Hey, remember when Snap created a drone to fly overhead and take aerial selfies? The Pixy drone, like Spectacles and Snap's other forays into hardware, was more or less experimental. The drone debuted in May 2022, but the company officially killed off Pixie in August of the same year. But even in death, this device came back to haunt Snap.
Snap is currently recalling all of its Pixie drones due to their batteries' tendency to swell, heat up, and even catch fire. The battery itself is also subject to a recall, along with the drone that surrounds it. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, which announced the recall, said the recall includes approximately 71,000 batteries. Snap will provide refunds to anyone who purchased a Pixy drone or its additional battery. You can apply for a refund from Snap's recall page.
Here are some of the consumer technology news of the week.
short circuit
Amazon's acquisition of Roomba robot vacuum cleaner has been canceled. The jack-of-all-trades company had originally planned to pay $1.7 billion for iRobot, but the deal was called off this week, in part because the acquisition is likely to be challenged by antitrust regulators in the U.S. and Europe. It was done. And since it's apparently mass layoff season in the corporate world, iRobot immediately announced that it would be laying off more than a third of its employees following the news.
The deal was a concern not only to regulators. After all, Amazon is a huge company that tracks your data in every possible way, but isn't all that diligent about actually protecting it. If Amazon were to buy Roomba, it would have access to the data the vacuum used to map the homes of millions of people. (This is why WIRED stopped recommending Roomba in our guide to the best robot vacuums.)
please show me the way
Google has been interested in making Maps useful for more than just driving for years, and has recently used AI to make its services even more useful.
Google's latest machine intelligence is injected into Maps with a feature called Local Guides. Leverage Google's collection of user submissions to better understand what you're looking for in places near you. For example, Google says you can now search Maps for activities for kids and nearby activities that are perfect for a rainy day. When you enter your request with text or voice prompts, Maps deploys an extensive language model to return the best results. Out of the box, it's very similar to Google Search, but you can also make more specific requests, such as finding restaurants that can accommodate multiple people's dietary restrictions.
Demolition time again
LVMH Watch Week in Miami is an annual event hosted by the French luxury brand. That means this week has seen a ton of gorgeous new watches that you'll probably never be able to afford. One notable example is Hublot's outrageous MP-10 Tourbillon Weight Energy System. It's like someone stuffed a Terminator into a fishbowl and strapped it to your wrist.