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A dependable external drive is one of those things you don’t realize you need until your laptop storage is nearly full or your photos are scattered across cloud accounts. Western Digital’s Elements Portable USB 3.0 Hard Drive is built for exactly that situation, and it’s currently on sale for $64.99 on StackSocial for 2TB of storage. That’s enough space to offload years of pictures and videos or stash work files without juggling thumb drives. At just under half a pound, it’s light enough to carry around in a bag, and since it uses USB 3.0, transferring large batches of files feels quick and painless compared to older drives.
It’s plug-and-play for Windows 10 and newer, so you don’t need extra software to get going. You can literally connect it and start dragging files over in seconds. The design is also more thoughtful than you might expect for a budget drive: the casing is made from over 50% recycled plastic, and the packaging is recyclable as well—a small but welcome improvement. It also has fast file transfers, straightforward backup, and a three-year limited warranty in case anything goes wrong.
That said, there are limitations worth noting. This particular model is formatted for Windows out of the box, so if you plan to use it with a Mac or Linux system, you’ll need to reformat it first. Like all portable hard drives, it also isn’t built to survive drops or rough handling—WD even cautions that a small fall can cause data loss. And unlike pricier SSDs, this is still a spinning-disk drive, so while it’s reliable for everyday backups, it won’t be as fast or durable as solid-state options. Still, if your main goal is affordable, dependable storage that you can toss in a backpack and trust with years’ worth of files, this 2TB WD Elements drive is hard to argue with at this price.
YouTube is rolling out some updates aimed at making visuals look better on its TV apps, including automatic AI video upscaling. To begin with, YouTube plans to upscale videos that were uploaded in under 1080p to an HD resolution. It aims to support 4K upscaling in the future.
The platform will still retain the original files and video resolution options. Creators can opt-out of the AI upscaling feature, which it’s calling Super Resolution, as well as automated audio adjustments. The platform says it’s also working with select creators to test larger video uploads to allow for higher-quality footage.
Creators will soon be able to upload thumbnails in higher quality too. YouTube will increase the thumbnail file limit from 2MB to 50MB.
As for viewers, it seems like YouTube saw those annoying automatic previews Netflix has had for the last decade and decided to copy that playbook. “Viewers will be able to see and flip through their favorite YouTube channels with immersive previews on the homepage, enhancing content discovery and engagement,” Kurt Wilms, the senior director of product management for YouTube on TV, wrote in a blog post.
Elsewhere, YouTube has added a contextual search function to its TV apps. When you search for something from a creator’s channel page, videos from said channel will appear first in the results. That’s a smart, logical idea.
With people watching YouTube on TV more than on mobile these days, it only makes sense for the platform to invest in improving the experience there.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/youtube/youtube-adds-automatic-ai-upscaling-for-low-res-videos-170342511.html?src=rss
It looks like a hundred thousand people fell for a fake NVIDIA livestream featuring an AI-generated version of CEO Jensen Huang, as reported by PC Gamer. Perhaps the scariest part is that the fake stream ran at the same time as an actual NVIDIA event and dwarfed the live viewership numbers.
The actual keynote speech of NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) garnered around 20,000 live views, while the fake stream maxed out at 100,000 live views. Even weirder? The fake Huang was talking about some crazy stuff mostly involving bogus crypto investments.
The deepfake spoke of “a crypto mass adoption event that ties directly into NVIDIA’s mission to accelerate human progress.” The avatar urged viewers to scan a QR code to, uh, send in cryptocurrencies. It’s unclear if any of the 100,000 viewers fell for this obvious scam that asked people to send the world’s richest company money to “accelerate human progress.”
The fake video has since been deleted. I haven’t been able to check it out to see just how real it looked and, thereby, how it was able to lure in 100,000 viewers. Before we all start screaming into the night about how reality doesn’t matter anymore, there are a few things worth considering.
First of all, we don’t know anything about the 100,000 accounts that were watching the fake stream. We don’t know where they’re from or even if the accounts were tied to real people. It’s also worth noting that the real stream has since garnered 200,000 views, despite just having 20,000 live viewers. We don’t know what kind of promotional tools the fakers used to draw in people or how long people stayed once they clicked.
Finally, there’s Huang himself. The man has hosted four GTC conferences just this year, and dozens upon dozens in previous years. There is an absolute abundance of footage of him standing on a stage and talking about stuff. That’s a whole lot of video for bad actors to use as AI training data.
Also, the real stream wasn’t exactly a barn burner. The most notable news we got was the announcement of a partnership with Uber to promote autonomous driving. This wasn’t an event to hype up new graphics cards or anything like that. The company revealed some government contracts, if that’s your bag.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/more-people-watched-a-fake-nvidia-livestream-than-the-real-thing-170035672.html?src=rss
Magic Leap is once again trying to make a name for itself in augmented reality. The company revealed an Android XR smart glasses prototype and it extended an existing partnership with Google. It said it built the glasses “as a reference design for the Android XR ecosystem.”
They look similar to other modern smart glasses, with thick frames to house all of the electronics and what appears to be a camera lens on the left side. Magic Leap hasn’t revealed too much more about the glasses, other than to say that, “by combining Magic Leap’s waveguides and optics with Google’s Raxium microLED light engine, the two companies are developing display technologies that make all-day, wearable AR more achievable.”
The glasses, of course, use Google’s Android XR operating system. Samsung’s Galaxy XR headset, the first device that runs on the operating system, arrived last week.
Although it has been through the wringer over the last several years, Magic Leap is still kicking around. In 2022, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund became the majority owner of Magic Leap and it has since pumped over $1 billion into the company.
Magic Leap failed to make headway in the consumer market with its AR headset after reportedly selling just 6,000 units in six months. Magic Leap pivoted to focus on the enterprise market with the Magic Leap 2, which it released in 2022.
In July 2024, it was said to have laid off 75 employees — primarily from the sales and marketing teams — as part of another change in direction to license its tech. A couple of months before that, Magic Leap announced a deal with Google to “advance the potential of [extended reality] technologies,” and that partnership is starting to bear fruit. It was reported late last year that Google brought in 100 Magic Leap staffers to work on Android XR projects.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ar-vr/magic-leap-reveals-an-android-xr-smart-glasses-prototype-165200068.html?src=rss
Chalk this one up under “The most clever (alleged) legal sidesteps this side of Tony Soprano.” On Wednesday, The Guardianpublished a report about a so-called “winking mechanism” regarding Israeli cloud computing contracts with Amazon and Google. The stipulation from 2021’s Project Nimbus is said to require the US companies to send coded messages to Israel. According to the report, whenever Google or Amazon secretly complies with an overseas legal request for Israeli data, they’re required to send money to Israel. The dollar amount indicates which country issued the request.
The coding system reportedly involves country dialing prefixes. For example, if Google or Amazon hand over Israeli data to the US (dialing code +1), they would send Israel 1,000 shekels. For Italy (code +39), they would send 3,900 shekels. (Out of morbid curiosity, I discovered that the highest dialing code is Uzbekistan’s +998.) There’s reportedly even a failsafe: If a gag order prevents the companies from using the standard signal, they can notify Israel by sending 100,000 shekels.
The Guardian says Microsoft, which bid for the Nimbus contract, lost out in part because it refused to accept some of Israel’s terms.
In a statement to Engadget, an Amazon spokesperson highlighted customer privacy. “We respect the privacy of our customers, and we do not discuss our relationship without their consent, or have visibility into their workloads,” they wrote.
The Amazon spokesperson denied that the company has any underhanded workarounds in place. “We have a rigorous global process for responding to lawful and binding orders for requests related to customer data,” they said. “[Amazon Web Services] carefully reviews each request to assess any non-disclosure obligations, and we maintain confidentiality in accordance with applicable laws and regulations. While AWS does not disclose customer information in response to government demands unless we’re absolutely required to do so, we recognize the legitimate needs of law enforcement agencies to investigate serious crimes. We do not have any processes in place to circumvent our confidentiality obligations on lawfully binding orders.”
We reached out to Google and the Israeli government for a statement, and we’ll update this story if we hear back. The Guardian’s full report has much more detail on the alleged leak.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/google-and-amazons-israeli-cloud-contracts-reportedly-require-them-to-sidestep-legal-orders-164635805.html?src=rss
Let’s start by stating the obvious: the PC is dead.
This may sound hyperbolic, especially as every major manufacturer is tripping over themselves to sell you a “true AI PC.” They’ll point to new chips with powerful Neural Processing Units (NPUs) and a dedicated Copilot key. But this is a false dawn. What they are selling you is not a new paradigm; it’s a faster version of an old one. It’s a horse that’s been bred to be slightly quicker, just as the automobile is being invented.
The personal computer—the self-contained clamshell or desktop box—was a brilliant invention for the Information Age. It was a tool for manual tasks: typing documents, organizing spreadsheets and retrieving files. Its design, centered on a keyboard and mouse, is a masterpiece of ergonomics for discrete, physical input.
The AI Age, however, is not about manual tasks. It’s about cognitive collaboration. We are moving from a world where we command a tool to one where we converse with a partner. And the fundamental bottleneck of the old PC is input/output. We can think and speak at over 150 words per minute, but we type at 40. We are trying to have a fluid, high-speed conceptual conversation with a near-sentient intelligence by tapping on little plastic squares.
The form factor is wrong. The interface is a bottleneck. The entire concept of a “box on your desk” is an anachronism. The true AI PC isn’t a “PC” at all. It is a distributed, multi-part system that separates the brain from the interface and is designed around the way we naturally think and communicate.
The Bottleneck of the Box
For thirty years, we’ve built our workflows around the PC’s limitations. We sit down, “log on,” and enter its world. We use a mouse to manually point at icons that represent physical-world metaphors—a file, a folder, a trash bin. This is an interface designed for information retrieval, not AI-driven co-creation.
An AI, however, is not a tool you use; it’s an entity you collaborate with. It needs two things our PCs can’t provide:
Full Context: To be truly personal, the AI needs to understand your world outside the screen. It needs to know about the meeting you just had, the design you sketched on a napkin, and the person you just met.
High-Bandwidth Interaction: To be a true partner, it needs an interface that matches the speed of thought. You shouldn’t be “typing a prompt”; you should be having a conversation, gesturing at ideas and molding concepts spatially.
The NPU-powered laptop is a dead end because it fails on both counts. It’s still a blind box that waits for you to feed it information through a tiny straw.
The New Personal AI: A Three-Part System
The true personal AI “computer” is a three-part system that divorces the brain from the body.
First is The Core. This is a small, silent, beautifully designed hub that lives in your home. This is the actual “computer.” It runs a powerful, personalized “Personal AI Twin”—a local version of the AI that knows your habits, your voice and your data, ensuring privacy and near-instant responsiveness. This Core is your secure enclave, your personal data vault, and the I/O router that communicates with your “terminals” and the broader cloud AI when needed.Second is The Ambient Terminal. This is a subtle, all-day wearable: a pin, a pendant or a set of advanced glasses. This is the AI’s “eyes and ears,” and it solves the context problem. It passively and privately captures your day (with your permission), logging the conversation you had, the face of the new client and the whiteboard you photographed. It’s the digital amanuensis that gathers the context your Core needs to be truly proactive and helpful.
Third is The Focus Terminal. This is your “desk,” redesigned for co-creation. It has no keyboard, no mouse and no screen. It is an immersive, ergonomic canvas—perhaps a large, tilted drafting table with a haptic surface. A sophisticated projection system creates a holographic or volumetric display above the canvas. You interact with your AI through voice and gesture, pulling data into 3D charts, sketching designs with your fingers and literally “throwing away” bad ideas. This is an interface for high-bandwidth, conceptual work.
When you sit at this terminal, you don’t “boot up.” You just start the conversation. “Show me that design I saw at the coffee shop today,” you’ll say. And because your Ambient Terminal saw it and your Core processed it, the AI can instantly project it onto your canvas for you to work on.
Scaling to the Enterprise: The Federated Fabric
This personal model is revolutionary, but the true paradigm shift happens when this concept scales to the enterprise. A company cannot run on a thousand individual, isolated AIs. It needs a secure, federated system.
The “Personal Core” is replaced by the “Enterprise AI Fabric.” This is a powerful, on-premise server or a secure private cloud instance. This Fabric is the central nervous system of the company’s intelligence, and it hosts three distinct AI layers:
The Corporate AI: The foundational model containing all company data, procedures and the single source of truth.
Team AIs: Specialized models sandboxed for departments (e.g., “Legal AI,” “Sales AI”) that have their own private data.
Personal AI Twins: Each employee gets a sandboxed “twin” that learns their personal workflow, but it is governed by corporate permissions.
This federated model solves the massive security and data governance problem that plagues enterprise AI today. Your personal AI can’t leak data from the legal team because it is fundamentally not permissioned to ever access it.
The New Office: Collaboration Hubs and Secure Keys
In this new enterprise, the “terminals” also evolve. The “Focus Terminal” becomes the “Collaboration Hub.” This is the new conference room. It’s no longer just a room with a TV and a speakerphone; the room is the computer.A smart wall or smart table acts as the shared immersive canvas. The “Team AI” is an active facilitator in the meeting. It transcribes, identifies speakers and—most critically—when someone says, “We need to see the Q3 sales data,” the AI projects it onto the table instantly. At the end of the meeting, it automatically generates and assigns action items to attendees based on the conversation.
The “Ambient Terminal” also gets a critical enterprise makeover. A passively-recording wearable is a corporate security nightmare. It is replaced by the “Enterprise Communicator.” This device, perhaps a smart lanyard or secure badge, is built for intentional interaction.
Its primary role is authentication. You tap it to enter a secure room or log into a hot-desk “Focus Station,” which instantly and securely loads your Personal AI Twin. It has no passive camera; it has a scanner you must aim to intentionally capture a whiteboard or document. It has no passive microphone; it has a push-to-talk button to give the AI a discrete command (“Add ‘file patent’ to my to-do list”). It provides silent, haptic notifications and a private earpiece for confidential alerts.
Wrapping Up
The “AI PC” that manufacturers are trying to sell you is a myth. It’s an attempt to shoehorn a cognitive revolution into a manual-labor form factor. The true AI PC is not a product you buy, but an ecosystem you inhabit. It’s a distributed system that separates the centralized “brain” from the human-centric “interface.” This new model—built on federated Cores, ambient context-gatherers and immersive canvases—is what will finally break the bottlenecks of the last 40 years. It will move us from using a computer to collaborating with an intelligence and, right now, it might not even run Windows.
Earlier today, you might have seen reports that Grammarly is changing its name to Superhuman. That’s not really the whole story. While the company did announce a broader rebrand coinciding with the release of a new AI assistant (more on that later), it also assured users that “the Grammarly brand isn’t going anywhere.” Essentially, what that means is that while Grammarly the company has a new name, Grammarly the product is still going by the same tried-and-true moniker as ever.
The confusion follows Grammarly’s acquisition of AI-powered email app Superhuman in June, which the company said “accelerates Grammarly’s evolution into an AI productivity platform for apps and agents.” Usually, acquired companies take the name of the companies that bought them, but that’s not a hard-and-fast rule. “Superhuman” certainly implies a broader scope than a name that’s all about grammar, so it makes sense that Grammarly might want to yoink its name if it plans to expand into other markets.
To that end, the company also today announced Superhuman Go, a more general AI addition to the Grammarly extension that works like Grammarly does now, but with more capability. The free version will still let you do everything Grammarly does, but it also ropes in access to tools like Coda, a collaborative workspace, and a chatbot that supposedly integrates with and can help take action for you across 100 apps. Or, you could pay up to also get the Superhuman AI inbox and the features you would previously expect from Grammarly Pro and Enterprise.
But while Grammarly is available within Go, if you’re skeptical, you don’t need to change your workflow yet. Pricing for the base paid Superhuman Suite subscription matches the previous Grammarly Pro subscription pricing, so you won’t be paying more even with access to new tools (although you’ll need to hop up to a higher tier to get that AI inbox). And as for using Go itself, it’s entirely optional.
Credit: Superhuman
To try Superhuman Go out, open the Grammarly extension, go to Settings and toggle on the switch next to Go. Otherwise, you can leave it off to continue using Grammarly as you always have, name and all.
A new class of attacks on Android phones, called “Pixnapping“, was announced on
October 13. It allows a malicious app to gather output rendered in a
victim app, pixel-by-pixel, by exploiting a GPU side-channel. Depending on
what the victim app displays, anything from sensitive email and chats to
two-factor authentication (2FA) codes could be captured—and shipped off to
an attacker’s site.
Hedge fund Apollo has reached a deal to sell AOL to Italian tech holding group Bending Spoons in a deal valued at roughly $1.5 billion, Axios reported Wednesday From the report: AOL still drives hundreds of millions of dollars of free cash flow. Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari said AOL has around 30 million monthly active users across its email and web content properties. That “incredibly loyal user base,” as he called it, could be better served with greater investments in AOL’s product and user experience, he noted.
[…] Bending Spoons is a privately held Italian holding company that acquires assets with large user bases and invests in their turnaround with technology improvements. The company tends to sit on their investments long term after acquiring them. Some of the other companies Bending Spoons has acquired include Vimeo, Evernote, WeTransfer, Brightcove.
YouTube has been streaming for 20 years, but it was only in the last couple that it came to dominate TV streaming. Google’s video platform attracts more TV viewers than Netflix, Disney+, and all the other apps, and Google is looking to further beef up its big-screen appeal with a new raft of features, including shopping, immersive channel surfing, and an official version of the AI upscaling that had creators miffed a few months back.
According to Google, YouTube’s growth has translated into higher payouts. The number of channels earning more than $100,000 annually is up 45 percent in 2025 versus 2024. YouTube is now giving creators some tools to boost their appeal (and hopefully their income) on TV screens. Those elaborate video thumbnails featuring surprised, angry, smiley hosts are about to get even prettier with the new 50MB file size limit. That’s up from a measly 2MB.
Video upscaling is also coming to YouTube, and creators will be opted in automatically. To start, YouTube will be upscaling lower-quality videos to 1080p. In the near future, Google plans to support “super resolution” up to 4K.
Magic Leap announced this week at the Future Investment Initiative (FII) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia its latest AR hardware plans along with a renewed partnership with Google.
The News
Google and Magic Leap announced in May 2024 a “strategic technology partnership” to secure key technology needed to make compact AR glasses. We’ve heard little about the partnership since, however now Magic Leap has provided an update.
The Plantation, Florida-based AR unicorn today announced it’s extending the partnership through a three-year agreement with Google that will position it as “an AR ecosystem partner to support companies building glasses,” including work on display systems, optics, and system integration for AR devices.
Additionally, Magic Leap and Google showed off an AI glasses prototype at FII, which the companies say will serve as a prototype and reference design for Google’s Android XR ecosystem. Android XR is designed to run on a variety of XR devices, including the recently launched Samsung Galaxy XR (ex-Project Moohan), as well as future AR glasses, and smart glasses from a variety of hardware partners, including Samsung, Warby Parker, and Gentle Monster.
Image courtesy Magic Leap
“The demo shows how Magic Leap’s technology, integrated with Google’s Raxium microLED light engine, brings digital content seamlessly into the world,” Magic Leaps says. “The prototypes worn on stage illustrate how comfortable, stylish smart eyewear is possible and the video showed the potential for users to stay present in the real world while tapping into the knowledge and functionality of multimodal AI.”
Note: It’s uncertain whether the prototype above is new, or actually Google’s previously teased smart glasses seen at Google I/O this year. We’ve reached out to Magic Leap and will update when it’s more clear.
“Magic Leap’s optics, display systems, and hardware expertise have been essential to advancing our Android XR glasses concepts to life,” said Shahram Izadi, VP & GM of Google XR. “We’re fortunate to collaborate with a team whose years of hands-on AR development uniquely set them up to help shape what comes next.”
Magic Leap 2 | Image courtesy Magic Leap
Founded in 2010, Magic Leap promised to revolutionize AR with its lightfield display technology, raising over $4 billion in funding from major investors like Google, Alibaba, Qualcomm, AT&T, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, and Axel Springer.
Its first headset, Magic Leap 1 (also stylized as ‘One’) however underperformed and struggled to find a viable consumer market when it launched in 2018, forcing the company to pivot to enterprise and medical applications. This came alongside a leadership shakeup that would see founder Rony Abovitz step down as CEO in 2020, making way for Pegggy Johnson, formerly of Qualcomm and Microsoft.
A year after the enterprise release of Magic Leap 2 in 2022, Johnson would be replaced as CEO by Ross Rosenberg, previously of Bain Capita, Danaher, First Solar and Belden. Rosenberg currently leads the company.
My Take
At the release of Magic Leap 1 in 2018, and consequently the height of consumer PC VR headsets, Magic Leap held conferences, courted influencers and media, and funded a fleet of expensive third-party apps aimed at gamers and casual users. The world didn’t even have a viable standalone VR platform yet, and Magic Leap was hoping to kickstart AR headsets—not glasses—as the next dominant consumer computing platform.
The company also presumably burned through a good portion of its multi-billion dollar runway in the process to launch something that the market, developers, and even Magic Leap itself didn’t really seem ready for. I, like most in the early days of XR, was skeptical. Too many pie in the sky (or ‘whale in the sky’) marketing videos. Never enough substance or clear direction to tell where things were really going for the company.
Magic Leap 1 | Image courtesy Magic Leap
What’s more, Magic Leap 1 didn’t even really outperform Microsoft’s staunchly enterprise HoloLens AR headset, or deliver on its promises of “lightfield photonics” to allow for multiple focal planes. Its first ‘Creator Edition’ ML1 headset contained a waveguide-based display with two focal planes. Nothing revolutionary, and at $2,300, too expensive of a platform for most consumer-focused studios to stomach.
But it did provide Magic Leap 2 to enterprise in 2022, which is exactly where it should have focused the entire time. But going that route from the get-go would have been less flashy, and probably less capable of attracting historic levels of funding.
Magic Leap Concept Art (2015) | Image courtesy Magic Leap
Barring all else, Magic Leap’s greatest sin was undoubtedly being a decade too early. Only now it seems that companies are building out the requisite customized chips, waveguides, light engines, everything, and slimming it down into a digestible form factor. And big players like Meta, Google, Samsung and (likely, but unconfirmed) Apple are hoping to use smart glasses first before serving up anything AR remotely targeted at consumers.
In the end, there’s a good reason Magic Leap is still kicking, even this late in the game. The company’s latest funding round was a $590 million debt financing deal struck in January 2024, led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. It seems to have the operational cash on hand, and has been rightfully deflated to make better use of it. That, and there’s still real know-how at Magic Leap to go along with a genuine pile of patents, which I suspect the company is leveraging as it makes its second big transition: from enterprise headset platform creator to glorified AR parts supplier to a company that could really play a big part in the coming AR glasses revolution.
In 2007’s The Bucket List, Jack Nicholson’s billionaire magnate is a fan of a luxury coffee called kopi luwak, only to be informed that the beans first pass through the digestive tracts of civets and are harvested from their feces prior to roasting. The implication is that the billionaire just liked drinking gimmicky expensive coffee without realizing its less-than-luxurious origins. It’s one of the most expensive coffees in the world, ranging from $45 per pound to $590 per pound, depending on whether the beans are farmed or collected in the wild.
Whether kopi luwak is worth that hefty price tag depends on who you ask. A Washington Post food critic once compared the beverage to stale Folgers, memorably describing the flavor as “petrified dinosaur droppings steeped in bathtub water.” Yet kopi luwak has many genuine fans who claim the coffee has a unique aroma and taste. Based on a new chemical analysis, they might have a point, according to a paper published in Scientific Reports.
Technically, kopi luwak is a method of processing, not a specific coffee bean variety. Asian palm civets hang around coffee plantations because they love to feast on ripened coffee berries; the berries constitute most of their diet, along with various seeds. The consumed berries undergo fermentation as they pass through the animal’s intestines, and the civets digest the pulp and excrete the beans. Coffee farmers then collect the scat to recover the excreted beans and process and roast them to produce kopi luwak.
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The Tinymoose Pencil Pro 2 is aimed squarely at iPad users who want the feel of Apple’s own stylus without paying Apple’s price, and it’s on sale for just $29.99 on StackSocial right now. It costs a fraction of the official Pencil but still packs features that cover most daily needs. This second-generation version is made for iPads from 2018 onward and brings a few upgrades over the original, including Bluetooth support and shortcut gestures. A smart button on the side is mapped for simple actions: one press for multitasking, two presses to exit apps, and a long press to power the pen on or off. That may not sound like much, but it helps when you’re hopping between notes and apps throughout the day.
Using the stylus feels pretty close to writing or sketching with a real pen. You can tilt it to shade or adjust the angle of your strokes, and palm rejection makes it easy to rest your hand on the screen without disrupting your lines. The input keeps up well, too, with no lag or weird trailing behind the tip. It connects over Bluetooth, which means your iPad can show you the battery level, and charging is quick. A full charge takes about 25 minutes and lasts over 10 hours, while a 15-minute top-up on USB-C gets you most of the way there. The aluminum body of the Pencil Pro 2 is light at just 13 grams and snaps onto supported iPads with its magnetic strip, though unlike the pricier models, it doesn’t recharge that way.
The extras round it out. Each purchase includes three spare nibs, a USB-C cable, and a leather case, which is more than Apple throws in. Still, there are compromises to consider. The Pencil Pro 2 only works with iPads, so you won’t get the cross-platform flexibility some third-party styluses offer. Its six-month warranty is also shorter than the standard one-year coverage from Apple, and while gestures and shortcuts are handy, they’re limited compared to the wider integration of the official Pencil. Even so, for students, note-takers, and casual artists who don’t need pro-level features but want a reliable everyday stylus, this deal makes a lot of sense.
While I updated my iPhone to iOS 26 as soon as I could, I haven’t yet pulled the trigger with macOS Tahoe. I love my M1 iMac, but I worry that Apple’s first version of this new update isn’t quite optimized for the five-year-old chip, and have been waiting to see if a future version of Tahoe performs a bit better.
As it happens, that next version is well on its way—and does seem improved, at that. Apple has been beta testing macOS Tahoe 26.1 alongside iOS 26.1 since September, and it dropped the release candidates for both of the updates on Tuesday. The “RC,” as the name implies, is what Apple thinks is the finished version of any given software release. Barring any major bugs or glitches discovered by developers and public testers, this will be the version of macOS Tahoe 26.1 released to the general public.
That release will likely come next week. In the meantime, we know what features Apple has in store for Mac users who decide to update. This is a much smaller revision than macOS 26, but 26.1 does bring some interesting new features for users to explore.
Control over Liquid Glass’ appearance
By far the most striking difference between this year’s Apple updates and last year’s is Liquid Glass. This new design language is Apple’s most drastic UI change in years, and while some people love it, others hate it. I’ve enjoyed the new look on my iPhone, but I understand why some users dislike how some elements let the background shine through, in some cases reducing visibility.
Apple seems to have taken the criticism to heart: With macOS Tahoe, as well as iOS 26.1 and iPadOS 26.1, the company now gives users the option to control how Liquid Glass looks, at least to a degree. The new toggle, which you can find in System Settings > Appearance, has two options: “Clear,” which retains the original look of Liquid Glass, and “Tinted,” which increases the opacity of your system’s UI elements. With Tinted, you won’t see as much of the background poke through, and whatever does come through doesn’t take over the overlayed element as much.
If you find Liquid Glass in macOS Tahoe too clear and “glassy,” this might be a good option to try.
Expanded support for Apple Music AutoMix
Apple’s latest round of updates introduced a new DJ-like feature to Apple Music. AutoMix will automatically build a transition between songs, fading one song into another. It’s a cool feature (when it works well), and can make transitioning between dissimilar songs a lot smoother.
With macOS 26.1, AutoMix now works over AirPlay. Previously, you lost this feature when beaming your music to an AirPlay device.
Better FaceTime audio quality
Apple says that Mac users updating to 26.1 should experience improved FaceTime audio quality in low-bandwidth conditions. The company doesn’t elaborate, but this is good news on its, uh, face: If you’re calling someone in a low-signal area, or with a weak wifi connection, you should be able to hear each other better.
Communication Safety and Web content filters for child accounts
If your Mac has child accounts (made for ages 13 through 17), Communication Safety and Web content filters will be enabled by default for those accounts after updating to this latest version. These filters are designed to limit adult websites, protecting underage users from content they shouldn’t be accessing.
A new Network icon
As spotted by the MacOSBeta subreddit, Apple has updated the Network icon for macOS 26.1. The new icon looks great, in my opinion, sporting a blue theme with glow effects:
Similarly, the Macintosh HD icon gets a small refresh. The original Tahoe icon was a major redesign over the previous, iconic icon. Now, Apple has removed the additional elements to simplify the design. (I still miss the original.)
Apple hasn’t announced security updates for macOS 26.1 yet, but in all likelihood, they will. Apple doesn’t often issue true security patches like other companies, barring an emergency patch. Instead, the company usually bundles its security patches within point updates like 26.1. Once the official update drops, expect Apple to update its security release notes to include details about these patches.
schwit1 writes: China has enacted a new law regulating social media influencers, requiring them to hold verified professional qualifications before posting content on sensitive topics such as medicine, law, education, and finance, IOL reported. The new law went into effect on Saturday.
The regulation was introduced by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) as part of its broader effort to curb misinformation online. Under the new rules, influencers must prove their expertise through recognized degrees, certifications, or licenses before discussing regulated subjects. Major platforms such as Douyin (China’s TikTok), Bilibili, and Weibo are now responsible for verifying influencer credentials and ensuring that content includes clear citations, disclaimers, and transparency about sources.
Audiences expect influencers to be both creative and credible. Yet when they blur the line between opinion and expertise, the impact can be severe. A single misleading financial tip could wipe out someone’s savings. A viral health trend could cause real harm. That’s why many believe it’s time for creators to acknowledge the weight of their influence. However, China’s new law raises deeper questions: Who defines “expertise”? What happens to independent creators who challenge official narratives but lack formal credentials? And how far can regulation go before it suppresses free thought?
Following last month’s Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS beta and COSMIC desktop beta, System76 has now shared their stable release plans for this long-awaited LInux distribution release with their Rust-written custom desktop…
