Last week, Apple introduced the new . It brought a new sky blue finish, and introduced a higher-resolution 12MP camera with support for Center Stage. However, it also included a much more important upgrade: a lower starting price.
That’s right, the MacBook Air now starts at $999 again. That’s a big deal for two reasons. One, you no longer need to buy last-gen tech for that price point, and two, it means there’s now incredible clearance deals on older models.
Among all of the Apple Intelligence features announced at WWDC24 last summer, notification summaries are likely one of the more controversial ones. Users have noticed a number of inaccurate summaries, which has resulted in Apple tweaking the design of notification summaries, as well as disabling it for news stories.
While these summaries will never be absolutely perfect, there is one way Apple could easily improve the quality and accuracy of them, and I’d like to see them take this idea into consideration for iOS 19.
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is coming to PlayStation 5 on June 26. At SXSW, Kojima Productions dropped a 10-minute trailer for the upcoming game, giving us our best look yet at the sequel to 2019’s Death Stranding. Pre-orders open on March 17 at 10AM local time, and those who buy the Digital Deluxe or Collector’s Edition will get early access two days before the game officially becomes available.
Hideo Kojima was joined by Norman Reedus and Troy Baker on stage at SXSW 2025 to discuss the much anticipated new game. The trailer reveals Death Stranding 2 takes place 11 months after the creation of the United Cities of America. As previous glimpses have shown, Reedus is back as Sam, along with Léa Seydoux, who voices Fragile, and Baker as Higgs. There’s otherwise a lot to take in over the course of the video’s 10-minute run, including a slew of new faces joining the cast.
Death Stranding 2 was first announced back in 2022, and last year’s PlayStation State of Play brought a 9-minute look into the game. Come summertime, you'll finally be able to play it.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/death-stranding-2-just-got-its-release-date-and-a-10-minute-new-trailer-231240932.html?src=rss
The giant extinct shark species known as the megalodon has captured the interest of scientists and the general public alike, even inspiring the 2018 blockbuster film The Meg. The species lived some 3.6 million years ago and no complete skeleton has yet been found. So there has been considerable debate among paleobiologists about megalodon's size, body shape and swimming speed, among other characteristics.
While some researchers have compared megalodon to a gigantic version of the stocky great white shark, others believe the species had a more slender body shape. A new paper published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica bolsters the latter viewpoint, also drawing conclusions about the megalodon's body mass, swimming speed (based on hydrodynamic principles), and growth patterns.
As previously reported, the largest shark alive today, reaching up to 20 meters long, is the whale shark, a sedate filter feeder. As recently as 4 million years ago, however, sharks of that scale likely included the fast-moving predator megalodon (formally Otodus megalodon). Due to incomplete fossil data, we're not entirely sure how large megalodons were and can only make inferences based on some of their living relatives.
Death Stranding’s sequel continues to look absolutely bonkers. The upcoming game — known as Death Stranding 2: On the Beach — got a fresh trailer and a long-awaited release date of June 26th during a presentation at SXSW.
The PlayStation 5 exclusive will cost $69.99 and is available for pre-order starting on March 17th. Those who buy the Digital Deluxe Edition ($79.99) or Collector’s Edition ($229.99) get early access starting on June 24th.
Hideo Kojima presented the 10-minute trailer, which opens on two characters — one is Neil, who is played by Italian actor Luca Marinelli — arguing with each other. Following that, there’s plenty of Sam (Norman Reedus) navigating the wastes with his BB and his cargo, facing bad weather, an avalanche, and the series’ signature horrific monsters. The game has a lot of star power, with the trailer highlighting characters like Fragile (Léa Seydoux), Tarman (George Miller), Higgs (Troy Baker), Tomorrow (Elle Fanning), Dollamn (Fatih Akin), Rainy (Shioli Kutsuna), The President (Alastair Duncan), Lucy (Alissa Jung), Heartman (Nicholas Winding Refn), and Doctor (Debra Wilson).
Near the end, the trailer shows Neil donning a bandana that, as IGN notes, is very reminiscent of Solid Snake, the lead character of Kojima’s famed Metal Gear Solid series. The shot is creepy, with quick flashes showing his face intermittently replaced with a skull.
Kojima also announced “The Strands of Harmony World Tour,” a Death Stranding concert tour that will visit 19 cities and feature the music of Death Stranding, performed by a live orchestra and singers. That begins on November 8th, 2025, in Sydney, Australia.
Manus, an “agentic” AI platform that launched in preview last week, is generating more hype than a Taylor Swift concert. The head of product at Hugging Face called Manus “the most impressive AI tool I’ve ever tried.” AI policy researcher Dean Ball described Manus as the “most sophisticated computer using AI.” The official Discord server […]
A report from The Washington Post details allegations made by whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams about Facebook in a 78-page complaint filed last April with the SEC, including that the company built a censorship system in hopes to be allowed to operate in China and that it considered allowing the Chinese government to access users’ data in the country. Claims that Facebook developed a content suppression tool to appease China, where it has been blocked since 2009, were first reported as far back as 2016 by The New York Times. Wynn-Williams has a memoir about her time at Facebook, Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work, coming out this week.
Wynn-Williams — a former Facebook global policy director who was fired in 2017 — said in the complaint that the company formed a team in 2014 focused on creating a version of Facebook that would comply with China’s laws, under the code-name “Project Aldrin,” The Washington Post reports. In addition to building a censorship system, it was reportedly proposed during negotiations with Chinese officials that the company allow a Chinese private-equity firm to review content posted by users in China, and that Facebook hire hundreds of moderators dedicated to the effort of squashing restricted content.
In a statement to The Washington Post, spokesperson Andy Stone said the company's past interest in the Chinese market is “no secret,” and that CEO Mark Zuckerberg had announced a move away from these efforts in 2019.But Wynn-Williams’ complaint paints a fuller picture of how far Facebook (pre-Meta) was allegedly willing to go to gain a Chinese userbase. Read The Washington Post’s full report here.
Zuckerberg has since become vocal about “free expression” and made changes to how Meta’s platforms approach moderation. Earlier this year, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook and Instagram would end fact-checking and instead adopt X-style Community Notes.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/whistleblower-complaint-expands-on-claims-that-facebook-once-built-a-censorship-tool-to-win-over-china-215047102.html?src=rss
CHINA - 2023/07/15: In this photo illustration, the Facebook app logo is displayed in the Apple Store for iphones. (Photo Illustration by Sheldon Cooper/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
The second-generation Chromecast was a colorful delight.
Reports are cropping up today that second-generation Chromecasts and music-streaming Chromecast Audio devices are failing, displaying an error on the device they’re trying to cast from that seems to imply the streamers may no longer be supported, reports 9to5Google.
Text from screenshots of the error posted to Reddit reads, “Untrusted device” and continues, saying the device “couldn’t be verified. This could be caused by outdated device firmware.” Understandably, people are concerned that Google has decided to send the streaming pucks, both quite old now, to the Google graveyard.
As 9to5Google points out, the company hasn’t said it is deprecating the two, as it did for the original Chromecast in 2023. At least one member of the Chromecast community says they have reached out to Google support and were told that the company is aware of the issue and is awaiting a fix. Google didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment.
Faced with an aging population and labor shortages, Japanese businesses are increasingly relying on service robots to supplement their workforce, according to Bloomberg. Research firm Fuji Keizai projects the country’s service robot market to nearly triple by 2030, to ¥400 billion ($2.7 billion). Potentially driving that growth: The Recruit Works Institute projects that the country […]
On Friday, Apple officially delayed the release of its promised iOS 18 Siri features. Those features, including personal context, on-screen awareness, and in-app actions, will now release “in the coming year.” We had already received hints that these features would be delayed, but now we know for sure. This leaves the question, what went wrong?
A mockup of the iPhone 17 Air from YouTube channel iDeviceHelp.
Apple is expected to release its thinnest phone yet later this year with the iPhone 17 Air. Rumors have held that the phone will be thinner than the 6.9mm iPhone 6 was, but recent leaks give us a better idea than we’ve had before of what to expect.
Rumors of the iPhone 17 Air’s dimensions have ranged over the last several months, but a recent one from leaker Ice Universe puts it at just 5.5mm thick, something that Ming-Chi Kuo predicted in January. Another analyst, Jeff Pu, said before that it would be more like 6mm.
But where Kuo said the phone will have a 6.6-inch screen, Ice Universe says it’ll actually be 6.9 inches like the iPhone 17 Pro Max — they say both phones will have the same “length, width, screen size, and bezel” as the iPhone 16 Pro Max. Later, they posted a video showing an apparent render of the device.
Exclusive: iPhone 17 Air will take my money away, which is very attractive and can be used as a great queen model. pic.twitter.com/hdctu3mtXr
On Friday, YouTuber iDeviceHelp posted a video in collaboration with leaker Majin Bu, who published similar-looking renders last month. iDeviceHelp claims to be showing mockups of the standard, Pro Max, and Air models “based on internal documents.” The video lingers on the edge of the phone at moments, and I was immediately struck by how much seeing it reminded me of looking edge-on at the 5.1mm 13-inch M4 iPad Pro, the one Apple device thinner than this is rumored to be.
It’s hard not to also notice the Google Pixel-like camera bar stretching left-to-right on the back of iDeviceHelp’s mockups of the iPhone 17 Air and Pro Max. It’s unclear whether the bar is functional or just Apple trying out some new aesthetic, but I welcome it all the same, if for no other reason than my iPhone 15 Pro is so dang floppy when laying on its back on my desk. iDeviceHelp demonstrated with the 17 Pro Max mockup that the bar seems to help there. But in both cases, the rear cameras themselves still stick up out of the bar, so it may not be perfect. Oh well, maybe next year.
As for the rest of the design, these renders and mockups appear to show it with buttons in all the same places as current iPhones (not counting the iPhone 16E, which lacks the Camera Control button), along with a USB-C port and speaker holes on the bottom. The phone is also expected to have a Dynamic Island and Face ID on the front. We won’t likely know for sure how close the renders are until September, when Apple typically reveals its latest batch of flagship iPhones.
