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VR’s prop hunt is superb but virtual yard work isn’t for me – my favorite Meta Quest 3 games and apps for May 2024

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Howdy folks, I’m back to run you through some of the best Meta Quest 3 games and apps I’ve been playing over the past month so you know which ones you might want to pick up and try in May.

Since my last roundup, I’ve completed a month-long VR fitness experiment – where I worked out exclusively in VR for 30 days. It was a great experience, and I’ve since kept up with the apps I relied on (I even talk about one of them down below). I also moved across the country to a new home. It meant I had a little less time to enjoy my Meta Quest 3 recently, but I still made time to give these three titles a whirl.

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Bisnis Industri

Apple Pencil 2 compatibility: Does it work with 2024 iPad models?

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When Apple unveiled the Apple Pencil Pro during Tuesday’s “Let Loose” event, the company seemingly bid adieu to the second-generation Apple Pencil. An Apple tool reveals that unspecified Apple Pencil 2 compatibility issues mean the older stylus won’t work with 2024 iPad Pro and iPad Air models.

So, if you’re an artist buying a new iPad, or someone who takes lots of handwritten notes, you probably need to budget an extra $129 for a new Apple Pencil Pro.

Apple Pencil 2 compatibility: Stylus doesn’t work with 2024 iPads

According to Apple’s device comparison tool, the new M2 iPad Air and M4 iPad Pro models are only compatible with the new Apple Pencil Pro and the budget Apple Pencil (USB-C). By comparison, previous iPad Pro models (11-inch tablets gen 1 through 4 and 12.9-inch tablets gen 3 through 6) and iPad Air models (gen 4 and 5) are shown as compatible with Apple Pencil (second gen) and the USB-C Apple Pencil.

Ultimately, this means that on top of the hefty price tag for getting a new iPad Pro or Air, you’ll potentially need to drop either $79 or $129, depending on which Apple Pencil model you want to pair with your shiny new tablet.

New features in Apple Pencil Pro

Features of the Apple Pencil Pro
Features of the Apple Pencil Pro.
Photo: Apple

During Tuesday’s event, Apple pointed out the need for a new Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro. And the pro tablet’s slimmest-ever design makes that obvious.

However, the company was less clear about whether owners of current Apple Pencils would need to upgrade if they bought a new iPad. Yes, the Apple Pencil Pro adds new features, including a “squeeze” gesture, haptic feedback and support for Apple’s Find My Network. But for existing iPad owners who don’t use their Apple Pencil 2 much, it would be nice if the older stylus still worked with the new iPad.

The sixth-generation M2 iPad Pro supports the second-generation Apple Pencil as well as the USB-C Apple Pencil. On paper, that tablet should run on the same chip featured in the new iPad Air. If the new iPad Air models truly don’t support the second-gen Apple Pencil, it could be due to a hardware limitation, possibly as a result of a new charging mechanism. (Apple moved the iPad Air’s front-facing camera to the tablet’s long edge so it works in landscape mode. And the Apple Pencil Pro attaches magnetically to the side of compatible tablets for charging.)

Alternatively, Apple could be restricting the functionality to boost Apple Pencil Pro sales. We’ll likely need to wait and see what early reviewers say when the devices launch on May 15.

Either way, for Apple’s most expensive iPad models (the M4 iPad Pro line), unless you already have last year’s USB-C Apple Pencil, you’re going to shell out a few extra bucks to add an Apple Pencil, and even more for the “Pro” pencil experience.



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French startup reveals quasi-immortal sensor that doesn’t need energy to work — SilMach’s ultra cheap microsensors can be used in a dizzying array of use cases

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France 2030 is a strategic €34 billion investment by the French government aiming to kickstart economic growth in the country. 

As part of this initiative, the SIRCAPASS project (Surveillance of Road Infrastructures by Passive Sensors) has chosen French firm SilMach to provide ultra-cheap microsensors to monitor and ensure the structural health of bridges across the country.

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Best Mac apps for all kinds of work and play

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These are the best Mac apps that’ll help you through all kinds of work — writing, graphic design, video editing — with a few simple (must-have) utilities that everyone can make use of.

Finding good apps can be hard, especially if you’re new to the Mac. Luckily, we’ve put together a list of the very best.

Keep reading or watch our video guide instead.

The best Mac apps

AirBuddy

AirBuddy menu bar item showing a trackpad connected to one Mac and Beats headphones connected to another
Just click to switch.
Screenshot: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

AirBuddy is a much better way to juggle Bluetooth devices between your Mac and your other devices. When you’re playing music from your iPhone and you sit down at your Mac, you can click on AirBuddy from the menu bar and yoink your AirPods over to your computer.

With AirBuddy’s Magic Handoff feature, you can see all the Bluetooth devices paired to all your Macs, instead of just the Mac you’re working on. Like Universal Control (which allows you to swap keyboards, mice and trackpads between devices), you can use AirBuddy to switch your headphones between your work Mac and personal Mac.

You can read more about AirBuddy (including its Shortcuts support) in our Awesome Apps article.

Price: $10 $8.99
Download from: Cult of Mac Deals

BBEdit

Two screenshots of BBEdit showing an Xcode project and a blog post
BBEdit can handle it all.
Screenshot: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

BBEdit is an incredibly powerful plaintext editor. It’s been a top choice for Mac users for over 30 years.

It can handle projects of all sizes and code in all languages. It has built-in support for opening and saving files over FTP servers. You can pull and commit projects directly to GitHub.

Calling it an “editor” sells it short — between powerful regular expression commands, AppleScript support and text transforms, it’s a word processing wonder. It’s also good for writing.

Price: $4.99/month or $49.99/year
Download from: Mac App Store

Blip

Receiving a file on Blip
Downloading a file on Blip.
Screenshot: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

AirDrop is the best way to transfer files between two Macs in the same room (or a Mac and iPad or iPhone). But the best way to transfer files across the internet is with Blip.

Blip is different than Dropbox or Google Drive because you don’t need to upload files to the cloud on one end and download them on the other end. Blip creates an instant and direct device-to-device connection.

This also means you can transfer entire folders at once, huge project files for Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, or whatever you need.

Read more about Blip in our Awesome Apps article.

Price: Free
Download from: blip.net

Camo

Edit camera settings and add an overlay
Put your iPhone to good use as an HD webcam.
Screenshot: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

Camo lets you upgrade your Mac’s built-in camera for web conferences and live streaming to something much better. Any modern USB camera — or even your iPhone — can be used as a webcam for any app on your Mac.

You can combine video from your iPhone with audio coming a desktop microphone. You can even create video recordings.

There are a bunch of advanced features for making a custom watermark, adjusting image brightness and contrast, blur effects and more.

Price: $49.99/year
Download from: Reincubate

Forecast

Forecast showing metadata for The CultCast
Do your listeners a favor with chapter markers.
Screenshot: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

If you make a podcast, Forecast is a must-have app. It’s a simple utility that you can use to add chapter markers to a podcast.

In Logic, you export your podcast as a WAV, drag it into Forecast and it’ll show you all the chapters. It’ll even embed metadata like chapter URLs, chapter-specific artwork, the episode title and description into the MP3 file.

Price: Free
Download from: Overcast

Front and Center

Front and Center settings
Change how your Mac wrangles your windows.
Screenshot: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

Front and Center is a window management utility for the Mac that changes one key behavior. When you click on a window, it doesn’t just bring that single window to the front, it brings all the app’s windows to the front.

So if you have a bunch of Safari windows or Finder windows open, clicking on any of them will bring all of them forward. This is already how it works when you click an app icon in the Dock, but now it’ll do that all the time.

Finder and Safari are two apps I use a lot of windows for. I usually have at least six different Finder windows and three Safari windows open at once.

With Front and Center, I don’t need to make sure all of them are visible — clicking on any Finder window lets me see the other ones. If you like organized chaos like me, you’ll find it an indispensable tool.

Price: $4.99
Download from: Mac App Store

IINA

IINA video player showing the subtitle menu, playing a Peter Capaldi episode of Doctor Who
Play all kinds of files — in a video player customizable to your taste.
Screenshot: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

IINA is a free video player for macOS that goes far above and beyond QuickTime. It supports many, many more file formats QuickTime doesn’t, like MKV and AVI.

The user interface is modern and highly customizable to your preferences. For example, I added a Take Screenshot button to the video player, which I use every day. It supports picture-in-picture mode, for letting a video or music playlist float above your desktop as you work.

For movies and TV shows downloaded to your computer, you can look up matching subtitles inside the app.

You can even use IINA as a YouTube video player. Hit ⇧⌘O and paste in a URL to start playing instantly.

Price: Free
Download from: IINA
Source code: GitHub

Maccy

Screenshot of Maccy pop-up on macOS
There’s a lot of advanced features, but all you really need to know to get started is ⇧⌘C to get started.
Image: Alex Rodionov

Once you install a clipboard manager, you’ll never know how it was possible to live without it.

You copy one thing that’s really important, you accidentally copy something else without thinking about it — wait, now you’ve lost the first thing. No more.

With Maccy, your Mac has a new keyboard shortcut, ⇧⌘C, to bring up a history menu. Then, you hit ⌘2 to instantly paste the second-most-recent item out of your clipboard. Likewise, you can hit ⌘3, and ⌘4, and so on to paste more items. You can set the size of its clipboard history to contain hundreds of items.

Maccy will keep paragraphs of text, images, files, all sorts of things.

Read more about Maccy here.

Price: $9.99
Download from: Mac App Store
Source code: GitHub

MacWhisper

MacWhisper
Create transcripts from video or audio files, YouTube videos, web meetings and more.
Screenshot: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

MacWhisper is an app that generates highly accurate transcripts out of audio files, including MP3, M4A, WAV, MP4 or MOV. It’s built on top of Whisper by OpenAI.

Just drag a file into the window and it’ll start building a line-by-line transcription. You can edit the transcript and export it in a bunch of useful formats: a subtitle file for a video, a plain text file, a CSV, a nicely formatted HTML webpage or a PDF for publishing.

All the core functionality is available in the free version. Included for free is the Small transcription model, which is a slight misnomer — Small does an unbelievable job.

If you pay for Pro, you get the larger models. They’re more accurate, although they work a little more slowly. You also can transcribe streaming audio from your Mac, if you want a transcription of a live stream or a meeting.

Price: Free with basic features, $30 for Pro features
Download from: Gumroad

MarsEdit

MarsEdit editing this very blog post about the best Mac apps
Yes, even this article was drafted in MarsEdit.
Screenshot: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

If you’re a writer with a WordPress blog, MarsEdit is a much better place to start your writing.

You don’t have to worry about losing your internet connection, your web browser bugging out and quitting, someone taking over your draft and losing your work, etc. MarsEdit is a reliable native Mac app that lets you start writing a collection of drafts offline before you send them to your site.

It syncs with WordPress to pull in your categories, authors, tags and existing posts. You can even upload media and images. It only offers mixed support for WordPress’ new Gutenburg block editor, but really, that is a feature in itself.

MarsEdit isn’t just for WordPress — you also can export a document as an HTML file.

Price: $59.99 with 14-day free trial
Download from: Mac App Store

Mimestream

Mimestream mail app
It’s the best desktop app to use Gmail, hands down.
Screenshot: Neil Jhaveri

Apple Mail — or really, most email clients — do a bad job at handling Gmail accounts.

Gmail has a bunch of features other email services don’t. Instead of folders, Gmail uses tags. Instead of a single inbox, Gmail offers smart categories like social, promotions, updates, and so on. And Gmail pairs great with Google Calendar, with one-click responses.

Mimestream is a desktop app that’s been designed to play nice with Gmail. The developer, Neil Jhaveri, is a former Apple employee, who worked on Mail and Notes. That really shines through in the app — Mimestream looks and feels like Apple made a first-class Gmail client.

Price: $49.99/year
Download from: Neil Jhaveri

OpenEmu

OpenEmu library
Organize and play your favorite classics in OpenEmu.
Screenshot: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

OpenEmu is the all-in-one classic game emulator for your Mac.

Like Delta on the iPhone, all you need to do is drag ROM files to add them to your library. It supports save states, game controllers — and it even has filters to make your games look like they’re being played on a CRT television or a pixellated LCD display.

It supports dozens of consoles, including the NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, Nintendo GameCube, Sony PlayStation — even the Vectrex and ColecoVision.

Best of all, it’s totally free and open source.

Price: Free
Download from: openemu.org
Source code: GitHub

Pastel

Pastel app for Mac
Collect color palettes for reference in Pastel.
Screenshot: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

If you do any kind of graphic design, especially if you do branding or marketing work for a few different clients, you need Pastel.

Pastel lets you create palettes and color swatches, organize them into folders, and give them names. You can right-click to copy a color’s RGB values, hex values or as code for your app in Objective-C and SwiftUI.

You can even export a color palette as a wallpaper. And on the iPhone, you can import a palette from a picture.

Price: $9.99
Download from: Mac App Store

Pixelmator Pro

Pixelmator Pro editing the thumbnail for this article, that says "All The Best Mac Apps"
I use Pixelmator Pro to make the very images in this article!
Screenshot: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

Pixelmator Pro is a modern graphic design program made just for Mac. Compared to the establishment (Adobe Photoshop and Affinity Photo), Pixelmator Pro is incredibly easy to navigate and use.

All the basic features you regularly use are put front and center. Cutting a subject out of a background? That’s done in just two clicks. It’s very rare that I find myself reaching for a more powerful app.

It even supports vector shapes and superimposing graphics on top of video.

Price: $49.99
Download from: Mac App Store

Rectangle

Options panel in Rectangle
The keyboard shortcuts are highly configurable. On the other tab, you can configure which edges of the screen do what.
Screenshot: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

If you’re a PC switcher, you might miss the window-snapping features that Windows has had for years. The Rectangle app brings it to macOS.

With Rectangle running, you can grab a window and throw it to the left or right side to make it fill half the screen. Or drag it to the corner to fill a quarter of the screen. You can even add custom keyboard shortcuts to tile your windows exactly how you want.

Even if you don’t use window snapping (like me), I use Rectangle’s ⌃⌥C shortcut to perfectly center a window on my display. If you run two monitors, you can use ⌃⌥⌘→ or ⌃⌥⌘← to move a window between your screens.

Price: Free with basic features, $9.99 for Pro features
Download from: Ryan Hanson
Source code: GitHub

UTM Virtual Machines

UTM library
UTM is, hands down, the best way to boot into other operating systems, old and new.
Screenshot: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac

UTM is the easiest way to virtualize other operating systems on your Mac.

Unlike the more complicated VirtualBox, adding a new virtual machine using UTM is as simple as clicking a couple of buttons. After you download it, just hit the + and click Download prebuilt from UTM Gallery. It’s a single file to download; without any configuration or manual setup you can boot everything from Windows XP to ArchLinux.

UTM can virtualize modern operating systems like Windows 11 for any PC programs you might want to run. If you use your Mac for software development, you can run all kinds of flavors of Linux — Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian and more. On an Apple silicon Mac, you can virtualize any other version of macOS for Apple silicon (macOS Monterey and newer).

Price: $9.99
Download from: Mac App Store

More of the best Mac apps

For more great Mac apps, check out our Awesome Apps series of posts. For more games, you can check out our list of the best games on Apple Arcade.



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Could generative AI work without online data theft? Nvidia’s ChatRTX aims to prove it can

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Nvidia continues to invest in AI initiatives and the most recent one, ChatRTX, is no exception thanks to its most recent update. 

ChatRTX is, according to the tech giant, a “demo app that lets you personalize a GPT large language model (LLM) connected to your own content.” This content comprises your PC’s local documents, files, folders, etc., and essentially builds a custom AI chatbox from that information.

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Glestain Gyuto Chef’s Knife Review: The Dimples Do Work

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Several years ago, a blurb in a food magazine caught my eye. In it, a chef recommended a unique-looking Japanese chef’s knife with giant dimples on only one side of the blade, designed to keep food from sticking to it. Knives with little dimples are common, but these were enormous, and it made me wonder if the manufacturer was on to something. That knife turned out to be as interesting as it looked. While it appears to be specialized equipment, it can help any level of home cook. Whether you are looking for your first nice chef’s knife or your forever blade, this Japanese gyuto fits the bill.

You may have seen dimples (aka hollows or “kullens”) on other knives and wondered whether they kept food from sticking to them, but on Glestain’s blades they are supersized, and they work. The Glestain’s dimples—two rows of them on the gyuto, no less—are extreme, like a neat double row of thumbprints on only one side of the blade. Lefties like me order theirs with the dimples on the left side and righties get them on the right. Lefties can use the right-handed version (and vice versa) and still love it; all they’d lose is the non-stick effect of the dimples. I was excited to put it to an extended-use test.

Hard and Durable

A gyuto is a type of chef’s knife that has a shape in between the curvy belly of a German chef’s knife and the near-flat cutting edge of the French style. There are two versions of Glestain’s gyutos, Professional and Home. I tested both and found them both to be pro-level equipment. The major differences are that the Professional has both a larger tang (the metal part that passes through the handle) and a metal plate on the butt of the knife. That makes it notably heavier–it feels a bit like a tank. Most home cooks and line cooks will prefer the Home version for everyday use.

Both versions feature a hard steel blade—59 on the Rockwell hardness scale—in a mix that includes chromium, carbon, molybdenum, and vanadium. That combination creates a hard, thin, and durable blade that resists rust and holds a mean edge. (For more knife nerdery, check out Chad Ward’s excellent reference, An Edge in the Kitchen.) The Glestains are Japanese-made Western-style knives, high-end Japanese blades with a handles like you’d find on a traditional French or German knives. It’s quite comfortable and evenly balanced and will keep you happy as you plow through piles of produce.

Two side views of the same kitchen knife left showing the indented side and right showing the smooth side

Photograph: Joe Ray

Really, though, we’re here for those dimples. It’s a “regular” knife, so there’s no special flick of the wrist to take advantage of them. It just took a minute to understand what to expect and how effectively they functioned.

The dimples are quite deep and much wider than on other knives. I own an old Mundial-brand slicer, and the Glestain’s dimples are much deeper and easily three times as wide. The real magic happens when what you’re cutting is wider than the dimples.

I got chopping, really happily so. Dimples or not, it’s a beautiful knife to work with. Dicing onions felt like I was doing it with a supremely nice blade, not a magic one. For those used to the curvy belly of a German-style chef’s knife, the flatter arc of the gyuto takes some getting used to. I cooked Moroccan chicken stew from Vishwesh Bhatt’s cookbook, I Am From Here, a favorite from 2022. It featured chopped dried figs, which did not stick too much. I loved the crunch-crunch-crunch feeling of chopping toasted pecans.

Pulling out the new Ottolenghi Test Kitchen: Extra Good Things cookbook, I made a daikon version of its kohlrabi tonnato recipe. The daikon was about two inches across. I started out by making quarter-inch-thick slices with both the Glestain and my santoku, a more vegetable-focused Japanese knife. The slices lay down neatly next to the Glestain, but when I switched to the santoku, they stuck to it as they would to almost any other knife. I had similar results when I quartered and sliced the daikon.

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Turns out the viral ‘Air Head’ Sora video wasn’t purely the work of AI we were led to believe

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A new interview with the director behind the viral Sora clip Air Head has revealed that AI played a smaller part in its production than was originally claimed. 

Revealed by Patrick Cederberg (who did the post-production for the viral video) in an interview with Fxguide, it has now been confirmed that OpenAI‘s text-to-video program was far from the only force involved in its production. The 1-minute and 21-second clip was made with a combination of traditional filmmaking techniques and post-production editing to achieve the look of the final picture.

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Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 Review: A Gaming Laptop Perfect for Both Work and Play

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A beefy graphics card paired with the lovely 14-inch screen size at an affordable price? That’s the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, and when you add extras like an OLED display and battery life impressive for a gaming laptop, it’s hard for me to not fall in love with this thing.

The G14 is the smallest model in the Zephyrus line, so it’s extremely portable. You can outfit it with an Nvidia RTX 4060 or 4070 graphics card, depending on whether you want to save some cash or max it out. It feels as comfortable to use as the Macbook Air M1 (2020) that I use for work, but it comes with luxury features that make playing games—and even watching movies—a top-tier experience.

Work-Life Balance

The Zephyrus G14 isn’t built to be a powerhouse—consider a laptop like the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 for that—but what power it does have is well allocated. The Zephyrus is powered by AMD’s Ryzen R9 8945HS, a powerful processor, paired with the RTX 4060 laptop graphics card—it tackles most games with ease and can even run some of the heaviest AAA titles reasonably well.

Both Starfield and Cyberpunk 2077 managed to maintain a respectable 50 to 60 frames per second on medium graphics settings at the laptop’s full 2,880 X 1,800 resolution. Starfield dipped to around 40 fps in areas like New Atlantis that have famously struggled to get very high frame rates. But this is still reasonably high given that Starfield is capped at 30 fps on the Xbox.

The back of a laptop lid white with a silver diagonal line sitting on a picnic table outdoors

Photograph: Eric Ravenscraft

When adjusting the display to 1,080p, I could crank the graphics settings in Cyberpunk and Starfield up to high while maintaining roughly the same 50 to 60 fps. By staying on medium, I got over 60 fps in both games. I prefer the latter approach since smoother gameplay feels better for me than extra foliage detail, but there’s flexibility here to tailor the experience to your desires.

Like most gaming laptops, you won’t spend much time playing on this machine away from a charger. However, the G14 still impressed by getting nearly two hours of gameplay while running games like Cyberpunk. Overwatch 2 lasted closer to an hour and a half, which makes sense, given that in faster-paced competitive games, I tend to lean on getting at least 90 fps for a smooth experience.

When using the laptop for more typical work or casual use, I got closer to 11 hours of battery life, impressive among any Windows laptop. I could easily use the Zephyrus G14 as my daily driver and feel comfortable getting an entire day’s worth of work done on a single charge.

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Inside the company making 35-year-old Game Boys look and work like new

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It might surprise you to know that becoming a sustainability warrior doesn’t necessarily take a calling. Sometimes, it just needs to start as a hobby that you can share with someone you love. That’s how Retrospekt, a Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based technology refurbishment firm got its start – and how, somewhat improbably, I’m now playing with what is essentially a 35-year-old Game Boy that looks as if it was made yesterday.

“It’s actually quite fun being able to stay in the midwest and bring something unique to the midwest,” Retrospekt co-owner and CEO Adam Fuerst told me during a lengthy conversation, adding that partner and licensee companies are often surprised at their location.

Sustainability Week 2024

This article is part of a series of sustainability-themed content we’re running to observe Earth Day and promote more sustainable practices. Check out all of our Sustainability Week 2024 content.



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Samsung is making its top executives work six days a week

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Samsung has shifted to “emergency mode” and is now asking executives to work six days per week.

The news, revealed in a report by The Korea Economic Daily, comes as the company battles ongoing business challenges. The company-wide policy affects executives and top managers across Samsung’s various divisions.

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