The creator of a popular Nintendo Switch emulator, Yuzu, appears to have agreed to settle Nintendo’s lawsuit against it, less than a week since the games company accused the emulator’s creator of “piracy at a colossal scale.”

A joint final judgment and permanent injunction filed Tuesday says developer Tropic Haze will pay the games company $2.4 million — along with a long list of concessions. The people behind Tropic Haze must halt all “activities related to offering, marketing, distributing or trafficking in Yuzu emulator or any similar software that circumvents Nintendo’s technical protection measures.” No more emulating, then. It must even surrender the emulator’s web domain (including any variants) to Nintendo. The website is still live at time of writing.

In recent years, Nintendo has increased its efforts to quash popular emulators and game piracy sites. It sued ROM-sharing website RomUniverse for $2 million and helped send hacker Gary Bowser to prison. Will this latest lawsuit stop people trying to emulate Nintendo consoles and games? No. But it’ll likely deter anyone trying to make a buck out of it.

We also take a look back at how Steam reshaped video games in the past two decades.

— Mat Smith

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Apple announces new MacBook Airs with M3 chips

This is the same CPU that powers the latest MacBook Pro laptops.

Apple

As predicted yesterday, Apple revealed new MacBooks. This time, it’s MacBook Air laptops housing the company’s latest Apple Silicone: M3 chips. No Pro or Max options, but it’s also ‘just’ a MacBook Air — the company’s entry-level laptop. Expect performance increases of 17 percent in single-core tasks and 21 percent in multi-core tasks, according to Apple’s estimates. As before, both computers max out at 24GB of RAM and 2TB of storage. There is now support for up to two external displays when the laptop is closed, as well as Wi-Fi 6E.

The 13-inch M3 MacBook Air is $1,099, while the 15-inch model starts at $1,299. The M2 13-inch model will remain at $999 — now mighty tempting at that price. Both of the new MacBook Air models are available to pre-order today.

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Twitter’s former CEO and other execs are suing X for $128 million in unpaid severance

The group says Musk “made up a fake cause” for their firing.

A group of former Twitter executives, including former CEO Parag Agrawal, is suing Elon Musk and X over millions of dollars in unpaid severance benefits. The claims date back to the chaos surrounding Musk’s takeover of the company in October 2022. The lawsuit cites Musk biographer Walter Isaacson’s account of the events, which explains Musk rushed to close the Twitter deal a day early to fire the executives “for cause” just before their final stock options were set to vest.

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Instagram finally lets you edit DMs

If you’re quick.

Meta just rolled out a software update for Instagram that finally allows DM edits. However, you have to do it within 15 minutes of sending the message. It seems the messages won’t be tagged as ‘edited,’ like Apple’s Messages or WhatsApp, either.

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This website first began on March 2, 2004. It’s older than YouTube, the iPhone, Uber, Tesla cars, Spotify and a whole lot more. It’s even roughly a month older than the word ‘podcast.’

To mark the 20th anniversary of Engadget, we’re taking a longer look at how the tech industry has changed over the past two decades. First up: streaming.

We were going to kick things off with a letter from the editor, but two weeks ago, Engadget’s parent company laid off many editors, writers and videographers from our small team, including our editor-in-chief, Dana Wollman.

As Aaron Souppouris puts in his introduction to the series, it’s not “business as usual,” but we are committed to pushing Engadget forward. What started as a grass-roots tech blog has now morphed into a media organization “aiming to break news, give no-BS buying advice and highlight the stories in tech that matter.”

Oh, and we have a podcast.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

Dune 2 kicks butt (literally)

This is what it looks like to reenter Earth’s atmosphere from a space capsule’s POV

Streaming video changed the internet forever

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No, Mark Zuckerberg isn’t having a ‘PR moment’

Meta has rarely been in so much hot water.

Tom Williams via Getty Images

Axios, a site known for political analysis (and extensive use of bullet points), has joined the ranks of pundits fawning over Mark Zuckerberg’s PR strategy. The Meta CEO, they claim, is (as originally headlined) “having a PR moment.” Should anyone be praising the PR strategy of a gigantic company credibly accused of enabling a variety of mass-scale harm? Even if that PR strategy was working — which it isn’t.

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Apple might announce new iPads, M3 MacBook Airs very soon

No spring event?

In Bloomberg’s Power On newsletter, Mark Gurman says Apple plans to announce several new products in a series of “online videos and marketing campaigns” pretty much imminently. If so, that’d be two years in a row Apple has passed on a spring event. This year, it could be particularly busy: Along with an iPad Pro refresh and a new 12.9-inch iPad Air, Gurman reports that Apple is planning to announce new Apple Pencils and Magic Keyboards. (Likely with USB-C.) It’s also expected to release the M3 MacBook Air in 13- and 15-inch models.

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Waymo gets approval to deploy its robotaxi service in Los Angeles

Despite the company getting suspended in February.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has permitted Waymo to expand its robotaxi operations to Los Angeles and more locations in the San Francisco Peninsula despite opposition from local groups and government agencies. In the CPUC’s decision, it admitted receiving letters of protest from the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, the San Francisco County Transportation Authority and the San Francisco Taxi Workers Alliance about Waymo’s expansion.

Following an incident where two of its robotaxis collided with a backward-facing pickup truck, the agency suspended Waymo’s expansion efforts in February for up to 120 days. Waymo spokesperson Julia Ilina said in a statement to Wired that the company will take an “incremental approach” when deploying the service in LA.

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We're back, having had to say goodbye and part with some great coworkers friends here at Engadget last week. Since then, we've covered everything at note at MWC 2024, including some sci-fi-level concepts from Lenovo that may never make it to stores but can still, well, hold our desensitized tech journalist's attention. Meanwhile, Nintendo is, once again, taking emulators and pirates to task in the courts. But this time could prove crucial for the future of emulators. A reminder: Nintendo's new console is set to launch in 2025. Coming up next week, Engadget's 20th anniversary. We're older than YouTube!

This week:

💻🛸: Lenovo’s concept laptop looks like a Star Trek prop:

🏴‍☠️🎮: Nintendo steps up its fight against game piracy:

💃📞: The Barbie phone debuts at MWC 2024

Read this:

I write reviews too! Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth takes the characters and world reintroduced with Remake and does a better job at scaling it all up. Instead of playing in a single city, this time, it’s a world tour. There’s also an expanded roster of playable characters, almost doubling Remake’s total. But there's only one big question: Does Aerith survive?

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Video doorbells manufactured by a Chinese company called Eken, sold under different brands for around $30 each, have serious security issues, according to Consumer Reports. These doorbell cameras are sold on Walmart, Sears and even with an Amazon Choice badge on Amazon.

As is often the case with basic technology products, the device is available under multiple brands, including Eken, Tuck, Fishbot, Rakeblue, Andoe, Gemee and Luckwolf, among others. Most pair with an app called Aiwitt.

Amazon

These devices aren’t encrypted and can expose the user’s home IP address and WiFi network name to the internet, making it easy for scumbags to gain entry. Worse, somebody could easily take control of it by creating an account on the Aiwit app, going up to the doorbell and then pressing a button to put it into pairing mode, which then connects it with their phone.

Worse still, even if the original owner regains control, the hijacker can still get time-stamped images from the doorbell, as long as they know its serial number.

There’s no way to protect yourself if you do own this doorbell series. Temu told Consumer Reports it’s looking into the issue. Amazon, Sears and Shein reportedly didn’t respond.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

Microsoft plans to streamline game upscaling across different graphics cards

The best DACs for Apple Music Lossless

This week’s gaming news: layoffs and weird PR emails

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Dell XPS 16 laptop review

Beauty and power come at a cost.

Engadget

The XPS 16 stands out from most other large laptops by combining power and beauty. But you’ll have to suffer through some usability tradeoffs. For example, the XPS 16’s invisible trackpad, a lovely divisive design feature, is still annoying and not for everyone. A lack of ports counteracts that minimalist design. (No HDMI, no SD card reader.)

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UK government wants to use AI to cut civil service jobs

That's not a typo.

The UK government is actively promoting the use of AI to do the work normally done by civil servants, including drafting responses to parliamentary inquiries, the Financial Times reports.

UK Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden will unveil a red box tool that can allegedly absorb and summarize information from reputable sources, like the parliamentary record. A separate instrument is also being trialed that should work for individual responses to public consultations. The Telegraph quoted Dowden arguing that implementing AI technology is critical to cutting civil service jobs — something he wants to do. “It really is the only way, I think, if we want to get on a sustainable path to headcount reduction.”

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Meta is killing the Facebook News tab in the US and Australia

The tab is already gone in the UK, France and Germany.

In early April, the Facebook News tab will disappear for users in the US and Australia. Meta has announced it’s pulling the dedicated tab to “align [its] investments to [its] products and services people value the most.” Meta added that the number of people using the News tab in the US and Australia over the past year has dropped by 80 percent.

By pulling the News tab in Australia, the company will stop paying publishers in the country for their content after their current deals end. A few years ago, Facebook blocked Australian news links in response to the then-proposed law requiring companies like Meta to pay media organizations for their content. The company unblocked news links just a few days after striking deals with Australian media organizations.

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Nintendo has filed a lawsuit against the creators of a popular Switch emulator called Yuzu, which gives users a way to play games developed for the platform on their PCs and Android devices. In the lawsuit, the company argues Yuzu violates the anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). 

While Nintendo taking down online offenders isn’t new, this case could set a precedent for future lawsuits against emulators, which aren’t themselves illegal. Nintendo is arguing their very nature is unlawful. It could be a big deal.

Nintendo says it protects its games with encryption and other security features meant to prevent people from playing pirated copies: “Without Yuzu’s decryption of Nintendo’s encryption, unauthorized copies of games could not be played on PCs or Android devices,” the company wrote in its complaint.

Nintendo revealed The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was illegally distributed a week and a half before its official release. It was apparently downloaded over a million times from pirated websites, which specifically noted people can play the game file through Yuzu. The company also mentioned that Yuzu’s creators are making money from their emulator: $30,000 a month from their Patreon supporters and around $50,000 from the paid version of their Google Play app.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

The Apple Car never felt real

This is the Nothing Phone 2(a)

More news organizations sue OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright infringement

TikTok is muting all Universal Music-related songs

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Biden executive order aims to stop Russia and China from buying Americans’ personal data

The bulk sale of geolocation, genomic, financial and health data will be off limits.

SAUL LOEB via Getty Images

In a fun bleak imagining of future late-stage capitalism, President Joe Biden is issuing an executive order to limit the mass sale of Americans’ personal data to “countries of concern,” including Russia and China. The order specifically targets the bulk sale of geolocation, genomic, financial, biometric, health and other personally identifying information.

Researchers and privacy advocates have long warned about the national security risks posed by the largely unregulated multibillion-dollar data broker industry. Last fall, researchers at Duke University reported that they could easily buy troves of personal and health data about US military personnel by posing as foreign agents. The loophole: This order will do nothing to slow the bulk sale of Americans’ data to countries or companies not deemed to be a security risk.

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LG’s latest OLED evo TVs start at $1,500

And go up to a sky-high $25,000.

LG

LG’s 2024 OLED evo TVs finally have prices. They’ll start at $1,500 for the midrange C4 models and go up to an impressive $25,000 for the 97-inch G4 flagship. The big theme this year is AI, and the company’s latest Alpha 11 processor is supposed to boost graphics performance by 70 percent, but it’ll only be in the high-end G4 series. The C4 models, meanwhile, will get the updated Alpha 9 Gen 7 chip. Both promise improved brightness (150 percent for the G4 compared to the G3), along with more AI features, like upscaling.

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Samsung’s new microSD card is faster than some SSDs

If your device supports SD Express.

Samsung’s upcoming microSD card will not only cram in 256GB of space but will offer a dramatic speed boost. The company’s 256GB SD Express microSD — Samsung’s first SD Express card — can read data at up to 800 MB/s, significantly faster than the microSDs you can buy today. However, we don’t yet know how much it will cost, and the card won’t be available until later this year. It will probably be pricey, but it may be worth the premium depending on how you use microSDs.

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After roughly a decade, multiple leadership changes and a regular spot in Apple rumor reports, the Apple Car project, internally known as Project Titan, could well be dead. A new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says Apple has officially canceled the car, breaking the news to nearly 2,000 employees working on it.

Apple will reportedly move “many employees working on the car” to the company’s artificial intelligence division where they will focus on generative AI projects, which Apple is expected to share more about later this year.

Leaks over the years revealed the company’s ambitions to expand into a brand-new product category. At the beginning of the project in 2014, Apple wanted to build a fully self-driving car without pedals or a steering wheel, with a remote command center ready to take over for a driver. More recently, Apple pared down its ambitions, with the most recent reports suggesting Apple’s car would be a more standard electric vehicle.

Now, we may never know. Would you have bought an Apple car?

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

Which iPhone should you buy?

Amazon accused of using AI to ‘replicate the voices’ of actors in Road House remake

PlayStation is laying off 900 staff across Naughty Dog, Insomniac and other studios

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Pokémon Legends: Z-A for Switch returns the series to Lumiose City

It could be the first Pokémon game for Nintendo’s next console.

The Pokemon Company

The Pokémon Company revealed the franchise’s latest Legends entry on Tuesday. Pokémon Legends: Z-A returns the series to Lumiose City, last seen as a region in Pokémon X and Y on the Nintendo 3DS. The Pokémon Legends: Z-A trailer — an extended teaser — doesn’t show any gameplay footage, and its shots of Lumiose City use wireframe models to tease a city in mid-development, according to the announcement.

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TikTok is muting more songs following its Universal Music royalties fight

Millions more tracks are likely to vanish.

TikTok is being forced to take down more music from its platform. Universal Music Group (UMG) recently yanked recordings it owns or distributes from TikTok, including tracks from superstars like Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and The Weeknd. The standoff is now impacting songs published by UMG, with millions more tracks to be muted on TikTok by the end of this week. Due to an issue called split copyrights, if a Universal Music Publishing Group-contracted writer has contributed to a song, that track may have to be removed from TikTok. So artists who have collaborated with Taylor Swift, Adele, Justin Bieber, Mariah Carey, Ice Spice, Elton John, Harry Styles and SZA may see their songs disappear from TikTok too.

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Google is reportedly paying publishers to use its AI to write news stories

What could go wrong?

Google has quietly struck deals with publishers to use new generative AI tools to publish stories. The deals, reportedly worth tens of thousands of dollars a year, are apparently part of the Google News Initiative (GNI), a six-year-old program that funds media literacy projects, fact-checking tools and other resources for newsrooms. Adweek says publishers can use the beta tools to create aggregated content more efficiently, indexing recently published reports generated by other organizations, like government agencies and neighboring news outlets, then summarizing and publishing them as a new article.

Publishers in the program are apparently not required to disclose their use of AI nor are the aggregated websites informed that their content is used to create AI-written stories on other sites. Publications like CNET and Sports Illustrated have been widely criticized for attempting to pass off AI-authored articles as written by human staffers.

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Nothing's drip feed of specs and line drawings gets us to this point. At MWC 2024, the company finally revealed its next phone in the flesh during its MWC soiree. Sadly, it was in a glass box — which seems to be the not-great trend of this year's Mobile World Congress. 

But, for a phone seemingly pitched as its cheapest device yet, it looks good. Cool, even. The Nothing design DNA is fully there, with an admittedly scaled-back version of its light-up Glyphs on the rear. The phone will seemingly mark the return of a centralized camera unit, gasp! What's next, a headphone socket?

Nothing

Journalists attending the event managed to capture every angle of the new phone, rumored to ring in cheaper than the Nothing Phone 2, which launched priced at a reasonable $599. (The original Phone 1 cost $299 in the US under a "Beta Membership" program.) Earlier rumors peg the European price around €400 ($430), with savings from using a cheaper MediaTek processor.

Courtesy of Tom's Guide, a perceptible bezel around the display is possibly the biggest sign of a cheaper Nothing device. Still, without handling the Phone 2(a) in person, we'll reserve judgment. The phone goes on sale March 5. 

Catch up on all of the news from MWC 2024 right here!

Lenovo’s Project Crystal is definitely sci-fi tech come to life. Currently, there are no plans to turn the concept laptop into a retail product. Yet. Instead, its ThinkPad division commissioned an exploration into the potential of transparent microLED panels and, sigh, AI integration.

Engadget

The most obvious use for the transparent laptop display would be sharing info at a doctor’s office or hotel desk. Instead of needing to flip a screen around, you could simply reverse the device’s output via software. According to Sam Rutherford, the transparency effect is bewildering. When closed or turned off, Project Crystal’s screen almost looks like an ordinary piece of glass with a brownish tint. But at a moment’s notice, the whole thing lights up like a battleship. It’s definitely the most intriguing thing so far at MWC 2024. Catch all the announcements right here. No tricorders, though.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

The best Bluetooth trackers

Our favorite budget wireless earbuds are down to $53 right now

Google finally brings Wallet passes to Wear OS watches along with transit directions

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Netflix removes grandfathered accounts’ access to Apple iTunes billing

If you’ve been paying through Apple, you will now have to pay directly.

If you’ve been paying Netflix through iTunes, you’ll soon have to say goodbye to your discounted rates. The company has confirmed to The Verge that it’s started removing users’ access to their iTunes billing plan for the streaming service. Members on the basic plan paying through iTunes will now have to pay the company directly using a credit or a debit card. Netflix stopped letting new customers sign up for in-app subscriptions on Apple devices way back in 2018 to avoid giving the latter a commission.

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NVIDIA’s RTX 500 and 1000 Ada GPUs bring more AI smarts to thin and light laptops
They will debut in laptops this spring.

NVIDIA unveiled its latest laptop GPUs and, what a surprise, they’re largely to assist AI processing. The RTX 500 and 1000 Ada Generation graphics cards are primarily for thin and light laptops. While they won’t offer as much TOPS AI performance as current higher-end mobile GPUs, they could be handy for on-the-go AI processing for researchers, content creators and video editors. These are workstation GPUs, so they’re not for your gaming demands. The company says the GPUs, based on the Ada Lovelace architecture, offer up to twice the ray-tracing performance of previous-gen GPUs (they employ third-gen ray-tracing cores). Fourth-gen Tensor Cores, meanwhile, deliver up to twice the throughput of previous GPUs.

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This robot lawnmower runs Doom

We’re not sure why.

Engadget

Landscaping technology company Husqvarna just announced the game will run on some of its robot lawnmowers. So you can mow down hellspawn and… grass. You play the game using the lawnmower’s onboard display. Rotating the control knob turns your character left and right and pressing the knob makes you shoot. Holding down the start button initiates forward movement.

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After complaints that Google’s image generator built into its Gemini AI was (ugh) woke, Google explained why it may have overcorrected for diversity. Prabhakar Raghavan, the company’s senior vice president for knowledge and information, said Google’s efforts to ensure a wide range of people generated in images “failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range.”

Users criticized Google for depicting specific white figures or historically white groups of people as racially diverse individuals. In Engadget’s tests, asking Gemini to create illustrations of the Founding Fathers resulted in images of white men with a single person of color or woman among them. When we asked the chatbot to generate images of popes through the ages, we got photos depicting Black women and Native Americans as the leader of the Catholic Church. The Verge reported that the chatbot also depicted Nazis as people of color, but we couldn’t get Gemini to generate Nazi images. “I am unable to fulfill your request due to the harmful symbolism and impact associated with the Nazi Party,” the chatbot responded.

Raghavan said Google didn’t intend for Gemini to refuse to create images of any particular group or to generate historically inaccurate photos. He also reiterated Google’s promise to improve Gemini’s image-generation abilities.

However, that entails “extensive testing” before the company switches the feature back on.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander tipped over at touchdown, but it’s still kicking

Some Apple Vision Pro units reportedly developed a similar hairline crack on the front glass

Amazon to pay $1.9 million to settle claims of human rights abuses of contract workers

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The first phone reveal at MWC 2024 is this official Barbie Flip Phone

C'mon Barbie let's go party.

HMD

MWC 2024 kicks off this week, and while Engadget is covering it all remotely — no tapas for Mathew — this is one we’d be unlikely to book a meeting for. HMD (or Human Mobile Devices) has been making Nokia phones for the past few years and announced at MWC it’ll release an official Barbie Flip Phone this summer, in partnership with Mattel. It’ll be pink, obviously, with a dash of “sparkle.” It’ll be a feature phone, not a smartphone, with HMD marketing it as an accessory geared toward “style, nostalgia and a much-needed digital detox.” That also means it should be cheap.

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Samsung’s Galaxy Ring gets officially revealed at MWC

It’ll be on display alongside its Galaxy AI mobile experience.

Samsung

Samsung has put its Galaxy Ring on public display for the first time at its booth at MWC, which starts today. The health and wellness device, available in platinum silver, gold and ceramic black, will go on sale later this year. The company said little about the Galaxy Ring when it first displayed a render of the device at Unpacked last month. We learned that it would be a wellness-oriented wearable to rival Oura, and it would have a suite of unknown sensors.

Journalists weren’t allowed to photograph it, but some additional images from Samsung show it to be a chonky, concave ring about the same size as the Oura. The extra girth isn’t surprising, given the electronics cached inside. The company described the Galaxy Ring as “a new health form factor that simplifies everyday wellness, supporting smarter and healthier living via a more connected digital wellness platform.” So, a smart ring then?

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Let’s talk about Xbox

This week’s gaming news.

No one is suggesting Microsoft should stop making video-game hardware. But should Microsoft keep making generationally distinct consoles in the traditional hardware cycle? Does Xbox need a box? The company calls its cloud game streaming service xCloud for a reason, right?

Watch here.

Every gram counts in commercial flight. Material scientists from Kobe University have discovered “nanospheres” that are near-invisible silicone crystals. The particles can reflect light thanks to very large and efficient scattering, research published in the ACS Applied Nano Matter journal details. The result could mean covering a surface in vibrant color while only adding 10 percent of the weight of painting an aircraft for the same effect.

Minoru and Hiroshi’s discovery focuses on structural rather than pigment color to exhibit and maintain hues. The former absorbs wavelengths while reflecting those the human eye picks up. Structural colors, on the other hand, are intense and bright as light interacts with micro- and nanostructures. While the headline commercial benefits are for planes, the paint could have many more uses simply for its brightness.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

The Odysseus has become the first US spacecraft to land on the moon in 50 years

The 8Bitdo Ultimate C controller is on sale for $25 today only

Google’s sign-in and sign-up pages have a new look

Sony is working on official PC support for the PS VR2

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Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth review

The open-world tour.

Engadget

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth takes the characters and world reintroduced with Remake and does a better job at scaling it all up. Instead of playing in a single metropolis, Midgar, this time, it’s a world tour. There’s also an expanded roster of playable characters, almost doubling Remake’s total, each with a unique play style, once again. But does Aerith survive?

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Xiaomi 14 Ultra combines a 1-inch camera sensor with 4 AI imaging models

It also supports satellite calling and texting.

The Xiaomi 14 Ultra is the latest Leica-branded smartphone, featuring a second-gen one-inch camera sensor. Xiaomi is finally catching up with the competition by picking up Sony’s newest mobile camera sensor, the LYT-900. The Xiaomi 14 Ultra has a slight edge on rival phones with the same sensor, with its faster main variable aperture at up to f/1.63, beating the Oppo Find X7 Ultra’s f/1.8 — on paper, at least.

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Framework’s new sub-$500 modular laptop has no RAM, storage or OS

Pick the parts you want and install them yourself.

Framework is selling its cheapest modular laptop. It has dropped the price of its B-stock Factory Seconds systems (which are built with excess parts and new components). As such, it’s now offering a Framework Laptop 13 barebones configuration for under $500 for the very first time. The 13-inch machine comes with an 11th-gen Intel Core i7 processor with Iris Xe graphics. So the CPU should be sufficient for most basic tasks and some moderate gaming. However, you’ll need to add RAM, storage, a power supply, an operating system and (probably) even a Wi-Fi card.

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