Luminar, the lidar manufacturer that rode a wave of self-driving car hype to land deals with major automakers like Volvo and Mercedes-Benz, filed for bankruptcy Monday. The company has been mired in a legal fight with its founder and former CEO, Austin Russell, who was ousted earlier this year following an ethics inquiry. As part…
General Motors is adding native Apple Music to the infotainment systems of select 2025 model year Cadillac and Chevrolet vehicles, the company announced today. The news comes as the automaker is racing to add more native app experiences to some of its vehicles to make up for the absence of popular phone mirroring services like…
Abynth 6’s very pretty, but questionably useful preset explorer. Absynth is something of a cult classic in the soft synth world. It was originally released in 2000, and quickly found an audience among the growing cadre of people making music on computers. But its last major update, Absynth 5, was released in 2009, and Native…
By 2010, the iPhone era was in full swing. Smartphones were still a new and unfinished idea – the iPhone had only just gotten copy and paste! – but it was clear that these big slabs of glass were going to change the way we did pretty much everything. Apple was also already on an…
Here’s a thought: what if the next-generation Siri is awesome? Not just awesome for setting timers and dictating text messages (though that would be nice), but so awesome and fun to talk to that people actually start falling in love with their iPhones. We may not be prepared for what happens next. On this episode…
An Xbox Ally in front of an Xbox Ally X. I still wouldn’t buy an Xbox Ally, and I still don’t think the tweaked version of Windows that shipped with it is ready for primetime. The Xbox Full Screen Experience (FSE) needs work. But two months after I panned the cheaper $600 white Xbox Ally…
Real ones will know that Mount Rainier looks too big in this image, but the re-creation of a Washington State ferry in this AI image is uncanny. This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on smartphones and digital imagery – real or otherwise –…
It’s a small sample size, likely driven by Black Friday discounts and temporary virality, but the Nex Playground has gone from little-known console curiosity to best-seller. It’s now on track to quadruple its sales from last year. According to research firm Circana, the Playground was the second best-selling console in the US for the week…
Music making is always better with hardware. Native Instruments and Ableton have had incredible success with their custom MIDI controllers that integrate with their DAWs (digital audio workstations), Maschine and Live, respectively. Native Instruments’ Maschine (yes, it’s the name of the hardware and the software) and Ableton’s Push are pretty much the gold standard for…
The Posha robot chef can autonomously cook a meal from scratch. As I’m sitting in my office writing this review, delicious, cheesy, garlicky scents are wafting up the stairs. I can hear whizzing and whirring, and the occasional clunk, as a robot chef in my kitchen is making macaroni and cheese. Its app tells me…
