Apple left it late, but this week it sprang its very own October surprise: new Macs running M4 chips. Okay, it wasn’t entirely a surprise, but Apple’s non-event way of teasing out three new Macs (MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac mini), and two new M4 CPUs was unusual, to say the least. It all looks very exciting – although the bigger news might be that Apple took one of its most popular laptops, the MacBook Air, and doubled the RAM without increasing the price.
If we want to lean into the spooky season that falls around the end of October, we could talk about the arrival of ChatGPT Search – and the people who might be most scared are not you or I, but the folks at Google. This looks, at least to me, like the real future of search – and, yes, it’s all thanks to AI. You should try it if you can.
Flipping back to surprises, and here’s Google again, exceeding our expectations with an early release of Android 16. Google isn’t going to make Android phone fans wait almost a year to get hold of the next version of its mobile platform, which is good news for those who’ll be queuing up for the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra – if that’s what Samsung will even call its next top-of-the-line handset.
You know where you don’t need scares or surprises? When it comes to finding the absolute best tech products. Instead, you need solid, expert advice, and if it can be boiled down to a single list of the very best products in every key category, all the better – and that’s exactly what we’ve done with our annual TechRadar Choice Awards. You can check out this year's winners in the articles linked below.
Finally, if you’re still in a spooky mood might I suggest Longlegs, which is available to rent on Prime, and in which Nic Cage is at his creepy best. We’ve also got our regular round-up of movie and show recommendations for this weekend, including the return of The Diplomat (an unheralded gem) and Wizards Beyond WaverlyPlace – because Disney will never let a good intellectual property die.
Did you know some credit cards can actually help you get out of debt faster? Yes, it sounds crazy. But it's true. The secret: Find a card with a "0% intro APR" period for balance transfers. Then, transfer your debt balance and pay it down as much as possible during the intro period. No interest means you could pay off the debt faster. Find out more
Apple's busy week of Mac announcements concluded with new MacBook Pros: they're now even Pro-ier, with Apple's new M4 chipsets, and boosts to battery life as well. Find out everything you need to know about these supercharged Apple laptops.
OpenAI just made its ChatGPT web search tool available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers – and based on our early testing, it's already able to return results that are more useful than Google's equivalents. This could be the future of finding information on the web.
Android 16 will be out in the first half of next year, Google has now confirmed: that's significantly earlier than normal, and Google says it decided to shift its schedule to get more devices running the latest software as quickly as possible.
The results are in, and the readers of TechRadar – together with our expert judges – have had their say on the best tech of the last 12 months. Find out which gadgets came top in which categories, and get some ideas for the holiday shopping season.
Looking for something to stream this weekend? The Diplomat season 2’s release on Netflix is our top pick for the week, but there’s plenty more thrilling and dramatic genre fare to catch on Disney Plus, Prime Video, Max, and Apple TV Plus, too.
