Tech Talk

House of the Dragon | Image: HBO Despite glitches for some people trying to watch via Fire TV Sticks , HBO announced that the first episode of its Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon recorded the network’s biggest premiere of all time, recording 9.986 million viewers across linear and HBO Max streaming on Sunday night in the US alone. The original Game of Thrones series closed out its run with 13.7 million live viewers on linear channels for the finale in 2019, clocking over 19 million views with the addition of streaming and video-on-demand numbers. According to HBO, ahead of the Dragon premiere, interest in the original series — with the entire series now available for streaming in 4K on HBO Max — spiked, drawing a weekly average in streaming for August that was up 90 percent in July. Now there appears to be an answer to the question of whether viewers were still interested in the series after the previous show’s final season and with so many people changing th

The PlayStation VR2 | Image: Sony Sony’s PlayStation VR2 headset is coming in “early 2023,” according to posts the company made on Twitter and Instagram . Sony has been trickling information out about the upcoming headset over the past several months, and now we have at least a timeframe for when we can expect to get our hands on the hardware. While the company released details of the headset’s design earlier this year, it still hasn’t announced a price. It is, however, promising a lot for the PlayStation VR2 — it’ll feature displays that add up to 4K resolution and can run at 90 or 120Hz, have a 110-degree field of view, and use foveated rendering , which renders certain parts of the image as sharper than others to make things easier for the computer (or, in this case, the PlayStation 5). The company also says the headset connects to your console with a single USB C cable. Sony has already announced it will have a lineup of about 20 “major” games available when it launches.

Saber Interactive had been helping out, and now it’s reportedly taking over. | Image: Sony Embracer Group is moving development on the upcoming Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic ( KOTOR ) remake for PS5 and PC from Aspyr Media to a Saber Interactive studio in Eastern Europe, according to Bloomberg . The game, announced last September in a short trailer during a Sony showcase , was originally being made by Aspyr, which is known for its ports of KOTOR and KOTOR II . But development on the remake was paused after a demo was shown to Lucasfilm and Sony, Bloomberg reported in July . Saber had been helping with development on the remake , but a cryptic statement in Embracer’s earnings report last week seemed to suggest that Saber could be officially taking over. “One of the Group’s AAA projects has transitioned to another studio within the Group,” Embracer wrote . “This was done to ensure the quality bar is where we need it to be for the title.” In its earnings report, Embrac

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge We may need to wait longer for the 3nm MacBook than we’d previously hoped. New 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros are on the horizon, according to a new prediction from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, but they’re unlikely to be the 3nm process. Refreshes of the excellent professional MacBooks “will enter mass production” in Q4 of 2022, Kuo tweeted this morning . Kuo’s intel indicates that they “may still adopt the 5nm advanced node,” which is the same process node that the recent M2 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models use. That would, if true, mean that Apple’s first 3nm MacBook chips, also rumored to be entering production later this year, will not debut in these machines. New 14" and 16" MacBook Pro with new processors will enter mass production in 4Q22. Given TSMC's guidance that the 3nm will contribute revenue starting in 1H23, processors of 14" and 16" MacBook Pro models may still adopt the 5nm advanced node. — 郭明錤 (Ming-Chi

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Intel is building what it claims is the “largest silicon manufacturing location on the planet” in Ohio, and it’s going to need 7,000 workers to construct it, according to a report from the Associated Press . However, a labor shortage affecting the construction industry could make it hard to recruit the workers it needs for the $20 billion job, and competition for workers could slow the pace of homebuilding in the area which is needed to support the growing workforce that Intel’s plant is supposed to attract. Intel first announced the Ohio project in January of this year and is on track to begin construction in late 2022. Once finished, the 1,000-acre site will house two factories, or fabs, and employ at least 3,000 people. But it has future plans to invest $100 billion into the project, expand the site to 2,000 acres, and eventually build a total of eight fabs, not just two. Actual chip production isn’t expected until 2025. As noted by t

It looks like something out of a video game , but this gadget is real: a portable, mechanical, computerized, laser-guided knife gun that actually throws spinning knives end over end through the air ( via Gizmodo ). This isn’t some slingshot or spiral Kunai shooter that flings those blades straight ahead, oh no — Quint Builds set out to build a gadget that can accurately throw knives just like a pro, nailing a target 10 times in a row at different distances. That meant painstakingly calculating how to spin a knife the right number of times to land tip-first, again and again and again — and employing a homemade lidar laser guidance system to measure that distance and adjust the knife’s trajectory accordingly. Otherwise, a knife might harmlessly bounce off the target... just like mine did so many times at the last Renaissance Faire I attended. The final contraption dispenses upwards of 10 knives from an integrated, spring-loaded magazine onto an electromagnet attached to a carriage

Amazon Alexa’s Routines, which play from devices like this Echo dot speaker, help my family get out of bed and stay on track in the mornings. | Image: Amazon This week, my kids headed back to school. For most parents, that means a weekend spent buying composition notebooks and Ticonderoga pencils and unearthing moldy lunchboxes from last year’s book bag (just me?). In my household, it also means reenabling all my back-to-school smart home routines. I’ve been using my smart home as an extra pair of parental eyes and ears for years now, and I think all parents need some home automation in their lives. The little things the smart home does well — lights that turn on when you walk into a room, a TV you can shut down with just your voice, a doorbell that shows you who’s there — are so much more useful when you are also juggling little people and their various demands. (A caveat to all this: I use these gadgets, routines, and automations to help our household run smoothly and give us