AutoCAD 2024 has dropped - and it’s official: the top 3D modeling software now natively supports Apple silicon chips.
According to developer Autodesk, Mac users should see overall performance upped to twice the overall performance compared to the last version.
Alongside performance enhancements on Apple’s M-series chips, the latest update for Windows and Mac also adds improved machine learning and design automation across computers and laptops for AutoCAD.
What’s new in AutoCAD 2024?
Users have long wanted Autodesk’s popular software for architects and interior design to add native support for the M1 and M2 chips, But it’s not just Apple users benefitting from faster workflows. Windows users will see up to 9x faster switching between layout tabs, and increased stability and fidelity compared to AutoCAD 2023.
With an eye on improving online collaboration, users can now view activity insights, which detail any file changes and user activities. The 2024 edition also includes better markup support. Not only do users have the option to annotate and share drawings, but it’s now quicker to implement feedback into drawings.
On the improvements, the company stated: “AutoCAD uses machine learning to detect certain instructions in the markup text enabling shortcuts to commands like Move, Copy, or Erase.”
The placement and replacement of blocks has also become smarter and faster. Imbued with those new machine learning capabilities, users are able to more easily find and replace blocks. Adding blocks, meanwhile, has also been streamlined. The software is able to infer the likely position of the next block based on the placement of previous blocks in the DWG file.
“AutoCAD 2024 introduces new machine learning capabilities to push the boundaries of productivity and speed up our customer’s workflows. AutoCAD for Mac 2024 and AutoCAD LT for Mac 2024 deliver incredible, new performance improvements with the ability to run AutoCAD natively on Apple silicon. It’s exciting to see how customers can now take full advantage of the latest hardware and M-series chips for faster ways to work,” said Dania El Hassan, Director of Product Management for AutoCAD.
The Chrome browser and Chromebooks are getting a smart new feature in the form of a Reading Mode, Google has revealed over at BETT.
The education tech show is currently underway in London, and Google unveiled plans for this Reading Mode to come to ChromeOS (meaning Chromebooks) as well as the Chrome browser.
The idea of the Reading Mode is it pops up a separate panel to the side of the web page in the browser window, enabling the viewing of that page in a cleaner format and offering greater clarity for simply reading the content.
In short, it strips away the clutter on the web page, so you can wave goodbye to distracting pictures, videos, icons, and buttons to concentrate purely on reading the actual text.
As 9 to 5 Google, which spotted this, points out, Reading Mode is inbound at some point later this year for the Chrome browser, and will debut on Chromebooks with ChromeOS version 114.
Analysis: Closer to the Edge
This is a welcome option for both ChromeOS and more widely the Chrome browser, as making web content more accessible has got to be a good thing – even if the Reading Mode took a long time to arrive (which it most certainly did).
Cutting out clutter to help focus on the core written content of a web page will be helpful in a range of scenarios, and clearly one of those is in the classroom for those who live with learning differences such as dyslexia and ADHD (which as Google points out, is one in five children in the US).
The Reading Mode will come with plenty of customization options so users can fine-tune it to their own needs, too. That’ll include the ability to change the font, and make the size larger if necessary, as well as adjusting elements such as character and line spacing, or the background color. For example, if you want a dark background rather than white, there’s a menu option to make that happen.
If this functionality sounds familiar, that’s because Google is playing catchup in this case, and you may have already played with this kind of streamlined browsing experience in Microsoft Edge (or other browsers).
The Edge browser has an Immersive Reader feature sporting a lot of similar capabilities to those announced by Google here (and more besides), and it was introduced some three years ago.
Immersive Reader can be kicked into gear by clicking the appropriate icon at the far right of the URL bar. (Although it may not be supported with every web page, you can still pull content out of a page by selecting the text and using the right-click context menu to invoke Immersive Reader).
The big difference between Google and Microsoft’s respective takes here is that Edge transforms the web page into its reading-friendly mode, whereas Chrome pops up the Reading Mode version in a panel next to the web page which is still displayed (side-by-side). Quite why Google has adopted this approach, we’re not sure, but as noted, you can expand the Reading Mode panel to be wider.
Microsoft is reportedly working on a new version of its ever-successful Windows operating system - but we’re not talking about Windows 12, no sir. Instead, this is ‘CorePC’, a new project from Microsoft designed to take on Google’s ultra-efficient Chrome OS.
That's according to the good folks at our sister site Windows Central, whose sources claim the idea is to create a modular iteration of Windows, which Microsoft could then tweak and customize into different ‘editions’ that better suit specific hardware. This new version of Windows would be less resource-intensive than previously, hopefully.
CorePC (bear in mind this is a codename, and will likely not be the name of the finished OS) is rumored to also have one more trick up its sleeve: AI. Of course it’s AI - we shouldn’t be shocked, given Microsoft’s current hyperfixation on shoving popular chatbot ChatGPT into everything from the Microsoft 365 suite to the Bing search engine. Details are thin on what exactly artificial intelligence will bring to the table here, but it’s claimed to be a focus of the CorePC project.
Opinion: This could actually be really good - if Microsoft stays the course
Though this is no more than a rumor at this stage, it makes a lot of sense. For starters, this wouldn't be the first time Microsoft had experimented with building a lightweight version of Windows.
The Windows 10X program, for instance, was supposed to be a stripped-back version of Windows 10 that cut down on features in favor of faster operation and better system security. Unfortunately for us, it was eventually canceled in 2021 and the OS never made it to our devices. There was also Windows Lite, a 2018 effort to build a lightweight Windows, which also never really saw the ‘lite’ of day.
I genuinely hope that CorePC doesn’t meet the same fate; the idea of a low-system-requirement version of Windows is an attractive one right now, with Chrome OS slowly encroaching in the budget hardware space. Hell, half of the products on our best cheap laptops list are Chromebooks at this point, and I’m a lifelong Windows devotee - I even owned a Windows phone back in the heady days of 2015 (this one, for anyone interested).
If the CorePC project specifically has the aim of creating a modernized version of Windows that can be easily adjusted to run smoothly on any device, that would be welcome. While I don’t think it will lead to the glorious return of Windows phones (a man can dream though, right?), it’d be great to see Chromebook-esque Windows laptops and tablets.
What exactly can we expect from CorePC?
Digging into the details a bit, it seems that Microsoft has an internal version of CorePC Windows already in testing. It’s barebones, running only the Edge browser with Bing AI, the Microsoft 365 suite, and Android apps - similar to how Chrome OS got access to apps from the Google Play Store back in 2016. This version of Windows is designed for super-affordable PCs and laptops designed to be used in educational environments.
That might not sound very exciting, but here’s the good part: this test build supposedly uses as much as 75% less storage space than Windows 11 and uses a split-partition install process that allows for faster updates, safer system resets, and better security thanks to dedicated read-only partitions the user (or any third-party apps) can’t access. It’s unclear at this point whether this new version runs on a conventional 64-bit structure or if it’s a more limited ARM-based build.
Considering that Windows 11 already uses between 20 and 30 gigabytes of storage space and Windows 12 looks to be jacking up the system requirements even further, the idea of a super-compact Windows edition is quite attractive - especially for use cases in education and enterprise spaces, where security is vital and a limited feature set won’t be a hurdle to everyday usage.
We’ve already seen Windows 11 scaled down for low-end hardware in the unofficial ‘Tiny11’ OS, so it’s not entirely surprising that Windows is seemingly working on an official version. Though there’s no projected release date, speculation points to 2024 so the release can coincide with the expected launch of Windows 12. In any case, I've got my fingers crossed!
The Chrome browser and Chromebooks are getting a smart new feature in the form of a Reading Mode, Google has revealed over at BETT.
The education tech show is currently underway in London, and Google unveiled plans for this Reading Mode to come to ChromeOS (meaning Chromebooks) as well as the Chrome browser.
The idea of the Reading Mode is it pops up a separate panel to the side of the web page in the browser window, enabling the viewing of that page in a cleaner format and offering greater clarity for simply reading the content.
In short, it strips away the clutter on the web page, so you can wave goodbye to distracting pictures, videos, icons, and buttons to concentrate purely on reading the actual text.
As 9 to 5 Google, which spotted this, points out, Reading Mode is inbound at some point later this year for the Chrome browser, and will debut on Chromebooks with ChromeOS version 114.
Analysis: Closer to the Edge
This is a welcome option for both ChromeOS and more widely the Chrome browser, as making web content more accessible has got to be a good thing – even if the Reading Mode took a long time to arrive (which it most certainly did).
Cutting out clutter to help focus on the core written content of a web page will be helpful in a range of scenarios, and clearly one of those is in the classroom for those who live with learning differences such as dyslexia and ADHD (which as Google points out, is one in five children in the US).
The Reading Mode will come with plenty of customization options so users can fine-tune it to their own needs, too. That’ll include the ability to change the font, and make the size larger if necessary, as well as adjusting elements such as character and line spacing, or the background color. For example, if you want a dark background rather than white, there’s a menu option to make that happen.
If this functionality sounds familiar, that’s because Google is playing catchup in this case, and you may have already played with this kind of streamlined browsing experience in Microsoft Edge (or other browsers).
The Edge browser has an Immersive Reader feature sporting a lot of similar capabilities to those announced by Google here (and more besides), and it was introduced some three years ago.
Immersive Reader can be kicked into gear by clicking the appropriate icon at the far right of the URL bar. (Although it may not be supported with every web page, you can still pull content out of a page by selecting the text and using the right-click context menu to invoke Immersive Reader).
The big difference between Google and Microsoft’s respective takes here is that Edge transforms the web page into its reading-friendly mode, whereas Chrome pops up the Reading Mode version in a panel next to the web page which is still displayed (side-by-side). Quite why Google has adopted this approach, we’re not sure, but as noted, you can expand the Reading Mode panel to be wider.
Every so often, a new Netflix series comes out of nowhere and blows the competition away to stunning effect. Think Stranger Things, Wednesday, and Squid Game, and you'll get the idea.
Three months into 2023 and Netflix has another unexpected TV-based success to add to that roster. Step forward The Night Agent, a politically-charged action thriller that stormed to the top of the Netflix TV charts less than a week after it debuted on the world's best streaming service.
Based on Matthew Quirk's book of the same name, The Night Agent stars Gabriel Basso as Peter Sutherland, an FBI agent who becomes embroiled in a vast conspiracy at the heart of the US government. Cue a race against time to stop the mole leaking intel and potentially causing US society from collapsing in on itself.
As plot synopses go, it's a simple one. Clearly, though, audiences have lapped up what's on offer in The Night Agent, with millions of viewers becoming absorbed in its cat and mouse-style narrative, shocking revelations, and suspense-filled teases that have left many on tenterhooks.
Ginny and Georgia season 2 is the only Netflix show to perform better than The Night Agent this year.(Image credit: Netflix)
In fact, The Night Agent has proven so popular that it's only the second Netflix show to debut this year with a whopping 100 million-plus hours streamed. The Night Agent only premiered on March 23 but, six days post-release, it's accrued 168.7 million hours viewed (per Netflix's Top 10 website).
Ginny and Georgia season 2 is the only English-language TV show to rack up more hours viewed in its first week this year – the comedy drama series amassing 180.4 million hours streamed during its opening week. On the non-English language front, revenge thriller The Glory (125.3 million hours streamed in its first week) is the only series to come close to matching The Night Agent's impressive tally.
Considering that The Night Agent has outperformed fan-favorite series like You (season 4 part 2 accumulated 92 million hours viewed in its first week) and Outer Banks (season 3 earned 154.9 million hours streamed during opening week), its success shouldn't be dismissed so easily. Expect The Night Agent to join that duo on our best Netflix shows list shortly.
Even more impressively, The Night Agent's opening week viewing figures were three times bigger than its nearest rival. Shadow and Bone season 2, which landed on March 16, collected 55 million hours viewed in its second week on Netflix (read our Shadow and Bone season 2 review while you're here). Love is Blind season 4 and Waco: American Apocalypse, which debuted alongside The Night Agent, performed terribly compared to the spy thriller – the pair racking up just 25.5 million hours and 21.5 million hours streamed respectively.
Analysis: a tough challenge to reach the top
The Night Agent has got a job on its hands to surpass Wednesday(Image credit: Netflix)
Unexpected as The Night Agent's, well, overnight success has been, it's unlikely to trouble Netflix's most-watched original shows of all-time.
Stranger Things season 4, Wednesday, Squid Game, and Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story racked up one billion-plus hours viewed each in the weeks after their respective launches. With Stranger Things season 5, Squid Game season 2, and Wednesday season 2, and a new installment in Netflix's Monster series all in development, the next entry in each of these global hits is likely to surpass their predecessor in the viewership stakes.
The Night Agent might be the latest TV darling to grace Netflix, but it's got a huge fight on its hands to even come close to matching its contemporaries' viewing figures. Of course, the series could enjoy a bumper second week at the top of the charts, especially if Netflix users recommend The Night Agent to their families, friends, and co-workers. Even with that word of mouth aid, though, we'd be surprised if The Night Agent makes a major play for the Netflix TV show throne. Yes, it'll continue to perform well for a couple more weeks, but it'll need more traction among viewers to stand a chance of tackling Netflix's most-streamed shows ever.
Pixar is renowned for being a boundary pusher in the animation space – and Elemental, the studio's next movie, looks like it'll continue that tradition.
The 27th Pixar movie, which follows hot on the heels of the Disney subsidiary's two 2022 releases – Turning Red and Lightyear – is set to arrive in theaters on June 16. It's high time, then, that we were given a better idea of what its plot will be.
Luckily, Pixar as duly obliged, releasing an official trailer for Elemental – one of our most eagerly anticipated new movies of 2023 – that not only provides some new details about its story, but also gives us another look at the film's jaw-dropping visuals. Check it out below:
Honestly, we can't stop watching the satisfying fluidity of Wade's water-y make-up or the constantly burning, fiery aesthetic of Ember's design. It's a seriously impressive feat to get these contrasting visuals to operate in the same VFX engine and look as beautifully natural as they do. Anybody else expecting Elemental to be a shoe-in for a Best Animated Feature nomination at the 2024 Oscars?
As for the movie's story, it seems it'll center on a platonic or romantic relationship between the fire-based Ember and water-styled Wade. Right now, we only have a simple plot synopsis, courtesy of Pixar, to go on, which reads: "In a city where fire, water, land and air residents live together, a fiery young woman and a go-with-the-flow guy are about to discover something elemental: how much they actually have in common". This new trailer, then, reveals how Ember and Wade's worlds collide and thematically explores the notion of how opposing races and forces can co-exist. A noteworthy message for our times, eh?
Elemental will star Leah Lewis (Batwheels, The Half of It) as Ember and Jurassic World: Dominion's Mamoudou Athie as Wade. Newcomer Mason Wertheimer has been cast as Clod, a young, street smart Earth-based character, while Wendie McLendon-Covey (Reno 911!) will portray Gale, an air-based individual. Catherine O'Hara (Schitt's Creek) voices Wade's mom Brook.
Pixar's latest feature film has been directed by veteran employee Peter Sohn, whose only other directing credit came on 2016's The Good Dinosaur. Sohn has voiced numerous characters in the Pixar-Verse, though, including Sox in Lightyear, as well as executively producing, writing, animating, and acting as a story consultant on many other Pixar flicks. John Hoberg and Kat Likkel (My Name Is Earl, Black-ish) are joined by Brena Hsueh (How I Met Your Mother) as the film's main writers.
Turning up the heat in the animation genre
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse will push the animation boundaries later this year, too(Image credit: Sony Pictures)
With the animation genre proving to be a popular medium for audiences and creators alike in 2022 – Turning Red, Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish were all stunningly gorgeous films – it seems that 2023 is set to follow in its predecessor's footsteps.
Given its penchant for breaking ground in the animation space, Pixar is helping to lead the pack with Elemental. However, the film isn't the only new release from the studio that's set to wow cinephiles with its visually arresting animation style, hues, cityscape backgrounds, and technological innovations.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the follow-up to 2019's Into the Spider-Verse, is also set to disrupt the animation medium with its own revolutionary art style and eye-popping colors – and it'll arrive just two weeks before Elemental on June 2, meaning the sixth month of 2023 will be an animated showdown for the ages.
Throw in The Super Mario Bros. Movie – the joint Universal, Nintendo, and Illumination animated flick based on Nintendo's legendary video game series – as well as Paramount's visually striking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem movie and Netflix's stop-motion animated sequel Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, and this year could be the one where animated movies are taken far more seriously than before. Let's hope the Academy and other film award organizations take note.
Windows 12’s system requirements are the latest speculation to be aired on the grapevine regarding the next version of Microsoft’s desktop OS, and the news is kind of good and bad.
Let’s start with the positive aspects here, which are that most of the recommended specs should stay the same compared to Windows 11, at least if a rumor from German tech site Deskmodder is correct (as flagged by Neowin).
The site’s unnamed sources – as ever, add your own seasoning, and maybe tablespoons rather than teaspoons in this case – claim that there should be no change on the security front. Specifically, the stipulation for the PC’s security needs will call for TPM 2.0 as is the case with Windows 11 currently.
Deskmodder clarifies that it’s too early to bring in Pluton, Microsoft’s security chip that has been included with some devices since last year, but not nearly enough to be requiring its presence.
Processor support, too, should remain unchanged according to this new info, so if your CPU is good enough for Windows 11, it’ll remain able to cope with any demands placed on it by the next-gen OS.
What may be different is that the RAM requirement could be upped to 8GB. We should note at this point that even the rumor couches this as a possibility, and as such it may not happen – the minimum spec could remain at 4GB, as with Windows 11.
However, it’s possible Microsoft could double up that RAM spec, and the reason for 8GB would apparently be the new ‘Cloud PC’ feature we’ve been hearing quite a bit about lately. The latter may be one of the key new features that Windows 12 is built around.
Other specs aren’t mentioned in the leak, but we can guess that the primary missing piece of the puzzle, namely storage, will probably be pretty much in line with Windows 11.
(Image credit: Tobias Dahlberg from Pixabay )
Analysis: But RAM, it’s an easy upgrade anyway, right? Well…
It’s not a big surprise that TPM 2.0 would remain in place and security demands won’t be beefed up, but it’s good to hear this nonetheless (even if it’s just rumored – all of this info should be treated with some caution, as we’ve already touched upon).
Similarly, it’s no shocker that the CPU requirements would stay the same. Windows 11 already set a pretty high bar here, and to raise it further definitely wouldn’t be well received.
The RAM is the fly in the spec ointment, though, with that potential ask of 8GB. The trouble with this is that there are still a lot of folks out there motoring along with Windows 11 and 4GB of RAM, the current minimum spec. Well, maybe not motoring, but certainly plodding along happily enough accomplishing basic tasks like emailing and web browsing without breaking a sweat.
It's true that for multi-tasking apps and more demanding work, ideally, you want 8GB of system memory these days anyway – heck, lots of Chrome browser tabs can be pretty demanding still (although Google has taken action on that front). But plenty of users out there won’t be happy about being frozen out of Windows 12 if it does raise the minimum RAM bar to 8GB.
But RAM is easily upgraded, you say? Well, yes, true enough. It’s one of the easier upgrades to carry out on a PC for sure, but it’s still something that might intimidate the less tech-savvy. And remember, it’s more complicated on some PCs, such as in cases where the CPU fan overhangs the RAM slots, thereby requiring the cooler to be removed to perform the upgrade, so the process then becomes a somewhat fiddlier affair.
There’s also the small matter of laptops, too – some of them can’t have their RAM upgraded, as it’s soldered on.
If Microsoft really is mulling a move to 8GB minimum, and perhaps soon – with Windows 12 rumored to be set to arrive next year – this could cause some bad feeling in terms of forced upgrades (or maybe devices locked out totally, in the case of laptops), pretty soon after the launch of Windows 11. Let’s face it, the majority of folks still haven’t made the jump to Windows 11 yet, and the next iteration of the OS is on the horizon already (maybe).
In a relatively short space of time – certainly in the world of operating systems – we’ve gone from needing 2GB of RAM for Windows 10 in 2015 (indeed, 1GB for a 32-bit installation originally), doubling up to 4GB for Windows 11 in 2021, and then potentially just three years after that, doubling again to 8GB? That feels like a steep rise when all other specs are remaining the same.
Is it time to upgrade your 4GB PC, then? Well, maybe – if that’s possible – but of course, let’s not get carried away quite yet. The theorized 8GB requirement may evaporate into the rumor ether, and we’re guessing there are a fair few folks that are hoping for such a vanishing act to happen.
If 1 in 20 gamers still have 4GB of RAM according to the latest Steam survey – with those who game typically being highly conscious of needing plenty of this particular system resource so frame rates run smoothly – we can only imagine how many everyday users remain in this boat.
