Mark Hachman

1 week ago | pcworld.com | Mark Hachman

Researcher IDC has unexpectedly concluded that the current administration’s see-sawing tariff plan is going to actually help the PC market grow in 2025. IDC said Wednesday that it now expects that the PC market will grow 4.1 percent over 2024, reaching 274 million units shipped this year. However, the PC market is also expected to contract in 2026, and the PC market should begin declining in the second half of 2025, the firm said.

1 week ago | pcworld.com | Mark Hachman

Opera is resurrecting Opera Neon, a browser concept first introduced in 2017, and equipping it with the latest tech trend: agentic AI—an assistant you can assign tasks to, which it will carry out autonomously. Opera Neon will work like a normal browser. Opera, however, is integrating local AI that you can chat with privately and ask to do tasks and combining it with an interface to a remote server that will serve as a workspace of sorts for Opera Neon’s AI creation tools.

1 week ago | pcworld.com | Mark Hachman

Microsoft has begun adding Copilot to the “new tab” page of Microsoft Edge, as expected — possibly making you yearn for the current crazy-quilt layout instead. Generally, browser makers allow you to either open a predetermined home page when you open a new tab, or else populate it with a variety of different content. On Edge, a new tab looks similar to the Widgets menu in the lower left. But a change is coming.

1 week ago | pcworld.com | Mark Hachman

Traditionally, PC graphics cards have included two types of ports: DisplayPort and HDMI. Now, they may be adding a third: Thunderbolt. Sparkle showed what it called “Project Thundermage” this year at Computex, a prototype OPC graphics card that put HDMI, DisplayPort, and a pair of Thunderbolt ports onto the same graphics card. The tell, however, was the partner: Intel, whose “Battlemage” Arc GPUs were paired with the Intel “Barlow Ridge” Thunderbolt 5 controller.

1 week ago | pcworld.com | Mark Hachman

Don’t expect too much from the Arc browser in the future. The browser’s developer admitted over the weekend that while Arc is being maintained, new features are no longer in active development. The explanation, however, is convoluted. In a blog post, the company explained that while they concluded that the Arc browser was “incremental,” its novel features weren’t being used, either. For example, just under 6 percent of users took advantage of what Arc called a “space,” or workspace.