Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Buried under the news from Google I/O this week is one of Google Cloud's biggest blunders ever: Google's Amazon Web Services competitor accidentally deleted a giant customer account for no reason. UniSuper, an Australian pension fund that manages $135 billion worth of funds and has 647,000 members, had its entire account wiped out at Google Cloud, including all its backups that were stored on the service. UniSuper thankfully had some backups with a different provider and was able to recover its data, but according to UniSuper's incident log, downtime started May 2, and a full restoration of services didn't happen until May 15.

UniSuper's website is now full of must-read admin nightmare fuel about how this all happened. First is a wild page posted on May 8 titled "A joint statement from UniSuper CEO Peter Chun, and Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian." This statement reads, "Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription. This is an isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally. This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption and taken measures to ensure this does not happen again."

In the next section, titled "Why did the outage last so long?" the joint statement says, "UniSuper had duplication in two geographies as a protection against outages and loss. However, when the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription occurred, it caused deletion across both of these geographies." Every cloud service keeps full backups, which you would presume are meant for worst-case scenarios. Imagine some hacker takes over your server or the building your data is inside of collapses, or something like that. But no, the actual worst-case scenario is "Google deletes your account," which means all those backups are gone, too. Google Cloud is supposed to have safeguards that don't allow account deletion, but none of them worked apparently, and the only option was a restore from a separate cloud provider (shoutout to the hero at UniSuper who chose a multi-cloud solution).

Enlarge / Google continues to change what it means to be the "Google" search engine. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Google I/O has come and gone, and with it came an almost exclusive focus on AI. Part of the show was an announcement for Google Search that was so huge it was almost hard to believe: the AI-powered "Search Generative Experience (SGE)" that the company had been trialing for months is rolling out to everyone in the US. The feature, renamed "AI Overview," is here now, and it feels like the biggest change to Google Search ever. The top of many results (especially questions) are now dominated by an AI box that scrapes the web and gives you a sometimes-correct summary without needing to click on a single result.

AI Overview is a bit different from the SGE trials that were happening. First is that AI Overview is a lot faster than SGE. For some popular queries, it seems like Google is caching the AI answer, which should help with the high cost of running generative AI. For queries with cached overviews, you'll see the AI box load instantly, right along with the initial search results pop-in. SGE responses would come in word by word, like they are being typed by a person. When you aren't getting a cached result, you'll see a blank AI overview box that loads with the search page, which will say "searching" while it loads for a second or two. Other times, Google will try loading an AI Overview and fail, with the message "An AI overview is not available for this search." (As if anyone asked.)

Left: The default results show no webpages at all on the first screen. Right: The "Web" filter looks like Old Google. (credit: Ron Amadeo / Google)

When Google decides you have an AI-appropriate query, it now takes a lot of scrolling to see web results. Google scrolls infinitely, so there are no "pages" anymore, but let's consider a "page" to be a full browser viewport height: The first page is an AI overview that takes up half the screen and then another answer box extracted from some website. Page two is a "People also ask" box suggesting other queries, then one search result, then a box for videos. Page three is the bottom half of the video box, then a "Discussions and forums" section with Reddit and Quora posts. It's not until page four and miles of scrolling that we get the traditional 10 blue links. This list isn't even counting an ad block, which would appear first normally. I've yet to see an ad block and AI overview at the same time, but I'm sure that's coming. Despite pushing AI Overviews live into production for everyone on the most premium spot on the Google Search page, Google still notes that "Generative AI is experimental."

Enlarge / The San Francisco 49ers' star quarterback Brock Purdy celebrates during a blowout 35-7 win over the Tom Brady-led Buccaneers. (credit: Getty Images/Thearon W. Henderson)

Hey, football fans! You're already watching the NFL on CBS, NBC, Fox, ABC, ESPN, ESPN Plus, Peacock, Amazon Prime Video, NFL Network, and YouTube TV, right? Well, get ready for one more: Netflix! The biggest streaming provider that wasn't showing NFL games is now jumping into the pile. The NFL and Netflix have signed a three-year deal that will put exclusive Christmas games on the streaming service.

The first Netflix Christmas games will be this season, on December 25, 2024, (that's a Wednesday, by the way). Netflix will get two Christmas games this year, Chiefs at Steelers and Ravens at Texans, with exact times to be announced later tonight at the NFL's live schedule unveiling extravaganza (even the schedule release is an event now). The NFL says 2025 and 2026 will see "at least one" game on the service each Christmas. The exact terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Netflix's lineup this year. (credit: Netflix)

In the quickly changing landscape of TV, the NFL has long been one of the few things left that is still appointment television. Of the top 100 highest-rated US TV broadcasts in 2023, 93 percent of them were NFL games. In the hyper-fragmented world of streaming, landing a few exclusive NFL games is a great way to hook people into your service. NBC's exclusive Peacock playoff game brought in 23 million viewers last year. And even if that was a bit low by NFL standards, NBC called it "the most streamed event ever in US history" and "a milestone moment in media and sports history." You might think NFL fans would immediately cancel after the final kneel-down, but one study showed a shocking 71 percent of users that signed up for the NFL game were still on Peacock seven weeks later.

Enlarge / The Android 15 logo. This is "Android V," if you can't tell from the logo. (credit: Google)

Google's I/O conference is still happening, and while the big keynote was yesterday, major Android beta releases have apparently been downgraded to Day 2 of the show. Google really seems to want to be primarily an AI company now. Android already had some AI news yesterday, but now that the code-red requirements have been met, we have actual OS news.

One of the big features in this release is "Private Space," which Google says is a place where users can "keep sensitive apps away from prying eyes, under an additional layer of authentication." First, there's a new hidden-by-default portion of the app drawer that can hold these sensitive apps, and revealing that part of the app drawer requires a second round of lock-screen authentication, which can be different from the main phone lock screen.

Just like "Work" apps, the apps in this section run on a separate profile. To the system, they are run by a separate "user" with separate data, which your non-private apps won't be able to see. Interestingly, Google says, "When private space is locked by the user, the profile is paused, i.e., the apps are no longer active," so apps in a locked Private Space won't be able to show notifications unless you go through the second lock screen.

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  The "ask this PDF" feature.

Google's "code red" demands that AI be part of every single Google product and that includes Android. At Google I/O, the company announced a "multi-year journey to reimagine Android with AI at the core" but only demoed a few minor AI enhancements.

Gemini can soon be brought up via the power button as an overlay panel, where it will have access to whatever's on your screen. The demo involved opening a PDF in Android's PDF reader, summarizing it, and answering questions based on the content. You can do something similar with a YouTube video. The demo also showed generating images based on a text prompt and then sending those images in a text message. Another demo involved Gemini understanding a chat log and suggesting future actions.

Talkback, Android's system for low-vision users, will soon be able to use AI to describe images that lack descriptive text.

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  AI in Gmail summarizes recent emails. [credit: Google ]

Google's Gemini AI often just feels like a chatbot built into a text-input field, but you can really start to do special things when you give it access to a ton of data. Gemini in Gmail will soon be able to search through your entire backlog of emails and show a summary in a sidebar.

That's simple to describe but solves a huge problem with email: even searching brings up a list of email subjects, and you have to click-through to each one just to read it. Having an AI sift through a bunch of emails and provide a summary sounds like a huge time saver and something you can't do with any other interface.

Google's one-minute demo of this feature showed a big blue Gemini button at the top right of the Gmail web app. Tapping it opens the normal chatbot sidebar you can type in. Asking for a summary of emails from a certain contact will get you a bullet-point list of what has been happening, with a list of "sources" at the bottom that will jump you right to a certain email. In the last second of the demo, the user types, "Reply saying I want to volunteer for the parent's group event," hits "enter," and then the chatbot instantly sends an email. We thought it was interesting that the demo never showed a confirmation step, but a Google rep contacted us later to say the production version would show you the message before sending it.

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  The Pixel 8a and its speedy 120 Hz display. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Somehow, Google's midrange phone just keeps getting better. The Pixel 8a improves on many things over the Pixel 7a—it has a better display, a longer support cycle, and the usual yearly CPU upgrades, all at the same $499 price as last year. Who could complain? The Pixel A series was already the best bargain in smartphones, and there's now very little difference between it and a flagship-class device.

Year over year, the 6.1-inch, 2400×1080 display is being upgraded from 90 Hz to 120 Hz, giving you essentially the same experience you'd get on the "flagship" Pixels. The SoC is the same processor you'd get in the Pixel 9, a Google Tensor G3. That's a 4 nm chip with one Arm Cortex X3, four Cortex A715 cores, four Cortex A510 cores, and a Mali G715 GPU.

Previously, the 120 Hz display was the primary thing A-series owners were missing out on compared to the more expensive Pixels, so its addition is a huge deal. Any comparison between the "midrange" Pixel 8a and the "flagship" 6.2-inch Pixel 8 will now just be splitting hairs. The flagship gets an extra 0.1 inches of display, 2 percent more battery, and Wi-Fi 6E instead of Wi-Fi 7. The cameras are technically newer, but since they all run the same image-stacking software, the images look very similar. Are those things worth an extra $200? No, they are not.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

OpenAI is eventually coming for the most popular website on the Internet: Google Search. A Reuters report claimed that the company behind ChatGPT is planning to launch a search engine as early as this Monday, but OpenAI denied that Monday would be the day.

The company recently confirmed it's holding a livestream event on Monday, though, but an OpenAI rep told Ars that "Despite reports, we’re not launching a search product or GPT-5 on Monday." Either way, Monday is an interesting time for an OpenAI livestream. That's the day before Google's biggest show of the year, Google I/O, where Google will primarily want to show off its AI prowess and convince people that it is not being left in the dust by OpenAI. Google seeing its biggest search competition in years and suddenly having to face down "OpenAI's Google Killer" would have definitely cast a shadow over the show.

OpenAI has been inching toward a search engine for a while now. It has been working with Microsoft with a "Bing Chat" generative-AI search engine in Microsoft's search engine. Earlier this week, The Verge reported that "OpenAI has been aggressively trying to poach Google employees" for an upstart search team. "Search.chatgpt.com" is already being set up on OpenAI's server, so it's all falling into place.

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  The Moto G Stylus 2024. [credit: Motorola ]

Motorola's latest phone is the 2024 Moto G Stylus 5G. For fans of pen input there isn't much out there other than this and the Galaxy S Ultra line, but for $400 you can get a phone with a stowable stylus.

The design is just a bit interesting thanks to the "vegan leather" (that's a type of plastic) back, which gives the phone some personality. You get flat aluminum sides, a flat screen, and a hole-punch camera. Android does not have a lot of built-in stylus features, so you'll mostly be relying on whatever Motorola has cooked up; the website only shows a "Moto Note" app and the ability to send your drawings over instant messaging, plus there's whatever you can find on the Play Store.

This is a mid-range phone, so for the SoC, we have a Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 1. That's four Arm Cortex A78 cores and four Cortex A55 cores, built with a quite modern 4 nm process. There's a 6.7-inch, 120 Hz, 2400×1080 OLED display, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a 5000 mAh battery with 30 W wired charging and 15 W wireless charging. Pictures will come from a 50 MP main camera, 13 MP wide-angle, or a front 32 MP camera. There's a MicroSD slot, headphone jack, in-screen fingerprint reader, stowable stylus (of course), and NFC. Wi-Fi only goes up to 802.11ac. That's "Wi-Fi 5" and is pretty old, but it will get the job done, I guess. The "IP52" dust- and water-resistant rating is also not great, promising only protection from some water drops at certain angles.

Enlarge / Huawei's Intel-powered Matebook X Pro has drawn criticism from US China hawks. (credit: Huawei)

The US crackdown on exports to Huawei now includes even stronger restrictions than the company has already faced. The Financial Times reports that Intel and Qualcomm have had their Huawei export licenses revoked, so Huawei will no longer be able to buy chips from either company.

The export ban has been around since 2020 and means that any company wishing to ship parts to Huawei must get approval from the government on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes these come with restrictions, like Qualcomm's license, which allowed it to ship smartphone chips to Huawei, but not "5G" chips. That led to Qualcomm creating special 4G-only versions of its 5G chips for Huawei, and the company ended up with 4G-only Snapdragon 888 phones in 2021.

Since then, Huawei has been working on its own Arm chips from its chip design division, HiSilicon. In April, the Huawei Pura 70 smartphone launched with an in-house HiSilicon Kirin 9010 SoC made at SMIC, a Chinese chip fab that is also facing export restrictions. With what is probably still a 7 nm manufacturing process, it's more of a 2020 chip than a 2024 chip, but that's still fast enough for many use cases.

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  The Pixel 8a. [credit: Google ]

Today is a big event day for Apple, but that doesn't mean Google is going to fade into the background: It's announcing the Pixel 8a today. The big news is that the Pixel a series is still $499 despite some upgrades.

What are those upgrades? How about a 120 Hz display on Google's mid-ranger for the first time? The 6.1-inch, 120 Hz, 2400×1080 display is closer to a flagship than ever, even if it is a smaller phone. You also get flagship-class support with Google's industry-leading seven years of OS updates, so the phone should be good until 2031, if you can hold out that long. Together, these two upgrades make the Pixel 8a an incredible value.

Major news with last year's launch of the Pixel 7a was the older Pixel 6a, which got a big price drop down to $349 when the 7a came out. When asked about a potential Pixel 7a price drop, Google says it "will continue to sell the Pixel 7a" but also that it has "no news to announce today on a pricing change." It did feel like the Pixel 6a's price drop stole some of the 7a's thunder last year, so maybe Google is giving that announcement some breathing room. For now, you'll have to think long and hard at checkout and decide between a $499 Pixel 8a and a $499 Pixel 7a. The base model Pixel 8, at $699 with nearly the same specs, is also a tough sell in the face of the Pixel 8a.

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  The Apple Pencil Pro [credit: Apple ]

With new iPads come new keyboards and pencils, and the big news today is the "Apple Pencil Pro," a souped-up version of Apple's iPad stylus. The Pencil Pro is $129 and works with the new iPad Pro and iPad Air.

How much can you improve a stylus? How about rotation detection via a new gyroscope embedded in the pencil? Apple calls this a "barrel roll," which provides rotation input in your iPad apps. If you're drawing and are using a brush that isn't symmetrical, a barrel roll will change the rotation of the brush. If you have a 3D item out in Procreate, a pencil rotation will rotate the 3D item. Devs can cook up whatever app interactions they can think of with this new feature.

The Pencil is also squeezable now, which can bring up a context menu. It also has haptics embedded in it, so you'll get feedback whenever you squeeze or rotate an item. The Pencil magnetically clips on the side of the iPad for charging, but if you happen to lose it, it will also show up in the Find My app next to all your other Apple things.

Enlarge / Google Fit seems like it's on the way out. (credit: Ron Amadeo / Google)

Google is killing off the Google Fit APIs. The platform originally existed to sync health data from third-party fitness devices to your Google account, but now it's being killed off. Deprecation of the APIs happened on May 1, and Google has stopped accepting new sign-ups for the API. The official shutdown date is June 30, 2025.

The Google Fit API was launched in 2014, just a few weeks after Apple announced Healthkit in iOS 8. The goal of both platforms is to be a central repository for health data from various apps and services. Instead of seeing steps in one app and weight in another, it could all be mushed together into a one-stop-shop for health metrics. Google had a lot of big-name partners at launch, like Nike+, Adidas, Withings, Asus, HTC, Intel, LG, and app makers like Runtastic and RunKeeper.

Fast-forward to 2024, and we get the familiar story of Google being unable to throw its weight behind a single solution. Today, Google has three competing fitness APIs. There is a "Comparison Guide" on the Android Developer site detailing the differences between the "Health Connect" API, the "Fitbit Web API" and the "Google Fit REST API."

Enlarge / The first Ecobee Thermostat, may it rest in peace. (credit: Ecobee)

Ecobee is killing off some of its oldest thermostats. The "Ecobee Smart Thermostat" (Model # : EB-STAT-02) and the Ecobee Energy Management System (EMS) business thermostat (Model #: EB-EMS-02) are losing web access on July 31, 2024. Every Ecobee device has nearly the same name, but these are older devices. Ecobee says these will still function as local thermostats after the shutdown, but "any features requiring connectivity to the Ecobee servers, such as control from the Ecobee Web Portal, weather information, integrations etc, will no longer function."

The EB-STAT-02 was "the world’s first Wi-Fi enabled thermostat" when it launched in 2008, and sales ended in 2013. Unlike the current Ecobees, this is a white rectangle that connected to a giant "equipment interface module" box you needed to hide in your HVAC system somewhere. The wall-mounted controller used an old-even-in-2009 resistive touchscreen, was an inch thick, and had a colorful interface that looked a lot like early versions of iOS. Most of the basics were here though, with an app that mimicked the wall controller interface, over-the-Internet control, a web portal, and access to lots of data. The EB-EMS-02 launched two years later as a commercial version of the Stat 02 and needed a subscription fee to work.

As you'd expect from an old Internet-connected device, the Wi-Fi support of the Stat 02 is pretty bad nowadays. According to Ecobee's support page, it only supported 802.11b/g for Wi-Fi (that would be "Wi-Fi 3" under the current naming scheme). Encryption went up to WPA2, and even with firmware updates, you have to start questioning the security of a 16-year-old Internet-connected device. Not relying on the cloud would be nice, but at some point, you just have to throw this stuff out.

Enlarge / The Samsung Watch 6 classic. (credit: Samsung)

Wear OS was nearly dead a few years ago but is now on a remarkable comeback trajectory, thanks to renewed commitment from Google and a hardware team-up with Samsung. Wear OS is still in a distant second place compared to the Apple Watch, but a new Counterpoint Research report has the wearable OS at 21 percent market share, with the OS expected to hit 27 percent in 2024.

Counterpoint's market segmentation for this report is basically "smartwatches with an app store," so it excludes cheaper fitness bands and other, more simple electronic watches. We're also focusing on the non-China market for now. The report has Apple's market share at 53 percent and expects it to fall to 49 percent in 2024. The "Other" category is at 26 percent currently. That "Other" group would have to be Garmin watches, a few remaining Fitbit smartwatches like the Versa and Ionic, and Amazfit watches. Counterpoint expects the whole market (including China) to grow 15 percent in 2024 and that a "major part" of the growth will be non-Apple watches. Counterpoint lists Samsung as the major Wear OS driver, with OnePlus, Oppo, Xiaomi, and Google getting shout-outs too.

2023 are actual numbers, while 2024 is a forecast. (credit: Counterpoint Research)

China is a completely different world, with Huawei's HarmonyOS currently dominating with 48 percent. Counterpoint expects the OS's smartwatch market share to grow to 61 percent this year. Under the hood, HarmonyOS-for-smartwatches is an Android fork, and for hardware, the company is gearing up to launch an Apple Watch clone. Apple is only at 28 percent in China, and Wear OS is relegated to somewhere in the "Other" category. There's no Play Store in China, so Wear OS is less appealing, but some Chinese brands like Xiaomi and Oppo are still building Wear OS watches.

Enlarge / The Rabbit R1. (credit: Rabbit Inc)

If you haven't heard of the Rabbit R1, this is yet another "AI box" that is trying to replace your smartphone with a voice command device that runs zero apps. Just like the Humane AI Pin, this thing recently launched and seems to be dead on arrival as a completely non-viable device that doesn't solve any real problems, has terrible battery life, and is missing big chunks of core functionality. Before the device fades into obscurity, though, Android Authority's Mishaal Rahman looked at the software and found the "smartphone replacement" device just runs a smartphone OS. It's Android—both an Android OS and Android app, just in a very limited $200 box.

OK, technically, we can't call it "Android" since that's a Google trademark that you can only access after licensing Google Play. It runs AOSP (the Android Open Source Project codebase), which is the open source bits of Android without any proprietary Google code. The interface—which is mostly just a clock, settings screen, and voice input—is also just an Android app. Being a normal Android app means you can install it on an Android phone, and Rahman was able to get the Rabbit R1 software running on a Pixel 6. He even got the AI assistant to answer questions on the phone.

Rabbit Inc. does not sound happy about Rahman's discovery. The company posted on X that it is "aware there are some unofficial rabbit OS app/website emulators out there" and that since it does not want to support "third-party clients," a "local bootleg APK without the proper OS and Cloud endpoints won’t be able to access our service." The company describes its device as a "very bespoke AOSP and lower level firmware modifications," but that's a statement that would be true for many phones. In another statement to Rahman, the company threatens that it will "reserve all rights for any malicious and illegal cyber security activities towards our services."