ICYMI: The 7 Biggest Tech Stories of the Week, From Apple’s M4 Mac Launch to Marvel’s 2025 TV Lineup on Disney Plus
This week we announced the winners of the 2024 Ny Breaking Choice Awards, Apple launched a slew of M4 Macs and Marvel outlined its MCU TV line-up (and boy are we excited).
To find out all this and more, we’ve rounded up the top seven tech news stories of the week below, with links to the original articles if you’d like to find out more.
Once you’re done catching up, take a look through our selection of the seven new movies and TV shows you can stream this weekend (November 1).
The Ny Breaking Choice Awards have returned for 2024 and we’ve crowned our winners in over 100 categories.
The Reader’s Choice Award (chosen 100% by our readers) went to the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, with the Samsung S95D being crowned the best OLED TV, the Apple Watch Series 10 being named the best smartwatch and the Nvidia winning computer brand of the year, and Balatro winning game of the year.
Halloween fell on a Thursday this year, meaning you’d be forgiven if you threw a party in early November. We even encourage it thanks to Ny Breaking’s Halloween week. Experts from across the site have contributed streaming recommendations, recipes, game ideas, AI tips, and more so you can make the most of the spookiest time of the year.
Don’t worry if you’re not a big horror fan, as there’s plenty of animation, comedies or general seasonal content if you’d prefer a more relaxed celebration. Halloween is for everyone and that includes our guide, so make sure you check that out this weekend.
With iOS 18.1, we finally get our hands on the first wave of Apple Intelligence features, including writing tools for proofreading and rewriting, Smart Replies to quickly reply to messages, notification overviews, photo cleaning, and a new design of Siri. You can also get these experiences on an iPad or Mac thanks to iPadOS 18.1 and macOS Sequoia 15.1, which also rolled out this week.
Unfortunately, Apple Intelligence tools like Genmoji, Image Playground, and ChatGPT integration for Siri, as well as the iPhone 16’s Visual Intelligence, won’t arrive until later this year in iOS 18.2.
To use Apple Intelligence on iPhone, you need an iPhone 15 Pro, 15 Pro Max, 16, 16 Plus, 16 Pro, or 16 Pro Max and make sure your device is set to US English. On a Mac you need an M-Series chip and on iPad you need the A17 Pro, M1, M2 or M4 chips to get Apple Intelligence (with the same language restriction as on the iPhone).
Sonos’ latest high-end soundbar is the Sonos Arc Ultra, and it’s now officially on sale – but some lucky buyers received it before the street date and took to the internet to share their experiences. And it’s good news for hopeful Sonos enthusiasts: One early tester who upgraded from the Arc to Arc Ultra said, “I was hoping the Ultra (would) be better than the Arc, but it’s significantly in every way better.”
The star is the bass, powered by an innovative new Sound Motion speaker – it goes far beyond what the previous model was capable of, and actually goes beyond what almost any other sub-less soundbar can do. We’re testing the Arc Ultra for our review, and can definitely say this part is big for Sonos.
People don’t seem to have any trouble setting it up in the Sonos app either, which is a good sign considering the tough months the company has had when it comes to software.
Every week is a busy week for Marvel, but the past seven days have been particularly busy for the comic book giant – and not just because Agatha all the timeThe two-part finale scared us all on Disney Plus (read more about it in our Agatha all the time ending explained article).
Whether it was the official announcement, indeed Spider Man 4 is not only in development but also has a confirmed release date, or Marvel unveils its full TV lineup for late 2024 and beyond, the Disney subsidiary has plenty more content to show us over the next 14 months. So much for releasing fewer movies and shows after Infinity Saga, eh, Marvel?
It’s been a banner week for Apple, with a slew of new M4 Mac product reveals kicking off on Monday with the new M4 iMac. The new iMac has an updated processor, new color options, and a lower starting price than the M3 version – all good things.
The second (and perhaps best) reveal was the new Mac mini with M4 and M4 Pro – a powerful computer crammed into an absolutely tiny five-by-five-inch chassis. The redesign not only made the Mac mini smaller and faster, but also brought audio and USB-C ports to the front of the chassis, a much-needed addition.
We also saw new versions of the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M4, M4 Pro and M4 Max chips, plus updated Magic Mouse, Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad peripherals for Mac users. Finally, 16GB is now the default base configuration for all Mac products – thank goodness – including retroactively the M2 and M3 MacBook Air.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot has taken the world by storm and introduced millions of people to AI for the first time, but now it’s going beyond its chatbot origins and competing directly with Google in search results.
Searching the web in ChatGPT is not the same as using Google. Instead of pages of web links in response to a question, you get a nicely thought-out series of AI text responses, with the option to click through to a web page if you wish.
The ChatGPT search is great for asking questions, but can also return answers to local searches like ‘What’s the best pizza restaurant near me?’, and can display results on a map. From our initial testing, it seems that ChatGPT search is a very efficient way to search the web.