Tom's Guide

If one more audio brand releases earbuds/headphones with "AI features", I'm going to scream. And, as it turns out, so will 98% of Tom's Guide readers. Or, put bluntly, so will you. Of 200 responses, only five readers said they specifically look for AI features in the best earbuds and best headphones. Most readers voted sound quality as their most important feature: 135 people, specifically. ANC came second with twenty-seven votes. Yes, first place received five times as many votes as second place. This got me thinking: Why? Why do audio brands keep pushing AI features down our throats when we so clearly don't want them? Do said brands worry they'll be "left behind" in the AI race? Do brands consider sound quality, ANC, and call quality last year's news? Or is it something else...?

We all know that plugging in your laptop is supposed to make it faster, but new testing of an Nvidia-powered laptop found the exact opposite, with AI performance dropping by nearly 80% when running Linux. The surprising discovery comes from MindStudio, which tested an MSI Prestige N16 Flip AI+ powered by Nvidia's RTX Spark platform. The team wanted to see whether Linux could run on the machine without sacrificing the performance available through Windows. It could, but there was a major catch. When running OpenAI's GPT-OSS-120B model, the laptop generated 65.4 tokens per second on Windows. Running Linux directly on the same hardware while plugged into a charger brought that figure down to just 13.9 tokens per second. That's a nearly 79% reduction in AI performance simply from changing the operating system. But even stranger, unplugging the laptop brought much of that performance back.

Apple’s new iMac with M6 might look identical to its predecessor at first glance, but it’s the extra power and improved connectivity under the hood that make this upgraded all-in-one desktop continue to stand out. Instead of drastically altering the iMac, Apple has kept more or less the same design since 2021 when the 24-inch model first debuted. Just like with the iMac M4, you’re still getting a 24-inch 4.5K Retina display, a 12MP Center Stage webcam, and two or four Thunderbolt 4 ports at the back depending on which configuration of the new M6 chip you choose. Similarly to the Mac mini M6 I reviewed, Apple’s M6 chip and its N1 wireless chip are the big upgrades here. While I wish there were other changes to its design — like an optional height-adjustable stand or a larger screen size — the iMac with M6 is a reliable and powerful desktop that’s incredibly simple to set up thanks to its one-cable solution. Also, unlike Apple's Studio Display monitors, the power cable is detachable, which makes cable management a breeze. Besides being one of the best all-in-one computers, it’s also the only one that can be configured with a matte finish thanks to Apple’s optional nano-texture glass.