 |
|
|
|||||
A speaker doesn't have to be brand new to sound good. Sonos speakers get high marks in our reviews and buying guides and the company has one of the better refurbished programs out there. Right now, you can grab a refurbished Sonos Arc SL soundbar for $509, which is $170 off the refurbished price and $240 off the speaker's full $749 price tag when it was new. A decent selection of other renewed soundbars and speakers are also on sale at Sonos, with up to 25 percent off the refurbished prices. We named the Sonos Arc the runner-up premium soundbar in our buying guide, praising its stellar sound quality and ability to calibrate its sound to match the room its in. The difference between the Sonos Arc and the Arc SL is the lack of a microphone, so you won't be able to talk to Alexa or the Google Assistant directly through your speaker. That might be a plus for anyone interested in the extra privacy of a mic-less device. Other than the lack of microphone, the Arc SL hardware is the same. It can even calibrate its sound to the room with the Trueplay feature, which uses the Sonos app on an iOS device to measure how sound reflects off your walls and furniture. The Arc SL is Wi-Fi enabled, supports Dolby Atmos, Apple Air Play 2 and connects to your TV via HDMI ARC or eARC. Though, sadly, there's just one HDMI port. Buying a refurbished device from Sonos carries a lot of the same perks of buying new, including the same one-year warranty, all necessary cables and manuals plus all-new packaging. They also donate one percent of refurbished sales to environmental non-profits as part of 1% for the Planet. If you'd rather a speaker that does have a mic, the refurbished second-generation Beam soundbar is also on sale. It's down to $299 after a $100 discount off the refurbished rate which works out to $200 off the brand new sticker price. The Beam is our top pick for a mid-range soundbar in our guide and has great sound quality, supports Dolby Atmos and, like all of the company's wares, does an excellent job of pairing up with other Sonos speakers. Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/sonos-refurbished-speakers-and-soundbars-are-up-to-170-off-right-now-161504151.html?src=rss
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
Meta just announced a major update for its AI assistant platform, Meta AI, which has been built using the long-awaited open source Llama 3 large language model (LLM). The company says it's now the most intelligent AI assistant you can use for free. As for use case scenarios, the company touts the ability to help users study for tests, plan dinners and schedule nights out. You know the drill. Its an AI chatbot. Meta AI, however, has expanded into just about every nook and cranny throughout the companys entire portfolio, after a test run with Instagram DMs last week. Its still available with Instagram, but now users can access it on Messenger, Facebook feeds and Whatsapp. The chatbot also has a dedicated web portal at, wait for it, meta.ai. You dont need a company login to use it this way, though it wont generate images. Those recently-released Ray-Ban smart glasses also integrate with the bot, with Quest headset integration coming soon. On the topic of image generation, Meta says it's now much faster and will produce images as you type. It also handles custom animated GIFs, which is pretty cool. Hopefully, it can successfully generate images of different races of people. We found that it struggled with this basic concept a couple of weeks back, as it seemed biased toward creating images of people of the same race, even when prompted otherwise. Metas also expanding global availability along with this update, as Meta AI is coming to more than a dozen countries outside of the US. These include Australia, Canada, Ghana, Jamaica, Pakistan, Uganda and others. However, theres one major caveat. Its only in English, which doesnt seem that useful to a global audience, but whatever. As for safety and reliability, the company says Llama 3 has been trained on an expanded data set when compared to Llama 2. It also used synthetic data to create lengthy documents to train on and claims it excluded all data sources that are known to contain a high volume of personal information about private individuals. Meta says it conducted a series of evaluations to see how the chatbot would handle risk areas like conversations about weapons, cyber attacks and child exploitation, and adjusted as required. In our brief testing with the product, we've already run into hallucinations, as seen below. Engadget/Karissa Bell AI has become one of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's pet projects, along with raising really expensive cattle for beef in a secluded Hawaiian compound, but the companys still playing catch up to OpenAI and, to a lesser extent, Google. Metas Llama 2 never really wowed users, due to a limited feature set, so maybe this new version of the AI assistant will catch lightning in a bottle. At the very least, it should be able to draw lightning in a bottle, or more accurately, slightly tweak someone elses drawing of lightning in a bottle.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-rolls-out-an-updated-ai-assistant-built-with-the-long-awaited-llama-3-160053435.html?src=rss
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
TSMC is the worlds biggest chipmaker and its products are found in everything from phones to game consoles and computers. But devices using TSMC chips could become more expensive if manufacturers opt to buy ones that the company makes outside of its home base of Taiwan. If a customer requests to be in a certain geographical area, the customer needs to share the incremental cost, TSMC CEO CC Wei said on an earnings call. In todays fragmented globalization environment, cost will be higher for everyone, including TSMC, our customers and our competitors. Talks with customers over price increases have already started. As the Financial Times points out, its more expensive for TSMC to manufacture chips outside of Taiwan (where over 90 percent of the planets most advanced semiconductors are made). But the company will be passing on those costs amid a push by companies and governments to increase chip supply outside of Taiwan, over which China is attempting to control. TSMC has plants in Japan and is building several in Arizona, the first of which started operating this month and is expected to go into full production this year. Its also constructing a plant in Germany. In addition, the US government last week agreed to provide the company with $6.6 billion in funding under the CHIPS Act, which seeks to bolster semiconductor manufacturing in the country. In return, TSMC pledged to up its US investment by $25 billion to $65 billion. Aligned with that, the company announced plans to build a third US plant by the end of the decade and to start making more advanced 2nm chips by 2028. Meanwhile, TSMC expects its manufacturing costs to increase in Taiwan. Thats because power prices there are soaring. An earthquake earlier this month is also expected to have a negative effect on the companys profitability, as is its struggle to make the manufacturing of its most advanced 3nm chips more efficient. Apple, NVIDIA, AMD and Qualcomm are among TSMCs more notable customers. So if they end up buying chips from the companys US, Japan or Germany fabs, their manufacturing costs could go up. Take a wild guess whod end up having to eat the cost of those increased expenses so device makers can maintain their profit margins.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/tsmc-will-charge-more-for-chips-made-outside-of-taiwan-possibly-making-devices-more-expensive-145146879.html?src=rss
Category:
Marketing and Advertising
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||