Nanoleaf opened up preorders for its newly Matter-enabled Essentials lineup of smart bulbs and light strips Wednesday.
Thanks to the Matter smart-home standard, they work with HomeKit and other smart-home platforms. But there is one catch regarding their use with HomeKit.
COVID-19 lockdowns in China didn’t just mess up iPhone production, they inspired the invention of a bizarre new machine with fake lips you can use with your smartphone to “kiss” someone far away.
Chinese startup Siweifushe launched the MUA — named after kissing sounds — a couple of weeks ago, selling more than 3,000 of them and receiving orders for 20,000 more, a new report said.
Bluetti noticed a gap in the portable power market. There are many solar power stations, but small ones offer questionable capacity. And the high-capacity power banks tend to be big and heavy.
Apple’s 2021 16-inch MacBook Pro might not be the latest MacBook around. But it is still more than powerful for almost any task you can throw at it.
If you don’t mind going for the 2021 model, you can save a whopping $500. The deal brings the price of the entry-level 16-inch MacBook Pro down to just $1,999 from $2,499.
Aqara unveiled its new Video Doorbell G4 in January. It’s the first battery-powered, easy-install doorbell to integrate HomeKit Secure Video. And now it’s available to buy.
This is good news for HomeKit users who don’t like to mess with wiring but would love to have a artificially intelligent video doorbell that triggers automations.
Apple reportedly hopes to make a big splash at your local movie theater in the very near future. The company supposedly will spend $1 billion to make films for the big screen.
These also will appear on the Apple TV+ streaming service, of course.
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Planet of the Apps is a series of interviews with app developers about making, marketing and maintaining apps in the App Store.
Swiss developer Morten Just has built a whole slew of useful Mac apps under the name Otato. But his latest app wasn’t made by him at all: He asked ChatGPT to build it for him.
While Just earned his stripes as a professional programmer, he didn’t write a single line of code to create 5 Movies. It’s an iPhone app that gives you five daily movie recommendations, shows you the trailers on YouTube and tells you where you can stream the films. (It’s currently pending App Store approval.)
These days, artificial intelligence is making headlines for giving users powerful tools that can write essays, recreate impressive art and give technology journalists the heebie-jeebies. 5 Movies is proof that, with a big assist from AI, it only takes a few prompts and a basic understanding of Xcode to create an iPhone app without any coding yourself.
When I interviewed Morten earlier this week for Cult of Mac, I asked him how he got ChatGPT to build his app, what the generated code looked like, and how AI-coded apps will impact ordinary people as well as software developers.
The Nothing company followed up its Ear (1) noise-canceling earbuds with the new Ear (2) version Wednesday, offering hip, hi-tech earbuds comparable to Apple’s AirPods Pro — but at a lower price of $149.
The new Nothing earbuds feature active noise cancellation, Hi-Res Audio certification, partially transparent casings for a cool look, and more personalization options than the originals.
The Amazon Luna cloud-gaming service will soon include the Batman: Arkham Knight, Lego DC Super-Villains and three other premium games. They will be added in April.
And this applies to more than the United States, because Amazon also announced on Wednesday that residents of Canada, the UK and Germany now have access to Luna, which means they can play console-quality games on Mac, iPad and iPhone. There are even free games for Prime members.
People go nuts for solid wood on everything from guitars to flooring. But how about an all-solid-wood mechanical keyboard?
Japanese outfit Hacoa has one decked out in wood from the keycaps down through the housing, in either walnut or cherry. It’s called the Hacoa Full Ki-Board Wireless.
And it can be yours for the stout price of 99,000Yen ($745) plus shipping costs. That’s more than a base Mac mini.
When you start to worry the air in your home could make you sick, an air purifier can help. And they’re getting smarter (but hopefully not “rise of the machines” smart a la Terminator).
The nara Pro, which the company bills as “the versatile air purifier robot,” runs a two-stage system via artificial intelligence that works with Siri and HomeKit, as well as other smart-home systems.
And you can get a good deal on it on the Indiegogo crowdfunding platform.
Apple’s 32-inch Pro Display XDR with nano-texture glass is down to its lowest price on Amazon. While the monitor retails for a whopping $5,999, you can get it for $5,499 on Amazon right now.
This is a massive $500 discount off its retail price. Like with all other Amazon deals, the one too is unlikely to last long.
Friday Night Baseball heads back to the Apple TV+ ballpark on April 7. This is the second season for the series that features weekly doubleheaders of marquee MLB games.
When the sports show launched in 2022, it was free. But that was last year — the 2023 season is only for subscribers to Apple’s streaming service.
This just in from the Things That Look Like Other Things Department: a Mac Studio desktop computer sitting on top of a Mac mini “looks like a small robot from Wall-E or one of the [other] Pixar films.”
Today’s featured setup sports the unintentional character in the form of an old Mac mini acting as a server and a stand for the much-newer Mac Studio. It’s pretty cute. You can imagine it rolling around, beeping and maybe firing off a laser blast.
NewQ debuted its 16-in-1 USB-C Docking Station Wednesday with triple-4K-monitor support for Windows and macOS. It expands opportunity for M1 and M2 Macs with limited native external display support (one for MacBooks, two for Mac mini).
Plus, the 16-in-1 dock offers a port for practically any need and powers your laptop.
The Voice Isolation feature iPhone users have become accustomed to in video chats will soon expand to regular phone calls. It will make participants in these voice calls easier to understand.
This will be one of the major new features in iOS 16.4, which is expected in late March.
Apple’s RC build of iOS 16.4 references an unreleased AirPods with the model number A3048. There’s also mention of a new AirPods charging case carrying the model number A2968.
In addition, Apple seems to be working on a new pair of Beats Studio Buds, dubbed the Buds+.
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Ted Lasso, the Apple TV+ show about an American soccer coach killin’ em with kindness in London, finds a new player in the mix and new hurdles at work this week. AFC Richmond is being watched by an old adversary, Roy’s got big feelings for the first time in a while, and everybody’s buzzing about what happens next.
The episode, entitled “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea,” is an above-average outing for the mawkish football comedy. (It’s anyone’s guess if the upward trend will continue.)
Apple’s experiment with the iPhone 14 Plus is paying off… somewhat. The first 6.7-inch non-Pro model is selling much better than the 5.4-inch iPhone 13 mini it replaced, according to a market analysis firm.
That said, the Plus reportedly has the weakest demand of any of the handsets Apple released in fall 2022.
Writing a script and performing it are very different things. Luckily, even if you’re a production team of one, your voice doesn’t need to be the one that shows up on the final track. Micmonster AI voiceovers can turn text into lifelike speech, and you can now get a lifetime subscription for only $49.97 — the best price on the web.
Apple seeded the release candidates for iOS 16.4 and macOS Ventura 13.3 to developers on Tuesday, signaling that beta testing for these upcoming operating systems is almost over. The same is true for the release candidates for iPadOS 16.4, watchOS 9.4 and tvOS 16.4.
These will usher in new emoji, a better way for devs to work with betas, and other changes.
Anker rolled out its latest 15W MagSafe charging stand Tuesday, introducing the 3-in-1 Anker 737 MagGo Charger. It adopts a triangular shape, juicing up iPhones at a full 15W and AirPods and Apple Watch at 5W apiece.
This follows the company’s first 3-in-1 MagSafe fast-charging stand, the Anker Cube, released in October 2022.
Premium smartphones are on a roll. Revenue from iPhone and other devices that cost more than $600 grew to the point that they contributed more than half of all revenue from the product category in 2022, according to a market research firm.
That’s to Apple’s advantage, as iPhone sales make up 75% of this category.