Quick OverviewMore options

Amazon Echo Dot with Clock

$60 at Amazon$60 at Kohl’s$71 at Macy’sSee more options

Freelancers

$59 at Amazon

Anker 511 portable charger

$26 at AmazonMore options

JLab Go Air Pop

$20 at Amazon$25 at VerizonSee more optionsMore options

TP-Link Kasa Smart Light Bulbs

$28 at Amazon$43 at NeweggSee more options

PopSockets Phone Wallet

$25 at AmazonMore options

Amazon Smart Plug

$25 at Amazon$25 at StaplesSee more optionsMore options

Ultimate Ears Wonderboom 3

$67 at Amazon$74 at Walmart$100 at VerizonSee more optionsMore options

Stanley IceFlow Tumbler

$35 at Amazon$35 at Eastern Mountain Sports$35 at Golf GalaxySee more options

Anker magnetic power bank (10,000 mAh)

$40 at AmazonMore options

Apple AirTag

$24 at Walmart$24 at Amazon$29 at AdoramaSee more optionsMore options

Tile Mate

$36 at Walmart$25 at Amazon$25 at TargetSee more optionsMore options

Blink Mini Pan-Tilt Camera

$40 at Amazon$40 at TargetSee more optionsMore options

8BitDo Pro 2

$50 at Amazon$80 at NeweggSee more options

Audible Premium Plus

$6 at AmazonSee 10 more

Amazon Echo Dot with Clock

Will Lipman Photography for Engadget

Amazon Echo Dot with Clock

The Echo Dot is often talked about as an affordable way to get Amazon’s Alexa in your home, but it’s really a great all-purpose smart speaker. The Dot with Clock makes a particularly good gift for anyone, since they could use it as an alarm clock, a compact speaker in their home office or a voice-assistant anywhere else in their home. Recent updates make it a more powerful speaker than you might think, with clear vocals and deep bass, plus its LED display can show the time as well as weather forecasts, song titles and more. The Dot can also act as an Eero extender, so if your giftee has an Eero Wi-Fi setup, they can get an extra 1,000 square feet of coverage with this little device.

$60 at AmazonExplore More Buying Options$60 at Kohl’s$71 at Macy’s

Freelancers

Freelancers / Plaid Hat Games

Freelancers

If Dungeons & Dragons is a bit too intimidating for you but you like the idea of such a game, try Freelancers instead. It’s a story-focused, choose-your-own-adventure board game with fantasy and magical elements including unique dice, spells and monsters. You play as a “freelancer,” a being in a post-apocalyptic hellscape who will take any job, no matter how questionable, to make a living in this broken world. The key to this game is its companion mobile app — whereas you need a game master to play Dungeons & Dragons, the app handles all of the actual storytelling in Freelancers, complete with narration, a soundtrack and more. Best of all, you can play an entire game in one night, and start things up again the next day with a totally new game and experience.

$59 at Amazon

Anker 511 portable charger

Will Lipman Photography for Engadget

Anker 511 portable charger

You can never have too many portable chargers, and the Anker 511 power bank is one that would make a great gift for anyone. It’s a 5,000 mah battery with up to 20W of power output, so it should be able to fast-charge most smartphones. It’s close to the size of a lipstick tube, making it compact and easy to throw into nearly any bag (not to mention a stocking). But what makes it stand out is its built-in foldable plug that lets you use it as a wall adapter too. It also only takes about 2.5 hours to fully recharge the battery itself, so your giftee will be hard pressed to find themselves without extra juice.

$26 at Amazon

JLab Go Air Pop

Will Lipman Photography for Engadget

JLab Go Air Pop

Yes, you can get a decent pair of wireless earbuds for $25. JLab’s Go Air Pop earned an honorable mention spot in our best budget wireless earbuds guide thanks to their lightweight design, decent isolation, IPX4 water resistance and over eight hours of battery life on a single charge. Not only do their onboard touch controls actually work quite well, but JLab also has a feature that lets users swap between three different EQ presets directly from the earbuds themselves. The included charging case adds another 24 hours of use and they have a built-in charging cable so your giftee has one less thing to worry about losing.

$20 at AmazonExplore More Buying Options$25 at Verizon

TP-Link Kasa smart lights

Kasa Smart

TP-Link Kasa Smart Light Bulbs

TP-Link’s Kasa smart light bulbs are some of our favorites and they make a good gift for tech nerds or anyone who just moved into a new home. They provide two things above all else: convenience and color. TP-Link’s easy to use mobile app lets you set on/off schedules for each bulb or by room pairings, so your giftee will never have to remember to shut the lights off before going to bed or leaving the house. When we tested these bulbs out, they stayed reliably connected to Wi-Fi at all times and we were impressed by their responsiveness: your recipient will be able to simply drag their finger across the in-app color wheel to see the rainbow of colors at their disposal. Whether they’re using these lights to set the mood for their holiday party or unwind before bed, they will get a ton of use out of them.

$28 at AmazonExplore More Buying Options$43 at Newegg

PopSocket Phone Wallet

PopSockets

PopSockets Phone Wallet

You’d be hard pressed to find someone who leaves home without their phone, and PopSocket’s phone wallet can make it easier for them to bring their most important cards and IDs with them every time. The slim accessory sticks to the back of smartphones and holds 3-5 cards, or a small bit of cash and an ID if that’s what they prefer. It has a traditional PopSocket built in as well, which will make it much easier for them to hold their phone one-handed. While you can pick a color that suits your loved one’s personality, they can change the style of the grip if they choose thanks to the fact that it can pop out and be replaced with a different one.

$25 at Amazon

Amazon Smart Plug

Will Lipman Photography for Engadget

Amazon Smart Plug

If you have a tech-lover in your life who hasn’t yet started their own smart home ecosystem, a smart plug is a good place to start. Amazon’s Smart Plug in particular has a low barrier to entry: plug it in, follow an easy setup process in the Alexa mobile app and turn a “dumb” device into a smart one. It’s made even easier by Alexa voice commands — using the mobile app or an Echo device they already have, they can ask the voice assistant to turn off that bedroom lamp before they go to bed or turn on the coffee machine to get it percolating in anticipation of their morning cup of joe. Plus, the Alexa app lets them set schedules and routines for the plug, so that new smart gadgets can run in the background of their lives without missing a beat.

$25 at AmazonExplore More Buying Options$25 at Staples

UE Wonderboom 3

Will Lipman Photography for Engadget

Ultimate Ears Wonderboom 3

It’s easiest for most people to use their phones as their primary speaker for listening to music while hanging out with friends or jamming in their home office. But you can give them a little more oomph with a Bluetooth speaker like the UE Wonderboom 3. This small, barrel-shaped speaker packs a punch with 360-degree sound, and an outdoor EQ mode that will make music sound even better in a wide, open space. It’s also IP67-rated against dust, dirt and water, so they can take it outside, on hikes or to the beach without babying it (and if it takes an accidental dunk in a pool, don’t worry, it’ll float). Add a 14-hour battery life on top of all that and you have a gift that anyone would be happy to receive.

$67 at AmazonExplore More Buying Options$74 at Walmart$100 at Verizon

Stanley IceFlow Tumbler

Stanley

Stanley IceFlow Tumbler

Quencher cups may be all the rage right now, but Stanley makes a bunch of solid drinkware that make for great gifts. The IceFlow tumblers have made it into gift guides in the past thanks to their folding handle that makes it easy to tote them around, and the flip-down spout that should keep things a bit more sanitary than a stationary straw. They have a double-walled, insulated design that keeps cold drinks chilled for up to 12 hours, and they should fit in most cup holders, too. They’re also available in more than 20 fun colors and patterns, so chances are you’ll be able to find just the right one for your recipient.

$35 at AmazonExplore More Buying Options$35 at Eastern Mountain Sports$35 at Golf Galaxy

Anker magnetic power bank (10,000 mAh)

Anker

Anker magnetic power bank (10,000 mAh)

If you need a gift for an iPhone user, you can’t go wrong with Anker’s 10,000mAh magnetic power bank. It snaps neatly onto the back of the latest iPhones and powers them up quickly and efficiently. They’ll get an additional 22 hours of life out of their phones while using Anker’s accessory, and they can even charge up the power bank itself while also using it to give life to their iPhone. Its flat, deck-of-cards style design means it won’t add a ton of bulk to their iPhone, and the handset will still be usable with one hand.

$40 at Amazon

Apple AirTag

Apple

Apple AirTag

If someone on your holiday shopping list is particularly forgetful, a Bluetooth tracker like Apple’s AirTag will come in handy. These devices let them keep track of things like their keys, wallet or bag, and Apple’s does so via the Find My network. Those with the latest iPhone can even use the Precision Finding feature to get on-screen directions that will guide them to their lost items, provided they are still within range of the stuff. As you might have guessed, AirTags will only work when paired with an iPhone, so if you have an Android user on your list, you may want to consider the next gift idea instead.

$24 at WalmartExplore More Buying Options$24 at Amazon$29 at Adorama

Tile Mate

Will Lipman Photography for Engadget

Tile Mate

Unlike AirTags, Tile trackers work with any smartphone, making them great gifts for almost anyone. And thanks to its keyring hole, the Tile Mate can attach to your giftee’s keys or fit snugly inside a pocket of a wallet or backpack to monitor the location of their stuff. Tile’s companion app will show them the last known location of their misplaced belongings and, if they are still within Bluetooth range, they can use the app to ring the Tile so they can more easily find their stuff.

$36 at WalmartExplore More Buying Options$25 at Amazon$25 at Target

Blink Mini Pan-Tilt Camera

Blink

Blink Mini Pan-Tilt Camera

We’ve long recommended the Blink Mini for anyone who wants a compact, wired security camera to watch over a small space. The pan-tilt version takes it up a notch, letting you watch over more of that space by moving the camera left and right, and up and down. You can get a 360-degree view of your space with this camera, so consider positioning it strategically so you can see all of the most important things — entrances, windows, pet’s bowls or baby’s cribs. In addition, this cam gives you all of the features found in the standard Blink Mini: 1080p recordings, motion alerts and two-way audio so you can hear and speak to whomever you see on the other side of the camera.

$40 at AmazonExplore More Buying Options$40 at Target

8Bitdo Pro 2

Will Lipman Photography for Engadget

8BitDo Pro 2

If you have a gamer on your gift list — regardless of if they play casually or have a strict Twitch streaming schedule — they’ll be happy to receive the 8Bitdo Pro 2. It has the same general layout of a classic SNES controller and sports two back paddle buttons, plus a switch that lets them toggle among three unique, customizable profiles. It’s one of our favorite controllers for the Nintendo Switch, but it can be used with a bunch of other platforms as well: iOS, Android, Steam Deck and Raspberry Pi, to name a few. It connects via Bluetooth or USB-C, and it’s compact enough that they could bring it with them when they want to have an on-the-go gaming session.

$50 at AmazonExplore More Buying Options$80 at Newegg

Audible Premium Plus

Audible

Audible Premium Plus

If you have a book lover in your life or someone who just loves to learn new things, an Audible subscription is a great gift that you can give to them almost instantly (that’s the beauty of digital gifts). The Premium Plus membership will give them one credit each month to use towards an audiobook of their choosing. But on top of that, they can immediately access a library of content that’s included for all Premium Plus subscribers, including books, podcasts and Audible originals. Members get exclusive access to sales throughout the year as well, giving them ample opportunities to pick up audiobooks for just a couple of dollars sometimes. Best of all, Audible’s holiday sale is still going strong: through December 31, you can get four months of Premium Plus for only $6 per month, much more affordable than the standard $15 monthly price.

$6 at Amazon

The post The best 15 last-minute Christmas gifts for 2023 appeared first on Best News.

Quick OverviewMore options

Tamagotchi Uni

$44 at Walmart$44 at AmazonSee more optionsMore options

Cuisinart 8 Cup Food Processor

$117 at Amazon$103 at Office DepotSee more optionsMore options

Marshall Willen

$90 at Amazon$120 at Nordstrom$129 at Macy’sSee more options

Petlibro Automatic Cat Feeder

$90 at Amazon

Xreal Air 2 Pro

$449 at XrealMore options

Philips Hue Wall Tap Dial Light Switch

$50 at Walmart$50 at Amazon$52 at StaplesSee more options

Ampere Shower Power Bluetooth Speaker

$149 at Amazon

Retrotink 5X-Pro

$325 at Retrotink

Dyson V8 Fluffy Cordless Vacuum

$360 at Walmart

Apple TV 4K

$130 at TargetMore options

Amazon Echo Dot

$35 at Lowe’s$50 at Amazon$50 at Kohl’sSee more options

JCLOUD Smart Scent Air Machine Pro

$195 at AmazonMore options

Orbit B-hyve Smart Sprinkler Controller

$99 at Amazon$120 at Lowe’s$120 at Ace HardwareSee more optionsSee 8 morePhoto by Cheyenne MacDonald / Engadget

Tamagotchi Uni

There was never any doubt about whether I, a Tamagotchi fanatic, would be getting the Tamagtochi Uni. Bandai announced the new, Wi-Fi-enabled virtual pet toy in June, and when pre-orders opened the following month, I bought two. Since then, it’s become the only device I use as much as my phone.

On top of the usual caretaking tasks Tamagotchi is known for, the Uni has some cute new activities. You can wear it like a watch (as Tamagotchi was originally envisioned to be), and it has basic motion sensing capabilities to power features like Tama Walks. During a Tama Walk, your character can collect items that you can later use to craft accessories. There’s also a built-in “Tamaverse” where your character can meet other users’ Tamagotchis from around the world, buy and display outfits, travel and partake in global Tama Arena events. These are competitive minigame challenges that last for one week, and they add an element of freshness to the overall gameplay. There are new characters to love, too, like the inexplicably buff-but-bashful shark, Shykutchi.

Despite these added perks, it can feel a bit boring at times; there should be more to do in the day-to-day beyond feeding, playing the same repetitive mini-games and cleaning up poop. One of those mini-games, the motion-based “Dancing” game, I never even play because it requires you wave your arms around and the device doesn’t accurately capture the movement more than half of the time.

But the fact that it has Wi-Fi and thus receives software updates means there’s so much potential for the experience to keep expanding, and we’ve already started to see the beginnings of this. The wristband is removable so you don’t have to wear it as a watch — but, as goofy as it may look to some, I almost always do. And it charges via USB-C, which is huge for convenience. Uni feels like a fresh interpretation of the classic Tamagotchi for today’s world, and half a year into use, I still love it. – Cheyenne MacDonald, Weekend Editor

$44 at WalmartExplore More Buying Options$44 at AmazonCuisinart

Cuisinart 8 Cup Food Processor

Having grown weary of paying way too much money for aggressively mediocre meals through food delivery apps, I set about a few years ago teaching myself to cook. That process has involved both improving my skills in the kitchen as well as slowly updating my collection of 50-year-old hand-me-down tools that I started with. This year’s purchase was a great one: the Cuisinart 8 Cup Food Processor, which I picked up as a replacement for my fading Osterizer Imperial blender.

Whereas the Osterizer had 10 separate and often confusing settings for deconstructing ingredients to various levels, the Cuisinart is far more straightforward: The options are high, low and pulse. And it turns out I don’t actually need more than that. A couple quick pulses is enough to break up nuts for my baking projects; a few seconds on low will diminish whole tomatoes into puree for soups; and 45 seconds on high creates pasta dough from a cup and a quarter of flour, an egg and a pinch of salt.

I also don’t need to pull out my mandolin anymore because any items that need shredding now get handled by the Cuisinart using its swappable shredding and slicing blades. Best of all, my knuckle skin stays where it should be: on my knuckles. That alone makes the Cuisinart 8-cup food processor worth its $100 asking price. — Andrew Tarantola, Senior Reporter

$117 at AmazonExplore More Buying Options$103 at Office DepotPhoto by Sarah Fielding / Engadget

Marshall Willen

Not to be that person, but I don’t know if I could go a day without listening to music. You might be surprised to learn, then, that I hadn’t owned a speaker since 2020 when the small device I had — unbeknownst to me — fell out of the car one winter night into my yard and froze in a pile of snow. Since then, I’ve turned to my iPhone 12 or M1-powered MacBook Air for music, telling myself (or really, lying to myself) that I’m not missing out. I’ve always loved the look of Marshall speakers, and when I saw that the company was running a sale earlier this summer, I knew it was my chance to upgrade.

I picked up the portable Willen speaker for $99, down from $119. It’s the smallest of Marshall’s offerings at about two-thirds of a pound and four inches around. After a bit of waffling and asking a few friends for opinions, I opted for the cream exterior and gold front rather than the classic all-black look. Not to get all Love Actually about it before the holidays, but I would happily hold up a sign to Marshall’s Willen speaker with the words, “To me, you are perfect.” The sound quality is great and it stays connected to my phone regardless of where I go in my little house (the range is 30 feet). Plus, the battery is great, with a playtime of over 15 hours and a quick charge over USB-C (three hours to 100 percent).

I brought the Willen to my parents’ place for a family gathering, and my brother, who isn’t easily impressed, loved it so much that he asked for it as a birthday present. Now, my mom has joined in, too (though with the black model) and uses it over her previously adored Alexa speaker. Whether sitting on my kitchen windowsill while I cook or on my dresser as I read a good book at night, this small speaker makes my day-to-day life better. Also, it just looks lovely. — Sarah Fielding, Contributing Reporter

$90 at AmazonExplore More Buying Options$120 at Nordstrom$129 at Macy’sPETLIBRO

Petlibro Automatic Cat Feeder

Four years after adopting our rescue cat, it finally occurred to me to get her an automatic feeder. Why didn’t it earlier, you may ask? We fed her wet and dry food, but after a vet recommended we switch up her dry food, she basically acts like the wet food doesn’t exist. She loves her new dry food medley, and that’s prime for an automatic feeder. Also, my husband and I go on a few short trips every year to visit family, and we know our cat will be just fine in our home for a couple of nights, provided she has ample amounts of water and food.

To make this easier for us and our cat, we bought the Wi-Fi-connected Petlibro feeder right before we got married and were to go on a honeymoon. After spending 10 minutes hooking the device up to our home Wi-Fi and filling it with food, I asked myself why I didn’t buy this thing sooner. From the get-go, Petlibro’s machine worked as promised, dishing out exact portions of food to our cat at specific times throughout the day. All of those details I programmed with the device’s companion mobile app, which lets you set feeding schedules and portion sizes, plus manually “feed” your furry friend at any time. Conversely, I can also skip one of my cat’s three scheduled daily feedings if I notice she didn’t eat all of her breakfast one morning.

Since we started using the Petlibro feeder, we haven’t had to deal with any power or Wi-Fi outages. But the feeder has a failsafe, too: a few D batteries inserted into the bottom of the machine allows it to keep its feeding schedule even in the event of a blackout. The convenience of this device was enough to sell me, but that extra feature put it over the edge and made it one of the best things I’ve bought this year and certainly one of the best purchases I’ve ever made for my cat. – Valentina Palladino, Senior Commerce Editor

$90 at AmazonPhoto by Will Shanklin / Engadget

Xreal Air 2 Pro

I typically write for work using a 49-inch ultra-wide monitor. This lets me keep browser tabs, Slack, notes and drafts all within view at the same time. But if I ever want to work from elsewhere, my laptop screen feels suffocating by comparison. So, I bought the $449 Xreal Air 2 Pro glasses to see if they could give me a virtual (and portable) version of my home setup.

When you plug the glasses into a host device, you’ll see a private virtual display — like a more primitive version of what Apple’s forthcoming $3,500 Vision Pro will do. From there, you can make adjustments: You can float a 320-inch monitor in front of your face while playing your PS5 as your partner watches something on TV, or work with three private MacBook screens on a flight. One of my favorite uses has been lying on the couch, gazing comfortably at the ceiling as I stream a show or play a game.

Testing them at home with my laptop convinced me they’ll suit my needs. I wrote articles on them for an entire week without any big frustrations (or editor complaints). And I love that, unlike full VR headsets, the Xreal Air 2 Pro can pass for an unusually thick pair of sunglasses. You’re less likely to be gawked at in public, they’re more portable and you still get a direct view of your environment (rather than a camera feed). This model even lets you dim the real world with the tap of a button, a feature that works strikingly well.

There are some downsides, though. The glasses have a somewhat kludgy setup, their 46-degree field of view prevents the illusion from feeling seamless and a cable juts from the glasses’ left arm. And to plant virtual screens in a fixed spot, you need the $119 Xreal Beam, an iPod-looking accessory wired between the glasses and host device, unlocking spatial tricks and whirring its loud-ass fan. Ultimately, I’d only recommend them if you’re in a similar situation as I was and can roll with some early adopter quibbles. But, unlike Apple’s upcoming reality machine, at least you don’t have to pay the equivalent of a nice vacation to catch a glimpse of the future. — Will Shanklin, Contributing Reporter

$449 at XrealPhilips Hue

Philips Hue Wall Tap Dial Light Switch

I’m a huge fan of smart lights. Ever since switching away from dumb bulbs years ago, I’ve been content to rely on voice controls, automations or a smartphone app to control their behavior. After all, half the fun is just sitting on the couch and seeing what kind of silly color combos you can come up with.

But now that my son is getting older, I wanted to give him a way to control the lights in his room without having to look at a screen or talk to a smart speaker. That prompted me to buy the Philips Hue Tap Dial switch. It has four programmable buttons that can change the settings of one light or an entire room with a single touch, plus a dimmer wheel for easily adjusting brightness. This makes having specific scenes set for various situations a breeze (think: wakeup, playtime, bedtime and a random rainbow one for funsies). This helps a lot when it comes to maintaining a consistent schedule for the kiddo.

The Tap Dial is compact and easy to move around the room so it’s never out of reach and, while we don’t use it, the switch also comes with a backplate so you can mount it on a wall. But most importantly, it’s so simple even a toddler can use it. And while it does rely on regular batteries, a single CR2032 cell is cheap (one comes pre-installed) and should last for around two years. The small downsides are that it’s a bit pricey at $50 bucks apiece and it only works with Hue lights. But perhaps the biggest surprise is that, while I didn’t think I needed physical switches for my smart lights, after having a Tap Dial for a few months I’m already planning on buying more for all the other rooms in my home. – Sam Rutherford, Senior Reporter

$50 at WalmartExplore More Buying Options$50 at Amazon$52 at StaplesAmpere

Ampere Shower Power Bluetooth Speaker

I’ve been searching a while for a safe way to add a soundtrack to my shower singalongs. Sure, you can plop any old speaker on a shelf, but my bathroom isn’t exactly spacious and I wanted something that actually sits in the shower so music wouldn’t have to compete with both the curtain and the rushing water. There are some problems, however, with placing an electronics device in a rectangular box that constantly fills with water. Where do you put it and how do you safely power it?

Earlier this year, however, my fevered, late-night Googling bore fruit. I found the Ampere Shower Power, a Bluetooth speaker that offers novel solutions to both of those problems. It screws in over the shower head, so there’s no heavy speaker being held up by the dangerous magic of a single adhesive strip. Now here’s the fun part: It charges via the magic of hydroelectric power. The force of the water rushing through the pipe and into the speaker is what gives it juice — and it actually works.

It took just 45 seconds to set up. Just twist off the old shower head, attach the speaker and twist the head back on. It is rather large and heavy, so there could be issues depending on the size and design of your shower head. But once you get it going it works like any other Bluetooth speaker. The cylindrical design delivers rich audio that is loud enough to overtake the roar of the shower. The audio quality is better than I expected and the speaker runs continuously, so long as it has a steady stream of water for power (baths are out). I can’t think of a bad thing to say about it other than the $100 price might be prohibitive for such a niche use. I’m glad that I splurged, though, to make my morning routine a bit more fun. — Lawrence Bonk, Contributing Reporter

$149 at AmazonRetrotink

Retrotink 5X-Pro

I’ve dove headfirst into retro game and console collecting over the past few years, but the problem with old consoles is that they weren’t built to work on modern displays. I can play them with simple HDMI adapters, sure, but I’m an A/V snob, so the resulting image is often too smudgy, imprecise or laggy for me to truly enjoy.

To solve this admittedly niche problem, I bought the RetroTink 5X-Pro, a little black box largely produced by one engineer that can hook up to vintage consoles and present a cleaner and more faithful image on HD displays. It can scale up to 1440p and keeps latency low enough to not be a bother. Best of all, it pretty much just works the moment you connect your cables. I hooked it into a GameCube, selected a resolution and played Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader and Donkey Kong Jungle Beat— bongos included, much to my wife’s amusement — like it was still 2004.

Does this look as nice as a shiny new PS5 game? Of course not. But not needing a mammoth CRT to enjoy these blasts of nostalgia is a blessing. There’s a buffet of additional settings you can tweak to fine-tune the image, but you don’t need to understand them to just play your game. The downside? The 5X-Pro costs $325, so it’s strictly for sickos (or “retro gaming enthusiasts”). But to me (a self-proclaimed sicko), it’s been money well spent. If you’re getting on this road, too, something like the 5X-Pro (or the new 4K model) could help you avoid the technical hurdles to enjoying old games. — Jeff Dunn, Senior Commerce Writer

$325 at RetrotinkDyson

Dyson V8 Fluffy Cordless Vacuum

A few years ago, I bought a heavy-duty canister vacuum that can be used for both wet and dry dirt. It’s sturdy and powerful, but it’s also bulky and needs to be plugged in. Since it takes up quite a bit of space, I keep it in a closet under the stairs, which is pretty hard to reach. That means for everyday cleaning, I just bust out my trusty Filipino walis instead of reaching for the vacuum. As that decade-old meme says: Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Then a few months ago, I saw a pretty huge sale on the Dyson V8 Slim Fluffy stick vacuum and decided to buy it after looking into its specs. It’s not as powerful as the brand’s more expensive stick vacuums, but it’s small and can be tucked into a corner. This model also has a shorter stem than its peers, which is perfect for me. Plus, it’s light and doesn’t need to be plugged in, which means it doesn’t have the “friction points” preventing me from using my canister vacuum as often as I’d like.

I live right beside a busy road, and dirt gets in even if my doors are always closed and I never open my windows. I also have a dog that sheds so much that I could weave a coat and a hat from all her loose fur. It can be a struggle keeping my house clean, but not so much that I’m forced to take out my canister vacuum every single day. The stick vacuum, however, I could easily grab from its corner and start cleaning anytime I want to. I just need to empty its clear bin every couple of days so the tube doesn’t get clogged. Nine months after buying the V8 Slim Fluffy, I can say that it was worth it. I haven’t touched a walis in months — and while I feel kinda bad for my poor, neglected canister vacuum, I’m hoping the V8 lasts me for years to come. — Mariella Moon, Contributing Reporter

$360 at WalmartPhoto by Devindra Hardawar / Engadget

Apple TV 4K

As much as I love my iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air and myriad other Apple devices, I didn’t think I needed an Apple TV in my life. My Amazon Fire TV could already play back all the shows and movies I needed. I didn’t need to drop $130 on something just because it has an Apple logo on it.

But then my Fire TV started acting up. I’d try to beam photos from my iPhone using AirPlay and it would struggle to find the TV until I rebooted both devices. Videos would stutter and freeze, too. So when a refurbished Apple TV 4K showed up on eBay for more than $40 off, I bought one impulsively.

I can’t claim that it changed my life, but it definitely made a big difference. Generally, it doesn’t matter if your streaming device’s specs are subpar or if the software is crummy as long as it gets entirely out of the way once you hit play. But the Apple TV’s specs and software are the opposite of crummy. It’s powered by the same chip that’s in the iPhone 14 and runs tvOS, an operating system that looks and feels miles ahead of whatever passes off as software on the Fire TV. And it helps that unlike the Fire TV, I never see a single ad.

Everything just flows, whether I am casually browsing through a grid of apps deciding what to watch next or using the Apple TV’s gorgeous remote to quickly flick through everything I have open. I wasn’t expecting to have so much fun with the Apple TV’s UI because the point of plonking yourself in front of a giant display is to watch stuff, not fiddle around with an operating system.

My favorite Apple TV feature, however, has nothing to do with watching TV. It’s the ability to take FaceTime calls on the largest screen in my house, while using my iPhone as a camera. For this brand new expat with family on the other side of the world, that alone is worth the price. — Pranav Dixit, Senior News Editor

$130 at TargetAmazon

Amazon Echo Dot

2023 marked my first full year at Engadget, and I pretty quickly realized that testing smart home devices was going to be a big part of my job. To do my job justice, I felt I needed each of the three major smart speakers — Apple’s HomePod mini, Google’s Nest Mini and Amazon’s Echo Dot — so I got them all. That gave me a unique perspective from which to judge the three major assistants.

Overall, I’m most impressed with Alexa on the Echo Dot, which is capable, responds quickly and generally gets what I’m asking it to do. I find the “personality” tidbits enjoyable, like when it tells me to have a nice day after I thank it for a weather forecast. I have to stop myself from referring to the AI as she, recalling Sister Simone from Mrs. Davis: “Not her, it.” But when Alexa asks whether I’d like to hear about an Amazon sale, I’m reminded exactly what I’ve invited into my home.

As for the HomePod mini, it offers decent audio for music, but I’m disappointed in Siri’s abilities as a smart assistant. The first hurdle is getting it to pick which device should answer. My iPhone, Apple Watch and HomePod all light up when I call upon the assistant and then… nothing. When it does answer, even a simple question like “What is 25 degrees Celsius in Fahrenheit?” triggers Siri to suggest I look for the answer on my iPhone. Not very helpful.

Finally, the Nest Mini with the Google Assistant does a great job of answering reference questions and I even use it to rattle off simple recipes in the kitchen. But the Assistant’s smart home control, while not incapable, is awkward: It often gets confused or it unnecessarily repeats a request, Perd Hapley style, before performing it. — Amy Skorheim, Commerce Writer

$35 at Lowe’sExplore More Buying Options$50 at Amazon$50 at Kohl’sJCLOUD

JCLOUD Smart Scent Air Machine Pro

This year, I discovered the JCLOUD Smart Scent Air Machine Pro and it blew my mind. Mixing and matching scents has always been my thing, and when it comes to my home, I’m adamant that the house should always smell like something. That could mean crisp linen, lavender or freshly baked treats (even when I’m too lazy to actually bake). I always had diffusers, both water and waterless, throughout the house; I thought that was the only way to achieve the ambiance I wanted, but this smart scent machine has taken things to a whole new level.

Instead of constantly refilling water diffusers, the scent machine fills the entire house all at once with the smell of the essential oil of your choosing — no water required. Well, it’ll fill most of the house, depending on the size of your space. JCLOUD has several models, but this one covers 4,500 square feet, which should be enough for most homes. It comes with a 500ml tank for you to fill with your favorite oils, like those you’d smell at a luxury hotel. It uses cold air technology to push scent where it needs to go, and there’s an app to control how often the machine diffuses. For more intense coverage, you can connect the machine to your HVAC system and increase the run time. I’m currently running the White Tea Luxury essential oil, but there are so many options out there and I’m excited to try them all. — Stephanie Barnes, Contributing Reporter

$195 at AmazonOrbit

Orbit B-hyve Smart Sprinkler Controller

There were many things we didn’t know how to use when my husband and I moved into our first home in 2022. The sprinkler system was one of them; neither of us had grown up with sprinklers, so aside from getting a professional to open and close the system each year, we were hesitant to touch the imposing control box in our boiler room. As time went on and we gained more confidence as homeowners, we decided to upgrade that old plastic box to a plastic box we could control from our phones. We ultimately bought the B-Hyve smart sprinkler control system, which took all of 15 minutes to install and another five minutes to program to our hearts’ content.

The most intimidating part about the setup process was properly connecting all of the sprinkler zone wires to the correct spaces in the new box, but everything is color-coded, making it pretty easy. Once plugged in and connected to our Wi-Fi, we both downloaded the B-Hyve mobile app and paired it with the new box. There are physical buttons to set watering schedules, manually shut off the system and more, but you can do all of that from the app as well. As to be expected, we haven’t touched the box since installation, preferring to use our phones for everything.

We set up a daily watering schedule for the wee hours of the morning that then ran without a hitch all summer. My husband had fun manually watering different zones during the first few days, but then fell back on the system’s like-clockwork automatic routines. But my favorite perk is B-Hyve’s “WeatherSense” feature that allows it to monitor weather forecast data and automatically pause watering before it’s going to rain. Any time that happened, I got an alert on my phone a few hours before the scheduled watering was to be skipped. Features like that help us save on water costs, while also making sure we don’t drown any of our plants. So often, smart home gadgets can be hit or miss and you really don’t know which it will be until after you buy the thing. But B-Hyve is definitely a hit in our house and it’s one of the best upgrades we’ve made to our home since moving in. – V.P.

$99 at AmazonExplore More Buying Options$120 at Lowe’s$120 at Ace Hardware

The post What we bought: Our favorite gadgets of 2023 appeared first on Best News.

So, now you’re probably spending a few days sleeping in your childhood bed, and wondering when Uncle Dave will stop talking to you about buying gold stocks. There’s never been a better time to take care of the less-than-riveting admin work of locking down your digital life. Here’s a quick holiday checklist you and your loved ones (including Dave) can spend an hour doing during your holiday downtime to set up for a more secure year.

Update all your apps and devices

For the most current patches and options, you’ll need to start this security check up by updating all your devices and apps. The companies behind the tech have already done a lot of the work to keep you safe, but it’s your job to make sure that you’re taking full advantage of those updates. I’d recommend starting with operating system updates then apps second because there’s usually some new features reliant on the latest OS within other software. While you’re there, set up automatic updates so that you don’t have to worry about doing this manually in the future.

Sign up for or update your password manager

Strong passwords are your first line of defense to keep your accounts safe, but they’re almost impossible to memorize and keep track of. Download a password manager to store this information for you, so that your passwords can be unguessable gibberish that you’ll actually use. Long term, it’s important to change these passwords every 90 days or so, and never to repeat across accounts. A password manager will help remind you of that, and even generate new password ideas for you. Unique and regularly-changing passwords help prevent attacks like credential stuffing, as we’ve seen make headlines in the recent 23andMe data breach.

Make sure you’re using MFA or, ideally, passkeys

Strong passwords are important, but it’s well-known that they aren’t enough to keep unauthorized actors out of your account. Most people are familiar with using a text message code to grant access to an account. If you’re taking time out of your day to set this up, however, I would recommend using a third-party authenticator app or a hardware key for more secure options. Or, for companies that have switched to allowing passkeys at login, that’s usually your best bet.

This will be one of the more tedious parts of the checklist, so if you can’t sit down and knock out your major logins now, at least push yourself to make these changes each time you log into a website over the next couple of weeks. Being stuck with family for the holiday might not be your preferred opportunity to make this change, but there’s sure to be an upcoming major snowstorm or bout seasonal depression just screaming to be harnessed for your technological well-being.

Consider a VPN, or at least a more secure browser

A strong VPN will keep your web browsing private. Whether it’s free or paid for, defaulting to using a VPN adds an extra layer of security to the work you’re doing online. Most have options to use it across different devices, or to run automatically on startup so that you can set it up once and forget about it. I would also recommend switching over to a secure browser like Tor that runs on a privacy-first platform for more sensitive online matters. Of course there’s a catch: VPNs and Tor can both slow down your browsing, or break certain website features. Updates to the services have helped over time, but even if you use it for just a portion of web browsing, some protection is better than none.

Get up to date on the latest hacks and attack vectors

Keeping up with security news will help you determine what accounts need special attention versus where you can go on autopilot. Once you know whether a breach may have occurred or a password has been leaked, you can quickly make changes to accommodate. Websites already exist to see if you’ve been in a data breach, and most companies have an obligation to tell you if they’ve been impacted. When you also stay up to date on the latest scams and attacks, you know what red flags to look out for in your own inbox to stay proactive.

Tell brokers to stop selling your data

It’s surprisingly easy to stop companies from trading your privacy for cash. On top of getting in the habit of not sharing your cookies or granting location data, you can opt out of working with the top three major data brokers. Axiom, Oracle and Epsilon all have slightly different variations of the same form to fill out so that information like your home address and relatives’ names aren’t being sold for profit. This is a good start to getting your online privacy back, however, it can be more of a headache than just one opt out form.

You have to do this frequently to make sure your information hasn’t been readded to any of the broker sites, and if your information has already been sold to marketing companies, it’s too late to undo it. There are subscription service sites that can help track and continuously delete whatever information pops up for you, but starting with just Axiom, Oracle and Epsilon will still be a free, worthwhile step toward more privacy.

Back up everything

Get an external hard drive or connect to the cloud and keep all of your data backed up. Do this regularly, so that even if your device quits or gets ransomed by an attacker, you aren’t completely screwed. I’d recommend opting for something that can be set up automatically, so that you don’t have to keep constant track of it. That could look like spending the 99 cents per month on extra iCloud storage (or Google Drive or another in-house cloud tool) so that your phone gets backed up each night while you’re asleep. Windows and Mac also both do auto updates to an external drive on desktop, so you can set it and forget it.

Alternatively, you could install backup software onto a device so that it’s taken care of by a third party, but that may be less intuitive to set up. Just don’t forget to clean up your data storage every once in a while, too, so that you’re not holding onto useless screenshots or pictures of your ex from years ago that are taking up valuable space.

Make a plan to check in on your security settings more frequently

It’s overwhelming to play catch up. Going through a list like this can seem intimidating if you haven’t worried about it before. If you set up automatic updates and backups, it’ll take some of those repeat tasks off your plate. But since you’ll already, hopefully, be setting new passwords once a quarter, you can do a quick check up on your other security measures too. See if you’ve been a victim of a breach or identity theft, keep telling data brokers to get their hands off your information and find out if new VPNs or other software has been released that could make your security setup more seamless. Making it a part of the routine is much easier than annual sprees, and can help you catch a cybersecurity problem before it becomes unmanageable.

The post Here’s everything you should do to up your security before next year appeared first on Best News.

I mention this because I’ve always thought the people in the tech industry with all the money are probably halfway savvy about how All Of This Is Meant To Work. I’d told myself that what, to me, appeared illogical and self-defeating was because they were playing a game of six-dimensional chess on a board I was too dim to see. Unless, of course, the economics of our industry are so unmoored from reality that everyone’s just pretending, or deluding themselves. And more than a decade of cheap money and lax regulation means everyone’s behaved a little bit sillier than they should have. Now the lights are coming up and everyone’s looking to see what’s actually going on, there’s nowhere for these apparently smart people to hide.

It’s stopped making sense for investors

The Silicon Valley mindset is easy to grasp: If you’re lucky enough to have spare cash, put a small bit of it behind some kids with a big idea. All it takes is for one of those bets – emphasis on the word bet – to win and you’ll get a slice of some pretty big profits. In an era where zero interest-rate policies mean it’s almost free to rack up extraordinary debt, it’s a better route than heading to Las Vegas with your 401k. Not to mention the special cachet and attention you can garner by presenting yourself to the world as a “guru.” But you might have noticed that a lot of high-profile bets haven’t been coming off of late, wasting a lot of cash in the process.

Take WeWork, which this year filed for Chapter 11 after working its way through $16.9 billion since 2014. What logic can we apply to its main backer, Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son*, to justify him burning the GDP of Jamaica on such a venture? Especially when Regus, which performs the same decidedly un-techy role of renting temporary office space, owns its properties and makes a small but regular profit every non-COVID year, was available to buy outright for a fraction of the cost? How did this amount of money pass from one company to another without any sort of internal or external oversight? And why did he think that WeWork’s nicer interior design and a beer tap on every floor was such a big draw? The only theory that holds water is that Son was so blindsided by promises of vast future profits (from office rental) that he lost any sense of self-restraint.

That mix of cheap credit and the promise of unbelievable future returns can be applied across the tech industry, too. It might help explain why the cost of streaming has leapt so high while the catalogs available have shrunk. The studios weren’t hurting for profit in the days before Netflix, but the fact it was valued like a tech company enabled it to rack up huge debts. That led plenty of studios to leap onto the bandwagon in the hope of getting some of that mythical profit. In the early days, the hope was that the sheer number of people paying for content would balance out the low cost. But now growth has stalled and there’s still $14.30 billion of debt, plus an audience with an ever-increasing desire for new content.

It’s stopped making sense for consumers

The debt swinging around Netflix’s neck, and the necks of those who followed it into the streaming world save for Amazon, Apple and Warner Bros***, is directly related to this gold rush. And it’ll need to be paid off to the investors and banks who handed over billions of dollars in expectation of vast rewards further down the line. Which is why the cost of a standard Netflix subscription has pretty much doubled since 2011 – with Premium plans now costing $23 a month. Given the scattershot nature of streaming libraries and the fact Netflix can’t be your sole source of entertainment, most consumers have more than one subscription going at the same time. That’s been fine, more or less, while times are good, so what happens when the world’s economies all start to slow down and you’re looking to make room in your monthly budget?

It’s worth remembering new technologies are expensive, both in cost and how much time and effort you spend to get to grips with them. But while technology has had some world-changing hits in the past – personal computing, the internet, smartphones and, uh, social media – it’s been a while since we’ve had anything that big. But the industry can’t help but keep hyping the next big thing even if it’s obvious to anyone with eyes that it’s not going to be a winner. We’re at the peak of the hype cycle for machine learning, which its boosters tell us will automate us all into obsolescence in a decade or so**. The problem is, whenever you actually sit and try to use a generative AI, the results are underwhelming, so great is the gap between the promise and the reality. Take Google’s new AI which managed to give fake answers to spreadsheet-level questions like who won an Academy Award last year. You can already see the itchy feet of those hoping the Humane Pin will be the Next Big Thing despite its risible introduction video.

Consumers lose out here not just because of these expensive boondoggles but because they suck up all the oxygen from everything else. Many of these technologies were designed not to solve real-world problems, of which we have plenty, but to dazzle investors, placate Wall Street and dupe credulous buyers. It doesn’t help that generative AI, like crypto before it, uses a significant amount more energy than it should, exacerbating climate change. Sadly, when all the attention and money shifts to the next thing, we’ll all be poorer for it, both for the folks who were duped into reading machine-written articles about the importance of volleyball, and the folks who got laid off because some genius thought GPT-3 would do a better job without oversight.

It’s stopped making sense for workers

Embracer Group is a Swedish game publisher that loaded up on debt to buy every small studio and IP it could get its hands on. In 2018, CEO Lars Wingefors told GamesIndustry his company would eschew a “fewer, bigger, better” strategy in favor of a “diversified” lineup. In 2021, it said it had access to more than $2 billion in cash and credit to continue its spending spree, bankrolling a slew of newer, smaller titles. That included reviving TimeSplitters developer Free Radical to start work on a new game in the long-dormant cult series.Two years after that, the company admitted that a deal worth $2 billion in revenue over six years had fallen apart and that it would have to cut costs. Free Radical has now been closed, putting the last two years’ worth of work on the shelf and close to 1,000 people across Embracer have lost their jobs.

Across the industry, countless jobs have been lost as even profitable companies look to trim their headcount. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek even said the quiet part out loud when admitting the company “took advantage of the opportunity presented by lower-cost capital” to staff up. Now that the economic situation has shifted, and money isn’t as cheap as it used to be, the company is letting 1,500 people go less than a month before the holidays. Big names who have also trod the same path this year include (deep breath) Amazon (multiple times), ByteDance, LinkedIn (twice), Epic Games, Lyft, Metabook, Dell, Google and Microsoft.

Reality’s going to hit us in the face like a shovel

When I was a kid, a relative worked for a company that made and sold slot machines for adult gambling. I must have been 10 when he came over and set up a game where he gave me a pound in 2p pieces, which I could wager on the outcome of a deck of cards. He’d rigged the game so that, despite all of the pledges to double my cash as my funds shrunk, I’d wipe out. It was a valuable lesson in why it’s not a smart idea to gamble your money, given by someone who saw it up close and personal every day.

The other lesson he taught me was the vow of gratitude he would utter often, which was doubly amusing given his atheism. Whenever there was a bad story in the news, or a tale of corporate woe closer to home, he’d say “there but for the grace of God go I.” Because he knew that so much of what happens in our lives is governed by chance, so it’s pointless to claim it was wisdom. We should always remember that none of us are untouchable, and that the worst phrase in the English language is “what could possibly go wrong?” It’s just a shame that so many of the supposed great minds in the technology industry didn’t get the chance to learn this lesson when they were young enough to appreciate it.

* Wikipedia – hardly a symbol of partisanship – has gone studs-in on Son. At the time of writing, his biography says “his reputation as an investor rests almost solely on his $20 million initial investment in Alibaba Group in 2000.” Given the rest of his track record – and the fact he is presently in debt to his own company to the tune of several billion, ouch.

** I do wonder how many of its backers who spend their days worrying about Roko’s Basilisk have thought about how they’ll be treated by the 85 million or so people suddenly forced into serfdom.

*** Warner Bros. malaise is more directly related to the debt tied to the various buyouts and sales that has seen it shifted from one corporate parent to another. Not that the streaming wars has helped here, but it's fair to say that its problems are a different realm to those of its peers.

The post 2023 was the year the economics of tech caught up with reality appeared first on Best News.

In 2023, the main factors molding the video game landscape were consolidation, layoffs and unionization, with each of these phenomena feeding into each other. This past year, the video game industry shrank, even as it grew financially.

Consolidation

When Microsoft's purchase of Activision-Blizzard-King was finally approved on October 12, 2023 after nearly two years of regulatory hurdles, it became the world’s third-largest video game studio by revenue. As the owner of the Xbox ecosystem, Microsoft was already a massive player in video games, but purchasing a tentpole AAA studio solidified its position in the top three. Activision and Blizzard are the owners of Call of Duty, Diablo, Overwatch, World of Warcraft and Starcraft, but the real meat of this deal comes from King, the mobile division. King operates Candy Crush Saga, a game with 238 million monthly active users, which is more than twice as many as Activision Blizzard’s combined player bases. Candy Crush Saga has generated more than $20 billion in lifetime revenue, and King routinely outperforms Activision and Blizzard in terms of quarterly returns. Mobile gaming remains a huge business, especially in the Chinese market, which represents the largest and most lucrative audience in video games.

Though the $69 billion Activision deal was the biggest in Microsoft’s history — trailed by its $26 billion purchase of LinkedIn in 2016 — it wasn’t the company’s first video game acquisition. Microsoft owns nearly 40 developers and it bought a chunk of those in the past five years. The Xbox umbrella covers 343 industries, Arkane Studios, Bethesda, Compulsion Games, Double Fine Productions, id Software, Infinity Ward, Mojang Studios, Ninja Theory, Playground Games, Tango Gameworks and Turn 10, among dozens more.

With these studios at its back, Microsoft is leaning hard into cloud gaming while attempting to build a device-agnostic ecosystem powered by the Xbox brand. These moves are designed to unlock the mobile market even more, putting Xbox games on all devices, everywhere, all the time.

Still, Sony is bigger than Microsoft by revenue. Though Microsoft is often the face of the game-studio acquisition spree, Sony is the owner of 21 development teams, including Bungie, Guerrilla Games, Haven Studios, Housemarque, Insomniac Games, Media Molecule, Naughty Dog and Sucker Punch Productions. Sony has been subtly expanding its roster — more subtly than Microsoft, at least — over the past three years, and it’s also made heavy investments in studios like Epic Games and FromSoftware.

With this lineup, Sony is betting heavily on ongoing games, and it has 12 live-service titles in production right now, on top of Bungie’s Destiny franchise. These include Haven’sFairgame$ and a multiplayer Horizon title from Guerilla.

“By expanding to PC and mobile, and… also to live services, we have the opportunity to move from a situation of being present in a very narrow segment of the overall gaming software market, to being present pretty much everywhere," Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Jim Ryan said in 2022.

For the companies at the top, total domination is the goal.

Even still, Tencent is bigger than both Sony and Microsoft. Tencent is not a console manufacturer, so it isn’t a household name among most players, but it’s one of the largest companies in the world, and it wields a ridiculous amount of financial power in video games. Tencent owns a portion of Bloober Team, Bohemia Interactive, Don’t Nod, Epic, Paradox Interactive, PlatinumGames, Remedy Entertainment, Roblox and Ubisoft, among others. It has a majority stake in Supercell, Grinding Gear Games, Klei Entertainment, Tequila Works, Techland, Yager Development and others. It fully owns Riot Games, Funcom, Sharkmob, Turtle Rock Studios, and, of course, others. It also runs multiple internal development companies, including the Level Infinite and Tencent Games publishing labels.

Sure, Sony has a stake in Epic, but Tencent’s is bigger. This investment alone means any time you buy a game built on Epic’s Unreal Engine, Tencent (and Sony) is getting a cut. Tencent is the biggest investor in games, with thousands of tendrils across the industry — if you played something this year, Tencent was probably involved.

On a smaller scale, companies like Netflix and Devolver Digital have also dabbled in acquisitions recently. Devolver started buying studios in 2020, and it now owns Croteam, Dodge Roll, Doinksoft, Firefly Studios, Nerial and System Era Softworks. Annapurna Interactive bought South African studio 24 Bit Games in November. Netflix launched its Games division in 2021, and it’s already purchased four studios, including Oxenfree developer Night School and Alphabear company Spry Fox.

Night School co-founder Sean Krankel told Engadget in June that the move to Netflix was a boon for the studio, providing financial security, a dedicated working space and plenty of marketing support for its projects.

“A small subset of teams are good to go for the next 10 years, but others have these peaks and valleys, and we were somewhere in between,” Krankel said. “We weren't in danger of anything going sideways. But we were at a spot where we're like, it would be cool to tether to somebody who has a similar vision, and somebody that we could work with that would like, de-risk us.”

This is the short-term benefit of being bought by a larger company, but there are downsides to relinquishing independence. Having a corporate overseer can result in rigid production timelines, hindering a studio’s ability to pivot, and despite all of the promises otherwise, developers may be forced to adhere to a specific tone, vibe or game-development structure. Owned studios are held accountable by people outside of the actual development of a game, and the bigger the company, the further away its bosses are from the creative process.

The most extreme negative outcomes for an acquired indie studio are, of course, layoffs and closures. We saw a lot of these in 2023.

Layoffs

The post-acquisition power dynamic is playing out in public and in real-time. It’s estimated that more than 9,000 people in video games were laid off this year and the firings affected teams of all sizes. This is a crisis amount of cuts.

The Embracer Group provides the clearest example of rampant, surprise layoffs in 2023. Embracer has spent the past few years acquiring prominent midsize studios, including Gearbox Software (Borderlands), Crystal Dynamics (Tomb Raider), Eidos-Montreal (Deus Ex) and Square Enix Montreal (Deus Ex Go). In the past decade, Embracer grew its portfolio to cover more than 100 game studios, including Volition (Saints Row), Coffee Stain (Goat Simulator), Free Radical Design (TimeSplitters) and Zen Studios (Pinball FX). The holding company also secured the rights to The Lord of the Rings in 2022, promising to turn it into “one of the biggest gaming franchises in the world.”

In June 2023, Embracer announced a six-year, $2 billion funding deal had fallen through, and it was going to restructure — meaning, layoffs and studio closures. Since this announcement, Embracer has shut down Volition, Free Radical Design and Campfire Cabal, it divested Goose Byte and it’s fired developers at Saber Interactive. More than 900 people lost their jobs during these moves. Meanwhile, Embracer’s share price rose by 11 points in November.

This wasn’t the only layoff round of the year. Unity lowered its headcount three times in 2023, affecting about 900 jobs. In its quarterly financial results in November, Unity reported a yearly revenue increase of 69 percent and it told investors, “We continued to manage costs well.”

Sony cut 100 jobs at Bungie, a company it bought for $3.6 billion in 2022. According to developers that are still there, Sony executives are attempting to use this upheaval to wrest more control of the studio from Bungie founders and leaders.

Epic Games fired roughly 830 people this year, or 16 percent of its staff. This included significant job cuts at Mediatonic, the studio behind Fall Guys that Epic purchased in 2021.

“For a while now, we've been spending way more money than we earn,” CEO Tim Sweeney wrote about the layoffs. He continued, “I had long been optimistic that we could power through this transition without layoffs, but in retrospect I see that this was unrealistic.”

Electronic Arts was one of the first video game companies to institute significant layoffs this year, with a reduction of 6 percent of its workforce, or about 800 employees, in March. EA later cut jobs at Dirt and F1 studio Codemasters, which it purchased in 2021 for $1.2 billion. EA culled an estimated 1,130 jobs in 2023.

CD Projekt RED and Sega each laid off about 100 people in the past 12 months, while Ubisoft fired an estimated 255 employees. Microsoft cut 10,000 jobs across its businesses early in the year, and that included about 100 people at Halo studio 343 industries.

These are just some of the biggest names in layoffs in 2023. Looking back on the carnage, it feels like a warning — as consolidation efforts increase, more game studios will be controlled by just a handful of companies, and they’ll be vulnerable to moves like mass layoffs and closures. We’re laying the foundation for the future of video games right now, and consolidation only makes the industry smaller and more generic, as accountants, investors and shareholders push for low-risk concepts, rather than innovation and change.

What will rampant consolidation mean for all of these acquired studios in five years’ time? What will it mean when these teams aren’t shiny, new investments any longer, and the people at the top are ready to get lean again? Remember that many of the shuttered studios listed above were purchased within the past three years.

Being acquired is a cost-benefit analysis for smaller studios, where the benefits are immediate and the costs are potential. It’s easy to say that won’t happen to us. But it can happen, and it does, and as consolidation increases, bulk layoffs are only going to occur more often.

Unions

Unionization is one approach that can help protect the livelihoods of people in the video game industry, and there was progress on this front in 2023. Developers at multiple studios now have union support, from small indies to AAA powerhouses.

Microsoft is currently the home of the industry’s largest union, with representation for more than 300 quality assurance workers at ZeniMax Media. ZeniMax is the parent company of Bethesda, id Software and Arkane, and Microsoft purchased the whole caboodle for $7.5 billion in 2021. Microsoft formally recognized the ZeniMax union this January and the parties started negotiating in April. In December, Microsoft announced it would hire 77 contract workers as full-time employees under the ZeniMax Workers United-CWA union. The deal guaranteed a pay raise, paid holidays and sick leave, and a copy of Starfield, the game they helped ship.

“We are now stronger at the bargaining table and are working to secure a fair contract for all workers — direct employees and contractors," ZeniMax union member Chris Lusco said. "We are all a part of ZeniMax Studio’s success and we all deserve our fair share. We hope to set a new precedent for workers across Microsoft and the entire gaming industry so that all workers, regardless of their employment status, are able to improve their working conditions through collective bargaining."

Meanwhile, executives at Microsoft’s newest acquisition, Activision Blizzard, spent the past few years stalling internal unionization efforts. However, QA employees at Raven Software, a subsidiary of Activision, successfully voted to unionize in May 2022. Microsoft has vowed to respect organization attempts now that Activision-Blizzard-King is under its control.

Other companies with unions established in the past two years include Avalanche Studios, Anemone Hug, CD Projekt RED, Experis Game Solutions, Keywords Studios, Sega of America, Tender Claws and Workinman Interactive.

The post Video games in 2023: Acquisitions, layoffs, unions appeared first on Best News.

Cruise's compounding problems

Cruise came into this year looking like a nigh-on unstoppable force of transportational change as the core of GM's self-driving efforts. The company received a $1.5 billion investment from the automaker in March 2022 after GM spent $2.1 buying equity ownership for the startup from Softbank Vision Fund. In February the company announced that its test fleet of driverless taxis had traveled a million miles of San Francisco’s streets without a human behind the wheel. The program had only started the previous November.

"When you consider our safety record, the gravity of our team’s achievement comes into sharper focus," Mo Elshenawy, Cruise's EVP of engineering, said in February. "To date, riders have taken tens of thousands of rides in Cruise AVs. In the coming years, millions of people will experience this fully driverless future for themselves."

Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt had been installed at his position in December 2021 after GM CEO Mary Barra ousted Dan Ammann from the spot. Vogt spent the following year laying out a grand vision of “zero crashes, zero traffic, and zero emissions,” though, according to a November report from the New York Times, the company “put a priority on the speed of the program over safety” during his tenure, cutting corners on safety in order to get more vehicles on the road. And expand Cruise did, into Houston and Los Angeles most notably, despite a growing number of traffic incidents and accidents left behind by its vehicles.

In April, the company was given permission to operate its driverless vehicles throughout San Francisco, 24/7 as well as pick up paying passengers during daylight hours. Previously, only Cruise employees were allowed to ride in the robotaxis and they could only operate when the sun was out. In August, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted 3-to-1 in favor of allowing Cruise (and Waymo as well) to to pick up paying passengers at all hours.

Not everybody was fully on board with the robotaxi takeover, mind you. In January 2023, San Francisco officials requested the CPUC slow or even halt the expansion of self-driving vehicle services in the city, arguing that the free-for-all growth OK’d by state regulators was becoming an “unreasonable” burden. In fact, barely a week after the CPUC voted in favor of expansion, the California DMV opened an investigation into an altercation between a Cruise taxi and a fire truck. In response, the DMV had Cruise cut its operating fleet in half — down to 50 vehicles during daylight hours and 150 at night — until it had completed its investigation. Then there was the whole “using robotaxis as love hotels” issue in August.

Those mishaps were bad. The events of October 3 and Cruise’s response to the resulting investigation proved unforgivable. As the company initially explained in the above thread, a human-driven vehicle struck a pedestrian, pushing her into the path of the Cruise taxi in the lane to her right. The taxi ran the woman over, despite aggressively braking, and ended up dragging her 20 feet until coming to a stop. EMS crews were able to extract the pedestrian from underneath the taxi using the jaws of life, and rushed her to medical treatment with critical injuries.Though she has not been identified, the pedestrian was reportedly in serious condition as late as October 25.

If that weren’t bad enough, Cruise then allegedly misled regulators about when the taxi engaged its brakes — telling them that the taxi had stopped immediately, not eventually, after slowly traveling another 20 feet down the block. The company then repeatedly delayed in releasing video of the incident to investigators until October 19.

The company’s cover-up efforts puts Cruise in financial jeopardy with the CPUC, which is currently considering fining it as much as $1.5 million for its obfuscating actions. The Commission's decision will be made in early February at an upcoming evidentiary hearing.

More immediately, the accident itself set off a whole slew of investigations, regulatory and internal alike. The Exponent consulting firm was brought in as an independent investigator and promptly dredged up some rather unflattering data regarding the robotaxis’ difficulties with spotting and reacting to the presence of small children. That revelation wasn’t so bad, at least compared to the company’s decision to keep the vehicles on the road even after being informed of the potentially deadly defect.

The California DMV was not amused and, two weeks after the accident occurred, the department suspended Cruise’s license to operate within the state, effectively shuttering its robotaxi operations. That’s a huge blow to GM, which has sunk billions into the startup and was anticipating the robotaxi service to generate as much as $5 billion annually when operations were to begin in 2025. In mid-November, the company recalled all 950 of its autonomous taxis in operation, and even paused robotaxi rides with human safety drivers behind the wheel a week later, as part of a “full safety review.”

Then things got even worse. On November 18, CEO Kyle Vogt announced his resignation from his position a week after GM installed EVP of Legal and Policy Craig Glidde (who was already a Cruise board member) as Chief Administrative Officer. The following day, company co-founder and Chief Product Officer Daniel Kan also announced his departure.

In response to Vogt's departure, GM promoted Mo Elshenawy from EVP of Engineering to the dual role of President and CTO, leaving the CEO position currently vacant. GM CEO Mary Barra told reporters recently that the company has “a lot of confidence with what the two co-presidents will do,” but will be “leaning in to make sure that it meets our strict requirements from a safety perspective.”

GM suddenly found itself holding the multibillion dollar bag, so it cut off funding near immediately, slashing budgets to the tune of “hundreds of millions” of dollars. As a result, Cruise has since suspended its equity program and begun laying off employees, starting with those in autonomous vehicle operations.

"The most important thing for us right now is to take steps to rebuild public trust," Cruise said in a statement. "Part of this involves taking a hard look inwards and at how we do work at Cruise, even if it means doing things that are uncomfortable or difficult."

But Cruise isn’t entirely dead yet, as Elshenawy explained in a recent email to staff. The company plans to scale back its self-driving ambitions and relaunch with a renewed focus on the current Chevy Bolt AV robotaxi platform, rather than its custom-built Origin vehicle. As such the company is pausing production on the Origin at least through 2024 but does plan to continue the program at some point in the future.

Waymo won by default

Waymo entered 2023 in much the same way as Cruise did: riding high on the hype and promise of self-driving vehicle technology. However it is ending the year in a very different place from its biggest competitor.

Google-backed Waymo had received glowing praise from Swiss RE, a leading global reinsurer, regarding the safety of its vehicles versus human drivers the previous September, and had just launched its second Waymo One taxi service area that December, this time in Phoenix, Arizona, running a route between downtown and the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

Los Angeles joined Waymo’s stable of cities in February. Much as it was rolled out in San Francisco, Waymo’s self-driving vehicles were initially made available only to riders who were part of the Waymo Research Trusted Tester program in a limited area (in this case, Santa Monica), always outside of rush hour and only in limited numbers.

The following month the company launched a similar effort in Austin, Texas, a town where it had conducted some of its earliest self-driving tests back in 2015. Austin is a hot town to test self-driving vehicles in, on account of a 2017 state law that prevents cities from locally regulating the technology’s use and deployment on their streets.

Things were going so well for Waymo come summer that the company announced it would shift gears, pushing back plans for its self-driving truck idea to instead focus fully on its expanding robotaxi service.

“Given the tremendous momentum and substantial commercial opportunity we’re seeing on the ride-hailing front, we’ve made the decision to focus our efforts and investment on ride-hailing,” Waymo co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov wrote in a July blog post. "We’re iterating more quickly than ever on our technology by pushing forward state of the art AI/ML, and seeing significant business growth and rider demand in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles.”

By August, Waymo announced that Austin would be joining those towns as the fourth city to host its autonomous taxi service, with the program rolling out through the Fall. That same month, Waymo received its driverless deployment permit from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), enabling the company to begin charging passengers for its robotaxi rides as well as expanding the service to additional customers. Previously, the company could only charge for rides if a human safety driver was behind the wheel. The company acknowledged at the time that demand was “incredibly high” (signups had already reportedly passed 100,000 users) but that it was working to make its fully autonomous trips "available to everyone over time."

“Things are growing… The ridership is increasing in both Phoenix and SF,” he continued, noting that the company provides more than 10,000 trips per city each week. Overall, it would have been a pretty great year for Waymo — especially after chief rival, Cruise, effectively imploded over the course of Q4 — had the company’s workforce not been subject to not one, not two, but three rounds of layoffs impacting over 300 employees.

The Road Ahead for Robotaxis

As we head into the new year, Waymo is effectively the only game in town, now that Cruise isn’t a viable commercial entity for the foreseeable future.

Midway through the year, analysts predicted the robotaxi market, valued at just over $1.1 billion in 2022, could rise to anywhere from $45.7 billion in 2030 to $118 billion in 2031 citing, “increasing demand for shared transportation, advancements in vehicle technology, growing interest in fuel-efficient public transportation, and improved infrastructure.”

Those outlooks have been tempered in recent months, at least for short term estimates, with Cruise temporarily out of the picture. Forrester Analytics, for example, now expects drone delivery services to become the dominant self-driving vehicle segment in 2024 as pushback from regulators slows development of robotaxi transit tech.

“Expect a booming year for self-driving forklifts, curbside delivery robots, and drone delivery, driven by the increasing popularity of e-commerce, the need for last-mile delivery solutions, and more sophisticated autonomous technologies,” wrote Craig Le Clair, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester.

We are, of course, still waiting on those million robotaxis Elon Musk promised us back in 2019.

The post In 2023, Cruise's robotaxi dreams took a necessary hiatus appeared first on Best News.

The YNAB Method is an approach to budgeting that resonated with me then and still does today. I won’t belabor the basics here, but put simply, you’re to give every dollar a “job” as soon as you get paid by taking care of immediate needs first and then accounting for the rest of your true expenses. The way YNAB does this is basically by acting like a digital envelope system where you can customize all of your envelopes (or “categories”) and the amount of money you need for each (“targets”), and dump money into all of them every time you get paid. For example, I know I need $65 each month to pay for internet, so I have an internet category in YNAB with a target of $65 each month that’s due by the 15th, since I’ll need that money to pay the bill on the 20th of every month.

Follow that example for all of the rest of your expenses like rent or mortgage payments, groceries, electricity, insurance premiums and you’ll have a full YNAB budget in place. You can (and should) also do that for “true” expenses, which include things like hair cuts and car maintenance in the YNAB system. You may not need a specific amount of money for things like that every month, but you can plan for them by saving a little every time you get paid — so by the time you need to get that hair cut ahead of a wedding or unexpectedly need a new set of tires, you have at least some, if not all, of the money necessary to pay it.

I was already taking stock of my standard expenses and setting aside money for those first and foremost, but YNAB made the process much easier. It’s worth noting that was already part of my routine. I was privileged enough to get a decent financial education from my parents growing up (mantras like “pay yourself first” come to mind, and I see taking care of your most necessary expenses as a way of accomplishing that).

The game-changer for me was considering my “true expenses,” which added up quickly. The inevitable weekly takeout order, veterinary bills for our cat, train and rideshare fees and the like were all things I knew I needed to pay for but didn’t previously deal with until the time came. In YNAB, you can create categories for all true expenses and plan for them each month (or week, depending on how you budget/get paid) so there’s (hopefully) never a question of how you’re going to pay for any of them.

If you’re able to do this and get your expenses in order, it’s possible that you’ll find you have money left over each paycheck. Then you can expand your budget to think about other true expenses or sinking funds you may want to address. My line between true expenses and sinking funds is blurry at best, but the latter are just allocated monies you set aside for variable expenses that you know are inevitable like home maintenance or insurance premiums.

Holiday gifts were big for me; every year, I have even more people in my life that I need to buy gifts for during the holiday season and I never planned for that in advance before using YNAB. Now, I have a “holiday gifts” category with a generous target that I put money toward every month and set to be “due” every year in early October. As soon as sales start to kick in during the fall, I have a pool of money with which I can buy all of my loved ones’ gifts.

I should say that YNAB appeals to my Type-A, über-organized personality, but you can’t plan for everything. A few years back, I unexpectedly had to spend about $500 for some car repairs and I didn’t have quite that much in my “car maintenance” sinking fund. Instead of panicking, I moved some money over from my “clothing” category to cover the remainder of the costs. It was a bit painful psychologically (I love seeing those little green progress bars in the YNAB app), but it didn’t impact my finances at all. YNAB accounts only for the money you actually have, regardless of which category it’s in, so I wasn’t spending anything that I couldn’t afford. That’s really important to me, as someone who tries to live within their means — and as much as possible, below it — to avoid lifestyle creep.

Getting back to those “adult” priorities I mentioned before: YNAB was one of the key things that helped me and my partner save up a home down payment and the funds we’d need to pay for our wedding simultaneously, without feeling too stretched along the way. We cut down (not cut out, mind you) on all unnecessary expenses and aggressively saved during this five-year period, and YNAB made keeping track of it all easy.

But I would like to stress that the service was just one of the things that helped, and there were other factors that contributed as well. It’s not realistic to suggest budgeting alone is the answer to all of one’s money prayers. But it’s certainly a step in the right direction and a good habit to build over time.

I consider YNAB up there with 1Password as one of the few services I’m happy to pay for every year because of how much it adds to my life. However, it’s worth noting that you don’t have to pay for YNAB to start budgeting using its tenants. The YNAB method, the envelope system and zero-based budgeting are all very similar and you can do them all with less expensive tools, and even manually with physical envelopes and cash. There are plenty of online communities with flourishing examples of how you can get started without paying for yet another subscription. I recommend checking out Taylor Budgets, Budget Treasures and other similar YouTube channels for more inspiration.

You Need a Budget (YNAB)

$99/year at YNAB

The post What we bought: How YNAB gives me peace of mind and keeps my money in check appeared first on Best News.

Some posited that his inept attempts at cost-cutting would cause irreparable damage to Twitter’s infrastructure or that mass resignations would lead to catastrophic instability. But as is so often the case with Musk, predictions were in vain. Twitter did die this year, but the way it played out was both more boring and more stupid than anyone could have possibly imagined.

Musk killed Twitter by slowly making it useless for those who relied on it for real-time information, by choking off conversations from those not willing to pay, by flooding users’ timelines with spammy blue-check sycophants and renaming the company X. He killed it by re-platforming actual Nazis and far-right trolls and Alex Jones and boosting anti-semitism so loudly the site’s largest remaining advertisers and most prominent users abandoned the platform in droves. Though you can still go to www.twitter.com and see a website that vaguely resembles the thing we used to call Twitter, it’s only a dull echo of what it once was.

The beginning of the end

While you could argue the death spiral began the second Musk walked into Twitter HQ carrying a sink 14 months ago, the platform we all knew began to die three months later, when Musk abruptly decided to ban third-party client apps from its platform and put the rest of its API behind an outrageously expensive paywall.

Twitter had long been an outlier among its social media peers for having a relatively open platform. It gave researchers tools to access the full history of all public conversations on Twitter. It allowed developers to build their own apps on top of its platform, which fostered a small but robust ecosystem of third-party Twitter clients.

Third-party apps like Tweetbot and Twitterific had a relatively small (but devoted) following, but they also played a significant role in defining the culture of Twitter. In the early days of Twitter, the company didn’t have its own mobile app, so it was third-party developers that set the standard of how the service should look and feel. Third-party apps were often the first to adopt now-expected features like in-line photos and video, and the pull-to-refresh gesture. The apps are also responsible for popularizing the word “tweet” and Twitter’s bird logo.

And while many of these apps had become less prominent in recent years, they were emblematic of the way that Twitter, at its best, empowered its users to shape the platform.

Likewise, having an open and readily-available API meant that Twitter, while not the largest social platform, could play an outsize role in shaping online culture. Because its firehose of data was easily accessible to researchers, the public conversations that happened there fueled studies into everything from global elections to public health.

By closing its API to developers and the research community, Musk made it clear he was not interested in using Twitter for anything that couldn’t make him a buck in the process. Twitter’s data was simply another part of the platform to commodify. Nearly a year later, making Twitter’s API inaccessible to all but those with the deepest pockets may not seem like even the tenth-most consequential change to happen under Musk, but it showed just how willing he was to alienate influential communities on Twitter. It was also a major warning sign of what was to come.

The blue check fiasco

If killing Twitter’s API was a quiet warning sign, the complete destruction of Twitter “verification” was a five-alarm fire. Twitter’s verification system was always flawed, but it hinged on the basic premise that the company had some evidence the accounts it verified belonged to the actual people claiming them and that those were people or organizations of some importance. When Musk rolled out his poorly thought out paid verification scheme last year, it went horribly and predictably wrong almost immediately because he failed to uphold any kind of identity check.

Despite the chaotic initial rollout, verification’s now-meaningless status did not become fully apparent until this year. After a wave of thousands of spammers, scammers and Musk sycophants signed up for verification, Twitter began removing “legacy” verification from thousands of accounts.

The algorithmic boost provided to the new paid-for wave of blue checks, combined with the promise of a potential share of ad revenue, has drastically altered the dynamics of conversation on Twitter. Verified accounts are given priority ranking in replies and search results, regardless of the size of their following or their engagement — which has made Twitter even less relevant and useful. And the promise of potential ad revenue has incentivized the worst kind of engagement bait.

The result is that even the most carefully curated timelines have become filled with useless spam. And fraudsters are increasingly using pay-to-play verification to carry out scams targeting people trying to reach legitimate customer service channels.

X marks… the death of Twitter

If you were to look for a singular moment when Twitter died, however, it happened in July, when Musk announced that the company would now be known as X. The company changed its name, logo and everything formerly associated with the bird app.

This was more than an ill-considered rebrand. X, a letter with which Musk has long been fascinated, represented, literally, the end of Twitter. For as much as Musk has said it’s about creating an “everything app,” it’s also about fully severing any ties to the expectations and norms associated with Twitter. Want to break verification? Want to charge new users for the privilege of posting? Want to make news stories unreadable? Want to maliciously slow down links to competitors’ websites? Want to re-platform the most heinous peddlers of hate and conspiracy theories? Those actions may have been at odds with Twitter’s mission, but at X, it’s all just another Tuesday. As CEO Linda Yaccarino told CNBC “the rebrand represented really a liberation from Twitter.”

It’s unclear if Musk will ever succeed at creating anything resembling an “everything app” where users will be able to use X to run their “entire financial world.” So far, users seem to have little interest in the somewhat random assortment of new features that have been introduced, like live shopping and aggregating job listings. What Musk has succeeded at, however, is reshaping the platform in his own image.

But if there was any doubt remaining about whether the platform had a chance, Musk has almost single handedly wiped out what remained of Twitter’s ad business. After boosting an antisemitic conspiracy theory and repeatedly failing to prevent ads from appearing near pro-Nazi content, many of the company’s largest remaining advertisers have halted their spending on the platform.

Musk, naturally, responded by telling advertisers “go fuck yourself,” while speculating that the loss of ad dollars could “kill the company.”

But it’s not just advertisers who have fled an increasingly toxic platform. Many of the biggest and most-followed accounts have stopped posting in recent weeks. X’s infrastructure continues to slowly crumble, with random features constantly breaking. Meanwhile, all this has only strengthened the growing number of X competitors, and especially the Meta-owned Threads app. Threads is surging, landing at number four on Apple’s list of most-downloaded apps of the year, despite a late summer launch. X, which has seen steady declines in traffic and engagement, did not make the list.

The post How Twitter died in 2023 and why X may not be far behind appeared first on Best News.

Casgevy, which also received the greenlight from regulators in the UK for another blood disorder called beta thalassemia, works by being administered in a single-infusion of genetically modified stem cells to a patient. Clinical study participants that took Casgevy were free from symptoms associated with sickle cell disease, like periodic episodes of extreme pain due to blocked blood flow through vessels, for up to a year.

CRISPR, which modifies precise regions of a human’s DNA strands, was once thought to be a far off scientific innovation. Human cells were first modified using CRISPR in clinical trials in China back in 2016. Less than a decade later, these landmark approvals have set the stage for future nods by regulators for other CRISPR-based therapies that can treat things like HIV, cancers and high blood pressure. “Gene therapy holds the promise of delivering more targeted and effective treatments,” Nicole Verdun, director of the Office of Therapeutic Products within the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research said in a recent press release.

CRISPR-based gene editing can be designed as a therapeutic for a number of diseases. A scientist can either delete, disrupt or insert segments of DNA to treat conditions by either targeting specific genes or engineering new cell therapies. The editing process can occur ex vivo (outside the body), in the same way Casgevy does, or in vivo (inside the body). Using CRISPR, sickle cell patients’ blood stem cells are modified in a lab before they are re-infused via a single-dose infusion as part of a hematopoietic transplant.

Neville Sanjana, a core faculty member at the New York Genome Center and associate professor in the Department of Biology at New York University, runs the Sanjana lab, which develops gene therapies for complex diseases like autism and cancer. “One of the really fundamental characteristics of CRISPR is its programmability,” Sanjana told Engadget. While working at the Zhang lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Sanjana says he helped design the “guide RNA” that became the blueprint for Vertex’s Casgevy. “CRISPR screens can be powerful tools for understanding any disease or genetic trait,” Sanjana said. Right now, he said biomedical folks are focused on applying CRISPR-based therapies for really serious inheritable diseases.

While it does “set a precedent” to have these first CRISPR-based gene therapies out there, it could also mean that regulators and the general public will regard future innovations in the space as “less novel,” Katie Hasson, a researcher with the Center for Genetics and Society (CGS) told Engadget. The CGS is a public interest and social justice organization that is focused on making sure gene editing is developed and distributed for good. Hasson explained, it doesn’t mean that because one got approved that all other innovative therapies to come after it will not get as much scrutiny.

Beyond therapeutics, gene editing has very broad applications for the discovery and understanding of diseases. Scientists can use CRISPR to explore the origins of things like cancer and pave paths for therapeutics and incurable diagnoses, but that’s not all there is to it. Scientists still need to conduct “considerable experimental research” when it comes to bringing an actual therapeutic to fruition, Sanjana said. “When we focus on therapeutic activity at a particular site in the genome, we need to make sure that there will not be any unintended consequences in other parts of the genome.”

Still, the spotlight will always shine a brighter light on the flashy developments of CRISPR from a therapeutic standpoint. Currently, a new gene editing method is being developed to target specific cells in a process called “cancer shredding“ for difficult-to-treat brain cancer. Scientists have even discovered a pathway to engineer bacteria to discover tumorous cells. However, there are barriers to using CRISPR in clinical practice due to the lack of “safe delivery systems to target the tissues and cells.”

“Maybe by curing one disease, you might give them a different disease — especially if you think of cancer. We call that a secondary malignancy,” Sanjana said. While there is strong reason for concern, one cure creating a pathway for other diseases or cancers is not unique to CRISPR. For example, CAR T cell therapy, which uses an entirely different approach to cell-based gene therapy and is not reflective of CRISPR, is a lifesaving cancer treatment that the FDA discovered can, in certain situations, cause cancer.

“We definitely don’t want any unintended consequences. There are bits of the genome that if you edit them by mistake, it’s probably no big deal but then there are other genes that are vitally important,” Sanjana said. Direct assessment of “off-target effects” or events in which a gene edit incorrectly edits another point on a DNA strand in vivo is challenging.

The FDA recommends that after a clinical trials’ period of investigatory study looking at the efficacy of a gene editing-based therapy, there needs to be a 15-year long term follow up after product administration. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said that the agency’s approval of Casgevy follows “rigorous evaluations of the scientific and clinical data.” Right now, researchers are focused on improving the precision and accuracy of gene editing and having the proper follow up is absolutely well merited, Sanjana explained. “The process right now is a careful one.”

Hasson believes that the 15-year recommendation is a good start. “I know that there is a big problem overall with pharmaceutical companies actually following through and doing those long term post-market studies.”

That’s where new approaches come into play. Base editing, a CRISPR-derived genome editing method that makes targeted changes to DNA sequences, has been around since 2016. Drugs that use base editing have already made headway in the scientific community. Verve Therapeutics developed a gene edited therapy that can lower cholesterol in patients with a single infusion. At higher doses, Verve said the treatment has the potential to reduce proteins associated with bad cholesterol for 2.5 years. Base editing, like CRISPR, has many potential applications for treatment and discovery. For example, base editing could repair a gene mutation that causes childhood blindness. Researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine also found base editing could help understand what genetic changes influence a patient’s response to cancer therapies.

Base editors use CRISPR to bring another functional element to a specific place in the genome. “But it doesn’t matter whether it’s CRISPR cutting or base editing… any time you’re modifying DNA…you would want to know what the off target effects are and you can bet that the FDA wants to know that too. You’re going to need to collect data using standard models like cell culture, or animal models to show there are zero or near zero off-target impacts,” Sanjana said.

CRISPR-based therapies already show high therapeutic potential for conditions beyond sickle cell disease. From blood based treatments, to edited allogeneic immune cells for cancers, there are a number of human clinical trials underway or expected to start next year. Trials for gene-edited therapies that target certain cells for cancer and autoimmune diseases are expected to begin in 2024.

It won’t be until 2025 before we get a better understanding of how Excision BioTherapeutics’ CRISPR-based therapy works to treat HIV. The application of gene editing as a therapeutic for Alzhiemer’s is still in the early stages, with mice at the forefront of research. Similarly, University College London researchers proved that CRISPR has promise as a potential therapeutic for treatment-resistant forms of childhood epilepsy. In a recent study, a gene edited therapy developed in the lab was shown to reduce seizures in mice.

But the clinical process of getting CRISPR to safely and effectively work as it’s intended isn’t the only hurdle. The pricing of CRISPR and related therapies in general will be a huge barrier to access. The Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), a research group that hopes to advance ethical use of these gene editing in medicine, estimates that the average CRISPR-based therapy can cost between $500,000 and $2 million per patient. The IGI has built out an “Affordability Task Force” to tackle the issue of expanding access to these novel therapies. Vertex’s sickle cell treatment costs a cool $2.2 million per treatment, before hospital costs. David Altshuler, the chief scientific officer at Vertex, told MIT Tech Review that wants to innovate the delivery of the therapeutic and make it more accessible to patients. “I think the goal will be achieved sooner by finding another modality, like a pill that can be distributed much more effectively,” Altshuler said.

“Access is a huge issue and it’s a huge equity issue,” the CGS’ Hasson told Engadget. “I think we would also like to look at equity here even more broadly. It’s not just about who gets access to the medication once it comes on the market but really how can we prioritize equity in the research that’s leading to these treatments.” The US already does a poor job of providing equitable healthcare access as it is, Hasson explained, which is why it’s important for organizations like CGS to pose roundtable discussions about implementing guardrails that value ethical considerations. “If you support people having access to healthcare, it should encompass these cutting edge treatments as well.”

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The post 2023 was a big year for CRISPR-based gene editing but challenges remain appeared first on Best News.

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Apple Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad

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MOFT Sit-Stand Laptop Desk

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Logitech Brio 500

Our current favorite webcam will up the video quality of all of the conference calls you take. The Logitech Brio 500 records 1080p 30fps video, and its improved light correction will help you put your best face forward regardless of the environment in which you’re streaming. Much like Logitech’s other webcams, the Brio 500 is a plug-and-play solution — just connect it via one of the USB-C ports on your MacBook and start a call. But you can customize things further if you want using the LogiTune software, which lets you change things like field of view, contrast, brightness, autofocus and more. The Brio 500 also supports Logitech’s RightSight technology, which keeps you in the middle of the frame even when you move around, similar to Apple’s Center Stage feature on its iPads. Admittedly, an external webcam will be most useful for those working with an older MacBook that still has a 720p built-in camera, but even those with new MacBooks can get use out of the Brio 500 — and if you spend most of your days on video calls, you’ll want the extra bump in quality and superior customizations that Logitech’s accessory provides. — Valentina Palladino, Senior Commerce Editor

$95 at AmazonExplore More Buying Options$130 at Staples$130 at Office DepotYilador

Yilador Webcam Cover (3 Pack)

The built-in cameras on MacBooks may have gotten better over the past few years, but they still don’t include a cover for when you want a little extra privacy. Webcam covers like these from Yilador are cheap and effective — these are super thin at 0.027 inches and adhere right over your webcam, allowing you to slide a shutter over the camera when you’re not using it. They’re easy to install, and the adhesive is secure enough that the cover won’t fall off but you can also remove the cover and stick it onto a new laptop when you eventually upgrade. The standard black option is great if you want the cover to blend in with the bezels surrounding your MacBook’s display, or you can opt for a fun design that features pizzas, fruits or cute little characters. — V.P.

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LapGear MyDesk Lap Desk

If you take your MacBook from room to room with you, you’ve probably found yourself working in some less-than-ergonomic positions. When you want to relax on the couch or your favorite armchair and still get some work done, a lap desk like this one from LapGear can make it more comfortable. It has enough surface area to fit 13- and 15-inch MacBooks, with extra side space where you can use a Bluetooth mouse along with your notebook. The raised ledge towards the bottom will prevent your laptop from sliding off, and the two storage wells at the top are good places to store pens, sticky notes, snacks and more. — V.P.

$20 at AmazonExplore More Buying Options$24 at Office Depot$34 at Bed Bath & BeyondPhoto by Amy Skorheim / Engadget

Satechi Dual Dock Stand

The Satechi Dual Dock Stand is our top pick for MacBooks in our docking station guide. It lets you go from using your laptop on the road to having a complete, peripheral-heavy set up back at your desk using a single (dual) plug. The dock fits neatly beneath your computer and has ports for monitors, Ethernet, and plenty of accessories with two USB-C and two USB-C connections. It connects to the two USB-C inputs on a Pro or Air, which means it can get around some of the multi-monitor limitations older MacBooks have. It’s not powered, which makes it more portable, but you’ll need to either run on battery, provide power via the USB-C passthrough port or do what I do and just use your MagSafe connector.

$150 at AmazonAnker

Anker 555 USB-C Hub

The latest MacBook Pros may have a bevy of ports, but they’re the only Mac laptops that have that level of connectivity. Anker’s 555 USB-C hub and accessories like it will be a necessity for anyone working with a new Air or an older Mac model. Anker’s hub gives you eight ports: two USB-A ports, one HDMI port, SD and microSD card slots, one Ethernet jack and two USB-C ports, one of which provides 100W power to charge your MacBook. The USB-C and USB-A ports can handle 10 Gbps file transfers and you can connect a 4K/60Hz monitor to the HDMI slot. Anker’s accessory may be ultra-portable, but it has enough power and versatility to be the only laptop hub you need. — V.P.

$50 at AmazonExplore More Buying Options$75 at NeweggBelkin

Belkin 108W GaN USB Charger

In our fast charger guide, Apple’s included 140W power adapter was the quickest to refill an M1 MacBook Pro, but it only has a single port. As our reviewer Sam Rutherford points out, that seems like a missed opportunity. Belkin’s four-port GaN BoostCharge Pro 108W charger gives you space for two USB-A and two USB-C cables and was the second fastest performer, getting the laptop from ten percent to 75 percent in about 45 minutes. The starting price is also about $10 cheaper than Apple’s. The BoostCharge Pro wasn’t the top pick in our 100W-plus category because it lagged when powering an Android phone, but if you’re looking for a reliable wall charger for your MacBook, this will serve you well. — Amy Skorheim, Commerce Writer

$80 at AmazonExplore More Buying Options$121 at Staples$90 at Abt ElectronicsAnker

Anker 100W 10ft USB-C to USB-C Cable

It would be nice if you could grab a random charging cable and have it work correctly with any device. But not all cables are the same: If you want to take advantage of a fast charging brick or the quick-charge port of a power bank, you’ll need a power delivery cable with a high wattage rating. Anker’s USB-C to USB-C 100W cable was the conduit of choice when Sam tested out fast chargers for our guide. It’s plenty long at 10 feet and it’s affordable at $16 (although, we’ve seen it go on sale for less). While it supports data transfer, it’s not rated for video output. For that, you’ll want a video cable or one marked as Thunderbolt 3 or 4. — A.S.

$10 at AmazonPhoto by Amy Skorheim / Engadget

Mophie Powerstation Pro AC 27,000mAh battery

When you take your MacBook on the road, it’s nice to have a way to juice it back up if an outlet isn’t available. Mophie’s Powerstation Pro AC is a massive, 27,000mAh power bank with 20W USB-C and USB-A ports, a 60W USB-C power delivery port and a 100W AC plug. In our tests, it recharged a 16-inch MacBook Pro from ten percent to 75 percent in 89 minutes — and that’s while using WiFi, a VPN, Slack and multiple active tabs in Chrome. The 140W power brick that comes with that laptop is too power-hungry for the 100W AC port, but plugging the USB-C end of the MagSafe cable into the Powerstation worked great. — A.S.

$174 at AmazonExplore More Buying Options$200 at Verizon$200 at Abt ElectronicsPhoto by Amy Skorheim / Engadget

Roost Laptop Stand

Hunching over a MacBook all day is murder on your back and neck, so it’s wise to make your everyday setup more ergonomic by using a stand paired with a separate keyboard and mouse. The Roost Stand adjusts to seven different heights and can accommodate up to a 16-inch MacBook Pro. It folds up to a slim stick and weighs just over six ounces, making it not only good for your desk, but also as part of your go-everywhere digital-nomad setup. Just be prepared: when I set mine up in public, I always get questions from strangers. — A.S.

$90 at AmazonPhoto by Amy Skorheim / Engadget

Logitech MX Ergo Wireless Trackball Mouse

There is a mouse graveyard in my office cabinet — devices I’ve tried and discarded because they didn’t help with my shoulder aches. The solution was a roller ball mouse and Logitech’s MX Ergo is the best I’ve found. It tilts for a more natural “handshake” grip and has a slow-mo trackball button for more precise movements in Photoshop and other apps. The scroll wheel is speedy but precise and you can switch between two computers (or one MacBook and one iPad) with the pairing button. You can even program the various buttons to do app-specific things using Logitech’s software. My only gripe is the antiquated micro-USB charging port, but the battery lasts long enough that I only have to use it once every few months. It’s pricey at $100, so you may prefer the $70 Ergo Lift. It also offers a handshake grip, but without the roller ball, and has Bluetooth or USB dongle connectivity options. — A.S.

$77 at AmazonExplore More Buying Options$65 at Woot$90 at LogitechPhoto by Amy Skorheim / Engadget

Apple Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad

We’ve already suggested you don’t work all day directly on your laptop, so along with your stand and external mouse, you’ll need a keyboard. Apple’s own Magic Keyboard with numeric keypad is a solid work-from-home or office option. It pairs quickly and reliably with any MacBook, and I appreciate the expanded key selection, which includes a forward delete key. Apple claims the battery lasts about a month with regular use, which jives with my experience, and you can recharge from your laptop while you work (a no-brainer feature the Magic Mouse doesn’t have). On the other hand, if you enjoy the pleasing clack of mechanical keys, consider some of our favorite 60-percent keyboards. — A.S.

$108 at WalmartExplore More Buying Options$108 at Amazon$115 at B&H PhotoPhoto by Amy Skorheim / Engadget

Logitech K380 Multi-Device Bluetooth Keyboard

I’ve carried Logitech’s K380 keyboard for travel and coffee shop sojourns for five years (and I’m currently typing on it). It puts up with rough treatment and connects easily to a roster of machines, including Mac, iOS, Windows, Android and Chrome OS. It has a that critical forward delete key and three Bluetooth pairing buttons so you can switch quickly between different devices. It takes three AAA-cell batteries, but lasts for over a year on a set. The top-row function keys support a few Mac-specific shortcuts like volume, mute, playback control and the “expose” function that shows all your open apps at once. — A.S.

$29 at B&H PhotoExplore More Buying Options$40 at Amazon$87 at NeweggPhoto by Amy Skorheim / Engadget

MOFT Sit-Stand Laptop Desk

Moft’s Sit-Stand laptop desk is a two-pound, flat-folding amalgamation of metal boards, magnets and vegan leather that reconfigures into a surprisingly sturdy prop for your MacBook. Standing mode lifts your laptop a good 10 inches so you can stand occasionally, switching up your working position with minimal effort. Gravity alone holds your laptop to the stand, so maybe don’t leave it unattended, but even with energetic typing, my laptop remained stable and wobble-free. It folds into four more positions for sitting, including a 25-degree angle that elevates the screen while still being comfortable for typing. The 45- and 35-degree arrangements get your screen to eye level, but you’ll need an external keyboard to type comfortably. The 60-degree formation is too steep for a MacBook, but will do a great job if you have a tablet. — A.S.

$60 at AmazonExplore More Buying Options$98 at Newegg

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