Andru Edwards

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Andru Edwards Andru Edwards is the CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Gear Live Media - http://www.gearlive.com.

He's also a top YouTube partner (http://youtube.com/), tech influencer, speaker, & consultant. Andru Edwards is your go-to-guy on the Internet for your first look at all the latest gadgets and gear. He runs a successful YouTube channel, hosts the weekly tech radio show and podcast "Geared Up", and is the founder of Gear Live.

10/14/2026

Get the Apple HomeView: https://geni.us/homeview
Get the HomePod mini 2: https://geni.us/homepodmini2
Get the Apple TV 4K: https://geni.us/appletv4k2
Apple HomeView has two uses I can already picture in my house: following a recipe while I cook and taking FaceTime calls without holding a phone. After trying Apple's new smart home display at the Welcome Home event, I get the appeal. The $299 price gets harder to make sense of when you look at the wall-mounted version, which comes without the mount.

HomeView is surprisingly small in person, with a square 7-inch Liquid Retina display, an A18 chip, and an adjustable hinge. I walk through Siri and the way HomeView recognizes different people to bring up their own home screens, widgets, and apps. That recognition happens locally and can be switched off. It also comes with an important condition: your paired iPhone or iPad needs to be nearby and recently unlocked, with authentication on your phone when the system isn't confident.

Cooking mode was one of my favorite parts of the demo. You can hand off a recipe from Safari on your iPhone, see the ingredients and steps in a view designed for the display, and tap times in the recipe to start timers. FaceTime is the clearest use for me personally, with a 12-megapixel Center Stage camera that keeps you centered as you move. I also cover the speaker setup, Spotify support through the CarPlay framework, and the family photos that can fill the screen between calls.

For existing smart-home owners, there's a detail Apple should have made much clearer: HomeView supports Matter and HomeKit, so accessories that already work with Apple Home can stay in your setup. Guests can access selected functions without an iPhone or access to your personal content. Choosing where to put HomeView brings another set of decisions, though. Both versions cost $299, and the wall model requires a separate mount purchase. I break down the mounting options and why the cable, installation work, and cost of putting displays in several rooms would affect my choice.

The Welcome Home event also brought HomePod mini 2 and a new Apple TV 4K. I cover the mini's Mac speaker support, its increase to $149, and Siri AI's arrival in a future update with no date yet. The $299 Apple TV adds an A19 chip, built-in microphones, a Siri Remote that can play a chime when you lose it, and support for four compatible HomePod speakers. There are features here I'd use, along with prices that make each purchase a bigger decision. Which would earn a place in your home?

CHAPTERS
00:00 - Apple Welcome Home Event Recap!
00:28 - Apple HomeView Explained!
06:38 - HomePod mini 2 Features and Colors
07:53 - Apple TV 4K with Siri AI
10:50 - Should You Get Apple’s New Home Products?

Apple

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camera: Panasonic Lumix S1H - https://geni.us/panasonics1h
audio: Sennheiser MKE600 Sh***un Mic - http://geni.us/mke600
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Anthropic just named its thief out loud.Here is how model theft works. Training a frontier AI like Claude costs billions...
10/14/2026

Anthropic just named its thief out loud.

Here is how model theft works. Training a frontier AI like Claude costs billions. A rival can skip most of that bill by asking Claude millions of questions and training a cheaper copy on the answers. The industry calls it distillation. It is copying the homework instead of doing it.

Anthropic says it has cut that extraction by 90 to 99 percent. It locked down access to Claude's step-by-step reasoning, the scratch work that makes a model smart. Reasoning tokens pulled by copycats are down 10 to 100 times. It banned tens of thousands of linked accounts and publicly named Z.ai, the Chinese startup behind GLM-5.3, as one of the offenders.

I run local models on my Macs every week, and plenty were distilled from bigger ones. Some of that is fair play. When a rival in China clones a frontier lab, it is a national security fight. Anthropic is saying the quiet part loud.

Expect the walls around every frontier model to get thicker from here.

AI just made your next phone more expensive.Counterpoint says global phone shipments fell 20% last quarter, the worst Q3...
10/13/2026

AI just made your next phone more expensive.

Counterpoint says global phone shipments fell 20% last quarter, the worst Q3 since 2012. The culprit is memory. AI data centers are buying up DRAM and NAND supply, so the chips inside your next phone cost far more than they did a year ago.

Phone makers passed the cost straight to us. Retail phone prices are up 20% this year. People are holding phones longer and buying refurbished, while the cheap end of the market gets squeezed out.

Look at who had the edge. Samsung held number one with 23% share because it makes its own memory and the Galaxy Z Fold8 sold well. Apple hit a record Q3 share of 22% by going premium only. No base iPhone 18 shipped this fall. Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo all dropped sharply.

I test every major phone that ships. You are paying the AI tax without getting the AI. A server farm in Virginia eats the same memory chips as your next flagship, and you fund it at checkout. Keep your phone another year. The refurb market is the smartest buy in tech.

Apple walked into a category it ignored for a decade. I'm in New York at the 'Welcome Home' event, where Apple unveils i...
10/13/2026

Apple walked into a category it ignored for a decade. I'm in New York at the 'Welcome Home' event, where Apple unveils its first smart home hub, a new HomePod mini, and a new Apple TV 4K.

The hub matters most. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports a 6-inch HomeView touchscreen in tabletop and wall-mount versions, with an A18 chip and homeOS. It reportedly recognizes who's in front of it and pulls up their calendar and music. The HomePod mini and Apple TV 4K get their first refreshes since 2020 and 2022, both rebuilt around Siri AI.

My take after 20 years covering this stuff: this is a referendum on the new Siri. The original HomePod failed because Siri couldn't carry the home. Apple waited until the Siri AI rebuild shipped to build a screen around it. At a reported $350, it's the same premium bet the $349 HomePod lost, in a category Google already quit. If the new Siri is real, this proves it.

I'm getting hands-on today. What do you want to know? Ask below and I'll find out while I'm here.

Your next AI assistant doesn't need an app. It just needs your phone number.Instinct is building a personal AI agent you...
10/13/2026

Your next AI assistant doesn't need an app. It just needs your phone number.

Instinct is building a personal AI agent you talk to inside your text messages. Last month it raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation, backed by Sequoia, Benchmark, and Coatue. Four times its valuation the month before. Founder Noah Shinn came from Sierra.

It plugs into email and calendar to plan trips, buy groceries, book tickets, and cancel subscriptions. A concierge calls businesses on your behalf. Still invite-only, and not alone. Folk, Caddy, and Tab are racing into iMessage, WhatsApp, and RCS. Meta is building the same thing with Muse.

My take after 20+ years testing consumer tech: the interface bet is right. The messaging app is the screen everyone already lives in. The hard part is trust. An agent next to your private texts, allowed to spend your money, has to earn its way in. The winner handles credentials, receipts, and boundaries without ever slipping.

Would you hand an AI your phone number and your calendar?

Your robotaxi just got a personal assistant. And not the generic kind.Over the weekend Tesla switched on Grok Bot access...
10/13/2026

Your robotaxi just got a personal assistant. And not the generic kind.

Over the weekend Tesla switched on Grok Bot access inside every Cybercab and the Model Y robotaxi fleet. Grok has been in these cars for a while, but riders only got the standard assistant. Now you sign into Grok once, and your personal bots are waiting on the 22-inch touchscreen. No phone needed. One rider ordered their usual drink mid-ride. A journalist added detergent to an Amazon cart. Step out and it logs you out automatically.

This is where the whole car is going. I have said for years the real competition in cars is the interface, not horsepower. Tesla is treating the robotaxi like a phone on wheels: your stuff, your agents, everywhere you go. The car stops being just a ride and starts being usable time.

The open question is trust. In your own Tesla, fine. In a robotaxi you hailed for ten minutes, you are signing into your life on someone else's screen. Auto-logout helps, but convenience and trust now ship in the same update.

Tesla is finally giving your car Shortcuts.A feature called Automations has been hiding in Tesla's latest firmware, fini...
10/13/2026

Tesla is finally giving your car Shortcuts.

A feature called Automations has been hiding in Tesla's latest firmware, finished in English behind a software switch. Today two Tesla tinkerers flipped it on: Shortcuts logic for your car. Pick a trigger, add conditions, chain actions. Say "Child Mode" and it locks the child doors and windows. Buckle your seatbelt while the passenger belt stays undone and the music drops to a set volume.

Triggers and actions cover seats, seatbelts, doors, windows, climate, charging, navigation, media, lights, even voice commands. Each one lives on a card you can switch off without deleting.

Likely headed for December's Holiday Update. Reports also have Tesla building CarPlay support directly with Apple.

My take after two decades of car tech: the most useful Tesla update for owners in a long time. Every EV has a big screen. Tesla is the only one treating the car like a platform you can program. Set it up once and the car starts behaving like it knows you.

Meta just entered the AI frontier race for real.Today Meta launched Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, its most capable m...
10/12/2026

Meta just entered the AI frontier race for real.

Today Meta launched Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, its most capable models yet. The independent Artificial Analysis leaderboard scores it at 56, behind Claude Opus 5.5 (58) and ahead of Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra (53). Meta's own tests say it leads on agentic work: coding, multi-step tasks.

For regular people: Meta says Muse Wonder will soon power its Muse personal AI agent, the app that hit 5 million downloads in three weeks. Subscribers get it first. Trained at Prometheus, Meta's gigawatt data center, with new features that carry context across conversations and push through blockers on their own.

Twenty years of AI launches taught me: benchmark charts are marketing. The test is whether the agent finishes the task without babysitting. Nobody has Meta's distribution: billions of people in its apps. If Wonder makes Muse genuinely useful and not just a good demo, this launch matters.

Wonder Full is only for $50-a-month Muse Code subscribers.

Apple is turning its stores into iPhone Duo showrooms. The Duo is Apple's first foldable iPhone: it opens like a book in...
10/12/2026

Apple is turning its stores into iPhone Duo showrooms. The Duo is Apple's first foldable iPhone: it opens like a book into a small tablet, starts at $1,999, and launches October 23. Pre-orders open Friday at 5 a.m. Pacific.

Mark Gurman reports the Fifth Avenue flagship gets more than 150 demo units and a takeover area. Big stores in Chicago, LA, and the Upper West Side get 30 to 40 each, and typical stores average about 20. New fixtures show off the fold, untethered units let you try StandBy, and a MagSafe stand places an open Duo next to two regular iPhones for comparison.

As recently as August, Apple thought production trouble could push the launch to late November. It kept the date, but supply stays tight. Easy to touch, hard to buy.

I have tested every major foldable since Samsung started this category, and Apple got the message: nobody buys a $1,999 folding phone from a spec sheet. The sale happens in your hands.

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