For the first time ever, Walmart is selling Apple MacBooks in stores. The mega-retailer isn’t selling the fastest models but rather the MacBook Air with an M1 chip, which was originally released in the fall of 2020. The laptop is listed for the reasonable price of $699. That’s a $300 discount over the M2 version from 2022, which Apple still sells for $999, and a $400 discount over the just-released MacBook Air with M3, which Apple sells for $1,099.
Clearly, Apple is looking to move inventory of its old hardware to make room for its new offerings. Since Apple started selling its newest MacBook Air model just over a week ago, it has delisted the option to buy a new M1 Air from its website. The model is still available as one of Apple’s refurbished machines, albeit for $50 more than the new-in-box computers Walmart is stocking. Other retailers are benefitting from this blowout too. Earlier this week, BestBuy started selling M1-equipped iMac desktops for $900, a discount of more than $500.
The MacBook Air with M1 is not the best MacBook you can buy; the laptops Walmart is selling have 8 GB of memory and just 256 GB of storage, so they should be considered entry-level machines. If you need more oomph, see WIRED’s MacBook buying guide for more recommendations. But if you need a good, cheap Mac, this is a great deal on a computer with Apple’s Silicon chipset.
Here’s some more consumer tech news from this week.
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How Do You Do, Fellow Redditors?
As Reddit readies itself for its IPO, the company is eager to make itself ever more appealing to advertisers. Reddit has announced a suite of business-friendly tools called Reddit Pro, which are meant to help companies better reach users everywhere on the platform. Now, that includes looking the part too.
The latest feature in this vein is called free-form ads. It lets companies take out ads that look and feel like regular Reddit posts. It apes the look of a popular megathread post, with a faint “Sponsored” disclaimer at the top to set it apart.
It’s likely to conjure up the same problem as sponsored ads on Google Search, which can make the service a slog to sort through all the ad posts before finding something substantive. It’s also a move that’s likely to rub Reddit’s particularly prickly user base the wrong way, considering that many of the most vocal Redditors tend to bristle at brands’ presence on the platform and rebel when Reddit seems to prioritize business over users.
Also: Reddit’s policy of allowing AI training models to access its user data is drawing the attention of the US Federal Trade Commission, the subject of our next item …
The FTC Screams for Ice Cream
The FTC and US Department of Justice have filed a joint comment advocating that soft-serve ice cream machines be made easier to fix. It’s a move that would affect all commercial soft-serve machines in the US, but the comment is particularly directed at McDonalds, which has become notorious for the constant breakage of its ice cream machines.
In 2021, an activist hacker group developed a device to fix the ice cream machines better than the company’s systems could, and then later sued McDonalds after the restaurant chain effectively shut down their guerrilla efforts. That case is still ongoing,
Ice cream machines may seem like unlikely soldiers on the front lines of the war for reparability, but the FTC’s and DOJ’s actions here could lead to more government intervention in cases where companies try to unfairly restrict repair access. If it means ice cream is easier to get because fewer machines are broken, that’s just a cherry on top.
TikTalk
Everybody’s talkin’ about TikTok these days, even if nobody can agree on what the app is, exactly.
This week, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that could effectively ban TikTok—assuming it can get through the Senate and is then signed by President Biden. TikTok has been in a similar position before, when the TikTok parent company ByteDance’s CEO Shou Zi Chew was grilled by Congress almost a year ago. This round of scrutiny over the company’s privacy practices and ties to China are looking a little more dire for TikTok. (Now may be a good time to download all your TikTok videos, just in case.)
This week WIRED’s Gadget Lab podcast is about how likely it is a TikTok ban will play out and whether TikTok’s data collection practices are any worse than what US social companies are already doing.
