Technology

According to reports, Beats is now gearing up to launch a new in-ear audio option. Leaked via internal iOS 15.1 RC files, the “Beats Fit Pro” earbuds are said to be performance focussed earphones in line with the qualities and features found in the Beats Studio Buds released earlier this year. The Beats Fit Pro earbuds are expected to come complete with Active Noise Cancellation, Class 1 Bluetooth and Apple’s H1 chip for seamless pairing with Apple products. An accelerometer is also utilized to reduce external noise when using the Active Noise Cancellation function. Finally, the earbuds are expected to deliver six hours of battery life with ANC or Transparency Mode and seven hours with Adaptive EQ, while the charging case is supposedly able to deliver 27 to 30 hours of charge altogether. 9...

Apple on Monday unveiled several new updates to its existing AirPods, HomePod mini and MacBook Pro lineups at its Unleashed event in Cupertino, California. Here are all of the biggest announcements from Tuesday’s major tech conference: 1. Apple unveiled its Third-Generation AirPods with spatial audio and a sleek new look The latest AirPods update arrives with an all-new design, equipped with a new low distortion driver that delivers powerful bass and clear high frequencies. The listening device supports spatial audio, which provides a three-dimensional immersive listening experience for both surround-sound music and videos. By combining the power of the H1 chip with a new acoustic system, the new AirPods utilize computational audio to produce high-quality sound with Adaptive EQ. Addit...

If you were ever concerned about safely cleaning your Apple products, now you can use an official $19 piece of cloth made by Apple to do so. Apple released this polishing cloth after today’s event in addition to its new MacBook Pros, the M1 Pro and Max chips, and third-generation AirPods (via 9to5Mac). Photo by Apple The Apple-branded cloth, made of unspecified nonabrasive materials, will be available to purchase separately. Other than having an Apple logo stamped on it, it’s unclear how the cloth is any different from a typical microfiber cloth that you can get for a fraction of the price. Apple recommends using “soft, lint-free cloth” and avoiding “abrasive cloths, towels, paper towels, or similar items” when cleaning your Apple devices, which are all worries that this $19 cloth puts to ...

Apple debuted a controversial new Safari tab design this summer at WWDC 2021, and since then, it has tweaked that look and even let you turn off many of the changes. With macOS Monterey, however, the company is going back to the way tabs looked before. On Apple’s official page for the upcoming software update, if you scroll down to the section titled “Access Tab Groups anywhere,” you can just barely see Safari’s older (and arguably better) design in the example screenshots on both a Mac and on an iPad (via Daring Fireball). Perhaps even more surprising is that the old design is now the default, according to MacRumors, which observed the reverted tabs in the macOS Monterey release candidate. However, if you want to use the design Apple revealed at WWDC, where tabs also function as URL bars,...

Apple has just announced the next generation of AirPods, but if you’ve been waiting for new Beats earbuds, you may also have something to look forward to there. A report from 9to5Mac describes the upcoming Beats Fit Pro that, according to the article, will have wingtips that seem to be designed to ensure a better fit in your ear. You can see the rumored earbuds at the top of this post or in this set of images shared by 9to5Mac, featuring the Beats Fit Pro in black, gray, white, and lavender. Grid View In addition to the new design, the earbuds will have active noise cancelation, Apple’s H1 chip for speedy pairing and Hey Siri, and support for quick pairing on Android through the Beats app, 9to5Mac reports. It also seems as if the Beats Fit Pro will have good battery life: six hours with AN...

Dbrand has revealed a brand-new design for its PS5 Darkplates just days after yanking the originals from sale. If you weren’t familiar with the original Darkplates, they looked exactly like the side shells of a PS5, but instead of being white, they were matte black. In its marketing of the first version, the company baited Sony to “Go ahead, sue us,” and Sony unsurprisingly followed up with a legal threat. Shockingly, just days after making a big public stink about Sony forcing it to pull the old version, Dbrand is already ready with a new design. The company says they’ve been in development since September, but conveniently would not tell us when Sony sent the cease-and-desist to begin with. Darkplates 2.0 look a little different than the original model. While they still attach to the sid...

Apple has unveiled its official polishing cloth, compatible to gently clean more than a dozen of its products. Although its fabric is not explicitly stated by the tech company, Apple shared on its website that it is crafted “with soft, nonabrasive material” and arrives with a minimal logo on the right hand corner. The polishing cloth “cleans any Apple display, including nano-texture glass, safely and effectively” and is compatible with iPhones from the first generation SE to the current iPhone 13 line, iPads from the first Mini generation to the sixth, MacBook and iMac models from 2012 to 2020, Apple Watches from the first generation to Series 7, iPods from the fourth generation Shuffle to the seventh generation Touch and Pro Display XR models. Purchase Apple’s Polishing Cloth on the Apple...

I nearly bought my first MacBook Pro in 2015. It would have been the first Mac I ever personally owned. But I convinced myself to wait another year for faster Intel chips — and in October 2016, Apple took away almost everything I admired about that Mac in one fell swoop. The comfortable keyboard? Replaced with a too-thin slab that also became a nightmare for many a Mac user over the years, the butterfly switch mechanism so fragile a speck of dust could lay it low. The handy SD card slot for photographers and videographers, and the HDMI port to easily connect to monitors or TVs? Both axed seemingly in favor of selling us more overpriced dongles. In the quest for ever-thinner and flashier laptops, Apple had seemingly forgotten why people bought the MacBook Pro in the first place — and pros w...

As the Steam Deck’s December 2021 launch approaches, Valve is taking time to make sure gamers know which titles will work on its portable machine. While its site still promises “Your Steam Library, anywhere,” we’ve had an interest — and a little skepticism — about whether or not games built for PCs will actually work well on a handheld device that runs Linux. The company recently opened up its @OnDeck Twitter account to highlight demonstrations of PC games running on the Steam Deck, and today it revealed the Steam Deck Compatibility program. Steam Deck compatibility labels appear on any game published via Steam, separating them into four categories. The highest level, Verified, has a green logo with a check mark, indicating games that work “great on Steam Deck, right out of the box.” Steam...

AMC has expanded open captioning on some film showings to 240 cinemas in the US, including select showtimes for all of its newer releases. The expansion of support in its theaters across the US — which has been extended to more than 100 markets — is AMC’s most significant push into captioned showings to date. A spokesperson told The Verge prior to the summer and fall of 2021, just a handful of AMC’s US theaters supported open captioning (which is viewable to everyone in the auditorium and separate from AMC’s closed-captioned assisted moviegoing initiative, which is available at all of its theaters nationwide). “We anticipate strong demand with growing awareness of open caption showtimes.” Again, not all AMC showings will include open captioning, but AMC said that theaters that do offer ope...

Google’s upcoming phones have made early appearances in leaks over, and over, and over, and over, and over again, so it’s really no surprise that someone seems to have obtained a retail-boxed Pixel 6 unit ahead of the fall launch event tomorrow. In a video posted initially to TikTok, then deleted but still available on Twitter for a few hours, @CristianDimboiu took a literal approach to unboxing by removing the “Sorta Seafoam” green device from its carrier without going any further. We didn’t see the screen turn on or see the screen at all. Fortunately, Google apparently ships its new phone upside down so that we could see the camera bar at the back with multiple lenses. It also appears that this phone ships with a cable and USB-C adapter but no charger, so hopefully, new owners will have ...