Vinicius™

While the new ‘Liquid Glass’ look and a way more powerful Spotlight might be the leading features of macOS Tahoe 26, I’ve found that bringing over a much-loved iPhone feature has proven to be the highlight after weeks of testing. Live Activities steal the show on the iPhone, thanks to their glanceability and effortless way of highlighting key info, whether it’s from a first or third-party app. Some of my favorites are: Flighty displays flight tracking details in real-time, for myself, family, or friends Airlines like United show my seat, a countdown for boarding, or even baggage claim Rideshare apps tell you what kind of car you're driving is arriving in Apple Sports displays your favorite teams' live scores in real-time with the game Now, all of this is arriving on the Mac – right at the top navigation bar, near the right-hand side. They appear when your iPhone is nearby, signed into the same Apple Account, and mirror the same Live Activities you’d see on your phone. It’s a simple but powerful addition. I’ve used it plenty at my desk, but to me, it truly shines in Economy class. If you’ve ever tried balancing an iPhone and a MacBook Pro – or even a MacBook Air – on a tray table, you know the awkward overlap. I usually end up propping the iPhone against my screen, hanging it off the palm rest, or just tossing it in my lap. With Live Activities on the Mac, I can stick to one device and keep the tray table clutter-free. Considering notifications already sync, iPhone Mirroring arrived last year, Live Activities were ultimately the missing piece. On macOS Tahoe, they sit neatly collapsed in the menu bar, just like the Dynamic Island on iPhone, and you can click on one to expand and see the full Live Activity. Another click on any of these Live Activities quickly opens the app on your iPhone via the Mirroring app – it all works together pretty seamlessly. You can also easily dismiss them, as I have found they automatically expand for major updates, saving screen real estate on your Mac. If you already have a Live Activity that you really enjoy on your iPhone, there’s really no extra work needed from the developer, as these will automatically repeat. https://www.techradar.com/computing/mac-os/one-of-my-favorite-iphone-features-arrives-on-the-mac-with-tahoe-and-i-cant-stop-using-it

AMD’s new Radeon RX 9060 8GB non-XT is the fifth card in the RDNA 4 family, arriving quietly and without a retail shelf debut. Like the RX 9070 GRE before it, this one is meant for OEM systems—prebuilt rigs you can actually buy in places like South Korea, but not yet in most other markets. That didn’t stop South Korean YouTuber Technosaurus from cracking open a newly purchased desktop, pulling out the card, and putting it through some benchmarks. On paper, the RX 9060 is supposed to slot neatly between Nvidia’s RTX 5050 and AMD’s own RX 9060 XT. Under the hood, it’s a cut-down Navi 44 GPU featuring 28 compute units, 1,792 shaders, 28 ray tracing cores, and 8GB of GDDR6 over a 128-bit bus. It runs just shy of 3 GHz, sips about 135 watts under load, and, in this case, came in Sapphire’s compact Pulse variant. The drop from the XT’s 32 CUs doesn’t sound like much, and as it turns out, in practice, it isn’t. Technosaurus ran the RX 9060 through nine modern games at 1080p with every slider cranked. What emerged was a surprisingly tight race: the RX 9060 landed within 2% of the RTX 5060 and just 6% shy of the RX 9060 XT, which is close enough that you’d need a benchmark overlay to tell them apart, as shown below. The real beatdown came against the RTX 5050, which only managed about 80% of the RX 9060’s frame rates—a gap big enough to see and feel in-game. The card’s behavior was also telling. That 3 GHz boost clock isn’t a boost; rather, it’s where the RX 9060 lives during gaming, until the modest power limit nudges it back. According to the host, overclocking isn’t going to net big gains here, but the efficiency is there, and the performance consistency between high-end CPUs like the Ryzen 7 9800X3D and more modest chips like the Ryzen 5 7500F suggests AMD has found a sweet spot for budget builds. Synthetic benchmarks continue to tell more of the same story. In 3DMark’s Time Spy, the RX 9060 posted 14,132 points; in Fire Strike, 35,511. That’s 38% and 25% faster than the RTX 5050, and still just a hair behind the RTX 5060. Titles like Cyberpunk 2077, God of War (2018), and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 saw frame rates so close to the 5060 that, for most players, paying extra wouldn’t make sense—at least if you could buy one of these cards off the shelf. The other catch: the RX 9060 is still an 8GB card in 2025, which means its runway for “ultra” settings in the next wave of games isn’t long, especially if you bring ray tracing into the equation. The 16GB RX 9060 XT will age better (like most 16 GB cards), especially at 1080p, but it costs more and draws more power. If AMD ever brings the RX 9060 to global retail, it could be the value king of this segment, but for now, it’s a quiet OEM-only assassin. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/amds-new-rx-9060-ripped-out-of-oem-pc-and-benchmarked-beats-the-rtx-5050-by-20-percent-basically-ties-the-rtx-5060-in-gaming-and-productivity

Nick movie: The Thursday Murder Club | Official Trailer | Netflix Time: 2025 Netflix / Amazon / HBO: Netflix Duration of the movie: 2:14 Trailer:

Music title: Avenged Sevenfold - Afterlife [Official Music Video] Signer: Avenged Sevenfold Release date: March 13, 2008 Official YouTube link:

A social media account linked to Chinese state media wrote an article on WeChat asserting that Nvidia’s H20 chips are neither technologically advanced nor environmentally friendly. According to Reuters, the account, Yuyuan Tantian, is connected to China Central Television, which is a key organization in the country’s state media (propaganda) apparatus. “When a type of chip is neither environmentally friendly, nor advanced, nor safe, as consumers, we certainly have the option not to buy it,” Yuyuan Tantian said in the article (a translation, we assume). The H20 chip is Nvidia’s answer to Washington’s ban on high-end AI GPU exports to China. Although its performance is only a fraction of what the top-of-the-line H200 can accomplish, it still sold surprisingly well, resulting in Nvidia posting a record revenue despite temporarily falling under export control between April and July 2025. Aside from its reduced horsepower, Chinese authorities are also concerned with possible hidden geo-tracking and backdoors in the Green Team silicon. The U.S. Congress introduced a bill to enforce location tracking of high-end gaming and AI GPUs in mid-May, with the White House mulling doing the same earlier this month. Because of this, China has raised concerns about the security of the H20 chips that Nvidia sells in the country, even going as far as summoning the AI chip giant to explain if it had any backdoor security risks. This isn’t the only criticism of Nvidia in Chinese media in recent times. People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, said that Nvidia should convince the Chinese people that its chips do not have security risks. However, the company has firmly denied any such risk, emphasizing that its GPUs have no kill switches, no backdoors, and no spyware. Although the headlining statement is not from a government source, China often uses state-linked social media accounts to shape its agenda and signal changes in its official stance without making a direct commitment. So, the criticism may be part of a broader campaign to steer domestic firms away from foreign AI hardware and toward homegrown alternatives like Huawei’s Ascend chips. Despite all these issues, many Chinese organizations and entities still purchase Nvidia products. Aside from the massive demand for H20 AI GPUs, there’s also a burgeoning black market for banned AI chips. It’s been estimated that a billion dollars’ worth of these GPUs have been sold in the past quarter, with some companies already advertising the upcoming B300, which is expected to arrive later this year. The WeChat post is likely the central government signaling its people to slowly move away from Nvidia’s products and use alternative homegrown AI GPUs instead. However, the ecosystem that the company delivers makes its local competitors a much less compelling alternative. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/china-state-media-says-nvidia-h20-gpus-are-unsafe-and-outdated-urges-chinese-companies-to-avoid-them-says-chip-is-neither-environmentally-friendly-nor-advanced-nor-safe

Nick movie: My Life With the Walter Boys: Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix Time: 2025 Netflix / Amazon / HBO: Netflix Duration of the movie: 1:51 Trailer:

Music title: Nelly Furtado - All Good Things (Come To An End) (US Version) (Official Music Video) Signer: Nelly Furtado Release date: June 17 2009 Official YouTube link:

Several current and former TSMC employees are accused of stealing the company’s 2nm trade secrets, with the group allegedly working to transmit the data to Japanese startup Rapidus. According to DigiTimes, a senior official from the Taiwanese government said that the semiconductor manufacturer keeps its key processes and trade secrets compartmentalized. So, even if one part of it is leaked or compromised, other companies won’t be able to use it. Nevertheless, because of how sensitive and advanced the nature of the stolen technology is, Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council has become involved in the investigation. The government body has tasked experts to assess whether the involved data constitutes “serious national core critical technologies,” and Taiwan’s courts have determined that the National Security Act applies because advanced semiconductor nodes, like the 2nm process, are deemed critical towards the country’s national interests. Although the initial investigation indicates the involvement of Tokyo Electron (TEL) and Rapidus, analysts say it’s unlikely that these Japanese companies initiated the industrial espionage. TSMC constitutes nearly 20% of TEL’s sales, making it one of the company’s major customers. Aside from that, the semiconductor giant has awarded the semiconductor fabrication equipment supplier with Excellent Technology Collaboration and Production Support during the 2024 TSMC Supply Chain Management Forum, showing that the two companies have, at the very least, a cordial relationship. Government-appointed TSMC board director and National Development Council Minister Paul Liu also said that Rapidus’ 2nm process node is licensed from IBM. So, even if it was able to get its hands on TSMC’s secrets, it’s unlikely that it’ll be able to use them immediately in its own processes. The Japanese startup began trial production of its 2nm process early this year, with mass production targeted for 2027. On the other hand, TSMC is expected to achieve the same within the second half of 2025. The Taiwanese government is keen on getting to the bottom of this industrial espionage case, especially as it seeks to protect the technology that helps keep it politically secure from its larger neighbor to the west. Even though the company has invested billions into its Arizona fab and the government has given it the go-ahead to manufacture its latest node abroad, TSMC’s leadership and massive R&D team will primarily remain in Taiwan to help avoid the leakage of its latest advancements. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/tsmcs-2nm-leak-is-considered-not-critical-senior-govt-official-says-company-secrets-are-compartmentalized-and-unusable-in-parts

Nick movie: The Terminal List: Dark Wolf - Official Trailer | Prime Video Time: 2025 Netflix / Amazon / HBO: Amazon Duration of the movie: 2:38 Trailer:

Music title: Minha Vida Ordinária-The Living Tombstone Signer: The Living Tombston Release date: Nov 24, 2017 Official YouTube link:

Windows 10's Game Bar has reportedly been hit with a nasty bug The Game Bar crashes when trying to access its options For those with Ryzen 3D V-Cache CPUs, this means they can't properly configure them for the best gaming performance Gamers running Windows 10 with a high-end AMD Ryzen 3D V-Cache processor are suffering at the hands of an apparent bug that messes with the Game Bar, and hampers these chips as a result. German tech site PC Games Hardware (PCGH) reports (via Neowin) that there's a problem with Windows 10 whereby the Game Bar - an overlay that carries a bunch of useful game-related settings - is crashing when you access the options to configure the mentioned Ryzen CPUs properly with any given game. Top-end Ryzen X3D chips with 12 or 16 cores (like the Ryzen 9900X3D or 9950X3D) have two chiplets, only one of which has the 3D V-Cache on top (that boosts gaming performance). So, to ensure these run PC games with the fastest possible frame rates, it's necessary to manually flag them as a game (ticking 'Remember this is a game') in said options. If the Game Bar crashes when trying to access the options, obviously, you can't do this, and therefore, those encountering this bug are having their games run sub-optimally on these particular chips. Note that it is only 12 and 16-core X3D models - the 8-core versions of 3D V-Cache CPUs are fine, as they don't have two chiplets, and the cache applies to all their cores (and obviously other Ryzen processors don't have any of this game-boosting cache, anyway). Further note that the Game Bar itself works fine; it's just clicking on the options that causes a crash to happen. An editor at PCGH claims that they were hit by this bug - even reinstalling Windows 10 didn't help as a possible (drastic) cure - and other gamers on the website's forum also reported the same experience. Notably, these were people not running Windows 10 Home, but Windows 10 Pro or an enterprise version (which some PC enthusiasts are using for the longer support timeframe). However, Neowin, which picked up on this report, also says it could reproduce the problem, though it doesn't specify which version of Windows 10 was running in this case. (And given that, I imagine it's not Home - as they would have said - but Windows 10 Pro most likely). Analysis: Whispers about 'sabotage' Okay, so these are just scattered reports at the moment, and it seems, though we can't confirm, that Windows 10 Home isn't affected. This is a niche problem, then - specific to heavyweight Ryzen X3D CPUs and Windows 10 Pro or enterprise versions - but there are enough reports for it to be worrying. Is this just a temporary glitch that's crept in with a recent version of the Game Bar, one that Microsoft will iron out? Possibly, but we've not even had confirmation of the bug yet, so we're getting ahead of ourselves. Whatever the case, it's more fuel to the fire for those suggesting, without proof, that Microsoft is somehow quietly sabotaging Windows 10 as its End of Life comes near, in an effort to cajole those diehards sticking with the older OS to upgrade to Windows 11 (this comes on top of those recent accusations of tech extortion you may recall, too). I don't think that any kind of 'sabotage' is afoot here, but at the same time, with Windows 10 about to slide into irrelevance come October 2025, there are certainly fewer reasons for Microsoft to worry about keeping the OS fully in shape for all users - and less impetus in general to investigate more niche issues like this apparent Game Bar-breaking bug. For now, we'll just have to watch this space - and, obviously, this isn't a problem on Windows 11, in case you didn't guess already that.

MicroSD Express cards are incredibly expensive right now, which has incentivized DIYers to look for alternative methods to improve the Switch 2's storage capacity. Better Gaming on YouTube, tested one such alternative, an open-source MicroSD Express adapter tailor-made for the Switch 2 that supports full-blown M.2 NVMe 2230 SSDs. However, initial testing proved to be unsuccessful. We have already reported on the open-source adapter Better Gaming is using. Known as the SDEX2M2 project, the adapter takes advantage of MicroSD Express' PCIe roots and integrated NVMe functionality to provide the necessary support to run NVMe M.2 SSDs. Specifically, MicroSD Express takes advantage of the SD Express 7.1 standard, which at its core takes advantage of a PCIe Gen 3x1 interface that supports the NVMe protocol. Better Gaming was able to take the blueprints for the SDEX2M2 project and make multiple duplicate PCBs through a third party. After receiving the PCBs, he soldered on all the necessary components to get the board up and running, featuring an M.2 connector and an R1 resistor. Four soldering attempts and four PCBs later, the YouTuber had a working adapter and tested it with a Corsair MP600 Mini NVMe SSD on their Switch 2. From a physical perspective, the hardware worked perfectly, the adapter slid into the handheld console without issue, and the Switch 2 was able to detect the adapter. However, that's where the problems began. The YouTuber immediately encountered an error code "2016-0641" in a prompt stating that the Switch 2 could not access the microSD card. Upon further investigation, Better Gaming discovered passive adapters do not provide all the communication necessary for the Switch 2 to control M.2 NVMe SSDs. MicroSD Express cards have their own built-in controller, and devices such as the Switch 2 are expecting to communicate with that controller when a MicroSD Express card (or adapter) is plugged in. Technically, NVMe SSDs have their own controllers, but obviously, these controllers are not designed around the SD Express 7.1 standard, which MicroSD Express uses. The developers behind the SDEX2M2 project have already discovered this flaw and are allegedly working on an updated design with an integrated FPGA that will emulate a MicroSD Express controller.

Nick movie: Fantasy Football Ruined Our Lives | Official Trailer | Netflix Time: 2025 Netflix / Amazon / HBO: Netflix Duration of the movie: 1:57 Trailer:

Music title: Guns N' Roses - Don't Cry Signer: Guns N' Roses Release date: 9 out of 2009 Official YouTube link:

When Bolt Graphics formally announced its Zeus GPU platform earlier this year, the company briefly stated its upcoming flagship graphics processor can be around 10 times faster than Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 in ray tracing workloads. But the startup never previously demonstrated actual benchmark results. Recently, the company quietly added a graph showing the relative ray tracing performance of Zeus GPUs compared to existing graphics cards, which appears to be quite impressive. However, there are a number of things to note about these simulated test results. The graph that Bolt Graphics shows is the ray-triangle intersection budget, which is measured in ray-triangles (tris) per pixel per frame. This expresses how much raw ray tracing work a GPU can do in terms of ray–triangle intersection tests for every pixel in a single rendered frame, while maintaining a 120 FPS framerate, at 3840x2160 resolution. This number is useful as a theoretical ceiling for geometry and lighting complexity a GPU can handle in ray- or path-traced rendering. And it's in line with Bolt's marketing message, that since modern GPUs do not have enough ray tracing and path tracing performance, game developers do not use these technologies extensively. Based on Bolt's internal simulations using its own micro-benchmark, its forthcoming quad-chiplet Zeus 4c (which is not a graphics card, but is a server) should be 13 times faster than Nvidia's existing flagship GeForce RTX 5090 (which is the best graphics card today), whereas a single-chiplet Zeus 1c (which is a card) should be 3.25 times faster than Nvidia's range-topping offering. In fact, even the entry-level Zeus can enable over 25 samples per pixel while sustaining 120 FPS in a 4K resolution. A higher value in this micro-benchmark means the GPU can sustain more samples, denser geometry, or both, without dropping below the target frame rate (120 FPS in this case). Bolt does not disclose anything about its micro-benchmark or how it simulates the performance of its hardware and how it gets comparative performance for AMD, Intel, and Nvidia GPUs, so we can't really say much about these results. Typically, the workload in synthetic tests is controlled: Rays are cast in predictable patterns against fixed triangle sets, and the acceleration structures are static and well-optimized. This test, however, produces a clean, high number that reflects the GPU's raw intersection throughput under ideal conditions, which is good enough if one only wants to learn about the theoretical limits of a GPU in this specific workload. In a real game engine, that number is affected by many variables. Acceleration structures may need to be rebuilt or updated for dynamic objects. Rays may be incoherent (due to reflections and refractions), and scene triangle density will vary by frame. The engine's traversal algorithms, shading pipeline, and memory layout also influence how many triangles each ray must test, which changes the effective rate. As a result, the practical ray triangle rate in games is lower than in synthetic benchmarks, and can fluctuate heavily depending on scene content and rendering settings. As for actual performance in real games, this depends on multiple factors, like shader and memory performance. The shading performance of Bolt's Zeus 1c is 10 FP32 TFLOPS, while Zeus 2c doubles it to 20 FP32 TFLOPS, which is dramatically lower than the 105 FP32 TFLOPS offered by the GeForce RTX 5090. As for memory, on the one hand, Bolt's Zeus 2c (which is the best the company can offer in an add-in-card form-factor) can carry 128 GB of LPDDR5X memory onboard, which is significantly more than GeForce RTX 5090's 32 GB of GDDR7 memory. But on the other hand, Nvidia's graphics board boasts a memory bandwidth of 1.8 TB/s, whereas Bolt's Zeus 2c can only offer 725 GB/s.

Microsoft has a new (and somewhat duplicitous) promotion going on It happens when searching for a rival AI service on Bing A Copilot banner appears at the top of the results, and it's easy for users to mistakenly use that instead of the AI they were really looking for Microsoft is up to some sneaky tricks again in terms of promoting its own services, and this time it's Copilot AI, which is now being pushed on those using Bing search. As Windows Latest reports, if you go to Bing.com and search for a major AI service that rivals Microsoft's own Copilot - meaning ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, or Claude AI - you'll get a Copilot banner popping up. This appears right at the top of the search, announcing that 'Your Copilot is here' and offering a prompt to ask Microsoft's AI 'anything'. You can then type a query in the presented box if you want, and it'll open up the Copilot website with the results. This behavior is implemented via the Bing search site itself, so it'll happen if you go to Bing.com in any web browser (not just Edge). Analysis: spotlight and shade While the Copilot banner that Bing search serves up is labelled as 'Promoted by Microsoft', the company has chosen a very small font for that particular detail, so it's easy enough to miss. In fact, the way the search result is laid out in this scenario is quite deceptive in a few aspects. So, say you search for ChatGPT in Bing, the ChatGPT website is the top result (as you'd expect, of course), but the way the Copilot banner is perched right above it could trick you into thinking the query box is actually for ChatGPT. Some people might not realize that and then end up redirected to the Copilot website with their query, which is clearly the idea. If the Copilot banner was presented to the side, for example - out of the way - this would be much less likely to happen. Furthermore, if you leave the tab with the Bing search for ChatGPT (or the other mentioned AI services), and then return to it, the Copilot banner is actually highlighted in bright white, with the rest of the results greyed out. The banner is effectively spotlighted - check out the above screenshot to see what I mean - so people are even more likely to be drawn to it, especially if they aren't tech-savvy and don't really look at the page properly. All in all, this feels like a bit of unwelcome duplicity, but in truth, it's nothing new for Microsoft - or other tech giants, for that matter. Microsoft is particularly keen on prompting folks to use its Edge browser in one way or another, including if you try to download Chrome. Indeed, searching for Chrome in Bing.com results in a very similar 'Promoted by Microsoft' banner at the top of the results (and we've seen even shadier moves than this in the past). And yes, Google pulls this sort of chicanery as well, and if you head to Google.com you'll be prompted to make use of its AI, Gemini, with a pop-up. That said, if you search for 'Copilot' on Google, you won't get Gemini inserted into the search results in the same way Microsoft does with Copilot in Bing. At any rate, while it's very unlikely this kind of promotional nonsense will ever go away, it's disappointing to see a somewhat more blatant example from Microsoft here - particularly in the highlighting of the Copilot query box, should you flick away from the active tab, and then switch back.

Microsoft has a new (and somewhat duplicitous) promotion going on It happens when searching for a rival AI service on Bing A Copilot banner appears at the top of the results, and it's easy for users to mistakenly use that instead of the AI they were really looking for Microsoft is up to some sneaky tricks again in terms of promoting its own services, and this time it's Copilot AI, which is now being pushed on those using Bing search. As Windows Latest reports, if you go to Bing.com and search for a major AI service that rivals Microsoft's own Copilot - meaning ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, or Claude AI - you'll get a Copilot banner popping up. This appears right at the top of the search, announcing that 'Your Copilot is here' and offering a prompt to ask Microsoft's AI 'anything'. You can then type a query in the presented box if you want, and it'll open up the Copilot website with the results. This behavior is implemented via the Bing search site itself, so it'll happen if you go to Bing.com in any web browser (not just Edge). Analysis: spotlight and shade While the Copilot banner that Bing search serves up is labelled as 'Promoted by Microsoft', the company has chosen a very small font for that particular detail, so it's easy enough to miss. In fact, the way the search result is laid out in this scenario is quite deceptive in a few aspects. So, say you search for ChatGPT in Bing, the ChatGPT website is the top result (as you'd expect, of course), but the way the Copilot banner is perched right above it could trick you into thinking the query box is actually for ChatGPT. Some people might not realize that and then end up redirected to the Copilot website with their query, which is clearly the idea. If the Copilot banner was presented to the side, for example - out of the way - this would be much less likely to happen. Furthermore, if you leave the tab with the Bing search for ChatGPT (or the other mentioned AI services), and then return to it, the Copilot banner is actually highlighted in bright white, with the rest of the results greyed out. The banner is effectively spotlighted - check out the above screenshot to see what I mean - so people are even more likely to be drawn to it, especially if they aren't tech-savvy and don't really look at the page properly. All in all, this feels like a bit of unwelcome duplicity, but in truth, it's nothing new for Microsoft - or other tech giants, for that matter. Microsoft is particularly keen on prompting folks to use its Edge browser in one way or another, including if you try to download Chrome. Indeed, searching for Chrome in Bing.com results in a very similar 'Promoted by Microsoft' banner at the top of the results (and we've seen even shadier moves than this in the past).

Nick movie: Fixed | Official Trailer | Netflix Time: 2025 Netflix / Amazon / HBO: Netflix Duration of the movie: 2:22 Trailer:

Music title: Guns N' Roses - Sweet Child O' Mine (Official Music Video) Signer: Guns N' Roses Release date: December 25, 2009 Official YouTube link:

Microsoft has said Windows 11 SE will run out of support in October 2026 This brings an end to this alternative spin on Windows 11 However, Surface Laptop SE owners were previously promised a longer timeframe of support for their devices Microsoft has announced that it's dropping support for Windows 11 SE in just over a year's time, leaving buyers of low-cost laptops running this spin on its OS in the lurch - and admitting defeat with this most recent initiative to take on Google's Chromebooks. If you're unfamiliar with Windows 11 SE, it was designed as a (kind of) lightweight version of the desktop operating system. It was preinstalled on affordable laptops that were priced to do well in the education sector, trying to take a piece of the pie that Chromebooks dominate (SE seemingly stood for Student or School Edition). Windows Central reports that Microsoft announced via its Learn portal that Windows 11 SE support is being shuttered in October 2026. The company said: "Microsoft will not release a feature update after Windows 11 SE, version 24H2. Support for Windows 11 SE - including software updates, technical assistance, and security fixes - will end in October 2026. While your device will continue to work, we recommend transitioning to a device that supports another edition of Windows 11 to ensure continued support and security." So, you won't be provided with Windows 11 25H2 later this year on your SE device, if you own one - version 24H2 is as far down the line as you'll get, and all updates will cease full-stop in just over a year. Analysis: Silly Ending for a Student Edition? Microsoft has been trying to take on Google's Chromebooks for a long time now, including efforts such as Windows 10X - which badly misfired and ended up being canned before it even arrived. Windows 11 SE was the most recent effort, emerging late in 2021, and it was showcased by Microsoft in its Surface Laptop SE. However, as we observed in our review of that machine, there was a problem here - the performance level of the notebook was rather poor. The simple truth about Windows 11 SE is that while it was supposed to be a streamlined operating system for low-cost devices, this variant of the desktop OS was still too unwieldy. There just wasn't enough emphasis on trimming down Windows 11 so it performed better. Indeed, much of the thrust of Windows 11 SE was about simplifying the computing experience for students - the interface, and locking the system to only admin-approved apps, plus cloud services - rather than actually streamlining the operating system so it ran well on lesser hardware. And let's be honest, the latter was the whole point, really, at least in terms of making affordable laptops to rival cheap Chromebooks (which run very slickly indeed, despite their low cost). So, all in all, it's not surprising to see Microsoft shutter this effort in this manner. What is surprising, though, is how owners of Windows 11 SE machines, like the Surface Laptop SE, have now been left in the lurch by this announcement that support is being killed in a year. As Neowin, which also picked up on this move, points out, the Surface Laptop SE has an end-of-service date (for firmware and drivers) of January 11, 2028. But with Microsoft now having revealed that Windows 11 SE won't be going on beyond October 2026, that's cutting this support window (pun not intended) short by over a year. Those who own a Surface Laptop SE, who thought they were good for another couple of years, have effectively now been told they're going to be a year shorter on support. If Microsoft promised support for this showcase laptop through to 2028, then why not extend support for the dedicated OS it runs to that date, too? Strong-arming folks into moving early hardly seems fair here. Those who own a Surface Laptop SE, who thought they were good for another couple of years, have effectively now been told they're going to be a year shorter on support. If Microsoft promised support for this showcase laptop through to 2028, then why not extend support for the dedicated OS it runs to that date, too? Strong-arming folks into moving early hardly seems fair here. It seems an odd decision to make, and one that won't endear Microsoft to some people. Indeed, when it comes to Microsoft's next big shot at taking on Chromebooks - if there is one - those in the education sector might remember what's happened here, and be less trusting of new ideas from the software giant. For those who do have a laptop running Windows 11 SE, and now need to plan on switching away sooner from that OS, maybe to a different flavor of Windows 11, this is possible, albeit somewhat problematic in some reported cases. Going by this Reddit thread, if you're running into trouble in this endeavor, you may want to try turning off Secure Boot in the laptop's BIOS to get a working installation of Windows 11 Home or Pro on an SE machine (you can switch the feature back on afterwards, apparently).