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Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Google is done making Chromecasts. In a post on Tuesday, Google says it’s “ending production of Chromecast” after over a decade of selling the streaming dongles.
Even though Chromecast devices will now be available “while supplies last,” Google says it will continue to push software and security updates to its newer devices without specifying which ones. The most recent update to the lineup was the Chromecast with Google TV released in 2022.
But now, Google says “technology has evolved dramatically” since the launch of the original Chromecast in 2013. “We invested heavily in embedding Google Cast technology into millions of TV devices, including Android TV,” Google writes. “We are taking the next step in evolving how streaming TV devices can add even more capabilities to your smart TV, built on top of the same Chromecast technology.”

In place of the Chromecast, the company will offer the newly announced $99.99 Google TV Streamer, which launches on September 24th. The set-top box comes with some significant spec bumps over the Chromecast with Google TV, such as a processor that’s 22 percent faster, along with Thread and Matter integration.
While the Google TV Streamer is a major upgrade to the Chromecast — and may finally even rival the pricier Apple TV 4K — it’s a shame Google is getting rid of its dongle. With a price of just $29.99, the Chromecast with Google TV offers entry-level access to an all-in-one streaming hub.

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Google is done making Chromecasts. In a post on Tuesday, Google says it’s “ending production of Chromecast” after over a decade of selling the streaming dongles.

Even though Chromecast devices will now be available “while supplies last,” Google says it will continue to push software and security updates to its newer devices without specifying which ones. The most recent update to the lineup was the Chromecast with Google TV released in 2022.

But now, Google says “technology has evolved dramatically” since the launch of the original Chromecast in 2013. “We invested heavily in embedding Google Cast technology into millions of TV devices, including Android TV,” Google writes. “We are taking the next step in evolving how streaming TV devices can add even more capabilities to your smart TV, built on top of the same Chromecast technology.”

In place of the Chromecast, the company will offer the newly announced $99.99 Google TV Streamer, which launches on September 24th. The set-top box comes with some significant spec bumps over the Chromecast with Google TV, such as a processor that’s 22 percent faster, along with Thread and Matter integration.

While the Google TV Streamer is a major upgrade to the Chromecast — and may finally even rival the pricier Apple TV 4K — it’s a shame Google is getting rid of its dongle. With a price of just $29.99, the Chromecast with Google TV offers entry-level access to an all-in-one streaming hub.

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Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge

The Quibi story is both short and epic. In January 2020, company founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman were onstage at CES delivering an hour-long presentation on how they were about to upend the entertainment business. They’d developed new tech, signed up seemingly half the stars in Hollywood, and had raised more than a billion dollars to pull it off. By October, it was all over. Quibi was shutting down.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we’re once again trying out a couple of our favorite new show formats. First up is the rewatch show, which we’re calling Version History. We talk through the whole story of Quibi, from its early days as NewTV to its extremely ill-timed launch and ultimate demise. Is there a world in which Quibi could have worked? Could a company called Quibi have actually succeeded? We have much to discuss.
Next, we try out our as-yet-untitled debate show, in which The Verge’s Kevin Nguyen and Alex Cranz take on a surprisingly contentious topic: is the future of books print or digital? Each gets to make their case, before having it ruthlessly ripped to shreds in front of their eyes.
(We’d love to know what you think about these new formats, by the way! We’re trying out lots of new stuff, and we’re always looking to expand and even launch new shows — so we want to know everything you think we should do more of, do less of, or do differently. You can send us an email at vergecast@theverge.com, call the hotline at 866-VERGE11, or just leave us a comment here.)
Finally, we answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline about a very unusual shopping situation for MP3 players. Turns out, there are good reasons to still want a dedicated music player.
If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, first on Quibi:

From Variety: Quibi Has Raised $1.75B After Closing $750M Round to Fund Launch

From Variety: Jeffrey Katzenberg’s NewTV Closes $1B, Major Studios Among Investors

Quibi’s CES 2020 launch
Quibi app review: shortform streaming in a shifting landscape
Steven Spielberg is writing a horror series you’ll only be able to stream at night
Quibi’s Super Bowl 2020 commercial
Quibi versus the world
From The Wall Street Journal: Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman Struggle With Their Startup—and Each Other

How Quibi imploded less than six months after launch
11 reasons why Quibi crashed and burned in less than a year

And on the future of books:

The Boox Palma is an amazing gadget I didn’t even know I wanted
Kobo’s great color e-readers are held back by lock-in
From The Wall Street Journal: How the Kindle Became a Must-Have Accessory (Again)

And on MP3 players:
Our pick: NW-E394 Walkman Digital Music Player

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge

The Quibi story is both short and epic. In January 2020, company founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman were onstage at CES delivering an hour-long presentation on how they were about to upend the entertainment business. They’d developed new tech, signed up seemingly half the stars in Hollywood, and had raised more than a billion dollars to pull it off. By October, it was all over. Quibi was shutting down.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we’re once again trying out a couple of our favorite new show formats. First up is the rewatch show, which we’re calling Version History. We talk through the whole story of Quibi, from its early days as NewTV to its extremely ill-timed launch and ultimate demise. Is there a world in which Quibi could have worked? Could a company called Quibi have actually succeeded? We have much to discuss.

Next, we try out our as-yet-untitled debate show, in which The Verge’s Kevin Nguyen and Alex Cranz take on a surprisingly contentious topic: is the future of books print or digital? Each gets to make their case, before having it ruthlessly ripped to shreds in front of their eyes.

(We’d love to know what you think about these new formats, by the way! We’re trying out lots of new stuff, and we’re always looking to expand and even launch new shows — so we want to know everything you think we should do more of, do less of, or do differently. You can send us an email at vergecast@theverge.com, call the hotline at 866-VERGE11, or just leave us a comment here.)

Finally, we answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline about a very unusual shopping situation for MP3 players. Turns out, there are good reasons to still want a dedicated music player.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, first on Quibi:

From Variety: Quibi Has Raised $1.75B After Closing $750M Round to Fund Launch

From Variety: Jeffrey Katzenberg’s NewTV Closes $1B, Major Studios Among Investors

Quibi’s CES 2020 launch
Quibi app review: shortform streaming in a shifting landscape
Steven Spielberg is writing a horror series you’ll only be able to stream at night
Quibi’s Super Bowl 2020 commercial
Quibi versus the world
From The Wall Street Journal: Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman Struggle With Their Startup—and Each Other

How Quibi imploded less than six months after launch
11 reasons why Quibi crashed and burned in less than a year

And on the future of books:

The Boox Palma is an amazing gadget I didn’t even know I wanted
Kobo’s great color e-readers are held back by lock-in
From The Wall Street Journal: How the Kindle Became a Must-Have Accessory (Again)

And on MP3 players:

Our pick: NW-E394 Walkman Digital Music Player

Read More 

Hand required to add cream. | Image: Keurig

I just used Keurig’s new hybrid K-Brew and Chill machine that can quickly cool down freshly brewed pod coffee (and fruity “refreshers”) to a temperature “as cold as, if not colder,” than an iced coffee and sweet drinks you could order at a local coffee shop. For me, there was something unexpectedly satisfying about making an instantly cold drink from a standalone and solidly built machine — even if the cup of La Colombe medium roast it made tasted disappointingly burnt.
I’m not sure why I was expecting a better taste — it’s not like the machine uses some premium new coffee. It starts with just your run-of-the-mill K-Cup, and does not support any of the company’s fancy K-Carafe, K-Mug, Vue, or Rivo pods. Like many models, you pop one into the chamber and use the handle to clamp it, although this machine has the “Multistream” feature that pokes five holes instead of one to better saturate the grounds.

Image: Umar Shakir / The Verge
The 70-ounce water tank is huge, so you can do multiple true 12-ounce pulls that are ideal for iced coffee servings.

From there, I pressed the Cold button, selected 10 ounces, and pressed the big K button in the middle. Then, something sounded unexpected. “You heard that little click, which is a little bit different for a Keurig,” the company’s SVP of coffee marketing, Becky Opdyke tells me during a live demonstration. “It’s closing it out so instead of the hot coffee coming out here, it’s now going through the bypass and into the cold system.”
Keurig’s new cooling system, called “Quick Chill Technology,” promises to chill a drink “in under 3 minutes,” so you don’t have to brew a standard hot beverage over ice that can melt and dilute the drink to something worse than, well, pod-brewed coffee. The company says that after the machine extracts the hot coffee, it cools it to “sub-60 degrees” by liquid cooling the coffee in the back of the machine before returning it to the front spout. It’s kind of like an AIO cooler inside custom PCs — you just drink the cooled processor.
But do not confuse the resulting drink with “cold brew coffee,” which involves steeping coarse coffee grounds in cold water for an extended period. This is hot coffee that’s been promptly chilled. Companies like SharkNinja literally call its reduced-temperature espresso over ice “cold brew,” which can confuse customers as “cold” coffee machines continue to trend.
Both the temperature and brew time claims by Keurig worked as advertised during my demonstration. Still, you must also account for a rinse cycle to clear the pipes, which according to Opdyke, takes 45 seconds after every cold drink process. And you’ll need to clear the drip tray once it fills up.

Image: Umar Shakir / The Verge
I much preferred the refreshers over the coffee, which tasted like the ones from Starbucks.

Out of the box, the K-Brew and Chill needs you to fill its rear chill tank with water, which is separate from the main reservoir (and does not mix with the drinks). It will initially take 6 hours to “charge up” the system so you can make cold drinks. Once both cold indicator lights are lit up, you can get about four 12-ounce cold drinks in a row before it has to recharge, which can take up to four hours.
A previous Keurig attempt at an instant cold drive machine was the “Kold” dispenser in 2016 that could make a tasty instant Coca-Cola, but it was quickly discontinued due to high cost and low demand. Opdyke tells me the K-Brew and Chill goes beyond the Kold’s technology.
The K-Brew and Chill is the first in a line of products, with options coming that will be cheaper than the current $199.99 price. “We always want to have a good, better, best,” Opdyke says.
According to Opdyke, Keurig is marketing the machine to budget-minded Gen-Z and millennials who go to the coffee shop a lot. Keurig calculated that each drink is about one-fifth the cost of an iced coffee from Starbucks. Although, that may not account for the extra desserty versions of iced coffees that Starbucks popularized, which helps mask the horrid-tasting coffee it sells.
If I wasn’t clear earlier, pod coffee is not my thing. But the fruity “refreshers” drinks Keurig has are a good value add to the K-Brew and Chill since they taste good and have the right amount of sweetness (and caffeine) built in. Additionally, instant iced tea is also welcome.

Costs aside, I think the K-Brew and Chill may be tough to market to the intended customer, especially with the gaining popularity of high-end coffee, local roasteries, and machines like the Breville Barista Express, which provides a craft coffeemaking experience at home. However, I think Keurig could sell this to current customers who are happy with the company’s K-Cup coffee offerings, and are ready for a solid replacement. People like my dad, who has a cabinet full of Donut Shop pods and Splenda packets, and just loves his office Keurig.
However, there are still questions about the environmental impact of pod drinks from companies like Keurig and Nestle. Opdyke says the pod’s plastics are recyclable, and some places like NYC process them in standard recycling. The company is also launching a ship-in recycling service later this year.

Hand required to add cream. | Image: Keurig

I just used Keurig’s new hybrid K-Brew and Chill machine that can quickly cool down freshly brewed pod coffee (and fruity “refreshers”) to a temperature “as cold as, if not colder,” than an iced coffee and sweet drinks you could order at a local coffee shop. For me, there was something unexpectedly satisfying about making an instantly cold drink from a standalone and solidly built machine — even if the cup of La Colombe medium roast it made tasted disappointingly burnt.

I’m not sure why I was expecting a better taste — it’s not like the machine uses some premium new coffee. It starts with just your run-of-the-mill K-Cup, and does not support any of the company’s fancy K-Carafe, K-Mug, Vue, or Rivo pods. Like many models, you pop one into the chamber and use the handle to clamp it, although this machine has the “Multistream” feature that pokes five holes instead of one to better saturate the grounds.

Image: Umar Shakir / The Verge
The 70-ounce water tank is huge, so you can do multiple true 12-ounce pulls that are ideal for iced coffee servings.

From there, I pressed the Cold button, selected 10 ounces, and pressed the big K button in the middle. Then, something sounded unexpected. “You heard that little click, which is a little bit different for a Keurig,” the company’s SVP of coffee marketing, Becky Opdyke tells me during a live demonstration. “It’s closing it out so instead of the hot coffee coming out here, it’s now going through the bypass and into the cold system.”

Keurig’s new cooling system, called “Quick Chill Technology,” promises to chill a drink “in under 3 minutes,” so you don’t have to brew a standard hot beverage over ice that can melt and dilute the drink to something worse than, well, pod-brewed coffee. The company says that after the machine extracts the hot coffee, it cools it to “sub-60 degrees” by liquid cooling the coffee in the back of the machine before returning it to the front spout. It’s kind of like an AIO cooler inside custom PCs — you just drink the cooled processor.

But do not confuse the resulting drink with “cold brew coffee,” which involves steeping coarse coffee grounds in cold water for an extended period. This is hot coffee that’s been promptly chilled. Companies like SharkNinja literally call its reduced-temperature espresso over ice “cold brew,” which can confuse customers as “cold” coffee machines continue to trend.

Both the temperature and brew time claims by Keurig worked as advertised during my demonstration. Still, you must also account for a rinse cycle to clear the pipes, which according to Opdyke, takes 45 seconds after every cold drink process. And you’ll need to clear the drip tray once it fills up.

Image: Umar Shakir / The Verge
I much preferred the refreshers over the coffee, which tasted like the ones from Starbucks.

Out of the box, the K-Brew and Chill needs you to fill its rear chill tank with water, which is separate from the main reservoir (and does not mix with the drinks). It will initially take 6 hours to “charge up” the system so you can make cold drinks. Once both cold indicator lights are lit up, you can get about four 12-ounce cold drinks in a row before it has to recharge, which can take up to four hours.

A previous Keurig attempt at an instant cold drive machine was the “Kold” dispenser in 2016 that could make a tasty instant Coca-Cola, but it was quickly discontinued due to high cost and low demand. Opdyke tells me the K-Brew and Chill goes beyond the Kold’s technology.

The K-Brew and Chill is the first in a line of products, with options coming that will be cheaper than the current $199.99 price. “We always want to have a good, better, best,” Opdyke says.

According to Opdyke, Keurig is marketing the machine to budget-minded Gen-Z and millennials who go to the coffee shop a lot. Keurig calculated that each drink is about one-fifth the cost of an iced coffee from Starbucks. Although, that may not account for the extra desserty versions of iced coffees that Starbucks popularized, which helps mask the horrid-tasting coffee it sells.

If I wasn’t clear earlier, pod coffee is not my thing. But the fruity “refreshers” drinks Keurig has are a good value add to the K-Brew and Chill since they taste good and have the right amount of sweetness (and caffeine) built in. Additionally, instant iced tea is also welcome.

Costs aside, I think the K-Brew and Chill may be tough to market to the intended customer, especially with the gaining popularity of high-end coffee, local roasteries, and machines like the Breville Barista Express, which provides a craft coffeemaking experience at home. However, I think Keurig could sell this to current customers who are happy with the company’s K-Cup coffee offerings, and are ready for a solid replacement. People like my dad, who has a cabinet full of Donut Shop pods and Splenda packets, and just loves his office Keurig.

However, there are still questions about the environmental impact of pod drinks from companies like Keurig and Nestle. Opdyke says the pod’s plastics are recyclable, and some places like NYC process them in standard recycling. The company is also launching a ship-in recycling service later this year.

Read More 

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images

Vice President Kamala Harris has chosen Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate in the 2024 presidential election, according to multiple news outlets including The New York Times. The news follows weeks of speculation during an accelerated campaign since President Joe Biden ended his candidacy and endorsed his VP for the role.
The choice comes weeks before the Democratic National Convention and just ahead of a virtual roll call vote where Harris is expected to become the party’s official nominee. Harris will appear in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with her VP pick — now expected to be Walz — later today.
Walz, a former educator from a blue state, is seen as having appeal with Midwest voters and effectively shifted Democrats’ messaging about Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, to that of how “weird” they are. He’s cited paid family and medical leave as top issues for a Harris administration.
As governor of Minnesota, Walz has signed one of the broadest right-to-repair laws to date, struck down rules blocking municipal broadband, and accepted $120 million in funding through Biden’s CHIPS Act to fund domestic semiconductor manufacturing. He’s gotten on the bandwagon of popular issues like ticket cost transparency, signing a “Taylor Swift bill” earlier this year, though he also vetoed pay raises for rideshare drivers while supporting efforts to keep Lyft and Uber in the state.
Several candidates were rumored to be on the short list for Harris’ consideration based on factors that could expand the Democratic ticket’s appeal to swing voters, particularly in battleground states. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) were seen as potential choices from battleground states, though that brought fears that should Harris get elected, it may be harder to win those seats again in the absence of a popular incumbent. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear was also said to be in the mix, as a Democrat who’s been able to secure a top seat in a deep red state. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was also a popular name in Democratic circles, but she said she was not “part of the vetting” for the role.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images

Vice President Kamala Harris has chosen Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate in the 2024 presidential election, according to multiple news outlets including The New York Times. The news follows weeks of speculation during an accelerated campaign since President Joe Biden ended his candidacy and endorsed his VP for the role.

The choice comes weeks before the Democratic National Convention and just ahead of a virtual roll call vote where Harris is expected to become the party’s official nominee. Harris will appear in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with her VP pick — now expected to be Walz — later today.

Walz, a former educator from a blue state, is seen as having appeal with Midwest voters and effectively shifted Democrats’ messaging about Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, to that of how “weird” they are. He’s cited paid family and medical leave as top issues for a Harris administration.

As governor of Minnesota, Walz has signed one of the broadest right-to-repair laws to date, struck down rules blocking municipal broadband, and accepted $120 million in funding through Biden’s CHIPS Act to fund domestic semiconductor manufacturing. He’s gotten on the bandwagon of popular issues like ticket cost transparency, signing a “Taylor Swift bill” earlier this year, though he also vetoed pay raises for rideshare drivers while supporting efforts to keep Lyft and Uber in the state.

Several candidates were rumored to be on the short list for Harris’ consideration based on factors that could expand the Democratic ticket’s appeal to swing voters, particularly in battleground states. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) were seen as potential choices from battleground states, though that brought fears that should Harris get elected, it may be harder to win those seats again in the absence of a popular incumbent. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear was also said to be in the mix, as a Democrat who’s been able to secure a top seat in a deep red state. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was also a popular name in Democratic circles, but she said she was not “part of the vetting” for the role.

Read More 

The Nest Learning Thermostat (4th gen) is a complete redesign of the iconic smart thermostat that first launched in 2011. | Photo by Owen Grove / The Verge

This week, almost a decade after Google last updated its flagship thermostat, the company has announced the Nest Learning Thermostat (4th gen). The thermostat has an all-new design, several new features, and support for the smart home standard Matter. So, yes, it now works natively with Apple Home.
At $279.99, the fourth generation of the Nest Learning Thermostat is more expensive than the third-gen Nest, which launched in 2015. However, it now comes with a new Nest Temperature Sensor (2nd gen) to monitor temperature in other rooms. Both are available for preorder now and will ship on August 20th — in the US and Canada only.

Photo by Owen Grove / The Verge
The Nest Learning Thermostat (4th gen) is the biggest redesign for the smart thermostat since it launched in 2011.

I’m a big proponent of smart home devices that are built to last — no one wants to upgrade their thermostat every couple of years. But it’s been nine years since we had a new Nest Learning Thermostat (the Nest Thermostat that arrived in 2020 stripped away most of the intelligence features), and technology is progressing more rapidly than in the days of the beige plastic boxes on your wall.
Surprisingly, Google didn’t follow competitor Ecobee by packing more function into its flagship thermostat. This isn’t a smart speaker, a smart display, or a smart home hub. Instead, the focus is on making this a really smart thermostat.
Google says the new model uses AI to learn your heating and cooling schedule faster and more accurately — alongside other upgrades to help manage your system more efficiently.

Google added its Soli radar sensor to the device to provide more accurate inputs about your presence, plus support for Matter, the new smart home standard. This means that, among other benefits, the Nest Learning Thermostat (4th gen) can now work natively in Apple Home. (The Nest Thermostat from 2020 already works with Matter.)
However, Matter support is over Wi-Fi — there’s no Thread radio — surprising, considering the original Nest is the reason Thread was developed.
But as Google Home’s head of product, Anish Kattukaran, tells me, Google wants users to have other devices in their homes to act as Thread hubs — such as the new Google TV Streamer 4K — which is a Google Home hub, Matter controller, and Thread border router. The Nest Thermostat is meant to focus on its main job: keeping you comfortable while saving you energy.

Photo by Owen Grove / The Verge
The third-gen Nest (top left) and the Nest Thermostat (2020) (top right) above three new Nest Learning Thermostats (4th gen). The new model is a complete redesign while retaining some of the design language of the original.

I saw the new Nest Thermostat in person at Google’s New York headquarters last week, and it’s very striking. It’s much bigger — the 2.7-inch screen is more than double the size of the previous generation — but also slimmer. It looks like someone flattened the third-gen Nest while borrowing a lot of design cues from the Pixel Watch, including the same curved glass screen and customizable watch-like faces.
It comes in three brushed metal designs: black, silver, and gold. I liked the gold best, although it’s more subtle in person than in the press shots.
The physical rotating dial remains but is now smoother and easier to control. It still has those satisfying clicks, but its larger size makes better precision selections possible on the screen.

Image: Google Nest
Dynamic Farsight shifts the thermostat’s display as you approach it — using the new Soli radar sensor — and is more customizable than on the third-gen Nest.

There’s no visible bezel, and the larger screen takes advantage of a fun new Dynamic Farsight feature that brings neat weather animations to the screen along with more customizability. You can choose the main face to be your indoor temperatures, an analog clock, a digital clock, or the weather, and as you approach, you’ll get more detailed information.
That detail now includes three extra fields, similar to watchface complications. Each can be set to show information such as humidity, outdoor temperature, time, and date. Plus there’s now the option of an outdoor air quality index score — useful in areas prone to seasonal issues like wildfire smoke.

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
The Dynamic Farsight feature adds the option to view more data on the near screen — including outdoor temperatures, humidity, and an outdoor air quality index.

On the learning front, Google is addressing a long-term annoyance of the smart thermostat: its propensity to have a mind of its own and crank up the heat on a sunny afternoon for no obvious reason (speaking from experience).
There’s now the option to have the thermostat suggest changes for you to accept rather than initiating them automatically. It will also tell you what it’s doing if you press on the screen. “We wanted to take the black box approach out of it. It’s an incredibly intelligent device, but that shouldn’t mean you don’t know what’s going on,” says Kattukaran.

That intelligence extends to new energy-saving features. Natural Heating and Cooling reacts to outdoor temperatures and learns how your house naturally adjusts to save energy. For example, “If it’s a sunny winter day and your home heats up a few degrees on its own, the thermostat will automatically pause heating to save energy,” says Kattukaran.
Adaptive Eco is an update to Eco Mode that adjusts based on climate. It won’t drop too low on a cold day when you’re gone, avoiding having to work overtime to ramp back up when you return, says Kattukaran. A new Smart Ventilation option for compatible hardware optimizes when to ventilate based on outdoor air quality.

Upgrades to the HVAC Monitoring feature, now called the System Health Monitor, track your system’s performance and send alerts about any issues. A Humidity Helper aims to keep humidity levels stable to prevent condensation and mold. Google says these new features are exclusive to the newest model at launch.
Kattukaran says the fourth-gen Nest is their most compatible thermostat yet and works with more systems, including humidifier, dehumidifier, and ventilation equipment. It now supports 12 wire hookups compared to 10 on the third-gen Nest and continues to work without a C-wire in most setups.
New look, same sensor

Photo by Owen Grove / The Verge
The Nest Temperature Sensor (2nd gen) is a small, pebble-like device you can place on a table or hang on the wall. It feeds temperature data to the thermostat to help balance hot and cold spots.

The other new hardware is the Nest Temperature Sensor (2nd gen), one of which comes with the thermostat. The sensor is essentially the same as the first-gen model, with a new look to resemble the new thermostat. In both cases, its primary job is still to feed the temperature in other rooms to the thermostat.
Unfortunately, the sensor still only monitors temperature and not occupancy, like the competing sensor from Ecobee. One upgrade is that multiple sensors can now average the temperature across several rooms.
Google says you can add up to six and choose which are active at different times by linking them to your schedules in the Google Home app. This lets you have the thermostat respond to the temperature in the kitchen and living room in the morning and then to your bedroom at night.

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
The Nest has a much slimmer profile than any of the previous models.

The new Nest brings significant upgrades to an already excellent device. While some features are playing catch-up with the competition (Ecobee already uses outdoor weather to balance climate and radar sensors for occupancy), it’s good to see them finally arrive. In terms of design, it feels like a winner — this is a gorgeous piece of wall art.
The Nest Learning Thermostat costs $279.99, and the Nest Temperature Sensor is $39.99 ($99.99 for three). They’re available for preorder now at store.google.com and select retailers and will ship on August 20th.

The Nest Learning Thermostat (4th gen) is a complete redesign of the iconic smart thermostat that first launched in 2011. | Photo by Owen Grove / The Verge

This week, almost a decade after Google last updated its flagship thermostat, the company has announced the Nest Learning Thermostat (4th gen). The thermostat has an all-new design, several new features, and support for the smart home standard Matter. So, yes, it now works natively with Apple Home.

At $279.99, the fourth generation of the Nest Learning Thermostat is more expensive than the third-gen Nest, which launched in 2015. However, it now comes with a new Nest Temperature Sensor (2nd gen) to monitor temperature in other rooms. Both are available for preorder now and will ship on August 20th — in the US and Canada only.

Photo by Owen Grove / The Verge
The Nest Learning Thermostat (4th gen) is the biggest redesign for the smart thermostat since it launched in 2011.

I’m a big proponent of smart home devices that are built to last — no one wants to upgrade their thermostat every couple of years. But it’s been nine years since we had a new Nest Learning Thermostat (the Nest Thermostat that arrived in 2020 stripped away most of the intelligence features), and technology is progressing more rapidly than in the days of the beige plastic boxes on your wall.

Surprisingly, Google didn’t follow competitor Ecobee by packing more function into its flagship thermostat. This isn’t a smart speaker, a smart display, or a smart home hub. Instead, the focus is on making this a really smart thermostat.

Google says the new model uses AI to learn your heating and cooling schedule faster and more accurately — alongside other upgrades to help manage your system more efficiently.

Google added its Soli radar sensor to the device to provide more accurate inputs about your presence, plus support for Matter, the new smart home standard. This means that, among other benefits, the Nest Learning Thermostat (4th gen) can now work natively in Apple Home. (The Nest Thermostat from 2020 already works with Matter.)

However, Matter support is over Wi-Fi — there’s no Thread radio — surprising, considering the original Nest is the reason Thread was developed.

But as Google Home’s head of product, Anish Kattukaran, tells me, Google wants users to have other devices in their homes to act as Thread hubs — such as the new Google TV Streamer 4K — which is a Google Home hub, Matter controller, and Thread border router. The Nest Thermostat is meant to focus on its main job: keeping you comfortable while saving you energy.

I saw the new Nest Thermostat in person at Google’s New York headquarters last week, and it’s very striking. It’s much bigger — the 2.7-inch screen is more than double the size of the previous generation — but also slimmer. It looks like someone flattened the third-gen Nest while borrowing a lot of design cues from the Pixel Watch, including the same curved glass screen and customizable watch-like faces.

It comes in three brushed metal designs: black, silver, and gold. I liked the gold best, although it’s more subtle in person than in the press shots.

The physical rotating dial remains but is now smoother and easier to control. It still has those satisfying clicks, but its larger size makes better precision selections possible on the screen.

There’s no visible bezel, and the larger screen takes advantage of a fun new Dynamic Farsight feature that brings neat weather animations to the screen along with more customizability. You can choose the main face to be your indoor temperatures, an analog clock, a digital clock, or the weather, and as you approach, you’ll get more detailed information.

That detail now includes three extra fields, similar to watchface complications. Each can be set to show information such as humidity, outdoor temperature, time, and date. Plus there’s now the option of an outdoor air quality index score — useful in areas prone to seasonal issues like wildfire smoke.

On the learning front, Google is addressing a long-term annoyance of the smart thermostat: its propensity to have a mind of its own and crank up the heat on a sunny afternoon for no obvious reason (speaking from experience).

There’s now the option to have the thermostat suggest changes for you to accept rather than initiating them automatically. It will also tell you what it’s doing if you press on the screen. “We wanted to take the black box approach out of it. It’s an incredibly intelligent device, but that shouldn’t mean you don’t know what’s going on,” says Kattukaran.

That intelligence extends to new energy-saving features. Natural Heating and Cooling reacts to outdoor temperatures and learns how your house naturally adjusts to save energy. For example, “If it’s a sunny winter day and your home heats up a few degrees on its own, the thermostat will automatically pause heating to save energy,” says Kattukaran.

Adaptive Eco is an update to Eco Mode that adjusts based on climate. It won’t drop too low on a cold day when you’re gone, avoiding having to work overtime to ramp back up when you return, says Kattukaran. A new Smart Ventilation option for compatible hardware optimizes when to ventilate based on outdoor air quality.

Upgrades to the HVAC Monitoring feature, now called the System Health Monitor, track your system’s performance and send alerts about any issues. A Humidity Helper aims to keep humidity levels stable to prevent condensation and mold. Google says these new features are exclusive to the newest model at launch.

Kattukaran says the fourth-gen Nest is their most compatible thermostat yet and works with more systems, including humidifier, dehumidifier, and ventilation equipment. It now supports 12 wire hookups compared to 10 on the third-gen Nest and continues to work without a C-wire in most setups.

New look, same sensor

The other new hardware is the Nest Temperature Sensor (2nd gen), one of which comes with the thermostat. The sensor is essentially the same as the first-gen model, with a new look to resemble the new thermostat. In both cases, its primary job is still to feed the temperature in other rooms to the thermostat.

Unfortunately, the sensor still only monitors temperature and not occupancy, like the competing sensor from Ecobee. One upgrade is that multiple sensors can now average the temperature across several rooms.

Google says you can add up to six and choose which are active at different times by linking them to your schedules in the Google Home app. This lets you have the thermostat respond to the temperature in the kitchen and living room in the morning and then to your bedroom at night.

The new Nest brings significant upgrades to an already excellent device. While some features are playing catch-up with the competition (Ecobee already uses outdoor weather to balance climate and radar sensors for occupancy), it’s good to see them finally arrive. In terms of design, it feels like a winner — this is a gorgeous piece of wall art.

The Nest Learning Thermostat costs $279.99, and the Nest Temperature Sensor is $39.99 ($99.99 for three). They’re available for preorder now at store.google.com and select retailers and will ship on August 20th.

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Image: Google

Google isn’t waiting for its upcoming hardware event to announce the Chromecast’s successor. Alongside the new, sleeker Nest Thermostat, today, the company is introducing the Google TV Streamer, a $99.99 set-top box that improves upon the Chromecast with Google TV with substantially better performance, Thread and Matter integration, and useful new features like a remote finder.
Yes, there are some Gemini AI tricks thrown in, and with other hardware upgrades like a built-in ethernet jack, the Google TV Streamer seems poised to be a much better entertainment hub than its predecessor. The only downside? Since it’s not a dongle anymore, you’ll have to provide your own HDMI cable when it ships on September 24th.
The sloped, low-profile device comes in two colors: porcelain (white) and hazel (dark gray), with the latter being exclusive to the Google Store. Unlike the Chromecast, which could be hidden away behind your TV, the Google TV Streamer is designed to sit underneath it and be seen — without standing out from your other home decor. Part of why Google designed it to be placed out in the open is because the device includes a Thread border router and connectivity support for Matter.

Image: Google
The Google Home panel offers an overview of all your smart home devices.

And that brings us to a key new feature: with one button press on the remote, you can pull up a Google Home panel on the right side of the TV screen, giving you easy control over your smart home devices and cameras from your living room couch.
That’s handy, and the Thread hardware is a nice bit of futureproofing. But at its core, the Google TV Streamer is still mostly an entertainment gadget. Google seems to recognize that customers have long been hoping for a more powerful device that doesn’t suffer from the lag and navigation hitches of the underpowered Chromecast with Google TV. The new hardware has a processor that’s 22 percent faster, double the RAM, and 32GB of integrated storage. That CPU bump probably means this thing still falls short of the Nvidia Shield TV and Apple TV 4K, but it’s something.

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
The Google TV Streamer comes in two neutral colors.

Hopefully, those changes will be enough to make the Google TV user experience much smoother and prevent the Streamer from getting bogged down over time. Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos are both present like before, and you can still cast content to the Google TV Streamer as always. The Chromecast name might be gone, but the functionality isn’t. This also has to be among the first streaming devices to be powered over USB-C. Other tech specs include HDMI 2.1a, Wi-Fi 5, gigabit ethernet, and Bluetooth 5.1.
The bundled remote looks similar but has undergone some nice design tweaks: the volume buttons are now right on the face instead of on the side, and Google has added a customizable button. You can set it to open the aforementioned Google Home panel, launch your favorite streaming app, or switch HDMI inputs. One of the best additions of all is a remote finder button on the back of the Google TV Streamer. Press it, and the remote will emit a beeping sound so you can easily track it down in the depths of your couch cushions.

Image: Google
The remote now has easier-to-use volume buttons and a customizable button at the bottom right.

On the software side, Google is tapping Gemini to provide viewers with “full summaries, reviews, and season-by-season breakdowns of content” as you browse. Otherwise, it’s the same Google TV interface as before, which already provided personalized recommendations and helpful context like Rotten Tomatoes scores for movies, so the new AI features aren’t exactly game-changing. You can create generative AI screensavers that are shown when the Google TV Streamer is in ambient mode, which sounds like the kind of thing people will try once or twice and then never use again. The ambient mode can also showcase your Google Photos albums, which I’ll definitely use.
I’m looking forward to reviewing the Google TV Streamer to see whether the company has finally produced a respectable foe to the Apple TV 4K. Google has always prioritized value and price over performance, but the new hardware upgrades and smart home features have me thinking that it just might have landed on the right formula this time.
Unfortunately, there’s still well over a month and a half to go before we all find out together: the Google TV Streamer will be available starting September 24th for $99.99.

Related:

Image: Google

Google isn’t waiting for its upcoming hardware event to announce the Chromecast’s successor. Alongside the new, sleeker Nest Thermostat, today, the company is introducing the Google TV Streamer, a $99.99 set-top box that improves upon the Chromecast with Google TV with substantially better performance, Thread and Matter integration, and useful new features like a remote finder.

Yes, there are some Gemini AI tricks thrown in, and with other hardware upgrades like a built-in ethernet jack, the Google TV Streamer seems poised to be a much better entertainment hub than its predecessor. The only downside? Since it’s not a dongle anymore, you’ll have to provide your own HDMI cable when it ships on September 24th.

The sloped, low-profile device comes in two colors: porcelain (white) and hazel (dark gray), with the latter being exclusive to the Google Store. Unlike the Chromecast, which could be hidden away behind your TV, the Google TV Streamer is designed to sit underneath it and be seen — without standing out from your other home decor. Part of why Google designed it to be placed out in the open is because the device includes a Thread border router and connectivity support for Matter.

And that brings us to a key new feature: with one button press on the remote, you can pull up a Google Home panel on the right side of the TV screen, giving you easy control over your smart home devices and cameras from your living room couch.

That’s handy, and the Thread hardware is a nice bit of futureproofing. But at its core, the Google TV Streamer is still mostly an entertainment gadget. Google seems to recognize that customers have long been hoping for a more powerful device that doesn’t suffer from the lag and navigation hitches of the underpowered Chromecast with Google TV. The new hardware has a processor that’s 22 percent faster, double the RAM, and 32GB of integrated storage. That CPU bump probably means this thing still falls short of the Nvidia Shield TV and Apple TV 4K, but it’s something.

Hopefully, those changes will be enough to make the Google TV user experience much smoother and prevent the Streamer from getting bogged down over time. Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos are both present like before, and you can still cast content to the Google TV Streamer as always. The Chromecast name might be gone, but the functionality isn’t. This also has to be among the first streaming devices to be powered over USB-C. Other tech specs include HDMI 2.1a, Wi-Fi 5, gigabit ethernet, and Bluetooth 5.1.

The bundled remote looks similar but has undergone some nice design tweaks: the volume buttons are now right on the face instead of on the side, and Google has added a customizable button. You can set it to open the aforementioned Google Home panel, launch your favorite streaming app, or switch HDMI inputs. One of the best additions of all is a remote finder button on the back of the Google TV Streamer. Press it, and the remote will emit a beeping sound so you can easily track it down in the depths of your couch cushions.

On the software side, Google is tapping Gemini to provide viewers with “full summaries, reviews, and season-by-season breakdowns of content” as you browse. Otherwise, it’s the same Google TV interface as before, which already provided personalized recommendations and helpful context like Rotten Tomatoes scores for movies, so the new AI features aren’t exactly game-changing. You can create generative AI screensavers that are shown when the Google TV Streamer is in ambient mode, which sounds like the kind of thing people will try once or twice and then never use again. The ambient mode can also showcase your Google Photos albums, which I’ll definitely use.

I’m looking forward to reviewing the Google TV Streamer to see whether the company has finally produced a respectable foe to the Apple TV 4K. Google has always prioritized value and price over performance, but the new hardware upgrades and smart home features have me thinking that it just might have landed on the right formula this time.

Unfortunately, there’s still well over a month and a half to go before we all find out together: the Google TV Streamer will be available starting September 24th for $99.99.

Related:

Read More 

Google Home is getting a Gemini intelligence upgrade. | Image: Google Nest

While splashy chatbots may get all the attention, generative AI has real potential to make the smart home simpler and more accessible. Amazon has already announced its plans for a smarter Alexa to power your home. Now, it’s Google’s turn to promise that it can produce a better, smarter, more helpful Google Assistant.
Ahead of its fall hardware event next week, Google announced three new Gemini intelligence-powered experiences it plans to bring to its Google Home smart home platform later this year. There’s a new camera intelligence feature that generates descriptive captions for video footage from Nest cameras, a natural language input for creating Google Home routines, and a smarter Google Assistant for Nest smart speakers and displays with an all-new voice.

Most of these features — aside from the new voice — will be paywalled behind Google’s Nest Aware subscription, its video recording subscription for Nest cameras that starts at $8 a month ($80 a year). The features will launch first in Google’s Public Preview beta program to a limited number of Nest Aware subscribers and will roll out to more users next year.
This is just the start of bringing more intelligence to the company’s smart home platform, Anish Kattukaran, Google Home’s head of product, told The Verge in an interview ahead of the announcements. “This sets the path for the next era of Google Home.”

Image: Google Home
Google Home’s new smart home hub, the Google TV Streamer 4K, is a Matter controller and Thread border router.

All of this will be welcome news for long-suffering Google Home users, many of whom are tired of dealing with underpowered, aging smart displays and seeing features they rely on get canceled. They’ve also been struggling through a laborious transition from the Nest app to the Google Home app.
This week’s launch of the Google TV Streamer 4K (which is a Google Home hub) and a new Nest Learning Thermostat, combined with the promise of a smarter Google Assistant, means things are starting to look good in Google’s hood.
It also seems the Google Assistant is here to stay. Rather than transplanting Gemini onto Nest speakers and smart displays to control your smart home, Google is deploying Gemini intelligence behind the scenes. “Gemini is a family of models, and we’re optimizing it for elements of Google Home,” explains Kattukaran.
Smarter security camera alerts

Image: Google Nest
The multimodal Gemini AI can understand what a camera sees and hears and produce a caption describing the action.

Google is using Gemini intelligence on Nest cameras to allow them to understand what they see and hear and then tell you what’s most important. This means that instead of just getting an alert for a person or package and then having to watch the video to see what happened, Google Home will add a detailed description of what the camera saw. The models will learn and train on your data — in the cloud, but for your home — getting smarter over time to better understand what’s happening around your home.
One example Kattukaran shared was a clip of a person unloading groceries from a car with the caption:
A young person in casual clothing, standing next to a parked black SUV. They are carrying grocery bags. The car is partially in the garage and the area appears peaceful.
Interpretative details aside, the caption provides a lot of context, which, alongside being helpful, could translate to smarter home automation. For example, if a camera detects an animal and understands that “the dog is digging in the garden,” the next step could be to create an automation to “turn on the sprinklers.”

Image: Google Home
You’ll be able to use text prompts to search your Nest cameras video footage for specific events.

There will also be an option to use text to search through footage in the Google Home activity tab. This could be handy when, say, my cat sneaks out after dark. I could ask it to show me the last time it spotted the cat rather than having to scroll through every video tagged with an animal to find him.
Home automation made easier

Image: Google Home
Gemini intelligence can parse natural language to create complex smart home automations.

A new “Help me create” feature in the Google Home app lets you describe what you want to happen — such as “lock the doors and turn off the lights at bedtime” — and have it create a routine to do it automatically.
You need to use the text or speech input in the Home app on your phone (it doesn’t work through Nest speakers), but Kattukaran says it will have all the current capabilities of the Google Home app. This includes all the current starters, conditions, and actions, plus access to any device connected to Google Home, including Matter devices. It’s not as complex or sophisticated as Google’s script editor, he says, but it should make creating automations easy for anyone to do.
Google Assistant grows up and gets new voices

Google is launching a new voice for its Google Assistant.

Besides easier automations and camera intelligence, Google says it’s improving the “core experiences” of its Google Assistant — such as playing music and setting timers — on all current Nest smart speakers and displays.
Plus, Google Assistant is getting new voices with different styles, tones, and accents. The company released a demo of the first new voice engaging in some conversational back and forth. As you can hear in the video, it retains the female tone but sounds lighter and more natural.
Google Assistant should not only sound more natural but should also communicate more naturally. Kattukaran says it won’t need specific nomenclature to do what you want, can handle pauses, ums, and ahs, and answer follow-up questions. I didn’t see an in-person demo of this, but it sounds similar to the features Amazon announced for Alexa last fall (that have yet to arrive).

Kattukaran says the new Google Assistant will be able to maintain the context of your conversation and start to learn and understand your home. The Gemini-powered capabilities will run “in the cloud, for your home” in accordance with Google’s privacy principles, he says.
“It is specific to your home and your data models. We’re being very intentional about going slow. In the home, the margin for error is very low; we can’t mess up,” he says. The goal is for the models to build an understanding of your home — such as the rooms and devices you have — and then build on that baseline to get smarter over time.
These changes are designed to push the digital voice assistant closer to the vision Google and its competitors have been working toward for years: a digital assistant that can be genuinely helpful.
“This sets the path for the next era of Google Home.”
“When we started out with that first-gen assistant, the promise was The Jetsons; the vision was an ultra helpful assistant that could proactively help you figure things out,” says Kattukaran. “We made a bunch of progress, then it plateaued — across all the assistants, not just us. We hit a technological ceiling. That’s been raised with LLMs and language models that are more multi-modal.”
As Kattukaran points out, “The home is a beast.” It’s complicated and messy, with multiple characters and scenarios. It’s hard enough for a human to manage, making it a significant challenge for a computer. But it seems Amazon, Google, and Apple are now all racing toward a future where our homes have an intelligent, context-aware assistant that can help it respond to our needs. It’s going to be fascinating to see how this plays out.

Google Home is getting a Gemini intelligence upgrade. | Image: Google Nest

While splashy chatbots may get all the attention, generative AI has real potential to make the smart home simpler and more accessible. Amazon has already announced its plans for a smarter Alexa to power your home. Now, it’s Google’s turn to promise that it can produce a better, smarter, more helpful Google Assistant.

Ahead of its fall hardware event next week, Google announced three new Gemini intelligence-powered experiences it plans to bring to its Google Home smart home platform later this year. There’s a new camera intelligence feature that generates descriptive captions for video footage from Nest cameras, a natural language input for creating Google Home routines, and a smarter Google Assistant for Nest smart speakers and displays with an all-new voice.

Most of these features — aside from the new voice — will be paywalled behind Google’s Nest Aware subscription, its video recording subscription for Nest cameras that starts at $8 a month ($80 a year). The features will launch first in Google’s Public Preview beta program to a limited number of Nest Aware subscribers and will roll out to more users next year.

This is just the start of bringing more intelligence to the company’s smart home platform, Anish Kattukaran, Google Home’s head of product, told The Verge in an interview ahead of the announcements. “This sets the path for the next era of Google Home.”

Image: Google Home
Google Home’s new smart home hub, the Google TV Streamer 4K, is a Matter controller and Thread border router.

All of this will be welcome news for long-suffering Google Home users, many of whom are tired of dealing with underpowered, aging smart displays and seeing features they rely on get canceled. They’ve also been struggling through a laborious transition from the Nest app to the Google Home app.

This week’s launch of the Google TV Streamer 4K (which is a Google Home hub) and a new Nest Learning Thermostat, combined with the promise of a smarter Google Assistant, means things are starting to look good in Google’s hood.

It also seems the Google Assistant is here to stay. Rather than transplanting Gemini onto Nest speakers and smart displays to control your smart home, Google is deploying Gemini intelligence behind the scenes. “Gemini is a family of models, and we’re optimizing it for elements of Google Home,” explains Kattukaran.

Smarter security camera alerts

Image: Google Nest
The multimodal Gemini AI can understand what a camera sees and hears and produce a caption describing the action.

Google is using Gemini intelligence on Nest cameras to allow them to understand what they see and hear and then tell you what’s most important. This means that instead of just getting an alert for a person or package and then having to watch the video to see what happened, Google Home will add a detailed description of what the camera saw. The models will learn and train on your data — in the cloud, but for your home — getting smarter over time to better understand what’s happening around your home.

One example Kattukaran shared was a clip of a person unloading groceries from a car with the caption:

A young person in casual clothing, standing next to a parked black SUV. They are carrying grocery bags. The car is partially in the garage and the area appears peaceful.

Interpretative details aside, the caption provides a lot of context, which, alongside being helpful, could translate to smarter home automation. For example, if a camera detects an animal and understands that “the dog is digging in the garden,” the next step could be to create an automation to “turn on the sprinklers.”

Image: Google Home
You’ll be able to use text prompts to search your Nest cameras video footage for specific events.

There will also be an option to use text to search through footage in the Google Home activity tab. This could be handy when, say, my cat sneaks out after dark. I could ask it to show me the last time it spotted the cat rather than having to scroll through every video tagged with an animal to find him.

Home automation made easier

Image: Google Home
Gemini intelligence can parse natural language to create complex smart home automations.

A new “Help me create” feature in the Google Home app lets you describe what you want to happen — such as “lock the doors and turn off the lights at bedtime” — and have it create a routine to do it automatically.

You need to use the text or speech input in the Home app on your phone (it doesn’t work through Nest speakers), but Kattukaran says it will have all the current capabilities of the Google Home app. This includes all the current starters, conditions, and actions, plus access to any device connected to Google Home, including Matter devices. It’s not as complex or sophisticated as Google’s script editor, he says, but it should make creating automations easy for anyone to do.

Google Assistant grows up and gets new voices

Besides easier automations and camera intelligence, Google says it’s improving the “core experiences” of its Google Assistant — such as playing music and setting timers — on all current Nest smart speakers and displays.

Plus, Google Assistant is getting new voices with different styles, tones, and accents. The company released a demo of the first new voice engaging in some conversational back and forth. As you can hear in the video, it retains the female tone but sounds lighter and more natural.

Google Assistant should not only sound more natural but should also communicate more naturally. Kattukaran says it won’t need specific nomenclature to do what you want, can handle pauses, ums, and ahs, and answer follow-up questions. I didn’t see an in-person demo of this, but it sounds similar to the features Amazon announced for Alexa last fall (that have yet to arrive).

Kattukaran says the new Google Assistant will be able to maintain the context of your conversation and start to learn and understand your home. The Gemini-powered capabilities will run “in the cloud, for your home” in accordance with Google’s privacy principles, he says.

“It is specific to your home and your data models. We’re being very intentional about going slow. In the home, the margin for error is very low; we can’t mess up,” he says. The goal is for the models to build an understanding of your home — such as the rooms and devices you have — and then build on that baseline to get smarter over time.

These changes are designed to push the digital voice assistant closer to the vision Google and its competitors have been working toward for years: a digital assistant that can be genuinely helpful.

“When we started out with that first-gen assistant, the promise was The Jetsons; the vision was an ultra helpful assistant that could proactively help you figure things out,” says Kattukaran. “We made a bunch of progress, then it plateaued — across all the assistants, not just us. We hit a technological ceiling. That’s been raised with LLMs and language models that are more multi-modal.”

As Kattukaran points out, “The home is a beast.” It’s complicated and messy, with multiple characters and scenarios. It’s hard enough for a human to manage, making it a significant challenge for a computer. But it seems Amazon, Google, and Apple are now all racing toward a future where our homes have an intelligent, context-aware assistant that can help it respond to our needs. It’s going to be fascinating to see how this plays out.

Read More 

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

Nvidia is on a mission to eliminate its legacy Control Panel and GeForce Experience apps and combine them into a single new Nvidia app. That effort started earlier this year, and a new beta update today adds display settings, RTX Video Super Resolution, RTX Video HDR sliders, and more features.
The new displays section lets you adjust resolution, refresh rate, and orientation controls for connected monitors or TVs. The controls are similar to what exists inside the Settings section of Windows 10 or 11, but this now lets you adjust all your GPU settings in a single location.

Image: Nvidia
The new display section of the Nvidia app.

Image: Nvidia
Nvidia’s statistics overlay is also getting more options.

Nvidia’s new video section of its app now lets you control whether its RTX Video Super Resolution technology is enabled to upscale old, blurry web videos on RTX 30- and 40-series cards. You can pick between the different quality levels, and also enable RTX Video HDR to upgrade SDR content to HDR using AI. The RTX Video HDR feature also has sliders to adjust peak brightness, contrast, saturation, and middle gray levels.
Finally, Nvidia has also updated its statistics overlay so it can now display 1 percent low stats for frame rates, alongside CPU usage, latency, and a variety of GPU-related information. Nvidia also added one-click GPU tuning to its beta app last month. You can grab the latest Nvidia beta app on Nvidia’s website.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

Nvidia is on a mission to eliminate its legacy Control Panel and GeForce Experience apps and combine them into a single new Nvidia app. That effort started earlier this year, and a new beta update today adds display settings, RTX Video Super Resolution, RTX Video HDR sliders, and more features.

The new displays section lets you adjust resolution, refresh rate, and orientation controls for connected monitors or TVs. The controls are similar to what exists inside the Settings section of Windows 10 or 11, but this now lets you adjust all your GPU settings in a single location.

Image: Nvidia
The new display section of the Nvidia app.

Image: Nvidia
Nvidia’s statistics overlay is also getting more options.

Nvidia’s new video section of its app now lets you control whether its RTX Video Super Resolution technology is enabled to upscale old, blurry web videos on RTX 30- and 40-series cards. You can pick between the different quality levels, and also enable RTX Video HDR to upgrade SDR content to HDR using AI. The RTX Video HDR feature also has sliders to adjust peak brightness, contrast, saturation, and middle gray levels.

Finally, Nvidia has also updated its statistics overlay so it can now display 1 percent low stats for frame rates, alongside CPU usage, latency, and a variety of GPU-related information. Nvidia also added one-click GPU tuning to its beta app last month. You can grab the latest Nvidia beta app on Nvidia’s website.

Read More 

Image: HBO / Warner Bros. Discovery

House of the Dragon has just concluded its second season, but we now know there are two more to look forward to. As reported by Variety, House of the Dragon showrunner and co-creator Ryan Condal confirmed during a press event that the series would have four seasons in total, with the third expected to go into production in “earlyish 2025.”
This is the first time that HBO has confirmed how many seasons the Game of Thrones prequel will have, but the network hasn’t revealed how many episodes remain. “I haven’t had discussions with HBO about it,” Condal said when asked whether Season 3 will have eight episodes, matching that of its second season. “I would just anticipate the cadence of the show, from a dramatic storytelling perspective, will continue to be the same from Season 2 on.”
That estimate is a smidge below what “A Song of Ice and Fire” author George R.R. Martin previously suggested. In 2022, he said that House of the Dragon would likely require four 10-episode-long seasons to “do justice to the Dance of the Dragons, from start to finish.” Viewers may also have a lengthy wait ahead of them given the almost two-year gap between the first two seasons, but the upcoming A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms series — yet another Game of Thrones prequel — should help to keep fans sated when it premieres next year.

Image: HBO / Warner Bros. Discovery

House of the Dragon has just concluded its second season, but we now know there are two more to look forward to. As reported by Variety, House of the Dragon showrunner and co-creator Ryan Condal confirmed during a press event that the series would have four seasons in total, with the third expected to go into production in “earlyish 2025.”

This is the first time that HBO has confirmed how many seasons the Game of Thrones prequel will have, but the network hasn’t revealed how many episodes remain. “I haven’t had discussions with HBO about it,” Condal said when asked whether Season 3 will have eight episodes, matching that of its second season. “I would just anticipate the cadence of the show, from a dramatic storytelling perspective, will continue to be the same from Season 2 on.”

That estimate is a smidge below what “A Song of Ice and Fire” author George R.R. Martin previously suggested. In 2022, he said that House of the Dragon would likely require four 10-episode-long seasons to “do justice to the Dance of the Dragons, from start to finish.” Viewers may also have a lengthy wait ahead of them given the almost two-year gap between the first two seasons, but the upcoming A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms series — yet another Game of Thrones prequel — should help to keep fans sated when it premieres next year.

Read More 

Image: MacRumors (YouTube)

Not a day goes by without me getting frustrated at the state of the mobile web. I rarely use my iPhone to read news articles now because every time I do there’s a cookie prompt obstructing what I want to read, or so many ads on a page that I can’t even see the text anymore.
Apple is clearly just as frustrated as I am, so it’s added a Thanos snap animation to iOS 18 that wipes out annoying parts of websites.
The new “Distraction Control” feature showed up in Safari earlier this week in the fifth beta of iOS 18 and iPadOS18. It’s designed to let you temporarily remove annoying and distracting elements from a mobile website, including cookie prompts, ads, those infuriating autoplay videos that follow you around while you scroll a site, and more.

I love the new Thanos snap animation in iOS 18 that lets you temporarily remove annoying ads on webpages pic.twitter.com/24UhKxExoy— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) August 6, 2024

The animation is a beautiful nod to the Thanos snap, and it certainly feels like I’m wielding all six Infinity Stones and snapping my fingers to exterminate half of the crap that exists on mobile websites these days. I also don’t feel guilty about it. This isn’t an adblocker, so it’s only temporary and nothing persists. You still load up the ads so the website owner gets an ad view, no harm done.
MacRumors has a great hands-on video demonstrating how it all works, but I just wish there was an easier way of using Distraction Control. In the latest iOS 18 beta 5 release you have to tap on the same button you’d use to enable the reader mode — which also lets you focus in on text on a website — to be able to hide parts of webpages. If there was a gesture to swipe these annoying ads away then that would make this even more useful.
Unless Apple does some last minute changes to iOS 18, this new Distraction Control feature should arrive as part of the final iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 release, likely to arrive next month.

Image: MacRumors (YouTube)

Not a day goes by without me getting frustrated at the state of the mobile web. I rarely use my iPhone to read news articles now because every time I do there’s a cookie prompt obstructing what I want to read, or so many ads on a page that I can’t even see the text anymore.

Apple is clearly just as frustrated as I am, so it’s added a Thanos snap animation to iOS 18 that wipes out annoying parts of websites.

The new “Distraction Control” feature showed up in Safari earlier this week in the fifth beta of iOS 18 and iPadOS18. It’s designed to let you temporarily remove annoying and distracting elements from a mobile website, including cookie prompts, ads, those infuriating autoplay videos that follow you around while you scroll a site, and more.

The animation is a beautiful nod to the Thanos snap, and it certainly feels like I’m wielding all six Infinity Stones and snapping my fingers to exterminate half of the crap that exists on mobile websites these days. I also don’t feel guilty about it. This isn’t an adblocker, so it’s only temporary and nothing persists. You still load up the ads so the website owner gets an ad view, no harm done.

MacRumors has a great hands-on video demonstrating how it all works, but I just wish there was an easier way of using Distraction Control. In the latest iOS 18 beta 5 release you have to tap on the same button you’d use to enable the reader mode — which also lets you focus in on text on a website — to be able to hide parts of webpages. If there was a gesture to swipe these annoying ads away then that would make this even more useful.

Unless Apple does some last minute changes to iOS 18, this new Distraction Control feature should arrive as part of the final iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 release, likely to arrive next month.

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