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Tech News
A new guide explains several ways to check whether a CR2032 coin-cell battery still works, including dedicated coin-cell testers, basic multimeters, and a simple LED test where touching the LED's legs to the battery's terminals shows whether it can supply current. It also notes that AirTag and SmartTag2 users can check battery status directly through their companion apps before opening the device.
Apple has released the MacBook Neo, a low-cost laptop priced at $700 that uses a repurposed iPhone processor rather than an M-series chip found in other current Macs. The launch comes shortly before the MacBook Air's price rose by $200 to $1,300, reportedly due to tariffs and rising memory costs.
Apple's newly launched folding iPhone lineup has gone on sale, but early demand is outstripping available stock. Reviews of the devices have been mixed, yet buyers are reportedly struggling to secure units through normal retail channels.
OnePlus has started pushing the stable Android 17-based ColorOS update to the OnePlus 15 and Pad 4, ahead of the rollout timeline it had previously announced. The update marks OnePlus's continued shift away from its OxygenOS branding toward the unified ColorOS software used across parent company Oppo's devices.
A discussion thread on Hacker News raises the question of why leading AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic primarily sell model access as tokens rather than using their own frontier models to build and launch consumer or enterprise products directly. The poster argues that as token prices fall due to commodification, more profit potential may lie in building applications on top of models rather than selling raw model access.
A pre-production trailer for an in-development Mass Effect sequel, titled Mass Effect: Universe, leaked on Reddit from an account claiming to belong to an EA employee. Bloomberg's Jason Schreier confirmed the footage is genuine. The trailer shows a new N7-clad protagonist, a bar confrontation with an asari, and a reveal of returning character Liara T'Soni.
eBay plans to cut roughly 1,000 jobs, or 9% of its workforce, according to a memo from CEO Jamie Iannone. The company had 12,300 employees at the end of last year and already cut about 800 jobs, or 6% of staff, in February. Iannone said affected employees would be notified in the coming days.
A new opinion piece argues that Donald Trump's once-vaunted media savvy has eroded, citing his incoherent public appearances, the five-day tenure of press secretary Katie Zacharia after a botched briefing, and a low-profile Small Business Administration broadcast modeled on a reality-TV pitch competition. The SBA special featured business owners pitching to judges including Grant Cardone, Nicki Minaj, and Joe Gebbia in an apparent bid to mimic Trump's old Apprentice format.
Soon Hagerty, who fled Vietnam by boat at age five and arrived in the U.S. with $300 and nine family members, has built a career spanning a luxury PR firm, a global communications agency and a Michigan restaurant called The Good Bowl. She also founded Boundless Futures Foundation, a nonprofit that awards $50,000 grants to female entrepreneurs. Hagerty attributes her success to taking action despite fear rather than waiting for confidence.
David Goodhart's 2017 book The Road to Somewhere divided Western societies into mobile, university-educated 'Anywheres' and rooted, less-educated 'Somewheres', arguing the latter's resentment drove Brexit and Trump's first election. The framework was widely adopted by academics, consultants and politicians. Commentary is now revisiting whether the balance of advantage between these two groups still holds.
On SpaceX's earnings call, CEO Elon Musk said merging SpaceX and Tesla would be a 'good idea' and noted that special committees have been formed at both companies' boards to explore the possibility. Musk is set to discuss Tesla's quarterly results Wednesday, with analysts expecting 43 cents earnings per share on $27.9 billion in revenue, roughly flat versus last year.
Recursive, a new AI company led by CEO Richard Socher, has released an open-weight coding model called Flint. Socher says the model was developed using an internal system called the Eureka Machine, which automated much of the training pipeline, including new training methods, architectures, and chip-specific code optimizations, allowing a small team to build the model in a few months. Recursive has published benchmark scores claiming Flint outperforms similarly sized models on coding tasks.