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Facebook just announced it is implementing multiplayer games into the video call feature within Messenger. This functionality allows you to converse with friends and family as you kick their booty in 14 currently-available titles. Trash talk is back, baby!

The video call gaming feature is available on Messenger for iOS, Android and the web, with no specialized installations required. The 14 games being showcased at launch include old favorites like Words With Friends and Mini Golf FRVR to newer titles like Card Wars and Exploding Kittens. Each game is designed to be played by as few as two people, though each title boasts differing maximum player numbers.

Each game is optimized for the service, with clearly-demarcated leader boards, and a user interface that leverages the Messenger experience. All you have to do is start a video call on Messenger, tap the group mode button, tap the “Play” icon, and then browse through the library of available games. The company has been experimenting with Messenger-enabled games for the past few years, but nothing has really stuck, so one hopes this new mode has some staying power.

The launch lineup here is relatively slim, at 14 titles, but Facebook Gaming says more free games are on the horizon later this year. To that end, the company is urging interested developers to contact their Partner Manager for details on how to add games to the platform. This news comes mere months after Meta shuttered the standalone Facebook Gaming app.

Amazon's ongoing layoffs now include those more directly involved in game production. The company has provided an internal memo from gaming VP Christoph Hartmann (originally shared by Bloomberg) announcing layoffs of "just over" 100 employees across gaming divisions that include Prime Gaming, Game Growth and Amazon Games' San Diego studio. The internet giant is also reassigning workers to projects that fit its "strategic focus," the executive says.

The teams in Irvine (which develops the online RPG New World) and Montreal (on an unannounced project) will continue to grow, Hartmann adds. Amazon's publishing efforts will also expand. Laid off employees are already being notified, and will get severance pay, health benefits and paid time to find new jobs.

The company hasn't elaborated on the reasons for the layoffs. In his memo, Hartmann says the cuts come after Amazon weighed its ongoing projects against its "long-term goals." The company tells Engadget it doesn't have more to share beyond the note.

Amazon's game development efforts haven't fared well. The company is only offering New World at the moment. Its attempt at a free-to-play shooter, Crucible, was only briefly available to the public and was shut down after just a few months. There has also been turmoil at the San Diego location. John Smedley, a Sony Online Entertainment veteran who ran Amazon Games' San Diego studio for six years, said in January that he would leave after a transition period.

The news comes just weeks after Amazon outlined plans to slash 9,000 positions, including some at the livestreaming service Twitch. The tech giant is looking to reduce costs company-wide while dealing with a turbulent global economy and the effects of the pandemic recovery. In that context, the gaming layoffs represent a small piece of a larger strategy.

If the dark, serious tone of Overwatch 2 Season 2's Ramattra wasn't your style, the game's latest hero might be a breath of fresh air. Meet Lifeweaver, a Thai scientist with long, flowing hair, an elegant sense of style and an overwhelming sense of confidence and bravado. His backstory outlines him as a naturalist who wields bio-light technology to "cure diseases and heal the world." In game, that translates to a support class.

Specifically, Lifeweaver's gameplay trailer shows the new hero using plant-themed hard light powers to restore health and using movement powers to turn the tide of battle. We see Lifeweaver pull a knocked back player back onto the map before they can fall off a cliff. Then, the hero creates a platform that lifts the opposing team's Orisa high above the battlefield just as she sets off her ultimate ability, rendering the attack harmless. That ability, Petal Platform, can be used by players on both teams — making it useful both for disrupting enemy movement and offering high ground to allies.

Lifeweaver's own ultimate move manifests as a large, glowing tree that constantly heals teammates in the surrounding area. It's also impervious to attacks, meaning it can be used to create cover in open spaces.

The moveset is certainly compelling — it's easy to imagine using these abilities to help teammates traverse the map in new ways, or help keep the enemy at bay in the final moments of battle. We won't have to wait long to find out exactly how Lifeweaver will change the game, however. The new hero launches with Season 4 on April 11th, and will be free to use for a limited time.

Microsoft announced a new sustainable Xbox controller today. Arriving as an Earth Day promotion, the Xbox Remix Special Edition wireless controller uses recycled materials from old gamepads, auto headlight covers and reclaimed CDs (among other sources) to give each accessory a unique look. Although it offers no special functionality, it allows gamers to vote with their wallets for environmentally friendly manufacturing.

One-third of each gamepad is made from post-consumer recycled resins and regrind materials. Microsoft says the resins are sourced from materials like “automotive headlight covers, plastic water jugs and CDs.” Meanwhile, the regrind comes from leftover Xbox One controller parts recycled into new material. The company says the regrind maintains the durability and performance you’d expect.

Microsoft describes the combination of recycled resins with regrind as creating “custom, earth-tone colors with subtle variations, swirling, markings, and texturing — giving each Remix Special Edition controller its own look and feel.” Unfortunately, the company’s marketing images don’t appear to reveal much of that, but you can expect each one to look at least slightly different from the rest. It also has “a topographic texture pattern” on its bumpers, triggers and side grip areas, which Microsoft describes as a “nod to the Earth’s dynamic landscape.” Finally, the green hues on its front case, D-pad and Xbox button were inspired by lichen, a composite organism found in the Pacific Northwest.

It wouldn’t make sense to buy an environmentally sound controller only to stuff it with disposable AA batteries that end up in landfills. So Microsoft bundles an Xbox Rechargeable Battery Pack with each special-edition gamepad. The accessory costs $25 on its own.

It’s easy to grow cynical about mega-corporations virtue-signaling around Earth Day products that most people won’t buy while their broader product portfolio falls short in environmental friendliness. But hey, it’s still something. Further, Microsoft does point us to its Xbox sustainability efforts — including goals of being carbon-negative, water-positive and zero-waste by 2030 and improving its consoles’ Energy Saver sleep mode.

The Xbox Remix Special Edition controller costs $85, the same price you’d pay for a $60 standard Xbox wireless gamepad with a rechargeable battery pack. It’s available for pre-order today before launching on April 18th, four days before Earth Day.

General Motors just pulled ahead of Ford to become the country’s second-leading seller of all-electric vehicles. According to sales numbers obtained by CNBC, Ford sold just under 11,000 EVs during the first quarter of this year, while GM sold twice that, at nearly 21,000 units.

As a matter of fact, Ford’s poor showing throughout the past few months dropped it to fifth place in total EV sales in the USA. Hyundai and Volkswagon now make up the third and fourth spots. What is to blame for Ford’s all-electric struggles? It had some significant production downtimes at two North American plants, leading the company to scramble to retrofit a pre-existing plant in Mexico.

Additionally, the Ford F-150 Lighting electric pickup experienced a small recall when some batteries started catching fire, forcing the company to lose five weeks of production. Ford is planning on using new battery technology to ramp up EV production to 600,000 vehicles a year, but those recent sales figures illustrate just how far it has to go to meet that metric.

While congratulations are in order for GM, it is worth noting that even it is playing catch-up to market leader Tesla. And it’s not even close. Tesla does not share regional sales reports, but Motor Intelligence estimates the company sold 161,630 EVs in the United States during the first quarter. That is around eight times the number that GM is currently putting down. According to Tesla, it is on track to manufacture 20 million electric vehicles per year by 2030, though many experts say the actual number is likely to fall much lower than that.

While Tesla is leading the country in sales, the same is not true globally. Chinese manufacturer BYD sells 20 percent of the world’s EVs, to Tesla’s 12.6 percent. As for GM, the company promises to build 50,000 EVs by the middle of the year and 100,000 more units by the end of the year. One interesting factoid is that the majority of GM’s sales this year were from its budget-friendly Chevrolet Bolt line, which cost under $30,000. The lowest price for a bare-bones Tesla Model 3 is around $43,000.

Our reverence towards stars and celebrities was not borne of the 19th century’s cinematic revolution, but rather has been a resilient aspect of our culture for millennia. Ancient tales of immortal gods rising again and again after fatal injury, the veneration and deification of social and political leaders, Madame Tussauds’ wax museums and the Academy Awards’ annual In Memoriam segment, they’re are all facets of the human compulsion to put well-known thought leaders, tastemakers and trendsetters up on pedestals. And with a new, startlingly lifelike generation of generative artificial intelligence (gen-AI) at our disposal, today’s celebrities could potentially remain with us long after their natural deaths. Like ghosts, but still on TV, touting Bitcoin and Metaverse apps. Probably.

Fame is the name of the game

American Historian Daniel Boorstin once quipped, “to be famous is to be well known for being well-known.” With the rise of social media, achieving celebrity is now easier than ever, for better or worse.

“Whereas stars are often associated with a kind of meritocracy,” Dr. Claire Sisco King, Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Chair of the Cinema and Media Arts program at Vanderbilt. “Celebrity can be acquired through all kinds of means, and of course, the advent of digital media has, in many ways, changed the contours of celebrity because so-called ordinary people can achieve fame in ways that were not accessible to them prior to social media.”

What’s more, social media provides an unprecedented degree of access and intimacy between a celebrity and their fans, even at the peak of the paparazzi era. “We develop these imagined intimacies with celebrities and think about them as friends and loved ones,” King continued. “I think that those kinds of relationships illustrate the longing that people have for senses of connectedness and interrelatedness.”

For as vapid as the modern celebrity existence is portrayed in popular media, famous people have long served important roles in society as trend-setters and cultural guides. During the Victorian era, for example, British folks would wear miniature portraits of Queen Victoria to signal their fealty and her choice to wear a white wedding gown in 1840 is what started the modern tradition. In the US, that manifests with celebrities as personifications of the American Dream — each and every single one having pulled themselves up by the bootstraps and sworn off avocado toast to achieve greatness, despite their humble beginnings presumably in a suburban garage of some sort.

“The narratives that we return to, “ King said, “can become comforts for making sense of that inevitable part of the human experience: our finiteness.” But what if our cultural heroes didn’t die? At least not entirely? What if, even after Tom Hanks shuffles off this mortal coil, his likeness and personality were digitally preserved in perpetuity? We’re already sending long-dead recording artists like Roy Orbison, Tupac Shakur and Whitney Houston back out on tour as holographic performers. The Large Language Models (LLMs) that power popular chatbots like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Bard, are already capable of mimicking the writing styles of whichever authors they’ve been trained on. What’s to stop us from smashing these technologies together into an interactive Tucker-Dolcetto amalgamation of synthesized content? Turns out, not much beyond the threat of a bad news cycle.

How to build a 21st century puppet

Cheating death has been an aspirational goal of humanity since prehistory. The themes of resurrection, youthful preservation and outright immortality are common tropes throughout our collective imagination — notions that have founded religions, instigated wars, and launched billion dollar beauty and skin care empires. If a society’s elites weren’t mummifying themselves ahead of a glorious afterlife, bits and pieces of their bodies and possessions were collected and revered as holy relics, cultural artifacts to be cherished and treasured as a physical connection to the great figures and deeds of yore.

Technological advances since the Middle Ages have, thankfully, by and large eliminated the need to carry desiccated bits of your heroes in a coat pocket. Today, fans can connect with their favorite celebrities — whether still alive or long-since passed — through the star’s available catalog of work. For example, you can watch Robin Williams’ movies, stand up specials, Mork and Mindy, and read his books arguably more easily now than when he was alive. Nobody’s toting scraps of hallowed rainbow suspender when they can rent Jumanji from YouTube on their phone for $2.99. It’s equally true for William Shakespeare, whose collected works you can read on a Kindle as you wait in line at the DMV.

At this point, it doesn’t really matter how long a beloved celebrity has been gone — so long as sufficiently large archives of their work remain, digital avatars can be constructed in their stead using today’s projection technologies, generative AI systems, and deepfake audio/video. Take the recent fad of deceased singers and entertainers “going back out on tour” as holographic projections of themselves for example.

The projection systems developed by BASE Hologram and the now-defunct HologramUSA, which made headlines in the middle of the last decade for their spectral representations of famously deceased celebrities, used a well-known projection effect known as Pepper’s Ghost. Developed in the early 19th century by British inventor John Henry Pepper, the image of an off-stage performer is reflected onto a transparent sheet of glass interposed between the stage and audience to produce a translucent, ethereal effect ideal for depicting the untethered spirits that routinely haunted theatrical protagonists at the time.

Public Domain - Wikipedia

Turns out, the technique works just as well with high-definition video feeds and LED light sources as it did with people wiggling in bedsheets by candlelight. The modern equivalent is called the "Musion Eyeliner" and rather than a transparent sheet of glass, it uses a thin metalized film set at a 45 degree angle towards the audience. It’s how the Gorillaz played “live” at the 2006 Grammy Awards and how Tupac posthumously performed at Coachella in 2012, but the technology is limited by the size of the transparent sheet. If we’re ever going to get the Jaws 19 signage Back to the Future II promised us, we’re likely going to use arrays of fan projectors like those developed by London-based holographic startup, Hypervsn, to do so.

“Holographic fans are types of displays that produce a 3-dimensional image seemingly floating in the air using the principle of POV (Persistence of Vision), using strips of RGB LEDs attached to the blades of the fan and a control-unit lighting up the pixels,” Dr Priya C, Associate Professor at Sri Sairam Engineering College, and team wrote in a 2020 study on the technology. “As the fan rotates, the display produces a full picture.”

Dr Priya C goes on to say “Generally complex data can be interpreted more effectively when displayed in three dimensions. In the information display industry, three dimensional (3D) imaging, display, and visualization are therefore considered to be one of the key technology developments that will enter our daily life in the near future.”

“From a technical standpoint, the size [of a display] is just a matter of how many devices you are using and how you actually combine them,” Hypervsn Lead Product Manager, Anastasia Sheluto, told Engadget. “The biggest wall we have ever considered was around 400 devices, that was actually a facade of one building. A wall of 12 or 15 [projectors] will get you up to 4k resolution.” While the fan arrays need to be enclosed to protect them from the elements and the rest of us from getting whacked by a piece of plastic revolving at a few thousand RPMs, these displays are already finding use in museums and malls, trade shows and industry showcases.

What’s more, these projector systems are rapidly gaining streaming capabilities, allowing them to project live interactions rather than merely pre-recorded messages. Finally, Steven Van Zandt’s avatar in the ARHT Media Holographic Cube at Newark International will do more than stare like he’s not mad, just disappointed, and the digital TSA assistants of tomorrow may do more than repeat rote instructions for passing travelers as the human ones do today.

Getting Avatar Van Zandt to sound like the man it’s based on is no longer much of a difficult feat either. Advances in the field of deepfake audio, more formally known as speech synthesis, and text-to-speech AI, such as Amazon Polly or Speech Services by Google, have led to a commercialization of synthesized celebrity voice overs.

Where once a choice between Morgan Freeman and Darth Vader reading our TomTom directions was considered bleeding-edge cool, today, companies like Speechify offer voice models from Snoop Dogg, Gwyneth Paltrow, and other celebs who (or whose estates) have licensed their voice models for use. Even recording artists who haven’t given express permission for their voices to be used are finding deep fakes of their work popping up across the internet.

In Speechify’s case at least, “our celebrity voices are strictly limited to personal consumption and exclusively part of our non-commercial text-to-speech (TTS) reader,” Tyler Weitzman, Speechify Co-Founder and Head of AI, told Engadget via email. “They're not part of our Voice Over Studio. If a customer wants to turn their own voice into a synthetic AI voice for their own use, we're open to conversations.”

“Text-to-speech is one of the most important technologies in the world to advance humanity,” Weitzman continued. “[It] has the potential to dramatically increase literacy rates, spread human knowledge, and break cultural barriers.”

ElevenLabs’ Prime Voice AI software similarly can recreate near perfect vocal clones from uploaded voice samples — the entry level Instant Voice Cloning service only requires around a minute of audio but doesn’t utilize actual AI model training (limiting its range of speech) and an enterprise version that can only be accessed after showing proof that the voice they’re cloning is licensed for that specific use. What’s more, “Cloning features are limited to paid accounts so if any content created using ElevenLabs is shared or used in a way that contravenes the law, we can help trace it back to the content creator,” ElevenLabs added.

The Enterprise-grade service also requires nearly 3 hours of input data to properly train the language model but company reps assure Engadget that, “the results are almost indistinguishable from the original person’s voice.” Surely Steve Van Zandt was onscreen for that long over the course of Lillyhammer’s four-season run.

Unfortunately, the current need for expansive, preferably high-quality, audio recordings on which to train an AI TTS model severely limits which celebrity personalities we’d be able to bring back. Stars and public figures from the second half of the 20th century would obviously have far more chance of having three hours of tape available for training than, say, Presidents Jefferson or Lincoln. Sure, a user could conceivably reverse engineer a voiceprint from historical records — ElevenLabs Voice Design allows users to generate unique voices with adjustable qualities like age, gender, or accent — and potentially recreate Theodore Roosevelt’s signature squeaky sound, but it’ll never be quite the same as hearing the 26th President himself.

Providing something for the synthesized voices to say is proving to be a significant challenge — at least providing something historically accurate, as the GPT-3-powered iOS app, Historical Figures Chat has shown. Riding the excitement around ChatGPT, the app was billed as able to impersonate any of 20,000 famous folks from the annals of history. Despite its viral popularity in January, the app has been criticized by historians for returning numerous factual and characteristic inaccuracies from its figure models. Genocidal Cambodian dictator, Pol Pot, at no point in his reign showed remorse for his nation’s Killing Fields, nor did Nazi general and Holocaust architect, Heinrich Himmler, but even gentle prodding was enough to have their digital recreations begin spouting mea culpas.

“It’s as if all of the ghosts of all of these people have hired the same PR consultants and are parroting the same PR nonsense,” Zane Cooper, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, remarked to the Washington Post.

We can, but should we?

Accuracy issues aren’t the only challenges generative AI “ghosts” currently face, as apparently, even death itself will not save us from copyright and trademark litigation. “There's already a lot of issues emerging,” Dan Schwartz, partner and IP trial lawyer at Nixon Peabody, told Engadget. “Especially for things like ChatGPT and generative AI tools, there will be questions regarding ownership of any intellectual property on the resulting output.

“Whether it's artwork, whether it's a journalistic piece, whether it's a literary piece, whether it is an academic piece, there will be issues over the ownership of what comes out of that,” he continued. “That issue has really yet to be defined and I think we're still a ways away from intellectual property laws fully having an opportunity to address it. I think these technologies have to percolate and develop a little bit and there will be some growing pains before we get to meaningful regulation on them.”

The US Copyright Office in March announced that AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted by the user under US law, equating the act of prompting the computer to produce a desired output with asking a human artist the same. "When an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the 'traditional elements of authorship' are determined and executed by the technology — not the human user," the office stated.

This is the opposite of the stance taken by a Federal Appeals Court. “[Patent law regarding AI] for the most part, is pretty well settled here in the US,” Schwartz said, “that an AI system cannot be an inventor of a new, patentable invention. It's got to be a human, so that will impact how people apply for patents that come out of generative AI tools.”

Output-based infringement aside, the training methods used by firms like OpenAI and Stability AI, which rely on trawling the public web for data with which to teach their models, have proven problematic as well, having repeatedly caught lawsuits for getting handsy with other people’s licensed artwork. What’s more, generative AI has already shown tremendous capacity and capability in creating illegal content. Deepfake porn ads featuring the synthetic likenesses of Emma Watson and Scarlett Johansson ran on Facebook for more than two days in March before being flagged and removed, for example.

Until the wheels of government can turn enough to catch up to these emerging technologies, we’ll have to rely on market forces to keep companies from disrupting the rest of us back into the stone age. So far, such forces have proved quick and efficient. When Google’s new Bard system immediately (but confidently) fumbled basic facts about the James Webb Space Telescope, that little whoopsie-doodle immediately wiped $100 billion off the company’s stock value. The Historical Figures Chat app, similarly, is no longer available for download on the App Store, despite reportedly receiving multiple investment offers in January. It has since been replaced with numerous, similarly-named clone apps.

“I think what is better for society is to have a system of liability in place so that people understand what the risks are,” Schwartz argued. “So that if you put something out there that creates racist, homophobic, anti-any protected class, inappropriate content, whoever’s responsible for making that tool available, will likely end up facing the potential of liability. And I think that's going to be pretty well played out over the course of the next year or two.”

Celebrity as an American industry

While the term “celebrity” has been around since being coined in 17th century France, during the days of John Jacques Rousseau, it was the Americans in the 20th century who first built the concept into a commercial enterprise.

By the late 1920s, with the advent of Talkies, the auxiliary industry of fandom was already in full swing. “You [had] fan magazines like Motion Picture, Story Magazine or Photoplay that would have pictures of celebrities on the cover, have stories about celebrities behind the scenes, stories about what happened on the film set,” King explained. “So, as the film industry develops alongside this, you start to get Hollywood Studios.” And with Hollywood Studios came the star system.

“Celebrity has always been about manufacturing images, creating stories,” King said. The star system existed in the 1930s and ‘40s and did to young actors and actrices what Crypton Future Media did to Hatsune Miku: it assembled them into products, constructing synthetic personalities for them from the ground up.

Actors, along with screenwriters, directors and studio executives of the era, would coordinate to craft specific personas for their stars. “You have the ingénue or the bombshell,” King said. “The studios worked really closely with fan magazines, with their own publicity arms and with gossip columnist to tell very calculated stories about who the actors were.” This diverted focus from the film itself and placed it squarely on the constructed, steerable, personas crafted by the studio — another mask for actors to wear, publicly and even after the cameras were turned off.

“Celebrity has existed for centuries and the way it exists now is not fundamentally different from how it used to be,” King added. “But it has been really amplified, intensified and made more ubiquitous because of changing industry and technological norms that have developed in the 20th and 21st centuries.”

Even after Tom Hanks is dead, Tom Hanks Prime will live forever

Between the breakneck pace of technological advancement with generative AI (including deepfake audio and video), the promise of future “touchable” plasma displays offering hard light-style tactile feedback through femtosecond laser bursts, and Silicon Valley’s gleeful disregard towards the negative public costs borne from their “disruptive” ideas, the arrival of immortal digitized celebrities hawking eczema creams and comforting lies during commercial breaks is now far more likely a matter of when, rather than if.

But what does that mean for celebrities who are still alive? How will knowing that even after the ravages of time take Tom Hanks from us, that at least a lightly interactable likeness might continue to exist digitally? Does the visceral knowledge that we’ll never truly be rid of Jimmy Fallon empower us to loathe him even more?

“This notion of the simulacra of the celebrity, again, is not entirely new,” King explained. “We can point to something like the Madame Tussaud's wax museum, which is an attempt to give us a version of the celebrity, there are impersonators who dress and perform as them, so I think that people take a certain kind of pleasure in having access to an approximation of the celebrity. But that experience never fully lives up.”

“If you go and visit the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, there's a kind of aura [to the space],” she continued. “There's something intangible, almost magical about experiencing that work of art in person versus seeing a print of it on a poster or on a museum tote bag or, you know, coffee mug that it loses some of its kind of ineffable quality.”

Klaus Teuber, who created the board game sensation Settlers of Catan, has passed away at the age of 70. According to the official Catan website, Teuber died on April 1st after a “brief and severe illness.” He is survived by his wife Claudia and their two sons, Guido and Benny, all of which are involved with publisher Catan Studios.

It is hard to do justice to how important Catan was (and is) to the board game space. Teuber invented the multiplayer resource-trading game in 1995 and is one of the first European board games to achieve massive success throughout the rest of the world. As of 2020, over 32 million copies of Catan in 40 different languages have been sold globally.

It’s not just board games. The popularity of Catan has allowed for multiple digital versions available for smartphones, video game consoles and PCs. The game has also left quite a pop culture footprint, inspiring countless references in media properties like The Big Bang Theory, Parks and Recreation, Supergirl and South Park. It even inspired a short film in 2014, The Lord of Catan, starring Amy Acker. There have also been rumors of a forthcoming Sony-produced feature film floating around since 2015.

Teuber may be best known for creating Catan, but the designer also had his hand in many popular board games like Barbarossa, Wacky Wacky Wacky and more. All told, he won the Game of the Year award a whopping four times. Not bad for a former dental technician who didn’t even begin developing games seriously until the 1990s, when he was in his 40s.

“I developed games to escape,” he told The New Yorker in 2014. “This was my own world I created.”

Teuber also founded publisher Catan Studios, which posted a memorial tweet today urging the title’s many fans to honor his impact on the world of gaming by “being kind to one another” and pursuing their dreams to the fullest.

Microsoft is no stranger to making elaborate laptop docks, but its latest may be particularly appealing if you need a genuinely robust hub for work. The company has unveiled a Surface Thunderbolt 4 Dock that, as the name implies, uses speedy Thunderbolt 4 (and hence USB 4) to connect your laptop or tablet to all your peripherals. There's enough bandwidth to connect two 4K monitors at 60Hz, as well as 96W of power that's enough to recharge some demanding portable PCs.

The dock offers a healthy mix of modern and legacy ports, plus a few helpful design touches. You'll find two USB-C ports, two USB-A ports, a 3.5mm headphone jack and 2.5Gbps Ethernet on the back, but you'll also find one USB-C and one USB-A port on the front — it shouldn't be awkward to plug in a thumb drive or phone. Tactile indicators on the back make it easier for people of various abilities to find ports by feel, while the 20 percent ocean-bound plastic reduces the environmental impact.

Before you ask: while the dock is designed with the Surface Laptop 5, Surface Laptop Studio and Intel-based Surface Pro 9 in mind, that's not a strict requirement. Any computer with Thunderbolt 4/USB 4 ports should work. You could attach a MacBook Pro, if you're feeling ironic. 

The Surface Thunderbolt 4 Dock is available today on Microsoft's store for $300. That's considerably more expensive than many laptop docks, and you may wish it had features like a full-size SD card reader. The price is on par with similarly powerful docks, though, and it may be worthwhile if you'd rather not spend valuable minutes plugging in peripherals when you sit at your desk.

There's an abundance of streaming devices out there to serve your TV, movie and live sports needs, but if you're looking for a solid model that can deliver 4K video without making too much of a dent in your bank account, it's definitely worth checking out Amazon's Fire TV Stick 4K Max. As part of a Fire TV device sale, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max has dropped back down to its lowest price to date. You can pick one up for $35, which is $20 off the regular price.

This is a souped-up version of the Fire TV Stick 4K. Amazon says the higher-end model is 40 percent more powerful and offers more fluid navigation while it can start apps more swiftly. There's support for WiFi 6, Dolby Vision, HDR, HDR10+ and Dolby Atmos audio. The Fire TV Stick 4K Max comes with the Alexa Voice Remote, and with the help of the 750Mhz GPU, you can play some games (such as Amazon Luna cloud gaming titles).

If you're looking for a streaming stick but don't need 4K video, it's worth considering the Fire TV Stick Lite. It's our pick for the best budget streaming stick. As part of Amazon's Fire TV device sale, it's currently $20, which is $10 off the usual price.

At the other end of the scale is the latest Fire TV Cube. That's currently down from $140 to $125. This device is twice as powerful as the Fire TV Stick 4K Max, Amazon says. It has an octa-core 2.0 GHz processor and WiFi 6E support. You'll have the option to control a compatible cable and satellite set top box with your voice and manage your smart home from your TV.

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Apple's latest Mac Mini has dropped to $549 at Amazon and B&H. Outside of special discounts for education customers, this matches the lowest price we've seen for the entry-level model with 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD and Apple's M2 chip. For reference, Apple normally sells this variant for $599.

We gave the Mac Mini with the beefier M2 Pro chip a review score of 86 earlier this year. This model won't be as powerful for video editing or software development, but the hardware is just as compact, and the base M2 is still plenty fast and quiet for web browsing, less hardcore work and general use. Just make sure that's all you want out of the device first, as, like most Macs, you can't upgrade the Mini's internals over time. And while the Mini's lack of front-facing ports is annoying, on the back it has two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, two USB-A ports, an HDMI port, an Ethernet jack and a headphone jack.

As with other recent Macs, this entry-level Mac Mini technically has slower SSD performance than its predecessor, but the drop-off shouldn't be significant in real-world use, especially if you stick to the less intense tasks at which this model is aimed. If you think you'll need more storage and don't want to use an external drive, a variant with a 512GB SSD is available for $749. If you plan on using the desktop daily for the next several years, buying a model with at least 16GB of RAM may be a better value; those options start at $799. But if you just want the cheapest Mac desktop possible, the base model is still a great compact PC for the essentials, and this discount makes it a little more affordable.

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