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Lucasfilm has tapped Jon Watts, known for directing the 'Spider-Man: Home' trilogy, to helm the opening installment of a new Star Wars trilogy. Further plot and casting details have not been disclosed.
Google confirmed to Engadget it has stopped manufacturing the Nest Mini and Nest Audio speakers, following the launch of a new smart speaker earlier this year, but will keep providing software updates and support. Factory resets on these devices require physical button presses rather than voice commands or the Google Home app, with slightly different steps for the 1st-gen Home Mini, 2nd-gen Nest Mini, and Nest Hub displays.
Apple's iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max introduce a variable-aperture 48-megapixel main camera that can switch between f/1.48, f/1.8, f/2.8 and f/4.0, unlike the fixed f/1.78 lens on last year's iPhone 17 Pro. The new models also add manual controls for shutter speed and white balance, an on-screen histogram, rear-camera Cinematic mode video up to 4K/60fps, and a feature called Apple Reference Image that stores sensor-signed RAW data alongside processed photos. Ultra Wide and Telephoto camera specs remain unchanged from the prior generation.
A home audio guide explains that front left, right and center speakers should sit at seated ear height rather than being mounted high above listeners. It notes that forward-firing, high-frequency speakers lose clarity in dialogue, cymbals and positional effects when aimed over people's heads, while subwoofers and upward-firing speakers designed to bounce sound off ceilings are exempt from this rule.
Smartphone makers including Apple and Google caution that IP67/IP68 water-resistance ratings do not mean phones are waterproof, and that steam from hot showers or saunas can condense into liquid that seeps in through charging ports, speakers, buttons and seals. Apple's support documentation specifically advises against bringing iPhones into saunas or steam rooms, noting that liquid damage isn't covered under warranty; Google offers similar guidance and suggests using a Bluetooth speaker instead.
The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association released an analysis attributing $942 million in additional healthcare spending over two years to hospitals' use of AI tools when submitting insurance claims. The group found a sharp rise in patients coded as having complex conditions without corresponding changes in the actual care delivered. The New York Times cited the findings as part of a broader trend of AI driving up healthcare costs on both the hospital and insurer sides.
Microsoft is introducing a feature allowing single cells in Excel to hold lists and arrays of data, rather than just individual values. The change marks a structural update to the spreadsheet program, which has not previously supported this kind of nested data within one cell.
Marvel is releasing a new comic that brings together characters from two separate animated X-Men series, X-Men: The Animated Series (1992) and X-Men: Evolution, within a shared multiverse story. The crossover pits versions of the X-Men from both cartoons against each other in a single narrative.
TikTok has settled a lawsuit brought by Alabama alleging it misled users about safety risks and designed its platform to addict children, agreeing to pay the state at least $100 million and up to $300 million depending on unspecified conditions. The company also agreed to add a two-hour daily time limit for minors, expanded parental controls, and restrictions on overnight use and cosmetic filters. The case had been set for trial this week.
Author Caroline M. Yoachim has released a satirical interactive short story structured as a branching 'choose your own path' narrative, set aboard a space station medical clinic between Saturn and Uranus. The piece follows a reader-protagonist who suffers an insect bite and must navigate absurd bureaucratic and medical scenarios with multiple lettered outcomes. The story is also included in the anthology 'The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017,' edited by John Joseph Adams and guest editor Charles Yu.
Developer Hayder Tirmazi published a set of performance optimizations for llama.cpp's prompt lookup decoding (n-gram speculative drafting), claiming up to 42x faster drafting and up to 2.6x lower memory use. The work draws on techniques from Daniel Lemire and Martin Ankerl, and Lemire subsequently contributed a further patch that Tirmazi says boosts drafting speed by an additional 4.2x, for a combined speedup of up to 140x.
WiCi has unveiled the WiCi One, an external graphics card enclosure that connects to laptops wirelessly over Wi-Fi 7 instead of using Thunderbolt or OCuLink cables. The base model includes an Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti 16GB GPU, an Intel Core 3 100U CPU, and 1TB of storage, with a more powerful RTX 5090-based version planned. Preorders for the base model start at $1,999, rising to $2,599 at full release, with shipping expected in the fourth quarter of this year.