Browsing: Tech Reviews

The OnePlus 15T has been teased ahead of its full launchIt’s set to pack a 7,500mAh ‘Glacier’ battery that uses silicon carbon techI loved the 15R’s battery, and this is even biggerWhen I’m reviewing a phone I look at all of its specs equally, but for my own device I always look for one with a giant battery. I get charge anxiety and I hate phones that run out of power quickly — so the next OnePlus phone sounds like it’ll be right up my street.The OnePlus 15T is an upcoming affordable spin on the OnePlus 15, which we gave…

At the current retail price of $299 for a 2-pack, the MSI Roamii BE Pro (model MRBE110) is easily among the least expensive tri-band Wi-Fi 7 mesh systems on the market. In real-world testing, that low cost translated into a pleasant surprise. Here’s the bottom line: The MSI Roamii BE Pro is a straightforward Wi-Fi 7 mesh system that offers much more than its friendly price tag suggests. If you’re in the market for a Wi-Fi 7 solution that delivers solid entry-level Multi-Gig bandwidth (2.5Gbps) via wired or wireless, give it a go today! Pros Affordable with excellent entry-level Multi-Gigabit performance…

On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced that a large collection of tech companies had signed on to what it’s calling the Ratepayer Protection Pledge. By agreeing, the initial signatories—Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI—are saying they will pay for the new generation and transmission capacities needed for any additional data centers they build. But the agreement has no enforcement mechanism, and it will likely run into issues with hardware supplies. It also ignores basic economics. Other than that, it seems like a great idea. What’s being agreed to The agreement is quite simple, laying out five points. The…

In a new blog post, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has admitted that it received a letter from the Defense Department, officially labeling it a supply chain risk. He said he doesn’t “believe this action is legally sound,” and that his company sees “no choice” but to challenge it in court. Hours before Amodei published the post, the Pentagon announced that it notified the company that its “products are deemed a supply chain risk, effective immediately.”If you’ll recall, the Defense Department (called the Department of War under the current administration) threatened to give the company the designation typically reserved for firms…

The wait for an inexpensive MacBook for day-to-day work and entertainment is over. On Wednesday, Apple announced the lower-cost MacBook Neo, which is sure to be a hit with those who wanted a MacBook but for whom spending $1,000 or more for a MacBook Air was out of reach. The new MacBook Neo starts at $599 (£599, AU$899), and you can get it for $499 with Apple’s educational discount.Taking on Chromebooks and cheap Windows laptops, the MacBook Neo isn’t based on an Apple M-series processor, which powers Apple’s newly announced MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models. Instead, it uses the A18 Pro chip…

Meta contractors claim your smart glasses can see more than you thinkMeta’s privacy policy does warn that your glasses share images and videos with the companyThis follows a growing trend of privacy concerns over smart glasses in public and in courtsWhen Meta warned us that it could see footage captured by its AI smart glasses, it turns out it wasn’t kidding. As part of a new investigation, Meta insiders claim to have seen intimate details of our lives, from bank cards to filmed sex scenes.In a joint investigation published by Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten (behind a paywall), Meta…

“What we found is that these AI agents can do something that was previously very difficult: starting from free text (like an anonymized interview transcript) they can work their way to the full identity of a person,” Simon Lermen, a co-author of the paper, told Ars. “This is a pretty new capability; previous approaches on re-identification generally required structured data, and two datasets with a similar schema that could be linked together.” Unlike those older pseudonymity-stripping methods, Lermen said, AI agents can browse the web and interact with it in many of the same ways humans do. They can use…

Today the White House announced that several major players in tech and AI have agreed to steps that will keep electricity costs from rising due to data centers. Under this Ratepayer Protection Pledge, companies are agreeing to practices that are intended to protect residents from seeing higher electricity costs as more and more businesses create power-hungry data centers. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and xAI have all apparently signed on. A few of the participants — Amazon, Google and Meta — had conveniently timed press releases patting themselves on the back for their participation and touting whatever other policies…

Highguard found itself in the spotlight of the online video game discourse back in December during The Game Awards show, when host Geoff Keighley made a special introduction for the game’s trailer, which came very late in the show, a time reserved for some of the night’s biggest reveals. The next day, there were questions as to what this free-to-play multiplayer shooter from a new studio was. Now, less than two months after its release, Highguard is being shut down. Developer Wildlight Entertainment posted on X about Highguard’s shutdown on Tuesday. The developer says it was unable to gain the player base…

Apple MacBook Neo is probably the most important new consumer electronics product of this still-new year. It’s not the most powerful laptop Apple has ever produced, but few products have thrown open the door to a new market and buying possibilities in quite the same way.The MacBook Neo arrives as a budget-laptop-busting portable that starts at just $599 / £599 / AU$899 ($499 / £499 / AU$749 for the education market) and rewrites the rules for a budget laptop.With a 256GB hard drive and 8GB RAM, it may not sound like it’s packed with possibilities, but Apple also equipped the…