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At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Sleek, sturdy design Sharp OLED screen Pleasantly tactile keyboard Good battery life Cons AI features still lacking Some keyboard keys too cramped Too many pre-loaded apps Our Verdict The Acer Swift 16 AI is a capable machine with a big, beautiful screen, but its AI chops are still unproven. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Acer is all in with AI computers, having now released half a dozen machines with the AI oomph to qualify for Microsoft’s in-development Copilot designation. The largest of them so far is the Acer Swift 16 AI, which sports a lovely 16-inch OLED screen and the latest Intel Lunar Lake CPU. This laptop is thin and light with a gorgeous display and ample connectivity options. The keyboard and trackpad are solid, notwithstanding the rather unnecessary LED AI indicator. However, there are faster computers out there for the same price, and the AI features could be more robust. It’s good for the MSRP but even better if you can find it on sale. Further reading: Best laptops 2025: Premium, budget, gaming, 2-in-1s, and more Acer Swift 16 AI: Specs and features Acer has used several different chipsets for its AI PCs, and some machines have multiple options across the various SKUs. The Acer Swift 16 AI, however, plays it straight with an Intel Lunar Lake CPU, paired with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. There are no other versions of the machine, which is available at Best Buy, but it does have an expansive OLED screen, which is a big step up from the IPS displays on Acer’s cheaper AI PCs. CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 256V Memory: 16GB LPDDR5X Graphics: Intel Arc 140V Display: 16-inch 2880×1800 OLED Storage: 1TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD Webcam: 1440p IR Webcam Connectivity: 2x USB-C (Thunderbolt 4, 40Gbps), 2x USB-A (5Gbps), 3.5mm audio jack, HDMI 2.1 Networking: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 Battery capacity: 70Whr, 65W charging Dimensions: 14.02 (W) x 9.92 (D) x 0.58-0.69 (H) inches Weight: 3.37 lbs (1.53 kg) MSRP as tested: $1,199.99 The Acer Swift 16 AI is a competent laptop for all your general computing and productivity needs. Acer Swift 16 AI: Design and build quality IDG / Ryan Whitwam Given the large footprint, I was surprised how thin and light the Acer Swift 16 AI is. It’s always a balancing act with larger laptops, but Acer threaded the needle fairly well here. The machine is barely half an inch thick, and the entire chassis is aluminum. However, the metal body isn’t very thick. There are places like around the fan grilles where you can see the frame flexing a bit too much, but the build quality is noticeably improved versus the smaller Acer Swift 14 AI. When closed, the Acer Swift 16 AI looks elegant in an industrial way. The flat black lid is free of branding, save for a small acer logo and the AI “dots” badge in opposite corners. The edge of the machine is flat where the ports are, but it tapers along the rest of the body, making it easy to pick up this sizeable laptop. It’s not too hard to wrestle into a bag, though, weighing in at 3.37 pounds. That’s a bit less than the average 16-inch laptop. The hinge on this machine feels appropriate for its $1,200 price point. The laptop stays closed securely, but it only takes one hand to open the screen, which swings smoothly into place. There’s a small lip around the camera that helps open the laptop, too. The rear edge of the display frame has feet that boost the rear of the laptop a few millimeters, giving it a slight incline that makes typing more comfortable. The camera lacks a privacy shutter, which I’d like to see at this price. The 1440p webcam supports Windows Hello biometric login, and the video quality is good but not better than the 1080p cameras on most laptops. The Acer Swift 16 AI has a good selection of ports, including two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4, as well as two legacy USB-A ports. There’s also a full-sized HDMI port and a headphone jack. I don’t love that both USB-C ports are on the left side, meaning the charging cable has to be on that side. The right side has just one USB-A and the headphone jack. Acer Swift 16 AI: Display and speakers IDG / Ryan Whitwam The Acer Swift 16 AI looks great, but it’s not quite the showstopper it could be. The 2880×1800 resolution is very sharp at normal viewing distances, and the touch response is fast and precise. It also supports an optional 120Hz refresh rate if you want smoother animations at the expense of battery life. As an OLED, the colors are gorgeous if slightly unrealistic. You can also enable HDR content on this display, but it might not pop quite like you expect. The brightness tops out at 340 nits, which is a bit on the low side for HDR. It is, however, a good bit brighter than the LCDs and IPS screens you normally see at this price. The brightness is good enough for use in all indoor settings, but the highly reflective screen makes outdoor use questionable. The speakers are on the underside near the front, a common location for speakers on notebooks. They sound good at low and mid volume levels, but there’s distortion and very little bass when you crank it up. They’re very average for a laptop in 2025 in spite of the DTS audio certification. Acer Swift 16 AI: Keyboard and trackpad IDG / Ryan Whitwam The quality of Acer laptop keyboards varies hugely across its product line. In the case of the Acer Swift 16 AI the typing experience is overall very good. The keys are stable, quiet, and quite tactile. The power button is in the far upper right corner, and despite the lack of any visual identification, it’s also a fingerprint sensor. It’s very accurate but sluggish like all Windows Hello biometrics. Most of the important keys are a good size, but I don’t care for having the up and down arrows crammed into a single key unit. There is a full number pad on this machine, but it’s quite squished. These keys are only about 75 percent as wide as the alphas, which makes it hard to rely on muscle memory to enter numbers on the pad. It’s still better to have it than not, given the ample surface area of this laptop. The trackpad doesn’t take full advantage of all that room. It’s a bit on the small side, though it is sturdy and accurate. The overall feel of the trackpad, as well as the click mechanism, are a big step up from the Arm-based Acer Swift 14 AI, which felt quite off to me. The trackpad has the same light-up AI logo in the corner as the company’s other AI-branded laptops. It blinks when you access AI features. It’s totally unnecessary, but you can turn it off in the Acer settings. Acer Swift 16 AI: Performance Acer loads its PCs with more software than most PC vendors—that has the potential to be good, but it’s mostly bad. There’s the McAfee suite, a few settings apps, a photo editor, a collection of third-party games, and several custom AI tools. It will take a bit to clear away the bloatware, but even Acer’s software won’t get much use. On one hand, I applaud Acer for actually bundling AI tools on its AI laptops. On the other, they don’t work very well. Apps like Acer Assist and VisionArt load an AI model locally to provide a chatbot and background generation, respectively. The model is about 5GB gigabytes in size, so it’ll leave you with very little free memory on this 16GB system. The model output is also extremely slow, and I wasn’t impressed with the chatbot’s capabilities or the lack of options in the wallpaper app. It’s also odd that these tools don’t use the Lunar Lake chip’s NPU—all the AI work is done on the GPU. Acer says it is planning to improve the on-device models soon, which will include support for running them on the NPU. The general system performance with the Core Ultra 7 is good. While Intel’s latest chips aren’t ideal for heavily multithreaded applications, the GPU is among the best you’ll see short of a dedicated chip. Thermal performance is also good, but Acer’s default power state is a bit slower than competing machines. When in high-performance mode, the laptop does get noticeably louder. It’s whisper-quiet in Normal mode. To give you a better idea of how the laptop performs, here are our standard benchmark tests. IDG / Ryan Whitwam PCMark 10 is designed to test a machine across a variety of metrics like web browsing, video chat, and photo editing. The Acer Swift 16 AI easily bests Meteor Lake chips here, but its default performance tuning makes it slightly slower than other Lunar Lake-based machines with a score of 6,539. The latest AMD Ryzen chips are also running ahead in this system benchmark. IDG / Ryan Whitwam Cinebench is a CPU-focused test that shows how a PC handles heavy but brief multi-core workloads. More CPU cores grant higher scores in Cinebench and cooling doesn’t matter very much. With Intel’s move away from hyperthreading, the Core Ultra 7 doesn’t do as well in this test, bringing up the rear with even the Meteor Lake TravelMate P4 ahead. However, switching to the Acer performance mode boosts the score to about 10,000, which is more in line with competing laptops. IDG / Ryan Whitwam The Handbrake test is similar to Cinebench in that it shows how a computer handles multithreaded tasks, but this is a longer-duration test where thermals matter more. While we don’t have any concerns with the laptop’s thermal performance, the eight-core/eight-thread design keeps this machine near the bottom of the heap. Switching to performance mode does shave a few hundred seconds off the encode, but AMD’s AI 300 parts run away with this one. IDG / Ryan Whitwam Our main gaming test is 3DMark Time Spy, a graphical benchmark that focuses on GPU performance. This isn’t a gaming computer, but Intel’s latest iGPUs are quite good. Here, the Acer Swift 16 AI is near the top at 3,988, besting even the Ryzen AI 9 with its Radeon GPU. The Acer Swift 16 AI is fast enough to play simple modern games or titles that are a few years old at lower settings. Acer Swift 16 AI: Battery life The Acer Swift 16 AI sports a 70Wh battery, which is average for a laptop of this size. It charges over USB-PD via either of the USB-C ports, with a peak speed of 65W. That’s standard for productivity laptops these days. The machine comes with a clunky charger, but we tested more compact third-party options, all of which charged the Acer Swift 16 AI just as well. IDG / Ryan Whitwam The Acer Swift 16 AI will last you an entire work day and then some. To quantify that, we ran our standard battery rundown test, which consists of playing a 4K video on a loop at set brightness until the machine dies. The Acer Swift 16 AI lasted 1,053 minutes (about 17.5 hours), which is very competitive. The display was in the default 60Hz mode for this test—switching to 120Hz will reduce battery life. Acer Swift 16 AI: Conclusion Like its smaller incarnation, the Acer Swift 16 AI is a competent laptop for all your general computing and productivity needs. Acer is trying as hard as any OEM to justify the AI hype with features like Acer Assist. However, even all this effort does not guarantee a good AI experience. Microsoft’s Copilot+ features are still barely there in Windows 11. Beyond all the marketing, the Acer Swift 16 AI is fast enough for almost everyone with a Core Ultra 7, but I wish Acer made this laptop in a Core Ultra 9 variant. Even then, the machine’s multithreaded performance would be lacking. If you’re going to be editing video, an AMD-based machine is your best bet right now. While this laptop shares a lot with the 14-inch Acer AI PC, it looks nicer. The step up to an OLED screen, with its vibrant colors and deep blacks, is appreciated as well. The keyboard is a delight to use, and it’s nice to see a full number pad, even if the keys are a bit cramped. The $1,200 MSRP feels slightly high for what you get, particularly when machines like the HP Omnibook Ultra regularly sell for around the same price. The Acer Swift 16 AI has dropped below $900 on sale, which is a steal. 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Remember when you first signed up for Netflix streaming? It was nice. A few bucks a month for tons of good movies, some pretty decent original shows, zero ads, and you could finally ditch the nightmare that was cable. Fast forward to 2025, and streaming is the nightmare. It splits up everything you want to watch across a dozen different platforms, all of which now have ads just so they can make you pay to remove them. They remove content constantly, they’re full to bursting with things you don’t care about or need (Hades the video game, a dozen horrible Christmas movies every year, and NFL games on the same ticket, what?) and the price is always, always, always going up. From the consumer perspective, streaming video services are objectively worse than they were a decade ago. Frankly, these services are absolutely milking and bilking their users. There’s no real alternative at this point, at least if you want to watch new shows or the occasional streaming-exclusive movie that isn’t terrible. But there are ways to maximize your enjoyment and minimize your money spent. Step one: quit. Quit early, quit often This isn’t a new idea — I first heard about it from my colleague Eric Ravenscraft years ago, and we’ve advocated for it on TechHive more than once. But it bears repeating. The streaming services don’t have any loyalty to you, and you’ll gain nothing by being loyal to them. Quit your subscriptions constantly, month by month if you want, and move on to the next one. Heck, we’ve said that cancelling your subscription immediately is the one trick all cord cutters should know. The watch-and-bail setup is pretty simple. You sign up for any singular streaming service for just one month, taking advantage of any deals or promotions they’re offering to entice new suckers customers. You go through whatever you want to watch on that service which is exclusive to that service alone. Then you bail, and move on to the next one. Rinse, repeat, try to never be subscribed to more than one at a time. ibreakstock / Shutterstock.com There are some obvious advantages here. Shows and movies financed or produced by one service tend to stay on that service and not move around. Netflix made House of Cards, so you can’t watch House of Cards on Disney+. Hulu made The Handmaid’s Tale, so you can’t watch it on Max. So watch only the exclusive stuff one one service while you have it. These aren’t universally true — Paramount+, “the home of Star Trek,” unceremoniously dumped Prodigy, and Netflix picked it up for its second season. Disney clawed back Daredevil and other Marvel series when it started making its own for Disney+. But in any given month you can generally rely on the exclusive content that’s already on a service to stick around for at least a month. Have a plan The way to maximize this process is to go in with a plan. I keep a list of all the upcoming shows (including returning seasons) that I want to see on any particular service, so when one of them gets three or four piled up, I switch to it and binge as much as my schedule will allow. For example, right now I’ve got Castlevania: Nocturne season 2 and A Man on the Inside qued up on my Netflix list. I’ll wait for at least one more show or movie to catch my eye (like, say, the Knives Out threequel) before I plan my next Netflix month. Streaminganbieter rafapress/Shutterstock.com Also, it doesn’t hurt to memorize the general landing places for movies, if you’re waiting on them to transition from theaters to streaming. Some are obvious: Disney movies (including Marvel, Star Wars, et cetera) will come to Disney+, Paramount movies will come to Paramount+, two to four months after they leave theaters. Warner Bros. movies will eventually land on Max, the service that it owns. Some (but not all) Universal Pictures movies will come to Peacock, as that’s an NBC-Universal brand. Sony Pictures is the only major Hollywood studio without an accompanying streaming service at the moment. And of course, any movie released to theaters explicitly by Netflix, Apple, or Amazon will make their way to those respective services before long. Keep an eye out for deals Obviously this approach will save you some money by keeping your subscriptions down to one or two a month. I like to use that savings to upgrade to ads, which again, are only there to make you pay more so they’ll go away. Enshittification strikes again. But even beyond maximizing your allotment of time and money, you can game this system to be better for you. Streaming services are constantly hungry for new users. They’ll try to entice them with a free week or month of trial service before they charge, or several months at a discount rate. Keep an eye out for those discounts — for example, at the time of writing Hulu will offer you a month of service for free, and Apple TV+ is doing a week. Watch the usual deal sites for these opportunities, especially if one of your singular service lists is getting long. Hulu Sometimes these are restricted to truly “new” users, i.e., if you’ve signed up and unsubscribed before you’re not eligible. You can sometimes get around this by making a new account: use a burner email (or a slightly tweaked one) and a method of payment you haven’t associated with that service before. If you can swing it, these freebies are a great way to watch just one show or movie that’s exclusive to a service you otherwise don’t care about. Infrequently there are some pretty good deals on year-long plans. I’m currently part way through a Paramount+ year-long package — I got it for $30, plus another $30 upgrade to remove ads. That’s half off the price, only $5 a month total, and I watch enough Star Trek releases throughout the year that it makes sense. (At least for the moment — damn you, Paramount, for canceling Lower Decks.) Bundles of media are less appealing to me, if only because they tend to offer diminishing returns. Hulu and ESPN are both owned by Disney, so there’s a package combined with Disney+, naturally. But each overlapping circle of that Venn diagram narrows the appeal to users. It might be different for you, of course, especially if you’re sharing services among a big family. Manufactured headaches The streaming services are aware of these bouncing customers, and trying to minimize that behavior as much as possible. That’s why the “drop all the episodes at once” binge model that Netflix pioneered is no longer the de facto standard. You’ll need a minimum of three months subscribed to get through a new ten-episode season on a weekly schedule. The solution is to wait until all the episodes are posted…but that requires some temperance, and leaves you out of “the conversation” and at risk of spoilers. Again, patience is your friend if you’re trying to maximize your money. A newer wrench in this system is live sports. Previously the exclusive domain of “live TV” bundles, a la Hulu+ Live TV or YouTube Live, streaming services are increasingly claiming major sports events for their own walled gardens. Netflix got an exclusive on NFL games on Christmas day last year, with no way to catch them over-the-air, and many Thursday night games are now exclusive to Amazon Prime Video. …just don’t ask about Monday, or Thursday, or Saturday, or Christmas.  NFL That’s going to be extremely frustrating if you’re subscribed to the ludicrously expensive Sunday Ticket on YouTube, plus ESPN for Monday Night games…you get the picture. Enshittification in action. There’s no real way to counter this from a penny-pinching perspective, though you can always go to a sports bar or a friend’s home (or invite them to log in at your place) to catch a singular game you don’t want to pay for. God, this just sucks If this all seems like a lot of complication and effort just to save some money, it is! That might be the point — the easiest thing to do is just spend more money and make fewer choices. A lot of people are so sick of it they’re just going back to old-fashioned physical media, and who could blame them? The silver lining here is that you have more choices for entertainment than ever before, frustrating as they might be. There are smaller, niche services like Dropout.TV, Crunchyroll, or Brown Sugar which are also more affordable. There are practically endless hours of things to watch on YouTube, and a lot of options to keep from paying Google’s ever-increasing premium to block ads. And if you don’t mind ads, and you’re not picky, there are completely free options like Crackle and Tubi. Droput is great and it’s cheap.Dropout There’s a stunning variety of video games in every shape and shade, and even ways to get them cheaply like Xbox Game Pass. You could also just, you know, do something not on a screen. I suppose that’s theoretically an option. They still make books, right? All joking aside, both your time and your money are limited, no matter how much you have of either. Remember that if a service isn’t earning your money, you should stop giving it to them. I recommend an “entertainment audit” once a year, during which you evaluate what you’re paying for in relation to what you’re using, and seeing if you really want to keep it up. Things are better than they were when your only choices were regular TV and cable. But not by much. And with other factors putting the squeeze on consumers even in affluent countries, I think streaming services that keep offering less and less while they charge more and more are going to meet some of the same harsh realities that the rest of us are dealing with sooner rather than later. Further reading: The best streaming devices of 2025 Read...

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Remember when you first signed up for Netflix streaming? It was nice. A few bucks a month for tons of good movies, some pretty decent original shows, zero ads, and you could finally ditch the nightmare that was cable. Fast forward to 2025, and streaming is the nightmare. It splits up everything you want to watch across a dozen different platforms, all of which now have ads just so they can make you pay to remove them. They remove content constantly, they’re full to bursting with things you don’t care about or need (Hades the video game, a dozen horrible Christmas movies every year, and NFL games on the same ticket, what?) and the price is always, always, always going up. From the consumer perspective, streaming video services are objectively worse than they were a decade ago. Frankly, these services are absolutely milking and bilking their users. There’s no real alternative at this point, at least if you want to watch new shows or the occasional streaming-exclusive movie that isn’t terrible. But there are ways to maximize your enjoyment and minimize your money spent. Step one: quit. Quit early, quit often This isn’t a new idea — I first heard about it from my colleague Eric Ravenscraft years ago, and we’ve advocated for it on TechHive more than once. But it bears repeating. The streaming services don’t have any loyalty to you, and you’ll gain nothing by being loyal to them. Quit your subscriptions constantly, month by month if you want, and move on to the next one. Heck, we’ve said that cancelling your subscription immediately is the one trick all cord cutters should know. The watch-and-bail setup is pretty simple. You sign up for any singular streaming service for just one month, taking advantage of any deals or promotions they’re offering to entice new suckers customers. You go through whatever you want to watch on that service which is exclusive to that service alone. Then you bail, and move on to the next one. Rinse, repeat, try to never be subscribed to more than one at a time. ibreakstock / Shutterstock.com There are some obvious advantages here. Shows and movies financed or produced by one service tend to stay on that service and not move around. Netflix made House of Cards, so you can’t watch House of Cards on Disney+. Hulu made The Handmaid’s Tale, so you can’t watch it on Max. So watch only the exclusive stuff one one service while you have it. These aren’t universally true — Paramount+, “the home of Star Trek,” unceremoniously dumped Prodigy, and Netflix picked it up for its second season. Disney clawed back Daredevil and other Marvel series when it started making its own for Disney+. But in any given month you can generally rely on the exclusive content that’s already on a service to stick around for at least a month. Have a plan The way to maximize this process is to go in with a plan. I keep a list of all the upcoming shows (including returning seasons) that I want to see on any particular service, so when one of them gets three or four piled up, I switch to it and binge as much as my schedule will allow. For example, right now I’ve got Castlevania: Nocturne season 2 and A Man on the Inside qued up on my Netflix list. I’ll wait for at least one more show or movie to catch my eye (like, say, the Knives Out threequel) before I plan my next Netflix month. Streaminganbieter rafapress/Shutterstock.com Also, it doesn’t hurt to memorize the general landing places for movies, if you’re waiting on them to transition from theaters to streaming. Some are obvious: Disney movies (including Marvel, Star Wars, et cetera) will come to Disney+, Paramount movies will come to Paramount+, two to four months after they leave theaters. Warner Bros. movies will eventually land on Max, the service that it owns. Some (but not all) Universal Pictures movies will come to Peacock, as that’s an NBC-Universal brand. Sony Pictures is the only major Hollywood studio without an accompanying streaming service at the moment. And of course, any movie released to theaters explicitly by Netflix, Apple, or Amazon will make their way to those respective services before long. Keep an eye out for deals Obviously this approach will save you some money by keeping your subscriptions down to one or two a month. I like to use that savings to upgrade to ads, which again, are only there to make you pay more so they’ll go away. Enshittification strikes again. But even beyond maximizing your allotment of time and money, you can game this system to be better for you. Streaming services are constantly hungry for new users. They’ll try to entice them with a free week or month of trial service before they charge, or several months at a discount rate. Keep an eye out for those discounts — for example, at the time of writing Hulu will offer you a month of service for free, and Apple TV+ is doing a week. Watch the usual deal sites for these opportunities, especially if one of your singular service lists is getting long. Hulu Sometimes these are restricted to truly “new” users, i.e., if you’ve signed up and unsubscribed before you’re not eligible. You can sometimes get around this by making a new account: use a burner email (or a slightly tweaked one) and a method of payment you haven’t associated with that service before. If you can swing it, these freebies are a great way to watch just one show or movie that’s exclusive to a service you otherwise don’t care about. Infrequently there are some pretty good deals on year-long plans. I’m currently part way through a Paramount+ year-long package — I got it for $30, plus another $30 upgrade to remove ads. That’s half off the price, only $5 a month total, and I watch enough Star Trek releases throughout the year that it makes sense. (At least for the moment — damn you, Paramount, for canceling Lower Decks.) Bundles of media are less appealing to me, if only because they tend to offer diminishing returns. Hulu and ESPN are both owned by Disney, so there’s a package combined with Disney+, naturally. But each overlapping circle of that Venn diagram narrows the appeal to users. It might be different for you, of course, especially if you’re sharing services among a big family. Manufactured headaches The streaming services are aware of these bouncing customers, and trying to minimize that behavior as much as possible. That’s why the “drop all the episodes at once” binge model that Netflix pioneered is no longer the de facto standard. You’ll need a minimum of three months subscribed to get through a new ten-episode season on a weekly schedule. The solution is to wait until all the episodes are posted…but that requires some temperance, and leaves you out of “the conversation” and at risk of spoilers. Again, patience is your friend if you’re trying to maximize your money. A newer wrench in this system is live sports. Previously the exclusive domain of “live TV” bundles, a la Hulu+ Live TV or YouTube Live, streaming services are increasingly claiming major sports events for their own walled gardens. Netflix got an exclusive on NFL games on Christmas day last year, with no way to catch them over-the-air, and many Thursday night games are now exclusive to Amazon Prime Video. …just don’t ask about Monday, or Thursday, or Saturday, or Christmas.  NFL That’s going to be extremely frustrating if you’re subscribed to the ludicrously expensive Sunday Ticket on YouTube, plus ESPN for Monday Night games…you get the picture. Enshittification in action. There’s no real way to counter this from a penny-pinching perspective, though you can always go to a sports bar or a friend’s home (or invite them to log in at your place) to catch a singular game you don’t want to pay for. God, this just sucks If this all seems like a lot of complication and effort just to save some money, it is! That might be the point — the easiest thing to do is just spend more money and make fewer choices. A lot of people are so sick of it they’re just going back to old-fashioned physical media, and who could blame them? The silver lining here is that you have more choices for entertainment than ever before, frustrating as they might be. There are smaller, niche services like Dropout.TV, Crunchyroll, or Brown Sugar which are also more affordable. There are practically endless hours of things to watch on YouTube, and a lot of options to keep from paying Google’s ever-increasing premium to block ads. And if you don’t mind ads, and you’re not picky, there are completely free options like Crackle and Tubi. Droput is great and it’s cheap.Dropout There’s a stunning variety of video games in every shape and shade, and even ways to get them cheaply like Xbox Game Pass. You could also just, you know, do something not on a screen. I suppose that’s theoretically an option. They still make books, right? All joking aside, both your time and your money are limited, no matter how much you have of either. Remember that if a service isn’t earning your money, you should stop giving it to them. I recommend an “entertainment audit” once a year, during which you evaluate what you’re paying for in relation to what you’re using, and seeing if you really want to keep it up. Things are better than they were when your only choices were regular TV and cable. But not by much. And with other factors putting the squeeze on consumers even in affluent countries, I think streaming services that keep offering less and less while they charge more and more are going to meet some of the same harsh realities that the rest of us are dealing with sooner rather than later. Further reading: The best streaming devices of 2025 Read...

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