Editorial

John Ternus Is Apple’s CEO. His New Bio Focuses on Durability and Repairs.

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News, Editorial,

Apple's leadership page changed today. John Ternus is listed as CEO, Tim Cook has moved to executive chair with a seat on the board, and the board section now carries headshots instead of a plain list of names. Apple also rewrote the bio under Ternus's photo. Day one came with no keynote and no memo to the troops. It came with a webpage, and somebody at Apple picked every word on it.

The longest paragraph in that bio skips past iPad, AirPods, and the run of iPhones he shepherded through hardware engineering. It's about things not breaking. "John has led much of the company's focus in areas like reliability and durability, introducing new techniques that have made Apple products remarkably resilient," it reads, before listing a recycled aluminum compound now used across multiple product lines, the 3D-printed titanium in Apple Watch Ultra, and "advancements in reparability that have increased the life spans of several Apple products."

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Rockstar Says GTA 6 Has No Microtransactions and No AI. Now Ask About GTA Online.

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Video Games, Artificial Intelligence,

Ask a game executive about monetization and you normally get a paragraph with an escape hatch built into it. Rockstar North co-studio head Rob Nelson gave reporters two short answers instead: there is no monetization in Grand Theft Auto 6, and no generative AI in it either.

That comes from Kinda Funny's Andy Cortez and Greg Miller, who each put the question to Nelson during press visits to the studio and reported the answers on the Kinda Funny Gamecast. Cortez asked whether you can use real-world money to buy things in the game and got "no monetization." Miller says he asked point blank whether AI is in the game and got "no AI." A New York Times feature on GTA VI published August 27 lands in the same place, and reports that Rockstar emphasized the game's human-made craft.

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Meta Closes the Ray-Ban Glasses Trick for Hiding the Recording Light

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Cameras, Wearables, Editorial,

The white light on the front of a pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses is the only thing standing between you and a stranger filming you. That's the whole design. There's no shutter sound, no lens barrel, no obvious gesture. A small LED comes on, and you're supposed to notice it and act accordingly.

Meta has started rolling out an update that closes the newest way people were getting around it. Until now, the glasses only checked the LED at the moment you pressed record. Start a video with the light exposed, then slide a finger or a piece of tape over it, and the camera kept going. Alex Himel, Meta's VP of wearables, announced the fix on Threads: "The camera will now stop working if the light is covered during a recording."

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You Don’t Own What You Bought. Here’s the Proof. (Video)

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Editorial, Home Entertainment, Smart Home, Misc. Tech, Videos,

You bought the thing. It's sitting in your house. The box listed the features, you paid the money, the return window closed. So you own it, right? Here's the uncomfortable answer I landed on after digging through more than a decade of firmware updates, lawsuits, and shutdown notices: a company can sell you a product, wait out your return window, and then reach back into it to slow it down, strip its features, or kill it entirely, without anyone ever touching the hardware sitting in your living room.

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Chatbots in Europe Now Have to Tell You They’re Chatbots

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

You know that customer service chat where you spend four minutes being pleasant to something before realizing it was never a person? In the European Union, that's now against the law. As of August 2nd, the transparency obligations in the EU's AI Act are live and being enforced, and the headline requirement is refreshingly blunt: if you're talking to a machine, the machine has to say so.

The rules cover three things. Chatbots and other interactive AI systems must disclose that a user is dealing with AI rather than a human. Deepfakes, meaning AI-generated or AI-edited images, video, and audio, must be labeled. And AI-generated or altered content has to carry machine-readable marks so platforms and researchers can detect it downstream.

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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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Apple Upgrade Subscription Sounds Great, Until You See What It Leaves Out

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Editorial,

Apple has a plan for the fact that its gear keeps getting more expensive: let you pay for it a little at a time. Next week the company rolls out Apple Upgrade, a monthly subscription that turns a big one-time hit into a manageable line item on your card. It sounds great. Then you read the fine print, and the catch lands on exactly the people the whole thing was supposed to help.

Here is the setup. Apple's prices have crept up lately, driven in large part by the cost of the memory that all this AI ambition demands, and more increases are expected this fall alongside new iPhone and Apple Watch models. There are even new "Ultra" tiers on the way, an iPhone Ultra and a MacBook Ultra, for people who want to spend more than they already were. Spreading that cost over monthly payments is a genuinely sensible idea. Financing a phone is nothing new, but having Apple do it directly, at the register and online, makes the sticker shock easier to swallow.

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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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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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China’s Kimi K3 Just Took the Top Coding Spot, and You Can Download It

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

For a couple of years now, the story about Chinese AI has been that it is close, impressive, and always a step or two behind the American frontier. That story just got harder to tell. Moonshot AI, the Beijing startup behind the Kimi chatbot, has released Kimi K3, and it did not quietly match the leaders. It walked into the Frontend Code Arena, a public leaderboard where models compete head to head on building working interfaces, and finished first. Ahead of Claude. Ahead of GPT. At the very top.

Here is the part that should make you sit up: this is not a locked API you rent from a company an ocean away. Kimi K3 is open-weight, which means the full model is going out to anyone who wants it. Moonshot says the complete weights land on July 27, and at 2.8 trillion parameters, K3 is the largest openly released model the world has seen. You could, in theory, download the same thing that just beat everyone at coding and run it yourself.

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