Tuesday’s top tech news: Hands-on with the HomePod – The Verge

Meta is inexplicably shutting down one of the best Oculus games

2023-01-31T19:17:55-05:00

We've called it a cross between the Battle School from Ender's Game and ultimate frisbee. We've called it Final Fantasy X blitzball meets VR. It made two of our Best VR Games lists - three, if you count the one I did for CNET before returning to The Verge. It convincingly sticks you into a robot body inhabiting a zero-G arena, where you have to use your wrist jets, obstacles, teammates, and even foes to catapult yourself to victory. It even became its own esport.

But now, Echo VR (née Echo Arena) is getting killed off by Meta (née Facebook). Facebook purchased its developer Ready At Dawn in 2020, after making Echo VR one of the flagship gam …

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AMD thinks the PC sales slump will end after one more rough quarter

2023-01-31T18:32:10-05:00

People aren't buying as many computers, and chipmakers are getting hit hard - but AMD thinks that should improve long before the year is out. "The first quarter should be the bottom for us in PCs," AMD CEO Lisa Su said today on the company's Q4 2022 earnings call.

Su predicts that the total addressable market for PCs will shrink 10 percent this year, down to around 260 million units. (IDC reported this month that 292.3 million PCs shipped in 2022, and both IDC and Gartner suggested it might take until 2024 to recover.) Su says AMD is expecting "a softer first half and a stronger second half."

While AMD is predicting that both its client pr …

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Rode added a removable microphone to its headphones

2023-01-31T18:00:00-05:00

Rode’s NTH-100M headset | Image: Rode

Rode is packaging the NTH-100 headphones with a headset microphone for broadcast, streaming, and other voice operations and calling it the NTH-100M.

There is virtually no difference between last year's NTH-100s and the new $189 NTH-100M outside of the new removable boom microphone and the required TRRS cable for allowing devices to utilize the microphone, but it's a welcome addition to the crowded headphone space.

One feature from the NTH-100s that stood out among other media production headphones was the dual-sided cable attachments, which could be plugged into either the right or left ear cup. The clever modularity here allows those sa …

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Custom build turns the Framework Laptop into a triple-screen powerhouse

2023-01-31T17:42:42-05:00

Open for business. | Image: DIY Perks

The Framework Laptop has been a godsend for DIYers. Not only does the modular design allow for quick and easy repair, but the swappable mainboard is a robust platform for all sorts of bizarre builds. Tons of tinkerers have used the modular mainboard design to create their own cyberdeck designs. You don't even need to buy the whole laptop to do it!

DIY Perks has taken that to the next level with this triple-screen laptop build. Unsatisfied with the lack of screen real estate and poor ergonomics in most laptops, they used their skills to cobble together a portable cyberdeck workstation.

The Framework mainboard, some elbow grease, 3D Printing, and a tiny bit of soldering. | Photo: DIY Perks" data-portal-copyright="Photo: DIY Perks">

The bill of materials for this is actually pretty strai …

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Twitter ends CoTweets, its collaborative posting feature

2023-01-31T15:59:29-05:00

Twitter is shutting down CoTweets, its collaborative posting feature that was one of the last big product updates introduced before Elon Musk's takeover. A notice was posted on Twitter's help center announcing the end of the feature.

CoTweets allowed two accounts to co-author posts that appeared simultaneously on users' profiles. As of last July, select users in the US, Korea, and Canada were able to use CoTweets after the company began testing the idea last spring. While CoTweets were still limited in rollout, many people anticipated they'd be helpful for brands doing collaborations or announcements.

As of today, users with the feature wo …

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ChatGPT’s creator made a free tool for detecting AI-generated text

2023-01-31T15:57:08-05:00

OpenAI, the company behind DALL-E and ChatGPT, has released a free tool that it says is meant to "distinguish between text written by a human and text written by AIs." It warns the classifier is "not fully reliable" in a press release and "should not be used as a primary decision-making tool." According to OpenAI, it can be useful in trying to determine whether someone is trying to pass off generated text as something that was written by a person.

The tool, known as a classifier, is relatively simple, though you will have to have a free OpenAI account to use it. You just paste text into a box, click a button, and it'll tell you whether it t …

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Hyundai’s Ioniq 6 EV can keep it rolling with its new EPA-estimated 361 miles of range

2023-01-31T15:32:21-05:00

The 2023 Hyundai Ioniq 6. | Image: Hyundai

Hyundai's new Ioniq 6 has had its playdate with the EPA, and now the automaker is revealing that its electric "streamliner" sedan can travel an estimated 361 miles on a full charge. While the calculation is specific to the SE Long Range RWD trim, the AWD version is no slouch, either, with a maximum range of 316 miles.

Compared to the similarly sized RWD version of Tesla's Model 3, the Ioniq 6 SE Long Range RWD could go a whole 89 miles further based on the EPA estimates. Although, Hyundai's AWD version of the Ioniq 6 isn't topping the 358-mile Tesla Model 3 Long Range AWD.

Hyundai is certainly ecstatic about the excellent EPA results for t …

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James Gunn’s DC Universe will debut a new Batman movie, the Green Lantern Corps, and a Booster Gold series

2023-01-31T14:47:38-05:00

We've known for some time that DC Studios co-leads James Gunn and Peter Safran were cooking up a big, bold plan to effectively reset Warner Bros. Discovery's universe of superhero movies in order to get the cinematic franchise back on track in the David Zaslav era. Now, the first details of that plan are starting to be released, and it's sounding a lot like the new DC Universe is going to be going back to the basics as the studio builds to a new future.

Though Gunn and Safran almost certainly have more ideas in the pipeline, Warner Bros. Discovery announced today that five movies and five series will kick off "Chapter 1" of the DC Universe. …

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Microsoft’s post-layoffs Halo studio is smaller and switching to Unreal Engine

2023-01-31T14:01:02-05:00

Halo could look a lot different. | Image: 343 Industries

Halo developer 343 Industries lost at least 95 people due to Microsoft's recent layoffs, and the studio is apparently switching from its proprietary Slipspace engine to Epic Games' widely used Unreal Engine for future games, Bloomberg reports.

The future of Halo has been somewhat up in the air since the layoffs announced on January 18th. Halo Infinite had a strong launch in late 2021, but over time, fans started to get annoyed by frustrations with multiplayer progression, repeated delays to planned features like network campaign co-op and Forge (which finally launched in November), and no indication that new campaign content was imminent.

…

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Apple Music’s Replay 2023 playlist is here to track your favorite songs

2023-01-31T13:26:40-05:00

Excited for my top 10 songs this year to just be the new Boygenius album. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Apple Music users who love having a playlist of their favorite songs rejoice: Apple has made the Replay 2023 playlist available, letting you see which songs you've listed to the most this year. The songs that are on it and their rankings will almost certainly change before the big replay roundup in December, but it's nice to start using it now as a shortcut to playing music you know you'll like.

The playlist has come a bit early this year, as XDA Developers points out. The 2022 version was released around the middle of February. It seems as if Apple is taking the feature a bit more seriously; last year, it apparently decided it should actua …

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