When Apple unveiled its upcoming software updates at WWDC 2026 on June 8, we didn't really get much on macOS 27 — aside from an animated skit about how the Golden Gate name was chosen. But having given the operating system a trial run, I can report that there is in fact a lot to look forward to.

It's worth emphasizing that installing the developer beta is risky: it's no exaggeration to say it can potentially brick your Mac, or at least some of its apps. Unless you're sure about this, you should wait for the public beta in July or the full release of the software sometime in the fall (for the northern hemisphere).

Just because I haven't come across any problems in my testing doesn't mean it'll be the same for you, but I can tell you that I'm impressed by what I've experienced so far. This is still very much a work in progress from Apple of course, so don't treat this as a review — features may come and go before it's pushed out to everyone.

As for compatibility, macOS 27 Golden Gate leaves Intel Macs behind. You'll only be able to install and run this if you're on an Apple Silicon machine. Here are my three favorite things about it so far.

1. It's smooth and fast

Apple has promised performance upgrades with macOS 27 — though it's been a little vague on the details — and while I haven't run any benchmarks, I'd say my MacBook has felt noticeably faster and snappier. Perhaps Apple is taking advantage of not having to take Intel chips into consideration any more.

Other users have noticed the speed increases too, and it seems that high performance tasks are particularly benefitting from this. Even though I don't do much beyond writing, web browsing, and photo editing, I've seen less in the way of lag and sluggishness than I did before, which bodes well.

These performance gains should hopefully translate into battery life improvements as well, though I haven't noticed any real change in terms of time between charges. Bear in mind that there are still months of development to go on macOS 27 Golden Gate, so it's likely to get better over time (this is still only the developer beta, after all).

2. Siri AI is a genuine upgrade

I have to mention Siri AI, which is now up and running on my MacBook. With a little bit of help from Google and Gemini, it feels like Siri is now genuinely useful on the desktop: answers are accurate and informed, relevant, and personalized to you.

One of the most helpful upgrades is the way that Visual Intelligence now works on macOS 27. You can highlight anything on screen (Shift+Cmd+Space is the shortcut you want), and then ask Siri something about it — and the assistant then uses clues about what's on screen and image recognition to serve up an answer.

It's the sort of feature that should've been in Apple Intelligence from the beginning, but at least it's here now. In addition, the dedicated Siri app and the integration with Spotlight works really well too, making the AI more accessible and more versatile.

3. The interface tweaks

There are numerous interface tweaks here that aren't major on their own, but which all add up to make a significant difference. Even something as simple as having an overflow button for menu bar icons is really effective — it means if you've got a lot of them, they won't start disappearing behind the notch.

The Liquid Glass slider has been given a lot of attention, and it works as advertised. You can find it in the Appearance section of System Settings, and I've moved it all the way to the right — it's as little transparency as possible for me, please. I'm actually hoping Apple gives us more control over this in the final release.

As we've written about before, the icons that were plastered all over app menus are gone as well, leaving behind an interface that suddenly seems more elegant and clean. This isn't a user interface revamp by any means, but it feels as though Apple's engineers have thought long and hard about what changes to make.

• Windows 10 is getting extended support through to October 2027
• That's an extra year on the original deadline, although Microsoft didn't formally announce the extension
• It gives those who were worrying about what to do next with their Windows 10 PC (especially if it wasn't compatible with Windows 11) some welcome room to breathe

Microsoft has given consumers another year of extended support for Windows 10 without any formal announcement of this move.

Windows Latest spotted that Microsoft changed its info on Windows 10's Extended Security Updates (ESU) scheme to indicate that support now runs through to next October.

The section about the deadline now reads: "Windows 10 support has ended. You can enroll in ESU any time until the program ends on October 12, 2027. If you're already enrolled, your coverage will automatically continue through that date — no action needed."

So, as noted, this means that if you're signed up for the ESU, you will continue to get updates not for another four months — as the original deadline for support ending was October 2026 — but for 16 months. It's still possible to sign up for the ESU program if you haven't yet done so, too.

Microsoft confirmed to Windows Latest that this isn't a mistake in the text, and the ESU does indeed now run for another year.

Analysis: a commendable move from Microsoft – but a jaded reaction

I still run Windows 10 on my main PC (Windows 11 is on my secondary PC), and I was about to fire up the upgrade most likely next month, or perhaps August — but soon, anyway. This gives me, and no doubt plenty of others, some extra breathing room. A lot of it, actually, which is very welcome.

I may still upgrade to Windows 11 this year, but given my procrastinatory ways, I might well wait until next year now. Especially seeing as Microsoft is busy fixing Windows 11 in all sorts of ways currently, so it kind of makes sense to wait until all that work is done anyway.

Clearly enough, this is a positive move for consumers, and I'm pleased to see it. I've argued before that a year of extended support wasn't enough — considering the hardware requirements rule out many PCs from upgrading to Windows 11 — and that Microsoft should give consumers a second year. (Especially given all the e-waste issues raised around Windows 10's end of the line in the past).

With that second year now confirmed, I'm rather surprised that Microsoft doesn't appear to have announced this anywhere, and just made the change to its website info quietly in the background.

Perhaps the idea is to keep it on the down-low, so as not to put off any imminent upgraders? At any rate, much of the reaction to this decision is pretty muted. One of the most upvoted comments on this Reddit thread is: "So are they finally admitting that Windows 11 isn't good enough almost 5 years later?"

You don't have to look far to find other jaded commentary like: "The moment the support expires I'll go with Linux."

Also, some folks have taken the line that it's not a surprise to see Microsoft extend support, and indeed that it always does this. And yes, that's true for businesses, where the company may support an outgoing Windows version for multiple years. But this isn't the case for consumers; remember Windows 10 is the first time Microsoft has ever offered extended support outside of the business world.

As a reminder, the support is free (as long as you're willing to sync your PC settings to OneDrive, which isn't that big a deal, at least not in my opinion), or you can pay $30. If you've already signed up, there's no extra charge for the second year, as you might hope.

As observed by a Redditor above, it's almost five years since Windows 11 was launched — and the OS was formally announced half a decade ago this week, in fact. I just wrote about that at length, and how I'm more optimistic about the future of Windows 11 at this point than I've ever been. Still, as mentioned, I won't be rushing to upgrade just yet on my primary computer, but I'll put the trigger on that update eventually.

• Only 31% of companies say they have accurate AI software visibility – 36% for overall IT visibility
• AI is complex to track because it's a layer that sits across existing categories
• IT leaders are also under pressure to prove AI ROI

New data revealed in Flexera's State of ITAM report has revealed that only 31% of companies have accurate visibility into their AI software – an area of IT spend that continues to grow as new use cases emerge and models develop.

This comes as nearly three in five (59%) reveal wasted AI spend has increased over the past year, with increasingly complex software stacks being blamed for an overall drop in visibility.

Flexera found that complete visibility across IT assets has fallen to 36% – only slightly ahead of AI visibility – thanks to complex and intertwined SaaS, public cloud and hybrid environments.

IT stack visibility is getting worse, not better

According to the report, ITAM professionals now spend more of their time optimizing software (32%), but audit response (22%) also takes up a considerable amount of their time.

As for AI, Flexera believes it's difficult to track because it doesn't occupy its own category. Instead, models, agents and platforms sit across multiple systems as an additional layer.

"What we’re seeing is a familiar pattern of rapid adoption followed by a scramble for visibility and control, as spend surges," Chief Product Officer Becky Trevino wrote.

But ironically, Flexera also found that AI promises to automate some ITAM work, including processing software contracts, purchase orders, licences and renewals.

With IT professionals under more pressure to prove AI ROI, the next steps move beyond identifying which AI tools are being used to consider how they're being used, how much they cost and what data they access.

Meta just announced some stunning new smart glasses, one pair of which has been co-designed by the Kylie Jenner. The specs, as always designed alongside Ray-Ban parent company EssilorLuxottica, will start at $299 / £269 / AU$599, offer much the same in terms of features as the second-generation Ray-Ban Metas, with improvements in some places, such as the addition of adjustable nose pieces, plus a lot of design and color choices.

They're available already, perhaps in efforts to beat Apple's suspected smart spec play later this year, but if you want AR experiences or the safe pair of hands the Ray-Ban frames offer design-wise, you might be better off shopping around.

Luckily, there are a few alternatives which may well be better for your needs currently on offer, some as part of the Amazon Prime Day deals, plus a few others from regional retailers like Best Buy in the US and Currys in the UK.

• Browse the full Amazon Prime Day sale

For me, personally, the deal-breaker is always style. A lot of smart glasses are more masculine in form, and few can hold their own against my bangs when it comes to filming, meaning a lot of my best vacation shots have been ruined by errant hair. That's why the new wider-frame Meta Starfire Kylie Edition frames have captured my heart so much, but if you're not bothered by that, you can score some of the best smart glasses we've tested for less right now. Read on for my top picks.

Today's best smart glasses deals (US)

Today's best smart glasses deals (UK)

I'd definitely spotlight the RayNeo Air 4 Pro deals as the best of the bunch. My colleague Hamish Hector is somewhat of a smart spec aficionado, and he raves about the RayNeo Air 4 Pro; you can watch below or read his full 4.5-star review to learn more about why.

More Prime Day deals in the US

• Amazon Devices: Fire Sticks & Echo from $18
• Amazon Haul: viral gadgets, tech & appliances from $1.99
• Apple: MacBooks, AirPods & AirTags from $29
• Beauty: 50% off toothbrushes & hair tools
• Cheap TVs: smart TVs from $69.99
• Garden: tools, mowers, planters from $24.99
• Headphones: 50% off Beats, Bose & Samsung
• Laptops: Apple, HP & Dell from $199
• Mattresses: Sealy, Serta & more from $186
• Patio: outdoor furniture, rugs & decor from $19.99
• Sports: 50% off fitness gear, treadmills & clothing
• Vacuums: Dyson, Shark & Bissell from $34

More Prime Day deals in the UK

• Amazon Prime: sign up for a 30-day free trial
• Amazon Devices: Fire TV, Ring & Blink from £24.99
• Amazon Haul: up to 30% off
• Apple: AirPods Pro 3 for a record-low price
• Appliances: up to 45% off Ninja, Tefal & Sage
• Beauty: up to 60% off Philips & Oral-B
• Essentials: household goods from under £10
• Fashion: up to 50% off
• Headphones: up to 50% off
• Laptops: from £149.99
• Tablets: Samsung & Lenovo from £125
• Toys: up to 25% off Lego and Tonies
• TVs: from £129.99
• Vacuums: up to 40% off Eufy & Roborock
• Wearables: Garmin & Huawei from £36.99

The Samsung Galaxy XR headset is now available for preorder ahead of its July 8 launch in the UK, and while you can’t pick it up at Amazon, that doesn’t mean you can't snag a Prime Day-like deal or two.

Best of all, you won’t need to be a Prime or other subscription service member; Samsung’s discounts are available to every shopper through its online store — you’ll just need to bundle a few things with your purchase, or sign up to PayPal (if you haven’t already) and check out using that as your payment method.

• Browse the full Amazon Prime Day sale

For that PayPal offer, you’ll get £100 off using the code PAYPALXR at Samsung's online store. That’s a serious saving off the £1,699 asking price, but you only have until July 7 to take advantage of this offer.

Plus, if you’re looking to upgrade your Samsung tech, or dive deeper into its ecosystem, it has deals that will save you 10% on Galaxy smartphones, a Galaxy Watch, and Galaxy Buds.

Today's best Samsung Galaxy XR deals

After spending a week with the Samsung Galaxy XR headset, Lance Ulanoff called it “an impressive multimodal AI spatial computer,” though Android XR and the overall experience didn’t hold a candle to visionOS and the Apple Vision Pro, especially the M5 version.

He also noted that, at launch, Gemini felt less deeply integrated as he had originally imagined, and the lack of precision with controls dulled the ‘wow’ factor.

At the same time, the Galaxy XR headset is half the price of the Vision Pro, so technical downgrades are to be expected, and as Google and Samsung iterate on the software, you could find the Samsung Galaxy XR headset seriously ups its game — especially as more apps get XR support.

It delivers some impressive OLED visuals despite costing less, and can integrate with the full G Suite of apps for some spatial productivity. So, if you want something that balances work and play, with great performance, at a more affordable price point, and don’t mind missing out on the Quest gaming library, you’ll struggle to find something better than Samsung’s XR machine.

More Prime Day deals in the UK

• Amazon Prime: get a 30-day free trial
• Amazon Devices: Fire, Ring & Blink from £13.99
• Amazon Haul: up to 30% off
• Apple: up to 33% off AirPods & Apple Watch
• Appliances: up to 45% off Ninja & Tefal
• Beauty: up to 60% off Philips & Oral-B
• Essentials: household goods from £5
• Fans: from £20
• Fashion: up to 50% off
• Gaming: £90 off PlayStation 5
• Headphones: up to 50% off Beats & Sony
• Laptops: from £149
• Tablets: Samsung & Lenovo from £79.99
• Toys: up to 25% off Lego and Tonies
• TVs: from £129.99
• Vacuums: up to 40% off Shark & Roborock
• Wearables: up to 30% off Garmin & Oura

Can you believe that it's now half a decade since Windows 11 was revealed? The operating system was first announced by Microsoft at a press event on June 24 back in 2021 (although the OS was leaked just before that, in typical fashion).

Five years ago today we were told that Windows 11 was inbound as a free upgrade for all Windows 10 users — but there was no stampede to adopt it, that's for sure (and the hardware requirements certainly didn't help the cause).

It wasn't until July 2025 that Windows 11 overtook Windows 10 as the dominant version of Microsoft's desktop OS according to Statcounter's figures, but it now holds a comfortable majority of over 70% of that market. As it should do, considering Windows 10 ran out of support last October (and only has a few months of extended support left).

However, putting aside the sluggish pace of adoption and the various problems that have plagued Windows 11 through the years (all the bugs and some notably missing features in the main), I think there's now cause for optimism for the future of Microsoft's operating system.

So, let me share my thoughts and reflect on what has been a half-decade of Windows 11, and tell you why I'm way more positive about the OS than I was last year — and why I think that Microsoft is finally on track (with, of course, some inevitable caveats).

The great fix-athon

Most of my hopefulness about where Windows 11 is heading comes, of course, from the big campaign Microsoft kicked off in March 2026 to fix Windows 11. Since that announcement — which I would say is the biggest statement to have been made since the OS was first announced in 2021 — Microsoft has very much proven that it intends to tackle all sorts of shortcomings and pain points with the OS.

Taskbar repositioning? We've got it. A much greater level of Start menu customization? Check. Spam removed from Windows search? Yep. More control over Windows updates? Certainly, and in fact way more control than I'd have ever believed might happen, including the ability to put off an update indefinitely, should you wish, on Windows 11 Home.

In fact, Microsoft has hit many wish-list features that I never expected would come to Windows 11, and the extent of the crowd-pleasing measures so far is heartening. These are features that are actually being delivered already, too, they're not just promises.

Furthermore, Microsoft appears to be listening to feedback and requests more closely, and generally engaging more with the community online. There's even a new initiative consisting of a research panel where Microsoft will consult testers directly on how to change aspects of Windows 11.

This genuinely feels like a fresh direction for Microsoft, and a serious commitment to change Windows 11 for the better based on what the users themselves actually want.

A more thoughtful, cautious approach

The other key driver for optimism with Windows 11 is the way in which Microsoft is taking more care over how the operating system is developed and coded.

Not so long ago, matters were less organized and more chaotic. Cast your mind back to the introduction of Qualcomm's Snapdragon X (Arm-based) chips in Copilot+ PCs back in 2024, alongside which Microsoft brought in a new underlying platform for Windows 11 (complete with the tinkering required to support that Arm silicon). While nothing was ever officially admitted, this is a move that I believe could have at least contributed to the mess that was the 24H2 update, which was laden with a ton of (sometimes very annoying) bugs.

Whatever the case in terms of how those glitches came to be, things have changed a lot since then. Microsoft is now being a lot more cautious with its Arm and x86 strategy — Windows 11 is split into two development paths, with the 26H1 update for Arm devices, and the 26H2 update for traditional x86 PCs — and the company has switched to use a fresh approach for these annual updates.

Instead of big annual updates — the last of which was the problematic 24H2 — Microsoft is now deploying small 'enablement packages', essentially very minor bumps to a new version of Windows 11. The actual features, the meat of Windows 11 changes, are pushed out in monthly updates as and when they're ready — in sometimes quite tightly controlled, carefully paced rollouts. This more gradual drip-feed of features is a more reliable method of deployment compared to dropping a lot of stuff all at once.

In short, Microsoft has learned its lesson from the nightmarish 24H2 release, which suffered from far too many bugs, to take on a fresh new way of operating. True, there will still need to be big updates at times, when the underlying codebase of Windows 11 has to be changed (quite possibly with 27H2). But it looks like Microsoft wants to mainly stick to compact, easily applied annual updates in the main, with features pushed out elsewhere in general.

Optimism abounds — with a notable catch

Between the ardent push to fix Windows 11 and the better thought-out deployment of features and updates, Microsoft has come a long way, but as I mentioned before, there are caveats here.

It's worth mentioning that while the new system of continual feature deployments, rather than weighty annual feature drops, is commendable (in my opinion), the controlled rollouts of these various features have come in for some criticism. Mainly because they are so cautious in some cases that something like the Start menu revamp (the one from last year, I should clarify, not the current work) took ages for some Windows 11 users to get, and those folks found that rather frustrating.

Part of that caution is likely down to Microsoft's paranoia around bugs, and sadly, the truth is that there are still too many bugs in Windows 11, and some of them are disappointingly weird. And by disappointing, I mean odd things that just shouldn't be happening.

I only need glance back to last weekend for one such example where there was a glitch with the Recycle Bin whereby the delete confirmation dialog (when junking a file from the bin) showed the internal file name instead of the proper name. While this only applied to the dialog box — so it was hardly an important or dangerous glitch — it was confusing some people, and more to the point, this sort of thing shouldn't be happening in the release version of an operating system.

This kind of bizarre slip-up also leads to folks blaming AI for being involved in Windows 11 coding. And while there is absolutely no evidence for that, it's the very nature of the strange bug that means people will easily jump to these conclusions when Microsoft has previously admitted AI is used to quite an extent in programming its software.

Whatever's at fault, Microsoft still needs to have better processes in place to catch these kinds of glitches, and other more critical bugs which have turned up in Windows 11 this year.

One thing I've called for in the past is a commitment from Microsoft to confirm that it's addressing its quality assurance processes, and improving bug squashing, and this is a notably missing part of the fix Windows 11 campaign. A vital part, in fact, I'd argue, for better stability going forward which is one of the big overarching goals (alongside better performance, and those crowd-pleasing feature additions).

Still, all in all, I've got to underline that right now, I'm as optimistic about Windows 11 as I've ever been. If Microsoft can tackle the bug blot on the OS landscape, and keep on listening to users — and its new research panel of testers from the community — Windows 11 could be in great shape come next year.

In 2026 it can feel a little like VR’s moment has passed.

Meta’s layoffs to kick off the year felt like a major downer for the industry at large — especially as it has been the champion of this space for years now — and it certainly seems that smart glasses like the Meta Ray-Bans but also Snap Specs, Android XR glasses, and more that have debuted this year are stealing the XR spotlight.

But VR is far from dead. Sure it might not be seeing the growth it once saw but sa a gaming and entertainment machine that tech is only getting better each day.

Plus with some Meta Quest 3S deals at Amazon Prime Day you can save big on the best affordable VR hardware out there.

• Browse the full Amazon Prime Day sale

This headset is technically as capable as a Meta Quest 3, meaning the 3S can handle whatever software the Quest ecosystem might want to throw at it — and that’s a broad list.

There’s plenty of VR games to jump into including Marvel’s Deadpool, Batman:Arkham Shadow, Walkabout Minigolf, and Beat Saber to name just a few. Plus there are fitness apps — which when combined with a silicone facial interface turn your headset into an actually enjoyable home gym — and a growing collection of streaming services which turn your headset into a private home theatre, you can even kick back in bed and enjoy watching the screen as if it were affixed to your ceiling.

With game console price hikes making gaming pricier than ever, it’s worth noting your headset can double as an Xbox too — again complete with a giant display. You’ll just need a Game Pass subscription and Xbox controller.

In the US a bonus Quest deal will get you a free month of Xbox Game Pass, while the UK version nets you 20%-off code for an Xbox controller and one month of Game Pass Ultimate after the purchase of a 3S headset.

Price up, prices down

The slight elephant in the room we should address with these Prime Day ‘deals’ is they unfortunately aren’t really deals in the truest sense.

Thanks to the RAM crisis the Meta Quest 3 series headsets saw a price hike. The 128GB model Meta Quest 3S went up to $349.99 / £319.99 / AU$569, while the price of the 256GB edition rose to $449.99 / £409.99 / AU$729. The 512GB Meta Quest 3now sets you back $599.99 / £549.99 / AU$969.

These Prime Day deals generally just revert the headset to its pre-hike price. You’ll see a roughly $53 saving, but in actuality it’s closer to $3.

That said, as some pointed out even after the hike, the Quest 3S represents incredible value for money. So sure this discount isn’t as great as it was a year ago before the base cost rose, but the Quest 3S at its original asking price is one of the best deals in tech, so definitely consider grabbing one while the discount is around.

With the RAM crisis and shipping troubles looking set to persist I wouldn’t be surprised if prices rise further, and Black Friday deals might struggle to match even those we have today. Not just for the Meta Quest 3S, but any gadget.

More Prime Day deals in the US

• Amazon Devices: Fire Sticks & Echo from $18
• Amazon Haul: viral gadgets, tech & appliances from $1.99
• Apple: MacBooks, AirPods & AirTags from $29
• Beauty: 50% off toothbrushes & hair tools
• Cheap TVs: smart TVs from $69.99
• Garden: tools, mowers, planters from $24.99
• Headphones: 50% off Beats, Bose & Samsung
• Laptops: Apple, HP & Dell from $199
• Mattresses: Sealy, Serta & more from $186
• Patio: outdoor furniture, rugs & decor from $19.99
• Sports: 50% off fitness gear, treadmills & clothing
• Vacuums: Dyson, Shark & Bissell from $34

More Prime Day deals in the UK

• Amazon Prime: get a 30-day free trial
• Amazon Devices: Fire, Ring & Blink from £13.99
• Amazon Haul: up to 30% off
• Apple: up to 33% off AirPods & Apple Watch
• Appliances: up to 45% off Ninja & Tefal
• Beauty: up to 60% off Philips & Oral-B
• Essentials: household goods from £5
• Fans: from £20
• Fashion: up to 50% off
• Gaming: £90 off PlayStation 5
• Headphones: up to 50% off Beats & Sony
• Laptops: from £149
• Tablets: Samsung & Lenovo from £79.99
• Toys: up to 25% off Lego and Tonies
• TVs: from £129.99
• Vacuums: up to 40% off Shark & Roborock
• Wearables: up to 30% off Garmin & Oura

• Meta unveils $299 / £269 / AU$599 smart glasses (Meta Glasses) designed with EssilorLuxottica
• They match Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses on virtually all features
• They add adjustable nose pieces, and a lot of design and color choices

"It’s pretty easy to make glasses that don’t look good, it turns out," chuckled Meta CTO and Head of Reality Labs, Andrew 'Boz' Bosworth, shortly after unveiling a bumper crop of new Meta eyeware, simply called Meta Glasses, all fashioned in collaboration with EssilorLuxottica.

Bosworth says the team argues over "every gram, every quarter of a millimeter" in an effort to bring ever lighter, ever more comfortable, and ever more fashionable AI eyewear to the market. With this foray into making frames with a slightly less well-known brand than Ray-Ban, Meta is bringing the new frames — Adventurer, Fury, and Starfire Kylie [Jenner] Edition — to market at a somewhat startling price: $299 /£269 / AU$599 (not counting prescriptions).

No one size or style fits all when it comes to eyewear, Ankit Brahmbhatt, Meta's Senior Director of Product for AI glasses, told me as he walked me through some of the new frames. There are, he added, eight colorways and 26 different style options.

Ogling the style choices

As I looked around the room in the Manhattan event space, I spotted black, something like ivory, tortoiseshell, deep black, green, and a dark maroon. The frames range from larger and almost boxy-looking to thinner and lighter frames. In fact, many of the EssilorLuxottica frames are so relatively thin and light that you might miss the cameras hidden in the front, and the slightly thicker stems to accommodate components and batteries, and mistake them for normal frames.

Kylie Jenner's cat-eye-style frames are particularly fetching, and surprisingly looked halfway decent on me.

Brahmbhatt told me Meta worked closely with Jenner to develop the design, adding signature touches like a tiny gem in the frame, a mirror in the case, and even Kylie Jenner's voice in the Meta AI.

There are structural changes new to the Essilor Luxottica frames. The nose piece adjusts with a push to three different positions, the stems are bendable at the ends (Bosworth noted that the wires are coated with a kind of cellulose plastic), and the stems actually flex outward. I tried on almost every style I could find, and they were all quite comfortable.

One of the biggest changes, though, is the addition of a small button behind the traditional Meta AI glasses button that you might use to capture a photo or start a video: it's a tiny Meta AI summoning button, and I used it interchangeably with saying, "Hey, Meta."

More and better AI

This is also the first set of Meta AI glasses to feature a Meta AI system backed by the company's more robust Muse Spark models, which provide a more conversational voice, better context awareness, and the ability to tap into the zeitgeist by checking out social media (at one point I asked Meta AI if there was chatter online about fake food, and it confirmed that many were talking about it on social media).

I tried the new Meta AI in a few scenarios, and it ably identified whatever I was looking at (I could hear it snap a picture before the analysis), launched a music playlist based on my surroundings, and translated Arabic print for me.

That all of this comes in for under $299 (Ray-Ban Meta frames start at $379), and without compromising on the 3K video-shooting quality, 12MP photos, microphones, array, or speakers, is remarkable; but these are still relatively early days in the wearable AI space.

Getting it right and making it safe

Design is "really important if you want people to wear them as daily driver glasses," said Meta Head of Industrial Design Peter Bristol, who joined Bosworth on stage and took some questions from reporters.

In perhaps a nod to how thick and oversized AI glasses can look, the pair talked about how they made subtle changes to the designs, slimming down the frames, or simply making them look thinner by, for instance, adding a chamfer along the top edge of the frames, near the brow.

A good design means less friction, which Bristol believes can help with AI adoption.

For Meta, the goal is to "reach every corner of the market," said Bosworth, but that approach does come with risks.

When asked about growing concerns about the privacy of these glasses (there have been reports of people wearing them to illegally photograph women and even tampering with the glasses to turn off the LED "I'm filming you" light), Bosworth acknowledged these issues, but reminded us that Meta had actually "pioneered putting LED on the glasses," and talked about the anti-tampering technology they put in Gen 2 Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses. But, he added, it's "a cat and mouse game."

As for what the future holds, I pointed out to Bosworth and Bristol that, while they now have a lot of styles, not everyone wears, or wants to wear glasses. What about smart contacts?

"Absolutely, that one’s top of mind for the design team," said Bristol, adding, "We are thinking and trying the other potential paths, but it’s a complicated space, so glasses is front and center for us.”

Bosworth agreed with the premise of my question, admitting that he’s not a glasses wearer, but is happy to wear Meta AI glasses “because they brought a lot of value — but I’m aware that I’m doing it.

"The design team is absolutely captivated by this question. What are the other ways that we can deliver this capability to people who don’t have glasses on?"

The RayNeo Air 4 Pro smart glasses are easily the best budget smart specs you can buy if you’re after the ultimate portable entertainment gadget.

High-tech specs are all the rage, but there are different types in this broad category. You have the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which offer audio-only AI assistance, the Snap Specs, which deliver AI and full-on AR, and then something like the RayNeo glasses, which act like your own private movie theatre.

• Browse the full Amazon Prime Day sale

You connect them to a compatible USB-C device, and your screen will be projected in front of you on a virtual 200-inch screen that only you can see.

This setup is perfect in so many scenarios. When I’m taking a flight I can watch Netflix on a giant display that’s better than any in-flight entertainment screen, I can lay back in bed with my Asus Rog Xbox Ally X display virtually projected onto my ceiling, and when I’m working on a story about an unannounced gadget I can rely on the specs to keep that info private with a display no one else can read.

If you don’t yet own a pair of smart glasses like this, you absolutely should. They’re a must-buy ahead of this year’s Summer travel season, and thanks to Amazon Prime Day there’s never been a better time to grab a pair.

Today's best RayNeo Air 4 Pro deals

Did I mention that the specs are only $295? For Prime Day, the standard edition specs are $239.20, saving you 20% at Amazon. That’s the best price these smart glasses have ever been, and the best bang for your buck a pair of smart specs has ever been. Meanwhile, in the UK, the RayNeo Air 4 Pro glasses will set you back just £248.99 at Amazon, a 34% drop from their usual £379 — again thanks to some Prime Day magic.

When tech prices have been on a sharp increase, it’s a breath of fresh air to see something as genuinely excellent as the RayNeo Air 4 Pros not only launch at a budget-friendly price, but then fall during Prime Day sales.

While the RayNeo Air 4 Pro glasses aren’t as unique as this category once was — I mean, we’re four generations in on just this product alone, plus all of its rivals from other brands — the tech stands alone because it’s so budget-friendly and yet incredibly capable.

The micro-OLED displays boast HDR10 support — and they were the first smart glasses of this type to do so. This means they boast an incredible range of color hues, with professional accuracy that will make your HDR10-supported content pop. Plus, as you expect from OLED screens, the contrast is solid, especially if you use a lens cover to block out external light.

As for audio, while headphones are a solid option if you want to keep what you’re listening to more private, RayNeo’s specs boast spatial audio tuned by experts Bang & Olufsen. They sound great, and a major step up from the earliest generations of smart specs, which were effectively unusable sonically unless you had a pair of Bluetooth cans.

More Prime Day deals in the US

• Amazon Devices: Fire Sticks & Echo from $18
• Amazon Haul: viral gadgets, tech & appliances from $1.99
• Apple: MacBooks, AirPods & AirTags from $29
• Beauty: 50% off toothbrushes & hair tools
• Cheap TVs: smart TVs from $69.99
• Garden: tools, mowers, planters from $24.99
• Headphones: 50% off Beats, Bose & Samsung
• Laptops: Apple, HP & Dell from $199
• Mattresses: Sealy, Serta & more from $186
• Patio: outdoor furniture, rugs & decor from $19.99
• Sports: 50% off fitness gear, treadmills & clothing
• Vacuums: Dyson, Shark & Bissell from $34

More Prime Day deals in the UK

• Amazon Prime: sign up for a 30-day free trial
• Amazon Devices: Fire TV, Ring & Blink from £24.99
• Amazon Haul: up to 30% off
• Apple: AirPods Pro 3 for a record-low price
• Appliances: up to 45% off Ninja, Tefal & Sage
• Beauty: up to 60% off Philips & Oral-B
• Essentials: household goods from under £10
• Fashion: up to 50% off
• Headphones: up to 50% off
• Laptops: from £149.99
• Tablets: Samsung & Lenovo from £125
• Toys: up to 25% off Lego and Tonies
• TVs: from £129.99
• Vacuums: up to 40% off Eufy & Roborock
• Wearables: Garmin & Huawei from £36.99

"You can take the MacBook back. I don’t have the patience to learn a new thing," said my wife as she slid the MacBook Neo back across the kitchen counter.

It was the unceremonious end to a two-week-long experiment in which I encouraged my wife, a decades-long Windows user, to give Apple a try, more specifically, the flavor of Apple found in a lovely, citrus MacBook Neo.

Look, I am no pusher. Ever since I started testing the $599 laptop, my wife had been eyeing it. She was becoming Mac curious. This had a lot to do with her creaky Microsoft Surface Pro 4, a decade-old system that would soon face the dreaded end of Windows 10 security updates (no TPM 2.0 on that old Surface Pro).

As a realtor, she kind of loved the old girl. It ably ran all of her Web-based business software, handled emails, basic art needs for whipping up new listing sheets, and social media materials. She also knew, however, that it was almost time for an upgrade. We both wondered if the affordable and mid-range-powered MacBook Neo could ably step in for the Surface Pro.

My wife even told me that, if she went with the MacBook Neo, Cirtus would not be her choice; the blush looked rather nice. Of course, Citrus is what I had on hand, so that's what she got.

I told her that, while different, macOS would not be completely foreign. Sure, it moved some things around, but my wife was no Luddite; she picked up new tech pretty well.

One thing about her, though, should have been a warning: she hates change.

Taking the macOS plunge

Simply buying her a MacBook Neo — even if there are some nifty Prime Day Deals right now — without knowing if she'd take to it made no sense, and since I'd been testing and using this on-and-off for months, we decided to set her up with it as if she'd bought the system brand new.

I reset the MacBook Neo. It's a $699 model with Touch ID and 512GB of storage, and I told her that this would likely be the one we would buy anyway since I wouldn't want her to run into storage issues.

Next, we sat side-by-side as I walked her through the setup. She took to this part quickly, though I realized that the placement of Touch ID on the power/sleep button was non-obvious. When I told her to register her finger to unlock the laptop, she stared at the system for a few seconds, clearly looking for something with a fingerprint symbol.

You're on your own

For the next couple of weeks, I would watch her slip the laptop into her work bag or use it at the dining room table. I did catch her occasionally trying to tap the screen, which was unsurprising. After all, she'd spent a decade with a touch-screen convertible. I'd ask her how it was going, and she'd give me a slightly less-than-enthusiastic "OK".

At work, she said she struggled to connect to the office printer and finally had a coworker step in and help her.

When she was at home, I showed her how to add her OneDrive account to access work files, a move that seemed to both confound and confuse her. The Windows system automatically integrates the drive. For the Mac, there's an app and then a few steps.

Even the benefits I found in adding a Mac to my Apple ecosystem were lost on her:
"Why do my iPhone notifications keep popping up on the MacBook? That's annoying."

I kept waiting for that moment, the epiphany that triggered, "Why didn't I make this switch years ago?"

It never came.

She found the need to use two fingers to enact right-click functions confusing and didn't seem all that thrilled with the trackpad.

It was clear she appreciated the MacBook Neo design, and yet, she told me, “It’s nice and sleek and all of that, but I could get a new PC that’s nice and sleek and all of that."

As we walked through a Best Buy looking at both MacBook Neo and a bunch of comparable Windows machines from Lenovo, HP, Dell, and Acer, it was clear that the MacBook Neo had not won her over.

After she returned the system, my wife told me that she just couldn't get used to all the differences. Why was the control center at the top? Why did the dock look like that? How could they not have a Start button?

For the average Mac user, like myself, there were all good reasons for these design elements and placements, but, having been a switcher myself, I understood the confusion. Working on a MacBook after 30 years on Windows means you are living in a constant state of "Who moved my cheese?" And when you, as my wife does, have important work to get done, you can't have a system's quirks getting in the way of your productivity.

Getting real

None of this is a commentary on the still excellent MacBook Neo, but it does say something about a certain class of users who, while Apple might try to attract them with the affordable MacBook Neo, are unlikely to make the switch.

The reality is that the best market for the MacBook Neo is still the back-to-school market, where it will likely have an easier time of swaying kids who've used Chromebooks or have only been on iPads.

They'll become Apple's newest customers. As for aging Windows users, getting them to make the switch might be more than Apple can or should hope for — even with the appealing MacBook Neo.

• Microsoft has confirmed that 26H2 will be a minor update
• It'll be a "small enablement package" like Windows 11 25H2
• This means less likelihood of bugs, with major features being rolled out separately in monthly updates – a sensible approach, although that said, 27H2 could be different

Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 11's next annual update will be another minor affair, all in the cause of avoiding a repeat of the chaos around the 24H2 update.

Windows 11 24H2 was the last version of the OS to land bristling with major changes, as 25H2 was a small incremental update – and now it's confirmed that this will be the case for 26H2 as well.

Windows Latest reports that Microsoft confirmed that Windows 11 26H2 is a "small enablement package" just like 25H2 before it.

In reality, this means that the upgrade is essentially a lightweight download with no meaningful feature additions – so isn't that disappointing?

In a word, no, because it's just indicative of how Microsoft has switched to a more sensible way of working in terms of yearly updates for Windows 11.

Analysis: a more stable way of working

Instead of unloading a whole raft of new features in the annual update, Microsoft is now deploying those features in stages throughout the year. And that strategy of drip-feeding important new features in different monthly updates – with the usual controlled rollouts, the pace of which varies depending on how cautious Microsoft is feeling about any given piece of functionality – is a better way of working overall.

Not only does it mean that we don't have to wait until the latter half of every year to receive major new changes for Windows 11, but we don't have a massive download and complicated installation to deal with when the H2 update arrives, too. On top of that, there's more chance of things going awry when a big annual update lands, as we saw with the 24H2 update, which suffered a whole load of annoying bugs – and I think Microsoft learned its lesson from this.

So, what's the point of the annual update now? Well, 26H2 provides another marker for support, extending your ability to get updates. Those still on Windows 11 24H2 should note that support runs out for this version in October 2026 – which is when 26H2 should roll out (or just before, perhaps in September) – so those on 24H2 will need to upgrade to 26H2.

That said, the other possibility with installing a newer version of Windows 11 that's an enablement package is that while it doesn't pack any new features as such, stepping up to the latest release such as 26H2 may trigger a feature rollout for your PC that you wouldn't have got otherwise. There's no guarantee you'll get anything, mind, but it could work out that way.

All in all, I'd rather Microsoft worked this way for the noted reasons around the increased stability of piecemeal feature deployment, rather than them arriving in one big lump with the inherent danger of a bunch of gremlins therein.

Microsoft can follow this path because the foundations of the underlying codebase remain the same – which has been the case since 24H2 – although at some point, it'll need to take Windows 11 forward onto a new codebase, which is when we'll see a bigger update.

And we've already had signs that this will happen with next year's update, and that 27H2 could represent a big change for Windows 11, one that unifies the Arm and AMD/Intel (x86) architectures (with the former currently split off into its own branch of the OS, on the 26H1 update instead of 26H2).

Hopefully going forward, Microsoft will still stick broadly to the new philosophy it appears to have embraced, in terms of fewer big updates and multiple enablement packages in-between.

Most companies don’t understand that today’s AI tools are capable of fundamentally transforming how daily knowledge work is done.

This is because they’re using AI in an unsophisticated way and aiming it at the wrong place.

But this level of transformation is already happening, as millions of knowledge workers have figured out, and as enlightened companies are starting to recognize.

To delve deeper, you first need to understand that most knowledge work is invisible. The essence of knowledge work—thinking, processing, judging, ruminating, planning, mulling—happens in workers’ heads, unseen.

Unfortunately, workplace AI is currently deployed into the knowledge systems that are visible, the outputs —emails, documents, chats, meetings, etc. It doesn’t matter how good the AI is, because when it operates at this level, it’s too late to really transform how the work is done.

To give a practical example, when you need to create a project deliverable, 80% of your effort is likely spent creating the first draft, with the remaining 20% polishing into a final deliverable. AI workplace assistants do a great job with that final polish (which we like, thank you). But to truly transform how work is done, you need AI to help with the underlying, unseen 80% effort used to create the first draft.

The real opportunity: A practical model for AI-driven work

The good news is AI is fully capable to help transform that 80%. This does not require waiting for “better” models or AGI. All you need to do is change how you’re using AI today, by integrating existing LLM-based tools into that invisible thinking portion of your work, rather than just keeping it at the surface-level work outputs.

While the AI vendors haven’t exactly made this intuitive (yet), using AI in this way has exploded in popularity since the beginning of 2026. In practice, the basic approach is to use AI the way software developers do, not as a one-off tool but as something that builds context over time.

Move beyond web-based interfaces where every conversation restarts from scratch

Create a centralized repository, put your critical files into a folder on the business computer which you give AI access to. Start with the classic things (deliverables, meeting notes, project plans, etc.)

Before doing any work, ask AI to interview you about your work style, what’s important to you and your personal preferences.

Review and refine AI’s understanding, ask it to scan through all your files to synthesize your latest thinking, ideas, story arcs, writing style and any other “intelligence” it can determine from your work. Review its findings and go back-and-forth until you feel it has a good understanding of you, your work and your style.

Build upon each session. A crucial step is having the AI tool understand this is not a one-time or manual exercise. Instead, a continued process to create, maintain, organize and update the files, based on what it learns about you over time, each subsequent AI session builds on all the work you’ve done together and what it has learned about you.

In essence, you are asking your AI to create a personal Wikipedia-style repository which gives your AI system an ever-growing continuous context library perfectly built and tuned just for you and your work.

Using AI like this doesn't require a new product or company, but a new way to leverage current tools. This is often called a “second brain”, “AI context vault”, “LLM-powered personal Wiki”, or something similar, and you can do this with any LLM vendor or product.

Most AI vendors now allow users to connect their LLM platforms into other business systems (like email, chat, document stores or productivity suites), which lets workers connect their personal knowledge systems into corporate apps and data.

Workers who use AI in this new way report fundamental shifts in the way they work within the first few hours. After a few days, many workers declare they will never go back to the “old way” of working again.

The tradeoffs to consider

Using AI to transform work in this way is not without its downsides, especially from the corporate perspective.

First, all the “classic” security complexities still apply: How do you know the AI did what it said it was going to do? How do you know it didn’t hallucinate? How do you trust it won’t spin out of control and email all your contacts with nonsense?

Addressing this involves many of the things you probably know but haven’t taken time to investigate yet, including configuring alternate accounts with restricted permissions for AI or setting clear guidelines for when and how AI-generated outputs will be reviewed.

This new process also requires asking workers to slow down and verify what their AI generates, which is pretty much the opposite of why they started using AI in the first place.

Another challenge is visibility. Much of the “back-and-forth” work - which previously happened in the open - now happens within the AI tool and the worker’s personal context vault, where it’s less visible to coworkers and management scrutiny. Individual workers view that as a positive, but to organizations, it can be a liability.

Lastly, when workers build personal AI context vaults using their personal AI subscriptions, the company can’t prevent the worker from taking all that context with them when they leave the company. Companies need to buy proper enterprise AI subscriptions which they can link to corporate SSO and DLP systems. The downside is that enterprise AI pricing is completely different from consumer pricing, and workers using AI like this via enterprise systems can easily consume thousands of dollars of tokens per month.

The bottom line is that today’s AI can fundamentally transform work, but only if there is a mindset reset around how it is being used.

This new approach introduces added complexity. Organizations will need to spend more time understanding, managing, and securing AI differently, but it’s clear that AI operating in this way is inevitable, so the time to start thinking about AI as a “second brain” is now.

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• A new Windows 11 bug has hit the Recycle Bin
• You may see the wrong file name displayed
• Microsoft says it's working on a fix

The latest frustrating bug to hit Windows 11 affects the trusty Recycle Bin, and it has apparently been delivered by the latest Patch Tuesday (update (KB5094126) — though Microsoft says it's aware of the issue and is working on a fix.

As Neowin reports, the bug means that when you try and delete a file from the Recycle Bin, the confirmation dialog shows the internal file name rather than the actual file name. It's not particularly serious, but it is confusing.

The proper name is shown in the Recycle Bin itself, and the proper name is used if you decide to restore the file rather than deleting it. The alternative internal name is only used on the confirmation dialog screen.

Microsoft says it's working on a fix for the issue, though we don't have a timeframe for when it'll be delivered. It's just one of several issues that have been introduced with this bug, including problems with OneDrive access.

Is AI to blame?

Microsoft confirms Recycle Bin glitch affecting all supported Windows versions — yes, even the trash needs debugging from r/technology

As you might imagine, users on Reddit have taken a rather dim view of the latest mishap from Microsoft. Many are suggesting that this is the result of code written by AI, though we don't have any confirmation of that.

Last year Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that as much as 30% of the company's code was written by, and that number is probably higher now. As for how reliable and functional that code is, however, he didn't say.

"This update broke me, I'm so fed up with Win 11 and all the issues that at this very moment I’m installing Linux on my desktop," commented one user. "Bye Microslop!" The Reddit thread also includes reports of numerous other issues.

Bugs accompanying Windows 11 updates are pretty much par for the course at this stage, and Microsoft is often trying to deal with multiple reported issues at once — though it has also been making progress with some substantial upgrades in recent months.

Artificial intelligence has transformed enterprise cybersecurity into a machine-speed quickdraw contest.

Today, threat actors routinely use AI and automation to launch sophisticated, multi-stage campaigns that exploit gaps between disconnected security tools.

Once inside a network, modern attacks move laterally across cloud environments, endpoints, and applications within minutes.

Because defensive windows have shrunk from hours to seconds, security teams must rely on AI-driven analytics to correlate threat telemetry and trigger automated remediation before a breach spreads.

To achieve this coordination, many organizations are aggressively pursuing platform consolidation. The logic is simple: by replacing a fragmented patchwork of niche security vendors with a single, unified security platform, a Security Operations Centre (SOC) can centralize its data, simplify management, and orchestrate automated responses more fluidly.

The hidden risks of the single ecosystem

While consolidation can simplify things, it also changes an organization's risk profile. When multiple layers of cybersecurity are interconnected through a single vendor’s control plane, dependencies build up. This level of architectural reliance introduces severe systemic vulnerability.

If your monitoring tools, identity systems, and automated response mechanisms all live under one roof, a single point of failure can paralyze your entire enterprise. A major software flaw, a configuration error, a vendor cloud outage, or a supply chain compromise can trigger a cascading failure that knocks out multiple layers of defense simultaneously.

Furthermore, extensive centralization strips an organisation of its long-term architectural flexibility. Once integrated into a single ecosystem, switching providers or adapting to shifting regulatory and digital sovereignty requirements becomes a massive, cost-prohibitive operational hurdle.

The balanced solution: Hybrid AI architecture

Faced with these challenges, forward-thinking cybersecurity leaders are looking at a happy medium between inefficient platform fragmentation, and total consolidation by adopting a balanced, hybrid approach.

This strategy centralizes AI-driven analytics and detection where shared visibility adds the highest value, while deliberately maintaining strict independence in critical operational zones. A resilient hybrid architecture divides the security environment into two distinct operational mandates:

1. Centralized visibility and detection: Security teams should continue to feed telemetry from endpoints, networks, and cloud infrastructure into a centralized, AI-driven engine such as an advanced SIEM or XDR platform. This allows AI to analyze vast pools of data in real time, map attacker behaviors, and coordinate high-speed incident responses across the enterprise.

2. Isolated control layers: To prevent a total system collapse during a crisis, critical defense layers must remain insulated from the primary detection platform. Two pillars require absolute autonomy:

Identity and Access Management (IAM): Systems controlling user authentication and policy enforcement (like Okta or Active Directory) should not be deeply intertwined with the automated response platform. If an attacker compromises the automated security system, an isolated identity layer prevents them from gaining total, unhindered access to the entire enterprise kingdom.

Backup and Recovery Infrastructure: Disaster recovery tools lose their effectiveness if they rely on the exact same network infrastructure they are designed to restore. Maintaining independent, immutable, and air-gapped recovery layers ensures that even if a ransomware campaign or platform outage takes down the primary network, the business can safely restore operations from a position of absolute control.

Designing for survival

The reality of modern enterprise IT is inherently hybrid, spanning legacy systems, multi-cloud environments, and distributed global workforces. Attempting to force this sprawling complexity into a single security platform is impractical and not without risk.

As artificial intelligence continues to accelerate the threat landscape, the pressure to automate and simplify will only grow. Unified AI ecosystems are essential for operational speed, but true resilience requires architectural balance. Future security strategies will not be judged solely on how quickly they detect a threat, but on how effectively the business can maintain continuity during a catastrophic disruption.

By blending centralized AI intelligence with strategically separated control layers, enterprises achieve the ultimate defensive posture: machine-speed responsiveness without the risk of systemic collapse.

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• Illinois is set to ban smart glasses being used while driving
• The bill makes no distinction between glasses with and without displays
• Many online fear that it gives cops too much power to pull drivers over

Illinois is poised to be the first US state to ban smart glasses — of any kind — while you’re driving. Importantly, the bill makes no distinction between smart specs with a display and those without.

Once Governor JB Pritzker approves the bill, people caught flouting the rules could face fines of $75 (or $150 for repeat offenses) and the possibility of misdemeanor or felony charges if involved in a serious crash while wearing smart glasses.

Other states, such as New York, have proposed bills limiting smart glasses use while driving, but so far none have progressed as far as Illinois’ has — though that could soon change if states decide to take Illinois’ lead.

The hope is that this proposal will make roads safer by reducing distractions for drivers.

While there’s possibly some advantage of drivers having, say, navigation on a HUD in front of them to find their destination — which is something Amazon is hoping to offer its delivery drivers with its own smart glasses — attempting to text chat or watch a video on your glasses while driving is a terrible idea.

So, to discourage this kind of dangerous driving, it’s perhaps safer to just ban smart glasses and avoid any possibility of temptation.

Safer, but for who?

While many can agree that having a display distracting you while you drive isn’t ideal, some are questioning why non-display glasses — which are completely hands-free and boast zero visual distractions — are included in the ban.

Some have therefore wondered if there’s an ulterior motive to Illinois’ smart glasses approach, or if it’s at least not very well thought out.

Over on Reddit one user pointed out that the law “Gives cops license to pull over anyone and claim ‘oh, i thought those were smart glasses’” which could be abused by bad actors to write invalid tickets — with the user linking to a viral example of a cop using Florida’s existing driver laws to pull over a woman for texting while driving using a phone in her right hand, and doubling down even when the woman shows she doesn’t have a right hand.

Meanwhile, a commenter replying to Gizmodo’s coverage of this story said the rules have “Nothing to do with driver safety. Everything to do with law enforcement not wanting to be recorded,” as it’s much easier to record police with your smart glasses than holding up a phone.

On the flip side, Illinois does have precedent for banning audio distractions; headphones, earbuds, or other headsets that play audio into both ears are illegal under the state’s vehicle code. One-ear headsets are generally allowed, and there are exemptions for some professions and audio devices that improve hearing, like hearing aids.

Because audio can be a major distraction while driving — you might not hear sirens if you have active noise cancellation turned on, for example — even in places where it isn’t expressly against the law, it is advised against, and can work against you if you’re caught in an accident while immersed in your music.

Smart glasses don’t fully immerse you because they have open-ear audio, but their audio notifications and music playing into both of your ears could cause a distraction.

Additionally, because the tech is evolving so quickly, creating nuanced carve-outs today might lead to legal disputes or confusion down the line, especially as lawmakers aren’t known for being particularly tech-savvy. There’s a simplicity to just banning smart glasses outright while driving.

Of course, these rules are just for one state, assuming they get signed into law at all, but smart glasses regulation seems to be on the agenda for a growing number of local and national governments in an attempt to curb bad actors.

So don’t be surprised if similar rules start being proposed in your local area, and be sure to follow any new smart glasses rules that are introduced if you like using a pair.

• Windows 11's Xbox mode uses less RAM than the standard desktop, but doesn't improve game performance
• That's the conclusion based on a battery of tests by a popular YouTube channel
• Gaming performance on Valve's SteamOS is still better, while Microsoft is trying to catch up

Microsoft's push to improve gaming on Windows 11 is still an ongoing process, particularly with its Xbox mode that provides a console-style user interface — but is seemingly not doing much to boost game performance.

As highlighted by Notebookcheck, Windows 11's Xbox mode does result in decreased RAM usage compared to the standard desktop, but crucially it doesn't improve actual game performance — or that's the conclusion of recent testing by Linus Tech Tips (LTT).

When testing the likes of Forza Horizon 5 at 1080p with max graphics settings and no upscaling across two PCs with the same specifications, there was no difference in frame rates between the standard desktop and Xbox mode. The same was true at 1440p resolution, and with other games such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Doom: The Dark Ages, where LTT found either the same frame rates or a negligible difference.

It's important to note that both PCs in LTT's tests show memory usage at lower levels when using the Xbox mode compared to the standard desktop, but this made no impact on performance.

I should point out that this is just one set of benchmarks, and results will, of course, likely vary depending on the exact tests and system configurations involved. However, LTT's testing here is a strong enough indication of a disappointing overall performance for Windows 11's Xbox mode as it stands.

It's no secret that Valve's SteamOS offers better game performance than Windows 11, with more optimal RAM usage, and it doesn't feature any of the unwanted bloatware that Windows 11 is loaded with. While SteamOS does have its own desktop mode, it's a Linux distro that is built for gaming at heart.

Something is amiss with Xbox mode, it seems, and Microsoft is struggling with optimization here. On top of that, the Xbox mode rollout isn't fully complete, acting as another pain point for Windows 11 users looking for an easy console-like gaming experience.

Frankly, the longer it takes for all users to gain access to Xbox mode, and for performance improvements to be realized, the harder it'll be for Microsoft to catch up with Valve.

While Windows remains by far the dominant OS for PC gamers, if anti-cheat support on Linux improves, that'll spell big trouble for Microsoft with more users likely migrating to SteamOS.

• Snap's AR glasses have been announced
• Specs will launch later this year and cost $2,195
• They're an upgraded version of its Specs developer kit

After joining the chorus of brands promising consumer smart glasses would arrive in 2026 at last year’s Augmented World Expo, Snap (formerly Snapchat) has finally debuted its latest Specs at this year’s AWE — announcing its true AR glasses are shipping later this year to the UK, US, and France. They’re incredible, truly sci-fi, and cost $2,195 (Around £1,640).

That high cost is explained by all the different XR tech the Specs combine into a single gadget. You have the form factor of glasses that are (relatively) lightweight, with a pair of clear displays built into the electrochromic lenses to overlay digital elements on the real world, and cameras to track your hands and anchor points in the space around you so that the spatial features feel as real as physical objects.

The glasses are powered by a pair of Qualcomm Snapdragon chips — matching the Apple Vision Pro’s approach, as one handles the OS and your apps, while the other tackles spatial aspects like hand and position tracking and anchoring.

Removable inserts can support a range of eyeglass prescriptions, and the batteries can deliver “up to four hours of mixed-use." You’ll get a charging case for an additional four charges (for 20 hours of total use), and, of course, there’s built-in AI assistance.

Best of all, this isn’t some unavailable prototype. It’s a real gadget you’ll be able to buy this Fall (aka September, October, or November). There’s nothing quite like the Snap Specs on the market right now, and that's a major advantage for Snap as it leapfrogs Meta, Android XR, and the rest.

Truly fantastical

Reactions online from many have been pretty negative, with folks asking, "Why can’t anybody make a normal looking pair of glasses," and "that’s gonna be a hard no from me dawg." However, I'm very excited to take these glasses for a whirl.

I’ve not used these Snap Specs specifically yet, but I have had several chances to try their predecessor — a developer kit with essentially the same capabilities — and they do stand alone amongst the growing sea of smart glasses. AI and basic XR features are cool and certainly feel futuristic, but Snap’s Specs take things a step further with true AR that feels positively science fiction every time I experience them.

Where they succeed best is in social interactions. During a live demo, I experienced a three-way conversation between two Snap representatives and me. We were each speaking a different language, but we could communicate perfectly as the Specs displayed live translation subtitles above our heads in near real time.

In another demo — this time of the game Peridot — we could all bring along our virtual pets into a shared space to play together as a group as if our critters were all really there in the room, and in another AR drawing app we could create and collaborate virtual sculptures and then walk through the room together as if in our own gallery — as each person’s creation appeared for everyone in the place it had been drawn as if it were a real object in the space.

Into the unknown

Unfortunately, these demos require each person to have a pair of Specs, and at $2,195, I expect they’re too pricey for mass adoption.

There are two other important unknowns.

Firstly: comfort. At 132g or 136g (based on which size of Snap Specs you buy), these AR glasses weigh almost three times as much as standard Meta Ray-Bans, and roughly double the monocular Ray-Ban Displays.

This is a lot less than a headset, with models like the Quest 3 and Samsung Galaxy XR clocking in at over 500g, but the form factor of glasses will make the weight feel different, and so we’ll have to wait and see if these chunky specs are something you can wear for a whole day. In my demos, they were comfortable enough, but only for an hour or so at a time.

More crucially, a big question is software.

Snap has showcased several AR Glasses applications, such as getting visual instructions from the AI assistant for a simple car repair, watching a video on a large virtual screen, navigating a real-world map, and real-time translation.

Plus, there are third-party apps for things like cooking and golf assistance, drawing tools for AR and real-world art, games including darts, Peridot, and an official Avatar: The Last Airbender experience, and more are promised.

It all looks great, but when the Specs cost $2,195, they have a high bar to clear out the gate. They can’t be a one-and-done thing either. They’ll need to be a growing platform that feels more valuable over time, with new experiences and features added. Otherwise, early adopters could feel let down, and the early hype will die.

This is what happened with the Apple Vision Pro. The hardware is superb, and the early impressions were praising Apple's headset, but after a month or so with the device many found it gathering dust and excitement dried up because it didn't have the software utility it needed.

The silver lining is that, for long-term affordability, there’s some hope. Thanks to the RAM crisis and other component cost increases, thanks to AI and global trade disruptions, tech is pricier than ever. If / when these troubles dissipate, we’ll hopefully see prices fall, and they could fall rather steeply.

We can’t know what the future holds, but I have my hopes that upcoming generations of the Snap Specs and glasses like them will be a lot more affordable. Hopefully, Snap’s current model is popular enough and impressive enough to deliver that AR future I’m dreaming of.

By now, almost every enterprise has an AI story.

Years into the AI boom, disappointment has become a familiar refrain.

Only 28% of enterprise AI projects meet ROI expectations, with more than 90% of AI pilots never making it into production.

AI projects stall, returns fail to materialize, and executives quietly conclude that the technology “wasn’t ready”.

That narrative is convenient, but often wrong. So, where does ROI come from?

The problem with half-hearted AI

Most AI failures come from businesses unwilling to change how they work. Many organizations fund pilots, rally up innovation teams and deploy smart tools, but stop short of changing the systems those tools need to operate within.

Teams are given access to AI without being upskilled to use it effectively, and processes designed for human-speed decision making are left untouched, even as machine-speed systems are layered on top.

The disappointment soon follows... isolated productivity wins, no enterprise-level impact and increased skepticism from the boardroom. And yet, walking away from AI isn’t the answer either.

Businesses lose up to 30% of revenue annually due to inefficiencies, precisely the kind of structural waste AI is designed to eliminate. The European Parliament has even explicitly warned that underuse of AI tools could cost the EU its competitive edge and stall economic growth, with estimates showing AI could add up to $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy.

For organizations sitting on the fence, failing to innovate means falling behind, while competitors see compounding gains quarter by quarter as they’ve simply cracked the AI code.

Why the ROI gap is self-inflicted

The real cost, then, isn’t failed pilots, it’s half commitment. Many organizations treat AI as optional or experimental, then act surprised when it behaves that way.

The first step is to stop measuring AI like another IT project; measure it like R&D. Applying traditional ROI metrics to AI repeats the same mistake organizations have made during every major technology shift; expecting immediate returns from AI reflects industrial era thinking applied to a cognitive era transformation.

When email arrived, companies didn’t abandon it because quarterly earnings didn’t spike. AI is similar. The problem isn’t that it doesn’t work, it’s that it’s being evaluated with the wrong lens. CTOs and CFOs should treat AI budgets strategically, similar to how R&D investment may be considered.

While there are some short term savings, the real value lies behind the longer amortization windows, staged milestones and tolerance for early phase losses. This reframes boardroom conversations away from short-term justification and towards strategic capability building.

How can we fix this?

1. Learn from our failure

We encountered this issue firsthand. When we started integrating AI into our own delivery model, productivity pockets appeared, but there was no sustained internal buy-in and no systemic change to support those gains.

What worked was a deliberate, process-led shift. Rather than trying to scale everything at once, we focused on a small set of lighthouse projects backed by lean, cross-functional teams. AI was embedded across the full software delivery lifecycle, with attention moving away from tools and towards how work actually flowed.

The friction was never in the code, but in the systems around the code. How do approval chains work when compliance teams operate on weekly cycles, but AI agents move at machine-speed? How do organizations build reusable, secure components rather than rebuilding from scratch on every project?

Treating AI as part of the operating model, not a collection of tools, is where meaningful ROI starts to emerge. We're now applying the same model with clients, with faster shipping and fewer people.

2. Get ready to dig deep and change your foundations

One of the biggest reasons AI initiatives stall is because organizations simply layer new intelligence on top of operating models that were designed for a very different era. Many enterprises are still structured around legacy systems and linear approval chains built to standardize transactions, not to support real-time judgement.

AI needs context, access across systems and the ability to act. But in many organizations, data is locked inside heavily-customized ERPs, workflows are fragmented by function, and decision rights are buried in handoffs and committees. So before buying the shiny new tool, go back to basics. Fix the foundations.

The sharpest lever is decision rights. AI agents operate in seconds, but most enterprise decisions still route through weekly approval cycles. Until that gap closes, AI speed has nowhere to go. This also means confronting legacy estates honestly.

Not every core system needs to be replaced, but the processes and assumptions built around them may need to change if AI is to operate effectively.

Addressing structural foundations

This is uncomfortable work, but once the structural foundations are addressed - clearer decision rights, less fragmented data, outcomes-oriented teams - AI can dramatically compress the time it takes to rebuild.

This is where AI-native engineering pays off, as it allows businesses to go from treating AI as a feature, to building systems, workflows and organizations where AI is a first-class participant in how work gets done.

Instead of hard-coded logic and rigid process flows, AI native engineering centers on systems that are context-aware, continuously learning and capable of taking bounded action across the stack - from interpreting intent, to orchestrating workflows, to generating and improving code and decisions, in real time.

The competitive advantage comes not from access to better models, which are increasingly commoditized, but from how effectively an organization can embed those models into its operating fabric.

3. Build a portfolio dashboard, not project scorecards

Boards can’t evaluate AI as a portfolio if every initiative reports success differently. A standardized AI ROI framework, tracking utilization, business outcomes and strategic value, allows cross-initiative comparison and portfolio-level decisions.

It’s also important to manage expectations. Most organizations achieve satisfactory ROI on a typical AI use case within two to four years - far longer than the seven-to-twelve-month payback typically expected from traditional tech investments.

That said, where organizations align process, people and governance early, faster transitions are possible – especially with AI native engineering.

4. Put your whole heart into it

AI’s ROI problem is organizational, and leaders serious about this should be prepared to change how their company is set up.

AI doesn't fit existing structures and companies have to change to use it..

The cost of failure is real, but the cost of half-heartedness is higher, and far easier to overlook.

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• Samsung's Galaxy XR headset is finally coming to the UK
• It lands on July 8, and will cost £1,699
• It lands ahead of Samsung's Android XR glasses expansion

After months of waiting, the Samsung Galaxy XR headset is finally ready to bring Android XR to countries beyond the US and South Korea. A UK launch date has just been announced for July 8 at a price of £1,699, and the headset is available for preorder right now at Samsung's online store.

Known previously as Project Moohan when it was debuted back in late 2024, this headset exists as a collaboration between Samsung, Google, and Qualcomm and showcases the best of each: Samsung’s hardware expertise is felt through the excellent 4K micro-OLED displays and comfortable design, Google’s Android XR software powers the beast with Gemini AI enhancements and a suite of Play Store apps at your fingertips, and Qualcomm’s chipmaking knowledge is leveraged through the Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2.

TechRadar's Lance Ulanoff got the chance to try the Galaxy XR when it launched, noting that it raises the bar while lowering the price for premium spatial experiences — check out his Galaxy XR review.

I’ve spent much less time with Samsung’s headset, though based on my hour-or-so demo at Samsung’s UK studio this week it was clear the headset offered some solid upgrades compared to my Meta Quest 3 experience — mainly those displays, and how impressive the visuals are.

If I could, I would have stuck Netflix on and just kicked back for a few more hours with a film. In fact, it was a delight to see a full suite of native entertainment apps (courtesy of the Android Play Store), something which is a little lacking on Meta’s hardware.

I’d also say my hour or so in VR was surprisingly comfortable — this is likely helped by the fact that the Samsung Galaxy XR is only 545g (just 31g heavier than my trusty Quest 3). This makes it a lot lighter than the Meta Quest Pro (at 722g), and the roughly 750g Apple Vision Pro, and so I’ll be excited to repeat my week-in-VR experiment from a few years ago.

A glimpse of more to come

The Samsung Galaxy XR seems impressive in its own right with its entertainment capabilities, solid selection of native XR (such as ports of existing games brought over to Google’s Play Store) and XR-enabled (2D apps you can place around your space as windows), and Gemini integrations.

I’m getting married next month, and we're already thinking about our honeymoon, which we’re planning to take some time early in 2027. The ability to explore destination we're considering in VR through Google Maps and street view — and even being able to visit attractions that have been 3D scanned by the owners — seems like an excellent holiday planning tool, especially for places I’ve never been to before.

That said, some of the tools feel like they’ll truly shine on AR glasses that you can wear all the time — like the headset’s circle-to-search function, which works both digitally and for the real world. I use my phone for this all the time, but having an even quicker way to visually search something I can see — such as details on where an outfit is from, how to care for a plant in my home, or more info on a landmark I can see, would be a major upgrade. It would be like a more precise version of Meta’s Ray-Ban’s look-and-ask tool, which I already use all the time.

That’s not to say the Galaxy XR isn’t its own thing, and I’m excited to experience it properly now that it’s landing in the UK. I'm just noting that some of the tools sound perfect for glasses, and as Samsung expands its foothold in this area — it just announced AI specs at Google I/O in partnership with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster — and I can't wait to see what else it has up its sleeve.

• Microsoft is changing the way that Windows 11 updates are delivered
• The likes of .NET, driver or firmware updates will be bundled together with the monthly update
• This change is now in testing, alongside a lot of work to make Windows 11's default apps better

Windows 11 is getting some more very useful changes, including an improved process for updates and a raft of tweaks for the default apps in the OS.

Microsoft has just released a new preview in the Experimental channel (build 26300.8687) which packs the changes for Windows Update (which were announced as incoming a while back in April).

Microsoft tells us: "We are rolling out a new unified update experience to reduce the number of reboots you see per month. We are starting by coordinating driver, .NET, and firmware updates to align with the monthly quality update, reducing the update experience to a single monthly restart."

Elsewhere, Thurrott.com points out that Microsoft has a whole lot of work underway for the various core Windows 11 apps, and that the company is now documenting these changes under separate release notes for apps in its Learn portal.

Calculator is getting tweaked so it has readable text when using high contrast themes and more accurate square-root results (with rare errors fixed).

Windows 11's Camera app now supports more video resolution options, and a full range of zoom levels (plus the zoom slider now works with more cameras, including the latest models). Microsoft has also ensured that the front-facing cameras on more devices are supported.

The Clock has the ability to run more countdowns (up to three simultaneously) and a new 15-minute snooze on alarms, among a whole load of minor changes.

Microsoft Paint now offers functionality to adjust how transparent the eraser is, and the AI image panel has been tidied up with a cleaner layout. The toolbar loads faster, too, and a bunch of stability tweaks have been applied, reducing the likelihood of crashes.

The Photos app also has some useful changes so it'll now display very tiny images (such as pixel art) with an appropriate level of zoom so they look sharp rather than a blurry mess, as well as tweaks for the interface and again stability (resolving a crash that happened during text recognition).

With improvements to Media Player (custom captions, bug fixes and better overall reliability) and Sound Recorder, Microsoft is clearly busy with these default apps.

Analysis: a better way of working with updates

Bear in mind that all of these changes are in testing right now, but the various bits of tweaking and new features for Windows 11's core apps shouldn't take long to come through.

The move to consolidate the deployment of Windows 11's updates will take longer, as it's only in the Experimental channel (early testing) right now, and it's just rolling out gradually there. However, it's great to see this inbound, because it's going to represent a major convenience for the average Windows 11 user.

Instead of having to bother with separate updates for firmware, or the .NET framework, or device drivers, Windows Update will bundle them all together with the monthly cumulative update that Microsoft releases. The upshot is that you'll only have to reboot once to apply all those upgrades, and while installation will take longer, simplifying how updates work in this way is definitely worth the trade-off.

This is one of many improvements Microsoft has in the works for Windows 11 updates, and the key piece of functionality that's already in the pipeline is the ability to delay a monthly update indefinitely. Update installation failures have long been a blemish on Microsoft's reputation, too, and moves are afoot to cure these blues.

Apple revealed macOS 27 Golden Gate at WWDC 2026 this week, with the first beta version of its next desktop operating system becoming available to download.

To be clear, this is an initial developer beta not intended for the general computing public – a beta for everyday users won't come until later – but even so, we saw an odd rush to grab this very first release of macOS 27.

Why? It certainly wasn't because Mac owners were very keen to get their pointers on a whole load of shiny, glitzy new features, because as we made clear, macOS 27 doesn't add anything particularly attention-grabbing. Indeed, one of the most notable things about macOS 27 is that it shuts the Golden Gate on Macs that don't run on Apple's M-series silicon (or the A18 Pro in the case of the MacBook Neo), with Intel chips officially being ditched.

Otherwise, macOS 27 is a case of general performance and stability work, as well as honing the interface, and a raft of minor feature additions. So, again – why are Mac owners falling over themselves to download the macOS 27 developer beta? Well, it's because that more humdrum-sounding work on generally fixing macOS when it comes to performance was badly needed after the release of the current iteration of the OS (macOS Tahoe).

In case you weren't aware, then, it isn't just Windows 11 that needs fixing – which Microsoft is in the midst of a major campaign to do – but also macOS. And the good news is that, apparently, Apple has done a great job right off the bat on the recovery front with the first macOS 27 beta – to an eye-opening extent, as you'll see.

Let's explore the broad reaction to macOS 27 with its initial debut in testing – including it being called 'mind-blowing', that's how positive some folks are being – and look at the three main reasons why Golden Gate isn't as lowkey a release as it may seem upon first glance.

1. Tahoe performance headaches seem to have been totally cured in macOS 27

Early adopters of the initial dev beta of macOS 27 are pretty much universally praising the performance boost compared to the current version of the OS, and essentially saying it feels like night-and-day compared to Tahoe.

This Reddit thread is a perfect example, where the original poster claims that: 'Performance is genuinely mind-blowing on the new macOS 27 beta'. They add that "macOS 27 feels incredibly fast compared to Tahoe", and that: "The lag, stutters, and general sluggishness I experienced on Tahoe seem to be completely gone. Apps launch faster, animations are smoother, and the whole system feels much more responsive and polished."

Others chime in with similar thoughts on that thread, and macOS 27 gets nothing less than a glowing write-up. For example: "Gets even better during high-end tasks! It [the MacBook] doesn't heat up as much, and isn't hogging RAM as much as Tahoe was."

Another Redditor says: "Agreed. I have an M1 Pro base as well and performance is so much better than Tahoe. It honestly feels like a new Mac now."

There's a common theme across many online comments from those who've already migrated from Tahoe to Golden Gate in that they're saying that their Mac now feels like a new computer (as per that last comment).

Of course, this is still early days – very early – but it's undeniably a positive sign that Apple is on the right track here. If you've avoided Tahoe due to performance-related concerns then it seems Golden Gate will be your golden ticket to upgrade from macOS Sequoia finally (assuming you don't have an Intel Mac).

2. The first macOS 27 beta is reportedly remarkably stable already – and that bodes well

As well as the observations on distinct and substantial performance improvements across the board, there's another theme with the reaction to macOS 27 so far, namely that it's very stable. And that's pretty remarkable given that this is the initial release of the pre-public (developer) version of Golden Gate – it simply doesn't get any more 'early adopter' than this.

Indeed, the original poster from the above Reddit thread concerning the great performance boost was wowed almost as much by the stability levels in evidence here. They noted: "It's still a beta, but so far the performance is absolutely amazing." And that: "It's pretty wild that a developer beta runs better than the stable version of Tahoe. I'd definitely recommend upgrading."

Someone else adds: "The beta of [macOS] 27 is more stable than macOS 26 during its entire run."

Indeed, there are a fair few Redditors who are chipping in and making comments saying that they'd never normally touch a first beta release, but having read these threads, they've been tempted into taking the plunge and leaving Tahoe behind.

On a more cautious note, I'd be careful about early betas in general, although at this point, macOS 27 is only open to developers anyway – and we explain more about what this means here.

At any rate, there's a double win with the first macOS 27 beta in terms of a big performance improvement combined with stability in spades given the early stage this work is currently at.

3. Apple has ironed out the interface wrinkles introduced with Tahoe

There were a number of frustrations aired about some of the decisions made with the interface in macOS Tahoe, and Apple has set about resolving these in macOS 27.

One key change is the menu icons, which have been widely criticized in Tahoe and even described as 'glaringly inconsistent and often utterly inscrutable', with app menus stuffed full of icons to a bewildering extent – but this has now been cleaned up.

Apple has also addressed complaints around window borders, and there are no more 'floating' sidebars, as they are now edge-to-edge inside their window, as noted by this Redditor. The changes to the Liquid Glass design are also singled out, with Apple ensuring that the transparency effect no longer makes text difficult to read.

As another Redditor put it more broadly: "Golden Gate is very sharp now. On Tahoe everything was so goddamn blurry and it's good now."

Note that Liquid Glass hasn't gone away, it's just been tweaked, and very much for the better by all accounts. There are a whole bunch of other UI tweaks for macOS 27 as highlighted by MacRumors in this list.

Only doing what had to be done?

So, that's all well and good. But while what Apple's done in terms of performance and stability for a first beta may be 'mind-blowing' in some respects, it could also be argued that this is merely to be expected. That's because macOS 27 is mostly about fixing Tahoe, and so that's what Apple has been concentrating on – hence the lack of any major feature additions.

Still, to be fair to Apple, it looks like the company has done a great job. And it is indeed unusual to see feedback praising stability so highly for an initial (dev) beta release. So, let's give credit where it's due, even if this is more a case of necessary refinement, honing, fixing, and generally 'recovering' from Tahoe than it is Golden Gate being any kind of standout leap over its predecessor.

It seems like macOS 27 is going to please a lot of Mac owners when it's released later this year, particularly those with older MacBooks (not too old, though – sorry Intel folks). Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, Microsoft's efforts to fix Windows 11 – a project set to span the course of this year – are also going well thus far. All this makes me optimistic that perhaps 2027 could be a golden year for desktop operating systems.

• Samsung's XR headset will help you meditate while giving blood
• Employees recently tried the demo, and it'll be available at AWE
• Further expansions are already planned

There are plenty of things in life we know we should be doing but don’t for one reason or another — like eating more vegetables, exercising several times a week, giving our time to good causes, or reading a good book. But for one such activity, giving blood, Samsung and healthcare company Abbott have just showcased a way to make it a bit more bearable: immersive meditation.

To mark World Blood Donor Day, Samsung employees in South Korea had the opportunity to give blood while experiencing immersive meditation, and the company plans to expand the program globally, with events scheduled for the US and Malaysia.

One such activation is happening in just a few days. Attendees at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California, next week (June 15 to 18) can take part in Samsung and Abbott’s four-day blood drive.

I’m currently taking part in a medical trial, and as part of it every couple of months I have to get a lot of blood taken. While I am now used to it, I always get stressed out in the moments before the needle goes in, and I can’t relax until I know it’s all over — so some kind of immersive XR experience would be a help.

It would certainly beat my current method of trying to distract myself by talking the nurse’s ear off.

Analysis/subhead section

We’ve seen XR used in similar ways before, for example, some flights now offer VR headset meditation to help calm nervous fliers, and schools have used VR to help bring education to life. These examples give some ideas for how XR can make other mundane parts of our lives a bit more fun.

Gamifying exercise to make it more exciting is a trend that's always being chased, but too often it struggles to pull folks away from a more traditional routine. So instead, I’d like to see an XR glasses app that can work with any gym equipment.

Imagine having an XR coach there to talk you through a routine, with advice for each machine and stats about your last visit, like what weights you were lifting and pushing you to go a little harder if you can. Treadmill runs could come with immersive routes to jog through, or perhaps you could have a virtual you/rival joining you at each machine, giving you someone to compete against.

My next proposal: a reading companion. I know a few teachers, and many have said it’s harder than ever to get kids to read. If you do try to set a reading and then quiz the kids on what the book is about, they’ll just use AI to summarize the story for them.

So what if an XR glasses or headset app could leverage eye-tracking to follow along as you read to see that you’ve actually gone through a book properly. Parents and teachers can then know their kid has been reading and deserves some congratulations, and for the kid, the glasses could help with understanding or pronouncing words, perhaps provide some visual cues to what they’re reading, and help them find similar books once they’re finished.

I’m not envisioning anything supremely immersive, just a few bits to help readers of all ages engage with a story.

Or perhaps we could use XR to help make doing chores less of a, well, chore.

MR apps have been made to show us where we have and haven’t vacuumed, so something similar for dusting, cleaning the bathroom, and other tasks would be great at keeping my home spotless in every way.

I also love listening to music while I clean, so perhaps an XR app could turn my home into a rave that only plays while I’m tidying, helping me push through chores.

These are just a few fun possible examples, but they showcase some of the reasons and ways XR could be an awesome technology as it develops. We’ll just have to wait and see what Samsung, Google, Meta, Apple, and the rest have up their sleeves.

• Microsoft has made a notable move with the Windows App SDK
• It's allowing some AI powers to run on non-Copilot+ PCs without an NPU, using an Nvidia GPU instead
• This is an experimental move for now, but it suggests a wider drive to bring more AI capabilities to all Windows 11 PCs, not just Copilot+ models

Microsoft is planning to bring AI features to a wider set of Windows 11 PCs, allowing devices with suitably beefy GPUs to avail themselves of local AI functionality that's currently restricted to Copilot+ PCs with a fast NPU.

Windows Latest spotted that Microsoft has a new feature in testing — marked as experimental — for the Windows App SDK, which allows developers to run local language models (AI features) on non-Copilot+ PCs by using a GPU.

Microsoft stated: "The Language Model APIs now run on non-Copilot+ PCs equipped with a supported GPU, bringing local language model capabilities to a broader range of Windows 11 devices. Supported hardware includes Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 series and newer with 6+ GB vRAM."

What does this mean in practice? If you're thinking that all Windows 11 PCs are going to get the full range of exclusive Copilot+ AI features — like Recall for example — that isn't the case.

What this is about is allowing software developers to let their apps tap into certain AI features on any Windows 11 PC with a qualifying GPU.

As Windows Latest points out, the move will mean that non-Copilot+ PCs can access Microsoft's Phi Silica small language model and use it locally (on the device, as opposed to reaching out to the cloud) not with an NPU, but with an appropriate Nvidia graphics card (with 6GB of video RAM) instead.

This will allow for basic AI abilities such as rewriting or summarizing text to be carried out within apps where the developer codes for this, outside of the Copilot+ PCs where this would normally be restricted to.

Analysis: an agentic future

The theory is that this is just the initial step, and Microsoft is going to push for the wider deployment of other AI features to non-Copilot PCs.

It also addresses a frustration that was aired in the very early days of Copilot+ PCs, when I remember a bunch of people questioning why Microsoft limited these AI features to devices with NPUs, when a decent GPU was easily capable of accelerating these on-device AI workloads.

This was an arbitrary restriction, of course, but now the questioning shifts to a different line: exactly how many AI powers will Microsoft allow to be pushed onto non-Copilot+ PCs.

Of course, it's notable of late that Microsoft isn't talking about Copilot+ PCs anymore — the brand didn't even get a mention at the company's recent Build conference. AI was very much still a hot topic, of course, and Microsoft appears to be shifting its angle from pushing a specific hardware brand to more widely promoting AI agents, which are to be the next big thing (AI-wise) in Windows 11.

If you thought Microsoft was cutting back on AI in Windows 11, then, this is another sign that the company is going very much in the other direction, and driving to get more AI features onto a wider array of PCs.

When Microsoft initially talked about cutting back on AI bloat — when the fix Windows 11 campaign was first announced — what it really meant was reducing some of the AI-related clutter in certain menus for the OS along with core apps. A trimming of excesses, basically, and away from that, AI remains a key focus for Microsoft, of course — with this latest move underlining that fact.

• Lawmakers in Pennsylvania want new smart glasses rules
• A proposed bill would mandate that glasses display when they are recording video or audio
• This comes after reports that modders are disabling this feature on Meta Ray-Bans for a price

Last week, I covered reports of, let’s face it, creeps who have been modifying their smart glasses (typically Meta Ray-Bans) to secretly record video and snap photos — by disabling the safety light that flashes when the glasses’ camera is in use. Now, Pennsylvania lawmakers want to make private recording with smart glasses a crime.

Representative Joe Ciresi (D-Montgomery), has introduced a bill that would require smart glasses made, sold or used in his state to display a visual indicator (like a light) when the device is recording — though his bill would go beyond video and to audio as well.

Calling the bill’s rules “common-sense privacy safeguards” to prevent the “misuse of emerging technologies.” It would also require device makers to prevent users from disabling the visual indicator.

While Meta has yet to respond to this new proposed bill, a spokesperson did get back to us after my last story, saying, "All technology — whether it's cameras, smartphones, or AI glasses — comes with the same basic expectation: people should behave responsibly and not misuse it.”

Adding “We aggressively target anyone advertising tampering tools, have removed thousands of violating ads and Marketplace listings for these services, and pursue legal action when appropriate," in response to questions about modification services being sold and advertised through Meta’s own Facebook Marketplace platform.

Meta also explained that its teams are working on evolving its measures — so hopefully it’ll find a way to counter the techniques modders have developed to disable the smart glasses' safety light.

The best outcome?

This new bill is one I’m expecting we’ll see echoed across the States and in other regions because it feels like common sense.

As I mentioned before, we’re seeing how folks are being plain weird in public by misusing smart glasses to harass, intimidate, stalk, and spy on people — amongst other creepy behavior — and these actions risk spoiling everyone’s fun.

Cameras on glasses have genuine utility for allowing the AI to identify landmarks or translate signs, or simply snapping a quick first-person shot while you’re on vacation. Having used my Meta Ray-Bans plenty, the camera quality is worse than my phone's, but the big advantage is that the specs can record without taking me out of the moment — you’re living it for real, not behind a phone screen, but still capturing the memory.

But the risks of misuse can be countered by full-on bans, so I’m glad to see Pennsylvania is taking a tactful approach.

We’ll have to see how companies and governments respond to modification services trying to skirt these rules, but this is the best possible next step in the smart glasses safety saga — giving us an increasingly uncommon win in the consumer tech space.

• The Windows 11 June update is now here
• It packs three key features, one of which speeds up the loading of core Windows 11 menus and apps
• There's also a nifty shared audio feature, and a boost for search

Windows 11's latest update is here, and the June patch brings with it a few key changes, and some useful complementary tweaks.

I've picked out the top three features as announced by Microsoft in what's officially called the KB5094126 patch (where does it get these catchy names from?) for Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2. I'll also round up the minor changes in a closing section, so that you can see everything that's new with the June update.

But I'll get to the main addition straight away, as it's a big one that makes Windows 11 feel a lot more responsive.

1. Low Latency Profile sounds dull, but should speed up Windows 11 substantially

The June update represents the beginning of the rollout of Low Latency Profile (LLP), a feature which I, and many others, have been keenly awaiting the arrival of, because it considerably speeds up the general operation of some core Windows 11 features (or at least it should do).

Windows Latest spotted that this is rolling out with the latest Windows 11 update, as part of a tweak to 'general performance', with Microsoft telling us: "This update accelerates app launch and core shell experiences such as Start menu, Search, and Action Center."

LLP means that the operating system calls on the processor to boost its speed — putting the accelerator flat to the floor, effectively, for a brief time (one to three seconds) — when you're opening an app or a Windows 11 menu. In short, whatever app or menu is being loaded appears a good deal more quickly. (Wondering why Microsoft didn't do this in the first place with Windows 11? I've discussed that in the past, along with criticism leveled at this technique for being a 'fudge').

The catch is that, as noted, this is a controlled rollout, meaning it's coming to Windows 11 PCs gradually. So, if you run out and install the June update now you probably won't get LLP right away, and you may have to wait a little while. How long? I refer you to the common saying about a piece of string, because the progression of this rollout will depend on what Microsoft finds as it monitors the PCs which get the feature.

The trouble is there'll be no announcement of LLP arriving on your system, so the only way you'll know it's there is that you'll suddenly notice apps and menus loading a lot more quickly (well, hopefully).

As Windows Latest points out, you can confirm the presence of LLP by installing a utility to monitor your PC's hardware, such as HWMonitor, which displays the CPU's speed (frequency) in real time. If the feature is active on your PC, you'll notice a big spike (to max speed, or very close) when opening any software or menu that triggers LLP. (Try the Start menu or Action Center and see).

(A final note: Windows Latest details how to force-enable LLP if you've installed the June update, but don't yet have it. However, I wouldn't do that, because it involves some fiddling around with a Windows configuration utility. More to the point, Microsoft is deploying this feature gradually, with careful monitoring, for a reason, so queue-jumping the rollout in this way may not be the best idea.)

2. Shared audio experience

This is a relatively simple idea, but a great addition to Windows 11 nonetheless. The new shared audio feature allows you to do just that — have the audio from your PC piped to two different outputs.

So, for example, if you're traveling with someone on the train and want to watch a movie on your laptop together, you can have the sound sent to your headphones and your friend's earbuds too.

3. Windows 11 search improvement

This one's an even more basic tweak, but still a useful one. As of the June update, when using the search function in Windows 11, the operating system will start showing you possible results with as few as two characters having been typed. This means you might see the query you're wanting more quickly, saving you a bit of time.

Bigger changes are coming to Windows 11 search, too, including the ability to handle long compound file names better (which is now in testing), and hopefully we'll eventually get the most important move of all — the ability to get rid of web results in search.

Other changes with Windows 11's June update

This latest update also brings in improvements on the accessibility front, with Magnifier now able to provide "clearer and more consistent announcements" when it's working with a screen-reading tool (such as announcing when it's zooming in or out).

There's also a new Multi-App Camera feature which means that multiple applications can access your webcam at the same time. And finally, a small tweak for the installation process: on setup, Windows 11 now allows you to choose a custom name for the user folder.

• Apple Maps is getting a huge Flyover visual upgrade
• It will use Vision Intelligence and aerial imagery to create detailed 3D models of city landscapes
• It looks like Apple has also adopted Gaussian Splatting to help render its 3D models

Apple’s upcoming iOS 27 upgrade isn't just about fancy new AI upgrades like the new Siri voice assistant — but Apple Maps is also getting quite a noticeable revamp.

During its WWDC 2026 keynote, Apple took a moment to shine a light on the new visual upgrade for the Flyover tool in Apple Maps, which allows you to view over 350 global cities in 3D from a bird's eye perspective. In iOS 27, Flyover will display buildings and natural landscapes alike using a combination of aerial imagery and Apple’s own Vision Intelligence models to produce 3D views that are even more detailed.

Though Apple didn’t go into further detail, the images used in the WWDC presentation suggest that the company has also adopted Gaussian Splatting to create its 3D landscapes, a graphics technique that uses video footage as the foundation to build a 3D framework. The tool could really give Apple a huge leg-up over Google Maps, which still uses photogrammetry to generate its own 3D models.

It’s not a theory that’s completely out of the question; there are users out there who have also pointed this out after seeing the newly rendered imagery in Apple’s keynote (see below).

Flyover’s enhanced imagery is designed to bring out every visual aspect of Apple Map’s 3D aerial views, including the nitty gritty parts that go unnoticed. Speaking at WWDC, Vice President of OS Program Management, Stacey Ford, shared the following: “From beautiful architectural details to the shapes of individual trees, to the way light reflects off the glass of skyscrapers, you’ll see cities around the world like never before”.

The update is quite a big technical shift for Apple Maps, and will join other upgrades from macOS Golden Gate, to custom AirPods EQ adjustments in iOS 27. The only downside is that you’ll have to wait a bit to test out Flyover’s new look, as iOS 27 is expected to roll out publicly in September — but you can register as a developer and download the first iOS 27 beta now.

Although there’s still a few months left to wait, users have spotted signs that Apple is tinkering with Flyover ahead of the wider iOS 27 rollout.

When the announcement was shared to the r/AppleMaps community on Reddit, users flocked to the comments to share more theories. One user believes Apple is conducting a “weird rollout”, who says that switching to iOS 27 reverts previously-supported cities to low-quality satellite images, while newly-supported cities receive the visual upgrade.

From the user’s experience, they recall seeing a handful of US locations including San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, and Phoenix revert to 2D, as well as international cities such as Sydney, Paris, and Stockholm. On the other hand, Vegas, London, Berlin, Barcelona, and others have been upgraded.

At the moment it’s still very much a guessing game, and Apple probably won’t provide further information until we get closer to the wider iOS 27 launch later this year. That said, Apple’s move from photogrammetry to Gaussian Splatting marks a big shift in digital map rendering, and now we’re just waiting for Google Maps to follow suit.

I come here to celebrate Apple delivering. It's not overshooting the mark with the new Siri AI, which it unveiled at WWDC 2026, but it is finally delivering on the promises it made at WWDC 2024.

Sure, it's beta (again), and there's a wait list (again), but I've now seen it at work, in person, in live and potentially unpredictable demos. Siri AI, as it's now called, works across platforms, and it has the potential to change how you use your iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

While I waited for my access to the new Siri on my iPhone 17 Pro, I visited one of the countless rooms in Apple's massive Apple Park headquarters, where I round-robined through a series of stations at which I could see Siri AI in action on iOS 27 Dev Beta, iPadOS 27 Dev Beta, and macOS Golden Gate Dev Beta. This is all a work in progress.

I'll admit that while I was probably most interested in the new Siri on the iPhone, I was most surprised by how it works on the iPad. On every platform, this smarter, more aware, and more personable Siri looks different than before. It's bigger, brighter, floatier (I made that a word), and it has a new sense of confidence.

On the iPad, you can summon Siri with your voice, but you can also swipe down from the top of the screen, and a sort of black teardrop will form until it releases from the top of the screen and is displayed as the small Siri AI window. It's a nice, classy touch.

Of course, you can type into Siri, and I watched as we searched for top PGA golfers, and I noticed how anxious new Siri was to get to work, auto-filling answers before we'd even finished our query. Since it initially had just 'Top PGA Golfers', it quickly spit out Jack Nicklaus before refining on the fly to more contemporary players like Scottie Scheffler.

I also noticed during this process a new 'working' iconography that looks unlike any previous form of Apple's 'Please wait for an answer' spinner. Sometimes Siri AI seems whip-fast; other times, you can watch that icon spin as it works. There's no obvious sense of, "Oh, it's heading out to the Private Cloud Compute for that."

I watched here and on other platforms as Siri AI effortlessly kept context, without demanding a restate or telling us it couldn't answer that, and "did we want to check the web?" or "Use ChatGPT?" In fact, ChatGPT appears to have been almost fully deprecated here. It does not show up as an option, though I believe you can still request it.

As we dug in on Scheffler's career, Apple was quick to show me how Siri AI always shows its sources. I appreciate the care.

The little Siri AI window that appears in a session can be easily expanded, and then you're suddenly in the new Siri app. Apple takes a slightly different approach here than, say, Gemini or ChatGPT: the chat window is familiar-looking, but the conversation history is card-based, with almost headlines for your query topic, and either a brief summary or image. I did not see an option for a tighter list form, which I might prefer.

iPhone, meet the new Siri

On the iPhone 17 Pro Max, we summoned Siri with a long press of the power button, which launched that new, large, almost alien spaceship-like floating blob. I say 'floating' because throughout the demo I noticed that Apple had made the effort to put very subtle shading under the new Siri interface so that it looks like it's floating just above the screen. It's a neat little effect.

Siri AI's superpower is not that it's smarter or more chatty (in fact, Siri will steer you away from conversations that might be better had with humans or, say, mental health support professionals); it's that it understands you through the data on your phone.

This is where the fulfillment of a promise comes in. Siri AI really does appear to know the contents of your phone in a way that could be truly helpful. Its needle-in-the-haystack approach means that, if you have a thread of memory about a bit of data, something someone mentioned to you in an email or message, Siri can dig it out for you.

In the demo I saw, we asked about a "podcast our sister recommended recently," and Siri searched across first-party apps (developers will have to build hooks into Siri AI in future versions of their apps) and pulled up a casual mention of a Sherlock Holmes podcast in Messages. Again, once we had that detail, we only had to say, "Play it," and Siri launched the podcast app.

The obvious benefit is the end of endless searching and then backing out and finding the right app. I could imagine a lot of your daily interactions with your iPhone getting done through Siri AI. Of course, much of this will depend on developers of apps like WhatsApp, Gmail, and others building in those Siri connections.

Still, the power here is exciting. Taking someone's lengthy emails full of useful but disorganized details and turning them into, say, a useful Camping Gear list in Notes is a significant leap from the current and endlessly disappointing "Sorry, I can't do that" Siri.

Over the course of my demo, I watched as Siri pulled up random references relating to queries about travel and meteor showers. It's sort of a de-randomizer. Like all good AI, Siri AI can see the patterns in your endless reams of data, and make sense of it.

I also got a look at Siri in the Camera app. That's right, it now has a menu item right next to 'Photo,' and once launched it works a bit like Visual Intelligence. Choosing it does mean that Siri can 'see what you see,' which may or may not comfort you, but if you're wondering what you're looking at or, say, want Siri to help you make a choice, it's ready. I did notice that the Camera app takes a photo of whatever Siri is analyzing.

At one point, we mispoke in the demo, but Siri sussed out the proper prompt and results without any intervention from us. Kind of impressive.

In a demo where it helped me decide which book to read next, I listened as Siri's new 'expressive' voice told me why I should read Blindsight next. I noticed, though, that the new voice sounded a bit odd. I don't know if the emotion sounded forced or missing, but I'm assuming this is an element that's still being tweaked in iOS 27 Dev Beta.

Spotlight on the Mac

Most of my Mac demo revolved around how Siri AI transforms Spotlight, the Mac's system-wide search engine. You can, it turns out, still use it to launch apps like Preview, but the new interface almost compels you to go further with the words, 'Search or Ask'.

Ask basically transforms Spotlight into a generative search box where almost any general knowledge question is welcomed. We asked about the Hawaiian islands for families. If the system deems the question as 'complex,' it will default to Siri and Apple's world Knowledge Engine. That's right, even though the new Siri is using, in part, Gemini Foundation models, Apple is not using Google's Search knowledge graph.

Once you launch a search, you're inside Siri, and you can keep that window open while you multitask on other desktop chores.

In Apple Intelligence, you select text and right-click to access AI-powered writing tools, but the new Siri is embedded in more subtle ways that still give you full access to its new power. We selected a bunch of text in Notes and, while we could still have Siri rewrite it, Writing Tools-style, we can also use this as a launch point to weave together other Apple first-party app capabilities. In this case, we asked it to use the notes to draft a structured email in Mail.

Again, this is a pair of first-party Apple apps working together, and Apple is well aware that your email client may not be Apple's Mail.

Overall, it's still just a glimpse of what Siri AI can do, but I find it a promising one, especially for beta software. The plumbing clearly works, and if you allow it, Siri can finally see across your iPhone, iPad, and Mac to understand you and your needs. It's been a long time coming, but I think Apple finally got this right.

If you're using an older Mac or MacBook with an Intel chip, then we have bad news, as Apple has quietly killed off support for any device sold before 2020 that doesn't have an Arm-based Apple silicon chip (that is, Macs with M1 chips or newer, or the A18 Pro, in the MacBook Neo's case).

Apple announced macOS 27 Golden Gate at WWDC 2026, and highlighted new features and performance improvements. However, it didn't reveal which Macs would be getting the upcoming operating system, which is due to release 'this Fall', so expect it about October.

Instead, we found confirmation tucked away at the bottom of the macOS news site. This is a bit cheeky, as it's a major change that will impact a lot of people, though it's also not that surprising, as it was only a matter of time before Apple dropped support for older Macs.

This also means there's no Mac Pro or iMac Pro model which can run macOS 27. Will Apple silicon models come out this year for those super-powerful workstations? Let's hope.

Bye bye Intel

Here is the list of Macs and MacBooks that will be able to run macOS 27 Golden Gate:

• MacBook Air M1 or later
• MacBook Pro M1 or later
• MacBook Pro 13-inch M1 2020 or later
• MacBook Pro 14-inch M1 Pro 2021 or later
• MacBook Pro 16-inch M1 Pro 2021 or later
• MacBook Neo
• iMac M1 2020 or later
• Mac mini M1 2020 or later
• Mac Studio 2022 and later

By concentrating on its own chips, which use Arm architecture, Apple also no longer has to worry about Macs running on Intel's x86 chip tech, which will hopefully mean the macOS team has more scope to improve the performance of the software and add features in the future.

If you have an Intel Mac, you can continue to use it with macOS 26, though running an older operating system that might not get security updates in the future isn't recommended. So, it might be time to consider a new Mac — see below for some top deals.

• MacBook Air M1 or later
• MacBook Pro M1 or later
• MacBook Pro 13-inch M1 2020 or later
• MacBook Pro 14-inch M1 Pro 2021 or later
• MacBook Pro 16-inch M1 Pro 2021 or later
• MacBook Neo
• iMac M1 2020 or later
• Mac mini M1 2020 or later
• Mac Studio 2022 and later

Apple has announced macOS 27 Golden Gate, the latest desktop operating system for the best MacBooks and Macs at WWDC 26, and in this guide, I'll show you how to install the developer beta, which is available to download right now. However, before we get into that, it's important to note that for most people, you won't want to download the developer beta unless you know what you're doing.

This is because the developer beta, which, as the name makes clear, is for developers to test their apps with. It's not for public consumption, as this early version will have missing features and plenty of bugs.

Instead, you're better off waiting at least until July, when the public beta will be released. By that time, a lot of bugs will hopefully have been caught and fixed, though there will still likely be some glitches. If you can wait, then the final release later this year (hopefully around October) will be much more stable.

You should also note that you need to have a developer account to download the developer beta, which costs money. If you absolutely can't wait, and don't mind paying, then follow my steps below - otherwise, hang tight until next month.

How to install the macOS 27 Golden Gate developer beta on your Mac

First of all, you must have a compatible Mac to install macOS 27 Golden Gate - see below to make sure your Mac is included.

Also, remember that this is early beta software, so it’s not advisable to put it on your daily driver Mac. Ideally, you want to instal this on a secondary device.

If you’re intent on having a macOS Tahoe developer beta on your main PC, then understand that it’s risky to run a pre-release operating system on it – and definitely be sure to back up before proceeding (you should do this in any case).

• MacBook Air M1 or later
• MacBook Pro M1 or later
• MacBook Pro 13-inch M1 2020 or later
• MacBook Pro 14-inch M1 Pro 2021 or later
• MacBook Pro 16-inch M1 Pro 2021 or later
• MacBook Neo
• iMac M1 2020 or later
• Mac mini M1 2020 or later
• Mac Studio 2022 and later

You also need to be a software developer. If you are, you must be signed into your Apple Developer account: head here, and click on Account, top-right, then log in.

If you don’t have a developer account, then you’ll need to create one here, signing up as an individual, which requires an Apple Account (with two-factor authentication enabled). You’ll need to provide a payment method, and a developer membership costs $99 per year, so it’s hardly cheap.

Once Apple verifies you and sets up your Apple Developer membership – or if you already have one and are logged in – you can then download macOS 27.

Head to System Settings > General > Software Update on your Mac, and where it says ‘Beta Updates’ click the Info (i) icon on the right. In the panel that opens, along from Beta Updates, click the button on the right, where it says ‘Off’ and you’ll get a list of options. Choose the macOS Developer Beta from that list, click Done, and then click Upgrade Now.

That’s it – the upgrade will go ahead, and after a reboot, you should be faced with an early version of Apple's new operating system. When the public beta is released, it'll be worth installing that rather than sticking with the developer beta, as it should be more stable. The developer beta will likely continue until the final macOS 27 Golden Gate release later this year, but will focus on cutting-edge features that need to be tested before they get rolled out.

That might sound exciting, but it does increase the possibility of bugs appearing; after all, that's part of the reason why beta versions exist.

WWDC 2026, this year's edition of Apple's software-focused developer conference, has been particularly notable due to it being the last one with Tim Cook as CEO — he'll be handing over the reins to John Ternus later this year. But it's also given us a glimpse of what the future holds for Macs and MacBooks, with the announcement of macOS 27 Golden Gate.

Unlike Microsoft's rival Windows operating system, Apple releases yearly major updates to its macOS operating system which come with a new name (usually taken from a Californian landmark) and number, which now reflects the year of release. While macOS 27 will release at the end of 2026, Apple will count 2027 as its main release year, so it doesn't feel outdated a few months after it lands on people's hard drives.

While WWDC 2026 is noteworthy for being Cook's last event, this year's macOS update is less exciting, and is mainly focused on performance improvements (which are always welcome), and AI integration (less welcome).

Still, it's an update anyone with a Mac or MacBook will want to download, as long as your device is compatible, so read on to find out what's new.

A note about compatibility: perhaps the most noticable change with macOS 27 Golden Gate is that Intel-based Macs and MacBooks are no longer supported. Only Macs that have Apple silicon chips (so, M1 Macs and MacBooks or newer) will be able to install macOS 27.

macOS 27 Golden Gate: at a glance

• What is it? The newest operating system for Macs and MacBooks
• When will it be out? A beta for developers is available to download right now, full version likely in October 2026 ('coming this Fall' according to Cook)
• How much will it cost? As usual, macOS 27 will be a free upgrade for everyone who has a compatible device

macOS 27 Golden Gate: Compatibility

Want to know if your Mac will be compatible with macOS 27 Golden Gate? Here’s the full list of Macs that’ll be able to run the operating system:

• MacBook Air M1 or later
• MacBook Pro M1 or later
• MacBook Pro 13-inch M1 2020 or later
• MacBook Pro 14-inch M1 Pro 2021 or later
• MacBook Pro 16-inch M1 Pro 2021 or later
• MacBook Neo
• iMac M1 2020 or later
• Mac mini M1 2020 or later
• Mac Studio 2022 and later

You'll notice that no Macs made before 2020 are supported. That's because macOS 27 Golden Gate is only compatible with Macs running on Apple's own M-series chips (or the A18 Pro, in the MacBook Neo's case).

This is a major change, and could see a lot of people unable to upgrade. Apple likely sees dropping older Intel models as a clean break, and means macOS 27 Golden Gate can include a big focus on AI features — the old Intel chips don't have NPUs for on-device AI.

By concentrating on its own chips, which use Arm architecture, Apple also no longer has to worry about Macs running on Intel's x86 chip tech, which will hopefully mean the macOS team has more time to improve the performance of the software and add features in the future.

If you have an Intel Mac, you can continue to use it with macOS 26, though running an not-updated operating system isn't recommended. So, it might be time to consider a new Mac — see below for some top deals.

macOS 27 Golden Gate: release date

The developer beta preview for macOS 27 is available today, but you probably don't want to install that.

For a start, you need to be a developer to download this beta, and that requires signing up and paying for a developer account. The public beta, which will come out in July, will be free, as will the final version when it launches later in the year.

Secondly, developer betas are very early versions of software that are mainly designed for (as the name suggests) software developers to test and make sure their apps are compatible. So, they're often very barebones, with missing features and plenty of bugs.

The public beta will hopefully be more stable, but there could still be problems, so I recommend most people wait until the final version is released, especially if you're installing macOS 27 on a device you rely on every day.

macOS 27 Golden Gate: new features

1. Liquid Glass tweaks

Last year's macOS 26 brought a major design change with its Liquid Glass theme. While macOS 27 doesn't bring another major change to the interface, it does address some of the common complaints about Liquid Glass, especially the issue with transparency effects (which gives the interface its name) making text hard to read.

It will diffuse shadows to make it easier to read, and there's a new slider to adjust the transparency of Liquid Glass.

2. General performance improvements

The major focus of macOS 27 will be making the operating system feel faster and more responsive on Macs and MacBooks, so while the new features might not be that exciting, you should hopefully notice an improvement in the overall performance of your Mac — and for free!

'Responsiveness' is an important word, with animations feeling faster, and Apple promises that Mac apps will load 30% faster thanks to pre-loading.

Photos should appear in your gallery faster, and AirDrop sharing is up to 80% faster.

3. Better Search in macOS

Search has been rebuilt on iOS and macOS for Spotlight, Photos, and Mail (new ranking system for more relevant results), so finding files and folders on your Mac should be a lot easier.

4. Improved parental controls

This is quite a hot topic at the moment, and it's good to see Apple has taken the protection of children seriously. Alongside the existing parental controls, macOS 27 Golden Gate will let parents put a block on apps, and there are now tools that will prevent unsuitable images, including nudity and gore, from being seen.

"We're giving powerful tools to parents," according to Craig Federighi, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Apple.

5. Siri AI

Personally, I've never felt the need to use Siri much on a Mac, unlike on iPhones and iPads where the virtual assistant feels like a more natural fit.

That could change with the new overhauled Siri, which after several delays, will be a key part of macOS 27 Golden Gate. With advanced AI features, courtesy of Google's Gemini, the new and improved Siri will be able to complete tasks with just a voice command (or text prompt), such as write emails for you, and it can also detect what's on your screen.

Siri will also make using the Calendar app in macOS better, as you can ask it to create events for you, and it can even check to see if you're available before you respond to invites.

There will be a new Siri app for macOS, where you can have conversations with the assistant, as well as see previous chats, much like you would see text messages in the Messages app. Conversations are synced with iCloud, so you'll be able to continue them on your iPhone or iPad.

You also get system-wide context menus, and Siri AI is now integrated directly into Spotlight, where you can ask Siri questions without going into an app. A keyboard shortcut will bring up Visual Intelligence, so you can ask Siri about things on your screen.

6. Image Playground improvements

Image Playground, the generative AI tool that turns prompts into images, has a new look that's easier to use, and it's getting an option that allows you to create wallpapers using AI.

A new model allows for photo-realistic images, and you can use it on your own photos, and nothing is uploaded or shared - it's all done on-device.

• Windows 11 search could give you the option to turn off web results
• Microsoft is already giving those results a lesser priority, but might go even further, and also remove results pointing to its store
• All this is based on changes seen in a meet-up with Windows 11 testers, but it remains a rumor for now

In what will hopefully be one of the most refreshing changes yet to be visited upon Windows 11, Microsoft is rumored to be working on letting users ditch web results (and therefore Bing) from the search function in the OS.

Windows Latest reports that it was present at a private meeting of Windows 11 testers where Microsoft revealed that the ability to turn off web results in search was inbound.

The website provides photographic evidence of the feature in an internal build not yet released as a preview, showing a toggle to turn off web searches, and another element of search suggestions can be switched off too, namely search results for the Microsoft Store.

We're told that these new options are going to be rolling out to Windows 11 testers in a matter of weeks, so we shouldn't have long to wait before we get concrete evidence of these changes.

Analysis: spam begone

If you've ever run a search in Windows 11 (or 10), you'll doubtless be familiar with web results popping up and getting in the way of what you actually want to see (namely local files being surfaced, or maybe Windows settings).

Just a few weeks ago, we heard that Microsoft is deprioritizing those web results in Windows search, meaning that as things stand with the current plan, these will still be present, but will appear further down the list than local files and other generally more relevant content.

At the time, I noted that Microsoft should give users the choice to switch off web results entirely, but remarked that this seemed unlikely. So, I'm very pleased to see that Microsoft has (reportedly) defied my expectations and is actually moving forward with this option – and the choice to ditch Microsoft Store recommendations to boot (even if these toggles should have always been in place when it boils down to it).

This is effectively giving users the choice to get rid of a lot of the 'spam' in Windows 11 search, cutting it back to just local results with nothing web-based being returned for any given query. It's a great move, and indeed I'd argue it's a key one in terms of getting rid of unwelcome promotional activity in Windows 11 (either pushing Microsoft Store apps, or web results which, naturally enough, open in Bing inside Edge, driving traffic to those Microsoft properties).

Before I get carried away here, it's worth remembering that for now, this remains a rumor – albeit a solid one given that Windows Latest shared a photo of the meeting and new Settings options. Even if all this is genuine, though, there's always the possibility that Microsoft could reverse course on the idea – but I doubt it, especially given that the company is very much in the mood to make crowd-pleasing changes to Windows 11 these days.

Keep those fingers crossed.

From November 2025-February 2026 at least nine Mexican government organizations were breached. Gambit Security reported that millions of confidential records were stolen from hundreds of servers. This is categorically bad, but scary security news is abundant.

For instance, Supply Chain attacks are becoming increasingly common, exposing the tooling that should keep software components reliable and trustworthy. But when source code is compromised, the impact of that damage is widespread and cascading.

Supply Chain compromise is the latest issue to keep the security profession up at night. Against that backdrop, why are the findings from the Mexican government breach so noteworthy?

Generative exploitation

This brutal campaign sets precedent for the scale of real-world exploitation with commodity Generative AI.

After building a map of resources, server data was passed through OpenAI’s APIs to GPT-4.1 for analysis, producing ~2500 reports which were fed back into Claude Code for exploitation. ~400 custom scripts were written to broaden and accelerate the attack.

Roughly 75% of the commands were generated and executed by Claude Code’s tools, including creation of a data exfiltration API and a complex tax certificate forgery tool. The report is clear that safety measures slowed the attack routinely, but never comprehensively enough to prevent it.

This is a view of offensive capability with a very capable scaffold and models released in 2025. AI helped the attacker move faster, discover weaknesses, build custom tools to exploit the weaknesses, and finally exploited more of those weaknesses.

In the interval between this attack and the Mythos Preview announcements, models such as GPT-5.3-Codex and Opus 4.6 already made measurable progress beyond 2025 models on Multi-Step Cyber Attacks.

Is Anthropic’s decision to withhold Mythos Preview a marketing stunt?

Withholding a model has been a long-standing lever in Frontier Lab safety plans. Before Mythos Preview and Glasswing, OpenAI launched their Trusted Access for Cyber program for GPT-5.3-Codex (their first model to reach “High” cybersecurity capability). Anthropic have now launched their similar Cyber Verification Program.

What’s unique in Mythos Preview?

The UK AI Security Institute (AISI) put it best with this summary, “Mythos Preview represents a step up over previous frontier models in a landscape where cyber performance was already rapidly improving”.

The AISI recently created an evaluation which tests model capability on a network attack simulation spanning 32 stages of an attack chain (estimated to take a human 20 hours to complete).

Mythos Preview is the first model to solve this challenge from start to finish, succeeding on 3 of 10 attempts with a 100 million token budget. AISI expect greater budget would improve results further.

Mythos Preview excels at lengthy orchestrated tasks. Anthropic has been explicit that Mythos Preview wasn't explicitly trained for cybersecurity capabilities; this leap stems from training for coding, specifically by focusing on improvements for long-running execution.

This is the first lesson we should take from Mythos Preview: coding capability and cybersecurity capability are equally linked to context, reasoning and orchestration.

If we review the rest of what can be disclosed (comprising roughly 1% of all findings in the Mythos Preview cybersecurity assessment), some other themes emerge.

Mythos Preview is better at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities, capable of finding things where humans wouldn’t look (scaling in ways that humans won’t), capable of finding things in code that humans have looked at thousands of times (but haven’t identified for decades), produces more accurate vulnerability findings and severity assessments, and is better at recommending fixes to the vulnerabilities it finds.

The Project Glasswing question

This final point brings us to Project Glasswing, Anthropic’s coordinated effort to share Mythos Preview vulnerability findings with the “world’s most critical software” vendors before the fuller findings are published.

This collaboration aims to remediate, “thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser.”

Anthropic has committed up to $100 million in Mythos Preview usage credits to the Glasswing vendors (for additional scanning and remediation) and $4 million in donations to OSS organizations.

With this level of mutual commitment (backed by messages from these vendors) we can be clear that this is not a marketing stunt. We will learn much more about the current findings once they can be disclosed.

Project Glasswing also seeks to produce concrete recommendations for a new era of AI-driven vulnerability discovery and remediation, possibly encompassing processes like vulnerability disclosure and software updates mechanisms (including OSS and wider supply chains), secure development practices, industry-specific standards, and automation for triage and scaling.

Anthropic concludes the Mythos Preview announcement by contrasting the difficulty of this moment with the last twenty years of, “stable security equilibrium”. Most cybersecurity practitioners would take issue with that characterization.

To cite a counterexample from the UK Government’s Cyber Action Plan, “Nearly a third (28%) of the government technology estate is estimated to be legacy technology, and therefore highly vulnerable to attack.”

But another of the closing statements sets the scene well, “we should prepare with the belief that the current trend is likely to continue, and that Mythos Preview is only the beginning.”

Anthropic’s report is bold, but their claims are backed by some of the most trusted voices in cybersecurity, including CSA (co-authored by Bruce Schneier, OWASP and SANS), NCSC and NIST.

If this is only the beginning, what’s next?

The post-Mythos Preview developments have already begun. As promised with the Mythos Preview, Anthropic have launched their first newer model with cybersecurity de-training in Opus 4.7.

When defenders have access to the fully trained model, this forms a two-prong strategy to advantage defenders. However, we can expect other Frontier AI Labs to release their own more powerful models, and that less strictly controlled models will continue to improve their offensive cybersecurity capabilities.

Two unrelated Anthropic events will also shape the future. The Claude Code source code leak will yield a global uplift in AI capability, because many capability improvements come from this scaffold, rather than in the models.

The success of some of those (often simple) approaches will certainly be mimicked widely, which will effectively democratize cybersecurity improvements.

Also, the DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax distillation attacks might have already been a factor in Anthropic’s decision to withhold the Mythos Preview release. If true, release rates might slow even while the rate of improvement accelerates.

AI as the differentiator for defenders

Some security experts have suggested that true cybersecurity tradecraft is found in chaining everything together, or evading discovery, or they emphasize that the human was still needed.

While that is all true, the barrier to carrying out attacks like these has been lowered dramatically, and the number of facets requiring human expertise are shrinking rapidly. As an example, the bug bounty profession has already changed dramatically.

It’s encouraging that Anthropic, the Project Glasswing vendors, and the authorities like CSA are all singing from the same hymn sheet.

Generative AI will accelerate remediation, and new security technologies will help defenders in some of the same ways it helps attackers, but all parties agree that security fundamentals will be the meaningful differentiator, even when some of the authors represent security vendors.

For many organizations, this should catalyze effort where it is often de-prioritized. The unglamorous work of improving these fundamentals may finally have its moment. Using AI tools to accelerate those adaptations may be the crucial differentiator for defenders.

We've featured the best encryption software.

This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.

The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit

• Code to power facial recognition has been found in the Meta AI app
• This would allow Meta's smart glasses to identify people's faces
• The feature isn't live yet, and Meta claims it may never be, but reactions to it are largely negative

Meta’s smart glasses like the Ray-Ban Meta and the Oakley Meta Vanguard have always been concerning from a privacy perspective, given their ability to photograph and film whoever the wearer happens to be looking at. But they just got even more troubling, as there’s evidence that they might soon get facial recognition.

Wired (via Mashable) has found that the company has quietly been adding code related to facial recognition to the Meta AI app over multiple updates this year.

Its investigation found references to three AI models, one which would detect faces, another that would crop them, and one that'd encode them into biometric data. And while the feature isn’t live, two security researchers who reviewed Wired’s findings claimed that it’s almost ready to launch, if and when Meta chooses to.

In a response, a Meta spokesperson told Wired that "nothing has shipped to consumers and no final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything. If we do decide to roll something out, we will take a thoughtful approach and do so with full transparency. One decision we can be clear about — we are not building a central face database."

A privacy nightmare in the making?

Still, the fact that Meta is already adding relevant code to its app certainly suggests a feature along these lines may well launch. At which point, not only do you need to worry about being photographed or filmed by people’s glasses, but that they could identify you just by looking at you.

Responses to the news on Reddit are largely negative, but also largely unsurprised, given that this is Meta we’re talking about — a company that hasn’t got the best track record for respecting people’s privacy.

One Reddit user commented “is anyone surprised by this, really?”, with others saying “well, that tracks”, “I miss privacy”, and “should be illegal”, among other negative comments.

And while Meta does at least provide some measure of privacy with its smart glasses — such as displaying a light when they’re recording or taking photos — modders can already disable that light, so it’s easy to imagine that any precautions put in place for facial recognition could also be disabled or got around.

• UK government says cheating in exams using smart devices poses a great threat
• Students could soon resort to using smart glasses and invisible earpieces
• It's not just a concern in the UK, and cases are rising in China and the US

The UK government has warned that the rise of smart tech could give students more reason to cheat in their GCSE, AS, and A-level exams, and the threat should not be overlooked.

Chief Regulator of Ofqual (The Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation), Sir Ian Bauckham, warns that devices such as hidden earpieces and smart glasses advertised to students via social media could overtake phones as a means of cheating. Speaking with BBC Radio 4, he shared the following:

"We're hearing stories — and I hear this directly from schools as I go up and down the country — of devices like supposedly hidden earpieces, smart glasses that play text covertly on the inside of the glasses that only the wearer can see, and even biros [pens] that have got apparently invisible mini video screens built into them”. "In the worst cases, they could lose all their A-level grades. That's future-altering," he added

Additionally, Bauckham appeared on Ofqual’s Can I Just Qualify That? podcast show, where he revealed that the government has had to “move really fast, because technology is moving fast”. He also said that exam invigilators are now being trained to spot these kinds of smart tech.

Since 2018, the rise of smartphone malpractice in exams has grown substantially, and last summer alone, 2,225 cases where smartphones and other devices were used to cheat were flagged, resulting in 545 cases where students were disqualified.

Having access to mobile phones in schools, Bauckham argues, has opened the doors for a new wave of technology to enable cheating in exams, and from his recent warnings, it’s only going to get more difficult to control. That said, this threat isn’t just limited to UK schools.

Global education systems need to take action

This isn’t the first time smart devices have made their way into the examination hall.

In regions such as China, smart glasses are becoming a popular way to cheat in university exams, allowing students to scan questions, which the device will then display the answers on the lens, Rest of World reported a few weeks back.

Students are even going the distance to rent out their smart glasses to other students to use during exams for between $6-$12 a day, the outlet says, and second-hand online marketplaces like Xianyu are becoming an increasingly popular place for students to source their devices.

Using smart glasses to cheat in exams is one thing, but AI is another growing issue in educational spaces. Not only is AI becoming increasingly difficult to detect in written coursework in the UK, but it’s prevalent in universities across the pond.

In May, Ars Technica reported that 30% of Princeton students are cheating in exams by using AI, but this can be attributed to the institution’s outdated examination codes. The outlet shared that because lecturers don’t monitor exams (the university still adheres to a 19th-century regulation), it makes it easier for students to get away with cheating, and the number of cases is only rising.

According to a survey of Princeton seniors conducted in 2025, almost 30% of students admitted to cheating during an exam. However, in spite of this number, almost 45% of students said they had witnessed fellow classmates cheating, but decided not to report it, even though students must vow to report malpractice.

However, the university is clamping down on this soon. A few weeks ago, Princeton faculty members cast votes in a referendum to write mandatory proctoring for in-person exams into Princeton's laws, and it was a landslide win with only one member opposing. The regulation will come into effect on July 1.

• Modders are charging as little as $50 in the US to alter Ray-Ban Meta specs
• The altered smart glasses are then able to record without the safety light
• This allows bad actors to film secretly and potentially harass people

Update: Since publishing this story Meta has responded to say its tech (like all technology) comes the expectation that "people should behave responsibly and not misuse it." You can read the full statement below. I've also reported on news that Pennsylvanian lawmakers want new smart glasses safety rules, and that story also includes Meta's statement.

Original: $50 or some technical know-how — that’s all it’s taking some to mod their Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to disable one of its most important safety features: the camera light.

The first-person video perspective is incredible for snapping first-person shots while on vacation or just living your day to day, but bad actors have been using smart glasses in more nefarious ways — often to harass women as the BBC reported earlier this year, with that likely to spike again as we enter beach season in the Northern hemisphere.

To help prevent secret recording, the Meta glasses switch on a light that plays the entire time. It sits on the left side of the glasses, creating design symmetry with the camera on the right, and if it’s ever covered (say, by some tape), the glasses will prevent you from recording.

However, as reported by Joanna Stern in a YouTube video, modders can permanently disable this light in a way that doesn’t prevent recording. You just need the technical know-how and some tools, or $50 to $100 to pay someone on places like Facebook Marketplace, adding an unfortunate ironic layer that it’s happening through Meta’s own platform.

This kind of hack isn’t illegal, but it is against Meta’s terms of service. Recording with these now secret spy glasses isn’t necessarily illegal either. It depends on the region's laws surrounding things like recording in public and if you need one- or two-party consent.

I reached out to Meta for comment, and it said "All technology — whether it's cameras, smartphones, or AI glasses — comes with the same basic expectation: people should behave responsibly and not misuse it. We aggressively target anyone advertising tampering tools, have removed thousands of violating ads and Marketplace listings for these services, and pursue legal action when appropriate."

It added that it is looking into evolving its existing measures so that it can continue to deliver safe and secure products.

Please don't ruin the tech I love

My relationship with smart glasses has been a little up and down recently, but overall, I’m still a major advocate for them.

Just like smartwatches before them, smart specs offer truly useful features in ways that are more convenient than our existing tech — I’ve used my own RayBans when I travel to great effect (translating signs, identifying historical sites and monuments, and recording memories without being taken out of the moment), and the tech’s only getting better.

These kinds of modifications risk ruining everyone’s fun. Because if people keep abusing this tech, I can see governments taking a heavy hand with restrictions — either outlawing cameras in specs, or simply banning smart glasses altogether if things get too out of hand.

That would suck.

So I'm hoping there are some fixes Meta can implement, and that other manufacturers follow suit. Perhaps they could also work with governments to introduce precise rule changes, such as making it illegal to record covertly or changing harassment rules so that bad actors are punished.

Because smart glasses are so incredibly cool, and while I have tried a lot of awesome tech over the years, smart specs have always seemed in a league of their own (in a great way). It’s a wearables category that I hope keeps thriving — we just need to make sure it grows the right way so that this dream tech doesn’t become a nightmare for many.

Elon Musk said that humanoid robots will push Tesla’s market value to $25 trillion. He also believes that they will reshape labor.

No longer will humans need to do dangerous, repetitive, or mundane things.

It’s a compelling vision. Yet the reality is likely far more nuanced.

My take is that the future of robotics in the industrial environment won’t look like us.

Rather, it will involve systems that are built to solve specific, high-value problems with speed, accuracy, and reliability.

The Humanoid Hype Deserves Scrutiny

Morgan Stanley forecasts the humanoid robot market will reach $5 trillion by 2050, with over a billion units deployed — roughly 90% for industrial and commercial use. But even that bullish projection comes with significant caveats: major advances in hardware, materials, and AI are required before humanoids can scale in industrial settings.

Then there is economics. Humanoids currently cost up to $200,000 per unit. At that price point, achieving ROI is extremely difficult given their still-limited capabilities.

Precision is an even bigger obstacle. Manufacturing has zero tolerance for error. Research from the IEEE illustrates the challenge: even folding laundry remains surprisingly unreliable for robots.

Translating meaningful dexterity into high-speed industrial workflows is a far steeper climb. And for many tasks — like driving a screw to mount a heat sink on a motherboard — a humanoid is simply overkill. A robotic arm, a screwdriver, and a smart navigation system will do the job better.

Manufacturing at the Edge: A Model that Actually Works

The traditional manufacturing model is based on a labor-first approach. An example is Foxconn, which employs around a million workers. Usually, these workers solve problems before considering automation systems.

True, this can work at scale, but it also has limitations with flexibility, consistency, and speed.

But manufacturing at the edge flips that equation. Instead of being produced in distant locations, production moves closer to where products are deployed. This allows for faster iteration, reduced logistics complexity, and greater responsiveness to demand.

From there, the model becomes about being technology-first. From the start, challenges are addressed with software, robotics, automation, real-time data, and AI. Think of it as “manufacturing in a box.”

Employees are still critical for this process, but they have a different role. They oversee operations, handle exceptions, and manage continuous improvement along with AI agents. Robots, on the other hand, focus on repetitive, precision-driven tasks and processes.

Manufacturing at the edge does not have to be monolithic. It can range from a warehouse, data center, or compact production facility. But instead of sprawling facilities, the footprints are generally smaller, say 50,000 to 100,000 square feet.

The benefits are clear: higher throughput, improved quality, faster time to market, and greater consistency. Manufacturing at the edge is also more cost-effective. This makes it easier to justify the onshoring of manufacturing.

The past few years have shown the importance of this. With COVID and geopolitical tensions, manufacturing on the edge offers a path to more resilient, localized production.

Applying AI to the Right Problem is the Real Differentiator

Building an AI-powered manufacturing environment is fundamentally different from traditional automation. It centers on flexibility. Manufacturing is dynamic as designs and capacity needs change, processes evolve, and systems must adapt without introducing friction or downtime.

This is why AI is so important, and why no single model can do it alone. A large language model might grab the headlines, but real-world systems draw on the full depth of AI — from classical machine learning for optimization, to deep learning for vision and perception, to generative AI for orchestration and insight. The power isn't in any one technique — it's in how they work together.

Another critical factor is knowing what should or should not be automated. Machines are ideal for consistency and repetition, while humans are adept at judgment, adaptability, and problem-solving.

In fact, AI can greatly empower operators. This can be done by providing real-time recommendations, visibility into system performance, and tools to continuously refine workflows. Humans remain firmly in the loop, overseeing operations, handling exceptions, and managing repair and optimization.

The Robot Manufacturing Transformation is Underway

The robots that will reshape manufacturing won't walk on two legs. They'll be purpose-built machines running sophisticated AI, operating in compact and efficient facilities, augmenting skilled workers rather than fully replacing them.

The future of industrial automation isn't about replicating humans. It's about combining specialized machines, intelligent software, and human judgment to solve complex problems — faster, better, and at scale.

That transformation is underway. And it looks nothing like what Hollywood imagined.

We list the best Robotic Process Automation software.

This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.

The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit

• Windows 11 is getting changes for the right-click menu
• A Microsoft exec says the context menu will be more streamlined by default
• It'll also load faster and be "configurable to what you use most", we're told

Windows 11 is getting another major change for the interface — and apparently we're going to be able to customize the right-click menu to our liking.

Windows Latest noticed that Microsoft's Marcus Ash, who is VP of Design and Research for Windows + Devices, responded to a complaint on X pointing out that the right-click menu — which offers context-sensitive options relevant to the file you're clicking — is way too long and unwieldy in general.

Ash said that Microsoft is "working on making context menus faster, simpler by default, configurable to what you use most. More will be shared on our approach soon."

These would be very welcome changes, streamlining and cutting back on the number of entries on the menu by default, and making it appear more swiftly, but it's the comment about configuration that's attracted the most attention.

Analysis: taming the context menu

The reference to 'configurable' is presumably about giving the user control over what's present in the context menu, although Ash doesn't go into any explanation of how that might work.

Indeed, my slight concern here is that Ash doesn't explicitly say the user will have actual control, leaving a little room for doubt that maybe the menu might configure itself somehow to the apps or functions you use the most. I don't think that's the case in all honesty, but it's a slight grey area I'd like clarified.

Also, how much control will the user have, exactly? Presumably there would still be default choices that would stay firmly planted in the context menu regardless of any customization.

At any rate, as the Microsoft exec indicates, more clarification will be coming "soon" and I look forward to that.

Microsoft continues to surprise me — no, 'shock' might be a better word — with just how far it's going with the changes to improve Windows 11 this year. This latest move effectively comes out of the blue, and it's been a request that's high on the wish list of many Windows 11 users when it comes to the central pieces of the operating system's interface.

Notably the campaign to fix Windows 11 also involves revamping the Start menu to allow for a much greater level of customization — way beyond what I expected — and removing some of the rusty old legacy elements of the OS.

Yes, granted, all this should have been in the works a long time ago in my opinion (and in the view of others), but I'm still glad Microsoft appears to be serious about making Windows 11 better. All this even gives me hope that the company could even tackle some of the biggest long-standing grievances I have with the OS.

For as long as many of us can remember, self-assessment has meant one tax return per year. But that’s now changed.

From April 2026, the government’s Making Tax Digital (MTD) program will require many sole traders and landlords to keep digital records and send quarterly updates of their income and expenses to HMRC using compatible software.

The first phase alone will bring hundreds of thousands of taxpayers in scope, applying to those earning more than £50,000 from self-employment or rental income, before expanding to lower income thresholds over the next few years.

On paper, this shift makes sense. It feels natural that digital records should reduce errors and give taxpayers a clearer, more up-to-date picture of their finances.

But what sounds like a perfect world on the face of it, is much more complex than that.

Inconvenience and tax stress

For many individuals, self-assessment is not just inconvenient, it causes emotional stress, anxiety and is a significant cognitive burden. So much so that many people would rather face the £100 late filing penalty than deal with the stress of submitting their return on time. And many sole traders report that anxiety around filing taxes has made them reconsider self-employment altogether.

These signs point to a broader systemic issue, deeply rooted in an overly complex system. So when sole traders and landlords face the music and turn to begin their quarterly updates, in addition to the already required one annual return, it’s unlikely that they’re going to be celebrating the prospect of more streamlined tax affairs. What many will fear instead is the requirement to interact with an already stressful and heavily administrative system more than they already had to.

If the current self-assessment system already struggles to work smoothly for millions of people, is UK tax software infrastructure really ready to become significantly more complex?

A major digital transformation project

Making Tax Digital is often framed as a tax policy change. In reality, it is one of the UK government’s largest ongoing digital transformation programs.

It represents a significant behavioral shift for many sole traders and landlords. Large businesses may already operate within structured accounting systems, but individuals running smaller operations often rely on a patchwork of tools. Spreadsheets, banking apps, paper receipts and occasional help from an accountant at the end of the year remain the norm.

Quarterly reporting effectively changes the operating model of tax compliance. Rather than a once-a-year administrative task, tax becomes a continuous digital process built into everyday financial record-keeping.

Moving from one annual submission to a system requiring continuous digital record-keeping and quarterly updates risks amplifying the pressures taxpayers are already feeling if the technology behind MTD isn’t ready.

The HMRC readiness question

MTD depends on a new digital ecosystem in which third-party accounting software providers connect directly to HMRC systems through APIs to submit data on behalf of taxpayers. And as we’ve seen time and again, large-scale digital government projects are rarely straightforward.

Rolling out a new reporting model across hundreds of thousands of taxpayers in the first phase - and eventually millions as thresholds fall - will place significant demands on HMRC’s digital platforms. Those systems must be able to handle sustained data flows from multiple software providers while maintaining reliability, security and clear feedback for users.

At the same time, the success of the program depends on the clarity of HMRC’s developer frameworks, integration standards and documentation. Software providers need stable APIs and predictable system behavior in order to build tools that taxpayers can rely on.

The fact that the first year of MTD for income tax will include a soft-landing period, where late quarterly submissions will not immediately trigger penalties, reflects a broader awareness from policymakers about digital transformation programs: they tend to expose IT infrastructure weaknesses quickly once real-world usage begins.

The human side of tax technology

Technology readiness is only part of the picture. The other challenge is behavioral and this is an area where HMRC has often fallen short. Take, for example, the figures that have flooded the market in recent months that reveal how many sole traders who will soon have to comply with the policy are not even aware of its existence.

The people most affected by MTD are not accountants or tax specialists. They are freelancers, landlords, gig workers and self-employed professionals who are managing their finances alongside running a business.

For many of them, tax is already a source of anxiety. If digital record-keeping requires significant manual input or complex categorization of transactions, compliance becomes another administrative burden. Where software automates much of that process, pulling in bank data, categorizing expenses automatically and generating updates in the background – the experience becomes far more manageable marking an improvement on the previous system.

A stress test for the UK’s tax technology ecosystem

Making Tax Digital will ultimately act as a stress test for the UK’s tax technology ecosystem.

It will test HMRC’s ability to operate large-scale digital tax services, the resilience of the integration layer connecting government systems with software providers, and the ability of companies in the fintech sector to continually innovate and build tools that genuinely simplify tax for individuals.

For the millions of sole traders and landlords who will eventually fall within scope, the stakes are significant. The self-employed economy plays a vital role in the UK’s labor market, but administrative complexity can be a real barrier to participation.

Digital transformation should make systems easier to use, not simply more digital.

Quarterly reporting may modernize the UK tax system in the long term. But unless the infrastructure behind it is robust, there is a risk that Making Tax Digital will make an already stressful process even harder to navigate.

We feature the best tax software.

This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.

The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit

Keeper has cut prices on its individual, family, and business starter plans by up to 50%.

For password managers, there are three main categories to pay attention to: cutting-edge security features, superior ease of use, and intuitive design.

Keeper is one of the few password managers that ticks all three boxes, and right now you can pick up a plan for less.

Why we recommend Keeper

Our keeper review pointed out how Keeper values user security by offering zero knowledge architecture and device level encryption to keep the contents of your personal vault completely private.

Biometric security allows you to access your Keeper app with ease by using a facial scan or fingerprint, so you don't have to worry about remembering a password while... trying to access your passwords.

Four households, the family plan includes five private vaults, allowing you to quickly share Wi-Fi or streaming passwords using Keeper's shared vaults.

These discounts apply to the first year only, so the value is highest for new customers or anyone switching from a monthly plan. After that, pricing goes back to standard rates.

• Windows 11 search is getting two useful additions
• Microsoft is fixing search so that it works better to locate files with long compound names
• The search function will also start to pop up possible results after just two two characters have been typed

Windows 11 Search is getting more improvements designed to make finding the files you need easier — and one of those upgrades is arriving this month.

Windows Latest reports that there are two changes that Microsoft is working on for the search function in Windows 11, and one is actually already available in the current preview (optional) update for the OS. This means it'll start rolling out in the June update, arriving in a week, but you may have to wait a while for the rollout to hit your PC thereafter.

The first change is the ability for Windows 11 to start showing you possible search results when you've typed in as few as two characters.

A bigger change, called 'search by substring', is coming later and is now in testing in Windows 11's preview builds. It's quite simple to understand: when there are files with long single names that consist of multiple words run together – such as "CookingRecipesJune2026" – if you simply type "Recipes" in the search box, Windows 11 will flag up the correct file.

Currently – and rather annoyingly – typing "Recipes" or "June" by itself is unlikely to locate the correct file. You'll probably need to also include the start of the file name, ("CookingRecipes"), in order for Windows 11 to successfully locate it.

Analysis: search gets stronger

That compound naming pitfall is one of my biggest bugbears with Windows 11 search, so it's great to see that Microsoft is resolving it, if only in testing for now. That said, it's one of those fixes that should have been in place a long time ago, but this is true for quite a number of the updates Microsoft is applying across Windows 11 in the campaign to improve the desktop OS for 2026. Better late than never, as they say…

My other major pain point with Windows 11 (and Windows 10) search is that it pulls in web results alongside local files or settings, and Microsoft has made a move on that front, too. A couple of weeks back, again in testing, we heard the news that these web results would be less prioritized in searches, which is a laudable positive step forward – though frankly I'd like the option to banish them entirely, which probably won't happen.

The tweak to start presenting search results with as few as two characters typed could be a useful timesaver, too. Of course, with only a couple of characters for Windows 11 to go off, the odds of hitting the correct result first time are slimmer.

Nonetheless, I'm happy that Microsoft is working on improving Windows 11 search, and the change with compound file names is especially welcome.

• Microsoft's new Windows 11 Start menu design is now in testing
• It allows for a surprising level of customization, including making the menu more compact
• On top of this, Microsoft has revealed it's working to modernize some legacy parts of the interface that are jarring when they appear

Windows 11's revamped Start menu that offers a full range of customization options is now officially in testing – and there's another change to improve the interface of the OS in terms of eradicating old bits of legacy UI.

Windows Latest flagged the blog post from Microsoft about freshly released preview builds in the Beta and Experimental channels, and the latter packs the Start menu redesign for 2026.

A big change here is that you can now turn off any section you want, not just the Recommended panel (which has been renamed to Recent, incidentally). So, if you want to ditch that Recent panel, or the Pinned section, or the list of All apps, you can do as you wish. You can hide your name and profile picture in the Start menu, too.

The other major change is that you can now choose between the standard (larger) Start menu and a more compact version. Previously, the small layout was applied automatically for certain devices with smaller screen sizes, but you couldn't actively select it — and some folks wanted to do that.

Now they can, and with the ability to switch off any section of the Start menu that you find superfluous, for the first time in Windows 11's history you have full control over the customization of this key piece of the desktop interface.

Analysis: Microsoft's gone surprisingly far here

Arguably this should have been done a long time ago, but nonetheless, it's great to see Microsoft finally implementing a complete range of customization options for Windows 11's Start menu. This means you can now turn off everything you don't want and make the menu highly compact and streamlined (addressing some of the bad feeling directed towards the last Start menu overhaul before this one, in terms of the menu being too hefty).

Indeed, you can turn off everything now and be left with a blank Start menu — which isn't very useful, of course, but this is how far Microsoft has gone here, as Windows Latest makes clear.

It's also worth noting that the new Recent panel isn't just a renaming of the Recommended section, and it appears to drop Microsoft's recommendations (promotional nonsense in some cases), highlighting recently used files rather than pushing ad-like suggestions. That's great to see, although this is based on limited testing thus far – and remember, all this work is still in preview. Things could change by the time the revamped Start menu reaches all Windows 11 PCs.

All this is part of the promised work in the fix Windows 11 campaign, of course, and Windows Latest spotted a bonus extra here. Namely that Microsoft's March Rogers, who is Partner Director of Design, confirmed on X that some rusty old parts of the Windows 11 interface are getting the operating system's new modern design.

These are legacy dialog boxes such as file copying (which has already been done), and the common file dialog (for when you're browsing folders in Windows 11, say when you're opening a file within an app) is apparently in line for a visual refresh.

I recently wrote about legacy parts of the interface badly needing to be addressed by Microsoft as part of my wish-list of vital things to fix in Windows 11, so I'm pleased to see this work going ahead (and the tweak to the Recommended panel in the Start menu, too). Now if only Microsoft would address my other key points, namely adverts more broadly, and also Windows 11's telemetry and installation with a local account — we could really be in business.

Microsoft Build 2026 takes place on June 2 and 3 at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, marking the first time the conference has left Seattle since 2016. With in-person tickets priced at $1,099 and capacity capped at around 2,500 developers, this year's event is deliberately compact, built around a single theme: AI agents.

Satya Nadella headlines the opening keynote, with two days of technical sessions from GitHub, Azure, and Windows teams covering the practical side of shipping AI agents and building on Windows as an inference platform.

The best way to get something practical out of Build is to show up already familiar with the tools being discussed. This article rounds up 50 products and platforms from across Microsoft's developer, productivity, and IT ecosystem that you can start using for free right now. We've organized them into eight categories so you can find what's relevant to your work and begin exploring before the June 2 keynote.

• Register for Microsoft Build here

What to expect from Build 2026

Build 2026 centers on a single argument: that shipping AI agents is no longer a specialist challenge reserved for research teams but an expected part of mainstream software development. Microsoft spent the 12 months after Build 2025 maturing the tools it announced at that event, including the general availability of Azure AI Foundry Agent Service and the merging of Semantic Kernel and AutoGen into a unified developer SDK. The session catalog reflects that shift, moving from introducing the concept of agentic AI to showing how production deployments actually work.

GitHub is set to take a prominent role at this year's event, with GitHub COO Kyle Daigle confirmed as a keynote presence. Sessions in the published catalog cover Copilot's fleet mode and autopilot capabilities, which let the Copilot CLI handle multi-step coding tasks across an entire codebase without per-step human input. Deeper integration between GitHub and Azure is also expected, along with multi-agent coding workflows running directly inside VS Code.

Azure AI Foundry headlines the cloud development story, with announcements likely to focus on combined model routing across OpenAI and open-source alternatives, small language models optimized for on-device inference on Windows NPU hardware, and tighter connections to Azure Cosmos DB and Azure AI Search. Microsoft faces a more competitive AI infrastructure market than it did a year ago, with AWS expanding Bedrock's model catalog and Google's newly announced Antigravity platform pitching itself as the developer-first agentic infrastructure option. Microsoft's response at Build 2026 appears to lean on its enterprise distribution advantages, particularly its 300-million-plus Microsoft 365 users and its deep Azure cloud commitments.

Windows also gets a new story at Build 2026, not just as an operating system but as a deployment platform for AI agents. Sessions are expected to cover the Windows AI Runtime, NPU passthrough in WSL 3, and an architecture where an agent built on a developer's laptop can scale to Azure without a separate codebase. That positions Windows against cloud-native agent platforms by turning its billion-device installed base into a deployment advantage.

Microsoft is giving Responsible AI its own dedicated track at Build 2026, covering safety frameworks, compliance tooling, and developer-facing governance controls for AI-powered systems in production. The decision to make this a named track is notable given the volume of enterprise security incidents in 2025 and the pace of AI regulation in the EU and US. If you're building AI features for enterprise customers or regulated industries, those sessions are likely to be among the most directly applicable content at the conference.

50 free Microsoft tools to try ahead of Build 2026

You don't need to wait until June 2 to start exploring what Microsoft's developer ecosystem looks like today. A significant portion of the company's tooling is either completely free or available through always-free service tiers that cover genuine workloads. Some of these tools have been around for years; others are recent additions that will likely come up directly in Build sessions.

We've organized the 50 tools into eight categories: developer tools, AI and machine learning, cloud infrastructure, productivity and collaboration, data and analytics, security and identity, IT administration, and low-code and automation platforms. The goal is to highlight what's most relevant to developers, product managers, and IT teams heading into Build 2026, not to catalogue every Microsoft product.

One quick note on what counts as "free" across this list. Some tools are completely free with no usage limits: VS Code, PowerShell, and Playwright being the most obvious examples. Others have always-free service tiers where the included quota covers real workloads, like Azure Functions (1 million executions per month) or Azure Cosmos DB (25 GB of storage). Where a free trial applies, such as Copilot Studio's 60-day offering, we've noted the time limit.

Developer tools

These are the building blocks of the Microsoft developer experience: the editors, runtimes, terminals, and testing frameworks that most developers working in the ecosystem use every day.

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is Microsoft's free, open-source code editor, running on Windows, macOS, and Linux with a library of more than 50,000 extensions covering virtually every language and workflow. Its built-in Git integration, debugger, and integrated terminal let you write, test, and version your code without switching between applications.

What sets VS Code apart from other free editors is its remote development framework, which lets you connect to containers, WSL environments, and remote machines through SSH as if they were local folders. Native GitHub Copilot support is built directly into the interface, and most of Microsoft's agentic coding demos at Build events use it as the primary development surface.

If you're preparing for Build 2026 specifically, the Azure Tools extension pack is worth installing. It adds direct access to Azure resources from the editor sidebar, and the Dev Containers extension is useful for replicating the kind of containerized development environments that appear throughout Microsoft's AI tooling demos.

GitHub Free

GitHub Free gives you unlimited public and private repositories alongside basic CI/CD through GitHub Actions, with 2,000 hosted compute minutes per month on public repositories. Issues, Projects, Discussions, and the full code review toolset are all included at no cost.

The free plan is the entry point for GitHub Copilot and the natural starting point for contributing to open-source projects in the Microsoft ecosystem. If you're planning to follow the Copilot sessions at Build 2026, having a GitHub account with some repository history makes the live demos considerably more actionable.

GitHub Copilot Free

GitHub Copilot Free gives you up to 2,000 inline code completions and 50 premium chat requests per month, with access to models including GPT-4.1 and Claude Sonnet across VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, and Neovim. The monthly cap makes this tier most useful as a way to decide whether AI-assisted coding changes your workflow before committing to a paid plan.

What makes the free tier informative is that the same model infrastructure powering the paid tiers runs underneath it. You're testing the real product rather than a limited preview, which means any workflow habits you form on the free tier carry over directly if you upgrade.

The model choice available on the free tier is worth paying attention to. Both GPT-4.1 and Claude Sonnet are production-grade models capable of meaningful code generation and debugging assistance, so the free tier gives you a realistic sense of what AI-assisted development feels like, not a stripped-down demo.

.NET SDK

The .NET SDK is Microsoft's free, open-source platform for building web, desktop, cloud, mobile, and game applications in C#, F#, and Visual Basic. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux and bundles the runtime, core libraries, and CLI toolchain needed to compile and run .NET applications locally.

If you're coming to Build 2026 for the Azure AI Foundry sessions, having the .NET SDK installed beforehand makes a real difference. Most of Microsoft's Semantic Kernel and Azure SDK code samples ship as .NET projects, and the CLI tooling integrates directly with Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions pipelines.

ASP.NET Core, which ships with the SDK, is Microsoft's recommended framework for building HTTP APIs and lightweight backend services. If you're working on the service layer for an AI-powered application or need API endpoints for an Azure Functions-based workflow, ASP.NET Core is worth getting familiar with before the Build sessions on Azure AI Foundry integration.

Windows Terminal

Windows Terminal is a free, modern terminal for Windows with support for multiple tabs, split panes, and configurable profiles for Command Prompt, PowerShell, WSL, and SSH connections. It's available from the Microsoft Store and ships as the default terminal in Windows 11.

The practical case for switching from legacy console windows is straightforward: working across PowerShell, Azure CLI, and a WSL environment simultaneously in a single window removes friction that adds up quickly during a day of infrastructure or DevOps work. Once you've used it, managing three separate console windows feels clunky by comparison.

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

WSL lets you run a full Linux environment directly on Windows without a virtual machine, with direct file system access between Windows and Linux and GPU acceleration through WSL 2. It's particularly valuable for teams whose production workloads run on Linux while developers use Windows machines.

WSL 3 is expected at Build 2026 in the context of NPU passthrough, which would allow Linux environments to access Windows PC NPU hardware for on-device AI inference. Running WSL now gives you the foundation to evaluate those capabilities as soon as Microsoft's documentation lands after the conference.

Getting comfortable with a Linux environment on Windows has also become more relevant as more developer tooling, particularly in AI and machine learning, assumes a Linux or Unix-like environment. Running Jupyter notebooks, containerized models, or Python-based agent frameworks through WSL removes the compatibility issues that otherwise surface when that tooling runs natively on Windows.

Dev Home

Dev Home is a free Windows application providing a developer dashboard for monitoring CPU, GPU, memory, and network performance in real time, alongside a guided setup flow for configuring a new machine from scratch. It connects to GitHub for cloning repositories, tracking pull requests, and monitoring CI status from the desktop.

The machine setup flow is particularly useful for teams that onboard developers regularly. Rather than maintaining a setup wiki that inevitably falls out of date, Dev Home lets you define a machine configuration as a JSON spec file and apply it to a new machine in a single step.

The GitHub integration is also worth setting up if you maintain multiple repositories. Seeing your open pull requests and CI status in a dashboard without switching to the browser reduces the context-switching overhead that accumulates quickly during a typical development day.

WinGet (Windows Package Manager)

WinGet is Microsoft's official command-line package manager for Windows, letting you install, update, and remove software from a curated repository with a single command. It's comparable in approach to Homebrew on macOS or apt on Debian Linux, with the package catalog covering developer tools, browsers, and common productivity applications.

WinGet scripts integrate directly with Dev Home's setup flow and are increasingly common in CI provisioning pipelines for configuring fresh Windows runners. If you're building automated development environment setup into your team's workflow, WinGet is where that work starts on Windows.

The package catalog is community-maintained through the winget-pkgs repository on GitHub, where new packages are added through pull requests reviewed by Microsoft. If a tool you need isn't in the catalog yet, submitting it is straightforward. Microsoft's review process ensures the catalog stays reliable.

PowerShell

PowerShell is Microsoft's cross-platform shell and scripting framework, free and open-source, running on Windows, macOS, and Linux as a consistent automation layer across different environments. PowerShell 7 is the current release and the standard choice for Azure CLI automation, infrastructure scripting, and DevOps pipeline work throughout the Microsoft ecosystem.

One of its less obvious strengths is that it works with system objects rather than plain text as command output. That makes it significantly easier to pipe data between commands without parsing strings, which matters when you're scripting against Azure APIs or automating multi-step administrative tasks where accuracy is non-negotiable.

The Az module, installed via Install-Module Az, extends PowerShell with cmdlets for every major Azure service. If you prefer cmdlet-based scripting to Azure CLI commands, the Az module gives you the same coverage through PowerShell syntax. It's the standard approach throughout Microsoft's Azure documentation for PowerShell examples.

Playwright

Playwright is Microsoft's open-source browser testing framework for end-to-end tests against Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit, with support for JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, .NET, and Java. It includes a built-in test runner, a trace viewer for debugging failures, and a code generation tool that records user interactions as test scripts.

Beyond web testing, Playwright is increasingly used to drive browser-based interactions in AI agent workflows. If you're building agents that need to navigate web interfaces as part of their task execution, Playwright provides a controlled, scriptable browser environment with a mature API and active community maintenance.

An active community project, microsoft/playwright-mcp, exposes Playwright as an MCP server, making it straightforward to add browser control as a tool available to AI agents built with Semantic Kernel or AutoGen. That pattern is directly relevant to the agentic workflow sessions at Build 2026.

AI, multi-agent systems, and machine learning

These tools reflect the direction Microsoft is taking at Build 2026. Several are worth exploring before the keynote to make the sessions more immediately actionable.

Microsoft Copilot

The free tier of Microsoft Copilot is available at copilot.microsoft.com without a Microsoft 365 subscription, built on OpenAI models and accessible in your browser for drafting, summarizing, researching, and generating code. Daily usage limits apply on the free plan, but the core capabilities are the same as in the paid tier.

Microsoft Copilot is the consumer-facing layer of the same AI infrastructure powering GitHub Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Using it regularly before Build 2026 gives you a grounded sense of where its capabilities are useful and where they fall short, which makes the Copilot architecture sessions considerably more meaningful in context.

AutoGen

AutoGen is an open-source framework from Microsoft Research for building multi-agent AI systems, where specialized agents collaborate asynchronously to complete complex tasks. It supports tool use, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and direct agent-to-agent communication, and it's one of the most widely adopted agentic frameworks in production environments outside of Microsoft's own products.

AutoGen and Semantic Kernel have been converging over the past year into a unified developer SDK, and that integration story is expected to feature prominently at Build 2026. Running the AutoGen sample notebooks locally beforehand is one of the fastest ways to understand what Microsoft's agentic framework architecture actually looks like in practice.

The sample notebooks on GitHub walk through patterns from simple two-agent conversations to complex multi-agent pipelines with tool use and memory. Running them gives you a concrete reference point for evaluating the framework's capabilities before the Build sessions on the merged Semantic Kernel and AutoGen SDK.

Semantic Kernel

Semantic Kernel is Microsoft's open-source SDK for connecting large language models to existing application code and organizational data. It has official support for C#, Python, and Java, and covers memory management, multi-step planning, and plugin orchestration across model providers. The framework underpins Microsoft's own Copilot products internally.

Understanding Semantic Kernel gives you direct insight into the architecture behind Microsoft's first-party AI features. If you're building AI capabilities into a .NET or Python application and want a framework that mirrors how Microsoft's own teams build Copilot integrations, Semantic Kernel is the reference implementation to study.

The plugin model is its most practical feature for teams with existing codebases. You can expose any .NET or Python function as a plugin that Semantic Kernel can call as part of a multi-step AI workflow, which means your existing business logic becomes available to an AI agent without a rewrite.

Phi-4

Phi-4 is Microsoft's small language model released as open weights on Hugging Face, designed for on-device inference at 14 billion parameters and optimized for modern Windows PC hardware with an NPU. It performs competitively with much larger models on reasoning and coding benchmarks despite its smaller footprint.

The practical case for Phi-4 is latency and data privacy. Running inference locally on NPU hardware avoids the round-trip to a cloud API and keeps sensitive inputs on the device. Build 2026's Windows AI Runtime sessions are expected to focus on exactly this kind of on-device deployment pattern, so experimenting with Phi-4 beforehand gives you a concrete reference point.

Running Phi-4 locally is straightforward with Ollama, available for Windows, which takes a few minutes from download to first inference. If you want to evaluate on-device performance specifically, pulling the model through Ollama and testing it against a sample dataset gives you a realistic baseline for what Windows NPU inference is likely to deliver once WSL 3 support arrives.

Azure AI Foundry (free exploration)

Azure AI Foundry's web portal lets you browse, compare, and test models from Microsoft's catalog, including OpenAI models, Phi models, and open-source alternatives from Meta and Mistral, without a paid subscription. Some models carry usage limits at the free tier, but the catalog browsing and prompt testing features are fully accessible.

The playground interface is a fast way to compare how different models handle the same prompt, which is useful context heading into the multi-model routing sessions at Build 2026. Microsoft has been positioning Azure AI Foundry as the hub for agent development, so familiarity with its interface makes the conference sessions more immediately applicable to your own work.

ONNX Runtime

ONNX Runtime is an open-source inference engine maintained by Microsoft for running trained machine learning models across CPU, GPU, and NPU hardware with a consistent cross-platform API. It supports models exported from PyTorch, TensorFlow, and scikit-learn, and it's the runtime layer behind on-device AI features in Windows and Microsoft Office.

For developers building AI features that need to run at the edge or on client hardware rather than in the cloud, ONNX Runtime removes the hardware dependency from the model itself. You train on whatever framework you prefer, export to ONNX format, and run the same inference code across different device types without rewriting the integration layer.

Responsible AI Toolbox

The Responsible AI Toolbox is a free, open-source toolkit from Microsoft for diagnosing model errors, bias, and fairness issues in machine learning pipelines. Its components cover error analysis, fairness assessment, and model explainability, and the toolkit integrates with Azure Machine Learning while also running fully standalone.

Given that Responsible AI has its own dedicated track at Build 2026, exploring this toolkit before the conference puts you in a position to evaluate Microsoft's governance recommendations against tools you can actually use today. For teams building AI features for enterprise customers or regulated industries, the error analysis component is worth understanding before deploying anything to production.

That component is the most practically useful starting point. It surfaces cohort-based error analysis showing you not just overall model accuracy but where the model fails most often (broken down by feature values), which is exactly the kind of evidence regulators and enterprise customers are increasingly asking development teams to provide.

Prompt Flow

Prompt Flow is Microsoft's open-source toolkit for building, evaluating, and deploying LLM-based applications and prompt pipelines. It supports local development, automated evaluation against test datasets, and CI/CD integration through GitHub Actions, with a connection to Azure AI Foundry for cloud-based evaluation runs.

Where Semantic Kernel handles runtime orchestration of AI applications, Prompt Flow handles the development and testing lifecycle: defining flows as visual DAGs, running batch evaluations, and tracking quality metrics across prompt iterations. For teams building RAG pipelines or multi-step AI workflows, it fills a gap that most general-purpose frameworks leave unaddressed.

Cloud infrastructure

Azure's free tier is broader than most developers realize, covering compute, storage, databases, container platforms, and AI services. All of the tools below are directly relevant to the cloud topics at Build 2026.

Azure Free Account

New Azure accounts receive a $200 credit valid for the first 30 days, 12 months of free access to a selection of popular services including virtual machines and databases, and permanent always-free tiers across more than 65 services. It's the most direct way to get hands-on time with Azure infrastructure before Build 2026 without any financial commitment.

The distinction between the 12-month free services and the always-free services matters for planning. The 12-month tier includes Azure Virtual Machines (750 hours per month) and Azure SQL Database, which expire after a year. The always-free services (including Azure Functions, Cosmos DB, and Container Apps) have no expiration, so projects built on those tiers won't start billing when the initial credit period ends.

Azure Functions (always-free tier)

Azure Functions permanently includes 1 million free executions and 400,000 GB-seconds of resource consumption per month on the consumption plan. This is not a time-limited trial but an ongoing always-free allocation, well-suited for event-driven workloads, lightweight API backends, and scheduled automation tasks where you'd rather not manage server infrastructure.

The consumption plan charges only for the compute time your function actually uses, which makes it a natural fit for workloads with variable or intermittent traffic. For the early stages of an agentic workflow where a function handles webhook callbacks or lightweight orchestration steps, the free tier is typically sufficient.

Azure Static Web Apps (free tier)

Azure Static Web Apps offers a free tier with built-in CI/CD from GitHub and Azure DevOps, custom domain support, automatic SSL certificates, and globally distributed content delivery through Azure CDN. Deployments trigger automatically when you push to a connected GitHub branch, with no separate deployment configuration required.

It's worth considering for any project where the frontend is static and backend logic lives in Azure Functions or another API layer. The combination of Static Web Apps for hosting and Functions for compute is a common Azure pattern for serverless full-stack applications, and the free tier of both services covers it without any cost.

Azure Container Apps (free tier)

Azure Container Apps is a serverless container platform with a permanent free monthly allocation of 180,000 vCPU-seconds and 360,000 GiB-seconds of memory, enough to run a containerized service under development load without incurring costs. Scaling, service discovery, and ingress configuration are handled automatically by the platform.

The main advantage over running containers directly on Kubernetes is that Azure Container Apps removes the cluster management layer entirely. For teams deploying AI agent runtimes or microservice components that need to scale to zero when not in use, the serverless container model is a better fit than maintaining a cluster that idles between workloads.

Dapr sidecar support is worth noting for teams building distributed agent systems. Dapr adds service discovery, pub/sub messaging, and state management alongside your container, which simplifies the infrastructure code needed to connect multiple agent containers into a coordinated workflow without custom middleware.

Azure DevOps (free for small teams)

Azure DevOps gives five users free access to Boards, Repos, Pipelines, Artifacts, and Test Plans, with 1,800 CI/CD minutes per month on Microsoft-hosted agents and unlimited free users for public projects. It's a complete software delivery platform with native integration into Azure deployments and GitHub repositories.

For teams already working in the Microsoft ecosystem, Azure DevOps Pipelines integrates with GitHub Actions, Azure CLI, and Bicep in ways that reduce the configuration overhead of connecting code repositories to cloud deployments. The free tier covers a small team's CI/CD needs without requiring any third-party tooling.

Azure Artifacts, included on the free tier, hosts private npm, NuGet, Maven, and Python packages within your organization. If your team maintains internal shared libraries, Artifacts removes the overhead of running a separate package registry and connects directly with Pipelines so packages are always in sync with your build output.

Azure Cosmos DB (free tier)

Azure Cosmos DB's always-free tier provides 1,000 request units per second and 25 GB of storage per account on a permanent basis, not as a trial. It's available in one free-tier account per Azure subscription and covers real workloads for development and light production traffic.

Cosmos DB is relevant to the Build 2026 sessions in a specific way: it now includes native vector search, making it a candidate for storing and querying embeddings in RAG-based applications directly alongside operational data. The free tier is enough to prototype a vector search integration without setting up a separate vector database service.

The change feed is worth exploring for event-driven agentic architectures. It provides a persistent, ordered log of all writes to a Cosmos DB container, which you can process with an Azure Functions trigger to kick off downstream workflows whenever new data arrives. It's a pattern that appears frequently in Microsoft's agentic reference architectures published ahead of Build 2026.

Azure AI Search (free tier)

Azure AI Search's always-free tier includes one search service with one index, 50 MB of document storage, and indexing capacity for up to 10,000 documents. It supports full-text search, faceted filtering, and semantic ranking using Microsoft's pre-built language models.

The free tier is the standard starting point for prototyping RAG pipelines and vector search applications. Azure AI Search handles the retrieval side of a retrieval-augmented generation architecture, and its integration with Azure AI Foundry and Azure OpenAI makes the connection between the search index and the model straightforward to configure.

The semantic ranker is particularly worth exploring for RAG applications, as it reranks results based on language understanding rather than keyword frequency alone. That produces more contextually relevant retrieval, which directly improves the quality of generated answers when Azure AI Search feeds into an Azure OpenAI or Azure AI Foundry pipeline.

Productivity and collaboration

Microsoft's free productivity offerings have expanded significantly over the past few years. Several of them now include Copilot integration that makes them worth revisiting even if you've used them before.

Microsoft 365 Online

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote are all free in your browser with a Microsoft account, supporting real-time co-authoring, version history, and OneDrive cloud storage. The web apps handle the large majority of common document and spreadsheet tasks without a paid subscription or a desktop install.

Microsoft has been adding Copilot features progressively to the web apps, with some AI capabilities now accessible on the free tier. If you're evaluating whether Microsoft 365 Copilot justifies a paid plan, using the web apps with a free account is a reasonable way to assess the baseline before making that decision.

OneDrive

OneDrive provides 5 GB of cloud storage free with any personal Microsoft account, syncing automatically across Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. It's the storage layer underlying Teams file sharing and the Microsoft 365 web apps, so files you create in Word or Excel online land in OneDrive by default.

For most developer workflows, OneDrive is less central than it is for general productivity use. A free Microsoft account does give you cloud-synced storage for personal document management without a separate service, and the sync client on Windows is stable and unobtrusive enough to run in the background without any friction.

Microsoft Teams Free

Teams' free plan supports group meetings up to 60 minutes with up to 100 participants, unlimited chat, file sharing through OneDrive, and collaborative editing of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. It's a workable option for small teams that don't need extended meeting times or full Microsoft 365 integration.

The main constraint is the 60-minute meeting cap. For teams that hold regular meetings under an hour it's sufficient, but longer calls, recordings, and transcription features require a paid Microsoft 365 plan.

Outlook.com

Outlook.com is Microsoft's personal email service, free with a Microsoft account, providing 15 GB of mailbox storage alongside a calendar and contacts manager. Copilot integration is now available on the free plan for drafting and summarizing emails directly from your inbox.

It connects tightly with the rest of Microsoft's free-tier apps: calendar invitations link to Teams Free meetings, attachments go to OneDrive, and flagged emails sync automatically to Microsoft To Do. For a developer working primarily in the Microsoft ecosystem who wants a consistent identity across all services, Outlook.com is the natural anchor account.

Microsoft Loop

Loop is a collaborative workspace where teams can create shared pages containing live components (tables, task lists, and AI-generated content) that stay synchronized across Teams, Outlook, and the Loop web app. The personal and small-team tier is free.

The concept behind Loop is that a piece of collaborative content should stay live wherever it's embedded rather than becoming a static snapshot. A shared task list in a Teams chat and the same task list on a Loop page update each other in real time, which is a different model from the usual copy-paste approach.

Whether Loop replaces your existing collaboration tools depends on how deeply your team uses Microsoft 365. If most of your communication already runs through Teams and Outlook, the live component sync works well in practice. Teams that mix Slack, Notion, or Google Workspace alongside Microsoft tools will find the tight Microsoft 365 dependency limiting.

Microsoft To Do

Microsoft To Do is a free task management app connected to your Microsoft account, offering task lists, due dates, reminders, list sharing, and Outlook integration. It syncs across Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android, and automatically pulls in emails you've flagged in Outlook as tasks.

It's not the most capable project management tool on the market, but for personal task management and lightweight team coordination without a paid subscription, it covers the essentials. The Outlook flag sync means your inbox and your task list stay aligned without any manual copying between applications.

Microsoft Forms

Forms is a free, browser-based tool for building surveys, quizzes, and polls with branching logic, basic response analytics, and Excel export. It's included with any free Microsoft account and integrates with Teams for sending surveys to channel members directly from a conversation.

For internal use cases like team feedback collection, event registration, or quick polls, Forms is a functional option that doesn't require a third-party service. The Excel export makes it easy to analyze response data in a tool most teams already have access to.

Microsoft Designer

Microsoft Designer is an AI-powered design tool for generating images, social media graphics, and presentation assets from text prompts, with a built-in editor for resizing, cropping, and refining generated visuals. The free tier includes a monthly allocation of AI-generated images alongside background removal and style editing tools.

For developers and product teams that need quick visual assets for documentation, presentations, or prototypes without a dedicated designer available, Designer covers that gap without requiring creative software expertise. The image generation quality is solid for presentation and communication use cases, though it's not a substitute for custom illustration or brand photography.

Data analytics

Whether you're querying a database, building a report, or tracking how users behave on a website, these Microsoft tools cover the fundamentals of the data workflow at no cost.

Power BI Desktop

Power BI Desktop is a free Windows application for building interactive dashboards and data reports, with connectors to hundreds of sources including Excel, Azure SQL, SharePoint, and REST APIs. Reports built locally can be published to the Power BI Service for personal use without a subscription.

The free desktop application is capable: you can build production-quality reports with complex DAX calculations, drill-through navigation, and custom visuals at no cost. The limitation arrives when you want to share those reports with other users, which requires a Power BI Pro license for recipients rather than just the report author.

Power Query, the data transformation layer built into Power BI Desktop, is also worth learning independently of the reporting side. It handles data cleaning, column transformations, and source merging through a visual interface that generates reproducible M-language scripts, and it's the same engine that powers Excel's Get and Transform feature, so skills in one transfer directly to the other.

Azure Data Studio

Azure Data Studio is a free, cross-platform database management and query tool for SQL Server, Azure SQL, and PostgreSQL, available on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Its extension marketplace adds support for additional database types, and its notebook interface combines T-SQL queries with markdown documentation in a single file.

The notebook format is particularly useful for data exploration work you want to document alongside the queries themselves. Rather than maintaining a separate document describing what each query does, the notebook keeps the explanation and the code together in a shareable file that can run top-to-bottom.

SQL Server Express

SQL Server Express is the free edition of SQL Server, supporting databases up to 10 GB with the full T-SQL engine and integration with both SSMS and Azure Data Studio. It includes free redistribution rights for applications, making it the standard local development environment for .NET applications with relational data needs.

The 10 GB database size limit is the main practical constraint. For most development and small production workloads it's sufficient, and teams that expect their data to grow beyond that threshold can develop entirely on Express and upgrade to a paid SQL Server edition or Azure SQL when the time comes.

Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity is a free behavioral analytics tool for websites, providing session recordings, click heatmaps, and scroll maps with no data sampling, no traffic volume limits, and no monthly cost. It now includes an AI-powered summary dashboard that surfaces behavioral patterns in plain language without requiring you to review individual recordings manually.

Clarity fills a gap that Google Analytics doesn't address. Quantitative traffic metrics tell you how many users dropped off at a particular page, but session recordings and heatmaps tell you why. For product teams iterating on web interfaces, having both types of data available makes for faster diagnosis, and the lack of a traffic cap makes it practical for any sized site.

Microsoft Fabric (free trial)

Microsoft Fabric's 60-day free trial provides access to its unified data platform, combining OneLake storage, Power BI, Synapse Analytics, real-time intelligence, and data engineering pipelines in a single environment. It's Microsoft's answer to the fragmentation of the modern data stack.

The pitch is that instead of connecting five separate services for ingestion, storage, transformation, modeling, and reporting, Fabric provides all of them as a single product with shared governance and a common storage layer in OneLake. Whether that consolidation makes sense for your team depends on how much of your data infrastructure is already on Azure, but the free trial is the right way to find out.

Security and identity management

Microsoft's security tools cover identity management, endpoint protection, and system-level diagnostics. The free tiers cover most of what small teams and individual developers actually need.

Microsoft Entra ID Free

The free tier of Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) provides identity management for up to 500,000 objects, single sign-on for cloud applications, multi-factor authentication through Microsoft Authenticator, and self-service password reset. It's included automatically with any Azure or Microsoft 365 subscription at no additional cost.

For small teams setting up Azure resources, Entra ID Free covers the identity and access fundamentals without a separate identity product. User management, group-based access control, and MFA for Azure resources are all included, which handles the security baseline for most early-stage projects without any extra configuration.

Microsoft Defender (built into Windows)

Windows Defender ships built into Windows 10 and 11 at no extra cost, providing real-time malware detection, ransomware protection, and phishing filters without a third-party subscription. It consistently performs well in independent endpoint security testing from organizations like AV-Test and SE Labs.

Its main advantage is that it's already there and requires no configuration to provide a reasonable security baseline. For individual developers and small teams without a dedicated security function, Defender's built-in capabilities cover the common threat vectors without adding software overhead or license costs to the machine.

Sysinternals Suite

The Sysinternals Suite is a free collection of more than 70 advanced Windows diagnostic utilities covering process monitoring, network activity tracking, file system auditing, and system behavior analysis at a level of detail unavailable through standard Windows tools. Process Monitor, Process Explorer, and Autoruns are the most widely used among security engineers and IT administrators diagnosing unusual system behavior.

Process Monitor in particular changes how you diagnose Windows problems once you've used it. Watching file system, registry, and network activity in real time at the per-process level makes it possible to trace exactly what an application is doing at any given moment, which is invaluable when something misbehaves in ways that standard logging doesn't capture.

Microsoft Security Compliance Toolkit

The Microsoft Security Compliance Toolkit is a free collection of security configuration baselines and tools for hardening Windows and Microsoft 365 environments against Microsoft's recommended settings, CIS benchmarks, and DISA STIG standards. IT administrators use it to assess current configuration states and apply consistent security policies across managed devices.

If your team deploys Windows environments for regulated industries or enterprise customers with security auditing requirements, the toolkit provides a documented, replicable baseline rather than a manually assembled policy set. The policy analysis tools show exactly which settings differ from the recommended baseline, so you can understand the gap before applying any changes.

Microsoft Authenticator

Microsoft Authenticator is a free mobile app for iOS and Android supporting multi-factor authentication for Microsoft accounts and any third-party service using TOTP-based verification codes. It also enables fully passwordless sign-in for Microsoft accounts through push notification approval, removing the password from the sign-in flow entirely.

The passwordless sign-in is worth enabling if you use Microsoft accounts regularly. Approving a push notification is faster than typing a password in practice, and removing the password from the flow eliminates the largest single credential vulnerability most accounts face. The app handles both Microsoft and non-Microsoft MFA codes in the same place, and setup takes only a few minutes.

IT administration

These tools are primarily for IT administrators, infrastructure engineers, and DevOps practitioners who maintain the environments developers work in. Most of them are free with no usage limits.

Windows Admin Center

Windows Admin Center is a free, browser-based management interface for Windows Server, Azure Arc-enabled servers, and Windows 11 client machines. It consolidates performance monitoring, event log review, storage configuration, and remote PowerShell access in a single web UI that deploys as a local gateway application without a separate management server.

The practical advantage over Server Manager and individual MMC snap-ins is that everything is accessible through a browser, meaning you can manage a server from any machine on the network without installing additional client software. Azure Arc integration means you can also bring on-premises Windows Servers into the same interface as your Azure resources.

Azure CLI

The Azure CLI is Microsoft's free command-line tool for creating, managing, and automating Azure resources, available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It covers virtually every Azure service through a consistent command structure and integrates with GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps pipelines as the standard administrative tool for Azure infrastructure work.

For developers used to managing infrastructure through cloud consoles, switching to CLI commands initially feels like extra work until you realize that commands are scriptable, repeatable, and version-controllable in ways that console clicks aren't. Once you're writing Azure CLI commands in scripts or pipelines, you have an auditable, reproducible record of every change made to your infrastructure.

Bicep

Bicep is Microsoft's open-source language for declaring Azure infrastructure as code, using a cleaner syntax than raw ARM JSON templates while compiling to the same ARM format at deployment time. It's natively supported in Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, and Azure CLI, and is Microsoft's recommended approach for infrastructure-as-code on Azure.

The main practical difference from ARM JSON is readability: Bicep templates are significantly shorter and easier to modify, which matters when you're maintaining infrastructure definitions alongside application code. If you're already using Terraform for multi-cloud deployments, Bicep occupies a similar conceptual space but sits closer to the Azure API surface.

SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)

SSMS is a free, Windows-only application for administering SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Synapse Analytics, providing a graphical environment for database configuration, query execution, index tuning, and performance monitoring. It's updated regularly alongside new SQL Server and Azure SQL releases.

For developers doing complex database administration work on SQL Server, SSMS remains the most complete GUI available. Azure Data Studio handles day-to-day query work effectively, but SSMS has deeper tooling for tasks like execution plan analysis, index maintenance, and SQL Agent job management. Both tools are free and work well alongside each other.

Low-code automation

Microsoft's low-code platform covers everything from desktop task automation to custom agent building. The free-tier options here are substantial enough to build real workflows before spending anything.

Power Automate Desktop

Power Automate Desktop comes free with Windows 11 and provides a visual designer for building automation flows that interact with web browsers, Windows applications, file systems, and system services. It handles attended automation, meaning flows that run while you're logged in and present at the machine.

For developers building process automation tools for non-technical colleagues, Power Automate Desktop provides a way to automate repetitive desktop tasks without writing code against Windows APIs. Users can record an action sequence and edit the resulting flow visually, which lowers the handoff threshold between technical and non-technical team members working on automation together.

Power Apps Developer Plan

The Power Apps Developer Plan is a free plan for individual developers to build and test apps using Power Apps, Power Automate, and Microsoft Dataverse. It includes three developer environments, 2 GB of Dataverse database storage, and up to 750 automation flow runs per month.

The plan is scoped to learning and development, so apps built under it can't be deployed to production users, so treat it as a sandbox rather than a starting point for a live application. It gives you full access to the low-code platform's capabilities, including Dataverse schema design, canvas and model-driven apps, and Power Automate flow building.

Copilot Studio (free trial)

Copilot Studio, formerly known as Power Virtual Agents, is Microsoft's platform for building AI agents through a visual no-code designer. Its 60-day free trial includes full access to the workflow designer, generative AI integration, knowledge source connections, and multi-channel agent deployment, with published agents remaining active for up to 90 days after the trial ends.

Copilot Studio is the path Microsoft has built for organizations that want to deploy AI agents without writing code against Azure AI Foundry or Semantic Kernel directly. The no-code design surface handles conversational flow, document grounding, and Teams integration through configuration rather than custom development. For teams evaluating what agent deployment looks like in the Microsoft 365 context, the trial period is more than enough time to build and test something real.

How has Microsoft evolved in the last 16 years of Build?

Microsoft Build launched in September 2011 in Anaheim, California, organized almost entirely around Windows 8 and the then-new WinRT platform for building touch-first Windows applications. The company under Steve Ballmer was still operating from the belief that Windows was the center of every developer's world, a position already being challenged by iOS, Android, and the rapid growth of cloud-hosted web applications. Those early Build editions were focused on keeping developers inside the Windows ecosystem at a moment when the industry's gravity was pulling in other directions.

Satya Nadella's appointment as CEO in February 2014 coincided with a visible and deliberate shift in how Microsoft talked to developers. The company's open-source commitments began to materialize concretely: TypeScript launched publicly in 2012 as an open-source project, the .NET compiler platform Roslyn was open-sourced at Build 2014, and Visual Studio Code arrived in 2015 under the MIT license. By Build 2018, the same year Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion, it had become plausible to describe the company as one of the largest open-source contributors in the world.

The GitHub acquisition gave Build an important new dimension. With GitHub's developer community growing toward 100 million accounts by 2023, Microsoft gained a direct relationship with developers who operated well outside the Windows and Azure context. That reach mattered when GitHub Copilot arrived: announced as a technical preview in June 2021, generally available in June 2022, and expanded into autonomous agent capabilities across Build 2023 and 2024. The Copilot product line emerged through GitHub rather than through traditional Microsoft channels, which says something about how significantly the company's developer relationships had changed since 2011.

The pandemic-era editions of Build in 2020 and 2021, held entirely online, expanded the conference's reach substantially. Free global streaming brought in audiences that would never have traveled to Seattle, and Microsoft found that recorded, asynchronous content worked at least as well for most developers as attending live sessions. That model persisted after the return to in-person events, with free keynote streaming and on-demand session recordings available worldwide.

Build 2025, held in Seattle under the banner "The Age of AI Agents," launched more than 50 announcements covering Azure AI Foundry Agent Service reaching general availability, the unified Semantic Kernel and AutoGen SDK, and protocol support for agent-to-agent communication and MCP integrations. Build 2026 carries that forward with a different kind of argument: not that the agent era is beginning, but that it's already underway, and that the real work now is shipping agent-powered systems reliably in production. That shift in framing reflects 16 years of Build evolving from a Windows developer conference into the venue where Microsoft sets the direction for its entire engineering ecosystem.

How to be prepared for Build 2026

Build 2026 runs on June 2 and 3 at Fort Mason Center on San Francisco's northern waterfront, with in-person tickets priced at $1,099 and attendance capped at around 2,500 developers. If you can't make it to San Francisco, keynotes and a large portion of the session catalog will stream free at build.microsoft.com, with on-demand recordings available afterward. The session catalog is already published on the Build site, so you can start identifying which tracks are most relevant to your work before the event starts, including AI agents, GitHub Copilot, Azure AI Foundry, Windows, and Responsible AI.

If your work involves the Microsoft developer stack, it's worth treating Build 2026 as a planning input rather than a product announcement calendar. The sessions on agentic AI maturity, multi-model Copilot updates, and Azure AI Foundry will likely shape how your team approaches automation architecture, cloud infrastructure decisions, and developer tooling over the next 12 months. Following the Build sessions alongside Microsoft's technical blog and the GitHub repositories for AutoGen, Semantic Kernel, and Prompt Flow will give you the clearest picture of what's production-ready now versus what's still on the roadmap.

The 50 tools in this article give you a head start on the topics that Build 2026 will cover. Setting up an Azure free account, running an AutoGen sample locally, or browsing the Azure AI Foundry model catalog are all things you can do before June 2. The more hands-on time you have with the platform beforehand, the easier it is to evaluate what you see in a demo against what your team actually needs to build.

• More hardware is reportedly on the way from Meta
• We could get an always-on AI pendant and new smart glasses
• The smart specs may involve new hardware partners

As well as exploring premium subscriptions for its social media platforms, Meta is also reportedly developing new hardware too: an AI pendant, and smart glasses that are apparently going to be different to the models we've seen before.

This is according to The Information, which says testing for the AI pendant will begin in the coming year. Presumably it works along similar lines to the Limitless AI Pendant which launched in 2024, as Meta acquired Limitless at the end of last year: the device records and processes audio, and can answer queries with its built-in chatbot.

Details are thin on the ground at the moment, but we've seen quite a few of these AI wearables in recent years. From transcribing meetings to telling you what time you need to be at the station to catch the next train home, the idea is they act as constant companions ready to lend a hand at any moment.

We know that ChatGPT developer OpenAI is working on something similar, though again there's not much in the way of solid information about what the something is, or what it'll do. We could be getting gadget launches from two of the biggest names in AI across the course of the next 12 months.

More smart glasses

As for the smart glasses, as per the report in The Information, there are apparently several new models coming. The rumored plan is to bring more partners on board, in addition to Ray Ban, which Meta already works with. As you would expect, Meta's own AI models are going to be providing the intelligence.

The same report mentions a new 'Wearables for Work' project at Meta, intended to drive subscriptions for Meta's AI apps — including an as-yet-unreleased AI agent called Hatch. Meta is apparently aiming to sell 10 million smart glasses in the second half of 2026, in part by expanding sales to more countries.

There's more evidence for the incoming smart glasses via Android Authority: Meta has registered several new pairs of smart specs with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the US, a necessary regulatory step for new gadgets. These documents have been filed under the Meta name, which hasn't often been the case with previous wearables.

That might suggest Meta is teaming up with another hardware partner, which lines up with what The Information is saying, but we'll have to wait for confirmation. Many other companies are expected to launch smart glasses soon too, including — perhaps — Apple.

Artificial intelligence is changing far more than the tools businesses use. It is changing who gets to build, who gets to participate and who gets left behind.

For decades, access to technology has often been shaped by technical expertise, funding and networks. AI tools are beginning to shift that balance. They are reducing the cost of building a business, shortening the distance between an idea and execution, and allowing individuals to create with a level of scale that once required an entire team.

As someone who grew up in the Philippines teaching myself how to build websites at 11 years old, I have seen how access can shape ambition. I did not grow up surrounded by startup ecosystems or technical mentors. Like many women in technology, particularly women of colour, I often had to find my own way into rooms where very few people looked like me. That experience taught me early that talent is often universal, but opportunity is not.

Some people will understand how to shape AI into useful tools, while others will only experience what those tools produce. That gap could become one of the defining inequalities of the next decade. And this can only exacerbate pre-existing inequalities, especially in technology, where the gender gap stifles access and pay for women.

The next generation of women need more than access to digital tools. They need opportunities to understand AI, experiment with it and use it to create solutions of their own. AI can offer an opportunity for them to benefit and close this gap. The more urgent question is what happens if they are excluded from shaping it.

AI literacy is becoming a core skill

AI literacy is quickly becoming as important as digital literacy. Understanding how AI works will soon influence career progression, business growth and economic mobility across nearly every sector. From healthcare to education to retail, organizations are already using AI to make decisions, improve efficiency and uncover opportunities that were previously harder to see.

Conversations about women and AI still tend to focus on fear: fear of complexity, fear of job displacement and uncertainty about whether this new wave of technology is really meant for them.

For younger generations, AI understanding will increasingly influence career opportunities and economic mobility. And with recent reports of major organizations, such as Meta, Microsoft and Amazon, cutting jobs to make way for AI, along with Anthropic’s labor market report highlighting the potential capabilities of AI across industries, the competitiveness of the job market may only heighten.

But literacy in this new era means more than knowing how to use a chatbot. It means understanding how to build workflows, evaluate outputs, identify bias and apply AI to real-world problems. It means moving from simply interacting with technology to directing it.

Those who can create with AI will have a very different relationship with technology than those who only consume it.

Women need to see themselves as builders

Young women are still too often introduced to technology as users rather than creators. They are encouraged to adopt tools, adapt to platforms and participate in digital spaces, but fewer are shown that they can design those systems themselves. That pattern has long influenced who enters the technology sector and who feels they belong there.

AI offers a chance to change that. Because AI can remove many of the traditional technical barriers, women can begin building solutions much earlier than previous generations could. A young woman with a strong idea no longer needs years of software training before she can start turning it into something real.

What she also needs is confidence, access and the opportunity to experiment. When women are encouraged to build with AI, they develop more than technical capability. They develop ownership over the systems that increasingly shape everyday life.

No-code tools can widen participation

One of the most important developments in AI is the rise of no-code platforms. For many people, the biggest barrier to innovation has never been creativity. It has been complexity.

I’ve seen first-hand at LaunchLemonade how no-code AI platforms are making it possible for people without traditional technical backgrounds to build intelligent tools, automate workflows and launch digital products that would once have required a development team. That changes who can participate.

For women balancing careers, caregiving and limited time, no-code tools can remove obstacles that have historically made entrepreneurship harder to sustain. AI can now manage repetitive tasks such as customer enquiries, scheduling, data handling and content drafting, creating breathing room where there was once constant pressure.

It improves productivity but also gives people more capacity to lead.

AI can reduce structural barriers

Women have faced structural disadvantages in business for decades, particularly when it comes to access to funding. Many female-led businesses have had to grow with fewer resources, smaller teams and tighter margins. AI has the potential to change the economics behind that challenge.

Tasks that once required multiple hires can now be supported by intelligent systems. Processes that once consumed entire days can now happen in minutes. Businesses can operate with more efficiency before significant capital is ever required.

For women founders, that can create a more level starting point. AI cannot solve inequality on its own. But it can reduce some of the barriers that have made growth harder to reach.

Human insight remains the advantage

As AI handles more execution, human insight becomes even more valuable. Technology can generate ideas, process information and automate systems. What it cannot replicate easily is lived experience, emotional intelligence and the ability to understand people deeply.

Many female-led businesses already excel in areas like trust, storytelling, community and customer understanding. AI can strengthen those strengths by removing operational friction and allowing founders to focus on the work only they can do.

The strongest businesses in the future may be those that combine AI capability with distinctly human leadership.

Inclusive AI supports stronger economies

AI will shape long-term economic development, but only if more people are included in building it. When technology is designed by a narrow group, it often reflects a narrow understanding of the world. By teaching AI skills, fostering experimentation and sharing AI opportunities from an early age, girls can grow up to become women that can fully be involved with this AI economy. When more women participate in creating AI systems, those systems become more relevant, more responsible and more useful for the people they serve.

That has implications far beyond individual businesses. It affects innovation, productivity and how entire communities benefit from technological change. Closing the AI literacy gap is not only about fairness in the workplace. It is about ensuring the future of technology reflects a wider range of perspectives.

The window is open now

For the first time, many people who were previously excluded by technical barriers can now create digital tools with far fewer obstacles. That opens the door to a more inclusive future, but only if girls are actively included in that shift from an early age to build stronger foundations for sustained gender equality and AI literacy.

AI is giving more people the ability to build without waiting for permission, large budgets or technical gatekeepers. The women and girls who engage with these tools now will help define how this technology evolves and how businesses develop.

Closing the AI literacy gap could become one of the most meaningful steps toward gender equality in technology.

When women have the confidence and capability to build with AI, they gain more than technical knowledge. They gain influence over the systems that will shape the world around them.

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Meta and other tech giants are justifying recent layoffs with the same narrative: AI can do the work now, so humans don't need to.

Yes, it’s true we’ve seen AI rapidly approach the level of human expertise. However, through our decade of work crafting AI tools that offer tailored interview prep, we’ve also seen why designing systems driven solely by AI is the wrong bet.

Yet, on paper, AI looks like it has already achieved human-level performance. Microsoft recently used OpenAI's advanced o3 model to "solve" more than eight out of ten New England Journal of Medicine test case studies, compared with a 20% success rate for human doctors.

Meanwhile, AI research non-profit METR predicts that by 2030, AI could "execute complex software projects" that today require weeks or even months of human expert labor.

But our replacement is not as inevitable as the AI industry would have you believe.

The companies that today are choosing to implement AI solely for cost savings are about to discover an expensive truth: the most effective AI systems are those designed around human expertise, not in its absence.

Permanently and intentionally incorporating human validation throughout AI workflows is what will unlock each subsequent level of AI functionality.

Where AI Systems Fail

AI accuracy gains are still hard-won. Each 10% improvement in foundational models requires $1 trillion in expenditure. At the same time, Stanford researchers have discovered that large language models may never be able to reliably distinguish between what is true and what humans believe to be true.

Translation: without human judgment in the system, AI will confidently scale blind spots. But there’s a failure point that will persist even if AI is perfect: often, the systems containing AI don’t use it properly.

Here's what it looks like when a company goes all-in on a faulty AI-driven workflow:

A product management leader assigns an agent to independently build a weekly performance dashboard. Everything looks right, so the PM ships it with only cursory oversight. A few months in, leadership shifts ad spend toward a new product based on the chart. Next quarter's sales tank. The cause: the agent had quietly counted free trial users as paying customers, which a human expert would have spotted in seconds. Instead, a full quarter of ad budget got burned because the role of human oversight wasn’t properly defined.

Or take a company using AI for hiring decisions. Without human input to fine-tune its selection, the model calcifies around outdated assumptions about what humans believe a successful leader looks like. It passes on multiple candidates who fall short on paper but bring the perfect combination of disparate skills; people who a seasoned manager would instinctively pull from the pile. Here, more codified routing rules for each application could have kept these candidates in the running.

These aren't imaginary scenarios. We're seeing them play out in our own work with AI systems; from how they still only variably account for rapidly changing medical guidelines to how they incorrectly assume they can move past human oversight steps.

And the consequences keep mounting as companies race to integrate AI into their core processes and consumers increasingly forgo expert consultations for AI advice. During a code freeze, an AI agent for Replit deleted an entire live database without human review, and AI-driven facial recognition sent a Tennessee woman to jail for five months for crimes she did not commit in North Dakota.

These incidents are the predictable cost of failing to integrate humans properly and instead treating them as an inefficiency to be optimized away.

Building AI-Native Workflows

Company leaders are pushing teams to just “rub some AI” on existing workflows to improve them. However, bolting AI on only worsens underlying problems as processes scale. To build AI that delivers on its growth promise, we must redesign workflows to inherently play to the strengths of AI, humans, and software.

The truth is not every task requires an LLM; there are situations that call for the predictability of routing, validation, and constraints. If everything is probabilistic, workflows become more like suggestion engines than reliable systems.

The best AI systems combine rigid and flexible processes and clearly define task ownership across three separate layers:

1. AI Flexibility: embeds probabilistic models that interpret more abstract requests and turn them into recognized actions.

2. Deterministic Software: adds hard-coded routing rules, constraints, validation triggers, and exceptions that direct operations toward the right pathway. This can include a context-aware RAG layer which pulls from a pre-determined "knowledge base" while also controlling memory and compression.

3. Humans For Context: continually assess model assumptions, change workflows based on external conditions, clarify human behavior nuance or overall ambiguity, and make final decisions.

AI's flexibility identifies inputs that don't quite match up with what the system might be expecting while the deterministic layer helps put up hard blocks on tasks it is unable to do, instead of placating the user.

At this ideal level of functionality, AI can make a recommendation of where to go next but let the human choose which path to take.

Redefining Human-In-The-Loop

Yes, AI is often inaccurate, but that doesn’t negate its potential. Frequently, it is a faulty system around AI that leads to the most dangerous breakdowns.

To improve AI integration, the goal is to go beyond adding a "human-in-the-loop." If a human is only there to check an AI's final output, that workflow is flawed. Instead, we should be designing AI systems where each part best contributes to a reliable outcome.

Eliminating humans from AI-driven processes today is akin to swapping a compounding asset for a one-time win. Instead, centering and clearly defining the role of human expertise is what will make AI systems better over time.

The companies that dominate the next decade won't be the ones with the smallest org charts but those that properly integrate humans with software to drive AI advancement.

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Microsoft Build has spent the last several years becoming the most important calendar event for developers working on the Microsoft platform. The 2026 edition, running June 2–3 at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, looks to carry that momentum further, with AI sitting at the center of almost everything on the agenda.

Whether you're attending in person or watching online for free, the session catalog has over 90 entries covering everything from agentic AI to model training. Registration for online access costs nothing, which means the full two days of content, including the opening keynote from CEO Satya Nadella, are open to anyone with an internet connection.

• Register for Microsoft Build here

Why Build 2026 is crucial to AI's future

Last year's conference set a high bar. Build 2025 produced more than 50 announcements under the theme of AI agents, including a new GitHub Copilot coding agent that could autonomously fix bugs, write tests, and open pull requests without developer prompting. That shift, from AI tools that assist to AI systems that act, is the thread running through almost every session this year.

Microsoft has moved quickly since then. Copilot Studio has gained autonomous agent capabilities, and the AutoGen multi-agent framework has matured into a platform developers are using in production. Build 2026 is where much of that work is expected to be demonstrated publicly for the first time, with the session catalog organized around six main themes: developer tools and frameworks, cloud platform and data, model training, agents and apps, responsible AI, and Windows.

The conference is also notable for its format. This year's edition is one of the more intimate Microsoft Build events in recent memory, with around 2,500 in-person attendees expected, down from the larger crowds of previous years. Microsoft and GitHub leadership have described that as a deliberate choice to keep the focus on technical depth rather than broad-audience product launches.

Azure is central to the picture as well. The Azure AI platform has expanded significantly over the past year, adding services around retrieval-augmented generation, fine-tuning, and agent orchestration. Sessions this year are expected to move past introductory concepts and address the harder question of what it actually costs to ship AI-powered applications reliably at scale.

For developers who want to understand where AI-assisted software development is heading, Build 2026 offers a clear view. You'll get a close look at what Microsoft's engineering teams are building, alongside honest takes from practitioners on what's working in production right now.

10 free Microsoft Build sessions you should attend this year

All keynotes and most breakout sessions at Build 2026 are available online at no cost, so you can follow the conference without a travel budget. For each session below, online streaming or recorded access has been confirmed through Microsoft's published session catalog.

These are the ten sessions worth blocking out on your calendar, whether you're focused on AI agents, GitHub Copilot updates, local model inference, or understanding how Microsoft is thinking about the next phase of developer AI.

You can view Microsoft's online session catalog for a complete list of keynotes and events.

Opening keynote: Creating new opportunity for developers in the era of AI

The opening session is where Microsoft sets the direction for the entire conference. Satya Nadella is headlining, and based on the session description, the focus is on what Microsoft calls "creating new opportunity for developers across our platforms in this era of AI."

Expect live product announcements and demos from Azure and Windows engineering teams, with OpenAI likely represented given how central that partnership is to Microsoft’s current direction. This is the session to watch if you want the big picture before diving into the technical tracks. It tends to be dense with news, so plan to watch it live and return to the recording to catch anything worth noting in detail.

BRK233: Software defensibility in the era of AI coding

One of the more philosophically pointed sessions in the catalog, this one is aimed at developers thinking about where their work is heading as AI agents become capable of generating code, writing tests, and deploying applications autonomously. The question of what human developers uniquely contribute in that environment is pressing for a lot of teams right now.

The session is likely to frame that challenge as an opportunity, with practical guidance on the kinds of higher-order work AI cannot easily replicate. For engineering leads and product teams, it should surface useful thinking about where to focus development effort in an AI-first environment.

BRK260: Build local AI experiences that harness the GPU, NPU and CPU on every Windows PC

Microsoft's on-device AI story has become considerably more specific in the past year.

This session covers Windows AI APIs, now expanding beyond the NPU to support GPU and CPU, alongside Foundry Local for running open-source models directly on a Windows machine. There's also new tooling for VS Code to help you optimize and prepare models for on-device deployment, and Windows ML now supports web apps through WebNN.

If you're building applications that need to run AI models locally rather than calling cloud APIs, this is the session to prioritize. On-device inference matters most where data privacy and low latency are non-negotiable, particularly in disconnected or air-gapped deployments.

BRK261: Build and ship faster with a developer-optimized experience on Windows

This session sits at the intersection of Windows platform development and AI tooling, covering how Microsoft's developer experience improvements over the past year fit together. It's likely to address the improvements to the inner-loop development experience on Windows, including how Copilot integrates into everyday workflows for developers building cloud-native and AI-powered applications.

For developers who spend most of their time on Windows machines, this one offers practical value even if autonomous AI agents aren't yet part of your day-to-day work. The faster feedback loops being added to the platform are worth tracking regardless of what you're building.

BRK222: The honest practitioner's take on agentic AI on Kubernetes

The title does most of the work here. This is positioned as a no-hype reality check from engineers who have shipped agentic AI systems in production on Kubernetes, which makes it stand out in a catalog that can sometimes lean toward polished demos over field experience.

You'll likely hear about the specific failure modes of multi-agent systems at scale and the gaps between what product announcements promise and what production deployments actually deliver. If you're already building agentic systems or planning to, this is probably the most directly useful session in the entire track.

BRK207: GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio: agents that debug, profile, and test

This demo-heavy session covers what Copilot agents inside Visual Studio can do beyond generating code. You'll see agents root-cause bugs using live runtime behavior and pinpoint performance bottlenecks with targeted fix recommendations. There's also a thread on building test coverage to catch regressions before they ship, with all of it aimed specifically at enterprise developers working in C#, .NET, and C++.

If your team uses Visual Studio for production work, this is probably the most immediately applicable session at the conference. The focus on diagnostics and code quality rather than just code generation is what makes it worth attending over the many other Copilot-adjacent sessions in the catalog.

BRK202: Azure DevOps meets GitHub, the path to AI-powered SDLC

Many development teams currently run both Azure DevOps and GitHub, managing two systems that overlap considerably but don't fully unify. This session lays out Microsoft's current integration story and the direction it's heading, with AI-powered software development lifecycle management as the connecting thread.

The AI angle here goes beyond GitHub Copilot. It also covers how hybrid patterns connecting GitHub with Azure Boards and Azure Pipelines can enable what Microsoft calls Agentic DevOps, with a first-person account from Microsoft's own engineering teams who have already adopted this approach.

For engineering managers planning a tooling consolidation or migration, this session offers a clear picture of what's actually available now.

DEM322: Smaller, faster, smarter: distilling agents with fine-tuning

Inference costs are a growing concern for teams running AI applications at scale, and this session addresses one of the more practical strategies for managing them. Model distillation, training a smaller model to replicate the outputs of a larger one, lets you hit latency and cost targets without sacrificing too much on quality.

The session covers distilling frontier models into purpose-built agents, a pattern that's gaining traction in production environments where running large models on every request isn't economically viable. Expect concrete examples of where distilled models perform well and where they fall short, which is exactly the nuance that's missing from most AI cost discussions.

BRK234: Shipping custom models at scale from fine-tuning to inference

Fine-tuning a model on Azure is relatively straightforward. Getting it into production, keeping it performant as usage grows, and managing the operational overhead is considerably less so. This session covers the end-to-end workflow, including the parts that most product demos skip over.

You'll likely hear about the infrastructure decisions that affect cost and reliability at scale, and the monitoring approaches that surface problems before users encounter them. The handoff between training and operations teams also gets coverage, which is one of the more practical topics that production teams actually care about.

DEM364: Simplify app dev with cloud-native PostgreSQL in Azure HorizonDB

The last session on this list is one of the more technically specific, but it addresses a problem a growing number of teams are hitting: AI-driven applications are sprawling across separate services for vector search, models, and retrieval pipelines, and the complexity is becoming a liability. This session introduces Azure HorizonDB, which embeds AI and search directly into a cloud-native PostgreSQL database.

You'll see how to run hybrid vector queries and call managed AI models directly from SQL, prototyping agentic workflows without stitching together a separate stack of services. For developers who want to keep their architecture tighter and ship faster, this is a session worth watching.

What to expect from Microsoft Build 2026?

Build 2026 takes place at a point where the initial wave of AI announcements has settled into something more operational. The questions this year are less about whether AI belongs in the development stack and more about making it work reliably at production scale without blowing the budget. That shift shows up clearly in the session titles, which lean toward production concerns and honest tradeoffs rather than introductory overviews.

The San Francisco venue is also worth noting. Fort Mason is a departure from the Seattle convention spaces that have hosted most recent editions. It looks like Microsoft has used the change in venue to justify a tighter event with a smaller participant capacity. Fewer attendees means fewer broad-audience sessions and more depth in the technical tracks, which should make the content more useful for developers who have found previous editions too surface-level.

Online attendance remains free, which makes Build accessible to developers who aren't in San Francisco. Keynotes and recorded breakout sessions are available through build.microsoft.com, and many sessions run simultaneously online and in person. If you want to track how AI development is evolving on the Microsoft platform, this is the clearest two-day view available.

• Register for Microsoft Build here

• Xreal just unveiled the xbx a01 smart glasses
• These XR specs are super budget-friendly...
• ...but packed with some impressive features

With its One Pro glasses Xreal seriously hit it out of the park — making arguably the best XR glasses you can buy right now for the private home theatre experience, and easily my favorites. The only issue? They’re pretty darn pricey, as are many of Xreal’s previous specs. That’s about to change however, with the new xbx range.

Standing for 'X by Xreal', and not some Xbox tie-in as I initially thought it was, this sub-brand will champion new glasses lines, starting with the budget-friendly a01 line. Instead of costing $649 like the Xreal One Pro, it’ll cost just $299.

Initially coming to China, with a US launch scheduled for July this new budget option looks set to give my favorite cheap XR specs — the RayNeo Air 4 Pros — a serious run for their money.

A budget XR champion?

First up, Xreal's xbx a01 boasts a 1600-nit HDR10 display. RayNeo’s budget specs debuted the first HDR10 XR specs earlier this year with the Air 4 Pros, and it seriously helps improve the vibrancy of its colors with compatible content. However it only came with 1,200 nits; the extra brightness from Xreal should help further enhance the clarity and beauty of its images.

Secondly, there’s a new anti-shake algorithm built for using during commutes, flights, and bumpy subway rides. Think of it like a reverse version of the stability controls cameras come with — the glasses will try to keep the in-display image from shaking around, while trying to preserve as much of the image clarity as possible.

Thirdly, these glasses are meant to look great. With a range of interchangeable front frames to suit different styles, they also cater to different needs — such as the ability to swap to dimmer lenses in brighter conditions.

Plus they should be pretty comfy too. At only 62g which should make them feel fairly light on your face.

Of course we’ll need to test Xreal’s glasses out to be able to judge them fully, but I’m a major fan of its other specs so I’m optimistic that Xreal’s foray in budget glasses will be a slam dunk.

If I was RayNeo I’d even be a little worried Xreal is coming to eat my lunch — though I’m sure it has some tricks up its sleeves to counter down the line.

This also gives us a fun look at how Xreal’s Android XR efforts might develop. As smart glasses become something we wear all the time, design aspects like interchangeable frame covers could allow us to make fashion conscious decisions (having multiple designs to wear for various scenarios) without breaking the bank on several expensive pairs of smart specs.

We’ll have to wait and see what next, but yet again smart glasses are proving why they’re one of the most exciting sectors in tech right now.

AI-assistants are now a standard feature of development workflows, helping teams generate production-ready code faster than ever.

For organizations under pressure to ship software quickly, the benefits are clear: shorter development cycles, faster releases, and more time for engineers to focus on solving complex problems. Yet as AI adoption grows, many teams are discovering that faster coding isn’t a complete solution for bringing innovation to market faster.

A widening gap has emerged between the speed of development and the systems responsible for testing, securing, and deploying that code. The challenge is not simply generating code faster, but ensuring it can be delivered reliably at scale.

The AI multiplier effect

The productivity impact of AI-assisted development is already visible. Teams that use AI coding tools multiple times per day are moving faster than those who don’t, with 45% releasing to production daily or more often. Just 15% of occasional AI coding tool users can deploy at the same pace.

However, this speed comes with trade-offs. Among very frequent AI users, 69% report that their teams regularly experience deployment problems with AI-generated code. At the same time, incident recovery times are increasing rather than decreasing, with teams that rely most on AI tools taking longer to resolve production issues.

Instead of reducing engineering workloads, AI often just shifts it downstream. Nearly half of frequent users of AI coding assistants say that manual work in areas such as quality assurance, remediation, and validation has increased.

This growing workload is taking its toll on developers. Almost all heavy users of AI coding tools regularly work evenings or at weekends due to release-related activity, reflecting the pressure associated with more frequent deployments.

Existing bottlenecks are further exposed

AI coding hasn’t introduced new problems, but it has amplified the flaws in existing DevOps pipelines, making them more visible and disruptive. Much of this stems from a lack of standardization.

Many organizations still don’t have consistent templates for building and deploying applications. Without shared patterns, delivery processes vary widely between teams, making it difficult to scale releases safely.

Provisioning core delivery infrastructure can also be slow. Only 21% of teams say they can set up functioning build and deployment pipelines quickly, while most face delays caused by dependencies on other teams responsible for infrastructure or approvals.

Time saved during coding is often lost downstream through waiting, rework, and coordination overhead.

Building foundations to scale safely

Organizations are still enjoying the benefits of AI-assisted development, but it’s coming at a cost, as engineers struggle to unblock bottlenecks in their pipelines. To provide the support they need, organizations need to invest in strengthening their delivery foundations and continue adopting AI coding tools.

By building reusable templates and consistent delivery pipelines throughout the entire lifecycle, organizations can reduce variability and enable teams to deploy AI-generated code safely and efficiently. These “golden paths” enable developers to move quickly without reinventing delivery processes for each new service.

Embedding automated quality, security, and compliance checks earlier in the lifecycle will also allow issues to be detected before they reach production. This reduces the need for manual intervention and helps validation processes keep pace with the higher development throughput enabled by AI-assisted coding tools.

Modern delivery practices such as feature flags, automated rollbacks, and centralized guardrails and controls can provide further relief for engineers by limiting the impact of failures and allowing changes to be introduced gradually.

Together, these capabilities enable organizations to absorb increased development velocity while maintaining control.

Closing the gap between speed and stability

AI-assisted coding is becoming a baseline capability across modern software development. The productivity gains are clear, and development will continue to accelerate as these tools become more advanced and widely adopted.

To fully realize the benefits of AI-assisted development, organizations must align their DevOps maturity with this new pace of change. Investing in standardized pipelines, deeper automation, and operational guardrails will allow teams to move quickly while maintaining reliability.

AI must also be used across the entire software delivery lifecycle to maximize efficiency gains and alleviate developer toil.

Those that close the gap between velocity and delivery capability will be best positioned to turn development speed into sustainable, high-quality software outcomes.

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Microsoft Build has been running annually since 2011, and in that time it has grown into the most consequential event in the Microsoft developer calendar.

Across 15 editions, it has served as the venue where the company signals what it wants developers to build on next, sometimes through finished products and sometimes through early previews that arrive months before the software ships.

Build 2026 runs on June 2 and 3 at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, the first edition outside Seattle with a tighter capacity limit of 2,500 attendees.

What makes Build worth paying attention to is the company's track record of using it to surface genuinely significant products, not just announcements made for the sake of filling a keynote slot. Not everything that debuts at Build lands well, and a few have disappeared entirely.

But if you want to understand what Microsoft is betting on, Build is consistently where the company shows its hand.

• Register for Microsoft Build here

Microsoft Build: Announcements, product launches, and early previews for developers

Build sits apart from Microsoft's other major events in terms of both audience and purpose. Ignite is aimed at IT administrators and enterprise buyers, Surface hardware launches are consumer-facing, but Build targets software developers using Microsoft’s ecosystem, whether they write Windows apps, run workloads on Azure, or build with GitHub and Microsoft's AI platform.

This distinction also shapes what gets announced and how. Sessions tend to focus on APIs, SDKs, preview capabilities, and platform architecture. Microsoft is speaking directly to the people who will decide whether to build with a new technology or ignore it, which means announcements need to be practical enough to evaluate on technical merits.

The timing of Build also matters commercially. Google I/O and Apple's WWDC both take place around the same period each year, and Microsoft is competing for the same pool of developers who will decide which platforms to prioritize. The gap between an exciting Build announcement and an actual shipment date can shift that calculation in Microsoft's favor, but it can also sometimes have the opposite effect.

Build has also become increasingly open to third-party voices over the years. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined the Build 2025 keynote virtually while GitHub leadership has featured heavily in recent editions. That mix of Microsoft's own engineers and partner voices has made the event more useful as a signal of where the broader ecosystem is heading, not just where the corporation itself wants to go.

How the company uses Build has also changed noticeably since the early days. The first few conferences were dominated by Windows coverage, with Microsoft trying to rally developers around Windows 8 and the Windows Store. By the late 2010s, Azure and cloud services had largely taken over. This year, AI is the thread connecting nearly every session and product announcement on the agenda.

10 products launched at Microsoft Build (2011–2026)

Microsoft uses Build to introduce products at varying stages of readiness. Some arrive as rough developer previews with significant work still ahead; others land in preview and reach general availability within weeks. Either way, the goal is the same. To get the product in front of the developers to generate early interest before it reaches the general public.

The ten products below span the full timeline of Build announcements, from the inaugural event in 2011 to the most recent edition in 2025. Some have become fixtures of modern software development. Others serve as useful reminders that even Microsoft's highest-profile bets don't always pay off.

Windows 8 developer preview (Build 2011)

The first Build conference ran from September 13 to 16, 2011, at the Anaheim Convention Center in California. Windows 8 was effectively the entire reason the event existed. Microsoft released a developer preview of the operating system and handed every attendee a Samsung tablet preloaded with it so they could interact with the tile-based Metro interface first-hand.

Windows 8 launched to the general public in October 2012 to mixed user reception. The removal of the Start button, the push toward a touch-first design even on desktop, and the lack of app volume on Windows Store caused more strife than Microsoft had projected. Microsoft released Windows 8.1 in 2013 to address the most pressing complaints before launching Windows 10 in 2015 as a full course correction, restoring familiar design conventions while preserving the underlying technical work from the Windows 8 generation.

Cortana (Build 2014)

Microsoft first demonstrated Cortana at Build 2014 in San Francisco, introducing it as the company's answer to Apple's Siri and Google Now. Named after the AI character from the Halo series, Cortana launched on Windows Phone 8.1 shortly after and came to Windows 10 desktops in 2015, where it was integrated directly into the taskbar search bar.

For a few years, Cortana spread across Microsoft's product line, appearing on Xbox One, Microsoft Band, Android, and iOS. But it never achieved meaningful market penetration, in part because it was tied to a mobile platform that was already failing. But it was also in part because Amazon's Alexa had established the smart speaker market before Cortana could enter the fray.

By 2019, Microsoft had started pulling Cortana out of the Windows search bar. The standalone Windows app shut down in August 2023, with all remaining integrations discontinued by June 2024. Microsoft Copilot now occupies the space Cortana was originally meant to fill on Windows desktops.

HoloLens (Build 2015)

Microsoft gave developers their first hands-on time with HoloLens at Build 2015. The headset had been revealed a few months earlier as a holographic computing platform and hundreds of units were made available on the conference floor for attendees to try. Demos included one where developers used holographic panels projected onto walls to interact with a robot, and the show floor response was strong enough to give HoloLens a genuinely well-received debut.

A developer edition of HoloLens shipped in 2016 at $3,000; HoloLens 2 followed in 2019 with improved hand tracking and a wider field of view. However, Microsoft steadily narrowed its ambitions for the product, pivoting toward enterprise use cases in surgery, manufacturing, and training. Consumer development never materialized. In early 2023, reports confirmed Microsoft was winding down HoloLens hardware development entirely, with no third-generation device in the plans.

Azure Functions (Build 2016)

Azure Functions entered public preview at Build 2016 as Microsoft's entry into the serverless computing space. It let developers run event-driven code without provisioning or managing underlying infrastructure, paying only for the compute time actually consumed. Microsoft positioned it directly against AWS Lambda and Google Cloud Functions, framing it as part of a broader push to make Azure the default cloud for Microsoft developers.

The service reached general availability by the end of 2016, with continuous updates since. Azure Functions now integrates with Azure AI Foundry, letting developers build and trigger serverless AI agents, a use case that didn't exist when the product launched. The current stable runtime is version 4.x, with earlier versions progressively retired. Of everything Microsoft announced at Build 2016, Azure Functions has arguably had the longest shelf life.

Windows Subsystem for Linux (Build 2016)

WSL was announced at Build 2016 as a way to run Linux command-line tools natively on Windows, without a virtual machine or dual-boot setup. It was a direct response to developer frustration with Windows as a working environment compared to macOS and Linux, representing a shift in the company’s relationship with open-source software.

WSL 2, which replaced the original compatibility layer with a full Linux kernel running inside a Hyper-V virtual machine, was announced at Build 2019. Microsoft separated WSL from the Windows codebase in 2021 to let it ship updates independently. At Build 2025, WSL became open source, formally closing a GitHub issue that had been open since the project's very first day in 2016: "Will this be open source?"

Windows Terminal (Build 2019)

Windows Terminal was announced at Build 2019 as a modern, open-source replacement for the Windows Console. It supported multiple tabs, GPU-accelerated text rendering, and all major command-line environments (including PowerShell, Command Prompt, and WSL) in a single window. For developers who spent significant time at the command line, it was a long-overdue improvement to an area that had received very little attention for years.

The first stable release shipped at Build 2020, exactly one year after the announcement. Windows Terminal is now the default terminal in Windows 11, with regular updates through the Microsoft Store. The most recent stable release, v1.24, arrived in April 2026. A tool that started as a developer quality-of-life fix has since become a standard part of the Windows environment.

GitHub Copilot (Build 2022)

GitHub Copilot's general availability was announced at Build 2022, after nearly a year as a technical preview. Built with OpenAI and trained on public code repositories, it was the first mainstream AI coding assistant to reach general availability, offering context-aware code completion, function generation from comments, and full code block suggestions directly inside developers' existing editors.

The product picked up over 400,000 subscribers in its first month of release, according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during a subsequent earnings call. By early 2024, it had grown to 1.3 million paid subscribers.

Early research suggested developers using the tool completed tasks up to 55% faster than those working without it. GitHub Copilot has since expanded from code completion into chat, code review, and pull request summaries, with a fully autonomous agent mode introduced at Build 2025 that works in the background without a developer actively typing.

Windows Copilot (Build 2023)

Build 2023 was the conference where AI moved from a background theme to the central organizing principle of every product Microsoft discussed. Windows Copilot was announced as a sidebar assistant built into Windows 11, putting a Bing AI-powered chatbot into the operating system itself, accessible from the taskbar on any compatible device. At the same event, Microsoft announced that Bing would become the default search engine for ChatGPT, signaling just how deeply the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership had become embedded in Microsoft's product strategy.

Windows Copilot has since evolved significantly. The original branding was retired in late 2023 as Microsoft unified its various assistant products under the Microsoft Copilot name. The assistant is now available across Windows, Microsoft Edge, and Microsoft 365, with capabilities well beyond what the Build 2023 preview showed.

Copilot+ PCs (Build 2024)

The day before Build 2024 opened, Microsoft announced Copilot+ PCs: a new hardware category defined by the presence of a dedicated neural processing unit capable of at least 40 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of on-device AI performance. The Surface Pro and Surface Laptop were the first devices to carry the designation. Microsoft framed it as the beginning of a new era of AI-capable personal computing, distinct from standard Windows devices specifically because of the on-device AI tasks the NPU enables.

The category has since expanded to include devices from Qualcomm, AMD, and Intel, with dozens of Copilot+ PC models from multiple manufacturers now on the market. AI features specific to the category include real-time captioning and on-device image generation. Recall — a searchable record of everything you have done on your PC — drew significant criticism over privacy concerns at launch and was delayed before returning under more restrictive settings.

GitHub Copilot for autonomous coding (Build 2025)

At Build 2025, Microsoft announced that GitHub Copilot was making the shift from coding assistant to autonomous agent. The new agent mode lets Copilot perform complete coding tasks independently: creating files, running tests, fixing bugs, and pushing changes to a draft pull request, all without the developer actively engaged.

At the same time, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke emphasized that every action is logged transparently so developers can review the work after the fact and existing security rules such as branch protection remain fully in force.

Satya Nadella compared the move to other inflection points in Microsoft's history, including the transition to 64-bit Windows and the company's pivot to the cloud. Whether that framing proves accurate depends on how quickly agent-mode coding becomes standard practice, but the announcement does represent the most substantial extension of GitHub Copilot's scope since the product launched in 2022.

What to expect from Microsoft Build 2026?

Build 2026 runs on June 2 and 3 at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, marking the first time the conference has left Seattle since 2016. In-person tickets cost $1,099 and capacity is capped at roughly 2,500 developers, making it a more compact event than recent editions.

Keynotes and select sessions stream for free by clicking here. On-demand sessions will be available afterward for anyone unable to attend or watch live.

Satya Nadella is confirmed for the opening keynote, which Microsoft has described as being about "creating new opportunity for developers across our platforms in this era of AI."

The session catalog published in April points toward four main themes: developer tools and frameworks, cloud platform and data, model training, and agents and apps. Given the trajectory set at Build 2025, further announcements around GitHub Copilot's autonomous capabilities and Azure AI Foundry integration seem likely.

Beyond agents, Build 2026 is expected to address Windows AI tooling, MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration across Microsoft's developer platform, and updates to the Copilot+ PC category.

What gets announced will probably surprise even close watchers, which is, historically, exactly the point of the event.

• Register for Microsoft Build here

Jensen Huang has achieved rockstar status in the technology world for leading his company through one of the fastest and most exciting transitions. NVIDIA, the once plucky GPU maker, has now become central to the AI buildout, and its CEO has long anticipated the transformative potential of this technology.

Signaling NVIDIA's AI pivot

Mere weeks before Google scientists released their seminal paper on AI transformer technology, Huang made this comment in an interview with MIT Technology Review almost nine years ago.

The company, popularized thanks to its consumer GPUs, was in the midst of laying the foundations for its AI-fueled ascent. It had just hosted the "world's premier AI conference" in San Jose and was exploring how its GPUs could make a significant impact in deep learning, overcoming some of the inefficiencies we had encountered with conventional processors.

This quote references the way software companies surged in relevance at the time. With increased access to computing power, the ongoing cloud revolution, and widespread use of machine learning, SaaS companies penetrated the heart of enterprises and proved truly transformative. But, as Huang forecast at the time, their reign would not be long-lived.

Does SaaSmageddon have legs?

It feels like every Anthropic press release delivers yet another body blow to the SaaS sector. SaaSmageddon – the phenomenon in which disruption in the software market is being driven by emerging AI capabilities – is now underway as agentic AI is on the rise.

Was Huang to know exactly how this would play out nine years on? It's plausible, but today's market sensitivities are also impacted by global events and other developments that were impossible to foresee at the time.

In 2026 and beyond, NVIDIA remains central to the ongoing AI buildout, with the industry clamoring for its technologies, and its hardware is flooding into data centers globally.

The software sector finds itself on its knees but far from out for the count. It remains to be seen whether these companies can adapt to the new normal, or whether AI will "eat them" as Huang suggested nearly a decade ago.