Computerworld.com [Hacking News]

In the first quarter of 2026, 65.6 million PCs were sold worldwide, according to data released this week by IDC. That represents a 2.5% increase compared to the same quarter a year ago. The research firm attributed the increase to customers moving to buy PCs now ahead of expected significant price hikes.

The fact that computer sales are rising despite the uncertain global situation and a worldwide shortage of RAM is seen as a positive sign, but the industry faces uncertainty in the months ahead.

“The conflict in the Middle East has introduced a new layer of volatility to the fragile computer market, which is weighing on global logistics with a double-edged sword of rising energy and transportation costs,” Isaac Ngatia, senior research analyst, IDC Devices Research, said in a statement.

As usual, Lenovo, HP, and Dell were the top PC sellers, followed by Apple and Asus. The latter accounted for the largest increase — specifically, up 17.1%.

I don’t know about you, but I spend a lot of time offline. And not by choice. That’s why I love new tools that work offline like the great one Google just launched. 

I know, I’m an outlier. As a full-time digital nomad who travels constantly, I have unusual connectivity problems. Right now, I’m living on a farm in Tuscany. It’s amazing. I love it. But for two days recently, the connectivity got so bad I could barely work. There was little I could do except drink Chianti and gaze at the rolling green hills. (On Easter Sunday and the day after — a local day off — everybody was at home stressing their internet connections, which made connectivity close to impossible.)

I often find myself in this position. My wife and I tend to favor old houses in old neighborhoods, usually in Europe or Latin America, and the connectivity can be bad to nonexistent. 

I lose connections while driving, while in or near very old stone buildings, while flying in airplanes, and while driving through remote areas. 

But even for people who don’t travel and move around like I do, being offline can also be a choice. It’s much more secure to disconnect, especially in public spaces like coffeeshops and airports and when using one of the many untrustworthy cloud-centric companies. Sometimes you need desperately to save battery life. Sometimes it can feel healthy psychologically to know you’re offline. 

Tools can and should work better offline. I have an expensive iPhone that would have been considered a supercomputer just 10 years ago. A modern smartphone is powerful enough to do a lot of the work that’s currently performed in the cloud. 

Cloud computing is necessary for chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini because all-purpose AI models require hundreds of billions of parameters, massive amounts of RAM, and huge amounts of electricity to be ready to do anything and everything very quickly. Forcing these workloads onto a mobile device fundamentally caps the intelligence and capability of general-purpose AI. But breaking down individual tasks (like transcription) doesn’t require massive data centers. 

The biggest problems for me are two of the tools I use most: MyMind and Lex. 

I wrote about MyMind in August. It’s a lifelogging, bookmarking, remember-everything tool that makes it very fast at recalling information. It uses AI to auto-tag and takes the work out of both saving and recalling information. 

Unfortunately, without a connection, I lose MyMind. It simply has no offline capability. So when I’m disconnected and want to save or recall something, I can’t. The more I rely on this prosthetic memory tool, the more being offline gives me amnesia. This is my biggest complaint about MyMind. 

I’ve also told you about Lex. Lex is essentially a word processor with built-in AI tools designed not to write for you (and make you worse at writing), but instead to point things out and advise you in ways that make your writing better. 

Lex also doesn’t work offline. Which is a shame, because its major alternatives like Google Docs and Apple Pages do. You can simply use them offline, and later when you get a connection they sync to the cloud. Lex’s lack of offline support is the main reason I often think about cancelling my subscription and going back to Pages. (Note that I use a Bluetooth keyboard with my phone to do real writing of columns, newsletters, blog posts and even books.)

Both MyMind and Lex use AI and I expect that in the very near future we’ll see a shift away from all-purpose chatbots to smaller, special-purpose AI-based tools like these running on the edge or on our phones. 

One great example of this shift is a new tool from Google called AI Edge Eloquent. 

Talk to the handheld

Google launched its free, iOS-only, English-only offline dictation app on Monday. While dictation doesn’t sound very interesting, Google has built in several features that make it really great. 

Firstly, it uses AI, with Gemma-based speech recognition models running locally on the phone. It doesn’t just capture what you say, but what you meant to say. Which is to say that it ignores your ums and ahs and repetitions, capturing only the clean words you intended. (If you toggle on cloud processing, it works even better.) It’s very good at adding punctuation automatically. 

When you’re done talking, the app automatically loads the clean text to the clipboard. That means you can talk to the app, then just switch over to your word processor, social media app, email app or other app and simply paste in the results. 

The app can re-write your transcripts using one of four default style options: 

1. Key points (condenses speech into a bulleted list)
2. Formal (shifts the text into a professional tone)
3. Short (summarizes the message)
4. Long (expands on the initial text)

(For most writing, I don’t recommend these kinds of stylistic shortcuts; I recommend communicating in your own style.) 

After you dictate something, you can press a stop button or a pause button. This is a great pair of choices because if you’re working on a longer piece, the pause button lets you gather your thoughts, do a bit of research, then resume, ending up with the whole screed in the clipboard. 

The most surprising feature is that it can learn custom words. For example, it learns from your edits, from the manual addition of words or — wait for it — from your Gmail conversation history (a button asks your permission, and you need to choose to explicitly log in to Gmail). The Gmail option brings in not only jargon, but also names, brand names you’ve talked about, abbreviations, foreign words, place names, and others. 

And, finally, the app prominently displays “usage stats,” including how many words, how many words per minute, average dictation speed, total number of words dictated, and the total number of “polishing edits” made by the app. 

AI Edge Eloquent sherlocks Wispr Flow and Willow, which each cost $15 per month. It also sherlocks SuperWhisper, priced at $85 per year. (In Silicon Valley parlance, “sherlocking” is when a major company copies a major feature of a competitor’s product, thereby rendering the competitor’s product obsolete.)

In short, AI Edge Eloquent is kind of perfect and extremely useful for anyone who wants to dictate anything. 

The slow rise of offline AI

I’m seeing a few other tools emerge that are based on the idea that AI should be on the edge and offline. 

One interesting new tool released this week is called WarClaw from a Bellevue, WA-based startup called Edgerunner AI. The company calls the tool a “digital adjutant” (an adjutant is a military officer who serves as an assistant to a military commander). 

The company claims WarClaw was built by former soldiers for use by active-duty military personnel. It’s a secure operating layer built on top of OpenClaw, according to the company. (I talked about OpenClaw earlier this year, as did my colleague Steven Vaughan-Nichols, who explained about how incredibly insecure OpenClaw is. 

The software is designed to work during combat in what they call DDIL settings (Denied, Disconnected, Intermittent, and Low bandwidth).

WarClaw runs on a disconnected mobile device and was trained on specific military data. It automates mission planning, scheduling, and the analyzing of information. Surprisingly, it can directly control office tools like Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Slack, web browsers, and email. 

The company has already won contracts to supply WarClaw to three US military branches. 

While WarClaw is for soldiers, I think business people could benefit from such a tool. For example, it would be great to have an offline assistant while traveling on business to data-insecure places (like China) and environments (like airports). 

I’d love to see nearly all the AI jobs currently requiring a connection to be turned into an app that runs locally, disconnected on the phone. Beyond the obvious convenience, that also represents a big opportunity for Google and Apple: they can match their AI tools to increasingly powerful smartphones, which gives phone buyers a powerful reason to upgrade their hardware more frequently. 

AI disclosure: I don’t use AI for writing. The words you see here are mine. I do use a variety of AI tools via Kagi Assistant (disclosure: my son works at Kagi) — backed up by both Kagi Search, Google Search, as well as phone calls to research and fact-check. I use a word processing application called Lex, which has AI tools, and after writing use Lex’s grammar checking tools to find typos and errors and suggest word changes. Here’s why I disclose my AI use and encourage you to do the same.

Why bother paying for your own generative AI (genAI) tokens when you can have the computations done for free using a competitor’s AI-powered customer service bot? That question is at the heart of a CIO.com report that explores the trend and various ways to block it.

It’s possible the best response to this kind of computational chicanery is to ignore the thieves and stay focused on delivering the best service for customers — hopefully boosting revenue by doing so. 

The CIO.com story offers a detailed look at how to combat the problem  — options that include limiting the number of tokens that can be used for a single answer and layering on AI to validate that questions are legitimate. 

But all the proposed approaches have major downsides. For one, the frequency of these inappropriate “queries” might be limited — and the costs of tokens used to handle them might not break the bank. 

My argument — to ignore the issue — includes both good and bad facets. On the positive side, genAI-based chatbots, when properly deployed, have the potential to be more efficient than human customer service people, and far better.

Specifically, genAI tools can handle highly-complex queries. Consider Amazon. With its various partner programs, it has an astoundingly large number of products in a massive number of categories. No human could have deep understanding of all of those SKUs and certainly wouldn’t be able to answer technical or detailed questions about them. GenAI, properly trained, can.

Or consider a customer who chats with a high-end restaurant bot, saying: “We have a reservation for 12 at your restaurant tomorrow night. The problem is that seven of those people have dietary issues, including one vegan, one who is strictly kosher, one gluten-free and several others who have rare allergies to specific ingredients. I am pasting a detailed description of the dietary issues for all 12 people. Can you review the full ingredients for all of your menu items and recommend to us several entrees, side orders, soups, salads and desserts that would accommodate all of our guests? That way, we don’t have to pepper the waitstaff with questions such as ‘Is the sugar you use vegan?’ or ‘Have you segregated the cookware for strict kosher?’”

GenAI is especially well suited to handle that kind of question and an accurate answer might win customers for life (though it might use up a large number of tokens). But if it buys the loyalty of new customers, that’s a powerful win.

That said, there remains a serious concern. I have argued that AI can be a powerful tool, but its hallucinations make it a bad choice for direct customer interactions. It’s the same reason I don’t back enterprise use of autonomous agents. Agents are great, but they are not nearly ready to function autonomously. 

For some companies, “GenAI can sometimes make things up and do so in a highly confident manner” is going to remain a deal killer. And it’s not like there’s a reasonable chance hallucinations will be eliminated anytime soon. (Indeed, the more sophisticated these models get, the more they hallucinate. Lovely.)

But if a company can set the hallucination issue side for now  — I know. It’s like that line, “Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” — genAI customer service chatbots have serious potential. And if a few stray coding and recipe requests rob you of some tokens while gaining you new customers, it’s a trade-off worth considering. 

Ahem: My fellow Android-appreciating organisms — I’ve got a confession.

After the better part of two decades of personally using Google’s Chrome browser on both Android and every desktop computer I own, I’ve made the leap into the arms of a shiny new web-weaving seductress. Her name is Vivaldi.

Yes, it feels like a mildly geeky version of virtual adultery (especially with an exotic-sounding name like that). But I’ve long been a proponent of embracing whatever apps and services best serve your individual needs at any given moment and avoiding being beholden to any one company — no matter who that company may be. And now, after all these years, it’s become clear that Chrome is no longer the best web-wading companion for me.

Now, don’t get me wrong: Chrome is completely fine. It’s got plenty of positives, and I’ve certainly got no major beefs with it. I think that’s why it’s been so easy to stick with all this time, for so many of us — ’cause it gets the job done, and it’s familiar. There’s something to be said for that.

But as a person who’s always curious about new technology, constantly striving to optimize my digital environments, and endlessly working to make ’em all as efficient as humanly possible, I came to realize that “fine” wasn’t as good as it’d get anymore. And, lemme tell ya: Particularly if you’re a productivity-minded browser power-goober like me, stickin’ with Chrome largely just because it’s what you use and know is causing you to miss out on some incredibly interesting and advantageous upgrades.

And you know what? You aren’t alone. In fact, the vast majority of monitor-staring mammals work exclusively within the confines of Chrome. (The browser commands somewhere around three-quarters of the worldwide desktop computer browser market as of early 2026, according to some recent estimates.)

Again: It’s easy to understand why. Heck, I was one of those numbers myself — up until just a matter of months ago. I’d tried pretty much every other browser out there at some point, and I just hadn’t found anything meaningfully different and better enough for my needs to make it worth the hassle of switching over and dealing with all that adjustment.

Until now. 

And my goodness, it wasn’t an easy change to make.

[Get level-headed knowledge in your inbox with my free Android Intelligence newsletter. Three new things to try every Friday — and my Android Notification Power-Pack as a special welcome bonus.]

My Chrome to Vivaldi adapting adventure

I’ve got an entire separate article about what ultimately won me over with Vivaldi and which exact features I’m finding to be invaluable within it. I’d highly recommend giving it a read.

Here, I want to focus specifically on how I managed to overcome the hurdle of such a challenging change — and it isn’t about anything technical with the transition, either. In fact, Vivaldi makes it almost shockingly easy to move your data over from Chrome and import all your basic settings and history.

What I found, though, was two-fold:

1. On the Android front, moving into the Vivaldi app was actually quite painless. I started out by using it here and there, as a supplement to the standard Android Chrome browser, and quickly realized how much I enjoyed and appreciated its experience and the added niceties it gave me — including seemingly endless customization over every last element of the browser interface and a whole slew of on-demand privacy and web-clutter-cutting options. It wasn’t long before I changed my Android browser default and was using it full-time.

Vivaldi’s Android browser is powerful, pleasant to use, and incredibly customizable.

JR Raphael, Foundry

2. On the desktop front, the change presented far more friction. In fact, I’ve been using the Vivaldi Android app for months now — since sometime in the fall of 2025 — and it wasn’t until early this year that I made the leap over to Vivaldi on my workday Windows computer, too.

What changed was that I finally put my finger on the problem.

If there’s one real hurdle with Vivaldi — and one thing that kept me, personally, from fully moving into its desktop version for so long — it’s that it really can be overwhelming to adapt and get accustomed to all the new interfaces and elements it gives you, especially within the feature-rich desktop domain and with an environment so central to everything we do these days.

As I noted in my in-depth Vivaldi exploration, with as much time as most of us spend in our browsers on computers at this point, the browser essentially is our desktop — and our virtual office, too. And leaving the comfort of familiarity behind for something so unknown and unfamiliar is a daunting prospect.

Vivaldi, in particular, is quite different from Chrome on a computer at first exposure. And it has a lot of new options, features, and possibilities to ponder.

The options and features within the Vivaldi desktop browser are both amazing and — especially at first — overwhelming.

JR Raphael, Foundry

With that in mind, let me tell you what worked for me:

• First, I took advantage of Vivaldi’s immense customization potential and scaled back some of the more jarring differences. For me, that meant eliminating the on-by-default left-of-screen vertical tab bar — which was just too different of an interface for me at first, especially amidst everything else I was adjusting to — and also changing the “Tab Cycling” setting to “Cycle in Tab Order” and the “New Tab Position” setting to “After Related Tabs,” which were two subtle-seeming returns to the standard Chrome behavior that really kept throwing me off in their different-by-default implementations.
• Second, I forced myself to ignore most of the new Vivaldi features — all that good stuff I go over in that other article! — and focus on just one new feature or element at a time, for at least a few days each. There is a lot to take in with this program, and if you try to ingest all of it at once, it’s bound to overwhelm you and lead to a retreat. But if you explore one new piece of the puzzle at a time, really see how you feel about it and get in the habit of using it (or, alternatively, disabling it — if it just isn’t for you), it’s a much more manageable and enjoyable transition.
• Third, after that initial targeted series of adjustments, I mostly ignored the mountain of Vivaldi settings for a while. There’s just too much there to reasonably process at the get-go. I’m still peeking in periodically and finding something new and realizing I can customize it in a way that suits my working style better (and then sometimes realizing that a similar option also exists that I hadn’t yet tapped into on Android). Doing it all at once before you even have a feel for the browser just isn’t reasonable.

Last but not least, remember — particularly for desktop purposes — that Vivaldi is based on the same Chromium foundation as Google’s Chrome browser. That means you can use the standard Chrome Web Store to find and install extensions as needed and bring over the same tools you’ve always had in your browser setup. That, too, helps a lot with making yourself comfortable and creating an optimal environment that works for your needs (though I always recommend eliminating any extensions you aren’t actively using, and a browser change is a perfect time to perform an audit and get rid of any dead weight).

If you follow this approach and take the time to wrap your head around everything Vivaldi offers, the transition doesn’t have to be difficult. And — who knows? — you might find yourself feeling the same sense of excitement I have over a guilt-free virtual dalliance where the only lasting impact is your own happiness and efficiency.

Check out my free Android Intelligence newsletter for even more thoughtful knowledge — including three new things to try each Friday and a trio of useful Android notification tools to get you going.

With its powerful M5 chip, the latest iteration of the world’s most popular laptop keeps everything that made the MacBook Air compelling in the first place, while meaningfully boosting performance across the board. Beyond the faster processor, there’s also much quicker SSD storage and better memory bandwidth, all of which combine to make this a highly capable Mac.

In practical terms, the powerful M5 chip allows these Macs to better handle demanding data workloads than earlier models, making it an ideal machine for many creative and professional users. You also get 512GB of storage as standard (with as much as 4TB available as an option) and at least 16GB of RAM.

Big improvements to Apple’s most popular laptop

To some extent, of course, the MacBook Air has been left in the shadows by the all-new MacBook Neo. The latter costs much less, is quite capable of handling most tasks, and is a great fit for general purpose use, though the M5 Air can do all of that faster, because it is built to be a more efficient machine. Compared to the M4-powered model you can see these improvements:

• With 10CPU cores and either 8 or 10 GPU cores, the M5 chip has a 15% faster CPU and 30% faster GPU.
• It also has neural accelerators in each core, which makes the M5 MacBook Air very capable for AI-specific tasks or 3D rendering.
• The memory bandwidth hits 153GBps. (The M4 model gave us 120GBps.)
• SSD read/write speed are up to twice as fast as the M4, which you’ll feel when doing things with big files, such as when flinging video or imaging assets through apps or working/developing with on-device AI models.

The price has increased by $100 to start at $1,099, though you get twice the built-in storage to help soften the blow.

Benchmark performance

Let’s look at some of the benchmark scores I saw using Geekbench 6 with the Apple-loaned 15.3-in. MacBook Air I tested:

• Single-core: 4,103.
• Multi-core: 17,089.

For comparison, here are benchmarks for the previous generations:

• M1 MacBook Air: 2,346 single-core; 8,356 multi-core.
• M2 MacBook Air: 2,588 single-core; 9,691, multi-core. 
• M3 MacBook Air: 3,065 single-core; 11,959 multi-core.
• M4 MacBook Air: 3,833 single-core; 14,871 multi-core. 
• M5 MacBook Air: 4,103 single-core; 17,098 multi-core.
• MacBook Neo: 3,608 single-core; 9,346 multi-core.

Illustrating the extent to which the move to Apple Silicon has opened up new opportunities for Macs, the M5 MacBook Air delivers the kind of performance we once got from M3 Pro/Max MacBook Pros that shipped just over two years ago.

Apple The bigger picture

To some extent, what’s coming next doesn’t mean much when planning what to get today, but the takeaway must be that MacBook Air has plenty of power under its hood for the future.  When you choose one, you aren’t just getting the processor — you’re also getting a range of other internal improvements designed to optimize the benefits it brings.

These improvements must certainly have been the North Star to engineers when they built this Mac, which also benefits from those new neural accelerators across all its cores. Even compared to the year-old M4 MacBook Air, these systems represent a big upgrade. 

Of course, when you grab a laptop, the big thing you need is battery life. While your results will vary, the promised 18 hours of use on battery will get you through your day, every day. So will the display, which in this case is a 15.3-in. Liquid Retina P3 display with support for 1 billion colors, True Tone, and 500 nits of brightness. 

When it comes to audio output and the built-in web conferencing cameras in these Macs, nothing much has changed fromlast year’s M4 models. The song remains the same when it comes to design: you get that beautiful aluminum chassis, new colors (Sky Blue, Midnight, Starlight, and Silver), with pretty much everything we already love about these Macs the same. Connectivity relies on an Apple N1 wireless chip for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. You also get two USB-C/Thunderbolt ports, MagSafe charging and the ability of driving up to two external displays in addition to that Liquid retina screen. That’s very useful for on-the-go pros who want to use a larger display most of the time but need the convenience of a portable now and then. 

Apple What about MacBook Neo?

Some feel the arrival of the MacBook Neo will cannibalize MacBook Air sales. There’s some truth in that. And while the Neo can and will handle almost anything a regular user might want to throw at it, the M5 Air is much more capable by design. While the Neo has a 6-core CPU, the Air has up to 10; the Neo gets 5 GPU cores, the Air gets 10; Neo has a maximum 8GB memory, while the Air ships with at least 16GB — and the memory interconnect is much faster too. It means these systems are great for anyone who wants to accomplish more demanding tasks, but can’t quite justify purchasing a MacBook Pro. 

No doubt, most people will be happy with any one of these Macs most of the time. But when you need to hit a deadline or regularly tackle more demanding tasks, you’ll probably lean toward the Air, or something better. Most business users will do just that, even though more companies will be eyeing Macs thanks to the affordable Neo, which will be suitable for a whole collection of new use cases that couldn’t justify investment in Air.

Buying advice

In reviewing Apple’s latest trio of Macs, I must confess — like so many people — that I really have lost a little bit of my heart to the MacBook Neo. But I do need a bit more power for what I do. That work doesn’t involve data-wrangling, video compositing, AI model design or any high-end graphics work, so while I might want a MacBook Pro, I really only need a MacBook Air. And this iteration offers all the power and performance I’d expect from a Mac I expect to use it for the next few years.

It’s a solid improvement to the most popular consumer notebook on the planet, remains a viable upgrade for MacBook Neo users and continues to serve as an alluring gateway to inch us toward the MacBook Pro. 

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.

Broken laptops are not becoming easier to fix, despite the availability of public data about their repairability and growing support for right-to-repair legislation. That’s according to US PIRG Education Fund, a consumer protection nonprofit.

Its fifth annual Failing to Fix survey found Asus to be the most repairable laptop brand — although its score dropped compared to last year — and Apple the least repairable of those surveyed. Prominent enterprise PC suppliers Dell, HP, and Lenovo fell somewhere in the middle of the rankings.

While the report looks at consumer products, many of the issues highlighted by the report would apply to businesses too — particularly Apple, which sells the same models to everyone.

“We haven’t done the research, so don’t have the exact numbers,” said Nathan Proctor, senior director or Right to Repair. “But businesses buy the same products and Right to Repair issues are even more pronounced the more expensive that the device is.”

Repairability is not just about product design: It can also be affected by contract terms.

“A lot of companies will tie service to a maintenance contract, and enterprises will find themselves left short if they don’t sign up, said Proctor. “For example, they might not send the firmware needed for a repair, if the customer hadn’t signed up for such a maintenance contract.”

It is certainly the case that more enterprises will look at maintenance as part of the overall package and will not look at PCs or laptops in isolation but rather as part of a “PC as a service” (PCaaS) deal, according to market research firm IDC. In a survey from last year, it found that enterprises were paying more attention to sustainability. “We see more IT leaders considering the complete lifecycle when choosing IT products for the enterprise,” said Lara Greden, senior director market intelligence with IDC.

“In a recent IDC survey, 88% said end-of-first-life, or IT asset disposition services, are a critical or important factor in choosing PCaaS vendors, for instance. OEMs like Dell, HP, and Lenovo offer these services, often with partners, including Apto Solutions and Iron Mountain, for example,” she said.

This is also reflected in the longer laptop lifecycles that companies are implementing. The tradition approach taken by companies is to allow for three years before upgrading but that is no longer the case.

“Some companies still refresh on a fixed three-year lifecycle, but there is a trend towards lengthening lifecycles to four to five years and even more so, to replace only as needed. Services such as Dell Lifecycle Hub and Lenovo xIQ make use of device performance telemetry data to inform repair and replacement cycles,” said Greden.

The PIRG survey of 105 products revealed some to be wary of when it comes to considering whole lifecycles. Apple’s laptops scored the worst, rated C- by PIRG, just behind Lenovo. Businesses wanting to put repairability at the top of the list will look to Asus and Acer, the two top scorers in the PIRG ratings. “I think people were surprised by Apple’s ratings,” said Proctor, “but we found that they didn’t offer the same levels of software support.”

The repairability of a device is certainly a factor to be considered. “IDC research shows that the ability to repair PCs, and even to include refurbished PCs, in PCaaS contracts is a top-2 decision-making factor for choosing a PCaaS vendor,” said Greden.

This is not the first time that PIRG has had the IT industry in its sights. Last October, it was urging Microsoft to change its deadline for the end of Windows 10 support. It is now looking for the US to introduce the same sort of system for scoring system for repairability that France has introduced. Consumers there can see detailed information about how fixable consumer tech products are, with companies obliged to post an overall repair score based on standardized criteria when a product goes on sale.

Buyers elsewhere would benefit 100% from the same sort of labeling, said Proctor.

A federal appeals court in Washington has refused to suspend the Pentagon’s supply-chain risk designation against Anthropic, leaving defense contractors with conflicting legal signals over whether they can continue using Claude, and putting the ruling at odds with a separate federal court that reached the opposite conclusion last month.

“The equitable balance here cuts in favor of the government,” a three-judge panel wrote in its order Wednesday. “On one side is a relatively contained risk of financial harm to a single private company. On the other side is judicial management of how, and through whom, the Department of War secures vital AI technology during an active military conflict.”

The panel, comprising Judges Henderson, Katsas, and Rao, acknowledged that Anthropic “will likely suffer some degree of irreparable harm” but found its interests “seem primarily financial in nature” rather than constitutional.

The order states the ruling is not a final decision on the merits. Oral arguments are set for May 19.

Anthropic had asked the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to pause the supply-chain risk designation issued March 3 by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

The label, according to the company’s court filings, bars it from Pentagon contracts and requires defense contractors to stop using Claude in military work. The court denied the request, conflicting with a US District Court in California that granted Anthropic a preliminary injunction on March 26, blocking a parallel designation under a related statute.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche called the ruling “a resounding victory for military readiness” in a post on X. “Military authority and operational control belong to the Commander-in-Chief and Department of War, not a tech company,” he wrote.

Vendor risk is no longer predictable

For enterprises, the split ruling creates a compliance problem with no clean answer. The order states the Department has canceled its contracts with Anthropic, begun removing Claude from its systems, and prohibited contractors from using it as a subcontractor on Pentagon work. It also states, however, that “the Department has not prohibited contractors from using Claude for work performed for entities other than the Department.”

That distinction does not resolve the uncertainty. Following the California injunction, the government filed a compliance status report on April 6, cited in legal analysis by Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, confirming it had restored Anthropic access across federal systems. That compliance applied only to the California statute. The broader D.C. designation remains active.

Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, said enterprises are dealing with vendor risk that their procurement frameworks were not designed to handle. “It means a vendor does not have a single legal status anymore. It can be restricted under one framework and protected under another, at the same time. That is a very different world from the one enterprise procurement teams are used to operating in,” he said.

The timing mismatch compounds the problem, Gogia said. “Legal processes move on their own timelines. Procurement cycles move on to another. Architecture decisions, once made, are not easy to reverse. When those timelines fall out of sync, you end up locked into dependencies that may no longer be viable,” he said.

‘Any lawful use’ shifts governance into the contract

The case has implications beyond Anthropic, Gogia said. The “any lawful use” standard the Pentagon sought to impose is one that the General Services Administration is separately moving to codify across federal AI procurement.

If that happens, governance authority would move from vendor-defined safeguards into contract language, Gogia said. “The contract becomes the final authority, not the platform. Governance is no longer primarily enforced through design. It is enforced through legal agreement,” he said.

Large defense contractors required to operate under such terms will push equivalent requirements down their supply chains, Gogia said, meaning enterprises with no direct Pentagon exposure may still face similar obligations through their partners.

On Anthropic’s refusal to drop its ethical restrictions, he said the question enterprises ultimately ask is “not whether a vendor is ethical, but whether that vendor can remain usable across all the contexts in which the enterprise operates.”

Matt Schruers, CEO of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which filed an amicus brief in the case alongside ITI, SIIA, and TechNet, said the outcome adds to an already difficult environment. “The Pentagon’s actions and the DC Circuit’s ruling create substantial business uncertainty at a time when US companies are competing with global counterparts to lead in AI,” he said in a statement.

The D.C. court directed both parties to address three unresolved threshold questions before May 19, including whether the court has jurisdiction over Anthropic’s petition at all, according to the order. Anthropic’s opening brief is due April 22. Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen announced plans to step down as CEO last month after 18 years leading software vendor through several periods of tech change from the arrival of the cloud, mobile computing, and the early days of artificial intelligence.  

For whomever is tapped next for the top job — the search is expected to take several months — the biggest priority will be reshaping Adobe’s products and strategy for the next wave of agentic AI, analysts said.

“Ultimately, Adobe must evolve from a leader in creative tools to the system that connects content, context, and commerce in a world of real-time agentic interactions,” said Gerry Murray, research director at IDC.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen (L) and Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business, speak on stage at Microsoft Ignite 2025. 

Microsoft

Narayen’s resignation, will “force the Adobe board to search for a leader who is not just a master of the subscription economy, but a visionary in the ‘agentic’ AI era,” Jim Lundy at Aragon Research said in a blog post last month.   

Adobe’s next CEO inherits a business that’s fundamentally strong, but entering a “more complex phase of execution,” said Maria Bell, senior research analyst at CCS Insight. “Under Shantanu Narayen, the company not only transitioned to a cloud subscription model, but built a highly integrated platform spanning creative, document and marketing workflows. 

“The challenge for his successor is less about transformation and more about proving that Adobe’s AI-led strategy can deliver consistent, long-term growth.” 

Questions about the company’s path ahead come as it prepares for Adobe Connect later this month in Las Vegas. The event runs April 20-22.

Adobe was among the early adopters of generative AI (genAI) with the launch of its Firefly model in March 2023, positioning itself as a commercially safe tool for enterprise customers such as IBM, Pepsi and Mattel to generate content. It later expanded Firefly with the addition of multi-modal AI tools that included video, vector and audio, while embedding Firefly across its software and rolling out GenStudio in 2024 to help businesses manage AI-generated at scale. 

Those moves have yet to reassure investors that the company is on solid footing. Adobe’s stock fell following its latest earnings report, despite seeing better-than-expected revenue and a three-fold year-on-year increase in AI-related sales.

Adobe had 850 million monthly users across Acrobat, Creative Cloud, Express and Firefly, according to its most recent financial results.

The company faces competition from a number of vendors, including Canva and Figma, which also offer creative design tools. It also must contend with AI providers such as OpenAI and Google that enable users to generate content via prompts.

“Adobe is no longer competing only with traditional design tools, but with a broader set of AI-native platforms and ecosystems that are reshaping how content is created and consumed,” said Bell. “This shifts the basis of competition from product capability to accessibility, integration and cost — putting pressure on Adobe’s historical pricing power.”

Although he will remain as chairman of the board, Narayen’s departure adds to the uncertainty around Adobe’s future. 

“While Adobe is currently in a position of strength,” said Lundy, “a leadership change of this magnitude often invites aggressive competitive maneuvers from rivals in the marketing and design tech stacks.” 

The key challenge for any successor will be “balancing Adobe’s professional-grade heritage with the increasing commoditization of creative tools driven by AI,” he said.

The most immediate pressure point for Adobe is its Creative Cloud suite, according to Murray, as competitors threaten Adobe’s dominance in the market. “AI-native tools are collapsing the value of skill, time, and complexity, especially for students and prosumers,” he said. “Adobe will need to rethink pricing and packaging around outputs rather than tools, while dramatically simplifying the user experience.” 

Nevertheless, Adobe retains a “significant structural advantage” in the strength of its product ecosystem and user base, said Bell. “Its tools remain deeply embedded among professional designers and creative teams, supported by a strong community built over decades.”

Another priority will be the need to differentiate its offerings from competitors that rely on similar AI models. This shifts competition away from engineering and towards a go-to-market strategy, Murray said, requiring Adobe to “innovate on pricing, packaging, and partners” to attract and retain users. 

Adobe has made “clear progress” embedding generative AI (genAI) tools across its portfolio, said Bell, but the move towards usage-based models — including generative credits and more flexible access models — “creates uncertainty around pricing, revenue predictability and margin sustainability.

“As such, the priority is moving from feature rollout to monetization discipline,” she said. 

There’s also the prospect that increasingly capable autonomous third-party AI agents could put pressure on Adobe’s margins. While some SaaS-pocalypse concerns are overblown — including the prospect that business customers will vibe-code their own enterprise apps – the emergence of increasingly capable AI agents could push software applications down to an infrastructure layer that agents access on behalf of humans. 

“AI is making it possible to recompose software dynamically, which threatens traditional application-layer value,” said Murray. 

At the same time, he noted that Adobe also has the opportunity to “redefine its moat” around agentic workflows and its ability to connect content and data for smarter automation.

To help Adobe adapt to these ongoing technological shifts, the next CEO will need to appoint a “central authority to align AI product strategy, platform architecture, and partnerships across business units” or lead the charge.

Adobe requires a “robust AI stack,” he said, but will have to find its place in a shifting landscape.  “… Adobe is unlikely to own the enterprise AI control plane, so success will depend on building an open, interoperable stack that integrates with hyperscalers while delivering differentiated value at the application and workflow level,” said Murray.

Through LinkedIn’s more than one billion business users, the Microsoft unit has access to a vast array of personally-identifiable information, including data that could identify religious and political positions. What is less clear is what LinkedIn does with all of that data.

A small European company that sells a browser extension to leverage different aspects of LinkedIn data is running a campaign, which it calls BrowserGate, that accuses LinkedIn of “illegally searching your computer” and “running one of the largest corporate espionage operations in modern history.” 

“Every time any of LinkedIn’s one billion users visits linkedin.com, hidden code searches their computer for installed software, collects the results, and transmits them to LinkedIn’s servers and to third-party companies including an American-Israeli cybersecurity firm,” the company claimed.

“The user is never asked. Never told. LinkedIn’s privacy policy does not mention it,” the BrowserGate site said. “Because LinkedIn knows each user’s real name, employer, and job title, it is not searching for anonymous visitors. It is searching identified people at identified companies.”

LinkedIn denies some of those accusations, and avoids addressing the remainder. 

“This [accusation] is a house of cards built entirely upon a fabrication,” said an emailed LinkedIn statement . “We do disclose that we scan for browser extensions in our privacy policy, in order to detect abuse and provide defense for site stability.” 

When asked whether it uses that data solely to do those things, LinkedIn did not reply.

Possible misuse

The key person behind the allegations calls himself Steven Morrell (not his legal name, which he asked not be published). The company he represents also has different names, including Teamfluence and Fairlinked. 

Morrell said that LinkedIn is gathering data that includes sensitive details, including information that he argued could be used to determine religious and political leanings. Gathering such data, Morrell said, could violate European privacy rules.

But Morrell is not saying that LinkedIn is in fact using the data to determine those preferences, but merely that they could. Much the same could be said for almost all large companies.

Morell isn’t exactly unbiased, however. He and LinkedIn are also involved in a legal dispute in Germany, in which Morrell said that LinkedIn violated EU rules and that it improperly kicked him, and others, off the service.

LinkedIn countered that Morell and the other plaintiffs had violated its terms of service with their plugins. Last month, a judge in Munich sided with LinkedIn, dismissing the motion for a preliminary injunction.

Might cause compliance issues

Safayat Moahamad, research director at Info-Tech Research Group, said that compliance approaches throughout the European Union and the UK could indeed have some issues with this deep a level of data collection. 

“European courts are likely to support platforms that restrict automated data harvesting, when they can plausibly link organization-level policy enforcement actions to consumer protection and regulatory compliance,” Moahamad said.

Advice for CIOs

Cybersecurity consultant Brian Levine, executive director of FormerGov, said enterprise CIOs should use these allegations, even if they prove to be untrue, to help them tweak their data strategy and privacy policies for 2026.

“Assuming the BrowserGate allegations are true, LinkedIn users should consider reducing the amount of identifiable, trackable, or sensitive data their browser exposes, and organizations should treat LinkedIn as a potentially hostile web environment until facts are verified,” Levine said. “Even if BrowserGate is exaggerated, browser fingerprinting is a real, widespread practice across the web. Treat LinkedIn like any other third-party data collector. LinkedIn has historically been treated as safe, [but] that assumption may need to be revisited.”

Levine said IT executives should “assume that LinkedIn can map your tech stack” and that, if the claims are accurate, LinkedIn could infer “which SaaS tools your employees use, which competitors you rely on, which job search tools your staff is using and which political/religious extensions appear inside your workforce.”

He added that IT should consider blocking LinkedIn on sensitive networks, or require it to only be accessed through VDI, as well as employing browser isolation techniques. Some companies might even want to use a separate isolated browser solely for LinkedIn, or, he said, “use a sandboxed browser session, such as Browserling or other cloud-isolated browsers.”

This article originally appeared on CSOonline.

We’ve reached that familiar point in Apple’s annual iPhone speculation cycle when conflicting reports insist an unreleased, unconfirmed product is both behind schedule and set to appear right on time.

As with Apple’s annual macOS system naming fable, this moment comes every year. One publication, sometimes Nikkei, might claim development is running late, while a second industry observer, usually well-connected analyst Mark Gurman, will rebut the claim. 

Apple, meanwhile, says nothing at all. How could it, when all the drama concerns a product it hasn’t even acknowledged exists? Instead, the company just sits back, quietly managing the coverage while occupying prime mental real estate without officially doing anything.

How the stories work

The details in these annual stories don’t matter much. At this stage, they usually involve technical or manufacturing process flaws related to a problem identified during the initial test manufacturing cycle, which Apple then manages to fix.

Once the device is introduced and reaches stores, Apple routinely sells through its initial product inventory rapidly. Shipping times slip, supply tightens, and sometimes weeks pass before availability stabilizes. Rarely, Apple will announce a product — but not actually ship it for a few more weeks. This is a pattern we sometimes see with the iPhone Pro models.

This year’s Big Story

This year’s Big Story concerns the mythical iPhone Fold. Nikkei reports last-minute manufacturing flaws and even speculates the device might not ship until 2027. Gurman rebuts the report, arguing Apple remains on track for its fall schedule for the still-unconfirmed product. “While supply could be limited initially, it’s also on track to go on sale at the same time — or soon after — the Pro models. Nikkei report is off base,” he wrote.

The rumor clearly rattled markets. Morgan Stanley analyst Eric Woodring weighed in with his own reporting, telling clients in a note seen by Computerworld that while early testing has identified a small engineering issue concerning the Samsung-made hinge, he hasn’t picked up news of delays. He cites an iPhone component supplier who said they had “not seen any order adjustment for the Foldable iPhone.”

Business as usual

None of this is unusual. Apple ran into similar challenges with iPhone X and iPhone 15. Picking up problems at this stage in the manufacturing process is precisely why Apple engages in test manufacturing runs. The idea is that if problems are found, there is time to get them fixed. Woodring expects Apple will do so, echoing Gurman’s view that a September announcement remains on track.

Of course, what makes all the iPhone Fold flip-flops so amusing is that right now the product doesn’t officially exist. Apple has said nothing about it, and while we know it’s worked on a folding iPhone for over a decade, it has never, ever announced one. 

Even so, we already think we know what to expect. 

What we think we know

The IPhone Fold will, perhaps unsurprisingly, fold. It might be a little squarer than a standard iPhone and folds out to be slightly smaller than an iPod mini. You’ll be able to use it folded or unfolded, it will have high-quality cameras, use premium materials and the fold will be almost invisible when used. It will boast an Apple silicon processor, plenty of memory, and be as happy taking a FaceTime call as it will be when running on-device AI. 

• It will look excellent. 
• It will feel expensive. 
• Hordes of influencers will love it. 

And it will likely cost around $2,000.

That’s what we think we know, but Apple hasn’t ever promised a folding iPhone. What it does promise, however, is that if it ships such a device it will do so on Apple’s terms, not the industry’s self-created schedule. That’s just how Apple flips its phones. 

Please follow me on Twitter, or join me in the AppleHolic’s bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe. Also, now on Mastodon.

Chinese AI company Z.ai has launched GLM-5.1, an open-source coding model it says is built for agentic software engineering. The release comes as AI vendors move beyond autocomplete-style coding tools toward systems that can handle software tasks over longer periods with less human input.

Z.ai said GLM-5.1 can sustain performance over hundreds of iterations, an ability it argues sets it apart from models that lose effectiveness in longer sessions.

As one example, the company said GLM-5.1 improved a vector database optimization task over more than 600 iterations and 6,000 tool calls, reaching 21,500 queries per second, about six times the best result achieved in a single 50-turn session.

In a research note, Z.ai said GLM-5.1 outperformed its predecessor, GLM-5, on several software engineering benchmarks and showed particular strength in repo generation, terminal-based problem solving, and repeated code optimization. The company said the model scored 58.4 on SWE-Bench Pro, compared with 55.1 for GLM-5, and above the scores it listed for OpenAI’s GPT-5.4, Anthropic’s Opus 4.6, and Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro on that benchmark.

GLM-5.1 has been released under the MIT License and is available through its developer platforms, with model weights also published for local deployment, the company said. That may appeal to enterprises looking for more control over how such tools are deployed.

Longer-running coding agents

Z.ai says long-running performance is a key differentiator for the company when compared to models that lose effectiveness in extended sessions.

Analysts say this is because many current models still plateau or drift after a relatively small number of turns, limiting their usefulness on extended, multi-step software tasks.

Pareekh Jain, CEO of Pareekh Consulting, said the industry is now moving beyond tools that can answer prompts toward systems that can carry out longer assignments with less supervision.

The question, Jain said, is no longer, “What can I ask this AI?” but, “What can I assign to it for the next eight hours?”

For enterprises, that raises the prospect of assigning an agent a ticket in the morning and receiving an optimized solution by day’s end, after it has run hundreds of experiments and profiled the code.

“This capability aligns with real needs such as large refactors, migration programs, and continuous incident resolution,” said Charlie Dai, VP and principal analyst at Forrester. “It suggests that long‑running autonomous agents are becoming more practical, provided enterprises layer in governance, monitoring, and escalation mechanisms to manage risk.”

Open-source appeal grows

GLM-5.1’s release under the MIT License could be significant, especially for companies in regulated or security-sensitive sectors.

“This matters in four key ways,” Jain said. “First, cost. Pricing is much lower than for premium models, and self-hosting lets companies control expenses instead of paying per use. Second, data governance. Sensitive code and data do not have to be sent to external APIs, which is critical in sectors such as finance, healthcare, and defense. Third, customization. Companies can adapt the model to their own codebases and internal tools without restrictions.”

The fourth factor, according to Jain, is geopolitical risk. Although the model is open source, its links to Chinese infrastructure and entities could still raise compliance concerns for some US companies.

Dai said the MIT license makes it easier for companies to run the model on their own systems while adapting it to internal requirements and governance policies. “For many buyers, this makes GLM‑5.1 a viable strategic option alongside commercial models, especially where regulatory constraints, IP sensitivity, or long‑term platform control matter most,” Dai said.

Benchmark credibility

Z.ai cited three benchmarks: SWE-Bench Pro, which tests complex software engineering tasks; NL2Repo, which measures repository generation; and Terminal-Bench 2.0, which evaluates real-world terminal-based problem solving.

“These benchmarks are designed to test coding agents’ advanced coding capabilities, so topping those benchmarks reflects strong coding performance, such as reliability in planning-to-execution, less prompt rework, and faster delivery,” said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia. “However, they are still detached from typical enterprise realities.”

Su said public benchmarks still do not capture the messiness of proprietary codebases, legacy systems, and code review workflows. He added that benchmark results come from controlled settings that differ from production, though the gap is closing as more teams adopt agentic setups.

Love it or hate it, Android’s dark mode has one foundational flaw — an oversight in how it operates that keeps it from being a truly useful option for enhancing how you view your favorite phone’s display.

As it stands now, dark mode — the system-level setting that switches the overall Android interface and also the appearance of most apps into a darker, less white-centric motif — is mostly an on-or-off, take-it-or-leave-it situation. The choices for how and when it activates are shockingly low in contextual intelligence, which is especially odd when you consider how many sensors our modern mobile devices are sporting that could make that mode infinitely more helpful.

At long last, there’s now a better way — all thanks to the creativity of a crafty Android developer.

[Don’t stop here: Come check out my free Android Intelligence newsletter for three new things to try in your inbox every Friday — and my Android Notification Power-Pack as a special welcome bonus!]

Android dark mode — redux

So, first things first, for context: On many Android devices today, dark mode is just enabled out of the box, by default — as an always-on selection.

That means you’re seeing that darkened appearance across most everything you do on your device — more like the image on the right, using Gmail as an example, in contrast to the regular (non-dark) mode shown at left:

Android’s standard, non-dark interface, at left — and with dark mode enabled, at right.

JR Raphael, Foundry

In Google’s Android system settings, you’ve got the option to turn dark mode on or off entirely, as you’d expect, and you also have the ability to set either a stable time-based schedule to switch it on and off at the same exact time each day or to automatically have it toggle on and off based on the sunset and sunrise, respectively, for wherever you are.

Android’s system-level dark mode settings are surprisingly limited.

JR Raphael, Foundry

That’s all well and good, but if you don’t want to live in the dark all the time and would rather use dark mode as a selective state — seeing its dimmer, less glary approach when you’re in a dark room and your eyes are more sensitive to lighter colors but then sticking with the standard brighter interface style when you’re in a brighter environment — you don’t presently have any great way to predict that and make it happen in an intelligent way.

Sure, going with a set time schedule or the sunset-sunrise pattern is kinda-sorta close…ish. But in our electricity-aided, post-caveman era, just because it’s the evening hours or the sun has set doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in a dark place. So rather than relying on these mostly meaningless measures, shouldn’t Android’s dark mode be able to detect the level of light around you and activate dark mode for you when you’re actually in a dim environment, if you’d like — then disable it and stick with the standard light interface when you aren’t?

The answer is an unambiguous and enthusiastic yes, of course. And now, with the right little free add-on, you can enhance Android’s existing dark mode in exactly that way and make it instantly more intelligent — and effective.

The app is called Adaptive Theme, and all it does is run quietly in the background of whatever device you’re using to flip dark mode on or off automatically based on the level of light around you. It’s brilliantly simple and such a sensible and welcome upgrade, you’ll wonder why it wasn’t just natively available in Android in the first place.

The app does have a teensy bit of one-time setup that may seem daunting at first, but it’s actually quite easy to get through — and once it’s up and running, you’ll never actively think about it again. It’ll just do its thing in the background of your device and make your dark mode come on when you’re in a dim room and stay off when you’re in a brighter environment.

Ready?

2 minutes to a smarter Android dark mode

I promise: This isn’t difficult at all to do. You’re looking at roughly two minutes of one-time setup.

To start, just download Adaptive Theme from the Play Store. It’s free, without any limits or asterisks.

Once it’s installed, open ‘er up and follow the steps in the initial setup screens it shows you:

• First, the app will ask you to enable Android’s developer options, if you haven’t done that previously.
  • That’s a special, typically hidden section of Android’s system settings with all sorts of advanced options that aren’t typically intended for average phone-usin’ folk to futz around with.
  • There’s no risk to you or your phone with enabling ’em, and as long as you follow the instructions here exactly and enable only the one single setting this specific app asks for, it’s actually quite easy. (It’s also quite easy to undo, if you ever decide you aren’t into it and want to go back.) But we are pokin’ around in an area of Android that’s meant mostly for developers, and if you veer off-course and mess with the wrong setting, you could make a mess — so follow the steps closely, capisce?
• The app will direct you on how to enable those options. The process may sound strange — tapping your finger on a line that says “Build number” seven times — but I promise you, it works.
• With that out of the way, you’ll make your way back to the Adaptive Theme app, and you’ll find a prompt to enable an option within those developer settings called USB Debugging. Tap the “Open Developer Options” button, tap the search icon at the top of the screen that comes up next, and type USB Debugging into the search box.
• Tap “USB Debugging” in the list of results, then tap the toggle next to that same option and confirm you want to enable it.
• Back in the Adaptive Theme app once more, you’ll see a prompt to connect your phone to another device to finalize the process.

Granting permission via another device is an unusual step, but it’s actually quite easy to do.

JR Raphael, Foundry

• Again, this is a bit unusual — but, as the setup screen explains, it’s because the permission the app requires to control your dark mode status requires another device to activate it, since it isn’t something that most third-party apps are typically able to do. 
• All you’ve gotta do is use a USB-C cable (like the one you rely on for charging) to plug your phone into a computer or even another Android device, then follow the prompt on your phone to open the website on the second device — where you’ll then tap “Start setup” followed by “Select device,” select your phone, and finally connect and confirm on both of the devices.
• And, as the app notes, nothing you’re doing here is permanent — and if you ever uninstall Adaptive Theme, it’ll all be automatically undone and revoked. I can confirm this is correct; once the app’s been uninstalled, in fact, you’ll have to go through the process again upon reinstalling it, as the permission will no longer be present and valid.
• It’s also worth noting that the Adaptive Theme app is completely open source, which means anyone with the right technical knowledge can peek directly at its code and confirm it’s doing exactly what it says — and nothing more.

Got all of that? Good — now, take a deep breath: You’re basically done!

At this point, Adaptive Theme will automatically assess the light level around you every time you turn your screen on, and it’ll then put you into dark mode if your environment is dark enough or into the standard non-dark mode if there’s enough light present.

Adaptive Theme lets you adjust the threshold for exactly when dark mode should kick in.

JR Raphael, Foundry

Personally, I find the settings it uses to make that determination slightly too skewed toward dark mode by default. I think it works better if you adjust the “Brightness Threshold” slider on the app’s main screen one slot to the left of where it begins, as shown above — which seems to make it so that any standard daylight or typical daytime lighting triggers the standard, non-dark mode while truly dim environments take you into the dark mode domain. But you can play around with that slider to find the exact level that feels right for you.

Just note that the switch happens only when you first turn your screen on — so even if your lighting changes, you’ll need to press your phone’s power button and then press it again to reset the detection and make any dark mode adjustments appear. (And, again: If you ever decide you don’t like the automatic dark mode switching, you can simply uninstall the Adaptive Theme app, and it’ll go right back to the way it was before — with the regular system settings and any schedules within it controlling your screen status.)

All that’s left is to enjoy your newly adaptive and intelligent dark mode setup — and wonder why it hadn’t been that way all along.

Keep the easy life upgrades coming with my free Android Intelligence newsletter — three new things to try every Friday and my free Android Notification Power-Pack today.

IDC has reiterated its warnings that a long-drawn out war in the Middle East is likely to drastically reduce global IT spending for 2026.

The research firm had already cut its 2026 IT spending growth forecast to 9% because of the conflict, a reduction from the 10% growth rate projected before the US and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28. But any spending growth could drop to just 5% or 6% if the fighting drags on for a long time, Stephen Minton, group vice president at IDC, said during a client briefing last week.

An expected macroeconomic slowdown resulting from global oil shortages and sharply higher energy costs will affect business confidence and consumer spending, Minton said.

Though the war between the US, Israel, and Iran is on pause for now, US President Donald Trump has made increasingly dire threats against Iran. The fighting has already caused disruptions in supply chains that could interrupt hardware upgrades and AI infrastructure buildouts. (IDC’s estimates were made for Trump announced a two-week cease fire late Tuesday. It’s unclear what happens next.)

IDC’s current forecast is conditional, meaning it’s contingent on any fighting ending by summer. “If things are wrapped up within the next two or three months…, that does leave half a year for recovery… [for] oil prices to normalize, supply chains to reopen, and for economic growth to recover,” Minton said.

Fighting that drags on beyond that time frame would have a bigger impact on IT spending and economic growth. “The longer this goes on and the longer this leads to elevated oil prices, which could have a significant impact on economic growth and then consequently IT spending in the second half of the year,” Minton said. 

IDC expects to provide an updated forecast at the end of April.

Higher energy costs lead to higher electricity bills and higher prices on component shipments. The macroeconomic effect could raise inflation as well as business costs, affecting IT budgets as a result.

Analyst Jack Gold, president and principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, sees a similar picture. He expects “that the war will increase costs substantially, so we may see a pull back in IT spending as costs for equipment and operational costs increase. Many companies see IT spend as a cost center rather than a profit center.

“If the war does cause us to go into a recession due to big hikes in inflationary costs, I suspect that IT spend will go down…, much as it has in past recessions, and we’ll see more layoffs to reduce costs to keep profit margins,” Gold said. He added, “there are lots of moving parts to this.”

IDC already expected slower IT spending in 2026 compared to 2025, when IT spending grew by 14%. Global economies were already reeling from geopolitical tension, tariffs and supply-chain realignment.

Spending on PC upgrades was also expected to be down due to price increases and memory component shortages, Minton said.

Helping to soften the blow has been aggressive AI investments, he said. “As long as that aggressive investment continues by hyperscalers and service providers…, that will provide a certain level of resilience and will cushion some of the impact of any slowdown,” Minton said.

The war worsened an already difficult economic environment, forcing CIOs to focus on efficiency within existing projects. The assumption is that AI investments will remain strong in the near term, Minton said.

“There are still areas of discretionary spending, new projects, certain digital transformation, project-oriented engagements [that] could be put on hold until 2027, [and] even more device upgrades [that] could be held over until next year,” he said.

Cybersecurity and business continuity are likely to be top priorities, according to Minton.

Enterprises need to plan for resiliency and assume operations could be affected by a data center, internet connection, cloud provider, or supplier going down, said Chris Grove, director of cybersecurity at Nozomi Networks, in an email. “Ensuring they have on-premises operational capabilities will be key,” he wrote. 

The war is specifically pushing cloud and data center spending into something of a new risk paradigm in terms of geopolitical risk. “Physical infrastructure is now a target… when cybersecurity was how most service providers and data center operators primarily thought about their disaster recovery,” Minton said.

The fighting has also had direct repercussions on data-center operators in the region. Iranian missiles have already hit data centers run by Oracle and Amazon.

Gartner in February — before the fighting broke out — had forecast 10.8% growth in IT spending in 2026 to $6.15 trillion.

At the start of the year, S&P Global had projected 9% growth in global IT spending, driven by AI infrastructure buildouts.

Results of  a Gartner study released Tuesday reveal that only 28% of AI use cases in infrastructure and operations (I&O) fully succeed and meet ROI expectations, and a full 20% end up failing outright.

According to Melanie Freeze, a director of research at Gartner, failure “most commonly occurs” for several reasons, including unrealistic expectations of what AI tools can do, and skills gaps during the actual pilot.

While these results are an improvement over the troubling findings from MIT released last year that revealed 95% of genAI projects produce no measurable financial return, there is, she said in an interview with CIO.com, a great deal of experimentation going on among IT departments in which a team of I&O professionals will “just go out and try something.”

The reality, said Freeze, is that in order to achieve an anticipated ROI, IT departments must not opt to run them as side projects.

In a Gartner Q&A advisory about the survey of 783 I&O leaders conducted late last year, she stated that, of the 57% of I&O leaders reporting at least one failure, “many said their AI initiatives failed because they expected too much, too fast. They assumed AI would immediately automate complex tasks, cut costs, or fix long‑standing operational issues. When expectations are not realistically set and the results don’t appear quickly, confidence drops and projects stall.”

The survey, she said, revealed that ROI from AI is not driven by the sophistication of the model, but by how well the technology is integrated, governed, and aligned with real operational needs.

Success factors

To that end, Gartner said it has identified what it calls three success factors. These include embedding AI into the systems and processes people already use. “As AI becomes part of day‑to‑day operations, it boosts adoption and creates visible impact within the organization,” the company noted.

Successful I&O executives also receive full support from top executives, which helps “remove roadblocks, align priorities, and ensure the investment stays funded and focused,” and they create realistic business cases.

Freeze said that I&O leaders should prioritize and determine funding for AI use cases “by managing AI use cases as a product to avoid duplication, drive synergies, and track their collective impact on I&O and business outcomes.

From there,” she said, “I&O leaders can work alongside their CIOs, data and analytics, security, legal, and finance stakeholders to assess each use case for feasibility, risk, cost, and expected business impact. A shared scoring model makes it easy to compare and rank all use cases and guide investment decisions.”

She pointed out that the bulk of the success comes from genAI applied to specific areas: IT service management (ITSM) and cloud operations, “where markets are mature and have proven business value. In fact, 53% of I&O leaders reported their AI wins occur in ITSM,” she noted. “Whether these wins occur in the cloud or in ITSM, I&O leaders must ensure they are shared broadly within the organization, and the AI strategy remains cohesive and centrally led.”

Needs to be grounded in a business case

Starting without a plan, she told CIO.com, is never a good idea: “It’s always a bad situation for any technology to say, ‘we built it. It’s going to succeed.’ It needs to be grounded in the business case. What does your business need? What are their ambitions? What are the problems within your function that your current tool set is not able to solve? Within that upfront strategic framework, then success follows.”

There is also the problem that a failed AI project can affect an entire organization. Not being able to provide secure, reliable, available infrastructure can have major implications for business outcomes, said Freeze.

“The drivers of failure are slightly different from the drivers of success,” she said. “I&O leaders must remember that a clearly defined, centrally endorsed AI portfolio helps their organization focus resources where they matter most. Above all, strong execution and business adoptions, not just prioritization, determine AI’s real ROI.”

Once priorities are clear, added Freeze, they can then determine which use cases deserve funding and at what level. “Today, many AI initiatives are still funded by individual business units,” she observed. “However, as AI infrastructure spending continues to rise, CEOs and CFOs need to play a more active role in setting funding criteria and approving major investments.”

This article originally appeared on CIO.com.

New York, United States: Minimus, a provider of hardened and secure container images designed to mitigate CVE risk, today announced the appointment of Yael Nardi as Chief Business Officer (CBO). In this newly created role, Nardi will lead the company’s next phase of scale, overseeing top-of-funnel growth strategy, operations, and corporate development.

As the market landscape evolves and AI reshapes customer acquisition, Minimus is implementing an operational model to scale marketing funnels and strategic alliances, which Nardi will manage.

“We are entering a phase of aggressive expansion that requires rigorous execution and a completely new playbook. Traditional marketing strategies are no longer enough in today’s fast-moving environment. We need an operational powerhouse at the helm. Yael is a world-class operator accustomed to zero-error environments and high-stakes execution. We are choosing intelligence, speed, and strategic alignment, and there is no one I trust more to run this machine.” – Ben Bernstein, CEO at Minimus

Nardi brings a multidisciplinary background to Minimus, with over 15 years of experience advising high-growth startups, investors, and technology corporations. Most recently, she served as Director at Meitar NY Inc. and Partner at Meitar Law Offices. Nardi was the lead corporate lawyer behind several significant M&A transactions, amongst them is the Twistlock’s acquisition by Palo Alto Networks (PANW) – a deal in the container image hardening and runtime security space – as well as transactions involving Wiz, JFrog, Salesforce, and others.

“I have worked with the Minimus team through some of their most critical milestones, and I know firsthand the massive potential of their technology. The demand for near-zero CVE container images and minimal container images with built-in security is only accelerating. Scaling a company in today’s environment requires the same 24/7 rigor, vendor accountability, and strategic precision as closing a major M&A deal. I am thrilled to step into this operational role and build the growth engine that will drive Minimus’s next chapter.” – Yael Nardi, Chief Business Officer, Minimus

Nardi holds a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) from Tel Aviv University and will operate out of Minimus’s New York City headquarters. In her new role, she will collaborate with the executive leadership team to drive the company’s growth objectives.

About Minimus

Minimus provides hardened container images and hardened Docker images engineered to achieve near-zero CVE exposure. Built continuously from source with the latest patches and security updates, Minimus images undergo rigorous container image hardening and attack surface reduction, delivering secure container images with seamless supply chain security and built-in compliance for FedRAMP, FIPS 140-3, CIS, and STIG standards. Through automatically generated SBOMs and real-time threat intelligence, Minimus empowers teams to prioritize remediation and avoid over 97% of container vulnerabilities – making it a compelling Chainguard alternative for teams seeking production-hardened, distroless container images at scale. 

For more information, visit minimus.io.

Media Contact

Minimus Public Relations

[email protected]

minimus.io

OpenAI has released a new policy paper outlining several proposals to address the economic consequences of rapid AI development. The document comes amid growing concerns that AI could quickly take over job roles and fundamentally transform entire industries.

Among the proposals is a public wealth fund, in which the government and AI companies would invest in assets linked to the AI boom, according to Business Insider. The returns would then be distributed directly to citizens.

OpenAI also called for modernizing the tax system, with a greater focus on corporate profits and capital rather than earned income. In the same vein, ideas about special taxes on automated work — sometimes called a “robot tax” — were also raised.

The company also wants governments to encourage companies to test a four-day workweek without pay cuts, where productivity gains from AI are used to the benefit of employees.

Nvidia’s recent acquisition of SchedMD, the company behind the Slurm workload manager, is raising concerns among AI industry executives and supercomputing specialists who fear the chip giant could use its new position to favour its own hardware over competing chips, whether through code prioritization or roadmap decisions.

The concern, as industry sources frame it, is straightforward: Nvidia now controls scheduling software that also runs on hardware from its rivals, including AMD and Intel. A vendor that controls workload scheduling software has significant leverage over how efficiently competing hardware performs within shared computing environments — whether it exercises that leverage or not, Reuters reported, citing five anonymous sources, three of whom work in the AI industry and two with knowledge of supercomputer operations.

Analysts who spoke to InfoWorld said Nvidia’s open-source commitment — the company said during the acquisition announcement that it would “continue to develop and distribute Slurm as open-source, vendor-neutral software” — may not be sufficient protection.

“Slurm’s open-source foundation offers safeguards such as transparent code, forking ability, and community governance, but SchedMD’s control gives Nvidia soft power rather than hard lock-in,” said Manish Rawat, semiconductor analyst at TechInsights. Rawat said Nvidia could subtly shape the roadmap, prioritising GPU-aware scheduling and topology optimisations that favour its own hardware, and that integration timelines already showed faster support for the CUDA ecosystem compared to alternatives such as AMD’s ROCm or Intel’s oneAPI – creating what he described as a “best-supported path effect.”

What is Slurm, and why does it matter

Slurm, originally developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, runs on roughly 60% of the world’s supercomputers. The software is in active use at major AI companies, including Meta Platforms, French AI startup Mistral, and Anthropic for elements of AI model training, Reuters reported.

Government supercomputers used for weather forecasting and national security research also depend on it. Nvidia acquired Slurm developer SchedMD in December 2025 and described the deal as a push to strengthen its open-source ecosystem and help users adopt newer AI techniques alongside traditional supercomputing work.

Is the concern valid?

Dr. Danish Faruqui, CEO of Fab Economics, a US-based AI hardware and datacenter advisory, said the risk was real.

“The skepticism that Nvidia may prioritize its own hardware in future software updates, potentially delaying or under-optimizing support for rivals, is a feasible outcome,” he said. As the primary developer, Nvidia now controls Slurm’s official development roadmap and code review process, Faruqui said, “which could influence how quickly competing chips are integrated on new development or continuous improvement elements.”

Owning the control plane alongside GPUs and networking infrastructure such as InfiniBand, he added, allows Nvidia to create a tightly vertically integrated stack that can lead to what he described as “shallow moats, where advanced features are only available or performant on Nvidia hardware.”

One concrete test of that, industry observers say, will be how quickly Nvidia integrates support for AMD’s next-generation chips into Slurm’s codebase compared with how quickly it integrates its own forthcoming hardware and networking technologies, such as InfiniBand.

Does the Bright Computing precedent hold?

Analysts point to Nvidia’s 2022 acquisition of Bright Computing as a reference point, saying the software became optimized for Nvidia chips in ways that disadvantaged users of competing hardware. Nvidia disputed that characterization, saying Bright Computing supports “nearly any CPU or GPU-accelerated cluster.”

Rawat said the comparison was instructive but imperfect. “Nvidia’s acquisition of Bright Computing highlights its preference for vertical integration, embedding Bright tightly into DGX and AI Factory stacks rather than maintaining a neutral, multi-vendor orchestration role,” he said. “This reflects a broader strategic pattern — Nvidia seeks to control the full-stack AI infrastructure experience.”

However, he said Slurm presented a fundamentally different challenge. “Deeply entrenched in supercomputing centers and academia, and effectively community-governed, Slurm carries high switching costs,” Rawat said. “Nvidia may influence but is unlikely to replicate the same tightly integrated control in markets dominated by established, neutral, and community-driven platforms.”

The open-source safety valve and its limits

Faruqui acknowledged that Slurm’s open-source licensing under a GNU GPL v2.0 licence offers some protection, including the community’s right to fork the project if Nvidia’s stewardship is seen as biased. But he cautioned that the option carried its own risks. “Slurm’s open-source status provides a safety valve with its limitations, but it is not a complete shield against vendor-neutrality,” he said.

The acquisition brought many of the world’s leading Slurm developers inside Nvidia, he noted, meaning a community-led fork would struggle to sustain the same pace of development.

Rawat described the situation as “a strategic dependency risk, not a crisis,” and said organisations should diversify GPU procurement, benchmark workloads across multiple vendor ecosystems, and develop internal expertise to modify or switch orchestration tools if needed.

Faruqui recommended that enterprise buyers negotiating Slurm support agreements seek service-level guarantees that apply equally to non-Nvidia hardware, covering response times, bug fixes, and feature parity across heterogeneous clusters. On architecture, he said organisations should consider containerising AI workloads to isolate applications from the underlying scheduler, making migration to alternative schedulers such as Flux or Kubernetes more feasible if required.

The article originally appeared in InfoWorld.

It’s not just your imagination; you are seeing more Macs being used in business environments these days — and that trend is expected to continue.

The latest Omdia/Informa US PC market data found that Apple took an 11% share of the US enterprise market last year. “For full-year 2025…, the biggest story at the vendor level was Apple, which has been making market share gains in US businesses, reaching an 11% share in full year 2025: up 2.4 percentage points from 2024,” said Kieren Jessop, research manager at Omdia:

Selected data points include :

• Across all segments (education, consumer, business) Macs grabbed 15.7% share in the last quarter of 2025.
• The Mac achieved an overall 16% market share across the year.
• Mac growth hit 11.2% in 2025 compared to industry average growth of 3.3%.

The data shouldn’t mask that enterprises are still dominated by Windows devices, but does give us a fairly useful temperature showing where the industry heat is right now.

What drove growth? 

The MacBook Air maintained its place on the throne as “Most Popular Notebook,” Jessop said. Apple, now in its 50th year,  also boosted memory to 16GB while pruning $100 off the cost of the ‘Air during the year. Those moves helped keep sales healthy. 

There may be more to come, Jessop suggested, particularly as the MacBook Neo enters public consciousness: “The $599 Neo extends that value trajectory and is expected to significantly disrupt the entry-level segment,” he said.

The Neo (reviewed here) is most certainly an inflection point for intense competition, the analyst noted. Available at just $499 in the weak education market, and $599 everywhere else, the new Mac aims squarely at entry-level users. The thing is, it breaks into this part of the market at the same time as widely-reported component cost increases kick in.

“Looking ahead, the outlook for 2026 is significantly more cautious,” said Jessop, predicting huge price increases in RAM and storage components. “Memory and storage costs have risen 40%–70% since the start of 2025,” he said. 

PC sales will feel the geopolitical heat

Climbing component prices are unlikely to change trajectory anytime soon, with the problem made worse by the growing conflagration in the Middle East. Oil is used in everything, from ferrying finished products around to creating the casing around cabling and manufacturing equipment of all kinds. Shortage in this one raw material will inevitably pour problems across the industry.

“Omdia expects at least a further 60% increase in mainstream PC memory and storage costs in Q1 2026,” the analyst said, predicting the greatest impacts on the sub-$500 segment, which includes most education and entry-level consumer devices. To put that into context, Omdia is currently forecasting a $90 to $165 increase in PC build costs  due to component shortages. These steep increases are expected to affect everyone, and while some of the larger manufacturers might be able to swallow a hit against margins, others will be unable to do the same. 

Apple is knocking on the door

We learned last week that Apple is moving quite aggressively, allegedly purchasing memory at top dollar prices and choosing to handle the pain. This secures its own supply, of course, but also makes it harder for others to buy the memory they need at a price they can afford.

The competitive threat it is putting in place is quite real. “As thinner margins and lower allocation priority constrain the low-end market, smaller vendors are especially at risk of being squeezed out of the market,” Jessop said.

Looking ahead, what seems most likely is that Windows systems comparable to the MacBook Air will begin to see increase prices, a move that will make the lower-cost Mac even more competitive. That’s particularly true across enterprises that need to deploy new kit, but face their own existential cost and supply chain-related challenges.

We have to wait and see how these forces play out, but it seems plausible to think Apple is nowhere near hitting the ceiling of its enterprise market share gains. The combination of its own strategies (from its various platforms, OSes, and Apple Silicon) and market reality seems to be forming a structural advantage the company should be able to exploit for years. 

“Apple’s vertical integration (own silicon, own OS) gives it more levers than competitors reliant on third-party chips and Microsoft licensing,” Hexnode CEO Apu Pavithran told me recently.

It’s almost as if years of carving out its own independent place means Apple now has in place strengths its competitors do not possess.

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.

Switching browsers is almost akin to switching to a new operating system — or, for a more physical analogy, moving into a completely new office where everything’s unfamiliar.

Most of us spend so much time in our browsers and handle so much work in that environment that in many ways, the browser essentially is the desktop these days. It’s arguably even more consequential than the operating system beneath it (or the physical office around it), given how much of our workdays — and beyond — end up revolving around that area.

It’s probably no surprise, then, that most of us don’t change browsers all that often. Unless your primary portal to the web is leaving you unsatisfied in a seriously striking way, it’s easier just to stick with what you know than to take the time to explore and adapt to some daunting new alternative.

As someone who’s been stuck in that rut for the better part of two decades, though, lemme tell ya: If you haven’t explored your browser options lately, you’re missing out on some incredibly interesting and advantageous productivity upgrades.

I’ve recently made a switch from Chrome to a newer, more off-the-beaten-path contender called Vivaldi. At a time when most mainstream browsers are focused on cramming AI features of questionable usefulness (and even more questionable consequences) into every nook and cranny, Vivaldi is actively making a point to avoid that and instead come up with a steady stream of clever interface enhancements that actually help you get stuff accomplished more efficiently (and without the very real risk of hallucination-induced embarrassment).

The Vivaldi browser is both fresh and familiar — with some truly interesting touches.

JR Raphael

Let me show you some of the specific Vivaldi advances that won me over.

First, a few foundational notes

Before we dive into my favorite Vivaldi features, we need to get a few quick basics out of the way.

First and foremost: Vivaldi is available to download for Windows, Mac, or Linux, on the desktop front, and also for both Android and iOS on mobile. Vivaldi’s mobile experience is quite nice, and I’d actually been using the Vivaldi Android app as my primary browser for several months before making the leap on the desktop side — but since the desktop is inevitably where the more powerful and ambitious features come into play, it’s where we’ll devote our attention in this overview.

Second: It’s free. No cost, no catches.

As for how Vivaldi manages to maintain a completely free offering — always an important question to consider — the company behind the browser says it makes its money via a combination of partner deals (with services like search engines and bookmark organizers), partnerships with websites that Vivaldi highlights in certain areas of its interface, and completely optional one-off or recurring donations from its users.

Third, and perhaps most notably: None of that involves any manner of tracking, profile, or personal data sharing — quite the contrary, in fact, as we’ll explore more in a moment — and none of it has any lasting effect on your browser experience if you choose to disable or delete the associated elements.

Got it? Good. Now, let’s get into the good stuff.

Vivaldi advantage #1: Shortcuts galore

The best part about using Vivaldi, for me, has been the immense system of step-saving shortcuts it adds into your day-to-day browsing adventures.

At the simplest level, that includes a Quick Commands menu that lets you perform practically any browser function — switching tabs, finding bookmarks, searching the web and/or your history, opening specific URLs, and so much more — simply by pressing Ctrl (or ⌘) and E and then either typing your query or typing a couple characters to find the command you want.

So, for instance, you might hit Ctrl-E and then type ex and hit Enter to open the Vivaldi Extensions page — or hit Ctrl-E and type pi to find the option for pinning and unpinning a tab.

Vivaldi’s Quick Commands menu is your key to next-level web work efficiency.

JR Raphael

And that’s barely scratching the surface of what’s available in this interface. Other potentially useful commands that are never more than a couple characters away include:

• Capturing a screenshot
• Moving a tab to a new window
• Renaming your current tab
• Closing all the tabs to the right of your current tab
• Copying the current page address
• Hiding all images in whatever page you’re viewing
• Muting or unmuting your current tab
• Translating the page you’re seeing
• And moving in and out of a clutter-free reading mode

The list of options is absolutely massive, and you can even customize it and change the order in which different types of commands are prioritized so that it takes fewer characters to find what you need.

Once you start to learn the commands that are most relevant to you, you’ll be flying around your browser — and your work day — like never before.

Vivaldi advantage #2: Command Chains

What’s without a doubt the most powerful part of that Quick Command system we just went over is the ability Vivaldi gives you to create your own custom “Command Chains” — sequences of browser-based actions that you cluster together and can then trigger with a chosen command from that same Quick Command menu.

It’s a tough concept to explain succinctly, but once you wrap your head around some specific examples, you’ll see what it’s all about — and understand why I’ve been so excited to embrace it.

So, first: Like many keyboard-caressing creatures, I have a handful of specific workflows I find myself facing repeatedly throughout my weeks. One such example is writing my Android Intelligence newsletter, which always starts out with my opening a particular page within my newsletter sending service, opening the “Newsletter Outline” Google Doc that I use to plan and organize each issue, opening the Trello board that I use to collect interesting ideas and articles for potential inclusion, and opening the RSS feed reader that I rely on to follow a slew of subject-specific news sources.

Traditionally, with Chrome, that’s meant I open one tab after another and manually navigate to each of those websites every time I’m ready to work on the newsletter. Now, with Vivaldi, I just hit Ctrl-E and then type AI to open all the sites together as a part of a custom Command Chain I created for that purpose.

My “AI” Vivaldi Command Chain is configured to open a series of specific websites together within a single window.

JR Raphael

I’ve got similar sorts of Command Chains for every other common workflow, and even ones that provide quick ways to open individual web pages I find myself pulling up often. But effective as those are, they’re relatively simple examples of what a Command Chain can accomplish.

In addition to opening specific web pages, Command Chains can perform practically any browser function imaginable — switching tabs, closing or moving tabs, reloading tabs, entering or exiting a full-screen viewing mode, deleting your browsing data, capturing screenshots of entire pages or specific areas within a page, you name it. You can even build in custom delays within your sequences, if you need to have a brief pause between two particular actions you’re performing.

Command Chains can perform all sorts of browser actions to accomplish any kind of goal.

JR Raphael

It’s essentially a custom automation system within your browser, in other words, and a way to reduce almost anything you find yourself doing often down to a couple quick keystrokes.

Or, if you’d rather…

Vivaldi advantage #3: Mouse gestures

Maybe you’re more of a mouse person than a keyboard warrior. If so, Vivaldi has a really interesting system of mouse gestures that can save you some serious time.

You trigger the gestures by either holding down your right mouse button or holding down your Alt key and then moving your mouse in a specific path — in a line straight downward to open a new tab, for instance, or in an “L” shape to close your current tab.

Vivaldi’s mouse gestures are an interesting extra shortcut option.

JR Raphael

Vivaldi has a whole host of those sorts of actions active and available out of the box, but the real power comes into play when you start to expand and customize those commands. You can create any mouse gesture you like for any of the basics, and you can add in your own new mouse gestures for any standard browser action as well as for any Command Chain you’ve created.

And if that still isn’t enough…

Vivaldi advantage #4: Custom keyboard commands

All Command Chain craziness aside, Vivaldi has a sprawling set of single-step keyboard shortcuts also available for browser-level actions. And unlike Chrome and other more traditional browsers, it offers you the option to both change any standard shortcut to anything else you’d like and to add in new shortcuts for browser actions you use frequently and want an easier way to access.

So, for instance, you might set it up so that Ctrl-X opens the Vivaldi Extensions page or Ctrl-Alt-S captures a screenshot and saves it to your system clipboard. The list of possibilities is positively mind-blowing, and it’s all about making your browser work the way that’s best for you.

Vivaldi’s list of keyboard shortcuts is staggering — and completely customizable.

JR Raphael

As an added bonus tip, take note that you can always use the built-in keyboard shortcut of Ctrl-F1 to view all of your current keyboard shortcuts — and, of course, you can also change that shortcut to something else, if you’d rather.

Vivaldi advantage #5: Web Panels

Another feature that’s been an immediate highlight for me is Vivaldi’s Web Panels. These are almost like small web-based widgets that you keep in a panel to the right of your browser and can then call up quickly anytime to view and interact with alongside any other page you’re viewing.

That’s perfect for the type of tool you’re typically accessing as a supplement to something else — like your notes, your calendar, a timer, a thesaurus, maybe even an LLM like Gemini or ChatGPT.

Web Panels are like on-demand widgets at the side of your browser.

JR Raphael

Whatever the case may be, all you’ve gotta do is add the site in as a Vivaldi Web Panel, and it’ll always be available to pop up with a single click on that sidebar.

And — for the real magical moment of all these pieces coming together — you can also create a custom keyboard shortcut for any of your Web Panels and then summon it without ever taking your fingers off your keyboard.

Whew! Anyone else workin’ up a bit of a sweat here?

Vivaldi advantage #6: Tab Tiling

Chrome recently added in the option to start up a split view and see any two web pages together, side by side, within a single tab in your desktop browser.

I thought that was pretty crafty and surprisingly useful. And then I saw Vivaldi’s vastly superior version.

Tab Tiling is like Chrome’s split view on steroids. It lets you bring multiple web pages together into a single tab, in all sorts of different configurations, simply by dragging and dropping ’em wherever you want — or, alternatively, right-clicking on a link and choosing to open it as a tiled tab from there.

Tab Tiling creates a whole new way to work on the web.

JR Raphael

It’s the kind of creative versatility the browser world has been missing for far too long and the type of productivity advantage you won’t want to give up once you get in the habit of having it.

Vivaldi advantage #7: Privacy, privacy, everywhere

Aside from all the surface-level practical advantages, Vivaldi excels in an area that’s increasingly important to lots of professionals these days — and that’s privacy.

Specifically:

• The browser includes built-in access to the Proton VPN service, which you can enable or disable anytime with a quick click. It’s completely free to use, too, without any limits (and with the option to upgrade to Proton’s paid premium plan for a variety of extras, if you want).
• It includes a native ad and tracker blocking system that’s off by default and can be enabled either web-wide or on a case-by-case basis.
• And it has a location override setting that makes it simple to protect your actual geographic location by choosing any other location, which websites will then be shown when they try to sense your whereabouts.

Being able to override your perceived location right within your browser is a pretty powerful advantage.

JR Raphael

The best part about all of these features is the way they’re implemented and the choice that approach affords you. You can decide where, when, and how you want to use any of them. Nothing is forced on you or enabled by default.

And on that note, last but not least…

Vivaldi advantage #8: Extreme customization

In addition to all the specific standouts we’ve gone over, what’s refreshing about Vivaldi is how much control it gives you over practically every facet of your browser experience — something that is not the case with Chrome or other more traditional browsers.

Every interface detail you can think of can be customized and changed within Vivaldi’s settings, ranging from the appearance of the address bar to the specific contents and layout of the menus.

Vivaldi lets you control even the tiniest of details about your browsing experience — if you’re so inclined.

JR Raphael

If there’s some element of your browser you don’t like or you think should work differently, odds are, Vivaldi will let you adjust it to your exact specifications.

More than anything, remember: Adapting to a new browser isn’t easy. Follow my approach on making that change, though, and you might just find yourself delighted by your new virtual office, as I’ve been, rather than just quietly accepting the way you’ve always known it.

The US tech sector lost 15,000 jobs in March even though the overall US economy saw  178,000 jobs gained across all sectors, according to data from multiple sources, including the US Department of Labor.

CompTIA, which analyzed the Friday jobs data released by Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), pegged the unemployment rate for tech workers at 3.9%. That’s still below the national unemployment rate of 4.3%.

The March losses reflect a downward trend compared to the 7,100 jobs gained in February.

Most of the jobs lost were in the custom software services and systems design occupation category, which shed 13,200 positions. Overall, about 118,000 tech jobs were lost across IT and non-IT sectors..

According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, employers cut 60,620 jobs in March. That’s up 25% from the number of cuts in February, but not as high as a year ago.

“Removing the wave of federal layoffs announced in February and March of last year, job cut announcements in 2026 are closely following the pattern of 2025,” ,” said Andy Challenger, workplace expert and chief revenue officer for Challenger, Gray & Christmas. “Last year it was government, retail, and technology. This year, it’s technology, transportation, and healthcare.”

Tech firm cuts mounted in March

The tech sector lost 18,720 jobs last month, including cuts from Dell, Oracle, and Meta, which is restructuring its Reality Labs division.

So far, the tech sector has lost 52,050 jobs in 2026, higher than the 37,097 lost in the first three months of 2025. And more layoffs are coming as AI’s influence drives personnel decisions this year, Challenger, Gray & Christmas said in the research note.

AI was cited as a reason for 15,341 job cuts in March, the research firm said. Notably, Block cut 4,000 jobs in a shift it portrayed as moving toward the automation of  work using AI. But many criticized Block for “AI-washing,” where companies use AI to justify downsizing.

AI has been cited as a reason for 54,836 layoffs so far in 2026, accounting for 5% of all jobs cut, higher than 3% in February, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

AI is forcing a shift in workforce skills

Companies are investing in AI instead of human labor, and functions like AI coding are replacing human developers. “Other industries are testing the limits of this new technology, and while it can’t replace jobs completely, it is costing jobs,” Challenger Gray and Christmas said.

Multiple studies noted the emergence of a new AI-savvy workforce, with tech job listings reflecting that shift as companies gradually implement AI strategies.

“More organizations are seeking talent with the technical depth to support automation, data integrity, and scalable systems,” said Kye Mitchell, head of Experis North America.

The appetite for AI is also creating positions needed to build out digital and physical infrastructure, Mitchell said.

The BLS data shows the labor market is regaining its footing, though the job numbers may be telling only a partial story, said Ger Doyle, Regional President, North America, at ManpowerGroup.

The ongoing Middle East conflict could also affect jobs in non-tech sectors. “Deepening geopolitical risk and higher energy prices create real uncertainty about what comes next,” Doyle said.