If you ever want a reminder of how hard it is to run a financial institution, check out this unfortunate error made by Crypto.com. it accidentally refunded one of its customers around $7.2 million, rather than the $68 she was expecting. Even worse, the company didn’t discover the expensive snafu until nearly seven months after the transfer. Given the basic tenets of crypto-libertarianism and its philosophical resentment of institutions, you might have expected the site to just write-off the loss. But the platform has instead gone to the courts to get the cash back, forcing the woman to return it, with interest.
– Daniel Cooper
The biggest stories you might have missed
It’s the same game, but far better looking.
Naughty Dog
If there’s one sign The Last of Us is already in the pantheon of greatest games ever made, it’s the fact it’s already leapt across two console generations. The title is just nine years old, yet it’s already on its second remaster, this time a ground-up remake for the PlayStation 5. Our resident TLoU fan Nathan Ingraham got to play the new edition before launch, and says it’s the same game, spared from much of the tinkering that has plagued some remakes we could mention. Instead, developers have taken the original and dramatically improved the visuals, including the performance and facial animation to make the story hit harder than it did before.
It’s an early adopter price for an early adopter product.
ASUS
ASUS’ Zenbook 17 Fold is an all-screen foldable tablet PC borne out of the company’s Project Precog prototype. It was announced at CES, all the way back in January, but it’s only now the company has announced a price for this groundbreaking machine. $3,500 is the starting price for one of these beasts when they roll out towards the end of the year. It’s early adopter money, but you wouldn’t expect anything less for a 17.3-inch laptop with a foldable OLED display, would you?
Save some cash in the back-to-school rush.
Will Lipman Photography for Engadget
dr Richard Carlson once told the world not to “sweat the small stuff,” a command for us to stop worrying about the minutiae of our lives. Sadly, our legion of product geniuses can’t help but obsess over the gadgets you can purchase for less than $50. So why not take advantage of their failings by picking up some sweet bargains during back-to-school season. If they’ve already spent the time sweating, it makes sense for you to take advantage of it, right?
It’s also canceled almost all of its original series.
Snap has announced a savage round of job losses and project cancellations as part of a major cost-cutting drive. The company behind Snapchat will Lay off 20 percent of its workforce, around 1,300 people, and cancel almost all of its original content projects. Standalone apps like Zenly and Voisey close, and development work on its lackluster, if cute, Pixy selfie drone will stop. Snap hopes it can save around $500 million as a result, although losing so many reasons to stick around might cause users to desert the platform as well.
The Twitch competitor was popular, but not popular enough.
Facebook Gaming, the social giant’s attempt to gain a foothold in the live gaming space, is closing down. Two years after launch, the standalone app is being shuttered, but the functionality will remain inside the main app’s gaming tab. It’s thought Facebook snipped the app to cut costs ahead of the looming economic downturn, but the company opted not to share its rationale.
What is it worth the wait?
Igor Bonifacic / Engadget
Engadget’s Igor Bonifacic has spent the better part of two years trying to snag NVIDIA’s drool-worthy graphics card, the RTX 3070. Cryptocurrency miners have held the graphics card market in their fist for years, and so it’s taken this long to find one available at an affordable price. He said it was worth the wait, especially now they can play games with the settings dialed up to 11 without breaking a sweat.
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