Microsoft

You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to preorder the $899.99 translucent green Xbox Series X (unless you received an early invitation from Microsoft), but you can preorder the matching controller now for $79.99. The device will begin shipping on October 20th.

The Microsoft-owned developer platform was down for hours on Monday, which is becoming a bit of a habit. “If you were trying to ship software that day, we let you down,” CTO Vlad Fedorov says, blaming the outage on a capacity failure after traffic hit “a new peak.”

Microsoft and Ikea started teasing a collaboration earlier this month. The pair are teaming up for a co-designed collection of items, including cushions and stools that could pair well with an Xbox fridge. The items will be shown first at Microsoft’s Xbox booth at gamescom next week.

Microsoft loves renaming products as much as Google loves killing them. Now you can relive those reinventions with The Rebrand Registry, a collection of decades of Microsoft branding history for cloud products, including analysis of which product categories get rebranded most often, and a risk index for future renames.

Microsoft’s latest Experimental Windows 11 Insider Preview build introduces support for Emoji 17.0, alongside an updated context menu experience in File Explorer that’s “designed to feel faster, cleaner, and easier to tailor.” A notable personalization feature finally lets you add the “Print” command to the context menu in Windows 11.

The Microsoft-owned developer platform began experiencing issues around 9:40AM ET, impacting a range of features including pull requests, Webhooks, Actions, Copilot AI, and more.

Windows Central shared photos showing what appears to be a prototype of a rumored, unreleased Windows phone “that was expected to ship in 2014 under the Surface moniker.” It even has a design similar to a Surface laptop and reportedly included a Qualcomm chip and a 720p display.

Xbox and PC gamers in Australia are reportedly being notified that they’ll soon need to verify their age before purchasing 18+ rated apps and games on both the Xbox Store and Microsoft Store. Existing purchases and downloads won’t be affected. Microsoft has a September 9th deadline to comply with Australian online safety rules, or risk facing an almost AUS$50 million fine (about $34.9 million in US monies).

And that’s a good thing, because its own 8GB Surface Laptop 13 struggles so much that it’s a tough buy. Microsoft’s other new areas of “focus” include making Windows onboarding and family controls easier to set up and making “voice [control] more natural and fluid” across apps.

Project Perception uses a series of AI agents to reason across a company’s data, tools, and workflows to detect potential security holes and patch them before they’re exploited.

The source code for Microsoft Comic Chat is now available, opening up the workings of a project released in 1996 that turned the walls of text from chats into comic strips, generating panels and illustrations that represent the chat and are still backward-compatible with text-only clients.

This Windows Central rumor says Windows 11 could add a dedicated flyout menu for the phone companion to show your phone’s status and things like DND status or “find my phone.” Other possible updates could bring a standalone SMS syncing app and sync your clipboard history beyond just the last entry.