Two years after generative AI was supposed to render India’s $250 billion IT services industry obsolete, the sector is finding that enterprises still need someone to handle the unglamorous plumbing work that large-scale AI deployment demands. Less than 15% of organizations are meaningfully deploying the new technology, according to investment bank UBS, and Indian IT firms are positioning themselves to capture the preparatory work — data cleanup, cloud migration, system integration — that channel checks suggest could take two to three years before enterprise-wide AI becomes feasible.

The financials have held up better than the doomsday predictions suggested. Infosys now calls AI-led volume opportunities a bigger tailwind than the deflation threat, a reversal from 2024, and orderbooks held steady in the third quarter even as pricing pressure filtered through renewals. Infosys expects its orderbook to grow more than 50% this quarter, anchored by an NHS deal worth $1.6 billion over 15 years.

The companies have been restructuring accordingly. TCS cut headcount by 2% and invested in a 1GW data-centre network while acquiring Salesforce advisory firm Coastal Cloud. HCLTech reduced margins by 100 basis points and became one of the first large systems integrators to partner with OpenAI; this week it announced acquisitions of Jaspersoft for $240 million and Belgian firm Wobby to expand agentic AI capabilities.

The bear case for the Indian IT sector assumed that AI would work out of the box. Two years in, it does not.

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While stock investors have pushed AI-related shares to repeated highs this year, debt markets are telling a more cautious story as newer AI infrastructure companies find themselves paying significantly elevated interest rates to borrow money. Applied Digital, a data center builder, sold $2.35 billion of debt in November at a 9.25% coupon — roughly 3.75% above similarly rated companies, or about 70% more in interest costs. The pattern has repeated across several deals.

Wulf Compute, a subsidiary of Bitcoin-miner-turned-data-center-operator Terawulf, raised $3.2 billion in mid-October at 7.75%, well above the 5.5% average yield for similarly rated issuers. Cipher Compute sold $1.7 billion in early November at just over 7%. CoreWeave, which rents data centers and installs computing systems for companies like OpenAI and Meta, raised $1.75 billion in July at 9%. The company’s bonds have since fallen to around 90 cents on the dollar, pushing the effective yield above 12% — nearly double the average for companies at its single-B rating level.

“We just have to be much more pessimistic and not buy into the hype,” said Will Smith, a portfolio manager at AllianceBernstein. Construction delays and uncertain demand for AI computing power remain key concerns for lenders who, unlike equity investors, have no upside beyond getting their principal back.

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A Google support page in Hindi says the ability to change your Gmail address is on the way. The feature would allow you to replace your current @gmail.com address with another. Your old address would remain active as an alias on the account, and all your data would stick around, unaffected.

The support page (translated) says that “the ability to change your Google Account email address is gradually rolling out to all users.” The change was first spotted on a Google Pixel forum on Telegram and was first reported in the press by 9to5Google.

Google hasn’t made a formal announcement about the change. The English version of the support page still says you usually can’t change your @gmail.com address. Up to this point, Google has only allowed address changes for non-gmail.com addresses.

Engadget reached out to Google for confirmation. We’ll update this story if we hear back.

When the feature (presumably) rolls out broadly, you’ll change it through your account settings. Sign in to your Google account, then go to Manage your Google account > Personal info > Google Account email. If you don’t see the option to change it, then you’ll have to wait.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/you-may-soon-be-able-to-change-your-gmail-address-165633905.html?src=rss

LG has revealed a new lineup of gaming monitors just ahead of CES. The UltraGear evo displays offer 5K visuals. Many incorporate on-device AI upscaling, taking some of the burden away from the GPU. 

LG says the tech will let consumers skip out on some card upgrades. This could end up being extremely beneficial because the AI boom has been impacting GPU prices.

LG

There are three displays in the lineup so far, with more to come down the line. There’s a 39-inch OLED (39GX950B) that includes the aforementioned AI upscaling to 5K, but also algorithms for scene optimization and sound. The company says this will “refine images and audio performance for a more immersive audiovisual experience.”

This monitor can easily switch from the standard resolution with a refresh rate of 165Hz to a much zippier WFHD resolution with a refresh rate of 330Hz. This is supported by a 0.03ms response time. It’s curved with a 21:9 aspect ratio.

LG

There’s also a 27-inch MiniLED (27GM950B) in the lineup. This display has been “designed to dramatically improve blooming control”, which is done by minimizing halo effects and stuffing in 2,304 local dimming zones. LG promises it “preserves fine details across bright and dark scenes alike.”

This one features AI algorithms for upscaling to 5K, scene optimization and sound. It can also switch between 165Hz at 5K and 330Hz at QHD, with a 1ms response time. The screen boasts a peak brightness of 1,250 nits.

LG

Finally, there’s the beastly 52-inch (52G930B) large-format gaming display. You didn’t read that wrong. This is a 52-inch gaming monitor. This 5K display offers a speedy 240Hz refresh rate. The 1000R curvature wraps around the peripheral, which should be great for flying sims and stuff like that.

LG hasn’t released any information as to when we’ll be able to get our mitts on these displays, or how much they will cost. With all the tech on offer, it’s likely they’ll cost a pretty penny.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/accessories/lg-announces-line-of-premium-gaming-monitors-that-offer-5k-visuals-165224945.html?src=rss

Black holes have long captured the imagination of both scientists and the general public. These exotic objects—once thought to be merely hypothetical—have also conceptually inspired countless artists all over the world. A generous sampling of such work is featured in Conjuring the Void: The Art of Black Holes.

Author Lynn Gamwell spent ten years as director of the New York Academy of Science’s Gallery of Art and Science. She has an extensive background writing about the intersection of math, art, and science. So she was a natural choice to speak at the annual conference of Harvard’s interdisciplinary Black Hole Initiative a few years ago. Gamwell focused her talk on the art of black holes, and thus the seeds for what would become Conjuring the Void were sown.

“I was just astounded at how much art there is [about black holes], and I was specifically interested in Asian art,” Gamwell told Ars. “There’s just something about the concept of a black hole that resonates with the Eastern tradition. So many of the themes—the science of black holes, void, nothingness, being inescapable—relate to the philosophy of Buddhism and Taoism and so on.”

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While America’s largest corporations are riding a wave of surging profits and AI-fueled stock market enthusiasm to record highs, small businesses across the country are cutting staff and scaling back operations as years of high inflation, cautious consumers and tariff confusion take their toll.

Private firms with fewer than 50 workers have steadily shed jobs over the past six months, according to payroll processor ADP, cutting 120,000 positions in November alone. Midsize and large firms continued adding jobs during the same period. The divergence mirrors what’s happening among American consumers.

The Federal Reserve’s latest beige book noted that overall consumer spending declined further even as higher-end retail spending remained resilient. Workers at small businesses tend to earn less than those at large companies, and stock market gains from large public company shares flow mostly to wealthier Americans. Small businesses — those with up to 500 workers — employ nearly half the American workforce and represent more than 40% of GDP, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But their profits are slightly lower than a year ago, per a Bank of America Institute analysis. Net income at S&P 500 companies rose 12.9% from a year earlier in the third quarter.

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This was the kind of year that felt 100 years long, so who could blame us for leaning into a bit of escapism? Some of us buried our noses in books in 2025, and thankfully, there were plenty of good reads to get lost in. Here are some of the Engadget team’s top picks from the year.

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Wild Dark Shore pulls off a magnificent balancing act of telling an intimate, personal story coupled with the backdrop of impending climate disaster. A father and two children are living on a remote island near Antarctica, taking care of a vast seed bank that was part of an abandoned research facility. They’re literally trying to stay above water for a few months until they get bailed out from the island along with as much of the seed bank as they can save before it goes under when a woman named Rowan washes up on shore. She survives, is nursed back to health, and starts forming bonds with her rescuers and their mission — but at the same time, she has some unexpected connections to the island and the former research team that lived there that she keeps to herself.

The magic of this book is in the way Charlotte McConaghy builds tensions from many sources throughout the book; you feel a lingering sense of discomfort through, waiting for the other shoe to fall even as Rowan gets closer and closer to the family. It’s a small-scale story at its heart, but with the backdrop of disaster looming the stakes feel extremely high. And McConaghy is a master at putting these feelings on the page in gorgeous prose. As she showed in her previous work Migrations, she has a real talent for realistically describing near-future climate disasters, but Wild Dark Shore raises the personal stakes in a visceral way. — Nathan Ingraham, Deputy Editor

Moonflow by Bitter Karella 

This book is a chaotic and deeply weird rollercoaster ride that repeatedly gave me whiplash, and I loved it. Fair warning, it’s not for the weak-stomached. It is horrifying, hilarious, nauseating and somehow a very good time and a very bad time simultaneously. Moonflow is told through dual narratives, one following Sarah, a trans woman and mushroom dealer who has found herself in a desperate situation, and the other following the henchwomen of a deranged cult that’s made its home in a cursed forest. After Sarah ventures into these woods in search of the King’s Breakfast, a rare mushroom said to grant divine understanding to those who consume it, all hell breaks loose.

Karella’s writing is immersive, and this is the kind of book you can see, feel, hear and smell, for better and worse. Every person in this book is like a caricature of someone I’ve crossed paths with at some point in life, and the names of the cult members are just… chef’s kiss. Some of them had me howling. It is completely unpredictable — except in those few moments where it seems the author wants you to know exactly where things are going just to make you dread the inevitable. Reading Moonflow was a visceral, unforgettable experience. — Cheyenne MacDonald, Weekend Editor

Simplicity by Mattie Lubchansky

Another one about a cult, except this cult rules. I picked up Simplicity knowing nothing about it except that everyone cool on the internet seemed to be praising it, and was excited to discover that it’s set near where I live in New York’s Hudson Valley, in a future version of the Catskills. And here in the Hudson Valley, it often feels like I’m one or two innocuous decisions away from accidentally joining a cult, so there was an immediate connection. In Simplicity, it’s the year 2081 and New York City is a high-tech dystopia run by a billionaire. North of the city, though, various communities have settled off-grid, including a group called The Spiritual Association of Peers.

Lucius Pasternak, a trans man, is sent on an anthropological assignment from the mayor to SAP’s compound, Simplicity, and it doesn’t take long for their uninhibited way of life to start growing on him. But Lucius soon begins to have strange dreams, and a series of violent attacks shakes up the community. Through his mission to understand the people of SAP and later to find and stop the entity that’s targeting them, a beautiful story about queerness and identity and belonging and fighting for what’s important unfolds. This feels like the kind of book that should be passed around between friends who just get it, and I imagine many readers will feel incredibly seen by it like I did. — C.M. 

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

Or Stephen Graham Jones’ Interview with the Vampire. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter blends historical fiction and horror to give us one of the most impactful vampire novels of our time — one that serves as an uncomfortable but necessary reminder of the atrocities committed against indigenous people in the US by white settlers. It begins with the discovery of a crumbling journal that claims to contain the confession of a Blackfeet man-turned-vampire named Good Stab, as told to Lutheran pastor Arthur Beaucarne. What follows is a gutting chronicle of slaughter, heartbreak and revenge. It’s a classic in the making. — C.M.

Isola by Allegra Goodman

Historical fiction is how I trick my brain into possibly learning something. And because the endings are set, the author has to hook you into the drama with more than just the peril of an unknown outcome. I fell deep into Wolf Hall even though I knew which heads Henry VIII chopped off. I thought Isola might be similarly gratifying.  

It tells the story of Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval, a young noblewoman from France who was intentionally marooned on an island off the coast of Canada in 1542. The story is based on historical records so you know the plot won’t adhere to safe formulas, but mon dieu, I was not prepared for how rough things would be for Marguerite. 

Her troubles began long before she found herself fighting for survival on a wild uninhabited island with brutal winters. From birth, nearly every happiness was undercut by more dominant forces, yet the woman never stopped moving forward. Thankfully, Goodman draws Marguerite’s character not as some tired brand of plucky heroine with grit and a wink, but as a perceptive, pragmatic being who also gives in to impulse and doesn’t have everything figured out. 

Isola is beautifully rendered, from the stone chateaus to creaking ships and rough abundance of the island. Despite being set over 400 years ago, nothing feels dated. Human versus universe is an unfair battle, but I rooted for Marguerite on every page — and those pages turned quickly. — Amy Skorheim, Senior Reporter, Buying Advice

Old Soul by Susan Barker

This was one of the first books I read this year, and it’s really stuck with me. Old Soul travels through time and all over the world, across multiple storylines to trace the devastating impact of one mysterious woman who seems to defy the rules of mortality and always leave tragedy in her wake. Barker’s writing in Old Soul pulls the reader in and doesn’t let go. It’s an unsettling slow burn that did a great job of getting under my skin.  — C.M.

Meet Me at the Crossroads by Megan Giddings

If a door appeared out of nowhere, would you go through it not knowing what lies beyond or if you’d be able to return? In Meet Me at the Crossroads, seven doors pop up one day around the world, and people are unsurprisingly captivated by them. Regular people tempt fate, the ultra-wealthy plan exclusive excursions through them, religions form around their mystique. Ayanna is a teenager who was brought up in one of these religions. She’s also a twin, with a sister named Olivia who she’s been separated from after their parents’ split. When it comes time for Ayanna to go through one of the doors as part of a ceremony, Olivia makes a last-second decision to go with her. What follows is the aftermath of that decision. Meet Me at the Crossroads is a haunting and emotional journey.  — C.M.

Woodworking by Emily St. James

I am cisgender, white middle-aged man, so the experience of learning and accepting a different gender identity is something I will never fully understand. But Woodworking, the debut novel by Emily St. James, is a hilarious, tragic and ultimatley hopeful look at two trans women navigating different moments of acceptance in their lives. Erica is a mid-30s high school teacher who is recently divorced and just figuring out that she’s trans, something no one else knows about her at the start. Her student, 17-year-old Abigail, is her opposite: proudly out about her identity in a way that’s uncommon and dangerous in her small, conversative town in South Dakota.

Their paths intersect, and Abigail ends up in the uncomfortable and somewhat unethical role of helping Erica find herself. After all she’s confident and not afraid of who she is — but she’s also still a teenager, one dealing with massive trauma of her own. The dual look into these two protagonists, each with sections of the book narrated from their own points of view, gave me a vivid picture of the different challlenges, emotions and dangers trans people face. But the unexpected community that develops around both characters plainly shows the value of living as your true self in a way that (hopefully) anyone should be able to relate to. — N.I.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/our-favorite-books-we-read-in-2025-160000704.html?src=rss

Western carmakers retreating from electric vehicles amid softening government mandates could find themselves in a precarious position as Chinese rivals continue gaining ground in the EV market they’re choosing to de-prioritize. The EU on December 16th dropped its earlier plan to ban petrol car sales outright from 2035, instead requiring carmakers to cut emissions from new vehicles by 90% from 2021 levels. The day before, Ford announced a $19.5 billion asset writedown as it rethinks its EV strategy and ends sales of the all-electric F-150 pickup.

In the U.S., the Trump administration has rolled back incentives and other measures that supported EVs. But Chinese brands controlled 10.7% of the all-electric car market in western Europe in the first ten months of 2025, up a percentage point from a year earlier, despite EU tariffs on Chinese EVs imposed in October 2024. Sales of Chinese hybrids, which aren’t subject to those tariffs, have surged. EVs will eventually become the cheaper option as production expands and costs fall, meaning Western carmakers that slow down now risk giving competitors an unassailable lead.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LG will present a home robot named CLOiD at CES 2026 in Las Vegas. With humanoid robotics sure to feature heavily at this year’s tech conference, LG has teased its home assistant before a full unveiling in January.

The company says CLOiD’s two articulated arms with five individually actuated fingers are designed to help with a variety of household tasks. However, LG has not yet given a specific example of a task CLOiD can handle. We’re also not sure what it looks like, because aside from a couple of very close-up images of CLOiD’s hands, LG is keeping what the robot looks like under wraps until the show. 

LG said CLOiD is part of the company’s vision that “Zero Labor Home, Makes Quality Time.” It said its robot is a step toward a company goal of “freeing customers from the time-consuming demands of housework.” 

CLOiD’s chipset is housed in its head, which also sports a display, speaker, camera and a bevy of sensors meant to enable expressive communication. LG says its new robot is powered by its “Affectionate Intelligence” technology and is designed to interact in a neutral, user-friendly way. It’s also designed to refine its responses through repeated interactions with a user.

CES often plays host to proof-of-concept products that offer a window into the future but may not make it to market. It remains to be seen if CLOiD is simply a booth-side attention-getter or something with real potential. Visitors can see CLOiD handle some real-life scenarios at LG’s booth in the Las Vegas Convention Center.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/smart-home/lg-will-show-off-a-humanoid-robot-for-household-chores-at-ces-2026-145411218.html?src=rss

The global smartphone and PC markets face potential contractions of up to 5.2% and 8.9% respectively in 2026, according to downside risk scenarios from IDC that trace the problem to memory chip manufacturers shifting production capacity away from consumer electronics toward AI data centers. Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology have pivoted their limited cleanroom space toward high-bandwidth memory for AI servers, restricting supply of the conventional DRAM and NAND used in phones and laptops.

IDC expects 2026 DRAM supply growth to hit 16% year-on-year, below historical norms. The smartphone industry’s decade-long trend of bringing flagship features to affordable devices is reversing. Memory represents 15-20% of the bill of materials for mid-range phones, and thin-margin vendors like Xiaomi, Realme and Transsion will bear the brunt. Apple and Samsung have long-term supply agreements securing components up to 24 months ahead. PC vendors including Lenovo, Dell, HP, Acer and ASUS have warned clients of 15-20% price increases heading into the second half of 2026.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brazilian regulators have reached a settlement with Apple after a yearslong investigation into the company’s App Store fee practices as well as its policies against third-party app stores. As first reported by Brazilian tech site tecnoblog, the nation’s Administrative Council of Economic Defense (CADE) said it has accepted Apple’s proposed agreement that will address claims of anticompetitive practices.

The agreement will allow for third-party payment processing methods for in-app purchases and reins in Apple’s anti-steering efforts by allowing links to external websites for transactions. The settlement requires that these payment options be shown next to Apple’s own. Apple must also allow third-party app stores to be installed on its devices, though the company is allowed to display warnings to users if they are written in a neutral and objective way.

A new fee structure has also been agreed to, with Apple applying no fee if users are directed to outside payment methods in a text-only way. The use of a clickable link or button for an external payment option will incur a 15 percent fee. Purchases made within Apple’s App Store will still be subject to a 10 percent or 20 percent commission. Developers using Apple’s payment system would also be subject to a 5 percent transaction fee.

Additionally a 5 percent “Core Technology Fee” would be levied against all app downloads from third-party app stores. This new structure bears similarities to policy and fee changes made after the EU passed its Digital Markets Act, with Apple allowing third-party app stores and external purchases subject to varying fees.

Apple will have 105 days to comply under the new agreement and could face fines of up to $27 million for failure to implement the changes. The iPhone maker has been facing mounting pressure from regulators worldwide over its anti-steering practices and was recently handed a $587 million fine by the EU for violating its Digital Markets Act. Apple is appealing the fine. In the US, Apple has been embroiled in a court battle with Fortnite maker Epic Games over commissions on purchases that take place on third-party payment platforms.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/apple-will-allow-third-party-app-stores-and-payment-processing-in-brazil-135114824.html?src=rss