Samsung is set to unveil the Galaxy S25 series in just a few weeks and while we’ve seen a lot of leaks so far, new renders posted by dbrand offer the best look yet at the design of the company’s upcoming trio.
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Apple senior VP of services Eddy Cue says Apple will not create a search engine to compete with Google as it “would cost billions of dollars and take many years,” as recorded in a motion to intervene filed with the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday. The purpose of the motion is to participate in the penalty phase of the DOJ’s antitrust case against Google, where as much as $20 billion could be at stake for Apple in its ongoing default search engine deal with Google.
The DOJ and Google have disagreed on how to address Google’s monopoly on general-purpose search engines, but both parties have tentatively accepted cutting or renegotiating its Apple partnership. Last week Google proposed a three-year ban on strict long-term exclusivity deals involving any ”proprietary Apple feature or functionality.”
Cue warns that removing the search deal would ultimately hurt Apple and benefit Google:
If this Court prohibits Google from sharing revenue for search distribution, Apple would have two unacceptable choices. It could still let users in the United States choose Google as a search engine for Safari, but Apple could not receive any share of the resulting revenue, so Google would obtain valuable access to Apple's users at no cost. Or Apple could remove Google Search as a choice on Safari. But because customers prefer Google, removing it as an option would harm both Apple and its customers.
As reported by MacRumors, Cue said Apple making its own general search engine would be “economically risky” and suggests AI chatbots are the next big evolution to search. Apple also noted in the filing that it would have to adopt targeted advertising as a core service to make search viable, which would fit badly with its privacy-focused business model.
Cue also says that “only Apple can speak to what kinds of future collaborations can best serve its users” and warns that the DOJ’s proposed remedies would “hamstring” Apple from fulfilling its customers’ needs.
If you’ve just unwrapped a new Xbox Series X or Series S for Christmas, you’ll have enough storage out of the box to download several games. But you’ll quickly feel the squeeze from 100GB-plus installs, especially if you tend to keep a heavy rotation. Expansion cards are your only relief on Xbox consoles if you’re playing titles optimized for Series X/S. Thankfully, you can get a 2TB expansion card cheaper than ever, with Western Digital’s WD_Black C50 going for $189.99 ($70 off) at Amazon. You can also get it in 512GB for $69.99 ($10 off) and 1TB for $109.99 ($48 off). That said, the 2TB model is the better deal in the long run.
Because the Series X and Series S use a proprietary storage format, you can’t use an external SSD, an internal NVMe SSD (as you could on the PS5), or a standard external hard drive to play newer games that are optimized for those consoles. You can use those hard drives to store Series X/S games, but expansion cards like the C50 are the only ones you can actually play them from. That’s because they support the platform’s “velocity architecture,” which has a minimum speed requirement and uses unique hardware and software tricks to enable console features like Quick Resume, not to mention other benefits for developers. Anyway, you don’t need to be a computer science major to understand the bottom line: if you want more storage for your Series X/S games, you’ll need an expansion card.
One of Apple’s most anticipated returning series, Severance, is back with season 2 on January 17. Now, as a holiday treat for viewers, Apple TV+ has released the first eight minutes of the Severance season 2 premiere as a special preview.
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LG has developed a new lamp that doubles as an indoor garden. The lamp, which LG will show off at CES in January, serves as an adjustable grow light for the tray of up to 20 plants beneath it, while also brightening up your room.
It has two different lighting modes: downward-facing lighting during the day that helps grow your plants, and upward-facing lighting at night to help brighten up your home. The lamp comes equipped with a 1.5-gallon water tank and “automatically dispenses the right amount of water and nutrients for the number and variety of plants being grown,” according to LG.
Image: LG
LG is also showing off a shorter, side table-style grow light at CES, which similarly puts a grow lamp above a bundle of plants. The devices are compatible with LG’s ThinQ app, letting you adjust light settings and manage cultivation schedules while you’re not at home.
This isn’t the first time LG has dabbled in creating indoor gardening technology. The company launched an indoor cultivator called the LG Tiiun in 2019, before following up with much more compact iterations. LG says its new lamp has a larger water capacity than its previous indoor planters, but it doesn’t mention any details about how much it will cost, or when it will actually ship.
AirPods Pro 3 aren’t here yet, nor are a proper AirPods Max 2, but this was a solid year for AirPods anyways thanks to and some strong software updates. One of my favorite new features this year, however, should have its biggest impact in the months ahead when iOS 18.4 launches.
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Here’s what to watch over the holidays in case all those live sports broadcasts don’t work out.
AI-generated books and images are threatening the nearly 500-year-old art of lace making.
It’s already come for the crochet community, and researchers have tried to teach machines to knit. But lace-making—a craft that even Renaissance artists struggled to master, and in which there are a literal infinite number of patterns to be created—is now having its AI slop moment.
Mary Mangan, the librarian for her New England-based lace making group, told me that she first became aware of AI infiltrating lace spaces when someone in her group asked her to research a book that featured a cover photo that she wanted to try to make herself. “So I began to research the book. It smelled funny and I tried to search for the author's other work but couldn't find any,” Mangan said. She asked r/BobbinLace, a Reddit community for the bobbin lace-making technique, and users there helped track down the original, not-AI image from a lace catalog that the cover photo seemed to be based on.
Longtime lace makers and experts from all around the community have started raising the alarm on AI grifting in their tight-knit community. Karen Bovard-Sayre, who has published several books about lace techniques, posted a video in November addressing the issue, saying she found 36 books about lace and tatting—a lacemaking technique—that seemed AI generated. She said she was looking at Amazon books about tatting to see what else was being published on the topic, and found many of the AI books targeting beginners.
“As you probably all know, the tatting world's not that big even though it's around the world, but we kind of know who's doing what, who's making content, who's making books and all that,” Bovard-Sayre said in her video. “I started reading the summaries and they all kind of sounded flowery and didn't really say what they were, and then I started looking at the covers and back covers, and said wait a minute, something's wrong here.” She spends the rest of the video demonstrating what these books get wrong, and how to spot AI generated lace making materials.
Some of the AI signs Bovard-Sayre points out include odd punctuation in the authors’ name (in the case of the book she’s examining in her video, “Sheila .A Richard,” where there’s a period before the middle initial), references to video tutorials like “This is a wonderful instructional video” which makes no sense in a printed book, obvious misspellings, and distorted or blurry photos.
She also finds designs in the book that she recognized as being the work of other lace designers, including Marilee Rockley, a fiber artist who specializes in tatting. Rockley also recently addressed the rise in AI generated materials on her website. “Some of you may have heard about the miserable thieves who are using Artificial Intelligence technology to ‘make’ books to sell,” she wrote. “Really horrible, fake books loaded with wrong information (lies) and stolen photos. They're so bad it would be laughable except they hurt a lot of innocent people who are looking to learn a new-to-them craft.”
Preying on beginners’ lack of knowledge and relative inability to spot blatant fakes is a tactic used in other AI book grifts, too. The mushroom foraging community recently discovered AI scam books were flooding Amazon, directing newcomers to bad, potentially deadly misinformation. Unlike eating a poisonous mushroom because a chatbot or AI book told you it’s safe, buying a book on lacemaking that contains sloppily-generated images or instructions isn’t a matter of life and death—but it does threaten to devalue and dilute the integrity of a centuries-old art, as well as deterring newcomers.
“Lace is a small hobby and a pretty tight community. We know who the designers and vendors are, and we trust them. However, until you become part of the lace community there's no way to know who is trustworthy and what is dubious. You need some level of skill and time within the network to really assess this,” Mangan told me. “Unfortunately, for newcomers who might be excited to dive into this hobby, they could get burned by the inadequate books—and frankly the thievery—of the work of our cherished lacemakers and designers. This could sour newbies on the craft and that would be unfortunate. And it could harm designers who opt out of sharing their works, and we'll all lose then.”
Lacemaker and textile historian Elena Kanagy-Loux told me she first noticed the proliferation of AI-generated books on bobbin lace while teaching a course last summer. A student showed her a book she’d recommended to her students on Amazon, but the recommended books on the site seemed off. “There were a number of suggested lace books with strange covers that did not represent real lace techniques, and subsequently I have been warning all of my students to avoid Amazon and buy from independent lace suppliers (a good practice for a multitude of reasons),” she said. “Now I see that there are a number of them advertising different lace techniques with strange AI images on the cover that don’t represent real lace or tools, and contents that—according to reviews—are either nonsense that provide no tangible instructions, or directly plagiarized from real lace books.”
Some of the books Elena Kanagy-Loux found on Amazon included:
I sent all of the above listings to Amazon for comment, and the platform removed all of them except for the first one. “We have content guidelines governing which books can be listed for sale, and we have proactive and reactive methods that help us detect content that violates our guidelines, whether AI-generated or not. We invest significant time and resources to ensure our guidelines are followed, and remove books that do not adhere to those guidelines," a spokesperson for Amazon told me in a statement. "We aim to provide the best possible shopping, reading, and publishing experience, and we are constantly evaluating developments that impact that experience, which includes the rapid evolution and expansion of generative AI tools. We continue to enhance our protections against non-compliant content, and our process and guidelines will keep evolving as we see changes in AI-driven publishing.”
Amazon is full of these books, but it’s not the only retailer selling them. Mangan showed me several she and others found on eBay, including Bobbin Lace Magic: Unlocking the Secrets of Colorous Book by Ethan CC Lee which, like the ones above, has a book-report description as if the author is reviewing their own book. And then there’s A Bobbin Lace Book by Tim M. Enoch, with a description that includes an error from generating the text: “This response was truncated by the cut-off limit (max tokens). Open the sidebar, Increase the parameter in the settings and then regenerate.” eBay did not respond to a request for comment.
Mangan wondered if the onslaught of AI-generated slop in lacemaking might drive people to connect to real humans more. “Gathering in groups and discussing valuable books might be a good outcome, and we can host public gatherings for the lace-curious folks,” she said. “One other thing that I do is to edit Wikipedia with good books as references when I hear about them—maybe that could become another route to connect people to higher quality and current materials.” Used and older books could become more valuable, too, she said.
“Over the years of posting videos about lacemaking on social media, I have gotten many snarky comments saying ‘AI will replace this.’ At first I laughed it off, because for lacemakers like myself the joy is in the process of working with our hands, which can never be replaced by technology,” Kanagy-Loux said. “But now I have genuine concerns that beginners seeking affordable books will be scammed by AI-generated books that contain no real information about the techniques and give up in frustration. This misinformation is why it is so important to me to share resources online and make knowledge about lacemaking and lace history accessible to a broader audience. Fortunately, our community continues to grow all the time, so I hope we can combat the proliferation of AI pattern books with the instructions of human beings.”
In 2024, Made by Google rolled out big updates with new features to Pixel phones on six occasions. The year saw everything from routine operating system updates to entirely new apps and even a rebrand.
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Glasses may be more promising as the head-worn computers of the future — and there’s a chance Apple might be looking in that direction.
Apple’s Vision Pro headset is an incredible piece of technology, but even Apple’s design and marketing magic hasn’t been enough to convince many people to don a VR headset for an entire day. Instead, people seem more willing to use discreet wearables like Bluetooth headphones, smartwatches, and products like the Ray-Ban Meta glasses — so Apple’s headset isn’t making the waves the company would have wanted.
Of course, an instant transformation of the computing landscape wasn’t exactly the point of the Vision Pro. Apple was clearly launching its headset for Apple enthusiasts, first adopters, and people who love VR. At a starting price of $3,499, the barrier of entry was just too high to expect the device to be a hit from the jump. Even CEO Tim Cook called it an “early-adopter product.”
Nearly a year from launch, though, Apple hasn’t done enough to demonstrate why the Vision Pro should be a potential showcase of the future of computing. It’s taking a long time to put together its immersive content library, and while those are great demonstrations of what’s possible, the videos have been short and isolating. There aren’t many great games, either.
Yes, Apple keeps adding cool new software features. The wide and ultra widescreen settings for using a Mac display seem exceptionally useful. But those are pretty specific options for pretty specific use cases. There still isn’t an immediate, obvious reason to buy a Vision Pro the way there usually is with the company’s newest iPhones and Macs. If I bought a Vision Pro today, I wouldn’t know what to do with it besides give myself a bigger Mac screen or watch movies, and I don’t think either of those are worth the exorbitant price.
It seems Apple may have already acknowledged that the Vision Pro might not be the future, either. The company has reportedly scaled back production and focused efforts on a cheaper version of the headset (perhaps just called Apple Vision?).
If Apple still wants to make a splash in VR, the company might need to race to get its next product out the door. It can be argued that Meta has the best VR headsets and ecosystem on the market right now — and a very clear lineup for consumers to consider. Its most affordable offering is the $299 Quest 3S, which has the same chip as the $499 Quest 3, meaning you can access the same experiences across both headsets. The price difference between the two largely comes down to displays and storage, and I’d argue that the cheaper Quest 3S is an excellent VR headset for most people.
But like the Vision Pro, Meta hasn’t really found a way to make its headsets much more than a great way to play VR games. The Quest Pro, which Meta pitched in part as a headset for work, was such a flop that the company discontinued it only two years after it launched. Horizon Worlds, the company’s 3D social network, still feels amateur and barren, despite the company’s efforts to make it a better place to hang out.
When I put on a Meta headset, I find that I just want to play games, either serious titles like Batman: Arkham Shadow or lighter fare like Maestro, where you conduct a virtual orchestra. I don’t care about the mixed reality features except to glance at my phone or computer screen to make a note or check notifications. You can make a pretty solid living selling game consoles, as Sony and Nintendo know very well, but it’s a far cry from the full-fledged computing platform Mark Zuckerberg once promised.
I just don’t know if any tech company is going to crack the code on how to make VR headsets anything but solo technology. Yes, you can use VR headsets to interact with other people over the internet. But putting on a VR headset at home means I can’t look my wife in the eye; if I’m going to look at a screen, I’d prefer to look at one that we can share or that I can easily put off to the side. And even if you’re fine with VR being mostly a solo thing, VR headsets don’t fit neatly into everyday life unless you have a good amount of space in your home for them. (And hopefully your controllers haven’t run out of battery power!)
Perhaps that’s why glasses seem like a much more promising option for computers that you wear on your face. Augmented reality glasses have been an aspirational goal for a long time, and you can see why. It’s much easier to make eye contact with somebody while you’re wearing glasses. Meta may have already proved that the glasses form factor works: its relatively simple Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which have a camera, speakers, and look fashionable, are already a huge hit.
If glasses-equipped cameras do truly go mainstream, I have some concerns that I’ve already written about. But I also wrote about the immediate appeal of the tech: whenever I wear the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, I find myself snapping tons of photos because it’s so much fun to capture my point of view without holding up a phone. And because they look like regular glasses, I can walk around and most people will think that they’re glasses, unlike a VR headset, which just looks silly in public.
It seems that Apple might be eyeing computer glasses as well; the company reportedly launched an internal study about the market. I think even glasses with some basic tech would make way more sense for Apple than a VR headset, especially if they let you easily snap photos and listen to podcasts. These devices could be years off, though, meaning that, right now, Apple is stuck selling VR headsets that barely anyone wants.
As a special holiday treat, on December 25th, the social media app Bluesky announced that it has added a new feature to its mobile app: a list of Trending topics that lets you know what subjects are popular among its users.
Screenshot: Bluesky
The new feature can be found by selecting the search icon (the magnifying glass), which appears at the bottom of the screen on the mobile app and on the left sidebar on the web. Lists of Trending and Recommended subjects now appear below the search bar. Tap on any topic, and you will be able to access the associated posts. When I tried it, choices among the top five included Christmas and Nosferatu (not an unexpected selection of topics but an interesting juxtaposition).
If you’d rather not see the list, you can get rid of it via a small “x” in the upper right corner, or go to Settings > Content & Media and toggle off Enable trending topics.
According to the announcement, the new feature is “V1” (it is marked as a Beta on the app) and “we will be iterating with your feedback.” So if you have any objections to Trends appearing under your Bluesky search bar, let them know.
Blaming victims, months of silence, and suing security researchers all featured in cybersecurity in 2024.
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