Hasta La Gadget!

Spotify’s 2024 Wrapped results arrived this week, and while the whole package seems a bit thin compared to previous years, we’re still getting a kick out of seeing our listening habits laid bare. Apple Music also dropped its annual Replay, and Tidal’s 2024 Rewind has landed, so non-Spotify users have some data to pore over too. For those among us who don’t use any of the big streaming apps, well, it’s still a nice time to reflect on personal favorites from this year. 

Here are some of the Engadget team’s most listened-to songs, artists and albums in 2024 (and how we feel about those picks). 

Spotify Wrapped 

I hate to add to the list because of all the controversy around Spotify recently, but I have to say that the layoffs at the company do seem to have impacted how accurate I found my Wrapped report to be. While I certainly have listened to a lot of Ariana Grande in 2024 (I even wrote about it for our site!), I felt that the sections on what I was listening to in August were inaccurate. According to Spotify I was vibing to Rose and Bruno Mars’ APT in August, but didn’t that song get released quite a bit later?

Anyway, judge me or don’t judge me based on my listening — all I can say is the data feels incorrect and incomplete but also fun and inconsequential. — Cherlynn Low, Deputy Editor, Reviews

I was pretty ill this year, and I spent hours in hospital and clinic waiting rooms listening to music on Spotify. Apparently, March was my “Pink Pilates Princess Strut Pop” phase, because I mostly listened to Dua Lipa, Ariana Grande and Charli xcx. My top artist for the year, however, was Fujii Kaze, whose music gave me a lot of comfort when I needed it the most. — Mariella Moon, Contributing Reporter

RIP New Jeans — Aaron Souppouris, Executive Editor

Apple Music Replay

I’ve had GNX on repeat since it came out, and it was one of the things that got me through our incredibly busy Black Friday coverage season. Very excited to see which of these tracks gets played live at the Super Bowl. My guess is we’ll get “tv off” (with at least one “Mustard!” shout) and “squabble up,” at the least.

Brat summer became Brat autumn, and it will continue to be a Brat winter for me. Top tracks: “Club classics,” “Sympathy is a knife,” and “365.”

Grasa is my true album of the year and it’s a must-listen for any urbano latino fans. It’s fantastic experienced as an album from start to finish, and any edit you make based on personal preference is sure to be excellent. My favorite tracks — “Legendario,” “Manhattan,” “Menina” — are still on repeat in my personal playlists and will be carried over into 2025.

While Renaissance remains my preferred album in this Beyonce cycle so far, Cowboy Carter has no skips. “Daughter,” “Spaghetti” and “Sweet Honey Buckin’” are my faves.

The Death of Slim Shady makes sense as a concept album to me and I think it succeeds as such. But “Tobey” is what really prompted me to give the entire album a listen when it came out, and I’m glad I did. “Tobey” remains a top track for me, along with “Renaissance” and “Somebody Save Me.” —Valentina Palladino, Deputy Editor, Buying Advice

Despite the fact that music streaming services push you to playlists and radio channels, I remain an Album Guy. And as usual, my top album of the year didn’t come out this year, though it’s a relatively recent release. Daughter’s Stereo Mind Game was near the top of my list last year, but this April it rocketed up my list and was an obsession for the rest of the summer. That is thanks in large part to a live studio session they released on YouTube that was the only chance I had to hear these songs performed in a somewhat live setting, as Daughter didn’t tour Stereo Mind Game at all.

And since I’m an album guy, the first four songs on the album were my second-through-fifth most played songs of 2024. The absurdly catchy “Blame Brett” by Canadian pop-rockers The Beaches was number one, from their excellent Blame My Ex album that also came out last year. I got obsessed with that album in late 2023 and it definitely carried over to the first half of 2024. The same thing happened with Tool’s 2019 opus Fear Inoculum — I saw the band in November of 2023 for the first time in 21 years, and got re-obsessed and continued playing it throughout the year.

Finally, something new from a very old favorite: David Gilmour, best known as the guitarist and co-lead songwriter of the legendary Pink Floyd, released his first solo album in nine years. He followed that with a very short tour that hit only four cities, New York City included. I was lucky enough to go see him a few weeks ago — at 78, this could easily be the last tour he ever does, but he still brings it. He’s my favorite guitar player of all time, and the last song “Scattered” on Luck and Strange is an all-time great as good as almost anything else he’s done.

Bringing up the rear is another new album from an old favorite, Pearl Jam. More than 30 years after their debut Ten, they still know how to make a damn good rock album. Both Pearl Jam and Gilmour went with producers much younger than they were, trying to find people who weren’t going to be beholden with the work they had done earlier in long and impressive careers. If you ask me, it worked out in both cases.

There are tons of other albums from much younger or less established artists I played all year long, including Bathe Alone’s I Don’t Do Humidity, Adrienne Lenker’s Bright Future, Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft, Medium Build’s Country, Girl in Red’s I’m Doing It Again Baby! and Waxahatchee’s Tigers Blood. They’re all worth a listen — but apparently this was a year for comfort and familiarity when I put things on repeat. — Nathan Ingraham, Deputy Editor, News

Tidal Rewind

This year for me was apparently all about fixating on a handful of new songs and playing them to absolute death. And, um, Ariana Grande. I don’t have Spotify, but my Tidal year-end playlist has every single song from Eternal Sunshine at the top, and I’m slightly ashamed to say I can’t argue the validity of that — I had that album on a loop for months after it came out. She’s really talented, okay?? After that my most listened-to songs were “Cry For Me” by Castle Rat, “Bloom” by Baroness (probably an all-time favorite song for me, really), “How Far Will We Take It?” by Orville Peck and Noah Cyrus, “Birds of a Feather” by Billie Eilish, “Weird World” by Allie X and “Red Wine Supernova” by Chappell Roan. I… contain multitudes… 

There’s a suspicious overall lack of emo on my 2024 wrap-up though, so I’m going to take these results with a huge grain of salt. I mean, my go-to playlist is titled “rawr xD.” — Cheyenne MacDonald, Weekend Editor

Personal Pick

I don’t have Spotify, so any recollection of particularly sticky music for me will necessarily be imprecise and skewed by recency bias. With that said: hooooooly moly can we talk about that Cindy Lee album?? My journey with Diamond Jubilee went something like this:

-What is this?

-No really, what is this??

-Why can’t I listen to anything besides this???

Its two hours of runtime play out like a secret radio station beaming some alternate version of ’60s girl groups into 2024 and I absolutely fell in love with it — and that was before even realizing Pat Flegel was in Women (another extremely cool, but very different band).

Honorable mentions go to Adrianne Lenker’s absolutely crushing Bright Future, which got me through recovery from a major surgery and the nervy bops on Robber Robber’s Wild Guess. As to my actual most-listened songs? It’s probably the stuff on my running playlist (Sheer Mag, Every Time I Die, Red Fang, 100 Gecs, IDLES, Femtanyl, Pissed Jeans etc.) — Avery Ellis, Deputy Editor, Reports

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/music/engadget-wrapped-the-music-we-listened-to-the-most-in-2024-143150906.html?src=rss

Is your weekend a bit bare-bones? Here’s something that could entertain you for a minute or two. The chatbot Grok-2 is now free for everyone to fool around with on X. We knew this was coming and, well, now it’s here. Grok it up baby.

There are some limitations for those who don’t want to plunk down $8 (or more) each month for X Premium. The free tier only allows for ten messages in each two-hour period. There’s also a hard cap on image analysis, at three requests per day. This Grok-2 beta will now be the only game in X town, as it’s replacing the pre-existing Grok-2 mini chatbot.

Look. Grok isn’t the most advanced chatbot on the planet. All LLMs make mistakes, but Grok is particularly prone to them. It says right on the chat page that users should “verify its outputs.” To that end, it caused a stir earlier this year when the wee bot was caught handing out false election information.

The image-generation component has also come under fire in recent months after it was used to create stuff like Barack Obama doing cocaine and Donald Trump pointing some guns. It has also been used to violate copyright, as it created stuff like an image of Mickey Mouse saluting Adolph Hitler.

It’s no secret that X has been hemorrhaging users as they depart for the greener pastures of Threads, Bluesky or, in rare cases, real life. Maybe Elon Musk and cohorts removed the Grok paywall to lure back dissatisfied users. However, it’s also likely that X made this move to better compete in a crowded marketplace. There are a bunch of free chatbots out there, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude.

It has been reported by the Wall Street Journal that xAI, which recently raised $6 billion in a funding round, is considering a standalone Grok app. This is another thing that most big AI companies already offer.

X

So if you’re bored as paste, head on over to your (likely dormant) X account and give Grok a whirl. I did and it whipped up some images of cats eating spaghetti before I maxed out the query cap. Look at all of the spaghetti on that table. Bad kitties!

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/if-youre-really-bored-xs-grok-ai-chatbot-is-now-free-to-use-194715700.html?src=rss

It seems increasingly likely that Apple’s fourth-generation iPhone SE will feature the first 5G modem the company has built in-house. A new report from Bloomberg both confirms earlier reporting from 9to5Mac and clarifies that Apple’s first modem won’t be quite as capable as the chips the company is trying to leave behind.

The new modem, reportedly called “Sinope” won’t support mmWave, the short-range 5G technology Verizon offers that can theoretically reach speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second. It also will only offer four-carrier aggregation as opposed to Qualcomm’s six, “a technology that combines bands from several wireless providers simultaneously to increase network capacity and speeds,” Bloomberg says.

Apple’s modem will instead be focused on providing Sub-6 5G, the more common standard that’s already supported on the current iPhone SE, which was released in 2022. In testing, Apple’s new modem reportedly “caps out at download speeds of about 4 gigabits per second,” slower than Qualcomm’s current mmWave models, but the difference is easier to justify on a cheaper device and might not be that noticeable anyway. The goal is ultimately to achieve even tighter integration between the modem and other components of the phone to offer more important benefits than just download speed, like improved battery life.

Bloomberg writes that launching on the iPhone SE first is how Apple plans on managing the risks of its new hardware gamble. Debuting on the iPhone 17 Pro would be a mark of confidence, but most people expect a phone that costs upwards of $1000 to work without issues. Until Apple can guarantee that, the SE makes sense as a modem guinea pig. That won’t be the case for long, however. “Ganymede,” Apple’s second-generation modem, should be ready for the iPhone 18 in 2026 and match Qualcomm’s current offerings with mmWave support and faster download speeds. In 2027, the company’s “Prometheus” modem is aiming to surpass Qualcomm entirely in “performance and artificial intelligence features.”

A report published later today suggests these new modem designs could also have a pretty big influence on more than just the iPhone. Bloomberg attributes the thinness of the rumored iPhone 17 Slim to the space-saving efficiency of Apple’s new modem, and also suggests that future Macs and Vision headsets could get cellular connectivity in the future, too. This would mark the first time a Mac had onboard cellular, though the iPad has had the option since day one.

There’s still years before any of that happens, and the road to even get here has been long and winding. For one, Apple’s relationship with Qualcomm has been up and down. The companies were in a legal spat over patent violations that ultimately led to a settlement and a licensing deal in 2019. That same year is when Apple’s intention to move on from Qualcomm became more public with the purchase of Intel’s modem business. Apple has attempted to build a team that could create its first modem since then, and even re-upped its agreement to use Qualcomm modems through 2026 in 2023. It now seems like the company could be a position for that to be the last deal with Qualcomm it makes.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/the-next-iphone-ses-new-modem-reportedly-wont-be-as-capable-as-qualcomms-205330204.html?src=rss

Apple is advancing its efforts to develop in-house 5G modems for iPhones and iPads, with a goal to rival Qualcomm’s technology by 2027, according to Bloomberg. Despite acquiring Intel’s modem unit in 2019, Apple’s modem development has faced technical setbacks. The company’s first proprietary modem is expected to debut in the next iPhone SE, followed by its introduction in the rumored iPhone “Slim” and entry-level iPads.

Apple plans a phased rollout, with a second-generation modem incorporating mmWave technology expected in 2026, aligning with the iPhone 18 and high-end iPads. By 2027, Apple aims to introduce the “Prometheus” modem, which could surpass Qualcomm’s offerings by supporting advanced features like next-generation satellite networks and AI-based functionalities.

New iPhone SE could be the first to ship Apple’s in-house 5G modem.

The initial modem is anticipated to offer dual SIM standby, enabling two active SIM cards simultaneously, but it may fall short of Qualcomm’s performance in specific areas. For example, it will lack mmWave support, limiting its ability to utilize the ultra-fast speeds available in some urban areas.

Additionally, it will support four-carrier aggregation instead of six, which may cap its maximum bandwidth potential. While these limitations affect theoretical peak speeds, real-world performance is typically lower and less dependent on such features.

Apple’s gradual shift to in-house modems aligns with its broader strategy to reduce reliance on external suppliers and increase control over key technologies. The transition will be pivotal in determining whether Apple can meet or exceed the industry-leading benchmarks set by Qualcomm.

Apple’s First 5G Modem Could Debut In 2025 With A New iPhone SE

, original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Clone Robotics, a Polish company specializing in biomimetic robotics, has unveiled its first full-scale humanoid robot, Clone Alpha. This advanced android incorporates synthetic organs, artificial muscles, and a skeletal structure mirroring human anatomy, aiming to push the boundaries of humanoid robotics.

The company seeks to replicate the dexterity and strength of biological beings by mimicking human anatomy before enabling motion, a departure from conventional robotic design.

Clone Alpha Robot. (Image: Clone Robotics)

At the core of Clone Alpha’s functionality is Myofiber, a proprietary artificial muscle technology introduced in 2021. These water-powered muscles attach to anatomically precise points on the skeleton, mimicking mammalian muscle traits like rapid response times, high contraction force, and efficient energy use. The system animates a full human-like skeleton with 206 bones, minor fusions, and fully articulated joints, providing up to 164 degrees of freedom in the upper torso and a realistic range of movement.

Clone Alpha’s muscles.

The robot features a comprehensive nervous system, including 70 inertial sensors for joint feedback, 320 pressure sensors for muscle force monitoring, and visual input from four depth cameras. Data processing relies on NVIDIA’s Jetson Thor GPU running Clone’s Cybernet model. Additionally, a compact electric pump simulates a human heart, delivering hydraulic pressure through an innovative Aquajet valve system for efficient muscle actuation.

Clone Alpha’s bones.

Despite showcasing impressive components and a humanoid torso with lifelike movements, Clone Robotics has not yet demonstrated a fully functional Alpha robot. Moving from prototypes to complete systems will test the scalability of their approach. With pre-orders open for 279 units on its official website, the company aims to solidify its position in the competitive humanoid robotics market by offering unparalleled realism and functionality in artificial beings.

Clone Alpha: The Humanoid Robot With Synthetic Muscles

, original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.