Hasta La Gadget!

Global emissions in 2022 are projected to rise just a fraction of the amount they increased by last year, thanks in large part to a surge in renewables installation and electric vehicle use, a major global energy organization said this week.

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If you subscribe to a YouTube Premium family plan, you may want to check your email: Google is notifying users that the monthly cost of the service will be going up by $5 a month.

Starting in November, most users will start paying $22.99 per month for YouTube Premium — though there seems to be some leeway. While the main announcement says that the price increase starts on the next billing cycle on or after November 21st, some legacy subscribers won’t see their bill jump for several months. One Engadget staffer was informed that their price would not increase until April due to their status as a “long-standing and valued member.”

With the new price structure, the family plan is less of a bargain for smaller groups. At $17.99, buying into the family plan for just two users offered a significant savings over individual accounts. Now, a two-user family will save only $1 a month. For now, however, single-user prices remain the same: $11.99 a month for individual accounts and $6.99 for students. The benefits haven’t changed either, with Premium still offering users an ad-free YouTube experience, the ability to download videos for offline viewing, access to YouTube Music, and the ability to continue to play music and videos in the background or with your phone screen off.

At least you still don’t need to subscribe to Premium to watch videos in 4K.

Today,
Apple published a press release announcing an update to the Apple TV
4K, which now comes in two configurations that offer different storage capacities and network connectivity. The
Apple TV HD is no longer available on Apple’s online store.

The Apple TV 4K has been updated with an A15 Bionic chip and support for HDR10+, which is part of tvOS
16. The base configuration, which is $129, has 64GB of storage and is WiFi-only. The other model adds Gigabit
Ethernet and has 128GB of storage for $149. The top-tier Apple TV 4K supports Thread, which allows it to serve
as a smart home hub for Matter devices too.

Apple
says:

CPU performance is now up to 50 percent faster than the previous generation, delivering greater
responsiveness, faster navigation, and snappier UI animations. GPU performance is now up to 30 percent
faster than the previous generation for even smoother gameplay.

The Siri Remote has remained mostly the same, except it has added USB-C charging in place of the previous
model’s Lightning port. The Siri Remote is included with the Apple TV but can be purchased separately for
$59.

Overall, the changes to the Apple TV 4K are fairly minor, notwithstanding the snappier UI the A15 Bionic
enables. I don’t see a good reason for most people to upgrade from a previous generation Apple TV 4K
unless you play a lot of games on the Apple TV and have run into storage limits. If you have an Apple TV HD
before and are planning on buying a 4K TV, the new model will save you some money and offer a few new perks.
Although it’s a shame that Ethernet is only available in the more expensive configuration, that’s
probably part of how the cost of the base model has been brought down, and I’m sure most people connect
their Apple TVs via WiFi anyway.

The new Apple TV 4K is available for pre-order now, with deliveries beginning on Friday, November 4th in
30 countries, including the US.

Square Enix has dropped a new trailer for “Final Fantasy XVI” that delves deep into the plot setting and lore ahead of the game’s release on PS5 next year.

Twitter is gearing up for layoffs no matter whether Elon Musk purchases the company, which could happen as soon as this Friday, according to a report from The Washington Post.

On one hand, Musk has told prospective investors that he plans to axe 75 percent of the Twitter’s 7,500-member staff upon completion of the deal, a move that would likely cripple the site’s operations and kneecap its ability to moderate content and ensure users’ security. On the other hand, internal documents obtained by The Post reveal that, prior to the Musk deal, current company leadership planned to “pare the company’s payroll” by around $800 million, a relatively modest 25 percent reduction in the workforce that would only see around 1,900 people left unemployed, along with “major” infrastructure cuts and data center closures.

Musk’s cuts would be “unimaginable” Edwin Chen, a data scientist formerly in charge of Twitter’s spam and health metrics, told The Post. “It would be a cascading effect,” he said, “where you’d have services going down and the people remaining not having the institutional knowledge to get them back up, and being completely demoralized and wanting to leave themselves.”

When asked about potential layoffs at a Twitter Town Hall meeting in June, Musk came out in favor of staffing cuts, arguing that he didn’t see why low-performing workers should remain employed. Musk has also advocated for loosening content moderation restrictions and allowing formerly banned accounts to be reactivated.