Once upon a time, in the year 2016 Apple completely disrupted our lives by removing the headphone jack. Starting with the iPhone 7, there was no port for your wired headphones, just a lightning charger. But, they did include one thing with the phone to soften the blow: a lightning to 3.5mm headphone jack adapter that allowed up to use our wired headphones in peace. Well, as all good things come to an end so, it seems, is the adapter, MacRumors reports.
Right now, the $9 adapter is listed as sold out in the US and most other countries, with it for sale only a few places in Europe. The same pattern occurred earlier this year to the SuperDrive, with it selling out around the world before being discontinued.
It's not a big shock if the adapter is no more, with wireless headphones and earbuds becoming such mainstays over the last decade (remember 2016 is also when Apple released its first generation of AirPods). Plus, you can't even use this adapter on the iPhone 15 or 16 series thanks to their USB-C port. Notably, the USB-C to headphone jack adapter is still available, also for $9.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/headphones/it-might-be-time-to-say-goodbye-to-apples-lightning-to-35mm-jack-adapter-133014701.html?src=rss
Back in January at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), LG unveiled a 27-inch 480Hz OLED panel with some incredible specs, but didn't say when or even if it would build a monitor around it. Now, the company has announced the UltraGear GX7 (27GX790A), a 27-inch QHD (2,560 x 1,440) OLED gaming monitor with a 480Hz refresh rate and a .03-millisecond response time — the fastest of any QHD OLED monitor, LG claims.
The new display supports both NVIDIA's G-Sync and AMD's FreeSync technology to reduce screen tearing and flickering. It received VESA's DisplayHDR True Black 400 certification, meaning it's decently bright, supports a wide color gamut (DCI-P3 98.5 percent) and produces deep blacks. It also comes with an anti-glare and low reflection coating.
The UltraGear GX7 is equipped with a headphone jack and both HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2.1 inputs. It should be noted that neither of those display technologies natively support 480Hz refresh rates at 1440p resolutions, so LG's new display will likely use DSC (display stream compression) technology that allows such a high refresh rate in conjunction with modern NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. Finally, it's perched on sleek, height-adjustable stand with 15 degrees of tilt and 30 degrees of swivel.
LG's new display isn't cheap at $1,000, but it does undercut rival Sony's InZone M10S (also a 1440p 480Hz OLED display) by $100. However, Sony's monitor has a few extra pro gaming features, including one that draws an outline around enemies and another that simulates older LCD monitors for players who prefer that. The UltraGear GX7 is live on LG's site, but there's no pre-order button or shipping date yet.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/lg-unveils-its-own-480hz-oled-gaming-monitor-131924601.html?src=rss
The iFixit teardown of the PS5 Pro is here, and while there isn’t all that much different going on from what we’ve seen with the PS5 and PS5 Slim in terms of repairability, Sony has made one notable change: in the Pro, it’s pretty easy to get to the CMOS battery. Whereas accessing this battery to replace it in the two previous PS5 models required a fair amount of work due to its placement beneath the main board, iFixit found that it’s right under the faceplates in the PS5 Pro and nestled behind a hatch that has just one screw.
That’s a nice improvement over the other PS5s, where “you’ve got to take apart almost the whole thing to change [the CMOS battery] out,” iFixit notes. Other than that, things look pretty familiar. That’s not to say the PS5 Pro itself doesn’t have excitement to offer — as our reviewers found, the PS5 Pro is an absolute beast of a console when it comes to performance. Less exciting though is its $700 price tag.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/ifixits-ps5-pro-teardown-reveals-an-easily-replaceable-cmos-battery-204423402.html?src=rss
It’s been a few years since Apple first introduced the AirTag, and while the tracker has undoubtedly become a useful everyday tool for a lot of buyers, there have also been concerns — and a class-action lawsuit — over misuses of the device as reports of AirTag stalking have come to light. With all of this in mind, Apple is reportedly building some privacy improvements into its next AirTag. Namely, it’ll be more tamper-proof, Mark Gurman reports in this week’s Power On newsletter.
The second-generation AirTag, which Gurman reports is expected to be released mid-next year, will be made so it’s more difficult to remove the speaker, he writes. Apple has implemented features to curb unwanted tracking, including sound alerts that will let a person know there’s an unknown AirTag in their vicinity, but it’s still relatively easy to remove the speaker, which would make it less noticeable. On top of the privacy tweaks, the new AirTag will also bring upgrades to range and the onboard wireless chip, according to Gurman. But looks-wise, it shouldn’t be much different from the AirTag we’re used to.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wearables/apples-next-airtag-is-coming-in-2025-with-privacy-improvements-173028439.html?src=rss
Amazon has a Black Friday deal on a pair of Blink Mini 2 cameras. The security cam, which just arrived earlier this year, has a built-in spotlight and supports person detection. Typically, it costs $40 apiece or $70 for a pair, but you can get two Blink Mini 2 cameras today for $35. That’s a record low — and cheap enough to qualify as a stocking stuffer.
The compact security camera has color night vision capabilities thanks to its built-in LED spotlight. It supports person detection, although you’ll need a Blink Subscription for that. They start at $3 monthly or $30 annually for one device. (And you get a 30-day trial to see if it’s worth it.)
The camera supports 1080p HD live view and has a wider field of view than its predecessor (143 degrees diagonally vs. 110 in the original). It also has a low-light image sensor. The Blink Mini 2 works with Alexa and supports two-way audio.
The plug-in camera works indoors and out, but you’ll need a $10 weather-resistant power adapter to use it outside. However, it does include mounting screws in the box, along with a 13-ft indoor power adapter and a stand for each camera. You can order the camera in black or white.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/black-friday-deal-a-two-pack-of-blink-mini-2-cameras-is-on-sale-for-only-35-140009061.html?src=rss
Back in October, the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) admitted that they were looking into "the unauthorized access to commercial telecommunications infrastructure by actors affiliated with the People’s Republic of China." These bad actors, collectively called "Salt Typhoon," allegedly targeted US officials and staffers for the recently concluded presidential elections. A few days later, though, The Wall Street Journal reported that the group had access to a lot more people than originally thought. Basically, the hackers could have accessed the data of any American who's a customer of AT&T and Verizon. That list of carriers has grown just a bit longer, because according to a new report by The Journal and Reuters, Salt Typhoon had also infiltrated T-Mobile's network.
The hackers are believed to have exploited various vulnerabilities, such as those plaguing Cisco Systems routers, to get inside the carriers' network. They also used AI and machine learning, The Journal said, and stayed inside some of the systems they infiltrated for over eight months. That's enough time to get away with a bunch of sensitive data — they were allegedly able to access the phone lines of US senior national security officials, as well as the call logs and unencrypted texts of their targets. The hackers were also reportedly able to access the information collected by carriers to comply with surveillance requests from the American authorities.
A company spokesperson told The Journal that T-Mobile is "closely monitoring" the attacks and said that its systems and data "have not been impacted in any significant way." They also said that the carrier didn't find evidence that its customers' information has been compromised in the security breach.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/t-mobile-was-also-infiltrated-by-china-linked-telecom-hackers-120004712.html?src=rss
As the competition between Bluesky and Threads heats up, Meta is adding a new feature to Threads that will likely look familiar to Bluesky users: custom feeds. The Meta-owned service is starting to test a feature that allows users to pin topic-based feeds to the home screen of the app.
The change will give people additional feeds beyond the algorithmic “for you,” which will remain the default view, and their “following feed.” Users can add custom feeds by searching a keyword like “skincare” and then tapping the “...” menu and selecting “create new feed.” These feeds can be further customized by adding specific profiles of people whose posts you want to see in that feed. Users are able to add up to 128 custom feeds in the app, a Meta spokesperson said, though it’s still only a test for now so not all users have access to it just yet.
The feature is similar in many ways to Bluesky’s custom feeds, which the company introduced last year. But while there are dozens of user-created algorithmic feeds in the app, making a new one is still a technical process. Meta’s version of the feature, however, is more straightforward. It could also address some users’ complaints about Threads’ main algorithmic feed.
The latest Threads feature comes as Bluesky has had a particularly good month. Though the service is still far smaller than Threads, which has more than 275 million users, Bluesky, which has just under 17 million users at the time of this writing, has been gaining momentum. The decentralized service added a million new users in the week following the election, and added another million new sign-ups in a single day this week. That’s striking considering Threads has also been growing by about a million users a day, according to a recent post from Instagram chief Adam Mosseri. If Bluesky is able to sustain that level of growth for very long, Meta may feel even more pressure to borrow some ideas from its smaller rival.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-is-testing-custom-feeds-for-threads-183948414.html?src=rss
Apple's latest M4-powered MacBook Pro is a pretty stellar laptop. We gave it a score of 92 in our review, due in part to its great screen. The display is brighter this time around, peaking at 1,000 nits for SDR (standard dynamic range) content and 1,600 nits for HDR material. However, there's another aspect of the screen about which Apple has strangely been keeping mum.
As noted by display expert Ross Young, Apple used a quantum dot (QD) film instead of a red KSF phosphor film on the display. "In the past, Apple went with the KSF solution due to better efficiency and lack of cadmium (Cd), but the latest Cd-free QD films are very efficient, feature as good or better color gamut and better motion performance," Young explained. That means the latest MacBook Pro screen should offer a wider color range than in the past while making motion look smoother.
Big Apple display news, they have adopted quantum dots for the first time. The latest MacBook Pro's (M4) use a quantum dot (QD) film rather than a red KSF phosphor film.
In the past, Apple went with the KSF solution due to better efficiency and lack of cadmium (Cd), but the… pic.twitter.com/5olq9lEHs9
Rather than being an early adopter itself, Apple often waits until technology has advanced to the point where it makes sense for the company to use it in products. Apple had considered using quantum dot tech in iMac displays at least as far back as 2015. But as TechRadar notes, cadmium is a toxic element and that would not have squared with Apple's stated commitment to environmentalism efforts, so the company abandoned that idea. However, cadmium-free film now makes quantum dot tech more feasible for Apple.
Quantum dots aren't exactly new. Other manufacturers have been using them in QLED TVs and monitors for many years at this point. QD-OLED panels are becoming more commonplace too. Apple is still using MiniLED backlighting in its MacBook Pros, but this could be a case of the company laying the groundwork for future QD-OLED MacBook Pro variants.
Engadget has contacted Apple for comment.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/apple-secretly-included-quantum-dot-tech-in-the-m4-macbook-pros-display-173424130.html?src=rss
If you’re looking for a gift for the aspiring vlogger in your life, or you want to try your hand at making more content for social media, this Black Friday deal may have just what you’re looking for. The DJI Osmo Mobile 6 smartphone gimbal has dropped to only $89; that’s a 36 percent discount and an all-time-low price on the camera-stabilizing device.
For the uninitiated, this product keeps a steady lock on smartphones so as to provide smooth camera and video footage. The Osmo Mobile 6 is a step up from its predecessors in nearly every way. It features a newly-designed handle that’s more comfortable to hold and a larger clamp to accommodate all of those modern giant phones. The clamp can also wrap itself around smaller phones in bulky cases.
This model boasts a built-in extension rod, so it doubles as a selfie stick. It also features the company’s ActiveTrack software. This allows for increased stability over longer distances and will actually track subjects as they turn, spin or move. Another new feature is Quick Launch for iPhone models. This automatically forces the phone into the camera view when the gimbal is unfolded.
There’s a built-in status panel to check battery levels, a timelapse feature, gestural controls and a whole lot more. It’s a nifty little gadget. On the downside, this is a lot of money for a smartphone clamp, even at $89. This is for people who prioritize top-tier footage.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/the-dji-osmo-mobile-6-gimbal-is-down-to-an-all-time-low-price-for-black-friday-161257902.html?src=rss
The latest Amazon Fire HD 8, updated last month and starting at $100, is a modest refresh, offering more RAM, a nominally upgraded camera and some new AI features. The general sales pitch, however, remains the same: You get a just-competent tablet for the essentials at a dirt-cheap (and often-discounted) price, and in exchange, Amazon gets to plant another appliance for its own apps and services in your home. Nothing about this update drastically changes that agreement, but after using the tablet for the past month (and after using older Fire tablets for years prior), it may be time to demand more from Amazon’s end of the bargain.
It’s definitely a cheap tablet
Physically, the new Fire HD 8 is nearly identical to the last one. It is, without a doubt, A Budget Tablet — it’s nowhere near premium, but it doesn’t feel distractingly cheap either. At just under eight inches tall and 0.37 inches thick, it’s small enough for most kids to operate without much struggle and most adults to carry with one hand. If you care more about your tablet’s travel-friendliness than its virtues as a miniature TV, this size should be fine. The whole thing is lightweight at 0.74 pounds, so it’s not an anchor in your bag. Its textured plastic frame is somewhat slippery but altogether sturdy, with no creaking or flexing. Its gently rounded edges dig comfortably into your palms. There are fairly thick bezels around the display, but I’ve never minded those on a tablet — they give your thumbs a natural place to rest.
The display won’t win any awards. It’s the same LCD panel Amazon has trotted out in previous generations, with the same 1,280 x 800 resolution. If you’ve used any iPad, or even many midrange Android tablets, in the last decade, everything about it will be an obvious downgrade. The meager pixel density (189 ppi) makes images and text visibly less sharp. Colors are more muted, too. It doesn’t get bright enough to be totally usable in direct sunlight; you can read it comfortably on the couch, but don’t expect it to work as well by the pool. It’s also a smudge and fingerprint magnet.
The back of the Amazon Fire HD 8 is composed of a sturdy, if mildly slippery, textured plastic.
Jeff Dunn for Engadget
Again, though, the Fire HD 8 is competing in a different weight class than even an older iPad. The fact that the screen is relatively small makes the lower resolution at least tolerable. You can watch Netflix or read Kindle books and not think “man, this sucks” the whole time, especially if you bought the thing for well under $100.
There are other hardware compromises. The speakers aren’t all that loud and struggle to fully separate different parts of songs. They’re entirely on the left edge when you hold the tablet vertically, which always sounds odd. There’s an old USB-C 2.0 port for charging and a glacially slow 5W power adapter in the box. Amazon says it’ll take about five hours to fully charge the tablet with that; you can cut the wait in half if you bring your own 15W charger, though that’s still not fast. There’s no water resistance rating, so you’ll need to be careful if you ever want to read in the tub. Both the five-megapixel rear camera and 2MP front camera are brutal, washing out colors and blurring fine details even in good lighting. (As always, please report anyone using their tablet as a camera to the nearest authorities.)
It’s not all bad. While the Fire HD 8 only comes with 32GB or 64GB of storage built in — of which only 25GB or 54GB is usable, respectively — you can add up to 1TB of additional space with a microSD card. The 13-inch iPad Pro, which starts at $1,299, does not let you do that (I’m just saying!). The Fire HD 8 also has a headphone jack, which helps offset the mediocre speaker performance a little bit, plus there’s Bluetooth for wireless headphones. And one benefit of the shoddy display resolution is that it makes the Fire HD 8 less power-hungry: Amazon rates the tablet’s battery life at up to 13 hours. I got much more than that in our (relatively forgiving) battery test, but closer to 10 or 11 hours with more strenuous use. Either way, it’s good. Most people can safely expect it to survive a day of basic streaming and web browsing.
The Fire HD 8's rear camera has technically jumped from 2MP to 5MP and now supports 1080p video recording, but it still doesn't take photos you'd want to share.
Jeff Dunn for Engadget
The new Fire HD 8 runs on a 2 GHz six-core processor (the MediaTek MT8169A). The base model includes 32GB of storage and 3GB of RAM, while a $130 variant with twice the storage bumps the memory up to 4GB. I tested the former. The previous generation only came with 2GB of RAM — the pricier “Fire HD 8 Plus” had 3GB — so this is a welcome upgrade.
That said, it’s not a huge boost. With the entry-level model, the gist is the same as it’s been with past Fire HD tablets: You can get by with simple video streaming, web browsing, reading and gaming, but there’ll be hitches and occasional crashes along the way, and it’ll never be powerful enough for serious work or reliable multitasking. The modern web is just too ad-heavy and grossly inefficient for a low-end chip like this, so you’ll inevitably have to deal with some choppiness when loading media-heavy sites like ESPN or The New York Times. Apps take just a bit longer to open than they would on a pricier tablet, and it’s not uncommon to get some lag when you jump back to the home screen.
Still, for the money, it’s all workable. It doesn’t take forever to open a Peacock stream or load an article on Engadget. The Mali-G52 GPU can even handle a decent level of gaming — casual card and match-three games run fine, and even more involved fare like PUBG Mobile and Diablo Immortal are totally playable, albeit with severely low-res textures. On the Geekbench 5 benchmark, the Fire HD 8 earned a single-core score of 193 and a multi-core score of 907. That is lightyears away from impressive, but given that the last-gen version struggled to even complete the tests without crashing, it’s still a step up.
One benefit of buying a cheap tablet: You usually get a headphone jack.
Jeff Dunn for Engadget
Ultimately, it’s about managing expectations. You don’t buy a $100 tablet demanding a workhorse. When discounts bring that tablet's price below $60, “not constantly annoying” becomes a compliment. If you can afford the model with 4GB of RAM, that should hold up better over time. Then again, a device like this makes the most sense when it’s as cheap as possible.
The ad-pocalypse that is Fire OS
The Fire HD 8 still runs on Amazon’s Fire OS, a fork of Android 11 that uses a custom app store and is designed to put Amazon’s own apps and services in the spotlight. (For the record, stock Android is up to version 15.) The generous read is that many of those apps are popular, so having them all front and center can be convenient. If you often stream movies on Prime Video, use Amazon Music with a Prime subscription or own a bunch of Kindle ebooks or Audible audiobooks, all of it is right there. You can set up different user profiles — also not available on an iPad — including child accounts that present a curated selection of kid-friendly websites and videos. A fairly robust set of parental controls let you monitor your child’s screen time within that. You can also call on Alexa and thus control various smart home devices hands-free, though Amazon has dropped support for the “Show Mode” that turned the tablet into a pseudo smart display.
You can install Alexa and all of those Amazon services on any tablet, though. Most of Fire OS’ actual changes suck, and they have for years now. The app store plays a big part in that. It covers many of the big streaming and social media players — Netflix, Hulu, TikTok, X, Max, Spotify, Disney+, etc. — but still omits all Google apps, Reddit, Apple Music, Apple TV+, Slack, tons of games and any browser besides Amazon’s ultra-basic Silk, among many others. The lack of Google remains the biggest killer; Amazon’s stock email and calendar apps are far less robust than Gmail and Google Calendar, while the bootleg YouTube “app” is just a web shortcut.
Left to right: one of Fire OS' lockscreen ads, a snapshot of the less-than-useful "For You" page and an example of the AI-powered "Wallpaper Creator" tool.
Jeff Dunn for Engadget
It’s true that you can install the Google Play Store and download most of what’s missing with a hacky workaround, but that’s not the experience Amazon is selling (and not one most people will opt to do). I can’t praise an OS that works best when you go behind its back. And as with many Android tablets, many of the apps that are supported look like blown-up phone apps more than experiences designed with a larger screen in mind.
Because this is a tech product launching in 2024, the Fire HD 8 also comes with a few AI-centric features, including an automated wallpaper creator, a writing assist tool and webpage summaries in the Silk Browser. All of these perform reasonably fast, but It’s hard to call them game-changers: The writing assist makes copy sound overly stilted, while the webpage summaries strip down most articles of their nuances (I beg you, just read the post.) The DALL-E-style wallpaper generator is neater, offering different styles and responding well to natural language requests, but I can’t get excited over AI art when there’s so much of the real thing out there.
More egregious are the ads. Oh, so many ads. Upon activating the tablet for the first time, I was greeted with a full-screen promo for BetMGM — because what budget-conscious tablet buyer isn’t looking to gamble their savings away — and have since been bombarded with lockscreen ads to buy Toshiba hard drives, State Farm insurance and SteelSeries gaming keyboards. Thankfully, you can remove these for an extra $15, either upfront or after purchase.
You can technically install the Google Play Store and get around some of Fire OS' app limitations, but it'll require a bit of legwork.
Jeff Dunn for Engadget
But the spirit of nickel-and-diming you goes beyond that. The first app you see is “Shop Amazon.” The home screen itself is split into two sections: For You and Home. The former is a page filled with content suggestions, a significant chunk of which are either sponsored apps, links to movies on Prime Video and songs on Amazon Music or calls to subscribe to Amazon services like Kids+, Luna and Audible. Some of these are free; many others are paid. At one point, I kid you not, it presented me with an ad to buy a different Fire tablet.
The Home tab does have a traditional app grid, but above it is a “Discover” row that takes up the top 40 percent of the screen and delivers a similar range of not-so-personalized suggestions. As I write this, it includes a link to the Prime Video series Fallout, the sponsored app “Vita Mahjong for Seniors,” the Max app, links to two different thriller books from the author Frieda McFadden and a few other things I’ve shown zero interest in over my time using Amazon services.
It’s a jumbled, undignified mess. There’s a distinct lack of care to Fire OS, a pervading sense that it doesn’t so much have your best interest at heart it wants to needle cash-strapped customers into pumping more revenue into the Amazon machine. This just isn’t the case with iPadOS or even stock Android. Actually pay attention to what Fire OS is doing, and it becomes difficult to see Fire tablets as anything but subsidized ad platforms Amazon can seed in homes on the cheap. If you want a product that treats you with a little more respect, you have to pay for it.
The Fire HD 8 resting on top of a 13-inch iPad Air.
Jeff Dunn for Engadget
Wrap-up
I get it, some of us just need to save some cash. And Amazon, fairly or not (i.e., not), can significantly undercut most other decent budget tablets on price. If cost is your number-one concern, you only want a tablet for casual media consumption and you can live with the unfiltered Amazon-ness of Fire OS, there’s still value to be had here. Little about the Fire HD 8 is good, but much of it is fine for the price, and when that price is as bananas-cheap as $55 with deals, that’s probably enough. So it goes. Just make sure the slate is on sale before you take the plunge. Otherwise, I’d consider the 10.1-inch Fire HD 10, which has the same software annoyances but a sharper, roomier display, more CPU power and a touch more battery life. Either way, here’s hoping Fire OS becomes less user-hostile one day.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/tablets/amazon-fire-hd-8-2024-review-a-cheap-tablet-hampered-by-outdated-software-141924425.html?src=rss