Do you want a do-everything multicooker, but don't need an Instant Pot? You're in luck. Amazon is selling Ninja's OS301 Foodi 10-in-1 for $119, a 41 percent discount on the regular price, as part of a one-day sale. This may be the best Ninja cooker deal yet — there was a Prime Day deal last year for a less-capable (if larger) 9-in-1 model that still cost more.
It's easy to see the appeal for this model. It handles typical multicooker tasks like pressure cooking, slow cooking, steaming and yogurt, but it also includes air frying (not always present in multicookers) and a nesting broil rack that lets you broil or steam on different levels. The 6.5-quart capacity is also just slightly higher than the six quarts you find in comparable Instant Pot models, so Ninja's offering is worth considering if you're worried about space.
The drawbacks mainly stem from your choice of ecosystem. Instant Pot's fandom is large enough that you'll find recipes and other guides for it where you won't with Ninja's cookers. If you're just interested in preparing a tasty dish, though, there's no reason you have to follow the crowd — especially not at a price like this.
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It may not be a household name, but one of the more important players in the semiconductor industry is Imec. It’s a nonprofit research organization that has been around since 1984 and frequently works with companies like ASML, currently the only manufacturer in the world that makes the EUV lithography machines necessary for making 7nm, 5nm and 3nm chips.
On Thursday, the organization announced the creation of the Sustainable Semiconductor Technologies and Systems program. As part of the initiative, Imec says it will work with the semiconductor industry to reduce its carbon footprint by helping partners analyze and anticipate the environmental impacts of their manufacturing decisions. With today’s announcement, the program also has its first partner: Apple.
If the program is to have a positive effect on the environment, Imec will need to attract more partners, but attracting Apple is a good first step. The company may not produce its own silicon, but there’s no denying it’s on the bleeding edge of chip design. More importantly, it’s among the most powerful buyers of manufacturing capacity in the industry. It frequently monopolizes the top-end processes of TSMC, the most important chip foundry in the world. Working together, Imec and Apple are well-positioned to inform other companies how to make their manufacturing more sustainable.
Amazon is offering another solid batch of games to Prime Gaming members at no extra cost next month. Remedy's excellent Control:Ultimate Edition(which includes both DLC chapters), Rise of the Tomb Raider and Dragon Age Inquisition are the big-name titles you'll be able to claim starting November 1st. The lineup also includes Rogue Heroes, Liberated, Puzzle Agent 2, Demon Hunter 2: New Chapter, BAFL - Brakes Are For Losers and Secret Files: Sam Peters.
Meanwhile, Prime Gaming has forged a new year-long partnership with Riot to give League of Legends, Legends of Runeterra, Valorant and League of Legends: Wild Rift players some goodies. Over the next 12 months, you can snag esports emotes and Riot Points for League of Legends, weapon skins in Valorant and much more. Prime Gaming will sponsor Riot esports events too, while members can expect some surprises to mark next week's release of League of Legends animated series Arcaneon Netflix.
Along with freebies for those games, Prime subscribers can claim swag for Apex Legends (including a character and weapon skin for the latest legend, Ash), Rainbow Six Siege, Amazon's own game New Worldand other titles in November. You can pick up consumables and in-game currency for Genshin Impact too.
Members still have a few more days to claim the current Prime Gaming perks. Those include Star Wars: Squadrons, Alien: Isolation and the terrific Ghostrunner.
Robot vacuums can be expensive, and if you want one with a base that automatically collects dirt, it'll cost you even more. But now you can get one of Shark's most advanced models for the lowest price we've seen. The Shark IQ RV1001AE robot vacuum with clean base is 47 percent off, bringing it down to $319. That's more than $280 off its normal price and the lowest we've seen it — not to mention that also makes it even cheaper than most iRobot devices that come with clean bases, even when they've been on sale.
We've been fans of Shark's robot vacuums since one of its cheaper models made it into our budget robot vacuum guide. Originally priced at $600, the RV1001AE is one of Shark's higher-end robo-vacs with powerful suction and a self-cleaning brush roll. The latter ensures that hair won't get tangled in the brush, making this vacuum a good pick for pet owners. In addition to Shark's IQ navigation, it also maps out your home as it cleans so you can tell it to only clean the living room or the kitchen by using the mobile app. And if you don't want to bother with manual cleanings, you can set a schedule in the mobile app, too, and let the robot do all the work.
This robot vacuum also cleans itself — it'll automatically empty its bin into the clean base that comes with it. Yes, you'll have to empty the base once every month or so, but that's much more convenient than having to remember to dump out the robot's contents every time. Also, Shark's clean base is bagless, so you don't have to buy proprietary liners like you do with other robots that come with similar bases.
If you can live without the clean base, a few other Shark vacuums — both robot and not — are on sale right now, too. Of note is the Shark IQ AV970, which is down to $250. That's $150 off its normal price and close to its all-time low of $230. It has many of the same features as the RV1001AE, including a self-cleaning brush roll, IQ navigation and Alexa and Google Assistant voice commands. Aside from the clean base, you'll have to forgo home mapping with this model, but you'll get an extra-large dust bin, which allows the robot to suck up more dirt and debris before you need to empty it.
McDonald's might not be the only restaurant experimenting with AI-based order taking in the near future. Restaurant Divereports McDonald's is selling its McD Tech Labs to IBM in order to "further accelerate" work on its automated voice ordering systems. The deal will help apply the technology to a wider variety of countries, languages and menus, McDonald's said, while bolstering IBM's Watson-powered customer service offerings.
The deal is expected to close in December. McD Tech Labs will join IBM's Cloud & Cognitive Software team.
McDonald's started testing AI drive-thru order taking in 10 Chicago-area restaurants in late spring. While the fast food chain saw "substantial benefits" for both customers and staff, it was clear the system needed improvement. It was only about 85 percent accurate, necessitating human intervention for nearly a fifth of orders. CEO Chris Kempczinski said it would take more than a year or two to implement the technology on a broader scale, and indicated that McDonald's routinely bought companies (like the AI firm Apprente) for short stints before spinning them out with partners who can expand the technology — it clearly sees IBM as key to making AI drive-thrus a success, at McDonald's and elsewhere.
It's not clear whether or not restaurant employees should be thrilled. This will save staff from the drudgery of listening to orders at 2AM, but it also raises the possibility of job cuts as restaurants limit human involvement to preparing orders. As before, automation could be a double-edged sword that hurts as much as it helps.
Nikon has officially unveiled its new flagship mirrorless camera, the $5,500, 45.7-megapixel Z9 with 8K 30p video and up to 20 fps RAW burst shooting speeds. It's Nikon's first camera to use a stacked sensor with built in memory that allows for very fast readout speeds. In fact, Nikon is so confident in the electronic shutter that it has abandoned the mechanical shutter entirely, so the Z9 is the first high-end professional camera without one.
With that high-speed sensor (which has the same megapixel count as the Z7 II), the Z9 allows a flash sync of up to 1/200th of a second, which looks like the fastest sync speed ever for an electronic shutter. That should also make it very resistant to rolling shutter, which is crucial if the camera is to be used for sports or action photography.
The faster sensor allows JPEG burst shooting at up to 30 fps, or RAW photos at 20 fps. If you're willing to drop down to 11 megapixels, you can shoot photos at an astounding 120 fps. As with other stacked sensor cameras, the Nikon Z has much improved buffering, letting you capture up to 1,000 frames at once with either JPEG or the new HE (high efficiency) RAW compression algorithms.
Nikon
Nikon's autofocus (AF) system is also all-new, and makes even more extensive use of AI algorithms. Much like Canon's EOS R3, it can now track a wide range of subjects, including the eyes, faces and bodies of people, along with dogs, cats and birds, planes, trains, motorbike and bicycles. And unlike other AI cameras, there's no need to tell it what you're shooting — the camera will figure that out if you set it to "Auto" (or, you can set the subject type manually). It also offers a "3D tracking" system much like you can find on Nikon's DSLRs. All of this falls into line with the Z9's purpose as a sports/action/wildlife photography camera.
Nikon has also improved its in-body stabilization system (which it calls "vibration reduction" or VR). Now, it can combine in-body and lens stabilization system for steadier video or fewer blurry photos. This will only be available with several lenses to begin with, however, namely the Nikkor Z 70-200m F/2.8, Z MC 105mm f/2.8 VR and freshly announced Z 100-400mm F/4.5-5.6 VR S.
Video performance is equally impressive. The Z3 will be able to capture 8K at 30p at launch, along with oversampled 4K 30p from an 8K capture that should be incredibly sharp. If you don't mind pixel binning or line skipping, it will also be able to capture 4K at up to 120 fps.
To start with, you'll be able to capture these formats at up to 10-bit with H.264 or H.265 long GOP codecs. On top of that, Nikon is offering the very useful option of capturing video with ProRes 422 HQ compression, which is much easier to edit straight out of the camera.
Things will get even more interesting later on, though. Nikon plans to introduce a future firmware update that will enable 12-bit 8K 60fps capture in a new, proprietary N-RAW format or using Apple ProRes RAW HQ capture at 4K/60p. Nikon promises that you'll be able to capture the oversampled 4K/30p for more than two hours at "normal" temperatures.
The Z9 has a large pro-style body with controls about where you'd expect them, other than a repositioned play button and AF button near the front. It uses dual CFexpress Type B slots (backward compatible with XQD) for maximum performance for video and burst photos. The new large, EN-EL18d battery is rated for up to 740 shots per charge with the LCD, or 700 shots with the EVF enabled.
It has a 3.69 million dot OLED viewfinder with just a 60 fps refresh rate, but Nikon said that it always delivers that speed and never downgrades it. It uses a multi-direction rear LCD and not a fully-articulating screen, but you can tilt t he screen up to face yourself.
With the Z9, Nikon has taken some of the best aspects of Canon's EOS R3 and the Sony A1 and married them into a single, large body. It falls a bit short of those models in terms of shooting speed, and the electronic viewfinder isn't too impressive on paper. However, Nikon seems to have vaulted ahead of both Sony and Canon in terms of video specs, but we'll have to wait and see if video autofocus is up to snuff. The Nikon Z9 will arrive by the end of the year in the US for $5,500 for the body only.
Google hasn’t given up on Android tablets. Even though, looking at the last few years, it probably should have. I’m (half) joking, but bigger-screened Android devices have felt like an afterthought for a while, as iPads or Windows-powered hybrids cleaned up at the high-end, and cheap devices for families and workplaces offered a mostly smartphone experience with more screen real estate.
Enter Android 12L. It’s designed for bigger screens, including foldables and even laptops. It boils down to a set of new features for the existing OS that are optimized for big screens. While Android can handle a (sort of) multi-window experience, parts of the interface still end up feeling like a blown-up version of a phone OS, rather than something that makes better use of the increased space. One of the things coming to Android 12L is a two-column layout for the notification shade and lockscreen when the system detects that the screen is above 600dps wide. Android is even adding a taskbar which is all very... Chromebook.
We've been hearing about Intel's powerful hybrid processors for so long, but finally the company is ready to launch those chips, previously codenamed "Alder Lake," as its 12th-gen desktop CPUs. And maybe, just maybe, it'll be able to steal the spotlight back from AMD and Apple.
Intel says 12th-gen chips are up to 19 percent faster than 11th-gen overall, and they're twice as fast in the Adobe After Effects Pulse benchmark. When it comes to multithreaded performance (tasks built specifically for more than one core, like video and 3D rendering), the company claims the top-end i9-12900K is 50 percent faster than last year's comparable chip from Intel while using less power. Better still, it can achieve performance parity using only around a quarter of the power. Basically, everyone who held off on upgrading over the last few years could be in for a treat.
The new hybrid core design will make Intel’s new chips look similar to AMD’s big.LITTLE technology found on smartphone CPUs, combining energy-efficient cores for lightweight tasks with heavy-lifting (but more energy-hungry) cores.
Apple's built a lot of tools into its new FaceTime feature.
iOS 15.1 was released yesterday, which means you can finally start checking out Apple's long-awaited SharePlay feature. The feature still only works with a small collection of apps at the moment, but it's coming soon to Disney+, while the NBA and TikTok apps will be updated today to support it. But, er, how do you use it? First step is: update your device.
The Xperia 1 III is another Sony phone aimed at camera fans. It sidesteps software processing tricks, popularized by phones like the Pixel series, instead showcasing Sony’s camera smarts in features like focus tracking and fine-grain controls. I put the phone through its paces, and while the gorgeous 4K screen can run at a smooth 120Hz, specs like this come at an almost prohibitive price ($1,300!), making it harder to recommend against the best smartphones from Samsung and Apple.
With four movies under its belt, the Toy Story franchise remains the crown jewel in Pixar's portfolio. But after Toy Story 4 seemingly wrapped up Woody's story, the focus is now shifting to Buzz Lightyear. The first trailer for Lightyear has just arrived, and it seems less about ‘toy’ Buzz, and more about the titular character himself.
Raspberry Pi has introduced a new version of its tiny wireless Zero W board, the Zero 2 W, with much improved performance, added features and a slightly higher $15 price tag. It uses a mildly downclocked version of the same Broadcom BCM2710A1 SoC die used in the $35 Raspberry Pi 3, along with 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM. With that, it delivers a significant performance boost over the original Zero, up to five times faster for multithreaded chores.
While just as tiny as the original Zero (about a quarter the size of a US bank note), it's highly capable. It comes with 2.4Ghz IEEE 802.11 b/g/n wireless LAN, Bluetooth 4.2, a USB 2.0 interface, a MicroSD card slot, Mini HDMI port, CSI-2 camera connector, a HAT-compatible 40 pin I/O header, OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0 graphics and H.264 1080p 30 encode and decode capabilities.
Since it's the same size as the original Zero and the Zero W, "almost all cases and accessories designed for Zero should work perfectly with the new board, including our own case and selection of cables," the foundation said in a blog post. Additionally, it introduced a new official Raspberry Pi Zero 2 USB power supply unit ($8) that can also power the Raspberry Pi 3B or 3B+. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is now available to buy in the UK, EU, US, Canada and Hong Kong for $15 / £13.50.
Twitter has rolled out Labs for its Blue subscription service, which will give its paid users early access to select experimental features. At the moment, one of the first two Labs experiments available to subscribers will give them the capability to upload videos up to 10 minutes long, which is much, much longer than its standard limit of 2 minutes and 20 seconds. That is, so long as they upload their video from a PC. The other experimental feature will allow them to pin their favorite conversations at the top of their inbox by swiping on those particular DM convos.
Labs will accept experimental features from various internal Twitter teams, allowing them to get early data from users. Just like any other test feature, the Labs experiments could be vastly different by the time they're ready for general release, if Twitter does decide to roll them out.
Like being ahead of the curve?
Today, we’re rolling out Labs 🔬, giving you *early access* to some new features we’re building before everyone else like: 🔹 Pinned Conversations on iOS 🔹 Longer video uploads on desktop only
A Blue subscription will set users back $3 a month and will give them access to exclusive features, including folders for organizing bookmarks and a "reader mode." It also gives users a way to "undo" their tweets. At the moment, it's only available in Canada and Australia, and it's still unclear when it will roll out in the US and other countries.
Tesla has long hidden hints in its code that it's giving owners live view access to its EVs' Autopilot cameras — now, the automaker is finally rolling out the feature. Its latest software update includes a feature called Sentry Mode Live Camera Access, which will allow owners to remotely view their car's surroundings when parked. Sentry Mode is Tesla's integrated surveillance system that uses a 360 dash cam to record damage and any attempted break-in. It has resulted to arrests of people who attempted to steal Teslas in the past, but owners haven't been able to use it to view their car's current surroundings until now.
In its update notes, Tesla says the live camera function is end-to-end encrypted and cannot be accessed by the company. To enable or disable it, owners need to go under Safety & Security in Controls. According to Electrek, however, owners must have an active Premium Connectivity subscription to activate live view. The subscription package gives them access to satellite maps and live traffic visualizations, as well as media streaming and web browsing on data. It does cost $10 a month, but owners can sign up for free trial before paying for the service.
At this point in time, live camera is only available to iOS users who can view the footage around their cars via Tesla's app. The automaker has unfortunately yet to announce when its Android app will also get the capability.
