Hail the orb! High-end French audio hardware manufacturer Elipson has a brand-new Death Star-esque orboid speaker worthy of worrying any self-respecting Alderaanian. It is called the W35 Xi. At £699 ($876) it's a pricey boombox but not far off from similar speakers made by other premium audio companies. (It's even …
Read More »Tesla Has Lost Its Range Crown to a Chinese EV You’ve Never Heard Of
All electric car owners know that cold weather affects range. It’s a chemical phenomenon that also gives your phone, laptop, and anything else powered by lithium-ion batteries a hard time through the winter months. But since electric car chargers aren’t yet as convenient as USB sockets, it’s the EVs that …
Read More »The Apple Vision Pro’s Killer App Is … Kitchen Timers?
This week, Apple finally let a carefully selected few people try out its boldest, most portentous product since 2007’s iPhone. It’s Apple Vision Pro, a spatial computer that is definitely not a VR headset. It costs a small fortune, some $3,499, yet preorders were wiped out within minutes. It's estimated …
Read More »Snap Recalls Its Pixy Drone Because of Overheating Batteries
Hey, remember when Snap made a drone that flew over your head and shot an aerial selfie? The Pixy drone was more or less an experiment, in line with Spectacles and Snap’s other forays into hardware. The drone debuted in May 2022, but then the company officially killed off the …
Read More »Apple Ramped Up Autonomous Vehicle Testing Last Year, Filings Show
Apple’s secretive vehicle project doesn’t have much to show for its six years of work, at least publicly. But records submitted by the company to a California agency show that Apple went on an autonomous testing jag last year, almost quadrupling the number of miles it tested on public roads …
Read More »Is There Lead in Your Reusable Water Bottle?
Stanley, maker of reusable water bottles and cups, seems to be in hot water. Just a few weeks ago, people were lining up to buy the giant collectible Stanley cups, but since then there's been a U-turn. Videos of Stanley cup owners testing theirs for lead with at-home kits have …
Read More »Ford Is Giving Away Free Tesla Charger Converters That Will Unlock a New World of EV Power
Ford CEO Jim Farley hopped on Elon Musk’s X today to make an announcement relevant to Elon Musk’s Tesla: Ford will be giving away adapters so that its electric vehicles can easily charge on Tesla’s charging network. “We want to make charging more convenient for our Ford EV owners,” Farley …
Read More »One of the Internet’s Oldest Software Archives Is Shutting Down
In a move that marks the end of an era, New Mexico State University (NMSU) recently announced the impending closure of its Hobbes OS/2 Archive on April 15, 2024. For over three decades, the archive has been a key resource for users of the IBM OS/2 operating system and its …
Read More »Porsche Rolls Out Its Second All-Electric Car
German auto manufacturer Porsche announced its second-ever model of an all-electric vehicle. The new EV Macan comes in two forms—the Macan 4 and the slightly beefier Macan Turbo. Both of these all-electric SUVs have high-performance 100-kilowatt-hour batteries. These are also the first Porsches to use an 800-volt architecture, which allows …
Read More »Apps Made the iPhone. They’re Missing on the Vision Pro
Apple’s Vision Pro mixed-reality headset is coming to the real world on February 2, and all the previews so far have shown it to be a great bundle of contradictions. It’s capable but clunky. Mobile but tethered to a battery pack. Exciting but just so, so expensive. Perhaps most importantly, …
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