Apple announced the Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 today. Both include a new "Health Sensing System" and S11 chip that give the devices the “most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable," Apple claimed during its fall event.

Apple's depiction of the S11 chip. Credit: Apple

Both watches will use the new S11 chip alongside the new "Health Sensing System," allowing the watches to deliver higher-frequency heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) measurements than prior Apple Watches.

The Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 (pictured) will run watchOS 27.

 

Read full article

Comments

© Apple

LG TVs are facing scrutiny due to a video seemingly showing the devices’ capability to track users when the TVs are off.

YouTube channel Gamers Nexus worked with Level1Techs, a technology-focused YouTube channel, and security researchers to analyze LG TVs’ tracking capabilities. They shared packet captures that pointed to the TVs, including LG’s pricey G5 OLED TV, scanning the LAN for other devices.

“The [G5] crawled our entire network and found dozens of unrelated devices, including smartwatches and phones of our staff who didn't even know we were working on this,” Steve Burke, Gamers Nexus' editor-in-chief, said.

Read full article

Comments

© LG

Following its announcement in March, game developer Cold Iron Studios has shut down the servers for the cloud version of Aliens: Fireteam Elite on the Nintendo Switch. The game originally cost $30 (or $60 for an “Ultimate” version with additional content).

Cold Iron Studios hasn't offered customers refunds.

TheGamer reported that affected players are entitled to a discount for the Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game, which is a 2021 co-op, third-person shooter based on the Alien film franchise. However, that would mean paying money for a game that you have already paid money for once.

Read full article

Comments

© Cold Iron Studios/Steam

OpenAI’s upcoming smart speaker will probably cost over $300, “people familiar with the matter” have told Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

The generative AI company has “discussed” charging up to $400, Bloomberg, which has been reporting on the yet-to-be-announced smart speaker since July, said today. The publication said that OpenAI is viewing the smart speaker as a smartphone replacement.

OpenAI has declined to comment on its product roadmap.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images | NurPhoto

Sony is “cautiously” moving forward with plans to stop producing discs for PlayStation games as of January 2028, CFO Lin Tao said through an interpreter today.

During an earnings call, Tao said there are “various reasons” for Sony's decision, with the biggest being that the “digitalization of [content] overall has been progressing.”

“When we think about the future, and we put in a lot of thought and time, and we cautiously considered this, and we came to this conclusion. And we’re going to cautiously move this forward,” Tao said.

Read full article

Comments

© Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Roku is raising the prices for its streaming sticks and boxes by up to 60 percent.

Roku has updated its website with the new prices. Currently, it is still selling its streaming players at their old MSRPs but lists those prices as sale prices. The new prices are:

• Roku Streaming Stick: $40 (formerly $30)
• Roku Streaming Stick Plus: $60 (formerly $40)
• Roku Streaming Stick 4K: $80 (formerly $50)
• Roku Ultra: $150 (formerly $100)
• Roku Streambar SE: $150 (formerly $100)

Roku is even upping the price for a bundle that includes a Streaming Stick Plus and a one-month subscription to Fox One. As recently as July 20, Roku listed the bundle at $60 with a sale price of $25, according to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Now, the bundle carries an $80 MSRP and $45 sale price.

Read full article

Comments

© Roku

LG is reportedly pulling a McAfee pop-up ad from a controversial app that some of its monitors have stealthily installed on connected computers.

An example of the pop-up ad is seen in a still from Gamers Nexus' video. Credit: Gamers Nexus/Windows/YouTube

The app, LG Monitor App Installer, installs itself through a Windows Update alongside monitor driver updates. LG Monitor App Installer then pushes ads for a 30-day free trial for McAfee, as well as other software, via a pop-up on affected systems, multiple users have reported.

This has drawn negative attention recently, with complaints surfacing on Reddit and a subsequent video from YouTube channel Gamers Nexus. In the video, editor-in-chief Steve Burke said that the publication paid $1,200 for an LG UltraGear 3GX900A-B gaming monitor (the monitor’s price dropped to $600 two days later, Burke said) for testing and replicated the behavior “several times” across “multiple” Windows 11 systems.

Read full article

Comments

© LG

Fubo prices are going up by $15 per month because it will have some NBCUniversal channels again.

For years, Fubo, a sports-centric vMVPD (virtual multichannel video programming distributor, which lets subscribers watch traditional TV channels live over the Internet), offered NBCUniversal channels. That stopped in November 2025 due to a contract dispute.

With the loss of local NBC affiliates, Telemundo, nine regional sports channels, and 32 national channels, Fubo made the sensible but rare decision to lower subscription prices in December. The Essential plan went from $85 per month to $74 per month. The Pro plan dropped from $85 to $75 per month, and the Elite plan dropped from $95 to $84 per month.

Read full article

Comments

© Gabby Jones/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The Indian government has fined HP India and its partners a total of 1.4 billion rupees (about $14.4 million) for working with reseller partners in the “cartelization” of computers, ink cartridges, and toner.

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) said this week that it found HP India had colluded with some channel partners to drive up the cost of bids for government contracts for computers, as well as for selling ink cartridges, toner, and other printing supplies, including graphic and digital manufacturing supplies.

It said that HP was aiming to outcompete other OEMs and discourage resellers from selling “counterfeit” ink and toner.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty

Sheetz, a US convenience store chain, is moving its 838 locations off VMware.

Sheetz has used VMware virtualization across two Dell R440/R450-series servers at each of its locations since 2019. Now it’s migrating 12 to 14 virtual machines (VMs) in each of its stores from VMware vSphere to StorMagic’s SvHCI, “with an additional two VMs to be replaced over the coming months to transition from Windows 10 to Windows 11,” Scott Robertson, infrastructure team manager at Sheetz, told Ars Technica via email. Ultimately, Sheetz will move about 11,000 VMs from Broadcom's virtualization platform. Sheetz is still running the original Dell server hardware.

So far, Sheetz has finished migrating more than 600 stores, averaging 200 per month, according to a company announcement today. Sheetz should be finished with the migration in four months, the announcement said.

Read full article

Comments

© Sheetz

The growing use of AI contributed to Oracle laying off 21,000 workers in a year, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Monday.

In its annual regulatory filing for the fiscal year ending May 31, Oracle said it has 141,000 full-time employees. In its 2025 filing, Oracle said it had 162,000 employees. The reported 12.9 percent reduction followed March reports of mass layoffs at the database management software company.

"[T]he adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce," the filing reads.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty

Tesco, a retail conglomerate headquartered in the United Kingdom, is moving 40,000 server workloads off of VMware amid "abusive conduct" from Broadcom, recent legal filings claim.

Tesco filed a lawsuit in the UK’s High Court against Broadcom alleging breach of contract last year. According to a September report from The Register, the lawsuit claimed that in January 2021, Tesco bought perpetual licenses for VMware’s vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation, a subscription to VMware Tanzu, plus support services until 2026, with the option to extend support for four additional years.

But when Broadcom took over VMware in November 2023, it would not honor the deal and instead tried to get Tesco to pay “excessive and inflated prices for virtualization software for which Tesco has already paid” and would not allow it to buy support services for its perpetually licensed software without buying “duplicative subscription-based licenses for those same Software products," the initial complaint read, The Register reported at the time.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty

Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) new virtualization software promotion will likely pique the interest of end users and resellers who are unhappy with Broadcom's pricing of VMware.

During its HPE Discover event in Las Vegas this week, HPE announced that customers could use its “HPE Morpheus Software—VM Essentials” offering for free for “up to one year,” per a press release. HPE’s website describes its virtualization platform as a “VMware alternative.” It includes a hardware virtual machine (HVM) hypervisor and unified management and lets users "manage VMware ESXi and HVM clusters from one console and migrate when you’re ready,” HPE’s website says.

“New VM Essentials customers can receive up to one free year of licenses for VM Essentials, a year of HPE Zerto for $1 to support non-disruptive migration to HPE virtual machines, and 0 percent interest on software through HPE Financial Services,” HPE’s announcement reads, referring to HPE’s group for helping IT teams manage funding.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty