Author: admin
Yet it’s only $699 (or $599 for students). The XPS 13 makes similar trade-offs as the MacBook Neo. First, it starts with only 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. It also starts with a slower Intel Core 5 processor (note: not Intel Core Ultra). I’ll be interested to find how the performance and battery life stack up against the MacBook Neo, but Dell is clearly taking notes from Apple, which used a slower iPhone chip in the Neo instead of an M-series laptop-grade processor.What’s nice about the Dell XPS 13, though, is that you can scale it…
Environmental activist Erin Brockovich has a new mission: Bringing more transparency to data center construction and the impact those data centers have on nearby communities. Brockovich — who was famously played by Julia Roberts in a film dramatizing her legal case against Pacific Gas & Electric — recently launched a website with a map of data centers across the United States. The website describes the map as “work in progress” that includes data centers reported by members of the surrounding community. In a Substack post, Brockovich said that after putting out a call for reports of data center-related issues in…
After criticizing a startup called Artisan for misusing his work, artist KC Green — creator of the famous “This is fine” meme — said he’s reached an agreement with Artisan. The dispute arose after the startup appeared to use a version of Green’s art to promote its AI assistant Ava. In Artisan’s bus and subway ads, Green’s recognizable dog sat amid recognizable flames, but instead of saying “This is fine,” it declared, “My pipeline is on fire,” while the ad urged people to “Hire Ava the AI BDR.” Earlier this month, Green posted on social media that his art had…
The YouTube-to-prestige-horror pipeline is looking very strong this weekend. Taking the number one spot at the box office is “Backrooms,” a feature film expansion of Kane Parsons’ series of YouTube videos featuring eerie found footage of a mysterious office space (drawn from a 4chan thread) that defies physics. Directed by Parsons, “Backrooms” will bring in an estimated $81 million at the domestic box office this weekend alone. That’s the biggest opening by far for indie studio A24 — the previous record was held by “Civil War,” which made $25.7 in its first weekend of release. The number two film, “Obsession,”…
Box founder Aaron Levie got us talking this week with a social media post suggesting that tech CEOs are “uniquely prone to AI psychosis.” On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I did our best to unpack Levie’s comment. For one thing, we noted that he isn’t disavowing AI tools, merely insisting that CEOs need to actually use those tools to understand them. That’s a relatively gentle note of skepticism compared to other signs of a broader backlash, whether you look at graduating college students booing any mention of AI, the bad vibes around…
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for the future of transportation and now, more than ever, how AI is playing a part. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! If you’re into EVs or sports cars, then you surely saw the kerfuffle over Ferrari’s first all-electric car, the Luce. The reaction was swift and biting for the five-seater EV designed by Apple veteran Jony Ive and priced at close to $650,000. Ferrari fans expressed horror, critics compared it to the far cheaper Nissan Leaf, memes were made, and even one car…
According to Crunchbase’s latest data around black founders, $643 million has poured into US Black-founded startups since the beginning of the year — an amount not seen since 2022, when Black founders raised $653 million in funding. For context, Black founders raised $942 million of all venture dollars last year (that’s 0.32% of the $290 billion total, per Crunchbase estimates). That means in just a few months, Black founders have already raised almost 70% of what was they raised in all of last year. Driving this funding are just a handful of deals (34, to be exact, per Crunchbase), most…
I am sitting in the sweltering Nevada heat watching a man struggle to lift a bar over his head. If the man manages to do it, he will win $250,000. The man is Boady Santavy — a two-time Olympic weight-lifting contestant from Canada — and he has muscles that look culled from the Marvel Cinematic Universe: massive, cartoonish arms that might as well belong to a superhero rather than a real human. Santavy is attempting to beat the world record for the men’s snatch — a lift of 183 kilograms, or approximately 403 pounds. After a tortured few seconds, Santavy drops…
Photograph: Pete CottellM-Audio has packaged everything this person would need in a tidy little box with its M Track Duo HD producer pack. It includes a two-channel class-compliant audio interface, an M100 condenser mic, a pair of HD41 headphones, a mic clip, a USB-C cable to connect the interface to your computer or mobile device, and an XLR cable to connect the mic to the interface—all for the low price of $200. Aside from a mic stand (we love this desk clamp boom arm stand from Innogear) and the unearned confidence necessary to speak into a mic for hours about…
After testing more than 60 mesh systems and routers in my last home, a modern two-story, 1,600-square-foot house, I found that single routers generally outperformed mesh systems, providing a faster and more stable connection, transferring files from one device to another on the network more quickly, and working efficiently without smart home connectivity issues. But many of those routers struggled to provide a fast connection in my backyard.Mesh systems extend your coverage, and nodes can target dead spots. I used a node to extend Wi-Fi into my backyard and to plug in a TV in the back room via Ethernet…
The astounding growth of the hair-transplant industry in Turkey is not just a medical tourism success story; it’s also a tale of “hacked” medical equipment and algorithmic craftsmanship.From a biological and evolutionary perspective, human hair is often viewed as an unremarkable mass of keratin that still plays some important functions—protecting our scalps from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays and regulating our body temperatures—but, for the most part, is no longer essential to our survival.Yet, since ancient times, our subconscious perceptions of whether another person is healthy, young, or fertile have been based on visual cues such as skin radiance, the…
SoftBank Group announced today that it plans to spend up to €75 billion (around $87 billion) to expand data center capacity in France. The goal, the firm said, is to develop and operate up to 5 gigawatts of additional data center capacity. The first phase of the plan involves building data centers in Dunkirk (Loon-Plage), Bosquel, and Bouchain to deliver 3.1 gigawatts of capacity to the Hauts-de-France region by 2031. SoftBank, which is both an investor in and customer of OpenAI, says this will be its largest AI infrastructure investment in Europe. In a statement, French economic minister Roland Lescure described…
The YouTube-to-prestige-horror pipeline is looking very strong this weekend. Taking the number one spot at the box office is “Backrooms,” a feature film expansion of Kane Parsons’ series of YouTube videos featuring eerie found footage of a mysterious office space (drawn from a 4chan thread) that defies physics. Directed by Parsons, “Backrooms” made $38 million on Friday, and is expected to bring in a total of $80 million to $90 million at the domestic box office over this weekend alone. For indie studio A24, that’s its biggest opening by far — the previous record was held by “Civil War,” which…
Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari currently dominate the web browser market, with Chrome holding a significant share due to the tech giant’s ongoing innovations, particularly in integrating generative AI into its search functionalities. However, users seeking alternatives will find a variety of browsers aiming to challenge these industry giants. To help navigate the competitive landscape of the browser wars, we’ve compiled an overview of some of the top alternative browsers available today. This includes browsers leveraging AI, open source browsers that promote customization and privacy, and “mindful browsers” — a new term that refers to browsers designed to enhance user…
Gemini Spark is Google’s new 24/7 agentic assistant, designed to help you help you “navigate your digital life,” which essentially means getting your online to-dos done, summarizing the things you don’t have time to read (like the entirety of your inbox), or organizing something that would have otherwise involved too much screen time-filled manual labor, like a personal expenses spreadsheet. The service was first introduced at Google’s annual developer conference in May, where CEO Sundar Pichai joked that Spark, which runs on virtual machines in the cloud, means that “yes, you can close your laptop.” The in-joke here is that…
The golden age of Microsoft’s Github Copilot appears to be at an end — for the little guy, at least. The company is switching its billing system from a flat subscription rate to a token-usage system that has the potential to bill users at a significantly higher rate. Bigger enterprises may still have the juice for it, but smaller companies and workers could find themselves wondering how they’re supposed to balance the monthly budget. The changes, which will take place June 1, mean that users will charged based on how many tokens they burn through as they work instead of…