While Microsoft's event on Thursday focused on AI, the company spent some time debuting a few new Surface devices as well. The new Surface Laptop Studio 2 is supposedly the most powerful Surface device Microsoft has made, with support for the latest Intel processor, NVIDIA RTX 40 series GPUs and the first Intel NPU on Windows to power AI effects. The Surface Laptop Go 3, on the other hand, is the company's newest small laptop and it's billed to have significant performance improvements and up to 15-hours of battery life. Here's how you can pre-order the new Surface Laptop Studio 2 and the Surface Laptop Go 3.

Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2

The updated Surface Laptop Studio 2 is even more powerful than the previous version, sporting 13th-gen Intel i7 H-class processors, NVIDIA RTX 4050 and 4060 GPUs and it can be configured to have enterprise-level RTX 2000 Ada Generation graphics as well. The 14.4-inch touchscreen tilts forward so you can use it in studio and stage modes (in addition to the standard laptop mode), and the machine has Dolby audio-powered speakers, a touchpad that supports adaptive touch and an included Surface Slim Pen 2. The latest model can be configured to have up to 64GB of RAM and up to 2TB of storage.

Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 3

The new Surface Laptop Go 3 is the latest iteration on Microsoft's tiny notebook. Coming in at under 2.5 pounds, it has a 12.4-inch touchscreen, a fingerprint-toting power button for biometric logins and improved performance that should make it 88 percent more powerful than the original Laptop Go. Microsoft claims the Laptop Go 3 will have up to 15 hours of battery life and it will come in four colors: platinum, sage, sandstone and ice blue. It will run on Intel Core i5 processors and can be configured to have up to 16GB of RAM and up to 256GB of storage.

Follow all of the news live from Microsoft’s 2023 Surface event right here.

Microsoft has announced the (previously leaked) sequel to the Surface Laptop Studio, and it appears to come with plenty of much-needed improvements. 

For starters, the Surface Laptop Studio 2 will offer twice the CPU and GPU power of its predecessor, thanks to Intel 13th-gen i7 H class processors and NVIDIA RTX 4050 or 4060 GPUs. Those GPU options are geared towards speed (and gaming), but can be traded for RTX 2000 Adas for those doing intensive graphical rendering work. During a demo of the machine during its Surface live event, Microsoft made a point of showing it smoking the M2 Max MacBook Pro in Blender. 

The Surface Laptop Studio 2 can also be loaded with up to 2TB of storage space and 64GB of RAM. It will sport an adaptive touch-enabled trackpad, and come packed in with the Surface Slim Pen 2. The touchscreen display will still clock in at 14.4 inches, with a 120Hz refresh, Dolby IQ and HDR. And, yeah, the screen tilts forward. Because of course it does. 

Microsoft is claiming the Surface Laptop Studio 2 will get up to 18 hours of battery life.

Notably, the Surface Laptop Studio 2 will also feature a neural processing unit, which can power AI effects — seemingly the first Intel NPU in a windows laptop . And just for good measure, it'll host a USB-A port, two slots for USB-C and a microSD card reader. 

The Surface Laptop Studio 2 will be available for customers on October 3, and starts at $1,999. 

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

Follow all of the news live from Microsoft’s 2023 Surface event right here.

Microsoft unveiled the Surface Laptop Go 3 during its Surface event on Thursday. The company says the latest model will run for up to to 15 hours on a single charge and that it will be ultra thin and ultra light (at under 2.5 pounds). 

It has a 12.4-inch touchscreen and a fingerprint power button. At first glance, the bezel doesn't seem to have changed much from previous iterations. Performance-wise, Microsoft claims the Surface Laptop Go 3 is 88 percent faster than the original model, which arrived three years ago.

Unsurprisingly, given Microsoft's focus on AI over the last year, the laptop will embrace the company's Copilot AI, which it's baking into Windows 11. The Surface Laptop Go 3 will be available in four colors. It will start at $799 and it will arrive on October 3.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

Follow all of the news live from Microsoft’s 2023 Surface event right here.

Microsoft announced Copilot for shopping at its 2023 Surface event on Thursday. The company plans to make Copilot a part of all its flagship products like Windows, Edge and more. Copilot for shopping will help you decide on a style, locate a specific item and buy it, according to the company. 

But the new launch may be more about playing catch up with its competitors than innovating product. Google Lens, for example, lets you find products to buy by just snapping a picture of them. That means you can find results that fit what you're looking for, even if you don't have the right words to type it in the search bar. Google even started using your data across the company's apps, including Lens, to help its Bard AI chatbot provide more relevant and actionable chatbot responses.

Copilot AI will start coming to devices on September 26. Microsoft spent a huge portion of its event on Thursday talking about updates to the AI product. While its currently a disparate software, with different iterations on across Microsoft platforms, an update to Copilot will create a single generative AI assistant that spans across products. 

Follow all of the news live from Microsoft’s 2023 Surface event right here.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

Despite it nominally being a Surface-centric event, Microsoft sure spent a lot of time talking about AI on Thursday. "We believe it has the potential to help you be more knowledgeable, more productive, more creative, more connected to the people and things around you," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told the assembled crowd of reporters. "We think there's also an opportunity beyond work and life to have one experience that works across your entire life." To that end, Microsoft announced that its CoPilot AI, which currently exists in various iterations in the Edge browser, Microsoft 365 platform and Windows, will be bundled into a single, unified and ubiquitous generative AI assistant across all of Microsoft's products — from Powerpoint to Teams.

"It's kind of like your PC now it's kind of becoming your CP. We believe Copilot will fundamentally transform the relationship with technology and user in a new era of personal computing, the age of Copilots," Nadella said. He also noted that the new AI will also have the "power to harness all your work data and intelligence," inferring that the system will be tunable to a customer's personal data silo.

Microsoft has been at the forefront of the generative AI revolution since the debut of ChatGPT last November. The company has spent years and millions of dollars in R&D working on the technology, including purchasing GitHub in 2019 and dramatically expanding its ongoing partnership with OpenAI that past January.

"It's starting roll out on September 26th, informed by what you're doing on your PC," Yusuf Mehdi, CVP Consumer Chief Marketing Officer, said on stage. The AI will arrive as part of the new Windows 11 release, which Medhi confirmed will "have over 150 new features and be the biggest update since it was first released."

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

Follow all of the news live from Microsoft’s 2023 Surface event right here.

Build a Rocket Boy has unveiled a new trailer for Everywhere, an ambitious sandbox title that will enable players to build their own experiences and explore others. If that sounds a bit like Fortnite on the surface, just wait until you see the art style. It looks very much like Epic’s game, right down to the stylized character models.

The clip provides the first look at gameplay. It's clear Everywhere has much more to offer than shooting and driving around pretty landscapes — the trailer shows a skeeball game and one character dodging obstacles in a gauntlet. It puts a heavy onus on the building aspect too, via the narration and some of the creative tools it shows off.

Build a Rocket Boy, which is led by former GTA producer Leslie Benzies, says the trailer shows off some of the "scale and variety" of what Everywhere has to offer. It says the project “seamlessly blends gameplay, adventure, creativity and discovery in an all-new multi-world gaming experience that redefines how players connect with one another and the digital world around them," according to VGC.

The studio announced Everywhere at Gamescom 2022 and it said at the time that the game would arrive sometime this year. There's no release date as yet, but Build a Rocket Boy plans to host a closed alpha test soon. You can create an account and claim your username now to have a shot at taking part in the first PC test.

Most earbud and headphone makers are starting to skip the annual update cycle. Sure, many of them release a new model regularly, but in terms of overhauling a previous product, the timelines are typically more extended. Bose has made an exception, choosing to reveal the QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds ($299) alongside its new QuietComfort Ultra Headphones a year after their predecessor. The new earbuds bring a familiar design and the same outstanding active noise cancellation (ANC), but the company is also promising a big boost in sound quality with its new Immersive Audio tech. For the same price as the set they replace, the QC Ultra Earbuds deliver spatial audio without the requirement, or the headache, of having to stream specialized content.

Design

Bose made minimal changes to the design, retaining basically the same formula from the QuietComfort Earbuds II . One key difference is the touch panel on the outside, which is now silver instead of matching the earbuds (which were black, gray or white). It’s still plastic, but it’s just a different hue. Second, the company changed the “stability bands” or fit wings so they’re easier to properly install. That’s a welcome update since getting those securely in place was an issue on the QC Earbuds II.

With an almost entirely identical design from model to model, Bose didn’t reduce the size of the earbuds. This means they’re still quite large at a time when a lot of the competition continues to get smaller. However, the trade-off is the outer touch panel is larger than on tinier models from other companies. This translates to more reliable controls on the QC Ultra Earbuds and allows Bose to throw in a dedicated swipe gesture for volume adjustment, which is rare in this category.

Software and features

Photo by Billy Steele/Engadget

All of the QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds’ features are accessible from the Bose Music app. Here, the company gives you battery percentages for each bud and a volume control at the top of the main screen. Below, you can access controls to toggle listening modes (ANC, transparency and Immersive Audio), the EQ, detailed settings, earbud seal test and options to reconfigure the shortcut gesture.

Under Immersive Audio, the app lets you switch between off, Still and Motion modes. They’re pretty self-explanatory, but I will point out that the Motion setting keeps the sound in front of you when you’re moving so music, movies and other content doesn’t stay in a fixed place or seem like it’s coming from behind or your pocket when you leave your desk. And since Bose lets you reconfigure the long press action on the earbuds, you can choose to have one side cycle through Immersive Audio modes while the other is set to shuffle through ANC (Quiet), transparency (Aware) and Immersive.

Sound quality

Bose’s new Immersive Audio is a big leap for sound quality on the company’s earbuds. The QuietComfort Earbuds II and the QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds both sound good right out of the box. But with this Ultra model and its spatial audio tech, Bose finally has the sonic chops to compete with comparable products from Sony and Sennheiser. And the best part is that you don’t need specially created content or a specific streaming service to unlock it. Immersive Audio works with everything, no matter where you’re playing it from.

Like most implementations of spatial audio, Bose’s version takes the stock tuning and makes it louder. There’s more presence to the sound, and noticeably more volume, but there’s also more clarity and detail. The company says it achieves this with virtualization tech that seeks to eliminate the sensation that sound from earbuds is inside your head. Instead, it makes it seem like you’re sitting in the “acoustic sweet spot” with speakers placed in front of you. The result is not only the feeling that you’re not wearing the earbuds at all, but also extremely natural-sounding audio that’s immersive without having to be dimensional to have an impact.

I noticed the biggest difference between the stock tuning and Immersive Audio on acoustic-driven albums like Zach Bryan’s self-titled release, Gregory Alan Isakov’s Appaloosa Bones and Noah Kahan’s Stick Season. All three are able to harness the effect of Bose’s spatial sound to the point that sometimes it seems like Zach Bryan is sitting right in front of you picking his guitar. When it’s just strings and a voice, you can really hear what Bose has achieved, but it doesn’t just work for folksy country or singer/songwriter ballads. You can clearly hear the influence of Immersive Audio throughout a range of genres, including metal, hip-hop and electronic tunes. At first you notice it’s louder, but after the initial jolt, the amplified details like texture in distorted guitars and synths, as well as reverb on the drums and layered instruments, become more apparent.

Noise cancellation performance

Photo by Billy Steele/Engadget

The QuietComfort Earbuds II have been our top pick for pure ANC performance in our best wireless earbuds guide since their debut. Bose has a long history of stellar noise cancellation and it’s still at the top of the heap. With the QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds, the company remains the best at blocking distractions, and these buds are especially good at reducing airplane noise to near silence during a flight. This new model struggles with voices, but that’s a pitfall of many earbuds and headphones. Still, when you encounter any kind of constant clamor, the QC Ultra Earbuds are likely your best choice if ANC effectiveness is top of mind.

Call quality

Bose says it made improvements with dynamic microphone mixing and adaptive filters. According to the company, the QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds can also prioritize which earbud is getting the least wind interference while picking from a number of noise filters to keep you sounding clear – all in real time. During my tests, voice quality wasn’t exactly pristine, but the earbuds did a great job of blocking background sounds to reduce distractions. Is it the best? No. Will it get the job done with minimal fuss? Absolutely.

Battery life

The new Immersive Audio tech will impact battery life, and Bose is upfront about that. The company says that with that spatial sound enabled, you can expect two hours less of playing time per charge. So instead of six hours with ANC, you’ll get around four, but that’s with noise cancellation and Immersive Audio turned on. During my tests, the QC Ultra Earbuds outperformed those estimates as the Bose Music app was still showing 30 percent left after four hours. What’s more, there are three additional charges in the case for a total of 16 to 24 hours of use.

The QuietComfort Earbuds II didn’t have wireless charging and the new model doesn’t either – at least not out of the box. If you want to top them up without a cable, you’ll have to buy a silicone cover for the charging case, which will cost an additional $50. Sure, it’s better than not offering wireless charging at all, but it would’ve been nice if the company had just built it into the product without requiring another component and an extra purchase.

The competition

Photo by Billy Steele/Engadget

Bose’s main competition for full-featured, noise-canceling earbuds is Sony, which debuted its WF-1000XM5 model in July, improving upon what was already a stellar formula. Simply put, no other company packs in as many features as Sony, and it manages to keep top-notch sound quality and ANC performance while doing so. The M5 is more expensive than previous models at $300, but that’s on par with the QC Ultra Earbuds. Sony also didn’t improve battery life from the M4, which is eight hours, and some of those handy features still need fine tuning.

For the Apple faithful, the second-gen AirPods Pro are also worth considering. Apple’s earbuds are loaded with features that make them the perfect companion for the iPhone and its other devices. The company has consistently put out the most natural-sounding transparency mode and new tricks enabled by the H2 chip, like Adaptive Audio, have made the year-old model even better. Great sound quality and solid ANC performance are also part of the appeal.

Wrap-up

The QuietComfort Earbuds II were already the best true wireless model Bose had ever built, mostly due to their superior active noise cancellation. Add spatial audio that doesn’t require you to jump through any extra hoops to use and the QC Ultra Earbuds are immediately a worthwhile upgrade. Sure, there’s still work to be done on things like transparency mode, call quality and built-in wireless charging. But perhaps for the first time, Bose has a set of earbuds that can compete with the best sonically and not just purely on its noise-blocking merits.

It's been an AI-heavy year for Microsoft, following the explosive launch of Bing's ChatGPT-powered AI chat. Today, Microsoft has even more AI news to drop alongside its annual refresh of Surface PCs. While the hype may be low, we're expecting to see the a lot of new hardware today. Judging from the most recent batch of rumors, we'll be hearing about the Surface Laptop Studio 2, Surface Laptop Go 3 and Surface Go 4 today. It's also a great time for Microsoft to update the Surface Pro with Intel's latest chips (and perhaps deliver a better 5G option than the Arm-powered Surface Pro 9).

Microsoft's Surface event kicks off at 10AM Eastern today, and we're here in attendance, ready to bring you every announcement as it happens, so follow along with our live coverage below! Unfortunately, there's no livestream, but the company says there will be a recording of the event available later today. 

The United States government is once again providing free COVID-19 tests following a summer that saw cases spike and the cost of at-home tests fall on individuals. Starting Monday, September 25, every household can request four free COVID-19 tests through the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) site COVID.gov. The tests are intended for use through the end of 2023, with the HHS noting that previously distributed tests have extended expiration dates displayed here.

A previous program to supply free COVID-19 tests stopped in May following the end of the public health emergency. In that time, the government claims to have been restoring its stockpile. However, $600 million is now going towards the manufacturing of COVID-19 tests and subsequent purchase of 200 million for at-home use. HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra announced the free tests and further investment while getting his COVID-19 booster at an event in Washington, DC. "These critical investments will strengthen our nation's production levels of domestic at-home COVID-19 rapid tests and help mitigate the spread of the virus," Becerra said in a statement. 

COVID-19 cases across the US started to increase in early July after months of decline. In the week of September 3 to 9, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported hospital admissions increased by 7.7 percent to 20,538, and deaths due to COVID-19 increased by 4.5 percent to 2.3 percent. 

Two-plus months after the spike began, the HHS has acted and addressed the common sentiment of being "done" with the virus — despite its continued existence. "We know, if past is prologue, it'll circulate to a higher degree and spread, and cases will go up in the fall and winter seasons," Dawn O'Connell, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS, said in a statement. "Anticipating that that would be true again, or something similar, we want to make sure the American people have these tools." The new COVID-19 boosters are also rolling out across the country, with the CDC recommending everyone six months or older get the latest shot. 

When Octopath Traveler 2 launched earlier this year, Microsoft's consoles were noticeably missing from the list of supported platforms. Now, at this year's Tokyo Game Show, Square Enix has revealed that the game is making its way to Xbox One, Series X and Series S sometime in early 2024. Xbox's Sarah Bond introduced Square Enix VP Yu Miyake during the event and also revealed that the platform has more than doubled its number of Japanese games over the past five years. 

The high definition 2D pixel-based game that's reminiscent of a different era in gaming came out in February for the Switch, the PlayStation 4, the PlayStation 5 and Steam. It built on the strengths of its predecessor, with its new battle dynamics and game mechanism, but we still found its eight storylines too disconnected to make us feel a meaningful connection between the characters. Still, we thought it was a pretty game with better cinematic cutscenes than the first entry of the series and a polished soundtrack.

Square Enix and Xbox don't have an exact date for the game's release just yet. But it doesn't come as a surprise that Xbox is getting it much later than other consoles, seeing as the first Octopath Traveler didn't become available for the Xbox One until three years after it launched.