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2026-03-14 01:40:32

Amazon is raising the price of its ad-free Prime Video subscription and locking 4K UHD streaming behind this new tier. Starting April 10 for US customers, a rebranded Prime Video Ultra subscription will cost $5 per month, up from $3 per month.

For that extra $2, you get a download capacity increase from 25 to 100, and you can now run five streams concurrently instead of three. Whether those "Ultra" upgrades are worth the $24 annual hike will probably depend on how many boxsets you like to plough through on a long flight, or how many devices are using your Prime Video account.

The changes are most galling for Prime members who automatically qualify for Prime Video with ads through their membership, as Amazon has decided to remove 4K streaming from the standard tier. That means that, despite already paying $15 per month or $139 per year for Amazon Prime, you’ll be stuck with 1080p shows and movies unless you sign up to Prime Video Ultra. 

Amazon has thrown in Dolby Vision support for the first time, as well as upping the concurrent stream and download count on its free tier as well, but you’re losing the privilege of UHD content that has been available to all Prime Video members for years. Dolby Atmos remains exclusive to the $5 tier too.

Amazon is the latest streamer to put its prices up, following similar recent hikes to Apple TV, Disney+ and HBO Max. If you don’t want to give the company any more of your hard-earned, you have just under a month to binge your way through the second season of Fallout in all of its irradiated UHD glory.

2026-03-14 00:45:25

Parallels, the company best known for making the virtualization software that enables you to run Windows and other operating systems on a Mac, has confirmed that Parallels Desktop is compatible with the MacBook Neo.

At launch it was unclear if Apple's new $600 laptop possessed the under-the-hood heft to run Windows apps, but in a recently updated post on its website, Parallels said that initial tests show its software running "stably," although performance is still being assessed.

The MacBook Neo uses an A18 Pro chip, which debuted in the iPhone 16 Pro. However, as this chip is based on the same ARM architecture as M-series chips for Mac, it’s still capable of running Parallels’ Windows virtual machine.

But there is a caveat to all this. Just because you can do something, it doesn’t necessarily mean you should. While Parallels Desktop could theoretically be a viable option for Neo owners who are only interested in light Windows use, anything that puts a significant strain on the CPU or GPU is going to present a problem.

This is because the MacBook Neo only ships with 8GB of RAM, and as Parallels highlights, Windows 11 requires a minimum of 4GB of RAM to run. That leaves a very small amount of remaining headroom for macOS and your Mac apps to run alongside Windows, which is going to noticeably hurt the laptop’s performance. Add to that the lack of a cooling fan, meaning the chip will reduce clock speeds when it detects a heavy CPU or GPU load, and this definitely isn’t a device for power users.

If you really want to dabble with Windows on a Mac, Parallels recommends picking up an Apple laptop with 16GB of unified memory or more, like the new MacBook Air M5 or a MacBook Pro. And for those content with macOS and looking to save some money, we dubbed the MacBook Neo the best $600 laptop we’ve ever used in our recently published review.

2026-03-14 00:08:06

The newly verified X account for Iran's supreme leader could be putting the company on the wrong side of US sanctions, according to a watchdog group. The Tech Transparency Project, which last month published a report on X granting premium perks to sanctioned officials in Iran, now says that the verified account for the country's new leader raises fresh questions about the issue. 

The TTP notes that the X account for Iran's new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, appears to be paying for an X premium subscription despite being on the US government's list of sanctioned individuals since 2019. As the group points out, the Iran-based account was created this month and currently bears a blue checkmark, which typically indicates the account holder is paying for a subscription. 

The account belonging to Mojtaba Khamenei has been boosted by other state-linked accounts in Iran, including the one that previously belonged to Khamenei's father. That account has had a gray checkmark, which indicates it belongs to a verified government official. Verified accounts on X are rewarded with extra visibility on the platform, along with other perks. The younger Khamenei's verified account has already gained more than 20,000 new followers in the hours since TTP first posted about it. 

"The new Supreme Leader's account is just the latest account for a sanctioned entity apparently paying X for premium services," TTP director Katie Paul said in a statement to Engadget. "TTP has identified dozens of accounts, many linked to designated terrorists, that subscribed to X premium over the past three years. What's more concerning than the blatant disregard for U.S. sanctions law is the fact that Musk's companies have a contract with the Pentagon while X is actively profiting from U.S. adversaries."

As Paul notes, this isn't the first time TTP has raised questions about whether X is running afoul of US sanctions via its premium service. In 2024, the group published a report noting that X was accepting paid verification from more than two dozen sanctioned individuals and groups. The company said at the time that it had a "a robust and secure approach in place for our monetization features." 

X didn't respond to a request for comment. But in the hours after Engadget reached out about Khamenei’s account, the blue checkmark was removed. The company also removed blue checks from a handful of Iran-based accounts flagged by TTP last month following reporting from Wired.

Update, March 13, 2026, 9:08AM PT: This story was updated to reflect changes made to Khamenei’s account following publication.

2026-03-13 23:55:53

TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance has figured out a way to access NVIDIA's latest AI chips despite export restrictions, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. The company is working with a firm called Aolani Cloud and building out Blackwell computing systems in Malaysia.

This should give ByteDance access to around 36,000 B200 chips. That's NVIDIA's most powerful processor. The hardware buildout will reportedly cost more than $2.5 billion. The company says it plans on using this new computing power for AI research and development outside of China.

The country has been unable to access the B200 chip, as it was designed in California and, as such, subject to US export controls. This has led some Chinese companies to do what ByteDance is doing with Aolani Cloud. The Singapore-based firm will buy up the components from NVIDIA and will operate exclusively in Malaysia, giving ByteDance access in the process.

"By design, the export rules allow clouds to be built and operated ​outside controlled ​countries," an NVIDIA spokesperson said. They also said that all of the company's cloud partners go through review before being approved to receive its products.

A representative from Aolani Cloud told Reuters ‌that the company adheres to all applicable export control regulations and that ByteDance will be just one of many customers. It plans on providing cloud-computing services to multiple companies across Asia and the globe. However, it's worth noting that Aolani currently operates ‌with just $100 million worth ⁠of hardware and ByteDance is planning to inject a whopping $2.5 billion.

The US did recently allow ByteDance to buy NVIDIA's H200 chips, but they've been slapped with a 25 percent tariff. Additionally, the US government mandated that the export license would only be approved if NVIDIA accepted a Know-Your-Customer requirement, which is an attempt to ensure that China's military can't access the chips. NVIDIA has yet to agree to these terms.

2026-03-13 23:01:25

Inevitably, the more you use something — your Mac included — the more dirty and cluttered it’s likely to become. At that point, you can buy a new machine, but the more economical move is to make what you have already work better. To help your computer feel new, or at least a little cleaner and less chaotic, we put together this guide with techniques and useful apps that have helped us maintain a more organized computer. I’ve been using these tips since before I first published this guide in 2021, and they’ve helped keep my 2018 MacBook Air looking and running (almost) like brand new.

How to clean your Mac’s screen and body

While there are many products out there from manufacturers claiming their one does it best, my advice is to keep things simple. It’s also the one Apple recommends. To start, you will need some water in a spray bottle and a clean microfiber cloth. You can use regular water from the tap but I've found distilled water works best; it’s far less likely to leave residue behind on your Mac, particularly on the display. You can buy distilled water at a grocery store or make it yourself with some simple cookware. Either way, it’s more affordable than dedicated cleaning solutions. If you don’t already own any microfiber towels, Amazon sells affordable 24-packs you can get for about $10.

One other product I would recommend is a Giottos Rocket Blower. I can’t say enough good things about this little tool. It will save you from buying expensive and wasteful cans of compressed air.

As for the actual process of cleaning your Mac, remember to start with a clean cloth (that’s part of the reason we recommend buying them in bulk). You’ll save yourself time and frustration this way. Begin by turning off your computer and unplugging it. If you bought a Rocket Blower, use it now to remove any dust. If not, take a dry microfiber cloth and go over your computer. Take special care around the keys, particularly if you own an older Mac with a butterfly keyboard.

Next, dampen one side of your cleaning cloth with water. Never spray any liquid directly on your computer. You’ll have more control this way and you’ll avoid getting any moisture into your Mac’s internals. I always clean the display first since the last thing I want to do is create more work for myself by transferring dirt from some other part of my computer to the screen.

The last step is to buff and polish your computer with the dry side of the cloth. Be gentle here as you don’t want to scratch the screen or any other part of. That’s it. Your Mac should be looking clean again.

How to organize your hard drive

Igor Bonifacic / Engadget

One of the trickiest parts of cleaning your Mac’s hard drive is knowing where to start; most of us have apps on our computers we don’t even remember installing in the first place. Thankfully, macOS comes with a tool to help you with that exact issue.

Navigate to System Settings > General > Storage. Here you’ll find a tool that separates your storage into broad categories like "Applications," "Documents," "Music," "Photos" and so on. Either double-click on an item in the list or click the circled i icon to see the last time you used an app and how much space it’s taking up. You can delete the apps from the same window.

The applications section is particularly helpful since you can see the last time you used a program, as well as if it’s no longer supported by the operating system or if it’s outdated thanks to a more recent release.

You don’t need me to tell you to uninstall programs you don’t use, but what you might not know is that there’s a better way to erase them than simply dragging them to the trash can. A free program called AppCleaner will help you track down any files and folders that would get left behind if you were just to delete an application.

Igor Bonifacic / Engadget

After deleting any apps you don’t need, move to the Documents section. The name is somewhat misleading here since you’ll find more than just text files and Keynote spreadsheets. In this case, documents turns out to be the tool’s catch-all term for a variety of files, including ones that take up a large amount of space. You can also safely delete any DMGs (disc image files with the extension .dmg) for which you’ve installed the related app.

The other sections in the storage space are self-explanatory. The only other thing I’ll mention is if you’ve been using an iPhone for a while, there’s a good chance you’ll have old iOS backups stored on your computer. You can safely delete those, too.

Tips and tricks for keeping a neat Desktop and Finder

Igor Bonifacic

Let’s start with the menu bar. It may not technically be part of the desktop, but a tidy one can go a long way toward making everything else look less cluttered. My recommendation here is to download an app called Bartender. At first glance, it’s a simple program allowing you to hide unwanted menu bar items behind a three-dots icon, but the strength of Bartender is that you get a lot of customization options. For example, you can set a trigger that will automatically move the battery status icon out from hiding when your computer isn’t connected to a power outlet.

While we’re on the subject of the menu bar, take a second to navigate to System Settings > General > Login Items & Extensions and look at all the apps that launch when you boot up your system. You can speed up your system by paring down this list to only the programs you use frequently.

When it comes to the desktop itself, less is more. Nothing will make your computer look like a cluttered mess more than a busy desktop. Folders and stacks can help, but for most people, I suspect part of the problem is they use their desktop as a way to quickly and easily find files that are important to them.

If you’ve ever struggled to find a specific file or folder on your computer, try using your Mac’s tagging capabilities instead. Start by opening the Finder Settings menu (Command + ,) and click the Tags tab. You can use the default ones provided by macOS or make your own. Drag the ones you think you’ll use most often to the favorites areas at the bottom of the preferences window. This will make it so that they’re easily accessible when you want to use them. To append a tag to a file or folder, click on it while holding the ctrl key and select the one you want from the dropdown menu. You can also tag a file while working on it within an app. Keep in mind you can apply multiple tags to a single file or folder, and you can even apply them to applications.

Igor Bonifacic / Engadget

What makes tags so useful in macOS is that they can appear in the sidebar of the Finder window, and are easily searchable either directly with Finder or using Siri. As long as you have a system for organizing your files, even a simple one, you’ll find it easier to keep track of them. As one example, I like to apply an Engadget tag to any files related to my work. I’ll add an “Important” tag if it’s something that’s critical and I want to find quickly.

One tool that can help supercharge your Finder experience is Alfred. It’s effectively a more powerful version of Apple’s Spotlight feature. Among other things, you can use Alfred to find and launch apps quickly. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but once you get a hang of it, Alfred will change how you use your Mac for the better.

How to organize your windows and tabs

Igor Bonifacic / Engadget

If you’ve used both macOS and Windows 10, you’ll know that Apple’s operating system doesn’t come with the best window management tools. You can click and hold on the green full-screen button to tile a window to either the left or right side of your screen, but that’s about it and the feature has always felt less precise than its Windows counterpart.

My suggestion is to download an app that replicates Windows 10’s snapping feature. You have several competing options that more or less offer the same functionality. My go-to is a $5 program called Magnet. If you want a free alternative, check out Rectangle. Another option is BetterSnapTool, which offers more functionality than Magnet but doesn’t have as clean of an interface. All three apps give you far more ways to configure your windows than what you get through the built-in tool in macOS. They also come with shortcut support, which means you can quickly set up your windows and get to work.

Check out more from our spring cleaning guide.

2026-03-13 22:30:33

It's already smartphone season. Samsung's annual deluge encompasses three new phones for 2026: the frontier-pushing S26 Ultra ($1,300) with its innovative Privacy Screen, the S26 ($899) and the S26+ ($999). The smaller flagships, yet again, are iterative versions of what came before, with the major differences centering on bigger batteries and brighter screens.

I'm getting waves of deja vu as I review the Galaxy S26, because at times I was writing exactly what I wrote last year — including the part about it being a little too similar to what came before.

Hardware

Image by Mat Smith for Engadget

Let's focus on the changes. The Galaxy S26's screen size is a little bigger than its predecessor's; 6.3 inches, up from 6.2 inches on the S25. However, it still has the same FHD+ (2,340 x 1,080) resolution. Given the slight size difference, there's no particular drop in sharpness. The screen can also go slightly brighter, topping out at 3,000 nits, which is always welcome — especially when Samsung has increased the battery to 4,300mAh from the S25's 4,000mAh. (The S25 already impressed us with its battery longevity.)

The design, however, is largely unchanged. The camera trio now sits on a unified circular island and, well, that's all I really have to say. Once again, it's premium Samsung hardware, but otherwise I'd just be reiterating what I said last year… and our review from the year before that.

Inside, Samsung increased the base RAM to 12GB and the storage to 256GB on the S26, doubling the space found on the S25. With the S26's processor, Samsung split the device into two different builds depending on region. In the US, you'll get the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy, like the S26 Ultra. Elsewhere, including my review device in the UK, the S26 and (S26+) have the in-house Exynos 2600.

Samsung's Exynos 2600 SoC is its first 2nm chip and should offer power-efficiency improvements over larger alternatives. This year's S26 didn't struggle with any of the games I played or video-editing tasks. Samsung says its new chip delivers around 50 percent better performance across single- and multicore tasks. The Exynos 2600 includes a new Xclipse 960 GPU, which casubtlenuan deliver double the graphical performance of the Exynos 2500.

On Geekbench 6, the Exynos S26 scored 3151 on single-core tests and 10,664 on multicore tests (not far behind the Snapdragon-powered S26 Ultra). Similarly, the GPU score (24425) didn't lag far behind — all pleasant surprises. There is a but coming.

Comparing battery rundown tests between a Snapdragon S26 and my Exynos version revealed a gap. Watching a looped video at 50 percent brightness, the Exynos iteration lasted almost 28 hours, while the Snapdragon 8 Elite S26 lasted nearly 30 hours. Sure, that's great longevity regardless of which S26 model you get. But this year's flagship does have a bigger battery, so why is the Exynos-powered version only matching last year's phone?

Cameras

Image by Mat Smith for Engadget

Not much has changed in the composition (or resolution) of the camera trio: there's a 50-megapixel main, a 12MP ultrawide and a 10MP telephoto. That means that any improvements in photos and video are subtle, to put it kindly.

It's hard to discern the improvements this year without really scrutinizing dark shots and zooming right in. The S26 does seem a little faster at capturing bursts and high-res video. And while I prefer the no-nonsense shooting of the Pixel 10a, the S26 offers a little more versatility with its zoom and ultrawide cameras. Cropped zoom, for example, lets you get closer to subjects beyond the 3X optical zoom, though more detail is lost than with the S26 Ultra and its larger resolution sensors.

Image by Mat Smith for Engadget

Once you've taken the shot, Samsung's bundle of AI tools can take over. Photo Assist attempts to corral all of these editing features into one place, offering quick ways to reduce reflections or edit out photobombers. You can now use natural language text prompts to guide your photo editing.

For example, I attempted to adjust the lighting more evenly on a photo of me taken outdoors with a flash. I could do it with my rudimentary photo-editing skills, but Samsung's tools are fast and, crucially, very easy to use. It's a feature where natural language interfaces really make sense.

With the front-facing camera, Samsung has added its Object Aware Engine, promising better, more accurate rendering of skin tones and hair, as well as an improved portrait mode. But again, I noticed marginal differences. The S26 seemed to have better color accuracy than its predecessor, resulting in slightly warmer selfies.

For videos, Samsung Super Steady mode is now more versatile, maintaining a consistent horizontal lock no matter how much you move around. As I mentioned during my hands-on, it's an interesting addition, the kind of feature you typically see on action cams and gimbals. It works well, too, although the footage does pick up a bit of focus-pumping as it fights to stabilize everything.

Rounding out the new additions is an Autoframing mode that crops in on your tracked subject as they move around. There's a degree of auto-detection for faces and pets, but you can tap to apply tracking to anything, to which it locks on well. It works particularly well with tripods, but there is a slight floating effect as the S26 tries to keep up with the phone's movement. I also noticed warping at the edge of the lens when the camera app kept my subject centered in the frame.

Software

Image by Mat Smith for Engadget

Samsung's S26 launch event suggested this was the era of agentic AI, with assistants now positioned to connect the dots between tasks themselves. We're not quite there, though.

The company has slightly expanded many of the features introduced last year. Now Brief is capable of pulling data from more apps to generate more comprehensive daily summaries, but I mostly saw the usual suspects: weather, calendar reminders and not much else.

Across the S26, a new Now Nudge feature will suggest actions with an unobtrusive icon, based on what's happening on screen, such as sharing contact numbers with someone or suggesting calendar times while dealing with work emails.

Perplexity is an interesting addition. The S26 series is in a curious spot where it has hooks into no fewer than three AI assistants: Gemini, Bixby (bless its heart) and now Perplexity.

You do have to install the Perplexity app (and log in to use it), but you can then choose to make it your primary AI assistant. Odd things are missing: Samsung said Perplexity integration would work across the phone, including its own Browser app — something I was excited to test. Perplexity's own browser, Comet, has a slick feature that lets it browse and summarize multiple tabs. I was in the middle of deciding where to eat during my recent trip to Barcelona, so I thought this was a great use case. However, that feature isn't available in Samsung's browser for now. According to Perplexity, Samsung will "integrate Perplexity's APIs into the Samsung Browser, with agentic browser capabilities."

Voice commands of "Hey Plex" also went unanswered. I found I had to manually grant permissions to the Perplexity app for it to work like Google's Gemini. This could just be teething issues with a pre-release device and software, but Perplexity, for now, doesn't offer enough utility beyond what I was already used to with Gemini.

Wrap-up

Image by Mat Smith for Engadget

The Galaxy S26 is a solid phone, with upgraded battery capacity and more base storage. Whether you get the Exynos or the Snapdragon S26, there's fortunately no performance gulf as has happened in the past. However, the shorter battery life is a disappointing discovery from Samsung's first 2nm chip.

For Samsung's smallest flagships over the last three years, it's all been very samey. Is the company now focused on its true flagship Ultra phone and foldables to generate buzz and make things exciting? That's what it feels like. There's nothing wrong with this safe, solid Android phone, but you could pick up last year's S25 and get an experience that's 99 percent the same for $99 less.