Skullcandy just announced new earbuds that go all-in on sustainability. The EcoBuds True Wireless earbuds are made with 65 percent certified recycled plastics and 57 percent less heavy metals than competing products. This gives the earbuds a 50 percent lower carbon footprint when compared to rival devices.

The bad news? The move toward sustainability forced Skullcandy to nix the usual battery case that accompanies modern earbuds, as lithium battery packs are a major environmental offender. To make up for the lack of a charging case, the new earbuds can be charged from a smartphone, in addition to any USB-C port or outlet. The earbuds still get eight hours of use before requiring some juice.

Skullcandy

Keeping with the company’s budget-friendly MO, these earbuds cost just $40. They are available in a Glacier colorway, which is a mix of white and blue, starting today. Skullcandy hasn’t announced if it would be adding more colors to the lineup in the near future.

Of course, Skullcandy isn’t the first company to try its hand at environmentally sustainable audio devices. Sony once made a version of its LinkBuds S earbuds out of recycled water bottles, which were also a melange of white and blue. That seems to be the preferred colorway for major corporations looking to drum up a bit of positive press.

Nothing says its latest device – the Phone 2a – is a mid-range handset. And just going by its specs, which include a 6.5-inch 120Hz OLED screen, up to 12GB of RAM and a big 5,000 mAh battery, that seems right. But starting at $349, it’s positioned more like a budget offering which makes it even more appealing. That’s because in a category where device makers often cut corners to hit a specific price, the Phone 2a combines solid components with a unique design to deliver a handset that looks good and is big on value. So while there are a couple of hiccups for potential buyers in the US, Nothing has created an engaging option in a sea of boring budget phones.

Design and display: Definitively distinctive

Nothing’s aesthetic is unmistakable. It’s inspired by ‘90s retro gadgets with translucent plastic like old Gameboys but remixed with a more modern and cohesive finish. This lets you see a number of its components like NFC antennas (which is the disc surrounding the rear cameras) without it becoming distracting. That said, on the Phone 2a, Nothing switched things up by moving its cameras to the middle, which gives the back more of a face while a small red accent provides a pop of color. It’s available in black and white color schemes, with the former sometimes making me feel like I’m looking at Wall-E’s emo cousin.

Photo by Sam Rutherford/Engadget

Another departure from Nothing’s previous handsets is that the Phone 2a features a polycarbonate back instead of a glass one. Now this might seem like a bad thing, but this device is a reminder of how nice plastic can be when it’s done well. Nothing says the phone’s subtly rounded edges wouldn’t be possible to do with glass. While I’m not sure that feature is a bona fide selling point, it does feel good. Additionally, the choice of material results in something that feels a lot lighter than it looks, which is nice compared to traditional glass bricks. The Phone 2a weighs just 6.7 ounces (190 grams), which is less than a Pixel 7a (6.82 ounces/193.5 grams) despite the latter boasting a significantly smaller 6.1-inch display.

As for the screen itself, the 6.5-inch OLED panel delivers punchy colors and surprisingly good brightness of around 700 nits during normal use with peaks of up to 1,300 nits. The only thing I struggled with was the in-screen fingerprint reader, which took a few registrations to get it dialed in before it would unlock every time.

Performance: More than good enough for the money

Photo by Sam Rutherford/Engadget

Nothing is bucking conventional wisdom by opting for a Mediatek Dimensity 7200 Pro chip instead of something from Qualcomm. Memory starts at 8GB, though in the US, the only config features 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. And while its Geekbench 6 scores (1,123 single-core and 2,603 multi-core) were a bit behind what I got from a Pixel 7a (1,442 single-core and 3,639 multi-core), it felt speedy and responsive during normal use. The only small issue is that sometimes scrolling through websites or social media wasn’t quite as smooth compared to more expensive rivals. But unless you’re hoping to do some serious mobile gaming, the Phone 2a has more than enough oomph to go around.

Cameras: Better than your average budget handset

A challenge for both budget phone makers and smaller companies like Nothing is keeping up with big names like Samsung and Google. But unless you’re a real stickler for image quality, the Phone 2a is good enough. It did a fine job during the day of producing pics that you won’t be embarrassed to post on social media. Both the main and ultra-wide cameras are based on 50-megapixel sensors that capture warm tones and produce color saturation that’s a touch richer than what I got from a Pixel 7a. That said, if you zoom in, you’ll notice that Google’s phone delivers slightly sharper photos with more detailed textures. At night, when budget phones tend to struggle a bit more, the Phone 2a’s images were slightly darker than similar shots taken with a Pixel 7a, as expected, but they were still more than serviceable. Sometimes, Nothing’s pics were actually less grainy than Google’s.

Battery life: 5,000 mAh goes a long way

Photo by Sam Rutherford/Engadget

Thanks to its large 5,000 mAh battery, the Phone 2a turned in one of the best times we’ve seen from a budget handset. On our video rundown test, it lasted 23 hours and 47 minutes, which is just shy of the Nothing Phone 2’s mark of 24:25 and way better than similarly priced rivals like the Pixel 7a (17:41).

When it comes to charging, though you don’t get support for wireless power (which is understandable on a phone in this price range), the Phone 2a does support wired charging at up to 45 watts, which is faster than some flagship phones like the Pixel 8.

US availability and carrier info

One of the biggest bummers about the Nothing Phone 2a is that while it will be readily available online in Europe, folks in the US should know that there are a few extra hurdles to jump through. The first is that in order to buy one, customers will need to sign up for the company’s Developer program. Thankfully, this can be done for free and as soon as you do, you’ll get a link to purchase the Phone 2a directly from Nothing. Additionally, while the handset does support 5G on T-Mobile via the N41 band, you won’t get any 5G on AT&T or Verizon, which severely limits the appeal for people on those networks.

Wrap-up

Photo by Sam Rutherford/Engadget

On paper, the Phone 2a has pretty much everything I look for in a good budget device. It’s got a solid build including IP54 water resistance, a bright screen and excellent battery life. While its performance isn’t earth-shattering, it still feels snappy even when compared to slightly more expensive rivals. But what really elevates the Phone 2a is that it accomplishes all this without erasing its personality in the name of cost-cutting. There simply isn’t another handset in this price range that looks this good. Nothing also pays attention to small details like the phone’s crunchy pseudo-analog sound effects that help marry its distinctive design with its custom UX and dot-matrix-inspired widgets. I just wish the Phone 2a was easier to buy and had better 5G support in the US.

The creator of a popular Nintendo Switch emulator, Yuzu, appears to have agreed to settle Nintendo’s lawsuit against it, less than a week since the games company accused the emulator’s creator of “piracy at a colossal scale.”

A joint final judgment and permanent injunction filed Tuesday says developer Tropic Haze will pay the games company $2.4 million — along with a long list of concessions. The people behind Tropic Haze must halt all “activities related to offering, marketing, distributing or trafficking in Yuzu emulator or any similar software that circumvents Nintendo’s technical protection measures.” No more emulating, then. It must even surrender the emulator’s web domain (including any variants) to Nintendo. The website is still live at time of writing.

In recent years, Nintendo has increased its efforts to quash popular emulators and game piracy sites. It sued ROM-sharing website RomUniverse for $2 million and helped send hacker Gary Bowser to prison. Will this latest lawsuit stop people trying to emulate Nintendo consoles and games? No. But it’ll likely deter anyone trying to make a buck out of it.

We also take a look back at how Steam reshaped video games in the past two decades.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

National Guardsman who leaked US defense secrets on Discord agrees to 16-year plea deal

Steam defined the modern video game industry

Shure’s first wireless lapel mic can connect to your phone without a receiver

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Apple announces new MacBook Airs with M3 chips

This is the same CPU that powers the latest MacBook Pro laptops.

Apple

As predicted yesterday, Apple revealed new MacBooks. This time, it’s MacBook Air laptops housing the company’s latest Apple Silicone: M3 chips. No Pro or Max options, but it’s also ‘just’ a MacBook Air — the company’s entry-level laptop. Expect performance increases of 17 percent in single-core tasks and 21 percent in multi-core tasks, according to Apple’s estimates. As before, both computers max out at 24GB of RAM and 2TB of storage. There is now support for up to two external displays when the laptop is closed, as well as Wi-Fi 6E.

The 13-inch M3 MacBook Air is $1,099, while the 15-inch model starts at $1,299. The M2 13-inch model will remain at $999 — now mighty tempting at that price. Both of the new MacBook Air models are available to pre-order today.

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Twitter’s former CEO and other execs are suing X for $128 million in unpaid severance

The group says Musk “made up a fake cause” for their firing.

A group of former Twitter executives, including former CEO Parag Agrawal, is suing Elon Musk and X over millions of dollars in unpaid severance benefits. The claims date back to the chaos surrounding Musk’s takeover of the company in October 2022. The lawsuit cites Musk biographer Walter Isaacson’s account of the events, which explains Musk rushed to close the Twitter deal a day early to fire the executives “for cause” just before their final stock options were set to vest.

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Instagram finally lets you edit DMs

If you’re quick.

Meta just rolled out a software update for Instagram that finally allows DM edits. However, you have to do it within 15 minutes of sending the message. It seems the messages won’t be tagged as ‘edited,’ like Apple’s Messages or WhatsApp, either.

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The battle between AI chatbots is more than a two-horse race. Anthropic, the company formed by several ex-OpenAI employees, claims its new Claude 3 language model outperforms ChatGPT and Google's Gemini in several key industry benchmarks. It even hit "near-human" levels on some tasks, the company wrote in a blog. 

There are three new chatbots under the Claude 3 umbrella, including Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus. Sonnet powers the Claude.ai chatbot and is offered for free with an email sign-in. Meanwhile, Opus is the largest and most powerful LLM and will be available with a $20 per month subscription via the "Claude Pro" service. It's also multi-modal, so it can work with both text and image inputs, unlike past versions.

All Claude 3 models "can power live customer chats, auto-completions and data extraction tasks where responses must be immediate and in real-time," the company said. On top of promising "near-instant results," they can supposedly handle longer, multi-step instructions with increased accuracy.

Anthropic

Opus showed better graduate-level reasoning than GPT-4, scoring 14.7 percent higher in that test than GPT-4. It also beat OpenAI's chatbot in tasks involving math, coding, reasoning and knowledge. 

They also top past Claude models. "For the vast majority of workloads, Sonnet is 2x faster than Claude 2 and Claude 2.1 with higher levels of intelligence. It excels at tasks demanding rapid responses, like knowledge retrieval or sales automation. Opus delivers similar speeds to Claude 2 and 2.1, but with much higher levels of intelligence," according to Anthropic.

Meanwhile Haiku, the smallest version of Claude 3, is "the fastest and most cost-effective model on the market." To that end, it's capable of reading a dense research paper complete with charts and graphs in under three seconds. 

The company also noted that Claude 3 "can process a wide range of visual formats, including photos, charts, graphs and technical diagrams," aiding companies that use PDFs, flowcharts, or presentation slides. It'll also be less likely to refuse harmless content thanks to a more nuanced understanding of requests, while still recognizing "real harm."

Anthropic has said that Claude AI is guided by 10 secret foundational pillars of fairness. Claude 3 was trained on both nonpublic internal and public-facing data, using hardware from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud (Amazon recently invested $4 billion in Anthropic). 

Claude 3 Opus and Claude 3 Sonnet are available now through Anthropic's API, with Haiku set to follow soon. Sonnet is also accessible through Amazon Bedrock and in private preview on Google Cloud's Vertex AI Model Garden.

A group of former Twitter executives, including former CEO Parag Agrawal, are suing Elon Musk and X over millions of dollars in unpaid severance benefits. The claims date back to the chaotic circumstances surrounding Musk’s takeover of the company in October 2022.

When Musk took control of the company, his first move was to fire Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde and general counsel Sean Edgett. According to the lawsuit, Musk had “special ire” for the group because of the role they played in the months-long court battle that forced Musk to follow through with the acquisition after he attempted to back out of the deal. According to the lawsuit, Agrawal is entitled to $57.4 million in severance benefits, Segal is entitled to $44.5 million, Gadde $20 million and Edgett $6.8 million, for a total of about $128 million.

The lawsuit cites Musk biographer Walter Isaacson’s account of the events, which explains that Musk rushed to close the Twitter deal a day early so he could fire the executives “for cause” just before their final stock options were set to vest. According to Isaacson, Musk bragged that the legal maneuver saved him about $200 million. 

“Musk doesn’t pay his bills, believes the rules don’t apply to him, and uses his wealth and power to run roughshod over anyone who disagrees with him,” the lawsuit states,“Because Musk decided he didn’t want to pay Plaintiffs’ severance benefits, he simply fired them without reason, then made up fake cause and appointed employees of his various companies to uphold his decision.”

X didn’t respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit. Of note, it’s not the first time former Twitter employees have sued the company for failing to pay severance benefits. A separate lawsuit claimed Twitter owed former workers more than $500 million in unpaid severance. Agrawal, Segal and Gadde also previously sued the company over unpaid legal bills as a result of shareholder lawsuits and other investigations that resulted from Musk’s takeover,

On Tuesday, Shure unveiled its better-late-than-never entry into the creator-focused wireless consumer lapel mic space. The audio company’s MoveMic system — available in single-channel (the $249 MoveMic One) and dual-channel (the $349 MoveMic Two) models — joins an increasingly crowded space of wireless lavalier mics alongside three tiers of Rode’s Wireless Go system and two iterations of DJI’s Mic.

Most products in this space require a receiver for your phone, but Shure offers direct-to-phone wireless transmission — including for two mics in the dual-channel model. But the catch is that it only works when using Shure’s MOTIV apps (available on iOS and Android), which won’t be everyone’s cup of tea.

For more versatile recording (including with cameras, computers and third-party phone apps), you’ll have to use the MoveMic Receiver. It’s available as a standalone $199 purchase or as part of a $499 bundle with two dual-channel mics.

Shure

The mic has subtle styling, with most of its body designed to tuck away behind clothing. Each mic weighs 8.2g and measures 46 x 22mm, and it has an IPX4 rating for resistance to at least light splashes and sprays of water (including rain).

The MoveMic has a 50Hz to 20kHZ frequency range with a tolerance of +/-1dB. Its range covers up to 100ft away (direct line) from the paired device. Shure estimates eight hours of recording per mic, plus another two full charges when using its bundled charging case.

Shure

Shure’s entry into this space isn’t cheap. The single-channel MoveMic One costs $249, the dual-channel model (including two mics) jumps to $349 and a bundle with a pair of mics with a receiver runs $499.

By comparison, the Rode Wireless Go II costs $299 for a bundle with a pair of dual-channel mics and a receiver, and the DJI Mic 2’s equivalent package is $349. (And that isn’t including those companies’ budget models.) Shure is banking on its industry reputation and the MoveMic’s more subtle appearance to justify the extra cost. Still, creators and video journalists will want to ask themselves whether those warrant the premium before taking the plunge.

Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of leaking classified defense secrets on Discord, has pled guilty. The New York Times reports the 22-year-old withdrew his not-guilty plea on Monday, trading a guilty admission for up to around 16 years in prison. Had he gone to trial and lost, he could have faced up to 60 years.

In a Boston federal court, Teixeira pleaded guilty to six counts of “willful retention and transmission of national defense information” under the Espionage Act. Federal authorities arrested the airman at his mother’s house last April.

The Air National Guardsman is accused of sharing classified documents on a Minecraft-focused Discord server in late 2022. The posted files included volumes of information about the war in Ukraine (including details about military equipment and Russian and Ukrainian troop movements), as well as Russia’s attempts to stockpile more weapons from Egypt and Turkey. The content eventually landed on 4chan, Telegram and other Discord servers.

The leaked docs also contained a report about the hacking of an unnamed American company by “a foreign adversary” and details about a plot to assault US troops serving abroad. 

The government said it didn’t find evidence of deliberate espionage motives, nor did it accuse Teixeira of acting as a whistleblower in the mold of Edward Snowden. Instead, prosecutors concluded he wanted to gain status with his online friends. The New York Times reports that a senior federal law enforcement official, speaking anonymously to the paper, said the DOJ wouldn’t have agreed to the reduced sentencing if it had uncovered more malicious motives.

The judge presiding over the case, Indira Talwani, scheduled a hearing in September to finalize her endorsement of the deal. The sentencing guidelines range from 11 to more than 16 years in prison. His lawyer, Michael K. Bachrach, told reporters Teixeira’s immaturity played a pivotal role while promising he would push for the lowest sentence. “He is very much a kid,” the attorney reportedly said. “We will be able to establish why his youth played a substantial role.”

A NYT investigation of more than 9,500 of Teixeira’s messages, published last May, revealed an obsession with “weapons, mass shootings, shadowy conspiracy theories — and proving he was in the right, and in the know.”

Tropic Haze, the popular Yuzu Nintendo Switch emulator developer, appears to have agreed to settle Nintendo’s lawsuit against it. Less than a week after Nintendo filed the legal action, accusing the emulator’s creators of “piracy at a colossal scale,” a joint final judgment and permanent injunction filed Tuesday says Tropic Haze has agreed to pay the Mario maker $2.4 million, along with a long list of concessions.

Nintendo’s lawsuit claimed Tropic Haze violated the anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). “Without Yuzu’s decryption of Nintendo’s encryption, unauthorized copies of games could not be played on PCs or Android devices,” the company wrote in its complaint. It described Yuzu as “software primarily designed to circumvent technological measures.”

Yuzu launched in 2018 as free, open-source software for Windows, Linux and Android. It could run countless copyrighted Switch games — including console sellers like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, Super Mario Odyssey and Super Mario Wonder. Reddit threads comparing Switch emulators praised Yuzu’s performance compared to rivals like Ryujinx. Yuzu introduces various bugs across different titles, but it can typically handle games at higher resolutions than the Switch, often with better frame rates, so long as your hardware is powerful enough.

Tropic Haze / Nintendo

As part of an Exhibit A attached to the proposed joint settlement, Tropic Haze agreed to a series of accommodations. In addition to paying Nintendo $2.4 million, it must permanently refrain from “engaging in activities related to offering, marketing, distributing, or trafficking in Yuzu emulator or any similar software that circumvents Nintendo’s technical protection measures.”

Tropic Haze must also delete all circumvention devices, tools and Nintendo cryptographic keys used in the emulator and turn over all circumvention devices and modified Nintendo hardware. It even has to surrender the emulator’s web domain (including any variants or successors) to Nintendo. (The website is still live now, perhaps waiting for the judgment’s final a-okay.) Not abiding by the settlement’s agreements could land Tropic Haze in contempt of court, including punitive, coercive and monetary actions.

Although piracy is the top motive for many emulator users, the software can double as crucial tools for video game preservation — making rapid legal surrenders like Tropic Haze’s potentially problematic. Without emulators, Nintendo and other copyright holders could make games obsolete for future generations as older hardware eventually becomes more difficult to find.

Nintendo’s legal team is, of course, no stranger to aggressively enforcing copyrighted material. In recent years, the company went after Switch piracy websites, sued ROM-sharing website RomUniverse for $2 million and helped send hacker Gary Bowser to prison. Although it was Valve’s doing, Nintendo’s reputation indirectly got the Dolphin Wii and GameCube emulator blocked from Steam. It’s safe to say the Mario maker doesn’t share preservationists’ views on the crucial historical role emulators can play.

Despite the settlement, it appears unlikely the open-source Yuzu will disappear entirely. The emulator is still available on GitHub, where its entire codebase can be found.

X has, once again, quietly changed its rules around deadnaming and misgendering without an explanation. With the latest change, it seems that there will be no penalties for misgendering or deadnaming people on X after al, except in cases when it may be “required by local laws.”

The update, which was first spotted by Mashable, comes after X appeared to reinstate some aspects of Twitter’s former policy, which fell under its hateful conduct rules. Prior to Elon Musk’s takeover, Twitter had barred targeted deadnaming and misgendering. That section of the company’s rules then disappeared last April. Then, last week, ArsTechnica noted that the policy was quietly updated to indicate that X would “reduce the visibility of posts that purposefully use different pronouns to address someone other than what that person uses for themselves, or that use a previous name that someone no longer goes by as part of their transition.”

While it wasn’t a full reversal of the earlier policy — under the company’s previous leadership, intentional misgendering was grounds for a suspension — it seemed that there once again would be penalties for this type of harassment. Now, that section of Twitter’s rules is prefaced with “where required by local laws.”

As with so much of what happens at X, there is significant confusion about the policy as the company’s rules seem to change based on the whims of Musk rather than a considered process. This was on display over the last fewldays as Musk fielded several complaints from right-wing personalities about last week’s change. On Thursday, Musk told one such account that the update “is just about repeated, targeted harassment of a particular person.” But by Saturday, Musk was offering a new explanation. “Turns out this was due to a court judgment in Brazil, which is being appealed, but should not apply outside of Brazil,” he said.

X didn’t respond to a request for comment about the policy or why it was changed twice in a matter of days. But Musk is known to be sympathetic to people who regularly engage in anti-trans harassment. One of his first moves after taking over the company was to reinstate a number of accounts banned for violating the company's previous hateful conduct policy. He has also repeatedly mocked people who specify their pronouns and publicly criticized X staff for attempting to apply the company’s “freedom of speech, not reach” policy to a transphobic documentary.

Apple revealed some new M3 MacBook Air laptops today and one of the marquee features is that they can drive two external displays while the lid is closed. It’s pretty weird when the Air line gets a feature missing from the beefier MacBook Pro line, but Apple’s on top of it. The company just announced that this feature is also coming to standard M3 MacBook Pro laptops via a software update, as reported by 9to5Mac.

There’s no details as to which software update would include the new tool, though macOS Sonoma 14.4 is in active development, so that’s a possibility. The feature should work exactly how it does with the forthcoming M3 MacBook Air, as the two lines share a processor and a similar architecture.

This update is going to be for 14-inch MacBook Pro laptops with the standard M3 chip. The more powerful versions with the M3 Pro and Max chips can already do this, so the 16-inch model doesn’t require a software update. Prior to this, you could only use the regular M3 MacBook Pro to drive a single external monitor with the lid closed. 

Apple Silicon MacBook Pros have been able to drive multiple external displays all the way back to the M1 Pro chip, but never with standard M-series chips. Apple hasn’t offered up a reason as to why this took so long to get going on chips without Pro or Max in the name. In any event, this is going to be huge for current M3 MacBook Pro owners looking for more screen real estate.