Gear Live: The Latest Tech, Gadgets, AI, and Gaming News
Nintendo’s Free Switch 2 Update Crams Eight Mario Kart Players Onto One Screen
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Handhelds, Video Games,
Picture your TV chopped into eight little rectangles, each one holding a friend, a kart, and a red shell with their name on it. That's now something you can do in your living room.
Nintendo pushed out a free Switch 2 update for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with no real warning, and the big change is local split-screen for eight players, up from a cap of four. This is a game that shipped on Wii U in 2014 and again on Switch in 2017. Twelve years on, it's still growing new features.
Tesla Killed the Solar Roof and Its Certified Installers Are Eating the Loss
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Smart Home,
Tesla stopped selling the Solar Roof in August. There was no event, no blog post, no farewell video. Certified installers were told Tesla would supply conventional solar panels going forward, and the Solar Roof page on Tesla's site now sends you to those panels instead.
Elon Musk once said Tesla would be installing 1,000 Solar Roofs a week by 2019 or 2020. The real total came to roughly 3,000 systems over about seven years, something like 95% short of that pace.
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TP-Link’s Wi-Fi 8 Routers Arrive First. Do You Actually Need One Yet?
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Broadband, Wireless / WiFi,
TP-Link showed up at IFA in Berlin with a router you can pre-order on September 30, and it wants you to know it got there first. The Archer 8 Ultra and the Deco 8 Ultra are among the first Wi-Fi 8 hardware anyone has put a real date on. The catch is worth sitting with. Wi-Fi 8 isn't finished, and the standard behind it isn't expected to be locked down until 2028.
So should you care yet? The honest answer starts with what Wi-Fi 8 actually is, and it is not a speed upgrade. Every previous jump trained you to expect a bigger number, so this one takes a second to sink in. There's no new spectrum, no wider channels, and the top speed sits about where Wi-Fi 7 already left it. What the engineers are chasing this time is reliability.
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BYD’s Sealion 08 Is the $33,000 Long-Range SUV You Can’t Buy
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Transportation,
Picture a three-row electric SUV longer than a BMW X7, one that charges from nearly empty to almost full in about nine minutes and claims to travel 559 miles on a charge. Now picture it costing about what a loaded Toyota Highlander does. That car is real. BYD launched it on September 2, and unless you live in China, you cannot buy it.
The Sealion 08 is the new flagship of BYD's Ocean lineup, and it is a lot of vehicle for the money. Prices run from 229,900 to 279,900 yuan, or roughly $33,000 to $41,000, across eight versions. For that you get a 5,115mm body, a choice of five or six seats, and a spec sheet that reads like a wish list an American automaker would quietly file under "someday."
Click to continue reading BYD’s Sealion 08 Is the $33,000 Long-Range SUV You Can’t Buy
Perplexity’s New Mac Feature Tries to Keep Your Private Files Off the Cloud
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Software, Artificial Intelligence,
You want AI to help with the messy, useful stuff: your tax return, a contract, the bloodwork PDF you can't make sense of. And every time, the same worry shows up. To get the help, do you have to hand all of it to somebody else's servers?
Perplexity says no, or at least not all of it. On September 1 it switched on a feature called Hybrid Compute in its Mac app. The idea: the cloud still does the heavy thinking, but the moment your task touches something private, that step runs on a small model on your own Mac instead. Your sensitive files are supposed to stay on the laptop.
JMGO’s Iris Ultra Max Wants to Be the Projector You Can Watch With the Lights On
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Displays, Home Entertainment,
Most projectors end up in a closet for one reason: you have to turn your living room into a cave to use them. Draw the blackout curtains, wait for dark, tell everyone to quit opening the fridge because the light spills onto the wall. That friction is why a lot of people buy a projector, use it twice, and go back to the TV.
At IFA in Berlin, JMGO built its whole pitch around solving exactly that. The new Iris Ultra Max is a 4K projector that runs at 120Hz, uses a triple-laser light engine, and claims up to 6,500 ISO lumens. That last number is the company betting it can throw a picture bright enough to survive a room with the lights on. It is now heading to markets outside China, with preorders opening September 4 and units shipping October 19.
153 Million License Scans Are for Sale, and the Sellers Say They Still Have Access
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Internet, Misc. Tech,
The last time you handed your driver's license to a rental car counter, or a hotel front desk, or the guy working the door at a dispensary, somebody ran it through a scanner. You probably never learned the name of the company behind that scanner. You never signed up with them, either.
A dark web store called Nexus is selling those scans. Its catalog claims 153 million driver's licenses covering people in the United States and Canada. Brian Krebs broke the story Wednesday at Krebs on Security, and he verified it against himself. He found a record holding six image files of his own license, timestamped to a trip he took in June 2025. Other people he reached out to found their own records too.
OpenAI Is Pulling Its Models Out of Cursor, and Musk Is the Reason It Gives
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Software, Artificial Intelligence,
If you open Cursor every morning with an OpenAI model selected in the picker, you have until November 12 to choose something else. OpenAI is winding down the contract that supplies its models to Cursor, and the reason has nothing to do with Cursor's code or its bill.
OpenAI laid it out in its own post on August 28: "Today, we notified SpaceX that we intend to wind down our contract providing OpenAI models to Cursor, with a proposed shutoff date of November 12, 2026." Cursor now belongs to SpaceX, which also owns xAI. Both answer to Elon Musk, and OpenAI would rather not hand him the keys.
The Switch 2 Costs $500 Today, and $450 Is Probably Gone for Good
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Handhelds, Video Games,
Consoles are supposed to get cheaper as they get older. Starting today, the Nintendo Switch 2 costs $50 more than it did yesterday, and yesterday was the last day you can buy one at the price it shipped with.
Nintendo of America moved the standard Switch 2 from $449.99 to $499.99 on September 1, 2026. That is the plain box: console, two Joy-Con, no game. If you have been circling this purchase since launch, you have until stores close.
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Dyson Put a Camera Inside a $500 Toothbrush
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Cameras, Smart Home, Misc. Tech,
Dyson spent six years building a toothbrush that can see inside your mouth. The CameraJet is up for pre-order now at $499.99 in Ceramic Ultra Blue and Ceramic Pink, and it ships September 8. It brushes, flosses and rinses in one pass. The seeing part is the whole pitch. A camera under the brush head finds the gaps between your teeth and fires water at them, so you never have to aim.
That is either the most Dyson product ever made or five hundred dollars for a toothbrush. Both are true.
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