Jonathan Rowny has been feeling nostalgic again, and this time the answer is a cassette that holds no magnetic tape. His player looks like a mixtape, fits a standard deck, and stays silent until the mechanism starts to turn. Songs live on a microSD card inside the shell. Sound leaves through a real tape head pressed against the deck’s own head, so the old machine treats digital files as if they were oxide sliding past at walking speed.
Cody Rhodes posted the Street Fighter clip yesterday and immediately made the whole thing look inevitable. He wears a tall blond plastic flattop on his head, the exact silhouette Guile has carried since the early Street Fighter games, and talks about it the way old luxury car ads used to talk about leather and wind resistance. “It’s ergonomic and it’s aerodynamic. And it can be yours,” he says, while Noah Centineo and Callina Liang reach up and pull popcorn out of the hollow where the hair should be.
Jack Scarlett opened the first episode of Top Gear Tech by walking into a finished production Tesla Semi eight years after the 2017 reveal. A small pilot fleet reached customers in late 2022. Those trucks and later units have now logged about 17 million test miles that fed the version now leaving the line.
Photo credit: ETZone
Sony shipped the SMC-70 in September 1982 as its first real microcomputer, first in the United States for office work and then in Japan on December 1. Most people walking past a gray-and-silver slab that year would have assumed it belonged to NEC or Sharp. Few realized the company that made Trinitron sets and Walkmans had just entered the personal-computer business with a Z80A running at 4.028 MHz, 64 KB of user RAM, and Sony BASIC already sitting in ROM.
Apple’s foldable has soaked up most of the oxygen this season, which is convenient if you already live inside iOS. Anyone who would rather keep Android, DeX, and three live apps on one slab still has a clearer answer: Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, priced at $1,799.99 (was $2,100), the first book-style Fold to carry the Ultra badge and the first to pair that badge with a camera and battery that finally match the price.