Al Landes

Al Landes focuses on the points where consumer technology, gaming, and emerging AI collide with power, policy, and everyday life, writing news and explainer pieces that foreground consequences rather than hype. He is a long-time tech writer with a strong interest in nerd culture and devices, and he writes for Gadget Review while managing a team of review writers. His work blends fast-moving news, clear technical detail, and practical guidance for people navigating a dense, often opaque tech ecosystem.

Apple Hardware and Leadership Transitions

Landes covers Apple as an evolving system of hardware, software, and corporate decision-making rather than a stream of isolated product launches. His recent pieces range from iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max and their A20 Pro chip to the return of Touch ID in Apple’s first foldable phone, treating each announcement as part of a broader shift in how the company controls AI access and on-device capabilities. He details specific memory thresholds and feature gates for Apple Intelligence, spelling out which models qualify and what that means for users who sit just below the cut-off. In coverage of Tim Cook’s last day as Apple CEO, he turns a leadership handover into a story about a multi-trillion-dollar business, tracing how succession and product roadmaps intersect. He also follows the rumour cycle around a foldable Mac, separating cancellation chatter from the underlying development story and giving readers a clearer sense of where the project actually stands.

AI, Privacy, and Device Security

AI systems, surveillance features, and security risks are a core strand of Landes’s beat. He writes on AI worms that generate their own attack playbooks and target everyday devices, framing the issue as a concrete risk for people’s phones, computers, and connected hardware rather than an abstract cybersecurity concept. In his smart TV privacy coverage, he explains how tracking technologies work, then walks through step-by-step actions such as disabling automatic content recognition and taking a TV offline to stop data collection entirely. He follows public sentiment and regulation around advanced AI, reporting on voters backing a bill to ban development of superintelligent systems and showing how political will is forming around technical capabilities.

His DeepMind WeatherNext 3 piece sits at the same intersection, exploring how an AI weather model outperforms traditional physics-based approaches and what that shift implies for infrastructure, prediction, and trust in machine-led forecasting.

Labor and Organizing in Video Games

Landes treats labour and organizing inside the games industry as a central subject, not a side note. In his reporting on France’s video game union striking all summer and preparing for more action, he follows a long-running campaign rather than a single day of protest, highlighting how extended industrial action reshapes the production of games.

He anchors the story in the union’s sustained strike, showing how a summer of stoppages creates pressure on studios and publishers and raises questions about working conditions. This labour focus brings a structural lens to gaming coverage, placing developers, organisers, and workplace dynamics alongside the usual attention to releases and platforms.

Experimental Consumer Tech and Infrastructure

Beyond mainstream phones and consoles, Landes regularly turns to experimental and sometimes contentious technology in public spaces.

His Walmart parking-lot drone airport coverage looks at how logistics infrastructure drops into neighbourhoods, balancing viral fascination with local anger from nearby residents. He writes about a 26-foot metal tower in the Utah desert that claims it can make it snow, using the story to probe the line between environmental engineering, spectacle, and scientific plausibility. On the consumer side, he covers devices like a Dyson toothbrush with a built-in camera and AI, focusing on how far everyday products are pushing into surveillance and automation and at what price point. His ENGWE e-bike piece, anchored by Robin van Persie’s role in championing commuting, connects individual hardware to broader shifts in urban transport.

In a story on SoftBank’s $50 million commitment to Trump’s library followed soon after by a data center lease, he shows how money, infrastructure, and political influence converge around large-scale tech projects.

Across this body of work, Landes’s reporting is distinguished by an emphasis on systems and consequences: who controls emerging technology, who is exposed to its risks, and which communities, workers, and voters live with its outcomes. His pieces typically combine narrative framing with close attention to technical and policy details, making his coverage especially relevant to stories that sit at the junction of devices, governance, and everyday use.