This story is part of WWDC 2022, CNET’s complete coverage from and about Apple’s annual developers conference. With the upcoming iPadOS, you’ll be able to plug external drives and SD cards into your iPad the way you already can with your Mac or Windows PC. “iPadOS … supports external drives, allowing users to easily plug …

If you like the high-speed Thunderbolt port for plugging stuff into your PC, there’s good news for this year and beyond. Thunderbolt debuted on MacBook Pro laptops in 2011 as an all-purpose port for monitors, storage systems and other high-end peripherals, and has since spread to Windows machines, too. This holiday season, though, Intel’s new Ice Lake processor will make …

When it comes to concerns over new ad-blocking limits planned for Chrome, Google has budged but so far hasn’t moved very far. The company is responding to criticism of proposed changes to its Chrome web browser that may cripple ad-blocking tools. Though Google revealed it’s lifting some limits and plans an exemption for enterprise users, it doesn’t look like the search …

PCs are dogged by tradeoffs. It’s hard to use your laptop all day on battery, get real work done during a two-minute break waiting for your train, or work hard when you’re not plugged into an electrical outlet. Intel noticed. The giant chipmaker is leading a multi-company, multiyear effort called Project Athena to address those tradeoffs. Athena’s goal: Make us …

A years-old, sometimes emotional division over the web’s core HTML technology has ended with an agreement designed to make it easier to chart the web’s future W3C Standards define how things work together. How far apart are the prongs on an electrical plug? How large is a sheet of letter-size paper? But for nearly a decade, two separate groups have …

After four years, Intel finally has a new processor design. And it’s something the company doesn’t have to be ashamed of. Ice Lake — officially Intel’s 10th-generation Core processor — clocks in at roughly 18% faster than its predecessor, Intel said. The processor’s graphics speed is 50% to 80% faster, and dedicated circuitry will boost AI software and double video-handling …

For a preview of the top-shelf Android phones that’ll arrive in 2020, check out the Arm Cortex-A77 processor design — and the 20% speed boost it should bring to smartphone chips. UK-based Arm designs chips and licenses those designs to companies like Samsung, Qualcomm and MediaTek. Some companies, like Apple, license only the chip instruction set,  the interface that software …

We’ve got 3D-printed plastics and 3D-printed metals. Now you can add 3D-printed diamond materials to the list. Sandvik, a Swedish company specializing in mining, materials science and metalworking, has developed a way to make diamond composite materials with the 3D-printing technology called additive manufacturing. The material can be formed into many custom shapes, but think of ultradurable drills, not exotic …

Apple has built new browser technology designed to let advertisers figure out when their ads successfully convinced you to buy something — but without tracking you across the internet and harvesting personal details to do so. The plan, called Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution and detailed Wednesday, is now built into Apple’s test browser for developers, Safari Technology Preview 82. …

The Tor Project’s leave-no-traces browser now is available for Android phones. The Tor Browser relies on a network of servers that send network requests over multiple intermediate links to hide who you really are when you visit a website. That can be useful if you don’t want to be tracked — whether you’re an activist trying to avoid government monitoring …