Tech / Product News & Reviews
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Apple releases public betas of all next-gen OS updates, except for VisionOS
Apple's public betas are usually stable enough for daily use, but be careful.
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Report: Alphabet close to $23 billion deal for cybersecurity startup Wiz
Deal of this size would draw scrutiny from antitrust regulators around the world.
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German Navy still uses 8-inch floppy disks, working on emulating a replacement
Four Brandenburg-class F123 warships employ floppies for data-acquisition systems.
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$500 aluminum version of the Analogue Pocket looks like the Game Boy’s final form
Other Pocket iterations have stuck to colorful (and cheaper) plastic.
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New app releases for Apple Vision Pro have fallen dramatically since launch
Apple struggles to attract content from developers for its $3,500 headset.
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Arduino’s Plug and Make Kit lets your hacking imagination run wild, sans solder
Daisy-chain tiny boards into weather stations, game controllers, and way more.
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Shady company relaunches popular old tech blogs, steals writers’ identities
This doesn't just threaten writers' work—it has a corrosive effect on the web.
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DVDs are dying right as streaming has made them appealing again
You don't know what you've got till it's gone.
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Arm tweaks AMD’s FSR to bring battery-saving GPU upscaling to phones and tablets
Arm "Accuracy Super Resolution" is optimized for power use and integrated GPUs.
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Three betas in, iOS 18 testers still can’t try out Apple Intelligence features
Apple has said some features will be available to test "this summer."
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Galaxy Z Fold & Z Flip 6, Watch Ultra, and new Ring are Samsung’s AI carriers
Samsung's spec-bump products get coated in Galaxy AI lacquer for their showing.
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Testers unearth touchscreen UI in tvOS beta, signs point to a touchscreen HomePod
Rumors of a touchscreen HomePod stretch back to 2021.
Paul Sutter walks us through the future of climate change—and things aren’t great
This episode of Edge of Knowledge focuses on our rapidly transforming world.
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Samsung’s abandoned NX cameras can be brought online with a $20 LTE stick
All it took was a reverse-engineered camera firmware and a custom API rewrite.
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After two rejections, Apple approves Epic Games Store app for iOS
European iOS users will see the alternative app store launch sometime soon.
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“Immensely disappointing”: Nike killing app for $350 self-tying sneakers
Without updates or ability to download after August, app will become useless.
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Notepad’s spellcheck and autocorrect are rolling out to everybody after 41 years
It's still bare-bones by most standards, but Notepad has evolved a lot recently.
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ChatGPT’s much-heralded Mac app was storing conversations as plain text
The app was updated to address the issue after it gained public attention.
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Amazon is bricking $2,350 Astro robots 10 months after release
Amazon giving refunds for business bot, will focus on home version instead.
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Japan wins 2-year “war on floppy disks,” kills regulations requiring old tech
But what about fax machines?
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Apple Vision Pro, new cameras fail user-repairability analysis
Meta Quest 3, PS5 Slim also received failing grades despite new right-to-repair laws.
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Google’s greenhouse gas emissions jump 48% in five years
Google's 2030 "Net zero" target looks increasingly doubtful as AI use soars.
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Surface Pro 11 and Laptop 7 review: An Apple Silicon moment for Windows
Superfluous AI features and compatibility issues don't detract from good PCs.
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Bleeding subscribers, cable companies force their way into streaming
Companies like Charter brought about the streaming industry they now want to join.
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30 years later, FreeDOS is still keeping the dream of the command prompt alive
Project's creator talks to Ars about where FreeDOS has been, where it's going.
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Apple’s Vision Pro goes on sale outside the US for the first time
Since February, the headset has only been available in the United States.
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Researchers craft smiling robot face from living human skin cells
Human cells isolated from juvenile foreskin are flexible enough to grin when moved.
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Google Translate just nearly doubled its number of supported languages
This includes common languages like Cantonese and lesser-known ones like Manx.
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Apple’s “Longevity, by Design” argues its huge scale affects its repair polices
Apple must consider volume, but also the world outside its closed loop.
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Patent document showcases the cloud-only streaming Xbox console that never was
Microsoft couldn't get the price of its streaming Xbox low enough to release it.
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OpenAI’s ChatGPT for Mac is now available to all users
It supports pretty much everything but API calls.
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iOS 18’s drive-formatting option shows how far iPhones have come for power users
The beta's Files app lets you format external drives in APFS, exFat, and FAT.
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Microsoft removes documentation for switching to a local account in Windows 11
But most Microsoft account sign-in workarounds for Windows 11 continue to work.
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Larry Finger made Linux wireless work and brought others along to learn
Remembering Finger, 84, who learned as he went and left his mark on many.
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iFixit says new Arm Surface hardware “puts repair front and center”
Both devices make it relatively easy to get at the battery and SSD.
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$200-ish laptop with a 386 and 8MB of RAM is a modern take on the Windows 3.1 era
Pocket 386 supports external accessories and will just barely run Windows 95.
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Citing national security, US will ban Kaspersky anti-virus software in July
Kaspersky blames the "present geopolitical climate and theoretical concerns."