Technology

Chris Novak, Xbox’s head of research and design who has been at Microsoft for nearly 20 years, is leaving the company, he announced Tuesday on LinkedIn. In his current role, which he’s had for more than five years, he led the user experience for things like Xbox Game Pass, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and Xbox Live, according to his LinkedIn. At Microsoft, he also held the roles of design architect and design director. “I have loved my time with Xbox,” Novak said in a post on LinkedIn. “Building end-to-end experiences for gamers is a privilege. There are very few things one gets to work on in life which evoke such passion in people around the world. I adore listening to gamers and envisioning that next moment of unexpected delight. Gaming is amazing. Xbox will always be with me.” Novak shared more a...

Brave announced a new feature for its browser on Tuesday: De-AMP, which automatically jumps past any page rendered with Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages framework and instead takes users straight to the original website. “Where possible, De-AMP will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from visiting AMP pages altogether,” Brave said in a blog post. “And in cases where that is not possible, Brave will watch as pages are being fetched and redirect users away from AMP pages before the page is even rendered, preventing AMP / Google code from being loaded and executed.” Brave framed De-AMP as a privacy feature and didn’t mince words about its stance toward Google’s version of the web. “In practice, AMP is harmful to users and to the Web at large,” Brave’s blog post said, before explaining t...

Governor Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma called on lawmakers to approve an enormous financial incentives package that’s supposed to coax an unnamed company with ties to the electric vehicle (EV) industry to the state, according to a report from Fortune and local media outlet News 9. A non-disclosure agreement barred Governor Stitt from revealing the name of the company and the amount of money pledged to the package — but there’s good reason to believe that this company may be Panasonic. “Tens of billions of dollars are going to be invested over the next five to seven years in this space, and we want Oklahoma to be the spot that these folks land,” Governor Stitt said in a press conference. “But I’ll tell you this, if I don’t get it passed, it’s not happening.” Shortly after Stitt’s pitch to state l...

Over the last day or so, Disney Plus subscribers may have noticed that certain episodes of their favorite shows are missing. The folks at What’s on Disney Plus collected a list of some of the shows with known missing episodes early Tuesday, and it’s a long one, including favorites like Hannah Montana, Wizards of Waverly Place, Once Upon a Time, and many others. Disney commented to Deadline that the “purge” is an accidental glitch it’s working to fix, and we’ve noticed that episodes have been restored for some series, like season one of Agent Carter. Meanwhile, others like DuckTales, or Rocket & Groot, are still incomplete. Image: Richard Lawler via DisneyPlus.com An occasional hiccup on a streaming platform is to be expected, and as long as it doesn’t keep fans from their next episode ...

In 2008, the fast-talking expletive-spewing video game reviewer Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation coined the phrase “The Glorious PC Gaming Master Race,” joking about how snobbish PC gamers allegedly looked down upon their “dirty console playing peasant” counterparts. (I remember it being quite funny at the time.) Then, something unfortunate happened: the PC gaming community decided to brand itself that way. “PC Gaming Master Race” became the community’s biggest subreddit, and in 2014, some guy also decided he’d use it to sell mousepads, mice, and keyboards to people, Nazi-era connotations be damned. Some guy has now realized the error of his ways — and so his company, “Glorious PC Gaming Race,” is ditching the name. It’s just “Glorious” now; the logo and products are going to change, and the co...

After years of rejecting calls for an ad-supported streaming tier, Netflix co-founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings said on Tuesday’s earnings call that the company is “quite open to offering even lower prices with advertising, as a consumer choice.” Apparently, the company is now looking into the option and “trying to figure out over the next year or two.” Hastings admits that introducing an ad-supported tier would be a big change in thinking for the company, saying that he’s historically been “against the complexity of advertising and a big fan of the simplicity of subscription.” Hastings now pitches the idea of an ad-supported tier as something that “makes a lot of sense” for “consumers who would like to have a lower price and are advertising tolerant.” After Tuesday’s news that it lost subs...

Apple’s next iPhones could have an improved selfie camera, with autofocus capabilities and a wider aperture, according to a prediction by well-known analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Unlike Apple’s current fixed-focus design, an autofocus-enabled front-facing camera could let the iPhone 14 take clearer pictures even if you’re closer or further away from the camera. A wider aperture — Kuo predicts f/1.9 vs. the iPhone 13’s f/2.2 — would add a touch of background blur and let in more light, making it slightly better for nighttime selfies or FaceTime portrait mode. Kuo and others have predicted that Apple will be getting rid of the notch on the iPhone 14 Pro, instead opting for a hole-punch design. While that does mean that Apple would have to fit the upgraded camera into a smaller space, it’s not an unp...

I thought it was really strange when Apple kept selling the original $299 HomePod months after it got discontinued. But now, it’s starting to make sense — not only are some people still willing to pay a premium for the somewhat smart speaker, they’re willing to pay more than Apple charged for it. We took a look at eBay sales numbers after spotting 9to5Mac editor-in-chief Chance Miller’s tweet, and we soon discovered it wasn’t just a joke: on average, an Apple HomePod fetched $375 this past week. That’s 25 percent more than Apple charged. Of course, some HomePods are worth more than others — a used speaker with no box might only net you $220 before eBay fees, but we’ve seen a few factory sealed non-refurbished HomePods sell for over $500. In fact, some sellers are boasting that they got App...

The Pokémon Company has acquired Millennium Print Group, a company that prints cards for the hugely popular Pokémon Trading Card Game. Millennium Print Group has been working with The Pokémon Company since 2015. “With this acquisition, The Pokémon Company International aims to further develop Millennium Print Group’s capabilities, infrastructure, and scale to become a premier printer of trading cards, serving the broader industry,” The Pokémon Company said in a press release. “Millennium Print Group will continue to operate as a separate, autonomous organization, but will gain both investment and industry expertise from The Pokémon Company International.” Pokémon cards have been very popular during the pandemic, with The Pokémon Company going so far as to publicly pledge that it would prin...

Netflix’s struggle to boost its subscriber count took a dire turn in the first quarter of 2022. The company reported a loss of 200,000 subscribers globally compared to Q4, and it’s forecasting even bigger losses to come. Netflix estimates it could lose up to 2 million subscribers in the second quarter. “Our revenue growth has slowed considerably,” Netflix acknowledged in its letter to shareholders. “Covid clouded the picture by significantly increasing our growth in 2020, leading us to believe that most of our slowing growth in 2021 was due to the Covid pull forward.” Netflix ended the quarter with roughly 222 million subscribers, so it’s still the largest streamer — but it’s facing a slew of challenges. In January, Netflix announced its first monthly subscription increase in two years. To...