Apple Just Won AI (and It’s Not Even Close) (Video)

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Videos, Artificial Intelligence,

Apple may have just won consumer AI by being last, and here is the twist that makes it interesting: it did it without having the smartest model. ChatGPT is more powerful. Claude is better at complex reasoning. Apple even leaned on the tech behind Google's Gemini to help train its own models, and after promising a revolutionary Siri back in 2024 and then failing to ship most of it, Apple had every reason to be the company nobody trusted with AI. But while everyone was writing them off, they quietly rebuilt the Siri that had been broken for 15 years, and after spending time with the beta, I think that changes the whole equation.

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The People Making Xbox Games Reportedly Hate Game Pass

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Microsoft, Video Games,

Xbox Game Pass has always had one obvious pitch: pay a monthly fee, and a giant library of games, including brand-new ones on day one, is just there. For players, that is close to a miracle. For the people who actually make those games, it may be closer to a slow-motion disaster.

According to a new report, that tension is not a rumor floating around the internet anymore. It is coming from inside the house. Xbox studio leadership reportedly detests Game Pass, and the reason is deceptively simple: they think it is teaching an entire generation of players that a $70 game should feel free.

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Apple Hid a Whole New Siri Interface in macOS 27. Here’s How to Turn It On

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Software, Artificial Intelligence,

Every so often Apple ships a feature before it's ready to admit the feature exists. That's what's happening in the macOS 27 beta right now: there's a redesigned, floating Siri interface sitting inside the software, fully built enough to poke at, but switched off so nobody trips over it. If you're the kind of person who reads release notes for fun, you can flip it on yourself with one Terminal command.

Here's the pitch. You select some text, a little icon pops up at the top-left of your selection, and hovering over it opens a compact popover full of things to do with those words. Rewrite. Proofread. "How does this sound?" Summarize into key points. "Edit with Siri." It's Writing Tools and Siri's smarts collapsed into one small, contextual menu that follows your cursor instead of making you dig through a menu bar. The idea is genuinely good. The execution, at least today, is a work in progress.

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Netflix Would Rather You Not Count How Much Everyone’s Watching

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Editorial, Home Entertainment,

Here is a good rule of thumb for reading any company's earnings: watch what it stops telling you. Netflix just told investors it will scale back its "What We Watched" engagement reports from twice a year to once a year, starting in early 2027. The official reason is that it wants everyone to focus on the numbers that pay the bills, revenue and operating profit, instead of getting distracted by hours watched.

That is a perfectly reasonable thing to say. It is also, conveniently, the kind of thing you say right when the viewing numbers get a little less flattering. Netflix racked up more than 97 billion hours of viewing in the first half of 2026, up about 2% from a year ago. Growth, yes. Blistering growth, no. And when the line stops going up and to the right as fast as it used to, publishing it half as often starts to look less like a focus decision and more like a mercy.

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Kodak’s New $35 Film Camera Wants to Be Your First One

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Cameras, Hot Deals,

You know that feeling when you want to try shooting film, poke around online for a camera, and immediately bounce off a wall of jargon about apertures and light meters and $300 price tags? The new Kodak EC35 is built for the exact moment right before you give up. It costs $35, it fits in a pocket, and it asks almost nothing of you.

Announced July 19, the EC35 is a reloadable 35mm camera aimed squarely at people who have never loaded a roll of film in their lives. The whole pitch is right there in the price: this is meant to be as easy, and nearly as cheap, as a disposable, except you keep the camera and just swap in a new roll when you are done.

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Alienware’s $800 AW3426DW Is a Gorgeous Ultrawide With One Big Catch

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Displays, Product Reviews, Video Games,

You know the moment when a game finally fills your whole field of view, the world stretching out past the edges of where a normal screen would stop, and you catch yourself just sitting there grinning? That is the feeling the Alienware AW3426DW is built to sell. At $800 for a 34-inch curved QD-OLED, it is Alienware's attempt to make that feeling affordable, and when everything lines up, it absolutely delivers.

The catch is that everything does not always line up. This is a stunning panel wrapped around a very specific idea of how you should be using it, and the moment you step outside that idea, the shine comes off fast. It is one of the best-looking monitors you can put on a desk for the money. It is also one that will happily leave a third of itself black if your game does not play along.

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Apple’s Mac Pro Was Supposed to Bury the Mac Studio. It Blinked Instead.

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, PC / Laptop, Rumors,

Here is the version of the Mac Pro you never got to buy: a tower with a chip so big it would have carried twice the processing cores and twice the graphics cores of the beefiest Ultra chip Apple sells. A machine built to make the Mac Studio look like a warm-up act. Apple designed it, plotted its launch, and then quietly walked away.

That is the picture painted by a new report from Bloomberg's Power On, and it lands with a little extra sting because Apple killed off the Mac Pro entirely back in March. So this is not a story about what is coming. It is a story about the monster desktop that got as far as the drawing board and then lost an argument to a smaller, cheaper box sitting right next to it.

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The LEGO One Piece Teaser Is Exactly the Goofy Detour This Story Needed

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Movies, Toys, Videos,

There is a particular kind of joy in watching a deadly serious adventure story get handed over to a pile of plastic minifigures, and Netflix just leaned all the way into it. The streamer dropped a teaser for LEGO One Piece, a two-part animated special that retells the first two seasons of its live-action pirate show entirely in brick form. It looks every bit as gleefully silly as that sentence sounds.

The special lands September 29, and the premise is smarter than a cash-in usually gets to be. Instead of a straight replay, it uses Usopp as the narrator, walking a wide-eyed Tony Tony Chopper through everything the Straw Hats got up to across the East Blue and the Grand Line. If you have never touched One Piece, that framing is basically a friendly on-ramp. If you have watched every episode twice, it is a chance to see the whole saga from a new angle, in a form that refuses to take itself too seriously.

Click to continue reading The LEGO One Piece Teaser Is Exactly the Goofy Detour This Story Needed

The iPad mini Is Finally Getting the One Upgrade That Actually Matters

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Handhelds, Rumors,

The iPad mini has always been the tablet you actually hold. Not the one you prop on a stand to type an email, but the one you read on in bed, thumb through on the train, or hand to a kid in the back seat. And for two years it has been coasting on the same screen it has had since forever. That is about to change.

Apple is reportedly planning to ship a new iPad mini this October, and for once the update is not just a spec bump. This is the mini's biggest overhaul in roughly five years, and the headline feature is the one thing that matters most on a device you stare at from six inches away: the display.

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Watch Styropyro Turn Mercury and Neon Into Lightning in a Bottle (Video)

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Mods / Hacks, Science, Videos,

The result looks like something out of a wizard's workshop: a hand-held tube that flickers and crackles with light every time it moves. And the wild part is that the basic trick is not new at all. People have been watching mercury glow in the dark since 1675, long before anyone had the faintest idea what electricity actually was.

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