Gadget Hacks: Page 6

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Apple Pulls Bitchat from China App Store: Why the Firewall Couldn't

Pixelmator Pro 4.0 is available now, but only through a Creator Studio subscription. The standalone App Store version sits at 3.7.1, where it has remained since Apple launched the bundle in late January. That version gap is the clearest documented outcome of the Apple Creator Studio acquisition strategy so far, and it shows the pattern in concrete terms: buy the developer, expand the app to new platforms, transplant its technology across other Apple software, then reserve the major new release...

Google Search was not down on May 5. What actually happened was narrower and stranger: a cryptographic error at Germany's domain registry made bahn.de, spiegel.de, and dozens of other .de websites unreachable for users on Google DNS, Cloudflare, and Quad9. The fault was at DENIC, the authority that manages the .de top-level domain. Google DNS users saw a "Google Search outage" because Google DNS was the service telling their browsers the site didn't exist but Google DNS was doing exactly what...

Code strings buried inside the Google Maps iOS app suggest that Gemini AI is coming to CarPlay, MacRumors reported this week. Gemini already exists in the iPhone version of Google Maps, but not in CarPlay. That gap may be closing, and the timing connects directly to a platform shift: Apple opened CarPlay to voice-based conversational apps for the first time with iOS 26.4, the change 9to5Mac covered in February.

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Apple has acquired MotionVFX, the Warsaw-based plugin developer that spent 15 years building the color grading, 3D workflows, and AI tools that Final Cut Pro lacked natively. The MotionVFX acquisition reportedly brings 70 employees into Apple and is aimed at attracting more subscribers to Creator Studio, the $12.99/month bundle Apple launched in January. Apple declined to comment and has not disclosed deal terms.

Discord launched Nitro Rewards today, and the headline feature is free access to the base tier of Xbox Game Pass bundled into the existing $9.99/month Nitro subscription. The Discord Nitro Xbox Game Pass bundle covers more than 50 PC and Xbox games and 10 hours of monthly cloud streaming, TechCrunch reported at launch. For Nitro subscribers who don't already pay for Game Pass, that's a genuine addition. It's also a deliberately constrained one.

Tim Cook is heading to Beijing this week as part of a group of top U.S. executives traveling with President Trump to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. A White House official confirmed Cook's inclusion in the delegation alongside Tesla CEO Elon Musk, BlackRock's Larry Fink, and Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, according to CNBC. No Apple-specific agenda has been reported for the trip.

Google TV's home screen has a problem that Google shows no signs of fixing: it keeps getting more cluttered. Free channel promotions, recommendations from services you've never opened, a Shop tab, ads throughout, and now an AI-curated Shorts tab rolling out to some devices, per MakeUseOf this month. None of it is meaningfully removable through Google's own settings, according to Android Police.

Samsung's headline number from the S26 launch was a 29% sales increase over the S25 series in the first three weeks. The number that tells the more interesting story is 71%. According to Counterpoint Research data reported by Android Police last month, seven out of every ten U.S. buyers who purchased a Galaxy S26 in that window chose the Ultra, a share that grew by 10 percentage points compared to the S25 Ultra's cut of its own lineup. Galaxy S26 Ultra sales success was visible even before...

Justice Elena Kagan denied Apple's request to pause contempt proceedings in the Supreme Court Apple Epic Games dispute this week, and she did it before Apple had even filed a reply brief, without referring the matter to the full court. SCOTUSblog reported that the speed of the denial suggested the application was not a close call.

Qualcomm this week announced the Snapdragon 6 Gen 5 and 4 Gen 5, two chips designed to push capabilities previously limited to flagship devices into affordable Android phones. The 4 Gen 5 is the larger generational jump: Qualcomm claims a 77% GPU performance gain and says it's the first 4-series chip capable of 90fps gaming, per Notebookcheck. The 6 Gen 5 leads with connectivity: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6.0, and AI camera features, though it steps back on ISP hardware relative to its predecessor.

Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 last year, targeting budget Android phones with a set of capabilities that previously required spending significantly more. The chip delivers a 29% GPU performance boost, an 11% CPU improvement, support for 144Hz displays at FHD+ resolution, and a dedicated NPU with on-device AI features, Android Authority previously reported. HONOR, realme, and OPPO are named as the first launch partners, with devices expected in the coming months, per the same report.

Google and Fitbit have acknowledged a permission reset bug that is causing Pixel Watch SpO2 and skin temperature tracking to stop working for some users, and the fix is not as simple as flipping a toggle. The permissions page on affected devices shows no app requesting access to those sensors, leaving users with no visible way to restore them. Both the PixelCommunity and FitbitHelpCommunity accounts confirmed the issue this week and said work is underway.

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