Technology advocates and celebrities are backing the launch of Free Our Feeds, a campaign designed to “save social media from billionaire capture.” The project aims to raise $30 million over three years to support the development of a social media ecosystem powered by the AT Protocol, or the decentralized network powering Bluesky.

The raised funds will go toward launching a public interest foundation to support the project, while creating an “independently hosted infrastructure” giving Bluesky users, developers, and researchers access to the content and data posted “no matter what the company decides to do in the future.”

After starting as a research project under former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Bluesky became an independent company in 2021 and went on to create the AT Protocol, an open-source infrastructure that aims to create a social ecosystem with interoperable apps. Bluesky built its own social network atop the framework, raising millions in funds and attracting a growing number of users.

Despite these efforts, Free Our Feeds believes “social infrastructure run in the public interest cannot be governed by a private social media company” forever.

“Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, could offer a new pathway for the social web. Yet as it stands, it is still venture-capital backed,” Wikipedia co-founder and Free Our Feeds supporter Jimmy Wales said in a statement. “This important initiative aims to safeguard Bluesky’s underlying technology and put it on an independent pathway, so that the future of social media can be freed from the whims of any one company or group of billionaires.”

Free Our Feeds will be led by nine custodians — including the Mozilla Foundation’s Nabiha Syed and Mark Surman — who will oversee the project’s “major governance decisions.”

Mastodon is also moving away from the single ownership model used by social platforms like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Elon Musk’s X. On Monday, Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko announced that he will transfer the ownership of the decentralized social network to a nonprofit organization because “Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.”

With Meta making drastic changes to its content moderation policy, and X’s transformation under Musk’s ownership, the Free Our Feeds project couldn’t come at a better time — even if it might take some time for its efforts to come to fruition.

Samsung is making the Galaxy Ring available to more people by adding size 14 and 15 rings to its options starting on January 22nd. With the expansion, which was rumored last month, the company says its ring sizes now run from five to 15, though it caveats that both size and color availability will vary by market.

The new sizes bring the Galaxy Ring closer to competitor Oura, which already offers its smart ring in sizes four to 15. Samsung’s announcement didn’t include details about the ring’s weight or battery life, but the current lineup’s larger size 12 and 13 rings use bigger batteries and can last an extra day versus the others.

The bigger options will be nice for those at the upper end of its size range, particularly if they’re only a half-size up. As my colleague Victoria Song wrote in her smart ring sizing guide, even if you’re able to slide the ring on, it could be hard to take it off again as your fingers swell in response to things like the food you’ve eaten or the environment you’re in.

Samsung also announced it’s going to sell its smart ring in 16 more countries, including Japan, Taiwan, New Zealand, Greece, and South Africa, starting on February 7th, though the exact date for each release will vary, it writes.

Google Cloud’s new Automotive AI Agent platform promises to “continue conversations and reference information” throughout users’ drives, and the first car announced with it is the new Mercedes CLA. That car has the next-generation MB.OS operating system with an upgraded MBUX Virtual Assistant.

When Mercedes revealed it at CES in 2024, it didn’t say which company’s LLM it was running on. Meanwhile, the existing MBUX Voice Assistant system that could handle about 20 commands triggered with “Hey Mercedes” now includes results provided by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing, but it’s not a conversational platform. According to Mercedes, there’s a plan to roll out this upgraded system to “further models” that run the older Voice Assistant, but it didn’t specify which ones.

The new MBUX Virtual Assistant will feature four “personality traits,” including natural, predictive, personal, and empathetic. It can also ask you questions for additional clarity to get you what you need.

Google’s new AI Agent is tailor-made to automotive uses, leveraging Google Maps data to find points of interest, look up restaurant reviews for you, give you recommendations, answer follow-up questions, and more. Google says MBUX Virtual Assistant users will get access to “nearly real time” Google Maps updates. It also says it can “handle complex, multi-turn dialog.”

The agent uses Gemini and runs on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI development platform, designed to help companies build out AI experiences. “This is just the beginning of how agentic capabilities can transform the automotive industry,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated in a press release.

While the cradle-style Backbone One is a great mobile controller we often recommend, it’s not the right choice for everyone. Thankfully, 8BitDo’s Ultimate Mobile Gaming Controller is a cheaper alternative for Android users, one that’s available at Amazon in black for $39.99 ($10 off) for the first time. That’s well below the Backbone One’s $100 MSRP and its typical sale price of $69.99.

The 8BitDo Ultimate Mobile doesn’t connect via a USB-C or Lightning port like other mobile options. Instead, it uses Bluetooth for wireless compatibility with most smartphones running Android 9.0 or later. (Sorry, iPhone users!) That does mean you’ll need to recharge it occasionally, but 8BitDo says it only requires a 1.5-hour charge for 15 hours of gameplay. It can also accommodate any phone measuring between 100mm and 170mm in length.

In terms of hardware, 8BitDo’s mobile gamepad offers an Xbox-style button layout and ergonomics, with four face buttons, a clicky D-pad, dual bumpers, and drift-free Hall effect sticks and triggers that should be less prone to failure over time. It also features two rear buttons, a dedicated profile button, and turbo functionality, all of which are customizable with 8BitDo’s excellent Ultimate Software.

More Monday deals

• If you’re looking for a massive monitor that can double as a smart TV, Samsung’s 32-inch M80D should do the trick. It’s on sale for an all-time low of $399.99 ($300 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart. The newer 4K monitor supports HDR10 Plus with AI upscaling and a dialogue amplifier, and it runs Samsung’s Tizen-based OS, which lets you access video, music, and gaming apps without a separate device. It also has an integrated webcam, plus the ability to seamlessly use one keyboard and mouse between the monitor and select devices. That includes 2021 or newer Galaxy Books, and Galaxy smartphones and tablets running One UI 5.1 or later. Read our review of the 2022 model.
• You can get the latest Amazon Echo in blue for $64.99 ($35 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and The Home Depot, which is only $15 more than its lowest price to date. The newest Echo is over four years old now, but it’s still a very capable smart speaker that sounds better than the fifth-gen Echo Dot. You can use it to control a wealth of compatible smart home gadgets, including both lights and smart plugs, and it can act as a range extender if you’re on an Eero mesh Wi-Fi network. It even doubles as a Zigbee hub with Matter support. Read our review.
• The first-gen Logitech G Pro X Superlight is currently on sale at Amazon for $87.38 (about $73 off), which is about $6 more than the record low. The newer Superlight 2 offers USB-C charging and a higher resolution 32K optical sensor, but if you don’t have upwards of $150 to spend, the original is still a great mouse with slight concessions. Its 25K Hero sensor still offers more DPI range than most need, and you can keep your micro-USB cables buried in your tech drawer if you pair it with Logitech’s optional Powerplay wireless charging mat. The slightly ambidextrous gaming mouse doesn’t have a ton of bells and whistles (not even RGB!), but it’s comfortable to push around as it weighs just 63 grams.

Microsoft is creating a new engineering group that’s focused on artificial intelligence. Led by former Meta engineering chief Jay Parikh, the new CoreAI – Platform and Tools division will combine Microsoft’s Dev Div and AI platform teams together, alongside some employees on the Office of the CTO team, to focus on building an AI platform and tools for both Microsoft and its customers.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella outlined his vision for this new team in an internal memo today, using a cricket reference (his favorite sport) to note that “we’re entering the next innings of this AI platform shift” in 2025 that will “reshape all application categories.” Nadella believes that every part of the application stack will be impacted by AI, and that “thirty years of change is being compressed into three years!”

To get ready for all this change, Nadella sees the need for an “AI-first app stack” inside Microsoft that will impact how its own developers use and build AI apps and tools in the future. “In this world, Azure must become the infrastructure for AI, while we build our AI platform and developer tools — spanning Azure AI Foundry, GitHub, and VS Code — on top of it,” says Nadella. “In other words, our AI platform and tools will come together to create agents, and these agents will come together to change every SaaS application category, and building custom applications will be driven by software (i.e. “service as software”).”

Parikh will lead this new group as the executive vice president of CoreAI - Platform and Tools, after previously being instrumental to Meta’s engineering efforts for more than a decade. Microsoft announced Parikh’s hire in October, and this is the first major engineering shakeup since he joined the software giant. Parikh also reports directly to Nadella and is a member of Microsoft’s senior leadership team. He now has a number of other Microsoft executives reporting up to him in his new role, including AI platform chief Eric Boyd, deputy CTO of AI infrastructure Jason Taylor, head of Microsoft’s developer division Julia Liuson, and head of developer infrastructure Tim Bozarth.

Microsoft is essentially taking its entire developer division and ensuring it’s focused on AI. While there’s a mention of Azure AI Foundry, GitHub, and VS Code, Nadella doesn’t call out Visual Studio or .NET in his memo. That’s probably because the mission, as Nadella describes it, is for this new CoreAI team to now “build the end-to-end Copilot & AI stack for both our first-party and third-party customers to build and run AI apps and agents.”

Last week, major location data broker Gravy Analytics disclosed a data breach that may have resulted in the theft of precise location data for millions of people, reports TechCrunch. That appears to include data from popular mobile games like Candy Crush, as well as dating apps, pregnancy tracking apps, and more, as 404 Media wrote on Thursday, following up its report of the breach two days earlier.

Baptiste Robert, CEO of digital security company Predicta Lab, said in a series of posts Wednesday that the small sample data set published in a Russian forum contained data for “tens of millions of data points worldwide” and included “sensitive locations like the White House, Kremlin, Vatican, military bases, and more.” As TechCrunch notes, the sample alone contained more than 30 million locations.

Gravy said in its disclosure to the Norwegian Data Protection Authority that it “identified unauthorized access to its AWS cloud storage environment” on January 4th. It says in the disclosure that it’s still investigating how long hackers had access to its cloud environment and whether the hack “constitutes a reportable personal data breach.” As for what or who was affected, the company writes:

Gravy Analytics is working diligently to determine the scope of the incident and the nature of the information involved. Preliminary findings indicate that an unauthorized person obtained certain files, which could contain personal data. These are currently being analyzed. If it is determined that personal data is involved, that personal data is likely associated with users of third-party services that supply this data to Gravy Analytics.

Gravy Analytics was one of two data brokers targeted last month in a proposed FTC order that forbids it from “selling, disclosing, or using sensitive location data in any product or service.” The FTC at the time wrote that its subsidiary, Venntel, collected data from apps and sold access to that data to businesses or government agencies, including the IRS, DEA, FBI, and ICE.

AWS chief Matt Garman says Amazon is already seeing the benefits of its massive AI investments.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Adobe is launching new generative AI tools that can automate labor-intensive production tasks like editing large batches of images and translating video presentations. The most notable is “Firefly Bulk Create,” an app that allows users to quickly resize up to 10,000 images or replace all of their backgrounds in a single click instead of tediously editing each picture individually.

The tool was created by combining several of Adobe’s Firefly-powered APIs for developers, with the aim of making them more accessible to creatives who lack technical coding experience. Bulk Create is launching in beta today, and split into two separate tools on Adobe’s Firefly web app: “Remove Background” and “Resize.” The first is pretty self-explanatory — users can upload image files into the tool from their computer, Dropbox, or Adobe Experience Manager, and quickly remove the backgrounds.

It should work on any image, but looks especially useful for product marketers. Alongside just removing the background, users can also set the tool to replace backgrounds with a specific image or color (defined by HEX codes) to get variations of each image that are ready for further editing. The file batches can be saved as either PNG or JPEG for now, with Adobe saying that support for Photoshop PSD files will be added in the future.

Image: Adobe

The “Resize” tool presents a selection of preset options for popular ad banner sizes and platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. It uses generative AI to stretch the backgrounds of images to fit these required dimensions, but the demo I saw wasn’t particularly inspiring — there was a lot of obvious warping, with one example strangely copying and blurring wine glasses together that were in the foreground. For simple backgrounds, though, it could spare graphic designers from having to manually resize their marketing assets for each platform. While services like Canva and Adobe Express also have tools that make this easier, Bulk Create can do so in a single click.

Adobe is making some new developer APIs for Firefly Services generally available in the coming weeks that developers can use to speed up video and print production workflows. “Dubbing and Lip Sync” can translate and edit lip movement for video audio into 14 different languages, and a new InDesign tool can automatically format text and images for print and digital media using predefined templates. “Digital avatars” created using text descriptions and voice recordings will also be available in beta this month, which can be used to present videos and product explainers.

The power required to edit batches of 10,000 images is presumably expensive. Adobe says there will be a fee to use these new tools based on “consumption” — which likely means users will need to pay for a premium Adobe Firefly plan that provides generative credits that can then be “spent” on the features.

Decentralized social network Mastodon has announced plans to transfer its ownership to a new nonprofit entity. Ownership of Mastodon will move away from the control of CEO Eugen Rochko, in contrast to the power exerted by other social media CEOs like Meta cofounder Mark Zuckerberg and X owner Elon Musk.

“Simply, we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components to a new nonprofit organization,” Mastodon says in a blog post, “affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.”

Rochko, who founded Mastodon in 2016, will take on a new role with a focus on product strategy while ownership moves to a new not-for-profit entity based somewhere in Europe, with the exact location still to be finalized. The organization is currently headquartered in Germany, where it was a nonprofit until its charitable status was stripped last year. This move is a way of restoring Rochko’s original intent for Mastodon.

“When founder Eugen Rochko started working on Mastodon, his focus was on creating the code and conditions for the kind of social media he envisioned,” Mastodon says. “The legal setup was a means to an end, a quick fix to allow him to continue operations. From the start, he declared that Mastodon would not be for sale and would be free of the control of a single wealthy individual, and he could ensure that because he was the person in control, the only ultimate decision-maker.”

In the short term, nothing should change for users. Mastodon will continue to host the mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers and support its federated network. Routine code development and bug fixes are ongoing, though the announcement adds that “changes are definitely in the pipeline.”

“Our core mission remains the same: to create the tools and digital spaces where people can build authentic, constructive online communities free from ads, data exploitation, manipulative algorithms or corporate monopolies,” Mastodon says.

Mastodon’s announcement comes at a time when the WordPress open-source project and its cofounder have been embroiled in a months-long legal feud, and Meta’s Zuckerberg has made headlines for stripping back Facebook and Instagram’s fact-checking and content moderation before lying about it to Joe Rogan.

Nvidia is cozying up to the incoming Trump administration after criticizing a new AI framework just announced by the Biden administration. The rules are meant to keep advanced chips and AI models under the control of the United States and its allies, but the President-elect will have the final decision on whether to enforce them.

If implemented, the “Interim Final Rule on Artificial Intelligence Diffusion” announced today would place new limitations on how many artificial intelligence chips companies can send to different countries without making special agreements with the US government. Nvidia will be impacted the most by this, given its estimated 90 percent share of AI chips.

The new rules aim to close loopholes that would allow countries like China and Russia — which are already subject to existing semiconductor trade restrictions — to obtain or develop their own AI technology. The Biden administration wants to keep transformational AI development under the control of the US and 18 of its allies, which include the UK, Canada, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. All other countries will be subject to caps that restrict AI chip imports.

“In the wrong hands, powerful AI systems have the potential to exacerbate significant national security risks, including by enabling the development of weapons of mass destruction, supporting powerful offensive cyber operations, and aiding human rights abuses, such as mass surveillance,” the White House said in a statement. “Today, countries of concern actively employ AI – including US-made AI – in this way, and seek to undermine US AI leadership.”

Nvidia says that the new “AI Diffusion” restrictions threaten to derail worldwide “innovation and economic growth,” and undermine the prior Trump administration’s efforts to create a successful environment for AI development.

“In its last days in office, the Biden Administration seeks to undermine America’s leadership with a 200+ page regulatory morass, drafted in secret and without proper legislative review,” Nvidia said in a statement. “This sweeping overreach would impose bureaucratic control over how America’s leading semiconductors, computers, systems, and even software are designed and marketed globally.”

“The first Trump Administration laid the foundation for America’s current strength and success in AI, fostering an environment where US industry could compete and win on merit without compromising national security,” reads Nvidia’s statement. “Rather than mitigate any threat, the new Biden rules would only weaken America’s global competitiveness, undermining the innovation that has kept the US ahead.”

“We look forward to a return to policies that strengthen American leadership, bolster our economy and preserve our competitive edge in AI and beyond,” Nvidia says in its MAGA conclusion.

Nvidia is notably not among the list of tech companies that have donated to Trump’s inaugural fund and CEO Jensen Huang has not been invited to Mar-a-Lago. Perhaps that will change now that Nvidia has reason to court favor.

In addition to curbing AI chip exports, the rules also set security standards to control the “weights” for AI models — the unique parameters that determine how each AI model makes its predictions. Companies like Microsoft and Google that operate data centers can also apply for special government accreditations that allow them to trade AI chips with fewer restrictions, in exchange for following security standards outlined by the Biden administration.

The new data center rules aim to keep the development of the most advanced AI models within the borders of the United States and its partners. According to the New York Times, Microsoft says it could “comply fully with this rule’s high security standards and meet the technology needs of countries and customers around the world that rely on us,” in a statement attributed to Microsoft president Brad Smith.

Tom Conrad, a longtime veteran of the tech industry who joined Sonos’ board of directors in 2017, has been appointed interim CEO following today’s ouster of Patrick Spence. And in his first letter as the (temporary) new boss, Conrad hits on a number of things that will likely be music to the ears of rank-and-file Sonos employees.

“I’ve heard from many of you about your own frustrations about how far we’ve drifted from our shared ideals,” he says in the letter. “There’s a tremendous amount of work in front of us, including what I’m sure will be some very challenging moments, decisions, and trade-offs, but I’m energized by the passion I see all around me for doing right by our customers and getting back to the innovation that is at the heart of Sonos’ incredible history.”

Conrad says he has already relocated to Santa Barbara — where Sonos is headquartered — and will be in the office daily as he works to reenergize employees after an ordeal that has cratered morale. “I think we’ll all agree that this year we’ve let far too many people down. As we’ve seen, getting some important things right (Arc Ultra and Ace are remarkable products!) is just not enough when our customers’ alarms don’t go off, their kids can’t hear their playlist during breakfast, their surrounds don’t fire, or they can’t pause the music in time to answer the buzzing doorbell.”

In a separate letter to employees, Sonos board chair Julius Genachowski said, “Tom’s mandate is to improve the Sonos core experience for our customers, while optimizing our business to drive innovation and financial performance,” and he noted that Conrad has left his job as CEO of Zero Longevity Science to give his full attention to Sonos. Perhaps the interim pick already has an eye on making this appointment more permanent.

Below is Conrad’s full letter to employees:

Team,

Nearly 18 years ago, in May of 2007, I stepped onto the stage at SFMOMA to launch Pandora for Sonos to an audience of tech journalists. I was 37 years old and my love of Sonos was in its earliest days. Over the decade that immediately followed, and through many ups and downs, we built Pandora into a streaming phenomenon. In those same years Sonos became the most beloved way to enjoy music throughout my home and millions of others.

Eight years ago, I was honored to be asked to join the Sonos board. Five months ago, as the team worked through the app recovery, I was lucky enough to get to know a wider swath of you personally – and to see firsthand your dedication to setting things right.

Last week, I was asked to step in as interim CEO.

Perhaps the most important thing for you to know today is that I’m here because I love this company, this product family and this brand. For nearly two decades, I’ve listened to music throughout my home on Sonos every day. In the last decade, I’ve binged every streaming phenomenon with dazzling surround from our Sonos soundbars. In recent years and when I was traveling, it was a Sonos Roam that made its way into my backpack. These days, every night I’m careful not to wake my sleeping family by watching audio-swapped television on my Sonos Ace.

I know as well as anyone the incredible power of what we can do. A Sonos Move was playing in the delivery room when my daughter (11 months just last week!) was born. Sonos provides a similar soundtrack for millions of lives throughout the world every single day. When it all works, it’s absolute magic.

It’s also true that when it doesn’t work, our customers are taken out of the moment and are right to feel that we’ve let them down. I think we’ll all agree that this year we’ve let far too many people down. As we’ve seen, getting some important things right (Arc Ultra and Ace are remarkable products!) is just not enough when our customers’ alarms don’t go off, their kids can’t hear their playlist during breakfast, their surrounds don’t fire, or they can’t pause the music in time to answer the buzzing doorbell.

I’m here to get us back on track. But is getting back on track enough?

I think the answer is clearly no. Getting back to basics is necessary, but clearly not enough to unlock the future we all envision for Sonos. So as delighted as I’ll be when every Sonos customer I meet tells me “You work at Sonos!? I love my Sonos!”, what really gets me up in the morning is the idea that we can expand the Sonos platform well beyond “out loud audio at home.”

I’ve heard from many of you about your own frustrations about how far we’ve drifted from our shared ideals. There’s a tremendous amount of work in front of us, including what I’m sure will be some very challenging moments, decisions, and trade-offs, but I’m energized by the passion I see all around me for doing right by our customers and getting back to the innovation that is at the heart of Sonos’ incredible history.

While I’m here today as “interim” CEO, please make no mistake: I’m here to move us forward. This is not a time for Sonos to be stuck in limbo. I’ve relocated to Santa Barbara and my family will join me here shortly. I’m in the office today and for as long as the job is mine. I’m counting on your help in making today the first day in our collective future. I’ll greet you all live tomorrow (see calendars for the meeting invite). It will be recorded and shared with those who aren’t able to attend. I’ll also be visiting our offices outside of California in the coming weeks. I can’t wait to meet all of you and start building towards a new chapter for Sonos.

Onward!

Tom

PS: As you get to know me in the coming weeks and months, you’ll find that I have many of the clichéd interests of an aging technology hipster, including an arm full of tattoos (see also: “Can I tell you about my interest in light roast espresso, vinyl records and Leica photography?”). While all of this rightfully might inspire some eye rolls (including from my wife), I hope it will make at least some of you smile to know that my most prominent tattoo is a pair of Sonos Ace on my left forearm.

In 2024, Sonos gave everyone a valuable lesson on the worst way to introduce a redesigned app. It was too soon, too buggy, and too careless.

In May 2024, Sonos released a completely rebuilt and overhauled mobile app for Android and iOS. The new software was meant to improve performance, make the app feel more customizable, and allow for new features in the future. But customers immediately complained about countless bugs, degraded Sonos speaker system performance, and features that had gone missing.

The controversy effectively torpedoed Sonos’ reputation with many customers. In the months since, Sonos has worked to regain their trust, address issues with the redesigned app, and bring back features that were absent at launch. The company still hasn’t fully recovered from its enormous mistake. On January 13th, 2025, Sonos announced CEO Patrick Spence would step down after he was unable to turn things around.

As chief executive, Spence oversaw many successful products. But there was no coming back from last year’s app debacle: it has finally led to his ouster.

Sonos CEO Patrick Spence is resigning from the company today, effective immediately, with board member Tom Conrad filling the role of interim CEO. It’s the most dramatic development yet in an eight-month saga that has proven to be the most challenging time in Sonos’ history.

The company’s decision to prematurely release a buggy, completely overhauled new app back in May — with crucial features missing at launch — outraged customers and kicked off a monthslong domino effect that included layoffs, a sharp decline in employee morale, and a public apology tour. The Sonos Ace headphones, rumored to be the whole reason behind the hurried app, were immediately overshadowed by the controversy, and my sources tell me that sales numbers remain dismal. Sonos’ community forums and subreddit have been dominated by complaints and an overwhelmingly negative sentiment since the spring.

In October, Sonos tried to get a handle on the situation, which, by then, had spiraled into a full-on PR disaster, by outlining a turnaround plan. The company vowed to strengthen product development principles, increase transparency internally, and take other steps that it said would prevent any mistake of this magnitude from ever happening again. I can also report for the first time that Sonos hired a crisis management public relations firm to help navigate the ordeal.

But three months later, Sonos’ board of directors and Spence have concluded that those steps weren’t enough: the app debacle has officially cost Spence his job. No other changes are being made today, however. So for now, chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin, who some employees have privately told me deserves a fair share of the blame for recent missteps, will remain in his role.

“We’re going to initiate a search for the next CEO, and we’ll work on finding a leader who’s going to continue to build on our legacy and work with the team to move the company forward,” Sonos spokesperson Erin Pategas told me by phone on Sunday afternoon. She described the leadership change as “turning a page on the chapter that we’re in and forging a path ahead that gets us in the direction that we want to be going for ourselves and our customers.”

In case you were wondering, that direction will not include a return to the old Sonos app; Pategas said the company remains fully committed to the new software, which has received a slew of bug fixes and gradually added back previous features over the last several months. It’s gotten better, but even this far along, complaints remain about speakers randomly vanishing from the app and other problems.

Spence joined Sonos in 2012 as chief commercial officer. As CEO, he oversaw a wide range of successful hardware products: Sonos released several impressive soundbars (including the still-new Arc Ultra), pushed into portable audio with the Move and Roam, and debuted the forward-looking Era 300 spatial audio speaker. But the app stumbles — and Spence’s failure to apologize in the immediate aftermath — ultimately soured his reputation with the company’s most loyal customers. There was no overcoming that.

Spence will technically remain with Sonos until June 30th of this year, during which time he’ll receive a base salary of $7,500 per month for providing the company with “strategic advisory services.” And when that end date rolls around, he’ll be granted a severance of $1,875,000. Those numbers come from an 8K filing that Sonos made with the SEC regarding today’s news.

It now falls on Conrad, who joined the Sonos board in 2017, to rally disenchanted employees and make good on winning back consumer trust. Conrad’s career includes a 10-year tenure as chief technology officer at Pandora and two years as VP of product at Snapchat. He worked on Apple’s Finder software during the ’90s. Most recently, Conrad served as chief product officer for the ill-fated Quibi streaming service. Pategas believes he’s a great fit for the interim CEO position because he’s keenly aware of the company’s current predicament; Conrad and chief innovation officer Nick Millington have already been spearheading Sonos’ fix-the-app effort for months.

Despite this seismic shift at the top, Sonos’ future product pipeline remains “full steam ahead,” Pategas told me. The company’s next major new product is rumored to be a streaming video player, which would pit it against the likes of Apple, Roku, Amazon, and Google in the living room.

The outgoing transportation secretary on EVs, robotaxis, Trump, Musk, and the work still left to do.

The outlook for electric vehicles looks shaky. Sales are up for most companies not named “Tesla,” but with Donald Trump promising to eliminate all of the generous subsidies and tax credits put in place by the Biden administration, that momentum could falter. Trump is also getting ready to unleash a flood of tariffs on foreign imports, including auto supplies. And he’s expected to relax tailpipe emission rules that could slow down EV sales even more — and allow car companies to sell more polluting vehicles.

Amid all this, Pete Buttigieg, who oversaw much of Biden’s EV policies, is trying to put on a brave face. While the incoming Trump team sharpens its knives, the transportation secretary is finishing out his days by approving as much spending as he can from the administration’s two landmark laws, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the climate-focused Inflation Reduction Act, before Trump can claw the rest back.

He’s also holding on to hope that Republican lawmakers, especially those who have directly benefited from the administration’s spending on EVs and clean energy, will resist Trump’s efforts to undo his predecessor’s accomplishments.

“For every conservative legislator publicly threatening to reverse our work, there’s two or three who look like they’re trying to take credit for it,” he said in an exit interview with The Verge. “And as long as that ratio keeps up, I think the bulk of our work will endure.”

Still, you can tell the election results and the coming turnover was weighing on Buttigieg, who seemed a lot more downbeat than in his previous interviews with The Verge. We also asked him what he wasn’t able to accomplish while in office and to describe his hopes for himself — and us — for the future.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Donald Trump has said he’s going to end the “EV mandate” on day one. Which of your policies do you see as the most endangered, and which are more likely to survive for the next four years?

I’m not that worried about having an EV mandate since there isn’t one, but I am concerned that he might take steps to make EVs more expensive for American consumers. And that would be unfortunate. The work we’ve done to make EVs more affordable is part of why there are more and more jobs being created in the industrial Midwest, in places like where I grew up that are seeing a level of auto industry growth that we haven’t had since the ’60s. And I think that needs to be kept up, especially because there is clearly a ferocious innovation competition with China. They’re using all the tools in their tool kit to try to edge us out, and we can’t let that happen.

I think the thing that has been the most effective in the short term has been the tax credits and making them more affordable. I think in the medium term, the thing that will matter the most is the charging network. Even though 80 percent of EV charging happens at home, we know that the other 20 percent really matters. And most of the projects that we set into motion will be physically online by 2027.

Given that it’s likely EVs are going to become more expensive over the next few years, how do you think the auto industry should respond to the elimination of these incentives? And how do you think customers are going to respond?

What we’ve seen lately is, despite some of the coverage and the stories that are out there every single year, more Americans choose EVs. I think that trend will continue even if there’s policy fluctuation because of the benefits in terms of the total cost of ownership. Having a vehicle with fewer moving parts and fewer fluids involved and that’s just cheaper to fuel will, in the long run, be why the market sends us in that direction.

Regardless, I think the important thing is to continue supporting a “Made in America” EV industry. And I’m concerned about that. The OEMs are going to do what makes the most sense to them in the given policy environment. They’ve made a lot of choices that there’s really no turning back for them. But of course, they’re going to need to modulate that up or down from year to year based on the market. That’s what businesses do, and that’s totally appropriate.

What sort of dangers do you feel exist for the climate from a transportation perspective, considering we’ve got an incoming administration that is rejecting the idea that climate change is an accepted science and seems ready to enact policies that will help worsen the effects of climate change?

The climate doesn’t care whether people care about it or not. It’s going to keep changing. And we need to keep adapting and doing what we can to prevent it from being worse than it already is. Obviously, it matters when you have an administration that cares about it versus one that doesn’t.

My experience as a mayor was that if cities, representing the bulk of global GDP, got together and said, “We’re not going to wait on our national capitals. We’re going to take action ourselves.” That’s how the C40, which became the climate mayors, was born. So I have a lot of confidence that state and local work will continue and that there are new stakeholders, including red states, working-class auto manufacturing families, who will be perhaps a surprisingly strong backstop on the continued importance of the growth of the industry in our country.

Have you heard specifically from any of these red state lawmakers in the so-called Battery Belt where these factories are going up, places like Tennessee and Kentucky? Have they told you anything that gives you confidence that maybe there’s going to be more pushback on the elimination of these policies?

Often, it’s more in what they don’t say than what they do say. The conspicuous decision of leaders in places like Georgia and Indiana not to try to pile on the anti-EV ideology because, of course, governors like cutting ribbons on good-paying building trades and manufacturing jobs. And that’s exactly what’s happening because of our work. If anything, I think there will be an attempt for others to try to take credit for it. But the most important thing is that happens at all.

Was the politicization of EVs over the course of the presidential campaign inevitable? Or do you think there was more the administration could have done to push back against that?

I think we did everything we could to stress that this shouldn’t be a Republican or Democratic thing. That when you’re in a high-stakes innovation competition with a country like China, you have nothing to gain by kind of over-indexing on old technology or telling people that what we did in the last century is going to work in this one without modernizing. I’ve just never seen a country win out by looking only to its past.

As we’ve seen in our time, everything from public health to transportation policy can get politicized. But again, I think the market will actually point in a pretty powerful direction here. And part of how I know that is you’ve got a country like China, which is conspicuously not enthusiastic about environmental protection, and they’re all in there doing that for a reason. The reason is economic strategy. And we better not be caught sleeping when it comes to our economic strategy. That’s a bipartisan concern.

The Trump team is also reportedly looking into canceling the standing general order on autonomous vehicle and advanced driver-assist crash reporting. That was another notable thing that happened under your watch. What do we stand to lose there if this sort of transparency is eliminated and we don’t have insight into some of these crashes?

To put it simply, I think kneecapping a safety initiative is not a good idea. I’ve seen lots of second-hand reporting on that. I don’t know what will actually happen. But what I know is that we need to make sure we have good information about the safety of this technology coming onto our roadways. And I say that not because I’m against that technology. On the contrary, I think it’s precisely because of the theoretically lifesaving potential that we need to get the rollout right as a country.

Trump also seems to be considering policies that favor his new best friend, Elon Musk. What concerns do you have seeing someone like Musk, with all of his conflicts and government entanglements, so close to power?

When you consider the power of any federal agency — certainly one like the USDOT, which has a lot of life-and-death responsibility — it’s incredibly important that that power be used in ways that are fair and objective. And we’ve sought to do that by calling balls and strikes without fear or favor. Sometimes that has meant that in the same month we are congratulating a company for some partnership with us in one realm, we’re also launching enforcement actions against them for some concern or violation in another realm. You have to be ready to call balls and strikes. And I hope there is enough public and congressional scrutiny to make sure that happens no matter who’s in charge here.

Do you think the Biden administration could have courted Musk a little more gently or strategically, given how he has emerged as this force in terms of his support for Trump and how much Tesla has been influential in the EV market?

Maybe, it’s hard to say in hindsight. One thing I’ve observed is that a lot of the players in this space — even though you would think it is hyper-rational given how technical and how economic it is — the truth is, there’s a pretty big emotion factor there, too. And I think it’s important to take that into account.

I also wanted to ask you about the ARPA project with infrastructure. That was a big announcement over the last four years. How do you see that sort of progressing into the next administration? Do you feel like there’s still going to be support for a Skunk Works-style project around infrastructure?

I think so. I hope so. I think there’s enormous potential here. I mean, some of the technologies that we use for transportation haven’t changed that much since the days of the Romans. And yet we know there’s evidence that everything from 500-year concrete to self-healing bridge components is potentially within our grasp. I mean, it could come to fruition in my lifetime. So given that some of those things are trillion-dollar ideas, we should continue investing the modest, comparatively modest millions that make it possible. And this is something, too, I hope is bipartisan. Innovation should be bipartisan. So far, I haven’t seen a strong Democrat / Republican valence about unlocking some of those technologies. We just need to be smart about which things the market can take care of and which things just don’t happen unless there’s government support.

A common criticism I heard about the Inflation Reduction Act was that a lot of money was being spent to incentivize cars, but not enough to get people out of their cars and walking and biking. There was an announcement today about $45 million for some active transportation. But compare that to the tens of billions of dollars spent on EVs, it seems kind of like a drop in the bucket. Do you feel like this was the right balance to strike, or do you think more could have been done?

That would be true if you looked at the IRA in a vacuum. But the truth is, even though we think we call the IRA the climate bill, in many ways the infrastructure bill was our climate bill as a department. What I mean by that is a lot of the things that went into supporting transit or supporting a new, better way to design our highways and bridges will mean just as much or more for carbon pollution reduction as what’s in the IRA. EVs help, but that’s only part of the story.

How are you personally feeling seeing all of these policies that you spent so much time on — so much effort, so much political capital to get enacted — now that they’re all on the chopping block or endangered?

I just can’t speculate or predict what will happen next. But what I do know is what we did was good policy and good work. One of the most flattering and convincing pieces of evidence I see for that is for every conservative legislator publicly threatening to reverse our work, there’s two or three who look like they’re trying to take credit for it. And as long as that ratio keeps up, I think the bulk of our work will endure.

And for those folks who are waiting with dread about what’s going to come down the pike in terms of transportation policy and climate policy — are we screwed, or do you think there’s some hope for the future?

As a federal official, I have sometimes been impatient with the limitations of the federal level compared to the power that our system places in state and local hands. I think going forward, maybe I’ll go back to my mayoral mentality and remember how much of our salvation comes from the local in this country. Again, some things are good policy in a way that endures no matter who’s in charge, even if they have a different vocabulary or a different emphasis. I actually think the realm of transportation work is one of the ones that will be the most durably bipartisan, even if, obviously, the next administration will show less interest in issues like climate change, labor union support, or racial and economic justice compared to this one.

As a last question, if you had another four years on this job, what are some things you would like to have done?

I just launched our Project Delivery Acceleration Council. And it sounds strange to launch something on your way out the door, but what I reminded that team of is that their work is going to be wildly important under the next administration, to make sure that we pay more attention to delivery. It’s critically important to fund these things, but you also have to bring out a lot more efficiency in the project delivery process. And it isn’t sexy, but it’s wildly important to get more value for our taxpayer dollar.

So as I think about the second half of this decade, when the bulk of these projects actually enter construction, that’s something I would have wanted to work on. I think I’ll continue to find some way to work on it on the outside, and I hope it gets continued bipartisan interest in [Washington, DC] because I think delivery is vitally, vitally important, not just on the legislative side.

The infrastructure law was a five-year bill and year five is coming up. Congress and the administration will have to negotiate what comes next. And it’ll be important to learn from everything good, bad, and indifferent that we’ve learned from the first infrastructure bill. And then from a safety perspective, I think the biggest piece of unfinished business remains the rail safety legislation — bipartisan, cosponsored by JD Vance, completely deserving of a vote and of being passed into law. And if the next administration is the one to do it, I’ll be the first to cheer for that because it’s just the right thing to do.

At this point, it’s pretty clear what Donald Trump wants from Mark Zuckerberg. But what does Zuckerberg, who has now gone to Mar-a-Lago twice since the November election, want from the President-elect?

That’s the question I’ve been asking sources in and around Meta over the last several days. They all described Meta’s relationship with the outgoing Biden administration as incredibly hostile. It’s safe to assume that Zuckerberg wants a reset for the MAGA regime, especially since Trump threatened not that long ago to imprison him for life.

In Trump’s America, removing tampons from the mens’ restrooms on Meta’s campuses, — a real thing that just happened — is as much a business decision as a political one. Destroying ‘woke’ ideology is a key pillar of Trump’s stated mandate. Others who know they need to play the game, like Amazon, are also starting to fall in line. Even still, Zuckerberg is transforming Meta for this new political reality at a speed that’s unusual for a company of its size and influence. Founder mode.

In his conversation with Joe Rogan and his video on Instagram, Zuckerberg shares a laundry list of issues that Trump could help him with: fighting other countries...

Read the full story at The Verge.

CES saw wild innovations from Roborock and Dreame and helpful upgrades from the rest of the pack, all of which are set to make 2025 a banner year for those who’d rather leave the cleaning to the robots.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Apple may have settled on iPhone 17 Air as the name for the rumored skinny iPhone that’s expected this fall, reports Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter. He writes that the phone will be “a testing ground for future technologies,” including the tech that leads to the company’s first foldables.

The name wouldn’t be surprising — both the MacBook Air and iPad Air were the thinnest versions of their lines when they were released. The iPhone 17 Air is expected to carry that forward by being “about 2 millimeters thinner” than current iPhones, Gurman has written. Other recent rumors have put it between 5.5mm and 6.25mm thick, which is close to the M4 iPad Pro’s depth and less than the thinnest iPhone so far, the iPhone 6.

The thinness isn’t just a flex — realizing it will help Apple along toward future foldable iPads and iPhones, Gurman writes. And he says the phone could be one of Apple’s first proving grounds for its in-house cell modem, codenamed Sinope, after it debuts in the iPhone SE this spring. This year’s iPhone lineup is also expected to debut Apple-designed Wi-Fi / Bluetooth chips, though Gurman doesn’t go as far as saying that includes the 17 Air.

Past rumors have said the new 17 Air will get a 6.6-inch ProMotion OLED display — Apple’s 120Hz variable refresh rate screen used only on iPhone Pro models so far — and that it will have just a single 48-megapixel camera lens on the back, with a 24-megapixel selfie camera. It may have Apple’s A19 chip and, like the iPhone SE 4, is expected to pack 8GB of RAM to run Apple Intelligence AI features.

It’s getting increasingly difficult to avoid AI when you open up your phone or laptop — as soon as I started this article in Google Docs, I was immediately offered some AI assistance to write it (which I didn’t take). And with the rollout of Apple Intelligence, that now applies to iPhones, iPads, and Macs, too.

But if you aren’t seeing much value in the Apple Intelligence features that have launched so far, you’re not alone: around three-quarters of iPhone owners can’t see what all the fuss is about, according to a recent survey. It’s also worth bearing in mind that these AI add-ons take up 7GB of local storage (and counting) on every device you want to use them on.

The good news is that Apple Intelligence is both opt-in and reasonably easy to disable, which isn’t something every company does with their AI tools (looking at you, Google and Microsoft). So if you find features like Writing Tools and mangled notification summaries superfluous to your needs, you can turn them off.

Assuming you’ve already turned it on, here’s how to turn off specific features of Apple Intelligence. And if you really don’t like it, here’s how to turn it off completely.

(The steps listed below were...

Read the full story at The Verge.

Las Vegas is punishingly dry. The arid winter air means I woke up on Day 3 of CES 2025 with a nosebleed, chapped lips, and ashy legs. This in spite of the fact I slathered myself with two pumps of a fermented bean essence, eye cream, moisturizer, and a lip mask. Staring at my face in the hotel mirror, I wonder if any of those products were doing what they’re supposed to — and if maybe, I should try something different.

This is why I was so eager to try L’Oréal’s Cell BioPrint.

For anyone who’s struggled with their complexion, the Cell BioPrint feels like a holy grail gadget. The device is a mini-lab setup that analyzes a skin sample to generate a report about your skin’s current condition. It’ll also “grade” your skin with regard to oiliness, wrinkles, skin barrier function, pore size, and uneven skin tone. Based on the proteins in your skin, you’ll also see whether you’re more likely to be susceptible to those issues down the line — even if they aren’t issues now. The test also determines whether you’re responsive to retinol, a popular and well-studied skincare ingredient that nevertheless causes a ton of confusion online.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 66, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, happy 2025, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been reading about loneliness and Web3 scams and the future of procedural TV, watching Deadpool & Wolverine on an airplane like the director intended, rewatching Severance and Squid Game to get ready for the second seasons, eagerly awaiting the return of Kids Baking Championship, wondering if that’s real Sara Dietschy or AI Sara Dietschy, and giving an Apple News Plus subscription a whirl as my go-to news source.

I also have for you a big report from CES in Las Vegas. This edition of Installer is a little different than most, just because we saw so many new things, and so many new things launched, and in many cases, it’s hard to know whether any of it will ever hit shelves. So think of this as part Installer, part CES recap, part “David hopes desperately these things actually ship” list. But I tried hard to pick out the stuff I’m confident will actually end up on sale at some point soon and might be worth your money. I’m sure I’ll be wrong about a few...

Read the full story at The Verge.