Technology

PC gamers want the smoothest experience possible, which usually means investing in top-tier hardware. While graphics cards and CPUs actually make a big difference, there's one component that gets way more attention than it deserves: SSDs.

Microsoft's switch from Windows 10 to Windows 11 left many PCs supposedly obsolete. This is sad news for many PC owners, but good news for you if you're in the market for a NAS or a homelab.

CES is normally a place for big tech news, but this year's show could add a dash of political intrigue to the mix.

At 11 a.m. on Thursday in Las Vegas, the annual Consumer Electronics Show will act as the venue for a "fireside chat" between Consumer Technology Association CEO Gary Shapiro, FCC chairman Brendan Carr, and FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson. Carr's involvement is key here because the FCC recently banned the sale of drones from the Chinese firm DJI, which manufactures a large majority of consumer drones on the market.

The big question here is will Carr address the DJI drone ban at CES? It would certainly be an appropriate venue for it, given the tech-focused nature of the event. However, the description of the fireside chat is incredibly vague, promising only "candid conversations on how [the FCC and FTC] are navigating the rapidly changing tech landscape." There's no mention of a Q&A or anything like that, so it's very possible that the topics of conversation will steer clear of anything potentially controversial. We will have to wait and see.

SEE ALSO: How to watch CES 2026 live: Streaming schedule, keynotes, events What is the DJI ban?

In case you haven't been following the news, the momentum towards a total ban on DJI drones in the United States started last year as part of the Trump administration's trade war with China. The government required all Chinese-manufactured drones to undergo a "national security risk assessment" by late December. Unfortunately for DJI, late December came and the ban went into place.

For its part, DJI agreed to take part in audits, but apparently that wasn't enough for the FCC. Again, it's not certain if Carr will or won't address the ban at CES, but in case you're curious how he feels about it, he provided a statement at the time of the ban that might say everything you need to know.

"President Trump has been clear that his Administration will act to secure our airspace and unleash American drone dominance," Carr said.

A decade ago, I didn’t want anything to do with Samsung phones. Now they’ve become the only ones I want to own—and while this may be surprising, there’s a single Samsung app that’s a big part of the reason why.

Apple’s AirPods are so ubiquitous, they’ve become the Kleenex of Bluetooth earbuds. But whether you own an iPhone or an Android, AirPods are hardly the only compelling option. As long as you stay clear of the cheapest budget options you see in checkout lines, Bluetooth earbuds, in general, are all pretty awesome.

Got an old smartwatch collecting dust in a drawer? Wondering if there's anything practical you can do with it besides gathering dust? Well, here are five genuinely useful ways to repurpose it into something that still earns its place in your daily routine.

Updated on Monday, Jan. 5 at 1:15 p.m. ET — Unfortunately, the Lego CES keynote press conference on Jan. 5 will not be livestreamed. However, Mashable reporter Matt Binder is in attendance, and you can follow the Mashable CES live blog for the latest updates in brick building technology.

You can read our original story below...

Lego is all set to show off its wares at CES this year.

The internationally beloved Danish toy company is holding its very first CES press conference in Las Vegas next week. While CES is a tech show that's largely focused on things like computer chips, electric vehicles, and AI, it's hard to guess what, exactly, Lego will announce. Lego's press conference is set for 1 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 5. While there isn't a confirmed livestream link yet, we will update this piece as soon as we have one. If one does not become available, we will report the news out of the press conference as best as we can.

SEE ALSO: CES 2026: The biggest tech trends to watch out for

As for what Lego is going to show off, it's hard to say. The company has its fingers in lots of pies, including some tech-y ones. There's a big new Lego Batman video game coming out soon, as well as a collaboration with F1 to produce a Lego car. I would expect the unexpected here, at any rate.

If nothing else, it should be more fun than the cavalcade of apps that use AI to manage your stock portfolio that get shown off at CES every year.

My iPhone 15 Pro has 256GB of internal storage. The last time I'd checked, I was using about half of that capacity. Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that my storage was suddenly almost completely full. The culprit was not what I was expecting.

When you buy a tech product, it usually comes in its own box. Many normal people will throw these boxes away, realizing that they're highly unlikely to ever need them again. Some of us, however, find it harder to say goodbye.

I’ve used just about every “read-it-later” app out there, and none of them stuck. To my surprise, what finally worked wasn’t a read-it-later app at all. It was Obsidian.

If you're a music fan who's never tried a high-quality pair of headphones, you just don't know what you're missing. Audiophile headphones built for Hi-Fi playback can completely transform the way you listen to and appreciate music. Here's what I learned when I first delved into the world of audiophile headphones.

Spotify is the most popular music streaming service of all time, so it's a surprise to no one that it changed the music industry forever, mostly not for the better. It's altered how artists release music and how we listen to it. Yet despite everything wrong with Spotify, I still can’t seem to quit.

For weeks, my Wi-Fi felt unreliable in ways I couldn’t reconcile. My house uses an eero mesh network, coverage is strong everywhere inside my home and even out at the fringes of the property, and speed tests at the router consistently looked fine. Yet my Windows work laptop would randomly crawl. Meetings had video issues, and large downloads would slow to a halt. Walking closer to a node didn’t help. Rebooting the router didn’t fix it. Toggling Wi-Fi off and on barely made a difference. Everything seemed to be pointing to "bad Wi-Fi," but there was no clear smoking gun.

This was a quieter week in the technology space, with CES 2026 just around the corner and everyone celebrating the holidays, but there were still new developments for Pebble smartwatches, Plex servers, Linux, and PC hardware. Here are the biggest stories you might have missed.

American sports cars have always turned heads with their rumbling V8s, bold looks, and a driving experience that’s anything but tame. They’ve built a reputation for raw power, freedom, and straight-line speed—without the sky-high prices of European sports cars.

If I had to cancel every subscription I have except for one, I would keep Apple Music. It gives me access to almost all the music I could ever want and integrates perfectly into the Apple ecosystem. It's not perfect, however, and some of the settings make it worse than it needs to be. If you're an Apple Music subscriber, there are a few settings you might want to change.

Looking to buy more tools this year? Ryobi has an excellent selection of power tools, and its constant stream of new products is one of many reasons it's so popular. And while Ryobi has released over 75 new items in the last year, here are a few new tools coming in 2026 that are actually worth waiting for.

Recently I decided to try using Xfce as my main desktop environment on my primary tower PC. I typically stick with KDE Plasma on most devices, and after weeks with Xfce, I just feel more affirmed in my preference for KDE for daily driving.

Now and again, I discover a service that’s so straightforward, I can hardly believe it works at all. The SSH-powered hosting service, pico.sh, is a perfect example.

Astronomers have confirmed for the first time with direct evidence that a lone, starless world is actually drifting through the Milky Way. 

Though scientists have documented a dozen of these so-called "rogue planets" in the past decade, this one isn't merely an educated guess based on a handful of clues. By catching the same brief cosmic alignment from Earth and space, researchers were able to directly measure the celestial object’s mass. 

In doing so, they found this orphan is within the same weight class as Saturn, strengthening the case that the galaxy teems with castaway exoplanets — born within solar systems but chucked out later into the abyss, said Subo Dong, a professor of astronomy at Peking University in Beijing.  

The finding, published in the journal Science, suggests at least some so-called "rogue planets" form like regular planets before their violent expulsion.  

"For the first time, we have a direct measurement of a rogue planet candidate’s mass and not just a rough statistical estimate," said Dong, who led the study, in a statement. "We know for sure it's a planet."

SEE ALSO: NASA's Hubble sees a stunning planet-forming disk. It's a real doozy.

Researchers determined the planet's mass by observing a fleeting event from both Earth and space, overcoming a long-standing obstacle in the study of wandering planets.

These rogues are difficult to detect because they give off little light and do not orbit stars. Astronomers have only ever spotted them through gravitational microlensing, which occurs when an object passes in front of a distant star and briefly magnifies the star’s light through gravity. The detectable flicker can last from hours to days, then disappears.

Scientists were able to measure the distance and mass of the rogue planet using the principles of parallax, which gives humans depth perception. Credit: Yu Jingchuan illustration

"Without a host star, common detection techniques, such as the transit method — finding an exoplanet (a planet outside of the solar system) by observing slight dimming of a star’s light as a planet passes in front of it — cannot be used," wrote Gavin A. L. Coleman, a Queen Mary University of London researcher, in a related commentary. "Currently, the only technique available to discover rogue planets is gravitational microlensing." 

But until now, microlensing observations could not clearly determine the distance to these planets, making it difficult to independently calculate their masses. That ambiguity left scientists relying on speculative estimates, raising questions about whether the sources were indeed planets or small failed stars called brown dwarfs. Some experts have even considered whether the objects are something else entirely unknown.

The new result comes from a microlensing event in May 2024. Ground-based observatories detected a short, two-day brightening of a star toward the bulging center of the galaxy. By chance, the European Space Agency's Gaia star-surveying spacecraft — about 1 million miles from Earth — also watched the event.

The two vantage points made it possible to measure microlens parallax, an effect similar to human depth perception. People can sense depth because a scene looks slightly different from each of their eyes, based on the space between the pair.

"We are able to use the same principle to extract the distance information of this rogue planet candidate, finding the mass and distance separately," Dong said. "The difference is that the spacing between the eyes of we humans is a few centimeters."

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The timing of the event was seen about two hours apart by the ground-based telescopes and Gaia. That delay revealed the object’s distance and, combined with other measurements, its mass.

The object is about 22 percent of Jupiter’s mass and lies roughly 9,800 light-years away. No host star appeared in the data, further indicating that the planet is either free-floating or on one super vast orbit rendering its distant star undetectable.

The planet’s relatively low mass is key because objects several times heavier than Jupiter — brown dwarfs — can form in isolation, like small stars. But an object akin to Saturn is far more likely to have formed in a planet-forming disk around a star, then later turned loose. That ouster likely happened through cosmic collisions, close encounters with other worlds, or the capricious gravitational influence of an unstable star. 

The study gives credence to the idea that planet ejection is a common occurrence in planet formation. Future missions, including NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, are expected to dramatically increase the known rogue planets and help clarify how often worlds are sent astray. If they're abundant, perhaps developing solar systems are routinely losing one or two worlds in the process.

"So far," Dong said, "we only have a glimpse into this emerging population of rogue worlds and what light they can shed on the formation of the bodies in the planetary systems of the universe."