Today Netflix, the biggest streaming service based on subscriber count, announced that it will increase subscription prices by up to $2.50 per month. In a letter to investors [PDF], Netflix announced price changes starting today in the US, Canada, Argentina, and Portugal. People who subscribe to Netflix’s cheapest ad-free plan (Standard) will see the biggest increase in monthly costs. The subscription will go from $15.49/month to $17.99/month, representing a 16.14…

On Monday, Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released its new R1 model family under an open MIT license, with its largest version containing 671 billion parameters. The company claims the model performs at levels comparable to OpenAI’s o1 simulated reasoning (SR) model on several math and coding benchmarks. Alongside the release of the main DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1 models, DeepSeek published six smaller “DeepSeek-R1-Distill” versions ranging from 1.5 billion to 70 billion…

A report from Mark Gurman in Bloomberg makes the very reasonable suggestion that automatic email categorization in Apple Mail, already present since iOS 18 arrived on the iPhone, is coming to Macs and iPads in a few months. The feature should arrive with macOS 15.4 and possibly iPadOS 18.4, both due in April. Similar to Google’s server-side Gmail sorting, which debuted in May 2013, Apple’s Mail app on iOS sorts…

I have one standard rack appliance in my home: a Unifi Dream Machine Pro. It is mounted horizontally in a coat closet, putting it close to my home’s fiber input and also incidentally keeping our jackets gently warm. I can fit juuuuuust about one more standard rack-size device in there (maybe a rack-mount UPS?) before I have to choose between outer-wear and overly ambitious networking. Were I starting over, I…

Photography enthusiasts pay a lot for their very powerful cameras. How much more should they pay to put them to much, much easier work as a webcam? However many hundreds of dollars you paid, Canon thinks you should pay $5 per month—or, heck, just $50 per year—to do that. Roman Zipp detailed his journey from incredulousness to grim resignation in a blog post. He bought his Canon PowerShot G5 X…

Apple released new beta versions of iOS 18.3 to developers and the public yesterday, and one of the changes coming with the new software update will (at least temporarily) disable Apple Intelligence notification summaries for all apps in the App Store’s News and Entertainment category, at least temporarily. Apple said earlier this month that it would be instituting updates to how these notifications are handled after complaints from news organizations,…

I’d describe myself as a skeptic of the generative AI revolution—I think the technology as it currently exists is situationally impressive and useful for specific kinds of tasks, but broadly oversold. I’m not sure it will vanish from relevance to quite the extent that other tech fads like the metaverse or NFTs did, but my suspicion is that companies like Nvidia and OpenAI are riding a bubble that will pop…

It’s that time again, when families and friends gather and implore the more technically inclined among them to troubleshoot problems they’re having behind the device screens all around them. One of the most vexing and most common problems is logging into accounts in a way that’s both secure and reliable. Using the same password everywhere is easy, but in an age of mass data breaches and precision-orchestrated phishing attacks, it’s…

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating Microsoft in a wide-ranging probe that will examine whether the company’s business practices have run afoul of antitrust laws, according to people familiar with the matter. In recent weeks, FTC attorneys have been conducting interviews and setting up meetings with Microsoft competitors. One key area of interest is how the world’s largest software provider packages popular Office products together with cybersecurity and cloud computing…