The weekend’s best deals: Beats, iPads, Samsung portable SSD, and more

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It's the weekend, and that means a fresh roundup of all the best tech deals around the web! This week we have the first price cuts on Beats' Fit true wireless ANC sports earphones and Withing's ECG-equipped hybrid smartwatch. Beats Fit earphones are essentially sport versions of Apple's AirPods Pro, carrying IPX4 water resistance. The noise cancellation isn't quite as adept as the AirPods (also on sale), but it cuts down on noise significantly, especially higher pitch sounds. Beats Studio earphones without water resistance are also at their all-time low.

Withings ScanWatch is a hybrid smartwatch that incorporates a small screen into a traditional watch face as though it were a watch complication. It's a sleek design that Withings has been using for some time, and this latest watch boasts FDA-cleared ECG and blood-oxygen measurements, with a battery that lasts up to 30 days. If you don't mind manually tracking some activities (it can automatically track walks, biking, running, swimming, and sleep), it's a cheaper, more basic alternative to the Apple Watch Series 7 for ECG readings, blood oxygen monitoring, and all-day heart rate tracking.

Elsewhere around the web, we have discounts on iPads, Amazon's 4K Fire TV Stick, and Samsung's fast and ruggedized T7 portable SSD. There are also solid discounts on Roombas, Google Nest thermostats, and Apple's (2021) 16-inch M1 MacBook Pro, among others. Check the full list of curated deals below.

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Every little bit helps: How to pick the least eco-hostile laptop

Enlarge / Dell's XPS 15 9510. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Earth Day is April 22, and its usual message—take care of our planet—has been given added urgency by the challenges highlighted in the latest IPCC report. This year, Ars is taking a look at the technologies we normally cover, from cars to chipmaking, and finding out how we can boost their sustainability and minimize their climate impact.

Labeling a laptop as sustainable, eco-friendly, or "green" is optimistic at best. The apparently endless cycle of upgrades produces a lot of waste, no matter how many green certifications a device gets. We have a long way to go.

But while all laptops contribute to waste, some do so more or less than others. Many people simply need a laptop, so abstaining from the whole thing isn't an option. But there are some small victories to be won if you spend some time considering the options.

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Coca-Cola’s first “gamer” flavor—and the history of game-and-soda tie-ins

Enlarge / Hats off to the marketing director who thought "Coca-Cola Byte" had a nice ring to it. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

If you're looking for a TL;DR on what the first "gamer" flavor of Coca-Cola tastes like, I can answer that at the top: It's weird. Blueberry, maybe? But only if a blueberry was dunked in a pool of Red Bull. That's "Coca-Cola Byte."

Upon its announcement, I asked Coca-Cola if I could sample Byte, slated to launch in the United States in early May, because I found its gaming-adjacent existence fascinating. Many other soda and junk-food makers have enjoyed a cozy commercialization relationship with video games for decades—so much so that you can close your eyes and imagine a stereotypical "gamer" holding a sugary, carbonated beverage by default. (It's probably Mountain Dew. So much "gamer" Mountain Dew out there.)

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  Coca-Cola Byte's recycling plea, written in l33t speak.

Yet somehow, Coke has avoided direct tie-ins with the gaming universe in most of the world. We've never seen limited-edition Super Mario cans of Coke. We've never had bottles of Coke hide codes under their caps that give away free XP in online games. And the stuff basically never appears inside games' virtual worlds, despite so many brands clamoring to capture gamers' eyeballs and disposable budgets.

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Review: Oura Ring 3 and Whoop 4.0 are 2 ambitious wearables, but they’re tough sells

Enlarge / The Oura Ring Gen3 and Whoop Strap 4.0 look dedicated and sporty, but they only made me feel like an athlete by making me pine for what's missing. (credit: Corey Gaskin)

Recently, some wearables have started to place a heavier emphasis on recovery and restoration between exercise instead of just tracking more common activity metrics. Fitbit’s recently launched Daily Readiness Score, for instance, measures your sleep quality, activity levels, and heart rate variability (HRV) to quantify whether your body is prepared for an intense training session or if it needs a break. Like other features of this type, it's locked behind a paywall—in this case, the $10-a-month Fitbit Premium subscription service.

The Oura Ring (Gen 3) and Whoop 4.0 are two buzzy, celebrity-endorsed fitness wearables built using these sorts of "health and performance optimization" insights. They look nothing alike—the former is, well, a ring, while the latter is an unassuming little wrist module. Whoop's marketing aims more narrowly at optimizing training for athletes, while Oura casts a wider net.

But both focus more squarely on recovery assessment than typical activity tracking and aim to tell you how your activity, sleep, and recovery rates intertwine. Both lack any sort of screen and require subscriptions for their data, and neither is cheap. And both come from fast-rising companies—though they aren't exactly household names, Oura was reportedly valued at $800 million in 2021, while Whoop was valued at $3.6 billion.

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Elon Musk sold $8.5B in Tesla stock after agreeing to $44B Twitter deal

Enlarge / CEO Elon Musk at SpaceX Headquarters in Hawthorne, California, on October 10, 2019. (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

Elon Musk has raised $8.5 billion from selling part of his stake in Tesla, boosting his cash position ahead of his planned purchase of Twitter.

The sales were made between Tuesday and Thursday, after Twitter’s board agreed to Musk’s $44 billion all-cash takeover approach.

The electric car maker’s share price slumped in the wake of news of the deal, with the drop blamed on concerns about potential share sales by Musk to finance the acquisition, though it also came amid a sharp fall in the wider stock market.

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Joe Manchin calls EV tax credits “ludicrous” in Senate hearing

Enlarge / US Senator Joe Manchin likes the coal industry, doesn't like electric vehicles. (credit: J. Scott Applewhite-Pool/Getty Images)

Senator Joe Manchin called federal tax credits for electric vehicles "ludicrous" in a Senate hearing on Thursday. The West Virginian politician, who continues to make millions from the coal industry, has been a regular critic of subsidies for EVs, which have been a key part of the Democratic Party's plan to decarbonize the transport sector.

Since 2009, the US has used federal tax credits as a way to offset the higher price of EVs thanks to their battery packs.

Currently, the credit is for any plug-in vehicle (both battery EVs and plug-in hybrid EVs) with at least 5 kWh of battery capacity and ranges from $2,917 to $7,500, depending on the exact kWh total. But it's a credit, not a rebate, so to receive the full $7,500, an EV buyer has to have at least $7,500 in tax liability that year. The tax credit also sunsets once a car manufacturer has sold 200,000 plug-in vehicles, although so far, only Tesla and General Motors have crossed that threshold.

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After flying 150th Falcon 9, SpaceX continues to make efficiency gains

Enlarge / The number of days between the first 50 Falcon 9 launches, the second 50, and the last 50. (credit: Eric Berger)

SpaceX launched its first Falcon 9 rocket on June 4, 2010, nearly a dozen years ago. During those first years, the company grappled with a whole host of challenges, from things as seemingly simple as trying to transport the rocket over land instead of by sea or air to more demanding tasks such as producing enough Merlin engines.

The company's first 50 flights took nearly eight years to complete, and in that time SpaceX engineers and technicians learned much about building large rockets, testing and transporting them, and then flying them. From 2010 to early 2018 SpaceX would make three major "block" upgrades to the rocket, as well as debuting the Falcon Heavy variant of the booster.

During this learning period of activity, SpaceX managed to launch a Falcon 9 rocket only every 56.6 days. As it started to experiment with reusing the first stage, of its first 50 launches, seven of those were on reused rockets. Also during this learning period, SpaceX had one launch failure, CRS-7 in 2015, and one failure during pre-launch activities, the Amos-6 accident in 2016.

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Rocket Report: FAA decision day, or another delay? Using a balloon first stage

Enlarge / The Space Launch System rocket rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building this week. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

Welcome to Edition 4.41 of the Rocket Report! For your situational awareness, Rocket Lab's "There and Back Again" mission is now scheduled for 22:35 UTC on Friday from Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand. The company is seeking optimal weather for the launch and subsequent recovery of the first stage by helicopter. Can't wait to see it.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Angara 1.2 rocket finally ready for flight. Russian space journalist Anatoly Zak reports that the Angara 1.2 vehicle—a single-core version of the Angara booster—is finally ready for its debut flight. It may launch as early as Friday from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia, carrying the small MKA-R spacecraft. The vehicle, Zak notes, has been under development for 25 years in various guises.

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The best games we played at PAX East 2022

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This year's PAX East was a bit of a strange experience. The last time we attended the show was just weeks before the entire country began shutting down due to the pandemic. After a canceled show in 2021, the Boston Convention Center was once again filled with gaming fans this year, though now all of them were wearing masks (with strict enforcement).

Many of the big-name publishers that were at previous PAX shows were missing this year, whether because of pandemic risks or shrinking promotional travel budgets. That left the usual mix of indie developers and publishers hanging on to their floor space—though not really expanding to fill in the gaps.

Even though the total selection of games on offer seemed smaller, there were plenty of standout titles. Here are the nine games we've been thinking about ever since we left Boston.

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The doomsday clock is ticking in new Jurassic World Dominion trailer

Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are joined by Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, and Sam Neill in Jurassic World Dominion.

Universal Pictures has released a second trailer for Jurassic World Dominion, the sixth installment in the hugely successful franchise, featuring cloned dinosaurs roaming freely on the mainland as human beings face possible extinction.

As we've reported previously, the Jurassic World trilogy was always intended to be a complete story told across three films, as opposed to the standalone nature of the original trilogy. Director Colin Trevorrow, who co-wrote Dominion's script, knew that he wanted the third film to center on dinosaurs going "open source," so to speak—portraying a world in which Wu is not the only scientist capable of cloning the beasts. But rather than scene after scene of dinosaurs terrorizing people and destroying cities, he wanted "a world where dinosaur interaction is unlikely but possible—the same way we watch out for bears or sharks."

Per the official premise:

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