Many of the most interesting bodies in our Solar System aren’t planets, but the moons that orbit them. They have active volcanoes, hydrocarbon oceans, geysers, and moon-wide oceans buried under icy crusts. And, as far as we can tell, the physics of the processes that produce large planets should make moon formation inevitable. Given how common planets are, our galaxy should be teeming with moons.
Yet, despite some tantalizing hints, we’ve not found a clear indication of a moon orbiting an exoplanet. What we have found are a few very young exoplanets that appear to have moon-forming disks around them. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope has obtained a spectrum of the ring-forming disk around a giant super-Jupiter, and found that it’s rich in small carbon-based molecules. That’s despite the fact that the star it’s orbiting seems to have a planet-forming disk that’s mostly water.
Finding disks
We search for exo-moons and moon-forming disks using completely different methods. To spot an actual moon, we rely on its gravitational influence. At some points in its orbit, it will be towing its planet forward to speed up its orbit; at others, it will be holding its planet back. This introduces subtle variations in the timing of when the planet arrives in front of the star from Earth’s perspective.
Starting in November, Venmo and PayPal users will finally be able to send money directly to each other, ending years of workarounds despite Venmo being owned by PayPal. TechCrunch reports: This change means that PayPal users will now be able to find Venmo users by inputting their phone numbers, and later, their email addresses. If you don’t want PayPal users to be able to find you, you can update your settings in the Venmo app by navigating to Settings – Privacy – Find me… and while you’re at it, you might as well default your Venmo transactions to private via Settings > Privacy. You’ll thank me in the long run.
PayPal announced that it would broaden its network of payment systems in July, starting with Venmo, but the companies did not confirm the date of the update until now. This collection of partnerships, which PayPal has named PayPal World, will also work with Mercado Pago, NPCI International Payments Limited, and Tenpay Global. This will help users send money internationally without barriers and fees. Combined, Venmo and PayPal have 2 billion global users, according to PayPal.
Intel’s graphics division has been busy shaking up its driver strategy over the past month, and the news cuts both ways. On the one hand, Intel has pulled the plug on day-to-day support for the integrated graphics in several recent Core CPU generations, but on the other, recent Arc driver updates deliver a surprisingly big win for gamers still
It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we’ve featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we’re experimenting with a monthly collection. September’s list includes how prebunking can restore public trust in election results; why ghost sharks grow weird forehead teeth; and using neutrinos to make a frickin’ laser beam, among other highlights.
Prebunking increases trust in elections
Credit:
Superior Electoral Court of Brazil /Public domain
False claims of voter fraud abounded in the wake of the 2020 US general election, when Joe Biden defeated incumbent Donald Trump for the presidency. Trump himself amplified those false claims, culminating in the violent attack on the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Two years later, Brazil faced a similar scenario in the wake of its 2022 general election in which voters ousted incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro. Once again, claims of fraud ran rampant as Bolsonaro supporters stormed their country’s capital.
While it might be tough to say when each of these features officially dropped, the point is they’re here now, and you can try them out today. Here are the six new features Meta highlighted, and what you can expect to see the next time you open the app:
Support for Live Photos and Motion Photos
Perhaps the biggest news of the bunch is support for Live Photos (iOS) and Motion Photos (Android). Before this latest update, these moving photos would simply as static images, so you’d miss out on the extra few seconds of motion and audio. If you wanted to send the full Live Photo or Motion Photo, you needed to choose a different messaging app. No longer!
It’s the latest WhatsApp update to make it easer to freely share media. Over the years, the company has slowly updated its policies on sharing high quality photos and videos. It was only in 2024 that WhatsApp finally let you share these images in full resolution, so it’s not that surprising to me that it took this long for Live Photo support.
Document scanning on Android
If you frequently share documents on WhatsApp, this is great news: Android users now have access to the app’s built-in document scanner. This feature was previously exclusive to iPhones, so it’s good to see it arrive on the Android version as well.
You’l find the “Document” option under the (+) button in any given chat.
Meta AI chat themes
Meta’s custom, AI-generated chat themes are now available in WhatsApp. The feature is a bit buried in the “Chat theme” settings, but after tapping “Create with AI,” you can ask the bot to generate any type of background you want. If you can’t think of anything, Meta AI has a series of pre-generated backgrounds you can use.
As you might expect, these backgrounds include all the hallmarks of AI-generated images: uncanny realisms, high contrast, and that “AI sheen.” Still, if you feel like mixing up your chat background with something you can’t find in the app’s selections, you can give this image generator a try. I’d prefer to stick with the human-generated selections.
That said, WhatsApp is far from the only app to offer AI-generated chat backgrounds. Even Apple’s Messages app now does, at least with iOS 26.
Video call backgrounds
Similarly, you can now use Meta AI to generate custom backgrounds for your video calls. This feature works when taking photos and videos directly in the chat, as well, just in case you ever want to quickly replace your background with something AI-generated. Outside of the sheer novelty though, I’m not sure when that would be all that practical.
Better group search
You can now search for specific contact names in the main Chats tab, and have WhatsApp return all of the groups you two are in together. I could see this being an easier way to find a group chat that’s been buried in your threads: Instead of scrolling or searching for specific messages, just search for the name of someone you know is in the chat.
Additional sticker packs
WhatsApp is also introducing at least two new sticker packs: “Fearless Bird” and “Vacation.”
After originally hoping to publish the open-source code last year, today AMD published the initial openSIL code for enabling Phoenix SoCs to make use of this in-development CPU silicon initialization alternative to AGESA…
In the age of cloud computing, protections baked into chips from Intel, AMD, and others are essential for ensuring confidential data and sensitive operations can’t be viewed or manipulated by attackers who manage to compromise servers running inside a data center. In many cases, these protections—which work by storing certain data and processes inside encrypted enclaves known as TEEs (Trusted Execution Enclaves)—are essential for safeguarding secrets stored in the cloud by the likes of Signal Messenger and WhatsApp. All major cloud providers recommend that customers use it. Intel calls its protection SGX, and AMD has named it SEV-SNP.
Over the years, researchers have repeatedly broken the security and privacy promises that Intel and AMD have made about their respective protections. On Tuesday, researchers independently published two papers laying out separate attacks that further demonstrate the limitations of SGX and SEV-SNP. One attack, dubbed Battering RAM, defeats both protections and allows attackers to not only view encrypted data but also to actively manipulate it to introduce software backdoors or to corrupt data. A separate attack known as Wiretap is able to passively decrypt sensitive data protected by SGX and remain invisible at all times.
Attacking deterministic encryption
Both attacks use a small piece of hardware, known as an interposer, that sits between CPU silicon and the memory module. Its position allows the interposer to observe data as it passes from one to the other. They exploit both Intel’s and AMD’s use of deterministic encryption, which produces the same ciphertext each time the same plaintext is encrypted with a given key. In SGX and SEV-SNP, that means the same plaintext written to the same memory address always produces the same ciphertext.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted on Tuesday to consider whether to lift the long-standing prohibition on a merger between any of the largest four broadcast networks and to consider relaxing other media ownership rules. The FCC said it would consider public comments before deciding whether to reverse the rule that bars a merger among the “Big Four” networks: NBC, owned by Comcast, Walt Disney Co’s ABC, Paramount Skydance’s CBS or Fox. The FCC also said it was seeking public comment on whether to eliminate or revise a rule that limits a single entity from owning more than two of the four largest television stations in the same local market and a rule that limits the total number of local radio stations that may be owned in a single market.
Previously, the FCC noted that a version of the rule barring dual ownership of networks has existed since the 1940s. A 2018 media ownership review concluded the bar should be upheld “because it advances the agency’s core policy objectives of competition and localism. “We intend to take a fresh approach to competition by examining the broader media marketplace, rather than treating broadcast radio and television as isolated markets,” FCC Chair Brendan Carr said. “If we determine that any rule no longer serves the public interest, we will fulfill our statutory duty to modify or eliminate those rules.”
Ever wonder why ChatGPT slows down during long conversations? The culprit is a fundamental mathematical challenge: processing long sequences of text requires massive computational resources, even with the efficiency tricks that companies have already deployed. While US tech giants can afford to throw more hardware at the problem, Chinese AI company DeepSeek, which is cut off from a steady supply of some advanced AI chips by export restrictions, has extra motivation to squeeze more performance from less silicon.
On Monday, DeepSeek released an experimental version of its latest simulated reasoning language model, DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp, which introduces what it calls “DeepSeek Sparse Attention” (DSA). It’s the company’s implementation of a computational technique likely already used in some of the world’s most prominent AI models. OpenAI pioneered sparse transformers in 2019 and used the technique to build GPT-3, while Google Research published work on “Reformer” models using similar concepts in 2020. (The full extent to which Western AI companies currently use sparse attention in their latest models remains undisclosed.)
Despite sparse attention being a known approach for years, DeepSeek claims its version achieves “fine-grained sparse attention for the first time” and has cut API prices by 50 percent to demonstrate the efficiency gains. But to understand more about what makes DeepSeek v3.2 notable, it’s useful to refresh yourself on a little AI history.
In a world that seems increasingly determined to keep us apart, we’re all bound together by at least one universal experience: the frustration of talking to a real person on the phone at a customer service call center. Whether we want to complain, resolve a problem, or simply get information, call center interactions can be a maddening experience. Companies are increasingly hiding their customer service representatives behind phone menus and AI-driven tools, and even if you make contact, the experience is often less than ideal. With October Prime Day around the corner, finding a solution to this problem can save you a lot of headaches.
While different companies handle their call centers in different ways (and host them in different countries), there are some universal truths to keep in mind—and use to your advantage, if you know a few secret ways to navigate them. These tips won’t guarantee you success in your quest for a refund, a return, or simply an explanation as to why you were shipped you a BTS-branded body pillow instead of the winter coat you ordered. But they will increase your odds of emerging from the call with something to show for your efforts.
A good general piece of advice: Keep calm, and always be polite. Call center employees are human beings doing a difficult job, so remind yourself that your beef isn’t with them, it’s with their corporate overlords.
GetHuman
Your chances of customer service success increase dramatically when you get a human being on the line. Hitting a rigid phone menu is pretty common these days, and it’s frustrating: The automated options often aren’t flexible enough to cover your specific need, and they seem to be designed to stop all but the hardiest souls from actually reaching a customer service rep (CSR).
And that’s because they are. It costs money every time you connect with a CSR, so companies try to keep you away from them as much as possible. So, instead of tangling with their phone menu and hearing “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that” fifteen times until you set your phone on fire in frustration, try a service like GetHuman. Type in the name of the company you’re trying to contact and see if there’s a direct phone number you can dial to get a person, or if they offer a set of easy instructions on how to break out of the phone menu. If you do get a human on the phone, ask for a direct number to call back if your problem needs to be addressed again.
The supervisor trick
It’s an oldie but a goodie—and it does work. If your CSR isn’t helpful, or you’re not getting the result you want, ask to speak to a supervisor. A slightly more polite and less combative way to do this is to ask to speak to “someone who can solve my problem” or similar language. In almost all situations, your CSR is obligated to transfer you upon request, and supervisors are often empowered to do things the common CSR can’t.
Hit zero—or say nothing
If you can’t get any information on how to connect to a human being, try pressing zero on your phone’s keypad. Many (though not all) call center phone menus will automatically dump you to a CSR if you press zero.
If that doesn’t work, have a little patience and simply do nothing. Most phone menus will time out if you don’t respond in any way to their prompts—and dump you to a human being by default. This might take a minute or two, but it often works.
Call during off hours
As you might imagine, call centers experience busy times like any other business, and they tend to align with people’s waking hours. If the company you’re trying to reach offers 24-hour customer service, try calling very early in the morning or very late at night. Most sane, well-adjusted people will be asleep or enjoying their lives, so your chances of getting through quickly (and your chances the CSR will have extra time for you) will be better.
Exhaust the script
It’s important to understand that every single CSR you speak to is working from a script. Companies develop complex algorithms for dealing with customer complaints. These scripts are designed to shorten call lengths—and to avoid outcomes the company finds undesirable (like refunding your money).
But like all scripts, they’re limited. A few simple tricks can help you break free from the script—and that’s when you can really get something done. A few things to try:
Repeat your demands. CSR scripts usually have a limit on how often the CSR can refuse you—but they won’t tell you that. Most commonly, if you trigger the same script loop three times, the CSR is obliged to transfer you—or empowered to reveal another option they’ve yet to share. So if the CSR tells you they can’t refund you, don’t just accept it—ask again. And then again.
Stay on the line. CSRs are always on the clock. Every interaction costs the company money, and their job performance is often tied to how quickly they can resolve customer problems. The longer you refuse to end the interaction, the closer you get to being transferred to someone who can actually do what you want, or inspiring the CSR to use some of the power they do have just to get you off the line.
Jump the script. When trying to cancel an account or get a refund, CSR scripts are larded with alternatives, up-sells, and misdirections. (Ever tried to cancel your cable TV and somehow wound up with three months of free HBO instead? That’s the power of the script.) One trick is to start off by pre-refusing everything—tell the CSR you don’t want freebies, discounts, new services, or anything else, you want one very specific thing. This can short-circuit the script and get you where you want to go much faster.
Call back immediately
If your CSR refuses to see things your way, don’t get mad—change venues. Politely end the call, then call back immediately. You’ll almost certainly get a different CSR, and the experience can often be dizzyingly different. That’s because your call may be routed to an entirely different call center, or may be picked up by a CSR with more experience—and more authority.
Show them the money
If you’re having trouble getting a human being on the line no matter what you try, there’s one last trick to play: Choose the menu option that involves spending money. Upgrade your account, make a purchase, take on the optional insurance—whatever option results in your bill going up will almost certainly get an eager human being on the phone. They may not be the right person to speak to, but now you’re inside the phone menu, and they can transfer you to a more appropriate department.
Customer service often seems like a battle of wills. But it’s also a battle of wits, and these secrets will give you some extra ammo.
Our Best Editor-Vetted Early Prime Day Deals Right Now
Version 1.5.0
of the Radicle peer-to-peer Git collaboration platform has been
released. This release includes better support for bare repositories,
structured logging, and improvements in the output of rad patch
show:
The previous output would differentiate “updates”, where the original
author creates a new revision, and “revisions”, where another author
creates a revision. This could be confusing since updates are also
revisions. Instead, the output shows a timeline of the root of the
patch and each new revision, without any differentiation. The revision
identifiers, head commit of the revision, and author are still printed
as per usual.
Fresh off his crusade against Jimmy Kimmel and ABC, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission may eliminate TV station ownership limits in a potential gift for station owners like Sinclair and Nexstar.
When FCC Chairman Brendan Carr threatened ABC affiliates with license revocations for carrying Jimmy Kimmel’s show, he said that national networks exert too much control over local TV stations and that he’s trying “to empower local TV stations to serve the needs of the local communities.” Taking a cue from Carr, Sinclair and Nexstar continued blocking Jimmy Kimmel Live! on their ABC affiliates even after ABC and its owner Disney ended Kimmel’s suspension.
Within days, Sinclair and Nexstar decided to put Kimmel back on the air. Pressure from viewers and advertisers likely played a major role in the reversal. But for Carr, the episode might reinforce his belief that station groups should have more influence over national programming.
With a new set of Microsoft 365 features, knowledge workers will be able to generate complex Word documents or Excel spreadsheets using only text prompts to Microsoft’s chat bot. Two distinct products were announced, each using different models and accessed from within different tools—though the similar names Microsoft chose make it confusing to parse what’s what.
Driven by OpenAI’s GPT-5 large language model, Agent Mode is built into Word and Excel, and it allows the creation of complex documents and spreadsheets from user prompts. It’s called “agent” mode because it doesn’t just work from the prompt in a single step; rather, it plans multi-step work and runs a validation loop in the hopes of ensuring quality.
It’s only available in the web versions of Word and Excel at present, but the plan is to bring it to native desktop applications later.
The Scribe is more affordable alternative to competitors like ReMarkable, combining an e-reader with a digital notebook with a paper-like writing experience and limited AI integrations.
A redesigned upgrade from the original 2022 Kindle Scribe, the 2024 model has a larger 10.2-inch, 300 ppi e-ink screen. It’s made of aluminum (in Tungsten or Metallic Jade) and comes with a “Premium Pen” stylus with an eraser that allows you to mark up imported documents, sketch, handwrite notes, or use it as a planner. According to Amazon, battery life is up to three weeks, based on a baseline of 30 minutes of writing daily.
This model is a reading-and-writing hybrid with a great writing experience, but it can’t compete with full-featured digital notebooks that can run apps. It does, however, have built-in AI tools that transform handwriting into a readable font, summarize notes, and tweak their tone or length to your liking. Active Canvas also allows you to annotate the pages of your e-books.
While the 2024 model has more note-taking features than its predecessor, this PCMag review notes that its new annotation system isn’t a big improvement over the 2022 model. Still, with a $100 discount, you get Amazon’s most refined e-note experience, the bonus of AI tools, and a premium pen bundled in, making the 2024 Amazon Kindle Scribea great choice for anyone who wants to elevate their reading, note-taking, and writing experience.
SCHOTT—a global leader in advanced optics and specialty glass—working with waveguide partner Lumus, is almost certainly the manufacturer of the waveguide optics in Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses. While the Ray-Ban Display glasses offer only a static 20° field-of-view, the company says its waveguide technology is also capable of supporting immersive wide field-of-view glasses in the future.
The News
Schott has secured a big win as perhaps the first waveguide maker to begin producing waveguides at consumer scale. While Meta hasn’t confirmed who makers the waveguides in the Ray-Ban Display glasses, Schott announced—just one day before the launch of Ray-Ban Display—that it was the “first company capable of handling geometric reflective waveguide manufacturing in [mass] production volumes.”
In anticipation of AR glasses, Shott has spent years investing in technology, manufacturing, and partnerships in an effort to set itself up as a leading provider of optics for smart glasses and AR glasses.
The company signed a strategic partnership with Lumus (the company that actually designs the geometric reflective waveguides) back in 2020. Last year the company announced the completion of a brand new factory which it said would “significantly enhance Schott’s capacity to supply high-quality optical components to international high-tech industries, including Augmented Reality (AR).”
Image courtesy Schott
Those investments now appear to be paying off. While there are a handful of companies out there with varying waveguide technologies and manufacturing processes, as the likely provider of the waveguides in the Ray-Ban Display glasses, Schott can now claim it has “proven mass market readiness regarding scalability;” something others have yet to do at this scale, as far as I’m aware.
“This breakthrough in industrial production of geometric reflective waveguides means nothing less than adding a crucial missing puzzle piece to the AR technology landscape,” said Dr. Ruediger Sprengard, Senior Vice President Augmented Reality at Schott. “For years, the promise of lightweight and powerful smart glasses available at scale has been out of reach. Today, we are changing that. By offering geometric reflective waveguides at scale, we’re helping our partners cross the threshold into truly wearable products, providing an immersive experience.”
As for the future, the company claims its geometric reflective waveguides will be able to scale beyond the small 20° field-of-view of the Ray-Ban Display glasses to immersive wide field-of-view devices.
“Compared to competing optical technologies in AR, geometric reflective waveguides stand out in light and energy efficiency, enabling device designers to create fashionable glasses for all-day use. These attributes make geometric reflective waveguides the best option for small FoVs, and the only available option for wide FoVs,” the company claims in its announcement.
As the likely provider of waveguides for Ray-Ban Display, Schott & Lumus have secured a big win over competitors. From the outside, it looks like Lumus’ geometric reflective waveguides won out primarily due to their light efficiency. Most other waveguide technologies rely on diffractive (rather than reflective) optics, which have certain advantages but fall short on light efficiency.
Light efficiency is crucial because the microdisplays in glasses-sized devices must be both tiny and power-efficient. As displays get larger and brighter, they get bulkier, hotter, and more power-hungry. Using a waveguide with high light efficiency thus allows the displays to be smaller, cooler, and less power-hungry, which is critical considering the tiny space available.
Light and power demands also rise with field-of-view, since spreading the same light across a wider area reduces apparent brightness.
Schott says its waveguide technology is ready to scale to wider fields-of-view, but that probably isn’t what’s holding back true AR glasses (like the Orion Prototype that Meta showed off in 2024).
It’s not just wide field-of-view optics that need to be in place for a device like Orion to ship. There’s still the issue of battery and processing power. Orion was only able to work as it does because a lot of the computation and battery was offloaded onto a wireless puck. If Meta wants to launch full AR glasses like Orion without a puck (as they did with Ray-Ban Display), the company still needs smaller, more efficient chips to make that possible.
Additionally, display technology also needs to advance in order to actually take advantage of optics that are capable of projectinga wide field-of-view
Ray-Ban Display glasses are using a fairly low resolution 0.36MP (600 × 600) display. It appears sharp because the pixels are spread across just 20°. As the field-of-view increases, both brightness and resolution need to increase to maintain the same image quality. Without much room to increase the physical size of the display, that means packing smaller pixels into the same tiny area, while also making them brighter. As you can imagine, it’s a challenge to improve these inversely-related characteristics at the same time.
Apple’s biggest product event of the year happens in September, when the company puts out a new batch of iPhones and Apple Watches and other odds and ends. But in most years, Apple either has another smaller event or just a handful of additional product announcements later in the fall in October or November—usually the focus is on the Mac, the iPad, or both.
It seems like a new iPad Pro could be one of the announcements on tap. Russian YouTube channel Wylsacom has posted an unboxing video and early tour of what appears to be a retail boxed version of a new 256GB 13-inch iPad Pro, as well as an M5 processor that we haven’t seen in any other Apple product yet. This would be the first new iPad Pro since May of 2024, when Apple introduced the current M4 version.
The same channel also got ahold of the M4 MacBook Pro early, so it seems likely that this is genuine. And while the video is mostly dedicated to complaining about packaging, the wattage of the included power adapter, and how boring it is that Apple doesn’t introduce dramatic design changes every generation, it does also give us some early performance numbers for the new M5.
At its fall hardware event today, Amazon announced a new lineup of Kindle Scribe devices, less than a year after the release of the second generation of its writeable e-reader. All three of the devices sport a new design with smaller bezels and a larger 11-inch screen, but the key takeaway is that the same display tech that powers the Kindle Colorsoft is coming to the digital notebook—along with a hefty price tag.
Three new Kindle Scribes are on the way
At the event, Amazon revealed plans for an overhauled Scribe lineup that includes three different devices: The standard Kindle Scribe (starting at $499) with front light and the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft (starting at $629) will both be available later this year, while a third version without lighting (starting at $429) will arrive “early” in 2026. None of them are available for pre-order just yet.
Given Amazon launched the Kindle Colorsoft e-reader last year, it’s unsurprising they are bringing their best-in-class color screen stack to the Scribe—though competitors like Boox have offered color digital notebooks for years. (The $530 Boox Note Air 4C is currently my pick for the best all-around digital notebook for most people.) But I find the addition of a Scribe without a front light to be a tad confusing: While it’s true that adding a lighting layer puts additional distance between the tip of the stylus and the inner display, which can make the writing experience feel less “paper-like,” the 2024 Kindle Scribe (with a great front light) already performs extremely well in that regard. Honestly, I’m surprised Amazon thinks there is a large enough market for a version without lighting, especially given the fact that, at $429, it costs more than the current model with lighting.
A new design and new features
Amazon promises that these Scribes offer an improved experience, whether you opt for color or not: In a press release, the company touts a new front light system with more uniform lighting, new textured glass that feels better to write on, a new display stack that reduces the distance between the outer glass and inner display, plus a faster processor and more memory.
The three Scribes all look the same, save for different colored bezels; gone is the offset chunky bezel of the current generation, replaced with thinner, uniform bezels on all four sides of the screen. Without a case, they’ll weigh in 400g, 34g lighter than the older model.
It’s hard to say what all that means in terms of practical use—for example, Amazon touts that the new Scribe is “40% faster for writing and page turns,” but Kindle page turns are already lightning fast, and as I noted when I reviewed the 2024 Scribe earlier this year, that model already had a great writing experience. The jury is out on whether these updates justify the price increase, whether you’re upgrading or buying for the first time.
Hardware aside, Amazon also talked up software changes, including a redesigned home screen that puts your notes front and center, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive integrations, AI-powered search for your notes, and a forthcoming “Send to Alexa+” feature that will allow you to converse with the paid version of Amazon’s digital assistant about the contents of your notebooks. As yet, it’s unclear if previous models will get the new software.
Pricier than the competition
Without having gone hands-on with the new Scribes, I can say that all these changes sound great—but those prices, oof. Amazon didn’t clarify whether tariffs were a factor, but even given the larger screen (11 inches versus 10.2 inches on the 2024 model), the apparent $100 price jump for the black-and-white Scribe is significant (granted, it’s currently unclear how much storage that will get you, but Amazon does note the device “starts” at $499, while the 2024 model is priced at $399 for 16GB of storage and goes up from there). And again, the forthcoming model with no front light costs more than the current generation with a light (and a storage boost to 32GB, for that matter).
With a starting price of $629, the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is $100 more than the Boox Note Air 4C, and the latter can do a lot more, given it isn’t tied to Amazon’s restrictive ecosystem—Boox devices run on an open version of Android with access to the full Google Play store, meaning you can download your preferred reading and productivity apps, rather than restrict yourself to Amazon’s OS. The Kindle will likely offer a better writing experience and Amazon’s typically frictionless user experience, but when it comes to a pricey tool like this, that’s only part of the equation.
Get a deal on a 2024 Kindle Scribe
If you aren’t sold on the promised changes and don’t care about color note-taking, it’s not a bad time to buy last year’s version of the Kindle Scribe: In advance of October Prime Day, it’s currently on sale starting at $299 for 16GB of storage—though I’d probably opt for the limited time bundle with a cover and an upgrade to 64GB of storage for $372.
AMD’s chiplet architecture has not really changed in a fundamental way since the introduction of the Ryzen 3000 processors based on the Zen 2 architecture back in 2019. The move to Socket AM5 necessitated a new cIOD or “client I/O die”, but it’s still connected to the CCDs, or Core Complex Chiplets, through a common organic substrate using
