News and Updates from Gadget Hacks: Page 2

Leaked specs for the Redmi K100 Pro surfaced earlier this month, pointing to a battery capacity somewhere north of 9,000mAh, a 200MP main camera, and an Apple-inspired design with full water resistance, according to GSMArena. The K100 family is expected around September. That timeline matters because it follows directly from what Xiaomi already built: the Redmi K90 Max, launched two months ago as the company's first gaming phone with a built-in cooling fan.

UC San Diego researchers are building a mini data center from 2,000 retired Pixel smartphones, stripped to their mainboards and clustered in groups of 20. According to a Google Research blog post cited by heise this week, each 20-board subsystem performs roughly on par with a conventional general-purpose server, and one such cluster already supports the simultaneous workloads of about 75 students running Jupyter Notebooks.

At WWDC 2026 last week, Apple announced two Siri AI upgrades and confirmed its mainstream flagship can't run either of them. The base iPhone 17 has 8GB of RAM; both new iPhone 18 Siri AI features require 12GB. Only the iPhone 17 Pro, Pro Max, and iPhone Air clear that bar, according to MacRumors and 9to5Mac, both reporting this week.

Apple will stop issuing new relay addresses from its current Sign in with Apple and Hide My Email domains later this summer, consolidating both under a single shared domain. The Sign in with Apple domain consolidation affects only newly generated addresses; existing ones keep forwarding without interruption. Developers and email providers whose systems name the old domains explicitly need to update before the rollout begins.

Security researchers published findings today claiming Apple's App Store logs every individual tap a user makes and transmits that data to Apple as behavioral analytics. The gap between that characterization and Apple's own personalization disclosure is now the center of a privacy dispute that raises a direct question: when Apple says users can opt out, what exactly are they opting out of?

Sony Semiconductor Solutions just announced the LYTIA L910, a 50-megapixel smartphone camera sensor that Sony claims can deliver 100 dB of dynamic range from a single exposure, with no multi-frame synthesis required. It is the first sensor in Sony's LYTIA lineup to feature LOFIC, a structural change to the pixel itself. Mass production is scheduled for this summer.

Apple published a support document on June 15, 2026, explaining why macOS may warn users before pasted Terminal commands can run. The document, titled "If your Mac blocks a Terminal command paste or script," clarifies popup alerts that 9to5Mac reported were introduced in macOS 26.4.

That small green dot in the top-right corner of your Samsung phone is a privacy indicator, not a bug. It means an app is using your camera, microphone, or both. If you also see a faint flicker near the top of the screen during calls, that is usually something else: the proximity sensor.

Apple is reportedly planning two 20th anniversary iPhone models for 2027, not a single commemorative flagship. Bloomberg reporting covered by MacRumors this week says both sizes would share identical specs, including the same next-generation 2nm A21 chip and the same four-edge curved display. Buyers wouldn't have to choose between owning the anniversary device and owning their preferred screen size. That's a meaningful structural shift from how Apple handled the iPhone's tenth birthday.

Google began rolling out Bubbles on June 16, 2026, giving Android 17 Pixel phone and foldable users a way to keep apps available as floating windows without leaving the app they're using.

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A surfaced Huawei vertical tri-fold phone patent points to something more consequential than a single filing: Huawei appears to be treating the Mate XT not as a finished product line but as an engineering platform, with a vertical folding axis as the next stress test. Where the Mate XT folds horizontally to open into a wide tablet slab, a vertical tri-fold would collapse a tall display into a compact, phone-shaped rectangle. That is a different ergonomic proposition entirely, and the...

A Weibo leaker is warning that the iPhone 18 Pro could repeat the finish-durability complaints reported by some iPhone 17 Pro owners, especially around the Cosmic Orange colorway. A separate report claims Apple may have revised its aluminum manufacturing process to reduce discoloration risk. Apple has confirmed neither claim, leaving buyers eyeing the rumored Dark Cherry colorway with two opposing signals and no official guidance.

Memory has overtaken the processor and display to become the single most expensive component in a smartphone, Nothing CEO Carl Pei warned this week, and he says phone prices are going up and will keep rising into next year. That claim matters beyond Nothing's own lineup: independent market data from IDC puts the memory shortage at the center of what it calls the steepest smartphone market contraction in recorded history.

Apple announced three concrete upgrades to iPhone Mirroring at WWDC, and the macOS 27 iPhone Mirroring upgrades cover the full range: Control Center access, protected video playback, and a resizable window that can shift aspect ratios beyond the iPhone's fixed proportions.

Peacock is launching its vertical video feed in the Peacock app, rolling out original Bravo microdramas and a swipeable short-form section built into the mobile app. According to Peacock, the two Bravo series are the first official originals in the microdrama format announced by a major U.S. entertainment streaming platform.

Apple's supply chain is reportedly preparing parts and module production for an iPhone camera the company has never built before. Sunny Optical has started producing actuators for a variable aperture mechanism destined for the iPhone 18 Pro, while LG Innotek is preparing full module assembly at its Gumi facility in South Korea for June or July, ahead of its normal schedule, specifically because the new mechanism raises defect risk, MacRumors reported. That points to supply-chain preparation,...

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Fox Corp. agreed Monday to acquire Roku for approximately $22 billion, gaining a foothold in the operating system running inside more than 100 million streaming households globally. As Deadline framed it yesterday: "Fox Corporation is buying an operating system." Analysts and executives have described it as a distribution and ad-tech play rather than a content-library acquisition, and the numbers bear that out.

A Google employee confirmed this week that the company has been investigating a Google Pixel bootloop issue tied to its March, April, and May 2026 software updates, with devices freezing on the G logo or crashing immediately after PIN entry. The acknowledgement covers the Pixel 6 through Pixel 10 series, and the public issue tracker has accumulated close to 800 entries since March, according to heise. Google says updated guidance is now available.

Tesla CarPlay support has long looked like a business decision dressed up as a product omission. For more than a decade, Tesla resisted CarPlay while competitors leaned on Apple and Google to compensate for weaker native platforms a dynamic that ABI Research noted last December when it confirmed Tesla was reportedly testing native CarPlay integration for the first time. But reporting over the past year points to something more specific than corporate reluctance: Tesla's driver-assistance...

T-Mobile subscribers who make voice calls abroad could soon pay twice as much per minute. Multiple customers have received notices warning that standard T-Mobile international roaming call rates will jump from $0.25 to $0.50 per minute on June 25, according to Android Authority today and PhoneArena four days ago. The timing puts the reported change squarely in the opening weeks of peak summer travel season.

The debate over Apple AI privacy risks in Europe is being framed as a Brussels problem. Apple used part of its WWDC 2026 keynote to announce a product it isn't shipping: Siri AI, the most capable version of its assistant, demonstrated at WWDC pulling a FIFA World Cup schedule from the internet, searching a user's Messages history for a recipe, drafting a party invitation, and preparing to send it to a group chat, all without the user opening a single app. That assistant will not reach iPhones...

Strava rolled out a broad set of new hiking features covering route planning, offline navigation, off-route alerts, and route following on Apple Watch. The features that matter most on an unfamiliar trail, planning where to go, staying on route, and navigating without cell service all sit behind the subscription paywall. Free users get a more capable recording screen and better social tools. Subscribers get the navigation suite.

Apple has reportedly been exploring an autocorrect upgrade for iOS 27 that would go beyond fixing misspellings to suggest alternative words as you type. The approach is comparable to how tools like Grammarly surface vocabulary rewrites, 9to5Mac reported in late March. No final decision on shipping the feature has been made.

Huawei reportedly unveiled HarmonyOS 7, a major upgrade to its self-developed mobile OS that the company is framing as its entry into what it calls the "agent era" positioning the platform less as a conventional Android rival than as an AI-agent system designed to coordinate complex tasks autonomously across devices. The announcement puts HarmonyOS 7 features directly in competition with Apple's iOS 27, according to South China Morning Post.

Nothing phones at Best Buy are now a real U.S. retail play. The London-based company has brought its phones and audio lineup to more than 500 Best Buy stores across the country, giving shoppers a much easier way to see and handle its hardware before buying.

An An unreleased Apple Watch anniversary band has surfaced outside Apple, and only four units are known to have surfaced publicly. The Sport Band is engraved with "2014–2024: Ten Years of Apple Watch," two units sold on eBay still sealed in Apple's internal sample packaging, and a public release now looks highly unlikely.

Microsoft Microsoft lists Build 5.2622.0 of Outlook for Android and iOS under its June 11, 2026, Outlook Mobile release notes, and the changelog for both platforms is limited to one line: "Various fixes to functionality and performance."

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Apple unveiled macOS 27 Golden Gate at WWDC26 this week, and the release has a clear internal logic: fix the readability problems Tahoe introduced with Liquid Glass, deliver a rebuilt Siri powered by Apple Intelligence, and give families parental controls that are actually worth using. Every Apple Silicon Mac from M1 forward can run it. The catch worth knowing upfront: the headline AI feature isn't fully here yet. Siri AI arrives as a separate beta later this year, starting in English only....

Siri has been a punchline for so long that skepticism feels like the responsible position. So here's the direct answer to the question everyone's asking after WWDC26 this week: is Siri actually good now? Not yet. But for the first time, there's a credible structural argument that it could be and that argument is worth taking seriously, with clear eyes about where it breaks down.

Two Apple Photos executives gave their clearest public account yet of what the iOS 27 Photos AI features are built to do. The word they kept returning to was "refine." The flagship tool, Spatial Reframing, can shift the apparent camera angle of a photo after the fact and change where a subject appears to be looking. That's a harder sell for "refinement" than Apple's framing acknowledges.

Apple Music, Fitness, and Health have all gained landscape orientation support in iOS 27, ending years of portrait-only layouts for three of the company's most-used first-party apps, Macworld reported this week. For everyday users, that's a straightforward fix. The more significant story is what sits behind it: the same beta that quietly rotated those apps also contains framework strings referencing fold states and display angles, neither of which maps to any device Apple currently sells.