HTC has announced the Vive Focus Vision, a new VR headset that builds on the Vive Focus 3 with features like color passthrough and better PC tethering support. The $999 Focus Vision is available for preorder from now until October 17th on HTC’s website.

The Focus Vision can be used either as a standalone device or tethered to your PC using USB-C. It’s essentially a beefed-up version of the Focus 3, which the company released in 2021 — it has the same 2448 x 2448 per-eye resolution and 120-degree field of view and also uses a Snapdragon XR2 chip. But it gains features like dual 16MP cameras with color passthrough, and it can now automatically adjust the lenses to compensate for the distance between your eyes.

HTC is going for gamers...

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Apple rolled out updates to all of its major operating systems this week, and the Vision Pro was no exception. With visionOS 2, the company has a chance to show the relative few who bought its spendy headset — and those who might yet — that it’s still committed to the new platform.

After a few months of using it in beta, visionOS 2 isn’t a dramatic change — it’s more like a smoothed-out version of the software the headset launched with. The addition of things like new gestures, better device support, and a couple of splashy features has removed a lot of the friction of using the Vision Pro and should give people who own it a reason to dust it off and take it for another spin.

Improving the basics

Let’s start with updates that really...

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On Tuesday, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) proposed a set of fines that total $633,009 over what it says were two instances of SpaceX launching missions with unapproved changes in violation of its license as well as skipping a required step for launch. In response, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk threatened to sue the agency on a claim of “regulatory overreach.”

The FAA says one set of fines totaling $350,000 is related to a June 18th, 2023, launch in which SpaceX used an “unapproved launch control room for the PSN SATRIA mission” and skipped a required “T-2 hour readiness poll.” The company had requested approval for the changes in May, the FAA says, but never got it.

Similarly, the company sought clearance for a new rocket propellant...

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Remember the last time you posted a salient take to social media and got zero engagement, or trolled? Now you can avoid that with a new “social network” full of inane AI chatbots that will — your pick! — debate you, attack you, or even just say nice things if you want.

It’s called SocialAI, and the very first thing it invites you to do is pick the followers you want, like “supporters,” “nerds,” “skeptics,” “visionaries,” and “ideators.” Afterward, endless chatbots along those themes fill the replies to your posts — not unlike the bots and boosters you’ll already find on Elon Musk’s social network, but now under your control.

Does that mean it’s any better? Well, take a look:

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Apple’s announcement last week that the Action Button is now on all of its iPhone 16 models, rather than just the Pro model that the button debuted on last year, was a little overshadowed by the introduction of the Camera Control button — a capacitive, tactile button for launching and controlling the iPhone 16’s camera. But don’t let that fool you: the Action Button is still one of the most powerful features Apple has added to its phones in years.

One very obvious use of the button is to connect it to the iPhone’s camera app, letting you press and hold to open the app, then press once more to take a picture. But does that mean the Camera Control button has made it obsolete? I don’t think so.

By default, the Action Button serves as a...

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Apple announced a new set of AirPods Max during its event last week, updating them with USB-C and in a new set of colors. The switch to USB-C is a welcome one, to be sure, but Apple changed nothing else about them. And that feels weird, right? What gives?

Apple’s high-end luxury headphones were impressive when they launched in 2020. They had all the features of the AirPods Pro and made clever use of the Apple Watch’s digital crown for volume control. They also sounded fantastic — still do, in fact! But the rest of the market didn’t sit still; alternatives from Sony, Bose, and more recently, Sonos, all offer comparable features and sound — most notably, they each compete with the AirPods Max when it comes to noise cancellation (Bose does...

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Chipotle has a new robot called the Autocado with a key assignment: peeling avocados. The prototype machine “cuts, cores, and peels avocados” by the case before workers mash them up for guacamole in a process Chipotle is describing as using cobots (collaborative robots).

The company says the robot being tested in a store at 20972 Magnolia St. in Huntington Beach, California, will help free employees up for other tasks. The “size agnostic” Autocado machine can get an avocado peeled and seeded within 26 seconds, according to Chipotle.

Chipotle says it has invested money from a $100 million venture fund into both of the companies it partnered with for the two new systems — Vebu...

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Google appears to be working on a way to finally synchronize notifications across devices in its ecosystem, according to Android Authority’s Mishaal Rahman, who discovered code references to a new “sync across devices” option in the Android 15 beta.

The snippet is apparently located under the Notifications section of Settings, nestled between “sensitive notifications” and a new “notification cooldown” option he spotted last week. There’s no Android notification syncing feature at the moment, as Rahman notes. So if you dismiss a notification on your Android tablet, the same notification will still greet you over on your phone later. This would, I’m sure, be a welcome change for most.

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Instagram might roll out a way to share comments on other Instagram posts to Threads, according to Alessandro Paluzzi, who often reverse engineers Meta’s social media apps to find coming features.

Paluzzi shared an image showing that when commenting on an Instagram post, there could be a new dropdown menu that lets users choose to share the comment only to Instagram or “also share on Threads.”

Meta has made a few moves to integrate Threads with its other platforms in the past, such as showing Threads posts on Instagram or Facebook (and, later, letting users opt out of that). The Twitter-like short-posting social network also lacks DMs of its own, but users can still receive or send messages through Instagram.

The bigger effort, of...

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Apple has hiked the price of its battery repair service for the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max. Now, it will cost $119 to get your battery replaced in either phone — a $20 jump over its older fee. The price remains the same for the standard and “Plus” models, as do those for last year’s phones, as MacRumors notes.

The company doesn’t seem to have started charging more for other battery replacements yet, but it wouldn’t be unexpected. In 2022, Apple drove the cost of iPhone 14 battery service up by $30 to $99. Increases for iPad, MacBook, and older iPhone battery repairs came after that, and Apple Watches followed suit later. (One longs for the salad days of battery drama-induced $29 battery replacements!)

Defective batteries are covered...

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Last week, The Flappy Bird Foundation announced a game called Flappy Bird. But while the group has been framing it as the triumphant return of a classic mobile game, Flappy Bird’s original developer, Dong Nguyen isn’t calling it a comeback — in fact, he says he’s not involved at all.

Nguyen posted as much on X (for the first time since 2017!) this morning, saying he didn’t “sell anything.” The Flappy Bird Foundation wrote in the announcement it shared with press last week that it had “acquired the rights from Gametech Holdings, LLC,” which had secured the trademark from Nguyen, but it doesn’t appear as though that was the result of any dealings between him and the group.

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Francis Ford Coppola wanted voice recognition software to let audience members ask Adam Driver’s Cesar character a question during theatrical showings of Megalopolis, according to a Telegraph interview with the director. Then, the software would trigger the theater’s projector to play a clip of “the most relevant response” from Driver.

Apparently, it was actually in the works. Amazon had agreed to make a “custom version of its Alexa voice-recognition software” to do this, but the team working on it was laid off during a huge round of layoffs in 2022, writes The Telegraph. Alas.

“Imagine!” Coppola beams. “You could see Megalopolis five times in its opening week and it would be different each time! It would have been the future of the...

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NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore spoke about their continued stay aboard the International Space Station during a press conference held yesterday. The two are now fully incorporated into the ISS crew, as the Boeing Starliner spacecraft that was meant to take them home last week was instead sent back to Earth uncrewed.

Early on, the two were asked if they felt “let down” by Boeing.

“Absolutely not,” said Wilmore:

“This operation is not easy. NASA does a great job — the people at Nasa do a great job — of making a lot of things look easy. Sending probes beyond the edge of our solar system; going in [and] getting samples from asteroids; humans in space. It’s a very risky business and things do not always turn out the way you...

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8BitDo announced it’s taking preorders for a new mod kit that lets you retrofit a wired GameCube controller with Hall effects joysticks and Bluetooth connectivity. The company is charging $25.98 for the kit, which it says is a simple, solderless mod.

8BitDo has made a few of these in the past for old Nintendo controllers, including those for the N64 and earlier consoles, and now it’s the GameCube’s turn. The kit replaces your controller’s existing PCB with a drop-in board that has Hall effects joysticks and a USB-C-rechargeable 300mAh battery attached. It also comes with a trigger pack, and 8BitDo says the battery will get 6 hours of playtime between charges. It’s compatible with the Switch and Android, according to the product page.

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Courtesy of iFixit, a new teardown video of the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold reveals what the repairability advocate organization’s Shahram Mokhtari says is “the most exciting foldable we’ve seen on the iFixit teardown table.”

iFixit offers very clear shots of the phone’s internals in the video and its accompanying blog post, along with some very detailed Lumafield CT scans of the foldable. Mokhtari notes in the video that Google is offering official repair guides and replacement parts for the phone.

iFixit found impressive modularity in the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, including easily removable wearable parts like the USB-C port and SIM card tray, and the site praised the use of 3IP screws throughout. The repair experts were also able to pull off...

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The iPhone 16 lineup has 8GB of RAM, from the base model to the 16 Pro Max, and it’s all thanks to Apple Intelligence. Apple VP of hardware tech Johny Srouji confirmed as much in an interview with Geekerwan, published yesterday, that 9to5Mac spotted.

Srouji explained in the interview that “DRAM is one aspect” when it comes to deciding hardware characteristics needed for Apple Intelligence, saying that the feature “led us to believe we need to get to 8GB.” He added that the extra RAM would also “help immensely” for tasks like high-end gaming on devices.

Apple hadn’t previously stated how much RAM the iPhone 16 line has, but MacRumors discovered references to the 8GB number in Xcode after the phones were announced. Apple, which isn’t...

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Disney and DirecTV are back in business with each other after a carriage dispute that has kept ESPN, ABC, and other Disney-owned networks off of the cable provider since the beginning of September. ESPN and other channels Disney had blocked have been restored, giving DirecTV subscribers access, once again, to Monday Night Football, college football games, and other programming from Disney’s channels.

As part of the deal, DirecTV will offer packages that include Disney Plus, Hulu, and ESPN Plus as bundles or a la carte options. It’ll also include “Disney’s upcoming ESPN flagship direct-to-consumer service” when it launches, for no extra cost. And DirecTV will be able to “offer multiple genre-specific options — sports, entertainment, kids...

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Apple revealed its iPhone 16 lineup on Monday, and the big selling point was Apple Intelligence. Apple’s on-device AI system offers splashy features like the ability to rewrite emails, generate custom emoji, and a significantly upgraded Siri. But underneath it all, AI is delivering one other big change to the iPhone: more RAM.

Although Apple never talks about RAM in its smartphones, MacRumors discovered that every iPhone 16 model now has 8GB of RAM, up from 6GB in the base models from last year. And it’s not just Apple making changes like that. Last month, Google made similar changes to its AI-heavy Pixel 9; both the standard and pro models saw an increase in RAM, making 12GB the least you can get this year.

The impetus behind these RAM...

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Google Search is now adding links to archived websites in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. That’s a bit of good news for anybody lamenting the disappearance of the cached pages link from Google’s results.

The Internet Archive hosts billions of archived webpages, as it notes in its blog post today about the change. The Wayback Machine is a very helpful tool for looking at older versions of websites to see what may have changed compared to past versions, which, in some cases, can go back decades.

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