There’s a moment in Metallica, the new three-song concert video Apple released for the Vision Pro yesterday, where Metallica lead singer James Hetfield is kneeling on the edge of the stage, engaged with a single fist-pumping audience member. Hetfield leans in to within inches of his face as he and the fan scream, before the singer stands and moves on. The spotlight follows Hetfield away but the camera stays put, lingering as the concert-goer reacts to what just happened. He falls back against the crowd and then pitches forward, steadying himself on the stage, then buries his face in his elbow, crying.

In a lot of ways, Metallica is like any other concert video, frequently cutting between shots of the band members as they trot around the stage, others of the fans, both in closeups and in flyover shots that points straight down at them from above. (There are so many smartphones!) The roughly 25-minute video from a Mexico City show features three Metallica songs — “Whiplash,” “One,” and “Enter Sandman” — interspersed with documentary-style footage and voiceover from Hetfield, drummer Lars Ulrich, bassist Robert Trujillo, and guitarist Kirk Hammett.

Apple’s 180-degree video format, combined with high production values and the Vision Pro’s sharp displays, ends up adding a lot of extra flavor. That moment with Hetfield and the fan is already very good concert video direction, but this presentation gives a visceral, emotional heft that I think would be hard to capture in 2D. The feeling that I was almost there as the camera tracked behind a cigar-smoking, life-sized-to-me Hetfield on his way to the stage made me think, “Oh wow, he’s tall.“ I got chills when “One” started (I’m a Person Of A Certain Age; I can’t help it), but I could practically feel my aging feet and lower back start to ache as Hammett stretched the song out with a lengthy solo and the crowd, which now had nothing to sing along to, lost some of its energy. The audience still went nuts for “Enter Sandman” after that, of course.

The Vision Pro’s Apple Immersive collection has gotten better in the last few months with the release of videos like The Weeknd: Open Hearts and the scripted fictional short film Submerged. Both are great, but although I’ve enjoyed the rest of the catalog, it often feels like its content is serving the immersive format, not the other way around. Metallica, on the other hand, isn’t just a good immersive video; it’s a good concert video, and it sets a bar that Apple should strive to keep meeting.

Spring has (almost) sprung, but if you’re looking to get a headstart on the array of seasonal sales that are surely on the horizon, Valve has you covered. That’s because now until 1PM ET on March 20th, PC gamers can save on a smorgasbord of great titles as part of the Steam Spring Sale, which encapsulates everything from classic Japanese RPGs and newer deckbuilding titles to one truly hellish shooter.

The bulk of the deals are not necessarily “new,” though they are a great way to catch up on newer games you may have missed and revisit landmark titles from gaming’s past. For instance, if you’ve been itching to revisit Chrono Trigger in honor of the game’s 30th anniversary this week, you can now snag Square Enix’s fabled SNES RPG for $3.74 (about $11 off). Want something modern? Cyberpunk 2077 is down to $42.76 (about $40 off) with its excellent Phantom Liberty expansion, while the 2016 Doom reboot is going for a mere $1.99 ($18 off).

It’s not all about studios with a AAA budget, either. Collectible card games like Inscryption (now $7.99) and Slay the Spire (now $6.24) — both of which offer deep mechanics and various roguelike elements — are steeply discounted this weekend, while the bullet hell survival game that is Vampire Survivors is going for $3.74 (about $1 off). And if you know nothing about the latter, well, rest assured there is now an official wiki that outlines any question you might ever think to ask.

More ways to save right now

• There’s been a spate of terrific Sonos deals over the last couple of weeks; however, if you’re looking for something somewhat budget-friendly, you can still grab Sonos Ray at Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy for $179 ($100 off). The 22-inch stereo soundbar makes some concessions to keep the cost down (RIP, HDMI), but it still manages to deliver excellent dialogue clarity and crisp, balanced sound that one-ups most other soundbars in its price range. It also taps into the rest of the Sonos ecosystem, naturally, and supports AirPlay 2 for streaming from various Apple devices. Read our review.
• Sleep Awareness Week is a thing, apparently, and the reason why Headspace has dropped the price of its annual subscription to $41.99 ($28 off) through March 18th. A subscription grants you access to a robust catalog of well-curated sleepcasts, not to mention guided meditation sessions, focus music, and daily inspirational videos. The app’s searchability and the gradual progression of the courses remain the best parts of Headpace, though, especially if you’re a relative newcomer to mindfulness exercises.
• If PC games aren’t your thing, Sony’s new Astro Bot PlayStation 5 bundle, which pairs a 1TB PS5 “slim” with last year’s Game of the Year, is now available for $449 at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart. It doesn’t come with Team Asobi’s adorable Astro Bot Dualsense controller or any sort of limited edition styling, sadly, but it is $50 cheaper than picking up a standalone PS5 console. You can also grab the bundle in a Digital Edition configuration at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart for $399. Read our Astro Bot review.

As we inch closer to the end of Severance’s second season, there are still a lot of open questions. But it’s also become clear that the show isn’t in a rush to answer them. Whereas many mystery box shows race to their conclusions, speeding through plot points so quickly that it can be hard to keep up, Severance has spent the latter part of this season meandering through flashbacks and spending some quality time with its characters. It’s a slower pace than other prestige streaming shows, but these episodes have helped show just how fascinating a place Severance’s bizarre world is. They’ve also helped set the show up for the finale — and answers — to come.

Spoilers ahead for Severance, up to season 2, episode 9.

It all started with the seventh episode, which shifted the focus from the Macrodata Refinement crew to center on Gemma (Dichen Lachman) and the nightmarish procedures and tests she was put through to become the calm and collected Ms. Casey. That was followed by a trip down memory lane for Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), who went back to her hometown, an isolated fishing village that was also previously home to a Lumon Industries ether plant. The story sp …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Star of Providence is like a retro game I would have loved as a kid. But the roguelike bullet hell shooter is also a modern twin-stick shooter, and the melding of the two eras results in a fun, fast, and challenging experience.

In Star, you control a ship and explore randomly generated dungeons. As you navigate room by room — similar to an old-school Legend of Zelda game — you’ll pick up powerful weapons to fight the many enemies you’ll stumble across in your dungeon crawling.

The weapons are a delight, filling your screen with bullets and lasers. Sometimes, you’ll get cool effects like the ability for your bullets to phase through one side of the screen and appear on the other. But enemies can also spew out huge amounts of bullets, and that means many rooms turn into chaos as you weave through attack patterns to line up a perfect shot. The game’s narrow aspect ratio makes rooms feel pretty small, too (though I appreciate how it adds to the retro vibe).

Star’s controls are tight, so it always feels like you can thread the needle to escape danger. A useful dash can get you out of rough spots. And you can deploy bombs to clear bullets from a room, but they can take …

Read the full story at The Verge.

When you’re starting a new sports league, or really a new anything, you’re always praying for your first viral moment.

For TGL, a new golf league hoping to reinvent the game for a new era and a new audience, that moment came before the first season ever started. In 2024, Tiger Woods, the golf world’s biggest name and both a player and co-founder in the upstart league, showed up to a not-quite-finished SoFi Center, in West Palm Beach, Florida, where all TGL matches would soon be held. He stood near the center of the stadium, on a football field-sized slab of turf, and started hitting balls into the 53-foot-high simulator screen. 

The next part seems to make TGL producer Jeff Neubarth laugh every time he tells it. He recounts it to me, months later, standing in almost the exact same spot. Neubarth points up to a tiny camera, barely visible five stories up atop that huge screen. “That’s camera 91,” he says. “I pointed it out to Tiger, and I said, ‘It’d be cool if you hit it.’ He said, ‘sure,’ dropped the ball, and hit it. First shot.”

The video of the ball flying upward and whacking the camera made the rounds on social media, before most people even knew …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Samsung’s flagship soundbar, the HW-Q990D, is being rendered useless for some owners after a faulty firmware update that the company rolled out this week. The sheer number of reports on Samsung’s community forums, Reddit, and AVSForum confirm that something has gone very wrong with the premium Dolby Atmos system in recent days. The issue isn’t limited to any specific region, with customers in the United States, Austria, the Philippines, Malaysia, and other countries all sharing in the frustration.

Customers say the soundbar has gone unresponsive and that none of the usual factory reset methods are working; affected units are also inaccessible via Samsung’s SmartThings app. The device powers on, but appears to freeze on the TV eARC input — with no sound output to speak of.

The culprit seems to be the latest firmware release, which is version 1020.7. Many Q990Ds are set to automatically install new updates, which has led to widespread complaints about the bad software over the last several days. If you’ve got a Samsung soundbar, it might be wise to disable automatic updates for the time being until this situation has cleared up. There are scattered reports of the same bug impacting other Samsung models like the HW-Q800D and HW-S801D, but the bulk of complaints pertain to the Q990D. It’s one of the most well-reviewed soundbars on the market, so this is an unfortunate development.

The Verge has reached out to Samsung for comment. Apparently some customers have already been instructed to send in their Q990D hardware for repair. That seems like a worst case scenario, so hopefully Samsung will have an easier, at-home solution once it realizes the scope of this problem. Can the malfunction be resolved with another firmware update in the coming days? Stay tuned.

Thanks for the tip, Eric.

Google is rolling out a Find My Device app feature update that shows a map of your friends and the family members who share their location with you, 9to5Google reports. The new feature was announced in the Android March feature update last week and is now available for more users.

There’s already a way for friends and family to see each other’s shared locations in Google Maps. Now, the Android Find My Device app does double duty, making it easier to find both things and people in one place. The map also shows the locations of friends who share from Google Maps on iOS.

In the app on Android, you can tap the new People tab to show the locations of any contacts that are sharing their location with you. You can also switch to a tab that shows who you’re sharing your location with and gives you options such as changing the duration you share your location with someone.

Google’s interface is now more reminiscent of Apple’s Find My app, which features a similar split-screen UI with a map on top and devices or people on the bottom, depending whether you’re viewing items or people.

The Trump administration is embarking on a massive university speech crackdown, starting with Columbia University, where it’s demanding external control of entire departments and punishment for student activists. Its first test case, Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student with a green card, offers a hint of what’s to come: a state of intentional chaos that undermines free speech and due process rights. Thus far, Columbia appears to be complying with the administration’s demands, even as its students gear up to fight back.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents raided Columbia University’s campus on Thursday night, looking for students in two residential buildings, according to a university-wide email sent by Columbia’s interim president Katrina Armstrong. At a press conference on Friday, deputy attorney general Todd Blanche said the Justice Department is investigating whether student protesters at Columbia violated federal terrorism laws and that it would prosecute “any person engaging in material support of terrorism.” Hours before the raids, Columbia received a joint letter from three government agencies demanding that it punish student protesters; empower “in …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Ashly Burch, the award-winning voice and performance actor behind Horizon Zero Dawn’s Aloy — one of the most prominent characters on PlayStation today — has some news and some very strong thoughts about the leaked Sony experiment that saw her character voiced and performed by AI technology instead of her or any other human being.

The video, originally shared with The Verge by a tipster and later pulled off YouTube by a copyright enforcement company that counts Sony PlayStation as a client, was of an internal prototype — not necessarily something that’s in production for actual games. Burch says Horizon developer Guerilla proactively confirmed to her that it is not actively in development. Nor did it use her voice or facial data, Guerilla claimed. 

But Burch says having seen the demo, she is worried, and not just about her own career. “I feel worried about this art form,” she says. You can watch her video immediately below, or scroll down for a transcript. 

The transcript:

Hi. Let’s talk about AI Aloy. I saw the tech demo earlier this week. Guerilla reached out to me to let me know that the demo didn’t reflect anything that was actively in development. They didn’t use any of my performance for the demo, so none of my facial or voice data. And Guerilla owns Aloy as a character.

So all that said, I feel worried. And not worried about Guerilla specifically or Horizon or my performance or my career specifically, even. I feel worried about this art form. Game performance as an art form.

We are currently on strike. SAG-AFTRA is on strike against video games because of AI. Because this technology exists, because we know that game companies want to use it, we’re asking for protections.

So currently what we’re fighting for is that you have to get our consent before you make an AI version of us in any form. You have to compensate us fairly and you have to tell us how you’re using this AI double.

And I feel worried not because the technology exists. Not even because game companies want to use it. Because of course they do. They always want to use technological advancements.

I just imagine a video like this coming out that does have someone’s performance attached to it. That does have someone’s voice or face or movement. And the possibility that if we lose this fight, that person would have no recourse.

They wouldn’t have any protections. Any way to fight back. And that possibility… it makes me so sad. It hurts my heart. It scares me.

I love this industry and this art form so much and I want there to be a new generation of actors. I want there to be so many more incredible game performances.

I want to be able to continue, to do this job, and if we don’t win, then that future is really compromised.

In a slightly longer TikTok version of the video, which we’ve embedded above to replace the original Instagram copy, Burch adds that “I’m genuinely not trying to put any game company specifically on blast, certainly not Guerilla. The technology isn’t the problem. Game companies wanting to use the technology is not the problem. The problem is we’re currently on strike, and the bargaining group will not agree to give us common sense protections.”

It’s unusual for performers who have such a close relationship with game companies to speak out like this, but we’re also in an unusual moment: as she points out, video game actors are on strike right now, specifically because of AI, and the very idea that a company like Sony is explicitly building and demonstrating ways to potentially replace actors like Burch is exactly what the striking workers fear.

In addition to starring in Horizon Zero Dawn, Burch has had minor roles in other Sony games including The Last of Us Part II and Spider-Man, but is otherwise best known for playing Chloe Price in the Life Is Strange games, Tiny Tina in Borderlands, and from the live-action D&D roleplaying series Critical Role and Apple TV Plus’s Mythic Quest, where she also serves as a writer.

Update, March 14th: Swapped Instagram video for Burch’s longer uncut TikTok video and added its additional context.

It is hard to describe how utterly joyless and devoid of imaginative ideas The Electric State is. Netflix’s latest feature codirected by Joe and Anthony Russo takes many visual cues from Simon Stålenhag’s much-lauded 2018 illustrated novel, but the film’s leaden performances and meandering story make it feel like a project borne out by a streamer that sees its subscribers as easily impressed dolts who hunger for slop. 

While you can kind of see where some of the money went, it’s exceedingly hard to understand why Netflix reportedly spent upward of $300 million to produce what often reads like an idealized, feature-length version of the AI-generated “movies” littering social media. With a budget that large and a cast so stacked, you would think that The Electric State might, at the very least, be able to deliver a handful of inspired set pieces and characters capable of leaving an impression. But all this clunker of a movie really has to offer is nostalgic vibes and groan-inducing product placement.

Set in an alternate history where Walt Disney’s invention of simple automatons eventually leads to a devastating war, The Electric State centers Michelle (Millie Bobby …

Read the full story at The Verge.

OpenAI and Google are pushing the US government to allow their AI models to train on copyrighted material. Both companies outlined their stances in proposals published this week, with OpenAI arguing that applying fair use protections to AI “is a matter of national security.”

The proposals come in response to a request from the White House, which asked governments, industry groups, private sector organizations, and others for input on President Donald Trump’s “AI Action Plan.” The initiative is supposed to “enhance America’s position as an AI powerhouse,” while preventing “burdensome requirements” from impacting innovation.

In its comment, Open claims that allowing AI companies to access copyrighted content would help the US “avoid forfeiting” its lead in AI to China, while calling out the rise of DeepSeek. 

“There’s little doubt that the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] AI developers will enjoy unfettered access to data — including copyrighted data — that will improve their models,” OpenAI writes. “If the PRC’s developers have unfettered access to data and American companies are left without fair use access, the race for AI is effectively over.”

Google, unsurprisingly, agrees. The company’s response similarly states that copyright, privacy, and patents policies “can impede appropriate access to data necessary for training leading models.” It adds that fair use policies, along with text and data mining exceptions, have been “critical” to training AI on publicly available data.

“These exceptions allow for the use of copyrighted, publicly available material for AI training without significantly impacting rightsholders and avoid often highly unpredictable, imbalanced, and lengthy negotiations with data holders during model development or scientific experimentation,” Google says.

Anthropic, the AI company behind the AI chatbot Claude, also submitted a proposal – but it doesn’t mention anything about copyrights. Instead, it asks the US government to develop a system to assess an AI model’s national security risks and to strengthen export controls on AI chips. Like Google and OpenAI, Anthropic also suggests that the US bolster its energy infrastructure to support the growth of AI.

Many AI companies have been accused of ripping copyrighted content to train their AI models. OpenAI currently faces several lawsuits from news outlets, including The New York Times, and has even been sued by well-known names like Sarah Silverman and George R.R. Martin. Apple, Anthropic, and Nvidia have also been accused of scraping YouTube subtitles to train AI, which YouTube has said violates its terms.

Anthropic is one of the world’s leading AI model providers, especially in areas like coding. But its AI assistant, Claude, is nowhere near as popular as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

According to chief product officer Mike Krieger, Anthropic doesn’t plan to win the AI race by building a mainstream AI assistant. “I hope Claude reaches as many people as possible,” Krieger told me onstage at the HumanX AI conference earlier this week. “But I think, [for] our ambitions, the critical path isn’t through mass-market consumer adoption right now.”

Instead, Krieger says Anthropic is focused on two things: building the best models; and what he calls “vertical experiences that unlock agents.” The first of these is Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding tool that Krieger says amassed 100,000 users within its first week of availability. He says there are more of these so-called agents for specific use cases coming this year and that Anthropic is working on “smaller, cheaper models” for developers. (And, yes, there are future versions of its biggest and most capable model, Opus, coming at some point, too.)

Krieger made his name as the cofounder of Instagram and then the news aggregati …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Amazon is discontinuing a feature that allowed users of some of its Echo smart speakers to choose not to send their voice recordings to the cloud. According to an email the company sent to users that was posted on Reddit, it will disable the feature that allowed select Echos to process Alexa requests locally on the device on March 28th, 2025. 

The move appears to be connected to the launch of its generative AI-powered Alexa Plus, slated for later this month (March 28th, perhaps?). The email states, “As we continue to expand Alexa’s capabilities with generative AI features that rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud, we have decided to no longer support this feature.”

Amazon confirmed the change in an email to The Verge. Spokesperson Lauren Raemhild provided the following statement: “The Alexa experience is designed to protect our customers’ privacy and keep their data secure, and that’s not changing. We’re focusing on the privacy tools and controls that our customers use most and work well with generative AI experiences that rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud. Customers can continue to choose from a robust set of tools and controls, including the option to not save their voice recordings at all. We’ll continue learning from customer feedback and building privacy features on their behalf.”

As she states, you’ll still be able to have Amazon delete voice recordings after they’ve been sent to the cloud. If you have “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” option turned on, it will default to the “Don’t save recordings” setting on March 28th. This means your recordings will be sent to and processed in the cloud and then deleted after Alexa deals with the request.

If you haven’t heard of this option, it’s not a surprise. Local processing of voice recordings was only available on three Echo devices – Echo Dot (4th Gen), Echo Show 10, and Echo Show 15 – and only for customers in the U.S. with devices set to English. 

Still, it’s a shame the option is going away, as it was a feature many would have liked to see expanded to more devices, not taken away, especially for smart home users who may only use the voice assistant to turn their lights on or adjust their thermostat. But it seems Alexa’s future, and to be fair, most of its past, is all about the cloud.

For those looking for a non-cloud-dependent voice assistant, Home Assistant’s new Voice PE is worth considering.

In recent weeks, Apple has been unable to escape headlines about its slow progress with everything having to do with Siri and artificial intelligence. The company has officially delayed features first promised last June intended to modernize Siri and give Apple a much-needed boost in the AI race. We still don’t know when those Apple Intelligence capabilities will arrive, and if a recent all-hands meeting is anything to go by, neither does Apple itself.

Bloomberg has the full scoop on what happened at a Siri team meeting led by senior director Robby Walker, who oversees the division. He called the delay an “ugly” situation and sympathized with employees who might be feeling burned out or frustrated by Apple’s decisions and Siri’s still-lackluster reputation. He also said it’s not a given that the missing Siri features will make it into iOS 19 this year; that’s the company’s current target, but “doesn’t mean that we’re shipping then,” he told employees.

“We have other commitments across Apple to other projects,” Walker said, according to Bloomberg’s report. “We want to keep our commitments to those, and we understand those are now potentially more timeline-urgent than the features that have been deferred.”

The meeting also hinted at tension between Apple’s Siri unit and the marketing division. Walker said the communications team wanted to highlight features like Siri understanding personal context and being able to take action based on what’s currently on a user’s screen — even though they were nowhere near ready. Those WWDC teases and the resulting customer expectations only made matters worse, Walker acknowledged. Apple has since pulled an iPhone 16 ad that showcased the features and has added disclaimers to several areas of its website noting they’ve all been punted to a TBD date. They were held back in part due to quality issues “that resulted in them not working properly up to a third of the time,” according to Mark Gurman.

Apple has not publicly commented on the situation beyond last week’s statement, when it said the advanced Siri capabilities were “taking longer than expected.” But Walker told his staff that senior executives like software chief Craig Federighi and AI boss John Giannandrea are taking “intense personal accountability” for a predicament that’s drawing fierce criticism as the months pass by with little to show for it beyond a prettier Siri animation.

“Customers are not expecting only these new features but they also want a more fully rounded-out Siri,” Walker said. “We’re going to ship these features and more as soon as they are ready.” He praised the team for its “incredibly impressive” work so far. “These are not quite ready to go to the general public, even though our competitors might have launched them in this state or worse,” he said of the delayed features.

So soon after Specter Divide, a multiplayer shooter developed by Mountaintop Studios, announced its pending shut down which will take its studio with it, is yet another live-service game going offline. Today, Star Wars: Hunters developer Zynga announced the game will be sunset on October 1st.

Hunters is a class-based arena shooter featuring original characters (or at least they seem original, who knows with folks named Babu Frik running around) from throughout the Star Wars universe. It had a soft launch in select countries in 2021, but didn’t get a global launch on mobile and the Nintendo Switch until June 2024. This means that the game officially lived a scant 16 months before it inevitably goes offline. That short time though is downright luxurious considering Specter Divide lasted roughly six months before it will shut down sometime in the next 30 days.

The developers do have some parting gifts for players before the galaxy winks out on Star Wars: Hunters, though. The current season will be extended an additional three weeks and the game will still release a new hero April 15th. Then the developers will keep the ranked leaderboards running until the game shuts down in October.

On Friday, Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, upped his investigations into Big Tech by sending subpoenas to 16 major tech companies, asking whether the federal government had pressured them into using artificial intelligence to “censor lawful speech” – a new front in his long-running quest to prove the tech industry is out to silence conservatives.

In letters accompanying the subpoenas, Jordan asked the companies –  Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic PBC, Apple, Cohere, International Business Machines Corp., Inflection AI, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Open AI, Palantir Technologies, Salesforce, Scale AI, and Stability AI – to preserve all documents between them and the Biden-Harris administration that showed “how and to what extent the executive branch coerced or colluded with artificial intelligence (AI) companies and other intermediaries to censor lawful speech.” The core of their claim:  algorithms could be used to discriminate against right wingers not just online, but in any everyday use case for AI, from hiring practices to generative content. 

Citing a report filed last December, in which the committee found several alleged examples of Biden officials “pressuring private companies to ‘advance equity,’ stop ‘algorithmic discrimination,’  and ‘mitigate the production of harmful and biased outputs,’” Jordan demanded they produce any and all emails with a third party, government or otherwise, between January 2020 and January 2025, “referring or relating to the moderation, deletion, suppression, restriction, or reduced circulation of the content, input, or output of an AI model, training dataset, algorithm, system, or product.”  

The subpoenas are the latest move in the GOP’s long-running and innumerable investigations into whether tech companies were suppressing right-wing ideology on their platforms, and narrowed in on potential interference from the Biden administration over the past several years. But this inquiry is particularly vast: its broad request for any document that ever discussed AI content restrictions over the past five years, as well as its targeting of software companies that are not media platforms, such as Adobe, Nvidia and Palantir, represents the party’s escalation against the industry. 

The new M4-powered MacBook Air only hit stores on March 12, but it’s already on sale. You can pick up the 13-inch entry-level configuration with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for $949 ($50 off) at Amazon (at checkout) and Best Buy if you’re a My Best Buy Plus and My Best Buy Total member. The 15-inch base model with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage is also on sale for $1,049 ($50 off) at Amazon and Best Buy for My Best Buy Plus or Total members.

Even at full price, Apple’s new entry-level laptop offers a lot of value. It’s cheaper yet more capable than its predecessor, offering faster performance courtesy of Apple’s latest M4 chip. It also boasts double the base RAM at 16GB along with the MacBook Pro’s 12MP Center Stage webcam, which is sharper and offers a wider field of view. The M4 chip also allows you to connect two external monitors with the lid still open.

There’s a new skylight blue option, but otherwise the new Air shares the same thin and sleek design as its predecessor, along with all-day battery life and Wi-Fi 6E support. There are some tiny differences if you move up to the larger display, but not much. The 15-inch model continues to offer a six-speaker system over the 13-inch model’s four speakers, for example. 

Read our M4-powered MacBook Air review.

Google is finally moving on from Google Assistant.

The company will be upgrading “more” users from Google Assistant to Gemini “over the coming months,” according to a blog post. The classic Google Assistant “will no longer be accessible on most mobile devices or available for new downloads on mobile app stores” at some point “later this year.” (9to5Google reports that phones running Android 9 or earlier and without at least 2GB of RAM will still be able to use the classic Assistant.)

“Additionally, we’ll be upgrading tablets, cars and devices that connect to your phone, such as headphones and watches, to Gemini,” Google says. “We’re also bringing a new experience, powered by Gemini, to home devices like speakers, displays and TVs.”

The company says it will share more details “in the next few months.” (I would guess that Google will announce information around that new experience at Google I/O in May.) In the meantime, “Google Assistant will continue to operate on these devices,” according to Google.

Google initially launched Google Assistant in 2016. Now, though, Gemini has become the catch-all branding for many of Google’s AI and assistant-like efforts, so it’s not too surprising that the company is officially retiring Google Assistant.

Update, March 14th: Added details from 9to5Google.

Google releases a lot of products, but it shuts down a lot of them, too. Some didn’t deserve to be discontinued (we pine for the days of Reader and Inbox), and some probably weren’t long for this world from the start. (What was Google Wave supposed to be, anyway?) The company actually used to shut down products with quarterly “spring cleanings,” but now, it just does so whenever it’s time for another product to be put out to pasture.

Follow along here for all our coverage of everything Google sends to the graveyard.

• Google is officially dumping Assistant for Gemini
• Google’s taking the extra search box out of your search results
• Saluting the Chromecast, one of the great HDMI dongles
• Google is discontinuing the Chromecast line
• Google is ending an experiment that let you annotate search results
• PDF organizer Stack is the latest app to hit the Google graveyard
• Google is killing infinite scroll on search results
• Today I learned there is a messaging service in Google Maps, and now it’s going away
• Google is shutting down developer access to Google Fit APIs.
• The Google One VPN service is heading to the Google graveyard
• Not everyone is losing Google Podcasts after today.
• Google Podcasts’ time is almost up.
• Google Pay replaced Google Wallet — now it’s going away to make room for Google Wallet
• Google Search’s cache links are officially being retired
• Hey Google, I was using that button!
• Google Assistant Driving Mode will shut down in February
• Google removes 17 features from Google Assistant
• Google is losing its Fitbit leaders and laying off hundreds of AR employees
• Google is finally saying goodbye to Google Play Movies & TV
• You can listen to podcasts through Google Podcasts until March 2024.
• Google News hammers the final nail into its magazine subscriptions coffin.
• Google’s whiteboarding app is joining the graveyard
• Google Podcasts is going to the graveyard as YouTube Music takes over
• Gmail’s basic HTML view will go to the Google graveyard in 2024
• Google kills Pixel Pass without ever upgrading subscriber’s phones
• We need Google Reader more than ever.
• Who killed Google Reader?
• Google has reportedly killed its Project Iris augmented reality glasses
• Google sunsets Domains business and shovels it off to Squarespace
• The real Q project.
• RIP Google Currents.
• Google will shut down Currents, the work-focused Google Plus replacement
• Google will shut down Dropcam and Nest Secure in 2024
• Google Stadia is how you shut down a service right
• Google’s Duplex on the Web joins the Google graveyard.
• Google’s worst hardware flop was introduced 10 years ago today
• Google’s handy scrollable Snapshot of your day has disappeared from phones
• A very brief history of every Google messaging app
• Alphabet is shutting down Loon, its internet balloon company
• Google to shut down Android Things, a smart home OS that never took off
• Google discontinues its Google Nest Secure alarm system
• Google kills off app that let you check in on loved ones during an emergency
• Android 11 officially drops support for Google’s Daydream VR
• Google is delaying the shutdown of Chrome apps, but you probably weren’t using them anyway
• Google Plus is officially gone after its mobile apps are rebranded as Google Currents
• These engineers are trying to rescue a ‘Bookbot’ from the Google graveyard
• Google is finally killing off Chrome apps, which nobody really used anyhow
• What we can learn from a decade of dead Google projects
• Google is shutting down its Cloud Print feature in 2020
• Google is open sourcing Cardboard now that the Daydream is dead
• Google Clips is dead
• Google is discontinuing the Daydream View VR headset, and the Pixel 4 won’t support Daydream
• Google finally gives Reader the respect it deserves with an actual gravestone
• Google Hire is the next Google tool to be shut down
• YouTube discontinues private messages to focus on keeping things public
• Google shuts down Nest app for Apple Watch and Wear OS
• How to replace Google’s Trips app
• The YouTube Gaming app is shutting down this week
• Google clarifies Works with Nest shutdown, provides extension on existing connections
• Google’s Nest changes risk making the smart home a little dumber
• Google ends sales of the Pixel 2 and 2 XL
• Google+ is officially deleting consumer data starting April 2nd
• The original Google Hangouts will start to disappear this October
• Google discontinues Chromecast Audio, but you can grab one for $15 while supplies last
• Google halted Chinese data collection program after Dragonfly backlash
• Google will shut down Google+ four months early after second data leak
• Google is ending Play Service support for Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
• Google is shutting down Allo
• Google is shutting down Google+ for consumers following security lapse
• Google’s Inbox app is shutting down in March 2019
• Google Goggles is dead; long live Google Lens
• Google is starting to phase out the old Gmail design
• Google is using the impending death of its blob emoji to promote Allo
• Google is finally replacing its bad emoji blobs in Android O
• Google is killing Gchat for good and replacing it with Hangouts
• Google is shutting down Spaces, its experimental group messaging app
• Google confirms the end of its modular Project Ara smartphone
• Google will end support for Chrome apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux
• Google will shut down Picasa this spring
• Google takes the ‘last step’ to shut down its failed social network Buzz
• Google Reader to shut down July 1st
• Google discontinues Listen podcast app, Google Apps for Teams, and Google Video for Business
• Google’s latest ‘spring cleaning’ moves all video content to YouTube, kills iGoogle and Symbian Search app
• Google Wave is officially dead starting today
• Google’s spring cleaning ends support for BlackBerry Sync, Picasa plug-ins for iPhoto, and more
• Google kills off more experimental services, including Wave, Gears, and Knol
• Google Buzz to shut down in a few weeks, Google Labs dies today

Reddit is going rolling out a feature that lets you hide an ad from your feed for “at least a year,” the company says in a post spotted by Ars Technica.

When the update is available to you, you’ll be able to see the “Hide” option for “any ads that appear in feeds, such as your home or subreddit feed,” Reddit says.

The option looks like an eye with a line through it, as shown in a screenshot. When an ad becomes visible again after you hide it, you can re-hide it if you’d like, according to the company.

Reddit says it’s rolling out the update this week that ads the feature and that it will “gradually become available across iOS, Android, and www.reddit.com over the next several weeks.”

Last year, Reddit added filters that let users limit ads from “sensitive” categories like alcohol, dating, gambling, and politics and activism.