Forza Horizon 6 arrives on Xbox and PC on May 19, 2026, but ahead of that players have questions about whether or not their custom creations can be carried forward.

Whether those are vinyls, decals, liveries, EventLab creations, or custom tuning setups, we do have an answer. It's not all good news, but there is some.

If you have custom creations in Forza Horizon 5 that you're hoping to carry into Forza Horizon 6, here's the state of play.

Can you transfer custom creations from Forza Horizon 5 to Forza Horizon 6?

It has been almost 12 years since Creative Assembly released Alien: Isolation, a survival horror game based on the Alien film series. The title was a big hit, selling over two million copies within a year, and is considered by fans as one of the best horror games ever made. However, the studio, being busy with all its Total War games, only announced that it was returning to the series a couple of years ago. Now, it seems a full reveal is almost here, as Creative Assembly dropped a cryptic teaser for the unnamed project earlier today.

Being a teaser, not much information can be gathered by what's being shown. You can watch the 25-second-long video below. Named "False Sense Of Security," it shows a heavy metallic door unlocking and opening to reveal what looks to be an industrial location under heavy rain. An old-school pay phone can be seen in the distance. Following a quick cut to the studio logo, the close shot of the phone shows the word "Emergency" plastered on the top of it.

Judging by the landscape, unlike the original Alien: Isolation, which primarily takes place on the Sevastopol space station, the sequel may be taking players to a planet for their alien adventures. The title could be following in the footsteps of the movies, where the second entry leaves the spaceship setting behind.

For those unfamiliar with the original survival horror game, its story follows Amanda Ripley, the daughter of Alien's Ellen Ripley, who is attempting to find her missing mother. The first-person experience has players avoiding the Xenomorph as the primary enemy, where the motion tracker and evasion tactics must be used to survive encounters.

As previously announced, the new project is being helmed by Al Hope, the first game's creative director, who called it a dream project of the development team.

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Posted Monday 27 April 2026 at 3:45 pm AEST (my time).

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After almost 15 years as Apple's CEO, Tim Cook announced last week that he will step down and be succeeded by John Ternus, the company’s senior vice president of hardware engineering. From a $4 trillion valuation to a 2.5-billion-device ecosystem, Tim Cook’s legacy at Apple is both significant and remarkable.

John Ternus is now Apple’s new chief executive officer, and according to Mark Gurman, his tenure officially begins on September 1. Gurman notes that Apple’s leadership deliberately chose this timing to make Ternus the face of the company’s hardware event, where the iPhone 18 Pro, 18 Pro Max, and Apple’s first foldable iPhone are expected to be unveiled.

The iPhone Fold is thought to be the highlight of Apple’s September event, giving John Ternus the opportunity to start his tenure by introducing one of the company’s most notable products of the past decade. According to Gurman, the iPhone Fold will emphasize durability, performance, a less noticeable display crease, and a horizontal screen when unfolded.

But the foldable iPhone isn’t the only Tim Cook legacy that Ternus will inherit. Gurman says Apple has at least nine other new product categories in the pipeline, which Ternus described as “the most exciting of his career” during a town hall meeting with the company’s employees.

Here’s the list of products that will shape John Ternus’s tenure as Apple CEO:

• Smart Home Hub: This device is essentially a HomePod with a screen that can be wall-mounted and runs on a new operating system. It supports Siri voice commands and apps like FaceTime.
• Tabletop Robot: Apple’s Tabletop Robot reportedly features a 9-inch screen attached to a robotic arm, allowing users to move it around. It is primarily designed for tasks such as videoconferencing.
• Home Security System: This product positions Apple as a competitor to Ring and Google Nest in the home security market.
• Smart Glasses: Apple has long been rumored to be developing smart glasses equipped with cameras to collect surrounding data and feed it into an AI system, essentially competing with Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses.
• AirPods with Camera: Similar to the smart glasses, Apple aims to add low-resolution cameras to AirPods, enabling them to capture images for AI processing.
• AI Pendant: Described as a “small, circular device,” the AI Pendant uses a computer-vision camera to capture surrounding data and integrate it with the iPhone’s AI and Siri features. Gurman says it can be worn as a necklace or pinned to clothing.
• MacBook with Touchscreen: A higher-end MacBook featuring a touchscreen might be unveiled in late 2026 or early 2027. The device is reportedly designed to be slimmer and will include an OLED display.
• AR Glasses: Gurman says Apple is developing lightweight AR glasses that overlay digital information onto real-world views, potentially serving as a successor to the iPhone.
• Foldable iPad: Apple is also working on a foldable iPad with a 20-inch screen. However, the company remains hesitant about its launch, and the project could ultimately be scrapped.

As Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, John Ternus directly oversaw the development of these products. Now, as chief executive officer, he will have the stage to introduce the next “One More Thing” to Apple’s product lineup.

Source: Bloomberg

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Posted Monday 27 April 2026 at 7:39 am AEST (my time).

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7 Days is a weekly roundup of picks of what's been happening in the world of technology - written with a dash of humor, a hint of exasperation, and an endless supply of (black) coffee.

This week's highlights include Tim Cook getting a successor, multi-billion-dollar AI deals, and WhatsApp getting a paid version after Instagram. Let's get started.

You can check out recent issues of the '7 Days' weekly series here.

End of an era: New Apple boss to take charge

One of the biggest transitions is happening in the tech industry. Apple has been preparing for Tim Cook's retirement for a while and finally announced that hardware chief John Ternus will fill in Cook's shoes as the new Apple CEO on September 1 this year. The current Apple boss, who catapulted the Cupertino giant from a market cap of $350 billion to $4 trillion, will continue as the executive chairman of Apple’s board of directors.

For AI dominance

The AI coding startup Cursor was a hot topic this week as SpaceX announced it's acquiring Cursor in a $60 billion deal later this year. The Elon Musk-owned company wants to build an integrated development platform (IDE) using the Colossus supercomputer. Meanwhile, it was reported that Microsoft also considered buying Cursor but decided not to proceed.

Ban Ban Ban

The UK's digital regulator, Ofcom, is going after Telegram after evidence suggested CSAM was being shared on the platform. An investigation under the Online Safety Act will see whether Telegram is meeting its CSAM obligations. If it fails, the instant messaging app could face a massive fine of 18 million pounds or 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue, and a potential ban.

Following other countries, Turkey has passed a bill to ban social media for kids under 15, and platforms will be required to install an age-verification system to restrict access to children. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has about two weeks to accept it.

Speaking of child safety, Meta's new Insights tab will show parents what their kids are up to with AI on Facebook, Messenger, or Instagram.

Boost volume by 500%

Opera just had its VLC moment; the web browser got a new volume booster to push the volume beyond your imagination. If you're struggling with low-volume content in a browser tab, you can increase the volume by up to 500%.

In other browser news, Google expanded Gemini in Chrome to seven countries in the Asia Pacific, allowing users to summarize tabs, edit images with Nano Banana 2, and sync Google apps directly inside their browser.

Microsoft Edge is working on a work profile feature for people who rely on Google for search queries to give them a more seamless experience. Meanwhile, Firefox 150.0 introduced Split View improvements, new features for the PDF editor, and more.

Fear sells?

Anthropic's Claude Mythos model became the latest buzzword in the AI space recently. The model can bypass sophisticated cybersecurity measures and caught the attention of the OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who remains unconvinced. He said that Anthropic is using fear-based marketing to promote its new model.

Speaking of cybersecurity, home security brand ADT confirmed a data breach linked to the ShinyHunters group. While ADT claims only a small number of users were affected, the hackers posted on a data leak site that the breach is much larger. Meanwhile, a trojanized HandyPay app is used by attackers to source NFC payment data of Android users.

Screenless band from Google (and more)

Google's upcoming screenless fitness band might be called Fitbit Air, according to a new leak. Expected to cost around $100, it will be available in Obsidian, Lavender, and Berry color options.

In other Google news, the search giant debuted its 8th-gen TPU AI chips (TPU 8t and TPU 8i) for training and inference, making big performance claims like near-zero latency. At Google Next Cloud, the company also unveiled Workspace Intelligence as a direct competitor to Microsoft's Work IQ.

Google Meet's Connect Room feature is now available to all Workspace customers with a Google Meet hardware. The feature uses ultrasound to detect the Meet hardware and join a video call without entering a code.

iPhone Fold on a strict diet before launch

The first foldable iPhone is expected to launch this year. A new rumor suggests the device will be thinner than expected, measuring 9.23mm compared to the previously suggested 9.6mm. This year will also see the iPhone 18 Pro in Dark Cherry as the new flagship color, replacing Cosmic Orange. It was reported that Apple might downgrade the base iPhone 18 to cut production costs, potentially bringing it close to the iPhone 18e in terms of specifications.

Apple fixes a loophole

The latest iOS 26.4.2 and iPadOS 26.4.2 updates patch a vulnerability that allowed the FBI to extract deleted, encrypted Signal messages from a suspect's iPhone, even after they were set to disappear. The agency exploited a flaw in iOS's internal push notification database instead of compromising Signal's end-to-end encryption.

WhatsApp paid version

After Instagram Plus, Meta is now looking for more ways to make money through WhatsApp. The company is testing "WhatsApp Plus" premium subscription, bringing perks such as the ability to send premium stickers, change the app's icon and theme, pin more chats, and access custom ringtones.

No more X Communities

The Communities feature on X, which lets you connect with people with similar interests, is shutting down. The social media giant is now focusing on XChat instead. It's said that low footfall and a high spam rate are the reasons why the feature is being scrapped.

A standalone XChat app launched for iOS 26 to act as an alternative for DMs and serve as a new home for Communities members. Among various features, admins can create group chats on XChat and share a joinable link on the Timeline.

Cheap DDR5 RAM, massive cache

While the global market is facing a memory crisis due to AI, Intel is working with ASRock and TeamGroup on a new technology to make DDR5 RAM cheaper. ASRock's new HUDIMM DDR5 module halves the number of memory chips per stick, enabling single-subchannel (1×32-bit) modules. It's supported on Intel 600, 700, and 800 motherboard series, but there is no mention of AMD motherboards yet.

Intel's upcoming Nova Lake-S desktop CPUs are expected to feature a massive cache, rumored to be much larger than AMD's 9950X3D2. A report claimed that Intel's top chip will include 288MB of L3 cache arranged across two compute tiles. AMD Ryzen X3D processors performed exceptionally well in AI RAG testing, showing big benefits on Windows 11 25H2.

In other silicon news, Alienware refreshed its Area-51 flagship gaming desktop with AMD Ryzen 9000 Series processors, including the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2. Maingear also announced a redesigned MG-1 Mk.II gaming desktop with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 and a bloatware-free Windows 11.

21 years of waiting

KDE seems to be testing the boundaries of better late than never. Plasma fans finally got the feature they have been requesting for over 21 years: per-screen virtual desktops. This means switching the workspace in a multi-monitor setup won't switch it across all monitors simultaneously. This Week in Plasma also brought good news for Intel users as KDE added support for overlay plans, which AMD users have had for years.

Here are some more stories from the open-source world:

• CachyOS has released a performance-oriented Linux 7.0 kernel
• OnlyOffice invokes AGPLv3, says Nextcloud must restore removed logos in Euro-Office fork
• Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Resolute Raccoon is now available with Linux 7.0 and native CUDA
• Ubuntu has started a 'complete redesign' of the series page on Launchpad

The money pump

The AI industry is pumping as much money as it can. Anthropic signed a $100 billion AI infrastructure deal with Amazon, designating AWS as its primary cloud and training provider to meet global demand. Meta also entered a multi-billion dollar deal to power its agentic AI and computer workloads with AWS Gravitation5 cores.

Anthropic is seeing money coming from all directions. Amazon will invest up to $25 billion in the AI company. Google is also pouring $10 billion and will invest an additional $30 billion if the AI startup hits certain performance targets.

Codex hits 4 million WAU

OpenAI's Codex reached a new milestone as it crossed four million weekly active users, adding a million users in just two weeks. The AI giant launched Chronicle for Codex, an opt-in preview feature for macOS to streamline developer workflows.

OpenAI had a big week. It started competing with Nano Banana 2 by launching ChatGPT Images 2.0, which is significantly better at images that include text. ChatGPT now has workspace agents in research preview to help teams build and share AI agents within their organization.

OpenAI also launched a specialized version of its AI platform, called ChatGPT for Clinicians, for healthcare professionals with documentation, medical research, and care-related queries. The company's new GPT-5.5 frontier model is significantly better at agentic coding, computer use, knowledge work, and early scientific research.

That said, here are some more AI stories from this week:

• GitHub halts new Copilot signups amid soaring usage and rising costs
• LinkedIn wants you to judge AI models head-to-head with Crosscheck
• DeepSeek V4 goes live with massive 1.6T parameters and 1M context support

New from System76

Linux PC maker System76 launched two new devices under its Thelio product family: Thelio Mira and Thelio Major. Mira is a desktop for professionals configurable with a Ryzen 9 9950X3D processor, 192GB of DDR5 memory, 28TB of storage, and NVIDIA RTX 5090 graphics. Meanwhile, the Thelio Major workstation is configurable with 64-core AMD Threadripper 9980X processors, 256GB DDR5 ECC memory, NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell graphics, and 40TB of storage.

Proton Pass gets folders and other stuff

The spring and summer roadmap for Proton says its password manager, Proton Pass, will get support for folders and a new SSH agent. You will be able to organize your credentials and notes into dedicated folders/subfolders and share them with others. Proton said the feature will "require some rethinking of our cryptography model."

What happened at Microsoft this week

For those wondering what happened under the Redmond giant's roof this week: Microsoft explained how Windows 11 will get faster, shared upcoming OneDrive features, and introduced a built-in internet speed test for 25H2 and 24H2 users.

Rufus got some big updates, including a silent Windows 11 installation, the ability to turn off Copilot, and the ability to remove stock apps. You can check out Taras's freshly baked Microsoft Weekly roundup to catch up on all the interesting stories this week.

Cheaper Game Pass

Microsoft made a surprising move and reduced the prices of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. This came after Xbox Chief Asha Sharma called Game Pass too expensive. A 15% to 25% reduction came with a price; Game Pass users won't see day-one launches for Call of Duty titles.

It's said that Microsoft is also readying a new Starter Edition for Game Pass. However, rather than being a standalone tier, it's likely to be bundled with Discord Nitro, a subscription service that offers extra chat and streaming perks.

The Xbox division has undergone massive shake-ups in recent months. It is focused on bringing things back on track with a list of major changes, and its "north star" will now be "daily active players." Meanwhile, a limited edition Forza Horizon 6 controller and headset arrived to celebrate the latest racing title.

What else in gaming?

The latest issue of Pulasthi's Weekend PC Game Deals curates several exciting games on sale this week. For the Epic Games Store this week, the fast-paced Metroidvania Doomblade is free to claim for all PC gamers.

While nine games left Xbox Game Pass, the subscription is now loaded with smaller-scale titles and indie hits, including Aphelion, Heroes of Might & Magic: Olden Era, and Vampire Crawlers. Meanwhile, the latest Free Play Days for Xbox fans brought Anno 117, Age of Mythology: Retold, and more titles.

That said, here are some more stories from the gaming world:

• Valve's new Steam Controller will have a hefty price tag, according to a leak
• Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is out in July; here are the PC system requirements
• NVIDIA GeForce NOW gains labels for Game Pass and Ubisoft+ titles
• NVIDIA released DLSS 4.5 SDK for developers, featuring Dynamic Multi-Frame Generation
• Ubisoft to unveil Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced in showcase event

From the review corner

If using vinyls and CDs is still your cup of tea, Steven got his hands on the MIXX Analog Plus this week. It's a 2-in-2 fully automatic vinyl turntable with a built-in CD player and wireless Bluetooth 5.3 audio streaming. The device has a premium build, a good price tag, and acceptable sound quality. However, it doesn't support gapless CD playback, starts in CD mode when powered on, and the Bluetooth switch is located at the back instead of the mode button.

Aulumu M10

Taras got to try out one of the coolest-looking power banks that can take care of all your Apple devices. With a 10,000 mAh capacity, Aulumu M10 can deliver a 35W max output. It comes with a built-in Apple Watch puck and MagSafe charging support. The power bank has a unique design, a metal chassis with good thermals, and comes with a carrying case. However, it might feel a bit awkward to hold.

So, these were some of the biggest tech news and other updates from this week. There will be more issues of our 7 Days series in the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned. You can also support Neowin by registering for a free member account or subscribing to extra member benefits, along with an ad-free tier option.

Have a great weekend!

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Posted Monday 27 April 2026 at 7:37 am AEST (my time).

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Paul's Hardware (1.54m subscribers)

April 26, 2026

Video length: 11m 11s

0:00 Welcome to Paul’s Tech News - April 26, 2026

2:03 9950X3D2 Dual Edition Launch Fallout

6:02 Intel Nova Lake - More unlocked budget CPUs, Z970 may replace most B860 boards

TECH BRIEFS

8:15 Samsung workers threaten strike, demand share of $38 billion AI memory windfall

9:14 AMD deploys “war room” to monitor VideoCardz.com for leaks

10:01 120 Steam users now own 20,000 games or more

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Posted Sunday 26 April 2026 at 5:22 pm AEST (my time).

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This week's news recap is here with Microsoft updating Windows Update, announcing major changes for Xbox and Game Pass, new exclusive Xbox accessories, a bunch of reviews, and various interesting stories about Windows.

Quick links:

1. Windows 10 and 11
2. Windows Insider Program
3. Updates are available
4. Reviews are in
5. Gaming news

Windows 11 and Windows 10

Here, we talk about everything happening around Microsoft's latest operating system in the Stable channel and preview builds: new features, removed features, controversies, bugs, interesting findings, and more. And, of course, you may find a word or two about older versions.

Microsoft also released new recovery updates for Windows 11 and a new emergency update to address repeated restarts. Speaking of updates, if you plan to upgrade from Windows 10 to 11, you may want to consider driver upgrades as well, as one user discovered that failing to do so cripples drive speeds significantly.

It may be a better variant to clean-install Windows 11 if you want to upgrade. Rufus, a very useful tool for doing that, received a major update this week. Now, you can enjoy more conveniences when creating a bootable media, including the ability to remove bloat and unwanted stuff like Copilot. Ventoy, a similar utility, also got a useful update this week.

Other Windows 11-related issues include bizarre pixelated crashes and death loops, which Microsoft has yet to address (there are bugs with Remote Desktop as well). On the bright side, Windows 11 is about to get a useful update with performance improvements, so hopefully things will get better. It also recently received a built-in network speed test powered by Ookla (sort of).

Microsoft also shared some useful info on fixing Windows 11's File History feature and how to download the latest version of TypeScript with improved performance.

To finish this week's Windows 11 section, here is a fresh list of cool and useful apps for Windows 11 in 2026. You can find there apps for AirPods, cross-platform AirDrop, useful toolbars, and other handy tools that every user could enjoy. We also have a list of 10 quick tweaks that make Windows 11 slightly better (at least according to our fellow Usama Jawad). Usama also posted his rumblings about Task Scheduler, an incredibly powerful Windows tool that Microsoft continues ignoring for some reason, and an interesting story about a File Explorer bug that was not actually a bug.

Windows Insider Program

Here is what Microsoft released for Windows Insiders this week:

In this week's preview builds, users discovered that Microsoft is working on a new display feature that should make screens easier on the eyes by applying custom color filters. It is called "Screen Tint," and it should join the existing Night Light feature for your eye comfort.

Updates are available

This section covers software, firmware, and other notable updates (released and coming soon) delivering new features, security fixes, improvements, patches, and more from Microsoft and third parties.

Files is among our favorite File Explorer alternatives, and its latest update, version 4.0.39 Preview, introduced a major customization feature. Now, you can select what buttons appear on the toolbar, switch themes with a keyboard shortcut, preview media length in tooltips, and more. The update is now available on the official website and in the Microsoft Store.

Firefox received a major feature update this week. Version 150.0 arrived with improved Split View, new features for the built-in PDF editor, enhancements for Firefox Translate, the ability to share multiple tabs with a single click, and more.

Opera also received a notable feature update. The latest release brought new streaming platforms integration into the browser's sidebar and a native volume booster, which can now crank the volume by up to 500% witout messing with media streaming.

Here are other updates and releases you may find interesting:

• Microsoft Teams and Outlook are getting significant changes soon.
• Microsoft shares what's coming next for OneDrive.

• GitHub halts new Copilot signups amid soaring usage and rising costs. It is also reportedly moving to token-based billing soon.

• VirtualBox 7.2.8 arrives with fixes for Windows 11 BSOD, Secure Boot, and more.

• A major lawsuit claims Microsoft overcharged for Windows Server on rival cloud platforms.

• Microsoft launched VS Code 1.117 with custom AI model support and fluid chat animations.

• Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to veteran US-based staff as AI investments surge.

   

Here are the latest drivers and firmware updates released this week:

• Intel 32.0.101.8735 non-WHQL with fixes for Pragmata.

Reviews are in

Here is the hardware and software we reviewed this week

This week, Steven Parker reviewed the UGREEN NASync DXP4800 Pro, a refreshed network-attached storage with a newer processor, dual PCIe 4x4 lanes, and DDR5-5600 memory. For its price, it is a great NAS, just beware of minor quirks here and there.

Also, we reviewed the Aulumu M10, a very cool-looking metal power bank with a built-in Apple Watch charger, MagSafe, and an integrated USB Type-C cable. There are also Windows 11-like LED indicators, good thermals, and overall great craftsmanship. It is not the fastest power bank, so you will have to deal with slower charging speeds, but it is still a nice addition to your Apple device family.

Finally, check out Steven's review of MIXX Analog Plus, a 2-in-1 vinyl and CD player with Bluetooth streaming.

On the gaming side

Learn about upcoming game releases, Xbox rumors, new hardware, software updates, freebies, deals, discounts, and more.

The biggest gaming news of the week was about Microsoft reducing the price of Xbox Game Pass. Asha Sharma, Xbox's new boss, announced that Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is going from $29.99 to $22.99, while PC Game Pass drops to $13.99 from $16.49. However, there is a massive string attached to this change: no more day-one Call of Duty releases. Microsoft also announced a new Xbox logo and its updated strategy. A new Xbox Game Pass Starter Edition is reportedly on the horizon as well.

In addition to reducing the cost of Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft announced a new wave of games for the catalog. New additions include Vampire Crawlers, Aphelion, Kiln, Sledding Game, Trepang 2, and more. These games are coming this month, with nine titles leaving the service.

New games are also available on NVIDIA GeForce NOW. The service received Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors, Tides of Tomorrow, Diablo III, MapleStory M, and more. Also, the service now has labels for games from Game Pass and Ubisoft+.

Forza Horizon 6 is launching next month, and to celebrate, Microsoft announced a limited edition of the Xbox Wireless Controller and Headset. These are now available for preorder, with availability on May 19.

Now, here are this week's deals and freebies in our Weekend PC Game Deals issue, including the latest giveaway from the Epic Games Store.

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Posted Sunday 26 April 2026 at 7:54 am AEST (my time).

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Google has reportedly committed to a massive investment in the AI space, funneling an initial $10 billion into the company behind the popular AI model Claude, with a potential $30 billion to follow later.

According to Bloomberg, Google will fork out that $30 billion only if the AI startup hits certain performance targets. The news of this investment comes just days after Anthropic and Amazon rewrote their own partnership with a new ten-year, $100 billion AI infrastructure deal. That agreement has Anthropic spending that money on Amazon Web Services technologies, securing up to 5 gigawatts of compute capacity powered by Amazon's custom Trainium chips.

To solidify the deal, Amazon injected an immediate $5 billion into the AI company earlier this week. The e-commerce giant also has plans to pump in an additional $20 billion if Anthropic hits specific commercial milestones in the future. Anthropic has been on a fundraising tear, driven by the wild success of its AI coding tool, Claude Code, which many engineers now use daily.

While it may seem counterproductive that Google is throwing money at "rivals" in the AI space, the logic becomes clearer when you really think about it. This is a highly calculated play. Remember that Google is not just an AI developer, but also a cloud and hardware provider.

Many of its investments into outside AI companies are built on "round-tripping" agreements: Google gives the startup $100 million, and in return, the startup commits to spending that money on Google Cloud infrastructure and Google's proprietary Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips.

Plus, the Mountain View tech giant Google uses these investments to hedge its bets in case an external lab achieves a breakthrough before Google DeepMind. It also uses the money to court open-source developers and get around antitrust regulators with creative tactics like "reverse acqui-hiring". Some of the other AI labs Google has poured money into include Character.AI, Hugging Face, Recursive Superintelligence, AI21 Labs, Essential AI, and the generative video company Runway AI.

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Posted Saturday 25 April 2026 at 7:53 am AEST (my time).

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While Microsoft typically shows off many of the bigger games or first-party titles that are coming to the Xbox ecosystem during its gaming presentations, it makes sure to spotlight smaller indie projects being developed by independent creators and studios as well.

Through ID@Xbox — a program designed to support and assist indie developers as they build games coming to Xbox consoles and PC systems — Microsoft has partnered with our friends at IGN to showcase new indie game projects and updates in the past, and now it's done so again with the ID@Xbox and IGN April 2026 Showcase.

First announced at the start of this week, the presentation has now come and gone, and gave Xbox and PC users their first looks at newly announced indie games, and deeper looks at ones we've known are on the way (many of which are coming to Xbox Game Pass and will support Xbox Play Anywhere). Weren't able to catch the show live? No worries — we've got you covered with a complete and comprehensive recap of everything shown below.

Everything announced at the ID@Xbox Showcase

Beastro

Dungeon Meshi fans will love this one! Beastro is a roguelike RPG set in a colorful fantasy universe, though the twist is that you're not the brave adventuring hero — you're the dutiful chef giving those legendary warriors the meals they need to save the world. It's coming to Xbox Series X|S on May 21, and will also be available on PC. Notably, you'll be able to play it through Xbox Game Pass.

Deep Dish Dungeon

Okay, Dungeon Meshi fans will also love this game, too. Deep Dish Dungeon, a survival exploration game in which you carefully journey, craft, and cook your way through a dark and "puzzly" dungeon in solo or co-op play, got a sweet new trailer during the presentation. It's coming to Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Cloud, and PC in Fall 2026, and will be on Xbox Game Pass. It also supports Xbox Play Anywhere.

Albion Online

The news that the PvP-centric MMO Albion Online was coming to Xbox consoles came last month, and a few days after its release this week, developer Sandbox Interactive is getting the word out with a comedic new live action trailer. The game is free, with perks for Xbox Game Pass members and Xbox Play Anywhere support.

Lofsong

One of the more striking game reveals from the showcase was Lofsong, an adventure game that challenges you to "traverse a haunting brutalist world guided by sound, resonance, and a mysterious origami companion" across time itself. Notably, audio-based mechanics will be core to the gameplay experience. Lofsong doesn't have a release date yet, but we know it's coming to both Xbox Series X|S and Xbox on PC with Xbox Play Anywhere support.

Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School

This puzzle adventure game is all about getting out of dangerous escape rooms and solving an enigmatic mystery in the midst of a day at school, which makes it quite a unique setting for this type of experience. It's coming to Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Xbox on PC, and PC in 2026, with Xbox Game Pass availability and Xbox Play Anywhere support.

Kalanoro

This upcoming action-adventure title sees you form a band of lemurs in order to save the colorful island you call home from an evil witch, with music seemingly playing a core role in the gameplay. Kalanoro is headed to Xbox Series X|S and Xbox on PC this summer, complete with Xbox Play Anywhere support.

Vapor World: Over the Mind

Vapor World, a new story-driven Soulslike sidescrolling platformer, got a new trailer during the showcase that featured gameplay prominently. It's headed to Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and Xbox Game Pass (with Xbox Play Anywhere support), with a release on PC, Nintendo Switch, and PS5 planned as well. Notably, a demo will be made available in June.

inKONBINI

If the sound of something more lowkey and relaxing sounds good to you, check out inKONBINI. This slice-of-life management sim puts you in the shoes of a small convenience store owner, and is directly inspired by the vibes of early 1990s Japan. It's releasing on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud Gaming, PC, PS5, and Nintendo Switch on April 30, 2026. It will also be on Xbox Game Pass, and supports Xbox Play Anywhere.

The vibrant sci-fi deckbuilder RPG Echo Generation 2 got a new trailer during the ID@Xbox show that showed off gameplay and also revealed that the game is coming out on May 27 next month. It's headed to Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and PC, with full Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Play Anywhere availability.

Starseeker

The beloved sci-fi sandbox game Astroneer is getting a spinoff with Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions, an adventure-focused take on the universe that centers around co-op expeditions with friends. There's no release date right now, but we know it's coming to Xbox Series X|S, PC, PS5, and Switch 2, and will be on Xbox Game Pass. It will also support Xbox Play Anywhere for Xbox on PC play.

Tears of Metal

Tears of Metal, a co-op roguelike hack-and-slash action title with a gorgeous art style, is headed to Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC (with Xbox Play Anywhere), Xbox Cloud Gaming, and Xbox Game Pass. Little else is known about it beyond the fact you'll be in command of a "formidable Scottish battalion," but it's one to watch if you're like me and love medieval games.

Crashout Crew

This cartoonish co-op title looks a lot like Overcooked, but if it was about forklifts instead of cooking. With up to three other players, it's up to you to "fulfill orders of increasingly chaotic, physics-based boxes." The game is coming out on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and Steam on May 28, and will be on Xbox Game Pass too. It also supports Xbox Play Anywhere.

RV There Yet?

One of last year's most popular new indie games on PC is coming to Xbox. RV There Yet? is a comedic co-op adventure in which you and your friends have to try and drive your RV back home despite the world seemingly doing everything it can to throw a wrench into that plan. It didn't get a specific release date, but the devs say it's coming to Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and Xbox Game Pass in May, complete with Xbox Play Anywhere support.

Solo Leveling Arise Overdrive

The popular action game Solo Leveling Arise Overdrive — a title based on the anime of the same name — is getting a Jeju Island Story Update soon, and got a trailer for it at the show. Notably, the game is coming to Xbox Series X|S consoles in Q3 2026, and is out now on both Xbox on PC and Steam.

There Are No Ghosts at the Grand

There Are No Ghosts at the Grand, an exciting new musical-themed hotel decor and ghost hunting title (yes, the game actually combines those two things), got a nice new trailer during the ID@Xbox showcase that gave fans a look at more of its gameplay and overall structure. It's coming to Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and other PC platforms, as well as Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Play Anywhere.

Golf With Your Friends 2

The popular party golfing game Golf With Your Friends 2 is getting a sequel, and it's coming to Xbox Series X|S, PC, PS5, and Nintendo Switch later this fall. It got a very short trailer at the ID@Xbox presentation.

Mistfall Hunter

The upcoming fantasy "extraction RPG" Mistfall Hunter was revealed in full during the showcase. The game is coming out in July this year on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, and other PC platforms, along with Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Play Anywhere. In it, you can team up with three other players, venture into the "Gyldenmist," and battle both PvE monsters and other teams in PvP before fighting your way to extraction.

Totopia

Need a party game to play? Totopia is a free-to-play one coming to Xbox, and the fact it will support Xbox Play Anywhere means it's coming to Xbox on PC too. It looks to be very Fall Guys-esque with plenty of different minigames to play.

SpeedRunners 2: King of Speed

The competitive racing platformer SpeedRunners is getting a "high-octane sequel" that will support up to eight competing Racers trying to zip their way through hazard-filled levels the fastest, with all the action taking place on a single screen (anyone who falls behind will be at the mercy of a flaming wall). It's coming to Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, PC, PS5, and Nintendo Switch in July, and will also be on Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Play Anywhere.

Vampire Crawlers

Vampire Crawlers, the deckbuilding spinoff of the beloved 2022 action roguelike Vampire Survivors, came out this week, and it got a trailer at the ID@Xbox show. It's the first of many new creative projects for developer Poncle, and is out now on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Xbox Game Pass, PC (Steam), PS5, and Nintendo Switch. It also has Xbox Play Anywhere support.

Screenbound

Finally, we got a new look at Screenbound, a unique action-adventure title in which you control a character in the 3D "real world" at the same time you're also playing as one in a 2D game on your handheld gaming system. Screenbound is coming to Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and Steam, along with Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Play Anywhere.

FAQ

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Posted Friday 24 April 2026 at 4:12 pm AEST (my time).

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Meta is planning to layoff around 10 percent of employees in May, according to a memo from the company’s chief people officer, Janelle Gale, published by Bloomberg. That means approximately 8,000 people will see their jobs cut. Meta will also be closing around 6,000 open roles, according to Gale.

The cuts follow Meta’s significant investments in AI, including spending huge sums to hire top talent and build data centers. The company forecast in January that it will spend $115 billion to $135 billion in capital expenditures in 2026 — a significant increase from its $72.22 billion in capital expenditures for 2025. The increase is to “support our Meta Superintelligence Labs efforts and core business.” Earlier this year, Meta announced layoffs affecting hundreds of employees in its recruiting, social media, and sales teams, as well as cuts impacting about 10 percent of its Reality Labs division.

Gale wrote that Meta is “doing this as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making. This is not an easy tradeoff and it will mean letting go of people who have made meaningful contributions to Meta during their time here.” Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton confirmed that Bloomberg’s report was accurate but otherwise declined to comment.

Affected staffers will be notified on May 20th. “I know this leaves everyone with nearly a month of ambiguity which is incredibly unsettling,” Gale said, noting that “as we’re still working through the details we aren’t able to share much more until later in May.”

Reuters reported last week that Meta was targeting May 20th for layoffs, also saying that further cuts are planned for the second half of 2026. In March, Reuters wrote that Meta was considering laying off 20 percent “or more” of the company.

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Posted Friday 24 April 2026 at 7:18 am AEST (my time).

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More content is always a good thing right? Well, maybe not all the time.

Microsoft and Xbox purchased Blizzard as part of its Activision acquisition a few years back. Since then, World of Warcraft and Blizzard both have been operating more autonomously than they have been in the past. In a recent interview, game director Holly Longdale hailed the development speed of the latest expansion, Midnight, noting that there'd been zero crunch at the studio, with "zero compromise on quality."

I recently wrote an article asking Blizzard to slow down a bit on its patch cadence for World of Warcraft. I didn't know how much of a predictor that would end up being.

Longdale's comments have been recirculating a bit again as of yesterday. World of Warcraft: Midnight shipped patch 12.0.5 yesterday per the roadmap from January. It added a sizeable chunk of new content. There's new fishing activities, a new PvP prop hunt mini game, and new PvE activities to help people catch up gearing their mains and alternate characters.

However, it has also introduced another wave of bugs and other issues, on top of what has already been proving to be a particularly buggy expansion.

World of Bugcraft, and I don't mean Silithus

Earlier this week, Microsoft surprised everyone by announcing that it is temporarily pausing new sign-ups for GitHub Copilot Pro, Pro+, and Student plans so that it can better serve existing customers more effectively. Also, they announced reduced usage limits for individual plans and the removal of Claude Opus models from Pro plans.

With improved AI models and their agentic capabilities, the usage of GitHub Copilot has skyrocketed over the past few months. This is not specific to GitHub Copilot; in the last few weeks, Anthropic, the current leader in the AI coding market, started imposing several new restrictions and reduced usage limits as well.

The subscription model for AI coding seems to be coming to an end. The $20–$30 per month pricing seems to be unsustainable even for large AI companies including Microsoft and Anthropic. While Anthropic has already moved to token-based billing for enterprise customers, GitHub Copilot is also trying to move in the same direction.

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At today confirmed that GitHub Copilot is moving to token-based billing from June 1st. The official announcement is expected to be made this week. Right now, GitHub Copilot users have a certain amount of “requests” depending on the subscription plan. For example, the Pro plan offers 300 requests a month, while the Pro+ plan offers 1,500 requests.

Instead of using “requests,” GitHub Copilot users will pay for the actual cost of input and output tokens. For example, if the GPT-5.4 model is selected, developers need to pay $2.50 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens.

To get access to the GitHub Copilot platform, users will pay a monthly subscription as usual. But instead of a certain number of premium requests, they will receive a certain number of AI tokens based on their subscription level. Enterprise GitHub Copilot users will have “pooled” AI credits which can be shared across the organization.

As per Ed Zitron, GitHub Copilot Business customers paying $19/month will get $30 of pooled AI credits, while Copilot Enterprise customers paying $39/month will receive $70 of pooled AI credits.

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Posted Thursday 23 April 2026 at 5:39 pm AEST (my time).

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Last year, Samsung’s executives and employees had faced charges over leaking 10nm DRAM technology to China. The matter hasn’t cooled off yet, and Samsung has reportedly hit a pause on the mass production of its flagship 10nm DRAM, thereby settling down an intense competition in the advanced semiconductor space.

The Korean news outlet, IT Chosun, reported that Samsung was to start trial production for its 7th generation 10nm 1d DRAM, also referred to as “D1d” in the first quarter of this year, but has postponed indefinitely due to unfavourable cost-to-return ratio and low target yield.

This comes amid the confidence that Samsung Electronics Vice President of Memory development Hwang Sang-jun had raised by expressing that, “D1d will be the core DRAM in the HBM5E”, during the GTC 2026. But the halting of the production stutters and delays Samsung’s next-generation Artificial Intelligence (AI) memory roadmap.

Talking about the nodes, "1d" is the successive generation of 10nm DRAM technology that follows the 6th Gen "1c" (started with D1x). The latest node is expected to play a foundational role in the upcoming high-bandwidth memory technologies, especially HBM5E, the 9th-generation high-bandwidth memory. The 1c DRAM was capable for memories from 6th-generation to 8th-generation, such as HBM4, HBM4E, HBM5, but a stable supply of D1d is required for HBM5E.

An internal source from Samsung Electronics said (originally in Korean, translated via Google Translate),

“On April 22, Samsung Electronics executives recently reviewed the yield and ROI of D1d and concluded that mass production was unsuitable, management's sober assessment was made that there were no customers who wanted or waited for the current level of D1d products along with insufficient yield”.

This delay has apparently also left almost 400 personnel idle, who were in the task force created for the D1d mass production, since the efforts are now limited to the development stage rather than full-scale production. Meanwhile, the technology gap between Samsung and its rival SK Hynix appears to be widening as the latter is ahead in D1d technology.

Source: IT Chosun

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Posted Thursday 23 April 2026 at 7:41 am AEST (my time).

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Most of the companies that have fully committed to building AI models are gobbling up every Nvidia AI accelerator they can get, but Google has taken a different approach. Most of its cloud AI infrastructure is based on its line of custom Tensor processing units (TPUs). After announcing the seventh-gen Ironwood TPU in 2025, the company has moved on to the eighth-gen version, but it’s not just a faster iteration of the same chip.

The new TPUs come in two flavors, providing Google and its customers with an AI platform that is faster and more efficient, the company says. Google is pushing the idea that the “agent era” is fundamentally different from the AI systems that came before, necessitating a new approach to the hardware. So engineers have devised the TPU8t (for training) and the TPU 8i (for inference).

Before AI models become something you can use to analyze data or make silly memes, they need to be trained. The TPU 8t was designed specifically for this part of the AI lifecycle to reduce the training time for frontier AI models from months to weeks.

Updated Tensor 8t server clusters, which Google calls “pods,” now house 9600 chips with two petabytes of shared high-bandwidth memory. Google claims TPU 8t can even scale linearly, with up to a million chips in a single logical cluster. It’s innovations like this that are making super-sized AI models much faster while also driving up RAM prices for everyone else. But if you’re involved in building those giant AI models, all this hardware saves time, with an impressive 121 FP4 EFlops of compute per pod. That’s almost three times higher than Ironwood’s training compute ceiling.

So the new chips allow for faster training, but Google also says you get more useful computation for every volt you pump into a TPU 8t. The company claims a “goodpute” rate of 97 percent, which means less waiting and wasted effort. With better handling of irregular memory access, automatic handling of hardware faults, and real-time telemetry across all connected chips, TPU 8t spends more time actively advancing model training.

When training is done, AI models run in inference mode to generate tokens—that’s the process happening behind the scenes when you tell a model to do something. This doesn’t require as much horsepower, so using the same hardware for both parts of the AI lifecycle is inefficient. That’s why inference is the purview of TPU 8i, which is designed to be more efficient when running multiple specialized agents, with less waiting time. TPU 8i chips also run in larger pods of 1,152 chips versus just 256 for the last-gen Ironwood inference clusters. That works out to 11.6 EFlops per pod, much lower than TPU 8t pods.

The TPU 8i has less raw power than TPU 8t.

Credit: Google

Google has tripled the amount of on-chip SRAM for each TPU 8i to 384 MB. This allows the company’s new chips to keep a larger key value cache on the chip, speeding up models with longer context windows. The eighth-gen AI accelerators are also the first from Google to rely solely on Google’s custom Axion ARM CPU host, featuring one CPU for every two TPUs. In Ironwood, each x86 CPU serviced four TPU chips. Google says this “full-stack” ARM-based approach allows for much greater efficiency.

An efficiency play

It makes sense that efficiency is a core part of Google’s new TPU setup. Training and running frontier AI models is expensive, and the return on investment is unclear. Companies are still burning money on generative AI in the hopes that efficiency will turn the corner at some point. Maybe Google’s new TPUs will help get there and maybe not, but the company has made notable improvements.

Generative AI systems consume a lot of power, which is often cited as one of the primary reasons not to use them. The eighth-gen TPUs don’t exactly sip power, but Google claims the chips offer twice the performance per watt compared to Ironwood. Google also touts improvements in its data centers, which are apparently “co-designed” with TPUs. Features like integrating networking with compute on a single chip and more efficient pod layouts have reportedly increased computing power per unit of electricity by six times. Of course, that doesn’t mean data centers will use less power, just that they get more compute for all the power they use.

Water usage for cooling data centers is also a big efficiency concern. The heat generated by the dense computing requirements of AI servers cannot be dissipated with air, so liquid cooling is the only way. Google has adapted its fourth-gen liquid-cooling setup to the new chips, using actively controlled valves to adjust water flow based on workload. Again, this is supposed to be more efficient.

Two racks of TPU 8i chips. Each rack has eight boards with four TPUs.

Credit: Google

The TPU 8t and TPU 8i will power Google’s Gemini-based agents in the future, but they are also designed with third-party developers in mind. Both new TPUs support the frameworks developers already use, including JAX, MaxText, PyTorch, SGLang, and vLLM.

Nvidia’s stock price briefly dropped about 1.5 percent after Google’s announcement, but it has since recovered and is again over $200 per share. Surging demand for AI accelerators has more than doubled Nvidia’s value over the past year, and Google’s gains have been even greater. Such is the nature of the potential AI bubble. Of course, the companies benefiting most don’t see it as a bubble—they see this as the beginning of an agentic AI future.

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Posted Thursday 23 April 2026 at 7:40 am AEST (my time).

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Confirming some rumors I heard a short while ago, Microsoft legend and Halo alumni Kiki Wolfkill has left Microsoft after almost three decades.

Announcing her departure via LinkedIn today, Wolfkill spent her most recent stint at Xbox developing the game's franchises for the big screen. Wolfkill helped steward several of Microsoft's recent transmedia initiatives, which has included things like the Halo TV show and Fallout TV shows, the Minecraft movie, and upcoming projects like the Gears of War TV show and movie, the Diablo show, and more secret stuff coming down the pipeline (more on that in a future article perhaps.)

"After 28 years, I've made the difficult but exhilarating decision to leave Microsoft!" Wolfkill said. "Friday was my last day at a place where I grew up and learned so many invaluable lessons - how to listen, lead, be accountable, and most importantly, to care deeply for who you serve - your team and your audience. I'm so grateful for the opportunities that Microsoft has given me and the career that it let me build in an industry that I love."

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has announced on X that it has obtained the rights to buy the coding startup, Cursor, for $60 billion later this year. The company said that it is working closely together with Cursor to “create the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI.”

It said that the partnership will combine Cursor’s leading product and distribution know-how and expert software engineers with SpaceX’s million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer. It said this will allow them to make the world’s most useful models.

According to SpaceX, the agreement allows it to buy Cursor later this year for $60 billion, or pay $10 billion for the work it is doing now with the startup. Cursor’s CEO also posted on X saying that he is “Excited to partner with the SpaceX team to scale up Composer,” Cursor’s AI model.

For anyone confused as to why a space company is getting into building an IDE, that would be because Elon Musk merged SpaceX and xAI in February in a deal valued at $1.25 trillion. This entity could IPO later this year and would likely set records.

Cursor is currently in talks to raise $2 billion at a valuation of $50 billion, according to CNBC, who reported this over the weekend. The funding round is being led by Andreessen Horowitz, with NVIDIA and Thrive Capital also contributing. Both Horowitz and NVIDIA are backers of xAI.

By working closely with team, and potentially buying it later in the year, it gives xAI a chance to catch up with Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI which each have a foothold in software development with tools like Antigravity, Claude Code, and Codex.

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Posted Wednesday 22 April 2026 at 1:39 pm AEST (my time).

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Under Steve Jobs, Apple released the groundbreaking products that defined the company. But the company wouldn’t be what it is today without Tim Cook’s reign of ruthless efficiency.

Jobs’ legacy has long been written at this point. He was stubborn, unpleasant, and a generational visionary. He pushed the limits of industrial design and brought technologies together in ways that others laughed off at the time. It’s an iconic tenure that’s basically unequaled anywhere else in tech. But the radical thinker passed the torch to a very different kind of CEO in Tim Cook in August of 2011.

Tim Cook is an inventor of a different kind. The Apple Watch and AirPods both arrived in the Cook years, and under his direction the company made a bold and lucrative bet on bringing chip design in-house. Nothing to sneeze at. But I wouldn’t call any of those generational innovations on par with the iMac or the iPhone. Instead, Cook optimized Apple’s product lines and supply chains to turn the company into a revenue-generating machine. As my colleague Sean Hollister noted around the 10th anniversary of Cook’s appointment as CEO, on his watch, Apple’s value eclipsed a couple of Saudi state-owned oil companies.

Tim Cook joined Apple in 1998 and quickly earned a reputation as a quiet, calculating supply chain wizard. He recognized a huge opportunity with Foxconn and expanded its relationship with the company, which was then only a minor supplier. He brought on like-minded former IBM colleagues, including future COO Jeff Williams and the famously ruthless negotiator Tony Blevins. They made huge investments in Foxconn that paid off for both companies. Apple managed unheard-of profit margins on the iPhone, and Foxconn became a trillion-dollar industry leader.

Cook may not have been a Jobs-level product innovator, but he did figure out how to sell a hell of a lot of iPhones. Under Cook, Apple began targeting different market segments with model variants, experimenting with Plus, Mini, and R versions on its way to the five current models it sells today: the 17, 17E, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max, and Air. The company set sales record after record. When growth stalled as people held onto their phones longer, another cash cow overtook hardware: services.

Cook knew how to squeeze a supply chain, and that includes software. The company maintained an iron grip over the App Store on his watch, and levied an infamous 30 percent fee on transactions that took place there. App Store fees, along with revenue from its growing portfolio of subscription businesses like Apple Music and Apple TV, make up a category the company refers to as services. The sales that Apple attributes to services rank second only to the iPhone itself — bigger than the Mac, iPad, and wearables combined. In the fourth quarter of 2025, Apple attributed $30 billion worth of sales to the category.

Tim Cook saw Apple through a decade of unprecedented growth, but the vibes started shifting in recent years. The company won a lawsuit brought by Epic Games centered on its App Store practices, but a federal judge ordered the company to relax its tight grip on App Store payments, a huge source of that services revenue. Four years later, the judge took Cook to task when she found the company’s weak attempts at reforms to be insufficient, saying that the CEO “chose poorly” at every turn.

Malicious compliance was business as usual in the Cook era, but the second Donald Trump term has turned out to be the real watershed for the departing CEO’s legacy. He has taken every opportunity to appease the president, from presenting him with a gold-and-glass statue to attending a VIP screening of Melania, the $75 million not-a-bribe documentary distributed by Amazon. Following public backlash around ICE activity in Minnesota, Cook offered only a mealy-mouthed statement about the need for “deescalation.” When the Grok app was clearly being used to create nonconsensual sexual deepfakes of women, Apple quietly asked X’s developers to rein it in — but never actually penalized Elon Musk’s company. The values of inclusion and empowerment that Cook’s Apple publicly espoused proved to be a weaker force than shareholder value.

Tim Cook takes the stage at WWDC in 2024.

Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge

 

Cook’s departure has been long rumored, but comes at a particularly precarious time for the company. No amount of kissing the ring can buy President Trump’s good favor forever, even though Cook is sticking around the company to keep trying. Elsewhere, Apple continues to fight antitrust battles. The memory crisis has put pressure on the entire supply chain, threatening even Apple’s famously generous margins. But those who found the Cook era of predictable efficiency to be a bit boring can take heart: John Ternus is a hardware guy.

The press release announcing Cook’s departure names the many product lines that Ternus oversaw as SVP of hardware engineering. But the first specific product highlighted in the memo isn’t the iPhone 17; it’s the MacBook Neo. Apple calls it “an all-new laptop that makes the Mac experience even more accessible to more people around the world,” and it’s not wrong. The Neo is surprisingly powerful for its low $599 price, and it’s a kind of culmination of the strengths Apple fostered in the Cook era. Cook oversaw the move to Apple designing its own silicon, which is how a previous-gen iPhone chip can be repurposed successfully in a brand-new laptop. Ruthless efficiency and supply chain mastery are their own kind of innovation. Tim Cook turned the company into a well-oiled machine; now we’ll find out what a hardware guy can do with it.

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Posted Wednesday 22 April 2026 at 7:16 am AEST (my time).

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Apple Silicon chips. The iPhone’s dominance. Apple Vision Pro. During Tim Cook’s 15-year tenure as Apple CEO there were highs — and in the case of the Vision Pro, maybe a low — that helped define Apple as one of the most dominant forces in tech even without Steve Jobs. But one product doesn’t get the recognition it deserves, as evidenced by The Verge’s Apple Top 50 products, where the original AirPods don’t even crack the top 10.

Before AirPods, almost all earbuds were still wired back to your phone or iPod. Apple’s ads leaned into the aesthetic with vibrant neon backdrops to frame dark, dancing silhouettes connected by the iconic, stark white earbud wires. But in 2016 that all changed. Suddenly there was Lil Buck, filmed in black and white, pulling a white case out of his pocket, flipping open the lid, putting earbuds without wires into his ears, and dancing down the streets and across the walls of Mexico City. It was a moment that reshaped an industry and turned Apple into the most important audio company of the past 25 years.

At Apple’s special event in September of 2016, Phil Schiller praised the “courage” it took Apple designers to remove the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. A few minutes later, the other shoe dropped: Jony Ive announced the AirPods. Sure, there was a Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter included with the phone so people could still use their wired headphones and earbuds, but the future was wireless. Removing the headphone jack — which, for the record, I and The Verge hated at the time — was instrumental in moving the audio world forward, whether anyone wanted to or not.

The AirPods weren’t the first true wireless earbuds — the Bragi Dash, Onkyo W800BT, and Earin wireless earbuds were all available in 2015 — but there’s a reason we’re not talking about the ubiquity of the Dash right now. Apple sold an estimated 14–16 million AirPods in 2017, and the number kept growing every year.

Untethering yourself from your iPod or iPhone was a game changer. Headphone wires got caught on everything: watchbands, backpack straps, collars, or worse if you ever commuted to work through a big city. Eventually, once people got over looking stupid, AirPods became a fashion statement in their own right. They suggested the wearer was already living in the future, a place where earbuds could be neatly stored in a case, a charging case, without the need to coil a cable that would inevitably unravel in a bag.

I’ll admit that when I got them in my ears for the first time, I was not an immediate fan. The open-ear, one-size-fits-all design wasn’t the most comfortable for me, it never felt totally secure, and the sound quality was merely fine. But it was the integration and ease of use, thanks to the W1 chip, that made the AirPods so attractive. No need to hassle with Bluetooth connections. Just bring the earbuds near your iPhone and they paired, and not only with your iPhone but your other Apple products, too.

The AirPods Pro 2 were a huge step forward in noise-canceling performance, and since then, they’ve gotten improved call quality with more mics and better algorithms, heart rate tracking, live translation, adaptive audio, and, on the AirPods Pro 2 and Pro 3, the ability to act as over-the-counter hearing aids.

And even though the original versions were not my favorite, today my AirPods are always with me. I use them for work meetings. I use them for walks around the neighborhood with their adaptive noise canceling keeping me aware of my surroundings. And I use them when I’m at home and want to watch something on my iPad. They’ve become ubiquitous in so many lives.

While Tim Cook led this period of audio innovation at the venerable computer company, John Ternus oversaw development of the first AirPods, and continues to do so. With Ternus stepping into the CEO position in September, almost exactly 10 years since the AirPods were announced, I fully expect we’ll continue to see the AirPods line grow in their integration, both in the Apple ecosystem and the lives of those who use them.

And maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll get them in a color other than white.

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Posted Wednesday 22 April 2026 at 7:15 am AEST (my time).

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GitHub has announced "disruptive" changes coming to Copilot Individual plans, which include pausing all new signups and restricting access to its most powerful AI models for some users.

The Microsoft-owned company said it is doing this because it has "seen usage intensify for all users" as developers embrace complex agentic workflows. Instead of simple code completion, users are now deploying autonomous agents and subagents to tackle massive, long-running coding problems. These new workflows are creating an unsustainable strain on its infrastructure, where GitHub admits it is now common for just a handful of user requests to rack up costs that exceed the plan's monthly price.

Pausing sign-ups for GitHub Copilot Pro, Pro+, and Student plans will allow it to "serve existing customers more effectively," it added. As for the models the service offers access to, Opus models are no longer available in the standard Pro plan. Developers who want access to Anthropic's powerful Claude Opus 4.7 model must now pay for the more expensive Pro+ plan. Opus 4.5 and Opus 4.6 will also be removed from Pro+.

Usage limits are also getting tightened significantly to prevent a few power users from degrading the service for everyone. To improve transparency, both VS Code and the Copilot CLI will now display your available limit so you are not caught by surprise.

The service operates with two caps: a session limit to manage server load during peak hours and a weekly limit that puts a hard ceiling on the total number of tokens you can consume in a seven day period. If you hit this limit, your access to premium models is cut off, and you are downgraded to "Auto model selection" until the usage period resets.

GitHub came under fire last month after it was widely reported that Copilot had been inserting ads (or tips, as the platform calls it) directly into developer pull requests. In reaction to the backlash, GitHub officially removed Copilot's ability to automatically insert these promotional "tips" and ads into pull requests, with Tim Rogers, the Principal Product Manager for Copilot at GitHub, admitting that "on reflection," letting an AI agent to secretly make edits and append marketing text to PRs was the wrong call.

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Posted Tuesday 21 April 2026 at 1:19 pm AEST (my time).

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Apple CEO Tim Cook will step down from the job effective September 1, 2026. As has long been rumored, Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering John Ternus will become Apple’s new CEO.

While Cook will no longer serve as CEO, he will remain with the company in a different capacity as executive chairman.

“As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world,” Apple says.

In a statement, Cook offered the usual positive words about his time as CEO:

It has been the greatest privilege of my life to be the CEO of Apple and to have been trusted to lead such an extraordinary company. I love Apple with all of my being, and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with a team of such ingenious, innovative, creative, and deeply caring people who have been unwavering in their dedication to enriching the lives of our customers and creating the best products and services in the world

Ternus added his own statement in the announcement: “I am humbled to step into this role, and I promise to lead with the values and vision that have come to define this special place for half a century.”

Ternus will also join the company’s board of directors.

Cook took the CEO role in 2011, succeeding Steve Jobs. He joined Apple in 1998 and became chief operating officer in 2005.

While Apple introduced some notable new products during Cook’s tenure as CEO (such as AirPods), his era was not as known for impactful new product category launches. Rather, Cook may be best remembered for a period of dramatic growth for the business, and for his role in establishing and maintaining an unprecedented international supply chain. He will also be remembered for the introduction of Apple Silicon, a transition that remade the Mac platform.

Apple Silicon was driven in large part by Johnny Srouji, who will become chief hardware officer in tandem with the CEO transition.

Ternus joined Apple’s product design team in 2001 and became VP of Hardware Engineering in 2013. Onlookers have long speculated that he could succeed Cook. At the most recent Apple event unveiling the new MacBook Neo, Ternus was in the presenting role that was normally reserved for Cook.

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Posted Tuesday 21 April 2026 at 1:16 pm AEST (my time).

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Last month, Ubisoft confirmed three years of rumors and leaks by announcing that the Assassin's Creed: Black Flag remake is real and that it is currently working on the project. While that confirmation didn't have any details about the remake, Ubisoft is readying an entire presentation to reveal the game officially to the masses.

The Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced: Worldwide Reveal Showcase is kicking off on April 23 at 9AM PDT / 4PM UTC / 6PM CEST. "The iconic solo pirate adventure returns," says the description of the stream's YouTube premiere link that's already active.

Ubisoft is even playing into all the leaks the remake project has had in its years in development. The teaser video for the showcase called this "Gaming's Worst Kept Secret," while the attached social media post said, "We know you know, but how about we tell you some more now."

As for what fans will get to see, there may be a cinematic trailer, as with all major Assassin's Creed releases, a release date, as well as a long look at all the gameplay systems. The original Black Flag's ocean exploration and ship combat elements have been fan favorites after all. Rumors say that while the piracy and assassin aspects will be returning, the modern-era-set missions and plotlines have been removed from the remake. At the same time, despite previous reports, this is said to be an action-adventure game just like the original, without going the RPG route like modern Assassin's Creed experiences like Valhalla or Shadows.

Ubisoft is also working on the next mainline Assassin's Creed game just as the Shadows content roadmap comes to an end. While a release window and a proper name are yet to be attached to it, Assassin's Creed Codename Hexe is set to land next with a focus on a darker, narrative-driven experience set during the witch trials. However, the project's creative director, Clint Hocking, recently left Ubisoft.

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Posted Tuesday 21 April 2026 at 7:58 am AEST (my time).

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Yesterday we reported on the purported specifications of Intel's next-gen Nova Lake-S desktop CPUs that are rumored to pack massive amounts of cache, even more than what we have on AMD's Ryzen X3D processors.

We already know that AMD manages to stay ahead of Intel CPUs in gaming thanks to that massive level 3 (L3) last-level cache (LLC), and so we expect Intel to overtake current-gen AMD 9000X3D parts.

However, while AMD has always highlighted the benefits 3D V-Cache brings in terms of gaming, the company has never shown that in particular AI workloads. Now a new test has revealed the potential for huge cache-based processors as AMD's 9000X3D parts show huge performance gains over their non-X3D counterparts.

The performance was evaluated by a Korean site called GiggleHD, and it used the X3D Rag Benchmark to test the CPUs. Both AMD and Intel parts were included in its assessment and the testing was done on Windows 11 25H2. Hence performance on Linux may vary.

For those wondering, the x3d-rag-benchmark measures how cache can improve Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) performance by leveraging large L3 cache when it's available. In RAG pipelines, queries are embedded on the GPU, then passed to the CPU for vector search before the GPU generates a final response. Since vector search involves random memory access patterns, the cache size becomes very crucial, similar to how DRAM cache improves random performance on SSDs.

In essence, the large L3 cache in X3D processors reduces the reliance on RAM lookups, which are generally much slower than CPU cache, thus increasing hit rates and lowering latency. This translates into faster query throughput, reduced time-to-first-token (TTFT), and better handling of concurrent searches. Hence, much like in gaming workloads, the cache advantage provides measurable gains for RAG workloads too.

First we have Batch Search measured in queries per second (QPS). The octa-core 3D parts manage to outdo the 16-core 9950X3D, indicating that cache and boost clocks probably matter more here. This is shown by the Intel Core Ultra parts too, as the higher-clocked 285K gets ahead of the 270K Plus.

In index building, measured in vectors per second, however, we see the X3D CPUs falling substantially behind both AMD non-3D and Intel CPUs. So the large L3 is still clearly impacting the test results, just in a negative way for the Ryzen CPU. This is a surprising result for sure, even on the Intel side, as 270K Plus easily beats 285K.

Finally we have throughput in requests per second and TTFT in seconds (hence for TTFT, the shorter bar implies better performance). The octa-core X3D parts again do really well here. It seems the single CCD design is definitely at a major advantage and the dual CCD 9950X3D is likely having cross-CCD latency issues since only one of its CCDs has 3D cache.

The test also suggests that the new 9950X3D2 will do much better than the 9950X3D, as both CCDs on the former pack 3D V-cache. Intel's upcoming Nova Lake-S dual chiplet parts may show even better performance.

Source and images: GiggleHD

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Posted Tuesday 21 April 2026 at 7:51 am AEST (my time).

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You don’t notice good video compression—until it’s not there.

For years, people have streamed high-resolution video without thinking about the tech behind it. But when companies clash over which hardware, software, and services can use modern codecs like HEVC/H.265, the idea that it all “just works” quickly falls apart.

For some Dell and HP customers, that illusion has already been shattered. When the companies disabled HEVC support built into the CPUs of select PCs, it raised uncomfortable questions: Why remove a capability that’s already a part of third-party hardware? What do OEMs and chipmakers pay to support HEVC—and are HEVC patent holders effectively double-dipping on licensing fees and royalties?

Implementing video codecs requires navigating an intricate web of technical and legal requirements built atop an even more complex patent licensing system. Recent consolidation among key parties, leading to “patent pools,” along with court rulings and new standards, has further complicated the picture.

We spoke with experts to unpack how HEVC patent licensing works for consumer products, why patent holders are suing, why some users are being forced to pay for the codec, and whether there’s a better option.

Tech vendors discuss killing HEVC support

A lot of video content, especially 4K and HDR offerings, uses the HEVC video compression format. Streaming services like Netflix and Apple TV+ use it for high-resolution playback, and it’s also common in mobile apps and videos shot on smartphones. That’s largely because it’s far more efficient than its predecessor, AVC/H.264.

So when a company disables hardware-based HEVC encoding and decoding support from a computer, it can create headaches. 4K and HDR streams on services like Netflix and Apple TV+ stop working in web browsers and desktop apps, for instance. An HEVC shot on an iPhone won’t play on many apps, including web browsers and some media players, like Windows’ Movies & TV. And tasks like editing and exporting HEVC videos in Adobe Premiere Pro become slower, since all the decoding and encoding must be handled by software instead of the PC’s hardware.

In these cases, users can pay for an HEVC video extension to restore hardware acceleration—the Microsoft Store sells it for $1—but it’s a frustrating ask when that capability was intentionally disabled. Another workaround is to play HEVC files in software with built-in decoding, such as VLC Media Player. That only goes so far, though—you can’t, for example, download a 4K episode of a show from Netflix and play it in VLC.

The technologies required for HEVC decoding and encoding are patented by several companies, including Ericsson, InterDigital, and Nokia. For a product to use HEVC, its vendor must pay licensing fees and royalties to the relevant patent holders. Those fees vary depending on whether the vendor licensed the patent directly from the licensor or through a third party.

In recent years, several tech companies have killed HEVC functionality in devices originally built to support the codec. Dell and HP disabled HEVC support that has been in Intel and AMD CPUs since 2015. In 2024, Synology removed HEVC, AVC, and VC-1 transcoding support from the DiskStation Manager (DSM) OS used in Synology NAS devices and the BeeStation OS used in its BeeStation private cloud devices.

Acer and Asus have even been prohibited from selling PCs in Germany since January due to a Munich Regional Court ruling that the companies’ computers infringe on one of Nokia’s HEVC patents.

An HP spokesperson previously told Ars that in 2024, the company disabled HEVC codec hardware on “select devices, including the 600 Series G11, 400 Series G11, and 200 Series G9 products.” The spokesperson declined to explain why.

Most of the devices HP named don’t offer discrete graphics cards or 4K screens, suggesting that the PCs aren’t intended for high-resolution workloads. HP listed at least one affected model, the ProBook 460 G11, that offers a discrete GPU (PDF), but that SKU seems to have seen little availability at traditional retailers. Given that, HP may have determined that these lower-end business laptops are unlikely to be used for high-resolution video and therefore don’t justify the patent fees and potential litigation risk tied to giving them HEVC support.

Lending more credence to that theory is Dell’s explanation when asked about disabling HEVC support in November. A company spokesperson said that only “premium systems” with “hardware or software, such as integrated 4K displays, discrete graphics cards, Dolby Vision, or CyberLink Blu-ray software” include HEVC support.

When I asked why Synology removed HEVC support from its DSM and BeeStation OSes, a company spokesperson said the decision followed an evaluation of HEVC codec usage across Synology’s NAS lineup. “[Synology] found that the vast majority of customers were not relying on server-side HEVC transcoding, as most video processing was being handled directly by playback devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs,” the spokesperson said.

Synology also considered patent licensing costs, the spokesperson said:

Discontinuing the usage of this codec allowed us to improve server efficiency, reduce unnecessary resource usage used in transcoding, and scale better in high-user environments. While licensing costs were a consideration, the primary driver behind this decision was long-term product optimization and delivering the best possible performance for our users.

Synology has noted that customers often get HEVC support through end devices, but that support isn’t a given in consumer products, including PCs.

So what makes HEVC support so costly, especially when it could be integrated through necessary components like CPUs?

Let’s start with HEVC patent licensing.

How HEVC patent licensing works

HEVC patent licensing deals typically happen behind closed doors and as part of newly consolidated and created programs.

Companies can obtain patent licenses directly from a licensor and try to negotiate pricing or secure a deal that covers technologies beyond just HEVC. Some licensors work through third parties, like patent pool administrators, which allows licensees to offload pricing, operating principles, term negotiations, and other relevant housekeeping to the third party. Patent pools may also allow licensees to access thousands of patents from numerous holders.

Access Advance and Velos Media are the only non-licensor entities administering HEVC patent licenses in the US. That has been the case since December, when Access acquired Via Licensing Alliance’s HEVC/VVC program. Access administers licenses through patent pools that cover about 80 percent of global HEVC patents. The company launched in 2015 with licensing for 500 HEVC patents and currently administers licenses for almost 29,000. Velos, meanwhile, claims to cover 450 HEVC-related patents, though it ended its HEVC patent pool in 2023.

Velos didn’t respond to requests for comment, but we were still able to gain insight into how Access’ patent pools work.

Increasing royalty rates

One of the most widely speculated reasons that tech companies are forgoing HEVC support is Access’ increased royalty rates for its HEVC Advance patent pool. The new royalty rates were originally supposed to take effect in January, but Access pushed the start date to July 1.

HEVC Advance licensees agree to 10-year contracts, with royalty rates guaranteed not to increase in the first five years, John Pint, SVP of licensing at Access, told me. After those five years, the terms may change, and royalty rates can increase by up to 20 percent. Licensors decide whether Access increases royalty rates for its patent pools, Pint said.

“If a company is a licensee starting from [the] 2015 [to 2016] timeframe, they’ve never seen their royalty rates increase, even though the pool has dramatically increased the number of patents and the number of licensors whose patents are included in the pool,” he added.

Dell and HP aren’t subject to the higher royalty rates

Access’ higher royalty rates could have a significant financial impact on licensees. But Dell and HP are not subject to the upcoming rates because both companies are in the middle of 10-year contracts.

Pint explained:

With respect to Dell and HP specifically, their rates as they currently stand are locked in until 2030. At that time, if the licensors chose, they could increase the rates, but no more than 20 percent for the period of 2031 to 2035.

It’s possible that HP and Dell disabled HEVC in some laptops in anticipation of royalties potentially rising in 2031. Access could also eventually change rates for its other HEVC patent pool, VCL Advance.

Still, Pint thinks it’s unlikely that HEVC Advance rates will increase in 2031, in part because they have not been raised for existing licensees in the past. He added that patents are time-limited assets, so there’s a “significant drop-off in the amount of patent coverage that will occur naturally by operation of law in the 2032 to 2033 timeframe,” meaning that “the patent coverage over that entire period is likely to be significantly less than it is today.”

Do chipmakers cover OEMs’ licensing fees?

Many PCs support HEVC through third-party components like CPUs or GPUs, leading some customers to assume that chipmakers, not OEMs, are the entities subject to HEVC patent fees. Another common assumption is that OEMs are responsible for these fees but that chipmakers typically pay some or all of them. Neither assumption is always accurate.

Intel declined to comment, and AMD didn’t respond to requests for comment. But Pint confirmed that the company only licenses consumer-facing products. For example, Access will license an HP laptop with HEVC support through an Intel chip but not the Intel chip itself. It’s true that chipmakers pay licensing fees, but they don’t pay Access. That leaves only patent holders and Velos as paths for HEVC licensing for B2B products like PC components and OSes.

Further, Access’ HEVC pools don’t have a procedure for chipmakers to cover licensees’ royalty fees, Pint said. VIA Licensing Alliance previously ran a pool in which “vendors of semiconductor chips or other products that contain an HEVC encoder and/or decoder may pay royalties on behalf of their customer who is a Licensee (and has responsibility for assuring payment) subject to that Licensee’s annual cap,” according to an archived version of its website preserved by the Internet Archive. Access acquired VIA’s program, now called VCL Advance, in December.

Pint explained:

One of the difficulties that we had in licensing the PC industry was that our approach was a departure from past practice of the AVC pool where Microsoft or Intel could cover their customers. The way we do it is not the same. So if Microsoft has an OEM customer that they’re selling Windows to, Microsoft can’t cover that [licensing fee] for HP.

Pint added that Access’ alternative strategy aims to provide more flexibility for OEMs so they can “put as many decoders in their products as they want” and then “just pay one royalty at the time of sale to cover all of them.”

It’s possible that chipmakers are making private deals with OEMs or Velos regarding HEVC fees, but Pint thinks that practice generally doesn’t happen anymore. “I think the industry’s kind of moved away from that model,” he said.

Litigious patent owners

In addition to the financial burdens of HEVC licensing, the risk of lawsuits from patent holders can deter companies from seeking HEVC support. The space is crowded with pending and settled lawsuits, intercorporate finger-pointing, and complex domestic and international legal concerns.

As mentioned earlier, you can’t currently buy an Acer or Asus PC in Germany due to the lawsuit from Nokia, which owns standard essential patents (SEPs) for the HEVC standard. SEP holders, as defined by the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization, are typically required to license their patents “openly under royalty-free terms or, more commonly, under Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) terms.”

Acer and Asus argued that they were entitled to use Nokia’s HEVC technologies under FRAND licensing terms, but the Munich court ruled otherwise.

FRAND terms vary among countries. Germany is considered a hotspot for patent litigation due to fast rulings and the potential for outcomes that favor patent holders, as noted by German IP law firm Finnegan. But there are also similar lawsuits in the US—Nokia has sued HP, Hisense, Amazon, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) over HEVC. HP, Hisense, and Amazon subsequently made licensing deals with Nokia, and the cases against Paramount and WBD are ongoing.

Naturally, Pint believes that the removal of HEVC support is less about patent pool fees and more about companies’ concerns about lawsuits from licensors that don’t work with pools. Such firms, he suggested, may be asking for “an outsized piece of the royalty stack disproportionate to what their patent holdings are.”

“It may be that HP was taking an action that would not only evade pool royalties but also make their risk with respect to somebody like Nokia less,” Pint speculated.

Explaining Nokia’s reasoning behind its numerous HEVC patent lawsuits, a spokesperson told me:

Nokia’s aim is to ensure that we receive fair compensation for the use of our technologies and to maintain a level playing field for companies who have already agreed to pay for the use [of] our technologies. Litigation is always a last resort, but sometimes it is the only way to respond to companies who choose not to play by the rules followed and respected by many others.

In response to industry commentators blaming aggressive patent litigation for companies disabling HEVC support, Nokia’s rep said that third-party streaming services and hardware wouldn’t work as expected without Nokia’s research and development.

“Nokia is seeking compensation for the use of these key inventions, royalties which we will reinvest along with substantial amounts of additional investment in the development of next-generation multimedia technology,” the spokesperson said. “It is a virtuous circle, a wheel that has been turning for many years, powering innovation.”

Nokia isn’t the only litigious HEVC patent holder in the US. InterDigital, for example, has sued Amazon, Hisense, and TCL, and Ericsson has settled litigation against Lenovo. In March, Dolby Laboratories, whose patents are administered through an Access patent pool, sued Snap Inc.

Users left to secure HEVC support on their own

When tech companies decide that it’s not worth the money, effort, or risk to incorporate HEVC support, users may be forced to pay for the codec themselves.

A commenter in the SysAdmin subreddit recently detailed how problematic disabled HEVC support can be for laptops:

People with older hardware were not experiencing problems, whereas those with newer machines needed to either have the HEVC codec from the Microsoft Store removed entirely from [Microsoft Media Foundation] or have hardware acceleration disabled in their web browser/web app, which causes a number of other problems/feature [degradations]. For example, no background blurring in conference programs, significantly degraded system performance…

A lack of HEVC support could deter shoppers who don’t want to worry about whether videos will work on their pricey new device. “There is a conscious decision being made to lessen or worsen the consumer experience by taking this functionality out or somehow hiding it in a way that they believe potentially evades royalties,” Pint said.

I asked the Nokia representative if the company is concerned about patent litigation concerns limiting users’ access to HEVC innovations. The spokesperson said that Nokia’s “aim is for consumers to benefit from our video technologies, but the innovation ecosystem breaks down if innovators are not fairly compensated for the use of their technologies, as it becomes harder to fund research into next-generation technologies.”

AV1: An open but debated alternative

As HEVC support confuses users and challenges tech companies, an alternative codec addresses much of the complexity associated with HEVC.

AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) was created as an open, royalty-free video codec by a group of companies called the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), which was tired of dealing with HEVC patent licensing. AV1 launched in 2018 under a royalty-free patent policy, and its reference implementations use a permissive software license (available here). In 2023, AOMedia, whose members include Amazon, Apple, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, and Samsung, claimed that AV1 is 30 percent more efficient than HEVC.

“AOMedia believes that its royalty-free patent policy and permissive copyright license help bring next-generation media experiences to more people, faster,” Dr. Pierre-Anthony Lemieux, executive director of AOMedia, told me.

HEVC was introduced in 2013, so companies had years to adopt it before AV1 arrived. But AV1 is still less common than you might expect after eight years, largely due to compatibility issues. Its supposed efficiency gains compared to HEVC stem from its use of more advanced algorithms. But those algorithms typically require more compression and more powerful hardware. In 2023, Meta, a member of AOMedia, named client-side hardware decoding as AV1’s biggest obstacle.

After AV1’s release, some hardware companies were reluctant to adopt AV1 decoders because the advanced requirements could drive up consumer prices, according to a 2025 report from The Verge. AV1 support would also introduce burdensome and unreasonable complexity and costs to some gadgets, including budget smartphones and Blu-ray players (the former rarely support AV1, and the latter generally do not).

Software solutions can handle client-side decoding, but they can also consume more computing resources and drain battery life.

As a result, some components, streaming devices, and many end devices, especially smartphones, have only recently added hardware-based AV1 support—or support it only partially, such as for decoding alone.

Another complication stems from attempts of companies outside AOMedia to collect licensing fees and royalties from companies that adopt AV1, despite AV1’s royalty-free goals. Firms such as Access and The Sisvel Group argue that AV1 relies on patented coding tools created by companies that aren’t AOMedia members and never agreed to a royalty-free system.

AV1 critics also dispute whether the standard can legally be royalty-free. In a lawsuit last month, Dolby accused Snap Inc. of infringing its patents by implementing AV1 in Snapchat. InterDigital is also suing Amazon (PDF) over AV1 support in some of its Fire streaming devices.

The outcomes of both cases could have lasting implications for AV1 adoption, potentially affecting HEVC support as well. European Union antitrust regulators have also investigated AV1; the investigation ended in 2023, with an EU spokesperson telling Reuters that the investigation’s closure was “not a finding of compliance or non-compliance of the conduct in question with EU competition rules.”

Despite these challenges, AOMedia continues to push for AV1 adoption. In September 2024, the group said that about 95 percent of Netflix’s catalog and more than 50 percent of YouTube’s catalog are available in AV1. Some streaming services, including HBO Max, Peacock, and Paramount Plus, are still holding out.

Dr. Lemieux declined to comment on how patent lawsuits are impacting consumers’ access to codecs like AV1 but said that AOMedia expects “growth to continue accelerating as the world moves to UHD and HDR video streaming.”

Technology has reached the point where most people don’t expect to think about video codecs—and certainly not to pay for them—just to watch a 4K YouTube video on a PC. If HEVC keeps failing to meet expectations for simple video compression, AV1 will only become harder to ignore, even with its own legal baggage.

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Posted Tuesday 21 April 2026 at 7:48 am AEST (my time).

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Silicon Valley moguls have lately complained that too many people are too negative about artificial intelligence. They’re likewise frustrated by stalled AI adoption among major corporations that aren’t seeing the lucrative efficiencies promised by Big Tech.

But if consumers and corporations are proving resistant to AI’s acceleration, it hasn’t stopped billionaire CEOs from charging ahead with their personal fantasies of what the technology can do.

On April 13, the Financial Times reported that Meta is working up a photorealistic, three-dimensional AI avatar of chief exec Mark Zuckerberg, according to several people at the company. Trained on his public comments, mannerisms, and up-to-date perspectives on corporate strategy, the bot is being designed to interact with Meta staff on Zuckerberg’s behalf. Employees would supposedly be able to hop on a video chat with the avatar, which could answer questions and offer managerial guidance and feedback.

Zuckerberg is personally involved in testing and training his animated doppelgänger, Meta employees told the Financial Times, noting that this early-stage project has become a priority amid the development of various other AI characters that Facebook and Instagram users will be able to engage with one-on-one.

Meta did not respond to a request for comment on the Zuckerbot. But such a concept is a predictable extension of what other tech leaders have already done. A year ago, Sebastian Siemiatkowski and Eric Yuan, the respective CEOs of Klarna and Zoom, both turned heads by enlisting AI doubles to deliver part of their remarks on quarterly earnings calls. The presentations hinted that company heads are thinking about what kind of routine responsibilities they can delegate to simulations of themselves.

Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Block (formerly Square), has overseen rolling layoffs as the financial services company leans more heavily into AI. In February, he announced a workforce reduction of 40 percent—about 4,000 employees lost their jobs. Then, in an interview for the business podcast Long Strange Trip this month, he revealed his vision for how he can gradually collapse the management hierarchy thanks to the central AI that Block is now building on.

“I would say our max depth right now is probably five folks between me and anyone in the company,” Dorsey said. “I would want to get that down to two to three this year. And in the most ideal case, there is no layer, everyone in the company reports to me, and that would be all 6,000 of the company. And that feels somewhat ridiculous when you consider the old structure. But when you consider that the majority of our work is going through this intelligence layer, it’s a lot more manageable.”

On its face, Dorsey’s proposal seems radically different from outsourcing your CEO duties to a digital stand-in. Yet the idea yields a similar result for staff: instant, AI-mediated “access” to your ultimate boss, and the illusion that he is directly supervising all employees, controlling every last piece of the company. The trend suggests that even while platforms face obstacles in foisting AI features onto users, the top brass is determined to exert greater influence within their business through a kind of AI-enabled omnipresence.

Responding to a request for comment on Dorsey’s remarks, a Block spokesperson provided a link to a March 31 blog post Dorsey coauthored with Sequoia partner Roelof Botha, titled “From Hierarchy to Intelligence.” The piece lays out a case for eliminating middle management by rethinking how AI is integrated into the workflow.

“Most companies using AI today are giving everyone a copilot, which makes the existing structure work slightly better without changing it,” the pair writes. “We’re after something different: a company built as an intelligence (or mini-AGI).” Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is an as-yet-nonexistent kind of reasoning AI that matches or exceeds human capabilities.
 

Both the Zuckerberg avatar and Dorsey’s scenario of 6,000 direct reports synthesized by an “intelligence layer” are apparent solutions to a problem any CEO runs into: They can’t be in multiple places at once. There’s no proof, however, that this technology can eliminate the distance between a commander and their ground troops, or that such proximity would automatically benefit both the employees and the company at large. As it stands, the executive class are placing their faith in theoretical shortcuts.

Clearly, Zuckerberg and Dorsey see an advantage in becoming even more central, singular, and irreplaceable figures than they already are—as if the current limitations of their businesses can be surpassed only by the expansion of their authority. They want a version of AI that amplifies and entrenches their individual perspectives. At last, a perfectly tech-bro substitute for human-to-human communication.

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It has been just five days since Microsoft released its April Patch Tuesday update (KB5083769) and already people are starting to report more issues on Microsoft’s Learn Q&A pages. One that stood out was the update being suspected of creating a “death loop” for several users. It’s unclear how many people are experiencing these death loops but aside from the poster, one commenter said they were having the same issue and so were three other people in their company.

The poster, who goes by the name Vagabond Superstar, said they attempted to install the Patch Tuesday update for April, but their PC got stuck in a “death loop” (similar to the bug on Windows Server perhaps) where the screen shows a “mosaic of weird pixels” followed by a blue screen saying that Windows needs to be recovered. The user was then given an option to retry, but after attempting this, the computer went into a boot loop where it kept giving the message that it was attempting to repair the issue, then it would loop back through the pixelated screens.

Vagabond Superstar notes that their PC is a HP Pavillion 590-p0044. It has an AMD Ryzen 5 2600, 32GB RAM, GTX 1080ti GPU, and is running Windows 11 Home. Another commenter, who goes by the name “L M”, said they’re having exactly the same problem on a Dell Desktop and describes the pixelated screen and repairs similar to what the original poster said they experienced.

The final commenter to report the same issue was Thomas B who said they’ve been experiencing the same thing and so are another three people in their company who are no longer able to boot into Windows, potentially preventing them from accessing important work documents. Thomas B noted that they were able to uninstall the latest “Quality” update and get back into their system, but one of the users had a recovery environment that was so broken, they couldn’t get back into their system.

It isn’t clear if this issue is being caused directly by Microsoft or if there is some common driver or software issue affecting all of these users. Microsoft’s Q&A Assist, which is AI-generated, says that similar issues have been documented when a cumulative/security update corrupts boot-critical components or drivers, especially on some AMD-based systems.

It recommends going into the Window Recovery Environment, attempting a System Restore, then a Startup Repair, then a Local reinstall if the first two recommendations fail. You can find its detailed answer in the post’s comments section.

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Posted Monday 20 April 2026 at 5:41 pm AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of March) 1,297

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Gamers Nexus (2.6m subscribers)

April 20, 2026

Video length: 26m 23s

We have a ton of stories for this hardware news recap. Currently, the team is traveling for our next major documentary and we will be putting together a huge report on the state of the industry in the coming weeks. That's also the main reason we've had a publishing pause lately, although there is one other secret reason that you'll soon find out. In this episode, we talk about the NVIDIA N1 laptop CPU spotted again, the AMD price and release for the 9950X3D2, Microsoft's Surface and ASUS' 9070 XT price increases, data center parasites, and more -- like a 4090 20GB that was resurrected from the dead.

00:00 - Recap for the Week

01:14 - GN UPDATE: Travel and Future Content

04:40 - NVIDIA N1 Laptop Board Spotted

06:09 - AMD Price and Release for 9950X3D2

07:25 - Microsoft Surface Prices Increase

08:22 - ASUS Raised its 9070 XT GPU Prices

09:59 - TSIA Urges Helium Stockpiling

12:17 - Texas to Lose Billions in Data Center Revenue

14:46 - Colorado Bill Moves Forward to Limit Right to Repair

18:53 - Valve Contractor Improves VRAM

21:23 - South Korea Tries to Keep Computers Affordable

23:34 - Modder Saves 4090

24:43 - Artemis II Outlook Issues

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Posted Monday 20 April 2026 at 6:49 am AEST (my time).

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