It’s been more than two decades since Seagate began working on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) — and now the company may finally be ready to release a hard drive using the technology. A new product page spotted by Tom’s Hardware shows an Exos M hard drive sporting up to 32TB of storage using Seagate’s Mozaic 3 Plus HAMR platform.

Seagate’s Mozaic 3 Plus technology allows for bigger hard drive capacities by making data bits smaller and closer together on each disk. To write data, a laser diode attached to the drive’s recording heads heats small areas of the disk. “Each bit is heated and cools down in a nanosecond, so the HAMR laser has no impact at all on drive temperature, or on the temperature, stability, or reliability of the media overall,” Seagate writes on its website.

Seagate says its Exos M hard drive has a 3TB per platter density, making it useful for enterprise applications like powering AI systems. We still don’t know when Seagate could release its Exos M hard drive, as its product page currently shows a link to “Stay Informed,” but a launch seems imminent.

As pointed out by Tom’s Guide, Seagate said in a filing earlier this month that it had “successfully completed qualification testing” for its HAMR hard drives with “several customers within the Mass Capacity markets, including a leading cloud service provider.” It says it will start shipping its HAMR-based hard drive to the unnamed cloud provider in the “coming weeks.”

The Verge reached out to Seagate with a request for more information but didn’t immediately hear back.

Seagate isn’t the only company working on high-capacity hard drives. In October, Western Digital launched a 32TB hard drive using energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR), while Toshiba recently demonstrated high-capacity hard drives with HAMR and microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR).

Often at CES, you’ll see a very impressive new technology debut at exorbitant prices before trickling down to more affordable models a couple years later. Lo and behold, that’s exactly what we’re seeing with LG and its Zero Connect Box. We got our first look at it with the M Series OLED in 2023. Now the company is bringing that Zero Connect Box, which beams audio and video to the TV panel, to one model of its still-terribly-named QNED Evo Mini LED lineup.

The box can transmit 4K video at up to 144Hz, and by all accounts from reviews last year, it works as advertised and poses no issues for gaming. The only cable that runs to the TV screen itself is the power cable.

LG says the QNED Evo series is also ditching quantum dots this year for a “proprietary wide color gamut technology, Dynamic QNED Color Solution” that supposedly produces “pure colors that are as realistic as they appear to the eye in general life.”

Unfortunately, I predict we’re going to see a lot of hype about AI on TVs at CES 2025 — even more than usual — and LG is already backing up my theory. It’s even putting a new AI button right on the Magic Remote for this year’s TVs. In what’s destined to be a controversial decision, the AI button actually takes the place of the traditional inputs button:

A short press on the AI button guides users to relevant keywords and TV features, while a long press enables personalized searches based on a large language model (LLM4). For example, if a user is planning a trip to France, they can ask their remote, “Recommend movies to watch on my trip to Paris.” The AI will understand the context and suggest movies set in the French capital, including specific genre recommendations based on the user’s viewing preferences.

Do people actually want this functionality from their TV? I digress. LG claims AI will also allow for more advanced upscaling, more fine-tuned HDR, and the conversion of two-channel stereo sources to a virtualized 9.1.2-channel sound output. LG claims its new AI tricks can also better distinguish voices from background noise — a challenge that TV makers never seem finished addressing — and make them clearer.

LG hasn’t yet shared pricing or a release timeframe for the 2025 QNED Evo lineup. But again, this is how CES TV announcements always go. You hear about the flashy new tech and better-than-ever picture quality months before learning how much it’ll cost you. The Verge will be in Las Vegas in just a few short weeks for the show, so you can at least count on some first-hand impressions of LG’s latest TVs.

A24’s lineup of films for 2025 is starting to become stacked — with fantastical creatures, that is. While the fantasy adventure The Legend of Ochi is slated to hit theaters next February, the dark comedy Death of a Unicorn is due out in the spring. And you can get a feel for it in the brand-new trailer above.

The film follows a father and daughter (Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega) who are driving to a weekend retreat, and accidentally kill an animal ... which just so happens to be a unicorn. From there, it seems as though the dad’s rich boss (Richard E. Grant) and his family can’t help but see ways to exploit the creature’s magical powers for profit. While the vibe is light and funny early one, things not only get darker, but take a turn towards horror by the end of the trailer.

Death of a Unicorn is the directorial debut from Alex Scharfman, and it also stars Will Poulter, Sunita Mani, and Téa Leoni. Hereditary director Ari Aster serves as a producer, while horror legend John Carpenter.

We didn’t all flock to a new platform or build on a thrilling new protocol. We went everywhere, and did everything, all at once.

Read the full story at The Verge.

European smart device manufacturer Shelly is launching 11 automation devices that can connect to the home from over a mile away. Shelly says its new and updated Wave devices are built around the Z-Wave Long Range (Z-Wave LR) specification, and will be available in the US in the first half of 2025.

The benefits of Z-Wave LR are similar to those offered by Amazon’s Sidewalk IoT network in that both can extend connectivity to devices beyond your home Wi-Fi network, without the need for expensive LTE data.

Z-Wave LR was announced back in 2020, but products that actually use it are only just starting to hit the market. The wireless protocol touts several features that are beneficial for large homes and commercial environments, such as eradicating the need for a mesh network with multiple signal repeaters. Instead, Z-Wave LR devices operate on a star network topology, which connects directly to devices via a central gateway hub.

Z-Wave LR has a maximum line-of-sight wireless range of 1.5 miles when operating at full power with support for up to 4,000 devices on a single network. Supported devices also automatically adjust the radio output power, providing up to 10 years of battery life on a single coin-cell battery.

The upgraded Shelly Wave products include a smart plug, a humidity and temperature sensor, a door/window sensor, a motion detector, a remote controller for motorized blinds, and a range of lighting dimmers and smart switches. Three of the devices are battery-powered. Shelly hasn’t revealed the price of these new products yet.

Z-Wave LR is backward compatible with older Z-Wave products and networks, but a Z-Wave LR-supported hub (built on the Z-Wave 700 or 800 series platform) is required to take advantage of the extended range benefits.