The Apple Watch Series 11 is on sale for the lowest price we’ve ever seen. You can pick up the smartwatch for $300, which is 25 percent off its regular price, a discount of $100. Discounts tend to increase as we get closer to September, when the next generation of Apple Watch is typically announced.

The Series 11 is our best overall smartwatch pick, and we gave it a score of 90 out of 100 in our hands-on review. We were impressed with the battery life, which lasted longer than the 24 hours it’s rated for in our testing. We also liked how lightweight and thin the watch is. The 9.7mm thick case on the Series 11 ties the Series 10 for the thinnest Apple Watch so far.

Fitness and health tracking are the main appeals of an Apple Watch, and the Series 11 introduces sleep tracking and hypertension notifications. The sleep tracking was comfortable thanks to the watch’s small form factor. The watch also added a new wrist flick gesture that lets you dismiss notifications, end calls and silence alarms or timers.

The GPS + cellular model of the Series 11 is also $100 off, and it’s the first Apple Watch to support 5G networks. It’s not too often you see an Apple product for 25 percent off its retail price, so if you were in the market for a smart watch, and especially if you are an iPhone user, it’s worth checking out.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wearables/the-apple-watch-series-11-is-at-the-lowest-price-weve-ever-seen-154609747.html?src=rss

CES 2026 kicked off with a big press conference from one of the biggest companies at the show: Samsung. The tech giant held its “first look” presentation to show off new home products and make a plethora of AI-infused announcements. New TVs, speakers, projectors and more were among the headliners, along with updated gaming monitors and soundbars.

Many of the products announced on stage were not actually new, but instead had been dripped out by Samsung recently. Like its minimalist Music Studio speakers or new Micro RGB TVs. We did get a closer look a previously undisclosed set, a flagship 130-inch Micro RGB TV framed by a giant metal easel with embedded speakers. It’s one of the most striking sets we’ve ever seen, but it’s much more in the realm of concept than reality. (That’s not to say they won’t sell it, just that we’ve heard no plans and if they do it will be hideously expensive.)

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

As for the rest of Samsung’s Micro RGB TV line, that may actually be slightly more affordable. The company released its first set last year for an eye-watering $30,000, but that was a 115-inch proof of concept. This year it’ll be offering TVs in more reasonable sizes, including the ever-popular 55-, 65- and 75-inch sets. We don’t know pricing on those but those smaller models will definitely be cheaper than $30,000. For those that want something bigger, there’ll also be 85-, 100- and 115-inch models. As before, the Micro RGB range will offer a purported 100% coverage of the Rec.2020 color space, which is something that even the highest-end OLEDs can’t match.

While they may have been announced prior to CES, we did get a few minutes in person with Samsung’s Music Studio speakers in the demo area after the big show. The Music Studio 5 and 7 are wireles speakers supporting both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. The Studio 5 has a four-inch woofer and dual tweeters, while the Studio 7 has a 3.1.1 setup with top-, front-, left- and right-firing speakers to give an “immersive 3D audio experience.” For all of that, it’s clear the main draw of these new speakers is the design, which is definitely striking.

Another thing from those heady pre-CES days was the Freestyle+, the latest attempt at a micro projector from Samsung. Like previous Freestyle models, it’s small and unobtrusive, but this one is a little brighter and has “smarter AI capabilities.” 

“The Freestyle+ reflects Samsung’s vision to create displays that adapt naturally to how people live and move between spaces,” said Hun Lee, Executive Vice President of the Visual Display Business at Samsung Electronics. “By combining true portability with intelligent AI that optimizes both the viewing environment and the content itself, The Freestyle+ makes it easier to enjoy a consistent, high-quality experience wherever you are.”

Billy Steele for Engadget

There were even products that Samsung didn’t mention on stage that we then found in the demo area. Like the Samsung HW-QS90H soundbar, a new skew on its popular HW-QS90 line that targets those of us that would rather not have a subwoofer sitting in our living rooms. It’s an all-in-one 7.1.2 soundbar with 13 drivers, including four (we’re assuming) woofers for its “Quad Bass Woofer system.” Or the 

And that was really that for the big announcements. The rest of the stage show was focused on how Samsung thinks (or really, at this point, insists) AI is going to make all of its products more useful. Demos included using AI noise cancelling to turn off the commentators in a soccer match, using AI to watch recipes on your fridge door, using AI to wash your clothes better (?) and… to cut a long story short, Samsung would very much appreciate it if you could please use AI.

We’re expecting to see and hear more from Samsung during CES, but for now you can find all of our news stories and more detailed hands-on impressions below, or if you want to relieve the event in extruciating detail there’s the livestream replay too. (Don’t worry, though the video is three hours long the event itself was a tight hour.)

Samsung hands-on impressions at CES 2026:

• Samsung brought an absolute beast of a 130-inch Micro RGB TV to CES 2026

• Samsung Music Studio 5 and 7 hands-on: Unique speaker designs debut at CES 2026

• Samsung HW-QS90H soundbar hands-on: Impressive bass performance without a subwoofer

• Samsung’s Freestyle+ projector hands-on: Much brighter and impressively adaptable

Samsung’s biggest announcements at CES 2026 so far:

• Samsung will show off its expanded Micro RGB TV series at CES

• Samsung’s latest Odyssey gaming monitor has a 32-inch 6K screen with glasses-free 3D

• Samsung’s two new speakers will deliver crisp audio while blending into your decor

• Samsung’s latest Freestyle portable projector is brighter and smarter

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/smart-home/samsung-unveiled-ai-powered-products-at-ces-2026-everything-announced-from-the-years-first-press-conference-230059247.html?src=rss

Last month, we asked readers to donate to a couple of good causes in our 2025 Charity Drive sweepstakes. And boy, did you deliver. With the drive now complete and the donations all tallied, we can report that Ars Technica readers gave an incredible $42,936.83 to Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in this year’s drive. That doesn’t set a new record, but it beats last year’s total and raises our lifetime Ars Charity Drive donation haul since 2007 to over $585,000. Well done, Arsians!

Thanks to everyone who gave whatever they could. We’re still early in the process of selecting and notifying winners of our swag giveaway, so don’t fret if you haven’t heard if you’re a winner yet. In the meantime, enjoy these quick stats from the 2025 drive.

• 2024 fundraising total: $42,936.83
  • Total given to Child’s Play: $19,424.27
  • Total given to the EFF: $23,512.56
• Number of individual donations: 474
  • Child’s Play donations: 272
  • EFF donations: 202
• Average donation: $90.58
  • Child’s Play average donation: $71.41
  • EFF average donation: $116.40
• Median donation: $50.00
  • Median Child’s Play donation: $26.25
  • Median EFF donation: $66.95
• Top single donation: $3,000 (to EFF)
• Donations of $1,000 or more: 8
• Donations of $100 or more: 133
• Donation of $10 or less: 72 (every little bit helps!)

• Total charity donations from Ars Technica drives since 2007 (approximate):$585,872.01
  • 2025: $42,936.83
  • 2024: $39,047.66
  • 2023: $39,830.36
  • 2022: $31,656.07
  • 2021: $40,261.71
  • 2020: $58,758.11
  • 2019: $33,181.11
  • 2018: $20,210.66
  • 2017: $36,012.37
  • 2016: $38,738.11
  • 2015: $38,861.06
  • 2014: $25,094.31
  • 2013: $23,570.13
  • 2012: $28,713.52
  • 2011: ~$26,000
  • 2010: ~$24,000
  • 2009: ~$17,000
  • 2008: ~$12,000
  • 2007: ~$10,000

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A new working paper from researchers at the University of Hong Kong has found that Chinese graduate students who plagiarized more heavily in their master’s theses were significantly more likely to pursue careers in the civil service and to climb the ranks faster once inside.

John Liu and co-authors analyzed 6 million dissertations from CNKI, a Chinese academic repository, and cross-referenced them against public records of civil-service exam-takers to identify 120,000 civil servants and their academic work. Those who entered the public sector had plagiarism scores 15.6% above average. Customs and tax officials fared worst — their scores ran 25% and 26% higher than private-sector peers respectively. Within the civil service, those who plagiarized more were promoted 9% faster during the first five years of their careers. The researchers validated their plagiarism metric through an experiment involving 443 job applicants who were asked to roll dice for rewards without monitoring. Those who had plagiarized more also reported improbably high rolls.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You no longer need an Amazon device to summon Alexa since the AI assistant will be available on the Alexa.com website. Amazon will roll out the web client to its Alexa+ Early Access customers first, still featuring the company’s new and improved AI assistant that was announced in February.

The web model won’t be much different from the existing Alexa+ that’s already available on Echo devices, Fire TV and Fire tablets. However, instead of buying into the Amazon ecosystem, Early Access customers can use any web browser to get Alexa+’s help with everything from basic questions to complex tasks, like controlling your smart home devices, customizing a recipe to account for dietary restrictions or making restaurant reservations if you don’t feel like cooking. The Alexa+ web version will also feature a navigation sidebar that will be home to your most-used Alexa features.

Amazon recently revamped its Alexa mobile app, while also integrating Alexa+ with Ring doorbells and BMW cars. However, introducing its AI assistant to web browsers could indicate that Amazon wants to encroach on a competitive market, which is currently dominated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini. To see how Amazon’s Alexa+ on web compares to the rest, you need to set up the Alexa+ Early Access first. After that, you can log into your Amazon account on Alexa.com to get started.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/amazon-is-rolling-out-alexa-for-the-web-so-you-can-use-its-assistant-without-a-dedicated-device-150053826.html?src=rss

Bee, the company behind an always-listening AI wearable that Amazon acquired last year, has announced new features in a status update. The device is designed to run in the background of daily life and captures conversations or thoughts spoken aloud. Recording can be started or stopped with the push of a button.

Co-founder of Bee, Maria de Lourdes Zollo, says the company has shipped four major updates that will run on the existing Bee Pioneer hardware. The first is “Actions,” which connects Bee to a user’s email and calendar and works to turn spoken commitments into actions. The company says that when you say you need to send an e-mail, for instance, Bee can draft one for you.

“Daily Insights” is designed to identify patterns and trends based on information collected over weeks or months. The company says the goal of this feature is to notice things before a user might, including “shifts in your relationships” and recommend personalized goals related to these, like a life coach of sorts.

“Voice Notes” lets a user press the record button on Bee and log a fleeting thought, a task for a to-do list or anything else that a user wants to recall later. Finally, “Templates” is designed to organize and summarize large amounts of information into a more digestible format. It can also create a study plan from a lecture or recap a sales meeting with a client.

Most of these features would presumably be more useful if a user sets their Bee to record constantly, which raises questions around legality and privacy. Zollo says that Bee processes audio in real time so no audio is ever stored, adding that neither Bee nor Amazon ever have access to transcripts. Still, the wearable could come up against recording consent laws which vary by jurisdiction.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wearables/bee-has-been-busy-since-its-acquisition-by-amazon-last-year-150025311.html?src=rss

Amazon just revealed the Ember Artline TV at CES 2026. This is a lifestyle TV that displays art, putting it in direct competition with Samsung’s The Frame. The 4K QLED screen is extremely thin, at 1.5-inches, so it’ll likely fit just about anywhere.

It also features a glare-reducing matte screen that has been “designed to make your art and photos look great.” The Artline integrates with Amazon Photos and offers access to 2,000 pieces of free art to display. For those worried about electricity usage, the TV includes proprietary technology that senses when someone has entered or left the room and turns on or off accordingly.

The display comes with Amazon’s new smart assistant Alexa+, allowing it to double as a smart TV. This is helped along by the inclusion of far-field microphones. Alexa+ is a beefier version of the company’s long-standing digital assistant. You can talk to it like a person, if that’s your bag. There’s even a new use case in which Alexa+ analyzes the aesthetics of a room and recommends art to throw on the screen.

Amazon

This is also a standard TV. It features support for Dolby Vision, HDR10+ and Wi-Fi 6 and will operate on the Fire TV platform. Customers can choose from 10 magnetic frames in a wide variety of colorways, further diversifying the aesthetics.

We don’t have a release date yet, other than “later this spring.” Amazon has released pricing, however, as this TV starts at $899 for the 55-inch version.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/home-theater/ember-artline-is-amazons-answer-to-samsungs-the-frame-150015104.html?src=rss

Amazon is kicking off the new year by announcing a redesign of its Fire TV UI at CES 2026. The new UI is designed to make finding things to watch on the platform faster, while making it easier to access more of Fire TV’s features straight from the home screen.

On first blush, the biggest difference in the new Fire TV UI is that everything is rounder. Shows, movies and apps have rounded corners, and Amazon’s changed the spacing in the interface to give everything more room to breathe. Tweaks to typography and color gradients also give the UI a more modern feel, and Amazon says it’s rebuilt the code of the Fire TV software to make everything faster, too, in some cases demonstrating “up to 20-30 percent gains in speed.”

The fundamentals haven’t changed all that much, however. There’s a menu bar of different tabs at the top of the interface that separates the Home page from things like Movies, TV Shows and Sports. Each page shows content in carousels, and Amazon still lets you pin streaming apps like Netflix or Apple TV underneath recommended content, with the biggest difference being you can now pin more apps at once (20 rather than six). Amazon is also changing up how the Fire TV Remote works. Pressing the Menu button now lets you quickly access Fire TV’s Art & Photos, Games and Ambient Experience features, and a long press of the Home button pulls up a shortcut panel with access to things like settings and connected Ring cameras. Alexa+, Amazon’s rebuilt AI assistant, is also available directly inside of the Fire TV interface for adding things to your watchlist, recommending content and controlling your smart home.

Amazon

Amazon offers the Fire TV mobile app as a way to control its streaming devices and TVs with a smartphone, but alongside this redesign, the company is also expanding what the app can do. The new Fire TV app lets you browse content, edit your watchlist and start playing things on your TV, in much the same way Roku and Google’s streaming apps do.

Both the new Fire TV mobile app and redesigned Fire TV UI will be available for free for all users, Amazon says. The new Fire TV UI will launch in February on the Fire TV Stick 4K Plus, the second-generation Fire TV Stick 4K Max and Fire TV Omni Mini-LED series. Later in the spring, Amazon says it will bring the redesign to more countries and devices, including the latest Fire TV 4K streaming devices, TVs like the Fire TV 2-series, 4-series and Fire TV Omni QLED series and TVs from third-party partners like Hisense, Insignia, Panasonic and TCL.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/home-theater/amazon-is-redesigning-its-fire-tv-ui-for-streaming-sticks-and-tvs-150000622.html?src=rss

Stack Overflow’s monthly question volume has collapsed about 300 — levels not seen since the site launched in 2009, according to data from the Stack Overflow Data Explorer that tracks the platform’s activity over its sixteen-year history.

Questions peaked around 2014 at roughly 200,000 per month, then began a gradual decline that accelerated dramatically after ChatGPT’s November 2022 launch. By May 2025, monthly questions had fallen to early-2009 levels, and the latest data through early 2026 shows the collapse has only continued — the line now sits near the bottom of the chart, barely registering.

The decline predates LLMs. Questions began dropping around 2014 when Stack Overflow improved moderator efficiency and closed questions more aggressively. In mid-2021, Prosus acquired Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion. The founders, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, exited before the terminal decline became apparent. ChatGPT accelerated what was already underway. The chatbot answers programming questions faster, draws on Stack Overflow’s own corpus for training data, and doesn’t close questions for being duplicates.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.