Remove those photobombers with even more accuracy than before.

Removing objects from your photos with Clean Up

Filipe Espósito for Engadget

If you’ve used Clean Up before, you’ll know where to find it in iOS 27. The difference is that it now has some extra controls. To start, choose a photo you want to adjust in the Photos app and tap the Edit button at the bottom. Select Tools and choose Clean Up. You’ll see an Auto button at the top, which lets you change the processing type. Leave this set to Auto to have your phone choose between the other two modes depending on how complex the image is. 

Fast retouches your photos with a smaller AI model. It gets the job done much faster, but it’s not ideal for more complex retouching. Say you have a photo of a landscape and you want to remove a trash can in the background. Or maybe you need to hide the wiring on the street lights. These are the kinds of edits that the Quick model is most likely to handle well.

But where Apple’s Clean Up feature has always struggled is with more complex edits. When there are a bunch of people behind you ruining your selfie, that’s where the High Quality option comes in. More advanced AI models can better understand the context of an image. But this improved processing comes at the cost of taking longer and using more battery.

Filipe Espósito for Engadget

Clean Up often tries to recognize unknown objects that you’ll want to remove from your photo. This doesn’t always work as it should, so it’s more accurate to circle what you want to remove.

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Extending and reframing photos

Filipe Espósito for Engadget

Girl Scout cookie season doesn’t start until January, but when it arrives, two new cookies will appeal to groups who likely haven’t been able to indulge in Girl Scout cookies before: people with dietary restrictions, and dogs.

Sparkables, a crunchy, allergy-friendly oatmeal cookie with chocolate chips and rainbow sprinkles, is formulated for those who are nut-free, gluten-free and vegan. They were developed with Partake Foods, and include whole-grain oats, organic brown sugar, semisweet chocolate chips, cassava flour, oat flour, white rice flour and more. See the full ingredient list online.

Patch Pals, a soft-baked, blueberry muffin-flavored treat specifically for pups, was developed with the pet-product company Bark. The treats, which feature four designs representing iconic Girl Scout patches, are for dogs who weigh more than 5 pounds and are older than 6 months. Nutritional info and other details available online.

Sparkables and Patch Pals will only be sold online, so you can’t order them from Girl Scouts outside your local store. The new varieties will be available for shipping when Girl Scout cookie season launches on Jan. 12. You can sign up now to receive a reminder when that date comes.

CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of “Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the ’70s and ’80s,” as well as “The Totally Sweet ’90s.” She’s been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She’s Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she’ll be first in line.

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Apple’s first foldable iPhone is almost here, and just hours ahead of the launch, we may finally have a better idea of how much it will cost. According to a new Bloomberg report, Apple has recently discussed pricing the device as high as $2,199, while higher-storage versions could get close to the $3,000 mark

There is no getting around it. $2,199 is a lot of money for a smartphone. However, the figure is also a little lower than some of the estimates we have been hearing over the past few months, which placed Apple’s first foldable somewhere around $2,300 to $2,500.

First-generation foldables have never been cheap

Apple entering the foldable market at $2,199 sounds extreme, but first-generation foldables have never been cheap. Samsung’s original Galaxy Fold launched in the U.S. for $1,980 back in 2019.

Samsung has had several generations to refine the formula since then. Its new Galaxy Z Fold 8 starts at $1,899, despite moving to the shorter and wider form factor that has helped make this generation particularly well received.

Apple, meanwhile, is launching an entirely new iPhone category, and the timing is not exactly helping. Bloomberg says the company initially wanted to keep the starting price at $1,999, but the ongoing memory shortage reportedly pushed costs beyond its original targets.

So while $2,199 is still a huge amount of money for a phone, there is some context behind it. Apple is entering a category that has always commanded high prices, while also dealing with unusually expensive RAM and NAND storage at launch.

Getting one could be the bigger problem

The price may not be the only obstacle at launch. Ming-Chi Kuo previously estimated that Apple would have just 500,000 to 1 million foldable iPhones ready during the third quarter, despite plans to build around 7 million to 8 million units during the second half of 2026.

Kuo also previously pointed to a price of around $2,300 to $2,500, so Bloomberg’s latest figure would actually put the starting price below those expectations.

Apple also appears pretty confident in its foldable plans. Bloomberg previously reported that a second-generation model, codenamed V78, is already being lined up for 2027. The first one has not even launched yet, so Apple clearly seems to be treating foldables as something it wants to stick with rather than a one-year experiment.

We should find out soon whether $2,199 is the number Apple finally settles on. The foldable iPhone is expected to debut on September 9, but Apple has not confirmed the price yet.

Microsoft is working on performance improvements for Windows 11 that could make the operating system boot faster and feel more responsive. The company says it has already made “significant gains” in startup speeds, although the changes aren’t available to Windows Insiders just yet.

Speaking at IFA 2026, Mark Linton, VP of Windows & Devices at Microsoft, said the company has been improving both boot times and Windows Hello responsiveness. “We’ve made significant gains on things like boot time, Windows Hello responsiveness,” Linton told Windows Latest.

The Lenovo ThinkPad T1g Gen 8 is a powerhouse and a semi-portable shell. It takes on the power of the beloved X1 Extreme, pairing an ultra 9 processor with quick memory, Thunderbolt 5, and decent storage. It’s designed for engineers, creatives, and other power users who need a machine that can do it all while still having that hint of portability.

I think of this quite like the 16-inch MacBook Pro. It’s the bigger choice in the line-up, but you would get it because you want the power and the ability, not necessarily the portability. The people who would get this laptop are the people who need the ports as well.

Less than two weeks after Meta agreed to a massive $18 billion multistate settlement in a lawsuit over social media’s consumer harms, the company announced its biggest bet on consumer AI to date — and one that requires significantly more trust than social media ever did. On Tuesday, the company introduced Muse, its new personal AI agent that helps consumers with everyday tasks and projects for users in the U.S.

To use Muse, consumers will have to trust Meta with more of their personal information than ever before. The AI agent works by connecting to the user’s apps and services that are a part of everyday workflows, like email, calendars, payments, and other things the individual may regularly use, like apps for health and fitness, the smart home, dining, shopping, music and events, and more.

The idea is a sizable bet on what comes after the ChatGPT era, where AI chatbots answered questions, served as sounding boards, or even became digital companions. Instead, Muse is focusing on AI that can actually do things for you.

The company says the agent can do things like sending emails, booking travel, lowering bills, filling out forms, creating plans, turning recipe reels into grocery lists, sending party invitations, and making purchases, leveraging Link by Stripe for checkout. The latter offers purchase protections, which could potentially ease consumers’ fears of letting an AI check out on their behalf. (Shopify’s Shop Pay and 1Password integrations are also coming soon.)

Muse’s users can decide which apps and services they want to connect, doing so one at a time, to make the opt-in nature of using Muse more transparent. The agent is powered by Meta’s AI model, Muse Spark, and ships with built-in connectors (pictured below) for several services, with plans to add more over time. If a service the user wants isn’t available but offers a public API, Muse can set up a connection using credentials the user provides. When no API is available, Muse can access the service via the browser instead.

Muse will initially be available via the web at muse.ai, through apps on iOS and Android, and through chats in WhatsApp. It will soon also make its way to Meta’s AI glasses, the company says. It will be free to use, with subscription plans kicking in as usage increases, which is why Muse requires a payment card to get started.

Two paid plans will be available at launch: Power at $20/month and Maximum at $100/month. Both of these subscriptions offer more Muse usage for handing off everyday tasks, though Meta believes most people will remain on the free tier. (The company says the app includes a usage meter that shows users what percentage of their usage they have left. It will also warn users when free usage runs out and present options to subscribe.)

Like other AI agents, Muse will continue to work even after the user leaves the app. It will also improve over time by learning from the user’s conversations what’s important to them to make suggestions unprompted, Meta noted.

The concept is not unique to Meta. The agentic era is now coming into its own, as larger companies and smaller startups alike are experimenting with how AI agents will make the most sense for consumers and can become integrated into people’s daily lives.

Some have tried AI web browsers or services, like Gemini Spark or Claude Cowork, that can kick off various tasks on consumers’ behalf. Others are integrating AI into the chat applications consumers use the most, like Apple’s iMessage platform, SMS, and WhatsApp.

Despite their usefulness, these powerful agents have forced consumers to wrestle with difficult questions about how much privacy they’re willing to give up. Many early testers of the AI assistant Instinct were shocked to see the app required a broad “perpetual and irrevocable” license to “access, use, host, cache, store, reproduce, transmit, display, publish, distribute, and modify” any of the user’s materials, including for training its AI models. 

Under the hood, Meta claims that Muse runs in its own “dedicated, secure computer with its own browser,” Muse Secure VM, which offers various privacy, safety, and security protections over customers’ data. The company says a separate Sentinel agent runs on that same virtual machine, but is kept apart from Muse at the system level.

This means Muse won’t have visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods. Meta also claims that Muse doesn’t share people’s conversations or data with Meta’s ads systems.

(These claims are explained in more detail in a technical post, also released today, but will require deeper investigation by security experts.)

Could Meta’s history hurt Muse adoption?

Despite Meta’s documentation of its security measures, it remains to be seen whether the company has enough consumer trust for its agent to be successful.

As it stands, Meta has a history of proclaiming one thing and doing another. In 2011, for instance, the tech giant settled with the FTC over charges that it deceived consumers by making users’ private information public without their approval. In 2019, the FTC penalized Facebook in a then record-breaking $5 billion settlement over eight separate privacy-related violations. In 2023, the FTC charged Meta with violating a privacy order that was filed after the 2019 settlement.

In terms of technical matters, Meta has also had some big missteps before, having discovered in 2019 a number of users’ passwords in readable formats, exposing people to potential hacks. The massive Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which saw Facebook data belonging to millions of consumers collected by a third-party without their consent, still lingers in some people’s minds, too.

Meta has also been repeatedly hauled before Congress to testify on how it protected — or failed to protect — minors from harm. With Congress failing to act, Meta ultimately became the target of several related lawsuits, including the one Meta just settled with 29 states in August, a New Mexico lawsuit over harms for children, where Meta was ordered to pay $942 million, and the thousands of personal-injury and school-district cases that are still pending against multiple social media giants.

To ease consumers’ fears, Meta not only talks in depth about its security promises, offering technical documentation and explanations. The company has also designed Muse in a way that would make consumers feel more connected with the agent itself. Users can customize Muse by giving it a name, picking out its avatar, and configuring its look and various settings that dictate how the agent communicates with them.

Time will tell if this personal connection and the utility Muse provides are enough for consumers to once again trust Meta with their personal information.

SYSTEMS

Startup wants to take atomic power generation on a barge to wherever the need is

Startup Bluecore Energy has raised $50 million in seed funding to develop floating nuclear power plants intended to supply ports and other locations with rapidly growing energy demands.

The California-based company said the Silverton Partners-led round, which includes $10 million in previously announced pre-seed funding, brought in several new investors. It plans to use the money to engineer and test its compact nuclear power system and pursue regulatory approval and maritime classification.

Its initial design is intended to generate about 10 MWe – megawatts of electrical output – continuously using light-water reactor technology. Bluecore says the maritime system would be able to operate for years at a time and require refueling only once every few years.

The company has secured its first barge and is developing a non-fueled, electrically heated reactor module prototype at its Port of Long Beach headquarters to test monitoring, sensor, and control systems.

Bluecore is targeting ports, AI datacenters, and coastal infrastructure, with the reactors potentially deployed offshore and connected to customers by subsea cables. Remote islands and coastal settlements in places such as Alaska may also lack practical connections to a wider electricity grid.

Bluecore claims its approach could provide reliable, zero-emission power to energy-intensive locations and open additional markets for nuclear generation.

“Six months ago, we were building the foundation. Today, we have the capital, the team, the hardware, and some of the most important institutions in nuclear and maritime working alongside us,” said Bluecore founder and CEO Kofi Asante.

“Our focus now is simple: create and deliver zero-emission energy as safely and quickly as possible.”

The move follows the launch of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) Atomic Technologies Licensed for Applications at Sea (ATLAS) initiative in the US capital last month.

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright linked that event to the Department of Energy’s own efforts to rapidly expand the provisioning of atomic energy generating capacity in order to meet the requirements of AI datacenters and other industries.

Bluecore has begun discussions with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and Coast Guard. The two agencies recently signed a memorandum of understanding to coordinate oversight of the design, construction, and operation of civilian floating nuclear power plants. The NRC says it is ready to license maritime reactors under existing federal regulations, while it develops an additional framework for microreactors and similarly low-risk designs.

Bluecore remains years from commercial deployment. It has yet to build a fueled reactor or apply for the approvals required to operate one, and its Long Beach proposal must also navigate California’s restrictions on new nuclear power plants.

While some may have concerns about waterborne atomic power plants, America has a long history of maritime nuclear generation. All of the US Navy’s active aircraft carriers are nuclear-powered, but the technology first went to sea aboard the submarine USS Nautilus in 1955. USS Enterprise became the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in 1961, while the cruiser USS Long Beach, commissioned the same year, was the first nuclear-powered surface combatant.

Bluecore says its team includes former US Navy nuclear submarine officers and leaders with experience across organizations including SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, Toyota, Rivian, and Uber.

Russia currently operates the world’s only floating nuclear power plant. The barge-like Akademik Lomonosov is considerably larger than Bluecore’s proposed design and can generate up to 70 MWe. ®

• South Korea could invest $22.3 billion in a massive Texas gas plant
• The proposed facility would generate 6.3 GW of electricity for AI
• Seoul says negotiations remain unfinished, leaving the reported investment unconfirmed

South Korea and the United States have reportedly settled on how much Seoul will contribute towards a new energy facility in southern Texas.

Korean outlet Edaily, citing unnamed officials and lawmakers, reported the contribution at close to $22.3 billion for the venture, which would be built in Encinal, Texas, and is expected to produce 6.3 gigawatts of electricity to power AI data centers once fully operational.