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Some of Our Favorite Noise-Canceling Headphones Are $100 Off if You Act Fast

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Some of Our Favorite Noise-Canceling Headphones Are 0 Off if You Act Fast


Bose is well known for its noise-canceling headphones and earbuds, and the high-end QuietComfort Ultra (9/10, WIRED Recommends) are currently marked down to just $329 on Amazon, with the same discount at Best Buy. You’ll have to move fast, though, as both sites feature countdown timers with less than 24 hours remaining as I write this.

Photograph: Ryan Waniata

The QuietComfort Ultra sit right near the top of our list of the best noise-canceling headphones, and for good reason. They sound great, with top-tier clarity and detail, and our reviewer Ryan Waniata was particularly impressed by the “fabulous instrumental separation” and the “wide and spacious soundstage.” The bass is a little boomy out of the box, but a quick tweak of the EQ can smooth that right out, and even if you prefer the big bass, it’s still clear and punchy. They sound just as good during phone calls, in case you really need to focus in while working or chatting.

The noise-canceling is the star here, and there are really only two companies that compete for the crown, Bose and Sony. Each company has flagship headsets that do a stellar job of keeping out plane engine noises, crying babies, and your chatty seat neighbor, with performance so close we have a dedicated guide comparing the two. There’s also a great transparency mode for when you need to stay a little more alert, but want to keep the music going.

There are some other features that we’re less enthusiastic about, like a spatial audio mode that tries to “spatialize” existing stereo tracks, which is a neat trick for some songs, but less so for more produced music or watching videos. There’s optional head-tracking as well that tries to keep sound coming from the same places as you turn around. They’re both a little gimmicky and don’t help with the QuietComfort Ultra’s already-middling 24 hours of battery life.

Even though Bose recently updated these extremely popular headphones, the newer version isn’t massively different from these. That means these are still a great deal, and one of our favorite noise-canceling headsets, despite being on the market for a few years. Its price compared to some of its biggest competitors was a downside, so the $100 discount makes a big difference if that was a deciding factor.



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Home Depot Is Handing Out Free Power Tools With Some Purchases

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Home Depot Is Handing Out Free Power Tools With Some Purchases


Fall is for nesting—and for feathering your nest with whatever will keep you sane during the winter. Which is why a number of retailers, including The Home Depot, drop prices on home goods with big fall deals.

The Home Depot fall savings event for 2025 is unusually broad, because The Home Depot itself is unusually broad—the store that first brought the home improvement superstore nationwide. This fall, The Home Depot sports discounts of 15 to 50 percent on home decor, mattresses, cookware, bed and bath, Milwaukee power tools, and the old football season staple: the mini-fridge.

Here’s a roadmap to The Home Depot fall deals in 2025. Follow the link here for even more deals and coupons from The Home Depot this month.

Biggest Home Depot Fall Deals in 2025

By percentage, the biggest deals The Home Depot is offering this fall are among cutlery, wall shelving, and basically everything having to do with bedding. Among knives, The Home Depot is offering half off on Japanese-made Kiyoshi and Damashiro knives put out by Australian knife brand Cuisine Pro—nearly all of which have full-tang stainless steel blades. (See WIRED’s guide to the best chef’s knives.)

Some of the more esoteric wall shelving is on hefty discount as well, including a decorative hexagonal wall shelf that’s half off, and a cushioned bench with shelves underneath.

The Home Depot Fall Mattress, Bedding, and Linen Deals

The Home Depot is offering some of its steepest price cuts on bedding and bathroom linens, as the thread count on sheets (which kinda doesn’t matter) becomes a sudden concern amid chilling temps. This includes the following:

See also WIRED’s guides to the best mattresses, and the best bedsheets.

Rare Deals on Milwaukee Tools at The Home Depot

WIRED reviewer Scott Gilbertson swears by century-old tool brand Milwaukee Tool, which rarely shows up on sale, as a smart investment across your tool set.

“The smart way to buy battery-powered tools is to invest in a single brand,” Gilbertson writes. “Most of the expense is in the batteries, and batteries are not interchangeable between tool brands (technically, there are adapters, but I’ve had bad experiences with them and do not recommend them). Many years ago, surveying the market at the time, I landed on Milwaukee, which so far as I could tell had the leading battery tech at the time, and good tools to boot. Since then I’ve purchased and used dozens of their tools, from impact guns to circular saws to specialty tools like a drywall screw gun.”



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Ex-McLaren boss could take the wheel at Porsche

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Ex-McLaren boss could take the wheel at Porsche


Porsche has been struggling with Chinese competition and US tariffs.

The former head of British supercar maker McLaren could take over as CEO of Porsche, the German firm said Friday, as it struggles with weak demand and a troubled shift to electric cars.

Michael Leiters, who headed McLaren from 2022 to April this year, “is available as a potential successor” to current chief executive Oliver Blume, and talks will be initiated, Porsche said in a statement.

Blume has for several years been boss of both Volkswagen and Porsche, one of the German titan’s subsidiaries, but has faced pressure to drop the dual role and focus on overhauling the broader VW group.

Leiters previously worked at Porsche for 13 years as well as at Italy’s Ferrari.

Blume, meanwhile, will remain CEO of Volkswagen Group, signing a five-year term that begins January 1, the company said Friday.

“In the last three years, Oliver Blume has impressively demonstrated his ability to advance and develop the Volkswagen Group’s strategy and business operations in a challenging environment,” VW’s board chairman Hans Dieter Poetsch said in a statement.

Talks will begin with Blume about “a mutually agreed early termination” of his CEO post, Porsche added. German newspaper Bild reported that Blume would give up the CEO role next year.

Like other German carmakers, Porsche has been struggling with weak demand in Europe and fierce competition in China, while tariffs in the United States, its top market, have added to headwinds.

Last month, the maker of the iconic 911 sports car also hit the brakes on its shift to electric vehicles, saying demand had increased more slowly than expected.

It announced measures including delays in introducing some fully electric cars and extending the lifespan of some combustion engine and hybrid models, with VW warning the changes would deliver a hefty financial hit.

In February, Porsche announced 1,900 job losses and has warned of more cost cuts ahead. And last month it was excluded from Germany’s blue-chip DAX stock index after its shares tanked.

The broader VW group, which makes 10 different brands including Audi and Skoda, has been struggling with the same issues afflicting Porsche. It announced last year plans to cut 35,000 jobs in Germany by 2030.

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Can AI Avoid the Enshittification Trap?

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Can AI Avoid the Enshittification Trap?


I recently vacationed in Italy. As one does these days, I ran my itinerary past GPT-5 for sightseeing suggestions and restaurant recommendations. The bot reported that the top choice for dinner near our hotel in Rome was a short walk down Via Margutta. It turned out to be one of the best meals I can remember. When I got home, I asked the model how it chose that restaurant, which I hesitate to reveal here in case I want a table sometime in the future (Hell, who knows if I’ll even return: It is called Babette. Call ahead for reservations.) The answer was complex and impressive. Among the factors were rave reviews from locals, notices in food blogs and the Italian press, and the restaurant’s celebrated combination of Roman and contemporary cooking. Oh, and the short walk.

Something was required from my end as well: trust. I had to buy into the idea that GPT-5 was an honest broker, picking my restaurant without bias; that the restaurant wasn’t shown to me as sponsored content and wasn’t getting a cut of my check. I could have done deep research on my own to double-check the recommendation (I did look up the website), but the point of using AI is to bypass that friction.

The experience bolstered my confidence in AI results but also made me wonder: As companies like OpenAI get more powerful, and as they try to pay back their investors, will AI be prone to the erosion of value that seems endemic to the tech apps we use today?

Word Play

Writer and tech critic Cory Doctorow calls that erosion “enshittification.” His premise is that platforms like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and TikTok start out aiming to please users, but once the companies vanquish competitors, they intentionally become less useful to reap bigger profits. After WIRED republished Doctorow’s pioneering 2022 essay about the phenomenon, the term entered the vernacular, mainly because people recognized that it was totally on the mark. Enshittification was chosen as the American Dialect Society’s 2023 Word of the Year. The concept has been cited so often that it transcends its profanity, appearing in venues that normally would hold their noses at such a word. Doctorow just published an eponymous book on the subject; the cover image is the emoji for … guess what.

If chatbots and AI agents become enshittified, it could be worse than Google Search becoming less useful, Amazon results getting plagued with ads, and even Facebook showing less social content in favor of anger-generating clickbait.

AI is on a trajectory to be a constant companion, giving one-shot answers to many of our requests. People already rely on it to help interpret current events and get advice on all sorts of buying choices—and even life choices. Because of the massive costs of creating a full-blown AI model, it’s fair to assume that only a few companies will dominate the field. All of them plan to spend hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few years to improve their models and get them into the hands of as many people as possible. Right now, I’d say AI is in what Doctorow calls the “good to the users” stage. But the pressure to make back the massive capital investments will be tremendous—especially for companies whose user base is locked in. Those conditions, as Doctorow writes, allow companies to abuse their users and business customers “to claw back all the value for themselves.”

When one imagines the enshittification of AI, the first thing that comes to mind is advertising. The nightmare is that AI models will make recommendations based on which companies have paid for placement. That’s not happening now, but AI firms are actively exploring the ad space. In a recent interview, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, “I believe there probably is some cool ad product we can do that is a net win to the user and a sort of positive to our relationship with the user.” Meanwhile, OpenAI just announced a deal with Walmart so the retailer’s customers can shop inside the ChatGPT app. Can’t imagine a conflict there! The AI search platform Perplexity has a program where sponsored results appear in clearly labeled follow-ups. But, it promises, “these ads will not change our commitment to maintaining a trusted service that provides you with direct, unbiased answers to your questions.”



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