Companies continue to find new ways to impress with true wireless earbuds. There’s no doubt the popularity of Apple’s AirPods helped make them a mainstay, but plenty of others offer reliable connectivity, great sound and active noise cancellation (ANC) in increasingly smaller form factors. You can also get features that used to be reserved for premium models on mid-range devices. Of course, the popularity means that new earbuds are popping up all the time and the list of options is longer than ever. To help, we’ve compiled the best wireless earbuds you can buy right now, including noteworthy features for each selection.

Engadget’s picks

• Best overall: Sony WF-1000XM4

• Runner up: Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless 3

• Best noise cancellation: Bose QuietComfort Earbuds II

• Best budget: Jabra Elite 3

• Best for iOS: Apple Airpods Pro (2nd-gen)

• Best for Android: Google Pixel Buds Pro

• Best for workouts: Beats Fit Pro

• Honorable mention: Sony LinkBuds S

Best overall: Sony WF-1000XM4

Sony keeps its top spot on our list for its combination of great sound, powerful active noise cancellation and a long list of features no other company can compete with. Just like its headphones, Sony manages to pack a ton of handy tools into its flagship true wireless model. The basics like wireless charging and battery life improvements are covered, but company-specific features like Speak-to-Chat automatic pausing, Adaptive Sound Control adjustments based on movement or location, 360 Reality Audio and a customizable EQ are icing on the cake. Plus, DSEE Extreme upscaling helps improve compressed tunes over Bluetooth.

Runner up: Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless 3

If sound quality is your primary concern, the Momentum True Wireless 3 is your best bet. You won’t get the truckload of features that Sony offers, but Sennheiser does the basics well at a lower price than the previous Momentum earbuds. A new Adaptive Noise Cancellation setup continuously monitors ambient sounds to suppress them in real time. Inside, the company’s True Response transducer is paired with 7mm dynamic drivers for top-notch audio.

Best noise cancellation: Bose QuietComfort Earbuds II

When it comes to blocking out the world, the Bose QuietComfort Earbuds II are the best at the task. Bose introduced a redesigned set earlier this year and the smaller buds deliver a more comfy fit. The company also managed to improve ambient sound and maintain its track record of solid audio quality. However, the real star here is the ANC performance which is hands-down the best you can get right now. The QC Earbuds II don’t have some basic features like multipoint connectivity and wireless charging, so that might factor into your decision.

Best budget pick: Jabra Elite 3

Jabra packs a lot into a set of earbuds for under $100. The Elite 3 don’t have ANC, automatic pausing or wireless charging, and the EQ changes are limited to presets. However, these affordable buds have impressive sound quality, good battery life, reliable on-board controls and a very comfy fit. If you’re looking for something that just gets the job done, the Elite 3 is more than capable.

Best for iOS: Apple Airpods Pro (2nd-gen)

Apple’s latest AirPods Pro are a huge improvement over the 2019 model. The company managed to improve the sound quality and ANC performance while keeping all of the conveniences that make AirPods the best option for iOS and Mac. To me, the most impressive feature is the transparency mode, which is more natural sounding than any other earbuds by a mile. You can leave these in during a conversation and it’s like you’re not even wearing them. Of course, fast pairing, hands-free Siri and wireless charging (MagSafe or Apple Watch chargers) will also come in handy.

Best for Android: Google Pixel Buds Pro

Google has hit its stride when it comes to true wireless earbuds. Every new model the company introduces is an improvement after its first attempt failed to impress. With the Pixel Buds Pro, Google offers deep, punchy bass, solid ANC performance, reliable touch controls and wireless charging. Plus, there are added convenience features for Android and Pixel devices including Google Translate Conversation Mode.

Best for workouts: Beats Fit Pro

Most of the best AirPods features in a set of workout earbuds? That’s the Beats Fit Pro. Thanks to Apple’s H1 chip, these buds offer one-touch quick pairing, hands-free Siri and Find My tools. They’ll also allow you to use Audio Sharing with an Apple device and another set of AirPods or Beats headphones for tandem listening or viewing. Balanced and punchy bass will keep the energy up during workouts while good noise cancellation and a comfy fit make these a solid option outside of the gym too. And there’s plenty of support for Android, so these aren’t just a good buy for iOS users either.

Honorable mention: Sony LinkBuds S

One of the biggest surprises this year wasn’t Sony’s unique open-wear LinkBuds, it was the more mainstream follow-up. With the LinkBuds S, the company debuted a more “traditional” design akin to its premium WF-1000XM4, only this model is much smaller and lighter which leads to a much more comfy fit. These tiny buds muster some punch when it comes to sound quality too and support for high-res listening (LDAC and DSEE Extreme) are both onboard. Capable ANC lends a hand with environmental noise and transparency mode can keep you tuned in when needed. What’s more, handy Speak-to-Chat is here and Adaptive Sound Control can automatically change settings based on activity or location. That’s a lot of premium for features at a mid-range price.

Source: Engadget – The best wireless earbuds for 2022

Twitter may not be restoring Blue verification for a couple of weeks, but it hopes to be more careful when the feature comes back. The social network has updated its FAQ site to warn that new accounts will have to wait 90 days before they can subscribe to Blue. The company also says it reserves the right to demand waiting periods “at our discretion without notice.”

The new policy comes shortly after Twitter blocked new accounts from joining Blue. Within two days of Twitter adopting its pay-to-verify system, the social media service grappled with a flood of impersonators and trolls using their new checkmarks to confuse users. The firm tried using a secondary “official” checkmark for public figures and organizations, but new Twitter owner scrapped the system mere hours after it launched.

Musk added that a “new release” would discourage fraudsters by dropping the Blue checkmark if they change their name — they wouldn’t get it back until Twitter confirmed that the new handle honored the Terms of Service. There isn’t yet any official policy to this effect, however.

There’s plenty of pressure for revised policies like these. Senator Ed Markey has grilled Elon Musk over the ease of creating fake accounts under the new verification system, and suggested that Congress might intervene if the entrepreneur doesn’t fix Twitter and his other brands. Twitter is also dealing with internal chaos as employees resign en masse in response to Musk’s demands for “long hours” from “hardcore” staff.

Source: Engadget – New Twitter accounts will have to wait 90 days before subscribing to Blue

You’re not alone if you’ve waited until Black Friday to scope out deals on the latest MacBooks. Considering these are some of the best (and most expensive) laptops out there right now, plenty of people will be looking for the best MacBook deals over the holiday shopping period. We me be still one week out from Black Friday proper, but we’re already seeing some solid deals on machines like the new MacBook Air M2, and even the high-powered 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros.

While you’ll likely get the best deal by shopping at a retailer like Amazon, B&H Photo, Adorama and others, Apple does have it’s own holiday sales as well. However, you’ll have to wait until Black Friday for those, plus they give you up to a $250 Apple gift card with purchase rather than a discounted price. If you know you’ll use that gift card, that may be the best option for you. But if you’d rather the instant gratification of a couple hundred dollars off, we’ve collected the best MacBook deals here so you don’t have to go searching for them.

MacBook Air M1

The 2020 MacBook Air with Apple’s M1 chipset is at an all-time low right now — only $800 for the base model with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. While, yes, the M2 chip in the latest model will give you a slight performance boost, the M1 processor is still quite powerful. It’ll certainly be an upgrade for anyone coming from an older, Intel-powered MacBook. We gave the M1 Air a score of 94 when it first came out for its incredibly fast performance, excellent keyboard and trackpad, lovely Retina display and its lack of fan noise.

MacBook Air M2

The latest and greatest MacBook Air, the 2022 model with the M2 chipset, is $150 off and down to a record low of $1,050. This laptop looks and feels quite different from the 2020 version thanks to Apple redesigning the machine to have a uniformly thing frame all around (no more wedge) and its screen is slightly larger at 13.6-inches. We also appreciated its quad-speaker setup and its excellent performance overall, so much so that we called it Apple’s “near-perfect” Mac.

13-inch MacBook Pro

Apple’s most compact Pro laptop, the 13-inch MacBook Pro, is on sale for $1,149 right now, or 12 percent off its normal rate. It sits, somewhat confusingly, in the middle of the company’s notebook lineup. While it has solid performance thanks to the M2 chipset, a long battery life and stellar build quality, it’s hard for us to recommend outright. Most people would be better served by the M2 MacBook Air, or jumping up to the 14-inch MacBook Pro for even more power. But if you’re set on the 13-inch size and want the efficiency provided by an internal fan (which the Air doesn’t have), this MacBook Pro is your best bet.

14-inch MacBook Pro

The 2021 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro processor, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD storage is a whopping $400 off and down to a record low of $1,600. This machine has the most advanced features of any Apple laptop (aside from its larger, 16-inch sibling), including a Liquid Retina XDR display, remarkable performance using that Pro chipset, excellent battery life and a bevy of ports that make connecting all of your peripherals and accessories much easier. Apple is overdue for a MacBook Pro refresh, though, but it’s likely that those machines won’t launch until early 2023.

16-inch MacBook Pro

The biggest of Apple’s laptops, the 16-inch MacBook Pro, is cheaper than ever at $2,000 thanks to a $500 discount. That still-hefty price gets you an M1 Pro chipset, a 10‑core CPU and 16‑core GPU, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. This model is essentially an enlarged version of the 14-inch Pro, sharing most of the same features with it. You’re getting a Liquid Retina XDR display, a bunch of ports including an SD card slot, a fantastic keyboard and great battery life.

Get the latest Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers by following @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribing to the Engadget Deals newsletter.

Source: Engadget – The best MacBook deals we found for Black Friday

The digitization of the music industry leveled the playing field for artists. An album can be written, recorded and released from a bedroom without an expensive recording studio or predatory record label. This DIY ethic isn’t new. Bands have been recording and releasing albums on their own or out of friendly record stores for decades.

Digitization has also created a glut of available music, which can make it difficult for new bands or artists to break through the noise. Plus, popular artists with record deals still get the lion’s share of the attention. I’m pretty sure every Beyonce release is now a national holiday. For every other artist, the resurgence of vinyl and cassette has revived the ability to give or sell something tangible to their fans – a physical keepsake that could offer a tighter emotional bond with the music. While making copies of tapes has been an at-home pastime since the 1980s, vinyl has required a third party that specializes in cutting records. At least, until recently.

Teenage Engineering’s $149 PO-08 Record Factory combines the nostalgia of a Fisher-Price turntable with the utility of a machine that can actually cut vinyl. You’ll have to assemble it yourself and master each song specifically for the device. Even after all that work, your music probably will sound like it’s being played through an AM radio. That might sound like a nightmare for some, yet is potentially wonderful for others.

The PO-08 is a rebranding of magazine publisher Gakken’s “Easy Record Maker” — a record cutter/player designed by Yuri Suzuki. Teenage Engineering worked with Suzuki for its version and even includes an interview with the designer in the supplied magazine/instruction booklet.

Though the turntable looks like a toy, Teenage Engineering tells you (again and again) that it’s not recommended for kids under the age of 12. It’s really built for “children” between the ages of 17 and 64 — for the type of person that has three bands, strong opinions about direct drive turntables, a very active Discogs account and a DIY attitude. Oh, and also the patience needed to fiddle with tiny parts for hours to create a single, not-so-perfect mono copy of a song. Yes, it works, but it’s a lo-fi representation of a professionally created record; The Factory is an EZ bake oven for vinyl.

Building the Record Factory takes about 60 to 90 minutes, and it helps give you the confidence to disassemble it when you realize that, say, you didn’t attach the cable for the needle securely. I had to do exactly that when there was no audio after I first put the device together – everything seemed to be working but there was no actual sound.

Having to assemble the device also lends insight into the Record Factory’s inner workings, which are quite clever. The cutting needle vibrates via a tiny speaker to engrave your audio onto one of Teenage Engineering’s blank discs. A tiny gearing system moves the needle along and after three to four minutes (depending on the recording speed), your song is inscribed onto the vinyl.

But everything leading up to that is a series of adjustments. If you’re the type of person that requires a thing to “just work” without much tinkering, stay far away from the PO-08.

You begin with your original recording and at the end of the inscription, you get a mono representation. The single-channel audio is a technical limitation of the device. To make sure the audio going in is mono, the Record Factory comes with a minijack cable that takes the left and right channels of your stereo signal and merges them together. You also end up losing fidelity, which is another technical limitation. The top and low ends of a song can get muddy easily and too much bass actually causes the cutter needle to jump.

You can try to fix this yourself, but it’s smarter to use Teenage Engineering’s online audio mastering tool. Just upload the file, wait a few minutes and the site spits out something that works better with the device. This process does result in the loss of all the intricate details of your song. The low end becomes slightly muddy or disappears altogether while the high end loses its bite. If you’re looking for crisp, exact copies, skip the PO-08 entirely.

A whole 45 minutes after mastering your audio, you get to cut a record. In that time, you’ll be adjusting the pressure of the cutting arm, listening very carefully to the audio being sent to the device to make sure it’s not distorting and if it is, turning down the volume. But you can’t go too low, or the signal wont be strong enough to engrave. That means you have to open up the equalizer and make adjustments (so many adjustments) until the audio sounds good (enough).

Now you’re ready to put it on wax (as they used to say in the olden days). Except before you create a record you can share, you need to cut audio onto a test vinyl. You record 10 seconds, wash the disc with water to get all the excess bits out of the grooves, then switch the Record Factory to play mode and listen to your masterpiece.

The test record isn’t that a big deal until you realize that Teenage Engineering has sold out of the discs needed for the turntable and hasn’t shared information on when they’ll be back in stock. This makes testing all the more important.

A word of caution: the cutter slows down the turntable, so when played back at regular speed it might sound a little higher pitched. Like low-level Chipmunks high. So make sure you drop your file into the relevant tools online to adjust your song. Except it likely still needs work if you want the closest representation of your song available from the PO-80, which means you’ll have to, surprise surprise, make more adjustments. I conducted five test cuts before I was finally ready to create my first at-home vinyl record of a song.

On top of all that, the turntable itself isn’t a great player, either. It sounds like you’re listening to music from under the sea. It’s fun to create and play on the same device, but it’s best to take the disc to a proper turntable. On my Technics SL-1200 MK2, the mono audio with the high and low-end cut-off sounded a bit far away compared to the original and the fidelity is nowhere near the quality of professional vinyl in my collection. Yet, it’s exactly what I anticipated and I’m happy with the end result.

The Record Factory lives or dies by its owner’s expectations. There are two types of people in this world: those that lose their minds and patience dealing with even the tiniest inconvenience and those that live for tinkering and experimenting.

The second group are people like me, and are excited about the difference in sounds between an at-home produced record, a cassette and a digital file. My band typically records on a digital eight-track but I also use a cassette four-track from the late 80s. There’s something special about sending a fan a vinyl recording that was produced at home. The PO-08 is for people that find beauty in the inherent potential for errors in DIY analog recordings.

The Record Factory will find its niche of users that happily spend hours creating the perfectly imperfect vinyl copy of their song. Unfortunately, if someone doesn’t already have a PO-08 turntable they will have to find one of these beauties on eBay or Craigslist. The power move is to search for the Gaken branded version on eBay. Those turntables are much cheaper (under $100) than the Teenage Engineering version.

Teenage Engineering told Engadget that it has no plans to produce more of the sold-out turntables which is a shame. Not every musician can afford to have hundreds of records produced by a third party. But, if they can find a Record Factory (they’re currently selling from $250 to $500) they can cut one-of-a-kind vinyl they can share with friends and fans while they wait to make it big. As long as they are happy doing that on a toy built for very patient music nerds that are happy trading fidelity for something real.

Source: Engadget – Teenage Engineering’s Record Factory is a DIY musician’s dream