Technology

Best Buy has unveiled its first ever small-format, digital-first store. Located in Monroe, North Carolina, the store is only about 15% the size of your average Best Buy store, which averages about 35 to 40,000 square feet—making it smaller than most Apple Stores as well. Best Buy has been working on creating smaller spaced stores since last year. As reported by Bloomberg, the company was testing out downsized locations of about 15,000 to 27,000 square feet in Charlotte to approach a more outlet-style for their stores. “The smaller shopping space isn’t the only new thing customers can expect to see at the Monroe store. We’re also piloting a new digital-first shopping experience that encourages customers to shop, get advice and check out digitally,” reads an official statement. Upo...

Meta just made the surprising announcement that it will be raising the price of its Quest 2 virtual reality headsets by $100 next month. If you did a double take upon seeing that news, we commiserate — it’s weird for a two-year-old consumer tech product to suddenly go up in price. We’re conditioned to expect the price of tech products to go down over time thanks to the relentless advancement of technology and more efficient manufacturing processes. But here, the same product you could buy in September 2020 will cost 33 percent more in August 2022. The official reason Meta is upping prices is that “the costs to make and ship our products have been on the rise,” according to a company blog post credited only to the “Oculus Blog.” “By adjusting the price of Quest 2, we can continue to grow ou...

SpaceX is pulling out all the stops to prevent Dish and other wireless companies from using the same radio frequencies as its internet-from-space Starlink satellites. Today, in a rare media call with reporters, SpaceX representatives reiterated how damaging they believe it would be for Starlink users if the Federal Communications Commission were to open up the 12GHz frequency band — which SpaceX’s satellites currently use — to other terrestrial uses like 5G. “Essentially, the band would become unusable,” David Goldman, senior director of satellite policy at SpaceX, said during the press call. “It would potentially end services for customers.” Dish hopes to use the spectrum to build out its new 5G network and has argued the deployment would be a win for consumer internet access. “Essentiall...

Last week a Change.org petition calling for Instagram to revert its recent changes launched, the push against the social media platform’s ongoing video-oriented content focus has now taken over feeds. Users are now sharing on their IG stories a post related to the petition that reads “MAKE INSTAGRAM INSTAGRAM AGAIN./(stop trying to be tiktok I just want to see cute photos of my friends.)/SINCERELY, EVERYONE.” In recent months, Meta-owned Instagram has been shifting towards its Reels short-video feature to the displeasure of many users. The negative reactions from users have now pushed Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri to offer a response regarding the recent changes. “I’m hearing a lot of concerns about right now about photos and how we’re shifting to video. Now, I want to be clear, we’re gonna c...

You know, I didn’t want to join Instagram, but I had adopted a kitten with an internet following, and the following wanted to know how the kitten was doing. For a while, I dutifully updated once a week. But then Instagram started to change. Two big things happened in 2016. First, there were the changes to the feed. Algorithmic. Well, all right. Then, the Snapchat imitation: the Story. It was whatever. I didn’t mind it. After a while, I stopped posting photos in favor of posting Stories because more people looked at the Stories. There started to be more ads clogging the Stories, so I stopped watching as many. And I stopped posting photos or Stories as often. Come now the Kardashians, who have said that the new Instagram sucks Then came the ham-fisted video stuff: IGTV, which I avoided as mu...

Development of the upcoming Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake for the PS5 and PC is on pause, according to Bloomberg. The game’s art director and design director were also fired earlier this month after the development team showed a demo of the game to Lucasfilm and Sony. The Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) remake was first announced at Sony’s big fall showcase last September, but developer Aspyr Media, which is owned by Embracer Group, hasn’t yet shared a release timeframe for the title. The remake has been in development for three years, and while the original plan was to release the game by the end of 2022, a more “realistic target” is now 2025, Bloomberg reports. Saber Interactive, another Embracer Group studio, is also helping with development, and Bloomberg says that ...

Satellite companies OneWeb and Eutelsat have agreed to a $3.4 billion merger to create a player in global internet connections that competes with SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper. Combined, the two companies say they will tie together low Earth orbit satellites that offer faster connections with less lag and geostationary satellites that have more capacity and cover wider areas, with OneWeb continuing to operate as its own brand under Eutelsat. France-based Eutelsat provides television and internet via 36 satellites in geostationary orbits around the Earth’s equator. OneWeb, which launched its first internet-broadcasting satellites in early 2019, currently has about 428 satellites in orbit out of the 648 it plans to have as part of its constellation and has so far cut deals focusing o...

Arlo, Apple, Wyze, and Anker, owner of Eufy, all confirmed to CNET that they won’t give authorities access to your smart home camera’s footage unless they’re shown a warrant or court order. If you’re wondering why they’re specifying that, it’s because we’ve now learned Google and Amazon are doing just the opposite: they allow police to get this data without a warrant if police claim there’s been an emergency. Earlier this month my colleague Sean Hollister wrote about how Amazon, the company behind the smart doorbells and security systems, will indeed give police that warrantless access to customers’ footage in those “emergency” situations. And as CNET now points out, Google’s privacy policy has a similar carveout as Amazon’s, meaning law enforcement can access data from its Nest products —...

Amazon will soon be raising the annual prices for its Prime subscription in Europe dramatically. In the U.K., the annual price is moving up from £79 GBP to £95 GBP (approximately $95 to $114 USD), roughly equating to a 20% rise. While it’s already a big jump, things get even more inflated in continental Europe. Germany sees a 30% increase from €69 EUR to €89.90 EUR (approximately $83 to $108 USD), while both Spain and Italy will be moving up by 39% from €36 EUR to €49.90 EUR (approximately $43 USD to $60 USD). France is hit the worst, seeing prices surge by a staggering 43% from €49 EUR to €69.90 EUR (approximately $59 to $84 USD). The price hikes will come into effect around September, and also follows shortly after the service also increased its cost for U.S. customers, bringing it up fr...

Profits are down at Google parent company Alphabet for the second quarter in a row, even as it brings in more money. Alphabet brought in around $16 billion in profit during its second quarter of 2022, down from $18.5 billion during the same period last year, the company reported in its Q2 2022 earnings report this afternoon. As with last quarter, it seems like rising expenses have played a part; the company actually brought in more revenue than it did in Q2 2021. This quarter, its revenues were almost $69.7 billion, up from last year’s $61.9 billion. However, compared to this time in 2021, Google’s spending around $3 billion more on both research and development and sales and marketing. Google’s working towards a “sharper focus” As for how Google made its money, the breakdown is similar to...

Mark Zuckerberg believes that Apple and his company are in a “very deep, philosophical competition” to build the metaverse, suggesting the two tech giants are ready to butt heads in selling hardware for augmented and virtual reality. The Meta CEO told employees earlier this month that they were competing with Apple to determine “what direction the internet should go in,” according to a recording of his comments during an internal all-hands meeting obtained by The Verge. He said that Meta would position itself as the more open, cheaper alternative to Apple, which is expected to announce its first AR headset as soon as later this year. “This is a competition of philosophies and ideas, where they believe that by doing everything themselves and tightly integrating that they build a better cons...