When Google announces its new family of Pixel 10 phones next month on August 20, there will likely be one bit of news that will surprise—or perhaps not surprise—everyone. And that’s the fact that its third-gen book-style foldable, currently dubbed the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, will almost certainly still start at a whopping $1,800. Android […]
Google Home Is So Bad That a Lawsuit Could Be on Its Way
There’s been some trouble at home lately. Not your home, hopefully, but if you live in Google HQ, then maybe. Last week, people using the Google Home app flooded Reddit with complaints over smart home products that mysteriously stopped working—lights, cameras, smart plugs, you name it. Those complaints were so numerous, in fact, that Google […]
YouTube Will Start Guessing Your Age
YouTube will no longer take your word for it when you enter your birthday. On Tuesday, the platform announced that it will be rolling out new age-estimation tools that will attempt to verify a person’s age based on a variety of indicators as part of an attempt to keep younger users from accessing more adult […]
Forget the Pixel Buds 3, Google Should Make an AirPods Max Killer
Google has a lot in store for us starting next month. I know this, not because of some insider knowledge or gadget-centric ESP, but because last week all of its upcoming announcements were leaked in succession, leaving precious little up to the imagination. Among the upcoming Google drops is a whole family of Pixel 10s, […]
Google Neutralizes Its Rivals… For Now
For over two decades, “Google it” has been the default way to find answers online. Now that dominance is being tested by a new wave of AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and upstarts such as Perplexity, which deliver conversational answers instead of a list of links. These disruptors are being cast as a mortal threat […]
Google Skips Right to Leaking the Whole Pixel 10 Lineup
If you were looking forward to Google’s upcoming summer event and all of the surprises about Pixel hardware it may reveal, you may want to stop reading. After showing the Pixel 10 on its own website following leaks, Google went ahead and doubled down on the anticlimax by previewing the entire new Pixel lineup in […]
OpenAI’s New Exec Has a Grand Plan to Make AI for Everyone
Fidji Simo knows technology can make life better or it can make inequality worse. As OpenAI’s incoming CEO of Applications, she’s making it clear which path she wants AI to take. “Every major technology shift can expand access to power,” she said in her memo announcing her new role on July 21. “The power to […]
Is This the End of Google As We Know It?
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman arrived in Washington this week with a carefully crafted message for policymakers: Artificial intelligence is already boosting productivity for millions of Americans, and his company intends to keep it “democratic” by putting it in everyone’s hands. As the capital buzzes with debates over AI regulation, Altman is positioning OpenAI not as […]
DuckDuckGo Is Hoping to Win Over AI-Hating Searchers
Are you tired of AI-generated images cluttering your search results? Lucky for you, there’s a way out of the slop, and it starts with forgetting about Google. DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine and web browser, recently rolled out a new feature that allows users to hide images made with AI from their search results. You […]
How to Build a Functional Smart Home When You’ll Never Own a House Yourself
Ah, yes, the American dream. A house with a white picket fence, a dog, and as many products as you can pile into a pickup truck that you paid for in cash, which I’m told is a type of green paper you can exchange for goods and services. Sounds nice; sounds normal; sounds totally and […]