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Shop tons of heavily discounted deals from cool tech gadgets to kids' toys and everything in between.
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While this time of year brings a lot of joy and all things merry, it can also bring a lot of stress. Finding the right holiday gift for your hard-to-shop-for dad, your best friend who seemingly has it all or your kids' teachers can be daunting, especially if you don't have a lot of time on your hands to research the best gifts.
This is where we at Engadget come in. Here, you'll find all of our holiday gift guides collected in one place, with some select gift ideas from each, so you can more easily find the best Christmas gifts for the loved ones in your life. Do you need some white elephant gift ideas? Are you struggling to come up with a good gift for the motherly figure in your life? Are you just looking for a good board game to pick up for your own family? We've got you covered with gift ideas for all of those people, scenarios and more.
Table of contents
Best white elephant gift ideas
Best board game gifts
Best gifts under $25
Best gifts under $50
Best gifts under $100
Best tech gifts and gadgets
Gifts our editors want
Best self care gifts
Best gifts for gamers
Best retro gaming gifts
Best gifts for coffee lovers
Best gifts f
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Earlier this year, Apple finally offered third-party developers access to its Near-Field Communication (NFC) technology. Not only are iPhone users in the EU receiving access, but other regions can also leverage this technology. Yesterday, Vipps MobilePay became the first Apple Pay alternative on the iPhone using its NFC technology for tap-to-pay transactions.
"Tap with Vipps" is the app's NFC payment solution. It works for sending money to friends and making online purchases, but that's not all. You can also pay organizations and associations with it. In other words, it's PayPal combined with Apple Pay if you want to think of it that way.
The reason Apple is opening up access to its NFC technology is primarily EU pressure. Apple had signed an agreement with the European Commission to open up the iPhone's NFC technology in July. By doing so, it avoided a legal fine of up to 10 percent of its $40 billion worldwide annual turnover.
With Vipps being the first Apple Pay alternative, Apple's monopoly on tap-to-pay is finally over. Still, Vipps is a Norwegian firm, and it currently only works there. Customers belonging to more than 40 local banks will be able to use Tap with Vipps to pay, and the company is planning to add more banks to the list. MasterCard and Visa support are also coming before Summer 2025.
Vipps' success story is likely the first example of a challenge to the Apple Pay monopoly
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At $99.99, you're getting a serious piece of smart home tech.
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 In its own heady blog post, Google debuted Willow, its latest quantum chip. It was flanked by hyped headlines that suggest something akin to the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The breakthrough might not be about the power, however: Google says it has reduced errors — a major issue with building quantum computers — by adding more qubits to the system.
In fact, Google makes no claim of quantum supremacy this time — something the company did when it publicly debuted its previous generation quantum computer in 2019. That claim quickly ended in controversy, with one researcher calling the company's announcement "just plain wrong."
Part of the issue then was that Google's last quantum chip was not part of a general-purpose quantum computer. Instead, it surpassed classic computers in a single task: random circuit sampling (RCS). But, in Google's own words, RCS has "no known real-world applications."
Google
However, the company is sticking with the metric, claiming RCS performance is a widely recognized gauge of quantum computing. That makes true comparisons difficult: Rivals including IBM and Honeywell use a quantum volume metric to tout their brea
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We can't and won't ban every technology from China. So now what?
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NEW RESOURCES Illinois State University: Milner Library launches P.T. Barnum digital collection. "Milner Library is proud to announce the publication of the P.T. Barnum Letters and Ephemera, a digital collection drawn from […]
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Google debuted Willow, its latest quantum chip, on Wednesday, and if you've spent any time online since, you've undoubtedly run into some breathless reporting about it. Willow "crushes classical computers on a cosmic timescale," proclaims one headline; Google "unveils ‘mind-boggling' quantum computer chip," reads another. It's all anchored by a claim that Willow can complete a computation that would theoretically take a classical computer significantly more time than the 14 billion years the universe has existed. But, as you can probably guess, what the chip represents is not so simple.
First, with Willow, Google makes no claim of quantum supremacy, something the company did when it publicly debuted its previous generation quantum computer, Sycamore, back in 2019. You may recall that, at the time, Google publicized how it took Sycamore just 200 seconds to perform a calculation that would have theoretically taken the world's then-fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to complete. That feat, the company said, demonstrated that it had created a quantum computer that could solve problems the best classical computers could not even attempt. In other words, Google had achieved quantum supremacy.
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The move comes after the United States expanded the number of Chinese tech companies subject to export controls.
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