While the four-pack of AirTags has been on sale for some time now, it's been a while since we've seen one AirTag go on sale. Now, Amazon's brought back the record-low price on a single pack, so you can grab one AirTag for only $24. That's $5 off its normal price — that may not seem like much, but it's a decent deal on an already affordable accessory.
If you're unfamiliar, AirTags allow iPhone users to keep track of their things from within the Find My app. Much like AirPods, AirTags seamlessly pair with iPhones as soon as you take them out of the box, and from there you can label what the tracker is attached to like your keys, wallet or backpack. A big downside to AirTags when compared to competing trackers like those from Tile is that Apple's devices don't have built in keyring holes. That means you'll have to buy a case or holder if you want to attach it to your keys.
After a quick setup process, you'll be able to check the Find My app whenever you need to locate your stuff. AirTags can also emit a chime if you're nearby, which should help you find your lost things a bit more easily. And if you have one of the latest iPhones, the Precision Finding feature can lead you directly to your stuff using on-screen instructions. Bluetooth trackers like these may not be as essential as your smartphone or even a smartwatch that you've grown attached to, but they will come in handy on the rare occasion that you misplace your belongings.
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Xbox has been talking about bringing the Game Pass Ultimate library to smart TVs for at least a year, and it’s finally happening in 2022. The Xbox app will hit this year’s lineup of Samsung smart TVs and monitors on June 30th, allowing Game Pass Ultimate subscribers to play titles from the cloud with no additional hardware, aside from a Bluetooth-connected gamepad. Even a PlayStation controller will do the trick.
Some 2022 Samsung smart TV models already support game-streaming services including Google Stadia and NVIDIA’s GeForce Now. Samsung launched a new Gaming Hub for its TVs in January, putting these cloud services front-and-center, and the Xbox app is set to join them. Xbox is one of the biggest forces in cloud gaming, with more than 25 million Game Pass subscribers – though not all of these are at the Ultimate tier, which unlocks streaming capabilities.
The Game Pass Ultimate library has hundreds of games available to stream and Xbox has made it a point to release its big first-party titles on the service on day one. On Samsung devices, the Xbox app will support Bluetooth headsets and gamepads including the Xbox Wireless Controller, and PlayStation’s DualShock 4 and DualSense.
There’s no update for now on the dedicated streaming device that Xbox said it was working on last year alongside the smart TV app.
Xbox
Xbox has more big plans for Game Pass in the coming months. Later this year, the company plans to add the ability for Ultimate subscribers to stream select games that they purchase outside of the Game Pass library. It’s unclear exactly how this will break down – it likely applies to titles that leave the Game Pass catalog but remain in the Xbox ecosystem, but it could include games from third-party distributors.
In response to a request for clarification, an Xbox spokesperson said, “Later this year, it's our intent to roll out the ability for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members to play select games from the cloud that you already own or purchase outside the Xbox Game Pass library. We'll have more to share on the specific games that will be supported via Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) over the next year.”
Xbox is bringing cloud gaming to two new countries, Argentina and New Zealand, on June 9th. This includes access to the Xbox streaming library and Fortnite. Xbox partnered with Epic Games to bring Fortnite to Xbox Cloud Gaming in May, and it’s available to play there for free without a subscription. At the time, Xbox said it was interested in adding other free-to-play titles to its cloud network.
Over the coming year or so, Xbox plans to test out a system that allows for multiple profiles to play at the same time under a single Game Pass subscription. That’ll be tested in Colombia and Ireland, and Xbox executives are positioning it as a “potential addition” to Game Pass.
Xbox
Finally, game demos are on their way to Game Pass. Within the next year, Xbox will start rolling out curated, bite-sized bits of upcoming games in Game Pass, allowing subscribers to test these titles for free and provide feedback to developers. The program will focus on independent titles at first, and Xbox said developers will be compensated for participating, meaning all the work that goes into building a demo won’t go unfunded. The demo program is called Project Moorcroft. There’s no word on if a Minecraft Project Moorcroft demo will ever drop, but it’s fun to say that regardless.
Time-limited, free game demos are one of the perks of the new PlayStation Plus subscription service, which will be competing directly with Game Pass. The new PS Plus goes live on June 13th and its most expensive tier, Premium, includes access to about 700 games in the PS Now library, plus cloud play for some games from past PlayStation eras. Sony’s subscription plan doesn’t support native streaming on mobile devices, as Xbox’s does, and it won’t include any new, first-party games at launch.
Sony received negative press in April after reports surfaced that the studio was making it mandatory for developers of certain games to build and release two-hour demos for PlayStation Plus Premium, with no apparent plans to compensate them for the work. Xbox, of course, made sure to highlight its plans to pay developers for building demos.
Astronomers everywhere have high hopes for NASA's James Webb telescope. It's supposed to give us an insight into the first stars and galaxies that ever formed and into the atmospheres of potentially habitable exoplanets. That is why NASA and its partners had engineered it to be able to withstand harsh situations, such as being bombarded by micrometeroids flying at extremely high velocities. Between May 23rd and May 25th, a micrometeoroid that's larger than expected hit one of the telescope's primary mirror segments. The event was significant enough for NASA to pick up a "marginally detectable effect in the data," but not enough to affect the telescope's performance.
In NASA's announcement, it said that the James Webb team performed an initial analysis and found that it still performs at a level that "exceeds all mission requirements." The space agency explained that its engineers relied on simulations and did actual test impacts on mirror samples when it was building the telescope to make sure it was adequately fortified. For instance, the telescope's flight teams can perform maneuvers to turn its optics away from known meteor showers. The recent impact it sustained was classified as an unavoidable chance event, though, and the micrometeoroid was larger than what engineers could have tested on the ground.
The good news is that James Webb has the capability to adjust mirror positions in order to correct and minimize the results of impacts like this. Its engineers have already made the first of several adjustments to make up for the damage on the affected segment. The agency has also formed a team of engineers to look into ways to mitigate effects of hits this scale in the future. Seeing as James Webb is meant to be Hubble's replacement and is expected to provide us invaluable data over the next 10 years — or 20, if everything goes well — NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency will most likely do the best they can to protect the space telescope.
Lee Feinberg, Webb optical telescope element manager at NASA Goddard, said:
"With Webb’s mirrors exposed to space, we expected that occasional micrometeoroid impacts would gracefully degrade telescope performance over time. Since launch, we have had four smaller measurable micrometeoroid strikes that were consistent with expectations and this one more recently that is larger than our degradation predictions assumed. We will use this flight data to update our analysis of performance over time and also develop operational approaches to assure we maximize the imaging performance of Webb to the best extent possible for many years to come."
Nothing, the company led by OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, will announce the phone (1), its first phone, on July 12th, 2022. Rumors about a Nothing-branded phone are as old as the company itself, and there were reports Pei was showing off a prototype back at Mobile World Congress. The company has already teased that the handset will use a Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset and a custom version of Android that highlights the operating system’s “best features.”
Pei made his name with OnePlus, making affordable phones for Android diehards with high-end specs. But the economics of the mobile industry has moved on and so has OnePlus, merging with stablemate Oppo to become a mainstream brand. It’ll be interesting, therefore, to see what Pei has planned to set Nothing apart from the rest of the industry. And if he’s got the power to achieve this feat a second time after making such a big splash the first time around.
Disney has announced it won’t be exhibiting its next big animated movie, Strange World, in French cinemas. This is in protest of the country’s fairly strict rules for how and when movies can be broadcast once they’re done in theaters. The complex rules, which were recently tweaked, essentially mean if Disney had put Strange World into cinemas, it wouldn’t be able to properly add it to Disney+ for the better part of two years. Instead, it'll just bypass theaters (and the rules) to go straight to the streaming platform. That could be a problem for France’s movie theater industry, which relies on the big money Disney movies bring in for a hefty chunk of their revenue.
Do you like cats and wish you could roleplay as one while still working through a dystopian action puzzler? Well, Stray is a new PlayStation and PC title launching on July 19th. You play from a feline point of view, as a small orange tabby trying to escape a futuristic city. But rather than an efficient departure, you scratch at walls, knock stuff over and generally behave… as a cat. That you can interrupt two robots’ playing a board game and they just find you adorable speaks volumes.
The HoloLens group will now be split into separate hardware and software teams.
Alex Kipman is leaving his role as head of Microsoft’s HoloLens project after allegations of misconduct published by Insider. Kipman reportedly engaged in inappropriate touching and comments toward female employees. Following his departure, Microsoft is splitting the HoloLens team in two, with the hardware group now reporting to Windows + Devices chief Panos Panay. Software developers on the project, meanwhile, will report to Experiences + Devices head Jeff Teper.
Our enormous virtual shopping spree through the world of Father’s Day continues with two new guides for 2022. The first is a list of little trinkets you can get to celebrate whoever filled the role of father in your life, all of which are under $50. If, however, your parent is the sort of person who talks about what “gear” they’re “shooting on” to random strangers, then our photography gift guide should be your first destination.
It’s another installment in the saga between Twitter and the person who really doesn’t want to buy it but signed a contract saying he would. Elon Musk said Twitter has failed to give him enough data to understand the platform’s bot and fake account problem. Twitter says it has, but in response to the new charge has reportedly decided to give Musk access to the “firehose,” the stream of raw data that includes details on more than 500 million tweets posted to the service every day. In many ways, it’s the most spitefully clever thing Twitter can do, burying Musk in so much data it can’t be accused of hiding anything. Although I don’t know if Twitter users will be thrilled to know how much of their information has been handed over to the meme-happy billionaire.
The Mac Mini is already the most cost-effective way to get an M1-based Apple computer and right now, you can get an even better deal on one. Amazon has the 2020 Mac Mini M1 (with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage) on sale for $570 via a $99 checkout discount, matching the lowest price we've seen to date.
The Mini comes with an eight-core CPU, eight-core GPU, one more than you'll find in the base Air M1. It also packs a 16-core Neural Engine, so you can expect speedy performance, high energy efficiency and nearly instant wake times. It should provide enough power for most users, even content creators and it can even handle some gaming as well.
The exterior design of the Mac Mini is largely unchanged from the Intel model and that's a good thing. The small silver box will fit into nearly any desk setup without taking up too much space and it has a number of ports including two Thunderbolt connectors, two USB-A ports, an HDMI port, an Ethernet connector and a headphone jack.
Our biggest issue with the machine is its lack of upgradeability, as the RAM and SSD are soldered in place. If you can live with that, the Mac Mini M1 remains a good option for anyone in need of an updated, powerful desktop. It's best to act quickly though, as Apple deals often don't last long on Amazon.
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Netflix and CD Projekt Red have unveiled the first trailer for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, their anime series based on Cyberpunk 2077. The companies first announced the project back in 2020 and have been developing it since 2018.
The 10-episode story revolves around a street kid turned mercenary edgerunner and is set in Night City, "a technology and body modification-obsessed city of the future," the description reads. CD Projekt Red is producing the project with showrunner Rafal Jaki (The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Cyberpunk 2077), but the animation is being done by Japan-based company Studio Trigger.
Studio Trigger is known for its wild anime designs and "raucous" storytelling with projects like Kill la Kill and Promare, and Edgerunners looks like it falls solidly into that category. It'll be directed by Studio Trigger founder Hiroyuki Imaishi, with Hiromi Wakabayashi doing character design. The original score will be composed by Akira Yamaoka (Silent Hill series). It's set to launch in September.
Microsoft has announced a handful of significant changes for employee contracts and agreements that would scrap some of the most controversial workplace policies in tech. To start with, the tech giant will no longer add non-compete clauses in its contracts for employees in the US and will not enforce it for most of its current staff. Only employees in senior leadership roles, such as partners and executives, will have to sign and comply with non-compete agreements. That means most employees in the US will be free to look for jobs with other companies considered as Microsoft competitors, such as Google.
"While our existing employee agreements have noncompete obligations, we do not endorse the use of such provisions as a retention tool. We have heard concerns that the noncompetition clauses in some U.S. employee agreements, even when rarely and reasonably enforced, feel at odds with our talent principles," Microsoft explained in its announcement.
The company is also ending another controversial practice: Having workers sign agreements with non-disclosure clauses when resolving disputes and providing separation benefits. Historically, NDAs have prevented workers from talking about instances of sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation in the workplace. By preventing them from talking, it keeps them from connecting with other employees who may have the same experiences and from banding together to demand real change from the company.
As GeekWire notes, Microsoft may have no choice but to implement this change anyway. A new law that makes it illegal for companies to ban workers from talking about "acts of discrimination, harassment, retaliation, wage and hour violations, and sexual assault" is set to take effect in the Washington state, where Microsoft is based, this week.
Microsoft is also increasing pay transparency by publicly disclosing salary ranges in all of its job postings across the US starting in January 2023. Finally, it will go through a civil rights audit that would examine its workplace policies and practices as conducted by a third party. It has committed to complete the audit by fiscal year 2023 and to publish a report of its results.
TikTok is rolling out more screen time controls to help users manage how much time they are spending in the app. With the change, the company is adding a new in-app dashboard that will more closely track how long people are spending in the app.
The dashboard will show statistics like how much time you spend in the app, when you sue the app most and how often it’s opened. Additionally, TikTok users will now be able to set screen time limits for how long they can use the app in any one sitting.
Previously, the the app has offered screen time controls that time out after a designated daily limit. But with the new setting users can, for example, opt to have the app remind them to “take a break” if they have had it open for an extended period of time.
TikTok
The changes come as TikTok and its peers have faced questions about their apps’ impact on teens. Earlier this year, lawmakers in the Senate introduced a bill that would increase the study of social media addiction in an effort to put up more “guardrails” to protect younger users.
Notably, TikTok now says it’s introducing additional screen time restrictions for teens between the ages of 13 and 17. Teens will now see weekly “digital well-being prompts” and get additional screen time reminders when they have spent more than 100 minutes in the app on a single day.
Starting today, you can stream a free demo of Resident Evil Villagefrom Capcom's website, with no need for a fancy gaming PC, Xbox or PlayStation. The demo is similar to one that's available on other platforms, which allows players to explore parts of the village and castle. This appetizer for one of last year's biggest-selling games is powered by Immersive Stream for Games, a version of Stadia tech that Google is licensing to others.
The demo will work on just about any computer, as well as iOS and Android phones and tablets, as long as the device can handle high-definition video and you have a sturdy enough internet connection (with a download speed of at least 10Mbps). It runs on Chrome on Windows, macOS and Android. On iOS, you can try it on Safari. The resolution tops out at 1080p and there's no HDR mode.
PlayStation DualShock 4 and Xbox One controllers are officially supported, but other peripherals might work. Alternatively, you can use touch controls on mobile or a mouse and keyboard.
Capcom
As with Stadia's click-to-play trials, there's no need to register to play the demo. It's worth noting that you'll be disconnected after 10 minutes of inactivity. There's no save function, so you'll need to restart from the beginning if you disconnect. You can play as many times as you like and there's no time limit, unlike previous versions of the demo.
In February, Insiderreported that Google was looking to secure deals with Capcom, Peloton and others to build the licensing aspect of its game-streaming business. It was suggested that Capcom might use the tech to stream demos from its website, which turned out to be the case. This could even be a precursor to Capcom running its own game streaming storefront.
A 2018 change in Facebook’s algorithm resulted in significant boosts in engagement for local Republican groups even though their Democratic counterparts posted more often, according to newly published research. The findings, first reported byNBC News, line up with one of the major revelations of the Facebook Papers. Namely, that a change meant to emphasize content from family and friends wound up making News Feed more divisive by incentivizing negative posts.
The latest research, published in Research & Politics, used CrowdTangle data to measure engagement with posts from local Democratic and Republican groups on Facebook and Twitter between January 2016 and August 2021. The researchers found that by the fall of 2018, several months after Facebook announced its algorithm change, there was a significant uptick in engagement with Republican pages on Facebook that didn’t occur on Twitter.
Of course without the actual algorithm we cannot say what caused the change in 2018. We can say there was a change, specifically on Facebook, and that it impacted a large number of local Republican parties. We can also say the timing lines up with what others saw for FB's changes
“We conclude that it seems possible that changes in how Facebook rated content led to a doubling of the total shares of local Republican party posts compared to local Democratic party posts in the first half of 2019 even though Democratic parties posted more often during this period,” the paper’s authors write.
The researchers say it’s “difficult” to know for sure what caused the shift toward the end of 2018. But they note that their findings broadly align with what we know about Facebook’s algorithm change, and the reaction to it, thanks to the Facebook Papers. The company had announced a major change to News Feed’s ranking systems in January 2018, in order to emphasize “meaningful social interactions” or MSI. But documents disclosed by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen indicate that by early 2019 publishers and political parties were raising questions about whether MSI was incentivizing negativity.
“Of course without the actual algorithm we cannot say what caused the change in 2018,” Kevin Reuning, one of the paper’s authors wrote on Twitter. “We can say there was a change, specifically on Facebook, and that it impacted a large number of local Republican parties. We can also say the timing lines up with what others saw for FB's changes”
In a statement to NBC News, Meta called the researchers’ findings “implausible,” saying differences in engagement could be attributed to other factors. “It doesn’t add up with what MSI actually did, which was reduce the amount of public content — like that of political parties — on the platform,” a company spokesperson said. “The trends here instead seem to coincide with a divisive election cycle, and since the differences between political parties in the U.S. have been growing for decades, the idea that a change to Facebook ranking would fundamentally shift how people choose to engage with political parties is implausible.”
