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Speaking plainly, Intel's recently-launched Core Ultra 200 desktop CPUs, code-named "Arrow Lake", weren't quite what we expected out of this new generation of chips from Intel. While productivity and content creation performance was potent in some cases, gaming performance saw a significant regression. As it happens, Intel was as disappointed by some of these results just as the community was, and is apparently hot on the trail of root cause identification with a host of fixes are inbound as well.

Speaking to us on our recent livestream, Intel's Robert Hallock was candid in saying that the Arrow Lake launch was indeed disastrous, but that it was in large part due to launch day performance being below Intel's own expectations and the result of test systems not being properly optimized. Hallock was quick to take the blame for the launch day missteps on Intel's behalf, saying that "our wounds with Arrow Lake not hitting the performance we projected were self-inflicted.

The iPod line has vanished into history, but the influence of this once-ubiquitous device is still shaping Apple, music, and the world, 23 years on from its announcement on October 23, 2001. You had one. Everybody had an iPod, some people had several, and at the time it seemed as if Apple had somehow thrown a light switch. One moment, almost nobody had any portable music players, and the next they were all wearing those white earbuds.

That isn't true, of course, because the iPod did take a long time to climb up as high as it got. Yet its ultimate dominance was so total that it used to be hard to imagine a time when there wasn't an iPod.

It was hard, too, to remember that there were alternatives, but there were many. Apple's iPod was far from the first music player, and Microsoft's failed, brown Zune may not even have been its absolute worst rival.

Memecoins surged Wednesday as former President Donald Trump clinched a second term in office.

Dogecoin surged more than 15% and Shiba Inu gained 6%, according to Coin Metrics. The moves came as bitcoin rose to a fresh record above $76,000.

But if you sit closer, Sony’s new game console can make select games look amazing. Blades of grass, pillars of rough hewn stone, the weave of a backpack — they pop at higher fidelity. It’s enough of an improvement that I found myself wanting to sit closer, or stand, or even plug the PS5 Pro into a 4K computer monitor to use it like a gaming PC.

With some games, playing the original PS5 could feel like looking through a dirty window. The PS5 Pro has the power to wipe that window clean.

What’s clear to me with this 9800X3D is that AMD has now established an even more impressive gap over Intel in gaming performance, while shrinking the performance differences in productivity and creator workloads. I think this smaller gap on the non-gaming side will now tempt more creators who also play games over to AMD.

Intel sacrificed gaming performance in favor of efficiency with its Core Ultra 9 285K, but many PC gamers simply don’t care about power efficiency unless it results in significantly cooler temperatures and, therefore, better performance and less throttling. Intel’s sacrifices make the 9800X3D an obvious purchase if you want the best PC gaming performance, and the Core Ultra 9 285K is an obvious choice if you want the best in productivity and creator performance and play games very little or not at all.

OpenAI bought Chat.com, adding to its collection of high-profile domain names.

As of this morning, Chat.com now redirects to OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the acquisition via email.

Chat.com is one of the older domains on the web, having been registered in September 1996. Last year, it was reported that HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah acquired Chat.com for $15.5 million, making it one of the top two all-time publicly reported domain sales.

In short: Social media users under the age of 16 are set to be barred from using social media, under legislation expected to be introduced to parliament this month.

The proposed legislation won't include exemptions for young people who already have social media accounts or those with parental consent.

What's next? A national cabinet meeting including the state and territory leaders will be held on Friday to discuss the changes.

On Tuesday, two AI startups tried convincing the world their AI chatbots were good enough to be an accurate, real-time source of information during a high-stakes presidential election: xAI and Perplexity.

Elon Musk’s Grok failed almost instantly, offering wrong answers about races’ outcomes before the polls had even closed.

On the other hand, Perplexity offered helpful, real-time election insights and maps throughout the night, linking to reliable resources and offering historical context where appropriate.

Perplexity took a risky bet, and it paid off.

Roblox is going to block kids from accessing certain types of experiences following reports alleging that the platform has enabled child abuse.

One new measure will stop kids under 13 from accessing experiences with “certain types of interactive features,” Roblox says in a post on its developer forum. Those include “social hangouts,” where the primary purpose is to communicate with others over text or voice chat, and “free-form 2D user creation” experiences, where players can do things like draw on a chalkboard or whiteboard. This change goes into effect beginning November 18th.

elieving that his political positions are fluid and his actions are often transactional, they are forging direct relationships they hope will benefit their businesses.

In his first term, Mr. Trump criticized tech companies for manipulating coverage of him on their platforms and opposing his agenda. He was punitive with those he considered antagonists. In one instance, Amazon accused Mr. Trump of pressuring the Pentagon to cancel a cloud computing contract with the company because its founder, Jeff Bezos, owned The Washington Post.

Anthropic on Thursday said it is teaming up with data analytics firm Palantir and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to Anthropic’s Claude family of AI models.

The news comes as a growing number of AI vendors look to ink deals with U.S. defense customers for strategic and fiscal reasons. Meta recently revealed that it is making its Llama models available to defense partners, while OpenAI is seeking to establish a closer relationship with the U.S. Defense Department.

Anthropic’s head of sales, Kate Earle Jensen, said the company’s collaboration with Palantir and AWS will “operationalize the use of Claude” within Palantir’s platform by leveraging AWS hosting. Claude became available on Palantir’s platform earlier this month and can now be used in Palantir’s defense-accredited environment, Palantir Impact Level 6 (IL6).

The new spec introduces “enhanced multi-admin,” an improvement on multi-admin — the much-touted interoperability feature that means your Matter smart light can work in multiple ecosystems simultaneously. It brings a solution for making Thread border routers from different companies play nicely together and introduces a potentially easier way to add Matter infrastructure to homes through Wi-Fi routers and access points.

Arguably, these should have all been in place when Matter launched. But now, two years later, the CSA is finally implementing the fixes that could help move the standard forward.

A federal agency has issued a directive to employees to reduce the use of their phones for work matters because of China’s recent hack of U.S. telecommunications infrastructure, according to people familiar with the matter.

In an email to staff sent Thursday, the chief information officer at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau warned that internal and external work-related meetings and conversations that involve nonpublic data should only be held on platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Cisco WebEx and not on work-issued or personal phones.

“Do NOT conduct CFPB work using mobile voice calls or text messages,” the email said, while referencing a recent government statement acknowledging the telecommunications infrastructure attack. “While there is no evidence that CFPB has been targeted by this unauthorized access, I ask for your compliance with these directives so we reduce the risk that we will be compromised,” said the email, which was sent to all CFPB employees and contractors.

Detroit is set to become the largest U.S. city to accept crypto for tax and fee payments, an initiative aimed at positioning the city as a tech-friendly hub and fostering economic growth.

Starting mid-2025, residents will be able to pay with popular cryptos like Bitcoin and Ethereum through a PayPal-managed platform, the city announced Thursday.

The payment option forms part of Detroit’s broader strategy to modernize municipal services and encourage financial inclusivity, particularly for residents with limited access to traditional banking.

“Detroit is building a technology-friendly environment that empowers residents and entrepreneurs,” Mayor Mike Duggan said in a statement. “We’re excited to be one of the first major U.S. cities to explore blockchain’s civic applications.”

To minimize the risks of crypto price volatility, payments will be converted to U.S. dollars on PayPal before reaching city accounts.

Apple quietly introduced code into iOS 18.1 which reboots the device if it has not been unlocked for a period of time, reverting it to a state which improves the security of iPhones overall and is making it harder for police to break into the devices, according to multiple iPhone security experts.

On Thursday, 404 Media reported that law enforcement officials were freaking out that iPhones which had been stored for examination were mysteriously rebooting themselves. At the time the cause was unclear, with the officials only able to speculate why they were being locked out of the devices. Now a day later, the potential reason why is coming into view.

“Apple indeed added a feature called ‘inactivity reboot’ in iOS 18.1.,” Dr.-Ing. Jiska Classen, a research group leader at the Hasso Plattner Institute, tweeted after 404 Media published on Thursday along with screenshots that they presen

AMD’s desktop CPU market share jumped nearly 10 percent in the last year, an analyst reported Thursday, on the heels of AMD’s strong rollout of its latest desktop gaming CPU. But overall CPU shipment growth dropped “well below seasonal norms,” because of slower Intel CPU shipments.

Mercury Research, which tracks the market share of PC CPUs from AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm, reported sweeping gains in most segments of the CPU market. A portion of the report specific to AMD was provided to journalists by AMD on Thursday, but confirmed by Mercury. Mercury then released a more comprehensive version of its report on Friday.

In general, because of the relatively low share of Qualcomm Snapdragon X CPUs, any share gains AMD realizes usually reflect a corresponding drop in Intel’s market share. However, Mercury said for the third quarter of 2024 Apple and Qualcomm collectively shipped about 10.3 percent of all CPUs, which was about flat with the quarter before.

Apple has added a High Power performance mode for the M4 Pro both in the Mac mini and in the new MacBook Pros. This feature was previously reserved for Max and Ultra chips and allows the chip to run at elevated speeds and temperatures for more extended periods of time; Apple says this should benefit GPU performance in particular at the expense of extra fan noise.

In our tests on the Mac mini, any performance gain from using High Power mode was essentially negligible, so small that we haven't bothered to make charts showing the difference—there are signs of a very small upward nudge in a couple of GPU tests, but all the CPU tests and many of the GPU tests show differences that are essentially within the margin of error.

While performance is a bit of a wash, fan noise is considerably increased under High Power mode. The Mac mini is mostly inaudible most of the time, the same way most Apple Silicon Macs have been, but under sustained CPU or GPU load, the mini emits a louder whoosh that you'll definitely hear unless you're wearing headphones. That could be a sign that, over many hours of activity, High Power mode will produce better or more consistent results than most of our tests, which generally take no more than a few minutes to run. But from where I sit, the benefits of High Power mode in the M4 Pro Mac mini are negligible, and the downside is noticeable. I would generally leave it turned off.

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Musk has gained a huge return on that investment already — Trump’s victory helped add billions to his wealth as Tesla’s stock rose nearly 12 per cent on Wednesday morning.

In the months leading up to the vote, Musk wielded his own megaphone — X — as its owner and the most popular account with more than 200mn followers. He flooded the platform with pro-Trump messaging, allegations about election fraud and warnings that Kamala Harris would destroy America should she win the White House.

Over the course of 24 hours on Tuesday, he tweeted nearly 200 times, according to an analysis by the Financial Times, racking up about 955mn views, after averaging more than 100 posts a day in the month leading up to the vote.

Leaders of major technology companies congratulated President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance on their victory in the U.S. presidential election Wednesday.

The messages were similar, with CEOs remarking that they wish Trump success when he returns to the Oval Office, and look forward to working with his administration.

A tracker run by Stand With Crypto, an industry group that vets politicians, said that 253 pro-crypto candidates had been elected to the House of Representatives on Tuesday, compared with 115 anti-crypto candidates. In the Senate, 16 pro-crypto candidates and 12 anti-crypto candidates were elected, the tracker said.

“The next Congress will be the most pro-crypto ever,” the group said.