Bad news if you're one of the handful of people using Steam to play games on a Chromebook: Google and Valve are preparing to end support for the still-in-beta ChromeOS version of Steam on January 1, 2026, according to 9to5Google. Steam can still be installed on Chromebooks, but it now comes with a notice announcing the end of support.

“The Steam for Chromebook Beta program will conclude on January 1st, 2026," reads the notification. "After this date, games installed as part of the Beta will no longer be available to play on your device. We appreciate your participation in and contribution to learnings from the beta program, which will inform the future of Chromebook gaming.”

Steam originally launched on Chromebooks in early 2022 as an alpha that ran on just a handful of newer and higher-specced devices with Intel chips inside. A beta version arrived later that year, with reduced system requirements and support for AMD CPUs and GPUs. Between then and now, neither Google nor Valve had said much about it.

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Framework’s main claim to fame is its commitment to modular, upgradeable, repairable laptops. The jury’s still out on early 2024’s Framework Laptop 16 and mid-2025’s Framework Laptop 12, neither of which has seen a hardware refresh, but so far, the company has released half a dozen iterations of its flagship Framework Laptop 13 in less than five years. If you bought one of the originals right when it first launched, you could go to Framework’s site, buy an all-new motherboard and RAM, and get a substantial upgrade in performance and other capabilities without having to change anything else about your laptop.

Framework’s laptops haven’t been adopted as industry-wide standards, but in many ways, they seem built to reflect the flexibility and modularity that has drawn me to desktop PCs for more than two decades.

That's what makes the Framework Desktop so weird. Not only is Framework navigating into a product category where its main innovation and claim to fame is totally unnecessary. But it’s actually doing that with a desktop that’s less upgradeable and modular than any given self-built desktop PC.

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Apple released a new developer beta build of macOS 26 Tahoe today, and it came with another big update for a familiar icon. The old Macintosh HD hard drive icon, for years represented by a facsimile of an old spinning hard drive, has been replaced with something clearly intended to resemble a solid-state drive (the SSD in your Mac actually looks like a handful of chips soldered to a circuit board, but we'll forgive the creative license).

The Macintosh HD icon became less visible a few years back, when new macOS installs stopped showing your internal disk on the desktop by default. It has also been many years since Apple shifted to SSDs as the primary boot media for new Macs. It's not clear why the icon is being replaced now, instead of years ago—maybe the icon had started clicking, and Apple just wanted to replace it before it suffered from catastrophic icon failure—but regardless, the switch is logical (this is a computer storage pun).

An iconic life

The original hard drive icon dates back to 2000, when Apple introduced the new look and feel of Mac OS X to the public through the third of four public developer betas (scroll down far enough in our original coverage, and you can spot the hard drive icon in some of the screenshots).

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Slowed tech progress, inflation, and global trade wars are doing a number on game console pricing this year, and the bad news keeps coming. Nintendo delayed preorders of the Switch 2 in the US and increased accessory prices, and Microsoft gave its Series S and X consoles across-the-board price hikesin May.

Today, Nintendo is back for more, increasing prices on the original Switch hardware, as well as some Amiibo, the Alarmo clock, and some Switch and Switch 2 accessories. The price increases will formally take effect on August 3.

The company says that there are currently no price increases coming for the Switch 2 console, Nintendo Online memberships, and physical and digital Switch 2 games. But it didn't take future price increases off the table, noting that "price adjustments may be necessary in the future."

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Microsoft says it plans to stop providing updates for Windows 11 SE, the special Windows 11 variant intended to compete with Google's ChromeOS in schools. The change was announced quietly via this Microsoft support document (spotted by the German-language site Dr. Windows), which says that Windows 11 SE will not be getting a version of this year's Windows 11 25H2 update. Security updates for Windows 11 SE will end in October of 2026, when Windows 11 24H2 stops receiving updates.

"Support for Windows 11 SE—including software updates, technical assistance, and security fixes—will end in October 2026," the document reads. "While your device will continue to work, we recommend transitioning to a device that supports another edition of Windows 11 to ensure continued support and security."

Microsoft has fielded multiple would-be ChromeOS competitors over the years, looking to prevent, suspend, and/or reverse Google's success in selling the laptops to schools and price-conscious laptop buyers.

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Apple's next-generation software updates are just a couple of months away, but Apple isn't done with last year's releases just yet. Apple has released iOS 18.6, iPadOS 18.6, macOS Sequoia 15.6, watchOS 11.6, tvOS 18.6, and visionOS 2.6 to the public today, fixing an issue with sharing movies from the Photos app but mostly patching a long list of security vulnerabilities.

For iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, the list of resolved CVEs covers everything from the Metal graphics API to WebKit to networking to filesystem permissions issues. All told, each of these updates patches over two dozen vulnerabilities, and the other OS updates cover many of the same flaws. According to Apple's release notes, at least, none of these vulnerabilities are being actively exploited in the wild—you should patch as soon as you can, but there appear to be no known zero-day vulnerabilities.

For iOS and iPadOS users in the EU, the updates also include a mechanism for installing alternate app stores and for installing apps directly from websites, in accordance with the EU's Digital Markets Act.

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Microsoft devotes most of its time and energy these days to promoting new AI- and Copilot-related features for Windows 11, but the company's Windows Insider builds are still full of small tweaks and changes aimed at improving longstanding Windows features for people who just want to use their PC the way they always have.

New updates that began rolling out to testers in the Windows Insider program yesterday include a couple of small but meaningful changes for Windows power users. First, Microsoft is changing the way the Taskbar works on secondary monitors, allowing users to click it to see the calendar and Notification Center on all monitors, not just the primary display.

Microsoft is also making a change to how the various tabs in the Task Manager measure CPU usage to make it more consistent (and less nonsensical).

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Apple released the macOS 26 Tahoe public beta today, alongside the public betas for iOS, iPadOS, and other operating systems.

The headliner this year is the new Liquid Glass aesthetic that Apple is introducing across its entire product lineup this year, and aside from that, there's nothing coming to the Mac that feels quite as significant as the iPad's new multi-window multitasking interface.

But macOS remains Apple's most powerful, most flexible, and most power-user-friendly operating system, and per usual, there are a few new things coming in other than the big headliners. Here are a handful of under-the-hood and lesser-publicized things coming in Tahoe, both for those who install the public beta this summer and who install the final version of the update in the fall.

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The Mac and the iPad are different devices that do different things. This has been the line from Apple executives, from its initial introduction to the advent of touchscreen PCs to just last month when Apple’s Craig Federighi talked to us about iPadOS 26’s new multitasking features.

But it sometimes feels like this internal commitment to keeping the devices separate has held the iPad back as its hardware has become more capable. A mouse cursor? Sure, we’ll add it, after a few years of insisting on keyboard-and-finger interactions, but we’ll make it round and imprecise instead of pointy because the iPad is Different. Windowed multitasking? Sure, we’ll give you a version of it, but you can’t do whatever you want with the windows, and we’ll tie it to a weird new interface for grouping them, because the iPad is Different.

I respect the desire not to take the path of least resistance here, which would be to imitate the Mac by default without trying to do anything new. And it’s not like you could just move macOS elements over totally unchanged; having a touch-first user interface and touch-first apps means the iPad’s system needs to work well with both touch and a keyboard-and-mouse/trackpad setup. It needs to work well in landscape and portrait modes.

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As promised, Apple has just released the first public beta versions for the next-generation versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and most of its other operating systems. The headlining feature of all the updates this year is Apple’s new Liquid Glass user interface, which is rolling out to all of these operating systems simultaneously. It’s the biggest and most comprehensive update to Apple’s software design aesthetic since iOS 7 was released in 2013.

Rather than getting iOS 19, macOS 16, and watchOS 12, all of the new operating systems this year are labeled as version 26, a shift to a new year-based version numbering system meant to make releases more consistent across all of Apple's platforms.

The one major update that isn’t getting a public beta is visionOS 26. If you want to test the new software on a Vision Pro, you’ll need to sign up for the developer betas instead—just know that when Apple chooses not to release a public beta, there’s usually a good reason. You might risk additional instability, an increased risk of data loss, or even damage to your device, so tread especially carefully.

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In January, YouTuber Jon Prosser posted a video to his Front Page Tech channel that claimed to be “your very first look at iOS 19,” the operating system that Apple would announce as iOS 26 a few months later.

Though Prosser claimed he “could not show the real video of what I saw” because he wanted to protect his source, the rest of the video showed a mock-up for a redesigned version of the Camera app, which ended up being a preview of the company-wide “Liquid Glass” redesign that Apple would show off at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June (Prosser also posted more extensive iOS 19 previews in April, including one labeled “the biggest iOS leak ever.”)

Months after the fact, Apple confirmed that Prosser got an early look at the new OS and the Liquid Glass design. It did so by suing Prosser and a man named Michael Ramacciotti for leaking Apple’s trade secrets (as reported by MacRumors).

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For more than two decades, hard drive manufacturer Seagate has been experimenting with heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology for increasing hard drive density—drives that use tiny lasers to heat up and expand parts of the drive platter, write data, and then shut off to allow the platter to cool and contract, all within less than a nanosecond.

After decades of overly rosy availability predictions, Seagate announced in late 2024 that it was finally delivering HAMR-based drives with capacities of up to 36TB to some datacenter customers. Today, the drives are finally available for end users and individual IT administrators to buy, albeit only in smaller capacities for now. Seagate and other retailers will sell you massive 30TB IronWolf Pro and Exos M hard drives for $600, and 28TB drives for $570. Both drives use conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology, which performs better than the shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology sometimes used to increase disk density.

The drives are based on Seagate's Mosaic 3+ platform, which "incorporates Seagate’s unique implementation of HAMR to deliver mass-capacity storage at unprecedented areal densities of 3TB per disk and beyond."

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Microsoft’s advertised end-of-support date for Windows 10 is October 14, 2025. But in reality, the company will gradually wind down support for the enduring popular operating system over the next three years. Microsoft would really like you to upgrade to Windows 11, especially if it also means upgrading to a new PC, but it also doesn’t want to leave hundreds of millions of home and business PCs totally unprotected.

Those competing goals have led to lots of announcements and re-announcements and clarifications about updates for both Windows 10 itself and the Office/Microsoft 365 productivity apps that many Windows users run on their PCs.

Today’s addition to the pile comes via The Verge, which noticed an update to a support document that outlined when Windows 10 PCs would stop receiving new features for the continuously updated Microsoft 365 apps. Most home users will stop getting new features in August 2026, while business users running the Enterprise versions can expect to stop seeing new features in either October 2026 or January 2027, depending on the product they’re using.

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Microsoft is adding a new recovery mode to Windows to help revive crashing PCs. Called quick machine recovery (QMR), this technology enables Windows 11 PCs to boot into the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE, also used by Windows install media and IT shops for various recovery and diagnostic purposes), connect to the Internet, and download Microsoft-provided fixes for "widespread boot issues" that could be keeping the PC from booting properly.

Initially announced in late 2024 as part of the "Windows Resiliency Initiative," QMR is one of a couple of steps that Microsoft is taking to prevent a repeat of mid-2024's CrowdStrike outage, when a bugged update to one of CrowdStrike's security products brought down millions of Windows PCs and servers and caused widespread service outages in many industries. Fixing some of those PCs required booting and fixing each one individually; QMR should make it possible to apply that kind of fix remotely even if a PC is so broken that it can't boot into Windows proper.

The initial version of the QMR feature is rolling out to Windows 11 PCs enrolled in the Canary channel of Microsoft's Windows Insider testing program. This is the least stable and most experimental of the four Windows 11 testing channels. As Microsoft adds features and fixes bugs, it should gradually move to the Dev, Beta, and Release Preview channels before rolling out to the Windows user base more broadly.

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Apple hasn't iterated on its Vision Pro hardware since launching it in early 2024 for $3,499, opting instead to refine the headset with a steady stream of software updates. But Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that a new version of the Vision Pro could arrive "as early as this year," with a replacement for the 3-year-old Apple M2 chip and a more comfortable strap.

Gurman says that the updated Vision Pro would ship with Apple's M4 processor, which launched in the iPad Pro last year and has since found its way into new MacBook Pros, MacBook Airs, a new iMac, and a redesigned Mac mini.

Our tests in Apple's other devices (and publicly available benchmark databases like Geekbench's) show the M4 offering roughly 50 percent better multicore CPU performance and 20 or 25 percent better graphics performance than the M2—respectable increases for a device like the Vision Pro that needs to draw high-resolution images with as little latency as possible. Improvements to the chip's video encoding and decoding hardware and image signal processor should also provide small-but-noticeable improvements to the headset's passthrough video feed.

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In the summer of 2024, corporate anti-malware provider CrowdStrike pushed a broken update to millions of PCs and servers running some version of Microsoft's Windows software, taking down systems that both companies and consumers relied on for air travel, payments, emergency services, and their morning coffee. It was a huge outage, and it caused days and weeks of pain as the world's permanently beleaguered IT workers brought systems back online, in some cases touching each affected PC individually to remove the bad update and get the systems back up and running.

The outage was ultimately CrowdStrike's fault, and in the aftermath of the incident, the company promised a long list of process improvements to keep a bad update like that from going out again. But because the outage affected Windows systems, Microsoft often had shared and sometimes even top billing in mainstream news coverage—another in a string of security-related embarrassments that prompted CEO Satya Nadella and other executives to promise that the company would refocus its efforts on improving the security of its products.

The CrowdStrike crash was possible partly due to how anti-malware software works in Windows. Security vendors and their AV products generally have access to the Windows kernel, the cornerstone of the operating system that sits between your hardware and most user applications. But most user applications don't have kernel access specifically because a buggy app (or one hijacked by malware) with kernel access can bring the entire system down rather than just affecting the app. The bad CrowdStrike update was bad mostly because it was being loaded so early in Windows' boot process that many systems couldn't check for and download CrowdStrike's fix before they crashed.

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Last fall, Microsoft announced that individuals who wanted to keep using Windows 10 past its official end-of-support date could do so by opting into the company's Extended Security Update (ESU) program at a cost of $30 per PC. That payment would get users a single year of additional security updates. Today, less than four months before that October 14, 2025, cutoff, Microsoft is announcing additional options for people who can't or don't want to pay that fee.

Individuals who want to pay $30 for the additional year of updates will still be able to do so. But Microsoft will also extend a year of additional Windows 10 security updates to any users who opt into Windows Backup, a relatively recent Windows 10 and Windows 11 app that backs up some settings and files using a Microsoft account. Users can also opt into ESU updates by spending 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, which are handed out for everything from making purchases with your Microsoft account to doing Bing searches.

These offers don't formally extend the end-of-support date for Windows 10. But for users who don't want to move to Windows 11 or who can't do so because their PC doesn't meet the requirements, they do effectively offer an additional year of free updates for the OS that's still installed on a slim majority of the world’s Windows PCs, according to Statcounter data.

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As with any operating system that ushers in a major new look and feel, this year's Apple operating systems and their new Liquid Glass aesthetic will likely merit some extra attention from power users who want to see all the new stuff and developers who suddenly need to acclimate to a new design language. Apple put out one early beta build of all of its new operating systems after its Worldwide Developers Conference keynote a couple of weeks ago—these updates are the first to standardize on year-based version numbering, making them all version 26—and today the company has formally released the second developer betas of iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, and most of its other updates.

For those who don't normally dabble in Apple's beta programs, the company offers two tracks: a developer beta and a public beta. The developer beta builds are offered earlier but tend to be buggier and less stable, and they change more from release to release. The public betas, which typically hit in mid- to late-July, are usually roughly the same code as the third or fourth developer beta and represent a nearer-to-final, more stable experience. Once the public betas begin, both developer and public beta builds are usually updated more or less in lockstep, though the developer betas are still usually available slightly earlier.

Apple used to gate its developer betas behind a $99-per-year developer program paywall. While app developers who want to distribute apps on Apple's App Stores still need to pay that fee, two years ago Apple began making developer betas available to anyone who signed up for a free developer account.

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"What's this purple laptop? It's cool."

Over a decade-plus of doing gadget reviews and review-adjacent things, my wife (and, lately, my 5-year-old) have mostly stopped commenting on the ever-shifting selection of laptops I have in my bag or lying around the house at any given time. Maybe she can't tell them apart, or maybe she just figures there isn't that much to say about whatever black or silver metal slab I'm carrying around. Either way, they practically never elicit any kind of response, unless there are just too many of them sitting out in too many places.

But she did ask about the Framework Laptop 12, the third and latest major design in Framework's slowly expanding lineup of modular, repairable, upgradeable laptops. With its five two-toned color options and sturdy plastic exterior, it's definitely more approachable and friendly-looking than the Laptop 13 or Laptop 16, both metal slabs with a somewhat less-finished and prototype-y look to them. But it retains the features that a certain kind of PC geek likes about Framework's other laptops—user-customizable and swappable ports, an easy-to-open design, first-class Linux support, and the promise of future upgrades that improve its performance and other specs.

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One weakness of Valve's Steam Deck gaming handheld and SteamOS is that, by default, they will only run Windows games from Steam that are supported by the platform's Proton compatibility layer (plus the subset of games that run natively on Linux). It's possible to install alternative game stores, and Proton's compatibility is generally impressive, but SteamOS still isn't a true drop-in replacement for Windows.

Microsoft and Asus' co-developed ROG Xbox Ally is trying to offer PC gamers a more comprehensive compatibility solution that also preserves a SteamOS-like handheld UI by putting a new Xbox-branded user interface on top of traditional Windows. And while this interface will roll out to the ROG Xbox Ally first, Microsoft told The Verge that the interface would come to other Ally handhelds next and that something "similar" would be "rolling out to other Windows handhelds starting next year."

Bringing a Steam Deck-style handheld-optimized user interface to Windows is something Microsoft has been experimenting with internally since at least 2022, when employees at an internal hackathon identified most of Windows' handheld deficiencies in a slide deck about a proposed "Windows Handheld Mode."

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