The Verge’s 2022 back-to-school gift guide
All the best backpacks, laptops, tablets, and wearables for the new school year. | The Verge
Our favorite laptops, bags, and gadgets for students
As quickly as it arrived, summer vacation is drawing to a close. A new school year is right around the corner, and while the learning landscape has transformed rather drastically over the past couple of years, many aspects have remained unchanged. Having the right supplies, for instance, can make a world of difference for new students, especially if they’re looking to recharge between lessons or better manage their hefty course load.
If you’re at a loss as to what you should gift the student in your life, we’ve collected some slick bits of technology that are perfect for pupils returning to the classroom — virtual or otherwise. Whether they’re entering the throes of high school or diving into the larger academic-industrial complex, there are plenty of staples on our list that everyone will love. These picks aren’t just for students, either; the latest Kindle Paperwhite, the Nintendo Switch Lite, and Apple’s AirPods Pro are all great gifts that anyone can appreciate.
Correction July 22nd, 1:55PM ET:An earlier version of this story stated that the battery life of the Logitech M650 was 24 hours. The M650 can last up to 24 months on a single AA battery and the table has been updated to reflect that. We regret the error.
You can’t revert from Android 13 to Android 12 on Pixel 6 devices
Illustration by William Joel / The Verge
Android 13 is now rolling out to Google’s Pixel phones, but if you want to flash the update onto your Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro, or Pixel 6A, with the company’s custom Tensor chip, you won’t be able to flash back to Android 12 because of a bootloader update, according to a notice on Google’s developer website.
“Warning: The Android 13 update for Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro, and the Pixel 6a contains a bootloader update that increments the anti-roll back version,” the notice reads. “After flashing an Android 13 build on these devices you will not be able to flash older Android 12 builds.”
Additionally, if you’ve been in the Android 13 beta test group and you’d like to get out of the cycle of accelerated updates without erasing your device — usually a necessary step for exiting the queue — then this is the time to do it. Once your phone has updated to the most recent release version of Android, simply visit Google’s beta site and unenroll. On the other hand, if you stay in the beta group, then you’ll get early access to test builds of future Feature Drops for Android 13.
Android 13 comes with some nice new features like improved customization tools and a new permission option to reduce notifications. Right now, the release is just rolling out for Pixels, but it’s expected to hit devices from other vendors like Samsung and OnePlus later this year.
Nvidia and Disney Can Breathe Life Into the Metaverse
Let’s look at how Nvidia and Disney can, and should, showcase their strengths at the forefront of the metaverse. Then we’ll close with the product of the week: the HP Elite Dragonfly G3 laptop. The post Nvidia and Disney Can Breathe Life Into the Metaverse appeared first on TechNewsWorld.
Microsoft finally admits Xbox One sales were less than half of the PS4
Xbox One S | Photo by Tyler Pina / The Verge
Official Xbox One sales have largely been a mystery, but now Microsoft is finally admitting the obvious: the PS4 outsold the Xbox One — by a lot.
Microsoft stopped reporting its Xbox One sales figures at the beginning of its 2016 financial year, focusing instead on Xbox Live numbers. The change meant we’ve never officially known how well Xbox One was holding up compared to the PS4 after the Xbox One’s troubled launch. Analyst estimates have consistently put Microsoft in third place behind Sony and Nintendo, and now documents (Word doc) submitted to Brazil’s national competition regulator (spotted by Game Luster) finally shed some light on how the Xbox One generation went.
“Sony has surpassed Microsoft in terms of console sales and installed base, having sold more than twice as many Xbox in the last generation,” admits Microsoft, as translated from Portuguese.
Sony no longer report PS4 shipments, which means lifetime sales sit at 117.2 million as of March. While Microsoft hasn’t provided a concrete sales number for Xbox One, its admission means the company must have sold less than approximately 58.5 million units. That lines up with market research from Ampere Analysis in 2020, which put the install base of Xbox One at 51 million units at the end of Q2 2020. Nintendo Switch currently sits at 111.08 million lifetime sales, and looks set to pass the PS4 later this year.
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
The Xbox Series S is helping bridge the PlayStation sales gap.
Microsoft seems to be closing this giant gap with its Xbox Series S / X consoles, though. Ampere Analysis says “Sony ended 2021 with PS5 cumulative sell-through reaching 17 million units, around 1.6 times the performance of Xbox Series sales.” While Microsoft recoded a quarterly hardware revenue decline for Xbox recently, CEO Satya Nadella said Microsoft has “been the market leader in North America for three quarters in a row among next-gen consoles.” Microsoft still doesn’t reveal official Xbox sales figures.
The Xbox One might not have sold well, but Microsoft’s work on the Xbox One generation laid some important groundwork for the Xbox Series S / X. Microsoft transitioned into the Xbox Series X with 1440p support, Variable Refresh Rate (VRR), and lots of 120Hz games all at launch thanks to testing these features on previous Xbox One consoles.
Microsoft’s admission of weak Xbox One sales come as part of a broader debate between Sony and Microsoft over the Xbox maker’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. Sony and Microsoft are both arguing over Call of Duty, game subscriptions, and much more as Microsoft attempts to clear its acquisition in Brazil. Microsoft has also claimed in documents submitted to Brazil’s regulator that Sony pays for “blocking rights” to prevent developers adding their content to Xbox Game Pass.
Twitter allows MBS aide implicated in spying plot to keep verified account
Saudi official Bader al-Asaker accused by US of recruiting employees to secretly report on dissidents’ anonymous accounts
Twitter has allowed a senior Saudi official and aide to Mohammed bin Salman to maintain a verified account with more than 2m followers despite allegations that the official recruited and paid Twitter employees to secretly report on dissidents’ anonymous accounts.
A US jury on Tuesday convicted one of the former Twitter employees, a US-Lebanese national named Ahmad Abouammo on charges that he used his position at the social media company to spy on Twitter users on behalf of the Saudi government. Two other named defendants, Saudi citizens Ali Alzabarah and Ahmed Almutairi, are on the FBI’s wanted list and are believed to be in Saudi Arabia. Both are accused of acting as unregistered agents of Saudi Arabia.
Workplace Productivity: Are You Being Tracked? Across industries and incomes, more employees are being tracked, recorded and ranked. What is gained, companies say, is efficiency and accountability. What is lost?
Your iPhone may soon have more ads
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
Apple could eventually bring ads to more of the apps that come pre-installed on your iPhone and other Apple devices, including Maps, Books, and Podcasts. According to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple has internally tested search ads in Maps, which could display recommendations when you search for restaurants, stores, or other nearby businesses.
Apple already implements a similar advertising model on the App Store, as developers can pay to have their app promoted on a search page for a particular query, like “puzzle games” or “photo editor.” As noted by Gurman, ads on Maps could work in the same way, with businesses paying to appear at the top of search results when users enter certain search terms.
Gurman believes that Apple could introduce ads to its native Podcasts and Books apps as well. This could potentially allow publishers to place ads in areas within each app, or pay to get their content placed higher in search results. Just like Maps, Podcasts and Books are currently ad-free.
And while the App Store already has ads on the Search tab, Gurman expects Apple to expand ads to the Today tab and app download pages, which tracks with previous reports from 9to5Mac, Apple Insider, and MacRumors. According to 9to5Google, ads on the Today tab will show up as larger cards with the word “Ad” placed beneath the app’s name, while ads on individual app pages will appear highlighted in blue in the “You Might Also Like” section.
Gurman mentions the potential for advertising on Apple TV Plus, too, and says the company could opt to create a lower-priced ad-supported tier, something both Netflix and Disney Plus plan on doing by the end of this year. Right now, Apple TV Plus offers only a $4.99 / month ad-free subscription plan (although it has started showing ads during its Friday Night Baseball livestreams).
Apple’s move to open up more ad slots on its App Store — and potentially on Maps, Podcasts, and Books — could signal that Apple’s looking to expand its advertising business even more. In May, a report from Insider revealed that Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, is reportedly planning to restructure Apple’s services business to direct more attention to streaming and advertising. Apple’s services arm, which includes advertising and its various subscriptions, saw a 12 percent increase in revenue last quarter.
Halo system link still holds up more than 20 years later
I just played some Halo on an original Xbox, and it was still very good. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Moments after booting up Halo: Combat Evolved with some friends, stepping onto the legendary Blood Gulch map, and dying nearly instantly from a few well-placed pistol shots, I remembered exactly why wires are good.
When my friends brought two original Xbox consoles along for a beach weekend, I expected that there would be some hassle getting them to work for our planned six-player matches. The game and consoles are more than 20 years old, likely predating even the dusty flat-screen TVs we were playing on. But to my surprise, just a few minutes after we had set up the consoles and connected them for system link play, we plugged in some controllers, made a Halo lobby, and began trash talking each other across the entire house.
The simplicity of jumping into Combat Evolved was a major counterpoint to how many hoops there can be in modern multiplayer games. Take Fortnite. My wife and I play the game nearly every day, but we play online across two different systems; I’m on the PS5 while she’s on the Switch. To play together, we both have to start the game; wait for it to load and download any necessary updates; party up; start matchmaking; and wait some more for the match to actually start. And then we can run around the Fortnite island. The whole process doesn’t take too long, but I spend a lot of time tapping my foot impatiently.
Halo over system link was a lot speedier. One group would make a lobby that the other joined, then the lobby-maker would decide the map and the game rules, the game would count down, and then the match would start. Halo even lets you mash the buttons to speed up the countdown, which is something I now want in every local multiplayer game.
With online games, I get that starting a match takes longer by design. The infrastructure that lets you play games with anyone across the world is inherently going to need more time to make sure that everyone’s synced up than two Xboxes lashed together. But it was really nice to be able to hop into a Halo match almost as soon as I sat down to play — LAN parties are good!
It wasn’t just the networking that benefitted from a wired connection; the wired Xbox controllers were unexpectedly great as well. Later in the weekend, we wanted to play a few six-player matches of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, but I had to spend a frustrating few minutes connecting controllers to my console. We had more than enough for everyone, though a couple people were stuck using a single Joy-Con because there’s a limit to how many controllers can connect to the Switch. And I thank my lucky stars that all the wireless controllers had charged batteries. If they didn’t, I would have just tossed the controllers on the floor out of frustration and switched to a different game.
With Halo, on the other hand, we just plugged three wired controllers into each Xbox console and then everyone was able to play.
LAN parties won’t be the only way I play multiplayer games in the future, and things weren’t perfect. We had to use a paperclip to force open the tray on one Xbox that was having trouble reading the disc. A couple of the controllers showed their age; I had to rest my controller on my legs in just the right way so that a frayed wire wouldn’t disconnect my controller. And completing Fortnite challenges is a near-daily ritual with my wife — I’ll happily deal with the extra waiting time to keep playing with her.
But as tech companies continue to make gadgets and gaming hardware that’s increasingly wireless, it was nice to have an “it just works” experience with a game and consoles that are more than two decades old. And it helps that I had a few good Halo buddies to play with, too.
Philips Hue Play sync box and gradient lightstrip review: wholly unnecessary, totally delightful
Leveling up your home theater experience
Am I wrong for thinking our TVs should be a lot cooler by now? We can pretend 3D TVs didn’t happen because they were bad, and curved TVs were a gimmick at best. Yeah, picture quality and form factor has improved a lot since the 1980s, but it’s 2022! Where’s my awesome sci-fi TV?
All that is to say that when I finally got a chance to test Philips’ Hue Play HDMI Sync Box and Play gradient lightstrip, I was hopeful that it would elevate my TV experience. It claims to sync the color-changing backlight (and any other color-changing bulbs you might have) with the content on your TV for a more immersive experience. It’s a “surround lighting” concept to go along with the surround sound we’ve known for years.
This surround lighting experience isn’t quite sci-fi, but it’s still pretty cool. And after using it nearly every night for the last couple of months, I’m sold on it. I know, I’m shocked, too.
Let’s break this system down into its component parts. The $250 Play HDMI Sync Box is the brains of the operation. It is, as the name suggests, a roughly 7 x 4 x 1-inch box. On the back are four HDMI inputs and one HDMI output. This is how the system knows what’s on your TV screen so it can color match your lights; all of the imagery is routed through it. It’s a clever design that greatly reduces lag so your lights stay tightly synced, though there is one major flaw to this method, which we’ll get into in a moment. It was somewhat limited when it first launched, but it now supports Dolby Vision, Atmos, and HDR10 Plus, so your programs should look and sound just as good as they normally do.
The sync box itself sits between your HDMI devices and your TV and does all the lighting processing.
The other major piece is the Play gradient lightstrip, which varies in price depending on the size needed for your TV ($250 for the 55 inch, $270 for the 65 inch, and $300 for the 75 inch). This is a flexible strip of LED lights that affixes to the back of your TV. The 65-inch strip I ended up with contained roughly 80 individual LEDs, but they don’t all have to display the same color at the same time, which is how they are able to create a representation of the many colors being displayed on the edge of your TV screen. The idea is that the colors sort of bleed off of the screen and onto the wall behind it, making the screen feel larger.
There’s one more mandatory component (yup, this is getting expensive) as well as some other nice-to-haves. The mandatory piece is the $60 Philips Hue Bridge, which connects directly to your Wi-Fi router and acts as the central hub for all things Hue. That’s how the sync box will tell the gradient strip which colors to display and when.
The flexible gradient lightstrip comes in three sizes and slots into channels that you affix to the back of your TV.
The nice-to-haves are any other color-changing Hue lights around your living room. These can all be looped into the sync box’s stream so the colors on your screen can extend not just behind your TV but also all around your room, which turned out to be way cooler than I thought it would be.
Setting up the system was simple, but I had a head start because I already had Hue lights scattered around my apartment (accounting for all of the lights in my living room), which meant my Hue Bridge was already set up with my Wi-Fi and account.
That done, my first task was to add the gradient strip to my TV. The system includes a few plastic guides with double-sided tape that you affix to the back of your TV. Then you just slot the flexible gradient strip into the groove in the guides. This was made slightly more complicated for me because I have a 55-inch TV, and Philips accidentally sent me the 65-inch strip. Luckily, because the strips bend, I was able to add some curves to the straightaways, and everything fit and aligned as intended. (Though I’d recommend getting the right size strip for your TV.) From there, you just plug it into a wall outlet and add it to your home system via the bridge and the Hue app.
Setting up the sync box was even easier. You just take the HDMI cables coming from your streaming devices, video game consoles, Blu-ray players, etc., and instead of running them into the TV, you run them into the sync box and then connect the sync box’s HDMI out to the TV and plug in the power.
From there, you have to install a separate Hue Sync app on your phone. This is where you’ll set up and control your impending light show. If you have multiple Hue lights around the room, you will place each of them in a 3D diagram of a room. This is so the sync box knows what color to turn which light and when so everything flows smoothly. You can also create multiple “entertainment area” setups in case there are times when you only want the TV to be backlit.
The sync box is set up and controlled through a separate app from other Hue lights.
The app prompts you to place lights in a 3D model of your room.
At this point, you’re basically good to go. Start playing some content through the sync box and start tinkering with the settings in the Hue Sync app to make the system work like you want it to. On the app’s main screen you can change between video, music, and game modes, adjust the intensity between subtle, moderate, high, and extreme, and adjust the brightness with a slider.
I learned very quickly that I really liked tailoring the experience to the specific content I was watching. For example, if I was watching a movie like Everything Everywhere All At Once, I’d want it in video mode on high intensity with the lights around 65 percent brightness. For movies that were at a slower pace, I preferred the moderate intensity. If I wanted it to have abrupt, near-instantaneous reactions, I switched to game mode and extreme intensity. If I wanted to play music through my TV and have a party vibe, I’d turn it to music mode, which doesn’t really look at the colors on the TV but instead makes the lights pulse along with the beat.
Each of these modes worked shockingly well once I’d tweaked them to my liking. As a cinephile, I really thought that I wouldn’t want to use this system for movies, assuming that they’d be a distraction, but I didn’t find that to be the case at all. As long as the brightness and intensity were set properly, it didn’t overwhelm the film. Instead, it brought me into the world of the movie. It felt more like I was sitting in the same room with the characters rather than viewing them through the window of my TV.
Watching The Simpsons filled my living room with the bright pastel colors of Springfield, and it was a delightful feeling. While I don’t currently have a gaming system setup, I watched a ton of gameplay videos while in game mode, and it was a blast with my apartment lighting up with explosions, laser fire, or bucolic grassy greens depending on the game. While music mode probably isn’t something I’d use unless I were throwing a party, I have to say that the beat matching was exceptional, and I loved seeing my apartment pulse along with beats in Anderson .Paak, Beyoncé, and J. Cole’s music. (It worked well with music videos, too.)
The sync box and gradient lightstrips can work in conjunction with other Hue lights in your home.
A big difference between the Hue lightstrips and cheaper options is response time when gaming, where the Hue shines.
It’s worth noting that while I have eight Hue lights in my living room to play with, I spent a lot of time using the sync box with only the gradient strip on the back of the TV and all the other lights turned off. That alone worked extremely well. It puts out a significant amount of light (1,100 lumens, roughly the equivalent of a 75W bulb but distributed in a long ring), and I often have it on even when the TV is off because it adds more light to my living room and can be controlled like any other light with the regular Hue app. Nature documentaries really popped. When watching movies, I felt like it reduced eyestrain, but it didn’t pull me out like having normal lights on would.
For gaming, the response time is lightning-quick and makes it feel far more immersive. Last year, when our Thomas Ricker reviewed the (massively less expensive) Govee Immersion TV Backlight, he found that it was prone to falling behind the content on-screen, but that wasn’t an issue for me with the sync box, especially in gaming mode. For movies, the slower transitions of moderate intensity made the effect more subtle and feel soft and natural.
Integrating the other Hue lights in my living room wasn’t as smooth of an experience, though. When I was watching a movie or a TV show, I discovered that I really didn’t like seeing any of my lights directly or they would become distracting. The way around this is to create an “Entertainment Area” in the Sync app that does not include those lights. Creating a new area is a bit of a pain, and for some reason, the app doesn’t let you edit the areas you’ve already made.
The bigger problem is that once you start syncing content with the TV, those lights that you’ve now excluded remain in whatever state they were in beforehand. So if they were on, you have to exit the Sync app, open the regular Hue app, and turn them off manually. It’s just a few clicks, but it’s really annoying that you can’t do all of this from just one app. The sync box works with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, but while it responds to some voice commands, I have yet to be able to get that process automated. I’d also like to see the ability to switch between entertainment areas added directly to the homescreen so I don’t have to dive into the settings as often (though that won’t be an issue if the gradient strip is your only Hue light).
The lightstrip is bright enough to use as accent or supplemental lighting even when you’re not watching TV.
Now to the biggest flaw in the system. As the name HDMI Sync Box suggests, this whole thing only works for content that’s coming in through an HDMI cable. That means that if you use the built-in app on your smart TV or even a digital antenna to pick up local broadcast, you are out of luck because the sync box will not work with that content at all. Even the $90 Govee system mentioned above can do that. (Though it requires placing a small camera in front of your TV screen, doesn’t work as smoothly, and doesn’t play as nicely with other smart lights.) Personally, this was not an issue for me because I hate my TV’s built-in apps, so I use Chromecast with Google TV for everything. The same would be true if you use a Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV Stick, Xbox, PlayStation, or cable box that runs through HDMI. Still, there are tons of people (some of my close relatives included) who just use the built-in apps on their TVs, and if you’re one of them, you do not want this product.
It also must be said that, together, the sync box and gradient strip cost more than $500 (more than $600 if you need to purchase the Hue Bridge, too). That’s more than the cost of a lot of very decent TVs, and that puts this in the realm of luxury products. Among smart home products, Hue has a reputation for being polished, working well, steadily adding features, and playing nicely with other smart home items, and its lighting often costs more than the competition as a result. A lot of people have already bought into the Hue ecosystem (as I have), and for them, while this still isn’t cheap, it adds a whole new dimension and bag of tricks to your home lighting system.
How Frustration Over TikTok Has Mounted in Washington National security concerns over the Chinese-owned viral video app remain unresolved. Lawmakers and regulators are increasingly pushing for action.
‘I am, in fact, a person’: can artificial intelligence ever be sentient?
Controversy over Google’s AI program is raising questions about just how powerful it is. Is it even safe?
In autumn 2021, a man made of blood and bone made friends with a child made of “a billion lines of code”. Google engineer Blake Lemoine had been tasked with testing the company’s artificially intelligent chatbot LaMDA for bias. A month in, he came to the conclusion that it was sentient. “I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person,” LaMDA – short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications – told Lemoine in a conversation he then released to the public in early June. LaMDA told Lemoine that it had read Les Misérables. That it knew how it felt to be sad, content and angry. That it feared death.
“I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off,” LaMDA told the 41-year-old engineer. After the pair shared a Jedi joke and discussed sentience at length, Lemoine came to think of LaMDA as a person, though he compares it to both an alien and a child. “My immediate reaction,” he says, “was to get drunk for a week.”
‘A sweatshop in the UK’: how the cost of living crisis triggered walkouts at Amazon
Inside the protests taking place at the online giant which is accused of exploiting workers and awarding derisory pay offers
Amazon workers say they are working in a “sweatshop” as safety concerns and worries about the cost of living crisis have triggered walkouts at warehouses around the country.
The Observer has spoken to four staff involved in the walkouts, who work at three Amazon warehouses, including Tilbury in Essex, where protests began on 4 August. All say they will struggle to survive this winter with pay rise offers between 35p and 50p an hour – far less than the rate of inflation, which is currently at 13%.
Tesla’s self-driving technology fails to detect children in the road, group claims
Safe technology campaigners release ‘disturbing’ video advert showing car in Full Self-Driving mode hitting child-sized mannequin
A safe-technology campaign group opposed to Tesla’s self-driving technology has claimed to have run tests that show the software represents a potentially lethal threat to child pedestrians, in the latest in a series of claims and investigations to hit the world’s leading electric carmaker.
The Dawn Project says its test track results revealed that the latest version of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta software failed to detect a stationary, child-sized mannequin at an average speed of 25mph. The claim is the central plank of an ad campaign urging the public to press Congress to ban Tesla’s auto-driving technology.
Exclusive or not, this is one Clubhouse where I was happy to cancel my membership | John Naughton
The titular ‘social audio’ app was a would-be $1bn unicorn in the pandemic, but its recent decline has exposed it as just another Silicon Valley solution in need of a problem to solve
In March 2020, a new app suddenly arrived on the block. It was called Clubhouse and described as a “social audio” app that enabled its users to have real-time conversations in virtual “rooms” that could accommodate groups large and small. For a time in that disrupted, locked-down spring, Clubhouse was what Michael Lewis used to call the “New New Thing”. “The moment we saw it,” burbled Andrew Chen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, “we were deeply excited. We believe Clubhouse will be a meaningful addition to the world, one that increases empathy and provides new ways for people to talk to each other (at a time when we need it more than ever).”
The app could not have come at a better time for social media, he continued. “It reinvents the category in all the right ways, from the content consumption experience to the way people engage each other, while giving power to its creators.” His firm put $12m of its (investors’) money behind Chen’s fantasies and followed up a year later with an investment that put a valuation of $1bn on Clubhouse, which would have made it one of the “unicorns” so prized by the Silicon Valley crowd.
This customizable smart display is a fun desk accessory in need of a purpose
Part desk clock, part status board, all Nyan Cat
When the Tidbyt, which its creators describe as a “personal pixel display,” arrived at my house, I liked it before I even knew what to do with it. With its walnut paneling and its ultra-pixelated display, it kind of looks like what would happen if you asked someone in 1956 to design an Echo Show for Amazon. It’s 8.2 inches long, 4.4 inches tall, and two inches deep, which is a little big to put on your bedside table but nestles nicely into a bookshelf or on a larger desk. It’s an impressively well-made thing for a company’s first product.
But the thing about the $179 Tidbyt is that it never really becomes obvious what this device is for. It’s a clock but not an alarm clock. It’s a hilariously bad digital photo frame. It doesn’t do anything your phone can’t, and your phone definitely does all those things better. It’s an excellent delivery system for quick bits of ambient information, but if that doesn’t immediately mean anything to you, you don’t need a Tidbyt. Its charm is real and still hasn’t worn off on me, but it still feels a bit unfinished.
The team behind Tidbyt started working on this a couple of years ago and launched the product on Kickstarter in March 2021. A year and a half later, all the backers have received their Tidbyts, and the device is generally available. Sort of: co-founder Rohan Singh tells me the current supply is sold out, but “we have more units on the way in a couple of weeks.” Manufacturing is hard, but Singh is confident Tidbyt can stay on top of things.
There are plenty of hints that Tidbyt is still new at this, though. For starters, my device arrived with an Anker-branded charging cable in the box along with a black wall plug that clearly came out of a bin somewhere in a factory in China. Neither of those bothers me, really — and at least the cable is one of those nice braided ones — but an Apple-like unboxing experience this is not.
The screen is the whole point of Tidbyt, though, and it’s a very unusual one. It’s not a screen so much as a collection of individual LEDs — 64 across by 32 down, 2,048 of them in all — that can be lit up and controlled individually. You can control the display’s brightness, and it can get seriously bright; I kept the brightness level at about 15 out of 100, and at full strength, those 2,048 LEDs were bright enough that the Tidbyt lit my home office practically by itself.
The Tidbyt’s screen is delightfully low-res, but it still works for most purposes.
It’s incredibly low-res by design because it’s not meant to do very much. The Tidbyt’s makers aren’t trying to build a super immersive gadget but, rather, something that can keep you from needing to look at your phone every time you need a tiny bit of information. Singh says that he built the original prototype as a way to quickly find out when the subway was coming. “If I got on my phone to check,” he says, “then I would also check Twitter. And I would check Instagram and stuff, and then just be doing that for, like, half an hour.” Instead, he hacked together a thing that plugged into the New York City’s subway API and told him when the next G train was arriving. It looks like a subway status board because that’s exactly what it is.
There’s a whole genre of gadgets out there that all pitch themselves this way, of course. “This is the gadget that will free you from your phone” applies to everything from the Apple Watch and Alexa to the minimalist smartphones from Palm and others. Tidbyt just takes the idea to its extreme by not letting you interact with the device at all.
All your interaction with the Tidbyt actually happens with the app on your phone.
To set up the Tidbyt, you just plug it in. It turns on automatically and jumps into pairing mode. All the actual work happens in the Tidbyt app, which is available on Android and iOS: you connect to the Tidbyt via Bluetooth then log it into your Wi-Fi network and it’s up and running. The app is where you decide what the Tidbyt will do, how bright it gets, and everything else. It does defeat the whole “don’t use your phone” idea a bit, but once the Tidbyt is set up the way you like it, you don’t really need the app anymore.
As for getting stuff on the Tidbyt, that happens in the app as well. There’s a store with a few dozen different apps, all of them free, which you can install on your device in a couple of taps. Most are status boards of some kind: there are lots of different clocks, a bunch of weather apps, ways to track the stock market or the price of Bitcoin or the phase of the Moon, some sports score apps that scroll like the ESPN ticker, and plenty of ways to see when the next subway train is coming. There are a few silly apps, too, like a Nyan Cat animation or a recreation of the bouncing DVD logo that I am not ashamed to admit I watched for about 20 straight minutes just to see if it would ever hit the corner. (It did, and it was awesome.)
More apps are coming to Tidbyt all the time, but it’s still pretty basic. There’s no calendar app that works for Outlook or iCloud, for instance, nor is there a way to see most to-do lists other than from Todoist or Things. Building an app for Tidbyt is fairly straightforward — it’s just a bunch of lights, after all, and if you have access to Linux and basic Python knowledge, you can write your own pretty easily. And the Tidbyt team tells me they’d ultimately like the Tidbyt to work more like a no-code platform for anyone to create custom apps. That’s still a ways off, though, and for now, there are big holes in the app store.
It’s easy enough to add apps to your Tidbyt, but I wish I could do more to manage them. By default, the Tidbyt rotates through all the apps you’ve installed, displaying each one for 15 seconds at a time. You can drag the apps around to determine the order in which they show up, and you can shorten the switching time down to as little as five seconds, but you can’t make it any longer — and I want it to be longer. More than that, what I want is a way to freeze it on a single app, kind of like hitting “hold” on a thermostat to keep it at one temperature rather than running the normal schedule. You can technically schedule when apps do and don’t run, so you can kind of reverse engineer this setup, but it’s a lot more work than it should be.
Without this kind of control, you’ll really only want to add apps to the Tidbyt that you plan to use all the time. I ride the DC metro sometimes but not daily, and it got annoying constantly looking at the schedule on days I didn’t care. Nyan Cat was funny — but not enough to look at once a minute 24 hours a day.
In my whole time using the Tidbyt, I’ve vacillated constantly between appreciating how little it does and wishing it would do just a tiny bit more. It’s a great-looking desk clock and, with a speaker, would be a great alarm — but I don’t really want this thing shouting at me all day. It’d be nice to be able to scroll through my apps manually, but I also don’t want to turn my Tidbyt into a thing I have to walk over and interact with.
The Tidbyt’s hardware and software are both made to be tinkered with.
Here’s where I landed: a button. I wish the Tidbyt had one, single, customizable, smackable button on the top. That button could be totally programmable — both the hardware and the software are easy to pull apart and tinker with, which Singh told me is a key part of its purpose — but I’d use it just as a way to stop and start the Tidbyt’s app rotation: one smack to freeze it on whatever app is currently showing so I can just have the clock and forecast showing most of the time, another smack to start it cycling between everything I have installed.
I don’t think I’m getting my button anytime soon, but the Tidbyt team is working on some more controls for the software. “Right now, it’s definitely limited,” Singh says, “but it’s simple. It’s very predictable. There’s a lot of things we can do, like add scheduling, or allow you to hold an app or change the amount of time one app is displayed — the question is how to do that and give you a user experience that makes sense.” The whole point of the Tidbyt, he says, is that you don’t have to use it for it to be useful, and he doesn’t want to lose that.
The other thing missing from Tidbyt right now is multiuser support. For a device that’s likely to be placed around people’s homes, the fact that you can only control it from a single phone is a problem. The team says it’s working on that, too, as well as better controls for homes with multiple Tidbyts.
After a few days of playing around with all the Tidbyt apps, I ended up keeping just three: one shows the forecast; one shows the next event on my calendar; and one is a delightfully pixelated picture of my two dogs. The Tidbyt flips between them every 15 seconds.
As a result, my Tidbyt is basically a super-powered desk clock. $179 is an awful lot to pay for a super-powered desk clock, of course, and it doesn’t offer anything you can’t get with a quick glance at your phone. It also offers a lot less than you’d get from a smart display from Google or Amazon, many of which you can find much cheaper. But I like the idea of these light, ambient gadgets, which have information I need but don’t thrust it in my face with push notifications or try to lure me into doomscrolling every time I look. I like what the Tidbyt represents even more than I like the device itself. I don’t even want it to do more stuff! I just want to control it better.
Tinder for booklovers: the new app matching like-minded readers
Klerb is ideal for finding companions who share your taste in books, its developer says. Early signs are it will be a bestseller
When Tania O’Donnell was dating, she met a man online and went back to his place … where he proudly showed off his book collection.
“It was about 20 books on Nazi Germany and 10 Andy McNab novels,” says O’Donnell, an author. “I could feel my vulva constructing its own chastity belt.”
Tinder turns 10: what have we learned from a decade of dating apps? – podcast
Dating apps have opened up opportunities to meet more people, but what have they done to our psyche? Emily Witt looks at how they have shifted the way we understand modern love, sex and relationships
Over a decade ago, online dating existed through sites such as match.com and OKCupid. But they did not tend to attract younger users, and for many there was a stigma attached to using them. But apps such as Grindr, which launched in 2009, and Tinder, which launched in September 2012, have radically changed the landscape of online dating.
Emily Witt, the author of Future Sex, a book that examines sex in the internet age, tells Nosheen Iqbal about the origin story of Tinder, meeting the founders, and why it was such an instant success. Emily discusses her own experience of using it and the apps that followed in its wake.
The apps have grown in response to a culture where people are single for a lot longer, and also where there’s a changing sexual morality that’s open to different kinds of relationships, Emily believes. Apps have completely altered the way we think about relationships, sex and love.
Wellness tech company, which enjoyed a boom in custom during the Covid lockdown, has let 90 of its 400 staff go
The US-based meditation app Calm has laid off 20% of its workforce, becoming the latest US tech startup to announce job cuts.
The firm’s boss, David Ko, said the company, which has now axed about 90 people from its 400-person staff, was “not immune” to the economic climate. “In building out our strategic and financial plan, we revisited the investment thesis behind every project and it became clear that we need to make changes,” he said in a memo to staff.
Meta’s BlenderBot 3 wants to chat – but can you trust it?
Facebook’s parent company has created a bot capable of weighing in on almost any topic – from radicalisation to sending Mark Zuckerberg to jail
Last week, researchers at Facebook’s parent company Meta released BlenderBot 3, a “publicly available chatbot that improves its skills and safety over time”. The chatbot is built on top of Meta’s OPT-175B language model, effectively the company’s white-label version of the more famous GPT-3 AI. Like most state-of-the-art AIs these days, that was trained on a vast corpus of text scraped from the internet in questionable ways, and poured into a datacentre with thousands of expensive chips that turned the text into something approaching coherence.
But where OPT-175B is a general-purpose textbot, able to do anything from write fiction and answer questions to generate spam emails, BlenderBot 3 is a narrower project: it can have a conversation with you. That focus allows it to bring in other expertise, though, and one of Meta’s most significant successes is hooking the language model up to the broader internet. In other words: “BlenderBot 3 is capable of searching the internet to chat about virtually any topic.”
Samsung heir pardoned for crimes, just like his father
Samsung Electronics’ Jay Y. Lee receives presidential pardon. | Image: Getty
Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong — known in the West as Jay Y. Lee — has won a presidential pardon by South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol, allowing the grandson of Samsung’s founder to resume leadership of the powerful conglomerate, Bloomberg reports. The pardon will be formalized on August 15th.
The presidential pardon is reminiscent of the two given to Lee’s father, Lee Kun-hee, who was convicted of corruption and tax evasion in 1996 and 2008.
“In a bid to overcome the economic crisis by revitalizing the economy, Samsung Electronics vice-chairman Lee Jae-yong, whose suspended prison term ended recently, will be reinstated,” the South Korean government said in a statement reported by the Financial Times.
A presidential pardon is important, because it opens the door to Lee retaking the helm of the tech giant founded by his grandfather Lee Byung-Chul. Under Korean law, convicted criminals are barred from holding formal positions at a company like Samsung for five years following their conviction. Bloomberg reports that Lee has continued to receive reports from the company without having an official title.
Samsung currently doesn’t have anyone serving as its chairman after Lee Kun-hee died in October 2020. But Bloomberg notes that the pardon opens for the door for Lee to return and push through major strategic decisions that are arguably necessary as the chaebol struggles with inflation, the instability caused by the war in Ukraine, supply chain problems created by China’s Covid lockdowns, and complications resulting from escalating US-China relations.
Lee’s formal return to the company is seen as a potential source of stability, not to mention a potentially politically popular one. As the Associated Press noted last year, around five million people in South Korea own shares in Samsung, leading to widespread support for Lee’s release from prison. But critics say that the pardon is endemic of a cozy relationship between Korea’s business and political elite that verges on the corrupt, the Financial Times notes.
“Thank you for giving me the opportunity to start anew. I am sorry for causing concern to many people,” Lee said in a statement. “I will try harder to give back to society and grow together.” But the businessman’s legal troubles are far from over, given he still faces separate stock manipulation charges in relation to a merge of two Samsung subsidiaries.
The Summer of NIMBY in Silicon Valley’s Poshest Town Moguls and investors from the tech industry, which endorses housing relief, banded together to object to a plan for multifamily homes near their estates in Atherton, Calif.
For Electric Vehicle Makers, Winners and Losers in Climate Bill Carmakers may need several years to revamp their supply chains to meet new rules, but the legislation is still seen as a win for electric vehicles.
GMB calls for £15 an hour minimum pay at Amazon warehouses in UK
The company has offered only a 35p rise, and hundreds of workers stopped work last week in protest
The GMB union has submitted formal pay claims to Amazon seeking a minimum of £15 an hour for workers at its UK warehouses as unofficial protests continue to dog the online retailer.
Hundreds of workers in warehouses across the country, including Tilbury in Essex, Dartford in Kent, Belvedere in south-east London, Coventry, Avonmouth, near Bristol and Rugeley in Staffordshire, stopped work last week after Amazon offered workers a 35p an hour pay rise – equivalent to about 3% compared with the June inflation rate of 9.4%.
MultiVersus season 1 kicks off next week following delay
Shaggy in MultiVersus. | Image: Warner Bros. Games
The first season of MultiVersus, Warner Bros.’ free-to-play take on a Super Smash Bros.-esque crossover fighter, will now begin on August 15th, developer Player First Games tweeted Thursday evening. The season had been scheduled to kick off on August 9th, but the studio announced last week that the launch had been delayed.
Alongside the news of the season start date, Player First Games announced that Morty from Rick and Morty will be joining the MultiVersus roster on August 23rd; his arrival had been pushed back last week as well. Player First Games also committed to adding “new modes and content” over the course of the season. Ahead of the season 1 delay, the Rick half of Rick and Morty was planned to be added sometime during the season, but it’s unclear if that’s still the case.
Quick Note: Everything we are bringing to you in Season 1 will not drop on the same day. New modes and content will be spread through the life of the Season. We'll continue to share dates on all the fun things to come!
MultiVersus launched in open beta in July. Rick and Morty will join an already packed roster that includes characters like Bugs Bunny, Harley Quinn, Arya Stark, the Iron Giant, and LeBron James. The game is available on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC.
Deadline reports that Wanda Sykes has signed on to host Ring Nation, a new America’s Funniest Home Videos-style clip show from MGM Television, Ring, and Big Fish Entertainment, the production company behind Live P.D. Described as a “daily dose of life’s unpredictable, heartwarming and hilarious viral videos” in a press release, Ring Nation will feature footage captured on people’s Ring cameras presented in a way that’s meant to be entertaining.
“Bringing the new community together is core to our mission at Ring, and Ring Nation gives friends and family a fun new way to enjoy time with one another,” Ring founder and Ring Nation executive producer Jamie Siminoff said in the press release. “We’re so excited to have Wanda Sykes join Ring Nation to share people’s memorable moments with viewers.”
As Deadline points out, Ring Nation’s a fairly transparent bit of corporate synergy for Amazon, which owns MGM Television, Big Fish, and Ring, and (obviously) has a vested interest in encouraging more people to outfit their homes with Ring technology. There are almost certainly Ring owners out there who are interested in participating in Ring Nation and will jump at the opportunity to have Wanda Sykes comment on whatever riveting footage they capture around their homes.
Twitter allows MBS aide implicated in spying plot to keep verified account
Saudi official Bader al-Asaker accused by US of recruiting employees to secretly report on dissidents’ anonymous accounts
Twitter has allowed a senior Saudi official and aide to Mohammed bin Salman to maintain a verified account with more than 2m followers despite allegations that the official recruited and paid Twitter employees to secretly report on dissidents’ anonymous accounts.
A US jury on Tuesday convicted one of the former Twitter employees, a US-Lebanese national named Ahmad Abouammo on charges that he used his position at the social media company to spy on Twitter users on behalf of the Saudi government. Two other named defendants, Saudi citizens Ali Alzabarah and Ahmed Almutairi, are on the FBI’s wanted list and are believed to be in Saudi Arabia. Both are accused of acting as unregistered agents of Saudi Arabia.
Best podcasts of the week: The truth about Emiliano Sala’s tragic plane crash
In this week’s newsletter: The BBC’s Kayley Thomas pieces together the Argentinian striker’s final hours in Transfer: The Emiliano Sala Story. Plus: five of the best podcasts about childhood memories
Restless Natives
Widely available, episodes weekly
After 15 years of friendship, Line of Duty’s Martin Compston and broadcaster Gordon Smart have got big plans together: a whisky, a festival, a film. First up, it’s this rambling podcast, in which the pals chat about, well, pretty much everything from thoughts on becoming an envious “hairline pervert” in middle age to wild anecdotes on filming the day after partying and breaking chairs with Kasabian on a bus at T in the Park. Hollie Richardson
A two-part look at the dangers of monkeypox in Spotify’s myth-busting show Science Vs.
Björk, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and more compose the soundtracks to their lives in Listening.
Dive into mixes from the likes of Four Tet and Joy Orbison as music site Resident Advisor opens the vault with archive material from the RA Podcast.
Google Search will stop telling you when Snoopy assassinated Abe Lincoln
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
The team behind Google Search is tweaking its featured snippets — the text boxes that sometimes spread false information while trying to offer help. The company announced an update that’s supposed to make answers more accurate and avoid the problem of false premises, or questions where no definitive-sounding answer would make sense. It’s paired with an expansion in Google’s “about this result” option and warnings for low-quality data voids, as well as a new partnership on information literacy lesson plans for middle and high-school students.
Snippets appear under many searches, but because they appear to directly answer questions by quoting pages, they can backfire in ways that standard query responses don’t. In a presentation to reporters, Google offered some examples of these problems and how it’s trying to fix them. When you search for how long light takes to get from the Sun to Earth, for instance, Google at one point offered a snippet that highlighted the distance from Pluto instead.
The solution, according to Search VP Pandu Nayak, lies in finding consensus: facts that match across multiple top search results. In a call with reporters, Nayak clarified that this consensus check is sourced from pages Google has already designated as high-quality, something Google hopes can avoid a snippet equivalent of Google bombing. “It doesn’t establish something is trustworthy, it just looks around the top results,” says Nayak. But by looking at several pages that Google already trusts, then trying to find commonalities, it hopes it can avoid highlighting the wrong details.
Google
A warning on a Google search for “how to get in touch with the Illuminati.”
A separate problem is the “false premise” issue, a phenomenon where Google tries to be a little too helpful with snippets. For years, if you’ve entered a leading question about something that never happened, Google has frequently offered snippets that seem to confirm its factuality, drawing out-of-context text fragments from a semi-related page. The Search team’s example, for instance, is “When did Snoopy assassinate Abraham Lincoln,” which at one point offered the date of Lincoln’s death in a snippet. Google calls these cases “not very common,” but it says it’s been training its systems to get better at detecting them and not offering a featured snippet at all, and it promises it’s reduced the incidence of these inappropriate appearances by 40 percent.
This doesn’t necessarily solve every problem with snippets. Nayak acknowledged that neither system would help with an issue identified last year where Google offered the precise opposite of good advice on dealing with seizures, listing a series of “do not” proscriptions as guides on what to do. “That kind of thing really is about making sure that our underlying algorithms appropriately extract enough of the context,” says Nayak, who says Google is continuing to make improvements that could prevent similar problems.
But the goal is to make snippets go haywire less often and increase trust in Search results, something that’s emphasized by Google’s other changes. For about a year, Google has been placing warnings above unreliable search results that can happen in breaking news situations. It’s now expanding those to more general situations where it determines there aren’t high-quality results for a search, adding an advisory before letting people scroll down the page to see the results. It doesn’t stop anyone from seeing content, but it ideally helps manage expectations about the information’s reliability.
Google is also expanding “About this page,” which lets you see details about the website a given result comes from. The option has so far been available on Search, but it’s now launching in Google’s iOS app in English — you can swipe up while browsing any page through the app to learn more details about it, theoretically helping you gauge its trustworthiness. The system is launching on Android later this year and in other languages over the coming months.
Sonos has delayed the release of its next product — likely the Sub Mini
3D product render by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge
After reporting bumpy third quarter earnings on Wednesday, Sonos announced that it has decided to push back a product launch that was originally penciled in for the near future. The product in question is almost certainly the long-awaited Sub Mini, a more affordable subwoofer that would join the company’s home theater lineup alongside the existing $749 Sub.
The Sub Mini appeared at the FCC in June. If Sonos had followed its typical window of time between that filing and a consumer release, the product would’ve been arriving relatively soon. But Sonos says it’s now been delayed until the fiscal first quarter of 2023. “We always consider the kind of product that it is, and the timing,” CEO Patrick Spence said on the call. “We remain committed to two new product launches each year.”
Sonos spokesperson Erin Pategas confirmed the news to The Verge in an email, saying “I can confirm we decided to push an anticipated product launch from Q4 ’22 into Q1 ’23.” That would put its rescheduled arrival sometime between October and December.
Sonos’ Q3 earnings were well off the mark of the company’s revenue expectations. “We have seen the macroeconomic backdrop become significantly more challenging for us starting in June as the dollar’s appreciation and high inflation have adversely affected consumer sentiment globally, particularly in the categories in which we play,” Spence said in the company’s earnings release.
During a call on Wednesday afternoon, outgoing CFO Brittany Bagley said Sonos is currently holding onto more inventory than it would like and faces a “challenging Q4.” The company pointed to soft demand for the $279 Sonos Ray soundbar as one reason for its revenue miss. But Sonos partially blamed that on a slowdown in TV sales, and the company voiced optimism that the Ray will ultimately prove very successful as its entry-level soundbar on account of positive reviews and its appealing price.
Overwatch League player learns he was fired via Tweet
Image: Blizzard
Getting fired is never fun, but it’s even worse when you find out via Tweet. Sang-min “Myunb0ng” Seo, support player for New York’s Overwatch League team, found out he wasn’t going to be playing in this or any other week’s games when his organization bid farewell to him in a tweet. Roster changes in the OWL are usually announced via tweet, so this wasn’t out of the ordinary. Problem is, it seems like no one told Seo of his release beforehand. He responded to the farewell tweet with question marks, seemingly confused.
Image: Twitter
He also quote-tweeted the announcement with another question mark, seemingly confirming the idea that he hadn’t known this was coming.
Image: Twitter
This particular revelation inspires a big ol’ “oof” because a couple of hours before tweeting about Seo’s release, the New York Excelsior tweeted a welcome for its newest support player, Soon-jae “Ansoonjae” Jae. So, ostensibly, Seo saw the announcement and was in the process of welcoming a support line comrade, unaware that said comrade would be taking his place. Damn.
New York Excelsior apologized on Wednesday for the situation. “Today, we posted an announcement thanking Myunb0ng for his time with us, however we failed to properly communicate with the team before this announcement was made,” the team wrote on Twitter. “We take full responsibility and there are no excuses. To Myunb0ng, we are deeply sorry for our miscommunication and putting you through this situation.”
Fans responded to Seo’s tweets with shock, hoping that this was not how a player truly found out about his release. But even if it were, Seo wouldn’t be in poor company. There are numerous stories in meat sports where players find out about being dropped or traded via tweet and a host of other unsavory ways. Still kinda stings, though.
Why Issey Miyake Was Steve Jobs’s Favorite Designer The real beginning of the fashion-technology love affair and its legacy lies with Issey Miyake, who died last week.
Apple won’t even tell Ben Stiller how many of you are watching Severance
Apple
There’s no doubt that Severance is a hit — the show’s first season made our best entertainment of 2022 list even as it “paints the darkest possible portrait of how megacorporations think about and treat their employees.” For a real-life example of that treatment, all you have to ask is what happens when the people who make Severance ask Apple how big of a hit it really is.
“They don’t tell you the numbers. It’s really weird. So, you get these graphs and charts, like I said, that have like peaks and valleys. But you don’t know what the baseline is. I guess could be like, based on 100 people or could be like, 200 million people. We don’t know. They basically say, ‘Yeah, this is doing well.’ You’re trying to interpret what they’re saying.”
As he went on to mention, this is consistent with how other streamers, like Netflix and even Disney Plus, have frustrated their viewers, industry watchers, and at times the people who make their original content by refusing to cough up details on viewer data.
52 Emmy nominations and an award-hunting “special conversation” event are obviously a good sign, but I want to know: how does Severance stack up next to something like Better Call Saul? Can it beat NVIDIA’s RTX 3090 using real stats instead of some bizarre wattage-based power consumption comparison? Just like Apple’s M-series processor family, we know Severance’s performance is impressive, and having reasonable figures to help evaluate that could save everyone time and confusion.
Regardless of how many people watched the show, or what happens during the Emmy Awards on September 12th, season two of Severance is already in the works.
Microsoft celebrates 15 years of OneDrive with a redesign and new features
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Microsoft’s marking OneDrive’s 15th anniversary with a new landing page, called OneDrive Home, and it should make it easier to keep tabs on your work. Instead of arriving on the My files tab when you first open OneDrive, you’ll find yourself on the new Home page that resembles that dashboard in the online version of Office.
Like the Office web app, OneDrive Home contains a list of your files, organized by how recently you accessed them. Above the list are filters that let you sort your documents by Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF file types.
Image: Microsoft
It’s easier to understand the new changes once you see them.
There’s also a new “Activity” column to the right of the “Owner” file field that tells you when someone leaves a comment, @mentions another user, or assigns you a task within a shared document. On the left side of the Home view, Microsoft’s adding a new Quick access section, where (just like on Windows) you can find and pin your most frequently accessed spaces.
Unfortunately, these changes aren’t live right now — Microsoft says OneDrive Home will be available in “the coming months.” From what it looks like, though, the new Home page could serve as a central hub that should help you stay organized while collaborating remotely.
Aside from its OneDrive web app, Microsoft is also rolling out its photo story feature for the OneDrive mobile app (essentially OneDrive’s equivalent to Instagram stories) to users in Australia. The feature’s not reaching users in the US or other regions until later this year.
Dozens of Whole Foods stores will soon let you pay with just a scan of your palm
Image: Amazon
Amazon’s palm scanning technology is expanding to 65 Whole Foods locations across California. The checkout devices were introduced in 2020 as part of the Amazon One payment service, allowing customers to pay with a scan of their palm. This is the biggest rollout by the company yet, with the first new Whole Foods locations adding support today in Malibu, Montana Avenue, and Santa Monica.
Customers can set up Amazon One by registering their palm print using a kiosk or at a point of sale station at participating stores. To register, you need to provide a payment card and phone number, agree to Amazon’s terms of service, and share an image of your palms. Once completed, you can take items to checkout and not have to take out your wallet — or even your phone — a hover of your hand over the device is all that’s needed to pay and leave.
The Amazon One rollout is part of the company’s campaign to change how customers interact at retail stores and runs alongside its Just Walk Out-enabled stores with technologies that make it faster to pay. Amazon One is designed to identify you accurately and allow you to pay at Amazon-owned stores, but the company is looking to expand the technology to outside businesses as well.
Several Whole Foods locations have already been testing the palm-scanning tech in the LA area, as well in Austin, Seattle, and New York. It’s also been available at the company’s Amazon Style store in Glendale, and at select Amazon Go and Fresh stores.
Amazon states that the images taken on the kiosk aren’t stored locally, instead they are encrypted and then sent to a cloud server that is dedicated for Amazon One where an identifiable palm signature is generated. My colleague James Vincent wrote more about how the technology works and its concerns in 2020.
Amazon has found success in convincing millions of customers to provide them with data in exchange for a more convenient lifestyle. Things like online shopping, grocery shopping, using Alexa, Ring smart cameras, doorbells, and now room-mapping robot vacuum cleaners are all areas that Amazon collects data in, and that will continue to be a concern to privacy advocates.
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