News and Updates from Gadget Hacks

Apple announced three concrete upgrades to iPhone Mirroring at WWDC last week, and the macOS 27 iPhone Mirroring upgrades cover the full range: Control Center access, protected video playback, and a resizable window that can shift aspect ratios beyond the iPhone's fixed proportions, according to 9to5Mac. Two of those fixes are system-level changes that work the moment users install macOS 27 and iOS 27. The third is the more significant addition, but it currently applies only to Apple's native...

Tesla CarPlay support has long looked like a business decision dressed up as a product omission. For more than a decade, Tesla resisted CarPlay while competitors leaned on Apple and Google to compensate for weaker native platforms a dynamic that ABI Research noted last December when it confirmed Tesla was reportedly testing native CarPlay integration for the first time. But reporting over the past year points to something more specific than corporate reluctance: Tesla's driver-assistance...

Memory has overtaken the processor and display to become the single most expensive component in a smartphone, Nothing CEO Carl Pei warned this week, and he says phone prices are going up and will keep rising into next year. That claim matters beyond Nothing's own lineup: independent market data from IDC puts the memory shortage at the center of what it calls the steepest smartphone market contraction in recorded history.

Strava rolled out a broad set of new hiking features covering route planning, offline navigation, off-route alerts, and route following on Apple Watch. The features that matter most on an unfamiliar trail, planning where to go, staying on route, and navigating without cell service all sit behind the subscription paywall. Free users get a more capable recording screen and better social tools. Subscribers get the navigation suite.

Apple's supply chain is already manufacturing parts for an iPhone camera the company has never built before. Sunny Optical has started producing actuators for a variable aperture mechanism destated for the iPhone 18 Pro, while LG Innotek is preparing full module assembly at its Gumi facility in South Korea for June or July, ahead of its normal schedule specifically because the new mechanism raises defect risk, MacRumors reported two months ago citing Korea's ETNews. That's active component...

Huawei reportedly unveiled HarmonyOS 7, a major upgrade to its self-developed mobile OS that the company is framing as its entry into what it calls the "agent era" positioning the platform less as a conventional Android rival than as an AI-agent system designed to coordinate complex tasks autonomously across devices. The announcement puts HarmonyOS 7 features directly in competition with Apple's iOS 27, according to South China Morning Post.

An An unreleased Apple Watch anniversary band has surfaced outside Apple, and only four units are known to have surfaced publicly. The Sport Band is engraved with "2014–2024: Ten Years of Apple Watch," two units sold on eBay still sealed in Apple's internal sample packaging, and a public release now looks highly unlikely.

Google Home Instant Account Relinking: Why Devices Go Offline

Gemini for Google Home Update: Faster Responses and Privacy Tradeoffs

Apple unveiled macOS 27 Golden Gate at WWDC26 this week, and the release has a clear internal logic: fix the readability problems Tahoe introduced with Liquid Glass, deliver a rebuilt Siri powered by Apple Intelligence, and give families parental controls that are actually worth using. Every Apple Silicon Mac from M1 forward can run it. The catch worth knowing upfront: the headline AI feature isn't fully here yet. Siri AI arrives as a separate beta later this year, starting in English only....

Two Apple Photos executives gave their clearest public account yet of what the iOS 27 Photos AI features are built to do. The word they kept returning to was "refine." The flagship tool, Spatial Reframing, can shift the apparent camera angle of a photo after the fact and change where a subject appears to be looking. That's a harder sell for "refinement" than Apple's framing acknowledges.

If you pay $8 a month for ChatGPT's Go tier, you still see ads. That single fact does more to clarify the ChatGPT ads vs Apple Intelligence comparison than any feature benchmark or privacy policy ever could. One company collects its AI return when you buy a new iPhone. The other has started collecting it mid-conversation.

Huawei has set a firm date. The company published an official notice today confirming it will raise prices on its "intelligent collaboration products" starting July 1, 2026, citing memory chip shortages, rising component costs, and AI-driven chip demand as pressures it can no longer absorb, according to Huawei Central. That notice covers smartphones, tablets, and other devices across Huawei's lineup, and moves the Huawei price hike July 2026 from executive speculation to a dated, company-issued...

The Spotify disco ball icon fix is now live on iPhone. The familiar flat green circle is back in the App Store today, 25 days after Spotify publicly told users the standard icon would return "next week." The update is available now, according to 9to5Mac.

Apple is moving Visual Intelligence out of a hidden gesture and into a named mode inside the Camera app with iOS 27, making a capability that has existed since iPhone 16 actually discoverable. The iOS 27 Camera Control improvement gives the feature a dedicated Siri mode in the mode selector alongside Photo, Video, and Portrait, according to MacRumors' hands-on developer beta coverage three days ago.

Murena launched /e/OS 4.0 today with the company's most direct attempt yet to address the practical obstacle behind most failed attempts to leave Google: not finding a different phone, but untangling a decade of email, contacts, Drive files, and account relationships from Google's infrastructure. The release lowers that barrier. How much, and for whom, depends on what you need from your phone after the switch.

Google confirmed Wednesday that a Play Store bug causing crashes on Wear OS smartwatches has been fixed, but the Pixel Watch Play Store crash fix has only been confirmed for Pixel Watch devices. Galaxy Watch owners reported identical behavior and have received no equivalent confirmation from Google or Samsung.

A growing number of Chromecast with Google TV owners are finding their remotes won't stay paired, and the pattern of complaints points to something more than individual hardware failures. 9to5Google reported that a fresh wave of complaints has accumulated across Reddit and Google's support forums, enough for reports to flag a recurring complaint pattern. The Chromecast with Google TV remote not working pattern has surfaced before, but the current volume and consistency are harder to dismiss.

Apple gave EU iPhone and iPad users a concrete reason to notice the Digital Markets Act earlier this month: Siri AI will not be available on iOS 27 or iPadOS 27 in any of the 27 EU member states when those releases ship later this year, with no timeline for when that changes, according to Apple's newsroom. Apple's marketing chief Greg Joswiak escalated that framing this week, calling the Siri AI EU launch delay the "most serious negative outcome yet" of the Digital Markets Act, Euractiv...

Google began notifying users this week that a new setting called Google Search Services History will govern how the company saves and uses the media submitted through Search. The change affects photos taken with Google Lens, recordings from the real-time Search Live tool, voice queries, spoken phrases entered into Translate, and uploaded files and video, The Verge reported Wednesday.