product

Toni Urban, Pixel Product Manager, about the Pixel 10a

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The new Pixel 10a comes to the fore to compete once again in the mid-range, a territory that over the years has become more ambitious and also more demanding. Each new generation tries to get a little closer to the experience of the top modelsincorporating advances that previously seemed reserved for more expensive devices. However, in this process there is a balance that does not depend only on technology, but on the ability to keep the essence of this segment intact. And it is precisely at that point where Google’s new proposal seems to be located. This balance does not arise in isolation, but from the product development process itself. In order to better understand this approach, we have spoken with Tony UrbanPixel Product Manager at Google, directly involved in this generation. Their answers allow us to contextualize the decisions made in the new Pixel 10a and frame its proposal within the evolution that the range has followed in recent years. Pixel 10a technical sheet GOOGLE PIXEL 10a DIMENSIONS AND WEIGHT 153.9mm x 73.0mm x 9.0mm 183g SCREEN 6.3 inch pOLED Resolution: 1080 x 2424 422 pixels per inch Refresh up to 120 Hz Brightness up to 2,000 nits in HDR Maximum brightness of up to 3,000 nits outdoors Corning Gorilla Glass 7i PROCESSOR Google Tensor G4 Titan M2 Security Coprocessor MEMORY 8GB STORAGE 128GB / 256GB BATTERY and charging 5,100 mAh Wire: 45W Wireless: 10W REAR CAMERAS Major: 48 MP with f/1.7 aperture and 82º field of view Wide angle: 13 MP with f/2.2 aperture and 120º field of view FRONT CAMERA 13 MP with f/2.2 aperture and 96.1º field of view Operating system Android 16 SOUND Dual stereo speakers two microphones CONNECTIVITY Wi-Fi 6E 5G sub 6 GHz Dual SIM (nanoSIM + eSIM) Bluetooth 6 NFC USB-C (USB 2.0) OTHERS IP68 certification On-screen fingerprint reader PRICE 549 euros Pixel 10a, an update that focuses on coherence The Pixel 10a largely maintains the design that was so well received in the previous generation: straight edges with gently rounded corners, a compact format and that feeling of lightness that, when we hold it in our hands, does not give up transmitting solidity. It is when turning it that the most visible changes begin to appear. The rear now adopts a completely flat surface and any trace of relief on the camera module disappearsa discreet adjustment in appearance, but significant within the silent evolution with which Google has been fine-tuning the visual identity of the Pixel family for some time. Behind this iteration there is also a reflection on what those who choose the A series really expect. As Urban tells us, the development has focused on the aspects that these users value most, with photography at the center. “Having a great camera is important for everyone, no matter what budget they have. And we know that at Pixel we do it really well, so being able to take many of those learnings from the Pro range to the A series is something we know how to execute very well.” That same logic explains the commitment to a completely flat rear: “In this generation we were able to do it with a completely flat surface… because we were able to transfer a large part of the physical optics to computational photography in the software layer and in the processor. “You still get the same great photos you’re used to in the Pixel family, but in that nice flat format.” There are decisions that are not explained only from the technical sheet, but from the idea of ​​balance that defines a device. On the Pixel 10a, one of them is the continuity of your processing platform: Google is betting on it again G4 tensioner already present in the Pixel 9aa detail that does not go unnoticed in a newly presented phone. Far from being an isolated gesture, this choice points to a concrete way of understanding the evolution within the mid-range, as our interviewee explains to us. “We had to make tough engineering decisions to maintain that $549 price point, which we’ve maintained for four generations. The chipset is part of that consideration. We knew we could still deliver the best of Google’s AI and the best camera experience with the chip we had; we didn’t feel like we were sacrificing quality, and we still made important improvements.” Beyond that internal decision, the Pixel 10a introduces noticeable advances in everyday use. One of the most obvious appears in the 6.3-inch Actua screen, now capable of reaching up to 3,000 nits of peak brightness and offer better legibility outdoors, accompanied by improvements in connectivity and loading speed that reinforce the feeling of an updated device without altering its position within the mid-range. They are less striking changes than a leap in processor, but which many users can appreciate. This progressive evolution also extends to photography and functions supported by artificial intelligence, two classic pillars of the Pixel family. The camera system arrives practically unchanged in terms of figures, with a 48 MP main sensor accompanied by a 13 MP ultra wide angle. To improve the experience, it relies on functions such as Best Shot, include me either Camera Coach. It remains to be seen, however, how all this balance translates into real use. Sustained performance, temperature management or the behavior of the device on a day-to-day basis will be key to understanding how far this proposal really goes. It will be something that we will analyze in detail in Xataka when we can test it thoroughly. Until then, and at least from what we can see, the Pixel 10a can be a very valid option for those willing to spend 549 euros in exchange for the more direct Google and Android experience within the mid-range. Images | Xataka | Google In Xataka | The CEO of Nothing is clear that we do not need a high-end mobile phone every year. A mix of RAM crisis and common sense

Musk doesn’t have the best model or the best product, but he has something more important in the AI ​​race: SpaceX

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Elon Musk has done it again: he has changed one of his companies from the right pocket to the left. In 2016, when his company Solar City was in the doldrums, he took advantage of the fact that Tesla was going like a rocket to save the company. Now it is xAI that needs a push in the age of artificial intelligence and, after a few brief rumorsconfirmation came: SpaceX has purchased xAI. Or what is the same: an Elon Musk company has bought another Elon Musk company. It’s an ideal move, but also a morrocotudo mess. In short. The announcement came late into our night. As part of a vertical integration, aerospace will absorb the operations of xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company. It was an extremely rare agreement. When it occurs a business purchasewe know the numbers, but here we only have some ideas about the goal. Musk has been deliberately opaque and has justified the movement as a restructuring to guarantee “freedom of expression”, with a story based on energy, the development of technology and something we have been talking about for some time: the need for exploit outer space as a source of energy and giant heatsink for the increasingly numerous data centers. One million satellites. In fact, the operation came shortly after we learned that SpaceX had filed with the US FCC a project to launch one million Starlink satellites. Currently, there are about 9,000, plus another few thousand companies like Amazon or chinese satellites and Europeans…and astronomers are already complaining about how difficult it is to observe beyond low orbit. With a million satellites from SpaceX alone, the amount of potential space debris will increase stratospherically, but Starlink is not a simple satellite system to have Internet anywhere on the planet: They are potential data centers. Musk himself, when companies like amazon either Google They began to be very vocal about the need for moving data centers into spacepointed out that SpaceX already had them and that it was easy to convert its satellites into computing centers. In space there is Unlimited, uninterrupted energyheat dissipation is much simpler because air or water is not needed as on Earth and the information is transmitted to terrestrial centers using lasers, eliminating the need for Expensive fiber optic interconnections. SpaceX works. And, in Musk’s statement, it is stated that this demand for energy and computing power to feed AI is almost impossible to cover with terrestrial solutions, so the most logical thing is the space exodus from data centers. And, of course, one plus one equals two: SpaceX has the infrastructure and xAI needs it. But beyond the synergy, there is another reality. SpaceX has become a solid and profitable company. It is the only one that, right now, can routinely transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station. It has become an essential piece for both NASA and the Department of Defense and, in addition, it has the aforementioned Starlink system that has crept in, perhaps too much, into the communications infrastructure of countries like Ukraine. xAI burns money. On the other hand, xAI shows the symptoms of a company focused on artificial intelligence. This valued at more than $230 billion and has raised several tens of billions in several rounds of financing, but is burning money at a rate of approximately one billion a month. This is typical, as we say, of companies in the growth phase, and the executives themselves have stated that they have plans and resources to keep spending aggressively, but everything has a limit. xAI requires enormous amounts of energy, resources, computing and is developing its own chips. All of that costs money, and putting data centers in space with existing infrastructure like Starlink’s can help ease the burden. In the economic and energy sense, it is a brilliant operation. When other technology companies want to start filling the space with their data centers, SpaceX will already be there. Morrocotudo mess. Therefore, and in the end, what Musk has done is unite a company in an aggressive investment phase with another that is solid and has established contacts with the US government. SpaceX is the highest xAI carrying vehicle and it looks like a win-win manual. Now, it’s also a tremendous mess. Because xAI is not just xAI: it is (Twitter), and now SpaceX has all that power under one umbrella. xAI manages military intelligence and we have already mentioned that Ukraine threw itself into the arms of Starlinkrelying on its infrastructure during the conflict with Russia. SpaceX is no longer just an aerospace company, it is that and much more: a brain, a social network with private data of tens of millions of people. And in a Europe that is fighting for their technological sovereignty and information protection, SpaceX can go from being a partner for a specific mission to something to look askance at. Image | The White House (edited) In Xataka | From $100 billion romance to silent divorce: NVIDIA and OpenAI’s relationship is disintegrating

The regulations allow you to take home a product from three weeks ago

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We go to the supermarket, we pick up a package of eggs where it says in big letters “Category A” or “Fresh Eggs” and we assume that those chickens They laid the eggs a couple of days ago. But the reality is very different, and the legal and biological sections follow very different paths. And it’s something easy to see if we look closely. on best-before dates and if we do the necessary math we will see that what the law considers “fresh” can take almost a month in the world. Many doubts. Seeing this, the most logical questions we can have in this case is if it is safe to consume or even if it is legal. And the reality is that it is. But there is a small print in the 28-day regulations that you need to know before deciding whether to make a curdled tortilla or homemade mayonnaise. The 28 day clock. To understand what we are buying, we must first go to the BOE and to European regulations. In this case, category A eggs —those that we usually find on the supermarket shelves— have a very specific commercial life cycle. According to marketing regulations, these eggs must be classified, marked and packaged within 10 days of laying. But this is where we have the key information: the best before date is set in a maximum of 28 days from laying. That is, the law allows an egg to be legally sold and consumed up to four weeks after it comes out of the hen. In this way, as they collect the labeling technical guides and AESAN itselfthat is the deadline to supply them to the consumer. Therefore, under the legal umbrella, “fresh” does not mean “placed yesterday.” Means “within the 28 day window“. How to know the real age. This is where we find the picaresque and calculation that many popularizers like the doctor Fernández Viso has shared on his TikTok account. In this case, the packaging rarely says the “selling date”, because it is not mandatory, if the ‘best before’ date appears. And with this you can do a kind of reverse engineering. To do this, let’s give an example. If we are in the supermarket on January 8 and see a container of eggs with the best before date of January 18, the operation is quite simple. The deadline in this case is 28 days after placement, and if they expire on January 18, it means they were placed around December 21. That is why nothing fresh. Its meaning. Although originally this time frame was limited to 21 days in order to guarantee proximity and consumption a little more, the reality is that it was changed to 28 days to reduce food waste. It is not that the egg magically stays “ultra fresh” until the 28th, it is that it has been prioritized that they do not end up in the trash if they are still suitable for consumption. The truly fresh one. There is a category that is much more recent, and it is the one that says “extra” or “extra fresh” on its packaging. The EU Delegated Regulation specifies that this term can only be used during the first 9 days after laying. If you see that label, you are guaranteed real freshness. If you don’t see it, you are looking at a standard egg that can be from 10 to 28 days old. The problem is that, in the consumer’s head, the term “fresh” on the shelf is interpreted loosely. Good business practice guides recognize this disparity: the legality of labeling does not match what people intuitively understand by freshness. Furthermore, the common commercial practice of mixing lots on shelves, which is legal as long as traceability is respectedmakes us lose the perception of the exact age of each container of eggs. Food safety. Knowing the age of the egg is not only a question of gastronomic quality, it is a safety issue. The AESAN and the EFSA (European Food Safety Authority) warn that extending the storage time increases the risk of Salmonella poisoning. Risk mitigation. This is a risk that grows exponentially the longer eggs are stored, both in the store and at home. Therefore, the experts’ recommendations are clear, and depend on the calendar we follow. Specifically, for cooking, that is, for the egg to be well set or cooked, it can be rushed until the best-before date without problem. But for raw consumption such as mayonnaise or tartars, freshness is critical. In this case, it is recommended to use eggs that are more than two weeks away from expiration. Images | Jakub Kapusnak In Xataka | Having a cup of coffee as soon as you wake up seems like a great idea. Science has something to say about it

They are the largest product experiment in the world

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Tu Le, founder of Sino Auto Insightshe explained in the podcast High Capacity How what Toyota took 36 months or more to develop (from design to production), companies like BYD or XPeng complete in 12 or 16 months. Modular platforms, digital simulations, OTA updates… all of this has replaced classic industrial processes. And they test features that almost no Western manufacturer would dare to include. Why is it important. What Toyota took three years to develop (design, prototype, validate, produce…), companies like BYD or XPeng execute in just over a year. And without reducing quality. What they do is change the process: They use modular platforms that stretch without redesigning everything. Digital simulations instead of physical prototypes. And software updates that improve the car after purchasing it, as Tesla already marked the rest of the industry. It’s a real-time product experiment. If a feature is unused or buggy, they send an OTA update after a few days. If a model is not selling well, they update it in 12 months. It is the logic of consumer electronics applied to the car. In detail. Chinese cars incorporate features that in the West might seem absurd or reckless. BYD, for example, sells models with drones on the roof that can fly out following us. NIO installs chips whose performance is disabled for months until an update activates them, which serves to increase the value of the car over time instead of simply depreciating it. They are proposals that reflect that they understand a consumer much younger than the average Mercedes buyer in Europe, hyper-digitized and accustomed to everything responding instantly. BYD’s ultra-fast charging promises times “as fast as refueling gasoline”. XPeng and NIO assisted driving systems They already operate on long-distance trips with minimal driver intervention. The aforementioned Tu Le and his colleague Lei Xing drove from Beijing to Shenzhen using the XPeng system for 90% of the trip. They then repeated the route on a NIO using only battery swapping. Both experiences worked. Between the lines. The founders of these companies do not come from the automotive world. Li Xiang (Li Auto), Li Bin (NIO) and He Xiaopeng (XPeng) come from the world of the Internet and apps. When they decided to make cars, they didn’t start thinking about factories or supply chains. They thought about user experience, interface and functionality. Then they learned to manufacture from that. This change in the process explains a lot: a traditional manufacturer begins to optimize thinking about industrial efficiency, one born in technology optimizes for the user and then decides how to take that to production. The context. China sold 25 million vehicles in 2025. One in every two was electric or hybrid: more than 12 million units. In that mass market, any product experiment has instant and scale feedback. If something works, it is replicated within weeks. If it fails, it is corrected just as quickly. BYD went from 700,000 units six years ago to 4.6 million in 2025manufacturing its own chips and batteries. Vertical control that allows you to iterate faster than any competitor dependent on external suppliers. And now what? Volkswagen invested in XPeng and will launch vehicles based on its platform this year. Stellantis bought 19% of Leapmotor in 2023. Ford licensed battery technology from CATL in 2022. They are implicit recognitions that the Chinese experiment works and the West needs to learn from it. Renault directly went there Learn how to build a cheap electric car in a short time. The question is not whether Chinese cars are better, but whether the rest of the industry can adopt this model of accelerated development without breaking everything built over a century. In Xataka | The year of Chinese consolidation in Spain: MG, Omoda and BYD close a spectacular 2025 and are among the best sellers Featured image | XPeng

While everything is going through the roof, a product is cheaper than ever in Spain: cocaine

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Those who are dedicated to probing the coca market have encountered a curious phenomenon: while the CPI rises and the prices of products such as the coffee either cocoacocaine undertakes the reverse path. Its cost seems to be in free fall. If a few years ago there was talk of more than 30,000 euros per kilogram of white powder, today there are sources that place it at barely 13,000a collapse that also coincides with an apparent increase of traffic and a high consumption. A difficult equation to solve. What do the figures say? It is not easy to talk about cocaine trafficking and the price. There is data and people dedicated to studying it, but for obvious reasons much of the information available is based on estimates. I shared the last one a few days ago The Catalan Newspaper in an extensive report in which he assures that right now a kilo of cocaine on the black market is around 13,000 euros. The same newspaper recalls that not so long ago a kilo brick was around 20,000 euros, but if you use the newspaper archive you will find information which show that a mere decade ago it was priced at between 27,000 and 29,000 euros in the Rías Baixas or even above 30,000 in Madrid and Valencia. What’s more, just a few months ago The Voice of Galicia assured that the official reference with which the Ministry of the Interior worked when calculating the value of the seized drugs set the value of a kilo at just over 30,500 euros. Is it something new? No. And that’s the curious thing. The media has been reporting on the drop in the price of coca for more than a year, sometimes with slight swings. Now does it The Newspaperbut a year ago I did it the Galician press and in 2023 it had the same message ABCwhich already at that time included the words of Fernando Iglesias, head of the Customs Surveillance Service in Galicia: “Its price has plummeted and that leads to a brutal offer.” “Cocaine prices have been devalued by almost half compared to just a few years ago, and that is a very clear indicator of the current abundance of this drug,” agreed the head of the Galician Foundation against Drug Trafficking. According to the data what he was driving at the time ABCthe kilo of Colombian coca that 20 years ago was paid for 30,000 euros had gone to price 17,000. Prices, however, always refer to a kilo. Curiously, this accelerated cheapening of drugs does not seem to have transferred to the street. Where the gram still costs the same than before: it remains around the 50 and 60 eurosdespite the fact that those who handle large quantities of drugs do so at a much lower cost. Are there more trends? Yes. Again they are based on estimates and indications, but they are just as interesting. The first tells us about the type of drug that is consumed. Not only has a kilo of coca become cheaper, it also seems to be purer. That at least is what emerges from the data from Energy Control, an agency dedicated to analyzing samples delivered by anonymous buyers. Their studies show that, on average, the samples that arrive have a purity that exceeds 70%. Other studies They have also noted an increase in purity. What about consumption? If there is a clear (and relevant) trend, it is the one that tells us about demand, which can be analyzed based on two key clues: studies on consumption and seizures of caches. In the first case (demand), the European Drug Report 2025 stands out, which reveals that Spain is the country with a highest percentage of population that has taken coca at some point in their life. The figure here reaches 13.3%, well above France and Denmark (9.4%). Do we have more clues? Yes. The European study, presented in June, slid that there are indications that consumption is increasing in the EU and even advised administrations to prepare for a rebound in demand for treatments. The percentage of people who admit to having tried the white powder also has been increasing over the last few years. The latest EADES survey (2024) indicates that 13% of individuals from 15 to 64 years old admit having used cocaine at some time, which marks the maximum in the historical series. In 2022 that indicator marked 11.7% and if we go to the early years of the 2000s the data was even lower. The Man Project Observatory also has noted its increase among users seeking to detoxify: in a matter of a decade it has gone from being the main addiction of 27% of users to extending its shadow to reach approximately 41%. What about seizures? They are another thermometer. At the end of the day, whether more or fewer caches are ‘hunted’ depends on the authorities’ aim, but also on the intensity of traffic. The Newspaper remember that the police only manage to seize a relatively low percentage of all the drugs that arrive at the ports. In the absence of more updated data, the 2024 Annual Drug Statistics published in July by the Intelligence Center against Terrorism and Organized Crime (CITCO) shows that last year Interior recorded an increase in cocaine seizures of 5.2%, which places them at approximately 123 tons. “There is more cocaine than ever”recognize police sources to The Newspaper about the situation that exists in cities like Barcelona. The same medium specifies that in 2023 and 2024 Customs Surveillance located just over 60 million tons of coca hidden in containers arriving by sea from South America. The reason for these data? One possibility is a change in routes that reduces the volume traveled through Holland and Belgium and places Spain as a gateway to Europe. What about the prices? If demand does not seem to be suffering… Why are prices falling, at least in the channels where kilos are moved (another … Read more

In 1995, the first product in eBay history was sold. The only problem is that it was broken

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In 1995 the Internet was not what it is now. Many of the great companies and sites related to the network were born then. AuctionWeb was the first official name of what we now know as eBay. Its creator, Pierre Omidyar, gave that name to a personal project that he wrote from his home in Silicon Valley taking advantage of one of the classic long weekends in the US, Labor Day. How do they count in The Perfect Store: Inside eBayfaced with the need to test whether that personal auction website worked, Omidyar grabbed the first thing he had on hand: a laser pointer. The choice was not random. Two weeks after buying it, it had broken, so he thought that if he managed to sell it, he wouldn’t lose anything if they gave him very little money for it. For a week that laser pointer that had cost him 30 dollars He failed to receive a single offer. Pierre Omidyar had not lied and admitted in the description of the item on AuctionWeb that it was indeed broken. There was no way to make it work. A week after being published on the Internet, that AuctionWeb object received the first offer for it. Pierre Omidyar asked for one dollar but the auction ended up closing at $14.83. What was his surprise that, even though he had already warned it in the advertisement, he preferred to make sure that it was clear to the buyer that the object purchased was broken and wrote him an email. Despite everything, the buyer kept it because it was just what he was looking for. This was eBay in 1995, when it was a personal project called AuctionWeb Mark Fraser I had seen some of those pointers and wanted one. But they were still quite expensive, on the order of $100 in those years, so he relied on his skill as electrical engineer to build yours. And he needed a part that he thought he would get from the broken pointer that was being sold on a new online site that he had found out about through a referral in the forums and information exchange places that he frequented on the Internet. Today, and as he confessed in a funny video that could be seen at eBay’s 20th anniversary party, the pointer still doesn’t work but he still has it. In Xataka |

The normal thing when a product is successful is that the manufacturer renews it the following year. Hello iPhone Air

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Apple has a problem, almost a syndrome with the fourth iPhone. For years it has been trying to integrate a new variant of the “classic” iPhone into the family, but the success of these models has always been limited. It happened with the iPhone mini and then with the iPhone Plus in its different versions. And now it seems to be happening with his brand new iPhone Air. No iPhone Air 2 at the moment. As indicated in The InformationApple has warned “engineers and suppliers that they would remove the future iPhone Air (next generation) from planning without providing a new release date.” Three different sources have confirmed that Apple has no intention at the moment of relaunching a second iteration of the iPhone Air. We expected it in 2026. Theoretically, the second-generation iPhone Air should have been launched next fall alongside the iPhone 18 family and the rumored iPhone Fold. And it was going to be much better. It was expected to be even lighter than the current iPhone Air and still have a higher capacity battery. In fact, sources close to the project also reveal that Apple was working on a new cooling system that debuted with the iPhone 17 Pro and that would be adapted to those hypothetical iPhone Air (2026). It was even rumored that instead of a single camera I would have two. Bad sales. The reason for that decision seems to be sales of the iPhone Air below expectations. News had already appeared that Apple had ordered a huge production cut to just 80% of the original capacity: that ultralight model does not seem to have attracted the mass public. Minimum production. In The Information they confirm this reduction in production. According to their data, Foxconn has “dismantled all but one and a half production lines, and expect to stop production completely at the end of this month.” Apple’s other major manufacturing partner for the iPhone Air, Luxshare, already stopped its production of this model at the end of October. New release schedule. Following the news, what is now expected is that Apple will present its new family of devices in two different phases: Fall 2026: iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, iPhone Fold (unofficial name) Spring 2027: iPhone 18, iPhone 18e The other possibility. Sources close to the company reveal that the iPhone Air could simply be suffering important changes —like those mentioned— for a theoretical second generation. That would make its development process a little longer, but it is not ruled out that this model will end up appearing in spring 2027 along with the iPhone 18 and iPhone 18e. The condemnation of iPhones that are liked but do not sell. we loved it the iPhone mini—like everyone else who bought it—but it didn’t sell much. The iPhone Plus also proved to be an interesting product, but it didn’t catch on either. In both cases, Apple ended up abandoning these models to focus on what worked in sales, and now seems to be doing the same, or, at least, adjusting production to demand, something that makes perfect sense from a business point of view. In Xataka | If the question is which of the big tech companies is winning the AI ​​race, the answer is: none

participate in our tournament and choose your favorite retro product

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The Xataka NordVPN Awards 2025 They approach slowly, but without pause. In these awards we choose (and you choose) the best technology products, the best innovations of the present that underpin the future, the crème de la crème, Oh. But in this edition there will also be space to look to the past and fondly remember those products that marked our childhoods. From Xataka we launch the Xataka Retro Award and we do it with a twist. It is not a new category in the Awards, but a tribute to the technology of yesteryear. Instead of the usual voting (xatakeros and jury vote for their favorite candidates through forms, here you have them all), this prize will be decided with a tournament through Instagram and Instagram Stories. So grab your PDAs, dust off your Walkman and look for your memory cards, there’s a real shot of nostalgia coming. when and where Duel of nostalgic titans Over the next few days it will take place in the stories of the official profile of Xataka on Instagram the Xataka Retro Prize Tournament. Through the stories we will show the intersections of the products and you, our xatakeros, will have to choose your favorite products by voting in the polls. NordVPN offers you a fast and stable connection thanks to your more than 6,300 servers in more than 110 countries. Enjoy advanced cybersecurity tools with Threat Protection Pro™, securely access your streaming platforms favorites wherever you are and enjoy the best offers on flights and hotels. Advice offered by the brand We have arranged the products into four categories, each corresponding to a junction. In the video game console category, the Game Boy will compete against the PlayStation 1. In the music category, the Walkman against the iPod. In computers, the legendary ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. Finally, in telephony, the Nokia 3310 against the Motorola V8. Here we leave you the crossings and the days on which they will take place. Quarter finals crossing vote results Game Boy vs PlayStation 1 Monday, October 27 Tuesday, October 28 Walkman vs iPod Wednesday, October 29 Thursday, October 30 ZX Spectrum vs Commodore 64 Monday, November 3 Tuesday, November 4 Nokia 3310 vs Motorola V8 Wednesday, November 5 Thursday, November 6 Semifinals crossing vote results Semifinal 1 Friday, November 7 Monday, November 10 Semifinal 2 Monday, November 10 Tuesday, November 11 grand finale crossing vote results Semifinal 1 Tuesday, November 11 Wednesday, November 12, and at the Xataka NordVPN 2025 Awards gala You still have time to get your tickets for the gala Xataka NordVPN Awards 2025 on November 20 in Madrid! Join us and discover the best technological products of the year in a free event full of gadgets, humor and surprises. Advice offered by the brand The winners will be revealed on November 12 and they will also have a space in the Xataka NordVPN Awards 2025. The first crossing has already begun, so take a look at the stories from Xataka on Instagram and choose your favorite product. I wish I could have done it on MySpace or Tuenti, but it is what it is. Thank you very much for participating!

Printers have been a terrible product for 30 years. The fault is Nash’s balance

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Let’s go back to 1949. A young mathematician named John Nash Find an original idea for your thesis at Princeton University. Game theory already existed thanks to the previous works (1944) by John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, but the von Neumann model focused on zero -sum games (one player wins, the other loses). Nash had a spark of genius in proposing that in any game there should be at least one point where no player could improve his situation by changing his strategy unilaterally. Formalized that idea in a short two -page article (‘Equilibrium Points in N-Person Games‘) In January 1950, and with it revolutionized history. Including printers. Is the printer the worst technological product in history? And is that the printers is an almost manual example to apply the call Nash balance. These types of products have been following – at least, to a large extent – the economic model of the machin and blades: you sell cheap the first, but face the second. Consumers know that when we buy an ink printer, the price will be economical, almost ridiculous. But we also have assumed that ink and cartridges for those printers will be very expensive. And if they are not, what will end up being is Ink subscription… either to the printers themselves. Not only that: in the last 30-40 years we have seen how printers have become-probably- The worst technological product in history. It is no longer only that printers can get stuck or work erratically. The real problem is terrifying form in which manufacturers have protected their business, preventing in all possible ways that users can for example use Compatible cartridges and tonniers of third parties. Nash’s balance explains very well why manufacturers do what they do. Imagine two great manufacturers such as HP and Canon with two options: Expensive and blocked cartridges (current model) Cheap and open cartridges (which allow competition and lower prices) Given this situation, HP and Canon managers know that three types of market situations can be found: If both keep expensive and blocked cartridges: they earn a lot If one “opens” its cartridges and lowers prices and the other remains closed: the one that opens loses income and the one that is still closed earns more … or the opposite. Whatever happens, one will end up winning a lot and the other losing a lot. If both open: there is strong competition again, but both win less Given that scenario, manufacturers make an inevitable business decision: they close their cartridge technology and sell it face Because that’s what gives more benefits to everyone. Nash’s balance is fully fulfilled here: it describes a stable point for each player (company) but does not ensure that the result is the best for the whole. Collectively and from the social point of view, the optimal would be to open the technology and lower prices: companies would earn less, but the market would be larger and fair. Reality, as we know, is very different. But maybe that reality can change. We need a “Tesla printer” The printer user has therefore 30 years constant bleeding which translates into an exaggerated expense in cartridges and also in an erosion of time and productivity. What has happened with printers is something extraordinary: We have normalized that printers are almost more a problem than a solution. The Open Printer, a striking printer project “Open Source” and is based on the use of HP cartridges but accepts compatible third -party cartridges. Source: The Open Printer. And that is why we have a panorama in which there is a great opportunity for a revolution in the printers market. This segment is hungry for an ethical disruptive: the manufacturer who abandons the current Nash balance can change everything here. It is a mature field in which an innovative based on transparency and reliability could not only capture the market, but even redefine it. What the market needs is a kind of “Tesla printer”. And we refer to a printer that causes in this segment what Tesla managed to provoke in the car industry: a machine that has a great design, a reliable operation and that is also designed to last. But above all, that offers an alternative to current printers and their dictatorial philosophy with cartridges. Here are some projects underway. The project The Open Printerfrom the Parisian startup Open Tooks, is intended as A repair ink printer, Open Sourceand that focuses its operation on reparable cartridges. Its creators claim that this printer is created “with standard mechanical components and with modular parts”, which theoretically simplifies its assembly, modification and repair. Source: The Open Printer. In fact, the Open Printer works with a small Raspberry Pi W plate as an operations center. There are no proprietary firmware or cartridges with DRM. It is designed to use HP63 cartridges (HP 302 in Europe) both in black and in color but they serve both those of HP and third parties. And not only can you print on AAR or A4 folios, but even in 27 mm paper rolls. There are no details about its price or availability for the moment, but the idea will not be launched directly, and will first be launched as a collective financing project. We know for previous failures (and frauds) that such financing models It has its risksbut in this case that option seems reasonable and we only have to wait for the best of the project. That may not be the only launch in this regard, and in fact There is an even more interesting rumor. Frameworkthe company that has conquered us with its repairable laptops, seems to be considering the idea of ​​creating its own printer (modular and repairable? We expect that!). This is how at least a recent message indicates in X in which they commented on how “one of you must have sabotaged the office printer and has forced us to manufacture one. It is not possible that HP is selling printers that broken.” … Read more

AI has become the best example that if you don’t pay for the product, you are the product

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They said it in The documentary ‘The dilemma of social networks’: If you are not paying for the product, you are the product. Surely you have heard the phrase more than once in reference to the apps and services that we do not pay with money, but with another type of currency. Social networks, browsers, GPS apps … almost all They collect our information staff and navigation data to do business. Artificial intelligence apps are not different, in fact, there is a career to attract more and more users and forge alliances to get data with which to continue training their chatbots. Improve experience. “When you share your content with us, you help our models more precise since it can better solve your specific problems,” this phrase is taken from the Chatgpt Privacy Policy And in the one of Gemini There are other similar ones. Anthropic was the only one who held the conversations with Claude privately, but Yesterday they announced that they changed their policy. Our personal information, use data and especially conversations serve to continue training and improve. We can disable this option if we want, but we have to be we who do it. By default it is activated. Data shortage. AI needs many data to be trained, many. With the first language models all kinds of content were used, including Content protected by copyright as books or images of works of art. But the data is not infinite. At the end of 2021 there was already a talk of a shortage problem already early this year, Elon Musk said that AI had already consumed all human knowledge. This is a problem for the advance of AI and would be responsible for The rhythm has slowed down. Solutions. IA companies have had to look for life to get new data. OpenAI transcribed a million youtube hours To train GPT-4, Google decided that it would use Any information published on the Internet to improve your AI and Musk believes that the future is in the synthetic data generated by AI itself. But there is something that can also be used to train AI and they are our conversations with it. With the first models they did not have so many users, but currently the volume of data that users generate is much greater. Only Chatgpt has 800 million usersit sounds like a booty too juicy not to use it. Giving away. The conversations we have with ChatgPT can be useful, but it is even more useful when they are data from more specific groups. They count on Rest of World That to achieve this, IA companies are forging alliances with other companies and organizations that allow them to access data that cannot be achieved Web scraping. Openai has been associated with Shopee and offers its Plus plan for VIP users in Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand. Google offers its free Gemini Pro plan for a year to students in India and Perplexity Pro is available free through operators such as Movistar or Airtel in India … These alliances increase their user base and provide real data of consumption of specific groups, which allows them to train their models more precisely. The Chinese case. China is an example of how to access specific data can give advantage when developing effective solutions. Pharmaceutical research companies that use AI have access to the national health system data, which covers more than 600 million people. This gives them a competitive advantage and has made Chinese companies sign Millionaire agreements with large pharmaceuticals. Worry. Experts such as Sameer Patil, director of the observer Research Foundation, calls to establish a clearer regulation, especially in sensitive sectors such as health or finance: “participating companies will have to ensure that data sets are not personalized and anonymous,” he says in statements to Rest of World. Image | Chatgpt In Xataka | Goal goes for all with AI: announces a data center almost as large as Manhattan and up to 65,000 million investment

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