Technology news

The growth of the Nintendo Switch has been nothing short of meteoric, easily surpassing those of the disappointing Wii U within months. Now, according to a new report from Nintendo, the Switch’s lifetime sales just surpassed those of the GameCube. The Switch’s lifetime sales, as of this writing, have reached over 22 million units, which surpasses not only the Wii U’s 13.6 million units, but the GameCube’s 21.7 million units. For reference, the next most successful N

A group of Chinese spies worked for years to hack aerospace companies and steal aircraft technology secrets, the Justice Department said today, as it announced the indictment of 10 people accused of stealing companies’ confidential information.10 people indicted
According to the department, Chinese intelligence officers and their operatives worked to steal the technology behind a turbofan engine used in commercial airliners. The scheme allegedly went on from at least early 2010 until May

The world’s biggest search engine is getting into the Halloween spirit today with a special playable Google Doodle. While Google has busted out game Doodles in the past (including for Halloween 2016), this is the first time the information giant has made a multiplayer game that players can jump into with other people online. Think of it as the opposite of Slither.io.
The rules of Trick-or-Treat: The Great Ghoul Duel are simple. You play a cute apparition picking up “spirits” a

Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent Alphabet, has been granted permission to operate fully driverless cars without human drivers behind the steering wheel on public roads in California. The company is the first to receive a driverless permit in the state.Waymo will restrict its driverless test cars to the neighborhoods of Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, and Palo Alto. “We know this area well,” the company said in a statement, noting it includes its ow

The era of Facebook’s nonstop growth has long since come to an end. Although the company is far from the point at which it might start to shrink, its growth in the US and Canada, as well as Europe, has stopped entirely and appears to occasionally decline.In its 2018 third quarter earnings report out today, the social network confirmed that the number of daily active users in US and Canada has remained flat at 185 million, while the number of European users has slipped from 279 million to

Apple’s newest iPad Pro, announced today in New York, is one of the most expensive tablets the company has ever made. The cheapest option starts at $799 for the 64GB 11-inch iPad Pro, and it can run all the way up to a whopping $1,899 for the 12.9-inch iPad Pro with LTE. That makes the new iPads also the most expensive to repair, if you’re out of warranty and don’t have AppleCare+, Apple’s extended warranty program.
Apple’s support page for iPad repairs lists the f

An iOS update usually means more emoji, and iOS 12.1 is no different. As noted by Emojipedia, if you account for all the skin and gender variations, there are 158 new tiny icons coming to an iPhone near you, including lettuce, a badger, and a disembodied leg. That’s cool — except for emoji No. 5 on that list, “Face With Uneven Eyes and Wavy Mouth aka ‘Woozy Face.’”
Woozy Face is just a polite way of saying “my dude has some wicked drunk face,” whi

Apple just updated its Shortcuts app, adding a weather integration, new measurement conversions, and better iCloud sharing, among other features. Now, Shortcuts lets you check upcoming weather forecasts with the “Get Current Weather” and “Get Weather Forecast” actions that are available for you to add to any custom shortcut.
You can also create an alarm, toggle an alarm, and start a timer. Previously, the app had some shortcuts that you could try to use as timers (like t

Warning: If you thought shopping for women in general was hard, just know that it gets harder. Try shopping for a teenage girl.
Juuls, Tide Pods, Converse (but only the white ones), and saying LOL (ironically) — yup, we’re talking about the ever-changing hell that is teenage girl trends. It can be tricky to choose a gift that she’ll like and use for longer than a month, but does that mean you throw in the towel and plop a gift card in an envelope? That’s basically code fo

Teenage girl trends can be an ever-changing hellscape. From VSCO, to Nike Air Force 1s (but only the white ones), to saying things like "sksksk" and "And I oop" as a reaction to literally everything, it's a confusing world. 
Funneling those trends into a gift that she’ll like and use for longer than a month seems nearly impossible, but plopping $50 in an envelope is basically code for "I don't get you at all."
SEE ALSO: Gifts for her 2019: Best gifts for the lady in your life
But you

Late this past summer, Meetupfounder and CEO Scott Heiferman announced his intention to move into the chairman position. Today, Meetup has announced that David Siegel will be taking the helm at the 16-year-old company.
Siegel hails from Investopedia, where he served as CEO for three years, tripling the company’s revenue and doubling its traffic in that period. Before his time at Investopedia, Siegel was president of Seeking Alpha, overseeing U.S.-based functions including sales, marketing,

On the heels of a funding round to the tune of $18.8 million, Even Financial has acquired Birch Finance for an undisclosed sum.
Even offers products like a pre-approval API, real-time pricing, machine learning optimization, a product comparison and recommendation engine for consumers and more. Birch Finance, a TC Startup Battlefield alum that raised $1 million earlier this year, aims to help people make the most of the credit cards in their wallets by telling them which cards will earn

There’s a lot of people in the machine learning community who’ll tell you that deep learning (DL) is a dead end. Gadi Singer isn’t one of those people. He believes DL is just getting started, in fact he says we’re about to enter the next phase of AI, and deep learning at the edge is a huge part of that. He probably knows what he’s talking about. After all most of the world’s AI compute cycles are run on his company’s architecture. Singer is Intel’

Apple announced new 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pros in New York today, which now come with Face ID, a USB-C charging port, and a new “Liquid Retina” display. Aesthetically, they’ve got slimmer bezels that only come in black, like the new MacBook Airs. The black bezels, when paired with the Smart Keyboard Folio, make the iPad Pro look closer to a laptop than it ever has before. They also allow for the 11-inch model display to fit a bigger screen into the same overall dimensions

This afternoon, NASA officially bid farewell to the Kepler Space Telescope, a pioneering spacecraft that helped discover thousands of planets beyond our Solar System. After years of service that extended long beyond its initial mission, the spacecraft finally ran out of fuel.
Kepler was a marvel of engineering. It detected planets by looking for their transits, which are the small dips in the light of a star as a planet passed between that star and Earth.“Like trying to detect a flea craw

Apple’s new MacBook Air may have left some 12-inch MacBook owners feeling a bit envious. But if you are picking up Apple’s lightest and smallest laptop (which, incidentally, hasn’t had its specs updated since June 2017), at least Apple has refreshed the colors on it to match its newer and cooler sibling, via 9to5Mac.As you can see in the image below, the older, lighter gold color has been updated to the same darker hue that Apple introduced with the new MacBook Air today. But

Apple events are traditionally a chance for tech connoisseurs to spend a couple of hours learning about the company’s next line of hardware products or software updates, but it also gives Apple executives a chance to hang out with super cool musicians.At the end of Apple’s presentation today, melancholic pop princess Lana Del Rey gave a charming performance with Jack Antonoff of two songs from her upcoming album Norman Fucking Rockwell. Del Rey wasn’t allowed to say the name o

Yesterday, a guest on Fox News claimed that migrants traveling toward the US will “infect our people” with smallpox, leprosy, and tuberculosis. He did not cite evidence to support this claim, because there is none — and available evidence suggests that when it comes to public health, we have more to worry about from anti-vaxxers than from immigration.This isn’t to say that there is never any risk of infectious disease from migration. The Centers for Disease Control and P

Apple announced a new MacBook Air today during a hardware event in New York. The new MacBook Air finally gets a Retina display as well as modern processors, 50 percent thinner bezels, and an updated keyboard. It’s the first major refresh of the MacBook Air in years, and it finally turns it into a modern, competitive machine. But how does it stack up against Apple’s existing MacBook and MacBook Pro?
Now that the MacBook Air has been revamped, it’s no longer at the $1,000 price

Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina justifies its existence in its second episode, which begins with a contentious conversation about religious rituals and cultural norms — a surprisingly sophisticated argument for a TV show about a teenage witch. As heroine Sabrina Spellman (Kiernan Shipka) approaches her 16th birthday, her aunts Hilda and Zelda and their priest, Father Faustus, try to quell some of her concerns about her upcoming baptism, reassuring her that the pledge of ete

One of Apple’s latest custom chips, the security-focused T2, has made its way to the newly updated MacBook Air, as well as the updated Mac mini. In a new security document published today, and reported on first by TechCrunch, Apple is giving us a glimpse at some of the chip’s capabilities, specifically its ability to prevent hackers from eavesdropping through your laptop microphone.
The T2 chip was first introduced in late 2017 with the iMac Pro, and it provides Apple with a secure

D’Angelo, the king of neo soul, the artisan of R&Baby making music, has a new song — and it’s tucked away in the Red Dead Redemption 2 soundtrack. You may have heard some buzz about RDR2 — like, how it’s had the biggest opening weekend in entertainment history after grossing $725 million in its first three days. You’ve probably seen the memes popping up for months from fans and celebs alike: The hype is deserved — it’s been in develo

Faraday Future is nearly out of money following a fight with its main investor, a founder has resigned, and the company is taking even more drastic measures to keep the company from collapsing until new investment comes in, The Verge has learned. Last week’s layoffs and salary cuts have not trimmed enough of the some $10 million monthly payroll, so management has decided to shut down some operations this week at the company’s headquarters in Gardena, California, and at its factory i

Today, Google announced that all of the email accounts you manage in the Gmail app on iOS can be viewed in a single, universal inbox.
In the past, you could access multiple accounts managed by Gmail, but it required tapping the icon in the top-left corner to toggle between them. The iOS app now behaves like the Gmail Android app, and an option will appear when the left-hand side drawer is opened that says “All inboxes.” Select this, and all your emails will appear in one inbox. Goog

If you’re looking to trade in your MacBook, iMac, Mac desktop, or an iPad, for one of the new iPad Pro or Mac devices Apple announced today, you stand to get a pretty good return. Apple’s tech has a reputation on the secondhand market for retaining value long after release. This speaks to build quality, but mostly to Apple’s long-lasting software support for its older products. This trend is positive for both buyers, who will end up with a product that will likely continue to

In March, streamer Ninja, pop superstar Drake, and breakout hit Fortnite coalesced into a perfect, record-breaking storm for the streaming platform Twitch. Ninja was already the most notable player of the popular game, but the combination propelled his name into general media consciousness and further solidified him as the most famous figure on Twitch.Ninja’s breakout success is a big win for the site, and he’s a human face it can tie to the often difficult-to-navigate platform to p

Off the heels of Google’s event announcing the Pixel 3, Pixel Slate, and Home Hub, Nilay sat down with Ivy Ross (Google’s VP of hardware design) and Rishi Chandra (Google’s VP of Home and Nest) for this week’s Vergecast interview. The three discussed the evolving and increasingly human design language of Google products, the future of devices like the Home Hub in a world that demands privacy, and — yes — the infamous Pixel 3 notch.Below is a brief, edited tra

Apple announced third-generation iPad Pros at its October event in Brooklyn today, along with an updated Apple Pencil that now charges wirelessly via magnetic attachment. The update was necessary, as the new iPad Pro switched from charging via Lightning port to USB-C, and the old Apple Pencil only charged via a Lightning port in its (easily losable) cap. The bad news is that the new Pencil is only compatible with the latest iPad Pros, and alternatively, the first generation Apple Pencils aren&r

Sony has officially licensed its PlayStation VR headset design to Lenovo, which is currently selling a headset that looks a whole lot like the PlayStation VR. The two-year patent licensing agreement, which was announced today, lets Lenovo use Sony’s design for its Mirage Solo headset. The exact terms of the agreement have not been revealed.
Lenovo vice president Yao Li says the two companies are now “[working] together to greatly enhance the design sophistication and appeal of the r

Update October 30th, 2:08PM ET: A prior version of this article stated that watchOS 5.1 enabled the electrocardiogram app on Apple Watch Series 4 devices. That was incorrect; Apple has said the functionality is coming this year, but it is not part of today’s update. We regret the error.
Apple released watchOS 5.1 today and with it comes support for new emoji, updated watchfaces, and group FaceTime audio. One new watchface includes a “color” face that’ll give users a choi