Dominic Preston is The Verge’s UK-based News Editor, and puts together the newsletter The Daily. He’s been in journalism since 2013, after picking up two degrees in philosophy that he still hasn’t figured out what to do with. His career in journalism started out with covering movies and games before moving onto the tech beat. He was previously the deputy editor at Tech Advisor and a managing editor at Android Police, and will jump at any excuse to review an Android phone. When he’s not writing about tech he’s usually writing about food instead, on his Substack newsletter Braise. Contact him on Signal for tips: @dompreston.01
Incube8 Games, which sells new games that run on cartridges in old Game Boys, has dropped prices across almost all its titles by an average of 22.5 percent, “to keep retro gaming accessible” as prices rise elsewhere. It insists the price drop is permanent, attributing it to “improved production management and ongoing process optimizations,” and says product quality won’t be changing.
[x.com]
When it’s in the Bay Area. Tesla has sent out invites for its “ride-hailing service,” conspicuously absent any Robotaxi branding.
Tesla doesn’t have permits for autonomous taxis in California, so its rides include a supervisor in the driver’s seat, who Reuters reports must be “ready to take over at all times” — in Austin the supervisor sits in the passenger seat. A first fan video shows the car doing most of the work, but the human driver’s hands always stay near the wheel.
After years of the US casting doubt on Huawei tech for alleged security threats, now China gets a turn. The country’s Cyberspace Administration reportedly called Nvidia execs in to explain “loopholes and backdoor” vulnerabilities in the H20 AI chips designed specifically to sell in China. It follows an antitrust investigation opened last year.
Then again, this could all be posturing — China wants its own chip industry to thrive, and Nvidia’s dominance makes that difficult.
[asia.nikkei.com]
Get a first look at the new fascia, NACS charging port, and brake lights on the Bolt, with Chevy promising “More this fall.”
GM killed the Bolt in 2023 before resurrecting it for its newer Ultium battery tech (which... it’s also killing, at least as a brand name). The new Bolt will boast faster charging and multiple models, but that won’t include a small hatchback — only the larger EUV Bolt is making a comeback.
Leaker Sonny Dickson has shared photos of dummy units from Apple’s upcoming iPhone 17 lineup, including a bright orange for the Pro and Pro Max models. Expect the exact hues to be different in the final phones though.
It follows a video yesterday from another leaker that showed similar Pro finishes, plus a model in gray — but with signs of AI generation in that video, we’d put more stock in Sonny’s shots.
Until now it’s stayed quiet on whether it received the same order to open a backdoor to user data as Apple, but a spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that it never did. If it had, Google wouldn’t be allowed to say so.
Apple has pulled iCloud encryption from the UK and appealed its order in the courts. Last week it was reported that the UK is ready to give up the fight following US political pressure.
ChatAI will help other headphone brands quickly add wake words or button shortcuts to talk to an OpenAI-powered assistant.
Bragi was once one of the most exciting earbud manufacturers itself, but quit making hardware in 2019 with grand ambitions to sell audio AI instead.
Big Tech has turned to everything from nuclear reactors to coal mines to get enough power to run new data centers demanded by the pivot to AI, but utility companies want to make sure they’re not stuck footing the bill.
They’re increasingly demanding that tech giants sign longer electricity contracts and commit to paying for surplus power regardless of whether they use it, to avoid the extra infrastructure costs ending up on consumers’ energy bills.
Android Earthquake Alerts uses the network of smartphones to detect tremors, sending alerts to other phones in the affected area. But in a paper published in Science, the company admitted it had found “several limitations” in the algorithm’s performance during two 2023 quakes that killed over 55,000 people.
It underestimated the 7.8 and 7.7 magnitude quakes, and instead of sending 10 million “TakeAction” alerts, which override Do Not Disturb, it sent just 469.