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Twitching Over Taxes? Here’s What Streamers Can Deduct

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Filing taxes can be daunting, especially if you’re a professional streamer. Every penny that you make via Twitch, YouTube, or any other content creation platform needs to be reported. I’ve spoken to various CPAs, Tax Auditors, and tax filing companies to find some best practices when filing taxes as content creators.

Editor’s Note: We contacted a number of tax professionals and researched several sources for this story. But it is meant to be general guidance, not professional legal advice. Please speak to a tax professional about these and other filing concerns before submitting your tax return.

You’ll notice that, when you level up to Affiliate status with Twitch, the company asks you to fill out a tax form. Once you do so from any business you are responsible for reporting that income. At the end of the year, these companies will send you a 1099/ W9 if you’ve made $600 or more.

Twitch Yearly Payout Less Than $600

If you have not made at least $600 on their platform, Twitch is not obligated to send you a 1099 form, but you are still obligated to keep track of your earnings and report them to the IRS on a Schedule C.

If you agree to Twitch’s Affiliate/Partnership program but do not fill out a W9 to specify how much taxes should be withheld, the company automatically withholds up to 30%, as stated on Twitch.tv.

Non-U.S. residents are also subject to U.S. income taxes. “In most cases, a foreign person is subject to U.S. tax on its U.S. source income. Most types of U.S. source income received by a foreign person are subject to U.S. tax of 30%”, the IRS website states.

Hobbyist vs Self Employed

If you are planning to make money as a content creator, freelancer, or streamer you are self-employed and run your own business as a freelancer. According to IRS.gov, if you earn more than $400 in a year, you are subject to self-employment taxes of 15.3%, which go into retirement and medicare and must file 1040 or 1040-SR forms.

Also, you must determine if your streaming income is classified as a business or a hobby. If it’s a business, you can deduct expenses. The IRS lists nine criteria for determining whether something classifies as a business, including:

“Whether you were successful in making a profit in similar activities in the past.
Whether the activity makes a profit in some years and how much profit it makes.
Whether you can expect to make a future profit from the appreciation of the assets used in the activity.”

Kari Brummond, Tax Preparer with Tax Debt Help said, “When you have self-employment income, the IRS considers you to be a small business owner and lets you write off your business expenses. This includes everything you purchase to support your streaming business — microphones, PCs, cameras, and streaming software are all deductible…”

If you constantly are losing money year after year as a content creator, the IRS will automatically determine you to be a hobbyist instead of a business. If you are spending more money on equipment than you are earning, it is a sign that you are losing money as a creator.

Turbo Tax suggests keeping copies of receipts throughout the year and, if possible, using a business credit card to differentiate between content creator purchases and everyday purchases. Get oil changes at the beginning of the year so you can have proof of your mileage. These bookkeeping tips will help you determine if you are losing money and your yearly expenses.

Deductible Expenses for Streamers

Ms. ZaCorra Bronson, a Tax Professional with W.E.B.S. Tax Preparation & Bookkeeping Services states, “[Since passage of] the Tax Cuts and Job Act, it is harder to deduct expenses because it increased the standard deduction by almost half but eliminated many previous eligible deductions as well. Fees for tax preparation or investment management are no longer eligible deductibles.”

According to the IRS, deductible expenses for any business include rent, travel and assets (which could include equipment).

CPA Travis Guterman said that, as a content creator, your expenses can include internet services, Xbox subscriptions, games bought, computer equipment, gaming hardware and video equipment. Guterman offered a few tips to help you calculate how much of your internet and computer equipment you use for business.

“Claiming you use your home internet or telephone for 100% business use is not accurate,” Guterman said. “You’re going to use it for personal matters such as streaming Netflix, communicating with friends and family, and etc.”

If you’re trying to calculate how much is used for personal or business, think about how long you stream or edit videos. If you’re streaming 70 hours a week, there are 168 hours in a week, you use about 40% of your internet for business a week. If you only stream two hours for income, you use less than 10% of your internet for a business in a week. Calculating how much you use an Xbox subscription requires the same calculations.

Writing Off Purchases

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If you’re using a car for streaming purposes, you can keep track of the miles and deduct them on your taxes. Your business expenses can be write-offs up to a certain amount.

“As a general rule of thumb, you write off the entire cost of small purchases and routine expenses (office rent, electricity software subscription fees) in the year of purchase, and you deduct large expenses such as computers incrementally over time,” Brummond said. “However, the Section 179 deduction lets you claim the full cost of many equipment expenses in the year of purchase.”

Using an EIN Instead of an SSN

If you are in the early stages of creating content you don’t have to file for an LLC just yet, suggests Guterman. If you’d like to acquire a free EIN, you can do so via the IRS.gov website.

Having an EIN doesn’t mean you have to file separate taxes for your business; it just means that you don’t want to give out your social security number to every company you work with. Everything made is added or subtracted from your overall annual income.

Tips and Donations Count as Income

You have to count donations sent to your PayPal, CashApp, or Venmo because those aren’t just gifts; they are part of your income. Ms. Bronson and TurboTax both suggest you subtract the service fees from platforms like PayPal. If someone gives you $30, Paypal charges you three cents per donation, which leaves you with $29.97.

What if You Spent More Than You Made?

I spoke with Guterman about losses and how to calculate them into your income. He gave me this formula. If you buy a new camera that costs $300 but only made $400 from Twitch, your income from that platform would be $100. Or, if you buy a $300 camera, but only make $200 on the platform you’ve lost money and can subtract $100 from your overall income, but you need to itemize those expenses on your Schedule C.

Finding and speaking with an accountant is going to be in your best interest. Using tax preparation software can help you prepare your taxes as well.

Annie M. Yang, Accountant Manager suggests using FreeTaxUSA.com as the cheapest option to file your taxes.

“If you use any other tax software company, they charge around $100 to file a tax return with Schedule C, which is way too much money for someone who earned less than $600 last year from their business,” she said.

The IRS site is a great resource that will also help you file your taxes. You can call 1-800-829-1040 to get answers to your federal tax questions 24 hours a day. The deadline for filing is April 15th. If you need an extension visit IRS.gov.

Stream it yourself

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Here’s what it’s like to craft live on stream

PmsProxy, a partnered Twitch streamer who has 147,000 followers, was tired. Tired of streaming Grand Theft Auto roleplay, and of streaming herself playing games more generally — something she’d been doing nearly every day for around six years. “I didn’t just want to sit and play games all day, I realized,” she says when I reach her by Discord. “I want to either tell a story through roleplay or just do something that made it feel fulfilling, and roleplay wasn’t that.” So she decided to make a change: instead of streaming herself playing games, she’d stream herself making things for her business.

That business was leatherworking. Proxy made the jump from full-time game streamer to full-time crafting streamer at the beginning of this year; it was a nerve-wracking but ultimately necessary step. “It’s been unbelievably different in the best way possible,” she says. “My viewers have gone up, my subs have gone up. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that my community members are seeing me be happy, right? They’re seeing me do something that I love.” The people who stayed, she says, want to buy her work and learn how she makes it.

Twitch is usually thought of as a place for streaming video games. And while that reputation is deserved — yes, a lot of people stream their gaming on Twitch — the site also has a surprising breadth of channels. Makers & Crafting is one of them; the category was created in 2018, after Twitch renamed “Hobbies & Crafts” to better represent the many pros who streamed in it (in their words). According to Twitch Tracker, a website that logs Twitch statistics, the category averaged 520 viewers in September 2018, the month it was created. As of January 2021, Makers & Crafting was averaging 1,520 viewers, or about three times more.

The people who stream in the category do everything from embroidery to woodworking; it’s mesmerizing to bounce among them. Makers & Crafting is a warm, welcoming category that feels a little intimate. The streams can run long — I mean, they’re making physical goods — but every streamer I’ve seen seems to vibrate at a slightly different frequency than the people who stream on the rest of the site. They’re calmer. Less frenetic. The vibe is aggressively wholesome. In other words: it’s about as close to an oasis as you can get online.

Streaming anything is difficult. In every broadcast you have to be a host, producer, audio engineer, and video technician — all at the same time. Streaming your crafts, however, is harder: making things for an audience is a special kind of difficult, especially if the products you’re making are eventually going to be sold. What’s perhaps more interesting is how learning crafts has changed with the accessibility of the internet. Proxy and another streamer and woodworker I spoke to, WorkedLettuce3 — whose handle was chosen by the Xbox gamertag gods — both learned their crafts from the internet.

“I watched a lot of YouTube videos,” he says. “I just never thought it would be something I would take up. Because, you know, a lot of woodworking YouTubers in particular, they like to flex their shop, they like to flex all the hundreds of thousands of dollars they spent on their tools, right? And, yeah, I mean, that was never gonna be me.” Even so, he found a channel that he says motivated him to be a woodworker — one that emphasized that you didn’t need tons of gear to pick it up as a hobby. “I’m very, very glad I found it because I’ve been loving just messing around woodworking, hanging out with people in the garage like we’ve been doing now,” he says.

Proxy also learned some of the tools of her leatherworking trade from the internet. Her foray into the Makers & Crafting section coincided with the first time she tried her hand at leatherworking. “I started leather crafting January of this year. Like my first time really getting my hands on my own stuff was in January,” she says. “But I spent the last year researching. So starting in 2019 and all through 2020, I did nothing but watch YouTube videos and Instagram videos. I did tons of research.” Proxy says she’s always been gifted in working with her hands. Leatherworking is just the most recent outlet. (She also went to art school.)

Lettuce is in a similar position; before six months ago, he’d never sawn a board in half.

He’d never streamed before, either. His first streaming setup was just streaming directly to Twitch from his phone; these days, he’s got a dedicated PC in his garage, a couple webcams, and the TV from his living room to read chat on. And his chat is important: among his viewers are veteran woodworkers and other crafters, along with people who’ve just stopped by to watch. The woodworkers help him when he’s stuck; he says there are people there who have coached him through his entire woodworking career. That kind of interaction is unique to Twitch, and to the Makers & Crafting section in particular.

Even so, he says he finds woodworking on stream scary sometimes. “Like, before the first time I turned my table saw on, I was terrified. Before I turned my router on for the first time, I was terrified. Before I ran a circular saw for the first time, I was terrified,” he says. And he did fall into some bad habits — like reading chat from his phone while working on things. “My chat would see me reading the chat from my phone. And a couple people in there just like stepped in and they were like, ‘Yo, like, for real. You can’t be doing that.’” He credits chat with keeping him honest.

“No one is coming in to backseat you,” says Proxy. “They’re not like, ‘Oh, you should go here and you should do this. And oh, you didn’t kill my favorite boss.’” Viewers are there to watch someone make something, and maybe learn a little in the process.

Proxy also makes just about everything in her store live on stream. Which she says is intimidating but also rewarding — because viewers (who are also buyers) can see exactly how much labor goes into making what they’ve bought. “They get to see what work is actually being put into this,” she says. “It’s not just, you know, a quick two hours, and it’s done. It’s a grueling two hours. Like everything is hand cut, and hand stitched and glued and stamped.”

Not everyone sells what they make on stream. Another crafter I spoke to, LaserGeekCreations, says that he doesn’t usually create the things that show up in his shop on stream. “Mainly because a lot of the stuff that’s on my Etsy shop is like, quick and easy to make,” he says. “It’s kind of boring to make a lot of the time.” (He assuages this boredom by creating things like a giant wooden dinosaur, which he also destroyed on stream.) LaserGeekCreations also happens to be the streamer who raided Lettuce when he was just starting out — which gave Lettuce his first real start on Twitch.

It’s not all fun and games on Twitch. The larger viewer community can sometimes be brutally toxic to people who don’t fit its notions of who can and can’t be a streamer; recently, Twitch partner Negaoryx lamented, at Twitch’s 2020 Participation Ceremony event, that the chat was targeting presenters with tons of hate speech.

There’s more than 42,000+ viewers watching the Twitch Participation Ceremony on the offical @Twitch channel now. Users in chat are spewing hate speech & harassing the guest streamers. 3 mod names in the chat list but since I’ve been watching, have seen ZERO messages get deleted.

— negaoryx (@negaoryx) January 23, 2021

Makers & Crafting feels different, though. It’s smaller, for one thing. But all the people I’ve spoken to who’ve been involved with the category think it’s a uniquely welcoming space nestled within the larger Twitch community. “It was almost like — it’s gonna sound fucking hilarious — but it was almost like walking into a warm hug,” says Proxy. “It was just like everyone was so welcome.” During her first week in the section, Proxy says she went from getting around 100 viewers to getting more than 500. They were leatherworkers and other crafters; they dropped tips and ideas and support.

Lettuce had a similarly warm experience. “The Makers & Crafting community is — I’m gonna say in my opinion, but I’m pretty sure it’s a fact — that they’re the most welcoming and loving community-minded community I’ve ever seen in my entire life.” Once the pandemic is over, Lettuce says, he’s considering driving from Las Vegas, where he lives, to New Jersey, where his parents are, and visiting his friends from Twitch on the way.

“I don’t think I’ll ever leave Twitch. I mean, live-streaming and the community in general,” he says. “The stream will still be a thing, but I think interpersonal communication and hanging out and, you know, giving someone a firm handshake is my end goal.”

LaserGeekCreations has been streaming crafting for longer than Lettuce and Proxy, and he confirms their assessments of the community. “The makers community is such an amazing community. I think you’ve probably heard that from other people already,” he says. “Because it doesn’t matter what you’re making. We’re all makers, we all like seeing what other people are doing. Everyone’s so supportive of each other.”

That kind of supportive community feeling can be invaluable if you’re trying to finish something. As anyone who’s tried to make anything knows, creating things is hard because going from idea to reality requires a number of steps, which sometimes aren’t particularly obvious. On Twitch, the Makers & Crafting community makes it just a little easier.

These LED dice could electrify your next DnD campaign

Sometimes it’s nice to get away from technology for a bit, settle down with some friends, and play an entire role-playing game using just pen, paper, and lots of dice. But if that’s a little low-fi for you, then there’s always Pixels, a new set of electronic dice with built in Bluetooth and RGB LED lighting. The dice have launched on Kickstarter, with prices starting at $39. As of this writing, over 14,000 people have already backed the project for a total of over $2 million pledged.

The main attraction here is obviously the colorful RGB lighting, which creator Systemic Games promises will be customizable and programmable via a companion app. The Pixels are also waterproof, charge wirelessly via companion charging cases, and can go for around five hours on a charge, or more if you’re willing to live without the lighting. A range of die styles are available, including D20, D12, D10, D8, D6, and D4.

RGB lighting illuminates the dice.

Image: Systemic Games

But for me, the most interesting thing about the dice is how they’ll apparently be able to communicate with Roll20, Foundry, and other online platforms that let you play tabletop games over the internet. At the moment a service like Roll20 relies on either virtual dice rolls, or rolling a traditional dice and then reporting back to your games master. In contrast, the Pixels could offer the best of both worlds, by letting you roll a physical die and automatically reporting the result.

Yes, there are a lot of obvious jokes to be made about not being able to play a pen-and-paper RPG because your dice aren’t charged. But if you like the thought of having Bluetooth-enabled dice that light up like Christmas trees, then the Pixels are available to back on Kickstarter until April 8th. One die (including charger) starts at $39, or you can get a set of seven dice and a charging case for $199. All of the usual warnings about backing Kickstarters apply, but if all goes to plan the Pixels should ship in around 12 months.

Gogo’s 5G network launch has stalled due to the chip shortage

Gogo will be delaying the rollout of its 5G network, pushing it back from 2021 to 2022. According to LightReading, the global chip shortage is to blame for the delay, though Gogo didn’t provide any direct details about how the shortage was setting it back.

Gogo isn’t the only one feeling the sting of the global chip shortage: graphics cards, CPUs, and game consoles have become infamous for being in short supply, and car manufacturers are having to slow down production lines because of the supply constraint. The situation has gotten to the point where President Joe Biden has signed an executive order calling for a review of the chip supply chain.

The company, known for providing in-flight Wi-Fi, had a difficult 2020: it did several rounds of layoffs, pay cuts, and furloughs, as people stopped taking flights. The company also ended up selling its commercial in-flight Wi-Fi business to a bankrupt satellite provider, which makes it slightly unclear as to what the company plans to do with its 5G network when it eventually gets it rolled out. The company still provides internet and in-flight entertainment for smaller, more business-oriented planes, so it’s possible it’ll use the network to improve that service. Gogo wasn’t immediately available to comment on its future plans for the network.

The 5G network, when Gogo gets it rolled out, will be an upgrade to the company’s existing 3G cellular towers. Gogo gave up on its plans of upgrading the network to 4G with equipment from ZTE after the US government basically shut down the network equipment provider with a ban.

Grassroots online efforts are forming a new queer network of care

Almost exactly one year ago, Theo Hendrie thought he might have to drop out of school. His partner had lost his job, and they were struggling to pay bills and make ends meet. He worried that X Marks The Spot, his newly released anthology, might be the only creative project that he’d ever be able to complete. And then, at just the right time, Tuck Woodstock’s Gender Reveal mutual aid program came through.

“Up until then it was always, you know, when we’ve got a tenner we’ll put it into so-and-so’s top surgery fund, and they’ll probably put something into mine later on, and it all gets swapped around,” Hendrie says. “Whereas I think Tuck’s thing was the first time I saw something that was helping the community as a whole, and helping us to do something creative rather than just paying for medical bills.”

Hendrie received £75, and credits the money with allowing him to stay in school. Admittedly, that doesn’t sound like a lot. But since then, he has graduated from university and returned, for a master’s degree in media and communications. Like the thousands of other folks who have benefited in some form or fashion from mutual aid, monetary assistance empowered him to pursue his goals and stabilize his life, sans disruption.

Hendrie’s experience is not unique — all across the internet, people are accessing assistance and care through digital networks that, inevitably, spill into the offline, everyday lives of queer folks. When people in the LGBTQ community feel excluded from, unwelcome in, or underserved by mainstream health networks, groups like QueerCare, For The Gworls (FTG), and transanta step in, offering aid in the form of care and, often, cash.

Woodstock launched their mutual aid fund via Gender Reveal at the beginning of the pandemic, when it became obvious that people urgently needed help. The fund replaced what was originally the Gender Reveal Grant, which required folks to present their work to a panel of judges. It wasn’t appropriate for the moment, Woodstock says. “It became just, ‘Do you need money to live? Do you need money in order to pay rent, to feed yourself, to pay for your medications?’”

Woodstock’s pivot to mutual aid and away from the Gender Reveal Grant is emblematic of a larger shift that happened in 2020, courtesy of COVID-19. It’s been well documented that the pandemic exacerbated inequality across the board; in some marginalized communities, doubling down on care independent of mainstream systems was the recipe for survival.

But this building of DIY care networks has been decades in the making. Queer people and other marginalized groups have been doing this grassroots work for generations, and the modern ubiquity of GoFundMe pages and Instagram accounts is merely the latest chapter in a long history of alternative care.

Asanni Armon, founder of FTG, credits Langston Hughes and the rent parties of the Harlem Renaissance with the idea to raise money for Black trans people’s rent and gender-affirming surgery costs. “We are just following in those footsteps,” Armon says. “As long as we’ve been affected by the ills of capitalism, especially Black people, we’ve had to do this kind of work.”

Mutual aid can look like a lot of different things, depending on what you need — while Woodstock has sent money in amounts as big as $800 (and as small as Hendrie’s £75) via PayPal and Venmo, FTG just helped raise $50,000 for 23 young people to receive a year’s worth of hormone replacement therapy, through Point of Pride’s new HRT Access Fund. Historically, mutual aid has been a way for folks on the fringes of mainstream economies to collectively access resources and provide care; look at the Black Panther Party’s breakfast program, or the AIDS activism of ACT UP, and you’ll see the same network formation, sans internet.

It’s no coincidence that these networks typically form alongside activism work, says Kirsty Clark, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Yale School of Public Health whose research focuses on LGBTQ mental health.

“When folks are pushed to the margins, they create social networks through formal or informal channels where people can give each other information and support,” she says. “It’s this coming together to push back against persecution and to forge a feeling of belongingness within the group. And these networks not only produce peer support, but then can also lead to resources for medical care.”

While the pandemic has put a stop to FTG’s rent parties, and forced organizations like Trans Defense Fund LA (TDFLA) to host their self-defense courses online, it has not slowed the proliferation of mutual aid programs within the queer community — quite the opposite. TDFLA just shipped out another 200 self-defense kits for trans folks in LA; FTG announced on February 8th that, since its inception in July 2019, $1.1 million has been redistributed to Black trans folks around the world; Woodstock, of Gender Reveal, raised $100,000 in one month alone. Clearly, the practical implications of mutual aid are real, and, often, life-saving.

“The biggest success is that we are supplying people with the necessary tools they need and it’s going in their hands,” says Nikki Nguyen, the organizer behind TDFLA. “That’s the biggest part — just being able to provide this for the trans community.”

How Facebook could escape the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit

I.

In December, the Federal Trade Commission voted 3-2 to sue Facebook for illegally maintaining a monopoly in social networking. The lawsuit, which was accompanied by a separate suit joined by 49 US attorneys general, alleges that Facebook used acquisitions and software restrictions on developers to prevent competitors from succeeding.

The government’s case appeared shaky from the start, I wrote at the time. Its allegation that Facebook owns a monopoly in advertising-supported social networking felt overly narrow and blinkered; the case does not even mention the existence of TikTok. And its suggestion that Facebook should have done more to share data with third-party developers seemingly runs counter to the FTC’s own privacy enforcement actions — in 2019 the agency fined Facebook $5 billion for sharing too much data with developers.

At the same time, the case contains numerous incriminating emails suggesting that Facebook executives acted knowingly to reduce competition by making acquisitions including Instagram and WhatsApp. And the states’ suit in particular articulated a compelling theory of harm: that Facebook’s privacy policies worsened as competition decreased, making life worse for the average consumer. This is important because recent antitrust law has focused on cases that have caused prices to rise for consumers; companies like Facebook (and Google and Amazon) have escaped scrutiny until now in large part because they offer their services for free.

It’s against that backdrop that I read Facebook’s response to the government, which it filed in court on Wednesday. Here’s Brent Kendall in The Wall Street Journal:

Facebook on Wednesday asked a federal judge to dismiss antitrust lawsuits by the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general, arguing that government enforcers have no valid basis for alleging the social media giant is suppressing competition.

The FTC “utterly ignores the reality of the dynamic, intensely competitive high-tech industry in which Facebook operates,” the company said in seeking to dismiss the commission’s case. In a second motion, Facebook argued the states’ case “does not and cannot assert that their citizens paid higher prices, that output was reduced, or that any objective measure of quality declined as a result of Facebook’s challenged actions.”

A motion like this is, on one hand, totally expected — if you’re Facebook, why not try to get this case thrown out as soon as possible — and, on the other hand, unlikely to succeed. No matter how wobbly the government’s case against Facebook appears from Silicon Valley, it is the product of years of investigation. I imagine a judge would be inclined to at least let the government make its case at trial, but we’ll see.

At the same time, Google — which is facing a similar set of US antitrust lawsuits — declined to filed such a motion when presented with the opportunity last year. So why does Facebook think its Hail Mary has a better chance of success?

The company laid out its arguments in a blog post yesterday. As expected, it complains about the government’s tortured efforts to define a market small enough for Facebook to credibly monopolize. It complains that the government cannot specify what exclusionary things it did in the wake of purchasing Instagram or WhatsApp, or restricting access to its data, that actually broke the law. And it raises various questions of standing and timing that I won’t try to assess here.

In response, the government dismissed these arguments, though not in any great level of detail.

“Facebook is wrong on the law and wrong on our complaint,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the states’ case, told The Verge. “We are confident in our case, which is why almost every state in this nation has joined our bipartisan lawsuit to end Facebook’s illegal conduct. We will continue to stand up for the millions of consumers and many small businesses that have been harmed by Facebook’s unlawful behavior.”

II.

Is there a better case to be made against Facebook than the antitrust complaints that actually got filed?

I wondered that while rereading this great 2018 David Streitfeld profile of Lina Khan, who President Biden will reportedly nominate to the FTC. Khan helped inspire the current antitrust moment with a widely read paper, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” which moved the discussion of competition issues away from a decades-long focus on price increases.

“We’re finally beginning to examine how antitrust laws, which were rooted in deep suspicion of concentrated private power, now often promote it,” Khan told Streitfeld.

This has been a necessary and productive reversal. As more of our lives move online, we can’t help but notice all the ways in which our activities are enabled and monitored by a small handful of West Coast companies.

Facebook owns three of the most popular apps in the world; is a primary news source for billions; hosts a significant portion of global political speech; runs a large marketplace for physical goods; is building a significant consumer hardware division; and developed a cryptocurrency (now operated by a consortium) intended to power a worldwide payments network.

It is a quasi-state operating in parallel with all the other nations where it exists.

Laws that were truly rooted in a suspicion of concentrated power, I think, might have intervened earlier in this state of affairs. Regulators could have expressed more skepticism about acquisitions; crafted a national privacy law; or written standards for data portability. They could have required Facebook to offer nondiscriminatory access to parts of its infrastructure, as if it were a public utility.

None of which would have required rethinking antitrust laws that may not be suited to the purpose that regulators are now pursuing.

Perhaps existing laws will turn out to be well-suited for that purpose after all. Perhaps the newly Democratic Congress will write some new ones, as they have long been promising to do.

Or perhaps, given that the consumer internet is now the most competitive it has been in the past half-decade or so, it won’t much matter either way.

I don’t think Facebook’s motion to dismiss is likely to end the government’s ambitions to rein in the company. But it does highlight the steep challenge facing the FTC in the short term. A badly written lawsuit could still succeed at trial — but first it has to make it there.

This column was co-published with Platformer, a daily newsletter about Big Tech and democracy.

Technics Ottava F SC-C70 MK2

Our Verdict

It might work for those who need a CD player and streaming in one box, but there are far better alternatives if you can compromise on features

For

Plenty of weight to sound
Good timing
CD player can be useful

Against

Dynamically uninteresting
Bass detail is poor

With vinyl sales having overtaken those of the CD for the first time in 35 years, and cassette tapes enjoying a similar resurgence to the black disc, it is almost novel to be testing an all-in-one system such as the Technics Ottava F SC-C70 MK2 in 2021.

We’re very much in favour of any physical media inclusion in a sector that is increasingly geared towards streaming, of course; it’s just a pleasant surprise when there’s a wireless speaker asking us to dig into our racks of CDs.

This is actually the second generation of Technics’s most premium Ottava wireless speaker, adding features such as Auto Space Tune along with a complete retune for its new drivers. We didn’t get our hands on the first one, but did spend some time with the four-star Ottava S SC-C30 – the baby of the group – so feel justified in having some high expectations.

That said, you shouldn’t really need any prior knowledge of the range to expect something for the money you’ll have to pay. A price tag of £799 ($999, AU$1649) certainly isn’t the weightiest among the wireless speakers we’ve tested, but it does place the SC-C70 MK2 in a premium bracket.

We’ve heard plenty of speakers that can comfortably account for prices doubling that of this Technics, even without bonuses such as the CD player. But to get an idea of how stiff competition is here, we only dished out one 2020 What Hi-Fi? Award to a wireless speaker costing more than £500, and that one is £50 cheaper than the SC-C70 MK2. Essentially, this is a lot of money to spend, and you’re well within your rights to expect something special in return.

Build

(Image credit: Technics)

There are certainly some aspects of the SC-C70 MK2’s construction that resonate with its price. Opening the packaging reveals a thick aluminium top panel – either grey or black, depending on which of the two finishes you’ve chosen – and the speaker’s weight as you lift it from the box is equally reassuring.

It looks pretty good, too. There’s an industrial stylishness to its straight lines and vent-like grille, which stands out just enough while hopefully not dating it too much into the future; a speaker such as this should have some staying power.

The OLED display is small, but functional, while that top plate also houses a few well-engineered push buttons alongside a row of touch controls for playback. You probably won’t be up this close often, though, thanks to the included remote and ability to work the SC-C70 MK2 via its app.

Around the back, there are inputs for aux-in, optical and USB, alongside connections for the included radio antenna, power and wired internet. These are all sandwiched between a pair of reflex ports that complement a quintet of drivers inside.

Most notably, the SC-C70 MK2’s downward-firing subwoofer, which you’ll feel if you stroke the speaker’s undercarriage. It’s a 12cm driver aiming to add some serious depth to the pair of forward-firing 8cm drivers taking care of the speaker’s midrange.

Technics F Ottava SC-C70 MK2 tech specs

(Image credit: Technics)

Power 30W + 30W (40W sub)

Inputs Aux-in, optical digital, USB-A

Headphone out Yes

Finishes x2

Dimensions (hwd) 14.3 x 45 x 28cm

Weight 8kg

In this second-generation SC-C70, these woofers are said to benefit from the reduced weight of their voice coil, enhanced airflow and increased rigidity of their diaphragm, and aren’t the only component to have undergone a major revamp.

The pair of 2cm dome tweeters are much changed, too, with a lighter silk diaphragm and optimised acoustic lens for improved dispersion. And each section has its own JENO Engine full digital amp unit, delivering 30W to the tweeters and midrange drivers and 40W to the sub.

There’s a lot packed in, and it becomes evident that it’s the SC-C70 MK2’s interior, along with the top plate, providing most of the weight. Unfortunately, the rest of the outside is rather plasticky to the touch. That might not be of great importance, given you’ll rarely touch the speaker’s sides, but it’s a feature that extends to the swiveling CD lid. Our initial hope that this might be glass is soon quashed, and a less than smooth finish on the edge only compounds the disappointment.

Features

(Image credit: Technics)

At least we can’t fault the feature list. Built-in Google Chromecast means the SC-C70 MK2 is primed for multi-room use, while Apple AirPlay 2 and Bluetooth also offer wireless playback options. That is, of course, along with the CD drive, DAB+ and FM radio, and analogue and digital inputs.

Less ordinary, though, is Technics’s Space Tune technology, and more importantly this speaker’s new automatic function. The MK1 offered pre-sets of Free, Near the Wall, and Near the Corner; all of those are present again for quick EQing, depending on where your speaker is placed, but the new Auto function can do that more precisely by using test tones and on-board mics for optimal sound.

You can even go further, using the Technics Audio Center app to adjust settings depending on your listening position. iOS devices can also be used to measure room noise and acoustic conditions as well as further calibrating sound characteristics.

Sound

(Image credit: Technics)

Some tuning could be vital, depending on your room, as there’s a lot of power coming from the SC-C70 MK2 that needs to be kept tame. Most notably in the low end, where that subwoofer proves a sound investment early on for those who like a lot of bass.

The key, of course, is finding a good balance; the Auto Space Tune does a good job of that, and the ability to further tweak is welcome. But you won’t be criticising this Technics speaker for not having enough in the way of bass weight.

Detail levels are generally okay as well, giving enough information to keep that full-bodied presentation from becoming soft – in the upper registers at least. Unfortunately, though, the other side of all that bass is that the mix is a bit of a blunt object and rather bereft of detail.

Despite that slightly corpulent low end, timing is still surprisingly good. It is an aspect with which a lot of really bassy-sounding products often struggle, appearing slow or muddled, but the SC-C70 MK2 is actually rather good at keeping time.

However, because that accurate timing is betrayed by a real dearth of dynamic expression, it fails to deliver any great sense of rhythm. This is our main gripe: there is such a lack of expression it quickly becomes a wearing listen.

(Image credit: Technics)

We sit there willing the SC-C70 MK2 to appear a little more interested in the music we’re sharing with it, but it has made up its mind. It’s even more of a shame when you consider all the power it flaunts delivering those bass frequencies; even if just a little more of that was directed at giving some punch, this would be a more entertaining listen.

And as we noted earlier, the SC-C70 MK2 has entered the market among some seriously talented rivals. If we were underwhelmed with its performance at first, the Technics only loses more ground when we compare it with the Award-winning Naim Mu-so Qb 2nd Generation.

There’s no CD player here, of course, but you should ask yourself whether you really need one; the Naim is leagues ahead in terms of detail, rhythmic sense and excitement. And you can always put the money saved towards a CD transport later on if necessary.

You’d even get a better all-round performance by going for a micro system such as the Denon D-M41DAB. Again there are compromises – the stereo speakers are separate, so it isn’t a on-box solution, and your only wireless streaming is via Bluetooth – but if CD is your main concern, then it’s a no-brainer in terms of sonic performance and value.

For anyone considering buying the Technics SC-C70 MK2, our advice would be to go back to the drawing board and think about what you’re willing to compromise. Our choice would always be features or space, rather than compromising on sound.

Verdict

Regardless of whether or not there is a true like-for-like alternative, the Technics Ottava F SC-C70 MK2 is just too expensive to sound this lifeless. A re-tune may be able to solve its issues – the feature set and building blocks of a good performance are here, but at the moment you’d need some fairly specific requirements to consider this a worthy buy.

SCORES

Sound 3
Features 5
Build 4

MORE:

Read our guide to the best all-in-one systems

Read our Naim Mu-so Qb 2nd Generation review

Read our Denon D-M41DAB review

I guess I have to watch ads everywhere on my $1,500 LG TV now

This afternoon, I was updating the streaming apps on my 2020 LG CX OLED TV, something I do from time to time, but today was different. Out of nowhere, I saw (and heard) an ad for Ace Hardware start playing in the lower-left corner. It autoplayed with sound without any action on my part.

Now I’m fully aware that it’s not unusual to see ads placed around a TV’s home screen or main menu. LG, Samsung, Roku, Vizio, and others are all in on this game. We live in an era when smart TVs can automatically recognize what you’re watching, and TV makers are building nice ad businesses for themselves with all of the data that gets funneled in.

But this felt pretty egregious even by today’s standards. A random, full-on commercial just popping up in LG’s app store? Is there no escape from this stuff? We’re just going to cram ads into every corner of a TV’s software, huh? Imagine if an autoplay ad started up while you were updating the apps on your smartphone.

The Ace spot wasn’t particularly annoying — it was over in 15 seconds — nor did it feel targeted at me or creepy. It’s really the placement that feels like a step too far.

This stuff can come off as invasive, but it’s also partially what’s steadily brought the prices down on even high-end TVs. I got this 55-inch CX on sale for like $1,400, and it’s pretty much the best TV on the market for next-gen gaming. But even if this beautiful panel came cheaper than it might have without ads plastered in random places, the level of ad infiltration on display here is still disheartening to see. LG recently announced it will be licensing webOS to other TV brands, so maybe the company is trying to see how far it can push things.

I guess I can always cut the TV’s internet connection and stick to a streaming stick or my Xbox Series X if the autoplay commercials keep popping up everywhere. Or maybe I can opt out of a setting somewhere to end the barrage. Some people aren’t bothered by this stuff, but if you are, check out this excellent Reddit thread, which can help you fight back and block some of the domains that these TVs phone home to for their ads. A lot of people on Twitter also pointed me to Pi-hole as a fix.

Nyan Cat’s creator is running an event to sell memes like Bad Luck Brian and Keyboard Cat as NFTs

After selling Nyan Cat as an NFT, its creator, Chris Torres, has found himself working on an even bigger event: a week-long series of auctions where classic memes are being sold on the blockchain by their original creators. Torres calls the event Memeconomy, and he’s hoping it’ll bring both recognition to the meme creators, as well as to the NFT space.

The memes involved should be recognizable if you were on the internet in the early 2010s. They include:

Bad Luck Brian
Coughing Cat
Kitty Cat Dance
Scumbag Steve
The Keyboard and Grumpy cats
The Me Gusta face

There will also be an auction of a new meme: a crossover between Twerky Pepe (a popular NFT creator) and the classic Nyan Cat. (Have you ever wanted to see thicc Nyan Cat? Now you can.)

The event is already under way, and so far the first meme, Bad Luck Brain, sold for just over $37,000. Coughing Cat is currently up for auction.

While the memes are mostly from the same era, Torres says that it’s not on purpose. “Honestly there was no real agenda” when it came to the selection of memes, he told The Verge, saying that the original meme creators had contacted him independently. He says that he won’t be making any money off the auctions themselves, he just wanted to help get the creators set up so they could get “proper recognition” after “10 plus years without [it].”

While NFTs are supposed to validate ownership, there’s no guarantee that the person creating an NFT owns the artwork they’re selling. There have been artists talking about how their work has been stolen and NFT-ized, and Giphy has tweeted that it was looking into user content being used by NFT sites. Torres knows it’s an issue and said that he made sure that everyone he talked to about NFTs was both the actual creator of the meme and actually held the rights to it. He also said that meme theft wasn’t a new problem: “sometimes you look over and there’s a company that has your picture on a shirt and they’re making millions of dollars without even talking to you about it.”

In the short term, the Memeconomy could put some cash (well, crypto) in the pockets of creators and open the doors for them to show off some recent work, if they have any. It could also work to build a community — finding friends through the process of organizing the Memeconomy event and through interactions in the NFT space.

In the long term, though, Torres thinks the meme NFTs will become collectables, and that “eventually somebody’s gonna want to have all of them” and it’ll “be a big fight to own all the memes whenever that time comes.” He said he “can’t wait to see that like a VR room with all the memes all displayed, that’s like… that would be awesome, like a grand collection of memes.”

I guess I have to watch ads everywhere on my $1,500 LG TV now

The Ace spot wasn’t particularly annoying — it was over in 15 seconds — nor did it feel targeted at me or creepy. It’s really the placement that feels like a step too far.

Apex Legends is out on the Switch, but it’s missing a key feature: cross-progression

Apex Legends is the latest major cross-platform Switch port. After years of availability on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC, EA has finally brought the battle royale shooter to Nintendo’s handheld console, adding a fresh wave of players to the mix and a new, on-the-go option for existing Apex Legends fans. But there’s a glaring issue with the Switch port: right now, there’s no cross-progression, making the Switch port effectively a nonstarter for dedicated players.

At launch, the new Nintendo Switch version of Apex Legends offers cross-platform gameplay — meaning that you can play with and against players on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC in addition to other Switch players. But any progress or purchases that players have made on those other platforms won’t carry over. Effectively, Apex Legends players on the Switch are starting from scratch.

Despite the “Season 8” branding that covers Apex Legends, there’s no continuity for players on the Switch version — so much so, that players have to replay the tutorial before they’ll actually be able to drop into a full match.

In an interview with Nintendo Life, Chad Grenier (Respawn’s game director for Apex Legends) said that cross-progression is planned for the future, but with the caveat that “we’re a ways out from being able to offer that.”

Grenier explains that there are a mix of issues preventing Respawn from offering cross-progression, with contractual, legal, and technical problems that need to be sorted out. “It’s a complex challenge of multiple accounts existing for various users that we have to resolve or merge, there are legal and contractual things to navigate with purchasing on other platforms and having those carryover and also some technical challenges.”

Apex Legends is by no means the first mainstream game to run into this issue. Unfortunately, the lack of cross-progression is more common than not for most cross-platform games, both on the Switch and on other platforms.

Overwatch, for example, has been struggling with the lack of cross-platform progression and gameplay for years, despite the emphasis that Blizzard puts on cosmetic content unlocks.

Control has been ported to plenty of platforms since its launch, including Amazon’s Luna, a cloud-based version for the Nintendo Switch, and a next-gen version for PS5 and Xbox One. But there’s no crossover for saves between those titles — if you started Control on a PS4, then that’s where your save is stuck forever, even if you want to try streaming it from an internet service or playing with fancier graphics on a next-gen console.

Obviously, there are real technical and legal issues here. Overwatch’s skins are heavily tied to its loot box economy, which are all purchased through the platform-specific stores, which can complicate things. Control’s lack of next-gen saves are tied to updates to the game engine that prevented Remedy from offering continuity for existing players.

But there’s also a wealth of games in 2021 that show that a better way is possible. Fortnite and Rocket League are the gold standard here: simply log into Epic’s free-to-play games on your platform of choice, and all your stuff is there waiting for you. You can play with friends on any platform (well, except iOS), from any platform, with all of your skins, emotes, items, and unlocks.

And even recent Ubisoft games have added cross-play and cross-progression through Ubisoft Connect, letting players start playing sprawling RPGs like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla on one system and continue on another.

In 2021, offering cross-progression and cross-play is increasingly becoming table stakes for major games. With massive titles that can take dozens, if not hundreds of hours of players’ time, locking down progression to a single console or platform just doesn’t make sense.

And that’s doubly true for free-to-play games like Apex Legends, which live or die on the strength and size of their multiplayer community and the money that they can make off selling cosmetic items. When your game is free to download on any platform, it’s critical that the time and money that players invest into getting those digital rewards be consistent across those platforms, because the collection of those items is the main reward structure of those games.

Bungie figured that out a while ago, back when it transitioned Destiny 2 to a free-to-play title — it now allows players to sync their in-game items to whatever platform they’re playing on (even if Bungie is still working out cross-platform gameplay).

The whole point of putting a game like Apex Legends on the Switch is to offer players another avenue to play the game. Sure, it may attract some new players, but for many others it’s a way to spend even more time with a game they already love. But by locking things like hero characters or items that players have painstakingly unlocked through time or money to a single platform, the game is still stuck in an outdated model of game design.

Players have a finite amount of time. And why would you open up Apex Legends to unlock all your old gear again when you pick up your Switch when you could make progress on your Fortnite battle pass — a far more substantial unlock that isn’t tethered to a single system — instead?

A former pro is helping figure skating look more authentic than ever

On TV, ice skating often looks like a sport stuck in time. Cameras aren’t hanging from wires above the action or placed close to the ice for a dynamic look at skaters zipping by. Instead, a few stationary cameras planted around a rink flip from one view to the next when a better angle is available. It can be dull to watch.

But far more exciting and intimate ways to shoot ice skating have been emerging on social media, and one person in particular has made a name synonymous with turning the sport into something spectacular to watch: Jordan Cowan, under the name On Ice Perspectives.

Plenty of others try to make videos similar to those Cowan uploads to his channels. What gives his content the edge is that he was a professional skater who represented Team USA at international competitions, competing six times at the US Figure Skating Championships.

Other professional skaters trust him on the ice because he’s one of them. Cowan’s ability to skate lets him stay in-step with skaters and keep them in his camera’s frame while speeding around a rink. Instead of following behind skaters, he’s usually along their path of flight, getting the best shot. In his videos, it’s easy to see a skater’s technique and exactly how they shift their weight with every move and transition. It’s pure fan service.

Cowan visits rinks around the world to shoot with up-and-coming skaters, and present and former Olympic-level skaters alike. He’s uploaded more than 900 videos since the channel launched in 2018, and altogether, they’ve gathered over 25 million views across all platforms. Notably, former first lady Michelle Obama recently tweeted a video he made that shows Starr Andrews, a Team USA senior medalist, dancing to “Black Like Me” by Mickey Guyton. Recently, he’s been tapped to help shoot CBC’s Battle of the Blades and ITV’s Dancing on Ice programs.

Cowan answered some questions over email to explain his technique, his tech, and his goals for On Ice Perspectives.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

What made you want to start On Ice Perspectives?

Looking at skating content on social media, I felt there was a gap between what I was seeing, and the truly inspiring content being captured in, say, the dance or gymnastics world. I wondered if someone with insider access, but also film and social media knowledge, could do for skating what several great dance videographers have done for the quality of dance content that we’re accustomed to seeing on TV and social media.

What tech do you use and what’s your workflow like? Do you use any custom gear that you’ve constructed yourself? And what’s on the horizon in terms of what tech you could use?

The camera I use for the majority of the work you see on On Ice Perspectives is the Sony mirrorless A7III, on a DJI Ronin SC gimbal, with a Rode shotgun mic for sound. For editing I use Final Cut Pro X on a MacBook Pro.

I am constantly tinkering with and improving the equipment that makes up my workflow. I like to think that I’m the only person using some of the configurations I have evolved, but realistically, everything I use is standard and accessible by all.

When I film for network shows, I generally use a rig made for cinema cameras with large cinema lenses. At this point I can’t own a rig of that caliber, and since it is my goal to bring a cinematic edge to the videos I share, it is my eventual goal to own my own rig that I can use to produce that level of quality.

You’ve shared the tech that does work well for your rig, but what hasn’t worked as well as you’ve hoped? I’m sure in your early days there was some trial and error.

I think creativity is born out of necessity, and necessity comes from limitations. My first gimbals were very basic, so when skating around a curve, for example, the horizon would start to roll, and I had to monitor that and manually compensate as I was plotting my next move. My newer gimbals are more powerful and precise, but I’d be lying if I don’t miss that charm of a gimbal that’s constantly rolling into a Dutch angle.

Photo: On Ice Perspectives

From the viewer’s perspective, it seems like you really can have a connection with the skaters that you record. The footage feels almost eerily in-sync with their movements at times. Can you explain how you do this?

I am lucky that I was a Team USA ice dancer, and as such, I have the built-in sixth sense that all skaters develop when training daily on the ice with world and Olympic champions. I often can’t answer why I know, at the moment, where to go to get a good angle of a subject, but I know it’s thanks to my training, and I am grateful for that.

I think the camera work during televised ice skating competitions leaves a lot to be desired. It’s very flat, and it can feel tough to be connected with the skaters during their dances. Is this something you’re trying to change with your shooting style?

Absolutely. When you are on the ice with elite skaters, you can feel the speed they create. The shapes their bodies make only fully make sense when seen against the perspective of where on the ice they have traveled. It’s just not possible to portray this with the traditional filming from the boards audiences are used to seeing in the media. I hope to give viewers a window to the feeling that being on the ice or at a live show gives you, and that has entirely informed how I choose to shoot.

Photo: On Ice Perspectives

What sorts of trends have emerged from your content? Are you seeing fans clinging to certain kinds of content more so than others?

It tends to be a routine made to music that breaks the traditional expectation of skating, like an ice dance team skating to Metallica or burlesque. It proved that skating as an art and dance form is linked to popular music, like most trends on the internet. The fact that it’s a sport as well makes it exceptional.

At what point did you decide to build your channel into a business via Patreon?

I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want to charge skaters in order to be able to focus on building On Ice Perspectives. What I love about Patreon is that it gives viewers the chance to support not only the very significant costs associated with running the channel, but also to have a stake in the mission of creating unique skating content. Unlike a traditional sponsor, my patrons can donate just a few dollars and access the extra content shared there, all while making a very real impact on my ability to continue sharing skating content with the world. In a sense, Patreon allows patrons a greater connection to what I do with On Ice Perspectives, but also with the sport itself.

What are your goals for On Ice Perspectives?

Honestly, I have so many. For the longest time I was focused on wanting to film the gala which follows the figure skating events at the Olympics, in a new and unique way. While I would still, of course, love to do this, my focus has shifted to wanting to produce livestreams and I hope, one day, a made-for-camera complete ice show.

EU aims to double chip manufacturing amid growing fears about ‘digital sovereignty’

The European Union wants to double its chip manufacturing output to 20 percent of the global market by 2030. The goal is part of its new Digital Compass plan, announced yesterday, which aims to boost “digital sovereignty” by funding various high-tech initiatives.

As well as doubling chip output, the EU also wants all households to have 5G access and gigabit internet connectivity by 2030; for “all key public services” to be available online in every member state; and for the bloc to have its first quantum computer. Funding for these and other projects will come from the EU’s €672.5 billion ($800 billion) coronavirus response fund, with 20 percent of this money ($160 billion) earmarked for tech investment.

The EU’s ambition to produce more semiconductor chips is particularly notable. Maintaining a steady supply of these chips has become a pressing concern for nations around the world as supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic and the US-China trade war have affected global supplies. As with the flow of key resources like oil, access to cutting-edge chips is essential for many industries and products, from iPhones to cars. Currently, the bulk of production is concentrated in Asia, particularly in Taiwan and Korea.

In February, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to investigate how the US can further support its own chip manufacturing industry. “This is about making sure the United States can meet every challenge we face in this new era of pandemics, but also in defense cybersecurity, climate change, and so much more,” said Biden at a press conference.

US President Joe Biden pledged in February to secure the United States’ “critical” chip supply chains.

Image: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

The EU’s worries mirror those of America’s. “We need to become less dependent on others when it comes to key technologies,” vice president of the European Commission, Margrethe Vestager, said at the launch of the Digital Compass plans, reports The Wall Street Journal.

This dependency extends beyond chip supply, too. The last few years have seen the EU grapple with its relationship with Chinese tech giant Huawei, which supplies essential 5G components but has been hamstrung by US sanctions introduced over national security concerns. In related news, Apple announced this week that it will invest more than €1 billion ($1.2 billion) in a silicon design center in Germany. Its employees will focus on “5G and future wireless technologies.”

Building up the EU’s chip production, though, will be a difficult task. Manufacturing semiconductors is an extremely expensive business, and the main success of European companies has been creating machinery used in this process rather than the chips themselves. Dutch firm ASML, for example, has a majority market share in the production of equipment known as “photolithographic machines” that are essential for chipmaking.

“As China has shown, throwing money at chips does not guarantee success,” Dan Wang, a technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, told the WSJ. “For the last few decades, Europe has seen its number of semiconductor companies shrink, and it will require a mighty effort to wrest leadership from the US and Asia, which are also investing heavily.”

Sonos Roam vs Sonos Move: how Sonos’ Bluetooth speakers compare

(Image credit: Sonos)

Sonos has just announced a new Bluetooth portable speaker. The Roam is only the firm’s second-ever, following the 2019-launched Sonos Move and marking another break away from its traditional at-home Sonos system. It’s smaller and consequently more portable than Move – cheaper, too. And it’s shaping up to be a real challenger to the best Bluetooth speakers around.

But what does it bring to the already crowded Bluetooth speaker market? And how does it compare to its larger, pricier sibling?

Sonos Roam is official – and the cheapest, smartest Sonos speaker yet

Sonos Roam vs Sonos Move: price

The Sonos Roam is essentially a smaller, more portable Move and so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s more affordable. The Roam costs £159 ($169, AU$279, €179), making it the cheapest Sonos speaker ever (apart from those made in collaboration with IKEA), sitting below the slightly pricier Sonos One SL. That’s also in the ballpark of many of the best Bluetooth speakers around, although for its size (albeit not feature set) there are plenty around asking half that price.

The six-times-the-size Move costs more than twice that at £399 ($399, AU$649), so yes, there’s quite a difference in cost. This might rule the Move out for people’s some budgets, but it’s still worth knowing what you’re getting (or not getting) if you choose either one.

Sonos: everything you need to know

Sonos Roam vs Sonos Move: design

(Image credit: Sonos)

As soon as you clap eyes on it, you’ll see the Roam is a very different beast to the Move. It’s triangular, for a start, like a Toblerone. And it’s a lot smaller – six times smaller in fact, measuring just 16.8 x 6.2 x 6cm. That’s smaller than a water bottle. Naturally, it’s lighter, too, tipping the scales at 430g.

The comparative specs for the Move are dimensions of 24 x 16 x 12.6cm and a weight of 3kg.

One of the biggest criticisms of the Move is that its bulk and heft pushes the definitions of portability. Whereas the majority of Bluetooth speakers are designed to be tossed in a bag and taken to the park, picnic, pool or beach (just as the Roam is), the Move is more of a home speaker that can be moved from room to room or into the garden.

In light of its ultra-portable, outdoor-friendly design, the Roam also more resistant to the elements than the Move. It’s IP67-rated, meaning it can be completely submerged in three feet of water for up to 30 minutes. It’s completely impervious to dust, too. The Move is only IP56-rated, which means it’s only protected from ‘harmful dust’ and ‘strong water jets from all directions’.

The names of both devices are quite apt, then: the Move is intended to be moved from room to room, and the Roam to be taken with you on your wider travels.

Which Sonos speaker should you buy?

Sonos Roam vs Sonos Move: features

While the Roam is a very different proposition to the Move, it does share some of the same traits. For example, it also has both Bluetooth and wi-fi connectivity, so you can stream tunes to it offline from a phone or tablet, or over the internet using a service like Spotify or Tidal, like the rest of the Sonos speaker range. Wi-fi also means it can work as part of a Sonos multi-room system (as the Move can too); it’s as much a member of the family as every other speaker, also controlled by the Sonos S2 app.

Like the Move, the Roam has a rechargeable battery, and despite its much smaller size, it manages to match the Move’s 10-hour run time. In that context it’s impressive, although note that (not-so-fruitfully-featured) Bluetooth speakers do often offer longer battery lives.

To juice it up, the Roam comes with a USB-C cable (but not a power adaptor). Sonos has also launched a $49 dedicated wireless charging base that the Roam clips onto using magnets, although Roam is compatible with any Qi wireless charger.

The Move also has a USB-C cable, with a charging base that comes in the box. Its battery is also swappable, should you need to replace it (it will be a lot cheaper than buying a whole new speaker). Sonos hasn’t yet mentioned such functionality with the Roam, but as the consumer tech world is moving towards more sustainability, we wouldn’t be surprised if it was an option for Roam – if its design even allows for it.

Also like the Move, the Roam has voice control via Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, as well as Apple’s AirPlay 2. Neither the Move nor Roam can work as a home cinema surround with the Sonos Arc, Playbar, Playbase, Beam or Sub – that remains the job of the One SL and IKEA speakers.

Right, so that’s enough similarities; let us tell you how the two devices differ.

The first new feature the Roam offers is the automatic switching between wi-fi and Bluetooth connectivity and connected devices. That means when you leave the house it can connect to a Bluetooth device without you having to initiate pairing. You don’t have to do anything, in fact. Just grab it and go.

‘Sonos Swap’ is also new and exclusive to the Roam. This lets you ‘hand off’ whatever music the Roam is playing to another Sonos speaker (the nearest to it) by long-pressing its play/pause button. So if you come home from a long afternoon’s picnicking you can seamlessly swap what’s playing to your home system. Neat. (It’s also a feature we’re expecting to work with the highly anticipated Sonos wireless headphones, due later this year.)

Auto TruePlay is on board, too – and introduces improvements over the version that launched with the Move. For the uninitiated, this is automatic calibration technology that uses the speaker’s microphones to measure the frequency response of its surroundings and adjust sound accordingly, whenever it detects being placed in a new location. Move the speaker from a bookshelf to a coffee table, say, and it’ll recalibrate its sound to its new surroundings to give you the best audio possible. This tech was first seen in the Move, but the Roam moves it along by letting it work in a Bluetooth domain as well as a network one. This feature is coming to the Move via a firmware update.

Ultimately, while there’s plenty familiar about the Roam, there’s plenty new too. And it could be the smartest Bluetooth speaker of its size ever made.

Sonos Roam vs Sonos Move: sound

(Image credit: Future)

Of course, for all the bells and whistles, a speaker sinks or swims by its sound quality. The Sonos Move managed to impress us in this area, with a sonic profile similar to the excellent Sonos One: think weighty, full-bodied audio, with a tonality that’s nicely even-handed and not bereft of solid, deep bass.

The Move’s ample size gives it plenty of scale and space – put it at the centre of your garden party, and you won’t be disappointed. But volume never comes at the expense of quality – the audio stays composed even when pushed to the limit of what’s socially acceptable. You can expect similar sonic satisfaction from Bluetooth playback too.

But while we’ve pored over the features and design of the Sonos Roam, we haven’t given it a through going over in our test rooms yet – watch. this. space – so we can’t comment on its sound quality. Sonos speakers are renowned for their sonic competitiveness – the company’s reputation is not only built on seamless integration and user experience but also performance – so we’re expecting big things, even from a relatively small package.

While we don’t expect the Roam to match the much bigger Move’s scale of sound, our expectations regarding pound-per-performance value are high. If we get the same Sonos sonic character but just smaller in scale and lighter on bass, the Roam shouldn’t have anything to worry about.

Not that the Roam will have an easy time of it; competition is fierce where the Roam is positioned. To make its mark, it’ll have to compare to the likes of the JBL Flip 5 (currently number one in our list of best Bluetooth speakers), Bang & Olufsen Beosound A1 (2nd Gen), Audio Pro Addon C3, and UE Megablast. No mean feat, although the Roam’s extra and Sonos-centric features will have to be accounted for.

All of these best-in-class portable Bluetooth speakers are superb options from established players in the market, and each of these manufacturers has a lot of experience of making such devices. Sonos is a big name in multi-room audio, but portable products are a different kettle of fish.

We’ll have a full review for you as soon as we can.

Sonos Roam vs Sonos Move: early verdict

On paper, the Roam looks like a great device, addressing the criticisms of the Move by being more portable and cheaper. It shouldn’t exactly undermine the Move, though, as the two are quite different propositions: the Roam is a proper portable for taking out with you and by design will have its sonic limitations, while the Move is a Sonos speaker you can take to the garden or another room and get a decent scale of excellent sound from.

The great thing about the Sonos ecosystem is that consumers, and especially Sonos loyals, may well have valid reason to choose both.

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Microsoft is ending support for the old non-Chromium Edge

Support for Microsoft’s Edge browser is ending today — not the new Chromium-based one, but the original Edge that was built as a replacement for Internet Explorer 11. Microsoft now calls it Legacy Edge, and the company announced it would be discontinuing the product back in August. That day has finally come: Legacy Edge will no longer receive security updates, and anyone still using it should start the process of switching to something else.

Legacy Edge was originally codenamed “Spartan” and was included with Windows 10 as the operating system’s default web browser before it was officially named Edge. The Edge mantle is being taken up by Microsoft’s Chromium-based browser, which was in beta throughout 2019 and officially launched in January 2020. This means Edge (the old Edge, that is) survived just over a year alongside its replacement. Microsoft also says Legacy Edge will automatically be removed by the April Windows 10 update, with the new Edge being installed in its stead.

If you’re the tech support person for your family, it’s worth checking in with your relatives to make sure Microsoft successfully bullied them into switching to the new Edge. If, somehow, it’s not installed on their computers (or your computer), you can download it directly from Microsoft’s website.

The death of Legacy Edge is bittersweet in some ways. By most metrics, the new Edge is vastly superior, but it does put the final nail in the coffin of Microsoft’s custom web-rendering engines, the history of which stretches back to early versions of Internet Explorer. It probably won’t be missed, given its… performance, but it’s still the end of an era. The old Edge is officially gone, and the new Edge has fully replaced it.