This is a switch: cable companies, which for years have insisted on only selling large bundles of channels to consumers, are apparently gearing up to reduce the size of the bundles. Where years of consumer complaints and legal threats couldn’t move them, apparently more and more people ditching their cable as they decide they can live without 5000 channels and still nothing on, thanks, has convinced them that they need to actually offer the consumer some options.

Just not, you know, the options they actually want.
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As you’ve no doubt heard, Steve Jobs, one of the driving forces at Apple and arguably the defining force of technology for the past decade, has died at 56. The cause of death has not been announced, but is likely due to complications from his pancreatic cancer.

We’ll leave the speculation about Apple’s future and other reporting to the other blogs on this: we simply want to take a moment to remember the man. In fact, your editor would like to put aside the magisterial voice for a moment and talk about how Steve Jobs’ vision has helped me achieve mine.
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Well, that was disappointing.

OK, OK, so the event hasn’t officially kicked off yet: since everybody and their mom is liveblogging it, we won’t be covering it until after the announcement is over. But there have been a few leaks and apparently all that perfectly reasonable and intelligent speculation about the iPhone 5 has turned out to be premature.

So how do we know it’s the 4S? Japan!
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The Kindle Fire is a shockingly good product for a shockingly good price. For $200, you get a screen with a higher resolution than the iPad, with a dual-core processor and an Android OS. In other words, it’s a Nook, only $50 cheaper, and it will likely be a hacker’s delight. But for all the buzz, it’s not going to be able to tackle the iPad in any meaningful way. Here’s two reasons why.
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We all know them. Many of us kind of hate them. The Bluetooth headset, though, is a staple of modern life. Whether it’s something you need or something you want, millions of people have one plugged in their ear.

And it may be paving the way for their smartphone to be hacked.
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So, Blockbuster, as we all know, had to go into bankruptcy after spending a decade posting quarter after quarter of losses, totaling over $10 billion, as Netflix and Redbox ate it alive. It was like watching a bad horror movie.

But, like a bad drama, Blockbuster had the chance to come back. Netflix has been reeling from the whole price rise and Qwikster debacle, and that left an opening for a streaming video service to step in and take a whole load of customers away. If it was going to happen, Friday was the day.

It didn’t happen.
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So, yesterday, in case you hadn’t heard, Google got dragged before the Senate to discuss its business model and the fact that it, de facto, controls the Internet. Some good points were made, some bad points were made, overall not much happened.

But it raises the point: is Google evil?
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Every year it happens. We wait with bated breath for the fall, when the new iPhone arrives and makes everybody curse their old iPhones for the now dated pieces of crap that they are. But even for Apple, it’s been unusually closed-lipped this year about the new iPhone’s debut. We know one is coming, thanks to enormous numbers of leaks from Sprint, and we know Apple always refreshes its products once a year. But we didn’t have a date.

That is, until now.
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It’s been a dream of science fiction for decades: a car where you just climb in and the computer takes care of the rest. It’s more than just neat: most accidents are caused by human error, so take the human out of the equation, and cars suddenly become much, much safer.

But what does it take to make the safest self-driving car? About $500,000 worth of gear.
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