News and Updates from Gadget Hacks: Page 7

A silicon wafer about a foot across yields roughly 500 A18-class chips. Without any rescue mechanism, Apple might recover only 200 usable dies from that wafer. The gap between those two numbers is where Apple chip binning lives, and it's where a significant slice of the product lineup is born.

Some Pixel Watch 2 owners are waking up to a message that shouldn't be there: "No recent data. Wear your watch to sleep." They wore it. The watch tracked them. It just won't show them anything.

Google last week unveiled Noto 3D at The Android Show: I/O Edition, a ground-up rebuild of its entire Noto Color Emoji set into what the company's emoji lead Jennifer Daniel described on Instagram as "hand-modeled 3D emoji" that are "actually true 3D objects," according to Emojipedia. All roughly 4,000 designs were rebuilt by hand. Pixel phones get them first, with a broader rollout across Google products planned for later in 2026, per Google's announcement.

Fosi Audio is launching the MD3 MagDac on May 25 at $149.99, a portable DAC and headphone amplifier that snaps magnetically to the back of an iPhone rather than hanging from its USB-C port, adding both 3.5mm and 4.4mm balanced headphone outputs to a device that lost its headphone jack nearly a decade ago.

In November 2025, Google shipped Gemini 3 with a new model, a refreshed app, and something quieter underneath both: for certain prompts, Gemini can move beyond a plain text reply and generate a custom user interface instead, according to Google's product blog. That shift is what the Gemini app redesign is actually about. The visual cleanup is real but secondary. The more consequential work is architectural.

Android 17 Beta 3 introduced visible blur and frosted-glass effects in the widget picker and app launch transitions, while Android 17 Beta 4 has since arrived as Google's last scheduled beta. The broader direction became clearer in Android Canary 2605, which shows Google testing blur across more Pixel system UI surfaces, but the stable Android 17 scope is still not fully confirmed. What remains unclear is how much of the broader Canary blur treatment will reach the stable Android 17 release, a...

Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition arrives on macOS via Steam on May 28, ported by Feral Interactive and requiring Apple Silicon. A Mac App Store version is planned for later in 2026, though no date or price has been set, the official Age of Empires site confirmed late last month. The release includes three bundled expansions alongside the base game.

Fortnite returned to iPhone in Japan in late April 2026, five months after Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said the game would not return to iOS in Japan in 2025 under Apple's implementation of the country's mobile competition law. Epic made the Epic Games Store available for Japanese iPhone users with Fortnite and Rocket League Sideswipe as its initial iPhone titles, per Epic's announcement. The launch follows Japan's Mobile Software Competition Act, which pushed Apple to allow alternative app...

Google shut down the third-party forum that hosted its smart home support community this week and launched a replacement on its own support domain. The Google Home and Nest Community migration transferred no login credentials, no earned status, and no previously published content, according to Android Authority. Everything on the old platform gets permanently deleted on June 30, 2026.

Apple and Intel are reportedly closing in on a deal that would have Intel manufacture some of Apple's Mac processors, CNBC reported last week. The news sent Intel shares up nearly 14% and Apple's up 2%, a market reaction that investors did not treat as routine supplier chatter.

A Palo Alto security firm called Calif says it built what it describes as the first publicly disclosed Anthropic Mythos macOS exploit targeting Apple's M5 chip a kernel memory corruption attack used to escalate privileges and reach protected areas of a MacBook that should be inaccessible, potentially granting an attacker control of the machine, Engadget reported today, citing the Wall Street Journal. Apple told the Journal that security is its top priority and that it is taking the researchers'...

Apple updated its cheapest iPad in March 2025 and handed it an A16 chip. If you're asking whether you should buy the iPad 11, that chip choice is where the answer lives. The A16 doesn't meet Apple's hardware threshold for Apple Intelligence, making this the only current iPad model locked out of Apple's AI platform. Every iPad Pro, every iPad Air, and the iPad mini all support it. The entry-level model doesn't, according to Apple's specs.

On Apple's April 30 Q2 2026 earnings call, Tim Cook was asked about the company's product roadmap. His answer was the standard version of Apple silence: "We do not get into our future roadmap," he said, adding that he did not want to "give too much info there," before pivoting to iPhone performance. This, he called "the strongest cycle that we've ever had in our history," with 22% growth in the quarter. Mac and iPad were, in effect, answered by not being answered, per the full call transcript.

Google has released Android Canary 2603, a public testing build that adds a blur filter to the app-launch transition, among a broader set of UI changes. Android Authority reported the blur addition about two months ago, noting that tapping an app from the home screen or app drawer now triggers a progressively intensifying blur layered over the existing pinch zoom animation. When you return to the home screen, the effect reverses, icons sharpening back into place. The whole sequence moves fast...

Apple is reportedly pushing Samsung and LG to manufacture a four-sided bending iPhone display for 2028, one that curves on all edges simultaneously rather than lying flat as iPhones have since 2020. The core obstacle isn't the geometry. Bending a panel on all four sides compounds optical distortion at every corner, and the proposed fix requires a cathode material that neither supplier currently produces at scale, Digital Trends reported yesterday, citing ETNews.

Sony's press release for the Xperia 1 VIII carries the headline: "Sony Announces the Launch of Xperia 1 VIII with Newly Integrated AI for Better Photos Every Time." Not "Telephoto Rebuilt." Not "Xperia's Biggest Camera Upgrade." AI, every time. That framing choice reveals a real contradiction at the center of this phone.

Rumors suggest the iPhone 18 Pro will look almost identical to its predecessor. That's where most of the easy consensus ends. The upgrade case for Apple's fall 2026 Pro lineup isn't about what you'll see on first glance it's about what you'll feel over a full day of use. Three specific rumored improvements, each targeting something you interact with constantly, could make the 18 Pro one of the more consequential Pro upgrades for day-to-day use in several years: longer battery life engineered...

Britain's Competition and Markets Authority has today opened a formal investigation into Microsoft's business software ecosystem, examining whether Microsoft holds strategic market status in that sector and whether it can use that position to limit customer choice. The probe will also consider whether Microsoft's software licensing practices are reducing competition in cloud services and how AI competitors are able to integrate with Microsoft's business software, according to the CMA's...

Exceeding the Google account 15GB storage limit locks your Gmail, freezes Drive uploads, and stops photo backups all at once. What it does not do, at least not right away, is delete anything. That distinction is worth understanding, because Google's own warning system tends to blur the two.

Two new CarPlay audio apps arrived this week, and they solve entirely different problems. Suno lets you play back music you've already generated with AI on your iPhone. Zeno Radio streams radio from around the world and lets you browse by genre, country, and region. Update either app to the latest version and it appears on your CarPlay dashboard automatically, per 9to5Mac.