OPINION: The countdown to the Black Friday shopping season is upon us, and Amazon is kicking things off even earlier next week with its oddly named Prime Big Deal Days.

Aside from the plethora of upcoming deals, it’s been another busy week as the tech streaming season continues to ramp up. Adobe rolled out some new AI editing features, HP announced a battery-powered desktop, and Samsung somehow found time to revive its price-conscious FE series.

But as always, we’re here to crown this week’s winners and losers, and it wasn’t hard to choose between this week’s picks.

Winner: Google announces Pixel 8 with seven years of software updates

Google announced three new Pixel devices at an event in New York this week: the Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro, and Pixel Watch 2. All of these products have been leaked extensively over the past few months, but now they’re finally making the rounds. and everything is pretty much as we expected.

Both phones feature new cameras, new Tensor G3 chips, and flat screens with high refresh rates. The buzzword of the event, as always with Google these days, was artificial intelligence. AI will allow you to remove unwanted audio from videos, make your friends smile in a group shot, and answer spam calls you’d rather ignore completely.

The Tensor G3 chip is specifically designed for these AI tasks, and that’s where Google hopes to differentiate these phones from rivals like the Samsung Galaxy S23 and iPhone 15 Pro.

This all sounded exciting, and we’re excited to see it in practice, but the big news of the event was that Google promised seven years of software updates for these phones, ensuring they’ll be supported until 2030.

These are not just security patches but also proper system upgrades and Pixel Feature Drops. Get a Google Pixel 8 or 8 Pro now; It will continue to receive new features for a very long time.

This is great news because supporting phones for longer keeps more people connected to their devices and will help alleviate problems with e-waste. It also makes it easier to deal with the initial investment if you know that the device will still be relevant after a few years.

Loser: Nintendo is ending online services for Wii U and 3DS

Nintendo has had a habit of shutting down access to past services after shutting down the Wii U and 3DS eShops earlier this year, and has now announced that online support for those consoles will officially end in April 2024.

In a post on Nintendo America’s support website, the company states that “online gaming and other functions utilizing online communications for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U software will end in early April 2024.” This means that after that date online cooperative play, internet rankings and data distribution will no longer work.

Pokemon Bank, a tool for transferring these interesting creatures from game to game, is floating around like StreetPass; So this isn’t such bad news.

This news was expected, especially after the closure of online stores at the beginning of this year; But it’s still a shame to see older games have limited functionality when we should be trying to preserve what we can.