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Meta is expanding its partnership with the NBA and WNBA to offer more than 50 live games in VR on Meta Quest, the company announced on Monday. The Meta Quest is the official headset of the NBA, as the company signed a deal with the league back in 2020.

The company will deliver a package of 52 live NBA games, including five immersive 180-degree monoscopic VR games in 2880 on its Xtadium offering and on Meta Horizon Worlds. Meta will also offer a selection of WNBA, NBA G League and NBA 2K League games over the course of the season. In Meta Horizon Worlds, you’ll also be able to access game highlights, recaps and archival content.

Users can visit the dedicated NBA Arena in Meta Horizon Worlds starting today to watch NBA content with friends, compete in interactive mini-games and support their favorite teams. Meta says that in the future, fans will be able to watch even more content in the app with an NBA League Pass subscription.

Meta also announced that it’s partnering with the league to launch NBA-licensed apparel in Meta’s Avatar Store in the coming weeks. Users will be able to purchase their favorite NBA or WNBA team apparel for their avatar and showcase it across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and on Meta Quest.

“Meta’s immersive VR technology is opening up new opportunities for sports fans to engage and interact with their favorite NBA teams,” said Meta Director of Sports Media and League Partnerships Rob Shaw in a blog post. “Fans will be able to express their fandom by donning their favorite team’s gear on Avatars and enjoy more live NBA games and experience NBA League Pass in a much more social and immersive way.

The games available in VR on Meta Quest in January include Milwaukee Bucks vs. Detroit Pistons on January 23, Denver Nuggets vs. New Orleans Pelicans on January 24, Denver Nuggets vs. Milwaukee Bucks on January 24, Cleveland Cavaliers vs. Oklahoma City Thunder on January 27, Los Angeles Clippers vs. Cleveland Cavaliers on January 29 and Miami Heat vs. Cleveland Cavaliers on January 31.

Meta expands its partnership with the NBA to offer 52 games in VR by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has fined home services marketplace HomeAdvisor up to $7.2 million for its use of deceptive and misleading tactics in selling home improvement project leads to service providers, including small businesses operating in the gig economy. The fine is the first gig work-related penalty following the FTC’s fall 2022 announcement that it was prepared to crack down on unfair, deceptive, and anticompetitive practices taking place in the gig economy.

Dever-based HomeAdvisor had merged with Angie’s List in 2017 to form a new public company called “Angi.” However, the FTC’s charge against HomeAdvisor wasn’t issued until March 2022. The Commission said that since at least the middle of 2014, HomeAdvisor had made unsubstantiated, false or misleading claims about the leads it sells to service providers, like general contractors and lawn care professionals. Specifically, it claimed that the Angil affiliate had misrepresented the quality and source of leads, and the likelihood that they would result in actual jobs.

The Commission found that HomeAdvisor told service providers its leads resulted in home improvement jobs at higher rates than its own data supported and misled service providers about the cost of its one-month subscription to its platform. The company told service providers the first month of the mHelpDesk subscription, which helps with scheduling appointments and processing payments, was free with an annual membership package. But this was not true, the FTC said. Service providers would end up paying $59.99 more than they expected, it noted. (The mHelpDesk program is an optional add-on to the $287.99 annual membership to the HomeAdvisor network).

In addition, the FTC found that while HomeAdvisor claims its leads concern consumers who intend to soon hire a service professional in soon, many of them do not. This is in part because HomeAdvisor would resell leads from affiliates who generate leads from online forms that asked consumers about potential home projects they were considering. However, the company would claim the leads came from its own website, which suggested consumers were seeking out HomeAdvisor’s assistance.

The FTC’s complaint also said many of the leads didn’t match the types of services the providers offered or were outside their preferred geographic area, despite HomeAdvisor’s claims to the contrary.

“Gig economy platforms should not use false claims and phony opportunities to prey on workers and small businesses,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, at the time of the original FTC order.

The new administrative order also bars HomeAdvisor from continuing its deceptive practices and sets up two redress funds to provide money to defrauded service providers. The first fund will make payments of up to $30 to service providers impacted by HomeAdvisor’s misrepresentations about its lead quality. Meanwhile, the second fund will make payments of up to $59.99 to service providers who had been told that the first month of their mHelpDesk subscription was free. In total, HomeAdvisor is required to pay up to $7.2 million for redress, the FTC said.

The Commission voted 4-0 to accept the proposed consent agreement.

This gig economy fine follows other warnings issued by the FTC, including one reminding MLMs (multi-level marketers) to not lie to consumers about potential earnings. This one was sent out to 1,100 MLMs, even if they were not under investigation. It also reminded these companies it had previously sued MLMs like Herbalife and Advocare for their promotions of high-earning potential even though most participants made little or no money. Herbalife settled with the FTC for $200 million and Advocare agreed to pay $150 million. The FTC settled with Amazon as well for using misleading earnings claims to attract drivers to its Flex platform, and sued DeVry University for false claims over the higher incomes graduates received.

The FTC fines HomeAdvisor up to $7.2M for lying about lead quality and other matters by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Coverdash, providing small businesses, e-commerce merchants and gig-economy workers with insurance, launched its product in all 50 states after closing over $2.5 million in seed capital.

The round was led by Bling Capital, with participation from investors, including AXIS Digital Ventures, Tokio Marine Future Fund (in affiliation with World Innovation Lab), Expansion VC and Cameron Ventures. A group of strategic angel investors also participated, including Greg Hendrick, CEO of Vantage Risk; Garrett Koehn, president of CRC Insurance; and Steve Shenfeld, president of MidOcean Partners.

The New York City-based insurtech was started by Ralph Betesh, David Vainer and Avery Rubin in 2022 to help smaller businesses source coverage in seconds and to provide an embedded technology so that partners working with businesses, like online marketplaces and service providers, can plug in Coverdash’s end-to-end insurance experience with a single line of code. The company secured 35 of these partners pre-launch, Betesh told TechCrunch.

Betesh, who started his career in insurance investment banking, said that large insurance carriers want those equally large policies to show top line growth to investors, so they often focus on big companies, and have done so for years now.

However, he saw a dynamic shift in the last two or three years of big carriers looking at smaller businesses “as a way to pick up fragmented premiums without necessarily having to go head to head with each other,” Betesh said. This is where many startups were successful in developing some niche approaches to solving the insurtech problem, and also attracting venture capital dollars.

Betesh himself began to look at what the process was for small businesses to get insurance and found, in his words, “a lot of clunkiness” and “murky” processes with no transparency. In addition, customers weren’t able to purchase policies without speaking to a human being.

“It just wasn’t the purchase experience that I would have expected,” Betesh added. “We felt like this wasn’t in alignment with small business expectations in the U.S., specifically tech-enabled small businesses.”

So the team set out to build a product that would make insurance accessible to small businesses of all shapes and sizes and one that was seamless and simple. It works with over a dozen carriers to offer policies including liability, property, workers’ compensation and cyber.

Here’s how it works: Customers come to the Coverdash site, and they can get a quote, bind policies together, pay for them and manage them in a matter of seconds. Betesh said there’s no redirection of the customer to a payment portal, a carrier portal or to speak to an agent, everything can be done through Coverdash.

Though the company is offering policies in a direct-to-consumer format, Betesh said the Coverdash’s future scale and revenue will likely come from policies sold through those partners that will embed its technology into their websites.

Meanwhile, the new funding will be used for go-to-market initiatives, product and technology development and hiring.

“The development and adoption of commercial insurance APIs within the insurtech industry has reached a tipping point, enabling innovative companies with the opportunity to drive true growth and transformation,” said Ben Ling, founder and general partner at Bling Capital, in a written statement. “We view Coverdash as the future of business insurance and embedded distribution.”

Bling Capital-backed Coverdash unveils its embedded, digital insurance for small businesses by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

Fintech-turned-HR outfit Deel reached $295 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) by the end of 2022, the company’s co-founder and CEO Alex Bouaziz shared today.

That’s up 417.5% from $57 million in ARR achieved at the end of 2021.

The massive jump in ARR is impressive by normal standards but particularly so considering the challenging macroenvironment that startups everywhere faced last year. Deel says it calculates ARR as monthly recurring SaaS revenues x 12. Bouaziz told TechCrunch that a bulk of its ARR is from the company’s EOR (Employer of Record) business. 

Bouaziz also today confirmed the company’s valuation of $12 billion, which we reported on in May at the time of Deel’s $50 million raise. At the time, Deel did not confirm that valuation, apparently choosing to wait until it had full year ARR numbers to share.

Bouaziz also told TechCrunch that Deel is profitable, having been EBITDA positive since September. Further, Deel claims that it makes in profits a margin of 85%. In other words, for every dollar in revenue generated, it retains 85 cents.

Bouaziz and Shuo Wang started remote-first, San Francisco-based Deel in 2019 as an EOR – with the mission of allowing businesses to hire employees and contractors in other countries “in less than five minutes.” Deel also says that it gives companies the ability to pay teams in more than 150 currencies with “just a click.” It has since evolved its strictly fintech model to what it describes as a “full-stack” “truly global HR platform” designed “to compliantly manage your entire workforce in just one system—from direct employees to international workers and everything in between.”

On January 11, we reported on Deel’s acquisition of Capbase for an undisclosed amount in a cash and stock deal, marking its entry into the equity management space.

Deel says it has over 15,000 customers including Nike, Subway, Reebok, Forever21 and Klarna and that it has “paid out $5 billion in salaries to hundreds of thousands of workers.”

In a blog post today, the company also said is offering a new basic product, Deel HR, for free for any business with under 200 people. It also unveiled a Deel Engage, a set of HR Slack plugins designed “to help distributed teams build stronger culture, improve employee engagement, and measure adoption with powerful metrics.” The startup also announced the expansion of its global payroll offering by building what it described as its “first in-house payroll engine,” starting with the U.S. The expansion aims to help companies hire globally without opening legal entities and consolidating payroll, among other things, Deel said.

Over the past year, the global HR space has heated up. In October, for example, Rippling revealed its own global payroll offering, stating it was specifically competing with companies like Deel.

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Remote work revolution helps Deel reach $295M in ARR by Mary Ann Azevedo originally published on TechCrunch

Meta announced today that it has started gradually expanding testing default end-to-end encryption for Messenger. The messaging service is also bringing some of its standard features to end-to-end encrypted chats, including chat themes, custom chat emojis and reactions, group profile photos, link previews and active status.

Over the next few months, millions of users around the world will continue to see some of their chats gradually upgraded with end-to-end encryption. Messenger will notify people in these individual chat threads as they are upgraded. Meta says the process in which it selects and upgrades individual threads is random so that there isn’t a negative impact on the company’s infrastructure and users’ chat experience.

“We know people want a space to connect and they want to know that those conversations are private, safe and secure,” Meta said in a blog post. “That is why we’ve spent time building a team of talented engineers, cryptologists, designers and policy experts who are all committed to rolling out default end-to-end encryption on Messenger. Building a secure and resilient end-to-end encrypted service for the billions of messages that are sent on Messenger every day requires careful testing.”

Meta first tested end-to-end encryption features for Messenger back in 2016 for “secret conversations.” Last January, the company introduced opt-in end-to-end encryption for group chats and calls for Messenger. But unlike Meta’s other popular chat app WhatsApp, end-to-end encryption is not yet enabled by default for all conversations on Messenger, but this will soon change as the company begins rolling out default end-to-end encryption.

As for Instagram, the popular Meta app began testing end-to-end encrypted messages through an opt-in setting in 2021. Last February, the social media app introduced the feature for all users in Ukraine and Russia.

Meta has previously said that it expects to roll out default end-to-end encryption protection across all its apps sometime in 2023. The company has not provided a recent update on this timeline, but says it will give updates as it continue to bring end-to-end encryption to Messenger.

Messenger ramps up testing of default end-to-end encryption by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

Bumble is putting the phrase “Netflix and Chill?” to the test with the launch of a weekly in-app Netflix-themed question game called “Netflix Nights In” that asks users questions about a popular Netflix show. Users can play against their match to see who can answer all the questions correctly.

According to a recent Bumble survey, 78% of users think it’s easier to talk to matches when they have similar TV and movie tastes. Seventy-two percent of the survey respondents said they’ve talked about TV shows and movies on a date.

“Netflix Nights In” will start next Monday, January 30, and ends on March 13. The question game is available to Bumble users in the US, Canada, and the UK.

Every Monday, the questions will revolve around one show, including “Emily in Paris,” “Stranger Things,” “Squid Game,” “Selling Sunset,” “Love is Blind” and “Outer Banks.” The right answer to each question won’t be revealed until both the user and their match pick their responses.

Also, each round will feature stars from the corresponding show, such as Ashley Park from “Emily in Paris,” Alexa Lemieux from “Love is Blind,” and Amanza Smith from “Selling Sunset.”

“When we’re getting to know someone, it’s human nature to try and find common interests. It gives you something to bond over and go beyond surface-level conversation,” said Magno Herran, Vice President of Marketing Partnerships at Netflix, in a statement. “We love seeing people connect over Netflix shows and films and create their own communities around them. And with this partnership, we wanted to give people a way to find someone who gets them based on what they watch while leaning into ‘if you know you know’ Netflix references that have helped to spark many conversations.”

Bumble previously partnered with streaming service Apple TV+ in October 2022 to give users a blind-dating experience based on the fictional dating app in the popular TV show, “Ted Lasso.” The “Bantr Live” experience, which ended last year, randomly paired users to potential matches without seeing what they looked like. The users were given three minutes to direct message each other.

Tinder has also been trying to find ways to help users break the ice. In 2021, Tinder launched its second “Swipe Night” series, an interactive “choose your own adventure” story that users were able to play every week. The dating app partnered with dog rescue shelters in 2022 to give Tinder users the ability to add a shelter dog to their profile photo for National Dog Week.

Netflix teams up with Bumble so users can bond over popular TV shows by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

With over 875 million users across over 200 countries, LinkedIn is a household name in the world of professional networking. But as the platform grew, it shifted some focus to becoming another source of consuming and producing content. Now a young startup wants to disrupt that.

Peerlist aims to fill this gap by providing a space for professionals to find and connect with one another based on their expertise and qualifications.

It’s creating a one-stop destination for professionals to showcase their work experiences, education and connect with like-minded individuals in their domain. Users on the platform can integrate work-attribution sites such as GitHub, Dribbble, Substack and Gumroad. They can also get their work experience and education to add an additional layer of authenticity.

The platform uses an individual’s work email to verify their work experience. For verifying educational credentials, users upload their student badge or ID or use their institute’s assigned email ID to get their profiles verified. The startup has plans to verify users’ past work experiences and education by expanding its verification feature over time.

“Because many people have their work distributed on different platforms, and developers and designers and tech professionals often write articles on Substrack and share codes on GitHub, we wanted to allow them to build a profile where they can showcase all their work,” said Akash Bhadange, co-founder and CEO of Peerlist, in an interview.

Profiles with verified details are available for public viewing in resume and work portfolio formats. Users need to sign up if they want to message a user or get their contact information.

Bhadange, a former product and UX designer, founded Peerlist in August 2021 with his wife, Yogini Bende. Bende, who has experience as a front-end developer, oversees the startup’s engineering-related tasks.

Bhadange asserted that Peerlist grew its user base to more than 20,000 people — of which 60% are verified — without any marketing spends. The startup plans to spend some of its fresh funding on marketing. It also aims to expand its engineering team from the existing five-people team for product development — alongside a dedicated marketing and sales team.

Peerlist hopes to amass over a million users by the end of the year, said Bhadange.

Peerlist’s current userbase consists of individuals with experience ranging from early to mid-senior levels. The startup said it is working to make the platform appealing to senior-level professionals. 

To appease more users, Peerlist plans to add a feature that will allow individuals to set up custom domains for their profiles. 

At present, Peerlist does not have a model to generate revenues. The platform, though, does want to monetize the verified user base by charging companies looking to hire professionals basis their work experience and education.

As it scales, Peerlist has attracted some investment from many industry insiders. The Delaware-registered startup, with an office in Pune, said it has raised $1.1 million in a seed funding round led by HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah.

Other participating investors include Plotch.ai founder and chief executive Manoj Gupta, Moonfrog co-founder and CTO Kumar Puspesh, Dukaan co-founder and CEO Suumit Shah and entrepreneur and angel investor Mohan Rao.

The startup plans to deploy the funds to add scores of additional features. One will allow companies to showcase their branding and tech stack on the platform. According to Bhadange, professionals using those profiles will be able find more details about a firm’s founders and other team members and also see their contributions, such as in writing on blogs or code contributions displayed on GitHub. This will give the professionals a deeper understanding of the company’s culture and technical capabilities and help them make more informed decisions about job opportunities, he said.

Additionally, Peerlist has plans to help angel investors get their investment history in startups verified on the platform, making it easier for professionals to connect with and secure funding from these investors. Bhadange said that this particular development was currently at an ideation stage but had the potential to add tremendous value.

“The world is ready for some innovation when it comes to online professional networks,” said HubSpot’s Shah, in a statement. “Peerlist is taking on this challenge with a product built for modern times that feels like a breath of fresh air. I invested because this is the need of the hour for this industry, and timing is perfect for such disruption.”

Before the all-equity seed funding, Peerlist had raised a small angel funding of $25,000 from ModernLoop engineer head Vishwesh Jirgale and Postman product engineering head Akshay Deo in October 2021.

HubSpot co-founder Shah backs Peerlist for a new take on professional networking by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch

Veteran tech giant PayPal is facing an antitrust investigation in Germany — where the Federal Cartel Office (FCO) has announced it’s looking into its rules on surcharges.

The regulator is concerned that restrictions PayPal imposes on merchants could be harming competitors and inflating costs for consumers by restricting price competition.

Clauses in PayPal’s terms the FCO said it’s examining include traders not being allowed to offer their goods and services at lower prices if customers choose a cheaper payment method than PayPal; and sellers not being allowed to express any preference for payment methods other than PayPal, or to make an alternative payment tech more convenient for customers.

“The fees to be paid by sellers for using a payment service vary considerably depending on the payment method. Retailers usually pass these fees on to the product prices, so that consumers ultimately bear the costs of the payment services, even if these – unlike shipping costs, for example – are usually not reported separately to consumers,” the FCO explained in a press release [the original is in German; this is a machine translation of that text].

“According to market studies, PayPal is not only the leading provider of online payments in Germany but also one of the most expensive online payment services. According to PayPal’s price list, PayPal’s standard fee in Germany is currently 2.49 – 2.99 percent of the payment amount plus 34-39 cents per payment,” it added.

Commenting in a statement Andreas Mundt, president of the FCO, said: “These clauses could restrict competition and constitute a violation of the prohibition on abuse. We will now examine what market power PayPal has and to what extent online retailers are dependent on offering PayPal as a payment method. If merchants are prevented from taking into account the different costs of the various payment methods with corresponding surcharges or discounts, other and new payment methods can hold their own less well in the price and quality competition or not even come onto the market. Payment services with market power could thus gain further leeway for their own pricing. The victims would then be the consumers in particular, who ultimately pay these higher costs indirectly through the product prices.”

PayPal was contacted for a response.

While German antitrust activity has been garnering wider attention in recent years, after the country updated its competition rules at the startup of 2021 — arming the FCO with greater powers to proactively address the market power of digital giants — the proceeding against PayPal is not one of those special abuse control cases.

A spokesperson for the FCO confirmed in this case it’s applying ‘classic’ competition rules — which means the regulator will first need to determine whether has a dominant position for payments before it can assess whether or not there has been any breach. So the proceeding may take some time to run its course.

In a separate antitrust action in Europe last year — also concerning digital payments — the Dutch Authority for Consumers and Markets forced iOS maker Apple to allow dating apps operating in the market to use non-Apple-based payment technology to process in-app sales. Apple initially sought to challenge the order but after a string of penalty payments and several months of back and forth, it came with a proposal that was accepted by the watchdog last summer.

In recent years, the European Union has also been eyeing online payment tech — taking action last year over restrictions Apple applies to Apple Pay.

Such interventions prefigure bigger and potentially more impactful changes coming for tech giants in the European Union this year as a major competition reform, called the Digital Markets Act, comes into application across the bloc. This “ex ante” regime will flip the classical antitrust protocol — whereby market power must be assessed and investigation precedes remedy — by applying, up front, a set of fixed rules on platforms designated as competitively significant “gatekeepers”. So as to become more responsive and proactively level the playing field between giants and the smaller competitors that rely on them to reach consumers.

Germany is looking into PayPal’s terms for merchants by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

The M2 Air is as close as Apple has ever come to the perfect MacBook. It’s a kind of platonic ideal for the category, and the culmination of key updates to the product line, including the arrival (and upgrade) of Apple silicon and the company’s acceptance that some things (bad keyboards, Touch Bar) simply weren’t working, no matter how hard it tried.

Taken as a whole, I don’t think I’ve ever liked an Apple laptop more than I like the 2022 MacBook Air, and I don’t anticipate that changing soon — at least not until the 2023 Air arrives, perhaps. Even with this month’s arrival of two new Pro models, last year’s Air remains the best mainstream laptop Apple has ever made.

There’s a rub, of course. There always is. Regardless of all the innovations it’s built on top of, no mass-produced computer will please everyone. In fact, as a line, the Air has always been defined as much by the things it leaves out. It’s true that the Air is currently at its point of least compromise, but making a product thin and light has always meant some manner of compromise.

That’s where the new Pros come in. Apple’s lineup has ebbed and flowed quite a bit over the years. With the disappearance of the standard MacBook, the Air has shifted from travel-minded ultraportable to what is effectively the company’s default laptop. The M1 model has stuck around as the “budget” entry, but the Air was — and continues to be — the best choice for a majority of users.

After years of relying on Intel, Apple cracked things wide open in 2020 with the arrival of in-house silicon. But there’s also a sense in which the company painted itself into a bit of a corner, moving forward. For most users, the power gains offer diminishing returns, if you’re not, say, editing multiple 8K videos or rendering 3D. That isn’t to say such power won’t be required in the future, of course, given the trajectory of computing requirements. It’s just that the $800 gulf between the starting price for the M2 Air and M2 Pro MacBook Pro (kind of a mouthful) ultimately doesn’t make a ton of sense for your average user.

This is, perhaps, a very long-winded way of saying the “Pro” in MacBook Pro is a less nebulous concept than ever before. It’s always been wholly clear that the Mac Pro, for instance, is designed for professionals than regular old consumers. The MacBook line has tended to be a bit more porous. If you’re more content consumer than creator, there isn’t exactly a load of reasons to make the leap. If, on the other hand, you’re a creator looking for a lot of power on the go, you’ll want to listen up.

Apple has comfortably settled into a nice, consistent design language with the MacBook line, with the strange exception of the 13-inch Pro. The entry-level Pro system remains a strange time capsule of earlier days, with Touch Bar hanging on like some vestigial organ and reminder of a nice enough idea that ultimately failed to justify its own existence. The far handier F keys once again reside up top on the newer models, where they belong. The TouchID (the best thing about the Touch Bar) is perched on the top left. The keyboard remains on the soft side, as is consistent across Apple products, but it works well, and the days of key-sticking frustration are finally behind us.

One of the primary aesthetic distinctions between the Air and the Pro are the skinny speaker grilles that flank the keyboard. The speakers get about as loud as you’d want a set of laptop speakers to get, and the open design allows for a richer sound than you get on the Air’s single back-firing panel. It’s good for a quick video or some music listening, but I imagine if you’re, say, editing audio, you’re going to want a pair of headphones regardless.

Another key difference is ports. As a general rule, the more ports the better. Certainly that’s the case here. In fact, one of the Air’s most glaring issues is a lack of places to plug things in, limited to the proprietary MagSafe 3, two ThunderBolt 4/USB-C ports and a headphone jack. That’s it. In most situations for most people, that’s mostly sufficient. Carrying the Air around at CES the other week, it was mostly fine — until it wasn’t.

I suddenly found myself attempting to navigate the labyrinthian Forums shops at Caesar’s at 8:00 p.m. on a Tuesday. My external SD reader had completely given up the ghost sometime between my last in-person event and CES. A relatively unique set of circumstances, certainly, but it drove home how much I’d missed having a built-in card slot after jumping from the Pro to the Air. If you’re a professional photographer (I’m certainly not claiming to be one, mind), I don’t need to tell you how essential a tool it is.

Like the Air, the Pro sports a pair of USB-C ports on the left side, just below the MagSafe connector. One of my highly specific issues with the Air is the decision to place the two USB-C ports on top of each other. Putting one on either side makes more logical sense in instances where the plugged-in object blocks the second port. Here, thankfully, the third sits on the other side. I’m among those who welcomed the return of MagSafe. It was one of the more beloved features of MacBooks past, and an odd thing to drop along the way.

It’s worth noting that, in spite of being custom built for the purpose, it actually charges a bit slower than USB-C. But the magnetic detachment is a little extra peace of mind for the clumsier among us (I do claim to be one of these, however), and it frees up the other ports for other, noncharging tasks. The final port is an HDMI output that supports 8K displays — a first for the MacBook line and an extremely appealing feature for the creator class.

What strikes you first on unboxing the new Pro, however, is the weight. The thing is heavy. The default weight of the 14-inch model is 3.5 pounds. The Air is 2.7 pounds. The 12.9 iPad Pro is 1.5 pounds (sans-keyboard case, mind). If you anticipate that the device will spend 50% of its time in your backpack, this is certainly something worth factoring in here. At 12.31 x 8.71 x 0.61 inches, the footprint is also larger than the Air (11.97 x 8.46 x 11.97) in every dimension.

Not that any of this is surprising, of course. That’s kind of the whole deal. The Pro delivers a lot more horsepower and bells and whistles. Being a bit more stationary just sort of comes with the territory. This is also due, in part, to the Air’s smaller display, which is 13.6 inches to the Pro’s 14.2. A larger surface area is a foregone conclusion. In addition to being larger, the screen is simply a thing to behold. The Air’s 2560 x 1664 Liquid Retina display gets a big bump to a 3024 x 1964 Liquid Retina XDR. It’s really gorgeous and bright at up to 1,600 nits for HDR content or 500 (the Air’s overall peak) for SDR. The refresh rate maxes out at a smooth 120 Hz — double that of the Air. Is any of this necessary for watching Netflix? Not really. Is it nice to have? Obviously. And it’s certainly a great mobile screen for those whose job descriptions involve creating visual content. macOS is still a long ways from becoming a gaming powerhouse by any stretch, but it’s come a long way over the past decade, and first-party silicon is a big piece of that. (Steam doesn’t hurt, either).

The baseline ($1,999) Pro sports an M2 Pro chip with a 10-Core CPU, 16-Core GPU, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. The review unit Apple sent isn’t quite top of the line, but it’s pretty close. It’s got the M2 Max with a 12-Core CPU and 38-Core GPU, 64GB or RAM and 2TB of storage. As configured, it’ll run you $4,100. If you really want to go all in, you can bump the RAM up to 96GB and storage to 8TB. Suddenly, you’re tipping the scales at $6,300. That’s more than 3x the cost of the base unit — a $4,300 increase. In other words, you can really trick this baby out, but it’s gonna cost you. And then some.

Performance is certainly reflected in the Benchmarks. The Max chip hit 1952 on the single-core and 15249 on the multicore GeekBench 5 tests (average of three tests). That’s a truly impressive gain over 1,922 and 8,974 we got with the M2 Air. The M1 Ultra still blows them all away with a 20,000+ multicore score, but that’s to be expected with desktop architecture. It frankly boggles the mind to consider the future of the Mac desktop (Mac Pro, perhaps?).

In the meantime, it’s extremely impressive to see the gains made for notebook processors over the past two years. Unlike the Air, the Pro’s got a fan and a pair of vents on either side of the engraved MacBook Pro logo on the bottom of the system. A quartet of rubber feet elevate the system a bit, to give the outgoing warm and incoming cool air somewhere to go. Truth is, you’re not likely to trigger with most day-to-day activities, but when the time comes to truly push the system to its limit, you’ll be very glad Apple didn’t go fanless across the line.

At 84888, the GeekBench Metal score handily beats the M1 Max (~64000-66000), courtesy of those 38 cores. Again, the M1 Ultra still beats the M2 Max’s GPU scores (>90000). The staggered rollout of silicon iterations may get a bit muddied for consumers, but the quick rule of thumb here is that the M2 Max trounces existing Mac laptop chips and even comes within spitting distance of the M1 Ultra. The native macOS port of Resident Evil Village, for instance, played smoothly (remind me to get a Bluetooth control), though the bottom of the Mac got quite warm to the touch. I was able to get it downright hot playing some Steam titles. Was I just looking for an excuse to replay Disco Elysium? Who can say, really?

Performance was great, probably keep it on a desk when you game (oh, and maybe pick up a decent Bluetooth controller while you’re at it). While extremely efficient, Apple silicon isn’t beyond the need for cooling with resource-intensive tasks. With daily tasks, it stays cool. However, you don’t have to push the system to the limit to noticed a marked difference in processing power. Things I do on the regular, like opening apps and editing podcast audio are perceptively zippier, coming off using the latest Air as a daily driver.

The new chips bring other updates beyond process power. There are some slight tweaks to the ISP (image signal processor) — specifically with regards to picture contrast. The webcam, still positioned in that display notch you either like or loathe, is more or less the same 1080p hardware you’ll find in the Air. The bump to 1080p was a long, long awaited upgrade, particularly in this golden age of the virtual meeting.

Some of the camera hardware (see the Studio Display) got off to a rough start. As we know, there’s currently only so much one can do with the processor versus good, old-fashioned camera hardware, but it’s certainly to a point where I’d feel wholly comfortable using it for a work meeting. Of course, if I’ve got an iPhone handy (as I usually do), I’m going to instead opt for Ventura’s Continuity Camera feature. Above, you can see two screenshots taken in Zoom, one with the built-in webcam and the other with a mounted iPhone 14 Pro. The choice is simple.

The battery life, meanwhile, is just straight up awesome. With video playback, I was able to squeeze an impressive 21.5 hours out of the system before the screen shut off. That’s just shy of the stated 22 hours. The Air and 13-inch Pro, meanwhile, are listed as up to 18 and 20 hours, respectively. It’s easy to see Apple hitting a full day in a generation or two. In the meantime, you should be able to make it through that direct flight from New York to Singapore without incident (no, I can’t sleep on flights, either).

Really, it’s the perfect encapsulation of the new Pros. They’re big, bold and brash. They can do all sorts of things that would have seemed impossible on a MacBook only a few generations ago. They’re an exciting signpost for how far Apple’s notebooks have come and provide insight into where things are going, if the company continues its current pace of new chips a couple times a year.

The last few generations of Macs can perform tasks that might have seemed impossible pre-pandemic. While that includes gaming, they still aren’t gaming machines by many definitions. If playing the latest and most resource-intensive titles is central to your computing experience, you know the drill. Apple silicon is built with workflows in mind. That is say, the “Pro” is more creative pro and less professional gamer. For those tasks, these systems sing — and if you want to play games after work, the new chips are increasingly capable with each generation.

As noted above, this particular system is $4,100, as configured. Starting with the $1,999 base, an upgrade from the M2 Pro 10-core CPU/16-core GPU to the 12-core CPU/19-core GPU is a $300 add-on. Bumping that up to the Max with a 30-core GPU is a $500 increase over the base price. The top of the line M2 Max with a 38-core GPU is $700. Things can get real pricey real quick when you’re staring at Apple.com checkout. You try to future-proof and hedge your bets, as you consider whether you plan to hold onto your machine for three, five or 10+ years. It’s an investment, right?

I don’t foresee Apple suddenly make another generational leap in the near future, but I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been wrong before. Predicting where tech will be in a decade can be a fool’s errand, even if it happens to one that’s central to this job. However, much as I noted above that the Air continues to be the best MacBook for most, I feel fairly confident that the M2 Pro will be plenty for most creative professions. If you need the added firepower of the M2 Max, you probably already know who you are. And hey, I can’t say I minded using it as my daily driver for a bit. Those load times might feel insignificant, but they add up.

It’s a reaffirmation of the “Pro” in MacBook Pro: chunky, heavy, blazingly fast, full of ports and packed with the best the company has to offer. And they’re decidedly not for everyone — not even most. I’m still going to recommend the Air for nine out of 10 people (if not more) who ask me which MacBook to buy in the coming year. If you’re that 10th person, you almost certainly already know.

Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch M2 Max review by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

Everyone is excited for Final Fantasy XVI, but in an age of endless sequels the fresh and original action RPG Forspoken has gamers hoping that a fun new franchise is being minted. Unfortunately, Square-Enix’s risky bet doesn’t quite pay off: it’s an ambitious but disjointed experience that feels for all the world like none of its developers played it.

Forspoken (for PC and PS5) follows the popular isekai trope, in which someone from our world is suddenly and inexplicably transported to another, usually a fantasy one in which their modern knowledge and sensibilities work to both their advantage and detriment.

In this case, Frey, a young woman from Manhattan with a mysterious origin (but more pressing legal and money troubles) is sent to Athia, a once beautiful land ravaged by a corruptive force and lorded over by four mad, magical matriarchs. Frey must figure out what’s happening and save the world, etc, etc, with the help of a sassy sentient vambrace (Cuff) whose voice only she can hear.

The player guides Frey through the world, battling monsters and collecting new gear, and scampering over the landscape using a “magical parkour” system that, while a bit imprecise, does impart a nice sense of speed and agility. Further traversal abilities, like a magical grappling hook, are acquired over time.

Combat has Frey swapping between several spell types and eventually elements, peppering monsters from afar or slashing them up close, dancing around them and dodging their attacks. These are upgraded with gear or by completing various challenges, like doing a certain amount of damage to enemies from behind.

Stand on a cliff’s edge and gaze out at the dramatic landscape, ripe with points of interest to raise stats and collect materials and items, and you could well think you’ve got a good time ahead of you. And in some ways, you’d be right. It’s fun to bound around, zapping baddies and snatching up upgrades. The combat is dynamic and occasionally strategic, and boss battles are engaging. The world-building and characters are occasionally inspired and pleasingly diverse, if inconsistently acted — it’s not Shakespeare, but I do want to find out what happens next.

But the cracks start to show pretty quickly as it begins to feel like the game was rushed out well ahead of readiness.

To begin with, it doesn’t run well. The quality-focused graphics settings are pretty much unplayable, and even on the “performance” setting, which lowers the resolution and detail considerably, you get slowdowns.

There’s a ton of dialogue, but the game also repeats itself a lot. Like a lot a lot. I’ve heard the same quips when sighting an enemy or finding an item or landmark dozens of times. Frey and Cuff exchange barbed dialogue constantly, yet somehow they only recorded a handful of unique conversations, so you hear the same ones over and over. I had to set the “chatter” to “minimal” in the settings because I was so tired of hearing the same thing. (The cringeworthiness of the writing I pass over for now and leave to others to detail… but .)

Not only that, but the game frequently freezes you in place for dialogue or quest alerts, which tend to linger in silence for an infuriating three-count before letting you move again. Sometimes you’ll be given back control for only a few seconds before some new cutscene or pop-up takes it back.

Combat is splashy but chaotic, with unreliable camera and targeting controls that result in Frey constantly missing with her magic. As enemies get more intense, you’ll often be hit from offscreen, and damage ranges wildly from nearly nothing to one-shot kills by ordinary mobs. The need to pull the haptically resisting R2 trigger many, many times in rapid succession, to do regular attacks, is wearying (you can change this but it’s another thing where one questions why it is that way at all). And the support magic has you constantly dipping out of battle and losing your flow so you can select a trap or area attack that isn’t on cooldown.

Dodging is done simply by holding down the parkour button, effectively making Frey invincible. There’s a counter system of sorts but it requires getting hit in the first place, which is a little weird, and was never well explained.

There is some variety to the monsters, for instance a guy shielded from the front that you must incapacitate and hit from behind. Great! But the game also falls into the trap of padding out combat and difficulty by swarming the player. Those shielded guys aren’t so fun to fight when there are 20, coming from every direction. One early boss, already something of a damage sponge, soon reappears as a miniboss, then two guard a gate, then a quest has you fight five at once. Since you can really only target one at a time, and they spam fireballs at you, you spend most of the time holding dodge, waiting for a pause in their patterns to do a little spray and pray.

And while the world is big and realistic, it’s drab and kind of uninteresting. Each ruined town or fort is indistinguishable from the last. The “labyrinths” are short, also nearly identical lines of rooms with non-unique bosses at the end, and actually identical treasure chambers. The lore entries you find are short and vague: “The Varandis Guild built this tower to conduct their researches in. They delved into forbidden magic and were purged after the war of A.G. 3,472. -Quaestor Invicta, Glorious History of Athia.” (I made that one up, but you know the type. You could write one.)

Why are any of these places different or cool or important? It’s never clear, so you’re always just kind of traversing an all-purpose fantasy landscape looking for arbitrarily placed stat increases in copy-pasted assets. And because every point of interest is labeled on the map, and chests don’t have anything special in them, you know you can skip (literally) over most of the world. Sure, that’s arguably true of every open world game, but especially so here.

The whole thing has the feeling of an alpha or tech demo, basically, or a launch game rushed out to show off certain qualities of the PS5 (it can look gorgeous, for sure, and load times are nonexistent). There are all these systems but they don’t seem to harmonize; there are all these locations but they don’t have a reason to exist; there is all this dialogue but much of it feels almost improvised in how unspecific it is; there are side quests (“Detours”) but few compelling rewards.

It’s as if they built the whole game in isolated rooms (with the pandemic, this may even be true) and forgot to have someone play it and ask important questions like “why is it this way?” Why doesn’t the camera snap to the next enemy when you defeat one? Why can’t you just assign support magic to button combos? Why does it take so long for certain UI items to appear or disappear? Why are there grapple points that shoot you so high that landing causes Cuff to think you’ve died? I was constantly running into things that seemed like they’d have be caught in QA or playtesting.

It’s too bad, because there is real promise in the setting and art direction, and the landscape really can be impressive and fun to explore at times. When the combat isn’t getting in its own way, it can be a messily fun power trip.

I do feel that, like Final Fantasy XV before it, Forspoken can be updated and mostly redeemed with six months or a year of work filling in the gaps, doing polish passes, and adding quality-of-life improvements. There’s nothing wrong with a cool open world to explore and fight monsters in — this is a new and original one and plenty of people will enjoy it as-is, but others will recoil at finding janky aspects in such a high-profile game. With luck Forspoken will eventually achieve its ambitions, but until then I’d say hold onto your money.

Forspoken review: Square-Enix’s risky new IP arrives half-baked by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch