Month: February 2022

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Welcome back to another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes a notable discount on Apple's iPad Air, which is currently down to $500 at Best Buy. We've also seen this price at Amazon, but stock there appears to be going in and out as of this writing. Either way, this is only $10 more than the lowest price we've tracked for Apple's 10.9-inch tablet, about $65 off the average street price we've seen online in recent months and $100 off Apple's MSRP. The deal applies to the 64GB model; if you need more storage, note that the 256GB variant is on sale for $650, which is also $10 off the best price we've seen.

We gave the iPad Air high marks back when the tablet launched in late 2020. We praised the device for its high-quality design, crisp and accurate display, and speedy performance, all of which have become typical of the iPad lineup. iPadOS isn't robust enough to make an iPad a full laptop replacement for most people, but its app support remains extensive, and it's still excellent for casual media consumption and lighter work tasks like word processing. This model also supports the latest Pencil stylus and the great-if-wildly-expensive Magic Keyboard, plus it has a USB-C port for further accessory support and faster charging.

The Air still sits in the middle of Apple's tablet offerings, providing more premium hardware and performance than the lower-cost iPad but fewer high-end features than the pricier iPad Pro. As we've noted before, the latter gets you Apple's more powerful M1 chip (though that doesn't make the Air slow for most tasks), a brighter display with a noticeably smoother 120 Hz refresh rate, more base storage at 128GB, Thunderbolt connectivity with its USB-C port, and slightly better mics, cameras, and speakers. But all of those upgrades come at a premium: the 11-inch iPad Pro is typically available for between $750 and $799 online. For those who want something better than the base iPad but can't pay that much, the Air is likely a better value.

Enlarge (credit: Raspberry Pi Foundation)

The Raspberry Pi hardware has included a 64-bit processor since the Pi 3 launched in early 2016, but the Raspberry Pi OS (formerly known as Raspbian) has remained primarily 32-bit. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has been testing a 64-bit version of the OS since 2020, though, and today the organization announced that the 64-bit version is leaving beta and is now a fully supported OS option on all 64-bit Pi hardware. This includes the Pi 3, Pi 4, Pi Zero 2 W, and all variants thereof.

The most significant benefit of the 64-bit switch will be software compatibility, since as the Pi Foundation notes, "many closed-source applications are only available for ARM64," and open source apps aren't always fully optimized for the instruction set that the 32-bit Pi OS uses.

The Pi Foundation's post also talks about the performance benefits of 64-bit ARM processors and the underlying ARMv8 instruction set while noting that these benefits "are most visible in benchmarks" at the moment. It also mentions the ability for single processes to address more than 4GB of RAM, though the Large Physical Address Extension (LPAE) feature already allows each individual process in the 32-bit Pi OS to access up to 3GB of memory.

Enlarge / Starlink Premium antenna. (credit: Starlink)

Starlink has started taking orders for a premium service with a bigger antenna that delivers download speeds of up to 500Mbps, and it costs five times as much as the standard service: $2,500 for the hardware and $500 per month for Internet access.

"Starlink Premium has more than double the antenna capability of Starlink," the product's website says. More specifically, the higher-performance user terminal has "twice the area of our standard phased array with broader scan angle," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on Twitter. It's intended for small offices, stores, and residences. The exact physical dimensions of the new user terminal don't seem to be available.

Ordering Starlink Premium requires a $500 deposit, and deliveries are scheduled to start in Q2 2022. It will be the latter part of Q2, as an FAQ says, "We expect to begin fulfilling Starlink Premium orders mid-2022." But the timing still means that people who order Starlink Premium could get service before people who have been waiting many months for a shipment of regular Starlink equipment.

Enlarge / UVeye's technology uses scanners and AI to diagnose defects. (credit: UVeye)

Can you train an AI to take a breath, wince, and remark, "Well, it's going to cost you"?

That's probably easier than teaching one to diagnose problems with your car after a visual scan of its undercarriage, and yet the latter is what an Israeli company called UVeye has done. The company has developed what you might think of as a car scanner that can diagnose problems in just a few seconds. Drive past it, and it will image your car's panels, tires, or underbody, spotting dings, oil leaks, foreign objects, or other problems, flagging them for remedy.

It's another intriguing example of the civilian spinoffs that have emerged from Israel's national security sector over the last couple of decades as sensors and algorithms find new life on civvy streets.