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Sony appears to be quietly stepping back from physical media. Its last remaining four-K Blu-ray player in Japan has been marked out of stock, and retailers have reportedly been told not to expect new shipments. It may signal the end of Sony's standalone player business entirely — a quiet farewell to a format that once felt like the future.
Shifting to the smart home, Philips Hue has rolled out its new artificial intelligence lighting assistant, bringing what it calls Custom AI Behaviors to the Hue app. The catch is that you'll need the pricier Hue Bridge Pro to access it, and the company itself is tempering expectations — the AI creates behaviors you currently cannot edit, which raises real questions about how much control users are actually giving up.
And on the economics front, two researchers looked at California's proposed billionaire tax and came away with starkly opposite conclusions — one projecting a windfall for state coffers, the other warning of capital flight. What California decides could set a precedent for how the entire country approaches taxing extreme wealth, and the disagreement among experts tells you just how uncertain that ground really is.
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