Category: Tutorials

They say your college years are the best of your life. But they tend to leave out the part where you’re scrounging every dollar for textbooks, food and (if you’re lucky) the occasional weekend outing with friends. Money is tight when you’re a student, and that financial stress can be compounded by the reality of having to stay on top of your studies.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s student discounts. Many companies offer their products and services for less to those struggling through lectures, writing research papers and studying for finals. We’ve compiled a list of the best deals you can get on useful services, along with some things you’ll enjoy in your down time. Just keep in mind that most of these offers require you to prove your status as a student either by signing up with your .edu email address or providing some form of student identification.

Shopping

Amazon Prime Student

If you’re not piggybacking off of your parents’ Amazon Prime account, you can have the subscription for less while you’re in school. College students can get Prime Student for $6.50 per month or $60 per year, and it includes the same perks as a standard Prime membership including free two-day shipping, free same-day delivery in select areas, and access to the entire Prime Video library. Amazon also currently offers a six-month free trial, so you’ll pay even less during your first year.

Buy Prime Student at Amazon – $60 a year

Best Buy

While it doesn’t offer a specific student discount, Best Buy has Student Deals that you can sign up to receive. Aside from proving your student status, the only requirement is for you to be a My Best Buy member; that program is free to enroll in. We actually recommend that most people sign up for My Best Buy because some items, especially during site-wide sales, will be even cheaper for members. All student deals will appear in the Member Offers page in your account.

Sign up for Student Deals at Best Buy

Apple

Apple offers some deals to students and educators. This year in particular, Apple is throwing in a free pair of AirPods when you buy select Macs or iPads for college. You’ll get AirPods with the regular wired charging case free, or you can upgrade to AirPods with the wireless charging case for $40 more. Alternatively, you can get the AirPods Pro for $90 more. Apple knows how popular AirPods are and it clearly wants to sweeten the deal for students who have been thinking about getting a new computer before heading off to college.

The AirPods promotion also includes Apple education pricing on Macs and iPads. There isn’t a flat percentage rate across all products; the discounts are device dependent. For example, right now students can get a new MacBook Air M1 starting at $899, which is $100 less than the normal starting price (Amazon's matching this price, too). The 13-inch MacBook Pro also starts off $100 cheaper and the new iPad Pros start at $749, or $50 cheaper than usual. These are decent savings if you must have a brand new Apple product, but those with tighter budgets should also consider Apple’s refurb program.

Shop Apple’s back-to-school promos

Samsung

Samsung offers up to 10 percent off most of its products to students and educators. The brand also has some decent offers like a "speed and storage" bundle that includes two Samsung drives for under $300. We’d recommend stretching that 10 percent discount as much as possible by using it on big-ticket items like a Samsung laptop or a Galaxy smartphone if you need one. Otherwise, Samsung has solid accessories like the Galaxy SmartTag and the Galaxy Watch Active 2.

Shop Samsung’s back-to-school promos

Microsoft

Microsoft also provides students and educators with up to 10 percent off its gadgets, including the already affordable Surface Go 2 and the Surface Headphones 2. And Microsoft’s online store doesn’t only sell Surface devices: You can also find Windows PCs from Lenovo, HP, Acer and others there at discounted prices.

Shop Microsoft’s back-to-school promos

Streaming

Spotify

Spotify Premium’s student plan gives you a lot for only $5 per month. Besides access to millions of songs, it also includes Hulu’s ad-supported plan and Showtime’s ad-free service. You’d spend roughly $27 a month if you paid for all three separately at their full prices, making this student offer one of the best you can get.

Buy Spotify Premium Student – $5 a month

Pandora

Pandora also offers students its Premium membership for $5 per month. Pandora’s offering doesn’t include any additional services, but you do get an ad-free experience, personalized music, unlimited skips and unlimited offline play.

Buy Pandora Premium Student- $5 a month

Apple Music

Apple also slashes 50 percent off its Apple Music subscription for students, bringing it down to $5 per month. The offer is available for up to 48 months so you can enjoy the rate for the entirety of your college experience. What’s more, the company bundles Apple TV+ in this student offer, so you can watch Apple originals like The Morning Show and See.

Buy Apple Music Student membership – $5 a month

Tidal

Tidal provides student discounts on both of its streaming services: Premium and Hi-Fi. Premium drops to $5 per month, down from $10, while Hi-Fi costs $10 per month, down from $20. This year, the company is offering a three-month free trial of either of its services to any new user through the end of August. Tidal is still often overshadowed by Spotify and Apple Music, but these discounts are a good way to give it a try without spending too much money.

Buy Tidal Student starting at $10 a month

Hulu

College students can sign up for Hulu’s ad-supported plan for only $2 per month. That’s $4 less than the normal price and a great deal considering all of the content that Hulu has to offer (think The Handmaid’s Tale, Grey’s Anatomy, Rick & Morty and more). Yes, you have to deal with commercials, but it’s a small price to pay to binge-watch shows like Brooklyn Nine Nine, which can provide a much-needed laugh when you’re drowning in coursework.

Buy Hulu (ad-supported) – $2 a month

YouTube

If you’re already spending a lot of time watching YouTube, you may have a better experience with YouTube Premium. The Student plan knocks nearly 50 percent off the price so you’ll pay $7 per month for ad-free video viewing, background play, video downloads and access to YouTube Premium Music. The latter is YouTube’s attempt at a Spotify/Apple Music competitor, but it has a long way to go before it can really hold a candle to those services. However, if you listen to most of your music via YouTube already, Premium could be your one-stop-shop for music and video streaming.

Buy YouTube Premium Student – $7 a month

Headspace

Being a student is stressful even in the best of times, but now it’s even more difficult to concentrate and find peace. Headspace is just one of many meditation and mindfulness apps available that can help with that, but it stands apart with a great student discount: $10 for the entire year, or $60 less than a normal annual membership. In addition to a large library of meditation lessons and routines to follow, Headspace recently added SleepCasts, a collection of soothing voices reading bedtime stories to help you fall asleep, as well as “mindful” workout routines.

Buy Headspace Student plan – $10 a year

Tools

Adobe Creative Cloud

You’re probably using Adobe products if you’re studying anything to do with digital art or design. Adobe CC is the industry standard in this space but the entire suite of programs is quite expensive at $53 per month. Thankfully, Adobe has education pricing for students that drops the entire creative suite to $20 per month for the first year. That includes the big programs like Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC along with Lightroom CC, Premiere Pro CC, Adobe XD and more.

After your first year, the monthly cost increases to $30 per month. While not ideal, it’s still more affordable for students than it is for industry professionals. If you’re not tied to Adobe programs, you might also consider Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher apps from Serif ($50 each for the Mac or Windows versions), which compete with Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

Buy Adobe CC – $20 a month

Ableton Live

Regardless of whether you’re studying music production, students can get 40 percent off Ableton Live Standard or Suite for as long as they are enrolled full-time. That brings Live 11 Standard down to $269 and Suite down to $449 — great discounts on some of the best music software available right now.

Buy Ableton Live starting at $269

Microsoft 365

Many students have to use Microsoft 365 tools on a regular basis. If your college or university doesn’t provide you with an account, you can still get Microsoft 365 for free by taking advantage of the company’s student and educator discount. This gives you access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and even Microsoft Teams free of charge, which is a great deal considering an annual subscription costs $100.

Get Microsoft 365

Ulysses

Spending all day and night writing papers is even more frustrating when you don’t have all your writing organized in one place. Ulysses is a popular writing app for mac/iOS that can be used for note taking as well as thesis writing, with features like auto-save and auto-backup, word-count writing goals, markup, plain text support and DropBox integration. Normally, Ulysses costs $40 per year but students can get it for only $11 every six months, or $22 per year. There isn’t a direct alternative for Windows users, but you do have options including Scrivener (a one-time student price of $41.65), IA Writer (a $20 one-time price) and FocusWriter (free and open-source).

Buy Ulysses – $22 a year

Evernote

Evernote can be an indispensable tool if you like to keep all of your thoughts in one place — everything from class notes to web clippings to to-do lists. Students can get half off one year of Evernote Premium, which brings the price down to $4 per month or $48 for the year. Premium is the way to go if you’re investing in Evernote because it syncs your notes across unlimited devices, gives you offline access, lets you annotate PDFs and search saved documents.

Buy Evernote Premium (1 year) – $4 a month

Squarespace Student plan

Whether you’re itching to get a jump-start on your portfolio or just want an online space for to show off your work, Squarespace is a good option as it gives students a 50 percent discount on any of its annual plans. The most affordable option will cost $72 for the year, which is half the normal yearly price of $144. Squarespace is one of many website builders out there, but it’s particularly popular with creative professionals. Its customizable templates make it easy to build a website and make it look exactly how you want it. Plus, you can upgrade down the line to add things like website analytics, custom JavaScript and CSS and e-commerce.

Buy Squarespace starting at $72 a year

News

It’s always been important to keep up with the news, but it’s never been more important than it is now. Yes, it’s daunting sometimes and we don’t expect (or encourage) you to inhale every breaking-news headline as it’s published. However, it’s crucial to know what’s going on in the country and the world as a whole. Here are some reputable news organizations that offer student discounts on their monthly or annual subscription plans.

The Atlantic: Starts at $25 per year for digital-only access.

The New York Times: $4 every four weeks for a base subscription.

The Washington Post: $5 every four weeks for digital-only access.

The Wall Street Journal: Starting at $4 per month for the Student Digital Pack.

Google is apparently learning a hard lesson about the importance of accurate writing. Android Police reports that Google has pulled a briefly available Chrome OS update that broke logins for Chromebook users, apparently due to a simple typo. The company appears to have added a second "&" to a line of code, preventing the OS from decrypting login info and effectively locking updated users out of their systems.

The issue not only prevented some users from signing in, but started bootloops (where the system keeps restarting). At least one system required a recovery USB stick to return to a working state. While Chrome OS thrives on cloud syncing, some people still lost important files.

Google has pinpointed the problem and should deliver a fixed update today (July 21st). Still, it's not clear how such a conspicuous flaw slipped through the testing process. If nothing else, it's a reminder about the importance of backups — it only takes one buggy update to create chaos, whether you're using a Chromebook or any other device.

The Sad Wolverine meme, in which a fully costumed Logan from the '90s X-Men: The Animated Series lays in bed, staring longingly at a photo of his beloved Jean Grey and that interloper Scott Summers, is becoming an action figure from Mondo. It's about time. Few memes can truly capture the same sense of emo thirst. Typically, the framed photo is replaced with an image that makes Wolverine's yearning seem all the more hilarious. Who among us hasn't laid in bed staring at Instagram with the same sense of pining for a gadget/vacation spot/person?

Mondo

Just be prepared to clear out some shelf space, as this Sad Wolverine figure will be 1:6 scale. And while you could take it out of its box and add a variety of other accessories, like an unmasked Logan head or the face of his former best friend Morph, why would you? Mondo will open pre-orders for the figure on July 23rd as a Comic-Con exclusive, and it'll run you $200. Here's hoping that Mondo follows up with another meme figure: Sad Wolverine seeing Scott and Jean kiss. 

Mondo

There’s a moment in the 1986 Aliens film when Bill Paxton’s character, William Hudson, turns to his crewmates and says, "Man, it's a shooting gallery down there." After playing though the preview of Aliens: Fireteam Elite, I can say it feels like the developers really took this line to heart. Like, really.

Aliens: Fireteam Elite is an online, co-op, third-person survival shooter from Cold Iron Studios, and it’s been in development for the past six years. Cold Iron was actually bought and sold four times starting in 2018, bringing its mysterious Alien-based game along for the ride. In the end, Cold Iron has cut a deal with 20th Century Studios to self-publish Aliens: Fireteam Elite, and it’s due to hit Steam, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series consoles on August 24th, priced at $40.

20th Century Studios

I had the chance to play a preview build of Fireteam Elite that included access to two of the four campaigns, and four of the five character classes: gunner, technician, demolisher and doc (the final class is recon). Each campaign consists of three missions filled with AI-powered Xenomorph hordes, with three difficulty levels unlocked from the start. Every mission requires three players, and empty team slots are filled by bots named Alpha and Beta, which honestly end up functioning more like mobile turrets than actual teammates.

So, after playing hours of the preview with friends and bots alike, here’s my conclusion: Aliens: Fireteam Elite is a generic survival shooter with old-school arcade DNA. Fireteam Elite feels like an online, updated version of light-gun games like Area 51 or House of the Dead, complete with repetitive environments and sloppy hit boxes. The game is competent, but not dynamic. To put it simply — man, it’s just a shooting gallery down there.

To be fair, that’s what survival shooters are all about. Enter a new area, prepare your defenses, kill the swarm, rinse and repeat. The thing is, Fireteam Elite deploys this formula in such a rigid structure that missions quickly become predictable, no matter how many bugs show up. What’s more, the generic sci-fi environments blend together after a few playthroughs, and tricks like falling ceiling panels and sudden bursts of steam lose their effectiveness well before the first mission is over.

Fireteam Elite fails to build tension. With such a transparent gameplay structure, any feeling of pressure or horror has to come from the xenomorphs themselves, and frankly, they’re often not smart enough to make this happen. The swarms rarely feel unmanageable and the specialized xenomorphs, like spitters or jumpers, routinely behave in non-threatening ways. This unpredictability ends up being more adorable than scary. Plus, I have to note that my game crashed three times in about seven hours of play.

That’s not to say the AI is trash altogether. Cold Iron says it’s already resolved some of the movement issues the xenomorphs were experiencing in the preview build, and it really is impressive to see dozens of inky black aliens bounding down the hallway, each on its own path but out for blood, and the game is built around these moments. The xenos stumble around corners like dogs on a tile floor, and details like this add much-needed personality to the waves.

20th Century Studios

The game’s most exciting moments come at the end of each mission, during the final swarm. These are long standoffs with waves of xenomorphs, including spitters, prowlers, bursters and giants that hunt down a single crew member at a time. I’ve found the technician and doc to be particularly useful in these moments — the technician has a turret that recharges after it’s been destroyed and shock grenades to keep the xenomorphs at bay, while the doc has an incredibly handy healing circle.

This is where the most strategizing takes place, even if it is mostly just turret talk. There are chests containing consumable weapons, health and on-demand ammo refills at each final battle, meaning your whole team will start off well-equipped and they’re free to spray and pray. This is good, considering the reticles on most of the weapons are generous, and crowd control is the name of the game, not accuracy. 

20th Century Studios

There are a few bright spots in Aliens: Fireteam Elite. The soundtrack is a James Horner-inspired orchestral situation and it’s a constant reminder of the game’s cinematic 1980s roots; it does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to setting the mood. Plus, the game’s RPG elements — including character, loadout and weapon customization, and challenge cards — add a necessary layer of depth to otherwise straightforward missions.

I wasn’t expecting Fireteam Elite to be as narrative-driven as the films or as moody as Alien: Isolation, but I had hoped for something like Left 4 Dead meets Dead Space, and this ain’t that. Instead, Aliens: Fireteam Elite feels like a theme park ride in video game form. The monsters aren’t really threatening, but the crowds certainly are. And, of course, it’s more fun with friends.

After a year-long delay due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, the games of the XXXII Olympiad are scheduled to begin in Tokyo this week. Despite Japan’s struggles to contain the virus and athletes testing positive inside the Olympic Village, the event is still on. The sheer amount of action happening every day through the first week of August means you’ll need to plan ahead to catch all of the events you want to see, especially if you’re on the opposite side of the world.

When do the Olympics start?

The official start to the Olympics is the opening ceremony on Friday, July 23rd at 7AM ET, but a few events will actually kick off before that. The softball and women’s soccer competitions begin Wednesday (Tokyo time), but the first games aired Tuesday night on the east coast. Softball, men’s soccer and rowing are set to take place on Thursday with rowing, cycling, tennis and women’s water polo scheduled after the Opening Ceremony Friday and into Saturday. This weekend is when things really get going, though, with a packed slate of events from Saturday onward. The closing ceremony will air at 8PM ET on NBC on Sunday, August 8th.

How to watch

USA TODAY USPW / reuters

For those of us in the United States, NBC is the official broadcaster of the Summer Olympics and has been since 2000. The network’s current deal goes through 2032, so you won’t have to look around to find the games on new channels anytime soon. Due to the volume of events, NBC proper isn’t enough to show all of the action, so you can also find live coverage on NBCSN, USA, CNBC, Golf Channel and the Olympic Channel — cable or TV streaming subscription required. Following controversy over tape delays during previous Olympics, NBC began airing events live in 2012 despite the massive time differences. During prime time in the US, the network will show highlights from earlier in the day in addition to any live action.

At least a portion of the marquee events — including the opening/closing ceremonies, the women’s soccer final, basketball, track & field — will air on NBC. A lot of the events that take place in the middle of the night Eastern time (which is the bulk of the action) will be shown on the other networks and NBC’s streaming service Peacock. NBC Sports announced that Peacock will be home to “major events live each morning” including women’s and men’s gymnastics, track & field and basketball. The streaming service will also have six themed channels alongside three highlight shows throughout the day Eastern time along with a spotlight series that focuses on the women of Team USA. Olympics coverage will be available for free on Peacock with the exception of men’s basketball. You’ll need a $4.99 subscription to watch those games.

If you’d rather watch from your computer, phone or tablet, NBC says “every single event” will be available through NBCOlympics.com and the NBC Sports app. Twitch will also serve up Olympics content, but not live events. There, you’ll find interviews, highlights and, of course, competitions. The platform will also host streams and co-streams with Twitch creators during some of the primetime broadcasts.

Thomas Peter / reuters

Several services and TV providers offer tools to help you keep up with all of the action. YouTube TV, for example, allows you to select which events you’re interested in and the app will automatically record them to its cloud DVR. Here’s to watching swimming at a normal hour and not staying up until 2AM. YouTube TV has also added a medal table for quick reference and its “Jump To” feature lets you hop around events and specific moments easily. Cable providers like Comcast (owned by NBC’s parent company) are offering Olympics hubs on their services for easy access. There’s a degree of personalization across Xfinity tiers, for example, as well as notifications about “must-see moments” and playlists of highlights.

For a full schedule, visit NBCOlympics.com to find info on all of the events you’re looking for.

Fans in the UK don’t have to contend with quite the time difference as those of us in the States, but they’ll still get to watch as much of the action as they want. The BBC is the official broadcaster in the UK and it’s promising over 350 hours of coverage through early August. BBC One and BBC Two will show live events while an additional livestream will be available on BBC iPlayer. The network will have daily highlights and recap shows in both the morning and evening with anything that airs on BBC One or Two available on-demand via iPlayer. Coverage is also available through BBC Radio 5 Live and The Olympics Daily podcast.

There's never been a better time to be a PC gamer, especially when it comes to laptops. Gaming notebooks are lighter, more powerful and cheaper than ever before. They're particularly useful for students because their beefy hardware could be helpful for rendering video and doing any other schoolwork that would make super-thin ultraportables sweat. You can find some general advice on choosing gaming laptops in our guide. In this piece, you'll find a few selections specifically geared towards school use.

Are gaming laptops good for college?

As stated above, gaming laptops are especially helpful if you're doing any demanding work. Their big promise is powerful graphics performance, which isn't just limited to games. Video editing and 3D rendering programs can also tap into their GPUs to handle especially demanding tasks. While you can find decent GPUs on some productivity laptops, like Dell's XPS 15, you can sometimes find better deals on gaming laptops. My general advice for any new workhorse machine: Get at least 16GB of RAM and the largest solid state drive you can find. Those components are both typically hard to upgrade down the line.

The one big downside to choosing a gaming notebook is portability. For the most part, we'd recommend 15-inch models to get the best balance of size and price. Those typically weigh in around 4.5 pounds, which is a significantly more than three-pound ultraportables. Today's gaming notebooks are still far lighter than older models, though, so at least you won't be lugging around a 10-pound brick. Also, if you're not into LED lights and other gamer-centric bling, keep an eye out for more understated models (or make sure you know how to turn those lights off).

Best midrange for most people: ASUS Zephyrus G15

Will Lipman Photography / ASUS

The Zephryus G15 has all the power you'd want in a gaming laptop, at a price that's more reasonable than higher-end options. It's a slightly larger follow-up to last year's favorite for this category (the G14), but there's still lots to love. The G15 features AMD's latest Ryzen 5000 processors, along with NVIDIA's RTX 3000 GPUs. And, judging from our benchmarks, it manages to make good use of all that power. It also has a fast 165Hz 1440p screen, which is ideal for playing games at high framerates. The G15 doesn't have a webcam, but its solid specs and performance more than make up for that.

Buy Zephyrus G15 at Best Buy – $1,850

Best high-end option: Razer Blade 15

Will Lipman Photography for Engadget

For years, Razer has staked a reputation for building gaming laptops that look as good as MacBooks. And that's still true. Razer's Blade 15 features a sleek and sturdy metal case, an impressively understated design (unless you really kick up those RGB keyboard lights), and just about all the power you'd want in a portable gaming powerhouse. If money is no object, you can equip the Blade 15 with Intel's latest 11th-gen processors, NVIDIA's powerful RTX 3080 and either a 240Hz QHD or 360Hz HD screen.

While you'll pay a bit more for the Blade 15 compared to some other models, you've still got a few different price points to work with. The entry-level model starts at $1,699 with an RTX 3060 GPU and 144Hz 1080p display. That's certainly enough power for most games and creative apps. If you're looking for something a bit smaller, Razer's new AMD-powered Blade 14 looks compelling as well.

Buy Blade 15 at Razer- $1,699

A stylish mid-range option: Alienware M15 R5 Ryzen Edition

Will Lipman Photography / Alienware

Alienware's M15 notebooks have made for solid options over the last few years, but the R5 Ryzen Edition adds something new to the mix with AMD's latest processors. Basically, you can expect slightly better multi-core performance from this machine, compared to its Intel-equipped siblings. The Alienware M15 still retains the brand's signature, sci-fi-like aesthetic, making the R5 Ryzen Edition a great option if you want a notebook that’s also distinct (without looking garish like cheaper offerings).

Buy M15 R5 Ryzen Edition at Dell – $1,274

Best budget option: Dell G5 15

Will Lipman Photography / Dell

While Alienware has established itself as a solid premium brand, Dell's cheaper G-series notebooks are worth a look for anyone on a budget. In particular, the G5 15 continues the trend of delivering very capable hardware under $1,000. Sure, the case may contain a lot of plastic, and the screen doesn't offer all of the latest niceties, but for the price it's hard to find something much better.

Buy G5 15 at Dell – $960

Best no-limit gaming laptop: ASUS Zephyrus Duo 15 SE

Will Lipman Photography / ASUS

Taking the idea of a gaming laptop to the absolute extreme, ASUS's latest Zephyrus Duo combines AMD's latest Ryzen mobile processors with all of NVIDIA's great RTX 30-series hardware. And, true to its name, it has two screens: a gorgeous 15.6-inch main display, and a very wide secondary panel right below. That opens up a near desktop-level of multitasking, since you can have windows spread across both screens. That could be useful for browsing the web and keeping an eye on Twitter at the same time. (Or, perhaps squeezing in a game of Overwatch while following an online lecture on the other screen. We won't tell anyone.)

Buy Zephyrus Duo 15 SE at ASUS – $2,899

Uber's grocery deliveries will soon include Costco's bulk-sized foodstuffs, provided you live in the right state. The internet giant is launching a pilot that will deliver Costco groceries from 25 warehouses in Texas, with seven more locations available in the "coming weeks." Uber and Uber Eats app users will initially find the option available in Austin, Dallas and Houston.

You'll need to place at least a $35 order, and you'll have to pay for delivery unless you're an Uber Pass or Eats Pass member. A virtual storefront in the Uber and Uber Eats apps will focus on your "favorite" essential items.

This is Uber's first experiment with an American food wholesaler. It's not certain if the pilot will translate to a full-fledged expansion, but it would represent a major move if so. While Uber recently doubled the scale of its US grocery deliveries with over 400 new cities, a larger team-up with Costco would improve the depth of that service — you'd have more shopping choices, particularly if you need to make large orders.

Partners Lyft and Ford are laying the groundwork for their driverless ride-hailing plans. Today, the companies announced that Ford's Argo AI-powered cars will be available on Lyft's network later this year in Miami, followed by Austin in 2022. The move will allow passengers to choose a Ford self-driving vehicle with a safety driver in those regions when they book their ride from the app. By 2026, Ford plans to add 1,000 of its driverless vehicles to Lyft's fleet in multiple markets, a pact that the companies are in the process of finalizing.

The deployment should provide a shot in the arm for Lyft's autonomous ride-hailing ambitions. The company plans to get fully driverless fleets serving customers in multiple US cities in 2023. But, it suffered a setback last year when its self-driving partner Magna chose to shift to assisted driving products instead. The decision reflected wider concerns within the industry over the revenue-bleeding nature of autonomous driving. In December, Uber decided to sell its self-driving unit to startup Aurora as a belt-tightening maneuver.

Fortunately for Lyft, it's had close ties with Ford — which is aggressively pursuing its own self-driving goals —since 2017. The partnership between the two companies was forged on the back of Ford's $1 billion investment in autonomous vehicle startup Argo AI. Since then, the automaker has been testing its driverless vehicle service in Miami, Austin and Washington, D.C.

“Argo and Ford are currently piloting, mapping and preparing for commercial operations of autonomous vehicles in more cities than any other [autonomous vehicle] collaboration, and this new agreement is a crucial step toward full commercial operations – the addition of Lyft’s world-class transportation network,” said Scott Griffith, CEO, Ford Autonomous Vehicles & Mobility Businesses.

People are weirdly fascinated with Blockbuster, even though (or perhaps because) there's only one remaining store in the entire world. You'll soon be able to re-experience that iconic yellow/blue design on PlayStation VR with an upcoming title called The Last Video Store.

It's being developed by RareBird Games, the company behind the extremely weird horror title Sinfeld Remastered. The debut trailer ought to bring out those nostalgic feels, with the rows of DVDs and VHS tapes in a Blockbuster-like store, chilled out employees and an overly bright interior. It might even help you forget that in reality, the best titles were rarely available when you wanted them, and that Blockbuster's real business model was collecting late fees. 

According to the trailer, you'll be able to explore the area around the store or take a night drive around the neighborhood. You'll also be able to engage a "survival mode" that includes "realistic local jobs and bills to pay while managing your video enthusiast hobbies on the side." You can also select cult videos like Evil Dead and Mac and Me and watch them in a theater type environment, though it's hard to see how that would work in the final game, given licensing, etc. 

Given how Sinfeld evolved since the first trailer, it's hard to say what form The Last Video Store may take when it's released — could it also become a horror title, for instance? Adding to the intrigue, the Last Video Store briefly appeared in the announcement trailer for Sinfeld, as GamesRadar notes. There's no other information, so we'll have to wait and see where the rabbit hole eventually leads.