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As usual, summer has sped by in the blink of an eye, which means it’s already back-to-school season. Thankfully, there are some great tech deals for college students (and lucky high school ones), including a record-low price on Apple’s 2022 MacBook Air with an M2 chip. Right now, you can get the 256GB laptop in any color for its Prime Day price of $799, down from $999 — a 20 percent discount. 

The 2022 MacBook Air is our choice for best budget MacBook thanks to a range of features that hold up two years later. It’s a “near-perfect Mac,” as we called it while giving it a 96 in our review, offering a 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display with up to 500 nits of brightness and a 60Hz refresh rate.  

This MacBook also has an M2 chip with eight CPU cores and up to 10 GPU cores. Apple has recently introduced the M4 chip, but the M2 should give you plenty of power for any run-of-the-mill programs. Speaking of power, you should get some excellent, vibrant sound quality with the MacBook Air’s quad-speaker system — plus, it’s compatible with Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio. 

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/apples-m2-macbook-air-drops-to-a-record-low-of-799-140005153.html?src=rss

As usual, summer has sped by in the blink of an eye, which means it’s already back-to-school season. Thankfully, there are some great tech deals for college students (and lucky high school ones), including a record-low price on Apple’s 2022 MacBook Air with an M2 chip. Right now, you can get the 256GB laptop in any color for its Prime Day price of $799, down from $999 — a 20 percent discount. 

The 2022 MacBook Air is our choice for best budget MacBook thanks to a range of features that hold up two years later. It’s a “near-perfect Mac,” as we called it while giving it a 96 in our review, offering a 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display with up to 500 nits of brightness and a 60Hz refresh rate.  

This MacBook also has an M2 chip with eight CPU cores and up to 10 GPU cores. Apple has recently introduced the M4 chip, but the M2 should give you plenty of power for any run-of-the-mill programs. Speaking of power, you should get some excellent, vibrant sound quality with the MacBook Air’s quad-speaker system — plus, it’s compatible with Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio. 

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/apples-m2-macbook-air-drops-to-a-record-low-of-799-140005153.html?src=rss

The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) efforts to ban noncompete agreements has been blocked by a federal judge in Texas. According to The Washington Post, US District Judge Ada Brown has determined that the agency doesn’t have the authority to enforce the rule, which was supposed to take effect on September 4. She reportedly wrote in her decision that the FTC only looked at “inconsistent and flawed empirical evidence” and didn’t consider evidence in support of noncompetes. “The role of an administrative agency is to do as told by Congress, not to do what the agency thinks it should do,” she added. 

FTC Chair Lina M. Khan explained that “noncompete clauses keep wages low, suppress new ideas, and rob the American economy of dynamism” when the agency voted 3-2 in favor of the ban. Noncompete agreements are widely used in the tech industry, and preventing companies from adding them to contracts would mean that workers will be able to freely move to a new job or start a business in the same field. The two Republican commissioners in the FTC, Melissa Holyoak and Andrew Ferguson, voted against the ban and also said that the agency “overstepped the boundaries of its power.”

In July, Brown temporarily blocked the rule’s enforcement to assess the lawsuit filed by Dallas tax services firm Ryan LLC mere hours after the FTC announced the ban. The US Chamber of Commerce and other groups of American businesses eventually joined the tax firm in challenging the new rule on noncompete clauses. 

“We are disappointed by Judge Brown’s decision and will keep fighting to stop noncompetes that restrict the economic liberty of hardworking Americans, hamper economic growth, limit innovation, and depress wages,” FTC spokesperson Victoria Graham told The Post. “We are seriously considering a potential appeal, and today’s decision does not prevent the FTC from addressing noncompetes through case-by-case enforcement actions.”

A federal judge in Florida also blocked the rule last week, though only for the lawsuit’s plaintiffs. Meanwhile, another judge in Pennsylvania ruled last month that the agency has the authority to enforce the ban in a separate case filed by a tree-care company in the state. All three cases could still be appealed and could even make their way to the Supreme Court. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/texas-judge-blocks-the-ftc-from-enforcing-its-ban-on-noncompete-agreements-133059676.html?src=rss

The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) efforts to ban noncompete agreements has been blocked by a federal judge in Texas. According to The Washington Post, US District Judge Ada Brown has determined that the agency doesn’t have the authority to enforce the rule, which was supposed to take effect on September 4. She reportedly wrote in her decision that the FTC only looked at “inconsistent and flawed empirical evidence” and didn’t consider evidence in support of noncompetes. “The role of an administrative agency is to do as told by Congress, not to do what the agency thinks it should do,” she added. 

FTC Chair Lina M. Khan explained that “noncompete clauses keep wages low, suppress new ideas, and rob the American economy of dynamism” when the agency voted 3-2 in favor of the ban. Noncompete agreements are widely used in the tech industry, and preventing companies from adding them to contracts would mean that workers will be able to freely move to a new job or start a business in the same field. The two Republican commissioners in the FTC, Melissa Holyoak and Andrew Ferguson, voted against the ban and also said that the agency “overstepped the boundaries of its power.”

In July, Brown temporarily blocked the rule’s enforcement to assess the lawsuit filed by Dallas tax services firm Ryan LLC mere hours after the FTC announced the ban. The US Chamber of Commerce and other groups of American businesses eventually joined the tax firm in challenging the new rule on noncompete clauses. 

“We are disappointed by Judge Brown’s decision and will keep fighting to stop noncompetes that restrict the economic liberty of hardworking Americans, hamper economic growth, limit innovation, and depress wages,” FTC spokesperson Victoria Graham told The Post. “We are seriously considering a potential appeal, and today’s decision does not prevent the FTC from addressing noncompetes through case-by-case enforcement actions.”

A federal judge in Florida also blocked the rule last week, though only for the lawsuit’s plaintiffs. Meanwhile, another judge in Pennsylvania ruled last month that the agency has the authority to enforce the ban in a separate case filed by a tree-care company in the state. All three cases could still be appealed and could even make their way to the Supreme Court. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/texas-judge-blocks-the-ftc-from-enforcing-its-ban-on-noncompete-agreements-133059676.html?src=rss

Over the past few years, the concept of “AI PCs” has gone from sounding like a desperate attempt to revive the computer industry, to something that could actually change the way we live with our PCs. To recap, an AI PC is any system running a CPU that’s equipped with a neural processing unit (NPU), which is specially designed for AI workloads. NPUs have been around for years in mobile hardware, but AMD was the first company to bring them to x86 PCs with the Ryzen Pro 7040 chips.

Now with its Ryzen AI 300 chips, AMD is making its biggest push yet for AI PCs — something that could pay off in the future as we see more AI-driven features like Microsoft’s Recall. (Which, it’s worth noting, has also been dogged with privacy concerns and subsequently delayed.) To get a better sense of how AMD is approaching the AI PC era, I chatted with Ryzen AI lead Rakesh Anigundi, the Ryzen AI product lead and Jason Banta, CVP and GM of Client OEM. You can listen to the full interview on the Engadget Podcast.

My most pressing question: How does AMD plan to get developers onboard with building AI-powered features? NPUs aren’t exactly a selling point if nobody is making apps that use them, after all. Anigundi said he was well aware that developers broadly “just want things to work,” so the company built a strategy around three pillars: A robust software stack; performant hardware; and bringing in open-source solutions.

“We are of the philosophy that we don’t want to invent standards, but follow the standards,” Anigundi said. “That’s why we are really double clicking on ONNX, which is a cross platform framework to extract the maximum performance out of our system. This is very closely aligned with how we are working with Microsoft, enabling their next generation of experiences and also OEMs. And on the other side, where there’s a lot of innovation happening with the smaller ISVs [independent software vendors], this strategy works out very well as well.”

He points to AMD’s recently launched Amuse 2.0 beta as one way the company is showing off the AI capabilities of its hardware. It’s a simple program for generating AI images, and runs entirely on your NPU-equipped device, with no need to reach out to OpenAI’s DallE or Google’s Gemini in the cloud.

AMD

AMD’s Banta reiterated the need for a great tool set and software stack, but he pointed out that the company also works closely with partners like Microsoft on prototype hardware to ensure the quality of the customer experience. “[Consumers] can have all the hardware, they can have all the tools, they can have all the foundational models, but making that end customer experience great requires a lot of direct one to one time between us and those ISV partners.”

In this case, Banta is also referring to AMD’s relationship with Microsoft when it comes to building Copilot+ experiences for its systems. While we’ve seen a handful of AI features on the first batch of Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ machines, like the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, they’re not available yet on Copilot+ systems running x86 chips from AMD and Intel.

“We’re making that experience perfect,” Banta said. At this point, you can consider Ryzen AI 300 machines to be “Copilot+ ready,” but not yet fully Copilot+ capable. (As I mentioned in my Surface Pro review, Microsoft’s current AI features are fairly basic, and that likely won’t change until Recall is officially released.)

As for those rumors around AMD developing an Arm-based CPU, the company’s executives, naturally, didn’t reveal much. “Arm is a close partner of AMD’s,” Banta said. “We work together on a number of solutions across our roadmaps… As far as [the] overall CPU roadmap, I can’t really talk about what’s coming around the corner.” But given that the same rumor points to NVIDIA also developing its own Arm chip, and considering the astounding performance we’ve seen from Apple and Qualcomm’s latest mobile chips, it wouldn’t be too surprising to see AMD go down the same Arm-paved road. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/amd-explains-its-ai-pc-strategy-123004804.html?src=rss

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