A fresh batch of deals are now live to start the week and lead up to Apple’s Scary Fast event tonight. You can go Carbon Neutral with the new Apple Watch SE 2 starting at $219, while the refreshed USB-C AirPods Pro 2 are down to $200. Plus, you can bring iMac vibes to your iPad Pro with . Hit the jump for all that and more in the latest 9to5Toys Lunch Break.

A combined Facebook and Instagram subscription is coming to European users in the next few weeks, enabling an ad-free experience in both services for €9.99/month ($10.60).

Alongside this, parent company Meta has announced that it is “pausing” all advertising to under-18s at the same time, meaning they get the same privacy benefits as a paid subscription at no cost …

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The Apple homepage has a little easter egg today: If you hover over the Apple logo with your mouse, it changes to an animated countdown.

Apple doesn’t normally show a count down on the homepage ahead of events, but it’s quite useful in this case due to the unusual start time: the event today starts in the evening at 5PM Pacific Time, whereas most Apple events kick off at 10 AM PT. A 5PM start means the stream will start in about nine hours from now, as seen in the screenshot of the countdown above.

The launch of Resident Evil Village on the iPhone would be a pretty big deal on its own – proving that Apple’s claims about the gaming capabilities of the A17 Pro chip have real substance to them – but one piece argues that it could signal a whole new future for gaming on Apple devices.

A future where we not only see a slew of AAA games on Macs, but where the Apple ecosystem as a whole becomes a solid gaming platform …

Apple’s new iMessage Contact Key Verification at first glance seems to be a rather niche security feature, likely to be of interest only to the most paranoid or highly-targeted individuals. But it could turn out to be a privacy feature which protects us all from government spying.

That’s because it seems almost custom-designed to prevent a plan developed by the UK’s equivalent to the NSA – GCHQ …

Apple’s new Journal app is now available in the developer beta of iOS 17.2, ahead of a public beta coming soon, and official launch later this year. But an early Apple Journal hands-on says that the mental health feature is unlikely to pose any threat to existing third-party journaling apps – at least, in its current form.

A longtime Day One user found that Apple’s app is extremely basic – so much so that he at first wondered whether he was missing something …