Month: April 2022

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

It’s time for another Dealmaster! Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes a number of lower-than-usual prices on various Apple devices. The 40 mm Apple Watch SE, for instance, is available for $229 at Amazon and Walmart as of this writing. That’s the best price we’ve seen since Black Friday and only $10 more than the all-time lowest price we’ve tracked. It’s the same situation with the bigger 44 mm model, which is available for $259. The higher-end Apple Watch Series 7, meanwhile, is down to its lowest price to date: the 41 mm model is currently on sale for $329, while the 45 mm model is down to $359.

To be clear, we’ve seen multiple discounts for both of these watches in recent months, and the two have generally retailed for less than Apple’s MSRPs at Amazon, Walmart, and a few other online stores since they launched. It’s almost inevitable that Apple will refresh one or both devices by the end of the year, too. But if you own an iPhone and want a wearable to pair with it right now, the Series 7 is still the top pick in our guide to the best smartwatches, and the SE remains a great alternative for those on a tighter budget. As we’ve noted before, both devices deliver a strong build quality, robust software, and good-enough activity tracking for most. Between the two, the Series 7 has a bigger display that stays active when you put your wrist down, faster charging speeds, and more advanced health-tracking tools like ECG functionality and blood-oxygen monitoring. If you can overlook those features—the lack of an always-on display likely being the most notable—the SE can do most of the same things, albeit slightly slower, for a much lower price. Either way, note that not all colorways for each watch are on sale between the two retailers.

Besides the Apple Watch, we also have a few iPad discounts. The 256GB Space Gray model of the entry-level, 10.2-inch iPad is down to a new low of $429, while versions of the latest 10.9-inch iPad Air and 8.3-inch iPad Mini with the same storage capacity are available for lows of $679 and $600, respectively. These devices aren’t especially cheap, but we’ve reviewed all three positively. In short, the base iPad is likely the best value for most, as it still offers an altogether competent way into iPadOS for the lowest price possible. The recently released iPad Air is a fairly noticeable step up in terms of performance, however, and its design is far more modern, with a bigger and brighter display, a USB-C port, wider accessory support, and better cameras. The iPad Mini, meanwhile, is built like a shrunken-down iPad Air, though its processor is a bit slower. If you prefer a smaller design, though, it’s the only iPad that fits the bill. Both the 10.2-inch iPad and iPad Mini launched in September 2021, while the iPad Air arrived last month.

Enlarge / This is your brain on NFTs. We have a lot of questions. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Ubisoft’s first experiment with non-fungible tokens (called “Quartz Digits”) in Ghost Recon Breakpoint is already winding down just four months after it started. The short saga serves as a prime example of the problems that can arise when a company just throws “the blockchain” into its plans without thinking about why it’s doing so.

Ubisoft announced on Twitter on Tuesday that the company has released “our final piece of content” for Ghost Recon Breakpoint after rolling out 11 updates since the game’s 2019 launch. While Ubisoft says it will “continue to maintain our servers” for Breakpoint and 2017’s Ghost Recon Wildlands for the time being, Breakpoint‘s relatively limited player base means that online multiplayer support probably won’t last that much longer. (Ubisoft will shut down the gameplay servers for battle royale shooter Hyper Scape later this month).

On the Ubisoft Quartz website, the company confirmed that “the last Digit for Ghost Recon Breakpoint was released on 3/17/2022.”

Enlarge / Forthcoming “Edit Tweet” option as seen in a post by Twitter’s communications team. (credit: Twitter)

Twitter is adding an edit button, the company said yesterday. The “Edit Tweet” option will become available “in the coming months” to users of the paid Twitter Blue subscription, with a potential rollout to other users later on.

The announcement came shortly after Elon Musk joined the Twitter board of directors and polled users about whether they want an edit button. But Twitter said the edit button has been in the works for months.

“Now that everyone is asking… yes, we’ve been working on an edit feature since last year!” Twitter’s communications team wrote in a tweet. “No, we didn’t get the idea from a poll . We’re kicking off testing within @TwitterBlue Labs in the coming months to learn what works, what doesn’t, and what’s possible.” Twitter Blue currently has an “Undo Tweet” option that delays sending tweets for up to 60 seconds, but the planned edit button would be the first feature to let users change a tweet after it has been posted. Twitter Blue costs $2.99 a month in the US.

Enlarge / Water levels at the Hoover Dam are well below capacity. (credit: Jorge Villalba)

News that Arizona’s Lake Powell is slowly but surely drying up has spread far and wide. The reservoir behind the 1,320-megawatt Glen Canyon Dam and power station, Lake Powell plays an important role in providing power for some 3 million customers in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.

But this year, the reservoir has hit a historic low, due to ongoing drought conditions in the region that have been attributed, at least in part, to climate change. The dam may even stop producing power if the situation continues to worsen, and this issue is not an isolated one in the American Southwest.

The Colorado River, an important source for many dams and power plants in the region, has been wracked by drought for the past 22 years—some research even suggests that it is subject to the worst drought the area has seen in 1,200 years. Further, according to the US Drought Monitor, as of March 29, 88.75 percent of the Western US has been experiencing a moderate drought or worse. According to staff members at the United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR), other dams in this be-droughted part of the country are seeing similar effects—though the officials also noted that each case is different.

Enlarge (credit: AMD)

In September, AMD added support for simple CPU overclocking to its graphics drivers. If you had a Ryzen 5000-series CPU and wanted to benefit from the extra performance, this auto-overclocking function could save you from needing to download the more complex Ryzen Master utility. The overclock would also be conservative enough that it probably wouldn’t cause system instability or other issues.

The problem for some users is that this auto-overclocking feature has become too automated—that is, it’s changing systems’ overclocking settings whether users want it to or not.

An AMD representative told Tom’s Hardware that “an issue in the AMD software suite” caused the feature to begin “adjusting certain AMD processor settings for some users.” Because the CPU overclocking feature is actually changing settings in your system’s BIOS, that means it can change overclocking settings that users have changed themselves and apply an overclock where there was no overclock before. That second bit could be especially problematic since overclocking processors generally voids AMD’s CPU warranty, even when you’re using AMD-provided tools like Ryzen Master or using AMD-advertised features like Precision Boost Overdrive (though, anecdotally, this policy isn’t consistently enforced).

Enlarge (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Intel, one of the world’s largest semiconductor companies, is suspending business operations in Russia “effective immediately,” the company announced on Tuesday.

“Intel continues to join the global community in condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine,” the company said in a statement. Intel stopped shipping chips to customers in Russia and Belarus in early March.

Intel said that it is “working to support all of our employees through this difficult situation, including our 1,200 employees in Russia.”