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After months of rumors and speculation, Apple has finally revealed the specs of its in-house custom ARM processor that will power future Macs—well, at least most of the important ones, like core count and number of transistors. Unfortunately, those specs don’t paint a complete picture of how the M1’s performance will actually compare to other…
Growing up you wouldn’t catch me dead with anything pink. Pink meant girly, and girly—I was convinced—meant weak. From a young age, I insisted on jeering at anything soft or sparkly. It only got worse when I started gravitating toward stereotypical male-coded hobbies, namely video games, which brought so-called “girl games” onto my radar of…
TikTok filed an injunction in a U.S. Appeals Court late Tuesday night in an attempt to halt an order by the Trump administration that would force the app to shutter. In the August 14 executive order, Trump directed the app to prohibit all new downloads beginning on Sept. 30, with parent company ByteDance being forced…
In a dispatch from Facebook’s newsroom released Tuesday night, corporate executives sought to downplay the role partisan discourse plays in shaping the platform, stressing that political content makes up only about 6% of users’ newsfeeds and that ranking pages by which posts receive the most engagement is not necessarily a good metric to determine which…
As of this morning, anyone who has received, or will receive, a beta invite to Luna, Amazon’s brand new cloud gaming service, can access the Ubisoft+ channel that’s filled with—you guessed it—Ubisoft games like Assassins’ Creed Odyssey. What Amazon didn’t initially announce was the price of subscribing to that game channel. But according to Ubisoft,…
Another argument for throwing your Ring doorbell into a cement mixer: It might catch your house on fire. After receiving 85 reports of doorbells catching fire, Ring has issued a recall of some second-generation Ring doorbells (the one with the blue ring). The announcement on the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s site claims that smoldering…
A West Virginia man named Timothy Watson was arrested last week for allegedly selling a 3D-printed wall hook that, when disassembled, was actually a “drop-in auto sear,” a small piece of plastic that could turn the popular AR-15 rifle into an illegal machine gun. The product, still available at the excitingly-named portablewallhanger.com, consists of two…
You don’t need to buy a Leica to get professional-level photos. It certainly won’t hurt, but a Leica is an object that tells the world you are either quite serious, have a ton of cash to burn, or a little bit of both. So, if you’re going to buy a Leica, why not buy a…
Don’t do it, they said. Hold off, they said! Against many stern warnings against buying a redesigned Apple product, which history has shown may be a poor and even regrettable decision, I intend to buy the newly unveiled Mac Mini—a decision my colleagues have told me repeatedly is reckless and bad. Here’s my thinking: I…
Another day, another Spotify acquisition. This time, it’s podcast advertising platform Megaphone, which the music streaming giant announced it was buying earlier today, in an attempt to beef up its advertising chops as it expands its roster of podcast programming. The acquisition accomplishes a few things for both the buyer and buy-ee. On Spotify’s end,…
Today, Apple announced its first in-house system-on-chip for Macs, the M1, and the Macs that will be based on the new processor: the MacBook Air, Mac Mini, and, of course, a 13-inch MacBook Pro. Apple used its event to dunk on PCs, and the $1,300 MacBook Pro is perhaps the pinnacle of those comparisons: the…
Someone at 10 Downing Street isn’t so great with Photoshop: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted a congratulatory message to President-elect Joe Biden with a barely visible hidden message seemingly congratulating Trump on his electoral win. Johnson’s tweet from Nov. 7 congratulated Biden on his win and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris for her “historic achievement.…
The Mac Mini is getting a massive update just two years after the last one. Featuring an air-cooled M1 processor Apple promises this is the fastest Mac Mini, and because it’s a Mac Mini it should be the cheapest Mac overall, as well. Apple claims its 8-core M1 is up to three times faster than…
Back at WWDC this summer, Apple teased one of the biggest updates to macOS since it moved to Unix with Mac OS X, and almost six months later, the update is finally upon us. Announced today during Apple’s big MacBook event, Big Sur promises to be a major change for macOS users that brings the…
Apple announced at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June that it planned to transition Macs away from Intel to an Apple-designed chip based on ARM, but we had few details on what that chip would entail—until now. The M1 chip for Macs is here, and now we know exactly what Apple has in store for…
Back at WWDC 2020, Apple announced its big plan to transition all of its computer over to custom-designed ARM-based processors, and now Apple is finally ready to announce its first batch of systems using those chips starting with this: the new MacBook Air with M1. Sporting the first of a new family of processors designed…
Steve Bannon has been outed for his involvement in running a network of misinformation pages on Facebook. Who could have possibly seen this coming. Facebook has talked a big game about monitoring election misinformation, and yet the independent activist network Avaaz said it had to alert the company to the pages before it removed them…
It took a stupid long time for wearables makers to add period tracking to their devices. Now, about 18 months after Garmin introduced period tracking to its devices, the company is now allowing users to track their pregnancy as well. The feature is part of the Garmin Connect platform and will allow pregnant users to…
Do you feel the creeping sense of deja vu? You should! Today is Apple’s third event in as many months. If September saw the Apple Watch and iPad, and October was for iPhones, it’s likely that November is the time for Apple’s ARM-powered MacBooks. Like the last two times, today’s event will start streaming at…
Following a two-year investigation into its practices as a retailer and platform, EU regulators announced antitrust charges against Amazon on Tuesday. The European Commission said that it takes issue with what it says is Amazon’s collection of non-public data on its platform that is used to benefit its own retail business. And if that doesn’t…
