The smart glasses market is growing, with more choice of wearable devices. Read...

It’s time to get a laptop that won’t disappoint you day in and day out. The Acer Swift 16 AI is a solid pick for that, with a good configuration and an even better price now that it’s on sale! Best Buy is currently selling it with a massive $470 discount, dropping it down to just $779.99. That’s a crazy, crazy price for a laptop of this caliber. At its core, it has a super-speedy Intel Core Ultra 7 256V CPU, which qualifies it as a Copilot+ PC that’s capable of Windows AI features and can handle pretty much all but the most demanding of tasks. Rounded out with 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM (pretty decent given the current RAM shortage that’s ruining everything) and a spacious 1TB SSD, this laptop won’t disappoint. You’ll enjoy responsive usage and fast system starts, app launches, and file transfers all around. But that’s not all. Treat your eyes to the beautiful 16-inch 2880×1800 (3K) screen with vibrant OLED panel, delivering the blackest blacks and vivid contrast that’ll blow you away whether you’re gaming or watching Netflix. The 120Hz refresh rate is adequate for gaming, too, and the 340 nits of brightness is enough as long as you aren’t using the laptop out in the sun. With Intel Arc 140V graphics, it’s actually not bad for casual gaming (and it can even do some ray tracing). Other notable bits include 19.5 hours of stated battery life (expect about half that in real-world usage) and a surprising amount of connectivity via double Thunderbolt 4, double USB-A, HDMI 2.1, and an audio jack. It also has a 1440p webcam (you don’t often see that much resolution in laptop webcams) with infrared, meaning it can also do Windows Hello facial recognition for quick and secure logins. You’d normally have to pay well over a grand for a laptop like this. It’s suitable for business, productivity, gaming, or just as an everyday daily driver for leisure. At this price, you’d be crazy to skip past it. But if you happen to miss it, see our daily updated roundup of the best laptop deals to find another one worth jumping on. Get the Acer Swift 16 AI with Core Ultra 7 and 16GB RAM for $470 offBuy now at Best Buy Read...

Oracle Red Bull Racing extends its AI-heavy Oracle title partnership to power strategy, simulations and hybrid engine work for F1`s 2026 era. Read...

IT leaders are racing to redesign AI operations so sovereignty, data residency and reliability can coexist under tightening global rules. Read...

During the early days of the iPad, Apple CEO Steve Jobs would offer the front rows at press conferences to any reporters who would take notes on an iPad. The same ornery son-of-a-gun who proclaimed that people “were holding it [the iPhone] wrong,” warned that laptop touchscreens would give you “gorilla arms” if you used them too long. Jobs was a jerk. Jobs could be right, of course. But in this, he famously wasn’t. And Windows users will have a chance to sit back and watch as Apple plays catchup once again: Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports, via Macworld, that Apple will release MacBooks with touchscreens in an apparent admission that Windows laptops were right all along. The weird thing is that Apple was so instrumental in designing the touch interface. The iPad used it; the iPhone did, too. A bit of research shows that Apple was credited with implementing the first true touchpad into 1994’s PowerBook, and it implemented haptic feedback into both the Apple Watch and the early iPhones. On the surface, there’s really no reason why Apple simply shouldn’t have extended touch into its MacBook laptops, as well. But Jobs adopted the view that after a short time, using a “vertical” touchscreen surface causes your hands to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, “your arm wants to fall off.” I was in the audience when Jobs gave special privileges to iPad users, and I vaguely recall Jobs lecturing Josh Topolsky on the correct way to hold his iPhone to avoid Antennagate. But anyone who has owned a laptop since the launch of the Microsoft Surface (and iPhone) in 2007 understands that touchscreens aren’t used for prolonged periods of time. Like any other form of input, they are what Microsoft referred to as a modalities: touch, type, mouse, pen, voice, and so on. None of the ways in which I interact with my PC are dominant, save perhaps typing. I use the others where it makes sense, and everyone else does too. Microsoft’s Bill Buxton, who worked at Microsoft Research, penned a look at multitouch input in 2007. “One of my primary axioms is: Everything is best for something and worst for something else,” he wrote. “The trick is knowing what is what, for what, when, for whom, where, and most importantly, why,” he added. “Those who try the replace the mouse play a fool’s game. The mouse is great for many things. Just not everything. The challenge with new input is to find devices that work together, simultaneously with the mouse (such as in the other hand), or things that are strong where the mouse is weak, thereby complementing it.” For me, that means a finger, and touch. I use touch all the time, but mainly for one specific purpose: When I connect multiple monitors to a dock, it often doesn’t recognize the orientation until I can touch my laptop’s display and start organizing them. I’ll occasionally use touch to scroll down a web page on my laptop, or move a slider back and forth. That’s about it. But I absolutely notice when a laptop (typically one used for gaming) lacks this functionality, and I’m usually left on pause for a second or two while my reactions adjust. Steve Jobs was a man who literally expected reporters to type with 10 fingers on a sheet of glass, the equivalent of running your daily jog barefoot on pavement, when running shoes existed. The man simply couldn’t envision a world where people might interact with a laptop touchscreen for a moment or two, but spend hours tapping and scrolling on a similar sheet of glass, held horizontally. So if Apple does debut a MacBook with a touchscreen, is it revolutionary? God, I hope not. We’ve gone down that road so many times I’m not sure if I want to yawn or vomit. My guess is that they’ll “reinvent” touchscreens for the modern era, or something. If and when Apple debuts a touchscreen MacBook, I’m not sure I’ll really care. It’s not really schadenfreude, either, to watch as a company stumbles across the finish line decades later. But imagine if Jobs had simply accepted reality two decades ago, rather than stubbornly ignore the obvious. Read...

Meta says it will help parents support their children - but safety campaigners have accused them of `passing the buck`. Read...

I’m in the minority when it comes to AI summaries. I hate them. I’ll save the reasons for another time—I’m here to share how to see your search results faster. (In this, I know I’m not alone.) It takes just a quick addition to every search query. Just type: -ai This instruction tells Google to remove the AI summary. It’s called a search operator, which you may already be familiar with as a concept. Typically, the minus sign tells the engine to ignore the phrase or term after it. For Google, it’ll block the entire AI summary. On occasion, Google will ignore this request, but most of the time I’m able to avoid delayed results and extra scrolling by adding this three-character string to the end of my searches. If you like having this extra control over your searches, memorizing a handful of operators can supercharge your results. For example, adding site:url to a query will hunt through just that one website for your search term. (I sometimes use this trick to find older PCWorld articles I want to reference in my writing.) You can look at a sample list of operators via Google’s user help pages—I recommend memorizing the double-quotes, minus sign, filetype, and date ranges as a starter set. It’s far faster to type those than use a mouse to set search parameters! Read...

AI-fuelled hackers can now spread across corporate networks in as little as four minutes, outpacing human defenders by hours. Read...

AI assistants are reshaping B2B discovery, forcing CIOs, CTOs and CMOs to rebuild content for zero-click, conversational buying journeys. Read...

Notion rolls out Custom Agents, AI teammates that automate recurring workflows for Business and Enterprise users in a public beta launch. Read...