Apple Posted Its Best June Quarter Ever. The Stock Fell 6% Anyway.

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News,

Apple just posted the best June quarter in its history. Record revenue, record iPhone sales, record Mac sales, records in every single geography it reports. The stock fell more than 6% in after-hours trading.

That gap is the whole story. The quarter Apple reported is already over, and it was excellent. The quarter Apple guided to is the one investors reacted to, and it comes with a warning that the company cannot build enough of what people want to buy, at margins that keep shrinking for reasons outside its control.

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Lego’s New Pokemon Sets Battle Each Other, and the Loser Actually Faints

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Toys, Video Games,

Leave one of Lego's new Pokemon alone on your desk for long enough and it falls asleep. Snoring included.

That detail tells you most of what's different about the Lego Pokemon Smart Play line, which goes on sale August 1 with sets running from $15 up to $120. Lego's Smart Brick tech showed up earlier this year in a Star Wars collection, and that line was fun in a specific way: you built a scene and acted it out, more director than participant. The Pokemon version does something else entirely. It borrows from the video games.

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Samsung Sold More Phones Than Ever and Still Lost Money

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Corporate News,

Here's a sentence that shouldn't make sense. Samsung sold plenty of phones last quarter, grew its mobile revenue year over year, and still managed to lose money doing it.

The number is 800 billion won, roughly $544 million, and it's the first operating loss Samsung's DX division has ever posted. DX is the half of the company that makes things you actually buy: phones, TVs, appliances. The loss came almost entirely from the mobile side. And the reason is the one everybody in tech has been bracing for since last year. Memory got expensive.

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2027 Kia Telluride X-Pro Review: The Rare Off-Road Trim That Doesn’t Ruin the SUV

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Product Reviews, Transportation,

Most off-road trims are a costume. You pay a few thousand extra for knobby tires, some black plastic cladding, and a pair of tow hooks painted a color that screams rescue me, and what you actually get is a family SUV that rides worse, hums louder on the highway, and never once leaves pavement. The 2027 Kia Telluride X-Pro had every opportunity to be exactly that vehicle.

It isn't, and that's the whole story here. Kia redesigned the Telluride from the ground up for 2027, and the X-Pro is the version that gets 9.1 inches of ground clearance, an electronic limited-slip rear differential, real all-terrain rubber, and recovery hooks that aren't decorative. The surprise is what it didn't cost: the thing still drives like the comfortable, quiet, absurdly practical three-row SUV that made the Telluride a phenomenon in the first place. That balance is harder to pull off than the marketing photos suggest, and almost nobody in this class has managed it.

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Samsung’s Galaxy Glasses Skip the Screen and Bet Everything on Gemini

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Wearables, Google, Artificial Intelligence,

The whole fantasy of smart glasses has always been the same one: a computer on your face that nobody else notices you are wearing. Samsung's new Galaxy Glasses, shown off at Unpacked, take that idea about as far as it will go. They leave out the one thing you might assume a pair of smart glasses needs, which is a screen you can see through.

Instead of putting anything in your field of view, the Galaxy Glasses lean entirely on cameras, audio, and Google's Gemini assistant. This is the first pair built on Android XR, the platform Samsung and Google have been teasing for what feels like ages, and it is aimed squarely at the Ray-Ban Meta crowd rather than anyone still waiting on Iron Man overlays. You look at something, you talk to it, and it talks back.

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Apple Is Quietly Rebuilding Every Mac It Sells

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

Look at Apple's Mac lineup today, then picture the whole thing swapped out. That is roughly the plan. According to a new report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is getting ready to refresh every single Mac it sells over the next two years, from the cheapest MacBook Air to the Mac Studio sitting under a video editor's desk. Not a spec bump here and a new color there. The entire family, top to bottom.

It is worth saying up front that this is a report, not an Apple announcement, so treat the dates and details as the best current read on Apple's plans rather than a promise. But the shape of it is easy to understand, and it tells you something about where Apple thinks the Mac is going. The short version: people are buying Macs again, a lot of them to run demanding AI work locally, and Apple wants a lineup that can meet that moment. Mac sales are reportedly on track to climb for a third year running.

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Gemini 3.6 Is Google Buying Time in the AI Race

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Google, Artificial Intelligence,

Every few weeks, one of the big AI labs drops a new model and asks you to care. Google's latest ask is Gemini 3.6, and the honest pitch is sitting right there in the release: it is cheaper to run than the last one. That is it. That is the headline feature.

Which is not nothing, if you are the person paying the bill. Google calls 3.6 its workhorse model, the one meant to balance quality against cost, and it does deliver real savings there: up to 65% fewer output tokens than 3.5 Flash in some cases, and about 17% fewer overall. Tokens are how these models get billed, so fewer tokens means a smaller invoice for the companies wiring Gemini into their apps. For everyone else, it is the kind of improvement you feel in a spreadsheet, not in a conversation.

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How Xbox Destroyed Game Pass - The Best Deal in Gaming (Video)

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

Microsoft spent more than $80 billion buying video game studios, and the Xbox division now runs at roughly a 3% profit margin. Park that money in a high yield savings account and you would have done better. That is the punchline everybody reaches for, and the conclusion they draw from it is that Game Pass was the mistake. I think they have it backwards.

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The Next Mac Mini Might Put a Newer Chip in the Cheaper Model

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

Picture buying the entry-level Mac mini and walking out with a newer chip than the person next to you who paid more. That is the small, strange promise tucked inside the latest report about Apple's tiniest desktop.

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is testing a next-generation Mac mini that pairs two chips from two different families: a fresh M6 in the base model, and last year's M5 Pro in the step-up configuration. None of this is official. There's no price, no spec sheet, and no release date attached yet. But if it holds up, it means the cheaper mini would run Apple's newest silicon while the pricier one leans on a chip that's technically a generation behind.

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Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Hands-On: The Foldable Finally Got the Shape Right

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Design, Product Reviews,

For six years, Samsung's big foldable has been shaped a little like a TV remote. Tall, skinny, and a bit awkward to hold shut. The Galaxy Z Fold 8 finally does something about that, and the fix is almost embarrassingly simple. It got wider.

That one change reshapes the entire phone. Closed, the new Fold looks and feels like a passport, with a 5.5-inch cover screen at a 10:16 aspect ratio that you can actually type on with two thumbs without popping the thing open. Samsung is calling this the biggest redesign since the original 2019 Z Fold, and after a few minutes in the hand, that reads as more than marketing. It borrows the squat, wide silhouette the first Pixel Fold pioneered, and it turns out that shape was right all along.

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