• Forrester analysts warn around four in five leaders and ITDMs envision having larger budgets in 2027
• Consumption-based AI pricing is making it harder to predict outlay
• Targeted investment to improve data quality is key

Forrester is predicting software budgets could be set to rise, with more than four in five leaders expecting to increase overall budgets over the next 12 months and 82% of tech decision-makers expecting larger budgets.

While some of the extra cash could come as a result of increased confidence and readiness to spend on tech, the company's analysts warn that a shift in pricing structures could also be forcing companies to fork out more.

This comes as software vendors shift from traditional per-seat licences to token or credit pricing, which introduces so many more variables including model selection, context size, output length and agent operating time, leading to far more unpredictable outgoings.

The real reason businesses are preparing to spend more on software

"Business leaders are no longer planning for a return to stability – they’re planning for a future where volatility is a constant,” Chief Research Officer Sharyn Leaver noted.

Recent shifts from major AI providers all point toward this emerging pricing model becoming the norm, with GitHub moving its Copilot plants to usage-based billing in June and OpenAI adding pay-as-you-go Codex seats in April. Anthropic also recently removed Fable 5 from its standard subscriptions and seat-based models over difficult-to-predict demand, but set out plans to reintroduce it where capacity permits.

Acknowledging these major shifts, Forrester's report reveals two areas where companies can increase their budgets for 2027 – building machine-readable context and enterprise knowledge, and increasing brand visibility in answer engines.

The report also hints at the major role AI can play in marketing and customer-facing experiences, and the potential use that synthetic data can provide subject to testing. All in all, it's more about targeting investments rather than throwing cash at the problem, as Leaver concludes:

"The organizations that outperform in 2027 won’t be those that spend the most on AI. They’ll be the ones that invest in the foundations that make AI effective."

In May, WordPress shipped the most consequential release in its history. Version 7.0 brought AI into the core of the CMS platform for the first time, and the people who built it made a choice that's easy to miss in all the noise about the feature itself. They left it switched off.

The infrastructure is in the codebase, but nothing reaches an AI service until the site owner connects a provider and turns it on. Upgrade a site and walk away, and it behaves exactly as it did the day before.

The on-switch was handed to the person who owns the site, not flipped on their behalf.

It's worth sitting with how deliberate that was. The team had just shipped the most powerful capability the platform has ever carried, and the posture they chose for it was opt-in, plugin-based, with nothing injected into anyone's site automatically.

In an industry that loves a sensible default, that restraint was itself a statement: this decision is yours to make.

Then the more interesting thing happened.

A reasonable instinct, taken one step too far

Within days of the release, SiteGround, one of the most established managed WordPress hosting companies in the business, did close to the opposite. It pre-installed and activated its own AI product across its customer base, configured it as the default connector, and bundled in a generous allowance of free usage to get people going.

The active-install count crossed a million almost immediately. Plenty of site owners logged in to find capable new software already running on sites they had never touched to put it there.

I want to be fair to SiteGround here, because fairness is where the useful lesson lives. This is a serious operator with a long, well-earned reputation, and the product it built is genuinely good, a real piece of engineering rather than a thin upsell. The reasoning behind the rollout isn't hard to reconstruct either.

The "correct" path to native AI is fiddly, and most people would stall somewhere in the middle and never finish it. Pre-installing the whole thing, free usage attached, removes that friction in a single stroke. From an operator's chair, that's a tempting piece of customer service, and I've sat in that chair for the better part of two decades. I understand the pull of it completely.

So this isn't a story about a company behaving badly. It's a story about a reasonable instinct (reduce friction, help the customer get to the good part faster) carried one step past the line. And the reaction told us exactly where that line is.

The objection wasn't AI. It was consent.

The pushback

The pushback was quick and pointed, and the striking thing about it was its subject. Almost none of it was about whether AI belongs in WordPress, or whether the tool was any good. Many of the people objecting use AI every day. What they objected to was finding it already switched on.

That distinction matters more than it first appears, because it separates two things the industry tends to blur: the quality of a change, and the consent to it. A genuinely good feature, installed without asking, still lands as something done to you rather than for you.

The standard defense (it's optional, you can remove it whenever you like) is all true, and none of it is the same as agreement. "We switched it on and you can switch it off" quietly moves the work of noticing, understanding, and undoing onto the customer, for a change they never approved. "Here's one-click setup if you'd like it" delivers the identical convenience and leaves the decision where it belongs.

This isn't a new tension. Webhosting companies have always made changes customers never see, and most of the time they're glad we do. But AI is going to surface this question over and over, because it's the most consequential thing most of us will ever be tempted to switch on by default. Getting the principle right now, while the stakes are still mostly reputational, is a lot cheaper than getting it wrong later.

The line worth holding

The honest objection to all of this is that hosts intervene on customer sites all the time, and nobody asks permission for that. True, and the distinction is the whole point.

When a host patches a vulnerability, blocks a malicious request, or disables a plugin that's being actively exploited, it's protecting the customer's site and the wider platform from harm. Customers extend us that trust precisely because it's defensive, narrow, and in their interest. Installing a new product is a different category of act.

It isn't protecting anything; it's changing what the website is. The trouble starts when the second borrows the permission we were granted for the first, when goodwill extended for security work quietly gets spent on shipping features. That's the line. Maintain the platform freely; change the product only with a yes.

Holding it doesn't mean making customers do more work. New capabilities can arrive off by default and one click away for anyone who wants them. Multi-site managers can get a single place to see and control what's running, rather than a hunt site by site.

Anything a host pushes can be pulled back as easily as it went out. And changes can be announced in plain language before they happen, including how to say no, because the absence of a clear, opt-out-inclusive heads-up is usually what turns an ordinary product decision into a breach of trust.

Parts of the ecosystem are already moving this way. None of it is anti-AI. If anything, it's what lets hosts lean into AI confidently, because customers can trust that nothing shows up uninvited.

Whose site is it, anyway?

As AI moves from novelty to default across the web, every host will face its own version of this question. Here's a genuinely useful new capability. Do we switch it on for everyone, or do we let people choose? The convenient answer and the right answer won't always be the same one, and the gap between them is where reputations are quietly made or lost.

It helps to remember who actually lives with the answer. When a host changes something on a site, the host moves on to the next ticket. The owner is the one who stays: the one whose visitor hits a page that behaves differently than it did the day before, whose inbox fills up when something looks off, whose name is on the business the site exists to represent. We get to make the change. They have to live with it. That asymmetry, more than anything written into the terms of service, is the real reason asking first isn't a nicety. It's an acknowledgement that the consequences were never ours to carry in the first place.

The site owners who pushed back this spring weren't standing against progress. Most of them, I'd wager, will happily adopt the very tooling they objected to, the moment they get to be the ones who switch it on. They were defending something simple that's easy to lose sight of when the technology is moving this fast: it's their site. Not the site we host for them. Theirs. A host's authority runs right up to the edge of the customer's ownership and stops there, and the best operators I've worked alongside never needed reminding of it. They saw their role as stewardship rather than possession.

That trust is the real product. Not the servers, not the dashboard, not even the support, though every bit of it matters. What a customer is buying is the confidence that nothing happens to their site that they didn't choose, and that when we do step in uninvited, it's to protect what's theirs and never to quietly redraw it. Trust like that takes years to earn and an afternoon to spend. Asking first is simply how you keep from spending it.

Get the boundary right, and AI in hosting becomes exactly what it should be: useful, and genuinely welcome. Get it wrong, and even the best feature in the world arrives as something taken rather than offered. The difference was never the technology. It was only ever whether anyone thought to ask.

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• A report commissioned by Mozilla accuses Microsoft of using 'harmful design' to undermine browser choice in Windows 11
• That allegedly includes trick wording, nagging, preselection, and generally dubious tactics to push Edge over other browsers
• The report does observe the situation is better in the European Economic Area, due to regulations there, and notes that "regulatory action works", urging authorities elsewhere to take a similar stand

Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, has published another report that claims Microsoft isn't maintaining a suitably level playing field for web browsers on Windows, and is unfairly pushing users towards Edge.

As Mozilla makes clear, it published the first 'Over the Edge' report – about 'How Microsoft's design tactics compromise free browser choice' – two years back, and the follow-up has just arrived (as spotted by Eteknix).

It's not actually written by Mozilla, I should note, but two independent researchers commissioned by the Firefox maker (Harry Brignull and Cennydd Bowles, the same pair who wrote the first article). It takes in user opinions from the US, UK, India and Germany regarding "key browser-choice journeys" on Windows 11 and 10.

In a nutshell, they conclude that: "Microsoft continues to deploy harmful design to undermine people's browser choice."

That specifically involves, according to the report: "Trick wording, obstruction, visual interference, preselection, nagging, and forced action — at almost every step of the user journey."

Some of the worst excesses highlighted are the pop-up banner that Edge users see when they go to the Chrome download page (trying to get them to stick with the Microsoft browser, which, it says, has the same tech as Chrome but with the "added trust of Microsoft"), and nagging within Windows around using Edge as the default browser in one way or another.

The report also notes how Edge is pre-pinned to the Windows taskbar, and how a migration from Windows 10 to Windows 11 resets Edge as the default browser, overriding any previous choice. There are a lot of accusations around trick wording, too, as well as an observation that Microsoft is using Copilot (AI) to open links in Edge rather than your default browser.

On the topic of AI, the report notes: "The researchers suggest that a sequence of seemingly minor consent requests across Windows and Edge may combine into a 'pipeline' funneling browsing data — potentially including data originating in rival browsers — into Microsoft's advertising and personalization systems."

It's notable that Germany — included as a representative country within the European Economic Area (EEA), which has different regulatory requirements Microsoft must adhere to — escapes quite a few of these excesses (the Chrome download nonsense included).

Despite that, the researchers argue that their broad conclusion that "Microsoft does not allow people to download and install an alternative browser, to set it as their default, or to continue using it as their default, without harmful interference" is, they claim, true "across every region tested".

Analysis: a call to regulate

Yes, this is a report commissioned by a browser rival, but these findings aren't at all surprising in the main, and it's long been known that Microsoft overzealously promotes Edge in Windows 11, trying various dubious shenanigans to get the browser in play as the report observes. Of course, on the flipside Google pulls similar stunts with Chrome.

Still, that's not an excuse, and no browser should be actively attempting to dissuade people from downloading another rival browser. What Mozilla is also pointing out, of course, is that Microsoft is in a particular position of power here, given that it owns the world's primary desktop OS, and it's leveraging that platform in various ways to push adoption of Edge.

Whether that's worked for Microsoft, or not — spoiler alert, it hasn't — is irrelevant, as this behavior obviously isn't ethical or fair, and while it may not have dented Chrome's reign as the top browser, it may have damaged smaller rivals like Firefox.

While the EEA may have a considerably better balance of browser equality within Windows, the report notes that this is, of course, because regulations have forced Microsoft's hand. Arguably, this is another negative in that it shows Microsoft only respects user choice in terms of browsers when it's forced to do so.

Mozilla finishes with the following paragraph that sums everything up nicely: "We again urge Microsoft to abandon these harmful patterns worldwide. And we urge regulators in the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, India, and beyond to consider this report as evidence that regulatory action works — there is much still to do."

So, if Microsoft really wants to talk about "added trust", how about some action on some of these sticking points? Or is this just a case of having to be more trustworthy than Google?

The software industry has always been shaped by new tools that promise speed and efficiency. From high-level languages to cloud infrastructure, each wave of innovation has reduced friction and raised expectations. The current wave is AI-generated code, but this new era of innovation is different in both scale and consequence.

For the first time, developers can produce large amounts of working software without fully understanding how it functions. This shift is creating a new challenge that engineering leaders are only beginning to articulate, a concept we’ll call comprehension debt.

Technical debt is a familiar concept. Teams knowingly trade long-term maintainability for short-term delivery and accept the cost later. Comprehension debt is a similar concept but where that debt resides is different.

Whereas with technical debt is located within a codebase, comprehension lives in the people building the systems. When developers ship software faster than they can truly understand it, the gap between output and understanding of the codebase widens. Over time, that gap can grow to be a serious organizational risk.

This tension is already visible across the industry. The most recent Developer Survey found that 84% of developers use or plan to use AI tools in their workflow, yet 75.3% say they do not fully trust AI-generated answers.

The findings highlight a growing contradiction at the center of modern software development: teams are increasingly dependent on AI, while remaining cautious about the quality and reliability of its outputs.

The disappearance of productive friction

For decades, the early years of a developer’s career were shaped by friction. Junior engineers learned by wrestling with compiler errors, reading documentation, and debugging unfamiliar systems. The process was often frustrating, but it helped developers build mental models of how software behaves and understand not just what worked, but why it worked.

Today, AI tools remove a good deal of friction. A junior engineer can generate a functional service, build an interface, and resolve common errors within minutes. The experience feels empowering and productive, but the friction was never purely an obstacle, it also acts as a teacher. When that struggle disappears, some of the learning disappears with it.

This does not mean the next generation of developers will know less. In many ways, they will be exposed to more complex systems earlier in their careers. However, developers may begin to feel productive before they have gained the deeper intuition that traditionally comes from years of problem solving and debugging. The sense of progress may outpace genuine understanding.

Faster progression, weaker foundations?

AI is also reshaping career development. Traditionally, engineers progressed from writing small pieces of code to reasoning about complex systems and eventually designing architectures.

AI compresses the earliest stages of that journey and engineers are able to contribute sooner and move more quickly towards higher levels of responsibility. In the short term, this looks like success with teams being able to deliver faster, and organizations expand their talent pipelines.

The long-term risk arises down the road, when organizations find themselves with engineers who can produce solutions quickly but struggle when those solutions fail in unexpected ways. Debugging, architectural thinking, and systems design all rely on deep mental models that are built slowly through experience. If those foundations are weaker, the consequences may only emerge months or even years later.

Enter vibe coding

Alongside this shift, the explosion of vibe coding as a practice, which entails a workflow built around prompts, rapid iteration, and intuition rather than deliberate engineering, has further exacerbated comprehension debt. There is genuine value in the vibe coding approach. Rapid experimentation has always driven innovation, and AI has the ability to unlock creativity in remarkable ways.

The danger appears when this becomes the default mode of production rather than a tool for exploration. When speed becomes the dominant priority, understanding can quietly become optional. Teams may accept generated code without fully reviewing it, and systems may be deployed that few people feel confident enough to explain in detail. The result is not immediate failure, but a gradual erosion of collective understanding.

Some skepticism about new tools is inevitable. Every generation has worried that higher levels of abstraction would weaken engineering skills. However, AI introduces an important difference. Previous tools abstracted complexity while still requiring developers to reason about behavior.

AI can now generate working solutions without the developer forming the underlying mental model at all. That changes not only how software is written, but also how expertise develops.

Building AI-native engineering cultures

The answer is not to resist AI adoption as the benefits are too significant to ignore, and organizations that fail to embrace these tools risk falling behind. The real challenge is adopting AI while protecting the growth of genuine understanding.

Some organizations are beginning to view comprehension as an explicit goal rather than an assumed outcome. Engineers are encouraged to explain generated code in their own words and document the reasoning behind AI-assisted decisions. This approach reinforces that understanding is part of the deliverable, not a nice to have.

Code review is evolving too. Historically, the focus was whether the code worked and met quality standards. Increasingly, teams are also asking whether the developer truly understands what they have produced and review conversations are shifting towards explanation, walkthroughs, and shared learning.

Hands-on learning also remains essential. Some teams are intentionally creating environments where AI plays a secondary role, whether through debugging exercises, architecture discussions, or smaller projects built from scratch. The goal is not to reduce productivity, but to preserve the experiences that build engineering intuition over time.

The most effective organizations are not choosing between AI and traditional development, but rather thoughtfully combining the two approaches. AI is increasingly used for repetitive tasks and scaffolding, while humans retain responsibility for critical thinking, system design, and architectural judgement.

This moment places a new responsibility on engineering leaders. Productivity is accelerating rapidly, yet learning must keep pace. If we succeed, AI will help create a generation of developers who build faster and think more deeply than ever before.

If we fail, we risk creating teams capable of shipping almost anything, yet uncertain about how the products they build truly work or how to fix them when something inevitably goes wrong.

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For the longest time, I thought that, despite their annoyances, iPhones had something big over the best Android phones: PC connectivity. I'd always seen iPhone and Mac-owning friends quickly send files between the two, and assumed it was an Apple-exclusive feature.

As it turns out, this isn't true. Android users can use a Windows app that brings loads of really useful features — and it's really underutilized, which is why a tech journalist like me hadn't heard of it.

This software is called Phone Link, and we've got a guide on how to connect your Android phone to a Windows PC using Phone Link elsewhere on TechRadar. I downloaded it about a year ago, largely out of duty to test every tool, appliance, and gadget I could get my hands on. I was expecting it to last a weekend.

A year on, though, and Phone Link has become such a useful part of my workflow that I'd forgotten it's something not everyone's heard about. It's such a natural part of the way I use my phone and computer that I'd totally forgotten it was something I initially downloaded to test!

Well, no longer: TechRadar has let me wax lyrical about Phone Link, and I'm going to give the tool its time in the sun.

Sending photos from phone to PC

For the most part, whenever I want to connect my phone to my PC, it's to move pictures between the two devices.

As a smartphone journalist, you can understand that I'm sending snaps from my phone to my computer a lot. Sometimes it's camera samples from a mobile I'm testing that I want to upload for a review. Occasionally, I want to back up pictures I really like before I wipe a phone and send it back to the company.

The most frequent use case, though, is to transfer to my PC pictures I've taken on one phone, of another. I use smartphones to do review photography, and it's a great way to test out a phone I'm reviewing.

Before Phone Link, I'd have to use a USB cable to connect my phone to my computer — approving the connection on my Android's end, because they're always annoyingly suspicious — and drag and drop all the relevant pictures into a folder on my computer. It's not an especially onerous process — it's a lot quicker than when I used to use Google Drive to transfer pictures, for instance — but it takes a little while of fiddling with my phone and digging out a cable to work.

Not so with Phone Link. Its Photos tab shows a big old list of all the pictures you've taken recently, giving you options to save them to your PC, open them in an editing app, and share them with others.

These pictures appear as soon as you take them, as long as your phone is on the same Wi-Fi as your computer. I've become used to taking photos in one room of my home, and entering my office, to see them linked up on Phone Link, ready for an edit. When I've got PC notifications turned on, I can even hear the 'bong' of my computer telling me they've arrived.

Phone Link also lets you browse the contents of your mobile in the Files tab, where it appears in the Devices and drives list alongside any cloud or local drives you have. I don't use my phone to handle non-photo files, but it's a nice touch that'd be really useful if I were in another line of work.

Apps on my PC

Ostensibly, one of the main uses for Phone Link is that it lets you open your smartphone apps on your computer. Its Apps page shows you a massive list of every one you have installed on your mobile, and clicking on it opens it in a window.

This doesn't override anything you have going on on your phone; if you're using it as a second screen to watch a YouTube video or act as a music player (one of many ways you can repurpose an old Android phone), the app will open in your PC window alone.

When I first started Phone Link, I tried using it for everything, but often bounced straight off. In many circumstances, using a smartphone is simply more intuitive than using a mouse and keyboard, given that phone apps are designed for thumbs. But over time, I've found a few uses of Phone Link's app windows that are genuinely handy.

As mentioned, one of those uses is as a music player. I can let Spotify hang around as a spare window, ready to skip tracks or change playlists when I want. It's also useful as a way to check apps that don't have PC equivalents, like Too Good To Go or Mubi Go, or ones that do have web functions but are easier on the phone, like my national health service's app.

There's one way that Phone Link saved me hours, though. When I used to work for a company that didn't let you use your work Gmail account on personal computers, Phone Link was my workaround to still see emails on my PC. This saved me ages each day; time that'd otherwise be taken up checking and replying to emails on my phone, or trying to get my decrepit work laptop to turn on.

Naturally, you can manage your calls and texts via Phone Link too. Personally, I don't think I've sent an SMS or made a non-WhatsApp voice call since the 2010s, but I'm sure there are some people who'd find this handy.

I also appreciate a notification list down the left side of Phone Link. This transforms it from being software solely for controlling your mobile to a veritable hub of information from your handset. I'll often keep it up on my second monitor; it makes good use of its space.

Controlling my phone from my computer

As mentioned, you can use your computer to control your mobile's apps via Phone Link, but you can also use it to change the actual settings of the device itself, which proves itself useful in an entirely different way.

Phone Link lets you monitor your phone status; I can see how it's connected to other devices, what battery it's on, and whether it's currently paired with Phone Link or not. I can even see a little representation of what my wallpaper currently is. All useful to a small degree, but the charge is the only one of those that's seriously useful.

What's more important are the status controls. You can toggle between vibrate, sound, and silent, turn Do Not Disturb on and off, and turn on the media player.

From a cursory mention of the tools, these might not sound that important, but I've found them really useful in a pinch. I'm constantly forgetting to mute my phone before I go on a video meeting, and a quick click of the Do Not Disturb button means I'm not going to have unexpected calls.

As a lazy person, I also love the fact that you can use Phone Link to play a sound from your phone; I'm always doing this instead of spending five seconds actually looking.

My one gripe with Phone Link is that I still need my phone with me to use it. When you start using it each session, you're required to unlock your device and approve the connection. But this is a small price to pay for the transformational effect it's had on my workflow — and I hope that you, too, consider giving it a try.

• Windows 11's July update has arrived
• It packs some smart features, including pausing updates at length and a new recovery option
• This patch also cures a nasty bug that slowly eats more and more drive space, but there's an issue to be aware of for Dell laptop owners

Microsoft has released its monthly patch for Windows 11 and the July update is a biggie, packing a feature that I've been awaiting for quite some time.

That would be the ability to pause updates on Windows 11 Home – beyond just a short period of time, which has been the only choice to date – and there are some other impressive additions from Microsoft here.

I'm going to pick out my top four features introduced by the July update, as well as rounding up some of the other more notable changes here. I'll also highlight an important bug fix that has been deployed for a nasty flaw that eats your drive space – along with a warning for some of those with a Dell laptop (who may not get this update for a good reason, as you'll see).

As ever, these changes were seen in the last optional update (June preview), and most of these features are being rolled out gradually, so you may not see them right away after installing this update (indeed, you may have to wait a while based on how the update winds blow regarding your exact PC configuration).

1. Pausing updates

Sometimes you want to hold off installing an update because of a bug that you're nervous about potentially affecting your system, and up until now, Windows 11 users have only been able to avoid any given update for five weeks.

Okay, so that's a fairly long time, but what if the bug is one of those persistent and niggly affairs that Microsoft takes an age to fix? You may want to delay the update beyond five weeks, and now you can. The catch is that you'll need to continually renew the delay for every 35-day period, but nonetheless, you can now keep an update at bay for as long as you want. (Well – until you're forced to update to a new version of Windows 11, that is, when support runs out for your current version).

2. Point-in-time restore

Another neat addition is point-in-time restore, a new recovery option that you can employ when something bad happens to your PC and you can no longer reach the desktop. Point-in-time restore lets you roll back a non-functioning system to a previous working state. It reverts to the "full system state" meaning that all your apps, files, and settings are recovered as captured at that previous time.

Hopefully this is a feature that you'll never need, but if you do, you'll be very glad of it. Note that the system backups obviously take up drive space, with older backups automatically deleted after 72 hours by default. Also, if you have a system drive that's smaller than 200GB, you'll have to enable this feature yourself (as it won't be turned on automatically due to potential space issues – note that you can specify a maximum amount of storage space used).

3. Fewer annoyances with widgets

The July update is making the widgets panel 'quieter' by which Microsoft means that it has cut out a lot of clutter. The main change is that by default the panel just displays your widgets and Microsoft has got rid of the promotional nonsense in terms of ads and the MSN feed. Notifications and taskbar badges are also minimized by default, and widgets no longer open when you hover over them.

There are some other streamlining moves here, and even if you don't use widgets, I think this is a noteworthy change as it shows the direction Microsoft is now heading in with Windows 11 – chilling out on the upselling as was previously promised (if not entirely banishing it).

4. Screen tint

Windows 11 has been graced with a number of accessibility improvements in the July update, first of which is a new screen tint ability. This does what it says on the tin, allowing you to tint the screen with a choice of colors to help reduce eye strain, or to make text more easily readable. You can adjust the tint intensity, and this is a very useful addition that'll save people from downloading a third-party app to get these kinds of color overlays.

Other features in the July update

There's quite a lot going on here aside from the above major moves, and that includes Microsoft boosting the speed at which File Explorer launches (helping Windows 11 to feel more performant overall).

There's a whole lot of work on the Bluetooth front, too, as Microsoft notes: "This update improves reliability and performance when connecting to and using Bluetooth devices." That includes better driver stability, improved audio routing for calls via Phone Link, and more.

File Explorer has also been honed to be more reliable, and Microsoft has implemented a performance tweak to the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) that means PCs will shut down more promptly. If you've ever sat staring at your computer while it takes 20 seconds to shut down, wondering what on earth it's doing, that kind of behavior will hopefully be a rarer occurrence going forward.

A major bug fix – and Dell laptop problems

There's some good news for those of you who have been suffering at the hands of a mysterious bug that eats storage space (due to an out-of-control database file). This is fixed with the July update (the cure was in the June preview before it), so you can grab this to resolve the issue (hopefully).

There's some bad news on the bug front, though, namely that you won't get this update on some Dell devices with Intel CPUs, as Microsoft has blocked it due to the July patch causing all sorts of weird issues. I say it's bad news, but at least Microsoft caught the problem and has prevented the update from being piped to those machines.

Microsoft informs us: "This update might not be available for a limited number of Dell devices with Intel processors due to an incompatibility reported by Dell that can potentially cause unexpected shutdowns, poor performance, increased heat, and battery drain. We are working together with Dell to prevent the affected models from experiencing the issue and plan to release a resolution for affected devices in the coming days."

So, if you were wondering why you couldn't get this patch on your Dell laptop, now you know. You'll just have to sit tight for now until Microsoft and Dell get this ironed out.

• White House, Treasury, DHS and DoW come together to launch Gold Eagle scheme
• The initiative will prevent duplicated work and prioritize vulnerability remediation
• Gold Eagle will also help to identify which systems could be at risk

The US Government has launched Gold Eagle, a new clearinghouse which looks to centralize vulnerability discovery and remediation against a backdrop of evolving AI-powered security threats.

Gold Eagle will serve as a central hub between federal agencies, AI developers, open-source software developers and critical infrastructure companies, in a bid to increase the speed of vulnerability discovery and prevent major incidents from occurring in the first place.

The scheme came about under President Trump's June 2 2026 executive order 'Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security' and represents collaboration between the Treasury, the DHS' Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Department of War.

US Gold Eagle scheme addresses growing vulnerability exploitations

Under the scheme, vulnerabilities scanning will happen centrally to ensure multiple organizations aren't independently repeating the same work. Gold Eagle will also identify which software, networks and critical infrastructure could be at risk, before coordinating fixes. The White House described the scheme as a "force multiplier."

Although AI is largely to blame for the increase in attacks, Gold Eagle is set to fight fire with fire by employing AI to identify bugs too, using models like Anthropic's Mythos.

"Through this strategic partnership, we will expand existing security measures to safeguard software and networks in the 21st century and continue to promote advancements in artificial intelligence," DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote.

The concept of a dedicated clearinghouse centralizes vulnerability management to ensure the right bugs are being prioritized and to cut through the noise of lower-quality reports. Its assistance will most likely be felt by the open-source community, which has limited resources and financial backing to identify and fix issues as effectively as enterprise software vendors.

"Under the leadership of President Trump, we are bringing a wartime footing to the cyber domain to relentlessly patch vulnerabilities," Secretary of War Pete Hegseth added.

• Microsoft is improving Windows 11 search in multiple ways
• That includes a calmer search panel, the ability to turn off web results, a better way of prioritizing returned results, and a more stable search overall
• This is in testing for now, and the main worry is how long it might take for Microsoft to usher all this through to release

If you're fed up with the way Windows 11's search functionality works – and you wouldn't be alone – some incoming changes are set to greatly improve this experience.

Microsoft revealed the tweaks to the search box in a blog post, explaining that they're being delivered via a gradual rollout to testers in the Experimental channel for Windows 11 preview builds.

The first major change is simply to make search a calmer place, so when the panel appears, it only contains a list of your recent searches (allowing you to easily fire up one of those again if you wish). The current clutter to the right of that list, including recommendations – some of which are outright adverts – along with trending searches has all been banished.

And the second important piece of work here is that Microsoft is finally giving Windows 11 users the ability to get rid of web results in search. Currently, when searching for a file in the operating system you get not just local results (for files on your drives), but also some web results which can get in the way.

In this new scheme of things, you'll be able to switch off all web results in Settings, and also ditch Microsoft Store suggestions too.

If you keep these results on, Microsoft notes that they won't be prioritized, although this is something the company had already started to address (it used to be the case that web content could appear at the top of the returned results in a truly baffling fashion). Web results have also been stripped of any 'promotional content' so you'll only get the most relevant answers if these results are enabled.

Microsoft has also bolstered the handling of results for Windows 11 settings so that more relevant options are flagged up higher in the pecking order, and Microsoft says further fine-tuning is planned on this front.

The search box will also be able to handle typos, with an improved ability to guess what you really meant ('Chrome' rather than 'Chome' for example), and it'll start to surface possible results after typing just two characters (another enhancement we've already heard about).

While this is mostly all about streamlining, Microsoft is going the other way in one notable respect — adding a bit more detail in for the files returned in the results. Search will now provide more info about files (such as when they were last opened) and a more in-depth preview in the right-hand panel, so you can more readily tell what you'll be opening if you click on that result.

Finally, Microsoft is making search more reliable, which involves "reducing [the] likelihood of crashing and loading issues" which is obviously a welcome move.

Analysis: the rollout fly in the soothing search ointment

Windows 11 search has always been a somewhat painful affair for me, thanks mainly to the clutter of the thinly veiled (or not even veiled at all) ads, and the irrelevant results which were surfaced with a baffling level of priority, as noted. Windows 10 isn't a lot better, frankly, but at any rate, I'm very happy to see the fresh direction Microsoft has taken here.

The calmer search results are a major boon, with Microsoft following in the same vein as the streamlining it recently announced for the widgets panel, which was made a quieter place. (All this follows a broader early promise to rein in the upselling with Windows 11 and generally make the interface a more chilled place).

I was hoping that the option to turn off web results would be brought in, and this is the most important addition for me personally. I'm not alone, and the reaction to these various changes has been very positive, with the only real sticking point being impatience around when these new features will be rolled out. That's both in terms of testers wanting to try the revamped search box now, and the general computing public wondering when they will eventually get their hands on all this.

As this tester posts on Reddit: "We love this... except gradual rollouts. We don't like when things are inconsistent from PC to PC despite running identical [test] builds [of Windows 11]. It's really obnoxious and breaks muscle memory. But the changes seem great and I look forward to trying them."

As Microsoft points out in its blog post, it's worth remembering that there are now feature flags that can be enabled if you're really keen to try out something in a preview build, and it's not on your PC yet.

However, as for those asking: 'For those of us on release, when might this arrive?'

Well, that's a very different kettle of fish, as it could take quite some time for this work to progress through testing. Mainly because there are a lot of changes involved, and it's not something Microsoft will want to rush (especially given the drive to make search more reliable and stable).

And when these search improvements are eventually released outside of testing, it'll be on a controlled rollout that you won't be able to jump the queue with. However, there's a reason for that – Microsoft will need to observe the changes going live in a gradual manner to ensure no unexpected gremlins are crawling around in the works.

So, you will have to be patient, and there's some frustration around the length of time it can take for controlled rollouts to proceed these days (the Start menu overhaul from last year being a key example here – some folks still don't have it even now). But the good news is that these changes are coming, and they promise to revamp search in Windows 11 to a considerable extent. I can't wait (but I'll have to).

London Tech Week’s focus on AI - from a £12 million investment in AI for SMEs to AI bootcamps for graduates and more - has reflected the pressure to compete in an AI-era.

As this digital revolution progresses, the job economy is changing, but the mantra that AI is taking our jobs is simply not correct and potentially fueled by an undercurrent of classicism.

When the Luddites famously started to break the first machines of the industrial revolution in 1811 in England, fearing for their job as textile artisans, the “Bourgeoisie” would describe them as “ignorant workers”, with no understanding of basic economics.

More than two hundred years later, with the rise of GenAI, it is no longer the blue-collar workers who fear for their job, but the white-collar workers. This time it is the “bourgeois” who live in the anxiety of an uncertain world.

Since ChatGPT introduced AI into the everyday lexicon, it has been clear that we would experience an unprecedented revolution. The rhetoric that immediately began to dominate social discourse has been that AI tools would render most jobs insignificant.

Furthermore, whilst other technological revolutions ended up being creative destruction, ‘this time it was different’.

But is that really the case? Or are we more fearful, more concerned about destroying the status quo, because this time it’s a different ‘class’ of people being impacted? This time it’s the desk workers, not the physical laborers, who risk losing jobs, and suddenly there is alarm.

Artificial Intelligence relies on humans - and more humans than ever

AI is a human creation and still relies on humans to evolve. First, we have those who build the infrastructure, like data centers, which accounted for almost all of the United States’ GDP growth in the first half of 2025 (according to Harvard economist Jason Furman).

Then, we have those who train the models, which still need to be constantly retrained. Even if models are able to train themselves eventually, there is no consensus that human intervention in training will become obsolete, because human behavior and the entropy of organizations are in a constant state of flux and evolution.

And even when trained, AI constantly needs to also understand the “context” in which it is prompted to perform efficiently. AI then needs to be deployed. Managing security, defining guardrails for agents, understanding how to use AI and tracking agentic AI’s actions, all comes with inherent challenges.

The CIOs of the largest global corporations are already investing hundreds of millions of pounds to understand this. Startups based in San Francisco - a city I recently visited where 95% of out-of-home ads were about AI agents - are focused entirely on resolving these problems for large enterprises.

The fact that both Anthropic and OpenAI have launched their own consulting companies is proof that managing AI complexities in the coming years will be the biggest source of growth for all consulting and outsourcing companies of the world.

Sourcing the right human talent in the AI era is the biggest challenge

Software engineering is a job category where GenAI - perfectly trained on open-source code and GitHub repositories - can now code better than even the most experienced developers.

Additionally, developers in AI labs - with privileged access to “tokens” on Claude Code or OpenAI Codex - now develop 100% of the time without writing a single line of code. Nonetheless, when asked about their biggest challenges, all AI startups would point to recruitment.

A report by the UK's National Foundation for Education Research showed a 50% increase in tech job adverts between 2019/20 and 2024/25, with entry-level roles particularly affected. However, we’re now seeing a surge in demand driven by Gen Z, according to Employment Hero’s March Jobs Report.

This demand for AI expertise is reflected in a new Malt Tech Trends Report, which analyzed 1.2 million searches of tech freelancers in 2025. It reveals that AI is now the second most-in-demand skill, irrespective of company size, industry, or project type. More specifically, demand for freelancers with agentic AI expertise exploded by 5,800% in just twelve months.

Observer of the AI revolution, Andrew Ng, explains that if, for example, a team of 3 developers builds 10 times faster, then they need more designers or product managers to fuel the creative process. Doing more faster, with fewer people creates more work to fuel and execute the output.

More people are echoing the same rhetoric as Ng, calling out the phenomenon of ‘AI washing’, whereby companies have justified mass redundancies with AI disruption. In reality, in many cases, they were either adapting to geopolitical and economic uncertainties or had simply employed too many in the crazy post-COVID bull market.

The AI job apocalypse is not yet here… Still, the fear is real and needs to be understood

Software engineering is a perfect example of a job category that has constantly evolved. Since the inception of computer science, programming has become progressively more about “natural language”. Whilst there were 50,000 developers worldwide in the 1960s, today there are almost 50 million. Undoubtedly, the eradication of barriers to entry to build software increases that number tenfold.

History, data, and observation shows us that the AI job apocalypse is not yet here. Still, the fear is real and needs to be understood. The reason every science fiction novel paints an inhospitable world and unattractive paradigm is because the human mind always fears change. We assume the worst.

AI transformation, like all transformations, will be a cultural change first. And it’s companies, not professionals, who are most at risk if they fail to adapt. If one thing will be different in this digital revolution, compared to the last (arguably comparable is the advent of the internet), it’s the rate of change.

CEOs will have to be imaginative, change org charts and processes, admit they are not omniscient, take risks, and invest in training. Schools and universities also face the challenge of teaching soft skills: how to adapt to live and work in a more uncertain world. Because we can only harness top-tier AI talent if we understand how to truly adapt to change.

Independent professionals - those who create their own roles - from freelance developer to fractional manager and strategic consultants - have already redefined work.

On average, freelancers spend 4 hours a week on upskilling and keeping up with the job market and already have the habit of switching from one client project to another. They were the first to adapt to AI and realize that a job is more than just a bundle of tasks.

As Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, recently said, if someone were to observe him at work, we would conclude that his day consists of tasks like making hundreds of calls and sending emails. AI will replace, augment, and improve these tasks. But it will not take Jensen’s job.

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• Microsoft has blocked Secure Boot updates on some devices
• There have been issues with some devices updating from the 2011 certificate to the latest 2023 certificate
• Some older devices or those not supported by their OEM may be restricted in downloading the latest Secure Boot certificates

Microsoft has blocked some Windows 11 PCs from installing Secure Boot updates due to known issues with certificate updates.

The company is currently rolling out an update for Secure Boot on devices using certificates issued in 2011, which are now expired. The new 2023 certificate is being applied through Windows Update, but issues on devices with faulty firmware have forced Microsoft to halt the rollout.

“Devices in this group are affected by a known issue. To reduce risk, Secure Boot certificate updates are temporarily paused while Microsoft and partners work toward a supported resolution,” Microsoft said.

Secure Boot issues

Secure Boot has long been a device-saving feature when it comes to removing malicious files, as it allows the device to verify and load only authentic software before booting to Windows. However if the device cannot receive certificate updates it can fall victim to threats at the boot-level before Windows is loaded.

Microsoft is currently working with manufacturers to issue a patch that will allow affected devices to install the new Secure Boot 2023 certificate, with HP issuing a BIOS update to allow the installation of the latest certificate.

What this means in practice is that some older devices, or devices that no longer receive updates via their Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM), will not be able to apply Secure Boot and Boot Manager protections. Microsoft clarified that, “this results in a gradual reduction in long-term security—not an immediate risk or system failure. Continue to follow standard security practices, including staying current with Windows updates.”

So even if your device is blocked from installing the latest Secure Boot certificate, it will continue to work properly, other Windows updates will continue to work, and your Secure Boot version will continue to protect against known vulnerabilities. It’s just future vulnerabilities that users affected by this issue will need to be aware of.

Many users may not be aware of issues until they need to use Secure Boot, so the silver lining in Microsoft’s warning is that now is the perfect time to check if your Secure Boot is working properly.

How to check Secure Boot is up to date

To check if you are using the latest Secure Boot certificate, take the following steps:

• Open the Windows Security app using the search bar
• Navigate to the Device Security dashboard using the menu on the right hand side
• Look at the Secure Boot section, and check for the following messages:

1. "Secure Boot is on"

If you see this message, Secure Boot is likely working properly. However, this does not display your certificates’ current state. Microsoft has been rolling out an update to show if your Secure Boot is running on the latest certificate, so make sure your don't have any pending Windows updates.

2. “Devices in this group are affected by a known issue.”

Devices with this message will likely be able to install the latest certificates once a firmware update has been issued by your OEM. Check your OEM update channel for availability.

3. “Secure Boot is on, but your device does not support the automated Secure Boot certificate update due to hardware or firmware limitations.”

Devices with this message may no longer be supported by your OEM, or the OEM might no longer be able to provide the firmware updates needed. Microsoft recommends checking your OEM’s Secure Boot support page to confirm whether your device is out of support.

Via WindowsLatest

• Windows 11's Copilot app has a new feature in testing
• 'PC insights' provides an easy way to receive clear answers to hardware-based questions about your device and its specs
• While there are some fears over privacy (and bloat), Microsoft has made it clear that Copilot needs to be granted permission to access your system and files

Copilot is getting a new ability to answer questions about your PC's hardware, allowing the AI to tap into the relevant hardware details to do so – and while Microsoft is treading carefully with privacy here, that's unlikely to stop some level of paranoia.

Windows Latest flagged the introduction of 'PC insights' for the Copilot app on Windows 11, which as Microsoft explains, "enables customers to conversationally ask Copilot questions about their Windows PC and receive clear responses based on their device's state without having to dig through system settings."

This is currently an experimental feature, so still in testing, and an optional ability that you must turn on for it to be in play. Windows Latest notes that it's gradually rolling out, but only in the US for now.

You can ask Copilot how much RAM you have, or storage space left, or what your GPU is, and the current level of usage for your processor, and a whole bunch of similar component-related queries. You can ask about elements as diverse as whether you have an antivirus running, or what your laptop's battery health is, diving into mild troubleshooting territory should you wish.

To get its answers, the Copilot app hooks up to Windows APIs to analyze your system, and the AI asks for permission to do this. You can allow it access to your PC's hardware details on a one-time basis for that session only, or you can elect to 'always allow' if you're happy to give Copilot this access on a more permanent basis.

Analysis: fears over hallucinations and bloat

As ever, this is AI, and as Microsoft notes, Copilot "may not always provide complete or accurate information", especially during this testing phase. So, if you do get a chance to try out PC insights, maintain a healthy sense of skepticism with the responses you get.

As Windows Latest makes clear, there's also a certain irony about a Windows 11 user checking up on resource usage, perhaps due to system sluggishness, employing the Copilot AI to run diagnostics when the app itself uses the best part of 1GB of RAM when running in the background and doing nothing.

That doesn't stop this new PC insights feature from being situationally useful, of course. Some of the reaction has come from a place of disdain, though, as you might guess, with comments such as the one from this Redditor: "Oh hey it's like Task Manager except instead of lightweight and authoritative, it's bloated and might be lying to me."

Of course, this is a feature aimed at less well-informed PC owners, not those who can easily understand what's happening in Task Manager at a glance. Criticism around the bloat of the Copilot app is fair enough, mind, and this is because in its most recent incarnation, Microsoft changed things so the app is essentially a standalone spin-off of the Edge browser.

Another worry is that of privacy, and having Copilot 'snoop around' on your machine, but as noted, there are clear requests for permissions, and the new feature is strictly opt-in. You don't ever have to go near PC insights if you don't want to. It's also worth noting that giving the Copilot app access permissions doesn't mean it can read the actual contents of files, but only their sizes (for weighing up questions about storage and the like).

At the moment, this is a purely informative or troubleshooting feature, and in the case of attempted diagnostics, it may point to issues with your PC, but won't resolve them for you. However, it's not difficult to envision where Microsoft might head with this, in terms of getting Copilot to implement fixes for certain issues that the AI flags up. I'm talking simple Settings changes rather than anything in-depth, and this has always been the idea of Copilot (even though it hasn't yet been realized to much of an extent).

When we get AI agents in Windows 11 – and they are coming, make no mistake – this kind of functionality may turn into a full-on troubleshooting agent. The trouble (pun not intended) with that being that the mistakes and hallucinations that AI can make could be considerably more aggravating in this kind of scenario.

There used to be a time when you’d buy an Apple app by paying for it once and never again. Then along came the idea of app subscriptions, and slowly but surely, Apple has started selling more and more of its software products through recurring payments. From iCloud+ to Apple TV, there are many ways to spend your cash on Apple’s wares on an ongoing basis.

Today, Apple flogs bundles of its own apps to its users, with Apple One in particular offering a cluster of apps for a single monthly price. And Apple hasn’t stopped there, with the Creator Studio package being introduced a few months ago for users of its artistic apps.

But while these app groupings ostensibly give you a way to get the software you need without paying multiple subscription fees, I’m starting to worry about how they restrict your choices and force you down avenues you might not want to travel.

Not only can they be expensive, but they’re also inflexible, giving you very little ability to customize them to your needs. If subscriptions are the future of app monetization, then Apple needs to do a whole lot better.

Enter the Creator Studio

Apple likes to portray itself as the company of creatives — think about its “Here’s to the crazy ones” or “I’m a Mac” commercials of days gone by. And the firm already sells apps made specifically for this demographic, including Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator Pro, and more. So it makes sense that Apple would want to offer a software suite that grants interested users access for a single fee, instead of requiring several payments, whether one-off or ongoing.

That’s what you get with the Creator Studio, which is priced at $12.99 / £12.99 / AU$19.99 a month or $129 / £129 / AU$199 a year. In return for your cash, you get a pass for the following apps:

• Final Cut Pro
• Logic Pro
• Pixelmator Pro
• Keynote
• Pages
• Numbers
• Motion
• Compressor
• MainStage

And yes, some of these apps — like Keynote, Pages, and Numbers — are already free, but pay the Creator Studio entry fee and you get “a library of high-quality, royalty-free photos and graphics, and powerful intelligence features” in addition to what comes with the toll-free editions, Apple says.

Considering Logic Pro alone costs $199.99 if you want to buy it outright (rather than pay an ongoing subscription), this package might seem like a rather good deal. But it’s not the price that I’m interested in — it’s the way app bundles like Creator Studio work.

Right now, there are two main app collections available from Apple: Creator Studio and Apple One. While Creator Studio contains the aforementioned creative apps, Apple One starts at $19.95 / £18.95 / AU$24.95 a month and comes with 50GB of iCloud+ storage, plus memberships to Apple TV, Apple Music, and Apple Arcade.

There are two additional tiers, with the most expensive costing $37.95 / £36.95 / AU$49.95 a month and throwing in 2TB of iCloud+ storage, Apple Fitness+, and Apple News+, in addition to what’s already in the entry-level option.

But what if you want to mix and match your apps and services from Apple? What if you want, say, Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro from Creator Studio, plus Apple Music, Apple Fitness+, and Apple News+? Well, you’re going to have to either take out the top Apple One bundle and separately buy those creative apps outright, or you’ve got to pay for memberships of two distinct ongoing subscriptions.

In this instance, combining Creator Studio with the most expensive edition of Apple One means paying $50.94 a month when all you want are five apps. The rest of the content you pay for is superfluous. Throw in AppleCare+, and you’re forking out even more.

Apple gives practically no flexibility or customization with its app collections. You can’t mix and match apps and services, and if there are some you want from both subscriptions, you’ve got to pay for both. That makes it an incredibly expensive way to go.

But with Apple seemingly getting evermore enthusiastic about subscriptions — and the revenue they bring in — don’t be surprised if this state of affairs continues.

Is there a better way?

You might feel that, since Creator Studio is relatively new, Apple is still working out the logistics of how to sell the apps and services it contains. But Apple is no stranger to subscriptions. It’s been offering the likes of Apple Music and Apple Arcade for years now, so it knows a thing or two about how to structure subscription offerings.

Is the lack of flexibility here and the absence of any way to pick and choose apps a deliberate policy on Apple’s behalf? We can’t know for sure, but it’s not a good look.

While the Creator Studio might seem like a decent bargain on its face, it becomes considerably less so if you’re not interested in everything it offers and want to pair its apps with those from the Apple One bundle.

Considering how keen Apple seems to be on subscriptions, I’m surprised it doesn’t offer individual memberships for each component app within these packages. For instance, why is there no individual subscription for Pixelmator Pro? Instead, you’ve got to choose between a one-off fee or the full Creator Studio.

If Apple were to go down this route — and it's what I'd do if I were CEO-to-be John Ternus — it would instantly solve the problem of pairing different apps from different collections. You could simply add whichever apps you wanted to your own “build a bundle” package and get exactly what you need for a more acceptable price.

But that kind of process doesn’t seem to be anywhere on the horizon. There are no rumors saying it’s coming, no telltale clues nestled in Apple’s code. Don’t hold your breath for its imminent arrival.

Until we do get something like that, Apple customers are going to continue to feel ripped off by a rigid, inflexible system that is happy to take their cash in return for apps they don’t want or need. It’s a situation that’s in desperate need of a rethink.

It wouldn't be a difficult argument to make that the USA is the television capital of the world, or at least the birthplace of modern TV culture.

From Walter Cronkite to Fox & Friends, I Love Lucy to The Simpsons, The Twilight Zone to The Sopranos; whether it's news, current affairs, comedy or drama, US television has produced some of the most iconic, enduring shows committed to the format.

And that's before you even get to sports. What would the sporting calendar look like without Super Bowl Sunday, the Fall Classic, Indy 500 and WrestleMania? Or, most recently, the 2026 World Cup that the USA is co-hosting.

America's shows and sports are collectively the most popular in the world, which means you can continue to watch them on local channels when you're overseas. But it isn't always the case – college basketball, for example, has limited appeal outside the States. And if you go to watch your usual streaming websites, apps and platforms in a different region, they're unlikely to work due to rights restrictions.

Thankfully, there's a very simple way to get around these blackouts. By using one of the best VPNs, you can watch as much US TV as you wish when traveling outside of its borders. Keep reading to discover how.

• Use NordVPN to watch US TV from overseas now (Save 75% with our exclusive deal)

Why can't I watch US TV overseas?

As we say, the international proliferation of US television and sports means that there's a good chance you'll be able to see the content you want in many other parts of the world.

However, due to licensing and rights agreements, you won't necessarily be able to watch them on the platform to which you've become accustomed (and, more commonly than not, pay for).

Try to watch Love Island USA on Peacock, Welcome to Wrexham on Hulu, or a numbered UFC event on Paramount Plus, for example, and you'll be met with an error message telling you that you can't stream them. The same goes for OTT cable alternatives like YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV, Fubo and Sling TV – all are region-restricted to the US.

It can even happen with certain content on the likes of Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video. They have slightly different libraries depending on which territory you're in. So you can forget watching The Great British Baking Show on Netflix if you're not Stateside.

And even if you find the show or sporting event on a local station, you may end up having to subscribe to stream. That hardly seems fair if you've already paid a premium back home to watch that exact same thing.

How can I watch US TV from overseas?

This is where having a good Netflix VPN or Peacock VPN can pay dividends.

The clever engineers at these VPN companies work constantly to make their tools compatible with the world's biggest streaming platforms, thereby letting you watch them regardless of where in the world you are.

The technology effectively spoofs your IP address so that your laptop, smartphone, tablet or streaming device looks like it's in an altogether different location.

Specifically, in this case, a location back within the USA.

Then, when you load up your app for Disney+, Apple TV, DirecTV or anything else, it will think you're back at home and so won't hit you with that annoying error message.

That's in theory, at least. Only the best streaming VPNs are able to unblock a wide range of these platforms. That's why it's worth making sure you get one that will come to your rescue when you're overseas on business or vacation...

Which is the best VPN for watching US TV when overseas?

Step-by-step guide on using a VPN to watch US TV overseas

Using a VPN to watch US TV when overseas is a doozy...

• Sign up and install a VPN on your device (NordVPN is our top pick)
• Connect to one of its United States servers
• Head to the website or app of the US streaming service you wish to use
• Hit play and enjoy!

We've learnt that it's best to connect to your US VPN server first before loading up the streaming app or website that you're attempting to unblock. We've found that if you do it the other way around (i.e. heading to the streaming platform first) you can, in effect, 'tip off' the streamer, which makes it less likely that the VPN will work its magic properly.

And another tip we have is to use an Incognito window you're streaming within a web browser. Again, it just helps to make sure that none of your cookies or usage history triggers the streaming platform to know that you're currently overseas.

What sports can I watch on US TV from overseas?

As a sports-mad nation, US TV hosts just about every event you can imagine from both home and abroad.

The NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB all go out on an intricate variation of networks and their associated streaming platforms. Anything that would normally be available on cable can also be watched on an OTT cord-cutting service.

Paramount Plus and Netflix are the respective homes of UFC and WWE, while Fox is the existing Nascar provider and has exclusive action from the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Apple TV has upped its game in recent years to win the rights to show MLS soccer and every race of the Formula 1 season.

Extensive coverage of the most recent Summer and Winter Olympic Games was carried by NBC's Peacock platform, as is Tour de France cycling.

In terms of overseas soccer, Peacock shows English Premier League matches, ESPN has La Liga from Spain and Bundesliga from Germany, and CBS carries the UEFA Champions League.

And what about sports that are traditionally less popular in the States? Dedicated platforms like RugbyPass and Willow TV respectively feature global rugby union and cricket action.

What news, dramas and comedy can I watch on US TV from overseas?

While some 24/7 rolling news casts will work wherever you are (e.g. Fox News, MS Now), others will not (e.g. NewsNation) without the use of a VPN.

Both current and prestige dramas can be streamed on an array of streaming platforms. George R. R. Martin's stories are an apposite example of this – Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon can be watched with a subscription to HBO Max. Peacock Originals include Ponies and The Five-Star Weekend, while Disney+ has plenty of Doctor Who.

Thankfully, most of the proprietary shows to land on Netflix and Apple TV can be watched from region to region. So the likes of Squid Game, Stranger Things and Severance can be streamed from pretty much anywhere.

It's a very similar situation in terms of comedies. Friends makes its home on HBO Max, while Seinfeld sits on Netflix and all seasons of Cheers are on Hulu. For something more contemporary, you'd need Paramount Plus for Colin from Accounts, Prime Video for Bait and Apple TV for Ted Lasso.

Just remember, if you're struggling to watch any of these when away from the country, you'll need to invest in a good VPN. They're more affordable than you might imagine.

• Meta reportedly has a new AI glasses prototype
• It is helping the company finalize a super sensing AI model
• Meta execs apparently aren't yet certain what rules the all seeing AI should follow

Meta is reportedly trialling a new super-sensing AI glasses prototype that aim to offer an ultimate level of assistance, for the small price of capturing your every moment.

The basic idea is that, because personal AI assistance gets better the more the AI knows you, by having you smart specs watch every detail of your life, the assistant can then offer more insightful help.

It could, for example, know if your fridge has milk in because it has seen inside it, or remind you not to forget your keys as you go to leave home. It could remember that gift your friend was desperately hoping to get for their birthday, or remind you the name of someone you’ve met before, if you're forgotten and are too embarrassed to ask.

This kind of tool would undeniably be pretty handy, but the extreme cost would be that your glasses would have to be always on — otherwise the AI might not see or hear the crucial information you’ll need later.

However, this incredible level of insight could be very easily abused — so you’d either have to really trust the company capturing it, or just not care if it knows everything about you.

This latest super-sensing leak comes via the Financial Times (behind a paywall) which reports that Meta is currently testing a pair of specs that achieve super-sensing by capturing continuous audio, and snapping photos every few seconds.

The more staccato image feed is likely an effort to conserve battery — according to previous leaks, existing Meta glasses have all the hardware they need to pull off super sensing, but their batteries wouldn’t be able to last long enough for it to be widely useful.

According to the report, Meta is also still trying to work on some other aspects, like whether the recording light LED should be displayed or not. When you’re recording it normally would be — super sense would be capturing people around you who might wish to know if they’re on camera — though sources have told the FT that there are plans for it to not to be displayed.

Considering that Meta just made a big post about privacy, and even updating the specs to disable tricks modders have been using to allow the specs to record without the light coming on, I’d be surprised if it took the no-light approach, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Man vs machine

You might also remember a story we shared in March about Meta contractors who claimed to be able to see images and videos taken with the glasses.

Essentially, in order to use Meta’s AI you agree to allow the company to see information about your AI communications, including videos and photos. This seemingly includes photos and videos you take using hands-free voice controls — which does technically involve Meta AI, as it has to action your request.

If an always-on AI is seeing every detail of your life there’s potentially a lot more scope for you to capture sensitive data that you'd rather not let Meta's contractors (or anyone else frankly) see. Encouragingly, according to people familiar with Meta’s super-sensing technology, there are plans to never store the raw footage and audio — meaning Meta nor the user could access it.

Instead, the system would extract the metadata from the capture, and only that would be uploaded — metadata is data about data, so imagine if instead of showing someone a photo you just described what’s in it and where it is.

There’s still some room for personal data to leak through this system, but with the correct safeguards it would have far fewer privacy implications. The big obvious gap would be the privacy of those around you — people who, unlike you the glasses wearer, might not have consented for Meta to store any kind of data about them.

The FT report adds there are also debates over whether Meta’s AI should be allowed to use this metadata for training purposes, in order for it to keep up with the capabilities of OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic’s models.

While leaks should be taken with a pinch of salt, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made it clear that he wants to offer these kinds of features on his company’s glasses. Most recently he said in an investor call that he wants smart glasses “to be a personal agent that’s with you all day long, helping you remember things and achieve your goals.”

So the advent of technology like super-sense is most likely a matter of when not if, though with battery hardware constraints persisting (especially if you want slim and light glasses), and with privacy being such a hot-button issue, I expect it might be a while before we see super sense in action.

Whenever it arrives, we'll just have to hope that it’s implemented in the right way, and with appropriate safeguards. Such a tool could potentially offers some incredible accessibility benefits, but if the privacy cost is too great the I don’t see it taking off in the way I’m sure Meta would want it to.

Do you remember the metaverse? If you don’t, don’t worry. In 2026, four years into the AI revolution that’s changing the world forever, you could easily be forgiven for thinking it was a strange fever dream you had back in 2021. You might even have odd memories of seeing a blocky version of Mark Zuckerberg floating about in a Minecraft-inspired hellscape, conducting meetings with people who could walk with no legs, while the real Mark Zuckerberg was looking at the whole thing through VR goggles. At least, that’s my memory of it.

I could be suffering from the Mandela effect, but I distinctly remember something off about the legs. They fixed that in a later version, but that’s my overriding memory — no legs. Oh, and Mark Zuckerberg assuring us that this was the future. He’d spent tens of billions of dollars on it, even changing the company name from Facebook to Meta, just to let us know he was really serious about the metaverse. Even if the legs didn’t work.

The problem was, it looked laughable. While everything in the technology world to do with games and special effects was moving in the direction of hyper-realism, the metaverse was moving in the opposite direction, towards the sort of blocky graphics that small children enjoy. But even that didn’t really answer the most basic question about the metaverse. Why? What possible advantage was there for us all to meet in a VR space where clunky avatars of ourselves could interact… badly?

Then AI happened and Meta abruptly forgot about the metaverse and pivoted towards the mission of putting personal superintelligence in all our hands instead, which sounds as terrifying and dangerous as it actually is, but we are where we are. At least when Zuckerberg was obsessed with the metaverse, we could ignore him. It existed somewhere “over there”, in Meta-land, where we could let him get on with it. Now he’s right up in our business again.

The rise of a bad idea

I’ve always been fascinated by how Zuckerberg got into the metaverse and why he became so obsessed with it. The origins of the metaverse go way back. In March 2014, Facebook bought Oculus, the VR company, for about $2 billion. This was where his passion for VR started. Think of it as the seed, not the full obsession.

By July 2021, Zuckerberg gave a long interview to Casey Newton at The Verge about Facebook becoming a “metaverse company” and described it as an “embodied internet”. Then, on October 28, 2021, his obsession became the company identity. Zuckerberg announced that Facebook the company was becoming Meta at Connect 2021, saying the new company brand would focus on bringing the metaverse to life.

I can see the logic. As a business strategy, that made sense. As a product ordinary people were expected to use, it was much harder to understand. Zuckerberg did not want Meta/Facebook to be trapped inside someone else’s platform again. Facebook had won on social, but on mobile it remained dependent on Apple and Google for distribution, privacy rules, app-store policies and hardware. The metaverse looked like a chance to own the next operating system of social life: hardware, avatars, identity, payments, meetings, gaming, work, commerce — the whole stack. In his 2021 founder’s letter, he framed the metaverse as the “next chapter of the internet” and said Meta would become “metaverse-first, not Facebook-first.”

Facebook had obviously had its problems — it was scandal-ridden. It had let advertisers target vulnerable teenagers, helped fake news spread, and enabled the spread of hate speech linked to atrocities in Myanmar. Perhaps Zuckerberg was looking for a way out of Facebook, and the metaverse offered that.

What I still didn’t understand was why he didn’t see what the rest of us saw — that it looked terrible and offered no real benefit to users. Then I read Sarah Wynn-Williams’ tell-all book about Facebook, Careless People, and it all started to make sense.

To say the book made my jaw hit the floor on several occasions would be an understatement. It’s an absolute page-turner, and your reactions grow from mild amusement to shock, then disbelief, then absolute outrage the further through the book you get. I’m aware of the criticisms of Wynn-Williams: that it is a book written by a disgruntled employee, and that she dodges a lot of personal responsibility for her part in the various misdeeds of the company. However, in another perfect example of the Streisand effect, the fact that Meta obtained a legal order in the United States to prevent her from saying anything negative about the company — at all — made me want to pick it up, and I’m glad I did.

Because now I get it — Zuckerberg seems to have spent years in an environment where too few people were willing to tell him when his ideas weren’t good. According to Wynn-Williams, he was surrounded by sycophants. When he had bad ideas, like the ill-fated Internet.org, he wouldn’t let them go and persisted with them, even when they were obviously going to fail. The people around him enabled him because he was simply too powerful. They even let him win at the board games he liked to play with them at his house or on his jet, and — crucially — he didn’t notice that they were letting him win. I can imagine that in that environment, nobody inside Meta would want to tell Zuckerberg that his metaverse was the equivalent of the emperor’s new clothes, especially if they wouldn’t even risk beating him at Settlers of Catan.

Wynn-Williams only mentions the metaverse in her epilogue. It happened after she was brutally fired from Facebook. Perhaps selfishly, I wish she’d been there for the metaverse period, because I would love to read firsthand accounts of how and why Zuckerberg persisted with such an obviously bad idea.

The fall of the metaverse

Maybe I’m being too harsh on Zuckerberg. The metaverse graphics did get better over time and Apple ventured slightly into the same territory with its Apple Vision Pro, even after the metaverse had turned into a smoldering wasteland. The fact is, people don’t enjoy wearing VR goggles for extended periods of time, and for normal people, VR lacks that one killer app. There doesn’t seem to be anything you can do in a VR space that you can’t do elsewhere much more easily.

The metaverse didn’t really die with a bang, but with a whimper. It faded through layoffs, spending cuts and the AI pivot. If I had to put a date on it, I’d say early 2023 was when Meta’s narrative moved on. In February and March 2023, Zuckerberg started talking about Meta’s “year of efficiency” and announced huge layoffs and cost-cutting. OpenAI had launched ChatGPT in November 2022, and by early 2023, generative AI had swallowed the oxygen that ideas like the metaverse need to survive. Every tech company was talking about AI now, not virtual offices and avatar legs.

The metaverse was over. We all forgot about it and moved on.

I’m glad I read Wynn-Williams’ book, because now I can understand how Facebook let the metaverse happen. And if there’s one thing I learned from reading it, it’s that money and power can bring you a lot of things, but common sense requires neither.

A study has revealed that approximately 40% of UK employees receive ‘work slop’ caused by low-quality, AI-generated content. As a result, it is estimated that each instance of work slop takes up to 3.5 hours each month to correct, resulting in millions of pounds in lost productivity.

It has been reported that as of mid-2026, approximately 78% of global businesses are using AI in at least one business function.

Despite this, studies have revealed that 62% to over 80% of workers lack confidence or training in AI, with many reporting they don’t have the skills to use the tool in their daily tasks, which can lead to errors and work slop.

What is AI work slop?

Many workers are using AI to make daily tasks such as generating reports, emails, or code more efficient. However, if used incorrectly, workers can be faced with low-quality, AI-generated content that may look like a high standard at first glance, but after closer inspection, is inaccurate and requires hours of manual checking and corrections.

To minimize AI work slop, there are several steps businesses can take:

Make training a key objective: It’s inevitable that without appropriate training and guidance using AI software, errors will occur. Business owners should ensure that employees are trained in more efficient prompting and understanding AI limitations to reduce work slop. If training is implemented during the employee onboarding stage or as early in the project as possible, the chances of work slop will be significantly reduced.

Start by brainstorming: AI must be used to enhance work, not to create it on its own. Before completing tasks that incorporate AI, it’s important to brainstorm how it can be used and the objectives you want to achieve. Where possible, create the bulk of content from scratch and use AI to support and enhance the end goal.

Introduce a review process: AI-generated work should never be presented to senior stakeholders or clients unless checked by an experienced team member. Business owners should ensure that all AI-generated tasks are reviewed and fact-checked before being presented as the final version.

An effective method is to create a mindset that AI-generated work has been created by an intern who has little knowledge of the industry. Reviewing work using this method will help to spot errors faster.

Encourage transparency: To reduce AI work slop, business owners should encourage workers to use AI to support and enhance tasks, not to complete them altogether. It’s also important for workers to be clear about how AI has supported the tasks they’re working on to make the reviewing process more efficient.

Encourage team feedback: One of the main ways to prevent continued work slop is to make colleagues aware that it has been spotted. More often than not, people will correct mistakes themselves, rather than be transparent and provide constructive feedback to their peers. Raising work slop in the early stages of the project will save time and prevent the issue from recurring.

Create manageable workloads: Workers who are unable to manage their workloads will often complete tasks quickly using AI, which can result in work slop. To prevent this, promote quality over quantity throughout the business and ensure that unmanageable workloads don’t hinder this ethos.

The key to AI success

For businesses using AI, the software should be used to elevate work and make processes more efficient, not cause delays and errors. If your business is looking to adopt AI, it’s important to be transparent with employees about when to use it and when to avoid it.

Employees should have a strong mindset towards AI and have quality and value in mind at all times when understanding the outcomes they’d like to achieve. When planning tasks, we should ask ourselves: Will AI add value and additional insights to the project, and how will it move your goals forward?

Once these points have been considered, it’s important to understand what AI can’t assist with, such as human perspective and strategic creativity. If you decide to use AI for the task you’re looking to complete, which is weighted towards human-powered thought and creativity, this is when work slop can be encountered, resulting in wasted time and resources.

To summarize, AI should be used to generate valuable content and results. Asking yourself the questions mentioned above before you turn to the software will help to generate the best possible outcomes.

An effective mental model that helps to prevent work slop

Before employees can use AI responsibly, they need to understand what it actually does. In "AI for Startup Leaders," we present a framework called A-R-C that captures the three core capabilities of AI:

• Agency: AI can work with tools, run code, and complete tasks on an employee’s behalf. For example, it can query data from your CRM, draft documents, or update a spreadsheet.
• Reasoning: AI can plan ahead and think through problems step-by-step. The latest models can break down complex challenges, consider multiple approaches, and work through logic chains.
• Context: AI can base its answers on the information you provide in each conversation. It can understand natural language, identify objects in photos, and parse data in spreadsheets.

The A-R-C model is crucial, as many workers use AI as an encyclopedia and to state facts, which isn’t what the software was created for. When people rely on AI for facts, work slop can occur. To avoid this, workers should be educated on the main purpose of AI, reasoning over their business context and taking action.

When employees understand A-R-C, they approach AI outputs differently. They recognize that AI is best used to reason from their business context rather than look up answers. Instead, they use AI to speed up how they collaborate with other teams and improve efficiency.

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For the past year, one idea has dominated conversations about enterprise technology: AI agents will replace Software as a Service (SaaS). It’s a compelling case on paper. If AI can reason across tools, write code, execute workflows, and interact with systems through APIs, then traditional SaaS applications start to look like unnecessary middlemen.

Seats become less relevant. User interfaces matter less. Software becomes cheaper to build. Custom internal tools become easier to create.

In that reality, much of SaaS gets pushed down into infrastructure, while value shifts to models, agents, and orchestration layers. This reaction is being driven by several parallel shifts.

Software is becoming cheaper and faster to build, AI agents are becoming better at navigating tools and executing work across systems, and the economics of agentic execution are bringing new attention to cost and latency, or time to serve.

The market is not wrong to think this way. AI agents will change software economics.

They will push platforms to become API-first, deeply connected, and capable of supporting autonomous activity at scale. They will challenge seat-based pricing and accelerate the move towards consumption and outcome-based models. They will expose weak products and reward systems that are trusted, extensible, and embedded in real operations.

This is the next phase of SaaS, rather than the end of it.

From replacement to expansion

The assumption behind the “end of SaaS” narrative is that software exists primarily as an interface. If agents can bypass that interface, the application becomes redundant. That logic holds for some categories of software, but it does not apply uniformly. Enterprise software has never been just a presentation layer.

Enterprise platforms derive their value from managing structured data, enforcing permissions, executing workflows, and maintaining the audit trails organizations rely on. Agentic AI does not remove that requirement; in many cases, it sharpens it. What AI changes is not whether these capabilities are needed, but which types of software are most exposed as agents become more capable.

Products whose value is largely defined by navigation, basic interaction, or shallow workflows are more vulnerable when agents can reason directly over APIs and complete tasks without human mediation. More configurable, deeply integrated platforms behave differently.

Solutions that act as systems of record, coordinate workflows across services, apply policy, manage state, and provide security, auditability, and evidencing are not easily displaced. Their role is not simply to present functionality, but to ensure work is executed consistently, safely, and at scale.

In that context, AI agents are not replacing platforms so much as being embedded within them, extending how work is initiated, coordinated, and completed. That direction is already visible in the data.

Gartner forecasts that by 2030, 85% of enterprise agentic AI investments will be bundled into existing SaaS and cloud renewals rather than delivered through net-new contracts, up from 55% in 2025.

SaaS as the execution and control layer

As agents become more capable, they shift where value sits and how platforms compete.

For years, software differentiation has been driven by features and user experience. In an agent-driven world, those differences begin to matter less. Agents can move across systems, access functions directly, and orchestrate tasks programmatically.

What matters instead is which platforms can actually complete work. This means coordinating processes across systems, applying the right type of automation at each step, and ensuring outcomes are reliable, traceable, and compliant.

In this model, SaaS does not disappear. It becomes the execution and control layer for enterprise AI. As this shift plays out, value and margin move away from individual features and towards the platforms that control execution and data access. Agents themselves are unlikely to be a sustainable point of differentiation. As capabilities converge, the focus moves towards control.

That’s because enterprise processes still need to be predictable, auditable, and, in many cases, reversible. Regulatory frameworks are reinforcing this, with increasing expectations around explainability and oversight. This places new importance on the platforms that sit at the center of operations.

Organizations that can orchestrate work across systems, apply automation selectively, and produce a clear evidence trail will capture more value over time. Those that cannot risk becoming passive data stores, rather than active systems of execution.

A multiplier effect on demand

There is another misconception shaping the conversation that AI will reduce the amount of work organizations need to do and, with it, the reliance on software.

In practice, the opposite is happening. As the cost and effort required to execute processes falls, more work becomes viable. More cases are identified, more customer needs are addressed, and more processes are triggered automatically.

We are already seeing this in service environments, where AI-driven detection and automation increase the volume of actionable work entering the system.

In the context of public services, for example, within a case management environment, a missed bin, pothole, or housing repair issue can be identified automatically, raised as a case instantly, and routed into the right workflow without waiting for a citizen or staff member to log it manually. In that model, the value sits not in who created the case, but in how effectively the platform absorbs, processes and resolves it.

This creates a multiplier effect. AI does not just reduce effort; it expands what organizations can do. AI expands demand, and SaaS platforms are where that demand is fulfilled.

The question is no longer how many users a platform supports. It is how much work it can handle, complete, and evidence effectively.

What this means for SaaS platforms

This shift will not benefit every platform equally.

As software moves from presenting information to completing work, value becomes tied to what a system can actually deliver, not just how it is accessed. This will also shape commercial models, with more platforms likely to combine traditional subscriptions with pricing based on consumption, throughput, or completed outcomes.

Organizations still need oversight, approvals, and ways to manage exceptions, but the focus is shifting towards how effectively platforms can absorb, process, and complete work at scale.

That change is already exposing the gap between strong and weak software, placing greater scrutiny on systems that offer limited workflow depth or rely heavily on manual effort. In contrast, platforms that are deeply embedded in operations, with strong data, logic, and execution capabilities, will become more valuable.

As agents become consumers of APIs, software needs to be connected and capable of supporting autonomous activity at scale. Those that are not will struggle to keep up.

The next phase of SaaS

Ultimately, what we are seeing is not the end of SaaS, but an evolution. SaaS is being reshaped, not just as software for human interaction, but as software designed for both humans and machines operating across systems.

A shift from systems that present information to systems that complete work. From user-driven interaction to orchestrated execution, and feature competition to control over how processes run.

This is not theoretical. It is already happening. Low-code platforms and productivity tools are being augmented by AI and agentic workflows, changing how applications are built, adapted, and used day to day.

But this shift also raises the bar for how organizations adopt AI. Those that simply layer agents onto existing processes risk creating more complexity rather than less. Introducing automation without understanding how work really flows can make outcomes harder to predict and harder to evidence, particularly in regulated environments.

The organizations that succeed will start with a real operational problem and introduce AI selectively. Where existing workflows provide sufficient structure and control, value can be delivered quickly without redesign. Where AI exposes friction or inefficiency, that insight can then inform targeted process improvement.

AI agents amplify the platforms beneath them; they do not replace them.

The result is not less software, but different software, running on platforms built to execute work, absorb demand, and stay in control. More automation, more cases handled, more throughput, more outcomes achieved through systems that reliably complete more work at scale.

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• A new update is coming to Meta's smart glasses
• It should stop modders from disabling the light that lets people know you're using the camera
• Meta is also targeting modders on and off its platform

Last month we shared details of reports that Meta glasses were being modded to bypass privacy protections and turn them into secret spy glasses. Now Meta has revealed it will update the glasses’ software to detect whether its light has been tampered with (or destroyed) to prevent recording.

Whenever you take a photo or video with Meta glasses, a white light appears on the front of the glasses to signal to people around you that you’re filming.

For creeps looking to be more secretive with their recordings, this light is a hindrance, but Meta has imposed more basic tamper-proof features since launch. That is, any attempt to use the camera while the light is blocked — such as by a piece of tape — wouldn’t be allowed. The trouble is, modders have found ways to open up the glasses and disable or damage the light and its mechanisms that prevent it from showing, without getting flagged by the system — meaning you can use the camera as you normally would, but without anyone else knowing.

This is (to put it bluntly) not good, and when the reports came out, a Meta spokesperson told me that the company was looking into ways to disable this workaround.

They also explained that Meta is working hard to stamp out advertisements for these kinds of services — some of which appeared on its own Facebook Marketplace platform — with its latest announcement explaining this means banning accounts, taking down listings, and taking legal action against people or businesses that tamper with its tech.

Beyond the detail of updating software to prevent tampering, the whole article from Meta is focused on privacy, and crucially how Meta keeps you and others safe.

Thanks to people misusing its tech, the wider notoriety these gadgets are getting again, and reports of contractors seeing recorded images and videos that Meta glasses users might not have fully realized they could see, Meta and smart glasses makers have been facing major privacy questions.

With this article, Meta seems to answer many of them, though we’ll have to wait and see if it can convince users — or if they might be tempted by the rise of cameraless smart glasses.

The only way is cameraless?

Even Realities, another smart glasses firm, recently announced it has raised $150 million in investment at a $1 billion valuation — not too shabby for a company that only launched its first XR gadget in 2024.

Instead of Meta’s camera-first approach, Even Realities went for a display-first approach. Information is shown visually as green text and basic diagrams to provide features such as AI advice, navigational directions, or a speech appearing on a virtual prompter. Its specs also lack speakers, though that’s not true for all glasses of their kind.

Losing out on the camera is, of course, a major privacy win for some, as there’s no possible way for the glasses to see something they shouldn’t or be used to spy.

The thing is, I think these kinds of glasses are pretty terrible. Having tested a few at home, the ones without a camera just aren’t worth wearing.

Smart glasses, despite being increasingly popular, are in their infancy, which in the tech world means you can expect to pay a fair sum for relatively limited features — that’s the price of being an early adopter. That’s especially true, I’ve found, for these XR glasses specifically, because while they can offer several tools like navigation, on-screen translations, a prompter, and notification pop-ups, their usefulness is pretty limited.

How often do you need a prompter? Or one-way translation tools? In the case of the latter, because these kinds of glasses often have you rely on your phone to set up the translation feature or access other features, you might as well just turn to something like Google Translate — which has conversation modes so that two people can talk and see translations through a single device.

The software I’ve found for these types of specs can also be pretty terrible with sluggishness, inaccuracies, and crashes — and if I, as someone who tests smart glasses professionally, have trouble, I can’t imagine what less techy people must think.

Additionally, the green text can be hard to make out on a bright day if you’re outside, making on-screen directions difficult to see.

While admittedly more limited feature-wise, the Meta glasses and smart specs like them feel like way better value for money. From Meta specifically, the software is generally very reliable, and more broadly, the ability to snap a photo whenever — either to capture a moment or to provide context for an AI’s response — comes in handy so often.

Even if it isn’t as good as my phone camera, the ability to record a memory, hands-free and without being taken out of the moment, is so utterly delightful.

Yes, there are privacy challenges which need to be hashed out more formally, as even without the ability to record privately there is still plenty of room for creeps to harass people with this kind of gadget, but if you want a pair of smart glasses right now there simply isn’t a better option.

“Tokenmaxxing” – the idea that AI coding success comes down to using as many tokens as possible – is an appealing metric.

Tokens are the fundamental unit that AI coding tools use to read, write, and reason. So on the surface, more tokens should mean more output, more productivity, and more impact.

But when we analyzed 12,000 developers across 200 companies, the data revealed that while more tokens do correlate with more output, they come at a significantly higher price per unit.

Some organizations are pushing software engineers to use as many tokens as possible, using leaderboards to promote the biggest AI users. But that’s not a sustainable strategy. CFOs are starting to push back on uncontrolled AI spending and asking coders to show receipts.

Leaders may be willing to spend money to move fast, but they can’t do it without proving their engineering teams are having an impact.

The best approach to “toxenmaxxing” isn’t to blindly push for AI adoption. Instead, the best path forward for companies is to push AI coding adoption more broadly, moving more engineers into the middle of the curve while avoiding both underuse and expensive overconsumption.

Why ‘tokenmaxxing’ doesn’t scale

We found that the top 10% of Claude Code users consumed about 10 times as many AI tokens as the median developer but produced only about twice the output. In other words, increasing token consumption does increase output, but not proportionally.

The research also shows a small but growing group of power users dominating total token consumption. At the 90th percentile, users are burning around 225M tokens per week, about 3x what they were using six months ago, and about 7x the median.

Many engineering leaders are now looking at their highest adopters and trying to figure out how to get the rest of the organization to the same level. That approach is misguided. With the cost per merged PR increasing from $0.28 at the lowest adoption tier to $89.32 at the highest, scaling extreme token usage simply cannot drive value.

Instead, engineering leaders should focus on smoothing the curve. Broad, moderate token consumption is far more cost effective than having a small group of power users at one end of the spectrum and everyone else lagging behind. When most of the organization is operating in the middle of the curve, AI becomes a durable advantage: enough to drive real productivity gains but not so much that engineering teams burn money chasing marginal output.

Maximize impact, not token consumption

The organizations that burn through the most tokens aren't necessarily getting the furthest with AI. When token consumption is high, most are spent on automating manual tasks with tools like Claude, Copilot or Cursor. Developers essentially have a better tool to do the same kind of work as they did before.

To really drive impact with AI, engineering organizations need to move towards new, truly agentic modes of working. However, agentic systems require major investments in IT infrastructure, including context engineering, orchestration, and sandboxed environments. Until organizations address these issues, the productivity gains will remain blocked by an "agentic barrier" that no amount of tokens can overcome.

How established enterprises can follow the AI-native lead

Conversations around AI and software development focus on coding, but writing code is just one part of an engineer's role. Taking a product to market also involves roadmap work, deployment, go-to-market enablement, and more. If engineers are spending tons of tokens on writing code as fast as possible, everything else needs to catch up.

Changing roadmap cadence and accelerating sales enablement requires major cultural shifts that many organizations aren't prepared for. As a result, extra cadences are often poured into the backlog or other things that may deliver value down the line but won't move the revenue needle in the short term. Teams can consume millions of tokens every week but have little to show for it by the end of the quarter.

AI-native companies are more likely to see an immediate return on their AI investments. While established enterprises may not be able to start from scratch, adopting AI-native principles can help remove bottlenecks and turn token spend into measurable business returns faster. By designing workflows with automation in mind, they can continue to accelerate coding without creating technical debt.

"Tokenmaxxing" is having a moment, but engineering leaders need to move beyond token count and start finding ways to prove value. By measuring how AI impacts delivery, quality, and productivity across the software delivery life cycle, leaders can demonstrate ROI and make sure every token counts.

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• Microsoft's new Windows 11 recovery method is available for Windows Insiders
• Cloud Rebuild allows users to reinstall Windows 11 and necessary drivers via the cloud, without a USB drive
• The feature should begin rolling out to users on stable Windows 11 builds

Microsoft is continually making adjustments to its Windows 11 operating system through patches that address user pain points, and, fortunately, its latest move is certainly welcome.

As reported by Windows Central, Microsoft has implemented a new recovery method for Windows 11, known as Cloud Rebuild, which is available to Windows Insider users. Cloud Rebuild allows users to reinstall the operating system and drivers from the cloud without the need for a USB drive.

It's a major step in the right direction for users who need to reset their PCs, whether due to data corruption, malware, or simply wanting to start anew, especially since not all users have immediate access to another device to download a Windows image or a USB drive to install it on.

Unlike the Windows Recovery Environment's 'Reset this PC' option, Cloud Rebuild doesn't allow you to keep personal files, but Microsoft says Cloud Rebuild reinstalls Windows with the appropriate drivers and "without depending on the integrity of the installed operating system".

Notably, Cloud Rebuild can still work when users can't boot into Windows 11, making life easier in a dire situation where the operating system is dysfunctional.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of Cloud Rebuild is for the acquisition of drivers, saving users plenty of time from manual downloads. This comes in handy for Windows 11 handheld gaming PCs, where reinstalling drivers can be slightly complicated, especially without the necessary peripherals being on hand for quick and easy navigation.

Cloud Rebuild isn't available to all Windows users yet, but the gradual rollout phase shouldn't be too far off. Fortunately, it's not a feature that most users urgently require (at least, I hope), so the wait for its arrival in stable Windows 11 updates shouldn't be frustrating.

How many unique passwords do you use to secure every single one of your hundreds of online accounts? If your answer isn't, "I have a strong unique password for every account," then you're among the millions of people at risk of having multiple accounts stolen from just a single password leak. All it takes is the right combination.

But that doesn't have to be the case. Using a password manager to generate and store your credentials is a secure and convenient way to prevent your accounts from being hacked. The best part is, Keeper has cut prices on its personal, family, and business starter plans by up to 50%.

Keeper's password manager offers secured password storage vaults, a password generator that easily complies with password strength requirements, and includes convenient features for privately sharing regularly used passwords - like the one for the Wi-Fi.

Why we recommend Keeper

Our Keeper review found the password manager to be an excellent addition to anyone wanting to improve their personal or household security.

The service uses zero knowledge architecture and device level encryption to keep the contents of your personal vault hidden from private eyes.

Rather than having to enter your master password each time you need to fill in your credentials, Keeper uses biometric security to access your vault. This uses the built in facial scan or fingerprint tech on your device. Keeper will also recognize when you are trying to log in to a website or app, and allow you to autofill the exact credentials you need.

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

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

MacPaw has spent years building a reputation as one of the most design-conscious developers in the Mac ecosystem. Its flagship product, CleanMyMac, has long included a malware removal module powered by Moonlock's engine. In October 2025, the Kyiv-based company spun that security technology into a standalone product: Moonlock, a full-featured antivirus app that goes well beyond a simple scanner.

Rather than leading with threat counts and detection percentages, Moonlock frames itself as security software that treats users like adults, explaining what malware is, why it matters, and what to do next, instead of firing off opaque alerts. The marketing centers on a 'care, not scare' approach, essentially promising to educate you rather than just bombarding you with red-text alerts.

While many live in the mythical belief that Macs are immune to viruses, MacPaw's own research reports that 66 percent of Mac users encountered at least one cyber threat last year, with a 67% increase in registered macOS backdoor variants in 2025. The research shows a key message: macOS is not immune, are users are being targeted more frequently than ever.

Plans and pricing

Moonlock starts at $54 per year for a single Mac, with licenses available for 2, 5, or more than 10 devices per subscription. Monthly billing and one-time lifetime license options are also available for those who prefer not to commit to an annual cycle.

Discounts of up to 67 percent are advertised on multi-year plans, which is worth exploring if you intend to stick with the product long term.

New users get a seven-day free trial, though a credit card is required to start. That is a common enough practice, but it does mean you will need to remember to cancel if the product does not suit you. To soften the blow of that annual fee, Moonlock offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, which is a considerably more generous safety net than the case-by-case refund process offered by some competitors.

Current Setapp subscribers get access to Moonlock at no additional charge, which may be the most compelling value proposition for those already in MacPaw's subscription ecosystem. At $54 per year for a single device, standalone pricing lands considerably higher than ClamXAV's three-Mac Home plan at $29.95, a gap worth weighing if budget is a primary concern.

Features

Moonlock is organized into six sections: Home, Malware Scanner, VPN, Network Inspector, System Protection, and Security Advisor. That framework reflects a deliberate decision to bundle a security suite rather than deliver a focused antivirus, giving the product a notably broader footprint than Mac-only rivals like ClamXAV.

Real-time protection runs continuously in the background, monitoring file activity, app behavior, and Mail attachments even when the main application window is closed. The Malware Scanner supports on-demand and scheduled scans, with built-in quarantine and removal tools. Detected threats are accompanied by plain-language explanations rather than raw file paths and specialized terms.

The bundled VPN is a simplified version of MacPaw's ClearVPN, covering around 60 server locations across more than 45 countries. Independent testing found no DNS or WebRTC leaks, and MacPaw maintains a no-logging policy. Speed retention is strong, holding around 82 percent of baseline download speeds on transatlantic connections and up to 96 percent on closer servers.

Network Inspector adds a country-level connection blocker, permitting users to block outbound traffic to specific regions. System Protection audits macOS's own built-in security settings and walks you through any gaps. Finally, Security Advisor provides a checklist for basic digital hygiene, including practical guidance on habits such as two-factor authentication and app permissions. AI assists with malware classification on the backend, helping the team update threat databases before new strains reach your device.

Privacy and Security

From a top level perspective, Moonlock was tested by the third-party laboratory AV-Test in September 2025 and earned it's AV-Test certification. It scored a 5.5/6 in Protection, 4.5/6 in Performance, and a full 6/6 for Usability (which I'll dive into in the next section).

As for the credibility of the underlying research arm, Moonlock Lab has made several notable contributions to the antivirus landscape, being the first to identify PyStealer on VirusTotal, and the lab has also been cited by the SANS Institute for discovering new variants of the Atomic macOS infostealer.

Regarding privacy, the VPN operates under a strict zero-logs policy, and all data is processed locally. MacPaw publishes a Trust Center at security.macpaw.com describing its data-handling practices, certifications, and security standards, which is a nice change in transparency from many other antivirus providers.

The one caveat worth noting is that Moonlock is a recent standalone launch. While the underlying engine has been in use in CleanMyMac for some time, the app itself has a limited history as an independently tested product. But it is worth noting that in the time since the last time AV-Test handled Moonlock, MacPaw have likely taken steps to improve protection and performance.

Interface and in use

The interface is highly polished, modern, and immediately legible, with a two-panel home dashboard that separates tasks on the left from status information on the right. Everything is where you would expect it to be, and the visual hierarchy makes it easy to tell at a glance whether your Mac is protected.

Instead of a generic 'Threat Resolved' notification, Moonlock tells you what was found, why it poses a risk, and what your options are. I found I was the one to make the final call on whether to remove a flagged item, which sidesteps the infuriating experience of automated deletion that occasionally catches legitimate software.

The system requirements make it suitable for older devices too, requiring macOS 13 or later and 515MB of disk space. The app runs quickly and, in day-to-day use, does not noticeably drag on performance. Installation requires a MacPaw account, which adds a step that competitors like ClamXAV skip entirely for home users, but the tradeoff is a unified login for managing licenses and accessing support.

Ultimately, Moonlock is a great option for those looking for an accessible and easily navigable Mac antivirus that doesn't bombard you with any overly-technical language, and performs as though you are the one in control.

Support

Moonlock support runs on MacPaw's established infrastructure, with a dedicated knowledge base that covers installation, configuration, and troubleshooting, and those with questions can submit immediate inquiries through the support portal. In-app feedback is also available via the Help menu.

As with many Mac-focused security products, live chat or phone support does not appear to be offered as a standard option. For most home users, the knowledge base and email channel will be sufficient. Teams with more complicated environments should verify support response times before committing, particularly given that Moonlock is a relatively new standalone product and the support documentation is still maturing.

The competition

ClamXAV is the most direct rival in the Mac-exclusive antivirus space. At $29.95 per year for three devices, it is considerably cheaper than Moonlock's $54 single-device starting price, and it also holds a perfect AV-Test score compared to Moonlock's test results. It does not include a VPN, network inspection, or the polished onboarding experience Moonlock offers, but for those who want focused antivirus protection at a lower cost, it is a strong option.

Intego Mac Internet Security X9 sits at a comparable price point and includes a network monitor, with a longer track record in independent third-party testing. Bitdefender Total Security and Norton AntiVirus Plus both offer wider platform coverage and larger feature sets, making them better fits for households with mixed Windows and Mac devices.

Those who are already subscribed to CleanMyMac should also note that its built-in malware-scanning module, powered by the same Moonlock engine, continues to function independently. Therefore the question is whether the full Moonlock standalone app adds enough to justify an additional subscription or an upgrade in spending.

Final verdict

Moonlock is one of the most carefully designed security apps I've encountered in the Mac ecosystem. Its interface is excellent, its feature set is broader than most Mac-specific alternatives, and the research team behind it is doing genuinely credible original work. The 30-day money-back guarantee is also a nice addition, despite the need to enter your payment details first.

At $54 per year for a single Mac, it costs nearly twice as much as ClamXAV's three-device plan. The added value of the bundled VPN and Network Inspector goes some way toward justifying that gap, but those who already have a VPN solution elsewhere may not find the extras compelling enough. Setapp subscribers, on the other hand, get all of this for free as part of a subscription they likely already value.

For long-standing CleanMyMac users who already benefit from the embedded Moonlock engine, the standalone app offers greater depth, visibility, and control, but it's not a replacement for anything missing. It is a fuller version of the protection they have already been relying on, now with a VPN, richer reporting, and a proper home for the security features that were previously contained within a Mac cleaning utility.

For Mac users who want a single subscription that covers antivirus, VPN, network monitoring, and system security guidance, Moonlock makes a strong argument. Just go in aware of what you are paying for relative to the alternatives.

You might also be interested in our report on the best Mac apps of the year.

Walk deep into Walt Disney Imagineering’s sprawling, surprisingly unassuming Glendale campus, and you’ll eventually find Studio C.

It’s where Imagineering mixes the audio for its attractions, but when I recently stepped inside, I quickly realized it was much more than a recording studio. The room is lined with dozens upon dozens of speakers designed to recreate the sound field of Disney attractions, letting Imagineers hear a ride long before guests ever do.

During my visit, I watched a live mix session for Zootopia: Hot Pursuit, Shanghai Disneyland’s trackless dark ride, and the experience was almost uncanny. Sound moved seamlessly around the room, tracking the ride vehicle as though I were actually inside the attraction.

That same room became the proving ground for one of Imagineering’s most unusual engineering challenges yet: figuring out how to mix the audio for Soarin’ Across America.

The reimagined version of Disney’s iconic flight simulator debuted this summer at both EPCOT at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, and Disney California Adventure in Anaheim, California, timed for America’s Semiquincentennial celebration. Disney’s Unscripted behind-the-scenes video confirmed that Imagineers used the Apple Vision Pro during production of Soarin’ Across America, but it left one obvious question unanswered: why? That’s what I wanted to find out.

So I spoke with Greg Lhotka, Sr. Manager, Audio Media Design at Walt Disney Imagineering, who walked me through the surprisingly complicated process behind mixing one of Disney’s most technically demanding attractions.

“For Soarin’ Across America, we utilized Studio C not only as a production facility, but as a proving ground for an entirely new field-mixing approach developed specifically for this film. On the sound design side, we partnered with Skywalker Sound, and together we used Studio C to prototype and validate a custom speaker configuration that closely mirrors the unique audio architecture of the Soarin’ theaters.”

If you’ve ridden Soarin’, you already know why that matters. Riders are lifted into the air in three stacked rows facing a massive curved projection screen, while sound moves not only around the theater but above and below you as well. As Lhotka explained, the attraction uses a four-tiered speaker system — upper, mid-level, lower, and a dedicated floor array — creating an audio environment that’s far more complex than a traditional movie theater.

Having now ridden Soarin’ Across America several times, it’s easy to appreciate the result. The updated film sweeps from New York Harbor and the Grand Canyon to California’s rolling hills and countless landscapes in between through soaring aerial cinematography, practical effects, and a soundtrack that glides almost effortlessly alongside you. The audio shifts just as fluidly as the visuals, making each transition feel natural as the ride carries you across some of America’s most recognizable landmarks and scenic vistas.

Studio C could simulate much of that during production, but not all of it.

“For Soarin’ films, mixing historically required the construction of scaffolding inside the theater to reach the appropriate listening height for final mix decisions,” Lhotka explained. “Even then, the process was far from ideal, as the ride canopy significantly influences the acoustics. For this project, one of the key requirements was that the theater remain fully operational and open to guests throughout production — eliminating the possibility of scaffolding altogether.”

That constraint forced Imagineering to rethink its entire workflow.

“The challenge was clear: how do you mix a show with over 1,000 audio tracks and an extremely complex panning matrix while seated in a ride vehicle? The solution came through an innovative use of new AR technologies. By leveraging advanced screen-sharing capabilities, we were able to remotely control our production system — directly connected to the theater — while seated in the ride vehicle itself. This allowed us to place virtual screens in our field of view, effectively bringing the mixing console into the theater environment.”

Before anyone tested it inside the attraction, Studio C became the test lab.

“Studio C once again played a critical role as our testbed. Over the course of a week, we evaluated multiple configurations to confirm that things could be controlled precisely in this way, and that the AR headset’s external cameras would allow us to view the film clearly in the theater’s low-light conditions while simultaneously monitoring the virtual screens. The final configuration exceeded expectations.”

Once validated, the workflow moved from experiment to production.

“This workflow was ultimately used as the solution — and it became the method by which Soarin’ Across America was mixed. The result is a soundtrack that was shaped directly from the guest’s perspective, using tools and techniques that reflect our continued commitment to innovation, immersion, and storytelling.”

Having experienced Studio C for myself, that revelation immediately clicked. The room is already designed to recreate the feeling of sitting inside a Disney attraction with remarkable accuracy. But even a purpose-built facility couldn’t perfectly replicate Soarin’s unique acoustics. The only place left to finish the mix was inside the attraction itself.

It’s an elegant solution that solved two problems at once. Guests never lost access to Soarin’ during production, and Imagineering’s audio team was able to shape the soundtrack from the exact seat every future rider would occupy. Rather than approximating the experience from scaffolding or even Studio C, the final mix was crafted where it mattered most: inside the attraction itself.

For the past year or so, predictions of SaaS's demise have dominated the tech conversation.

Headlines warned that AI tools would replace traditional software, engineers would become obsolete and the SaaS industry itself was headed for extinction.

The narrative became so widespread that Wall Street gave it a name: the ‘SaaSpocalypse’.

Fortunately, reality has proved far less dramatic.

While the SaaS market - once the darling of investors - has undoubtedly taken a substantial hit, it is a long way from dead. In fact, I would argue that software doesn't die; it evolves.

If history has taught us anything, then it’s that major technology shifts rarely eliminate software altogether. Instead, they reshape it, with the biggest winners often being those agile enough to adapt.

From the rise of the internet to the shift to cloud computing, time and time again we’ve seen established players demonstrate an ability to evolve alongside technological change.

The AI era is unlikely to be any different.

SaaS subsectors best positioned to unlock AI-enabled growth

And I’m not alone in this view. Over recent months a number of high-profile economists, technology historians and analysts have arrived at that same conclusion. JPMorgan continues to champion the SaaS subsectors best positioned to unlock AI-enabled growth. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs projects the global app software market could still reach $780bn by 2030, with agentic AI ultimately expanding the market rather than shrinking it.

Put bluntly, AI isn’t killing SaaS but rather separating the bad from the good. For years, SaaS startups have benefited from intense market hype and lofty valuations, often with minimum regard given to operational efficiencies, product differentiation or true value creation. Today that playing field looks a lot different. In effect, AI is now acting as a filter, revealing which SaaS models are superior and offer a genuine point of differentiation and, in turn, those which have for far too long favored style over substance.

For SaaS founders then, it isn’t time to panic. In our experience, investors-in-the-know will be more than willing to overlook the misguided SaaS narrative and recognize a genuine high potential opportunity should it arise.

Take, for example, the mid-market. Although much focus tends to surround the startup scene, I would argue that established software vendors are actually best positioned for AI transformation. After all, they already possess powerful structural advantages, including proprietary customer data, deeply embedded workflows and long-term contracts.

Moreover, they often sit on years of customer data. In this way, unlike startups where the focus is typically product, these firms actually have something meaningful to transform.

Well positioned to use AI to strengthen their market position

Far from becoming obsolete overnight, many are well positioned to use AI to strengthen their market position. Take, for example, Keyword.com. Having early recognized that search itself is changing, it launched a product to track brand visibility across AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. That repositioning opened up an entirely new growth vector.

In terms of how founders can best navigate this new terrain, it’s important to look beyond product and focus on structural resilience. For a long time, SaaS benefited from assumptions such as high multiples on ARR, heavy adjustments for stock-based compensation, and a willingness to prioritize growth over almost everything else.

That is now being replaced by a much more grounded framework. Investors are increasingly looking at real profitability, on a GAAP basis, and asking harder questions about cost structure, for example around sales and marketing efficiency, and now AI-related compute costs as well.

At the same time, as founders will be aware AI is introducing new variables. Revenue may be less predictable if it’s usage-based, and margins can be more dynamic because of inference costs, meaning investors won’t simply rely on simple rules of thumb anymore.

Valuation is becoming less about applying a multiple and more about understanding the underlying business, with a focus on true earnings quality, defensibility and efficiency.

Another significant but largely underappreciated upshot of the current environment is the emergence of roll-up opportunities.

The SaaS landscape is becoming increasingly fragmented

As valuations normalize and weaker players struggle to differentiate, the SaaS landscape is becoming increasingly fragmented. This creates fertile ground for consolidation strategies, particularly for investors with deep sector expertise.

Importantly too, AI enhances this model by enabling efficiencies across portfolios, from automated customer support to streamlined marketing and product development.

For investors, this is opening up a different kind of opportunity in terms of not just backing individual high-growth companies but participating in broader aggregation strategies that can unlock value through scale and operational improvement.

This means that purposefully positioning your business for ease of integration and standardization could pay dividends.

The short of it? Software isn’t going anywhere. Just like the major tech trends before it, it is simply evolving from a market that is less about hype and surface-level metrics to a more practical, mature model driven by genuine business outcomes.

For founders, this may mean navigating a more complex operating environment. But it also creates an exciting opportunity to differentiate.

Not all SaaS firms are primed for this new investment landscape, so those who pay due diligence by prioritizing intelligence over features, operational prowess and AI interoperability to deliver clear, measurable value will be best positioned to succeed.

We've reviewed and ranked the best business cloud storage.

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

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

• Microsoft posted an ad promoting Copilot on social media
• It said that Copilot is the "button you can press to fix everything"
• This has elicited quite the outpouring of rage from some folks, and it's not a wise promo given the prevailing climate around AI and Windows 11

Microsoft is catching some flak once again over the topic of AI in Windows 11, following what might be regarded as an overzealous piece of marketing.

Windows Latest noticed that Microsoft's marketing department posted an image across its social media (Facebook, Instagram, and X) which promoted the dedicated Copilot button and the AI assistant it summons.

The text featured in the pic was: "Them: There's no button you can press to fix everything," followed by a reply as if in a conversation that read: "Me: Wanna bet?"

Predictably this has stirred up some controversy, with responses to Microsoft's little ad that range from accusing Copilot of being "AI slop" (or "Microslop") through to comments along the lines of "no one wants this" and similar negativity.

Undermining the fix Windows 11 effort

This is a particularly poorly timed piece of PR, given that, as Windows Latest observes, Microsoft is finally bringing in the ability to change the Copilot key back to function as Right Control. This is the key that the Copilot button replaced on 'AI PCs' (laptops), but as some people have said, Right Control is crucial to their workflow (and has accessibility ramifications for one-handed keyboard use).

With that change coming to Windows 11 later this year — an effective softening of Microsoft's initial stance that you should have the Copilot key and like it — this marketing snippet feels even more badly judged.

What's worse here for me is the exaggeration of the usefulness of the Copilot key. The AI can "fix everything" can it? It's a frankly ridiculous statement to make, and yes, I know that's not exactly uncommon in advertising, but you've got to bear in mind your target audience here and the context.

AI in Windows 11 has triggered a lot of bad feeling in the user base since last year, and indeed Microsoft's blinkered focus on pushing AI was one of the reasons that people were up in arms about fixing the OS rather than adding Copilot trimmings. Or in other words, the big fix Windows 11 campaign — which is the focus of this entire year for Microsoft — was partly the result of all the anti-AI feeling.

So, erm, let's market around the Copilot key being this amazing solve-all feature, shall we? Sounds like a great plan, everyone. Full steam ahead! Let's talk about how great it would be to add more AI into Notepad while we're at it, yeah? (Apologies, I remapped my Copilot key to be a 'Sarcasm' key and it appears to be jammed down right now).

Microsoft also says the Copilot key is a button with "main character energy" in this advert, the problem being that if AI in Windows 11 was a movie, it's been a box office turkey for the software giant so far. Microsoft's hope is that AI agents in Windows 11 will turn things around, but it remains to be seen how that'll pan out.

Meantime, while Microsoft is trying to generate positivity and good vibes around Windows 11 with all its (very commendable) work to fix the OS, it'd be better for the software engineers and designers in the thick of it not to have those efforts undermined by the marketing crew wheeling out unintentional ragebait like this Copilot button nonsense.

Now, I'm not saying that Microsoft's PR team can never mention AI, of course, but this particular snippet on social media is a perfect example of how not to do it in the current Windows 11 climate.

• Capture One has added native Hasselblad .3FR RAW file support
• Hasselblad's X2D II 100C, X2D 100C and CFV 100C are included
• Tethered capture is set to follow later this year

Hasselblad photographers, I have the news you've been waiting years for: Hasselblad cameras finally have native Capture One support.

The support covers Hasselblad's 16-bit .3FR RAW files and includes three of its 100MP medium-format cameras: the X2D II 100C, X2D 100C and CFV 100C digital back (which is the sensor module for the 907X). You'll need the latest version of Capture One 16.8.3 or Mobile Version 3.3.4.

It's truly a match made in heaven; Hasselblad's 16-bit RAW files and 'Natural Color Solution' render possibly the most true-to-life colors I've seen in my 15 years of testing cameras, while Capture One is industry-favorite editing software for color correction and tethered shooting.

This partnership between two Scandinavian companies had to happen some time, and now it has, with tethered shooting support (a studio setup where you can control the camera through the software) also promised for later this year.

It's a big deal for both parties — Hasselblad shooters can ditch Adobe, which is held in lower regard among pro colorists, in favor of Capture One and its precise photo-editing toolset.

The move might also attract new professional and commercial photographers, who have previously been put off because of the lack of Capture One support, to Hasselblad's medium-format digital cameras.

As for Capture One, it can potentially attract a new wave of existing Hasselblad photographers, with a seamless workflow from capture to the finished image.

Letting Hasselblad cameras sing

Until now, workarounds were needed to bring Hasselblad RAW files into Capture One, at the cost of color accuracy and editing latitude. Meanwhile, Adobe's photo-editing platforms, such as Lightroom, are held in less regard than Capture One for outright color fidelity.

Now Hasselblad's 100MP medium-format RAW files are supported, with profiles for Hasselblad's entire range of XCD lenses and the ability to organize files as well as edit them and, later this year, tethered capture.

I reached out to Hasselblad for comment, and a spokesperson told me: "One of the most consistent requests has been native support for Hasselblad RAW files in Capture One. This partnership is a direct response to that feedback, and we've been working with the Capture One team for some time to make it happen."

Capture One echoed Hasselblad's sentiment about the new partnership, saying "Giving Hasselblad photographers the native Capture One workflow they've asked us for is genuinely rewarding. Both of us are firmly rooted in the commercial and professional space, and that's a big part of why this partnership makes sense."

And when I asked about the challenges in bringing native support to a new format, Capture One told me, "The real challenge was less about simply reading the files. Getting a new format right means dedicated color profiles for each of the three cameras, so Hasselblad's files render with the true-to-life color our users know Capture One for, plus lens profiles for the XCD lenses that correct distortion, chromatic aberration, and light falloff.

"Throughout, the priority was making sure the unique character of these cameras comes through with the image quality we pride ourselves on."

You can sign up for a free Capture One 7-day trial if you've yet to try it, with subscriptions starting at $18 / £16.67 AU$27 per month, or a one-time purchase costing $349 / £336 / AU$523.

• Some Windows 11 users have found their drive space has been mysteriously dwindling
• In some reported cases, this is down to a database file for a Windows component that grows massively due to an apparent bug
• The optional update for June fixes this, albeit that patch is still in testing

If you use Windows 11 and have been wondering why your drive space seems to have been mysteriously dwindling of late, the culprit could be a background process called Capability Access Manager.

Capability Access Manager (CAM) is a rather obscure Windows component which, as the name suggests, manages the apps on your PC in terms of permissions to access the camera, mic and so forth.

CAM keeps a database that logs app requests and this is stored as a file called CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal – and it's that file which is growing hugely on the drives of some unlucky Windows 11 users.

Neowin reports that Microsoft just implemented the fix for this aggravating issue in the latest update for Windows 11. This is patch KB5095093 which is the optional update for June (so it's still in preview, or testing, at this point).

In the changelog for this release, Microsoft tells us: "This update improves disk space usage for the CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal file."

So, with any luck, this will be an end to the gremlin, and those who install the June preview will find this database file has been changed so it doesn't spiral out of control and eat their storage like some kind of log-based black hole.

Analysis: a baffling case of bloat

This is a nasty little problem, especially for those who've got a modest main drive for Windows 11, such as a 256GB SSD (or maybe even smaller). With reports of the database file expanding to a size of 60GB to 100GB, or even larger (200GB according to this Redditor), you can see how problematic this could be when you're already short on space with your SSD.

Microsoft doesn't explicitly say that this is a bug, but surely it must have been? Albeit a situational one that only occurred on certain systems by all accounts (Dell PCs are mentioned in a few reports, I should note). It's clear, however, that there are a lot of reports of CAM woes on Reddit and Microsoft's own help site, with some folks left scratching their heads as to what on earth was going on – and why their drive space was disappearing into some apparent void.

Unfortunately, these problems have been around for some time, with those reports going back to March 2026, and some dating from almost a year ago. As one Redditor explained in a post some 10 months ago: "Turns out it's the 'CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal' file which ate up 25GB. Looked through some forums and seems like it's a notorious culprit for system bloat. That file is supposed to slowly build up then be emptied each month, but mine bugged and never emptied itself."

There are workarounds to delete the CAM database file and effectively empty it out, but they're somewhat fiddly, and the log will rebuild itself if buggy conditions still abound on your PC. As one Redditor observed: "I spent hours trying to delete that file. Like in a horror movie, it just wouldn't die, even when I thought I had killed it. Your procedure [workaround] worked perfectly. Thanks!"

So, the whole thing has been a bit of a headache really, and while it's good to see an apparent cure now, it's taken Microsoft long enough. And frankly, I'm not impressed with the communication on this issue from the software giant.

To be clear, the fix right now is to download and install the June optional update for Windows 11, but bear in mind that as noted, it's a preview, so there's no guarantee it'll work as it should. The resolution will be provided with the full July update, mind, in tested form, and that's just around the corner – so you might just want to wait for that. Assuming your drive isn't chock-full and causing you a whole load of grief, anyway.

• Conversation focus is being limited to three hours a month for some Meta glasses users
• For a longer 15 hours a month limit you'll need to pay for Meta One Premium
• The feature is handled on device, so it's unclear why it has been paywalled

The Meta Ray-Bans and other AI glasses can perform a slew of useful tasks thanks to their wearable hardware and digital assistant — but Meta has just announced that one of those features will be getting serious limitations as it introduces a paid subscription plan that will unlock more usage time.

Conversation focus was showcased at Meta Connect last year, and is essentially an audio mixer for your real-life conversations. When you switch the feature on — using the voice command "Hey Meta, start conversation focus" — the specs’ microphones will pick up the voice of the person you’re looking at, the AI will separate their voice from the background noise, and then your glasses’ speakers will play what they’re saying to you to amplify their speech and make it stand out.

It’s an impressive feature, and very useful if you struggle to hear people in crowded spaces — or are starting to become a little hard of hearing and want a voice boost much of the time — but this is the feature Meta is now starting to limit. If you only have the free account that you create when you set up your glasses in the Meta AI app, you’ll just have three hours of conversation focus a month (as spotted by The Verge).

If you want more hours you’ll need to sign up to a paid Meta One Premium subscription, which costs $19.99 per month. Notably this subscription doesn’t unlock unlimited conversation focus access; instead your limit is bumped up to 15 hours a month.

In addition to this, Meta One Premium will also give you access to more advanced Meta AI reasoning models through the app, and expanded access to image and video generation models.

Was this inevitable?

We know that unlimited free AI access isn’t sustainable. Every AI query has a data center and energy cost to AI companies like Meta, and eventually they'll need to recuperate those costs or risk serious financial struggles.

However, no matter how inevitable a Meta AI glasses subscription seemed, this isn’t how I imagined it would roll out — frankly it’s quite a bad look for Meta, and I hope it reverses course.

My frustrations with this change as a Meta AI glasses user are three-fold. First, having something that was previously free taken away is never fun, especially as features like conversation focus felt like they’d already been paid for via the purchase of Meta’s glasses.

If Meta One had instead locked a new more powerful AI model behind a subscription, or some powerful new tool, that would feel very different. Your glasses would still do everything you were told they could do at launch, but to get some serious upgrades you’d need to pay up — sure this wouldn’t feel all that amazing either, but at least Meta wouldn’t be seen to be taking a feature away and holding it hostage.

My next frustration is that it’s conversation focus specifically that is being taken away. As I've mentioned, this is something of an accessibility tool, and while I’m sure most users only activate it periodically if there’re in a very noisy bar or somewhere similarly packed, for some I can see conversation focus being a tool they rely on frequently if they have more general hearing troubles but aren’t quite ready for a more sophisticated aid.

The flip side, unfortunately, is that if conversation focus isn’t a tool everyone uses all the time it’s the one least likely to actually inconvenience most Meta glasses users, allowing the company to experiment with paid access to tools without upsetting a large section of their consumer base.

Finally, according to Meta itself, conversation focus is handled entirely on-device. Your Meta AI glasses can offer the function without an internet connection, meaning it shouldn’t be costing its data centers anything to process.

In a way, taking unlimited conversation focus usage away is like Meta limiting how many photos your glasses can take a month. All the hardware and software tech is on your device; it’s just being locked away in what seems like a classic case of corporate greed.

Now, the silver lining at the moment is that if you haven’t noticed any rate limits yet, or heard about Meta One through your specs, it’s likely that your glasses are still working the same as they always have. As explained in the help article, “Meta One is currently in limited testing and isn't available everywhere yet.”

Additionally, I’m hoping the fact that Meta One is still in testing means Meta won’t be afraid to reverse course, especially as this decision feels so nonsensical for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Or perhaps it’ll be forced to rethink things if its AI glasses rivals (including the incoming Android XR specs) boast similar features at a similar price with no such paywall or usage limit.

Otherwise, this feels like yet another unforced error for Meta in the smart glasses space. How can we now trust tha tMeta won’t paywall any AI glasses feature we’ve previously had access to?

Following the announcement of its more budget-friendly AI glasses — including a pair styled by Kylie Jenner — I hoped it might be getting back on the right track. This latest announcement has knocked my confidence, but the ball is still in Meta’s court — perhaps Meta Connect 2026 will see it properly turn things around.

• Windows Subsystem for Linux gets new container feature after being teased last month
• CLI and API form the basis of the latest update, Intune management also added
• Other changes being made available to alternative container CLI tools

Microsoft has released Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) containers in public preview following its earlier announcement at Build 2026, as a way to create, run and manage Linux containers directly on Windows.

When the feature update was first revealed, Microsoft described it as "a built-in way to create, run and interact with Linux containers using familiar CLI & API."

The new container feature is now available in the latest pre-release version, which can be downloaded from GitHub, and includes two new core features.

WSL containers now available in public preview

As part of the update, Microsoft has added a built-in container CLI and an API to let Windows applications run Linux containers.

The company noted that the API is particularly useful for reusing existing Linux specific code, like running cloud applications locally, while the CLI tool uses a familiar format so users can "use [their] existing muscle memory when running Linux containers."

Microsoft also added new management settings to let admins control whether people can use WSL distros and containers via Intune.

Besides the headlining container update, Principal Product Manager Craig Loewen also highlighted a series of other changes the company has made to WSL, including a new 'virtiofs' file system that makes Windows file access 2x faster and a new 'consomme' default networking mode to improve compatibility.

Loewen noted that the lower level platform changes are also being made available across "other fantastic Linux container CLI tools" like Docker Desktop, Podman Desktop and Rancher Desktop.

Microsoft has also published a support page covering how to install the API, which includes support for C, C++ and C#.

The company hasn't yet provided a timeline for general availability.

• An ex-Microsoft software engineer has created a lightweight alternative to Notepad
• TinyRetroPad turns back the clock to avoid the bloat Microsoft has introduced to the text editor
• The engineer observes that the app has no bloat or telemetry, and that it's "just pure old school Windows done right"

Ever long for the days when Notepad was a lean, mean, text editing machine? If so, a software engineer who used to work at Microsoft has just released something you may well be interested in.

The Register noticed that Dave Plummer — who was likely one of admittedly many catalysts that sparked Microsoft's fix Windows 11 campaign — has created TinyRetroPad. (It's a fork of Dave's Tiny Editor or DTE by Matt Power, which, in turn, was built on the foundation of Plummer's HelloAssembly — the world's "smallest possible complete Windows application" no less).

TinyRetroPad is a fully functional text editor in the style of the original Notepad, completely streamlined and with all the bloat removed, so it's, well, tiny as the name suggests, weighing in at 2.5KB.

Plummer explains that he isn't keen on Notepad as it is, and so he "rebuilt it from scratch", with: "No bloat. No telemetry. No nonsense. Just pure old school Windows done right."

Analysis: note to Microsoft – debloat Notepad

In case you weren't aware, Notepad has been accused of being a bloated application for quite some time now, as Microsoft has expanded its features to cover all kinds of bases beyond what you'd expect from what's supposed to be a basic text editor.

Of course, the problem is that WordPad — which used to be the app that covered the middle-ground between Notepad and Microsoft's fully-fledged Word — was ditched back in 2024. Since then, Microsoft has drafted more and more features into Notepad in what's essentially covering for the removal of WordPad.

The trouble is that this is very much at odds with Notepad's core philosophy of being a lightweight text editor, and Windows 11 users now fear it's being bloated and will eventually end up less and less responsive, and therefore less useful as a quick-and-easy editor that puts a premium on convenience.

What all this means is that some people have abandoned Notepad and searched out third-party alternatives for Windows 11. Of course, TinyRetroPad represents another of these offerings, albeit about as pure and compact an alternative as you'll find.

How is this app so very small? Essentially, the program can be extremely compact because it taps components already installed in Windows.

As Plummer explains: "TinyRetroPad is basically a wrapper around the RICHEDIT50W control from the WinAPI."

So, Plummer notes, if you want Notepad to be "exactly like you might remember" from the Windows XP era, this is what TinyRetroPad does. I think the ex-Microsoft engineer may have a few takers on his hands.

• AI is forcing Apple to deliver security updates more often
• iOS 26.5.2 is part of Apple's new update strategy
• More updates mean better protection against AI-powered cyberattacks

It seems that the number of ways AI is changing the world is increasing. The requirement for more RAM to run new AI features in Apple products is already being blamed for the recent price increase in Apple products, as well as for the current high price of RAM itself.

Now, according to a recent Reuters report, AI is also to blame for the number of iOS and macOS updates we'll need to install. The bad news is that it's going up, all because of the threat posed by the latest AI models and their potential to aid cyberattacks.

Instead of waiting for the next scheduled operating system update for the latest round of security fixes to arrive, Apple is now delivering individual security updates ahead of the next iOS and macOS 26.6 update.

iOS 26.5.2 is here now

If you look in Settings > General > Software Update on your iPhone, you'll see that iOS 26.5.2 is waiting for you now, unless your iPhone already installed it overnight.

The description for the update reads, rather vaguely: "This update provides security fixes for your iPhone," but it's the dangers posed by AI that are driving this update, so make sure you install it promptly.

Details of the security updates for all Apple operating systems are available on the Apple Security Updates page.

Malicious hacking tools

The Reuters article states that the urgency of the update is due to the risk that AI now poses to Apple devices.

"The company told Reuters on Monday it was adapting to the reality that, given the ability of artificial intelligence to speed the development of malicious hacking tools, it needed to reduce the time between when updates were first made public and when they were put into customers' hands."

It looks increasingly likely that this will become the new normal for security updates, and companies like Apple won't be able to rely on bundling the latest security fixes into the next scheduled operating system update. Stand-alone security patches delivered whenever they're needed are something we're all going to have to get used to.

While it might be annoying to keep updating our tech gadgets more often, it's a small price to pay for better security in the AI era. We'll just have to get used to software updates being less about new features and more about staying ahead of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks.

OpenAI and Anthropic are publicly disagreeing about whether their new AI cyber tools should be shared with European regulators.

OpenAI has offered Brussels access to its model. Anthropic is holding back, with Commission talks described as being at a different stage. Both have framed their position as the responsible one, and both arguments have merit.

But whether openness or restriction is the right call is ultimately a policy question and one that will take time to resolve. For organizations managing cyber risk today, the more immediate question is whether the teams are equipped to handle what these tools can already do.

AI systems can now autonomously carry out multi-step cyberattack tasks in controlled environments. Anthropic's Mythos completed a 32-step simulated corporate attack in testing.

Before it existed, no AI had ever done that in this type of full-chain simulation. Regulatory access to that kind of model matters for policy development. But the organizations that will be on the receiving end of attacks it enables are not waiting for that process to conclude.

The question of who decides when a powerful cyber tool is safe to deploy is important. But responsible deployment cannot just mean responsible release. It also means ensuring the organizations expected to defend against these capabilities actually have the people and skills to do so.

Most organizations are underprepared

Recent UK survey data found that only 27% of UK organizations are fully prepared for AI-powered attacks. Seven in ten are operating with partial or no AI-specific readiness, even though the vast majority of senior leaders already recognize that AI is increasing their risk. The awareness is there. The preparation is not keeping pace with it.

Part of the issue is that cyber security has long been treated as a technical problem with a technical solution. Buy the right tools, run the right software and you are covered. AI fundamentally changes that assumption.

When attack tools can learn, adapt and probe defenses continuously, finding weaknesses, failing and trying again without getting tired, the humans on the other side need to be able to keep up. That requires expertise, not just familiarity with a dashboard.

The skills gap is an operational risk

AI identifying a vulnerability is only the first part of the problem. Someone still needs to understand what they are looking at, assess how serious it is, prioritize it against everything else on their plate and act quickly. That judgement does not come from a tool.

It comes from trained, experienced people who have built that capability over time. This is especially important as AI-generated attacks become harder to distinguish from legitimate activity. Threat recognition at speed requires pattern-matching built through experience and training, not simply access to the right software.

The data supports this. Among organizations that have invested in ongoing certification training, 86% report a measurable reduction in cyber risk, with an average reduction of nearly 48%. Certified teams also recover faster when something goes wrong.

Nearly half of UK organizations surveyed experienced at least one attack in the past 12 months, with the financial cost most commonly landing between £100,000 and £199,999 once recovery, downtime, regulatory fines and reputational damage are factored in.

Regulation is moving, but slowly

This is also where the governance question gets more practical. Giving regulators access to frontier AI models is useful for understanding what they are dealing with. But that access is only meaningful if the organizations it is meant to protect have the capability to act on what those models can do. A policy framework built around tools most security teams are not yet equipped to respond to does not close the gap.

AI security standards are still being written. Most security teams have limited awareness of what frameworks even exist, let alone what is coming. The EU AI Act, NIS2 (Network and Information Security Directive 2) and emerging sector-specific guidance are all moving targets. Organizations that build continuous training into how they operate will be better placed to keep up as those requirements take shape.

The fix is known

For most organizations, the question of whether they have the skills in their people to respond when it matters is the gap between awareness of risk and readiness to manage it.

The investment in trained and certified security professionals has a measurable impact on an organization's ability to deal with attacks. It also builds the kind of internal capability that makes it easier to maintain regulatory compliance as requirements evolve. This isn’t a glamorous answer but the evidence for it is consistent.

Organizations that view training as a core part of managing cyber risk, rather than something to be revisited after a breach, are generally in a much better place. The tools and the threats will evolve all the time. It is the difference between resilience and vulnerability.

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

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

• Windows 11's File Explorer is receiving major improvements via the latest preview update
• File Explorer should perform much faster, including mounting disk images
• The update is currently in the rollout process

Microsoft is still hard at work fixing pain points within Windows 11 for its users. While this case isn't focused on gaming improvements, it addresses an issue that should improve one of the operating system's fundamental aspects.

As reported by Windows Latest, Microsoft is rolling out File Explorer improvements with its latest preview update, KB5095093. The update includes much better speed and performance of the File Explorer and increased responsiveness when mounting disk images.

This is a long-awaited update for Windows 11 users, as File Explorer hasn't always been the most responsive or fastest, especially compared to macOS or SteamOS, both of which feature fairly responsive file managers.

It's also worth noting that PC hardware, specifically SSD speeds and storage space, can have an impact on loading times. Still, the onus has been on Microsoft to fix its Windows 11 File Explorer, which has been noticeably slow even with a high-speed SSD — so this update is very much necessary.

Perhaps the most important improvement being rolled out is better performance for mounting disk images, which was arguably the worst aspect of Windows 11's File Explorer. This would often result in a five-minute wait for the disk image to fully open, and that's frustrating, especially for users with high-speed hardware.

Windows Latest also highlights that the 'Properties' tab on a file will be seeing a visual overhaul, with a more modern look using WinUI 3, as opposed to the Windows 95-era UI.

It's great to see Microsoft address these issues, seemingly as a wider attempt to improve Windows 11's functionality and appearance due to consistent user complaints. For sure, there's still more to be desired in the game performance aspect, but Microsoft should get praise where it's due.

My only concern is a potential update that could undo all of the hard work, since Windows 11 updates are notorious for breaking functionality, whether that's via File Explorer or as far as GPU stability — which have previously impacted Nvidia GPU users.

For the past two years, the generative AI conversation has been dominated by one piece of hardware: the GPU.

GPUs supplied the parallel compute needed to train large language models, and their scarcity quickly became a proxy for AI readiness.

But that shorthand is now incomplete.

The next phase of enterprise AI will not be defined by accelerators alone.

It will be shaped by CPUs, memory bandwidth, cloud capacity, networking, and the workflow systems that allow AI to move from casual experimentation into daily business operations.

AI’s true economic impact will not come from model access; it will come from whether businesses can turn AI into reliable, cost-efficient operational capacity.

AI is Becoming an Infrastructure Problem

The first wave of generative AI adoption was largely experimental. Employees used standalone tools to draft emails, summarize documents, or write code. These ad-hoc use cases were useful, but they did not require companies to redesign how work actually gets done.

The next wave is different. As AI moves deeper into enterprise workflows, IT infrastructure requirements become exponentially more complex.

A customer service tool that drafts a response is simple. An AI system that reads account history, checks policy, updates a CRM, logs the interaction, and triggers a follow-up task is an entirely different beast. This system does not just need a powerful model; it requires compute orchestration, secure data access, software integrations, permissions, audit trails, and fallback logic.

This is where the GPU-centric view fails. While GPUs remain critical for heavy inference, CPUs coordinate how these workloads interact with databases, APIs, security layers, and operating systems. As a result, memory bandwidth, latency, and power availability are becoming the true strategic constraints.

The High Cost of Unstructured AI Usage

The early enterprise playbook was simple: give employees access to powerful tools and see what happens. While this accelerated learning, it also exposed a massive financial vulnerability. Individual, unstructured prompting is expensive, difficult to measure, and hard to tie to tangible business outcomes.

We are seeing a major corrective shift play out among tech giants. Microsoft recently began pulling back internal licenses for Anthropic's Claude Code—which was costing between $500 and $2,000 per engineer monthly due to high token consumption—and is forcing its Experiences and Devices division to transition to GitHub Copilot CLI ahead of its June 30 fiscal year-end.

Similarly, Uber completely exhausted its entire AI coding tools budget in just four months. The ride-hailing giant deployed Claude Code to roughly 5,000 engineers and aggressively stoked adoption using internal leaderboards. The experiment was incredibly effective—assisted systems generated nearly 70% of committed code—but token usage scaled faster than anyone anticipated, forcing Uber's leadership to publicly question the net ROI.

Consequently, the future of enterprise AI will move away from fragmented prompting toward a central intelligence model. Rather than thousands of disconnected interactions, companies will rely on shared intelligence layers—centralized systems that understand corporate data, apply consistent business rules, route tasks across applications, and track performance.

This model is inherently more efficient because the same intelligence is reused across workflows rather than recreated from scratch by individual users.

From Answers to Workflows

The most critical shift in enterprise tech is the transition from tools that answer questions to systems that perform work.

Traditional software is deterministic: a user clicks a button, and a system performs a known action. AI workflows are more dynamic. An agentic workflow can retrieve real-time data, reason through a multi-step process, interact with third-party software, and loop in a human for approval.

This puts immense pressure on the full technology stack. To unlock actual productivity gains, businesses need clean data infrastructure, disciplined governance, and robust integrations. Advanced models are useless if layered on top of fragmented, disconnected corporate systems.

Unprecedented Change Management and the "AI-Native" Workforce

As these agentic systems mature, the impact on global employment will trigger a corporate change management crisis on a scale never before seen. AI will fundamentally alter hiring patterns and role requirements long before it eliminates headcount at scale.

Historically, headcount was the default lever to scale capacity; more customers required more support staff. AI breaks that linear relationship. Instead of asking how many people are needed to handle an influx of volume, leaders will increasingly ask how much of a process can be handled by automated systems.

This environment will aggressively reward adaptability. Professionals who stay ahead of the technology curve, learn to design AI-enabled workflows, and manage systemic exceptions will disproportionately benefit.

Conversely, the risk of displacement is starkest for those relying purely on legacy industry experience. Traditional technical and managerial paradigms are being disrupted by a new cohort of AI-native developers, product managers, and team members. These professionals do not just use AI as an assistant; they build, manage, and think in terms of automated, model-driven systems.

Those who fail to transition from traditional operators to AI-native orchestrators risk being replaced by those who do.

AI Infrastructure is Economic Infrastructure

The broader economic impact of AI will be determined by how deeply it can be embedded into the core systems that run global businesses.

GPUs, CPUs, networking, and data centers form the physical foundation. Agent orchestration, security, and observability form the operational foundation. Together, they dictate whether AI remains a novelty or becomes a scalable business capability.

The GPU race was merely the opening chapter of the AI boom. The next chapter will be defined by the holistic compute, data, and workflow systems that allow AI to do real work at scale. That is the moment AI stops being a tool and truly becomes infrastructure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. It's smooth and fast

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

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

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

2. Siri AI is a genuine upgrade

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

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

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

3. The interface tweaks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IT stack visibility is getting worse, not better

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Browse the full Amazon Prime Day sale

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

Today's best smart glasses deals (US)

Today's best smart glasses deals (UK)

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

More Prime Day deals in the US

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

More Prime Day deals in the UK

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

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

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

• Browse the full Amazon Prime Day sale

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

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

Today's best Samsung Galaxy XR deals

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

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

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

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

More Prime Day deals in the UK

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

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

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

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

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

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

The great fix-athon

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

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

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

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

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

A more thoughtful, cautious approach

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

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

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

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

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

Optimism abounds — with a notable catch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Browse the full Amazon Prime Day sale

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

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

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

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

Price up, prices down

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

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

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

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

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

More Prime Day deals in the US

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

More Prime Day deals in the UK

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

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

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

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

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

Ogling the style choices

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

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

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

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

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

More and better AI

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

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

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

Getting it right and making it safe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Browse the full Amazon Prime Day sale

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

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

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

Today's best RayNeo Air 4 Pro deals

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

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

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

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

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

More Prime Day deals in the US

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

More Prime Day deals in the UK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking the macOS plunge

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

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

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

You're on your own

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

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

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

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

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

It never came.

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

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

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

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

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

Getting real

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis: a more stable way of working

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The tradeoffs to consider

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is AI to blame?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The hidden risks of the single ecosystem

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

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

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

The balanced solution: Hybrid AI architecture

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

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

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

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

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

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

Designing for survival

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Safer, but for who?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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