Tuesday’s top tech news: Hands-on with the HomePod

We’ve called it a cross between the Battle School from Ender’s Game and ultimate frisbee. We’ve called it Final Fantasy X blitzball meets VR. It made two of our Best VR Games lists — three, if you count the one I did for CNET before returning to The Verge. It convincingly sticks you into a robot body inhabiting a zero-G arena, where you have to use your wrist jets, obstacles, teammates, and even foes to catapult yourself to victory. It even became its own esport.

But now, Echo VR (née Echo Arena) is getting killed off by Meta (née Facebook). Facebook purchased its developer Ready At Dawn in 2020, after making Echo VR one of the flagship games for the Meta Quest (née Oculus Quest) and Rift S launch. Meta will not be offering any refunds on in-app purchases, in-game currency, or DLC.

People aren’t buying as many computers, and chipmakers are getting hit hard — but AMD thinks that should improve long before the year is out. “The first quarter should be the bottom for us in PCs,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said today on the company’s Q4 2022 earnings call.

Su predicts that the total addressable market for PCs will shrink 10 percent this year, down to around 260 million units. (IDC reported this month that 292.3 million PCs shipped in 2022, and both IDC and Gartner suggested it might take until 2024 to recover.) Su says AMD is expecting “a softer first half and a stronger second half.”

Rode is packaging the NTH-100 headphones with a headset microphone for broadcast, streaming, and other voice operations and calling it the NTH-100M. 

There is virtually no difference between last year’s NTH-100s and the new $189 NTH-100M outside of the new removable boom microphone and the required TRRS cable for allowing devices to utilize the microphone, but it’s a welcome addition to the crowded headphone space. 

The Framework Laptop has been a godsend for DIYers. Not only does the modular design allow for quick and easy repair, but the swappable mainboard is a robust platform for all sorts of bizarre builds. Tons of tinkerers have used the modular mainboard design to create their own cyberdeck designs. You don’t even need to buy the whole laptop to do it!

DIY Perks has taken that to the next level with this triple-screen laptop build. Unsatisfied with the lack of screen real estate and poor ergonomics in most laptops, they used their skills to cobble together a portable cyberdeck workstation.

Twitter is shutting down CoTweets, its collaborative posting feature that was one of the last big product updates introduced before Elon Musk’s takeover. A notice was posted on Twitter’s help center announcing the end of the feature.

CoTweets allowed two accounts to co-author posts that appeared simultaneously on users’ profiles. As of last July, select users in the US, Korea, and Canada were able to use CoTweets after the company began testing the idea last spring. While CoTweets were still limited in rollout, many people anticipated they’d be helpful for brands doing collaborations or announcements.

OpenAI, the company behind DALL-E and ChatGPT, has released a free tool that it says is meant to “distinguish between text written by a human and text written by AIs.” It warns the classifier is “not fully reliable” in a press release and “should not be used as a primary decision-making tool.” According to OpenAI, it can be useful in trying to determine whether someone is trying to pass off generated text as something that was written by a person.

The tool, known as a classifier, is relatively simple, though you will have to have a free OpenAI account to use it. You just paste text into a box, click a button, and it’ll tell you whether it thinks the text is very unlikely, unlikely, unclear if it is, possibly, or likely AI-generated.

Hyundai’s new Ioniq 6 has had its playdate with the EPA, and now the automaker is revealing that its electric “streamliner” sedan can travel an estimated 361 miles on a full charge. While the calculation is specific to the SE Long Range RWD trim, the AWD version is no slouch, either, with a maximum range of 316 miles.

Compared to the similarly sized RWD version of Tesla’s Model 3, the Ioniq 6 SE Long Range RWD could go a whole 89 miles further based on the EPA estimates. Although, Hyundai’s AWD version of the Ioniq 6 isn’t topping the 358-mile Tesla Model 3 Long Range AWD.

We’ve known for some time that DC Studios co-leads James Gunn and Peter Safran were cooking up a big, bold plan to effectively reset Warner Bros. Discovery’s universe of superhero movies in order to get the cinematic franchise back on track in the David Zaslav era. Now, the first details of that plan are starting to be released, and it’s sounding a lot like the new DC Universe is going to be going back to the basics as the studio builds to a new future.

Though Gunn and Safran almost certainly have more ideas in the pipeline, Warner Bros. Discovery announced today that five movies and five series will kick off “Chapter 1” of the DC Universe. In a press release, the studio described this first chapter as focusing on some of the franchise’s most powerful “Gods and Monsters,” and Safran emphasized how Chapter 1 is being “designed to minimize audience confusion and maximize audience engagement across platforms.”

Halo developer 343 Industries lost at least 95 people due to Microsoft’s recent layoffs, and the studio is apparently switching from its proprietary Slipspace engine to Epic Games’ widely used Unreal Engine for future games, Bloomberg reports.

The future of Halo has been somewhat up in the air since the layoffs announced on January 18th. Halo Infinite had a strong launch in late 2021, but over time, fans started to get annoyed by frustrations with multiplayer progression, repeated delays to planned features like network campaign co-op and Forge (which finally launched in November), and no indication that new campaign content was imminent.

Apple Music users who love having a playlist of their favorite songs rejoice: Apple has made the Replay 2023 playlist available, letting you see which songs you’ve listed to the most this year. The songs that are on it and their rankings will almost certainly change before the big replay roundup in December, but it’s nice to start using it now as a shortcut to playing music you know you’ll like.

The playlist has come a bit early this year, as XDA Developers points out. The 2022 version was released around the middle of February. It seems as if Apple is taking the feature a bit more seriously; last year, it apparently decided it should actually compete with Spotify’s Wrapped feature and made its end-of-year recap significantly more appealing and shareable. The jury’s still out about whether it went far enough, but at least it’s something.

As promised, EA is teasing out details for its next-generation Sims game, codenamed Project Rene. During a livestream today, EA confirmed that multiplayer will be a major component of the experience — though not at the expense of the traditional single-player that has made the series such a blockbuster. “We think we can be both,” Grant Rodiek, game director for Project Rene, explained.

He was quick to stress that the new game is “not an MMO,” so don’t expect World of Warcraft with characters speaking in Simlish. Instead, as an example, EA showed off the new game’s enhanced customization tools — where you can tweak every part of a piece of furniture, from its color to the parts it’s made of (see the image below) — saying it’s a feature you can utilize in real time with other players. From the sound of it, these kinds of features will be additive to what Sims players expect. “We know that our players want to have that intimate, personal experience,” Rodiek said.

Update February 3rd, 7:52PM ET: Nvidia has released an update to fix this issue, which should automatically download to your PC.

Original article below:

A few weeks ago, President Joe Biden was in the Netherlands, where he asked the Dutch government to restrict export from a company called ASML to China. ASML is the only company in the world that makes a specific machine needed to make the most advanced chips. Apple couldn’t make iPhone chips without this one machine from the Netherlands’ biggest company. ASML doesn’t just shape the Dutch economy — it shapes the entire world economy. How did that happen?

Chris Miller, Tufts professor and author of Chip War: The Fight For The World’s Most Critical Technology walked me through a lot of this, along with some deep dives into geopolitics and the absolutely fascinating chip manufacturing process. This one has everything: foreign policy, high-powered lasers, hotshot executives, monopolies, the fundamental limits of physics, and, of course, Texas. Here we go.

NASA’s Perseverance rover has dropped the last of 10 sample tubes onto the surface of Mars, thereby completing humanity’s “first sample depot on another world.” The rover began depositing titanium tubes containing samples of rock and dust six weeks ago as part of the Mars sample return mission to collect Martian material and deliver it to Earth for further study.

Perseverance landed on Mars in February 2021, touching down inside a 28-mile-wide bowl known as Jezero Crater with a core mission to look for signs of ancient microbial life and gather samples of the Martian environment. Scientists believe that, billions of years ago, Jezero Crater may have contained a river that flowed into a vast lake, which could have provided the necessary environment to support microbial life.