Technology

If you’ve wanted MagSafe-style convenient charging on an iPad Mini, Pitaka’s latest case is here for you. The new $79 MagEZ Case Pro for the sixth-generation iPad Mini (aka the iPad Mini 6) has magnetic points on the back that pass power through the iPad’s USB-C port when used with the included pad. Or you can use it with the $129 MagEZ Charging Stand, which elevates the tablet and provides a second Qi charging spot in its base for a phone or headphones. There are some downsides to this approach. Pitaka’s case doesn’t make use of the magnets built into the back of the iPad Mini, and it blocks the USB-C port from access, leaving you with the magnetic pad as the only way to charge the device. Forget about transferring any data over a wired connection while the case is on, too. The case itsel...

The Weather Channel is not trying to win you over by spending big on its version of House of Cards. It’s not bidding on The Office next time it comes up, nor is it interested in NFL games. “Our tentpole is Mother Nature,” says Nora Zimmett, TWC’s chief content officer. “And she’s always delivering weather.” TWC launched a dedicated streaming service this month. It costs $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year, and it is … well, it’s The Weather Channel. The app’s main screen is an always-on stream that replicates exactly what you’d see on cable. That, Zimmett says, is what viewers were actually looking for. “We looked at our audience and heard, ‘where can I get The Weather Channel if I don’t want to pay $200 a month for a traditional bundle?’” she says. Rather than try to reinvent itself for ...

A photo of the Pixel 7 prototype. | Image: eBay listing An alleged prototype of Google’s upcoming Pixel 7 smartphone has been posted on eBay, giving us our first look at the new phone in the wild months ahead of its scheduled fall release (via Android guru Mishaal Rahman). Google just revealed the phone a few weeks ago at Google I/O, and what we can see in the prototype matches up with what Google has already shown. The distinctive camera bar is back, and this year it’s an aluminum bar with cutouts for the cameras. And the alleged prototype’s casing is a deep black that looks just like one of the colors Google showed off at I/O. Image: GoogleOne of Google’s official Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro images — including that deep black. The eBay listing includes a few photos… Continue reading&he...

Rivian’s Charly Mwangi, its executive vice president of manufacturing engineering and a former Tesla exec, is leaving the company as part of a bigger shakeup splitting up parts of the company, according to Bloomberg. “The reorganization calls for splitting the commercial business, which includes delivery vans made for Amazon, from the retail side of the company that produces the R1T plug-in pickup truck and R1S sport-utility vehicle,” Bloomberg reports. The company’s new COO, Frank Klein, will now oversee “many” senior manufacturing and supply chain employees. The Wall Street Journal also reported on the shakeup. The changes are happening as the company is starting to ramp up production of its in-demand R1T and R1S electric vehicles. In its latest earnings call, the company said it deliver...

Amazon is ending support for its Cloud Cam security camera and offering owners a free Blink Mini to replace it. MacRumors noted the change late last week, and The Verge obtained a copy of an email sent to customers announcing the change. Cloud Cam owners will be able to use their cameras and download video until December 2nd of this year, after which all recordings will be deleted and the hardware will no longer function. Customers with the Cloud Cam Key Edition will also lose the ability to connect to smart locks, although they can get a free fourth-generation Echo to replace the functionality. “As the number of Alexa smart home devices continues to grow, we are focusing efforts on Ring, Blink, and other technologies that make your home smarter and simplify your everyday routines. Therefo...

In February of this year, Amazon finally completed its consumption of the once independent app for downloading comics, Comixology. Amazon had acquired the app way back in 2013, and apart from removing the ability to buy comics directly from the app, it left it untouched for nearly a decade. But this year, Amazon changed things — incorporating Comixology’s digital marketplace directly into the Kindle ecosystem and totally redesigning the Comixology app. It has taken two distinct mediums — digital comics and digital books — and smashed them together into an unholy blob of content that is worse in every single way. Apparently, if you let one company acquire a near-monopoly in the digital books and comics spaces, it will do terrible things that make the experience worse. For those of you who a...

DeLorean Motor Company has revealed the first images of the Alpha 5 electric vehicle (EV), the brand’s attempt at resurrecting the DeLorean name in an all-electric form. Staying true to the classic ‘80s-era DeLorean known for its appearance in Back to the Future, the Alpha 5 comes with those iconic gull-wing doors and can reach 60mph in about 2.99 seconds (or 88mph in 4.35 seconds, if you’re curious). Before we dive into the details, it’s worth noting the company behind the Alpha 5 isn’t actually the same one behind the original DeLorean vehicles — that company went defunct in 1982. An unrelated Texas-based company, which supplies replacement parts to the owners of vintage DeLorean vehicles, snapped up the rights to the DeLorean brand and teased an all-electric revival in April. Grid View ...

Art is painful and unpredictable in Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg’s latest film. As a work of art itself, though, Crimes of the Future has a remarkable amount of polish. The movie brings Cronenberg back to science fiction for the first time in two decades, and it melds his signature squishy body horror with a luxuriant retro-futuristic aesthetic and a murky but carefully traced story about artists at the end of the world — or the birth of a new one. It’s a film whose tagline is “surgery is the new sex,” but the results are less shocking and more pleasurable than they might sound. Crimes of the Future is (presumably) set in the future, but there’s little indication as to when or where. It takes place in a grimy metropolis where technology ranges from camcorders and CRTs to fleshy j...