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I’ve been trying to disentangle my online life from Google for a while. And as someone who wrote about Android professionally for years, it hasn’t been easy. I’ve ditched Chrome, but I still use a Samsung Galaxy phone and Google Pixel Watch, for example. But when I finally got off the big daddy, Google Search, and switched to DuckDuckGo, it had a surprising effect: Google got better. That’s a broad statement, so let me be more particular right away. Switching to DuckDuckGo made parts of Google better, specifically Google Discover and Google News. And since I cover news for hours every morning as part of my job, that’s kind of a big deal for me. No need for Incognito Mode I’ll give you a scenario. I’m having a dinner with a friend, and they tell me that Sabrina Carpenter’s music video in an NYC church was scandalous. This is something I had no idea about, because I don’t follow pop music. But just for the sake of keeping the conversation going, I’d search (or as I would have said at the time, I’d Google) for something like “Sabrina Carpenter NYC church scandal.” If I’m being careful, I’d switch my browser over to Incognito/private mode first…because if I don’t, I’ll be seeing nothing but news about Sabrina Carpenter for the next few days in Google Discover. If I’m being lazy, I just search in the URL bar and deal with my adjusted algorithm. Ditto for some things I just don’t want Google to know about me. Say I break my toe and I’m looking for a good podiatrist. (I have not broken my toe, but you get the idea.) If I search for “podiatrist near me” on Google, I’ll be seeing ads full of feet for a long time, because medical services are big business in the backwards capitalist wasteland of the United States. Again, I’ll dip into Incognito mode (even though I know Google’s still going to watch me, through fingerprinting if not through blatant history monitoring) for anything vaguely medical or private. Google Google’s recent demand to shove generative “AI” into every aspect of customers’ lives, whether they want it or not, has given me some very pointed reasons to look for alternatives. And it’s not as if I was super happy with Google before that — it’s a poster child for the enshittification of everything digital, and the declining quality of search results is probably the most visible part of that. The fact that Google seems to want to destroy my career surely doesn’t help. DuckDuckGo is the most obvious choice, so it’s the first one I switched to. I changed the default search in my Vivaldi browser, on my desktop, laptop, and phone. And I’d be lying if I said that it was seamless. DDG uses a different crawler and algorithm for search ranking, of course things will be different. And to my disgust, it’s still trying to use “AI.” But it wasn’t so different that I was lost — after all, we’re talking about a list of links, which is what Google looked like years ago, and what I was really looking for now. So I don’t “Google” (verb) anymore, I search on DuckDuckGo, which doesn’t flow quite as well. And after a little adjustment, I was surprised at how little it took to, well, adjust. DuckDuckGo is committed to the privacy bit, so it doesn’t even ask for you to log in — I don’t have an account and haven’t felt the need for one at all. (You do get some more advanced options if you log in, FYI.) DDG doesn’t track anything, according to its promotional materials, and so far I haven’t been able to find anything that contradicts that claim. Discovering a better news feed But all that wasn’t half as surprising as when Google Discover started getting better. Google Discover, the algorithmic feed of news and other topics that’s easily accessible on most Android phones, is a huge driver for traffic all over the web. That includes PCWorld and its sister sites. So even if I wanted to quit it, I’d still need to take a gander at Google Discover and Google News several times every workday. That’s why I have a separate app to make it work with my custom Android launcher, Nova. Google The biggest immediate improvement is that I can search for pop star gossip via DuckDuckGo without suddenly seeing my Discover feed turn into Us Weekly. For that matter, I can search for Us Weekly (because I didn’t know if it was capitalized ‘US Weekly’ or not!) without it affecting Discover or News, either. It’s freeing! And now, the primary determiner of my Discover feed is…what I tap on in Discover. Imagine that. So Discover has more and more tech news, and a bunch of sci-fi and gaming stuff, the things that I actually like to read about on my phone. It’s reverse enshittification. Amazing. And since I’ve uninstalled Chrome on my phone, I can click on it and read in the Android version of Vivaldi, which is a far superior experience. Another fun bonus: Google doesn’t know what targeted ads to show me in Discover anymore. So I’m getting some real random stuff, scraping the bottom of the barrel for things like robot puppies with blatantly fake AI video trailers, or discrete nipple covers. Google is getting very bad at advertising to me, specifically, and I’m enjoying it a lot. Google If you’re not aware, I’m a 37-year-old cis man. I’m not necessarily opposed to either robot puppies or covered nipples, but the idea that someone paid Google to try and sell me either is entertaining. I wouldn’t say that poorly-targeted advertising from Google is a plus of using DDG in the conventional sense, but hey, I’m enjoying it. Less Google is better Google If you’re wondering, I’ve asked a representative at DuckDuckGo if the company plans to introduce anything equivalent to the Google Discover or News algorithmic feed. They told me no. DuckDuckGo News only works if you search for something specific, and if you enter a blank query, it goes back to the main search page. DuckDuckGo is far from perfect, too — whenever I search for anything that’s even remotely related to a product I can buy, I get the same “There’s One Clear Winner Now” ad, and dammit, there’s no way there’s “one clear winner” for the best backpack for a million people making that search. DuckDuckGo’s entire primary search page, for any product-related info, is advertising. And not good advertising. DuckDuckGo But there is one clear winner for a basic, no-frills search, that doesn’t want to steal a bunch of data and keep me on the page for every possible second. And it isn’t Google. Google still knows a hell of a lot about me. I’m still using Gmail, Google Docs, Google Maps, YouTube, even searching with Google Images, because DuckDuckGo just isn’t quite there yet. And I’m still signed into my account at basically all times. Heck, Google still has a lot of my health data, because my Pixel Watch uses FitBit to track exercise and sleep, and that’s also Google. But between ditching Chrome and Search, the fact that other Google services get better when you don’t use them is both interesting and imminently satisfying. Maybe some high-profile antitrust court losses will make for a slightly better internet, for users if not for megacorps. It makes me wonder how some other changes might improve things — maybe I’ll try for a Google Maps alternative next. Read...

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Don’t expect too much from the Arc browser in the future. The browser’s developer admitted over the weekend that while Arc is being maintained, new features are no longer in active development. The explanation, however, is convoluted. In a blog post, the company explained that while they concluded that the Arc browser was “incremental,” its novel features weren’t being used, either. For example, just under 6 percent of users took advantage of what Arc called a “space,” or workspace. “After a couple of years of building and shipping Arc, we started running into something we called the ‘novelty tax’ problem,” the company wrote. “A lot of people loved Arc — if you’re here you might just be one of them — and we’d benefitted from consistent, organic growth since basically Day One. But for most people, Arc was simply too different, with too many new things to learn, for too little reward.” For now, Arc seems to be in limbo. Because Arc runs on a custom infrastructure knows as the Arc Development Kit, it’s “too complex to break from Chrome,” the company wrote, and it’s the company’s “secret sauce.” Instead, the company has shifted work to Dia, which the company says will be an “AI-first” browser. That browser is currently in alpha testing. The problem, the company says, is that ADK is split between the two browsers, preventing the company from moving forward with Arc. “So while we’d love to open-source Arc someday, we can’t do that meaningfully without also open-sourcing ADK. And ADK is still core to our company’s value. That doesn’t mean it’ll never happen. If the day comes where it no longer puts our team or shareholders at risk, we’d be excited to share what we’ve built with the world. But we’re not there yet.” The Browser Company of New York said it still believes that the world will move on from the current browsers like Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome, and that traditional web pages won’t be its foundation. “Imagine writing an essay justifying why you were moving on from your candle business at the dawn of electric light,” the company said. “Electric intelligence is here — and it would be naive of us to pretend it doesn’t fundamentally change the kind of product we need to build to meet the moment.” It’s certainly possible that the (sigh) The Browser Company of New York will end up being correct, perhaps even ahead of its time. But the metaphors being used here, which carried over into the Arc browser’s visual aesthetic, were too twee for me. Perhaps Dia will offer a helping hand to those of us who are still stuck in the past. Perhaps not. There’s certainly room for a product that simply wants to break with history and embrace an AI-powered future. Doing so, though, limits your market appeal and also locks you into a younger aesthetic that, incidentally, seems to be aggressively rejecting the use of AI. I’m happy to admit that I don’t quite understand what the company is going for. Maybe Dia will make it all clear, someday. Read...

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At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Long battery life (almost 24 hours in our test) Beautiful OLED screen Great webcam Cons Lunar Lake’s multithreaded performance isn’t ideal for some workloads Glossy screen can be difficult to read in harsh lighting conditions A little expensive Our Verdict The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition is a sleek 14-inch Lunar Lake laptop with a beautiful display and extreme battery life. It’s a nice machine, and it would be easy to recommend more widely if it was less expensive. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition is a 14-inch 2-in-1 convertible laptop with an Intel Lunar Lake processor. It combines a touchscreen and 360-degree hinge along with 32GB of RAM, a beautiful OLED screen, and the long battery life Intel’s Lunar Lake hardware is known for. Unlike some other Yoga-branded laptops I’ve reviewed in the last year, this model is a 2-in-1 convertible PC with the 360-degree hinge the Yoga name was once known for. This machine has the same CPU as the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 Gen 10, and I reviewed them both at the same time. The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 is the consumer alternative to the ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 with the same CPU on the inside but a different design and a more entertainment-focused display choice. The battery life is long, the screen looks beautiful, and the machine looks and feels sleek. Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1: Specs The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition is an upgrade to the previous-generation Lenovo Yoga 9i (Gen 9). This time around, the machine has a Lunar Lake CPU — specifically, the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V. That means it gets much longer battery life and can run Copilot+ PC AI features that Intel’s older NPU just wasn’t powerful enough to run. It also has a more powerful integrated GPU that is surprisingly good for integrated graphics—plus a generous allotment of 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD. Model: Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 258V Memory: 32 GB LPDDR5x RAM Graphics/GPU: Intel Arc 140V NPU: Intel AI Boost (up to 47 TOPS) Display: 14-inch 2880×1800 OLED display with variable refresh rate up to 120Hz and HDR Storage: 1 TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD Webcam: 5MP 1440p webcam Connectivity: 2x Thunderbolt 4 (USB Type-C), 1x USB Type-C (USB 20Gbps), 1x USB Type-A (USB 10Gbps), 1x combo audio jack Networking: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 Biometrics: Fingerprint reader, IR camera for facial recognition Battery capacity: 75 Watt-hours Dimensions: 12.44 x 8.66 x 0.63 inches Weight: 2.91 pounds MSRP: $1,749 as tested This is a wonderful laptop for people looking for a sleek, portable 2-in-1 with a vivid display and long battery life. Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1: Design and build quality IDG / Chris Hoffman The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1’s design feels similar to other Lenovo Yoga machines I’ve used in the past year or so. This Yoga laptop uses “Cosmic Blue,” in contrast to Lenovo’s ThinkPad line, which opts for a business look with more shades of gray. Combined with the rounded edges and glossy high-resolution OLED screen, it’s a sleek experience. The blue is rather dark, though. In real life, it looks a lot closer to black than you might expect while catching light in an intriguing way. The top and bottom are made of aluminum, and the build quality is solid — this is a proven Yoga design, and it’s not Lenovo’s first time putting out a machine in a chassis like this one. It looks very similar to the Lenovo Yoga 9i (Gen 9), for example. The hinge works well. The hinge also has what Lenovo calls a “rotating soundbar” built into it. There’s no flex that shouldn’t be there, no undesired movement of the display as you type, or anything else you wouldn’t want to see on a machine like this. The design just works like it should. At 2.91 pounds, it’s a standard weight for a laptop like this one — not too heavy and not unusually light. The built-in software is a little more cluttered than I’d like: it’s got McAfee antivirus popping up and asking you to subscribe out of the box, for example. Consumer laptops tend to have more bundled offers than business laptops, but it feels a little much for a $1,749 laptop. Still, that doesn’t matter at all when you can quickly uninstall it. Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1: Keyboard, trackpad, pen IDG / Chris Hoffman The keyboard feels fine to type on. Lenovo says it has “soft-landing” switches, which the company describes as having a “snappy” feel, along with 1.5mm of key travel. It’s not mushy, and the switches feel good to type on for a lightweight portable laptop. Once again, I have a criticism to make about a Yoga keyboard’s layout. Lenovo has put the fingerprint reader at the bottom right corner of the laptop. Personally, my fingers naturally gravitate towards the bottom-right corner of the keyboard, anticipating the presence of the right arrow key there, which disrupts my muscle memory! And, on the ThinkPad X1 2-in-1, Lenovo put the fingerprint reader to the left of the arrow keys. So that appears to be a touch reserved for Yoga laptops alone. Sure, you’ll get used to it — and if you like this machine and plan on spending a lot of time with it, perhaps that won’t be an issue for you. The trackpad feels nice and smooth, and it’s plenty large. When you click down, there’s a fine click that isn’t mushy. I would like to see laptops like this one include haptic trackpads — that’s just my preference — but this is a good mechanical trackpad. Lenovo also includes a Yoga Pen, which magnetically attaches to the top of the laptop, on the lid right below the camera bump. It’s an active pen that charges via USB-C. You can use it to draw on the laptop’s display, and it works well if you’re looking for that kind of pen experience on a consumer laptop with a 360-degree hinge. Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1: Display and speakers IDG / Chris Hoffman The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 has an excellent 14-inch OLED display with a touchscreen. It’s designed to wow — with a 2880×1800 resolution, HDR support, and the vivid colors OLED displays are known for. The screen is glossy, unlike the matte one on the business-focused ThinkPad X1 2-in-1. This machine is more interested in providing the most beautiful screen possible for media consumption, while the ThinkPad’s anti-glare display is more optimized for readability in various lighting conditions. It’s always a trade-off when selecting a laptop. To be clear, the screen glare is not unusual — this is just what happens in harsh lighting conditions when a laptop has a glossy OLED display. IDG / Chris Hoffman The Lenovo Yoga 2-in-1’s display tops out at a refresh rate of 120Hz, but it has a variable refresh rate, which probably helps Lenovo squeeze more battery life from this system. In fact, the most impressive thing about the display is probably that Lenovo has managed to squeeze long battery life out of this system, despite a display that feels like it should be power-hungry. Intel Lunar Lake is necessary, but the variable refresh rate on the display and the larger battery built into the laptop are probably the things that complete the puzzle. Lenovo makes a big deal of the rotating soundbar, saying it “allows the device to project audio independent of the device’s orientation.” The soundbar has two tweeters that rotate with the screen, and the laptop has two woofers on the bottom. The speaker setup sounds quite good. Listening to Steely Dan’s Aja on Spotify—a classic audiophile test track for speakers—the sound was clear and detailed. Swapping over to Daft Punk’s Get Lucky for a more electronic sound with more bass, the audio sounded punchy and fun — but obviously without the kind of bass you’d get from a good pair of headphones or external speakers. Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1: Webcam, microphone, biometrics The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 has a 5 MP webcam with a 1440p resolution. That sounds great on paper. It looks high-quality, too, with a clear picture. In fact, it’s one of the better webcams I’ve seen on a laptop — even compared to the webcams on some business laptops I’ve reviewed. The quality is more than good enough for video meetings and calls. Lenovo has also included a physical privacy shutter, so you can block the laptop by sliding a switch right above the webcam. These are always good to see. The microphone picks up clean, clear audio and has good noise cancellation in a room with desktop PC fans whirring. To my ears, it may be one of the better microphone setups I’ve tried in a laptop recently. Given that the Yoga line primarily caters to consumers, the webcam and microphone performance is impressive. The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 has a fingerprint reader at the bottom-right corner of the keyboard and an IR camera built into the camera bar above the display. You can sign in with Windows Hello using either your fingerprint or face. Both work well. Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1: Connectivity IDG / Chris Hoffman The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 doesn’t have the largest selection of ports, but I’ve seen worse. On the left side, you’ll find a USB Type-C port (USB 20Gbps) and a USB Type-A port (USB 10Gbps.) On the right side, you’ll find two Thunderbolt 4 ports (USB 40Gbps) and a combo audio jack. This laptop charges via USB-C, so you’ll plug the charger into one of those USB Type-C ports. Anyone looking for an HDMI out port, a microSD card reader, or a second USB Type-A port will need to look elsewhere. (For example, the business-focused ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 has a built-in HDMI out port.) But this isn’t too bad for this type of portable laptop, especially if you’re prepared to use a dongle if you ever need more ports. I’m just happy to see Lenovo included a headphone jack on this machine! I’ve reviewed a similarly named Lunar Lake-powered Yoga laptop without a headphone jack, the Yoga Slim 9i. Thanks to Intel’s Lunar Lake, this machine also comes with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 as standard. It’s imperative that these features become standard for new laptops. Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1: Performance The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 delivers snappy desktop performance thanks to its Intel Core Ultra 7 258V CPU. Lunar Lake works well for day-to-day productivity applications and delivers extremely long battery life — plus surprisingly good graphics performance for integrated graphics hardware. As always, though, we ran the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 through our standard benchmarks to see how it performs. IDG / Chris Hoffman First, we run PCMark 10 to get an idea of overall system performance. With an overall PCMark 10 score of 7,719, the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 seems to squeeze every bit of performance it can out of Lunar Lake’s hardware. We like to test laptops in their default state without tweaking them much — like a normal PC user would experience them — and I imagine recent changes to Windows 11 that put laptops into a higher-performance state automatically when they’re plugged in helped this machine in the benchmarks. IDG / Chris Hoffman Next, we run Cinebench R20. This test is a heavily multithreaded benchmark that focuses on overall CPU performance. It’s a quick benchmark, so cooling under extended workloads isn’t a factor. But, since it’s heavily multithreaded, CPUs with more cores have a huge advantage. With a multithreaded Cinebench R20 score of 4,306, Intel’s Lunar Lake hardware shows its biggest weakness here. With fewer CPU cores, it’s not just substantially slower at multithreaded CPU workloads than AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 series hardware, which also has an NPU and can run Copilot+ PC AI features. It’s also substantially slower than Intel’s own previous-generation Meteor Lake chips. Lunar Lake does provide longer battery life than its competitors, but it comes at a cost. This isn’t representative of real-world productivity application usage, which is good — but it will be an issue for multithreaded CPU-heavy workloads. IDG / Chris Hoffman We also run an encode with Handbrake. This test is another heavily multithreaded benchmark, but it runs over an extended period. It demands the laptop’s cooling kick in, and many laptops will throttle and slow down under load. The Lenovo Yoga 9i completed the encode process in an average of 1,414 minutes, which is about 23 and a half minutes. Again, multithreaded CPU performance is a weakness here. IDG / Chris Hoffman Next, we run a graphical benchmark. This isn’t a gaming laptop, but it’s still good to check how the GPU performs. We run 3DMark Time Spy, a graphical benchmark that focuses on GPU performance. With a 3DMark Time Spy score of 4,716, Lunar Lake delivers great graphics performance for integrated graphics — second only to laptops with discrete Nvidia or AMD graphics hardware. Overall, this machine delivers solid performance. This laptop showcases Lunar Lake at its peak performance. It also struggles with Lunar Lake’s lower-than-ideal multithreaded performance, as Intel included fewer cores on Lunar Lake than on the last-generation Meteor Lake hardware. That’s only a concern if you have workloads that need sustained multithreaded performance, but it’s an important thing to consider on a $1,749 laptop. Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1: Battery life The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 combined a substantial 75 watt-hour battery with long-lasting Lunar Lake hardware, so we’d hope it would have long battery life. And it does — it’s very impressive. IDG / Chris Hoffman To benchmark the battery life, we play a 4K copy of Tears of Steel on repeat on Windows 11 with airplane mode enabled until the laptop suspends itself. We set the screen to 250 nits of brightness for our battery benchmarks, and it’s worth noting that the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1’s OLED display has a bit of an advantage, as OLED screens use less power to display the black bars around the video. This is a best-case scenario for any laptop since local video playback is so efficient, and real battery life in day-to-day use is always going to be less than this. The Lenovo Yoga 9i lasted for 1414 minutes before suspending itself — that’s 23 and a half hours. The OLED display almost certainly uses more power, but the choice of a variable refresh rate for the display and the larger battery help this machine achieve extremely long battery life. Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1: Conclusion The Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition is a sleek machine with a beautiful display and long battery life. The 2-in-1 experience is great. It’s as nice as it looks in the photos. The downsides are evident: the glossy screen may not be ideal in certain situations, the low multithreaded CPU performance may disrupt some people’s workflows, and the fingerprint reader located to the right of the arrow keys may not be to everyone’s liking. But the main concern is the price — at $1,749, this is a little on the premium-priced side for a consumer laptop. Still, it is a 2-in-1, and a high-quality one at that. This is a wonderful laptop for people looking for a sleek, portable 2-in-1 with a vivid display and long battery life. If those are your priorities — and the price seems reasonable to you — this machine is great. Read...

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If your browser has more AI tabs open than work tabs, it’s probably time to simplify. Meet 1min. AI, the all-in-one AI platform that replaces your messy patchwork of apps with one streamlined, powerhouse tool. And right now, you can get lifetime access for just $29.97 (reg. $234). Whether you’re a copywriter hunting for headline magic, a designer fixing up a product image, or a small business owner trying to be your own marketing department, 1min.AI can help. This thing doesn’t just chat. It writes, rewrites, summarizes, generates, transcribes, translates, edits, creates, and helps you look like a productivity wizard even on your worst brain fog day. Powered by a dream team of AI models—including GPT-4o, Claude 3, Gemini, and Mistral—1min.AI lets you hop between assistants like a boss. Need blog ideas? Covered. Need to rephrase that LinkedIn comment so it sounds like a human wrote it? Yep. Want to upscale that low-res image or yank the background off a product photo? Easy. Do you want to interact with a PDF easily? Done. Audio and video editing tools? Yep. Even social captions get the AI treatment here. And you won’t be waiting around for the platform to collect dust. It includes updates, a public roadmap, and fresh tools are constantly added, keeping you in the loop and ahead of the curve. Don’t miss this lifetime access to 1min.AI while it’s just $29.97 (reg. $234). 1min.AI: Lifetime SubscriptionSee Deal StackSocial prices subject to change. Read...

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