Apple Just Raised Trade-In Values, and It’s Taking Android Phones Now

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Smartphones, Hot Deals,

Apple raising trade-in values is normally a footnote. Apple raising trade-in values roughly a month before its biggest launch of the year, with some devices jumping close to 30 percent, is a strategy.

The company updated its U.S. trade-in estimates today, lifting the numbers for most iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch models compared to the last revision in May. It also added several Android phones to the list for the first time.

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OpenAI’s First Gadget Is a $300 Donut with Moving Arms You Carry Around

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smart Home, Rumors, Artificial Intelligence,

Picture a metal doughnut roughly the size of a hockey puck sitting on your kitchen counter. No screen. Small moving parts that shift when it answers you, and lights that glow when it's listening. That is the first piece of hardware OpenAI wants to sell you, and Bloomberg says it will cost somewhere between $300 and $400.

Mark Gurman's report gives real shape to a device we've only heard described in fuzzy terms since July. It's a speaker with no display, built to be picked up in one hand and carried from the kitchen to the laundry room to the bedroom. It runs on a battery. It has speaker grilles, microphones, a camera system, and sensors that feed it information about whatever room it's in. Jony Ive is designing it.

Click to continue reading OpenAI’s First Gadget Is a $300 Donut with Moving Arms You Carry Around

Bose’s New QuietComfort Headphones Borrow the Ultra’s Best Trick for $359

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Accessories, Portable Audio / Video,

If you wear glasses and you've ever noticed noise cancellation working worse than the review scores promised, you weren't imagining it. The arm of your frames breaks the seal on the earcup, and ANC that depends on a sealed cavity starts leaking. Bose says it finally built around that.

The new QuietComfort Headphones (2nd Gen) arrive today at $359, the first real hardware update to the line since 2023. Preorders open August 8 and shipping starts August 13.

Click to continue reading Bose’s New QuietComfort Headphones Borrow the Ultra’s Best Trick for $359

ChatGPT’s New Slider Lets You Decide How Hard It Thinks

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Software, Artificial Intelligence,

The most annoying thing about ChatGPT has never been that it's wrong. It's that it's long. You ask a one-line question and get back a bulleted essay with three headers and a summary you didn't request. OpenAI has apparently noticed.

Alongside today's free-tier news, Plus and Pro subscribers are getting an updated GPT-5.6 Sol in ChatGPT's Chat experience, tuned to give shorter and more focused answers, and a slider that lets you set how much thought the model puts into each response. Both are live today on web, mobile, and desktop.

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Dolby Vision 2 Is Real Now, and Hisense Owners Get It First

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment,

This is the first time the next generation of Dolby's HDR format has landed on hardware people can actually buy. The firmware is going out to 2026 Hisense UX, UR9, UR8, and U7 sets (sold as U7 Pro in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Central and South America), on both Google TV and Hisense's own VIDAA platform.

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Airtable Was Worth $11 Billion. It Just Sold to Bending Spoons for $1.28 Billion.

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Internet, Software,

If you use Airtable to run something, a small production schedule, a client tracker, the spreadsheet that got out of hand, today's news deserves your attention for one reason: Bending Spoons is buying it. The Italian company agreed Tuesday to acquire Airtable in an all-cash deal valuing it at $1.285 billion in enterprise value, or roughly $2.25 billion counting Airtable's cash.

That's a fine outcome by most measures and a brutal one by the measure that matters to Airtable's investors. In 2021 the company was valued at over $11 billion. Earlier this year its shares were reportedly changing hands on secondary markets around $4 billion. Airtable raised more than $1.4 billion over its life. The math does not work out the way anyone hoped.

Click to continue reading Airtable Was Worth $11 Billion. It Just Sold to Bending Spoons for $1.28 Billion.

I Built the Most Unreasonable Mac Desk Setup! (Video)

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Peripherals, Videos,

There's a version of this desk that makes sense, and this isn't it.

Four Apple silicon Macs. A terabyte and a half of unified memory. Six docking stations. A chair with actual motors inside it.

I record and edit every video here, test hardware here, and spend a completely unreasonable percentage of my life here when I'm not traveling. At some point the question stopped being what do I need and quietly became what happens if I stop saying no.

Click to continue reading I Built the Most Unreasonable Mac Desk Setup! (Video)

The Budget Xbox Series S Now Costs 499 Euros, and That’s the Good News

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Microsoft, Video Games,

The Xbox Series S was supposed to be the console you bought without thinking about it. Cheap, small, good enough, the thing you got your kid or picked up as a second machine for the bedroom. In Europe it now costs €499.99. That's a 43 percent increase on a console that launched as the budget option, and it's the smallest number in this story.

Microsoft told everyone back in June that Xbox prices were going up on August 1st, but it only shared US figures at the time. The European and UK numbers landed when the increase actually took effect, and they're considerably worse than the American ones.

Click to continue reading The Budget Xbox Series S Now Costs 499 Euros, and That’s the Good News

Fitbit Data Can Finally Write to Apple Health, Twelve Years Late

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Wearables, Google,

If you wear a Fitbit and carry an iPhone, you've spent the last twelve years running a small, annoying errand. Your steps and sleep lived in one app. Everything else your phone tracked lived in Apple Health. Getting them into the same place meant paying for a third-party bridge and hoping it didn't break. That errand is finally over.

Google Health version 5.05 landed on iOS this week, and buried in the release notes is the thing people have been asking for since 2014: you can now share your exercise records, sleep, vitals, steps, and more from Google Health into Apple Health. It works for Fitbit trackers and the Pixel Watch, since Google Health replaced the old Fitbit app back in May.

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Maingear’s New Gaming PCs Hide Every Cable, and the Top One Costs $6,499

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Design, PC / Laptop,

You know the moment. You've finished a build, the glass side panel is on, and instead of admiring the graphics card you're staring at a nest of black cables you spent forty minutes trying to route behind a motherboard tray that was never going to fit them.

Maingear's new Zero lineup is built so that never happens, and you don't have to do the building. These are pre-built desktops that use the company's rear-connection design to move every power and data cable to the back of the board, out of sight. Look through the glass and you see the CPU socket, the memory, the water cooling tubes, the PCIe slots. Nothing else.

Click to continue reading Maingear’s New Gaming PCs Hide Every Cable, and the Top One Costs $6,499