Apple’s Next iPhone SE Is Around the Corner

Apple’s next iPhone may launch next week. No, it’s not the iPhone 17, but the long-awaited iPhone SE. This will be the fourth generation of the “Special Edition” iPhone, arriving three years after its last refresh. It’s usually the cheapest in the lineup, and rumors suggest it will cost around $499, which—if true—would be a small price bump over the $429 MSRP for the 2022 model.

The price may be justified because this iPhone SE may not look like its predecessor and will be a bigger phone. It’s rumored to feature a 6.1-inch screen, a sizable jump from the 4.7-inch screen, with OLED in tow and Face ID, officially ditching the Home button with Touch ID baked in. It’s also expected to feature USB-C and MagSafe for all your modern charging needs.

If its predecessor is anything to go by, it will likely be powered by Apple’s A18 chipset, the same as the iPhone 16, which means this device will have access to Apple Intelligence. However, the new Camera Control button that debuted on the iPhone 16 isn’t expected here, meaning there won’t be any way to access Apple’s Visual Intelligence feature, which lets you point the iPhone camera at objects and have Siri provide context.

The iPhone SE was initially expected to launch this past week after a Bloomberg report, but Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman now says Apple has delayed it to the following week. Apple CEO Tim Cook seems to have confirmed this on X, saying there will be a new product launch on Wednesday, February 19.

The OnePlus Watch 3 Has a Big Battery

Also arriving next week is OnePlus’ next Wear OS smartwatch, the OnePlus Watch 3. After a dismal launch with the original—which had a proprietary operating system—OnePlus turned things around with the OnePlus Watch 2, which was one of the few full-featured smartwatches with a three-day battery life. Now it’s upping the ante with a five-day battery life claim for its latest wearable. That’s just by default—if you enable battery-saver mode, it can purportedly last 16 days on a single charge.

That’s unheard of on a smartwatch of this type, and the innovation is two-pronged. OnePlus is one of the few Wear OS smartwatch makers utilizing a dual-engine architecture, with Wear OS and the Snapdragon W5 chipset running the intense graphical tasks and the Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) powered by an upgraded BES2800 MCU chipset handling all the smaller background tasks. This is paired with a new silicon-carbon battery technology the company just introduced in the OnePlus 13, which allows for denser batteries that don’t need to be thicker. Hence, this watch has a big 631-mAh battery cell (its predecessor had a 500-mAh cell) without a drastic size increase.

It retains the stainless steel casing, but now there’s a titanium alloy bezel around the screen for extra protection, and the 2D sapphire crystal display is brighter, too. It’ll come in Emerald Titanium and Obsidian Titanium, with more details about features, specs, and price to come on February 18.

Ninja’s Ice Cream Maker Now Does Soft-Serve

Soft-serve ice cream at home is an odd holy grail—usually the province of expensive commercial machines that churn and swirl air into fast-freezing ice cream. People do weird stuff to mimic it. Very few home machines have tried or succeeded. Well, into the breach jumps Ninja with its new $350 Ninja Swirl Creami ice cream machine, released with much fanfare this week.

The Swirl is the follow-up to Ninja’s previous-generation Creami ice cream maker, which inspired sellouts and TikTok pandemonium after its release in 2022. The Swirl, like the original Creami, lets you pre-freeze any recipe you want—canned mangos, bananas, Campari and OJ, you do you—and turn it into ice cream, froyo, or sorbet. But alongside hard ice cream, the new excitement on the Swirl is the addition of six soft-serve settings ranging from traditional to regional variants such as the Midwest’s beloved frozen custard and a Dole-inspired fruit whip.

According to Ninja, the soft-serve option relies on a “Creamerizer Paddle” to aerate and texture the soft-serve swirl. And after online health nuts kept trading low-calorie protein ice-cream recipes for the Creami, the Swirl now also includes an alarmingly named protein ice-cream setting called “CreamiFit.” Look, I love a good soft-serve machine. But the main thing I’ve learned this week is that whoever names new products at Ninja has the best and most hilarious job on earth. —Matthew Korfhage

Wacom Revamps the Intuos Pro Tablet

It’s been eight years since Wacom redesigned the Intuos Pro—the company’s digital drawing tablet for creatives—but the time has finally come for a revamp. Like its predecessor, it comes in three sizes: small, medium, or large. The tablets are now thinner and more compact. Each one also has a larger drawing area, while still maintaining a 16:9 aspect ratio to complement most displays. Despite the slimmer profile, it sports longer battery life of 16 hours. With Bluetooth, you can connect the tablet to up to three devices (one via USB and two wirelessly) and use the mechanical switch to toggle between each one. It’s compatible with both Mac and Windows.

Wacom also moved the ExpressKeys and touch buttons from the side to the top of the tablet, and swapped the touch rings with dials that deliver tactile feedback. These changes are specifically meant to limit any accidental movements or input while drawing or editing—regardless of whether you’re right- or left-handed. They come preinstalled with shortcuts too, but you can customize your own depending on the app you’re using. Each tablet also includes the existing Pro Pen 3, which comes with programmable shortcut buttons, customizable weight and grip thickness, and interchangeable nibs. It doesn’t require batteries or charging.

The new Intuos Pro is already on sale, with the small size starting at $250, the medium costing $380, and the large hitting $500. (They seem to already be out of stock at Wacom’s webstore.) Each tablet comes with a free trial of Clip Studio Paint, Capture One, and MASV, as well as Wacom’s Yufiy software, which embeds a digital micromark to your work. —Brenda Stolyar

Google’s Family Link Redesign

Google’s parental controls app, Family Link, got a big redesign this week. There’s now a dedicated Screen Time tab that puts all related screen-time management tools in one place, and in the Controls tab, Google says it has “streamlined key controls” to make it easier and faster to manage privacy settings and content filters.

Also new is School Time, which debuted for the Fitbit Ace LTE and Samsung Galaxy Watch for Kids as a way to minimize distractions on smartwatches during school hours. Now this is available on Android phones and tablets as well via Family Link. It can limit phone functionality and silence notifications, and you can choose what apps are accessible. Google says in the coming months, it will add the ability for parents to approve contacts for their kids to call and text on Android phones.

And speaking of Google, the company sent out invites this week for its Google I/O developer conference in Mountain View, California: May 20 and 21. This event is usually where we’ll hear more details about the upcoming version of Android—Android 16—along with updates to the Gemini voice assistant and all of Google’s other software products, from Wear OS to Android Auto.

Monitor Your Meals With Lifesum’s AI Tracking

If you’re diabetic or trying to get your cholesterol levels down, tracking your meals is probably the most difficult part. What’s in there, exactly? How much protein, fiber, or calories are you really ingesting? Companies like Oura have begun experimenting with using AI to analyze your meals. But the more ways you can log your food intake, the easier it is to stick to it.

This week, the nutrition app Lifesum (iOS, Android) introduced multimodal AI-powered meal tracking via photos, text, or barcodes. Take a picture of your meal, upload to the app, and advanced image recognition will quickly break it down and log it for you. Should you choose to describe it via voice or text, language processing models will do the same. You can also scan barcodes for instant nutritional information. We’ve come a long way from counting the points in a handful of popcorn, that’s for sure. —Adrienne So

Adobe’s Firefly Generative AI Video App Is Here

Adobe claims its Firefly app—which launched in beta this past week—employs the “first commercially safe AI video generation model” to market. It was only available within Adobe Premiere Pro before, allowing you to use text prompts or images to generate videos, but now Firefly is accessible as a web app.

What the company means by “safe” is that its Firefly Video Model injects a watermark to signify parts of the video that have been generated by AI for transparency. Adobe also says Firefly was trained on licensed videos, meaning the generated video content is safe to use without worrying about intellectual property theft. Now you can just worry about your job being replaced in a few years once it can generate full-length videos!

Alongside the new web app, Adobe also has new subscription options (of course). The Firefly Standard plan is $10 per month with 2,000 credits, enough for 20 five-second AI videos in 1080p. Firefly Pro upgrades that to 7,000 credits, which equals up to 70 five-second 1080p videos for $30 per month. There will be a Firefly Premium plan in the future that offers even more credits for “high-volume creators,” but no details have been shared yet.

Apple TV Comes to Android

Android users pining for Ted Lasso on the go had good news this week, as the Apple TV app is finally available for Android phones and tablets. Not to be confused with the streaming box of the same name, the Apple TV app serves up the brand’s Apple TV Plus subscription streaming service, a formidable player in the crowded streaming marketplace, thanks to Lasso and other popular originals like The Morning Show and the addictive sci-fi thriller, Severance, now in its long-awaited second season.

Other enticing Apple TV content includes critically acclaimed original movies like Coda and Martin Scorsese’s marathon period film, Killers of the Flower Moon, and live sports like Friday Night Baseball, Sunday Night Soccer, and access to MLS Season Pass (for an additional fee).

Apple TV Plus has been available across all major smart TVs and streaming devices for years, but in that oh-so-Apple way, the app has been conspicuously unavailable for Android users since its launch in 2019. The biggest advantage for Androidian Apple TV Plus subscribers may be the ability to download Apple TV series and movies for offline viewing, a feature most other major streamers provide. —Ryan Waniata

PSA: Amazon Is Ending Kids+ Support for iOS and Android

Amazon announced last year that Amazon Kids+ would no longer be available for new customers on iOS or Android devices, and would eventually be going away for everyone on those platforms. That day is rapidly approaching. On March 10, Amazon will no longer support the Kids+ app for iOS and Android. It’s unclear exactly what this means, but the message is clear in spirit if not letter: Amazon Kids+ requires an Amazon device like a Kindle, Fire Tablet, Echo Speaker, or Fire TV. —Scott Gilbertson