Gear Live: The Latest Tech, Gadgets, AI, and Gaming News
Anker’s MindBase Keeps 48TB of Your Home Footage Off the Cloud
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smart Home, Storage, Artificial Intelligence,
Anker has built a smart home hub whose main selling point is that your footage never leaves your house. MindBase, announced at IFA in Berlin on September 3, is the company's first AI home hub, and it holds up to 48TB of local, expandable storage for camera recordings, household data and family photos. No monthly fee to keep last Tuesday's doorbell clip, and no data center in Virginia sitting on video of your kitchen.
That runs against how the smart home has worked for most of the last decade, and it was the most interesting thing in a lineup of roughly 22 Anker products at the show. It's also the claim worth checking hardest, because Anker is the company that already made this exact promise once and broke it.
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Gurman Says Apple Has 14 Products Coming by Early 2027, Starting Next Week
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Smartphones, Rumors,
Fourteen products between now and early 2027. That is the roadmap Bloomberg's Mark Gurman sketched out this week in Power On, rounded up Friday by MacRumors, and it would make the next five months one of the heaviest release runs Apple has ever attempted. None of it is confirmed. Gurman has a good record on Apple's plans, but a roadmap is a report, not a product page.
What Apple has actually said is small. There is an event on Wednesday, September 9, at 10am Pacific and 1pm Eastern at Apple Park, and marketing chief Greg Joswiak posted the tagline, "Surprise and shine." That is the whole official story. Everything below comes from reporting, and where the reports disagree, we say so.
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Zelda Gets a 40th Anniversary Direct Tuesday, Switch 2’s Winter Slate Lands Wednesday
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Announcements, Handhelds, Video Games,
Nintendo is running two shows next week, and the first one belongs entirely to Link. The Legend of Zelda gets a half hour to itself on Tuesday morning, then the company comes back Wednesday to talk about what you can actually buy before the end of the year.
The Legend of Zelda 40th Anniversary Direct airs Tuesday, September 8 at 7am PT / 10am ET and runs roughly 30 minutes. A general Nintendo Direct follows Wednesday, September 9 at the same time, running about 45 minutes and focused on Switch 2 games launching this winter. Both stream on Nintendo's YouTube and Twitch channels.
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Tesla Said the Cybercab Is Legal. NHTSA Wants to See the Homework.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Editorial, Transportation,
Tesla put its first production Cybercabs on public streets in Austin this week. Federal safety regulators opened a file on them before the next day was over.
The probe is an audit query, AQ26002, from NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation, and it covers roughly 1,000 vehicles. No crash set it off. The agency is asking about paperwork, specifically the paperwork Tesla filed on itself.
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Ugreen Built a Smart Home That Skips the Cloud. The Big One Costs $19,999
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smart Home, Storage, Artificial Intelligence,
Your security cameras are almost certainly shipping video to somebody else's server right now, and you are probably paying a monthly fee for the privilege. Ugreen showed up at IFA in Berlin with a lineup built on the opposite idea. The box sits in your house, the footage stays on it, and the AI that reads that footage runs on the same machine, with no subscription attached.
There are three of them, and the spread is enormous. The HomeAgent HA100 lists at $1,799, the HA100 Pro at $5,999, and the MasterAgent MA100 at $19,999. Early backers pay roughly half. Nothing ships until late January 2027 at the earliest, and the MA100 not until July of that year.
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XREAL’s Aura Glasses Showed Up at IFA With Everything But a Price
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Wearables, Displays, Google,
Every couple of years somebody straps a display to your face and tells you the laptop is finished. XREAL's Aura is the 2026 version of that pitch, and it turned up at ShowStoppers during IFA in Berlin this week running Google's Android XR. It still has no price and no ship date more specific than "fall."
What happened in Berlin was a demo. XREAL announced nothing at IFA. The glasses were shown as Project Aura alongside Google at I/O back in May, then got their real name, a full spec sheet, a content lineup and a reservation page at AWE in June. Berlin was one of the first big consumer shows where a general audience could put them on, which is worth something. The news itself is three months old.
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Nintendo’s Free Switch 2 Update Crams Eight Mario Kart Players Onto One Screen
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Handhelds, Video Games,
Picture your TV chopped into eight little rectangles, each one holding a friend, a kart, and a red shell with their name on it. That's now something you can do in your living room.
Nintendo pushed out a free Switch 2 update for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with no real warning, and the big change is local split-screen for eight players, up from a cap of four. This is a game that shipped on Wii U in 2014 and again on Switch in 2017. Twelve years on, it's still growing new features.
Tesla Killed the Solar Roof and Its Certified Installers Are Eating the Loss
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Smart Home,
Tesla stopped selling the Solar Roof in August. There was no event, no blog post, no farewell video. Certified installers were told Tesla would supply conventional solar panels going forward, and the Solar Roof page on Tesla's site now sends you to those panels instead.
Elon Musk once said Tesla would be installing 1,000 Solar Roofs a week by 2019 or 2020. The real total came to roughly 3,000 systems over about seven years, something like 95% short of that pace.
TP-Link’s Wi-Fi 8 Routers Arrive First. Do You Actually Need One Yet?
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Broadband, Wireless / WiFi,
TP-Link showed up at IFA in Berlin with a router you can pre-order on September 30, and it wants you to know it got there first. The Archer 8 Ultra and the Deco 8 Ultra are among the first Wi-Fi 8 hardware anyone has put a real date on. The catch is worth sitting with. Wi-Fi 8 isn't finished, and the standard behind it isn't expected to be locked down until 2028.
So should you care yet? The honest answer starts with what Wi-Fi 8 actually is, and it is not a speed upgrade. Every previous jump trained you to expect a bigger number, so this one takes a second to sink in. There's no new spectrum, no wider channels, and the top speed sits about where Wi-Fi 7 already left it. What the engineers are chasing this time is reliability.
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BYD’s Sealion 08 Is the $33,000 Long-Range SUV You Can’t Buy
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Transportation,
Picture a three-row electric SUV longer than a BMW X7, one that charges from nearly empty to almost full in about nine minutes and claims to travel 559 miles on a charge. Now picture it costing about what a loaded Toyota Highlander does. That car is real. BYD launched it on September 2, and unless you live in China, you cannot buy it.
The Sealion 08 is the new flagship of BYD's Ocean lineup, and it is a lot of vehicle for the money. Prices run from 229,900 to 279,900 yuan, or roughly $33,000 to $41,000, across eight versions. For that you get a 5,115mm body, a choice of five or six seats, and a spec sheet that reads like a wish list an American automaker would quietly file under "someday."
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