PC Magazine May 2022

Welcome to our May issue—and to a new PCMag project! We’re always thinking of ways we can slice and dice our reviews data to make life easier for our readers. Traditionally, our product roundups include the top scorers in a given category: the best laptops, speakers, streaming services, and even bitcoin wallets, to name a few. And although we take pricing into account when we assign product ratings, low prices don’t usually float a product to the top of the heap. So we decided it’d be helpful to create a product roundup that focuses more on cost. Of course, specs and test results have to be good enough (preferably, better than good enough), too, for a product to fit into the PCMag Cheap 100; we’re just weighing things a bit differently. Here,…

VERIZON: WE’RE FLOODING THE ZONES WITH 5G In the northern area of Chicagoland, in and around Lake County, I am getting 350 to 400 [download speed] according to Speedtest, but not at my home. Coverage … has not permeated the area yet.—Gary Paul Sarsok What about people who can’t get C-Band on their phones? What about people who can only get regular 5G on their phones, like people who have the Note 20 Ultra? Why not ‘blanket the nation’ with regular 5G first before rolling out new stuff?—Jim Roscovius Sascha Segan’s reply: Because Verizon’s other stuff isn’t very good. Verizon’s ‘nationwide’ 5G just shaves off parts of the 4G bands and has very little performance difference from 4G, and its millimeter-wave 5G has very short range (so it’s primarily being used for in-building…

Security researchers have spotted 11 Android apps collecting sensitive information from user phones, including copy-and-paste data, phone numbers, and email addresses. The findings come from security firm AppCensus: It examined a software development kit (SDK) running on the Android apps, which together were downloaded over 46 million times on the Google Play Store. “​Whenever a user copy/pastes something, it goes to a shared clipboard, which this SDK was scouring and uploading to its servers,” AppCensus said in a report in April. “What gets put there is arbitrary data, and can include passwords, for example, if a user uses a password manager.” The SDK can also collect precise GPS information, along with the phone number and email address associated with the device. In addition, it can try to pull the unique MAC address of…

A new AI program is wowing the public with its ability to draw realistic and creative pictures from a mere text description. The program is called DALL-E 2, and it comes from the San Francisco-based OpenAI research lab. In April, the lab introduced the AI by showing off the art it’s able to generate. The results are impressive and make us wonder whether this is the future of image editing. For example, if you tell the AI to draw “a koala dunking a basketball,” DALL-E 2 will do just that by creating a photorealistic image of the animal flying through the air to a basketball hoop. The AI can also edit existing photos by replacing the imagery inside: For example, if you type in “cute cat” for a dog photo, DALL-E 2…

After two years of significant growth, the PC market saw a decline in shipments during the first quarter of this year; one cause is sagging demand from consumers and education buyers. Research firm IDC reports that PC shipments declined 5.1% between January and March 2022, following two years of pandemic-fueled double-digit growth. The decline doesn’t necessarily mean the market is headed toward a “downward spiral,” IDC said. In fact, during Q1, PC vendors shipped 80.5 million units across the globe. That’s notable, especially when you consider the market shipped a mere 58.5 million units three years ago. “The 1Q22 volume marks the seventh consecutive quarter where global shipments surpassed 80 million, a feat not seen since 2012,” IDC added. Those 80 million units also shipped amid the ongoing chip shortage and global supply-chain…

Not content with being one of the most notorious Twitter users, one with posts so bad he was fined by the SEC, billionaire Elon Musk bought a $2.9 billion stake in the company and is promising big changes ahead. Whatever Musk’s vision, though, it won’t matter because neither he nor any billionaire can save social media. Only we can. THE ENORMOUS BRAINS A defining factor of our modern Western world is the belief that skills from the tech industry are superior to all other forms of human thought and that becoming a billionaire proves how smart and talented you are. Every week, it seems, the worst people on the internet dream up cockamamie high-tech solutions to the most complex problems on the planet. This is how Uber reinvents the bus or multi-level…