Geek News

If you're getting a HomePod, be sure to place it somewhere safe... depending on what you break, it might be expensive to get a fix. Apple has updated its support pages to reveal that an out-of-warranty HomePod repair will cost $279 (£269). Throw in the shipping fee ($20 US, or £13) for a mail-in repair and you're not far off from the price of a brand new smart speaker. This is one of those times where the AppleCare extended warranty ($78 if you include the incident fee, or £68) may be the better value, at least if you're in a household where an accident is a real possibility. Thankfully, the power cable won't cost such a hefty sum. The 9to5Mac team has learned that you'll need to pay $29 (£25) to repair a damaged cord. That's more than a detachable cord might have cost, but definitely easier to justify if your pet has gnawed the cable to oblivion. In practice, you're not nearly as likely to need a fix for a HomePod as you would for an iPhone or a Mac...

The Meltdown vulnerability is bound to have far-reaching effects on the computing industry, but it's having a very tangible effect right now: it's causing chaos for multiplayer gaming. Epic Games has blamed Meltdown patches for login problems and downtime in Fortnite , pointing to the increased processor use at the third-party cloud services the battle royale game needs to run. There may be other "unexpected issues" over the next week as other services are updated, Epic said. The company has promised to do whatever it can to "mitigate and resolve" problems as they come up. Like virtually every other internet-dependent firm, Epic doesn't have much choice but to patch Meltdown and accept slowdowns. Even if it were in full control of Fortnite 's cloud services, it wouldn't want to leave its systems vulnerable to serious attacks. However, this suggests that online game providers (and really, online service providers as a whole) may have to scra...