Engadget

Mark Zuckerberg says there's an end in sight to Reality Labs' years of multibillion-dollar losses following the company's layoffs to the metaverse division earlier this year. The CEO said he expects to gradually reduce how much money the company is losing as it doubles down on AI glasses and shifts away from virtual reality. Speaking during Meta's fourth-quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg was clear that the changes won't happen soon, but sounded optimistic about the division that lost more than $

Researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope have found a galaxy that is offering new data about the early stages of the universe's existence. The latest discovery shared by astronomers is about a bright galaxy dubbed MoM-z14. According to the team, this galaxy existed 280 million years after the Big Bang. The sounds like a long time, but in the context of the universe's estimated 13.8 billion years of existence, that's actually one of the closest examples astronomers have found to the Big B

Weve somehow almost reached the end of January already, which means its time for Sony to divulge the list of PlayStation Plus Monthly Games for February . They are Undisputed , Subnautica: Below Zero, Ultros and Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown . If you have a PS Plus subscription on any tier, you can claim these starting on February 3. After claiming them, these games will stay in your library as long as your PS Plus plan remains active. Undisputed (PS5) is a 2024 boxing game with dozens of licensed

Patreon creators will need to make some changes soon, thanks to Apple. On Wednesday, Patreon said Apple has renewed its requirement that all Patreon creators must move to subscription billing. The deadline to do so is November 1, 2026. Patreon's blog post announcing the change made it clear that it had no other choice. We strongly disagree with this decision, the company wrote. Creators need consistency and clarity in order to build healthy, long-term businesses. Instead, creators using legacy b

Music hardware and software manufacturer Native Instruments has entered into preliminary insolvency proceedings, according to a report by Create Digital Music . This is the company behind iconic software like Massive, Traktor and Kontakt and hardware like Maschine+. Native Instruments also owns the brands iZotope, Brainworx and Plugin Alliance. We don't have many specifics as to what this entails and what the future of the company will look like. We do know that an administrator has been appoint

Following its recent AI makeover of Gmail , Google is bringing more Gemini-powered tools to Chrome . Starting today, a host of new features are rolling out for the browser, with more to come over the next few months. The first of the new features is a sidebar. Available to all Gemini in Chrome users , the interface allows you to chat with Gemini and keep a conversation going across multiple tabs. Google suggests the sidebar is useful for multitaskers.Our testers have been using it for all sorts

When deciding which video game to buy, Is it fun? is no longer the only consideration. Given the state of the industry, Do I want to support this company? is arguably more important. Take, for example, Ubisoft, where things seem to unravel more each day. After the floundering publisher floated even more layoffs this week, workers at its Paris headquarters said, Enough is enough. They're now calling for a three-day strike. Unions representing Ubisoft employees plan to strike from February 10 to 1

ExpressVPN is back on sale again, and its two-year plans are up to 78 percent off right now. You can get the Advanced tier for $101 for 28 months. This is marked down from the $392 that this time frame normally costs. On a per-month basis, it works out to roughly $3.59 for the promo period. Weve consistently liked ExpressVPN because its fast, easy to use and widely available across a large global server network. In fact, it's our current pick for best premium VPN . One of the biggest drawbacks h

As frustrating as it is that governments and businesses are running roughshod over our online freedoms, at least we have plenty of good VPNs to keep us protected online. There are so many fast, intelligently designed, full-featured and affordable services on the market that the biggest problem is picking one. For any use case, you can bet at least two providers will be neck-and-neck for first place. On the other hand, the VPN world is still the Wild West in some ways. It's easy enough to slap a

Gaming peripheral company Razer has announced the beta release of Synapse Web, a browser-based version of its desktop software. The web app is intended for quick adjustments when away from home, such as LANs or tournaments, where downloading the full desktop version may not be possible or practical. At launch, Synapse Web will only support the Razer Huntsman V3 Pro keyboards, though Razer says more devices will be added down the line. Using any Chromium-based browser, users can make quick change

Apple has launched its next-generation AirTag for $29 and brought a slew of new features along with it. But, first, it's important to get this out of the way: The new AirTag still doesn't have a keyring hole, so you'll still need accessories like a case, holder or secure pocket . Once you get over that, the new Apple AirTag does offer some nice improvements. For starters, it's now powered by Apple's second-generation Ultra Wideband chip the same one used in the iPhone 17 lineup and for the Appl

If one of your New Year's resolutions was to improve your cybersecurity , it's not too late. Most of the holiday deals are over by now, but plenty of services are still offering excellent prices. With access to a virtual private network (VPN) , you can keep your activity hidden from your ISP and any advertisers it may sell that data to all while streaming sporting events and TV dramas from all across the globe. We strongly recommend using a VPN , but if you jump on the very first deal you see,

The latest lineup of MSI's Prestige laptops is now available to buy. The company unveiled its next-generation business laptop at CES earlier this month, all of them powered by the latest Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors. Available in configurations that include up to the Intel Core Ultra 9 , the updated Prestige series are equipped with chunky 91Wh batteries and, depending on the model, offer over 30 hours of 1080p video playback. In more real-world terms, if youre on a work trip and know yo

Fans of co-op beat-em-ups and fictional bass players who kind of suck as human beings might want to mark March 3 on their calendars. Thats when Scott Pilgrim EX is set to hit PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and Steam. Developer and publisher Tribute Games announced the release date in a new trailer, which also revealed two more playable characters: Matthew Patel (a member of the League of Evil Exes) and Robot-01, a creation of the Katayanagi Twins. One more fighter will be u

The big game is one of the few instances now in the US where most people gather around the TV to watch the live event together. While the teams playing in Super Bowl 2026 are the true stars of the show (and Bad Bunny , of course), your TV is a pretty important part of the puzzle of putting together an excellent Super Bowl party. Maybe youve been thinking about replacing an aging set, or youre itching for a full refresh of your home theater setup either way, youll want to try to get a good deal

A new year is the perfect time to get your spending in order, and if you're not trying to build your own spreadsheet, budgeting apps are one of the best ways to do it. To save yourself some money in the process, you can pick up a year-long subscription to Monarch Money , one of Engadget's favorite budgeting apps , for just $50 if you use code NEWYEAR2026 at checkout and you're a new subscriber. That's a 50 percent discount on the service's normal $100 price. Monarch Money makes for a capable and

Services have been a huge part of Apples business for the past several years to the tune of tens of billions of dollars in revenue last year alone. Now, with the new Apple Creator Studio bundle, the company is leaning harder into the professional creative software space. Apple Creator Studio packages a bunch of the companys pro apps into a single subscription service that you can pay monthly or yearly for. Its officially available starting January 28, and includes a one-month free trial. The ke

Tax season is fast approaching, and unfortunately for 2026, Direct File isn't an option anymore . The free, government-provided service was shut down, so you'll need to look to other federal programs, including IRS Free File , to file your paperwork. If you don't qualify for Free File , TurboTax might be your best bet for a relatively cheap, efficient way to file your taxes. While it pains us to suggest you give money to a company that has spent decades lobbying to ensure America's tax system re

Last year fans of Ted Lasso received the good news that the show would be returning for a fourth season , despite having referred to its third season as its final one. Now Apple TV has shared some still images and further confirmation that production is underway. As first shared by The A.V. Club , this latest batch of still images depicts the eponymous coach back in action, this time coaching a womens soccer team. A description of the upcoming season shared with the outlet reads, In season four,

The peak time for deals on streaming services the holiday shopping season has come and gone, but Disney is back with a fresh offer for the new year. New and eligible returning subscribers can get one month of the ad-supported Disney+ Hulu bundle for just $10. That's $3 off the usual monthly rate for the bundle, and more than 58 percent off if you consider the prices for each service individually (Disney+ at $12 per month and, separately, Hulu also at $12 per month). We'd be remiss if we didn't

LinkedIn has long been a platform for showing off professional accomplishments. Now, the company is leaning into the rise of vibe coding by allowing users to show off their proficiency with various AI coding tools directly on their profiles. The company is partnering with Replit, Lovabl, Descript and Relay.app on the feature and is working on integrations with fellow Microsoft-owned GitHub as well as Zapier. LinkedIn has always allowed users to add various skills and certifications to their prof

Snaps augmented reality glasses business will now be its own entity, with the company establishing Specs Inc. as a wholly owned subsidiary. It will enable Snap to more easily secure investors and partnerships for its wearables, as well as to grow Specs into a distinct brand while running it within Snap Inc. As The Information reported in mid-2025, Snap was thinking of ways to raise outside money for its AR glasses to be able to better compete with Meta, which has a lot more money to spend on dev

If you're looking to expand the storage on your Switch 2, the 512GB Samsung P9 microSD Express card is on sale right now for 33 percent off, marked down to $80 from $120. With component prices skyrocketing these days, it's getting increasingly rare to see good storage on sale, and 512GB for $80 is a much better deal than you'll currently find directly from Nintendo . The P9 boasts transfer speeds of up to 800MB/s, making moving games to the card that much faster. As for load times, in our testin

Last summer, Google announced that Android 16 would include a desktop interface built from Samsung DeX , a mirroring and phone integration tool for PC. Thanks to a (now permissions-restricted) bug report discovered on Google's Issue Tracker, we have what is almost certainly a first look at the Android-on-desktop project, codenamed Aluminium OS . First spotted by 9to5Google , the bug report was about Chrome incognito tabs and included two screen recordings. The description said the recordings wer

Anker introduced a nifty little charger at CES 2026 , which is a refresh of the pre-existing Nano Charger . It's already on sale for $30, which is a discount of $10 when you clip the on-page coupon on Amazon. The 45W charger includes a smart display that shows real-time data like power flow, temperature and charging status. It also features fun animations to keep things cheerful. Anker says it can recognize what's being charged and automatically adjust certain metrics to ensure a longer battery

Rarely does a set of open-fit earbuds actually impress me. I tend to find them underwhelming because overall sound quality is subpar compared to the more traditional in-ear models. Any promise of noise reduction, or a far-fetched claim of noise cancellation , usually doesnt hold true. The first time I used the Shokz OpenFit Pro ($249.95) I was immediately met with better audio performance than Id just experienced on Sonys new LinkBuds Clip and noise reduction technology that actually lessened so

China has agreed to import its first batch of NVIDIAs H200 AI chips after the government initially rejected the idea, Reuters reported. Several hundred thousand H200 chips were approved for sale in the country following NVIDIAs CEO Jensen Huangs visit there last week, according to two people familiar with the matter. The US government allowed the sale of NVIDIAs H200 processors to vetted and approved companies in China late last year. The first sales have been allocated mainly to three unnamed C

Apple has been leaning harder on services for several years now. That part of the business brought in tens of billions of dollars in revenue last year alone, and the company says 2025 was a record year . With Apple Creator Studio, Apple is extending that strategy further into professional creative software. Apple Creator Studio is a new subscription bundle that packages several of the companys pro apps under a single monthly or yearly fee. It launches on January 28 and includes a one-month free

Windscribe is a virtual private network (VPN) with intense How do you do, fellow kids? energy. It has servers in 69 countries and an annual plan that costs $69, an obsession with the sex number that rivals Elon Musk's. I'm shocked that it doesn't have a subscription costing $4.20 per month. But there's another side to Windscribe's cringe: an obsession with independence and a Bernie Sanders-like anger on behalf of an exploited public. In a market where the best VPNs aim for professionalism, Winds

Amazon has confirmed that its letting go of 16,000 workers and employees across its organization. In an announcement by company SVP Beth Galetti, she explained that Amazon was going through organizational changes to reduce layers and remove bureaucracy. Affected employees in the US will be given 90 days to look for another internal role and will receive severance pay if they do not find any. Galetti also said that Amazon doesnt have plans to announce broad reductions every few months but admitte

If vacuuming is your least favorite chore, employing a robot vacuum can save you time and stress while also making sure your home stays clean. While once most robo-vacs landed on the higher end of the price spectrum, thats not the case anymore. Sure, you could pick up a $1,000 cleaning behemoth with mopping features, but it would be incorrect to assume that you need to spend that much money to get a good machine. Now, you can get an autonomous dirt-sucker with serious cleaning chops for $500 so

E Ink tablets have always been intriguing to me because Im a longtime lover of pen and paper. Ive had probably hundreds of notebooks over the years, serving as repositories for my story ideas, to-do lists, meeting notes and everything in between. However, I turned away from physical notebooks at a certain point because it was just easier to store everything digitally so I always had my most important information at my fingertips. E Ink tablets seem to provide the best of both worlds: the tactile

Meta has faced some serious questions about how it allows its underage users to interact with AI-powered chatbots. Most recently, internal communications obtained by the New Mexico Attorney General's Office revealed that although Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was opposed to the chatbots having explicit conversations with minors, he also rejected the idea of placing parental controls on the feature. Reuters reported that in an exchange between two unnamed Meta employees, one wrote that we pushed hard

Meta has started blocking links to ICE List, a website that compiles information about incidents involving Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents, and lists thousands of their employees' names. It seems that the latter detail is what caused Meta to take action in a move that was first reported by Wired . ICE List is a crowdsourced Wiki that describes itself as an independently maintained public documentation project focused on immigration-enforcement activity in the

Adobe Photoshop introduced some new features that are rolling out for creators today. As you'd expect from any service operator in this day and age, there's some AI involved. Adobe has improved the tools for Generative Fill, Generative Expand and Remove that are powered by its Firefly generative AI platform. Using these tools for image editing should now produce results in 2K resolution with fewer artifacts and increased detail all while delivering better matches for the provided prompts. The Re

Here's a use of AI that appears to do more good than harm. A pair of astronomers at the European Space Agency (ESA) developed a neural network that searches through space images for anomalies. The results were far beyond what human experts could have done. In two and a half days, it sifted through nearly 100 million image cutouts, discovering 1,400 anomalous objects. The creators of the AI model, David O'Ryan and Pablo Gmez, call it AnomalyMatch. The pair trained it on (and applied it to) the Hu

Wireless audio has become the industry standard, but there are still options out there for people who prefer a wired connection. Two new choices joining the market come from Sennheiser, which has released the CX 80U wired earbuds and HD 400U wired over-ear headphones. These new takes on the company's previous models for wired listening have replaced the 3.5mm audio jack connector with a USB-C cable. Both sets support 24-bit, 96 kHz digital audio playback. They're compatible with a broad array of

Pornhub will stop offering full access to new users in the UK on February 2, its parent company Aylo said Tuesday, citing the nation's Online Safety Act and its age-verification requirements. The company said users who already verified their ages before the cutoff will still be able to access the adult site through existing accounts. The move follows the Online Safety Acts Protection of Children Codes , which took effect last summer and require adult sites to use highly effective methods of age

A recent investigation by an online advocacy organization called the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) found that the Apple App Store and Google Play Store are rife with so-called nudify apps . These are AI applications that create nonconsensual and sexualized images, which is a clear violation of both companies' store policies. All told, the investigation found 55 of this type of app in the Google Play Store and 47 in the Apple App Store. Both platforms also still offer access to xAI's Grok, whic

Sonos has unveiled its first new product of 2026, the Amp Multi. This amplifier is a niche option for the owners of very large or complicated spaces, and it's being billed as professional grade option for residential audio installations. The Amp Multi has eight 125W outputs and four configurable zones, and each channel can support up to three Sonos Architectural speakers. In other words, that's a lot more audio than the average home needs. Even the Sonos Amp would probably be overkill for those

The French government is saying au revoir to Microsoft Teams and Zoom as it embraces a home-grown alternative. By next year, civil servants across all departments will have switched to French videoconference platform Visio, as EuroNews reports. As with Teams and Zoom, Visio has an AI-powered transcription tool. Visio runs on a French company's cloud infrastructure as well. The platform has around 40,000 users and it's been in testing for the last year. The government expects the switch to help r

TikTok has reached a settlement in a closely-watched lawsuit over social media addiction, narrowly avoiding a trial that's scheduled to begin jury selection Tuesday. Terms of the deal, which was reported by The New York Times , weren't disclosed. TikTok's settlement comes about one week after Snap reached a settlement in the same case. The trial is expected to move forward in Los Angeles with Meta and YouTube as the only defendants. Mark Lanier, a lawyer for the plaintiff, said in a statement to

Amazon is rethinking its grocery business, and as part of that, it will shut down all of its remaining Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh physical stores. The company will convert some locations into Whole Foods Market stores. While we've seen encouraging signals in our Amazon-branded physical grocery stores, we haven't yet created a truly distinctive customer experience with the right economic model needed for large-scale expansion, the company wrote in a blog post . Amazon added that it would help wor

Google AI Plus, the companys most affordable AI subscription plan, is now rolling out in the US. It will cost you $8 a month for its features, though you can get it for $4 a month for the first two months for a limited time only. AI Plus gives you access to 200GB of storage, as well as access to the Gemini 3 Pro model, Deep Research and Nano Banana Pro inside the Gemini app. Nano Banana Pro generates images that look so realistic, theyre nearly indistinguishable from ordinary photos snapped on p

OpenAI is releasing a new app called Prism today, and it hopes it does for science what coding agents like Claude Code and its own Codex platform have done for programming. Prism builds on Crixet , a cloud-based LaTeX platform the company is announcing it acquired today. For the uninitiated, LaTeX is a typesetting system for formatting scientific documents and journals. Nearly the entire scientific community relies on LaTeX, but it can make some tasks, such as drawing diagrams through TikZ comma

Meta's WhatsApp just introduced something called Strict Account Settings , a tool that further protects your account from highly sophisticated cyber attacks. This is a one-click button in the settings that automatically initiates a series of defenses. So what does it do? It blocks media and attachments from unknown senders, disables link previews and silences calls from unknown senders. This results in a more restrictive experience, but hopefully a safer one. The company says this isn't necessar

Yahoo has announced a new AI-powered answer engine, dubbed Yahoo Scout. The new tool is available now in beta and is powered by Anthropic's Claude . The company says Scout synthesizes info from the web, as well as Yahoo's own data and content when constructing responses to user's natural-language search queries. Yahoo says the interface will include interactive digital media, structured lists and tables and visible source links aimed at making answers easier to verify. (Disclosure: Yahoo is the

Samsungs 2025 was filled with new foldables , an ultra-thin new form factor and the launch of Google's XR platform . After making some announcements at CES 2026 , the company is expected to host its first Galaxy Unpacked of the year in February to introduce the Galaxy S26 lineup. Engadget will be covering Galaxy Unpacked live, and we'll most likely have hands-on coverage of Samsung's new smartphones soon after they're announced. While we wait for an official invite, here's everything we expect S

Google has begun rolling out two upgrades for Search. Starting today, Gemini 3 is the default model powering AI Overviews. When the company debuted its new family of AI systems last November , it first deployed Gemini 3 in AI Overviews through a router that was programmed to direct the most difficult questions to the new system. Now Google is making Gemini 3 the standard for all users globally. In practice, Gemini 3 should prove better at generating more credible and relevant summaries. As for t

After more than two months of contract disputes, NBCUniversal's lineup of channels are still not being carried by Fubo, which is a bummer for anyone hoping to watch the 2026 Winter Olympics . Once again, NBC will be the primary place to watch the Winter Games, but Fubo subscribers will need to find alternate viewing methods if they want to watch events like figure skating, ice hockey, luge or skiing this year. The Olympics will also be broadcast on the USA Network and CNBC, and those channels ar