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 Apple is offering U.S. customers who purchase and redeem an Apple Gift Card three months of free access to Apple Arcade. Holiday gift card purchases made before January 6, 2026 are eligible for the ?Apple Arcade? trial, as long as the card is redeemed by January 13, 2026.
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Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 just got a fairly bizarre expansion inspired by the Netflix show Stranger Things. If you've ever wanted to fly over a fictional Indiana town in the 1980s, this is the update for you.
That's right. The game now lets folks fly over Hawkins, Indiana and check out more than 40 iconic locations from the series, including Starcourt Mall, the junkyard, the government lab and, of course, the upside down.
?? Recreation of Hawkins with more than 40 iconic locations
?? Five exhilarating missions
Full details: https://t.co/JyB4LkMSzO pic.twitter.com/XsmGzt52Mb
— PlayStation (@PlayStation) December 9, 2025
Inexplicably, this isn't just a joyride. There's an actual game here, with five helicopter-based missions that have players arranging supply drops, rescuing characters and chasing bad guys. Murray Bauman, portrayed by Brett Gelman, is on hand to assign missions and engage in banter.
This is a free update and it's available right now, so get out there and blast that one Kate Bush song over and over (and over.) As for Stranger Things, the second part of season five drops on December 25, followed by the series finale on
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We've all been there: You can't (or won't) get help when something breaks, but the YouTube clip doesn't cover your specific issue. It's what repair gurus at iFixit want to solve with FixBot, an AI-enabled app that talks you through whatever repair you're doing. The chatbot will help you diagnose the problem and then walk you step-by-step through the fix. Plus, it's voice-enabled so you won't have to get your phone all smeary when you're elbows-deep in a job. After all, iFixit's guides don't just cover fixing your electronics, but everything you might fancy doing yourself, from appliances through to cars and trucks.
Unlike traditional AIs, FixBot has been trained on iFixit's library of 125,000 guides, its forum and database of repair manuals. The company says there's less risk of hallucination as it pulls from and shows you the schematics it's referencing to ensure you don
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A collaborative report from Consumer Reports, Groundwork Collaborative and More Perfect Union has uncovered pricing experiments within the Instacart app that yielded higher or lower prices for different users on the exact same items from the same store location.
The organizations partnered to enroll 437 shoppers in an experiment across four cities, where each shopper added the same items to their carts within Instacart from the exact same store. Almost 75 percent of grocery items were shown to shoppers at multiple price points, with as many as five different prices shown for the same item. The average difference between the highest and lowest price shown was 13 percent, while the highest delta on an individual item was a whopping 23 percent.
Engadget reached out to Instacart and received the following response. It reads in part: "Just as retailers have long tested prices in their physical stores to better understand consumer preferences, a subset of only 10 retail partners — ones that already apply markups — do the same online via Instacart. These limited, short-term, and randomized tests help retail partners learn what matters most to consumers and how to keep essential items affordable." An Instacart spokesperson added that this is not dynamic pricing (insofar as it is not based on supply and demand), that no personal demographic data is used in the process and that these experiments are random.
The bulk of the tests were conducted at Safeway and Target stores, which both yielded similar results. A Tar
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Holiday travel is almost upon us and, while it likely won't be something out of a Richard Curtis film, there are ways to make it easier. You can raid our list of best travel gifts for 2025 and pick up our favorite MagSafe power bank: Anker's MagGo
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 Australia's new social media law goes into effect on December 10, 2025, and ahead of that date, Apple is sharing information on developer tools that are designed to help social media apps adhere to the law.
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Roskomnadzor, Russia's federal agency for monitoring and censoring mass media, has blocked access to Snapchat and FaceTime in the country, Bloomberg reports, citing Russian news service Interfax. The bans were reportedly put in place because the platforms were used "to organize and carry out terrorist acts," and commit fraud.
It's not clear if either service is still accessible by using a VPN, but banning Snapchat and FaceTime fits with Russia's crackdown on communication and social platforms that started after the country's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Facebook and X were blocked in March of that year, and Instagram was added to the ban list not long after. In 2024, the encrypted messaging app Signal was also banned, and more recently in July 2025, Russia threatened to block access to WhatsApp.
Engadget has contacted both Apple and Snap to comment on the Russian bans. We'll update this article if we hear back.
Banning or restricting these platforms is a way to exert control over where and h
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