This year, tech companies have made concessions that would have once been unthinkable. Apple agreed to adopt the RCS protocol, allowing for text message interoperability with Android devices, and, after more than a decade it ditched the lightning port in its latest iPhone. Meta offered some users the choice to opt out of targeted advertising for a monthly subscription. TikTok, Meta, and Snap allowed some users to opt out of their recommendation algorithms entirely.
None of these concessions would have happened without pressure from the European Union. The bloc has long taken the lead in regulating “Big Tech” (or attempting to), but 2023 saw some of those efforts finally come to fruition.
The most immediate result of increased EU regulations this year came with the arrival of the iPhone 15 lineup, which was the first phone from Apple to support USB-C rather than its proprietary lightning port. The company may have eventually made the switch on its own, but it came in 2023 as a direct result of a European law that made USB-C the common charging standard.
"We have no choice as we do around the world but to comply to local laws," Apple exec Greg Joswiak said about the rules last year. (The regulation requires all new phones and other mobile devices to adopt USB-C by the end of 2024.)
Likewise, it’s widely believed Apple’s decision to finally agree to support the RCS standard in iMessage was the result of political will within the EU. Apple had long been resistant to supporting RCS, which would finally modernize text messages between iPhone owners and their “green bubble” friends.
Apple hasn’t publicly said why it changed its stance. But Google and other companies were pressuring EU authorities to regulate iMessage like other “gatekeeper” services that fall under its authority thanks to the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Apple’s surprise announcement that it would support RCS after all came on the same day as the deadline for companies to challenge the EU’s gatekeeper rules. So Apple’s about face on RCS could reasonably be interpreted as an attempt to pacify EU regulators who could have taken more aggressive measures, like requiring iMessage to be fully interoperable with other chat apps like WhatsApp.
Notably, both of these changes will also benefit US users, even though they are a consequence of EU-specific regulations.“There's definitely a higher degree of protection to the consumer in Europe than there is in the US,” Carolina Milanesi, a consumer analyst with Creative Strategies, told Engadget. Those protections, she noted, often “cascade down” to other regions because it can be impractical to implement different standards across geographies.
In addition to the gains made under the DMA, most of the major social media apps — including Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram — fall under the purview of another EU law that went into effect this year, the Digital Services Act. Under this law, these companies are required to make detailed disclosures about disinformation and other harmful content, and explain how their recommendation algorithms work.
“If you force the social media industry to explain itself, to reveal to some degree its inner workings, it will have an incentive to not misbehave and/or incentive to self regulate more vigorously” explains Paul Barrett, deputy director of NYU’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.
Whether these measures will actually make these services better for those using them, however, is less clear. There are still open questions about how the rules will be enforced. But there have been a few notable changes for EU-based social media users.
Snapchat, Meta and TikTok all now allow European users to opt out of their recommendation algorithms entirely. Snapchat also ended most targeted advertising for 13- to 17-year-olds in the bloc. Additionally, Meta was forced to allow EU users to opt-out of targeted advertising or choose no advertising at all (in exchange for a hefty monthly subscription.)
While these may not seem like monumental changes, they do strike at the heart of all of these companies’ business models. And it’s unlikely, if left to self-regulate as US policymakers have been content to allow them to do, that any of these companies would have voluntarily acted against their own self-interest.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/how-the-eu-forced-tech-companies-to-change-in-2023-153023033.html?src=rss
Every time Microsoft launched a major AI feature this year, I couldn't help but feel more skeptical about the company's new direction. Here's Microsoft, a notoriously conservative and slow-moving giant, reshaping its products around artificial intelligence not long after most people learned generative AI existed. The last time it made such a dramatic shift we got Windows 8, a failed attempt at making its flagship OS tablet and touchscreen friendly.
Now, the company is bringing AI right into the heart of Windows and I'm left wondering: Is Microsoft jumping into artificial intelligence to actually make its products better? Or is it just trying to stake a claim as an AI innovator and pray that the technology actually lives up to the hype? At this point, it's genuinely hard to tell.
As the Zune, WebTV and Windows Phone have shown, Microsoft isn't so great at timing. Its products often either land too early to be useful (as in the case of the sluggish WebTV), or arrive far too late to make an impact (like the genuinely great Zune HD). But when the company unveiled its AI-powered Bing Chat earlier this year, it was perfectly positioned to coast on the success of ChatGPT, which by then had reportedly reached 100 million users in just two months. According to UBS analysts, that would have made ChatGPT the fastest growing consumer application in history. What better time to mate the power of generative AI with one of its notoriously beleaguered products? Microsoft had nothing to lose.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the first OpenAI DevDay in November 2023.
Justin Sullivan via Getty Images
After investing a total of $13 billion in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI (and acquiring a 49 percent stake in the process), Microsoft was probably eager to show off its shiny new toy ahead of Google and others. The introduction of Bing Chat officially kicked off Microsoft's year of AI: Copilot launched on Edge, Microsoft 365 products like Word and Powerpoint and eventually made its way to Windows 11. Even more surprising, the company recently announced that Copilot is coming to Windows 10 — a sign that it wants AI features in front of as many people as possible. (Windows 11 reportedly accounts for 26 percent of Windows installations, while Windows 10 still has 69 percent. By targeting both platforms Copilot could potentially reach up to 1.4 billion users.)
There's no doubt that Copilot makes a great first impression. Type in a few words (or speak them aloud), and it returns with direct answers to your questions, like a whip-smart assistant. There are no ads to wade through, and you only have to engage with additional links if you want. It's a glimpse at a world beyond search engines, one where AI could help guide us through an increasingly chaotic media landscape. Microsoft's Copilots can also help out in specific applications: In Edge it can summarize the webpage you're looking at; it can help to transcribe and generate action points in Teams Meetings; and it can help unearth hard to find settings in Windows (for example, you could just type "How do I turn on Night Mode?" to flip that on).
But Copilot's confident veneer hides the fact that it often makes errors and can occasionally misunderstand your questions entirely. It's far less responsive than using a typical search engine, as there's a lot of opaque AI processing happening in the background. And in my testing, it also crashes more often than you'd think, which requires a “reboot” of your session (but at least it doesn't flash a blue screen like Windows).
Microsoft
In an effort to temper our expectations, Microsoft has a helpful note emblazoned atop Bing's AI chat: "Bing is powered by AI, so surprises and mistakes are possible. Please share feedback so we can improve!" Microsoft appears to show a bit of humility here by acknowledging that its AI chat isn't perfect, and it's trying to earn some brownie points by saying it's listening to your feedback. Mostly, though, that warning serves as a way out for Microsoft. It can tout Copilot's ability to write essays for you and hold vaguely realistic conversations, but the minute it screws up, the company can just say, "It's just a beta, LOL!"
The big test for Microsoft's Copilots and other generative AI tools comes down to one thing: trust. Can a user trust that it'll deliver the relevant information when it asks a question? Can we be sure Copilot will even understand our query correctly?
Aaron Woodman, Microsoft's VP of Windows Marketing, tells us that trust will ultimately come down to users "kicking the tires" for themselves and seeing how well Copilot performs. "I think that type of organic growth is one that we're going to see over time," he said in an interview with Engadget at the Windows Copilot launch in September. "And I bet it'll be explosive because the value is there, and I think customers will see that very quickly."
Microsoft
Woodman also believes that users will understand that Copilot won't always be perfect, especially during these early days. "I weirdly think we're probably more empathetic with people and understand where they're at with growth than we are with technology," he said. "I think the best thing that we can do is honestly own that, be transparent about it. At some level, every conversation we're in, we're trying to lean into [that] this is a growth process. We want to make sure you understand reference materials. I think people will understand that we're trying to accelerate bringing [new] technology to them."
I’ve been using Microsoft’s AI solutions since Bing Chat launched earlier this year, and while it’s helpful for simple tasks, like creating a specification table comparing two products, it hasn’t exactly changed the way I work. Microsoft also had to seriously restrict Bing Chat’s capabilities early on after it started arguing with users and issuing disturbing responses. In Windows 11, Copilot can sometimes help me find settings like dark mode, but it can’t always pull up the controls within the Copilot pane, and sometimes it just sends me to general settings menus if it can’t figure out what I’m asking for.
More recently, I’ve had disappointing conversations with Bing when I asked if it was a good time to buy a Nintendo Switch (it took some prodding for it to bring up rumors of a potential Switch follow-up coming next year), and its ability to answer questions around images is still less useful than Google’s image search.
When I took a photo of my kid’s baby monitor and asked “What is this?,” Bing was aware of its function, but it got the actual model and manufacturer wrong. That query also took five seconds to complete. The Google Image Search took half a second and correctly identified it as the Eufy Space Monitor. Score one for traditional search (and yes, I know it’s also powered by its own set of computer vision models).
Microsoft
We can look to Microsoft's Github Copilot, which launched in November 2021, as one way users can learn to work with AI. It's mainly meant to serve as a partner alongside an experienced programmer: It'll look out for potential issues and it can even whip up some simple code.
According to developer Aidan Tilgner, Github Copilot can be genuinely useful for coders, so long as you keep your expectations in check. In the paper "GitHub Copilot AI pair programming: Asset or Liability?" authors Arghavan Moradi Dakhel, Vahid Majdinasab, Amin Nikanjam, Foutse Khomh, Michel C.Desmarais, and Zhen Ming Jiang found Github Copilot similarly useful, but note "it can also become a liability if it is used by novices, those who may not be familiar with the problem context and correct coding methods."
"Copilot suggests solutions that might be buggy and difficult to understand, which may be accepted as correct solutions by novices," the authors add. "Adding such buggy and complex code into software projects can highly impact their quality."
By leaning so much on Copilots in the future, Microsoft may also be tying itself too closely to OpenAI, a young company that recently went through one of the most volatile weekends in Silicon Valley history. OpenAI’s board fired CEO Sam Altman, but after a significant amount of internal pressure (and some cajoling from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella), it ultimately re-hired him a few days later. If OpenAI goes through another tumultuous event, it won’t just be Microsoft’s $13 billion investment in danger: It’ll be the company’s future plans for practically all of its products.
According to Windows Central, Microsoft’s next major Windows update, “Hudson Valley,” may arrive next year with a slew of AI enhancements in tow. That includes the ability to analyze content being displayed in video chats, an improved Copilot that can remember everything you’ve done on your PC, and better system-wide search. Some features may also require CPUs with NPUs, like AMD’s last batch of chips and Intel’s new Core Ultra hardware. That’s similar to the Windows Studio Effects features like background blurring and auto-framing, which also require NPUs.
The one constant around AI these days is that everything is changing quickly. Since I started writing this piece, Microsoft announced Copilot would be upgraded with the more powerful GPT-4 Turbo and Dall-E 3 models, which will make them even more capable. Perhaps Microsoft and OpenAI will eventually be able to fix all of the issues I’ve seen with Copilot so far, and ultimately deliver a transformative AI tool that’s easily available to everyone. But I also hoped for the best when it came to the company’s dual-screen Duo and Neo plans, and all I got in return was disappointment.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-bet-big-on-ai-in-2023-but-its-ai-future-is-still-unclear-143055721.html?src=rss
Every time Microsoft launched a major AI feature this year, I couldn't help but feel more skeptical about the company's new direction. Here's Microsoft, a notoriously conservative and slow-moving giant, reshaping its products around artificial intelligence not long after most people learned generative AI existed. The last time it made such a dramatic shift we got Windows 8, a failed attempt at making its flagship OS tablet and touchscreen friendly.
Now, the company is bringing AI right into the heart of Windows and I'm left wondering: Is Microsoft jumping into artificial intelligence to actually make its products better? Or is it just trying to stake a claim as an AI innovator and pray that the technology actually lives up to the hype? At this point, it's genuinely hard to tell.
As the Zune, WebTV and Windows Phone have shown, Microsoft isn't so great at timing. Its products often either land too early to be useful (as in the case of the sluggish WebTV), or arrive far too late to make an impact (like the genuinely great Zune HD). But when the company unveiled its AI-powered Bing Chat earlier this year, it was perfectly positioned to coast on the success of ChatGPT, which by then had reportedly reached 100 million users in just two months. According to UBS analysts, that would have made ChatGPT the fastest growing consumer application in history. What better time to mate the power of generative AI with one of its notoriously beleaguered products? Microsoft had nothing to lose.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the first OpenAI DevDay in November 2023.
Justin Sullivan via Getty Images
After investing a total of $13 billion in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI (and acquiring a 49 percent stake in the process), Microsoft was probably eager to show off its shiny new toy ahead of Google and others. The introduction of Bing Chat officially kicked off Microsoft's year of AI: Copilot launched on Edge, Microsoft 365 products like Word and Powerpoint and eventually made its way to Windows 11. Even more surprising, the company recently announced that Copilot is coming to Windows 10 — a sign that it wants AI features in front of as many people as possible. (Windows 11 reportedly accounts for 26 percent of Windows installations, while Windows 10 still has 69 percent. By targeting both platforms Copilot could potentially reach up to 1.4 billion users.)
There's no doubt that Copilot makes a great first impression. Type in a few words (or speak them aloud), and it returns with direct answers to your questions, like a whip-smart assistant. There are no ads to wade through, and you only have to engage with additional links if you want. It's a glimpse at a world beyond search engines, one where AI could help guide us through an increasingly chaotic media landscape. Microsoft's Copilots can also help out in specific applications: In Edge it can summarize the webpage you're looking at; it can help to transcribe and generate action points in Teams Meetings; and it can help unearth hard to find settings in Windows (for example, you could just type "How do I turn on Night Mode?" to flip that on).
But Copilot's confident veneer hides the fact that it often makes errors and can occasionally misunderstand your questions entirely. It's far less responsive than using a typical search engine, as there's a lot of opaque AI processing happening in the background. And in my testing, it also crashes more often than you'd think, which requires a “reboot” of your session (but at least it doesn't flash a blue screen like Windows).
Microsoft
In an effort to temper our expectations, Microsoft has a helpful note emblazoned atop Bing's AI chat: "Bing is powered by AI, so surprises and mistakes are possible. Please share feedback so we can improve!" Microsoft appears to show a bit of humility here by acknowledging that its AI chat isn't perfect, and it's trying to earn some brownie points by saying it's listening to your feedback. Mostly, though, that warning serves as a way out for Microsoft. It can tout Copilot's ability to write essays for you and hold vaguely realistic conversations, but the minute it screws up, the company can just say, "It's just a beta, LOL!"
The big test for Microsoft's Copilots and other generative AI tools comes down to one thing: trust. Can a user trust that it'll deliver the relevant information when it asks a question? Can we be sure Copilow will even understand our query correctly? Aaron Woodman, Microsoft's VP of Windows Marketing, tells us that trust will ultimately come down to users "kicking the tires" for themselves and seeing how well Copilot performs. "I think that type of organic growth is one that we're going to see over time," he said in an interview with Engadget at the Windows Copilot launch in September. "And I bet it'll be explosive because the value is there, and I think customers will see that very quickly."
Microsoft
Woodman also believes that users will understand that Copilot won't always be perfect, especially during these early days. "I weirdly think we're probably more empathetic with people and understand where they're at with growth than we are with technology," he said. "I think the best thing that we can do is honestly own that, be transparent about it. At some level, every conversation we're in, we're trying to lean into [that] this is a growth process. We want to make sure you understand reference materials. I think people will understand that we're trying to accelerate bringing [new] technology to them."
I’ve been using Microsoft’s AI solutions since Bing Chat launched earlier this year, and while it’s helpful for simple tasks, like creating a specification table comparing two products, it hasn’t exactly changed the way I work. Microsoft also had to seriously restrict Bing Chat’s capabilities early on after it started arguing with users and issuing disturbing responses. In Windows 11, Copilot can sometimes help me find settings like dark mode, but it can’t always pull up the controls within the Copilot pane, and sometimes it just sends me to general settings menus if it can’t figure out what I’m asking for.
More recently, I’ve had disappointing conversations with Bing when I asked if it was a good time to buy a Nintendo Switch (it took some prodding for it to bring up rumors of a potential Switch follow-up coming next year), and its ability to answer questions around images is still less useful than Google’s image search.
When I took a photo of my kid’s baby monitor and asked “What is this?,” Bing was aware of its function, but it got the actual model and manufacturer wrong. That query also took five seconds to complete. The Google Image Search took half a second and correctly identified it as the Eufy Space Monitor. Score one for traditional search (and yes, I know it’s also powered by its own set of computer vision models).
Microsoft
We can look to Microsoft's Github Copilot, which launched in November 2021, as one way users can learn to work with AI. It's mainly meant to serve as a partner alongside an experienced programmer: It'll look out for potential issues and it can even whip up some simple code.
According to developer Aidan Tilgner, Github Copilot can be genuinely useful for coders, so long as you keep your expectations in check. In the paper "GitHub Copilot AI pair programming: Asset or Liability?" authors Arghavan Moradi Dakhel, Vahid Majdinasab, Amin Nikanjam, Foutse Khomh, Michel C.Desmarais, and Zhen Ming Jiang found Github Copilot similarly useful, but note "it can also become a liability if it is used by novices, those who may not be familiar with the problem context and correct coding methods."
"Copilot suggests solutions that might be buggy and difficult to understand, which may be accepted as correct solutions by novices," the authors add. "Adding such buggy and complex code into software projects can highly impact their quality."
By leaning so much on Copilots in the future, Microsoft may also be tying itself too closely to OpenAI, a young company that recently went through one of the most volatile weekends in Silicon Valley history. OpenAI’s board fired CEO Sam Altman, but after a significant amount of internal pressure (and some cajoling from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella), it ultimately re-hired him a few days later. If OpenAI goes through another tumultuous event, it won’t just be Microsoft’s $13 billion investment in danger: It’ll be the company’s future plans for practically all of its products.
According to Windows Central, Microsoft’s next major Windows update, “Hudson Valley,” may arrive next year with a slew of AI enhancements in tow. That includes the ability to analyze content being displayed in video chats, an improved Copilot that can remember everything you’ve done on your PC, and better system-wide search. Some features may also require CPUs with NPUs, like AMD’s last batch of chips and Intel’s new Core Ultra hardware. That’s similar to the Windows Studio Effects features like background blurring and auto-framing, which also require NPUs.
The one constant around AI these days is that everything is changing quickly. Since I started writing this piece, Microsoft announced Copilot would be upgraded with the more powerful GPT-4 Turbo and Dall-E 3 models, which will make them even more capable. Perhaps Microsoft and OpenAI will eventually be able to fix all of the issues I’ve seen with Copilot so far, and ultimately deliver a transformative AI tool that’s easily available to everyone. But I also hoped for the best when it came to the company’s dual-screen Duo and Neo plans, and all I got in return was disappointment.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-bet-big-on-ai-in-2023-but-its-ai-future-is-still-unclear-143055721.html?src=rss
As a long-time Mint user, I was frustrated to say the least when news broke at the end of 2023 that Intuit would shut Mint down. I, like millions of others, enjoyed how easily Mint allowed us to track all accounts in one place and monitor credit scores. I also used it regularly to track spending, set goals like pay my mortgage down faster and with general money management.
So I set out to find the best Mint alternatives in the wake of its disappointing demise. I gave Credit Karma, Intuit’s other financial app, a try but found it to be a poor Mint substitute. The following guide lays out my experience testing some of the most popular Mint replacement apps available today in search of my next budgeting app.
Our pick for best Mint alternative remains Quicken Simplifi, even months after the Mint shutting down, thanks to its easy to use app, good income and bill detection and its affordable price. But there are plenty of other solid options out there for those with different needs. If you’re also on the hunt for a budgeting app to replace Mint, we hope these details can help you decide which of the best budgeting apps out there will be right for you.
No pun intended, but what I like about Quicken Simplifi is its simplicity. Whereas other budgeting apps try to distinguish themselves with dark themes and customizable emoji, Simplifi has a clean user interface, with a landing page that you just keep scrolling through to get a detailed overview of all your stats. These include your top-line balances; net worth; recent spending; upcoming recurring payments; a snapshot of your spending plan; top spending categories; achievements; and any watchlists you’ve set up.
Another one of the key features I appreciate is the ability to set up savings goals elsewhere in the app. I also appreciate how it offers neat, almost playful visualizations without ever looking cluttered. I felt at home in the mobile and web dashboards after a day or so, which is faster than I adapted to some competing services (I’m looking at you, YNAB and Monarch).
Getting set up with Simplifi was mostly painless. I was particularly impressed at how easily it connected to Fidelity; not all budget trackers do, for whatever reason. This is also one of the only services I tested that gives you the option of inviting a spouse or financial advisor to co-manage your account. One thing I would add to my initial assessment of the app, having used it for a few months now: I wish Simplifi offered Zillow integration for easily tracking your home value (or at least a rough estimate of it). Various competitors including Monarch Money and Copilot Money work with Zillow, so clearly there's a Zillow API available for use. As it stands, Simplifi users must add real estate manually like any other asset.
Dana Wollman / Engadget
In practice, Simplifi miscategorized some of my expenses, but nothing out of the ordinary compared to any of these budget trackers. As you’re reviewing transactions, you can also mark if you’re expecting a refund, which is a unique feature among the services I tested. Simplifi also estimated my regular income better than some other apps I tested. Most of all, I appreciated the option of being able to categorize some, but not all, purchases from a merchant as recurring. For instance, I can add my two Amazon subscribe-and-saves as recurring payments, without having to create a broad-strokes rule for every Amazon purchase.
The budgeting feature is also self-explanatory and can likely accommodate your preferred budgeting method. Just check that your regular income is accurate and be sure to set up recurring payments, making note of which are bills and which are subscriptions. This is important because Simplifi shows you your total take-home income as well as an “income after bills” figure. That number includes, well, bills but not discretionary subscriptions. From there, you can add spending targets by category in the “planned spending” bucket. Planned spending can also include one-time expenditures, not just monthly budgets. When you create a budget, Simplifi will suggest a number based on a six-month average.
Not dealbreakers, but two things to keep in mind as you get started: Simplifi is notable in that you can’t set up an account through Apple or Google. There is also no option for a free trial, though Quicken promises a “30-day money back guarantee.”
Monarch Money grew on me. My first impression of the budgeting app, which was founded by a former Mint product manager, was that it's more difficult to use than others on this list, including Simplifi, NerdWallet and Copilot. And it is. Editing expense categories, adding recurring transactions and creating rules, for example, is a little more complicated than it needs to be, especially in the mobile app. (My advice: Use the web app for fine-tuning details.) Monarch also didn’t get my income right; I had to edit it.
Once you’re set up, though, Monarch offers an impressive level of granularity. In the budgets section, you can see a bona fide balance sheet showing budgets and actuals for each category. You'll also find a forecast, for the year or by month. And recurring expenses can be set not just by merchant, but other parameters as well. For instance, while most Amazon purchases might be marked as “shopping,” those for the amounts of $54.18 or $34.18 are definitely baby supplies, and can be automatically marked as such each time, not to mention programmed as recurring payments. Weirdly, though, there’s no way to mark certain recurring payments as bills, specifically.
Dana Wollman / Engadget
Not long after I first published this story in December 2023, Monarch introduced a detailed reporting section where you can create on-demand graphs based on things like accounts, categories and tags. That feature is available just on the web version of the app for now. As part of this same update, Monarch added support for an aggregator that makes it possible to automatically update the value of your car. This, combined with the existing Zillow integration for tracking your home value, makes it easy to quickly add a non-liquid asset like a vehicle or real estate, and have it show up in your net worth graph.
The mobile app is mostly self-explanatory. The main dashboard shows your net worth; your four most recent transactions; a month-over-month spending comparison; income month-to-date; upcoming bills; an investments snapshot; a list of any goals you’ve set; and, finally, a link to your month-in-review. That month-in-review is more detailed than most, delving into cash flow; top income and expense categories; cash flow trends; changes to your net worth, assets and liabilities; plus asset and liability breakdowns. In February 2024, Monarch expanded on the net worth graph, so that if you click on the Accounts tab you can see how your net worth changed over different periods of time, including one month, three months, six months, a year or all time.
On the main screen, you’ll also find tabs for savings and checking accounts (and all others as well), transactions, cash flow, budget and recurring. Like many of the other apps featured here, Monarch can auto-detect recurring expenses and income, even if it gets the category wrong. (They all do to an extent.) Expense categories are marked by emoji, which you can customize if you’re so inclined.
Monarch Money uses a combination of networks to connect with banks, including Plaid, MX and Finicity, a competing network owned by Mastercard. (I have a quick explainer on Plaid, the industry standard in this space, toward the end of this guide.) As part of an update in late December, Monarch has also made it easier to connect through those other two networks, if for some reason Plaid fails. Similar to NerdWallet, I found myself completing two-factor authentication every time I wanted to get past the Plaid screen to add another account. Notably, Monarch is the only other app I tested that allows you to grant access to someone else in your family — likely a spouse or financial advisor. Monarch also has a Chrome extension for importing from Mint, though really this is just a shortcut for downloading a CSV file, which you’ll have to do regardless of where you choose to take your Mint data.
Additionally, Monarch just added the ability to track Apple Card, Apple Cash, and Savings accounts, thanks to new functionality brought with the iOS 17.4 update. It's not the only one either; currently, Copilot and YNAB have also added similar functionality that will be available to anyone with the latest versions of their respective apps on a device running iOS 17.4. Instead of manually uploading statements, the new functionality allows apps like Monarch's to automatically pull in transactions and balance history. That should make it easier to account for spending on Apple cards and accounts throughout the month.
Monarch also recently launched investment transactions in beta. It also says bill tracking and an overhauled goals system are coming soon. Monarch hasn't provided a timeline for that last one, except to say that the improved goals feature is coming soon.
Copilot Money might be the best-looking budgeting app I tested. It also has the distinction of being exclusive to iOS and Macs — at least for now. Andres Ugarte, the company’s CEO, has publicly promised that Android and web apps are coming soon. But until it follows through, I can’t recommend Copilot for most people with so many good competitors out there.
Copilot Money for Web and Android!
Thanks to the support from our users, and the overwhelming positive reception we're seeing from folks migrating from Mint, we can now say that we'll be building @copilotmoney for Web and Android with a goal to launch in 2024.
There are other features that Copilot is missing, which I’ll get into. But it is promising, and one to keep an eye on. It’s just a fast, efficient, well designed app, and Android users will be in for a treat when they’ll finally be able to download it. It makes good use of colors, emoji and graphs to help you understand at a glance how you’re doing on everything from your budgets to your investment performance to your credit card debt over time. In particular, Copilot does a better job than almost any other app of visualizing your recurring monthly expenses.
Behind those punchy colors and cutesy emoji, though, is some sophisticated performance. Copilot’s AI-powered “Intelligence” gets smarter as you go at categorizing your expenses. (You can also add your own categories, complete with your choice of emoji.) It’s not perfect. Copilot miscategorized some purchases (they all do), but it makes it easier to edit than most. On top of that, the internal search feature is very fast; it starts whittling down results in your transaction history as soon as you begin typing.
Dana Wollman / Engadget
Copilot is also unique in offering Amazon and Venmo integrations, allowing you to see transaction details. With Amazon, this requires just signing into your Amazon account via an in-app browser. For Venmo, you have to set up fwd@copilot.money as a forwarding address and then create a filter, wherein emails from venmo@venmo.com are automatically forwarded to fwd@copilot.money. Like Monarch Money, you can also add any property you own and track its value through Zillow, which is integrated with the app.
While the app is heavily automated, I still appreciate that Copilot marks new transactions for review. It’s a good way to both weed out fraudulent charges, and also be somewhat intentional about your spending habits.
Like Monarch Money, Copilot updated its app to make it easier to connect to banks through networks other than Plaid. As part of the same update, Copilot said it has improved its connections to both American Express and Fidelity which, again, can be a bugbear for some budget tracking apps. In an even more recent update, Copilot added a Mint import option, which other budgeting apps have begun to offer as well.
Because the app is relatively new (it launched in early 2020), the company is still catching up to the competition on some table-stakes features. Ugarte told me that his team is almost done building out a detailed cash flow section as well. On its website, Copilot also promises a raft of AI-powered features that build on its current “Intelligence” platform, the one that powers its smart expense categorization. These include “smart financial goals,” natural language search, a chat interface, forecasting and benchmarking. That benchmarking, Ugarte tells me, is meant to give people a sense of how they’re doing compared to other Copilot users, on both spending and investment performance. Most of these features should arrive in the new year.
Copilot does a couple interesting things for new customers that distinguish it from the competition. There’s a “demo mode” that feels like a game simulator; no need to add your own accounts. The company is also offering two free months with RIPMINT — a more generous introductory offer than most. When it finally does come time to pony up, the $7.92 monthly plan is cheaper than some competing apps, although the $95-a-year-option is in the same ballpark.
You may know NerdWallet as a site that offers a mix of personal finance news, explainers and guides. I see it often when I google a financial term I don’t know and sure enough, it’s one of the sites I’m most likely to click on. As it happens, NerdWallet also has the distinction of offering one of the only free budgeting apps I tested. In fact, there is no paid version; nothing is locked behind a paywall. The main catch: There are ads everywhere. To be fair, the free version of Mint was like this, too.
Even with the inescapable credit card offers, NerdWallet has a clean, easy-to-understand user interface, which includes both a web and a mobile app. The key metrics that it highlights most prominently are your cash flow, net worth and credit score. (Of note, although Mint itself offered credit score monitoring, most of its rivals do not.) I particularly enjoyed the weekly insights, which delve into things like where you spent the most money or how much you paid in fees — and how that compares to the previous month. Because this is NerdWallet, an encyclopedia of financial info, you get some particularly specific category options when setting up your accounts (think: a Roth or non-Roth IRA).
Dana Wollman / Engadget
As a budgeting app, NerdWallet is more than serviceable, if a bit basic. Like other apps I tested, you can set up recurring bills. Importantly, it follows the popular 50/30/20 budgeting rule, which has you putting 50% of your budget toward things you need, 30% toward things you want, and the remaining 20% into savings or debt repayments. If this works for you, great — just know that you can’t customize your budget to the same degree as some competing apps. You can’t currently create custom spending categories, though a note inside the dashboard section of the app says “you’ll be able to customize them in the future.” You also can’t move items from the wants column to “needs” or vice versa but “In the future, you'll be able to move specific transactions to actively manage what falls into each group.” A NerdWallet spokesperson declined to provide an ETA, though.
Lastly, it’s worth noting that NerdWallet had one of the most onerous setup processes of any app I tested. I don’t think this is a dealbreaker, as you’ll only have to do it once and, hopefully, you aren’t setting up six or seven apps in tandem as I was. What made NerdWallet’s onboarding especially tedious is that every time I wanted to add an account, I had to go through a two-factor authentication process to even get past the Plaid splash screen, and that’s not including the 2FA I had set up at each of my banks. This is a security policy on NerdWallet’s end, not Plaid’s, a Plaid spokesperson says.
Precisely because NerdWallet is one of the only budget trackers to offer credit score monitoring, it also needs more of your personal info during setup, including your birthday, address, phone number and the last four digits of your social security number. It’s the same with Credit Karma, which also does credit score monitoring.
Related to the setup process, I found that NerdWallet was less adept than other apps at automatically detecting my regular income. In my case, it counted a large one-time wire transfer as income, at which point my only other option was to enter my income manually (which is slightly annoying because I would have needed my pay stub handy to double-check my take-home pay).
YNAB is, by its own admission, “different from anything you’ve tried before.” The app, whose name is short for You Need a Budget, promotes a so-called zero-based budgeting system, which forces you to assign a purpose for every dollar you earn. A frequently used analogy is to put each dollar in an envelope; you can always move money from one envelope to another in a pinch. These envelopes can include rent and utilities, along with unforeseen expenses like holiday gifts and the inevitable car repair. The idea is that if you budget a certain amount for the unknowns each month, they won’t feel like they’re sneaking up on you.
Importantly, YNAB is only concerned with the money you have in your accounts now. The app does not ask you to provide your take-home income or set up recurring income payments (although there is a way to do this). The money you will make later in the month through your salaried job is not relevant, because YNAB does not engage in forecasting.
The app is harder to learn than any other here, and it requires more ongoing effort from the user. And YNAB knows that. Inside both the mobile and web apps are links to videos and other tutorials. Although I never quite got comfortable with the user interface, I did come to appreciate YNAB’s insistence on intentionality. Forcing users to draft a new budget each month and to review each transaction is not necessarily a bad thing. As YNAB says on its website, “Sure, you’ve got pie charts showing that you spent an obscene amount of money in restaurants — but you’ve still spent an obscene amount of money in restaurants.” I can see this approach being useful for people who don’t tend to have a lot of cash in reserve at a given time, or who have spending habits they want to correct (to riff off of YNAB’s own example, ordering Seamless four times a week).
My colleague Valentina Palladino, knowing I was working on this guide, penned a respectful rebuttal, explaining why she’s been using YNAB for years. Perhaps, like her, you have major savings goals you want to achieve, whether it’s paying for a wedding or buying a house. I suggest you give her column a read. For me, though, YNAB’s approach feels like overkill.
Other Mint alternatives we tested
PocketGuard
PocketGuard used to be a solid free budget tracker, but the company has since limited its “free” version to just a free seven-day trial. Now, you’ll have to choose between two plans once the trial is over: a $13 monthly plan or a $75 annual plan. When I first tested it, I found it to be more restricted than NerdWallet, but still a decent option. The main overview screen shows you your net worth, total assets and debts; net income and total spending for the month; upcoming bills; a handy reminder of when your next paycheck lands; any debt payoff plan you have; and any goals. Like some other apps, including Quicken Simplifi, PocketGuard promotes an “after bills” approach, where you enter all of your recurring bills, and then PocketGuard shows you what’s left, and that’s what you’re supposed to be budgeting: your disposable income.
Although PocketGuard’s UI is easy enough to understand, it lacks polish. The “accounts” tab is a little busy, and doesn’t show totals for categories like cash or investments. Seemingly small details like weirdly phrased or punctuated copy occasionally make the app feel janky. More than once, it prompted me to update the app when no updates were available. The web version, meanwhile, feels like the mobile app blown up to a larger format and doesn’t take advantage of the extra screen real estate. Ultimately, now that the free tier is gone, it just doesn’t present the same value proposition as it once did.
What is Plaid and how does it work?
Each of the apps I tested uses the same underlying network, called Plaid, to pull in financial data, so it’s worth explaining in its own section what it is and how it works. Plaid was founded as a fintech startup in 2013 and is today the industry standard in connecting banks with third-party apps. Plaid works with over 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada and Europe. Additionally, more than 8,000 third-party apps and services rely on Plaid, the company claims.
To be clear, you don’t need a dedicated Plaid app to use it; the technology is baked into a wide array of apps, including the budget trackers I tested for this guide. Once you find the “add an account” option in whichever one you’re using, you’ll see a menu of commonly used banks. There’s also a search field you can use to look yours up directly. Once you find yours, you’ll be prompted to enter your login credentials. If you have two-factor authentication set up, you’ll need to enter a one-time passcode as well.
As the middleman, Plaid is a passthrough for information that may include your account balances, transaction history, account type and routing or account number. Plaid uses encryption, and says it has a policy of not selling or renting customer data to other companies. However, I would not be doing my job if I didn’t note that in 2022 Plaid was forced to pay $58 million to consumers in a class action suit for collecting “more financial data than was needed.” As part of the settlement, Plaid was compelled to change some of its business practices.
In a statement provided to Engadget, a Plaid spokesperson said the company continues to deny the allegations underpinning the lawsuit and that “the crux of the non-financial terms in the settlement are focused on us accelerating workstreams already underway related to giving people more transparency into Plaid’s role in connecting their accounts, and ensuring that our workstreams around data minimization remain on track.”
How to import your financial data from the Mint app
Mint users should consider getting their data ready to migrate to their new budgeting app of choice soon. Unfortunately, importing data from Mint is not as easy as entering your credentials from inside your new app and hitting “import.” In fact, any app that advertises the ability to port over your stats from Mint is just going to have you upload a CSV file of transactions and other data.
To download a CSV file from Mint, do the following:
Sign into Mint.com and hit Transactions in the menu on the left side of the screen.
Select an account, or all accounts.
Scroll down and look for “export [number] transactions” in smaller print.
Your CSV file should begin downloading.
Note: Downloading on a per-account basis might seem more annoying, but could help you get set up on the other side, if the app you’re using has you importing transactions one-for-one into their corresponding accounts.
How we tested Mint alternatives
Before I dove into the world of budgeting apps, I had to do some research. To find a list of apps to test, I consulted trusty ol’ Google (and even trustier Reddit); read reviews of popular apps on the App Store; and also asked friends and colleagues what budget tracking apps they might be using. Some of the apps I found were free, just like Mint. These, of course, show loads of ads (excuse me, “offers”) to stay in business. But most of the available apps require paid subscriptions, with prices typically topping out around $100 a year, or $15 a month. (Spoiler: My top pick is cheaper than that.)
Since this guide is meant to help Mint users find a permanent replacement, any services I chose to test needed to do several things: import all of your account data into one place; offer budgeting tools; and track your spending, net worth and credit score. Except where noted, all of these apps are available for iOS, Android and on the web.
Once I had my shortlist of six apps, I got to work setting them up. For the sake of thoroughly testing these apps (and remember, I really was looking for a Mint alternative myself), I made a point of adding every account to every budgeting app, no matter how small or immaterial the balance. What ensued was a veritable Groundhog Day of two-factor authentication. Just hours of entering passwords and one-time passcodes, for the same banks half a dozen times over. Hopefully, you only have to do this once.
What about Rocket Money?
Rocket Money is another free financial app that tracks spending and supports things like balance alerts and account linking. If you pay for the premium tier, the service can also help you cancel unwanted subscriptions. We did not test it for this guide, but we'll consider it in future updates.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/the-best-budgeting-apps-to-replace-mint-143047346.html?src=rss
Hyperloop One had once dreamed of building a high-speed freight link between Europe and China, one that could take cargo from one end to the other in a single day. That will, however, remain one of the many goals the company won’t be able to fulfill. Hyperloop One is shutting down, a staff member has confirmed to Engadget after Bloomberg published a report about its closure. It was founded in 2014 following the release of Elon Musk’s paper about his vision for hyperloop transportation technologies.
The company originally aimed to provide transportation for both cargo and people in the form of pods traveling through sealed metal tubes across long distances in airplane-like speeds. From 2017 until 2022, it was known as Virgin Hyperloop One due to an investment from Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. But Virgin quietly pulled its branding last year when the company decided to abandon its plans of transporting passengers to focus on building a cargo-only service. Hyperloop One laid off over 100 staff members early last year due to its change in priorities.
According to Bloomberg, the company has been having financial troubles for a while and has notably never secured a contract to build a working hyperloop system. It has now laid off most of its remaining employees, the news organization said, and the ones left will be let go on December 31. Until then, they’re reportedly overseeing the sales of Hyperloop One’s assets, including its machineries and test tracks.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hyperloop-one-is-shutting-down-030049106.html?src=rss
Hyperloop One had once dreamed of building a high-speed freight link between Europe and China, one that could take cargo from one end to the other in a single day. That will, however, remain one of the many goals the company won’t be able to fulfill. Hyperloop One is shutting down, a staff member has confirmed to Engadget after Bloomberg published a report about its closure. It was founded in 2014 following the release of Elon Musk’s paper about his vision for hyperloop transportation technologies.
The company originally aimed to provide transportation for both cargo and people in the form of pods traveling through sealed metal tubes across long distances in airplane-like speeds. From 2017 until 2022, it was known as Virgin Hyperloop One due to an investment from Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. But Virgin quietly pulled its branding last year when the company decided to abandon its plans of transporting passengers to focus on building a cargo-only service. Hyperloop One laid off over 100 staff members early last year due to its change in priorities.
According to Bloomberg, the company has been having financial troubles for a while and has notably never secured a contract to build a working hyperloop system. It has now laid off most of its remaining employees, the news organization said, and the ones left will be let go on December 31. Until then, they’re reportedly overseeing the sales of Hyperloop One’s assets, including its machineries and test tracks.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hyperloop-one-is-shutting-down-030049106.html?src=rss
As a precocious teen looking to improve my college application, I sat in on a business studies class. I figured taking two extra A-Levels at night school alongside those I took during the day would make me irresistible to admissions tutors. The class I watched examined if it was worth a large factory keeping its own trucks and drivers in-house rather than outsourcing them. The data showed selling the trucks and firing the workers was more expensive in the long run, and yoked the company to the whims of any third-party logistics company in the local area. Not to mention, if you don’t own a mission-critical component of your business, you’re a lot less powerful when negotiating with your suppliers. But the teacher, and the class, all agreed it was smart to sell it all because it made a bigger profit in the quarter and was cheaper for the next two years. These people had never considered if something bad would happen, and how to prepare for it. It was at this point I realized my values were out of step with the commercial orthodoxy and opted not to take the course.
I mention this because I’ve always thought the people in the tech industry with all the money are probably halfway savvy about how All Of This Is Meant To Work. I’d told myself that what, to me, appeared illogical and self-defeating was because they were playing a game of six-dimensional chess on a board I was too dim to see. Unless, of course, the economics of our industry are so unmoored from reality that everyone’s just pretending, or deluding themselves. And more than a decade of cheap money and lax regulation means everyone’s behaved a little bit sillier than they should have. Now the lights are coming up and everyone’s looking to see what’s actually going on, there’s nowhere for these apparently smart people to hide.
It’s stopped making sense for investors
UCG via Getty Images
The Silicon Valley mindset is easy to grasp: If you’re lucky enough to have spare cash, put a small bit of it behind some kids with a big idea. All it takes is for one of those bets – emphasis on the word bet – to win and you’ll get a slice of some pretty big profits. In an era where zero interest-rate policies mean it’s almost free to rack up extraordinary debt, it’s a better route than heading to Las Vegas with your 401k. Not to mention the special cachet and attention you can garner by presenting yourself to the world as a “guru.” But you might have noticed that a lot of high-profile bets haven’t been coming off of late, wasting a lot of cash in the process.
Take WeWork, which this year filed for Chapter 11 after working its way through $16.9 billion since 2014. What logic can we apply to its main backer, Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son*, to justify him burning the GDP of Jamaica on such a venture? Especially when Regus, which performs the same decidedly un-techy role of renting temporary office space, owns its properties and makes a small but regular profit every non-COVID year, was available to buy outright for a fraction of the cost? How did this amount of money pass from one company to another without any sort of internal or external oversight? And why did he think that WeWork’s nicer interior design and a beer tap on every floor was such a big draw? The only theory that holds water is that Son was so blindsided by promises of vast future profits (from office rental) that he lost any sense of self-restraint.
That mix of cheap credit and the promise of unbelievable future returns can be applied across the tech industry, too. It might help explain why the cost of streaming has leapt so high while the catalogs available have shrunk. The studios weren’t hurting for profit in the days before Netflix, but the fact it was valued like a tech company enabled it to rack up huge debts. That led plenty of studios to leap onto the bandwagon in the hope of getting some of that mythical profit. In the early days, the hope was that the sheer number of people paying for content would balance out the low cost. But now growth has stalled and there’s still $14.30 billion of debt, plus an audience with an ever-increasing desire for new content.
It’s stopped making sense for consumers
Mario Tama via Getty Images
The debt swinging around Netflix’s neck, and the necks of those who followed it into the streaming world save for Amazon, Apple and Warner Bros***, is directly related to this gold rush. And it’ll need to be paid off to the investors and banks who handed over billions of dollars in expectation of vast rewards further down the line. Which is why the cost of a standard Netflix subscription has pretty much doubled since 2011 – with Premium plans now costing $23 a month. Given the scattershot nature of streaming libraries and the fact Netflix can’t be your sole source of entertainment, most consumers have more than one subscription going at the same time. That’s been fine, more or less, while times are good, so what happens when the world’s economies all start to slow down and you’re looking to make room in your monthly budget?
It’s worth remembering new technologies are expensive, both in cost and how much time and effort you spend to get to grips with them. But while technology has had some world-changing hits in the past – personal computing, the internet, smartphones and, uh, social media – it’s been a while since we’ve had anything that big. But the industry can’t help but keep hyping the next big thing even if it’s obvious to anyone with eyes that it’s not going to be a winner. We’re at the peak of the hype cycle for machine learning, which its boosters tell us will automate us all into obsolescence in a decade or so**. The problem is, whenever you actually sit and try to use a generative AI, the results are underwhelming, so great is the gap between the promise and the reality. Take Google’s new AI which managed to give fake answers to spreadsheet-level questions like who won an Academy Award last year. You can already see the itchy feet of those hoping the Humane Pin will be the Next Big Thing despite its risible introduction video.
Consumers lose out here not just because of these expensive boondoggles but because they suck up all the oxygen from everything else. Many of these technologies were designed not to solve real-world problems, of which we have plenty, but to dazzle investors, placate Wall Street and dupe credulous buyers. It doesn’t help that generative AI, like crypto before it, uses a significant amount more energy than it should, exacerbating climate change. Sadly, when all the attention and money shifts to the next thing, we’ll all be poorer for it, both for the folks who were duped into reading machine-written articles about the importance of volleyball, and the folks who got laid off because some genius thought GPT-3 would do a better job without oversight.
It’s stopped making sense for workers
Embracer Group is a Swedish game publisher that loaded up on debt to buy every small studio and IP it could get its hands on. In 2018, CEO Lars Wingefors told GamesIndustry his company would eschew a “fewer, bigger, better” strategy in favor of a “diversified” lineup. In 2021, it said it had access to more than $2 billion in cash and credit to continue its spending spree, bankrolling a slew of newer, smaller titles. That included reviving TimeSplitters developer Free Radical to start work on a new game in the long-dormant cult series.Two years after that, the company admitted that a deal worth $2 billion in revenue over six years had fallen apart and that it would have to cut costs. Free Radical has now been closed, putting the last two years’ worth of work on the shelf and close to 1,000 people across Embracer have lost their jobs.
Reality’s going to hit us in the face like a shovel
krisanapong detraphiphat via Getty Images
When I was a kid, a relative worked for a company that made and sold slot machines for adult gambling. I must have been 10 when he came over and set up a game where he gave me a pound in 2p pieces, which I could wager on the outcome of a deck of cards. He’d rigged the game so that, despite all of the pledges to double my cash as my funds shrunk, I’d wipe out. It was a valuable lesson in why it’s not a smart idea to gamble your money, given by someone who saw it up close and personal every day.
The other lesson he taught me was the vow of gratitude he would utter often, which was doubly amusing given his atheism. Whenever there was a bad story in the news, or a tale of corporate woe closer to home, he’d say “there but for the grace of God go I.” Because he knew that so much of what happens in our lives is governed by chance, so it’s pointless to claim it was wisdom. We should always remember that none of us are untouchable, and that the worst phrase in the English language is “what could possibly go wrong?” It’s just a shame that so many of the supposed great minds in the technology industry didn’t get the chance to learn this lesson when they were young enough to appreciate it.
* Wikipedia – hardly a symbol of partisanship – has gone studs-in on Son. At the time of writing, his biography says “his reputation as an investor rests almost solely on his $20 million initial investment in Alibaba Group in 2000.” Given the rest of his track record – and the fact he is presently in debt to his own company to the tune of several billion, ouch.
** I do wonder how many of its backers who spend their days worrying about Roko’s Basilisk have thought about how they’ll be treated by the 85 million or so people suddenly forced into serfdom.
*** Warner Bros. malaise is more directly related to the debt tied to the various buyouts and sales that has seen it shifted from one corporate parent to another. Not that the streaming wars has helped here, but it's fair to say that its problems are a different realm to those of its peers.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/2023-was-the-year-the-economics-of-tech-caught-up-with-reality-153052312.html?src=rss
Every day, there seems to be new generative AI news, and while it can often be serious and quite technical, this time around it's just plain fun. Instagram has launched a new generative AI-powered tool called backdrop that lets you create a new image in the, yes, background of your Story. Meta's generative AI lead, Ahmad Al-Dahle, announced the feature on Threads alongside a video tutorial.
Instagram's backdrop tool appears once you upload or capture content for your Story. It sits alongside existing icons at the top of your screen, like text and music, represented by an image of a person with a rectangular frame behind them. To use backdrop, just click on that icon, and the image's entire background will go checkered (similar to picture editors like PhotoShop) along with a text box prompting you to "describe the backdrop you want..." From there, you can add anything from "surrounded by puppies" to "chased by dinosaurs" — very different vibes — and the AI tool will generate it in the background.
Don't expect people to actually think you're hanging out under the aurora borealis (another possible prompt), as your Story will get tagged with AI·Backdrop by Instagram, along with a sticker saying try it and your description in quotation marks. Currently, Instagram's backdrop tool is only available to users in the United States.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/instagram-now-offers-ai-generated-backgrounds-on-stories-115054259.html?src=rss
If you've been thinking about hosting your own mini data center or need to stream 1,333 Netflix 4K programs at once, Google Fiber has the answer. The Alphabet-owned ISP will launch it's 20Gbps service with Wi-Fi 7 in select cities early next year for $250 a month (plus taxes and applicable fees) — not that ridiculous of a price for such ridiculous speed.
"We’re starting in Kansas City, North Carolina’s Triangle Region, Arizona, and Iowa," the company wrote. "As we continue to roll out Nokia’s 25G PON across our network, we’ll open up invitations in new areas, so make sure you’ve let us know if you are interested in being the one of the first to have this in your home."
As with Google's other Fiber offerings, the 20Gbps speeds are symmetrical, so you'll see them whether you're uploading or downloading. Google notes that Wi-Fi 7, which offers peak wireless speeds of 40Gbps, is so bleeding-edge that it hasn't even been fully certified yet. The service is being offered through Google's GFiber Labs division, and is made possible by new Nokia 25G PONs (passive optical networks) installed as part of last-mile infrastructure upgrades.
While obviously expensive, the new plan allows for some interesting possibilities. For instance, Google promises multi-gig internet speeds on multiple floors of your house, for example, thanks to the custom Wi-Fi 7 router co-created with Actiontec. That could let plan buyers amortize the price across multiple users — 20 people could have 1Gbps connections for $12.50 per month each, for instance.
The new plan offers four times the speed of AT&T's Elite 5Gbps fiber offering for the same $250 per month. However, Google Fiber's problem has never been the technology or value proposition, but the availability. The company's 5Gbps and 8Gbps plans only just got off the ground and are still only available in a few regions. While available in some major cities (San Franciso, Atlanta, San Antonio), Google Fiber is notably absent in key markets like New York City and Los Angeles.
The 20Gbps plan will start rolling out in the above-mentioned cities in the first quarter of 2024. Just be aware that you'll need the fastest Wi-Fi possible on your computer (currently Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 on select models) to even get a fraction of that maximum speed.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/googles-superfast-20gbps-wi-fi-7-fiber-plan-costs-250-a-month-095511377.html?src=rss
If you've been thinking about hosting your own mini data center or need to stream 1,333 Netflix 4K programs at once, Google Fiber has the answer. The Alphabet-owned ISP will launch it's 20Gbps service with Wi-Fi 7 in select cities early next year for $250 a month (plus taxes and applicable fees) — not that ridiculous of a price for such ridiculous speed.
"We’re starting in Kansas City, North Carolina’s Triangle Region, Arizona, and Iowa," the company wrote. "As we continue to roll out Nokia’s 25G PON across our network, we’ll open up invitations in new areas, so make sure you’ve let us know if you are interested in being the one of the first to have this in your home."
As with Google's other Fiber offerings, the 20Gbps speeds are symmetrical, so you'll see them whether you're uploading or downloading. Google notes that Wi-Fi 7, which offers peak wireless speeds of 40Gbps, is so bleeding-edge that it hasn't even been fully certified yet. The service is being offered through Google's GFiber Labs division, and is made possible by new Nokia 25G PONs (passive optical networks) installed as part of last-mile infrastructure upgrades.
While obviously expensive, the new plan allows for some interesting possibilities. For instance, Google promises multi-gig internet speeds on multiple floors of your house, for example, thanks to the custom Wi-Fi 7 router co-created with Actiontec. That could let plan buyers amortize the price across multiple users — 20 people could have 1Gbps connections for $12.50 per month each, for instance.
The new plan offers four times the speed of AT&T's Elite 5Gbps fiber offering for the same $250 per month. However, Google Fiber's problem has never been the technology or value proposition, but the availability. The company's 5Gbps and 8Gbps plans only just got off the ground and are still only available in a few regions. While available in some major cities (San Franciso, Atlanta, San Antonio), Google Fiber is notably absent in key markets like New York City and Los Angeles.
The 20Gbps plan will start rolling out in the above-mentioned cities in the first quarter of 2024. Just be aware that you'll need the fastest Wi-Fi possible on your computer (currently Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 on select models) to even get a fraction of that maximum speed.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/googles-superfast-20gbps-wi-fi-7-fiber-plan-costs-250-a-month-095511377.html?src=rss