The temperatures are about to soar now that summer is almost upon us — and so are our cooling bills. If you want to keep comfy while saving money on your energy bills, it’s worth investing in Ecobee’s Smart Thermostat Premium now that it’s down to its best price of the year. Normally $249.99, right now you can buy it at Amazon, Best Buy, and directly from Ecobee for $219.99, which is $10 shy of its all-time low.

Ecobee’s smart thermostat is our favorite on the market, one that goes beyond your typical heating and cooling needs. It can adjust your HVAC system based on where you are in your home (if you’re home at all), and even keep your pets safe as you travel thanks to its support for various temperature alerts and reminders — a feature that saved my colleague’s rabbit as recently as last year. Ecobee’s premium thermostat also integrates well with Amazon Alexa, Apple Home, Google Home, SmartThings, and IFTTT, so you don’t have to lock yourself into a specific ecosystem.

What’s even more impressive, though, is how versatile it is. Yes, it’s a smart thermostat, but Ecobee’s step-up model can also function as a decent smart speaker, an indoor air quality monitor, and even a hub for Ecobee’s smart security system. It doesn’t do a bad job, either. It can respond to both Alexa and Siri commands, and though it’s pretty basic as far as air quality monitors go, it can still calculate how clean your air is based on carbon dioxide levels, relative humidity, and VOCs. How many smart thermostats can do that?

Read our Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium review.

A few more deals to kick off the weekend

• Now through May 19th, Nomad is running a buy one get one free promo on all of its iPhone cases when you use offer code BOGOCASE at checkout. The sale extends to leather cases for all four iPhone 15 models, too, some of which are already discounted — including the attractive Modern Leather Folio case for the 15 Pro, which is down to just $48 ($12 off).
• For the second time this month, JLab’s Go Air Sport have fallen to $19.88 ($10 off) at Amazon, matching their all-time low. For the price, JLab’s fitness-focused earbuds have a lot going for them, including decent sound and dedicated hooks for a more secure fit. They also sport an IP55 rating for sweat and dust resistance, providing some extra peace of mind during sweaty workouts.
• Microsoft’s Xbox Wireless Controller is available from Verizon in white for $35.99 ($25 off), which is one of its best prices to date. The gamepad doesn’t have customizable buttons like some pricier models, but it still offers good comfort and features for the price. It supports USB-C and Bluetooth, for example, so you can use it with your Xbox, PC, or mobile device. It features a dedicated share button, too, letting you easily save and share clips with whomever you see fit. Read our guide to the best Xbox controllers.

Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg:
A profile of Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters, who led the company's successful crackdown on password sharing and is now pushing a focus on live programming  —  Now all he's got to figure out is live programming, sports, gaming, pricing and, oh, advertising.  —  In mid-February, Greg Peters …

Maybe best friends DO get shafted as we grow up!

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The GE Profile Smart Indoor Smoker delivers on its promise of bringing smoking indoors, but sadly its smarts didn’t make me a better pitmaster.

My love affair with barbecue has been a slow burn. I’m from England, where BBQ means grilling burgers and steak in the garden on a gas grill. So, when I moved to South Carolina over a decade ago, I had no clue what pulled pork was or that brisket was even a thing. I learned quickly. Smoking meat is akin to religion around these parts, and I suspect many pitmasters would view the latest gadget I’ve been testing as something akin to heresy.

Today, barbecue is one of my favorite dishes — brisket from Lewis Barbecue in Charleston is what I would request for a last meal. However, while I fancy myself as something of an accomplished home chef, I have never had much luck smoking my own meats. So, I was intrigued to test the $999.95 GE Profile Smart Indoor Smoker.

A smart indoor smoker, GE Profile’s gadget promises an easier, quicker way to get that smokey flavor; plus, it’s literally the only option if you don’t have the space or an accommodating climate for using an outdoor smoker. I do have an outdoor smoker, but it rarely gets used. It’s huge, requires a lot of prep, and I feel compelled to smoke a lot of meat to justify using it — plus, as mentioned, I’ve not been very successful making my own barbecue.

Its main tricks are being small enough to fit on your countertop (although it’s not small) and smoking food without smoking up your kitchen. Something called Active Smoke Filtration technology and an airflow system combined with tight gaskets and seals keeps the smoke in the appliance. This worked very well. No smoke escaped the oven at all during cooking, but I still got the lovely aromas. The one thing that did come out of the gadget was heat. My kitchen got very warm while using it.

This is because it’s essentially an oven that adds smoke flavor. Unlike a true outdoor wood-pellet smoker, the Smart Indoor Smoker doesn’t cook your food with smoke. It uses a separate heating element that does most of the hard work while the smoke infuses it with flavor. This significantly cuts down on cooking time and means you use way fewer wood pellets. But I did find meats didn’t always achieve that tenderness you get from smoking alone.

If you want to smoke meat indoors, though, this is a very good way to do it. Purists might scoff, but it’s more efficient than an outdoor smoker. And while I found it hard to fit into my everyday cooking routine — it still can’t cook anything in under an hour — in the two months I tested it, I used it at least twice a week, far more often than I use my outdoor smoker. It’s super simple to use and easy to clean, and its neat Keep Warm feature meant I could put a piece of meat or some sweet potatoes in the smoker in the morning, and it would be ready for dinner time.

Two downsides are the price — $1,000 is a lot for a single-purpose gadget — and the size. Only consider this if you have a lot of countertop space or somewhere you can store it when it’s not in use. It’s short enough to fit under my cabinets, but not with the four inches of clearance the manual recommends. My husband didn’t want it near anything that might catch fire (he’s a firefighter and was deeply suspicious of this device, but it never caused any issues).

It needs to be big so it can fit the popular barbeque meats. GE Appliances says its three removable racks allow for enough space to cook three racks of baby back ribs, a brisket, a whole chicken, up to 40 wings, or a 14-pound pork butt. I did not test these capacity limits — there’s only so much meat one family can eat. But it didn’t struggle to handle anything I put in it, from a whole chicken to two racks of ribs to a sizeable brisket (halved).

The rest of the device is similarly well-designed. It has a nice big digital display that’s easy to read, with a large dial you turn and press to select temperature and smoke level, plus digital buttons for basic functions. There are six presets for brisket, pork ribs, pork butt, chicken wings, chicken breast, and salmon that can be activated from the device or GE Appliance’s Smart HQ app. Then there’s a customize option for setting your own smoke. The app isn’t required, but it offers some tips and tricks and can alert you when the door is left open, when the smoker is preheated, or when the food is almost done, which is handy.

To start a smoke, I selected one of the presets, chose whether to use the built-in temperature probe or a set cook time (annoyingly, you can’t use both), added the pellets, filled the water bucket — where the pellets go to be extinguished — and pressed start on the machine. Once it reached the set temperature, I had to press start again (which I couldn’t do remotely), and the smoking got underway.

The smoker did a great job infusing everything I cooked with a lovely smokey flavor, ranging from mild for shorter cook times to really rich for meats that were slow-cooked over eight to 10 hours. I liked that I could monitor and control the device from the app and use voice commands with Alexa to adjust the temperature.

But its smarts are limited. As is common with smart kitchen devices, I couldn’t remotely start the appliance. I was also disappointed that the smoker couldn’t automatically adjust the cooking temperatures for me. The Traeger smart smoker I have will adjust the temperatures over a long smoke, which takes a lot of the guesswork out of barbecuing. The GE Profile smart smoker required frequent manual intervention for bigger meats like brisket, including rotating the meat since the compartment doesn’t heat evenly.

Sadly, my manual intervention was not successful. While all the meats I cooked had excellent smokey flavor, my two attempts at pork butt and three tries at briskets all came out chewy. Chicken, salmon, and sweet potatoes were all fine, but those more complicated meats I struggled to get right.

To be fair, I struggle with those in the Traeger, too, but the GE Profile smart smoker didn’t make me a better pitmaster. That’s still a skill I guess a machine can’t learn. In retrospect (and based on a similar experience this professional griller had with the smart smoker), it’s likely that using the Keep Warm setting overcooked my meats. It takes a while for the internal temperature to get back down, so I probably needed to adjust the cook time to account for that.

What would be great is if this smart smoker was smart enough to do that for me. Or smart enough to adjust the cooking temperature automatically during a smoke so that the meat comes out tender every time. While this innovative gadget brings something new to the kitchen, right now, its smart features are fairly basic. Smart kitchen gadgets that help you cook are great, but what I want most from the smart kitchen are smart devices that help you be a better cook.

Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Nitish Pahwa / Slate:
How bots monopolizing DeviantArt's promotional and revenue apparatuses and the platform's unwillingness to address the issue are driving artists to abandon it  —  Once a vibrant platform for artists, DeviantArt is now buckling under the weight of bots and greed—and spurning the creative community that made it great.