Technology - Google News

Incredibly, your Apple HomePod may now be worth more than its $299 MSRP - The Verge
Here’s the first near-final look at the Pixel Watch and its very curved design - 9to5Google
Brave's De-AMP feature bypasses 'harmful' Google AMP pages - The Verge

Incredibly, your Apple HomePod may now be worth more than its $299 MSRP - The Verge

Posted: 19 Apr 2022 06:14 PM PDT

I thought it was really strange when Apple kept selling the original $299 HomePod months after it got discontinued. But now, it's starting to make sense — not only are some people still willing to pay a premium for the somewhat smart speaker, they're willing to pay more than Apple charged for it.

We took a look at eBay sales numbers after spotting 9to5Mac editor-in-chief Chance Miller's tweet, and we soon discovered it wasn't just a joke: on average, an Apple HomePod fetched $375 this past week. That's 25 percent more than Apple charged.

Of course, some HomePods are worth more than others — a used speaker with no box might only net you $220 before eBay fees, but we've seen a few factory sealed non-refurbished HomePods sell for over $500. In fact, some sellers are boasting that they got Apple to replace their old HomePods with brand-new units just so they could flip them.

When I filtered out expensive sealed-box outliers, the average sale price was more like $350 this past week. That's still $50 more than they cost brand-new!

It's subtle, but you can see in the eBay chart above that the value of a HomePod has been appreciating over the past year since it got discontinued. That's practically unheard of for gadgets like these, save for scalping situations like we've recently seen with consoles and GPUs.

Why the HomePod? That's a good question. It's a piece of Apple history, perhaps; you need two of them for stereo or more for whole-home audio; and unlike its more affordable successor the HomePod Mini, it's acoustically quite good. My colleague Jen Tuohy has also explained that the smart home is one of the few places where Siri actually excels. She thinks people are realizing it's the only other option besides the worse-sounding HomePod Mini.

So that's a working theory for now.

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Here’s the first near-final look at the Pixel Watch and its very curved design - 9to5Google

Posted: 19 Apr 2022 03:21 PM PDT

The first near-final image of the Pixel Watch leaked today, and it provides our first look at what should be the final design of Google's upcoming wearable.

Evan Blass on 91Mobiles this afternoon shared a render of the circular watch with a very curved design. The display is presumably just the flat surface you see, but Google went to great lengths with the glass to extend the curvature all the way to the rear piece (which we can't even see in this image).

The crown also helps emphasize that seamless design by having the stem prominently jut out from the glass at a three o'clock position. Google is not hiding the stem by making it silver like the crown, which is also wider — but rather short — and somewhat reminiscent of a bottle cap.

Meanwhile, the watch face is similar to the ones we previously revealed in December. There's the time with a date complication — annoyingly no day — above it and three more below that are clearly sourced from Fitbit. There are steps, heart rate, and one that presumably launches the stats overview. Everything is hued a yellowish green. The last thing we see is a white dot noting that you have available notifications.

This leak of the watch body raises a very interesting question: With such an edge-to-edge design, will Google even offer multiple body colors? Looking at the Pixel Watch head-on, you don't really see the undercarriage of the device. In fact, to help sell the seamless design, it'd be better if the body was also black/dark in color. The company could get away with just offering a single color SKU and really emphasizing different bands, which have yet to leak.

There are also questions about how durable this design is.

More on Pixel Watch:

Check out 9to5Google on YouTube for more news:

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Brave's De-AMP feature bypasses 'harmful' Google AMP pages - The Verge

Posted: 19 Apr 2022 03:33 PM PDT

Brave announced a new feature for its browser on Tuesday: De-AMP, which automatically jumps past any page rendered with Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages framework and instead takes users straight to the original website. "Where possible, De-AMP will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from visiting AMP pages altogether," Brave said in a blog post. "And in cases where that is not possible, Brave will watch as pages are being fetched and redirect users away from AMP pages before the page is even rendered, preventing AMP / Google code from being loaded and executed."

Brave framed De-AMP as a privacy feature and didn't mince words about its stance toward Google's version of the web. "In practice, AMP is harmful to users and to the Web at large," Brave's blog post said, before explaining that AMP gives Google even more knowledge of users' browsing habits, confuses users, and can often be slower than normal web pages. And it warned that the next version of AMP — so far just called AMP 2.0 — will be even worse.

Brave's stance is a particularly strong one, but the tide has turned hard against AMP over the last couple of years. Google originally created the framework in order to simplify and speed up mobile websites, and AMP is now managed by a group of open-source contributors. It was controversial from the very beginning and smelled to some like Google trying to exert even more control over the web. Over time, more companies and users grew concerned about that control and chafed at the idea that Google would prioritize AMP pages in search results. Plus, the rest of the internet eventually figured out how to make good mobile sites, which made AMP — and similar projects like Facebook Instant Articles — less important.

A number of popular apps and browser extensions make it easy for users to skip over AMP pages, and in recent years, publishers (including The Verge's parent company Vox Media) have moved away from using it altogether. AMP has even become part of the antitrust fight against Google: a lawsuit alleged that AMP helped centralize Google's power as an ad exchange and that Google made non-AMP ads load slower.

Still, nobody has gone after AMP quite as hard as Brave. De-AMP is somewhat reminiscent of Mozilla's Facebook Container extension, which it created in 2018 as a way for Firefox users to prevent Facebook from tracking them across the web. It's a statement of values in the form of a new feature. Google has been a target for Brave for years, too; Brave has published blog posts complaining about Google's privacy features and even went so far as to build its own search engine. Brave has long billed itself as a privacy-first browser, so Google is a logical villain to choose.

Of course, for all Brave's bravado and development, it holds only a tiny portion of the browser market, and Chrome continues to dominate. So no matter how much of the internet turns against it, AMP won't die until Google kills it.

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