Face: booked

Yet another device to look through, not at.

It seems like AR (augmented reality) and AI (artificial intelligence) are becoming the new acronyms of the tech industry, and every big tech company is racing to have their brand associated with the best of both worlds.
Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook (following the trend of creating a parent company for itself, like Google did with Alphabet), has been at the forefront of the AR headset and AI glasses industry for a while now, with its Meta Quest product line (formerly known as Oculus) and its partnership with Ray-Ban to bring smart glasses to the masses (wow, it rhymes!).

Last week, Meta announced a new collaboration with Oakley, the iconic eyewear brand, to create a new pair of AI smart glasses. Oakley is known for its focus on sports eyewear, and this new pair of shades is no exception.

The new Oakley + Meta AI Glasses feature an open-ear stereo speaker system, a 12MP camera, a 5 microphone array, and a touchpad, plus a significantly improved battery life (compared to the Ray-Ban AI Glasses).

Pre-orders for the Oakley + Meta HSTN Special Edition Glasses open on July 11th, priced at $499. Meta announced that the full lineup (starting at $399) of Oakley + Meta AI Glasses will be available this summer.

Collab Time!!

Who doesn't like having two hi-res screens strapped directly in front of their eyeballs? (asking for a friend)

Meta and Xbox have both recently announced new product collaborations, such as Meta's partnership with Oakley that I just wrote about, and Xbox's collab with Asus to create the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X, which I wrote about two weeks ago.

So it's not much of a surprise that they both decided to team up and create a special edition version of the Meta Quest 3S, the latest in Meta's line of VR headsets. The Meta Quest 3S Xbox Edition comes in a sleek black colorway, accented with the signature Xbox green, with matching accessories.

Keep in mind that it's not really a new product, but rather an Xbox-themed version of the existing Meta Quest 3S.
Despite this, the headset sold out within three days of being announced on June 24th.

A yuge huge backpedal

What happens on the internet stays on the internet.

The T1 phone from the Trump Organization looked fishy from the start.
It claimed to be “Made in America” yet was priced at just $499, didn't have any processor specs available, had a painfully bad photoshop job for the product image, and used a headphone jack.

The phone was announced in early June to celebrate the 10th anniversary of President Trump's first presidential campaign launch.

Now, just a few weeks later, the Trump Phone is no longer advertised as being made in America, one of the phone's primary selling points. A slogan replaces the original “Proudly Made in America” tagline, now reading “American-Proud Design”.

It looks like the Trump Organization may have switched suppliers for the phone (but critics say that it's very likely that they were planning on it being made in China all along), as the specs page for the phone changes the original “6.8"(6.78")Punch Hole AMOLED Screen” with “6.25 inch Punch Hole AMOLED Screen”, and removing the RAM specs altogether, as spotted by The Verge.

Despite all this, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization told CNN that “the T1 phones are proudly being made in America.”

The model number for the T1, 8002, is a complete mystery to all tech news outlets, with one satirical review jokingly suggesting that the previous 8001 designs were thrown out for “not being gold enough”.

I covered the T1 in last week's article, so check it out for more info.

Now it's the Black Screen of Death

Same acronym, tho.

The Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) is a feared and infamous symbol in computing history. It appears when there's a fatal computer error that Microsoft Windows can't recover from, and needs to reboot to fix. During the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, which left over 8 million PCs around the world blue-screened, the BSoD was seen everywhere from airports to hospitals to restaurants.

It made its first appearance on Windows 95 as white text on a blue background. Because of the severity of these crashes, it earned the nickname “Blue Screen of Death”, and often included information on what caused the crash.

Windows NT and Windows 2000 brought more detail to the error messages, providing IT staff and computer engineers more context on what caused the issue, helping them better diagnose the problems.

The BSoD generally remained the same with a few small tweaks until Windows 8, which introduced a sad face “:(” and a QR code linked to a Microsoft Support page.
Windows 10 didn't really change things, with only a few minor tweaks to fonts and updated layout to fit the system design language.

And so, that brings us to modern day. Now, the Blue Screen of Death looks a lot like the Windows Update screen (which is often equally as infuriating as the BSoD). The background is black, the text is white, and there's no sad face to offer condolences.

RIP BSoD.
(There's no doubt, however, that people will still make countless more BSoD memes)

That wraps up this week's ohno article!

I really hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it!

If you've got any questions, comments, ideas, or noticed something I messed up 😬, feel free to get in touch at hi@owen.uno.
Check back next week for a brand new article!

P.S. Sorry this week's article was shorter than usual! I have some secret projects I'm working on that are coming soon, so stay tuned!