Since its debut in 2015, Apple Music has offered one of the more generous free trial periods in the streaming industry. As a first-time subscriber, you could use the platform to listen to music for free for up to three months before the company asked you to start paying. That’s no longer the case.

Igor Bonifacic / Engadget

In a change spotted by Japanese blog Mac Otakara and subsequently reported by MacRumors, Apple now offers a shorter one-month free trial in many countries where the service is available, including the US, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom and Japan. You can already see the change reflected on the Apple Music website. “One month free, then $9.99 per month,” the US portal says when you visit.

At the moment, Apple Music pricing remains the same, with the $5 per month Voice Plan as the most affordable way to access the platform’s library of tracks. The change broadly aligns Apple with competitors like Spotify, which, outside of promos, typically offer one-month free trials to new subscribers.

While we’ll likely never know Apple’s official reason for shortening the trial, there’s a good chance the decision came down to simple economics. When the company first came out with Apple Music, it didn’t pay royalties for tracks users streamed during their free trial period. Apple later famously changed that policy after Taylor Swift published a letter criticizing the company. By shortening the trial period, the company can more quickly recoup the costs of attracting new subscribers to the platform. 

Apple will host its next hardware event sometime on or around March 8th, according to Bloomberg. At the event, the company will reportedly announce the third-generation iPhone SE, a refresh of the 2020 iPad Air and a new Mac computer that will feature an Apple Silicon chip. The date aligns with the March to April timeframe Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman previously said Apple had set for the SE’s debut but warned potential production delays could force the company to change its plans.

As before, the new phone will reportedly feature a 5G modem, a first for the SE line. It’s also expected to include a faster processor and a better camera. However, it will retain the iPhone 8-era design of the current model. As for the new iPad Air, it too will get a processor refresh and the addition of 5G connectivity. Bloomberg didn’t say much about the new Mac that Apple may announce at the same event, but most recent reports point to the company unveiling a new 27-inch iMac Pro model.

If the idea of a new iPhone SE isn’t too exciting for you, the good news is Bloomberg reports Apple also plans to release iOS 15.4 sometime in the first half of March. Among other enhancements, the update is expected to add a feature that will allow you to unlock your iPhone with Face ID even while wearing a mask.

Microsoft has not abandoned development on HoloLens 3, according to the technical fellow who leads the company’s mixed reality division. In a tweet spotted by The Verge, Microsoft’s Alex Kipman told a concerned fan not to believe everything they read online. “HoloLens is doing great and if you search said internet they also said we had cancalled HoloLens2… which last I checked we shipped with success,” he said.

Kipman’s tweet came in response to a report Business Insider published this week claiming the company had recently scrapped plans for what would have been HoloLens 3. Microsoft strongly disputed the outlet’s reporting. “We remain committed to HoloLens and future HoloLens development," Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw told Business Insider. He added that the device is a "critical part of [the company's] plans for emerging categories like mixed reality and the metaverse."

Like Shaw, Kipman didn’t directly address the possibility of Microsoft working with Samsung to co-develop a separate mixed reality device, nor did he touch on the staffing issues Microsoft’s mixed reality division has reportedly had to contend with. According to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, Kipman’s team has lost approximately 100 people over the last year, with many of those employees defecting to Meta.

Microsoft, however, seems bullish on its metaverse prospects. “We feel very well positioned to be able to catch what I think is essentially the next wave of the internet,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told analysts last month during the company’s Q2 earnings conference.

With the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing underway, there are more ways than ever to watch Team USA and athletes from around the world compete, including in 8K VR. This month, NBCUniversal and parent company Comcast will stream more than 150 hours of interactive content from the games. To watch that coverage, you’ll need a TV Everywhere login and a Quest 2 headset from Meta.

Once you download the NBC Olympics VR by Xfinity app, you can look forward to watching live and on-demand coverage of six sports, including figure skating, hockey and snowboarding from a 180-degree perspective. With some events, NBC will also offer multiple viewpoints of the action. Additionally, the broadcaster plans to stream features and highlights from 10 other sports throughout the Olympics, including alpine skiing, bobsled and speed skating.

If you missed the Opening Ceremony, or want to see it from a new perspective, you can also rewatch the event from the point of view of athletes who took part in the parade of nations. When the 2022 Olympics finish later this month, NBC will offer interactive coverage of the Closing Ceremony too.

If you don’t have access to a Quest 2 headset, you can still enjoy the games in 4K HDR and immersive Dolby Atmos audio. NBCUniversal will stream the higher-resolution broadcasts during primetime and Prime Plus, with figure skating, skiing, snowboarding, hockey, bobsled and other sports set to get the special treatment.

In a few short days, Samsung will host its first Unpacked of 2022. While the company is sure to stage many more events throughout the year (too many, if you ask us), the first one is always the most exciting. That’s because it’s usually where Samsung has announced the next iteration of its flagship Galaxy S line, and Wednesday’s Unpacked promises to be no different. On February 9th, the company is expected to unveil the Galaxy S22. No surprise there, but there could be more to that announcement than you might anticipate. Let’s break down everything we expect to see from the company later this week.

Galaxy S22 and Galaxy S22+ 

Evan Blass

Much like it did in 2021, Samsung is expected to launch a trio of new Galaxy S phones. As you’ll see in a few moments, the S22 Ultra is likely to be a significant departure from its predecessor. But as for the S22 and S22+, the expectation is that they’ll be more iterative updates.

Prerelease reports suggest they’ll feature a similar design with the same “Contour Cut” rear camera housing that you’ll find on the Galaxy S21 and its Fan Edition offshoot. As far as upgrades go, most leaks point to the Galaxy S22 featuring a new glass back and both phones coming with 50-megapixel main cameras. More interesting is what could be inside the phones.

Evan Blass

As it’s done in years past, Samsung is expected to source two different chipsets for the Galaxy S line in 2022. In North America, the phone will likely feature the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. That would make it one of the first phones to bring Qualcomm’s latest flagship SoC to the US and Canada. Meanwhile, in Europe and other parts of the world, the S22 will almost certainly come with Samsung’s own Exynos 2200.

Announced in January, the 4nm chip features an “Xclipse” GPU powered by AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture. In practice, what makes the Exynos 2200 noteworthy is that Samsung claims it’s capable of ray tracing. Early benchmarks suggest the Exynos 2200 could also be faster than its Qualcomm counterpart. All of that would make the potential differences between the North American and European versions of the Galaxy S22 more notable than in years past.

What we’re less clear on is how Samsung plans to price the Galaxy S22. In a recent tweet, WinFuture’s Roland Quandt said the base model S22 and S22+, both with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage, would start at €849 and €1049, respectively. Those prices suggest the company won’t charge more for the S22 and S22+ than it did for the S21 and S21+. However, a separate leak from earlier in the month suggested every model in the S22 line could cost $100 more than its S21 counterpart. We’ll have until the 9th to get a better sense of those details.

Galaxy S22 Ultra

Evan Blass

Shortly before Samsung announced it was hosting an Unpacked on February 9th, company president TM Roh teased the event would feature “the most noteworthy S series device we’ve ever created.”

After component shortages and a pandemic-fueled decline in demand for high-end phones led Samsung to skip the Note line in 2021, the fan-favorite phone is coming back this year. In all but name, we expect the Galaxy S22 Ultra will be the Note 20 successor Samsung fans have been waiting to see for nearly two years. But don’t TM Roh’s or our word for it. In the weeks leading up to Wednesday’s Unpacked, images of the S22 Ultra leaked multiple times.

Renders shared by Evan Blass of Evleaks fame suggest the S22 Ultra will feature a dramatically different design from the rest of the S22 lineup. Not only will the phone seemingly come with an S-Pen stylus in the box, but it will also feature a curved display and flat backplate. What’s more, judging from photos shared by Front Page Tech, the S22 Ultra will include a slot for storing an S-Pen inside of the phone.

A set of alleged prerelease marketing images shared by Blass suggest the S22 Ultra will feature a quad-camera array with a 108-megapixel main camera, 12-megapixel ultrawide and two 10-megapixel telephoto cameras with Samsung’s 100x Space Zoom feature built-in. The leaked marketing material also suggests the phone will feature a 6.8-inch AMOLED display with 120Hz refresh rate and QHD+ resolution.

Internally, the S22 Ultra is expected to include many of the same components found in the S22 and S22+. However, one potential source of drama related to the S22 Ultra may come down to how much RAM you’ll find in the base model. According to Roland Quandt, the most affordable S22 Ultra variant will ship with 8GB of memory. At the same time, it will cost as much as the entry-level Galaxy S21 Ultra, which came with 12GB of RAM. Per Quandt, European consumers will need to pay a €100 premium to get the model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of internal storage. It’s unclear if Samsung will implement the same pricing strategy in the US.

Galaxy Tab S8 and Tab S8 Ultra

Evan Blass

Samsung has been making Android tablets long enough for Google to first abandon the form factor and then more recently declare that it’s the “future of computing.” So it should come as no surprise reports suggest the company will update its Tab line at Unpacked. According to a separate leak from Quandt, we can expect the company to equip the 11-inch Tab S8 with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, 8GB of RAM, up to 256GB of internal storage, an 8,000mAh battery and a 120Hz LCD display.

As for the larger Tab S8+, Quandt suggests it will feature a 12.7-inch OLED display and a bigger 10,090mAh battery while being slightly thinner than its smaller sibling. We’ll note here some reports had said the Tab S8+ could feature a 12.4-inch display. Either way, both models are expected to come with a bundled S-Pen stylus.

But that’s not all, we also expect Samsung to add a new model to the Tab line. Per Quandt, the company will announce the Tab S8 Ultra on February 9th. It will reportedly feature a monstrous 14.6-inch AMOLED screen, up to 16GB of RAM and dual-front facing cameras housed in an unsightly display cutout. It could also come with a feature that would allow you to use the Galaxy S22 Ultra as a separate color palette when drawing with the S-Pen, which is exactly the sort of parlor trick only Samsung would think of to sell you on its most expensive devices.

Everything else

By all accounts, the first Unpacked of 2022 will see Samsung focus on the Galaxy S22 and Tab S8. The company could surprise us with updates to its foldable and watch lineups, but so far there haven’t been any leaks and reports to suggest that will happen. Either way, you’ll want to visit Engadget on February 9th. We’ll have comprehensive coverage of all the company’s biggest news.  

Catch up on all of the news from Samsung’s February Unpacked event right here!

Last October, Adidas partnered with Swedish headphone maker Zound, best known for its work with Marshall, to announce three sets of new true wireless earbuds. One of those was the FWD-02 Sport earbuds, which were supposed to launch last year. Following a delay, however, they’re finally available starting this month.

Adidas

As a refresher, the FWD-02 Sport are a pair of runner-friendly earbuds with swappable ear tips and wings, and a force sensor so you can control them while wearing gloves. They’re also IPX5 certified so they’re resistant to sweat and water. Adidas and Zound claim you can expect up to 6 hours of playtime from the earbuds, with the charging case providing another 19 hours of battery life before you need to head to an outlet.

The case features a mesh top layer, which Adidas said helps the buds dry faster when you need to store them. The FWD-02 also include an Awareness mode that allows ambient sounds to filter through so you can stay safe while using them for outdoor workouts.

At $170, the FWD-02 earbuds face some stiff competition, particularly from Apple’s Beats Fit Pro. While they’re $30 more expensive, they include active noise-cancellation, a fit a lot of people like and Apple’s H1 chip for hands-free access to Siri, one-touch pairing and other iOS-specific features. The lack of ANC isn’t a dealbreaker for a pair of sport-focused earbuds like the FWD-02, but it’s a feature that more and more people are looking to get on their next pair of headphones.

Google has two lost prominent members of its Ethical AI research group, reports Bloomberg. On Wednesday, researcher Alex Hanna and software engineer Dylan Baker left the company to join Timnit Gebru’s Distributed AI Research Institute. Gebru founded the nonprofit in December following her controversial exit from the tech giant in 2020.

Up until the end of that year, Gebru was one of the co-leads of Google’s Ethical AI research group. After publishing a paper the company said didn’t meet its bar for publication, Gebru claims Google fired her. The company, however, has maintained she resigned. In February 2021, several employees left the unit in protest of Google’s handling of the situation. Later that same month, the company fired Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI research group. Hanna and Baker told Bloomberg the dismissals weighed heavily on them, and that they wanted to work with Gebru again.

“I am quitting because I’m tired,” Hanna wrote on Medium after announcing her departure from the company. The post is in many ways a call to action. “In a word, tech has a whiteness problem. Google is not just a tech organization. Google is a white tech organization,” Hanna writes. “More specifically, tech organizations are committed to defending whiteness through the ‘interrelated practices, processes, actions and meanings,’ the techniques of reproducing the organization. In this case, that means defending their policies of recruitment, hierarchization, and monetization.”

The post also touches on the paper at the center of Gebru’s dismissal from the company. Hanna says the claim Jeff Dean, the head of Google’s AI division, made about the robustness of the company’s publishing process was “laughable.” She points to analysis the group Google Walkout for Real Change published in 2020. “Google management remained silent when an article on the Google Walkout page pointed out that there were many counterexamples, like how nearly half of papers in the system were approved within a day or less of the deadline,” Hanna said.

Hanna and Baker told Bloomberg they also believe Google has become less willing to listen to employees in recent years. They specifically pointed to the company’s pursuit of potential contracts from the Pentagon over the past and the very public objections of its workers.

“We appreciate Alex and Dylan’s contributions — our research on responsible AI is incredibly important, and we’re continuing to expand our work in this area in keeping with our AI Principles," A Google spokesperson told Engadget. "We’re also committed to building a company where people of different views, backgrounds and experiences can do their best work and show up for one another.”

The Federal Communications Commission could soon make it more difficult for telemarketers to leave ringless voicemails on your cellphone. On Wednesday, Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel shared a proposal that seeks to force callers to obtain your consent before they can leave a message directly in your voicemail box.

The proposal would effectively extend the protections of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act to cover ringless voicemails. The 1991 law prohibits telemarketers and other groups from using automated systems to make non-emergency calls to your mobile phone without first obtaining your consent. In March 2017, a company called All About the Message asked the FCC to rule that the TCPA did not cover ringless voicemails. Rosenworcel’s proposal would deny that petition.

“Ringless voicemail can be annoying, invasive and can lead to fraud like other robocalls—so it should face the same consumer protection rules,” said Rosenworcel. “No one wants to wade through voicemail spam, or miss important messages because their mailbox is full. This FCC action would continue to empower consumers to choose which parties they give permission to contact them.”

The FCC didn’t say when it plans to hold a full commission vote on the proposal. The agency’s next open meeting is scheduled for February 18th, but addressing ringless voicemails isn’t listed on the day’s agenda. There’s no guarantee the FCC will approve the proposal, but compared to a topic like net neutrality, combating spam callers is something most Americans want more action on from the government.

Arturia has launched a new promotion to help those who are just starting their musical journey. Until February 17th, the company has discounted individual software instruments, effects and presets by 50 percent.

The highlight of the sale is Arturia’s Pigments software. At 50 percent off, you can get the company’s original virtual synth for $99, instead of $199. Outside of the fact it’s discounted, now is also a great time to pick up Pigments because Arturia recently released an update to add support for Apple’s M1 chips. Among other additions, the 3.5 update also added a new cross-modulation feature that makes it possible to dial in results that range from weird to full-out sonic freakouts.

We’ve used some of Arturia’s software in the past. For the most part, the company’s instruments, effects and presets are easy to use and surprisingly close to the synths and devices they attempt to emulate. They may not be the real thing, but you’ll pay far less for Arturia’s software than you would for a Moog synth or Rhodes piano — not to mention the fact tracking down some of those classic instruments can be a challenge and they take up a lot of space. When you add a discount to that software, it makes it an even easier decision for those just starting out in music production. 

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Earlier this week, 19-year-old Jack Sweeney won a bit of internet fame when Protocol published a story about one of his Twitter bots. The college student maintains ElonJet, a tracker that tweets out when Elon Musk’s private jet takes off and lands. Sweeney has several other such bots that use publicly available air traffic data to follow the private planes of celebrities like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. However, with 180,000 followers and counting, the ElonJet account is by far Sweeney’s most famous creation. And it’s that popularity that attracted none other than Elon Musk to the bot.

Last fall, the entrepreneur contacted Sweeney about ElonJet. “Can you take this down? It is a security risk,” he said, according to Protocol. Musk told Sweeney he would give him $5,000 to delete the account and keep “crazy people” from finding out his whereabouts. Sweeney made a counteroffer. “Any chance to up that to $50k? It would be great support in college and would possibly allow me to get a car maybe even a Model 3.”

Musk told him he would think about it, but the two haven’t spoken since. At the time, Sweeney told Protocol he wasn’t bothered by Musk ghosting him. His work on ElonJet had taught him how to code and landed him a part-time job with a company called UberJets. Plus, as a self-proclaimed fan, he got to share a conversation with one of his idols.

Now the teen seems to have changed his tune. In a new interview with Business Insider, he said he decided to go public with Musk’s offer after the billionaire seemingly lost interest in cutting a deal. "He went the opposite way of me, so why wouldn't I go the opposite way of him?" he asked the publication. "I've done a lot of work on this and $5,000 is not enough," Sweeney said. He told Business Insider the initial offer wouldn’t replace the “fun” he’s had working on the bot.

It doesn’t seem like Musk has any interest in negotiating with Sweeney. Following their initial conversation, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO implemented some of the technical advice Sweeney gave him to make his jet harder to track. At the time, Musk reportedly also told Sweeney it didn’t “feel right to pay to shut this down.” He probably has a point.