The redesigned MacBook Pro might be more powerful than you think, provided you have the right configuration. Apple has confirmed to Engadget and MacRumors that the 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Max chip can invoke a previously hinted-at "High Power Mode." While the company was shy on details, macOS Monterey beta code suggested the mode would "optimize performance" for demanding tasks in return for the possibility of more fan noise.

This could be frustrating if you buy either the 14-inch MacBook Pro or a 16-inch system with the M1 Pro. This isn't surprising, though. Features like this by their nature drive up power consumption and heat, and Apple may want to make sure there's enough battery and thermal headroom (that is, a larger enclosure). The M1 Max is also a better fit for a mode like this than the M1 Pro — there's simply more performance to unlock.

If you do buy a higher-end MacBook Pro, though, this could be particularly helpful. Many pro users have moments when they need performance at all costs, such as a hurried video export or last-minute code compile. High Power Mode might help finish those tasks on time while putting a ceiling on noise in most situations.

Less than a year after it first started testing live audio rooms, Twitter is opening up Spaces to nearly everyone. Starting today, anyone on Android and iOS can host a Space, no matter how many people follow them. As of this past May, the feature was open to any Twitter user with more than 600 followers. At the time, the company said it put that limit in place to ensure a “good experience.” Now that the option is available to all Android and iOS users, you can start your own audio room by tapping on the compose button and then the Spaces icon.

If there’s a reason Twitter waited almost a year to make hosting Spaces available to everyone, it’s because the company has spent the last few months adding features that enhance the experience significantly. Twitter recently added a topics tool that allows you to add pre-defined tags to make your audio room easier to find. It also recently added a co-hosting feature you can use to recruit people to help you with moderation. Those are all things that should make Spaces more appealing to first-time users.

Snap is finally seeing the effects of Apple’s iOS 14 privacy changes on its ad business and the changes have had a bigger impact than it expected.

The company reported revenue of just over $1 billion for the third-quarter of 2021. But despite that being a new milestone for Snap, it was $3 million shy of what the company had previously estimated. Snap executives said Apple’s iOS changes that make it more difficult for advertisers to track users were largely to blame for the shortfall.

“Our advertising business was disrupted by changes to iOS ad tracking that were broadly rolled out by Apple in June and July,” CEO Evan Spiegel said during a call with analysts. “While we anticipated some degree of business disruption, the new Apple provided measurement solution did not scale as we had expected, making it more difficult for our advertising partners to measure and manage their ad campaigns for iOS.”

It wasn’t all bad news for Snap, though. The company once again beat expectations on user growth, adding 13 million new daily active users for the second quarter in a row. Snap now has 306 million DAUs, a new high for the company.

Still, Spiegel called it a “frustrating setback” for the company, but added that increased privacy protections are “really important for the long term health of the ecosystem and something we fully support.”

The iOS 14.5 update forced developers to ask users to explicitly agree to sharing their device identifier (known as IDFA), which is used by advertisers to track users across apps and services. Though Apple previewed the changes more than a year ago, the update wasn’t released until April. Since then, third-party analytics have estimated that a vanishingly small percentage of iOS users agreed to allow apps to track them.

Snap isn’t the only company that has warned about Apple’s iOS changes on its ad business. Facebook, which has been publicly slamming the changes for more than a year, saying the changes will have an outsize impact on developers and small businesses. But Facebook has also warned investors that the changes are likely to hurt its own ad revenue in 2021. The social network is reporting its third-quarter earnings Monday, when it will share just how significantly it's been affected. 

Twitter said in April that it was undertaking a new effort to study algorithmic fairness on its platform and whether its algorithms contribute to “unintentional harms.” As part of that work, the company promised to study the political leanings of its content recommendations. Now, the company has published its initial findings. According to Twitter’s research team, the company’s timeline algorithm amplifies content from the “political right” in six of the seven countries it studied.

The research looked at two issues: whether the algorithmic timeline amplified political content from elected officials, and whether some political groups received a greater amount of amplification. The researchers used tweets from news outlets and elected officials in seven countries (Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States) to conduct the analysis, which they said was the first of its kind for Twitter.

“Tweets about political content from elected officials, regardless of party or whether the party is in power, do see algorithmic amplification when compared to political content on the reverse chronological timeline,” Twitter’s Rumman Chowdhury wrote about the research. “In 6 out of 7 countries, Tweets posted by political right elected officials are algorithmically amplified more than the political left. Right-leaning news outlets (defined by 3rd parties), see greater amplification compared to left-leaning.”

Crucially, as Chowdhury points out to Protocol, it’s not yet clear why this is happening. In the paper, the researchers posit that the difference in amplification could be a result of political parties pursuing “different strategies on Twitter.” But the team said that more research would be needed to fully understand the cause.

While the findings are likely to raise some eyebrows, Chowdhury also notes that “algorithmic amplification is not problematic by default.” The researchers further point out that their findings “does not support the hypothesis that algorithmic personalization amplifies extreme ideologies more than mainstream political voices.”

But at the very least, the research would seem to further debunk the notion that Twitter is biased against conservatives. The research also offers an intriguing look at how a tech platform can study the unintentional effects of its algorithms. Facebook, which has come under pressure to make more of its own research public, has defended its algorithms even as a whistleblower has suggested the company should move back to a chronological timeline.

Twitter’s research is part of a broader effort by Twitter to uncover bias and other issues in its algorithms. The company has also published research about its image cropping algorithm and started a bug bounty program to find bias in its platform.

American tech heavyweights are facing yet more scrutiny of their payment practices. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has ordered Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, PayPal and Square to hand over info concerning their payment system plans. The bureau wants to learn how these companies harvest data and control access to spot any anti-consumer behavior and provide "adequate" protections to the public.

The CFPB will also study Chinese tech firms' payment systems, including Alipay and WeChat Pay.

Director Rohit Chopra justified the order by warning that payments can pose a threat to the fair market thanks to their "tremendous scale and market power." He pointed to China as an example, noting that systems like Alipay and WeChat Pay are so thoroughly integrated with Chinese society that residents are effectively forced to use them as-is.

The bureau said it was following up on Federal Trade Commission oversight of Big Tech. The regulator has studied some of the companies' behavior in detail and, in the faces of Facebook and Google, put them under close watch. In 2020, for instance, the FTC investigated Facebook and Google acquisitions that hadn't been reported.

There's no certainty the CFPB orders will lead to regulatory action. However, they come right as politicians are trying to rein in Apple, Google and others for allegedly abusing app store payments. The Biden administration as a whole is also determined to crack down on tech companies. There's a chance CFPB will take corrective measures, even as those companies lower fees and otherwise try to make peace offerings.

Amazon may soon face a second unionization effort in less than a year. Per The New York Times, hourly workers at the company’s JFK8 fulfillment center in New York City are in the process of collecting signatures to file for a union election. They’re expected to contact the National Labor Relations Board on Monday. If the agency grants their request, it will lead to a vote with potentially significant ramifications for Amazon.

This past April, Amazon beat back a historic union vote at its BHM1 fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama. Approximately 1,700 of the more than 3,000 employees who took part in the election voted against unionization, handing Amazon a comfortable majority. However, the election was mired in controversy, with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which sought to represent the approximately 5,800 workers at Bessemer, accusing the company of unfairly influencing the vote. In August, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Amazon had violated US labor laws, and recommended that workers in Bessemer hold a new election.

Amazon employs more than 5,000 workers at JFK8. Beyond its sheer size, the facility has been the site of multiple protests since the start of the pandemic. Among those leading the unionization effort at JFK8 is Christian Smalls. Amazon fired Smalls after he organized a walkout over the company’s handling of COVID safety at the warehouse. At the time, the company said Smalls broke a quarantine order by attending the event. At the start of the year, New York sued Amazon, alleging the company had retaliated against Smalls.

When Engadget reached out to Amazon about the effort, the company noted its employees have always had the option to join a union but said it was against the idea.

As a company, we don’t think unions are the best answer for our employees. Every day we empower people to find ways to improve their jobs, and when they do that we want to make those changes — quickly. That type of continuous improvement is harder to do quickly and nimbly with unions in the middle. The benefits of direct relationships between managers and employees can’t be overstated — these relationships allow every employee’s voice to be heard, not just the voices of a select few. We’ve made great progress in recent years and months in important areas like pay and safety. There are plenty of things that we can keep doing better, and that's our focus — to keep getting better every day.

Even if the National Labor Relations Board calls an election after Monday, the workers at JFK8 face an uphill battle. They’re up against one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful corporations. From competitive wages to Twitch ads, Amazon has consistently used nearly every tool available to it to dissuade its workers from unionizing.

It took the better part of a year, but Razer's smart face mask is finally available. You can buy the Zephyr either by itself for $100 or a $150 Starter Pack with three replacement filter kits. Individual replacements are $30. Just be prepared to hunt around, or at least to be patient — the Starter Pack is already listed as "out of stock," and the mask by itself is still "coming soon."

The Zephyr is, effectively a high-end pandemic protection kit for gamers. The transparent design and RGB lighting give it a bit of flash (this is a Razer product, after all), but the highlight is a dual-fan active air filtration system with N95 filters. This theoretically protects you as well as it does others. There's even a mobile app to customize the lights.

In a sense, Razer's mask is a gamble that paid off. While it's arriving relatively late in to the COVID-19 pandemic, there are many places that still require masks, some of which might mandate that protection for a while to come. The Zephyr could help people in those areas feel more comfortable in public, particularly if they're already Razer enthusiasts.

Shortly after Microsoft released Windows 11 earlier this month, AMD warned that the OS could slow down apps on systems with Ryzen processors. The chipmaker promised to fix the bugs, and now AMD and Microsoft have issued patches that should do just that.

The latest chipset driver (version 3.10.08.506) should take care of the UEFI CPPC2 issue, which in some cases didn't "preferentially schedule threads on a processor’s fastest core," AMD said. That could have slowed down apps that are sensitive to CPU thread performance. AMD noted that the problem was likely more noticeable in more powerful processors with more than eight cores and 65W or higher Thermal Design Power (TDP).

Meanwhile, Microsoft is rolling out a software update tackling a bug that increased L3 cache latency. The issue impacted apps that need quick memory access, which in turn caused CPUs to slow down by up to 15 percent. The patch, Windows 11 update KB5006746, will be available starting today, but at the time of writing, a page containing instructions for installing it isn't yet live. You should be able to install it via Windows Update too.

In the past decade we’ve seen the tag “gamer” used increasingly as a lifestyle sales pitch. Sure, you can buy gaming headsets and gaming mice and gaming keyboards, but there are also gamer hoodies and gamer drinks and even gamer furniture. Chairs made especially for playing have been proliferating over the past few years and until now, they’ve tended to be overpriced and ostentatious. Razer’s new Enki chair is still a bit over the top, but at least it’s a more affordable over the top, starting at $299.

To build the Enki, Razer called in ergonomics experts, paying attention not just to lumbar support, but also to how test subjects sat on the bottom cushion. The 21-inch-wide seat is shaped to distribute your weight more evenly, so you can sit for hours without getting a sore ass. They even considered the needs of those who like to sit in more unusual positions, like a half- or full-lotus. As someone who often sits cross-legged in my chair, I am grateful for the extra space and support.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the chair is how far back it can lean. It’s not quite 180 degrees, but 152 degrees is still pretty good — the kind of angle you might only see on an airliner’s international business class. It’s the kind of chair you can fall asleep in. It seems precarious but in use, the chair held my weight well when I opened it to its max. It didn’t feel too top heavy, like it would fall backward, but it felt a bit unnatural due to the lack of a footrest. But let’s be honest, you really should just retire to your couch or bed when you need a proper snooze. This is good for when you need a bit of a stretch between Overwatch matches or Zoom meetings.

Kris Naudus / Engadget

My one nitpick besides the lack of a footrest is the head pillow, which is only included with a more expensive $399 package. It’s a nice shape and the fabric feels good to the touch, but it’s also not very adjustable. It has to be strapped on around the moon-shaped cut out toward the top of the seat, which means the height is non-negotiable. I found it ended up in that limbo between my head and neck, where it just jutted out and supported neither of them. I found it incredibly uncomfortable and ended up tearing it off. However, it also felt weird to not have something supporting my head in this chair. I can only hope that Razer ends up offering more options for users of different heights.

Kris Naudus / Engadget

Aside from that, it’s a very good chair offered at a very good price — other chairs from Secretlab or Logitech might cost hundreds more, and a good non-gaming office chair can easily go above $1,000. And, while some might find it silly to buy a “gaming” chair, there’s no rule this has to be used only for gaming. You can use the chair for work, meetings and anything else. It’s not gaudy in any way that would draw attention on a video call, as Razer eschewed its usual use of lime green highlights.

In the end, it’s just a chair. A nice, comfortable chair that you can buy directly from Razer or various retailers starting today, for $299 for the Enki X or the $399 Enki that includes the head pillow, a more reactive seat tilt and an armrest adjustable in four directions. With all the time you’ve been spending in front of the computer lately, you should make it a little nicer.

Innersloth has been promisingfor months that it will bring Among Us to Xbox and PlayStation sometime this year. Sure enough, the Mafia-style social deduction game is coming to PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S on December 14th.

Just like on PC, Among Us will be included with Xbox Game Pass on consoles. Those on PlayStation, meanwhile, will get an exclusive Ratchet & Clank cosmetic at a later date. Among Us has crossplay support, so you'll be able to play with friends across PC, Nintendo Switch and mobile.

Innersloth also revealed details about the physical editions of Among Us for PlayStation, Xbox and Switch. Along with the base game and all of the DLC, the $30 Crewmate Edition includes a poster of the Skeld map, stickers and a holographic card. That version will hit Europe on December 14, Japan and South Korea two days later, and then the US, Canada and Latin America on January 11th.

The $50 Impostor Edition includes the same gear as the Crewmate package, along with a purple crewmate plush, an enamel pin and a lanyard. The $90 Ejected Edition comes with even more goodies, including a steelbook case, a beanie and, best of all, a fleece blanket. Both of those editions will ship in spring 2022.

Among Usexploded in popularity in 2020, two years after its debut, as Twitch streamers and YouTubers started playing it en masse. People were also looking for ways to connect with their friends during COVID-19 lockdowns and, for many, lying to their buds about what they were doing in Among Us' med bay fit the bill perfectly. It's coming to Xbox and PlayStation just in time for more people to play and argue with their loved ones over the holiday season.