Gadget Hacks

Google is sending enforcement emails to holders of G Suite legacy free edition accounts, telling them their accounts have been flagged for commercial use and that Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and Meet will be suspended within 45 days unless they upgrade to a paid Workspace plan or win an appeal. Users claim personal family domains are being swept up alongside actual commercial accounts, according to The Register, which broke the story this week. Google says it does not use private customer data to...

Nintendo announced Pictonico! on May 19, a mobile game for iOS and Android that pulls faces from your photo library and drops them into rapid-fire minigames. Nintendo lists Pictonico! for release on May 28, 2026, though the US App Store page currently shows an expected date of May 30, 2026. Pre-registration is open now on the App Store and Google Play. The catch is built into the name: the app is "free-to-start," which means some minigames are available as a free demo, while paid volumes unlock...

Many iPhone users have quietly developed a workaround for Siri's limitations: they open a different app. ChatGPT for questions requiring actual reasoning, Google for search, Claude for anything needing sustained back-and-forth. Apple's reported design choices for the iOS 27 Siri redesign suggest the company is trying to close that gap, not by making one big bet, but by targeting three specific problems at once.

Apple's Eddy Cue will receive the Cannes Lions Entertainment Person of the Year 2026 award at the festival running June 22–26, Deadline and Variety reported today. The institution doing the honoring is not a Hollywood guild or a streaming trade body. Cannes Lions is the advertising and marketing world's biggest annual gathering, and Lions CEO Simon Cook pointed explicitly to Apple's influence on consumer behavior through its devices and platforms when explaining the decision, not just its...

The big story in the latest Galaxy Z Fold 8 leak is the list of missing features on a phone expected to cost around $2,000. Leaks published this week suggest the device may ship without S Pen support, without the display material Samsung already put in the S26 Ultra, and without the privacy screen technology that debuted on that phone. Leaks suggest the Galaxy Z Fold 8 may miss features already available on the cheaper Galaxy S26 Ultra, and the gap is hard to ignore at this price point.

Samsung launched what it says is the industry's first 6K gaming monitor today, and the Samsung Odyssey G8 G80HS is built around a single architectural bet: that the most useful gaming display is one that can change what it is. Flip Dual Mode and the monitor drops to 3K resolution and pushes its refresh rate to 330Hz, putting it in the same performance tier as dedicated esports panels. That switch is what separates the G80HS from a resolution showcase with no practical application.

Spotify just launched verified badges for podcasts, bringing its "Verified by Spotify" program to show pages and search results across the platform. The light green checkmark identifies a show as the official presence of the creator, publisher, or brand it claims to be. The rollout pairs with a reinforced takedown policy that explicitly covers AI-assisted impersonation but the badge itself says nothing about whether a show's content was made by a human.

Backing up PS1 saves from DuckStation on Android to Google Drive is straightforward in theory and surprisingly fragile in practice. DuckStation, a PS1 emulator available on the Android Play Store, puts save management entirely in the user's hands. There is no automatic cloud sync, no platform-level backup, and no recovery path if a phone dies or gets reset unless the player has already moved those files somewhere else. Google Drive is a practical destination for that kind of manual backup. What...

Apple may be preparing to hand Google the engine under its flagship AI product. A reported multi-year deal, valued at roughly $1 billion annually, would see a custom Gemini model serve as the reasoning backend for a rebuilt Siri, with the public debut planned for WWDC this June. Apple has not confirmed the arrangement. If the reporting holds, Google's newly announced Gemini Intelligence initiative vs Apple Intelligence stops being a useful frame for this story. One company may be powering the...

April 11, 1985. Apple's boardroom. CEO John Sculley, the PepsiCo executive Jobs had personally recruited two years earlier, tells the board he wants Jobs gone. The board sides with him. Jobs walks out, as Vanity Fair reported last week. He will not return for eleven years.

Pixel owners are missing incoming calls without realizing it. Phones set to vibrate are staying completely silent, and most users only discover the problem after the fact, when a missed-call notification shows silent mode was active despite vibration being switched on and no automation rules running. If your Pixel isn't vibrating for calls, there are two settings worth checking before you contact support, and one of them takes about 30 seconds.

Apple is reportedly building a version of Siri that will remember details from past conversations, read what's on your screen in real time, and pull answers from your texts, emails, and installed apps. That's not a voice assistant upgrade. It's a different product category, with a different set of privacy stakes. Which is exactly why the most telling detail in the pre-WWDC rumor cycle isn't a new AI model or a chatbot interface. It's a retention timer.

Samsung has published its One UI 9 Good Lock compatibility list, and the 16-to-8 split in favor of working modules obscures what actually matters. The eight modules confirmed incompatible with the One UI 9 beta govern the home screen, lock screen, navigation bar, quick settings, and notifications, surfaces that Good Lock users are most likely to have customized.

Disney announced a new round of Disney+ and Hulu integration features on May 19, 2026, bringing the two apps closer together with Hulu profile linking, Hulu access inside Disney+ for eligible Hulu subscribers, new Hulu profile avatars, and an upcoming Live Guide. Bundle subscribers who primarily watch Hulu on demand can now bring more of their Hulu activity into Disney+, though Hulu Live TV, add-ons, and non-adult profile linking are not fully folded in yet. Disney says there are "no current...

Google announced Wear OS 7 today. The headliners are familiar: better battery life, a redesigned interface, and AI assistance that can reach into third-party apps. None of that is surprising. What matters for anyone wearing a Wear OS watch right now is whether any of it arrives on their device, and when, and on those questions, the announcement is thin.

Google last week announced a feature that changes what happens after you open a link on your phone. Starting late June, Gemini in Chrome on Android will place an AI icon in the browser toolbar. Tap it, and a panel slides up over the page you're already on, ready to summarize, explain, or answer questions about that specific content, without opening a new tab or leaving the page.

The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Wide vs Motorola Razr Fold comparison is genuinely asymmetric, and that asymmetry is the story. One device has a complete, confirmed spec sheet. The other has confirmed proportions and almost nothing else. Running this comparison honestly means being precise about which claims belong to which category.

Apple's chief hardware officer Johny Srouji is restructuring the company's hardware organization into a single unified group, The Verge reported today, citing Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The change folds two previously separate divisions, hardware engineering and hardware technologies, under one roof and splits the combined group into five focused teams. According to Bloomberg's framing, the goal is to help chip teams work more closely with product teams as Apple faces mounting pressure on its AI...

Plex is tripling the price of its Lifetime Plex Pass. Starting July 1, 2026 at 12:01 AM UTC, new buyers pay $749.99, up from $249.99 a 200% increase on a product the company openly admits it considered eliminating entirely, per Plex's own announcement today. Existing holders keep all current benefits unchanged. New buyers have six weeks at the current price.

In November 1997, Steve Jobs stood before an audience at Cupertino's Flint Center and admitted something most executives would never say publicly: more than a thousand customers had written to tell him how bad it was to buy an Apple product. Not the product itself, but the experience of acquiring it. That candid acknowledgment, 9to5Mac reported, came as Jobs was explaining a new partnership with electronics chain CompUSA. The problem was a distribution failure dressed up as a brand problem, and...

Apple SVP Eddy Cue wants an F1 movie sequel, and he wants more Formula 1 streaming rights. Those two ambitions point in the same direction: Apple is trying to own more of the F1 fan experience, not simply carry races under contract through 2030. A sequel to F1 The Movie is in development, Apple's U.S. rights deal is now in effect, and the question now is whether Apple's platform-first approach actually expands F1's U.S. audience or just repositions it behind a different paywall.

This guide covers three ways to disable Apple Intelligence notification summaries on your iPhone: a global off switch that stops them across every app, a category-level setting that targets news apps specifically, and how to turn off AI notification summaries on iPhone before you've ever opted in. All three paths run through Settings > Notifications > Summarize Notifications.

Apple announced a broad set of new accessibility features last week, timed to Global Accessibility Awareness Day, covering iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro. The headline additions include Accessibility Nutrition Labels on the App Store, Magnifier on Mac, a unified Braille Access experience, and a Switch Control protocol for Brain Computer Interfaces. All features are due later this year; exact OS versions and device compatibility are not yet confirmed, per Apple's announcement.

With WWDC 2026 opening this week, Apple is under pressure to answer a question its 2025 accessibility release left open: which users can actually access the tools Apple built? Last September, Apple shipped its most extensive accessibility update across iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and visionOS 26, per Apple's release announcement. The features include Personal Voice, Braille Access, Magnifier on Mac, Accessibility Reader, and new developer APIs. What Apple's public...

Microsoft launched its Xbox Player Voice feedback portal this week, and the top results came in fast. Within hours, the most-upvoted requests pointed in one direction: bring back console exclusives, expand backward compatibility, and drop the subscription requirement for online multiplayer. The Verge and IGN both covered the Xbox Player Voice feedback results today.

Two settings changes are all it takes. Set the lid-close action to Do Nothing and disable the inactivity sleep timer. Both live in Settings > System > Power & Battery and take about three minutes to configure.

Sony's PlayStation Plus price increase is due to take effect tomorrow, May 20, pushing monthly subscriptions from $9.99 to $10.99 and three-month plans from $24.99 to $27.99 across the U.S., UK, and Europe, GamingBolt and BBC reported this week. The annual plan stays flat at $80. Sony cited "ongoing market conditions."

A dormant interface inside Google Password Manager on Android has been activated by researchers, exposing new settings that extend import and export options to cover passkeys alongside passwords. The discovery is the most concrete evidence yet that Google passkey transfer on Android is in active development. Android Authority reported last week that the mechanism has not been switched on for users, and Google has not confirmed the feature in public.

The May 2026 Patch Tuesday update is failing to install on a subset of Windows 11 machines, stalling mid-reboot at roughly 35–36% completion and rolling back with error code 0x800f0922. Microsoft says the issue occurs on devices with limited free space on the EFI System Partition, especially when the ESP has 10 MB or less available; The Register covered Microsoft's disclosure on May 18, 2026. Both Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 are affected.

Google I/O 2026 kicks off this morning at 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET, streaming free at io.google and on YouTube with no registration required. A pre-show starts an hour earlier at 9 a.m. PT, with reporters on the ground in Mountain View, per PCMag. Sessions are uploaded afterward to the Google for Developers YouTube channel, with registered attendees getting first access, according to PCMag. The physical event at Shoreline Amphitheatre runs through tomorrow.

Honor confirmed this week that its Robot Phone will launch in China between July and September 2026, narrowing the release window for a device that has spent months behind glass at trade shows. The announcement came from the Cannes Film Festival, alongside a partnership with professional cinema camera manufacturer ARRI Image Science. Both choices tell you something about how Honor wants this phone understood.

Samsung's chip division went from KRW 0.4 trillion in operating profit to KRW 53.7 trillion in three quarters. That earnings swing, and what it says about Samsung's position in the AI memory market, is the reason the Samsung $1 trillion market cap conversation exists. Whether the earnings quality behind that valuation can hold is a separate question, and the answer is already taking shape.

A cheap Fire TV Stick and an Apple TV 4K will both stream in 4K. Both support Dolby Vision. Both respond to voice commands. So when you're looking for the best 4K streaming device and Consumer Reports' five-dimension scoring framework tends to favor premium set-top boxes over cheap sticks, the reason isn't what's happening on the screen. It's everything else.

Apple is once again rumored to be testing a solid-state haptic button system for its 20th-anniversary iPhone, which is presumed to arrive in fall 2027, and this time the feature appears to have cleared a more specific round of reliability testing. Chinese leaker Instant Digital renewed the claim in a May 5, 2026 report, saying the button system has already cleared tests covering gloves, wet hands, extreme temperatures, and phone cases, according to MacRumors.

Apple spotlighted four WWDC 2026 Distinguished Winners from this year's Swift Student Challenge on May 7, 2026, singling them out for a public preview ahead of its biggest developer conference of the year. The four are drawn from a group of 50 Distinguished Winners whose submissions Apple described as 'truly exceptional,' selected from 350 total winners representing 37 countries and regions.

Apple is planning to overhaul Genmoji in iOS 27 with automatic suggestions drawn from users' photo libraries and most-typed phrases, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported this week. The change would shift Genmoji toward proactive suggestions rather than fully manual prompts. A new toggle in Keyboard settings will read: "Suggested Genmoji are created from your photos and your commonly typed phrases."

Apple is reportedly building a way for iOS 27 users to choose third-party AI models for Apple Intelligence writing tasks. What the reporting doesn't settle is whether that choice would extend to the iOS 27 AI writing tools grammar checker, or only to the generative features like Compose and Rewrite. That distinction matters more than the headline suggests.

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference runs June 8–12, with the keynote kicking off at 10 a.m. PDT on June 8. The WWDC 2026 announcement describes the week as spotlighting "AI advancements and exciting new software and developer tools" — language so close to what Apple used when it first announced the dates two months ago that the two press releases are nearly interchangeable. For developers waiting to understand how Apple Intelligence fits into their build decisions, that repetition tells a...

iOS 26.5 appears to add a new "App Installation" setting for Brazilian iPhone users, visible today under Settings > Apps, designed to let them select a preferred app marketplace outside the App Store. Current reports show it listing only the App Store. The infrastructure for iOS 26.5 alternative app marketplaces in Brazil is in place; the actual alternatives are not.

Samsung's mobile division is reportedly exploring BOE as a possible OLED supplier for the standard Galaxy S27, after ZDNet Korea reported on May 11, 2026, that Samsung had sent BOE a request for information related to the model's display. If it happens, it would be a first for Samsung's Galaxy S line: ZDNet Korea reports that BOE has received Galaxy S-series OLED RFIs before, but has not yet secured final supply. The base S27 may also stick with an older OLED material stack rather than...