Kalakshar US

It’s still back-to-school season and, regardless of whether you’ve picked up a textbook recently, that will always mean its time to pick up new supplies. Thankfully, there are some great deals currently running, including a new all-time low price for the USB-C Apple Pencil. 

Right now, you can pick up the USB-C Apple Pencil for $50, down from $79. The 37 percent discount is available as part of Woot’s warehouse clean out and will run for six more days or until the accessory sells out. Notably, Woot states that it will deliver the new Pencils in non-retail packaging and that they don’t qualify for AppleCare. 

Apple released its USB-C Pencil in 2023 as part of its switchover from Lightning ports. It’s compatible with iPad models including the Pro 11- and 13-inch (M4), Air 11- and 13-inch (M2), mini (A17 Pro and sixth-generation) and 10th-generation iPad. It works really well as a standard option for writing, navigating an iPad and other casual uses. However, it doesn’t offer some of the same perks as its more expensive counterparts, such as handling pressure sensitivity and magnetic charging. 

Check out our coverage of the best Apple deals for more discounts, and follow @EngadgetDeals on X for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/the-usb-c-apple-pencil-drops-to-a-new-all-time-low-123045887.html?src=rss 

Judge William Alsup has rejected the record-breaking $1.5 billion settlement Anthropic has agreed to for a piracy lawsuit filed by writers. According to Bloomberg Law, the federal judge is concerned that the class lawyers struck a deal that will be forced “down the throat of authors.” Alsup reportedly felt misled by the deal and said it was “nowhere close to complete.” In his order, he said he was “disappointed that counsel have left important questions to be answered in the future,” including the list of works involved in the case, the list of authors, the process of notifying members of the class and the claim form class members can use to get their part of the settlement. 

If you’ll recall, the plaintiffs sued Anthropic over the company’s use of pirated copies of their works to train its large language models. Around 500,000 authors are involved in the lawsuit, and they’re expected to receive $3,000 per work. “This landmark settlement far surpasses any other known copyright recovery,” one of the lawyers representing the authors said in a statement. However, Alsup had an “uneasy feeling about hangers on with all [that] money on the table.” He explained that class members “get the shaft” in a lot of class actions once the monetary settlement has been established and lawyers stopped caring. 

Alsup told the lawyers that they must give the class members “very good notice” about the settlement and design a claim form that gives them the choice to opt in or out. They also have to ensure that Anthropic cannot be sued for the same issue in the future. The judge gave the lawyers until September 15 to submit a final list of works involved in the lawsuit. He also wrote in his order that the works list, class members list and the claim form all have to be examined and approved by the court by October 10 before he grants the settlement his preliminary approval. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/judge-rejects-anthropics-record-breaking-15-billion-settlement-for-ai-copyright-lawsuit-033512498.html?src=rss 

Rimac Technology has unveiled a new battery pack platform for electric vehicles that uses only solid-state batteries. The company has been an EV supplier for notable car brands including Aston Martin and Koenigsegg, as well as making electric supercar Nevara. Rimac collaborated with ProLogium and Mitsubishi Chemical Group on the product, which it claims will offer a lighter, safer and more energy-dense EV battery. It introduced this tech, alongside new composite and hybrid battery EV developments, at the IAA Mobility 2025 event.

Solid-state batteries are being touted as an important new development for EVs. European R&D operation Imec released a study into this tech last year that backed claims that these batteries did indeed have the potential to improve efficiency while bringing down costs.

However, the commercial development of solid-state batteries has been slow going. Despite a flurry of partnerships several years ago, the targets for getting EVs fully powered by the tech onto the road may still be some time away. For instance, Nissan said it aims to have its first EV solely using solid-state batteries released by its 2028 fiscal year. Rimac didn’t offer even a rough timeline for when it might have its new battery tech available for customers. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/rimac-introduces-its-take-on-solid-state-batteries-for-electric-vehicles-215915664.html?src=rss 

Vodafone made a commercial starring an AI avatar posing as a real lady. This is interesting because Vodafone is a major global brand and not a fly-by-night TikTok company using a ridiculous deepfake of Jackson Galaxy to sell cat toys.

The tells in the commercial are obvious and what one would expect. The AI avatar’s hair is a bit off, which ruins the charade that this is a real person. The physical mannerisms and speaking tone are also wonky. A facial mole moves around at one point. It’s AI. You know the drill.

The company responded to a question on a message board as to why it couldn’t put “a real person in front of the camera” by saying this is simply an experiment. It said it was “testing different styles of advertising — this time with AI,” and that “AI is so much a part of everyday life these days that we also try it out in advertising.”

This isn’t the first Vodafone ad to feature generative AI. It released a fully AI-generated commercial last year that spurred a bit of controversy, despite looking absolutely awful. Social media platforms are also becoming increasingly littered with AI-generated virtual influencers. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/vodafone-is-testing-an-ai-actor-to-sell-its-products-instead-of-paying-a-human-to-do-it-185301360.html?src=rss 

Google is opening up AI Mode to more languages. Starting today, the AI chatbot the company is integrating into Google Search is available in Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean and Brazilian Portuguese. 

The company has been rapidly expanding access to the search experience. In May, Google started offering it to everyone in the US (and later the UK and India) after starting public tests just two months earlier. 

Google added more features to AI Mode in July, including support for the Gemini 2.5 Pro model and Deep Search. As of last month, AI Mode has been present in more than 180 countries. But until now, AI Mode had only been available in English. This is the first language support expansion for the chatbot. 

“Building a truly global Search goes far beyond translation — it requires a nuanced understanding of local information,” Hema Budaraju, Google’s vice president of search product management wrote in a blog post. “With the advanced multimodal and reasoning capabilities of our custom version of Gemini 2.5 in Search, we’ve made huge strides in language understanding, so our most advanced AI search capabilities are locally relevant and useful in each new language we support.”

Google has been claiming recently that traffic to websites from Search is “relatively stable” since the rollout of AI Overviews and that “the web is thriving.” However, the company admitted something very different in a court filing last week. Its lawyers stated that “the open web is already in rapid decline.” That, plus the expansion of AI Mode, will surely be welcomed with open arms by publishers who are seriously feeling the pinch of declining web traffic.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/google-expands-ai-mode-beyond-english-for-the-first-time-192245955.html?src=rss