Apple has confirmed to Engadget that the Mac Pro, the desktop tower-shaped computer that was last updated in 2023, has been discontinued. As 9to5Mac notes, the computer no longer appears in the lineup of Macs on Apple’s website or in its storefront. That means at least for now, the Mac Studio is the Apple’s top-of-the-line professional computer.

The current version of the Mac Pro was introduced in 2019, with a distinct cheese-grater design, Intel chips and a bevy of easily-accessible expansion slots. Apple released the computer as a make-good for several years of inadequately meeting the performance needs of professional Mac users, but its uncontested time at the top of the company’s lineup was short-lived. A year later in 2020, Apple began transitioning to its custom M-series Arm chips, proving Macs could be more powerful and power-efficient by abandoning Intel entirely.

Apple eventually updated the Mac Pro to the M2 Ultra without updating the computer’s design, but by then the writing was on the wall. The far smaller Mac Studio, introduced in 2022, also supported the new chip, and it’s been updated since then while the Mac Pro has languished. Bloomberg reported Apple was planning to retire the Mac Pro in November 2025, so it’s not all that surprising the company quietly pulled the plug only a few months later.

Apple’s effort to cater to professionals, creatives and anyone with a chunk of change to drop on a fast computer lives on through the Mac Studio, and the recently announced Studio Display XDR, itself a replacement for the Pro Display XDR Apple announced for the 2019 Mac Pro. Now all the company needs to do is update the Mac Studio with an M5 Max chip to make it the most “pro” computer Apple offers.

Update, March 26, 6:25PM ET: Added confirmation from Apple that the Mac Pro has been discontinued.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/apple-discontinues-the-mac-pro-221502339.html?src=rss

Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley are pressing the Energy Information Administration (EIA) to provide better information on how much electricity data centers actually use. In a joint letter sent to the EIA on Thursday, the two senators press the agency to publicly collect “comprehensive, annual energy-use disclosures” on data centers, saying it’s “essential for accurate grid planning and will support policymaking to prevent large companies from increasing electricity costs for American families.” Wired reports: In December, EIA administrator Tristan Abbey said at a roundtable that he expects the EIA “is going to be an essential player in providing objective data and analysis to policymakers” with respect to data centers. The agency announced on Wednesday that it would be conducting a voluntary pilot program to collect energy consumption information from nearly 200 companies operating data centers in Texas, Washington, and Virginia, which will cover “energy sources, electricity consumption, site characteristics, server metrics, and cooling systems.”

While the senators praise the EIA pilot program, their letter includes several questions about how the agency plans to move forward with more data collection, such as whether or not the energy surveys will be mandatory and whether or not the EIA will collect information on behind-the-meter power. This information will be especially crucial, the senators say, to make sure that big tech companies that signed the agreement at the White House earlier this month pledging that consumers won’t bear the costs of data center electricity use will stick to their promises. “Without this data, policymakers, utility companies, and local communities are operating in the dark,” the senators write.

The EIA mandates that other industries, including oil and gas and manufacturing, provide regular data to the agency; Hawley and Warren assert that the EIA should be able to collect similar information from data centers under the same provision. The provision is broad enough, Peskoe says, that it could absolutely be interpreted to encompass data centers. Yesterday, Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced a bill that would “enact a reasonable pause to the development of AI to ensure the safety of humanity.” It calls for a federal moratorium on AI data centers until stronger national safeguards are in place around safety, jobs, privacy, energy costs, and environmental impact.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Thursday, Elon Musk lost his lawsuit alleging that advertisers violated antitrust law by colluding on an ad boycott after he took over Twitter, gutted content moderation teams, and disbanded the Trust and Safety Council.

In her opinion, US District Judge Jane Boyle wrote that the lawsuit was dismissed because Musk failed to state a claim. His arguments that advertisers acted against their own best interests by avoiding advertising on his platform, now called X, did not plead facts showing that consumers were harmed. Without consumer harm, there can be no antitrust violation, the judge wrote, deeming the ad boycott perfectly legal.

“The very nature of the alleged conspiracy does not state an antitrust claim, and the Court therefore has no qualm dismissing with prejudice,” Boyle said. At one point, she emphasized, “the question underlying antitrust injury is whether consumers—not competitors—have been harmed.”

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This is a video demonstration of the Roadrunner bipedal robot developed by the Robotics and AI Institute. The 33-pound robot looks like a pair of dismembered robotic legs with wheels for feet, presumably because that’s exactly what it is. It can roll around with its wheels oriented straight ahead or each at 90 degrees like a ballerina in second pose (seen above), and even stomp up the stairs like an angry roommate. Great, just what we needed — stomping robots. At the end of the video it even balances on one wheel. So, you know, if the whole robots taking over the world thing doesn’t work out, at least it’ll have a place in the circus. They’re absolutely going to kill us all though, just to be clear.

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This year’s Amazon Big Spring Sale doesn’t have too many deep discounts on premium watches, but we are seeing some sweet deals on budget models. One worth looking at is Amazfit’s Active 2 Sport, on sale today for $79.99. It’s a fitness watch with a solid feature set, and it will cost you half the price of other brands’ entry-level watches. 

Amazfit Active 2 Sport

$79.99
at Amazon

$99.99
Save $20.00

$79.99
at Amazon

$99.99
Save $20.00

Amazfit watches keep impressing me

I’ll confess that when I first heard of Amazfit, I assumed they were some kind of Amazon fitness brand. But there’s no relation—the Amazfit brand is owned by a company called Zepp. And Zepp has quietly been making solid fitness devices for years, including some unexpected ones. It has the best Whoop alternative (the Amazfit Helio Strap, also branded as Core), it’s working on a meal-tracking camera, and it’s made several impressive forays into the world of high-end adventure watches. 

I liked Amazfit’s T-Rex 3 Pro when I reviewed it: nice hardware, ambitious software features, but ultimately somewhat clunky execution. My colleague Meredith Dietz had a similar experience with the T-Rex Ultra 2. Not all of Zepp’s products hit the mark they aim for, but they’re never bad, and I’m generally pretty impressed with the company. 

The Active line delivers on the basics at a good price

Even at full price, the Active 2 Sport watch is only $99.99. I haven’t tested this watch myself, but I have been trying out the Active Max ($169.99), a more recent version with a bigger screen. It seems pretty nice so far, although you’ll have to wait for my final verdict. The Active watches don’t make as big a swing for fancy features as the T-Rex models Meredith and I reviewed, and so it’s a lot easier for them to meet your needs.

The Active 2 has GPS and heart rate tracking, sleep tracking, 160+ workout modes, and it can handle calls and texts from a Bluetooth-connected phone. (As with most fitness watches, Android users get more functionality for replying to texts, but iPhone users can still get notifications.) Amazfit says the battery lasts 5 days with “heavy use” and 10 days with “typical use.”

The Active 2 can even store music and maps, which is impressive other brands only put their offline maps on high-end watches. That said, Active 2 users have said in forums like this one that the storage is limited. One says that one map leaves room for 45 minutes of music; another says they can fit a map plus two hours of audiobooks. That sounds like enough for a single run, but you’d need to switch out maps and music fairly often. 

Spotify and major record labels are seeking a $322 million default judgment from Anna’s Archive, which hasn’t responded to court proceedings over its scraping of millions of music files from Spotify’s streaming service.

The music companies are also seeking a permanent injunction in an attempt to eject the Anna’s Archive website from the Internet by cutting off its access to domain and hosting providers. But the plaintiffs previously obtained a similar injunction that proved to be little more than an inconvenience for the shadow library, which has changed providers and said it’s working on bolstering its ability to remain online in the face of court orders.

The music companies sued Anna’s Archive in late December and quickly obtained a court order that shut down the shadow library’s .org domain, though Anna’s Archive has remained online elsewhere. Anna’s Archive has filed no response to the lawsuit in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, and the clerk of court last month certified that the defendant is in default.

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X Pro, the feature most users would recognize as TweetDeck, has been removed as a benefit of the social network’s Premium subscription. It is now only part of the Premium+ tier, which costs $40 a month. 

TweetDeck was rebranded to X Pro in 2023 following Elon Musk’s renaming of Twitter to X. It became a subscription feature shortly after. The tool offered a popular interface for showing multiple timelines, feeds and lists in a single interface.

Engadget staffers using X Pro at the Premium level didn’t find any advanced notice that the feature would be changing subscription tiers, so people may be in for an unpleasant surprise when they next go to access their accounts. The feature appears to be gone no matter when you last paid up for the service, which might feel pretty scummy for people who just re-upped to have such a key feature lost.

At least some of the X support documentation currently describes X Pro as only available under Premium+. It’s listed as such under the help center page listing different X Premium plan benefits, but at the time of publish, there’s currently no mention of the limitation on the dedicated X Pro page. Here’s what Grok had to say when a confused subscriber asked about the change:

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/x-moves-the-ashes-of-tweetdeck-behind-its-40-premium-subscription-210601250.html?src=rss

P3 Global Intel claims that it has “quickly become the new standard in tip management for Crime Stoppers programs, [Law Enforcement Agencies], and government agencies helping to solve and prevent crimes around the world.”

Its software does what it says on the tin: It accepts tips from the general public and then manages conversations between law enforcement and the tipper. Many of these tips are, by their very nature, extremely sensitive, and disclosure of the tip could imperil people’s lives. P3 promises on its websites that “your anonymity is protected at all times.”

But earlier this month, hackers calling themselves the, err, “Internet Yiff Machine” released 93GB of data that they claim was pilfered from P3’s tip-taking system.

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JPMorgan is piloting a system that monitors junior investment bankers to avoid burnout (source paywalled; alternative source). “[T]he bank will seek to match up hours claimed by the bankers with digital activity,” reports Bloomberg. “The tool won’t be used for evaluation purposes, but is designed to provide a better estimate of employee workloads.” From the report: The program will monitor the weekly digital footprint, including video calls, desktop keystrokes, and scheduled meetings, the Financial Times reported earlier, adding JPMorgan plans to roll out the effort more widely across its investment bank. Banks on Wall Street are known for heavy working hours, but can in return offer salaries of as much as $200,000 for entry-level analyst and associate roles. “Much like the weekly screen time summaries on a smartphone, this tool is about awareness — not enforcement,” a representative for JPMorgan said in a statement. “It’s designed to support transparency, well-being, and encourage open conversations about workload.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Amazon Big Spring Sale is in full swing, and it features some deep discounts to streaming tech. Whether you’re looking for a budget-friendly option for the guest room or you want to upgrade your old gear to the newest thing, there’s a deal for you.

Roku Smart TV 2026 – 40-Inch Select Series, 1080p Full HD TV – RokuTV with Voice Remote – Flat Screen LED Television with Wi-Fi for Streaming Live Local News Sports & Movies – Bluetooth Headphone Mode

$129.00
at Amazon

$229.99
Save $100.99

$129.00
at Amazon

$229.99
Save $100.99

Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Select

$17.99
at Amazon

$39.99
Save $22.00

$17.99
at Amazon

$39.99
Save $22.00

Google TV Streamer 4K – Fast Streaming Entertainment on Your TV with Voice Search Remote – Watch Movies, Shows, Live TV, and Netflix in 4K HDR – Smart Home Control – 32 GB of Storage – Hazel

$79.99
at Amazon

$99.99
Save $20.00

$79.99
at Amazon

$99.99
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Amazon Fire TV Cube (3rd Gen)

$99.99
at Amazon

$139.99
Save $40.00

$99.99
at Amazon

$139.99
Save $40.00

VSDINSIDE Macro Keypad, Stream Controller Deck Gaming Streaming Shortcut Keyboard, 18 Programmable Keys Customizable Visual AI Pad USB Soundboard for OBS, YouTube, Desk Office Setup, Laptop, PC, Mac

$43.99
at Amazon

$54.99
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$43.99
at Amazon

$54.99
Save $11.00

All-in-one streaming TV: Roku Smart TV 2026

The Roku Smart TV 2026 is a standout pick in this year’s Big Spring Sale if you want everything in one package. The 40″ version is marked down 44% to just $129. It’s an all-in-one, hassle-free streaming solution that’s perfect as a second TV in a bedroom or office. It comes with the Roku interface that can be navigated with voice remote, and it offers access to over 500 free live TV channels as well as Netflix, Disney+, and any other pay streamer you can think of.

Budget streaming device: Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Select

If you need to make video TV stream and you’re on a budget, you won’t find many less expensive options than Amazon’s Fire TV stick. It’s marked down 55% to $17.99. That’s less than 20 bucks for HDRO10+ supported 4K streaming. This is the first stick to run Amazon’s new Vega OS, so the response time should be faster than older budget devices, and it has Amazon’s new Alexa+AI built in as well. If you’re a gamer, it supports Xbox Game Pass and Amazon Luna so you can stream games to your TV without a console.

Best streaming choice for smart homes: Google TV Streamer 4K

The Google TV Streamer 4K is a more “sophisticated” streaming upgrade that’s perfect for a smart home. Currently 20% off ($79.99), it’s a full media console that doubles as a Matter smart home hub and a Thread border router. Both are key to a functional smart home: Matter is a universal language that allows smart devices from different brands to talk to each other, while Thread is a mesh network that makes devices respond instantly without slowing down your wifi. Google TV Streamer 4K features 32GB of storage, a built-in Ethernet port for faster 4K streaming, and Gemini AI, but my favorite feature is the “Find My Remote” button on the base, because I’m always losing the damn thing.

The “we need more power” choice: Amazon Fire TV Cube

If you’re tired of sluggish menus, the Fire TV Cube will obliterate them. It’s the fastest streaming device Amazon makes—it has twice the power of the Fire TV Stick 4K Max. Currently on sale for $99.99 (29% off), Fire TV Cube supports Wi-Fi 6E, offers an ethernet port for faster speeds, and features an octa-core processor for near-instant app launches. You can navigate all of it with your voice, and it features an HDMI input, so you can plug in a game console in or cable box directly.

The streaming accessory you never knew you always needed: VSDINSIDE Macro Keypad

If your home streaming is running from a PC, consider a macro keyboard. They might be made for gaming, but the VSDINSIDE Macro Keypad can be a killer media dashboard for your home entertainment set-up. Currently on sale for $43.99 (20% off), this device features 15 customizable LCD keys that can be programmed to act as a physical interface for your TV—instead of navigating menus to get to Netflix, you just hit the Netflix button and instantly launch it. Since it’s a Smart Home friendly setup, you can program a button to dim your Matter-enabled lights when you’re ready to start the movie, but best of all, it features tactile, physical knobs you can use to control volume, brightness, or other settings.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hasn’t had a director since August, and now it’s without even a temporary one after the Trump administration blew through a federal deadline on Wednesday to nominate someone for the permanent role.

According to federal law, there’s a 210-day limit on a Senate-confirmed position being filled by someone in an acting capacity. The clock started when anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired Susan Monarez from her Senate-confirmed role as CDC director in late August—allegedly after she refused to rubber-stamp changes to CDC vaccine recommendations. Until yesterday, Jay Bhattacharya, who heads the National Institutes of Health, had stepped in to also be the acting director of the CDC. But he can no longer hold the position officially.

The void of leadership comes as the Trump administration is working to restrain Kennedy after finding his relentless anti-vaccine agenda is widely unpopular and potentially harmful to Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections.

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Netflix isn’t preparing for a multibillion acquisition anymore, but it’s still raising prices.

As first spotted by Android Authority today, Netflix now lists its ad-supported plan as costing $9 per month, up from $8/month. The Standard, ad-free plan went up from $18/month to $20/month, and the Premium ad-free plan (which supports viewing from four, instead of two, devices simultaneously, 4K, and spatial audio) went from $25/month to $27/month.

For comparison, Disney+ starts at $12/month with commercials and $19/month without.

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One of my all-time favorite products is marked down during Amazon’s Big Spring Sale: The Enabot EBO ROLA Mini FamilyBot.

Enabot EBO ROLA Mini FamilyBot

$128.34
at Amazon

$150.99
Save $22.65

$128.34
at Amazon

$150.99
Save $22.65

I love this thing. It’s an adorable little robot-with-a-camera designed to help pet owners to interact with their pets when they’re not home. You control it with an app and it takes surprisingly nice-looking 2K video, even when it’s dark. It also transmits and listens to sound, so you can talk to your pet, or press a button to make it meow, bark, or quack. It can also act as a surveillance camera and take pictures or video when something moves in front of it.

This is literally the only toy my cat has ever played with. My cat is not nice. She won’t let you pet or hold her. She’s all business. I’ve tried catnip, all kinds of toys, balls of string, and everything else, but Peepers was never interested in anything until I got her a robot/surveillance camera. Then, for a few, glorious moments, I got the Most Serious Cat on Earth to bat a toy around. It was a breakthrough in our relationship, and I even caught it on camera.

Netflix is raising prices across all of its subscription tiers, according to an updated “Plans and Pricing” page spotted by Android Authority. The company last raised prices in January 2025, when the cost of all of its tiers were jacked up by $1 or more.

As of this latest price hike, Netflix’s ad-supported Standard plan is going from $8 per month to $9 per month, while the ad-free version is rising from $18 to $20 per month. The company’s Premium plan, meanwhile, which supports things like 4K streams, spatial audio and the ability to watch content on four devices at the same time, is jumping from $25 to $27 per month. Netflix is also making the cost of adding an extra member to your plan more expensive. Adding a member to an ad-supported plan now costs an additional $8 per month, while adding someone to an ad-free plan now costs $10 per month.

When asked to comment on the price changes, a Netflix spokesperson shared that the company is updating “prices in the U.S to reflect improvements to our wide range of entertainment and the quality of our service.” The new prices will roll out to current subscribers in the coming weeks. “Existing members will be notified by email a month before the new prices are applied to them,” the spokesperson said. “The exact timing will depend on the specific member’s billing cycle.”

Netflix is not quite at the point where it’s raising the cost of its subscription every year, but it’s getting close. Prior to last year’s price hike, the company last raised prices in 2023. The streaming service’s growing subscription fees have helped Netflix to continue its push into streaming live events like sports and reality TV competitions, and to license new kinds of content like video podcasts. If Netflix hadn’t dropped out in February, they also would have served as financial backing for the company’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Even though Warner Bros. Discovery ultimately decided to take Paramount Skydance’s offer, Netflix didn’t leave the deal empty handed: Paramount paid the company $2.8 billion to formally end its acquisition of the historic film studio.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/ugh-netflix-is-raising-prices-again-202318277.html?src=rss

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While companies might make you feel like you always need to buy their latest and greatest model, you can save quite a bit by opting for their older devices. These days, the hardware from reputable manufacturers tends to be good enough to last years, which makes one or two generation-old devices a great value. As such, if you’re in the market for a new iPad, consider an “old” iPad instead. Amazon has Apple’s cellular M3 iPad Air with AppleCare+ up to 23% off for its Big Spring Sale.

iPad Air (11-inch)

$718.99
at Amazon

$928.00
Save $209.01

$718.99
at Amazon

$928.00
Save $209.01

As you might assume from the intro, the M3 iPad Air is not the latest iPad Air. Apple has since released the M4 version, which comes with very few perks over the M3. The first, of course, is that it has the M4 chip, which is one generation newer, and also enables the iPad’s Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 support (as opposed to Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 on the M3). The M4 chip has one more efficiency core than the M3 (five vs. four), 120GB/s memory bandwidth over the M3’s 100GB/s memory bandwidth, and 12GB of RAM over the M3’s 8GB.

Aside from that, however, these are the same exact iPads, down to the battery life (10 hours of web surfing over wifi, according to Apple). What you get with the M3 Air, then, is Apple’s “modern” iPad design, with thin bezels, a selfie camera along the long bezel (perfect for video calls when holding the iPad in landscape), and one 12MP camera on the back. These are also the cellular models, which means you can pay for an optional plan to use the iPad out and about—including connecting to 5G networks.

Really, the only decision is which size to get: The Air comes in either 11-inch or 13-inch variants, each of which will impact the pricing. The 13-inch is $838, which Amazon says is 16% off the list price. The 11-inch, however, is $718.99, which is 23% off the list price. Both of those prices are for the 256GB wifi-only models. The 11-inch comes in Space Black for this sale, while the 13-inch comes in Blue.

I still use my 2021 iPad Pro with its M1 chip, and it has no trouble handing iPadOS 26. I have no reservations about recommending an iPad with a chip that’s two generations newer than that. Apple’s iPad software, while more robust than it has ever been, isn’t the most demanding, so these chips really do last a long time.

You can save some money if you don’t want the model with AppleCare+. Amazon will sell you an 11-inch cellular M3 iPad Air for $649.99, it just won’t be covered by Apple’s extended warranty.