MSI has quietly launched the Prestige 13 AI+ Evo A2VM, a super-lightweight laptop aimed at business professionals and creatives alike.

First unveiled at IFA 2024, the device is powered by up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 288V processor (offering up to 48 NPU TOPS and a total of 120 AI TOPS), paired with Intel Arc 140V graphics.

Mainframe computers running code dating back to the 1960s are still vital to some banks, airlines and government departments, but the skilled engineers familiar with their COBOL computer language are mostly dead or retired. Now researchers say AI may be able to fill this skills gap and help maintain or replace these antiquated yet essential systems.

COBOL dates back to 1959 and was designed specifically for large, centralised mainframe computers, which carry out bulk data processing for large organisations. When…

September has been a good month on Netflix, especially with the arrival of Rebel Ridge. Jeremy Saulnier’s action thriller stars Aaron Pierre as a former Marine who takes on the corrupt police officers of a small town. With a star-making performance from Pierre and riveting action scenes, Rebel Ridge will easily become one of Netflix’s most popular movies of 2024.

Rebel Ridge will remain on Netflix because it is considered one of the streamer’s original films. However, licensed movies depart from the streamer every month. September is no different. Of the handful of movies leaving Netflix, consider watching these five movies, including a sci-fi classic, a 1980s teen comedy, and a riveting war drama.

Back to the Future (1985)

Back to the Future is the perfect blockbuster — original, smart, funny, and entertaining. All age groups love Back to the Future for its easy-to-understand adventure, so don’t worry about the sci-fi jargon. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is a teenager living in 1985. He leaves his house one night to help his friend, scientist Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), with an experiment. Libyan terrorists interrupt the test and attempt to kill Marty, which eventually leads to him going to 1955 in a time-traveling DeLorean.

Stuck in the past, Marty runs into teenage versions of his parents (Crispin Glover and Lea Thompson) and interrupts the meeting when they fall in love. With the aid of Doc, Marty must make his parents fall in love before attempting his return to 1985 or risk altering the space-time continuum and destroying his universe.

Stream Back to the Future on Netflix.

The Breakfast Club (1985)

No filmmaker is more integral to the coming-of-age movement of the 1980s than John Hughes. The Chicago-based filmmaker is behind several classic teen comedies, including Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. However, his best edition to the genre is The Breakfast Club.

On a Saturday morning, five students from different walks of life arrive at their high school for all-day detention. The students include Claire Standish (Molly Ringwald), the queen bee; Andrew Clark (Emilio Estevez), the jock; Allison Reynolds (Ally Sheedy), the social outcast; Brian Johnson (Anthony Michael Hall), the nerd; and John Bender (Judd Nelson), the rebel. The group begins as enemies, but throughout the day, they slowly realize that they share the same feelings of anxiety and resentment that many teenagers face.

Stream The Breakfast Club on Netflix.

Dumb and Dumber (1994)

Dumb and Dumber is an aptly chosen title for the 1990s comedy. The two dummies at the center of the film are best friends Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey) and Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels), who are not the sharpest tools in the shed. While working as a limousine driver, Lloyd comes across a suitcase full of money that belonged to Mary Swanson (Lauren Holly). Lloyd fell in love with Mary on his short drive with her to the airport.

Lloyd and Harry load up the Shaggin’ Wagon and embark on a cross-country road trip to find Mary in Aspen, a place where “the beer flows like wine and beautiful women instinctively flock like the salmon of Capistrano.” The plot might be dumb, but the laughs are plentiful. Don’t ask questions; enjoy the comedic genius of Carrey and Daniels.

Stream Dumb and Dumber on Netflix.

The Conjuring (2013)

When done correctly, demonic possession films always play well with audiences. Most of these spooky tales are based on true stories. What’s scarier than a story that actually happened to someone? The Conjuring follows the supernatural exploits of Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) and Ed (Patrick Wilson) Warren, paranormal investigators and demonologists who rose to prominence in the 1970s. Their next case involves Roger (Ron Livingston) and Carolyn Perron (Lili Taylor), who believe their new farmhouse in Rhode Island is haunted.

Upon further investigation, the Warrens believe a hostile demon is occupying the house, leading to a series of strange occurrences. When the demon makes its presence known, the Warrens must rid the house of its presence before it occupies one of the children. With terrific jump scares and a spine-chilling atmosphere, The Conjuring is an effective thriller with legitimately frightening moments.

Stream The Conjuring on Netflix.

The Outpost (2019)

The Outpost is a riveting, edge-of-your-seat military drama that is impressively made and harrowing to watch. Yet, a July 2020 release at the height of COVID-19 buried its chances of gaining traction with audiences. Ever since it hit Netflix, The Outpost has gained a devoted following, with many declaring it one of the more underrated war movies of the last decade.

During the war in Afghanistan, a group of soldiers man Combat Outpost Keating, a secluded community surrounded by three mountains. In other words, the soldiers are susceptible to an attack from the Taliban. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened in 2009, and the ensuing Battle of Kamdesh became one of the bloodiest fights of the war.

Stream The Outpost on Netflix.

It’s September, which means, new iPhones. This year, in terms of hardware, Apple has yet another S year. Which is fine. Most people aren’t upgrading every year, or even every couple of years. Most of the changes are in the software this year. Though there is Camera Control, which at least is available at launch. It’s a new button on the side of the phone that lets you control the camera.

iOS 18 is here with Apple Intelligence, though that is going to be limited to iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max. And Apple Intelligence is also delayed until at least iOS 18.1, which will start rolling out next month.

Best Overall iPhone: iPhone 16 Pro Max

iPhone 16 Pro Max gains camera control

The iPhone 16 Pro Max is by far the best iPhone that you can buy right now. While it does look pretty similar to the iPhone 15 Pro Max, it does bring in some nice changes. Of course, the big one is going to be the Camera Control. While it was rumored to be called the Capture Button, Apple refuses to call it a button.

With Camera Control, you can easily open the camera app and snap a photo in both landscape or portrait orientation. You can also adjust the settings using that button, including the focus, aperture, and even photographic styles. Though, more features will be launching with iOS 18.1 in October.

The cameras are the same this year, aside from the ultrawide. It is now a 48-megapixel camera which is going to allow for much higher-resolution macro photos. That’s actually a pretty big deal, and even shortens the minimum focusing distance for macro shots.

iPhone 16 Pro Max does have significantly better battery life this year, Apple is touting that it can hit 33 hours of offline video playback, versus 27 hours on the iPhone 15 Pro Max. Since Apple doesn’t like to list battery capacities, that’s about the best we can do here.

Apple is once again selling the iPhone 16 Pro Max starting at $1,199 for 256GB. There’s also a 512GB and 1TB model available too. It’s available in Black Titanium, White Titanium, Natural Titanium and a new Desert Titanium.

Buy at Best Buy

Best Small iPhone: iPhone 16 Pro

The smaller iPhone 16 Pro is now bigger than ever

Apple is one of the few companies that still makes a fairly small phone. Though, the iPhone 16 Pro is now larger than before, at 6.3-inches. Both Pro models did gain a 0.2-inch increase in its display size. Allowing for larger batteries and cameras on the iPhone 16 Pro.

The iPhone 16 Pro is also made of titanium, like the Pro Max model, which makes this iPhone a lot easier to hold onto, and more comfortable. It’s much lighter this year while also being more durable, which is rather interesting. Apple is selling the iPhone 15 Pro in four colors: black, white, desert, and natural titanium. Making for some pretty boring colors this year on the Pro models, unfortunately.

There are fewer upgrades here, compared to the iPhone 16 Pro Max, but it does also get that A18 Pro chipset. This is a pretty powerful chipset, benchmarking ahead of the competition. But as I’ve always said, benchmarks really don’t matter. In day-to-day usage, I do notice a difference between the A18 Pro and the A17 Pro that was in the iPhone 15 Pro. You should see a much better performance here, with slightly better battery life.

The A18 Pro is also great to use for gaming, as Apple is even bringing console-level games to the iPhone 16 Pro. Making it so you can have a console in your pocket now – Nintendo Switch who? The first of those games, Resident Evil Village, has already been launched. It looks amazing on the iPhone 16 Pro, but it’s much better with a controller. The Backbone controller is a good option.

Of course, we can’t forget about USB-C. Finally, the chargers for Android phones will work with your iPhone. I’ve been using the iPhone 16 Pro for over a month, and it’s still weird plugging in a USB-C cable to it. Mostly because I use MagSafe almost exclusively on my iPhone, and have since the iPhone 12 Pro series. Apple did give us faster charging speeds this year, for wireless on the iPhone 16 Pro it can now charge as fast as 25W.

Buy at Best Buy

Best iPhone for Most People: iPhone 16

The iPhone 16 narrows the gap with the “Pro”

For most people, you won’t need something like a 120Hz display, a telephoto camera, or titanium. And for those people, the regular iPhone 16 is the best option. The iPhone 16 starts at $799, with options for up to 512GB of storage. It does actually add quite a few pro features, and even brings it up to the A18 chipset this year. Which is slightly lower than the A18 Pro in the iPhone 16 Pro models.

The iPhone 16 does once again have a matte back and sides, thank goodness. This is a change that Apple made last year with the iPhone 15. It also changed the orientation of the cameras, making it look more like the iPhone X from 2017. The main reason for this was, to allow users to shoot Spatial Video, which you need cameras to be in the same horizontal space to do so, versus them being diagonal like the iPhone 15.

There was a lot of talk about the colors this year on the iPhone 15, or the lack of colors on the iPhone 15. Apple went very vibrant for the colors this year. There’s the usual black and white colors, along with pink, teal and ultramarine. My personal favorite is the ultramarine, to be honest.

The iPhone 16 this year, arguably got the biggest performance leap compared to the other iPhone 16 Pro models. That’s because it jumped from the A16 to the A18 and also jumped from 6GB of RAM to 8GB. So it’s a much more powerful device this year.

Buy at Best Buy

Best Value iPhone: iPhone 15

The iPhone 15 ditches some “pro” features for a cheaper price

For most people, you won’t need something like a 120Hz display, a telephoto camera, or titanium. And for those people, the regular iPhone 15 is the best option. The iPhone 15 starts at $699, with options for up to 512GB of storage. Now that the iPhone 16 is out, the iPhone 15 gets a $100 price drop to $699. As mentioned, it does ditch quite a few “pro” features, like the ProMotion display, the telephoto camera and also the titanium frame. Instead, Apple is using an aluminum frame, which is fine. It’s still pretty durable and should survive a few drops with ease.

Something new that Apple did this year for the iPhone 15 was, give the back a matte finish. This was sorely needed, since the iPhone 12, 13 and 14 series all were fingerprint magnets on the back. Now, that’s not an issue on the iPhone 15 series either. Even though most people are going to stick to using their phone in a case, now you have the option to not use a case.

There was a lot of talk about the colors this year on the iPhone 15, which is a lot more pastel this year, compared to previous years. Apple is still offering five colors: blue, pink, green, yellow and black. There’s no true white color this time, but the colors are all so light, that you might not even notice. Honestly, the pictures really don’t do it justice. My sister picked up the iPhone 15 in blue and it looks really good. You can definitely tell that it is indeed blue and not white.

A few other upgrades for the iPhone 15 this year include the camera and processor. The iPhone 15 picked up the 48-megapixel sensor from the iPhone 14 Pro series the year before. Which kind of solves that telephoto problem. Since Apple lets you do 2x lossless zoom on the 48-megapixel sensor. This is because the sensor is so large, that Apple can crop in and give you a 2x zoom without losing any details. That’s a pretty big deal, to be quite honest. Then there’s the processor, it’s the A16 Bionic from the iPhone 14 Pro from last year. It’s not really a new processor, just new for this phone. It’s plenty fast, and battery life is pretty decent, too, so there’s that.

Then there’s USB-C. Many believed that only the Pro models would get USB-C this year, but that’s not true. Apple did bring USB-C down to the iPhone 15. Though some will argue that it is still using USB 2.0 speeds instead of USB 3.0, keep in mind that most other phones on the market do this. Very few offer USB 3.0 or 3.1 speeds because many don’t transfer files off of their phones – they use iCloud.

With the launch of the iPhone 15, many were upset that it was still using a 60Hz display. I even wrote an editorial about why it’s not coming to the iPhone 15. Apple calls 120Hz, “ProMotion” so why would they add a “Pro” feature to a non-Pro iPhone? Additionally, most people don’t even know what 120Hz is. Which is why the iPhone 15 is the best for “most people”.

Perhaps my favorite feature of the iPhone 15 series is the new Find My Friends feature. This lets you find your friends, just like you put an AirTag on them. It’s thanks to the new Ultra Wideband chip (which they didn’t call U2 for some reason; the 2014 fiasco might be the reason why). This chip gives you better precision finding, the only problem here is that it is only available on the iPhone 15 models, so your friends and family would need an iPhone 15 series phone to use this feature.

Buy at Best Buy

Best Cheap iPhone: Apple iPhone 14

2022’s iPhone is a great bargain in 2024

Apple is surprisingly still selling the iPhone 14. Which is fine, because it is still a really good iPhone. I absolutely loved my red iPhone 14. It was a good size, lightweight and the battery life was really impressive. So the iPhone 14 used the same A15 Bionic as the iPhone 13 series, which seemed odd, but it meant that Apple was really able to optimize for it, offering up really impressive battery life on the iPhone 14.

Now that we are two years out from the iPhone 14 release, Apple has dropped the price permanently to $599. Now that’s not the cheapest “new” iPhone you can get, as the iPhone SE is still out there. But that iPhone SE is from 2022 as well, and is not a good option for $429. You’d be better off spending another $170 for a much better experience and much more storage. Considering the iPhone SE starts at 64GB.

It does still have that aluminum frame, which looks and feels great, though the back is not matte like the iPhone 15. If you’re going to stick it in a case or don’t really care much about fingerprints, then that’s not a deal breaker. For me, it was really annoying and forced me to use a case.

iPhone’s cameras are always really good, and that’s still the case on the iPhone 14. It sports dual 12-megapixel cameras for wide and ultrawide. It does not offer telephoto and only digital zoom. However, the pictures of this phone are still impressive. I’m still shocked when I see photos coming out of the iPhone 14 because it’s just on another level.

Now for the real question: is it worth buying a year-old iPhone? Apple is really good with software updates. It updated the iPhone 6s for well over seven years before calling it quits. And we’d expect something similar for the iPhone 14. So even though it launched with iOS 16 and has already gotten iOS 17, we definitely expect it to hit at least iOS 22 or longer. So, buying a year-old iPhone is not a big deal. And even once it stops getting new versions of iOS, it will continue to get security updates – Apple just updated the iPhone 4s with a security update in September 2023.

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It’s Meta’s turn to step up to the plate and host a developer conference. This year’s Meta Connect takes place on September 25 and 26. While the bulk of the event will focus on how developers can get the most out of Meta’s products, most of the actual news is likely to come from the opening keynote and developer keynote, which run back to back on September 25 starting at 1PM ET.

You’ll be able to watch the keynote live on Facebook on the . There’s also the option to , in “a virtual experience inspired by the Meta campus in Menlo Park.” Meta has also shared the keynote on its YouTube channel in previous years, but only after Connect is over, so it’s unlikely to livestream the event there.

The Connect keynote will feature Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussing advancements in mixed reality, AI and wearables. The company is also promising a look at new products and features. Those may well include a pair of augmented reality glasses codenamed Orion that executives have been teasing for quite some time.

We’re also expecting to see a less-expensive version of the Quest 3, dubbed the Quest 3S. Leaks suggest that this could sell for $300, which is significantly less than the $500 Quest 3. The Quest 3S could make it easier for Meta to finally ditch the Quest 2, which debuted in 2020 and is significantly less powerful than the Quest 3.

Elsewhere, Meta may announce an update for the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses at Connect. Meta and Ray-Ban owner EssilorLuxottica recently renewed their partnership, so there’s , either now or in the future.

In addition, there will likely be lots of talk about AI in the developer keynote starting at 2PM ET. It’s likely that we’ll learn more about how it’s being used across Meta’s headsets and smart glasses. As a result, the open-source Llama large language model is expected to be a topic of discussion.

A startup called Letta has just emerged from stealth with tech that helps AI models remember users and conversations. Created in UC Berkeley’s famed Labs startup factory, it also announced $10 million in seed money led by Felicis’ Astasia Myers, at a $70 million post-money valuation. 

Letta is also backed by a who’s who of angel investors in AI, like Google’s Jeff Dean, Hugging Face’s Clem Delangue, Runway’s Cristóbal Valenzuela, and Anyscale’s Robert Nishihara, among others.

Founded by Berkeley PhD students Sarah Wooders and Charles Packer, this is a highly anticipated AI startup launch. That’s because it’s a child of Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab and is the commercial entity of the popular MemGPT open source project.

Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab, led by acclaimed professor and Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica, is the descendent of RISELab and AMPLab, which spawned such companies as Anyscale, Databricks, and SiFive. Sky Lab, in particular, birthed numerous popular open source large language model (LLM) projects like the Gorilla LLM, vLLM, and the LLM structured language SGLang.

“A ton of projects very quickly, within a year’s time frame, came out of the lab. Just people sitting next to us,” described Wooders. “So it was kind of an incredible time.”

MemGPT is one such project and is such a hot commodity that it actually went viral before it even launched. 

“Someone scooped us,” Packer told TechCrunch. The founders had posted a whitepaper on Thursday, October 12, 2023, and planned to release a more in-depth paper and the code to GitHub the following Monday. Some random person found the paper, posted it to Hacker News on Sunday, and it “went viral on Hacker News before we had a chance to properly release the code, release the paper, or, like, do a tweet thread or anything like that,” he said. 

The reason for the excitement was that MemGPT mitigates a pernicious problem for LLMs: In their native form, models like ChatGPT are stateless, meaning they don’t store historical data in long-term memory. This is problematic for AI apps that depend on getting to know and learn from a user over time — everything from customer support bots to healthcare symptom-tracking apps. MemGPT manages data and memory so that AI agents and chatbots can remember previous users and conversations.

The post on the paper stayed atop Hacker News, the popular site for programmers run by Y Combinator, for 48 hours, Packer recounted. So he spent his weekend and the next few days answering questions on the site while trying to get the code ready to be released. Once the project was available on GitHub, a link to it went viral on Hacker News, again. YouTube interviews and tutorials, Medium posts, 11,000 stars and 1.2K forks on GitHub happened quickly.

VC Felicis’ Myers discovered Wooders and Packer by reading about MemGPT, too, and immediately recognized the tech’s commercial possibilities.

“I saw the paper when it was released,” she told TechCrunch, and she promptly reached out to the founders. “We had an investment theme around AI agent infrastructure and appreciated that a really important component of that was the data and memory management to make these conversational chat bots and AI agents effective.”

The founders still virtually traipsed around Sand Hill Road doing Zoom calls with VCs before going with the one that loved them first.

Meanwhile, Stoica brokered introductions to Dean, Nishihara and other big-name Silicon Valley angels. “A lot of the professors at Berkeley, just as a consequence of being at Berkeley, are very well connected,” Packer recalled about how easy the angel investor process was. “They have their eye on projects out of this lab that are going to be commercialized.”

Competition and the threat of OpenAI o1

While MemGPT is already out in the wild and being used, Letta’s commercial variant, Letta Cloud, is not yet open for business. As of Monday, Letta is accepting requests for beta users. It will offer a hosted agent service that allows developers to deploy and run stateful agents in the cloud, accessible via REST APIs, a programming interface that can maintain state. Letta Cloud will store the long-term data necessary to do so. Letta will also offer developer tools for building AI agents.

With MemGPT, Wooders sees a large span of uses. “I think the number one use case that we see is basically, highly personalized, very engaging chatbots,” she says. But there are also cutting-edge uses like “a chatbot for cancer patients” where patients upload their history and then share ongoing symptoms so the bot can learn and offer guidance over time. 

Worth noting that MemGPT isn’t alone in working on this. LangChain is probably its best known competitor, and it already offers commercial options. The biggest model makers also offer AI agent-making tools as well, like OpenAI’s Assistants API. 

And OpenAI’s new o1 model may make the need to fix state a moot point for its users. As it is a multistep model, it fundamentally must maintain state to some degree in order to “think” and fact check before it replies.

But Wooders, Packer, and Myers see a few key differences to what Letta is offering versus what 800-pound market gorilla OpenAI is doing. Letta claims it will work with any AI model and expects its users to use many of them: OpenAI, Anthropic, Minstrel, their own homegrown models. OpenAI’s tech currently only works with itself. 

More importantly, Letta is using open source MemGPT and jumping firmly into the open source side of the FOSS vs. black box LLM debate, saying open source is a better choice for AI application programmers.

“We are positioning ourselves as the open alternative to OpenAI,” Packer says. “I think it’s actually very, very hard to build very good AI applications, especially when you care about, like hallucination, if you can’t see what’s going on under the hood.”