It’s going to take a lot more gold coins to buy the Trump Phone now. | Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Bad news if you didn't lock in a Trump phone at launch: It now costs $749, a $250 increase on its price at launch. The T1 Phone itself hasn't changed.
Trump Mobile didn't announce the price increase, instead quietly changing its website overnight. This wasn't a total surprise though, especially given the phone ships with an unexpectedly generous 512GB of storage and 12GB of RAM. When I spoke to two Trump Mobile executives earlier this year, they called the $499 launch pricing "introductory," and a few months later, the website itself was changed to reflect that, calling it a "promotional price." That wording is now gone.
Longtime followers of Practical AI know that multi-repeat guest and friend Demetrios Brinkmann combines brilliant insight and playful banter into one fun-filled show, and this conversion with Chris was no different. They had a blast!
As AI agents become more capable of using computers, interacting with software, and taking action on behalf of users, what does that mean for the way we work and interact with the internet? Chris and Demetrios explore computer-use agents, MCP, agent harnesses, agent-to-agent interactions, and prognosticate the emerging possibilities around agentic commerce. They also discuss how these tools are already being used to automate everyday tasks, the challenges of bringing computer-use agents into enterprise environments, and how the relationship between models and agent harnesses is evolving.
In fact, they had so much fun that their conversation continued long after the show was over, but we didn’t get that here. 🤷♂️
AGNTCon + MCPCon – the Agentic AI Foundation’s flagship conference
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Midwest AI Summit: Join AI practitioners on October 15 in Indianapolis for practical sessions, hands-on discussions, and real-world AI solutions. Use code PracticalAI20 to save 20% on your registration. https://midwestaisummit.com/#tickets
1219.This week, we talk to Daniel Heuman and Chris Ryder from Intelligent Editing about the errors hiding in AI writing that looks flawless. We look at why it invents its own rules when you ask for Chicago or AP style, why it goes wrong in the middle of a document rather than at the ends, and why an AI that over-edits is harder to clean up than one that under-edits.
Find Daniel and Chris on LinkedIn, and more about their projects at Perfectit.com.
Chris welcomes Andy Kong to discuss “Chargerless” and how to build ultra-low-power wearable health trackers that never need wall charging. (00:00:15)
From Hacker Mindset to Startup Founder: They discuss Andy’s background in biosensing, staying with Samy Kamkar, and bringing a pragmatic “get things done” hacker mindset to founding Chargerless in San Francisco, as documented on Andy’s personal website. (00:02:10)
Solving the Wearable Charging Bottleneck: Andy explains how frustration with daily Apple Watch charging led him to design a wearable requiring only one minute of daily sunlight exposure, noting that modern wearables are bottlenecked by battery volume rather than logic chip size. (00:04:30)
Deliberately Underpowered MCUs: Chris and Andy explore system architecture trade-offs, focusing on Chargerless’s choice of an underpowered Renesas microcontroller paired with lean firmware rather than feature-heavy, power-hungry processors. (00:07:15)
Intelligent Sampling vs. Continuous Monitoring: They contrast Whoop and Apple Watch’s continuous PPG power drain with Chargerless’s periodic sampling approach, which reserves high-frequency tracking for active workout modes. (00:09:45)
The Limits of Commercial Sensor ICs: Why off-the-shelf health ICs from TI and Analog Devices consumed 100 times too much power due to unoptimized ADCs, inefficient amplifiers, and fixed pulse timings. (00:12:20)
EKG vs. Wrist PPG: Explaining how multi-lead chest EKGs measure electrical heart potential vectors, whereas wrist Photoplethysmography (PPG) uses green light reflection to detect oxygenated blood volume changes. (00:15:05)
Badge Life and DIY Biometrics: Chris and Andy reminisce about community hardware projects like Chaos Camp’s Card10 EKG badge, Kerry Scharfglass’s IR-synchronized dragonfly badge, and Chris’s earlobe PPG sensor built inside Solo cups. (00:17:50)
Custom Discrete PPG Frontend: How Andy replaced commercial ICs with a discrete circuit that strobes a green LED 50 times per second for microsecond bursts, cycling both the LED and transimpedance amplifier. (00:20:40)
Eliminating Decoupling Lag: Stripping decoupling capacitors removed turn-on delays, while using two amplifier stages avoided high-capacitance digital potentiometers. (00:23:10)
Pivoting Away from BCI: Andy describes his college research on brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) with OpenBCI and why he abandoned non-invasive EEG due to microvolt-level signal noise from cable movement. (00:25:55)
Quantified Self & Personal Informatics: Discussing how self-trackers capture environmental data to identify root causes of complex health symptoms. (00:28:30)
Low-Power Bluetooth Data Batching: How Bluetooth Low Energy accounts for less than 5% of overall power draw by batching 10 KB payloads every 10 minutes for fast burst transmissions to the phone. (00:31:15)
Form Factors and Ring Safety: Comparing Whoop, Oura, Garmin, and Fitbit Air trackers, while covering smart ring battery constraints, Samsung battery recall testing, and degloving risks. (00:34:00)
Whoop’s Slide-On Battery: How Whoop designed a slide-on battery pack to charge while being worn, avoiding the user drop-off caused when devices are taken off to charge. (00:36:45)
Solar Harvesting & Laser Dicing: Chargerless uses boost converters to harvest power from amorphous solar cells, which Andy initially custom diced with laser cutters at MIT. (00:39:20)
Bare-Metal Registers & 28-Hour Days: Transitioning from dev boards to custom PCBs required low-level MCU register programming, custom Makefiles, and a 28-hour daily cycle sleep study in tinfoiled rooms. (00:42:10)
Pricing & Open Data Access: Chargerless is rolling out a pre-production run of a few hundred units for $199 with no subscription fees on getchargerless.com and open data export capabilities. (00:45:00)
Power Over Skin (Body Channel Communication): Andy breaks down his Power over Skin research project, which sends 40–100 MHz RF power safely through human skin using the body as an antenna. (00:47:45)
Microwatt Energy Harvesting: Utilizing Skyworks low-forward-drop diodes, tank circuits, and rectifiers to harvest microwatts for powering LED earrings, ring joysticks, and skin patches. (00:50:30)
One-Time Passwords (OTP) over SMS are often the default for phone-based login: every phone can receive a text, users know the drill, and it works most of the time. However, delivery rates vary wildly by country, carrier filtering silently drops codes, and every message costs money. On top of that, phone numbers can be hijacked. If your users already spend their day in WhatsApp (roughly 2 billion people do), delivering the code there means better deliverability and often a lower price per message.
AI coding assistants have become a core part of software development. AI-generated code has shown productivity gains, but it's also contributing to security weaknesses and familiar bug patterns. In this article, author Nitin Garg highlights the bottleneck has moved from code generation to code verification, and how to detect & mitigate it when the AI-generated behavior diverges from the intent.
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