If the Mac Mini with Apple’s M1 chip has been on your radar as your next desktop machine, it’s worth checking out the latest deal on the system. The base model with 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM is once again available for $600 on Amazon. That’s $100 off the regular price. The discount includes a $49 coupon that’s automatically applied at checkout.

Buy Apple Mac Mini (256GB) at Amazon – $600

The Mac Mini is perhaps the most cost-effective way to get your hands on an M1-powered system at the minute. The M1 is a powerful chip designed by Apple that can handle most day-to-day tasks with ease and speed. The chip boasts an eight-core CPU (with four performance and four efficiency cores) and an eight-core GPU. There’s also an 16-core Neural Engine to handle machine learning tasks.

The system runs on macOS Big Sur and you’ll be able to upgrade to the latest version of the operating system, Monterey. On the connectivity front, there are two Thunderbolt ports and a pair of USB-A ports, along with HDMI 2.0, WiFi 6 and gigabit Ethernet support. There’s a 3.5mm headphone jack too.

Unlike with an M1 MacBook or iMac, you’ll need to connect your own display, keyboard and mouse, which might not leave a lot of space among those ports for other peripherals. You won’t be able to upgrade the storage or RAM either. However, the base Mac Mini should still be capable enough for many users.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

Source: Engadget – Apple’s Mac Mini M1 is back down to 0 at Amazon

Xiaomi has today announced the CyberDog, an open-source quadruped robot intended for developers to “build upon” and create applications for. The machine, which resembles a beefier version of Boston Dynamics’ Spot, is a showcase for Xiaomi’s engineering know-how, including its proprietary servo motors.

Running the show is a version of NVIDIA’s Jetson Xavier NX, which has been dubbed the world’s smallest AI supercomputer. In terms of being able to experience the world, CyberDog has 11 sensors over its body, including touch and ultrasonic sensors, cameras and GPS to help it “interact with its environment.”

Xiaomi says that this technology is good enough to enable CyberDog to follow its owner and navigate around obstacles. It is also capable of identifying posture and tracking human faces, enabling it to pick out and track individuals in a group.

Rather than selling this as a general-sale product, the company is for now going to release 1,000 of these things to “Xiaomi fans, engineers and robotics enthusiasts to jointly explore the immense possibility of CyberDog.” This will be facilitated by an open-source community, hosted by Xiaomi, which may be followed by the construction of a robotics laboratory to lay a pathway for “future innovations.”

Of course, this thing isn’t cheap, and those folks willing to get involved will need to shell out 9,999 yuan or around $1,540 to get one of these for themselves.

Source: Engadget – Oh hey, Xiaomi has its own creepy robot dog now

Most credit cards these days offer some kind of reward to users, whether it’s a percentage of your spending in cash back, airline miles or some other perk. Venmo launched its own credit card last fall, and while it offers up to three percent cash back, the company is now letting users do something relatively unique with that refund. As of today, Venmo credit card users can automatically get that cash back in cryptocurrency.

Once you opt in, you can choose one of four cryptocurrencies to purchase with your cash back: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash. There are no transaction fees for the purchase, and the transfer happens automatically. From there, you can turn that crypto back into cash at any time, or change what currency you get each month from your cash back. 

This feature builds on the cryptocurrency features that Venmo added to its app earlier this year. Since April, Venmo users have been able to buy those same four cryptocurrencies directly in the app, so a feature to easily turn cash back into crypto might make it easier for more people to dip their toes into the Bitcoin world. 

Source: Engadget – Venmo credit card users can turn their cash back rewards into cryptocurrency

Ever since we first reviewed it last year, Lenovo’s Flex 5 Chromebook has been our favorite device in the Chrome OS realm. It may not be the most high-powered Chromebook out there, but it has essential features that most users need at a price well under $500. At launch, the Flex 5 came in at $430, but it often went on sale and could be found for $330 on rare occasions. But Amazon has it for even less right now — only $310 — which is $120 off and the best price we’ve seen.

Buy Lenovo Flex 5 Chromebook at Amazon – $310

When you get to the $300 mark in the Chromebook space, you’re often asked to sacrifice when it comes to power. That’s not the case with the Flex 5 — it runs on a 10th-gen Core i3 processor, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. Those specs should be more than enough for most people, especially considering a majority of Chromebook work will be done in a browser. We found the Flex 5 was more than capable of running numerous Chrome tabs at once with few hiccups. We also appreciated its ability to do so for at least eight hours before needing to be recharged.

When it comes to design, the Flex 5 doesn’t take too many risks and that’s ok. It’s not the slimmest or the lightest laptop, but at 0.66-inches thick and three pounds, it won’t be hard to shuffle from room to room in your home or tote with you to school. It’s also a convertible, which gives you more flexibility in how you use it. The 13-inch 1080p touchscreen will serve most people well, be it for work or entertainment purposes, and we especially liked its backlight keyboard.

Overall, it’s hard to find a Chromebook that ticks so many boxes at this price point. Sure, Lenovo made some sacrifices when it comes to RAM and storage capacity, but those are to be expected when you’re looking at sub-$500 Chromebooks. The Flex 5 combines a solid 2-in-1 design with a good amount of power at a wallet-friendly price point, and that’s more than we can say for other Chromebooks coming in at $300.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

Source: Engadget – Amazon knocks 0 off Lenovo’s excellent Flex 5 Chromebook

Just days after Oppo unveiled its latest under-screen camera solution, Xiaomi is now launching a new flagship phone with a similar, if not the same, feature. The Mi Mix 4 is the Chinese company’s slimmest ceramic unibody smartphone yet, featuring a 6.67-inch 2,400 x 1,080 screen that stealthily hides a 20-megapixel selfie camera underneath a near-indistinguishable patch of pixels — it’s the same 400ppi density as the rest of the panel, albeit with smaller pixels and transparent circuitry thanks to advancements in AMOLED production.

If the selfie photos on the Mi Mix 4 turn out to be just as good, if not better, than Oppo’s samples from last week, then it’s no surprise that Xiaomi went with this under-screen camera tech. The Mix series has always been about pushing the boundary of form factor design, with the firsttwo models — both designed by Philippe Starck — offering super slim screen bezels along three sides. They were some of the first ceramic smartphones, too. 

With the Mi Mix 3, Xiaomi finally got rid of the chin by moving the selfie camera to a slide-up module. I wasn’t a fan of that design, though, as it felt more fragile.

Now that the under-screen camera is seemingly reaching maturity, it serves as a sensible evolution path to the Mi Mix 4. Still, CEO Lei Jun added that if you really care about your selfies, you should stick to phones with punch-hole cameras; but for him, the under-screen camera is good enough.

The screen itself is otherwise very much the same as what many other recent flagships are offering: 10-bit color, P3 gamut, Dolby Vision, HDR10+, 120Hz refresh rate and 480Hz touch sampling rate. It’s protected by a layer of Gorilla Glass Victus. Like many recent Xiaomi phones, the Mi Mix 4 provides stereo sound tuned by Harman/Kardon, which should go well with that vibrant screen.

The Mi Mix 4 also happens to be the first smartphone sporting Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 888+ 5G processor, taking the clock speed up to 3GHz while being cooled by several layers of graphene and graphite. LPDDR5 RAM options range from 8GB to 12GB, whereas UFS 3.1 storage goes from 128GB to 512GB.

Much like the iPhone 12 series, the Mi Mix 4 also packs UWB (ultra-wide band), but instead of tracking tags, Xiaomi is using this for a feature dubbed “Point to Connect.” Simply point your Mi Mix 4 to a compatible Xiaomi smart device like a TV, smart speaker (like the freshly-announced Xiaomi Sound) or air conditioner, and the relevant app will show up. 

The company will also offer a small UWB hub for existing TVs, and this will launch via a beta program in China on August 20th. But if you prefer the old-school way, this Android phone also has an infrared remote feature — as is the case with some Chinese smartphones these days.

The rear cameras are impressive on paper. There’s a 108-megapixel main camera (HMX sensor with optical stabilization), an 8-megapixel 5x optical zoom camera (with optical stabilization) and a 13-megapixel 120-degree ultra-wide camera (with free-form lens). Still, Lei admitted on stage that he’s saving the better camera components for his main flagship line.

The Mi Mix 4 houses a 4,500mAh which is relatively standard these days, but it supports 120W wired charging, which goes from zero to 100 percent in 21 minutes by default, or in just 15 minutes if you enable “Boost Mode.” There’s also 50W wireless charging, which normally takes 45 minutes for a full charge, or just 28 minutes in “Boost Mode.”

Xiaomi will be selling the Mi Mix 4 in China starting from August 16th, with colors including white, black and a new gray option. Prices start from 4,999 yuan or around $770 for the 8GB RAM + 128GB storage model, and capping at 6,299 yuan or about $970 for the 12GB RAM + 512GB storage option. We’ll have to stay tuned for international availability, but we’d be surprised if the world’s second largest phone maker doesn’t plan on taking the Mi Mix 4 outside of China.

Source: Engadget – Xiaomi’s Mi Mix 4 packs an under-screen camera in a ceramic body

Twitter’s first bounty program for AI bias has wrapped up, and there are already some glaring issues the company wants to address. CNETreports that grad student Bogdan Kulynych has discovered that photo beauty filters skew the Twitter saliency (importance) algorithm’s scoring system in favor of slimmer, younger and lighter-skinned (or warmer-toned) people. The findings show that algorithms can “amplify real-world biases” and conventional beauty expectations, Twitter said.

This wasn’t the only issue. Halt AI learned that Twitter’s saliency algorithm “perpetuated marginalization” by cropping out the elderly and people with disabilities. Researcher Roya Pakzad, meanwhile, found that the saliency algorithm prefers cropping Latin writing over Arabic. Another researcher spotted a bias toward light-skinned emojis, while an anonymous contributor found that almost-invisible pixels could manipulate the algorithm’s preferences

Twitter has published the code for winning entries.

The company didn’t say how soon it might address algorithmic bias. However, this comes as part of a mounting backlash to beauty filters over their tendency to create or reinforce unrealistic standards. Google, for instance, turned off automatic selfie retouching on Pixel phones and stopped referring to the processes as beauty filters. It wouldn’t be surprising if Twitter’s algorithm took a more neutral stance on content in the near future.

Source: Engadget – Twitter’s AI bounty program reveals bias toward young, pretty white people