Microsoft ended official support for Windows 10 in 2025, but the company may have a harder time than expected putting the operating system out to pasture. After promising a year of optional extended update support, Microsoft has changed its policy, tacking on another year to its Extended Security Updates (ESU) program. If you are still clinging to Windows 10, you don't have to do anything but enjoy that extra year.

The last regular updates rolled out to Windows 10 in October of last year, but the Internet can be a dangerous place for unpatched Windows machines. That was a problem for Microsoft, as Windows 11 usage had only barely surpassed Windows 10 when support ended. Microsoft's solution was to give everyone on the old OS a free year of extended updates.

That program was set to end on October 12, 2026, but Microsoft has updated its policy with hardly a whisper, pushing back the end of extended updates to October 12, 2027. The ESU support page was updated with that date, and Microsoft's blog post on the program has a new editor's note confirming the change.

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Google Finance is not a new product—it has been around for 20 years, long enough that it initially relied on Flash to display charts and graphs. The website has gotten a few major updates over the years, but it has never had a mobile app until now. Google has released the first standalone app for Google Finance, which is currently exclusive to Android, with iOS planned for later this year.

The app is available globally in the Play Store, but that's not the only update to Google's financial tracker. The AI-powered makeover for the Finance website is also leaving beta, making Google's chatbot a core part of the experience. Naturally, the mobile app includes a heaping helping of generative AI that aims to make sense of irrational financial markets.

If you've checked out the new Finance web experience, you'll see a lot of familiar features in the app. You can create watchlists, monitor real-time market data, and keep up with financial news in one place. While perusing graphs of stock performance, Finance will use AI to generate "key moments" that can explain why the numbers changed. This feature initially launched in the Finance web interface in May.

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Google spent the last few years locked in a legal grudge match with Epic Games, which claimed that Google's stewardship of the Play Store was anticompetitive. Now, the companies are thick as thieves, and Google is beginning to implement app store changes as agreed in its settlement with Epic. The lower developer fees and new payment options that Google promised are rolling out in select markets this month before expanding.

Until a few years ago, Google followed an Apple-like approach to app store billing, charging most developers a 30 percent commission for transactions in the Play Store. That was the only option, too. Directing users to make purchases outside the store was not allowed, and that's what got Epic in hot water in 2020. Epic added cheaper external billing to the Android and iOS versions of Fortnite, getting the game pulled from both stores and prompting a lawsuit.

Apple managed to (mostly) win its case, but Google tripped up in how it tried to control the Play Store while keeping a more open appearance. The judge in the case was set to impose some dramatic remedies in 2024, including forcing Google to distribute third-party app stores in Google Play. The settlement, which Google has noted will end its dispute with Epic globally, doesn't go that far. However, developers are about to get the promised fee reductions.

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The Steam Machine is almost here. Valve chose possibly the worst time to announce new PC gaming hardware in late 2025, just as the AI boom sent storage and RAM prices through the roof. The upheaval delayed its new Steam Machine release, but Valve has announced its TV-friendly gaming PC will go on sale June 29 with a reservation-based system and a starting price of $1,049.

The Steam Machine will come in two variations: one with 512GB of storage and a more expensive one with 2TB. They'll retail for $1,049 and $1,349, respectively, and you'll be able to bundle a Steam Controller with either for an additional $79. Buying the 2TB model also gets you a pair of exclusive faceplates with red fabric and walnut finishes. Like the Steam Deck, the machine ships with the Linux-based SteamOS.

Both versions of the Steam Machine will run on a custom six-core AMD Zen 4 CPU with a peak clock speed of 4.8GHz. The integrated AMD RDNA3 GPU will feature 28 compute units and 8GB of dedicated DDR6 VRAM soldered to the board. The system will have its own 16GB allotment of DDR5 on the board. This should provide enough oomph (with upscaling tech) to play moderately demanding PC games on your TV.

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Almost 20 years ago, Google pitched Android as the more open alternative to Apple's walled garden. Last year, Google announced it would begin erecting its own walls through developer verification. The company has issued an update on its plans, affirming that the verification system will begin rolling out in select countries later this year. We're also learning which app stores are participating in verification and the timeline for key features like the recently revealed "advanced flow" for bypassing verification.

Google has claimed that developer verification is a necessary change to smartphone software distribution, pointing to the increased prevalence of scams that trick Android users into installing malware apps. Google's solution requires verifying the identities of developers outside the Play Store just like it does for devs publishing on its platform. This has proven to be a contentious change for myriad reasons.

In the new blog post, Google's Matthew Forsythe confirms that the developer verification system is slated to come online on September 30 of this year. The initial deployment will be limited to countries with a high level of app scams: Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand.

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Good things take time, but not all things that take time are good. The jury is still out on the Google Home Speaker, but it certainly took a while to arrive. After announcing its new speaker last August, Google finally has a release date. The company's first new smart home speaker in years will launch on June 25, and you can preorder it today for $100.

The generically named Google Home Speaker is Google's first home audio device in almost six years. The last one was the Nest Audio, which debuted back in September 2020. The new device is small and round—an oblate spheroid, technically. It's covered in a partially recycled fabric available in four colors: hazel, porcelain, jade, and berry (jade and berry are limited to the US). Google says the device produces "360-degree sound" for a uniform listening experience anywhere in a room.

Google is into lighting effects again. Credit: Google

Previous Google speakers included Assistant-style illuminated lights, but the Google Home Speaker features a light ring around the bottom that glows when the device is listening, "thinking," or responding. This is becoming a trend with Google. The company will require a similar glowing lightbar embellishment on the upcoming Googlebook laptops. There are three far-field microphones distributed around the speaker that will pick up your speech, and there's a mute switch when you don't want it listening for the "OK Google" trigger.

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Android 17 has been in testing since early this year, with the final beta hitting devices just a couple of weeks ago. Insofar as a mature operating system like Android still has big days, this is one of them. The official Android 17 build is starting its rollout on Pixel phones, adding a small set of new features and laying the groundwork for the future. This release also coincides with a Pixel Drop and a new version of Wear OS (based on Android 17) on Pixel Watches.

Google no longer uses an unmodified version of Android on its phones—the Pixel build includes numerous features that are distinct from Android 17 itself. Other device makers will include versions of some of these features when they eventually update their phones, but for now, Google's Pixel phones are the only way to experience Android 17.

The multitasking Bubbles system in Android 17 expands on a similar (but underutilized) messaging feature. In Android 17 on Pixels, you can long-press on any app icon to open that app as a floating window. When minimized, these bubbles stay on top of other apps. On foldable phones, the bubbles dock into a "bubble bar" for easy multitasking.

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Google loves telling us all the ways people are using its generative AI products to build new things, grow businesses, and save the world. Supposedly. Of course, people are also using AI for crime. Google has announced a new legal salvo aimed at a Chinese group called Outsider Enterprise, which is allegedly responsible for a massive AI-powered scam campaign. Google says it's working with law enforcement and mobile carriers to fight back.

According to Google's legal filing, Outsider Enterprise operates through Telegram. The group offers phishing-as-a-service to individuals who may not be technically savvy enough to set up fraudulent websites and text campaigns on their own. In its Telegram channels, Outsider Enterprise reportedly provided instructions on how to use Google's Gemini AI to create websites that imitate those of Google, YouTube, and government agencies such as New York’s E-ZPass. The group offered nearly 300 scam templates.

Google says that scams enabled by Outsider Enterprise resulted in more than 2.5 million text messages being sent to Android users. About 55,000 of those messages happened in a two-week period last month. In all, Google has tracked 9,000 fake websites and 1 million URLs connected to the scam network.

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Another day, another AI model from Google. This time, Google DeepMind has released a new member of the Gemma 4 open model family, but it's fundamentally different from the rest of the lineup. DiffusionGemma doesn't generate outputs linearly like most AI models. Instead, it can produce an entire block of text in parallel. Google says this makes it faster and more efficient when running on local hardware like an Nvidia DGX or a humble gaming GPU.

Most AI models are designed to be autoregressive—they generate text left to right one token at a time. DiffusionGemma has more in common with image generation models, which start with static and then denoise it to create the desired content. This model takes a field of placeholder tokens running over the canvas multiple times to generate likely tokens and using those to improve estimation of others. At the end of the process, the model finalizes its token outputs in one large block—the "denoised" text canvas.

DiffusionGemma is fairly large in the realm of Google's open models. It's a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model with a total of 26 billion parameters, but only 3.8 billion are activated during inference. That means it should fit in the 18GB RAM allotment of a high-end GPU. In testing with an RTX 5090, DiffusionGemma spits out around 700 tokens per second. With a single Nvidia H100 AI accelerator, DiffusionGemma can produce 1,000+ tokens per second. That's about four times the output of the similarly sized autoregressive Gemma models.

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Google has been chasing real-time translation for years, which it says has been one of its "pioneering machine learning experiments." We've seen numerous demos on stage at Google events in the past, but you needed Google phones, earbuds, or some other specific setup. Last year, Google brought real-time translation to more users in the Translate app, and now it's expanding availability more. With the release of Gemini 3.5 Live Translate, you'll have access to instant translation in more places and with lower latency than ever before.

The new AI model is part of the version 3.5 family that launched at I/O. Before today, Google had only rolled out the Flash version, but we're expecting a Pro model to drop in the coming weeks. Gemini 3.5 Live Translate is a speech-to-speech model tuned to automatically detect and translate in more than 70 languages.

Google says Gemini 3.5 Live Translate is fast enough to keep up with a normal conversation, following just a few seconds behind the speaker while also matching intonation, pacing, and pitch. In short, the voice sounds more like you than a generic robot. The demos, which are all being recorded under controlled conditions, do sound impressive. You won't have to wait long to verify the model's abilities for yourself, though.

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Google's NotebookLM was one of the company's first forays into generative AI technology, and in un-Googley fashion, it hasn't been shut down yet. In fact, NotebookLM is getting one of its biggest updates, ever, today, moving to the latest Gemini 3.5 model, support for more file types, and streamlined web source integration. Google also says NotebookLM will be able to do more with all those queries thanks to embedded support for Antigravity.

Gemini 3.5 Flash debuted at Google I/O this year, promising much faster and more efficient processing. Google has claimed that companies worried about token costs can save big by moving their projects to the new Flash model while also getting outputs that are of similar or better quality. Those improvements are now filtering down to other Google products. NotebookLM, which launched in 2023 at the very beginning of the AI boom, lets you analyze specific sources like documents and webpages with Google's latest AI models.

The upgraded NotebookLM beats the old version in all of Google's "core evaluation dimensions." Credit: Google

Google conducted side-by-side evaluations of NotebookLM on the old Gemini 3.1 branch and with the updated 3.5. The company is being somewhat vague about the nature of the tests, breaking things up into "top five core evaluation dimensions," which are Accuracy and Quality, Multilingual Support, Large Document Analysis, Document Creation, and Advanced Research. In these tests, Google says NotebookLM averaged a 65 percent win rate versus the older model.

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Smartwatches can track your health stats, but they also do a lot of other things you might not always want or need. The $100 Fitbit Air tracker ditches the screens that have become common on people's wrists, leaving behind a tiny puck of health sensors you can often forget you're wearing. You will not, however, forget that Google's new health platform is built around AI.

The Air has no speaker, and there's only one LED on the side to indicate battery level. You can double-tap the tracker to check the level, and that's about the end of on-device features. The vibration motor is only for alarms—it can't sync with notifications on your phone. That makes sense, given there is no screen to tell you what that buzz was all about.

The Fitbit Air doesn't have a display or buttons—just a small LED on the side for battery status. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

The stock Performance Band is simple, consisting of a smooth polyester yarn with small velcro pads and a metal loop. It's durable but does seem to absorb a bit of moisture. For swimming or heavy workouts, you'll probably want the silicone active band. This one hides the Air puck a bit more effectively, and it looks good in a sporty way.

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The generative AI boom has driven the cost of memory into the stratosphere, and Google is a key part of that trend. So it's only fitting that Google should offer some less RAM-hungry local AI models. The company has announced the release of a new Gemma 4 model that fills a gap in the lineup that launched earlier this year. The new model is efficient enough that you may be able to run it on a pretty average consumer laptop.

In April, Google released four models in the Gemma 4 family, which also marked the shift to a more open Apache 2.0 license. The initial models included two mobile-optimized options (E2B and E4B) along with a pair of models for more serious work (26B Mixture of Experts and 31B Dense). That left a rather large unserved space in the middle, which is right where the new model falls.

Gemma 4 12B is considerably more capable than the mobile versions, but it won't require a $20,000 AI accelerator to run locally. Google says Gemma 4 12B is unique in that it can run on many consumer laptops without sacrificing quality. As long as you've got a computer with 16GB of system RAM or VRAM, the 12-billion-parameter model will work. That's about half the total memory footprint of Gemma 4 26B MoE, and Google claims the new model is almost as capable, at least as far as benchmarks go.

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Microsoft has been deeply committed to the growth of generative AI technology in recent years through its now-fragmented partnership with OpenAI. At Build 2026, the company remains all-in on AI, and it's looking toward the future with a new software platform. The new Android-based OS is called Project Solara, and Microsoft says Solara is designed to run agents instead of apps.

Project Solara is not something you'll have to worry about killing your apps anytime soon. It's limited to a few pieces of concept hardware and software that are awaiting the magical agents of the future. The vision is for Solara to run on myriad specialized devices with interfaces generated on the spot, and it's all powered by the explosive intelligence of models that Microsoft and others insist will soon exist.

According to Microsoft, Solara is a chip-to-cloud platform intended to free agents from reliance on single interfaces. Much of Microsoft's messaging around AI is speculative and self-serving, but the company rightly points out that new computing form factors have always required specialization, and that process is complex and expensive. The shift to mobile computing, for example, tripped Microsoft up multiple times as it fell behind on app availability, security, and long-term support.

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We're expecting Android 17 to begin rolling out later this month, but first, Google has a batch of updates for the wider Android device ecosystem. As usual, some of the new features are limited to specific devices, and others require using Google's apps. But if you don't mind the latter, you can get automated protection from the growing threat of deepfake phone scams.

According to Google, "impersonation fraud" is one of the most common types of financial scams. The FTC tracked almost $3 billion in losses from such scams during 2024, and the improvements in AI voice cloning tools more recently are making the schemes easier to pull off. The voice models are becoming so capable that it can be difficult to identify a fake caller even when an AI is imitating someone you talk to every day.

Google's solution is an expansion of the system it debuted last month for verified financial calls. Now, a similar feature will work with anyone in your contacts. Many of the most effective deepfake scams involve spoofing a contact's number, which makes the call look more legitimate when your phone lights up. Victims of these scams are then greeted by an accurate re-creation of the person's voice spinning a yarn that involves an urgent need for cash.

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It's impossible to totally avoid generative AI when interacting with technology anymore, but Apple has a bit less of it. That's not entirely by choice, though. The iPhone maker has delayed the AI-enhanced Siri multiple times since first promising it in 2024, but a deal with Google will merge the iconic assistant with Gemini later this year. As we approach the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple has been working to bring big AI smarts to the modest processing environment of a smartphone. Apple fans may not like the outcome, though.

Apple has long crowed about the privacy value of running AI locally, but a new report suggests that despite Apple's best efforts, the iPhone's Gemini makeover will lean heavily on Google and Nvidia in the cloud. The Information reports that Apple's Gemini-infused Siri will run both on-device and in the cloud, an apparent reversal of its privacy-focused preference for local AI.

With every new chip announcement, we hear about how the silicon has been optimized for AI—even Apple does this with its focus on Neural Engine upgrades. You may think from the grandiose language that smartphones are equipped to handle beefy AI models, but that's not necessarily the case. In fact, the GPUs in most phones can process more AI tokens than the AI-focused NPUs. Components like Apple's Neural Engine are designed for contextual, efficient AI processing. Even if phones had faster AI processing, they lack the RAM to keep enormous models in memory.

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Motorola was early to foldable phones, announcing its first Razr-branded foldable in 2019. Since then, the company has churned out a series of foldable flip phones, but the new Razr Fold is its first attempt at a tablet-style foldable. Samsung, Google, and others have been making devices like this for a while, so we know the formula, and the Razr Fold doesn't change the game.

Like the competition, the Razr Fold has flagship specs and a giant foldable display that fits in your pocket. It also comes with a hefty $1,900 price tag. While Motorola has made progress overcoming some traditional shortcomings of foldables, the phone still feels rather impractical, while still being very cool.

Is "cool" enough reason to spend almost two grand on a phone, though?

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Google took its first swing at laptops with Chromebooks way back in 2011. These web-first laptops have seen success over the years, mostly in enterprise and education. Google insists Chromebooks aren't going away, but the company's focus has shifted to something new: Googlebooks. That's what Google has decided to call the new line of Android-powered laptops, which will begin shipping later this year.

If you thought other Google products were steeped in Gemini, you haven't seen anything yet.

Google says it designed Googlebooks from the ground up with Gemini Intelligence, and it all starts with the cursor. Google calls this the Magic Pointer. Just wiggle the cursor back and forth, and it will activate a full-screen Gemini experience. The AI will see what's on your screen so it can make contextual suggestions and pull in data from multiple apps.

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Google's I/O conference is next week, and we expect to hear a lot about the company's AI endeavors. The company says there's so much to talk about that it's spilling the Android beans a little early, and yes, a lot of AI is involved. In the coming months, Google will roll out more smartphone AI features under the Gemini Intelligence banner, bringing more automation and customization to your phone.

App automation will be a major element of Android going forward, Google says. Automation for apps is expanding after Google began testing it earlier in 2026 with DoorDash and Uber on Pixel and Samsung phones. It was a very frustrating experience at launch, but Google says it has spent the intervening months fine-tuning the system.

Google promises that Android will be able to handle more complex automations across apps. For example, the robot could find a course syllabus in Gmail and then hop to a shopping app to add the necessary books to your shopping cart. Google also suggests taking a picture of a travel brochure and telling Gemini to book something similar in the Expedia app.

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