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 Clayface Trailer Turns a Batman Villain Into a Full-On Horror Movie

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

That is a genuinely strange pitch, and it might be the most interesting thing DC Studios has tried in a while. Clayface is a full R-rated horror origin story built around a classic Batman villain, and the trailer is far less interested in capes and punch-ups than in what it feels like to watch a person come apart from the inside out.

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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 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.

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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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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, Artificial Intelligence,

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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This Might Be the Smartest Way to Clean a Pool (Beatbot Sora 30 & iSkim) (Video)

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smart Home, Product Reviews, Videos,

Keeping a pool clean sounds simple until you are the one trying to keep leaves, bugs, pollen, dirt, sand, and that weird waterline grime under control right before people show up. In this video, I’m taking a look at a different approach from BeatBot: instead of asking one robot to do everything, the Sora 30 handles the floor, walls, and waterline while the iSkim patrols the surface.

Click to continue reading This Might Be the Smartest Way to Clean a Pool (Beatbot Sora 30 & iSkim) (Video)

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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Apple Intelligence Photo Editing: Everything You Missed! (Video)

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

Apple’s Photos app is getting a serious AI upgrade in iOS 27, and it changes what happens after you tap the shutter. In this video, I break down three new Apple Intelligence photo tools coming to iPhone: a much more powerful Cleanup, a new Extend feature that can grow the edges of your photo, and Spatial Reframing, which lets you shift the composition after the shot was already taken.

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