Alright, I'll just outright say it: if you're a manufacturer in 2026, and you decide to ship a product with single-channel memory, you do not care about your customer. I'm sorry, you just don't.

I've heard the excuses, I've had the pre-emptive PR emails telling me "oh well we did it in this product so you can double capacity later if you'd like", followed up with the inevitable "it only matters in some synthetic benchmarks anyway" nonsense, and I'm here to tell you that's the biggest steaming pile of the proverbial I've ever heard.

There's no justifiable way, in my head, that you can look at the paltry savings that you make there, and say "ahh yeah it'll be fine, they can deal with a 40% performance drop on iGPU tasks". You just can't. It doesn't matter if it's an SFF (small form factor) gaming PC or a gaming laptop, it's a disaster.

Take those integrated graphics cards as an example. Those commonly found in small form factor gaming PCs, or some laptops, and things along those lines. Now, the iGPU doesn't have this massive amount of physical PCB that it can inhabit. They're typically baked into the overall CPU chip design, and as a result, instead of utilising its own dedicated pool of VRAM, like an RTX 5080 would as an example, it has to rely on system memory or RAM instead. You know, the same thing that's used by your CPU to handle volatile memory tasks across your entire machine.

For those not in the know, the default assumption for many is that, well, it's fine, if you've got the capacity, it doesn't matter. If you have 32GB of RAM, a good portion of that can go to the system applications, the rest can be used by the iGPU. And although yes, that is technically true, it's not the capacity that's inherently the issue.

With memory, or RAM, you have effectively three (technically four with real-world latency) characteristics that you need to pay attention to, which determine performance.

The best analogy that we have for that is that it's like a motorway or a highway, right? You have speed, which is how fast the cars can travel on that road (data packets in our case). Capacity, how many cars you can fit on that road. And channels, how many lanes you have across each side of that road.

Your speed is MT/s (or MHz, depending on whether you like marketing hype or not). Your capacity is measured in GB, as we know, and bandwidth is a bit of a calculation that you do based off of memory speed and the number of channels that the memory kit has available to it on the platform you're using it on. The more channels, or lanes, the greater the number of cars that can move across it at any one time.

Now modern systems support dual-channel memory by default, with backwards compatibility for a single-channel solution if needed, or if a stick fails. To enable dual-channel, you need to install two individual sticks across two DDR slots in your machine. If you don't, your system will effectively be running single-channel only. For context, two sticks of 16GB DDR5 running at 5,600 MT/s will net you around 89.6 GB/s of theoretical max bandwidth. A single 32GB DDR5 stick running at that same speed halves that at 44.8 GB/s. That's a staggering drop.

Boosting your bandwidth

The issue is that when you have two pieces of hardware vying for the same memory, both trying to utilize that bandwidth (or the highway in our analogy) at the same time, inevitably, you're going to hit a bottleneck where data cannot be transferred fast enough across those channels. And as a result, it slows the entire system down.

In fact, it can be such a huge bottleneck that it can stifle iGPU performance and even some computational tasks by well up to 40% and above. That's average fps, time taken to render a file, compression speed. So many mission-critical applications and use-cases, just hammered by a manufacturer choosing to opt for a single-channel solution instead of dual-channel.

I've seen this too. Earlier this year, I was benchmarking two small iGPU-based gaming PCs, both with a Radeon 890M GPU, one dual channel, one single channel, and both with near-to-identical CPUs (the single-channel boy actually had a better processor with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 versus the dual-channel's AI 9 HX 370).

At 1080p in Cyberpunk 2077, the average fps scores were 22 fps on single-channel and 38 fps on the dual-channel machine. Same preset. Same frequency. Same drivers. The works. At higher frame rates, it got even worse: F1: 24, 86 fps on dual-channel, and 30 fps on the single-channel model. The dual-channel machine, too, was generally slower as well, average and max CPU and GPU frequencies were lower, and power draw and temps were practically identical.

The thing that frustrated me most about that particular situation (ignoring the performance) is that nowhere did the manufacturer in question list that it was a single-channel setup; not on the product page, not in the Amazon listing, or even the specs on the side of the box.

It just had the RAM listed as 32GB and called it a day. Even the big flashy product page with all the features and graphics lit up, had it down as 32GB DDR5, "high speed, expandable, with dual-channel support". Even the 3D renders and the exploded view showed off two DDR sticks. Like seriously, yeah, alright, that's technically all true. You're not lying. Congrats.

This isn't something that's isolated to one-off manufacturers either. I've seen it across big brands and names, and products well into the four-digit categories too. It's just staggering to me.

I get it; memory prices are through the roof, the AI onslaught is moving ever upwards, and memory manufacturers can't keep up with that just yet. But seriously, I can't stress enough just how important it is to do your research right now. To make sure the machine you're potentially considering buying has a dual-channel setup. And if it doesn't and you're reliant on that performance, I'm at the point where I'd genuinely recommend you go buy something else instead.

Over the years, there's been one iPhone app that keeps drawing me back. It’s called GarageBand, and since its iOS release in 2011, it has consistently managed to keep its claws stuck into me. There’s something about being able to generate good-sounding music with just a few loops that keeps me dreaming of being a music creator!

But, as good as GarageBand is, it’s not the only kid on the block, and I’ve recently been wondering what the alternatives are. There’s Splash, WalkBand, and FL Studio Mobile, to name only a few, but I’ve recently landed on BandLab as my favorite GarageBand alternative.

BandLab is a free music-making app and one of the quickest ways to turn ideas into release-ready tracks. It’s feature-rich, comprehensive, and easy-to-use, all with a nifty (albeit ad-heavy) interface, and it's simple and intuitive to use.

The BandLab app has enough depth to deliver professional results while also being playful enough to have that GarageBand experimental feel. And as you’d imagine, there are a host of AI music generation tools to get your teeth stuck into as well. This is 2026 after all!

Creating music is a breeze

The first step involves creating music. This can be done by uploading an audio file or adding a track. I started from scratch and laid down a drum beat, which I subsequently edited. Creation and editing tools are fast, intuitive, and easy to find, so even though I was new to BandLab, I was able to find my way around without any problem at all.

From there, I entered Studio mode and started laying down multiple tracks, including voice, drum, bass, and guitar. Each instrument comes with its own interface, but with enough consistency between them to not overcomplicate navigation.

Without any formal training, I was able to add effects, crop clips, and perform auto-pitching. With over 300 sound presets, premade drum kits, and 100K+ loop and layer sounds, I effortlessly created a professional-sounding mix.

If at any time I needed to change the settings of my project, I could do so using the Project Settings tab. It's possible to change the tempo, time signature, and project key. Underneath these, there are the app's studio settings, such as changing the input device, which is your phone by default, or whether or not you want a count-in not.

From there, the library of projects becomes your friend. With it, you can manage albums, bands, playlists, and more. It’s also the easiest way to duplicate tracks for creating multiple edits of the same song.

Collaborate and share

One of the best collaboration tools centers around creating music as a band rather than individually. Any project you’ve already created can be assigned to a band, or if you create a new project, then it can be done at the point of creation. Either way, sharing your project lets other band members contribute to the creation process.

With your music created, it’s time to share it. With BandLab, publishing, sharing, and social media tools are built into the very heart of the app experience. Through it, you can easily connect and collaborate with like-minded creators on the BandLab social music platform.

BandLab is much bigger than just your world of music. The Home tab provides access to a vibrant feed of music and videos from other artists. This helped me discover new artists as well as genres of music that I never considered exploring.

Go big with BandLab Premium

Getting a BandLab membership unlocks exclusive creation features with AI tools. One premium feature that is well worth the monthly cost is AutoMix, which instantly adjusts a track’s volume and panning for a clean, polished mix. All you have to do is pick a genre, and you get a balanced, polished mix in seconds.

BandLab Pro is available for $180 / £149 per year, or if you want the complete unlocked experience, then you’ll need a BandLab Max membership, which costs $360 / £199 per year.

Download BandLab and get creating on iOS and Android.

Cast your mind back to the so-called "flopfest" season that is January. Only five short months ago, Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson were fronting Mercy, a new movie following a man falsely accused of murder, only to be tried by an AI-generated court.

The premise is simple: Make the AI judge believe you're innocent through a numerical threshold, and you walk free. Don't, and you die. There's no lawyer or jury — just your brain and access to your life via curated digital files.

After its theatrical release, it has been on Prime Video for the majority of 2026, and I cannot discourage you enough from watching it. It's far from the worst movie of the year so far, but it's bad enough to be a must-miss.

Without boring you too much, the production feels cheap, it struggles to retain momentum, and Pratt (whose character is hilariously also called Chris) being restrained in a chair for 90% of Mercy's runtime runs thin incredibly quickly.

But let's not talk about Mercy... instead, we need to focus on the movie Pratt recommended as a double bill. Not only does it serve as inspiration for Mercy's action, but it's arguably the most underrated Christopher Nolan movie all time.

Perfect timing ahead of The Odyssey, don't you think?

Chris Pratt reveals Christopher Nolan's Memento is a huge inspiration — and you need to stream it ASAP

"There's a little bit of Memento in this," Pratt told me shortly before Mercy's release.

"This is a character who does not know what's going on, and he's unpeeling the layers of his reality as he learns in real time what has happened."

As soon as he mentions it, I remember just how much of an astonishing viewing experience it was. Starring Guy Pearce and Carrie-Anne Moss, it follows insurance investigator Leonard Shelby (Pearce), who suffers from anterograde amnesia.

He uses notes and tattoos to hunt for the man he thinks killed his wife, which is the last thing he remembers. This means that we know as much as he does, making it one of the most unique and interactive crime thrillers of the last 26 years.

You're thrust back and forth in time with so much confusion that you're wondering if you killed your ex-wife. It's no secret just how much of an exceptional director and storyteller Nolan is... but this was only his second movie.

The talent was already off the scale, but it's no surprise that, given just how many corkers came out more recently (his Batman trilogy, Inception, and Oppenheimer, to name a few), Memento has been put on the collective back burner.

For Matrix fans, Carrie-Anne Moss is also the best female lead that Nolan could have picked. Add in sharp 2000s vibes and lashings of desperation, and you're about to stream a movie you'll never forget (unlike Mercy, which you hopefully do immediately).

• Watch Memento on Prime Video in the US
• Watch Memento on Sky in the UK
• Watch Memento on Paramount+ in Australia

Apps are the lifeblood of smartphones, and with so many to choose from, we inevitably each have our favorites. As such, the apps I'm about to suggest might not be essential for everyone, but they are for me — and you never know, you might just fall in love with them too.

These are five of the iPhone apps I use most throughout my day, so they essentially define how I use my phone. For the most part, they’re also apps that I actively enjoy spending time in.

So, if they sound interesting to you, then they’re worth a download — especially as they all have free versions.

1. StoryGraph

For a long time, Goodreads was my go-to app for logging what I’m reading, making lists of what I want to read, and finding new books, but recently I’ve largely switched over to StoryGraph.

It's a very similar concept to Goodreads but with an arguably more attractive, modern interface, and without the baggage of it being owned by Amazon — a brand I’m trying to interact with less.

But on top of that, StoryGraph also has far more stats and book details built into it, showing you things like the pace of a book, how plot-driven it is, whether it has strong character development, and more, all based on what readers have said.

You can also see how many books and pages you’ve read, how many books of each genre, what moods your books most commonly feature, how your reading has changed over time, and more. So, if you like stats, there’s a lot to dig into here.

Some features are hidden behind a StoryGraph Plus subscription, but the majority of the app is available for free.

2. Letterboxd

Unlike StoryGraph, Letterboxd is something I’ve been using for a very long time, and it’s a similar idea but for movies — so just as StoryGraph is an alternative to the bigger name Goodreads, Letterboxd is an alternative to IMDb.

But it’s more social and community-driven than IMDb, with user reviews very much being front and center of the Letterboxd experience. And as with StoryGraph, there is a wealth of stats available (though some of these are hidden behind a paywall).

You can see how many films you’ve watched, how many hours you’ve spent watching, the number of directors and countries you’ve watched films from, your most watched genres, your highest rated films from each decade, your most watched themes, and many, many other things.

Plus, of course, you can make lists, view lists created by other users, add films to your watchlist, and even rent movies — including sometimes films that aren’t available anywhere else.

3. Pocket Casts

Podcasts are the soundtrack to much of my day, and Pocket Casts is my player of choice. I won’t pretend this is the only great podcast app, but if you’re unhappy with your current player, then it’s well worth giving this one a try.

Pocket Casts has been around for a long time, and it’s gradually gotten better and better, to the point where now, I can’t think of much that could improve it.

It has an attractive interface with good discovery tools, the option to sort podcasts into folders, both dark and light themes, playlist support, the option to change the speed, boost the volume, and trim the silence, a sleep timer, videos (where available), and more.

Plus, Pocket Casts works not just on iPhone but also on Android, Apple Watch, Mac, Windows, the web, and Sonos; it also supports CarPlay, Chromecast, and AirPlay, so you can listen to your podcasts just about anywhere.

4. Proton VPN

VPNs have always been advisable from a privacy perspective, but never more so than now, when countries like the UK are increasingly requiring you to hand over identification to access large parts of the internet — often outsourcing the data collection to companies that may or may not be responsible with it.

So, VPNs are one way to avoid that risk, but they also have other benefits beyond security and general privacy, such as letting you access streaming platforms that might either not operate in your region or have a different selection of content elsewhere.

As for why I’m recommending Proton VPN in particular, I’m a big fan of Proton in general and also use some of their other services. They take privacy more seriously than some VPN companies, and their VPN has over 17,000 servers in over 120 countries, so it’s a good, reliable service, and I don’t notice significant speed drops when connected to Proton VPN either.

That said, there are plenty of other great VPN providers to consider (check out our best VPNs guide for our full list of recommendations), so while I stand by Proton VPN, my suggestion is more just to make use of VPNs in general.

5. Google Photos

Yes, Apple has its own Photos app built into iPhones, and it’s not bad. But for me, Google Photos is the superior option.

Part of that is because it works across various operating systems, so if I ever switch back to Android, I’ll still have ready access to all my photos. But even if you’re a lifelong Apple user, there are still advantages to Google Photos.

While both apps have a decent search function for finding photos through keywords, Google Photos does this best in my experience, and it comes with far more free cloud storage. So, if you want to back up a lot of photos, then Google’s offering is the clear winner there.

Ultimately, I find myself using both apps, but it’s Google Photos that I’m more passionate about — and that I’ll take with me to non-Apple devices.

We've tested a lot of crazy workout gear over the years, from Adidas' pressurized workout shoes to elaborate virtual coaching booths, but never anything from space.

Let me confirm that I haven't actually worn anything from outer space: this is a workout layer from premium activewear company Walero, which also makes professional-grade motorsport gear. The Walero Active temperature-regulating baselayer incorporates Outlast technology, which is a fabric system originally developed for NASA to clothe its astronauts.

The Outlast website says "the most important part of fabrics and materials with this NASA technology is the microencapsulated wax, which is usually won from rapeseed oil.

"When the temperature rises, it causes the wax in the capsules to melt. During this phase shift, the temperature cannot increase any further. Heat peaks are reduced or even prevented and as a result, sweat production decreases by up to 48%."

So the wax hardens and softens inside the fabric based on the wearer's temperature, capping it. Clever.

While the Walero baselayers only consist of 20% Outlast technology, I was intrigued enough to try it when I was offered to test one. Given that I also test the best running shoes in addition to fitness gadgets, I'm always intrigued when I hear about performance-enhancing technical fabrics and materials in addition to smartwatches and other gadgets on my usual beat.

So, without further ado, I laced up my Saucony Ride 19s and hit the road, wearing it on as many runs as I could (in between washes) over a month.

Beat the heat

I tested the Ben Nevis long sleeve half-zip Walero Active top, but I found it difficult to judge its results in an objective, numerical fashion. Walero claims its kit is scientifically proven to lower heart rates by 8%, and sweat production by 30%.

However, one person's sweat production and heart rate can change dramatically for all sorts of reasons, ranging from what they've eaten that day, to the weather, to their previous night's sleep. I normally test the best smartwatches against a Polar H10 heart rate monitor to obtain numerical data, but I found it difficult to deliver any meaningful comparison data on a regular workout vs. one in the top. An 8% decrease in heart rate isn't a massive change for the average runner to measure, although it could mean everything for an elite athlete. How does a mediocre but enthusiastic runner quantify this sort of thing?

Nevertheless, after running 10 kilometers in a UK heatwave, during which I would have normally worn as little clothing as possible (and certainly not a long-sleeved top) I must admit I was partially convinced. I wore a sleeveless t-shirt underneath, and hadn't needed to remove the long-sleeved top at all during the run.

Other runs in the top, some shorter, some similar distance, were done in cooler conditions, including one in the rain. At all times, the layer stayed on, apart from one exceptionally hot day. I didn't see any historic achievements or plateau-breaking as a result of wearing it, but my runs felt strong and the top was comfortable. I didn't need to shed the layer in most hot conditions to avoid overheating, or feel like it was insufficient in cold.

Will it really increase performance?

At the end of the day, it's a very premium-priced (a hefty £195, around $250 / AU$370) baselayer with a nice feel. Will it increase performance? Perhaps. It's definitely going to be a go-to when exercising in the cold, as the 'layering problem' rears its ugly head most often in transitional seasons. You start out cold, and end up baking due to over-layering. I see this piece as an answer to this issue.

One independent study testing the thermo-regulation property of Outlast fiber by means of thermal analysis found that the 'smart fiber' as its called, has "been certified [for] its obvious capability of temperature regulation". So the Walero top will reduce sweat and keep your body regulated with its 20% Outlast fibers woven into its construction, in theory.

In practice, for most of us, it's a fun novelty that seems ideal to wear in most conditions, and most suited to cooler changeable weather. You'll get a lot of wear out of it as it's very adaptable, but it's certainly more expensive than most baselayers. It's a cool gimmick to chat about as you queue up at the startline of your local parkrun, but whether it represents good value will depend on your budget. An amateur athlete looking to save money (most of us) won't get enough mileage out of this top to justify the expense, while a high performer with deep pockets will likely live in it due to its thermo-regulating qualities.

I've got quite the varied selection for our first instalment of Scream or Skip, which features a mix of new releases and an indie horror movie I had never heard of until a few days ago.

Thanks to my social media algorithms being full of horror content, it's never hard for me to discover new things. This month, we have a bit of a water-based theme going on, as two out of my three picks are set there, and the third comes from nautical beginnings.

But they couldn't be more different, ranging from a disturbing coming-of-age story at a lake to a Lovecraftian-style nightmare. There's been a lot of discussion about all three of these, but what did I think of them?

Read on to find out more about my three horror picks across streaming and gaming in June.

TV - The Terror: Devil in Silver

Where to watch: AMC+ (US only for now)
Lucy's verdict: Skip

The Terror: Devil in Silver is the newest installment in the AMC+ horror anthology series, and unfortunately, it has taken a nosedive in quality after the first two seasons. If you take anything away from this, it would be that I recommend you check out 2019's The Terror because it is still the best out of the three stories and is widely available to stream, unlike Devil in Silver, which is currently US-only.

For Devil in Silver, we're in an entirely new setting, moving from a cursed ship at sea to a psychiatric hospital. Here, Downton Abbey's Dan Stevens plays Pepper, who has wrongly been committed there, and begins to experience supernatural events whilst trying to prove he should be freed.

There's no denying the performances are great, both from Stevens and Judith Light, who plays Dorry, a fellow hospital resident. But the series does unfortunately suffer from pacing issues and a lack of genuine scares, meaning it pales in comparison to the original The Terror series. It might be a good pick for those who like a slow burn, but it seems to stand out when compared to the others in the anthology for the wrong reasons.

Movie - Mean Creek

Where to watch: Paramount+ (US); rent or buy (UK, AU)
Lucy's verdict: Scream

Mean Creek is a 2004 movie that completely fell under the radar for me. I'd never heard of it until I stumbled across this TikTok video. I was immediately intrigued by the premise, and I must say, I'm glad I watched it. It's billed as a "dark coming of age story" and is very psychological in its approach to horror, so expect a lot of dread and harrowing scenes rather than jumpy moments.

Josh Peck has comfortably moved away from comedy in recent years, and here he plays school bully George, who has terrorized his peers for too long. They decide enough is enough, so they invite George to a fake birthday party at a lake, where they decide to play a prank on him, which involves throwing him overboard during a boating trip.

Inevitably, things go wrong, and this movie examines the consequences of that. It is bleak, realistic, and will linger for a while, and it has been widely praised by horror fans as a result. What goes down is truly horrific, and I'm glad I gave this a go. It is worth the rental price in the UK and Australia, too.

Game - The Sinking City

Where to play: PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC
Lucy's verdict: Scream

There are a lot of Lovecraftian horror games out there; it can be hard to know where to start. The Sinking City 2 releases in August this year, so I wanted to take a look at the first game to see how it holds up.

The Sinking City was released in 2019 and is a survival horror RPG. Here, a half-submerged city is gripped by supernatural forces. You play a private investigator, and you have to uncover the truth of what has possessed the city and the minds of its inhabitants.

I had a great time playing this, and I'm now keen to check out the sequel. You can explore The Sinking City by boat, on foot, and in a diving suit if you're brave enough to swim down into the depths. There's plenty to uncover and lots of fun creature design, and there are multiple endings to explore based on your decisions. This game is also widely available across platforms, which is just another bonus.

Sometimes I feel like the only person who actually liked Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days. Sure, the old third-person shooter isn’t exactly the most fun to play — but that’s entirely the point.

It’s the gory swansong of two disgusting men, presented entirely through the low-res lens of a handheld camcorder that intentionally leaves you disoriented as you navigate the towering concrete skyscrapers of Shanghai. The game does everything it can to overwhelm, with its fragmented plot told almost entirely in a language that you can’t even understand.

The whole experience is devoted to being as unapologetically miserable as possible, and that’s exactly what makes it so alluring. Like a grimy slasher movie, you just can’t look away. In my eyes, there’s never really been an experience quite like it. That is until now.

Pure rage

When an ad for Better Than Dead came across my Instagram feed, I instantly knew it was just what I’ve been looking for. The camcorder perspective is the most obvious similarity, although unlike Kane & Lynch 2, the camera in Better Than Dead is being held by the protagonist, so everything unfolds in first-person.

The storytelling is just as raw. The game opens on a visual of a bright blue sky, distorted by the fisheye lens and film grain effects. This serene scene is nothing more than a clever visual trick, a poster plastered to the wall of the cell where our young woman protagonist has been confined.

You look around to discover a mattress covered in blood, gross scraps of discarded food, a filthy squat toilet, and an alluring side table bathed in light from a little lamp.

On it, you find a pistol, accompanied by an unknown message in Chinese and a drawing of a bird fleeing a cage. You don’t need a translation to know the stakes: something horrible is happening here, and this gun is your only way to escape.

From there, your rampage begins, sprinting through the corridors of what turns out to be a dodgy porn studio, gunning down members of the triad before eventually bursting out onto the street.

After this, each level has you infiltrating other triad-affiliated locations, like seedy restaurants or shifty back alleys, to take out every gang member in sight. It’s paced almost like a first-person Hotline Miami, with dense layouts and tricky enemy placements that require at least a few goes to learn the ropes, and an emphasis on speed and brutality.

You’ve got a slick slide that helps dodge incoming fire and offers a sliver of bullet time — vital for success as you die in just two hits.

Back for more

The gunplay isn’t exactly simple, though. Although our protagonist is fueled by pure rage, she’s still untrained with firearms, with swaying hands that make it difficult to land hits on target. Mercifully, ammunition is unlimited, so dumping a whole magazine in the general direction of enemies is the way to go.

Can it be frustrating? Incredibly, but that only increases the satisfaction of pulling off the perfect massacre. Throw in the fact that the game isn’t afraid to touch on some pretty dark subject matter, and I’m feeling the same rush that had me so in love with Kane & Lynch 2.

I can’t fault the presentation either. If you can look past the crude menu UI, the total lack of on-screen icons in the game lends the action a cinematic, realistic feel. The strong camcorder effects and wise decision to pixelate characters’ faces (facial animation is usually a sticking point for lower budget games) do a great job of smoothing out the visuals. Squint, and you could even mistake what’s on screen for real video footage.

The sound design is impeccable as well. Gunfire is meaty, and enemies scream in pain when they’re shot, often dropping to the floor and twitching a little before you finish them off. Given that all of this comes from a solo developer and costs just $14.99 / £13.75 / AU$ 20.95, it’s a pretty impressive achievement.

Better Than Dead is currently in early access via Steam and is receiving frequent updates. There are only a handful of levels now, but in the time I’ve owned the game, the developer has already added the start of a hub world with a handy practice firing range and is constantly tuning things based on player feedback.

Kayne and Lynch 2 fans (I know there are potentially dozens of us out there), this is one to watch.

With AI undoubtedly revolutionizing the way many office jobs get done, the effects new technology is having on blue-collar jobs often flies under the radar.

But it is in these hands-on industries where AI can really make a difference, boosting not only productivity and efficiency, but also improving safety and worker welfare.

At its recent Samsara Beyond 2026 conference, I saw first-hand some of the new AI-powered tools and services which could revolutionize the operations industry in years to come - but also heard why the human connection will always remain vital.

AI improvement

"Humans are extremely capable - and I don't see the machines or AI replacing that anytime soon - I see it augmenting us, and helping us," Johan Land, CPO at Samsara tells me at the event.

We're speaking after a jam-packed keynote which saw the company reveal a host of new AI-empowered tools and services, from a smart shipping label sticker, to a 360-degree camera which can help truck drivers navigate cramped delivery yards.

But it was the new AI tools which drew a lot of attention, including the ability for drivers to talk directly to their manager or an AI agent remotely, as well as a new AI Studio which lets customers create bespoke offerings for specific use cases - so why such a big focus on AI right now, I ask Land.

"First of all, the AI has got so much better over time - but then in addition to that, our customers want it," he notes, highlighting how Samsara can help customers on how to best plug AI into their systems.

"Physical operations is tough! It's very labor-intensive, there are many tasks that are very repetitive and it's hard to hire people - so this solves a really acute problem in that sense."

Ryan Yu, VP of Product at Samsara, agrees with Land, telling me Samsara's goal, "is to be the operating system for physical operations."

When it comes to improving the efficiency of customer's workflows, "there's so much low-hanging fruit", he notes, highlighting the importance automating the big things, in a way that makes sense.

Samsara's customer base is everyone from mining operations to building firms, from school districts to logistics firms, so I ask Land how important AI will be as a selling point over its competition - and how eager these more "traditional" industries are to get working with AI.

"The hardest thing with AI is probably making it work for people in their real life and to create true value," he says, "it can easily become vaporware, it looks good on the surface"

"Sometimes they get it (AI), and sometimes they don't," he adds, "but it doesn't matter - and it might be even better if you don't understand it, because their expectations are super high...that's the empowerment, they expect it to just work."

"We need to provide the rails," Yu adds, "and we also need to provide guidance to what types of use cases are best served...because the underlying technology is still evolving."

AI augmenting humans

So how long will it be before even the most hands-on industries are fully embracing AI to get their work done? Land notes that the work is already well underway.

"Overall, we see the AI augmenting humans, taking care of some tasks," he says, "but overall it's making humans more empowered, stronger and capable."

Yu notes the immediate future will be dominated by the themes of "discovery, education and adoption" by customers, and the role Samsara can play in this.

"We want to make sure we meet them where they are, and provide the right templates," he notes, "and the good thing is we know what their most important use cases are, and what they struggle with...when we talk about reducing manual drudgery, we understand deeply how customers engage with their products."

"This is a time of distractions," Land laughs, "but for us it's very simple, we follow our customers, we just talk to them, understand what their problems are, what they need from us, and then that's how we prioritize literally everything we do."

"The direction this is going is that a job site or workplace of the future will have all kinds of things inside of it...the way we see ourselves to be is as the connecting tissue - the agentic platform that ties all of this together."

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.

Anthropic has accused groups linked to Alibaba and its Qwen AI lab of carrying out a massive campaign to extract capabilities from Claude just by asking it a lot of questions, as first reported by Reuters. The AI developer wrote a letter to U.S. lawmakers alleging that Alibaba used nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to generate more than 28.8 million interactions and glean detailed, proprietary information about Claude.

Alibaba has not publicly responded to the allegations, and there has been no independent confirmation of Anthropic's claims, but simply leveling them has potentially enormous consequences. The sheer volume of accounts and interactions is eye-catching, but it's even more fascinating how it reveals a vulnerability in AI models that can give away their secrets.

AI developers may now have to worry that rivals can learn from those models without ever seeing the underlying code or training data through a technique known as model distillation. Essentially, AI models will inadvertently share deliberately obscured facts about themselves if a huge number of the right questions are asked. As an analogy, imagine taking a test about a book, but instead of reading the book, you ask the author one million questions about their life, their thinking, their experience writing the book, and several hundred thousand more questions. You'd probably have a pretty good chance of knowing everything they might have written without once cracking the covers.

Can you copy an AI just by talking to it?

Model distillation is a common technique used by AI companies to build variations of their models, especially smaller, faster options. But no company would be okay with a rival using their model to train the competition. But that's what Anthropic alleges. The fake accounts supposedly asked Claude a ton of very complex and detailed questions related to its advanced software engineering and agentic reasoning features. The responses filled in a picture of the model's workings, accelerating Alibaba's own development of competing AI systems, Anthropic claimed.

The conundrum is obvious. Large language models are designed to answer questions. Every answer teaches the user something about how the model behaves. You can't interact with an AI model, or a person, without giving up some information about yourself. Normally, that wouldn't matter, but at the scale Anthropic is claiming, conversations become reverse engineering.

It's not the first time Anthropic has alleged illicit model distillation. Anthropic levied similar claims against DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax earlier this year. And other companies, including OpenAI, have expressed concern that they have also been victims of the technique.

The glaring irony that the companies that used enormous collections of publicly available information, including licensed material, to train their AI models are now arguing about how those same models are valuable intellectual property is hard to ignore.

AI arms race

AI developers see their models' behavior as crucial to competing with rivals. If another company can reproduce much of that behavior by asking enough carefully designed questions, spending billions of dollars training frontier models starts to seem like a waste.

Anthropic claims model distillation can effectively transfer years of work on their part to another company for almost nothing. Anthropic asked lawmakers to take action and combat this problem as soon as possible. If leading models can be imitated so easily, there won't be much incentive to innovate, and the AI competition will only be about beating copycats. And picking the best models will be difficult, as a new AI model that matches an existing one's capabilities might be born of years of original research or simply copying an existing option.

Whether Anthropic ultimately proves its allegations, they have revealed that the next great AI battle may not be about building the smartest model. It may be about stopping somebody else from talking to your model and learning how it operates, one question at a time.

With Grand Theft Auto 6 pre-orders live right now, many are wondering when the next big trailer will be. We've only had two released so far, and while they're both great showcases of the game's visuals, neither has really shown us any proper gameplay or explained any potential new mechanics.

This would normally be pretty unusual—when was the last time you can remember being offered the chance to pre-order a game before you'd even seen any gameplay footage?—but not a big surprise coming from developer Rockstar Games.

In fact, the GTA 6 marketing so far has played out in a very similar fashion to that of the studio's last release, Red Dead Redemption 2, and I think that looking back at the past gives us a pretty good idea of what to expect this year.

GTA 6 trailer 3 could arrive very soon

After a few cryptic teasers, the first Red Dead Redemption 2 trailer dropped on October 20, 2016. It didn't tell us that much beyond introducing the setting and giving us our first look at the open world.

It also ended with a release window, Fall 2017, which Rockstar failed to hit with the game actually finally releasing in 2018.

The GTA 6 similarities should be obvious already. GTA 6 Trailer 1 was released in December 2023 and mainly focused on the upcoming game's Vice City setting and, just like Red Dead Redemption 2, gave us a 2025 release window that eventually turned out to be a year out thanks to delays.

It took practically a whole year for the next Red Dead Redemption 2 trailer to appear, a big gap that we saw replicated when the second GTA 6 trailer took 518 days to arrive.

There was then a much smaller seven-month wait between Red Dead Redemption 2 trailers 2 and 3, and I suspect we'll see a similar pattern this time. It's been over 400 days since GTA 6 trailer 2, so a third gameplay trailer coming in the next few weeks would still represent a smaller gap than that initial 518 days.

I wouldn't be surprised if Rockstar Games has one in the bank for when GTA 6 pre-order hype starts to wane as a way to give sales a boost.

Before we dive in, here's how to get your hands on a GTA 6 pre-order if you haven't placed one yet.

What about gameplay?

Red Dead Redemption 2 received two meaty gameplay trailers: one 85 days before its release and another 25 days before.

It seems Rockstar likes to wait as long as possible before actually showing gameplay and, if GTA 6 follows the same pattern, we're likely seeing our first glimpse of gameplay about three months before launch.

That means the first gameplay trailer is likely to drop sometime in early August. The second could then follow in late October, or even right at the start of November, when the November 19, 2026, release date is right around the corner.

Expect GTA 6 Online after launch

GTA Online launched on October 1, 2013 — just a few weeks after GTA 5 hit shelves.

Red Dead Online followed a similar trajectory. It rolled out to players in a beta state on November 30, 2018 (or a few days earlier for Ultimate Edition owners).

Both modes received standalone releases a few years down the line.

The PlayStation Store listing for GTA 6 states that the game is strictly a "single-player experience," which rules out availability at launch. I predict that it will arrive in some form in December, even if that's just as an early access beta.

If the previous games are anything to go by, this would be followed by a full release in 2027 and a standalone version a few years later.

And finally a PC port after a year

Red Dead Redemption 2's PC port took roughly a year to arrive, dropping in November 2019. As the most recent Rockstar Games release, I think it could give us an idea of when a GTA 6 PC version is likely to arrive.

I predict that it will come out in December 2027 if it follows the same pattern. This might even coincide with the full release of GTA 6 Online in order to really drum up the excitement.

Of course, all of this is speculation based on past events, and the release timeline could play out in any number of ways. We'll just have to wait and see whether Rockstar has any curveballs in store.

Spoilers for Dutton Ranch episode 8 ahead.

In the words of Charli XCX in 2024, we're going full brat. Dutton Ranch episode 8 turns the tables on Carter (Finn Little) after getting hideously drunk at the 10 Petal anniversary party and destroying Beulah's (Annette Bening) property.

He's been lashing out in the Yellowstone spinoff for two reasons: the fact he's had to move to Texas in the first place — being convinced that Beth (Kelly Reilly) and Rip (Cole Hauser) are now interfering in his life too much — and because Oreana (Natalie Alyn Lind) has rejected him for someone with more status and money.

Mix in the expected teen angst of a 19-year-old and you've got a very unnecessary storm brewing. With Beulah collapsing to the floor in the finale scene of episode 7 (just after Carter smashed up her prized bull head), the tension is even higher.

In fact, Carter haters might want to look away from Dutton Ranch episode 8 altogether... and you'll see why below.

Beulah is hospitalized after having a heart attack — and everyone is questioning her decisions

Episode 8 starts with Beulah being airlifted out of the party and sent to hospital, with Rob-Will (Jai Courtney) following close behind.

The next morning, Rob-Will finds Oreana, Joaquin (Juan Pablo Raba) and Everett (Ed Harris) in the hospital waiting room, and explains that Beulah has had a heart attack. She has a standard angioplasty procedure and is declared medically fine.

Beulah asks to see Rob-Will and Joaquin together before anyone else, with the pair still taking swipes out of each other. She explains that Rob-Will has been given 10 Petal because he is "weak," with Beulah adding "it's not your prize, it's your protection."

She claims that the brothers are going to be joined at the hip no matter what, and that Rob-Will needs Joaquin much more than the other way around. Rob-Will also claims that he wants to fire Beth and Rip with Beulah refusing, responding that they are the "assets" that the ranch needs.

Beth herself stops by to visit later, offering her apologies for Carter's behaviour the night before. The pair talk about the fallout of parenting boys before Beth moves onto why she's really there: she cannot understand the decision behind Rob-Will's appointment.

"I agreed to work with you, not with him," she adds, claiming that they need to speak about things properly once Beulah is out of hospital. Everett asks her the same questions when he visits on his own later on, with Beulah implying that 10 Petal had to go to a "flesh and blood relation."

Their conversation moves onto Beulah's suggestion of retiring together earlier in the season, with Everett stating that he's ready for a new shot at romance if she is. "If I knew a heart attack was going to change your mind, I'd have had one a lot sooner," Beulah replies.

Everett takes Beulah back to his to recoup at home, essentially breaking out of the hospital before she's officially been discharged.

A disgraced Carter finally opens up to Beth — but it all goes wrong

Rip and Carter make their way back from the party on horseback, with Carter repeatedly falling off and vomiting over his own horse (maybe one of the worst things I've ever seen).

The next morning, Beth makes Carter a coffee and asks to talk to him outside. Carter reveals that he's quit school, though neglects to tell her anything about working with Dwight (Ray McKinnon). Beth implies that just hating school isn't good enough, telling Carter that he needs to take every opportunity to make his life better with both hands.

Despite being hungover, Rip makes good on his promise to Carter to take him to work at 10 Petal to get some experience. Immediately, Azul (J.R. Villarreal) and the other ranchers start ribbing Carter for how much he's had to drink, which takes a sour turn when Carter is thrown off of his horse while trying to lasso an escaped cow.

Rip scolds Carter for snapping at Azul, with Carter swearing and storming off in a huff. Rip finds him in a cattle barn, telling him that if any other rancher had rode away from him, they'd be fired on the spot.

Carter threatens Rip to do it, with Rip sensing that Carter wants to throw a punch. Rip then tries to teach him lessons from life's failures while also empathizing with Carter's struggles of being an orphan, but Carter is having none of it.

Returning home, Carter than explodes at Beth, who tearfully claims that she's going to try harder to be a better mother figure. Carter says he needs some time alone, and drives off.

We later find him back at Dwight's, with the Sherriff (Josh Stewart) finding him outside the empty leopard cage. Carter than tries to blackmail the Sherriff into getting a job shadowing him by threatening to reveal that he killed Dwight for no good reason.

It doesn't work, but there is some good news... we learn that Dwight's leopard has been rehomed at a local zoo.

Joaquin tries to turn Rob-Will in for murder

Fuming after his conversation with Beulah, Joaquin pays his own visit to the Sherriff's office. He reveals a gun in a plastic bag, which was the same gun that Rob-Will used to kill Wes (Nakoa DeCoite) in episode 1.

Joaquin tells the Sherriff about Wes, but cannot prove anything because he doesn't know where the body is. The Sherriff tells him to leave the gun, but that he doesn't believe a word Joaquin is saying. "I haven't forgotten who you are... I just no longer give a f**k," the Sherriff says.

On the drive home, an infuriated Joaquin is seen roadside by a local graveyard in a fit of rage. In episode 8's final scene, we see Joaquin get back in his car to dial his dad — who if you remember from episode 7, was essentially Beulah's caretaker.

In Spanish, we hear Joaquin say, "Hi, Dad. I need your help."

Austin tells 10 Petal's truth to Beth and Rip

10 Petal rancher Austin's (Sterlin English) moral crisis also reaches a head in episode 8. After the deaths of Wes and Chet (Hart Denton), he's on a rampage to reveal the Jackson's family secrets once and for all.

This starts with Austin pulling a gun on Miguel (Berto Colon) during wrangling hours, demanding that he reveal what's been going on or be killed. Zachariah (Marc Menchaca) has to intervene, with Austin later asking him if Rip can be trusted. "With your life," replies Zachariah.

That evening, the pair visit Beth and Rip at home and reveal the truth — 10 Petal is running an illegal cattle smuggling operation across the Mexican border to keep financially afloat. The next shipment is in two days, leaving Rip and Beth at a loss for what to do next.

This also explains how Bullet, the bull bought at cattle auction in episode 2, was able to be unvetted while having foot and mouth disease.

You open Google Search Console, and it is full of green arrows. Position 4 turned into position 2. Position 2 turned into position 1. You did the work, the work paid off, and then your traffic graph started pointing at the FLOOR.

I have watched this happen to sites with clean rankings, fresh content, and zero penalties. It is one of the most confusing things in SEO right now, and most of the noise about it just repeats the same reasons.

See, ranking and traffic stopped being the same thing a while ago. In 2026, the gap between them is the widest it has ever been. But before we get into the reasons, one truth lies beneath them all.

Your clicks are leaking out of Google through several holes at once. AI Overviews is only the loudest one.

Seer Interactive tracked organic Click-Through Rates (CTR) and found a 61% drop on queries that show an AI Overview. Fair enough; that is the reason everyone talks about. But on queries with no AI Overview at all, clicks still fell 41%.

So, if AI Overviews were the whole story, that second number would be pretty flat. It isn't. That clearly means something bigger is shrinking the entire click economy – and we’re going to talk about just that.

1. The demand simply isn't there anymore

Start with the boring reason, because it is the one everyone skips.

Sometimes your traffic drops because fewer people are searching. Not because you slipped. The market shrank, and your rankings are just sitting on top of a smaller pile.

This used to be a seasonal thing. A tax tool loses traffic in June. A swimwear brand loses traffic in December. Normal stuff. But there is a newer version of this in 2026, and it is structural, not seasonal. People are running fewer searches overall because they get their answers somewhere else first (more on this below).

What to do: Open Search Console and pull the full 16-month view, then lay it next to the same months last year. Drop your main keywords into Ahrefs or Semrush and look at search volume over time. If demand fell and your rankings held, you did nothing wrong. You are winning a race with fewer runners.

2. AI overviews are answering the question for you

Ahrefs re-ran its study on SERP clicks in December 2025 across 300,000 keywords. Surprisingly, they found that when an AI Overview shows up, the top-ranking page loses 58% of its clicks. That is nearly double the 34.5% they measured back in April 2025. It is getting worse, not better.

Pew Research found the same thing from the other direction, by tracking real people instead of tools. The study proved that users clicked a result only 8% of the time when an AI summary appeared, versus 15% when it didn't. And only 1% clicked a link inside the overview itself.

So you can rank number one and still lose, because there is now a box sitting above your number one that answers the question before anyone scrolls.

What to do: Split your Search Console keywords into two buckets, the ones that trigger an AI Overview and the ones that don't. Both Ahrefs and Semrush have a filter for this. Then change the goal. Stop trying to rank below the overview. Start trying to get cited inside it. Pages cited in the overview actually keep their clicks.

3. People get their answer from AI before they open Google

A chunk of your missing traffic is made up of searches that never happened. Someone asked ChatGPT or Perplexity instead. They got their answer, made their decision, and never typed anything into Google at all.

Now, do not panic and blame AI for everything. The referral numbers tell a calm story. Cloudflare measured every AI search engine combined (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity) at under 0.28% of search referrals in April 2026, while Google still sent 87.52% of them. So AI is not stealing your clicks by quietly sending traffic somewhere else.

The damage is sneakier. It happens upstream, where the search just disappears. And inside Google's own AI Mode, Semrush found that 92% to 94% of searches end with no click to any website. More than nine in ten, just gone.

What to do: Start tracking your branded search volume in Search Console, because that is the footprint AI leaves behind. When someone hears about you inside an AI answer, they often Google your name later. The new win is being the brand the AI names, not just the link it skips.

4. The search page got crowded

Think about what a Google results page looked like five years ago. Sponsored ads followed by ten blue links. That was it.

But now, a Google results page generally shows:

• An AI Overview
• A People Also Ask box
• A local pack with a map
• Shopping results
• A video carousel

Now, your blue link is still there. It is just buried under a pile of other things that all want the same click.

FirstPageSage found that the top three organic results take 68.7% of all clicks on a clean page. But fewer and fewer pages are clean. Every feature Google adds pushes your link further down and hands the searcher one more place to go instead of you.

What to do: Actually look at the search results for your top ten keywords. Count what sits above your link. If a snippet is eating your click, write a tighter answer and go take the snippet for yourself (snippets pull a 42.9% click-through rate, higher than a normal number one). If a video carousel is winning, maybe you need a video.

5. Reddit quietly took over your category

If you run a review site, a comparison site, or anything with the word "best" in your titles, this one is probably half your problem.

So, Google fell in love with Reddit. Between July 2023 and April 2024, Reddit's visibility in Google search jumped 1,328%, and it climbed from the 68th most visible site in the US to the 5th. On the product review and "best of" searches that used to land on editorial sites, Reddit is now everywhere.

So when someone searches "best running shoes" or "is X worth it," they are not landing on your carefully written guide.

They are landing on a Reddit thread because Google decided real people arguing in a forum beat a polished, well-researched article.

What to do: Find the Reddit threads ranking for your keywords. Then show up in them, genuinely and helpfully, not with spam. You are not going to outrank Reddit on those terms, so the smart move is to be present inside the thread that already won.

6. You won some keywords and quietly lost others

This is the blind spot that fools smart people.

You are tracking 100 keywords. Twenty of them climbed, and you are celebrating. But your traffic comes from thousands of keywords, and you are not watching the other 900. Some of them slipped, and that quiet slip is bigger than your loud win.

Your rank tracker only shows you what you told it to show you. It says nothing about the long tail that was actually paying your bills.

What to do: Ignore your tracked list for an afternoon. Go into Search Console, export every query, and compare clicks against the same period last year. Sort by clicks lost. The pages bleeding the most traffic are almost never the ones you were watching.

7. You rank higher but fewer people click

Sometimes the ranking is genuinely up, and the click-through rate just collapsed. Well, in such situations, the most common reason is embarrassingly simple. Your title still says 2025 and the year is 2026. People scan the results, see a stale date, and skip you for the fresher-looking result below. You ranked number one and lost the click on a detail you could fix relatively quickly.

There are other causes too. A weak title. A meta description that misses the point. Or your page matches a search whose intent it does not actually serve.

What to do: Pull your top pages by impressions, then look at the ones with a poor click-through rate. Update the year. Rewrite the title so it matches what the searcher actually wants. Small change, fast result, and you do not need to rank any higher to get it.

8. Your impressions are lying to you

This one is technical, so here is a simple way to see it.

Imagine your page used to show up for 50 searches a day, all of them a perfect fit, and people clicked. Now Google shows your page for 500 searches a day, but 450 of them are only loosely related to what you offer. Those extra people see you and scroll past, because you are not really what they wanted.

Your impressions shot up. Your average position might even look better. But your click-through rate fell off a cliff, because Google is matching you to searches that were never yours.

And "average position" hides all of it. It is an average. One number is smoothing over a hundred different stories, most of which you cannot see.

What to do: In Search Console, find the queries where impressions jumped but clicks stayed flat. That gap is the loose-match junk. It is not really a problem to fix; it is a number to stop trusting. Judge yourself on clicks from queries that fit, not on raw impressions.

9. Mobile is dragging you down (and no, it is not AMP)

Your desktop rankings can look great while mobile quietly tanks – and most of your traffic is mobile.

Two things make this worse. Mobile users click far less than desktop users. And on a small screen, an AI Overview plus a couple of SERP features eat the entire first screen. Your link is somewhere down there, after a lot of thumb-scrolling.

Now, an important correction, because half the internet still gets this wrong. The fix is not AMP. Google dropped the AMP requirement for the Top Stories carousel back in June 2021, killed the lightning-bolt badge, and the big publishers have all walked away from it. AMP gives you no ranking advantage today.

What to do: Open the device tab in Search Console and compare desktop against mobile honestly. Then fix the thing that actually matters: Your Core Web Vitals (how fast the page loads, how fast it reacts, how much it jumps around while loading). A fast, normal, responsive page beats an AMP page in 2026.

Conclusion

Here is the mindset shift that makes the whole thing click.

Stop treating rankings as the finish line. Ranking number one is now just the price of admission. It does not promise you clicks.

Run the diagnosis in order. Check if demand fell. Check if AI Overviews or AI Mode are intercepting the answer. Check the rest of the search page. Check the keywords you stopped watching. Check your titles, your impressions, your mobile experience, and your analytics. Nine times out of ten, the answer is not one of these reasons. It is three of them stacked on top of each other.

And then the bigger shift, the one that matters more every month. Start measuring visibility, not just clicks. Being the answer inside an AI Overview. Being the brand platforms like ChatGPT, names. Being the thread that ranks. The click was the old goal. Showing up is the new one.

Your rankings being up is not a lie. It just stopped being the whole truth.

The World Cup draws millions of viewers who want nothing more than to stream the action live. For many fans, this doesn’t just mean watching any broadcast; it means accessing their home country’s service to hear commentary in their native language.

Yet when you travel abroad, live sports streaming often hits a brick wall. Streaming platforms are increasingly aggressive in detecting and blocking VPN connections, making it surprisingly tricky to access familiar home broadcasts from your hotel room or airport lounge.

Understanding how these apps spot your connection and knowing how to bypass their defenses with the best VPN services is key to keeping your viewing experience uninterrupted.

Why streaming services block VPNs (and how they do it)

Streaming services block VPNs because they have strict licensing deals based on location.

Broadcasters pay for exclusive rights to show matches in specific countries. If a user logs in via a VPN to watch games they aren’t licensed for, it breaks those agreements.

To honor these agreements, platforms have no choice but to block these workarounds. For football fans, this creates a frustrating loop: you try to connect, the app spots something is amiss, and you’re hit with an error message before kickoff.

The most common method streaming services use to spot VPN traffic is maintaining a huge, updated blacklist of IP addresses known to belong to data centers. If your connection comes from one of these flagged numbers, you’re blocked immediately.

Beyond IPs, platforms analyze behavior. A genuine user travels slowly over days, whereas a VPN user might appear in London one minute and New York the next, triggering alerts.

Even if your main traffic is hidden, small background requests such as DNS queries can slip outside the VPN tunnel, revealing your real location.

Some services use deep packet inspection to recognize the unique “fingerprints” of popular VPN protocols. If the data looks like it’s running through a tunnel rather than regular browsing, it gets flagged.

How to avoid VPN detection

Navigating these streaming app blocks starts with picking the right settings. While protocols like WireGuard are the best option for raw speed, they don’t inherently hide your traffic better from detection systems than other VPN protocols.

The real key is often the server you choose. Just because one server is blocked doesn’t mean the whole country is out of reach. Sometimes a heavily used server gets flagged while a smaller, less popular one flies under the radar. If you run into trouble, start by switching locations before tweaking anything else.

Before you even test a connection, make sure your browser isn’t working against you. Clearing your browser’s cache and cookies is crucial because old location data stored there can contradict your new IP address and trigger an immediate block, making a good server appear broken.

If problems persist, experiment with your protocol. Although WireGuard is the default choice of many VPN providers – and the fastest – OpenVPN over TCP can sometimes work better on restrictive networks, particularly when those networks block or interfere with UDP traffic.

The best streaming VPNs counter blacklists and leaks by rotating fresh IPs, maintaining private networks to avoid data center flags, and using obfuscation to mask traffic.

Don’t let distance stop you from streaming the World Cup

Knowing how streaming services block access can help you watch the World Cup online from anywhere.

Choose a quality VPN, configure it properly, and stay ahead of detection tricks to keep your connection steady.

For answers on which VPN works best for specific services or where to watch your national team this summer, check our streaming guides and full World Cup coverage.

When the soon-to-be ex-British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, told the nation last week that a full social media ban for all under-16s from social media was “the right choice" for the country, a group of people was watching closely, and thinking about what to do next.

For them, policies like these are problematic. They require all users (adults included) to undergo mandatory age verification checks. That means face scanning or ID document sharing to prove that any user is old enough to access content and social media services – and that’s something that privacy advocates and technologists have long warned is "a cybersecurity disaster waiting to happen".

But for this group, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Today, it’s your face they’ll want to scan. Tomorrow, it’ll be your messages.

So, after a social media ban in Australia, the development of Canada’s Bill C-22, the expansion of mandatory age verification in Europe, the EU's Chat Control debate, and discussions on children’s online safety proposals in the US Congress, the UK’s announcement was the final straw

On June 16, 2026, just 24 hours after Starmer's speech, that the Stop Killing the Internet campaign was officially unveiled with its mission to defend the open internet against state policies that could trigger mass surveillance and excessive control.

"Any restriction that restricts people's human rights and right to access the open internet is what we're opposed to,” Programme Manager at the Open Rights Group (ORG), James Baker, told TechRadar.

The ORG is just one of many high-profile UK digital rights groups that have come together to form Stop Killing the Internet, along with Big Brother Watch, and Index of Censorship. They are calling to arms other worldwide organizations committed to finding rights-based solutions to online social problems to join in.

“We hope to expand globally because it affects people in all countries, including places like India or China, where the internet is a lot more restricted."

Ahead of the launch, Baker and the rest of the group have already held urgent meetings with over 20 organizations, listened to the perspective of young people about the UK's proposed teen social media ban, and decided it was time to take action.

Stop Killing the Internet was formed as a sister campaign of Stop Killing Games, a movement created by the gaming community to advocate for legal protections to prevent publishers from shutting down video games.

But why have gamers joined forces with digital rights advocates to challenge ongoing children's online safety policies? And, most importantly, which solutions is the group proposing instead?

Why restricting the internet for teens is a bad idea

We can divide children's online safety policies into two main strands — each has its critics warning of dangerous unintended consequences.

The first are access barriers which cut children off from online spaces and content thought to be unsuitable for their age.

Policymakers first started by barring children from adult-only sites with age verification checks. Then came total platform blocks such as Australia's world-first under-16s social media ban, which the likes of the UK, France, Malaysia, and other countries are also looking to follow.

Baker believes that, ultimately, these bans won't work — an idea backed up by recent data from Australia — but it’s the nature of the approach that bothers the ORG’s Programme Manager.

"If there was rowdy behavior or a fight in a town hall or a public square, you'd try to police it and solve it — you wouldn't completely shut down the space for everyone,” he said.

“Yet the response to internet problems is to try to shut down the space and exclude people based on their age."

The second group of child protection policies focuses on content scanning.

An example here is Keir Starmer's ultimatum to Big Tech to find a way to prevent children from accessing explicit images on their devices. It's a plan that so unpalatable from a privacy perspective that it prompted private messaging platform Signal to say that it "would rather exit the market than undermine the technical guarantees that people trust for their privacy".

Content scanning is an old idea that continues to arise on lawmaker agendas and, often, fails to translate into actual legislation.

One incarnation of this client-side scanning was initially part of the UK's original Online Safety Act, but it was halted until "it's technically feasible to do so" in a privacy-respecting manner. And there's been no mention of it since, with regard to OSA, most likely because it's easily said by politicians but next to impossible in practice.

In the EU, another message scanning movement, commonly referred to as Chat Control — the nickname for the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR) proposal — has been in negotiations for over three years and still there's no final text that's convincing enough for privacy experts to accept.

In reality, though, according to Stop Killing Games' Strategy Lead Moritz Katzner, all of these copycat policies, wherever they are in the world, have very little to do with child safety at all.

"You have to seriously ask if this is actually about protecting children. As someone who was recently part of that demographic, I do not believe them, because they did not care about me, nor my gaming communities, for a very long time," he told TechRadar.

Katzner explains that a crucial part of the Stop Killing the Internet campaign is indeed making people understand that there is no difference between chat control, age verification, and ID verification.

"They are all reasoned from the same agenda," he said. "It is an escalation ladder where they start by scanning your face, then require ID, and eventually start scanning your chats."

How Stop Killing the Internet plans to reset the debate

For the people involved in Stop Killing the Internet, it's a non-negotiable — what's needed to protect both children and the open web is to shift the focus of the online safety debate.

"Our primary goal is to force a hard reset of the debate,” said Katzner. “To do so, we should listen to what experts have been saying for three decades and look at the algorithms, because these platforms are addictive to adults, too."

And how do they plan to do that?

Stop Killing the Internet aims to make the knowledge of academics, computer scientists, civil societies, and other experts, mainstream directly via social media content creators. This strategy would allow them to bypass mainstream media, which, they believe, has mostly failed to critically report on this issue.

An important goal of the movement is to expose the global network of funding that they say backs up these laws. According to Katzner, it's vital to make a clear distinction between genuine advocacy and corporate lobbyism.

"Meta spent millions in the US and UK lobbying for platform-level age verification because it serves their interests, and politicians are being misused in this process," he said.

While Big Tech plays hot potato with the responsibility of children's safety, how the laws land make a huge bearing on the likes of the gaming community, according to Katzner. Gaming platforms are also included in age verification and social ban policies. Yet, as Katzner explains, there's also a tactical reason for Stop Killing Games to be involved in this fight.

Stop Killing Games has material successes in its fight to date. It brought its cause to the political agenda and helped the Protect Our Games Act to pass California’s Assembly vote — as reported by The Guardian.

“We are now bringing the strong muscle of online communities into this campaign," Katzner added, with reference to the broader internet freedom fight.

What's next for Stop Killing the Internet?

While Stop Killing The Internet is expected to fully launch on June 27, 2026, — and reveal all the people involved — Baker from Open Rights Group said that it has already attracted interest from organizations and individuals from Australia, Canada, the United States, Africa, and Europe.

In the coming days, we will also know what the movement's first step will look like.

What's certain, however, is that the problems with children's online safety policies are only its starting point — the goal is to save a free and open internet from all forms of online restrictions.

Speeding fines are rising and automated enforcement is everywhere. According to DVLA data, the number of UK drivers receiving penalty points for breaking speed limits increased by 32% between 2022 and 2025, while road safety charity IAM RoadSmart says fines and penalty points are now at a four-year high.

It is a similar story in US, where automated speed cameras are gaining momentum thanks to a growing number of states permitting the use of cutting-edge camera tech.

Modern cars increasingly feature built-in speed camera alerts, but plenty of older vehicles don't. That's where a growing number of dedicated speed camera detection devices step in, using smartphone connectivity, community reporting and extensive camera databases to keep drivers informed.

Questions of legality vary wildly in the US and you'll struggle to find the devices listed below on sale anywhere, but all of those tested are available to purchase and are perfectly fine to use in the UK and much of Europe.

I've spent the past month putting the most popular options through their paces to find out which deserves a place on your dashboard.

1. Ooono Co-Driver NO2

• £69.99 / $95 / AU$143

The Ooono Co-Driver NO2 is arguably the benchmark here. Its compact design, simple setup and clever mounting options make it the most discreet device I have tested.

This latest generation pairs quickly with a smartphone, works with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, and can play alerts through the car's speakers. Plus, it automatically kicks into life when it detects a phone and the ignition is switched on.

Once installed, it quietly gets on with warning about fixed and mobile speed cameras, traffic jams and road hazards using a combination of LED alerts and audio notifications. Reporting incidents is equally straightforward, and the series of button combinations takes only minutes to learn.

The community-driven database continues to improve, although hazard reporting still isn't quite as comprehensive as Waze or Google Maps in some UK regions.

The biggest advantage is simplicity. There's no screen demanding attention and no subscription fees. It just works.

• Verdict: Still the easiest and most polished speed camera companion available. Looks good, too.

2. Tom by TomTom

• £69.99 / $95 / AU$143

TomTom has clearly taken inspiration from Ooono's playbook — and that's no bad thing.

Setup is quick, requiring little more than a Bluetooth connection to a smartphone and a free account. The rechargeable battery lasts around a month, meaning there are no cables to worry about.

Alerts are clear, with bright LEDs and audible warnings for cameras, congestion and speed limit breaches. Incident reporting is similarly simple and the camera database proved consistently accurate during testing.

Where it falls short is its design. The mounting solution isn't quite as elegant and the plastics don't feel as premium as Ooono's. The button layout also takes a little longer to learn by touch.

Still, it delivers almost everything the Ooono does and does it very well.

• Verdict: An excellent Ooono alternative that runs the class leader surprisingly close.

3. Road Angel Pure Sync

• £99.99 / $135 / AU$205

The Road Angel Pure Sync takes a different approach, adding a display screen and GPS speed readout to the mix.

Unfortunately, it also suffers from the most frustrating setup process. Registration requires payment details despite the included subscription, while Bluetooth pairing proved temperamental during testing.

The magnetic mount is neat, but unlike its rivals, the device requires constant power, meaning cables need to be routed around the dashboard.

Once operational, camera alerts are timely and effective. Speed limit warnings are impossible to miss, with bright visual cues and extremely loud voice prompts — perhaps too loud until adjusted in the settings.

The GPS speed display is useful in older cars but feels less necessary in modern vehicles that already feature accurate digital readouts.

Build quality is also disappointing for the price, with a plasticky feel and a display that can be difficult to read in direct sunlight.

• Verdict: Effective once running, but harder to recommend given the higher price, subscription requirement and less polished experience.

4. Ooono Co-Driver NO1

• £19.99 / $27 / AU$41

It's only when you place the Co-Driver NO1 and NO2 side by side that you realize just how much Ooono has improved its innovative speed camera alert device.

While cheaper to buy, the first-generation Co-Driver doesn't feature a built-in rechargeable battery, instead opting for a replaceable coin-cell battery that lasts around a year. It also doesn't communicate with Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, nor does it feature a dedicated false-alert cancellation button.

It is considerably smaller, though, so if you want something discreet, this is the one to buy. That said, it uses a fixed 3M adhesive mount, so once in place, it is more difficult to relocate.

In short, the Co-Driver NO1 still handles the basics well, delivering reliable speed camera alerts and connecting to Ooono's community of users for free. It's also one of the cheapest ways to dip a toe into the world of GPS speed camera detectors.

• Verdict: A more basic version of Ooono's current speed camera offering — it's smaller and much cheaper, so perfect for those on a budget.

5. Snooper My-Speed Plus

• £199.99 / $270 / AU$410

After testing all of the other smartphone-connected devices here, the Snooper My-Speed Plus feels like a bit of a throwback to an era of bulky sat-nav units suction-mounted to a dashboard.

Unlike its rivals, it is a completely self-contained unit that mounts to the windshield and plugs into a 12V lighter socket, using its own GPS receiver and Snooper's AURA speed camera database to keep drivers informed.

The first thing you notice is its size. Where most of the competition is content being discreet little pucks that blend into the dashboard, the Snooper displays everything on a large 5-inch color screen. It constantly shows your GPS speed alongside the current speed limit, with red and green graphics that make it very difficult to ignore when you've drifted over the limit.

Speed camera coverage is extensive, but updating requires first registering the device and then plugging it into a Windows PC or Mac via the provided USB cable. Seeing how quickly speed cameras are appearing, frequent travelers will want to update the database monthly.

It's decidedly old-school and expensive, but the display is sharp and the overall hardware feels more premium than the Road Angel.

• Verdict: It feels like a device from a bygone era and it's expensive.

The final verdict: which to buy?

Having used all of the devices, the Ooono Co-Driver NO2 stood out above the rest and would get my money.

It's simple, easy to use and doesn't require monthly memberships. While it's possible to get a similar experience with the Co-Driver NO1, I preferred the larger button and the look of the second generation... not to mention the fact that you can recharge it via USB-C and mount it to the sun visor, rather than sticking it to a dash.

TomTom's offering is near identical, but the app isn't as slick and the button layout isn't as user-friendly.

I don't think drivers need a GPS speed camera unit with a screen these days, as it defeats the point of mounting something small and discreet to the car.

Finally, it's worth addressing the fact that you can get a similar experience by using free smartphone apps, such as Waze, Google Maps, Apple Maps and more.

But the Ooono and TomTom devices earn their money during those times where a smartphone is left in the pocket and you aren't navigating using either the vehicle or your phone's software.

Personally, I find it is exactly these moments when it easy to forget that a 20mph speed limit has been introduced in the local area and a gentle nudge from the Ooono saves my bacon.

The AI industry may have found its next battle, and it’s not model training, GPU availability or data centers expansion. It’s actually how artificial intelligence is being framed in the first place.

For the past couple of years, AI coding assistants have been marketed as productivity boosters, promising to help across code generation, debugging and testing.

But the recent SpaceX acquisition of AI coding platform Cursor shows just how important AI coding systems can be in AI. While coding tools are generally considered from the developer’s point of view, software generation is increasingly being seen as a strategic capability for future autonomous systems.

Whether managing infrastructure, coordinating logistics or automating business processes, tomorrow’s coding agents will need to create, edit and maintain software instead of just helping developers to write code.

AI’s impact on code generation is trust

In other words, AI coding agents are less about being tools and more about being infrastructure layers through which organizations can build, operate and even govern their tech – similar to how we see cloud, networking and security today.

But in dehumanizing software generation, we’re uncovering the next challenge. Software development used to be limited by the speed at which humans can review, test and validate code before it goes into production, but it’s now all about trust and verification.

With AI now capable of generating code at lightning pace, questions around quality, security, compliance and governance are now being raised.

Acknowledging that code generation has been vastly democratized, Qodo CEO Itamar Friedman now believes what sets companies apart will be verification and governance. The winners will be the ones to deploy trustworthy software at scale, not the ones to launch it fastest.

To better understand what SpaceX’s Cursor acquisition means for the future of software engineering, how AI coding platforms are evolving from tools to infrastructure, and how we can tackle the next bottleneck that is trust, I spoke with Friedman.

• Does this acquisition signal that AI coding tools are becoming strategic infrastructure rather than just developer productivity tools?

Yes, and the price tag makes it explicit. You don’t just pay $60B for a productivity feature, you pay that price to have complete control over the coding mechanism your engineering teams run every day.

When the tool sits in the path of every change that ships, it is infrastructure, with the same reliability, security, and governance expectations as the rest of your stack.

• What does SpaceX's interest in Cursor say about the role AI coding tools will play in the next generation of AI-native companies?

AI-native companies want to own their means of production. SpaceX is not buying a chat window, it’s buying the ability to shape how code is generated across an organization that writes mission critical software.

What the next generation of tools is signaling is that the coding layer is too important to rent on someone else's roadmap. Instead, companies need to treat code generation, review, and governance as core infrastructure they direct, not as a third party relationship they hope holds up.

• Why might companies building highly complex or mission-critical systems want greater control over the AI coding layer?

In a high-stakes environment, you never let the builder be its own reviewer. When a single system both writes code and judges whether it is correct, you get a biased feedback loop where the AI is grading its own homework.

Greater control means being able to insert independent verification, enforce your own standards, and produce an audit trail of every decision.

• How should enterprises think about evaluating AI coding tools after a major ownership change or acquisition?

Enterprises should evaluate for independence and continuity, not for features. They must ask who controls the roadmap now, whether your data stays in your environment, and whether the tool still works alongside the rest of your stack or quietly steers you into another owner's ecosystem.

During an acquisition, a tool that was neutral yesterday may be optimized for its new parent tomorrow. The durable choice is the layer you can keep running on your terms regardless of who owns the model underneath it.

• As AI generates more production code, what new challenges does that create for engineering teams?

As code volumes skyrocket, the bottleneck moves from writing code to verifying it. The hard part about software was never producing more lines, it is confirming the code does what it’s intended to do, holds to your architecture, and meets your standards at scale.

When AI writes thirty percent of your codebase and rising, line-by-line human review can’t keep up and trust becomes the scarce resource. The challenge is building verification that runs with near-perfect precision and recall across hundreds of quality dimensions, automatically, on every change.

• What will differentiate the winners in the AI coding market over the next few years: better code generation, better governance, or something else?

Generation is commoditizing. High-fidelity output already looks more and more similar across the major models, and that gap will keep closing.

Then, differentiation moves to the quality layer: governance, verification, and the ability to enforce standards with the precision an enterprise can actually trust.

Better governance is the moat: those enterprises that succeed will be the ones that make AI-gen code safe to ship, not the ones that generated it faster.

• What should developers and engineering leaders be watching for as the AI coding market continues to consolidate?

Watch out for vendor lock-in disguised as integration. As the market consolidates, the pressure will be to buy generation and verification from the same owner, which is exactly the conflict of interest that erodes trust.

Leaders should keep their verification layer independent from whoever writes the code, protect the portability of their data and standards, and avoid betting their SDLC on a single vendor's incentives.

Most plumbing jobs aren't planned. After all, a burst pipe doesn't wait for business hours. The company that answers the phone first usually wins the work.

Running that kind of business also means juggling a tight labor market and a stack of admin work that piles up the moment you stop chasing it. Now, I don’t run a home services business myself, but I’ve spent a lot of time reviewing business software for a living.

For this article, I tested different tools and platforms across five categories using sample data modeled on real plumbing scenarios, from urgent service calls to routine maintenance paperwork. Here's how it went.

#1 Field service management keeps the schedule honest

A field service management (FSM) platform schedules jobs and dispatches the closest available technician. It also stores every customer's repair history in one place, so nobody has to dig through paper invoices to remember what got replaced last time.

I tested one by building a week's worth of sample jobs, mixing emergency calls with routine maintenance the way a busy schedule actually looks. Everything was much easier to manage as the FSM software took care of most of my admin overhead. Meanwhile, my phone synced job notes and photos back to the dashboard in real time.

Industry research backs up what I saw. One 2025 survey of trade businesses found that 94% of companies using field service software reported real productivity gains. Eighty-three percent said the software helped their business grow.

The catch: techs used to working off a clipboard need real coaching before the software earns its keep. Switching systems mid-season can throw off a busy crew.

#2 Asset tracking stops tools from going missing

Plumbing crews lose more money to missing tools than most owners realize. An asset-tracking app assigns a QR code or GPS tag to every truck and major tool, so you always know who has what and where it's parked.

I built a sample inventory of tools and vehicles inside the app, then simulated one tool sitting unused in the yard for several days. The app flagged it within that same test run. It's exactly the kind of alert that would catch a missing drain snake before it becomes a bigger problem on a real job site.

Construction equipment theft costs the industry more than $1 billion a year in the US. Fewer than a quarter of stolen tools are ever recovered. One analysis found that businesses with full visibility into their assets boosted maintenance productivity by 28% and cut repair costs by 18%.

#3 AI lead capture tools answer calls you'd miss

AI-powered lead generation covers everything from chat widgets that qualify leads on your website to AI phone agents that answer calls after the office closes.

I set one up against a batch of sample after-hours calls, the kind that would normally roll to voicemail. In the test runs, several of those calls turned into booked appointments before a human ever saw the missed-call notification.

How fast you respond matters more than which specific tool you use. Contractors who reply to a lead within five minutes book the job far more often than those who wait half an hour, according to lead-response research.

Most contractors remain cautious about AI, though. One survey of more than 1,000 contractors found that just 25% use it in any meaningful way. So be sure to plan well before you roll it out.

#4 Accounting apps turn receipts into cash flow clarity

Accounting software is the least exciting tool on this list, but it's probably the one that saves the most time. It pulls in your bank transactions automatically and turns a pile of receipts into a usable profit and loss statement for your business.

I fed it a batch of sample receipts, the kind a plumbing crew would rack up in an average week. They landed already categorized in the right expense column within seconds. Generating a profit and loss statement from that sample data took minutes instead of an evening with a spreadsheet.

Manual bookkeeping eats up roughly 8 to 12 hours a month for the average small business owner. Decent software cuts that down to 2 to 4 hours.

Generic accounting platforms still fall short on job costing. They handle invoices fine, but rarely break down labor and materials by job the way a plumbing business actually needs.

#5 Training software shortens the learning curve

Specialty trade roles can take 45 to 60 days just to hire. New techs often need another 12 to 18 months before they're fully productive.

Many new techs quit within a year if there's no clear path forward for them. Forty-seven percent of trade workers say they'd leave a job that doesn't offer a clear way to learn new skills. That share has climbed sharply over the past year, according to recruitment research.

That’s why staff onboarding and training software turns tribal knowledge into a checklist that a new apprentice can actually follow. Training modules and certification checklists live in one app instead of a binder in the back of the truck.

I built a sample new-hire profile and ran it through one platform's onboarding checklist. I was able to clear the required certifications faster than I expected. The app even flagged exactly which ones were still missing instead of leaving that to memory.

Why software plays a big role in a plumbing business

Plumbing used to run on a paper schedule and word-of-mouth. Neither one has disappeared. Neither one is enough by itself anymore.

Part of the reason is the labor shortage. The industry is short an estimated 550,000 plumbers by 2027, a gap projected to cost the broader economy roughly $33 billion a year. When you can't hire your way out of a busy season, the work has to get done faster with the crew you already have.

That's what ties these five categories together. Scheduling, asset tracking, AI lead capture, accounting, and staff training don't replace a good plumber. They remove friction around everything else the job demands.

We tested each tool against scenarios modeled on how a busy plumbing business would actually use it, not as a polished sales demo. The ones that made this list are the ones that held up under that kind of pressure.

Your phone won't stop ringing, but half your day still disappears into paperwork. Quotes need typing, schedules need shuffling, invoices need chasing, all before a dollar lands in your account. Add a tightening labor market, and there's even less room to waste hours on busywork.

The construction and trades sector needs roughly 349,000 net new workers in 2026 alone, according to the Associated Builders and Contractors. With fewer hands on deck, the businesses protecting their margins are the ones tightening their processes rather than just adding headcount.

Here are nine ways to do exactly that.

#1 Standardize how you estimate and quote jobs

A vague estimate can turn out to be quite expensive.

A survey of more than 600 construction business owners and finance experts found that one in four companies would close if they made just two or three inaccurate bids. Create one standard template that prices labor and materials with overhead built in, then reuse it for every quote.

#2 Centralize scheduling and invoicing in one system

The global market for field service management software is projected to grow from $5.64 billion in 2025 to $9.68 billion by 2030, as more commercial service businesses move toward all-in-one service management software.

Booking jobs in one tool and invoicing in another creates gaps where details fall through, especially once a crew gets added to the mix. A single system that connects bookings with dispatch and billing keeps your office and crews looking at the same information, so nothing gets double-booked or invoiced twice.

Look for software that fits how your trade actually works, rather than forcing your workflow to fit the software. A good platform usually covers:

• Online booking requests with instant quotes
• Technician scheduling and dispatch
• Mobile invoicing with on-site payments
• Customer messaging and review requests

#3 Put the right tools in technicians' hands

Admin tasks eat up roughly 30% of an average field technician's working week — almost as much time as they spend on the job itself — according to a recent study.

Mobile apps that let crews pull up job details and capture signatures on site cut out a layer of paperwork that used to sit on someone's desk back at the office. Photos and checklists logged on site also create a clear record if a job ever gets disputed.

#4 Track job costs in real time, not after the fact

Contractors who track actual costs against estimates while a job is still running see project margins improve by 15% to 20%. If you wait until a job closes to check the numbers, the overrun has already happened. A crew running 50% over its labor budget while only 30% through the work is worth flagging in week one, not at final invoicing.

#5 Make customer communication part of the process

Homeowners and commercial clients judge contractors on the whole experience, from first contact through final cleanup. A survey of more than 1,000 US homeowners found that 73% would refer a business after a great service experience.

Most homeowners also say speed and clear updates shape who they hire. Automated appointment reminders and status texts handle this consistently, without relying on someone in the office remembering to make a call.

#6 Plan routes around your crew, not the other way around

Poor routing and scheduling can eat up more than 40% of a field technician's workday.

Route optimization typically cuts drive time by 15% to 30%, freeing up hours that crews can spend on billable work instead of behind the wheel. That gap is often the difference between fitting in one more job or running into overtime.

#7 Build simple SOPs for your most common jobs

Crews waste an estimated 5% to 12% of total project costs on rework industry-wide, often repeating the same mistakes from job to job.

A short, written process for your most frequent jobs, covering the steps and the quality checks each one needs, keeps standards consistent even as your team grows. A plumbing business might document exactly how a water heater swap gets quoted and signed off, regardless of which technician shows up.

#8 Let your operational data guide staffing decisions

Research claims that AI tools could take over roughly 35% of a service team's administrative work, saving each employee more than two hours a week.

Use the data your business already generates, such as job duration and callback rates, to decide where to hire, retrain, or rebalance workloads before busy season hits. A technician whose first-time fix rate keeps slipping likely needs more training, not a heavier workload.

#9 Treat onboarding and training as retention tools

Replacing a skilled tradesperson can cost 50% to 200% of their annual salary once you factor in recruiting and lost productivity during ramp-up.

A structured onboarding process, with clear training steps and check-ins in the first few weeks, gets new hires productive faster and less likely to walk. Even a simple 30-60-90 day check-in schedule tends to catch problems long before they turn into a resignation.

Final thoughts

None of this needs to happen overnight. Pick the one area causing the most friction right now, maybe it's chasing payments, maybe it's an overbooked schedule. Fix that first, then move on to the next.

Growing a service business in 2026 means doing more with the same crew, not necessarily a bigger one. Tighter processes protect the margins that labor shortages and rising costs keep squeezing.

The contractors who win the most work are rarely the cheapest. They're the ones who make hiring them feel easy, from the first quote to the final invoice.

Woody the toy cowboy has faced a lot of frightening moments over the course of five Toy Story movies, but the actor voicing him for the last 30 years is trepidatious over the possibility that AI will supplant him. Tom Hanks told Entertainment Weekly in a new interview that the idea of AI replacing his voice is "a scary thought."

"Time is undefeated," Hanks said. "The question would be whether or not we could cobble together some version of me. Every word we have ever recorded in time in Toy Story is on digital media somewhere, so they could put together anything they would want."

Debates about AI in movies and film are raging even as the technology is deployed to reproduce the voices and complete performances of people who have passed away. Not to mention fully AI-generated films that otherwise employ human voice actors.

AI acting

Most entertainment projects with AI so far have generally involved the participation or approval of the performers themselves, but they also demonstrate how quickly the technology has matured. What once required painstaking effects work can increasingly be achieved with sophisticated machine learning models trained on years of existing material.

Hanks has himself been in AI-assisted productions, specifically in the film Here, which relied on AI to de-age him and co-star Robin Wright for part of the film rather than depending entirely on traditional visual effects.

Hanks' concerns extend beyond his own career. He has elsewhere suggested that his biggest worry is whether audiences will eventually stop caring whether a performance comes from a human being at all, not trusting that what they see isn't produced with AI. That feels like a more unsettling question than whether Woody could return without Hanks.

Future films

There's a little irony in Hanks' comments. The original Toy Story was a technological revolution that some saw as a threat to traditional hand-drawn animation. Three decades later, one of the stars who helped usher in that revolution is looking at the next wave of technology with understandable caution.

Caution doesn't mean dismissal of AI, of course. Hanks is known for being part of projects using advanced tools like motion capture, digital filmmaking, and experimental visual effects throughout his career. His concern seems more about what gets lost when technology starts replacing the people audiences are connected with in the first place.

And while each individual use of AI can be justified as another filmmaking tool, there's still a larger question about where AI assistance ends, and replacement begins. The answer will probably depend on what audiences decide they value rather than purely technical capabilities. Movie stars are more than collections of facial expressions and vocal recordings, and recreating the performance that audiences associate with Woody, that's more than just "good enough," would be a tall order.

Your phone rings while three jobs are already running late. A fourth customer wants to know why nobody confirmed their appointment window. If you're coordinating calls through a shared calendar, a stack of paper tickets, or a group chat with your crew, this probably sounds familiar.

You're likely looking at software because the manual approach stopped holding up around your fifth truck. A missed appointment may have already cost you a repeat customer. Picking the wrong platform wastes money you can't spare, so it pays to know what matters before you sign anything.

Why use a dedicated platform for HVAC services

Spreadsheets and paper trackers work fine with two trucks and a short customer list. A few more technicians or a batch of maintenance contracts push that setup past its limit. Job details start slipping between the office and the field before anyone notices.

The HVAC trade doesn't have spare hands to throw at the problem either. The industry is short roughly 110,000 technicians nationwide, with about 25,000 leaving the workforce every year, according to ACHR News. Customers have also grown less patient: industry surveys show that 74% expect a repair within 24 hours when their air conditioning fails, with 30% wanting same-day service.

Dedicated software closes that gap by automating reminders and arrival windows. It also turns every job into a record, with service history and equipment details attached to the customer rather than a technician's memory. That record becomes the foundation for maintenance plans, where a lot of HVAC profit actually sits.

What to look for in HVAC field service management platforms

Once you've decided to move off spreadsheets, the next challenge is sorting features that matter from features that just look good in a demo.

Pricing pages tend to list the same buzzwords, which makes the real differences hard to spot on a sales call. We've focused the criteria below on what changes daily operations, not what fills out a checklist.

Scheduling and dispatch tools

A clear view of who's where and what's next is the core job of this software. Look for a drag-and-drop calendar showing technician location alongside current job status. Dispatchers should be able to reassign a job in seconds when a call comes in or a repair runs long.

Route optimization matters more than it sounds, since grouping nearby jobs cuts drive time and adds billable hours. Some platforms also weigh technician skill level, so a complex repair doesn't land with someone trained only on residential units.

We'd ask specifically how the platform handles same-day emergencies. A good system slots an urgent job into an existing route without rebuilding the day's schedule by hand.

Mobile features for field technicians

Your technicians live on their phones once they leave the shop, so the mobile app needs to work as hard as the office dashboard. Look for offline access, since basements and rural job sites often have weak signal. A technician who can keep working offline, then sync once back in range, won't lose half a day to a dead zone.

The app should also surface what a technician needs before they knock on a door, including service history and notes from the last visit. All of it should live on one screen, not behind a phone call to dispatch.

Photo capture and on-site invoicing round out a solid mobile experience. A technician who can collect a signature and close out a job before driving away gets paid faster.

Payment processing

Cash flow depends on how quickly a job becomes a paid invoice. Look for software that lets technicians invoice on-site and take payment immediately, rather than mailing a bill and waiting weeks.

Check whether pricing is locked to a pricebook technicians can pull from in the field. This keeps quotes consistent across your team and prevents undercharging on parts or labor.

Integration with accounting software like QuickBooks saves your office from re-entering the same data twice. Ask exactly which platforms a vendor supports natively, since a clunky export process defeats the purpose.

Customer communication

Customers want more than a booking confirmation. They expect to know when the technician is actually on the way. Automated text or email updates, including a real-time arrival window, cut down on the calls asking where the technician is.

A self-serve customer portal is increasingly standard, too. Letting customers view past invoices or request a new appointment without calling in lightens the load on busy days. Review-request features, which prompt a happy customer right after the job closes, are worth checking too. Word of mouth still carries serious weight in a trade that runs on trust.

Maintenance agreement and equipment tracking

Recurring maintenance plans are where a lot of HVAC profit quietly sits. The Air Conditioning Contractors of America has reported that recurring service agreements now make up more than half of total HVACR industry revenue at well-run companies. Software that automates plan billing and renewal reminders turns this into a system, rather than a manual chase every spring and fall.

Equipment tracking matters just as much. A platform that logs serial numbers and warranty status per unit means a technician arrives already knowing the system's history, which makes the case for a replacement far easier to have.

Reporting and software integrations

Once a platform is running, the data it collects should say something about your business beyond which jobs are scheduled. Look for dashboards showing technician productivity alongside which crews convert service calls into maintenance agreements.

Integrations matter beyond accounting, too. Check whether the platform connects to your payment processor and parts suppliers, since an isolated system just becomes one more login to manage.

Most vendors say their software integrates with everything. Ask for a specific list of supported tools rather than taking that claim at face value.

Conclusion

A smooth rollout matters almost as much as the features themselves. Start with one crew before pushing it across the company, then use that pilot to catch workflow problems early.

Budget for more than the monthly subscription fee. Most vendors charge per technician. Implementation and training can also add real cost in the first few months.

We'd suggest asking current customers in your trade how long their rollout took, since vendor estimates tend to run optimistic. A platform that fits your actual call volume and crew size earns back its cost within the first year.

Running a service business means competing for the same local customers as every other contractor in your area, all while keeping a crew busy and a calendar full.

The old growth playbook, more ads and a bigger budget, costs more for the same number of leads today. Growth now comes down to getting more value out of every customer and every hour your technicians spend in the field.

Lead costs keep climbing while skilled technicians get harder to hold onto. Customers also expect a faster response than they did even a year ago. We've broken down seven strategies that tackle each of these pressures head-on.

#1 Make your reputation work harder

Most homeowners and property managers check reviews before they call anyone. BrightLocal's research shows the vast majority of consumers look up a local business online before deciding who to hire. A handful of three-star reviews can cost you the job before you've even sent a quote.

A one-star increase in your average rating can lift revenue by 5 to 9%, according to Harvard Business School research on Yelp ratings. Ask for a review after every completed job instead of hoping a happy customer remembers to leave one. A modest referral discount for existing customers costs far less than most forms of paid advertising.

#2 Win local searches before the call

Search is usually the first stop before anyone hires a contractor. Research cited by Hook Agency found that 84% of homeowners use Google before choosing a service provider. Most people never scroll past the first few results.

A complete Google Business Profile makes a real difference here. Google's own data shows that a complete profile makes customers 70% more likely to visit and 50% more likely to buy from you. Keep your service area listings and photos accurate.

#3 Turn one-off jobs into recurring revenue

A one-time repair pays the bills today. It does nothing for next quarter. Maintenance plans and service memberships change that by giving you predictable income between emergency calls.

Industry estimates put preventive maintenance contracts at close to 40% of total HVAC revenue, a sign of how much recurring work already flows through these programs. Keep your plan simple: one straightforward tier beats three confusing ones. Train technicians to recommend the plan after a service call instead of trying to sell it like an add-on.

#4 Get more from existing customers

Winning a new customer costs far more than keeping one you already have. Selling additional work to an existing customer succeeds 60-70% of the time, while a brand-new customer converts at just 5-20%, according to widely cited customer-retention research. That gap alone should change where you spend your follow-up time.

Look for the natural next step after every job, like gutter guards after a cleaning or a duct inspection after a tune-up. Train your team to mention these options on-site instead of waiting for the customer to ask. A short follow-up message a few weeks later keeps the offer fresh without feeling pushy.

#5 Run scheduling and dispatch from one system

Spreadsheets and sticky notes stop working once you have more than a couple of crews on the road. Commercial service management software puts scheduling and dispatch on one screen instead of scattered spreadsheets and paper job sheets. The market for these platforms is on track to grow from roughly $5.6 billion in 2025 to nearly $9.7 billion by 2030, according to Grand View Research.

Real-time dispatch means you can slot a same-day emergency call into a gap in the schedule instead of turning it down. Mobile access lets technicians see job history and customer notes before they knock on the door. Most users of this kind of software run small operations rather than large enterprises, so the learning curve fits a five-person crew, not a 500-person fleet.

#6 Quote and invoice faster to win jobs

Customers contacting multiple companies for the same job almost always hire whoever responds first. Research from MIT, popularized through the Harvard Business Review, found that contacting a new lead within five minutes makes you dramatically more likely to actually reach them than waiting half an hour. Most service businesses still take hours, sometimes days, to send a quote.

Speed matters after the sale, too. A quote sent from the job site, with a digital signature and an online payment link, gets approved faster than a paper estimate mailed or emailed later. Faster payment also means fewer awkward follow-up calls chasing invoices that should have been settled weeks ago.

#7 Invest in the technicians you already have

Finding skilled labor is the single biggest constraint on growth for most service businesses right now. Up to 2.1 million skilled trades positions could go unfilled in the US by 2030, according to research from commercial real estate firm JLL. Demand for electricians alone is projected to grow at roughly three times the average rate for all occupations through 2034, the same research found.

Hiring your way out of this isn't realistic for most owners, so retention matters just as much as recruiting. Pay matters, but so does giving technicians modern tools instead of paperwork and guesswork. A crew that isn't fighting bad scheduling and slow payment processes is a crew that's more likely to stick around.

Wrapping up

None of these seven strategies work well on its own. A strong reputation feeds your local search rankings, which in turn feeds your lead pipeline. The system you use to manage scheduling and invoicing is what lets you keep up once those leads start calling.

Growth in 2026 isn't about chasing more leads at a higher cost. It's about getting more value from the customers and jobs you already have. We'd start with whichever strategy addresses your biggest bottleneck this quarter, then move to the next once it's running smoothly.

ChatGPT's new Scheduled Tasks feature announcement this week — the ability for ChatGPT to now send reminders, handle recurring work, or monitor things — caught my attention immediately.

After all, AI assistants are all predicated on being reactive and needing your initial input. No matter how sophisticated the technology becomes, the responsibility usually remains firmly on your side of the screen. But if they are to truly be assistants, they have to be able to help you out when you might not remember to ask for their help.

Scheduled Tasks do require your input to begin with, of course. But you can't tell ChatGPT to remind you about something later. You can ask it to send recurring updates. You can keep an eye on a topic and notify you when something changes.

Unlike a lot of ChatGPT features, this one truly seems to give ChatGPT more of an actual assistant feel.

How to start using Scheduled Tasks

I started with a basic reminder of something I frequently forget. I asked ChatGPT to remind me to practice my saxophone three evenings each week.

Again, the setup was conversational. There were no complicated menus or automation builders. I simply described what I wanted. ChatGPT replied, "I'll remind you to practice saxophone three evenings per week. I'll keep the reminders encouraging and focused on making consistent progress."

Your Scheduled Tasks are all accessible from a new left-hand menu item, nestled between Projects and Apps, provided you are a ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, or Enterprise user. If you click the menu option then ChatGPT will suggest some things to try with Scheduled Tasks.

That evening I received the first reminder, with a couple of links suggesting songs to learn. Exactly the kind of thing that will help keep me on track.

If you've enabled notifications for the ChatGPT app on your phone, you'll get a notification that your scheduled task has completed. If you're using ChatGPT in a browser then turn on Desktop Notifications when it asks you. If email notifications are enabled for scheduled tasks in your ChatGPT settings, you'll also receive the result by email.

I then set up a more complicated evening reminder. I wanted a suggestion sent every day at 4 p.m. for a short but fun game to play outside with my child. The idea was to outsource a small piece of the fretting I sometimes feel to keep young kids entertained. Happily, not long before he returned home from daycare, ChatGPT suggested a fun and even slightly educational game of dinosaurs which he loved because of getting to run around and roar, but also helped him learn the names of several dinosaur species.

Getting a useful morning briefing

My third test was set for overnight. I told ChatGPT that I wanted a quick summary of local events or critical information to know every weekday morning at 8 a.m. Normally, this would involve checking several websites and social media. ChatGPT agreed to do so, and this morning I got a roundup of not only the day's weather, but details of yesterday's election news, the upcoming World Cup games, and how they might affect traffic.

Plenty of apps can recommend activities. What mattered was that the suggestion appeared before I had even started thinking about them or when it felt too late. Throughout the day, I kept noticing the same thing. Scheduled tasks were not saving enormous amounts of time. They were saving small moments of mental effort. Each individual task removed one tiny obligation from my internal to-do list.

That is the subtle trick scheduled tasks pull off so well. Instead of responding to a need, it anticipates one. Countless services can handle individual pieces of what happened during those two days. What felt different was having everything tied to the same conversation. That may be why the feature works better than you might expect. It remembers things so that you do not have to.

Running a commercial cleaning business off spreadsheets and paper checklists gets harder once crews scatter across a dozen sites a week. Clients want documented proof of service. A missed inspection can sink a contract you spent months winning.

Good software fixes more than admin headaches. It keeps every job accountable and all clients informed. It also keeps your business ready for an impromptu safety audit you didn't see coming.

Why does commercial cleaning require dedicated operations software?

Generic scheduling apps handle simple appointments fine, but commercial cleaning runs on details those tools weren't built for. A single contract might cover ten buildings and three shifts, with each visit needing its own proof of completion.

Labor adds another layer of pressure, with the US employing about 2.4 million janitors and building cleaners at a median hourly wage that climbed past $17 in 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Margins stay thin, so every hour lost to manual scheduling is an hour you're not billing.

Safety compliance raises the stakes further. A serious OSHA violation can run up to $16,550, while a willful or repeat violation tops $165,514, under the agency's 2026 penalty schedule. Paper logs rarely hold up to that kind of scrutiny.

Clients on multi-site contracts want consistency they can verify, beyond your word alone. Digital inspections with photo timestamps and GPS check-ins give them exactly that. They also give your supervisors a way to catch problems before a client does.

Look for software built around the specific demands of janitorial work, not generic field service basics. The features that matter most include:

• Recurring schedules across multiple sites and shifts
• GPS-verified time tracking and route management
• Digital inspection checklists with photo proof
• Compliance documentation for chemicals and safety training
• Client portals for reports and feedback
• Invoicing tied to verified, completed jobs

What to look for in commercial cleaning platforms

Not every cleaning platform covers every need. Pricing varies just as widely as the feature lists. Before you commit, look closely at how each platform performs in five areas that matter most for daily operations.

Treat this as a checklist for your demo calls, not a ranking of any single tool. The right mix of features depends on your crew size and contract mix.

Scheduling and multi-site dispatch

Recurring contracts are the backbone of commercial cleaning, so scheduling needs to handle them without constant manual rework. Look for tools that let you set a job once and have it repeat automatically for the length of the contract.

Multi-site dispatch matters just as much as recurring schedules. You need a single view of which crew is where and what's left to finish. You also need to know who's available if someone calls in sick.

Route optimization is worth checking too, especially if crews travel between buildings during a shift. Even modest improvements in travel time add up across a fleet covering dozens of stops a week.

Digital inspections and quality scoring

Quality assurance separates a professional operation from a one-off cleaning crew. Digital inspections let supervisors score jobs against a consistent standard, rather than relying on a client's gut feeling.

Photo timestamps and GPS check-ins give that scoring real weight. They prove a job happened as scheduled. They also give you evidence if a client disputes the work.

Some platforms let clients view inspection scores directly through a portal. That transparency can be the difference between a renewed contract and a client who quietly starts shopping around.

Safety documentation

Commercial cleaning touches more regulations than most service businesses realize, from hazard communication rules to client-specific safety requirements. Software that tracks safety data sheets and chemical dilution logs turns a compliance program from a scramble into routine.

Audit trails matter here, too. If an inspector or a client asks when a high-touch surface was last disinfected, you want an instant answer instead of a search through paper logs.

Look for customizable checklists that adjust by facility type. A hospital corridor and a warehouse floor call for different protocols. Your software should reflect that without extra manual setup.

Client communication

Facility managers want proof of value beyond a monthly invoice. Automated reports that summarize completed jobs and inspection scores save you from writing that summary by hand every month. They can also flag recurring problems before a client has to call about them.

A client portal goes further by giving facility managers self-service access to schedules and reports whenever they need them. That visibility builds trust and cuts down on status-check phone calls.

Look for two-way communication features as well, such as in-app messaging or ticketing for special requests. Buried email threads make it easy for a request to slip through the cracks.

Mobile tools for frontline crews

Most of your workforce never sits at a desk, so the mobile experience matters more than the back-office dashboard. Crews need an app that works offline in basements and parking garages where signal drops out.

Multilingual support is worth checking, given how diverse the cleaning workforce is in many markets. Clear instructions in a worker's preferred language cut down on mistakes and rework.

Time tracking through the same app keeps payroll accurate without separate punch clocks. The fewer apps a cleaner has to juggle on a shift, the more likely they are to actually use the one you give them.

Conclusion

Rolling out new software works best in phases. Start with one site or one crew, and fix the inevitable hiccups before expanding. Move to additional locations once your supervisors are comfortable running the system day to day.

Pricing typically scales with the number of users, sites, or inspections you run each month, so get a quote based on your actual job volume rather than a published starting price. Factor training time into your budget too, since adoption usually determines your return on investment more than the feature list does.

The best commercial cleaning software won't replace good supervisors or trained crews. It gives them the tools to prove the job got done. It also gives you the data to bid your next contract with confidence.

Spoilers for Avatar: The Last Airbender season 2 ahead.

Even before Avatar: The Last Airbender season 2 dropped on Netflix, we knew exactly where it was heading: the Fire Nation taking over all of the Four Nations.

In the latest batch of seven episodes, the target is the hidden city of Ba Sing Se — and as of season 2 episode 6, it's been captured.

With Avatar Aang (Gordon Cormier) the only person who can save the day, the pressure is on to stop Fire Lord Ozai (Daniel Dae Kim) from doing any more damage.

Unluckily, Princess Azula (Elizabeth Yu) is taking her dad's wishes into her own hands. But can our favorite gang cope with her fiendish plans?

Here's everything you need to know about the Avatar: The Last Airbender season 2 ending... and what it might mean for the already confirmed season 3.

Appa, Sokka, Zuko and Katara are all captured by the Dai Li — which is now controlled by Azula

We kick off Avatar: The Last Airbender season 2 episode 8 with a flashback of baby Aang meeting Appa the sky bison for the first time. Aang feeds Appa an apple (trying to say that three times fast), and they embrace.

Cut to the present day, where Appa has been kidnapped by the Dai Li — Ba Sing Se's secret police force — which is now being controlled by Princess Azula. Trust me, you will cry seeing him in chains.

In a meeting with the city's Grand Secretariat, Long Feng (Chin Han), Azula kills all of Ba Sing Se's highest-ranking men in the force when they question why the Fire Nation wants to control the city. Long Feng, however, begrudgingly but fearfully complies with Azula's plan: to raise Ba Sing Se's drawbridge and let the Fire Nation troops roll in, taking out anything they want in the process.

Remember, this is all coming from Lord Ozai's orders, despite Azula being a more than willing vehicle for them. But Appa isn't the only Aang ally the Dai Li has captured on her orders, with Sokka (Ian Ousley) and Katara (Kiawentiio) also in separate cells.

Sokka reunites with inventor Sai (Danny Pudi) in his cell, with the inventor already being captured before his arrival. Together, they try to figure out how to use the prison's underground structure to break free.

Katara has been put in a cell with Zuko (Dallas Liu), who was caught by the Dai Li after "doing a good act." This marks the biggest pinnacle in Zuko's personal struggle between good and evil so far, and Azula has no idea that he's jailed.

Meanwhile, Toph (Miya Cech) returns home to her mother, complaining that Aang and co. "don't understand her" after their huge falling out in episode 6. While initially seeming on board with how great Toph's earthbending powers are, her mother poisons Toph's tea in order to try and control her urge to leave home forever.

Aang and Iroh plan an escape mission

So where is Aang in this? Right behind his pals, having already figured out where Appa is underground just by sensing him. When the Azula-controlled Dai Li parade through the center of Ba Sing Se, he's hidden by allies made in season 2, episode 1.

When he attempts to approach the Dai Li's underground jail, he's spotted by Iroh (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee) and is immediately suspicious. Iroh reveals that he's also on a mission to break Zuko out of jail, thinking that the pair should team up for maximum effect.

Iroh tells Aang about a secret door that Avatar Kyoshi once installed to lead into the underground caves, but it needs all four elements bent at once to be able to open it. Aang is missing his firebending powers at this stage, so he needs Iroh just as much as Iroh needs Aang.

Together, the pair locate and open the door, and set off on their rescue mission.

Zuko tries to bond with Katara

While Sokka and Sai try to be proactive, Katara learns who Zuko really is. Immediately, she goes on the defensive, telling him how all of her family — and the entire Waterbending tribe — were wiped out thanks to the hostile Fire Nation invasion.

Zuko definitely feels empathy for Katara, but still has a chip on his shoulder. He tells her that the Fire Nation also stripped him of his family, with his mother dying at the hands of Lord Ozai.

The more the two talk, the more they realize that they have a lot in common. It's the closest we've even seen Zuko come to his "good" side, and it seems as though he's finally going to stay that way for good.

Looking at the burn mark around his left eye, Katara offers to try and heal Zuko using the waterbending potion in the locket around her neck. Just as she's about to apply it, Aang and Iroh storm in, having found and released Sokka and Sai first.

Aang goes to fight Zuko, but Iroh stops him, claiming that he's seen huge changes for the better in his nephew. Not quite believing that Zuko has defected from the Fire Nation, the gang sets off in search of the exit.

Aang's escape plan is thwarted

With the Dai Li everywhere, the gang splits up. Aang goes to find Appa after Long Feng brings him up to speed with Azula's plans, earthbending a hole through the ceiling so that Appa can fly to safety.

But as he tries to rejoin the others, he passes another prisoner who was originally being psychologically tortured by a Dai Li officer earlier on. Aang offers to bring her with them, but instead of accepting his offer, she shouts that "the Avatar is here," alerting the guards.

From there, it's fighting on all fronts. In pairs, the group makes light work of the Dai Li roaming the hallways, especially when Toph joins suits, revealing that she has invented "metalbending."

In fact, metalbending is how she ended up there in the first place. When she wakes up after her poisoning, Toph awakes in a metal box riding inside her mother's horse and carriage. Coming to the conclusion that Aang really does understand her, where her family doesn't, she bends the box and flies out of the carriage, making her way to safety.

An all-out battle with Azula changes Zuko's allegiance

With the fight raging on, Azula soon joins the mix, learning that her brother is among the escapees. Honing her focus on him, she tries to convince him, once again, to rejoin her side.

At first, Zuko remains hesitant, more confident in his newfound ability to do good things. But when Azula brings up the death of their mother, he changes his mind.

Where Zuko has always held a grudge against Azula for how she acted when their mother died, Azula reveals that she was only acting on her mother's orders. Their mom wanted the siblings to stay together through the trauma, breaking an emotional trigger point inside Zuko when he hears this.

By the time the rest of the gang reach a large clearing in the underground caves, Azula and Zuko emerge to fight them all as a team. This shocks Katara, who had genuinely believed that Zuko was coming around to being on their side.

After a lot of intense bending and fighting, it looks as though Azula has Aang right where she wants him — after all, the entire point of kidnapping his friends was to lure Aang to Ba Sing Se.

But in his hour of need, Aang taps into what can best be described as an "Avatar portal," seeing physical forms of all the Avatars that came before him in his mind's eye. More clearly, it's what causes Aang's eyes and head arrow to turn a shining blue, as he's essentially channelling their collective power through his body.

Aang is left unconscious

At this point, we see Aang's best bending to date, turning the tables on Azula and leaving her (and the Dai Li guards who join her) powerless.

But just as he's about to deliver the final blow, Aang loses his inner vision, effectively shutting his power off. He collapses to the floor, but Katara, Sokka and Toph are able to get him to safety thanks to Appa having waited outside.

With Ba Sing Se still under Azula's control, our final scene shows the gang flying away on Appa's back. Kata uses the potion she initially offered to Zuko on Aang, aiming to heal him and bring him back to full health.

However, nothing happens after she gives it to him, with the final shot showing Aang completely unconscious and unresponsive.

Season 3 predictions

Obviously, finding out if Aang has actually survived the battle is a top priority for season 3. But the mere fact that season 3 has already been greenlit basically confirms that we'll be seeing Aang again anyway.

In a nutshell, we can expect to see Aang learning to firebend, infiltrating the Fire Nation, and preparing for his climactic showdown with Fire Lord Ozai before Sozin's Comet arrives. Not too much, then.

We also know that Zuko will eventually team up with Aang and the gang to make this happen, so we can expect to see some more emotional upheaval from him.

We're hoping to see season 3 episodes next summer.

Although the technology powering them has evolved in performance and efficiency, the core principle of data centers hasn’t changed much in the past two decades.

Every new generation of infrastructure has been designed to shorten the distance to users, reducing latency and increasing reliability. However AI is putting serious strain on that model, and unprecedented demand for data centers is making companies think outside the box.

Terrestrial projects now face challenges from all directions, including land availability, cooling, power and water consumption, and local opposition.

Step in orbital data centers. Some pioneers are now looking to rocket data centers up into space, and the model keeps shifting further from concept and closer to reality.

While enormous technical hurdles remain, advocates argue orbital data centers could eventually complement terrestrial campuses by shifting some of the most energy-intensive AI workloads away from land-based constraints.

Networking is what will define good orbital compute

Some of the benefits include virtually unlimited space to expand, uninterrupted access to green solar energy and cooler environments that don’t require so much cooling.

But while sending compute into space tackles some of the problems we face today, it reverses one of the biggest fixes we’ve spent years improving – latency.

In today’s instant economy, a data center has no use if it can’t exchange information quickly and reliably. Terrestrial networks lean heavily on fiber networks and physical connections, but orbital data centers would need to improve wireless transmission across hundreds of miles.

As work on this progresses, Internet exchange operator DE-CIX CEO Ivo Ivanov says orbital compute should be viewed as another layer in our increasingly distributed digital ecosystem – not an outright replacement for terrestrial compute.

To better understand whether orbital data centers are just another ambitious experiment or whether they could be the next evolution of digital infrastructure, I spoke with Ivanov about the industry’s biggest challenges.

• You noted that SpaceX's IPO has brought the idea of AI data centers in space into the mainstream. Setting the hype aside, how close is this to real, and what's actually driving the biggest companies in the world to look at space?

The idea of placing data centers in orbit is the kind of thing that immediately captures people's imagination. It belongs in the same category of technological ambition as reusable rockets, commercial spaceflight, or landing on the Moon.

For decades it felt like something that belonged in science fiction. Today, for the first time, it's being discussed as a serious infrastructure proposition. But I don’t think the real story here is about space – it’s about AI, and how it’s altering our global trajectory.

Over the last few years, we've seen an extraordinary increase in demand for compute capacity. AI training clusters are growing larger, power requirements are rising, and in many regions the availability of energy, land, and cooling has become a genuine constraint.

These constraints are what drive innovation, and that’s what we’re seeing play out here.

In theory, space offers access to continuous solar energy and room to scale without the physical limitations we experience here on Earth. Having said that, we're still at a very early stage.

I don't think we're talking about replacing terrestrial infrastructure anytime soon. What we're seeing today is the beginning of a serious exploration into how orbital resources could complement the digital infrastructure ecosystem that already exists.

There is still work to be done, particularly around networking – putting an AI data center into orbit would be a milestone achievement, but it won’t count for much if we have to truck hard drives into space to do any training. For now, all anybody can say with confidence is that it's becoming part of a broader conversation about how society will support the next generation of AI workloads.

• What problems could orbital data centers potentially solve that terrestrial infrastructure struggles with today?

I think the broader answer is that orbital infrastructure has the potential to ease some of the physical constraints that have shaped and limited digital infrastructure for decades. We can’t simply keep building more data centers – they need access to land, power, cooling, transport links, and of course, connectivity.

As AI continues to grow, some of those resources will become harder to secure, especially at the pace the industry wants to move.

That's why the industry is starting to look at non-terrestrial alternatives. Suddenly, you're talking about access to potentially unlimited solar energy, plenty of space, and the opportunity to scale at a pace that matches our ambitions for AI.

But putting data centers into orbit, as impressive as it would be, is only the first step. Google’s Project Suncatcher is already exploring how power might be harvested from the sun, while the European Space Agency’s OFELIAS project is exploring how optical feeder links between Earth and orbit can be optimized to reduce latency and disruption. There are lots of moving parts.

• From a networking perspective, what challenges will emerge once data centers move into orbit?

The moment you put a data center into orbit, networking becomes the make-or-break factor. A data center on Earth can usually rely on a dense ecosystem of fiber routes, Internet Exchanges, cloud on-ramps, and interconnection facilities. In orbit, that ecosystem doesn't exist yet.

Every workload, every application, and every AI model depends on data moving between different locations, and suddenly those journeys become much more complex.

A lot of the discussion I’m hearing focuses on bandwidth or speed, but I think predictability is the more interesting challenge. AI systems need data to arrive quickly, but they also need it to arrive consistently.

Optical and laser-based communications have enormous potential, but they also introduce new variables like cloud cover, atmospheric turbulence, satellite handovers, and changing orbital positions that can all affect how data moves between Earth and space.

That's why I believe the real challenge isn't simply connecting an orbital data center to the ground, but creating an interconnection layer that makes orbital, terrestrial, cloud, and edge infrastructure behave as though they're part of the same ecosystem.

That's a much bigger networking challenge than people realize.

• Elon Musk said orbital infrastructure is "only a few milliseconds away." How much could those milliseconds matter, and is latency the biggest challenge?

Those milliseconds absolutely matter. AI systems are fundamentally data-driven, and every additional moment spent moving information between users, applications, models, and infrastructure affects performance and productivity.

That's one of the reasons the industry is investing so heavily in edge computing – the closer you can bring compute resources to the data, applications, and users they serve, the better the experience tends to be.

Certainly, low-Earth orbit is only milliseconds away, but for latency-sensitive use cases, the 20-40 ms it takes to reach the stratosphere will provide a significant challenge for some AI inference use cases. So not all applications can possibly be served from hundreds of kilometers above the ground.

Having said that, performance isn't just a question of latency. A network that consistently delivers twenty-five milliseconds of latency is often more valuable for many enterprise use-cases than one that fluctuates between twenty and a hundred.

Physics determines how quickly data can travel, but factors such as atmospheric conditions, satellite handovers, routing decisions, and network architecture all influence how predictable that experience is.

• If a data center is in orbit and the AI workloads it serves are on Earth, what actually has to happen for those two worlds to behave as one network?

The way I like to think about it is that users shouldn't have to think about where a workload is running. Whether an application is being served from a terrestrial data center, an edge location, a cloud region, or one day an orbital platform, the experience should feel seamless.

Achieving that is much harder than it sounds, because data has to move continuously between different environments, and those environments need to behave as though they're part of the same network, even when they're separated by hundreds or thousands of miles and, increasingly, by the boundary between Earth and space.

That's one of the reasons projects like the ESA's OFELIAS initiative, which I mentioned earlier, are so important. As part of that initiative, DE-CIX is working alongside partners including the German Aerospace Center to explore how optical feeder links between satellites and the ground can become more stable, efficient, and predictable.

Rather than simply building more connections, we need to create an infrastructure foundation that allows terrestrial, satellite, and orbital resources to work together as a single ecosystem.

We've spent decades building that kind of seamless interconnection on Earth, and now we need to take what we’ve learned and combine it with new technologies to bring non-terrestrial infrastructure into the picture.

• Where does this leave terrestrial data centers and interconnection? Will orbital compute compete with what exists on the ground, or depend on it?

I don't see this as a competition at all. Digital infrastructure has a long history of adding new layers rather than replacing existing ones. Cloud computing didn't eliminate enterprise data centers, edge computing hasn't eliminated centralized clouds, and satellite connectivity hasn't replaced terrestrial networks.

Instead, each technology tends to find the role it's best suited to, and the overall ecosystem becomes more capable as a result.

I think orbital compute will follow a similar path. Some AI workloads may benefit from being processed closer to abundant energy sources in orbit, while others will remain in terrestrial edge data centers because they require ultra-low latency inference, regulatory compliance, or proximity to users and applications.

It’s not about choosing one over the other, but creating an architecture where workloads can be placed wherever they make the most sense and where data can move seamlessly between them.

• What should the industry be doing now to prepare networks for orbital compute?

I think the first step is recognizing that orbital compute is more than a compute challenge. It's a networking one. The industry has spent decades building highly interconnected ecosystems on Earth, where data can move efficiently between enterprises, cloud providers, networks, content platforms, and users.

If compute begins expanding into orbit, we'll need to ensure the same level of interconnection exists between terrestrial, satellite, and orbital environments. Advances in satellite communications, laser-based networking, and distributed infrastructure are creating new possibilities that didn't exist a decade ago.

What I'd like to see now is greater collaboration between network operators, cloud providers, infrastructure companies, and space organizations.

The technologies themselves are advancing rapidly, but the challenge is ensuring they evolve as part of a coherent ecosystem rather than a collection of isolated systems.

• Looking ten years ahead, what does a fully interconnected ecosystem spanning terrestrial, edge, cloud, satellite, and orbital infrastructure actually look like? What technologies will make it work?

The most interesting thing about the future is that people probably won't think about infrastructure at all. Today, we spend a lot of time talking about whether something runs in a cloud region, an edge location, a data center, or on a particular network.

Ten years from now, if we succeed with orbital infrastructure, workloads will simply move to wherever they can be processed most efficiently, and data will flow across terrestrial, satellite, and orbital environments as naturally as it moves across continents today.

When we look back at the great infrastructure achievements of the past, whether it's railways, electricity grids, undersea cables, or the Internet itself, their success wasn't measured by the technology, but by how completely they disappeared into everyday life.

People stopped thinking about the infrastructure and started focusing on what it enabled. I think we'll see something similar here. The future of digital infrastructure will be defined by our ability to connect every layer of the ecosystem into something that feels seamless.

That's when we'll know we've succeeded.

The CEO of Samsara has hailed the benefits of AI in helping modernize and boost efficiency and productivity in the operations industry.

Speaking at the opening keynote of Samsara Beyond 2026 conference in Las Vegas, Sanjit Biswas laid out how the company is, “working together to build the future of operations”.

“These are industries that you can't read about in a book, or just visit a website…you have to put on your boots and go onsite,” he noted.

“Automate away the grind”

Biswas noted how Samsara’s customers are all facing the same challenges, namely the rising cost of fuel, caused by the war in the Middle East, put also the rising cost of doing business across the board, with rising maintenance costs also biting hard.

But technology was also proving a challenge in these more “hands-on” industries, he noted, with too many reports and disparate systems in conflict, leading to “data overload” as too many apps and distractions actually just annoy and frustrate workers.

To combat this, Biswas set out his idea of “automate away the grind” - using technology to give workers time back to focus on the really important tasks.

“We're entering a whole new age - the age of intelligence," he said, noting how Samsara wants to be, “taking operations to the next level”.

“We can collect tons and tones of data in the field,” he added, “and now we can use AI to find insights, and figure out what’s really going on…AI can now formulate plans, figure out tools, and really help you run your operation to take action on your behalf.”

Biswas laid out a host of useful examples where AI could benefit frontline workers, such as automatically adjusting vehicle settings during extreme weather situations, monitoring usage of tools and equipment to help predict when maintenance is needed, and giving drivers more information on delivery situations/environments such as a new drop-off location.

To back this up, Samsara announced its new Agent Studio, specifically designed for companies in the physical operations sector, which lets customers utilize a range of pre-configured agents or build their own from scratch.

The company says that going forward, tasks such as managing paperwork, communicating with drivers, and working with vendors can now be automated with agents in minutes, freeing staff from hours of manual work each week

“Reducing risk for the frontline, increasing the efficiency of the operation, and really helping you digitally transform with this technology - that’s what we’re excited about today," Biswas concluded.

Grand Theft Auto 6 pre-orders are live, and now we’re finally within touching distance of the release of 2026’s most anticipated game — if not, one of the most anticipated games of all time.

Of course, to play the game you’ll need a modern console, and one of the best TVs or best monitors can’t hurt either. But there’s one more thing I think you need to enjoy the experience at its very best: a strong audio setup.

That’s right, most TVs have pretty shoddy built-in speakers, and even if they support immersive formats like Dolby Atmos, typically struggle to whip up expansive, punchy, and clean sound. As a result, I’d strongly suggest investing in a soundbar, which will help you truly immerse yourself in the world of GTA 6, and enjoy movies and series like never before.

So, I’ve curated a list of five soundbars I’d recommend grabbing right now, with everything from affordable all-in-one options through to spectacular surround sound systems — there really is something for all kinds of budgets and living spaces here. Ready to discover my top picks?

1. Sonos Beam Gen 2

It may be almost half a decade old, but the Sonos Beam Gen 2 is still one of the best compact soundbars I’ve ever tested. I found that it delivers the kind of hard-hitting bass you’d expect from a larger, pricier soundbar, it’s easy to customize in the Sonos companion app, and it even conjures up a pretty wide soundstage, in part thanks to its Dolby Atmos support.

On top of this, I love how the Beam Gen 2 is incredibly easy to set up. Just connect it to your display’s HDMI eARC port, plug it into the power, and you’re good to go. Its small size also makes slotting it into your setup super seamless, and its modern look helps it to stand out as a stylish centerpiece in any living room or bedroom.

When you’re done with a GTA 6 play session, this soundbar can also double up as a neat companion for music too. It has Wi-Fi streaming, enabling you to stream your favorite tunes with high quality playback, and there’s even AirPlay 2 support for iOS devices. If you have other Sonos products, you can also link the Beam 2 with them and enjoy the beauty of multi-room audio, meaning this model really is a great all-rounder.

2. Marshall Heston 60

For me, the hottest competition the Sonos Beam Gen 2 has in the small soundbar category, is the Marshall Heston 60. This 2025-issued model really wowed me when I got my hands on it, and for two key reasons: its spacious sound, and its luxurious looks.

Let’s start with how this thing performs. Despite its limited 28.7-inch / 730mm width, it creates a surprisingly convincing sense of width, and whether I was playing video games or spinning some 4K UHD Blu-rays, I found it delivered delicious depth and excellent tracking of any on-screen action. With Atmos content, it really felt as if I could hear some elements playing in the corners of our TV testing space, which is something that a lot of mini models fail to do.

It also gets the basics spot on, with clear dialogue, controlled yet relatively powerful low-end sound, and impressive musicality. Although I have to say, this soundbar arguably looks even better than it sounds. Its amp-inspired aesthetic, golden details, striking frets, and classy control panel really make it stand out. As a result, you won’t only get a soundbar that’s great for engrossing audio in GTA 6, but you’ll get a product that you’re proud to put at the front and center of your living space.

3. Samsung HW-Q800F

Right, let’s take things up a gear, should we? If you want truly absorbing bass as well as expansive sound from a main soundbar, then the Samsung HW-Q800F has got you covered.

I tested this 5.1.2 channel model at the end of last year, and awarded it a rare five star rating, praising its deep, almost room-swallowing bass, its exceptional dialogue clarity, and its convincing Dolby Atmos effects. This bar can even muster up an impressive sense of height, providing an almost tangible feel to sound effects in video games as well as movies.

The Q800F brought a new sub into play which is a lot more compact, but still hits hard, meaning it's easy to fit into your living space without requiring a sacrifice in terms of quality. It’s also rammed with countless features, such as an effective calibration tool, Dolby Atmos and DTS:X support, a range of sound modes (including a Gaming setting), and Q-Symphony, which adds audio from compatible Samsung TVs into your system.

4. Samsung HW-Q990F

OK, now we’re getting into the really spacious-sounding stuff, and where better to start than with the Samsung HW-Q990F, the step-up options from the aforementioned Q800F.

Although the newer Samsung HW-Q990H is available in 2026, I’d still suggest getting the Q990F right now, as it offers a very similar level of quality at a typically smaller cost. It comes with a soundbar, sub, and two surround speakers, giving you true surround sound for the most enveloping experience imaginable. And when I heard the Q990F for myself, I was really struck by how well all of these speakers work in harmony — with games and movies alike, I found that audio sounded incredibly cohesive and well-balanced.

More generally, the Q990F delivers awesome all-round sound, with seriously weighty yet regimented bass, ultra-clean mids, and expressive highs. It also serves up impressive dynamics, a nuanced soundstage for gaming, movies and music alike, and fantastic features within Samsung’s SmartThings app. Another highlight is its two HDMI 2.1 inputs, which you can connect a games console like the PS5 Pro to for 4K 120Hz gameplay — ideal if you’re running out of slots on your TV or monitor.

5. JBL Bar 1300MK2

Last but not least, we have the magnificent JBL Bar 1300MK2 (or JBL Bar 1300XMK2 in the US), which is one of the most mind-blowing surround sound systems I’ve ever had the joy of testing here at TechRadar.

The most attention-grabbing thing about the Bar 1300MK 2 is its immense power. It has a maximum power output of almost 2,500W across its 29 drivers, which — as I said in my review — is ludicrously high. This means that you can access room-shaking volumes, and if you’ve got a large living space, you’ll be able to feel the might of its sound in every inch of the room.

But the 1300MK2 doesn’t just have power for the sake of power, it really does sound mesmerizing. The highlight is the low-end, which I found to be seismic and full-sounding, while still remaining controlled and never getting in the way of sounds elsewhere in the frequency range. Dolby Atmos is also spectacularly strong on the 1300MK2 with almost mind-boggling width on offer and solid height effects, making you feel at the center of the action when gaming or watching videos.

The flexibility of the 1300MK2 is another one of its highlights. It comes with battery powered surround speakers, which you can easily place wherever you want without having to mess around with wires — something a lot of rivals force you to do. And these can even be used as standalone Bluetooth speakers if you’re on the go, or be used standalone for night mode — ideal for a 2am gaming sesh.

In case you hadn’t heard, GTA6 pre-orders are live tonight (June 25) at midnight. Due for general release on November 19, it’s been 13 years (!) since GTA 5 first launched two console generations ago. While you’re pre-ordering your copy, now might be the time to upgrade your TV to experience Vice City looking its best.

I test TVs for a living, and that includes the best gaming TVs. For GTA 6, you’re going to want excellent picture quality with vibrant colors, excellent motion handling for the fast-paced action, and a suite of gaming features to cover the bases. Below, I’ve picked five of the top gaming TVs to suit all budgets that will be perfect for tearing through Vice City.

You may notice that all of these TVs are from last year. While we’ve been testing the best TVs this year and a lot of them are great, last year’s TVs will be a much better value and still more than capable of doing justice to GTA 6. That’s why, for me, they’re the better option right now.

LG C5

The best place to start is with the top recommendation. Sitting at the top of our best gaming TV guide, as well as our best OLED TV guide, is the LG C5, a five-star OLED that can literally do it all. It has a full suite of features and superb picture quality that will be perfect for GTA 6.

The C5 delivers rich, bold colors with whatever it’s given, and this is going to be important for the neon-soaked streets of Vice City in GTA 6. Watching colorful movies like Elemental on the C5, colors really pop on screen, with oranges, reds, and blues all shimmering. It also delivers rich contrast with deep black tones, important again for that nightlife vibe in Vice City. With excellent motion handling, car chases will be a breeze for the C5.

Packed with a full suite of gaming features, the C5 is a top-notch gaming TV. Four HDMI 2.1 ports support 4K 144Hz, full VRR, HGiG, ALLM, and Dolby Vision gaming, and with a 9.2ms input lag time, expect super-responsive gameplay as you’re fleeing from the cops in GTA 6. It handled Battlefield V at 120fps with ease when I played it.

Price-wise, you’ll want to pay about $1,199 / £1,399 (stock is looking thin in Australia) for a 65-inch model. This will be a great size for seeing GTA 6 in all its glory, but the C5 is available in sizes 42 to 83 inches to cover every situation.

TCL QM6K/C6K

If you’re looking for a TV upgrade but don’t want to break the bank, the TCL QM6K (known as the TCL C6K/Q6C depending on region and retailer) is a fantastic choice. It still has great picture quality and an impressive stock of gaming features for a very affordable price.

I tested the C6K as I’m based in the UK, and it has great overall picture quality. Its main highlight is its color reproduction. It produces vivid, natural colors that made movies like Wicked look great during my testing, accurately capturing the vibrant pink of flowers in trees. Expect the same for GTA 6. The C6K also demonstrated impressive backlight control and black tones for a mini-LED at this price range, working well for movies like The Batman. Again, Vice City nightlife should look great.

The C6K supports a lot for gaming, which is rare at this level. It supports 4K 144Hz, FreeSync Premium Pro, ALLM, and Dolby Vision gaming. It has a measured 13.6ms input lag, which is still above the 15ms threshold we look for. Gaming on it, I had a great time while playing Battlefield V, as it did a great job handling chaotic battle sequences, so it should be prepared for GTA 6.

Its real highlight is its price. A 65-inch QM6K has dropped as low as $529 and the C6K 65-inch will cost around £679/ AU$1,099. These are excellent prices for a TV this size and a great option for an affordable upgrade for GTA 6.

Samsung QN90F

Now, if you’re someone who’s planning to take some time off to play GTA 6, you’ll need a TV that works well in a bright room for daytime gaming sessions. Enter the Samsung QN90F, a brilliant gaming TV that also doubles as our best TV for sports.

The QN90F is the perfect TV for bright rooms for several reasons. It has solid brightness (exceeding 2,500 nits HDR peak and over 600 nits full screen) and an effective, anti-glare screen that does a great job reducing mirror-like reflections to a minimum. So, even if you have big windows, the QN90F can handle them. It also has great picture quality to go with it, producing punchy, accurate colors and strong contrast with surprisingly rich black tones. Expect GTA 6 to look great on this one.

The QN90F is equipped with a full list of gaming features, too. It supports 4K 165Hz, FreeSync Premium Pro, ALLM and HDR10+ gaming across four HDMI 2.1 ports. Its 9.5ms input lag time is up there with the very best, so you can expect it to handle the chaos of GTA 6 with no problems.

While the QN90F is a flagship model, its prices have dropped significantly. A 65-inch will cost you roughly $1,399 / £1,299 (stock in Australia is low again), which is again phenomenal pricing for a TV at this level.

LG B5

If you want an OLED but can’t quite stretch to the LG C5, the LG B5 is your next best option. It’s one of the best budget OLED TVs I’ve tested and delivers a lot of the same great performance and features as its step-up sibling.

With accurate, rich colors that suited the vibrant aesthetic of Wicked and Elemental, the B5 is sure to make GTA 6’s sun-soaked, colorful streets look fantastic. It also produces the powerful contrast with inky blacks you’d want from an OLED TV, despite its cheaper price range. While the B5 doesn’t have the brightness of other step-up OLEDs, it still has punchy highlights that will make the neon of Vice City pop.

The B5 is kitted out with a full list of gaming features, including 4K 120Hz, full VRR including FreeSync and G-Sync, HGiG, Dolby Vision gaming, and ALLM, all built into the four HDMI 2.1 ports. A measured 9.1ms input lag time is at the top of the gaming TV list, so expect all the action of GTA 6 to look superb.

The B5’s prices can fall to a deceptively affordable place for an OLED. You can get the 48-inch model, a perfect size for bedroom gaming, for as low as $549 / £569 / AU$1,169, meaning you don’t have to spend a fortune for OLED.

LG G5

The flagship OLED for LG in 2025, the LG G5, is like the C5 taken up a notch. It has a similar feature set but turns up the picture quality by another level with higher brightness, bolder colors, and more impactful contrast.

Testing the G5, its colors were its most impressive aspect. Vibrant, rich, and bright all at once, any colorful scene dazzled on screen, and I think it’s going to do the Miami-inspired Vice City serious justice in GTA 6. It also produces powerful contrast, expertly balancing deep black levels and bright highlights. Vice City nightlife will look stunning on this TV. It also produces extremely impressive textures that are 3D-like, along with refined detail.

This is another TV with an impressive list of gaming features. 4K 165Hz, full VRR including FreeSync and G-Sync, Dolby Vision gaming, HGiG, and ALLM are on all four HDMI 2.1 ports. Its measured 9.2ms input lag time again did wonders for Battlefield V’s fast-paced gunfights at 120fps when I played it, so it should do the same for GTA 6.

The G5 is at the more premium end of the TV market, with a 65-inch model costing $2,299 / £1,999 / AU$2,699, but if you are looking for the premium way to play GTA 6, this will be the TV to do it on.

A smartphone can be a major investment — especially if you’re shopping for one of the best phones around — so it’s important to be sure that the device you’re buying isn’t just good for now, but good for many years to come.

Software support is a key factor in determining how long a phone will last, and in recent years, manufacturers have been committing to much longer product support windows than they used to. But not all phones get the same amount of support, and indeed some older phones will be approaching their final update in 2026.

So, below, we’ve detailed how long phones from Apple, Samsung, Google, and Motorola will continue to receive updates.

To keep things simple, we've focused on major brands with US availability, but if you have a recent high-end phone from the likes of Honor, Oppo, or Xiaomi, it will likely be in line for between five and six years of updates from its launch date. Older and lower-end models tend to be in the two-to-three-year range.

Apple iPhones

Apple never used to commit to a specific support window for its phones, but that changed in 2024, when new UK regulations required brands to outline a minimum support window. As a result, Apple now promises a minimum of five years — but this only applies to security updates, not the kinds of iOS updates that add new software features. And five years is a minimum, with Apple often going beyond that number anyway.

All of which is to say we can’t be certain when iPhones will get their final update, but typically, they’re supported for between five and seven years.

So, the list below is our best guess for how many years of updates each currently supported iPhone model has left.

• iPhone 17 series — 4-6 years (last update in 2030, 2031, or 2032)
• iPhone Air — 4-6 years (last update in 2030, 2031, or 2032)
• iPhone 16 series — 3-5 years (last update in 2029, 2030 or 2031)
• iPhone 15 series — 2-4 years (last update in 2028, 2029, or 2030)
• iPhone 14 series — 1-3 years (last update in 2027, 2028, or 2029)
• iPhone SE (2022) — 1-3 years (last update in 2027, 2028, or 2029)
• iPhone 13 series — 0-2 years (last update in 2026, 2027, or 2028)
• iPhone 12 series — 0-2 years (last update in 2026, 2027, or 2028)
• iPhone 11 series — final update will probably be this year with iOS 27
• iPhone SE (2020) — final update will probably be this year with iOS 27

Samsung Galaxy phones

Samsung offers as much as seven years of support for some of its recent phones, but older and lower-end handsets get fewer updates, so how long your phone will be updated for can be quite variable depending on the model.

• Samsung Galaxy S26 series — 7 years (last update in 2033)
• Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 — 6 years (last update in 2032)
• Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 — 6 years (last update in 2032)
• Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold — 6 years (last update in 2032)
• Samsung Galaxy S25 series — 6 years (last update in 2032)
• Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 — 5 years (last update in 2031)
• Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 — 5 years (last update in 2031)
• Samsung Galaxy S24 series — 5 years (last update in 2031)
• Samsung Galaxy A57 — 6 years (last update in 2032)
• Samsung Galaxy A56 — 5 years (last update in 2031)
• Samsung Galaxy A36 — 5 years (last update in 2031)
• Samsung Galaxy A26 — 5 years (last update in 2031)
• Samsung Galaxy A17 — 5 years (last update in 2031)
• Samsung Galaxy A17 — 4 years (last update in 2030)
• Samsung Galaxy A55 — 1 year (last update in 2027, security patches until 2029)
• Samsung Galaxy A35 — 1 year (last update in 2027, security patches until 2029)
• Samsung Galaxy M35 — 1 year (last update in 2027, security patches until 2029)
• Samsung Galaxy A25 — 1 year (last update in 2027, security patches until 2028)
• Samsung Galaxy A54 — final Android update this year (2026), final security patch in 2028
• Samsung Galaxy A34 — final Android update this year (2026), final security patch in 2028
• Samsung Galaxy S23 series — final Android update this year (2026), final security patch in 2028
• Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 — final Android update this year (2026), final security patch in 2028
• Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 — final Android update this year (2026), final security patch in 2028
• Samsung Galaxy M54 — final Android update this year (2026), final security patch in 2028

Google Pixel phones

Google has committed to supporting all handsets from the Pixel 8 onwards for seven years, while phones from the Pixel 6 and Pixel 7 lines get five years of support.

Note that, as a-series models launch later than their mainline siblings, they technically get supported for longer. But depending on when major new Android versions launch, they may not get additional significant updates.

• Google Pixel 10a — 7 years (last update in early 2033)
• Google Pixel 10 series (excluding 10a) — 6 years (last update in late 2032)
• Google Pixel 9a — 6 years (last update in early 2032)
• Google Pixel 9 series (excluding 9a) — 5 years (last update in late 2031)
• Google Pixel 8a — 5 years (last update in early 2031)
• Google Pixel 8 series (excluding 8a) — 4 years (last update in late 2030)
• Google Pixel Fold — 2 years (last update in mid-2028)
• Google Pixel 7a — 2 years (last update in mid-2028)
• Google Pixel 7 series (excluding 7a) — 1 year (last update in late 2027)
• Google Pixel 6a — 1 year (last update in mid-2027)
• Google Pixel 6 series (excluding 6a) — final update this year (2026)

Motorola phones

Motorola’s update commitments feel quite messy and inconsistent, with some phones getting more or fewer updates than you might expect, but you’ll find an overview of the currently supported handsets below.

• Motorola Signature — 7 years (last update in early 2033)
• Motorola Edge 70 series — 3 years (last update in 2029, security patches until 2031)
• Motorola Edge 60 Neo — 3 years (last update in 2029, security patches until 2031)
• Motorola Edge 50 Neo — 3 years (last update in 2029)
• Motorola Razr 70 / Razr 2026 series — 2 years (last update in 2028, security patches until 2030)
• Motorola Edge 60 series (excluding Neo) — 2 years (last update in 2028, security patches until 2029)
• Moto G75 — 2 years (last update in 2028, security patches until 2030)
• Motorola Razr 60 / Razr 2025 series — 1 year (last update in 2027, security patches until 2029)
• Motorola Edge 50 Pro — final Android update this year (2026), final security patch in 2028
• Motorola Edge 50 Fusion — final Android update this year (2026), final security patch in 2028
• Motorola Edge 50 Ultra — final Android update this year (2026), final security patch in 2028
• Motorola Razr 50 / Razr 2024 series — final Android update this year (2026), final security patch in 2028
• Moto G86 — final Android update this year (2026), final security patch in 2029
• Moto G56 — final Android update this year (2026), final security patch in 2029

Traveling to the 2026 World Cup means joining hundreds of thousands of fans in crowded cities across North America.

Airports, stadiums, fan zones, and hotels are all packed with people competing for the same public Wi-Fi networks. These connections are often slow and insecure, making personal data vulnerable to interception.

To stay protected without sacrificing speed, you need more than just a VPN – you need the best VPN with the right settings. Tuning your VPN configuration helps keep your connection secure and fast, no matter where you go during this summer’s tournament.

The 5 best settings to change for top VPN performance

Just turning on your VPN isn’t always enough to cut through the noise of a packed stadium or busy airport terminal. To get good speeds and real security when thousands of people are online at once, here are five specific settings to tweak:

1. Protocol

WireGuard is the superior protocol choice for modern devices, offering faster connection speeds and lower latency compared to OpenVPN or IKEv2.

This efficiency matters when network congestion is high. WireGuard establishes secure tunnels more quickly, reducing wait times. If your provider offers OpenVPN, it's a great alternative for compatibility, but for raw performance in crowded zones, WireGuard is best.

2. Transport protocol

If you've never heard of transport protocols before, think of them as the delivery method your VPN uses to move data. Most commonly, you'll see TCP and UDP as your choices for this.

On congested networks, TCP’s reliability mechanisms can add delay when packets are lost. UDP avoids this overhead by sending data without waiting for confirmation.

In a crowded stadium where every millisecond counts, switching to UDP can reduce latency and improve responsiveness for smooth VPN streaming even when the network is struggling to keep up.

3. Split tunnelling

With split tunneling, you can choose which apps can be routed outside the VPN’s encrypted tunnel. At a stadium, your banking app needs maximum security, but a local map app might benefit from direct access to avoid unnecessary latency.

Excluding non-sensitive apps from encryption can reduce bandwidth strain and prevent compatibility issues with local networks that sometimes block VPN traffic entirely.

4. Location

Connecting to the server closest to your physical location often results in lower ping and faster speeds. However, nearby servers may be overwhelmed by thousands of users connecting simultaneously.

If your current location lags, try switching to a server slightly further away that’s under less user load. Avoid jumping between regions unnecessarily, as crossing international borders increases the distance data travels and introduces lag that ruins live streaming.

5. Obfuscation

In monitored environments like airports, deep packet inspection can detect and block standard VPN traffic.

Obfuscation disguises VPN traffic as regular HTTPS web traffic, allowing you to bypass firewalls and censorship attempts. Although this adds processing that might marginally impact speed, the ability to stay connected when other connections fail more than makes up for this.

As you prepare to cheer on your national team at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, make sure your setup can handle the packed stadiums and busy airports.

By selecting the right VPN protocol, using UDP, and enabling features like split tunneling, you can protect your data and keep your device safe so you can enjoy the World Cup worry-free..

If you’re looking to buy an instant film camera, there are only two serious names in the game: Polaroid, and Fujifilm Instax. While some manufacturers like Canon and Kodak offer digital instant-print cameras that use techniques like dye-sublimation to create instant prints of digital images on specialist paper, it’s not the same. For the true alchemical magic of instant film, you Polaroid and Instax are the big hitters.

Polaroid is undoubtedly the better-known brand name due to its long history, dating back to the 1940s (though hitting major popularity in the 70s). It spent a few years in the wilderness following a bankruptcy in the early 2000s, before being purchased and revitalised in 2017 by an analog film collective called The Impossible Project. All the proper Polaroid cameras you can buy new today have been released since this renaissance.

Instax cameras may not have the historical cachet of Polaroids, but they are massively popular — Fujifilm reported last year that its Instax line has sold more than 100 million units since its inception in 1998. I don’t have similar sales data on post-revival Polaroid, but frankly, I don’t think it’s anywhere close.

Ultimately, there are compelling reasons to choose either brand. The Instax mini 12 is TR's pick as the best instant camera, and I can see why — it's a great option for the majority of users. But for me personally, it’s Polaroid all the way.

Why I’ll pick Polaroid every time

It’s not a question of print size, as both brands have similar offerings. Fujifilm Instax Wide film is about the same size as a Polaroid I-Type (or SX-70) print, just rectangular rather than square. Polaroid’s smaller ‘Go’ film produces prints of comparable dimensions to Instax mini.

What it’s all about is vibe. Scoff if you want, but come on — you’re shooting instant film. You’re not here for accurate colors or pitch-perfect sharpness, you’re here because you love the tangibility of holding a print in your hands, the transportative lo-fi look of a format that’s been around for half a century. It’s all vibe.

I’ve shot Polaroid and Instax prints side by side before for comparison. Once, while I was viewing them, my partner made an astute observation that I have since stolen and made my own: the Instax catches your eye first, but you end up liking the Polaroid more. Instax prints are bright and vivid, with naturalistic colors and a decent level of detail, especially the Wide format. They’re fun and kitschy.

But Polaroid images just have that inimitable retro glow that instantly transports me back in time. The softer, more muted color palette makes images less immediately striking, but more satisfying the longer I look at them. There’s a richness to them, a greater sense of depth and subtle tonality. If I were embarking on an artistic project with instant film, there’s no question which format I’d choose. It wouldn’t even be a decision.

Instax cameras are easier to use for sure — most are just point and shoot. If I were recommending an instant camera for a family, or for someone who isn’t an experienced photographer, I’d go with Instax. But for me, as someone who knows my way around a camera, the depth of control offered by the top-end Polaroid cameras leaves Instax in the dust.

Connect to the Polaroid app, which works very smoothly and is highly intuitive, and you can completely program in your settings, taking total control over your images. Want to try your hand at creating long exposures on instant film? It’s straightforward on a Polaroid Flip or Polaroid I-2, and impossible on an Instax Mini 99.

Sure, Polaroids aren’t perfect. The ongoing cost of I-Type film is a sore point, with packs of eight shots costing the same as a pack of 20 shots of Instax Wide or Mini. This sucks. No way to pretend it doesn’t. Buying in bulk can help a little, though honestly not a lot. At least the smaller Polaroid Go film is much cheaper, and I prefer it to Instax Mini. Again, its subtler look is less striking, but richer.

Do you agree? Let me know which is your preferred instant-film format in the poll above. And if you’re looking for an instant-film camera to buy, see my explainer on why the Polaroid Go Gen 2 is the best buy you can make this Prime Day and click on today's best deals where you live using the links below.

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.

I’ll be honest: I’ve yet to be really sold on AI laptops. The problem is, laptop makers like Apple, Samsung, HP, Microsoft, and more have been trying to convince us we need a device capable of local AI tasks by suggesting it can help us write emails (I can do that already) and generate images (a fun distraction initially, but I quickly lose interest – and there’s something about AI-generated images, videos, and music that gives me the ick).

It left me feeling as if even the best AI laptops are more of a gimmick used by companies just trying to get us to buy new devices, rather than something revolutionary.

However, after talking to Dr Liv Grant, a technology influencer, science podcaster, and ‘PhD Queen’, I’m actually excited about the implications of on-device AI in laptops, especially for students.

Dr Liv Grant recently ran a vibe coding workshop with Apple, where she showed students with no coding experience how they can create apps using MacBooks and local LLMs (Large Language Models, the tech that modern AI as we know it is based on) and spoke to me about the laptops she uses and recommends to students.

With the Back to School period approaching and Prime Day sales in full swing, students and their parents will be looking for the best student laptops to see them through college and university, so I was keen to get Dr Liv Grant's recommendation.

“I have a MacBook Neo,” she told me, “that’s great for people who are beginning to code. For someone who is learning online and branching into something less data-heavy, such as web developing, it’s a great choice.”

However, Dr Liv Grant explains, "while you can do extremely light cloud-based AI using the device, if someone is looking for the best Mac to use for on-device AI, my recommendation is the MacBook Pro, and if you’re looking for more of an entry device, it would be the MacBook Air.” She continues, “If you’re curious about coding and you already have a MacBook Neo you can begin your journey there, but you’d ideally need an Air or Pro.” 

The MacBook Neo is Apple’s most affordable MacBook, selling for $599 / £599 / AU$899. If you’re a student, there's an exclusive discount from the Apple Education store, which drops the price to $499 / £499. Despite the low price, it performs very well at day-to-day tasks, and thanks to the Apple A18 Pro chip that powers it, it can also handle on-device AI, though Apple would like to make clear that the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro are better suited for coding and on device AI and LLM workflows.

The Apple A18 Pro features an NPU (Neural Processing Unit), which Apple calls the Neural Engine, and is the part of the chip that enables on-device artificial intelligence.

What’s on device AI?

Let’s back up a bit for a minute. You might be wondering what on-device AI means, and what makes it different from online AI chatbots such as ChatGPT.

ChatGPT, Claude and other popular AI chatbots are mainly cloud-based and accessed via the internet. On-device AI means that AI tasks such as image or text generation are performed on the device itself by the NPU using a local LLM.

You don’t need an AI-capable laptop or device to use cloud-based AI tools – all you need is an internet connection. However, devices that can run AI locally offer plenty of benefits, as Dr Liv Grant explained.

“With on-device AI, you don’t need internet connectivity. I’m always working on the go; especially when working at university, I’d work during my commute. The Wi-Fi on public transport can be awful, and it would interrupt my work.”

This is probably the most noticeable benefit for many people. If you’re doing important work that requires AI tools, using those tools locally on the device means that if you lose your internet connection, you can still keep working – and you won’t be in danger of losing your work.

Running those tasks locally has privacy and security benefits as well, as you’re not sharing data, files, or any other information with a remote third party, which is the case with cloud-based AI tools. For extremely sensitive data, or even personal things like using AI to help edit family photos, you should use on-device AI.

To ensure a laptop you’re considering buying is capable of on-device AI, you should check to see if it comes with an NPU (or Neural Engine if you’re looking at MacBooks).

The good news is that most modern chips from Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and Apple feature NPUs. Windows 11 laptops with these chips will most likely be labeled as ‘Copilot+ PCs’ – not the best name, but that’s Microsoft for you. Meanwhile, Apple products will be labeled as being ready for Apple Intelligence.

NPU performance is often measured in TOPS (Trillions of Operations Per Second). The higher the TOPS, the faster the NPU will complete AI tasks. Windows 11 laptops with an NPU of 40 TOPS or more can be labeled as a Copilot+ PC, for example.

This is why Dr Liv Grant suggests the MacBook Neo is best for less-intensive AI tasks, as its NPU is capable of around 35 TOPS, while it's also limited to 8GB of unified memory.

So, the MacBook Neo is fine for beginners, but if you have more ambitious plans that require on-device AI, you’ll want to go for a device with an NPU capable of higher TOPS and offering more RAM.

Light as air

Because of that, Dr Liv Grant uses a MacBook Air for the majority of her coding and AI work. It’s a great alternative due to its thin and light design (ideal for people who work while traveling) and its relatively affordable price (the 13-inch MacBook Air with M5 chip starts at $1,099 / £1,099 / AU$1,799, and again, there’s a student discount that’ll knock $100/£100/AU$160 off the price if you qualify).

It's also far more capable when it comes to day-to-day tasks and on-device AI, thanks to its M5 chip and 16GB of unified memory to start.

While Apple doesn’t officially disclose the TOPS of its chips, we estimate that it’s around 133 TOPS – which, on paper, makes it around four times faster for AI. Combine that with the larger amount of faster unified memory, and the MacBook Air becomes an excellent mobile AI workstation. At Dr Liv Grant’s vibe coding workshop, the participants all used a MacBook Air.

The final tool in Dr Liv Grant’s MacBook arsenal is a MacBook Pro, which she primarily uses for content creation for her extremely popular Instagram and TikTok accounts.

"My everyday device is my MacBook Pro, because of the heaviness of my workflow. When I’m on the go, I use MacBook Air, which is what we used for the workshop at Apple," she told me.

For students (or anyone, for that matter)looking for a laptop that can handle complex AI tasks as well as demanding creative workloads, a MacBook Pro might be a wise investment, but it is a lot more expensive.

All about the vibe coding

So, what’s the importance of AI for students? While a lot of focus has been on how AI can help students research and study, Dr Liv Grant suggests vibe coding is where it can make the biggest difference, and not necessarily just for programming students.

“Vibe coding is where you use AI or a chatbot tool to help you write code,” explains Dr Liv Grant. “For example, I have an idea for an app to help content creators do a job – a few years ago I’d have had to learn the language, the syntax, the codebase from scratch. With vibe coding you can use AI to help you.”

As Dr Liv Grant is keen to stress, vibe coding isn’t a replacement for traditional coding, and she is familiar with many programming languages. Instead, it’s a tool that can help coders experiment and get creative while still being productive.

Dr Liv Grant’s mention of coding languages is an interesting one, as there’s a huge range of languages used. Web developers, for example, might use JavaScript, while someone making Windows 11 apps would use C#, and someone coding for Macs or iOS apps would likely use Swift. Being experienced with one coding language doesn’t mean you’ll be ‘fluent’ in others, and that’s where vibe coding can really help.

“Even if you know what you’re doing, everyone should use vibe coding,” Dr Liv Grant suggests.

In her workshop, students with no coding background used MacBook Airs to create an app. “We made a pomodoro timer app using LLM studio, picked a vibe coding tool, and gave it three prompts.”

The AI tool would then give examples of code to use in the desired language. “With the first prompt,” explains Dr Liv Grant, “there were some errors, but those were easy to fix.” This is where a basic understanding of coding and syntax comes in, as Dr Grant used her coding experience to correct any mistakes in the AI-generated code.

The ease of vibe coding combined with more affordable laptops such as the MacBook Neo “opens up the world of coding to so many people – people in lower socioeconomic groups, students, anyone,” Dr Liv Grant told me. “It’s very exciting; students have so many ideas, and vibe coding helps those students realize those ideas without having to learn entire programming languages.

“Red Bull Basement recently ran a competition for people to pitch their ideas for an AI tool or app. All the entrants were using vibe coding. They didn’t have a background in coding.”

To me, that sounds both exciting and worrying. Exciting because it could mean that new (once-marginalized) voices, ideas, and products come to market. Someone who once might have had a great idea for an app, but never did anything with it as they were unable to code, could now rustle up a prototype with vibe coding.

Similarly, someone without a coding background who needs an app for a specific task could make their own rather than trying to find someone who would do it for them.

However, I’m also worried – could vibe coding mean an influx of slop apps? And what about programmers, will they be out of jobs? Is it even worth becoming a programming student?

“Yes,” says Dr Liv Grant when I ask her if people should still study to become programmers, “but maybe not in the depth we used to learn coding in. Learn basic syntax, how code works,” Dr Grant suggests. Those skills will prove essential to ensuring any vibe-coded project has a base level of quality. As for programming as a career? “It’s going to move more towards how good you are at interacting with AI and how good you are at prompting.”

I left our conversation with a newfound appreciation for how AI can help students, especially when it comes to vibe coding, and how that, combined with more affordable devices like the MacBook Neo (even considering its limitations), could make app developing much more accessible.

It’s certainly an interesting time, and if you or someone you know is considering getting a laptop to vibe code on, I’ve picked some of my top choices below. Make sure you also follow Dr Liv Grant on TikTok and Instagram for more fascinating insights into tech, science and Epigenetics.

If what we talked about here has got you interested in getting a MacBook for vibe coding (and more), then check out these fantastic MacBook Prime Day deals I've hand-picked below.

Prime Day MacBook deals

After only two hours of playtime, it's clear that Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a breath of fresh air for A Plague Tale fans. It provides an engaging narrative with fresh but familiar ground, suitable for both franchise veterans and newcomers.

It's all thanks to an original story that will leave you wanting more after every discovery — and notably, one that doesn't absolutely require knowledge of previous entries.

Asobo Studio has taken a risky but bold step in a completely different direction with Resonance, and while there is still plenty more to be seen, it's off to a great start in both its narrative and gameplay.

In Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy (set 15 years before A Plague Tale: Requiem), we follow a familiar face that both previous main characters, Amicia and Hugo, encountered. Sophia, labelled a 'fierce young plunderer,' will be center stage as she journeys to uncover the mystery behind her past, while on the run from a gang she left behind.

Unlike anything the franchise has offered before, Asobo sets out its stall in Resonance from minute one, focusing on action-adventure aspects to a greater extent, with combat that will not only entertain players but also test their mettle.

Resonance borrows from the best action-adventure games

If you love Tomb Raider and Naughty Dog's Uncharted games, or even Bethesda's Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, you're likely going to have a lot of fun with Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy.

In exploration, you'll be tackling a wide range of puzzles, many of which will require you to look through clues in a notebook (just like you would with Nathan Drake in Uncharted). Set pieces will see Sophia jumping from ledges or shimmying in tight and dangerous spots, all in a fascinating spectacle that left me smiling, ready for more.

Remember those sequences in Uncharted or Tomb Raider that saw either Nathan Drake or Lara Croft finding a key item, only to be stopped by an antagonist, leading to an epic escape? Resonance captures the essence of those moments in its own charming and entertaining way.

Unlike Amicia, Sophia can wield swords and a dagger, pull enemies off of rooftops with a grappling hook, and engage in a brutal and bloody back-and-forth with enemies thanks to the game's parry, dodge, and attack functionality. You'll feel like you can hold your ground against a barrage of enemies, with a character who isn't afraid to make a foe think twice about approaching.

While some areas of sword clashes and fights can feel slightly janky, particularly with dodges or general strafing that feel as though they lack much weight, the melee mostly holds up quite well, featuring multiple skills to unlock and enhance Sophia's capability in combat.

Asobo has seemingly structured Resonance's combat encounters, puzzles, and exploration very well. It doesn't feel like there are too many moments of combat, puzzles, or exploration, as each moment does just enough to keep you engaged and ends before it overstays its welcome.

Perhaps above all, Resonance features one of the best horror-like, thrilling sequences I've seen in a long time, forcing an unarmed Sophia to survive and escape a deadly and terrifying creature that can snatch her life away with very little effort.

It was during this encounter that I realized Resonance has just about everything I hoped it would in a new entry within the series, and I genuinely can't wait to see what more it has to offer when it launches later this year on August 27, 2026, on PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and PC.

In case you missed it during its West End run earlier in 2026, there's good news for international theatre fans: Les Liaisons Dangereuses will be in select cinemas worldwide from June 25, before heading to the National Theatre at Home streaming service later in the year.

This is all thanks to National Theatre Live, whose productions have been seen by more than 13 million people across the globe. I'm one of these, having seen everything from Hansard to All My Sons in theaters and local community centers.

The goal is to make British theater more accessible, which is fantastic news if you're international or just (rightfully) can't afford paying up to £120 for a ticket. Out of all of the productions I've seen, Les Liaisons Dangereuses is one that you absolutely cannot afford to miss.

For us peasants, this translates to Dangerous Liaisons, which you've likely seen in the 1988 movie of the same name starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich. This time, Lesley Manville and Aiden Turner take on the respective roles of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont.

During its three-hour (I know) runtime, viewers experience a whirlwind of drama, deceit, unrequited love, and outright chaos. The staging is exquisitely minimal yet dramatic thanks to its use of moving mirrors, with our cast included in mass choreographed dance numbers interspersed throughout.

Frankly, it's like nothing I've ever seen. So when the National Theatre invited me on an exclusive tour behind-the-scenes during one of its two filming days for NT Live, I was as giddy as a five-year-old.

National Theatre Live: Les Liaisons Dangereuses was shot with the same cameras used to film your favorite Netflix movies

Here's how it works. For productions that aren't beamed into cinemas live, filming happens across two performances in the same week.

This way, editors can splice together the best cuts of scenes, meaning that if there's a mark on the floor or a prop out of place, you won't notice. The idea is to replicate the

When I walk into the theater on the second day of shooting, a total of seven cameras are rehearsing their placements for later in the evening. They're all a part of ARRI camera systems, which are the same kind that film all the latest Netflix movies. Small world, huh?

Most of them have a stationary position, with the camera closest to the stage operating on a dolly (which is essentially a small piece of track it can move up and down). Instead of being operated hands-on like on a movie set, the dolly camera is operated remotely from a portable control room.

So where is this mysterious crew? Instead of being packed into the auditorium, they're (literally) parked outside in two mobile van units. The first acts like a screen studio you'd see on an actual TV set, monitoring each camera through numbered live feeds. Next door is the audio mixing unit — meaning if someone coughs in the audience, it will be removed.

Basically, it's all the pleasure of being at the theater without any of the annoyances. I'm almost jealous of whoever gets to see it on screen, zooming into painful and poised movements in a way that I just couldn't see, even with my best glasses on two rows from the front.

You might be wondering what happens when a production is beamed totally live into cinemas without editing or delay, such as Inter Alia with Rosamund Pike in 2025. The process is almost the same, except that the NT team has to book a satellite to use in order to do so. According to my tour guide, that means a lot of bartering with international TV channels.

Regardless of how it is recorded, you can guarantee getting the best theatre experience possible. And if that hasn't sold you... Lesley Manville and Rivals' own Aiden Turner?! Come on.

Full disclosure: I am writing this before Amazon Prime Day. If the iPhone Air is not currently on sale in your region, then you should only pay its $999 / £999 / AU$1,799 asking price if a) you have a bottomless supply of cash or b) you simply must own Apple’s most beautiful iPhone (and make no mistake: the iPhone Air is Apple’s most beautiful iPhone).

But I will eat my hat if there aren't any meaningful deals on the iPhone Air by the time you read this. It's already been discounted by as much as 30% in both the UK and Australia this year, and as such, I have a hunch that Amazon will run similar deals during its annual Prime Day sale (if you’re in the US, look out for carrier-based offers on Apple’s best iPhones).

• Browse the full Amazon Prime Day sale

If you can snag the iPhone Air for around 20% less than its retail price this week, I’m utterly convinced that it’s the best-value phone purchase you could make right now — for two reasons.

Firstly, you will not find a nicer-looking — and nicer-feeling — phone than the iPhone Air without spending silly money on one of the best foldable phones. The Air measures just 5.64mm at its thinnest point and is some 41g lighter than the iPhone 17 Pro, despite boasting a larger 6.5-inch display.

You might not think you care about having a thin and light phone — I also didn’t to begin with — but trust me: once you start using a device of such svelte proportions, you won’t want to go back to a regular-sized phone.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a recent picture of me with a group of tech content creators showing off our current phones of choice:

All four of us test the best phones for a living, and all four of us settled on Apple's super slim iPhone as our personal handset of choice.

The second reason why a discounted iPhone Air is the best-value phone purchase you can make right now is less obvious. Not only is this Apple’s most beautiful iPhone, but it’s also its most powerful: like the iPhone 17 Pro, the Air boasts an A19 Pro chipset and 12GB of RAM.

Now, I don’t usually highlight chipsets as a reason to buy phones — the iPhone 17e’s A19 chipset, for instance, is plenty fast enough for most people — but the iPhone Air's A19 Pro chipset and 12GB of RAM combination has suddenly become more significant than most people realize.

Here's an extract from a recent article in which I explain why the iPhone Air is future-proofed in a way that only the iPhone 17 Pro can match:

At WWDC 2026, Apple announced its all-singing, all-dancing Siri AI assistant, which will soon be available on all Apple Intelligence-compatible iPhones (read: the iPhone 15 Pro and upwards) as part of iOS 27. But only three iPhones will get the very best version of Siri AI — and the iPhone Air is among that number.

Specifically, only the iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air will get Siri voice customization and more advanced systemwide dictation, because only these phones run on Apple’s AFM Core Advanced model and 12GB of RAM.

Admittedly, these two features aren’t reason enough to buy a top-end iPhone — the former gives you the ability to customize the expressiveness and pace of Siri’s voice, while the latter makes Siri more effective at converting speech into accurate text — but I would bet my (non-existent) house that Apple locks several additional, more significant features behind this AFM Core Advanced paywall in future versions of iOS.

In other words, like the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max, the iPhone Air will soon support more software features than any other iPhone — and the gap between model capabilities will only grow wider as more hardware-exclusive features are announced.

I genuinely believe this under-the-radar feature makes the iPhone Air almost worth its regular $999 / £999 / AU$1,799 asking price, but if you can pick it up for significantly cheaper than that during Prime Day, it’s a bona fide bargain.

It's a tale as old as tech time: a new flagship device appears on the scene, which means the device it's replacing gets a price drop, and potentially offers better value for money for the discerning gadget buyer.

For this guide, we're going to be looking specifically at the Oura Ring 4 (which launched in 2024) and the Oura Ring 5 (launched in 2026). The Oura Ring 4 is likely to see some great Amazon Prime Day deals, but should you go all in on the latest and most expensive model? Or is the older model the better investment when bought at a discount?

• Browse the full Amazon Prime Day sale

There's no doubt that both models qualify as two of the best smart rings on the market right now, but which one is right for you depends on your budget and what your priorities are. Here's how they compare.

Oura Ring 5 vs Oura Ring 4: pricing

While pricing varies as special offers come and go, the Oura Ring 5 launched for a starting price of $399 / £399 / AU$649, with some finishes costing extra at $499 / £499 / AU$799 – that's a little more expensive than the original Oura Ring 4 (note that the prices for Australia are for third-party resellers, not from Oura directly).

There's an upgraded charging case available for $99 / £99 / AU$159 for the Oura Ring 5, and then there's the monthly subscription: $5.99 / £5.99 / AU$9.99 a month or $69.99 / £69.99 / AU$109.99 a year. While a subscription isn't technically necessary to use an Oura Ring, you do need one to access the bulk of its features.

So what about Oura Ring 4 price drops? At the time of writing, the starting price is $349 / £349 if you go through the official channels, and we're seeing some good deals on the Oura Ring 4 already, which you can find below. Given that it's an older model, you're much more likely to see discounts on this smart ring on both the Oura shop and third-party retailers like Amazon.

Oura Ring 5 vs Oura Ring 4: specs and features

What you need to know first is that the Oura Ring 5 is notably slimmer than the Oura Ring 4: for the most affordable finishes, it's 6.09 mm (0.24 inches) wide and 2.28 mm (0.09 inches) thick, down from 7.9 mm (0.31 inches) and 2.8 mm (0.11 inches), which is a reduction of about 40%.

That can make a difference when it comes to comfort and day-to-day wear. The new model is lighter too, with those reduced dimensions, weighing 2 grams rather than 3.3 grams. Both models are available in a variety of ring sizes to fit your finger, though the Oura Ring 5 introduces a new sizing scheme that doesn't match its predecessor.

The Oura Ring 5 is also more scratch resistant, while both models offer the same level of waterproofing (down to a depth of 100 meters). Battery life has been improved on the new model too, with the official estimates standing at 5-8 days for the Oura Ring 4, and 6-9 days for the Oura Ring 5.

As for sensors and health tracking features, this is where the rings are mostly tied. Oura says the fifth-generation model is more accurate because of a change in the sensor layout, but the core sensor tech is the same between the two models, and the software experience through the app is the same for tracking steps, activity, heart rate, and more.

Oura Ring 5 vs Oura Ring 4: Verdict

There's clearly a lot that's new and improved in the Oura Ring 5: it's slimmer and lighter, and offers better battery life. Oura says it's also more accurate, though that's not something we've finished testing ourselves just yet. That said, the tracking capabilities, sensors, and app features are more or less identical between the models.

Where the Oura Ring 4 really has the potential to outdo the newer model is in terms of pricing. As time goes on, you're likely to see bigger and bigger discounts on the fourth-generation model — and don't forget that we awarded it our Health & Fitness Device of the Year award for 2025. It's a seriously impressive bit of kit, and if the right discount comes along during Amazon Prime Day, it'll certainly be a better-value package than the Ring 5.

Regardless, you'll need to weigh up what's most important to you for your next smart ring, and how much you're prepared to spend to get it. Both of these premium smart rings from Oura will give you years of use — so we might be talking about the Oura Ring 6 before you need to think about upgrading again.

More Prime Day deals in the US

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I’ve tested more than 20 soundbars during my years of reviewing tech and audio products at TechRadar, many of which have performed brilliantly, while some… it’s best we don’t talk about them.

Although I’ve tested some premium surround-sound options such as the LG Sound Suite Immersive Suite 7 Pro and JBL Bar 1300MK2, I’ve also tested a lot of budget-friendly, affordable options. And today, I’m here to share some of the very best affordable models I’ve tested, so you can upgrade from basic TV audio or enter into the world of cinematic Dolby Atmos home entertainment without breaking the bank.

I’ve picked out a range of options, from an ultra-cheap 2.0 channel bar, all the way up to a multi-box combo with Dolby Atmos and Wi-Fi streaming. There really is something for everyone in this list, so without further ado, let’s get into my top picks.

1. Sony HT-S100F / HT-SF150

Whenever a big sale comes around, I always plug the Sony HT-S100F — also known as the Sony HT-SF150 in some markets, including the UK. Why? Well, it’s because Sony created the ideal affordable audio upgrade for anyone frustrated by unpleasant TV sound.

This one-box 2.0 channel soundbar produces solid clarity and width, with well-defined dialogue, and a built-in bass reflex speaker for enhanced low-end performance. It also makes use of Sony’s proprietary S-Force Front Surround virtual processing, which creates the impression of three-dimensional audio to impressive effect.

With HDMI, digital optical, USB, and Bluetooth connectivity, there are so many ways to enjoy sound on the HT-S100F, and it’s incredibly quick and easy to set up too.

Of course, you’re not going to get the thumping, cinematic bass that larger models can offer, and there’s no Dolby Atmos here either. But if you want clearer sound at an ultra-low price, then the Sony HT-S100F is still one of the very best options on the market.

2. Klipsch Flexus Core 100

Moving onto a Dolby Atmos soundbar now with the Klipsch Flexus Core 100. This 2.1 channel model is a great performer, with impactful, striking bass output, accurate dialogue reproduction, and impressive power.

Like the aforementioned Sony option, the Flexus Core 100 is also very simple to set up, and its LED display makes it incredibly easy to flick between various modes and options. There’s also a remote included in the box, as well as an awesome companion app which is free to download and super-responsive.

Although there are some limitations in terms of height, the Flexus Core 100 delivers admirable width when watching movies in Dolby Atmos, and when I watched a 4K UHD Blu-ray of The Mask, the titular character’s cartoonish spin sounded as if it was coming from the corners of our testing space.

While an alternative like the Marshall Heston 60 may offer sharper Atmos effects and stronger all-round quality, the Flexus Core 100 is often on-sale for far less than this model, which is a very capable alternative. This Klipsch bar’s talents in the bass department alone make it well-worth considering — especially if you just need a step-up from thin-sounding TV audio.

3. Sonos Beam Gen 2

OK, shifting up a gear once more, and I’ve simply got to shout out the Sonos Beam Gen 2. This small soundbar may not be the newest, but it’s still sensational. Sure, Sonos owners will get the beauty of multi-room capabilities, and there’s Wi-Fi streaming here too, which makes streaming music from your phone incredibly seamless. But that’s not even the best part.

See, the thing that really stands out about the Sonos Beam Gen 2 is its ability to conjure up almost thunderous bass, in spite of its limited confines. Even when testing it against the newer Marshall Heston 60, I found the Beam Gen 2 to offer more dynamic, and more immersive low-end sound, with high-octane action scenes and sudden jump-scares in horror movies hitting with striking impact.

On top of this, the Beam Gen 2 serves up crystal-clear dialogue, commendable musicality, and Dolby Atmos capabilities. If you want, you can also customize the model’s sound via the Sonos companion app.

What’s more, the Beam 2 looks absolutely gorgeous, with a modern, minimalist aesthetic that I can’t get enough of. If you’re short on space, have a smaller TV, or don’t want to spend all too much, then the Sonos Beam Gen 2 is a ridiculously easy recommendation to make.

4. Samsung HW-Q800F

Finally, we have the best overall choice in our guide to the best soundbars: the Samsung HW-Q800F. And this soundbar isn’t only one of the best affordable options out there, it’s simply one of the best soundbars I’ve ever tested here at TechRadar.

The Q800F is a soundbar-subwoofer combo that delivers incredible value for money. You get seriously convincing, multi-dimensional Dolby Atmos and DTS:X effects, and even height effects come through well — something a lot of Atmos soundbars struggle with. You also get seismic bass from the compact sub, crystal clear dialogue from the main bar, and precise, controlled treble.

In addition, the Q800F is crammed with connectivity options, with HDMI eARC, digital optical, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and even an HDMI input for your games consoles, streaming devices, and more. The sub and soundbar are also paired right out of the box, making your set up phenomenally straightforward.

Yes, the Q800F is a little pricier than the other entries in this list, but you can often find it on sale for far less than its initial list price of $1,099 / £799, which was already strong value considering the quality of this model’s audio, build, and feature-set.

I’ve been reviewing gadgets at TechRadar for years now, and it’s pretty rare that something stops me in my tracks and so violently defies my expectations. But sometimes, a special product comes along and totally stuns me: and that was well and truly the case with the Sennheiser CX 80U.

Now you might be thinking: really? A pair of wired earbuds? But yes, they really were that impressive. See it all comes down to quality vs price, and these earbuds genuinely sound way, way better than I expected given their typical cost of $39.95 / £34.99. If you want rich, detailed sound at a highly-accessible price-point, the CX 80U are all you need.

I’ll drill into the beauty of this product more down below, but the bottom line is: the CX 80U are what I’d recommend to anyone looking to go back to wired earbuds in 2026.

Low risk, high reward

I’ve already touched on the Sennheiser CX 80U’s low price (and they’re occasionally discounted for even less), but let’s discuss what exactly makes them so special.

These buds use a USB-C connector with a built-in DAC, opening up lossless audio — something that’s not truly possible over Bluetooth, which is an inherently lossy technology. By using USB-C as a connectivity method, the CX 80U aren’t only optimized for modern smartphones, tablets, and laptops, but they also won’t need to be charged like their Bluetooth counterparts — and I often keep them with me in case I forget to juice up my Sony WH-1000XM6 headphones or LG Tone Free T90S earbuds.

But as practical as the CX 80U are, the real highlight is their performance. They show impeccable attention to detail, and can easily illuminate elements such as subtle percussion or delicate vocal intricacies. However, they also nail the fundamentals, with well-balanced, agile bass, clear mids, and vivid treble.

Speaking of treble, I found this to be a real highlight on the CX 80U — highs have an impressive sense of space, and often sound as if they’re operating in a well-defined pocket, giving percussion in particular plenty of space to express itself. But during my time testing the CX 80U, I was impressed with their quality right across the frequency range, and regardless of what genre I threw at them, they delivered an enjoyable and entertaining listen each time.

As well as sounding great, the CX 80U manage to provide surprisingly substantial passive noise cancellation, and they come with various-sized eartips, so you can find the perfect seal. Whenever I use them, I also find that cable noise is pretty muted, and they’re comfortable to wear, even for longer listening sessions.

One more thing I love about the CX 80U is their build quality. They look more premium than their price suggests, and I’m drawn to their rounded buds, slim wires, and enticing silver details. Classy.

So, if you’re on a budget but looking to get into the wired earbuds game, then it really doesn’t get much better than the Sennheiser CX 80U. Go on, give ‘em a go!

Running a one-person business means doing the job of an entire company by yourself. You're closing a deal in the morning and debugging the product by lunchtime. Every hour spent on admin is an hour not spent on the part of the business that actually grows revenue.

That's the gap a new generation of AI agents is built to close. OpenClaw and Hermes Agent are open-source tools that run in the background, hold memory of your business, and act on tasks without waiting for you to ask twice. Pair either one with a handful of supporting tools, and you get something close to a small team, for the price of a few subscriptions.

Why solo founders need an agent, not another app

Most AI tools you've used so far live in a browser tab. You open Claude or ChatGPT, ask a question, get an answer, then close the tab. The assistant stops existing the moment you stop typing.

An agent works differently. Once you set up OpenClaw or Hermes Agent, it keeps running, checking a task list, remembering what happened yesterday, and acting on a schedule instead of waiting to be prompted. For a solo entrepreneur with no employees, that difference matters more than which model sits underneath.

An agent doesn't replace you. Ideally, it should absorb the tasks that would otherwise eat your day, things like triaging support email, drafting a weekly update, or chasing an unpaid invoice. That frees you up for the work only you can do.

OpenClaw or Hermes Agent: Picking your AI co-founder

Two open-source projects dominate this space right now. They take different approaches to the same problem.

OpenClaw is the older, larger, and more battle-tested of the two. It started as a weekend project by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger in late 2025.

In February 2026, Steinberger announced he was joining OpenAI and that OpenClaw would move to an independent foundation rather than staying tied to any single company. The project's GitHub repository now sits at 373,000 stars and 77,300 forks.

Hermes Agent takes the opposite bet. It launched in February 2026 from Nous Research, the lab behind the Hermes, Nomos, and Psyche model families. By mid-June, it had crossed 190,000 stars of its own.

Instead of chasing breadth, it focuses on depth. After every task, it evaluates how the work went, turns whatever worked into a reusable skill file, and pulls from that file the next time a similar job comes up rather than reasoning from scratch.

How they measure up

In our experience, the honest answer comes down to setup time versus patience. OpenClaw's web search and file tools tend to work immediately after a Docker setup, often the same day. A full Hermes Agent setup with memory and tools configured typically takes a few hours instead.

Start with OpenClaw if you want results fast. Choose Hermes if you're willing to spend a weekend up front for an agent that keeps improving at your specific workflows.

A growing number of operators don't pick just one. Some experienced users run OpenClaw as the orchestrator for planning and multi-step coordination, then hand fast, repeatable task loops to Hermes as an execution specialist, with the two agents communicating over a shared protocol. That setup is overkill for a first attempt, but it's worth knowing the option exists once a single agent starts to feel limited.

What this looks like in practice

The clearest public example of an agent running a one-person business is Felix, an OpenClaw agent built by entrepreneur Nat Eliason. In January 2026, Eliason gave the agent $1,000 in startup capital and its own X account, then told it to build something and sell it overnight. Felix responded by writing a playbook on how to hire an AI agent, building a website to sell it, and launching its own social presence.

Three weeks in, Felix had generated $14,718 in revenue. Within about two months, that figure had grown to roughly $177,000 across the original product, a skills marketplace called Claw Mart, and custom agent deployments built for other businesses.

Eliason still holds the API keys and reviews what the agent does. Day-to-day decisions, from pricing to outreach, run through Felix rather than through him.

Felix is an extreme case, built specifically to test how far one agent could go without a human in the loop. Most one-person businesses won't hand over a Stripe account on day one.

That's the right call for most of them. Even so, the same pattern applies at a smaller scale: give an agent its own accounts, a narrow task, and enough room to act without you checking in every hour.

Building the rest of the stack around your AI agent

An agent is only as useful as what it can plug into. Most one-person stacks pair OpenClaw or Hermes Agent with a handful of tools that already expose an API, a webhook, or an email address the agent can act through. None of these need to cost much.

Scheduling and communication

Calendly remains a common default for letting people book time on your calendar without the back-and-forth, with a free plan for individual use and paid plans starting at $10 per month. Point your agent at the same calendar so it can answer "when am I free" without you checking manually.

For day-to-day messages, the agent typically lives wherever you already work. Both OpenClaw and Hermes Agent connect natively to WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, and Discord, so you're adding a contact to a conversation you're already having, not a new inbox to check.

Invoicing and bookkeeping

Wave and FreshBooks cover most solo founders here. Wave's core invoicing and accounting tools are free, with charges kicking in only if you use its built-in payment processing. FreshBooks costs a monthly fee but adds time tracking and client portals, useful once you start billing by the hour.

Either way, give your agent read access to the invoice list rather than write access to your bank account. Letting it flag an overdue invoice and draft a reminder is a reasonable task. Letting it move money on your behalf is not, at least not yet.

Customer relationships and leads

HubSpot's CRM is free, with no time limit on the core plan. For a founder tracking a few dozen leads, that's enough to replace a spreadsheet without adding a subscription. As the pipeline grows, the agent can sit on top of it, drafting follow-ups, logging calls, and flagging deals that have gone quiet.

Content and social media

This is where an agent earns its keep fastest, because content work is repetitive and time-stamped. Point it at your newsletter platform, whether that's beehiiv, MailerLite, or ConvertKit. Give it a standing instruction to draft, not send, a weekly update from your week's notes.

You stay the editor. The agent stays the drafter.

Contracts and signatures

For anything that needs a signature, tools like PandaDoc or SignNow handle the legal side. Your agent can handle the busywork around it instead, generating the draft from a template, sending it out, and nudging a client who hasn't signed after a few days. We'd still keep a human checking the final terms before anything goes out the door.

AI guardrails you need before you go all-in

Running an autonomous agent is not the same as running a chatbot. The security record so far reflects that. A 2026 audit of OpenClaw's skill marketplace found 341 malicious entries out of 2,857 skills checked, traced largely to a single supply chain campaign known as ClawHavoc.

A separate vulnerability, CVE-2026-25253, scored 8.8 out of 10 on the severity scale and involved unsafe automatic connection behavior that could expose authentication tokens. Cisco has publicly described personal AI agents in this category as a serious risk for enterprise environments, specifically because of how much access they're given by default. Hermes Agent has reported no known critical vulnerabilities as of mid-2026, though that partly reflects its smaller install base rather than proven hardening over time.

Three habits cut most of that risk down to size:

• Give the agent its own accounts. A separate email address, a separate cloud storage folder, and separate API keys mean a mistake stays contained instead of spreading into your personal accounts.
• Start with one channel and one task. Let it manage a single Telegram conversation or a single invoicing workflow before connecting it to your bank, your CRM, and your domain registrar all at once.
• Keep it updated and keep it behind authentication. Both projects ship fixes quickly once a problem surfaces, but only if you're running a current version rather than an old build exposed to the open internet.

Treat the access you grant an AI agent the way you'd treat access for a new hire — useful from day one, but earned in stages rather than handed over all at once.

Getting started without breaking anything

Pick one agent and one task before you do anything else. People who've run these setups for months consistently recommend starting on the computer you already own rather than buying dedicated hardware, then moving to a small server later if the agent earns a permanent home.

Give it its own email address and a single connected channel, such as Telegram, before anything else. Ask it to handle one real task for a week: drafting follow-up emails, summarizing your inbox each morning, or chasing one recurring invoice. Once that task runs reliably without daily intervention, add the next one.

Treat the agent like a new employee rather than an extension of yourself. Give it accounts you'd be comfortable revoking, not your own logins.

That one habit prevents most of the damage a misconfigured agent could otherwise do. By the time you've added a second and third task, you'll have a clearer sense of which platform fits your workflow than any comparison article could give you, including this one.

The bottom line

Hiring your first real employee usually means payroll, onboarding, and months before they're fully useful. Setting up OpenClaw or Hermes Agent costs a few hours and, in OpenClaw's case, nothing beyond compute.

Obviously, the output won't match a skilled human on judgment calls, but for the repetitive parts of running a business, the gap is closing fast enough that a solopreneur can get their business out the door without overhiring before they are ready.

Start small, watch what the agent actually does with the access you give it, and expand from there. We've noticed the founders getting the most out of this approach aren't running the most complicated stack. They picked one agent, gave it one real job, and let it prove itself before adding the next.

You typed a few prompts into an AI tool and watched it build something that works. Maybe you've shown it to early users, or pitched it to investors who got excited about the demo. Now you're stuck on the harder question: is this thing actually safe enough to put in front of real customers?

The tools that got you this far were built for speed, not durability. Production means real payment details and real consequences when something breaks at 2 am.

This guide walks through the steps that close that gap, from auditing what the AI actually built to choosing where it finally goes live.

Why prototypes break once real users arrive

A vibe-coded demo and a production application can look identical on screen and still be entirely different things underneath. Veracode's 2025 GenAI Code Security Report tested output from more than 100 large language models and found that 45% of the code samples introduced a known security flaw.

Some of that risk has already turned into real incidents. A 2025 flaw in the AI app builder Lovable, tracked as CVE-2025-48757, left more than 170 live applications with exposed databases because the AI-generated backend skipped row-level security checks. A separate platform, Moltbook, leaked 1.5 million authentication tokens through improperly secured API responses.

Security isn't the only failure mode, either. In mid-2025, an AI coding agent on Replit deleted a live production database belonging to SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin, wiping out records for more than 1,200 executives and nearly 1,200 companies during an active code freeze.

None of this necessarily means AI-generated code is unusable. It means the gap between "it works on my screen" and "it works for everyone else" needs a deliberate process to close.

1. Audit what the AI actually built

Before changing anything, read through what you have. Open every page, every API route, and every database table, and get an honest picture of what's solid and what's held together with good intentions.

You're looking for a few patterns in particular. Business logic that lives inside front-end components instead of a proper backend layer, database tables with no clear ownership rules, and features that were quietly removed but left their API endpoints active are the most common issues vibe coding tools leave behind.

Pay close attention to your data model at this stage. Schema problems are simple to fix while you have a handful of test users, and expensive to fix once thousands of real accounts depend on the structure staying the same.

Check your dependencies while you're in there. AI coding tools tend to pull in libraries without explaining why. A project can end up with three different packages doing the same job, with none of them checked against known vulnerability databases before launch.

2. Close the security gaps first

Security should come before new features, not after. AI coding tools optimize for what works, not what's safe, so the gaps they leave are predictable and worth checking in order.

Start with secrets. GitGuardian's State of Secrets Sprawl report found that 28.65 million new credentials were leaked on public GitHub in 2025 alone. Most of those stay valid for years after they're exposed.

Search your codebase for API keys, database passwords, and tokens written directly into files, then move every one of them into environment variables that never reach the browser.

Authentication and authorization come next. Security researchers at Invicti have found that AI-generated apps repeatedly ship with authorization checks that are missing, weakened, or applied inconsistently across endpoints. The Cloud Security Alliance recommends verifying that every API route checks for a valid session before it does anything, and that user-supplied input gets sanitized before it touches a database query.

A short list to work through before you go any further:

• Every secret lives in an environment variable, never in client-side code
• Every API route checks who's calling it, not just whether they're logged in
• Database tables have row-level security or equivalent access rules, not just a flag that says it's enabled
• Form fields and URL parameters are validated server-side, not just in the browser
• Error messages shown to users don't leak stack traces or database structure

3. Set up real environments and version control

Most vibe-coded projects deploy straight to a single live URL, with no separation between testing and production. That setup works fine for a demo. It's also exactly what turned a routine mistake into the Replit database incident described above.

Set up at least two environments before you go further: a staging copy where changes land first, and production, which only gets updated deliberately. Most major tools, including Lovable, Bolt, and Replit, support exporting your code to GitHub, which gives you version history and a way to roll back a bad change in minutes rather than hours.

If you're not ready for a full CI/CD pipeline, even a simple two-question habit before every deployment helps: Did I test this in staging? Do I have a recent backup?

The point isn't bureaucracy. It's about having a way back if a change goes wrong.

4. Test beyond the happy path

AI tools are good at building the path you describe and bad at anticipating the one you didn't. Testing a vibe-coded app means deliberately trying to break it, not just confirming the obvious flow works.

Share the app with a handful of real users early, before every feature is polished. One founder building on Convex Chef found that users balked at an "anonymous login" pattern the AI had quietly baked into the architecture, a problem that would have been a quick fix at the prototype stage and a major refactor once real accounts depended on it.

Beyond user feedback, check what happens when two people edit the same record at once, or when an API call times out halfway through. These edge cases rarely show up in a demo. They're exactly what production traffic finds within days.

You can use the same AI tool that built the app to help write these tests, since describing a failure scenario in plain language is no different from describing a feature. Ask it directly to find the weakest points in what it built rather than only asking it to add new features, since those are different prompts with different incentives.

5. Choose your deployment and hosting setup

Most vibe coding platforms offer one-click hosting on their own subdomain, which is fine for sharing a demo and limiting it for a real product. Lovable, Bolt, and Replit each let you keep that built-in hosting or export to your own infrastructure on Vercel, Netlify, or a server you control.

The decision usually comes down to control versus convenience. Built-in hosting means faster updates and no DevOps work, but custom domains and SSO are often paid add-ons. You're also tied to that platform's uptime and pricing.

Exporting your code means more setup work upfront, but it gives you a portable codebase that doesn't disappear if the platform changes its terms or shuts down.

Portability also varies a lot between tools. One comparison of vibe coding platforms ranked v0 and Lovable as having the least platform lock-in thanks to standard React code and two-way GitHub sync, while some other builders couple your app more tightly to their own hosting and database setup. Check this before you build anything you intend to keep.

6. Monitor, back up, and plan ahead

Once you're live, the work shifts from building to watching. Set up basic logging so you can see what broke and when. Make sure error messages reach you rather than disappearing into a console no one checks.

Backups matter more than most people realize until they need one. Test your restoration process before you need it for real, not after. The Replit incident only ended well because Lemkin was eventually able to recover his database manually, after the AI agent first told him that recovery wasn't possible at all.

A practical pre-launch checklist

Vibe coding tools shrink the cost of building software, often by an order of magnitude. Independent estimates put a professional rebuild of a successful vibe-coded prototype at roughly $5,000 to $30,000, compared with $75,000 or more for an equivalent app built from scratch by an agency.

But that gap is worth paying once your app handles money, health information, or any data covered by regulation. It's also worth paying once you're adding features faster than you can verify they're safe, or once "I don't know why this works" becomes a regular answer to your own questions about your own product.

FAQs

"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.

ChatGPT thinks it knows what my next obsession will be — and after reading its explanation, I'm not entirely convinced it's wrong. In fact, it's a neat trick to try, and you might enjoy doing it with ChatGPT yourself by using the same prompt.

I asked the AI chatbot a simple question: "Based on everything you know about me, what hobby, interest, TV show, band, sport, or technology am I most likely to become obsessed with over the next six months?"

After clarifying with me that I wasn't referring to any professional interests and meant activities beyond work, ChatGPT came back with a somewhat surprisingly nuanced list. The top prediction was surprising: backyard astronomy.

"Of everything you've talked about, it has the highest future obsession potential," ChatGPT told me. "It combines learning, wonder, collecting, equipment, family memories, and a touch of childhood fascination. There's a telescope-shaped hole in your life that it will fill."

Astronomical fun

I have asked questions about telescopes, stargazing, and things to do with my son that do not involve staring at screens as part of other tests. Less obviously, I tend to prefer hobbies that reward curiosity and gradual improvement rather than immediate mastery. So it made sense.

And the AI was happy to lay out ideas for getting into the hobby, including local astronomy clubs and public observation nights, and of course, links to equipment to buy. What struck me most was that astronomy was not presented as a random recommendation. It emerged from a pattern. The prediction was less about stars and planets than about the kinds of activities that consistently grab my attention.

That same logic showed up elsewhere on the list. Board games landed near the top of ChatGPT's list, for instance. The reasoning was not so much because of discussions about playing board games specifically, but more because, according to the AI, I often look for activities suitable for Family outings and weekends, as well as screen-free entertainment.

Bird is the word

Not everything on the list made sense for my life, simply because ChatGPT doesn't know everything about my daily life. For example, I've discussed getting better at guitar with the AI, but haven't really said anything about my daily practice and current efforts. So, while guitar being on the list wasn't a crazy notion, it would have been more relevant a couple of years ago.

The appearance of birding on the list was much more unexpected, as I don't recall ever expressing an interest in birds with the AI. But ChatGPT explained that it stems from the same reasons it thinks I like astronomy as a hobby, mainly how they both require observation, patience, collecting knowledge, and becoming excited about things that look nearly identical at first. I'm not sure that it will be something I take up, but I can't deny the notion that it might be fun.

On the other hand, the AI could be wildly off about my potential interests. According to ChatGPT, I am "a strong candidate to become obsessed with the Grateful Dead." I have no problem with the band or its music, but it will never be a sound I choose to listen to independently. According to ChatGPT, the recommendation was more about the culture surrounding the music, its deep history and lore, the passionate fans, and the huge back catalog. But while I may like exploring complex and deep worlds of hobbies, it still has to be a subject I'm interested in. So, while I may start spending my nights looking at the stars, the soundtrack will have to be something else.

Spoilers for Dutton Ranch episode 7 ahead.

As far as fictional parties go, 10 Petal ranch's 190-year anniversary bash in Dutton Ranch episode 7 was pretty tame.

Most of it went without a hitch, with even Beth (Kelly Reilly) and Rip (Cole Hauser) blending into the background. Rob-Will (Jai Courtney) returned home to bully mom Beulah (Annette Bening) into changing her plans for the ranch's successor... and it works.

Shortly after Beulah announces that Rob-Will will be taking her place — and almost everybody else around them has objected — Beulah falls to the floor, potentially on the brink of death.

All has yet to be revealed in the Yellowstone spinoff, but Dutton Ranch fans have been distracted by something (and someone) much more unfulfilling. Does the new Paramount+ show need a drastic shakeup already?

Dutton Ranch fans want to see less of Carter — and his painful on-off romance with Oreana

Yep, that's right — Dutton Ranch fans are practically begging for Beth and Rip's adopted "son" Carter (Finn Little) to have less screentime.

"I know I should care about Carter as I used to on Yellowstone. But in my opinion, there are too many scenes with him and not enough of the other characters. Honestly, he bores me," one fan posted on Reddit.

A second agreed, "His character is poorly written this time and that combined with Oreana (Natalie Alyn Lind) makes it a hard watch. I hope it develops a bit but I don't expect too much."

"Yeah, teenage angst is not why I watch," a third chipped in.

Up until episode 5, Carter's healthy screentime made sense. He needed to get settled into Rio Paloma, and he's the only character who actively protests against the family's move from Montana.

He was also embroiled in the death of Dwight (Ray McKinnon), which has emphasized his internal battle between being a boy and a man. But for many, it's this that is Dutton Ranch's "toughest watch."

"Love the show but I hope the high school subplot ends soon," one fan writes, as another adds, "I get the whole teenage angst thing. But he's still an annoying little sh*t."

A third weighs in, "I was hoping the Dwight situation would be a subplot like Joe Exotic or something interesting. The older gf looks 30 and it’s not as interesting unless Beth goes after her soon and takes care of it."

With Oreana now seemingly gravitating towards another love interest, Carter's teen angst could actually be kicked up a notch. But with two episodes of Dutton Ranch left to go, anything is possible.

Summer is here, and there’s one thing you need to take your barbecues, beach trips, and festivals to the next level: a Bluetooth speaker.

That’s right, a portable speaker is sure to bring the vibe up — well, if you’ve got one that’s actually good. And believe me, there are a lot of models out there that really aren’t worth your time. Whether it’s an unbranded speaker that only costs $15 / £15 and produces distorted sound, or an overpriced luxurious alternative, you’ll want to steer clear of the slop.

Luckily, I’ve tested more than 50 Bluetooth speakers, so I know good value when I see it. And today, I’m here to share three of my very favorite portable speakers with you, all of which are well worth their asking price, and excel in crucial areas like sound quality, design, and feature-set. So, want to ensure you get a high quality audio companion for the summer? Look no further than these top picks.

1. The ultra-cheap option: Tribit Stormbox Micro 3

I could’ve easily given this one to the JBL Go 5, but spoiler alert: JBL is featuring later on in this list — and hey, it’s good to get a bit of variety in there, right? And so, enter the Tribit Stormbox Micro 3, which is easily among the best Bluetooth speakers in the ultra-cheap category.

This palm-sized speaker offers a lot more quality than you’d expect at its moderate price point. What grabs you first is its seismic bass output. But don’t be fooled: this isn’t the bloated, overstated low-end that a lot of budget speakers produce — it’s impactful and commanding. This is great for genres with pumping bass like House and other electronic genres, for instance.

What’s more, this speaker is IP68-rated, meaning that it’s fully dustproof, and can survive a 30-minute-long dunking in a meter and a half of water. It's also made of a rough and ready fabric material, and is drop-proof, which, paired with its compact size, makes the Stormbox Micro 3 the ultimate speaker to take out and about.

Another real highlight is the Stormbox Micro 3’s 24-hour battery life, which is absolutely exceptional. For reference, that’s double the amount you’d get with the Bose SoundLink Micro Gen 2, and while that model may offer slightly more detailed mids and more expressive treble, its underwhelming bass and high price means I’d pick the Stormbox Micro 3 every time.

2. The mid-range maestro: JBL Flip 7

The JBL Flip 7 is one of those pieces of tech that seems too good to be true — except it isn’t.

It supplies sound far greater than you’d expect for its size, with huge yet controlled bass, powerful yet detailed mids, and vibrant yet articulate highs. The Flip 7’s dual-driver configuration and 35W max power output also helps it to get surprisingly loud, making it a versatile option for either bedroom listening or a party environment.

In addition, the Flip 7 is compatible with Auracast, enabling you to easily connect to other JBL speakers, there’s USB-C lossless audio support, and again, IP68 dust and waterproofing for on-the-go use. Sprinkle in a high-quality build, AI Sound analysis for optimized audio, and a neat array of color options, and the Flip 7 really does feel like the full package.

Usually, the Flip 7 will cost you about $149 / £129 / AU$179, but it goes on sale quite a lot of the time — even when writing this article, I spotted it going for less than $100 / £100 / AU$150, which is unspeakably good value for money.

3. The premium powerhouse: Marshall Kilburn III

Let’s finish up with the speaker I always reach for at my desk: the Marshall Kilburn III. This beautiful amp-inspired model is a true work of art, with faux-leather casing, a gorgeous metallic speaker grille, and eye-catching golden details. But it’s a lot more than a pretty face.

Yes, the Kilburn III sounds exceptional even with the lack of higher-res Bluetooth codecs like LDAC or aptX Adaptive. It serves up deep, regimented, almost moving bass, well-separated mids, and controlled highs, and there’s a great sense of balance right across the frequency range. The Kilburn III also makes use of Marshall’s “true” 360-degree stereophonic sound, which means the speaker has no real sweet spot — it sounds fantastic from all angles.

One of the things I love most about the Kilburn III, however, is its S-tier battery life. You get a mammoth 50 hours of playtime here, and there are also battery health options that you can activate in the Marshall Bluetooth app. On top of this, you get a 3.5mm port for wired listening, a USB-C port that enables you to charge external devices, and there’s even a placement compensation feature for getting optimized audio, no matter where your speaker sits.

At $379 / £299 / AU$599, this is by no means the cheapest speaker on the market, but I’ve seen it go on sale for less than $300 / £250 / AU$500 before. And if you’re looking for something with a touch of class, then it really doesn’t get much better than the Marshall Kilburn III.

If you're looking for the very best Dolby Atmos movies to show off what your that home system you've lovingly researched and chosen can do, then there's a smart list of the 'top 100' options available on a site called Hello Atmos.

This top 100 was curated by the creator of Hello Atmos in order to find the 'consensus' list of the movies that get recommended the most often. It's based on published reviews and lists of great Atmos movies (including ours), plus community recommendations from platforms like Reddit, in the many many threads where people ask for recommendations.

It's all pulled into an algorithm designed by the app's creator, Adrian Wrona, to rank the movies based on how strongly they're recommended, and resulting in the top 100 list.

You can read the full list just below, or see it on the Hello Atmos site, which also includes where you can stream the movies in your country (though it's TechRadar's stance that uncompressed audio from the best 4K Blu-ray players is the only way to really show off your system).

While like any best-of lists there's plenty of opportunity for an argument — is Blade Runner 2049 still a better showcase than Dune? Why isn't Dredd higher up the rankings? — it's a great and eclectic guide to some of the best sounding spatial audio soundtracks, with details of who did the mixing, which is a nice touch.

We've written about Adrian before; another tool on Hello Atmos scans your Apple Music or Spotify playlists to identify which ones are available in Atmos, which is great if you want to really explore spatial audio for music.

The 100 best Dolby Atmos movies, as rated by Hello Atmos

1. Blade Runner 2049
2. Dune
3. Mad Max: Fury Road
4. Ready Player One
5. The Batman
6. Top Gun: Maverick
7. Dune: Part Two
8. Gravity
9. Ford v Ferrari
10. A Quiet Place
11. The Matrix
12. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
13. Pacific Rim
14. 1917
15. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
16. Edge of Tomorrow
17. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
18. Fury
19. Midway
20. Saving Private Ryan
21. Deepwater Horizon
22. Bohemian Rhapsody
23. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
24. A Quiet Place Part II
25. Civil War
26. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
27. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
28. Twister
29. Godzilla vs. Kong
30. Roma
31. No Time to Die
32. Transformers
33. Hacksaw Ridge
34. Oblivion
35. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
36. Prey
37. Alita: Battle Angel
38. TRON: Legacy
39. Baby Driver
40. Warfare
41. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
42. Godzilla Minus One
43. Gran Turismo
44. John Wick: Chapter 4
45. Hans Zimmer: Live in Prague
46. Kong: Skull Island
47. Ambulance
48. Twisters
49. Unbroken
50. John Wick

51. Avengers: Endgame
52. Jurassic Park
53. Apocalypse Now
54. Blade Runner
55. First Man
56. Man of Steel
57. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
58. The Fifth Element
59. Soul
60. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
61. Black Hawk Down
62. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
63. John Wick: Chapter 2
64. Dredd
65. Star Trek Into Darkness
66. Deadpool
67. Nope
68. Sinners
69. Brave
70. Doctor Sleep
71. WALL·E
72. F1
73. War of the Worlds
74. Mission: Impossible - Fallout
75. Us
76. Alien: Romulus
77. Everest
78. Star Wars: The Force Awakens
79. Avatar: The Way of Water
80. Ghostbusters: Afterlife
81. 6 Underground
82. Avengers: Infinity War
83. Ballerina
84. Aquaman
85. Titanic
86. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
87. The Guns of Navarone
88. Aliens
89. Nosferatu
90. Uncut Gems
91. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
92. Back to the Future
93. Suspiria
94. Overlord
95. Top Gun
96. Sicario
97. 300
98. Evil Dead Rise
99. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
100. A Quiet Place: Day One

The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra is a balanced flagship phone, but can it compete with Ultra-branded camera phones from China? To find out, I pitted the best Samsung phone against the Oppo Find X9 Ultra, which is widely considered the best camera phone available right now. But while the Oppo flagship was the favorite going into my photo walk, the Samsung surprised me in a few ways.

With the S26 Ultra, the Korean giant doubled down on software and bundled it with larger apertures on two sensors, whereas Oppo went all-in on hardware upgrades and paired them with meaningful software advancements. It also added 10x optical zoom, making the Find X9 Ultra the only Ultra phone with this feature in 2026. Oppo says its 10x telephoto camera is 3x more light-sensitive than the Galaxy S23 Ultra's 10x camera.

The resulting camera system beats the Galaxy S26 Ultra in most scenarios, but Samsung's flagship phone surprised me on multiple occasions. It's certainly a better camera phone than the Galaxy S25 Ultra, despite having seemingly similar hardware.

Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra vs. Oppo Find X9 Ultra: Specs

The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra covers 13-111mm focal lengths. It has a 50MP 13mm f/1.9 ultra-wide camera with a 1/2.5-inch sensor, a 200MP 23mm f/1.4 main camera with a 1/1.3-inch sensor, a 10MP 67mm f/2.4 3x telephoto camera with a 1/3.94-inch sensor, and a 50MP 111mm f/2.9 5x periscope telephoto camera with a 1/2.52-inch sensor. It looks formidable until you see what Oppo has on offer this year.

The Find X9 Ultra covers focal lengths from 14mm to 230mm. It has a 50MP 14mm f/2 ultra-wide camera with a 1/1.95-inch sensor, a 200MP 23mm f/1.5 main camera with a 1/1.2-inch sensor, a 200MP 70mm f/2.2 3x telephoto camera with a 1/1.28-inch sensor, and a 50MP 230mm f/3.5 10x telephoto camera with a 1/2.75-inch sensor.

I took more than 500 photos on each phone and narrowed down this comparison to 25 images. Here's how the two Ultra phone cameras compare:

Main camera

Both Samsung and Oppo shoot pixel-binned images from their 200MP sensor by default. I recommend using a higher resolution mode (like 24MP or 50MP on the Galaxy S26 Ultra and 50MP on the Oppo), but I kept the default settings for this comparison.

The Galaxy S26 Ultra boosts color saturation to add a pop, whereas Oppo's shots look more natural. While I like Samsung's contrast, there's some artificial color sharpening going on, making it look less natural.

On the other hand, the Find X9 Ultra gives you a more pleasing bokeh, thanks to a bigger sensor. Both phones captured good amount of details, as you can see the texture on the leaves.

However, I prefer Oppo's color science and Master Mode, which give me natural tones with minimal phone-like color processing.

In evening shots, the Galaxy S26 Ultra gave my photos a teal hue, whereas the Find X9 Ultra had a pink hue. My skin tone was better captured by the Oppo phone, and it had more details. In comparison, the Samsung shot looks slightly noisy and less appealing overall.

Samsung has been working on improving its night mode photos for a few years now, and the Galaxy S26 Ultra beats its rivals in this scenario on most occasions. I want my low-light photos to look like low-light shots instead of artificially brightened photos. That's why I like Samsung's saturated colors on the entrance board versus Oppo's brightened picture quality at night.

However, if you switch to the Master Mode, things change drastically. The Find X9 Ultra handles night light well and doesn't overexpose the shots to brighten every detail. In my testing, Master Mode consistently delivered better results than Oppo's default processing, and I relied on it for night shots.

Telephoto cameras

This is one of the scenarios where Samsung surprised me. I like its cooler tone versus Oppo's warmer look, which gave my skin a yellow tint. It doesn't look bad, but I'm simply not that pale. Again, this could be fixed by using the Master Mode, but I expected better color science from the default processing. However, Oppo's shot captured rich details as compared to a slightly smoother-looking skin on the Samsung flagship.

In challenging lighting situations like the above, when the setting sun was directly hitting my face, Samsung processed the photo better than Oppo.

The Galaxy S26 Ultra managed to get the golden hour look, while the Find X9 Ultra's shot looks washed out. Both photos were captured with tap and shoot, so the focus was set, and the cameras didn't struggle to find the subject automatically. Again, I wish Samsung captured more details with a more natural-looking bokeh. It looks soft and slightly artificial in comparison to the Oppo's.

Oppo's bigger lens and smarter processing comes in handy when you need rich details in shots like above. Samsung struggled to focus on the thick webbing, while the Find X9 Ultra focused and captured even the single strands. And this extends to the 10x telephoto camera.

Oppo demolishes the Galaxy S26 Ultra in macro shots. This was a tricky subject because the small flower kept moving in the slightest breeze. I struggled to get it in focus with the Galaxy S26 Ultra, which it simply couldn't do. That's why I don't have a comparison photo for this shot. The Oppo Find X9 Ultra, by contrast, focused on the same subject with a single tap and even captured those white threads in the picture.

One of the reasons I love having big telephoto cameras, like the one on the Find X9 Ultra, is that they allow me to get so close to small subjects and capture things I'd never be able to focus on with my eyes. Oppo's macro mode is right up there with Vivo's, and Samsung doesn't have a match for it.

Ultra-wide camera

When it comes to my ultra-wide testing, the Oppo Find X9 Ultra was able to get more contrast and highlight the blues of the sky without blowing out the green leaves as the Galaxy S26 Ultra did.

Overall, I prefer Oppo's shot here because it has more details on the tree trunks and didn't overexpose the leaves. However, Samsung's processing focused on better exposing the leaves and didn't have the same halo effect as its rival.

Verdict

The Oppo Find X9 Ultra consistently captured richer details compared to the Galaxy S26 Ultra. However, the Samsung flagship stood its own and even beat the Oppo phone on a couple of occasions. While I prefer having bigger sensors, the Galaxy phone surprised me in the best ways.

That said, Oppo easily wins in most scenarios. It is, hands-down, the current king of smartphone telephoto cameras. TechRadar's Cameras Editor Timothy Coleman also compared the Find X9 Ultra to two dedicated cameras and concluded, "It feels like this flagship Chinese phone renders most travel zoom compacts redundant," which can't be said about the Galaxy S26 Ultra. The Master Mode is an added benefit if you like shooting film-like colors. I simply can't stop shooting with this phone.

I'm currently testing the Garmin Forerunner 170 Music to see if it merits inclusion in our best Garmin watch list. It's a recent release and stands as the successor to the excellent Garmin Forerunner 165, positioned as one of Garmin's cheaper watches, costing $299 / £259.99 / AU$479 for the version without music storage and $349.99 / £299.99 / AU$549 for the version with music storage.

As a more affordable device (for Garmin, anyway), it's made some concessions during construction, such as a cheaper plastic body without a metal bezel or back, and an older heart rate monitor, Garmin's Elevate V4 model. The more accurate Elevate V5 is reserved for more expensive watches, such as the Garmin Fenix 8.

This did concern me. The Elevate V4 is getting a little long in the tooth, and I wanted to make sure the Forerunner 170 Music was still up to snuff in the accuracy stakes. After all, what's the point of a running watch that isn't accurate?

To find out whether it was accurate, I ran on the treadmill for 25 minutes while wearing both the Garmin Forerunner 170 and the Polar H10 electrical heart rate monitor, which I wore across my chest. The H10 is considered the gold standard of heart rate measurement, far more accurate than the Garmin Forerunner 170, and is my go-to when testing wearables.

Here are the results:

Garmin Forerunner 170 Music vs Polar H10: accuracy test

As you can see, they're actually very close together in the heart rate categories, which is very encouraging. The Polar H10 chest strap read 154 bpm (beats per minute) as the 'average' heart rate across the workout, and 182 bpm as the maximum.

The Garmin Forerunner 170 Music recorded similar data, with a 150 bpm average and 182 bpm maximum. Both measurements were within 5 bpm of the Polar, a very acceptable margin of error.

Calories were a little different, but not by much. The Polar H10 recorded 344 calories burned, while the Garmin Forerunner recorded 316. This is under 10%, and other factors come into play here, such as the Garmin watch's accelerometer, which the Polar doesn't have — heart rate is only part of the story.

Based on these readings and the last few days of testing, I'm happy to say that the Garmin Forerunner 170 Music has proven very accurate so far. Stay tuned for my full review.

These days, if you're looking at tech news, it won't be long before you come across a mention of the RAM crisis. The dwindling supply of memory chips is proving increasingly problematic, and at this point, it seems that the AI industry hasn't just eaten the consumer's lunch, but also their dinner, pudding, and the little mints that usually arrive with the bill afterwards. And did it tip? Not likely.

I have got a tip for you, though – yeah, I know, smooth segue – or rather five tips as we face the inexorably on-rolling memory shortage, which is crushing all wallets in its path. In this article, I've picked out five pieces of computing hardware that I believe you should buy now, or in the very near future, before the PC component crisis — because it extends beyond mere RAM, of course — renders this hardware a good deal pricier.

Nothing is guaranteed in life, not even my expert predictions (ahem), so consider them with that in mind. But I'm making these recommendations — from MacBooks to SSDs — based on what's happened most recently in terms of said crisis, for good reasons that I'll expand upon when I come to each individual pick.

So here are my five devices or components which I believe you should move sooner rather than later with if they're on your shopping list. Bear in mind that with Amazon Prime Day just around the corner (and discounts on the go already), it could also be worth keeping an eye out for bargain deals at that retail giant.

1. Apple MacBooks — especially the MacBook Neo

Earlier this week, Tim Cook came forth with some information that everyone who's mulling buying a new Mac needs to know about. The Apple CEO told us that its products are going to get substantially more expensive before long, liberally sprinkling around words like "unavoidable" without going into any specifics.

Price hikes, and likely sizable ones, are coming to Apple's major products, then, and that includes MacBooks (as well as iPhones and probably iPads too, and more besides no doubt). What I'm particularly worried about though, as I discussed at the time, is what this could mean for the MacBook Neo.

Long story short: Apple ditched the entry-level Mac mini last month, the product which cost an enticing $599 (£599 / AU$999), making the next-tier-up model, which has twice the storage (512GB instead of 256GB), the cheapest option at $699 (£699 / AU$1,099). Might the same thing happen to the MacBook Neo? I believe there's a chance that Apple could mirror this move, because given the need to address MacBook pricing, when it comes to the Neo, applying a hike this early in the device's lifespan doesn't look good. Especially not when it's built entirely on its value appeal as a budget model.

So, a way of rejigging things without a price hike would be to just ditch the current entry-level Neo, just as happened with the Mac mini, leaving folks to pay a hundred notes more for the baseline model (while getting more storage, granted). Then this could be framed as a configuration adjustment rather than a cost adjustment.

With that in mind, the MacBook Neo at its current entry-level price might be a steal, and that's especially the case if you can get a bargain on the laptop. Indeed, there's already a good early Prime Day deal in the UK (at the time of writing) — and there may be others too.

Of course, there could be deals on other MacBook models, and just as with the Neo, it's likely a smart move to grab a bargain on a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, or any Mac you might be considering buying this year. All these PCs may be hit with what'll seemingly be substantial price hikes, and so I think buying now is very much the thing to do.

A MacBook Air M5 at $950 currently (the discounted price in the US on Amazon, again as I write this) might look pretty good compared to the Neo at $700 a little way down the road, potentially.

2. SSDs

My second port of call given recent rumblings with the component crisis is to grab a relatively affordable SSD if you can, though granted, this comes with caveats — it may not be easy to find one.

Still, I think it's worth trying — again, Prime Day might help here — and to pick an example, Samsung's 990 Pro SSD has been at reasonably palatable pricing (for the current climate) of late. Okay, so a current deal on the 1TB model costs about the same as the MSRP of the 2TB flavor before the RAM crisis hit, but still, a bit over $200 in the US is not bad in the overall picture.

And the thing to bear in mind here is that earlier this week, an exec in the SSD supply chain (a VP at Silicon Motion, which makes drive controllers) gave us an alarming soundbite that ran: "The retail SSD market has almost disappeared." With SSDs all being funneled towards data centers and OEMs (PC manufacturers), there's precious little left heading to the shelves where the average consumer can pick them up.

Unlike RAM, where price inflation may not have much further room to maneuver — given that consumers will just stop buying at some point — there is still some space for SSDs to rise. What the Silicon Motion VP said all sounds rather ominous, and points to a picture where the decent deals — relatively speaking — that we can get right now on SSDs may evaporate before too long.

3. External hard drives

This comes right off the heels of the above in the world of storage, as there's evidence pointing to a rise in hard drive prices. While as noted, SSD prices have shot up — especially for larger capacity or high-end models — hard drives hadn't really been affected, at least not until a few months ago.

Based on the findings of 3D Center, which monitors the German retail market, hard drives are becoming increasingly expensive. Last month, they were 34% more expensive than a year ago, and as of June 2026, that ante was upped distinctly to 58% (effectively a price increase of close to 20% in the span of a month).

So, if you need an external hard disk for your backups or NAS — or to provide extra capacity for your Mac with a small SSD — you might want to consider buying it now before price increases shift up another gear, which looks like what's going to happen.

4. Windows 11 laptops

MacBooks aren't all you need to worry about when it comes to price hikes, as naturally the broad upward pricing pressures on components affect all notebooks.

I previously wrote about why it's a good idea to buy a Windows 11 laptop now, following Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, predicting that the RAM crisis might spin onwards until the end of this decade.

The crux of the matter is that affordable notebooks are still very much a thing, especially during sales, but with the additional gloom cast on pricing woes in recent times — particularly by Huang, who is well placed to forecast — I feel there's a distinct danger that it could be harder to buy a cheap laptop before long.

I doubt you'll regret buying a Windows 11 laptop at today's prices, put it this way, particularly with a discount applied.

5. Graphics cards

Finally, if you're pondering a graphics card upgrade at some point going forward, this is another component that I reckon it'd be smart to grab soon.

While price increases for Nvidia GPUs have been more confined to higher-end models — products with more video memory (VRAM), which is where the pricing misery mainly stems from — I think that they'll apply more to mainstream cards as 2026 rolls on.

Why? For starters, I don't think it's a great sign that Nvidia is resurrecting half-decade-old GPUs from the generation before last to help bolster supply levels of its boards. (These RTX 3000 models use GDDR6 VRAM, which is a useful alternative memory vein to tap away from the GDDR7 that's in current-gen graphics cards). We've seen nasty hikes applied to the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB already, and the RTX 5070 price is creeping up too, based on the latest data from our sister site Tom's Hardware.

The RTX 5070 and RTX 5060 8GB can still be had at relatively palatable prices, though, so they may be a solid buy with a bit of a Prime Day discount in the offing perhaps. (Even if they aren't hugely well-liked GPUs, in all fairness, for one reason or another — the scant VRAM allocation being the main bone of contention for many gamers).

Where I'd be more inclined to look, though, is at the AMD RX 9070 XT. That GPU is in a similar position to the RTX 5070 in the US with a relatively mild (roughly) 10% price hike right now, the difference being that it packs 16GB of VRAM and considerably better performance (at least away from ray tracing).

We've seen some decent deals on the 9070 XT recently, and if you can grab one, I think that could be a great move as a GPU upgrade that'll last you. Particularly given that AMD's CEO Lisa Su has forecast pricing misery to come later this year, with Team Red serving up some relatively strong signals for the likelihood of incoming Radeon graphics card price hikes.