I’ve been trying hard to resist the urge to upgrade my monitors to OLED for a while now, reserving said money for silly inconsequential things like food and gasoline. But it looks like a lot of other PC gamers have made the switch already. According to a statement attributed to LG, more than a fifth of gaming monitors are now using upgraded OLED panels. The sourcing on this one is a little circuitous, to be honest. The statement comes from popular YouTube channel HDTVTest, which has a sponsored video covering LG’s new OLED monitors at CES (spotted by PCGamer). Presumably LG gave the channel the statistic: “It’s only been two years since LG introduced its first UltraGear OLED gaming monitor, but OLED is already sitting at 22 percent of the total gaming monitor market share.” That’s even more impressive if you also take LG’s estimation of the television OLED market share, 18 percent, into account. And according to the wording, that’s monitors currently in use, not monitors shipping to retailers…though it wouldn’t surprise me if the latter is the actual statistic in play. HDTVTest attributes both of these figures to a virtual briefing held before CES. It’s an interesting number to be sure, but pay close attention to those qualifiers. LG cites the 22 percent penetration figure for “gaming monitors,” while 18 percent is for the much wider television market as a whole. It follows that PC gamers, especially those who use desktops (and are thus more predisposed to buy separate monitors), would be more interested in upgrading to the latest and greatest screens than PC users as a whole. Whereas the general TV-buying public is much more inclined to go for bigger and/or cheaper screens, and OLED TVs mostly appeal to those who want to build a high-end living room setup. So yes, we’re seeing a lot more OLED monitors out there, and thankfully they’re becoming much more attainable — a few models hit below the $500 mark during Black Friday late last year. But more affordable, conventional monitors aren’t going anywhere, even if gaming monitors seem poised to switch to OLED panels very quickly. Now come on, Samsung, give me that 57-inch, double 4K ultrawide OLED already. I don’t need to eat that much food. Further reading: The best monitors we’ve tested Read...

It comes amid a legal fight to stop Attorney General Merrick Garland from releasing the special counsel`s report of his investigations into then-President Donald Trump. Read...

AMD’s world-beating 9800X3D chips destroyed the competition and promptly sold out. Why? David McAfee, AMD’s corporate vice president and general manager of its Client Channel Business, and Frank Azor, the chief architect of gaming solutions and gaming marketing at AMD, sat down with reporters to give their answer: Intel’s competing Arrow Lake chip simply stunk. In PCWorld’s review of the 9800X3D, we said that the chip obliterated Intel’s best. At the same time, supplies of the part — a single chip, mind you — promptly sold out. And now AMD has added the 9950X3D, an even more powerful chip, to the lineup. For more details, including why AMD’s new GPUs weren’t included in the company’s CES 2025 keynote, the future of AI-rendered pixels, and how the new AMD AI Max chip shapes up to traditional gaming notebooks, see our Q&A with AMD’s executives. Put simply, AMD simply didn’t anticipate the disparity between its own product and Intel’s. “Put it this way,” AMD’s Azor said. “We knew we built a great part. We didn’t know the competitor had built such a horrible one. So the demand has been a little bit higher than we had originally forecasted.” McAfee went even further: “What I can say is that we have been ramping our manufacturing capacity — the monthly, quarterly output of X3D parts. That’s 7000X3D as well as 9000X3D. It’s crazy how much we have increased over what we were planning. I will say that the demand that we have seen from 9800X3D and 7800X3D has been unprecedented.” Chips take about twelve weeks to go from the start of the wafer manufacturing process to end product, he explained, so even increasing the number of wafers (and eventually chips) takes a long time. “And so it’s longer than a quarter to really ramp, you know, the output of those products, and so we’re working very, very hard to catch up with demand,” McAfee said. “I think as we go through the first half of this year, you’ll see us continue to increase output of X3D. You know there’s no secret, X3D has become a far more important part of our CPU portfolio than I think we, any of us, would have predicted a year ago. And I think that trend will continue into the future, and we are ramping capacity to ensure we catch up with that demand as long as consumers want those X3D parts.” Although the HX3D uses AMD’s stacked cache, the cache isn’t itself a gating factor, according to McAfee. Meanwhile, AMD launched its “Fire Range” processors, which take the HX3D architecture and bring it to gaming notebooks. The Ryzen 9955HX3D has yet to ship, however. AMD also launched two new faster HX3D parts for the desktop. McAfee said that the 7800X3D, the “affordable” option, was the one that consumers turned to — not the high-end, niche parts. “If I look historically at our 7000X3D products, the 7800X3D was dramatically the highest volume part in that product stack. I think that those 12- and 16-core parts, there are certain types of customers that buy those.” He also added, “My belief is, in the 9000 series, those higher core count products, there’ll be some demand there, but it’ll still be ten-to-one or more on the eight-core X3D parts because they’re just such a great gaming part. For a pure gamer, there’s nothing else like it.” Read...

AMD’s world-beating 9800X3D chips destroyed the competition and promptly sold out. Why? David McAfee, AMD’s corporate vice president and general manager of its Client Channel Business, and Frank Azor, the chief architect of gaming solutions and gaming marketing at AMD, sat down with reporters to give their answer: Intel’s competing Arrow Lake chip simply stunk. In PCWorld’s review of the 9800X3D, we said that the chip obliterated Intel’s best. At the same time, supplies of the part — a single chip, mind you — promptly sold out. And now AMD has added the 9950X3D, an even more powerful chip, to the lineup. For more details, including why AMD’s new GPUs weren’t included in the company’s CES 2025 keynote, the future of AI-rendered pixels, and how the new AMD AI Max chip shapes up to traditional gaming notebooks, see our Q&A with AMD’s executives. Put simply, AMD simply didn’t anticipate the disparity between its own product and Intel’s. “Put it this way,” AMD’s Azor said. “We knew we built a great part. We didn’t know the competitor had built such a horrible one. So the demand has been a little bit higher than we had originally forecasted.” McAfee went even further: “What I can say is that we have been ramping our manufacturing capacity — the monthly, quarterly output of X3D parts. That’s 7000X3D as well as 9000X3D. It’s crazy how much we have increased over what we were planning. I will say that the demand that we have seen from 9800X3D and 7800X3D has been unprecedented.” Chips take about twelve weeks to go from the start of the wafer manufacturing process to end product, so even increasing the number of wafers (and eventually chips) takes time. “And so it’s longer than a quarter to really ramp, you know, the output of those products, and so we’re working very, very hard to catch up with demand,” McAfee said. “I think as we go through the first half of this year, you’ll see us continue to increase output of X3D. You know there’s no secret, X3D has become a far more important part of our CPU portfolio than I think we, any of us, would have predicted a year ago. And I think that trend will continue into the future, and we are ramping capacity to ensure we catch up with that demand as long as consumers want those X3D parts.” Although the HX3D uses AMD’s stacked cache, the cache isn’t itself a gating factor, according to McAfee. Meanwhile, AMD launched its “Fire Range” processors, which take the HX3D architecture and bring it to gaming notebooks. The Ryzen 9955HX3D has yet to ship, however. AMD also launched two new faster HX3D parts for the desktop. McAfee said that the 7800X3D, the “affordable” option, was the one that consumers turned to — not the high-end, niche parts. “If I look historically at our 7000X3D products, the 7800X3D was dramatically the highest volume part in that product stack. I think that those 12- and 16-core parts, there are certain types of customers that buy those.” He also added, “My belief is, in the 9000 series, those higher core count products, there’ll be some demand there, but it’ll still be ten-to-one or more on the eight-core X3D parts because they’re just such a great gaming part. For a pure gamer, there’s nothing else like it.” Read...

You never know what you’re going to get with CES. Of course, we knew we’d hear a lot about AI — check — and that there’d be announcements of new CPUs and GPUs — also check. But you just never know how the all the pomp and hoo-ha of this annual mega tech event is going to pay off in the real-world, for regular consumers. Does the average PC user have something to be excited about now that the veil has come off of this year’s product launches? If the PCWorld staff is any indication, the answer is yes! We found plenty of cool products, innovations, and advances at this year’s show that are currently available or promise exciting things ahead. Our picks don’t stop at PC hardware, either. What’s CES without an array of goods for the tech-loving lifestyle? We note a few of our favorite home-tech products, too. Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 overclock3d I’ve never witnessed a PC product as hotly anticipated as the GeForce RTX 5090, unveiled by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during this year’s CES flagship keynote. And this monstrous graphics card lived up to the hype, at least on paper. The RTX 4090 is still the fastest GPU on the planet and the RTX 5090 blows it out of the water in all key areas. It has an astounding 21,760 CUDA cores — 33 percent more than the 4090, and more than three times as many as the new RTX 5070. Nvidia graced the card with an ample 32GB of memory (the most ever for a GeForce GPU) and a humongous 512-but memory bus, a high-octane combo for no-compromises 4K gaming and AI workloads alike. And Nvidia’s overhauled DLSS 4 will tap dedicated AI cores to send performance soaring even higher in supported games. If gamers even get a chance to buy it — even at $1,999, the RTX 5090 will be a screaming deal for AI researchers with all that memory. Everyone is going to want one. -Brad Chacos Alienware Area-51 shaunlucas.com Dell I’m not usually one for gaming laptops, but the newly resurrected Area-51 machine from Alienware might be the one that converts me. Not only is it filled to the brim with the latest and greatest hardware, but the Liquid Teal finish gives the chassis a unique iridescent sheen and it’s to die for. I love the departure from the cliched gamer look (i.e., black exterior with hot red accents), as unnecessarily flashy designs make me wince. I much prefer understated beauty. The underside of the laptop also has a clear window, which allows you to see all of the hardware inside — this is a nice touch.  This laptop doesn’t shove its gamer identity down your throat. Instead, it stands tall in a quiet yet confident manner. -Ashleigh Biancuzzo Lenovo Legion Go S, powered by SteamOS Valve opening SteamOS up for other PC makers is a deeply exciting development for the industry, and as the very first SteamOS-powered handheld beyond the Steam Deck, Lenovo’s Legion Go S would’ve earned its spot here for that alone. But I’m buzzing about more than the software on this. A big part of why the Steam Deck rocks is because it’s so affordable. Most of its competitors try to carve out niches with premium hardware and features — at much higher prices. But Lenovo partnered with AMD for an exclusive license to a more affordable version of AMD’s new game-changing Ryzen Z2 chip, appropriately dubbed “Ryzen Z2 Go.” By using older CPU and GPU cores, Lenovo is able to offer the entry-level Legion Go S for just $499 — giving gamers on a budget a much-needed Steam Deck alternative. -Brad Chacos Lenovo IdeaCentre Mini x with Snapdragon Mark Hachman / IDG Lenovo announced that it’s bringing Snapdragon to mini desktop PCs. Now you can finally enjoy Copilot Plus with your desktop. While both the IdeaCentre Mini x and the ThinkCentre neo 50q are set for the upgrades, it’s the Mini x model that has me most excited. With the option for either Snapdragon X or Snapdragon X Plus chips, up to 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage, you can totally trick this thing out if you want. It also comes with Wi-Fi 7 connectivity and an incredible five total USB-A ports, two USB-C ports, plus an HDMI, DisplayPort, and ethernet port. I’m not quite sure what engineering wizardry they were able to conjure up over there at Lenovo, but whatever it is, it has me excited to get a new mini desktop PC this year. -Sam Singleton Second opinion I’m a mini PC convert. Late last year, I ditched a massive desktop for a mini PC running an Intel “Tiger Lake” Core i7. But now I wish I had waited a few more months to purchase the Lenovo IdeaCentre Mini x instead. The Intel mini PC runs unbearably loud at anything but the most modest power settings, whereas the IdeaCentre Mini x, complete with a super-efficient Snapdragon X processor, should run much quieter, just like its laptop counterparts. But even more importantly, I now want a desktop with an NPU for AI workloads. During a one-hour demo with Qualcomm, they showed off a bunch of content-creation apps that directly hook into Snapdragon NPUs. My mind started conjuring how the IdeaCentre Mini x could be a gateway into a whole new world of useful AI – starting with video and image editing (which I already do) but also running on-device LLMs. Bottom line: I’m not sure how I’ll be using hardware-supported AI in 2025, because this whole AI thing is just taking off. But I know I want the option to do so, and having that hardware in a powerful, compact mini PC is just what I’m looking for. -Jon Phillips Asus ROG XG Mobile eGPU Asus When it comes to the best of CES, my vote is for the 2025 Asus ROG XG Mobile eGPU and its awesome power and versatility. As if it wasn’t enough that it harnesses the power of up to Nvidia’s top-tier RTX 5090 chip with up to 150W power, the external GPU also supports Thunderbolt 5 connectivity for exceptionally high bandwidth. That means it benefits from Thunderbolt 5’s up-to-80Gbps bidirectional data transfer speeds. Asus claims the eGPU can hit at least 64Gbps, which surpasses USB 4 and rivals OCuLink. I’m also chuffed by XG Mobile’s other port offerings, which include HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2.1, 5Gbps Ethernet, and an SD card reader. It also sports better cooling than last year’s model and its design weighs just 2.2 pounds. -Dominic Bayley AMD Ryzen AI Max and HP’s Z2 Mini G1a HP AMD’s Ryzen AI Max, previously codenamed Strix Halo, has been causing a furor in the PC leaks community for months now, and it’s easy to see why: It has a lot in common with AMD’s vaunted Threadripper chips. Threadripper debuted as a wild “jam this thing with all the cutting-edge tech we can” enthusiast project and Ryzen AI Max lives up to that legacy. Strix Halo pairs abundant Zen 5 cores and AMD’s powerful 50 TOPS NPU with more integrated Radeon CPU cores than any chip ever seen before, with support for up to 128GB of unified memory and 96GB just for the GPU. Wild! That insane GPU + 128GB memory configuration will make this an absolute beast for AI workloads, which demand gobs of memory and fast graphics performance. “This is something very, very special,” said Rahul Tikoo, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s client computing business, in a recorded briefing for reporters – and he’s absolutely right. Ryzen AI Max mostly targets laptops, but the most interesting launch partner instead crams this monster chip inside of a desktop mini PC. HP’s Z2 Mini G1a comes with loads of ports, the flagship 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395, 128GB of memory, and up to 4TB of SSD storage (you can add another 4TB yourself via an empty M.2 slot) — literally the maxed-out version of AMD Ryzen AI Max. AI professionals and students are going to go nuts for this wonderfully weird machine. -Brad Chacos Asus Zenbook A14 Michael Crider/Foundry The Asus Zenbook A14 is the company’s first laptop to use its unique ceraluminum finish, which bonds a ceramic exterior to an aluminum interior, across a laptop’s entire chassis (instead of just the display lid). It’s also built from magnesium-aluminum alloy, a common and lightweight material. The result is a slim, portable laptop with a look and feel unlike anything else on the market. Picking up the machine reminded me of handling a premium notebook or a slim hardcover book. The Zenbook A14 weighs about 2.1 pounds and measures about six-tenths of an inch thick, with a claimed battery life of 32 hours (!!) thanks to the Snapdragon X chip inside. The Zenbook A14 is my favorite laptop of all of CES 2025. It’s attractive, portable and, perhaps best of all, affordable at a starting price of $899. — Matt Smith SteamOS Asus/Valve Brad has already highlighted the Legion Go S, Lenovo’s portable sequel that uses an official build of SteamOS right from Valve. And that’s exciting on its own as a consumer product. But I’m more interested in SteamOS itself. While these are early days, I think it’s entirely possible that SteamOS could become a successful gaming-focused platform all on its own…which would spell big trouble for Microsoft. Windows 11 isn’t exactly winning people over, and they might be ready to look for an alternative at last. Imagine the very real possibility of a gaming laptop running the Linux-based SteamOS, sold directly to consumers. Wild. -Michael Crider Razer’s Project Arielle Razer These days, I care less about how powerful my tech is and more about how comfortable I am while using what I have. It sucks to freeze in my chair while I’m trying to game in the winter, and it’s equally miserable in the summer with sweaty back stuck to my chair. Comfort is performance, if you ask me. And that’s why the Project Arielle gaming chair speaks to me. It has a built-in bladeless fan system for cool airflow when it’s hot and an integrated heater for warmth when it’s cold, and it’s all conveniently managed via a control panel on the chair. Say goodbye to personal ACs and space heaters. Will Project Arielle ever go mainstream? Eh, probably not. But I’m quite smitten with the concept — assuming Razer keeps the price reasonable. -Joel Lee Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable Mark Hachman / IDG There are so many solutions for adding extra screen space for working on the road, from extra displays to foldables and more. Lenovo’s ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable is a special machine, hiding what is essentially a second virtual monitor behind the screen, which can be unrolled when needed. That seems to be extremely handy as well as structurally sound, at least based on my limited hands-on time. As a guy who totes external displays or even extra notebooks to serve as extra screens, this ThinkBook is one to watch. -Mark Hachman Lenovo Legion Tab Gen 3 Lenovo As a certified Android fan, I lament that Android tablets have long been unable (and often even unwilling) to compete with the iPad Mini. A small, high-quality tablet is a nut that Google and its partners just can’t crack. That’s why I’m happy to see the Legion Tab Gen 3, an 8.8-inch Android “gaming” tablet. A smaller tablet makes sense for gaming (unlike Acer’s crazy 11-inch Steam Deck-style handheld), and that focus means a more powerful Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, roomy 12GB of RAM, and an upgraded screen and cooling system. Shame about the outdated Android 14 OS (don’t hold out for timely updates from Lenovo, either), but at least someone is giving this form factor a shot. -Michael Crider Secondary screens Corsair I love tons of monitors around me, enabling multitasking work and feeding me tons of information and video all the time. That might not be great for my mental health, to be honest…but I’m still excited to double down on it. Corsair has a newer take on its dedicated desktop widget touchscreen with the 14.5-inch Xeneon Edge. This is essentially a mini-monitor, complete with USB-C and HDMI support. But if you want something a little less functional and more flashy, Govee has animated pixel displays that can live on your wall or desktop. The Gaming Pixel Light (which looks kind of like an upgraded Light Bright toy) can also double as an animated clock, weather widget, or sports ticker. -Michael Crider Pawport Smart Pet Door Pawport Give your favorite four-legged friend the freedom to come and go as they choose while keeping your home safe with the Pawport Smart Pet Door, a retrofit-style device that slides in front of an existing pet door. With help from an included Bluetooth tag, the steel-and-aluminum Smart Pet Door ($499) senses when your pet approaches, opening its doors automatically, while a sensitivity gauge keeps the doors from accidentally closing on your furry friend. You can also control the door remotely with the Pawport app, while pet “curfews” can keep your pet inside during designated hours. -Ben Patterson Stern Pinball: Dungeons & Dragons: The Tyrant’s Eye I love pinball. PCWorld does not cover pinball tables. That’s not usually a problem. This year, it is. Stern’s latest table is rad. You do not play pinball; you pick a character and then level that character up as you play pinball, amassing treasure and loot and exploring dungeons and then eventually fighting beholders and gelatinous cubes and an animatronic dragon voiced by Michael Dorn. There are ramps, hidden trap doors, the works. Nerd bliss, all for $7,000. I played for a half hour and didn’t want to stop. Stern even offered to send us one to try out. If you see a video on our YouTube channel, you’ll know my dreams have been answered. -Mark Hachman LIFX Luna Lamp LIFX With its first ever smart lamp, LIFX drew inspiration from an early product: its own SuperColor Ceiling light, an eye-catching, multi-zone fixture that won our Editors’ Choice award last year. Packing in 26 discretely addressable color zones, the Luna Lamp can be mounted on a wall or placed on a flat surface, like a countertop or a bedside table. The Matter-enabled Luna Lamp also boasts a quartet of programmable buttons that can control either the lamp’s own settings or other nearby Matter devices — even without an internet connection, thanks to Matter’s device-to-device binding functionality. It’ll be available in February for $69.99. -Ben Patterson Plantaform Smart Indoor Garden Plantaform Not everyone has the outdoor space for a garden, and even those who do might be limited by poor weather conditions during parts of the year. The Plantaform Smart Indoor Garden offers a cool and convenient alternative for growing produce at home, while also making for a captivating indoor showpiece! A combination of fog and plant nutrients, cleverly dubbed “fogponics,” feeds up to 15 plants at a time in the windowed chamber. An accompanying app helps you monitor your plants’ progress, reminds you to fill water reservoirs, lets you change the lighting schedule, and notifies you when it’s time to harvest. The windows are all removable for easy access to your bounty. Sure, at $500, plus $29.99 for Plantaform’s various plant pod packs, it’s not exactly the money-saving proposition you might associate with growing your own food. But you can’t beat the prospect of having a fresh-produce garden year round, requiring minimal work, that also looks so futuristically awesome, can you? -Katherine Stevenson Read...

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs says more than 600 New Zealanders are in the city as massive blazes rage. Read...

Ten years ago PC gamers were eagerly awaiting Steam Machines, console-style Linux boxes built from the ground up to play PC games. They flopped, due in no small part to Steam operator Valve’s lack of experience working with hardware partners. But in 2025, both Valve and its home-built gaming operating system are different beasts. And Microsoft should be afraid of them. Further reading: How to use Steam Deck as a desktop PC The Steam Deck dominates PC gaming The big story in PC gaming for the last three years has been the Steam Deck. This low-power, portable, relatively inexpensive machine is clearly something the market has been waiting for, exciting gamers and energizing PC makers to pump out imitators, like the Asus ROG Ally and the Lenovo Legion Go. But all of these machines lack a crucial component, despite copying the Steam Deck’s hardware to a greater or lesser degree. They rely on Windows, as do almost all consumer PCs not made by Apple. And Windows just isn’t a good experience in this form factor. That’s why Lenovo turned to Valve for its second-gen Legion Go S. Or perhaps more precisely, the Legion Go S Powered By SteamOS (its full and cumbersome title). It’s the first handheld PC officially powered by Valve’s Linux-based operating system, but probably not the last. Lenovo is also making new Windows-based versions of the same hardware, but we’ve already heard that Asus is working on a similar Steam-powered handheld, and Valve itself will let you download and install builds of SteamOS later in 2025. Some tech heads aren’t even waiting, and are already building their own quasi-SteamOS-powered PCs. Lenovo/Valve Despite fumbling its initial debut on console-style Steam Machines, SteamOS has quietly and steadily improved over the last decade, benefitting both from the Linux market’s maturity and Valve’s endless investment into the Steam store and community as a quasi-platform of its own. The X factor in the Steam Deck’s explosive popularity is the Proton compatibility layer, which allows games made only for Windows to run on the low-powered AMD hardware with minimal fuss. It can’t run everything — non-Steam games like Fortnite and the latest AAA polygon-pushers can’t run optimally on the Steam Deck. But it’s good enough for the vast majority of PC games and on a device that starts at $400, you get a lot of grace from gamers who also need to pay for rent and groceries. Contrast this with Windows, the current de facto standard for PC gaming. Yes, Linux fans, I know you’ve been playing some of the same games as Windows users for years, ditto for Mac. But when you think “gaming PC,” you think of a Windows-powered desktop or laptop. Or do you? It’s possible — though hard to pin down, since Valve hasn’t released any numbers — that in terms of single-device volume, the Steam Deck is now the most popular gaming PC in the world. Windows wobbles from 10 to 11 But I digress. Windows is the home of PC gaming, at least for now and the foreseeable future, but it’s not a happy home. As I said previously, handheld gaming PCs that ape the Steam Deck’s hardware but run Windows 11 often find that last point is the biggest pain point for users. They complain of inefficient use of the limited hardware, to say nothing of how Windows just isn’t easy to use on those smaller screens. And companies like Asus, Lenovo, MSI, et cetera don’t have the software chops to make an effective go-between layer for users, even if these devices could spare the performance overhead (they can’t). Michael Crider/Foundry Windows isn’t looking so hot in general, in fact. The transition from Windows 10 to Windows 11 hasn’t quite been the disaster that the initial Windows 7 to 8 transition was. But it hasn’t been great, either. Those big yearly updates seem to reliably bork at least some portion of the userbase’s machines, disproportionately affecting gamers and Microsoft is still struggling to get people to give up Windows 10. Even with a well-publicized end of support coming in under a year, Windows 11 is struggling — and sometimes flat-out failing — to gain market share over its previous incarnation. Microsoft’s has larger general woes in the gaming market, watching the Xbox platform and brand apparently drown even as its Game Pass subscription grows. Game Pass is pretty clearly the company’s attempt at a cross-platform rebirth, the culmination of hundreds of billions invested in buying up developers and publishers to own games as diverse as Minecraft, Call of Duty, and WoW. But you can’t spend-money-to-make-money forever, and gaming isn’t Microsoft’s only business. It’s also desperate to sell Windows machines (2025 is “The year of the Windows 11 PC refresh,” allegedly), Office subscriptions, and AI services to the enterprise. There might be too many cooks in the kitchen and too many mouths to feed, all at once, in one of the tech industry’s oldest and most reliable megacorps. SteamOS reminds me of Android So look at a wobbling Windows platform on one hand, and an ascendant and suddenly spreading SteamOS on the other. Valve has committed to offering SteamOS to manufacturing partners via the “Powered by SteamOS” branding initiative. With the open source Linux as a foundation and relative hardware agnosticism, it’s starting to look a lot like the relationship that Google developed with smartphone makers to proliferate Android across the mobile market. It’s not a complete one-to-one comparison, but Valve told us in an interview that it’s not charging for SteamOS. Huh. Microsoft tried to compete with Android. It failed, miserably, and the company essentially had to abandon the mobile space entirely and settle for providing backend services through apps. Even when Microsoft tried to get an early foothold in the folding device segment with the Surface Duo (also failing), it did so using Android as a basis. My colleague Adam Patrick Murray waxed philosophical about SteamOS powering gaming laptops when he spoke with a Valve engineer at CES. And I think that’s a definite possibility, even if it isn’t Valve’s immediate focus with SteamOS as it moves to conquer the handheld form factor first. But we’re talking about a “free” operating system (those quotes are because you’ll need to partner with Valve in some capacity to get the branding), built from the ground up for PC gaming, and flexible enough to run on some of the lowest-power hardware on the market or potentially the most cutting-edge gaming devices. The parallels to Android are hard to ignore, at least for me, a journalist who cut my teeth on the smartphone boom. But the prospects don’t stop at gaming. With Chromebooks and ChromeOS, Google has proven that regular consumers and even some bigger customers like education aren’t as committed to Windows as they were back in the 90s. Marek Sowa / Shutterstock ChromeOS is still seen as a “budget” laptop solution (much to Google’s chagrin). But a year or two from now, you could see Chrome-powered budget laptops next to mid-range and high-end SteamOS-powered gaming laptops, all sitting next to Windows 11 machines on a Best Buy shelf. And that’ll be after Microsoft has forced an upgrade upon lots of people who didn’t want to give up Windows 10. Consumers are ready for a future beyond Windows Let me be clear: The odds of a massive, immediate shift away from Windows PCs aren’t great. This isn’t a “year of the Linux desktop” rallying cry. But if there is a Linux desktop that exists today, it’s the Steam Deck. And that makes SteamOS a bellwether for greater proliferation of non-Windows devices (if not necessarily “Linux” specifically) in a huge range of form factors. At the start of 2025, Microsoft still has its comfortable stranglehold on the consumer side of the PC market. It weathered “the death of the desktop” predicted during the smartphone and tablet boom — people aren’t getting rid of their personal machines. But Windows’ never-ending dominance as the de facto PC operating system is, if not in doubt, then certainly in question. Microsoft’s attempts to ameliorate the issues that Windows-powered handheld PCs, lacking as they are, shows that the company is aware of the problem it has in that form factor. I wonder what it’ll do if it sees SteamOS jump to gaming laptops…or desktops. SteamOS isn’t necessarily a harbinger of doom for Windows. But it could be. And that should make Microsoft very, very frightened. 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Launched way back in April 2004, Gmail has now been around for over 20 years — and it boasts lots of great features that many users, for whatever reason, still aren’t taking advantage of. While Gmail is fundamentally built for the sending and receiving of email, its various features can make that entire process work better for you. If you aren’t using the following Gmail features, consider starting today. You might be surprised by how helpful they can be. Smart compose Smart Compose is designed to help you write emails faster by writing your emails for you, saving you the hassle of wasting time or brainpower. The feature uses machine learning to predict what you intend to type, with Gmail offering real-time suggestions as you compose an email. Dave Parrack / IDG Smart Compose is turned on by default unless you’ve opted out of smart features and personalization. However, it’s easy to toggle Smart Compose by navigating to Settings > See all settings, then scrolling down the General tab until you see Smart Compose. The standard Smart Compose feature offers predictive writing suggestions as you type, but you can also enable Smart Compose Personalization to have these real-time suggestions personalized to your own writing style based on all the emails in your Gmail account. Schedule send Are you the type to write your emails ahead of time? If so, you probably draft them up then let them sit in Drafts until you’re ready to send. But this can be risky because you might forget about it… and is there anything more frustrating than thinking you sent someone that email only to hear back that you never did? Ugh! Dave Parrack / IDG That’s why you need to be using Gmail’s Schedule Send feature. When your email is typed up and ready to go, you don’t have to send it right away — you can instead set a date and time for the send. To do this, instead of clicking Send like usual, click the drop-down arrow next to Send and then click Schedule Send. By default, you can opt for “tomorrow morning,” “tomorrow afternoon,” or “Monday morning” (which is great if you’re typing up a work-related email on the weekend). But you can also Pick date & time to select any specific date and time for sending it out. Never forget again! Undo send Gmail’s Undo Send feature is pretty self-explanatory. It gives you a grace period after sending an email to change your mind, allowing you to cancel the send so you can make further changes, or postpone sending to a later time, or just withhold sending altogether. Undo Send is really useful when you accidentally send in the middle of composing the email, or if you forgot to attach those files, or if you spot a typo after the fact, or you mistakenly CC’d instead of BCC’d, etc. Dave Parrack / IDG Undo Send is enabled by default, but you can change the duration of the grace period for undoing the sending of an email. Navigate to Settings > See all settings, then scroll down the General tab until you find Undo Send. You can then set the timer to anywhere from 5 seconds to 30 seconds. I recommend setting it to 30 seconds because there’s really zero downside to having that extra time. To undo an email after sending it, look for the Message Sent notification in the bottom-left of your screen and click Undo. If you’re quick enough, the email will revert back to Draft status without ever actually having been sent to the recipient’s inbox. Search operators While the basic search function in Gmail is as easy as typing what you’re looking for into the search box, the results aren’t always that great. If you’re tired of irrelevant or excessive results when searching through your entire Gmail archive, start using Gmail’s search operators to better filter the results. This is especially useful if you have tons of emails filling up your inbox and it feels like searching for a needle in a haystack any time you have to rummage through for a particular email. Dave Parrack / IDG There are too many Gmail search operators to list them all here, but some of my most used ones include from: (used to filter emails to only those that were send from a specific person) and subject: (used to filter the search by email subject lines and ignore body content). I recommend checking out our article on essential Gmail search operators worth knowing. To go even further, you can see a full list of all Gmail search operators on this Gmail support page. Snooze emails Snoozing an email is a bit like snoozing your alarm clock in the morning — Gmail temporarily removes the snoozed email from your inbox for however long you decide to snooze it. By default, you can snooze an email until “tomorrow,” “this weekend,” or “next week.” But you can also pick and choose whatever date and time you want, allowing you to procrastinate to your heart’s content. When the snooze expires, the email pops right back into your inbox. Dave Parrack / IDG To snooze an email in Gmail, hover over the email in question and click the Snooze icon on the right-hand side of the options. You’ll see a bunch of default time periods you can snooze the email for, but if none quite work for you, click Pick date & time to set your own. You can also snooze multiple emails at once by selecting them all and doing the same. After snoozing emails, you can then view all of your snoozed emails under Snoozed in the left panel, and you can unsnooze any emails early if you want to deal with them ahead of schedule. Email templates If you find yourself sending the same email over and over — or at least similar emails that contain very similar structure and content — then you should absolute utilize Gmail’s Email Templates feature. As the name suggests, Email Templates allow you to create and save different templates, which you can then use in the future to instantly start with a baseline email that you can edit, instead of having to draft your emails from scratch every single time. Dave Parrack / IDG To use templates, navigate to Settings > See all settings, then scroll across to the Advanced tab and find Templates. Click Enable, then Save Changes. Once Gmail has reloaded, you can create a template. To create a template in Gmail, compose an email as normal, but instead of sending it, click the three-dot menu > Templates > Save draft as template. Then, the next time you want to send a similar email, just click the three-dot menu > Templates > Insert template. Spelling and grammar suggestions Correct spelling and grammar in emails is important at all times, but it’s especially important when you’re emailing someone in a professional capacity. Whether to your boss or a client, you want them to have the best impression of you with every email you send. Thankfully, Gmail offers autocorrect for both, as well as real-time spelling and grammar suggestions that come in handy when autocorrect seems too much and you want to remain in control of your writing. Dave Parrack / IDG To have Gmail check your spelling and grammar as you write, navigate to Settings > See all settings. Scroll down the General tab until you see the option to toggle grammar suggestions, spelling suggestions, and autocorrect. Experiment and find what combination works for you. Inbox categories, labels, and filters If you send and receive a lot of emails, Gmail’s basic organization isn’t enough to keep you sorted and tidy — at least not without a lot of manual effort on your part. Fortunately, Gmail has advanced organization features that can help automate a lot of that and keep you straight. For starters, Gmail’s inbox categories exist to automatically sort your email by intent. These inbox categories include Social, Promotions, and Spam, and Gmail automatically processes incoming emails and sorts them into these categories for your convenience. Beyond those categories, you also have labels. A label is like a custom tag that lets you manually categorize emails however you want. Each label is like a folder, except you can mark an email with as many different labels as you want. Labels are navigable in the left-side panel, and labeling makes it easy to browse and find emails by type. For example, you might have labels for receipts, bills, work projects, different hobbies, etc. Dave Parrack / IDG One step further, you have filters. A filter is a custom rule you can create, which automatically does things to emails as they enter your inbox. To create a filter, click Show search options to the right of the search box, enter your search criteria, and then click Create filter. For example, you might create a filter that automatically applies a certain label to all emails with a certain word in the subject line, or you can automatically forward emails to a different inbox if they come from a specific domain address. Confidential mode Did you know Gmail has a confidential mode? It’s one of the best ways to make Gmail more secure, designed to protect your sensitive information by limiting what recipients can do with your email. When an email is sent via confidential mode, you can set it to have an expiration date and whether it should require an SMS passcode to open. Confidential emails can’t be forwarded, copied, printed, or downloaded by recipients. You can also revoke access to the email later. Dave Parrack / IDG To send a confidential email, when composing a message, click the Lock icon to toggle confidential mode. You’ll then be able to set the above mentioned features for that email. Safe! Keyboard shortcuts While Gmail is, by default, extremely user-friendly, you can end up wasting a lot of time if you only navigate using your mouse cursor. The more time you spend reading, writing, and organizing your email, the more you can benefit from the use of keyboard shortcuts. You have to enable keyboard shortcuts in Gmail, but once you’ve done so — and after you’ve learned the useful ones enough that they become second nature — Gmail will become so much easier to use and you’ll end up saving a lot more time than you thought possible. Dave Parrack / IDG To enable keyboard shortcuts in Gmail, navigate to Settings > See all settings, then scroll down the General tab until you see the option to toggle Keyboard Shortcuts. Gmail offers a large number of keyboard shortcuts out of the box, and it may take some time to wrap your head around all of them. Once keyboard shortcuts are enabled, you can always see a full list of them by typing ? while Gmail is open. If you aren’t happy with the keyboard shortcuts as is, you can customize them however you want. Navigate to Settings > See all settings, then scroll down the Advanced tab and enable Custom Keyboard Shortcuts. After that, you should see a Keyboard Shortcuts tab where you can customize Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts to your heart’s content. Further reading: The Gmail settings I always use (and a few I don’t) Read...

Local are divided on whether general waste moving from weekly to fortnightly collection is a good idea or whether it will mean less rubbish goes to landfill. Read...

CES is kind of huge this year. We’ve got big new announcements from almost every major PC company, including new GPUs from both Nvidia and (to an admittedly lesser extent) AMD. And their OEM partners are showing off their stuff on the floor, too. MSI has Nvidia cards, Gigabyte has both of them, and Adam Patrick Murray got to check them all out. First up we’ve got MSI’s incoming lineup of RTX 50 series cards, including the Gaming Trio, Vanguard, and Suprim variants. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Gigabyte is also showing off new Nvidia cards, including a few that confirm to the SFF (small form factor) standard revealed last year. Considering how huge GPUs are getting in general, I’m sure a lot of home builders will appreciate it. There’s also a waterblock for the liquid-cooled version of the 5090. Gigabyte is one of the few vendors that have early samples of AMD’s next-gen Radeon cards, which top out at the RX 9070 XT. There’s an Elite version of the high-end card Gaming OC version of the RX 9070. So that’s a look at what the new cards will, well, look like. For more technical breakdowns of the latest graphics cards, check out our writeups of the RTX 50 series and Radeon 9000 series. For more glimpses at the CES show floor, be sure to subscribe to PCWorld on YouTube. Read...