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Typically, at the end of every month, streamers will remove a select group of shows and movies from their respective services. However, these departing programs will be replaced with new and returning shows to fill the void. Our top choice of the week stems from Hulu. It's a twisty crime thriller starring Emmy Rossum, who returns to television for her first starring role in nearly three years.

TL;DR: flowkey teaches piano through interactive lessons, instant feedback, and more than 1,000 songs. Get five years of access for $79.99 (reg. $899).

Opens in a new window Credit: Flowkey flowkey Piano Learning App: Classic Plan (5-Year Subscription) $79.99
$899 Save $819.01   Get Deal

Learning piano used to mean weekly lessons, a stack of intimidating sheet music, and finding time in your schedule to make both happen. Now all you need is a keyboard, a phone or laptop, and a little consistency. Oh, and an app. flowkey teaches piano through interactive lessons and real songs, and it’s $79.99 (reg. $899) for five years.

Rather than throwing you into music theory from day one, which can feel overwhelming for beginners, flowkey focuses on playing. The app listens as you perform and provides instant feedback, so you know when you’ve hit the right notes — and when you haven’t. Features like Wait Mode, which won’t move on until you play the correct note, along with slow-motion playback and looping, make it easier to work through tricky passages without feeling rushed.

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Once you’ve got the basics down, there’s plenty to keep you busy. The Classic plan includes more than 1,000 classical and public-domain pieces, with arrangements for beginner, intermediate, advanced, and pro players. You’ll find works by Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Bach, Debussy, Brahms, Liszt, and other classical composers, while lessons cover fundamentals like reading sheet music, playing with both hands, chords, rhythm, and technique.

Because your subscription works across computers, tablets, and phones, it’s easy to fit in practice whenever you find a few minutes to spare. Whether you’re learning your first scales, dusting off piano skills from childhood, or finally tackling a piece you’ve always wanted to play, flowkey offers a structured way to keep making progress without having to schedule weekly lessons.

Formerly $899, you can grab a 5-year subscription to flowkey for just $79.99.

StackSocial prices subject to change.

Google's next big event, Made By Google, is just a few weeks away. But, if you can't wait to see what the tech giant has in store, Google has just dropped a little teaser regarding the new Pixel 11 Pro.

As part of its Ask More of Your Phone campaign, Google's Pixel 11 Pro sneak peek lists a slew of Google's suite of online products like Gmail, Google Maps, Google Search, and Gemini. The narrator than hints that the viewer should perhaps go with a Google Pixel phone as well.

The teaser then displays Google's upcoming Pixel 11 Pro device with a strong focus on the rear of the device, specifically a glowing multi-colored circle next to the camera lenses.

This appears to be Google's introduction of the rumored Pixel Glow indicator.

It's not yet entirely clear what the glow indicator does. It appears to be a small reactive LED display located within the Pixel camera bar.

Reports have suggested that the glow indicator could react with different colors in order to provide visual notifications to the user. It's possible that the colored lights react differently to certain contacts or specific apps.

We'll find out more about the Pixel 11 lineup of Google smartphones, including the Pixel 11 Pro and the glow indicator, on August 12 during the Made By Google event.

If you have spent the past two weeks refreshing theater listings for an IMAX 70mm ticket to The Odyssey, your persistence may finally pay off.

IMAX has extended Christopher Nolan's blockbuster in the coveted format through Sept. 16, nearly a month beyond its previous Aug. 19 end date. New screenings appeared on IMAX's website Thursday July 30, although the additional dates did not exactly eliminate the competition. The AMC app placed moviegoers in a digital queue as tickets were released.

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The problem is partly one of supply. Only 25 theaters in the United States and 41 worldwide can project the physical IMAX 70mm reels used for the movie. Other theaters offer digital IMAX screenings, but those versions may be cropped depending on the auditorium rather than displaying the full, towering image captured by the cameras.

That distinction matters more for The Odyssey than it does for most blockbusters. Nolan's retelling of Homer's epic — starring Matt Damon, Tom Holland, and Anne Hathaway — is the first feature film shot entirely using IMAX film cameras.

Previous movies typically used the bulky, extremely loud cameras for action sequences before returning to another format for dialogue-heavy scenes. As a result, their aspect ratios could change throughout the movie. The Odyssey fills the screen from top to bottom for its entire 173-minute runtime.

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Moviegoers have treated the screenings accordingly. The first tickets went on sale a full year before the movie's July 17 release, and some theaters sold out weeks of showings in advance. Locations eventually added screenings at hours generally reserved for airport departures, including 2 a.m. and 6 a.m., to squeeze more viewers into the limited number of auditoriums.

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All of that demand is turning the format into a large piece of the movie's success. By July 26, IMAX screenings had generated more than $140 million worldwide in ticket sales, accounting for over 20 percent of the movie’s then-$652 million global total. That's especially notable given that IMAX locations represent less than 1 percent of its screens.

By July 30, The Odyssey had passed $700 million globally after just 12 days in theaters, already becoming the fourth highest-grossing movie of the year.

Its second-week ticket sales declined only 27 percent from its domestic opening weekend. Major studio releases more commonly fall between 50 and 70 percent, making the unusually small drop another indication that people are continuing to book tickets and possibly returning for repeat viewings.

Nolan has been here before. IMAX extended the 70mm run of Oppenheimer twice in 2023, and the movie later returned to the format as its awards campaign gathered momentum. Given the reviews and box-office performance of The Odyssey, it could eventually follow a similar path.

For now, fans have one more month to catch the movie in Nolan's preferred format, though finding an available seat may remain an odyssey of its own.

Did you know that the next time you drive across town, a camera you barely notice could record where your car goes?

Known as Flock cameras, the small black devices sit beside roads, near intersections, and at the entrances to neighborhoods and parking lots, collecting information about every vehicle that passes.

Flock Safety says its network now includes more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states and operates in more than 6,000 communities. Police departments, businesses, schools, and homeowners associations use the cameras, which can turn a passing car into a searchable record containing its license plate, location, color, model, and even details such as bumper stickers or dents.

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The company's rise has been fast. Founded in Atlanta in 2017 by Garrett Langley, Matt Feury, and Paige Todd, the company raised $275 million last year at a $7.5 billion valuation. Although it is best known for license plate readers, Flock also sells broader surveillance systems and is developing first-responder drones following its acquisition of Aerodome.

As that network has grown, so has the backlash. Cities are canceling contracts, police officers have been accused of using the system for personal reasons, and protesters have painted, burned, and cut down cameras across the country — and encouraged others to do the same.

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So, what exactly are Flock cameras, and why do some people want them gone?

How do Flock cameras work?

Flock cameras are automated license plate readers, commonly known as ALPRs. Unlike red-light or speed cameras, they are generally not waiting for a driver to commit a specific traffic violation, but rather photograph passing vehicles and convert what they see into data that can be searched later.

Each record can include a car’s license plate, location, make, model, color, body type, and the time it passed the camera. Flock’s software can also recognize individual features of the car, creating what amounts to a “vehicle fingerprint.”

Police officers can search for a particular plate or enter a broader description, such as a blue Toyota with a bumper sticker. They can also add vehicles connected to stolen-car reports, missing people, or criminal investigations to a “hotlist.”

If a camera detects a possible match, the system sends an alert with the vehicle's location. A police department can also allow other participating departments to search its camera data. In some states, that can mean searching across much of the country.

Flock says its cameras take individual images rather than continuously tracking a vehicle, and its default policy is to delete license plate data after 30 days — although the actual retention period can vary based on local laws and an agency’s agreement.

SEE ALSO: How 3 very different people use AI chatbots Why do police use Flock cameras?

Some police departments say the technology can produce investigative leads and solve crimes. If a child is reported missing, for example, officers can enter the plate of the vehicle involved and receive an alert when it passes a camera. The same process can help police locate stolen cars, follow fleeing suspects, or determine where a vehicle traveled before or after a crime.

On July 30, North Carolina authorities said Flock cameras helped track a vehicle connected to a child abduction case. Police arrested a woman in Charlotte on July 29, and the child was taken into protective custody.

That same week, police in Alabama credited a Flock camera with helping establish the direction traveled by two missing senior citizens. Officers combined that information with a community tip and assistance from OnStar to locate the couple safely.

Flock says its network has supported more than 1 million investigations and helped locate more than 10,000 missing people in 2025.

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The concern starts with the amount of information being collected about people who are not suspected of committing a crime. When a single camera records one moment on a public road, a network of thousands can capture the same vehicle at different times and locations.

Some industry critics argue that ALPR data can reveal when drivers visit sensitive places, including health centers, protests, and places of worship. The organization has also argued that police should obtain a warrant before searching large ALPR databases, although the Supreme Court has not decided whether historical ALPR searches require one. Flock adamantly disputes the description of its system as mass surveillance.

Data sharing has also pulled Flock into the immigration enforcement debate. In May 2025, 404 Media reviewed search logs showing more than 4,000 Flock lookups that local and state police conducted at the request of federal officials, as an informal favor, or for potentially immigration-related purposes. A Feb. 2026 investigation by The 74 also found that outside police departments searched cameras owned by a Texas school district, including queries that officials said were performed to assist the Department of Homeland Security.

Flock also responded to that claim, stating that it has no contract with ICE and that the agency cannot directly access its cameras or data.

Then there is the possibility of personal misuse. The Institute for Justice has collected 28 reported cases in which officers allegedly used license plate readers to follow partners, former partners, colleagues, or other romantic interests.

On July 29, the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation arrested Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer Seth Elliot and charged him with illegally accessing a government computer. Investigators allege that Elliot used Flock and a state criminal-justice database to run an unauthorized search of a North Carolina license plate for a non-law-enforcement purpose.

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In June 2026, The Drive editor Joel Feder was test-driving a Range Rover with a New Jersey manufacturer plate when four Minnesota police cars surrounded him and his wife in a parking lot. Police had been receiving Flock alerts because a different plate with a similar code had been reported lost in California.

Flock acknowledges in its official policy that license plate translations can occasionally be incomplete or inaccurate. CEO Garrett Langley later said departments need a clearer process for challenging and correcting inaccurate hotlist entries.

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Disagreement has also spilled into neighborhoods. More than 80 municipalities have ended or declined to renew Flock agreements, while states including Washington have adopted new restrictions on how license plate data can be collected, searched, and shared. Residents of Marinette, Wisconsin, are pressing their city to do the same — a coalition is now circulating a petition calling for its Flock contract to be canceled outright.

Some communities are also dealing with people damaging the cameras themselves. There have been 33 incidents across 23 states in which people damaged or destroyed Flock cameras in apparent protest against surveillance. Cameras have been covered in paint, cut down, burned, obstructed, and struck with vehicles.

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Online, some X users are tracking where Flock cameras appear, which models are being installed, and what direction they face. One user finds the company to be "laying the infrastructure for a mass surveillance network in America."

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For communities considering Flock cameras, the decision now involves weighing their use in investigations against concerns about privacy, access, and oversight.

Due to rising prices, people are using their phones for longer than ever. Future-proofing is now a major consideration, and that means opting for more storage. However, paying extra for more GBs may create more problems than it solves.

Netflix is no stranger to dealing with online movie thieves, but now it's dealing with the fallout from physical theft. Writer and producer Simon Afram and his production company Op-Fortitude are suing Netflix for $105 million in damages after a master copy of the upcoming Nicolas Cage WWII movie Fortitude was stolen from the streaming giant's Los Angeles office.

The Ford Escape Hybrid has never enjoyed the same recognition as rivals like the Toyota RAV4 Hybrid and Honda CR-V Hybrid. Yet with up to 42 mpg in city driving, it has quietly remained one of the most efficient compact SUVs on sale.

The arrival of August means that HBO Max has announced its lineup of new shows and movies coming to the platform. Subscribers have a hearty selection of new content to choose from, but first, the month kicks off with a new original docuseries from the director of Tiger King that’s both shadowy and gripping.

Finding a genuinely fun performance car has become harder than ever. Sports cars have become increasingly expensive, while many affordable performance models force you to sacrifice comfort, practicality, or everyday usability in exchange for speed.

Google and Samsung are both trying to address battery drain issues on their Android phones, and not always successfully. The two have released July 2026 software updates that have alternately fixed and created battery problems.

AI companies have spent years pulling training material from the internet. Now, as more of the web fills with AI-generated writing, some are looking for text in a place largely untouched by chatbots: used-book shelves.

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Until July 28, ISBNdb, a company that operates an online book database, advertised its ability to source as many as 1 million physical books per order for AI developers. The since-deleted page offered books “tailored to your LLM training needs,” according to 404 Media, including older, specialized, rare, and out-of-print titles gathered from used bookstores and other catalogs.

The company also promised confidentiality. Its marketing materials advertised a “strict NDA on every engagement” and said clients’ identities, strategies, and acquisition targets would not be disclosed. That secrecy attracted attention because converting physical books into AI training data can involve destructive scanning: cutting off their bindings, feeding the loose pages through industrial scanners, and discarding or recycling the originals.

By July 28, ISBNdb had removed the sourcing page and its promise of an NDA. The company said the service had been part of “exploring demand” and that it had “chosen to pivot away from that direction," in a news update.

Still, ISBNdb’s brief sales pitch offered a glimpse into a book-buying operation that one major AI developer has already carried out on a much larger scale. Federal court records show that Anthropic purchased and scanned millions of physical books, while used-book sellers in the United States and Europe have recently reported unusual bulk orders for obscure and out-of-print titles.

The reports have opened several practical questions: Why have older books become so valuable to AI developers, how widespread is destructive scanning, and what happens to the originals once their pages become training data?

Why AI companies are hunting for old books

Older books offer something that has become surprisingly difficult to guarantee online: writing produced entirely by humans.

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Large language models are trained on enormous quantities of text collected from websites, articles, books, code repositories, and other digital sources. Since generative AI tools became widely available, however, the internet has filled with machine-written summaries, product listings, social posts, and articles.

That creates a problem for developers assembling new training datasets. If a model is trained too heavily on material produced by earlier models, it can begin reinforcing their mistakes while losing some of the variety and less common information contained in the original human data. Researchers call the process “model collapse.”

A physical book printed before the current AI boom offers a relatively clean alternative. Unlike a webpage that may have been quietly generated or rewritten by a chatbot, an older book provides a more dependable record of human writing. Books are also edited, structured, and often contain specialized information that cannot easily be found elsewhere online.

ISBNdb leaned heavily on those qualities in its sales pitch.

“Books represent curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate,” the company wrote. “Dense, edited, authoritative.”

ISBNdb also emphasized that many potentially useful titles had never been fully digitized. Its marketing effectively presented the pre-chatbot bookshelf as a reserve of human-created training material that had yet to be mixed with AI output.

That demand did not appear out of nowhere. It follows a much longer effort to turn printed books into searchable digital information.

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People have been converting books into digital files for decades. Project Gutenberg began creating electronic versions of public-domain works in 1971 and now offers more than 75,000 free ebooks.

The industrial-scale version arrived with Google Books in 2004. Working with libraries and publishers, Google scanned books and made their contents searchable online. By 2019, the company said it had assembled a collection of more than 40 million books in over 400 languages.

Those scans also helped form HathiTrust, a digital repository created by research libraries in 2008 to preserve their collections and make as much of the material publicly accessible as copyright law allowed.

The project prompted an earlier version of today’s copyright fight. Authors sued Google for scanning copyrighted books without permission, but a federal appeals court ruled in 2015 that the project qualified as fair use. The court found that creating a searchable index and displaying limited snippets gave the books a new purpose without providing readers with a replacement for the originals.

Other digitization programs have emphasized preservation and access. The Internet Archive, for example, says it has digitized more than 25 million books since 2006 using nondestructive scanning designed to keep the bound volumes intact.

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But converting a book into data does not necessarily make it publicly accessible. That distinction concerned Charlie D. Becker, a second-generation bookseller whose family runs Becker’s Books in Houston. His store recently received a single order for 70 obscure titles, including a 1995 guide to metropolitan Denver and manuals explaining how to use WordPerfect in 1991.

After investigating, Becker suspected the buyer was using an algorithm to find underpriced books and relist them on Amazon, rather than acquiring them for AI training. Most of the titles were either unavailable on Amazon or listed there for as much as 20 times his store’s price, and the shipments appeared to be going to Fulfillment by Amazon preparation companies.

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Still, Becker said an obscure book can be especially easy to lose because few people consider it worth preserving. Books that fail to sell through Amazon’s fulfillment system may eventually be liquidated, while some titles have little more than scattered listings across private databases to prove they existed.

“Everyone assumes the internet preserved everything,” Becker wrote in a longer account of the orders. “It didn’t.”

Anthropic has already scanned millions of books

The buyers behind the recent bookstore orders remain unclear. The destructive scanning process, however, is no longer hypothetical.

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In 2024, Anthropic hired Tom Turvey, a former Google executive who had worked on partnerships for the Google Books project. According to a June 2025 federal court ruling, Turvey was tasked with helping the company obtain “all the books in the world” for an internal research library.

Turvey initially contacted publishers about licensing their books, but those conversations did not continue. His team then approached major book distributors and retailers about purchasing print copies in bulk.

Anthropic ultimately spent millions of dollars acquiring millions of physical books, many of them used. Service providers removed the books from their bindings, cut their pages to the appropriate size, and fed them through scanners. The searchable PDF files went into Anthropic’s internal library. The paper originals were discarded.

Engineers could then select groups of those books for inclusion in datasets used to train the large language models behind Claude.

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That process became central to a legal battle over how Anthropic obtained its training material. In June 2025, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that the company’s use of books to train Claude was transformative and qualified as fair use under the specific circumstances of the case.

Alsup also found that converting legally purchased print books into digital files could qualify as fair use because Anthropic destroyed each physical copy and replaced it with one internal digital copy. In other words, the company did not keep both versions.

The ruling did not give AI companies blanket permission to copy any book they could find. Alsup drew a sharp distinction between the print books Anthropic had legally purchased and the more than 7 million pirated books the company had downloaded and stored in a permanent digital library. Purchasing physical copies of some titles later did not erase the original piracy, he found.

That distinction eventually became expensive. On July 20, a federal judge approved Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with authors and publishers, resolving claims involving approximately 482,000 pirated books. Eligible rights holders are expected to receive about $3,000 per title, according to Reuters.

For some authors, the payment does not resolve the larger disagreement. Charles Graeber, one of the case’s original plaintiffs, told NPR that he was proud authors had secured a substantial settlement, but said the case had cost him more than two years of time, travel, and professional opportunities.

Fellow plaintiff Andrea Bartz questioned a system that allows companies to train commercial models on legally purchased books without negotiating separate licenses with the people who wrote them.

“The algorithm is being used to essentially try to put us out of a job,” she told NPR.

Anthropic has maintained that training AI models on books is protected by fair use. The court’s ruling nevertheless helps explain why physical books may be especially attractive to developers: A lawfully purchased copy gives the company a much stronger legal position than a file downloaded from a pirate library.

Destroying the original may be a legally useful distinction. For many readers, it is also the most unsettling part of the story.

Who is buying all these books?

Anthropic’s operation is documented in court records. The source of the more recent bookstore orders is harder to pin down.

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One bookseller specializing in uncommon and low-circulation titles told 404 Media that his weekly sales jumped from roughly 20 books during a good week to several hundred after the orders began arriving in April.

The requested titles did not appear to share a subject, author, genre, or language. They did, however, all have International Standard Book Numbers, or ISBNs, leading the seller to suspect that they had been selected through a book database.

The surge was financially helpful and allowed him to clear inventory that might otherwise have remained unsold. He was less enthusiastic about where the books might be going.

“I don’t like the end-use, and I don’t like that uncommon books are being pulped,” he said.

Booksellers in Europe have reported similarly broad requests. An antiquarian bookseller in the Netherlands received a list of approximately 3,000 English-language books organized by ISBN, ranging from an academic study of Irish folklore to a technical book about laser shock peening.

There is no public confirmation that every unusual bulk order came from an AI company or that every book purchased through these orders was destroyed. There is also no evidence that developers are intentionally hunting for the final surviving copies of rare titles.

The uncertainty itself is part of the concern. A company purchasing from a massive ISBN list could sweep up uncommon or out-of-print editions without first checking how many physical copies remain.

Why the story struck a nerve

Once the reports reached social media, they were accompanied by an unsettling visual: a cutting blade moving inch by inch through a book’s spine. Comparisons to Fahrenheit 451 and the Library of Alexandria followed quickly.

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Book destruction carries a particular weight because it has historically represented more than the loss of paper. The 1933 Nazi book burnings targeted works deemed “un-German,” including books by Jewish, pacifist, and left-wing writers. The act became an enduring symbol of censorship and the suppression of ideas, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

That symbolism is central to Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel about a society where books are outlawed and burned. Bradbury said his warning extended beyond government censorship to television reducing knowledge to digestible fragments and eroding interest in reading. Users have also invoked the Library of Alexandria, another enduring symbol of lost knowledge, although historians believe it declined gradually through political upheaval, reduced support, neglect, and repeated damage rather than disappearing in one catastrophic fire.

Elon Musk joined the conversation on July 27. He wrote on X that he had asked the SpaceXAI team to preserve rare books in a library and scan them “the hard way,” without removing their spines.

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As the discussion spread, users resurfaced a 2011 Cracked article about libraries, universities, and retailers destroying unwanted books years before the current AI boom.

That history has informed a less alarmed response. Some users argued that the books shown in warehouses appeared to be ordinary, unwanted inventory rather than irreplaceable artifacts. If a book would otherwise be recycled without being read again, they asked, could scanning it first preserve something that would have been lost?

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AI adds a complication. The text may survive, but inside a private company’s research library rather than a public archive. A forgotten manual or travel guide may have little resale value, yet still contain exactly what an AI developer wants: edited human writing created before the flood of chatbot output.

That has led authors and publishers to argue that they should have more control over how their work is used, especially when it is helping companies build commercial products. AI developers, meanwhile, continue to argue that training a model is a transformative use of the material rather than a replacement for the original books.

ISBNdb has removed its sourcing page, but the demand behind it remains. The web’s AI problem has sent developers back to the bookshelf. The next chapter will depend on whether they can extract what they need without leaving those shelves any emptier.

I've used Gemini to answer Excel questions for a while, but I wanted to see whether it could handle a real workflow. When I asked it to automate a tedious reporting task, I ended up with a reusable VBA tool that could run in any XLSX workbook—but only after testing, refining, and improving the result.

AI assistants have been pitched as a solution to overflowing inboxes, messy calendars, and trips that still need booking. But what happens when the task being outsourced is remembering your anniversary?

The startup Orchid introduced its personal assistant with a now-viral cinematic video, posted to X July 28, following a woman whose partner has forgotten their anniversary. After she tells Orchid what happened, the assistant contacts him, books a dinner reservation, arranges a flower delivery, and keeps her updated on his progress.

"Introducing Orchid, the first assistant that actually gets you," the company wrote alongside the video. "It remembers what you forget. Down to the flower."

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By the end, Orchid has transformed the mistake into what looks like a thoughtful anniversary celebration. Viewers were less charmed.

The video received more than 20 million views within its first several days, but it also attracted hundreds of replies from people disturbed by the future it seemed to present.

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The reservation and flower delivery were hardly the most controversial parts. AI tools already help users search for restaurants, make plans, and select gifts; apparently, romance is now just another workflow waiting to be automated.

So, what does Orchid actually do?

Orchid describes itself as a personal assistant that users communicate with through text messages. The company says it can manage email, schedule meetings, prepare users for calls, plan trips, source gifts, handle invoices, and remember personal details.

Users can also ask Orchid to create recurring "habits," including delivering a morning news briefing, checking the weather, tracking meals, sending medication reminders, and automatically checking them into flights.

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The product's primary audience appears to be professional. According to Orchid's FAQ, it was designed for "founders, investors, lawyers, agents, and agency owners" whose time would be better spent on "real work" than administrative tasks. The company's only published case study focuses on helping an executive prepare for client calls.

But the video shows the assistant doing more than organizing someone's calendar. Orchid appears to connect to the users' iMessage accounts in order to communicate separately with both members of the couple, passing information between them and reporting one person's actions to the other.

Orchid co-founder Nizar Abi Zaher told Gizmodo that "Orchid allows multiple people to communicate with the same agent and share context." For now, he said, that feature is "just group chats and also coordinating meetings." In the advertisement, however, the couple appears to be communicating with Orchid through two private conversations.

Although Orchid's homepage promises "a hundred tools, one assistant," its FAQ says the product presently works with Gmail and Google Calendar. Integrations with Outlook, Slack, Notion, and Linear are still on the way.

The company also says the AI acts "only within the limits that you set." Email responses remain in drafts until the user sends them, while calendar holds require approval. It also says it does not sell users' data or use it to train AI models.

A shared assistant raises additional questions. The ad doesn't explain which information each partner has agreed to share, whether either person can access the other's messages, or how Orchid determines what it can report back. At least, not yet. Mashable has reached out to Orchid for a comment.

Social media isn't sold on Orchid's vision

The possibility of using AI to shape a relationship is not especially new. In a 2025 survey of over 5,000 U.S. singles, 26 percent said they were using AI to enhance their dating lives, a 333 percent increase from the previous year. Nearly half of Gen Z singles had used it for tasks such as filtering matches, writing messages, and evaluating their dating habits.

AI has also made its way into established relationships. A 2026 survey of 1,000 married U.S. adults found that 44 percent had used an AI tool for relationship advice, rising to nearly 65 percent among millennials. That growing use has not necessarily made people comfortable with AI's expanding role — about half of U.S. adults believe AI will worsen people's ability to form meaningful relationships.

That discomfort may help explain why Orchid's ad went over so poorly online: "an AI for perpetuating your dead-end relationship that both parties secretly hate," one X user wrote. Another described Orchid as an "assistant for people who want to subcontract all the basic acts of care that make up a relationship." Some users described the concept as "lame," and an advertisement for "adult babies uninterested in the world they live in." One viewer offered a more concise thought: "Tech people need to stop."

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Some people suspect the company understood exactly how the scenario would be received. "I think they knew what they were doing and hoped the ragebait worked," one user wrote. "Unfortunately it did."

The company has said it intentionally built the advertisement around a story instead of creating a traditional product demonstration. "We wanted to build a story around a real situation," the Orchid team explained in a behind-the-scenes video.

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At least one member of Orchid's team appeared to be taking notes. "If you have feedback on Orchid or ideas on what would make you actually use it, my DMs are open!" Lucas Valbuena, an intern at the startup, posted on X as the backlash spread. Meanwhile, other Orchid employees, AI companies, and engineers publicly rallied behind the company.

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The ad also made its way to r/ExecutiveAssistants, where the person who started the discussion said their "heart kind of broke" after learning about Orchid. Along with worrying about the loss of human connection, they asked whether AI could eventually replace people in their field.

The assistants who responded were mostly skeptical that Orchid could replace them. One predicted that products like it would become tools executive assistants use, leaving humans to catch hallucinations and supply the context AI misses.

"Execs are way too lazy to work these out themselves," the commenter added. Another dismissed Orchid as "marketing fluff aimed at the people who could never really afford us," arguing that a reminder app cannot reproduce the emotional intelligence experienced assistants bring to the job.

That skepticism helps explain why Orchid's ad bothered so many. An assistant can book a table and order flowers, but those gestures usually matter because a partner remembered the occasion and chose to make them in the first place. In the video, Orchid does that work while the human receives the credit.

Orchid promises to remember an anniversary "down to the flower." The backlash suggests people still care who remembers it in the first place.

Few vehicles have managed to buck the trend in 2026, with rising prices and shifting buyer preferences making growth increasingly difficult across the industry. Yet one rugged SUV has done exactly that, posting one of the most impressive sales surges of any mainstream model this year.

Here at Mashable, we're constantly testing the best laptops based on an exhaustive in-house methodology that combines real-world use with performance benchmarking. In the past two years alone, we've tried over 80 different models across a range of price points.

To determine which of them fit the bill for college students, specifically, I researched the top 10 public universities' hardware recommendations for the upcoming fall 2026 semester. These include processor types, operating system support, RAM and storage minimums, and other spec requirements for different majors. I honed my guidance based on the common threads I noticed.

I also gave special preference to laptops that are long-lasting and portable enough to be toted around campus, and those that are competitively priced for the current market. Laptops aren't cheap right now, but a solid splurge can last you well past graduation. (Take advantage of student discounts whenever possible.)

Based on this analysis, I eventually settled on six top picks that make the best laptops for college students. Whether you're a humanities student, a STEM major, or still undeclared, I'm confident that at least one of my options will be your ideal machine. You can read more about these picks and my research below.

What to look for in a college laptop, based on my research A Windows laptop with a mid-tier Intel Core or AMD Ryzen 7 processor is suitable for most college students. Credit: Haley Henschel / Mashable

Six of this year's 10 top-ranking public universities tell their incoming students to purchase Windows 11 laptops or MacBooks that are less than two years old. I wouldn't go any older than that for the sake of future-proofing.

Most of those schools tell their students to purchase laptops with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD storage at minimum. (Liberal arts majors might be able to get away with 256GB of storage, but you'll probably have to supplement that with an external hard drive.) More RAM and storage is better if your budget allows; more is mandatory if you're an engineering, design, or computer science major. Students in those fields are generally advised to get a laptop with at least 24GB to 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.

SEE ALSO: Laptop specs explained: A jargon-free guide to what's inside your computer

You can approach your processor options in a similar way. For Windows laptops, most schools suggest a mid-range CPU like an Intel Core/AMD Ryzen 5 at minimum, and a mid- to high-end Intel Core/AMD Ryzen 7 or 9 chip for more demanding workloads. Several schools recommend tacking on a dedicated GPU for such coursework, too (i.e, Nvidia GeForce RTX/Radeon RX graphics). On the Apple side, the MacBook Air and Pro with the base M5 chip are go-to recs for most students.

Two schools tell their students not to buy ARM-based Windows laptops (with Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors) because they can't run certain software natively, and because they don't support older peripherals like university printers and scanners. One software example is AutoCAD, a popular 2D and 3D design app that engineering and design students rely on heavily. I love a lot of ARM laptops because they're fast and long-lasting, and I will say that their compatibility is improving every year. Still, I've opted to keep them off my list of 2026 picks out of an abundance of caution; stick with Intel and AMD CPUs for now.

Be sure to budget for an extended warranty with accidental damage protection, as suggested by over half of the top 10 public universities. For reference, AppleCare+ for Mac costs $67.99 to $139.99 a year for students, depending on the MacBook model.

What type of laptop should college students buy? Credit: Joe Maldonado / Mashable

This is a question that only your college can answer for sure, as laptop type recommendations can vary by major. For example, the University of Virginia and the University of California, Davis approve MacBooks for their general student populations, but their engineering departments tell certain tracks to avoid them. Likewise, UCLA's Anderson School of Management hardware requirement page says, "Mac computers are acceptable to use as primary computers for study at Anderson. However, please note that some elective course software is only available for Windows. Students are responsible for ensuring compatibility and configuring their Macs accordingly."

I can say for sure that you probably shouldn't buy a Chromebook. Three schools in my research pool discouraged them for some or all majors, and one school — the University of Florida — only recommended them "as supplemental devices." I included a Chromebook in a previous version of this guide as a secondary option for note-taking, but price increases amid the ongoing RAM shortage have made many of them just as expensive as Apple's budget MacBook Neo (if not more so), which is a much nicer and more powerful computer, relatively speaking.

Do you need your own laptop for college?

Yes, you should have your own laptop at college. Most universities let students temporarily borrow laptops through their libraries and/or tech desks. However, these loaners are available on a first-come, first-served basis and wiped upon return (i.e., you can't save anything on them long-term).

I wouldn't rely too heavily on your school's computer lab, either, because you can't take bring those desktops to class or your dorm. Ultimately, owning your own laptop is way more convenient and ensures you'll have the exact specs needed for your major's coursework.

Recent updates to this guide

• July 30, 2026: I updated this guide with the results of the Dell 14S' battery life test. It was able to loop a video for 34 hours and 29 minutes before dying — very impressive!

• July 25, 2026: My preferred configuration of the Acer Swift X 14 is back in stock, so I added it to this guide in place of the Acer Swift X 14 AI. They're both smart buys, but the non-AI version is more powerful and lasts much longer.

• July 18, 2026: I overhauled this guide to the best laptops for college students ahead of the start of the 2026 school year. I added fresh picks from Apple, Acer, and Dell based on all-new testing and research.

WPA3 is one of those router settings that most people will tell you to use. You might have done it and assumed your job was done, but that's not always true. Unfortunately.

Every time you type a website into your browser, your ISP gets a free ticket to watch it. A few Windows 11 privacy settings get talked about a lot, but this one rarely does, even though it's been sitting inside your PC this whole time. It's not a third-party app, and you don't need to install anything new. You only need to know where to look, and honestly, most people never do.

Investors are thinking twice about the stocks that have most benefited from the AI boom.

The 20 most valuable chip stocks have lost $1.3 trillion over the past week after a big sell-off, according to analysis by CNBC.

According to the outlet's data, Nvidia led in losses after investors liquidated $238 billion since the market closed on Friday. There's perhaps no bigger sign that investors are getting cold feet when it comes to artificial intelligence, as Nvidia has benefited more than any other company from the AI boom. 

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Other companies in the memory space have also taken a big hit. SK Hynix lost $176 billion. Samsung is down $173 billion. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. lost $119 billion. Micron shed $113 billion. And AMD is down $110 billion.

Tech companies have seen demand in memory and storage skyrocket as AI companies buy out supply to power their insatiable compute needs. Due to this, RAM and SSD storage supply has dwindled for everyday consumers. Consumer tech companies like Apple have been forced to institute price hikes on their products as a result.

Despite this, however, investors are seemingly starting to question their AI-related investments.

“This decline appears to be driven largely by sentiment rather than fundamentals,” Morningstar's Chief Equity Strategist Michael Field told CNBC. “Simply put, it’s loss of confidence,” he added. “We continue to see upside in many AI names, but these are growth stocks, and, as such, much of their value comes from cash flows expected far out into the future, which requires a lot of faith from investors.”

Investor concern surrounding AI technology seems rooted in the fact that while these companies make billions of dollars, they're spending way more than they make. According to recent reporting from the Financial Times and Ed Zitron, AI giant OpenAI had a net loss of $38.5 billion last year. Just this week, OpenAI announced that it will spend $750 billion on infrastructure through 2030. Finally, Google recently experienced its first-ever negative cash flow quarter, thanks to spending on AI infrastructure.

Of course, investor sentiment on AI can turn around quickly.

I've had Roku devices in my house for years, going all the way back to when it was just a little box sitting next to the TV. At this point, I've got several Roku TVs and a few sticks spread across different rooms, and for the most part, I've always used them the same way. Open an app, pick something to watch, and move on. It works, so I never really thought much about what else was there.