Arguing over the best hardware of the year is usually fun. That’s as true as ever in 2025, when Brad Chacos, Adam Patrick Murray, Will Smith, and Alaina Yee (hi, it’s me) rolled up our sleeves and got down to the messy business of naming our top hardware picks. This annual tradition on The Full Nerd always involves twists and turns, especially given our individual differences on how we define “best.” But you can see the effect of a multitude of wearying trends—tariffs, AI, increased memory costs—on the debates. In past years, alliances formed faster and positions softened less. More shouting happened, too. But Brad had no reason to invoke journalistic integrity this time around. We all saw the bright spots for hardware clearly; so too with the ugly news in the industry. Instead, we argued more gently. We rallied together to remember Gordon Mah Ung, the creator and long-time host of The Full Nerd, with a new award category in his honor. And we all left feeling satisfied with the winners. Mostly. Here are the results. (Note: This list is separate from PCWorld’s nominees for the best PC hardware and software of 2025. The winners of “Nerdies,” as we like to call these awards, are chosen by The Full Nerd crew alone, and focus more specifically on enthusiast tech. If you’d like to catch our show in real time, be sure to subscribe to the Full Nerd channel on YouTube!) Welcome to The Full Nerd newsletter—your weekly dose of hardware talk from the enthusiasts at PCWorld. Missed the surprising topics on our YouTube show or latest news from across the web? You’re in the right place. Want this newsletter to come directly to your inbox? Sign up on our website! And The Full Nerd 2025 award winners are… As long-time viewers of the show may have expected, we once again slightly retooled the categories for this year. We expanded on “accessory,” choosing to make that slot open to components or accessories. And as mentioned, our team decided to honor Gordon with a brand-new category, meant to embody his love for (and fascination with) any technology that furthered innovation. No restrictions on how niche or widely applicable. The categories we brawled over this year: Best CPU Best GPU Best PC component / accessory Best trend Worst trend Gordon Mah Ung Wild Card Best CPU: AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (Strix Halo) Will mini-PCs powered by chips like Strix Halo (such as this GMKtec model) become the norm? Time will tell. Christoph Hoffmann If you define “best” as hardware that pushes boundaries, then no other CPU stood out as clearly as AMD’s boundary-shattering Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (aka Strix Halo). Was it only available in select products? Sure. But it showed how CPUs with integrated graphics don’t have to play second fiddle to typical discrete GPU setups.  Strix Halo (and future chips like it) could upend our assumptions about what a good gaming PC looks like. In this mobile processor, AMD packed in a Radeon GPU capable of similar performance to Nvidia’s RTX 4070 or 5070. A maximum of 128GB of embedded memory can fuel it as well. And so devices we saw sporting the AI Max+ 395, like the Framework desktop and the ASUS Rog Flow Z13, weren’t just beasts at gaming. They also represent form factors that haven’t really packed such a strong punch before. For example, the Flow Z13 is a tablet notebook capable of gaming in ways that far exceeds other tablets. So while Adam believes in Strix Halo’s promise for handheld gaming PCs, the overall TFN crew anticipates a big splash across the board. Enough so that Brad thinks that Nvidia’s partnership with Intel came about in part to compete on this front. Best GPU: AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT Adam Patrick Murray / Foundry Despite Will’s valiant attempt to elevate the Tegra T239 (the Switch 2’s SoC) above all other GPUs, our debate rapidly focused on Nvidia and AMD’s major PC graphics card launches this year. In contrast to the muted rivalry on the CPU side, the two largest consumer GPU makers took off their gloves, with Nvidia launching its ferocious 50-series lineup and AMD its own monstrous 9000-series offerings. Ultimately, AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT took the top spot, despite back-and-forth over the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090’s sheer insanity and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti’s mix of performance, value, and availability. Team Red earned this second award for 2025 due to the 9070 XT’s combo of strong raw performance and major strides with its FSR upscaling tech.  True, FSR Redstone can’t quite deliver the same polish as Nvidia’s more seasoned DLSS enhancements. But AMD had another thing going for it that held sway with this judging panel: better support on Linux. You may not yet be able to officially call 2025 the year of Linux, but the operating system sure commands more attention these days. Best PC accessory: MSI MPG 272URX QD-OLED 4K monitor Matthew Smith / Foundry Sometimes when you pair a PC with the right accoutrements, you might not even notice that you lack flagship hardware in your rig. Other times, the right secondary equipment elevates the utter joy of owning blazing-fast parts. Our winner for 2025’s best component or accessory is an example of the latter—and what a beautiful one at that. Despite its unpronounceable name, MSI’s MPG 272URX QD-OLED monitor breaks barriers. It’s among the first 4K OLED displays to sport a refresh rate at 240Hz, blending gorgeous, rich color with buttery-smooth output. You can’t get much better than this for rapid refresh rate 4K monitors—and as our reviewer says, it’s not just a superb 4K gaming monitor, but a fantastic all-around display for office tasks, HDR movies, and creative work, too. Also getting nods as runners-up: The ASUS Rog Falcata, an excellent off-the-shelf option for a luxe ergonomic mechanical keyboard, and SilverStone’s vintage-vibes FLP-02 PC case, which brings back the best of the 90s and all its beige glory. Best trend: Linux gets gud Pexels A long-standing joke has been the awaited rise of Linux. (We even asked “Is this the year of Linux?” while among the nerdiest of nerds at a Micro Center opening earlier this year.) But by the end of this year, the meme felt…real. A confluence of circumstances led to this strange new world. Windows 10’s death sparked interest in alternative operating systems, thanks to Windows 11’s bloat and outright incompatibility with older yet still usable hardware. A greater number of newbie-friendly distros exist. And, perhaps most importantly, demographics have also shifted among the user base, with friendlier voices becoming louder, setting a more pleasant tone for the Linux-curious. We’ve seen this trend up close and personal on The Full Nerd’s own Discord server, with an influx of Linux users who discovered us through our Dual Boot Diaries show. Our newest members have added more depth and dimension to our community, offering a wealth of knowledge (and a wide variety of distro suggestions) to the uninitiated and experienced alike. Worst trend: AI ruins everything RIP affordable tech. Thanks, AI.Zoomik / Shutterstock.com Last year, we voted for “enshittification” (pardon our French) as the worst trend of the year, a phenomenon driven by AI’s growing insertion into, well, everything. You couldn’t turn any direction without running into an app or service that had deteriorated in quality. You could argue that this year, AI models and the insertion of AI-powered features have improved. That’s true to a degree, but not enough to fix the messy output, buggy software, or otherwise worsened quality of the tech we use daily. (Even more aggravating, we’re often now paying companies for subscriptions that use our data to train AI models.) More concerning, AI has contributed to a sudden, rapid decline in affordability and accessibility of consumer PC hardware—most notably memory, which has exploded in price (and is found in just about everything we take for granted in life nowadays). We’re now unsure of the future for the PC as we know it, with all of us feeling some degree of concern about building, upgradability, and affordability in the coming months. The idea that we could return to a time when only the very well-to-do could afford modern technology is unsettling. Gordon Mah Ung Wild Card: “What is a frame?” AMD For decades, enthusiasts only discussed gaming in terms of frames, and simple terms at that: Those rendered natively by a graphics card, and their quantity per second. But more recently, companies and gamers alike have begun to challenge that approach, digging with greater precision into the details. And that matches Gordon’s brand of fine-tuned nerdery. So whether flipping on Nvidia’s multi-frame generation tech or firing up programs that record microstutter in games, rethinking what constitutes high-quality gaming performance is exactly the kind of thing that Gordon would have loved. I think he would have been championing these new approaches himself, even. In this episode of The Full Nerd As you already know, in this episode of The Full Nerd, we duke it out over the best hardware of 2025—but the results detailed above leave out the twists and turns (and random alliances) in our discussions. Plus hilariously choice quotes, courtesy of one Will Smith. For example: Adam: All right, tell us why the 5090 is the best GPU of 2025.Will: It’s real fast, Adam. You should catch the full episode (including the preshow!) for more of these debate hijinks. We may not have forced chat to break any ties (especially in ways that Brad still has not forgiven me for), but we still had lots of fun despite the bummer year. Also, stay tuned for not just one but TWO streams next week! (Details in my sign-off below.) Willis Lai / Foundry Missed our live show? Subscribe now to The Full Nerd Network YouTube channel, and activate notifications. We also answer viewer questions in real-time! Don’t miss out on our NEW shows too—you can catch episodes of Dual Boot Diaries and The Full Nerd: Extra Edition now! And if you need more hardware talk during the rest of the week, come join our Discord community—it’s full of cool, laid-back nerds. This week’s ominous nerd news According to analysts, we’ll soon see laptops reflect the ongoing woes with memory availability and affordability. I am not looking forward to a regression in configuration options. Nor am I happy to hear that RAM pricing hurts so bad that DDR4 compatible processors (like the AMD 5800X3D) now cost a ton, too. Never thought I’d cross my fingers for AMD to start producing more Zen 3 chips soon, but here we are. Thiago Trevisan / IDG Mid-range laptops may return to 8GB RAM as default: I hate it. I also hate that Windows 11’s bloat is the reason budget laptops aren’t yet set to slide back down to 4GB. Also, Kingston says to buy your RAM now: In an interview with our very own Mark Hachman, a company representative warns that prices will only go up. We all knew this to be true, but still. Ouch. &*#% yeah: I’m glad we have science proving the benefits of swearing. I plan to make use of this knowledge when struggling through my push-ups next Tuesday. A $100 Steam Machine with Bazzite? This project sounds absolutely up Will’s alley. I hereby nominate him for giving it a go and reporting back to us on how it went. You can get a Raspberry Pi to train you in chess: Here’s a neat project, courtesy of my German colleagues at PCWelt. But as miraculous as Raspberry Pis can be, I don’t think they can do the impossible. (That is: Train me in chess.) Adam Patrick Murray / IDG Feels like the pandemic again: Never thought I would have sold an old webcam for far more than I paid, but such was 2020. Now apparently 5800X3D owners have the same option. I don’t even have a wall big enough for a 100-inch TV: But you know what, I’d still be interested in seeing one of these OLED competitors up close. Who needs windows or sunlight, right? That’s nuts: Micron said in a recent earnings call that it can only meet about 50 to 66 percent of demand. Makes more sense now why Crucial got axed so abruptly, I guess. Who needs a graphics card, anyway? Each year, Mike Crider updates his handy guide to games that don’t need a graphics card. It’s a perfect thing to keep in your back pocket when helping dole out tech advice during the holidays (as we all inevitably do). What even happened over there: If you can’t handle depressing PC carnage, avoid this story about a man who apparently lost 50 SSDs to a destructive young child. The pictures are brutal. Coming next week… By the way, we have a surprise for you all next Monday—we’re having a tribute stream to Gordon starting at around 11am Pacific! Come hang out for a variety show, set to span several hours. What exactly we’ll be doing? A little building, a little chatting, and more! ?? And of course, on Tuesday, it’s time for us to score how well we did at foreseeing the future. Will has a lot of 2025 predictions on the board. Like double the rest of us. I for one am interested to see how accurate he was. Catch you all soon! ~Alaina This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of Gordon Mah Ung, founder and host of The Full Nerd, and executive editor of hardware at PCWorld. 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Can you name one single, solitary, success Microsoft had in 2025? Think hard. It sure ain’t easy. In the years that PCWorld has catalogued Microsoft’s wins, failures, and head-scratching “WTF” moments, there’s always been a mix of high points and lows. I went through our list or stories, polled colleagues, even queried Copilot, Google Gemini, and ChatGPT. Microsoft’s strongest victory? It made money, and a lot of it, even if few liked what it was doing. Boy, doesn’t that sound apropos for 2025? If you’re a Microsoft hater, grab a fork and dive in, for there’s enough steaming schadenfreude for all. For everyone else, better go searching for some crumbs of the holiday’s desserts. There’s not much here to celebrate. Xbox Game Pass price hike: FAIL Microsoft has made some bad decisions, but aiming a Halo plasma rifle at its foot and then pulling the trigger had to be one of its most consequential. That shot was fired Oct. 1, when Microsoft decided to raise the price of its Game Pass Ultimate subscription from $19.99/mo to $29.99/mo, with a price increase to the Game Pass PC as well. And it came only months after the “Xboxalypse” saw Microsoft jack up prices on Xbox consoles and hardware, too. Inflation is everywhere, but it really hurts when it hits your living-room couch.Microsoft Fans went berserk, with many swearing and then swearing off Game Pass entirely. (It sounds very much like what happened after Microsoft gutted its money-saving Microsoft Rewards in 2023 — which the company later backed off of.) Still, while Microsoft has raised its price, Amazon is still selling Game Pass at the old price at the time I was writing this, weeks after Microsoft’s price increase. So at least there’s a loophole? Microsoft’s politics comes under fire: WTF Politics continues to color nearly every aspect of public life, and Microsoft’s fiftieth anniversary celebration and Build conference became two very public venues to criticize Microsoft’s actions on the world stage. Protesters broke in twice to the Seattle anniversary celebration, with one employee, Ibtihal Aboussad, claiming that Microsoft was profiting by selling AI products to the Israeli military, and contributing to the genocide in Palestine. In August, Microsoft employees were fired after a sit-in at Microsoft’s headquarters with a similar message. Protesters disrupted a Build keynote by CEO Satya Nadella as well. But pro-Palestinian groups continued to make their voices heard through November at various Microsoft events. It was a WTF moment in the true sense of the words, as tech’s relationship with authoritarian governments came under scrutiny. Meanwhile, co-founder Bill Gates and Nadella kissed up to President Trump at dinners at the White House, a display of obeisance to a president who tried and succeeded in deporting even naturalized citizens like Nadella himself. Still, Microsoft couldn’t (and didn’t) really do anything about the Trump tariffs, which panicked American taxpayers, businesses, and investors alike. AI exhaustion: FAIL In 2025, Copilot was everywhere…and that was just too much for many people. Microsoft had to justify its enormous investment into AI and responded by, er, “encouraging” users to use Copilot in almost every aspect of their daily lives. Of course, Copilot is now in the Office apps, Edge, and even the Xbox app. Is it useful as a productivity tool? As a writer, I tend to avoid it — but to be fair, there are examples of Copilot being used productively. Hi, I’m Copilot…and I’m here to help!Microsoft Nevertheless, it’s exhausting to try and even document the ways in which Microsoft has tried to inject Copilot into our daily lives. Here are a few, ridiculous examples: Do we need Copilot to have a face? Do we want Copilot (or Teams) in our cars? Did we need Notepad to have Copilot type letter by letter? Who wants an “agentic Copilot” which can shop for you? “No one asked for this,” indeed. It was bad enough that we even wrote a story on how to turn off AI inside your PC. Recall is too risky: FAIL Politics aside, Microsoft also navigated a sharp, fundamental divide on whether AI was truly safe, let alone helpful. On one hand, Microsoft injected Copilot into just about everything it could, from apps and services, even if users really weren’t taking advantage of it. But that was AI in the cloud; Microsoft also had to come up with some way to convince consumers that AI made sense on the PC, too. Recall, which stored searchable snapshots of what was stored on your PC, was the answer. I really didn’t dislike Windows Recall in concept. But in practice, when it’s so easy to access, it’s just too risky.Mark Hachman / IDG But Recall was delayed while Microsoft worked out privacy issues, which then reserved it exclusively for Snapdragon processors before laptops powered by AMD and Intel chips finally received Recall, too. But by that time, the damage was done: an authoritarian government had come to power, consumers were suspicious of AI and resentful of Microsoft’s relentless Copilot marketing, and privacy issues were simply a very real concern. I recommended you remove Recall and I’m glad I did, but even then Microsoft’s AI efforts on the PC weren’t particularly impressive. Windows 11’s 2025 improvements: FAIL Recall aside, what was Microsoft’s greatest AI accomplishment on the PC for 2025? In October, I asked Microsoft technical fellow Steven Bathiche what it might be. His suggestion: Semantic search. And that might be right…but it’s not a real show-stopper, either. Both Windows 11 24H2 and Windows 11 25H2 (whose differences were still confusing) introduced a revamped Start menu and tighter integration with Phone Link. To be fair, Microsoft added a number of smaller features to Windows, too: Click to Do, improvements to Windows Share, some tweaks to the Widget screen and so on… while removing more loopholes that allowed local accounts. Again: largely forgettable. Windows 11’s updated Start menu features a tighter integration with Phone Link.Microsoft Microsoft did take some big swings: Copilot Vision did manage to help me through some unfamiliar applications, and my hope is that it continues to improve. But Copilot Vision and Microsoft’s Gaming Copilot both sounded much better in concept than what they actually achieved in practice. Windows 11 Insider Program: FAIL ZDNet’s Ed Bott spelled out what I’ve felt for most of 2025 but never actually put pen to paper: the Windows Insider program is a mess, and that’s being generous. There are four channels to roll out code, and none of those supply guarantees that the code they test will arrive on your PC in a timely fashion. Half the time it’s a coin flip over whether you’ll actually get it. That leaves everyone involved unsure whether Microsoft’s announcement of new features and new builds can even be tested. Both Ed and I have also noted that basically the entire Windows Insider team, the people that helped found and shape the program, have recently moved on to other positions within Microsoft. With the oft-cited rumor that Microsoft axed its quality-assurance teams many moons ago, the fact that Microsoft’s beta teams have now given up (?) means that that a critical user-facing organization is being led by who, exactly? At some point Microsoft is going to have clean this up before moving on to Windows 12. I’m not going to mark Microsoft down for Windows 12, incidentally. Users expected it, but Microsoft stayed silent. It also looks like Windows 11 26H1 won’t be testable unless you’re on a Snapdragon X2 Elite chip, which implies that Windows 12 may not land in 2026, either. Copilot+ PCs: FAIL Microsoft began with the AI PC, then moved to Copilot+ PCs. Neither particularly mattered, as sales of Copilot+ PCs plunged in early 2025 and Intel publicly acknowledged that customers were interested in older hardware, rather than their latest processors with NPUs inside. The reasons, though, appear to be nuanced. Laptops with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processors inside them sold poorly, though Qualcomm’s market share was always far behind AMD or even Intel. For its part, Intel never really specified if customers preferred older processors because of poor “Arrow Lake” sales, or if they didn’t see the appeal of either the Core Ultra 100 or 200-series processors. Either way, it’s not like consumers have a choice when it comes to laptops; if virtually all laptop processors contain NPUs, end users will end up buying Copilot+ PCs anyway. Microsoft Still, the Copilot+ brand doesn’t have much to offer. AI features like Microsoft Recall never had much impact, and Microsoft pushed features like Copilot Vision, to all PCs, not just Copilot+ users. The biggest impact may come from Windows ML, designed to route “AI” tasks to a CPU, GPU, or NPU — whatever’s available and is best for the job. Windows 10 transition: WIN I’m giving Microsoft a win here, in part because what was advertised as a sharp, major transition between the (relatively) beloved Windows 10 and the (relatively) mediocre Windows 11 wasn’t the hard landing Microsoft originally made it out to be. Microsoft offered numerous avenues to remain on Windows 10 for another year, from paying a small fee to setting up Windows Backup, to, well, being forced to by the European Union. It could have been worse. That’s not to say Microsoft didn’t push you toward Windows 11, though.Dave Parrack / Foundry You could argue that Microsoft just delayed the inevitable, pushing out the Windows 11 transition to another year. But in a sense, it already occurred. If Microsoft is dead set on you using AI, but doesn’t care that much about AI beyond Copilot, and Copilot is already part and parcel of Microsoft 365 as well as the Copilot app, then it doesn’t really matter which OS you actually use. Microsoft’s “Handheld Xbox”: FAIL This was a tough call. I consulted my colleagues Adam Patrick Murray and Michael Crider for this one, both of who are more in touch with the handheld gaming scene than I am. Adam: “The handheld itself was awesome, but the Xbox fullscreen experience was a fail.” Crider: “Also, Microsoft already spread that UI to other handhelds, giving up its one real advantage right away.” While it’s great that Microsoft addressed the handheld PC market, a lot of the credit goes to Asus.Michael Crider/Foundry Adam: “Other than the fact that this is not an Xbox, it just doesn’t have the basic usability of either an Xbox or SteamOS, which is the real issue here.” So, to recap: Microsoft’s “handheld Xbox” actually turned out to be third-party hardware (the Asus ROG Ally X) made by the Asus ROG team. Since the hardware was officially credited to Asus, I have to give them the victory here, while kind of wondering what all the Windows UI fuss was about. Bringing in other storefronts’ games was certainly nice, though, as was Microsoft’s attempt to streamline shaders in games. Microsoft’s Surface desert: WTF For the first time in well over a decade, I didn’t personally review a Surface device in 2025 — possibly because I became fed up with Microsoft’s pricing strategy and called it a ripoff, at least where the Surface Pro is concerned. To be fair, Microsoft suffered a self-inflicted Surface shortage: first refreshing the otherwise stellar Surface Laptop 7 as well as the Surface Pro 11 with Intel Core Ultra 200 (“Lunar Lake”) processors to appease businesses, and then offering smaller, fanless versions of both devices with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Plus chips inside. Our Swedish colleagues simply decided to buy the smaller Surface Pro and test it rather than wait for Microsoft’s offer to review it. Smart decision. Then there was the revamped Surface Laptop with 5G, which felt like an afterthought. And adios, Surface charger — probably not the worst thing in the world. Microsoft’s smaller Surface Laptop was basically Microsoft’s key Surface release for 2025.Matthew Smith / Foundry I don’t really know what to make of Microsoft’s Surface strategy at the moment. I absolutely prefer an X86 chip for gaming, but Microsoft’s commitment to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips seems perfectly justified. The problem? I’m one of the few who believes it. With Panos Panay now drafting new devices for Amazon, and Microsoft absolutely fixated on AI software and services, Surface seems to be in limbo. Memo to Microsoft: start telling the world what Surface stands for in 2026. Microsoft Making Money: WIN The bottom line (ahem) is that Microsoft continues to rake in the cash, in part by upselling every organization it can into Azure and related services contracts. As you can see from the chart below, Microsoft annual revenue and net income continues to increase, and Microsoft’s share price (which we don’t care about, but others do) finished higher than when it began. In the past ten years, Microsoft’s share price has increased about 9 times versus 2015. It must be noted, however, that I generated the above chart using Anthropic’s Claude AI, not Copilot. Copilot drew me a nice line graph of Microsoft’s quarterly results, then crashed when I asked it for a bar chart instead. The resulting chart (below) looks nice, until you zoom in; Microsoft made $76.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025 on $27.2 billion of net income. That’s way off from what Microsoft provided. It does make you wonder what people are paying for. Mark Hachman / Foundry Let’s hope that 2026 isn’t worse Insiders have been saying for years that Microsoft has stopped caring about the consumer, and is focused on businesses instead. Keep in mind that PCWorld focuses on the end users and mainly consumers. (Our sister business-to-business applications like Computerworld dive deeper into Microsoft’s successes there…and its failures, too.) Microsoft’s sales teams have convinced enterprises to pay big bucks for its cloud services, and those cloud services are worth far more than a bunch of cranky consumers. Really, though, does anyone think that Microsoft is headed in the right direction? No one seems to be happy with Microsoft’s plans, decisions, and rollout schedule. The PC market is dealing with ongoing component shortages and price hikes, and the always looming threat of tariffs. In years past, initiatives like Surface have been the torch that Microsoft carried, illuminating the way forward. This year, it seems that Microsoft was as lost as everyone else. Read...

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Comcast and Spectrum are trying new tactics to win back cord-cutters and keep their existing TV customers from jumping ship. Last week, Comcast retooled its TV plans and made them easier to understand. Instead of needing to provide a service address and scrutinize the fine print for hidden fees, you can now just go to an Xfinity web page to compare the actual prices up front. Spectrum, meanwhile, has focused on bundling streaming services with its main cable TV packages. (It also stopped doing sneaky fees last year.) The upshot is that it’s now a lot easier to decide whether cable TV is still worth it, or to determine whether your current cable TV plan is overpriced. Let’s walk through Comcast’s and Spectrum’s offerings to help you figure it out. Spectrum’s $100 cable TV deal vs. streaming Spectrum is currently offering a promo for its “TV Select Signature” plan, bringing the price to $100 per month for 12 months instead of the usual $120 per month. Spectrum’s “TV Select Plus” plan, which includes regional sports, costs an additional $10 per month. Both plans include cloud DVR for up to 50 shows, and you can use Spectrum’s streaming TV apps instead of a cable box. Jared Newman / Foundry On the surface, neither plan compares favorably to the likes of YouTube TV ($83 per month) or Hulu + Live TV ($90 per month). Spectrum’s big pitch, though, is that you get a bunch of streaming services at no extra cost, including Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, ESPN Unlimited, Paramount+, Peacock, AMC+, and Vix. (Tennis Channel is also included in Spectrum’s TV Select Plus and TV Platinum plans.) Spectrum says these the value of these services equals more than $100 per month, but that claim relies on some double-dipping. ESPN Unlimited and Fox One consist mainly of the same content that’s already on their respective cable channels, and Spectrum’s adding up the individual costs of Disney+ and Hulu instead of their bundled price with ESPN. When we look at the real value of these streaming freebies, it adds up to $63 or $73 per month: Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN Select (all with ads): a $20-per-month value HBO Max (with ads): an $11-per-month value Paramount+ (with ads): an $8-per-month value Peacock (with ads): an $11-per-month value AMC+ (with ads): a $7-per-month value Vix (with ads): a $6-per-month value Tennis Channel (TV Select Plus and TV Platinum only): a $10-per-month value So, is Spectrum’s TV plan a good deal? It depends on which services and channels you’d normally pay for year round. YouTube TV combined with just the first four streaming services listed above, for instance, would cost you a total $133 per month, versus $120 per month with Spectrum ($100 per month in year one). Hulu with Live TV combined with Peacock, Paramount+, and AMC+ would cost you $120 per month, same as Spectrum’s non-promotional rate. (Hulu’s service includes Disney+, Hulu on demand, and ESPN Select at no extra charge.) In those scenarios, Spectrum comes out ahead. But if you don’t need a full-sized pay TV package, or your streaming needs are more narrow, Spectrum’s TV plans could be a waste of money. As I’ve previously documented, cheaper bundles with fewer channels are starting to become available, some of which include free streaming services themselves. I encourage you to look at all those options before committing to a TV bill of $100 per month or more, because even when you factor in Spectrum’s freebies, the cost might not be worth it. (While Spectrum also offers a $40-per-month option called TV Stream, with dozens of entertainment channels along with CNN and Fox News, you won’t get local channels, live sports, or any streaming freebies.) Comcast’s updated packages vs. streaming Unlike Spectrum, Comcast isn’t bundling any free streaming services with its standard cable TV packages. That makes the comparison a lot simpler. Comcast’s main TV package is now called “Xfinity TV Plus,” and it costs $95 per month if you also have Xfinity home internet service. “Xfinity TV Premium” costs $125 per month for internet customers, and it includes regional sports networks and sports league channels. (Each is $10-per-month pricier without an Xfinity home internet service.) Comcast includes an X1 cable box and 300 hours of DVR with all plans, and you can use the Xfinity Stream app on connected smart TVs, PCs, and mobile devices as well. Jared Newman / Foundry Compared to YouTube TV at $83 per month or Hulu + Live TV at $90 per month, Comcast’s full-sized TV packages are still more expensive, though not by lot. You’d be paying a premium for the creature comforts of a cable box (and tying yourself to Comcast’s internet service if you want the $10-per-month discount). But Comcast is also wading into the skinny bundle business. Its Sports & News TV package includes local channels, major national sports networks, cable news channels, and Peacock for $80 per month. An $85-per-month World Soccer Ticket plan adds Spanish-language channels such as TUDN, Fox Deportes, and ESPN Deportes. (While these plans include Peacock, Comcast’s larger packages strangely do not.) Other sports bundles are still cheaper, including DirecTV MySports ($70 per month) and Fubo Sports ($56 per month), but as with Comcast’s full-sized packages, DirecTV’s sports offerings might be worthwhile if you want the cable-box experience. More to come Last week, YouTube announced that it will launch more than 10 of its own genre-specific packages early next year. It hasn’t revealed pricing or many details, except that one of the packages will focus on sports. All of which means that the cable companies will soon need to adapt once more. It’s great that they’ve finally embraced price transparency and are finding ways to deliver value, but without more flexible options for cord cutters, they’ll again find themselves behind the times. Sign up for Jared’s Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter for more streaming TV advice. Read...

Imagine it’s the year 2030 and Nvidia has just announced its newest RTX 7000-series graphics cards. But the cheapest of the cards is priced over $2,000 and the top model is nearly double that. The series offer minimal uplift on rendering performance, but they’re incredibly good at accelerated upscaling and frame generation. Plus, memory bandwidth is almost double over the last-gen models. Let’s continue the hypothetical: Nvidia’s new xx60-series cards aren’t expected for months while Nvidia stockpiles enough defective GPUs. But don’t worry if you can’t afford these new cards or don’t want to wait. Why? Because GeForce Now offers the full upgrade right now for an “affordable” monthly fee, especially with an annual sub locked in. I wrote the above as a nightmare scenario, but it’s odd how close it sounds to the launch of the RTX 50-series. It’s a history that seems likely to repeat and accelerate as Nvidia’s gaming division becomes an ever-more-minor side hustle to its AI initiatives. Nvidia could effectively give up on gaming in the near future, and that might be the most financially sensible thing to do if the AI bubble doesn’t burst. But what would happen if they did? Just follow the money The numbers behind my pessimistic prognosis paint a stark picture. Nvidia’s Q3 2025 revenue topped $57 billion. Guess how much of that money came from data centers? A whopping $51.2 billion. That’s just shy of 90% of its total revenue and represents a 25% increase over the previous quarter and a 66% increase year on year. How much revenue do you think Nvidia pulled in from gaming? A measly $4.3 billion by comparison. That’s down 1% on the previous quarter, and that’s despite having the most powerful graphics cards available and with stock and prices being far more favorable than they were earlier in the year. It’s still up 30% on last year, but the difference in potential between data centers and gaming is staggering. Nvidia Indeed, gaming makes up less than 8% of Nvidia’s total revenue as of now, and although the overall income from gaming continues to increase, it’s miniscule in comparison to its data center take. Bullfincher highlights how quickly that’s changed, too: just a few years ago, gaming represented over 33% of Nvidia’s total revenue. Where do you think it’s going to be in another five years? Assuming the AI bubble doesn’t pop as catastrophically as it could, gaming is going to become a tiny footnote on Nvidia’s balance sheet. Will Jensen Huang even bother doing gaming hardware keynotes at that point? Mark Hachman / IDG Nvidia might be the biggest megacorp in this space, but its contemporaries show similar gaming red flags on their balance sheets. AMD made just over $9 billion this past quarter, but $4.3 billion was from data center sales while only $1.3 billion came from gaming. That’s much better than last year—when data centers brought in $3.5 billion and gaming just $462 million—but data centers are still a far bigger portion of AMD’s revenue than gaming. These numbers make a compelling case for giving up some interest and investment in gaming hardware development. It doesn’t mean they’re going to stop make gaming GPUs entirely. (Or does it?) But if you’re Jensen Huang facing off against shareholders who are demanding the revenue numbers go up as much as possible as fast as possible, what are you going to sell them on: a new gaming GPU that has historically low margins, or a new generation of data center hardware to feed into the accelerating AI bubble with untold potential? You could even argue that Nvidia’s increasing focus over the past few years on DLSS and ray tracing over pure rasterization performance is an early sign of it putting its eggs in the data center basket. A canary in the RAM mines The biggest side effect of all these new data center builds hasn’t been GPU scarcity, surprisingly. (At least, not to the degree we saw during the cryptocurrency craze.) Rather, it’s skyrocketing memory prices. RAM kits have increased in price by over 200 percent in some cases, making large capacity kits more costly than top-tier GPUs. Some modest RAM options are even more expensive than gaming consoles. Consumer RAM is shooting up in price because all the major memory manufacturers are inundated with orders for data center memory, like HBM and LPDDR. Some have begun pivoting their fabrication lines to these higher-margin memory types, leading to shortages of NAND chips—and, consequently, shortages of consumer memory and SSDs. Nor Gal / Shutterstock.com Those shortages are making RAM and SSDs far more expensive. And yet, despite the increased margins and diminishing supply versus demand, Micron just closed its Crucial brand of consumer RAM and SSDs. It was profitable, it was popular, it had a distinct market niche that served consumers and gamers for decades. But even Micron didn’t see the point of keeping it going when it could instead make heaps more cash from selling Micron NAND chips and server memory. And if Micron is so willing to pull out of the consumer space due to AI-driven demand, how much more will Nvidia be tempted to do the same? What’s stopping Nvidia from reaching the same conclusion? For further proof of this future, Nvidia is rumored to be cutting its gaming GPU supply in 2026 due to memory shortages. It’s especially notable how Nvidia appears to be cutting the more affordable mid-range graphics cards first, leaving ultra-budget and ultra-high-end lines intact for now. Is this just the first step in Nvidia leaving gamers behind? Where things could go from here There are some intriguing comparisons to make between Nvidia and other big businesses that found growth and revenue in avenues that weren’t where they started. IBM went from being the name in computing hardware to one that largely runs in the background. It sold off its core hardware businesses and became a software and services company that’s still worth tens of billions of dollars. It recently spun off again, creating a separate company to handle IT services while the core business refocused on cloud computing and AI. Nvidia could do that: spin or sell off its gaming divisions and license its GPU technology to that spun-or-sold-off subsidiary. Notice the lack of graphics cards in this Nvidia promo image.Nvidia Perhaps Nvidia could even end up like Adobe. In the mid-2010s, the developer of Photoshop launched Creative Cloud and slowly pushed all its once-in-perpetuity software licenses into a subscription model that’s still going on today. Could that apply to Nvidia’s GeForce Now streaming service? It had 25 million subscribers as of 2023 and ran on GPUs designed for data center server racks. Nvidia could leave dedicated desktop and laptop GPUs behind entirely and pivot its gaming divisions into software/hardware-as-a-service firms. If gaming goes a similar way to TV and movie streaming, it’s possible Nvidia could even pull a Netflix and slowly de-emphasize its DVD-like hardware business in favor of powering it all from the cloud. Gaming won’t die, but it will change As much as this article is heavy on the doom, Nvidia is unlikely to exit gaming entirely. People want to play games and there’s money to be made there, so someone will keep tapping that market. But how that revenue is extracted may change—dramatically so. Microsoft is already talking about making the next Xbox more of a PC/console hybrid. And with the latest Xbox consoles being the third wheel of this generation, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see the future of Xbox focus more on streaming games than buying/owning them. Xbox Game Pass already has over 37 million subscribers—that’s more than the number of Xbox Series X/S consoles sold this generation. Nvidia could do something similar. Or it could spin off. Or it could stop making gaming GPUs entirely. The only thing we know for sure is this: when a gaming company starts making astronomical amounts of money due to AI-driven demand, it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t be tempted to dive head-first into an AI-first strategy at the expense of gaming. Further reading: PC vs. consoles? Gaming’s future is blurrier than ever Read...

Imagine it’s the year 2030 and Nvidia has just announced its newest RTX 7000-series graphics cards. But the cheapest of the cards is priced over $2,000 and the top model is nearly double that. The series offer minimal uplift on rendering performance, but they’re incredibly good at accelerated upscaling and frame generation. Plus, memory bandwidth is almost double over the last-gen models. Let’s continue the hypothetical: Nvidia’s new xx60-series cards aren’t expected for months while Nvidia stockpiles enough defective GPUs. But don’t worry if you can’t afford these new cards or don’t want to wait. Why? Because GeForce Now offers the full upgrade right now for an “affordable” monthly fee, especially with an annual sub locked in. I wrote the above as a nightmare scenario, but it’s odd how close it sounds to the launch of the RTX 50-series. It’s a history that seems likely to repeat and accelerate as Nvidia’s gaming division becomes an ever-more-minor side hustle to its AI initiatives. Nvidia could effectively give up on gaming in the near future, and that might be the most financially sensible thing to do if the AI bubble doesn’t burst. But what would happen if they did? Just follow the money The numbers behind my pessimistic prognosis paint a stark picture. Nvidia’s Q3 2025 revenue topped $57 billion. Guess how much of that money came from data centers? A whopping $51.2 billion. That’s just shy of 90% of its total revenue and represents a 25% increase over the previous quarter and a 66% increase year on year. How much revenue do you think Nvidia pulled in from gaming? A measly $4.3 billion by comparison. That’s down 1% on the previous quarter, and that’s despite having the most powerful graphics cards available and with stock and prices being far more favorable than they were earlier in the year. It’s still up 30% on last year, but the difference in potential between data centers and gaming is staggering. Nvidia Indeed, gaming makes up less than 8% of Nvidia’s total revenue as of now, and although the overall income from gaming continues to increase, it’s miniscule in comparison to its data center take. Bullfincher highlights how quickly that’s changed, too: just a few years ago, gaming represented over 33% of Nvidia’s total revenue. Where do you think it’s going to be in another five years? Assuming the AI bubble doesn’t pop as catastrophically as it could, gaming is going to become a tiny footnote on Nvidia’s balance sheet. Will Jensen Huang even bother doing gaming hardware keynotes at that point? Mark Hachman / IDG Nvidia might be the biggest megacorp in this space, but its contemporaries show similar gaming red flags on their balance sheets. AMD made just over $9 billion this past quarter, but $4.3 billion was from data center sales while only $1.3 billion came from gaming. That’s much better than last year—when data centers brought in $3.5 billion and gaming just $462 million—but data centers are still a far bigger portion of AMD’s revenue than gaming. These numbers make a compelling case for giving up some interest and investment in gaming hardware development. It doesn’t mean they’re going to stop make gaming GPUs entirely. (Or does it?) But if you’re Jensen Huang facing off against shareholders who are demanding the revenue numbers go up as much as possible as fast as possible, what are you going to sell them on: a new gaming GPU that has historically low margins, or a new generation of data center hardware to feed into the accelerating AI bubble with untold potential? You could even argue that Nvidia’s increasing focus over the past few years on DLSS and ray tracing over pure rasterization performance is an early sign of it putting its eggs in the data center basket. A canary in the RAM mines The biggest side effect of all these new data center builds hasn’t been GPU scarcity, surprisingly. (At least, not to the degree we saw during the cryptocurrency craze.) Rather, it’s skyrocketing memory prices. RAM kits have increased in price by over 200 percent in some cases, making large capacity kits more costly than top-tier GPUs. Some modest RAM options are even more expensive than gaming consoles. Consumer RAM is shooting up in price because all the major memory manufacturers are inundated with orders for data center memory, like HBM and LPDDR. Some have begun pivoting their fabrication lines to these higher-margin memory types, leading to shortages of NAND chips—and, consequently, shortages of consumer memory and SSDs. Nor Gal / Shutterstock.com Those shortages are making RAM and SSDs far more expensive. And yet, despite the increased margins and diminishing supply versus demand, Micron just closed its Crucial brand of consumer RAM and SSDs. It was profitable, it was popular, it had a distinct market niche that served consumers and gamers for decades. But even Micron didn’t see the point of keeping it going when it could instead make heaps more cash from selling Micron NAND chips and server memory. And if Micron is so willing to pull out of the consumer space due to AI-driven demand, how much more will Nvidia be tempted to do the same? What’s stopping Nvidia from reaching the same conclusion? For further proof of this future, Nvidia is rumored to be cutting its gaming GPU supply in 2026 due to memory shortages. It’s especially notable how Nvidia appears to be cutting the more affordable mid-range graphics cards first, leaving ultra-budget and ultra-high-end lines intact for now. Is this just the first step in Nvidia leaving gamers behind? Where things could go from here There are some intriguing comparisons to make between Nvidia and other big businesses that found growth and revenue in avenues that weren’t where they started. IBM went from being the name in computing hardware to one that largely runs in the background. It sold off its core hardware businesses and became a software and services company that’s still worth tens of billions of dollars. It recently spun off again, creating a separate company to handle IT services while the core business refocused on cloud computing and AI. Nvidia could do that: spin or sell off its gaming divisions and license its GPU technology to that spun-or-sold-off subsidiary. Notice the lack of graphics cards in this Nvidia promo image.Nvidia Perhaps Nvidia could even end up like Adobe. In the mid-2010s, the developer of Photoshop launched Creative Cloud and slowly pushed all its once-in-perpetuity software licenses into a subscription model that’s still going on today. Could that apply to Nvidia’s GeForce Now streaming service? It had 25 million subscribers as of 2023 and ran on GPUs designed for data center server racks. Nvidia could leave dedicated desktop and laptop GPUs behind entirely and pivot its gaming divisions into software/hardware-as-a-service firms. If gaming goes a similar way to TV and movie streaming, it’s possible Nvidia could even pull a Netflix and slowly de-emphasize its DVD-like hardware business in favor of powering it all from the cloud. Gaming won’t die, but it will change As much as this article is heavy on the doom, Nvidia is unlikely to exit gaming entirely. People want to play games and there’s money to be made there, so someone will keep tapping that market. But how that revenue is extracted may change—dramatically so. Microsoft is already talking about making the next Xbox more of a PC/console hybrid. And with the latest Xbox consoles being the third wheel of this generation, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see the future of Xbox focus more on streaming games than buying/owning them. Xbox Game Pass already has over 37 million subscribers—that’s more than the number of Xbox Series X/S consoles sold this generation. Nvidia could do something similar. Or it could spin off. Or it could stop making gaming GPUs entirely. The only thing we know for sure is this: when a gaming company starts making astronomical amounts of money due to AI-driven demand, it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t be tempted to dive head-first into an AI-first strategy at the expense of gaming. Further reading: PC vs. consoles? Gaming’s future is blurrier than ever Read...