Amazon’s Big Spring sale is on the way, running from Mach 20 to 25, and it will include a variety of discounts on "seasonally relevant items." However, don’t confuse it for another Prime Day; according to the retail giant, some offers will be Prime-exclusive, but most will not. We don’t expect the spring sale to be heavy on tech deals either, but rather focus on things like seasonal fashion, outdoor gear and home goods.

Nevertheless, if you're hoping to grab a good gadget at a discount, we'll be sorting through the noise and picking out the handful of tech deals that are actually worth your time. Amazon has put up a landing page for the Big Spring Sale already, so below we've rounded up the best early deals we could find. Currently, the standouts include price drops on Sonos speakers, Apple's AirPods Pro and Sony and Bose headphones. To be clear, not everything is explicitly tied to Amazon's Spring sale — we're still seeing good PS5 and Nintendo Switch deals from a few days ago, for instance — and we've included a few noteworthy sales from stores besides Amazon. If you're looking for a bargain, though, here are the best tech deals you can grab today. We'll update this roundup over the coming days as more discounts pop up.

Your Spring Sales Shopping Guide: Spring sales are in the air, headlined by Amazon’s Big Spring sale event. Our expert editors are curating all the best spring sales right here. Follow Engadget to shop the best tech deals from Amazon’s Big Spring Sale, and find the best spring sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

Starbucks is pulling the plug on Odyssey, its Web3 rewards program that gave members access to collectible NFTs. The company updated its FAQ on Friday to let members know that the beta program is closing on March 31, and they have a little over a week left to complete any remaining activities (called journeys). Those will shut down March 25. Users won’t lose their Stamps (Starbucks’ NFTs), which are hosted on Nifty Gateway, but they’ll have to sign up for Nifty using their Starbucks Rewards email to access them there, if they haven’t already.

Starbucks was late to the NFT game with Odyssey, which launched in beta in late 2022 — well after interest in the digital collectibles peaked. Unlike some other NFT ventures from major brands, though, it seemed to be aiming for more than a quick cash grab. It gamified the rewards system, offering activities and coffee-related mini-games that encouraged members’ ongoing participation.

In a conversation with TechCrunch published just last month, Odyssey community lead Steve Kaczynski emphasized the community element, saying, “I’ve seen that people who live in California in the Starbucks Odyssey community are really good friends with people in Chicago and they have met up in real life at times. This never would have happened if not for Web3.” But it’s 2024, and brands and consumers alike have long since moved on from NFTs. (Naturally, Forum3, which worked with Starbucks on Odyssey, seems to have pivoted to AI).

Starbucks says the Odyssey marketplace, where members could buy and sell their stamps, will move over to the Nifty marketplace. They can also withdraw their Stamps to trade them on other platforms.

A budding startup called Interlune is trying to become the first private company to mine the moon’s natural resources and sell them back on Earth. Interlune will initially focus on helium-3 — a helium isotope created by the sun through the process of fusion — which is abundant on the moon. In an interview with Ars Technica, Rob Meyerson, one of Interlune’s founders and former Blue Origin president, said the company hopes to fly its harvester with one of the upcoming commercial moon missions backed by NASA. The plan is to have a pilot plant on the moon by 2028 and begin operations by 2030, Meyerson said.

Interlune announced this week that it’s raised $18 million in funding, including $15 million in its most recent round led by Seven Seven Six, the venture firm started by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. The resource it’s targeting, helium-3, could be used on Earth for applications like quantum computing, medical imaging and, perhaps some day down the line, as fuel for fusion reactors. ​​Helium-3 is carried to the moon by solar winds and is thought to remain on the surface trapped in the soil, whereas when it reaches Earth, it’s blocked by the magnetosphere.

Interlune aims to excavate huge amounts of the lunar soil (or regolith), process it and extract the helium-3 gas, which it would then ship back to Earth. Alongside its proprietary lunar harvester, Interlune is planning a robotic lander mission to assess the concentration of helium-3 at the selected location on the surface. 

Interlune

“For the first time in history,” Meyerson said in a statement, “harvesting natural resources from the Moon is technologically and economically feasible.” The founding team includes Meyerson and former Blue Origin Chief Architect Gary Lai, Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt, former Rocket Lab exec Indra Hornsby and James Antifaev, who worked for Alphabet’s high-altitude balloon project, Loon. 

The biggest story this week was TikTok and the US government going at it again, with the house voting in favor of a bill that could force TikTok's parent company to sell to a US owner or face getting banned outright. Don't worry, though; your elected officials didn't waste the chance to embarrass themselves, as usual. Meanwhile, Mike Tyson comes out of retirement to box for Netflix. He'll face-off against Jake Paul, which I feel is best represented by this Punch-Out! tweet.  

This week's stories:

✅🕣⛔️ House passes bill that could ban TikTok

🥊🥊😵 The real fight isn't Tyson vs. Paul — it's Netflix vs. its livestreaming infrastructure

📹🏨 Airbnb to hosts: please stop filming the guests

And read this:

To celebrate this website's 20th anniversary, we're looking back at the products and services that have changed the industry since Engadget's inception on March 2, 2004. I've also been here for over half of its existence. Horrifying. I'd share my not-great first hands-on video for the site, but the footage only lives on through Russian content scrapers. What a shame.

All of the stories live here, but I suggest starting with our stories on how streaming video changed the internet and the game-changer that was (and is) Bluetooth audio.

Owen Diaz's lengthy court battle against Tesla is officially over, now that both parties have agreed on a settlement. Attorney Lawrence Organ, Diaz's lawyer, told CNBC that that the "parties have reached an amicable resolution of their disputes," but that the "terms of the settlement are confidential." If you've been following this case for a while now, that means you won't get to find out how much Diaz is getting after the massive $137 million in damages he was originally awarded got dramatically lowered to $3.2 million. 

The former elevator operator famously sued the automaker for enabling a racist workplace, saying that he faced discrimination "straight from the Jim Crow era" as a Black individual. He said his fellow workers left left drawings of swastika and racist graffiti, such as ones of Inki the Caveman, on his workspace and around Tesla's Fremont assembly plant. Diaz also said that he and other Black workers were subjected to racial slurs, and that the company failed to address thes behaviors despite repeated complaints. 

In 2021, a San Francisco court ordered Tesla to pay $137 million in damages to its former worker, which was one of the highest amounts awarded to a plaintiff suing on the basis of discrimination. However, a judge during the appeals that followed found the amount excessive and lowered it to $15 million, even though he upheld the original jury's verdict. The parties went back into trial after Diaz refused the lowered amount, but a jury lowered the damages Tesla must pay even further to $3.2 million. At the time, Diaz's lawyer said he was wrongly attacked by the defense and that they had already requested a new trial due to misconduct. It looks like both parties have since agreed to negotiate behind closed doors. 

While Diaz's case is done, Organ also represents Marcus Vaughn, who filed another lawsuit against the automaker for racial harassment. Vaughn called Tesla's Fremont plant a "hotbed for racist behavior" and petitioned the court last year to give his lawsuit class action status so that he could add 240 Black colleagues to his complaint. 

Confession time: I already have a copy of Final Fantasy XVI and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth for the PS5 even though I still don't have a PlayStation 5 console. I never get consoles the moment they come out and usually wait a few years for their next version. In the PlayStation 5's case, I thought it was going to be the PS5 Slim, but it looks like I could have another option by the end of the year: The PlayStation 5 Pro. Tom Henderson of Insider Gaming says the PS5 Pro details leaked by the Moore’s Law is Dead YouTube channel came from documentation Sony itself recently sent to third-party developers. 

Take the website's confirmation with a grain of salt, of course, but Henderson has a pretty good track record when it comes to leaks. In 2022, he reported that Sony was working a "genuine professional controller" for the PS5, two months before the DualSense Edge was officially announced. He also revealed that the company was set to release a version of the console with a detachable disc drive a full year before Sony introduced the smaller and lighter PS5 model. 

Based on leaked information on the PS5 Pro so far, it will offer improved and consistent frame rate (FPS) at 4K, as well as a "performance mode" for 8K resolution. It's also expected to be able to render games up to 45 percent quicker and to have ray tracing capabilities that are two to three times faster than its non-pro counterpart. Plus, the documentation Moore’s Law is Dead featured in its video shows that it will have a GPU with 67 Teraflops FP16 (33.5 Teraflops FP32) performance, which indicates faster speeds and better graphics overall.

Henderson says Sony is targeting a holiday release for the PS5 Pro, most likely to take advantage of heightened sales for the season. However, that could still change, depending on whether the company feels there haven't been enough first-party title releases this year. 

The Federal Trade Commission is looking into Reddit’s AI licensing deals, the company disclosed in paperwork filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company, which is in the midst of its Initial Public Offering, said that the regulator notified Reddit officials that it “intended to request information and documents” about the company’s AI deals.

It’s not clear why the FTC is probing Reddit’s relatively new licensing business, but it seems to be in the early stages of its inquiry. “On March 14, 2024, we received a letter from the FTC advising us that the FTC’s staff is conducting a non-public inquiry focused on our sale, licensing, or sharing of user-generated content with third parties to train AI models,” Reddit wrote in a filing. “Given the novel nature of these technologies and commercial arrangements, we are not surprised that the FTC has expressed interest in this area. We do not believe that we have engaged in any unfair or deceptive trade practice.”

Reddit’s deals to license its catalog of user-generated content are a key part of the company’s strategy to grow its revenue as it gets ready to go public. On the day the company filed for IPO, the company announced it had reached a deal with Google, which will use Reddit data to train its AI models. That arrangement was reportedly worth around $60 million. The company said it was in the early stages of “exploring” these types of deals.

According to Axios, other companies have received similar letters from the FTC. The regulator has previously shown an interest in the current wave of generative AI upstarts and their relationships with large tech companies, The FTC is currently investigating Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon over their investments into prominent AI startups.

Microsoft has been pushing Bing pop-up ads in Chrome on Windows 10 and 11. Windows Latest and The Verge reported on Friday that the ad encourages Chrome users (in bold lettering) to use Bing instead of Google search. “Chat with GPT-4 for free on Chrome! Get hundreds of daily chat turns with Bing Al”, the ad reads. If you click “Yes,” the pop-up will install the “Bing Search” Chrome extension while making Microsoft’s search engine the default.

If you click “Yes” on the ad to switch to Bing, a Chrome pop-up will appear, asking you to confirm that you want to change the browser’s default search engine. “Did you mean to change your search provider?” the pop-up asks. “The ‘Microsoft Bing Search for Chrome’ extension changed search to use bing.com,’” Chrome’s warning states.

Directly beneath that alert, seemingly in anticipation of Chrome’s pop-up, another Windows notification warns, “Wait — don’t change it back! If you do, you’ll turn off Microsoft Bing Search for Chrome and lose access to Bing Al with GPT-4 and DALL-E 3. Select Keep it to stay with Microsoft Bing.”

Essentially, users are caught in a war of pop-ups between one company trying to pressure you into using its AI assistant / search engine and another trying to keep you on its default (which you probably wanted if you installed Chrome in the first place). Big Tech’s battles for AI and search supremacy are turning into obnoxious virtual shouting matches in front of users’ eyeballs as they try to browse the web.

There doesn’t appear to be an easy way to prevent the ad from appearing.

Microsoft reportedly confirmed the pop-up’s authenticity in statements to Windows Latest and The Verge, cringingly painting the move as an opportunity for users. “This is a one-time notification giving people the choice to set Bing as their default search engine on Chrome,” a company representative wrote. “For those who choose to set Bing as their default search engine on Chrome, when signed in with their MSA [Microsoft account] they also get more chat turns in Copilot and chat history.”

In a reminder of how friendly its intrusive ads supposedly are to user freedom, it added, “We value providing our customers with choice, so there is an option to dismiss the notification.” Engadget emailed Microsoft for independent verification, but the company didn’t immediately respond. We’ll update this article if or when we hear back.

Windows Latest described the advertisement as coming from a “server-side update” and said the ad wasn’t part of a Windows update. Instead, the outlet speculated that it’s linked to BCILauncher.EXE or BingChatInstaller.EXE, two processes Microsoft reportedly added to “some Windows systems” on March 13.

Uber and Lyft plan to end operations in Minneapolis after the city council voted to increase driver pay. The council passed an ordinance on the issue last week. On Thursday, it voted to overrule a mayoral veto of the measure.

The new rules stipulate that ridesharing companies need to pay drivers at least $1.40 per mile and 51 cents per minute (or $5 a ride, whichever is higher) whenever they're ferrying a passenger. Tips are on top of the minimum pay. According to the Associated Press, the council passed the ordinance to bring driver pay closer to the local minimum wage of $15.57 an hour.

However, Uber and Lyft say they'll end services in the city before the pay rise takes effect on May 1. Lyft says the increase is "deeply flawed," citing a Minnesota study indicating that drivers could meet the minimum wage and still cover health insurance, paid leave and retirement savings at lower rates of $1.21 per mile and 49 cents per minute. “We support a minimum earning standard for drivers, but it should be done in an honest way that keeps the service affordable for riders," spokesperson CJ Macklin told The Verge.

An Uber spokesperson told the publication that the company was disappointed by the council's choice to "ignore the data and kick Uber out of the Twin Cities,” putting around 10,000 drivers out of work. They noted Uber's confidence that by working with drivers, drivers and legislators, “we can achieve comprehensive statewide legislation that guarantees drivers a fair minimum wage, protects their independence and keeps rideshare affordable.”

However, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz last year vetoed a bill to boost wages for Uber and Lyft drivers, citing concern over the state becoming one of the most expensive places in the country for ridesharing. Other jurisdictions have mandated minimum driver pay for ridesharing services, including New York City, where the rate starts at about $18 per hour.

If Uber and Lyft follow through on their threat to quit Minneapolis, that could make it harder for people (particularly folks with disabilities and those who can't afford a car of their own) to get around. The rise of ridesharing has upended the taxi industry over the last decade or so. As such, a Minneapolis official says there are now just 39 licensed cab drivers in the city, a significant drop from 1,948 licensed drivers in January 2014.

Meanwhile, some upstart ridesharing companies are looking to move in and take over from Lyft and Uber. Empower and Wridz, for instance, have shown interest in starting operations in Minneapolis. Both companies ask drivers to pay a monthly subscription fee to use their platforms and find riders. In return, drivers keep the entire fare.

The M1 MacBook Air has dropped to its lowest price ever, thanks to a sale at Walmart. You can pick one up for just $700, which is $50 cheaper than the previous low and a whopping $300 discount from the original asking price. If you’re looking for an entry-level Apple laptop, this is a mighty fine option.

Now, the M1 Air is over three years old and a full two generations behind the newly-released M3-equipped laptops. Despite getting a bit long in the tooth, the M1 chip is still no slouch, so this MacBook Air is plenty capable. It’s a solid machine that excels with basic everyday computing tasks, like streaming content and surfing the web. It’ll even do fine with light video editing and music production. We called it “faster than most PCs” in our official review back in 2020.

That doesn’t exactly track anymore (the march of progress and all) but the M1 Air features a gorgeous Retina display and no fan noise to speak of, in addition to an excellent keyboard and trackpad. The battery life is great, going for over 16 hours before having to hit the outlet. That’s only an hour or two shorter than the new M3 MacBook Air computers.

Apple Silicon chips are pretty dang impressive, but the M1 will struggle when you go beyond everyday computing tasks and into the worlds of serious video editing and AAA gaming. Also, the M1 laptop still has that wedge-shaped design, whereas the newer models feature a uniformly flat design. Some people actually prefer the wedge, but I’m not one of them.

This is the bare-bones standard M1 Air with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of internal storage. The 720p webcam isn't going to win any visual clarity awards, but it’ll get the job done. This isn’t the most future-proof computer around, as Apple recently discontinued it, but it’s also $700. The M3 MacBook Air starts at $1,100 and the M2 starts at $1,000. 

Best Buy has the M1 Air on sale for even cheaper, at $650. This is one heck of a deal but it looks to be tied to specific locations. The retailer's also offering open box models.

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