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Apple still sells wired EarPods alongside its AirPods lineup, offering a no-frills alternative for users who want simple audio without Bluetooth or battery concerns. The wired buds come in 3.5mm, Lightning, and USB-C variants, making them compatible with a broad range of devices at a low price point.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports Apple is building two game controllers for the iPhone, likely to be sold under its Beats subsidiary rather than the Apple brand itself. The report follows earlier findings by MacRumors of references to two first-party controller devices buried in macOS 26.7 code, even though the products are apparently intended for iOS.
Sebastian Stan has confirmed he is joining the cast of 'The Batman Part II', director Matt Reeves' follow-up to his 2022 Batman film. Stan described landing the role as a mix of good timing and personal excitement to step into a new corner of the superhero genre after years associated with Marvel.
Wokyis has released the G5 and G7, retro-styled docking stations designed for the Mac mini and Mac Studio respectively, styled after the original 1984 Macintosh. The docks pack a 7-inch flip-up display, nine remappable physical controls, an NVMe SSD enclosure supporting up to 8TB, and a mix of high-speed ports including Thunderbolt 5 on the 80Gbps configuration. Both 10Gbps and 80Gbps versions are available, with card readers, USB-A/C ports, HDMI, DisplayPort and a headphone jack rounding out the connectivity.
USB-C hubs can substitute for docking stations by adding extra ports to a laptop, but they draw power and bandwidth directly from the host computer rather than a dedicated outlet or bus. This makes them less reliable for power-hungry or high-bandwidth devices like external SSDs, HD webcams, external GPUs, and multiple monitors.
Newegg is selling AMD's Ryzen 7 9850X3D, currently the top gaming CPU on the market, for $484, roughly $15 under its original launch price. The deal throws in a 240mm Cooler Master AIO liquid cooler worth $79.99 and a copy of Onimusha: Way of the Sword worth $69.99 at no extra cost. The chip, an upgraded version of the 9800X3D announced at CES 2026, keeps the same 8-core/16-thread design and 3D V-Cache but adds a higher boost clock for a modest gaming performance gain.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has confirmed earlier code discoveries suggesting Apple is building its own gamepad accessories for iPhone, identified internally by model numbers T6502 and T1057. The devices reportedly include a D-pad, thumbsticks, haptic motors, and possibly motion-sensing hardware, though their final design remains unknown. Gurman suggests the controllers may ultimately launch under the Beats label, with Beats executives leading the project.
Developers behind the ZLUDA project have released a reproducible stack combining ZLUDA v6-preview.69 with AMD's HIP SDK 6.4, allowing CUDA-targeted Windows applications, including LibTorch-based machine learning workloads, to run on AMD hardware. The setup has been validated specifically on the Radeon RX 9060 XT (gfx1200), where core CUDA libraries like cuBLAS and cuFFT passed checks and a PPO reinforcement learning network completed training over 65,536 timesteps.
OpenArm is a newly released open-source 7-degree-of-freedom humanoid arm built for physical AI research, offering high backdrivability and compliance for safe interaction with humans. A complete bimanual system costs $6,500, and the project includes a standardized 'OpenArm Cell' testing environment for reproducible research. The team is inviting contributors, researchers, and manufacturers to join development.
Senators Bernie Sanders and Greg Cezar unveiled the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which would criminalize efforts to build artificial superintelligence, with violators facing up to 20 years in prison—comparable to penalties for illegal nuclear weapons development. The bill also calls for a new cabinet-level federal agency to enforce the ban domestically and push for international agreements restricting superintelligence development worldwide.
A new essay outlines a startup evaluation heuristic focused on power rather than incremental revenue growth: asking how a company can own the customer relationship, control money flow, become a platform others build on, or create network effects. The piece argues these structural shifts can multiply a company's value far more than simple revenue optimization.
A retrospective piece traces how early IBM and other PC-era keyboards, including the Selectric typewriter and IBM 1130 computer, used pictorial symbols for functions like space, backspace, and page navigation. Over time, as computing shifted toward American office use, most of these icons were phased out in favor of plain text labels, leaving only Shift, Enter, and Tab as widely recognized symbolic holdouts on modern PC keyboards.