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With the news that Blizzard and ESL FACEIT are preparing to launch a new esports circuit for Overwatch 2, mere months after the death of the Overwatch League, it’s a good time to take stock of the entire esports scene. Things are looking slightly frantic, at least in North America. League of Legends and Rocket League are particularly messy, entering their 2024 seasons with lean budgets and major shakeups. Meanwhile, an expansion of the open-qualifiers model should provide more opportunities for everyday players to compete in Valorant, Overwatch 2, Rocket League and all manner of fighting games. Get those fingers ready, folks.

This week’s stories

Xbox lineup in 2024

Xbox held its first showcase of 2024 last week, highlighting a handful of games that have been in development for years. Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is due out later in 2024, and it comes from Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus studio MachineGames. The new footage showcased lots of whipping, quipping and Nazi punching, just like Indy would want. 

Next, Obsidian’s big fantasy RPG, Avowed, will hit PC and Xbox in the fall. Obsidian is the studio that made Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds, and Avowed looks like its spin on an Elder Scrolls game. 

Finally, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II will come out on May 21, nearly five years after it was announced alongside the reveal of the Xbox Series X.

Esports are back and smaller than ever

2024 is a moment of reckoning for esports, especially in North America. Blizzard killed the Overwatch League last year and it’s trying to start a new series with the ESL, viewership of North American League of Legends is on the decline, and Rocket League’s RLCS tournament is in a state of upheaval.

League of Legends is the king of esports, and in 2023, its World Championship tournament broke viewership records, driven by legendary performances from Korean and Chinese teams — OK, mostly Faker. But no matter how hard I cheer for them, North American League of Legends teams are still kind of a joke on the world stage. Last year, the Korean summer split attracted 1.5 million concurrent viewers, while the LCS summer tournament peaked at 223,000 viewers, and that was down from 370,000 in 2022. The 2024 season kicked off this month with regional tournaments, and the North American LCS looks like a brand new beast. The number of teams competing in the LCS has been cut from 10 to 8, meaning Evil Geniuses and Golden Guardians are gone, and the league is using a faster-paced best-of-one format in the regular season. We’ll see how this all pays off at MSI in May.

In the Rocket League Championship Series, budgets are tight and teams are scattered. There will be two major tournaments this year instead of three, plus the World Championship, and there are fewer spots reserved for both North America and Europe. Six established casters were dropped from this year’s events and it looks like only North America and Europe will have hosted tournaments, in English only. The RLCS prize pool is also smaller this year, down from $6 million to $4.3 million. A handful of teams lost sponsorships heading into 2024 and there was a ton of player shakeup among existing orgs. To top it all off, the game’s most famous player, Squishy, announced plans to retire from pro play to focus on streaming. It’s just a confusing time in Rocket League esports.

One side effect of esports shrinkage is a shift to open qualifiers. Rocket League swapped to open qualifiers this year, meaning basically anyone could compete for a spot in the RLCS, rather than teams buying in for the season. The RLCS prize pool is deeper, even though it’s also smaller, and the top 128 teams in North America will receive small payouts.

The Valorant esports scene has been steadily solidifying since the game’s launch in 2020, with a peak of 1.4 million viewers for the 2023 Valorant Champions Tour. The VCT has always featured open qualifiers, and this year that system is expanding with Premier, an in-game competitive track that acts as another funnel for everyday players to compete on the main stage. (As a side note, the VCT Game Changers series highlights players of marginalized genders and it’s really awesome, check it out sometime.)

Just this week, Blizzard announced the Overwatch Champions Series, a multi-region esports tournament for Overwatch 2. Unlike the deceased Overwatch League, the Champions Series will have open qualifiers. The new series is produced by ESL FACEIT, which is owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which makes me sad.

Meanwhile, the fighting game community has been all over open registration for a while. EVO is the biggest fighting game tournament of the year, and in 2023 it hosted more than 9,000 players competing across eight titles. As a one-on-one genre, fighting games often find themselves on the frontlines of experimentation in esports, and EVO is always a good time.

I think open registration is a cool move for esports in general — it allows more people from diverse backgrounds to participate and provides a sustainable entry point for young pros. This is how talent pipelines are built.

Now Playing

After taking a few months off to play other games, I’m back on Cult of the Lamb. The free Sins of the Flesh update landed last week, and it’s big and sexy, adding layers of debauchery and plenty of new content to the game. As Engadget weekend editor Cheyenne MacDonald said in her review, “We’re having a great time sinning, my followers and I.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/esports-are-messy-in-2024-this-weeks-gaming-news-170043963.html?src=rss

If you haven’t heard, the popular budgeting app Mint is about to go away. Parent company Intuit will shut down the service on March 24, 2024. The company suggests folks migrate to its other personal finance app, Credit Karma. Mint had 3.6 million active users as of 2021, according to Bloomberg, and I’m one of them. I use the app to track all of my accounts in one place without having to log into too many disparate banking apps. But I’ve also used it to monitor my credit score, stick to a monthly budget, and set goals like building a rainy-day fund or paying down my mortgage faster. With that, looking for a Mint alternative beyond Credit Karma became a top priority.

Intuit has not commented on whether it intends to fold Mint’s budgeting features into Credit Karma but as it stands, Credit Karma is not a Mint substitute: It’s meant to monitor your credit and, Intuit hopes, steer you toward credit cards and various other financial products. I downloaded it, spent some time with it and wasn’t impressed.

So, in addition, I recently installed a good half-dozen competing money apps to see if any might cut it as a permanent Mint replacement. What follows is the guide I would have wanted to read: a comparison of budgeting apps that promise to track your net worth and spending in one place. I also pledge to update this guide as the various apps I tested continue to add more features and, in some cases, correct known bugs. Join me as I fall down a rabbit hole.

How we tested

First, I had to do some research. To find a list of apps to test, I consulted trusty ol’ Google (and even trustier Reddit); read reviews of popular apps on the App Store; and also asked friends and colleagues what budget tracking apps they might be using. Some of the apps I found were free, just like Mint. These, of course, show loads of ads (excuse me, “offers”) to stay in business. But most of the available apps require paid subscriptions, with prices typically topping out around $100 a year, or $15 a month. (Spoiler: My top pick is cheaper than that.)

Since this guide is meant to help Mint users find a permanent replacement, any services I chose to test needed to do several things: import all of your account data into one place; offer budgeting tools; and track your spending, net worth and credit score. Except where noted, all of these apps are available for iOS, Android and on the web.

Once I had my shortlist of six apps, I got to work setting them up. For the sake of thoroughly testing these apps (and remember, I really was looking for a Mint alternative myself), I made a point of adding every account to every tracking app, no matter how small or immaterial the balance. What ensued was a veritable Groundhog Day of two-factor authentication. Just hours of entering passwords and one-time passcodes, for the same banks half a dozen times over. Hopefully, you only have to do this once.

How to import your financial data from Mint

If only importing data from Mint were as easy as entering your credentials from inside your new budgeting app and hitting “import.” In fact, any app that advertises the ability to port over your stats from Mint is just going to have you upload a CSV file of transactions and other data.

To download a CSV file from Mint, do the following:

1. Sign into Mint.com and hit Transactions in the menu on the left side of the screen.

2. Select an account, or all accounts.

3. Scroll down and look for “export [number] transactions” in smaller print.

4. Your CSV file should begin downloading.

Note: Downloading on a per-account basis might seem more annoying, but could help you get set up on the other side, if the app you’re using has you importing transactions one-for-one into their corresponding accounts.

The best Mint alternative: Quicken Simplifi

No pun intended, but what I like about Quicken Simplifi is its simplicity. Whereas other apps try to distinguish themselves with dark themes and customizable emoji, Simplifi has a clean user interface, with a landing page that you just keep scrolling through to get a detailed overview of all your stats. These include your top-line balances; net worth; recent spending; upcoming recurring payments; a snapshot of your spending plan; top spending categories; achievements; and any watchlists you’ve set up. You can also set up savings goals elsewhere in the app. I also appreciate how it offers neat, almost playful visualizations without ever looking cluttered. I felt at home in the mobile and web dashboards after a day or so, which is faster than I adapted to some competing services (I’m looking at you, YNAB and Monarch).

Getting set up with Simplifi was mostly painless. I was particularly impressed at how easily it connected to Fidelity; not all budget trackers do, for whatever reason. This is also one of the only services I tested that gives you the option of inviting a spouse or financial advisor to co-manage your account.

Dana Wollman / Engadget

In practice, Simplifi miscategorized some of my expenses, but nothing out of the ordinary compared to any of these budget trackers. As you’re reviewing transactions, you can also mark if you’re expecting a refund, which is a unique feature among the services I tested. Simplifi also estimated my regular income better than some other apps I tested. Most of all, I appreciated the option of being able to categorize some, but not all, purchases from a merchant as recurring. For instance, I can add my two Amazon subscribe-and-saves as recurring payments, without having to create a broad-strokes rule for every Amazon purchase.

The budgeting feature is also self-explanatory. Just check that your regular income is accurate and be sure to set up recurring payments, making note of which are bills and which are subscriptions. This is important because Simplifi shows you your total take-home income as well as an “income after bills” figure. That number includes, well, bills but not discretionary subscriptions. From there, you can add spending targets by category in the “planned spending” bucket. Planned spending can also include one-time expenditures, not just monthly budgets. When you create a budget, Simplifi will suggest a number based on a six-month average.

Not dealbreakers, but two things to keep in mind as you get started: Simplifi is notable in that you can’t set up an account through Apple or Google. There is also no option for a free trial, though Quicken promises a “30-day money back guarantee.”

The best Mint alternative (runner-up): Monarch Money

Monarch Money grew on me. My first impression of the app, which was founded by a former Mint product manager, was that it’s more difficult to use than others on this list, including Simplifi, NerdWallet and Copilot. And it is. Editing expense categories, adding recurring transactions and creating rules, for example, is a little more complicated than it needs to be, especially in the mobile app. (My advice: Use the web app for fine-tuning details.) Monarch also didn’t get my income right; I had to edit it.

Once you’re set up, though, Monarch offers an impressive level of granularity. In the budgets section, you can see a bona fide balance sheet showing budgets and actuals for each category. You’ll also find a forecast, for the year or by month. And recurring expenses can be set not just by merchant, but other parameters as well. For instance, while most Amazon purchases might be marked as “shopping,” those for the amounts of $54.18 or $34.18 are definitely baby supplies, and can be automatically marked as such each time, not to mention programmed as recurring payments. Weirdly, though, there’s no way to mark certain recurring payments as bills, specifically.

Dana Wollman / Engadget

Not long after I first published this story in December 2023, Monarch introduced a detailed reporting section where you can create on-demand graphs based on things like accounts, categories and tags. That feature is available just on the web version of the app for now. As part of this same update, Monarch added support for an aggregator that makes it possible to automatically update the value of your car. These features, too, are likely to appeal to power users who prefer a more hands-on approach to managing their finances.

The mobile app is mostly self-explanatory. The main dashboard shows your net worth; your four most recent transactions; a month-over-month spending comparison; income month-to-date; upcoming bills; an investments snapshot; a list of any goals you’ve set; and, finally, a link to your month-in-review. That month-in-review is more detailed than most, delving into cash flow; top income and expense categories; cash flow trends; changes to your net worth, assets and liabilities; plus asset and liability breakdowns.

On the main screen, you’ll also find tabs for accounts, transactions, cash flow, budget and recurring. Like many of the other apps featured here, Monarch can auto-detect recurring expenses and income, even if it gets the category wrong. (They all do to an extent.) Expense categories are marked by emoji, which you can customize if you’re so inclined.

Monarch Money uses a combination of networks to connect with banks, including Plaid, MX and Finicity, a competing network owned by Mastercard. (I have a quick explainer on Plaid, the industry standard in this space, toward the end of this guide.) As part of an update in late December, Monarch has also made it easier to connect through those other two networks, if for some reason Plaid fails. Similar to NerdWallet, I found myself completing two-factor authentication every time I wanted to get past the Plaid screen to add another account. Notably, Monarch is the only other app I tested that allows you to grant access to someone else in your family — likely a spouse or financial advisor. Monarch also has a Chrome extension for importing from Mint, though really this is just a shortcut for downloading a CSV file, which you’ll have to do regardless of where you choose to take your Mint data.

Coming soon, Monarch says it is adding syncing for investment transactions; bill tracking; a more detailed and “intuitive” approach to goal setting; and net worth graphs on mobile. Monarch hasn’t provided a timeline for most of these items, except to say that the improved goals feature is coming in early 2024.

The best up-and-comer: Copilot Money

Copilot Money might be the best-looking budget tracker I tested. It also has the distinction of being exclusive to iOS and Macs — at least for now. Andres Ugarte, the company’s CEO, has publicly promised that Android and web apps are coming in 2024 (more likely the second half of the year, Ugarte tells me). But until it follows through, I can’t recommend Copilot for most people with so many good competitors out there.

There are other features that Copilot is missing, which I’ll get into. But it is promising, and one to keep an eye on. It’s just a fast, efficient, well designed app, and Android users will be in for a treat when they’ll finally be able to download it. It makes good use of colors, emoji and graphs to help you understand at a glance how you’re doing on everything from your budgets to your investment performance to your credit card debt over time. In particular, Copilot does a better job than almost any other app of visualizing your recurring monthly expenses.

Behind those punchy colors and cutesy emoji, though, is some sophisticated performance. Copilot’s AI-powered “Intelligence” gets smarter as you go at categorizing your expenses. (You can also add your own categories, complete with your choice of emoji.) It’s not perfect. Copilot miscategorized some purchases (they all do), but it makes it easier to edit than most. On top of that, the internal search feature is very fast; it starts whittling down results in your transaction history as soon as you begin typing.

Dana Wollman / Engadget

Copilot is also unique in offering Amazon and Venmo integrations, allowing you to see transaction details. With Amazon, this requires just signing into your Amazon account via an in-app browser. For Venmo, you have to set up [email protected] as a forwarding address and then create a filter, wherein emails from [email protected] are automatically forwarded to [email protected].

While the app is heavily automated, I still appreciate that Copilot marks new transactions for review. It’s a good way to both weed out fraudulent charges, and also be somewhat intentional about your spending habits.

Like Monarch Money, Copilot recently updated its app to make it easier to connect to banks through networks other than Plaid. As part of the same update, Copilot says it has improved its connections to both American Express and Fidelity which, again, can be a bugbear for some budget tracking apps.

Because the app is relatively new (it launched in early 2020), the company is still catching up to the competition on some table-stakes features. Ugarte told me that his team is almost done building out a detailed cash flow section, which could launch before the end of 2023, but more likely in early 2024. On its website, Copilot also promises a raft of AI-powered features that build on its current “Intelligence” platform, the one that powers its smart expense categorization. These include “smart financial goals,” natural language search, a chat interface, forecasting and benchmarking. That benchmarking, Ugarte tells me, is meant to give people a sense of how they’re doing compared to other Copilot users, on both spending and investment performance. Most of these features should arrive in the new year.

Copilot does a couple interesting things for new customers that distinguish it from the competition. There’s a “demo mode” that feels like a game simulator; no need to add your own accounts. The company is also offering two free months with RIPMINT — a more generous introductory offer than most. When it finally does come time to pony up, the $7.92 monthly plan is cheaper than some competing apps, although the $95-a-year-option is in the same ballpark.

The best free budgeting app: NerdWallet

You may know NerdWallet as a site that offers a mix of personal finance news, explainers and guides. I see it often when I google a financial term I don’t know and sure enough, it’s one of the sites I’m most likely to click on. As it happens, NerdWallet also has the distinction of offering one of the only free budget tracking apps I tested. In fact, there is no paid version; nothing is locked behind a paywall. The main catch: There are ads everywhere. To be fair, the free version of Mint was like this, too.

Even with the inescapable credit card offers, NerdWallet has a clean, easy-to-understand user interface, which includes both a web and a mobile app. The key metrics that it highlights most prominently are your cash flow, net worth and credit score. (Of note, although Mint itself offered credit score monitoring, most of its rivals do not.) I particularly enjoyed the weekly insights, which delve into things like where you spent the most money or how much you paid in fees — and how that compares to the previous month. Because this is NerdWallet, an encyclopedia of financial info, you get some particularly specific category options when setting up your accounts (think: a Roth or non-Roth IRA).

Dana Wollman / Engadget

As a budgeting app, NerdWallet is more than serviceable, if a bit basic. Like other apps I tested, you can set up recurring bills. Importantly, it follows the popular 50/30/20 budgeting rule, which has you putting 50% of your budget toward things you need, 30% toward things you want, and the remaining 20% into savings or debt repayments. If this works for you, great — just know that you can’t customize your budget to the same degree as some competing apps. You can’t currently create custom spending categories, though a note inside the dashboard section of the app says “you’ll be able to customize them in the future.” You also can’t move items from the wants column to “needs” or vice versa but “In the future, you’ll be able to move specific transactions to actively manage what falls into each group.” A NerdWallet spokesperson declined to provide an ETA, though.

Lastly, it’s worth noting that NerdWallet had one of the most onerous setup processes of any app I tested. I don’t think this is a dealbreaker, as you’ll only have to do it once and, hopefully, you aren’t setting up six or seven apps in tandem as I was. What made NerdWallet’s onboarding especially tedious is that every time I wanted to add an account, I had to go through a two-factor authentication process to even get past the Plaid splash screen, and that’s not including the 2FA I had set up at each of my banks. This is a security policy on NerdWallet’s end, not Plaid’s, a Plaid spokesperson says.

Precisely because NerdWallet is one of the only budget trackers to offer credit score monitoring, it also needs more of your personal info during setup, including your birthday, address, phone number and the last four digits of your social security number. It’s the same with Credit Karma, which also does credit score monitoring.

Related to the setup process, I found that NerdWallet was less adept than other apps at automatically detecting my regular income. In my case, it counted a large one-time wire transfer as income, at which point my only other option was to enter my income manually (which is slightly annoying because I would have needed my pay stub handy to double-check my take-home pay).

Budgeting apps we also tested

YNAB

YNAB is, by its own admission, “different from anything you’ve tried before.” The app, whose name is short for You Need a Budget, promotes a so-called zero-based budgeting system, which forces you to assign a purpose for every dollar you earn. A frequently used analogy is to put each dollar in an envelope; you can always move money from one envelope to another in a pinch. These envelopes can include rent and utilities, along with unforeseen expenses like holiday gifts and the inevitable car repair. The idea is that if you budget a certain amount for the unknowns each month, they won’t feel like they’re sneaking up on you.

Importantly, YNAB is only concerned with the money you have in your accounts now. The app does not ask you to provide your take-home income or set up recurring income payments (although there is a way to do this). The money you will make later in the month through your salaried job is not relevant, because YNAB does not engage in forecasting.

The app is harder to learn than any other here, and it requires more ongoing effort from the user. And YNAB knows that. Inside both the mobile and web apps are links to videos and other tutorials. Although I never quite got comfortable with the user interface, I did come to appreciate YNAB’s insistence on intentionality. Forcing users to draft a new budget each month and to review each transaction is not necessarily a bad thing. As YNAB says on its website, “Sure, you’ve got pie charts showing that you spent an obscene amount of money in restaurants — but you’ve still spent an obscene amount of money in restaurants.” I can see this approach being useful for people who don’t tend to have a lot of cash in reserve at a given time, or who have spending habits they want to correct (to riff off of YNAB’s own example, ordering Seamless four times a week).

My colleague Valentina Palladino, knowing I was working on this guide, penned a respectful rebuttal, explaining why she’s been using YNAB for years. Perhaps, like her, you have major savings goals you want to achieve, whether it’s paying for a wedding or buying a house. I suggest you give her column a read. For me, though, YNAB’s approach feels like overkill.

PocketGuard

PocketGuard is one of the only reputable free budget trackers I found in my research. Just know it’s far more restricted at the free tier than NerdWallet or Mint. In my testing, I was prompted to pay after I attempted to link more than two bank accounts. So much for free, unless you keep things simple with one cash account and one credit card. When it comes time to upgrade to PocketGuard Plus, you have three options: pay $7.99 a month, $34.99 a year or $79.99 for a one-time lifetime license. That lifetime option is actually one of the few unique selling points for me: I’m sure some people will appreciate paying once and never having to, uh, budget for it again.

From the main screen, you’ll see tabs for accounts, insights, transactions and the “Plan,” which is where you see recurring payments stacked on top of what looks like a budget. The main overview screen shows you your net worth, total assets and debts; net income and total spending for the month; upcoming bills; a handy reminder of when your next paycheck lands; any debt payoff plan you have; and any goals.

Dana Wollman / Engadget

Like some other apps, including Quicken Simplifi, PocketGuard promotes an “after bills” approach, where you enter all of your recurring bills, and then PocketGuard shows you what’s left, and that’s what you’re supposed to be budgeting: your disposable income. Obviously, other apps have a different philosophy: take into account all of your post-tax income and use it to pay the bills, purchase things you want and maybe even save a little. But in PocketGuard, it’s the “in your pocket” number that’s most prominent. To PocketGuard’s credit, it does a good job visualizing which bills are upcoming and which ones you’ve already paid.

PocketGuard has also publicly committed to adding some popular features in early 2024. These include rollover budgeting in January 2024, categorization rules in February and shared household access in March.

Dana Wollman / Engadget

Although PocketGuard’s UI is easy enough to understand, it lacks polish. The “accounts” tab is a little busy, and doesn’t show totals for categories like cash or investments. Seemingly small details like weirdly phrased or punctuated copy occasionally make the app feel janky. More than once, it prompted me to update the app when no updates were available. The web version, meanwhile, feels like the mobile app blown up to a larger format and doesn’t take advantage of the extra screen real estate.

Of note, although PocketGuard does work with Plaid, its primary bank-connecting platform is actually Finicity. Setting up my accounts through Finicity was mostly a straightforward process. I did encounter one hiccup: Finicity would not connect to my SoFi account. I was able to do it through Plaid, but PocketGuard doesn’t make it easy to access Plaid in the app. The only way, as far as I can tell, is to knowingly search for the name of a bank that isn’t available through Finicity, at which point you get the option to try Plaid instead. Like I said: the experience can be janky.

What is Plaid and how does it work?

Each of the apps I tested uses the same underlying network, called Plaid, to pull in financial data, so it’s worth explaining in its own section what it is and how it works. Plaid was founded as a fintech startup in 2013 and is today the industry standard in connecting banks with third-party apps. Plaid works with over 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada and Europe. Additionally, more than 8,000 third-party apps and services rely on Plaid, the company claims.

To be clear, you don’t need a dedicated Plaid app to use it; the technology is baked into a wide array of apps, including the budget trackers I tested for this guide. Once you find the “add an account” option in whichever one you’re using, you’ll see a menu of commonly used banks. There’s also a search field you can use to look yours up directly. Once you find yours, you’ll be prompted to enter your login credentials. If you have two-factor authentication set up, you’ll need to enter a one-time passcode as well.

As the middleman, Plaid is a passthrough for information that may include your account balances, transaction history, account type and routing or account number. Plaid uses encryption, and says it has a policy of not selling or renting customer data to other companies. However, I would not be doing my job if I didn’t note that in 2022 Plaid was forced to pay $58 million to consumers in a class action suit for collecting “more financial data than was needed.” As part of the settlement, Plaid was compelled to change some of its business practices.

In a statement provided to Engadget, a Plaid spokesperson said the company continues to deny the allegations underpinning the lawsuit and that “the crux of the non-financial terms in the settlement are focused on us accelerating workstreams already underway related to giving people more transparency into Plaid’s role in connecting their accounts, and ensuring that our workstreams around data minimization remain on track.”

My top Mint alternative picks: Quicken Simplifi and Copilot Money

To conclude, you might be wondering what app I decided on for myself after all of this research. The answer is actually two apps: Quicken Simplifi, my overall top pick, and Copilot Money. For now, I am actively using both apps and still deciding, long-term, which I feel more comfortable with. I tend to prefer Copilot’s fast, colorful user interface, but as I explained above, it’s too lacking in table-stakes features for me to go so far as to name it the best overall option.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-best-budgeting-apps-to-replace-mint-143047346.html?src=rss

The Mac, formerly the more austere Macintosh, turns 40 today, putting Apple’s longest-running product squarely in middle age. But like someone who sees the back half of their life approaching and gets in marathon-runner shape, the Mac is in the strongest place it’s been for decades. From a revenue perspective, Mac sales declined precipitously in 2023, but that came on the heels of four years of growth that was likely the product of pent-up demand for an improved Mac lineup.

In 2020, Apple finally started delivering on that, thanks in large part to Apple Silicon arriving in the Mac, ushering in the era we’re in now. While the Mac was on shaky ground prior to Apple Silicon, it would now be pretty silly to suggest the Mac won’t make it to its 50th birthday. That wasn’t always a given, though. While the Mac is Apple’s oldest product, it’s also gone through numerous moments where it appeared to be on the brink of irrelevance or complete disaster. Through most of the ‘90s, before CEO Steve Jobs returned to lead the company he had founded, the Macintosh was a mess.

It was too expensive for the power it delivered, Apple’s product lineup was confusing and cluttered and Windows PCs now had both the GUI and performance to make the Mac a poor choice for most people. And even after Jobs returned and introduced the iMac and iBook while revitalizing the Power Mac and Powerbook lines, the G3 and G4 still lagged behind PCs in most tasks. Ironically, the move to Intel in 2006 helped make the Mac more relevant, even as it held Apple back a decade later, as the company chased thin and light laptop designs with “innovations” like the Touch Bar and butterfly keyboard that held it back while letting its power languish.

But in 2014, when the Mac turned 30, it was in a pretty good place. Apple had spent the recent years focusing on the iPhone and then the iPad, with former CEO Steve Jobs famously comparing PCs to trucks — an implication that the iPad would be the more mainstream car for most people. But at least as far as laptops go, the Mac was fairly compelling. The MacBook Air had finally become what Jobs had wanted when he pulled it out of an envelope on stage in 2008. It was a thin, light and reasonably powerful laptop with a reasonable price, and the spill-over effect from people buying iPods and then iPhones had helped the MacBook Air become ubiquitous in coffee shops and college campuses. The MacBook Pro, meanwhile, was well-suited to the creative professional Apple marketed towards, with a great screen, plenty of ports and enough power for it to be a compelling mobile studio.

However, there were plenty of weak spots in the lineup if you looked closely. Perhaps the most obvious was the strange saga of the Mac Pro. For years, Apple’s tower-style computer had gotten more and more expensive, clearly priced out of the range of most consumers. That wasn’t a bad thing on its own, but Apple failed to recognize what its target market was looking for when it released the cylindrical Mac Pro redesign in 2013 — and then failed to meaningfully upgrade it for years. Between the lack of updates and a design that limited expandability, the Mac Pro was a bit of a joke in Apple’s lineup for the better part of a decade.

Apple then made a similarly disastrous change to the MacBook Pro in 2016. Let us count the ways Apple dropped the ball with this generation of laptops. First, the unreliable butterfly keyboard, which existed seemingly only so Apple could make these laptops as thin and light as possible. Then there was the removal of useful ports like HDMI, USB-A and an SD card slot in favor of just four USB-C / Thunderbolt ports, one of which was needed for charging. There’s also the Touch Bar, a thin OLED strip on the keyboard that dynamically changed depending on what app you were using. A neat idea, though one that failed to gain much traction with developers or end users, and the lack of a physical escape key baffled users for years to come.

Finally, while Apple managed to make the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pro models much thinner and lighter than their predecessors, it came at a performance cost. Plenty of users experienced overheating and CPU throttling, as if the extremely thin enclosure combined with the powerful chips was a bad combo.

Meanwhile, the venerable MacBook Air was left to languish for years with minor updates and a design and low-resolution screen that were quickly becoming uncompetitive. The iMac and Mac mini chugged along as solid options for users looking for a desktop machine, but picking a Mac laptop at the time was an exercise in compromise and paying for something that probably did not check all the boxes.

Things showed signs of turning around in 2019, when Apple introduced a new, tower-style Mac Pro with increased expansion options. But more significantly, Apple reversed course on the terrible butterfly keyboard and brought back scissor-style keys to the MacBook Pro and, a few months later, the MacBook Air (which had since been updated with a Retina display and more current Intel processors). Amazingly enough, Apple made the revamped 16-inch MacBook Pro thicker and heavier than the one it replaced, something that showed the company was moving away from thinner and lighter at all costs, especially in products like this where it just didn’t make sense to chase a smaller form factor at the expense of performance.

However, the Mac really rebounded in late 2020, when Apple released the first Macs running on the company’s own custom silicon. Apple had been designing chips for years, ever since the A4 first arrived in the iPhone 4 and original iPad in 2010, and the combo of efficiency and power the company had hit on had proven to be a big advantage for the company. And the first round of Macs running Apple Silicon included some of Apple’s most popular models, like the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro.

The improvements were immediately obvious — when we reviewed it, we said the M1-powered MacBook Air “redefines what an ultraportable can be.” The combo of huge performance gains alongside wildly impressive battery life made the MacBook Air a no-brainer. Meanwhile, the Mac mini provided a ton of bang for the buck if you were looking for an inexpensive desktop computer.

The next big move for the Mac came in late 2021, when Apple fully fixed the MacBook Pro issues it introduced with the 2016 model. The totally redesigned 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models brought back a lot of the ports that Apple initially removed, banished the Touch Bar and utilized new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips that boosted the multicore performance of these laptops far beyond their Intel-based predecessors.

The last major piece of the puzzle came into place in March of 2022, when Apple introduced the Mac Studio. While the Mac Pro lingered on with Intel chips, the new Mac Studio represented a middle ground between the Pro and mini. The $2,000 model included the M1 Max chip, which you can also get in a MacBook Pro if you were willing to pony up the cash, but the $4,000 model basically strapped two of those chips together to make the M1 Ultra. That monster processor had up to 64 GPU cores, while the M2 Ultra that replaced it lets you get up to a 76-core GPU to go along with its 24-core CPU and 32-core Neural Engine for machine learning tasks. Plain and simple, it’s the kind of power Apple hadn’t offered in its computers for a long time.

Since 2022, Apple has mostly been in a refine, upgrade and iterate mode, with many Macs moving on to the M3 architecture. But there are a few places that could still use an overhaul — the Mac Pro moved to Apple Silicon late in the transition to these new chips, only arriving this past June. And while it has an expandable tower-style case, it runs the same M2 Ultra that you can get in the Mac Studio but costs a whopping $3,000 more. There’s a pretty big opportunity for Apple to put in an even higher-end workstation-class — maybe it can just bolt two of the M3 Ultras that are surely coming together to further separate the Mac Pro from the Studio.

On a more consumer-focused level, Apple has recently made another stab at making Mac gaming a thing, with the company bringing popular, mainstream titles like Death Stranding and Resident Evil 4 to the platform. But the company still isn’t in the same realm of gaming on Windows, despite the massive power Apple Silicon offers. If the company can figure out a way to make porting games easier, developers could have a whole new market to sell to — and Apple would have another feather in its cap. If the company has any ambitions of really pushing past PCs the way the iPad came to dominate the tablet market, they’ll need to push even harder to get big games on the Mac.

And, of course, we’re just a week away from Apple releasing its first new platform in almost a decade, the Vision Pro. While it’s launching as a wildly expensive, standalone device, it’s not hard to imagine the market expanding if the form factor catches on. If that happens, we might see a Vision device that runs Mac apps natively, instead of just viewing them. Apple has long held the belief that its platforms should stand on their own, though — witness the futile calls for a touchscreen Mac or a version of MacOS for the iPad Pro. But in this case, maybe we’ll be talking in 10 years about how spatial computing was the next thing to move the Mac forward.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-mac-turns-40-how-apple-silicon-cured-its-midlife-crisis-161520642.html?src=rss

I’ve come to expect certain things from Audio-Technica earbuds and headphones. First, there’s the company’s warm, soothing sound profile that’s easy to listen to for hours at a time. It’s usually good, but not necessarily great, though the company typically combines it with a solid overall experience thanks to features and performance. That all holds true on the ATH-TWX7: a $199 set of wireless earbuds with active noise cancellation (ANC) and a host of handy tools that rival more expensive competitors. Some work better than others, but the company has done well over the years to expand its capabilities, even though the ATH-TWX7 lacks one basic item.

Design

Despite their stickbud appearance, the ATH-TWX7 looks more refined than most similarly-priced earbuds. Audio-Technica opted for a mix of black and silver (or white/silver or gray/silver) that makes the earbuds look similar to high-end headphones. The main housing is quite small, which translated to a more comfortable fit in my ears. The case also has a unique teardrop shape that allows the earbuds to sit at an angle rather than standing up or laying completely flat while charging. There’s no real benefit here, but it is a departure from the norm worth pointing out.

Audio-Technica did something for the onboard controls on the ATH-TWX7 that’s rare in earbuds. It uses both touch and physical buttons for playback, calls, sound modes and to summon a voice assistant. Typically you see this on headphones where the playback controls are touch and the noise cancellation and transparency modes are assigned to a button, but I don’t recall seeing both on earbuds like this before. Granted, I’ve been reviewing audio gear for several years at this point, so I hesitate to proclaim Audio-Technica as the “first” to do so.

To help you find the ideal fit, Audio-Technica includes two different types of ear tips. One is labeled “soft,” and it’s designed to be more comfortable, while the standard option is meant to offer a more secure fit. I expected the “soft” version to be foam, or at least partially foam, but they’re almost identical. One is slightly thinner, but they both seem to be the same silicone material you see in most earbuds, and neither really feels softer than the other.

The last thing I’ll point out in terms of the ATH-TWX7’s design is its ingress protection (IP) rating. These are only rated IPX4 against water splashes and they’re not built to withstand spray jets or submersion. That’s probably enough for workouts, and while it’s about average for mid-range earbuds, slightly more expensive models venture into IPX7 territory.

Software and features

Photo by Billy Steele/Engadget

When I reviewed the ATH-CKS5TW earbuds in late 2019, Audio-Technica’s app was so limited there was really no reason to ever fire it up. Unless it was to install a firmware update, it didn’t offer anything useful and even the onboard control customization was restricted. I’m happy to report that’s no longer the case as the A-T Connect software now offers a much more robust list of settings and reconfigurable tools than before.

The app’s home screen is devoted to options for changing the music codec, EQ and sound mode, as well as showing the battery life for each earbud. Tapping the image of the ATH-TWX7 takes you into the detailed settings, divided into Audio and System sections. All of this is standard fare with access to everything the onboard controls offer in the app, including the ability to remap the touch and physical buttons as you wish. But despite letting you set an automatic power off timer when there’s no audio, the ATH-TWX7 doesn’t have automatic pausing when you take them out of your ears. That’s a big omission in 2024 when almost every set of wireless earbuds does this.

I will point out a couple of things that are pretty novel. First, under the Call Microphone settings, Audio-Technica goes a step further with an in-app call test so you can hear what you’ll sound like before you dial. This is in addition to features like Natural Mode for quiet locations or Noise-Reduction Mode for windy or loud environments. The latter isn’t very original, but will still come in handy. You can disable the touch controls and just rely on the tiny physical buttons on the earbuds. What is a bit innovative is the ability to tweak the sensitivity of those panels, set to medium by default with low and high options if you need ‘em.

The inclusion of both touch and physical buttons gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of how you set those up. Everything on the ATH-TWX7 is reconfigurable, which means you can move things from the buttons to the touch panels and vice versa, or add things that aren’t there by default. In addition to options for playback, calls, voice assistant and noise cancellation settings, you can add Talk-Through, Low Latency Mode and Check Battery Level. Audio-Technica didn’t reinvent the wheel in terms of what these earbuds can do, but the greater customization gives you way more options for assigning tasks in a way that makes the most sense for you.

Sound quality and noise cancellation

Photo by Billy Steele/Engadget

Nearly every set of Audio-Technica earbuds and headphones I’ve ever tested has a similar sound profile. It’s a warm, inviting tone that’s pleasant to listen to for hours on end, mostly because the dynamics aren’t exhausting. The ATH-TWX7 is more of the same, for better or worse, with some exceptions.

Softer, acoustic-driven styles are excellent, with crisp details in drums and guitars that lend texture to tracks like Zach Bryan’s “Heavy Eyes” and Charles Wesley Godwin’s “Family Ties.” The ATH-TWX7 also does well with jazz and synth-heavy pop, rock and instrumental tunes. Hip-hop is nice as well, but the earbuds start to struggle with hard rock, metal and more chaotic, bombastic genres. Better Lovers’ “30 Under 13” is still the gritty, raucous hardcore I know and love, but everything sounds flat and has less energy than on other earbuds. The sound on this album and other metal selections like Gojira’s Fortitude is more compressed than with other genres, with less space for everything to open up – especially guitars that typically soar around in your head.

Like a lot of ANC earbuds, the active noise cancellation on the ATH-TWX7 does well with constant noise, but struggles with things like human voices. This model had no trouble combatting the roar of the noisy heating unit in my Las Vegas hotel during CES, and the same goes for white noise machines and fans at home. It’s not Bose-level sound blocking, but it’s definitely above average.

Sound quality in Hear-Through or transparency mode is also quite good. There’s a nice, natural element to it that doesn’t seem as compressed or muted as some of the competition. However, the ATH-TWX7 doesn’t pipe in your voice like the AirPods Pro, so the overall effect isn’t as if you aren’t wearing earbuds at all. I assumed the Talk-Through feature would assist with this, but instead that tool simply lowers the volume or mutes content. Confusingly, despite offering two options to let in your surrounding sound, this tool doesn’t let you simply pause. It’s Hear-Through adjacent rather than a truly helpful setting for a quick chat. Because your voice isn’t beamed back to your ears, you’ll still feel the need to speak up, which means you’re more likely to get shouty if you aren’t careful.

Call quality

Props to Audio-Technica for the easiest way to check call performance ever on the ATH-TWX7. Thanks to that in-app call test, you can get an idea of how you’ll sound before answering or dialing in, which is way better than hoping you sound okay to your caller. I also found this helpful in assessing which setting worked best for where I was at the time, even if I was at home.

Noise-Reduction Mode lives up to its name, but it also sacrifices some voice quality. Natural mode sounds the best, but it picks up background noise easily. If you’re in a quiet spot though, the ATH-TWX7 gives you above-average voice performance that’s noticeably clearer than the typical speakerphone-like quality most earbuds offer.

The ATH-TWX7 also seems to struggle a bit with automatic switching via multipoint Bluetooth, but only when it comes to calls. If I was hopping from my phone to my laptop for music or some other audio, the changeover was quick and seamless. However, if I was listening to something on my MacBook Pro and got a call, there were a few times the earbuds had trouble swapping over to it. Since this is the most likely scenario in which I’d need that auto switching, this was disappointing. Best case scenario was for me to tap to change the audio from my iPhone to the ATH-TWX7 after answering, but that’s not really an ideal workflow.

Battery life

Photo by Billy Steele/Engadget

Audio-Technica promised up to 6.5 hours on the earbuds themselves with two additional charges in the case. It doesn’t specify if that’s with ANC on or off, but during my tests I had no trouble hitting the stated figure while blocking background noise. That’s doing a mix of music and calls, with the occasional few minutes of Hear-Through mode and leaving the ATH-TWX7 to automatically turn off twice. I could reliably eke out 30 minutes more than the company claimed, and a few minutes extra is always a good thing.

The competition

In the $200 price range, an apt comparison for the ATH-TWX7 are Sony’s LinkBuds S. An honorable mention on our best wireless earbuds list, these have similar battery life and the same IPX4 rating, but are more comfortable to wear and have some trademark Sony features. Those include support for DSEE Extreme upscaling in addition to Quick Attention Mode that’s handy for quick chats in the office, coffee shop or airport. What’s more, the LinkBuds S can automatically pause when you speak and an adaptive sound mode can be configured to change settings based on activity or location. Plus, they’re available for $200 at full price.

iPhone owners will be more satisfied with the second-gen AirPods Pro over the ATH-TWX7. Currently available for under $200, the 2022 version of the earbuds are the best option if your life is intertwined with iOS, iPadOS and macOS. New features like Adaptive Audio bring automatic adjustments to your day and Apple’s take on transparency mode continues to be the best in the business. Lastly, they’re more comfortable for a longer period of time than the ATH-TWX7.

Wrap-up

There’s plenty to like about the ATH-TWX7. A robust set of features brings a lot of convenience to your day. But a few of those tools could still use some fine-tuning and the lack of automatic pausing in 2024 is a head scratcher. Still, the audio is mostly good, albeit inconsistent at times, and transparency mode is better than most. Add in the solid call quality and the in-app voice test and the ATH-TWX7 are a worthy consideration, especially at this price. Too bad it falls short of being a more complete package some of the competition offers for a slightly larger investment.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio-technica-ath-twx7-review-good-earbuds-with-frustrating-flaws-160054450.html?src=rss

Most of the time, the best gaming headset isn’t a “gaming headset” at all. Although these devices are often thought of as a distinct niche within the wider headphone market, they’re ultimately still headphones. And while it’s certainly not impossible to find gaming headsets that sound nice, those tend to cost much more than a comparable pair of wired headphones (yes, those still exist).

A good wired headphone remains your best bet if you want the most detailed sound possible at any given price point and don’t need something especially portable, which is usually the case while gaming. If you need to chat with friends, you can always buy an external microphone, whether it’s a USB mic, a cheaper clip-on model or a standalone option like the Antlion ModMic or V-Moda BoomPro. Oftentimes, those’ll make your voice sound clearer and fuller than a gaming headset’s built-in mic.

But we recognize that many people just want the convenience of an all-in-one combo. So after testing out a few dozen pairs over the past several months, we’ve put together a list of good headphones for gaming and full-on gaming headsets. We recommend you consider the former first, but all of them will make your play time more enjoyable.

What to look for in good gaming headphones

Photo by Jeff Dunn / Engadget

Evaluating headphones is a particularly subjective exercise, so calling one pair the absolute “best” is something of a fool’s errand. At a certain point, whether you’re an audiophile or not, everything becomes a matter of taste. For most, a headphone with a wide soundscape and strong imaging performance — i.e., the ability to position sounds correctly, so you can more precisely tell where footsteps and other game effects are coming from — will provide the most immersive gaming experience, the kind that makes you feel like your head is within a given scene.

For that, you want a high-quality pair of open-back headphones. That is to say, an over-ear pair whose ear cups do not completely seal off the ear from air and outside noise. These are inherently terrible at isolating you from external sound and preventing others from hearing what you’re playing, so if you often play games in a noisy environment, their benefits will be blunted. But in a quiet room, the best open-back pairs sound significantly wider and more precise than more common closed-back models.

More up for debate is how a good gaming headphone should sound. If you want something that’ll help you in competitive multiplayer games, you may prefer a headphone with a flatter sound signature, which’ll keep a game’s mix from being overly boosted in one direction and is less likely to mask the smaller details of what’s happening around you. A slightly brighter sound, one that pushes the upper frequencies a tad, may also work. Open-back headphones almost never have huge sub-bass, so you rarely have to worry about low-end sounds muddying up the rest of the signature. In this light, the fact that an overwhelming amount of gaming headsets are closed-back and bass-heavy seems counterintuitive.

Lots of people love bass, though. And if you don’t really care about competitive play, some extra low-end can add a touch of excitement to action scenes or rousing soundtracks. You still don’t want a pair that boosts the low-end too hard — as many gaming headsets do — but the point is that what makes a pair “immersive” to one person may sound dull to another.

A quick PSA on wireless gaming headsets

Most people do not need a wireless gaming headset. The PS5 and Xbox Series X/S have a headphone jack built into their controllers, while the Nintendo Switch and most gaming PCs still carry the port as well. The cost of an OK wireless headset is often higher than a comparable wired one, and for the money most wireless models tend to provide worse audio quality and less-clear microphones. You also risk introducing issues with latency. (That’s why non-gaming Bluetooth headphones are a no-go here.) That said, the top end of the wireless headset market has improved noticeably in terms of audio, mic and battery performance over the past couple of years. You’ll still have to pay a significant premium to get one of those options, so they aren’t great values — but if you absolutely must go wireless, you won’t have to make as much of a sacrifice as you used to.

Honorable mentions

Other gaming headsets we tested

If the Audeze Maxwell is out of stock, the Logitech G Pro X 2 Lightspeed is another quality wireless headset worth considering. It sounds better than the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless, with satisfying but more controlled bass and more accurate mids, and it’s lighter on the head than the Maxwell. Logitech rates its battery life at 50 hours, but we found it to last much longer at moderate volumes. However, similar to the Astro A50 X, a dip in the treble makes it sound darker and more veiled than the Maxwell, and it doesn’t have any HDMI-switching tricks to fall back on. Its mic also sounds less natural than those of the Maxwell, A50 X and Cloud Alpha Wireless. Plus, while it can connect over a USB dongle, Bluetooth or a 3.5mm cable, it can’t pair to two devices at once like Audeze’s and Astro’s pairs. Our biggest issue is the price: Value-wise, it’s in something of a no man’s land at its MSRP of $250. It’s a fine choice if it dips below $200, though.

Xbox owners who want a more affordable wireless headset than the Audeze Maxwell could do worse than the SteelSeries Arctis Nova 7X. It’s another bass-forward pair, and its mic is comparable to that of the Cloud Alpha Wireless. It offers multiple connectivity options, including Bluetooth and a 3.5mm cable. While it’s marketed for Xbox, it can also connect to PCs and PS5s. Its 30-ish-hour battery life is well short of the Maxwell and Cloud Alpha Wireless, however, and its uneven treble can cause things like in-game dialogue to sound masked in certain titles.

The wired HyperX Cloud Alpha often goes for $80 or less, and at that price it’s a decent middle ground between the Cloud Stinger 2 and Astro A40 if you really want a closed-back gaming headset. It’s old, but its plush earpads and headband are comfy, and its detachable mic, while not superb, is still better than the one on the A40. Its treble is underemphasized, however, and again it sounds more “in your head” than Astro’s pair.

Photo by Jeff Dunn / Engadget

The SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro is comfortable and has a noticeably clearer mic than the Astro A40. It also comes with a useful DAC that makes it easy to adjust the headset’s EQ and game-to-chat mix on the fly. However, its closed-back design can’t provide the same enveloping sense of width, and its default sound can sound piercing in the treble. Like the Virtuoso Pro, it’s also a bit too pricey, typically hovering in the $200 to $220 range.

The SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless is largely similar to its wired counterpart but adds a passable level of active noise cancellation. Being able to hot-swap battery packs and connect to multiple devices at once is also nice. It’s not as convenient for multi-console play as the Astro A50 X, though, and it usually costs more than the Audeze Maxwell, which sounds better, has a superior mic and lasts longer on a charge.

The wireless Beyerdynamic MMX 200 locates in-game effects accurately, feels sturdy and has a great boom mic, but it sounds less articulate than the Audeze Maxwell, with heavily exaggerated bass and recessed lower-mids. There’s no game-to-chat mix or custom EQ tools, which is tough for a $250 headset, and its 35-hour battery life is unremarkable. We also found its sweat-inducing ear cushions and headband to clamp down too tight for comfort. However, the built-in transparency mode is nice and the tight fit does a good job of isolating outside noise. 

The HyperX Cloud III Wireless is comfy and can last up to 120 hours per charge but sounds less dynamic than the older Cloud Alpha Wireless, with weaker bass response. Like that pair, it also lacks a 3.5mm jack, Bluetooth audio support and Xbox compatibility. The Cloud Alpha Wireless still gets nearly three times the battery life, too, so it remains a better buy if you want a wireless headset for PC or PS5 in the $150 range.

The Razer BlackShark V2 is lightweight and easy to wear, plus it doesn’t sound bad for a $100 closed-back headset. But it’s still not as immersive as the Astro A40, its mic makes voices sound thinner than the HyperX Cloud Alpha, and its plastic design feels cheap.

The $60 Xbox Stereo Headset straight up sounds bad, with overblown bass and underemphasized treble that makes finer details feel like they’re underwater.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/best-gaming-headset-130006477.html?src=rss