The Jubilee bank holiday has trimmed this week short in the UK, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t heard any big news.
Pokémon dropped the trailer for Scarlet and Violet, Microsoft unveiled the Surface Laptop Go 2 and Fujifilm updated its X Series with the X-H2S mirrorless camera.
We’ve rounded up the best (and worst) news in tech for this week’s edition of Winners and Losers. Keep reading to find out what we chose as our winner and our loser this week and why…
Winner: Netflix
Netflix smashed its own record this week when it finally dropped the fourth season of hit sci-fi horror show Stranger Things.
Season 4 Volume 1 saw users tune in for a total of 286,790,000 hours from May 23rd to the 30th, snatching the long-winded title of “biggest premiere weekend for an English language TV show” back from Bridgerton Season 2 and putting it back in the lead by almost 100 million hours.
Considering Stranger Things 4 didn’t even arrive until May 27th, that’s quite the feat.
It’s even more impressive that Netflix kept these numbers up shortly after Netflix announced price hikes across all three of it’s subscription packages in the UK and Ireland.
The March 2022 billing changes actually marked the second increase for the Standard and Premium packages since March the year before, meaning the price of the Premium package has risen by £4/month in the space of just a year.
Considering we’re going through a cost of living crisis right now, Netflix is going to need to keep its viewers entertained if it wants to see similar success with Season 4 Volume 2.
If you’re interested in seeing what the Season 4 hype is about, visit our guide to learn how to watch Stranger Things 4 right now.
Loser: Google
Google experienced a less lucky week, after it became apparent the company is struggling to keep its Pixel 7 smartphone under wraps.
The Pixel 7 showed up in an eBay listing this week – months before the phone is even expected to launch.
The listing – which describes a “128GB Stormy Black Pixel 7 prototype” – has obviously been removed by now, but you can see some photos of the device taken from eBay in the tweet linked below:
While the device could certainly be a fake, the design seems to match renders of the Pixel 7 already shared by Google earlier this year, making it possible this is a real prototype of the phone.
As Chris Smith pointed out in our news story, this isn’t even the first Pixel prototype to exit Google’s offices and make it out into the real world in recent days. AndroidCentral received photos of the Pixel Watch before it was unveiled at I/O this month.
Google’s going to need to do a better job of guarding its devices if it wants any of us to be surprised next time it holds a big launch event.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
