We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.
If you have some spring chores to tackle in your yard, a good set of cordless outdoor tools can save you time—but cordless outdoor tools can also be expensive. Cordless lawn and gardening tools use high-capacity batteries, which can cause a steep increase in price. Amazon has some Big Spring Deals on landscaping tools that can save you up to 62% off on the equipment you need to tackle your spring to-do list.
If you need to trim a tree or clean up fallen branches, a chainsaw can speed up the process. Although most battery-operated chainsaws aren’t quite as powerful as traditional gas-powered ones, a good quality battery can give you enough power for most things you would use a chainsaw for in your yard. The Greenworks 24-volt, 10-inch chainsaw is on sale for $97.99, down from 149.99. The saw comes with a 24-volt, two-amp-hour battery and a charger as well.
Whacking weeds is a big part of keeping your yard look manicured, especially in springtime. Getting a trimmer that lasts long enough to get some work done can be expensive, so a 40-volt, two-amp-hour battery is a good investment to avoid running back to the charger every few minutes.
The Greenworks 40-volt, 12-inch string trimmer and 390 CFM leaf blower combo is on sale for $124.99, down from 189.99. This combo comes with a 40-volt, two-amp-hour battery and a charger. It’s rated to work at maximum capacity for at least an hour and can be used on about a third of an acre per charge.
The Greenworks 40-volt, eight-inch cordless edger is on sale for $190.95, 36% off its regular price. The edger tool comes with a 40-volt, four-amp-hour battery that you’ll be able to use right out of the box. The edger is rated to tackle about one mile of edging and can run for at least an hour before needing a charge.
A spare Greenworks 40-volt, two-amp-hour battery is on sale for $49, 62% off its regular price. If you already have a Greenworks set of 40-volt tools, this battery is compatible with those sets. Having at least two batteries allows you to charge one battery while you’re using the other so you don’t need to wait for a fresh battery. This is a battery-only deal, so you’ll need a Greenworks 40-volt charger to use it.
If you have a larger yard, it might take more than an hour to trim. A 60-volt battery will give you a little more power and run-time so you can get more done between battery swaps. The Greenworks 60-volt yard tool combo set is on sale for $209, 34% off its regular price. It comes with a 13-inch string trimmer, a 540 CFM leaf blower, a 60-volt, four-amp-hour battery, and a charger. The set can run for 90 minutes and the string trimmer can trim about two miles worth of weeds on a single charge.
The case (initially reported by Oregon Live) centers around attorney Bill Ghiorso,
Following the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver pull request landing transparent hugepages for device pages as an SVM win, another round of Intel Xe driver updates were sent out this week ahead of next month’s Linux 7.1 merge window. This latest pull request lands a new user-space API for helping the Intel Xe driver better cope with situations of video memory pressure / out-of-memory behavior for vRAM…
RV Tech, a joint venture between Volkswagen Group and Rivian, has completed a successful winter test program, it said this morning. The partnership was created in 2024 when VW Group announced it would invest $5.8 billion in the American electric vehicle maker to gain access to Rivian’s expertise in vehicle software and electronic architecture. VW Group initially paid Rivian $1 billion in cash, with further payments over time: the completion of the winter testing milestone should unlock a further $1 billion payment.
VW’s decision to turn to Rivian followed a tortuous history of its own internal software development. It created a new division in 2019 just to develop software for cars, then immediately bit off more than it could chew by trying to simultaneously develop three different vehicle operating systems. Things went the opposite of smoothly, with software-related delays to the two new platforms used by cars like the VW ID.4 and Porsche Macan that led to chairman Herbert Diess’ firing and the third platform delayed until late in this decade.
Rivian, meanwhile, had no such problems developing its own vehicle electronic architecture and software, starting from a clean sheet unencumbered by generations of legacy cruft. As a startup automaker, Rivian needs money, and since Volkswagen needs better tech, the joint venture makes a lot of sense.
We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.
If you want a high-quality OLED TV for gaming and movies but the options you’ve been seeing online are out of your price range (they often easily surpass the $1,000 mark), the 55-inch Samsung S85F OLED TV checks most of the necessary boxes and is currently down to $897.99 (originally $1,397.99) thanks to a 36% discount during the Amazon Big Spring Sale.
Despite being labeled an entry-level OLED TV, the picture quality is still impressive, with not just strong HDR performance, color accuracy, and near-infinite contrast, but also perfect blacks and refined shadow detail. That means you’ll get better bang for your buck during dark scenes than you will with LED/QLED displays. The S85F has a very wide viewing angle, allowing for a consistent image from all sides. It uses an AI Gen2 processor and has AI-based enhancements, including 4K AI Upscaling and Real Depth Enhancer, and runs on the Tizen 9.0 smart TV platform.
It’s also an underrated choice for gamers that rivals the best gaming TVs, with a highly responsive 9.4ms input lag. It has four HDMI 2.1 ports that support 4K 120Hz, AMD FreeSync Premium, Nvidia G-Sync, ALLM, and HDR10+ gaming, as well as Motion Xcelerator tech to reduce blur in fast scenes and an AI Auto Game Mode to optimize settings. Plus, the Samsung Gaming Hub offers extra perks, including access to a wide range of cloud gaming apps. The two 2-channel, 20W speakers give users decent bass and clear dialogue, but they’re not home theater-level.
While it may not be the absolute brightest OLED on the market or have top-of-the-line built-in audio, the 55-inch Samsung S85F OLED TV still offers great value and makes a strong choice for gaming and movies, especially at a sub-$900 price point, which is more than fair for an OLED from a top brand. If you want the best of the best, you can upgrade to a model like the S95, but it’ll come with a hefty price bump. For most people, a middle-ground OLED like the S85F is a solid choice.
Meta and EssilorLuxottica appear to be preparing two new Ray-Ban smart glasses for launch, according to US Federal Communication Commission (FCC) filings from earlier this month.
As first reported by Janko Roettgers in his Lowpass newsletter, Meta hardware partner EssilorLuxottica has filed with the FCC two new devices which appear to be the next generation of their Ray-Ban smart glasses.
The FCC filing in question contains the names ‘Ray-Ban Meta Scriber’ and ‘Ray-Ban Meta Blazer’, describing them as “production units”, which could mean launch is fairly close.
Typically, FCC filings are one of the last stops before launch, as we saw with the last three hardware generations of Ray-Ban smart glasses, all three of which released less than a month after their respective FCC filings.
The company’s second-gen smart glasses released in 2025 include hardware refreshes of its popular Ray-Ban glasses, as well as Oakley Meta HSTN, Oakley Meta Vanguard, and the $800 Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses—the company’s first smart glasses to include a heads-up display.
As Roettgers points out, the new FCC filings are largely devoid of details or images of the devices, however a charging case was mentioned in testing—an accessory provided with all generations of the companies’ smart glasses.
Model numbers for Blazer and Scriber, respectively RW7001 and RW7002, are also new, which suggests we’re dealing with a new hardware generation.
Additionally, the devices were tested using the Wi-Fi 6 U-NII-4 band (5.9 GHz). Notably, the company’s latest smart glasses use Wi-Fi 6E (6 GHz), which does not operate in the 5.9 GHz U-NII-4 band.
This comes amid a significant shift in priorities at Reality Labs, Meta’s XR division. In January, the company laid off at least 10 percent of staff at Reality Labs, as the company has doubled down on AI and smart glasses, and reduced spending on first-party VR content.
Meanwhile, the smart glasses segment has been very successful for the Meta-EssilorLuxottica partnership, with the French-Italian eyewear maker revealing earlier this year that it had sold over seven million smart glasses last year, effectively tripling sales from all prior years in 2025 alone.
The post Meta Slated to Launch Two New Ray-Ban Smart Glasses, According to FCC Filing appeared first on Road to VR.
The Top Gun: Maverick and Twisters actor joins the all-star cast
It was only last August that Sony raised PS5 console prices in the US, blaming a “challenging economic environment” at the time. Today it has slightly tweaked the phrasing to “continued pressures in the global economic landscape,” but the outcome is the same: price rises across the board, this time even affecting the PS Portal handheld.
Starting April 2, the price of the standard PS5 (that’s the one with the disc drive) is going up to $650. That’s a whopping $100 hike, or $150 if you go back to before the August price increases. The Digital Edition is getting the same increase, up to $600 from $500 since August.
But the most eye-wateringly huge bump goes to the PS5 Pro, which will now cost you $900, $150 more than its (already very high) previous $750 MSRP. If you managed to pick up a Pro during last year’s Black Friday sale, when its price was slashed to $650, then you’re probably feeling pretty smug right now.
Even the PlayStation Portal is getting a $50 increase, up from $199 to $250. The Portal has gotten a lot more capable in the last 12 months, but $250 for a device that can’t run any games natively might make a purchase harder to justify for a lot of people.
In a blog post, Sony acknowledged the impact of prices increases on its audience, but said after “careful evaluation” that it was “a necessary step to ensure we can continue delivering innovative, high-quality gaming experiences to players worldwide.”
Global economic turbulence is affecting the entire games industry right now. Valve has already pushed back the launch date for the Steam Machine, while the ongoing RAM crisis could also be to blame for Steam Deck stock shortages.
Microsoft also raised Xbox prices twice last year, and earlier this week Nintendo announced that some of its physical first-party Switch 2 games will soon be more expensive than purchasing the game digitally. While Nintendo has experimented with this kind of pricing structure before, it might point to the increasingly prohibitive costs of making and shipping products right now.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/the-ps5-is-getting-more-expensive-again-133141514.html?src=rss
We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.
Amazon’s Big Spring Sale is underway, and one of the more practical big-ticket deals right now is on the Anker Solix F2000 Portable Power Station. It’s down to $799.99 (from $1,999), which is about 60% off and the lowest price tracked so far, according to price tracking tools like Keepa. That kind of drop makes this a very different conversation. At full price, it’s a niche buy. At this price, it starts to feel like a realistic backup option for homes, road trips, or anyone who deals with frequent power cuts and wants something more reliable than a basic inverter setup.
The F2000 is built around a 2,048Wh battery and a 2,300W AC output. In real terms, that’s enough to run a dishwasher through a full cycle or keep essentials like a fridge, lights, and a few devices going during a blackout. It can also handle heavier appliances like a washing machine or oven, just not all at once, since that 2,300W is shared across its three AC outlets. You also get a mix of ports that cover most setups: three AC sockets, three USB-C ports with up to 100W output for laptops, two USB-A ports, and car-style outlets. Plus, there’s a screen that gives you a clear read on battery levels, power usage, and time estimates, and the companion app adds extra control like switching ports on or off and monitoring battery temperature.
Charging is flexible, too. You can plug it into a wall for a full recharge in a little over an hour, use a car adapter, or connect up to 1,000W of solar panels (sold separately) for off-grid use. If you want more runtime, there’s also an optional expansion battery that doubles the capacity to 4,048Wh, though the output stays the same at 2,300W. It’s currently bundled with the F2000 for $1,498.99, down from $2999. The main downside here is size and weight. Even with wheels and a telescopic handle, this is not something you casually move around.
Consoles used to get cheaper as the generation went on
Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and Republican Senator Josh Hawley are urging the US’s central energy information agency to provide better information on how much electricity data centers actually use.
In a joint letter sent to the Energy Information Administration Thursday morning, seen by WIRED, Hawley and Warren press the agency to publicly collect “comprehensive, annual energy-use disclosures” on data centers. This information, they write, is “essential for accurate grid planning and will support policymaking to prevent large companies from increasing electricity costs for American families.”
As the data center boom spreads across the country, there have been widespread worries from voters about how their massive energy needs may increase consumers’ electric bills; this concern helped shape some midterm elections in data-center-heavy states, including Virginia and Georgia. Last month, Hawley cosponsored a bill with Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal that would require data centers to supply their own power sources in order to protect consumers. Earlier this month, Donald Trump convened a group of executives from Big Tech companies at the White House to sign a nonbinding (and toothless) agreement pledging to pay for their own power for data centers.
We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.
Hisense’s mid-range TVs tend to land in that sweet spot of good features at a not-astronomical price. That certainly describes the 2025 U7 Series right now, as the 65-inch model is discounted by $800 at Best Buy, dropping to just $699. It’s one of Lifehacker’s picks for the best 65-inch TVs in 2026, especially at this price.
The sale price is good through April 19, and Best Buy is sweetening the deal with a discount on mounting and free haul-away for members, which will make upgrading your older TV a bit less of a chore.
The Mini-LED backlighting and QLED panel of the 65U75QG deliver deep blacks with minimal blooming, and displays punchy HDR content with support for Dolby Vision and HDR10+, so watching movies or sports feels lively. It gets bright enough to handle sunlit rooms without looking washed out, though if your room has a lot of light, reflections can show up during darker scenes. There’s a built-in speaker setup with a subwoofer and upward-firing speakers, which adds some height to the soundstage, though it won’t replace a dedicated soundbar. As Google TV runs the interface, apps, casting, and voice control are all baked in.
On the downside, this TV doesn’t track brightness levels as precisely as higher-end models, so scenes can look slightly off without careful calibration. Also, the viewing angle is narrow enough that colors and contrast shift if you’re sitting too far to the side. While gaming works well overall, with smooth performance and plenty of support for high refresh rates, fast-moving scenes may blur more than expected. None of these factors will be a dealbreaker for casual use, but they matter if you’re picky about image accuracy or plan to use this in a wide seating setup. For most people, though, this is a bright, capable TV that covers a lot of ground, especially for this price.
Owlcat Games confirmed that their upcoming Mass Effect-like RPG is being developed with some help from generative AI
We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.
If your wifi is too damn slow (and I bet it is), the bottleneck is probably the router. This TP-Link Archer AXE75 might be the solution, and it’s 44% off for Amazon’s Big Spring Sale, bringing it down to $112.99—and it’s already a good deal at the full price.
This is a Wi-Fi 6E router, which unlocks the 6GHz band, so it’s a serious router for the price of a bargain one. It features a 1.7 GHz Quad-Core CPU, so it won’t freeze up when you’re gaming while someone else is streaming 4K in the next room, and it has six high-gain antennas that are built to kill dead zones in medium-to-large homes. Check out PCMag’s review for more details.
That’s the good news. The bad news is the FCC regulations regarding foreign-made routers going into effect. Like most routers, AXE75 is “foreign made”—but the regulations only affect the future authorization of brand-new models. Since the Archer AXE75 is already an authorized, existing model, you can legally buy and use it without worry. But there’s a caveat: The FCC has allowed security updates for these models through March 1, 2027. After that, it’s not certain it will be supported. TP Link says it’s planning to move manufacturing to the U.S. If that happens, the FCC is expected to extend its waiver, and the device will be supported. But no one can say for sure.
For decades, video conferencing has been defined by a persistent, frustrating barrier: the screen. No matter how high the resolution or how low the latency, you are always acutely aware that you are looking at a flat representation of a human being. You are talking to a TV, not a person. But as I sat across from a woman who appeared to be sitting just three feet away from me—despite being hundreds of miles apart—I realized that the “glass wall” has finally shattered. This is the promise of HP Dimension with Google Beam, a collaboration that represents the most significant leap in communication technology since the invention of the telephone.
My journey with this technology began with a demonstration that felt less like a product briefing and more like a magic trick. The setup for HP Dimension uses specialized light-field display technology, similar to the anamorphic 3D electronic billboards you might see in Times Square or Tokyo, which make objects appear to float in free space or move toward the viewer.The moment of “total buy-in” happened when the woman on the other side of the link picked up an apple. She held it out toward me, and as her arm extended, the apple moved beyond the physical plane of the monitor. It was well out of the screen, rendered in full 3D with perfect depth parity. My brain didn’t see a pixelated fruit; it saw an object I could reach out and grab. This is the power of Google Beam—it provides a true-to-life sense of presence that traditional 2D video simply cannot replicate.
One of the most profound advantages of HP Dimension is what it doesn’t require: a headset. While the industry has pushed VR and AR as the future of work, the reality is that wearing a heavy goggle set for eight hours is a non-starter for most professionals. It ruins eye contact, causes physical fatigue, and creates a barrier to the very “human” connection it tries to facilitate.
HP Dimension delivers a glasses-free 3D experience. By using advanced computational photography and light-steering optics, the system ensures that your eyes see different perspectives of the remote person simultaneously. This mimics how we perceive depth in the real world. Because you aren’t tethered to a headset, you can maintain natural eye contact, read subtle micro-expressions, and engage in the kind of deep, empathetic communication that is often lost in the “Zoom fatigue” of the modern era.
While the initial rollout of HP Dimension with Google Beam—slated for later in 2026—will likely target high-end enterprise environments, the roadmap for this technology is expansive. We are looking at a future line of teleconferencing products that scale to meet every need:
The implications of this technology extend far beyond the quarterly earnings call. As these systems become more affordable, they will redefine how we maintain our most personal relationships.
Imagine a college student living thousands of miles from home. Instead of a grainy FaceTime call on a smartphone, they can sit down for “dinner” with their parents. The sense of presence provided by HP Dimension could drastically reduce the isolation often felt by remote students or elderly family members.
Taking this a step further, the integration of human digital twins and AI-driven avatars opens a door to something even more profound. By utilizing historical data and high-fidelity 3D modeling, we could eventually use this technology to “speak” with virtual celebrities, politicians, or even relatives who have passed away. While the ethical considerations are vast, the ability to have a 3D, life-sized conversation with a digital representation of a lost loved, or a living person who doesn’t have the time or bandwidth to chat with fans or constituents, one offers a level of closure and connection that a photograph or video recording never could.
Once we master the ability to project “presence” without headsets, the use cases for HP Dimension and Google Beam will explode into other sectors:
Of course, moving from a demo to a shipping product involves hurdles. The bandwidth requirements for “true to life” 3D are significant, requiring high speed connections and sophisticated compression algorithms from Google. There is also the matter of lighting and camera placement—the system must capture the user from multiple angles to reconstruct the 3D volume in real-time.
However, HP’s history of hardware engineering combined with Google’s AI and cloud prowess makes this the most “realistic” attempt at holography we’ve seen to date.
HP Dimension with Google Beam is more than just an upgrade to your webcam; it is the first step toward the “Star Trek” (Holodeck) future of communication. By removing the headset and breaking the 2D plane of the screen, this technology restores the physical and emotional nuances of human interaction. Whether it is a business leader closing a deal, a family staying together across oceans, or the preservation of a legacy through digital twins, the feeling of being “in person” is no longer a luxury of geography. When this ships in 2026, the world will get a little smaller, and our connections will become significantly deeper.
For about four years now, AMD has offered special “X3D” variants of its high-end desktop processors with an extra 64MB of L3 cache attached, an addition that disproportionately benefits games. AMD calls this “3D V-Cache” because it stacks the cache directly on top of (for Ryzen 5000 and 7000) or beneath (for Ryzen 9000) the CPU die.
The 12- and 16-core Ryzen chips have their CPU cores split between two silicon chiplets, which has historically made the 7900X3D, 7950X3D, 9900X3D, and 9950X3D a bit weird. One of their two CPU chiplets has the 64MB of 3D V-Cache attached, and one does not. AMD relies on its driver software to make sure that software that benefits from the extra cache is run on the V-Cache-enabled CPU cores, which usually works well but is occasionally error-prone.
Enter the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition, a mouthful of a chip that includes 64MB of 3D V-Cache on both processor dies, without the hybrid arrangement that has defined the other chips up until now. This gives the chip a grand total of 208MB of cache—16MB of L2 cache, the 32MB of L3 cache built into each of the two CPU dies (for a total of 64MB), and then another 64MB chunk of 3D V-Cache per die. In total, AMD says the new chip should be as much as 10 percent faster than the 9950X3D in games and other apps that benefit from the extra cache.
The Document Foundation announced today the general availability of LibreOffice 26.2.2 as the second maintenance update to the latest LibreOffice 26.2 office suite series with various bug fixes.
