Consumer Electronics

Google and a coalition of security partners have disrupted a botnet of more than 1.3 million Android devices, most of them television set-top boxes, and Google says the infection was not an accident. In a report published on Monday, November 2, the Google Threat Intelligence Group said it assesses with high confidence that Videostrong Technology Co., a device maker based in Shenzhen, China, intentionally developed, deployed and operated the backdoor for financial gain, then sold access to criminal affiliates.

Apple on Tuesday unveiled a new 14-inch MacBook Pro and a refreshed iMac, both powered by its latest M6 chip, with the company pitching faster performance for running artificial intelligence tasks directly on the devices rather than in the cloud.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at 1,999 dollars, while the iMac starts at 1,499 dollars. Customers can pre-order both products from Wednesday, October 28, in 35 countries and regions, including the United States, with availability starting on Friday, November 6.

Apple's big smart-home moment arrives Tuesday — and this time the company is going all in.

At its "Welcome home" experience in New York on October 13, Apple is expected to unveil HomeView, its first dedicated smart-home hub, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The name surfaced in a trademark filing discovered by MacRumors, and Gurman has now fleshed out the details in his Power On newsletter.

Microsoft and Nvidia used a joint event in San Francisco on October 7 to make their biggest push yet for AI on the personal computer. The centerpiece is the 15-inch Surface Laptop Ultra, priced at $2,599 and built around Nvidia's RTX Spark platform — a combination of a Grace CPU and Blackwell RTX GPU that Microsoft says delivers up to a petaflop of FP4 AI performance, with configurations offering up to 128GB of unified memory. Preorders opened the same day, with shipments starting October 16.