Apple Ramps up AR/VR Development
Bloomberg contributor Mark Gurman reports that Apple is continuing to ramp up its AR/VR team hiring efforts by recruiting new employees, moving senior veterans around, and poaching back former employees who have left the company. The first internal version of the operating system for the in-development mixed reality headset, codenamed Oak, is reportedly nearing completion in time for a new hardware release next year. According to a job description, Apple wants to support third-party applications on MR devices and also plans to “build tools and frameworks to enable connected experiences in 3D mixed reality.

YouTube removes option to show channel’s oldest videos
In a tweeted response to a user query on November 11, YouTube acknowledged that it has discontinued the ability to display the oldest videos on its channels. YouTube said it is “open to feedback” and that users who want to add the feature back can fill out a questionnaire to express their requests.

Users first noticed YouTube removing the “oldest videos” option in gray testing in April of this year. Officials initially denied it and added it back for a time, but removed it again soon after, saying they had “run into some issues” and were still exploring ways to add it back. Reviews have generally expressed frustration with this approach, saying that YouTube is taking away user choice in order to promote new content and algorithmic recommendations.

Microsoft confirms that Windows 11 22H2 has gaming performance issues
On November 11, Microsoft updated its official documentation to confirm that there are known performance issues with the recently released Windows 11 22H2, and that certain games and applications may experience lower-than-expected performance or lag on this version of the system. Microsoft explained that the reason for this is that the affected games and applications have inadvertently enabled GPU performance debugging, a feature that is not available for consumer use. Microsoft said it is working on a solution and will provide an update in an upcoming release; it has suspended the 22H2 update for devices affected by this issue and is also advising users not to manually update for now. If users are already using 22H2, they can resolve the issue by updating their games and applications to the latest version.

Since the release of Windows 11 22H2, users have reported a number of issues, including blue screens, printing, Windows Hello, performance issues with SMB copying large files, and more.

Apple is working hard to improve its search capabilities, but is still four years away from making a search engine that can compete with Google, according to The Information. Google currently pays Apple about $15 billion a year to remain the default search engine in Apple devices. Apple’s search technology development has suffered from a brain drain, according to the report. in 2018, Apple acquired Laserlike, a machine learning company founded by a former Google search engineer, in an attempt to fuel the development of the web search engine, but Laserlike’s founders have now returned to Google. Apple’s search team is believed to have at least 200 employees, and its operations include Spotlight searches, Siri suggestions and answers provided by Siri. One of the team’s top priorities is to improve Spotlight performance so that it can handle a hundred times more query requests than it does today.