It may have looked like something you’d see a bank teller use, but it withstood heavy battering. And it ran the coolest games

I have told my wife that I want a Mini Amiga for Christmas. I know it’s only April, but I do this with things I want in the hope that when it suddenly appears in the house next week, my wife will think she bought it for me. I have slipped the purchase of seven games machines, a stuffed tarantula and an air fryer under the radar this way. In an inconsistent world, I like the way this institution of marriage works.

I read the reviews and was surprised at the appearance of two words I never associated with the original Amiga: cool, and love. It might seem strange to say the Amiga wasn’t loved, because a lot of people bought and used one. But people use things every day that they don’t love: electric shavers, patience, door handles, the train.

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Elon Musk’s X says it opposes demands from Australia’s eSafety commissioner that it remove the content globally

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Social media platform X says it has complied with Australian federal court orders to remove footage of the Wakeley church stabbing, even as the video itself appeared in a post directly below the announcement, visible to users in Australia.

The company says it complied with the law by “restricting” some posts for Australian users. It also argues that the posts should not have been banned in Australia at all, and that the Australian government should not be able to censor what users posted in other countries.

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App’s ‘secret source’ algorithm reportedly core to operations of parent company, which sources say make a sale highly unlikely

ByteDance would prefer to shut down TikTok rather than sell it if the Chinese company exhausts all legal options to fight legislation to ban the platform from app stores in the US, four sources said.

The algorithms TikTok relies on for its operations are deemed core to ByteDance’s overall operations, which would make a sale of the app with algorithms highly unlikely, said the sources close to the parent.

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World’s largest public company reports $61.86bn revenue after investing billions into artificial intelligence

Profits at Microsoft beat Wall Street’s expectations as its heavy bet on artificial intelligence continued to bear fruit in the latest quarter.

The technology giant has invested billions of dollars into AI in a bid to turbocharge its growth, particularly of its cloud computing services. Its cloud computing revenue surged by more than 20%.

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Shares surge after tech giant issues first ever dividend and posts revenue of $80.5bn, up 15% since last year, despite staff turmoil

Shares in Alphabet, the owner of Google and YouTube, surged after it issued its first ever dividend and revealed that profits had surged in the last quarter.

Sundar Pichai, CEO, hailed the transition to artificial intelligence as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” as his company races to integrate the technology across its business.

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Snap’s share surged 21% in after-hours trading as app’s users increased by 422 million, bringing in $1.2bn in revenue

Shares in the owner of Snapchat surged 21% during after-hours trading after the social media group beat Wall Street’s expectations for quarterly revenue and user growth.

Improvements to Snap’s advertising system are delivering results faster than anticipated, the company said.

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Strict rules have led to a wild west of rentals, with visitors choosing between huge hotel bills or word-of-mouth deals

Until recently, visitors to New York basically had two options: hotel rooms or short-term rental platforms like Airbnb. But in September 2023, the city started enforcing a 2022 law that banned people from renting their homes for fewer than 30 days (unless the host stayed in the home with guests).

Now the only legit option for people visiting the city is hotel rooms – and they’re unaffordable for many. Most of the Times Square hotels don’t have rooms for less than $300 a night. A search for Thursday 2 May found the Muse at $356, Hampton Inn at $323 and the Hard Rock at $459 (although, because of dynamic pricing, these are subject to regular change). They’re getting more expensive still. Hotel rates have increased between the first quarter of this year and the first quarter of 2023 at twice the rate of inflation, said Jan Freitag, an analyst at the real-estate data firm CoStar Group.

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In this week’s newsletter: TV journalist Scott Bryan looks back at the making of I Wanna Marry “Harry” – and the dubious ethics behind the show. Plus: five of the best podcasts hosted by pop stars

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The Competition
All episodes now on Wondery+, widely available from Monday
When Shima Oliaee was a teenager, she flew to Mobile, Alabama, to compete for a lucrative scholarship. She didn’t win. More than 20 years later, she returns as a judge and goes behind the scenes of the tough two-week event, which sees one girl crowned Distinguished Young Woman of America and win a $40k education. It’s a harsh, competitive tale that Oliaee tells so well. Hannah Verdier

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Tired of colonial artefacts being hoarded, Chidi Nwaubani and Ahmed Abokor use tech to redistribute them from museums in audacious digital heists

In March last year, two men in tracksuits, wearing hockey masks and carrying matching laundry bags, headed for the British Museum. Just outside, patrolling police asked the two strange-looking men where they were going. “We’re going to the British Museum to loot back stolen goods,” one of them said. “Well, we’ll see you in there then!” the policewoman answered.

But no arrests were made, as nothing incriminating happened. What did take place was a “digital heist” of one of the most famous objects in the British Museum, an artefact that is, according to Egyptologist Monica Hanna, “a symbol of western cultural power” and “of British imperialism”: the Rosetta Stone.

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Elon Musk is at war with Australia — in particular Australia's online safety regulator — due to videos that were circulating on his platform after an alleged stabbing at a church in Sydney last week. After the eSafety commissioner requested all social media platforms to remove video of the stabbing from their platforms, X made the videos unavailable to view within Australia, but they're still available to watch both outside of Australia. Now, X and the eSafety commissioner are fighting it out in court, while X's owner Elon Musk continues to fight it out online. Guardian Australia's Josh Taylor explains what's going on behind the tweets

• Elon Musk’s X v Australia’s online safety regulator: untangling the tweet takedown order

• Bishop will argue video of his Sydney church stabbing should not be removed from Elon Musk’s X, court hears

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The little grey box – 35 years old this month – has kept you going, helped you through grief and long journeys, and been your companion through childhood

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Not to make anyone feel old, but the Game Boy turned 35 at the weekend.

That small grey box was millions of people’s first introduction to video games. It was shared among families, played with equal enthusiasm by girls, boys, men and women. When I asked people for their most cherished Game Boy memories last week, almost a hundred people got in touch to share their reminiscences of playing it on the commute to work, on long car journeys, on family holidays and under the covers after bedtime (with a torch for the screen, naturally). The Game Boy liberated games from the TV and brought them into those pockets of free time in everyday life. It felt more intimate, and despite its rubbish screen and rather rudimentary tech, it acted as a private portal to other worlds.

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PC, PS4/5, Xbox; 2K Games
Whether you’re playing as a real-life pro or your own wacky avatar, this subtly calibrated title will have you perfecting your lobs and dropshots for hours

Tennis is one of those sports that has only been intermittently well served by video games. The odd major series comes along, such as Pete Sampras, Virtua Tennis or Smash Court, but often we’re left relying on old favourites (take a bow, Super Tennis). It’s been 13 years since TopSpin 4 was released, and that title is considered such an authentic simulation of the sport that people are still seeking out copies to this day. But perhaps no longer: 2K Games has at last produced a follow-up, and it’s a true championship contender.

From the opening, TopSpin 2K25 has all the detail you’d expect from a modern licensed sports sim. All the key stadiums and championships are here – though the play environments are only adequately detailed, rather than the stunning theatres of photorealism we’ve come to expect from EA Sports. There are 25 star players in the opening roster, from Emma Raducanu to Andre Agassi. It’s not a huge selection and the quality of the likenesses varies, but it’s good enough and 2K says it will add more in the future.

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The head of the company’s gaming subscription service explains its priorities as it anticipates the Vision Pro revolution, and tries to bring originality to a market still dominated by free to play mobile titles

When Apple launched its games subscription service, Arcade, in September 2019, it drew a huge amount of attention – as with everything the company does. Offering 100 premium (ie, not ad-infested) mobile games for a monthly subscription fee of GBP4.99/$4.99 (now GBP6.99), and the promise of more titles to come, it was an attempt to bring the Netflix business model to gaming.

It offered an alternative in a mobile gaming market in which free-to-play and ad-supported games were dominant. The dominance of behemoths such as Genshin Impact, Clash of Clans and Candy Crush previously made it difficult for the makers of paid-for, premium games to find an audience, but Arcade offered a range of curated titles that could run across Apple’s devices – iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV – with no ads or in-app purchases. Games also worked offline, eliminating the annoyance of being kicked out of a game on the London Underground.

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The handheld console introduced millions to the joy of video games, and remains one of the best-selling consoles ever

On April 21, 1989, Nintendo released a chunky grey game-playing rectangle to stores in Japan. It’s fair to say that nobody expected much of it. Internally, at Nintendo’s Kyoto HQ, the portable console was reportedly not a well-loved project. But within two weeks, it had sold out its entire 300,000-unit initial run. The Game Boy would arrive later that year in the US, and across the rest of the world over the next couple of years. Everywhere it went, it proved just as popular. Thirty-five years and almost 120m sales later, it is still the fourth best-selling games console in history.

Like Sony’s Walkman, the Game Boy is a tech design icon of its time, still instantly recognisable from its silhouette alone. Developed by a team led by Satoru Okada and Gunpei Yokoi in Kyoto, the Game Boy is perhaps the preeminent example of Yokoi’s “lateral thinking with withered technology” maxim, a do-more-with-less technological principle that endures at Nintendo to this day. It’s so simply designed – with four buttons and a cross-shaped directional pad – that you already know how to use it as soon as you look at it. Thanks to its greyscale screen, the battery lasted for days of play. And most importantly for accident-prone kids of the 90s (and their parents), you could throw it off a bridge and it would probably still work.

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Todd Baker composed the soundtrack for the indie puzzler as he was living through the loss of his mother. On the series’ 10th anniversary, he reflects on the experience

‘The part where the mother and child are separated on a red mountain, in a level quite early on in the game where you have to get back to the mother and find her … I was completing the sound design and music for that in a hospital, right beside my mum when she was sleeping, recovering from open heart surgery.”

Todd Baker pauses for a second. He is recalling the development process of 2017’s Monument Valley 2, an indie puzzler, the highly anticipated follow-up to the one of the biggest success stories in mobile game history. The second game is more experimental than the first; it has more of a story, which in turn changed its feel. Whereas the first title is all optical illusions and impossible objects, the sequel moves away from MC Escher-inspired towers and spires and towards non-Euclidean geometry and brutalism.

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As the show becomes a global hit and is renewed for a second season, experts say game adaptations are the new superhero movies

In the first few days of its release, Fallout – the Prime Video adaptation of the post-apocalyptic video game franchise – has become a hit with global audiences, shooting to the top of the UK chart and ranking among Prime’s top three most-watched titles ever.

On Friday, just a week after the show debuted in more than 240 countries and territories, Amazon announced it had renewed it for a second season. “The bar was high for lovers of this iconic video game and so far we seem to have exceeded their expectations, while bringing in millions of new fans to the franchise,” the streamer said.

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Funky transparent design backed by good sound and noise cancelling make these budget buds winners

The tech firm Nothing’s latest set of cut-price Bluetooth earbuds offer great sound and noise cancelling for an even more competitive price, while continuing to stand out from the crowd through cool design.

The London-based firm has launched the budget Ear (a), which keep almost everything that was great about previous Nothing earbuds and cost GBP99 (€99/$99). That is GBP30 less than its previous offering and the new GBP129 (€149/$149) Ear, which offer a few more customisations for sound and other features.

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Social media reporter Matilda Boseley reacts to songs made with Suno AI, a new AI music generator. Like other paying users, Guardian Australia now owns the rights to these songs. But is this technology actually good enough to threaten the livelihoods of musicians? Spoiler alert: it’s no worse than some tracks on the radio, but don’t expect a Grammy anytime soon

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Repairable electronics pioneer shows noise-cancelling Bluetooth earbuds do not have to be disposable

Fairphone, the repairable and ethical electronics pioneer, is back with a pair of some of the first Bluetooth earbuds to make it so easy and cheap to replace their batteries that you can do it at home in minutes.

Bluetooth earbuds have become a ubiquitous part of life, driven by the success of Apple’s AirPods. Until now they have all compromised on sustainability by being very difficult to repair, in effect making them disposable.

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Quality earbuds with improved Bluetooth, great battery life, good controls and future-proofed tech

Sennheiser’s latest high-end earbuds aim to retake the crown as the best-sounding noise-cancelling earbuds you can buy, with cutting-edge chips, tricks and future-proofed tech.

The Momentum True Wireless 4 earbuds cost GBP259.90 (€299.90/$299.95), pitting them directly against the best from Bose and Sony.

Water resistance: IP54 (splash)

Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.4, SBC, AAC, aptX adaptive, LC3

Battery life: Seven hours; up to 28 hours with case

Earbud weight: 6.2g each

Driver size: 7mm

Charging case weight: 66.4g

Case charging: USB-C, Qi wireless charging

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Faster chip, tremendous battery life, premium touch points and a price cut make the best even better

Apple’s latest MacBook Air adds more power to an already potent package while maintaining its very long battery life and coming at a lower price than its predecessor.

The 2024 model ships with Apple’s latest M3 chip, first seen in the MacBook Pro, giving the company’s thinnest and lightest machine a boost in performance. On the outside the laptop is identical to the 2022 model.

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Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, has said Chinese state-affiliated actors have been involved in two cyber-attacks on the UK, including the hacking of the Electoral Commission, and attacks aimed at parliamentarians. Dowden said the Foreign Office would summon China’s ambassador to account for its actions

• Chinese hackers targeted UK’s Electoral Commission and politicians, say security services

• UK politics: latest updates

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Funky design, fun software, decent performance and long battery life provide a lot of phone for the money

London-based tech firm Nothing’s latest Android attempts to shake up the budget phone market with something a little more interesting.

Costing from GBP319 (€329/A$529) the Phone 2a aims to take the cool design and intrigue that made its higher-end models stand out and package it up into something cheaper but still novel, sits alongside the full-fat Phone 2 costing GBP579.

Screen: 6.7in 120Hz FHD+ OLED (394ppi)

Processor: MediaTek Dimensity 7200 Pro

RAM: 8 or 12GB

Storage: 128 or 256GB

Operating system: Nothing OS 2.5 (Android 14)

Camera: 50MP main and ultrawide, 32MP selfie

Connectivity: 5G, eSIM, wifi 6, NFC, Bluetooth 5.3 and GNSS

Water resistance: IP54 (splash resistant)

Dimensions: 162 x 76.3 x 8.9mm

Weight: 190g

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A slick screen, top chip and long battery life are let down by lack of advanced AI and short support life

OnePlus’s latest top phone can’t shake the feeling of being left behind by rivals.

Even with a sleek appearance, speedy software and longer battery life the OnePlus 12 is devoid of the much-hyped AI tools packed into handsets from Samsung, Google and others. It feels more like a phone from 2020 than from the new era of artificial intelligence.

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Super-premium phone-tablet is the thinnest and lightest ‘folder’ yet – but compromises on camera

Honor’s Magic V2 is the best designed folding phone-tablet yet. It feels just like a regular phone when closed but then opens up like a book to reveal a large, plush screen.

Launched in China last year, the Magic V2 has now made it to Europe but not at a price that could be considered affordable. At GBP1,700 (€2,000), it is placed between the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 and OnePlus’s slightly cheaper Open.

Main screen: 7.92in (402ppi) 120Hz OLED flexible display

Cover screen: 6.43in (404ppi) 120Hz OLED

Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2

RAM: 16GB

Storage: 512GB

Operating system: MagicOS 7.2 (Android 13)

Camera: 50MP + 50MP ultrawide + 20MP 2.5x tele; 2x 16MP selfie

Connectivity: 5G, dual sim + esim, USB-C, wifi 7, NFC, Bluetooth 5.3, GNSS

Water resistance: none

Dimensions folded: 156.7 x 74 x 10.1mm

Dimensions unfolded: 156.7 x 145.4 x 4.8mm

Weight: 237g

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Titanium superphone has serious speed, battery life and unrivalled camera zoom but is ultra-priced

Samsung’s latest smartphone packs a plethora of the latest flashy AI tools in an attempt to improve text, images, video and search – with both hits and misses.

The new Galaxy S24 Ultra comes equipped with a combination of Samsung and Google’s latest AI layered on top of one of the most capable phones on the market, filled to the brim with competition-beating specs.

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