When Google euthanized the Coral USB Accelerator last year, I wrote about the workarounds my cameras fell back on — and I was honest about the ceiling. A Raspberry Pi with a Hailo stick can watch two, maybe three streams before it starts dropping frames like a bad phone call. My house runs six cameras, …
Somewhere around minute forty of yesterday’s Connect keynote, my notebook stopped being a list of announcements and became a scorecard. My team and I have been tracking the leaks on this one for months — we even put our predictions in print last week — so when Mark Zuckerberg finally took the stage in Menlo …
Five days from now, Mark Zuckerberg walks onto a stage in Menlo Park at an unusual hour — 4PM PT, 7PM on the East Coast, an evening keynote for the second year running — and opens Meta Connect 2026. My team has been through every leak, firmware dig, and supply-chain whisper leading into this one, …
There is a small box on the shelf above my desk that has heard nearly everything I’ve said out loud for the past three months. Every voice memo, every interview, every half-formed idea muttered at the whiteboard at 11 p.m. It has never sent a single syllable to the cloud, it has never asked me …
Every house has one. Ours was a metal filing cabinet in the basement, plus a shoebox of receipts that migrated from closet to closet through three moves. When the insurance adjuster asked for the serial number of a water heater we bought in 2021, I spent forty-five minutes downstairs with a flashlight, emerging with a …
There’s a specific kind of quiet panic that hits when a piece of hardware you depend on gets quietly discontinued. Mine arrived in April, when Google archived the driver for the Coral TPU — that little purple USB stick that has been the default brain for every self-hosted AI camera project since roughly 2019. The …
Amazon’s voice assistant wanted a raise this year, and that’s what finally pushed me off the couch. If you’ve been watching the slow march of Alexa’s AI-era subscription push — plus the quiet admission that everything you say near an Echo gets processed somewhere you’ll never audit — you know the feeling. I’ve spent twenty-five …
There’s a drawer in my test lab where AI subscriptions go to die. Plaque charges, assistant upgrades, transcription credits — at one point last spring my team was bleeding roughly sixty dollars a month across five services, and the honest answer to “what are we getting for that?” was a shrug. So we tried an …
I have a confession that will get me disinvited from at least two GPU enthusiast group chats: the AI server that runs my daily workflow lives on a shelf behind my desk, it weighs three pounds, and I have to check the power LED to confirm it’s on. After years of testing local inference rigs …
I’ve been covering Google hardware launches since the original Pixel back in 2016, and I’ve learned something over those ten years: the company’s product events have a rhythm. Some years it’s all software and incremental bumps. Other years, like today, Google walks on stage and empties the entire parts bin. The Made by Google 2026 …