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Apple Intelligence is finally coming to China with iOS 27.3

Image of iPhone 16 running iOS 18.1 with Apple Intelligence on a bench.

Apple will launch Apple Intelligence in China with iOS 27.3, the company announced on its Chinese newsroom website, as reported by MacRumors. The Apple Intelligence features will be available first in an iOS 27.3 beta that's set to launch on November 4th, with a full iOS 27.3 release scheduled for December.

This launch doesn't bring the new Siri AI to China. Instead, Apple is launching several of its earlier Apple Intelligence features like notification summaries, real-time translation, rewriting and proofreading tools, visual intelligence, and removing objects from photos. Apple also says it has worked with Ailbaba to add support for its Q …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Exclusive details about Akai’s MPC Sample Key

Akai teased its new MPC Sample Key on Instagram earlier this week, and said it plans to open-source its software so the modding community can hack it to their hearts' delight. While there's no word yet on when the device will launch or how much it will cost, The Verge has received exclusive images of the upcoming instrument that offer some details about its feature set.

While the Sample Key shares many of the same controls as the MPC Sample - including the three context-sensitive encoders, a large main encoder - it seems designed for pitched sample playback, rather than chopping up drums. In fact, the "chop" button from the MPC Sample is m …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Sam Altman says it’s better for RAM to be in a data center than on your desk

Asked about supply chain shortages, like the ongoing RAM shortage, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview that it's "terrible" to have RAM in personal PCs instead of data centers. During his appearance on the Cheeky Pint podcast, where he also commented on AI's impact on math, Altman said:

"A lot of people want local inference. And somehow, they assume that the problem is solved now because we are going to have open-source models, we're going to be able to run them on our computers, and so we're not going to need all the stuff in the data center.

But from a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybo …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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The biggest names in AI are backing a new way to opt out of scraping

Photo illustration of a brain on a circuit board in red.

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic say they will adopt a new standard that publishers can use to opt out of being scraped by AI, as reported earlier by Search Engine Roundtable. With this control, publishers can apply their AI training preferences across multiple AI companies, instead of setting them individually.

The shared "policy token" signal is proposed by Kevin Kelley, a technical lead for standards at Anthropic, as part of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It will live within a website's robots.txt file, which has long signaled which web crawlers can and can't scrape a site - whether for search indexing, archiving, or …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Google’s satellite AI server transmits its first response to Earth

Google's AI chip-equipped satellite has generated its first response from space. In a blog post on Friday, Google says it successfully booted up the satellite's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), allowing the on-board Gemma 4 model to follow through on a prompt to create a haiku about being in space:

Blue marble below

Data streams in silent grace

Starlight feeds my core. ✨

Google says it tried out other space-themed limericks and telemetry prompts as well. The test is part of Google's Project Suncatcher, an experimental initiative that could eventually put AI data centers in space. Google launched the satellite into orbit earlier this …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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The delightfully messy state of Apple gadgets

The iPhone has more screens! The MacBook has a touchscreen! The HomeView does CarPlay apps! For the first time in a long time, Apple is in a period of unabashed gadget experimentation, and while the final results aren't always perfect, it's fun to watch the most successful product maker try some new things again. Even when, in this case, "trying" amounts to just slapping a touch panel on a lovely new MacBook Pro - just to see if you might use it.

On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay debate the merits of a touchscreen laptop, Nilay explains why he is absolutely positively going to buy the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display, …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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This electric screwdriver uses a camera and AI to figure out what bit you need

A person holding the Arrowmax Arrowspace S1 electric screwdriver showing its illuminated camera on the bottom.

Companies like Hoto and Fanttik have elevated the design and functionality of tools like electric screwdrivers, but Arrowmax wants to make them smarter by adding a camera and AI that work together to eliminate the trial and error of finding the exact type and size of bit you need. It's convenient, but also helpful, as choosing the wrong size could potentially leave you with a stripped screw and a much harder repair.

Arrowmax is making the Arrowspace S1 available through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, but the company has already successfully crowdfunded other products. You can preorder the screwdriver by itself for around $79, but its …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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The HomeView and Echo Show 16 could be the family computers I’ve been asking for

The Amazon Echo Show 16 and Apple HomeView are shown against an orange background.

Three years ago, I wrote an obituary for the smart display. The category - smart speakers with touchscreens attached - was stuck with a few underpowered gadgets from Google and Amazon that tried to do too much and did too little well. Back then, I also laid out what they needed to do to improve. This month, Apple and Amazon launched new smart displays that check nearly every box on that list.

Based on my brief hands-on time with Apple's first smart display, the $299 HomeView, and Amazon's $499.99 Echo Show 16, a ground-up rebuild of its smart display line, these could finally turn the smart display into what it should have been all along: …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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The Apple Pencil turned the Duo into my new favorite notebook

If not notebook, why notebook shaped?

Apple's $2,000 folding phone is a surprisingly good stand-in for a $20 notebook.

Believe me; nothing gets me going quite like a new notebook. This one will be different, I think. This time, I really will take it everywhere. Inspiration can strike at any moment, and you have to be ready, says David Sedaris in that one MasterClass I watched on a flight. With this one special new notebook, I will see the world differently. I'll steal moments for myself to write, rather than pulling out my phone to scroll at every opportunity like a trained monkey. And a few weeks, a month, or maybe a year later, I'll concede that it didn't change everything an …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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The touchscreen MacBook Pro is just a MacBook Pro with aΒ touchscreen

A designer uses the touchscreen on a MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display to manipulate a 3D render.
Touch β€˜em if you got β€˜em. | Photo: Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

Apple's long-awaited touchscreen MacBook Pro is finally here. I got to try this MacBook that, according to the last two Apple CEOs, shouldn't exist. The most surprising thing is how normal it is.

The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display (what a name) has one of the nicest screens I've seen on a laptop. The current Mini LED MacBook Pros are great, but the OLED has those even inkier blacks. It also gets super bright, with incredibly rich colors and infinite contrast. Apple calls it a "reference-caliber display," which is a very Apple-y marketing term, but it walks the walk by being the first laptop display with support for Apple CMF 2026 color …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Binance hackers stole $6.3 billion in record-breaking crypto heist

An illustration of falling coins with crypto logos on.
Binance says it will cover all losses resulting from the hack. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Turbosquid

Binance has disclosed that $6.3 billion worth of crypto funds have been stolen from the platform, in what's believed to be the biggest cryptocurrency hack on record. In a series of updates posted to X, the crypto exchange said that user funds are safe, and that around $3 billion of the impacted assets have been frozen so far.

Binance has publicly committed to covering any losses resulting from the hack. The company has an emergency reserve fund of around $1.3 billion (at last valuation) to protect user assets in these situations, and said it has also reserved over $6.34 billion of company funds to cover this incident - $5 billion of which …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Wikipedia’s operator says a bad AI copyright ruling could threaten the open web

Wikipedia β€œW” and globe on a grey background.

The Wikimedia Foundation is staking out a middle ground in a group of landmark AI copyright cases, pushing courts to legally protect large language models (LLMs) training on copyrighted work - but not chatbots regurgitating that work to users. An overly black-and-white ruling, it says, could either deprive Wikipedians of useful AI-based tools or endanger the open web.

In an amicus brief filed Friday, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia weighed in on a set of lawsuits pitting publishers including The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft, taking neither side. "Wikimedia is concerned that the parties' positions in this case push for overbroa …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Intel says it’s selling every affordable laptop chip it can make

Vector illustration of the Intel logo.

During Intel's latest earnings call, CEO Lip-Bu Tan said that demand for its budget-focused Wildcat Lake chips "is outstripping supply." According to CFO David Zinsner, the chips are now sold out. Zinsner said Intel has "seen significant growth in Wildcat Lake. It's coming exactly at the right time because it's cost-optimized and we're seeing a lot of focus in that regard."

As shortages of RAM and other components have driven up PC prices over recent months, Intel's Wildcat Lake chips have been appearing in new lower-cost Windows laptops on par with the MacBook Neo, like the new Dell XPS 13 or the HP Omnibook 5 14. Wildcat Lake laptops like …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Reddit’s CEO says Google’s AI Mode β€˜does not drive traffic’

An illustration of the Reddit logo.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an earnings call today that Google's AI-powered search modes do not help with traffic to the platform, echoing problems facing other websites and publishers. As part of its Q3 2026 earnings, Reddit revealed that search traffic in October has "dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week," and he attributes part of the company's struggles with Google traffic to how AI Mode and AI Overviews change the search experience.

"The reality is, AI Mode does not drive traffic," Huffman says. "Not for us, and not to anybody, as far as I know. That's just a fundamental shift in how Google works. It used t …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Reddit will force everyone to log in

An illustration of the Reddit logo.

Reddit is announcing a huge shift: It's going to start requiring users to log in.

Right now, you can browse Reddit without having an account, and the site is generally a great resource for crowdsourced information on a whole range of topics. I know I'm not the only person who appends "reddit" to a lot of Google searches to find answers to things written by actual humans instead of robots. But that openness has made it a target for scraping and automated traffic, leading Reddit to file lawsuits over alleged unauthorized access of its data and make product changes like limiting access to "Old Reddit."

There's no definitive timeline on when t …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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GM to pay $220 million to resolve claims it sold driving habits data

A photo of the GM logo

General Motors has agreed to pay $220 million to settle claims that it illegally sold driver and location information to data brokers, as reported earlier by Reuters. The agreement, which resolves a complaint from a coalition of 36 US attorneys general, requires GM to limit the driving data it collects and obtain "express consent" from drivers before collecting their information.

The allegations surround GM's now-discontinued Smart Driver program, which collected data about driving habits, including acceleration, braking, and trip length. GM allegedly passed this information to data brokers, enabling insurance companies to purchase the data …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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You can generate and edit Google Docs files directly in Gemini chats now

Now you can generate, preview, and edit PDFs, Google Docs, Google Sheets, slide decks, Markdown files, TXT files, and code directly within Google Gemini. The new file editing capabilities are available starting today for all Gemini users, and while PDF previews/editing works on both the web and mobile, all other file formats are only in the web version for now.

Google added support for generating and downloading files in Gemini earlier this year, but now you can tweak those files without leaving the Gemini app. Google says you can expand documents to edit them in full-screen mode and highlight text in files to ask Gemini questions or prompt …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Apple’s new laptop supports one of the coolest features for color pros

The new MacBook Pro brings with it a bunch of firsts for Apple laptops, the two flashiest being an OLED display and touchscreen functionality. But as an image-accuracy enthusiast, trained calibrator, and resident display expert, what excites me most about the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display is the technology it uses to display an accurate picture. It's the first laptop, and only the second product overall, to support Apple CMF 2026 color modes. It could be the future for displays.

CMFs, or color-matching functions, mathematically represent how we perceive color, and there are a few different variations. The specification that's been the …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Utah charges Kalshi and its CEO with illegally promoting online gambling

A photo of Kalshi co-founder Tarek Mansour
Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour. | Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Utah has filed criminal charges against Kalshi and its executives, accusing the prediction market of breaking anti-gambling laws, as reported by The Salt Lake Tribune and the Associated Press. The state has filed 14 charges against Kalshi, as well as CEO Tarek Mansour and COO Luana Lopes Lara, including 12 counts of illegally promoting online gambling.

The move marks an escalation in a nationwide battle against prediction market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket. Utah has already sued Kalshi over claims that it's operating illegally in the state, joining several other states, including New York, Nevada, New Mexico, Washington, Connecticu …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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This open-source project lets you sync Withings data to other apps without a subscription

Withings Body Smart scale against a colorful background.

When it was revealed earlier this month that Withings would require new users to subscribe to a Withings Plus subscription to sync heath data from the company's devices to third-party apps, Tom Anthony, who was already fed up with the Withings mobile app which they describe as a "bloated mess," became motivated to "free" their scales. Anthony's solution was to create an open-source project called YourOwnWeigh that reroutes your data away from Withings' servers so it can be wirelessly synced to other apps and platforms for free.

You can read more about the project on GitHub, where you'll also find quick-start guides on how to get YourOwnWeig …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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