Japan’s Digital Minister Taro Kono announced late last month that he had successfully scrapped 1,034 government regulations that required the use of floppy disks. According to Reuters, Kono described the achievement as winning “the war on floppy disks” — though there is apparently one regulation left that still requires their usage.
At a time when younger readers may have never seen or heard of a floppy disk, it seems truly insane that the world’s fourth-largest economy still relied on them in over 1,000 different situations. But this has been a long journey for Kono and Japan, which announced its intentions to rid the government of floppy disks in 2022.
The Japanese government’s attitude toward technology has been famously old school in the past. In 2018, the cybersecurity minister made the news when he admitted he had never used a computer before. Thankfully, Kono seems to be taking his job a bit more seriously. He’s been very vocal about his plans to scrap floppy disks and also intends to combat other old tech like fax machines.
Despite its reputation as an innovator in technology, Japan is also known for its stuck-in-the-’80s bureaucracy, and as this news suggests, it’s no exaggeration.
For what it’s worth, when I was working in Japan just a few years ago, I had to fill in a paper timesheet and fax it to my employer. The damn thing took about four or five minutes to do its job and could fail at any point, so there was nothing to do but stand and wait. And the quality of the scan it took was just shocking — I don’t envy whoever had to try and decipher the mess that arrived on the other end.
To my colleagues, that was just the way things worked, but the government was forced to realize just how inefficient all the paper filing and floppy disks were during the pandemic. That’s when the Digital Agency was formed. Given the sheer number of non-digital bureaucratic processes in Japan, Kono really has his work cut out for them.
Then again, Japan isn’t the only government in the world that just recently ended its reliance on floppy disks. It was famously revealed back in 2014 that 8-inch floppy disks were still being used for storage in the U.S. Air Force nuclear silo.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.