IT General

The Android 17 beta releases are really heating up now. After a month between Beta 2 and Beta 3, Android 17 Beta 4 is now available just three weeks later. This is the last “scheduled” beta release, meaning the stable update is only a few months away.

The current-generation Jeep Grand Cherokee has been on the market for a few years now, and the 2026 update brings a mild refresh with sharper styling and updated tech. It still sits in that sweet spot as an American midsize SUV trying to punch into the premium space.

The first few weeks of April have kicked off the final seasons for several marquee shows. The Boys is now three episodes into its fifth and final season on Prime Video, while Hacks recently kicked off its last run on HBO Max. Elsewhere, Euphoria ended its four-year hiatus with an explosive season 3 premiere. What's great about television is that we can do it all again this weekend with a new crop of shows.

Intel has delivered what could be an antidote to surging PC prices, however unintentionally. The chip giant has launched Core Series 3 mobile processors (codenamed Wildcat Lake) that share the same architectural roots and 18A manufacturing process as Core Ultra Series 3 (aka Panther Lake), but are aimed at "value buyers" watching every cent.

It’s April, which means two things are likely true: spring is finally here, and you’ve either just received or are anxiously awaiting your tax refund. According to the latest IRS data, the average refund for the 2026 filing season will be around $3,521.

It’s no secret that Android and iPhone regularly borrow from each other. Usually, the features on one side are useful to the other side, too. However, Google is currently in the process of adopting a classic iPhone feature, and I have my doubts that Android users will care.

If you've already fallen under the spell of Witch Hat Atelier, Crunchyroll has a new way to stay immersed in the series between episodes.

The anime streamer has launched Witch Chat: The Witch Hat Atelier Companion Podcast, a new watchalong-style series under its Anime Effect podcast slate. The show is designed to guide viewers through the anime adaptation of Kamome Shirahama's beloved manga, and the first three episodes are available now on Spotify and YouTube.

SEE ALSO: 'Witch Hat Atelier' is anime's next truly magical hit

Hosted by anime cosplayer and content creator Lena Lemon and Crunchyroll personality Tim Lyu, fans can expect episodic recaps and an even deeper dive into the magical world of Coco, Qifrey, Agott, Tetia, and Richeh. Or maybe you really want to make sure you're pronouncing words like Atelier, Qifrey, and Richeh correctly (because...same).

Credit: Courtesy of Crunchyroll

For a show like Witch Hat Atelier, which is already full of intricate lore, mysterious Brimmed Caps, and enough storybook beauty to inspire endless TikTok edits, a companion podcast feels like a natural fit. The first episode of the anime premiered on April 6, and the podcast gives fans another place to theorize about Coco's future, Qifrey's secrets, and whatever unsettling thing the Brimmed Caps are planning next.

It is also a reminder of how much anime fandom now lives online. According to Crunchyroll, 82 percent of anime fans discuss anime on social media, with TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube serving as major discovery tools for viewers. After all, it only takes one devastating edit to change the course of someone's life, or dictate what they watch next.

And if any new show feels built for that kind of fandom ecosystem — the cosplay, the fan art, the ship discourse, the aesthetic moodboards, the painstaking manga-to-anime comparisons — it's definitely Witch Hat Atelier. Judging by the online discourse so far, the Qifrey obsession has already begun.

Believe it or not, there are people who actually miss the Windows 8 interface. One enthusiast liked it so much that they decided to recreate the Windows 8 Metro user interface for Linux systems. I tried it, and it's easily the most janky-but-lovable graphical interface I've ever seen.

Cars have gotten a lot more tech-heavy over the past decade, and that hasn’t always made them simpler or easier to live with. A big reason is the push to electrify internal combustion engines to meet stricter emissions rules, which forces modern cars to balance regulations with what drivers actually want.

Anthropic has been shipping products and making news at a blistering pace in 2026, and on Thursday, the AI company announced the launch of Claude Opus 4.7.

Claude Opus 4.7 is Anthropic's most intelligent model available to the general public. Notably, Anthropic said in a press release that Opus 4.7 is not as powerful as Claude Mythos, which Anthropic deemed too dangerous for public release.

Claude Opus is a family of hybrid reasoning models capable of multi-step reasoning and advanced coding. Until the announcement of Claude Mythos on April 7, Claude Opus was considered Anthropic's most advanced series of AI models.

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How to try Claude Opus 4.7

Claude Opus 4.7 is available now via Claude AI, the Claude API, and Anthropic partners such as Microsoft Foundry. The new model is priced the same as Claude Opus 4.6.

SEE ALSO: Anthropic makes the case for anthropomorphizing AI in ‘unsettling’ research paper

However, Anthropic noted that because "Opus 4.7 thinks more at higher effort levels," it uses more ouput tokens than its predecessor. Users can read more about how to optimize token usage in the Opus 4.7 migration guide.

How Claude Opus 4.7 improves over 4.6

As expected, Claude Opus 4.7 offers improved capabilities across the board.

In particular, Anthropic says Claude Opus 4.7 is better at advanced coding tasks, visual intelligence, and document analysis. Anthropic also says Opus 4.7 is "more tasteful and creative when completing professional tasks, producing higher-quality interfaces, slides, and docs."

"Users report being able to hand off their hardest coding work — the kind that previously needed close supervision — to Opus 4.7 with confidence. Opus 4.7 handles complex, long-running tasks with rigor and consistency, pays precise attention to instructions, and devises ways to verify its own outputs before reporting back," reads an Anthropic blog post.

Claude Opus 4.7: Benchmark performance

Anthropic released a detailed model card outlining how Claude Opus 4.7 compares to other Anthropic models and frontier models from OpenAI, Google, and xAI.

Opus 4.7 lags behind the unreleased Claude Mythos, which Anthropic reports scores significantly higher on common benchmarks such as Humanity's Last Exam. "Claude Opus 4.7 is less capable than Claude Mythos Preview on every relevant axis we measured and does not advance our capability frontier," the model card states." That means Claude Opus 4.7 is not evidence that AI development has accelerated beyond existing trend lines.

SEE ALSO: The AI industry has a big Chicken Little problem

On Humanity's Last Exam (without tools), Anthropic reports that Claude Opus 4.7 outperforms all other frontier models except Claude Mythos.

• Claude Mythos scored 56.8 percent on HLE

• Claude Opus 4.7 scored 46.9 percent

• Gemini 3.1 Pro scored 44.4 percent

• GPT-5-4 Pro scored 42.7 percent

• Claude Opus 4.6 scored 40.0 percent

With tools, GPT-5-4-Pro scored 58.7 percent compared to Opus 4.7’s 54.7 percent. Mythos beat them both with 64.7 percent.

Mashable has not independently verified these benchmark results. Full results are available in the Opus 4.7 model card.

Credit: Anthropic

Overall, Anthropic scored Opus 4.7 above other leading models in some benchmarks, though Gemini 3.1 Pro and GPT-5-4 score higher in some areas.

Claude Opus 4.7: Safety and hallucinations

Anthropic also reports that Opus 4.7 shows a low risk of misaligned behaviors, with a similar risk profile as Opus 4.6.

For example, Anthropic says Opus 4.7 is less likely to hallucinate and shows lower rates of reward hacking.

"Claude Opus 4.7 is more reliably honest than Opus 4.6 or Sonnet 4.6, with large reductions in the rate of important omissions, and moderate improvements in factuality and rates of hallucinated input," the model card states.

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I built my first PC in my early teens, and I just never really stopped. A passion for building desktops turned into a career, and two decades later, I still love everything about the process of building a PC, from picking the parts to actually assembling them and benchmarking the final rig.

Although I'm a long-time Plex user, I also keep its best open-source alternative, Jellyfin, installed alongside it. One of the things I admire most about Jellyfin is its support for plugins, which let developers flex their creative muscles and add features that Plex either charges for or doesn't offer at all. Here are some of my favorites.

Are you ready to dive into a weekend full of fun and functional Raspberry Pi projects? Today, I’ll show you how to track your internet speed, display some motivational quotes, and even build a custom touchscreen macro keypad for your setup.

TikTok is in mourning over Gus Everett.

After news broke that Patrick Schwarzenegger had been cast opposite Phoebe Dynevor in the film adaptation of Emily Henry's Beach Read, readers immediately flooded TikTok with reactions ranging from confusion to outright despair. "#NotMyGus" became a common refrain on the app. Others seemed certain that the adaptation had already been ruined before filming even started.

Their main argument? The vibes are off. Sure, Schwarzenegger doesn't look like the literary sad boy Henry described in the book. But he also doesn't have the aura.

In Henry's novel, he is a literary novelist with dark hair, olive skin, and a slightly rumpled, brooding energy. He is handsome, but not in an obvious leading-man way. He feels worn down by life. His appeal comes from the tension between how emotionally closed-off he seems and how soft he actually is underneath it all.

Schwarzenegger, at least publicly, projects almost the exact opposite energy: polished, glossy, conventionally handsome, and impossible to separate from his nepo-baby image. Fans are not reacting because they think he is a bad actor. They are reacting because he does not really resemble the version of Gus that exists in the book.

That disconnect is especially striking because Gus is one of the defining romance heroes of the modern BookTok era. Readers have spent years fancasting actors like Paul Mescal, Logan Lerman, Joe Keery, and Dev Patel for the role, largely because they embody the melancholy energy people associate with Gus. Schwarzenegger, even after his acclaimed turn on The White Lotus, still feels more country club than tortured novelist.

Director Yulin Kuang has already defended the choice, saying she spent six months looking for Gus and ultimately prioritized chemistry with Dynevor over physical resemblance to the book version of the character. Kuang described Schwarzenegger as a "slow burn" choice and said there was "something electric" between the actors during chemistry reads.

That may be enough to win readers over when the film premieres. After all, styling can do a lot: darker hair, rumpled sweaters, bad posture, a little stubble.

But for now, the internet response says something bigger about how attached readers have become to the men they imagine while reading romance novels. By the time an adaptation is announced, fans are not just comparing the actor to the book; they're comparing him to the version of the character they have been carrying around in their heads for years.

When every little thing costs a small (or big) fortune, now's not the time to go shopping for a new PC. It's more important than ever to stay on top of maintenance and to keep an eye on the state of your computer. This helps you step in before anything ever goes south, and can save you lots of time and money on unnecessary repairs, replacements, and upgrades.

You'll want to act quickly if you've been eying a Meta VR headset, as the company is raising prices for its entire Quest lineup on April 19. The entry-level Meta Quest 3S with 128GB of storage will climb from its current $300 to $350, while the 256GB version will jump from $400 to $450. The steepest increase affects the flagship Quest 3, which will surge from $500 to $600 for its lone 512GB variant.

In this modern era where seemingly every tech company is defined by its relationship with AI (or lack thereof), Allbirds has made perhaps the most 180-degree corporate pivot we've ever seen.

In case you're unfamiliar, Allbirds was a direct-to-consumer company that made wool sneakers popular among Silicon Valley types in the 2010s. Take note of the past tense, because the company announced in a statement this week that it is completely abandoning the shoe business to instead become an AI firm.

An unspecified investor has agreed to pony up $50 million to fund the brand's pivot to AI compute infrastructure; the money will go towards data center tech instead of shoe production.

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SEE ALSO: Nano Banana can now make personalized AI Images based on your Photos library

Allbirds has also changed its name to NewBird AI. In a company statement, it proclaimed that it would help facilitate access to AI hardware for clients.

"The rise of AI development and adoption has created unprecedented structural demand for specialized, high-performance compute that the market is struggling to meet...The result is a market where enterprises, AI developers, and research organizations are unable to secure the compute resources they need to build, train and run AI at scale.

NewBird AI is being built to help close that gap. The Company will initially seek to acquire high-performance, low-latency AI compute hardware and provide access under long-term lease arrangements, meeting customer demand that spot markets and hyperscalers are unable to reliably service."

It wasn't that long ago that Allbirds was riding high, and after a 2021 IPO, the company reached a peak valuation of over $4 billion. Amid the tech startup boom of the last 15-ish years, Allbirds Merino wool sneakers were commonplace in Bay Area tech offices. However, it's been a rough five years for the brand, and after failing to find a wider market, it was sold for pennies on the dollar to a brand management firm in March, according to the New York Times.

For what it's worth, NewBird AI stock rose 600 percent after the announcement, per the Times.

Still, it's highly unusual to see a clothing company completely drop the clothing part of its business in favor of buying up GPUs to lease to clients. Many companies, big and small, have pivoted towards AI in one way or another in recent years, with varying degrees of success.

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If you’ve ever read the phrase "lifetime fluid" with regard to vehicle maintenance, you might be tempted to breathe a sigh of relief. It sounds like one less bill to worry about. However, lifetime in this context is more of a marketing term referring to the length of your vehicle’s factory warranty, not its actual life beyond that.

Nothing makes me happier than a free weekend. Between the grind of the 9-to-5 lifestyle and the pressure of fulfilling social obligations, a weekend of rest and relaxation feels like a luxury. If I find myself with an open weekend, I love to start a show that I know I can finish before work on Monday morning.

Hot on the heels of YouTube Premium’s recent price hike, Google is quietly dangling a discount that may or may not soften the sting depending on how deep you’re already in the company's ecosystem.