THE iPHONE ‘HANG UP ’ BUTTON MIGHT NOT BE MOVING MUCH AFTER ALL

By DAVID HAMILTON AP Business Writer

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) —

Almost a week after the Apple faithful collectively gasped at the first evidence that the iPhone’s red “end call” button might soon be vacating its centre position to take up residence one column to the right, it looks like it might have been mostly a false alarm. The initial shock followed the release of last week’s test, or beta, version of iOS 17, the next major update of the iPhone’s operating software. That’s where users first saw the end-call button, which has traditionally lived in splendid isolation centred well below function buttons such as “mute,” “keypad” and “speaker,” instead joining its peers and taking a more assimilated position in the lower right-hand corner of a six-button block.

THE APPLE iPhone 13 is displayed on its first day of sale, in 2021.

Now, though, images of the latest iOS 17 beta shared by multiple

Virgin galactic’s first space tourists finally soar, an olympian and a mother-daughter duo

By SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN and MARCIA DUNN

Associated Press

TRUTH OR CONSE-

QUENCES, N.M. (AP)

— Virgin Galactic rocketed to the edge of space with its first tourists Thursday, a former British Olympian who bought his ticket 18 years ago and a motherdaughter duo from the Caribbean.

The space plane glided back to a runway landing at Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert, after a brief flight that gave passengers a few minutes of weightlessness.

This first private customer flight had been delayed for years; its success means

Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic can now start offering monthly rides, joining Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the space tourism business.

“That was by far the most awesome thing I’ve ever done in my life,” said Jon Goodwin, who competed in canoeing in the 1972 Olympics.

Goodwin, 80, was among the first to buy a Virgin Galactic ticket in 2005 and feared, after later being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, that he’d be out of luck.

Since then he’s climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and cycled back down, and said he hopes his spaceflight shows others with

Parkinson’s and other illnesses that “it doesn’t stop you doing things.”

Ticket prices were $200,000 when Goodwin signed up. The cost is now $450,000.

He was joined on the flight by sweepstakes winner Keisha Schahaff, 46, a health coach from Antigua, and her daughter, Anastatia Mayers, 18, a student at Scotland’s University of Aberdeen. They high-fived and pumped their fists as the spaceport crowd cheered their return. “A childhood dream has come true,” said Schahaff, who took pink Antiguan sand up with her. Added her daughter: “I have no words.

The only thought I had the whole time was ‘Wow!’ “ media sites shows the red button right back in the centre of the phone dialpad, pretty close to where it’s long staked out its territory. But it’s still not alone; now it’s in the second row, centre seat of that six button block, where it appears to be daring you to try hanging up without also opening the keypad or accidentally adding another participant to your call.

To be fair, it’s always difficult to draw firm conclusions from beta software releases, which are intended both to help engineers hunt down bugs and to gauge user reaction to changes large and small. So they’re a bit experimental by nature, and some experiments fare better than others. But we don’t have much choice but to speculate whether the endcall button’s wanderings have come to an end. Apple typically doesn’t comment on its design process — or much of anything else — and did not reply to a request for comment from The Associated Press.

a mazon is rolling out a generati V e ai feature that summarises product re V iews

By HALELUYA HADERO AP Business Writer

AMAZON is rolling out a new generative AI feature that summarises product reviews for customers.

The feature, which the company began testing earlier this year, is designed to help shoppers determine at a glance what other customers said about a product before they spend time reading through individual reviews. It will pick out common themes and summarise them in a short paragraph on the product detail page.

The company wrote in a blog post published Monday that the AI-generated reviews are now available to a subset of mobile shoppers in the U.S. across a “broad” selection of products. And it may be expanded to more shoppers and additional categories of products in the “coming months” based on customer feedback, said Vaughn Schermerhorn, Amazon’s director of community shopping.

PASSENGERS during Virgin Galactic’s first space tourism flight on Thursday. The space plane glided back to a runway landing at Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert, after a brief flight that gave passengers a few minutes of weightlessness. (Virgin Galactic via AP)