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The Apple Mac Mini is aimed at users who are looking for a compact desktop computer for everyday use, business, and multimedia, but do not want to compromise on performance. Thanks to its small housing, it can be used flexibly, for example on the desk, in the home office or in the living room. Typical for Apple is the close integration of hardware and macOS, which is reflected in performance and smooth processes. The M4 Apple Mac Mini is currently available on Amazon for just $479. That’s 20 percent off the usual $599 price. So if you order directly from Apple, you pay significantly more. The Mac Mini M4 is extremely popular, with over 10,000 orders in the last month alone, making it the number 1 bestseller among Mini PCs. And our colleagues at Macworld adores the beefier M4 Pro version of the Mac Mini they reviewed. What the Apple Mac Mini M4 has to offer Under the bonnet is Apple’s M4 chip with a 10-core CPU consisting of four performance and six efficiency cores, as well as a 10-core GPU. The system is supported by 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. This configuration is primarily designed for everyday tasks, productive work, multimedia applications, and light creative work. The Mac Mini remains true to its lineage as a particularly compact computer. With dimensions of 5 inches by 5 inches and a height of 2 inches, it takes up hardly any space and weighs just 1.5 pounds. This means it can easily be placed under a monitor or in small work environments without dominating your workspace. Bestselling Mac Mini M4 for only $499 There are two USB-C ports with USB 3 support and a 3.5 millimeter headphone connection on the front. Three Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI and Gigabit Ethernet are available at the rear. 10 Gigabit Ethernet is also available as an option. This makes the Mac Mini suitable for both modern peripherals and wired networks. You can operate up to three monitors simultaneously, including resolutions of up to 6K or even 8K at 60 Hertz (if only 2 monitors are connected). This also makes the Mac Mini interesting for multi-monitor setups in the work environment. This is complemented by extensive video and audio functions, including support for common HDR formats, Dolby Atmos and numerous audio and video codecs. For users in the Apple ecosystem, collaboration with iPhone and iPad also plays a role. Content can be copied across devices, messages can be answered and Facetime calls can be made directly on the Mac. Why the offer is worthwhile At the current price of $479, the Apple Mac Mini M4 is positioned well below MSRP and only just above the previous lowest price during Black Friday week. Between the compact design, the modern M4 platform, and the solid core specifications, you’ll be very satisfied with the price-performance ratio. If you’re looking for a powerful, space-saving desktop computer for everyday use and can get by with the basic configuration, the Amazon offer is a significant saving compared to Apple’s price. Bestselling Mac Mini M4 for only $499 Read...

NZ First says it is a bad deal, but there is widespread support for the Free Trade Agreement with India among the New Zealand business community. Read...

TL;DR: Get Microsoft Office 2024 Home & Business for Mac or PC for a one-time payment of $149.97 (MSRP $249.99) and enjoy lifetime access. Take your productivity to the next level with Microsoft Office 2024 — all the apps you know and love, now with smarter features and a one-time purchase. Say goodbye to recurring subscription fees and hello to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook installed directly on your Mac or PC for $149.97 for a limited time. Whether you’re drafting reports, crunching numbers, designing presentations, or wrangling emails, Office 2024 gives you the tools you need, without the hassle of monthly payments. Built for busy professionals, students, and small business owners, Office 2024 is faster, sleeker, and more capable than ever. Excel’s AI-powered insights help you make sense of complex data, PowerPoint lets you record presentations with video and narration, and Word’s Focus Mode keeps you locked in without distractions. Collaborate in real time with co-authoring, chat, and comments — plus Teams integration keeps communication seamless. The lifetime license installs directly on your computer and stays yours forever. Work offline, stay secure, and enjoy regular feature updates, all without ever worrying about renewing or paying again. Upgrade your workflow with a lifetime license to Microsoft Office 2024 Home & Business for a one-time payment of $149.97 (MSRP $249.99) and get a lifetime of essential productivity tools. Microsoft Office 2024 Home & Business for Mac or PC Lifetime LicenseSee Deal StackSocial prices subject to change. Read...

The chain, which is backed in part by England captain Ben Stokes, is remaining open for business except at one venue. Read...

TL;DR: Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2019 for Windows is just $29.97 (MSRP $229) through December 21 — one payment, no subscription fees, all the essential apps you already use every day. Why keep paying for Microsoft Office on repeat when you can make it a one-and-done purchase instead? For $29.97, you can grab a lifetime license to Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2019 for Windows. That means permanent access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, Access, and OneNote — no recurring subscription, no monthly charges, just yours to use for good. This is one of Microsoft’s most widely used Office versions for good reason. It’s stable, streamlined, and packed with the features that everyday users, business owners, freelancers, and spreadsheet wizards rely on. Whether you’re managing invoices, writing your next presentation, editing a résumé, or organizing your inbox like a boss, Office 2019 is built to make your life easier. Plus, this version’s got some sweet upgrades: better inking across apps, more data analysis in Excel, improved email handling in Outlook, and sleek new transitions in PowerPoint. Once installed on your Windows PC, it’s good to go with — no recurring costs, no cloud dependency (thank goodness), and no fuss. Don’t miss getting lifetime access to Microsoft Office 2019 while it’s just $29.97 (MSRP $229) only until December 21 at 11:59 p.m. PT. No coupon is needed. Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2019 for WindowsSee Deal StackSocial prices subject to change. Read...

TL;DR: Lifetime access to the 1minAI Advanced Business Plan is now $74.97 (MSRP $540). The end of the year is when people start hunting for upgrades that will actually make life easier in January. If you have spent most of 2024 bouncing between ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and your favorite image generator, this holiday deal rolls everything into one place. For $74.97, you can lock in lifetime access to the 1minAI Advanced Business Plan and begin 2025 with every AI tool you could possibly need. 1minAI combines multiple high-performing AI models under a single interface, so you can switch engines depending on your project. Whether you are writing marketing copy, generating images, cleaning audio, editing video, summarizing PDFs, or debugging code, it is all available through one dashboard without juggling subscriptions or separate accounts. What you can create with 1minAI Articles, blog posts, outlines, and SEO tasks Image generation and style variations Audio transcription and cleanup Video editing, conversion, and creation PDF chat, summaries, extraction, and processing Coding assistance and error fixes Choose what you want to do, select your preferred model like GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, or Claude 3.5 Sonnet, then enter your prompt and let the system handle the rest. How does it work Your lifetime license includes: 4,000,000 credits renewed every month Enough for roughly 1.1 million words or 1,100 images monthly An extra 450,000 monthly credits just for logging in Most users will never come close to running out. A smart way to upgrade before the new year If your goal is to streamline your workload, grow a side hustle, or make creative projects more efficient, locking in lifetime access now means you start the year ahead of schedule. One purchase covers almost every AI task you will need in 2025 and beyond. Get lifetime access to the 1minAI Advanced Business Plan for $74.97 (MSRP $540) while this 86 percent off holiday price is still available. 1min.AI Advanced Business Plan Lifetime SubscriptionSee Deal StackSocial prices subject to change. Read...

Officials say transparency is critical to build trust in the government`s most important data system, but the business case for expanding it is mostly blanked out. Read...

The app`s Chinese owner ByteDance has signed a deal with investors to run its business in the US. Read...

Arguing over the best hardware of the year is usually fun. That’s as true as ever in 2025, when Brad Chacos, Adam Patrick Murray, Will Smith, and Alaina Yee (hi, it’s me) rolled up our sleeves and got down to the messy business of naming our top hardware picks. This annual tradition on The Full Nerd always involves twists and turns, especially given our individual differences on how we define “best.” But you can see the effect of a multitude of wearying trends—tariffs, AI, increased memory costs—on the debates. In past years, alliances formed faster and positions softened less. More shouting happened, too. But Brad had no reason to invoke journalistic integrity this time around. We all saw the bright spots for hardware clearly; so too with the ugly news in the industry. Instead, we argued more gently. We rallied together to remember Gordon Mah Ung, the creator and long-time host of The Full Nerd, with a new award category in his honor. And we all left feeling satisfied with the winners. Mostly. Here are the results. (Note: This list is separate from PCWorld’s nominees for the best PC hardware and software of 2025. The winners of “Nerdies,” as we like to call these awards, are chosen by The Full Nerd crew alone, and focus more specifically on enthusiast tech. If you’d like to catch our show in real time, be sure to subscribe to the Full Nerd channel on YouTube!) Welcome to The Full Nerd newsletter—your weekly dose of hardware talk from the enthusiasts at PCWorld. Missed the surprising topics on our YouTube show or latest news from across the web? You’re in the right place. Want this newsletter to come directly to your inbox? Sign up on our website! And The Full Nerd 2025 award winners are… As long-time viewers of the show may have expected, we once again slightly retooled the categories for this year. We expanded on “accessory,” choosing to make that slot open to components or accessories. And as mentioned, our team decided to honor Gordon with a brand-new category, meant to embody his love for (and fascination with) any technology that furthered innovation. No restrictions on how niche or widely applicable. The categories we brawled over this year: Best CPU Best GPU Best PC component / accessory Best trend Worst trend Gordon Mah Ung Wild Card Best CPU: AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (Strix Halo) Will mini-PCs powered by chips like Strix Halo (such as this GMKtec model) become the norm? Time will tell. Christoph Hoffmann If you define “best” as hardware that pushes boundaries, then no other CPU stood out as clearly as AMD’s boundary-shattering Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (aka Strix Halo). Was it only available in select products? Sure. But it showed how CPUs with integrated graphics don’t have to play second fiddle to typical discrete GPU setups.  Strix Halo (and future chips like it) could upend our assumptions about what a good gaming PC looks like. In this mobile processor, AMD packed in a Radeon GPU capable of similar performance to Nvidia’s RTX 4070 or 5070. A maximum of 128GB of embedded memory can fuel it as well. And so devices we saw sporting the AI Max+ 395, like the Framework desktop and the ASUS Rog Flow Z13, weren’t just beasts at gaming. They also represent form factors that haven’t really packed such a strong punch before. For example, the Flow Z13 is a tablet notebook capable of gaming in ways that far exceeds other tablets. So while Adam believes in Strix Halo’s promise for handheld gaming PCs, the overall TFN crew anticipates a big splash across the board. Enough so that Brad thinks that Nvidia’s partnership with Intel came about in part to compete on this front. Best GPU: AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT Adam Patrick Murray / Foundry Despite Will’s valiant attempt to elevate the Tegra T239 (the Switch 2’s SoC) above all other GPUs, our debate rapidly focused on Nvidia and AMD’s major PC graphics card launches this year. In contrast to the muted rivalry on the CPU side, the two largest consumer GPU makers took off their gloves, with Nvidia launching its ferocious 50-series lineup and AMD its own monstrous 9000-series offerings. Ultimately, AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT took the top spot, despite back-and-forth over the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090’s sheer insanity and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti’s mix of performance, value, and availability. Team Red earned this second award for 2025 due to the 9070 XT’s combo of strong raw performance and major strides with its FSR upscaling tech.  True, FSR Redstone can’t quite deliver the same polish as Nvidia’s more seasoned DLSS enhancements. But AMD had another thing going for it that held sway with this judging panel: better support on Linux. You may not yet be able to officially call 2025 the year of Linux, but the operating system sure commands more attention these days. Best PC accessory: MSI MPG 272URX QD-OLED 4K monitor Matthew Smith / Foundry Sometimes when you pair a PC with the right accoutrements, you might not even notice that you lack flagship hardware in your rig. Other times, the right secondary equipment elevates the utter joy of owning blazing-fast parts. Our winner for 2025’s best component or accessory is an example of the latter—and what a beautiful one at that. Despite its unpronounceable name, MSI’s MPG 272URX QD-OLED monitor breaks barriers. It’s among the first 4K OLED displays to sport a refresh rate at 240Hz, blending gorgeous, rich color with buttery-smooth output. You can’t get much better than this for rapid refresh rate 4K monitors—and as our reviewer says, it’s not just a superb 4K gaming monitor, but a fantastic all-around display for office tasks, HDR movies, and creative work, too. Also getting nods as runners-up: The ASUS Rog Falcata, an excellent off-the-shelf option for a luxe ergonomic mechanical keyboard, and SilverStone’s vintage-vibes FLP-02 PC case, which brings back the best of the 90s and all its beige glory. Best trend: Linux gets gud Pexels A long-standing joke has been the awaited rise of Linux. (We even asked “Is this the year of Linux?” while among the nerdiest of nerds at a Micro Center opening earlier this year.) But by the end of this year, the meme felt…real. A confluence of circumstances led to this strange new world. Windows 10’s death sparked interest in alternative operating systems, thanks to Windows 11’s bloat and outright incompatibility with older yet still usable hardware. A greater number of newbie-friendly distros exist. And, perhaps most importantly, demographics have also shifted among the user base, with friendlier voices becoming louder, setting a more pleasant tone for the Linux-curious. We’ve seen this trend up close and personal on The Full Nerd’s own Discord server, with an influx of Linux users who discovered us through our Dual Boot Diaries show. Our newest members have added more depth and dimension to our community, offering a wealth of knowledge (and a wide variety of distro suggestions) to the uninitiated and experienced alike. Worst trend: AI ruins everything RIP affordable tech. Thanks, AI.Zoomik / Shutterstock.com Last year, we voted for “enshittification” (pardon our French) as the worst trend of the year, a phenomenon driven by AI’s growing insertion into, well, everything. You couldn’t turn any direction without running into an app or service that had deteriorated in quality. You could argue that this year, AI models and the insertion of AI-powered features have improved. That’s true to a degree, but not enough to fix the messy output, buggy software, or otherwise worsened quality of the tech we use daily. (Even more aggravating, we’re often now paying companies for subscriptions that use our data to train AI models.) More concerning, AI has contributed to a sudden, rapid decline in affordability and accessibility of consumer PC hardware—most notably memory, which has exploded in price (and is found in just about everything we take for granted in life nowadays). We’re now unsure of the future for the PC as we know it, with all of us feeling some degree of concern about building, upgradability, and affordability in the coming months. The idea that we could return to a time when only the very well-to-do could afford modern technology is unsettling. Gordon Mah Ung Wild Card: “What is a frame?” AMD For decades, enthusiasts only discussed gaming in terms of frames, and simple terms at that: Those rendered natively by a graphics card, and their quantity per second. But more recently, companies and gamers alike have begun to challenge that approach, digging with greater precision into the details. And that matches Gordon’s brand of fine-tuned nerdery. So whether flipping on Nvidia’s multi-frame generation tech or firing up programs that record microstutter in games, rethinking what constitutes high-quality gaming performance is exactly the kind of thing that Gordon would have loved. I think he would have been championing these new approaches himself, even. In this episode of The Full Nerd As you already know, in this episode of The Full Nerd, we duke it out over the best hardware of 2025—but the results detailed above leave out the twists and turns (and random alliances) in our discussions. Plus hilariously choice quotes, courtesy of one Will Smith. For example: Adam: All right, tell us why the 5090 is the best GPU of 2025.Will: It’s real fast, Adam. You should catch the full episode (including the preshow!) for more of these debate hijinks. We may not have forced chat to break any ties (especially in ways that Brad still has not forgiven me for), but we still had lots of fun despite the bummer year. Also, stay tuned for not just one but TWO streams next week! (Details in my sign-off below.) Willis Lai / Foundry Missed our live show? Subscribe now to The Full Nerd Network YouTube channel, and activate notifications. We also answer viewer questions in real-time! Don’t miss out on our NEW shows too—you can catch episodes of Dual Boot Diaries and The Full Nerd: Extra Edition now! And if you need more hardware talk during the rest of the week, come join our Discord community—it’s full of cool, laid-back nerds. This week’s ominous nerd news According to analysts, we’ll soon see laptops reflect the ongoing woes with memory availability and affordability. I am not looking forward to a regression in configuration options. Nor am I happy to hear that RAM pricing hurts so bad that DDR4 compatible processors (like the AMD 5800X3D) now cost a ton, too. Never thought I’d cross my fingers for AMD to start producing more Zen 3 chips soon, but here we are. Thiago Trevisan / IDG Mid-range laptops may return to 8GB RAM as default: I hate it. I also hate that Windows 11’s bloat is the reason budget laptops aren’t yet set to slide back down to 4GB. Also, Kingston says to buy your RAM now: In an interview with our very own Mark Hachman, a company representative warns that prices will only go up. We all knew this to be true, but still. Ouch. &*#% yeah: I’m glad we have science proving the benefits of swearing. I plan to make use of this knowledge when struggling through my push-ups next Tuesday. A $100 Steam Machine with Bazzite? This project sounds absolutely up Will’s alley. I hereby nominate him for giving it a go and reporting back to us on how it went. You can get a Raspberry Pi to train you in chess: Here’s a neat project, courtesy of my German colleagues at PCWelt. But as miraculous as Raspberry Pis can be, I don’t think they can do the impossible. (That is: Train me in chess.) Adam Patrick Murray / IDG Feels like the pandemic again: Never thought I would have sold an old webcam for far more than I paid, but such was 2020. Now apparently 5800X3D owners have the same option. I don’t even have a wall big enough for a 100-inch TV: But you know what, I’d still be interested in seeing one of these OLED competitors up close. Who needs windows or sunlight, right? That’s nuts: Micron said in a recent earnings call that it can only meet about 50 to 66 percent of demand. Makes more sense now why Crucial got axed so abruptly, I guess. Who needs a graphics card, anyway? Each year, Mike Crider updates his handy guide to games that don’t need a graphics card. It’s a perfect thing to keep in your back pocket when helping dole out tech advice during the holidays (as we all inevitably do). What even happened over there: If you can’t handle depressing PC carnage, avoid this story about a man who apparently lost 50 SSDs to a destructive young child. The pictures are brutal. Coming next week… By the way, we have a surprise for you all next Monday—we’re having a tribute stream to Gordon starting at around 11am Pacific! Come hang out for a variety show, set to span several hours. What exactly we’ll be doing? A little building, a little chatting, and more! ?? And of course, on Tuesday, it’s time for us to score how well we did at foreseeing the future. Will has a lot of 2025 predictions on the board. Like double the rest of us. I for one am interested to see how accurate he was. Catch you all soon! ~Alaina This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of Gordon Mah Ung, founder and host of The Full Nerd, and executive editor of hardware at PCWorld. 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