For thirteen years, the pattern was simple. Rockstar drops a Grand Theft Auto trailer on YouTube, a hundred million people watch it, and the internet talks about nothing else for a week. No showcase, no partner, no gatekeeper. That changes on August 27.

Rockstar announced today that "Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look" premieres on Netflix at 3 p.m. ET, and won't hit the official Rockstar YouTube channel or the GTA VI site until 9 p.m. ET the same day. Netflix gets a six-hour head start on the most anticipated video the industry has left.

Continue reading Rockstar Is Putting the Next GTA 6 Reveal Behind a Netflix Login for Six Hours

Two months ago the case for staying calm went like this: yes, memory prices have gone insane, but Apple runs the best supply chain on earth and has a long history of quietly eating costs to protect a price point. Analyst Jeff Pu of GF Securities was making exactly that argument in May, saying Apple could still price the iPhone 18 Pro aggressively. This week he changed his mind.

In a new research note, Pu now expects the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max to land $250 to $300 above their predecessors. That works out to roughly $1,349 to $1,399 for the iPhone 18 Pro and $1,449 to $1,499 for the Pro Max. The iPhone 17 Pro starts at $1,099 today. The 17 Pro Max starts at $1,199. Do that math on a Pro Max with any storage upgrade at all and you're staring at a phone that costs more than a decent laptop.

Continue reading The iPhone 18 Pro Might Start at $1,399, and Even the Optimists Are Giving Up

Apple raising trade-in values is normally a footnote. Apple raising trade-in values roughly a month before its biggest launch of the year, with some devices jumping close to 30 percent, is a strategy.

The company updated its U.S. trade-in estimates today, lifting the numbers for most iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch models compared to the last revision in May. It also added several Android phones to the list for the first time.

Continue reading Apple Just Raised Trade-In Values, and It’s Taking Android Phones Now

Picture a metal doughnut roughly the size of a hockey puck sitting on your kitchen counter. No screen. Small moving parts that shift when it answers you, and lights that glow when it's listening. That is the first piece of hardware OpenAI wants to sell you, and Bloomberg says it will cost somewhere between $300 and $400.

Mark Gurman's report gives real shape to a device we've only heard described in fuzzy terms since July. It's a speaker with no display, built to be picked up in one hand and carried from the kitchen to the laundry room to the bedroom. It runs on a battery. It has speaker grilles, microphones, a camera system, and sensors that feed it information about whatever room it's in. Jony Ive is designing it.

Continue reading OpenAI’s First Gadget Is a $300 Donut with Moving Arms You Carry Around

If you wear glasses and you've ever noticed noise cancellation working worse than the review scores promised, you weren't imagining it. The arm of your frames breaks the seal on the earcup, and ANC that depends on a sealed cavity starts leaking. Bose says it finally built around that.

The new QuietComfort Headphones (2nd Gen) arrive today at $359, the first real hardware update to the line since 2023. Preorders open August 8 and shipping starts August 13.

Continue reading Bose’s New QuietComfort Headphones Borrow the Ultra’s Best Trick for $359

The most annoying thing about ChatGPT has never been that it's wrong. It's that it's long. You ask a one-line question and get back a bulleted essay with three headers and a summary you didn't request. OpenAI has apparently noticed.

Alongside today's free-tier news, Plus and Pro subscribers are getting an updated GPT-5.6 Sol in ChatGPT's Chat experience, tuned to give shorter and more focused answers, and a slider that lets you set how much thought the model puts into each response. Both are live today on web, mobile, and desktop.

Continue reading ChatGPT’s New Slider Lets You Decide How Hard It Thinks

If you use Airtable to run something, a small production schedule, a client tracker, the spreadsheet that got out of hand, today's news deserves your attention for one reason: Bending Spoons is buying it. The Italian company agreed Tuesday to acquire Airtable in an all-cash deal valuing it at $1.285 billion in enterprise value, or roughly $2.25 billion counting Airtable's cash.

That's a fine outcome by most measures and a brutal one by the measure that matters to Airtable's investors. In 2021 the company was valued at over $11 billion. Earlier this year its shares were reportedly changing hands on secondary markets around $4 billion. Airtable raised more than $1.4 billion over its life. The math does not work out the way anyone hoped.

Continue reading Airtable Was Worth $11 Billion. It Just Sold to Bending Spoons for $1.28 Billion.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Continue reading Expensive Gas Just Did What EV Subsidies Couldn’t

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Continue reading Samsung Sold More Phones Than Ever and Still Lost Money

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Continue reading Apple Is Quietly Rebuilding Every Mac It Sells

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.

Continue reading Gemini 3.6 Is Google Buying Time in the AI Race

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.

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

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.

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

NotebookLM has quietly become the app that power users swear by, the thing you open on a laptop that already has thirty tabs fighting for space. It reads your sources, connects the dots, and answers questions about them. So here is the odd part of Samsung's latest Galaxy Unpacked pitch: that tool, now rebranded Gemini Notebook, comes preloaded on phones you fold in half.

The Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, Z Fold 8, and Z Flip 8 all ship with it built in. On paper that sounds like a real upgrade over yet another chatbot shortcut. In practice, it raises a simple question worth asking before you get excited: is a deep-research desk tool something you actually want to reach for on a phone?

Continue reading Samsung Put Google’s Research Brain on Your New Foldable. Does It Belong There?

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.

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

The lineup is a proper nostalgia flight: Fuzion Frenzy, BLiNX: The Time Sweeper, Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge, and Conker: Live and Reloaded. These are not lazy ports. Microsoft has bolted on custom graphics settings, better anti-aliasing, and upscaling that pushes the original 480p all the way to 4x sharper, so games built for a CRT in the corner of your living room can actually look at home on a modern monitor.

Continue reading The Original Xbox Comes to PC, and It’s Really About the Next Console

Ultra is supposed to be the word that ends the argument. It's the phone you reach for once you've decided money is no longer the point, the one with the biggest battery, the longest zoom, the most of everything. So here's the strange thing about the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra: after a couple of hours holding it, the device that kept nagging at me was the cheaper one sitting right next to it on the table.

Don't get me wrong, the Z Fold 8 Ultra is a genuinely lovely piece of hardware. But Samsung has quietly built itself a problem. For the first time there's a standard Z Fold 8 and an Ultra sitting side by side, and the roughly $200 you pay to move up buys you less than you'd expect. Working out whether that gap is worth it is the whole story of this phone.

Continue reading The Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra Is Samsung’s Best Foldable, and Its Own Worst Enemy