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Xbox Says Project Helix Is a ‘Family of Devices.’ The Rest Is Still a Guess.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Microsoft, Video Games,
Every console generation starts with a word you're supposed to read a lot into. This time the word is "family."
Speaking to the BBC at gamescom, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said the company has "been hard at work on a great next generation and a great family of devices for Helix, and we'll share more soon." Project Helix is the code name for whatever follows the Series X and Series S. Sharma didn't say how many devices are in that family, what any of them are, or when you could buy one.
Apple Reportedly Built an Apple Pencil for the Foldable iPhone, Then Backed Away
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Smartphones, Rumors,
Apple built an Apple Pencil for its folding iPhone, and then appears to have talked itself out of it. That comes from Mark Gurman's Power On newsletter for Bloomberg, published Sunday. He describes a stubbier Pencil, sized for a phone rather than an iPad, that snaps magnetically onto the side of the device to sit and charge there. Apple tested it. Gurman says it probably will not be announced next month, and probably is not going on sale at all.
Apple has confirmed none of this, and none of it is a product. It is one reporter's account of an internal prototype, and killing prototypes is a normal part of how hardware gets made. The reasons he gives describe why a stylus on a folding phone is hard before anyone gets near the software.
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The US Is Reportedly Drafting a Rule to Stop China Renting the AI Chips It Can’t Buy
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Artificial Intelligence,
American export controls on AI chips have always had a hole in them shaped like the cloud. You cannot ship an Nvidia Blackwell server to Beijing. You can, apparently, sit in Beijing and rent time on one that is racked in Bangkok. A new report says the Trump administration is finally writing a rule about that.
The Information reported this week that the Commerce Department is working on export controls aimed at Chinese companies' remote access to advanced AI compute in countries that do not have matching restrictions, with Thailand and Singapore named as the obvious examples. Per that reporting, Commerce could circulate the draft to industry trade groups for feedback as early as September. Every word of that is in the conditional. What exists is a draft described by sources. No rule has been proposed, published, or enforced, and the administration has not announced one.
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Apple TV Now Costs $14.99 a Month, and the Annual Plan Took the Bigger Hit
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News, Home Entertainment,
The annual plan is where this one bites. Apple raised US prices for its Apple TV streaming service today: $14.99 a month, up from $12.99, and $119 a year, up from $99. The monthly bill went up about 15%, and the yearly one went up 20%.
Apple didn't send a press release. Its Apple TV page now lists $14.99 a month after a seven-day trial, and points to Apple One "starting at $21.95," which confirms the Individual bundle went up two dollars as well, and Apple's own marketing pages don't list a yearly price at all.
Click to continue reading Apple TV Now Costs $14.99 a Month, and the Annual Plan Took the Bigger Hit
Stealing a car in Grand Theft Auto has taken about as much effort as opening a door for two decades now. Walk up, hold a button, drive away. In Grand Theft Auto VI, that stops working on a lot of cars.
Rob Nelson, co-studio head at Rockstar North, told IGN the studio has "put some layers of stratification into the vehicles." Before, "you could just press triangle to automatically hotwire and steal any vehicle." Now certain parked cars stay shut to you "until you get a bit further along with the story and you acquire certain tools to get into them." Carjacking is untouched. In Nelson's words, "You can always carjack any driver you see."
Click to continue reading GTA 6 Is Making You Work for Stolen Cars
VW’s first electric California camper skips the kitchen and the pop-top
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Misc. Tech, Transportation,
The camper van fantasy usually falls apart at the sink. You picture waking up at a trailhead with the doors thrown open, and then you remember the plumbing, the gas bottle, and the cabinetry you haul around all year and use four weekends of it.
Volkswagen's answer is to leave most of that out. The ID. California Cruise, shown today at the Caravan Salon in Düsseldorf, is the first fully electric van to wear the California badge, and it's built on the ID. Buzz Pro. You get a bed for two, blackout blinds on every window, two camping chairs, a table, and a 2,000-watt socket. You don't get a kitchen, and going by what VW has announced, you don't get a pop-top roof either.
Click to continue reading VW’s first electric California camper skips the kitchen and the pop-top
DLSS 5 Leaked Out of NBA 2K27, and Modders Already Have It Running in Control
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Mods / Hacks, PC / Laptop, Video Games,
A basketball game is a strange place to find Nvidia's next graphics technology, and yet here we are. NBA 2K27 went into early access this week carrying a file called nvngx_dlssnr.dll, short for DLSS Neural Rendering. Developer Renan Maniero spotted it. Within hours, modders had pulled it out and forced it into games it was never meant to touch.
DLSS 5 has not launched. Nvidia announced it in March and said it would arrive this fall, and a library buried in a basketball build is not a release. What people are running today is an unfinished piece of software that escaped early, injected into titles with no official support for it, at settings nobody outside Nvidia fully understands yet.
Spatial Audio in CarPlay Reaches the Volvo EX90, With a 25-Speaker Catch
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Portable Audio / Video, Transportation,
The car is where a lot of people still listen to music on purpose. Alone, on a highway, with nobody interrupting and nothing else competing for the speakers, you hear the bass line in a way you never do at your desk. It's the closest thing most of us have to a listening room, and audio companies have been circling it for years.
Volvo is pushing Spatial Audio in CarPlay, powered by Dolby Atmos, out to the EX90 through a software update, and confirmed it in a press release this week. Back in July it named the EX60, EX90 and ES90 as the three models getting it. There's a catch, and it's an expensive one. The feature needs the optional Bowers & Wilkins sound system.
Click to continue reading Spatial Audio in CarPlay Reaches the Volvo EX90, With a 25-Speaker Catch
Chip Tariffs Could Reach Laptops and Game Consoles
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: PC / Laptop, Rumors, Video Games,
Taxing a chip and taxing the laptop that chip lives inside are two very different policies. One duty falls on a component. The other falls on the whole machine, and the customs value of a machine is a lot bigger than the customs value of the silicon in it.
On August 27, Politico reported that the Trump administration is weighing the second version. Citing eight people familiar with the discussions, Politico said officials have been working on a round of semiconductor tariffs that would reach finished products built with chips: laptops, gaming consoles, and data center servers. CNBC and Reuters both picked the story up the same day, and Reuters noted it could not independently verify it. Nothing has been signed. No rate has been reported, and there is no effective date, because there is nothing yet to make effective.
Click to continue reading Chip Tariffs Could Reach Laptops and Game Consoles
The Galaxy S26 FE Costs $50 More, and Only the Chip Really Changed
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Features,
The Fan Edition pitch has never been complicated. Samsung takes a flagship, shaves off the parts most people won't miss, and sells it for a few hundred dollars less. The Galaxy S26 FE, official as of August 27, keeps that pitch intact. It also raises the entry fee to $699.99, up $50 from where the S25 FE started last year.
For that you get a 6.7-inch FHD+ Dynamic AMOLED 2X running at 120Hz and rated for 1,900 nits, a 4,900mAh battery, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB or 256GB of storage. It arrives September 3 at select carriers and September 4 at Samsung.com and everywhere else, in Pistachio, Blueberry, and Graphite. Nearly all of that carried over from the S25 FE unchanged.
Click to continue reading The Galaxy S26 FE Costs $50 More, and Only the Chip Really Changed