Category: Technology

Yes, Amazon’s Prime Day already happened in July, but the company’s members-only sales events are apparently not done. Amazon now plans to hold Prime Big Deal Days, another Prime Day of sorts, on October 10 and 11, something it did the same month last year.

Prime Day is two days long, and that’s the pattern Amazon is following here, even hinting at a few early deals on Amazon devices. You can save up to 65 percent on a three-pack of eero Pro Mesh Wi-Fi, select Fire TV devices, Kindles and more. Amazon also promises a $15 credit to Prime members who download its Photos app and upload their first photo, between now and October 7, just ahead of its Big Deal Days.

If you want to know what devices to keep an eye on — check out our Prime Day primer right here.

— Mat Smith

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iOS 17’s release date is upon us, here’s how to update your iPhone

watchOS 10 has arrived, bringing widgets back to the Apple Watch

Intel seems pretty excited about glass substrates

Unity apologizes and promises to change its controversial game install fee policy

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Microsoft’s Panos Panay leaves after nearly 20 years

And he’s reportedly heading to Amazon.

Panos Panay is leaving Microsoft. After heading the development of the initial Surface line of tablets and hybrid laptops, he became the company’s chief product officer in 2018. His rise continued in 2021 when he moved to executive vice president after a successful Windows 11 launch. He’s also been a mainstay of Microsoft’s livestreams, press events and product launches alongside CEO Satya Nadella.

There’s been no reason given by either party, but Panay said he has “decided to turn the page and write the next chapter” when he announced the move on X. However, Bloomberg subsequently reported he has been poached by Amazon. Panay will apparently replace Dave Limp, the Amazon executive previously in charge of Alexa and Echo, who announced his retirement last month. What makes this more unusual is that Microsoft has a livestream event this Thursday, which will almost certainly focus on the new Surface products.

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MS Paint just got two killer features for a ’90s graphics editor

Microsoft is rolling out layers and transparent PNG support.

iOS updates? Pschh. Tell me more about MS Paint. The ’90s and ’00s distraction is finally getting support for layers. It’s an exciting time to be alive.

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AirPods Pro Adaptive Audio preview

Automatically adjusting to your day.

Alongside the arrival of iOS 17, a firmware update to Apple’s AirPods Pro adds a few new features, most of which will automatically adjust to your environment or activity, so you don’t have to touch the earbuds or reach for your phone. The headline addition is Adaptive Audio, a tool that automatically and “dynamically” blends transparency mode and active noise cancellation (ANC) based on your surroundings. Adaptive Audio gradually starts tweaking the blend of ANC and transparency. So if you enter a loud coffee shop, AirPods Pro gently increases noise cancellation to combat the distractions. Engadget’s Billy Steele tests out all the new features.

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The Google Nest Hub Max is losing some of its video call functionality

It’ll still support Meet, in a more limited capacity.

Google is discontinuing support for Zoom and Google Meet meetings on its Nest Hub Max. Some users have received notifications that they can no longer join meetings from the device beginning September 28. The news follows Zoom’s July announcement that Nest Hub Max support will end for the video calling service on September 30. Google said in a statement that “support for joining meetings via meeting codes and links in Meet” is going away, but also noted, “There is no change to making 1:1 and group video calls to friends, family and businesses with Google Meet.”

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Sonos Move 2 review

Better sound and battery life come at a cost.

When Sonos released its first portable speaker, the Move, four years ago, it was an anomaly. Portable and connectable through Bluetooth, this was a different Sonos product. In 2023, these tricks have proliferated across the Sonos lineup. The more affordable Roam speaker brought the Move’s feature set to a much smaller device, while recent home speakers, like the Era 100 and 300, both support Bluetooth, as well. The Move 2 doesn’t suggest a new direction for future Sonos products, but it does bring the company’s latest tech and design cues to an existing product.

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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-amazons-plans-for-yet-another-sales-event-111551729.html?src=rss 

We’ve already seen OpenAI and Salesforce incorporate their standalone chatbots into larger, more comprehensive machine learning platforms that span the breadth and depth of their businesses. On Tuesday, Google announced that its Bard AI is receiving the same treatment and has been empowered to pull real-time data from other Google applications including Docs, Maps, Lens, Flights, Hotels and YouTube, as well as the users’ own silo of stored personal data, to provide more relevant and actionable chatbot responses.

“I’ve had the great fortune of being a part of the team from the inception,” Jack Krawczyk,bproduct lead for Bard, told Engadget. “This Thursday marks six months since Bard entered into the world.”

But despite of the technology’s rapid spread, Krawczyk concedes that many users remain wary of it, either because they don’t see an immediate use-case for it in their personal lives or “some others are saying, ‘I’ve also heard that it makes things up a lot.’” Bard’s new capabilities are meant to help assuage those concerns and build public trust with the technology through increased transparency and more fully explained reasoning by the AI.

“We started off talking about Bard as a creative collaborator because that we saw in our initial testing, that’s how people use it,” he continued.”Six months into the experiment, that hypothesis is truly validating.”

The new iteration of Bard, “is the first time a language model will not only talk about how confident it is in its answer by finding content from across the web and linking to it,” Krawczyk said. “It’s also the first time the language model is willing to admit that it made a mistake or got something wrong, and we think that’s a critical step.” Krawczyk notes that feedback provided by the experimental tool’s users over the past half year has enabled the company to rapidly iterate increasingly robust, “more intuitive and imaginative” language models.

To that end, the chatbot can now parse and respond to more extensive and complicated prompts, such as “It’s my first semester in college and I want to get involved, but also would like to get strong grades. Help me formulate a point of view on why it’s important to balance my involvement in school clubs and extracurriculars, while also focusing on my studies.”

In order to provide these more expansive responses, Google is following OpenAI and Salesforce’s lead in enabling its AI to access the real-time capabilities of the company’s other apps — including Maps, YouTube, Hotels and Flights, among others. What’s more, users will be able to mix and match those API requests using natural language requests.

That is, if you want to take your partner to Puerto Rico on February 14, 2024 and go sightseeing, you’ll be able to ask Bard, “can you show me flights to Puerto Rico and available hotels on Valentines Day next year?” and then follow up with, “show me a map of interesting sites near our hotel” and Bard should be able to provide a list of potential flights, available hotel rooms and a list of stuff to do outside of said hotel room once you book it.

“We believe there’s already a high bar for the transparency choice and control that you have with your data,” Krawczyk said. “It needs to be even higher as it relates to bringing in your private data.”

In an effort to improve the transparency of its AI’s reasoning, Google is both explicitly linking to the sites that it is summarizing, and introducing a Double Check feature that will highlight potentially unfounded responses. When users click on Bard’s G button, the AI will independently audit its latest response and search the web for supporting information. If Search turns up contradictory evidence, the statement is highlighted orange. Conversely, heavily referenced and supported statements will be highlighted green. 

Users will also be able to opt-in to a feature, dubbed Bard Extensions, that will allow the AI access to their personal Google data (emails, photos, calendar entries, et cetera) so that it can provide specific answers about their daily lives. Instead of digging through email chains looking for a specific important date, for example, users will be able to ask Bard to scour their Gmail account for the information, as well as summarize the most important points of the overall discussion. Or, the user could work with the chatbot to draft a cover letter based specifically on the work experience listed in their resume.

And to allay concerns over Google potentially having even more access to your personal data than it already does, the company has pledged that “your content from Gmail, Docs and Drive is not seen by human reviewers, used by Bard to show you ads or used to train the Bard model.” What’s more, users will be able to opt in and out of the system at will and can allow or deny access to specific files. The service is initially only available to non-enterprise users in English, though the company is working to expand those offerings in the future.

“We think that this is a really critical step, but so much context is required in communication,” Krawczyk said. “We think really harnessing the healthy and open web is key because what we found in the first six months of Bard is, people will see a response and then follow up with trusted content to actually understand and go deeper. We’re excited to provide that for people with this new experience.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/googles-bard-ai-can-tap-the-companys-apps–and-your-personal-data–for-better-responses-100020506.html?src=rss 

Microsoft is planning a mid-generation refresh of the Xbox Series X with a new disc-less cylindrical design, according to a document accidentally revealed from the FTC v. Microsoft court battle. It also leaked the existence of a new controller with a gyro (codenamed Sebile), a refreshed Xbox Series S, key specs for the new devices and a timeline. It’s not clear how the documents came into public view, but they could be damaging for Xbox’s gaming business, as it shows the company’s strategy well over a year in advance.

Microsoft previously stated it has no plans to a mid-gen console refresh, but that doesn’t appear to be true according to the document. In fact, the company plans no less than three new consoles. The first, codenamed Ellewood, is a light refresh of the Xbox Series S (set to arrive in September 2024), while “Brooklin,” tentatively planned for November 2024, is a new disc-less version of the Xbox Series X. Another model, called XDL, matches Brooklin’s specs but will presumably offer Xbox Design Lab customization. 

Microsoft’s two-tone “Sebile” controller has a built-in accelerometer and haptics that “double as speakers,” which would make it more like Sony’s latest DualSense controller. It also features new modular thumbsticks, quieter buttons and thumbsticks and new app features, along with sustainability tweaks like a swappable battery, recycled materials and improved reparability. Once it’s released, we’ll likely see games with support for the gyro, letting you maneuver just by moving the controller around. The company will also have an XDL version of Sebile, codenamed Igraine.

The star of this leak is the new updated Xbox Series X console, though. While Microsoft touts it as “adorable” (presumably due to the cylindrical design that’s less severe than the current fridge-like Xbox Series X), many gamers may not find the lack of a disc cute at all. 

Along with the new design, the Series X will come with Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, USB-C front port, an all-new southbridge “to modernize IO and sustainability efforts” and a 6-nanometer die shrink. That will result in a reduced (15 percent) power draw with a new low-power standby mode that’s up to 80 percent less than current standby, along with increased use of recycled plastic (>30 percent) and 100 percent recycled packaging. 

It’ll have 2TB of storage, or double the current model, and come standard with the Sebile controller. Microsoft also notes that it’ll have the “same great price” as the current Xbox Series X at $499 when it arrives (tentatively November 2024), but that’s a somewhat disingenuous statement given the lack of a disc.

The Xbox Series S will have similar improvements inside, along with double the storage (1TB rather than 512GB), though the design appears relatively unchanged. It’s also set to carry the same current $299 price, with availability tentatively set for September 2024. 

A lot more information is laid out, including things that Microsoft would no doubt want private, like projected sales volumes, margins, funding and more. For instance, Microsoft notes that “Sebile full product vision not currently approved due to GM % (gross margin percentage), and appears to place that ball in the “Finance” court. It also outlines a “path to leadership in gaming” with a vision of cloud-first, PC-first and console-first Xbox Game Pass subscription numbers. The leak appears to be a massive screwup that will likely cause some severe fallout, so stay tuned.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/huge-leak-reveals-microsoft-will-launch-an-all-digital-xbox-series-x-and-new-gyro-controller-090442796.html?src=rss 

The newly upgraded particle accelerator at the DoE’s Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) has produced its first X-rays. The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) upgrade, LCLS-II, can emit up to a million X-ray pulses per second (8,000 times more than the original) and an almost continuous beam 10,000 times brighter than its predecessor. Researchers believe it will enable unprecedented research into “atomic-scale, ultrafast phenomena” and shed new light on quantum computing, communications, clean energy and medicine.

One of the keys to the accelerator’s powerful upgrade is its cooling abilities. The original LCLS, which went online in 2009, was capped at 120 pulses per second because of the natural limits of how many electrons could simultaneously travel through the accelerator’s room-temperature copper pipes. But the updated version includes 37 cryogenic modules cooled to negative 456 degrees Fahrenheit (colder than outer space), allowing it to “boost electrons to high energies with nearly zero energy loss.” The new accelerator will work in parallel with the existing copper one.

SLAC researchers say the new capabilities will allow them to examine details of quantum materials with unprecedented resolution while enabling new forms of quantum computing and “reveal unpredictable and fleeting chemical events” to help advance clean energy tech. In addition, they say it could help scientists develop new pharmaceuticals by studying how biological molecules work on an unprecedented scale. Finally, they stated that its unmatched 8,000 flashes per second will “open up entirely new fields of scientific investigation.”

SLAC researchers began envisioning upgrades to the original LCLS in 2010. The project has since gone through $1.1 billion and has involved “thousands of scientists, engineers, and technicians across DOE, as well as numerous institutional partners.” It required numerous “cutting-edge components,” including a new electron source, two cryoplants to produce refrigerant and two new undulators to generate X-rays from the beam. Multiple institutions contributed to the endeavor, including five US national labs (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, among others) and Cornell University.

“Experiments in each of these areas are set to begin in the coming weeks and months, attracting thousands of researchers from across the nation and around the world,” said LCLS Director Mike Dunne. “DOE user facilities such as LCLS are provided at no cost to the users — we select on the basis of the most important and impactful science. LCLS-II is going to drive a revolution across many academic and industrial sectors. I look forward to the onslaught of new ideas — this is the essence of why national labs exist.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/stanfords-upgraded-x-ray-laser-is-up-and-running-192326869.html?src=rss