Month: April 2022

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It’s the weekend, and that means a fresh roundup of all the best tech deals around the web! This week we have the first price cuts on Beats’ Fit true wireless ANC sports earphones and Withing’s ECG-equipped hybrid smartwatch. Beats Fit earphones are essentially sport versions of Apple’s AirPods Pro, carrying IPX4 water resistance. The noise cancellation isn’t quite as adept as the AirPods (also on sale), but it cuts down on noise significantly, especially higher pitch sounds. Beats Studio earphones without water resistance are also at their all-time low.

Withings ScanWatch is a hybrid smartwatch that incorporates a small screen into a traditional watch face as though it were a watch complication. It’s a sleek design that Withings has been using for some time, and this latest watch boasts FDA-cleared ECG and blood-oxygen measurements, with a battery that lasts up to 30 days. If you don’t mind manually tracking some activities (it can automatically track walks, biking, running, swimming, and sleep), it’s a cheaper, more basic alternative to the Apple Watch Series 7 for ECG readings, blood oxygen monitoring, and all-day heart rate tracking.

Elsewhere around the web, we have discounts on iPads, Amazon’s 4K Fire TV Stick, and Samsung’s fast and ruggedized T7 portable SSD. There are also solid discounts on Roombas, Google Nest thermostats, and Apple’s (2021) 16-inch M1 MacBook Pro, among others. Check the full list of curated deals below.

Enlarge / Dell’s XPS 15 9510. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Earth Day is April 22, and its usual message—take care of our planet—has been given added urgency by the challenges highlighted in the latest IPCC report. This year, Ars is taking a look at the technologies we normally cover, from cars to chipmaking, and finding out how we can boost their sustainability and minimize their climate impact.

Labeling a laptop as sustainable, eco-friendly, or “green” is optimistic at best. The apparently endless cycle of upgrades produces a lot of waste, no matter how many green certifications a device gets. We have a long way to go.

But while all laptops contribute to waste, some do so more or less than others. Many people simply need a laptop, so abstaining from the whole thing isn’t an option. But there are some small victories to be won if you spend some time considering the options.

Enlarge / Hats off to the marketing director who thought “Coca-Cola Byte” had a nice ring to it. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

If you’re looking for a TL;DR on what the first “gamer” flavor of Coca-Cola tastes like, I can answer that at the top: It’s weird. Blueberry, maybe? But only if a blueberry was dunked in a pool of Red Bull. That’s “Coca-Cola Byte.”

Upon its announcement, I asked Coca-Cola if I could sample Byte, slated to launch in the United States in early May, because I found its gaming-adjacent existence fascinating. Many other soda and junk-food makers have enjoyed a cozy commercialization relationship with video games for decades—so much so that you can close your eyes and imagine a stereotypical “gamer” holding a sugary, carbonated beverage by default. (It’s probably Mountain Dew. So much “gamer” Mountain Dew out there.)

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  Coca-Cola Byte’s recycling plea, written with gamer-specific encouragement. [credit:
  Sam Machkovech ]

Yet somehow, Coke has avoided direct tie-ins with the gaming universe in most of the world. We’ve never seen limited-edition Super Mario cans of Coke. We’ve never had bottles of Coke hide codes under their caps that give away free XP in online games. And the stuff basically never appears inside games’ virtual worlds, despite so many brands clamoring to capture gamers’ eyeballs and disposable budgets.

Enlarge / The Oura Ring Gen3 and Whoop Strap 4.0 look dedicated and sporty, but they only made me feel like an athlete by making me pine for what’s missing. (credit: Corey Gaskin)

Recently, some wearables have started to place a heavier emphasis on recovery and restoration between exercise instead of just tracking more common activity metrics. Fitbit’s recently launched Daily Readiness Score, for instance, measures your sleep quality, activity levels, and heart rate variability (HRV) to quantify whether your body is prepared for an intense training session or if it needs a break. Like other features of this type, it’s locked behind a paywall—in this case, the $10-a-month Fitbit Premium subscription service.

The Oura Ring (Gen 3) and Whoop 4.0 are two buzzy, celebrity-endorsed fitness wearables built using these sorts of “health and performance optimization” insights. They look nothing alike—the former is, well, a ring, while the latter is an unassuming little wrist module. Whoop’s marketing aims more narrowly at optimizing training for athletes, while Oura casts a wider net.

But both focus more squarely on recovery assessment than typical activity tracking and aim to tell you how your activity, sleep, and recovery rates intertwine. Both lack any sort of screen and require subscriptions for their data, and neither is cheap. And both come from fast-rising companies—though they aren’t exactly household names, Oura was reportedly valued at $800 million in 2021, while Whoop was valued at $3.6 billion.

Enlarge / CEO Elon Musk at SpaceX Headquarters in Hawthorne, California, on October 10, 2019. (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

Elon Musk has raised $8.5 billion from selling part of his stake in Tesla, boosting his cash position ahead of his planned purchase of Twitter.

The sales were made between Tuesday and Thursday, after Twitter’s board agreed to Musk’s $44 billion all-cash takeover approach.

The electric car maker’s share price slumped in the wake of news of the deal, with the drop blamed on concerns about potential share sales by Musk to finance the acquisition, though it also came amid a sharp fall in the wider stock market.