Monthly Archives: March 2026

I Ran Android On A MacBook And Even Airdropped Files To iPhone at MWC 2026… And You Can Too

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Mirroring a MacBook screen onto an Android phone is not something you expect to work, let alone work fluidly with smooth animations. At HONOR’s MWC 2026 booth, it did exactly that, and then went further by letting you mirror the Magic V6’s display back onto the MacBook, turning the interaction into a genuine two-way street. Tap your HONOR device near an iPhone and files transfer between them, photos, videos, documents, the whole lot, with the kind of animated polish you associate with Apple’s own AirDrop. The same trick works with iPads. HONOR calls the system HONOR Share, and the cross-platform angle is just one layer of a much deeper ecosystem play the company quietly walked in and demonstrated on final, shipping hardware at one of the world’s biggest tech shows.

This cross-platform handshake is part of a broader upgrade to HONOR Share, and it extends well beyond just sending a photo to your friend’s iPhone. The company is positioning its new flagship trio, the Magic V6, MagicPad 4, and MagicBook Pro 14, as an open bridge rather than another walled garden. For the Magic V6, a feature called OneTap transfer allows it to push files directly to a Mac with a single touch, a claim that seems to hold up based on the MWC demos. It’s a direct, pointed solution to a daily friction point for anyone living with a foot in both ecosystems. While Google is still in the process of rolling out its own Quick Share-AirDrop interoperability to the wider Android world in 2026, HONOR just went ahead and shipped a finished product.

Designer: HONOR

The MagicRing integration goes several layers deeper than the Apple-facing features (FYI, it’s a software feature, not an actual ring). Within the HONOR ecosystem, the Magic V6, MagicPad 4, and MagicBook Pro 14 all communicate through HONOR Connect, and any screen can project onto any device bidirectionally, something Apple’s Sidecar only partially replicates within its own hardware range. The mechanics are drag-based: open HONOR Connect, find your target device, drag the screen sharing icon over to it, and projection starts. Bidirectional means both directions work, the MacBook’s display mirroring onto the foldable, the foldable mirroring onto the laptop, same process either way. Dropping files and folders between devices with continuity-style drag behavior runs natively on the MagicPad 4, without a companion app or cloud relay.

At 4.8mm thick with a 12.3-inch 3K OLED running at 165Hz, the MagicPad 4 is a serious piece of hardware to run a MacBook’s extended display onto. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 inside means you’re not compromising on the secondary screen, which matters when you’re doing real creative or coding work. Used as a real-time extended display for a MacBook, it eliminates the need for additional hardware, and for mixed-ecosystem users that’s already a compelling argument on its own. Cross-device drag-and-drop turns it into a productivity node rather than a conventional Android tablet, a designation very few Android tablets have earned. Xiaomi’s iOS Bridge in HyperOS 3.1 gestures at something similar but still relies on companion apps and hasn’t been demonstrated on final shipping hardware.

Apple’s Continuity framework has set the benchmark for multi-device workflows since 2014, and the gap between what Apple offers and what Android could offer was real enough to function as a legitimate reason to stay in Apple’s ecosystem. That gap is narrowing. The Magic V6’s foldable form factor already does things no iPhone can, and layering genuine Apple interoperability on top removes the last practical friction for anyone straddling both worlds. The MWC demo landed on execution: working software on final hardware, smooth animations, no companion apps required. For a certain kind of user, the question of whether to stay full-Apple or go mixed just got significantly harder.

HONOR’s AI Connect Platform, projected to integrate over 20,000 AI services by end of 2026, is the infrastructure underneath all of this, and the MWC demos are its first serious public proof of concept. The company has been repositioning from a budget device manufacturer into what it now calls a global AI device ecosystem company, and this is the first time that framing has been backed by something you could touch and test on a show floor. The Magic V6, running the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, is the first foldable to carry that chip and the anchor device pulling the whole network together. Google’s Quick Share-AirDrop interoperability is confirmed for broader rollout this year, but it carries sharing mode caveats that HONOR has already cleared. The demo in Barcelona was an answer, not a preview.

The post I Ran Android On A MacBook And Even Airdropped Files To iPhone at MWC 2026… And You Can Too first appeared on Yanko Design.

Did Apple’s $599 MacBook Neo just paint a target on the Google Chromebook’s back?

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The cheapest MacBook now costs exactly the same as the cheapest iPhone. That’s not a punchline; it’s a price list. For $599, you can get a phone, or you can get a laptop that runs on a phone’s chip, specifically the A18 Pro that powered the iPhone 16 Pro a couple of years back. Apple looked at its vast bin of perfectly good, massively over-engineered mobile silicon and made the most logical leap imaginable. They put it in a beautifully milled aluminum chassis with a keyboard and a 13-inch Liquid Retina display, creating a machine that is, for all intents and purposes, a grown-up iPhone that doesn’t make calls. It’s a wildly clever, almost cynical, piece of product engineering that redefines the entry point to the entire Mac ecosystem.

This move wasn’t about inventing new technology, but about finding the perfect home for existing tech that had become inexpensive through sheer scale. The A18 Pro, with its 6-core CPU and 5-core GPU, is more than capable of handling the daily workload of the average student or web-browser warrior. Paired with a baseline of 8GB of unified memory and a 256GB SSD, the MacBook Neo is engineered to be just enough computer for a massive audience that was previously priced out. Apple’s genius here is recognizing that the performance floor of their mobile chips has risen so high that it now meets the “good enough” ceiling for a huge segment of the laptop market. This is an exercise in masterful cost management, not a race for benchmark glory.

Designer: Apple

That brings us to the real target of this colorful little machine: the classroom. The MacBook Neo isn’t for the video editor or the traveling professional; it’s a precision-guided missile aimed directly at the heart of Google’s Chromebook empire. With an education price of just $499, Apple has officially entered a knife fight with a very sharp, very shiny knife. For years, schools have defaulted to fleets of cheap, functional, and ultimately disposable Chromebooks. Apple is betting that for a small premium, school districts will jump at the chance to give students a device that feels premium, integrates with their iPhones, and carries the weight of the Apple brand. It’s a compelling argument that repositions the Mac from an aspirational product to a practical, attainable one.

It’s not that Google completely fumbled its lead, but it certainly grew complacent. The Chromebook ecosystem won on price and dead-simple IT management, not on user experience. Google’s Auto Update Expiration policy, which effectively gives every device a software death sentence, has been a constant source of friction for budget-strapped schools that need hardware to last. This created an opening for a company known for its long-term software support. Apple can now walk into a school administrator’s office and offer a more durable, better-feeling machine with a clear software roadmap, making the slightly higher initial cost seem like a smarter long-term investment. Google sold schools a cheap solution, and Apple is countering with a cost-effective one.

Of course, a $599 Mac comes with an asterisk, and the MacBook Neo has a few big ones. The most glaring omission is the lack of a backlit keyboard, a feature that has been standard on laptops for over a decade and feels almost punitive to remove. There’s also no support for fast charging, so topping up the battery will be a leisurely affair. These aren’t accidents; they are carefully calculated sacrifices made to protect the profit margin and create clear feature differentiation from the more expensive MacBook Air. Apple is using the vibrant new color options, like Citrus and Indigo, to distract from the spec sheet compromises, but to be honest, nothing is more of a distraction than that price point.

The post Did Apple’s $599 MacBook Neo just paint a target on the Google Chromebook’s back? first appeared on Yanko Design.

Big tech companies agree to not ruin your electric bill with AI data centers

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Today the White House announced that several major players in tech and AI have agreed to steps that will keep electricity costs from rising due to data centers. Under this Ratepayer Protection Pledge, companies are agreeing to practices that are intended to protect residents from seeing higher electricity costs as more and more businesses create power-hungry data centers. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and xAI have all apparently signed on. A few of the participants — Amazon, Google and Meta — had conveniently timed press releases patting themselves on the back for their participation and touting whatever other policies they have for mitigating the negative impacts of data center construction.

The main provisions of the federal pledge have tech companies agreeing to "build, bring, or buy the new generation resources and electricity needed to satisfy their new energy demands, paying the full cost of those resources." It also claims they will pay for any needed power infrastructure upgrades and operate under separate rate structures for power that will see payments made whether or not the business uses that electricity.

The pledge doesn't appear to be any form of binding agreement and there's no discussion of enforcement or a penalty for companies that don't honor the stipulated provisions. It also doesn't address any of the other impacts data centers and AI development might be having, either on local communities, on other utilities and resources, or on access to critical computing elements like RAM.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/big-tech-companies-agree-to-not-ruin-your-electric-bill-with-ai-data-centers-230102956.html?src=rss

Big tech companies agree to not ruin your electric bill with AI data centers

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Today the White House announced that several major players in tech and AI have agreed to steps that will keep electricity costs from rising due to data centers. Under this Ratepayer Protection Pledge, companies are agreeing to practices that are intended to protect residents from seeing higher electricity costs as more and more businesses create power-hungry data centers. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and xAI have all apparently signed on. A few of the participants — Amazon, Google and Meta — had conveniently timed press releases patting themselves on the back for their participation and touting whatever other policies they have for mitigating the negative impacts of data center construction.

The main provisions of the federal pledge have tech companies agreeing to "build, bring, or buy the new generation resources and electricity needed to satisfy their new energy demands, paying the full cost of those resources." It also claims they will pay for any needed power infrastructure upgrades and operate under separate rate structures for power that will see payments made whether or not the business uses that electricity.

The pledge doesn't appear to be any form of binding agreement and there's no discussion of enforcement or a penalty for companies that don't honor the stipulated provisions. It also doesn't address any of the other impacts data centers and AI development might be having, either on local communities, on other utilities and resources, or on access to critical computing elements like RAM.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/big-tech-companies-agree-to-not-ruin-your-electric-bill-with-ai-data-centers-230102956.html?src=rss

Mark Zuckerberg downplays Meta’s own research in New Mexico child safety trial

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Jurors in a New Mexico child safety trial heard testimony from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg today. During pre-recorded testimony, Zuckerberg was repeatedly asked about the company's understanding of social media addiction and other issues that had been studied by its researchers. 

During the deposition, which was recorded last March, Zuckerberg was asked about numerous findings from researchers at Meta who studied how the company's apps affect users and teens. The CEO downplayed the significance of many of these documents.

Early in the testimony, which was viewed by Engadget on Courtroom View Network, Zuckerberg was questioned about a document on the effect of feedback on Facebook users. The document stated that "contributors on Facebook are likely to learn to associate the act of posting with feedback" which will "lead contributors to seek rewards by visiting the site more often.” Zuckerberg said he wasn’t “sure if that's actually how it works in practice, but I agree that you're summarizing what they appear to be saying.”

Later, the CEO was questioned about a document that graphed the proportion of 11 and 12-year-olds who were monthly active users on Instagram. The chart indicated that at the time, around 20 percent of 11-year-olds were monthly users of the service. "I agree that the graph says that, I am not familiar with what methodology we were using to estimate this," Zuckerberg said. "I assume that if we had direct knowledge that any given person was under the age of 13, that we would have them removed from our services."

New Mexico's attorney general sued the company in 2023 for alleged lapses in child safety, including facilitating predators' access to minors and building features it knew were addictive. In court, Meta's lawyers and executives have disputed the idea that social media should be considered an "addiction." In public statements, the company has said that lawsuits have relied on "cherry-picked quotes and snippets of conversations taken out of context" and that it "has consistently put teen safety ahead of growth for over a decade."

As with his recent testimony in a separate trial over social media addiction in Los Angeles, Zuckerberg repeatedly rejected the "characterization" of questions that were posed to him. And he said that Meta's goal was to make its apps "useful" rather than to increase the amount of time people spend with them. 

Zuckerberg was also questioned about a document written by a company researcher that stated "there is increasing scientific evidence, particularly in the US, … that the average net effect of Facebook on people's well being is slightly negative." The CEO said that "my understanding is that the general consensus view is not that."

It's not the first time a Meta executive has tried to downplay the significance of internal research. The company used a similar strategy in 2021 after former employee turned whistleblower Frances Haugen disclosed documents showing that Facebook's researchers had found that Instagram made some teen girls feel worse about themselves.

Zuckerberg's testimony was played one day after jurors heard recorded testimony from Instagram chief Adam Mosseri. The exec was also asked about Haugen's disclosures and Meta's response to them. Some of those disclosures were based on "problematic research," he said. "Most research is surveys. We run hundreds of surveys every month."

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/mark-zuckerberg-downplays-metas-own-research-in-new-mexico-child-safety-trial-222924340.html?src=rss

Bill Gates-backed TerraPower begins nuclear reactor construction

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The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has granted approval to TerraPower to begin construction of a reactor in Wyoming. The project is the first new US commercial nuclear reactor in about a decade, according to The New York Times. TerraPower was founded by Bill Gates, and it took years for the business to receive regulatory approval for this construction effort.

TerraPower is part of a push to create more efficient and less expensive nuclear facilities as an alternative power source, particularly as AI companies and data center construction places more demands on the US' current infrastructure. TerraPower's project involves tech it has dubbed Natrium in its planned reactor. Using this liquid sodium approach rather than a traditional light-water reactor is part of how the company aims to reduce costs and time frames.

Advocates see nuclear reactors as a way to generate power without the climate impact of coal or gas plants. Critics point to the safety risks as a severe downside to this approach, while others question whether the creation and disposal of nuclear waste counter the environmental gains. The Gates-backed operation still isn't coming in cheap. The proposed facility could cost at least $4 billion and still faces logistical challenges before coming online as planned in 2031.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/bill-gates-backed-terrapower-begins-nuclear-reactor-construction-221132639.html?src=rss

This New London Café Has a Ceiling Inspired by St Paul’s Dome, and It Sits Right on the Thames

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The stretch of the Thames running between Tate Modern and St Paul’s is one of those London views that never quite loses its effect — and London studio Cake Architecture made that exact backdrop the entire design brief for WatchHouse’s newest café, a 60-seat riverside space that absorbs some of the city’s most iconic architecture and folds it into something intimate and grounded.

The project sits directly beside the Thames, though it never leans on the view as a crutch. The design operates at a more atmospheric level, rooted in the tension between the monumental permanence of London’s skyline and the restless, shifting energy of the river running past it. It’s a conceptual starting point that could easily stay theoretical. Here, it doesn’t.

Designer: Cake Architecture

That thinking earns its keep through specific, well-resolved gestures. The most arresting is a dramatic circular void carved into the ceiling, a spatial echo of St Paul’s dome, translated from the sacred to the everyday. Below it, a monolithic espresso counter holds the room together, its weight and material language borrowed from Tate Modern’s industrial character and the infrastructural logic of the riverbanks themselves. Neither move is decorative. Both shift the room into territory that most café designs never reach.

The palette is handled with the same restraint. Colour is drawn from the immediate surroundings: the tonal range of the river at different hours, the bleached stone of the embankment walls, the open and often overcast London sky. Back-painted finishes introduce a soft iridescence to the surfaces, so the room doesn’t read as a fixed thing. It responds to the time of day, softening in morning light and warming as the afternoon settles in.

WatchHouse has always been deliberate about place; each of its London locations takes its visual cues from the neighbourhood it occupies, but this Thames-side outpost feels like one of the most fully resolved in the portfolio. The 60-seat space will serve rare and special coffees alongside breakfast, viennoiserie, and bakery options, giving the room both the footfall and the menu to justify the ambition behind its design. For Cake Architecture, it’s another assured project from a studio building a reputation for spaces that think carefully about where they are. Here, the scale is modest, and the mood is quiet, and it’s all the stronger for it.

The post This New London Café Has a Ceiling Inspired by St Paul’s Dome, and It Sits Right on the Thames first appeared on Yanko Design.

Assassin’s Creed Unity is getting a free 60 fps patch tomorrow

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Ubisoft shared its upcoming plans for the Assassin's Creed franchise today. Along with the news of a remake for its piratical entry, the game company also announced that a visual upgrade is coming for a title from way back in 2014. Assassin's Creed Unity will receive a free patch tomorrow to offer 60 fps performance on the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X/S. 

The company bringing a performance upgrade more than a decade after launch feels like a fitting close to Unity's development. The game suffered from bugs and performance issues from the jump, and while most of those did get addressed, no amount of big fixes or free DLC could fix this howler of a story or make Arno any more compelling as a protagonist. But every fan has their own passionately argued take on which titles are the worst, so just because I found Unity to be a particularly low point in the series doesn't mean it's not going to be a fave for somebody else. So if you are someone who, as Ubisoft put it, has been waiting a long time for a chance to dive into Unity on modern hardware, then tomorrow is your lucky day. Amuse-toi bien. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/assassins-creed-unity-is-getting-a-free-60-fps-patch-tomorrow-210109721.html?src=rss

LG reveals pricing for its 2026 OLED TVs

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Now for the news you've been waiting with bated breath for: LG's 2026 TVs from CES finally have prices. (Well, some of them do, anyway.) Surprisingly, the evo G6 and C6 series OLED TVs aren't increasing in cost from last year's models. But the bad news is, they’re still expensive as all get-out.

The flagship LG evo G6 series ranges in price from $2,499 to $24,999. (Cue spit take.) Fortunately, that five-figure price only applies to the 97-inch model, which nobody this side of Elon Musk needs. The entry-level price is for a 55-inch OLED. Moving up the ladder, the 65-inch one costs $3,399, the 77-inch model is $4,499 and an 83-incher will set you back $6,499.

The evo G6 line includes all the OLED upgrades from the head-turning LG Wallpaper TV, for which LG hasn't yet announced pricing. You'll find the company's new "Hyper Radiant OLED" panel and optimizations to black and color levels in both lineups.

Meanwhile, the evo C6 line, which sits a notch below, ranges from $1,399 (42-inch) to $5,299 (83-inch). Rounding out the list is a 55-inch model for $1,999, a 65-inch one for $2,699 and a 77-inch model for $3,699. The C6 and G6 lines are powered by LG's Alpha 11 AI Processor Gen3. Both series support gamer-friendly features such as 4K at 165Hz with VRR, NVIDIA G-SYNC and AMD FreeSync Premium.

The evo G6 and C6 lines are available to order today from LG's website. Retail availability will follow later this month. Just keep in mind that, if you can hold off a little while, the entire history of TV pricing suggests you'll soon be able to find them for less than MSRP.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/lg-reveals-pricing-for-its-2026-oled-tvs-203923873.html?src=rss

Issey Miyake Just Made Sunglasses With Eight Lenses

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Most sunglasses get two lenses. That’s the standard, the baseline, the thing nobody questions because why would you? Two lenses. Two eyes. Done. But Issey Miyake Eyes just released UROKO, a pair of sunglasses with eight lenses, and it made me stop and genuinely reconsider what we accept as default in design.

UROKO is part of the IM MEN Spring Summer 2026 collection, titled “Dancing Texture,” and the name alone tells you this isn’t a collection built on safe choices. The eight-lens design draws inspiration from the ceramic works of Shoji Kamoda, a celebrated Japanese potter known for his distinctive scale-like surface patterns. In Japanese, “uroko” literally means scale, and the connection between the pottery and the eyewear is direct, visible, and surprisingly earned. This isn’t one of those cases where a brand name-drops an artist and calls it a day.

Designer: Issey Miyake Eyes

Four lenses sit on each side of the frame, arranged in sequence to mimic the overlapping scale motifs found in Kamoda’s pottery. Each lens features a concave cut, meaning they curve inward rather than outward. That engineering decision is clever. By pulling the lenses inward, they can sit close together without the whole structure ballooning into something unwearable. It’s a practical solution wrapped inside an aesthetic one, and I appreciate when design works that way. Function hiding inside form, each decision earning its place.

The 3D-printed frame goes through a finishing process that intentionally leaves slight surface variations intact. No two pieces are perfectly uniform. That part matters because it mirrors the very thing Kamoda was known for in his ceramics: surfaces that resisted smooth perfection. What could have been a production quirk becomes a design language, a deliberate echo of the source material. It’s the kind of detail you don’t notice immediately but can’t unsee once you do.

Made in collaboration with Kaneko Optical and crafted entirely in Japan, the frame is lightweight titanium, which strikes me as both the right material and the obvious one. Eight lenses on your face need a frame that won’t drag you down by the end of the afternoon. The brushed finish shifts subtly depending on how light falls on it, giving it that quality where the object looks different from one moment to the next. That feels intentional rather than accidental, which again speaks to how much thought went into this.

Seeing UROKO from a distance, I understand why one description floated around: it looks like a necklace before it looks like sunglasses. Only when you get close enough to see the hinges fold and the scale-shapes settle into the familiar form of a pair of frames does the full picture land. That delay, that moment of working out what you’re looking at, is actually the design doing its job. Not all eyewear needs to announce itself from ten feet away.

I’ll admit there’s a part of me that wants to ask whether eight lenses actually changes how you see. The short answer is probably no, not in any technical sense. But I don’t think that’s the point. UROKO isn’t positioning itself as an optical innovation. It’s positioning itself as a wearable object that carries a conversation between contemporary manufacturing and Japanese craft tradition, between function and sculpture, between an artist who shaped clay in the twentieth century and a design house still finding new ways to reference that legacy.

Available in Dark Gray and Brown, and offered in both optical and sunglass versions, UROKO is priced at ¥99,000 JPY, approximately $632 USD. It’s not a casual purchase, but it’s not trying to be. It sits firmly in the category of considered design objects, the kind you buy because you’ve decided to live with something that makes you think a little, even on an ordinary Tuesday.

The real takeaway isn’t about the lenses. It’s about what happens when a design team takes a constraint, in this case the question of how to honor a ceramic artist’s vision through eyewear, and decides not to answer it predictably. Eight lenses is a strange answer. It’s also, once you see UROKO in person, kind of the only answer.

The post Issey Miyake Just Made Sunglasses With Eight Lenses first appeared on Yanko Design.