Your keys (bags, jackets, purses) may soon become easier to find, thanks to the Big Spring Sale at Amazon. Right now a four pack of Tile Pro Bluetooth trackers are down to $80 instead of the $100 full price for the pack. The deal looks even better when you consider a single Tile Pro goes for $35. That's not quite an all-time low, as we saw the set drop to around $70 for the shopping holidays in 2022 and again last year. Still a decent savings over buying our favorite trackers for Android phones separately and at full price. 

The Tile Pro lets you swap out the battery, unlike other Tile models where you need to replace the whole unit. It's also louder than other Tile trackers and Apple's AirTag. While Tile trackers will work with Apple and Android phones, we found the connectivity to be much more reliable with an Android device. Like AirTags, the tags rely on the millions of other Tile users to anonymously ping your lost items when they're out in the world. At home, you can make them ring using the app to help you figure out which couch cushion your keys have fallen between. One caveat is that some features, like the alerts that let you know when you've left your items behind, are only available with a monthly subscription. 

Other Tile trackers are on sale as well, including the smaller Tile Mate and the Mate paired up with a Tile Slim, our pick for the best wallet tracker. If you're interested in our top overall Bluetooth tracker, it's worth noting that the Chipolo One is on sale for $60 for a four-pack. It was the loudest tracker and the quickest at letting you know when you were leaving the house (or restaurant, coffee shop, grandma's house) without your things. Though it's wider finding community is nowhere near as vast as Apple's or even Tile's. 

Your Spring Sales Shopping Guide: Spring sales are in the air, headlined by Amazon’s Big Spring sale event. Our expert editors are curating all the best spring sales right here. Follow Engadget to shop the best tech deals from Amazon’s Big Spring Sale, hear from Autoblog’s car experts on the best spring auto deals on Amazon, and find spring sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

Replacing a smartphone every two years is partially why billions of phones go into landfills each year. If stacked flat atop one another, that many handsets would reach farther than the ISS. But we’ve become accustomed to that 24-month time frame because wireless carriers often push an upgrade on biennial contracts, and many smaller phone makers only offer software support for two years. But now, with longer software commitments from major manufacturers, along with growing right-to-repair legislation, many newer phones can stay in our pockets for closer to seven trips around the sun. Here’s how you can extend the lifespan of your smartphone and avoid shelling out hundreds before it’s absolutely necessary.

How to make your smartphone last longer

Engadget

Use a case

It’s a flashy move to carry a naked phone around, but the chances of a handset making it through a tumble go up dramatically when you employ extra protection. We recommend a number of them in our guide to iPhone cases and in our eco-friendly phone cases guide. In my family, we’ve been happy with Mous cases. Though we’ve never subjected our phones to the brutality seen in the company’s ads, I can say that these cases have seen my partner’s aging Samsung Galaxy and my elderly iPhone through some pretty gnarly spills, sparing them from scratches or worse.

Take care of the built-in battery (or use a power bank)

Since a phone’s battery is often the first thing to show signs of age, it’s worth it to follow recommendations for extending its lifespan. Lithium-ion batteries don’t perform well in heat and you should avoid charging them if it’s hotter than 95 degrees — doing so can degrade the battery quickly and even cause them to malfunction. They’ll tolerate cold weather better, but can get sluggish when things get too chilly.

If you’re storing a phone for a while, it’s best to do so with the battery at half charge, rather than full or empty. In fact, Li-ion cells last longer when they spend less time being either completely discharged or full — that’s why battery optimization features in iPhones and Pixel phones delay overnight charging to 100 percent until about an hour before you typically grab your mobile. And while it’s sometimes necessary to charge a battery quickly, a slower charging method when speed isn’t critical will put less stress on the ionic components and help extend the cell’s life.

But over time, any battery will eventually wear down. The cell powering my iPhone 11 can make it through a typical day, but if I’m traveling, relying heavily on navigation or using the phone as a hotspot, it’ll need a top-off before bedtime. That’s easy if I’m home, but out in the world, a battery pack is an essential. I have a slew of them on hand after testing for our best power banks guide and the two I grab most often are the Otterbox Fast Charge, because it looks cool and has a good capacity, and the Nimble Champ Pro, because it’s crazy fast.

If you really want to give your phone a new lease on life, a new internal battery could be the ticket. For Pixel phones, you can go through Google’s official channel for either a walk-in or mail-in repair, or you can pick the DIY route with iFixit’s Pixel repair kits and instructions. For iPhones, you can start with Apple’s official page, go through Best Buy or other third-parties, or try iFixit’s methods. Samsung also has an in-house option, or you can try Best Buy or iFixit. Depending where you go and the model of your phone, the price for a new battery and installation will likely run you between $45 and $150 — still far less than ditching your handset for something brand new.

Clean up your phone’s storage

Most advice on how to declutter your phone and make it run faster centers on one thing: freeing up space. Your phone’s OS will likely have suggestions for clearing up storage space, like automatically offloading unused apps or deleting year-old messages. You can also do things manually by deleting any apps you don’t use. Next, consider the photos and videos you’re storing locally and either opt to pay for cloud storage or transfer the files to a computer or an external backup device. You can also consider getting rid of any music and movies you may have downloaded for offline use, and deleting old messages and large attachments. A good rule is to keep your storage at around 80 percent capacity. Once you’ve deleted and transferred what you can, restart your phone to give it a chance to clear up its temporary memory.

Why you can (and should) extend the life of your smartphone

Photo by Sam Rutherford/Engadget

The e-waste stream grows each year and doesn't do great things for human or planetary health. Smartphone companies are offering better and more consistent trade-in deals, but even some electronic recycling has its faults. Simply hanging onto a device instead of opting for a new one is the most efficient way of cutting back on a phone's environmental impact — plus it'll save you money.  

While every giant phone maker would like you to believe that upgrading annually is critical, it’s worth noting that new generations of phones often bear strong resemblance to the prior year’s model. We called both the latest iPhone and Google Pixel the most significant updates in years, but prior to that, upgrading didn’t make much sense. The latest Samsung Galaxy phone has a slew of new AI tricks, but physically, it’s not much different than the one that came before it.

With only minor hardware upgrades, the more exciting new features come via over-the-air software updates. When Google released the Pixel 8 last October, the company promised security and software updates for a full seven years. Samsung came out with the Galaxy S24 in January of this year and committed the same support for its handsets. Apple hasn’t made the same pledge, but when the launch of iOS 17 last year cut support for the iPhone 8 and iPhone X, both models had enjoyed around six years of updates from launch.

What Apple did announce is that the batteries in all four models of the iPhone 15 last twice as long as the company originally claimed. Originally, battery capacity was listed at 80 percent of the original full charge after 500 cycles. Now, that same capacity rate applies to 1,000 cycles. The improvement, Apple says, comes courtesy of advanced battery tech and better power management from the operating system. It’s true battery technology has improved in capacity over the years, but longevity hasn’t gone up across the board, as a study by PhoneArena makes clear.

More advancements in battery life spans may be on the horizon particularly as the EV industry grows, which also relies on lithium-ion cells. For now, declining battery health is usually the most noticeable issue affecting older phones. This year, the European Parliament voted for rules surrounding battery-powered devices and included a mandate to allow consumers to “easily remove and replace” batteries. That won’t go into effect until 2027, and there will be plenty of interpretation as to what “easily” means. But EU mandates are what made Apple finally ditch Lightning ports on iPhones in favor of USB-C, so this could eventually be a step towards (once again) having smartphones with swappable batteries.

Even in the US, legislation will soon compel companies to make repair a better option. Right-to-repair bills were passed last year in New York, Minnesota and other states. California has the strongest rule, and it even garnered Apple’s support. Once the law goes into effect in July, it will require companies to provide repair tools and documentation, and to sell components for seven years after the last new model is made for any device costing more than $100. Of course, the law didn’t say anything about prohibiting “parts pairing,” in which a device only works properly when repaired with official parts by a manufacturer-authorized repair center.

Currently, a number of phones have decent repairability scores, according to the online repair community iFixit (the FairPhone 5 gets the highest marks). After California’s law goes into effect, more models may become user-repairable, considering few manufacturers are likely to ignore the state’s nearly 40 million customers. In the meantime, authorized repair is an option, as is self-repair for the more industrious.

Amazon's Big Spring Sale officially begins this Wednesday, but as with all such sales, a number of deals went live early, including on Google's latest Pixel smartphones. The 128GB-capacity Pixel 8 Pro is 25 percent off, which deducts $250 from the list price and brings the handset to $749. That beats the all-time-low price we saw for Black Friday last November. Larger capacity models are seeing discounts as well, with all three colors that Amazon carries included. If you'd rather buy direct, you can get the same discount from Google's online shop, which also has the Google-exclusive Mint color.

A similar discount goes to the 128GB Pixel 8 which is 29 percent off and down to $499 instead of $699 at both Amazon and from Google. Again, that's the lowest price we've tracked and the discounts extend to the larger capacity models. We named the Google Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro the best Android smartphones on the market thanks to their speedy chips, brighter screens and improved cameras. Plus the suite of AI-enabled tools are more than just gimmicks and actually help you out with things like search, taking better photos and a more capable Google Assistant. Perhaps the best part is Google's commitment to seven years of software support, which means these phones can stay in your pocket for far longer than the average mobile.  

As for the difference between the two phones, the Pro model has a larger screen at 6.7 inches versus the Pixel 8's 6.2 inches. The Pro also has a screen with a 400-nit higher peak brightness, more RAM and a third, telephoto camera. Both have the same chip and many of the same AI tools.  

Those looking for an even steeper deal should check out the Google Pixel 7a, which is also down to a record-low price of $374 at both Amazon and Google. We not only named this the best mid-range Android phone in our guide to smartphones, it's also the splurge pick in our budget Android guide. 

Your Spring Sales Shopping Guide: Spring sales are in the air, headlined by Amazon’s Big Spring sale event. Our expert editors are curating all the best spring sales right here. Follow Engadget to shop the best tech deals from Amazon’s Big Spring Sale, hear from Autoblog’s car experts on the best spring auto deals on Amazon, and find spring sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

If you're ready to commit to a year of Max, you can do so for a 40 percent discount. Right now, every tier of the streaming service is on sale — that includes the ad-free, 4K version for $140 annually, which works out to $12 per month instead of the regular $20 monthly. The least expensive sub is ad-supported and goes for $70 yearly, or $5.83 per month as opposed to $10. Between the two is an ad-free level without 4K support that's going for $105 for the year, when you'd usually pay $192 for 12 months.  

The deal is open to all new subscribers. Existing subscribers who buy their service direct from Max.com can also take advantage. If you're a returning subscriber and previously went through Max.com, the Apple App Store or Google Play, you can also get the discount. Unfortunately, only new subscribers via Fire TV are eligible. The timing of the deal is tied to March Madness promotions, as Max will stream all 2024 Division I NCAA men's basketball championship games live, along with other live sports. 

For those who don't remember, Max is the name given to the streaming service that combines HBO's programming with Discovery+ content. While the name may be less memorable, the smooshing of the two services means more content to peruse — from brands like HGTV and Food Network — in addition to fine HBO fare like The Last of Us and True Detective. It's also where you can find Studio Ghibli films and A24 movies. Plus Our Flag Means Death, though canceled, was fantastic. There's a reason we named Max one of the best streaming services out there. 

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The air in your home can be five times more polluted than outdoor air. Energy-efficient homes are designed to be more sealed, too, so they trap more pollutants inside. From cooking emissions and cleaning chemicals to fragrances and pets, a lot of everyday things can make the air inside your home less than ideal. The best thing you can do to improve your indoor air quality is open up windows and doors, as long as the air outside isn’t unhealthy. But if letting in fresh air isn’t an option, air purifiers can help reduce the level of pollutants, while also removing odors and trapping some bacteria and mold. There are hundreds of models from dozens of brands on the market, so we tested a handful and put together this guide to the best purifiers so you can decide which will work best for you.

What an air purifier can and can’t do

There are three key pollutants that adversely affect the quality of the air you breathe: volatile organic compounds (VOC), particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10) and carbon dioxide. VOCs are emitted gasses that can come from cleaners, off-gassing plastics, paint, solvents, fragrances, cooking food and, ironically, air fresheners. VOCs are most closely related to odors you can smell. High levels can irritate your breathing passages, cause headaches and may become cancer-causing over time. Air purifiers with activated charcoal components can help clean VOCs from the air.

Particulate matter is usually discussed as PM2.5 and PM10, with the numbers indicating particle size in microns. This is dust, dirt, mold, smoke and, again, emissions from cooking food. Higher levels of PM can lead to respiratory irritation, allergy symptoms, respiratory infections and potentially lung cancer. Air purifiers that include a HEPA filter can help remove particulate matter from your space.

Carbon dioxide is what humans and pets breathe out. Elevated levels can cause dizziness and lethargy. But no air purifier can reduce CO2 levels because the molecules are so small. Plants can help to some extent, but really the only solution is opening a window and ventilating the space.

There are no federal standards for air purifiers, but the state of California does require all air cleaners sold in the state to be certified by the California Air Resources Board (CARB). All of our top picks here have met that certification.

What to look for in an air purifier

HEPA filters and other filter types

An air purifier isn’t an overly complicated device. Smart modes and app connectivity aside, they’re not much more than a filter and a fan. The latter pulls air through the former to capture particulate matter and other unhealthy elements so you don’t breathe them in. The type of fan can make some difference — it should be powerful enough to pull in air quickly, but also quiet enough on its low speed so it can unobtrusively clean all day long.

Filters, on the other hand, are more varied. Most have two or more layers, typically a pre-filter, an activated carbon component and sometimes a HEPA filter. The pre-filter is made from a fine mesh that captures big stuff like pet hair and larger chunks of dust. Sometimes this part is separate from the more technical filters — which means you can remove and clean it without needing to swap out the whole thing. For all-in-one filters, you can vacuum the outside of it to remove larger particles.

An activated carbon or activated charcoal layer is extremely porous, tightly packed coal that presents a vast amount of microscopic surface area to the passing air. Gaseous chemicals, VOCs and other molecules become lodged in the crannys and stick. This is the layer that gets rid of odors.

Some air purifiers include a HEPA (high-efficiency particulate air) filter. These are pleated masses of ultrafine fibers that force air to take a convoluted path in order to pass through. This traps and absorbs tiny molecules of smoke, dander, dust and some viruses and bacteria.

Since all of these filters physically trap particulates, they’ll eventually fill up and become less effective. Most manufacturers recommend replacing the filter every six months, while others claim a year-long life span. Most smart air purifiers will let you know in the app when it’s time to replace. When you’re considering a unit’s cost, be sure to factor in the expense of replacement filters, which you may end up buying twice a year.

Room size

Air purifiers list their cleaning capabilities in terms of room size and frequency of air exchanges. For example, a smaller one might say it can exchange the air in a 500-square-foot room twice per hour. So that model should be able to pass all of the air in a 250-square-foot room through the filter every 15 minutes, but a 1,000-square-foot room would probably be outside its effective range. Of course, there’s no standard for manufacturers to adhere to when it comes to these calculations, but typically, larger air purifiers can handle larger rooms.

Where you put the machine makes a difference, too. Since it requires airflow to be effective, somewhere close to the middle of the room and at least a foot away from furniture, walls and other potential blockages is ideal. That’s not always practical, so aim for getting it as close as you can to the center of your space while maintaining a one-foot clearance all around.

Controls

In our testing, we focused on “smart” air purifiers with companion apps that can monitor air quality and adjust the fan speed as needed. Within the apps, you can control auto-clean settings, set timers and schedules and check the health of the filter as well. Most will remind you when it’s time to get a replacement, and let you order one directly from the manufacturer through the app. You can also see the current and historical readings from the internal air quality (AQ) sensor. Most determine air quality through an optical particle meter, though some brands like Dyson and Molekule also include chemical sensors for VOC measurements. When levels of particulates become elevated, the fans switch up to high speed to move more air through until the quality improves.

Most smart purifiers also work with voice assistants, so if asking Alexa to turn on your air purifier makes your life easier in some way, you can do so. If you don’t want to talk to an AI or grab your phone to control your purifier, getting a unit with simple on-board controls is a good idea. These can be as basic as buttons with indicator lights or as elaborate as a touchscreen panel. At minimum, it’s good to have a way to control the fan speed and turn on or off auto mode on the device itself.

Design

As we mentioned, sticking the device as close to the middle of the room is helpful for getting the best performance. That means you’ll be looking at it a lot, so design considerations matter. Most purifiers are cylindrical towers with fan vents up top. Units meant for larger rooms are not small, weighing between 12 and 20 pounds and reaching two feet tall (or in the case of the Dyson Purifier Cool, three and a half feet). Some, like Coway’s Airmega IconS, take on more furniture-like designs to blend in. Others, like Dyson's, are conspicuously designed to stand out.

When an air purifier just isn’t enough

The most striking bit of knowledge I picked up from testing air purifiers is how effective opening windows can be on indoor air quality. What took an air purifier a half hour to clear out took mere minutes when I opened my front door and a few windows. Every variable measured by the air quality monitors, including VOCs, PM, and particularly CO2 levels (which air purifiers can’t alleviate), improved dramatically after exposure to fresh air — significantly faster and better than any machine we tested. Even on very cold or very hot days, it might be worth it, even if your doors and windows are only open for a few minutes. True, my HVAC system had to work a little overtime afterwards, but venting a room was the most surefire way of getting air quality quickly back in the green. Of course, if the air outside is unhealthy from fires or run-of-the-mill pollution, throwing open the windows won’t work and an air purifier might be the best way to consistently clean things up.

How we test air purifiers

My living room is not a science lab; there’s far too much pet hair for that to be the case. Still, I went beyond just turning stuff on and sniffing the air by acquiring two consumer-grade indoor air quality monitors that performed well in laboratory assessments, the Element from Element from Awair and the uHoo Smart Air Monitor. I conducted burn tests by measuring the ambient air quality, then burned a brick of piñon incense for twenty minutes and measured the air again. Then I ran one purifier at its highest speed for thirty minutes and recorded levels, then ran the unit on the lowest setting for a half hour and remeasured. I made note of the sound levels using a simple iPhone app to compare one machine’s fan noise to the next.

Over the course of a month, I used each unit in different scenarios (such as in the basements where the cat litter boxes are) and tried out each device’s smart features, controls and auto modes. I also just lived with them and evaluated how they fit into everyday life. As new purifiers come on the market and as we become aware of other units that seem worthy of inclusion, we’ll continue to test them and update this guide accordingly.

Other air purifiers we tested

Sensibo Pure

At $229, and nearly always on sale for $130, I had the Sensibo Pure pegged as a contender for a budget pick. Unfortunately, replacement filters are $99 unless you subscribe to automatic shipments and many of the app features are behind a paywall as well. It’s not certified by CARB and underperformed many of the other units in the burn test, though it did return the air back to a “good” rating according to the air monitors after 30 minutes. The design is inoffensive, it’s not overly loud and it does integrate with Sensibo’s smart AC devices, so if you’re already happy with one of those, this may be a decent option.

Dyson Purifier Cool

Like all Dyson products, this air purifier is dripping with design. It looks like no other unit on the market and it’s up to you to decide whether you like that or not. I was indifferent to the looks, but appreciated the slick and informative app, which not only displays indoor air quality, it also shows what conditions are like outside, using a clever house graphic to differentiate the two sets of numbers. I also like that it detects VOCs as well as particulates and the auto mode seemed to read the room accurately. The air coming out of the fan did indeed feel cool, though at first had a strong plastic odor. Unfortunately, it was the lowest performing unit during two separate burn tests and had repeated connectivity issues.

Molekule Air Pro

The Molekule Air Pro comes from a brand that pays keen attention to aesthetics. It and the app have that Instagrammable, muted-modern look that countless clothing and bedsheet brands emulate these days. That style doesn’t come cheap as the Air Pro costs over $1,000 and requires $140 filters. The company came under fire for and had to stop making many of its claims about its filtration abilities, which may have led to it filing for bankruptcy last year. Molekule is still able to tout its patented photoelectrochemical oxidation, which the company says destroys pollutants at a “molecular level.” In my tests, it performed almost as well as the others in improving VOC and PM2.5 levels. But it’s also very loud: When auto mode kicked the fan into high gear, it would make me tense. Also, I found the unit often indicated “bad” or “very bad” levels when my two monitors indicated the air quality was actually pretty good.

Sony's 1000XM-series headphones have topped our list of the best wireless headphones you can buy for a couple years running. The current top pick is held by the WH-1000XM5 ANC headphones and right now they're $72 off at Amazon, making them $328 instead of their $400 list price. That's not an all time low — we saw them dip to $250 just before the holidays last year and this year they've gone for $300 and $280 at different retailers. But if you don't want to wait and see if those discounts come back, $72 represents a decent savings on a pair of highly recommended over-ear speakers. The sale comes as part of a larger sale on Sony audio at Amazon. 

Even at full price, the WH-1000XM5 are a wise buy if you're looking for superior audio, excellent noise cancellation and an enduringly comfortable fit. Our audio expert, Billy Steele, said these are in a league of their own in his review. The audio is an improvement over the previous generation — which was already great — but now the bass is punchier and the clarity is even more finely tuned. They pack a long, 30-hour battery life and the noise cancellation is adept at blocking human voices, TV sounds and various other environmental noises. There are plenty of easy-to-suss out onboard controls, letting you do things like skip tracks and answer calls. There's even a feature that pauses what you're listening to when you start talking.  

While these are an improvement over the prior model, Sony's WH-100XM4 headphones, those are still a compelling option with great sound and a comfortable fit. They're on sale for a much lower $248. That's $100 off the list price and about $20 more than the all-time low they hit for Black Friday last year.  

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As another week winds to an end, we've put together another roundup of the best tech deals we could find on devices and gadgets Engadget has tried and recommends. Right now a Marshall Bluetooth speaker with good sound and an impressive waterproof rating is $64 cheaper. Our favorite budget robo vac, the Roomba 694 is 35 percent off. And early Mar10 sales have trimmed the prices of a few games staring Mario and his friends. Other deals include sale prices on Bluetooth trackers, a portable projector, a two-pack of Sonos speakers and an Backbone iPhone 14 gamepad. Here are the best tech deals from this week that you can still get today. 

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Just as Engadget was hitting publish on its first posts, I was putting a freshly minted English degree to use working at an indie bookshop in Los Angeles. In seemingly unrelated news, Amazon had just reported its first profitable year after switching from selling books to selling “everything” four years before. (It still sold a lot of books.)

Our bookstore did a good job keeping shelves stocked with a balance of the more worthy popular hits and smaller, better fare. But we couldn’t have every book a customer might want, so we offered to order any in-print title. If a distributor had it, it’d take about a week to get in, longer if we had to go through the publisher. That seemed fine for most customers.

But sometimes “about a week” was too long. A few people came right out and said, “Nah, I’ll order it on Amazon.” In 2005, Amazon launched Prime, the membership program that, for $79 a year, gave customers unlimited two-day shipping on most orders. At launch, CEO Jeff Bezos called it “‘all-you-can-eat’ express shipping.” No one knew at the time how hungry the world was for Amazon’s brand of convenience. And now, nearly two decades later, we’ve seen the shifts that accommodate that buffet — in labor, retail and the entire customer experience.

Prime wasn’t an overnight success. It’s estimated that six years after launch, just four million households paid for the service. But 10 years later, in 2021, Bezos claimed it had accrued 200 million members worldwide. Outside of that milestone, Amazon hasn’t made its membership numbers public, but it’s likely the figure is higher now.

That shipping should be both free and fast has become an expectation, and no company has done more to alter the landscape of logistics than Amazon. On its own, the company operates over a hundred warehouses in the US, each ranging from 600,000 to four million square feet. Each one employs between 1,000 and 1,500 people, and an army of around 750,000 robots works alongside humans in many locations.

The company operates a fleet of cargo planes, is experimenting with drone deliveries and deploys thousands of delivery vans — though none of those Amazon-branded vans are driven by actual employees. Rather, separate companies, known as delivery service partners (DSP), subcontract drivers to operate those vans. Amazon employs 1.5 million people either full or part time (with one million in the US), but those figures don’t include independent contractors and temporary personnel. In addition to the DSP program, Amazon Flex lets individuals use their own cars to deliver smile-emblazoned packages to porches. The company outsources delivery to traditional providers too, relying on both UPS and the US Postal Service, the latter it has compelled to deliver packages on Sundays since 2013.

Such vast orchestration to deliver Stanley Quenchers and pimple patches faster than anyone has paid off. However, it’s hard to look at growth and revenue numbers without considering the human costs. Contracted drivers pee in bottles because meeting quotas leaves no time for bathroom breaks. Workers sustain serious injuries at automated warehouses. The company has been sued for retaliatory firing, intrusive employee surveillance practices and failure to follow COVID safety guidelines. Amazon again made the dirty dozen list in 2023 for workplace safety, according to the advocacy group National COSH. And while it has taken steps to improve, with better compensation, the company takes anti-union actions typical of a massive corporation, joining others in calling the National Labor Relations Board “unconstitutional.”

Apart from worker issues, Amazon’s dominance has made life harder for retail businesses in general, particularly the big chains. The Amazon Effect became shorthand for the mall-emptying squeeze of e-commerce on traditional retail. Even businesses that team up with Amazon don’t fare well. Third-party sellers on the site are subject to punitive measures and must contend with increasing fees, which sometimes put them out of business. Sellers who do perform well have seen products copied and sold by Amazon’s private label. Notable partnerships have had dismal results, such as when Borders outsourced its early web sales or the exclusivity deal with Toys ‘R’ Us. Of course, Borders no longer exists, and Toys ‘R’ Us filed for bankruptcy in 2017.

Trying to beat Amazon on speed and price is pointless. Joining them is unwise. So retailers compete in other ways. At the bookstore, we focused on our strengths: a varied, multi-talented staff who could size up a customer’s reading tastes and stick a good book in their hands. If someone came into our store circa 2005 and said they were into fantasy, there’s a good chance our book buyer would pass them a copy of George R.R. Martin’s latest, years before HBO had anything to do with it.

We had a curated ‘zine section and hosted live events with bestselling authors, cult magazine founders and local writers. But mostly, we capitalized on folks who wanted something more from their shopping experience than just speed and convenience, people who didn’t mind if it took a week to get a book, as long as it came with a little local community. Some just wanted to browse books while sitting under the tree (there’s a tree in the middle of the store), petting a cat (in my day, that was Lucy) and listening to what we felt were pretty wicked playlists.

Today, Skylight Books is still a force of creativity and verve in the Los Feliz neighborhood, and it has even expanded into an annex next door. In general, after the initial casualties from the retail apocalypse and COVID, independent bookstores are doing OK, with established names staying put and new stores opening. Elsewhere in the retail industry, big chains continue to close locations, but independent retail seems to be growing. Personally, I enjoy the new bakeries, brewpubs and bulk stores that have sprung up around the neighborhoods where I now live.

I can’t, as a commerce writer, ignore that a decent portion of my job directs readers to Amazon’s website. The company is playing a part in displaying the very words you’re reading, as Engadget’s site is facilitated by Amazon Web Services (AWS) through Yahoo’s cloud partnership. The company is one of the biggest on the planet, the second largest employer in the US and a good portion of every retail dollar spent in the US goes into Amazon’s revenue chest.

With its acquisition of Whole Foods’ 500+ stores, Amazon is doing fine in the physical retail sector. Yet the company doesn’t tend to win when it tries to fabricate other retail experiences. Amazon Books, Amazon Style and Amazon 4-Star were all small-scale retail spaces that tried to leverage Amazon’s brand, massive trove of buyer data and cutting-edge retail technology. At their peak, those stores comprised about 70 brick-and-mortar locations, all of which are now closed. The cashierless Amazon Go still has more than 20 locations in the US, but Amazon shut down nine of them in 2023 and hasn’t announced plans to open more.

Those misfires could be statistically inevitable; more than half of new businesses go under before they hit the 10-year mark. But perhaps those stores failed because, as physical spaces, they couldn’t capitalize on Amazon’s primary strength: zero-effort buying. Shopping at Amazon.com isn’t particularly pleasant. The website is cluttered and confusing. Suspect products and fake reviews erode shoppers’ trust. It isn’t even the cheapest place to shop. But that 1-Click™ buy button and turbo delivery makes stuff appear on our doorsteps like it slid there on greased rails.

Yet when people get up the energy to leave their homes, they may hope for more: human experiences created by people from their own neighborhoods who do what they do out of passion, not because market data indicates dollars to be had in a given sector. With its trillion-dollar valuation, Amazon isn’t going anywhere, but under its massive shadow, there’s still room for businesses that focus on the human element of commercial transactions, places where people might want to spend some of the time Amazon’s speed and convenience may have saved them.

To celebrate Engadget's 20th anniversary, we're taking a look back at the products and services that have changed the industry since March 2, 2004.

The Anker Nebula Solar HD portable projector is on sale at Amazon for $250. That matches a previous low and represents a 46 percent discount off the current $460 list price. Wshen it first came out in 2021, it went for $600. We give the Nebula Solar a shout out in our buyer's guide to projectors as a notable budget option, noting that you get a lot of features for the price. 

It's a 1080p HD projector that emits 400 lumens for reasonably bright outdoor use. The battery is included, which isn't always the case with portable projectors, so that's another relevant savings. You'll get up to three hours of play from a charge (depending on how bright you set the output) and sound comes courtesy of dual three-watt speakers with support for Dolby Digital Plus. 

Android TV is preloaded and the projector is Wi-Fi enabled to access that content. You can also connect via HDMI, USB or Bluetooth, and it can mirror content from your phone using Miracast. Since it's a projector, the screen size depends on how far away you place it from the wall or other projection surface. This one can deliver up to 120 inches of movie or TV visuals and has a built-in stand to help you adjust the angle. 

Of course, as a portable projector, the Nebula Solar isn't going to be as bright as its corded cousins, but if you want to try out watching a movie under the stars once the weather warms up, this is a pretty inexpensive way to do it. 

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The Marshall Middleton Bluetooth speaker has a list price of $300, but right now Amazon is selling it for $236. That's a 21 percent discount and the lowest price we've tracked since it's launch last March, beating the former low of $260 it hit last December. It's also on sale for $250 at B&H Photo. We named the Middleton one of the best mid-range ($200 to $400) Bluetooth speakers you can buy in our guide. It combines good sound quality with a IP67 rating, meaning it's dust-tight and can survive a dip in a meter of water for up to 30 minutes. Plus there's a handy carry strap to drag it around.   

Marshall markets the Middleton as their flagship Bluetooth speaker — and the company's largest portable with a waterproof rating. At four pounds, it's still small enough to toss in a backpack, but large enough to house three battery cells adding up to 9,600mAh of charge to enable a 20-hour run time. You can even siphon off some of that juice to charge a phone thorough the USB-C port. 

It puts out 360-degree sound from two 15-watt woofers, two 10-watt tweeters and a pair of passive radiators. We found the output to be respectable, handling low frequencies well. Marshall's sound tends to have a good dynamic range combined with significant depth, and that's what you get here. 

The Middleton is also the biggest model to support Stack Mode which lets you pair up with another Middleton or the smaller Emberton II or Willen. Pairing happens using the app and double pressing the speakers' Bluetooth buttons.  

Speaking of other music boxes, the Emberton II speaker, which we named one of the best picks under $200 in that same speaker guide, is also on sale. It's 21 percent off and down to $134, which isn't an all-time low — it went for $14 less last Black Friday. It's not the loudest speaker in it's size range, but the sound is pleasantly balanced and a good accompaniment to small gatherings. 

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