If you mostly use Reddit on a desktop browser, you probably have no issue jumping from subreddit to subreddit. On mobile, it's a different story: Reddit really wants you to use its mobile app, and it makes that clear with pop-ups whenever you access the site in your browser. If you'd rather not download another app onto your phone, dismissing the pop-ups is easy enough—until it isn't.
That's the situation this week. Some users accessing the Reddit home page or jumping directly to individual posts on the mobile site are running into a new roadblock that stops their browsing in its tracks. Things seem normal when first loading up a thread, but as you start scrolling, a large pop-up appears at the bottom of the page. It shows the Reddit app, with its App Store rating, along with a bolded alert: "Get the app to keep using Reddit." The pop-up says the app lets you "search better, personalize your feed, and never miss an update on your [favorite] communities," all things the mobile site was perfectly capable of too.
Credit: Lifehacker
If you've experienced Reddit's previous mobile app pop-ups, this might not seem like such a big deal. Just dismiss it and move on, right? But there is no (X) here, or any obvious way to clear the pop-up. Plus, it's not just the pop-up—once it appears, the entire page stops responding to inputs.
Why is Reddit blocking its mobile site?
This is the most aggressive I've ever seen Reddit be in pushing people to its mobile app, but I don't quite understand the logic. Why stop users from accessing the mobile site? When Futurism reached out to the company for comment, it said, “We’ve found users who are logged in have a more personalized experience and can more easily find communities that match their interests...So, we’re running a test for a small number of logged-out mobile users that prompts them to download the app after visiting the Reddit site.” The company added that it was also targeting "a small subset of frequent mobile web users" because it feels they are already familiar with how Reddit works and would still have a better experience in the app.
I can attest that the times I've run into this issue, I was indeed logged out of the mobile site. But I didn't even mean to be: I don't typically intentionally browse Reddit on my phone, I just check out links that appear in a Google search. As such, it's wildly frustrating to hit this pop-up when I'm casually looking up the answer to a question. I'm certainly not going to download the Reddit app for those random moments; in fact, this experience makes me even less likely to do so.
Based on the App Store privacy notes, the Reddit app collects a bunch of data points, including purchases, contact info, search history, usage data, location, identifiers, and diagnostics. Sure, it doesn't link most of that data to your identity, save for identifiers and usage data, but still, browsing in something like Safari blocks a lot of that tracking. In short: Thanks but no thanks on the app recommendation, Reddit.
How to get around Reddit's mobile site pop-up
Luckily, you don't have to choose between downloading the app or forgoing using Reddit on your phone, as there are a few workarounds you can try to keep using the mobile site uninterrupted.
Sign in. If Reddit is indeed only targeting users who are logged out, sign in with your account. I just signed in to mine in the browser, and so far, I haven't hit this pop-up again. That's promising.
Clear your cache. If you don't have a Reddit account or you'd rather not sign in, you still have some options. As Futurism notes, some Redditors have found success when clearing their browser's cache and cookies, which might trick Reddit into thinking you're a different user, allowing you to shake off the targeted pop-ups. (We have guides for clearing the cache on both iPhone and Android, if you don't know how.)
Use "Old Reddit." Finally, before I realized the scope of the issue, I was simply switching to "Old Reddit" anytime I ran into the pop-up. Reddit still lets you use its original design, which strips away many of the bloated "new" features—or, in this case, the pop-up that stops you from accessing the mobile site. To switch to this stripped-down interface while using the mobile site, tap the address bar, then replace the "www" in the URL with "old" (e.g. old.reddit.com), without adjusting the rest of the link. The page will open in Reddit's old design, and you'll be free to browse at your leisure—but you'll miss out on the current site's more optimized UI.
The Trump administration is letting Elon Musk pay a $1.5 million fine to settle a lawsuit that originally sought at least $150 million. If approved by a federal court, the proposed settlement submitted yesterday would require a trust in Musk's name to pay a $1.5 million civil penalty to the government.
The January 2025 lawsuit, filed in the last days of the Biden administration, relates to how Musk purchased a 9 percent stake in Twitter in 2022 and failed to disclose it within 10 days as required under US law. The Securities and Exchange Commission alleged that "Musk was able to continue purchasing shares at artificially low prices, allowing him to underpay by at least $150 million for shares he purchased after his beneficial ownership report was due.”
Twitter's stock price soared after Musk belatedly disclosed his stake, and he bought the company outright later in 2022. The Biden SEC's January 2025 lawsuit demanded that Musk "pay disgorgement of his unjust enrichment as a result of his violation," plus interest and a separate civil penalty. But the SEC had investigated the late disclosure and related matters for nearly three years before filing the lawsuit, leaving no time to litigate the case before the Trump administration took over.
If your console of choice is PlayStation and you tend to buy your video games digitally, I have good news and bad news. The good news is you might be entitled to some money thanks to a proposed lawsuit settlement from Sony. The bad news is, it's probably not going to amount to all that much.
In a press release on Wednesday, the Saveri Law Firm announced a class action settlement for a case filed against Sony. The case, which is currently pending in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, centers on Sony's PlayStation Store: The plaintiffs in the case claim that Sony acted as a monopoly in the sale of its digital games, which drove prices for gamers higher than they should have been on the PlayStation Store. At the core of the argument is Sony's game voucher program, which, prior to 2019, allowed gamers to buy digital game copies from retail stores. The case argues that stores could sell games cheaper than Sony's digital store, but once the company stopped supporting game vouchers, gamers only had the option to pay the higher online prices. Sony, for its part, has denied any wrongdoing in this case, and the court has not found Sony guilty of the allegations.
While Sony is not admitting guilt, it does seem ready to settle. As such, the court has "preliminarily approved" the $7,850,000 settlement. If this settlement is approved during a subsequent hearing, that's the amount Sony will pay to settle the suit for all impacted customers. If you've ever bought a digital game on the PlayStation Store, you could be eligible for a (small) slice of those millions.
How can I check if I'm eligible for the PlayStation Store settlement?
There are a few qualifications that may exclude some customers, but if you're a Sony gamer, I'd bet there's a good chance you'd qualify. According to the suit, anyone who bought at least one digtal game through the PlayStation Store between April 1, 2019 and Dec. 31, 2023 may be entitled. That game needed to have previously had a voucher available in stores, and that voucher must have sold at least 200 copies before April 2019. Finally, the game's price needs to have increased by at least $0.50 after April 2019 compared to the price while the voucher was available. You can see the full list of applicable games here.
If that's confusing, here's the saving grace: If you do qualify, you don't actually need to do anything. The suit says that if you don't act to exclude yourself before July 2, 2026, you will be considered part of the Settlement Class. You can exclude yourself from the settlement if you want, but you must do so before July 2. You'll lose out on the payment, but you'll retain your right to sue Sony if you choose. You can also formally object to the settlement, which grants you the right to speak in person at the Fariness Hearing.
How much you'll get from the PlayStation Store settlement
We don't know exactly how many people will make up the settlement class, so it's tough to say precisely what the payments will be. But since there are likely many gamers who bought the digital games in the list during those select dates, the pool is probably quite large—especially considering you don't have to do anything (or even know about the lawsuit) to get a payout.
Push Square's Sammy Barker has an estimate based on all available data thus far, and it's not too impressive: You're likely to get around $1 to $3 per purchase. If you bought a ton of digital games on your PS4 or PS5, you might be wind up with a decent payout, but if you only bought a handful, don't expect your cut to amount to much.
After an unanticipated five-week break in the season, Formula One resumed action this past weekend in Miami. Held at a temporary circuit around Hard Rock Stadium, the event is emblematic of the Liberty era of F1: a turbocharged marketing extravaganza crammed full of hospitality suites with ticket prices as high as $95,000. It might be miles from the sea—the original plans to race across a bridge over Biscayne Bay did not survive contact with locals—but the sport is doing its best to make this a modern Monaco, playing up the host city's glamorous reputation and pastel color palette.
As we learned a couple of weeks ago, there have been tweaks to the amount of energy that the cars' new hybrid power units can regenerate and deploy via the electric motor that contributes almost half of the car's power output. The first three races of this season were frenetic, but they alarmed many longtime fans, as the cars are now too energy-limited to be driven flat-out during qualifying; that energy limitation also led to cars swapping positions multiple times, derisively dubbed "yo-yo" racing by critics.
The new limits on harvesting energy from the V6 to charge the battery on the move should reduce the potential for huge speed differentials like the one that caused Oliver Bearman's crash in Japan, and energy management was (thankfully) not much of a topic this weekend. Miami's layout definitely helps there, with plenty of braking zones to help regenerate much of the now-allowed 7 MJ each lap.
Educational tech giant Instructure has confirmed that data was stolen in a cyberattack, with the ShinyHunters extortion gang claiming responsibility. [...]
While I’m normally a KDE user, I do keep close tabs on various other desktop environments, and install and set them up every now and then to see how they’re fairing, what improvements they’ve made, and ultimately, if my preference for KDE is still warranted. This usually means setting up a nice OpenBSD installation for Xfce, Fedora for GNOME, and less often others for some of the more niche desktop environments. Since GNOME 50 was just released, guess who’s time in the round is up?
Since everybody’s already made up their mind about their preferred desktop eons ago, with upsides and downsides debated far past their expiration date, I’m not particularly interested in reviewing desktop environments or Linux distributions. However, after asking around on Fedi, it seemed there was quite a bit of interest in an article detailing how I set up GNOME, what changes I make to the defaults, which extensions I use, what tweaks I apply, and so on.
Of course, everything described in this article is highly personal, and I’m not arguing that this is the optimal way to tweak GNOME, that the extensions I use are the best ones, or that any visual modifications I make are better than whatever defaults GNOME uses. No, my goal with this article is twofold: one, to highlight that GNOME is a lot more configurable, extensible, and malleable than common wisdom on the internet would have you believe. It’s not KDE or one of those cobbled-together tiling Wayland desktops, but it’s definitely not as rigid as you might think. And two, that GNOME is good, actually.
Tools of the trade
The first thing I do is install a few crucial tools that make it easier to modify and tweak GNOME. I really dislike lists in articles, but I will begrudgingly use one here:
GNOME Tweaks: this tool gives you easy access to some hidden settings, most notably to easily switch themes.
Extension Manager: the easiest way to find, install, update, and manage GNOME extensions. With this application, you won’t need to use the browser for extensions at all.
dconf Editor: a tool to fiddle with even more obscure GNOME settings.
Add Water: an application with an odd name, designed entirely to easily install and update the Firefox GNOME Theme, which transforms Firefox (or LibreWolf, in my case) into something that much more closely resembles a GNOME/libadwaita application.
After installing all of these tools, the actual tweaking can commence.
Visual tweaks
I didn’t use to like GNOME’s Adwaita visual style, but over the years, it started growing on me to the point where I don’t actively dislike it anymore. With the arrival of libadwaita, it has also become effectively impossible to theme modern GNOME applications, so even if you do change to something else, many of your applications won’t follow along. If consistency is something you care about, you’ll stick to Adwaita, but that leaves one problem unresolved: applications that still use GTK3. These applications will follow a much older version of Adwaita, making them stand out like eyesores among all the modern GTK4 stuff.
Luckily, since GTK3 applications are still properly themable, this is easily fixed: just install the adw-gtk3 theme, either by hand, or through your distribution’s repositories. To enable it, first install the user themes extension through Extension Manager, and then enable the theme in GNOME Tweaks for “Legacy Applications”. Any potential GTK3 applications you still use will now integrate nicely with modern libadwaita applications.
The one part of GNOME I really do deeply dislike is its icon theme. I can’t quite explain why I dislike this icon set so much, but it runs deep, so one of the very first things I do is replace the default GNOME icon set with my personal favourite, Qogir. This is a popular icon set, so it’s usually available in your distribution’s repositories, but I always install it from its GitHub page. Changing GNOME’s icon set is as simple as selecting it in GNOME Tweaks. You can’t get much more personal taste than an icon set, and there are dozens of amazing sets to choose from in the Linux world. Changing them out and trying out new ones is stupidly easy, and it’s definitely worth looking at a few that might be more pleasing to you than GNOME’s (or KDE’s) default.
Lastly, I open Add Water and enable the amazing GNOME theme for LibreWolf. Add Water basically makes this as easy as flipping a switch, so there’s no need to copy any files into your LibreWolf profile or whatever. The application also provides a few more small tweaks to fiddle with, like enabling standard tab widths so tabs don’t grow and shrink as you close and open tabs, moving the bookmarks bar below the tab bar, and many more.
Extensions
Since the release of GNOME 3 in 2011, extensions have been the most capable way to modify GNOME’s look, behaviour, and feature set. As far as I can tell, while the extension framework is an official part of the GNOME Shell, the extensions themselves are all third-party and not part of a vanilla GNOME installation. By now, there are over 2800 listed extensions, but that number includes abandoned extensions so it’s hard to determine the actual number of currently-maintained ones. Whatever the actual number is, there’s bound to be things in there you’re going to want to use.
Here are the extensions I have installed. Let’s just start at the top and work our way down. I guess I’m forced to do another list.
AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support: for reasons that are clearly beyond my limited understanding of the world, GNOME does not support AppIndicators, KStatusNotifierItems, and legacy system tray icons. This must-have extensions fixes this inexplicable omission.
ArcMenu: a very configurable application/Start menu kind of thing. Has tons of options and preconfigured layouts, and is an absolute must for me as I’m a basic guy whose second GUI was Windows 95.
Blur my Shell: as the name implies, adds a nice configurable blur effect to various parts of the GNOME shell. An entirely aesthetic thing that adds little in functionality.
Dash to Dock: adds a dock to GNOME. An absolute 100% must for me. I used Mac OS X back when it didn’t suck (10.2-10.6), and my love for the dock metaphor is one of the few things from that time that stuck.
Date Menu Formatter: GNOME is remarkably limited and rigid when it comes to configuring locale-related settings, as it forces you to adopt every individual aspect of a locale (contrary to KDE, which has a very detailed settings screen for every aspect of locale). Even though I’m Dutch and live in Sweden, I always use all my software in US English, which in the case of GNOME also means adopting things like US currency, date formats, and so on. This little extension allows me to manually format the date in the top bar to be actually readable.
Gtk4 Desktop Icons NG (DING): GNOME does not support desktop icons. I think this is a bizarre design decision. This extension brings desktop icons back, with a nice collection of settings to adapt them to your needs.
Junk Notification Cleaner: whenever an application receives a notification, GNOME puts them in its notification center in the top clock menu. Sadly, this is also the only place where you can dismiss them. With this extension, you can set it so that the notifications of an application are cleared when you focus its window, close it, or both. I set it to both.
Just Perfection: this extension provides you with a massive set of toggles and switches to change tons of little aspects of the GNOME Shell. I use to hide a slew of buttons and toggles from the clock and top-right menu on the top panel that I never use, as well as to move the notification OSD to the top-right.
Lock Keys: ads a little Caps Lock icon in the top panel when Caps Lock is engaged. Very useful, especially when your keyboard lacks indicator LEDs.
User Themes: allows you to set GNOME Shell themes from your home directory.
Weather or Not: one of the many extensions that adds the weather to the top bar. We have two toddlers and live in the Arctic – we absolutely must have frictionless instant access to the current outside temperature.
There are countless more extensions to choose from, and you’re definitely going to find things you never even thought could be useful.
Miscellaneous tweaks
There’s a few other things I modify. In GNOME Tweaks, I make it so that double-clicking a window’s titlebar minimises it while right-clicking it lowers it; two features I picked up during my years as a BeOS user that I absolutely refuse to give up. I configure the dock from Dash to Dock so that it always remains on top and never hides itself, no matter the circumstances. In Settings, I disable virtual desktops entirely (I don’t like virtual desktops), and I make sure tap-to-click is disabled (if I’m on a laptop).
GNOME is good, actually
After making all of these changes, I feel quite comfortable using GNOME, at least on my laptop. It’s a nice, coherent experience, and offers what is probably the most polished graphical user interface you can find on Linux, even if it isn’t the most full-featured. The third-party application ecosystem, through modern libadwaita applications, is also quite healthy, moreso than what you find on KDE. To get there, however, I need to make a lot of changes to fix, undo, or work around some of the more… Peculiar defaults in GNOME, primarily through extensions.
And I think this is a problem.
The GNOME extension ecosystem is lively and active, but it also highlights a potential shortcoming of GNOME. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone use GNOME without extensions, and it’s honestly not hard to see why. Things like desktop icons and a system tray are pretty basic features of any modern desktop, and it’s not surprising that people seek them out, regardless of any grand design vision the GNOME team may have. GNOME developers can and should do whatever they want and what they think is right, but perhaps some of the most popular extensions should become official parts of GNOME if they are as popular as they seem.
For now, GNOME extensions kind of feel like the little block holding up the entire stack in that xkcd comic. Is it really wise to leave this linchpin to third parties, especially considering extensions run code on your machine? Sure, they make GNOME a lot more configurable and extensible than prevailing sentiments would have you believe, but perhaps not in the most convenient and safest way. Also, several of them break every time GNOME does a new release. Bummer.
In the end, though, GNOME is a product of its developers, and they alone get to decide how they want it to behave, what it looks like, and which features it will and won’t have. With how popular GNOME is, you have to be a real dishonest person to argue that what they have built isn’t a damn fine desktop environment, even if it makes some design decisions some of us find baffling. It won’t replace KDE as my desktop of choice, but having two excellent desktops like these that far outshine whatever “AI” and ad-ridden crap the proprietary vendors have to offer is truly an embarrassment of riches for the open source desktop world.
Microsoft Defender is detecting legitimate DigiCert root certificates as Trojan:Win32/Cerdigent.A!dha, resulting in widespread false-positive alerts, and in some cases, removing certificates from Windows. [...]
PAC: Now why can't everybody else in public sector do it like this?
Parliament's spending watchdog has held up a successful large-scale public sector tech transformation as a rare example worth emulating, in a striking departure from the usual diet of failure and overspend.…
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The Echo Show has come a long way since its humble beginnings. The latest smart display from Amazon came out in the winter of 2025 and, for the first time, brings Fire TV integrated into the display, so you can stream your shows directly on it, as well as Alexa+ AI voice control, among other improvements. Right now, the 11-inch Echo Show 11 is $169.99 (originally $219.99) and the 8-inch Echo Show 8 is $139.99 (originally $179.99), both at their lowest prices according to price-tracking tools.
The Amazon Echo Show 11 replaced the 3rd Generation Echo Show 10. One of the obvious differences is the smaller size, but the screen is actually bigger since the bezels are much smaller, giving it a more modern look. The sound is much better as well, with forward-facing speakers and a subwoofer that can fill up a room with sound. The resolution on the display has been bumped to 1,920 by 1,200 pixels, which is better but still underwhelming considering it's not 4K. Some of the more subtle upgrades are the new support for Matter, Thread, and Zigbee, essentially covering almost every smart home device.
If you had the 3rd Gen Echo Show 10, you'll notice the physical camera shutter is gone (you can still disable the camera in settings), as well as the swivel camera feature that follows you around (it is now mounted in place). Amazon's new Alexa+ generative AI is free for Prime members, otherwise, it'll be $19.99 per month. Alexa+ can do anything you'd expect it to; it's conversational, can control your devices without needing to say the exact words in the right order, and will remember past conversations. You can check out more details on PCMag's "excellent" review.
The Echo Show 11 and 8 are the same device, even in audio; the only difference is the screen size and the price.
Amazon’s cloud customers will need to wait several more months before the US tech company can repair war-damaged data centers and restore normal operations in the Middle East. The announcement comes two months after Iranian drone strikes targeted three Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain—meaning that full recovery from the cloud disruption could take nearly half a year in all.
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) dashboard posted an April 30 update describing how its UAE and Bahrain cloud regions “suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East” and are unable to support customer applications. The update also said that “relevant billing operations are currently suspended while we restore normal operations” in a process that “is expected to take several months.”
That wording suggests Amazon will continue to avoid billing AWS customers in the affected regions—ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1—after it initially waived all usage-related charges for March 2026 at an estimated cost of $150 million.
Windows Phone 8 is seeing a surprising revival through community efforts like 8Marketplace, which restores app downloads, alongside patched apps that connect to modern services like Bluesky.
Motorola is crazy about foldables. With each passing year, the company has beefed up its folding phone lineup, and in 2026, there will be four devices launching on May 21. At the top end is the company's first tablet-style foldable, the Razr Fold. Below that, Motorola will again offer three flip-style foldables: the Razr Ultra, Razr+, and Razr. These phones get a few modest upgrades over last year's phones, along with price increases. Motorola is unfortunately not immune to the rising cost of components.
Specs at a glance: 2026 Motorola Razr series
Razr 2026 ($800)
Razr+ 2026 ($1,100)
Razr Ultra 2026 ($1,500)
Razr Fold ($1,900)
SoC
MediaTek Dimensity 7450X
Snapdragon 8s Gen 3
Snapdragon 8 Elite "Pro"
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5
Memory
8GB
12GB
16GB
16GB
Storage
128GB
256GB
512GB
512GB
Display
External: 3.6-inch 1056 x 1066 OLED, 90 Hz, 1700 nits; Internal: 6.9-inch 1080 x 2640 OLED, 120 Hz, 3000 nits
External: 4-inch 1272 x 1080 OLED, 165 Hz, 2400 nits; Internal: 6.9-inch 1080 x 2640 OLED, 165 Hz, 3000 nits
External: 4-inch 1272 x 1080 OLED, 165 Hz, 3000 nits; Internal: 7-inch 1224 x 2992 OLED, 165 Hz, 5000 nits
Hematite, Violet Ice, Sporting Green, Bright White
Mountain View
Orient Blue, Cocoa
Blackened Blue, Lily White
The Razr Fold represents a big step for Moto. Its foldable flip phones have revived the Razr name and offered a good alternative to Samsung's Z Flip line, but people buying foldables are generally more interested in the large format. As prices at the lower end of the spectrum ratchet up, there's less and less distance between premium flip phones and bigger foldables. At $1,900, the Razr Fold is not a cheap phone, but it's roughly in line with the pricing of 2025 foldables (right between Google and Samsung). Given the current state of things, that's a small win for 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM.
Moto's first big foldable is almost here. Credit: Motorola
Motorola is not reinventing the wheel with the Fold, so you can expect a device that looks and feels similar to other big foldables like the Pixel 10 Pro Fold. It's about the same size as Google's foldable but slightly thinner and lighter. Samsung's Z Fold 7, however, is much thinner and lighter. Motorola does have the advantage of stylus input, which Samsung has dropped from its foldables. The Moto Stylus will launch at $99 alongside the Razr Fold on May 21.
DoI offers up to $885M if they abandon offshore wind projects
As the Iran war pushes up energy prices, the Trump administration is paying offshore wind developers to walk away from projects and invest instead in fossil fuel infrastructure.…
This weekend’s London Marathon was a phenomenal event, with not one but two men (Sabastian Sawe and Yomif Kejelcha) breaking the sub-two-hour barrier that people used to say would never be broken. The women’s winner, Tigst Assefa, also smashed her own world record. So what kind of running watches do these elite marathoners wear? Mostly cheap ones, including older Garmins.
I was able to confirm some of these runners’ specific watch models with Garmin and Coros. Since fans seem to be wondering whether the runners are sponsored by their respective watch companies, I also asked Garmin and Coros about sponsorships. Only two of the six appear to be sponsored. Here are the top three men and women:
Sabastian Sawe, with a world record time of 1:59:30: Garmin Forerunner 55 ($167). I confirmed this with Garmin. He is not sponsored by Garmin, though.
Yomif Kejelcha, the second person ever to run sub-2 with a time of 1:59:41: Coros Pace 3 ($199). He is not sponsored by Coros.
Jacob Kiplimo, 2:00:28: Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 ($349-$239 - unclear exactly which model, but not the Classic). He seems to be a sponsored athlete—here’s a Samsung article about how he uses the watch in his training.
Tigst Assefa, with a new women’s world record at 2:15:41: Garmin Forerunner 255 ($243). I also confirmed this with Garmin, and they do not sponsor her either.
Hellen Obiri, 2:15:5: Coros Pace 4 ($249). I confirmed this with Coros; she is a sponsored athlete, newly signed just before the race.
Joyciline Jepkosgei, 2:15:55: another older Garmin, which Ivan Jovin at Gadgets and Wearables identified as possibly the Forerunner 955 ($449). She is not sponsored by Garmin.
Of the six, four are wearing older models (released 2021-2023) with reflective MIP screens. The Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 and the Coros Pace 4 are the only watches in this group that were released in the past year (and they are the only two with the more modern style AMOLED screen). Most of these watches cost less than $250.
That may be surprising if you think of running watches as a cutting-edge tool where newest is always best. But even though watch manufacturers keep coming out with new features, that doesn’t mean those features are necessary to support training and racing, even for elite runners. Ever since I started reviewing and writing about fitness watches, I’ve been asking every runner I meet what kind of watch they have. Most of the time, it’s an older Garmin. Sometimes they don’t even know what model. Basic watches make perfectly good workhorses, even for elite runners.
Why elite runners don’t wear top-tier watches
These mostly budget picks don't surprise me, because elites need to focus on what their body is doing, not what’s going on inside their watch. The most important job of a running watch on race day is letting you know what pace you’re running—especially if you’re betting everything on being able to break a certain world record. Even the most basic digital watches can tell you how long it’s been since the starting gun went off, but a modern GPS-enabled watch can also give you a reasonably accurate sense of how many miles you’ve gone and how far it is until the next mile marker. (That said, it’s the official race timing and distance that counts; your watch just gives an estimate.)
I haven’t spoken to these athletes myself, so what follows are my opinions based on knowing what running watches offer to the people who wear them. In short: Everything besides your time and pace is icing on the cake.
Elites don’t need the training scores and statuses that some watches offer; they have coaches handling that stuff. They don’t decide the day’s training based on how many steps they’re getting; again, they and their coaches, not tech, are in control. It doesn’t matter if the watch has 150+ activity modes if your only job is to run.
So why do newer watches have those features in the first place? A lot of the features are there to help you feel a little more elite. For example, you may not have a coach, but your watch can coach you by suggesting a workout. Watch features also aim to keep you interacting with the watch—checking your scores, tracking other activities besides running—which helps the watch company’s bottom line by getting more engagement from you and keeping you excited about the brand.
As I’ve mentioned before, companies keep adding features to justify new models and higher prices—just look at Garmin’s Forerunner 570, which has one athletically meaningful upgrade from the 265 (a more accurate heart rate sensor) and otherwise tacked on a lot of bells and whistles to justify what was, at the time, a $200 price hike. Meanwhile, I've loudly proclaimed that the Forerunner 255, which you can still buy new, is probably the best value Garmin out there.
None of the top-tier features actually help you run faster, unless it’s by keeping you more interested in the hobby of running. So it should be no surprise that professional runners don’t prioritize extra features. And I may be a mere recreational runner, but I’m quite happy to run with a basic watch, as well. How excited I get about fancy features really depends on how much I’m relying on the watch to structure the way I train. If you aren’t looking to the watch to make decisions for you, a basic watch is just fine.
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Apple announced a slew of new products in March, including updated MacBook Airs with the M5 chip. These MacBooks come in both 13-inch and 15-inch sizes, and if you're interested in either, it's a good time to buy: Amazon is selling both at a $150 discount. That brings the 13-inch MacBook Air to $950 (down from $1,100) and the 15-inch MacBook Air to $1,150 (originally $1,300), matching their lowest prices ever, according to tracking tools.
The M5 MacBook Air is tempting, especially for under $1,000. In comparison to the already excellent M4 Airs, the M5 base model has double the storage at 512GB, making up for the $100 bump in the list price. The M5 chip is powerful and makes the performance even smoother, according to Mashable's review. The aluminum design is as good as you'd expect from Apple's most popular portable laptop, keeping it lightweight and thin. It comes with a Liquid Retina display, Touch ID, a 12MP Center Stage Camera, and the Magic Keyboard.
Typically, the question would be whether to go for the slightly older M4 MacBook Air or pay a bit more for the newer M5 chip—but with the current discount, the 13-inch M5 with 512GB of storage is actually cheaper than a comparably equipped M4 from Amazon, making the choice a no-brainer.
Wednesday, May 06, 2026
Moto's first big foldable is almost here. Credit: Motorola
