Google’s X “moonshot factory” this week announced its latest graduate. Heritable Agriculture is a data- and machine learning-driven startup aiming to improve how crops are grown.  As the firm noted in an announcement post published Tuesday, plants are incredibly efficient and impressive systems. “Plants are solar powered, carbon negative, self-assembling machines that feed on sunlight […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple has agreed to pay $20 million to resolve a class-action lawsuit over battery swelling on the Apple Watch. Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in 2019, the suit alleges that the problem affected the first four Apple Watch models. Battery swelling is pretty much what it sounds like: […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple’s latest earnings were a mixed bag, with slipping iPhone sales countered by rising revenue. Reporting after the bell Thursday, the iPhone maker’s overall revenue in the first quarter of 2025 beat Wall Street expectations, with a 4% bump to $124.3 billion over the same time last year. Apple reported net income of $36.33 billion, […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Google SVP Rick Osterloh issued an internal memo to the Pixel/Android/Chrome team Thursday, announcing a “voluntary exit program.” TechCrunch has confirmed the letter’s existence with the company, after it was first reported by 9 to 5 Google. In a statement to TechCrunch, a spokesperson notes: The Platforms & Devices team is offering a voluntary exit […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

At an event in New York City on Thursday, Microsoft unveiled two additions to the Surface line of PCs. The new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop both arrive with Copilot+ PC certification. Announced in May 2024, the program aims to identify business-focused devices that are designed specifically for the company’s AI platform, Copilot. It’s a […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

These days, nothing is certain about the tech market or the world at large. Even Nvidia’s seemingly bulletproof stock took a hammering on Monday, enduring a $589 billion market cap decline after China-based DeepSeek raised questions for investors about more efficient AI models. But Apple’s stock has remained steady ahead of its first-quarter earnings report, […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Safety is often overlooked in the rush to bring humanoid robots to the workplace. As high-profile corporations ranging from retailers like Amazon to carmakers such as Mercedes and BMW have announced humanoid pilots for factories and warehouses, conversations around worker safety are regularly buried beneath industry hype. One Bay Area robotics firm is hoping to […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

UC Berkeley spinout Ambi Robotics announced Tuesday the arrival of AmbiStack, a novel system that automates pallet packing. The system features an industrial robotic arm mounted above a conveyer belt that moves along the X and Y axes and lifts boxes up via suction cups mounted to a gripper. Once lifted from the conveyer belt, […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Amazon announced Monday it has picked the North England town of Darlington as the first site for its planned U.K. drone-delivery expansion. Amazon was expected to expand Prime Air to the U.K. and Italy in 2024. After missing that initial target, the company opted to not share a timeline for this latest launch. Instead, the […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Researchers at Cornell University on Monday showcased a pair of bio-inspired robotics running on a hydraulic fluid-powered battery. The redox flow battery (RFB) also mimics biological functions, as it releases electrolytic fluids, which dissolve to create energy through chemical reaction. The first two robots on display are a modular worm and a jellyfish, designed by […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Four years after launching the (then) most lucrative crowdfunding campaign in Kickstarter’s history, smartwatch maker Pebble abruptly closed in 2016, filing for insolvency before being sold off to rival Fitbit. The fitness-tracking giant went on to build much of its Ionic smartwatch with help from former Pebblers, along with Pebble’s pioneering software stack. It could […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

1X has acquired Kind Humanoid, the Norwegian robotics startup told TechCrunch on Monday. The deal marks a small but key consolidation for a humanoid robotics industry on the brink of a major moment in 2025. TechCrunch spoke with Kind Humanoid in October, when the then-three-person startup announced that it had enlisted famed designer Yves Béhar […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Apple released new figures Friday, highlighting user adoption of iOS 18. Released in public form back in September 2024, the mobile operating system is now installed on 68% of compatible devices. That number jumps to 78% on iPhones released in the last four years. As for the remaining iPhones out there, 19% are running iOS […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Fitbit has settled with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) over a long-standing defect that caused some wearers to sustain burns. The deal finds the Google-owned fitness company paying a $12.25 million penalty for the issues surrounding its Ionic smartwatch. The issue dates back to 2018, continuing on into 2020. Fitbit agreed to recall […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Roli on Thursday announced its latest educational product at the NAAM audio show in Anaheim. The simply named Roli Piano builds on products like the Roli Airwave and Piano M, more than doubling the latter’s key count to 49. The Piano is much like its predecessor in most ways, with MIDI keys that light up […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Samsung Unpacked’s “one more thing” was a bit of a weird one. After the presentation ended, the company rolled a brief pre-packaged video of the Galaxy Edge — not to be confused with the “Star Wars” theme park of the same name. Though limited, the reveal was confirmation of earlier rumors that the hardware giant […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The dream of battery-free devices has taken an unlikely turn, as Carnegie Mellon researchers debuted Power-Over-Skin. The technology allows for electrical currents to travel through human skin in a bid to power things like blood sugar monitors, pacemakers, and even consumer wearables like smart glasses and fitness trackers. Researchers note the tech is still in […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Another tidbit just dropped following Wednesday’s Samsung Unpacked event. This one comes courtesy of Adobe, which notes that the new Galaxy S25 line will be the first handsets to support the Content Credentials standard, aimed at labeling AI-generated content as such. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) group — of which Samsung is […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Samsung on Wednesday announced the latest additions to its Galaxy S flagship smartphone line at the company’s annual Samsung Unpacked 2025. As suspected, the defining characteristic of the Galaxy S25, S25+, and S25 Ultra is the company’s continued focus on mobile AI — a fact that hardly distinguishes the consumer electronics giant from the rest […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

A new day has dawned for the Samsung side button. At Samsung Unpacked 2025 on Wednesday, the company announced a small — but meaningful — tweak arriving on the Galaxy S25 line. As it continues to focus more efforts on mobile AI, Samsung is offering up easier access to Google Gemini, by way of the […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.