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Laptops are expensive, so it’s important to know everything you need to before slapping down money on one of these pricey machines. If you’re using it frequently for work, school or even gaming, then it’s worth going a little more expensive. But which ones are the best for both work and play? We’ve done the research and testing to figure that out. Below, we’ve rounded up some of the best 14- and 15-inch work and gaming laptops you’ll find on the market right now.

You’ve probably found — either from research or personal experience — that a 13-inch laptop is too small and a 17-inch can be too big; the sweet spot lies in the 14-inch and 15-inch screen range. Recently, laptop companies have been putting more emphasis on 14-inch models, directing marketing efforts away from 15-inch laptops. I prefer a 14-inch screen: It just seems to offer the best balance of price, performance and size. So, that’s why you’ll find many of CNET’s picks for the best 15-inch laptop are… 14 inches.

These are the laptops, from budget to premium, we consider to be the best 14- and 15-inch work and gaming laptop options based on:

• Performance and battery life for a given set of specs and intended use, where the configuration specs include the amount of solid-state storage and memory (SSD and RAM), main processor (CPU) and graphics processor (GPU), and operating system (Mac OS or Windows).
• Features for a given weight class, such as the combination of laptop screen size, type (touchscreen or not) and resolution (4K, QHD or FHD), ports (such as an HDMI port, Ethernet port and the type and number of USB connections), webcam and fingerprint reader.
• Design, both aesthetic and functional, including keyboard layout and feel (lots of people want a backlit keyboard and a numeric keypad on their laptops), build quality, upgradeability and reparability and so on.

If you’re laptop shopping, remember you don’t have to buy now if money’s tight or can afford to wait. If you decide to postpone your purchase, here are some tips for stretching the life of your old laptop. If you do opt to go ahead, think about recycling it.

This list is periodically updated with new models we’ve tested and reviewed. It’s a great place to start to get an idea of what’s available. If you need advice on whether a particular type of laptop or two-in-one is right for you, jump to our FAQ below this list.

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1. Acer Swift 3

Top budget pick

It’s a 14 incher, but if you’re on a tight budget, 14 inches is your friend. It’s a good deal for the basics like email, word processing and much more, thanks to AMD Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 processors. It’s available with 11th-gen Intel processors, too. This budget laptop has a backlit keyboard, a fingerprint reader and a USB Type-C port, too. The Acer Swift 3 is also an incredibly lightweight laptop — less than 3 pounds — for a machine that can be found for less than $700.

In addition to this Acer Swift, we’re also fans of the Acer Aspire 5, which has a larger 15.6-inch display. The Acer Aspire 5 is available in a variety of configurations starting as low as $400, but that’s for a pretty poor configuration.

Read our Acer Swift 3 (14-inch, 2020) review.

$632 at Walmart

$791 at eBay

$655 at Amazon

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2. HP Victus 16

Best for budget gaming

The HP Victus 16 is a strong, affordable gaming laptop option. It offers a respectable balance for people with different needs for play and work. Spending more will likely get you better build quality and more enjoyable audio. But if you can get past the screen wobble, the Victus can hold its own against pricier models.

I recommend avoiding configurations with 8GB RAM; MacOS can get away with that, but Windows has more overhead. The 16GB models tend to be hard to get, though. For a little more ($890), you can get a reasonable low-end model that you won’t outgrow quickly with an Intel i5-12450H, 12GB RAM, 512GB PCIe NVMe, a 144Hz 1080p screen and GeForce GTX 1650.

Read our HP Victus 16 review.

$890 at Amazon

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3. HP Chromebook x360 14c

Recommended 14-inch Chromebook under $500

The two-in-one design means you can use the HP Chromebook x360 as a tablet (though it’s a bit heavy to use as a handheld device), and 14 inches is much less awkward to use that way than a 15-inch model. You can also tent it, connect an external keyboard and mouse and use it as a small all-in-one computer.

The Core i3 processor and 8GB of memory keep this HP Chromebook running smoothly even with a couple dozen tabs open and streaming video in the background. And this Chromebook laptop has a long battery life, lasting 10 hours, 40 minutes in CNET’s tests.

$430 at Walmart

$200 at Amazon

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Apple

4. Apple MacBook Pro 14

Best Apple laptop

If you need any convincing that 15-inch (and 17-inch) laptops are a dying breed, take Apple’s killing them off as a confirmational nail in their coffin. If your major concerns are weight and price and you don’t need much power, then the smaller MacBook Air rules.

But I disagree with my colleague Dan Ackerman that the Air is the best choice for most people: I think the MacBook Pro 14 is. It costs a lot more, but it’s significantly better in every way and I think it will meet most people’s needs for a lot longer. (The 2022 model of the Air with an M2 processor may change my mind about that, and I agree that the MacBook Pro 13 M1 and M2 give you very little over the Air for the extra cost and weight.) On the flip side, the 14-inch can be configured closely to the weightier and more expensive MacBook Pro 16, with the exception of the bigger screen and option for a higher-performing GPU.

Read our Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch review.

$1,999 at Apple

$1,999 at B&H

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5. Razer Blade 15

Top pick for work and play

The 2022 refresh of the Blade 15 retains the title of least-gaming-like gaming laptop, but doesn’t forgo the speed, but like all Razer’s it’s pretty expensive. It’s got a streamlined, slim and sturdy design with plenty of ports and a comfortable Razer Chroma RGB keyboard, plus the latest from Intel and Nvidia and new high-quality panel options for gaming. For work, you can benefit from the 1080p webcam with Windows Hello support. It can get a bit warm when it’s revved up, though.

• Options include:
• Up to 12th-gen Intel Core i7-12800H or Core i9-12900HK processors
• 16GB or 32GB of DDR5 memory, upgradeable to 64GB
• 1TB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD, upgradeable to 2TB
• Up to Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics
• 360Hz FHD display with 100% sRGB color gamut, or 240Hz QHD or 144Hz UHD displays with 100% P3 color gamut

The 14-inch Blade 14 is equally attractive and lighter, as well as a little cheaper — a nice 165Hz QHD model with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 and AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX will run you around $2,200. The extra room on the 15-inch gives it space for a Thunderbolt connection, SD card reader and an additional USB-A port.

Read our Razer Blade 15 Advanced review.

$2,400 at Amazon

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6. Samsung Galaxy Book 2 Pro 360

Best 15-inch 2-in-1

The highlights of this thin and light 15-inch Windows two-in-one are its excellent battery life, high-contrast OLED screen and the plethora of cross-device features it serves up for owners of Samsung’s Galaxy phones and accessories. It’s specifically designed for people who want a laptop experience similar to that of their phones, with similar responsiveness. For its size, it’s relatively slim and lightweight, and includes the excellent S Pen.

Read our Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 2 360 review.

$1,150 at Samsung

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7. Lenovo Yoga 9i (Gen 7, 14-inch)

Also the best 2-in-1

The Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 7 continues the company’s streak of fantastic premium two-in-ones. The 12th-gen Intel processor delivers a big performance jump in multicore tasks compared to its predecessor, and the features and design are worth the higher price. The latest model offers a big performance jump, top-flight sound and visuals and bundles a sleeve and stylus. It does go hot and heavy on the software and services upselling, though, so if that’s going to drive you nuts, run away.

Read our Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 7 review.

$1,530 at Lenovo

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Laptop FAQs

It seems like every app I download has some sort of monthly paid subscription now. Uber and Uber Eats have Uber One, which gets you free food delivery and reduced fees on rides, while Twitter has Twitter Blue, offering exclusive features like a blue verification checkmark and the ability to edit tweets.

BMW even charges customers in some countries $18 a month to heat the front seats of their own cars. Absurd, right?

And we’re not immune to this service-based economy either. If you’re anything like me, you’re probably paying hundreds of dollars in recurring payments for streaming apps like Amazon Prime, Netflix, Spotify, Hulu and Disney Plus, or more practical things like AppleCare. With so many services, it’s easy to lose track of everything you’re paying for too.

And if you’re trying to cut some costs, you should start with the many subscriptions you might have on your phone.

In this story, we’ll show you how to find all the monthly services you’re paying for on your mobile device, whether it’s via the Apple Store on your iPhone or via Google Play on Android, and how to cancel the ones you no longer want.

If you’re looking to save money in other ways, check out 10 ways to save on streaming services, how to save on TV streaming with these simple tricks and free options to some of your favorite paid services.

Find and cancel your subscriptions on your iPhone

You can find all your monthly subscriptions from the Apple Store in a couple places on your iPhone, but the easiest is through your settings. To do this, launch the Settings application, tap on your name at the top and then hit Subscriptions in the first section. Here you’ll see a list of all the active (and inactive) subscriptions that you’ve signed up for from apps you downloaded from the App Store.

Under Active, you’ll see all the subscriptions you’re currently paying, with the following information: app or service name, short description, next bill date and cost. To cancel an active subscription, tap on the subscription, hit the red Cancel Subscription button at the bottom of the page and then tap Confirm in the pop-up that appears.

For most subscriptions, you’ll still be able to access the paid services until the end of your billing period. However, some apps won’t let you continue using the service, so you’ll have to read the fine print to see what happens if you cancel. Once it’s canceled, the subscription will remain in the active section, but will show, in red text, when it’s expiring.

Find and cancel your subscriptions on your Android

Unlike iOS, Android runs on devices from various brands, such as Samsung, Google and Motorola, but luckily all these versions of Android all have the Google Play Store, and so finding and canceling your monthly subscriptions is similar no matter what phone you’re using.

To find all your subscriptions, launch the Play Store application, tap your profile picture or first name initial that appears on the top-right and go to Payments & subscriptions > Subscriptions. Here you’ll see a list of your active and inactive subscriptions.

If you want to cancel a subscription, tap it and then hit the green Cancel subscription button. The Play Store may ask you to consider other cheaper subscriptions and also to give a reason as to why you’re canceling. Accept any prompts to continue until you see a fully green Cancel subscription button. Hit it and your subscription will be canceled, but you should still have access to it until the end of your billing period.

Microsoft is hosting an event Tuesday that’s expected to reveal the fusion of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT and Microsoft’s search engine Bing.

Invites to the event were sent last week, and attendees were told there will be news of “progress on a few exciting projects” from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The event starts at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET Tuesday at Microsoft’s Campus in Redmond, Washington.

Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, hinted strongly at such an announcement in a tweet Monday, saying that he’ll attend the event.

Microsoft hasn’t provided details on a possible integration of ChatGPT and Bing, but information about a new search experience appeared to leak last week. Images and details posted on social media documented a new interface, which may include a larger search box for chatting instead of for submitting search queries. A new Bing could potentially do research and handle tasks for people, according to leaked details. CNET has not confirmed the leaks.

Bing has long lived in the massive shadow of Google’s search engine. According to Statista, Google accounted for 84% of global desktop search in December, with Bing coming in second at 9%. But integration with ChatGPT could be a game changer.

ChatGPT has taken the world by storm since artificial intelligence developer OpenAI released it in late November. Tens of millions of people have raced to sign up and test its chops. The AI doesn’t know anything per se but can recognize patterns in text harvested from the internet, allowing it to fully answer questions from people. It can create bedtime stories, write poems, make diet plans, help you lower bills, get you out of tickets — and complete homework assignments such as essays, a feature that has struck fear in the hearts of teachers.

Microsoft, which had already invested in the OpenAI and created a partnership years ago, pledged to invest billions of more dollars into the company in January in order to build new features.

Microsoft’s announcement of the event came shortly after Google revealed on Monday its own AI chatbot called Bard. Google said its chatbot will integrate with its search engine and use the AI to break down complex information for users.

Editors’ note: CNET is using an AI engine to create some personal finance explainers that are edited and fact-checked by our editors. For more, see this post.

Overwatch 2 is getting ready to kick off its third competitive season, on Tuesday, Feb. 7. This’ll be the first season with no new hero, as we officially enter the “alternating between new hero and new map each season” phase of the game’s content roadmap. Instead, we get a new control map, Antarctic Peninsula, along with a new mythic skin in the battle pass.

We also get some unexpected changes, like an upcoming IP collaboration and Overwatch’s first foray into text-based dating sims. Here’s everything we know so far, including information from this morning’s blog post.

New map: Antarctic Peninsula

Control maps, aka king of the hill maps, are a community favorite in Overwatch, but we’ve gotten only two new ones since the game launched in 2016. The new Antarctic Peninsula map is poised to give players a different feel than what they get from the game’s other control maps, which are typically set in more metropolitan areas. The three submaps in Antarctic Peninsula will be an icebreaker ship, an underground drilling area, and Overwatch laboratories. Overwatch 2’s narrative lead has hinted that environments have some lore hidden away for sharp-eyed players to find. Also: penguins.

IP Crossover with One Punch Man

Perhaps the biggest surprise of all the season 3 news is the Fortnite-style IP collaboration with the anime One Punch Man. The only thing we know so far is that there will be a Saitama-themed skin for Doomfist, Overwatch’s own punching machine, but there may be other skins and cosmetics as well. The blog post says the team is looking for more potential collaborations in the future.

New mythic skin: Amaterasu Kiriko

In its first two seasons, Overwatch 2 offered a new type of hero skin called mythic skins, which come with hero customizations and different sound and visual effects. These skins are unlocked at level 80 of the battle pass. Season 1 brought us Cyberdemon Genji, while Season 2 added a Zeus-themed Junker Queen to the game. Season 3 continues the mythology trend by adding a mythic Amaterasu skin for support hero Kiriko. According to the season 3 blog post, the mythic skin is based on various deities in Japanese mythology and can be customized with moon, sea and storm themes. The shinto deity seems like a good fit for Overwatch’s newest support hero, whose healing abilities are already tied to a Japanese fox spirit.

Competitive and matchmaking changes

Matchmaking has been one of the community’s biggest complaints since Blizzard launched Overwatch 2, and the developers have planned changes for season 3 to address some of those concerns. In a developer blog about matchmaker goals, they said the matchmaker will start looking to balance teams within each role (tank, DPS and support) rather than just across the entire team. This should help avoid games where an entire role on one team outclasses the other, leading to a one-sided stomp.

The devs are also introducing a couple of adjacent changes to improve the competitive experience. Previously, players would be able to see their updated rank only after they’d notched seven wins or 20 losses. Starting in season 3, those numbers have been lowered to five wins or 15 losses, allowing players to see their updated rank more often. It means you’re less likely to rank up on each update (because you’ll have played fewer games on average), but it also means you no longer have to win 21 games to update your rank across all three roles — a welcome change. The devs said, too, that the user interface will also get an update in the mid-season patch, so you can always see how close you are to a competitive update (instead of only after a win or by doing math based on your current number of competitive wins for each role).

Your competitive rank will still decay at the start of season 3. But the developer blog said they’ll remove the seasonal rank resets that drop players roughly one full rank at the start of a season, starting in season 4.

Dating sim

Honestly, Overwatch dipping its toes in dating sims feels like an eventual inevitability, but that doesn’t make it any less exciting. Your personal feelings about the heroes Genji and Mercy may make it more or less exciting, though, as those are the two heroes you have the option of pursuing, with the aid of a cupid-themed Hanzo. You’ll be able to unlock a Play of the Game highlight with certain endings, so be sure to check it out between Feb. 13 and Feb 28 at loverwatch.gg once the event is live.

Please, everyone play this and make it a huge success so we get more in the future. The game is filled with eligible candidates. The player base is thirsty. Baptiste already flirts with people in the game. I’m begging everyone to band together so we can flirt back.

Streamer mode

The game is introducing a streamer mode in an attempt to cut down on stream sniping, where players queue up at the same time as streamers so they can watch the stream while playing, in order to outmaneuver the streamers. New streamer mode options include hiding your and other players’ Battletags, hiding chat and replay codes, and delaying and hiding queue times to make it harder for people to join the same match as the streamer.

Accessibility improvements

A few changes are coming to aid in visibility across various parts of the game, including more subtitle options, mouse cursor size options, and custom colors for groups and alerts, which players will now be able to preview before applying.

Apple released iOS 16.3 in January, and the update includes some bug fixes and security updates to make your iPhone run more smoothly. The update also brings some useful new features to your iPhone, like security keys and an update to emergency SOS via satellite.

The iOS 16.3 update was released alongside updates for other Apple software, too, like iPadOS, Safari and previous versions of iOS. The latest iOS update arrived about a month after the release of iOS 16.2.

Here are the new features landing on your iPhone with iOS 16.3.

Security keys come to Apple ID

Users can now use third-party security keys instead of two-factor authentication for their Apple ID.

Security keys are a lot like keys to your home. You still use passwords, but this extra layer of security can help protect you against phishing scams and hackers.

“Hardware security keys are very, very secure,” Diya Jolly, chief product officer of authentication service company Okta, told CNET’s Stephen Shankland.

Apple’s security keys feature only works with FIDO Alliance-certified security keys.

Support for the second-gen HomePod

Apple’s iOS 16.3 software adds support for the second-generation HomePod, which is out now and costs $299 ( 299, AU$479). Apple announced the release of the new HomePod four days before the latest iOS software was made available.

New Unity wallpaper for Black History Month

The latest iOS update includes a new iPhone wallpaper as part of Apple’s Black Unity Collection. The collection celebrates Black History Month with a special-edition Apple Watch Black Unity Sport Loop, a mosaic watch face and the new iPhone wallpaper. Apple also plans to release a selection of Black History Month content for Apple TV, Fitness Plus, Music, Maps, Books, Podcasts and the App Store as part of the collection.

New ways to use Emergency SOS via satellite

Emergency SOS via satellite was introduced at Apple’s event in September. In iOS 16.3, the Call with Hold option has been replaced with Call with Hold and Release. If you enable Call with Hold and Release, you can hold the side button and a volume button to initiate a countdown and an alarm. After the countdown, you release the buttons and your iPhone will call emergency services on its own. Before with Call with Hold, pressing the side button and a volume button would first bring up the Emergency SOS call slider. If you continued to hold the buttons, a countdown started and an alarm would go off. After the countdown ended, your phone would make an emergency call.

There’s also an option to Call Quietly in Emergency SOS. By enabling this option, when you try to make an emergency SOS call, your phone won’t start flashing or making an alarm sound.

Here is Apple’s list of new features and changes included in iOS 16.3:

• New Unity wallpaper honors Black history and culture in celebration of Black History Month.
• Security Keys for Apple ID allow users to strengthen the security of their account by requiring a physical security key as part of the two factor authentication sign in process on new devices.
• Support for HomePod (second generation).
• Emergency SOS calls now require holding the side button with the up or down volume button and then releasing in order to prevent inadvertent emergency calls.
• Fixes an issue in Freeform where some drawing strokes created with Apple Pencil or your finger may not appear on shared boards.
• Addresses an issue where the wallpaper may appear black on the Lock Screen.
• Fixes an issue where horizontal lines may temporarily appear while waking up iPhone 14 Pro Max.
• Fixes an issue where the Home Lock Screen widget does not accurately display Home app status.
• Addresses an issue where Siri may not respond properly to music requests.
• Resolves issues where Siri requests in CarPlay may not be understood correctly.

New iOS Tech Makes It Super Hard to Hack Your iCloud Login

See at CNET

For more iOS 16 news, see what new features were added in iOS 16.2 and iOS 16.1. Here’s how you can sign up to test Apple’s iOS beta software, too.

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Samsung’s Galaxy S23 Ultra is all about the cameras. The tech giant spent a good chunk of its launch event last week flaunting how well its new cameras can capture more colorful photos and cinematic videos. Veteran movie director Ridley Scott even made an appearance in Samsung’s promotional clip.

I’ve only spent a day with the $1,200 ( 1,249, AU$1,949)Galaxy S23 Ultra so far, but some of the camera upgrades are already noticeable. Portraits taken in low light, for example, seem more vibrant and flattering.

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The Galaxy S23 Ultra is one of three new phones Samsung announced, alongside the $800 ( 849, AU$1,349) Galaxy S23 and $1,000 ( 1,049, AU$1,649) Galaxy S23 Plus. The Galaxy S23 Ultra is Samsung’s first with a 200-megapixel main camera, but the company also made some significant under-the-hood changes that should improve dynamic range and video capture.

Here’s a look at what has stood out the most in my first 24 hours with Samsung’s new phone.

Galaxy S23 Ultra: Great low-light portraits

The Galaxy S23 Ultra has four cameras just like the Galaxy S22 Ultra, but the main sensor has an upgraded resolution of 200 megapixels instead of 108. There’s also a 12-megapixel ultrawide camera and two 10-megapixel telephoto lenses, one with 3x optical zoom and the other with 10x.

Behind-the-scenes upgrades to dynamic range should also result in more accuracy when capturing the light and dark areas in video recordings. But it seems like these improvements are noticeable in photography, too.

My biggest takeaway so far is the way the S23 Ultra takes flattering portraits in low light. The photo below of my colleague Claire Reilly was taken in a very dim podcast studio in CNET’s San Francisco office. It was her favorite of the bunch when compared to similar photos I took of her with the Pixel 7 Pro and Galaxy S22 Ultra.

She said the lighting and color in the S23 Ultra’s photo made her face look “radiant” and is comparable to the way she looks in CNET videos that she films on a Sony ZV-1 camera with a professional lighting setup. The Pixel 7 Pro’s photo, by comparison, made her skin tone look muddier. The sequins on her sweater also look more colorful in the S23 Ultra’s photo than in pictures taken with the Galaxy S22 Ultra and Pixel 7 Pro. (Note: The Galaxy S23 Ultra photos below aren’t displayed at their full 200-megapixel resolution because of the large file sizes.)

The Galaxy S23 Ultra also excelled under mixed lighting and captured vibrant photos, as shown in the image below taken in CNET’s kitchen. But whether the photo is better than pictures taken on the Pixel 7 Pro or Galaxy S22 Ultra depends on your preference. For example, Claire said the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s bolder colors made the photo look less natural than the Pixel 7 Pro’s, despite the Pixel’s image having harsher contrast and more severe shadow lines in the face.

When it comes to selfies, Samsung says the phone should have better dynamic range and object segmentation. That means the camera should be smarter about separating the subject from the background, as well as distinguishing other fine elements like strands of hair. You can also access manual controls for the front camera in pro mode or take selfies with the Expert Raw app. Raw capture saves full, unretouched versions of images and should offer more flexibility when editing.

So far, I haven’t noticed a huge difference in selfie quality. In fact, I prefer the Galaxy S22 Ultra’s selfie over the S23 Ultra’s in the images below. That said, the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s selfie is much brighter than the Pixel 7 Pro’s photo. I also intentionally took this photo in challenging lighting conditions to see how it handles a mix of dim indoor lighting and natural light.

Keep in mind that these are just a few early camera examples. Our full review will have more photos and videos.

Galaxy S23 Ultra design: Just as big, and just as beautiful

The Galaxy S23 Ultra looks almost identical to the Galaxy S22 Ultra. It has the same boxy shape, which sets it apart from the regular Galaxy S23 and other Android phones. The only major aesthetic difference is its color; the Galaxy S23 lineup is available in cream, green, lavender and black, while its predecessor came in burgundy, green, white and black, in addition to a few Samsung-exclusive colors. I’ve been using the cream version so far, which looks sleek and eye-catching.

The Galaxy S23 Ultra has a 6.8-inch screen that seems just as bright and vibrant as its predecessor’s, although it’s a tad large for my taste. It’s too soon to tell how long the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s battery will last on a single charge, but my review unit dropped to roughly 90% around lunchtime after starting the day at 100%.

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Overall, the Galaxy S23 Ultra seems promising, particularly for photographers and videographers, but I have to put it through more testing to know for sure. I’ll have more details on the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s camera, battery life and performance in our full review.

Google released its own AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT on Monday called Bard.

“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models,” Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai tweeted Monday. “It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.”

Powering Bard is Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA). The company says its new AI will use information from the web to make creative responses to queries or provide detailed info on questions asked.

Bard will be made available on Monday to selected testers and will be available to the public in the coming weeks..

Google didn’t immediately respond to request for comment.

Bard uses a lightweight version of LaMDA, according to a blog post by CEO Sundar Pichai. This model uses less computing power, allowing it to scale to more people and allowing additional feedback. Pichai pressed that feedback will be critical in meeting Google’s “high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information.”

Don’t expect Google rival Microsoft to stand still. CEO Satya Nadella is announcing “progress on a few exciting projects” at a press event at the company’s headquarters on Tuesday, according to an invitation. Microsoft plans to integrate ChatGPT into its technology, and this event could be where details are announced.

ChatGPT uses artificial intelligence technology called a large language model, trained on vast swaths of data on the internet. That type of model uses an AI mechanism called a transformer that Google pioneered. ChatGPT’s success in everything from writing software, passing exams, and offering advice, in the style of the King James Bible, on removing a sandwich from a VCR has propelled it into the tech spotlight, even though its results can be misleading or wrong.

AI technology already is all around us, helping in everything from flagging credit card fraud to translating our speech into text messages. The ChatGPT technology has elevated expectations, though, so it’s clear the technology will become more important in our lives one way or another as we rely on digital assistants and online tools.

Google AI subsidiary DeepMind also is involved. Chief Executive Demis Hassabis told Time that his company is considering a 2023 private beta test of an AI chatbot called Sparrow.

Google detailed transformers in 2017, and it’s since become a fixture of some of the biggest AI systems out there. Nvidia’s new H100 processor, the top dog in the world of AI acceleration at least in terms of public speed tests, now includes specific circuitry to accelerate transformers.

The large language model (LLM) revolution in AI that resulted is useful for language-specific systems like ChatGPT, Google’s LaMDA and newer PaLM, and others from companies including AI21 Labs, Adept AI Labs and Cohere. But LLMs are used for other tasks, too, including stacking boxes and processing genetic data to hunt for new drugs. Notably, they’re good at generating text, which is why they can be used for answering questions.

Google, which endured bad publicity over the departure of AI researcher Timnit Gebru in 2020, has a program focusing on responsible AI and machine learning, or ML, technology. “Building ML models and products in a responsible and ethical manner is both our core focus and core commitment,” Google Research Vice President Marian Croak said in a January post.

Google is keen to tout its deep AI expertise. ChatGPT triggered a “code red” emergency within Google, according to The New York Times, and drew Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin back into active work.

Editors’ note: CNET is using an AI engine to create some personal finance explainers that are edited and fact-checked by our editors. For more, see this post.

Virtual reality does a lot more than just games. It can be an amazing escape, a workout or even both. For the best of everything, gaming and otherwise, you can try the VR headset, the Quest 2
(previously the Oculus Quest 2, now the Meta Quest 2 after Facebook’s name change to Meta). While it doesn’t have as many VR games as other game consoles, new titles keep coming in, even a few years into the Quest 2’s release.

After years of testing games and apps across the Meta app store, there are some that I love more than others, and several that I recommend to friends and family. Some of these games also work with the original Quest, but a growing number of apps are now exclusive to the Quest 2. Note that to access top PC VR games like Star Wars: Squadrons or Half-Life: Alyx, you’ll need to connect to a gaming PC, either wirelessly or with a USB cable.

We’ll continue to update this list as new options become available.

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Meta

What The Bat?

Best random novelty game that defies description

What The Golf? is one of my family’s absolute favorite indie games. Its spiritual sequel has arrived for VR with What The Bat? and it’s the type of whimsical, random fun I wish VR had more of. It’s about living life with baseball bats for hands, and everything else is best left as a surprise to discover. Expect lots of rapid-fire, clever-weird puzzle challenges — the average quick experience here is much shorter than the typical hole in What The Golf?

$25 at Meta

Meta

Iron Man VR

Best Marvel VR game

Ever dream of being Iron Man? This game will have you hovering around in a jetpack, using your hands to aim and blast through a series of missions that are surprisingly kinetic and fun. Iron Man was originally a game on the PlayStation VR, but the move to Quest 2 is far more fun because there are no wires to worry about getting tangled in.

$40 at Meta

Polyarc Games

Moss: Book 2

Best magical miniature platform puzzler

Moss was one of my very favorite VR games, and has been a classic on Quest for a while. There’s a sequel now, and its graphics look even better on Quest 2 headsets. The gameplay, which involves moving a sword-bearing mouse hero named Quill on a quest to save her world, is mostly the same: Move through massive miniature worlds and solve puzzles. It’s a great sit-down-and-play experience, and fun to share with family.

$30 at Meta

Devolver Digital

Tentacular

Best monster squid simulator

Devolver’s adorable VR game turns you into a sea monster living near a seaside town. Your hands are tentacles. The sensation of bodily transformation works wonderfully, and you’ll find yourself flip-flopping your sucker-filled arms to grab things and try to help your little cartoony townspeople as you navigate a dollhouse-sized world all around you.

$25 at Meta

Fast Travel Games

Virtuoso

Best VR musical playground

A bunch of wild VR instruments you’ve never seen before, recording tools and the ability to multitask — Virtuoso isn’t just a toy, it’s a music platform in VR. It’s soothing and fun to play for fun on the fly, but digging deeper is surprisingly rewarding, too. Setting up drums, a weird VR xylophone, and a Theremin-like music cube side by side to jam with is really cool.

$20 at Meta

Vermillion

Vermillion

Best painting in VR

Instead of sculpting or drawing in 3D like many VR art apps do, Vermillion focuses on the canvas. It feels uncanny to paint with a palette and an easel, even more so if you use the mixed-reality mode to make the painting feel like it’s sitting in your home. Bringing up video tutorials while you paint feels like a preview of our AR-overlaid future and can feel surprisingly calming.

$20 at Meta

Realities.io

Puzzling Places

Best VR jigsaw puzzle

I had no idea how a VR jigsaw puzzle would feel or whether I’d care to play one. While I don’t love this game’s limited number of puzzles or its strange interface, its 3D environments that you can piece together (with up to hundreds of pieces per puzzle) are weirdly hypnotic. More, please!

$15 at Meta

Capcom

Resident Evil 4

Best console port to VR

Playing the classic Resident Evil 4 in VR feels like a whole new game. The ability to use your hands, holster weapons and actually walk into creepy settings is transformative. Other than 2D cut-scenes, this feels like a native VR game. Resident Evil 4 is a Quest 2 exclusive, so original Quest owners can’t play it. But this is an excellent game to show off how good stand-alone VR has become.

Read our Resident Evil 4 review.

$40 at Meta

Oculus

I Expect You To Die 2

Best spy-puzzle escape room

VR is a great format for escape room experiences. I Expect You To Die is a game you can play seated, leaning over desks and flipping switches, using telekinetic powers to control items from afar. The puzzle designs can be as challenging as any escape room I’ve ever been in. Try the original game and this one for double the challenge.

$25 at Meta

Oculus

Walkabout Mini Golf

Best VR mini-golf

My overall favorite VR game just might be mini-golf. Walkabout’s multiple golf courses are brilliantly designed, with extra-hard challenge modes and hidden golf balls to collect. The game’s golf physics are perfect. The multiplayer modes are great for having friends join in online. A number of increasingly-good courses keep arriving as DLC, from one based on Jim Henson’s Labyrinth to a series of Jules Verne courses. Every time a new course comes out, I get excited. Seriously, you have no idea how good VR mini-golf is.

$15 at Meta

Resolution Games

Demeo

Best tabletop RPG in VR

Demeo is a miraculous four-player online RPG that captures the feel of collaborative play, but in VR. The 3D map, the characters and your hovering hands, holding cards that can be played in-game, feel like a session of D&D that’s animated into reality. A recent update adds more free content; games are randomized a bit each time to keep the excitement going indefinitely.

Read our Demeo hands-on.

$30 at Meta

ForeVR Games

ForeVR Bowl

Best VR bowling

Sometimes, I really miss Wii Sports. Or real bowling alleys. ForeVR Bowl is the best simulation of both, with online play and solo challenges, and a mix of realistic and weird environments. The ball physics is more realistic than Wii Sports could have ever dreamed of, but it’s also forgiving enough to have fun. Just leave some arm room in your home play area… you need a bit more free space than you think.

$20 at Meta

Crytek/Oculus

The Climb 2

Best rock climbing simulation

You have no idea how surprisingly intense VR rock climbing can be until you’ve tried The Climb 2. This sequel to a classic VR game (also on Quest) uses your hands to reach up and grab ledges, grab ropes and zipline. It sounds easy, and yet discovering ledges, holding the right grip and keeping focus can be a real challenge. It’s also absolutely beautiful.

Read our The Climb 2 first take.

$30 at Meta

Resolution Games

Cook-Out

Best co-op cooking game

This isn’t Overcooked, but Cook-Out is a charming and really immersive cooking game where you race to put sandwiches together using a grill and tools right in front of you. Other players can join in, up to four players at once. At full speed it feels like a theme park attraction created in VR just for you.

$20 at Meta

Cyan Worlds

Myst

Best retro game to reboot in VR

Cyan Worlds’ new version of Myst is the same game you’ve probably played a million times, but the environments here are really beautiful to move through. Consider this a puzzle game that doubles as meditative escape. Read our Myst VR hands-on.

$30 at Meta

ILMxLab

Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge

Best Star Wars theme park experience at home

I missed my chance to go to Disney and see Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, but ILMxLab’s Batuu-themed game is the next best thing. It’s not exactly a tour of Black Spire Outpost, but the incredible character acting, world design and intense blaster battles are an impressive feat. It’s over too soon, but this Quest game still costs less than most Disney souvenirs. The $10 expansion pack is worth getting to complete the storyline. (Also check out Vader Immortal, ILMxLab’s previous lightsaber-wielding adventure involving Darth Vader.)

Read our Galaxy’s Edge hands-on and interview.

$25 at Meta

Big Box VR

Population One

The closest thing to Fortnite in VR

The multiplayer battle royale experience of Population One is very Fortnite-like. In fact, it’s extremely Fortnite-like. That’s a good thing. There are few large-scale multiplayer VR games right now, and this is one of the best. Dropping down from above, navigating the shrinking map, climbing and hunting for supplies, and excellent controls make this a must-play team shooter. Plus, there are constant season updates.

$30 at Meta

Skydance Interactive

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

Best zombie-horror game

It’s expensive, and the file size can get up to 8GB on the Quest 2, but this is console-quality VR shrunken down into a portable headset. Saints & Sinners was already an acclaimed PC VR game, and the transition to the Quest keeps its polish and RPG-like feel. It’s freaky, but it’s also deep. There’s a lot more going on than simple shooting.

$40 at Meta

Oculus

Rec Room

Best free social game-iverse

A lot of Quest games are expensive, but a surprising number are free. Rec Room is a social hub that’s also a doorway to tons of social games, with a seemingly limitless set of possibilities. Sometimes it feels a bit like Wii Sports or VR Roblox. There are mini-adventures, paintball games and more. I just want there to be improved parental-control features (there seem to be a lot of parents letting kids into Rec Room lately).

Read our Rec Room hands-on, pre-Quest.

See at Meta

Oculus

Beat Saber

King of music fitness

This is the Quest’s killer app, and if you want to get moving, love lightsabers, or just want a fun dance challenge, this is it. There are plenty of tracks to keep you busy, the lightsaber tracking is fantastic, and there are extra music packs to buy if you feel compelled. I’m still exhausting myself trying to beat my nephew’s high scores.

$30 at Meta

Devolver

Superhot VR

The action game to beat

Bullet time, grab the gun, wait — the faster you move, the faster everything else moves. Get it now? Superhot was one of the first games that hit the Quest, and it’s still amazing. Runner-up pick: Pistol Whip. (Sorry, I still like Superhot more.)

$25 at Meta

For Fun Labs

Eleven Table Tennis

Next best thing to real ping-pong

Seriously, ping-pong in VR is so good. The table physics, the size of the play area, the way VR matches what you need perfectly — who knows? You can play online with real people, and the gameplay is shockingly unforgiving.

$20 at Meta

Fireproof Games

The Room VR: A Dark Matter

Best horror VR escape room

If you’re up for a creepy dive into mysterious puzzle boxes, this unique VR game from the makers of the hit game series called The Room is a fantastic and spooky mental challenge (it’s not great for kids, though). There are lots of other escape room games on Quest, including the excellent I Expect You To Die 2 (listed above), and a ticketed live multiplayer escape-room experience from Adventure Labs, too.

Read our The Room VR: A Dark Matter review.

$30 at Meta

Oculus/Tender Claws

The Under Presents

Best theater head trip

I can’t explain The Under, really. Nightmare cabaret? Apocalyptic playground? There’s stuff to explore, and secrets to find, and real actors who perform in it from time to time. There’s a ticketed performance of an immersive theater version of The Tempest. There’s a variety show. You’ll find other people who can’t speak, and neither can you. But somehow, it all ends up feeling magical and strange.

Read our The Under Presents review.

See at Meta

Enhance

Tetris Effect: Connected

Best puzzle meditation

The synesthetic Tetris Effect was one of the best games of 2018, and the Quest version is mostly as good. It’s intense, the music is amazing, and even though the levels are frantic, it’s also weirdly zen. This is a perfect way to unwind.

Read our Tetris Effect review.

$30 at Meta

Oculus

Echo VR

Best VR esports

Oculus’ zero-gravity ultimate frisbee game is a relentless three-on-three VR experience that gave me vibes of Rocket League, but in VR. The controls, which rely on your hands to catapult around, are brilliant. The open beta is free until Nov. 30, and it’s great. But expect to lose.

See at Meta

Oculus

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes

Best VR party game

With other people in your home, VR can be a solitary disconnect. Keep Talking involves others by having people not in VR handle a bomb-defusing manual while the person in VR tries to communicate and stop the bomb in time. It feels like a weird board game, which is something most VR games never succeed at.

$15 at Meta

Oculus

In Death: Unchained

Best archery survival game

An endless and randomly generated set of castle enemies meet you every time you play, and this roguelike game uses a bow and arrow as your only method of navigation and attack. The mechanics feel great, and being surrounded by enemies you’re firing arrows at can be incredibly intense.

$30 at Meta

Oculus

Space Pirate Trainer

Best arcade game

Talk about a game that never seems to get old. While Space Pirate Trainer has been around since the launch days of the HTC Vive, the simple arcade design is perfect. You stand still, shoot at aliens and shield yourself. Survive as long as you can. It’s perfect.

$13 at Meta

Oculus

Pixel Ripped 1995

Best virtual retro game world within a world

Want to revisit ’90s games, including the experience of sitting on the floor with a controller playing games on a TV? You can do that already with a little retro 16-bit console, but Pixel Ripped pulls it off uncannily in VR. You’re a kid in a house, playing games that don’t exist. Then you enter the pixel world, and it gets stranger. The original ’80s-set Pixel Ripped 1989 is now inside as add-on DLC, too.

$20 at Meta

Vertigo Games

A Fisherman’s Tale

Best trippy puzzle game

VR can turn your sense of reality inside out, and A Fisherman’s Tale is the best type of out-of-body experience. A room with puzzles to solve also has a dollhouse, which is a perfect model of the room you’re in. You can reach into your own space and as you do, a larger hand from above enters your room. It’s like living in your own weird puzzle dollhouse universe, and it’s fantastic.

$15 at Meta

Vertical Robot

Red Matter

Most amazing-looking adventure game

Red Matter was one of the best-looking Oculus Quest games, and an update for the Quest 2 pushes the graphics even further. The puzzle-solving, atmospheric, brooding adventure is set in an alternate-timeline Cold War in space. Your tool-filled space suit glides around and grapples with the brilliantly evoked world, which often has Half-Life vibes. There’s also a sequel now, Red Matter 2, which is also worth getting.

$25 at Meta

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Have you ever found yourself trawling through endless pages of results on a search engine to find the answer to a complex question? Say you want to find out if a vegetarian diet is suitable for your dog. Your research journey might begin by hopping onto Google and typing “is a veg diet good for dogs” into the search box and then having to make sense of the legion of generated links. By the time you find an answer, you’ve sunk way more time than you’d budgeted into poring through articles, reports and their sources.

In the not-so-distant future, finding the answer to a complex question might not be such a tedious process. Microsoft is reportedly integrating a more advanced version (GPT-4) of the AI tech that underlies the headline-grabbing ChatGPT into its Bing search engine in a move that could transform search as we know it. More specifically, Bing might have the potential to serve up a search experience that’s superior to Google, according to AI researchers, and potentially usurp the search giant’s decades-long dominance.

“ChatGPT is the first new technology in more than a decade that may really transform search and that could, at least in principle, upend Google’s market dominance,” said Anton Korinek, an AI researcher and professor of economics, at the University of Virginia. “What the technology does is that it allows consumers to interact with their computer in a much more natural and conversational form than traditional search.”

Read More: Why ChatGPT Will Be Everywhere in 2023

At this point, we don’t know what Bing’s AI-driven search results might look like exactly (although some people have seen the new version of Bing appear briefly before vanishing). Microsoft declined to comment for this story. However, AI researchers expect a meaningful departure from the status quo in terms of how a search engine presents an answer and how users interact with it. After all, ChatGPT is not designed to browse the internet for information (like a search engine). Instead, the chatbot uses information studied from vast swaths of training data to generate a response.

“ChatGPT can answer its users with a single clear response compared to the myriads of links of traditional search engines. It also has capabilities that are far beyond traditional search engines, like [the ability] to generate new text, explain concepts, have a back-and-forth conversation between the user and the system, and so on,” said Korinek. “People still find emergent capabilities that even the creators of ChatGPT were not aware that the system had.”

Microsoft announced plans in January to invest more resources into OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, to the tune of $10 billion. The deal would help keep both companies at the cutting edge of what’s known as generative AI, a tech used in ChatGPT that can learn from copious amounts of data to create virtually any content format (text, images, music and so on) simply from a text prompt.

Search is just one in a suite of consumer-facing products in Microsoft’s stable that could potentially change meaningfully for customers in the coming years. According to a report by The Information, the Seattle-based tech giant also has plans to integrate ChatGPT’s AI tech into long-established products like Word, PowerPoint and Outlook in an endeavor that could change how more than a billion people work and accomplish daily tasks. For instance, integrating it into Outlook could mean simply prompting the email application to write a message about a specific topic.

“Microsoft will deploy OpenAI’s models across our consumer and enterprise products and introduce new categories of digital experiences built on OpenAI’s technology,” the company said in a press release announcing the expanded partnership.

Conversational search

For its part, Google and its cutting-edge subunit DeepMind have been working on similar systems for years. In fact, Google pioneered the AI technology known as a transformer that’s used in ChatGPT, GPT-3 and GPT-2. The search giant chose not to release them to the public, though, in part over concerns about unethical behavior and how chat systems sometimes break social norms.

However, in the wake of ChatGPT’s viral success, Google says it’s gearing up to release its challenger to ChatGPT imminently.

“In the coming weeks and months, we’ll make these language models available, starting with LaMDA, so that people can engage directly with them,” CEO Sundar Pichai said on a call detailing Alphabet’s fourth-quarter financial results in early February.

Google will focus on responsible AI, Pichai said, an important point given the problems with bias and wrong answers the technology can produce, among others. For instance, in 2016 Microsoft created a chatbot called Tay that it was forced to take offline after it spewed out hate speech. Even ChatGPT, which has rules to create positive and friendly content, can be manipulated into producing upsetting responses using the right prompts.

Google has also recently invested $300 million dollars into ChatGPT rival Anthropic, according to a Financial Times report.

“A competing system that is currently conducting beta tests is Anthropic’s Claude, which (or perhaps I should say who) has a very different personality from ChatGPT and is really a pleasure to interact with —it is so refined, cultured and polite,” said Korinek.

It’s no secret that Google search has become more conversational in general over the years. The company has made progress in this area with the Google assistant and with knowledge panels in search, and for years has pitched conversation as the future of search, demoing its AI systems LaMDA and MUM at its 2021 I/O developer conference.

Leveraging OpenAI’s artificial intelligence seems to be how Microsoft is attempting to edge out Google at its own game. In the wake of ChatGPT’s release, Google management issued a “code red,” according to The New York Times. The report said internal teams had been reassigned to kickstart work on AI between now and an expected company conference in May.

Still, Google’s search engine today remains the undisputed market leader as it has for decades, commanding 84% of global search market share, compared to Bing’s 9% (although it has grown in recent years) in 2022, according to Statista.

Google declined to comment for this story.

Read More: Microsoft’s New Tools Use AI to Generate Any Image You Imagine

How smart is ChatGPT?

As you’ve probably heard by now, ChatGPT is a sophisticated chatbot that went viral globally after its consumer release in late November as a free online tool accessible to anyone with an internet connection. The AI-powered chatbot made headlines thanks in part to its ability to churn out delightful poetry, generate meal plans and provide authoritative answers to complex questions within seconds after being prompted. The tech underlying it isn’t exactly brand new, but no chatbot had yet managed to capture mainstream fascination in the way that ChatGPT did. That’s largely because OpenAI built a snazzy user experience around the GPT-3.5 language model, and that’s the phenomenon we know as ChatGPT.

GPT-3.5 is an improved version of GPT-3, which debuted in 2020 and which learned from vast tracts of data and code to help it achieve its abilities. According to researchers at Stanford University, GPT-3 was trained on 570 gigabytes of text and has 175 billion parameters. (Google’s Dale Markowitz, meanwhile, put it at 45 terabytes of text data, “including almost all of the public web.”) For comparison, its predecessor, GPT-2, was over 100 times smaller, at 1.5 billion parameters.

“This increase in scale drastically changes the behavior of the model — GPT-3 is able to perform tasks it was not explicitly trained on, like translating sentences from English to French, with few to no training examples. This behavior was mostly absent in GPT-2,” researchers from Stanford‘s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence wrote in a 2021 post.

“The current version of ChatGPT probably already knows more about the world than any individual human, and it can present that knowledge in digestible form,” said Korinek.

For all the promise ChatGPT holds, there are nearly as many limitations. Critics of ChatGPT say it’s not always clear where the chatbot is pulling information from, which can make it difficult for people to trust the results. Skeptics also point out that ChatGPT will always remain undermined by the imperfect nature of the data it was trained on, including biased information or misinformation.

OpenAI has acknowledged the chatbot’s weaknesses in its current form. CEO Sam Altman said in a December post on Twitter that the product struggles with “robustness and truthfulness” and that it would be “a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now.”

But don’t look for the AI bandwagon to slow down.

“There will be a number of new systems like ChatGPT that will enter the market in 2023, and the main implication of the resulting competition is that consumers will have more choice and, hopefully, better products for consumers,” added Korinek.

GPT-4, which is under development, is reported to have 100 trillion parameters. But a release is not expected to take place until OpenAI is “confident we can [release] it safely and responsibly,” Altman said in an interview with StrictlyVC in early January.

Altman also attempted to manage expectations of that fourth iteration of GPT, the sophisticated language model that underpins ChatGPT, saying “we don’t have AGI.” AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, or a technology with its own emergent intelligence as opposed to relying on the deep learning models currently used by OpenAI. It’s the kind of intelligence that has been dramatized in science fiction stories for more than a century and was popularized in recent years by the award-winning dystopian show Westworld.

“I think [AGI] is sort of what is expected of us,” Altman said in the same interview, adding that GPT-4 is “going to disappoint” people who hold out that hope.

Editors’ note: CNET is using an AI engine to create some personal finance explainers that are edited and fact-checked by our editors. For more, see this post.

Apple makes some of the best tablets on the market, but they don’t come cheap. While budget tablets from Amazon and others might plug the gap for some folks, the user experience is often lacking when it comes to performance, app availability or build quality. Right now at Best Buy, you have the opportunity to score a recent iPad model for just $250. Over there, the ninth-gen iPad is $79 off its retail price and down to a new record low.

If you’ve been eyeing a new tablet to help you stay productive on the go (or entertained on a comfortable couch), now’s the time to pull the trigger on what is one of the best iPad deals available right now. Apple’s 10.2-inch tablet may not be the latest model anymore — having been superseded by the 10th-gen iPad, which ditched the home button — or the most capable when it comes to raw power, but it has plenty of great features. It’s equipped with the still-capable A13 Bionic chip, an 8-megapixel wide-angle rear camera, a 12-megapixel ultrawide front camera with Center Stage technology and more. The Retina display has been upgraded from previous models and now has True Tone technology, which adjusts the screen for comfortable viewing in any light.

It also features a Lightning connector and gets up to 10 hours of battery life per charge. Plus, this 2021 iPad supports the first-gen Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard, which are sold separately, but can help you create and work more easily, so they may be worth the investment.

The $250 price applies to the base-spec 64GB model, though the 256GB variant is seeing the same savings, as are cellular-equipped models.