Tag: tech

Maserati has unveiled the new GranCabrio Folgore electric car. It’s a great-looking car and we had a chance to take a look at it in person.

The Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 is lighter than a MacBook Pro, and it can pack up to an RTX 4090, but it will challenge your expectations about gaming laptops.

To celebrate Earth Month, National Geographic has announced the launch of Vibe Check x Nat Geo, a new four-part digital series featuring ASMR meditative videos.

Netflix has renewed The Witcher for a fifth season, but the company says that will bring the series to an end. The final season will be shot back-to-back with the fourth season, which has just started production. The two seasons will cover the events of the last three books in the series: Baptism of Fire, The Tower of the Swallow and Lady of the Lake. The show is a direct adaptation of Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels, but it does occasionally take inspiration from CD Projekt Red’s game adaptations (and vice versa).

The fourth season will mark a significant change for The Witcher, as Liam Hemsworth is replacing Henry Cavill in the lead role. This time around, Geralt of Rivia will find a new family in the Hanza, who will help him track down Yennefer and Ciri after the trio is separated. New cast members who are joining for the fourth season include Laurence Fishburne, Sharlto Copley and James Purefoy.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/netflix-will-stop-tossing-coins-to-the-witcher-after-season-five-171500284.html?src=rss

Cities: Skylines 2 developer Colossal Order is unlisting and refunding purchases of its controversial Beach Properties asset pack less than a month after its release. It’s also significantly delaying the game’s future DLC and console port.

Beach Properties was the first paid DLC for Cities: Skylines 2, and has an “Overwhelmingly Negative” rating on Steam, with just 4 percent of user reviews marked as positive. In a note announcing the reverse of course, Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen said the company had let its community down. 

“We thought we could make up for the shortcomings of the game in a timeframe that was unrealistic, and rushed out a DLC that should not have been published in its current form,” Hallikainen said. “For all this, we are truly sorry.”

The asset pack itself worked as advertised, adding a number of zoneable waterfront-style properties to the game, but it was definitely thin for the $9.99 asking price. Most will admit, though, that the content itself wasn’t the problem: The DLC was largely derided because it was released at a time when players were waiting on patches for the base game. Cities: Skylines 2 was released in a poorly optimized state in October 2023, and although it’s in better shape now, many in the community feel there are fundamental issues with the simulation, and there is still work to be done to make the game run better. Mod support — perhaps the reason that the original Cities: Skylines had such a long lifespan — was also slow to arrive, and is still only in beta, with no support for custom assets.

In an FAQ accompanying the announcement, Colossal Order explains how the refund and compensation program will work. Essentially, if you bought the DLC separately, you should be able to get a refund. Those who redeemed a code as part of the game’s Deluxe or Ultimate editions will not. Instead, compensation will come in the form of creator asset packs and radio stations which Colossal Order says will “total around $39.99 in added value.” The beachfront properties will be added to the base game, free of charge, for all players.

To call Cities: Skylines 2’s launch messy would be kind. Since the game’s release on PC last October, developer Colossal Order has burned through the goodwill it built up over a near-decade of the original game’s lifespan. Things came to a head in late January, when many of the community’s loudest and most respected voices broke rank to talk openly about the game’s issues.

Another casualty of today’s announcement is the game’s console release. Cities: Skylines 2 was supposed to launch simultaneously on PC and console, but the PS5 and Xbox versions were pushed back to spring 2024 weeks before release. It has been clear for some time that revised date was not going to happen, and Colossal Order confirmed it’s now hoping to have the console ports ready for October.

The final piece of bad news is that Bridges & Ports — the first expansion pack that will go beyond assets — is going to be further delayed to Q1 2025 to allow the developers to “focus on additional free patches and game updates in the coming months.” The expansion pack was supposed to be released in Q2 2024, and is included in the game’s Ultimate Edition.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cities-skylines-2s-embarrassed-developers-are-giving-away-beachfront-property-for-free-170042260.html?src=rss

Google’s wired Nest security camera has dropped to its lowest price to date. The second-gen device is for indoor use and it’s motion sensitive. It’s capable of capturing 1080p HDR video. You can snap one up for $70, which is $30 or 30 percent off the regular price of $100, at Amazon if you opt for the fog or linen colorway. However, if you go for the snow variant you can save a little more. That one is on sale for $67.59, or 32 percent off.

The Nest Cam uses AI to discern between people, animals and vehicles. It can send you alerts via the Google Home app, and you won’t need a subscription for that. You will need a Nest Aware plan if you want up to 60 days of video history. Otherwise, Google will offer three free hours of event video history. Handily, if you have a Wi-Fi outage, up to an hour of event recordings will be stored on the device itself.

There’s a two-way audio function, so you can chat with house guests if you’re not home. In the event of an unwanted visitor, you can contact emergency services directly from the Google Home app if you’re a Nest Aware member who is perhaps using a tablet instead of a phone. You’ll be able to view live video feeds on compatible smart displays and smart TVs too.

Nest Aware subscribers can receive notifications when familiar faces are recognized. There’s also the option to set up home and away routines so the camera doesn’t capture video while you’re at your place.

Elsewhere, the Outdoor Nest Cam with Floodlight is on sale too. It has dropped by 29 percent to $200. That’s just $10 more than the lowest price we’ve seen for it to date.

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/googles-wired-nest-security-camera-is-cheaper-than-ever-163019138.html?src=rss

A speaker doesn’t have to be brand new to sound good. Sonos speakers get high marks in our reviews and buying guides and the company has one of the better refurbished programs out there. Right now, you can grab a refurbished Sonos Arc SL soundbar for $509, which is $170 off the refurbished price and $240 off the speaker’s full $749 price tag when it was new. A decent selection of other renewed soundbars and speakers are also on sale at Sonos, with up to 25 percent off the refurbished prices.  

We named the Sonos Arc the runner-up premium soundbar in our buying guide, praising its stellar sound quality and ability to calibrate its sound to match the room its in. The difference between the Sonos Arc and the Arc SL is the lack of a microphone, so you won’t be able to talk to Alexa or the Google Assistant directly through your speaker. That might be a plus for anyone interested in the extra privacy of a mic-less device. Other than the lack of microphone, the Arc SL hardware is the same. It can even calibrate its sound to the room with the Trueplay feature, which uses the Sonos app on an iOS device to measure how sound reflects off your walls and furniture. The Arc SL is Wi-Fi enabled, supports Dolby Atmos, Apple Air Play 2 and connects to your TV via HDMI ARC or eARC. Though, sadly, there’s just one HDMI port. 

Buying a refurbished device from Sonos carries a lot of the same perks of buying new, including the same one-year warranty, all necessary cables and manuals plus all-new packaging. They also donate one percent of refurbished sales to environmental non-profits as part of 1% for the Planet. 

If you’d rather a speaker that does have a mic, the refurbished second-generation Beam soundbar is also on sale. It’s down to $299 after a $100 discount off the refurbished rate — which works out to $200 off the brand new sticker price. The Beam is our top pick for a mid-range soundbar in our guide and has great sound quality, supports Dolby Atmos and, like all of the company’s wares, does an excellent job of pairing up with other Sonos speakers. 

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/sonos-refurbished-speakers-and-soundbars-are-up-to-170-off-right-now-161504151.html?src=rss

Meta just announced a major update for its AI assistant platform, Meta AI, which has been built using the long-awaited open source Llama 3 large language model (LLM). The company says it’s “now the most intelligent AI assistant you can use for free.” As for use case scenarios, the company touts the ability to help users study for tests, plan dinners and schedule nights out. You know the drill. It’s an AI chatbot.

Meta AI, however, has expanded into just about every nook and cranny throughout the company’s entire portfolio, after a test run with Instagram DMs last week. It’s still available with Instagram, but now users can access it on Messenger, Facebook feeds and Whatsapp. The chatbot also has a dedicated web portal at, wait for it, meta.ai. You don’t need a company login to use it this way, though it won’t generate images. Those recently-released Ray-Ban smart glasses also integrate with the bot, with Quest headset integration coming soon.

On the topic of image generation, Meta says it’s now much faster and will produce images as you type. It also handles custom animated GIFs, which is pretty cool. Hopefully, it can successfully generate images of different races of people. We found that it struggled with this basic concept a couple of weeks back, as it seemed biased toward creating images of people of the same race, even when prompted otherwise.

Meta’s also expanding global availability along with this update, as Meta AI is coming to more than a dozen countries outside of the US. These include Australia, Canada, Ghana, Jamaica, Pakistan, Uganda and others. However, there’s one major caveat. It’s only in English, which doesn’t seem that useful to a global audience, but whatever.

As for safety and reliability, the company says Llama 3 has been trained on an expanded data set when compared to Llama 2. It also used synthetic data to create lengthy documents to train on and claims it excluded all data sources that are known to contain a “high volume of personal information about private individuals.” Meta says it conducted a series of evaluations to see how the chatbot would handle risk areas like conversations about weapons, cyber attacks and child exploitation, and adjusted as required. In our brief testing with the product, we’ve already run into hallucinations, as seen below. 

Engadget/Karissa Bell

AI has become one of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s pet projects, along with raising really expensive cattle for beef in a secluded Hawaiian compound, but the company’s still playing catch up to OpenAI and, to a lesser extent, Google. Meta’s Llama 2 never really wowed users, due to a limited feature set, so maybe this new version of the AI assistant will catch lightning in a bottle. At the very least, it should be able to draw lightning in a bottle, or more accurately, slightly tweak someone else’s drawing of lightning in a bottle.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-rolls-out-an-updated-ai-assistant-built-with-the-long-awaited-llama-3-160053435.html?src=rss

Dutch startup Meatable has hosted the first legally approved tasting of cultivated meat in Europe. On the menu was a lab-grown pork sausage. Meatable says the produce is “indistinguishable” from traditional meat, but causes no harm to animals or the environment. To replicate the flavours and textures of livestock, Meatable first extracts a single cell sample from a pig. The sample is then cultivated in a bioreactor. Over time, the sample multiplies and forms real muscle tissue, which is shaped into a familiar meat form. In Europe, however, no one was previously allowed to eat the output. That changed when the…

This story continues at The Next Web