Ever since the release of the 2015 iPad Pro 12.9, if iOS device owners wanted to take advantage of rapid USB PD charging capabilities, they had to spring for Apple’s overpriced, questionably durable USB-C to Lightning cable. There was no third-party solution, because accessories OEMs like Anker had no way of purchasing ...

Tethering your laptop and phone can be a bit of a hassle. Google’s Chrome OS has long offered a solution called Instant Tethering that makes the process automatic, but so far, this only worked for a small set of Google’s own Chromebooks and phones, starting with the Nexus 6. Now Google ...

Apple is launching 58 new Today at Apple sessions to beef up its in-store education offerings for people who want to explore Apple’s products. The sessions, which cover video, photography, accessibility, coding, music, health and more, are free to attend and available at all of Apple’s retail stores across the ...

Desperate for data on its competitors, Facebook has been secretly paying people to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that lets the company suck in all of a user’s phone and web activity, similar to Facebook’s Onavo Protect app that Apple banned in June and that was removed in August. Facebook ...

Choose Your Own Adventure-style stories have been making a comeback, thanks to Netflix’s adoption of the format for kids TV and other interactive tales, like “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch,” as well as earlier efforts, like HBO’s Mosaic. Now Amazon is testing out the genre for Alexa devices, with the launch of professionally performed, ...

Jaguar XF Sportbrake 2019 (Image: JAGUAR) Estate cars are becoming a fairly maligned market segment as the colossal rise of the SUV charges on without any hope of slowing down. A victim of circumstance much like the saloon as compact, mini, medium and large SUVs embed their claws deeper.  Do ...

Tonga’s two-week period without a working subsea cable to Fiji has ended. The cable had originally fallen over on January 20, and a second fault was subsequently found; however, RadioNZ reported on Saturday that the connection to the main island has been restored. On Friday afternoon, the Tongan government had ...

Machine learning and all its related forms of “AI” are being used to work on just about every problem under the sun, but even so, stemming the alarming decline of the bee population still seems out of left field. In fact it’s a great application for the technology and may ...

In the wake of TechCrunch’s investigation yesterday, Apple blocked Facebook’s Research VPN app before the social network could voluntarily shut it down. The Research app asked users for root network access to all data passing through their phone in exchange for $20 per month. Apple tells TechCrunch that yesterday evening ...

Mary Ann Azevedo Contributor Mary Ann Azevedo covers startups and tech at Crunchbase News. 2019 has been good to the Austin startup scene so far. Combined, Austin startups have raised $240.3 million in January. That’s not much less than the nearly $300 million raised in all of Q4 2018. And since ...