I saw the warning signs firsthand. I recently set out to build a small gaming PC for my living room, to play on my TV with surround sound. The project required a standard 32GB kit of RAM. On Sept. 11, that kit was selling for a reasonable $90. By the time I placed my order…
OpenAI’s August launch of its GPT-5 large language model was somewhat of a disaster. There were glitches during the livestream, with the model generating charts with obviously inaccurate numbers. In a Reddit AMA with OpenAI employees, users complained that the new model wasn’t friendly, and called for the company to restore the previous version. Most…
When Chinese AI startup DeepSeek became a global sensation in January, it not only shocked Silicon Valley but also startled ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. The Chinese tech giant had already launched Doubao, its own flagship AI assistant app with tens of millions of users. But when DeepSeek became the best-known Chinese AI company overnight, no…
If you Ask any bike shop owner or manager if they fix electric bikes, you get an interesting array of stories. “I know a guy who has lost a finger working on ebikes,” says MacKenzie Hardt, owner of Hardt Family Cyclery in Aurora, Colorado, and the former executive director of the nonprofit bike shop and…
Consumer Reports evaluates lower-priced mattresses the same way we test any mattress: by putting them through our exhaustive lab tests, as well as asking thousands of CR members about how well their mattresses have served them. Put together, this information provides a good sense of what a mattress offers for a variety of body sizes…
Most people aren’t using physical media anymore, which is why I spent the majority of my time testing the HW-Q990F with streaming media. I find that Apple TV has the best audio quality of any of the major streaming services, which tracks with my experience testing this bar: Atmos-mixed shows like sci-fi hit Foundation come…
At Anthropic’s first court hearing challenging sanctions imposed by the Trump administration, the AI tech startup asked the government to commit that it wouldn’t levy additional penalties on the company. That didn’t happen. “I am not prepared to offer any commitments on that issue,” James Harlow, a Justice Department attorney, told US district judge Rita…
As Congress races to pass President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” it’s also sprinting to placate the many haters of the bill’s “AI moratorium” provision which originally required a 10-year pause on state AI regulations. The provision, which was championed by White House AI czar and venture capitalist David Sacks, has proved remarkably unpopular with…
In our lab, CR’s engineers put vacuum cleaners through a set of tough tests to evaluate how well a model picks up dirt, how much debris it retains, how easy it is to maneuver, and how noisy it is. We embed sand and pet hair into carpets to see how effective the appliance is at…
Keep in mind that these services may not work all the time. But being able to see how much a product costs right before the sale starts (and whether the MSRP happened to increase) can be helpful. Putting these tools together can help you deduce whether a deal is worth your money. WIRED always fact-checks…