Новости за 21.05.2024

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

With Microsoft’s new Surfaces leading a wave of Copilot Plus PCs powered by Arm chips that could reshape our expectations of Windows laptops, you might be wondering: do they game?

The wireless Yale Keypad Touch provides fingerprint and key code access for the new Yale Approach lock and several August smart locks. | Image: Yale

August makes excellent smart locks, but careful observers may have noticed that the company hasn’t released any new hardware in four years. Owners of August locks may be relieved to know that a new wireless keypad finally brings them the option of fingerprint unlocking.

A chunky electric spoon for your chunky low-sodium foods. | Image: Kirin

If you’re cutting salt out of your diet, either for medical reasons or just trying to be healthy, low-sodium foods can be a letdown. But don’t despair — Japanese company Kirin claims to have a solution in its Electric Salt Spoon, which uses electrodes to electrify your tongue to give you a little salty shock.

Image: Square Enix

I’ve been having these weird thoughts lately... like, should I go back and replay the Kingdom Hearts series or not? Fortunately, Square Enix has made this decision trivial with the announcement that it’s releasing the series on Steam on June 13th. To celebrate, and perhaps destabilize an entire generation of adults for whom the first Kingdom Hearts trailer was a transformative experience (aka, me), a trailer was released with a brand-new recording of Hikaru Utada’s “Simple... Читать дальше...

Recall, one of Windows’ new AI features, on a Surface Laptop. | Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge

Microsoft’s new Windows on Arm push is a milestone moment. It’s taken nearly five years to get to the point where the software maker is confident it has the upper hand over the MacBook Air on performance, battery life, and app compatibility.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at Build 2024. | Screenshot: YouTube

Microsoft had a lot to say about Windows and AI — and a little to say about custom emoji — during the Build 2024 keynote. The company, like just about everyone else in the industry, is charging hard at cramming AI into every nook and cranny it can find. That means Copilot watching your screen to help you play Minecraft or giving you AI agent co-workers.

Illustration: The Verge

Microsoft is adding a new Advanced Paste feature to PowerToys for Windows 11 that can convert your clipboard content on the fly with the power of AI. The new feature can help people speed up their workflows by doing things like copying code in one language and pasting it in another, although its best tricks require OpenAI API credits.

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

You can already beam your flat Windows desktop and its VR games onto your Meta Quest headset — but what if Windows could send HoloLens-like 3D apps and digital objects to the headset, too?

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is making progress on adding multimodal inputs to its Grok chatbot, according to public developer documents. What this means is that, soon, users may be able to upload photos to Grok and receive text-based answers.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Here’s one more way to stay on top of your favorite programming projects: have them sync to the same File Explorer you already use to navigate your hard drive in Windows.

Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge

Microsoft launched a range of Copilot Plus PCs yesterday that includes new AI features built directly into Windows 11. Behind the scenes, the company now has more than 40 AI models running on Windows 11 thanks to a new Windows Copilot Runtime that will also allow developers to use these models for their apps.

The stylish Sonos Ace come in black and white. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

At long last, the eagerly anticipated Sonos Ace have arrived. On Tuesday, the company announced that its first pair of wireless headphones will be available on June 5th. Even better, you can already preorder them ahead of launch for $449.

Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Like parent company Disney, Pixar is now laying off employees as part of Bob Iger’s big plan to get the company’s spending under control.

Illustration: The Verge

Google only just rolled out AI summaries in search results — and now they’re getting ads. In an update on Tuesday, Google says it will soon start testing search and shopping ads within AI Overviews for users in the US.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

It seems no industry is safe from consolidation, and the latest target is gaming media. IGN Entertainment has acquired the website portfolio of UK publisher Gamer Network, which operates a number of beloved games-focused publications. That list includes Gamesindustry.biz, Eurogamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, VG247, and the tabletop site Dicebreaker. The network also holds shares in sites like Nintendo Life and Digital Foundry.

The East Bay Municipal Utility District Wastewater Treatment Plant on March 20th, 2024, in Oakland, California.  | Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

The Environmental Protection Agency is ramping up its inspections of critical water infrastructure after warning of “alarming vulnerabilities” to cyberattacks.

Image: Xbox

Traversing the nightmare realms of the human mind has always been central to horror. The stories we tell ourselves about what’s moving in the darkness, the creation of monsters out of unknown sounds — from this emerges our fascination with terror. In Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, players navigate a cold, dark ninth-century Iceland in the often wet shoes of the Pictish warrior Senua on her second adventure in the third-person action-horror franchise. I was very fond of the first Hellblade... Читать дальше...

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge

We’ve heard the story so many times, that this is the time that Windows on Arm will work and we’ll get a revolution in powerful, portable, long-lasting PCs. For a decade, the story has been fiction. This time, though... I don’t know. It sort of seems real.

The company’s app redesign fumble threatens to steal the thunder from what otherwise looks (and feels) like a strong debut in a new category.

Image: Sonos

Sonos is refreshing its small portable speaker, the Roam, with a second-generation model that mostly adds some minor quality-of-life improvements. It’s reasonable to think of the new Roam 2, available today for $199, as more of a Roam 1.5: this is really what Sonos should’ve released in the first place.

Adobe is adding more mobile app-like AI editing tools to Lightroom. | Image: Adobe

Adobe is adding some new generative AI tools to Lightroom that aim to make the photo editing platform easier to use for both professional creatives and inexperienced users alike, even from a phone. These include an in-development object removal feature that’s rolling out in beta and new AI lens-blurring effects that are now generally available to all Lightroom users.

The Aqara Wall Outlet H2 can trigger scenes based upon real-time power usage. | Image: Aqara

Aqara just announced the €39.99 Wall Outlet H2, which offers a one-for-one smart replacement for standard 16A wall sockets used in Europe. Its party trick is the ability to monitor the real-time power usage of connected devices and appliances to initiate automations around the home.

Photo by Nathan Congleton / NBC via Getty Images

Scarlett Johansson says that OpenAI asked her to be the voice behind ChatGPT — but that when she declined, the company went ahead and created a voice that sounded just like her. In a statement shared to NPR, Johansson says that she has now been “forced to hire legal counsel” and has sent two letters to OpenAI inquiring how the soundalike ChatGPT voice, known as Sky, was made.

Image: Aurora

Volvo revealed its first “production-ready” self-driving truck that it’s making with Aurora, the autonomous driving technology company founded by former executives from Google, Uber, and Tesla.

Image: X / Belle Delphine

Belle Delphine, the woman who went viral in 2019 for selling jars of her bathwater, revealed earlier this month that the stunt earned her $90K in profits. In a thread on X, the adult content creator and model also explained that because of PayPal, the payment processing system she used for the sale, she never saw a dime of that money.