Apple's designer exodus continues as product design chief Tang Tan is leaving the company and joining Jony Ive's design firm LoveFrom, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. There, he'll reportedly work on a new artificial intelligence hardware project backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman with aim of creating devices deploying the latest deep learning technology. 

Tan was in charge of design for Apple's main products including the iPhone, Watch and AirPods, so his departure leaves a sizable hole. As part of LoveFrom, Tan will act as hardware design lead for the new AI project, with Altman providing the software running underneath. All products are supposedly in the early concept phases, with a focus on devices for the home. None of the parties (OpenAI, LoveFrom or Apple) have commented on the news. 

It was already known that Tan would be likely be leaving Apple, but it hadn't yet been revealed where he'd go. Earlier this year, Jony Ive's successor Evans Hankey left the company after just a few years in the product design chief role. In all, about 14 members of Ive's former team have left Apple since 2019, with only a half dozen or so remaining. Ive worked as a consultant for Apple until 2022, and more than 20 former Apple employees have joined Ive under LoveFrom. 

Altman was recently fired (and then rehired) by OpenAI, in part because he was raising funds for other endeavors. One of those was the team-up with Ive to create AI hardware backed by Softbank, according to a previous Bloomberg report. 

Just ahead of CES (as usual), LG has unveiled one of the most interesting gaming monitors we've seen yet as part of its 2024 UltraGear OLED lineup. The 32-inch 32GS95UE UltraGear OLED not only offers a stellar 240Hz 4K option, but also lets you crank the refresh up 480Hz at 1080p with a "simple click." The company also unveiled new and updated 27-, 34- and 39- and 45-inch UltraGear OLED widescreen curved models, expanding its OLED gaming monitor family considerably. 

The 32-inch UltraGear OLED is the first model in that family to use LG's new "Dual-Hz" feature that lets you quickly switch between 4K (3,840 x 2,160) at 240HZ, to Full-HD 1,920 x 1,080 at a stellar 480Hz. Very few monitors have the refresh rates that high, let alone the ability to choose between the two highest refresh rates available at their respective resolutions. 

LG

LG says you can switch between these modes "via a hotkey or joystick's directional switch" to best suit the genre of game you're playing. "For fast-paced action titles and shooting games, users can select FHD 480Hz, while visually rich story-driven games can be enjoyed in 4K 240Hz," the company said. 

Along with that trick, the 32-inch UltraGear OLED offers a .03-millisecond GtG response time — something that's important for a high refresh rate monitor to avoid motion blur and other artifacts. Other features include high-end HDR picture quality (DCI-P3 98.5 percent at 400 nits), a "virtually borderless design," built-in speakers with DTS Virtual:X tech, G-Sync compatibility and more. 

LG

Aside from that Model, LG introduce the 34-inch 34GS95QE and the 39GS95QE, it's first 39-inch OLED monitor. Both are ultra-wide models with a 21:9 ultrawide aspect ratio, aggressive 800R curve, 3,440 x 1,440 resolution and 240Hz refresh rate. These are significant because they're LG's first ultrawide OLED monitors, and the first such ultrawide curved OLED models with a 240Hz refresh rate. Both support G-Sync, FreeSync Premium Pro and DisplayHDR True Black 400 (the OLED standard). 

LG has also refreshed its UltraGear OLED 27 and the UltraGear OLED 45. Both versions of the 45-inch model offer 3,440 x 1,440 resolution and 240Hz refresh rates, but the 45GS96QB version includes speakers and a USB-C PD (power deliver) connection rated up to 65 watts.

After laying off nearly a quarter of its staff last year, e-scooter rental company Bird has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the company announced. Existing lenders have agreed to purchase the assets and the company is being kept afloat via a $25 million loan from Apollo Global Management (Yahoo and Engadget's owner) and second-lien lenders, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

The company will continue to operate as normal and "has sufficient liquidity to meet financial obligations to city partners, vendors, suppliers, and employees during and after the restructuring process, and will operate as usual," the company wrote. The filing doesn't affect Bird Canada or Bird Europe, which are separate organizations.

Bird aims to sell off its assets for the highest possible price via a “stalking horse” agreement that will set in motion an auction of sorts. Its current lenders will designate a baseline bid before opening the proceedings to other bidders over the next few months.

Bird went public in 2021 via a "SPAC" (special purpose acquisition company) with an implied valuation of $2.3 billion, but its stock cratered less than a year later. Founder Travis VanderZanden stepped away late in 2022, at which point his stake in the company was worth less than his Miami house, according to a Crunchbase report. Bird was forced to delist from the New York Stock Exchange this year due to a valuation that was too low. 

Bird launched in multiple cities in 2017-18 with a fair amount of hype as e-scooters were seen as a sustainable urban mobility solution. It continued to grow despite a lack of profitability (following the Uber model), but the COVID pandemic forced the company to halt operations in multiple locations around the world. Since then, cities have also become more hostile to e-scooter rentals, with some seeing them now as a potential safety hazard and eyesore. 

On top of fighting (and losing to) Epic Games over Play Store antitrust concerns, Google has been fighting a similar lawsuit filed by 36 states and the District of Columbia in 2021. A settlement for that suit was announced in September, but a judge still had to confirm the terms. Now, Google has announced that it will pay a $700 million fine and make what amounts to fairly minor changes to the Play Store. 

Of that sum, Google will distribute $630 million to consumers who may have overpaid for apps or in-app purchases on Google Play (after taxes, lawyers’ fees, etc.). That covers around 102 million people, according to The Washington Post. It will also pay $70 million into a "fund that will be used by the states," according to Google's blog. 

The other major change is that Google must allow developers to steer consumers toward sideloading to avoid Google's Play Store fees on subscriptions and the like. It'll do that via updated "language that informs users about these potential risks of downloading apps directly from the web for the first time." However, these actions will be time limited to seven years for the sideloading and five years for the updated language, according to settlement's wording spotted by The Verge. 

Google will also include language stating that "OEMs can continue to provide users with options out of the box to use Play or another app store." Starting with Android 14, third-party stores will be allowed to handle future app updates, including automatic installs. It's also expanding user choice billing that will allow Android apps and games to offer their own payment system in the US. "Developers are also able to show different pricing options within the app when a user makes a digital purchase," Google states. 

The company will only be required to make these changes for five or six years maximum (seven years for alternate means to download apps). In other words, it could feasibly cut off access to sideloading or third-party app stores after that point, or make it harder for the average consumer to find the option. 

Another big thing missing is exterior payment links. "Google is not required to allow developers to include links that take a User outside an app distributed through Google Play to make a purchase," the settlement agreement reads. 

The settlement sum represents a miniscule portion of Google's turnover and the other terms are relatively minor changes over what it already does. It also doesn't include Epic Games, which won its own lawsuit against Google earlier this month (Google has vowed to appeal). A court still needs to formally approve the states' settlement.  

Google also argued at its Epic trial that consumers were able to get games by sideloading and other means, but that failed to sway the jury. When the settlement with the states was announced in September, Epic CEO Tim Sweeny said that if it "left the Google tax in place" his company would fight on. "Consumers only benefit if antitrust enforcement not only opens up markets, but also restores price competition," he said at the time.

An EV from Chinese manufacturer Nio will soon go on sale with a "semi-solid state" 150kWh battery (140kWh usable) that's the largest in any passenger car, Car News China reported. To show much range that will deliver, Nio CEO William Li drove a prototype version of the ET7 1,044km (650 miles) in 14 hours, a distance surpassing many gas-powered vehicles. 

The test was run in relatively cool temperatures (between 28 – 54 F) and livestreamed. Driving was done mainly in semi-autonomous (or Navigate-on-Pilot+, as Nio calls it), and speed-limited to 90 km/h (56 MPH). The average speed was 83.9 km/h (a respectable 52.4 MPH), with a travel time of 12.4 hours excluding stops.

"The completion of this endurance challenge proves the product power of the 150kWh ultra-long endurance battery pack," said Li in a Weibo post (Google translation). "More importantly, all models on sale can be flexibly upgraded to 150kWh batteries through the Nio battery swap system."

In fact, the ET7's 150kWh battery will only be available on a lease separate from the car, much as we've seen with some cars sold in Europe. Previously, the company said that the battery alone would cost as much as an entire car (the company's entry-level ET5 EV), or around $42,000. 

WeLion New Energy Technology

Manufactured by WeLion New Energy Technology, the battery has a single-cell energy density of 360 Wh/kg or 260 Wh/kg for the entire pack (Tesla's latest cells are under 300 Wh/kg). Semi-solid state batteries use gel, clay or resin electrolytes, offering greater energy density and fire-resistance than current batteries. However, they're still far from the promised land of full solid-state batteries, which could feasibly double energy density. 

We likely won't see the 150kWh battery pack stateside, though. With the Biden administration's latest rules, some US cars like Tesla's Model 3 Long Range that use specific Chinese battery components will no longer receive the full $7,500 tax credit. 

Nio is a luxury EV manufacturer in China that offers vehicles without a battery, letting you sign up to a battery-as-a-service (BAAS) monthly subscription. That service also allows you to swap out your battery at any time for a larger one. 

The Hugo Award-winning The Murderbot Diaries books from Martha Wells are becoming a 10-episode Apple TV+ series starring Alexander Skarsgård, Apple announced. It will follow a self-aware "SecUnit" robot that must hide its free will in order to complete a dangerous assignment and comes from About a Boy creators Chris and Paul Weitz. 

"Murderbot is an action-packed sci-fi series, based on the award-winning books by Wells, about a self-hacking security android who is horrified by human emotion yet drawn to its vulnerable 'clients,'" Apple wrote. "Murderbot must hide its free will and complete a dangerous assignment when all it really wants is to be left alone to watch futuristic soap operas and figure out its place in the universe."

The Weitz brothers will write, direct and produce the series, while Skarsgård will also serve as executive producer. Apple TV+ currently offers other sci-fi series including Silo, For All Mankind, Invasion and others. The streaming service needs to keep the content flowing as it has doubled Apple TV+ prices in just over a year. At the same time, Apple is looking for the right kind of content as it aims to avoid hot-button topics following the cancellation of The Problem with Jon Stewart. 

Several Murderbot chapters have made Engadget's gift guides and recommended reading lists. We called the Fugitive Telemetry novella a "banger" with "space intrigue and robotic mysteries" and recommended the earlier novella series in our 2019 holiday guide. 

Google is creating a new, more sophisticated Android AI assistant called Pixie set to arrive with its Pixel 9 phone, according to a report from The Information. Based on the company's new Gemini large language model (LLM), it'll be able to perform "complex and multimodal tasks" like giving you directions to the nearest store to buy a product you photographed on your smartphone. 

The assistant will be exclusive to Google's Pixel devices and use data from Google products like Gmail and Maps. That would help it "evolve into a far more personalized version of the Google Assistant," the report states. It appears to be a separate product from Google's Assistant with Bard showed off at Made By Google in October. 

If accurate, the report on the update shows Google making whiplash changes to its AI roadmap to keep rival OpenAI in its sights. Google only just revealed its Gemini AI last week as an answer to GPT-4, calling it "the most capable model we’ve ever built." It also announced that Gemini would come to Android via a new product called Nano, giving your phone the capability to do things like summarize conversations and calls without the need to be online. 

As a reminder, Gemini launched last week as an integrated multimodal AI, rather than multiple models stacked together. That will supposedly allow it to "seamlessly understand and reason about all kinds of inputs from the ground up, far better than existing multimodal models." With Pixie powered by Gemini, it could be a far more sophisticated personal assistant than, say, Google Assistant. Gemini will also power the next generation of Bard, Google's AI chat assistant. 

As with past Google products, though, it's going to be hard for consumers to grok (see what I did there) all the different AI offerings. We've now got Pixie, Bard, Gemini, Gemini Nano (for smartphones), Gemini Pro (for Chrome, API calls and more) and Gemini Ultra, coming in 2024. By contrast, OpenAI has kept things relatively simple with GPT-4 being its LLM, ChatGPT being the chat assistant, and DALL-E the image generator. Most savvy consumers have at least heard of those things, but Google has once again made it hard for people to keep up with its own product family. 

Meta's Threads has finally arrived in Europe over five months after it launched in the US, UK and elsewhere around the world. Following a countdown and Instagram teaser invitation, the app is now officially available in the bloc on the web, though the iOS and Android apps still aren't available for many.

Threads.net is now live on the web, though the mobile apps are still showing as unavailable for many (you may have to wait patiently). I was able to sign in using my Instagram account, though Meta also offers access without creating a profile — though you can't post or interact with content in that case. Once I agreed to use Instagram and chose my profile, it asked if I was okay with it being public and if wanted to follow the same people I do on Instagram. A few more clicks and I was in. 

Steve Dent for Engadget

The delay was reportedly due to the EU's upcoming Digital Markets Act (DMA) set to take effect in 2024. As one of seven tech giant "Gatekeepers," Meta wanted to ensure it's in compliance with the DMA, particularly around rules for sharing data between apps. In compliance with EU policies, the app also allows users to access the platform without needing to create a profile.

Threads launched July 5 on mobile with a basic feature set and required users to sign in using their Instagram accounts. It was much like Twitter (now X) when it launched, with support for text posts up to 500 characters, along with photos and five-minute videos. It also supported reposts and quote posts, while allowing users to limit their replies and block/report other users.

Since then, it has added a web version, along with both "following" and "for you" feeds, the ability to send Threads posts on Instagram, following list sorting, liked posts on your profile page and more. In short, it's become a robust rival to X, Bluesky and its other short-form social media apps.

In addition, yesterday Meta started testing the ability to make Threads posts available on Mastodon and other fediverse apps. That compatibility with the decentralized "ActivityPub" service, and the ability to cross-post to other apps, was a key promise Meta made when it introduced Threads. 

Threads' rise came with the steep decline of Elon Musk's X, now seen as more polarized than ever. Among much other drama, the platform recently lost a number of key advertisers after Musk boosted an antisemitic conspiracy theory. In response to that, Musk delivered a new message for advertisers pulling back from the platform: “Go fuck yourself.”

Threads is still in a precarious spot, though. It was an instant hit, crossing the 100 million signup mark just five days after launch and counted 141 million users as of November 10, according to research company Quiver Quantitative. However, engagement is another issue — the number of daily active users has fluctuated and dropped steeply a month or so after launch. It should get a massive boost now that it's in Europe, though, and Meta easily has the might (and money) to make it work and crush both established and potential rivals. 

Following a two-year investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Tesla will recall over two million vehicles to make fixes to its Autopilot system, according to new NHTSA documents. Fixes will be issued to owners for free via over-the-air (OTA) updates to add features that ensure drivers pay attention while using Tesla's controversial driver assistance system. It affects all current Tesla EVs built since Autopilot launched in 2015, including the Model 3, Model Y, Model S and Model X. 

"The remedy will incorporate additional controls and alerts to those already existing on affected vehicles to further encourage the driver to adhere to their continuous driving responsibility whenever Autosteer is engaged," the NHTSA stated in a document. It noted that while Autopilot (specifically its Autosteer component) does have several controls to ensure drivers pay attention, they're not always enough. 

"In certain circumstances when Autosteer is engaged, the prominence and scope of the feature’s controls may not be sufficient to prevent driver misuse of the SAE Level 2 advanced driver-assistance feature," the document states. That in turn may lead to "an increased risk of a collision." 

Tesla was ordered to address the driver monitoring system. "The remedy will incorporate additional controls and alerts to those already existing on affected vehicles to further encourage the driver to adhere to their continuous driving responsibility whenever Autosteer is engaged, which includes keeping their hands on the steering wheel and paying attention to the roadway," it states. Those will include more prominent visual alerts, making it easier to turn Autosteer on and off, and eventual suspension from Autosteer if the driver fails to behave responsibly on an ongoing basis. 

In a letter to the NHTSA, Tesla acknowledged the order and said it would issue the required fix. "Tesla will release an over-the-air (OTA) software update, free of charge. Owner notification letters are expected to be mailed February 10, 2023." The order affects 2,031,220 vehicles, though models that went into production after December 7th will have already incorporated the update. 

The NHTSA said last August that it was opening an investigation into Autopilot following 11 crashes with parked first responder vehicles since 2018 that resulted in 17 injuries and one death. In a letter to Tesla sent shortly afterward, the regulator requested detailed documentation on how the driver assistance system works. Specifically, it wanted to know how it ensures that human drivers will keep their eyes on the road while Autopilot is engaged and whether there are limits on where it can be used.

Several years ago, Land Rover announced plans to offer electrified versions of all its vehicle and that process has finally begun. The company teased the Range Rover Electric in a press release and video, promising an 800 volt architecture and all the benefits of a modern EV. At the same time, it'll be just as powerful and capable off-road as its gas-guzzling counterparts.

Apart from some aspirational promises, details are still sparse. To start with, it'll supposedly have "performance comparable to a flagship Range Rover V8 and the all-terrain capability developed in-house by Land Rover experts." That all-terrain capability includes the ability to wade through 850mm of water (2.8 feet), though the current V8-powered 2023 Range Rover already offers 900mm of depth. 

Land Rover

The new model will supposedly be the "quietest and most refined Range Rover ever created," the company said, thanks to "active road noise cancellation configuration and sound design, plus cabin comfort levels enabled by its electric underpinnings." In other words, it'll take advantage of the relatively low noise levels and simplicity of an electric drivetrain, like other luxury EVs.

The new model will be built on Jaguar Land Rover's Modular Longitudinal Architecture (LMA) based on an 800 volt architecture, something that generally supports added charging power, enhanced performance, increased efficiency and weight savings. That, the company says, will help enable "fast-charging on public networks," among other benefits.  

The company is also promising "a seamless electric ownership experience — effortless charging, energy partnerships, software-over-the-air updates and intelligent technology to maximise range." On top of that, the vehicle and and batteries will both be built in the UK in Solihull and Wolverhampton, respectively.

Range, performance and other key specifications, along with full photos of the vehicle are still missing. If you're undeterred by that and swayed by Land Rover's promo video (featuring glimpses of the vehicle, a model in a gold dress wearing green rubber boots, some koi fish and plenty of water), you can now join the waiting list.