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More than half of iPhone users haven’t upgraded to a 6 or 6S yet

To Apple enthusiasts, it’s hard to imagine that someone might go more than a year or two without upgrading to the latest and greatest iPhone.

With new plans from AT&T, Verizon, and Apple itself that make it easy (if perhaps not cost-effective) to trade in your iPhone for a new model every year, many gadget lovers are well-equipped to always have the newest iPhone. But many, many people — a majority of iPhone owners, in fact — do not upgrade every year, or even every 15 months, according to data released by Apple CEO Tim Cook on this quarter’s conference call.

In fact, only 40 percent of iPhone users who — deep breath for caveat — owned an iPhone the day before the iPhone 6 was released in September 2014, have upgraded to one of the…

Microsoft’s News Pro app is an iOS competitor to Apple News and Flipboard

Microsoft’s experimental app outfit, the Microsoft Garage, released another iOS app today called News Pro. The reader is similar to Apple’s own offering, Apple News, and mobile mainstay Flipboard. You can login with a Facebook or LinkedIn account, where you’ll pick topics of interest like finance, tech, and design to get a selection of algorithmically chosen articles in a more mobile-friendly reading format. News Pro has a highlights section for getting a list of top stories and an explore tab for checking out new topics organized by industries, organizations, skills, and products. That type of granularity may be useful to some users, especially those interested in certain subtopics like coding languages.

By linking with either your…

Kanye West’s new album is now called Waves

Days after Kanye West announced that work was completed on long-awaited new record Swish and posted the tracklist for what he believes will be “the best album of all time,” something major about its release has changed: Swish is no more, and now we’re all waiting on Waves.

Werner Herzog explains why happiness isn’t important

The pursuit of happiness might be enshrined into the US Declaration of Independence and arguably the basis for western civilization, but for legendary German director Werner Herzog, the concept is unimportant. “I find it odd that people are striving for happiness as a primary goal in life,” Herzog said during a panel at this week’s Sundance’s Film Festival in Utah. “I find it silly.” But Herzog — who shared the panel with The Act of Killing director Joshua Oppenheimer — argues he’s not a proper nihilist, just focused on loftier ideals. “I’m interested in other things. Hope or no hope, optimism,” he said. “Being part of something meaningful like striving for justice, or equal rights for all humanity. It’s a much more dignified goal than…

Former Twitter product head Kevin Weil is joining Instagram

Kevin Weil, Twitter’s former VP of product who was among the group of executives who left the company over the weekend, has a new job: Head of Product at Facebook-owned Instagram.

That’s according to multiple sources, who claim Weil was recruited by Instagram for months before announcing his departure from Twitter late Sunday night. The timing makes sense. Peter Deng has been Instagram’s head of product for the past two-plus years, and recently jumped to another Facebook property, Oculus, earlier this month. So the head of product position is (temporarily) vacant.

The Olympus Pen-F is a classic film camera with digital guts

If you like to read photography blogs, this one should come as no surprise. But at least now it’s official: Olympus is resurrecting one of its flagship film rangefinders, the Pen F, as a mirrorless digital camera.

The new Pen-F will be available in the US in early March, will cost $1,199, and — if you like lots of knobs and brushed metal finishes — it could be one of your favorite cameras of 2016.

Unsurprisingly, the Pen-F won’t come with a full-frame sensor the size of a 35mm piece of film. But it is getting an upgrade from the 16-megapixel chip Olympus has been using in its smaller cameras lately. Instead, the Pen-F has an all-new 20-megapixel Micro Four Thirds sensor. (That’s still bigger than the 1-inch sensor found on cameras…

Make your own life-size BB-8 droid for $120

It’s not supplanted R2-D2 in the “cute robots we wish were our best friends” stakes just yet, but The Force Awakens’ BB-8 is getting close. Sadly, we’re at least a few years away from the kind of artificial intelligence that’ll let us create a race of real-life droids. Until then, we can either with Sphero’s smaller version of the Star Wars robot, or — like 17-year-old engineering prodigy Angelo Casimiro — take matters into our own hands.

Angelo’s version of BB-8 is life-size, controllable with an iPhone, and built from just $120 worth of parts. For the body, Angelo took a low-tech approach, slathering a beach ball with paper mache to build the central sphere, before topping it with a domed styrofoam “head.” Inside, Angelo has used an A…

Lyft will give drivers $12.25 million in compensation, but they’re still not employees

Lyft has agreed today to pay drivers $12.25 million in compensation, give them certain benefits, and warn them when they are about to be deactivated, Reuters reports — but the ride-sharing service still won’t classify them as employees. A court filing detailed the settlement, which comes after Lyft drivers brought a lawsuit against the company that argued that they should be classified as employees, and were entitled to travel expenses as part of their work.

An attorney for the Lyft drivers said that the settlement — which still has to be approved by a San Francisco federal court judge — will “result in some significant changes that will benefit the drivers,” but that it did not achieve the reclassification as employees they hoped for….

LG’s next flagship phone will stand out with a unique accessory slot

Yesterday’s earnings report from LG painted a bleak picture of the company’s mobile business, which hasn’t generated meaningful profit since about this time last year, and even then it was only moderately successful. Sources familiar with LG’s plans now tell The Verge that the company is going for a fundamental redesign with its next flagship smartphone, the LG G5. Unlike the G3 and G4 (pictured above) that preceded it, the G5 will not be an evolution of its forebears — it will look and feel “nothing like” those earlier Android smartphones.

The operating system won’t be changing, of course, but LG’s new flagship will have a significantly altered design, with our sources confirming it will feature a new accessory slot at the bottom, as f…

This smart padlock unlocks using just your fingerprint, what could go wrong?

If you use a padlock on a regular basis — at the gym or locking up your bike — then you’ll know the annoyance of misplacing your key or forgetting your combination. (It’s stupid but it happens.) Canadian tech firm Pishon Lab wants to solve this by kitting out padlocks with a security measure that’s become almost essential on smartphones: the fingerprint sensor. The company has launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for its fingerprint-secured TappLock padlock, which Pishon claims is “the ultimate in security and convenience.”