Apple Music Just Got More Expensive, and It Was Only a Matter of Time

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Music,

If you pay for Apple Music, your next bill is going up. Apple bumped the price of its music service today, and it's the first time the company has touched that number in almost four years. The last increase landed back in October 2022, so if you felt like you'd been paying the same amount forever, you basically had been.

Here's the damage. Apple Music Individual moves from $10.99 to $11.99 a month. The Family plan takes the biggest hit, jumping from $16.99 all the way to $19.99. And the student plan, the one plenty of people stretch out for as many years as they can get away with, ticks up from $5.99 to $6.99. All of it takes effect today, July 17, in the US and a handful of other countries.

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Moonshot’s Kimi K3 Is the Open Model That Just Crashed the AI Benchmark Party

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Misc. Tech, Software,

Here is the question everyone in the AI world woke up asking this week: how far ahead are American labs, really? Alibaba-backed Chinese startup Moonshot just gave a very specific answer with Kimi K3, a new open-weight model that is turning up near the top of some serious benchmarks. The weights land on July 27, and at 2.8 trillion parameters, Moonshot says it will be the largest open model anyone has released.

That size is the headline number, but it is not the interesting part. The interesting part is what K3 does on the leaderboards. On Arena.ai's front-end development test, it ranks above both Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, the two strongest proprietary systems on the market. Arena's CEO did not hedge: he called it "the single biggest release of the year" and said it "marks the moment that OSS Chinese models have surpassed US models," noting that Kimi K3 had "BEATEN FABLE" just six weeks after Fable shipped.

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Netflix Used AI on Roughly 300 Titles This Year, and It Wants Investors to Know

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Movies, Software,

Netflix has a number it wants you to notice: 300. That is roughly how many titles the company says have used generative AI so far this year, a figure it dropped right into its Q2 shareholder letter. This is not a quiet experiment tucked into the corner of one show. It is a company-wide habit, and Netflix shared the count because it thinks the number is good news.

Most of that work is happening in post-production, the unglamorous stretch after filming where scenes get cleaned up, stitched together, and finished. Netflix says it is "increasingly leveraging these tools to deliver higher quality output more quickly and at a lower cost than traditional methods." Translate that out of investor-speak and it means one thing: AI is helping the company make stuff faster and spend less doing it.

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Tesla Is Selling a $225 Balance Bike for Toddlers

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Toys, Transportation,

Your two-year-old cannot legally drive. Tesla has found a workaround anyway. The company is now selling a $225 balance bike for toddlers, a pedal-free, motor-free little machine that a kid propels the old-fashioned way, with their own feet on the ground.

That is Flintstones-style locomotion at a Silicon Valley price. The bike targets kids aged 2 to 5 who weigh under 77 pounds, with a lightweight magnesium frame in white, a five-way adjustable black seat, the Tesla word mark on the side and a T logo up front. It comes with assembly tools. It is also, as of now, already sold out.

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Samsung Is Betting Titanium Can Finally Flatten the Galaxy Z Fold 8’s Crease

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Design, Displays,

Every foldable phone comes with an asterisk, and it sits right in the middle of the screen. The crease. That soft valley where the display bends has been the one thing keeping foldables from feeling like the future they keep promising to be, the little dip your thumb finds every time you scroll. Samsung has spent seven generations trying to make it go away. With the Galaxy Z Fold 8, the company says it finally has a real answer, and its name is titanium.

Ahead of its July 22 Unpacked event, Samsung revealed a new display technology it’s calling Flex Titanium, built to flatten the crease on the Z Fold 8 and the higher-end Z Fold 8 Ultra. Notice the careful wording, though: Samsung is promising “reduced crease visibility,” not a crease that’s gone for good. That gap between “better” and “invisible” is the whole story here, so it’s worth understanding what the titanium is actually doing inside the phone.

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You Won’t Look At Apple’s Siri AI The Same Way After Watching This (Video)

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Google, Software, Videos,

Here's the story you probably heard: Apple fell behind on AI, panicked, and quietly handed Siri over to Google. So when a much smarter Siri showed up at WWDC, the case seemed closed. Siri was just Gemini wearing an Apple logo. It was a tidy narrative, repeated everywhere, and it turns out to be wrong.

During WWDC, I was invited to a closed-door media briefing with Craig Federighi and his team. Craig took the Google question head-on, first walking us through how a typical chatbot app like ChatGPT or Gemini works, then explaining what Apple built instead. His conclusion was blunt: "The amount of Google Assistant we use is none." No Gemini client code in iOS, none of the models Google deploys to its own customers, and not even Google Search as the foundation of Siri's world knowledge.

Click to continue reading You Won’t Look At Apple’s Siri AI The Same Way After Watching This (Video)

Apple’s visionOS 27 Update is Actually Insane (Video)

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Wearables, Software, Videos,

You can probably recite the joke by now: Vision Pro is a very expensive iPad strapped to your face. I've heard it for two years. However, after going hands-on with the visionOS 27 developer beta, I think that joke is finally running out of road.

Start with Siri, because Apple basically started over. On visionOS 27, the assistant lives in your room as a small 3D orb you can park anywhere - next to your monitor, above the couch, wherever - and it stays anchored there. There's no wake word anymore, either. A new interaction called Look and Speak means you just glance at the orb and start talking. That sounds small. In practice, it removes the most awkward thing about talking to a headset.

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Apple’s Long-Promised New Siri Is Finally Here, If You’re Willing to Beta Test iOS 27

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Smartphones, Software,

Apple has been promising a smarter, more personal Siri for so long that it started to feel like a running joke. The assistant that was supposed to understand your life, dig through your apps, and actually get things done kept slipping - announced, delayed, quietly pushed to “next year.” Well, next year is here. The new Siri just made its public debut in the iOS 27 beta, and for the first time you can actually try the thing Apple has been talking about for what feels like forever.

There’s a catch, though. A few of them, actually. This isn’t a switch that flips on your iPhone tomorrow. You have to opt into a public beta, join a waitlist, own a fairly recent iPhone, and live in the right part of the world. The upside, though, is that once you get in, the new Siri is...actually really good. For Apple, that would be a first.

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Asha Sharma’s XBOX Reset is Devastating (Video)

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

Eight days. That's how long it took Xbox to go from holding what I thought was its best showcase in a decade to shutting down a studio it had just used to headline it. Microsoft announced a brand new Hellblade on that stage, and barely a week later Ninja Theory, the team behind Senua, was told it's over. You don't do that unless something in the foundation is cracking.

Here's the number behind the chaos: Microsoft has poured more than $20 billion into Xbox over the last five years, and annual revenue still dropped by nearly half a billion dollars. Satya Nadella said the quiet part out loud when he described the operation as "subsidizing entertainment." He also pointed out that there's more monetization of Xbox games happening on YouTube than at Microsoft. Sit with that: creators earn more from Xbox games than Xbox does. That's a structural problem, not a rough quarter.

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