Do you know what a spudger is? I didn’t until I was already fingertips deep into performing open-heart surgery on the Google Pixel Watch 4 and realized that the implement — a plastic stick with one pointy end and one flat end — was already in my hand.
I was following iFixit’s instructions to try to do a full screen replacement on the watch from the comfort of my own home, and spudging, it turned out, was a key part of the process. The spudger is used for pressing, prying, pulling and coaxing the watch’s components in and out of place without damaging the metal elements.
But no sooner had I got to grips with it, when I suddenly had to swap it for a pair of tweezers with pincers sharper than scorpion tails. I wielded them clumsily while trying to peel off a sticker holding the screen connector together. The instructions warned me that in extracting this well-secured scrap of tape, I must be careful not to damage it.
I began to sweat as I tussled with both the sticker and my frustration. If you’ve ever tried to remove chewing gum from your hair, you’ll understand what I mean (though you can’t just fill a smartwatch with peanut butter and hope it still works).
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It’s not exactly like I have experience in the field. Call me an ambitious amateur.
Once, for example, around the age of 10, I helped my dad repair our boxy television set with a soldering iron. On a couple of occasions in recent years, under close supervision from the iFixit team at tech shows, I’ve tinkered with laptops and phones. I never electrocuted myself in physics class while playing with circuits. I’m also pretty good at jigsaw puzzles. That’s basically it.
But I wanted to make a go of it because I fundamentally believe product repairability is important. Extending the lifecycle of products means less waste, less need to constantly mine the Earth for rare minerals and less impact on vulnerable communities around the world, including the use of child labor in dangerous conditions. It also means we can get our money’s worth out of our ever-more-expensive devices.
Increasingly, we have the right to repair our own electronics thanks to regulations that compel companies to design their products for easy repair and to make parts and instructions accessible. But it’s one thing to repair a laptop or even a phone. Wearables — from the laudably compact to the fiendishly tiny — are a whole other degree of difficulty, for both manufacturers and consumers.
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By early 2025, every US state had introduced some form of right-to-repair legislation, with 10 laws currently in effect (you can check your own state here). Meanwhile, in Europe, the EU Right to Repair Directive is set to come into force at the end of July. Theoretically, we should be starting to see repairability and parts availability trickle down into the tech we buy. In reality, progress is painstakingly slow.
“We are kind of at the point where right to repair has passed legally,” says Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, an advocacy group that offers repair guides for high-tech consumer gear and sells tools and replacement parts.
But compliance? It’s “uneven,” Wiens says.
Tiny tech, big problems
As I set out on my repair adventure, I felt pretty intimidated. Not because the stakes are particularly high, but because I’d like to be able to prove that even for me, an idiot with a screwdriver, this is possible. Because if I can do it, so can you.
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The Pixel Watch 4, which came out last year, was an obvious candidate for me to tear down (and then rebuild), because Google has been proactive in making this wearable repairable in a way that no other smartwatch maker has yet attempted.
CNET/Andrew Lanxon
“They kind of swung for the fences early, and they’re out ahead,” says Wiens.
The company reengineered its watch from the ground up, without adhesives, so someone like me could disassemble and reassemble it without breaking it. Possible, that is, but not always straightforward.
Throughout history, watchmakers have been considered artisans as much as they are technicians. Working on watches of all stripes requires dexterity, patience, precision and a steady hand — none of which are qualities I innately possess, nor have I done much to cultivate.
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I could’ve made this process easier for myself by choosing something larger and less fiddly to repair, but at this point in time, there’s a well-established repair ecosystem for phones, laptops and bigger electronics, whether that be local repair shops or cafes, company-led efforts such as Apple’s Genius Bar or support for self-service repair.
Examine the spectrum of iFixit scores, and it’s clear that many phones still pose a challenge — especially the newer foldable variety — but as a category, repairability has improved significantly over the past decade.
The same repair ecosystem and focus on repair from tech companies are not currently in place for wearables.
That’s an issue, because the number of wearables has been skyrocketing as we adorn ourselves with tech to track our sleep and our workouts, to provide the soundtrack to our lives and to observe and record the world around us. I’m talking not only about earbuds and smartwatches, but also newer gadgets, including smart rings, smart glasses and a whole slew of niche (for now, at least) AI peripherals. These items don’t come cheap and ideally will last at least us as long as, if not longer than, our phones. If we can’t repair them, they’ll quickly end up in the trash, adding to the growing mounds of e-waste piling up around the world.
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A study published in Nature last December by researchers from Cornell University and the University of Chicago found that demand for health-focused wearables could approach 2 billion units by 2050. Cumulatively, they have the potential to generate 100 million tons of e-waste, increasing pollution risks to communities worldwide.
By far, the biggest contributor to these devices’ carbon footprint is the production of their printed circuit boards. The researchers concluded that if devices are designed to be modular and repairable, their circuit boards can be reused time and again, extending their lifecycles and reducing the need to constantly mine for new materials.
Here we have both a problem and a solution — so why aren’t tech companies doing more to implement it? For a long time, there’s been a perception that wearable tech is simply impossible to repair, which has led many companies to avoid trying. Instead, they tend to rely solely on recycling and trade-in programs to offset the environmental damage.
When it comes to repairability, wearables pose, without a doubt, “the most challenging frontier of consumer tech,” says Matt White, head of sustainable design at deep tech powerhouse Cambridge Consultants. But it’s a challenge that he has first-hand experience overcoming.
I first met White at CES 2026 in a dimly lit Las Vegas hotel suite with his colleagues. The show is famous for its endless stream of shiny consumer tech launches, but the team brought something very different — a proof-of-concept repairable smartwatch called Ouroboros.
The idea behind the project was to identify the roadblocks to repairability, whether engineering, cultural or legislative. What the team discovered, says White, is that building a truly repairable product requires not only a determination from its inception, but also a commitment to it as a north-star priority throughout the design process.
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“It’s a business transformation, it’s not just a product design transformation,” he says. “That takes a lot of guts, it takes a bit of a leap of faith and a bit of a bet on innovation for companies to do that. I think that the reward is there, but it requires the right kind of mindset.”
CNET/Andrew Lanxon
How Google reinvented the Pixel Watch
Google is already seeing that reward, even though it released the Pixel Watch 4 only last summer.
“The reception after launch has been better than we could have hoped for,” says Francis Hoe, group product manager for Google Pixel Watch.
First up, there was the acknowledgment from iFixit, which awarded the device a 9/10 repairability score, that Google had created the most repairable smartwatch on the market (most watches, like the popular Apple Watch, score 3 or 4 out of 10 at most).
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This was validating, Hoe says, but he also appreciates the way the community of Pixel Watch owners has responded. He says he loves to go on Reddit and see people promoting its serviceability, as well as discussing how easy they found the watch to repair.
“It’s a little surprising,” he says. “But it’s good to see that feedback.”
One such Reddit user who completed a successful repair said the iFixit guide was easy to follow, and it took them less than an hour (much better than my 90 minutes).
“I’m familiar with doing maker projects, soldering, etc, but I think anyone could do this pretty easily,” they said. “I do have small hands, so not sure if that helped.”
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There were some nerves around how people would actually find the process of repairing the device, according to Hoe. And having taken it apart and put it back together again, I can understand why. On the iFixit website, it ranks replacing the screen on the Pixel Watch 4 as “moderate” on the difficulty scale, and says it should take between 30 minutes and one hour.
By the time I tightened the final screws in the Watch, I was about to hit the 90-minute mark. But ultimately, despite the fiddliness of the operation, I completed it.
The remarkable thing about the Pixel Watch 4 is that from the outside, it looks almost identical to the Pixel Watch 3, but the two products share almost no DNA. Even the screws that hold the watch together, one hidden under each watch band, are a new addition. Previously, there was just glue.
The assumption was that once the device was sealed, that would be it, says Hoe. Now that things have to go in and out, both the components and the order in which they’re assembled have been completely rearchitected. Many parts have been shrunk, the haptic engine was swapped for an alternative, and the connectors needed to be extra robust to survive being attached and detached. The battery was a particular challenge.
“If the battery gets smaller, battery life gets worse, and that’s obviously a huge selling point of wearable devices,” says Hoe. “It meant fundamentally changing our battery strategy.”
The last thing Google wanted to do was make any part of the Pixel Watch experience worse for the sake of repairability, whether that be reducing battery life, increasing the device’s size or making it less waterproof.
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Tech companies often use the difficulty of waterproofing as an excuse for not prioritizing modularity and repairability, says Ben Hatton, connected devices analyst at CCS Insight. But the direction of travel is beginning to change.
“Seeing things like the Google Watch and smartphones becoming more repairable, but not sacrificing IP68 and 69 ratings for it, proves that actually that’s not really a compromise that has to be made,” he says. “That major argument against preventing water ingress is starting to be maybe debunked a little bit.”
Those IP ratings indicate resistance to dust and water infiltration. The 6 in the first position indicates the highest level of dust protection, while the 8 or 9 in the second position are high marks for water resistance.
With the Pixel Watch 4 being a sports and fitness device, making it waterproof was a nonnegotiable, says Hoe. Again, this was previously accomplished with adhesives, which aren’t compatible with self-repair, so they had to experiment with alternatives.
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The Pixel Watch 4 does come with an IP68 rating, and I got to see first-hand how Google has used O-rings — donut-shaped rubber bands — to create a tight, leak-free seal on both the external screws and around the screen. Getting the tiny O-rings back on the 2mm screws was another tricky part of the reassembly process for me, like playing an ant-size game of Hoopla, but it will be essential if I’m ever to wear the watch in the shower.
Given the potentially dicey trade-offs, many companies would’ve thrown in the towel on repairability. White, who has worked on many different products over the years, says he’s seen multiple times when companies set out to make something repairable but abandon that design principle when it might hold up a project.
“Keeping it sacred is very, very hard when you know engineering teams are getting pressure that you know this has to be released next month in order to hit this milestone and that milestone,” he says. “Then, it’s the first thing in the firing line.”
For Google, repairability eventually won out in internal debates.
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“Every time that there’s an inflection point of trade-offs that have to be made, I think we always try to come back to the user and what are we hoping to deliver with this product,” Hoe says. “The trend is usually people are using the devices longer and longer, so it wasn’t something that we wanted to walk away from.”
Fairphone
Fairbuds mount a challenge to the industry
When it comes to challenging the status quo, no one in consumer tech is doing it quite like Fairphone. The Dutch social enterprise is best known for its sustainable, repairable smartphones — the mere existence of which throws down the gauntlet to the entire industry, including giants such as Apple and Samsung.
Around 2021, the company decided to branch out into audio products and has since released a series of products, most notably the Fairbuds, which are earbuds, and the Fairbuds XL, which are over-ear headphones.
Perhaps because they’re so small, often relatively inexpensive and viewed as a peripheral rather than a device in their own right, people tend to treat headphones as disposable. You’ve probably had at least one pair of headphones break, but did you think to try to repair them?
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If your answer is no, don’t feel ashamed. There’s been a long-held belief that headphones are impossible to repair. That’s just started changing.
It’s only in the past few years that iFixit has been handing out repairability scorecards to wireless earbuds, and only in May that it started marking headphones. In both categories, only one company has managed a perfect 10/10 score.
This Fairbuds XL, in particular, is the company’s “most fun” to repair, says Chandler Hatton, Fairphone’s CTO. “It’s a little bit chunkier, and you can feel a little bit more comfortable taking it apart.”
Earbuds, meanwhile, posed a trickier challenge. Our ears aren’t typically load-bearing body parts, so there’s a trade-off between weight and battery size. The small batteries inevitably burn out sooner than we’d like, so we end up chucking them and buying new ones.
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“The way that we combat it is to make it super simple to upgrade it to the point that it would be quite silly to throw it away, because you realize: Hey, this thing that I have is valuable, and I can very easily purchase something for very little money and spend 5 minutes putting it into this device,” says Hatton.
Giving a device a second or even third life can prevent a piece of tech from ending up gathering dust in a drawer, he adds, noting the sense of confusion many people feel when they don’t want to admit they might never use something again.
Ultimately, to build repairable tech, you do need to start with repairability as a design principle, says Hatton. If every component needs to be soldered to a printed circuit board, you’re asking people to do too much to repair it. Instead, you need to take a modular approach and ensure the most commonly replaced components are actually accessible.
Another major benefit of making a device modular and repairable is that it can be backward compatible. When Fairphone launched the latest version of the Fairbuds XL, it made the new driver available so people with the earlier model could upgrade their headphones without buying a whole new pair.
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It’s important to the company to make tech that’s also appealing and affordable, says Hatton. She doesn’t want to ask people to compromise on their design and comfort standards. Repairability can’t come at the cost of an avant-garde product that might alienate people and make them less willing to take a chance on a smaller brand.
“We want to build on the things that are already there and be part of the conversation, part of the ecosystem and part of the trends that are going on,” says Hatton.
CNET/Andrew Lanxon
When repairability becomes an obligation
For now, companies, including Fairphone and Google, are leading by example, but at some point that example might form the basis of a legal precedent.
Europe’s battery regulation, which will come into force in 2027, requires most portable consumer electronics to have easily user-replaceable batteries. Just as the EU regulation mandating USB-C charging made it the global charging standard, it’s expected that the new rules will affect the design and repairability of products worldwide.
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There are exemptions for devices where battery access would compromise water resistance, or for ultra-compact designs where physical constraints make safe battery access impossible. But these exceptions exist for only as long as there’s nothing in the state of the art — or in the market — that proves it’s possible to make a battery accessible or waterproof after all, says White, the consultant.
Now that Google has shown it’s possible to make a smartwatch with an IP68 rating and a user-replaceable battery, that could shift what’s considered state-of-the-art.
“Whether it be for a ring or whether it be for smart glasses or whether it be for headphones, it’s a real opportunity for companies to go… this is now the state of the art, and everyone else has to follow,” says White. “You can use it as a tool to enact change across the entire sector, and also gain all of the benefit of being the first one to do it.”
With both regulation looming and product precedents being set, there is enormous potential for tech companies to force competitors to raise their own game by developing replaceable battery solutions first. If you hold a licensable patent for such a solution, it could even prove profitable.
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European regulators might be slow, but their power shouldn’t be underestimated. Even Apple switched its proprietary Lightning port to USB-C on all the iPhones it sells globally.
Apple has made significant strides in repairability, says iFixit’s Wiens, who has publicly and successfully exerted pressure on the company over the years.
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“They really, genuinely, I think, do believe in repair and making it last longer,” he says. “Broadly, the iPhone does last a long time, and it’s great resale value.”
He’s less impressed when it comes to the Apple Watch and AirPods. (Versions of the latter consistently receive a 0/10 iFixit score, and Wiens describes the lack of repairability as “egregious.”)
The Apple Watch, meanwhile, poses a “fixable design problem,” says Wiens. One of the main issues — prevalent across the industry, especially with games consoles — is the availability of parts and manuals, which Wiens sees as lacking when it comes to the watch.
He directs me to a letter sent by Apple to the Minnesota attorney general in February and posted on Reddit, in which the company points to its online Self Service Repair store as proof of its compliance with the state’s right-to-repair law regarding the Apple Watch. This resource contains documentation and opportunities to buy parts for many Apple products, but not the Apple Watch.
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A spokesperson for Apple said the company meets the requirements of Minnesota’s right-to-repair law, and that it’s the first smartphone maker to support a push for federal right-to-repair regulation.
The miniature design of the Apple Watch presents challenges, but the company is rolling out same-unit battery repair service for a growing number of models over an expanding range of regions. Display repairs for certain models are also under development, as are further enhancements to overall Apple Watch repairability.
“We’ve seen big improvements from Apple and almost market-leading improvements in some respects,” says Ben Wood, chief analyst at market research firm CCS Insight, who cites an easily delaminated glue the company invented to simplify iPhone disassembly. It’s the kind of thing that could be rolled down to the Apple Watch and other small products to increase ease of repair.
Wood adds that he wouldn’t be surprised, especially given Apple’s progress in cutting emissions associated with the manufacture of recent Apple Watch models, to see a more easily repairable Apple Watch in the near future.
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Quinten Klein
Emerging wearables: No repairability in sight
While the established players in established wearable product categories are taking active strides toward sustainability, the same can’t be said for the up-and-comers.
Quinten Klein, a 30-year-old business development and operations contractor, dangles a pair of first-generation Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses in front of his camera from his home in Los Angeles.
“If you can see in here, I’ve taken off one of the arms,” he says, as the inside edge of one of the glasses stems flaps open.
This is the fourth pair of Meta Ray-Bans Klein has tinkered with, he tells me. The speakers on his first pair of Ray-Bans broke out of warranty, prompting him to take matters into his own hands. Reddit is filled with complaints from people just like him, who have been left with a non-functioning pair of smart glasses relatively soon after buying them.
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“They’re definitely fragile,” Klein says. “They’re not easy to repair — not because the job isn’t easy, [but] because things just don’t work once you repair it. Things don’t go back together right, and it’s packed tightly. It’s one of those things where they’ve obviously designed it never to be opened up again.”
On the Gen 1s he shows me over the video call, he’d replaced the battery with one from the Ray-Bans Gen 2. This time, he’s been extra careful not to cause any serious damage so that he can keep on using them rather than have them be another sacrifice to repairability science.
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“You’re still going to end up damaging some little parts, like the bottoms here — the plastic is just so soft,” he says. “The glue, once you’ve broken it off, it’s really hard to get off of the little plastic edges. It’s definitely not something that I would recommend to any casual user.”
Once he was in, the battery on the Gen 1 glasses was actually pretty easy, says Klein. The front half of the glasses’ arm nearest to the lenses is very simply organized and connected (the back half, where the speakers reside, is more of a mystery).
“It’s the putting it back together part and the reliability once it’s together part that is not really there,” he says.
This is something I relate to from my tinkering with my Pixel Watch 4. The reassembly was by far the most fraught part of the process. “I’m not sure what kind of glue they used, but I’ve been trying to work with different industrial glues to copy it,” says Klein.
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Smart glasses (especially those without screens) are currently experiencing explosive popularity, with research published by IDC this week showing 167% year-on-year growth in the first three months of 2026. Let’s hope those 2.25 million units stand the test of time.
“It could turn into an e-waste nightmare if there’s not due consideration designed into these things,” says White.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Meta is the market leader in smart glasses, with over 69% market share, according to IDC. No other company currently boasts more than 3.5%, but several promising challengers are poised to enter the fray with competitive products.
Glasses from Google, Samsung, Gentle Monster, Warby Parker and Xreal are all on the verge of hitting the shelves. Meanwhile, the Alibaba Qwen smart glasses I tried at MWC in Barcelona in March had swappable batteries on the ends of the arms — the first hint of any repairability we’ve seen in this emerging product category.
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Thanks to his intrepid approach to DIY repair, Klein has shown that if you can get inside the Meta Ray-Bans and close them up again, battery repair is not only possible but straightforward. But access to the device’s innards is so prohibitive that in an iFixit teardown, the team deemed the glasses “unrepairable.”
The generous way to think about this is to acknowledge that it is new technology and that Meta is still figuring it out.
“You’re packing a considerable amount of tech into a crazy, already predetermined form factor that you can’t deviate much from,” says Carsten Frauenheim, iFixit’s global head of design for repairability. “Their engineering challenge is high, and I think their priority is just tackling that right now.”
Wiens has a more take-no-prisoners attitude. “Glasses are hard — we’re at the bleeding edge of this,” he says. “But come on, you’ve got to find a way to make the battery swappable on these smart glasses, otherwise it’s a disposable product. … I’m going to continue to hold their feet to the fire until they get the battery repairable.”
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A spokesperson for Meta said the company was always looking for ways to improve the overall lifecycle of its products, focusing on durability and longevity as key considerations during hardware development. The company follows circular economy principles, including “reusing hardware components, increasing the use of recycled materials and responsible supply chain practices,” they said.
“We have several programs in place to keep devices in use and out of landfill,” they added. “We also offer refurbished products where available, extending the lifecycle of existing hardware.” Lenses are fully replaceable and customers, having trouble with warrantees should reach out to Ray-Ban or Oakley customer support directly.
Compared with upcoming interlopers into the glasses game, such as Google, Samsung and potentially Apple, Meta has relatively little hardware manufacturing experience, which could put it at a disadvantage. It’s likely that they’ll include some of the learnings from making other products in their portfolios repairable, Hatton says. “Maybe that could steer Meta into a more sustainable outlook.”
Other makers of wearables, including smart rings and AI peripherals such as pendants and clips, don’t appear to be doing much better — though there are signs of hope.
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Earlier this year, smart ring maker Oura filed for a patent in the US with a replaceable battery design. The company hasn’t commented further on this, and there was no such component in the Oura Ring 5, which debuted in May, but it still feels promising at a time when very few companies designing emerging wearable products seem to have repair on their agendas at all.
For those, such as Wiens, who are campaigning for the right to repair, the lack of care and attention being given to repairability by companies experimenting with new product categories is ultimately dispiriting.
“I get we’re excited with the shiny new, but you can’t go and mine a hole in the Earth every day of raw materials, get stuff made by children … then drag the supply chain all around the world to make something that we’re going to sell to you for $400, and then it stops working in 18 months,” he says. “This is not OK. It should not be ethically tolerated.”
In the face of unrepairable products, companies only have trade-in and recycling schemes to fall back on. Both Meta and Oura offer these, but in the long run, they won’t meet the requirements of right-to-repair legislation, and it’s hard to measure how thorough any recycling truly is.
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CNET/Andrew Lanxon
Our role in repair
All of this brings me back to my own attempts to repair the Pixel Watch.
It’s all well and good for companies to invest in making their products easily repairable and recyclable, but the onus is also on us, as consumers of those products, to follow through by repairing or recycling. If we leave them in a drawer for years gathering dust — something I’ve been guilty of doing — or dispose of them irresponsibly, we’re not playing our part in keeping the circular economy a true circle.
In a survey last year by the University of Bradford in northern England, researchers found that 73% of people were willing to repair their electronics. The majority were motivated by cost savings and the fun of a DIY project.
Those who were reluctant to repair their tech cited lack of skills, tools, knowledge and time as major barriers. Lack of time is a personal issue and often a matter of priorities and perception. As for the other three, iFixit and other self-service repair stores, including Apple’s, have people covered.
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Still, for many of us, a psychological shift might be required to add a repair chapter to the story of our ownership of any given item. If we can make this shift, we might be able to find the time after all. We’re out of practice right now — most of us don’t spend our evenings sitting in front of the TV darning our own socks.
Tech companies could also do more to hold our hands through this process, says White. “There’s an opportunity there in not just the raw engineering design, but in the messaging, in the [user experience] of the product, in little touch points within the product that kind of nudge or guide the consumer to understand either how to repair their products or what to do with it at the end of life.”
Our consumer culture is one of abundance, so the skills and inclination to fix and mend have been replaced by the ease of disposing of and replacing. But if we can get out of that habit, there may be untapped and unacknowledged benefits in repairing our broken things.
Consider the Ikea Effect, a term coined in 2011 by three academics from Harvard, Yale and Duke who published the results of three studies in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. Together, their findings showed that people tend to cherish items they’ve built themselves, placing much higher value on them than on items they’ve simply purchased.
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Most of us are familiar with the feeling of satisfaction of completing a Lego set, for example, as well as the way we tend to value the finished product — often not wanting to tear it down, but instead displaying it somewhere we can admire it. Our effort creates attachment, and the same might well be true of items we successfully repair.
Tech companies can help make repairs more fun for us, too. At every step of the journey, the Pixel Watch team had to think about what people would experience if they went fishing around under the hood. That meant not just making it easy to take apart, but making it aesthetically pleasing.
“We’re not thinking about just the outside, but how do we drive the inner beauty of the device, so that when you’re taking it apart, it feels like something we considered,” says Hoe. He points to the printed Google branding on the battery’s metal, the way the components line up to create a smooth surface, and the lack of sharp edges. “It wasn’t an afterthought, essentially,” he says.
We could well start to see our technology not simply as utilitarian items destined sooner rather than later for the rubbish heap, but instead as something partially crafted by our own hand, into which we have poured time, labor and care. We might subsequently make more effort to keep our tech safe and give it a responsible send-off when it finally does take its last gasp.
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Likewise, handholding us through our confusion over what to do with our broken products is a way for tech companies to establish goodwill among customers.
“It’s a really great opportunity for the brand to build loyalty and stickiness,” says White. “In my mind, it feels like a win-win.”
The legacy of the Pixel Watch, says Hoe, is that it’s already proven people do actually care about repairability.
I found my experience of replacing the Pixel Watch’s screen both deeply fun and satisfying. It also massively boosted confidence in my own capabilities. Having completed one repair, I now feel less intimidated at the thought of getting out my screwdriver, my tweezers and, yes, my spudger to crack open more of my damaged tech.
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There’s one particularly pricey pair of headphones sitting in a drawer that is calling to me. I’ve been putting off dealing with them, but they’re already broken. It’s at this point that I have to ask myself, what’s the worst that could happen?
The problem with letting an AI agent loose inside a company is not that it might forget who it is. It is that it has no reason to hold back.
A human employee is restrained by the fear of being fired. An agent, as one investor in Arcade.dev put it, “will exhaustively exploit every permission it inherits” to reach its goal. Arcade has raised $60mn to make sure that, by design, it cannot.
The Series A was led by SYN Ventures, with strategic cheques from Morgan Stanley and Wipro. Added to a $12mn seed last year, it brings the San Francisco startup to $72mn in total funding.
Identity is easy. Authorisation is the wall
Most companies can already verify that an agent is what it claims to be. What they cannot do, according to Arcade chief executive Alex Salazar, is prove that a given agent, acting for a given user, is allowed to perform a given action on a given system.
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“Agents don’t fail in production because the model is wrong,” Salazar said. “They fail because nobody can prove” who is authorised to do what. That gap, he argues, is why so many corporate agents never leave the pilot stage.
Salazar, a former Okta product leader who once sold a startup to the identity firm, built Arcade with chief technology officer Sam Partee, formerly of Redis.
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The accidental product
Arcade did not set out to build this. Its first product was an agent that diagnosed misbehaving servers and databases, which required sweeping super-user access. “No one in their right mind was going to actually let us do that in the real world,” Salazar said.
So the team split the model’s reasoning from the layer that actually touches tools, and built the part that decides which tools the agent may use. Nobody was excited about the diagnostic agent. Everybody who understood AI was excited about the authorisation layer. Arcade dropped the agent and kept the plumbing.
Plumbing for the agent era
That plumbing now hangs off Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, the emerging standard for connecting models to tools like email and internal APIs, to which Arcade says it has contributed. Its runtime checks each request against an organisation’s real permissions, can run inside a customer’s own environment, and logs every action so a company can tell an agent’s move apart from a human’s.
Salazar’s argument for why a control layer has to sit outside the agent is the oldest one in enterprise risk: the thing taking an action never gets to authorise itself. Traders don’t approve their own trades. A smarter model, he says, doesn’t change that, and because most companies run several models at once, the control layer has to be neutral to all of them rather than owned by any one vendor.
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It lands amid a rush of startups selling ways to put AI agents to work and, increasingly, to fence them in. Arcade frames the incumbents as solving the wrong problem, with API gateways routing traffic and identity tools proving who you are, when the question is what an agent may do, on which system, right now. Its bet is that the boring layer underneath is where the durable business sits.
The catch
For now this is a roughly 40-person company that still has to scale and defend its turf in a field filling up fast. Several of its headline proof points, production use at the world’s largest banks, a 25-fold jump in usage, thousands of prebuilt tools, are Arcade’s own figures rather than independently verified.
The underlying argument, though, is hard to dismiss. As agents start acting on systems no single person fully understands, the question of what they are permitted to touch stops being a policy document and becomes infrastructure. Arcade is betting it owns that infrastructure.
AI drug discovery is so last year, even though it hasn’t accomplished much yet
In order to move more semiconductor manufacturing onshore, the US needs to depend less on foreign-sourced materials. Now, the government is giving an Alphabet spinoff $500 million in CHIPS Act funds to find domestic minerals, molecules, and chemicals needed for this process.
SandboxAQ (that’s AI and Quantum, for those wondering), which spun off from Alphabet in 2022 under the chairmanship of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, announced the award Wednesday. The company won’t be doing any manufacturing – this is just an R&D grant to turn the startup’s AI simulation software toward discoveries necessary to build a domestic chip industry.
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According to SandboxAQ, the $500 million awarded to it by the Department of Commerce will go toward developing “novel molecules and formulations for semiconductor manufacturing,” including chip production materials that are free of PFAS (“forever chemicals”), new semiconductor fabrication catalysts, magnets that don’t rely on foreign-sourced neodymium and other rare earths, and fab-powering batteries that don’t rely on majority foreign-sourced materials like lithium.
The CHIPS and Science Act, signed into law by President Biden in 2022, was designed in part to dole out $52 billion to US firms to reignite domestic semiconductor manufacturing, which has mostly fled the country for more favorable production environments overseas. Four years on, the government’s many investments have seen some payoff, like the acquisition of a 10 percent stake in Intel to help keep the company afloat, but there’s still a lot of work to be done to reduce dependence on foreign supply chains and manufacturers.
SandboxAQ relies its own large quantitative models (LQMs), which it describes as “AI systems trained on the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, not human language.” That, the company asserts, means they’re well-suited to discover new materials needed to eliminate harmful PFAS and foreign-sourced materials from the semiconductor supply chain.
The hope is that the LQMs will be able to generate their own material predictions that researchers then test in the lab – essentially the same process that’s undergirded the years-long effort to use AI to help synthesize new drugs.
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Despite AI industry leaders prognosticating we’d be popping AI-designed drugs in 2025, AI has yet to design a functional medicine, according to the US National Institutes of Health. Why, then, should we presume an AI will succeed at replacing critical battery and chip manufacturing components where drug research has failed?
In fact, according to SandboxAQ’s announcement, its LQMs aren’t even necessarily grounded in real-world data. They rely in part on synthetic data, which is then fed into the company’s LQMs and used to train their design-make-test workflows.
A company spokesperson told The Register in an email that it still uses real-world data where possible.
“Where experimental data exists, we incorporate it,” SandboxAQ told us. “Where it doesn’t, we can still move forward and solve the problem.”
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When asked whether an error in the reasoning process could compound, leading to considerable lost time for researchers and a lack of results, the company admitted that such a potential is exactly what “any rigorous AI-driven materials program has to answer.”
“Our models are trained on the laws of physics and chemistry, so they are anchored to physical reality, rather than free to drift,” the spokesperson told us, adding that lab testing is the final check on AI accuracy. “A material either performs in the lab, or it doesn’t, and that validation gate is precisely what prevents a chain of reasoning from running away with itself.”
SandboxAQ added that it is not starting from zero in any of the four target areas, having done previous work on catalysts, battery materials, alloy discovery, and PFAS breakdown that will be incorporated into its CHIPS Act-funded work.
“In commercial deployment, we’ve already cut development timelines from months to weeks” at the candidate screening stage, the SandboxAQ spokesperson explained. SandboxAQ said that some of the work it’s doing, like PFAS mitigation, could be rolled out to existing fabs, as could new batteries and the like, but it admitted that the various verticals will operate on different timelines.
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“Qualification in the semiconductor industry is genuinely rigorous and does take time – we wouldn’t minimize that – but the path runs through validation and industrial qualification with existing manufacturers, not through standing up new fabrication capacity from scratch,” SandboxAQ told us. ®
The company was recognised for its work in e-commerce advertising for Meta and Google promotions.
Belfast-based technology company Karb AI has come away from the 2026 UK StartUp Awards with the Digital Startup of the Year title for Northern Ireland (NI). The ad optimisation tool for e-commerce brands and agencies was recognised for an ‘AI layer’ that impacts how e-commerce advertises for Meta and Google promotions.
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Established in 2025 by Karthik Bangalore Rajendra Prasad, Karb AI enables e-commerce platforms to audit, optimise and scale digital advertising. Its flagship product is an AI decision layer for e-commerce Meta ads.
The UK StartUp Awards, which were founded by Prof Dylan Jones Evans aim to celebrate the ambition and resilience of the entrepreneurs driving the economy. As the NI winner, Karb AI will progress to the UK StartUp Awards national final to be held on 9 September at Ideas Fest in Champneys Tring in Hertfordshire, an event projected to attract 6,000 founders, investors and leaders.
Commenting on the win, Prasad said: “Winning the Digital Startup of the Year for Northern Ireland is a significant milestone for us as we approach our first anniversary. Our mission is to empower e-commerce brands with AI-driven insights that simplify complex advertising decisions and this recognition from the UK StartUp Awards validates the many benefits we’re already delivering for digital marketers and e-commerce companies.”
In other start-up news, earlier this week University College Dublin’s Nax Bioscience and Trinity College Dublin’s Imragen were awarded the top spot at the inaugural Irish Genomics Business Plan Competition, an initiative established to identify and support high-potential genomics-focused start-ups and research ventures in Ireland’s life sciences ecosystem.
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Both Nax Bioscience and Imragen were selected as the winners in recognition of their innovative genomics-driven technologies and strong commercial potential.
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Knowing absolutely nothing about you other than the fact that you’re currently reading Hackaday, I can predict with a high degree of certainty that we’re both fond of at least a few of the same movies. That’s not to say they’re necessarily our favorite works of art. Indeed, in some cases they may even be objectively bad films. But the memory of them has stuck with us — and by extension nearly everyone else in the hacker and maker community — for decades.
Even if you don’t remember all the little details, you’ll never forget the names: movies like WarGames, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, and Short Circuit. Stories that showed smart people using their intellect and a bit of cobbled together hardware to triumph over the bad guys. The tech wasn’t always believable, sometimes it was downright farcical. But they made it seem real, and by the end of the story when they won the day using brains and a soldering iron rather than fists or a gun, the minutia of how it all worked wasn’t really that important anyway.
It’s not a stretch to say that films such as these helped put many of us on a path towards science and technology. For those with an interest in more cerebral pursuits, seeing a scientist or an engineer save the day was hugely influential. How many engineers got their start watching Scotty frantically eke just a bit more power out of the Enterprise?
But as we recently discussed some of these classic movies behind the scenes here at Hackaday, it struck us that all of the best examples we could come up with were now 20, 30, or even 40 years old. That’s not to say there aren’t a few contemporary standouts, but they mostly seem to be biopics or other historical dramatizations which don’t quite scratch the same itch. Even so, none of them appear to have had the cultural impact necessary to stand the test of time in the same way their predecessors have.
So where have all of Hollywood’s heroic nerds gone, and what does it mean for future generations if these niche role models are no longer represented?
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Evil Geniuses and Thick Glasses
Before we get lost down memory lane, we should acknowledge that there’s undoubtedly an element of survivorship bias at play here. We naturally identify with the examples that put techie types on a pedestal, and tend to forget about the less flattering portrayals. In truth, it seems that there’s was only a short period of time in which the classic “nerd” characters got promoted from comedic sidekick roles to protagonists. Before that, and arguably after, it’s a different story.
In the early days, the archetype of the “Mad Scientist” was extremely pervasive. From the 1940s up until the 60s or so, you’d be hard pressed to find a drive-in that wasn’t showing the latest hideous creature pieced together by an unscrupulous doctor. But it wasn’t a concept limited to horror and science fiction. After all, MI6 wasn’t in the habit of dispatching James Bond to defeat drooling imbeciles. Whether they knew how to build killer robots or were titans of industry, the smartest person in the room was often seen as the most dangerous.
In a way, that was still less insulting than the alternative. If a scientist wasn’t trying to forcibly transplant somebody’s brain, they probably had a pocket protector, horn-rimmed glasses, unkempt hair, and buck teeth. My sincere apologies to any readers who may currently meet that description. They might not have been the “bad guy” in the traditional sense, and may even have ended up helping out the heroes in their own way, but nobody was looking at the screen and wishing they were the one with the lisp and the lab coat.
A particularly notable case is The Nutty Professor, in which Jerry Lewis portrays the quintessential nerd who uses his knowledge of chemistry to create a confident and suave alter-ego for himself in the style of Jekyll and Hyde. To be fair, the movie ultimately makes a statement about being true to yourself and the importance of what’s on the inside. But ironically, more than 60 years later, the imagery of Lewis hamming it up as a socially awkward intellectual is undeniably the film’s most indelible element.
The Era of Golden Geeks
At the dawn of the 80s, things started to change. You still had the classic bespectacled nerd, but increasingly films started to put greater focus on their skills and abilities. The “geeks vs jocks” trope became very popular, perhaps most famously exemplified by the Revenge of the Nerds franchise which managed to wring four films out of the concept.
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Now a new breed of nerd started to emerge in film that was young, charismatic, and handsome. The only thing that identified Matthew Broderick’s character in WarGames as anything other than a normal teenager in 1983 was the fact that he had a computer in his bedroom and knew how to program it. Steve Guttenberg played a heartthrob roboticist in Short Circuit, and they really screwed the curve up for the rest of us when they cast Val Kilmer as a laser prodigy in Real Genius. The nerds even started to find love, and one wonders how many young men spent their evenings furiously flipping switches on the front panel of their IMSAI 8080 in hopes that a breathless Ally Sheedy might appear in their doorway with an urgent mission that needed their unique expertise. I don’t know about anyone else, but I still haven’t given up hope.
Find somebody that looks at you the way Val Kilmer looks at a six-megawatt excimer laser.
Even school-age kids were getting in on the action. In 1985, Explorers featured a trio of youngsters who built their own spacecraft after assembling a circuit board based on a schematic they collectively dreamt about. The same year saw the release of The Goonies, and while only one of the kids was a tech wiz, they were all clearly meant to be somewhat off-center socially.
Of course, the most famous and culturally relevant example of 1980s nerds using their tech skills to save the day is Ghostbusters. Three 30-something scientists not only determine the physical properties of supernatural entities through empirical research, but also design and construct the equipment necessary to combat them. The resulting “Proton Pack”, which brilliantly captured the look and feel of a piece of hardware hastily thrown together from scavenged parts, became what is arguably the most iconic prop in cinema history. Not only has it been lovingly and reverently recreated by hackers and makers countless times since the movie’s release in 1985, but not a Halloween goes by that you won’t see at least one strapped to the back of a child.
What’s a Nerd, Anyway?
There’s little question that the 1980s represent the high-water mark for nerds in media, but it’s not as if somebody flipped a switch and it all ended at once. There are a few standouts from the early 1990s, with Sneakers coming immediately to mind. It not only meets all of the criteria we’ve discussed here, it’s legitimately an excellent film with an incredible cast. If you haven’t already, please go watch Sneakers.
But for all the hate it’s gotten over the years, I’d also give the nod to Hackers. With a reminder that technical accuracy was never one of the criteria, it absolutely ticks the proper boxes when it comes to young, competent people using their technical skills for good. Plus, if Kilmer raised the bar for hot hackers in film, Angelina Jolie sent it into orbit.
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Although the aesthetic benefit that Jolie’s character brings to the film is beyond contestation, it’s important to note that Hackers presents her as exceptionally skilled, with abilities that meet or exceed those of her male peers. The fact that those abilities are accepted by every character in the film without question is a testament to how the audience’s expectations were changing at the dawn of the 2000s. The boys in Revenge of the Nerds might have been able to get away with a panty raid in 1984, but by 1995, the girls were popping shells with the best of them.
That said, those evolving standards may be the reason these type of movies seem to be so uncommon today. Given the expectations and the technical proficiency of the average moviegoer in 2026, what exactly would a nerd hero actually look like? The nerd stereotypes from the Nutty Professor era would be all but completely unrecognizable to modern audiences, and while one could argue that the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are getting uncomfortably close to real-life Bond villains, that’s taking us in the wrong direction.
The reality is, it will take more than a teenager with a computer to captivate audiences today. Or to put it another way, if everyone in the theater is at least a little bit of a nerd to begin with, it’s much more difficult to create that mystique on the screen without taking the story to fantastical lengths.
Or at least, that’s one possibility. We’d love to hear your thoughts on the past, present, and future of nerds in the media. Will we ever see the likes of Real Genius and WarGames again, or has the world simply moved on? Are nerds normal?
Samsung has finally opened pre-orders for the high-end Galaxy XR headset in the UK ahead of release on 8th July, following its release in the States in October 2025.
The launch marks Samsung’s first major step into mixed reality hardware, with Galaxy XR developed in partnership with Google and Qualcomm. It is also the first device to ship in the UK with Android XR, Google’s new extended reality platform, which means tight integration with familiar Google services as well as compatibility with existing Android apps.
The headset runs on Android XR and centres its feature set on multimodal AI interactions that allow users to navigate virtual and real environments through voice, vision and gesture controls. Samsung says the software experience will feel familiar to existing Galaxy users too, with an interface influenced by One UI.
Google’s suite of services sits at the core of the experience, with Gemini available as an in-headset assistant for contextual queries, Google Maps offering immersive 3D exploration with personalised location suggestions, and YouTube providing access to a library of 180 and 360-degree VR content alongside a spatial tab for 3D-converted videos.
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Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)
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You can also use apps such as Chrome, Gmail, Netflix and Paramount Plus in floating windows, giving the headset a broader productivity and entertainment pitch than simple VR content consumption.
A Circle to Search feature extends that discovery layer into the physical world, letting users draw a circle in the air around any real-world object in pass-through mode to trigger an instant search result without removing the headset. Gemini integration also goes beyond simple voice assistance, with the ability to ask questions about what you are seeing around you or to use AI-guided help while exploring places in Google Maps.
The Galaxy XR is built around dual 4K Micro-OLED displays, with Samsung saying each panel is roughly postage-stamp-sized. It runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 Plus Gen 2 platform, which the company says delivers around 20% faster CPU performance and roughly 15% stronger GPU performance than the standard XR2 Gen 2 chip. Samsung has also equipped the headset with 16GB of memory and 256GB of storage, while support extends to 4K per eye at up to 90fps.
For mixed reality use, the headset includes two world-facing cameras for full-HD colour passthrough, six hand-tracking cameras and four eye-tracking cameras, allowing for controller-free navigation in many situations.
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Samsung Galaxy XR is available for pre-order now on the Samsung website, with general sale beginning on 8th July. It will also be available in select Samsung stores in London and Manchester, as well as the KX store.
Pricing starts at £1,699 for the headset itself, while the optional XR controllers cost £249, the travel case is priced at £249, and the smart keyboard costs £90.
There’s something going on over in Microsoft’s Xbox division and it isn’t good. Don’t take my word on that. Apparently the bosses over there are circulating an email to staff talking about how properly fucked everyone is if something doesn’t change soon.
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty just sent an email out to all Xbox employees with a clear, yet terrifying message: “this cannot continue.”
Shared publicly via Xbox Wire, the email paints a picture of a broken division, bogged down by the weight of both years of unsuccessful investments and unchecked excess, and battered by the winds of outside economic forces. Sharma, now having been in charge for 100 days, has made it clear that what she is spearheading is indeed going to be a hard reset, complete with hard decisions that will make or break the division and ripple out through the lives of its thousands of employees.
The letter itself attempts to paint a rosy picture at the outset, but then lays out the challenges. The Xbox division has a 3% margin, which is laughably low. The crises in pricing and availability of computer component parts is out of control and likely to get much worse, thanks in no small part to the bumbling buffoons who currently run the country. Complex internal and vendor relationships have led to communication issues and speed-to-market deficiencies throughout the division. Pretty much everyone agrees that there are mass layoffs coming to the Xbox division as a result of the above. And then there’s this:
We expanded our studio system when we needed a pipeline of content to meet multiple strategies across subscription, streaming, and devices. In the process, we have found ourselves over extended as we executed on changing strategies in a landscape of more readily available content. We are the fortunate stewards of industry-defining franchises that have enormous potential and player demand, but we have not adequately funded them to compete and win. At the same time, as we saw this past weekend at Showcase, a reliable pipeline of first- and third-party exclusives and new IP are critical to our success. We need to reassess the balance between these and our investment priorities for the next 5 years.
There are two, separate things being stated here. Let’s take them in order, because both are important.
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The expansion of the studio system being a problem is absolutely hysterical. Xbox does indeed have a hefty portfolio of studios operating under its ownership. More than half of those studios came over to Microsoft in the Zenimax and Activision Blizzard acquisitions. Both acquisitions came with regulatory challenges, the latter being far more involved from the FTC. Both acquisitions also got past regulators in the courts specifically by being positioned as vertical acquisitions rather than horizontal acquisitions, meaning that there wouldn’t be “efficiency layoffs” as a result of bringing them on board, and that the acquisition would lead to lower prices, better games, and faster development for the gaming public.
Here is the Xbox people themselves saying that it isn’t working and that the sprawl of the studio system itself is having a negative effect on game production.
Oh, and about those layoffs that wouldn’t happen? They began happening in January of ’24, leading the FTC to point out to the court that it had been lied to. Then came the Zenimax studio layoffs in May of ’24 and more Xbox layoffs in July of ’25. All while the current, new Xbox bosses complain that they are overextended in terms of their studio sprawl? Cool.
Then there’s the second half of the quote, in which it appears that the Xbox strategy will return once more to a strategy built in part of stupid, dumbass console exclusives to try to entice people to buy Xbox devices. Matt Booty, Xbox Chief Content Officer, elaborated on this recently in an interview.
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“[We] want people to have a reason to get on board with Xbox,” Booty said. “We want them to have a reason to buy an Xbox reason to be an Xbox fan. At the same time we want to reward all our players that have been with us for a long time. We know that exclusives are important. That’s why we got Gears coming in 2026, Clockwork in 2027.”
He continued, “We also want to be clear, our big multiplayer games, live service, games are going to continue to be multiplatform. If we’ve promised something to players already, we’re going to honor that promise, right? And then we’re going to really, I think Asha said it, we’re going to make the right decision, not the fast decision.”
The Xbox team has never been able to get its story straight on console exclusives. But when you’re clearly running in third place in a console war that consists of 3 consoles, and you’re not particularly competitive at that, trying to coerce your way into console success by holding games hostage to your platform is a recipe for destroying gaming franchises and still losing the console wars.
There’s a very good reason that the trend over the past decade or so has been one of less exclusivity, not more. Getting games out there, particularly when you’re directly publishing a bunch of games because of that same studio sprawl we talked about earlier, is the most important thing for the bottom line. Xbox should want all the games it publishes itself to be on every platform everywhere, in order to maximize sales. Spending money on third-party exclusives makes little sense, either, particularly when you clearly have a console series in decline.
I imagine it must be a very uncomfortable time to be an Xbox employee. And that’s too bad. I have no doubt there are a ton of good people working there and at their studios. But I’m not going to pretend to be surprised that Xbox overall as a platform is not doing well, considering all the lies, the acquisitions that probably shouldn’t have been allowed, and the chaos in messaging that has come out of that group.
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Of course, that discomfort apparently applies directly to some of the top execs who reported directly to Booty, who have started to get out before the situation gets even worse.
Cravings rarely check the calendar. Most ice cream makers force a long pause because their bowls need a full night in the freezer before anything can happen. That single requirement turns an impulse into a project and leaves the machine collecting dust more often than it gets used. The Instant Pot InstantChill removes that barrier with a built-in compressor and cold plate that start working the moment the machine turns on.
Mix together a simple base of cream, milk, sugar, and flavorings, then pour it into the machine, which will immediately freeze and churn. In most cases, you can get soft serve consistency in around twenty minutes. The benefit is that you don’t need to plan ahead of time, you don’t have to take up a lot of freezer room with a hefty bowl, and you don’t have to wait until the next day. Six one-touch apps cover the usual suspects, with a few extras to try. Ice cream, gelato, and sorbet each have their own setting that produces the desired texture and overflow every time. A non-dairy program automatically handles plant-based milks including coconut cream. The rolled ice cream mode allows you to simply pour the mix directly onto the cool plate, spread it thinly with the provided paddles, and produce those gorgeous swirly ribbons that end up as neat tiny cylinders, making dessert more of a show.
NO PRE‑FREEZING, ICE CREAM IN MINUTES*: Built-in compressor and cold plate system rapidly freezes and churns ultra-smooth fresh ice cream, gelato…
BUILT‑IN COLD PLATE FOR FASTER RESULTS: Churn in the bowl or pour directly onto the cold plate for even faster freezing. Roll, or scoop—your…
6 ONE-TOUCH PROGRAM MODES: (6) precision pre-set programs deliver the ideal balance of speed and timing for perfect results every time. Make Ice…
A smart alarm will sound when it is time to add the mix-ins. Chocolate chips, berries, cookie bits, and almonds are all added at the appropriate moment, resulting in an equally distributed mixture rather than sinking or becoming mushy. That small detail can make a huge difference in texture and saves you a lot of trial and error with other machines.
The finished batch yields roughly two pints, which is ideal for feeding two to four people or experimenting with new flavor combinations without wasting anything. Because the machine does not need to be re-frozen between batches, you may run numerous batches in succession, which is ideal for a long afternoon of creating different flavours without the normal downtime. Some early testers have even reported producing three distinct flavors in a single session without the customary breaks.
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The machine is quiet enough to use in an apartment or in the evening while watching a movie in the next room. The control panel is straightforward to operate, with clear icons on the display, and you can see what’s going on via the transparent lid without opening it. It’s also a relatively tiny machine, being approximately eighteen inches long, twelve and a half inches broad, and nine inches tall, and weighing nearly twenty pounds, so it won’t get banged around on your counter.
Cleaning up is also simple because the churning paddle can be washed in the dishwasher, the bowl rinses quickly, and the cold plate only requires a damp towel. You don’t have to disassemble it or get into any weird positions; just a quick clean and it’s done. Some early response has emphasized the creamy results (whether you’re making dairy or non-dairy), the consistent time, and the fact that people want to use it on weeknights rather than just special events.
Up until a few weeks ago, I had never heard of the Tartan Army (despite being one-quarter Scottish and having an actual family tartan of my own!). But now that the World Cup has begun and the Scotland fans known as the Tartan Army have descended on my home state of Massachusetts, they’re inescapable. And that’s not a bad thing.
Full disclosure: I live in a suburb outside Boston, so I haven’t had any firsthand experiences with any of these kilted soldiers, but I have been following their exploits in the news and on social media, and I’m so glad they’re here. (If I were in a neighboring house to visiting tourists who were playing bagpipes throughout the day, it’s possible I’d feel differently.)
The Tartan Army has been going viral over the past week or so, partly due to their sheer numbers — it’s estimated up to 40,000 Scottish fans have traveled to Massachusetts for the group stage of the tournament — and partly because of the festive atmosphere they’ve brought to places like Fenway Park. Upwards of 10,000 fans attended a Red Sox game last weekend, and on the streets, they’ve marched while wearing their signature kilts and playing the bagpipes. And they’ve done their research as tourists, too.
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They know that the real tourist attractions in Boston are Dunkin’ and the Cop Slide, a slide at the playground on Boston’s City Hall Plaza known for causing injuries because some people accelerate so fast. The slide went viral when a police officer attempted to use the slide and… it didn’t go well. (We can laugh now because he’s OK.) But this is why we now have a video of a man playing the bagpipes while descending the Cop Slide.
I don’t know if anyone thought that would be one of the byproducts of hosting the World Cup, but this World Cup has provided us with so many unexpected and delightful moments. The Cape Verdean goalkeeper, Vozinha, who went from virtual unknown to worldwide legend during his team’s 90-minute match against Spain, is another story that’s sparking joy, along with yet another viral police officer video, this time of Boston cops joyfully dancing with fans after the Cape Verde-Spain match. All these little dopamine hits really add up.
Bostonians and most New Englanders have a reputation for not being warm. It’s a remnant of the Puritanical and stoic values imported by our earliest settlers and that have lingered for centuries — this can make us seem standoffish and aloof at times, when really it’s more an innate reservedness that some of us can’t shake, no matter how hard we try. But the Scots are cracking our tough outer shell, at least temporarily.
A scroll through TikTok will turn up dozens of videos of gratitude, both from the Scots, thanking Boston for the warmth they’ve been shown, and from locals who have been charmed by the exuberant and joyful visitors. Fans and pundits alike keep talking about how the World Cup really has become the great unifier we need right now, and the influx of Scottish tourists in our state feels like it has lifted the local mood.
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But alas, we won’t get to call the Tartan Army ours for long. The team and their fans will stick around for one more match on June 19 against Morocco before traveling down to Miami for their final group-stage match against Brazil on June 24. Sure, Miami has beautiful beaches, and we’ll probably get a viral video of a bagpiper on a jet ski out of this, but we’ll miss the Tartan Army when they’re gone. At least we’ll always have Cop Slide.
CNN brass have been waiting to get federal approval of their problematic $111 billion merger with Paramount. As we’ve detailed exhaustively, the high debt load from the CBS/Paramount and Warner Brothers merges is going to result in mass layoffs, higher consumer prices, and sagging quality control at the resulting company. It’s what always happens. It’s not really a debate.
“In late February, Daniel Dale appeared on CNN to dismantle the more than 20 false or misleading claims that he identified during Donald Trump’sState of the Union address…But that appearance, more than three months ago, marked the last time Dale was seen on CNN’s air for his trademark rapid-fire fact checks.”
Shortly after the Status story popped up, Dale just as curiously appeared on air again. Along with a statement of denial from CNN that they’d ever try to court regulatory favoritism by dampening their journalism:
“There is no truth to this. Daniel is a multiplatform reporter whose regular fact checks of the President are an important part of CNN’s political coverage. Like all CNN reporters, his on-air appearances are determined by the news of the day — any suggestion otherwise is false.”
Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s not. Nothing we’ve seen from major corporate media outlets during Trump’s tenure should indicate they’re deserving of any benefit of the doubt. Last Friday the Trump DOJ approved the deal, falsely claiming it will be great for competition and labor. CNN brass almost certainly already knew approval was coming before they put Dale back on the air.
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One thing of note. There’s been a lot of hushed reverential commentary about what’s potentially happening to CBS and CNN. As if these corporate journalism outlets hadn’t been steadily degraded for years by corporate ownership. As if CNN and CBS didn’t go well out of their way to hire more lying on-air authoritarians as a direct act of appeasement to Trumpism even before the mergers.
That said terrible U.S. media can always get worse; and recall the reporting from last fall that Larry Ellison personally met with Trump to carve out which CNN analysts they’d have fired post-acquisition.
Like the CBS Ellison acquisition (where we saw Skydance execs making management decisions before the ink was dry), not yet having a signed deal won’t prevent companies like this — in a country with no working regulators — from getting a running head start on their ambitious censorship plans.
In 2012, a new form of bootkit was demonstrated. Instead of targeting machines through the BIOS or master boot record, one such bootkit attacked Mac OS X systems by infecting the EFI, a package of firmware that started the boot process. A second very primitive bootkit targeted Windows 8 machines by infecting the UEFI bootkit, the predecessor to the UEFI. Around 2013, a researcher demonstrated a more advanced UEFI bootkit for Windows named Dreamboat.
The first known case of a real-world attack targeting the UEFI came in 2018 with the discovery of malware dubbed LoJax. A repurposed version of legitimate anti-theft software known as LoJack, it was created by the Kremlin-backed hacking group tracked under names including Sednit, Fancy Bear, and APT 28. The malware was installed remotely using malware tools that can read and overwrite parts of the UEFI firmware’s flash memory.
In 2020, researchers unearthed the second known instance of real-world malware attacking the UEFI. Each time an infected device rebooted, its UEFI checked whether a malicious file was present in the Windows startup folder and, if not, installed it. Researchers from Kaspersky, the security provider that discovered the malware, named it “MosaicRegressor.” Researchers have yet to determine how the compromised UEFIs became infected. Since then, a handful of new UEFI bootkits have come to light. They are tracked under names including ESpecter, FinSpy, and MoonBounce.
Necessity is the mother of invention
In response to the more menacing threat of UEFI bootkits, Microsoft worked with device makers to develop Secure Boot, an industry-wide standard that uses cryptographic signatures to ensure that each piece of firmware loaded during startup is trusted by a computer’s manufacturer. Secure Boot is designed to create a chain of trust that prevents attackers from replacing the intended bootup firmware with malicious firmware. If a single link in the startup chain isn’t recognized, Secure Boot will prevent the device from starting.
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