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Spatial Audio in CarPlay Reaches the Volvo EX90, With a 25-Speaker Catch
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Portable Audio / Video, Transportation,
The car is where a lot of people still listen to music on purpose. Alone, on a highway, with nobody interrupting and nothing else competing for the speakers, you hear the bass line in a way you never do at your desk. It's the closest thing most of us have to a listening room, and audio companies have been circling it for years.
Volvo is pushing Spatial Audio in CarPlay, powered by Dolby Atmos, out to the EX90 through a software update, and confirmed it in a press release this week. Back in July it named the EX60, EX90 and ES90 as the three models getting it. There's a catch, and it's an expensive one. The feature needs the optional Bowers & Wilkins sound system.
Click to continue reading Spatial Audio in CarPlay Reaches the Volvo EX90, With a 25-Speaker Catch
Chip Tariffs Could Reach Laptops and Game Consoles
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: PC / Laptop, Rumors, Video Games,
Taxing a chip and taxing the laptop that chip lives inside are two very different policies. One duty falls on a component. The other falls on the whole machine, and the customs value of a machine is a lot bigger than the customs value of the silicon in it.
On August 27, Politico reported that the Trump administration is weighing the second version. Citing eight people familiar with the discussions, Politico said officials have been working on a round of semiconductor tariffs that would reach finished products built with chips: laptops, gaming consoles, and data center servers. CNBC and Reuters both picked the story up the same day, and Reuters noted it could not independently verify it. Nothing has been signed. No rate has been reported, and there is no effective date, because there is nothing yet to make effective.
Click to continue reading Chip Tariffs Could Reach Laptops and Game Consoles
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The Galaxy S26 FE Costs $50 More, and Only the Chip Really Changed
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Features,
The Fan Edition pitch has never been complicated. Samsung takes a flagship, shaves off the parts most people won't miss, and sells it for a few hundred dollars less. The Galaxy S26 FE, official as of August 27, keeps that pitch intact. It also raises the entry fee to $699.99, up $50 from where the S25 FE started last year.
For that you get a 6.7-inch FHD+ Dynamic AMOLED 2X running at 120Hz and rated for 1,900 nits, a 4,900mAh battery, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB or 256GB of storage. It arrives September 3 at select carriers and September 4 at Samsung.com and everywhere else, in Pistachio, Blueberry, and Graphite. Nearly all of that carried over from the S25 FE unchanged.
Click to continue reading The Galaxy S26 FE Costs $50 More, and Only the Chip Really Changed
Latest Andru Edwards Videos
Meta Closes the Ray-Ban Glasses Trick for Hiding the Recording Light
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Cameras, Wearables, Editorial,
The white light on the front of a pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses is the only thing standing between you and a stranger filming you. That's the whole design. There's no shutter sound, no lens barrel, no obvious gesture. A small LED comes on, and you're supposed to notice it and act accordingly.
Meta has started rolling out an update that closes the newest way people were getting around it. Until now, the glasses only checked the LED at the moment you pressed record. Start a video with the light exposed, then slide a finger or a piece of tape over it, and the camera kept going. Alex Himel, Meta's VP of wearables, announced the fix on Threads: "The camera will now stop working if the light is covered during a recording."
Click to continue reading Meta Closes the Ray-Ban Glasses Trick for Hiding the Recording Light
Anthropic said no to the Pentagon. A judge just ruled the punishment illegal.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Artificial Intelligence,
Turning down government work is not supposed to get you branded a national security threat. A federal judge in San Francisco spent 59 pages explaining that the Pentagon did exactly that to Anthropic, and that it broke the law doing it.
U.S. District Judge Rita Lin, ruling on cross-motions for summary judgment in the Northern District of California, vacated the Defense Department's designation of Anthropic as a "supply chain risk" and blocked the government from enforcing the directives built on top of it. "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," Lin wrote.
Cerebras Built a Chip the Size of a Dinner Plate Because Memory Is the Wall
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Misc. Tech, Artificial Intelligence,
Most AI chips spend a lot of their time waiting. The math units sit idle while the memory system hauls in the next slab of model weights, and that waiting is a big part of why a chatbot pauses before it answers you. Cerebras's answer has been to skip the step where a wafer gets cut into individual chips and ship the entire wafer as one processor.
That wafer is close to the size of a dinner plate: 46,225 square millimeters, a bit under 8.5 inches on a side, carrying four trillion transistors and 900,000 cores. Cerebras announced the CS-4 in mid-August, a rack holding three of them, with first shipments beginning this quarter. At Hot Chips this week the company walked through how the rack is built and where the wafer goes next.
The Translucent Green Xbox Series X25 Is $899, and Pre-Orders Open Thursday Morning
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Microsoft, Video Games,
If you were a kid in 2001 and you ever saw one of the see-through green Xbox consoles, you know why this thing exists. Microsoft confirmed the details for the Xbox Series X25 during its gamescom broadcast on Wednesday: translucent OG green shell, guts visible through the case, every unit individually numbered with its own engraving.
It costs $899.99 in the US (£759.99 in the UK) and launches November 13, 2026, right up against the 25th anniversary of the original Xbox. Pre-orders open Thursday, August 27 at 7 a.m. Pacific / 10 a.m. Eastern on the Xbox site and at participating retailers, limited to one per customer. Some longtime Xbox customers got emailed early access on Wednesday.
Legato Just Hid an AI Hearing Aid Inside a Normal Pair of Glasses
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Wearables, Artificial Intelligence,
In a loud restaurant, somebody across the table says something, you catch about 60% of it, and you nod anyway. For a lot of the 50 million American adults with hearing loss, that's every conversation, and the fix is a device you have to admit you need. A startup called Legato is going after that problem by not making a medical device at all.
Legato came out of stealth Wednesday with $12 million in funding and its first product, Legato Frames. It's a pair of glasses with hearing assistance built into the arms. From across the room, they look like glasses.
Click to continue reading Legato Just Hid an AI Hearing Aid Inside a Normal Pair of Glasses
OpenAI Built Its Own AI Chip, Jalapeño, and It’s Beating Nvidia on Power
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Artificial Intelligence,
You know that pause when you ask a chatbot something and the answer sits there, one word at a time, while you stare at it? That pause is inference, and it's the most expensive thing in AI right now. OpenAI just showed off a chip built to kill it.
The chip is called Jalapeño. OpenAI published its first benchmark numbers at the Hot Chips conference this week. Against Nvidia's Blackwell systems, OpenAI says Jalapeño does 1.5x to 1.9x more work per watt and responds 1.7x to 3.6x faster end to end.
Click to continue reading OpenAI Built Its Own AI Chip, Jalapeño, and It’s Beating Nvidia on Power
Samsung Put a Processor Inside Your Phone’s RAM
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Misc. Tech, Artificial Intelligence,
Every time your phone runs an AI feature on-device, most of the energy goes into hauling data out of memory, over to the processor, doing a bit of math, and hauling it back. Again and again. The math is cheap. The commute kills your battery.
Samsung's answer, shown at the Hot Chips conference this week, is to stop commuting. LPDDR5X-PIM puts small compute units inside the memory chip, so the calculations happen where the data already lives. It's the first time this has been done with LPDDR, the low-power memory that goes into phones and laptops instead of data center racks.
Click to continue reading Samsung Put a Processor Inside Your Phone’s RAM