We’ve tested a lot of Macs (and even iPads) running on Apple’s M1 chip. But now we have the M1 Ultra and power to burn. As a quick reminder, the M1 Ultra fuses two M1 Max chips together to give you a processor with 20 CPU cores and 64 GPU cores — yikes. That comes with up to 128GB of RAM, ensuring it’s one of the fastest processors ever in Engadget’s offices — or at least WFH offices and spare rooms.

Engadget’s Chris Schodt, our Upscaled series host, assembled a list from readers and YouTube viewers aimed at pushing the new chip as hard as we could. Think Adobe Lightroom and Premiere Pro, Davinci Resolve and Fusion, 3D modeling in Blender, machine learning tests like TensorFlow and Pytorch, and some gaming. Of course.

However, Apple's M1 ecosystem still feels, at times, unfinished — Chris experienced a few strange bugs, and software compatibility can still be an issue. Check out his full test over on the latest episode of Upscaled.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

• Sony's latest PlayStation 5 console covers arrive next month

• ASUS' Flow X16 2-in-1 gaming laptop features a 165Hz mini-LED display

• The best online resources for cooking at all skill levels

• Apple softens its stance on remote work amid return-to-office delays

• Hyundai's luxury Genesis brand opens US orders for its first EV

A campus literally made by Google

The all-electric campus' design focuses on sustainability

Google

Google has finally opened its Bay View campus to employees almost 10 years after revealing its initial plans for the new facility. It's the first Google campus the company has developed itself, and it’s covered in a "dragonscale skin" of 90,000 silver solar panels capable of generating almost seven megawatts of energy, or up to 40 percent of the new offices' energy needs.

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You can practice for a job interview with Google AI

Don’t tell it your weaknesses!

Google has launched an Interview Warmup tool that uses AI to help you prepare for interviews. The site asks typical questions (such as the classic "tell me a bit about yourself") and analyzes your voiced or typed responses for areas of improvement. You'll know when you overuse certain words, for instance, or if you need to spend more time talking about a given subject.

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What to look for in an electric lawn mower

Ditch the gas-powered lawn tools.

With a long, hot summer of high gas prices imminent and the writing on the wall for two-stroke engines in your yard, what better time to electrify your lawn care equipment? Before you head down to your local home improvement center, here’s some advice on what to look for in an electric mower, directly from the people who design them.

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Ransomware group threatens to oust Costa Rica's government as crisis deepens

'We have insiders in your government,' the Conti group said.

Last week, Costa Rica declared a state of emergency following a massive Conti ransomware attack on its government. Now, Conti has boosted its threat, saying its aim is nothing less than to overthrow the government. "We have our insiders in your government," the group said. "We are also working on gaining access to your other systems, you have no other options but to pay us."

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This gadget offers a quick and (less) dirty way to make plant milk at home

Generally less mess.

Engadget

As part of Cooking Week, we tested some of the most niche (and, in some cases, most ridiculous) kitchen gadgets we could find. We wanted to know if these impressive-looking appliances were actually worth the splurge. Alongside yesterday’s kinda-smart toaster, we tested Almond Cow, a big, high-powered blender with just enough moving parts to make alt milks at home, with an attached blade, a filter basket, a big base and a motor inside that makes all the magic happen.

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Plant-based whole eggs could be served in US restaurants this year

Yo! Egg expects to have its products in restaurants by the end of 2022.

There are plenty of meat-free burgers and ‘chicken’ nuggets, but there aren’t many plant-based eggs. Sure, you can find powdered substitutes, but a whole egg with a runny yolk is a different bag. Yo! Egg claims to have developed the first plant-based poached and sunny-side-up eggs. Following a limited rollout in Israel, the company is bringing its products to the US.

Since its eggs are made from soy, sunflower oil, water and flour, they’re more sustainable to make. With one gram of protein, they’re not a one-for-one replacement for chicken eggs in nutritional value, but they don't have any cholesterol. We also need to taste them. Do they go well with hot sauce?

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Ford added GT power (and fun) to the Mach-E

We gave it a test drive.

Engadget

The Mustang Mach-E GT suffers from long-name syndrome – Ford just had to cram 'Mustang' in there, which has really angered some ‘classic’ Mustang owners on the internet. They can be mad all they want because the GT is a great addition to the family, even though it’s an electric SUV. Check out our test drive video.

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Last year, YouTube debuted a feature that let viewers shop products directly from a livestream. It'll take that feature a step further later this year by allowing creators to co-host live shopping streams across two channels, it announced at its annual Brandcast event. It also unveiled a new "redirects" feature that will let YouTubers work more closely with brands.

YouTube said the features will be a way to help creators and advertisers make more "meaningful connections" with their audiences. The first allows two channels to go live and cohost together, "uniting their communities in a single live shopping stream," YouTube said. The other is called live redirects, letting creators start a shopping livestream on their own channel, then redirect to a brand's channel for fans to keep watching. 

With the new features, YouTube is taking live shopping to a new level in order to take on terrestrial shopping channels. It's not a coincidence that it hosted Brandcast at the so-called "Upfronts" sessions used by TV channels broadcasters to promote new content to advertisers, rather than the digital equivalent, NewFronts. 

While most broadcasters flaunt original programming at Upfronts (the first live version in three years), YouTube focused on live shopping, short-form video and high-profile creators like Mr.Beast, Patrick Starr and Marques Brownlee. It also noted that the Media Rating Council accredited YouTube again for content-level brand safety, making it the only platform with the rating. As mentioned, the co-hosting feature will arrive sometime in 2022, but there's no word yet on when we'll see the brand redirects feature.

NASA's Mars InSight lander will soon no longer be able to send back data and images scientists can analyze to better understand the red planet. It's been gradually losing power for a while now as dust continues to accumulate on its solar panels. The darker skies expected in the next few months — also due to having more dust in the air — won't be doing it any favors, as well. InSight's solar panels used to be able to generate around 5,000 watt-hours of energy each Martian day, which is enough to power an electric oven for an hour and 40 minutes. These days, they can only produce roughly 500 watt-hour of energy per Martian day, enough to power an electric oven for 10 minutes at most. 

The space agency believes the lander will no longer be able to sustain its seismometer by the end of summer, putting an end to its science activities. InSight's non-seismic instruments will be switched on every once in a while after May, but NASA expects it to be become completely unresponsive around December. The only way to prevent those events is for the lander to encounter a strong dust-cleaning phenomenon, such as a dust devil. Removing even 25 percent of the dust off its solar panels will allow the spacecraft to continue its science activities. 

The InSight lander arrived on Mars in November 2018 and has spent the past few years gathering information on marsquakes to help us measure the depth and composition of the planet's crust, mantle and core. It has a robotic arm that was used to deploy its seismometer and heat probe, which was also once used to clean some dust off its solar panel. InSight's ground team will put the arm into its "retirement pose" for the last time later this month. 

Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, said:

"InSight has transformed our understanding of the interiors of rocky planets and set the stage for future missions. We can apply what we’ve learned about Mars’ inner structure to Earth, the Moon, Venus, and even rocky planets in other solar systems."

New York City may have more Airbnb listings than apartments for rent despite a 2016 law banning short-term rentals, Curbed has reported. April apartment rental inventory in Manhattan, Brooklyn and northwest Queens numbered 7,699 units, according to the Douglas Elliman report. That compares to somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 entire-apartment or entire-home Airbnb rental listings across all of NYC, as calculated by AirDNA and Inside Airbnb.

New York City has effectively prohibited short-term rentals (less than 30 days) in multi-unit buildings without the owner present since 2011, and made it illegal to even advertise such listings in 2016. If Airbnb renters are following the law, that means the listings are only active for short periods during the year.

Many could also be Brownstone "garden apartments" separated from but still a part of the main dwelling, which can be rented year-round by apartment owners. "A decade ago [those] may have gone to long-term tenants," Curbed noted. The lack of that inventory on the long-term rental market is particularly noticeable now with rentals so tight and prices averaging $3,925 per month in Manhattan.

Other factors may have contributed to the NYC housing shortage, though, Airbnb said. "Over the past two years, our entire space listing supply citywide has decreased, and it now represents a fraction of a percent of the city’s rental units — and all while rent prices have trended upward and city-issued permits for new-unit development remain down by a double-digit percentage," a spokesperson told Curbed in an email. In addition, some Airbnb listings may only be available for several weeks out of the year.

Airbnb is widely used by tourists and travelers, but hotels see them as unlicensed competition and city councils and housing advocates say that they take thousands of rentals off the market and distort market prices. The problem is particularly acute in cities with tight housing markets like New York and San Francisco, the latter of which also issued laws limiting rentals.

The extent to which Airbnb has contributed to a NYC housing shortage is debatable. However, the optics of having more Airbnb listings than rentable apartments isn't great in a brutal rental market. "Bidding wars accounted for one in five new lease signings," Elliman wrote. "Greater affordability is not right around the corner. More and more people are hunkering down."

An Apple executive who oversaw Apple's machine learning and artificial intelligence efforts has left the company in recent weeks, citing its stringent return-to-office policy, according to Bloomberg. Ian Goodfellow is now reportedly joining Google's DeepMind team as an individual contributor, a few years after he left the tech giant for Apple. Based on his LinkedIn profile, Goodfellow worked in different capacities for Google since 2013, including as a research scientist and as a software engineering intern. 

Bloomberg says the former Apple exec referenced the policy in a note about his departure addressed to staff members. In April, Apple announced that it was going to start implementing its return-to-office policy on May 23rd and will be requiring employees to work in its offices at least three times a week. 

The New York Times has just reported, though, that the company has softened its stance on remote work and will now launch a pilot that will see some employees come in to office only twice a week. Google has also started implementing a "hybrid work" plan that requires employees to physically work in its offices some days of the week, but Goodfellow may have taken a role that allows him more freedom.

Goodfellow supervised the engineers working on autonomous technology at Apple and developed a system that gave Google Maps the ability to automatically transcribe addresses from Street View car photos. However, he's probably mostly known for inventing generative adversarial networks or GANs, which can be used to create deepfakes. 

Grubhub’s offer of free lunch to anyone in the New York City metro area today led to sheer chaos. Many were unable to access the promotional deal — which was scheduled to run from 11 am to 2 pm ET this afternoon — when both the website and app started to crash, according to tweets from many frustrated users. A large number of restaurants were overwhelmed with orders from hungry customers, prompting them to pause taking on new orders or “close” for the day. Although Grubhub’s “free lunch” promo was actually just a deep discount (the offer was good for $15, and customers were responsible for additional taxes, tip and delivery fee), turns out few people will turn down the offer of a cheap meal, especially in one of the world’s most expensive cities. While access to the website and app was eventually restored, a number of customers still complained about delayed or canceled orders.

At its peak, Grubhub said its platform was receiving 6,000 orders per minute. “The initial demand temporarily overwhelmed our app, causing some diners to experience an error message when they used their promo code. However, this was quickly rectified, and along with our restaurant and driver partners, we were able to successfully fulfill more than 400,000 lunch orders connected to the promotion,” a spokesperson for Grubhub told Engadget. 

But workers and restaurant owners faced worse problems than merely going hungry on their lunch breaks. Buzzfeedspoke to several Grubhub delivery people and restaurant owners and workers, all who recounted a harrowing, stressful day filled with non-stop orders. Many workers and restaurants told various outlets that they weren’t informed about the promo in advance.

“We really got slammed by it today,” Ching, a worker from Greenberg’s Bagels told Buzzfeed. “It was just non-stop all day.”

Grubhub denied claims that it didn't inform restaurants of the promo beforehand. "Grubhub isn’t just a delivery logistics app, we are a marketplace for restaurants. And as we do with any promotions, we notify our entire restaurant network in advance via multiple points of communication," a Grubhub spokesperson told Engadget in a statement. 

Despite the advance warning, it's clear many restaurants were unprepared for the barrage of orders and the extra strain on staff and food supply that such an offer incurred. 

The wait is over. Next month, Sony will release three new PlayStation 5 console covers. As you may recall, the company announced at the end of last year it would begin producing PS5 plates in five additional colors. At the time, Sony said the Midnight Black and Cosmic Red plates would go on sale at the start of 2022, with the three remaining colors – Nova Pink, Starlight Blue and Galactic Purple – to follow during the first half of the year.

Sony left the release to the last moment, but starting today customers in US, UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg can pre-order the new plates through the PlayStation Direct website – with general availability to follow on June 17th. The console covers are easy to install. All you have to do is pop off the white ones that came with your PS5 and install the new ones. You can also mix and match two different sets of plates to make your console stand out even more – though that will cost you extra to do so.

Netflix terminated the roles of 150 mostly US-based staff today in an ongoing effort to cut costs following a historic drop in subscribers, reportedDeadline. The impacted employees reportedly include a number in senior-level positions. It’s the second round of layoffs at the company— which numbers roughly 11,000 employees — in recent weeks. An undisclosed number of writing and editing staff attached to Netflix's in-house fan website, Tudum, were let go last month.

A company spokesperson said the layoffs were directly tied to a slowdown in Netflix’s revenue growth. “As we explained on earnings, our slowing revenue growth means we are also having to slow our cost growth as a company. So sadly, we are letting around 150 employees go today, mostly US-based,” a Netflix spokesperson said in a statement to Engadget. “These changes are primarily driven by business needs rather than individual performance, which makes them especially tough as none of us want to say goodbye to such great colleagues. We’re working hard to support them through this very difficult transition.”

Varietyreported today that the streaming service has also cut a number of in-development animated projects, including Wings of Fire from executive producer Ava DuVernay, a preschool series called Antiracist Baby and With Kind Regards From Kindergarten. But according to Variety's sources, these projects were dropped due to creative reasons and not as an effort to cut costs. 

The streaming service also dropped the documentary Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, And You, a companion piece to Stamped From the Beginning.

Employee morale has been low at the Los Gatos, California-based company since it indicated during its last earnings call that it plans to tighten its belt, according to the Los Angeles Times. The company also updated its cultural memo this month to warn prospective employees that the streaming services “may not be the best place” for those who cannot work on content they disagree with.

“As employees we support the principle that Netflix offers a diversity of stories, even if we find some titles counter to our own personal values. Depending on your role, you may need to work on titles you perceive to be harmful. If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you,” reads the culture guidelines.

Netflix reported it lost subscribers in the first quarter of 2022, which it chalked up to a rise in password sharing, increased competition from other streaming platforms and dropping its entire subscriber base in Russia. The streaming service is exploring adding a lower-priced, ad-supported tier as well as cutting a number of projects that were in development. The company anticipates losing another 2 million subscribers in the second quarter of 2022.

Apple is once again delaying its return to the office, and this time it will be less strict about in-person work. The New York Timesunderstands that Apple has delayed the return to offices once again. The iPhone maker will no longer require staff to come to the office three times a week by May 23rd. Instead, the company will reportedly launch a pilot that has some employees return two days a week in the "weeks ahead." Anyone who doesn't feel comfortable can still work remotely, according to a company note.

While Apple didn't share many other details, it promised at least two weeks' notice before any changes. The test will require that in-person workers wear masks in common spaces and elevators.

We've asked Apple for comment. The delay was reportedly prompted by an increase in COVID-19 cases, and comes after multiple setbacks that included the coronavirus' more transmissible Omicron variant. Until this latest hurdle, Apple had wanted in-person work at least once per week in April and twice per week as of May 2nd.

The company may not have had much choice regardless of the exact infection levels. Thousands of Apple workers have pushed back against the return-to-office plans as part of an "Apple Together" movement. In early May, the alliance published an open letter asking management for more flexibility in remote work. The company's director for machine learning, Ian Goodfellow, even quit over the return-to-office policy. Apple risked further stoking tensions, and potentially losing more talent, if it continued with its earlier plans.

The first Overwatch 2 PvP beta just wrapped up today, and Blizzard is already preparing to reveal what's next for the game with an event on June 16th. Details about what to expect are fairly thin for now, though the studio will provide some info on the next PvP beta as well as its plan for the coming months.

Blizzard could be hoping to use the event to address some of the criticism about the first beta. Along with new hero Sojourn and four fresh maps, the beta introduced another game mode, an upgraded game engine, major changes to many heroes and, most significantly, a shift in the number of team members from six to five.

I loved the beta, for the most part (I'm not a fan of the revamped scoreboard at all). It was only a slice of what Overwatch 2 will eventually become, but it still felt fresh. However, some critics felt that the beta wasn't enough after two years without significant content updates for the original game. Others suggested it was effectively a big patch.

"Overwatch as a world, as a universe, is deeply personal to the team; something that we pour our time, creative energies and passion into," game director Aaron Keller wrote in a letter to fans. "It can be scary putting something that means so much to you out there for other people to look at. Especially when you know that it’s not finished and you’re asking for people’s real and valid criticisms of what you’ve made. But the reason we do it is important — to make a better game, and it’s our players and our community that make it possible."

The Overwatch 2 team said it focused on testing specific elements in the first beta, such as the new maps, shift to 5v5, balance and stability of the build and servers. It promised that more features, heroes and maps will be introduced in upcoming betas. Blizzard will surely try to convince the doubters that it's on the right track with Overwatch 2, hopefully by revealing some more major updates next month. 

In the meantime, a new event just started in the original game, offering the chance to snag some new versions of fan-favorite skins and play some limited-time modes. That could help players pass the time until the next beta, whenever that may start.