Gaming is in danger of being a rich man's hobby.

Fans react to Nintendo's next-gen console.

A lawyer for Xiaofeng Wang and his wife says they are safe after FBI searches of their homes and Wangs sudden dismissal from Indiana University, where he taught for over 20 years.

Nintendo's next-generation handheld is set to launch June 5 alongside a slew of new games and accessoriesincluding one very cool rebooted GameCube controller.

MacworldIf you need a tablet that will fit into your pocket, then the new iPad Mini A17 Pro is your best bet, especially now that its on sale. You can snag this iPad mini for $399 at Amazon, a savings of $100 and matching the best price weve ever seen.We loved the iPad mini in our review and appreciated the speedier A17 Pro chip and support for Apple Intelligence and the ApplePencilPro. We gave it a 4-star rating and concluded that the iPad mini is still a great tablet, perhaps the best at its size and better than larger, non-Apple tablets.This tiny tablet is only 8.3 inches across and can easily slip into a beach bag or backpack for summer outdoor activities. It features a gorgeous Liquid Retina display that delivers rich, vibrant colors and impressive contrast, and with the A17 Pro processor, youll be able to quickly load apps and games and switch between them without issue. Youre also sure to get OS updates for many years to come. The tablet also comes with 12MP front and back cameras so you can participate in video meetings or snap pics and videos with ease. And since it has the same excellent battery life as Apples other iPads, youll be able to take it on a trip or hike without worrying when it will need a charge. So dont miss out on the chance to get the new A17 Pro iPad mini for $399 at Amazon, its lowest price ever.Grab the tiniest iPad for $100 off Buy now at Amazon

MacworldWhen we take our iPhones out of our pocket to make a call, send a text, or check our email, we expect them to work. When they dont, it can be a frustrating experience, especially when you cant get online. If youre away from Wi-Fi, youre dependent on a cellular connection, and when that isnt available, youll be alerted with an SOS icon in the status bar. Heres what SOS means when you see it on your iPhone, why your iPhone is in SOS mode, and how you can fix it.What is SOS mode on iPhone?SOS mode doesnt mean your iPhone is in distress. Rather, it means your device isnt connected to a cellular network and can only make emergency calls via satellites. This feature is available in Australia, Canada, the United States, the U.K., Japan, and parts of Europe. In other regions, it will say No Service or Searching. It requires an iPhone 14, 15, or 16 running iOS 18.2 or later. Why is my iPhone is SOS mode?There are several reasons why your iPhone may be in SOS mode:Dead spots: The most common reason for seeing SOS on your iPhone is if you travel into a dead spot. Even the most expansive networks have areas without coverage, and if you walk or drive into one of them, youll lose the ability to make calls for as long as youreCarrier outage: Occasionally, carriers will have outages that affect customers across the country. When that happens the carrier will communicate with customers to let them know when service will be restored. To find out if your carrier is having problems where you are try Down Detector (U.S,) or DownDetector (U.K.).Cellular data is off: In Settings or Control Center, there is an option to toggle off Cellular just like Wi-Fi. Go to Settings. Tap on Cellular (or Mobile Service if you are in the U.K.) If its grayed out instead of green, tap it to turn it on. What can I do when my iPhone is in SOS mode?SOS means your iPhone can only call out to emergency services, including 911 in the U.S. If you have an iPhone 14 or later, you can also use Emergency SOS via Satellite to text emergency services when youre off the grid with no cellular and Wi-Fi coverage. With iOS 18, you also send iMessages or SMS messages via satellite when you lose cellular coverage.How can I fix SOS mode on my iPhone?The first thing to do if your iPhone is in SOS mode is to check your surroundings. Try moving a bit to see if your phone connects. Dead spots can be avoided just by walking a bit or driving to a different area. If youre somewhere where you usually have coverage, try toggling the Cellular button off and on again on your phone to force it to reconnect.Finally, a restart can sometimes fix connection issues. Hold down the power and volume up buttons until the shutdown slider appears. Slide it to power off, wait 15 seconds or so, and hold down the power button until the Apple logo appears.

Mozilla has decided to launch a challenger to Gmail called Thundermail. The upstart is a web-based email service based on the open-source project Stalwart, according to technology site Thurrott.The plan is to eventually add support for calendar and contacts to Thundermail, but when that would happen remains to be seen.Alongside the new email service, Mozilla is also launching Thunderbird Pro. It offers, among other things, an AI assistant, a file-sharing tool and a planning tool and can be seen as a complement to Thundermail.Users interested in trying the new services, can sign up for a waiting list at Thundermail.com.

Apple is a hot property, and the big banks all want a chance to grab a piece of the action now that Goldman Sachs hasdecided to leave retail banking behind.Weve entered the breaking it down for parts stage of deal-making now, with banks bidding for both financial network access provision and to be the partner of note for the card.Apple Cardwas the future of bankingwhen it launchedsix years ago. It immediately generated noteworthy public interest, people liked the software that supported it, and the interest rates (which have changed over time) were seen as super-attractive. Apples Daily Cash loyalty scheme became popular, too, as did the Apple Card Savings account the company created a little later. The card was supported by Goldman Sachs as the credit partner and used Mastercard as the payment processor. Following somecostly service failures, Apple has been working to leave the first partner, while the deal with the second has expired. And thats where the action is.The Apple Card yard saleMastercard wants to keep Apples business, but is facing fairly aggressive competition from both Visa and American Express. There is clearly value in the business Visa hasoffered a hefty $100 millionto take over from Mastercard, while American Express is vying to take a partnership position in replacing both Mastercard and Goldman Sachs. Barclays, Synchrony Financia, and JP Morgan Chase have also discussedtaking over the credit side of the Apple Card business.Whats in it for them, of course, is access to Apples high-value market of relatively affluent and very loyal consumers. There are more than 12 million Apple Card users in the US with north of $20 billion in balances. These are (mostly, possibly except me) creditworthy people who spend, save, and borrow money. A 2020 survey told us that a third of Apple Card customershad annual incomes above $100,000.Customers in demandIn an unpredictable economy, customers like these are gold dust and Apple has them. The opportunity to expand the service into other up-and-coming economies wont be lost on the banks, either. Banks usually want to follow the money, so once all these deals are done, it will be interesting to see where Apple Card gets introduced.But thats not all that Apple brings to the table: Challenger banks newer, tech-driven services that arent weighed down by tradition have proliferated and improved since 2008 when bankers seemingly siphoned all the cash from the global economy.Banks responded by improving customer service and developing better B2C and B2B applications and software services. But challengers including Revolut have sought and gained banking licenses and pose more competition now than they did then. Whats limiting all these efforts, of course, is software design; the best services offer the best software.Thats where Apple comes in.Follow the moneyBanks know that Apple is really, really good at software (most of the time). They know that when it comes to usability and platform support, the company is second to none. They read the same research that shows Apples productsrapidly replacing Windows, and they also recognize that Apples commitment to security and privacy is vital essential, even to secure and stable financial exchange.(This is why the UK really shouldannouncewhether it has chosen to sacrifice its financial services sector by breaking end-to-end encryption, because financial firms will be furious when they find their trading system security underminedwithout any warning.)Apple has a lot to offer. But for more traditional financial entities such as those talking with the company about Apple Card, the biggest thing it can offer is that it is more than capable of building software and services to compete with challenger banks.And while many of us might rejoice if those challengers defeat the established order of financial things, incumbent entities will not fold without a fight hence, the interest in Apple Card. They think Apple couldhelp them thrivein the New World Fiscal Order. They are probably right.Deal, or no deal?This is whats at stake in Apples talks around the Apple Card. Banks want a direct line to the worlds most affluent customers, want to surprise and delight those customers, retain and profit from them, and they believe Apple can help them do it. The only snag is going to be whether Apple gets the deal right, or prices itself out of the market after all, Apple was a challenger once, and some other service could conceivably replace it.You can follow me on social media! Join me onBlueSky, LinkedIn, andMastodon.

Rumors of the ongoing death of software development that its being slain by AI are greatly exaggerated. In reality, software development is at a fork in the road: embracing the (currently) far-off notion of fully automated software development or acknowledging the work of a software developer is much more than just writing lines of code.The decision the industry makes could have significant long-term consequences. Increasing complacency around AI-generated code and a shift to what has been termed vibe coding where code is generated through natural language prompts until the results seem to work will lead to code thats more error-strewn, more expensive to run and harder to change in the future. And, if the devaluation of software development skills continues, we may even lack a workforce with the skills and knowledge to fix things down the line.This means software developers are going to become more important to how the world builds and maintains software. Yes, there are many ways their practices will evolve thanks to AI coding assistance, but in a world of proliferating machine-generated code, developer judgment and experience will be vital.The dangers of AI-generated code are already hereThe risks of AI-generated code arent science fiction: theyre with us today. Research done by GitClear earlier this year indicates that with AI coding assistants (like GitHub Copilot) going mainstream, code churn which GitClear defines as changes that were either incomplete or erroneous when the author initially wrote, committed, and pushed them to the companys git repo has significantly increased. GitClear also found there was a marked decrease in the number of lines of code that have been moved, a signal for refactored code (essentially the care and feeding to make it more effective).In other words, from the time coding assistants were introduced theres been a pronounced increase in lines of code without a commensurate increase in lines deleted, updated, or replaced. Simultaneously, theres been a decrease in lines moved indicating a lot of code has been written but not refactored. More code isnt necessarily a good thing (sometimes quite the opposite); GitClears findings ultimately point to complacency and a lack of rigor about code quality.Can AI be removed from software development?However, AI doesnt have to be removed from software development and delivery. On the contrary, theres plenty to be excited about. As noted in the latest volume of the Technology Radar Thoughtworks report on technologies and practices from work with hundreds of clients all over the world the coding assistance space is full of opportunities.Specifically, the report noted tools like Cursor, Cline and Windsurf can enable software engineering agents. What this looks like in practice is an agent-like feature inside developer environments that developers can ask specific sets of coding tasks to be performed in the form of a natural language prompt. This enables the human/machine partnership.That being said, to only focus on code generation is to miss the variety of ways AI can help software developers. For example, Thoughtworks has been interested in how generative AI can be used to understand legacy codebases, and we see a lot of promise in tools like Unblocked, which is an AI team assistant that helps teams do just that. In fact, Anthropics Claude Code helped us add support for new languages in an internal tool, CodeConcise. We use CodeConcise to understand legacy systems; and while our success was mixed, we do think theres real promise here.Tightening practices to better leverage AIIts important to remember much of the work developers do isnt developing something new from scratch. A large proportion of their work is evolving and adapting existing (and sometimes legacy) software. Sprawling and janky code bases that have taken on technical debt are, unfortunately, the norm. Simply applying AI will likely make things worse, not better, especially with approaches like vibe.This is why developer judgment will become more critical than ever. In the latest edition of the Technology Radar report, AI-friendly code design is highlighted, based on our experience that AI coding assistants perform best with well-structured codebases.In practice, this requires many different things, including clear and expressive naming to ensure context is clearly communicated (essential for code maintenance), reducing duplicate code, and ensuring modularity and effective abstractions. Done together, these will all help make code more legible to AI systems.Good coding practices are all too easy to overlook when productivity and effectiveness are measured purely in terms of output, and even though this was true before there was AI tooling, software development needs to focus on good coding first.AI assistance demands greater human responsibilityInstagram co-founder Mike Krieger recently claimed that in three years software engineers wont write any code: they will only review AI-created code. This might sound like a huge claim, but its important to remember that reviewing code has always been a major part of software development work. With this in mind, perhaps the evolution of software development wont be as dramatic as some fear.But theres another argument: as AI becomes embedded in how we build software, software developers will take on more responsibility, not less. This is something weve discussed a lot at Thoughtworks: the job of verifying that an AI-built system is correct will fall to humans. Yes, verification itself might be AI-assisted, but it will be the role of the software developer to ensure confidence.In a world where trust is becoming highly valuable as evidenced by the emergence of the chief trust officer the work of software developers is even more critical to the infrastructure of global industry. Its vital software development is valued: the impact of thoughtless automation and pure vibes could prove incredibly problematic (and costly) in the years to come.This content was produced by Thoughtworks. It was not written by MIT Technology Reviews editorial staff.

Following the release of iOS 18.4, macOS 15.4, and other updates to the public, Apple has started up a new round of developer betas for iOS 18.5, iPadOS 18.5, macOS 15.5, tvOS 18.5, watchOS 11.5, and visionOS 2.5.Examples of Apple Intelligence at work. On March 31, Apple released its updates for iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, macOS 15.4, tvOS 18.4, and visionOS 2.4. A day later, it re-released watchOS 11.4 Following those releases, Apple has moved on to the next update, with a new set of builds for the follow-up releases.The first iOS 18.5 and iPadOS 18.4 developer betas share build number 22F5042g, with macOS Sequoia 15.5 using build number 24F5042g. The first tvOS 18.5 build is 22L5542f, the first watchOS 11.5 build is 22T5542f, and the first visionOS 2.5 build is 22O5442g. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums