Hey, do you remember when? Snap created a drone that flies overhead and takes aerial selfies? The Pixy drone was somewhat of an experiment in line with Spectacles and Snap’s other hardware forays. The drone debuted in May 2022, but the company officially discontinued the Pixie in August of that year. But despite its death, the device came back to haunt Snap.
Now Snap is recalling all Pixy drones because the batteries tend to swell, get hot, and sometimes catch fire. The batteries themselves are also being recalled, along with the drones that surround them. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, which issued this recall, said that approximately 71,000 batteries were included in the recall. Snap will refund anyone who purchased a Pixy drone or additional batteries. You can apply for a refund on Snap’s recalls page.
Let’s take a look at some more consumer tech news from this week.
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Amazon’s acquisition of the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner manufacturer has been halted. The massive company initially planned to pay $1.7 billion for iRobot, but that deal was canceled this week. In part, that’s because the acquisition may have been challenged by antitrust regulators in the U.S. and Europe. And as layoff season approaches across the corporate world, iRobot has announced it will lay off more than a third of its workforce effective immediately.
The deal has more than just regulators worried. After all, Amazon is a huge company that tracks your data in all sorts of ways, but is much less diligent about actually protecting it. Amazon’s acquisition of Roomba will give it access to the data the vacuum cleaner used to map the homes of millions of people. (This is why WIRED stopped recommending Roombas in its guide to the best robot vacuums.)
please show me the way
For years, Google has been interested in making Maps useful for more than just driving, and more recently it has been leveraging AI to add even more utility to the service.
Some of the latest Google machine intelligence coming to Maps is in a feature called Local Guides. We leverage Google’s collection of user contributions to better interpret what you’re looking for near you. For example, Google says you can now ask Maps to find nearby activities that are good for kids or best for a rainy day. When you enter a request via text or voice prompts, Maps deploys a large language model to return the best results. This is very similar to a Google search, but allows for more nuanced requests, such as finding a restaurant that meets the dietary restrictions of multiple people.
Time to break up again
LVMH Watch Week in Miami is an annual event held by the French luxury brand. That means there’s a new watch announced this week that’s too cool for you to buy. One standout example is Hublot’s outrageous MP-10 Tourbillon Weight Energy System. It looks like someone put the Terminator in a fish tank and strapped it to his wrist.
Photo: Hublot
