Microsoft plans to sunset Skype, a service that was part of the foundation of IP telephony, by May 5. Instead, Microsoft plans to replace Skype with the free version of Microsoft Teams, the company said. In doing do, Microsoft will throw a shovelful of dirt on Skype, which it bought for $8.5 billion in May 2011, 14 years ago. “In order to streamline our free consumer communications offerings so we can more easily adapt to customer needs, we will be retiring Skype in May 2025 to focus on Microsoft Teams, our modern communications and collaboration hub,” Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 365 Collaborative Apps and Platforms, said in a blog post. Teper said that the “way we communicate has evolved significantly over the years.” Skype was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, using a peer-to-peer protocol to route “phone calls” over the web, a technology later known as VoIP. eBay bought Skype in 2005 for $2.5 billion in stock, before Microsoft bought it in 2011. Skype’s free video app was released in 2013, when Skype claimed over 70 million users were using the app simultaneously. Microsoft tried to integrate Skype into Windows, but the writing may have been on the wall once Microsoft launched Teams as a Slack competitor in 2017 — though Teams began strictly as a chat app, it quickly added video. Microsoft tried to lure users away from Slack in 2018 by launching a free version of Teams, now awkwardly named “Teams (free).” But then Microsoft employed a similar strategy with its own Skype for Business in 2019, shuttering the service in 2021 and pushing business users to use Teams instead. “Over the last two years, we’ve worked closely with customers to refine Teams, and we now feel we’re at the point that we can confidently recommend it as an upgrade to all Skype for Business Online customers,” James Skay, the senior marketing manager for Skype for Business, said in 2019. Six years later, and Microsoft apparently feels the same about the consumer version of Skype. The problem? Consumers have never really cared to use Teams. Microsoft tried to launch a consumer version of Teams in 2021, which seems to have been largely ignored. There was Teams Chat, which lived in the Windows 11 Taskbar, which also debuted in 2021. That followed Microsoft Teams for Home‘s launch in 2020, with shared grocery lists and other features for consumers on iOS and Android. By 2023, Teams Chat was part of the free Teams app. In 2024, Microsoft signaled that it planned to streamline both the business and consumer versions of Teams into a single application. The common thread: No one seemed to care. Microsoft did say that, over the past two years, the number of minutes spent in consumer Teams calls has quadrupled — without saying from what to what. But Skype and its chat/calling capabilities have largely been replaced with apps like Discord. In any event, Microsoft seems to have given up on using the carrot to lure users from Skype to Teams. Instead, it’s using the stick. The Skype to Teams transition: How it will work Microsoft said that, over the coming days, Skype users will be able to sign into Teams (free) using their Skype credentials, beginning with users who have signed up for the Insider programs. Chats and contacts will automatically populate from one app to the other. Skype users can download Teams from the Microsoft website. Paid Skype features will sunset as well. “Moving forward, we will no longer offer new customers access to paid Skype features that allow users to make and receive international and domestic calls using pay-as-you-go credit and subscriptions. Current Skype subscription users can continue to use their Skype Credits and subscriptions until the end of their next renewal period. Skype Credit users can also continue to use their remaining Skype Credit. After May 5, 2025, the Skype Dial Pad will be available to remaining paid users from the Skype web portal and within Teams.” During the transition, Skype and Teams users will be able to chat with the other service. That period will apparently expire on May 5, 2025, when Skype will be turned off, 22 years after its founding. Read...

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Some of my colleagues based on the West Coast have recently been commenting on how expensive hotels have become. Sure, they’ve become pricier for everyone, but now, they were saying, it’s getting ridiculous. At first, I just chalked it up to the post-COVID tourism boom. But then articles started to pop up accusing popular hotel booking sites of a predatory technique called price discrimination.  Residents of the notoriously affluent city San Francisco were being charged higher rates for hotels online than those based in other places. A study by researchers at Northeastern University found that users of some sites were unwittingly placed into pricing buckets based on their stored cookies and steered towards more expensive hotels. The list goes on. So, what does all of this mean and can you use it to your advantage to actually save money on your next hotel? I tested this out on the most popular booking sites and found that a VPN might be just the solution you need to find the best price no matter where you are. What is price discrimination? Price discrimination is based on the idea that some consumers are willing and able to pay more for goods or services than others—especially when they’re unaware of the differences. Think of the stereotypical used car salesman who sizes you up and then highballs you because they think you’ll be able to pay extra. The same thing is happening across nearly every segment of online shopping, but it’s particularly egregious on travel sites. Airfares and hotels are notorious for this practice and you might have already seen shades of it yourself—flight tickets and hotel room rates often fluctuate with each refresh of the website. While the exact mechanisms behind how companies track user metrics and set these discriminatory prices are trade secrets, the fact that they’re doing this has been an open secret for some time. It’s believed, however, that one of the main ways that companies track you is using locational data based on your IP address.  Thankfully, by using a VPN you can hide your true location and trick these sites into thinking you’re from a different area. With a little cunning and some elbow grease you can use these companies’ own underhanded tactics to your advantage to find cheaper rates. Further reading: Is it time to switch VPN providers? 5 reasons to consider a change How I tested To test if price discrimination is happening with online hotel booking, I conducted an experiment. I visited and compared prices across six of the most popular online booking sites: Booking.com, Kayak, Trivago, Expedia, Hotels.com, and Priceline. I searched for hotels in New York City for the night of Friday, March 21 through Saturday, March 22—approximately one month from the day I was searching. I would connect to a VPN server located within the U.S. and then visit each site using Chrome’s Incognito Mode—so no cookies or browser cache was stored between visits. I conducted the experiment on the same day using VPN locations all across the U.S. including San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, New Jersey, Miami, and Chicago. The price experiment I conducted was designed to gauge to what extent your IP’s location (ie. the area you’re booking from) affects the prices of hotels. Blocking the collection of cookies, browser cache, and history allowed me to rule out other potential factors that may have altered pricing results.  What I learned about online hotel prices My results showed both good news and bad news. The good news was that overall, prices for most hotels stayed the same across VPN server locations. There were minor differences of a few dollars that I noticed, such as Trump International New York going for a rate of $836 from a Phoenix server and $839 from a San Francisco server, but mostly the differences were negligible. The bad news is that some hotels across some sites change a lot. The most egregious case I found was a hotel called The New Yorker. The prices for this hotel fluctuated on all sites, but on Trivago the discrepancy was the largest. Searching for the same hotel while connected to different VPN servers resulted in wildly different prices. Sam Singleton While connected to a VPN server in Phoenix the price for the hotel was $206, from a server in New Jersey it was $269, and from a server in San Francisco it was a staggering $352. That’s a difference of $146 per night, or an outrageous markup of roughly 71 percent for San Franciscans. It’s worth noting, however, that the price seemed to remain the same if you took the extra step of becoming a Trivago member, something I didn’t do for the purposes of this experiment. I found a similar result with the Hyatt Grand Central hotel, which was offered for $199 per night from a server in Phoenix or $278 per night from a server in San Francisco—a 40 percent markup. This may have been even more indicative of price discrimination as there was no special discount for Trivago members. While other price discrepancies I found were less severe, they were still seen across all sites, not just Trivago.  So, what’s happening here? The answer to that is complex. Some of these price differences might be solely attributed to the location from which you’re searching. Others may be due to special promotional rates that are only offered to certain areas or mobile providers—this may have been what was happening with The New Yorker hotel and the special Trivago member rate. Still other factors such as the time of day you’re searching or hotel room availability fluctuations can have an effect.  While I tried to limit these factors by using the same VPN service and searching on the same day at the same time and then rechecking results if I found a discrepancy, these other determinants can’t be ruled out. Still, my results seem to show that the biggest determining factor for the price of hotels is the location you’re searching from. This means that a VPN or proxy server is likely the best tool when trying to find the cheapest price on a hotel. How to use a VPN to find the best price VPNs reroute your online traffic through an encrypted tunnel, allowing you to appear as if you’re accessing the internet from a completely different location. Not only is this a great way to hide your home IP address, but it also has the added benefit of anonymizing your online activities and getting around restricted content.  The best VPNs provide large networks of globally distributed servers that users can connect to and change their online locations. Plus, services such as NordVPN and ExpressVPN have created their own VPN protocols that help optimize your connection’s privacy, security, and speeds. our favorite VPN ExpressVPN Read our review When using a VPN to find the best price for a hotel online, simply connect to a server in a less-wealthy city and search from there. In my experiment, I found that connecting to servers in either Phoenix or Salt Lake City provided me with the cheapest average hotel rates. It’s definitely worth it though to try searching while connected to multiple different VPN servers. States with low to median incomes such as Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, and West Virginia might all be good places to search from if your VPN has servers in these areas. On the flipside, stay away from servers in notoriously high average income areas such as New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, and LA.  While a VPN might be the single best way to circumvent price discrimination, there are a few extra precautions you should also take as well.  Most VPNs offer an optional ad- and tracker-blocking service.Sam Singleton Browsing in Incognito mode for Chrome, Private browsing mode in Firefox, or other similar browser modes are also necessary. These browser privacy modes ensure that your history, cookies, or cache are not logged or used to identify you—which could happen even with a VPN if you’re not careful. Most VPNs also come with built-in ad- and tracker-blocking features that you’ll want to turn on to keep any sneaky third parties from betraying your disguise. If you prefer, you could also use a separate ad-blocker instead. Using a VPN and taking these additional steps will help set you up for the greatest possibility of success in finding cheaper hotel rates. Happy shopping. Read...

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Will Framework ever build a laptop based upon a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor? If history holds, then yes… but not now. At the launch of the Framework Desktop (and the Framework Laptop 12 and updated Laptop 13), I asked Framework chief executive Nirav Patel about the possibility of a Snapdragon X-based Framework Mainboard. After all, performance isn’t just the force driving PCs. Battery life matters more than ever, too. Patel, unfortunately, was non-committal as the company was only there to talk about what it had just launched. Some products, like the gaming-oriented Framework Laptop 16, didn’t receive any significant updates save for the inclusion of a specialized key. But Patel did note that Framework was one of the first to market with the DeepComputing RISC-V Mainboard, which can be plugged into the mainstream Framework Laptop 13. That’s a deep cut of a processor that certainly is talked about in processor circles, but has made hardly any impact in the PC space (so far). The mainboard features a StarFive JH7110 processor with four SiFive U74 RISC-V cores… and it doesn’t run Windows natively. Of course, Framework has shipped multiple Mainboards and laptops with multiple AMD and Intel CPUs that do. I speculate that this means yes, Framework is watching the Windows on Arm space, and it’s a good sign that Qualcomm (or maybe Nvidia?) could have something related to Windows on Arm up its sleeve. Patel didn’t provide any hard answers on the other issue of the moment: tariffs. The Trump administration has pledged to impose tariffs of 25 percent on imported semiconductors, plus additional tariffs on good imported from China. That’s a burden for anyone importing chips, including Mainboards with them soldered on. For a company reliant on multiple modules, would Framework be especially vulnerable? Tariffs are in a “very dynamic place right now,” Patel said. But Framework was founded in 2020, when the first Trump administration was talking tariffs as well. “Right from the start, we built our supply chain from scratch, knowing that international trade and international logistics was going to continue to get more and more difficult. And so right from the start, we actually established a manufacturing base in Taiwan.” Compal, the contract manufacturer used by Framework, has a factory in Taiwan, which does assembly. Patel said that that some of its “modules” might be affected by tariffs. “But you’re not seeing us re-price right now, as some other companies do,” he said, referring to Acer’s plan to raise laptop prices by 10 percent. Read...

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