from the maybe-don’t-fuck-with-people-who-actually-know-the-law dept
The thing about raiding law offices is that they tend to be filled with people who actually know the law. A bunch of opportunistic ICE officers thought they might be able to talk their way into an illegal search, but that initiative (is that the word for this?) died out almost immediately when the interloping officers were greeted by a small group of immigration lawyers.
As is to be expected, this attempted illegal raid occurred in a “blue” state — the states that are still seeing large amounts of immigration officer activity just because their populations refused to throw a majority of their support behind Donald Trump during the last three elections.
Multiple U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement agents armed with guns attempted to inspect a Sacramento immigration law firm — and threatened to return later and break windows — on Friday morning, according to several employees of the building.
Employees of the North Natomas law firm and next door dentistry office said the agents, who arrived in at least four vehicles, claimed to have received a list from Washington, D.C., which listed the building’s address as the primary mailing address for many people. The ICE agents requested to tour the office for beds, but were ultimately turned away after failing to provide a warrant.
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You can see the pretense. And you can see how everyone else would have recognized it was a pretense, even if the ICE officers hadn’t backed down immediately in the face of “get a warrant” demands from the occupants of the law office.
ICE pretended that a lot of migrants using the law office as a mailing address (something likely limited to court documents, etc.) was evidence that the law office was illegally housing dozens of migrants. But, as a migrant trying to work your way through the immigration system, it just makes sense to list a law office as the address of contact when engaging court proceedings, especially if your housing situation may be in a constant state of flux. Telling courts to send summons, notices, etc. to your legal reps is the smart way to handle things like naturalization proceedings, given that the rules seem to keep changing, and our current government is doing whatever it can to disrupt immigration proceedings to maximize arrests and detentions.
It would be immediately clear to anyone but an opportunistic ICE thug that the Morris Law Office was incapable of housing a large number of migrants. It’s a strip mall law office that shares a building with a dental implant clinic.
Having rushed directly into a stone wall composed of well-composed immigration lawyers (as well as the absolute stupidity of having to pretend a strip mall law office could be a second home for a large number of migrants), ICE officers retreated empty-handed, but not before issuing a threat that only later proved to be as empty as their fingerless gloved hands:
Raissa Morris, owner of the Morris Law Group, received a text at 9:16 a.m. which read “immigration is here.” The message came from one of her employees who told her an agent, who was armed and wearing an ICE badge, had entered the front lobby and asked to speak to an office manager.
She quickly told one of her employees to tell an agent that they could not inspect the building without a warrant. The agent responded by saying that they had received a list from Washington, D.C., which featured multiple clients using the law firm’s address. He asked to inspect the office for beds and said if they received follow-up orders that they could return at 3 a.m. to break windows and enter.
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Thugs to the very end. “If you won’t let us abuse our power and ignore your rights, we’ll just ask someone back at the office to swear out some paperwork that will let us get what we want without your cooperation.” Obviously, this paraphrasing is far more coherent and polite than anything uttered by your average ICE officer (and, at this point, almost any ICE officer would be lucky to be considered “average”). But the ultimate point remains: if ICE doesn’t get what it wants immediately, it will find a way to get it eventually.
Additional coverage by local news station KCRA includes some on-site reporting, along with screenshots of several photos of ICE vehicles shared by law firm employees. It also includes a comment from the DHS, which apparently couldn’t be bothered to respond to questions from reporters at the publication that first broke the news.
In a statement to KCRA 3, DHS said, “On August 14, ICE officers approached an unmarked door during a targeted enforcement operation, thinking it was the target address as it was listed as the address of the illegal aliens they were planning to arrest. Upon finding out it was a law firm; they departed the address.”
This statement is only true if you ignore the officers’ attempt to engage in a warrantless search, as well as the parting threat they issued when they were ejected by Morris Law employees. ICE had to know it was a law firm because that would be the first result in any normal search of that address. And officers couldn’t pretend it was just some hostel for migrants when they rolled up in at least four separate unmarked vehicles. They were clearly in a quasi-strip mall parking lot facing a business with the business name clearly displayed above the address the DHS now claims was so inscrutable it took an accosting and a confrontation with people who actually know and respect the law to inform the officers of their “mistake.”
The DHS statement is idiotic, which just means it’s on-brand for this administration. So far, the threat to come back and break windows while no one’s in the office has yet to materialize. But this government is filled with sore losers and sore winners (that would be the big baby boy sitting behind the Resolute Desk), so I wouldn’t put any money on ICE just taking this L and moving on to other things.
Why it matters: Nvidia is reportedly close to buying Hugging Face for a staggering $12.9 billion. If completed, the transaction would put the main supplier of AI processors in control of the platform that has become one of the most important hubs for sharing open AI models and supporting developer collaboration.
The Information reports that Nvidia has agreed to the purchase, citing one person with knowledge of the agreement. A separate Business Insider report is less definitive, saying the companies held serious talks at a valuation above $13 billion but had not signed an agreement. Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face has publicly confirmed the reports.
If it does close at the stated price, Hugging Face would become Nvidia’s largest completed takeover, surpassing the $7 billion it paid for Mellanox in 2020.
The startup is often described as the GitHub of AI, providing a central hub where developers publish, discover, test, and deploy models and datasets. Hugging Face says its community reached 13 million users, more than two million public models, and over 500,000 public datasets in 2025.
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The Information says Hugging Face recently generated about $150 million in annualized revenue, putting the reported price at roughly 86 times that figure. Its previous funding round raised $235 million at a $4.5 billion valuation in 2023, with Nvidia joining Salesforce, Google, Amazon, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, and IBM as investors.
Nvidia and Hugging Face have a history of collaboration. There was their 2023 partnership that connected Hugging Face models to Nvidia’s DGX Cloud for training and fine-tuning. The pair later expanded into on-demand training clusters. Hugging Face also works with AMD, AWS, and Google, making platform neutrality a concern if the AI industry’s dominant chip supplier becomes its new owner.
Buying Hugging Face could give Nvidia greater influence over how developers find, share, optimize, and deploy AI models. The move also aligns with Jensen Huang’s public support for open models. Nvidia’s CEO believes wider access encourages AI adoption and ultimately creates more demand for chips and data centers. Nvidia and Hugging Face also signed the same industry letter urging US policymakers to keep advanced model weights accessible. The company can certainly afford the deal, having just reported $96.2 billion in quarterly revenue and $59.7 billion in net income.”
“I think Nvidia is very much a community, a platform-based company, and in that respect, I think Hugging Face fits perfectly within that. There is this five-layer cake from Nvidia, and foundational models are one of them,” Siddy Jobe, a fund manager at Eonopolis Exponential Technologies funds, told CNBC. “It is clear that Nvidia wants to be integrated in the entire stack vertically, going from energy to foundational models and also to applications,” he added.
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Hugging Face reportedly rejected a $500 million Nvidia investment late last year at a $7 billion valuation because it didn’t want one dominant backer influencing decisions. One would expect that full ownership will raise that concern again, and regulators may agree.
Similar fears surrounded Nvidia’s proposed Arm purchase, a $40 billion deal that collapsed in 2022 under global antitrust pressure.
Rather than trying to compete with devices like the Echo Hub or a Google Nest Hub, the SwitchBot E-Ink Home Dashboard focuses on delivering glanceable information on a crisp E-Ink screen, combining weather forecasts, environmental data, family calendars and a couple of smart home shortcuts.
The hardware is good; with a sharp display, impressive battery life and plenty of mounting options, but the software still feels like a work in progress. Calendar setup is more fiddly than it should be, navigation between screens isn’t especially intuitive and some obvious features are missing.
If you’re already invested in the SwitchBot ecosystem, there’s a lot to like, particularly if you have environmental sensors dotted around your home. But for the asking price, it doesn’t quite do enough on its own, especially considering you’ll also need a SwitchBot hub to unlock many of its smarter features.
Excellent 7.5-inch E-Ink display
Up to one year of battery life
Useful environmental sensor integration
Matter-compatible buttons (via SwitchBot hub)
Calendar setup is unnecessarily fiddly
Navigation could be much better
Needs SwitchBot hub for smart features
Quite expensive
Key Features
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Review Price:
£109.99
Connects to external sensors
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Monitor temperature and more from one of SwitchBot’s environmental sensors.
E-Ink display
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Low power display helps extend battery life
Introduction
Smart displays have largely followed the same formula over the past few years. Big colour screens, voice assistants, streaming services and video calls have become the norm, whether you’re looking at an Echo Show, a Google-powered display or a smart tablet dock.
The SwitchBot E-Ink Home Dashboard takes a completely different approach.
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Rather than acting as a touchscreen command center, it focuses on surfacing information that matters throughout the day. Weather forecasts, indoor conditions, upcoming appointments and smart home shortcuts are all presented on a 7.5-inch E-Ink screen that looks more like a framed e-reader than a traditional smart display.
Originally announced as the SwitchBot Weather Station, the device eventually launched under the E-Ink Home Dashboard branding.
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Read on for my full SwitchBot E-Ink Home Dashboard is worthy of your wall space.
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Design
Picture frame design
Freestanding or wall mounted
Rechargeable battery
At first glance, the E-Ink Home Dashboard looks like a Kindle that’s been dropped into a picture frame.
Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)
It’s compact, understated and should fit into almost any room without drawing attention to itself. Unlike a traditional smart display, there’s no bright LCD constantly glowing away, with the paper-like E-Ink panel blending nicely into a kitchen, hallway or home office.
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Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)
Inside the box you’ll find everything needed to get started, including two detachable legs for standing it on a desk or shelf, a wall mounting bracket with adhesive pads, a USB-C charging cable and additional sticky pads to keep it sitting flush against the wall.
Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)
Adding it to the SwitchBot app is straightforward. Tap the plus icon, hold the pairing button on the rear for a couple of seconds and after a reassuring click, the display springs to life.
Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)
There’s a built-in front light that can be activated with a single press of the top button, making it perfectly readable in darker rooms, while holding that same button for a couple of seconds forces the display to refresh immediately rather than waiting for the next scheduled update.
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The hardware itself is difficult to fault. The display is sharp, the backlight works well and the whole device feels well made.
Features and in use
Shows weather
Can connect to external sensor
Integrated wtih SwitchBot ecosystem
The idea behind the E-Ink Home Dashboard is simple. Rather than constantly reaching for your phone, it gives you a quick snapshot of the day’s weather, indoor conditions, upcoming appointments and smart home status.
Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)
The home screen displays a healthy mix of information including indoor and outdoor temperature, humidity, weather forecasts, air quality, sunrise and sunset times and more.
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There are several different layouts available too, including Daily Overview, Calendar, Countdown, Environmental Data, Daily Verse and Custom Text, with additional schedule-focused layouts also available.
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The Daily Verse screen feels like an odd inclusion, although thankfully the four shortcut buttons along the bottom can be customised. I quickly swapped mine over to show environmental data and my calendar instead.
Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)
The Custom Text option is potentially one of the more interesting features, allowing information generated through SwitchBot’s OpenClaw platform to be displayed on the screen, such as transport timetables or other custom information.
Editing these views happens inside the SwitchBot app, although it’s a little clunky. Rather than assigning different custom layouts directly to each shortcut button, you create a collection of screens and scroll through them.
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There also isn’t a dedicated Home button, so returning to the main dashboard means cycling through whichever screens you’ve configured.
Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)
There’s also a browser-based editor available for configuring the display, although you’ll need to log in before making changes.
Weather information is generally clear and useful, although by default the weather view focuses on the coming days rather than the next 24 hours. There is a dedicated hourly weather screen available if that’s your preference.
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Like any E-Ink device, updates aren’t instant. If you don’t want to wait for the next automatic refresh, holding the top button forces everything to update immediately.
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Calendar and smart home
Calendar integration is one of the Dashboard’s headline features, but it’s also where the experience feels least polished.
Rather than simply signing into your Google, Apple or Outlook account, you’ll need to dig around for calendar URLs and iCal settings. Thankfully SwitchBot includes detailed walkthroughs and video guides inside the app, but it’s still more work than it should be.
Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)
Once configured, the calendar works well enough. It supports up to five separate calendars, displaying as many as 30 events per person each day, and you can quickly switch between them.
The interface itself is fairly basic though. By default you only see today’s events. A couple of button presses will take you to a three-day view, but there’s no proper week-at-a-glance display, which feels like a missed opportunity for something positioned as a family planning device.
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Smart home functionality is similarly a mixed bag.
Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)
The two configurable shortcut buttons can trigger SwitchBot scenes, and when connected through a SwitchBot Matter-enabled hub, I was also able to expose them to Home Assistant via Matter and use them to trigger automations there as well as in Apple Home.
One annoyance is that the Dashboard doesn’t display labels for those shortcut buttons unless the scenes are created inside the SwitchBot app (and use SwitchBoy devices).
If you’re triggering Home Assistant or Apple Home automations, you’re left remembering which button does what.
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Likewise, while the Dashboard can work perfectly well as a standalone weather display, you’ll need to invest in an additional SwitchBot hub to unlock Matter connectivity, notifications and many of its more advanced smart home features.
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It feels like a missed opportunity not to build hub functionality directly into the device, especially at the price.
Environmental monitoring
Has its own sensors
Can connect to SwitchBot environmental sensors
Where the E-Ink Home Dashboard starts to make a stronger case for itself is environmental monitoring.
It includes built-in temperature and humidity sensors, but it can also connect to as many as three compatible SwitchBot environmental sensors, including CO2 monitors.
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Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)
That’s genuinely useful if you have different spaces around your home you’d like to keep an eye on, whether that’s a nursery, greenhouse, garage or home office.
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In my setup, I actually ignored the Dashboard’s own temperature sensor altogether. Since I had the display mounted on my fridge (which might give off extra heat), I instead configured it to display readings from my SwitchBot Meter Pro located elsewhere in the kitchen, giving me much more accurate information.
You can also configure notifications for temperature and humidity thresholds, provided you have a compatible SwitchBot hub.
Battery life
Battery life should be one of the Dashboard’s biggest strengths.
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SwitchBot claims up to a year from the integrated 5,000mAh rechargeable battery when refreshing every three hours over Wi-Fi, which is entirely believable given the incredibly low power demands of E-Ink technology.
If you’d rather not think about charging at all, there’s always the option of leaving it permanently connected via the USB-C port on the rear.
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Should you buy it?
You want something to monitor the environment
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The large display and option to pull data from external sensors makes this a useful tool for keeping an eye on the weather.
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You want a slicker experience
Slightly clunky calendar and scene integrations do hold the product back.
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Final Thoughts
The SwitchBot E-Ink Home Dashboard gets a lot right. The hardware is excellent, the E-Ink display is genuinely nice to look at and the ability to combine weather, environmental monitoring, calendars and smart home shortcuts into a single low-power display makes plenty of sense.
The problem is that the software doesn’t quite live up to the hardware.
Calendar setup feels dated, navigation could be much slicker and some small interface improvements, like labelled scene buttons and easier movement between views, would make a noticeable difference to the overall experience.
At its current price, I’d have expected it to double as a SwitchBot hub. Instead, you’ll need to buy another piece of hardware if you want to unlock Matter support and many of the smart home features that make the Dashboard most appealing.
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It’s a promising product with plenty of potential, particularly for existing SwitchBot users, but it feels like the second generation could be the one that truly delivers on the concept.
How We Test
We test every smart home product we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
We test how each product integrates with other smart home systems including Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple HomeKit, IFTTT and Samsung SmartThings
We use each smart home product in a real world setting, integrating it into our home.
FAQs
Is the SwitchBot E-Ink Home Dashboard a hub?
No, you’ll need an additional product to act as a SwitchBot hub in your home.
DuckDB creators Mark Raasveldt, left, and Hannes Mühleisen. (DuckLabs Photo)
Amazon has agreed to acquire DuckLabs, the company behind DuckDB, the fast-growing open-source database that has become a favorite of developers looking to analyze large amounts of data without the cost and setup of a cloud data warehouse.
Employees of DuckLabs will join Amazon Web Services, including co-founders and DuckDB creators Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt, who will continue leading the team and setting the project’s technical direction. They will remain based in Amsterdam, where the team will continue developing DuckDB and related projects.
Amazon says it is not acquiring the DuckDB open-source project itself. DuckDB will remain free and open source under the MIT license, overseen by the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation, as will the related DuckLake and Quack projects, according to DuckLabs.
Financial terms were not disclosed. Amazon said it has signed a definitive agreement and expects the acquisition to close shortly. DuckLabs said it expects to become part of AWS in early September.
Larger shifts in cloud data
The deal fits Amazon’s broader push to turn S3, its flagship cloud storage service, into a place where customers analyze data rather than just store it. It gives Amazon a team experienced in building fast, lightweight analytics software that runs directly against data sitting in cloud storage.
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The move comes as the data industry shifts toward keeping information in open formats in cloud storage, where it can be queried directly rather than loaded into a separate warehouse.
The shift puts pressure on companies like Snowflake and Databricks, which sell the compute and governance layer on top of stored data. Both are major AWS partners as well as competitors, with large numbers of customers running on Amazon’s cloud.
AI has raised the stakes, driving up both the volume of data companies keep in the cloud and the cost of analyzing it. Amazon says DuckDB is a natural fit for AI agents, which query data much the way people do, poking and experimenting with small sets before deciding what they want.
DuckLabs said it has worked closely with AWS in recent years, including on DuckDB support for Amazon’s S3 Tables and SageMaker Lakehouse.
“DuckDB is an incredible open source project with an amazing community; it is broadly used and very much loved by S3 customers today,” said Andy Warfield, an AWS vice president and distinguished engineer, in a press release announcing the deal.
‘That’s Amazon’s playbook’
One of the companies watching closely is in Seattle. MotherDuck, which sells a cloud service built on DuckDB, was founded in partnership with the DuckLabs team and has worked with it closely for four years. Three of its engineers are among the top 10 outside contributors to the DuckDB project.
MotherDuck CEO Jordan Tigani. (LinkedIn Photo)
In a blog post Wednesday, MotherDuck CEO Jordan Tigani said Amazon is following a familiar pattern. “That’s Amazon’s playbook, after all: wait until an open source project gets big enough, then launch it as a service,” wrote Tigani, who helped start Google’s BigQuery and spent a decade there before co-founding MotherDuck in 2022.
He expects Amazon to do exactly that with DuckDB: “After all, they’re not acquiring Duck Labs just because they love open source,” he wrote. “We welcome the competition.”
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He said the deal is likely to be good for DuckDB, because Amazon has a financial reason to keep the project open and healthy. “If DuckDB becomes the standard, it is going to drive a lot more compute on their infrastructure, which is where they make their money,” he wrote.
Tigani said DuckLabs is being kept as a wholly owned subsidiary with its organization intact, and that the DuckDB Foundation has “iron clad control over the DuckDB IP.”
MotherDuck also said it is now offering enterprise support for DuckDB — which it had previously steered clear of to avoid competing with DuckLabs. Tigani said the company has Mühleisen and Raasveldt’s “explicit blessing” to take it on now that they are joining Amazon.
Five years, no venture capital
DuckLabs was founded a little more than five years ago as a long-term home for the DuckDB development team. The company turned down venture capital, stayed owned by its founders and employees, and grew to more than 30 people in Amsterdam, funding itself through support and feature-development contracts.
In a blog post, Mühleisen and Raasveldt wrote that they had come to worry DuckDB’s growth would outpace their ability to support it, and that their small company “could become a bottleneck for the project.” Building a larger sales and operations organization, they wrote, would have pulled the team away from the technical work that made DuckDB successful.
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Nine days before the acquisition was announced, Mühleisen and Raasveldt published a preview of DuckDB 2.0, due this fall, declaring that the release “kicks off the year of DuckDB as a server.” It adds Quack, which lets one DuckDB instance serve data to others over a network, along with work aimed at speeding up queries against data held in object storage such as S3.
DuckLabs said the DuckDB Foundation will add a technical advisory board, giving leading community members input on the project’s technical direction. The company also plans to let DuckDB run extensions signed by outside developers and organizations.
For users of a certain age, fractal patterns and computers are nearly synonymous. Typing in BASIC programs and seeing the Mandelbrot set or other fractals slowly render on screen is a key memory for some of us. Others will have generated recursive patterns mucking about: point an analog camera at the screen showing its video feed, and you’d better believe you get recursion. It’s called video feedback, and it looks a lot better than audio feedback sounds, especially in the hands of a master like [The Light Herder] who has now found a way to take this vintage art into the 4K resolution of the 21st century.
Physically this build is very similar to the “God Machine II” sculpture we covered previously, which in turn built on the first 720p version of his art piece. Getting analog video feedback in HD was hard enough — you need to be able to adjust the hue, saturation, brightness and contrast of the monitor as you go in order to have the full control of the resulting image. Most old TVs had those back in the SD era, but once HD came around it was rare; [The Light Herder] despaired of ever finding a screen that would to this in 4K.
As it turns out, the answer was to embrace digital — all the knobs on his analog control board feed into a Teensy, which is communicating via RS-232 with the LCD driver boards to alter the desired display properties. Obviously judicious selection of driver boards was required. If you watch the build video embedded below, you’ll find there’s an awful lot of tech in this analog, ‘no computer’ setup. If you want to skip the how-to and a master’s explanation of video feedback and just see pretty pictures he’s got a demo video as well. It really has to be seen to be believed.
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If you want to create a colorful analog light show that isn’t quite so self-referential and a lot simpler to build, you could always try soap. Actually, we’d love to see him start the feedback with some soap-film colors. The result would likely be as was once said “totally far out, man”.
Graze co-founders Peat Bakke (left) and Devin Gaffney. (Graze Photo)
Portland-based social media startup Graze is joining Flipboard in a strategic acquisition aimed at expanding open social protocols and giving users control over their own content algorithms.
Founded by Devin Gaffney, Peat Bakke and Andrew Lisowski — starting from a blog concept and officially forming 21 months ago — Graze has grown into an engine for the open social web.
The Graze platform has delivered over 41 billion posts to 12 million users. It enables creators, publishers and everyday users to build, tune, and monetize custom social algorithms, particularly across platforms like Bluesky, without writing a single line of code.
In announcement announcing the deal, Gaffney said that Graze marks the most important work of his career, creating a new “playbook for how to re-orient the attention economy, and start pulling us back out of the widening gyre.”
Under the direction of Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company has heavily invested in open social protocols like AT Protocol, ActivityPub and RSS through initiatives like its Surf browser and “Social Websites” product.
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The acquisition combines Flipboard’s front-end discovery tools with Graze’s back-end algorithmic engine.
“Combined, we become two halves of one machine,” wrote Gaffney. “Surf will be the browser for the open social web — where people go to read and discover feeds across Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, RSS, and more. Graze will be the engine under those feeds — how a curator builds, tunes, and monetizes one without writing a line of code.”
As a lean team, Graze faced a number of operational slowdowns with Gaffney writing that they ended up “wearing a half dozen hats we didn’t know we needed at the start.” Joining Flipboard allows the team to accelerate development by tapping into Flipboard’s established infrastructure rather than rebuilding existing systems from scratch.
“Mike (McCue) and I share a vision of creating an attention economy that works for everyone, and as the onslaught of generative AI starts to clog the pipes of legacy platforms, we both deeply believe that a curatorial role in shaping “the algorithm” is the only sustainable way to run that attention economy into the future,” Gaffney wrote.
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For Graze’s existing user base, the team confirmed that the core product and service will remain online. The combined entities aim to offer a creator-first alternative to closed, legacy platforms like Facebook or Instagram, providing users with ownership over what they see and how they earn.
In April 2025, Graze raised $1 million in a pre-seed round led by Betaworks, Salesforce Ventures Factorial, Apertu Capital, Skyseed, and angel investors from Mozilla and Protocol Labs. Graze employed just two people — Gaffney and software engineer Nick Gerakines — and both will be transitioning to Flipboard. Bakke and Lisowski left the company last year.
In an email to GeekWire, Flipboard’s McCue said that the Graze team has built a special tool that has benefited many curators, community builders, creators and developers.
“I’m inspired by their vision and can’t wait to work closely with them to continue building out the open social web,” McCue said. “Devin and Nick will continue to advance Graze as the ultimate feed building and hosting platform while Surf and Flipboard will enable millions of additional users to discover and experience feeds in new ways we’re going to design together.”
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Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, though Gaffney tells GeekWire that they are “confident that this is a great outcome for the team, the company, and the investors.”
The Whoop Meridian takes a screenless fitness tracker that usually looks sporty and turns it into a luxury accessory. Rather than a silicone band, you’re looking at a tapered metal mesh band, magnetic clasp, and four finishes designed to look more at home alongside jewelry than running shoes. Whoop is selling Meridian in Gold, Rose Gold, Alloy, and Black for $149 starting today.
There’s just one small problem. One of Whoop’s biggest ideas is that you’re supposed to wear its tracker continuously, and higher-tier Whoop 5.0 memberships even include a wireless power pack that can charge the tracker while it remains on your wrist. But unfortunately, Meridian can’t do that.
Whoop
Looking better means taking it off
Whoop’s wireless charger cannot send power through Meridian’s metal band, so the tracker has to come off before it can be charged. So you’re not getting that convenient feature on Whoop’s existing design, particularly for users obsessive enough about continuous health data to dislike gaps in their tracking.
The company addressed the new design in its official announcement, talking about how it now matches the occasions where people might normally remove a fitness tracker — dinners, events, travel, or simply situations where a fabric sports band doesn’t complement what they’re wearing.
The Milanese-style mesh, tapered silhouette, and continuously adjustable magnetic clasp are supposed to turn the Whoop into something closer to jewelry. I can see the appeal. During our review of the Whoop 5.0, we found the standard model comfortable and unobtrusive. Though its chunky fabric-band appearance was one of the hardware’s weaker points. Meridian addresses that complaint rather directly.
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Google’s Fitbit Air makes this look expensive
Whoop
Meridian costs $149 for the band alone. You still need compatible Whoop hardware and an active membership, with Whoop’s subscriptions starting at $199 per year. Meanwhile, Google will sell you an entire Fitbit Air for $99.99. That’s a complete screenless health tracker with 24/7 heart-rate monitoring, sleep tracking, workout detection, up to seven days of battery life, and compatibility with Android and iOS. More importantly, its fundamental health-tracking features continue working without paying for Google Health Premium.
The two products are targeting slightly different customers. Whoop leans much harder into detailed recovery, strain, and performance data, while Fitbit Air is deliberately aimed at making passive health tracking simpler and cheaper. For $50 less than Whoop’s new strap, Google gives you the tracker too. So it mostly makes sense for users already in Whoop’s ecosystem.
Apple has confirmed that its autumn event will take place on 9 September at 10am Pacific time at Apple Park, under the tagline “Surprise and shine” and an invitation showing a sun rising behind the company logo.
The more consequential detail is what is not on the list. The standard iPhone 18 is expected to slip to a spring launch, which means Apple has quietly split the annual iPhone cycle into two events for the first time.
That is a bigger change than a new hinge. The September keynote has been the fixed point of the consumer technology calendar for well over a decade, and moving the volume model out of it changes what the event is for.
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The foldable itself, reported variously as the iPhone Fold or iPhone Ultra, is expected in a book-style design with an outer display of around 5.3 in and an inner display near 7.8 in.
Reports describe a titanium frame and a display Apple has worked hard to make close to crease-free, which has been the visible weakness of every rival for seven years.
One design decision stands out from the rest. Face ID is expected to be replaced by Touch ID in the power button, presumably because there is nowhere sensible to put the sensor array on a device that folds.
Pricing expectations run from about $2,000 to $2,500, which would make it the most expensive iPhone Apple has sold by a considerable margin. Samsung has had this category largely to itself since 2019 and has never made it a volume business, so Apple arriving late and expensive is not the disadvantage it sounds.
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Apple’s stated position on foldables has always been that the category was not yet good enough, which is roughly the argument it made about large screens and about styluses before adopting both. The test will be whether the hinge and the crease hold up over a couple of years rather than whether they impress in a demo.
The Pro models are the more conventional part of the event. The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max are expected to keep their current designs while gaining an A20 Pro chip built on a 2nm process, Apple’s own C2 modem, a variable-aperture main camera, and a smaller Dynamic Island.
A 2nm part would put Apple a full node ahead of most of the Android field, where Xiaomi’s in-house silicon is still on 3nm. Whether buyers notice is a separate question from whether it matters competitively.
There is also a reported price rise of roughly $300 on the Pro line, which would be unusually steep for Apple and is worth treating as a rumour rather than a plan. Component costs have moved sharply this year, particularly memory, so the direction is at least plausible.
Durability is where foldables have historically disappointed buyers, and it is also the hardest thing to judge from a keynote. A $2,000 phone with a moving part is a warranty proposition as much as a product one.
The home products may be the quiet story. Updated HomePod mini and Apple TV hardware with Siri’s newer AI stack are expected, along with a home hub carrying a seven-inch screen and a FaceTime camera, which would be Apple’s first real attempt at a category Amazon and Google have occupied for years.
None of this is confirmed beyond the date, the venue, and the tagline, and Apple’s invitations have never been dependable guides to their contents.
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What the schedule does confirm is that the company is willing to hold a September keynote without its highest-volume product on the stage, which is not a decision it has taken before.
Samsung is hosting another Unpacked today, and the company says the fanfare is for the “newest addition to the S26 family.” Given we’ve already seen a trio of Galaxy S26 flagships earlier this year, and being very familiar with Samsung’s device lineup, we can make a highly educated guess that this is likely going to be the launch of the S26 FE.
The FE series is typically a lower priced version of the company’s premium handsets, usually with some compromises on cameras and processors. In its announcement for this event, Samsung said the next S26 family member was “purposefully designed to bring many Galaxy S26 experiences from camera to AI, along with the latest One UI, to those who look for what truly matters most to them.”
We don’t expect there to be many surprises, nor for the presentation to last very long. The show starts at 8AM ET, which is in just over an hour, which gives us some time to hang out with you all. Leave us a comment below with your thoughts and questions, we’d love to chat with you here!
T-Mobile is cutting 77 jobs across Washington state, trimming staff across its Bellevue headquarters, regional retail stores, and remote roles, according to a new state filing.
The workforce reductions span frontline, regional, and corporate roles, eliminating positions ranging from retail mobile experts and account care specialists to principal systems architects and senior directors at the wireless carrier.
In addition to 63 newly disclosed job cuts, the filing includes 14 workers whose previously announced departures were deferred to this fall.
Beyond corporate offices, the cuts will result in permanent store closures across Washington. Locations expected to close include retail sites in Seattle (45th & Stone Way), Bellingham, Bothell, Kennewick, Tacoma, Vancouver, and Yakima.
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“Like all businesses, we’re constantly looking at where we allocate our resources so we can invest in the areas that matter the most to our customers,” a T-Mobile spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “That means making adjustments where needed while continuing to hire in areas that support our priorities, strengthen our momentum and help us keep changing the industry through innovation.”
The spokesperson pointed to a broader retail pivot aimed at concentrating its store footprint toward company-operated locations integrated with digital tools like its T-Life app, rather than third-party dealer operations.
“Changes to third-party dealer-operated locations do not affect T-Mobile employees,” the spokesperson added. “In most cases, T-Mobile retail employees can apply for positions in other locations or relocate if there is a change to their current store.”
A subset of the latest cuts stems from facility relocations, where some employees were offered transfer opportunities, according to the filing.
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The company previously cut 393 workers in Washington in February.
How much do you hate typing? The advent of large language models has rapidly advanced voice-to-text technology. Whether it’s Wispr Flow joining your meetings to summarize discussions or Google debuting smarter on-device dictation in its latest Pixel smartphone, these tools do far more than transcribe: They intelligently strip filler words, clean up unscripted thoughts on the fly, and seamlessly mediate multilingual conversations.
Now, a new startup is entering the fray. Unlike its software-focused peers, Relay is building a dedicated, portable microphone for high-fidelity voice-to-text anywhere. Based in London, Relay was founded by two former Nothing employees: Cookie Xu, who was Nothing’s head of AI and services, and Raymond Zhu, a hardware product manager. While the company is debuting its software today, the hardware—what it calls the Relay Q—won’t be available until early 2027.
Zhu says when he and Xu worked at Nothing, they used Wispr Flow’s transcription software to “type” most of their messages at work. He says it greatly helped with thinking out ideas, but they kept running into an issue: talking loudly in an office.
“In the office, we never really could get the right volume for input,” Zhu tells WIRED. “If I whisper too quietly, the Mac wouldn’t be able to pick it up; too loud and my coworker next to me can hear. Sometimes I would actually pull out my earbud and go like this,” he says over a video call, holding an earbud in front of his mouth to demonstrate. “It calls for dedicated hardware.”
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Courtesy of Relay
Relay is exclusive to macOS at launch, though the company has plans to bring it to Windows, iOS, and Android. It’s starting with the desktop because Zhu believes conversations are most complex there. Chats with friends and family are simple on phones, but at work in front of a computer, you’re sharing ideas, brainstorming, and using varied tone and formality.
Though the microphone is still months away from being ready, I’ve been using a beta version of Relay’s macOS app, which works with or without the dedicated mic.
During setup, you’ll need to choose a hotkey that will trigger Relay in any text field—the default is Fn. Press and hold the key while your cursor is in any text field, and Relay activates and handles the voice dictation. The voice-to-text engine is powered by Google’s Gemini models.
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