logo
Best Buy, Ikea test new kitchen concept in U.S. stores

Best Buy, Ikea test new kitchen concept in U.S. stores

CNBC31-07-2025
Best Buy said Thursday it will test mini-showrooms in some of its stores featuring Ikea products to show off kitchen design elements from the home retailer beside home appliances from the electronics store.
Beginning this fall, the program will debut in 10 Best Buy stores across Florida and Texas. Each store will feature a 1,000-square-foot Ikea "shop-in-shop" showcasing styled kitchens and laundry rooms.
"By bringing together our home furnishing expertise, products, and services with Best Buy's leadership in appliances and technology, we're creating a one-stop destination where customers can design their dream kitchen, storage solutions or laundry space with ease," Rob Olson, chief operation officer of Ikea U.S. said in a Thursday press release.
The companies did not disclose financial aspects of the partnership.
IKEA is the Swedish flat-pack furniture giant, while Best Buy is one of the United States' top consumer electronic stores.
The partnership comes as Best Buy looks for new ways to attract shoppers.
The company has struggled lately with rising tariff pressures, a soft demand in appliances, and a sluggish housing market. Best Buy said this spring that it had increased prices on some items due to tariffs.
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

JBL's 2.1-Channel Soundbar and Subwoofer Bundle Is Now Priced Lower Than Its Live Pro 2 Earbuds
JBL's 2.1-Channel Soundbar and Subwoofer Bundle Is Now Priced Lower Than Its Live Pro 2 Earbuds

Gizmodo

timean hour ago

  • Gizmodo

JBL's 2.1-Channel Soundbar and Subwoofer Bundle Is Now Priced Lower Than Its Live Pro 2 Earbuds

Movies rule. This has been such a great summer for film, between Ryan Coogler's Sinners, James Gunn's Superman, Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later, and Zach Cregger's Weapons. If you didn't catch them in theaters, they'll soon be on home video. Heck, a couple already are. And if you want to get as close as you can to the cinema experience these movies have to offer, you're not going to achieve that with a good TV alone. You're going to need solid sound. This soundbar and subwoofer combo from JBL can bring your home audio to the next level and it won't cost you too much either. The JBL Cinema SB170 usually goes for $250. However, Best Buy has it discounted down by $100. That means you'll only be paying $150 to bring the theater experience of these summer blockbusters to your home. See at Best Buy With a soundbar and subwoofer like these JBL is offering, you can expect extraordinary sound with a bss that packs a punch. This system provides a massive 220W of power. with four full range drivers. The subwoofer is totally wireless so you don't need to worry about solving the puzzle of running cables from your TV to wherever you need to place it. The JBL Cinema SB170 2.1-channel soundbar and subwoofer aren't just for watching stuff on TV. The speakers support Bluetooth so you can actually connect your smartphone or other devices to the system. Stream music or tune into your favorite podcast from the comfort of your couch using the same speakers you use for TV. A massive pet peeve of mine when it comes to watching films or shows on a TV is when the sound is mixed poorly. We all know the experience. You have character that sound like they're speaking in a whisper followed by explosive action sequences that wake your neighbors both above and below you. If you too are sick of turning on the closed captioning when you don't want it, you'd be interested in the Voice sound mode made. Just press the dedicated button on the remote control and it will enhance voice clarity specifically while keeping the volume of all other sound at a comfortable level. It feels like magic. For a limited time, you can pick up the JBL Cinema SB170 2.1-channel soundbar and subwoofer for a steep discount. Save $100 for a limited time when you get them for just $150 at Best Buy. See at Best Buy

'Inference whales' are breaching AI coding startup business models
'Inference whales' are breaching AI coding startup business models

Business Insider

timean hour ago

  • Business Insider

'Inference whales' are breaching AI coding startup business models

The AI coding sector has a problem. Heavy users of AI coding services have been racking up huge costs, forcing some leading startups to overhaul their pricing structures and offerings to avoid big losses. "Inference whales," as some in the business call these customers, are making industry insiders question whether AI products that are just "reselling inference" can survive long-term. Inference refers to how AI models are run. Newer reasoning models break user requests down into multiple steps, which increases inference costs. When applied to AI coding services, where developers set automated agents to longer-term tasks, expenses can soar quickly. This is a problem for AI coding services because they're often offered through monthly subscription plans. Many plans allow unlimited use for a fixed monthly fee, and a few users have taken advantage by bombarding the services with huge projects. These startups must still pay for the underlying AI models, so they're getting squeezed between a relatively fixed revenue stream and rapidly rising backend costs. "If you're purely reselling AI inference, your business could be very fragile and vulnerable, because the winds can shift violently," said Eric Simons, CEO of StackBlitz, and startup that offers a popular AI coding service called Claude Code whales Anthropic offered its popular Claude Code service through a $200 a month unlimited plan earlier this year. Some subscribers went berserk, using thousands of dollars' worth of AI inference over a few weeks or months. Someone even built a website to rank these AI coding whales. The Claude Code Leaderboard lists one developer at the top who's burned through almost 11 billion tokens. Tokens are how AI models break queries down into digestible data chunks. Industry pricing is based on how many tokens are processed. That top-ranked developer's token usage costs almost $35,000, according to this leaderboard. That compares to the $200 a month he's been charged. Even if that's over a whole year, Anthropic would be getting about $2,400, while incurring much higher inference costs. Anthropic is changing its pricing That's clearly unsustainable, so Anthropic plans to change its pricing. The $200 a month plan will stay, but the startup will introduce weekly rate limits, starting August 28. If users blow through these new weekly rate limits, they will have to buy additional capacity. "We've identified extreme usage by a small number of customers that impacts capacity for our broader community," an Anthropic spokesperson told Business Insider. The startup said it's also seen "policy violations," such as account sharing and reselling access. "We're committed to supporting advanced use cases long-term, but need to ensure consistent performance for all developers in the meantime," the Anthropic spokesperson added. A Swedish whale I tracked down one of the whales near the top of the Claude Code Leaderboard. Albert Örwall, a developer based in Sweden, said he's been using the $200 a month Claude Code subscription to build his own vibe-coding platform, along with some open-source agentic tools. "I was probably running 3 to 4 fairly long-running tasks in parallel constantly while I was working, and that's when it really took off," he said of his Claude Code usage. Even excluding these big projects, Örwall said his regular workflow in Claude Code likely racks up inference costs of $500 per day, under a subscription that costs only $200 a month. "So I'm guessing my workflow might not be sustainable for Anthropic," he added. Cursor responded, too When Anthropic's new pricing kicks in, Örwall said he'll keep the $200 a month subscription for a while to get a feel for what the weekly limits actually mean for his budget. "I'll avoid paying anything beyond the $200 subscription," he said, noting that he can change how he writes code and develops projects to avoid breaching the new rate limits. "The reason I originally switched from Cursor to Claude Code was because usage-based pricing became too expensive in Cursor," Örwall added. Cursor is another popular AI coding service, which often uses Anthropic's AI models as the underlying intelligence powering its product. Cursor recently switched its $20 a month Pro plan from unlimited requests to a tiered system with usage-based pricing for "fast" requests, meaning users are charged extra for exceeding a certain limit. This change, coupled with a lack of clear communication, caused confusion and frustration among some users who expected unlimited usage. Cursor announced the initial change in mid-June. Then it updated with more details about 2 weeks later, and then again in early July. "New models can spend more tokens per request on longer-horizon tasks," the startup wrote in a blog post, apologizing for surprising users with unexpected new bills. "Though most users' costs have stayed fairly constant, the hardest requests cost an order of magnitude more than simple ones." Inference costs aren't falling The assumption across the industry has been that inference costs will drop dramatically, making these AI coding services more financially viable. However, in practice, this hasn't happened thus far. Instead, when a new top AI model comes out, all the AI coding services integrate it — along with its higher prices. "This is the first faulty pillar of the 'costs will drop' strategy," Ethan Ding, CEO of startup TextQL, wrote in a recent blog. "Demand exists for 'the best language model,' period. And the best model always costs about the same, because that's what the edge of inference costs today." Developers and other AI users usually want the best, not last month's leading intelligence. "Nobody opens Claude and thinks, 'you know what? let me use the shitty version to save my boss some money.' We're cognitively greedy creatures," Ding wrote. "We want the best brain we can get." Even when inference costs do fall, the rise of agentic AI workflows means that developers set up longer, automated projects that generate a lot more tokens. If a project uses 100 million tokens, rather than 1 million, the initiative's cost remains high, even if per-token prices may have fallen. "A $20/month subscription cannot even support a user making a single $1 deep research run a day," Ding said. "But that's exactly what we're racing toward. Every improvement in model capability is an improvement in how much compute they can meaningfully consume." "There's no way to offer unlimited usage in this new world under any subscription model," he added. "The math has fundamentally broken."

This ASUS gaming laptop with a great GPU is on sale from Best Buy at $160 off
This ASUS gaming laptop with a great GPU is on sale from Best Buy at $160 off

Digital Trends

time2 hours ago

  • Digital Trends

This ASUS gaming laptop with a great GPU is on sale from Best Buy at $160 off

Not all gaming laptop deals will get you a device that will meet the strict requirements of gamers. For a machine that won't let you down, you should consider the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16. Its configuration with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card is on sale from Best Buy for $1,440, for savings of $160 on its original price of $1,600. This offer is part of a clearance sale, so we're not sure how much longer stocks will last. You need to hurry in completing your transaction, as the bargain may end at any moment! Why you should buy the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 gaming laptop The Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 scored a solid 4 stars out of 5 stars in our review, and it's an outstanding device for gamers when paired with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070, which is our choice for laptops among the best graphics cards. Along with the 13th-generation Intel Core i7 processor and 16GB of RAM — which is the best place to start for gaming, according to our guide on how much RAM do you need — you'll be getting a gaming laptop that doesn't only run the best PC games without any issues, but can also serve as a productivity tool whenever you need it. The 16-inch screen of the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 features Full HD resolution and a 165Hz refresh rate, sacrificing a bit of portability for sharp details and smooth gameplay. It's still not bulky though, as its thickness is just 0.78 of an inch. The gaming laptop ships with Windows 11 Home, pre-loaded in its 512GB SSD, so that you can start downloading and installing your favorite titles right after you unbox the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16. Gamers who are looking for their next gaming laptop can't go wrong with the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16, especially if you can get it at its lowered price from Best Buy's clearance sale. You'll only have to pay $1,440 for its configuration with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card, for a $160 discount on its sticker price of $1,600. The savings are an excellent bonus for the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 gaming laptop, so you should push forward with your purchase quickly to make sure that you don't miss out.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store