The walls of Apple’s garden are tumbling down
Apple’s reckoning isn’t just the end of an era for the company — it’s a reflection of the smartphone’s fall from beloved gadget to commodity.
Apple’s reckoning isn’t just the end of an era for the company — it’s a reflection of the smartphone’s fall from beloved gadget to commodity.
Feed refreshed
Someone made an ASMR video out of expanding the latest iPhone’s storage. It’s very satisfying as long as you don’t think too much about how deeply frustrating the Herculean effort to do this is, from a right-to-repair perspective.
On this episode of The Vergecast: the $100 billion sale coming soon, the Rabbit R1, Tesla earnings, and more.
At the moment, it seems Meta’s “AI studio” will let people make private and public bots, tuned for duties like personal shopping, trip-planning, meme generation, and helping users “never miss a romantic connection.” (I assume that last one is designed to trawl Craigslist Missed Connections for you.)
Alessandro Paluzzi posted these screenshots in a thread where he’s been tracking the feature since January.
I'm a big kid. I play with amazing toys. Recently, I discovered the joy of sharing minute-long videos of them with you.
Now, I've started a Threads account where you can freely subscribe to my vids, get alerts for new vids, and ask me anything. (It's best viewed in the mobile app.)
This self-transforming Megatron? There's a lot more where that came from.
Sega’s Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble — the first truly new game in the series in more than 10 years — is coming to the Nintendo Switch on June 25th.
Here’s a trailer for the 16-player online multiplayer, which looks... so much better than, say, Monkey Tennis in Super Monkey Ball 2.
We found a collection of unique gift ideas that go beyond the flowers and chocolates that typically rule the day.
GamesIndustry.biz did the math to put it in perspective: Zuck’s Reality Labs has burned a billion dollars every month since June 2022, and plans to spend even more: “We continue to expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year,” CFO Susan Li said on the Q1 earnings call.
Meta is plenty profitable overall, though: it raked in $12 billion last quarter alone.
[GamesIndustry.biz]
Paging Helen Hunt. Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton to Twister, please.
Don’t know how I missed this the other week: Nvidia’s quietly pointing its board partners towards small GPUs again! I sincerely hope this means blower cards are back on the menu to exhaust hot air from my case. Nvidia cracked down on those years back, allegedly to avoid cannibalizing workstation GPU sales. It’s one way GPUs might head back in the right direction.
The company responsible for Bored Ape Yacht Club is restructuring, and as a result, firing some of its employees. In a memo, its CEO complained that “The creative-first spirit that drove this company from inception has been getting muddied by labyrinthine corporate processes."
This time, we get a full-on Pixel 8A promo video leaked courtesy of MySmartPrice showing it’ll get Google’s AI features from the Pixel 8, including Best Take, Circle to Search, Live Translate, and Audio Magic Eraser.
It’s arriving just hours after the last Pixel 8A leak, but Google’s tradition of coughing up hardware info early goes back much, much, much further.
Following a report by Puck’s John Ourand that ESPN has carved out a piece of the new NBA media landscape, The Athletic added an Amazon rumor:
It is expected that Prime Video’s package will include significant regular season and postseason games, perhaps even some conference finals. The anticipation is that the final contract will be for at least a decade and begin the 2025-2026 season.
If the deals go through, this might add streaming NBA games on Thursdays when Amazon’s NFL games aren’t on.
[The Athletic]
The creator subscription platform markets itself as basically the opposite of the algorithm-driven TikTok — but that doesn’t mean Patreon is celebrating the forced divestment from ByteDance.
Banning TikTok just serves to further entrench YouTube and Instagram as the dominant platforms in this industry. But more competition is good for creators–it gives them more leverage and ultimately more control over their businesses.
The company worked with IBM to release a 1998 uncompiled version DOS 4.0 on Thursday, although unfortunately, this release lacks the app-switching capabilities that landed it the nickname MT-DOS. Multitasking was scrapped in later versions to make way for GUI operating systems like Windows.
Microsoft already released MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 in 2014, in cooperation with The Computer History Museum.
Underneath your Home and Work address shortcuts, the Google Maps widget now has a shortcut that lets you launch a map of your current location. This is neat, considering that, unlike Garmins, most Wear OS watches don’t have native compasses or maps preloaded.
I mean, what could go wrong? A new video conferencing feature in the style of Zoom, Meet and Microsoft Teams is coming soon to X, according to X user/Elon whisperer DogeDesigner and X Daily News.
X Conferences will be hosted on the the platform’s existing live audio platform X Spaces (which added video earlier this year), according to a screenshot of the beta version.
Specifically, the rails that keep Joy-Cons firmly connected to the Switch? Because Spanish pub Vandal (which correctly reported minor details of the Switch OLED before launch) says a larger Switch 2 will replace those rails with magnets.
That’s according to accessory vendors who apparently didn’t even see the Switch 2, mind, just touched it in a box. Still: magnets alone? I could see magnets and rails, but...
What it does, the R1 seems to do well enough — with some typical AI quirks. But where are all the features we were promised?
Romulus is looking pretty scary, but if you’re in the mood for something more immersive there’s an Alien horror game for VR on the way as well. Unfortunately there’s no actual gameplay in this trailer for Rogue Incursion, but the developers at Survios describe it as a “single-player, action-horror game” launching this holiday on PS VR2, PCVR via Steam, and Meta Quest 3.
Reuters reports Pope Francis will head to Puglia in Italy to meet leaders from the US, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Canada, and Japan to discuss regulating AI.
The pope previously expressed concerns about AI-driven inequality and has learned more about the technology since then.
The pontiff will presumably not wear a Balenciaga coat.
Years of security issues and mounting criticism have left Microsoft needing to overhaul its cybersecurity.