Gear Live

Apple TV Now Costs $14.99 a Month, and the Annual Plan Took the Bigger Hit

Andru Edwards — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 23:21:00 -0700

The annual plan is where this one bites. Apple raised US prices for its Apple TV streaming service today: $14.99 a month, up from $12.99, and $119 a year, up from $99. The monthly bill went up about 15%, and the yearly one went up 20%.

Apple didn't send a press release. Its Apple TV page now lists $14.99 a month after a seven-day trial, and points to Apple One "starting at $21.95," which confirms the Individual bundle went up two dollars as well, and Apple's own marketing pages don't list a yearly price at all.

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GTA 6 Is Making You Work for Stolen Cars

Andru Edwards — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 23:17:00 -0700

Stealing a car in Grand Theft Auto has taken about as much effort as opening a door for two decades now. Walk up, hold a button, drive away. In Grand Theft Auto VI, that stops working on a lot of cars.

Rob Nelson, co-studio head at Rockstar North, told IGN the studio has "put some layers of stratification into the vehicles." Before, "you could just press triangle to automatically hotwire and steal any vehicle." Now certain parked cars stay shut to you "until you get a bit further along with the story and you acquire certain tools to get into them." Carjacking is untouched. In Nelson's words, "You can always carjack any driver you see."

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Spatial Audio in CarPlay Reaches the Volvo EX90, With a 25-Speaker Catch

Andru Edwards — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 11:34:00 -0700

The car is where a lot of people still listen to music on purpose. Alone, on a highway, with nobody interrupting and nothing else competing for the speakers, you hear the bass line in a way you never do at your desk. It's the closest thing most of us have to a listening room, and audio companies have been circling it for years.

Volvo is pushing Spatial Audio in CarPlay, powered by Dolby Atmos, out to the EX90 through a software update, and confirmed it in a press release this week. Back in July it named the EX60, EX90 and ES90 as the three models getting it. There's a catch, and it's an expensive one. The feature needs the optional Bowers & Wilkins sound system.

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Chip Tariffs Could Reach Laptops and Game Consoles

Andru Edwards — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 10:41:00 -0700

Taxing a chip and taxing the laptop that chip lives inside are two very different policies. One duty falls on a component. The other falls on the whole machine, and the customs value of a machine is a lot bigger than the customs value of the silicon in it.

On August 27, Politico reported that the Trump administration is weighing the second version. Citing eight people familiar with the discussions, Politico said officials have been working on a round of semiconductor tariffs that would reach finished products built with chips: laptops, gaming consoles, and data center servers. CNBC and Reuters both picked the story up the same day, and Reuters noted it could not independently verify it. Nothing has been signed. No rate has been reported, and there is no effective date, because there is nothing yet to make effective.

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The Galaxy S26 FE Costs $50 More, and Only the Chip Really Changed

Andru Edwards — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 10:07:00 -0700

The Fan Edition pitch has never been complicated. Samsung takes a flagship, shaves off the parts most people won't miss, and sells it for a few hundred dollars less. The Galaxy S26 FE, official as of August 27, keeps that pitch intact. It also raises the entry fee to $699.99, up $50 from where the S25 FE started last year.

For that you get a 6.7-inch FHD+ Dynamic AMOLED 2X running at 120Hz and rated for 1,900 nits, a 4,900mAh battery, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB or 256GB of storage. It arrives September 3 at select carriers and September 4 at Samsung.com and everywhere else, in Pistachio, Blueberry, and Graphite. Nearly all of that carried over from the S25 FE unchanged.

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Meta Closes the Ray-Ban Glasses Trick for Hiding the Recording Light

Andru Edwards — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 10:00:00 -0700

The white light on the front of a pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses is the only thing standing between you and a stranger filming you. That's the whole design. There's no shutter sound, no lens barrel, no obvious gesture. A small LED comes on, and you're supposed to notice it and act accordingly.

Meta has started rolling out an update that closes the newest way people were getting around it. Until now, the glasses only checked the LED at the moment you pressed record. Start a video with the light exposed, then slide a finger or a piece of tape over it, and the camera kept going. Alex Himel, Meta's VP of wearables, announced the fix on Threads: "The camera will now stop working if the light is covered during a recording."

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Anthropic said no to the Pentagon. A judge just ruled the punishment illegal.

Andru Edwards — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 09:57:00 -0700

Turning down government work is not supposed to get you branded a national security threat. A federal judge in San Francisco spent 59 pages explaining that the Pentagon did exactly that to Anthropic, and that it broke the law doing it.

U.S. District Judge Rita Lin, ruling on cross-motions for summary judgment in the Northern District of California, vacated the Defense Department's designation of Anthropic as a "supply chain risk" and blocked the government from enforcing the directives built on top of it. "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," Lin wrote.

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Cerebras Built a Chip the Size of a Dinner Plate Because Memory Is the Wall

Andru Edwards — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 09:50:00 -0700

Most AI chips spend a lot of their time waiting. The math units sit idle while the memory system hauls in the next slab of model weights, and that waiting is a big part of why a chatbot pauses before it answers you. Cerebras's answer has been to skip the step where a wafer gets cut into individual chips and ship the entire wafer as one processor.

That wafer is close to the size of a dinner plate: 46,225 square millimeters, a bit under 8.5 inches on a side, carrying four trillion transistors and 900,000 cores. Cerebras announced the CS-4 in mid-August, a rack holding three of them, with first shipments beginning this quarter. At Hot Chips this week the company walked through how the rack is built and where the wafer goes next.

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The Translucent Green Xbox Series X25 Is $899, and Pre-Orders Open Thursday Morning

Andru Edwards — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 21:43:00 -0700

If you were a kid in 2001 and you ever saw one of the see-through green Xbox consoles, you know why this thing exists. Microsoft confirmed the details for the Xbox Series X25 during its gamescom broadcast on Wednesday: translucent OG green shell, guts visible through the case, every unit individually numbered with its own engraving.

It costs $899.99 in the US (£759.99 in the UK) and launches November 13, 2026, right up against the 25th anniversary of the original Xbox. Pre-orders open Thursday, August 27 at 7 a.m. Pacific / 10 a.m. Eastern on the Xbox site and at participating retailers, limited to one per customer. Some longtime Xbox customers got emailed early access on Wednesday.

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Legato Just Hid an AI Hearing Aid Inside a Normal Pair of Glasses

Andru Edwards — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 21:39:00 -0700

In a loud restaurant, somebody across the table says something, you catch about 60% of it, and you nod anyway. For a lot of the 50 million American adults with hearing loss, that's every conversation, and the fix is a device you have to admit you need. A startup called Legato is going after that problem by not making a medical device at all.

Legato came out of stealth Wednesday with $12 million in funding and its first product, Legato Frames. It's a pair of glasses with hearing assistance built into the arms. From across the room, they look like glasses.

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OpenAI Built Its Own AI Chip, Jalapeño, and It’s Beating Nvidia on Power

Andru Edwards — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 21:29:00 -0700

You know that pause when you ask a chatbot something and the answer sits there, one word at a time, while you stare at it? That pause is inference, and it's the most expensive thing in AI right now. OpenAI just showed off a chip built to kill it.

The chip is called Jalapeño. OpenAI published its first benchmark numbers at the Hot Chips conference this week. Against Nvidia's Blackwell systems, OpenAI says Jalapeño does 1.5x to 1.9x more work per watt and responds 1.7x to 3.6x faster end to end.

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Samsung Put a Processor Inside Your Phone’s RAM

Andru Edwards — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 21:25:00 -0700

Every time your phone runs an AI feature on-device, most of the energy goes into hauling data out of memory, over to the processor, doing a bit of math, and hauling it back. Again and again. The math is cheap. The commute kills your battery.

Samsung's answer, shown at the Hot Chips conference this week, is to stop commuting. LPDDR5X-PIM puts small compute units inside the memory chip, so the calculations happen where the data already lives. It's the first time this has been done with LPDDR, the low-power memory that goes into phones and laptops instead of data center racks.

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Amazon Is Killing Mechanical Turk, the Human Engine That Helped Train AI

Andru Edwards — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 21:22:00 -0700

Amazon told workers and customers this week that Mechanical Turk shuts down on September 30, ending a 21-year run for the marketplace that did the grunt work behind the machine learning era. Jeff Bezos once described it as artificial artificial intelligence, a joke about humans pretending to be machines. The actual machines made the joke obsolete.

If you never used it, MTurk paid people a few cents at a time to do small tasks a computer couldn't: labeling images, transcribing audio, filling out surveys, moderating content. More than 500,000 people passed through it. A lot of the training data underneath the AI you use every day started as somebody clicking through those tasks for pennies.

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The Govee TV Backlight 3 is the Smartest TV Upgrade You Can Make

Andru Edwards — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 21:18:00 -0700

Watch The Govee TV Backlight 3 is the Smartest TV Upgrade You Can Make on YouTube

When it comes to home entertainment, most people think they need a bigger TV to get a more immersive experience. But you don't need to drop thousands on a massive new panel. True immersion is less about the screen itself and more about the space around it.

The Govee TV Backlight 3 tackles exactly this. It bleeds your content onto the wall behind your TV. This expands your viewing area beyond the bezels in a way that is incredibly eye-catching.

What is in the box

Govee ships everything you need in one package. You get the LED strip, a camera bar to monitor the picture, a control box, corner clips to keep things stable, orange calibration squares, and a power adapter.

You have two sizing options depending on your setup. The 11.8-foot version covers 55 to 65-inch screens. The larger 16.4-foot version fits 75 to 85-inch TVs.

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The New Mac mini Starts at $899, and That Price Is the Real Story

Andru Edwards — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:24:00 -0700

The Mac mini used to be the easy recommendation. Somebody asks what desktop to buy, you say Mac mini, they say how much, you say $599. Apple dropped a new one on Tuesday with no keynote and no fanfare, and the cheapest one now costs $899.

That's a $300 jump from where the M4 model launched in October 2024, in under two years. You get the same 16GB of memory and the same 256GB of storage you got at $599. What the extra money buys is speed.

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Instagram and Facebook Are About to Lock Teens Out at Midnight

Andru Edwards — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:19:00 -0700

A 15-year-old in most of the United States will soon get two hours a day on Instagram and Facebook, and then the apps stop. At midnight they lock until 6 a.m. During school hours, notifications go quiet. And the teen can't switch any of it off without a parent signing off first.

That's the product side of the settlement Meta announced Wednesday with a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general, ending a federal trial in Oakland over claims that Facebook and Instagram were designed to keep kids hooked. The payment runs to roughly $16.7 billion. The defaults are what will change how the apps feel.

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Apple’s Fall Event Is Set for September 9, and It’s John Ternus’s First One

Andru Edwards — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 11:21:00 -0700

Apple finally put a date on the biggest phone announcement of the year, and the most interesting thing about it might not be a phone at all. Invites went out Wednesday morning with the tagline "Surprise and shine." The event happens Wednesday, September 9 at 10 a.m. Pacific (1 p.m. Eastern) at the Steve Jobs Theater on the Apple Park campus.

You can watch it the usual ways: Apple's website, YouTube, and the Apple TV app. What actually separates this one from the last decade of Septembers is who will be standing at the front of it. John Ternus takes over as Apple's CEO on September 1, with Tim Cook shifting to executive chairman. That makes September 9 Ternus's first keynote in the job.

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Tim Cook Has One Week Left, and Ternus Inherits an Apple Mid-Pivot

Andru Edwards — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 13:23:00 -0700

Apple threw Tim Cook a party. Roughly 200 people at Caffè Macs, OneRepublic playing in the courtyard, tributes from Laurene Powell Jobs, services chief Eddy Cue, former COO Jeff Williams, and the man taking his job. It happened on August 23, one day before the fifteenth anniversary of the day Cook replaced Steve Jobs.

On September 1, John Ternus becomes Apple's eighth CEO. Cook doesn't leave the building, though, as he becomes executive chairman. He'll be focused on engaging with policymakers around the world, which is a polite way of saying he keeps handling the regulators and trade fights he has spent a decade getting good at.

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Apple’s Magic Keyboards Finally Match the MacBook’s Keycaps

Andru Edwards — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 13:19:00 -0700

Look at the modifier keys on a MacBook and then at the ones on a desktop Magic Keyboard. The laptop shows symbols. The desktop keyboard spells out the words. Apple has been shipping that mismatch for years, and today it quietly fixed it.

All four Magic Keyboards now use MacBook-style keycaps with symbols instead of words. They went on sale immediately, alongside the new Mac mini and Mac Studio, and the prices did not move.

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Xpeng Raised $900 Million to Build Humanoid Robots on a Car Assembly Line

Andru Edwards — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 13:15:00 -0700

Xpeng's robotics business just raised more than $900 million at a valuation above $6.3 billion, in what the company says is the largest single private round China's embodied AI sector has seen. IDG Capital led it, Gaorong Ventures joined, and Tencent and Alibaba came in as strategic investors.

The money goes toward one machine: a humanoid robot called IRON, which Xpeng expects to enter mass production by the end of 2026.

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Apple Cut the Price of the Polishing Cloth in Half

Andru Edwards — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 13:13:00 -0700

Apple spent this morning raising the price of its cheapest desktop by 50 percent. It also released a new Polishing Cloth for $9, down from $19. The cloth is the only thing in the lineup that got cheaper today.

It's available now. Apple's product description is word for word what it was before: soft, nonabrasive material that safely cleans any Apple display, including nano-texture glass.

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The M5 Ultra Fuses Four Chips Into One, a First for Apple Silicon

Andru Edwards — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 13:07:00 -0700

Every Ultra chip Apple has shipped so far has been two Max chips bolted together with an interconnect called UltraFusion. The M5 Ultra is four. That's the whole story, and it's a bigger deal than the core counts make it sound.

Apple announced M5 Ultra today inside the new Mac Studio, where it scales to a 36-core CPU, an 80-core GPU, and 512GB of unified memory. Apple calls it the most powerful chip it has ever made. It's also the most structurally unusual.

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The Echo Dot Is $79.99 Now, and AI Data Centers Are the Reason

Andru Edwards — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 13:03:00 -0700

The Amazon Echo Dot cost $49.99 last week. It costs $79.99 now, a 60 percent jump that Amazon made overnight with no announcement. Fortune caught the change across Amazon's hardware lineup and got the company to confirm it.

Amazon's explanation is the one every hardware maker is giving this year. A spokeswoman said the consumer electronics industry is facing steep increases in memory and storage component costs, and that Amazon absorbed them for as long as it could before adjusting prices across its product lines.

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Nvidia’s Groq Chip Is in Full Production, and It Exists to Fix One Annoying Thing

Andru Edwards — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 12:47:00 -0700

When you hand an AI coding agent a task and it sits there for eleven seconds before doing anything, you're feeling a very specific bottleneck. Not training. Not raw compute. Token generation speed, which is how fast a model produces its answer one piece at a time. Nvidia just put a chip into full production that does almost nothing else.

Announced at Hot Chips 2026, the Groq 3 LPX is an inference accelerator that extends Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform. It's also the first real product to emerge from Nvidia's $20 billion Groq acquisition, and Nebius is the first AI cloud signed up to run it.

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The New M5 Ultra Mac Studio is an AI Beast That Holds Up to 512GB of Memory

Andru Edwards — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 12:42:00 -0700

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Here's the pitch for the new Mac Studio, stripped of marketing language: you can put 512GB of memory on your desk, hand it a frontier-class open-weight model, and never pay a cloud bill or count a token again. That's a genuinely appealing idea. Here's the catch: the version that does it starts at $5,499, and a loaded one will run you well past five figures.

Apple announced the machine this morning alongside the new M6 and M5 Pro Mac mini. Pre-orders are open now, shipping starts September 22, and the 512GB configuration doesn't arrive until late October. The M5 Max model starts at $2,499.

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Garmin’s Fenix 9 Pro Gets a Titanium Case and a Satellite Lifeline

Andru Edwards — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 12:34:00 -0700

Watch Garmin’s Fenix 9 Pro Gets a Titanium Case and a Satellite Lifeline on YouTube

Garmin did something today it almost never does: it scheduled a livestream and made an event out of a watch launch. The watch is the Fenix 9, and the thing worth caring about isn't the sensor list. It's that the Pro model can text, call, and fire an SOS from your wrist over satellite, with no phone anywhere near you.

The Fenix 9 starts at $999.99. The Fenix 9 Pro starts at $1,099.99. Both are available now.

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Apple’s M6 Is Its First 2nm Chip. Here’s What That Actually Changes

Andru Edwards — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 12:32:00 -0700

Apple's new M6 chip is here, and you may be wondering what's different this time around. It's a 2 nanometer chip, but process nodes are some of the most over-hyped numbers in tech. "2 nanometer" doesn't describe the size of anything you could measure on the die. Instead, it's a label for a manufacturing generation, and it has been marketing shorthand for years. So when Apple says M6 is its first 2nm chip, the useful question is "What did Apple do with that new headroom?"

Based on what Apple published today: two more CPU cores, two more GPU cores, a second Neural Engine, and more memory bandwidth, all packed into a smaller die. M6 debuts in the new Mac mini, which starts at $899 and ships September 22.

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AliExpress Was Playing Silent Audio in Your Browser to Track You

Andru Edwards — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 12:28:00 -0700

A developer noticed his Bluetooth headphones wouldn't hand off from his laptop to his phone. He closed a browser tab and the problem vanished. The tab was AliExpress. What he found digging through the site's code is one of the more inventive tracking techniques to surface in a while: silent audio, played at zero volume, running purely to identify his machine.

It's called audio fingerprinting, and it doesn't need a single cookie to work.

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Apple’s New M6 Mac mini Wants to Be the AI Box That Lives on Your Desk

Andru Edwards — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 12:25:00 -0700

Watch Apple’s New M6 Mac mini Wants to Be the AI Box That Lives on Your Desk on YouTube

Apple didn't hold an event for this one. It put a new Mac mini on the store page on a Tuesday morning, two weeks before the iPhone 18 event, and let the spec sheet do the talking. Read that sheet closely and something stands out: this is the first Mac that Apple openly pitches as a machine that sits on your desk and runs AI models all day, whether or not you're sitting in front of it.

The headline is the chip. M6 is Apple's first 2nm processor, and it landed in the cheapest desktop Apple sells. Pre-orders opened today, machines arrive September 22, and the M6 model starts at $899 with 16GB of unified memory. There's also an M5 Pro version at $1,699 for people who need real render horsepower in a box the size of a sandwich.

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The Ceramic Apple Watch Might Be Coming Back

Andru Edwards — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 15:54:00 -0700

Every year around this time, the Apple rumor mill produces one story that fans want to be true so badly that it spreads faster than its sourcing deserves. This year it is the ceramic Apple Watch.

The claim: Apple will bring back a ceramic case with the Apple Watch Series 12, expected at next month's September event. It would be the first ceramic Watch since the Series 5 Edition in 2019. It is a genuinely appealing idea. It is also, at the moment, one post on X.

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