Enlarge / Dan O’Dowd’s campaign wants the link to Ralph Nader’s safety campaign to be explicit. (credit: Dan O’Dowd)

Tesla’s stratospheric valuation owes a fair amount to the company’s futuristic-sounding FSD feature, which promises a truly autonomous car that could even work the streets while its owner sleeps. But the company’s progress has been rocky, switching compute platforms and ditching sensors while trying to match the functionality of older Teslas built with simpler but more robust advanced driving assistance systems.

FSD is an important money-maker for Tesla, however. In January Tesla CEO Elon Musk told investors that “full-self-driving will become the most important source of profitability for Tesla.” And the company has repeatedly raised the price for the feature—what started as a $6,000 option in 2019 is now a $12,000 option.

Google shocked us all when it decided to reveal the Pixel 7 live at Google I/O a few weeks ago. The phone, which isn’t due out until the fall, was officially confirmed as the “Pixel 7” and “Pixel 7 Pro” with promises of next-gen Google Tensor chips, a polished aluminum camera bar, and a few official pictures of the back. We can learn a bit more about the device now, though, thanks to… an eBay listing?

Over the long weekend, some eBay seller had the bright idea to try to sell a prototype Pixel 7. The $530 listing of what is surely a stolen item has been removed from eBay, but you can still see an archive of the listing here. The seller listed the item saying it “comes with android 13 and pixel apps in development stage. Selling as is. No guarantees of any sort.” Hmmm. The seller at least scored what counts as the first in-person pictures of the Pixel 7, showing the device from all angles.

The Pixel 7, complete with that new camera bar and identifying prototype line symbols in the bottom third. (credit: meetveeru)

The Pixel 7 is very close to the Pixel 6, so there’s not a ton to look at, but this gives us a good look at that new camera bar. The Pixel 6 camera bar has one big sheet of glass across the entire back, while the Pixel 7’s camera bar is a big block of aluminum with a smaller glass cover for the lenses. The Pixel 7’s smaller camera glass should make it less susceptible to glare—it was easy for light to bounce around inside of the Pixel 6’s huge glass camera cover. The new look is aesthetically a downgrade, though. The Pixel 6 camera bar was a simple, continuous black strip that contrasted against the body color, while this aluminum is trying to match the glass body color, failing, and then has a black blob inside it for the camera lenses.

Enlarge / The original Surface Laptop Go. (credit: Jeff Dunn)

Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Go was originally introduced in October of 2020 as a smaller, lighter, and more budget-friendly member of the Surface family, but it hasn’t been updated since then. That may change soon, according to a leaked retail ad spotted by The Verge—it said that a spruced-up version of the Surface Laptop Go could be available for preorder as soon as June 2.

Intel’s 12th-gen processors have been available for a while now, and in that context, the new Laptop Go’s hardware isn’t very exciting. The laptop was listed with a Core i5-1135G7, a quad-core CPU originally launched in late 2020 that we’ve seen in tons of other laptops in the last two years. The new Laptop Go appears to use the same 12.4-inch touchscreen, the same un-backlit keyboard and fingerprint sensor, and the same complement of ports (one USB-C, one USB-A, a headphone jack, and a Surface Connect port). The laptop will also ship with Windows 11—the current model fully supports Windows 11 but still ships with Windows 10 in S Mode out of the box.

Though it’s almost as old as the original Surface Laptop Go, the i5-1135G7 would be an interesting upgrade to the current laptop’s i5-1035G1. It has the same number of CPU cores, but there are big increases to the base and boost clock speeds. The Iris Xe integrated GPU would also be considerably faster, thanks to a newer GPU architecture, a higher GPU clock speed, and more than twice as many execution units (80, up from 32). A gaming laptop it ain’t, but, especially at the screen’s native 1536×1024 resolution, it should be fast enough to play older and less-demanding games.

Enlarge / iRobot Roomba j7+ robot vacuum. (credit: iRobot)

Roomba launched the iRobot OS on Tuesday to signal its robotic household cleaners’ advanced software capabilities. As of writing, it only rebrands the two-year-old Genius Home Intelligence AI platform, but the company aims for it to be a leading computer vision platform that differentiates its robot vacuums and mops and eventually moves to other products, like air purifiers.

iRobot OS doesn’t include any new features yet but represents iRobot’s focus on “superior software intelligence,” Colin Angle, chairman and CEO of iRobot, said in a statement shared in Roomba’s announcement.

As it stands, Roomba’s iRobot OS-powered devices use computer vision to avoid, depending on the product, up to 80 “common objects,” like cords, socks, and, oh so importantly, animal waste. The OS is pet-friendly by including features like “Keep Out Zones” so your dog doesn’t start a fight with your robo vac when it’s around the food bowl. It can also recommend cleaning schedules, including based on when your furry friend tends to shed. If you want to see all that iRobot OS offers, the strongest iteration is the Roomba J7-series. The device came out in September and uses a front-facing camera with computer vision to better understand its environment’s layout than any other iRobot robot.