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You're responsible for your own Spotify algorithm now. On stage at SXSW, Spotify's co-CEO, Gustav Sderstrm, announced the Taste Profile feature, which allows users to personally customize exactly what they want to listen to, whether it's music, audiobooks or podcasts. This AI-powered feature is still in beta, and it will be available to Premium users in New Zealand in the coming weeks. From its short video demo, Spotify's Taste Profile feature will show you a summary of your listening habits and

There may have been some extra incentive for the Trump administration to get the TikTok US deal done. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal , the Trump administration is set to receive a total of $10 billion in the deal that allowed TikTok to remain in the US. The new investors who acquired stakes in the US entity of TikTok already paid a $2.5 billion fee to the administration when the deal closed in January, but WSJ 's latest report noted that the group of investors would continue

Need something new for your reading list? This week, we recommend A.D. Sui's The Iron Garden Sutra, a meditative horror sci-fi/fantasy and murder mystery. I don't typically gravitate toward locked room mysteries, but the description of this book ticked all the right boxes to win me over: a death monk and a team of researchers trapped onboard a spaceship of the dead encounter something beyond human understanding. It has all the makings of a compelling murder mystery, which is fine on its own, but

Meta could be preparing for one of the largest layoffs in its history, according to a Reuters report. The tech giant is planning to cut about 20 percent of its workforce, according to the outlet's sources. According to the report, neither a date nor the exact number of layoffs has been finalized yet. However, Reuters reported that Meta's top executives have told other senior leaders to start planning how to pare back. In its latest financial report , the company's employee headcount was 78,865 a

Digg has shut down, for now, just a few months after its open beta launched. Justin Mezzell, the companys CEO, has explained on the home page that it noticed hours after the beta launched that it was already being targeted by SEO spammers. The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts, he wrote. Apparently, the Digg team wasnt ready for the scale and the speed at which bots found and started flooding the website. Mezzell said Digg banned tho

Welcome to our latest roundup of what's going on in the indie game space. A bunch of intriguing games arrived this week, including a mobile port of one of the most absorbing things Ive played in years and two completely different titles with the same name. Lets get things started with a look at a few projects that were featured in the latest edition of the Future Games Show . Hyperwired (from SidralGames and publisher SelectaPlay) is a 2D roguelike shooter with an interesting resource-management

Meta AI should soon be better at surfacing international news content thanks to a set of new deals with publishers. The company announced new agreements with international outlets and offered additional details on its recent deal with News Corp. The latest deals bring French newspaper Le Figaro , Spanish media company Prisa and German newspaper Sddeutsche Zeitung into the fold. Together, along with News Corp, which runs a number of outlets in the UK, these sources should give Meta AI better acce

Adobe has agreed to pay the US government $75 million to settle its lawsuit over the company's allegedly harmful approach to subscriptions. The suit started in 2024, when the US Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission filed a joint complaint alleging the company deliberately made it difficult to cancel subscriptions and obscured the frequently expensive early termination fee customers have to pay to get out of annual subscriptions that are paid monthly. While we disagree with the

In the mad dash many companies have made to incorporate AI features into their phones, Nothing arrived at one of the better ideas with Essential Space on the Nothing Phone 3a in 2025. The AI-powered app turns screenshots and voice recordings into actionable to-do lists and transcriptions, and now Nothing is rolling out an update to make the app easier to search and capable of recognizing new kinds of content. As part of the update, Essential Space now recognizes Events, displaying them in their

Apple's cheapest laptop is also its most repairable. iFixit gave the new MacBook Neo a 6/10 repairability score. Although that number would only be mediocre for, say, a game review or final exam grade, it's the MacBook line's highest iFixit score in about 14 years. As always, iFixit goes into great detail about the product's repairability, but a few points stand out. First, the MacBook Neo's battery is screwed down rather than glued moving it from his might burn the house down to outine repai

Meta is killing end-to-end encryption in Instagram DMs. The feature will o longer be supported after May 8, 2026, the company wrote in an update on its support page. Unlike WhatsApp, Meta never made encryption available to all Instagram users and it was never a default setting. Instead, users in some areas had the ability to opt-in to encryption on a per-chat basis. In a statement, a Meta spokesperson said the feature was being retired due to low adoption. Very few people were opting in to end-

Amazon is raising the price of its ad-free Prime Video subscription and locking 4K UHD streaming behind this new tier. Starting April 10 for US customers, a rebranded Prime Video Ultra subscription will cost $5 per month, up from $3 per month. For that extra $2, you get a download capacity increase from 25 to 100, and you can now run five streams concurrently instead of three. Whether those Ultra upgrades are worth the $24 annual hike will probably depend on how many boxsets you like to plough t

Parallels, the company best known for making the virtualization software that enables you to run Windows and other operating systems on a Mac, has confirmed that Parallels Desktop is compatible with the MacBook Neo. At launch it was unclear if Apple's new $600 laptop possessed the under-the-hood heft to run Windows apps, but in a recently updated post on its website, Parallels said that initial tests show its software running stably, although performance is still being assessed. The MacBook Neo

TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance has figured out a way to access NVIDIA's latest AI chips despite export restrictions, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal . The company is working with a firm called Aolani Cloud and building out Blackwell computing systems in Malaysia. This should give ByteDance access to around 36,000 B200 chips. That's NVIDIA's most powerful processor. The hardware buildout will reportedly cost more than $2.5 billion. The company says it plans on using t

Inevitably, the more you use something your Mac included the more dirty and cluttered its likely to become. At that point, you can buy a new machine, but the more economical move is to make what you have already work better. To help your computer feel new, or at least a little cleaner and less chaotic, we put together this guide with techniques and useful apps that have helped us maintain a more organized computer. Ive been using these tips since before I first published this guide in 2021, an

It's already smartphone season. Samsung's annual deluge encompasses three new phones for 2026: the frontier-pushing S26 Ultra ($1,300) with its innovative Privacy Screen, the S26 ($899) and the S26+ ($999). The smaller flagships, yet again, are iterative versions of what came before, with the major differences centering on bigger batteries and brighter screens. I'm getting waves of deja vu as I review the Galaxy S26, because at times I was writing exactly what I wrote last year including the pa

Somehow, Apple made a $599 laptop that's actually a joy to use. In this episode, Devindra and Deputy Editor Nathan Ingraham chat about what makes the MacBook Neo so great. And they also dive into the new M4 iPad Air, M5 MacBook Air and M5 Pro/Max MacBook Pros. Also, Roberto Baldwin, SAE International's Sustainability Editor, joins us to chat about the state of EVs today as gas prices explode. Subscribe! iTunes Spotify Pocket Casts Stitcher Google Podcasts Topic MacBook Neo review: Apple puts $60

Apple is lowering its developer fees in China following discussions with the Chinese regulator. From March 15, the commission rate for standard in-app purchases (IAPs) will be reduced from 30 percent to 25 percent on its mainland China App Store storefront for both iOS and iPadOS. In a Developer blog , Apple also said that developers belonging to its App Store Small Business or Mini Apps programmes will also have their fees reduced by 3 percent, from 15 to 12 percent. This applies to the commiss

Apple's new family of laptops might have a cringeworthy name, but don't let it fool you. Despite the MacBook Neo running on a built-for-iPhone A-series processor and being limited to 8GB of RAM, it delivers on what Macs do best. It has a capable screen, keyboardand trackpadand its overall build quality should embarrass other laptop-making rivals that have compromised on those areas with their $600 laptops. Engadget Don't expect a gaming rig it struggled predictably to run Lies of P , but for mo

Meditation is often touted as a mental cure-all, purported to help with stress, sleep, mood, focus and even certain medical conditions. Ive been meditating most of my adult life. Ive done silent retreats. Ive been formally trained in various techniques. Ive had someone in my contacts list who I referred to as a guru. So I feel Im relatively qualified to give some bad news: Meditation wont fix your life, despite what David Lynch says. However, theres also some good news: Despite not actually bein

Ubers and Motional's Hyundai Ioniq 5 autonomous EVs will start appearing as an option for riders in Las Vegas. Passengers requesting for an UberX, Uber Electric, Uber Comfort or Uber Comfort Electric ride may be matched with a Motional robotaxi. They will not be forced to take it, though, and will be notified and given the option to decline and choose a regular ride instead. But if they want to try it, they can boost their chances of getting matched with a robotaxi ride by opting in via the Ride

Its hard to believe that its been almost four years since Apple gave the MacBook Air a serious glow-up. The 2022 model was a total redesign that bumped its performance with the M2 chip and also improved a number of key components. It was also the first MacBook Air to drop the signature tapered design, and Apple added a 15-inch model one year later to boot. Since then, Apples primarily focused on making sure it has a new chip every year were already up to the M5, if you can believe it. As such,

Apple's exclusive deal for US broadcast rights of Formula 1 was a big shift to streaming from ESPN's cable coverage of the past, but after the first race (the Australian Grand Prix), it seems to be going well. The 2026 Formula 1 season on Apple TV is off to a strong start, with fans responding positively and viewership up year over year for the first weekend, exceeding both F1 and Apple expectations, Apple VP Eddy Cue told The Hollywood Reporter . Apple didn't give any ratings or other details,

Bandai Namco has announced a new Little Nightmares game, this time for virtual reality. Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes is developed by Iconik and not by Tarsier Studios, but its still connected to the beloved titles Little Nightmares I and II . Remember Dark Six, the protagonist Sixs dark doppelganger from the previous games? Well, in this installment, you will control her as she goes on a journey to reunite with the actual Six in order to reunited with her and become whole. The adventure

Many of us remember the halcyon days of being a kid in the 90s, spending a weekend afternoon with remote control in hand and a seemingly endless well of stuff to watch on TV. Now you can relive the experience thanks to the appropriately named Channel Surfer web app. It's essentially a YouTube discovery tool that surfaces interesting videos, but presented in a retro homage to the cable channel screen. Channel Surfer is the work of developer Steven Irby. He has 40 channels on the app right now, mo

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the union that covers warehouse workers, drivers and a diverse collection of other laborers, has come out against Paramount Skydance's merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. In a press release , the Teamsters announced that it has submitted a report to the US Department of Justice's Antitrust Division outlining its concerns about the impact of the deal, and is urging the DOJ to intervene in the merger. This merger threatens the livelihoods of the very wor

The newly verified X account for Iran's supreme leader could be putting the company on the wrong side of US sanctions, according to a watchdog group. The Tech Transparency Project, which last month published a report on X granting premium perks to sanctioned officials in Iran, now says that the verified account for the country's new leader raises fresh questions about the issue. The TTP notes that the X account for Iran's new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, appears to be paying for an X premiu

Adobe's long-time CEO has shared that he plans to step down. Shantanu Narayen has been the chief exec at the tech company for 18 years, a tenure where he led Adobe in the major shift to become a software-as-a-service provider. The exact timeline for his exit is still up in the air, as Narayen will depart when the board of directors names his successor. He will remain on the board as its chair after leaving the CEO post. While Adobe was not the first to take the SaaS route, it was one of the firs

NASA will soon give it another go on April Fools' Day. On Thursday, NASA said it's targeting April 1 at 6:24 PM ET for the Artemis II mission's next launch attempt. In case that date doesn't pan out, NASA added April 2 at 7:22 PM as a secondary launch opportunity. If necessary, the agency foresees several more openings between April 1 and 6 to get the Orion rocket into space. Within those six days between the first and the sixth, we can't always turn around every day for an attempt, NASA acting

We've been seeing all sorts of warnings about how RAMaggedon is nigh. The latest horseman signalling a disaster is the International Data Corporation, which had already cautioned that things were looking bad at the end of 2025. Today, the organization further cut its forecasts for the PC market in 2026, anticipating that global shipments would fall 11.6 percent. The previous report projected that this year would see a falloff of up to 8.9 percent due to ongoing memory shortages. And the new figu

KPop Demon Hunters is getting a sequel, Netflix and Sony have announced . Sony Pictures Animation handed the rights to the film to Netflix in 2021 as part of a larger licensing deal, but neither company could have expected how much of a hit it would ultimately become. Besides being Netflix's most-watched movie of all time, KPop Demon Hunters is also nominated for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song at the 98th Academy Awards , and stands a good chance of winning. Maggie Kang and Chris A

Instagram has long limited users' ability to share links, restricting link-sharing to Stories, Reels and user profiles. But that might now be changing. The company has started to test clickable links inside of post captions for subscribers to Meta Verified. The new feature, which has been a long-requested update from creators, was spotted by blogger Andrea Valeria, who posted screenshots of a clickable Substack link she was able to add to an Instagram post. According to Valeria, an in-app messag

European regulators are continuing to crack down on loot boxes and gaming features it classifies as interactive risk categories. The Pan-European Game Information, better known as PEGI, is rolling out new rules that will apply age ratings based on the presence of loot boxes and other in-game purchases or systems that could be tied to gambling or addictive behavior. The exact policies are as follows: Purchases of in-game content: games with time-limited or quantity-limited offers will be classifi

Bumble is testing an AI dating assistant called Bee that it hopes will get users on dates without them having to swipe through profiles, Bloomberg writes . The company announced the AI assistant during its fourth quarter earnings , and intends to use the AI in a new experience it calls Dates. When a user opts in to Bumble's Dates feature, Bee performs an onboarding chat where it learns about the users' values, relationship goals, communications style, lifestyle and dating intentions, and then at

Ankers Soundcore projectors have become an attractive option for buyers thanks to models like the P1 and Nebula X1 that combine performance and portability. Now, the company has added affordability to that equation with its latest model, the $369 P1i . Instead of being detachable like on the P1, its speakers fold out toward listeners, promising better and louder sound than most cheap projectors. The P1i also delivers 1080p video, Google TV for streaming and the same easy screen fit setup as othe

Its already been a busy year for high-profile Microsoft departures, with longtime Xbox chief Phil Spencer bowing out last month alongside his expected successor Sarah Bond. Today its the turn of Microsoft's head of Experiences + Devices, Rajesh Jha, who leaves after more than 35 years at the company. Jha, who oversaw some of Microsofts most important products and services, including Windows, Office and Teams, said in a press release that hes been planning for his succession alongside CEO Satya N

Amazon just unveiled a new personality type for Alexa+ . The sassy option is reserved for adults and the company claims it will throw out censored curse words from time to time. Amazon describes this option as a combination of unfiltered personality and razor-sharp wit, playful sarcasm and occasional censored profanity. We aren't yet sure how the chatbot handles the censoring. Does it use a garden variety bleep or a replacement word like fudge or something? I managed to get it to say damn and he

Fancy yourself as one of those folks who stands in front of an expensive touchscreen display on a news network on election night, zooming in and out of counties while bleating about polling and voting data? If so, you might get a kick out of BallotGuessr . This is a riff on GeoGuessr that tasks you with guessing how a county voted in the 2024 presidential election. All you have to go on to figure out the identity of each county are contextual clues from Google Street View images. You can move ar

Ukraine's four-year war with Russia has made it the world leader in battlefield drone technology. One byproduct of that is that the data it collects has become one of the country's most valuable assets. On Thursday, Ukraine played that card, saying it will begin sharing its battlefield data with allies to train drone AI software. In modern warfare, we must defeat Russia in every technological cycle, Ukraine Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov wrote on Telegram (translated from Ukrainian). Artifici

After spending many years as the public face of Overwatch , Jeff Kaplan stayed well out of the limelight after leaving Blizzard in 2021 . Five years later, the former Blizzard vice president and Overwatch lead director is back with his own studio and a new game, which you might be able to play pretty soon. The Legend of California is billed as an open-world, action-survival shooter. It looks like a mix of Red Dead Redemption and Rust (Rust Dead Redemption, if you will). It's set during the gold

With Claude enjoying a moment of newfound popularity among regular people , Anthropic is previewing an update designed to make its chatbot better at explaining some concepts. Starting today, Claude can generate charts and diagrams as part of its responses, either when asked directly or when it decides visuals might be helpful to the user. For example, try asking Claude what's the best way to fold a paper plane. Where previously it was limited to text, now it can show you step by step how to fold

Honda has announced it is canceling three electric vehicles it was months from starting production on at its EV Hub in Ohio . The Honda 0 SUV, the Honda 0 sedan and the Acura RSX are all being wound down. The company showed off all three models, and touted them as in near-production form at CES 2025 . Unlike the Honda Prologue and Acura ZDX , which run on GM's Ultium platform, the scrapped models were built on Honda's own Zero platform and would have been its first fully in-house EVs. Honda in p

Flash floods are notoriously difficult to predict , but Google might have a novel solution. The company just revealed Groundsource , a prediction tool for flash floods that uses Gemini to source data from old news reports. This is the first time it has used a language model for this type of work. Flash flood prediction models need historical data and model training that often doesn't exist. Our solution: Groundsource, a new AI-powered methodology that uses Gemini to transform 5M+ global reports

Microsoft has unveiled Copilot Health , an AI-powered tool it claims can help make sense of your medical records, health history and fitness data from wearables, should you grant it access to that information. The company said it will be in a separate, secure space in the Copilot app and that the idea is to help provide you with more context and insights so you can ask your doctor the right questions when you see them. Copilot Health is designed to help you better understand your medical informa

Uber has launched a new invite-only luxury ride experience called Uber Elite. Aimed at executives, frequent travelers, and riders looking for a more elevated experience, it sounds like an upgraded version of Uber Black for the, well, uber-rich. A ride booked through Uber Elite will be operated by a professional chauffeur driving a new-model luxury vehicle less than three years old. An Elite-only Meet and Greet feature allows riders to pre-arrange to be picked up in the airport terminal they arri

Ahead of its official release later this spring, today Rivan is announcing full pricing and trim levels for its long-awaited R2 electric SUV. The rollout for the company's first mid-size (two-row) offering will be similar to its previous vehicles, with more expensive premium models hitting the road first this spring, followed by more affordable configurations becoming available later this year and into 2027. This timeline is especially important for anyone hoping to snag the $45,000 base model o

Its not just the major social platforms that know how effective an endless scroll of short videos is at hijacking your dopamine system. Disney+ is adding Verts, a selection of short vertical clips you can scroll through to keep your brain chemistry happy when you are in the bathroom so inclined. The company says its a dynamic feed to help users quickly find their next favorite watch, letting you jump straight in to see the full movie or TV show the clip hails from. Not to mention the side benefi

The first season of a TV show is a tricky thing. It has to convince people to watch it and justify the shows existence to the network (or streaming service) execs. It has to deal with actors and writers who may not have fully dialed into the characters and world yet. There are some shows with absolutely stellar first seasons Stranger Things , Veronica Mars and Ted Lasso are a few but many other hit shows stumbled out of the gate, like The Office and Supernatural . Star Trek is not immune to th

Google has announced that GFiber is merging with Astound Broadband, in an agreement that sees Astounds parent company Stonepeak become the majority owner, with Alphabet retaining a minority stake. No financial specifics were detailed in a press release, but the new combined business will be an independent provider led by GFibers executive team, who Google says will use its expertise in high-speed fiber innovation to manage the combined network footprint. Astound already serves over one million c

JBL just released two new pairs of headphones in its pre-existing Live line . There's the over-ear Live 780NC and the on-ear Live 680NC. Both sets of headphones have similar specs, despite the difference in design. The biggest news here is likely the battery life. They max out at 80 hours per charge with regular use, which is a fantastic metric. This shrinks to 50 hours when using ANC, but that's still fairly remarkable. We truly live in a golden age of wireless headphone batteries . JBL's new h