Articles tagged Adslice

9 Smart Home Upgrades That INSTANTLY Improve Your Life (Video)

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smart Home, Videos,

You don't notice how much friction lives in your house until someone points it out. You dig for keys every time you get home. You cross the room for a light switch that's always on the wrong wall. Your blinds offer blinding sun or total darkness and nothing in between. None of it feels broken, because that's how houses have always worked. I've been deleting that friction one piece at a time, and these are the nine upgrades that did it, from a $40 smart plug to one that costs a lot more than I'd like to admit.

Click to continue reading 9 Smart Home Upgrades That INSTANTLY Improve Your Life (Video)

The Xbox Disaster Microsoft Never Recovered From (Video)

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

Microsoft spent a decade building Xbox into the console everyone's friends owned, then burned it down in about an hour. On May 21, 2013, Don Mattrick walked onto a stage in a white tent on Microsoft's Redmond campus and spent the first 30 minutes of the Xbox One reveal talking about TV. When a reporter asked what people without reliable internet were supposed to do with a console that phoned home every 24 hours, he told them to buy an Xbox 360. Xbox still hasn't recovered, and I think the reason has less to do with that stage than with what players were doing at home.

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Anker’s MindBase Keeps 48TB of Your Home Footage Off the Cloud

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smart Home, Storage, Artificial Intelligence,

Anker has built a smart home hub whose main selling point is that your footage never leaves your house. MindBase, announced at IFA in Berlin on September 3, is the company's first AI home hub, and it holds up to 48TB of local, expandable storage for camera recordings, household data and family photos. No monthly fee to keep last Tuesday's doorbell clip, and no data center in Virginia sitting on video of your kitchen.

That runs against how the smart home has worked for most of the last decade, and it was the most interesting thing in a lineup of roughly 22 Anker products at the show. It's also the claim worth checking hardest, because Anker is the company that already made this exact promise once and broke it.

Click to continue reading Anker’s MindBase Keeps 48TB of Your Home Footage Off the Cloud

Tim Cook Has One Week Left, and Ternus Inherits an Apple Mid-Pivot

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News,

Apple threw Tim Cook a party. Roughly 200 people at Caffè Macs, OneRepublic playing in the courtyard, tributes from Laurene Powell Jobs, services chief Eddy Cue, former COO Jeff Williams, and the man taking his job. It happened on August 23, one day before the fifteenth anniversary of the day Cook replaced Steve Jobs.

On September 1, John Ternus becomes Apple's eighth CEO. Cook doesn't leave the building, though, as he becomes executive chairman. He'll be focused on engaging with policymakers around the world, which is a polite way of saying he keeps handling the regulators and trade fights he has spent a decade getting good at.

Click to continue reading Tim Cook Has One Week Left, and Ternus Inherits an Apple Mid-Pivot

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.

Click to continue reading You Don’t Own What You Bought. Here’s the Proof. (Video)

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.

Click to continue reading How Xbox Destroyed Game Pass - The Best Deal in Gaming (Video)

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.

Click to continue reading Apple Just Won AI (and It’s Not Even Close) (Video)

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.

Click to continue reading Apple Music Just Got More Expensive, and It Was Only a Matter of Time

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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