Gear Live: The Latest Tech, Gadgets, AI, and Gaming News
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.
Click to continue reading The Switch 2 Costs $500 Today, and $450 Is Probably Gone for Good
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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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Xbox Disc to Digital Is Live for Insiders, and Your Series S Can’t Play Along
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Microsoft, Video Games,
There is a shelf in a lot of living rooms that has turned into a problem. Fifty Xbox games, maybe two hundred, and a growing suspicion that the next console you buy won't have anywhere to put them. Microsoft's answer started reaching Xbox Insiders on Monday, and the pitch is refreshingly boring. Put the disc in, launch the game, keep the digital copy.
Xbox announced the feature on its blog on August 26 and filled in details during a Gamescom livestream with Jason Ronald. Insert a supported disc into an Xbox One or Xbox Series X, start the game, and you claim a digital entitlement tied to that disc. The disc keeps working exactly as it always has. You just stop needing it in the tray.
Nvidia’s DLSS 5 Ships September 3, and It Changes What the Artists Drew
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: PC / Laptop, Video Games, Artificial Intelligence,
Every version of DLSS so far has been a clever way to draw the picture developers already designed. Render fewer pixels, let the AI fill in the rest, get your frame rate back. DLSS 5 is different. It reaches into the finished frame and adds detail that nobody at the studio put there.
It ships September 3 alongside NBA 2K27, it runs only on RTX 50-series cards, and Nvidia calls it 3D-guided neural rendering. The pitch is that it puts back what real-time budgets force studios to cut: light scattering under skin, light passing through hair and foliage, contact shadows, ambient occlusion. The reception so far has been rough. Early demos built on Resident Evil: Requiem and Starfield drew a pile of complaints about faces that landed square in the uncanny valley, and a leaked build that modders bolted onto older games made the criticism louder.
Click to continue reading Nvidia’s DLSS 5 Ships September 3, and It Changes What the Artists Drew
Godot Just Got Raytraced Sound, and a Solo Dev Built It
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Mods / Hacks, Software, Video Games,
Every time a game makes you feel like you are standing in a concrete stairwell, somebody put that stairwell there by hand. A sound designer drew a box around the space, tagged it with a reverb preset, drew another box around the doorway so footsteps muffle when you round the corner, then did it again for every other room in the level. It works. It is also an enormous amount of tedious labor, and it stops being true the second a player knocks a hole in a wall.
Vercidium, a game developer who has spent the past year posting audio experiments to YouTube, released a plugin for Godot that does the job the other way around. It traces sound the way a renderer traces light. Rays bounce off the real geometry of your level, lose energy to whatever they hit, and what reaches the player is whatever survives the trip. Nobody draws a box around anything.
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John Ternus Is Apple’s CEO. His New Bio Focuses on Durability and Repairs.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News, Editorial,
Apple's leadership page changed today. John Ternus is listed as CEO, Tim Cook has moved to executive chair with a seat on the board, and the board section now carries headshots instead of a plain list of names. Apple also rewrote the bio under Ternus's photo. Day one came with no keynote and no memo to the troops. It came with a webpage, and somebody at Apple picked every word on it.
The longest paragraph in that bio skips past iPad, AirPods, and the run of iPhones he shepherded through hardware engineering. It's about things not breaking. "John has led much of the company's focus in areas like reliability and durability, introducing new techniques that have made Apple products remarkably resilient," it reads, before listing a recycled aluminum compound now used across multiple product lines, the 3D-printed titanium in Apple Watch Ultra, and "advancements in reparability that have increased the life spans of several Apple products."
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Sonos Bets on the Beam Ultra, Ace Ultra, and Sonos27 App Update It Can’t Afford to Botch
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Home Entertainment, Portable Audio / Video, Artificial Intelligence,
Sonos showed up at IFA today with a $699 soundbar, a pair of $449 headphones, and a new version of the app that did the company real damage two years ago. The app is the one that will decide how this year goes.
The hardware is easy to like. The Beam Ultra is a mid-size soundbar with nine drivers, and for the first time in a Beam, two of them fire upward. That is the difference between Dolby Atmos your soundbar fakes with processing and Atmos with sound actually bouncing off your ceiling. Sonos is calling the result true 7.1.2. Pre-orders open today, and it ships September 29.
The Google TV Streamer Costs $150 Now, and Google Isn’t Saying Why
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Home Entertainment,
The Google TV Streamer launched in 2024 at $100. It costs $150 on the Google Store today. Same box, same 4GB of RAM, same 32GB of storage, same remote, 50 percent more money.
Google did not announce this. No blog post, no new product page explaining a new value proposition, no statement. The number on the store listing changed, Best Buy's listing changed with it, and if you had one sitting in a cart you found out by looking.
Click to continue reading The Google TV Streamer Costs $150 Now, and Google Isn’t Saying Why
Sony Tells a Judge That Thinking You Own Your PlayStation Games Is Unreasonable
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Video Games,
You've clicked a button that says Buy. On the PlayStation Store it says Buy Now, then Confirm Purchase, and then the money leaves your account and the game shows up in your library. Sony's lawyers have now told a federal judge that if you walked away from that thinking you bought something, your understanding wasn't a reasonable one.
That's the argument in a motion Sony filed on August 21 in Heycock v. Sony Corporation of America, the proposed class action over PlayStation Store checkout language now in front of Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco. Sony's filing says "reasonable consumers would not be misled" into believing they own the digital games they buy, and that its checkout already does what California law asks, because you agree to the license terms before the purchase goes through. The Software Product License Agreement puts it flatly: "The software is licensed to you, not sold."