Technology

After reporting bumpy third quarter earnings on Wednesday, Sonos announced that it has decided to push back a product launch that was originally penciled in for the near future. The product in question is almost certainly the long-awaited Sub Mini, a more affordable subwoofer that would join the company’s home theater lineup alongside the existing $749 Sub. The Sub Mini appeared at the FCC in June. If Sonos had followed its typical window of time between that filing and a consumer release, the product would’ve been arriving relatively soon. But Sonos says it’s now been delayed until the fiscal first quarter of 2023. “We always consider the kind of product that it is, and the timing,” CEO Patrick Spence said on the call. “We remain committed to two new product launches each year.” Sonos spo...

Summer nights are getting increasingly dangerous thanks to climate change. By 2100, the risk of death from excessively hot nights is expected to grow six-fold compared to 2016 — even under the most optimistic predictions of future global warming, according to a new study published in the journal The Lancet Planetary Health. Hot nights are becoming both more frequent and way more intense, the study authors found. We don’t know just how much the planet will heat up in the future, but scientists have estimates for best- and worst-case scenarios. When looking at a more middle-of-the-road forecast for future climate change, hot nights become 75.6 percent more frequent by the end of the century. The average intensity of a sweltering night doubles — from 20.4 degrees Celsius (68.7 degrees Fahrenh...

Facebook served ads on searches related to white supremacist groups, despite a ban on such content on the platform, according to a report by the Tech Transparency Project. The report, which was first covered by The Washington Post, identified 119 Facebook pages and 20 Facebook groups affiliated with white supremacist organizations on the platform. Researchers searched Facebook for 226 designated hate groups or dangerous organizations using sources like the Southern Poverty Law Center, Anti-Defamation League, and even Facebook itself, and found more than a third had a presence on the platform. The study found that despite Facebook’s insistence that the company doesn’t profit from hateful content, ads appeared on 40 percent of the queries for the groups. The white supremacist pages identifie...

No cap, Sen. Mike Lee himself is tweeting from the @BasedMikeLee Twitter account. The account cropped up seemingly out of nowhere towards the end of last month, posting news articles about the Duke of Sussex, Prince Harry; claiming that Lee is taller than his colleague Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY); and shaming the tech companies he aims to regulate as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “The haters can’t handle this frickin’ smoke,” Lee said in a July 24th tweet on the account. Quote-tweeting Turning Point USA contributor Benny Johnson that same day, Lee wrote, “This account is no cap — bussin, forreal forreal.” The Salt Lake Tribune was the first to confirm that the account belonged to Lee on Tuesday. Lee Lonsberry, a Sen. Lee spokesperson, confirmed that it was the senator’s “personal T...

Apple could make the upcoming iPhone 14 more expensive than the iPhone 13, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Kuo believes that the average selling price (ASP) of the combined iPhone 14 lineup may increase by 15 percent when compared to the iPhone 13 lineup. For reference, the standard iPhone 13 model starts at $799 (with carrier discounts), while the Pro and Pro Max models bump that price up to $999 and $1,099, respectively. While Kuo doesn’t mention price predictions for individual devices, he thinks the ASP of the iPhone 14 lineup (Pro models included) could hover around $1,000 to $1,050. Kuo blames the ASP increase on a potentially more expensive iPhone Pro and Pro Max, as well as a “higher shipment proportion.” (1/2)Hon Hai/Foxconn is one of the winners of the increased ASP of i...

Continuing its string of iterative hardware updates today, Samsung is introducing the new Galaxy Buds 2 Pro. The company says they’re smaller and more comfortable than the original Buds Pro, and the new model supports 24-bit audio playback over Bluetooth — if you’re using a Samsung phone, that is. Preorders for the $229.99 Buds 2 Pro start today, and they’ll be available on August 26th. (That’s $30 more expensive than the launch price of the original pair.) Samsung’s latest top-of-the-line earbuds will be offered in black, white, and purple. The Buds 2 Pro are 15 percent smaller than the original Buds Pro, and Samsung has also expanded the venting grille to allow added airflow to reach your ears and cut down on any “plugged up” feeling during extended use. Hopefully this will also make the...

Samsung, purveyor of the only serious foldables available on a global scale, is taking a victory lap with the Galaxy Fold 4. As is tradition, the company has announced full details after a parade of teases and leaks, confirming what we strongly suspected: it’s not a huge update. The overall design is ever so slightly sleeker, with a slimmer hinge and bezels. This is mostly cosmetic and doesn’t make much of a difference to how compact the phone folds down — just the difference of a fraction of a millimeter (15.8mm thick at the hinge and 14.2mm where the sides meet). It weighs a little less: 263 grams compared to the Z Fold 3’s 271 grams. It’s still a heavy phone, which is to be expected for something that doubles as both a phone and a small tablet. I can’t say it was noticeably slimmer or l...

It’s not a day for big updates or surprises from Samsung, and the Galaxy Z Flip 4 is holding the line. It’s the latest generation of Samsung’s smaller foldable, and it comes with some small but meaningful upgrades, like a bigger battery, upgraded camera hardware, and a stronger main display. There are some new colors, too, which you can mix and match to create your own “bespoke” Flip 4. But if you were holding your breath for a price drop, then we’ve got some bad news for you: it still starts at $999 — affordable by foldable standards but still in the upper echelons of smartphone pricing. Naturally, there’s an updated chipset: the Flip 4 comes with a Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 (paired with 8GB of RAM), which you’ll find on basically every flagship Android phone not made by Google released thi...

Gather your paint cans, squids. With Splatoon 3 right around the corner, Nintendo’s released the most in-depth look at what to expect from the closest thing to an esport that the company actually still cares about. (Sorry, Smash.) The 30-minute-long presentation covered (it’s a paint joke!) everything from new weapons to new stages and even featured a rough roadmap for content updates post-launch. Settle in — there’s a lot of ink to spill. As Nintendo’s previously revealed, Splatoon 3 takes place in Splatsville, a sprawling city located in the arid desert of the Splatlands. There, inklings and octolings will plop, glop, and otherwise make all sorts of gross glooping noises as they fight to splatter paint across a variety of stages. Splatoon 3 will feature some new weapons designed to assis...

Urbanista is following up its solar-powered over-ear headphones from last year with a pair of solar-powered true wireless earbuds called the Phoenix, the company officially announced today. Like the headphones, Phoenix uses Powerfoyle solar panels produced by Exeger to extend their battery life with power from the sun’s rays. But unlike the Los Angeles headphones that have solar panels built into the headband, the panels aren’t included on the Phoenix earbuds themselves. Instead, they’re built into the Phoenix charging case. The decision to shift the solar-charging tech to the charging case makes sense given the small size of the earbuds. But it’s likely to mean that users will have to make an effort to keep the solar panels directed at the sun. A headphone band on top of your head is goin...

Microsoft is reportedly laying off its team focused on winning back consumers. In 2018 the software giant originally detailed its efforts to win back the non-enterprise customers it let down, forming a Modern Life Experiences team to focus on professional consumers (prosumers). Business Insider now reports that Microsoft is laying off that team, and telling the roughly 200 affected employees to find another position at the company or take severance pay. While Microsoft isn’t officially commenting on the end of its Modern Life initiative, a Microsoft senior designer revealed there was “hard news” for the Modern Life Experiences team this week in a LinkedIn post. The news comes weeks after Microsoft cut less than 1 percent of its 180,000-person workforce, with job cuts in consulting, and cus...

Don’t you just hate it when you pick up your trusty Canon EOS R5, only to discover it’s actually a sneaky Transformer? Well bad news, because this nightmarish future spotted by TFormers is actually becoming a reality next year thanks to a collaboration between Takara Tomy (the Japanese company behind the Transformers toys) and Canon (the Japanese company behind… well you get the idea). The collaboration has resulted in a pair of Transformers figurines that are able to fold away into surprisingly realistic looking Canon mirrorless cameras. I say “surprisingly realistic” because at first glance I somehow mistook these for functioning cameras. But in case it wasn’t obvious from their ¥ 19,800 (around $147) pricing, they’re non-functional replicas that are only 80-percent of the size of the re...