Author: News Room

SwitchBot is introducing a new version of the tiny button-pressing robot that helped launch the company a decade ago. The functionality of the new SwitchBot Bot is exactly the same as the original that the company will continue to sell, but comes with a rechargeable battery instead of a disposable one.The wirelessly controlled SwitchBot Bot Rechargeable can be installed by simply sticking it to a button or rocker switch that it will physically press using a small arm that extends and retracts. Like the original, the battery is accessible by removing a panel on the front of the bot. You…

Today, I’m talking with Sarah Personette, CEO of Puck, which is a fancy new media company that’s been around for just about five years now.Puck hires big stars and gives them newsletters that are all mostly part of a subscription bundle. These newsletters are often must-reads in their categories — everyone in Hollywood reads Puck’s Matt Belloni, for instance. Those reporters then get equity in Puck and a share of the company’s revenue.The idea is to combine the financial incentives of the influencer economy with the rigor of old-school journalism — you’ll hear Sarah say journalists were the original influencers,…

Sam Altman was seemingly targeted by a second attack on Sunday morning, with two suspects arrested following a shooting at his Russian Hill residence, The San Francisco Standard reports. The suspects were arrested and charged with negligent discharge, according to a police report on the incident, citing surveillance footage that appears to show a vehicle passenger firing a weapon at Altman’s home.This follows an earlier attack on Friday, in which a 20-year-old man was arrested for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at the same property. The investigations for both incidents are still ongoing.According to San Francisco Police, offers were dispatched…

Microsoft has started testing its own virtual mouse cursor inside its Xbox mode for Windows-based handhelds. The new Gamepad Cursor option provides a quick way to turn the left stick of a handheld like the Xbox Ally X into a virtual mouse.While Asus has its own cursor as part of Armory Crate, Microsoft’s Gamepad Cursor lives inside its own Xbox mode in Windows 11, and it’s easy to activate from the Game Bar without having to use Armory Crate. Once activated, the Gamepad Cursor will turn your left stick into a mouse for precise control, or for apps that aren’t…

Elon Musk promised Neuralink would bring superhuman abilities and minds merged with AI. Then he fueled a runaway hype train for his brain implant technology, which ended up with a grisly record for implants in monkeys and some success with human subjects. But for all of the hype, he’s still further away than Mars from his goal. And that’s because his relentless ambition is once again hitting the wall of scientific reality.The heart of the issue is how brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) translate thought into results. Neuralink’s products have all been brain-to-cursor interfaces, which allow patients to control a mouse with…

Apple and Samsung have both been strongly linked with plans for foldable phones in a boxy, wide aspect ratio, but it looks like another company will get there first. Huawei has just revealed the design of the Pura X Max, a new foldable it’s launching in China next week, and its passport-esque form factor is a dead ringer for early leaks of the iPhone Fold.We don’t know too much about the Pura X Max yet, which will get a full release on April 20th alongside the colorful Pura 90 series, but early images shared by Huawei show blue, white, orange,…

In celebration of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie coming to theaters, Nintendo is making it a little cheaper to get both Super Mario Galaxy games when you buy a $449.99 Nintendo Switch 2 console. Now through May 9th, you can buy a Switch 2 with Super Mario Galaxy + Super Mario Galaxy 2 for $499.99 ($20 off) from Amazon, Best Buy, GameStop, and Target. It’s a small discount, but it’s a good deal if you were planning to pick up a console and both games anyway.Amazon makes it easy to buy the game and console bundle with a single click.…

Rockstar confirmed on Saturday that some of its data was compromised in a breach of a third-party provider. The group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility, saying it had gained access to the company’s Snowflake instances (a cloud-hosting provider popular with enterprise customers) via Anodot, a cost-monitoring and analytics service. The group is demanding a ransom by April 14th, or it will leak the data it has stolen.In a statement provided to Kotaku, the company said that the compromised data was limited in scope and “this incident has no impact on our organization or our players.”It’s unclear exactly which data was compromised, but…

For years, even decades, virtually everyone in the United States had the same phone. Nobody really thought about it, it didn’t even matter what it was called – it was just The Phone. Well, The Phone was called the Western Electric 500, and when landline phones ruled the world, the Western Electric 500 ruled the landlines. It was so ubiquitous for so long that even if you’ve never touched a landline, you’ve encountered the 500. The Phone app on your iPhone? Looks like a 500.On this episode of Version History, we tell the story of the Western Electric 500, and…

RGB LED TVs have been the talk of the TV world this year, with models coming from all the manufacturers, and the first one of 2026 is here — the Hisense UR9. It’s the first look at the viability of the new backlight technology outside of demo rooms, and it’s a step above the traditional mini-LED TVs of years past. HDR is colorful and accurate, it has great brightness, and it is capable of showing colors beyond the P3 color space for movies and TV shows that have wider color. But at $3,500, the 65-inch model I reviewed is priced…

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the AI coding and vibe-coding booms, follow David Pierce. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.Writing code was a killer app for AI even before anyone was really talking about AI. In the spring of 2021, 18 months before the world knew the word “ChatGPT,” Microsoft debuted the very first product of a partnership with a nonprofit called OpenAI: a tool called GitHub Copilot that watched developers as they wrote code and…

I love black-and-white photography. I also adore compact cameras you can always have by your side. So I’m a total mark for the Ricoh GR IV Monochrome, a fixed-lens camera that can’t zoom and can’t record color — at all. It’s a formula that makes the average person ask, “Why?”I’ve tested the GR IV Monochrome for over a month, taking it with me everywhere and photographing everything. Let me explain how this pricey little point-and-shoot is likely to go down as one of my all-time-favorite cameras.$2197The GoodExcellent black-and-white image qualityEverything great about the standard GR IV: sharp lens, small size,…