This may sound odd coming from a mobile tech writer with more than a decade of experience in the field, but I’m not exactly what you’d call a smartphone power user. You can call me cheap or unsophisticated if you want, but I can name multiple devices in the $400 to $600 price range right now that I feel are more than adequately equipped to satisfy my day-to-day needs just as a $1,000+ phone would.
The Pixel 9a is not only one of those devices, but the one I like most and would strongly recommend to anyone who feels the above description might apply to them as well. Do you own a mid-range Android handset and want to switch to a new one… without having to spend a small fortune?
Google Pixel 9a
$100 off (20%)
5G, Unlocked, 128GB Storage, 8GB RAM, 6.3-Inch P-OLED Screen with 2424 x 1080 Pixel Resolution and 120Hz Refresh Rate Technology, Google Tensor G4 Processor, Android 15, Google Gemini, 48 + 13MP Dual Rear-Facing Camera System, 13MP Front-Facing Camera, 5,100mAh Battery, 23W Charging Capabilities, Four Color Options
Buy at Amazon
Google Pixel 9a
$100 off (17%)
5G, Unlocked, 256GB Storage, 8GB RAM, 6.3-Inch P-OLED Screen with 2424 x 1080 Pixel Resolution and 120Hz Refresh Rate Technology, Google Tensor G4 Processor, Android 15, Google Gemini, 48 + 13MP Dual Rear-Facing Camera System, 13MP Front-Facing Camera, 5,100mAh Battery, 23W Charging Capabilities, Two Color Options
Buy at Amazon
Then this is the time to pull the trigger, as Amazon sells the Google-made 6.3-incher with Tensor G4 processing power at $100 less than usual. That discount, believe it or not, is totally unprecedented, even beating the e-commerce giant’s Prime-exclusive price cut from last month, and incredibly enough, it applies to a bunch of different color options, as well as both of the Pixel 9a‘s storage variants.
To be completely honest, I kind of felt like the phone was a bit overpriced at $499 and up when it made its (delayed) commercial debut a few months ago. But at $100 below that point with 128 gigs of internal storage space and $100 off a regular price of $599 in a 256GB configuration, the Pixel 9a may have reached budget-friendly perfection.
Clean and unsophisticated, the Pixel 9a is my kind of phone. | Image Credit — PhoneArena
That Tensor G4 chip, mind you, is the same one found inside the Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, and Pixel 9 Pro XL, all three of which technically fall into the high-end category, fetching… appropriately high prices. The 48 + 13MP dual rear-facing camera and 5,100mAh battery are also worthy of a high-end label (and fitting price tag), and not just in theory.
Our in-depth Google Pixel 9a review proves that the real-world battery life, camera performance, overall system speed, and user experience are all as impressive as they look on paper, which begs an obvious question – why am I trying to convince you to buy this phone at a new record high discount when I could be doing the same? Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an Amazon order to make.
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Adrian, a mobile technology enthusiast since the Nokia 3310 era, has been a dynamic presence in the tech journalism field, contributing to Android Authority, Digital Trends, and Pocketnow before joining PhoneArena in 2018. His expertise spans across various platforms, with a particular fondness for the diversity of the Android ecosystem. Despite the challenges of balancing full-time parenthood with his work, Adrian’s passion for tech trends, running, and movies keeps him energized. His commitment to mid-range smartphones has led to an eclectic collection of devices, saved from personal bankruptcy by his preference for ‘adequate’ over ‘overpriced’.
A new online tool aims to help tackle the country’s mental health crisis among kids.
A 2019 study from Jama Network found children who spent more than three hours a day on social media were at double the risk for mental health disorders, including depression and anxiety.
The feature known as Balance was developed by security company Aura. It’s marketed as the first to use artificial intelligence technology to monitor a child’s online habits and wellbeing.
“Our mission’s always been to help families navigate all the challenges that come with technology,” said CEO Hari Ravichandran. For him, the motivation to create the app was personal after his 13-year-old daughter faced a mental health crisis.
“She didn’t wanna get out of her room, like, she was lying in her bed, I don’t want to get up, it was very visible that she’s struggling,” he said.
Ravichandran decided to look at his daughter’s phone.
“I looked at it and I mean, it’s literally all there. All the questions she’s asking, the things that she’s struggling with,” he said. “To me it seemed very clear that the truth is actually on the device.”
How the app works
Ravichadran turned to experts, including child psychologists and clinicians, to help him create the app.
He says his medical team trains AI models to analyze many things including a child’s language patterns, online tone, emotional state and late-night activity.
From the child’s baseline, AI can detect anomalies, which can signal things like stress or shifting moods.
Parents will then receive reports through the app. The goal is for families to start to have a dialog.
When questioned about mistakes made by AI, Ravichadran acknowledged that the technology is not perfect.
“Like any technology that’s new, right? It has to go through its cycle of getting better and better and better,” he said.
Response to Balance
Rebecca Wilcoxson’s 15-year-old son Sam got his first iPhone in December, but she wanted guardrails.
“It’s a lot of pressure on parents to try to keep up with this tech that is constantly changing if not daily, hourly,” Wilcoxson said.
She joined a paid clinical study for Balance.
“As I scroll it will explain how his tone was in his texting and then it will show me the most used apps for the time he was on his phone,” she said.
She said the app has opened communication with her son.
“I see where there’s maybe been some more negative talking and we’re able to use that as a talking point together,” she said.
Josh Golin heads Fairplay, an advocacy group aiming to protect kids online. He said real change needs to come from lawmakers and big tech companies.
“When they are faced with choices about implementing features that would make kids safer they do not implement those features because it would hurt their bottom line. So if regulation says you have a duty to protect kids, that’s when I think we’ll start to see real change,” Golin said.
But Wilcoxson agrees more oversight is needed.
“If these tech companies have this money to keep developing developing developing, then where is their opportunity to make it safe for our children, the most vulnerable of our population,” she said.
Monitoring kids’ online activity
While Balance is one of the first to use AI, there are other tools aiming to help parents monitor their child’s online activity, including apps like Bark, Qustodio or Norton.
As schools are starting up again soon, some states are taking measures to keep phones out of the hands of kids all together.
At least 31 states and Washington D.C. require districts to ban or restrict students use of phones in school.
Jo Ling Kent
Journalist Jo Ling Kent joined CBS News in July 2023 as the senior business and technology correspondent for CBS News. Kent has more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of technology and business in the U.S., as well as the emergence of China as a global economic power.
This week we welcomed a record-breaking baby to the world. Thaddeus Daniel Pierce, who arrived over the weekend, developed from an embryo that was frozen in storage for 30 and a half years. You could call him the world’s oldest baby.
His parents, Lindsey and Tim Pierce, were themselves only young children when that embryo was created, all the way back in 1994. Linda Archerd, who donated the embryo, described the experience as “surreal.”
Stories like this also highlight how reproductive technologies are shaping families. But while baby Thaddeus is a record-breaker, plenty of other babies have been born from embryos that have been frozen for significant spells of time.Read the full story.
—Jessica Hamzelou
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. If you’re interested in reading more about fertility tech, why not check out: + Earlier this month, researchers announced babies had been born from a trial of three-person IVF. The long-awaited results suggest that the approach can reduce the risk of mitochondrial disease—but not everyone is convinced.
+ Frozen embryos are filling storage banks around the world. It’s a struggle to know what to do with them.
+ Read about how a mobile lab is bringing IVF to rural communities in South Africa.
+ Why family-friendly policies and gender equality might be more helpful than IVF technology when it comes to averting the looming fertility crisis.
+ The first babies conceived with a sperm-injecting robot have been born. Meet the startups trying to engineer a desktop fertility machine.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Donald Trump has announced new tariffs across the world They will affect virtually every nation—some more favorably than others. (CNN) + The new rates range widely from 10% to 41%. (NYT $) + The African country Lesotho had declared a tariff-induced state of emergency. (WSJ $)
2 Palantir has signed a $10 billion deal with the US Army It’s the latest in a string of lucrative agreements with federal agencies. (WP $) 3 Tech giants are raking in cash But we still don’t know how useful a lot of the AI they’re currently building will prove to be. (FT $) + It’s a boon for investors, but not necessarily for employees. (WSJ $) + It’s unclear whose approach will result in sustainable profits. (Semafor)
4Neuralink is planning its first trial in the UK To join the current five patients using its brain implant. (Reuters) + This patient’s Neuralink brain implant gets a boost from generative AI. (MIT Technology Review)
There are times when you have to wonder what Apple has its finger on because, occasionally, it isn’t on the pulse of the public. A good example of this was mentioned by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in his weekly online Power On newsletter. For some reason, perhaps for self-preservation, some Apple employees in the tech giant’s AI group came to the conclusion that there was no reason why Apple should develop a ChatGPT-style chatbot for the iPhone.
Apple wrongly believes that consumers have a limited interest in using AI chatbots
According to today’s report, top executives in both the software and marketing units in Cupertino came to the conclusion that there is only limited consumer interest in chatbots. Perhaps what Apple isn’t seeing is that chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini are great at answering your queries, something that Siri fails miserably at. The problem is that chatbots can’t set timers and alarms or handle any tasks related to your phone.
ChatGPT can be installed on your iPhone from the App Store. | Image credit-Phonearena
Apple does allow Siri to hand off questions it can’t answer to ChatGPT if the user agrees to this on a question-by-question basis. But the responses from ChatGPT are limited. If you rely on the Siri/ChatGPT combo to answer your questions requiring what Apple calls “world knowledge,” you might be better off installing the ChatGPT app and using it for all your queries. You’ll get more in-depth answers from the app than the responses that come from Siri/ChatGPT. In addition to ChatGPT, another app to install on your iPhone is Google’s Gemini.
Another area where AI makes a great tool is Search. Eddy Cue, Apple’s Services chief, testified in court that search via AI is where things are headed. Of course, Apple is in no hurry to replace Google, which pays Apple approximately $20 billion a year to be the default search engine on Apple devices. The DOJ might have something to say about this deal, and it is expected that the Justice Department will put the kibosh on the arrangement. This is quite worrisome for Apple as Cue says that growth in the Services unit is connected to the Apple-Google partnership.
Back in June, Gurman wrote that Apple was looking at teaming up with AI app Perplexity, whose iOS app is available through the App Store by tapping on this link. Its App Store listing says that Perplexity will allow you to “Cut through the clutter and get straight to credible, up-to-date answers.” That’s something that Siri users have always wanted from the digital assistant. With nearly 230,000 reviews from iOS users, the app has a 4.9 score out of a possible 5.
Apple is reportedly working on developing an “answer engine” to power Siri, Spotlight, and Safari
Apple has created its own in-house team called “Answers, Knowledge and Information,” also known inside the company as AKI. This team has been given the job of finding a new search tool that delivers a similar experience to ChatGPT. Gurman writes that he has been told that the AKI team is looking through in-house AI services to help it complete its task.
“Our work fuels intuitive information experiences across some of Apple’s most iconic products, including Siri, Spotlight, Safari, Messages, Lookup, and more. Join us in shaping the future of how the world connects with information!”
-Apple ad promoting a job opening
The team is said to be developing an “answer engine” that will crawl the web to answer general knowledge queries. Apple is considering developing an individual app in addition to using the answer engine to power Siri, Spotlight, and Safari. Owners of Apple devices can’t wait to see how all of this shakes out and whether the tool Apple does create is a big improvement over Siri.
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The U.S. job market, already showing the strain from global trade tensions, is showing early signs of another critical issue facing workers today: artificial intelligence.
In July alone, rising adoption of generative AI technology by private employers accounted for more than 10,000 job cuts, according to a report released this week by Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The outplacement firm lists AI as one of the top five factors contributing to job losses in 2025.
Layoffs have jumped this year, adding to fresh concerns about a pullback in hiring after new labor data on Friday showed that employers added only 73,000 jobs in July — well short of analyst forecasts. Through July, companies have announced more than 806,000 private-sector job cuts, the highest number for that period since 2020, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Of those layoffs, the technology industry wielded the sharpest axe — private companies in the sector have announced more than 89,000 job cuts, up 36% from a year ago. Since 2023, more than 27,000 job cuts have been directly tied to the advent of AI, according to the firm.
“The industry is being reshaped by the advancement of artificial intelligence and ongoing uncertainty surrounding work visas, which have contributed to workforce reductions,” Challenger, Gray & Christmas said.
The impact of AI on hiring is perhaps most visible among younger workers. Job listings for the kind of entry-level corporate roles traditionally available to recent college graduates have declined 15% over the past year, according to Handshake, a career platform geared toward Gen Z employees. Over the past two years, there has been a 400% increase in employers using “AI” in job descriptions, the firm found.
While AI is already starting to reshape how Americans work, for now other factors are having a more immediate impact on the labor market. More than 292,000 positions have been eliminated this year due to cuts linked to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an initiative to reduce federal spending spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk, Challenger, Gray & Christmas found.
“We are seeing the federal budget cuts implemented by DOGE impact non-profits and health care in addition to the government,” Andrew Challenger, senior vice president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said in a statement.
Layoffs are also accelerating in the vast retail sector as tariffs raise the cost of doing business, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Retailers have announced more than 80,000 cuts through July, up nearly 250% compared to the same period last year, the firm found.
“Retailers are being impacted by tariffs, inflation and ongoing economic uncertainty causing layoffs and store closures. Further declines in consumer spending could trigger additional losses,” the group said.
Megan Cerullo
Megan Cerullo is a New York-based reporter for CBS MoneyWatch covering small business, workplace, health care, consumer spending and personal finance topics. She regularly appears on CBS News 24/7 to discuss her reporting.
For this study, Lindsey and his colleagues worked to lay down some of that groundwork. Previous research has shown that various dimensions of LLMs’ behavior—from whether they are talking about weddings to persistent traits such as sycophancy—are associated with specific patterns of activity in the simulated neurons that constitute LLMs. Those patterns can be written down as a long string of numbers, in which each number represents how active a specific neuron is when the model is expressing that behavior.
Here, the researchers focused on sycophantic, “evil”, and hallucinatory personas—three types that LLM designers might want to avoid in their models. To identify those patterns, the team devised a fully automated pipeline that can map out that pattern given a brief text description of a persona. Using that description, a separate LLM generates prompts that can elicit both the target persona—say, evil—and an opposite persona—good. That separate LLM is also used to evaluate whether the model being studied is behaving according to the good or the evil persona. To identify the evil activity pattern, the researchers subtract the model’s average activity in good mode from its average activity in evil mode.
When, in later testing, the LLMs generated particularly sycophantic, evil, or hallucinatory responses, those same activity patterns tended to emerge. That’s a sign that researchers could eventually build a system to track those patterns and alert users when their LLMs are sucking up to them or hallucinating, Lindsey says. “I think something like that would be really valuable,” he says. “And that’s kind of where I’m hoping to get.”
Just detecting those personas isn’t enough, however. Researchers want to stop them from emerging in the first place. But preventing unsavory LLM behavior is tough. Many LLMs learn from human feedback, which trains them to behave in line with user preference—but can also push them to become excessively obsequious. And recently, researchers have documented a phenomenon called “emergent misalignment,” in which models trained on incorrect solutions to math problems or buggy code extracts somehow also learn to produce unethical responses to a wide range of user queries.
Other researchers have tested out an approach called “steering,” in which activity patterns within LLMs are deliberately stimulated or suppressed in order to elicit or prevent the corresponding behavior. But that approach has a couple of key downsides. Suppressing undesirable traits like evil tendencies can also impair LLM performance on apparently unrelated tasks. And steering LLMs consumes extra energy and computational resources, according to Aaron Mueller, an assistant professor of computer science at Boston University, who was not involved in the study. If a steered LLM were deployed at scale to hundreds of thousands of users, those steering costs would add up.
So the Anthropic team experimented with a different approach. Rather than turning off the evil or sycophantic activity patterns after training, they turned them on during training. When they trained those models on mistake-ridden data sets that would normally spark evil behavior, they instead remained as helpful and harmless as ever.
Packing for a single-destination trip is challenging enough, but what if your itinerary sees you taking flight to Rome for meetings, before swinging over to Brazil to watch your sister tie the knot, and then hightailing it to the Bay Area for a class reunion.
Packing for a single-destination trip is challenging enough, but what if your itinerary sees you taking flight to Rome for meetings, before swinging over to Brazil to watch your sister tie the knot, and then hightailing it to the Bay Area for a class reunion.
Packing for a single-destination trip is challenging enough, but what if your itinerary sees you taking flight to Rome for meetings, before swinging over to Brazil to watch your sister tie the knot, and then hightailing it to the Bay Area for a class reunion.
Packing for a single-destination trip is challenging enough, but what if your itinerary sees you taking flight to Rome for meetings, before swinging over to Brazil to watch your sister tie the knot, and then hightailing it to the Bay Area for a class reunion.
