Technology

Tesla plans for its future electric vehicles to be able to both suck up power and spit it back out into the grid. Tesla didn’t specify when this capability would be available when CEO Elon Musk made the announcement during Tesla’s much-anticipated Battery Day event in Palo Alto, California. “A Powerwall and a car” But instead of hyping up this development, Musk downplayed how useful it would be for the company’s vehicles to be able to connect to the grid. “Vehicle-to-grid sounds good, but I think actually has a much lower utility than people think,” Musk said. He ostensibly wants consumers to continue buying Tesla’s Powerwall batteries for their homes, rather than using its EVs as batteries on wheels. “I think it’s actually going to be better for people’s freedom of action to have a Powerw...

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At Amazon, you can save $15 on the total cost of an Apple Watch Series 6 or Apple Watch SE. It’s not a huge discount, but per a deal post at AppleInsider, Amazon is the only place where you can actually save money on Apple’s latest smartwatches. This price drop for the new watches brings the Series 6 (GPS, 40mm) down to $384.99 and the cheaper SE in the bigger size (GPS, 44mm) down to $299.99. If you want the Series 6 or SE with cellular added to the Watch, you can also save up to $15 on those models. The Series 6 (GPS + Cellular, 40mm) is $485 instead of $500, and the SE (GPS + Cellular, 40mm) is $320 instead of $330. Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Both of these new Watches make the Apple Watch Series 3, in both 38mm and 42mm sizes seem all the more affordable. It starts at $169 for bo...

The Game Awards, an annual award show hosted by Geoff Keighley, is returning December 10th. This year’s festivities are taking a “multi-city approach,” offering streams from studios in Los Angeles, London, and Tokyo, albeit without in-person audiences. The event will also introduce a new award, Innovation in Accessibility, to honor developers “pushing the medium forward by adding features, technology, and content to help games be played and enjoyed by an even wider audience.” More details on the show will be released closer to its air-date, though organizers promise it will again feature news about games available that night, demos, and more. It will be available as a free live stream over 45 platforms. Keighley’s spoken about his ambitions to turn TGA into a global affair for years. While...

On Wednesday, Volkswagen officially unveiled the ID 4, the first electric vehicle built on the automaker’s mass-manufactured modular electric vehicle platform, or “MEB,” to be sold in the US. The ID 4 will also be VW’s first affordable crossover SUV to reach America, with a suggested retail price of just under $40,000. The ID 4 is one of the many ways VW has had to atone for Dieselgate, the massive emissions cheating scandal made public five years ago. In addition to nearly $35 billion in settlement fees and fines, VW vowed to spend billions more on a whole new lineup of electric vehicles in the hopes of rescuing its damaged reputation. The automaker said it will sell 150,000 electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles by 2020 (hurry up, clock’s ticking!), and over a million battery-electric vehi...

For big tech platforms, one of the more urgent questions to arise during the pandemic’s early months was how the forced closure of offices would change their approach to content moderation. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter all rely on huge numbers of third-party contract workers to police their networks, and traditionally those workers have worked side by side in big offices. When tech companies shuttered their offices, they closed down most of their content moderation facilities as well. Happily, they continued to pay their moderators — even those who could no longer work, because their jobs required them to use secure facilities. But with usage of social networks surging and an election on the horizon, the need for moderation had never been greater. And so Silicon Valley largely shifted mo...

Images of what appear to be a new Amazon Fire TV Stick have leaked ahead of the company’s hardware event this Thursday. WinFuture.de, which shared the pictures, says they show the upcoming “Amazon Fire TV Stick Lite” — a likely successor to the discontinued $35 second-generation Fire TV Stick. Visually there are no surprises here, with the design of the device barely changing from earlier models. The main differences are a new Amazon logo on the bottom of the remote, the removal of the power and volume buttons, and a new button with a TV icon. There are no leaked specs so we can only speculate about hardware changes. But it’s possible the new TV button will take viewers to Amazon’s growing selection of live TV broadcasts. Grid View As the company detailed in a blog post in July, Fire TV no...

Garmin has announced the $199 Venu Sq and $249 Venu Sq Music Edition, two square-shaped watches with 1.3-inch (240 x 240) color LCD touchscreens protected by Gorilla Glass 3. These wearables offer many of the same features as Garmin’s more expensive Venu smartwatch — for less. Both new models are available now through Garmin.com. The pricier Music Edition watch is different only in that it has built-in storage that, with a paid subscription to Spotify, Amazon Music, or Deezer, can connect to Wi-Fi and let you save up to 500 songs for listening with Bluetooth headphones. I tend to be skeptical of the quality of affordable smartwatches, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised with just about every aspect of the Venu Sq. The case, which Garmin says is fiber-reinforced polymer, feels very tough, an...

The next generation of PlayStation is nearly here. After more than a year of drip-feeding information about the PlayStation 5, Sony has finally laid out the price, release date, and some of the games we can expect to play at launch. With the PS5, it seems like Sony is sticking with the approach that made the PlayStation 4 so successful: sell consoles that can play first-party games from Sony’s storied franchises, and supplement that lineup with great third-party titles, too. You should expect to see better graphics in your games, and the PS5 will also support high refresh rates, which should make games feel smoother (if you have a display that supports those refresh rates). Plus, the PS5’s custom SSD promises to offer such a leap forward in loading speeds that it could change the way games...

iOS 14 has a lot of iPhones looking pretty different these days — some with classy monochrome color schemes, others with pastel styles ripped right off of Pinterest, and some that look like they’re straight out of Animal Crossing or emulating Windows Mobile. The changes aren’t some new, radical shift by Apple, but rather a viral wave of enthusiastic users taking advantage of widgets and other tweaks to bring an unprecedented level of customization to the usually rigid Apple-enforced design of the OS. It turns out that lots of people have been dying to theme iOS, and as any number of viral videos displaying lavishly designed homescreens show, they’re going to great lengths to do it. It’s proof that Apple should continue to trend down this path and allow users to have even greater control ov...

As part of its Battery Day presentation, Tesla CEO Elon Musk showed off video of the new “Plaid” version of its Model S sedan, a step up from its “Ludicrous” model. According to the specs on Tesla’s website, the long-awaited Plaid powertrain will have a range between charges of 520 miles, get from zero-to-60 in under two seconds, and a top speed of 200mph. The price is listed on Tesla’s website at $139,990. Musk has been teasing the Plaid for a while, and showed a video last year of a Tesla with the Plaid powertrain, noting it would “cost more than our current offerings.” (The name is apparently a reference from the Mel Brooks movie Spaceballs.) The Plaid Model S debuted last September at the Laguna Seca raceway, where it ran the course in 1 minute and 36 seconds, seen in this video: [embe...

SXSW, the annual tech, music, and film meetup held in downtown Austin was canceled earlier this year due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The festival’s organizers announced today that it will host an online-only version of the weeklong event next year. SXSW Online will take place from March 16th through March 20th, 2021. Throughout the week, organizers say attendees will be able to check out film and music screenings and take part in other activities such as exhibitions and networking opportunities, but they’ll all be online. SXSW isn’t just a conference where you can substitute a digital stage I’m curious to see how it all goes. Unlike other events, SXSW isn’t just a convention. Sure, people go to the keynotes, but SXSW is a festival. Most years, it’s packed with opportunities for peopl...