Quick Post Archive
Content from 6 Months Later and handpicked
stories from around the web.
Launched at Meta Connect, the latest generation of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses gets all the upgrades we saw in the Oakleys. There’s also a new Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses, which we’ll be reviewing over the long term.
After years of saying it was coming, the company finally announced it will be rolling out to Spotify Premium subscribers in the coming months, at no additional cost. There’s still no Dolby Atmos music, however. Even with lossless audio, many of the advantages other streaming services have, as we went over in our 2025 comparison, remain.
As reported by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy for The Verge, Ultraloq has become one of the first smart lock brands to roll out a software update to their lock (Ultraloq Bolt NFC), which already supported Apple’s Home Key technology. The coming changes to smart locks are something we covered in our 2025 smart home guide, which also covered the new Aliro standard, and UWB-unlocking (which might prove to be a real game changer). Smart lock section starts at 10:25:
After more than four years since announcing it was coming, Spotify is finally delivering on its promise to bring lossless audio quality to the service. No word on support for Atmos, however.
If you have a Pixel 8 or newer, you can take advantage of this new feature. Read more about it in The Verge’s excellent write-up.
Framework did something Apple would never do–pull back the curtain on their product development and show all the cool and interesting ideas they tried.
Finally figured out why the Pixel 10 Pro's display looks so much better to me than my 9 Pro XL's! Google added Adaptive Color tone (similar to Apple's True Tone). Hard to believe but this is the first Pixel since the PIXEL 4, to have this feature. Glad it's back.
— Josh Teder (@joshteder.bsky.social) August 30, 2025 at 12:14 AM
[image or embed]
According to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, these new products include two new displays for the smart home, new smart home products such as cameras and a FaceID doorbell, and more. You can read his full report here, and watch him talk about it in the video below.
The Verge’s Jennifer Pattison Tuhoy takes over The Vergecast for an absolutely fascinating deep dive into the story of Insteon’s comeback plus a fantastic Vergecast hotline segment helping listeners solve smart lighting issues. Def worth a watch or listen.
The Verge has a fascinating look at Google TV from contributor Janko Roettgers, where Google admits they aren’t very good at making money from Google TV and calls into question the direction of the platform. This comes right as we’re about to release our 6 Months Later Review of the Chromecast with Google TV, which is certainly interesting timing!
Meta announced these new headsets in a blog post, and they show where the format might be going in the future and the goal Meta is chasing after: passing the visual Turing test. These headsets are quite a bit more advanced than the Quest 3 and Quest 3S we’ve recently covered, but show the company is still pouring quite a few resources into advancing the category. The Verge also did an excellent write up of the news which you can find here.
You no longer have to think about what mode to use; the model will do it for you. Plus, it’s way better at coding and answering health questions, and it’s less likely to hallucinate. While not a product we regularly cover after our ChatGPT video bombed, it’s still a product we use every day for our operations, primarily for writing code. These quick posts run via code primarily generated by ChatGPT!
Philips Hue lights, to be exact. According to Hueblog.com, Sonos’s Assistant might be able to control Philips Hue lights shortly. This makes a lot of sense for homes with multiple speakers in different rooms. Sonos remains one of our favorite speaker brands, which we’ve featured extensively already. It’s unclear if Sonos has plans to integrate with any other smart home platforms, but given Amazon’s apparent plans to litter Alexa with ads and upcharge for Alexa Plus, this sounds kinda nice.
As reported by Emma Roth at The Verge, as with last year’s Pixel event, some products are expected to come out in October rather than right after Google’s August event. If you’re curious about our experience with the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, check out our review of it.
As reported by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy from The Verge, Sengled’s reliance on only a Wi-Fi connection for some of their smart bulbs perfectly illustrates the problem with buying any smart home device that needs a cloud connection to work. This situation is why we almost always recommend smart home devices that rely on local connections, so if the company goes under, you can still turn on the lights. Here’s the smart home stuff we recommend in 2025.