Hasta La Gadget!

Apple discontinued its original HomePod smart speaker a few years ago. Now, we have a sequel. The company has resurrected the bigger unit with upgraded audio, a more powerful chip, more smart home abilities and, importantly, a lower price. The overall design, however, is mostly unchanged. Some will think it’s still a little pricey at $299, however.

The HomePod has room-sensing tech, so it can read sound reflections to determine its position (near a wall or in free space) and adjust the audio in real-time. There’s also Spatial Audio support. But the most interesting updates are its smart home tools. First, a feature called Sound Recognition can monitor for smoke and carbon monoxide alarms and send an alert to your iPhone if it hears one. This tool will be available in a software update “later this spring.” Since the new smart home standard Matter is (almost) everywhere, the 2023 HomePod can connect to and control gadgets compatible with it. Apple added that any smart home communications are end-to-end encrypted by default, and the company can’t read them.

The new HomePod is available for pre-order now and ships February 3rd. However, if you’re looking for something a little different, you could wait for a hub-styled smart home device. The latest rumors suggest Apple is working on an iPad-based device to go up against the likes of Google and Amazon.

– Mat Smith

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Google may be working on a location tracker like Apple’s AirTag

It could be announced during Google I/O.

According to developer (and well-sourced leaker) Kuba Wojciechowski, Google’s Nest team is developing a tracker codenamed Grogu. It’ll reportedly include an onboard speaker, as well as support for Bluetooth Low Energy and ultra-wideband (UWB). Wojciechowski found evidence of the tracker when he noticed Google added support for locator tags in the developer hub for Fast Pair, the Android feature that quickly connects Bluetooth devices. Wojciechowski says the Pixel 6 Pro and Pixel 7 Pro both shipped with UWB modules, which would allow them to direct you to nearby objects accurately.

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Amazon is shutting down the AmazonSmile charity program in February

It says the program ‘has not grown to create the impact’ it was hoping for.

Amazon plans to wind down AmazonSmile, its giving program for buyers to donate to their favorite charities with every purchase, by February 20th, 2023. Apparently, the program’s ability to make a meaningful impact was hampered by it having over a million eligible organizations worldwide. Donations were apparently spread too thin. According to Bloomberg, the company donated almost $500 million to charities over the past 10 years through AmazonSmile. Still, the average amount per charity was apparently only $230 due to the sheer number of participating organizations. The cynical approach is that Amazon is axing the program to help with its own cost-cutting. Surely some charitable donation is better than none?

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Boston Dynamics’ Atlas shows off its acrobatic ‘gopher’ skills

Robot, fetch me my tools.

Boston Dynamics

Boston Dynamics showed off more of its Atlas robot’s stunning agility and dexterity in a new demo video, delivering a tool bag to a human at the top of some scaffolding. “This is more a demonstration of some of the robot’s new control capabilities, and a fun connection to our prior work,” Scott Kuindersma, Atlas team lead, said. “Our hope is that, if we can build the foundational technology that allows us to easily create and adapt dynamic behaviors like these, we should be able to leverage it down the road to perform real, physically demanding jobs.” The robot flips off the scaffolding at the end, too.

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Twitter Blue has arrived on Android, and just like on iOS, it will cost you $11 a month to pay for a subscription through Google Play. The social media website has updated its About page for Blue to add Android pricing for all the countries where the service is currently available, namely the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. 

Before this, you’d have to pay for a subscription via the web or an iOS device if you want to enjoy Blue’s perks on an Android phone. Take note, however, that paying through Google will cost you $3 more than paying through a web browser. By charging more when you pay via your device’s app store, Twitter is essentially passing the tech giants’ 30 percent commission onto you. If you don’t mind firing up a web browser to pay for Twitter Blue, you can score a year-long subscription for $84 per year, no matter what your phone’s operating system is. It’s a newly launched option that’s equivalent to paying $7 a month instead of $8. 

A Twitter Blue subscription will put a blue checkmark next to your name on the website and will give you access to features not yet available for non-paying users. One of those features lets you preview your tweet and gives you the option to “undo” it before it gets posted on your timeline. You also get access to bookmark folders, themes and custom app icons. But as TechCrunch notes, there’s no telling what Blue’s feature list will look like over the coming months: The company could very well add new perks or remove them in the future. The checkmark will likely remain as one of the service’s main selling points, however, seeing as Elon Musk previously called Twitter’s “lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark” as “bullshit.”

Apple is reportedly working on an iPad-like smart home device designed to compete against Amazon’s Echo Show and Google’s Nest Hub products, according to Bloomberg. It would reportedly be “essentially a low-end iPad” that would operate as a hub to control thermostats, lights and security systems, while also allowing FaceTime chats. It could be mounted on walls using magnetic clips or positioned more as a home hub-type device than a regular iPad. 

The company has also discussed the idea of building smart home displays larger than iPads, though there are no other details on those. None of the smart home products would be ready until 2024 at earliest. 

Rumors about potential Apple smart displays have popped up before. Last August, it was reported that the company had four smart home devices in its labs, including a kitchen accessory that combined an iPad with a speaker. (In the same report, Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman correctly predicted the new HomePod model that arrived yesterday.) 

Apple is also reportedly working on a new version of Apple TV, set for release in the first half of 2024. It would have a faster processor but carry the same design as the current model. 

Smart home devices with touchscreens represent a potentially lucrative market segment still largely untapped by Apple. Amazon makes several versions of its Echo Show smart display, with prices ranging from around $30 for the Echo Show 8 to $250 for the Echo Show 15. Google has the Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max, priced at $100 and $229 respectively. 

Apple just made a key update to its smart home family yesterday. Following the launch of new MacBook Pro and Mac mini models, it released a new $300 version of its larger HomePad that was discontinued last year. Notably, it features new smart home features along with updates like improved audio, an S7 chip and a lower price. Those include a built-in temperature and humidity sensor, along with a feature called Sound Recognition can monitor for smoke and carbon monoxide alarms and send an alert to your iPhone. 

“The Late Show” host shows what the conspiracy theorist lawmaker can do with her new committee assignment.

Amazon plans to wind down AmazonSmile, its giving program that allows buyers to donate to their favorite charities with every purchase, by February 20th, 2023. In its announcement, the e-commerce giant said “the program has not grown to create the impact that [it] had originally hoped” almost a decade after it was launched. Apparently, the program’s ability to make meaningful impact was hampered by the fact that it has over 1 million eligible organizations worldwide. Donations were often spread too thin. 

Whenever people use the AmazonSmile website to make a purchase, the company donates 0.5 percent of what they paid to the charity of their choice at no additional cost to them. As a parting donation to participating organizations, Amazon will give them the equivalent of three months what they earned in 2022 through the program. Going forward, the company will focus its charitable work “in other areas where it can make meaningful change.” It gave a few examples of its future plans, such as investing $2 billion to build and preserve affordable housing, funding the computer science curriculum for 1 million students across thousands of schools and delivering 12 million meals this year through food banks. 

Amazon didn’t expound on what it meant by the program failing to make a meaningful impact. According to Bloomberg through, the company donated almost $500 million to charities over the past 10 years through AmazonSmile, but the average amount per donation is only $230 due to the sheer number of participating organizations. Still, critics can’t help but wonder if this is merely one of Amazon’s cost-cutting tactics.

If you’ll recall, Amazon recently announced that it’s expanding its planned job cuts to eliminate over 18,000 roles. Amazon was one of the companies that benefited from COVID lockdowns over the past few years and had to hire thousands of new people to keep up with the demand. Consumers eventually went back to their pre-pandemic shopping habits, and Amazon (with its bottomline affected by the shift) reportedly conducted cost-cutting reviews to figure out which units weren’t bringing in money. As a result, Amazon froze hiring, closed brick-and-mortar stores and shut down business units, in addition to cutting jobs.