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About that Facebook trust ranking
To the complete horror and amusement of those watching the grand experiment Facebook is doing on everyone, this week we found out the company is assigning a reputation score to users that ranks their trustworthiness. The perversity of the situation was lost on no one. (And no, it's not the kind of perversity we like; this is Facebook, after all, the anathema to human sexual expression.)
Does Samsung's Galaxy Home stand a chance?
After more than a year of rumors and vague comments from Samsung leadership, the Galaxy Home, Samsung's Bixby-powered smart speaker, is finally official. Sort of. Samsung briefly showed off the device at today's Galaxy Note 9 launch event in Brooklyn, but the company left us with more questions than answers. We don't know when it'll launch; how much it'll cost; what music services, if any, it supports besides Spotify; and, perhaps most importantly, what Bixby will be capable of when the Galaxy Home goes on sale. Like Apple did with the HomePod, Samsung is touting the Galaxy Home first and foremost as an excellent listening speaker, with multidirectional tweeters and a full subwoofer as well as some neat audio-optimization tricks. Spotify is Samsung's new streaming-music partner, which means you'll be able to control Spotify music playback with Bixby. The device will also serve as a hub for smart home gadgets using the SmartThings platform. Finally, we know Bixby will be on board, but what specifically it'll be capable of remains a mystery. While there will probably be some things to like about the Galaxy Home, the lack of info Samsung has provided made its introduction feel like a rushed, incomplete letdown. It's the kind of misstep that's hard to make when you're competing against the likes of Apple, Google and Amazon.
Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8 still has game one year later
The Galaxy Note 8's job was not only to serve the legions of smartphone users who demand S Pens but also to rehabilitate Samsung's image after the Note 7, to prove that the company had bounced back from a very public failure. On both counts, I'd argue the Note 8 succeeded. With Samsung gearing up to reveal its next-generation Galaxy Note, we thought it'd be appropriate to check in with 2017's Note 8 to see just how well it holds up against a year's worth of smartphone progress.
Even automakers don’t want Trump’s emissions rollback
The Trump administration unveiled its proposal to weaken Obama-era fuel efficiency standards, and it's as bad as you would expect.
Motorola's smartphone Mods weren't the game-changers we hoped for
Two years ago, Lenovo-owned Motorola embarked on a grand plan to build modular smartphones that weren't cumbersome. It worked. Moto Mods are accessories that magnetically attach to the company's Moto Z smartphones, and they let people easily expand their phones' feature sets. And later this week, we're expecting Motorola to unveil what might be its most ambitious Mod yet: a 5G modem for high-speed data. (Never mind the fact that, as of this writing, there are no commercially accessible 5G networks in the US.) The brand's execs first started talking about the possibility of a 5G mod in late 2016, and the idea of adding next-generation wireless performance to an existing smartphone is as enticing as ever.
Why Macs matter to Apple, even when they aren’t selling well
Apple didn't say much about the Mac on yesterday's quarterly earnings call. Customers only bought 3.7 million Macs in the past three months, a 13 percent drop compared to the year prior. For those keeping track, that's only the fifth quarter in the past eight years in which Apple sold less than 4 million traditional computers. Meanwhile, both IDC and Gartner released reports saying the past quarter was the best the PC market has seen in six years. The Mac's decline is vindicating to the Apple fans and professionals alike who have been on the soapbox discussing how the company's current products don't measure up in one way or another. The best example is surely the MacBook Pro, with its problematic keyboard, lack of legacy ports, recent thermal troubles, questionable touch bar and -- of course -- its sky-high price. Meanwhile, the MacBook Air, Mac Mini and Mac Pro have all lingered for years without meaningful updates.
'No Man’s Sky' finally delivers the grand adventure we were promised
The huge No Man's Sky Next update has landed. Now we've had some time to relax into new material economies, multiplayer adventures and horrific alien eggs that will ruin your day, do we feel differently about the contentious space exploration game that promised so much and didn't quite deliver? The Engadget team outline how their odyssey is faring this time around.
Tesla asking suppliers for money back is a risky move
The Model 3 will do one of two things for Tesla: It'll make the company a profitable seller of cars, solar panels, and batteries; or, it'll drag it further into debt. To keep the latter from happening, the company is doing something that seems insane: It's asking some of its suppliers for money back for parts it already bought. Parts going back as far as 2016.
Why Elon Musk isn't the hero we imagined
Every now and again, there's a story of true human ingenuity that reminds us what we should aspire toward. Twelve children, trapped in a flooded cave system, were rescued by an international team of experts. Divers used their years of training and experience to find and save people when all hope was thought lost. One diver, Saman Kunan, died in the effort. And yet, rather than celebrate their sacrifice and effort, we've spent the better part of a week preoccupied with the word "pedo." You already know why: Elon Musk, the entrepreneur who revolutionized e-commerce, electric vehicles and private spaceflight, lashed out at someone in anger. Members of Team Musk raced to the aid of their hero, while others used it as yet another stick with which to beat the man. It's impossible to talk about Musk in a rational, balanced way. He's not simply a human being, with flaws and foibles and dreams like we all have, but a touchstone for the whole world. Musk has become a representative for so many causes that, to many, criticizing him is somehow denigrating the cause. Look at Tesla, the car company that has disrupted the automotive and energy industries. Almost single-handedly, Musk made EVs cool, and proved that people wanted to own one. The fact that I can now even think about buying a second- or third-hand EV is, at least in part, due to Musk. Tesla also demonstrated that concerns over battery life and range were unfounded. It's now relatively easy to schedule your trip to include a 20-minute-or-so stop for a bathroom break while an EV recharges. And the Supercharger network has quickly been supplanted by a number of additional charging stations in hotels, in public buildings and curbside. Some of this has been the result of government incentive programs, but demand is clearly increasing. While Musk made EVs cool, plenty of others have benefited from this perception change. In my native UK, the Nissan Leaf and Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV have outsold the Tesla Model S and X by a considerable margin. But that may change in the future, since the Model 3 could become what was seen as impossible a few years ago: a mass-market electric sedan.
Apple’s MacBook eGPU is a step toward winning back creative pros
Even though Apple makes a lot more money on iPhones and iPads, Macs are still crucial to its bottom line. For years, they were widely loved by creative folks and influencers because they were simpler and more powerful than Windows PCs. Now, content creation pros and designers are falling out of love with Apple. Many see the MacBook Pro's Touch Bar as a consumer gimmick, and worse, Apple's top-end laptops have failed to keep pace technologically with powerful, well-designed PCs from Microsoft, Dell and others.
Pro drone racing confronts its amateur roots
"The drone racing league is a sport. We are a league. We do an annual season. We have a clear rule system and scoring system," Nick Horbaczewski, founder and CEO of the Drone Racing League (DRL), enthuses in a small business suite located on the second floor of the Circus Circus Casino in Las Vegas. With a deal with ESPN in the bag, his league is poised to bring the sport mainstream, and within moments of our introduction, he's let me know he's serious.
GamerGate’s subreddit temporarily shuts down because toxicity
GamerGate was a huge deal, mostly because the internet becomes incredibly volatile at perceived slights against white men. But, it turns out, that even the founder of one of the movement's most potent social channels has had enough. Business Insider reported on Friday that one of the primary subreddits temporarily shut off access to the page after its head moderator called it a "cancerous growth."
Facebook’s approach to fighting fake news is half-hearted
Earlier this week, Facebook hosted a group of reporters (myself included) at its NYC office for a Q&A session about its efforts to fight fake news. The event, led by Head of News Feed John Hegeman and News Feed product specialist Sara Su, began with Facebook showing us a short film called Facing Facts. It's a documentary that debuted last May, which tells the story of the company's uphill battle to rid its site of a misinformation plague that seems incurable. For months, Facebook has talked about how hard it is working to fix the issue (by hiring third-party fact-checkers, removing fake accounts and more), but on Wednesday it left us with more questions than answers. That's because Facebook believes reducing and flagging fake news stories is better than removing them altogether, and that doesn't seem like the best approach.
Defending InfoWars, Facebook declines to stop fake news
This week, we learned in concrete terms that Facebook, like the Trump administration, has no bottom when it comes to hypocrisy and catering to neo-fascist conservatives. The hole has since been dug so deep by the company that its usual tactic of trading access for a positive PR apology tour may not work as well as it used to.
Our (likely) next Supreme Court justice doesn't get the internet
Barring some serious Democratic finagling, Judge Brett Kavanaugh is going to be our next associate Supreme Court justice. The problem is, he doesn't really get the internet. He made as much clear in a dissenting opinion he wrote in the thick of last year's net neutrality debate. Long story short, a panel of judges from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the FCC's 2015 Open Internet Order in 2016 after it was challenged by a coalition of telecom and cable companies. Those organizations then petitioned for a second hearing in front of the entire court, and were shot down again (.pdf here) in 2017. Kavanaugh disagreed with the court's decision, and then proceeded to lay out arguments for why the FCC's net neutrality rules were "unlawful."
Apple’s iOS App Store changed the way we think about software
Ten years ago today, Apple officially launched the iOS App Store and -- for better or worse -- it helped rewrite the rules of society. The iPhone, which debuted about a year prior, came with just north of 12 built-in apps to start. But with the coming of iOS 2.0 and the App Store, the sort of functionality you could squeeze out of Apple's smartphone was only constrained by a developer's imagination ... and how much storage you had left.
HBO's new owner needs to learn that 'more' doesn't mean 'better'
After AT&T bought Time Warner, the business was handed over to AT&T veteran John Stankey. Last month, the new boss told The New York Times that he would be hands-off, especially toward HBO, Warner's quirky, ultra-premium network. Stankey said AT&T lacked the ability to do a better job, and it would be business as usual at the home of blockbusters like Westworld. Sadly, it appears that Stankey has failed to heed his own advice.
America's love affair with firearms bleeds into gaming culture
Gaming culture is rife with graphic representations of gun violence and has been since arcade goers first blew aliens out of Space Invader's skies. You'll be hard-pressed to find more than a handful of AAA titles designed for adults (sit down Rayman) that don't rely on firearms, or use gore in substitution, either as a primary tool for the gameplay or as a thematic element.
'Life is Strange 2' prelude proves superpowers aren't just for girls
In The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, the latest installment in the Life is Strange series, developer Dontnod once again taps into a deep and pervasive human emotion: The desire to have superpowers. However, where the first season approaches this feeling from the perspective of a confused teenage girl with the fate of an entire town in her hands, Captain Spirit puts players in the basketball-spotted socks of a 9-year-old boy playing pretend. Though the protagonist, Chris, is younger than the star of the original series, his problems are just as mature: His mother recently died in a car wreck, and in the aftermath, his dad is having a rough time creating a stable home life. Meanwhile, Chris attempts to escape his new reality by becoming the superpowered Captain Spirit -- in his imagination and possibly in the real world, too.
The Model X vs the I-Pace: A luxury electric SUV face-off
It's impossible not to compare the new Jaguar I-Pace with the Model X. They're currently the only members of the EV luxury SUV club. At least for now. BMW and Audi are both working on getting their electrified vehicles to market. But let's look at the differences between --not just two of the best EVs on the market -- but really two great vehicles overall.
