These prices — which I presume are a back-to-school season promotion — are even lower than those during the weeklong “Prime Day” earlier this month, and you don’t need to be a Prime subscriber to get them:

• The pretty-good base configuration (16 GB RAM, 256 GB storage) is just $800.
• The configuration with 16 GB RAM and 512 GB is $1,000, the normal price for the base model.
• You can splurge and get 24 GB RAM with 512 GB storage for just $1,200.

These are make-me-rich affiliate links, as is this link for AirPods Pro 2 for just $200, $50 off.

Sean Lyndersay, general manager of Edge at Microsoft:

For decades, the way we’ve used browsers has remained linear: open a tab (or 20), search for something, read a page, repeat. It’s a model that’s worked well, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed. Until now. As AI begins to reshape nearly every facet of digital life, we’re witnessing a turning point in how we interact with the web. Now, it’s worth asking: is your browser working for you as much as it should?

Color me skeptical about the idea that my web browser should be “working for me”, rather than serving as a tool for me to work with. The AI hype cycle is pointing to a future where automated agentic web browsers surf automated AI-generated websites. Robots consuming robot-generated content — an infinite loop of AI onanism.

This is why today we’re excited to launch Copilot Mode, a new experimental mode in Microsoft Edge, and our next step towards building a more powerful way to pilot the web.

With Copilot Mode on, you enable innovative AI features in Edge that enhance your browser. It doesn’t just wait idly for you to click but anticipates what you might want to do next. It doesn’t just give you endless tabs to sift through but works with you as a collaborator that makes sense of it all. It keeps you browsing, cuts through clutter and removes friction to unlock your flow — all built to the highest Microsoft standards of security, privacy and performance trusted by billions of people and businesses worldwide — with you as the user always in control.

Microsoft is famously known for presenting interfaces that “cut through clutter” and “remove friction”. I’m sure this will be great.

I am reminded of the decade-ago Netflix strategy espoused by Ted Sarandos: “The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” I think something similar is behind Microsoft trying to make Copilot front-and-center in Edge, and Google’s concurrent move to junk up Chrome with AI-generated suggestions. Their goal is to make their web browsers chatbots faster than OpenAI can make ChatGPT a web browser.

HBO is still around. It even just got its name back. But Netflix won that race.

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:

Google on Monday announced an update to its Chrome web browser that will introduce AI-generated store reviews to U.S. shoppers with the aim of helping to determine the best places to make a purchase. The feature, which will be available by clicking an icon just to the left of the web address in the browser, will display a pop-up that informs consumers about the store’s reputation for things like product quality, shopping, pricing, customer service, and returns.

The feature, which is currently available only in English, will generate the summaries based on reviews from partners, including Bazaarvoice, Bizrate Insights, Reputation.com, Reseller Ratings, ScamAdviser, Trustpilot, TurnTo, Yotpo, Verified Reviews, and others.

I have never heard of a single one of these “partners”. It’s bad enough that so many web pages themselves are increasingly covered with distracting junk, much of it AI-generated slop. But now browsers themselves will be adding their own layers of distracting cruft atop the websites. The entire premise of Chrome — the reason for its name — is that it was originally designed to simplify the UI of the browser app itself, the “chrome”, at a time when Internet Explorer and even Firefox were increasingly cluttered and confusing. I feel like this is a sign that Chrome is completely losing its way — AI-generated slop from the browser layered atop AI-generated slop in the underlying web pages.

Dare Obasanjo, on Bluesky, takes this news credulously:

Google Chrome is now going to provide AI generated summaries of online stores covering topics like customer service, product quality, shipping, pricing and return policy.

This is on the heels of Microsoft Edge announcing Copilot mode earlier today. Apple’s Safari is being left behind in the AI wars.

I would argue that Safari is looking ever more like a proverbial glass of ice water in hell. These Chrome AI overviews (Chrome is also, for example, going to start presenting its own AI-generated menu summaries for restaurants) don’t seem like user-centric features to me. They seem like features designed to turn the dial up on Google’s slice of commissions from web transactions.

Emanuel Maiberg and Joseph Cox, reporting again for 404 Media:

Despite Tea’s initial statement that “the incident involved a legacy data storage system containing information from over two years ago,” the second issue impacting a separate database is much more recent, affecting messages up until last week, according to the researcher’s findings that 404 Media verified. The researcher said they also found the ability to send a push notification to all of Tea’s users.

It’s hard to overstate how sensitive this data is and how it could put Tea’s users at risk if it fell into the wrong hands. When signing up, Tea encourages users to choose an anonymous screenname, but it was trivial for 404 Media to find the real world identities of some users given the nature of their messages, which Tea has led them to believe were private. Users could be easily found via their social media handles, phone numbers, and real names that they shared in these chats. These conversations also frequently make damning accusations against people who are also named in the private messages and in some cases are easy to identify. [...]

Some of the private messages viewed by 404 Media include:

• One user tells another they just discovered their husband on the app being discussed. “I am his wife,” many of the messages say.
• Another appears to show a woman contacting others about a man she is engaged to.
• Multiple messages which appear to show women discussing their abortions.
• Chat logs between women discovering they are dating the same man, exchanging information such as what car he drives for verification.

When I linked to 404 Media’s coverage of the initial breach at Tea the other day, I wrote, “I’m not accusing Tea in particular of being vibe-coded”. Well, I still don’t know if Tea’s service architecture was vibe-coded, but it’s now clear that whoever made it was shamefully incompetent. They shouldn’t have made any sort of services backend, let alone one like Tea’s that’s intended to carry incredibly sensitive personal information and messages.

This is an outright privacy — and quite possibly, personal security — disaster. With the abortion discussions and the current bifurcation of women’s rights here in the US, it could be a legal disaster, too. 4chan clowns have taken the images and data and created maps of Tea users’ addresses, and a Mark-Zuckerberg-“Facemash”-style site for ranking users’ appearance.

For women who’ve already signed up and started using Tea, I doubt there’s anything that can be done to remove them from exposure. Even if Tea offers a “delete your account” feature, I wouldn’t trust that it actually deletes anything from their database, let alone everything. And the cat’s already out of the bag for any bad actors who figured out this second exploit before Tea was alerted.

Yet another data point for the argument that any “private messaging” feature that doesn’t use E2EE isn’t actually private at all.

One of the best indie weather apps just got a major overhaul for 2025, and it’s worth checking out.

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