Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass Ultimate costs $22.99 a month after a 2026 price rollback, but starting in November it caps cloud play at 15 hours monthly. Engadget explains who still gets value from day-one releases, Fortnite Crew perks, Ubisoft+ classics, discounts and points.
The White House launched America.gov, an AI chatbot built with Google's Gemini, to help citizens find government services and information.
Amazon cut the Kindle Kids 16GB e-reader to $122.99, 32% off its $179.99 list price, Android Authority reported.
Samsung has begun rolling out a major SmartThings redesign on iOS in version 1.7.51, adding a refreshed Home tab, faster hub controls and Routine Insights. Galaxy and other Android users are still waiting for the update.
The MacArthur Foundation has named 20 scholars and artists as this year's fellows, awarding each $800,000 over five years. The class includes Kate Spradley, who identifies and repatriates migrants who died near the Texas-Mexico border.
DeepSeek launched a desktop Harness agent for macOS and Windows, adding file workflows, scheduled tasks and plugins.
Unily has launched Content Studio, an AI-powered product that turns company knowledge into podcasts, videos and infographics in minutes, with early customers reporting steep time savings.
Microsoft has announced Xbox Mythic Achievements, a top-tier award unlocked after earning every original achievement in a game, and opened it to Xbox Insiders for testing.
Engadget says AI data center demand and a memory shortage make prebuilt gaming PCs better value than custom builds.
AI posters and cafe menus are spreading in real life, and creative workers warn the generic look can erode brand trust.
Nebius and NVIDIA have opened applications for the 2026 Physical AI Awards, offering $150,000 in compute credits in each of five categories. Entries close October 25, 2026, with finalists and winners named in mid-November.
Engadget names $99 Google Home as best affordable Sonos alternative, with Apple and Amazon options for their ecosystems.
Amazon is offering the Breville Barista Touch espresso maker for $799.99, a $200 discount from $999.99, for National Coffee Day, according to TechRadar.
Amazon’s early fall Prime Day sale includes $500 off select 2TB M5 Pro MacBook Pro models, up to $150 off M5 MacBook Air, $50 off the new M5 Max Mac Studio, and clearance deals on black Apple Watch Ultra 3 models, according to 9to5Mac.
NVIDIA has released Kumo Tabular, an open foundation model for tabular classification and regression that predicts new rows in a single forward pass without training or feature engineering. It is available on Hugging Face under a commercial-use license and ranks first on four benchmarks, according to NVIDIA.
Amazon’s 2nd-gen Echo Auto is “Currently unavailable” and gone from direct searches, Android Authority reports. Its future is unclear.
IMAX Dome theaters, renamed from OMNIMAX in the 1990s, project fisheye-lens films onto domed ceilings up to nearly 100 feet across for a 180-degree field of view, and remain largely a science-museum format, according to Engadget.
A travel router logs into a hotel network once and rebroadcasts it as a familiar Wi-Fi signal, though the extra gadget mainly pays off for travelers carrying several devices.
Amazon is discounting Harry Potter Lego sets by up to 44% ahead of Prime Day on Oct. 6-7, with early deals open to non-Prime shoppers, according to TechRadar.
Konrad Zieliński, who lost his voice to cancer, founded Uhura Bionics to build non-invasive wearable devices that let laryngectomees speak with emotion. The startup will demo its Whitney device at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026.
OpenAI announced Dots personal agents and Codex cloud updates at DevDay while Florida sought an injunction to halt its development, GPT-6.1 Astra was paused over safety concerns, and tech leaders met Trump at the White House.
Apple has released fixes for CVE-2026-86950, a high-severity CoreGraphics zero-day in iOS, iPadOS and macOS that may have been exploited in extremely sophisticated attacks against specific targeted individuals. Users are urged to update promptly.
TechRadar has published a review of the Fujifilm Instax Pal 2, describing it as the cutest and priciest toy camera around. The review is credited to Cameras Editor Tim.
Instinct founder Noah Shinn says more than 50% of transactions on the invite-only AI agent platform are travel-related, as it approaches $1 billion in annual transactions and recently raised $1 billion in Series C funding.