Calling anyone who has been wanting an Apple Watch but not wanting to break the bank. The Apple Watch SE 2nd gen is already the cheapest option on the market, but it's currently at an all-time low price. The 40mm model is down 12 percent, to $219 from it's usual $249. Comparatively, currently the Series 8 is $329 (also on sale) and the Ultra is $769. 

The Apple Watch SE has most of the same features of its counterparts for a much lower price tag. It's swimproof, has fall and crash detection, and provides heart rate notifications — to name a few. The SE is available in midnight, starlight, and silver colorways with matching bands. It's a good choice for someone who wants the look and benefit of a smart watch without paying for any extras. Plus, you can use your savings to get an Apple Watch screen protector or case. 

Depending on what you want an Apple Watch for, you may never even notice the few perks missing from the SE. Unlike the Series 8 or Ultra, it doesn't have a blood oxygen or ECG app. The two higher level watches also offer temperature sensing and IP6X dust resistance. 

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

If you’ve been waiting for Apple’s second-generation AirPods Pro to go on sale, your patience has paid off. On Amazon, the earbuds are currently $50 off, making them just $200. That’s a return to the all-time low price they hit at the start of February.

Despite similar appearances, the second-generation AirPods Pro feature some notable upgrades over their 2019 predecessor. To start, the inclusion of Apple’s new H2 chip means the earbuds boast better noise cancellation performance and a more functional transparency mode. Audio quality is similarly improved, as is integration with Apple products. They also come with touch controls, a feature missing from the original model, and modestly improved battery life.

Of course, they’re not perfect. The touch controls can take a while to master, and battery life, despite improvements, is not as good as some competing models. You also need an iPhone or iPad to get the most out of the AirPods Pro, making them less compelling options for Android users. Still, they’re an excellent option for iOS users, especially when you can get them for less than their usual street price.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

When E3 returns this June to the Los Angeles Convention Center for the first time since the start of the pandemic, Microsoft won’t be on the show floor. “We can’t wait to host our Xbox Games Showcase on June 11th and will share more details later,” an Xbox spokesperson told IGN on Friday (via The Verge). “We also look forward to co-streaming our event as part of E3 Digital and will not be on the E3 show floor.”

Questions about Microsoft’s E3 2023 presence began circulating at the start of February when IGN reported that the company, alongside Sony and Nintendo, would not have a presence on the show floor. There was some hope Microsoft would still be at the event after the company announced it would stream a dedicated Starfield showcase on June 11th, the same day E3’s “Digital Week” kicks off. Microsoft’s decision to skip the in-person portion of E3 comes after Nintendo said last month it would not be at the event at all. Sony has yet to state whether it will be at E3 2023.

The absence of even one console manufacturer from the E3 show floor is a significant blow to the Entertainment Software Association. The show has lost much of its shine since 2019, when the ESA inadvertently leaked the contact information of more than 2,000 journalists, analysts and content creators. The pandemic and the emergence of competing events like Summer Game Fest haven’t allowed E3 to regain its footing.

With spring around the corner, now is a good time as any to start thinking about improving your fitness. A smartwatch like the Apple Watch Series 8 can make it easier to stick to your goals. Good thing the 41mm model is back on sale. After an 18 percent discount, the Midnight and Product Red colorways are down to $329 on Amazon.

That’s $70 less than the Series 8’s usual $399 starting price, and the best discount Engadget has seen on the smartwatch since it was on sale at the start of February. Unfortunately, Amazon only has 41mm model stock, and the Silver and Starlight colorways aren’t included in the sale.

Despite being a modest upgrade from its predecessor, the Series 8 is one of the best smartwatches you can buy at the moment. It’s fast and features a large always-on display. It also comes with robust app support and integration with Apple’s broader ecosystem. New to the Series 8 is a crash detection feature that can alert first responders in an emergency. It also features a temperature sensor that can assist with ovulation tracking.

That said, the Series 8 isn’t for everyone. You can’t use the wearable without an iPhone, making it a non-starter for Android users. It’s also worth noting the second-generation SE offers many of the same core features of the Series 8 for less money.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

It’s easy to be cynical about a lot of things, but then you see a picture of clouds taken from the soil of another planet, and you remember what a great gift human ingenuity can be. For the first time, a Mars probe has taken a clear image of sunbeams seen from the Martian surface. Curiosity rover, during a survey of twilight cloud formations, took a shot clearly showing crepuscular rays emerging from the heavens.

Researchers say this cloud formation is higher in the atmosphere than normal, and is made of dry ice rather than water ice. Other treats from Curiosity’s current survey include sight of an iridescent cloud shaped like a feather. This, too, is helping teams here on Earth get a better sense of the Martian atmosphere, not to mention giving us a lovely stream of new desktop backgrounds.

– Dan Cooper

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

The biggest stories you might have missed

• Sony's PS5 update with Discord voice chat begins rolling out to all

• The best wireless chargers in 2023

• Watch Relativity Space try to launch a 3D-printed rocket into orbit at 1 PM ET (update: scrubbed)

• Microsoft debuts a new 'velocity green' Xbox controller

• The most interesting foldables, rollables and demos at MWC 2023

• Microsoft Edge can now use AMD and NVIDIA GPUs to upscale web videos

'Starfield' has been delayed to September 6th

We’ll learn more about the ambitious RPG in June.

Bethesda

Starfield, Bethesda Studios’ ambitious sci-fi RPG, has once again been delayed, this time to September 6th. That may be a pain to fans who’ve been waiting since the last pledged release date of November 11th, 2022, to get their hands on the title. In compensation, the studio will release a lengthy deep-dive on June 11th, immediately after Microsoft and Bethesda’s own Xbox summer showcase ahead of E3.

Continue Reading.

VW's connected emergency service is free for 5 years after botched carjacking response

It refused police requests to activate dormant tracking features to help save a child.

Volkswagen is offering its Car-Net connected emergency service free to a number of 2020 to 2023 vehicles after a high-profile bungle. An Atlas SUV was carjacked, with the thief not realizing a child was still inside, but VW staff refused requests made by police officers to activate remote tracking. Mercifully, the child was found safe and well, but as part of a high-profile mea culpa, VW will offer five years’ service free to all qualifying models.

Continue Reading.

Ring’s latest doorbell offers head-to-toe views of your visitor

The Battery Doorbell Plus is the first battery-powered machine to get the feature.

Ring

Ring’s brought one of the best features from its Pro 2 video doorbell to its range of battery powered units. The new Battery Doorbell Plus gets the same 150 x 150-degree field of vision and 1536p video as the flagship. That gives you a proper view of your doorstep, letting you keep an eye on packages dumped there when you’re out.

Continue Reading.

Google One's VPN will soon be available to all subscribers

That includes base-tier subscribers paying as little as $2 per month.

Google’s One subscription plan offers cloud storage and backup, extra support and better offers on Google products. It also has a VPN, but that’s only on offer to people paying for the Premium tier with 2TB of storage. Now, however, the search giant is opening up its VPN for all users and will even bring the feature to base-tier users paying as little as $2 a month.

Continue Reading.

Bowers & Wilkins Pi7 S2 review: Excellent sound only goes so far

The whole package lacks polish, especially at this sort of price.

Billy Steele

Our audio expert Billy Steele has reviewed Bowers & Wilkins’ new Pi7 S2 true wireless earbuds, and it makes for great reading. Unless you’re Bowers or Wilkins. He takes the company to task for not pairing the admittedly great sound with a package to match it. Lackluster noise cancellation, poor battery life and limited customization paired with a price far in excess of its better, cheaper competitors means you might be better off looking elsewhere for your next pair of earbuds.

Continue Reading.

When Google shut down Stadia in January, it also wound down third-party access to the underlying cloud gaming technology. Google's Jack Buser tellsAxios' Stephen Totilo his company is no longer offering Immersive Stream for Games as it was "tied to Stadia itself." A provider can't simply pick up the pieces, to put it another way.

Only a handful of brands ever used Immersive Stream, and then mainly as a promotional tool. AT&T let mobile subscribers play Batman: Arkham Knight and Control, while Capcom offered a Resident Evil Village demo that saved curious gamers the hassle of a download. Even Peloton used the tech to bring a fitness game, Lanebreak, to its stationary bikes.

We've asked Google for comment. The company isn't completely ignoring cloud gaming, but it's now relegating itself to support. As the firm's Jack Buser tells Axios in an interview, the focus now is on supporting others' Destiny-style live service games by providing a server platform, data management and analytics. Developers may not need to invest as much in online infrastructure, or worry about scaling as their player bases grow. Niantic, Ubisoft and Unity are among the existing customers.

The Immersive Stream shutdown isn't surprising. While it didn't require Stadia's heavily subscription-driven model it suffered from the same limitations as many game streaming services. You needed a fast, stable internet connection, and you still had to contend with increased lag and reduced visual quality compared to a locally-stored game. That limited the appeal, particularly for gamers with sufficiently powerful PCs and consoles.

At the same time, the closure limits the industry's choices. There's no longer a true turnkey cloud gaming option. Companies either have to build their own platforms or bring their games to existing services like GeForce Now. As such, it might be a while before you see more AT&T- or Capcom-style forays.

Sony has laid out more concerns about Microsoft's planned takeover of Activision Blizzard in its latest response to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Sony has opposed the deal from the start. Now, it's suggesting that Microsoft could (perhaps unintentionally) kneecap the performance and quality of Call of Duty on PlayStation, which might result in fans switching to Xbox. 

"Microsoft might release a PlayStation version of Call of Duty where bugs and errors emerge only on the game’s final level or after later updates," the letter (PDF) reads. "Even if such degradations could be swiftly detected, any remedy would likely come too late, by which time the gaming community would have lost confidence in PlayStation as a go-to venue to play Call of Duty. Indeed, as Modern Warfare II attests, Call of Duty is most often purchased in just the first few weeks of release. If it became known that the game’s performance on PlayStation was worse than on Xbox, Call of Duty gamers could decide to switch to Xbox, for fear of playing their favourite game at a second-class or less competitive venue."

Sony claims there wouldn't be a viable way for it or the CMA to assess how "Microsoft chooses to allocate its resources and the quality/quantity of engineers it devotes to the PlayStation version of Call of Duty to ensure that SIE would be treated fairly and equally." Degrading the quality of Call of Duty on PlayStation, intentionally or not, perhaps wouldn't be the wisest course of action, as The Verge points out. A buggy Call of Duty release on PlayStation would probably lead to a bigger backlash against Microsoft and Activision than Sony.

In any case, Microsoft noted in its latest response to the CMA (PDF) that it has offered to "provide Sony with parity on release date, content, features, upgrades, quality and playability with the Xbox platform." That is, if Sony accepts Microsoft's proposed 10-year agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation. Microsoft would be willing to agree to a third-party assessor to oversee the platform parity.

Sony's letter reiterates its concern that Microsoft would make Call of Duty a Game Pass exclusive and away from PlayStation. Again, that's something Microsoft has refuted. “As we have said all along: it makes zero business sense to take Call of Duty off of PlayStation,” Microsoft Competition Law Group corporate vice president Rima Alaily recently told Axios.

It will be a while yet before we know for sure whether Microsoft will be allowed to buy Activision Blizzard. The CMA is set to make a final ruling on the deal by April 26th. It has millions of Microsoft and Activision documents, and thousands of emails from the public to take into account, according to Sony. The CMA raised concerns about the deal in February, suggesting it could "harm UK gamers" and lead to a "substantial lessening of competition in gaming consoles."

Other major regulators have yet to rubberstamp the takeover, including in the US, where the Federal Trade Commission has attempted to block it. However, reports suggest the European Union is set to give the merger the green light following news that Microsoft will bring Call of Duty and other games to Nintendo and GeForce Now platforms.

In case you're wondering, Microsoft's letter details how Activision would get Call of Duty games to run on Nintendo Switch, which is much less powerful than PlayStation and Xbox consoles. It would do so "by optimizing the display resolution, in-game texture resolution, reducing the rendering speed (i.e., frames per second) and simplifying advanced rendering techniques (e.g., raytracing, shadow, lighting and antialiasing techniques)." In other words, it'd make the game look and run worse than on other systems.

In the meantime, it seems Call of Duty fans have another bizarre crossover coming their way soon. A teaser posted on the series' Twitter account shows Shredder from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and a date of March 21st. 

An Arlo doorbell will work with Alexa, the Google Assistant, Siri, Samsung's SmartThings or IFTTT integrations. Unlike some smart home devices, Arlo plays nice. And right now, you can save $100 on the brand's wire-free version of the Essential Video Doorbell at Amazon. That's half off the usual $200, bringing it down to $100 in either the white or black casing. You can also get the same discount through Arlo's site directly. 

The rechargeable battery inside makes the unit easy to install, particularly if your front entry isn't already wired for a doorbell. It connects directly to your WiFi and delivers a wide, head-to-toe view of who or whatever is at your door to your smartphone or smart display. The view goes all the way to the ground so you can see packages and the built-in mic and speaker lets you both hear and talk to visitors. 

If you'd rather go with wires, the wired Essential Video Doorbell is 47 percent off, bringing that unit down to $80. Not only do you save $20 over the sale price of the wire-free unit, you also never have to recharge the battery. Just be sure your doorbell wiring delivers at least 16V. Our senior ran into that snag when he installed a wired Arlo doorbell in his new house. After upgrading his existing transformer, he appreciated the coverage and peace of mind he got from the doorbell along with a few Arlo Pro 3 security cameras.

The latest model of Arlo's outdoor Pro camera, the Pro 4 Spotlight, is only five percent off right now, for a thin, $10 savings. But you can save 27 percent on a two pack of the outdoor Essential Spotlight Camera. Like the Pro 4s, they offer a spotlight, two-way audio, night vision and direct-to-WiFi connectivity, but with a lower resolution at 1080p and a slightly narrower field of view at 130 degrees. 

Arlo's wired indoor cams are also on sale, with a 20 percent discount bringing those down to $80. That's not as great of a deal as we saw on the cameras last month, but still might ease the cost of entry to creating a home with video coverage inside and out. 

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

Google One is expanding its security features. First, Google is making its virtual private network (VPN) available to all subscribers at no extra cost. A VPN for Google One members was first introduced in October 2020, but only for those on plans with at least 2TB of storage. The 2TB plan costs $10 per month or $100 per year, but you now won't need to pay that much to access Google's VPN.

Starting today and over the next few weeks, Google will open up access to the VPN across all plans. That includes the Basic $2 per month option, which gives you 100GB of storage across your Google account. The VPN will be available in 22 countries on Android, iOS, Windows and Mac devices. You'll be able to share it with up to five other people who are on your One plan.

The VPN will hide your internet activity from hackers and network operators. Google says. The company claims it will "never use the VPN connection to track, log, or sell your online activity."

Elsewhere, Google is adding another feature to help One subscribers protect themselves. A dark web report, which the company will start rolling out to members in the US over the next few weeks, can scan the dark web for your personal details to check if your information has been included in a data breach.

You can select which details — such as your name, address, email, phone number and Social Security Number — you'd like Google to look out for on your monitoring profile. Google says it will handle this data according to its privacy policy. You can remove the details from your profile at any time and ask Google to stop monitoring the dark web for your information, if you prefer.

If Google finds your tracked information on the dark web, it'll notify you and offer some suggestions on how to protect yourself. It says that, for instance, if it spots your Social Security number, you might want to report it as stolen and take action to protect your credit. The report will also highlight information potentially related to you beyond the details you add to your monitoring profile.

Google has been adding other features to One beyond security measures and extra storage. It revealed in February that subscribers can access the Magic Eraser feature in Google Photos. Before then, the feature was only available on Pixel 6 and Pixel 7 devices.

Google's annual developer conference will return on May 10th. The search giant announced the date on Tuesday afternoon after internet users quickly solved the teaser puzzle Google shared in the morning. As with last year's conference, I/O 2023 will take place in front of a "limited live audience" at the historic Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California. Google has not held an I/O anyone can pay to attend since before the pandemic. In 2020, the conference was canceled, like many other in-person events that were scheduled to take place that year. One year later, Google held the event at its Mountain View campus, with the in-person audience mostly limited to company employees.              

The good news is that Google will publicly steam the event. I/O 2023 will open with a keynote from CEO Sundar Pichai, followed by on-demand developer sessions that will be available to watch on YouTube and the I/O website. More so than in past years, there will be a lot at stake at I/O 2023. It's likely Google will spend a significant portion of the event playing up its latest AI advances and innovations, and with good reason. The recent announcement of Bard did not go according to plan after the chatbot shared incorrect information about the James Webb Space Telescope. Google needs to show it won't be outdone by rivals like OpenAI.