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Engadget Podcast: The M4 MacBook Air and Mobile World Congress 2025

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Apple finally dropped some long-awaited updates this week:  An M4 MacBook Air (now starting at $999!), M3 iPad Air, as well as a refreshed Mac Studio with M3 Ultra and M4 Max chips. In this episode, Cherlynn, Devindra and Deputy Editor Nathan Ingraham chat about all of Apple’s new hardware, as well as some interesting tidbits from Mobile World Congress 2025. Devindra also dives into his reviews of NVIDIA’s RTX 5070 and AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT. It turns out AMD has finally delivered some killer GPUs to counter NVIDIA’s dominance.

Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you’ve got suggestions or topics you’d like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!

  • MacBook Air refresh announced with an M4 chip and a slight price drop – 2:04

  • What’s hot at Mobile World Congress 2025 – 23:10

  • Lenovo’s Solar PC – 35:20

  • Xiaomi 15 Ultra (with a fancy Leica camera) – 37:53

  • New releases from Nothing – 39:16

  • Samsung releases a trio of A series devices – 40:35

  • NVIDIA vs. AMD part ∞: AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT edge out the GeForce RTX 5070 – 46:20

  • Pop culture picks – 54:11

Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Cherlynn Low
Guest: Nathan Ingraham
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O’Brien

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/engadget-podcast-the-m4-macbook-air-and-mobile-world-congress-2025-123012794.html?src=rss

One of Intel’s Ex-CEOs May Be Right that Breaking Up Intel Is a Bad Idea

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Intel is planning to break itself up, something that the most recent ex-CEO, Pat Gelsinger, disagreed with, which is why he is the latest ex-CEO. Craig Barrett was the Intel CEO directly after Andy Grove, and he has gone public with his view that breaking up Intel is not only a bad idea, but having Gelsinger step down wasn’t smart either. Many Intel employees, existing and ex, also feel that Intel’s board stumbled with their two moves, and there is a decent chance that they are right. 

Let me walk you through it.

Breaking Up a Company

There are monetary advantages to breaking up a company, but they often tend to be tactical and leave the company much weaker than it was. For instance, the breakup of HP resulted in two companies, neither of which had the span of Lenovo or Dell (HP’s primary computing competitors), leaving the companies far weaker than they were as a contiguous unit. Tactically, the market liked the move, but strategically, the firms struggle with their now much larger enterprise competitors (and the way the breakup was done, both firms really don’t want to get together again now). 

IBM has spun out a lot of businesses, and that made the company far smaller and weaker. You could argue it may be more agile, but it is far from its once dominant status, and there is no clear path to getting that back. For a firm that once ruled the tech sector, IBM remains a shadow of what it once was. Part of that is because few people see the brand anymore, while at its peak, there were desktop products, copiers and even phones with the IBM logo on them. Granted, the phone thing didn’t work out very well, but that unit was an acquisition that was misunderstood and thus mismanaged, and in IBM’s defense, AT&T made a nearly identical mistake with NCR.

What Intel is contemplating is spinning out manufacturing, something that IBM did with IBM Microelectronics, and AMD did (AMD’s highly rated CEO is out of IBM Microelectronics and thus IBM lost the benefit of her employment when they spun out that entity). When you spin out a major portion of a company, there is a ton of unanticipated collateral damage, and I doubt the manufacturing side of Intel can survive, let alone flourish, as an independent entity. It would need to be sold to someone like TSMC, but that would increase TSMC’s competitiveness because TSMC is a Taiwanese company and reduce Intel’s as a result. And should China take Taiwan, then these massive plants, critical to U.S. defense, would be disrupted if not destroyed and leave the U.S. and U.S. tech, automotive, aerospace and defense companies at very high risk of not being able to get or replace critical parts. 

Firing a CEO

Firing a CEO for bad behavior like Intel did with Brian Krzanich strengthens the firm, but both when Paul Ottolini and Pat Gelsinger were fired, it was not because they weren’t performing. It was because the board felt strongly that Intel was going in the wrong direction and the CEOs likely did, because they were closer to the problems, know best. The trigger for firing Ottolini was that the board wanted Intel to go into smartphones, something Intel tried and failed spectacularly at. Ottolini was right. Intel wasn’t set up to go into that market, and while he was set up by Brian Krzanich, the end result was a significantly weakened Intel. 

I think the trigger for getting rid of Gelsinger was likely Biden losing the U.S. election and the very real threat that not only would Trump kill the Chips Act (something he lacks support for), but that he would aggressively move against Intel (given Intel’s strategic nature, I doubt he’d have broad support for that either). President Trump is aggressively working to destroy any and all accomplishments Biden made, so I understand the board’s concern. 

However, there are protections that Intel could have used, and it could have moved Gelsinger to an Executive Chairman position and had another person be the figurehead CEO, creating the impression that Gelsinger was no longer there even though he’d still be running the company. But Gelsinger weakened marketing during his tenure, and to make this work, marketing needed to be extremely strong. So, I think the better path, rather than firing Gelsinger, would have been to restore marketing to something closer to what it was in Andy Grove’s time and give Intel’s CMO the kind of support that Dennis Carter enjoyed. 

Getting rid of Gelsinger just created a power vacuum, and putting in place two temporary CEOs will make it very hard for intel to come up with a company-wide vision, let alone execute it (Intel also needs a real CTO). In other words, strengthen Intel’s defense and make it more like Grove’s Intel rather than shooting the guy who had been, up until the U.S. election, executing well. There may have been pressure because of the massive Intel shareholder lawsuit, but Intel just won that, making this concern moot; nice work Intel legal.  

Wrapping Up: I Agree with Barrett

When Craig Barrett was CEO, I didn’t agree with him a lot, but he was innovative, he loved Intel and he knew the company about as well as any C-level executive could. I think he has it right. Breaking up Intel will significantly weaken the company, and moving from Gelsinger to a shared CEO solution will make it hard to come up with and execute a company-wide vision. Sadly, Intel isn’t alone with regard to boards thinking tactically rather than strategically. I see the threat Intel’s tying to avoid, but by going down this path, it’s likely to critically weaken not only Intel but the U.S. in general, and I don’t think that is wise at all. 

Intel’s board needs to rethink this path because there is a decent chance, given how competitive the market is and how rapidly China is advancing in this space, that the path it’s on will result in a massively weakened Intel. 

The Morning After: Buying a good graphics card is an expensive mess

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It’s been a weird time to dip into graphics cards, GPUs and… another synonym for the GeForces and Radeons of this world.

AMD has tried for a while to undercut NVIDIA with slightly cheaper but less capable video cards — but this time, with the Radeon 9070 and 9070 XT, it might have got the recipe right, especially in 4K and ray tracing performance.

Devindra Hardawar says the $599 Radeon 9070 XT, in particular, is a solid midrange GPU with excellent support for 1440p gaming and a bit of 4K. It has better ray tracing support than before, it’s faster than the plain Radeon 9070 and it finally has AI upscaling built in too. Not to mention, NVIDIA’s similarly priced GPUs landed around the same time.

It’s a good strategy — better than fighting with NVIDIA at the extreme high end of GPUs. It makes more sense for AMD to focus on cards people can actually buy — if you can.

It’s a good time to look closer at that too. “Buy.” Hah! The gaming PC makers and people who need high-powered machines for their work know this already — it’s a mess.

Not only is it impossible to find NVIDIA’s 50 series GPU in stock, but as Igor Bonifacic noted, nearly every single model is way above NVIDIA’s suggested price. This isn’t a pandemic thing anymore, this isn’t a crypto thing anymore (although that’s stoked demand, of course).

It’s like Taylor Swift tickets or a PS5 disc drive when the PS5 Pro broke cover — it’s scalpers and opportunism from the middle-man companies that make the majority of GPUs out there.

— Mat Smith

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The biggest tech stories you missed

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Is there a robot vacuum that won’t destroy phone cables? How is US trade policy going to affect the price of my next phone? Do I need another phone? Ask Engadget returns, with an entirely new email address: askmat(AT)engadget.com.

Ask me something!

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A sub-$500 smartphone that Engadget can endorse is a rare feat, but Nothing might have nailed it. Despite a premium Nothing Phone 3 not even existing, the company’s see-thru phone series shoots straight for the cheap midrange. Many of the specs, like periscope zoom, a 120Hz 6.77-inch screen and a huge 5,000mah battery are typically in phones that are several hundred dollars more. It’s all wrapped in a design full of character too. Check out my first impressions and expect a full review very soon.

Continue reading.

An upgraded laptop with a price drop? In this economy? The new MacBook Air, with an M4 chip, will retail at $999, down $100 from the previous starting price. There are still two size choices: 13-inch and 15-inch. RAM for the M2 and M3 laptops is 16GB by default, and the M4 model matches that standard. Apple is promising up to 18 hours of battery life, and the Airs will have support for Apple Intelligence. There’s also a new look in the lineup, with a sky blue color adding a new option beside the usual shades of gray.

Continue reading.

Engadget has been testing action cameras for more than 16 years and with that experience, we can help you find the right model for your budget and needs. In the past, GoPro was the go-to choice for first-person action filming, whether it’s surfing, rock climbing or offroading. But now, you have more choice, with models also available from DJI and Insta360. We break down all the different form factors — and our best choices.

Continue reading.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-engadget-newsletter-121555319.html?src=rss

Rocket Report: Starship fails for a second time; what’s to blame for Vulcan delays?

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Welcome to Edition 7.34 of the Rocket Report! What a day in space Thursday was. During the morning hours we saw the triumphant second flight of the Ariane 6 rocket, a pivotal moment for European sovereignty in space. Then Intuitive Machines had a partially successful landing on the Moon. And finally, on Thursday evening, SpaceX’s Starship failed during its second consecutive test flight.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Firefly sets date for next Alpha launch. Having completed a static-fire test, Firefly Aerospace has set a target date of March 15 for the launch of its “Message in a Booster” mission. The Alpha rocket will launch Lockheed Martin’s LM 400 spacecraft from Vandenberg Space Force Base, with the 52-minute launch window opening at 6:25 am PT (14:25 UTC). Lockheed is self-funding the demonstration mission of its new satellite bus, the LM 400, which it says can serve civil, military, and commercial customers.

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iPhone 16e review: The most expensive cheap iPhone yet

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For a long time, the cheapest iPhones were basically just iPhones that were older than the current flagship, but last week’s release of the $600 iPhone 16e marks a big change in how Apple is approaching its lineup.

Rather than a repackaging of an old iPhone, the 16e is the latest main iPhone—that is, the iPhone 16—with a bunch of stuff stripped away.

There are several potential advantages to this change. In theory, it allows Apple to support its lower-end offerings for longer with software updates, and it gives entry-level buyers access to more current technologies and features. It also simplifies the marketplace of accessories and the like.

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BBC iPlayer is now available on Google’s TV streamer

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It’s an exciting day if you’re a fan of the BBC and the Google TV Streamer. BBC iPlayer is finally available on the streaming platform almost six months after Google launched it, 9to5Google reports. Google certified its TV Streamer for use with BBC iPlayer back in November 2024. 

BBC One and BBC Two are now under the TV streamer’s Channels tab, while BBC iPlayer appears on the Google Play Store with a new download option. BBC iPlayer allows anyone to pays for a TV license in the UK to watch their favorite shows and movies live, on-demand or downloaded to their device. It has already been available for use on Google TV and Android TV.

Google launched its TV Streamer in September as a replacement for the Chromecast line. It retails for $100 and features a smart home panel that allows users to see and control devices like lights, thermostats and doorbell cameras. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/bbc-iplayer-is-now-available-on-googles-tv-streamer-110029855.html?src=rss

Quest’s Most Popular Mini Golf Game Gets a Brand New Course of Mythic Proportions

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Mighty Coconut just released a new course for Walkabout Mini Golf (2020), letting you putt-putt your way around the home of the gods: Mount Olympus.

As the game’s latest paid DLC, the Mount Olympus map brings two 18-hole courses (one easy, one hard) intertwined around classical Greek temples. As per usual, there’s also an unlockable putter, a new collection of themed Lost Balls to hunt, and some themed cosmetics too.

It’s more than just togas—or rather, chitons—and fun Greco-Roman hairstyles though. Emma Mercado, Senior 3D Artist at Mighty Coconut, says the game “took a more traditional approach” when imagining the godly realms, giving each major god their own temple, including bits to highlight their legendary lore and mythos.

In an interview with Meta, Mercado says the team created props from the stories about each god, such as the affair between Ares and Aphrodite—and the reaction of her jealous husband Hephaestus, how Alectryon was turned into a rooster for failing as Ares’ bedroom guard, or how Arachne continues to hang around Athena’s loom after besting her at a weaving contest. You’ll also get a sense of Demeter’s grief over losing her daughter Persephone to Hades, shown through the changing seasons at her temple.

You’ll find the Mount Olympus DLC, which is notably Walkabout Mini Golf’s tallest, largest, and densest course to date, on all supported platforms.

Priced at $4, you can buy it now over on the Horizon Store for Quest, PlayStation Store for PSVR 2, Steam for PC VR headsets, Pico Store for Pico headsets, and App Store for the iOS-supported Pocket Edition (flatscreen gameplay).

The post Quest’s Most Popular Mini Golf Game Gets a Brand New Course of Mythic Proportions appeared first on Road to VR.

The best password manager for 2025

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Recently, we saw all the ways reused passwords can harm your security posture. The 23andMe attack comes to mind, but generally credential stuffing has been on the rise. Hackers can buy or find your reused passwords to access some of your most sensitive accounts. To prevent yourself from falling victim, password managers can help. They encourage you to have a unique, strong password for each account by removing the burden of memorizing all sorts of different login combinations.

But there are dozens of password managers available now — that’s why we tested out nine of the best services available now to help you choose the right one for your needs. 1Password remains our top pick for the best password manager, thanks to its zero-knowledge policy, numerous security features and general ease of use, but there are other top password managers out there to consider as well.

It seems counterintuitive to store all your sensitive information in one place. One hack could mean you lose it all to an attacker and struggle for months or even years to rebuild your online presence, not to mention you may have to cancel credit cards and other accounts. But most experts in the field agree that password managers are a generally secure and safe way to keep track of your personal data, and the benefits of strong, complex passwords outweigh the possible risks.

The mechanics of keeping those passwords safe differs slightly from provider to provider. Generally, you have a lengthy, complex “master password” that safeguards the rest of your information. In some cases, you might also get a “security key” to enter when you log in to new devices. This is a random string of letters, numbers and symbols that the company will send you at sign up. Only you know this key, and because it’s stored locally on your device or printed out on paper, it’s harder for hackers to find.

These multiple layers of security make it difficult for an attacker to get into your vault even if your password manager provider experiences a breach. But the company should also follow a few security basics. A “zero-knowledge” policy means that the company keeps none of your data on file, so in the event of an attack, there’s nothing for hackers to find. Regular health reports like pentests and security audits are essential for keeping companies up to par on best practices, and other efforts like bug bounty programs or hosting on an open source website encourage constant vigilance for security flaws. Most password managers now also offer some level of encryption falling under the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). AES 256-bit is the strongest, because there are the most number of possible combinations, but AES 128-bit or 192-bit are still good.

You likely already use a password manager, even if you wouldn’t think to call it that. Most phones and web browsers include a log of saved credentials on the device, like the “passwords” keychain in the settings of an iPhone. That means you’ve probably seen the benefits of not having to memorize a large number of passwords or even type them out already.

While that’s a great way in, the downfall of these built-in options are that they tend to be device specific. If you rely on an Apple password manager, for example, that works if you’re totally in the Apple ecosystem — but you become limited once you get an Android tablet, Lujo Bauer, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and of computer science, at Carnegie Mellon University, said. If you use different devices for work and personal use and want a secure option for sharing passwords with others, or just don’t want to be tied to one brand forever, a third-party password manager is usually worth it.

We tested password managers by downloading the apps for each of the nine contenders on iPhone, Android, Safari, Chrome and Firefox. That helped us better understand what platforms each manager was available on, and see how support differs across operating systems and browsers.

As we got set up with each, we took note of ease of use and how they iterated on the basic features of autofill and password generators. Nearly all password managers have these features, but some place limits on how much you can store while others give more control over creating easy-to-type yet complex passwords. From there, we looked at extra features like data-breach monitoring to understand which managers offered the most for your money.

Finally, we reviewed publicly available information about security specs for each. This includes LastPass, which more experts are shying away from recommending after the recent breach. For the sake of this review, we’ve decided not to recommend LastPass at this time as fallout from the breach still comes to light (The company disclosed a second incident earlier in 2024 where an unauthorized attack accessed the company’s cloud storage, including sensitive data. Since then, hackers have stolen more than $4.4 million in cryptocurrency using private keys and other information stored in LastPass vaults.)

These are the password managers we tested:

For a while, security experts considered LastPass a solid choice for a password manager. It’s easy to use, has a slew of helpful extra features and its free version gives you a lot. But we decided not to include LastPass in our top picks because of the high profile data breaches it has experienced over the past couple of years.

Keeper met a lot of the basic criteria we tested for, like autofill options and cross-platform availability. We liked its family plan options, too, that can keep your whole household secure. There’s even a self-destruct feature that deletes local data after five incorrect login attempts, should your device be lost or stolen (the cloud-based data remains untouched). But we didn’t think its extra features, like the encrypted messaging app, added much value.

Enpass works well as an affordable password manager. That includes an inflation-beating “lifetime” access pass instead of a monthly payment for users really committed to the service. Still, it was confusing to set up across devices and because Enpass stores data locally, as opposed to in the cloud, we struggled to get started with it on mobile.

A familiar name in security, we were excited to test out Norton’s password manager. While it’s free, its features seem underdeveloped. It lacked password sharing, account recovery and complex form-filing tools that come standard in many of the other password managers we tested.

LogMeOnce comes with a wide range of premium tiers, from professional to family, that include different levels of storage and features. But when we tested, it lacked some basic cross-platform availability that other password managers had already, like compatibility with Mac and Safari.

Using a password manager can enhance your online security. They store all of your complex passwords and autofill them as needed, so that you can have unique, good passwords across the web without remembering each of them yourself. In many cases, unique passwords are your first defense against attack, and a reliable manager makes it easier to keep track of them all.

Password managers are a secure way to store your credentials. Experts in the field generally agree that the benefits of accessibility when storing complex passwords outweigh the possibility of attack, like what happened with LastPass. But with any service, it can vary from provider to provider. You should look out for zero-knowledge policies, regular security audits, pentests, bug bounty programs and encryption when choosing the right secure password manager for you.

Think of password managers like virtual safe deposit boxes. They hold your valuables, in this case usually online credentials, in a section of the vault only accessible to you by security key or a master password. Most of these services have autofill features that make it convenient to log in to any site without needing to remember every password you have, and they keep your credit card information close for impulse purchases.

But given that passwords are one of the top ways to keep your online identity secure, the real value of password managers is staying safe online. “It’s just not possible without a password manager to have unique, long and hard-to-guess passwords,” Florian Schaub, an associate professor of information and of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, said.

Common guidance states that secure passwords should be unique, with the longest number of characters allowed and uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers and special characters. This is the exact opposite of using one password everywhere, with minor variations depending on a site’s requirements. Think of how many online accounts and sites you have credentials for — it’s an impossible task to remember it all without somewhere to store passwords safely (especially in instances when you need to create a new password for any given account). Password managers are more readily accessible and offer the benefit of filling in those long passwords for you.

Given their universal benefit, pretty much everyone could use a password manager. They’re not just for the tech-savvy people or businesses anymore because so much sensitive information ends up online behind passwords, from our bank accounts to our Netflix watch history.

That’s the other perk of password managers: safe password sharing. Families, friends or roommates can use them to safely access joint accounts. Texting a password to someone isn’t secure, and you can help your family break the habit by starting to use one yourself, Lisa Plaggemier, executive director at National Cyber Security Alliance, said. Streaming is the obvious use case, but consider the shared bills, file storage and other sites you share access with the people around you as well.

Forgetting a master password won’t necessarily lock you out for good, but the recovery process varies from provider to provider. Some services give you a “security key” at sign up to enter when you log into new devices. It can also be used to securely recover your account because it’s a random string of keys stored locally that only you have access to. Other services, however, have no way to recover your vault. So creating a master password that you won’t forget is important.

A good master password should be unique, with the longest number of characters allowed and uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers and special characters. Experts often recommended thinking of it like a “passphrase” instead of a “password” to make it easier to remember. For example, you can take a sentence like “My name is Bob Smith” and change it to “Myn@m3isB0b5m!th” to turn it into a secure master password that you won’t forget.

A passkey is a sort of digital identification that’s interlocked to your account on a given app or website. While that sounds like a password, there’s an important distinction: Passkeys are bilateral authenticators that have two separate components: a private key stored locally on your device and a public key belonging to the website or application. When logging in with a passkey, these two keys pair and give you access to your account. You can read more about passwords versus passkeys here.

Update, October 28 2024, 5:15PM ET: This story has been updated to note that Keeper’s “self-destruct” security feature only deletes local content when engaged, but maintains data on a subscriber’s cloud-based account. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/best-password-manager-134639599.html?src=rss

Mistral Adds a New API That Turns Any PDF Document Into an AI-Ready Markdown File

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Mistral has launched a new multimodal OCR API that converts complex PDF documents into AI-friendly Markdown files. The API is designed for efficiency, handles visual elements like illustrations, supports complex formatting such as mathematical expressions, and reportedly outperforms similar offerings from major competitors. TechCrunch reports: Unlike most OCR APIs, Mistral OCR is a multimodal API, meaning that it can detect when there are illustrations and photos intertwined with blocks of text. The OCR API creates bounding boxes around these graphical elements and includes them in the output. Mistral OCR also doesn’t just output a big wall of text; the output is formatted in Markdown, a formatting syntax that developers use to add links, headers, and other formatting elements to a plain text file.

Mistral OCR is available on Mistral’s own API platform or through its cloud partners (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Vertex, etc.). And for companies working with classified or sensitive data, Mistral offers on-premise deployment. According to the Paris-based AI company, Mistral OCR performs better than APIs from Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. The company has tested its OCR model with complex documents that include mathematical expressions (LaTeX formatting), advanced layouts, or tables. It is also supposed to perform better with non-English documents. […]

Mistral is also using Mistral OCR for its own AI assistant Le Chat. When a user uploads a PDF file, the company uses Mistral OCR in the background to understand what’s in the document before processing the text. Companies and developers will most likely use Mistral OCR with a RAG (aka Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system to use multimodal documents as input in an LLM. And there are many potential use cases. For instance, we could envisage law firms using it to help them swiftly plough through huge volumes of documents. “Over the years, organizations have accumulated numerous documents, often in PDF or slide formats, which are inaccessible to LLMs, particularly RAG systems. With Mistral OCR, our customers can now convert rich and complex documents into readable content in all languages,” said Mistral co-founder and chief science officer Guillaume Lample.

“This is a crucial step toward the widespread adoption of AI assistants in companies that need to simplify access to their vast internal documentation,” he added.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.