Today’s topics include rumors that the debut of the Apple iPhone 5se and the 9.7-Inch iPad Pro has been moved to March 21, disclosure that the 2015 IRS Breach was much worse than first thought, the market debut of the Raspberry Pi 3 mini PC and why WhatsApp is dropping support for BlackBerry, Nokia, and Android 2.2.
Rumors continue to circulate about the reported debut date for Apple’s upcoming smaller iPhone 5se and the 9.7-inch iPad Pro, which will both apparently be unveiled on or about March 21.
Only a week ago, the expected debut date for the devices was March 15. The latest debut date was revealed in a Feb. 27 article by AppleInsider, which said the announcements will likely come at a low-key Apple event at the company’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters, rather in a glitzy presentation, as is often the company’s practice.
In May 2015, the IRS publicly confirmed that information on 114,000 American taxpayers was exposed due to a breach of the IRS’ Get Transcript application.
After an additional nine months of investigation, the IRS is now increasing its publicly disclosed estimate on the number of American taxpayers who were impacted.
The IRS now says it found evidence that about 390,000 additional taxpayer accounts were compromised, bringing the total number of potentially impacted taxpayers to about 500,000.
The Raspberry Pi—the small, basic computer that is aimed at device designers and students—keeps gaining features, even as the price stays the same.
The project behind the computer—which is essentially a motherboard that comes with such features as CPUs, graphics, wireless connectivity and memory—on Feb. unveiled the latest model, named the Raspberry Pi 3, which launched exactly four years after the rollout of the original Raspberry Pi Model B.
WhatsApp will end support for a number of older mobile operating system versions, including BlackBerry, Nokia S40, Nokia Symbian S60, Android 2.2 and 2.1 and Windows Phone 7.1, by the end of 2016 as the user bases for the platforms continue to shrink.
The move, which comes as consumers have flocked instead to Apple’s iOS and later versions of Google’s Android operating systems that run on a majority of today’s mobile devices, was announced in a post on the WhatsApp Blog.