Google has gone from being the go-to search engine to something people are paying to avoid entirely. This week, Cherlynn and Devindra chat with 404 Media co-founder Jason Koebler about his experience moving away from Google and towards Kagi, a $10 a month search engine without ads or data tracking. Funny enough, Kagi is still relying on Google’s index, so it’s a lot like using that site before the onslaught of ads, sponsored posts and AI results. Also, we discuss the company’s lies around Chrome’s incognito mode, as well as the news that it would be deleting user data collected in that mode. (Be sure to check out the 404 Media podcast too!)

Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!

Topics

• Why Jason Koebler moved from Google to Kagi's paid search engine – 0:45

• Google says it will destroy data collected from users using Incognito mode – 15:01

• Gurman report: Apple is working on personal home robots – 24:55

• Amazon just walked out on its self check-out tech – 30:43

• FCC set to vote to restore Net Neutrality – 43:00

• Apple adds Spatial Personas to make the Vision Pro experience less lonely – 45:09

• Proposed California state law would give tech workers the “right to disconnect” – 47:17

• Tekken director responds to fighting game fans’ request for a Waffle House stage – 49:57

• Around Engadget – 51:22

• Working on – 54:31

• Pop culture picks – 59:13

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Credits 

Hosts: Cherlynn Low and Devindra Hardawar
Guest: Jason Koebler
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien

Roku already serves ads through its platform, but it's also apparently exploring the idea of showing you ads while you're using third-party devices connected to its TVs. Based on a recent patent filing unearthed by Lowpass, the company is looking to develop a system or a method "for ad insertion by a display device coupled to a media device via a high-definition media interface (HDMI) connection." That means if you've connected another streaming device or console — say, an Apple TV, a Chromecast or a PlayStation — to a Roku TV via HDMI, the company would still be able to serve you advertisements. 

In particular, Roku is hoping to show you commercials while whatever you're watching or playing on the third-party device attached to it is on pause. In its patent, it described several methods on how it can detect whether the show or game on screen is paused, such as receiving a pause signal from the remote control, detecting a pause icon, looking at several video frames and determining that the image on screen hasn't changed for some time and getting a silent audio signal from the HDMI connection. 

If it works as intended, those ads wouldn't impact your viewing or playing experience (much), assuming you're truly stepping away or doing something else in the meantime. While you'd probably prefer those experiences to be free of ads altogether, Roku is at least looking to make sure that it's serving you relevant ads. It could analyze frozen video or audio frames and use automatic content recognition (ACR) technology to identify what's on screen. Or it could analyze metadata to show ads connected to what you're playing or watching. It could also serve commercials based on what third-party device is attached to your TV. 

As Lowpass notes, the company could have conjured the idea because manufacturers typically don't make a lot of money from hardware sales. For the fiscal year of 2023, Roku lost $44 million on smart TVs. Similarly, Samsung's visual display and digital appliances division posted $37.5 million in operating losses for last year's fourth quarter. Meanwhile, ads and services generated $1.6 billion in profit for Roku. This idea could potentially make it more money... if the prospect of watching commercials while your show or game is paused doesn't turn you off buying Roku TV, of course. This is just a patent at this point in time, though, and Roku may very well end up scrapping it and not implementing it at all. 

Over 700 people at Apple have recently lost their jobs, according to the latest WARN report posted by the Employment Development Department of California (EDD). Most of the people who were laid off worked at Apple's offices in Santa Clara, with 371 of them coming from the company location that primarily dealt with the company's now-defunct electric vehicle project. Under California law, companies are required to file a report with the EDD for each location affected by layoffs under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) program. 

Eight Apple locations in Santa Clara were hit by layoffs, including the main car office, though one of them worked on its in-house MicroLED display project that was reportedly scrapped in March due to costs and technical difficulties. The company was hoping to produce its own screens for iPhones, Macs and its smartwatches, but that clearly isn't happening anytime soon. 

Apple's original car ambitions were to build a fully autonomous vehicle without pedals and a steering wheel, until it decided to develop an electric vehicle instead. A previous Bloomberg report said Apple canceled the initiative internally called "Project Titan" after investing billions of dollars and a decade into it. The employees who were developing the vehicle were given the chance to transfer to Apple's other divisions, including its teams that are reportedly working on artificial intelligence and home robotics. But based on Apple's WARN report, it wasn't able to re-integrate everyone into the company. 

Apple is believed to be in the very early stages of developing personal robotics for people's homes. One of the machines that's currently a work-in-progress is a robot that follows people around, while the other is a table-top device that uses a robot to move a display around, according to another Bloomberg report. The company's work on personal robotics is part of its efforts, which also include the Vision Pro, to find new sources of revenue. 

It’s taken Razer a few extra months to get its latest 18-inch Blade laptop ready for primetime after we first saw it at CES. Those who have been waiting for the company’s latest chonkster can now order the 2024 edition of the Razor Blade 18, which starts at $3,099.

The base system comes with an i9-14900HX processor, 32GB of RAM, 1TB of SSD storage, Wi-Fi 7, a triple-fan cooling system and a six-speaker array with THX spatial audio support. On the GPU side, you can equip the laptop with up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 (the base model has a 4070 graphics card). In what Razer claims is a first for a laptop, there's Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, but only if you opt for a 4080 or 4090 GPU.

Razer

The display is one of the big talking points for this laptop. It comes with a QHD+ 300Hz Mini-LED display as standard. If you want higher fidelity, you can opt for a 4K 200Hz screen. The company seems to have found an extra 35 hertz since CES, since it said at the time the Razer Blade 18 would have a 4K 165Hz display option. Razer claims that this display is a world first for a laptop and it’ll set you back an extra $1,700, far more than an equivalent standalone monitor would cost. You'll also need to wait until later this summer for a model with a 4K 200Hz panel to ship, whereas you can snag one with the QHD+ display now.

We felt that last year's model was very expensive for a fully kitted-out configuration and that's the case again this time around. Still, if you need a big-screen, high-end laptop that can run just about any program or game you can throw at it, the latest Razer Blade 18 can be all yours if you have the cash to spare.

Razer

Robot vacuums are handy little devices that can help folks save a ton of time and energy. However, some of the more well-known options are often a bit pricey, especially when a mopping function comes into the mix. As it happens, iRobot has revealed a relatively budget-friendly 2-in-1 robot vacuum and mop. It says the $275 Roomba Combo Essential actually outperforms the Roomba 600 Series thanks to 20 times more suction power, and the addition of a mop and smart navigation.

According to iRobot, this model offers 25 percent better performance at picking up dirt from hard floors than the Roomba 600 Series. It's also said to have a longer battery life at up to 120 minutes, the ability to clean in neat rows, customizable suction and liquid settings, Clean Map reports and intelligent settings such as suggested cleaning schedules.

Although you can set up cleanings in advance, you can start one at any time with an Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant voice command. Alternatively, you can press the Clean button or tap a button in the iRobot Home app to put the device to work right away.

iRobot

The device has a four-stage cleaning system that includes adjustable suction and liquid settings, a v-shaped multi-surface brush, an edge-sweeping brush and a pump-fed microfiber mop pad. For vacuum-only operation (i.e if you're looking to remove dirt from a rug), you'll need to remove the mop pad first. That adds a little bit of friction to using this model. There's another trade-off in that this isn't a self-emptying Roomba — you'll need to empty out the dirt storage bin manually more often.

Still, this seems like a solid Roomba at an eye-catching price. It's available in Europe, the Middle East and Africa now, and iRobot will start selling it in the US on April 7 and Canada on April 12. The Roomba Combo Essential will reach Asia Pacific markets later this month. Folks in the US can trade in a Roomba 600 Series for a $50 credit toward a Roomba Combo Essential

In addition, iRobot is rolling out a model called the Roomba Vac Essential in North America. It has the same smart functions and other similar features as the Combo Essential, but there's no mop. That robot vacuum will cost $250 and it'll land in the US on April 7 and Canada on April 12.

Meanwhile, iRobot says it has reached a new milestone. Since debuting the Roomba in 2002, the company has sold more than 50 million robots.

The White House has published a policy memo asking NASA to create a new time standard for the Moon by 2026. Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) will establish an official time reference to help guide future lunar missions. The US, China, Japan, India and Russia have space missions to the Moon planned or completed.

NASA (and the White House) aren’t the only ones trying. The European Space Agency is also trying to make a time zone outside of Earth’s… zone.

Given the Moon’s weaker gravity, time moves slightly faster there. “The same clock we have on Earth would move at a different rate on the Moon,” NASA space communications and navigation chief Kevin Coggins told Reuters.

You saw Interstellar, right? Er, just like that. Exactly like that. No further questions.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

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Microsoft may have finally made quantum computing useful

The most error-free quantum solution yet, apparently.

What if we could build a machine working at the quantum level that could tackle complex calculations exponentially faster than a computer limited by classic physics? Despite all the heady dreams of quantum computing and press releases from IBM and Google, it's still a what-if. Microsoft now says it’s developed the most error-free quantum computing system yet, with Quantinuum. It’s not a thing I can condense into a single paragraph. You… saw Interstellar, right?

Continue reading.

Stability AI’s audio generator can now create three-minute ‘songs’

Still not that good, though.

Stability AI just unveiled Stable Audio 2.0, an upgraded version of its music-generation platform. With this system, you can use your own text to create up to three minutes of audio, which is roughly the length of a song. You can hone the results by choosing a genre or even uploading audio to inspire the algo. It’s fun — try it out. Just don’t add vocals, trust me.

Continue reading.

Bloomberg says Apple is developing personal robots now

EVs schmee vees.

Apple, hunting for its next iPhone / Apple Watch / Vision Pro (maybe?), might be trying to get into robots. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, one area the company is exploring is personal robotics — and it started looking at electric vehicles too. The report says Apple has started working on a mobile robot to follow users around their home and has already developed a table-top device that uses a robot to move a screen around.

Continue reading.

Another Matrix movie is happening.

Not like this.

Warner Bros.

Whoa.

Continue reading.

Now's a good time to shop if you're looking for reliable earbuds that won't break the bank. There's currently a sale on Apple AirPods, including a 31 percent discount on the second-generation Apple AirPods to $89 from $129. While the second-gen Apple AirPods came out back in 2019, the entry-level option is still a great option — especially on sale. 

Apple's second-generation AirPods have an H1 headphone chip that provides a low-latency, clear sound. You can access Siri through them and control settings like pause, play and next song by double tapping one AirPod — plus customize which side does what. The second-gen AirPods hold about five hours of juice at a time and last up to 24 hours with the lightning charging case.

The entry-level AirPods are on sale alongside the third-generation Apple AirPod's 13 percent drop to $149 from $169. The newest model's improvements include much better audio quality and six hours of battery life (or 30 with the charging case). The second-gen AirPods Pro are marked down to $199 from $249 — a 20 percent discount. These AirPods are worth the extra cost if you want noise canceling, great sound with an H2 chip and a MagSafe USB-C charging case. 

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

These days, the best gaming TVs are really no different from the best TVs you can buy in general. That said, there are a few key features to keep in mind when looking for a set to get the most out of your PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X/S. No, you don’t need a fancy TV to simply enjoy a video game, but a good screen can only make the experience more enjoyable. If you’re unsure where to start, we’ve laid out some helpful advice for buying a good gaming TV and noted a few well-reviewed examples you can buy today, at various price points.

What to look for in a gaming TV

Whether you use it for gaming or not, all good TVs are built on the same foundations. You want a 4K resolution, sufficient brightness, high contrast ratios with deep and uniform black tones, colors that find the right balance between accuracy and saturation, and wide viewing angles. For video games specifically, you want a TV with minimal input lag and fast motion response, with no blur or other unwanted artifacts behind quick-moving objects. Of course, finding a set that has all of these gaming features and fits into your budget can be tricky.

For now, a top OLED TV will offer the best picture quality for gaming or otherwise. But good OLED TVs usually cost more than their LCD counterparts, and some OLED sets may not get bright enough for those who have their TV set in a particularly well-lit room. If you opt for an LCD TV, an advanced backlight with mini LEDs and effective full-array local dimming will usually improve contrast and lighting detail, while a quantum dot filter can enhance colors.

One thing you don’t need to worry about is 8K support. Although the PS5 and Xbox Series X are technically capable of outputting 8K video, very few games are made for that resolution, and 8K’s practical benefits are extremely minimal unless you plan on sitting unreasonably close to a massive TV. The few 8K TVs on the market are also very expensive.

All that said, there are a few terms you should particularly look out for when buying a TV for your new game console or high-end graphics card.

HDMI 2.1

To get the most out of a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X/S, your TV should have full HDMI 2.1 support. This is the latest major update to the HDMI spec, enabling a higher maximum bandwidth — 48 gigabits per second, up from HDMI 2.0’s 18 Gbps — and a handful of features that are beneficial for gaming performance specifically. These include variable refresh rate (VRR) and automatic low latency mode (ALLM), which we detail further below.

Beyond that, perhaps the chief perk of HDMI 2.1 is its ability to transmit sharp 4K video up to a 120Hz refresh rate with modern consoles like the PS5 and Xbox Series X, or up to 144Hz with a powerful gaming PC. Not every PS5 or Xbox Series X/S game supports frame rates that high — and some only do at lower resolutions — but those that do will look and feel especially fluid in motion. HDMI 2.1 also includes support for Enhanced Audio Return Channel (eARC), which allows you to pass higher-quality lossless audio from a source device connected to the TV to a compatible soundbar or receiver.

The more full HDMI 2.1 ports your TV has, the better. “Full” is the key word there. As reported by TFT Central, because HDMI 2.1 is backwards compatible with HDMI 2.0, TV and monitor manufacturers have been allowed to brand HDMI ports as “HDMI 2.1” even if they lack full (or any) support for the spec’s upgraded features. We recommend a few TVs below that have true HDMI 2.1 ports, but if you’re buying a new TV for gaming, make sure your chosen set isn’t trying to hide any capabilities you may consider essential.

HDR — High Dynamic Range

HDR refers to a TV's ability to display a wider range between the darkest and brightest parts of a picture. This broader range can bring out details that would otherwise be missing on a standard dynamic range (SDR) TV, in both the very dark and, especially, the very bright areas of an image. HDR typically comes with an improvement to color reproduction as well, displaying a larger palette of more vibrant colors that brings content closer to its creator’s original vision.

To get an HDR picture, you need both content that is mastered to take advantage of the tech and a TV capable of displaying that content. HDR also comes in a variety of formats, which are generally split between those that utilize static metadata (e.g., HDR10) and those that utilize dynamic metadata (e.g., HDR10+, Dolby Vision). In short, the latter allows a TV to optimize its brightness and colors on a per-scene or even per-frame basis, while the former uses one set of optimized settings for the entirety of the given content. Support for these formats can differ depending on the TV, content and game console you use. The Xbox Series X and S, for example, support Dolby Vision for gaming, while the PS5 does not.

The good news is that most TVs you’d buy in 2023 are HDR-ready in some fashion, even on the budget end of the market. The catch is that some TVs are much better at getting the most out of HDR than others. The same goes for actual content mastered in HDR. With video games in particular, there aren’t quite as many titles designed to take advantage of HDR as there are movies (though the number is growing all the time), and the variance in HDR quality tends to be wider.

HGiG — HDR Gaming Interest Group

HGiG stands for the HDR Gaming Interest Group. Sony and Microsoft are both members, as are many TV makers and game developers. What this means is that, ideally, all the groups communicate information so that you can start up a new game on a console or PC and have it automatically recognize your display. Once that happens, the game can adjust the internal settings to adjust for that display's capabilities and give you the best picture quality possible, without losing details in the brightest or darkest areas of the screen. For example, daylight at the end of a dark tunnel may portray a brightly lit environment instead of looking like an overexposed white blob.

This is a good thing, but the reality is a bit more complicated. Not all TVs highlight HGiG compatibility in their settings menu, while only some PlayStation and Xbox games recognize and follow the guidelines. If an HGiG option is listed in your TV's tone mapping settings, you should turn it on prior to running the console's HDR settings. Then, if you're playing a game that supports HDR and HGiG, you should be in good shape without having to adjust the various luminance levels again. Still, how all of this looks to you might differ depending on your TV and the game you’re playing. Owners of certain LG OLED TVs, for instance, may prefer their TV’s Dynamic Tone Mapping setting. Use whatever settings you think look best.

ALLM — Auto Low Latency Mode

ALLM allows a source (like your PS5 or Xbox) to tell the display to switch into a picture mode that reduces lag between receiving each frame of an image and displaying it on the TV. This cuts out additional processing that could be the milliseconds of difference between landing a precise input or not. A good modern TV can automatically switch to game mode, then back out when you'd rather watch a movie or TV show.

VRR — Variable Refresh Rate

VRR will sound familiar if you're a PC gamer. Most players have experienced slowdown, screen tearing or stuttering as a system struggles to render each frame at the target speed, which is most commonly 30 or 60 fps on a TV. With VRR, everything stays in sync: Your display won't show the next frame until it's ready, which can make things feel smoother and more responsive, even if the system fails to deliver on its target frame rate.

There are a few different implementations of VRR available, including Nvidia’s G-Sync, AMD’s FreeSync and the HDMI Forum’s VRR spec, which is part of the full HDMI 2.1 standard. Both a TV and an input device need to support the same VRR tech for it to work, and different devices may only support VRR within a specific refresh rate window. On a 120Hz display, for instance, the PS5’s VRR only works between 48Hz and 120Hz.

As a reminder, the PS5 supports HDMI Forum VRR, the Xbox Series X/S support HDMI Forum VRR and FreeSync, while gaming PCs may support G-Sync or FreeSync depending on whether they use a Nvidia or AMD graphics card. A great gaming TV supports all the big VRR formats, but missing, say, G-Sync, isn’t a killer if you only game on a PS5 or Xbox.

Good gaming TVs you can get right now

The likes of Samsung, LG, TCL, Vizio and Hisense have unveiled new TVs for 2024 but, as of this writing, we’ve only recently started to see the first few of those become available. Details for more new models should be confirmed in the coming weeks. If history is any indication, though, most of those sets are unlikely to be game-changing upgrades over the 2023 models still on sale today, and they'll cost more out of the gate. We'll have to see if there are exceptions, of course: Samsung’s new S95D OLED TV now uses anti-glare technology, for instance, while Hisense promises improved brightness across its new midrange sets. If you want the latest and greatest and are willing to pay more to get it, hold out for a little longer.  

But the TV market is always in motion. Most of the best models from last year have steadily fallen in price since launch, and they should only drop further as manufacturers look to clear out inventory. This means that, in most cases, buying a good 2023 TV should continue to provide the most bang for your buck, at least for the near term. Those are the sets we’ve highlighted with our recommendations below. While we at Engadget do not formally review TVs, we’re confident in our picks after thoroughly researching user feedback and the consensus from other professional review sites we trust, such as Rtings, Wirecutter, Reviewed and PCMag, among others.

Richard Lawler contributed to this report.

Apple is still on the hunt for the next revolutionary product to help it remain dominant in the market and to serve as new sources of revenue after abandoning its plans to develop an electric vehicle of its own. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, one of the areas the company is exploring is personal robotics. It reportedly started looking into robots and electric vehicles at the same time, with the hopes of developing a machine that doesn't need human intervention. 

While Apple's robotics projects are still in the very early stages, Bloomberg said it had already started working on a mobile robot that can follow users around their home and had already developed a table-top device that uses a robot to move a screen around. The idea behind the latter is to have a machine that can mimic head movements and can lock on to a single person in a group, presumably for a better video call experience. Since these robots are supposed to be able to move on their own, the company is also looking into the use of algorithms for navigation. Based on the report, Apple's home devices group is in charge of their development, and at least one engineer who worked on its scrapped EV initiative has joined the team. 

Robots, however, aren't like phones in the sense that people these days need them in their lives. Apple is apparently worried about whether people would pay "top dollar" for the robots it has in mind, and executives still can't get to an agreement on whether the company should keep working on these projects. Gurman previously reported that Apple may have sold its EV for $100,000 — if that's true, it had a bigger potential to grow the company's revenue. But the Apple Car is now out of the picture, and the company is reportedly putting all of its focus on the Vision Pro and new products for the home, which also includes a home hub device with a display that resembles an iPad. Of course, Apple could still scrap these projects, and it could find other classes of products to invest in if it discovers that they could bring in bigger money in the future. 

The dream of quantum computing has always been exciting: What if we could build a machine working at the quantum level that could tackle complex calculations exponentially faster than a computer limited by classical physics? But despite seeing IBM, Google and others announce iterative quantum computing hardware, they're still not being used for any practical purposes. That might change with today's announcement from Microsoft and Quantinuum, who say they've developed the most error-free quantum computing system yet.

While classical computers and electronics rely on binary bits as their basic unit of information (they can be either on or off), quantum computers work with qubits, which can exist in a superposition of two states at the same time. The trouble with qubits is that they're prone to error, which is the main reason today's quantum computers (known as Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum [NISQ] computers) are just used for research and experimentation.

Microsoft's solution was to group physical qubits into virtual qubits, which allows it to apply error diagnostics and correction without destroying them, and run it all over Quantinuum's hardware. The result was an error rate that was 800 times better than relying on physical qubits alone. Microsoft claims it was able to run more than 14,000 experiments without any errors.

According to Jason Zander, EVP of Microsoft's Strategic Missions and Technologies division, this achievement could finally bring us to "Level 2 Resilient" quantum computing, which would be reliable enough for practical applications.

"The task at hand for the entire quantum ecosystem is to increase the fidelity of qubits and enable fault-tolerant quantum computing so that we can use a quantum machine to unlock solutions to previously intractable problems," Zander, wrote in a blog post today. "In short, we need to transition to reliable logical qubits — created by combining multiple physical qubits together into logical ones to protect against noise and sustain a long (i.e., resilient) computation. ... By having high-quality hardware components and breakthrough error-handling capabilities designed for that machine, we can get better results than any individual component could give us."

Microsoft

Researchers will be able to get a taste of Microsoft's reliable quantum computing via Azure Quantum Elements in the next few months, where it will be available as a private preview. The goal is to push even further to Level 3 quantum supercomputing, which will theoretically be able to tackle incredibly complex issues like climate change and exotic drug research. It's unclear how long it'll take to actually reach that point, but for now, at least we're moving one step closer towards practical quantum computing.