It's official: after plenty of hype and a slight delay, William Shatner has become the oldest person to fly to space. The 90-year-old Star Trek icon was one of four crew members aboard Blue Origin's NS-18 mission as it flew to an altitude of 66 miles. He edged out 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk, who set the previous age record just a few months earlier.

The New Shepard flight also included Blue Origin VP Audrey Powers, Planet Labs co-founder Dr. Chris Boshuizen and Medidata co-creator Glen de Vries. This is the second of three crewed missions Blue Origin has planned for 2021.

This is an important moment for spaceflight, not to mention sci-fi fans. It shows that age isn't much of a restriction for brief trips to space, and fulfills the dreams of anyone who wanted to see Captain Kirk visit the final frontier in real life — even if he wasn't helming a starship.

With that said, it's also a timely public relations boost for Blue Origin. Jeff Bezos' private spaceflight outfit is currently grappling with accusations of a toxic work environment, not to mention the fallout of its legal tussle with SpaceX over NASA's Moon mission contract. Shatner's successful trip won't completely distract from those issues, but it might give Blue Origin a chance to highlight some achievements at a time when many are focused on its shortcomings.

Some Snapchat users are having problems with the app this morning, with several noting on Twitter that they're unable to send snaps. The company acknowledged the outage and said it was looking into the matter. 

Outage reports from users skyrocketed on Down Detector just before 7AM ET before tapering off somewhat at around 9:30AM. A heat map indicated that reports were coming in from across the US and, at the time of writing, users are still grousing about the outage on Twitter. Engadget has contacted Snap for more details, and we'll update this post when things look like they're getting back to normal.

This is the latest big outage to affect a major social media service over the last week or so. Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down for more than six hours on October 4th. Facebook blamed the outage on a "faulty configuration change" that caused havoc with the DNS servers. Facebook's apps went down yet again for a couple of hours last Friday. Twitter, meanwhile, briefly had issues of its own on Tuesday evening, with tweets not loading for some users for a spell.

NBA 2K22 Arcade Edition is one of several games that's bound for Apple Arcade in the coming weeks. The follow-up to NBA 2K21, which is also available on Apple's game subscription service, includes a new mode called The Association. You can become the general manager or head coach of an NBA franchise and put together your own team by scouting rookies, making trades and scooping up free agents while managing the budget.

The game features current NBA rosters and modes including quick match, online multiplayer and Blacktop, a 3v3 street basketball option. In MyCAREER mode, you can create your own player with a custom look, position, jersey number and play style. You can run drills on a custom court to practice and level up your player in the MyCOURT mode. NBA 2K22 Arcade Edition will debut on the same date as the NBA's 75th season tips off: October 19th.

Elsewhere, a classic iPhone title is coming to Apple Arcade this Friday. Tiny Wings first made waves back in 2011 as a one-button game in which you control a bird that slides down hills and launches into the air. It's one of those simple-in-concept, great-in-execution games that works so well on a mobile device. It'll be a solid addition to Apple Arcade.

Looking further ahead, Apple has announced the sequel to tower defense game Kingdom Rush is on the way to the service too. You'll protect your domain from dragons, human-snaffling plants and other deadly enemies in Kingdom Rush Frontiers TD, which first hit iOS back in 2013. It's coming to Apple Arcade soon.

Sony has unveiled the FE 70-200mm F2.8 GM OSS II zoom lens that looks to be an interesting option for hybrid video and photo shooters. Designed for the company's full-frame Alpha-series mirrorless cameras, it's the lightest 70-200mm F2.8 lens on the market at 1,045 grams, Sony said. It also offers a number of features aimed at movie creators not usually seen in a lens like this. 

While large zoom lenses tend to focus slowly, Sony said the new model uses four XD linear motors to deliver reliable focus that's up to three times faster than rival models, and four times faster than the previous model on Sony's Alpha 1 camera. Tracking with continuous autofocus while zooming has improved by 30 percent compared first-gen model, too. It also focuses quietly, so the motor sound is less likely to be picked up by a camera's microphone. 

Video shooters often need to pull focus between subjects, but lenses designed for photography usually exhibit "breathing," or zooming in or out while changing focus. Sony said it designed the FE 70-200 F2.8 GM OSS II to curtail that, while also reducing focus shift while zooming. Such features are usually only found in cinema lenses that cost considerably more.

The lens should deliver nice bokeh thanks to the wide, continuous F2.8 aperture, while offering good handling with dual lens elements that move internally. It also offers three separate rings for focus, aperture and zoom, making it easier to rig for cinema use. Other features include high resolution, extra-low dispersion, aspherical glass to suppress chromatic aberrations, Sony's Nano AR Coating II to reduce flares and ghosting and a new 11-blade aperture that produces softer, more circular bokeh. 

Sony also offers FE 1.4x and FE 2.0x teleconverters ($548 for both) that extend the lens's focal length up to 400mm at F5.6. The FE 70-200mm F2.8 GM OSS II zoom lens will go on sale in the near future for $2,800. 

As part of its usual autumn laptop refresh, Acer is announcing a host of new Chromebook today that'll roll out in the coming months. There are four models being refreshed today: the Chromebook Spin 514, Chromebook 515, Chromebook 514, and Chromebook Spin 314. That's a lot of product names, but Spin devices can flip around with a 360-degree hinge, and the last two digits denote the screen size. That should hopefully ground you as we go through these new models.

Most interesting is probably the Spin 514 (pictured above), which combines a 14-inch 1080p touchscreen that has minimal bezels with Intel's 11th-generation Core i3, i5 or i7 processors. This laptop has no fans, which means these probably aren't the highest-powered versions of Intel's chips, but they should still provide solid performance for Chrome OS. Acer also put some focus on the webcam, a wise choice given how we're all still stuck on videos calls for the foreseeable future. It's a 1080p camera with a blue glass filter and new noise-reduction technology to remove things like light flares. We'll have to see how this works in practice, but given how many laptops have entirely mediocre webcams, any improvements here will be welcome.

Other specs include up to 16GB of RAM, up to 512GB of storage, Intel Iris X graphics and 10 hours of battery life. The Spin 514 weighs in at 3 pounds, so it's not going to be the lightest thing to use in tablet mode, but otherwise it sounds like it'll be a very good Chromebook — it also simply looks nice and well-built, at least as far as I can tell from these images. And Acer has a solid track record of making very good Chromebooks, so hopefully that'll continue here. The Spin 514 is expected to arrive in the US in January and starts at $700.

Acer's Chromebook 515 (which comes in consumer and enterprise editions) has similar specs to the Spin 514, though it has a larger 15.6-inch display. Given the large size, this laptop isn't a convertible, which is probably a smart move. For a 15-inch laptop, though, it's pretty light — only 3.75 pounds. It comes with the same 11th-generation processor options as the Spin 514, though it also has a budget Pentium Gold option (paired with Intel's UHD graphics rather than the Iris X). The Chromebook 515 will initially be available in Europe this month for €499; the Enterprise version will come to the US in January 2022 starting at $640.

Acer has a few less expensive Chromebooks coming out, as well. The Chromebook Spin 314 starts at $500 and arrives in the US in November. For that price, you'll get a 14-inch screen with an unfortunate 1,366 x 768 resolution, which is pretty unacceptable in the year 2021. It also features budget processors in the form of Intel's Pentium Gold or two Celeron options and has a 360-degree hinge, as the name implies. More intriguing is the Chromebook 514, which pairs a 14-inch, 1080p display with MediaTek's 8-core Kompanio 828 processor and 8GB of RAM. We haven't tested a MediaTek Chromebook in a while, so we can't say for sure how it'll perform yet. But Acer is promising 15 hours of battery life, and the laptop weighs less than 3 pounds, so it does have some potential as a budget Chromebook (the 514 will cost $400 when it is released in December). 

As part of its usual raft of hardware updates, Acer is adding new ConceptD machines with new displays and different chassis options. But the most notable product on the docket for late-2021 is the new ConceptD 7 SpatialLabs Edition, which packs a stereoscopic display. It’s the first time that such a product is available for everyone to buy after the company first teased the project earlier this year.

Back then, Acer and SpatialLabs teamed up to put one of the latter’s stereoscopic displays on the former’s machines. The idea is to enable 3D artists to preview their work in a form closer to the finished article long before it had reached the lengthy rendering pipeline. But while that initial concept was only available to developers who applied (and promised to share their work with Acer), this is a retail product.

The ConceptD 7 SpatialLabs Edition is packing an 11th-generation Core i7, with the option of a GeForce RTX 3080, up to 64GB RAM and up to a 2TB SSD. And users are going to be staring into a Pantone-validated 4K display with a Delta E<2 color accuracy for those who need it. Of course, this is only a sideshow to the eye-tracking cameras sited on the top bezel to match the 3D images to your gaze.

Acer added that, on the software side, it has updated the AI underpinning the system that enables users to view 3D content from any 2D image (or video) shown on screen. The company has also launched a new developer site to allow users to download all of the various plugins and tools (including a hand-tracking app and add-ons for Unreal Engine) to make everything work.

Of course, it’s not simply designers who may find the D 7 (don’t make me type it all out again) a useful proposition. The company says that it already has examples of companies using this as a car configurator for showroom use, architects using this to show off home designs and researchers examining high-resolution images from satellites.

If you want one of these, bear in mind that you’ll need to wait until December (if you’re in EMEA) or 2022 (if you’re in the US). Plus, you know, it’s going to cost: The starting price on that side of the pond will be €3,599 (roughly $4,158).

At the same time, the company is launching a new 16-inch ConceptD 3 model with a 16:10-ratio display and a 15.6-inch convertible edition. These, too, will be reaching the US at some point early next year, with base prices running from $1,700 through to $2,000, depending on your size preferences.

Apple's health ambitions for AirPods might extend beyond using them to boost conversations. Wall Street Journalsources claim Apple is exploring multiple ways it can use AirPods as health devices. It might use the buds as hearing aids, but it could also use the motion sensors to correct your posture. A prototype would even include a thermometer to check your core body temperature, according to leaked documents.

The features wouldn't show up in 2022 and might not be available at all, the sources said. Apple declined to comment.

Apple would face numerous hurdles to marketing AirPods as health gadgets. The company would likely require regulatory clearance for at least some features. A US Food and Drug Administration ruleset due in 2022 might make that possible, but it could still take months to approve the earbuds. Even Bose had to wait a long time before it could sell its FDA-cleared SoundControl hearing aids.

There are technical challenges, too. Right now, AirPods Pro won't last longer than 4.5 hours for listening (with noise cancelling on), and 3.5 hours for calls — that just wouldn't be practical for health wearables that might need to sit in your ears all day. They'd also need to be comfortable for long periods and adapt to varying types of hearing loss.

It's easy to see why Apple might expand the AirPods' usefulness, though. As with the Apple Watch, health could be a selling point that grow the audience beyond the enthusiast core. It might also court a relatively underserved market of people who may have mild or moderate hearing loss, but either can't afford most hearing aids or don't like the limited functionality and drab designs that often define the category.

The main difference between Apple’s Watch Series 7 and the Series 6 is just a larger display, but it makes an outsized impact on a device as small as a watch. Apple also generally enlarged the UI, making things easier to read and navigate. To make better use of the bigger canvas, the company also added some new watch faces and a full QWERTY keyboard for replying to messages.

The other changes to the Series 7 are less obvious, like a new SiP (system-in-package), faster charging and overnight respiratory tracking. For those coming from the last generation, this might not feel like a significant upgrade. But the larger display does make a meaningful impact for anyone that’s upgrading from a Watch SE, Series 5 or older.

Design and hardware

Even though its screen is bigger, the Series 7 still manages to retain basically the same footprint as its predecessor. It’s a hair heavier than the Watch SE and Series 6, which makes sense since its case is slightly larger. Unlike previous generations, which came in 40 and 44mm sizes, this year you can choose between 41mm and 45mm. The difference is barely noticeable at first. 

Cherlynn Low / Engadget

Once I turned the screen on, though, I was struck by its roominess. This was when this main design change became obvious. Apple used a refractive edge here to make it seem like the display curves slightly along the sides and it helps the face feel even more expansive. The bezels have been whittled down to just 1.7mm (0.07 inch) compared to last gen’s 3mm.

Oh, and a quick shout here to its durability: It’s the first Apple Watch to be certified IP6X for dust resistance. Since I’m in reviewer mode, I've been very careful to avoid situations where I might damage the device. But I’ll admit I’ve already dropped the Series 7 once and it survived without a scratch, thanks to Apple’s crystal covering that the company says is more crack resistant than on the Series 6.

Now, you’re probably not comparing an Apple Watch to Android or Wear OS, but in case you were curious, Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 4 is noticeably lighter than the Series 7. It also has a round face and thinner body. But really, if you’re an iPhone user, you’ve probably never even thought about a Galaxy watch.

A big screen difference

Depending on which Apple Watch you’d been using before, the jump in screen size may be less obvious. It’s increased more than 50 percent from the SE and 20 percent from the Series 6. Either way, the more spacious UI is helpful. Buttons for entering my passcode stretched out over the edges, and I didn't need to aim as carefully to strike the right keys. It's easier to hit the right settings in the control center, too, and I can see more of my friends’ messages at once. My heart rate and time passed during workouts are more readable as well. Those with visual impairments will also appreciate that there are new larger font size settings available.

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Though most buttons are between 12 and 27 percent larger, app icons are still squished together. That’s a problem for those of us who use the grid view for all apps, but not so much if you’re in list view.

The extra space also means Apple was able to introduce a full QWERTY keyboard for replying to messages by typing or swiping on the screen. Compared to handwriting, dictating or emojis, a keyboard offers a bit more flexibility, especially when the system correctly picks up your swipes. But because it’s so cramped, the accuracy rate is maybe 60 percent, and I still preferred using dictation. Plus, the new screen may be big, but it’s definitely not big enough to make tap typing possible. Still, it’s a good option to have.

In addition to enlarging most of the elements across the UI, Apple also added new faces that can display more information at once, like the Modular Duo. There’s also a Contour style that pushes the clock’s digits all the way to the edge where they warp and “melt” over the sides like in Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. The remaining two are a Portrait face that we already saw in the watchOS 8 beta, and World Time, which is helpful for interacting with people in other countries. I used Modular Duo the most, though it’s not very attractive, and when I wanted something prettier I just switched to one with my face as the wallpaper instead. (Just kidding: I use the “Artist” design or a cute animal background.)

The new Modular Duo screen is the most useful. It lets you place two expanded complications on top of each other, while still showing the time and an additional small complication at the top. You can choose to show the world clock with a timer or your favorite stock’s performance with Apple Music, for example. I went with a Spotify controller and the Weather forecast. Though the latter worked well, showing me hourly temperature and sunlight data on the screen, the Spotify complication was, in a word, trash. It just shows the words “Tap to play music,” and I’d have to waste a tap and a second to pull up playback controls.

A second doesn’t sound like much, but when I’m out running or juggling my groceries, I don’t want to waste that time holding up my arm and watching my screen for more than a fraction of a second. I’m not going to harp on this because this is more of a Spotify problem than an Apple Watch issue, but given how many people use the music app, it would do both companies good to make this complication work better. I’d love to see more useful complications from other apps too.

One last note on the Series 7’s screen: Though its actual peak brightness hasn’t changed, Apple has tweaked the system so that the Always On display is up to 70 percent brighter when you’re indoors. This way, it’s easier to read if you have your hand hidden below a table while you’re at a meeting.

Battery life, charging and performance

That pretty much sums up all the screen-related updates on the Series 7. But there are a few other noteworthy upgrades. The most significant of these is that it charges faster, and in about 10 minutes, I got close to 10 percent capacity. It reached almost 100 percent in under an hour with the new cable that Apple includes in the box. Meanwhile, the Apple Watch SE only got to about 60 percent in an hour.

Cherlynn Low / Engadget

You’ll need both the new charger and the Series 7 to get these faster charging speeds, by the way. It’s the coils on both the watch and the wireless disc that enable the higher rate, so this isn’t something you can get just by running out and buying a new accessory. As someone who’s constantly forgetting to charge my watch until I'm about to run out the door, I appreciate the faster speeds. That said, I still wish smartwatches in general lasted longer and took less time to charge.

Speaking of the battery, the Series 7 promises the same runtime as its predecessor, which is to say, about 18 hours. I generally found myself getting about half a day more from the new watch than the SE, despite the lack of an Always On display on the SE. The Series 7 usually stuck around for a day and a half, almost two, with the screen set to Always On, and tracking between three and five workouts. I also used the device to send plenty of messages and map my walks while I ran errands with the GPS on. That endurance is impressive given the larger screen, but it’s worth noting that I haven’t used the watch for sleep tracking yet.

The battery efficiency can be partly attributed to Apple’s new S7 system-in-package (SIP), which is based on the same processor as the S6. In general, I didn’t feel much of a difference between the Series 7 and the SE when launching workouts or getting Siri to text my friends. The Apple Watch has been and continues to be a responsive device that feels as fast as, if not faster than, its Android counterparts.

Cherlynn Low / Engadget

Sleep tracking, watchOS 8 and other updates

One area where Apple continues to lag the competition is sleep tracking. While companies like Fitbit and Samsung can use their wearables’ heart rate monitors to detect what sleep zone you’re in, Apple still doesn’t offer that. And you’ll need to make sure you have the Sleep Focus mode on (either manually or by setting a schedule) before the Watch will log your slumber. The others are all able to automatically tell when you’ve gone to sleep and don’t need you to set a schedule. In fact, Fitbit has been doing it since 2015.

The Series 7 does usher in a new feature that logs your respiration rate while you sleep, and then tells you your breath-per-minute rate the next morning. Cool. Respiratory tracking is something that’s coming via watchOS 8 and isn’t exclusive to the Series 7, and the same is true of features like the new Mindfulness app, guided meditation sessions, redesigned Photos app, SharePlaying Fitness+ workouts and more. This means they’re less likely to sway your decision on whether to get the Series 7 if you already have an Apple Watch. The main things exclusive to the Series 7 are the Modular Duo and Contour watch faces, larger font sizes and buttons, and the QWERTY keyboard.

Cherlynn Low / Engadget

Wrap-up

Though the differences between the Series 6 and 7 seem minor, it's worth a reminder that most people who own last year’s model likely aren’t looking to upgrade yet anyway. For anyone else who’s looking for a new smartwatch, the Series 7 will be a satisfying purchase, especially if you’ve never used one before. WatchOS is a capable and comprehensive system that can help you track your workouts, automatically log your sessions, prompt you to be more active and mindful of your mental health all while being a great extension of your smartphone. It’s not the best at sleep-tracking, though, so if that’s a priority you might prefer a Fitbit. Despite its relatively high starting price of $400, what Apple offers is currently the best in the market, especially for the iOS ecosystem.

At the end of July, AMD announced the Radeon RX 6600XT, a video card the company billed as its 1080p flagship. For its final GPU release of 2021, it has unveiled the Radeon RX 6600. It's a video card that offers 28 compute units, a 2,044MHz game clock and up to 8GB of GDDR6 memory. On paper, that makes it only slightly less powerful than the RX 6600XT, which comes with 32 compute units, a 2,359MHz game clock and 8GB of GDDR6 RAM.

On average, AMD claims the RX 6600 is 23 percent faster than NVIDIA’s last generation RTX 2060 and about on par with the RTX 3060 while delivering better per watt performance. In Cyberpunk 2077, the company says players can expect an average of 70 frames per second at max settings in 1080p. In less visually demanding titles like Resident Evil Village and Hitman 3, you can expect on average more than 100 frames per second, according to AMD.

Notably, AMD didn’t say how the RX 6600 performs in esports titles like Valorant and Overwatch. Presumably, it should be able to put up the kind of frame rates you need to drive a single Full HD monitor at 240Hz or 360Hz. The more interesting tidbit about the RX 6600 is that it can play some games at 1440p. In Far Cry 6, for example, AMD says it’s possible to get a very playable 62 frames per second at the higher resolution.

The RX 6600 will also ship with ray-tracing support out of the box. Here the company claims you can get more than 60 frames per second while playing Far Cry 6 at both 1080p and 1440p, provided you also take advantage of its DLSS-like FidelityFX Super Resolution upscaling technology. Ray-tracing performance has consistently been a weak point among AMD’s RDNA 2 GPUs, so we’ll have to see if the RX 6600 lives up to the claims.

One other point AMD was eager to get across is that RX 6600 only needs 132 watts of board power. So you’ll only need a power supply unit with about 450 watts of total power to run the GPU, making it an upgrade that should be easy to add to most computers.

The Radeon RX 6600 is available today from AMD board partners like ASUS, Gigabyte and XFX, with pricing for the GPU starting at $329. AMD CEO Lisa Su recently said she expects the current global chip shortage to continue through into the second half of 2022, so we anticipate supply of the RX 6600 will be hard to come by.

In the meantime, if you’re still using a Radeon 5000 series GPU, the good news is that AMD is expanding support for its Smart Access Memory feature to cards in that family. You’ll need a Ryzen 5000 or 3000 series CPU and B550 or X570 motherboard to take advantage, but if you have the necessary components, you can expect up to a 16 percent performance uplift in some games.

While it's very likely we'll hear about new Apple computers next week, Amazon's having a sale now on the Mac Mini M1. The base 256GB model is down to $600 thanks to an automatically applied coupon, but the upgraded model has an even rarer discount. Normally, we've seen it drop to $800 in the past — but now another automatically applied coupon has knocked the 512GB Mac Mini M1 down to $750.

As with other M1 machines, this Mac Mini doesn't look different from its Intel counterpart but Apple upgraded the internals significantly with its M1 chipset. We haven't tested the machine ourselves, but we have tried out the M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, and both laptops impressed us with their powerful performance and speed. The Mac Mini M1 has an eight-core CPU and an eight-core GPU, plus a 16-core Neural Engine that handles machine learning tasks. Both the 256GB and 512GB models have 8GB of RAM and that should be enough for most people, but remember that you're basically stuck with that because you can't upgrade it yourself.

Those who prefer a desktop setup will gravitate to the Mac Mini for its sleek, compact profile. There's not much to the small box aside from an array of ports, which includes two Thunderbolt ports, two USB-A connectors, an HDMI port, an Ethernet port and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

But we'd be remiss if we didn't mention Apple's event coming up next week where we could see new Mac laptops, desktops and even a new pair of AirPods. Nothing is confirmed yet, but rumors have been swirling for a while about a redesigned Mac Mini. But if you need a new desktop sooner rather than later, or you want to get one while you can save a bit of money, Amazon's latest sale on the Mac Mini M1 isn't one to overlook.

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