Apple's seeming about-face on repairability will soon help you spot less-than-honest iPhone repair shops and part sellers. As Gizmodonotes, Apple has revealed iOS 15.2's settings will include a "parts and service history" section (under General > About) that indicates not only whether the battery, camera and display have been replaced, but will indicate whether or not they're officially sanctioned Apple parts. If a component is listed as an "unknown part," it's either unofficial, an already-used part from another iPhone or malfunctioning.
Just how much you'll learn depends on your iPhone model. Anyone using an iPhone XR, XS or second-generation iPhone SE can only tell if the battery has been replaced. You'll need an iPhone 11 or newer to also find out if there's a display swap, and an iPhone 12 or later to know if the camera has been replaced. Apple stressed that these alerts won't prevent you from using your device — you're fine if you're comfortable using unofficial parts and losing warranty coverage.
iOS 15.2 currently exists as a release candidate for developers, suggesting the finished version will be available relatively soon. It's not yet clear if iPad owners will see a corresponding part history feature at some point.
The "unknown part" label might not thrill advocates for third-party component options. Apple clearly wants you to use official parts, and that means either taking it in for authorized service or (in 2022) buying parts from Apple. This might help you catch shops lying about the quality of their parts, though, and could be useful if you repair an iPhone yourself and want to be sure your fixes went smoothly.
Rockstar Games will soon release another big update for GTA Online, which includes a story mission featuring one of Grand Theft Auto V's main characters. "The Contract" centers around Franklin Clinton and his friends, who aspire to be problem solvers for celebrities and "rich folk who got rich folk problems."
One of those potential clients is Dr. Dre, who appears as himself in the story. A phone containing unreleased music from the rapper and producer has gone missing. As a potential partner for Franklin's new enterprise, it's your job to get it back.
You'll be able to hear those Dre tracks and other fresh music when the update arrives on December 15th. Rockstar is promising "an eclectic new radio station from some very special guest hosts" and big changes to current radio stations. Expect additional side missions, weapons (including an EMP launcher), vehicles, locations and more. Rockstar will reveal more details about "The Contract" in the coming days.
A few other well-known figures have appeared as themselves in the Grand Theft Auto series. Phil Collins was involved in several missions in GTA: Vice City Stories, while Katt Williams and Ricky Gervais performed stand-up sets in GTA IV.
Still, it's notable that Dr. Dre is taking a bigger role in GTA Online — he popped up briefly during 2020's Cayo Perico heist. Other major ongoing games like Fortnite include versions of real people and fictional characters from other properties. Perhaps GTA Online is becoming a metaverse too.
Since the start of 2021, The Trevor Project, the largest suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ young people, has used an AI technology called the Crisis Contact Simulator to train its counselors on how to talk to in-crisis youth. The tool essentially simulates what a conversation like that may look like with the help of AI chatbots. At launch, the CCS came with access to one such “persona.” Today, The Trevor Project is adding a second one called Drew. The new chatbot represents a fictional youth in their early 20s who lives in California and faces bullying and harassment.
Since implementing its first persona, the aptly named Trevor, in February, the organization says the technology has helped train more than 1,000 counselors. One thing to note here is The Trevor Project is using the Crisis Contact Simulator to complement its existing training methods; the tool is not a replacement for in-person training. It allows new applicants to complete two roleplay sessions at a time that works best for them. It also claims the chatbots offer an accurate representation of today’s Gen Z youth, complete with “realistic” capitalization and punctuation.
“Starting from the first conception of the Crisis Contact Simulator two years ago, it has always been our hope to develop a variety of training roleplay personas that represent the diverse experiences and intersectional identities of the LGBTQ young people we serve, each with their own stories and feelings,” said Dan Fichter, The Trevor Project’s head of AI and engineering. “We’re excited to deploy Drew with our trainees to offer a wider variety of practice scenarios and narratives, which will better prepare them to connect with any young person in a moment of crisis when the time comes.”
The Trevor Project is no stranger to the tech world. The organization has previously worked with Google and Facebook to offer crisis intervention.
Moderating content on today’s internet is akin to a round of Whack-A-Mole with human moderators continually forced to react in realtime to changing trends, such as vaccine mis- and disinformation or intentional bad actors probing for ways around established personal conduct policies. Machine learning systems can help alleviate some of this burden by automating the policy enforcement process, however modern AI systems often require months of lead time to properly train and deploy (time mostly spent collecting and annotating the thousands, if not millions of, necessary examples). To shorten that response time, at least to a matter of weeks rather than months, Meta’s AI research group (formerly FAIR) has developed a more generalized technology that requires just a handful of specific examples in order to respond to new and emerging forms of malicious content, called Few-Shot Learner (FSL).
Few-shot learning is a relatively recent development in AI, essentially teaching the system to make accurate predictions based on a limited number of training examples — quite the opposite of conventional supervised learning methods. For example, if you wanted to train a standard SL model to recognize pictures of rabbits, you feed it a couple hundred thousands of rabbit pictures and then you can present it with two images and ask if they both show the same animal. Thing is, the model doesn’t know if the two pictures are of rabbits because it doesn’t actually know what a rabbit is. That’s because the model’s purpose isn’t to spot rabbits, the model’s purpose is to look for similarities and differences between the presented images and predict whether or not the things displayed are the same. There is no larger context for the model to work within, which makes it only good for telling “rabbits” apart — it can’t tell you if it’s looking at an image of a rabbit, or of a lion, or of a John Cougar Mellencamp, just that those three entities are not the same thing.
FSL relies far less on labelled data (i.e. pictures of rabbits) in favor of a generalized system, more akin to how humans learn than conventional AIs. “It’s first trained on billions of generic and open-source language examples,” per a Wednesday Meta blog post. “Then, the AI system is trained with integrity-specific data we’ve labeled over the years. Finally, it’s trained on condensed text explaining a new policy.” And unlike the rabbit-matching model above, FSL “is pretrained on both general language and integrity-specific language so it can learn the policy text implicitly.”
Recent tests of the FSL system have proven encouraging. Meta researchers looked at the change in prevalence of harmful content shown to Facebook and Instagram users before and after FSL’s activation on the sites. The system both found harmful content that conventional SL models had missed and reduced the prevalence of that content in general. The FSL system reportedly outperformed other few-shot models by as much as 55 percent (though only 12 percent on average).
Meta
FSL’s improved performance is thanks in part to entailment, defined as “the act or fact of entailing, or involving by necessity or as a consequence.” It’s essentially a logical consequence between two sentences — if sentence A is true, then sentence B must also be true. For example, if sentence A is “The President was assassinated,” then it entails that sentence B, “the President is dead,” is also true, accurate and correct. By leveraging entailment in the FSL system, the team is able to “convert the class label into a natural language sentence which can be used to describe the label, and determine if the example entails the label description,” Meta AI researchers explained. So instead of trying to generalize what a conventional SL model knows from its training set (hundreds of thousands of rabbit pics) to the test set (“are these two images of rabbits?”), the FSL model can more broadly recognize harmful content when it sees it, because it understands the policy that the content violates.
The added flexibility of having a “single, shared knowledge base and backbone” could one day enable AI moderation systems to recognize and react to new forms of harmful content far more quickly, catch more content that just barely skirts around current policies and even help Meta develop and better define future policies.
Sonos is the latest tech company to commit to reducing its environmental impact in the long term. The smart speaker firm has unveiled an inaugural climate plan that will make its "value chain" carbon neutral by 2030, and achieve net zero emissions by 2040. The company will use some carbon offsets (such as a marine ecosystem project in Cambodia), but it also promises to improve both its products and operations.
Many of the product efforts focus on smarter material choices and recycling. All of Sonos' new products will use recycled plastic by the end of the company's fiscal 2023, while all hardware will use "responsibly sourced" paper packaging by fiscal 2025. Fiscal 2023 will also mark the release of Sonos' first devices designed explicitly with recycling and reuse in mind, such as easier-to-remove fasteners in place of glue. All products will have a sleep mode by that year, and the firm will cut idle power draw to 2W starting with portable speakers in fiscal 2022.
The move might not satisfy everyone. Neutrality in 2030 isn't an aggressive target when it includes offsets — Sonos will still produce excess CO2 emissions. The company may also face a significant challenge overcoming its mixed environmental record. While Sonos is known to support its speakers for a long time, its bifurcated support strategy (where older devices can't operate alongside newer ones) and now-dead recycle mode (which bricked haven't instilled confidence in the past.
Still, this plan could go a long way toward improving Sonos' reputation. It's not only acknowledging its overall environmental impact, it's designing with longevity and repairability in mind. If things go smoothly, you might keep using Sonos gear well after its original luster has worn off.
Amazon's Halo View fitness band is now available from its online storefront, and Amazon 4-star and Amazon Books locations. The company opened pre-orders for Halo View last month and said the fitness band would ship sometime in December. During the pre-order period, Amazon offered customers to snap one up for a $30 discount, but the device is back to the regular price of $80.
The fitness band is a new version of the original Halo, which emerged in 2020. It's the first Halo with a screen. The AMOLED color display shows activity history, sleep scores, blood oxygen levels, live workout tracking and more. The tracker weighs less than 22 grams and it's swimproof up to 50 meters.
The Halo View comes with a 12-month Halo membership. That provides access to personalized AI-powered features, recipes, sleep resources, body fat percentage analysis and workouts led by Halo coaches. The plan typically costs $4 a month.
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Recording studios aren't a thing of the past per se, but whole swaths of the production chain are now cheap and accessible enough for a talented amateur producer to achieve enviable results from the comfort of their bedroom. Still though, many of the top plugins—which can simulate anything from mixing consoles to effects units and vintage analog synths—remain outside the budget for most hobbyists.
Cleverly, Native Instruments have gone the subscription route to deliver those tools in easier-to-swallow monthly payments as low as $9.99 per month. Dubbed Komplete Now, it's essentially the Adobe Creative Cloud model, only for access to sound creation tools instead of industry standard image software.
A Komplete Now will grant customers access to some of the most recognizable tools in NI's arsenal, among them Massive X (a wavetable synth), Retro Machines MK2 (samples from over a dozen analog synth), a slightly tweaked version of Battery (drum sampler), as well as delay and reverb tools Raum and Replika.
Full licenses for each product in the Komplete Now package would retail for over $700 combined—though that route still makes sense for professionals who plan to use these tools for years on end. Granted, Native Instruments also offers its more limited Komplete Start bundle for free.
Komplete Now is available now at the aforementioned monthly price, or via a $99 yearly plan.
The smart home has never been more accessible, with more affordable entry points than ever. From security cameras to smart light bulbs, pretty much any internet-connected device that you can control via an app is enough to get you started on your smart home journey. But before you dive in, we advise taking a few preliminary steps. For one, don’t try to outfit your entire smart home in one go. Not only can this be quite expensive, we think it’s generally best to buy just one or two items first to see if you like them. From there, you can figure out if you want to buy more devices, making sure that they’re compatible with one another. Below are our suggestions for the best of each smart device category, with alternate suggestions where appropriate.
Before you start, pick a voice assistant
While plenty of smart home devices are platform agnostic, there are some — smart speakers and smart displays in particular — that require you to choose your voice assistant. Currently, that means deciding if you’ll use the Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa on a regular basis. (I’ll address Siri in a moment.) They’re both compatible with various smart home products from light bulbs to robot vacuums, but there are certain devices that work best with either Google or Amazon. Nest products, for example, are more compatible with Google-powered speakers and displays. They can still work with Amazon devices, but certain features might be disabled. The same holds true with Amazon products: They work better if they’re in the same ecosystem.
So how do you choose between Alexa and Google Assistant? It really depends on your personal preferences. Do you listen to Audible, watch Prime Video and tend to do a lot of shopping on Amazon? Then you might lean toward an Alexa-powered product. Do you use a lot of Google services like YouTube and Google Podcasts? A Google-powered device might be best.
If you want a voice assistant that’s great at answering questions, Google Assistant tends to be better than Alexa. Amazon’s helper, on the other hand, currently supports more smart home products. The company’s smart speakers and displays also support the Zigbee smart home protocol, and some devices even have built-in smart home hubs. Both Google and Amazon devices can sync with your calendar, though Google’s tend to work better with Google services. Plus, if you already have an Android phone, you might be more comfortable with Google Assistant anyway.
But what about Siri? Apple’s assistant is an option as well, but it doesn’t have the same level of device support as Google and Amazon. The HomePod mini and the (now discontinued) HomePod are the only Siri-compatible speakers on the market at the moment, too. That said, it’s not too hard to find HomeKit-compatible gear as more third-party companies add support for it, but you currently have a smaller pool of devices to choose from.
Engadget picks
Best smart speaker: Sonos One
Nathan Ingraham
Our recommendation for the best smart speaker is the Sonos One. It’s compact enough to fit in most areas in your home, but more importantly, it delivers excellent audio quality that’s superior to a lot of other smart speakers out there. When tuned properly to the acoustics of your room — which requires the iOS app — the sound is fantastic, with punchy bass and clear highs. Unfortunately, the Android app doesn’t have TruePlay tuning (Sonos has not said whether it’s in the works), but the speakers should still sound admirable. It’s also compatible with a slew of streaming services, including major ones like Spotify and Pandora.
The main benefit that a Sonos speaker brings over the competition is that it’s a gateway to a multi-room audio setup that you can build out over time. It’s also convenient if you plan on building a home theater setup later on, as the One integrates well with Sonos soundbars. On top of that, the Sonos One supports both Alexa and Google Assistant, so you don’t have to worry about picking one voice assistant over the other.
If you’re not interested in a multi-room audio setup, we also like Amazon’s Echo Studio. The price is comparable to the Sonos One and the audio quality is on par, too. As you can imagine, this is an especially compelling choice if you already know you’d prefer Alexa over Google Assistant.
For those with tighter budgets, there are a handful of smart speakers around $100. We recommend picking up one of the three latest smart speakers from either Google, Amazon or Apple. Out of the three, we think the Echo has the best audio quality. Our colleague Nate Ingraham said its bass is impressive and the mid-range frequencies are pretty powerful. You can also pair two together to get even better stereo sound.
That said, the Nest Audio and HomePod mini are no slouches either. The HomePod mini sounds balanced, while the Nest Audio has pretty good bass tones. Again, it all comes down to which assistant you prefer.
The best Alexa-powered smart display is the Echo Show 8. The Echo Show 5 is a little too small, while the Echo Show 10 and its rotating screen take up too much space. The Echo Show 8, on the other hand, is perfectly sized for most rooms in the house. Like other Alexa-powered smart displays, it supports plenty of video streaming services including Amazon Prime, Hulu and Netflix and it comes with a couple of built-in browsers that you can use to surf the web. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support YouTube, which is a pretty notable omission considering how ubiquitous the service is. As a workaround, you can access it via the aforementioned browsers, but the experience isn’t as smooth as if it were a native app.
You can use the Show 8 to make video calls with any phone or tablet with the Alexa app. Alternatively, it supports Skype, Zoom and Amazon’s own Chime service. Like the Nest Hub Max, the Show 8 also has an optional face-tracking feature that follows your movements around the room during a call.
Our favorite Google-powered smart display is the second-generation Nest Hub. It has a 7-inch screen, which makes it just big enough to fit in most rooms in the house. The size also makes it work well as a digital photo frame. You can set it up to pull in pictures of friends and family from your Google Photos library, and there’s a smart algorithm that automatically uses the best shots while avoiding the blurry ones. As you might expect, you can also use the display to watch YouTube, Netflix and other streaming services.
Plus, a smart display without a camera is great if you want to place it in more intimate places like the bedroom, where you might be more protective of your privacy. If you place it by your bedside, the Nest Hub also has a sensor that can track your sleep patterns, if you opt in.
If you prefer a display with a camera, we recommend splurging on the higher-end Nest Hub Max. Its built-in camera can be used for video calls with Google Duo, Google Meet and Zoom. It also has an optional face-tracking feature that lets the camera follow you around during calls. One benefit of the camera is that it gives you the option for Face Match, a feature that automatically recognizes individual members of the house and then displays the information that’s pertinent only to them, like calendar alerts.
Additionally, the camera adds a unique gestures feature that lets you play and pause media simply by holding up your hand to the screen, which is convenient if you need to stop the music without having to shout across the room. The Nest Hub Max also has better audio quality than the Hub thanks to its larger speakers.
One of the easiest entry points to the smart home is to swap out some of your existing light bulbs with smart ones. Smart light bulbs let you control your lighting remotely, either via an app and with your voice. They add automation and scheduling to the mix, so you can have them turn on and off at certain times of the day. Some also let you adjust their brightness and color temperature, or even let you create a custom light scene.
Our favorite smart lighting products come from Philips Hue, and the White and Color Ambiance LED Smart Button Starter Kit is a particularly good entry point as it includes three Philips Hue White and Color Ambiance 60W LED smart bulbs; a Hue hub that lets you control up to 50 lights; and a Smart Button if you want to have the option of turning off the lights without having your phone around.
This kit offers lots of versatility in lighting styles; you can change not just the brightness but also the color temperature and experiment with all different shades of the rainbow, decking out your room in whatever light scene you desire. If that seems a little too daring, Philips offers alternatives: The Hue White Ambiance Starter Kit lacks the color option, while the Hue White Starter Kit won’t let you adjust the color temperature.
The main reason we prefer Philips Hue bulbs is that they’re widely supported across smart home ecosystems. Not only can you find them pretty much anywhere, but they’ll work with Google, Amazon and Apple’s HomeKit. Since all the bulbs connect to the Hue hub via the Zigbee protocol (and not your home’s WiFi), it tends to be more reliable and it won’t slow down your home internet connection either.
If you’re not quite ready to dive into a whole lighting ecosystem or you just prefer a more affordable alternative, we suggest GE’s Cync Full Color Direct Connect Smart LED Bulb. Formerly known as C by GE, these bulbs don’t require a connecting hub: just screw in the bulb, connect it with the app, and you’re done. It, too, offers an array of lighting options in all manner of colors, and you can set schedules as well. Cync’s Direct Connect system works with both Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa, but you’ll need to get a hub if you want to connect to Apple’s HomeKit.
Security cameras are helpful for catching intruders, nabbing porch pirates or just keeping an eye on your pet while you’re out of the house. Our favorite is the Wyze Cam V3 for its wide range of features along with its affordable price. Plus, thanks to its IP65 waterproof rating it can be used either indoors or outdoors, and it has color night vision that’s capable of recording nighttime video in full color.
Like previous-gen models, it sends alerts to your phone whenever it detects sound or motion. You can also customize Motion Detection Zones that allow you to adjust just how sensitive you want it to be. It also offers 24/7 continuous video recording that you can store via a 32GB microSD card (not included).
We especially like that the Wyze doesn’t require a subscription; free cloud storage is included with the purchase, and you’ll always have access to the last 14 days of recording on the app. Be warned, however, that the free account can only hold 12-second clips every five minutes. If you want it to record unlimited motion, consider upgrading to a Cam Plus subscription, which includes additional features like alerting you if it detects a person or a package. Fortunately, it’s inexpensive at $2 a month or $15 a year.
There’s a lot to like about the Wyze Cam V3, but it needs to be plugged in. For a wireless alternative, we like the Blink Indoor and Outdoor cameras. They both run on AA batteries, so you can place them anywhere you want, and they’ll run for around two years before you need to replace the batteries. The Blink Outdoor is weather resistant, but otherwise both cameras are the same. They both have night vision, motion detection and two-way audio. You can store clips in the cloud via the Blink Subscription Plan or you can also save events locally to a Sync Module 2 via a USB flash drive (sold separately). Unfortunately, Blink works with Alexa only, which could be a non-starter for some.
Best doorbell camera: Arlo Essential Video Doorbell
Engadget
If you want a camera specifically for your front door, a doorbell camera makes more sense than a standalone option. Our favorite is the Arlo Essential Video Doorbell, which is compatible with Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa and Apple HomeKit. It delivers high-quality HDR footage along with a 180-degree view so you can see a person from head to toe and it can ring your phone with a video call whenever someone rings the bell. There’s also two-way audio so you can talk to whoever’s at the door.
A highlight of this doorbell is that it comes with a three-month trial to Arlo’s Smart subscription service, which includes a motion detection feature that can tell the difference between a person, package, vehicle or animal. Senior Editor Devindra Hardawar said that he really appreciated the package alerts; it did a good job of telling him whenever UPS dropped off a box. It’s such a useful feature, in fact, that we recommend keeping the service beyond the trial period.
You should be able to use the Arlo Essential Video Doorbell with either Google or Amazon’s smart displays, but it won’t be fully integrated. You’ll be able to view the webcam on the display, but if someone rings the doorbell, they won’t automatically show up on the screen. If you want that particular feature, you’ll have to use either a Google doorbell like the Nest Video Doorbell or an Amazon doorbell like the Blink Video Doorbell (for Google and Amazon displays, respectively).
Our favorite robot vacuum is the iRobot Roomba 694. We recommended it in our budget robot vacuum guide as it did a great job cleaning hard and carpeted surfaces. (We liked the Shark Ion RV761, too, but the Roomba 694 is a newer model.) Plus, the app is really easy to use for luddites and the tech savvy alike. And just in case you don’t have access to the app — maybe you left your phone in another room, for example — the Roomba 694 has manual controls as well.
One of the reasons the Roomba 694 cleans so well is that it has a three-stage system that tells it to suck up dirt while also navigating around obstacles. When it encounters an especially filthy area, it focuses in on it, making sure it’s clean before moving on. You can also manually instruct it to clean a specific spot in case you need it. And if you prefer to talk to your robot vacuum, the Roomba 694 works well with both Alexa and Google Assistant.
If you don’t mind spending more money on an even better robot vacuum, we recommend the Roomba i7+. It cleans both carpet and hard floors well, but it’s quieter and smarter. It has a mapping technology that helps it keep track of all the different rooms in your home to clean it in the most efficient way possible. But the coolest thing about the i7+ is that after each job, it automatically empties its bin into a clean base that can hold about 30 jobs worth of dirt. In short, the i7+ is worth the splurge if you want a robot vacuum that doesn’t require a lot of attention.
Smart plugs are the easiest way to add a bit of connectivity to your home without spending a ton of money. Connect your regular non-smart lamp and voila, it’s internet connected and you didn’t have to spend a fortune. The best one we’ve tried is from Wyze, thanks largely to its easy-to-use app. We were able to fly through the installation process; pairing was seamless and connecting it to WiFi was simple as well. We especially love that it offers two-factor authentication (the rest of the smart plugs we tried did not have this). You can schedule it to go on and off at different times and days. The Wyze Plug works with Alexa, Google Assistant (though you’ll have to go through the Google Home app to pair it) plus the IFTTT service.
Another smart plug option: TP-Link Kasa Smart Wi-Fi Plug Mini
TP-Link
Another solid option is TP-Link’s Kasa Smart Wi-Fi Plug Mini. We didn’t find the app as easy to use — installation was not as seamless as the Wyze — but once you get past that, it’s still just as capable. Just like with the Wyze Plug, you can schedule the plug to turn on and off at certain times and days of the week. On top of that, the Kasa actually offers scheduling around sunrise or sunset times, a feature that the Wyze lacks. It works with Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, IFTTT plus Samsung SmartThings.
It took the better part of a year, but Google Stadia is available on recent LG TVs. Anyone with an LG set running webOS 5.0 or 6.0 (that is, 2020 or newer) can use the cloud gaming service to play Assassin's Creed or Madden without requiring a media device or PC as a go-between. You'll need a compatible gamepad, but that shouldn't be an issue when the Stadia Controller and common console pads should work either wirelessly or through USB.
Not surprisingly, LG suggests one of its OLED TVs for Stadia thanks to the fast pixel response times, low latency and (for Stadia Pro subscribers) 4K HDR visuals. They're certainly not required, though, and it's arguably the lag from game streaming that will make the larger difference.
Stadia is available through the LG Content Store in all 22 countries where the service already exists. You probably won't buy a TV with Stadia in mind, but this significantly widens the number of sets where native support is an option — you might be more inclined to try it if the barrier to entry is that much lower.
Polestar has released an over-the-air update that boosts the Polestar 2's torque and horsepower. It bumps up the EV's oomph to 469 horsepower (an increase of 67hp) and 502 lb. ft of torque, an increase of 15.
In practical terms, Polestar says those upgrades shave around a tenth of a second off the 0-60 MPH acceleration time, which is down to 4.4 seconds. The company suggests the biggest acceleration boost will be found in the mid-range. It claims that going from 50 to 75 MPH will take 2.2 seconds, which is around half a second faster than the typical Polestar 2 setup.
The update isn't free, however. It's available in the Polestar Extras store for eligible cars in the UK, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, Germany and Austria, and it costs around €1,000 ($1,130). Polestar plans to offer the update in the US and Canada in the spring, with pricing to be announced later.
Polestar isn't the only automaker to increase EV performance via over-the-air updates. Tesla has also offeredpaid updates that boost acceleration in some models, such as Model 3 and Model Y.