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Today — 23 February 2025Tech News

These are my favorite unique charging accessories for your Apple ecosystem

23 February 2025 at 08:00

If you take a look at the current landscape of charging accessories in 2025, it seems like everyone is doing the same thing. Every brand has its flagship 3 in 1 charger or a 140W wall charger, or a Magsafe charging brick. So what I wanted to do is highlight some products that have brought some unique twists to a product category that seems to have been stale. Let me know which is your favorite!

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Hasbro and Space Marine II Devs Team on “Tentpole” IP Game

23 February 2025 at 07:30
Space Marine 2 Titus Tyranids

Saber Interactive's been conscripted to bring their magic on Warhammer 40K: Space Marine II to make a game out of a major Hasbro brand.

Apple’s M4 MacBook Air could be here in just a few weeks

We may see the M4 MacBook Air as soon as March. In the Power On newsletter this weekend, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple is readying itself for the launch of the upgraded laptop next month. The company is “preparing its marketing, sales and retail teams for the debut,” according to Gurman’s sources, and it’s letting inventory of the existing models wind down. The M4 MacBook Air is expected to come in two sizes, 13-inch and 15-inch, like the previous model.

Apple introduced the M3 MacBook Air last March, and unveiled its new M4 chip a few months later, bringing that first to the iPad Pro. In October, it refreshed the iMac, Mac mini and MacBook Pros with the M4 family of chips. The MacBook Air is now due for its turn. While the laptop didn’t get the M4 chip in the fall, Apple did announce a long-awaited memory boost for the lineup at that time, with the M2 and M3 now starting at 16GB of RAM.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/apples-m4-macbook-air-could-be-here-in-just-a-few-weeks-153004599.html?src=rss

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© Apple

The Apple logo beside "M4" in white lettering surrounded by an iridescent square representing the M4 chip, agains a black background

Hades II just keeps getting better

23 February 2025 at 07:00

Hades II just received its second major update as part of its early access development, which was a great  excuse for me to jump back in. Since its initial release, I’ve logged more than 30 hours and actually held myself back from playing much more – I don’t want to get tired of the game before it hits 1.0 – but with the new update, I wanted to see what’s new and try to beat the new final boss on my very first run.

Sadly, I haven’t even been able to see what the boss is yet. I did make it to the update’s new region, but I got destroyed by a dangerous miniboss. Still, I’ve still been really impressed with what Supergiant Games has added since May to make what’s already a very good game even better.

The big additions are impressive. Hades II initially launched with six regions — four for an Underworld route and two for a “surface” route — and with each major update, Supergiant has added a new region with new enemies, characters, and music to round out that surface route.

The first major update, which came out in October, added the game’s first new region, Mount Olympus, and it feels as epic as Mount Olympus should. It has grand architecture, fearsome e …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Apple’s M4 MacBook Air bump may be just around the corner

By: Wes Davis
23 February 2025 at 06:58
Last year’s M3 MacBook Airs.

Apple is readying its MacBook Air line for an update to M4 chips in March, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter. With the slim laptops’ spec bump, the MacBook line’s M4 transition will be complete.

Gurman didn’t provide timing beyond that the laptops are coming next month, but as usual before it launches a product, Apple is “preparing its marketing, sales and retail teams for the debut” and letting its retail stock of the laptops clear out. Both the 13-inch and 15-inch models are expected to come at the same time, like last year.

Since the Apple Silicon transition, the MacBook Airs have largely shared specs with the low-end MacBook Pro, just packed into a slimmer laptop with omissions like fewer ports and no cooling fan. The base model 14-inch Pro starts with 10-core CPUs and 10-core GPUs and feature 16GB of RAM — you can get a sense of that configuration’s performance from our review of the base M4 MacBook Pro. Ideally, the new Air models will also get the Pro’s key upgrade of being able to simultaneously connect to two external displays with the lid open.

That leaves only the Mac Studio and Mac Pro, which are still M2-generation machines, without M4 chips. Gurman has pegged the Mac Studio’s M4 bump for “between March and June” and the Mac Pro’s anywhere from June to this fall.

Gurman: Future Apple modems likely to be integrated with main chipset

23 February 2025 at 05:45

In the latest Power On newsletter, Mark Gurman reports that Apple plans on integrating future modems within the main chipset of the device. This means that, in the future, there won’t be both an A18 chipset alongside a separate C1 modem, instead they’ll all be one. This development will take a few years, though.

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Apple wants the iPhone 17 Pro to replace your camera for video recording: report

23 February 2025 at 05:33

According to the Power On newsletter from Mark Gurman, Apple plans to heavily focus on video recording improvements for the new iPhone 17 Pro models. The company has previously focused primarily on photography, so it’s nice to hear that video will be getting some much-needed love.

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Our favorite apps for listening to music

23 February 2025 at 05:00

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 72, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope you like gadgets, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) 

This week, I’ve been reading about Hasan Piker and calculator apps and car thieves and the real economics of YouTuber life, using my month of Paramount Plus to watch Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Yellowjackets, replacing my big podcast headphones with the Shure SE215 in-ear headphones, switching all my reading out of the Kindle ecosystem for increasingly obvious reasons, and taking copious notes on Kevin Kelly’s 50 years of travel tips.

I also have for you Apple’s slightly confusing latest smartphone, a couple of new things to watch this weekend, the best new Xbox game in a while, and much more. Also, the first part of our group project on all the ways we listen to music. Let’s do this.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / playing / listening to / hot-gluing this week? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tel …

Read the full story at The Verge.

In war against DEI in science, researchers see collateral damage

When he realized that Senate Republicans were characterizing his federally funded research project as one of many they considered ideological and of questionable scientific value, Darren Lipomi, chair of the chemical engineering department at the University of Rochester, was incensed. The work, he complained on social media, was aimed at helping “throat cancer patients recover from radiation therapy faster.” And yet, he noted on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and X, his project was among nearly 3,500 National Science Foundation grants recently described by the likes of Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican and chair of the powerful Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, as “woke DEI” research. These projects, Cruz argued, were driven by “Neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda,” and “far-left ideologies.”

“Needless to say,” Lipomi wrote of his research, “this project is not espousing class warfare.”

The list of grants was compiled by a group of Senate Republicans last fall and released to the public earlier this month, and while the NSF does not appear to have taken any action in response to the complaints, the list’s existence is adding to an atmosphere of confusion and worry among researchers in the early days of President Donald J. Trump’s second administration. Lipomi, for his part, described the situation as absurd. Others described it as chilling.

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