Technology

A second trailer for the Obi-Wan Kenobi Disney Plus series has been released to celebrate Star Wars Day, May the 4th. In it, we see Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan trying to convince a reluctant Owen Lars (Joel Edgerton) to let him train a young Luke Skywalker. “Like you trained his father?” Owen snaps back at Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan Kenobi is set to premiere on the streaming service on Friday, May 27th and will run for six episodes. The series is set 10 years after the events of Revenge of the Sith, while Obi-Wan is in hiding on Tatooine and keeping an eye on a young Luke Skywalker from afar. At this point in the Star Wars story, the Empire is now in control of the galaxy and all remaining Jedi are now being hunted down and killed by Vader’s Inquisitors. These formidable antagonists are set to make thei...

Beats has an enviable list of collaborators. Over the last year alone, the label has partnered with l’Art de l’Automobile for a road trip-themed release, A-COLD-WALL* for concrete-inspired headphones, and Stüssy for a new Pill+ speaker. The latest designer to work with Beats is London-based Paria Farzaneh, who has put her own spin on the Powerbeats Pro earphones. “It’s a really easy collaboration, because I use this product every day,” Farzaneh tells HYPEBEAST. Her genuine appreciation of the product is central to the collaboration, and something that Farzaneh thinks sets it apart from other projects. “In the market right now – and in music and fashion more generally – collaborations feel oversaturated. When you see a product collaboration, it doesn’t necessarily feel special or unexpected...

People might not have known what to expect when Roku first announced that it’d tapped Daniel Radcliffe to portray Weird Al Yankovic in its upcoming biopic, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. But following the streamer’s inaugural upfront presentation this week and a new Weird trailer, there’s little question about what sort of energy director Eric Appel’s going for. At one point in Yankovic’s 1989 feature UHF, Yankovic plays a parody of Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky character due to Stallone himself backing out of a planned cameo. In order to approximate Stallone’s physique for the film, Yankovic donned an oiled-up muscle suit that didn’t need to look anywhere near as convincing as it did. Though Weird’s trailer doesn’t mention UHF or Stallone by name, Radcliffe does somehow manage to evoke the id...

Employees at a third Apple retail store have announced that they’re trying to organize a vote on whether to unionize, according to a report from The Washington Post. Workers at Apple’s Towson Town Center store in Maryland say that they’ve received signatures from a majority of the employees that would likely be able to join a union, and are planning on filing with the National Labor Relations Board to schedule an election. In a letter, the organizers say their union is called the “Coalition of Organized Retail Employees” (or AppleCORE), and say they’re not trying to “go against or create conflict with” Apple management. Instead, the workers say they want to gain access to rights they currently don’t have. While they don’t specify which ones in the letter or a press release, The Washington ...

After an indefinite delay and months without an update, Ubisoft has announced that it’s moving the development of its highly anticipated Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake to its studio located in Montréal, Canada. The game was originally in the works at Ubisoft’s India-based Mumbai and Pune studios. “The development of Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time Remake will now be led by Ubisoft Montréal, the very birth place of the epic Sands of Time trilogy,” Ubisoft’s announcement on Twitter reads. “This decision is an important step and the team, building on the work achieved by Ubisoft Pune and Ubisoft Mumbai, will now take the time they need to regroup on the scope of the game to deliver the best experience for this remake of an all-time classic, when it’s ready.” Outside of assisti...

The latest on organization efforts at one of the world’s largest retailers Contributors: Verge Staff Amazon, one of the United State’s largest employers and a mainstay of Americans’ shopping habits, has long resisted unionization efforts such as union drives in 2000 and 2014. In recent years, though, the calls for unionization have grown louder and more public — and an upstart union was even able to win an election at one of the company’s facilities in New York. The recent string of elections started in Bessemer, Alabama, when the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union attempted to organize Amazon’s BHM1 facility, which had around 5,800 workers at the time. In 2021, the workers voted resoundingly against unionizing, but the union successfully petitioned the National Labor Relations B...

If you took one look at the first wave of modular magnetic wireless charging battery humps for the iPhone and thought, “Wake me up when they give us more than one full charge!” — then Anker may have the battery pack for you. The new Anker 633 Magnetic Battery, now available for $80 on Amazon, has twice the capacity at 10,000mAh. That’s enough to charge an iPhone 12 twice or an iPhone 13 Pro up to 1.8 times, according to Anker (via Gizmodo). It is not small.Image: Anker As you can see, attempts at fashion have gone out the window — no chic colors or fancy origami stand from Anker this time. Instead, this utilitarian battery pack boasts a traditional flip-out kickstand and what appears to be an extra USB-A port, in addition to Qi wireless charging. If you want faster charging than its 7.5W Q...

A few years ago, YouTube added Live Redirects as a way for creators to hold livestreams that ended by pointing viewers to another video on their own channel for premiere events, like BTS engaging fans before showing off a new music video. Now it has adjusted Live Redirects so that live streamers on the service can bounce their audience to another livestream when they go offline. A premiere launch event for the film Top Gun: Maverick on Wednesday will be one of the first big events to take advantage of the new addition. On Twitch, this behavior is called a raid. On one hand, it’s a good way to help grow audiences and find new content, but it has also been a conduit for harassment on the platform as “hate raids” would target marginalized streamers with abuse from hundreds of accounts at a ti...

A funny thing happened in 2020: AMD won the gaming laptop for the first time ever. Until the Asus Zephyrus G14, we’d never seen a laptop with an AMD CPU and AMD GPU run circles around the competition. Since then, we’ve repeatedly seen that “AMD laptop” no longer means cheap. But now, AMD is setting its sights higher than mid-range gaming machines — it just revealed it’s building a new CPU aimed at the “pinnacle of gaming performance” with the “highest core, thread and cache ever”. The new CPU line is codenamed “Dragon Range,” and they’ll live exclusively at 55W TDP and up — enough power that they’ll “largely exist in the space where gaming laptops are plugged in the majority of the time,” says AMD director of technical marketing Robert Hallock. Slide: AMD The slide above shows they’re aime...

Swedish inventor and YouTuber Simone Giertz (aka the “queen of shitty robots”) has revealed her latest creation: a website named after the way her last name is pronounced, “Yetch.” Giertz’s roster of inventions includes things like a toothbrushing helmet and a gnarly vegetable chopping machine. While the website doesn’t feature the “Truckla,” a Tesla Model 3 that Giertz transformed into a pickup truck, or a Lego-built photo booth for cute puppy photos, it does feature some practical accessories and items. While an all-white puzzle can sound like a pain, this one can be a funny pain for those who lose their puzzle pieces. Yetch’s “Incomplete White Puzzle” consists of 499 pieces out of a 500-piece puzzle, and since it is intentional, it will still cost you the full price of $38. The puzzle i...

A new Instagram test would make the app look even more like TikTok. According to TechCrunch, Instagram is experimenting with full-screen vertical home feeds. Upon opening the Instagram app, users immediately see vertical content meant to “bring video more front and center.” An image shared by Instagram shows a home feed taken up by a full-screen post with comments, captions, likes, and other features placed on top of the post instead of below. Though the Stories bar isn’t present at the top of the screen in the image, Seine Kim, a Meta spokesperson, says that view shows the home feed once users start scrolling and that Stories will still be accessible at the top of their screen. Search, Reels, shopping, and a user’s own profile are still accessible via buttons at the bottom of the screen. ...