Late last night, Google experienced a bizarre outage which caused a number of devices to misbehave. The devices in question, the OnHub router, Google Wifi, and Chromecast, all logged themselves out of their user accounts, and in some cases went so far as to reset themselves to factory settings.
It’s unknown precisely how many devices were affected, but it appears to be the result of an internal issue at Google, not some kind of malicious attack. According to Tech Hive, if you were logged out of your device last night, your data is secure, but you might have to set up the device all over again.
We know some of you had issues signing in today. Please try again now. Rest easy — your account's security was not affected.
— Google (@Google) February 24, 2017
The Google Wifi mesh network routers, and the last-gen Google OnHub routers were the most profoundly affected by the outage. Instead of just being logged out, the Google routers were reset to factory defaults. If your router was affected, you’ll have to set up your network all over again.
“We experienced an issue with our Google Accounts engine that may have affected your Google Wifi or OnHub device. This causes some devices to automatically reset to the initial state you bought them in,” reads the Google help page dedicated to the issue.
Google’s Accounts Engine, the beating heart of your Google experience, appears to have been the culprit. While it’s certainly convenient to login to so many devices and services with the same account, last night’s outage illustrates one of the dangers posed by convenience. When one account goes down, all the services and devices reliant upon it will follow suit — like dominoes.
Luckily, last night’s outage was over quickly, and doesn’t appear to have been too widespread. Being logged out and having a few devices reset to factory settings is inconvenient, but not dangerous.
Still, while you’re rebuilding your home network, and logging into your Google accounts again, now would be a good time to make sure you have two-factor authentication enabled, and change your passwords just for good measure.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.