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- Intuit Officially Owns Mailchimp Now
Intuit closed its roughly $6.3 billion acquisition of Mailchimp, folding the email-marketing giant into its small-business software stack.
- Halloween Horrors: The Chip Shortage Ghost That Won't Leave
A Halloween look at the console and GPU shortage haunting a second straight holiday season, plus a bright spot in Halo Infinite's November beta.
- Mars Check-In: Ingenuity's 14th Flight and Perseverance Wakes Back Up
NASA's Ingenuity helicopter logs its 14th Mars flight while Perseverance resumes science after October's solar-conjunction blackout.
- Facebook Is Now Meta, and It's Betting the Company on the Metaverse
Facebook's parent company rebranded as Meta at Connect, reorganizing around Zuckerberg's metaverse ambitions just days after the Facebook Papers hit.
- Pixel 6 Launch Day: Google's Big Silicon Bet Hits Shelves
The Pixel 6 and 6 Pro go on sale today, marking Google's first custom Tensor chip and its most aggressive hardware push yet.
- Copilot Packs Its Bags: GitHub's AI Pair Programmer Leaves VS Code Behind
GitHub shipped a Copilot plugin for Neovim, with JetBrains support landing days later, taking the AI coding assistant beyond its VS Code roots.
- Halo Infinite Finally Lets Us See the Campaign
343 Industries showed a long, open-world campaign demo for Halo Infinite, but confirmed co-op and Forge won't be there at launch.
- macOS Monterey Lands, and Apple Finally Drops the OS X Numbering
Apple's macOS Monterey ships today with Universal Control, iOS-style Shortcuts, and cross-device Focus modes.
- The New MacBook Pros, One Week Later: The Reviews Are In
A week after Apple's Unleashed event, early M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pro owners are reporting big real-world speedups for developers and video editors.
- The Facebook Papers Are Here, and They're Ugly
A media consortium began publishing stories from leaked internal Facebook documents this week, exposing what the company knew about Instagram's harm to teens.
- Halley's Comet Sends Its Fireworks: The Orionids Peak Tonight
The annual Orionid meteor shower, made of debris from Halley's Comet, peaks around October 21-22 with up to 20 meteors an hour under dark skies.
- Rust 2021 Edition Is Here, and It's the Good Kind of Boring
Rust 1.56.0 and the 2021 Edition shipped today with disjoint closure captures, array IntoIterator, and new macro or-patterns.
- Google's Pixel 6 Bets Everything on a Homemade Chip
Google's new Tensor SoC inside the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro puts AI processing on-device, and the $599 starting price is a shot at flagship pricing norms.
- Bitcoin Gets a Wall Street Wrapper, and Google Finally Shows Its Chip
ProShares' Bitcoin Strategy ETF stormed onto the NYSE the same day Google took the wraps off the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro.
- Apple Finally Goes Big: M1 Pro, M1 Max, and the MacBook Pro's Redemption Arc
Apple's Unleashed event brought M1 Pro and M1 Max chips and redesigned MacBook Pros with MagSafe, HDMI, and an SD slot back.
- The SEC Just Let Wall Street Buy Bitcoin Without Buying Bitcoin
The SEC has cleared ProShares' Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITO) to launch on the NYSE, the first U.S. Bitcoin futures ETF.
- Lucy Launches: NASA's 12-Year Trip to the Trojan Asteroids
NASA's Lucy spacecraft launched today on a 12-year mission to study eight asteroids, including six Jupiter Trojans.
- The Great Console Restock Watch, Holiday Edition
PS5 and Xbox Series X remain nearly impossible to find at retail, and the Steam Deck is shaping up to be the season's next scarcity story.
- Silverlight Is Officially Dead, and Almost Nobody Noticed
Microsoft ended support for Silverlight on October 12, 2021, quietly closing the book on the browser plugin era that Flash's death began.
- Captain Kirk Actually Went to Space Today
William Shatner became the oldest person in space on Blue Origin's NS-18 flight, and his reaction afterward was the real story.
- The Wrist Is Where the Next Platform War Gets Decided
With Apple Watch Series 7 preorders live and Google still sitting on Fitbit, the holiday wearables race is heating up.
- How One Bad Config Push Erased Facebook From the Internet
A closer look at the BGP misconfiguration that knocked Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp offline for six hours last week.
- A Bacterial Protein Could Make Rare-Earth Mining a Lot Less Toxic
A newly described protein called lanmodulin offers a greener way to separate rare-earth elements than today's harsh solvent-extraction processes.
- GPU Prices Just Hit a Six-Month High, and Nobody's Surprised
Nvidia and AMD graphics cards are selling well above MSRP again as chip shortages and crypto demand collide heading into Q4 2021.
- Twitch's Nightmare Week: A 125GB Leak and a Scramble to Contain It
An anonymous leak of Twitch's source code and payout data forced the platform into emergency damage control this week.
- The 2021 Chemistry Nobel Just Rewarded a Better Way to Build Molecules
Benjamin List and David MacMillan won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for asymmetric organocatalysis, a cleaner tool for building molecules now used across drug manufacturing.
- Windows 11 Is Here, and the TPM Wall Is the Real Story
Windows 11 began rolling out October 5 as a free upgrade, but its TPM 2.0 and CPU requirements are locking out a surprising number of otherwise capable PCs.
- The Nobel Physics Prize Just Validated Decades of Climate Modeling
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics honors Manabe, Hasselmann, and Parisi for turning chaotic, seemingly unpredictable systems into physics we can actually model.
- Android 12 Is Here, and Your Phone Is About to Match Your Wallpaper
Google officially released Android 12 today, led by the Material You design system that builds a color theme from your wallpaper.
- GPU Prices Are Still Insane, and Q4 Isn't Going to Save Us
Graphics cards remain 70-80%+ over MSRP as the chip shortage grinds on, with AMD's CEO warning the pain extends into 2022.