Amazon’s Black Friday deals have dropped the Kobo Clara 2E ereader to a record-low price. This model is Engadget’s top pick for the best ereader in 2023, with its terrific design, intuitive navigation and seamless library book borrowing. Typically $140, the Clara 2E is only $120 right now on Amazon and Kobo.

After spending countless hours trying eight models from five different brands, Engadget chose the Kobo Clara 2E as the top ereader for most people. Despite being pricier than the baseline Kindles, Engadget’s Amy Skorheim loved the Kobo’s intuitive design, IPX8 water resistance (it can handle submersion in two meters of water for 60 minutes), warm light and lack of ads.

The device has a 6-inch touchscreen with “ComfortLight Pro,” Kobo’s branding for adjustable brightness and warmth. It has 16GB of storage, enough for around 12,000 ebooks, and its battery life lasts for “weeks.” It has a pleasant onboarding experience, walking you through account setup and asking about your favorite books to help improve its algorithmic recommendations. It even nudges you toward its library lending feature (through Overdrive integration), a rare example of a company notifying you of free alternatives to its digital wares. We found the borrowing process to be seamless.

Most importantly, the Kobo Clara 2E provides a top-notch reading experience. The device is light (only six ounces) and has a textured back that makes longer reading sessions more comfortable. We found the quality of its front light to make it the most paper-like of any ereader we tried, and adjusting brightness is as easy as swiping your finger down the screen’s left edge. It was also the most responsive to touch of any ereader we tested. It even has a quick wake-up feature that, after pushing its button, immediately jumps to the page you were last reading without any swiping past ads or extra taps.

Your Black Friday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Black Friday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Black Friday tech deals. Learn about Black Friday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Black Friday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Black Friday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

OpenAI rival Anthropic launched Claude 2.1 today. The latest version of the ChatGPT rival boosts its context window to 200,000 tokens, allowing you to paste the entirety of Homer’s The Odyssey for AI analysis. (Tokens are chunks of text it uses to organize information, and a context window is the set limit of tokens it can parse in a single request.) The company said version 2.1 also halves Claude’s hallucination rate, leading to fewer erroneous answers (like those the ChatGPT lawyer trusted far too much). Coincidentally or not, the update arrives as the tech world watches Anthropic’s rival OpenAI descending into pandemonium.

The company says Claude 2.1’s 200K-token context window allows users to upload entire codebases, academic papers, financial statements or long literary works. (Anthropic says 200,000 tokens translates roughly to 150,000 words or over 500 pages of material.) After uploading the material, the chatbot can provide summaries, answer specific questions about its content, compare / contrast multiple documents or recognize patterns humans may have a harder time seeing.

“Processing a 200K length message is a complex feat and an industry first,” the company wrote in an announcement blog post. “While we’re excited to get this powerful new capability into the hands of our users, tasks that would typically require hours of human effort to complete may take Claude a few minutes. We expect the latency to decrease substantially as the technology progresses.”

Anthropic warns that analyzing and responding to extremely long inputs could take the AI bot a few minutes to complete — significantly longer than the seconds we typically have to wait for simpler queries. “We expect the latency to decrease substantially as the technology progresses,” the company wrote.

Hallucinations, or confidently inaccurate information, are still prevalent in this generation of AI chatbots. However, Anthropic says Claude 2.1 has cut its hallucination rate in half compared to Claude 2.0. The company attributes some of the progress to an improved ability to separate incorrect claims from admissions of uncertainty, making Claude 2.1 about twice as likely to admit it doesn’t know an answer rather than providing a wrong one.

Anthropic says Claude 2.1 also commits 30 percent fewer errors in extremely long documents. In addition, it has a three to four times lower rate of “mistakenly concluding a document supports a particular claim” when using more robust context windows.

The updated bot adds a few perks specifically for developers, too. A new Workbench console allows devs to refine prompts “in a playground-style experience and access new model settings to optimize Claude’s behavior.” For example, it lets users test multiple prompts and tap into Claude’s codebase to generate snippets for SDKs. Another new developer beta feature, “tool use,” lets Claude “integrate with users’ existing processes, products, and APIs.” The company cites examples like using a calculator for complex equations, translating plain language to structured API calls, using a web search API, tapping into clients’ private APIs or connecting to product datasets. The company cautions that the tool use feature is in early development and urges customers to submit feedback.

Cities: Skylines II developer Colossal Order is delaying the city building simulation’s expansion roadmap. After numerous complaints about the PC game’s performance (and the delay of console versions until 2024), the team decided to pause rapid patches, digging instead into more time-consuming performance and bug fixes. CEO Mariina Hallikainen apologized for the delay in a blog post, explaining, “We must not rush new content out before the base [game] is ready for it.”

The development delay pushes most Cities: Skylines II expansion pass content back by a quarter. The Beach Properties asset pack has been postponed to Q1 2024 from Q4 2023. Two creator packs (Modern Architecture and Urban Promenades), initially scheduled for Q1 2024, will arrive in Q2 2024. Finally, the Deluxe Relax and Soft Rock radio stations are knocked back to Q1 and Q2 2024, respectively. Meanwhile, the Bridges & Ports expansion remains in the Q2 2024 slot.

Hallikainen’s blog post cited a need to address more time-consuming bug fixes and performance problems before rolling out new content. “We have made it through the quicker fixes and we’re now digging into the ones that require a bit more work,” she wrote. The CEO mentioned applying fixes for graphical details to improve GPU performance before moving on to CPU optimizations, including stutter fixes, while ensuring a fast and smooth experience. She said the development team is currently sifting through players’ bug reports, identifying 100 reproducible issues the team will look into and another 100 reports requiring more investigation.

Colossal Order / Paradox Interactive

Weeks before launch, Colossal Order raised the game’s minimum and recommended specs, warning, “We have not achieved the benchmark we targeted.” However, it and its publisher, Paradox Interactive, opted to continue with Cities: Skylines II’s planned release date. When it arrived in late October, fans, hoping for a stable experience expanding on the 2015 original, panned the product they got. They complained about shoddy performance, buggy core gameplay elements and an overall lack of optimization relative to the PC hardware it runs on — even, in some cases, on fairly high-end setups.

Despite fans’ disappointment with the stability of the hotly anticipated title, Colossal Order seems to have received the message. “Once the PC version is where we want it to be, we will be focusing on the console release and DLC content,” Hallikainen wrote.

Dyson is taking $175 off the V15 Detect Absolute stick vacuum. The device won’t only clean your floors; it will show you how much dirt it’s sucking up, thanks to a built-in laser light and dust particle counter. The early Black Friday deal brings the powerful stick vac’s price down to $575 from its standard $750. A similar model, the Dyson V12 Detect Slim Absolute, is $250 off and down to $400 in another Black Friday vacuum deal as well.

Engadget tried the V15 Detect Absolute when it launched in 2021 and found it an elite cleaning machine for those willing to pay a premium. “It feels weird to consider a high-end vacuum as a luxury, or even a treat,” Mat Smith wrote. “But honestly, that’s how it felt when I was using it: reliable, powerful, and habit-forming.” He described the vacuum as a “total beast at extracting ingrained dust and dirt in carpets and rugs.”

In addition to its dirt-sucking prowess, the V15 Detect Absolute stands out with its laser-powered optic cleaner head. It illuminates dust particles you wouldn’t usually see, helping you better understand how dirty your floor is before tackling it. It also includes a piezo sensor, which sizes and counts dust particles, displaying them on the handle’s LCD. In addition to particle count, the screen shows your remaining runtime and maintenance alerts.

The stick vac has sensors that monitor brush bar resistance 360 times a second, adapting the device’s power usage across different floor types. It has an estimated hour of battery life and includes Auto, Eco and Boost cleaning modes to pace its energy use. Like all Dyson stick vacuums, you can convert it to a stubby handheld for getting those hard-to-reach spots.

The V12 Detect Slim Absolute has many of the same features as the V15, but in a lighter package. It has a 0.1 gallon bin, which is slightly smaller than the 0.2 gallon bin on the V15 Detect, and it’s suction isn’t quite as powerful as the V15. However, both models have the same 60-minute battery life and “detect” technology. They also both come with Fluffy Optic and Motorcar Cleaner heads that you can swap out, depending on the type of mess you have to clean up. If you have a smaller space or don’t have any pets to tidy up after, the Slim could be a good option for you.

If you’re looking for a cheaper model without the V15’s bells and whistles, Dyson also has a discount on the V8 Absolute. On sale for $300 compared to its usual price of $520, this vacuum has a less powerful motor than the V15 but is still plenty capable. It’s also lighter in hand and on the wallet. The stick vac ships with two cleaner heads (one specializing in carpets and another in hard floors) and lasts up to 40 minutes.

Your Black Friday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Black Friday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Black Friday tech deals. Learn about Black Friday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Black Friday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Black Friday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

Hulu is offering an enormous discount on its ad-supported plan for Black Friday. The streaming service will give you a year of Hulu (With Ads) for a mere $12. The plan typically costs $80 annually, giving you 85 percent off.

Hulu offers films, current-season episodes of popular broadcast television series and older TV. In addition, the Disney-owned service has original programming, like The Bear, Only Murders in the Building and The Handmaid’s Tale. Remember that the $12 Black Friday sale only applies to the version with advertisements, which doesn’t allow downloaded content for offline viewing.

New subscribers and former members who canceled their plan at least a month ago can take advantage of the Black Friday deal. Everyone who redeems it will pay directly to the streamer (rather than through an app storefront) and convert to a full-priced ($8 monthly) ad-supported plan at the end of 12 months. Hulu also offers an optional Starz add-on for $1 monthly for all new and existing subscribers.

Hulu’s Black Friday sale is live now and runs through the end of the day on November 28.

Your Black Friday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Black Friday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Black Friday tech deals. Learn about Black Friday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Black Friday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Black Friday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

Amazon has the Dyson Airwrap on sale for a record low. The innovative styling tool uses air rather than extreme heat to dry and shape hair — potentially boosting your hair’s long-term health when used regularly. Typically $599, a clickable coupon on its product page drops the price to $480.

The Dyson Airwrap utilizes the Coanda effect, a phenomenon describing airflow’s tendency to follow the path of a curved surface. Here, the air jet flows around the tool’s barrel or brush attachment, wrapping, drying and styling your hair. It does so without extreme heat, which could cause hair damage if used long-term. Dyson says the device measures the airflow’s temperature over 40 times per second, maintaining a safe temperature for your hair.

The styling tool has a rotating cool tip, three airflow speeds, three heat settings and a cold shot feature that immediately turns off the heating element, setting your style with a blast of cool air. Its seven bundled accessories include a 1.2-inch long barrel, a 1.6-inch long barrel, separate brushes for soft or firm smoothing, a Coanda smoothing dryer, a round volumizing brush and a detangling comb. In addition, you’ll get a filter cleaning brush and storage case.

Dyson

The blue blush holiday gift set and a complete set for straight-to-wavy hair are covered in the sale. Note that a third model on the product page, “Complete Diffuse for Curly to Coily Hair,” isn’t eligible for the $119 coupon.

The Dyson Airwrap has been a hot item on social media that’s regularly gone in and out of stock. So, if you’ve been considering one, you may not want to wait long before snagging Amazon’s record deal.

Your Black Friday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Black Friday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Black Friday tech deals. Learn about Black Friday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Black Friday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Black Friday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

Amazon has cut Ember smart mug prices to record lows for Black Friday. The high-tech mugs have built-in heating that can keep your coffee, tea or other hot drink at your ideal preset temperature, allowing you to take your time sipping it without worrying about a lukewarm beverage. Usually $130, you can pick up the 10 oz Ember Smart Mug 2 starting at $90.

One of Engadget’s recommended gifts for teachers, the Ember Smart Mug 2 can keep your mug heated to anywhere between 120 and 145 degrees Fahrenheit. Once you find your perfect temp, you can set the mug’s companion app (available for iOS and Android) to it and forget about it. The mug will remember your setting, automatically heat when it detects liquid and stop when it’s empty. The mug lasts up to 80 minutes on a full charge, and if you leave it on its bundled charging coaster (except, of course, when picking it up to sip), it essentially lasts all day.

At the time of publication, the white, black and red variants of the 10 oz. Mug 2 are available and marked down on Amazon. However, the black and red options cost a (still heavily discounted) $100, requiring an extra $10 over the white model.

Amazon also has the standard 14 oz. Ember Smart Mug 2 for $40 off. The larger model includes the same features, temperature controls and estimated battery life as the 10 oz. one. This variant ships in white and black for $109.46 (usually $150) and you can grab the copper version for $130 (typically $180).

Your Black Friday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Black Friday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Black Friday tech deals. Learn about Black Friday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Black Friday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Black Friday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

If you’re looking for a VPN with robust cross-platform software support, CyberGhost’s Black Friday sale gives you four extra months when you buy a two-year plan. Combined with the typical savings from committing to two years, it adds up to 84 percent off the security company’s standard monthly pricing over the same period.

When you buy two years of CyberGhost access for $56.94, the VPN provider will throw in four months for free. The deal is live now and runs through Black Friday and Cyber Monday, wrapping up on December 7.

CyberGhost is Engadget’s pick for the best VPN for cross-platform access. It offers simultaneous connections on up to seven devices while supporting devices like computers, phones, routers, smart TVs and more. CyberGhost has Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and Linux apps, and it even offers browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Ensuring its status as our favorite cross-platform VPN is the company’s detailed instructions on setting up its various apps, helping to enhance its all-around user-friendliness.

The company recently expanded its server network from 91 to 100 countries, adding Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, Laos, Myanmar, Nepal, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic to its available locations. CyberGhost committed to an independent audit with Deloitte earlier this year. It also runs a vulnerability disclosure program and recently published an updated transparency report.

Your Black Friday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Black Friday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Black Friday tech deals. Learn about Black Friday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Black Friday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Black Friday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

If you’ve considered securing your online accounts with a physical key, today isn’t a bad time to start. Yubico has its highly rated YubiKeys on sale for Cyber Week, and you don’t have to wait for Black Friday to take advantage. From today through November 27 (Cyber Monday), you can buy one and get one half off on YubiKeys in the standard and YubiKey 5 series.

A physical hardware key is one of the most secure ways to protect an online account: It’s a secondary authentication method to prevent people from jacking your data with a password alone. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Slack and other big names in the tech world support the accessories. Unlike using your phone for SMS authentication, YubiKeys aren’t prone to SIM card hacks; an intruder would need your physical key and passwords to access your protected accounts.

The buy one, get one half-off deal is appropriate because security experts recommend keeping one hardware key with you at all times and a backup stored in a safe location. This redundancy means you can still access your data even if you lose one key. Just remember to set up both keys with each account you secure. (Scan the account’s setup QR code for each key.)

When shopping for YubiKeys, buy the type that matches your devices’ ports. Yubico sells models with USB-A, USB-C, Lightning and NFC connections — some including more than one. If you have an older (pre-2023) iPhone, you may want to consider future-proofing your purchase with the YubiKey 5Ci, which has both Lightning and USB-C connectors, or the YubiKey 5C NFC, which you can tap against your phone without plugging in. Apple has phased out Lightning in its current products, so getting a YubiKey with USB-C will allow you to eventually upgrade your phone without buying new security keys.

Your Black Friday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Black Friday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Black Friday tech deals. Learn about Black Friday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Black Friday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Black Friday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

Ooni is holding a Black Friday sale, offering all-time-low deals on its highly-rated outdoor pizza makers. The company’s Fyra 12 wood pellet pizza oven is 30 percent off, dropping it to $244 from its standard $349. If that’s out of your holiday budget, Ooni also has the Pizza Steel 13, a flat surface that upgrades your indoor-baked pizzas, on sale for $70.

The Ooni Frya 12 wood pellet pizza oven is one of Engadget’s top picks for the best pizza ovens. It uses “sustainably sourced hardwood pellets” to reach 950 degrees Fahrenheit in 15 minutes and can cook stone-baked pizzas in as little as 60 seconds. It uses a gravity-fed hopper that replenishes the pellet tray automatically, allowing you to focus less on the oven’s needs and more on your pie’s.

The outdoor oven fits 12-inch personal pizzas inside, allowing everyone at your gathering to customize their pies. It weighs only 22 lbs and has a relatively small footprint, ideal for easy transportation and tabletop pie-baking. It could be a popular supply for outdoor parties, tailgating, camping and other open-air activities that would benefit from more pizza.

Ooni

Meanwhile, the deceptively simple-looking Pizza Steel 13 accessory slides into your conventional oven to enhance your homemade pies. The stainless steel surface heats quickly and retains the warmth, helping your indoor pizzas come out more like those made in dedicated pizza stoves. The Pizza Steel 13 is on sale for $70 (typically $100).

Ooni’s Black Friday sale runs from now through November 28.

Your Black Friday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Black Friday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Black Friday tech deals. Learn about Black Friday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Black Friday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Black Friday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.