Microsoft has announced that companies and organizations will have to pay more for the Office productivity suite from July 1, 2026. Exactly how much the price increase will be depends on the variant, but according to CNBC, it is an increase of up to 33 percent. “Over the past year, we’ve released more than 1,100 features in Microsoft 365, Security, Copilot, and Sharepoint. The new features have added value to the packages,” writes Microsoft 365 manager Nicole Herskowitz in a blog post on the company’s website. In other words, the increase is justified by the new features, not least Microsoft’s heavily touted AI tool Copilot. The last time Microsoft raised prices for its business-focused Office packages was in 2022. Microsoft substantially hiked the price of Microsoft 365 consumer plans early in 2025, citing the addition of AI features as justification, shortly after Google did the same for its G-Suite plans. Read...

I did not have “Micron kills its consumer business” on my 2025 bingo card. The company announced the shuttering of its Crucial brand on Wednesday morning in unexpectedly simple, transparent language. The short version: Micron is concentrating on their business customers, where the demand has “surged” for memory and storage—thanks to data centers and their scaling up for AI. (Translation: ‘We can make way more money through enterprise customers, so we will.’) As noted in this same post, this decision ends 29 years of the Crucial brand. I can’t say I’m completely shocked. But I am surprised by what this move partially implies. Namely, enterprise’s hunger for memory and storage lasting for years and years. Welcome to The Full Nerd newsletter—your weekly dose of hardware talk from the enthusiasts at PCWorld. Missed the surprising topics on our YouTube show or latest news from across the web? You’re in the right place.  Want this newsletter to come directly to your inbox? Sign up on our website!  Am I nervous for consumers? Not just yet. But I am wondering if the somber estimate of RAM shortages lasting beyond this decade ends up proving true. I’m also wondering which other companies will back off consumer sales. And maybe more importantly, how such decisions will affect the development cycles and cost of new products. I don’t mean only RAM kits and SSD drives, though I could see any company producing memory or storage modules abandoning direct-to-consumer efforts. No, I mean anything that contains them, too—like graphics cards. For example, rumor has it that Nvidia may start expecting board partners to source their own memory. Individually, those smaller companies have less power to negotiate. That could then influence the pricing and quantities they get, which in turn would result in higher costs for consumers…and likely slower releases and fewer options, too. Similarly, I could see prebuilt PCs become less bleeding edge with their specs, either staying stagnant or even regressing. Sounds bad, right? So why am I not nervous? Let’s say consumers are faced with higher prices and sluggish innovation. Let’s assume too that everyday folk will push off tech upgrades for longer stretches. The market will have to adapt—and I am curious what that would look like. Chromebooks and GeForce Now have expanded what’s possible for people with low budgets or limited hardware. But I don’t want that approach to PCs to become the default.Matt Smith/Foundry To make up for lagging consumer hardware performance, does the shift to cloud computing accelerate faster? Or will software innovations make up for older, less performant consumer PCs and phones? Companies want everyone on a subscription model, but no one can afford all that exist.  I want the second scenario as our future, if we have to endure a hardware apocalypse. How can we make that happen? Consumers can vote with their dollars, and we must as things become bleaker. Local computing needs to remain a fundamental part of consumer technology. Chromebooks and GeForce Now are fantastic options, but the concepts they rely on—always online, fully dependent on remotely administered servers—cannot handle everyone’s needs. Plus, with online security devolving into a bigger and bigger dumpster fire, local computing is a defense against privacy and data leaks. When PCs first became mainstream, a basic model cost $1,500 to $2,500. Since then, consumer demand fueled the accessibility and openness of the PC—it’s a core reason for why I’m here writing these words and why you’re reading them. I don’t want to watch that die. So I’m choosing to believe we consumers can (and must) stave off such a regression. In this episode of The Full Nerd  In this episode of The Full Nerd, Adam Patrick Murray, Alaina Yee, and Will Smith dig into my annual list of the best DIY gaming PCs buildable with Black Friday deals, plus our predictions for CES 2026. As gloomy as we sound, it was a fun discussion—I enjoy sifting through all the deals and then jigsaw-puzzling them into build lists. Really cool to have crossed the 10-year mark with this tradition! As for CES, we have decided not to play a drinking game based on how often “AI” is mentioned in keynotes and press releases. We’re too old to weather the guaranteed massive hangover. I lived my best streamer-beanie life during this episode. (Gordon’s takes on life were so hilarious.)Willis Lai / Foundry Missed our live show? Subscribe now to The Full Nerd Network YouTube channel, and activate notifications. We also answer viewer questions in real-time! Don’t miss out on our NEW shows too—you can catch episodes of Dual Boot Diaries and The Full Nerd: Extra Edition now! And if you need more hardware talk during the rest of the week, come join our Discord community—it’s full of cool, laid-back nerds.  This week’s packed nerd news I came back from our holiday weekend feeling as if I hadn’t heard much news. But plenty still happened behind the noise of AI and its affect on hardware, even if it wasn’t particularly cheery. So on theme with Thanksgiving, I’m grateful to all the wonderfully crazy weirdos who do things like play Minecraft on a receipt printer—I find it great for morale as a hardware enthusiast. And a lover of doing dumb, harmless things for entertainment. That drive is pretty tiny.Mark Hachman / Foundry Long live emoticons: I’m in the minority of folks who still use emoticons, rather than emoji, for conversations. Reading up on emoticon history (as cataloged by former PCWorld contributor Benj Edwards) put a real smile on my face. It was simpler times then. Though humans were still very human. Am I old now? No, it’s the children who are wrong: I identified strongly with this rant from my colleague Mark Hachman, about the physical size of modern external SSDs. (I have too many things to track these days…) So…Year of Linux for real? According to the Zorin OS developers, the latest release of their distro hit an all-time high of 1 million downloads in just five weeks. Steve benchmarked a bunch of Linux games, btw: Our friend Steve Burke & team over at Gamers Nexus dove deep into Linux gaming performance. If you’ve been curious about how a switch off Windows would go, definitely check out this video. Microsoft’s new ugly holiday sweaters are kind of… cute? Except that Zune one. Burn it with fire. Also, it’s a no for me on the Copilot logo mixed in with ’90s nostalgia. And the Xbox one is okay only if you’re a huge brand fanatic. …Okay, yeah, let’s just skip all of these. An expensive slice of Pi: Sadly, RAM pricing affects our favorite budget single-board computer, too. Oh no: I don’t want Google Gemini on my phone. I also rely heavily on Google Assistant to set reminders for me. If this goes beyond just Android Auto, March 2026 may be the month where everyone finds out just how truly bad I am at keeping track of things on my own. ð?? Yep, that’s Minecraft on a receipt printout.smilly (YouTube) / Tom’s Hardware Playing Minecraft on a receipt printer is a thing? Well, it was for a YouTuber who decided to give a go. Very entertaining concept. Almost as good as playing games with bananas or pomegranates. Friends laughed at my living room PC. But who’s laughing now? I mean, really no one, because Netflix killing casting support is just a crappy bit of news. But I do feel vindicated about the little buddy attached to my TV. My kind of ethical hacking: Organizers at Kawaiicon in New Zealand built a system to monitor CO2 levels in the air, as a proxy for viral infection risk. Pretty dang neat bit of hacking. (It’s a hacker conference though, so I guess the digital kind went wild and free, for science and fun.) (Yes, a hacker con, not an anime con.) (No, I did not expect that either.) On the topic of privacy: Proton just released an Excel alternative for its users. In combination with its Word alternative (Proton Docs), it’s now a possible viable alternative to Google’s free webapps. Time to roll up my sleeves and give it a spin, for the sake of reporting. Japan invents ‘human washing machine’: But fails to consider what will not get washed if a human sits in a recliner the whole time while being (gently) hosed down. (Ew.) I expected more from the land that gave us high-tech bidets. Uh oh. Cherry is having big financial problems: To stay afloat, parts of their business will be sold—and production of their well-known switches will shift from Germany to China and Slovakia. Feels like the Cherry we knew will not be the one that survives. RAM is so expensive, Samsung won’t even sell it to Samsung: My colleague Mike Crider has a way with headlines—and this one’s so good I had to include it here, even though everyone’s saturated with memory-related news. It is quite the sign of the times.  I have a dilemma: As mentioned on the show, I have an insufficient quantity of holiday sweaters for our December episodes. Should go with a classy holiday sweater to round out my collection? Or should I lean even harder into the ugly holiday sweater theme? Decisions, decisions. Catch you all next week! ~Alaina This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of Gordon Mah Ung, founder and host of The Full Nerd, and executive editor of hardware at PCWorld. Read...

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We liked pretty much everything about the Nuki Smart Lock, a compact retrofit model that came out earlier this year, except for one thing: the monthly fee to use its Wi-Fi features.  Yep, that’s right: Nuki wanted its customers to pay $5.90 a month for Nuki Premium, a subscription plan that was required to access the Nuki Smart Lock remotely via Wi-Fi. The alternative was either Bluetooth connectivity, meaning you’d need to be physically near the lock to control it, or patching the Thread-enabled lock into your local network via Matter.  That charge for Wi-Fi access always seemed a little nuts, and indeed, Nuki never actually imposed the fee, instead pushing it off until September and then again to December. Now, the Austria-based company tells TechHive it will drop the fee for Nuki Premium entirely, essentially ditching the Wi-Fi paywall.  There is a slight catch, however: While the Nuki Premium fee is gone, Nuki is raising the price for its smart lock to $199, a $40 price hike. It is also raising the price for its Smart Lock + Keypad 2 bundle, which will now cost $269, a $40 increase.  A Nuki spokesperson confirmed that Nuki Premium will be free for both new and existing smart lock users.  “With Nuki Premium, we aimed to create a sustainable business model that, in our opinion, reflects the value we deliver to our users,” said Nuki CEO and co-founder Martin Pansy in a statement. “However, we had to realize that the market isn’t yet ready for that. That’s why we’re returning to a one-time pricing model—without putting key smart features behind a paywall.”  Aside from dumping the Nuki Premium fee, Nuki is introducing a Guarantee Plus, which gives Nuki Smart Lock users a three-year extended warranty for $29.  Subscription fees are common in the smart home security market, but they’re generally reserved for security cameras, including cloud video storage as well as access to AI-powered detection functionality.   Nuki’s plan to charge a subscription fee to access its smart lock via Wi-Fi was unusual—a little too unusual, as it turned out.  This news story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart locks. Read...

The AI boom has claimed another victim: Crucial, Micron’s consumer storage brand that the company says will wind down in 2026 to focus on its enterprise businesses. Micron said that it will close Crucial in February 2026, though it will continue to support Crucial products and provide warranty support. (The company did not say for how long, however.) If this feels familiar, it should. AI hyperscalers have sucked up the available supply of many components that also feature inside the PC; two of those are DRAM and storage, both of which Micron’s Crucial business sold to consumers. Black Friday may have been literally the last chance for deals on DRAM and SSDs, as prices in DRAM are skyrocketing and SSD prices have begun to increase as well. Some PC makers are warning that they will increase prices later in December because of rising component costs. Meanwhile, many of those same components are in high demand by enterprise AI businesses. The logic is simple: Either compete to sell those same products at the lowest margin for consumers, or sell memory and storage at whatever prices well-funded enterprise businesses are willing to pay to build out their own AI deployments. “The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage,” Sumit Sadana, executive vice president and chief business officer at Micron Technology, said in a statement. “Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments. Thanks to a passionate community of consumers, the Crucial brand has become synonymous with technical leadership, quality and reliability of leading-edge memory and storage products. We would like to thank our millions of customers, hundreds of partners and all of the Micron team members who have supported the Crucial journey for the last 29 years.” “By concentrating on core enterprise and commercial segments, Micron aims to improve long-term business performance and create value for strategic customers as well as stakeholders,” Micron added, implying that there is more value in selling to businesses than consumers. Micron will continue to sell Micron-branded products to enterprises, it added. Micron’s decision means that there’s some small, faint hope that retailers might discount the company’s products to clear their own shelves and expand relationships with competitors, such as Kingston. Still, Micron’s decision reflects the reality of the business right now: Selling into consumer PCs simply won’t make as much money for component makers as relationships with hyperscalers will, and we’re all going to pay the price. Read...

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