“While a tough regulatory climate in 2024 had hampered such large-scale deals, Wall Street is optimistic that a shift in antitrust policies under US President Donald Trump could reignite dealmaking momentum,” Reuters wrote today.
Google reportedly agreed to a $3.2 billion breakup fee that would be paid to Wiz if the deal collapses. A Financial Times report said the breakup fee is unusually large as it represents 10 percent of the total deal value, instead of the typical 2 or 3 percent. The large breakup fee “shows how technology companies are still bracing themselves for pushback from antitrust regulators, even under President Donald Trump and his new Federal Trade Commission chair Andrew Ferguson,” the article said.
Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport wrote today that although the plan is for Wiz to become part of Google Cloud, the companies both believe that “Wiz needs to remain a multicloud platform… We will still work closely with our great partners at AWS, Azure, Oracle, and across the entire industry.”
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian wrote that Wiz’s platform would fill a gap in Google’s security offerings. Google products already “help customers detect and respond to attackers through both SaaS-based services and cybersecurity consulting,” but Wiz is different because it “connects to all major clouds and code environments to help prevent incidents from happening in the first place,” he wrote.
“Wiz’s solution rapidly scans the customer’s environment, constructing a comprehensive graph of code, cloud resources, services, and applications—along with the connections between them,” Kurian wrote. “It identifies potential attack paths, prioritizes the most critical risks based on their impact, and empowers enterprise developers to secure applications before deployment. It also helps security teams collaborate with developers to remediate risks in code or detect and block ongoing attacks.”
RevenueCat also found that in most app categories, the revenue gap between the top 5 percent of apps by revenue and the other 95 percent is widening. In 2024, RevenueCat concluded that the top 5 percent of apps in most categories made 200 times more revenue than the rest. In this year’s, that stat jumped to 500 times.
After a year, the top 5 percent of apps in most categories, including gaming, photo and video, health and fitness, and social and lifestyle, make more than $5,000/month. The 25th percentile makes $5 to $20 per month, depending on the category, save for photo and video apps, whereas the bottom quartile makes $32 per month.
And in another illustration of how lopsided app monetization can be, the report found that 76.1 percent of devs in North America make over 80 percent of their revenue from iOS apps.
Developers try to make ends meet
A lack of monetization opportunities in mobile software has led some developers to cajole users to subscribe for premium features—or sometimes to continue using the app at all. This can be irritating to users who may have no interest in additional features or don’t see the value in paying for something they’ve previously used for free.
According to RevenueCat, the window of time when people are likely to try out a mobile app subscription is small. The report says that “82 percent of trial starts occur the same day a user installs an app, which is even higher than last year.”
The graphs below show how common it is for trial users to cancel their subscription within a month—or even a week—of signing up.
“Price increases are not a reported reason for cancelations, suggesting that pricing changes either rarely occur or do not significantly impact subscriber retention,” the report says.
As you might expect, app developers also face monstrous obstacles around subscription renewals. RevenueCat reported that with“monthly plans, barely 10 percent of payers reach the second year,” and with weekly plans, “less than 5 percent make it to month 6.”
As a result, developers are expected to continue pushing for more ways to make ends meet. Over the next year, the monetization hurdles facing mobile apps likely mean “more paywalls, upsells, and maybe even some price hikes” across all app categories, Rik Haandrikman, VP of growth at RevenueCat, told Ars Technica via email.
He expects AI-powered apps to “see many add-on usage-based pricing (credits or pay-per-feature models) instead of relying solely on subscriptions.”
“In general, app users might expect to see more ‘ways to buy’ apps as [devs] experiment with multiple subscription types [plus] one-time purchases for certain content or features,” Haandrikman said.
With measles declared eliminated from the US in 2000 and national herd immunity strong, health experts have recommended that American children get two doses of the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine—the first between the ages of 12 and 15 months and the second between the ages of 4 and 6 years, before they start school.
Before 12 months, vulnerable infants in the US have been protected in part by maternal antibodies early in infancy as well as the immunity of the people surrounding them. But if they travel to a place where population immunity is unreliable, experts recommend that infants ages 6 to 11 months get an early dose—then follow it up with the standard two doses at the standard times, bringing the total to three doses.
The reason they would need three—and the reason experts typically recommend waiting until 12 months—is because the maternal antibodies infants carry can interfere with the vaccine response, preventing the immune system from mounting long-lasting protection. Still, the early dose provides boosted protection in that 6-to-11-month interval.
In the past, this early, extra dose was recommended for infants traveling internationally—to countries that hadn’t achieved America’s enviable level of herd immunity and were vulnerable to outbreaks. But now, with US vaccination rates slipping, herd immunity becoming spotty, cases rising by the day, and outbreaks simmering in multiple states, the US is no longer different from far-off places that struggle with the extremely infectious virus.
In an article published today in JAMA, prominent health experts—including former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky—call for the US to update its MMR recommendations to include the early, extra dose for infants who are not only traveling abroad, but domestically, to any areas where measles is a concern.
“With some local immunization levels inadequate to avert outbreaks and ongoing disease spread in various regions of the country, a dichotomy between domestic and international travel is not appropriate,” the experts write. “For many travel itineraries, there may even be a higher risk of measles exposure at the US point of departure than at the international destinations.”
Vaccinating at-risk infants early is critical to their own health—as well as the people around them, the experts note. “[I]nfants younger than one year face a heightened risk of severe measles-related complications such as pneumonia, encephalitis, and death. Younger infants are also at increased risk of developing subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), a rare measles complication that has a high fatality rate and may surface years after initial infection,” according to the experts.
A Falcon 9 rocket launched four astronauts safely into orbit on Friday evening, marking the official beginning of the Crew-10 mission to the International Space Station.
Although any crew launch into orbit is notable, this mission comes with an added bit of importance as its success clears the way for two NASA astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, to finally return home from space after a saga spanning nine months.
Friday’s launch came two days after an initial attempt was scrubbed on Wednesday evening. This was due to a hydraulic issue with the ground systems that handle the Falcon 9 rocket at Launch Complex 39A in Florida.
There were no technical issues on Friday, and with clear skies NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov rocketed smoothly into orbit.
If all goes well, the Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying the four astronauts will dock with the space station at 11: 30 pm ET on Saturday. They will spend about six months there.
A long, strange trip
Following their arrival at the space station, the members of Crew-10 will participate in a handover ceremony with the four astronauts of Crew-9, which includes Wilmore and Williams. This will clear the members of Crew 9 for departure from the station as early as next Wednesday, March 19, pending good weather in the waters surrounding Florida for splashdown of Dragon.
If that’s not enough to deter you from sharing voice recordings with Amazon, note that the company allowed employees to listen to Alexa voice recordings. In 2019, Bloomberg reported that Amazon employees listened to as many as 1,000 audio samples during their nine-hour shifts. Amazon says it allows employees to listen to Alexa voice recordings to train its speech recognition and natural language understanding systems.
Other reasons why people may be hesitant to trust Amazon with personal voice samples include the previous usage of Alexa voice recordings in criminal trials and Amazon paying a settlement in 2023 in relation to allegations that it allowed “thousands of employees and contractors to watch video recordings of customers’ private spaces” taken from Ring cameras, per the Federal Trade Commission.
Save recordings or lose functionality
Likely looking to get ahead of these concerns, Amazon said in its email today that by default, it will delete recordings of users’ Alexa requests after processing. However, anyone with their Echo device set to “Don’t save recordings” will see their already-purchased devices’ Voice ID feature bricked. Voice ID enables Alexa to do things like share user-specified calendar events, reminders, music, and more. Previously, Amazon has said that “if you choose not to save any voice recordings, Voice ID may not work.” As of March 28, broken Voice ID is a guarantee for people who don’t let Amazon store their voice recordings.
Amazon’s email says:
Alexa voice requests are always encrypted in transit to Amazon’s secure cloud, which was designed with layers of security protections to keep customer information safe. Customers can continue to choose from a robust set of controls by visiting the Alexa Privacy dashboard online or navigating to More > Alexa Privacy in the Alexa app.
Amazon is forcing Echo users to make a couple of tough decisions: Grant Amazon access to recordings of everything you say to Alexa or stop using an Echo; let Amazon save voice recordings and have employees listen to them or lose a feature set to become more advanced and central to the next generation of Alexa.
However, Amazon is betting big that Alexa+ can dig the voice assistant out of a financial pit. Amazon has publicly committed to keeping the free version of Alexa around, but Alexa+ is viewed as Amazon’s last hope for keeping Alexa alive and making it profitable. Anything Amazon can do to get people to pay for Alexa takes precedence over other Alexa user demands, including, it seems, privacy.
Not all devices can simply download an updated app—after almost a decade, Assistant is baked into many Google products. The company says Google-powered cars, watches, headphones, and other devices that use Assistant will receive updates that transition them to Gemini. It’s unclear if all Assistant-powered gadgets will be part of the migration. Most of these devices connect to your phone, so the update should be relatively straightforward, even for accessories that launched early in the Assistant era.
There are also plenty of standalone devices that run Assistant, like TVs and smart speakers. Google says it’s working on updated Gemini experiences for those devices. For example, there’s a Gemini preview program for select Google Nest speakers. It’s unclear if all these devices will get updates. Google says there will be more details on this in the coming months.
Meanwhile, Gemini still has some ground to make up. There are basic features that work fine in Assistant, like setting timers and alarms, that can go sideways with Gemini. On the other hand, Assistant had its fair share of problems and didn’t exactly win a lot of fans. Regardless, this transition could be fraught with danger for Google as it upends how people interact with their devices.
Stream your DRM-free audiobooks to devices yourselves, without the cloud’s chains.
We’re an audiobook family at House Hutchinson, and at any given moment my wife or I are probably listening to one while puttering around. We’ve collected a bit over 300 of the things—mostly titles from web sources (including Amazon’s Audible) and from older physical “books on tape” (most of which are actually on CDs). I don’t mind doing the extra legwork of getting everything into files and then dragging-n-dropping those files into the Books app on my Mac, but my wife prefers to simply use Audible’s app to play things directly—it’s (sometimes) quick, it’s (generally) easy, and it (occasionally) works.
But a while back, the Audible app stopped working for her. Tapping the app’s “Library” button would just show a spinning loading icon, forever. All the usual troubleshooting (logging in and out in various ways, removing and reinstalling the app, other familiar rituals) yielded no results; some searching around on Google and DuckDuckGo led me to nothing except a lot of other people having the same problem and a whole lot of silence from Audible and Amazon.
So, having put in the effort to do things the “right” way and having that way fail, I changed tacks and fixed the problem, permanently, with Audiobookshelf.
Audiobookshelf! Behold, the unholy melding together of my wife’s and my audiobooks.
Credit: Lee Hutchinson
Audiobookshelf! Behold, the unholy melding together of my wife’s and my audiobooks. Credit: Lee Hutchinson
Audiobookshelf
Audiobookshelf is a self-hosted audiobook and podcast server, and after two weeks of use, so far it works vastly better than trying to stream within Audible’s app. My wife can now actually listen to audiobooks instead of staring at a spinning loading icon forever.
To get Audiobookshelf running, you need something to run it on—a spare desktop or other computer you’re not using should fit the bill, as Audiobookshelf’s requirements are relatively meager. You can either install it via a Docker image, or on bare metal on Windows or several different Linux distros. (The Linux distro installations include a repository for handling updates via your system’s update method, so you won’t have to be manually installing releases willy-nilly.)
Since I already have a Proxmox instance up and running on my LAN, I chose to install Audiobookshelf inside an Ubuntu 24.04 LXC container using the “bare metal” method. It’s not particularly resource-intensive, using about 150MB of RAM at idle; as noted above, if you don’t have a server handy, running Audiobookshelf via Docker on your desktop or laptop shouldn’t be much of a burden on your memory or CPU. (It does suck up a fair amount of processing power when it’s bulk-importing or matching books in your library, but these aren’t things you’ll be doing terribly often.)
Audiobookshelf process resource utilization in htop.
Credit: Lee Hutchinson
Audiobookshelf process resource utilization in htop. Credit: Lee Hutchinson
Getting it going
Once you’ve got Audiobookshelf installed via your preferred method, your next stop is creating and then populating your library. You can do this directly in the application’s web interface, if desired:
You can populate your library via Audiobookshelf’s upload page, if desired. Credit: Lee Hutchinson
I chose to do it the old-fashioned way and copy files into the library location myself, which also works.
There are a number of ways to make sure Audiobookshelf properly ingests and categorizes your books; first, it is aware of and respects metadata tags if your books have them. If your files lack tags, the Audiobookshelf docs provide several other methods of organization using file and directory structure. Between tags and being able to just name things per the guide, I had no problem uploading all 300-ish of my books into Audiobookshelf, with no misses or mismatches.
Of course, this all presupposes that you’ve got some DRM-free audiobooks. There are plenty of sources where you can get books free of charge—like Librivox, for example. If you’re using pay sites like Audible, you’ll want to actually log in to your library via a web browser and download each audiobook locally; this will give you a pile of files in .AAX format or something similar—which leads to a significant caveat.
The DRM elephant in the room
While books that come on audio CDs don’t have DRM embedded in them, files downloaded from Audible or other for-pay sources often do. Audiobookshelf won’t play books with DRM, which means you need a method of stripping that DRM out.
Unfortunately, here’s where we run into a problem: removing DRM from your audiobooks is not universally legal. “In the US, the law against ‘circumventing’ effective DRM has no personal-use exemption. In Europe, it varies by country,” explained the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Competition and IP Litigation Director Mitch Stoltz when Ars reached out for advice. “That’s as silly as it sounds—stripping DRM from one’s own copy of an audiobook in order to listen to it privately through different software doesn’t threaten the author or publisher, except that it makes it harder for them to charge you twice for the same audiobook. It’s another example of how anti-circumvention laws interfere with consumers’ rights of ownership over the things they buy.”
And that means you’re kind of on your own for this step. Should you live in a jurisdiction where DRM removal from audiobooks for personal use is legal—which includes some but not all European countries—then sites like this one can assist in the process; for the rest of us, the only advice I can give is to simply proceed in a legal manner and use DRM-free audiobooks to start with.
Playing things
Once you’ve got Audiobookshelf set up and your DRM-free books stuffed into it, the last piece of the puzzle is an app to actually listen to books with. There is an official Audiobookshelf app, and if you’re an Android user you can grab it right here. The iOS app is perpetually stuck in beta and requires Test Flight, but there are third-party alternatives.
Personally, I’ve been using Plappa, and I’ve found it to be not just perfectly acceptable, but also more responsive and less prone to crashing than Apple’s own Books app (not to mention there’s no annoying in-app audiobook store page always trying to get in my face!).
Administrating things
Audiobookshelf itself has plenty of tunable options for the home system administrator who just can’t leave well enough alone; I’ve found most of the defaults are exactly what I want, but there’s tons of stuff to tweak if you want to do the tweaking.
Notably, Audiobookshelf supports multiple libraries if you want more organizational options. It has accounts you can set up for different listeners, logging options, notification options, RSS support, and a whole mess of other things I honestly haven’t even looked at yet. The good news for me is that you don’t have to look at any of that stuff if you don’t want to—Audiobookshelf is set up to be workable right out of the box.
But what if I’m not home?
Sharper readers might already have spotted a major problem with self-hosting audiobooks on one’s LAN: How do you listen when you’re not on the LAN?
This is probably worth another article, but the way I’m tackling this particular problem is with a local instance of Wireguard and a VPN profile on my mobile devices. When I’m out and about or in the car or whatever, I can tap the “VPN” shortcut on my iOS home screen, and boom—Plappa is now able to see Audiobookshelf, and streaming works just as well as it does at home.
One potential concern for doing this is cellular data usage, but this fear seems minor. The biggest audiobook I’ve got is a cool multicast recording of Frank Herbert’s Dune, which weighs in at about 2.4GB—so, the most data I’m going to transfer even for my biggest audiobook is 2.4GB max, and that’d only be if I listened to all hillion-jillion hours of Dune at the same time. And depending on the app you’re using for playback, you’ll likely also have the option to download the books to your device and listen to them locally, without streaming. (This is true for Plappa, at least.)
Self-hosting happiness achieved
I glossed over a lot of the setup steps to keep this a relatively short piece, but even so, getting Audiobookshelf going is a relatively simple self-hosting task, as self-hosting tasks go.
We also haven’t talked about Audiobookshelf’s other major feature: podcast hosting. I’m not a big podcast kind of guy (I tend to prefer audiobooks if I have time to listen to something), but Audiobookshelf is also (purportedly) great for hosting a giant pile of podcasts. If those are your jam, then that’s another point for Audiobookshelf.
I can’t vouch for the podcasting bits, but I can say that it’s gratifying to have solved a problem—especially one that was driving my wife crazy, and any day I can solve a problem for her via nerdery and server-wrangling is a good day. At least as of right now, the Audible app on her phone remains nonfunctional for reasons that are beyond me, but with luck—and a bit of ongoing care and maintenance for the server in the closet where this stuff all lives now—neither of us will ever have to deal with that app again.
Lee is the Senior Technology Editor, and oversees story development for the gadget, culture, IT, and video sections of Ars Technica. A long-time member of the Ars OpenForum with an extensive background in enterprise storage and security, he lives in Houston.
Once his team nailed how droplets become electrically charged and how the micro-lightning phenomenon works, they recreated the Miller-Urey experiment. Only without the spark plugs.
Ingredients of life
After micro-lightnings started jumping between droplets in a mixture of gases similar to that used by Miller and Urey, the team examined their chemical composition with a mass spectrometer. They confirmed glycine, uracil, urea, cyanoethylene, and lots of other chemical compounds were made. “Micro-lightnings made all organic molecules observed previously in the Miller-Urey experiment without any external voltage applied,” Zare claims.
But does it really bring us any closer to explaining the beginnings of life? After all, Miller and Urey already demonstrated those molecules could be produced by electrical discharges in a primordial Earth’s atmosphere—does it matter all that much where those discharges came from? Zare argues that it does.
“Lightning is intermittent, so it would be hard for these molecules to concentrate. But if you look at waves crashing into rocks, you can think the spray would easily go into the crevices in these rocks,” Zare suggests. He suggests that the water in these crevices would evaporate, new spray would enter and evaporate again and again. The cyclic drying would allow the chemical precursors to build into more complex molecules. “When you go through such a dry cycle, it causes polymerization, which is how you make DNA,” Zare argues. Since sources of spray were likely common on the early Earth, Zare thinks this process could produce far more organic chemicals than potential alternatives like lightning strikes, hydrothermal vents, or impacting comets.
But even if micro-lightning really produced the basic building blocks of life on Earth, we’re still not sure how those combined into living organisms. “We did not make life. We just demonstrated a possible mechanism that gives us some chemical compounds you find in life,” Zare says. “It’s very important to have a lot of humility with this stuff.”
The Athena spacecraft was not exactly flying blind as it approached the lunar surface one week ago. The software on board did a credible job of recognizing nearby craters, even with elongated shadows over the terrain. However, the lander’s altimeter had failed.
So while Athena knew where it was relative to the surface of the Moon, the lander did not know how far it was above the surface.
An important detail, that. As a result, the privately built spacecraft struck the lunar surface on a plateau, toppled over, and began to skid across the surface. As it did so, the lander rotated at least once or twice before coming to a stop in a small, shadowed crater.
“The landing was kind of like sliding into second base,” Steve Altemus, chief executive officer of Intuitive Machines, which built the lander, said in an interview Thursday.
Cold and lonely
It has been a busy and tiring week for the chief of a company that seeks to help lead the development of a lunar economy. Expectations were high for this, the company’s second lunar landing attempt after its Odysseus vehicle became the first private spacecraft to ever make a soft landing on the Moon, last year, before toppling over.
In some ways, this mission was even more disappointing. Because Athena skidded across the lunar surface, it dredged up regolith. When it came to a stop, some of this material was blown up into the solar panels—already in a sub-optimal location on its side. The spacecraft’s power reserves, therefore, were limited. Almost immediately, the team at Intuitive Machines knew their spacecraft was dying.
“We knew we had slid into a slightly shadowed crater, and the temperature was very cold,” Altemus said. “The solar arrays had regolith on them, and they weren’t charging, the ones pointing up, enough to give us sufficient power to power the heaters to keep it warm enough to survive.”
Opinion: The long-rumored Sonos streaming box wasn’t a good idea anyway.
Sonos has canceled plans to release a streaming box, The Verge reported today. The audio company never publicly confirmed that it was making a streaming set-top box, but rumors of its impending release have been floating around since November 2023. With everything that both Sonos and streaming users have going on right now, though, a Sonos-branded rival to the Apple TV 4K wasn’t a good idea anyway.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman was the first to report on Sonos’ purported streaming ambitions. He reported that Sonos’ device would be a black box that cost $150 to $200.
At first glance, it seemed like a reasonable idea. Sonos was facing increased competition for wireless speakers from big names like Apple and Bose. Meanwhile, Sonos speaker sales growth had slowed down, making portfolio diversification seem like a prudent way to protect business.
By 2025, however, the reported plans for Sonos’ streaming box sounded less reasonable and appealing, while the market for streaming devices had become significantly more competitive.
A saturated market
In February, The Verge, citing anonymous sources, reported that Sonos was now planning a streaming player that would “cost between $200 and $400.” That’s a lot to charge in a market where most people have already found their preferred platform. Those who want something cheap and don’t mind ads settle for something like Roku. People who hate ads opt for an Apple TV box. There are people who swear by their Fire Sticks and plenty who are happy with whatever operating system (OS) their smart TV arrives with. Sonos would have struggled to convince people who have successfully used some of those streaming devices for years that they suddenly need a new one that’s costlier than alternatives, including some smart TVs. In the US especially, the TV OS market is considered heavily saturated, presenting an uphill battle for newcomers.
Without Sonos ever confirming its streaming device, it’s hard to judge what the company would’ve offered to lure people to a new streaming platform. Perhaps the Sonos box could have worked better with Sonos devices than non-Sonos streaming devices. But vendor lock-in isn’t the best way to try to win new customers. That approach would also force Sonos to test if it’s accrued the type of customer loyalty as a company like Apple. Much of the goodwill needed for such customer loyalty was blatantly obliterated, though, during Sonos’ botched app update last year.
According to The Verge, Sonos’ box didn’t even have a standout appearance. The publication said that by February 2025, the box was “deep into development,” and “about as nondescript as streaming hardware gets.”
“Viewed from the top, the device is a flattened black square and slightly thicker than a deck of trading cards,” The Verge reported at the time, citing images it reviewed.
Among the most appealing planned features was unified content from various streaming apps, like Netflix and Max, with “universal search across streaming accounts.” With the growing number of streaming services required to watch all your favorite content, this would be a good way to attract streamers but not necessarily a unique one. The ability to offer a more unified streaming experience is already being tackled by various smart TV OSes, including Samsung Tizen and Amazon Fire OS, as well as the Apple TV app and sister streaming services, like Disney+ and Hulu.
A potentially ad-riddled OS
There’s reason to suspect that the software that Sonos’ streaming box would have come out with would’ve been ad-coddling, user-tracking garbage.
In January, Janko Roettgers reported that ad giant The Trade Desk was supplying Sonos with its “core smart TV OS and facilitating deals with app publishers,” while Sonos worked on the streaming box’s hardware and user interface. The Trade Desk makes one of the world’s biggest demand-side platforms and hasn’t made streaming software or hardware before.
Sonos opting for The Trade Desk’s OS would have represented a boastful commitment to advertisers. Among the features that The Trade Desk markets its TV OS as having are a “cleaner supply chain for streaming TV advertising” and “cross-platform content discovery,” something that Sonos was reportedly targeting for its streaming hardware.
When reached for comment, a Sonos spokesperson confirmed that Sonos was working with The Trade Desk, saying: “We don’t comment on our roadmap, but as has been previously announced we have a long-standing relationship with The Trade Desk and that relationship continues.”
Sonos should take a moment to regroup
It’s also arguable that Sonos has much more important things to do than try to convince people that they need expensive, iterative improvements to their streaming software and hardware. Sonos’ bigger focus should be on convincing customers that it can still handle its bread and butter, which is audio devices.
In November 2023, when word first dropped about Sonos’ reported streaming plans, there was no doubt that Sonos understood how to make quality speakers. But last year, Sonos tarnished its reputation by rushing an app update to coincide with its first wireless headphones, the Sonos Ace. The app’s launch will go down as one of the biggest app failures in history. Sonos employees would go on to say that Sonos rushed the update with insufficient testing, resulting in Sonos device owners suddenly losing key features, like accessibility capabilities and the abilities to edit song queues and playlists and access local music libraries. Owners of older Sonos devices, aka long-time Sonos customers, were the most affected. Amid the fallout, hundreds of people were laid off, Sonos’ market value dropped by $600 million, and the company pegged initial remediation costs at $20 million to $30 million.
At this point, Sonos’ best hope at recovering losses is restoring the customer trust and brand reputation that it took years to build and months to deplete.
Sonos could also use time to recover and distill lessons from its most recent attempt at entering a new device category. Likely due to the app controversy associated with the cans, the Ace hasn’t been meeting sales expectations, per a February report from The Verge citing anonymous sources. If Sonos should learn anything from the Ace, it’s that breaking into a new field requires time, patience, and incredible attention to detail, including how long-time and incoming customers want to use their gear.
Of course, financial blowback from the app debacle could be more directly behind why Sonos isn’t releasing a streaming box. Additionally, Sonos saw numerous executive changes following the app fiasco, including the departure of the CEO who greenlit the streaming box, Patrick Spence. New executive leaders, including a new chief product officer and chief marketing officer, could have different views on the value of Sonos to enter the streaming market too.
Sonos’ spokesperson didn’t answer Ars’ questions about Sonos’ reported plans to cancel the streaming box and whether the decision is related to the company’s app woes.
Sonos may have dodged a bullet
Ultimately, it didn’t sound like Sonos’ streaming box had the greatest potential to disrupt other TV streaming platforms already settled into people’s homes. It’s possible Sonos had other products that weren’t leaked. But the company would have had to come up with a unique and helpful feature in order to command a high price and compete with the likes of Apple’s TV 4K set-top box.
Even if Sonos came up with some killer feature or app for its streaming box, people are a lot less likely to gamble on a new product from the company now than they were before 2024’s app catastrophe. Sonos should prove that it can handle the basics before attempting to upcharge technologists for new streaming hardware.
Sonos’ streaming ambitions may only be off the table “for now,” new CEO Tom Conrad reportedly told employees today, per The Verge. But it’s probably best that Sonos focus its attention elsewhere for a while.
Scharon is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica writing news, reviews, and analysis on consumer gadgets and services. She’s been reporting on technology for over 10 years, with bylines at Tom’s Hardware, Channelnomics, and CRN UK.
After a little over three months, Intel has a new CEO to replace ousted former CEO Pat Gelsinger. Intel’s board announced that Lip-Bu Tan will begin as Intel CEO on March 18, taking over from interim co-CEOs David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston Holthaus.
Gelsinger was booted from the CEO position by Intel’s board on December 2 after several quarters of losses, rounds of layoffs, and canceled or spun-off side projects. Gelsinger sought to turn Intel into a foundry company that also manufactured chips for fabless third-party chip design companies, putting it into competition with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company(TSMC), Samsung, and others, a plan that Intel said it was still committed to when it let Gelsinger go.
Intel said that Zinsner would stay on as executive vice president and CFO, and Johnston Holthaus would remain CEO of the Intel Products Group, which is mainly responsible for Intel’s consumer products. These were the positions both executives held before serving as interim co-CEOs.
Tan was previously a member of Intel’s board from 2022 to 2024 and has been a board member for several other technology and chip manufacturing companies, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), and Cadence Design Systems.
On Wednesday, Google DeepMind announced two new AI models designed to control robots: Gemini Robotics and Gemini Robotics-ER. The company claims these models will help robots of many shapes and sizes understand and interact with the physical world more effectively and delicately than previous systems, paving the way for applications such as humanoid robot assistants.
It’s worth noting that even though hardware for robot platforms appears to be advancing at a steady pace (well, maybe not always), creating a capable AI model that can pilot these robots autonomously through novel scenarios with safety and precision has proven elusive. What the industry calls “embodied AI” is a moonshot goal of Nvidia, for example, and it remains a holy grail that could potentially turn robotics into general-use laborers in the physical world.
Along those lines, Google’s new models build upon its Gemini 2.0 large language model foundation, adding capabilities specifically for robotic applications. Gemini Robotics includes what Google calls “vision-language-action” (VLA) abilities, allowing it to process visual information, understand language commands, and generate physical movements. By contrast, Gemini Robotics-ER focuses on “embodied reasoning” with enhanced spatial understanding, letting roboticists connect it to their existing robot control systems.
For example, with Gemini Robotics, you can ask a robot to “pick up the banana and put it in the basket,” and it will use a camera view of the scene to recognize the banana, guiding a robotic arm to perform the action successfully. Or you might say, “fold an origami fox,” and it will use its knowledge of origami and how to fold paper carefully to perform the task.
Gemini Robotics: Bringing AI to the physical world.
In 2023, we covered Google’s RT-2, which represented a notable step toward more generalized robotic capabilities by using Internet data to help robots understand language commands and adapt to new scenarios, then doubling performance on unseen tasks compared to its predecessor. Two years later, Gemini Robotics appears to have made another substantial leap forward, not just in understanding what to do but in executing complex physical manipulations that RT-2 explicitly couldn’t handle.
While RT-2 was limited to repurposing physical movements it had already practiced, Gemini Robotics reportedly demonstrates significantly enhanced dexterity that enables previously impossible tasks like origami folding and packing snacks into Zip-loc bags. This shift from robots that just understand commands to robots that can perform delicate physical tasks suggests DeepMind may have started solving one of robotics’ biggest challenges: getting robots to turn their “knowledge” into careful, precise movements in the real world.
Better generalized results
According to DeepMind, the new Gemini Robotics system demonstrates much stronger generalization, or the ability to perform novel tasks that it was not specifically trained to do, compared to its previous AI models. In its announcement, the company claims Gemini Robotics “more than doubles performance on a comprehensive generalization benchmark compared to other state-of-the-art vision-language-action models.” Generalization matters because robots that can adapt to new scenarios without specific training for each situation could one day work in unpredictable real-world environments.
That’s important because skepticism remains regarding how useful humanoid robots currently may be or how capable they really are. Tesla unveiled its Optimus Gen 3 robot last October, claiming the ability to complete many physical tasks, yet concerns persist over the authenticity of its autonomous AI capabilities after the company admitted that several robots in its splashy demo were controlled remotely by humans.
Here, Google is attempting to make the real thing: a generalist robot brain. With that goal in mind, the company announced a partnership with Austin, Texas-based Apptronik to”build the next generation of humanoid robots with Gemini 2.0.” While trained primarily on a bimanual robot platform called ALOHA 2, Google states that Gemini Robotics can control different robot types, from research-oriented Franka robotic arms to more complex humanoid systems like Apptronik’s Apollo robot.
Gemini Robotics: Dexterous skills.
While the humanoid robot approach is a relatively new application for Google’s generative AI models (from this cycle of technology based on LLMs), it’s worth noting that Google had previously acquired several robotics companies around 2013–2014 (including Boston Dynamics, which makes humanoid robots), but later sold them off. The new partnership with Apptronik appears to be a fresh approach to humanoid robotics rather than a direct continuation of those earlier efforts.
Other companies have been hard at work on humanoid robotics hardware, such as Figure AI (which secured significant funding for its humanoid robots in March 2024) and the aforementioned former Alphabet subsidiary Boston Dynamics (which introduced a flexible new Atlas robot last April), but a useful AI “driver” to make the robots truly useful has not yet emerged. On that front, Google has also granted limited access to the Gemini Robotics-ER through a “trusted tester” program to companies like Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, and Enchanted Tools.
Safety and limitations
For safety considerations, Google mentions a “layered, holistic approach” that maintains traditional robot safety measures like collision avoidance and force limitations. The company describes developing a “Robot Constitution” framework inspired by Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and releasing a dataset unsurprisingly called “ASIMOV” to help researchers evaluate safety implications of robotic actions.
This new ASIMOV dataset represents Google’s attempt to create standardized ways to assess robot safety beyond physical harm prevention. The dataset appears designed to help researchers test how well AI models understand the potential consequences of actions a robot might take in various scenarios. According to Google’s announcement, the dataset will “help researchers to rigorously measure the safety implications of robotic actions in real-world scenarios.”
The company did not announce availability timelines or specific commercial applications for the new AI models, which remain in a research phase. While the demo videos Google shared depict advancements in AI-driven capabilities, the controlled research environments still leave open questions about how these systems would actually perform in unpredictable real-world settings.
