Whether you're looking for a last-minute Valentine's Day gift for your special someone or a pick-me-up as winter rages, discounted AirPods are a solid option. Right now, Apple's third-generation AirPods are down from $169 to $140 – a 17 percent discount. The sale brings these earbuds down to the lowest we've seen them this year.

The third-gen Apple AirPods came on the scene in 2021 as a major upgrade to their predecessor. For starters, they have a comfier design and IPX4-level sweat and water resistance. The third-gen AirPods also offer six hours of playtime (30 overall with the case), wireless charging with a Qi‑certified wireless charger and one hour of juice in just five minutes in the case. Plus, this model has always-on Siri and more accurately detects when the AirPods are in your ear. 

Are you looking for just the basics in your AirPods purchase? The second-generation model AirPods are also on sale, with a 30 percent discount dropping the price from $129 to $90. However, they don't have wireless charging and last only five hours, or 24 hours with the case. 

If noise canceling is vital to you, then the second-gen AirPods Pro might be the right call instead. They're currently 24 percent off, dropping from $249 to $190 — not far off from the standard price for the classic third-gen AirPods. In addition to noise canceling, the second-gen AirPods Pro offer transparency mode and Adaptive Audio. They also have six hours of battery life and 30 hours with the case. Plus, both the AirPods and the MagSafe case are IP54 sweat, dust and water resistant. 

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Meta’s Oversight Board wants the company to update its manipulated media policy, calling the current rules “incoherent.” This follows the board’s decision about a misleadingly edited video of President Joe Biden.

The video featured footage from October 2022, when the president accompanied his granddaughter, who was voting in person for the first time. News footage shows him placing an “I voted” sticker on her shirt. A Facebook user later shared an edited version that looped the moment, so it appeared as if he repeatedly touched her chest, adding the caption that Biden was a “sick pedophile.”

The Oversight Board said the video did not violate Meta’s manipulated media policy because it wasn’t edited with AI tools, and because the edits were “obvious and therefore unlikely to mislead.” (Has the board been on Facebook?)

The board said it was concerned about the current manipulated media policy in many ways, including how it was overly focused on how content has been created rather than on which specific harms it prevents (like damaging electoral processes). It wrote Meta should “reconsider this policy quickly, given the number of elections in 2024.”

— Mat Smith

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Microsoft may bring Bethesda’s Starfield and Indiana Jones games to the PS5 after all

The company may reveal ‘more details’ next week.

Microsoft

Microsoft’s gaming division appears to be considering a significant shift in its major-exclusives strategy. Rumors have been swirling for a while about the company bringing Hi-Fi Rush, a well-received game from last year, and Sea of Thieves to Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5. But the company could add some of its more recent blockbuster Xbox exclusives to the PS5 as well, which would mark a monumental change in policy. Multiple publications suggested several games could make the jump, including the Gears of War series, Indiana Jones and Starfield. “We’re listening and we hear you,” Xbox boss Phil Spencer wrote on X: “We’ve been planning a business update event for next week, where we look forward to sharing more details with you about our vision for the future of Xbox. Stay tuned.”

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Microsoft is teaming up with Semafor on AI-assisted news stories

Signals will be written entirely by journalists, using Microsoft’s chatbot as a research tool.

Microsoft is teaming up with media website Semafor on a new project that uses ChatGPT to aid the creation of news stories, called signals. It’s one of several journalism collaborations Microsoft is announcing, conveniently following that New York Times lawsuit filed against the company and OpenAI for copyright infringement.

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YouTube may have an Apple Vision Pro app on its roadmap

Google said in January it had no immediate plans to support Apple’s headset.

Engadget

Google reportedly plans to develop a YouTube app for the Apple Vision Pro. A YouTube spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that the company plans to make a native Vision Pro app while optimizing YouTube for Safari as a stopgap solution. Despite Vision Pro launching with over 600 native apps, YouTube said on January 19 it had no plans for a Vision Pro app. Netflix is another high-profile holdout, while Disney+ went all in.

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The latest beta update for the PlayStation 5 will make it easier to hear what's going on in your game. Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) has announced the software update, which will enable DualSense and DualSense Edge wireless controllers to produce louder audio so that you can hear in-game sounds and audio chats more clearly. 

In addition to giving controllers the ability to produce louder sounds, the update also gives their noise cancellation feature a boost. Sony's announcement says the controllers now have better mic input, thanks to a new AI machine learning model. It'll give PS5's system the ability to suppress background noises, such as the game audio itself, allowing your voice to go through clearly and improving the quality of voice chats as a whole. 

The update brings non-sound-related improvements to the PS5, as well, including the option to adjust the console's power indicator under "Beep and Light" in System Settings. Plus, it will give you access to Share Screen tools that you can use as a viewer to interact with the host's gameplay. Want to catch the host's attention and make them notice a certain element in the game? There's a pointer you can move around or use to draw a line on the display and highlight objects in game. You'll also be able to send the host's screen emoji reactions. These new interactive tools for the Share Screen are enabled by default, but you can always switch them off in settings. Take note that they will only work if both you and the host already have access to the beta features. At the moment, the upgrades are only rolling out to select users in certain countries, but SIE plans to release them to all PS5 gamers around the world in the coming months. 

Apple's latest Pencil with a USB-C charging port, which has only been available since November, is currently on sale for the lowest price we've seen yet. You can grab it at Amazon for $69, saving you $10 (13 percent) off the regular $79 price. 

The USB-C model is Apple's most budget-friendly pencil to date, priced at $20 less than the original model and $40 cheaper than the second-gen Apple pencil. Despite the lower price, it offers the same accuracy as those models, along with low latency and tilt sensitivity. It even includes support for a hover feature for M2 iPads, letting you preview any lines before applying them to your sketch or notes. You can also magnetically attach the USB-C Apple Pencil to the side of supported iPads. 

It doesn't have pressure sensitivity, so serious artists may want to stick with the 2nd-generation model. It also lacks wireless charging and you can't double tap it to change drawing tools. Still, it's Apple's first all-USB-C Pencil and has plenty on offer for most users — particularly at the $69 price. 

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At almost seven years old, the Nintendo Switch still has life left in it — so much so that Nintendo has upped its predicted sales figures for its current fiscal year. In its third-quarter earnings release, the company announced that it was increasing Switch's projected sales from 15 million to 15.5 million. The boost follows overall third-quarter net sales that were 29.9 billion Japanese yen ($201.1 million) higher and net profits of 6.4 billion Japanese yen ($43.1 million) higher than Nintendo's projections. However, it's worth noting that despite better than expected third-quarter net sales, the figure was still six percent lower than in the same period in 2022.

A few long-standing favorites and new games are likely fuelling additional Switch sales. Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. Wonder game came out in October and hit 11.96 million units sold. Then there was The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which had an April release in theaters and piqued interest in older titles like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and 2023 launches like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the company reported.

The Switch's improved sales forecast comes as gamers eagerly await the Switch's successor. While Nintendo hasn't released any substantial information yet, the gaming system will reportedly launch sometime this year (and will face a much more crowded market than its predecessor when it does). Developers allegedly got a peek at the Switch 2 (for lack of a concrete name) behind closed doors at Gamescom in August 2023. They were said to view a version of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild with a higher frame rate and resolution than the original Switch offers. The demo also reportedly showcased the Unreal Engine 5 for the upcoming Switch, ray-tracing, NVIDIA's DLSS upscaling tech, and visual quality similar to that of the PS5 and Series X.

Can you imagine having to mail in a $3,499 gadget because you forgot the passcode you nominated to be able to use it? Customers who purchased the Apple Vision Pro may have to do just that if they forget their device's passcode. According to Bloomberg, the company has been telling buyers that the only way to reset their codes is to go to an Apple Store or to mail their mixed reality headset to AppleCare customer support. Apple will then reset their codes so they could use their device again. 

As Bloomberg notes, if a user enters an incorrect code too many times, their device will be disabled and they'll have to sit through a waiting period to be able to try again. They'll have to get Apple to reset their code if they still can't recall it after that waiting period, and getting the company to do will erase all the content on their headset. 

It's worth noting that some users on the Apple discussion forum still got locked out even though they entered the correct passcode — it's unclear if it's a bug affecting some units — so the issue could happen to anyone. Based on some other posts, Apple's Genius Bar personnel use an accessory called the Developer Strap that the company is selling to developers for $299 to connect the headset to iPads or laptops to be able to reset it. In at least one instance, Apple Geniuses reportedly failed to reset the user's headset and had to replace it altogether. 

The process to change the headset's passcode could still change in the future — the recently released Vision Pro, after all, is the first iteration of a brand new product category. For the sake of those who've already purchased one, we hope it's introduced through a software update instead of as an improvement in the next version. 

Currently serving over 70 million daily active users, Roblox is still going strong since its September 2006 launch — almost 18 years ago. The development team is now taking one step further to boost the platform's massive community, by way of providing real-time AI chat translation to connect gamers around the world. According to CTO Daniel Sturman, his team needed to build their own "unified, transformer-based translation LLM (large language model)" in order to seamlessly handle all 16 languages supported on Roblox, as well as to recognize Roblox-specific slangs and abbreviations (this writer just learned that "obby" refers to an obstacle course in the game).

As a result, the chat window always displays the conversation in the user's own tongue — with a small latency of around 100 milliseconds, so it's pretty much real time. You can also click on the translation icon on the left of each line to see it in its original language. Sturman claims that thanks to the language model's efficient architecture and iterative training, it "outperforms commercial translation APIs on Roblox content." The development team will later roll out a feedback tool to help improve translation quality, in addition to its ongoing updates with whatever new catchphrases it picks up on the platform.

Roblox

Roblox's translation efforts don't stop there. Sturman adds that his team is already looking into automatically translating "text on images, textures, 3D models" and more. As Roblox supports voice chat, the exec also teases the possibility of automatic voice chat translations, so gamers from around the world can seamlessly talk to one another in their own tongue on the platform. Given that Samsung already offers a similar feature via Galaxy AI, it probably won't be long before we hear another update from Roblox on this end.

Google reportedly plans to develop a YouTube app for the Apple Vision Pro. The Verge says a YouTube spokesperson confirmed the company’s plans to make a native Vision Pro app, while it optimizes YouTube for Safari as a stopgap. The U-turn comes after developer Christian Selig (creator of the popular Apollo app that Reddit killed in 2023) launched an unofficial YouTube app for Apple’s $3,500 headset.

“We’re excited to see Vision Pro launch and we’re supporting it by ensuring YouTube users have a great experience in Safari,” YouTube spokesperson Jessica Gibby reportedly wrote in an email to The Verge’s Nilay Patel. “We do not have any specific plans to share at this time, but can confirm that a Vision Pro app is on our roadmap.”

Despite Vision Pro launching with over 600 native apps, YouTube said as recently as January 19 that it had no plans for a Vision Pro app. (Netflix is another high-profile holdout.) In addition, a YouTube company spokesperson told Engadget at the time it also had no plans to make its iPad app available on the visionOS App Store. Porting iPad apps is the (relatively) quick and easy way for developers to get their software onto Apple’s “spatial computing” device.

Christian Selig / Juno

Something changed the company’s mind in the last two-and-a-half weeks. One theory is, despite its staggering $3,500 price, Apple’s mixed reality headset appears to be off to a strong start as the company’s most loyal and deep-pocketed fans quickly scooped up pre-orders. Well-sourced analyst Ming-Chi Kuo estimated Apple sold somewhere between 160,000 and 180,000 headsets during its opening weekend.

Another theory is that YouTube noticed an independent developer picking up its slack. Christian Selig, the maker of the now-defunct Apollo for Reddit app, launched an unofficial third-party YouTube app called Juno that was available at launch. Selig has significant trust and stature among Apple device users: He’s a former Apple developer and creator of one of iOS users’ favorite Reddit apps (before the company’s controversial API rules effectively killed most third-party Reddit apps).

“YouTube is probably one of the parts of the internet I consume the most, so I was more than a little sad when YouTube announced that they don’t have plans to build a visionOS app, and disabled the option to load the iPad app,” Selig explained last week in a blog post. “This leaves you with Safari, and the website is okay, but definitely doesn’t feel like a visionOS app.”

YouTube supports 3D and 360-degree videos, but neither currently works on Vision Pro. It isn’t yet clear if the company plans to incorporate those into its app.

The popular MMO game Final Fantasy 14 is finally heading to Xbox Series X/S consoles, but there’s a major caveat. The full release will require an Xbox Game Pass Core or Ultimate subscription, according to publisher Square Enix. This will be in addition to the monthly fee to actually play the game.

Let’s break down the cost. A 30-day subscription to the game will set you back $15, while 90 days costs $42 and 180 days comes out to $78. Xbox Game Pass Core costs $10 per month or $60 for a year. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate costs $17 per month. So Xbox players will have to shell out a minimum of $18 each month and a maximum of $32 per month to travel the magical world of Eorzea. The download itself is free, for whatever that's worth.

This is slightly unusual for a couple of reasons. Back in April of 2021, Microsoft removed subscription requirements for free-to-play multiplayer games. Final Fantasy 14, however, is not quite free-to-play, though it’s free-to-download. Also, PlayStation players have long been able to adventure through the game without having to purchase a PlayStation Plus Subscription. To Sony, the game falls into the free-to-play category, but not for Microsoft.

It’s worth noting that the subscription requirement has been lifted for beta players. The open beta test for the Xbox Series X|S version of Final Fantasy 14 starts on February 21 at 12AM PT.

The full game will be released when the beta finishes up, but there’s no concrete information yet. It should be available by the time this summer’s Dawntrail expansion hits. The open beta’s reserved for new players, so you won’t be able to participate if you’ve already had access to a free trial or a license registered to your Square Enix account.

Rivian will reveal the R2 on March 7. The company confirmed on Monday in a post on X (Twitter) that customers should “get ready to meet R2 on March 7th.” Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe previously said the next-generation platform would be smaller and cheaper than the R1 lineup.

The automaker hasn’t yet said where the event will take place, but it will all but certainly be in Laguna Beach, CA. Last month, its city council publicly posted an approved request in its minutes for a “Rivian R2 Launch,” part of a “worldwide product launch event at the Rivian Theater” on the same date. If that wasn’t enough of a clue, Rivian’s X teaser included audio of waves crashing, beachgoers playing and seagulls squawking.

Rivian representatives reportedly plan to hold the event at the Rivian South Coast Theater in Laguna Beach. The automaker bought the cinema (which opened in 1937 and closed in 2015) in 2021 before renovating and reopening it this past December. The company asked the council for permission to display six vehicles on a grassy public area near the theater, which sounds ideal for a media hands-on area after a formal presentation inside.

The R2 platform is expected to start with a smaller SUV (reportedly about the size of a Jeep Grand Cherokee) priced in the $40,000 to $60,000 range. R1 platform vehicles start at around $80,000, although some models are available for leasing, which makes them eligible for a full $7,500 tax credit.

When Scaringe held an Instagram Q&A last year, he said the vehicle’s expected delivery date had slipped from 2025 to 2026. So, unless Rivian’s plans have changed dramatically since then, expect the March event to precede a long waitlist period before you can take one home. Rivian still hasn’t started construction on an upcoming Georgia factory that will produce the R2 lineup.

Rivian loses about $31,000 on every R1 platform vehicle it makes as the EV maker positions its brand for an all-electric future. The R2 is expected to be more efficient (with more accessible pricing) as the automaker tries to pivot into profitability. The company’s CEO said in late 2023 that it was chatting with a “pipeline” of commercial customers for its electric vans after its four-year exclusivity agreement with Amazon ended. However, it still plans to fulfill its contract with Amazon, which calls for the delivery of 100,000 vans to the online retailer by 2030.