CATEGORIES

Microsoft Surface Go 3: Best Budget Windows 2-in-1 Tablet

Although it runs Windows 11 and can be used with an optional keyboard, the Microsoft Surface Go 3 is a tablet designed to compete with Chromebooks and the Apple iPad, not traditional laptops.

Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio: Great for Creative Pros

Perhaps you’re a software developer by day and a gamer by night. Or maybe you game and code simultaneously by night, and by day, you sleep.

Microsoft Windows 11: A Radically Modernized Design

Many people thought there would never be a Windows 11—understandably, after Microsoft announced in 2015 that Windows 10 would be the operating system’s last version number.

Apple iPhone 13: A Battery-Life Beast

The Apple iPhone 13 is a battery-life beast, with far greater longevity than previous midrange smartphones.

We're in Uncharted Territory

Nobody said it would be easy.

TorGuard VPN: Affordable and Robust

REVIEWS/SOFTWARE&APPS

How to Deal With a Swollen Laptop Battery

Lithium-ion batteries pack an amazing punch for their size. They’re robust enough to run our laptops for hours on a single charge, they’re at the core of the latest smartphones, and they even serve as the power plant behind cutting-edge electric vehicles such as the Tesla line.

HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY FROM THE INTERNET

It’s not just government spying; big-tech behemoths including Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have collected huge amounts of people’s data in order to serve up targeted ads—and then, there’s the personal data that’s scooped up in all the breaches and hacks.

Framework Laptop: True Modularity

REVIEWS/HARDWARE

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14: Blazing-Fast Gaming Machine

REVIEWS/HARDWARE

Demand for SpaceX's Starlink Satellite Internet Pushes Wait Times to 2023

Demand for SpaceX’s Starlink satellite broadband system may push wait times into 2023.

HAS A CYBERSTALKER TAKEN OVER YOUR LIFE? HERE'S HOW TO GET IT BACK

Picture this: You enter your house and find a stranger (or an enemy) sitting at your kitchen table chowing down on your leftover potato salad and reading your mail. You order him out, but before long, he’s back.

HP Instant Ink vs. HP Plus vs. HP Smart: Which Ink Program Saves You the Most?

When you buy and install an HP printer, the setup routine may ask you to make some choices depending on the printer model.

Vilo Mesh: Very Affordable

REVIEWS/HARDWARE

Polaroid Now+: A Terrific Tool

REVIEWS/CONSUMER ELECTRONICS

You Don't Need Millions to Get Started in NFTs

When the Paper Cats project launches, it should be a continually affordable non-fungible token (NFT) avatar.

Trippy Treatments

Psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” is undergoing clinical trials. It could be the biggest advance in treating depression since Prozac.

Master Social Media Without Sacrificing Your Privacy

Some people have no filter. They’ll conduct the most personal phone conversations at maximum volume on the subway. Or they’ll regale perfect strangers with the excruciating details of their latest medical procedures. Most of us, though, have a better idea of how to maintain privacy for ourselves and our friends. But do you take the same attitude on social media? It’s easy to notice that you’re too loud on the phone in public, but it’s less easy to realize that your settings let any schmo read your social media posts. And yet protecting your privacy on social media is important, in more ways than you may realize.

Hulu: A Top Streaming Choice

As the competition between video-streaming services intensifies, differentiation is ever-important. Hulu continues to offer both a strong on-demand streaming library and a robust live TV option. The service is an excellent option for watching popular TV shows, and we like its broad platform support, even if Hulu’s original series are hit-or-miss. On the live TV front, Hulu’s channel coverage is top-notch, and its DVR features compare well to the competition’s. Despite a few missteps, Hulu keeps its Editors’ Choice award, because no other service can quite match its combination of streaming content.

FASTEST MOBILE NETWORKS 2021

It’s T-Mobile’s year at last. T-Mobile’s new mid-band 5G network is the only nationwide 5G that’s markedly faster than 4G, earning the carrier its first-ever PCMag award for America’s fastest mobile network.

Corel PaintShop Pro: A Worthy Photoshop Alternative

Photoshop is a magnificent tool, but many of its users could do everything they need to in Corel’s photo-editing software, PaintShop Pro, without having to pay a monthly tribute to Adobe. PaintShop Pro supports layers and lets you edit both raster and vector image formats—something you’d need two of Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps to do.

Clean Up Apple Messages to Free Up Space

My family and I love to share pictures and videos in an Apple Messages group text. Since COVID-19 struck, we’ve mostly shared pics and videos of dogs, babies, food, snow, hiking, and the 20-plus bananas I accidentally bought in an online grocery order.

Sony ZV-E10: A Camera for Vloggers

A year after introducing its first camera for vloggers—the fixed-lens ZV-1—Sony is bringing the concept to an interchangeable lens platform. The ZV-E10 is built around the same sensor as the stills-focused Sony a6100 but is made just for video.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 (2021): A Superlative Aspirational System

We won’t try to keep you in suspense. When we reviewed last year’s model, we called the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon the best laptop in the world—though we later decided it shared that title with the Dell XPS 13 OLED—and it hasn’t done anything in its latest revision to change that state of affairs. The X1 Carbon Gen 9 catches up with the Dell and other elite ultraportables by moving to an 11th Generation Intel “Tiger Lake” Core processor and a slightly taller 16:10 rather than 16:9 screen aspect ratio. Its premium price and lack of an SD card slot still knock half a star off what would otherwise be a perfect five-star rating, but it effortlessly collects yet another Editors’ Choice award as the most desirable executive notebook on Earth.

Samsung Galaxy Buds2: Good ANC for the Price

Since introducing the Galaxy Buds in 2019, Samsung has iterated on the formula with the Galaxy Buds Live and the Galaxy Buds Pro. The company now has an official successor, the aptly named Galaxy Buds2. The biggest change here is the addition of active noise cancellation (ANC), and it’s quite good for the price ($149.99). The earphones also deliver a powerful, notably bass-forward sound with enough brightness to keep things balanced.

HP Laptop 14-dq2020nr: A Limited Budget Laptop

You probably know that HP’s Pavilion brand is for consumer PCs priced and positioned below its upscale Envy and Spectre lines. But Pavilion is only the second-lowest rung on HP’s notebook-PC ladder. Its budget laptops have no brand at all, just a generic family name: “HP Laptop.”

AMD Ryzen 5 5600G: A Superb Value-Focused Option

As a six-core, 12-thread processor with great integrated graphics, the AMD Ryzen 5 5600G is the CPU that 2021 has been waiting for. A strong successor to older, budget-friendly, gaming-focused CPUs such as the AMD Ryzen 5 3400G, it puts up some of the fastest game frame rates to date from an integrated graphics processor (IGP). Cheaper than the IGP-less Ryzen 5 5600X ($299) and layered in with the highly capable Radeon RX Vega 7 graphics engine, the AMD Ryzen 5 5600G is a serious threat to Intel’s competing Intel Core i5-11600K on CPU grunt and really puts the hammer down once you factor in its gaming results and Radeon Software compatibility. Whether you’re an esports hopeful aiming to get a gaming PC built for cheap or just want a solid IGP-equipped processor to drive low-lift daily computing, the Ryzen 5 5600G is a stellar 7nm AMD desktop processor. With yet another Editors’ Choice award win, AMD’s going to need a bigger trophy case.

Bitdefender Premium VPN: Affordable, Clean Design

A VPN protects your privacy by routing your traffic through an encrypted connection to a remote server, blinding your ISP to your activities and making you harder to track online.

Hands on With macOS Monterey: Improvements Abound

WHAT'S NEW NOW/APPLE

Chegg: Unique Online Learning

Chegg is an online learning service and app that offers students help in a few ways.