The Morning After: Amazon Prime Day 2021 kicks off
Prime Day #PrimeDay
It’s Amazon Prime Day, and the all-consuming day of deals has already begun. There are your usual suspects, including lots of Amazon hardware, Instant Pots and headphones. The usual Prime Day rules apply. It’s a great chance to save money on things you already planned to buy — yes, I’m looking into over-ear headphones — but the sea of other deals available across Amazon (and other retailers) is built for multiple purchases and distraction. We’ve got a team of editors working to highlight the most notable deals available today. The best way to keep up would be through our deals feed on Twitter: @engadgetdeals.
So far the biggest surprise might be lower-than-usual prices across a lot of Apple hardware and accessories, including AirPods and the Apple Watch.
And if you can’t stand Prime Day? Don’t worry, it’ll all be over soon, and we’ll have plenty of news to distract from retail distractions.
— Mat Smith
A good deal for wireless earbuds that just got added value.
Amazon is selling Apple’s true wireless earbuds for $190, a healthy $60 below the official price. That’s one of the lowest prices we’ve seen outside of Black Friday. They’re Apple’s best-sounding earbuds, offering strong active noise cancellation, a comfortable fit and workout-friendly water resistance. In recent times, Apple has also added Spatial audio in movies and Apple Music, offering you a level of immersion still rare in wireless earbuds. The only thing that might give you pause is we’re expecting Apple to reveal its next-gen buds relatively soon. The next-generation AirPods could, however, be more budget-friendly than the Pro model, even at this discounted price. Oh, and the original AirPods are also down to $100. Continue reading.
GAN Theft Auto is based on NVIDIA’s GameGAN neural network. 
On Friday, YouTuber Harrison Kinsley shared a video showing off GAN Theft Auto, a neural network that can generate a playable stretch of Grand Theft Auto V’s game world on its own. The generative adversarial network (GAN) is, predictably, pretty complicated and involves two competing neural networks: a generator and a discriminator. The generator is trained on a sample dataset and told to produce content based on what it saw. The discriminator compares the output of the generator with the original dataset, “coaching” its counterpart to output something increasingly close to the source material.
The network models a surprising number of systems from the game, including shadows and reflections. Even mountains in the distance get closer, which isn’t something Kinsley necessarily expected the AI would do. As it’s made by an AI, there’s a dream-like fluidity to the gameplay. Kinsley says there was one instance where he saw an oncoming police cruiser split into two just as it was about to crash with his car. Watch the whole thing, right here.
It’ll be a Premium feature at first before rolling out to all users in the US. 
YouTube is bringing a long-awaited feature to its iPhone app: picture-in-picture (PiP). All Premium subscribers will soon have access to the viewer, and YouTube says it plans to enable PiP for all iOS users in the US. The feature means you can continue to watch the video in a smaller window while browsing other apps.
It’s taken its time: Apple brought PiP to iPhone last year as part of iOS 14. Many video streaming apps already support the feature, including Netflix, Twitch, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and Apple TV. Even though it has supported PiP on Android since 2018, YouTube had been a notable holdout on iOS. Continue reading.
The telescope is literally in safe mode until the problem is resolved.
NASA has spent a week trying to fix a glitch in Hubble’s payload computer. The system broke down on June 13th, and the operations team had no success either restarting the computer on the 14th or switching to a backup memory module. This isn’t the first such glitch this year. NASA spent days reviving Hubble in March following a software error in the main flight computer. Continue reading.
It’s been a busy, quiet kinda show. 
The first online-only E3 officially ended last week, and the complementary Summer Game Fest has just begun. While most of the big players were in attendance, there weren’t many huge announcements, and the biggest reveal of E3 wasn’t even at an official E3 event. Here’s everything that happened, from Elden Ring through to Metroid Dread. Continue reading.
Tamagotchi is back again, this time in smartwatch form
Elon Musk’s Boring Company is reportedly pitching freight tunnels
California gives residents digital access to their COVID-19 vaccine record
Apple’s new 12.9-inch iPad Pro with 256GB storage is $100 off at Amazon
Apple Watch Series 6 drops to $279 at Amazon and Best Buy
Amazon’s new Fire HD 10 tablet falls to $80 for Prime Day