
Baseus 2-Pack USB-C Charger Blocks Drop to Freebie Territory, It's Like Getting Each One as a Gift
If you're looking to make your life that little bit easier, then you'll want to hop on this deal. You can currently get two Baseus 45W USB-C Charger Blocks for just $21, which means that they're a little over ten bucks each, which is amazing. This is a limited-time deal though, so it's worth noting that we don't know how long it'll go on for.
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These charger blocks are both perfect for homes with a lot of modern devices. We mean things like the iPhone 16, not just things like a working refrigerator. The reason for this is that they're USB-C blocks, and they also come with two USB-C cables, which is always handy if you're looking to set up proper charging stations in different rooms in your home, instead of just having to carry around the one cable you own that works.
The 45W output is huge as well, as it allows you to charge an iPhone 16 to 56% battery in just 30 minutes, or up to 61% for a Galaxy S24. Sometimes you need a lot of power quickly, and the days of leaving your phone on charge overnight are likely behind you thanks to the improvements in charging technology.
These are also 46% smaller than other Baseus chargers, and they're covered in safety features, which means that you don't have to overcharging, overheating, and other overs too. It's essential to be able to trust your chargers, especially given how much phones cost these days. You can use these for more than just phones as well, so you can give power to tablets, laptops, MacBooks and more. The flexibility is huge because these are chargers that'll likely be used almost every day, or several times every day.
This two-pack of chargers would normally cost you $30, which is a very reasonable price to begin with, but the chance to get them for $21 instead is one that you're not going to want to miss out on. So, if you do need new chargers, make sure you're quick on buying these or the deal could end before you're ready.
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Forbes
42 minutes ago
- Forbes
Myth Or Reality: Will AI Replace Computer Programmers?
Have computer programmers innovated themselves out of a job? That's the fear driving theories that AI will remove the need for humans who can write computer code. Today's most sophisticated large language models like GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet are just as fantastically efficient at coding as they are at drafting emails and essays in human languages. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently said he believes AI will soon be writing 90 percent of all code. And Amazon CEO and President Andy Jassy said his company will hire fewer software engineers thanks to AI. So does this mean that learning to program—since the start of the computer age, an accessible gateway to a lucrative career for many—is pointless now? Regardless of the capabilities of today's AI, is there any way that someone setting out to learn software development now can hope to be able to compete with the AI coders of five years in the future? With 30 percent of coders saying they believe that AI will replace them, there's fear and uncertainty in the air, but how does this affect the reality of the situation? Let's take a look: Why Are Programmers Worried They Will Be Replaced? Evidence certainly seems to be growing that generative AI tools can carry out many of the tasks associated with coding and programming. Commonly cited use cases include creating new code, optimizing existing code, detecting bugs, explaining code, maintaining documentation and detecting security vulnerabilities. Although quantitative research is limited at this point, one study found that programmers assisted by Microsoft's AI coding assistant, GitHub Copilot, have been able to complete tasks 55 percent faster than those without. It's frequently speculated that entry-level programming roles are the most likely to be affected because their work is more easily automated. Senior roles such as team leaders and lead engineers, requiring a broader skillset and the ability to deal with strategic challenges, may be less exposed. But there's still the question of where the next generation of human software development leadership will come from if there are no jobs for beginners! According to the Washington Post, computer programmer jobs have declined by almost 30% compared to the previous two years. It's important to note that this isn't reflected in the figures for software development as a whole, which has declined by only around 3%. Jobs with the title of "programmer", however, are more likely to be entry-level roles that can more easily be replaced by automation. This does point towards the possibility of major shifts in the labor landscape. But it also gives anyone who programs computers for a living useful clues about what they need to do to stay relevant. Evolving Roles The truth is that the role of the programmer, in line with just about every other professional role, will change. Routine, low-level tasks such as customizing boilerplate code and checking for coding errors will increasingly be done by machines. But that doesn't mean basic coding skills won't still be important. Even if humans are using AI to create code, it's critical that we can understand it and step in when it makes mistakes or does something dangerous. This shows that humans with coding skills will still be needed to meet the requirement of having a 'human-in-the-loop'. This is essential for safe and ethical AI, even if its use is restricted to very basic tasks. This means entry-level coding jobs don't vanish, but instead transition into roles where the ability to automate routine work and augment our skills with AI becomes the bigger factor in the success or failure of a newbie programmer. Alongside this, entirely new development roles will also emerge, including AI project management, specialists in connecting AI and legacy infrastructure, prompt engineers and model trainers. We're also seeing the emergence of entirely new methods of developing software, using generative AI prompts alone. Recently, this has been named "vibe coding" because of the perceived lack of stress and technical complexity in relation to traditional coding. In truth, these are really just new methodologies that require developers to focus on more strategic tasks like project management and program architecture, rather than the nuts and bolts of getting code to do what we want it to do. The term is sometimes used by traditional coders in a derogatory way to imply that those coding with AI are scared of getting their hands dirty with 'real' coding. However, the practice also serves as an indicator of how software development is likely to change, and what skills coders and engineers should be developing now if they want to remain relevant. A glimpse of one potential future is provided in this quote from Adjrej Karpathy, director of AI at Tesla: 'A large portion of programmers of tomorrow do not maintain complex software repositories, write intricate programs, or analyze their running times. They collect, clean, manipulate, label, analyze and visualize data that feed neural networks.' Myth Or Reality? Software development and programming jobs are not going to disappear, in the short term at least. But the role will change immeasurably, and there are firm clues in place as to the direction of that change. What's the key learning here? I'd say it's that the ability to learn new skills and continuously stay ahead of change is the one skill everyone involved in programming, software engineering and development needs to develop if they don't want to be left behind. Creativity, innovation and real-world problem-solving skills are vital to ensuring AI can be used to improve people's lives. While I believe emerging and future generations of AI technology will deliver wonders, humans will still be at the heart of the process. Partly this is down to the ethical responsibility to ensure there is always human oversight. But also because it will be some time (if ever) before AI has the strategy-focused, people-centric skills needed to replace programmers.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Should You Forget Amazon? Why You Might Want to Buy This Unstoppable Growth Stock Instead
Key Points Amazon remains the king of the e-commerce arena. Its sheer size and heavy-handed management of its online shopping mall, however, isn't necessarily what the marketplace wants anymore. A fast-growing company capitalizing on this shift in consumer preference should easily outgrow its bigger rival over the course of the next several years. 10 stocks we like better than Shopify › There's no denying it. Up more than 300,000% since its 1997 public offering, e-commerce giant Amazon is one of the market's most rewarding investments of this generation. It's still going strong too. Despite it's already massive size, this year's expected top-line growth of more than 9% should reach nearly 10% next year. Not bad. But no company keeps its competitors in-check forever. Young, enterprising rivals will eventually figure out how to penetrate the market with a new and better idea, technology, or solution. Enter Shopify (NASDAQ: SHOP), which has introduced what's arguably the most change the online shopping industry has seen since Amazon laid down its roots nearly 30 years ago. And it's got the growth numbers to prove it. What's Shopify? In simplest terms, Shopify helps businesses of all sizes establish and operate their own e-commerce presence. From websites to digital shopping carts to inventory management to online marketing to payment processing, Shopify is a one-stop shop for any enterprise that wants to be online but doesn't have a clue about where to start. Although the company itself no longer discloses the number, estimates put the current number of Shopify-powered online stores well into the millions. You may have even used its tech without even realizing it. Simply opening an online store doesn't necessarily mean it's successful, of course. How are these operators actually faring? Pretty well, actually. Shopify's technology facilitated the sale of $292.3 billion worth of goods and services last year, up 24% from 2023's top line. For its part, Shopify generated nearly $8.9 billion worth of its own revenue in 2024, reflecting a percentage of those sales, revenue from subscriptions to certain services, fees for processing payments, and the like. Of that, $1.1 billion was turned into operating income. For comparison, Amazon reported a 2024 top line of $638 billion and net income of $59 billion. Clearly, Shopify poses no immediate existential threat to the e-commerce giant. Shopify doesn't have to topple Amazon, however, to be a rewarding investment. It only needs to grow itself, and it's had no problem doing that. It's probably not going to face a growth headwind anytime soon either, given how the online shopping landscape is evolving in a way that plays right into Shopify's unique strengths. Different in all the right ways To fully appreciate Shopify's likely future, you really need to revisit its roots. Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake didn't create Shopify back in 2006 by accident. After launching a snowboarding-equipment online store just a couple of years earlier, the trio realized the tools available to small businesses looking to establish their own e-commerce presence were pretty lousy. That's when the actual business opportunity became crystal clear. The rest, as they say, is history. That being said, in a way, it was actually Amazon's commanding-but-heavy-handed control of North America's online shopping market that set the stage for Shopify's incredible growth. Think about it. Plenty of merchants and online sellers utilize as a selling platform due to its sheer size; industry research outfit Digital Commerce 360 says it facilitates on the order of 40% of North America's online shopping. But, these sellers decreasingly view Amazon as a partner. That's because -- in addition to competing directly with Amazon's own goods -- Amazon is increasingly pitting its third-party sellers against one another by monetizing its sales platform in a new way. That's advertising. For a third-party seller to become and remain truly competitive at it needs to pay to feature its products. Amazon did over $56 billion worth of this high-margin advertising business last year alone, all of it coming out of its sellers' pockets. Then there's the matter of brand authenticity in an environment that craves it. While Amazon's product listings are effective and efficient, they're also cold and impersonal, and unable to tell the underlying company's story. That's not the case with a Shopify-powered store though, where sellers have complete control of the presentation that makes the personal connection which leads to a sale. And it matters. Recent research performed by Forrester indicates that 70% of consumers say they can better relate to an authentic brand and are therefore more likely to buy that brand. This trend is growing too, with younger consumers increasingly requiring this personal connection. In this vein, perhaps the most frustrating aspect of selling through Amazon is that once a seller or merchant has turned a consumer into a paying customer, that person is more of an Amazon customer than the seller's. By using Shopify's technology to sell directly to a consumer, however, a business can build a deeper customer relationship with the individual if for no other reason than it directly garners that person's contact information. The resulting opportunity created by all of these factors is nothing less than amazing. An outlook from Straits Research suggests the worldwide e-commerce platform market is set to grow at an average annualized pace of 12% through 2033, jibing with similar predictions from Mordor Intelligence and Analysts expect even better growth from Shopify at least through 2027. Given its commanding share of this space (a leading 28% share of the U.S. market, according to Oberlo) on top of the entire industry's ongoing expansion, Shopify is likely to maintain its strong growth rate well past that point. Don't sweat the steep valuation too much There are legitimate concerns. Chief among them is valuation. Shopify shares are presently priced at nearly 90 times this year's expected per-share profits of $1.39 and 70 times next year's projected bottom line of $1.78 per share. If nothing else, this steep valuation leaves the stock vulnerable to sizable stumbles. Being priced above the consensus target of $118.79 doesn't exactly help either. This is one of those cases, however, where the story is so compelling and a company's future is so bright that the market is supportive of a rich valuation. Indeed, the fact that Shopify shares are still trading near February's high and still priced well below their 2021 high is an opportunity. This window of opportunity probably won't remain open much longer though, if recently reported economic data is any indication of how the economy's faring. While July's jobs report was disappointing, June's retail sales, June's consumer spending, and Q2's estimated GDP growth rate of 3% were all pretty strong. It matters simply because economic strength supports consumerism, including the online shopping that Shopify helps make happen. Should you invest $1,000 in Shopify right now? Before you buy stock in Shopify, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Shopify wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $624,823!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,064,820!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 1,019% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 178% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of July 29, 2025 James Brumley has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon and Shopify. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Should You Forget Amazon? Why You Might Want to Buy This Unstoppable Growth Stock Instead was originally published by The Motley Fool


CNBC
6 hours ago
- CNBC
Last week's big winners and losers reveal where the stock market is headed
You can learn an awful lot by looking at the list of stocks that made new highs last week — and the list of stocks that hit new lows. Foremost, they can tell you what is and isn't working in this market, especially during earnings season. We saw many groups roll over and only one, the data center, really advance. The combination of Friday's weak employment number , more discriminatory tariffs , and President Donald Trump's anger, brought out sellers after a very long run up. The selling is real and it will take an end to speculative excess and endless tariff news to get us to restart, and I don't see it happening. I hear the usual geniuses talk about how dip-buying is as stupid as ever, even as though it has been fabulous since 1982. I see a landscape that wants to go lower, but I also see earnings that don't justify big declines, just a drift until something great happens. And I don't mean Fed Chair Jerome Powell quitting. Let's start — and end — with some cracks in the Magnificent Seven. The growth in Microsoft's Azure cloud business and the breakout of Meta's multiple revenue streams explain the incredible gains of those two Club names — gains strong enough that they both made the list of new highs. The perceived weakness of Amazon's 17% gain in web services versus the whopping 39% gain in the smaller but all-powerful Azure certainly helped. Amazon put up $30.9 billion in revenues in its AWS cloud unit. That's obviously a ton of business, but it was flat with the previous quarter and only equal to the estimates. Microsoft's cloud acceleration in the quarter was jaw-dropping. The staggering distance between Azure's triumphant growth and Amazon's perceived slowing led to a rally in Microsoft's stock and a sell-off in Amazon shares — losses which triggered immense soul-searching. Was Microsoft real? Or was it inflated by its partnership with OpenAI and its ChatGPT function, which reigns supreme? The burgeoning ChatGPT roster was a big reason why OpenAI was able to raise $8.3 billion this week at a $300 billion valuation. That little-noticed fact should have turned more heads, and that alone could explain some of this week's craziness. After all, design software company Figma only raised $1.2 billion in its initial public offering Thursday, a puny deal, but it still managed to capture everyone's attention. (More on that later.) There was lots of grousing about Microsoft benefitting from the surge in OpenAI business. Some experts liken the partnership to that of Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and predict it too will soon flame out, meaning that huge stream of Open AI revenue could go away. But the amount of fear instilled by AWS critics was behind the huge sell-off in Amazon . As I made my calls to sources Friday, I kept hearing that AWS, built to sell product, isn't built to help create new businesses based on AI. There is some truth here. AWS has fallen behind Microsoft in the cloud. I also believe that it doesn't have enough Nvidia product and has too much of its own chips, which are considered inferior by the fresh-faced AI developers even as it regarded as darned good for DevOps. Amazon is underspending its competitors. That's highly unusual and not good, and it's all that people cared about last week. I wish it didn't matter, but after this quarter Amazon's status as one of the greatest companies on Earth is now going to be considered suspect. The conference call was dispiriting, with CEO Andy Jassy giving a long and unnecessary soul-searching answer to Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak's question about Amazon falling behind in generative. A do-over on that question would help, but there are none. All of the great data about retail meant nothing. Sure, we own Meta and Microsoft, but the stock of Amazon now worries me, even though I would never count these guys out in a gunfight. My work says it will all sort out itself and Amazon will reaccelerate, if not this quarter then this year and those who sell will regret it. Amazon will get the Nvidia's next generation "Rubin" chips, and swallow the damned pride of making its own chips. We just want Amazon to be the fastest and the best. How the company hasn't bought AI start-up Anthropic is downright perplexing, to use the word of the day. Oracle , of course, is a state of the art, Rent The Runway style data center that is now loved, and its build out has been nothing short of amazing. Yes, it rankles me because we owned it and lost it on account of two misses on its way to greatness. GE Vernova and Constellation Energy show up on the highs list because all of the hyperscalers admit to being power-constrained, with Amazon emphasizing the need more than the others. Constellation has nuclear, Vernova has the more practical natural gas turbines, along with nuclear. They can keep going higher, even as the bears consider them meme stocks. They are most decidedly not. Caterpillar reports next week and it will be considered part data center, part reshoring and part Biden infrastructure. All of those themes work until someone decides they don't work well enough. Eaton is a better analogue. DoorDash and Roblox make the list because there are always a couple of companies that amaze and can't be denied. Doordash caught some upgrades. Roblox has accelerating revenue. Both are awful shorts. (Reddit will have a similar trajectory when it eventually gets added to the S & P 500.) S & P Global is a pure play on offerings, something that we can all agree to are about to heat up based on Circle and Figma. And Altria ? Its basic business repels managers even as it enthralls users. I want to break down and buy Altria, which happens to be the greatest stock of all time. No kidding. Even better than Nvidia because: 1) it has been around for 100 years; and 2) the power of compounding. Then there's Figma, the spawn of CoreWeave and Circle. It looks like those who embrace meme stocks and those who love the tightly controlled bitcoin have fallen in love with the IPO process and the lack of float. Coreweave, an almost busted deal, cut the size of its initial public offering (IPO) to $1.5 billion: 37.5 million shares at $40 per share, down from its previous plan of 49 million shares at $47–55 per share. It worked and the stock exploded higher. Figma also had heavy demand and light supply, as only $1.2 billion went to the company and the rest went to selling shareholders. Strange ratio there: 12.4 million shares raised by the company and 24 million shares raised by selling shareholders. I can't blame the bankers for low-balling Circle after Coreweave. But there was no excuse for the underpricing of Figma; even the gents putting up the signs in front of the New York Stock Exchange knew it would be a smash. Anyway, it's too bad because it devolved into rank speculation as the buyers, sensing there could be no more new shares trading for six months, decided to play bitcoin and generate an increase on the second day of trading that was childish. Palantir reports results on Monday, and I am expecting another home run, which will ignite even more speculation. Friday's losers were far more varied and deep. First, can we dispense with the idea that the employment number, as weak as it was, caused the sell-off? The classic recession stocks fared miserably: Procter & Gamble , Bristol Myers , Colgate , McCormick all landed on the new-low list. (Bristol was good, but without a hit in Cobenfy, its drug to treat schizophrenia , we will never make money in it.) These stocks would be on the list of new highs if a recession was the real story. Plus, with bonds soaring and yields plunging, you would think someone would want that P & G yield. You also would have thought that Baxter would be on the new highs list in a recession, but all I can say is have no idea what's happening there. But it isn't good. If you cut your dividend (as in the case of Dow ) or if the dividend is doubted (think UPS ), you end up on the list of new lows. Both of those stocks deserve that fate. Old Dominion is a legit recession story if you want to frame it that way. Carmax , too, except the incredible move in Carvana makes that reasoning suspect. The food group is just so bad: General Mills and Conagra pop up; the latter lives on this low list. Then there are a couple of oddballs. Accenture had been on a multiyear consulting tear. That's over. It didn't take long for Otis after myriad good quarters to land on this ignoble list. Two yesteryear faves, Chipotle and Lululemon , are a reminder that this market has little enthusiasm for high-multiple disappointments. Both need huge upside surprises to change their direction. I don't see any coming. And then there's UnitedHealth , the much beloved UnitedHealth. What a death rattle feel for that Dow stock. It's a wide and varied list for the new lows. But it's not the kind of list you get when people think there is a recession coming soon. Instead, it says there is considerable rot underneath that we might not have known otherwise when we look at all of the deals and IPOs and SPACs that are being priced. Although the latter spells trouble, too — way too speculative. So where do I come out? We just had a huge move that was decapitated by Trump's tariff sword once again. To me, it was a depressing week because the speculation emanating from Figma, the endless bitcoin derivatives, and the Palantirs and next Palantirs are signs that nothing good is about to happen. We need Figma and Ciricle to be crushed if we are going to go anywhere. We need the fascination with stocks as crypto champs to die down. We need a return to the financials as leaders and techs as consolidators. Yes, we need to see consolidation in tech (and many other industries) to get things back on track. There is no sign of a pulse at the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission, so the time is right. Which leads me back to the Magnificent Seven and Apple . The quarter was good . Double-digit growth in revenue and earnings per share. Most encouraging: When I spoke to CEO Tim Cook, the need to put big deals on the radar screen was clear. The idea of something major in a finance vertical, now that the Goldman Sachs credit card deal is unraveling, is downright exciting. But the fact that this stock went down last week? Downright depressing. How bad? If it goes down big Monday, we're going to have to some major resetting of what works around here and it won't be good. (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer's Charitable Trust.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust's portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.