We finally got an iPad Mini refresh, and it's not particularly exciting. But that's fine! It's still a useful little tablet, and now thanks to the A17 Pro chip, it's already ready for upcoming Apple Intelligence features. In this episode, Engadget Deputy Editor Nathan Ingraham joins to discuss what he liked about the new iPad Mini, and what he hopes Apple will eventually fix in future models.
Alarmo is the quintessential Nintendo product: It's a fun and quirky spin on a bedside alarm clock (with a motion sensor!) that mines your love for everything Nintendo. It's a $100 device entirely meant to surprise and delight you. But there are also usability issues that make me think the company's engineers haven't encountered any modern gadgets over the past decade (which is how long they've been developing Alarmo).
Another year, another flagship Qualcomm mobile chip. But things are reportedly a bit different with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, the company's newest offering headed to premium smartphones. For one, it's using the Oryon CPU that debuted in X Elite chips for laptops last year, according to a leaked slide from Videocardz.
Amazon finally did it: This week the company announced the Kindle Colorsoft, its first color E Ink e-reader. In this episode, Devindra and Cherlynn discuss where this device sits in a world of cheap tablets, and they dive into the updated Kindle Paperwhite and the writable Kindle Scribe. Also, we've got final thoughts on the Meta Quest 3S, the updated iPad Mini and tons of news.
You can think of the $300 Meta Quest 3S as a basic Honda Accord of VR headsets. It doesn't have the same high-quality optics as the $500 Quest 3, which is more like a Touring-grade Honda for enthusiasts, but they both get you to the same place: Truly immersive virtual reality.
This week, we’re joined by tech critic Paris Marx to discuss Data Vampires, his latest Tech Won’t Save us podcast series. We chat about how data centers suck up vast amounts of power, water and other resources, and why the AI boom is exacerbating those issues.
Alongside its new family of Arrow Lake desktop hardware, Intel today also gave us a few tidbits around its upcoming Arrow Lake H mobile chips for high performance laptops. First off, they're not expected to arrive until the first quarter of 2025 — but the slight wait might be worth it, as Intel says they will offer powerful new Xe GPUs with XMX. Thanks to that upgrade, the GPU alone will offer four times better AI workload processing than its previous chips, alongside double the ray tracing performance and twice as much cache (8MB L2).
Instead of cramming more technology into its Quest VR headsets, which would inevitably escalate their price, Meta has taken the opposite approach with the Quest 3S. It's a slightly bulkier, slightly less sharp version of the Quest 3 starting at $300, almost half off that headset's $500 launch price. The Quest 3S pitch is clear for consumers and developers alike: It's a more powerful and feature-rich budget device than the now defunct Quest 2, and since it has the same processor and GPU as the Quest 3, developers don't have to worry as much about supporting older headsets either.
At this point, you probably either love the idea of making realistic videos with generative AI, or you think it's a morally bankrupt endeavor that devalues artists and will usher in a disastrous era of deepfakes we'll never escape from. It's hard to find middle ground. Meta isn't going to change minds with Movie Gen, its latest video creation AI model, but no matter what you think of AI media creation, it could end up being a significant milestone for the industry.
This week, Microsoft started rolling out the Windows 11 2024 update, but it quickly became clear that the company was far more eager to unveil new features for its Copilot AI and Copilot+ AI PCs. In this episode, Devindra and Cherlynn chat about Microsoft's current AI priorities, and what it means for people with older PCs. Also, we discuss the death of HoloLens and Microsoft giving up on AR as Meta, Apple and even Snap build for an augmented reality future.