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Keychon has been an ascending name in the mechanical keyboard world for a while now. The company strikes a good balance between features and price and it’s also not shy about releasing new models meaning whatever you’re after it likely has a solution. Unless you wanted a premium aluminum deck with a wireless option that is. Finally, that gap has been filled by the Q1 Pro – a flagship, fully customizable 75% keyboard complete with Bluetooth connectivity.

Surprising as it may seem, higher end, customizable keyboards often don’t offer wireless thanks to their tendency for metal housings. Keychron’s Q1 Pro, then, will be of great interest to those who want to fully configure their own keyboard but also want the convenience of Bluetooth.

As the name suggests, the Q1 Pro is heavily based on the original Q1 model which Keychron launched in late 2021. Like its predecessor, the Pro model features a gasket design (a double gasket in fact), hot-swappable switches and QMK/VIA compatibility (open source software for easy remapping of any key). There’s also the option of an aluminum rotary knob for things like volume control (or zoom, or brightness or whatever else you might want it for) and the obligatory RGB. As with all Keychron models, it’s also compatible with Mac, Windows and Android – or all three at the same time thanks to the option to connect to multiple Bluetooth devices.

We were big fans of the original Q1 which offered a relatively affordable entry point into the fully customizable keyboard world. And it’s a bit of a weird world at that, with configurations, price and availability varying wildly. Perhaps two of the higher profile competitors for the Q1 are the GMMK Pro (starting at $170 barebones, or $350 pre-built) and the recently released Sense75 from Drop (starting at $249 barebones, or $350 pre-built).

In a slight break from tradition, the Q1 Pro is being launched via Kickstarter. The benefit here being the chance to grab one at an early bird price. The barebones model is available for $174 if you already have your own switches and keycaps. Or, for $194 you can get the pre-assembled kit. Given that a set of keycaps or switches often cost more than $20 on their own, the complete kit does represent a pretty decent value.

Once you have everything setup, or out of the box if you go fully-assembled, Bluetooth pairing is merely a key-combo away. As noted earlier, you can connect the Q1 Pro to up to three devices of any type thanks to the switch around the back for Windows/Android and MacOS. There are even spare key caps in the box for the differing keys on Microsoft vs Apple layouts. Of course, if you want to connect over USB-C instead, that’s still an option.

Battery life will largely depend on how ham you go with the RGB. With no backlighting at all, Keychron claims you can expect about 300 hours of use on a full charge. If you’re demure with it, that number drops to 90. Keychron doesn’t give an estimate for hardcore full-power RGB but expect it to be less.

With the model Keychron sent for testing, the gasket design appears to have a bit more flex in it than the original Q1, but that doesn’t translate to a softer typing experience thankfully. The supplied red switches are comparable to Cherry reds in resistance, but of course you can choose whatever you want, in fact it’s encouraged. It’s hard to make a like-for-like comparison without having a rival product with the same switches and keycaps, but, overall, the Drop Sense75 and GMMK Pro feel a little stiffer on the gasket side of things resulting in a snappier type. As always, your mileage and preferences will vary.

Regardless, if you wanted a premium aluminum, customizable keyboard with Bluetooth connectivity, the Keychron Q1 Pro is likely your best (if not only) choice right now.

 

Amazon is selling the 2022 Kindle Kids at a discount for the first time since it was released in September last year. The e-reader is currently on sale for $85 or $35 less than its retail price of $120. If your child wants a device with a bigger screen, though, the Kindle Paperwhite for Kids is also on sale for $110, which isn’t quite an all-time low for it but is still $50 less than its usual price. Like Amazon’s other kid-focused e-readers and tablets, these Kindles come with a Parent Dashboard you can use to set age filters and device bedtime. They also ship with a year-long subscription to Amazon Kids+ that will give your children access to a library of age-appropriate books and audiobooks. 

Buy Kindle for Kids at Amazon – up to $50 off

The e-commerce giant introduced its first ever Kindle Kids Edition back in 2019. This newer version comes with the specs the refreshed regular e-reader has, so it’s pretty much the same device without the kid-focused features. It has a 300 ppi display, unlike its predecessors that had 167 ppi screens, which is the same resolution as the Paperwhite’s. That enables text and graphics to appear crisper and more defined. It can last up to six weeks on a single charge, and its onboard has been doubled to 16GB from 8GB, allowing your child to store more books. 

In addition, the all new Kindle Kids has adjustable front lights and a dark mode for night reading, as well as a USB-C port, so you can finally put that old microUSB charger to rest. With its 6-inch display, though, it is smaller than the Kindle Paperwhite Kids that comes with a a 6.8-inch screen. Both devices ship with covers and a two-year worry-free guarantee that gives you a way to easily get a replacement if it breaks within that period. 

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

 

Apple’s first major announcements of 2023 are here! This week, Devindra and Deputy Editor Nathan Ingraham chat about Apple’s new M2 Pro/Max MacBook Pros and Mac Mini. Sure, they seem like solid upgrades, but did they come too late? Also, we dive into the latest rumors around Apple’s AR and MR headsets, as well as news about cheaper AirPods and new AirPods Max. And in other news, we explore the downside of AI in journalism, as well as another round of layoffs in tech.

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 podcasts, the Morning After and Engadget News!

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Apple announces M2 Pro and Max chips for MacBook Pro and Mac Mini – 1:23

The big HomePod is back from the dead! – 15:34

Apple’s AR headset may be delayed, a cheaper mixed reality headset may be in development – 25:41

Other News: CNET’s AI article problem, Twitter breaks third party apps, and layoffs at Microsoft – 32:11

Working on – 44:44

Pop culture picks – 46:08

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Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Nathan Ingraham
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O’Brien
Livestream producers: Julio Barrientos
Graphic artists: Luke Brooks

 

While Google shuttered Stadia for good this week, other cloud gaming services are expanding their offerings. NVIDIA is upgrading its GeForce Now service with a bunch of features, thanks to the addition of new SuperPODs equipped with RTX 4080 GPUs. This seems to be the first truly high-end cloud gaming experience. The renamed Ultimate plan now includes support for refresh rates of up to 240Hz at full HD or 4K at 120 fps and an expanded set of usable widescreen resolutions (3,840×1,600, 3,440×1,440 and 2,560×1,080).

NVIDIA is also adding better support for HDR on both Macs and PCs, along with the ability to use full ray tracing with DLSS3 in supported games. This elevates GeForce Now above rivals like Xbox Cloud Gaming, which is capped at 1080p/60 fps. There are the usual cloud gaming caveats: NVIDIA’s recommended minimum bandwidth for gaming at 1080p at 240 fps is 35 Mbps.

If you want to max out at 4K/120 fps, Engadget’s Sam Rutherford notes you’ll need at least a 45 Mbps connection. These new SuperPODs have limited availability, too. At launch, new servers with 4080 GPUs will be in four places: San Jose, Los Angeles, Dallas and Frankfurt, Germany. That means only people in the US and Central Europe will experience NVIDIA’s best cloud gaming experience, for now.

– Mat Smith

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

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Samsung’s display injunction worries repair technicians

It requested an investigation into third-party OLED display imports.

Samsung may have a way to strike a hefty blow to the United States’ burgeoning right-to-repair movement. If the ITC (International Trade Commission) finds in the company’s favor, it would, in the words of Louis Rossmann (who published the text of the complaint), “fire a kill shot on the entire repair industry.” Samsung says several patents cover its AMOLED displays. But factories in China (and elsewhere) are, according to the company, churning out similar screens that infringe on those patents. Several businesses named in Samsung’s complaint include MobileSentrix, Injured Gadgets and DFW Cellphone & Parts. Many offer wholesale parts and equipment to other repair companies, as well as their own repair services. If Samsung’s request is successful, it could prevent large volumes of third-party OLED displays from being imported to the US, curtailing the repair ecosystem for one of the most crucial to your smartphone: the screen.

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Twitter’s new developer terms officially ban third-party clients

The company quietly updated its terms a week after cutting off prominent app makers.

In case there was any doubt about Twitter’s intentions in cutting off the developers of third-party apps, the company has quietly updated its developer agreement to make clear that app makers may not create their own clients. The “restrictions” section of Twitter’s developer agreement was updated Thursday with a clause banning “use or access to the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications.” The company’s suggestion that the rule was “longstanding” doesn’t line up with its history. Twitter clients have long been a part of Twitter. Twitterrific, one of the most prominent apps affected by the API shut-off last week, was created before Twitter had its own native iOS app. Twitterific is even credited with coining the word “tweet.”

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‘Tron 3’ may finally be happening with Jared Leto

I.. OK?

It’s been over 12 years since Tron: Legacy debuted, and those who’ve been longing for a third entry in the classic sci-fi series may get what they asked for. Tron: Ares, as the film may be called, could start filming this August with Jared Leto, ol’ Morbius himself, reportedly set to star, with Joachim Rønning (Maleficent: Mistress of Evil) is in talks to direct, according to Deadline. Leto first signed on back in 2017, but Disney had a third movie on the backburner long before then. Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski said in 2015 that he wrote and storyboarded a sequel “that takes place on the internet with Yahoo and Google and all those sites.”

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Netflix co-founder steps down as co-CEO

Reed Hastings will still serve as executive chair.

Netflix co-creator Reed Hastings is stepping down as the company’s co-CEO. Ted Sarandos, who has been co-CEO since July 2020, will share the reins with newly promoted operations chief Greg Peters. Hastings’ departure comes as Netflix slowly recovers from a grim 2022. It lost subscribers for the first time in over a decade and blamed a combination of fiercer competition and widespread account sharing. In its recent earnings report, it announced adding 7.66 million new customers, reaching 230.75 million subscribers.

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Google parent Alphabet is cutting around 12,000 jobs, or around six percent of its global workforce, it wrote in a company-wide email sent to employees. CEO Sundar Pichai said that he was “deeply sorry” to workers that will be let go and that it was a “difficult decision to set us up for the future.” The layoffs will be felt globally and across the entire company, and Pichai said he takes “full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.” 

Alphabet went on a hiring spree over the last few years during a period of “dramatic growth,” but Pichai said that “we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.” Over the past few weeks Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and others instituted equally painful and dramatic job cuts due to economic conditions. 

Google is the last of those to implement layoffs, thanks in part to its powerful ad and cloud-computing divisions. However, the company saw a 27 percent drop in profit last quarter compared to the year before, and Pichai said Alphabet would need to reduce expenses and hiring. However, activists and analysts called for more aggressive cuts, noting that the company’s headcount had gone up 20 percent since 2017, according to Bloomberg.

Pichai said that that employees would be paid during the full notification period of 60 days minimum. Alphabet will also offer severance packages starting at 16 weeks salary plus two weeks for every additional year at Google “and accelerate at least 16 weeks of GSU vesting.” It’ll also pay 2022 bonuses and remaining vacation time, while offering 6 months of healthcare, job placement services, and “immigration support for those affected.”

Over just the past two weeks, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta laid off 10,000, 18,000 and 11,000 employees respectively. Google has cut other expenses of late as well, shutting down Stadia, cancelling the next-generation Pixelbook laptops and more. It plans to focus even more strongly on AI, saying its “getting ready to share some entirely new experiences for users, developers and businesses.” 

 

Amazon Music Unlimited prices are going up in the US and UK, rising a dollar from $10 to $11 stateside and £10 to £11 across the pond starting on February 21, 2023. Student plans are also going up by a dollar in both regions from $5/£5 to $6/£6. That follows a move last year by Amazon to raise the prime of Music Unlimited for Prime subscribers from $8 to $9 per month or $79 to $89 annually. 

Amazon said the price increase were made “to help us bring you even more content and features.” Last year, both Apple Music and Deezer made identical price increases, and in October 2022, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said a US price increase was possibly in the cards for that streaming service as well. 

Amazon’s music streaming plans can be a bit confusing. Amazon Music Prime is free with a Prime membership, while Music Unlimited is offered either separately or at a discount rate with Prime. Both offer the same selection of 100 million songs, but Amazon Unlimited offers higher quality (lossless and spatial audio), along with the ability to listen offline, play on multiple devices, access personalized stations and more. 

 

Now that Stadia is gone, Bungie is steering players toward NVIDIA’s GeForce Now. The developer has offered Destiny 2 users a free month on the game streaming service, sending unique codes to each user, according to an email seen by 9to5Google. “We managed to snag some free codes for NVIDIA’s high-performance cloud gaming platform,” Bungie wrote. “Redeem your one-month code of a GeForce Now priority membership, for free.” 

Destiny 2 featured prominently in Stadia’s marketing up until the end, but also figured in GeForce Now promotion for various devices, as shown in the image above. Of the remaining cloud services, Destiny 2 is available on GeForce Now but not Xbox Cloud, Amazon’s Luna or PlayStation Now. 

Google announced in September that it would shut down Stadia for good as the service failed to gain traction with users. It refunded all game and hardware sales, and some game studios stepped in to help port games over to other services. If you have a Stadia controller, you can enable Bluetooth support via an online tool so it can be used with PC, iOS or Android devices.

Bungie’s offer was sent to each Destiny 2 user, so check your inbox for the invitation and unique code, then be sure to redeem it before February 19th. That will give you a free month of GeForce Now Priority, which offers 1080p gaming, 6-hour session lengths and up to 60fps refresh rates (it’ll cost $10 per month or $50 for six months after that). The service just introduced a new Ultimate membership tier with a new RTX 4080 boost that offers 4K resolutions, 8-hour sessions and up to 120 fps for $20 per month, or $100 for six months.

 

The contractors working on the Federal Aviation Administration’s NOTAM system apparently deleted files by accident, leading to the delays and cancellations of thousands of US flights. If you’ll recall, the FAA paused all domestic departures in the US on the morning of January 11th, because its NOTAM or Notice to Air Missions system had failed. NOTAMs typically contain important information for pilots, including warnings for potential hazards along a flight’s route, flight restrictions and runway closures. 

While the FAA only paused departures on the 11th, US flights were already being pushed back the day before after the outage occurred at around 3:28PM ET. The issue even had an impact on military flights that partly relied on FAA NOTAMs: Pilots reportedly had to call around to ask for potential flight hazards themselves. 

The agency later reported that the system failed after “personnel who failed to follow procedures” damaged certain files. Now, it has shared more details as part of the preliminary findings of an ongoing investigation. Apparently, its contractors were synchronizing a main and a back-up database when they “unintentionally deleted files” that turned out to be necessary to keep the alert system running. It also reiterated what it said in the past that it has “so far found no evidence of a cyberattack or malicious intent.” 

As The Washington Post notes, it’s unclear at this point how deleting some files would cause the whole system to go down. The FAA had already fixed the problem and had taken steps to make the system more resilient, but the incident certainly puts the reliability of FAA’s outdated technologies into question. The Transportation Department itself previously described the NOTAM system as “failing vintage hardware” in a budget document requesting $30 million to fund its upgrades.

 

T-Mobile has admitted that hackers were able to steal the information of around 37 million postpaid and prepaid customers in another major data breach. The carrier said in a regulatory filing that it discovered the issue on January 5th, but that it believes the bad actors had been taking data from the company since November 25th. In a post announcing the breach, T-Mobile revealed that the hackers used an API to steal customer information. 

While the company was able to contain the issue 24 hours after discovering the malicious activity, the bad actors have had access to its data long enough to have stolen people’s names, billing addresses, emails, phone numbers and birthdays. They were also able to obtain users’ account numbers and information about their plans, such as the number of lines they have. T-Mobile said, however, that it didn’t find evidence that its network or systems had been breached or compromised. “No passwords, payment card information, social security numbers, government ID numbers or other financial account information” were stolen, the company said. 

The carrier is still investigating the incident to get a more detailed view of what happened, but it has already warned investors that it would likely incur significant costs due to the incident. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Federal Communications Commission has also opened an investigation into T-Mobile, because as a spokesperson told the publication, “this incident is the latest in a string of data breaches at the company.”

If you’ll recall, the carrier confirmed in August 2021 that tens of millions of customers had been impacted by a data breach that exposed their sensitive information, including their social security numbers and driver’s licenses. T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert said back then that the hacker used “specialized” tools and knowledge of its infrastructure in order to gain access to its testing environment. While the initial number of affected customers for that breach was around 30 million, it ultimately ballooned to 76.6 million customers. 

Almost a year later, the carrier agreed to pay $350 million to settle a consolidated class action lawsuit and pledged to spend $150 million to update its data security technologies. As The New York Times reports, the company said it has “made substantial progress to date” on those updates, but it clearly wasn’t enough to prevent this incident. In its announcement, though, T-Mobile vowed to continue making “substantial, multi-year investments in strengthening [its] cybersecurity program.”

 

Epic Games and Match Group now have a court date for their antitrust case against Google. A Northern District of California judge has set the start of a jury trial for November 6th. Both Epic and Match accuse Google of abusing its control of Android app distribution through the Play Store by establishing unfair fees and requirements for in-app purchases. This comes alongside a lawsuit from 39 attorneys general as well as a customer class action suit demanding $4.7 billion in damages.

Epic sued Google in 2020 after the Android creator kicked Fortnite out of the Play Store for letting customers use an alternative in-app payment system. Match sued Google last year over the “exorbitant” store fee. Epic and Match consolidated their case and a filed motion last fall to expand their allegations, accusing Google of further antitrust violations by paying major developers hundreds of millions of dollars to keep their apps in the Play Store. 

Unlike Epic’s partially successful lawsuit against Apple, this case has to acknowledge that customers do have a choice. Where Apple requires that all regular app downloads go through the App Store, Android’s sideloading option lets customers install software without downloading it from Google. The issue, as you might imagine, is that those apps are both harder to install and less likely to be noticed when the Play Store is included by default on many Android phones.

Google denies misusing its power, and argues that the fees are necessary to maintain and invest in the Play Store. It maintains that the incentive program doesn’t forbid developers from launching third-party stores, and that its portal competes fairly. In December, Google called on the court to deny the expanded requests over timing and other issues.

Google has made some concessions, including a test program for Play Store billing alternatives. That pilot still gives Google a cut of each transaction, though, and it remains to be seen if moves like that will satisfy the court and regulators. As it is, the internet pioneer is facing a raft of other antitrust cases that include a Justice Department lawsuit from 2020. Even if Google prevails against Epic and Match, it may not escape unscathed.