In 2008 Peter Serafinowicz walked onto a BBC set in the role of an Apple store employee and introduced Mactini, the smallest computer in the world. One key. Press it once for A. Press it 26 times for Z. For a comma, hold four seconds, lift for two, then fire off a rapid little drum fill. The audience laughed. Apple kept making things smaller anyway.
Every year, families forget the same dates, a birthday passes by, and an anniversary card is bought two days late. Three phones and a scrap of paper attached to the refrigerator are used to keep holiday shopping lists. Dragon Touch’s 15.6-inch TM15 digital calendar, priced at $149.99 (was $160), is a plug-in device that sits on the same wall or counter, keeping everything in one place and visible from across the room.
Gamescom usually sells the next console, the next season pass, the next reason to stay up too late. This year IKEA arrived with a nine-piece line called YXSTABY, built with Xbox designers piece by piece, and the pitch is quieter than the hall around it. Play now happens on sofas, at kitchen tables, between homework and dinner. These objects are meant to roll in for that hour and roll back out without turning the room into a cave.
Rockstar and Netflix put twenty-six minutes of actual GTA 6 gameplay on screens this afternoon, all captured on a regular PlayStation 5, and for the first time the wait stopped feeling like rumor. Jason and Lucia walk into a dim apartment building looking for a man named Raymond on a pickup for someone called Boobie Ike.
Reports this week put a possible NVIDIA purchase of Hugging Face near $13 billion. This morning the company’s Bordeaux robotics group still went ahead and opened pre-orders on something far smaller: Microduck, a 25-centimeter biped from Pollen Robotics that looks like a one-eyed water bird and costs $399 before tax and shipping.