Technology

Apple on Monday announced that the Apple Watch Series 7 will be available to order starting Friday, October 8, at 5 a.m. PDT and available in stores beginning Friday, October 15. The device features Apple’s largest and most advanced Watch display to date, with a remastered Always-On Retina display and thinner borders. The design is equipped with more rounded corners and a refractive edge, which makes the display appear seamlessly connected with the case’s curve. The Apple Watch Series 7 — which includes a more crack-resistant crystal, introduces a new IP6X certification for dust resistance and continues to hold a WR50 water resistance rating — is available in both 41mm and 45mm sizes. The watch offers several health and wellness tools, including an electrical heart sensor, blood oxygen sen...

Former Apple Design Chief Jony Ive wrote a letter published in The Wall Street Journal Magazine on Monday, honoring his close friend and collaborator Steve Jobs 10 years after his death. “I think about Steve every day,” he wrote. On Jobs’ death, Ive says his memories of that day are “scattered and random,” though his reflections on the former Apple CEO over the course of their friendship remain clear. “We worked together for nearly 15 years. We had lunch together most days and spent our afternoons in the sanctuary of the design studio. Those were some of the happiest, most creative and joyful times of my life.” He continued: “I loved how he saw the world. The way he thought was profoundly beautiful.” Ive referred to Jobs as “without doubt the most inquisitive human I have ever me...

On Monday, Facebook was completely knocked offline, taking Instagram and WhatsApp (not to mention a few other websites) down with it. Many have been quick to say that the incident had to do with BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol, citing sources from inside Facebook, traffic analysis, and the gut instinct that “it’s always DNS or BGP.” Facebook is on its way back up, but this all begs the question: What is BGP? At a very basic level, BGP is one of the systems that the internet uses to get your traffic to where it needs to go as quickly as possible. Because there are tons of different internet service providers, backbone routers, and servers responsible for your data making it to, say, Facebook, there’s a ton of different routes your packets could end up taking. BGP’s job is to show them the w...

Amazon has billed today’s Deal of the Day as its “Epic Daily Deal,” and the shoe certainly fits when it includes one of the most epic RPG-in-a-box titles of all time. Gloomhaven is currently on sale, tying its all-time low price of $85 just for today. This shaves 40 percent off its usual MSRP of $140. If you have ever considered playing Dungeons and Dragons but could never get one of your friends to buckle down and put in the work as gamemaster, Gloomhaven might be the perfect solution for you and up to three friends. Gloomhaven $85 $140 40% off Perhaps the closest you’ll get to playing a video game on paper, Gloomhaven is an expansive board game filled with detailed miniatures, evocative art, and a sweeping narrative. As players progress through the story, they’ll open sealed boxes and ch...

In the chaos of Monday’s Facebook outage, it’s easy to lose sight of the company’s reach. Not being able to post a new photo to Instagram is an annoyance, but it’s not necessarily catastrophic. Yet for WhatsApp users, especially outside of the US, losing Facebook’s encrypted messaging service is a life-halting change, and one competing messaging services were eager to capitalize on today. In February last year, WhatsApp announced it had 2 billion users worldwide. Compare that to original flavor Facebook’s 2.5 billion and it’s easy to see how many lives WhatsApp touches. It’s become the default method to contact people in plenty of countries, including around 400 million unique monthly users in India Bloomberg writes. That goes beyond casual communication, as well: WhatsApp is a...

When something like Facebook drops off the internet, there are massive knock-on effects. For example, a website that’s meant to tell you if services are down, called Is It Down Right Now, struggled mightily under the load of people trying to see Instagram’s status. Cloudflare, a company that runs a DNS service (DNS acts like a map for your web browser when it’s trying to find a website and is also the likely culprit when it comes to major outages), reports that it had to mobilize extra resources to keep up with the traffic of people trying to load Facebook (or Instagram or WhatsApp) over and over. If you need to check if other sites are down, you do still have options. There’s the venerable DownDetector, as well as Down for Everyone or Just Me (DFEOJM informed me that it’s not just me havi...

Facebook experienced its biggest global outage since 2008, with Instagram and WhatsApp also down as of Monday afternoon. The outage began at around 12:00 p.m. ET. As of 6:00 p.m. ET, Instagram service appeared to have been restored to some users. Facebook has not issued a direct response in relation to the issue and did not immediately respond to HYPEBEAST for comment on the cause of the outage. According to CNBC, the outage marks the worst since 2008, when a bug took Facebook offline for about a day, though the site’s audience was merely a fraction of the three billion users it boasts today. According to The Verge, Facebook engineers have been sent to one of the company’s main data centers in California to try and problem solve on location. Mike Schroepfer, the company’s chief t...

I don’t know what else to call it: the Windows 11 upgrade situation is a confusing mess. Depending on when your PC was built, which components you chose, and how it was configured, there’s a decent chance Microsoft will try to scare you away from installing the free upgrade, which is available a day early today. Millions of people will likely be told their systems are incompatible, and Microsoft is reserving the right to withhold security updates if you install on older systems. But as far as we can tell, Windows 11 is largely Windows 10 with a fresh coat of paint, and there’s a strong chance your Windows 10 computer will run Windows 11 just fine. Do we recommend it? Not necessarily, but this article might help you figure out whether your PC is ready for the ride. Here’s a basic checklist ...

Acer has refreshed its Nitro 5 lineup of entry-level gaming laptops for the second half of 2021, and its new 17.3-inch model launching in mid-October seems particularly impressive given its $1,199.99 price. Its 1080p display has a 144Hz refresh rate, and it comes equipped with an 11th Gen Intel Core i7 processor and Nvidia’s RTX 3050 Ti graphics chip. (Acer hasn’t specified the CPU model or what the maximum graphics power of the GPU will be.) Other specs include 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 1TB SSD. That sounds like a solid gaming laptop to me, so long as you’re not expecting too much out of it. If you want something smaller, Acer also has a 15.6-inch version coming in mid-October for $769.99. It also has a 144Hz refresh rate screen, but as you might have guessed with the $400 price difference, ...

Windows 11 is now available and will be rolling out to millions of PCs worldwide. But, as with any new OS rollout, it’s not going to happen overnight, and many Windows users will be waiting for a while until that magic upgrade notice appears. Don’t want to wait? You don’t have to — you can, with just a little effort, download and install the new version of Windows right now. Keep in mind, though, that unlike previous versions of Windows, you may not be invited to install Windows 11 if your machine isn’t considered up to its standard. That doesn’t mean that you can’t install the new OS — Microsoft has said if you have an older machine, you will be able to access Windows 11, but you’ll have to download an ISO file of Windows 11 and install the OS manually. (However, you may not get automatic...