Just a year ago, Apple announced the biggest software update the iPad has ever seen. iPadOS 16 ushered in Stage Manager, a completely revamped multitasking mode that brought overlapping, resizable windows to the iPad, along with robust external display support (provided you had compatible hardware).

There were a host of other new features, as usual, but Stage Manager in particular brought the iPad closer than ever to a Mac or Windows PC experience. iPadOS 17, on the other hand, is a more subtle update. That’s usually the case, with one year bringing big new features and the next offering tweaks and stability improvements. And while there isn’t one singular headline feature in iPadOS 17, the totality of myriad smaller changes definitely adds up. I’ve been using iPadOS 17 in beta for a few weeks, and now that the public beta is live, you can do the same.

A note on stability: Even though this is a public beta, the “beta” still applies. It’s probably not ideal to install on a machine you rely on for daily use, as you’ll surely run into some bugs and crashes. And it’s always a bit of a crapshoot how well third-party apps work on a beta. All that said, I haven’t run into anything particularly severe. Occasionally, an app will just toss me back to the Home Screen, or you might find some weird UI issues where apps haven’t quite been optimized yet. But over the last few years, Apple has gained a reputation for releasing public betas in solid, usable states, and that’s the case here as well. Just remember that “downgrading” to iPadOS 16 final releases isn’t exactly a simple process.

Stage Manager updates

While Stage Manager opened up some major new multitasking features for the iPad, it was also a lot more rigid than the windows management system you’d find on a Mac. This year, Apple has tweaked things to make it easier to set up your ideal workspace. Previously, apps would snap to a handful of predetermined sizes to fit your display, and the specific placement of each individual window was up to iPadOS to decide. Now, app windows have a lot more granularity in how you can size and place them. For example, I can make the Notes app that I’m typing into right now a tiny window half of my screen’s height and about a quarter of its width. From there, I can make it as tall or wide as I want; there are still specific sizes that it snaps to, but there’s far more flexibility than there was last year.

iPadOS 17 is also a lot more flexible about how you arrange multiple apps, something that wasn’t the case last year. When you added a second app to a space, iPadOS automatically decided where the two windows should go. You could resize them both as you wanted, but it was basically impossible to show two apps side-by-side without any overlap, for example. That’s no longer the case. Now, it’s a simple matter of grabbing the top of a window and dropping it where you want.

These basic controls have been available on Windows and macOS for decades, but it’s still a new paradigm for the iPad. I’m definitely glad that Apple seems to be trusting its users more by giving them more flexibility rather than letting iPadOS make major decisions about how you lay out your screen. Stage Manager is still somewhat of a niche feature, given that lots of iPads can’t run it, but people who want to push their iPads further will definitely appreciate these updates.

Lock Screen and interactive widgets

Probably the most obvious user-facing update is the revamped Lock Screen. It should also be very familiar, because Apple first introduced it on the iPhone a year ago. Basically, you can now set up multiple lock screens, each with its own wallpaper, widgets and design elements (like fonts and color filters). To jump between different styles you’ve set up, you can just press and hold on the Lock Screen and then choose what suits you. Finally, you can also set a specific Focus setting for each Lock Screen, so you can set up a whole profile for work mode or vacation time.

There’s also a great new wallpaper picker – this, too, borrowed from the iPhone. There are some new styles here specifically for the iPad, though, including striking views of every planet in the solar system stem. And in a nod to the iPad’s history, they brought back the original Pyramid Lake wallpaper (shot by photographer Richard Misrach) from the first iPad back in 2010. I’m a sucker for nostalgia and love the photo, so Apple won me over here.

Beyond the aesthetics, having widgets on the Lock Screen makes the iPad’s large display more useful — there’s a ton of space, so why not show more than just the time and your notifications? But widgets are getting a big improvement beyond just being able to drop them on the Lock Screen. At long last, they’re interactive. That means if you have a Reminders widget, you can tap a specific item to check it off without having to open the app. Or, with the Apple Music widget, you can automatically start playing an album or playlist.

Previously, widgets let you tap specific parts to jump to that place in the app, so they weren’t just static information displays, but this takes their functionality a lot further. We’re going to need third-party developers to add this functionality to their widgets to really take full advantage of the feature, but I’m looking forward to seeing how apps incorporate it when iPadOS 17 is out in the wild.

Health

There aren’t many Apple apps on the iPhone that you can’t also get on the iPad. Health was one, but that’s been remedied this year. It’s just what you’d expect: Health data tracked from your iPhone and Apple Watch is available for you to review on the iPad, with a design that’s better suited to the larger screen. While there’s nothing revolutionary here, the Health app can include so much data that it’s actually a bit easier to dig through everything here.

Everything syncs from your iPhone, but so far that sync process hasn’t been the most reliable. Even though the Health app on my iPad says it synced two minutes ago, it hasn't pulled in updated steps data since 7AM this morning. My activity rings from my Apple Watch are similarly hours out of date. I wager this will get settled before iPadOS 17 is finished, though.

Apple announced a handful of features relating to mental health as part of the latest iPad and iOS updates, including a dedicated journaling app and mood trackers in the health app. While the journal app isn’t coming until “later this year,” sometime after iPadOS 17 and iOS 17 officially launch, the mood tracking features are available in the Health app. I’ve long been in the habit of tracking my daily mood, and this isn’t a bad place to do it. It’s pretty simple, with a slider to pick your overall mood and a few follow-up questions, but the idea is for it to be quick and painless so you do it repeatedly. There’s also a mental health questionnaire you can take that claims to assess your anxiety and depression levels that reminds me of questions I’ve answered from a doctor in the past. I did reach out to Apple to find out where they’re sourcing this set of questions from so we can know more about their validity and approach.

Safari, Messages, Notes and more

As always, Apple’s core apps are getting lots of little but potentially meaningful updates. Safari’s biggest new feature is arguably the ability to set up multiple profiles. Each profile can access all your bookmarks, saved passwords and reading list, but it keeps things like logins to sites and tab groups separate. I did the basic “personal and work” profiles, with logins to work-specific tools kept separate. It’s also pretty easy to move things between profiles if you accidentally open windows in your personal profile that you’d rather have with your work tabs. And, of course, this all syncs via iCloud to other devices — I have the macOS Sonoma beta installed as well, and things were shared seamlessly.

Messages is possibly Apple’s most important app, and every year it gets usability tweaks and new features. A bunch of those are focused around audio messages, which I haven’t really had a chance to check out much. One thing I do like, though, is that replying in a thread is a lot easier than it used to be. Now, swiping right on a message opens the reply interface, which is definitely quicker than holding down on a message, waiting for the menu to pop up and selecting the “reply” option.

The search experience has also been upgraded with filters. For example, you can first search for a specific contact, and then search just their conversation for keywords. The results naturally include specific messages as well as relevant links, images and more.

But the update I’ve had the most fun with so far is definitely Stickers. You can now easily create your own stickers from images in your photo gallery. If you tap on a subject in a photo, you can pull it out from the background and save it as a sticker, so you can easily use it again. Live Photos can be turned into live stickers — and let me tell you, the live sticker I made of my dog laying down is adorable and I will spam everyone with it.

Your own stickers can live alongside sticker packs from other apps, emoji and Memoji. And the stickers you’ve created will be available to use in third-party apps, as well. Basically, stickers you create as well as those from apps should be easier to share outside of just Apple’s Messages app, which is a nice change from the previously walled-off approach Apple took.

Notes, quietly one of Apple’s most useful apps, has gotten more improvements this year too. You can now embed PDFs right into a Notes doc and they display full-width, so you can easily browse through a PDF and make notes on it below. You can also naturally mark it up with an Apple Pencil or collaborate on it in a note shared with other people.

PDF support system-wide has been improved. For example, opening a PDF document from the Files app will open it in its own window, provided you’re running Stage Manager. This makes it easier to put a PDF side-by-side with another app while still having full access to the Files app. Auto-filling fields in PDFs has also been improved system-wide; Apple says it’s using an on-device neural network to identify documents that have fields that need to be filled in across the system, and you’ll be able to AutoFill details like names and addresses the same way you can on websites.

Another useful trick is the ability to link directly to a specific note in your library. Other note-taking apps like Bear have had this feature for a while, but it’s undeniably handy to link related notes together so you can easily jump between them instead of having to go back to the sidebar and search for the one you’re looking for.

The rest

This just scratches the surface of iPadOS 17. Lots of new features, like the changes to Messages, work best when other people you know are also running the new software. And other things, like the journal app, won’t be available to try for months to come. Finally, there are plenty of iOS 17 features like Facetime updates and a smarter keyboard will be in iPadOS 17 as well. If you want to give this all a shot months before Apple finalizes everything, you can install the iPadOS 17 public beta now. But as always, think hard about whether you’re up for some instability before you take the plunge.

When Apple announced the 15-inch MacBook Air last week, it was exactly what you’d expect. Apple simply took the design and internals of the M2-powered Air it announced a year ago and stuck it in a bigger case with a bigger screen. Done and done.

As such, I went into this review thinking it would be a simple assignment. “It’s a MacBook Air, but bigger.” But that undersells the actual experience of using the 15-inch MacBook Air. See, for a long time, a 15-inch Mac was my ideal computer, from the days of the first titanium-clad PowerBook G4 through the 15-inch MacBook Pro Apple sold a decade ago. Those laptops were powerful and had a screen big enough to use all day, but they were also compact enough to take anywhere. In recent years, though, Apple really leaned into the “Pro” designation, with the price skyrocketing well above $2,000, making it cost-prohibitive for most people.

But the M2-powered, 15-inch Air brings me back to those days. I could easily see using this laptop as my only computer. Like the 13-inch model, it’s powerful, has long battery life and a high-quality (if not cutting-edge) display. It’s also surprisingly thin and light, another hallmark of the Air lineup. And with a starting price of $1,299, it’s significantly more affordable than any laptop that Apple has offered with this size screen.

There are only a few things that the MacBook Air doesn’t have in common with its smaller sibling. Most obvious is the 15.3-inch display with a 2,880 x 1,864 resolution. That works out to 224 pixels per inch, the same as the 13-inch Air. It’s one of Apple’s “Liquid Retina” displays, which has 500 nits of brightness, support for the P3 “wide color” gamut and a modest 60Hz refresh rate.

It’s missing the niceties you’ll find in the mini LED displays on the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro, including a much more dramatic contrast ratio, support for HDR, slightly more pixels per inch and a 120Hz max refresh rate. But Apple’s standard displays are still very nice, and the MacBook Air’s screen is bright, sharp and entirely pleasant to look at for extended periods of time. I use a MacBook Pro as my daily driver, and while I noticed the lower refresh rate at first, I mostly forgot about it after a short while.

Photo by Nathan Ingraham / Engadget

The rest of the differences between the two Air models are minor. The base 15-inch model comes with the 10-core GPU variant of the M2 to power the bigger display’s extra pixels; the 13-inch has an 8-core GPU by default. The other internal specs are similar for both base models: 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. (The model I’m testing has 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, a configuration that costs $1,699.)

The 15-inch Air also has a six-speaker sound system with “force-canceling woofers” for improved bass, compared to a four-speaker setup in the smaller model. Apple has been making surprisingly excellent laptop speakers for a few years now, and these also sound very lively and full when playing back music or movies. They’re not nearly as good as the ones in the 16-inch MacBook Pro, but that laptop is significantly thicker and heavier than the Air; that extra space surely helps with resonance and bass. But the speakers in the Air still sound lively and fun to listen to. Cranking the volume up to the max reveals the lack of bass, but I was happy to listen to music at mid-range volume all day long.

Beyond those things, the 15-inch Air is just a slightly bigger version of the 13-inch model. It has the same relatively meager port selection: just two USB-C ports, MagSafe for power and a headphone jack. The laptop comes in the same four colors (or, more accurately, shades of gray). The keyboard, large trackpad and Touch ID sensor are all excellent, which is true of all Mac laptops at this point. The butterfly keyboard debacle is fortunately a distant memory.

Photo by Nathan Ingraham / Engadget

Unsurprisingly, it sports the same design language that Apple first unveiled with the MacBook Pro refresh a few years ago and then carried over to the Air last year. That means the Air’s formerly iconic wedge shape is gone, replaced with a uniform thickness of less than half an inch, noticeably thinner than the 16-inch MacBook Pro and about identical to the 13-inch Air. Naturally, the 15-inch Air is heavier and bigger in other dimensions, but it still feels extremely thin and also far more portable than either of the MacBook Pro models.

There’s also a notch in the display for the 1080p webcam — again, the same one we’ve seen on other recent MacBooks. It’s much better than the old camera Apple was using until recently, and I don’t mind trading the notch for an improved webcam. The bezels around the display are otherwise nice and thin: not quite as thin as those on the MacBook Pro, but not thick enough for me to give them a second thought.

Performance-wise, the 15-inch Air is also essentially identical to the smaller model. Geekbench 5 scores were almost the same as those we got when testing both the 13-inch Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro, both of which also use the M2 chip. The same goes for Cinebench R23 and a few others we tried. It's worth noting that while single-core performance is similar to the 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M2 Max chip, multi-core and graphics performance is where the M2 can't quite keep up. That said, for most users, there's plenty of power here. 

Performance-wise, the 15-inch Air is also essentially identical to the smaller model. Geekbench 5 scores were almost the same as those we got when testing both the 13-inch Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro, both of which also use the M2 chip.

Photo by Nathan Ingraham / Engadget

Beyond the benchmarks, the 15-inch Air is just as capable as the smaller model we reviewed last year — it can handle most computing tasks without breaking a sweat, and despite having no fans, I never really noticed it getting warm. Of course, that changes a bit if you’re running games or doing more intense tasks like video editing. But my workflow, which consists of dozens of tabs open across multiple Safari windows along with apps like Mail, Slack, Music, Trello, Todoist, Bear and Lightroom, didn’t cause any hiccups. To be fair, these aren’t taxing apps, but dipping into Lightroom to edit some large RAW photos didn’t tax the computer either.

My only concern is that this brand-new Air is running a chip that’s already about a year old. It’s so powerful that this shouldn’t be a problem for the Air’s target audience, but it’s still something worth considering. If you’re going to spend more than $1,000 on a laptop that you’ll likely own for years, the ideal situation is to start out with the newest, fastest, most future-proof tech that you can afford. The M2, as capable as it is, has been around for a while already. If you want bleeding-edge Apple silicon you might be better served with a MacBook Pro or waiting for the next Air refresh. But given that Apple just released this computer with the M2 chip inside, it’s fair to say the company is in no hurry to release an M3.

All of the Apple silicon laptops I've tried have had outstanding battery life, and the 15-inch Air is no exception. It exceeded the 18 hours that Apple claims for video playback by about an hour before eventually running out of juice. And while the battery didn't quite last as long during my normal work routine, I still got about 12 hours before I needed a charger. I easily got through the work day and still some power left for some couch browsing and messaging. I think it's safe to say most people can charge overnight and then not worry about plugging in again until their day is over.

One thing to note on battery, though. Apple offers a compact 35W dual-port charger, which is handy if you want to have your computer charger and another cable right at hand. But after using more powerful chargers for the last few years, this one definitely felt pokey — while I was using the Air, it took about two hours to charge from 45 percent to full while in use. Since Apple gives you the option of swapping in a single-port 70W for no extra charge, I'd recommend that if charging speeds are at all important to you. On the other hand, the battery lasts so long that just charging it more slowly overnight, when speed doesn't matter, is also a fine option.

As usual, Apple dropped a lot of hyperbole about how the 15-inch Air compares to the “most popular 15-inch Windows laptop running an Intel i7 chip.” The claims are that the Air is much faster, the screen is better, the battery is longer while the laptop itself is thinner and lighter. Apple is being very deliberate about these claims, but the MacBook Air does stack up well compared to some of the most popular 15-inch laptops available.

Dell’s XPS 15 is one of the best overall laptops out there, and the $1,299 base model has double the RAM and storage of the Air. You can also get one with a discrete graphics card, which can make a big difference in more demanding tasks. But it’s also much thicker, a pound heavier and has a lower-resolution display and webcam. Microsoft’s Surface Laptop 5 is probably a closer comparison for the Air – it’s a little bit thicker and heavier, but more svelte than the XPS 15, and has a higher-resolution screen. But it doesn’t have the newest Intel, and the M2 bests the 12th-generation chip that it does offer.

Photo by Nathan Ingraham / Engadget

As you’re surely aware, the 15-inch MacBook Air is little more than a bigger version of the computer that Apple released a year ago. But that’s damming it with faint praise when actually this is one of the best Apple laptops I’ve used in a long time. It does everything the 13-inch MacBook Air does with a noticeably larger screen and only a modest price increase. The only real catch is that I think the RAM and storage in the base model is rather stingy, not an unusual tactic for Apple. The M2 smokes even with only 8GB of RAM, but consider adding more if you want your computer to remain speedy for years to come.

If you travel a lot, or value portability above all else, by all means get the 13-inch model. But if I were in the market for a new laptop right now, I think the 15-inch Air would be at the top of my list. It’s fast, light and extremely pleasant to use. And getting a big screen in a compact package is just icing on the cake.

As usual, Apple is unveiling a major set of updates for iPadOS. This year, we're on to iPadOS 17, and as expected it features a host of changes that have already been shown of for the iPhone in iOS 17, plus some updates specific to the tablet. 

For starters, widgets are now interactive, which means you can update them and take actions without necessarily jumping right into the app. You can start playing music via the Music widget, check off reminders, update smart home features and so forth.

Unsurprisingly, iPadOS 17 is also getting the lock screen redesign that Apple pushed to the iPhone last year with iOS 16. This lets you add widgets to the home screen, assign different focus modes to specific wallpapers, change the fonts of the clock and text and more. There's also a pretty cool Live Photo feature that animates your wallpaper when you wake the iPad. 

Apple is also bringing the Health app to the iPad for the first time. Naturally, it syncs data from the Health app on your phone and Apple Watch, but it looks like you can use it standalone as well if you don't have that other hardware.

PDF support is coming to the Notes app, which might not sound like the most exciting thing ever. But Notes is a pretty powerful app, and having it host PDFs for annotation could be quite useful. There's even a live collaboration feature that lets two people work on a shared PDF at the same time, and changes are reflected as both of you work.

Stage Manager is getting some improvements, too, giving you more flexibility for placing windows. This feature was a key bit of iPadOS 16, and it's good to see that Apple is answering some requests that people have had over the year.

Naturally, a lot of the same updates that are coming to iOS 17 will be here, as well. That includes an improved Messages experience, customizable contact posters, and the brand-new Journal app. 

Follow all of the news from Apple's WWDC 2023 right here.

Apple's long-rumored 15-inch MacBook Air is finally a reality. As expected, the new laptop is extremely similar to the redesigned 13-inch version that Apple announced at WWDC one year ago — just a bit bigger. This marks the first time Apple has released a laptop with a screen this size that wasn't part of its "pro" lineup of devices, whether we're talking about the MacBook Pro or its predecessor, the PowerBook.

As expected, the 15.3-inch MacBook Air is using the same M2 chip as the smaller model, a processor that was also unveiled about a year ago. Despite its age, we don't have any immediate misgivings about the choice, given how well it performs on the 13-inch MacBook Air.

Design-wise, it’s unsurprisingly similar to all the other laptops Apple has released recently, with a squared-off design rather than the old wedge that the Air was previously known for. It also has the same controversial notch in the display for the 1080p webcam.

Apple says that the MacBook Air delivers 18-hour battery life and is only about 3.3 pounds in weight. Like the 13-inch model, it doesn't have a fan.

The 15-inch Air will ship in the same four colors (or shades of gray, depending on who you’re asking) as the smaller laptop: Midnight, Space Gray, Starlight and Silver. The laptop starts at $1,299 and will be up for pre-order today. It’ll be available in stores starting next week. We're still waiting to see how much RAM and storage the different Air models come with and will update this post when we have more details. 

At the same time, Apple cut the price on the two existing 13-inch MacBook Air models. The M2 MacBook Air now costs $1,099 instead of $1,199, while the M1 model starts at $999.

Rumors about this device picked up last year — just after WWDC 2022, Bloomberg reported that a 15-inch Air was in the works for 2023. And then just a few months ago, developer logs were shared with the publication that showed Apple was testing a new device for compatibility with third-party App Store apps. The device in question had specs similar to the 13-inch Air, but was identified in these developer logs as a "Mac 15,3." 

While the rumors of a 15-inch MacBook Air have been a lot more concrete in the last year, they've existed for almost as long as the MacBook Air lineup itself. For a fun trip down memory lane, check out this sketchy rumor report from way back in 2009.

Follow all of the news from Apple's WWDC 2023 right here.

It seems like every few weeks, NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) drop an impressive image from the James Webb Space Telescope that is both stunning to behold and advances our knowledge of the universe. The latest is of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 5068, called a "barred" galaxy because of the bright central bar you can see in the upper left of the above image. It's a combination image consisting of infrared shots taken from the telescope's MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) and NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) sensors. 

What those sensors captured is a galaxy in the Virgo constellation about 20 million light-years from Earth, and because the JWST can see through the dust and gas that surrounds stars as they're born, the instrument is particularly suited to producing images that show the process of star formation.

Looking at the two individual images that make up the composite reveals different layers of the galaxy. As Gizmodo notes, the image produced by the MIRI sensor provides a view of the galaxy's structure and the glowing gas bubbles that represent newly formed stars.

ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Lee and

The second image, taken from the NIRCam, put the focus on a huge swath of stars in the foreground. The composite, meanwhile, shows both the enormous amount of stars in the region as well as the highlights of the stars that have just been "born."

ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Lee and

There isn't one specific breakthrough finding in this image; instead, NASA notes that this is part of a wider effort to collect as many images of star formation from nearby galaxies as it can. (No, 20 million light-years doesn't exactly feel nearby to me, either, but that's how things go in space.) NASA pointed to another few images as other "gems" from its collection of star births, including this impressive "Phantom Galaxy" that was shown off last summer. As for what the agency hopes to learn? Simply that star formation "underpins so many fields in astronomy, from the physics of the tenuous plasma that lies between stars to the evolution of entire galaxies." NASA goes on to say that it hopes the data being gathered of galaxies like NGC 5068 can help to "kick-start" major scientific advances, though what those might be remains a mystery.

Ever since Apple released the first iPad in 2010, a common refrain is that the tablet is great for consumption, not creation. Right from the start, Apple tried its best to battle that perception. The first iPad came with fairly capable versions of the company’s Pages, Numbers and Keynote productivity apps, and the more powerful iPad 2 was released alongside tablet-specific versions of GarageBand and iMovie.

Since those early stumbles, years of advancements in software and more capable hardware — like the iPad Pro — have forged Apple's tablet line into an extremely capable creative tool. In fact, since Apple started putting its M1 and M2 chips in the iPad Air and iPad Pro, it hasn’t been totally clear what all that power is for. Apple provided an answer to that question a few weeks ago when it announced versions of its Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro for the iPad.

I’m not a movie-maker, and I’ve only dabbled in digital audio workstations, but I was nonetheless intrigued to see how successful Apple was at bringing them to the iPad and how well they performed.

Logic Pro

Of the two apps, Logic Pro requires less horsepower. It’ll work on any iPad with an A12 Bionic or newer processor, which covers a lot of devices: Pros from 2018 onward, Airs from 2019 or newer and even the basic iPad, starting with the 2020 release. I tried it on a current-gen 12.9-inch iPad Pro with an M2 chip as well as an older 11-inch iPad Pro from 2020 with the A12Z chip. In both cases, the app was extremely responsive as I blasted through demos that showed me how to create beats with the step sequencer, play and tweak the huge variety of software instruments included, build tunes with Live Loops and more.

That said, there’s no doubt this app is best with the largest display possible. As anyone who has worked with a DAW before will know, there are a lot of elements to manipulate and the screen can get very crowded quite quickly. (Even using most DAWs on larger laptop screens can feel pretty cramped.) If you’re serious about using Logic Pro as a significant part of your workflow, you’ll want the biggest iPad you can get. You can also use M1 and M2 iPads with an external display and Stage Manager multitasking, but a big draw for these apps is portability, something you can’t take as much advantage of when hooked up to a monitor.

In addition to the wide variety of built-in instruments and samples, you can plug instruments directly into the iPad and record them. I hooked up my guitar with an IK iRig HD 2 and was immediately impressed with the huge variety of different tonal options available. Off the bat, I didn’t notice any latency when running my guitar live through different effects and amp presets. There are a ton of those to try, and you can dig into each to see exactly what effects are being applied and modify them to your liking.

The app also shows you the signal chain, so you can move things forward or backward and see what differences that makes. Finally, you can route the signal through multiple different amp and effects chains at the same time, so you can simulate sending your guitar tone into both a clean amp with some chorus and delay as well as a distorted stack, which added some great texture.

Apple helpfully included a demo song with Logic Pro that contained a total of 36 tracks across multiple vocals, pianos and synths, guitars, bass and drums. I was able to manipulate this all in real-time as the song played back – for example, I could drop a new instrument patch on the keyboard track to change the tone and it would render near-instantly. You can also add effects in real time, like when I decided to drop a heavy metal stack simulator on a “smooth and gentle” keyboard track.

I also quickly dabbled in third-party Audio Unit Extensions. Since iPadOS is much more closed than macOS, the only way to load up a third-party plugin is to download its app from the App Store. If the AU isn’t offered there, you’re out of luck. The good news is that they’re completely plug-and-play – Logic Pro automatically detects if you have compatible AUs installed and displays them in the interface. There are AUs in the App Store from major companies like Eventide, Baby Audio, FabFilter, Moog and more.

You can use Logic Pro with a keyboard and trackpad, but I found that Apple did a great job of making it touch-friendly. There are a ton of things that you can do in the app that easily lend themselves to a touch interface – things like drum machines or triggering samples, as well as dragging and dropping tracks or adjusting sliders in the mixer. The Beat Breaker and Step Sequencer tools are two more examples of manipulating audio where touch felt extremely natural. While the interface is filled with virtual knobs, Apple smartly lets you drag your finger up and down rather than requiring you to “turn” the knob to adjust it. Overall, the interface feels well-tuned to a touch interface, and there were few if any times it wasn’t an ideal way to control things – though there is a definite learning curve to the huge amount of customization you can do here.

Naturally, the Apple Pencil works here as well. For the most part, it just acts as another way to work with the app, but given the amount of interface elements, it can provide a little more precision over your finger. One feature where the Pencil shines is with automation curves. It’s simply much easier and more intuitive to draw these changes with the Pencil rather than doing it with a mouse cursor or even with your finger.

One of the more compelling things about Logic Pro is its price. For $5 a month or $49 a year, you have access to everything the app can do (Apple is also offering a 30-day free trial before committing). On the Mac, you’re looking at a $200 one-time purchase. If you’re unsure about whether the app will meet your needs, this is a pretty low-risk way to try it out. Any projects you make on Logic Pro for the iPad can be easily transferred back to the Mac app, as well. The Mac app still has the advantage of wider third-party Audio Unit Extension (AU) support – on the iPad, you’re limited to apps and plugins you can find in Apple’s App Store. And moving Logic projects between the iPad and Mac won’t be nearly as smooth if you’re using the desktop app with third-party AUs that aren’t available on the iPad – you’ll have to render those tracks to audio before moving to another platform. Beyond this potential issue, Logic Pro for the iPad still looks like a pretty powerful and portable music-making tool.

Final Cut Pro

Final Cut Pro isn’t Apple’s first time making video editing software for the iPad. Like GarageBand, iMovie was first released along with the iPad 2 in 2011. Also like GarageBand, iMovie has improved significantly over the years to become a surprisingly capable video-editing tool, but there’s also no doubt that Final Cut Pro is significantly more powerful.

Final Cut Pro has the same pricing model as Logic Pro: $5 a month or $49 a year, after a one-month trial. Again, that feels fair for such a powerful tool, though I do wish both apps had a one-time purchase option too. But before you plunk down your cash, you’ll need to make sure your iPad is up to the task – only iPad models with an M1 or M2 chip can run Final Cut Pro. Only the most recent iPad Air and the iPad Pro models released in 2021 and 2022 have the necessary horsepower. And given the complexity of a video-editing app, you’ll be best served running this on the 12.9-inch iPad Pro.

As I said earlier, I’m no movie-maker. But Apple’s 30-second demo project included in Final Cut Pro is complex enough to see what the app is capable of. It includes more than a dozen different video clips, several voiceover tracks, some audio effects, title cards and a few music tracks. I didn’t notice any slowdowns while scrubbing through the project timeline, applying effects to different video clips, rearranging and editing various pieces of footage and exporting a finished video file to the iPad’s storage.

The layout will be familiar to anyone who has used Final Cut Pro on the Mac, with a timeline across the bottom showing everything in your project, along with a preview window and a clip viewer up top. You can resize all these elements depending on what you want to focus on, and you can pinch to zoom in and out of the timeline for more granular editing. There’s also a virtual jog wheel that shows up on the right side of the screen by default so you can scrub through the project with fine precision, or give it a more forceful spin to move back and forward quickly.

There are some handy Apple Pencil features, as well. If you have the M2-powered iPad Pro, you can hover the pencil over your timeline and move forward and backwards. Naturally, you can also make edits and trim clips and do basically anything you can with your fingers with the Pencil, which offers a little more precision in my experience. There’s also a new “live drawing” feature, where you can record yourself sketching or writing and have that animation play in the video, either on its own or overlaid on top of another clip. It’s a fun and potentially powerful tool that visual artists should be able to take great advantage of, and there are lots of other potential use cases here as well. It’s the kind of feature that could be very useful when creating demonstration videos or educational resources, or something a coach could use to mark up game footage for players to review, just to give a couple examples.

The latest iPad Pro and iPhone models also let you capture video in the ProRes format, which means you can shoot footage and edit it directly on an iPad Pro. You can also combine and sync multi-camera footage and then tap through it to choose the best angles as you go. But people who know more than me about video editing have also pointed out a number of missing features in Final Cut Pro for the iPad, like familiar keyboard shortcuts for editing as well as things like some video stabilization tools.

Considering that Final Cut Pro for Mac costs $300 (a cost that’ll get you six years of Final Cut Pro on the iPad), it’s not surprising that the feature set isn’t exactly one to one. Though, using the name Final Cut Pro obviously carries some expectations that you’ll be able to do the same things with this iPad app that you can on the Mac. Still, I think that any video editor who likes using an iPad and has familiarity with Final Cut Pro could find the iPad app to be a useful tool, but probably not their only one. That also applies to Logic Pro; both apps feel like potentially great on-the-go options for professionals. And given the affordability of both apps, enthusiasts who want more power than they can get from iMovie and GarageBand should find a lot to like here as well.

Amazon might be planning to offer Prime subscribers a pretty significant perk: free cell phone service. According to Bloomberg, the company is talking with multiple US-based carriers about offering cheap — around $10 a month — or even free phone service to Prime customers. Right now, Amazon is supposedly negotiating with the three major US carriers (Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile) as well as the Dish Network, though it sounds like talks with AT&T have fallen off in recent weeks. 

It'll likely be a while before this potential offering launched, as Bloomberg says that talks have only been ongoing for about six to eight weeks and they could still be scrapped. But given how expensive mobile plans can get, this could be a potentially interesting offer for Amazon customers. Of course, that would require a further commitment to Amazon, which already has its fingers in a frankly absurd number of different businesses. 

So far, there's no details on what Amazon's service might look like — whether it would offer the same level of service as you'd get going directly through Verizon, T-Mobile or AT&T. Specifically, carriers tend to offer more data at 5G speeds depending on what plan its users choose; there are also a ton of perks that carriers tend to include these days like Netflix from T-Moble or Apple Music or Disney+ on Verizon. 

But it's not hard to imagine that a lot of customers would trade some of those perks or even less high-speed data to get mobile service for free. That's assuming they're OK tying yet another part of their digital lives to Amazon — but if you're already hooked on Prime, this could make for a compelling new part of Amazon's subscription plan. 

Google has just been hit with a $32.5 million penalty for infringing on a patent held by Sonos. According to Law360, a California federal jury ordered the fine after determining that Google infringed on a patent Sonos holds relating to grouping speakers so they can play audio at the same time, something the company has been doing for years. 

US District Judge William Alsup had already determined that early version of products like the Chromecast Audio and Google Home infringed on Sonos' patent; the question was whether more recent, revamped products were also infringing on the patent. The jury found in favor of Sonos, but decided a second patent — one that relates to controlling devices via a smartphone or other device — wasn't violated. They said that Sonos hadn't convincingly shown that the Google Home app infringed on that particular patent.

Still, it feels like a big win for Sonos, who originally filed suit against Google all the way back in January of 2020. Specifically, Sonos claimed that Google gained knowledge of the patent through prior collaboration between the two companies, back they collaborated to allow for integration between Sonos's speakers and Google Play Music.

Since then, Google counter-sued Sonos, claiming that Sonos had in fact infringed its own patents around smart speakers. As with any good legal battle, Sonos then expanded its own lawsuit a few months later. More recently, Google sued Sonos in 2022, saying that its new voice assistant infringed on seven patents relating to the Google Assistant. 

Whether today's decision will slow the legal battle between the two companies remains to be seen, though we'd expect the bickering to continue full-throttle in the months to come. There are plenty of suits out there between the companies that aren't yet resolved, and we'd expect Google to appeal this decision as well. We've reached out to both Sonos and Google and will update this story with anything we hear.

Arc, a Mac-only internet browser from the aptly-named Browser Company, is one of those apps trying to reimagine a core computing tool. Years after we all decided that a stack of tabs at the top of a browser window is how we’re doing things, Arc has a different approach. Like most modern apps, Arc puts everything in a sidebar and lets you build spaces that you can use to focus on a particular task. For example, all the research and documents I need for a particular article live in their own space, and I can jump over to another for personal tabs or a third for keeping an eye on the news of the day.

Arc, which launched a little over a year ago, certainly has its quirks. A big one is the fact it doesn’t have a bookmarking system like other browsers, and there are a lot of small things that differentiate it from Chrome and Safari. One of those features is taking center stage in a new update that Arc is rolling out today. It’s called Boosts, which the Arc team grandly refers to as a way to take control over the sites they visit. I’ve been testing the Boosts 2.0 release for a few weeks, and while I don’t think it is reinventing the internet, it does open up some fun possibilities.

Boosts first launched about a year ago, and product designer Nate Parrott told me the concept was to “make it 10 times easier” to build a browser extension. “If you’re the kind of person who likes to tinker with things or a person who makes websites, you probably have all the technical skills to make a Chrome extension, like JavaScript and CSS and HTML,” Parrott said, “and yet nobody makes them because it's just really hard.” And while the original Boosts release put a bunch of tools right in the browser to let you customize sites, it still wasn’t exactly user-friendly for people who don’t know things like CSS.

“Ten times easier than making a Chrome extension is not really that easy,” Parrott said. “You have to know how to code, you have to be willing to dig around in the web inspector and figure out what things are called in the code and stuff like that. It's just not that easy.” Boosts 2.0 fixes that in a pretty major way by giving anyone a few simple tools to tweak sites they visit. If the original Boosts made things ten times easier, Parrott wanted Boosts 2.0 to make it 50 times easier.

To that end, Boosts now has a handful of simple but useful ways to customize basically any site. There’s a color picker that lets you change most sites from the standard white or black backgrounds you’re used to, and you can also replace the font in many cases as well. That might not sound like that big a deal, but it can really make things feel fresh – being able to change the Spotify web app from the black-and-green motif was nice, and being able to try some new customization features for my Gmail inbox was fun as well.

Perhaps more useful is the “Zap” feature. This lets you highlight an element of a page that you don’t want to see and just… zap it into oblivion. I tried this with YouTube Music; since the service added podcasts a few weeks ago, the “explore” page has included a “top shows” segment that surfaces some extremely low-quality garbage. I just clicked the zap button, highlighted the section and now I don’t have to think about it anymore.

Results can be a bit hit or miss. For example, I tried to zap some elements on Twitter’s website to essentially make it read-only so I can use it to dig for news without being tempted to actually engage with anything. I was able to delete the row that contains the reply and like buttons below a tweet, but getting that to apply to every tweet didn’t work for me. Of course, if you have the technical knowledge to dig into a site’s code, you can still do that just like you can in Boosts 1.0 and use tools like CSS, HTML and Javascript to tweak things to your liking.

You can also share your Boosts with other Arc users, something else that’s new to this release. (Any Boost that uses Javascript is unable to be shared for security reasons, though.) If you’ve come up with a particularly inspired tweak to a site, you can share it directly with a friend, as each Boost has a permalink. Arc will also be curating a gallery of its favorite custom options as well.

The Browser Company

I asked Parrott if he had any concerns that giant corporations would take issue with users tweaking their websites, but he had the good point that Arc’s user base is so small that it’s hard to imagine it would be an issue. He also had some philosophical thoughts about the tension between how people want the internet to look versus how companies and designers want it to look. “We've swung so far in the direction of ‘users do not have agency over the web tools that they use,’ while the companies have so much control,” he said. “I think that really anything that swings the pendulum a little bit in the other direction of ‘the users actually have a little bit of agency over this’ I think is gonna be a positive thing and a healthy thing.”

Right now, Arc is still Mac-only and you need to sign up on a waitlist to get access, so whatever weird things people try with Boosts 2.0 will remain a minor part of the internet landscape for now. And after playing around with them a bit, I can’t say they’d be a key driver in my decision to use Arc over another browser – but then again, I’m not much of a tweaker. Maybe the people who prefer Android over an iPhone, or those who are spending hours making wild contraptions in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom are exactly the kind of people who might enjoy painting Engadget’s home page in a lovely shade of teal.

At the end of Sony's PlayStation Showcase today, the company gave us our first extended look at Spider-Man 2, including a fair bit of gameplay showing off both Peter Parker and Miles Morales. Perhaps most significant, though, Parker is wearing the iconic black Venom suit — for those less familiar with Spider-Man lore, the Venom suit gives Parker a ton of wild additional powers. But, it's also an alien symbiote that quite possibly could be affecting Peter's best judgement. How he ends up with the suit remains a mystery, but I wager it'll be a big part of the new game.

The preview also showed an extended action sequence where gameplay seamlessly flips between controlling Parker and Morales. A lot of the gameplay feels familiar, particularly in the hand-to-hand fighting area, but the new suit clearly offers a ton of new moves, while a wild chase through Queens gives a good sense of the kind of action we can expect outside taking down hordes of bad guys. We also got to see a new trick for Miles, as he now has a sort of "wingsuit" glider that lets him float over extended distance. This trick wasn't part of the Spider-Man: Miles Morales game from 2020 where we first got to control the younger Spidey. 

It also looks like the game's map will be bigger than ever before — the first game covered most of Manhattan, but from this preview we've also seen Queens, and a huge portion of the chase sequence took place on the water, as well. The original Spider-Man already put together a convincing and massive version of New York City, and I'm looking forward to seeing how this one expands on it. We'll get the chance this fall, though there's still no official release date. Insomniac Games did say they hoped to share a final date "soon."