Technology

BlackBerry used to rule the smartphone space, but then the iPhone came out. BlackBerry execs deemed the iPhone a “toy” and a “fad,” but that fad eventually drove the company to revamp its product lineup. It was too late, though. BlackBerry will probably never regain the throne, but it’s not done …

No one knew exactly what DeepMind was up to when it was acquired by Google a few years back. Now DeepMind is an Alphabet company, working on big machine learning problems like how to beat humans at Go, improving AI problem solving, and making computer-generated speech more realistic. On that …

The consumer Internet of Things is a sprawling ecosystem of hardware. For every well-made product, there are a dozen that raise serious concerns about basic security practices, or require the customer to risk paying top dollar for expensive equipment, only to discover it will be shut down one day. There are …

AOL announced today that AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) will shut down as of December 15. AIM has been pretty dead for years, largely supplanted by services like Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Google Hangouts, text messaging, and WhatsApp. But I’m still a little sorry to see it go. AIM was the first …

Intel’s Coffee Lake Core i7-8700K has launched, earning our top CPU recommendation at its price point. But there’s one issue worth being aware of going forward: Intel has declared that it will no longer officially disclose its per-core Turbo frequencies. When we queried Intel why this was being changed, the …

Google’s much-anticipated hardware unveiling yesterday included the Pixel 2, some new Google Homes, and more. One thing notably absent was any mention of Android Wear. The Google Store got a visual refresh as all the new product pages went up, and that refresh apparently included the complete removal of the …

In the wake of the massive Equifax data breach, once again a spotlight has been shone on the overuse of the not-so-secret number that passes for a national ID in the United States–the Social Security Number (SSN). Perhaps we have become numb to these hacks and data breaches. What, my …

The TechCrunch mobile app was in dire need of a refresh, so we rebuilt it from the ground up. Starting today, you can download the new app in the iOS App Store or Google Play store. If you already have the old version of the app installed on your phone, …

Today, Intel is unveiling its new Coffee Lake line of desktop CPU cores and its first mainstream desktop response to AMD’s Ryzen architecture since that platform launched in March. That’s not to say we haven’t seen some significant shifts in Intel’s desktop parts–in fact, even before today’s launch, we’ve seen …

For the second year in a row, Google has chosen October 4th to unveil all its new hardware. Yes, Google has its own hardware now, something that was not true in the past. After it sold off Motorola to Lenovo, Google started a hardware team headed by former Motorola CEO …