Technology

Legal action and recruitment mean we&ve learned a lot about the Apple Car this week, and it seems the technology it is developing is also being deployed across the companywider ecosystem. Herea few things we learned this month:

Apple has thousands working on a car

Apple has already confirmed it is working on a car. We&ve heard rumors that it has a huge team working on developing some kind of vehicle. We know now those claims to be true because charges made against former Apple engineer Xiaolang Zhang reveal the company has at least 5,000 employees authorized to access data on its autonomous driving efforts.

You know itgoing to be an Alice in Wonderland month when some sites report that Microsoft plugged 54 vulnerabilities on Patch Tuesday, while others report 53. Fact is, patching has become so brutal — and so banal — that thereno consensus on counting, much less on whatgood and bad.

Suffice to say that, once again this month, there was a huge number of security patches (129 individual patches, according to the Microsoft Update Catalog), with no pressing security fixes unless you&re using the Edge browser or Internet Explorer. Microsoft changed Win10 version 1803 to &Semi-Annual Channel,& but the term now means less than it ever has before. If thatpossible.

Waymonext phase in self-driving cars has begun.

The former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet has received its first threeall-electric I-Pace crossover sport utility produced by Jaguar Land Rover.These I-Pace EVS — the first on U.S. roads outside of JLRown fleet — can be seen driving around the San Francisco Bay Area.

These aren&t operating autonomously just yet.For now, Waymo is testing the vehicleperformance on roads to generate self-driving system design requirements and developdurability tests, the company told TechCrunch.

Waymo announced in March a strategic partnership with Jaguar Land Rover to develop a self-driving electric I-Pace for a driverless transportation service.The plan is for the electric SUV to become part of Waymodriverless fleet beginning in 2020.

Ultimately, up to 20,000 modified I-Pace vehicles will join Waymosoon-to-be-launched driverless ride-hailing service in the first two years of operation.

The Jaguar I-Pace SUVs are a piece of Waymolarger plan to build a self-driving system to be used in ride-hailing, delivery and logistics such as trucking, connecting rides with public transit and licensing the technology with automakers forpersonally-owned vehicles.