Gear Live: The Latest Tech, Gadgets, AI, and Gaming News
Apple Intelligence Now Wants 14GB Free, and 256GB iPhone Owners Pay for It
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Software, Artificial Intelligence,
Before you update to iOS 27 and switch on the new Siri, check your free space. Apple now asks for up to 14GB of it on its newest high-end iPhones. The old number was 8GB.
Per Apple's support document, the 14GB tier covers iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max and iPhone Air. Every other Apple Intelligence phone, from the iPhone 15 Pro up through the standard iPhone 17, still needs up to 8GB, and Apple Watch needs up to 1.5GB. iPhone Air starts at 256GB and so does iPhone 18 Pro, so the bigger bill lands on the people who already paid the most.
Click to continue reading Apple Intelligence Now Wants 14GB Free, and 256GB iPhone Owners Pay for It
Clicks Wants $499 Today for a Keyboard Phone That Ships in December
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Announcements, Smartphones,
For two years Clicks sold you a keyboard that snapped onto somebody else's phone. Now it wants to sell you the whole phone, and it wants the full $499 about three months before one lands in your hands.
The Clicks Communicator is a small Android phone with a physical keyboard under a 4.03-inch screen, the arrangement you last took seriously on a BlackBerry. Clicks locked in the final specs this week, opened order configuration, and said shipments begin in December. The $499 launch price runs through September 30. On October 1 it becomes $649.
Click to continue reading Clicks Wants $499 Today for a Keyboard Phone That Ships in December
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Apple’s Hardware Boss on the iPhone Duo Crease: ‘Hold Us Accountable to That, Please’
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Smartphones,
"Hold us accountable to that, please." That is Tom Marieb, Apple's VP of hardware engineering, talking to TechRadar about the crease down the middle of the iPhone Duo. Every folding phone shipped so far has grown one, and Apple has now invited everybody to come back and check on his.
The Duo is Apple's first foldable, it starts at $1,999, and it goes on sale October 23. Nobody outside Apple has folded one a few thousand times yet. Marieb's claim is that when you finally do, you will have a hard time seeing the line, and he would like to be judged on it.
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California Wants a Kill Switch for Frontier AI. The Order Never Says What One Is.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Artificial Intelligence,
A kill switch is an easy thing to picture. Somewhere in a data center sits a big red button, and if a frontier AI model slips its constraints, somebody walks over and presses it.
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order on September 18 that has been read as asking for exactly that. Engadget wrote that the governor "wants to implement a kill switch for frontier AI models." Gizmodo called the idea "eyebrow-raising." The order itself doesn't say what the switch is, how it works, or who gets to pull it.
Joby’s Plane Flew 3,199 Miles Across America. Its Pilot Never Touched a Thing.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Transportation, Artificial Intelligence,
A Cessna Caravan lifted off from Buchanan Field in Concord, California, flew 3,199 miles, and landed at a small county airport on North Carolina's Outer Banks. There was a pilot sitting up front the whole way. Joby Aviation says that pilot never touched a control.
The plane is a converted Caravan that Joby calls the J208, and the company says it handled its own taxiing, takeoffs, route navigation and landings for the entire trip. Humans supervised it remotely from Joby's autonomy headquarters in California and from Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, at distances of up to 2,323 miles. Joby is calling it the first fully autonomous flight across the United States, and it is being loud about what it wants to do next.
SpaceX Plans to Retire Crew Dragon Eventually. NASA’s Backup Is Still Starliner.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Science,
NASA paid for two rides to orbit so that one bad flight would never strand American astronauts on the ground. For most of the past two years it has had one. SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell now says that one has an end date, even if she will not say when.
Talking on the All-In Podcast, Shotwell said SpaceX intends to wind Crew Dragon down and leave room for Boeing. "There is another provider, Boeing has been paid, I think, probably more than we have been paid to develop their human capsule," she said. "So we're just gonna let them have some business. They should fly their capsule." She went further: "The government paid a lot of money for that. They should be able to use it." She also said "We're not retiring it today, for sure," and she named no year.
Twitch’s CEO Put GTA 6 Multiplayer in 2027. Nobody at Rockstar Has.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Rumors, Video Games,
The most specific thing anyone has said about Grand Theft Auto 6's multiplayer mode this year came from a man who doesn't work at Rockstar Games.
Twitch CEO Dan Clancy sat down with Bloomberg to talk about what GTA 6 will do to his platform's numbers, and somewhere in the middle of it he put a date on an online mode nobody has announced. "You are going to see this big bump with GTA 6, but then an even bigger one next year when they launch multiplayer." Next year is 2027. Rockstar has never said that, and neither has Take-Two.
Click to continue reading Twitch’s CEO Put GTA 6 Multiplayer in 2027. Nobody at Rockstar Has.
Laser Strikes on Aircraft Fell 24% This Year, and the FAA Says It Knows Why
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Science, Transportation,
That photo is what a laser strike looks like from the left seat. The whole windscreen washed green, the runway lights behind it barely readable, and a pilot on final approach whose night vision has gone. The FAA published that image. On Thursday it published better news to go with it.
Pilots have reported 4,470 laser strikes to the agency so far in 2026, a 24 percent drop from this time last year and the third annual decline in a row. The all-time high was 13,304 in 2023. Then 12,840 in 2024, then 10,993 in 2025, and now a year running well below that pace.
Paris Opened a Criminal Probe Into Smart Glasses Filming, Five Days Before Meta Connect
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Cameras, Wearables, Editorial,
You can be filmed on a public street by a stranger in ordinary-looking sunglasses, end up on TikTok, and never know either thing happened. The Paris prosecutor's office says it has recently opened at least one criminal investigation following sexual harassment complaints involving smart glasses, after a run of videos in which men record women in public without their consent and post the footage for engagement.
Prosecutors told Reuters that their cybercrime unit tested a pair of the glasses about two weeks ago to work out what offenses the devices could be used to commit. They did not say whether Meta is a target of the investigation or whether the file covers only the unnamed people doing the filming. Meta has not been named as a suspect, and the office has not clarified the scope. Anyone telling you France is prosecuting Meta is ahead of the reporting.
Google’s CC Is a Family AI With Its Own Google Account. Six People Choose What It Sees.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Software, Artificial Intelligence,
There is a new Google account in some households this week, and it does not belong to anyone who lives there. Google Labs has relaunched CC as an AI agent for families and groups, and it runs on its own Google account. Up to six people connect to that account and decide, one at a time, what it gets to see.
Google says the separate account gives CC "a distinct identity and clear permissions model," which is a polite way of saying the company knows a shared agent with a line into six inboxes is a harder sell than a personal one. What you get in return is one place where the household calendar, the task list and the school emails all land. Each morning CC sends a brief it calls "Your Day Ahead": who needs to be where, what needs to be done.