Find Our Latest Video Reviews on YouTube!
If you want to stay on top of all of our video reviews of the latest tech, be sure to check out and subscribe to the Gear Live YouTube channel, hosted by Andru Edwards! It’s free!
Rockstar Is Putting the Next GTA 6 Reveal Behind a Netflix Login for Six Hours
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Home Entertainment, Video Games,
For thirteen years, the pattern was simple. Rockstar drops a Grand Theft Auto trailer on YouTube, a hundred million people watch it, and the internet talks about nothing else for a week. No showcase, no partner, no gatekeeper. That changes on August 27.
Rockstar announced today that "Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look" premieres on Netflix at 3 p.m. ET, and won't hit the official Rockstar YouTube channel or the GTA VI site until 9 p.m. ET the same day. Netflix gets a six-hour head start on the most anticipated video the industry has left.
The iPhone 18 Pro Might Start at $1,399, and Even the Optimists Are Giving Up
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Smartphones, Rumors,
Two months ago the case for staying calm went like this: yes, memory prices have gone insane, but Apple runs the best supply chain on earth and has a long history of quietly eating costs to protect a price point. Analyst Jeff Pu of GF Securities was making exactly that argument in May, saying Apple could still price the iPhone 18 Pro aggressively. This week he changed his mind.
In a new research note, Pu now expects the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max to land $250 to $300 above their predecessors. That works out to roughly $1,349 to $1,399 for the iPhone 18 Pro and $1,449 to $1,499 for the Pro Max. The iPhone 17 Pro starts at $1,099 today. The 17 Pro Max starts at $1,199. Do that math on a Pro Max with any storage upgrade at all and you're staring at a phone that costs more than a decent laptop.
Advertisement
Apple Just Raised Trade-In Values, and It’s Taking Android Phones Now
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Smartphones, Hot Deals,
Apple raising trade-in values is normally a footnote. Apple raising trade-in values roughly a month before its biggest launch of the year, with some devices jumping close to 30 percent, is a strategy.
The company updated its U.S. trade-in estimates today, lifting the numbers for most iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch models compared to the last revision in May. It also added several Android phones to the list for the first time.
Click to continue reading Apple Just Raised Trade-In Values, and It’s Taking Android Phones Now
Latest Andru Edwards Videos
OpenAI’s First Gadget Is a $300 Donut with Moving Arms You Carry Around
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smart Home, Rumors, Artificial Intelligence,
Picture a metal doughnut roughly the size of a hockey puck sitting on your kitchen counter. No screen. Small moving parts that shift when it answers you, and lights that glow when it's listening. That is the first piece of hardware OpenAI wants to sell you, and Bloomberg says it will cost somewhere between $300 and $400.
Mark Gurman's report gives real shape to a device we've only heard described in fuzzy terms since July. It's a speaker with no display, built to be picked up in one hand and carried from the kitchen to the laundry room to the bedroom. It runs on a battery. It has speaker grilles, microphones, a camera system, and sensors that feed it information about whatever room it's in. Jony Ive is designing it.
Click to continue reading OpenAI’s First Gadget Is a $300 Donut with Moving Arms You Carry Around
Bose’s New QuietComfort Headphones Borrow the Ultra’s Best Trick for $359
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Accessories, Portable Audio / Video,
If you wear glasses and you've ever noticed noise cancellation working worse than the review scores promised, you weren't imagining it. The arm of your frames breaks the seal on the earcup, and ANC that depends on a sealed cavity starts leaking. Bose says it finally built around that.
The new QuietComfort Headphones (2nd Gen) arrive today at $359, the first real hardware update to the line since 2023. Preorders open August 8 and shipping starts August 13.
Click to continue reading Bose’s New QuietComfort Headphones Borrow the Ultra’s Best Trick for $359
ChatGPT’s New Slider Lets You Decide How Hard It Thinks
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Software, Artificial Intelligence,
The most annoying thing about ChatGPT has never been that it's wrong. It's that it's long. You ask a one-line question and get back a bulleted essay with three headers and a summary you didn't request. OpenAI has apparently noticed.
Alongside today's free-tier news, Plus and Pro subscribers are getting an updated GPT-5.6 Sol in ChatGPT's Chat experience, tuned to give shorter and more focused answers, and a slider that lets you set how much thought the model puts into each response. Both are live today on web, mobile, and desktop.
Click to continue reading ChatGPT’s New Slider Lets You Decide How Hard It Thinks
Dolby Vision 2 Is Real Now, and Hisense Owners Get It First
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment,
This is the first time the next generation of Dolby's HDR format has landed on hardware people can actually buy. The firmware is going out to 2026 Hisense UX, UR9, UR8, and U7 sets (sold as U7 Pro in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Central and South America), on both Google TV and Hisense's own VIDAA platform.
Click to continue reading Dolby Vision 2 Is Real Now, and Hisense Owners Get It First
Airtable Was Worth $11 Billion. It Just Sold to Bending Spoons for $1.28 Billion.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Internet, Software,
If you use Airtable to run something, a small production schedule, a client tracker, the spreadsheet that got out of hand, today's news deserves your attention for one reason: Bending Spoons is buying it. The Italian company agreed Tuesday to acquire Airtable in an all-cash deal valuing it at $1.285 billion in enterprise value, or roughly $2.25 billion counting Airtable's cash.
That's a fine outcome by most measures and a brutal one by the measure that matters to Airtable's investors. In 2021 the company was valued at over $11 billion. Earlier this year its shares were reportedly changing hands on secondary markets around $4 billion. Airtable raised more than $1.4 billion over its life. The math does not work out the way anyone hoped.
I Built the Most Unreasonable Mac Desk Setup! (Video)
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Peripherals, Videos,
There's a version of this desk that makes sense, and this isn't it.
Four Apple silicon Macs. A terabyte and a half of unified memory. Six docking stations. A chair with actual motors inside it.
I record and edit every video here, test hardware here, and spend a completely unreasonable percentage of my life here when I'm not traveling. At some point the question stopped being what do I need and quietly became what happens if I stop saying no.
Click to continue reading I Built the Most Unreasonable Mac Desk Setup! (Video)
The Budget Xbox Series S Now Costs 499 Euros, and That’s the Good News
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Microsoft, Video Games,
The Xbox Series S was supposed to be the console you bought without thinking about it. Cheap, small, good enough, the thing you got your kid or picked up as a second machine for the bedroom. In Europe it now costs €499.99. That's a 43 percent increase on a console that launched as the budget option, and it's the smallest number in this story.
Microsoft told everyone back in June that Xbox prices were going up on August 1st, but it only shared US figures at the time. The European and UK numbers landed when the increase actually took effect, and they're considerably worse than the American ones.
Click to continue reading The Budget Xbox Series S Now Costs 499 Euros, and That’s the Good News