Amazon is bringing the new AI-powered Alexa Plus to a wide range of its existing Echo devices — but the upgrade will skip many of the earliest models. The majority of the company’s first-generation Echos won’t get support, according to the Alexa Plus FAQ page, though Amazon says they will continue to work with the standard Alexa.

Alexa Plus won’t support “certain older generation Echo devices,” such as the first-generation Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Plus, Echo Tap, Echo Spot, and Echo Show; the second-generation Echo Show won’t support it, either. Amazon spokesperson Kristy Schmidt confirmed that is the full list of devices. If so, that still leaves many early Echo devices that will work with Alexa Plus.

That means I’ll be able to ask Alexa to book a restaurant reservation through my Echo Flex, the quirky modular Echo speaker that plugs straight into a wall outlet. And people can still get an AI-generated song piped through speakers they’ve connected their microphone-only Echo Inputs to. And if you have an ancient first- or- second-gen Echo Show 15 or newer Echo Hub, those will apparently get access to the AI-enhanced Alexa, too. Schmidt confirmed that each of those will be compatible.

Perhaps it’s a bummer that some of the older Echo devices won’t use AI to book reservations, track ticket prices, or generate fake songs. But at least they’ll still be able to do the old Alexa stuff, like turn on your lights or tell you the weather. And given rumors about the struggle Amazon has had getting Alexa Plus to work right, that might be a good thing, at least for a while.

Amazon is finally launching the long-awaited generative AI version of Alexa — Alexa Plus — that, if all goes well, will take away much of the friction that comes with talking to a speaker to control your smart home or getting info on the fly.

Some of the new abilities coming to Alexa Plus include the ability to do things for you — you’ll be able to ask it to order groceries for you or send event invites to your friends. Amazon says it will also be able to memorize personal details like your diet and movie preferences.

Alexa Plus is $19.99 per month on its own or free for Amazon Prime members — a better deal, considering Prime costs just $14.99 per month or $139 per year. That comes with access to the Alexa website, where the company said you can do “longform work.” Amazon also said it created a new Alexa app to go with the new assistant. Alexa Plus will work on “almost every” Alexa device released so far, starting with the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21. Early access will start rolling out next month.

Alexa Plus will also be able to carry on conversations from uttering its wake word, which is still just “Alexa.” It also has vision capabilities and can take pictures and analyze images. Amazon demoed other abilities, such as Alexa prompting you to tell you about concert ticket availability and being able to tell you about local businesses (referencing Yelp to do so) and book dinner reservations. The company says it can read a study guide and test you on the answers, as well as research trips and create itineraries.

Like before, you can still control smart home devices, with Amazon calling out things like smart home cameras and lights, but the company says it can create routines on your behalf as well. You’ll also be able to use Alexa Plus for music, with the ability to find songs based on relatively vague descriptions. The company also said you can ask Alexa to jump to a specific scene in a movie, though that took a couple of tries.

A lot of what Amazon showed off was clearly well beyond what you can do with the older version of Alexa. In one part of the demo, Amazon SVP of devices and services Panos Panay asked Alexa if anyone had walked the dog recently, and it referenced smart home cameras to respond that, yes, someone had. 

Amazon’s director of Alexa, Mara Segal, demonstrated that you’ll be able to share documents with Alexa — such as handwritten notes and recipes, emails, instruction manuals, and pictures — that it can reference later. For instance, Segal asked Alexa to read a housing association document and analyze its rules regarding solar panels. She also asked it for a readout of a SXSW schedule. 

Segal also demonstrated how Alexa Plus can take action when prompted, like telling her about a kids’ soccer schedule and adding calendar details and reminders based on it, all using fairly casual, natural language in an ongoing conversation.

A lot of the demonstrated Alexa Plus features were visual, meaning that the dashboard and UI on touchscreen Echo devices have had a facelift. There are new customizable widgets on the homescreen that can be moved to a second page and a whole new widget specifically for controlling connected smart home devices.

When you speak with the new Alexa Plus on Echo devices with a display, you’ll also see a fluctuating blue bar at the bottom of the interface. Panay said this “is Alexa” and that the little animations and icons it displays are called “Alexicons,” which are used to visually express a sense of personality.

The company also showed off some familiar LLM greatest hits — you can get Alexa Plus to make up stories for you, and it seems to be able to generate AI art as well. 

Amazon said Alexa Plus is a model-agnostic system, using its own Amazon Nova model, as well as those from companies like Anthropic. It will choose the best model for the task at hand, according to the company. 

Amazon also listed a number of partners from which Alexa Plus draws data to understand and analyze financial markets, sports, and more. Some of the partners include The Associated Press, Politico, The Washington Post, and Reuters.

The company demonstrated that by having Alexa answer questions about the Boston Red Sox and asking Alexa to track ticket availability over time. Alexa Plus will apparently also be able to buy those tickets for you. The company says these are day-one capabilities powered by hundreds of models it calls “experts.”

Amazon said its LLM experts can also do things for services from firms like Uber Eats, Sonos, Wyze, Zoom, Xbox, Plex, Dyson, Bose, Grubhub, Levoit, and Ticketmaster. It also noted some of the Alexa Plus features will be available on the web through Alexa.com.

The company is also partnering with AI song generator Suno to allow Alexa Plus to create songs on the fly from a prompt, with the company demonstrating an AI-made country song about a bodega cat. 

Amazon first announced it was going to “supercharge” Alexa with AI in September 2023. Back then, the company made a lot of big claims, saying that Alexa would understand context or build automated routines for you — you needed only ask. But by the following June, around when Apple announced its own Siri AI upgrade, reports emerged that the company was struggling to realize its efforts and that some employees were leaving because they didn’t think this version of Alexa would ever work.

The devices team at Amazon also saw a major executive shakeup in the interim, with longtime leader Dave Limp being replaced by Panay, who’d come over from running Microsoft’s Surface lineup.

Now that its AI Alexa is here, Amazon is entering a world very different from the one Alexa was born into back in 2014. It will compete with a crowded field of AI-powered digital assistants like the way-ahead Google Gemini, the category-defining ChatGPT, and Apple’s reportedly also-struggling upgraded Siri. But with some very limited exceptions, those chatbots aren’t on smart speakers yet, and that may be Amazon’s opportunity. Its speakers could bring an AI chatbot to a lot of people a lot faster than competitors. Amazon just needs to finish getting it out the door.

YouTube isn’t a podcast app, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming the number one place people who want to consume online radio shows now turn to. According to the company, a staggering 1 billion people are tuning into podcasts every month on YouTube. That’s not just more than either Apple or Spotify can claim — it utterly lays them to waste. 

In 2023, Spotify reported it had 100 million regular podcast listeners, and touted that half a billion people had listened to a podcast on its platform since 2019 when it started its push into the world of online radio shows. Apple tends to come out behind Spotify in third-party measurements. If a full eighth of the world’s population uses YouTube for podcasts, it seems like that’s probably where the action is. 

Reaching that big chunk of audience takes extra work for podcasters, though. Listeners can’t turn just off their phone’s screen to listen unless they’re paying for YouTube Premium, and people may not want to stare at a static image for an hour straight. That means doing video to really make it count.

Making video for YouTube is far more expensive than it used to be. In a newsletter earlier this month, cooking creator Carla Lalli Music, formerly of Bon Apetit, said it cost her $3,500 to shoot a single video for the platform. Those were more complicated than a podcast video, but it still speaks to the platform’s demand for quality in order to get off the ground. YouTube says that more than 400 million hours of podcasts were watched on TVs alone last year. Video clearly matters; creators can’t just turn on their webcams and get results.

Reaching YouTube’s audience also means playing by YouTube’s rules. The platform doesn’t work with RSS feeds in the same way that most other podcast platforms do — every podcast has to become a native YouTube video. That requires them to play by YouTube’s ad rules, too, and use YouTube’s ad systems. Podcasters can’t serve ads the same way they do everywhere else, and they can’t get the same metrics they’d normally use to sell advertisers on their reach and success.

Still, that tradeoff has clearly been worth it to a great many creators, and YouTube’s stats today show why. It may not be a traditional podcast platform, but it’s a big one that podcasters can’t ignore.

The Dark Horse Digital service is being shut down, and as part of that, the Dark Horse Comics iOS app will no longer be supported, according to an announcement. Dark Horse Comics says people should download comics they’ve purchased by March 30th, as it will end support for its iOS app and the standalone Plants vs. Zombies comics app the following day.

You can still visit the Dark Horse Digital website if you make an account before the deadline to read the comics you’ve bought — but only through “at least” summer 2025, the company says in a FAQ. You can also sync your website account with the app to download issues, according to the announcement. 

This isn’t totally the end for Dark Horse’s ebook comics; the company says its books will continue being available “on numerous digital reading platforms.” But it says it decided to stop its own direct-to-reader sales because “consumer reading preferences have evolved in different directions.”

According to Dark Horse’s FAQ, you can get a refund for comics you’ve bought this year from its website. But refunds for purchases from the iOS apps “have to be discussed with Apple,” the company says says. 

While it’s nice that Dark Horse gave buyers a heads-up so they can download their purchases and potentially get refunds, it points out in its FAQ that you don’t own digital books themselves, only the license to them. That’s the peril of buying digital, and something Senator Ron Wyden called out today in a letter to the FTC.

Automattic-owned Beeper has announced a new beta update to its desktop and iOS apps to finally merge its service with Texts, which Automattic acquired in 2023. You can download the desktop version or see instructions for using the iOS beta in TestFlight by going to this page.

Beeper says the new desktop version is built “on the foundations of the Texts desktop app,” while it built the iOS app “from scratch.” In a post on X, Texts.com founder Kishan Bagaria called it “the next-gen texts app, now rebranded as beeper.” Both are universal messaging services that can connect to and let you message people from several platforms, including WhatsApp, Instagram, Slack, and others. 

Things have been quiet for Beeper since it gave up its fight to make iMessage work on Android phones and sold to Automattic, which also owns platforms like WordPress.com and Tumblr. 

Beeper isn’t done with iMessage, as Bagaria also says the company plans to support Apple’s protocol in the desktop version of the app. Beeper promises other future updates, including messages being encrypted on your device instead of Beeper’s servers, and support for “multiple accounts for a single network.”

Starting May 12th, YouTube says it will show fewer mid-roll ads that it thinks will interrupt sentences or action sequences, and more at “natural break points” like pauses or transitions, according to a help page on the change. The company says it’s also inserting “additional, automatic ad-slots at natural break points” into older videos with manually-placed slots, a change creators can opt out of.

YouTubers can decide to use automatically chosen ad slots instead of manual, or a mix of both. Those who prefer to keep things manual can check whether their chosen mid-roll slots “are considered interruptive” using a YouTube Studio feedback tool the company is rolling out. YouTube says that this will ensure creators are picking slots “where ads are likely to be served.”

The company says it found in an experiment last year that videos using a mix of automatic and manual ad slot placement averaged five percent more revenue than those with only manually placed slots. Creators can opt out of letting YouTube place slots for them in the Earn tab in YouTube Studio, but YouTube says “videos with interruptive mid-roll ad slots may earn less revenue” after the May change.

YouTubers will still control if they want to pick where ads are shown, but it’s not clear if doing so means they’ll risk some of those ads simply not being shown, and YouTube didn’t immediately respond to our request for clarification. The company has removed some of creators’ control over ad placement before, like with a late 2023 change that took away creators’ ability to choose when ads are skippable or whether they’re placed at the beginning or the end of a video.

Google has announced new searchable transcripts for videos you store in Google Drive. The feature is rolling out to all Google Workspace users, starting today and finishing by March 26th.

The transcripts look a lot like those you’d see on YouTube. If one is available, it’ll appear in a sidebar next to the video as blocks of timestamped text, with each block highlighted as it’s spoken in the video you’re watching. The search bar for the transcript sits at the top of this sidebar, and clicking on specific text blocks will take you to that moment in the video. You can see the transcripts by clicking the settings icon at the bottom of the video and then choosing “Transcript.”

The transcript option is only available if the video already has captions, as indicated by the CC button that shows up in the controls along the bottom of the Google Drive video player. If a video doesn’t have captions, you can create them by right-clicking a video file in Drive, choosing “Manage caption tracks,” and then “generate automatic captions.”

President Donald Trump announced Sunday night he has named conservative podcaster Dan Bongino as the FBI’s new deputy director. Bongino has worked as a New York police officer and US Secret Service agent, but has no FBI experience.

Bongino is well-known in conservative media, thanks to credits like having hosted a Fox News show and contributed to conspiracy website InfoWars. (Another one-time Fox News presenter, Pete Hegseth, serves as the US Secretary of Defense.) He was also among the right-wing commentators whose popularity sparked a fight over Facebook’s CrowdTangle analytics tool, ultimately resulting in its shutdown. His outsized online influence saw him named one of the top election conspiracy “misinformation superspreaders” in research by global human rights group Avaaz, The New York Times reported in 2020.

The new acting director currently hosts Rumble podcast The Dan Bongino Show. Trump said in his Truth Social announcement that podcasting is “something he is willing and prepared to give up in order to serve.” On his podcast today, Bongino said he’s leaving the show, calling it “a lot to walk away from.”

Bongino wll serve under recently confirmed FBI director Kash Patel, who has previously published a list of “deep state” enemies and has vowed to “rebuild” the agency after his confirmation by the Senate. As BBC notes, Bongino’s appointment as deputy director requires no Senate confirmation.

Grok, Elon Musk’s ChatGPT competitor, temporarily refused to respond with “sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation,” according to xAI’s head of engineering, Igor Babuschkin. After Grok users noticed that the chatbot had been given instructions to not respond with those results, Babuschkin blamed an unnamed, ex-OpenAI employee at xAI for updating Grok’s system prompt without approval.

In response to questions on X, Babuschkin said that Grok’s system prompt (the internal rules that govern how an AI responds to queries) is publicly visible “because we believe users should be able to see what it is we’re asking Grok.” He said “an employee pushed the change” to the system prompt “because they thought it would help, but this is obviously not in line with our values.”

Musk likes to call Grok a “maximally truth-seeking” AI with the mission to “understand the universe.” Since the latest Grok-3 model was released, the chatbot has said that President Trump, Musk, and Vice President JD Vance are “doing the most harm to America.” Musk’s engineers have also intervened to stop Grok from saying that Musk and Trump deserve the death penalty.

On Friday, the Space Force published a picture taken last year from a camera mounted on the secretive X-37B space plane while high above the Earth. Space.com notes that the “one other glimpse” of the plane in space was while it was “deploying from Falcon Heavy’s upper stage” during its December 2023 launch.

The Space Force says it snapped the photo during experimental “first-of-kind” aerobraking maneuvers “to safely change its orbit using minimal fuel.” The Air Force said in October this would involve “a series of passes using the drag of Earth’s atmosphere,” and that once complete, it would resume its other experiments before de-orbiting.

This is the X-37B’s seventh mission; its sixth, which concluded in November 2022, lasted about two-and-a-half years (or 908 days) and was its longest mission to date. Prior to its launch, the Space Force described mission goals that included “operating in new orbital regimes” and testing ”future space domain awareness technologies.“ It also mentioned an onboard NASA experiment involving plant seeds’ radiation exposure during long spaceflight missions.

Elon Musk tweeted Saturday that federal workers would soon get an email “requesting to understand what they got done last week.” According to the New York Times, the email from the Office of Personnel Management went to agencies across the federal government that afternoon, including the FBI, State Department, and others, with a deadline for response by 11:59PM ET on Monday. 

However, the message lacked a detail from Musk’s tweet, according to the Times, where he said, “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” which a number of lawyers have said would be illegal. The Washington Post reports that experts said it “may be asking some recipients to violate federal laws,” and Sam Bagenstos, a University of Michigan law professor quoted by the Times, said, “There is zero basis in the civil service system for this.” 

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement Sunday that “Elon Musk is traumatizing hardworking federal employees, their children and families. He has no legal authority to make his latest demands.”

The stunt is another echo of Musk’s approach after he took over Twitter, with requests to review engineer’s code and saying that failing to respond to an email would be regarded as a resignation. Across hundreds of tweets posted on Saturday and early Sunday, Musk — who may or may not run the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), in addition to his various companies — claimed, without presenting evidence, to be rooting out fraud and employees who don’t do any work.

Leaders of at least some of the departments, like the FBI and State Department, reportedly told their workers to await guidance to respond, while the Post reports that acting Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director Bridget Bean told staff to comply with the “valid request.”  

Unions like the American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union told employees “not to respond, either just yet or at all,” Axios writes. CNN reporter Pete Muntean said the National Air Traffic Controllers Association called the “email an unnecessary distraction to a fragile system.”

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.

Apple released the first developer beta of iOS 18.4 yesterday, which users have since discovered contains support for robot vacuums in the Apple Home app through Matter.

As spotted by 9to5Mac, Smart Home Centre confirmed the functionality using a Switchbot S10, which offers its own beta support for Matter. (Switchbot first added Matter robot vacuum support last year, but it required a hub and was kind of a hack.) Apple Home screenshots shared in the story show the robot vacuum’s Home widget (complete with a little robot vacuum glyph) along with a control screen featuring a start / stop button, options for choosing between “Vacuum” and “Vacuum and Mop,” selections for operating modes like “Quiet” or “Deep Clean.” There’s also a “Send to Dock” option, although Smart Home Centre notes that this only paused the S10.

Robot vacuums in the new iOS beta can also be added to automations and scenes. You can see how all of it works in the outlet’s video below.

Apple was expected to add Matter support for robot vacuum cleaners last year, but that didn’t materialize. Few robot vacuum companies offer Matter support at the moment, and some of those are still waiting on a firmware update to enable it. Robot vacuum makers have confirmed to us that these models will support Matter:

• Ecovacs X8 Pro Omni
• Ecovacs Deebot X2 Combo
• Switchbot S20
• Switchbot S10
• Switchbot K10 Pro Plus
• Switchbot K10 Plus
• Dreame X50 Ultra
• Dreame X40 Ultra
• Roborock Saros 10 and 10R
• Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra
• Roomba Combo 10

Some of the other changes users have spotted in the first developer beta for iOS 18.4 include the addition of an ambient music Control Center option, a new “sketch” style option in Image Playground, Apple Intelligence-powered Priority Notifications, and the ability to set a default translation app. More changes could be coming, as this is only the first beta for a release that had been expected to begin Siri’s big upgrade, a shift that may still be more than a month away.

AT&T has introduced SplitPay, a new payment option that lets those sharing a phone plan with others split their payment line-by-line, so no one person has to pay the entire bill. The company says the program is available for “select postpaid wireless plans,” and that those using SplitPay can still get multi-line discounts.

It sounds like a nice idea, especially if you’ve ever had the experience of bothering people you’re sharing a plan with for their part of a bill that you pay. As for what happens if not everyone pays up, AT&T says the account holder is still responsible for the bill, and late payments could still result in extra fees or suspended service. The company writes that it will text each payer a payment link and what they owe when a billing cycle begins, and says it will notify the primary payer about any outstanding payments prior to the bill’s due date.

To set up SplitPay, you can head to AT&T’s SplitPay page, select the account holder, and then pick the individual lines and devices, like smartwatches or tablets, you want to assign to each payer, according to a help page on the program.

If you were paying attention to CES this year, you may have come across the Asus Adol 14 Air Fragrance Edition’s curious gimmick: a magnetically-attached oil diffuser in the lid that emits the aroma of essential oils once the laptop heats up. Asus has now announced details about a “Fragrance Mouse” to go with it. Mentioned along with the company’s Copilot Plus PCs at CES 2025, it’s coming to the US “around late April, early May,” company spokesperson Anthony Spence told The Verge in an email.

The Fragrance Mouse has a light-duty mousing layout of two buttons and a scroll wheel. Its trick is on the underside, where a small compartment holds a refillable vial you can load with essential oils of your choosing. It’s an otherwise standard affair — the mouse connects wirelessly over Bluetooth or a 2.4GHz wireless USB dongle, offers adjustable DPI (1200dpi, 1600dpi, and 2400dpi), and is powered by a single AA battery. Asus says it’s “available in distinctive Iridescent White or Rose Clay finishes.”

You may not be able to get a complete stinky laptop and mouse set, since the Adol 14 Air Fragrance Edition has only been released in China since being introduced in July 2024, as Ars Technica notes. Spence was unable to confirm pricing details for the Fragrance Mouse in his email to The Verge.

Update February 22nd: Added that Asus had previously mentioned the Fragrance Mouse in January.

One of the big problems with a VR headset is that anything you want to do, you have to do inside it. Apple is looking to tackle that and other Vision Pro pain points with visionOS 2.4, which will offer improvements to the guest user experience and two new apps for finding new things to do and watch, whether you’re wearing the headset or not. 

The visionOS 2.4 update rolling out in beta to developers starting today also adds Apple Intelligence features to the headset.

Right now, it’s hard to find software for the Vision Pro without putting on the headset and doing the search there, but with this update and iOS 18.4 that’s getting easier with a new Apple Vision Pro for iOS app. It lets you browse the visionOS App Store, install apps remotely, and even cue up videos on the headset from your iPhone. Without it, your other choices are to search for other users’ recommendations online or scroll around this Apple page that shows Vision Pro apps.

Letting another person use your Vision Pro is a hassle and something you can’t really do without first putting it on and going through some setup. This update is addressing much of that friction by making Guest Mode easier to use. For starters, you no longer have to put on the headset before anyone else can use it. When a guest puts it on, the owner will get a prompt on their iPhone or iPad to approve placing it in guest mode. They can then choose the apps guests can access and decide whether or not to AirPlay what they’re seeing, just like Apple employees can for in-store demos. 

In theory, if someone in your house uses your Vision Pro regularly, that means they can get to doing that much faster. However, Apple still isn’t removing the 30-day limit that resets saved guest profiles, so less frequent users will still have to go through the rigamarole of hand-and-eye setup. Even so, it’s a big improvement from the initial experience of sharing a Vision Pro.

You’ll also be able to view your headset’s information, like the serial number, from the app instead of hunting around for it inside the headset or finding your Vision Pro in the device list of your iPhone’s Apple Account settings. People who need prescription lenses will also be able to view and store their App Clip code for ZEISS Optical Inserts in the app too. Vision Pro owners don’t have to do anything to get the app either. It’ll download to their iPhones automatically with iOS 18.4, though it is also separately downloadable for non-owners from the App Store.

Along that vein, Apple is rolling out a new Vision Pro app, too, called Spatial Gallery. The company describes it as an Apple-curated collection of spatial photos, videos, and panoramas, which includes things like behind-the-scenes clips from Apple TV shows like Severance and Shrinking. The idea is to showcase content that highlights the Vision Pro’s strengths. That app will become available for Vision Pro owners when visionOS 2.4 is released in April.

Apple’s goal with the new iPhone 16E seems to be the same as with the iPhone SE: offer a very good, cheap smartphone to entice price-sensitive shoppers to either leave Android or upgrade from a much older iPhone. From what we’ve seen so far, the company seems to have succeeded â€” but maybe a little too well: there’s not a whole lot of space differentiating the 16E from the pricier iPhone 16. That’s something Apple will have to remedy the next time its flagship phone updates come around if it wants that model to stand out.

There used to be a large gap between the iPhone SE and the standard model iPhone. The SE had an old design with thick bezels and a home button. It had a small screen, a slower processor, and less storage. If you bought the SE, you knew you weren’t getting the latest and greatest.

The iPhone 16E looks a lot more like a flagship phone at a budget price. It has an OLED display, FaceID, Apple’s latest processor, and even the customizable Action Button â€” a perfect feature for nerding things up that was once exclusive to iPhone 15 Pro phones. It only has a single camera, but it’s been upgraded to a 48-megapixel affair that Apple bills as a “2-in-1 …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The Humane AI Pin has collapsed, but Rabbit is still kicking. The company published a blog post and video today showing off a “generalist Android agent,” slowly controlling apps on a tablet in much the same way that Rabbit claimed its R1 device would over a year ago. (It couldn’t, and can’t.) The work builds on LAM Playground, a “generalist web agent” Rabbit launched last year.

The engineers don’t use the Rabbit R1 at all for the demonstration. Instead, they type their requests into a prompt box on a laptop, which translates them to actions on an Android tablet. They task it with things like finding a YouTube video or locating a whiskey cocktail recipe in a cocktail app, gathering the ingredients, and then adding them to a Google Keep grocery list. At one point, they ask it to download the puzzle game 2048 and figure out how to play it, which it does, albeit slowly.

The model generally does the things they ask, sometimes well and sometimes with quirks like sending a poem over WhatsApp one message at a time instead of in a single block. One of the engineers wonders if they should have asked it to use line breaks in their prompt, but they don’t go back to try again.

Rabbit’s AI agent is clearly still a work in progress, as it has been since the R1 launched with almost none of the capabilities that founder and CEO Jesse Lyu presented in January 2024. Rabbit has steadily rolled out updates, like the ability to train its AI agents to complete specific tasks or prompt it to remake its own interface. The examples it presented today are “only the core action loop an Android agent completes,” according to Rabbit’s blog post. The company promises to share more about its “upcoming cross-platform multi-agent system” in coming weeks.

Amazon-owned Eero is updating its mainline mesh routers with Wi-Fi 7 options in the new Eero 7 and Eero Pro 7 that are available for preorder now ahead of their launch on February 26th. Pricing for the Eero 7 and Eero Pro 7 ranges from $169.99 and $299.99 for single routers to $349.99 and $699.99 for three-packs, respectively.

Eero says these routers can push wireless throughput of up to 1.8Gbps (Eero 7) and 3.9Gbps (Eero Pro 7) — if true, that’s more than enough for most peoples’ hardwired internet service. Like their Wi-Fi 6 and 6E predecessors, the two mesh systems are mainly distinguished from each other by the number of bands they have and the throughput of their ethernet ports. The cheaper Eero 7 is a dual-band router (2.4GHz and 5GHz) with two 2.5Gbps, self-configuring ethernet ports, while the Pro 7 adds a 6GHz band and dual 5Gbps ethernet ports.

Those figures aren’t as impressive as the numbers Eero claims for its first Wi-Fi 7 router, the Eero Max 7, but the new routers bring Wi-Fi 7-exclusive features that can still benefit you even if you don’t have Wi-Fi 7 devices, and at a much lower price than the Max 7’s almost $1,360 three-pack price. Those features promise to improve the connection between wireless routers by combining multiple bands into one for higher throughput and more stability (if one is congested or goes down, it’s still using the other one), and offering 320MHz channel bandwidth on the 6GHz band, or double the 160MHz that was the maximum going back to Wi-Fi 5.

Eero VP of software engineering Rowan Chakoumakos told The Verge in a briefing that both the Pro model and standard Eero 7 can push up to a 240MHz signal on the 5GHz band, something else that’s only supported in Wi-Fi 7. Basically, the wireless signal going to an Eero 7 or Pro 7 mesh router should have more throughput than with older Eero systems, to the benefit of even your older, non-Wi-Fi 7 smartphone, game console, or laptop. It’ll also be a cheaper option if you’ve considered the Eero Outdoor 7 but couldn’t bring yourself to get the pricey Eero Max 7 to integrate it with.

Like their predecessors, the new Wi-Fi 7 routers work as smart home hubs for Amazon’s Alexa ecosystem, with Matter support, a Zigbee radio, and the ability to act as Thread Border Routers. They’re also backward compatible with all of Eero’s 10 years’ worth of routers and work with Amazon smart speaker devices like Echo Dots with Eero mesh extender capability and all older Wi-Fi standards.

The release of these new routers brings Eero’s Wi-Fi 7 options up to four, including the outdoor Wi-Fi 7 router it announced in October. The company says it will keep selling the Eero 6, 6 Plus, and Pro 6E, each of which got a recent price drop that knocked around $20 off of prices that now range between $89.99 for a single Eero 6 all the way up to $549.99 for a three-pack of the Eero Pro 6E.

Apple has just introduced the iPhone 16E, a spiritual successor to the iPhone SE line that has a significant first: it introduces Apple’s long-awaited in-house 5G modem called the C1. The chip, which Apple says is the most power-efficient modem in a phone, is Apple’s bid to end its reliance on Qualcomm’s 5G chips.

Apple says the chip contributes to the 16E’s longer battery life. The company says the phone’s internal design is optimized to support a larger battery, giving it up to 26 hours of video playback. According to Apple’s technical specifications for the iPhone 16E, its new chip covers much of the same low-end 5G spectrum as the iPhone 16 but lacks mmWave — that’s the 5G with gigabit-territory throughput.

The C1 starting in the 16E makes sense: the $599 device is now the cheapest way to get one of Apple’s thin-bezel phones with Apple Intelligence. If this inaugural outing for the chip doesn’t end up being great, people may chalk it up to this being a more affordable phone.

This has been nearly six years in the making, with Apple having bought Intel’s cell modem business in 2019. There’s every reason to be skeptical that it will perform as well as Qualcomm. In 2023, the company extended its deal with Qualcomm. The news was followed by a report that it was struggling with its in-house modem’s design. But 2026 is coming, and the C1 may be the first step toward Apple weaning itself off of Qualcomm once and for all.

The iPhone 16E is available to preorder tomorrow and ships on February 28th.