The Budget Xbox Series S Now Costs 499 Euros, and That’s the Good News

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Microsoft, Video Games,

The Xbox Series S was supposed to be the console you bought without thinking about it. Cheap, small, good enough, the thing you got your kid or picked up as a second machine for the bedroom. In Europe it now costs €499.99. That's a 43 percent increase on a console that launched as the budget option, and it's the smallest number in this story.

Microsoft told everyone back in June that Xbox prices were going up on August 1st, but it only shared US figures at the time. The European and UK numbers landed when the increase actually took effect, and they're considerably worse than the American ones.

Click to continue reading The Budget Xbox Series S Now Costs 499 Euros, and That’s the Good News

Fitbit Data Can Finally Write to Apple Health, Twelve Years Late

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Wearables, Google,

If you wear a Fitbit and carry an iPhone, you've spent the last twelve years running a small, annoying errand. Your steps and sleep lived in one app. Everything else your phone tracked lived in Apple Health. Getting them into the same place meant paying for a third-party bridge and hoping it didn't break. That errand is finally over.

Google Health version 5.05 landed on iOS this week, and buried in the release notes is the thing people have been asking for since 2014: you can now share your exercise records, sleep, vitals, steps, and more from Google Health into Apple Health. It works for Fitbit trackers and the Pixel Watch, since Google Health replaced the old Fitbit app back in May.

Click to continue reading Fitbit Data Can Finally Write to Apple Health, Twelve Years Late

Maingear’s New Gaming PCs Hide Every Cable, and the Top One Costs $6,499

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Design, PC / Laptop,

You know the moment. You've finished a build, the glass side panel is on, and instead of admiring the graphics card you're staring at a nest of black cables you spent forty minutes trying to route behind a motherboard tray that was never going to fit them.

Maingear's new Zero lineup is built so that never happens, and you don't have to do the building. These are pre-built desktops that use the company's rear-connection design to move every power and data cable to the back of the board, out of sight. Look through the glass and you see the CPU socket, the memory, the water cooling tubes, the PCIe slots. Nothing else.

Click to continue reading Maingear’s New Gaming PCs Hide Every Cable, and the Top One Costs $6,499

The Friend AI Necklace That Texted You Now Talks Back, and Costs $150 More

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Wearables, Artificial Intelligence,

Friend is back. The new version, which Schiffmann announced on X as friend 2.0, adds a built-in speaker, so the thing around your neck can now hold up its end of a conversation with what the company describes as a consistent personality. The new price is $249, up from $99 at launch.

Click to continue reading The Friend AI Necklace That Texted You Now Talks Back, and Costs $150 More

Expensive Gas Just Did What EV Subsidies Couldn’t

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Features, Transportation,

Fifty countries just posted record quarterly EV sales at the same time, and it happened in a year when the overall car market shrank. The thing that finally moved people wasn't a tax credit or a better charging network. It was the price at the pump.

That's the read from a new International Energy Agency report on the second quarter of 2026. Sales of EVs and plug-in hybrids rose 4 percent year over year and jumped 35 percent from the previous quarter, and electrified vehicles are now on track to make up 29 percent of global car sales this year. Meanwhile, total car sales fell 5 percent in the first half.

Click to continue reading Expensive Gas Just Did What EV Subsidies Couldn’t

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.

Click to continue reading Apple Posted Its Best June Quarter Ever. The Stock Fell 6% Anyway.

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.

Click to continue reading Lego’s New Pokemon Sets Battle Each Other, and the Loser Actually Faints

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.

Click to continue reading Samsung Sold More Phones Than Ever and Still Lost Money

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.

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

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.

Click to continue reading Samsung’s Galaxy Glasses Skip the Screen and Bet Everything on Gemini