the world of blogging over a decade ago, the industry wasn’t exploitative in the same way it is today, said Crystal Abidin, an academic from Curtin University who specializes in internet cultures. When you trace the child influencer industry back to its roots, what you find is parents, usually mothers, reaching out to one another to connect. “It first came from a place of care among these parent influencers,” she said.

Over time, the industry shifted, centering on children more and more as advertising dollars flowed in and new marketplaces formed. 

Education about the risks hasn’t caught up, which is why people like Sarah Adams, a Vancouver mom who runs the TikTok account @mom.uncharted, have taken it upon themselves to raise the flag on those risks. “My ultimate goal is just have parents pause and reflect on the state of sharenting right now,” she said. 

But as Mom Uncharted, Adams is also part of a wider unofficial and informal watchdog group of internet moms and child safety experts shedding light on the often disturbing way in which some parents are, sometimes knowingly, exploiting their children online.

The troubling behavior uncovered by Adams and others suggests there’s more than naivete at play — specifically when parents sign up for and advertise services that let people buy “exclusive” or “VIP” access to content featuring their children.

Some parent-run social media accounts that Adams has found linked out to a site called SelectSets, which lets the parents sell photo sets of their children. One account offered sets with titles such as “2 little princesses.” SelectSets has described the service as “a classy and professional” option for influencers to monetize content, allowing them to “avoid the stigma often associated with other platforms.”

Over the last few weeks, SelectSets has gone offline and no owner could be traced for comment.

In addition to selling photos, many parent-run dancer accounts, Mollie’s included, allow strangers to send the dancers swimwear and underwear from the dancers’ Amazon wish lists, or money to “sponsor” them to “realize their dream” or support them on their “journeys.”

While there’s nothing technically illegal about anything these parents are doing, they’re placing their children in a gray area that’s not explicitly sexual but that many people would consider to be sexualized. The business model of using an Amazon wish list is one commonly embraced by online sugar babies who accept money and gifts from older men.

“Our Conditions of Use and Sale make clear that users of Amazon Services must be 18 or older or accompanied by a parent or guardian,” said an Amazon spokesperson in a statement. “In rare cases where we are made aware that an account has been opened by a minor without permission, we close the account.”

Adams says it’s unlikely to be other 11-year-olds sending their pocket money to these girls so they attend their next bikini modeling shoot. “Who the fuck do you think is tipping these kids?” she said. “It’s predators who are liking the way you exploit your child and giving them all the content they need.”

Turning points

Plunkett distinguishes between parents who are casually sharing content that features their kids and parents who are sharing for profit, an activity she describes as “commercial sharenting.” 

“You are taking your child, or in some cases, your broader family’s private or intimate moments, and sharing them digitally, in the hope of having some kind of current or future financial benefit,” she said.

No matter the parent’s hopes or intentions, any time children appear in public-facing social media content, that content has the potential to go viral, and when it does, parents have a choice to either lean in and monetize it or try to rein it in.

During Abidin’s research — in which she follows the changing activities of the same influencers over time — she’s found that many influencer parents reach a turning point. It can be triggered by something as simple as other children at school being aware of their child’s celebrity or their child not enjoying it anymore, or as serious as being involved in a car chase while trying to escape fans (an occurrence recounted to Abidin by one of her research subjects). 

One influencer, Katy Rose Pritchard, who has almost 92,000 Instagram followers, decided to stop showing her children’s faces on social media this year after she discovered they were being used to create role-playing accounts. People had taken photos of her children that she’d posted and used them to create fictional profiles of children for personal gratification, which she said in a post made her feel “violated.”

All these examples highlight the different kinds of threats sharents are exposing their children to. Plunkett describes three “buckets” of risk tied to publicly sharing content online. The first and perhaps most obvious are risks involving criminal and/or dangerous behavior, posing a direct threat to the child. 

The second are indirect risks, where content posted featuring children can be taken, reused, analyzed or repurposed by people with nefarious motives. Consequences include anything from bullying to harming future job prospects to millions of people having access to children’s medical information — a common trope on YouTube is a video with a melodramatic title and thumbnail involving a child’s trip to the hospital, in which influencer parents with sick kids will document their health journeys in blow-by-blow detail.

The third set of risks are probably the least talked about, but they involve potential harm to a child’s sense of self. If you’re a child influencer, how you see yourself as a person and your ability to develop into an adult is “going to be shaped and in some instances impeded by the fact that your parents are creating this public performance persona for you,” said Plunkett.

Often children won’t be aware of what this public persona looks like to the audience and how it’s being interpreted. They may not even be aware it exists. But at some point, as happened with Barkman, the private world in which content is created and the public world in which it’s consumed will inevitably collide. At that point, the child will be thrust into the position of confronting the persona that’s been created for them.

“As kids get older, they naturally want to define themselves on their own terms, and if parents have overshared about them in public spaces, that can be difficult, as many will already have notions about who that child is or what that child may like,” said Steinberg. “These notions, of course, may be incorrect. And some children may value privacy and wish their life stories were theirs — not their parents — to tell.”

This aspect of having their real-life stories made public is a key factor distinguishing children working in social media from children working in the professional entertainment industry, who usually play fictional roles. Many children who will become teens and adults in the next couple of decades will have to reckon with the fact that their parents put their most vulnerable moments on the internet for the world to see — their meltdowns, their humiliation, their most personal moments. 

One influencer family, the LaBrants, were forced to issue a public apology in 2019 after they played an April Fools’ Day Joke on their 6-year-old daughter Everleigh. The family pretended they were giving her dog away, eliciting tears throughout the video. As a result, many viewers felt that her parents, Sav and Cole, had inflicted unnecessary distress on her.

In the past few months, parents who film their children during meltdowns to demonstrate how to calm them down have found themselves the subject of ire on parenting Subreddits. Their critics argue that it’s unfair to post content of children when they’re at their most vulnerable, as it shows a lack of respect for a child’s right to privacy.

Privacy-centric parenting

Even the staunchest advocates of child privacy know and understand the parental instinct of wanting to share their children’s cuteness and talent with the world. “Our kids are the things usually we’re the most proud of, the most excited about,” said Adams. “It is normal to want to show them off and be proud of them.”

When Adams started her account two years ago, she said her views were seen as more polarizing. But increasingly people seem to relate and share her concerns. Most of these are “average parents,” naive to the risks they’re exposing their kids to, but some are “commercial sharents” too.

Even though they don’t always see eye to eye, the private conversations she’s had with parents of children (she doesn’t publicly call out anyone) with massive social media presences have been civil and productive. “I hope it opens more parents’ eyes to the reality of the situation, because frankly this is all just a large social experiment,” she said. “And it’s being done on our kids. And that just doesn’t seem like a good idea.”

For Barkman, it’s been “surprisingly easy, and hugely beneficial” to stop sharing content about her son. She’s more present, and focuses only on capturing memories she wants to keep for herself.

“When motherhood is all consuming, it sometimes feels like that’s all you have to offer, so I completely understand how we have slid into oversharing our children,” she said. “It’s a huge chunk of our identity and our hearts.”

But Barkman recognizes the reality of the situation, which is that she doesn’t know who’s viewing her content and that she can’t rely on tech platforms to protect her son. “We are raising a generation of children who have their entire lives broadcast online, and the newness of social media means we don’t have much data on the impacts of that reality on children,” she said. “I feel better acting with caution and letting my son have his privacy so that he can decide how he wants to be perceived by the world when he’s ready and able.”

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Instagram boss Adam Mosseri is set to move to London later this year as part of his ongoing fight to keep the social network thriving in an increasingly competitive marketplace. The move is partly due to Mosseri’s personal desire to relocate to the British capital, the Financial Times first reported.

With the move, which will be not be permanent, Mosseri will also oversee the Instagram team from parent company Meta’s new Kings Cross headquarters. The UK is already home to a number of Instagram teams, and the company could be looking to take advantage of the city’s cheaper cost of labor compared with Silicon Valley, following its first-ever drop in revenue.

“Given the global nature of his role, Adam will be temporarily based out of London later this year,” said a spokesperson for Meta. “London is already Meta’s largest engineering hub outside of the US, with over 4,000 employees across our offices, including a dedicated Instagram product team with people focused on building long term solutions for creators.”

The company is struggling to define its strategy amid competition from rival app TikTok. Last week Mosseri put out a video defending changes to the app, which included a greater focus on video content and testing a full-screen home feed, only to his reverse his decision to keep the changes days later. Instagram is working to shore up its stable of high-profile influencers, but the changes received backlash from two of the app’s top 10 most-followed users, Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner.

Mosseri has worked for Meta since 2008, and became head of Instagram in 2018 following the departure of the app’s co-founders from the company. In December 2021 he testified before Congress about safety, after pausing the development of Instagram Kids earlier in the year.

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Amazon Prime will deliver last-minute gifts and stream original shows like Good Omens. But it comes at a cost — one that is set to increase in mid-September in the UK and Europe.

On Tuesday, Prime customers awoke to an email from Amazon telling them that their Prime membership will increase by up to 43% on Sept. 15, depending on which country they live in. The company cited “increased inflation and operating costs” as the reasons behind the hike.

“This is the first time we have changed the price of Prime in the UK since 2014,” said Amazon in its email to UK customers. “During this time, we have significantly increased the number of products available with unlimited, fast Prime delivery; added and expanded ultra-fast fresh grocery delivery; and added more high-quality digital entertainment, including TV, movies, music, games, and books.”

In the UK, a monthly subscription will rise 12.5% from £8 ($9.60) per month to £9 ($10.80) per month. If you pay annually in the UK, the cost will increase 20% from £79 ($95) to £95 ($114). Customers in Spain, France and Italy are facing price hikes of up to 43%.

Amazon’s decision to raise the cost of Prime subscriptions comes at a tough time for many people who are already feeling the squeeze due to inflation. It also follows a price increase for UK customers of Netflix back in March — the second in 18 months.

Earlier this year, Prime members in the US faced a 17% increase, with annual membership shifting from $119 to $139.

Consumer advocate Martin Lewis, founder of MoneySavingExpert.com, is recommending in a TikTok that monthly Prime customers in the UK and Europe switch to an annual payment before the Sept. 15 deadline to lock in the lower price for the next year, forestalling the rise. He also recommended that annual customers whose memberships would automatically renew shortly after Sept. 15 could cancel their membership now and start a new membership before the date when prices are set to increase, again pushing off the pricier payment for a year.

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What’s happening

EU lawmakers reach an agreement to make USB-C charging mandatory on all phones and other small- and medium-sized devices by 2024.

Why it matters

The legislation could force Apple to abandon Lightning ports on iPhones in favor of USB-C — and not just in Europe.

We all know the frustration of a low phone battery when there’s nobody around with the right charging cable. In a bid to reduce hassle for consumers and to curb excess electronic waste, the European Union plans to introduce a common mandatory phone charger that people can use across all their small- and medium-sized devices. 

The charging tech it has chosen? USB-C.

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EU lawmakers reached a deal on Tuesday that will make USB-C the mandatory universal charger for phones by fall 2024. Not only will the rule apply to phones but also to tablets, headphones, e-readers, portable speakers, handheld games consoles and digital cameras. At a later date, it will apply to laptops too. 

The agreement stipulates that fast charging speeds must be harmonized, so that people can expect to charge their devices at the same speed regardless of the charger they use. In addition, the legislation will let people choose whether to buy devices with or without a bundled charger, allowing them to avoid unnecessary accessories if they already have a drawer full of USB-C chargers at home.

“European consumers were frustrated long with multiple chargers piling up with every new device,” European Parliament Rapporteur Alex Agius Saliba said in a statement. “Now they will be able to use a single charger for all their portable electronics.”

Most tech companies already use USB-C chargers for the majority of their small- and medium-sized tech, so they’ll be largely unaffected when the rules come into force. 

One major exception is Apple, which uses a Lightning connector to charge iPhones and has reintroduced MagSafe chargers to its latest generation of MacBooks. The new EU legislation will force Apple to change its charging technology. And when Apple does so, the change is unlikely to affect only products sold in Europe.

Apple has argued against the idea of a common phone charger, saying that the move could stifle innovation and cause more waste if people are forced to abandon their Lightning cables. In spite of this resistance, a report by Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo in May suggested that Apple is preparing for all iPhones to use USB-C charging within one to two years. This could even improve transfer and charging speeds, said Kuo.

Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment on the EU’s agreement.

The EU’s bid to introduce a universal charger has been a decade in the making and, according to internal estimates, will save European consumers up to 250 million euros ($267 million) per year. The EU also estimates that disposed-of and unused chargers represent about 11,000 tons of e-waste annually. It’s hoping the new legislation will drastically reduce this figure, helping to make the consumer tech industry more sustainable, ahead of what it predicts will be an eventual move to universal wireless charging.

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Your iPhone‘s lock screen has long been a place to outwardly personalize the look of your phone, but have you felt like the customization options are a little… limited? Well, no longer. 

Apple announced during its WWDC 2022 keynote on Monday that it’s giving the iPhone lock screen its biggest-ever overhaul with the upcoming release of the iOS 16 mobile operating system.

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“New lock screen remains undeniably iPhone while also giving you new ways to make it more personal, beautiful and helpful than ever,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, said as he introduced iOS 16 during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. 

The event takes place all this week, but it kicked off letting Apple customers know what changes they can expect via software updates later this year.

See also

• WWDC 2022 Recap: iOS 16 and Everything Else Apple Announced
• Apple M2 MacBook Air Hands-On: Bigger Screen, Higher Price
• iOS 16 Features iPhone Users Are Going to Love Most

The new lock screen options are designed to make your phone more immediately useful and more aesthetically pleasing when you pick it up. The new features to customize the interface are more akin to those that are already available on the Apple Watch. A new depth effect will make subjects in your photos stand out against the rest of the background. And you’ll be able to switch out the backgrounds to make images of your pets or loved ones pop even more. 

If you’re indecisive, you can even create a wallpaper gallery that allows you to switch between lock screen images with ease, or have them set to shuffle at different intervals throughout the day.

Switching up your lock screen promises to be easy. You press and hold to test and customize, swiping to test different colors, filters, fonts and time options. Apple also promises that when you’re listening to music that the album art will take up more real estate on your lock screen than it typically has in the past.

Beyond aesthetics, you’ll also now be able to add widgets to your lock screen, giving easy access to more information about the temperature, an activity or your calendar at a glance. Notifications will now roll in from the bottom of the lock screen so they don’t block your photos. You’ll also be able to get live updates (on your ride, food delivery or workout progress, for example) thanks to Apple’s new Live API, which will let app makers build these live, glanceable experiences.

Apple is also extending its Focus mode, introduced with iOS 15 last year, to the lock screen of your phone. You’ll be able to set different focus lock screens for personal and work scenarios, giving you the best chance of concentrating on what you’re supposed to be doing.

Until now, Apple has kept the look of the lock screen fairly uniform, but these changes are going to give iPhone users more control than ever over how their phone looks. Which customization feature are you most excited to try? Let us know!

For more, follow along with CNET’s live coverage of WWDC. Plus, here’s everything to know about WatchOS 9, MacOS Ventura and Apple’s new M2 chips.

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Europe reached a key milestone Thursday in the renegotiation of its rules governing the tech industry, announcing agreement on the upcoming Digital Markets Act between the European Parliament and EU member states. The legislation amounts to an overhaul of antitrust rules in Europe and will give the EU more power to rein tech giants.

The foremost example of this is the approach to messaging apps. The DMA will require companies with messaging apps to make them interoperable. This includes the biggest messaging apps in the world, such as Meta’s WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and Apple’s iMessage. Meta and Apple will be obliged to ensure people using these services can exchange messages, photos and videos among all messaging apps, both big and small.

This could pose a complex tech challenge for companies, but they have a strong incentive to comply. If they break Europe’s upcoming rules, they could be fined up to 10% of their global annual revenue, jumping to 20% for repeated infringements. The size of the fines reflects the fact that the EU is “serious about this common endeavour,” Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton said in a statement.

The aim of the Digital Markets Act is to ensure an equal and level playing field among tech companies that want to compete in the EU in order to ensure that European citizens have the benefit of choice. 

“What we want is simple: Fair markets also in digital,” European Competition Commissioner Margethe Vestager said in a statement. “We are now taking a huge step forward to get there — that markets are fair, open and contestable.”

But the impact of the legislation will extend far beyond benefitting European consumers and smaller tech businesses operating in the region. As countries around the world, including the US, continue their own efforts to regulate Big Tech, Europe’s early intervention creates a model for others to either follow or reject.

Of particular interest to lawmakers in the US will be how the DMA regulates “gatekeepers” — a term used to describe the biggest and most powerful technology companies. While the DMA sets the rules for all tech companies competing in the EU to follow, gatekeeper companies must follow additional rules because they are “most prone to unfair business practices,” according to an EU press release.

The DMA sets out a definition of gatekeepers as companies with a market capitalization of at least 75 billion euro (about $83 million) or an annual turnover of 7.5 billion euros, and additionally must provide certain services such as browsers, messengers or social media, which have at least 45 million monthly users in the EU and 10,000 annual business users. This extends to companies largely based in the US, including Apple, Meta, Amazon and Google.

Some of the obligations of gatekeepers include:

• Allowing services provided by third parties (messaging apps, for example) to interoperate with their own.
• Not blocking users from uninstalling any preinstalled software or apps.
• Not restricting their users from accessing services that they may have acquired outside of the gatekeeper platform.
• Providing companies advertising on their platforms access to performance measuring tools.
• Providing their business users with access to the data generated by their activities.

“The Digital Markets Act puts an end to the ever-increasing dominance of Big Tech companies,” Andreas Schwab, the rapporteur from Parliament’s Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee, said in a statement. “From now on, they must show that they also allow for fair competition on the internet.”

Thursday’s agreement is an important milestone, but the legislation still needs to be passed. Passing legislation in Europe is a complex and time-consuming process because it must be agreed upon by the executive branch of government, the European Commission, the Council, which consists of representatives from member states, and the European Parliament, which is made up of elected representatives from across the continent.

After the legislation is been approved by the Council and the Parliament, the Commission expects it to come into effect around October. Companies running complex messaging apps are likely to be given a grace period to ensure their interoperability.

In the meantime, tech giants will also be anticipating the sister legislation to the Digital Markets Act, known as the Digital Services Act. This specifically deals with the regulation of content, including disinformation and advertising. 

Meta and Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Carl Pei’s tech company Nothing will unveil its first smartphone, the Phone 1, this summer, the entrepreneur announced at an event on Wednesday.

The phone will run on Nothing OS, which the company said will distill “the best features of pure Android.” If you’re interested in getting a glimpse, a first preview of the OS will be available via its launcher, which will be available to download on select smartphone models from April. It will come with three years of OS updates and four years of security updates.

At Wednesday’s event, Pei said the company wants its products to help dispel “skepticism” and “apathy” about tech. He said he hopes the phone will be the “wakeup call” that the industry needs. He promised the phone will look like nothing we’ve seen before.

Nothing, which launched last year, unveiled its first product, the Ear 1 headphones, last July. Already the company has shipped half a million units, said Pei. But, he added on Wednesday, “we are not an audio company.” Nothing has big plans to move into many different product areas, with Pei expressing his ambition to challenge Apple.

The London-based company has some big backers, including Nest founder Tony Fadell, as well as co-founder and CEO of Reddit Steven Huffman and GV (formerly Google Ventures), Alphabet’s investment arm. The company also now has over 300 team members, Pei confirmed Wednesday, adding that its supply chain is ready to go.

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What’s happening

Breaking free of Huawei has allowed Honor to resurrect its partnerships with Qualcomm, and to make its first high-end flagship phone: the Honor Magic 4 Pro.

Why it matters

After already seeing growth in China, Honor is hoping the Magic 4 Pro will help spur similar growth in Europe, helping it along the road to becoming one of the biggest phone makers in the world.

Formerly youth-focused phone brand Honor is “back,” according to the company’s CEO, George Zhao. But the Honor that’s back is looking a little different from the company we knew before.

Once a subbrand of Chinese tech giant Huawei, Honor parted ways from its parent company in November 2020, when it was sold to Shenzhen Zhixin New Information Technology. Under increasing pressure from US trade sanctions that prevented it from buying American components and using Google Services, Huawei turned to the sale in a bid to keep both Honor and itself from becoming twin sinking ships.

But the decision to sell Honor was about more than just guaranteeing Honor’s survival. Setting the company free also has allowed it to stretch its wings and try things it never dreamed of before.

In an interview with CNET, Zhao said his goal is to turn Honor into an iconic global brand.. “The most important thing for us is to develop the flagship product, and the experience should be better than today’s most popular smartphone.”

That product is the Honor Magic 4 Pro, unveiled last week at MWC in Barcelona. A high-end Android flagship with an intriguing ring-shaped multicamera setup, the Magic 4 Pro is the kind of ambitious device the Honor of 2020 or earlier would never have had the freedom to produce. Breaking free from Huawei has liberated Honor from its original directive, which was to appeal squarely to a youthful audience with the pocket money to buy budget and midrange phones offering value for money. 

For Zhao, independence meant the opportunity to show what he and his team were truly capable of. “Now we are free to enter any area and any price segment.”

That doesn’t mean Zhao will attempt to make Honor big in the US straight off the bat. For now his target is to grow in Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific and Latin America. Only later, when the company has scaled up its R&D capability will it try to crack the ever-tricky North American market.

Foldables and beyond

Already, Honor has made significant progress in China. According to Counterpoint Research, it went from having the fifth largest market share in the country at the beginning of 2021 to claiming second place (jointly with Vivo) by the end of the year.

Its next big challenge will be to replicate that leap in the European market, where it’s not even in the top six. Winning customer support through the Magic 4 Pro and other Honor products will be key to making the “double-digit growth” Zhao expects to see this year compared to 2022.

Zhao’s first big decisions for Honor as an independent company were in product development. He set his team working on developing its first foldable phone, the Magic V, to show the industry that Honor not only could compete in this product category, but do it better than others.

It’ll face challenges. Innovation within the mobile industry has reached something of a bottleneck, said Zhao. The question he’s been mulling is how to break out of it. His approach so far has been to value customer needs as highly as technological innovation. He’s hoping this will allow Honor to break through that ceiling.

Despite acknowledging ing they’re “the most difficult product” to make, Zhao firmly believes that foldable phones will at some point become mainstream – a belief that’s creating the demand he said Honor has seen for the Magic V. The phone has a water-drop hinge that Honor says is “the slimmest compared to similar products in the market” and allows the inside tablet screen to be “creaseless.” Demand for foldables is pushing Honor to bring them to a wider audience and making the company aspire to be the industry leader in design.

Zhao is also excited about the possibility of virtual reality, augmented reality, AI and other emerging technologies that can be integrated with smartphones. Honor is starting to think about a mixed reality and metaverse-ready product, said Zhao, but the tech isn’t mature enough yet. For him, it’s all about timing, and for now he’s focusing on dominating in existing product categories.

Honor didn’t stop at the Honor V last year. It also released a range of phones, tablets, PCs and accessories. All were part of Zhao’s bid to prove that “in each area, we can compete with industry leaders,” he said. 

With the Magic 4 Pro, his team wanted to show they could offer display, photography and gaming performance similar to that of the iPhone 13 Pro. It’s this team, rather than the company’s sales or products, that Zhao most is proud of since the company’s independence.

“They always pursue the best in class,” he said. “They say, Honor can solve these challenges, these difficulties, these problems. This spirit and attitude really is the future [of the company].”

Rekindled relationships

One such difficulty Zhao’s team has navigated is the global chip shortage, which has affected all phone makers. The situation has improved, said Zhao, and continues to do so. In the short term, it means Honor had to focus on very specific markets, such as Europe, in order to deliver phones. But as chips become widely available again, the company will be able to cast its net more widely to scoop up market share elsewhere.

Another major benefit of parting ways with Huawei is that Honor can once again join forces with external companies that offer the cutting-edge tech necessary to compete at the top end of the phone market.

Huawei tried its damnedest to wean itself off relying on third-party companies – partly out of desire, partly out of necessity. For many years it exclusively used its homegrown Kirin chipset in its phones. When that supply ran out, it was forced to switch to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips – although it was restricted to using the 4G versions. The US trade ban that prevented it from buying parts to keep making Kirin also prevented it from continuing to offer Google services, an essential component of any Android phone.

Zhao doesn’t have to replicate Huawei’s strategy of trying to do everything in-house, nor is he trying to. “Honor will rely on global ecosystem partners,” he said. 

Not only are Google services back on Honor phones, but also its high-end flagship Magic 4 phone series is one of the first to be powered by Qualcomm’s latest 5G Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip. No longer obligated to use Kirin, Honor has resumed its working relationship with Qualcomm, with the companies’ R&D departments working more closely together than ever.

Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon offered his congratulations to Honor on the unveiling of the Magic 4 Series last week. “We’re so thankful and proud of the strong collaboration between our two companies, which has led to the development of truly amazing devices,” he said in a statement.

If, as it hopes, Honor has harnessed its Qualcomm and Google partnerships to ensure the Magic 4 Pro is one of the most exciting Android phones to be released in 2022, this could be a banner year for the company. Zhao knows he has set his team a difficult challenge, but he believes the rewards are worthwhile. “When we give out a product that’s highly praised by the end consumer or by the industry, this feeling is really amazing,” he said.

The post Life After Huawei: Honor Bids to Become ‘Iconic’ Global Phone Brand first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

Unlike Apple’s annual September iPhone launch, or its WWDC developer conference in June, both of which have pretty predictable agendas, the first event in Apple’s calendar can be something of a pot-luck: You never know quite what you’re going to get. This year’s March event, entitled “Peek Performance,” has turned up the Mac Studio and Studio Display — two new additions to Apple’s computer lineup.

Mac Studio

$2,000 at Best Buy

The Mac Studio is a compact, standalone computer, smaller than a Mac Pro, but more powerful than a Mac Mini. The Studio Display is its accompanying monitor. As the name suggests, the Mac Studio is designed for creative professionals who work in studios, offering them an ideal mix of performance, connectivity and modularity. It’s intended to form part of digital or audio workspace for musicians, photographers and videographers, as well as engineers wanting to build new versions of code faster.

See also

• Mac Studio, iPhone SE and More: Everything Apple Announced
• iPhone SE 2022: Apple’s $429 Phone Gets 5G, A15 Bionic Chip
• Mac Studio, Studio Display: Apple’s New Desktop for Creatives

The Mac Studio is a diddy thing, measuring just 7.7 by 3.7 inches, so it can sit tucked neatly below your display. Tucked inside its single aluminum extrusion is either Apple’s M1 Max or M1 Ultra chips (the former comes with up to 64 gigabytes of unified memory, and the latter offers up to 128GB). Add in a capacity of up to 8 terabytes of solid-state storage, and it becomes clear that the Mac Studio is designed for working on massive projects at very high speed.

Read more: Mac Studio, iPhone SE, iPad Air and Studio Display: Everything Apple Just Announced

According to Apple, the Mac Studio with the M1 Max chip is 2.5x faster than the 27-inch iMac and 50% faster than the Mac Pro. Upgrade to the M1 Ultra chip and you’re looking at a computer that’s 3.8x faster in terms of CPU performance than the fastest 27-inch iMac and 90% faster than the Mac Pro. The Mac Studio with M1 Ultra can also do something no other computer in the world can (again, according to Apple) — it can play back 18 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video.

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Connectivity-wise, it offers four Thunderbolt 4 ports, a 10GB Ethernet port, two USB-A ports, HDMI and a pro audio jack. Additionally there are two USB-C ports, another Thunderbolt port and an SD card slot on the front, which will be music to the ears of photographers and video editors everywhere.

The Mac Studio starts from $1,999 (£1,999, AU$2,499) and will be available from March 18 — although if you’re keen to get your hands on one, orders open today.

Apple also announced an updated iPhone SE with 5G support at the event, along with a new iPad Air and new colors for the iPhone 13.

The post Mac Studio and Studio Display: Apple’s New Desktop for Creatives first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Tuesday that the US will hold a 5G auction for 2.5GHz midband spectrum this July.

The benefit of this midband sliver of airwaves is that it combines great coverage over long distances and the ability to carry lots of data. T-Mobile, which already uses a bunch of 2.5GHz spectrum, is reportedly hankering for a big chunk of the airwaves that will be auctioned off this summer to expand and shore up its 5G service.

Since Rosenworcel was confirmed as FCC chairwoman in December, she’s been outspoken about the lack of cohesive whole-of-government spectrum policy and the impact that has had on the US’ 5G rollout, especially in the wake of the clash between the aviation industry and wireless carriers last month.

During her MWC keynote, Rosenworcel spoke about the importance of paving the way for 6G, and of taking a different approach to the way the US has deployed 5G. “Let’s not forget the lessons we’ve learned with millimeter wave spectrum and 5G,” she said. “These waves are fragile. And while there’s a lot of this spectrum to deploy, it doesn’t travel very far, and right now deploying it is awfully costly.”

For 6G, which is still years away from real-world deployment, she wants to start identifying midband spectrum right now that can support faster speeds and wider coverage, she added. 

“It’s not too early to harmonize these efforts around the world, because that’s how we will ensure that this next generation can reach everyone everywhere,” she said.

Rosenworcel has tasked the FCC Technological Advisory Council she set up last July with staying on top of new developments to ensure the US can turn the latest scientific research into the communications technologies of the future. “We’ve got to learn from what came before and recognize that emerging technology … benefits from a little advance planning,” she said.

The post FCC Plans 2.5GHz Spectrum Auction for July, Paves Way for 6G at MWC 2022 first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.