Enlarge / North Dakota's capitol, in Bismarck, features convenient floral labeling. (credit: pabradyphoto | Getty Images )

The North Dakota state Senate is jumping into a simmering feud between Apple and iOS software developers with a bill that would make it illegal for device makers to require to use their app stores and payment systems.

The bill ( PDF ) has two main prongs. First, it would make it unlawful for companies such as Google and Apple to make their app stores the "exclusive means" of distributing apps on their platforms. Second, it would prohibit those providers from requiring third parties to use their digital transaction or in-app payment systems in their applications.

The proposed law applies to app stores for which gross sales receipts to North Dakota residents exceed $10 million in a calendar year. It applies to any "general-purpose hardware," including tablets and smartphones, but it explicitly excludes "special-purpose digital application distribution platforms" such as gaming consoles, music players, and "other special-purpose devices connected to the internet." Thread that needle, and you're left with a pretty firm arrow pointing directly at Google's and Apple's mobile app platforms. (It could also apply to the Mac OS and Windows app stores for laptop and desktop computers, but those platforms are already less restrictive.)

Enlarge / Former Apple hardware engineering leader Dan Riccio. (credit: Apple )

A couple of weeks ago, Apple announced that longtime hardware engineering chief Dan Riccio will step down from his role to focus entirely on a "new project" within the company. According to yet another report at Bloomberg based on sources with knowledge of Apple's plans today, the project Riccio has focused his energies on is Apple's upcoming augmented reality, virtual reality, or mixed reality headset.

Development of an AR headset at Apple seems to have hit a snag or two under current project lead Mike Rockwell, though the report does not outline exactly which obstacles have emerged. While Rockwell will remain in charge of day-to-day work on the project, Riccio will have "ultimate oversight" over the company's AR/VR efforts, which are said to involve "well over a thousand engineers."

Riccio had already handed top-level management of most current consumer products like the iPhone to an executive named John Ternus, who Apple announced will replace Riccio as the head of hardware engineering overall. The latest news indicates that he has also handed development of new camera and display technology to Johny Srouji, the executive who spearheaded the design and engineering of Apple Silicon .

Enlarge / Users can install Homebrew via the Terminal in macOS. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Popular Mac tool Homebrew has long been used by developers and others for package management on macOS, but as we lamented in our first M1 Mac review, it didn't support Apple Silicon when Apple's new Macs first launched late last year. Now, with the release of Homebrew 3.0.0, that's no longer the case: Homebrew now supports Apple Silicon natively, albeit not with every package.

The volunteer Homebrew team made the announcement on the Homebrew blog alongside today's release. While the native support is not yet comprehensive, it bridges the gap significantly, and users can still run Terminal via Rosetta 2 to do what they can't yet while running natively on Apple Silicon. The Homebrew blog post says "we welcome your help" in providing bottles for all packages moving forward.

Here's the full bullet point on Apple Silicon in the Homebrew 3.0.0 release notes:

Snapchat on an iPhone. (credit: Maurizio Pesce )

Social media company Snap (which runs Snapchat) and game development software company Unity have joined Facebook in warning their investors that Apple's imminent ad-tracking change will negatively impact their businesses.

As previously reported, Apple plans to use the next iOS update (iOS 14.5, due out in early spring) to implement a requirement that all apps on the platform gain user opt-in to track users with IDFA (ID for Advertisers) tags. IDFA tags are used to track what users do across multiple apps in order to target advertising more effectively.

Social media giant Facebook has told its own investors that the coming change to Apple's operating system could very negatively impact its advertising revenue, because this kind of tracking-based ad targeting is one of Facebook's main ingredients for success.

Enlarge / We don't know what the Apple Car will look like, so here's a picture of some apples and a car. (credit: Sergei Malgavko / Getty)

Rumors are continuing to trickle in about Apple's long-expected car project. On Wednesday, CNBC reported that Apple is close to finalizing a deal for an Apple Car to be manufactured at Kia's assembly plant in West Point, Georgia, an hour southwest of Atlanta. Apple is a famously secretive company, and I don't have any inside information about Apple's plans. But I'm skeptical that whatever product Apple ultimately unveils will match CNBC's description of it.

According to CNBC, the Apple Car, due out in 2024 or 2025, will be "fully autonomous." One source told CNBC that Apple is aiming to make "autonomous, electric vehicles designed to operate without a driver and focused on the last mile." CNBC predicts that the cars could be used for food delivery or in a robotaxi service.

If true, that would represent a dramatic departure for Apple. A central feature of Apple's corporate culture is that it sells hardware products directly to users. There are technology companies like IBM and Microsoft that focus on selling to business customers. There are technology companies—from Uber to Google—that focus on building services.

Enlarge / The "Sword of Damocles" head-mounted display, the original augmented reality headset, circa 1968. Augmented reality has gotten a lot more mobile in the past decade. (credit: Ivan Sutherland)

A new report in The Information corroborates and expands upon an earlier Bloomberg report claiming that Apple is preparing to launch a high-end VR headset as early as next year, citing unnamed people with knowledge of the product.

Among the new revelations is that the new headset will feature two 8K screens (one for each eye) and that Apple has considered a steep $3,000 price point.

The headset (which the report says is codenamed N301) will be able to display rich 3D graphics at that resolution, thanks both to an ultrafast M1 chip successor and because Apple will liberally use an already-known VR technique that involves using eye-tracking to render objects in the user's periphery at a lower fidelity than what the user is focusing on.