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| RadioNZ - 15 minutes ago (RadioNZ) The Games has been scaled back after the organisers struggled to find a host, however, it will still see more than 200 medals contested across 10 sports in Glasgow this year. Read...Newslink ©2025 to RadioNZ |  |
|  | | PC World - 4 hours ago (PC World)If you’re looking for the best way to watch the Super Bowl in 2025, the answer is more complicated than it should be.
Between cable providers, live TV streaming services, free streaming options, and a trusty antenna, there are an assortment of ways to watch the game. Unfortunately, many of them offer varying levels of video and audio quality, yet it’s weirdly difficult to get precise details on what those differences are.
Seriously, I shouldn’t have to spend hours chasing down PR contacts and interrogating them on 4K, HDR, and surround sound options for the Super Bowl. This stuff should just be posted online by the companies involved.
But since they won’t, I will. These are what I believe are all the Super Bowl viewing options, ranked from best to worst:
1. Comcast’s “Enhanced 4K” feed
Quality: 4K, Dolby Vision HDR, Dolby Atmos, low-latency
Requirements: X1 box for low latency
Though it’s painful to admit, the highest-quality Super Bowl broadcast is only available on cable; specifically, via Comcast and its X1 cable boxes.
As with the Paris Olympics last year, Comcast is offering an “Enhanced 4K” feed that supports both Dolby Vision HDR and Dolby Atmos audio, a combo that no other streaming platform will offer. The company is also promising “ultra-low latency,” which should only trail behind live action by about 10 seconds.
Comcast will also offer Enhanced 4K through its Xfinity Stream app, but a spokesperson confirms that it won’t support ultra-low latency. That means you’ll need an X1 box if you want no risk of social media spoilers. (The app is available on Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, Samsung TVs, LG TVs, Xumo devices, and Xfinity Flex boxes.)
2. Tubi
Quality: 4K HDR, 5.1 surround sound, possibly low latency
Requirements: Compatible Roku, Fire TV, Android TV/Google TV, or Apple TV for 4K HDR and surround sound
Tubi is Fox’s free streaming service, and this year it will stream the Super Bowl for the first time. Tubi will carry the same exact broadcast as Fox proper, and it will support 4K HDR video and surround sound on compatible Roku, Fire TV, Android TV/Google TV, and Apple TV devices.
Note that Fox is not natively broadcasting the game in 4K, and is instead upscaling a 1080p signal. Still, Tubi should provide an overall better picture than over-the-air broadcasts if you have the proper hardware. Hopefully it also provides the same low-latency feed that the Fox Sports app did in 2023.
There’s just one potential snag: Tubi’s app will have a sign-in requirement, and you’ll need to create an account if you don’t already have one. Given that Tubi has never covered a live event at this scale before, and that lots of people will suddenly be signing up on game day, there’s plenty of potential for things to go wrong.
3. An antenna and ATSC 3.0 tuner
Quality: 720p to 1080p, HDR, 5.1 surround sound, low latency. (Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision or HDR10+ in select markets)
Requirements: ATSC 3.0-compatible TV or tuner box
The Super Bowl is a big event for ATSC 3.0, also known as NextGen TV, as it brings HDR to the big game’s over-the-air broadcasts. Using an antenna also gives you lower latency than most streaming services, and it’s not prone to any buffering issues or service outages.
Caveats apply, however; you’ll need a TV or external tuner with ATSC 3.0 support, and your local Fox station must support HDR on its NextGen TV feed. (The NextGenTV website’s station lookup tool shows which channels in your area offer HDR.)
Some local Fox affiliates owned by Gray Media will go a step further, offering HDR10+ and Dolby Vision in select markets. TVTechnology reports that these include Atlanta, Ga.; Las Vegas, Nev.; Davenport, Iowa; Mobile and Birmingham, Ala., Pensacola, Fla.; Greenville-Spartanburg, S.C.; and Portland, Ore.
Gray will also provide Dolby Atmos audio in New Orleans, La.; Atlanta, Ga.; Springfield, Mo.; Louisville, Ky.; Honolulu, Hawai; Tucson, Ariz.; Davenport, Iowa; and Portland, Ore.
4. An antenna without ATSC 3.0
Quality: 720p to 1080i, SDR, 5.1 surround sound, low latency.
Requirements: Just an antenna
Even on TVs that use the longstanding ATSC 1.0 standard, an antenna a fine way to watch the Super Bowl. Assuming reception is strong in your area, you’ll get a 5.1 surround sound and a lower-latency signal than streaming services; plus, no risk of buffering issues or outages. Picture quality might also be better than the more compressed feeds of cable and streaming, though that can vary by station and the number of subchannels it’s carrying.
5. YouTube TV, DirecTV Stream, or Fubo
Quality (DirecTV and YouTube TV): 4K HDR, 5.1 surround sound
Quality (Fubo): 4K HDR, stereo sound, plus Dolby Vision on Roku, Android TV/Google TV, and Fire TV
Requirements: See compatibility lists for YouTube TV 4K, YouTube TV surround, DirecTV 4K, and Fubo 4K
DirecTV’s service includes 4K HDR video at no extra charge and will carry Super Bowl LIX on channel 105. YouTube TV charges $10 per month extra for 4K video, but is offering the add-on as a 30-day free trial for new users. Fubo will stream Super Bowl LIX in 4K HDR, but only in its Elite package, which costs $108 per month after regional sports fees.
While their capabilities differ, I’m ranking them all the same. Fubo is the only live TV streaming service that will offer the Super Bowl in Dolby Vision HDR, but doesn’t support surround sound. The other two services offer surround sound, but support HDR10 only. You shouldn’t sign up for any of them just to watch the game—not with free alternative available—but the features are nice to have if you’re already a subscriber.
6. Sling TV
Quality: 4K, stereo audio
Requirements: See Sling’s 4K compatibility list
Sling TV, whose Blue package carries Fox in select markets, will carry the game in 4K, but the company has not responded to an inquiry on HDR support. At least 4K doesn’t cost extra if you’re a Sling subscriber.
7. Regular cable TV
Quality: HD, 5.1 surround sound
Requirements: A cable box
I’ve yet to see any other cable providers besides Comcast announce 4K HDR support for Super Bowl LIX, so let’s assume for now that they’ll stick with the usual HD quality. If you’re still a cable TV subscriber, you’ll probably just stick with it for the Super Bowl instead of chancing the vagaries of streaming, but the free 4K feed on Tubi might be worth a look for comparison’s sake.
8. Hulu + Live TV
Quality: HD, 5.1 surround sound
Requirements: Any device with the Hulu app
Unlike most of its live TV streaming peers, Hulu + Live TV won’t offer a 4K feed of the Super Bowl, though the service at least supports surround sound on select devices.
Dead last: The NFL app
Quality: HD, 30 frames per second, stereo sound
Requirements: Any device with the NFL app
As in previous years, the NFL app will stream the Super Bowl with no TV provider authentication required. Too bad the app’s video quality is garbage, with dull colors streamed at a choppy 30 frames per second.
Now that the NFL offers its own streaming service, you’d think the league would bring quality in line with modern streaming standards; but no, it continues to insult its viewers by doing the absolute bare minimum. Rant over. You can at least keep it in mind as a free backup solution if all other options fall apart on gameday.
Sign up for Jared’s Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter for more streaming TV advice. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | BBCWorld - 6 Feb (BBCWorld)He says the move, which covers non-elite levels, restores fairness but human rights advocates have condemned it. Read...Newslink ©2025 to BBCWorld |  |
|  | | Stuff.co.nz - 5 Feb (Stuff.co.nz) Luka Doncic was nearly asleep last Saturday night in Dallas when his phone buzzed. Read...Newslink ©2025 to Stuff.co.nz |  |
|  | | Stuff.co.nz - 5 Feb (Stuff.co.nz) It’s been in place for more than 20 years, but the long-standing sponsorship of New Plymouth’s premier sports venue has come to an end. Read...Newslink ©2025 to Stuff.co.nz |  |
|  | | Stuff.co.nz - 5 Feb (Stuff.co.nz) The 38-year-old joins a list which includes a golfer and six-time major winner. Read...Newslink ©2025 to Stuff.co.nz |  |
|  | | PC World - 5 Feb (PC World)At a glanceExpert`s Rating
Pros
Sleek, sturdy design
Sharp OLED screen
Pleasantly tactile keyboard
Good battery life
Cons
AI features still lacking
Some keyboard keys too cramped
Too many pre-loaded apps
Our Verdict
The Acer Swift 16 AI is a capable machine with a big, beautiful screen, but its AI chops are still unproven.
Price When Reviewed
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Acer is all in with AI computers, having now released half a dozen machines with the AI oomph to qualify for Microsoft’s in-development Copilot designation. The largest of them so far is the Acer Swift 16 AI, which sports a lovely 16-inch OLED screen and the latest Intel Lunar Lake CPU.
This laptop is thin and light with a gorgeous display and ample connectivity options. The keyboard and trackpad are solid, notwithstanding the rather unnecessary LED AI indicator. However, there are faster computers out there for the same price, and the AI features could be more robust. It’s good for the MSRP but even better if you can find it on sale.
Further reading: Best laptops 2025: Premium, budget, gaming, 2-in-1s, and more
Acer Swift 16 AI: Specs and features
Acer has used several different chipsets for its AI PCs, and some machines have multiple options across the various SKUs. The Acer Swift 16 AI, however, plays it straight with an Intel Lunar Lake CPU, paired with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. There are no other versions of the machine, which is available at Best Buy, but it does have an expansive OLED screen, which is a big step up from the IPS displays on Acer’s cheaper AI PCs.
CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 256V
Memory: 16GB LPDDR5X
Graphics: Intel Arc 140V
Display: 16-inch 2880×1800 OLED
Storage: 1TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD
Webcam: 1440p IR Webcam
Connectivity: 2x USB-C (Thunderbolt 4, 40Gbps), 2x USB-A (5Gbps), 3.5mm audio jack, HDMI 2.1
Networking: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4
Battery capacity: 70Whr, 65W charging
Dimensions: 14.02 (W) x 9.92 (D) x 0.58-0.69 (H) inches
Weight: 3.37 lbs (1.53 kg)
MSRP as tested: $1,199.99
The Acer Swift 16 AI is a competent laptop for all your general computing and productivity needs.
Acer Swift 16 AI: Design and build quality
IDG / Ryan Whitwam
Given the large footprint, I was surprised how thin and light the Acer Swift 16 AI is. It’s always a balancing act with larger laptops, but Acer threaded the needle fairly well here. The machine is barely half an inch thick, and the entire chassis is aluminum. However, the metal body isn’t very thick. There are places like around the fan grilles where you can see the frame flexing a bit too much, but the build quality is noticeably improved versus the smaller Acer Swift 14 AI.
When closed, the Acer Swift 16 AI looks elegant in an industrial way. The flat black lid is free of branding, save for a small acer logo and the AI “dots” badge in opposite corners. The edge of the machine is flat where the ports are, but it tapers along the rest of the body, making it easy to pick up this sizeable laptop. It’s not too hard to wrestle into a bag, though, weighing in at 3.37 pounds. That’s a bit less than the average 16-inch laptop.
The hinge on this machine feels appropriate for its $1,200 price point. The laptop stays closed securely, but it only takes one hand to open the screen, which swings smoothly into place. There’s a small lip around the camera that helps open the laptop, too.
The rear edge of the display frame has feet that boost the rear of the laptop a few millimeters, giving it a slight incline that makes typing more comfortable. The camera lacks a privacy shutter, which I’d like to see at this price. The 1440p webcam supports Windows Hello biometric login, and the video quality is good but not better than the 1080p cameras on most laptops.
The Acer Swift 16 AI has a good selection of ports, including two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4, as well as two legacy USB-A ports. There’s also a full-sized HDMI port and a headphone jack. I don’t love that both USB-C ports are on the left side, meaning the charging cable has to be on that side. The right side has just one USB-A and the headphone jack.
Acer Swift 16 AI: Display and speakers
IDG / Ryan Whitwam
The Acer Swift 16 AI looks great, but it’s not quite the showstopper it could be. The 2880×1800 resolution is very sharp at normal viewing distances, and the touch response is fast and precise. It also supports an optional 120Hz refresh rate if you want smoother animations at the expense of battery life.
As an OLED, the colors are gorgeous if slightly unrealistic. You can also enable HDR content on this display, but it might not pop quite like you expect. The brightness tops out at 340 nits, which is a bit on the low side for HDR. It is, however, a good bit brighter than the LCDs and IPS screens you normally see at this price. The brightness is good enough for use in all indoor settings, but the highly reflective screen makes outdoor use questionable.
The speakers are on the underside near the front, a common location for speakers on notebooks. They sound good at low and mid volume levels, but there’s distortion and very little bass when you crank it up. They’re very average for a laptop in 2025 in spite of the DTS audio certification.
Acer Swift 16 AI: Keyboard and trackpad
IDG / Ryan Whitwam
The quality of Acer laptop keyboards varies hugely across its product line. In the case of the Acer Swift 16 AI the typing experience is overall very good. The keys are stable, quiet, and quite tactile. The power button is in the far upper right corner, and despite the lack of any visual identification, it’s also a fingerprint sensor. It’s very accurate but sluggish like all Windows Hello biometrics.
Most of the important keys are a good size, but I don’t care for having the up and down arrows crammed into a single key unit. There is a full number pad on this machine, but it’s quite squished. These keys are only about 75 percent as wide as the alphas, which makes it hard to rely on muscle memory to enter numbers on the pad. It’s still better to have it than not, given the ample surface area of this laptop.
The trackpad doesn’t take full advantage of all that room. It’s a bit on the small side, though it is sturdy and accurate. The overall feel of the trackpad, as well as the click mechanism, are a big step up from the Arm-based Acer Swift 14 AI, which felt quite off to me.
The trackpad has the same light-up AI logo in the corner as the company’s other AI-branded laptops. It blinks when you access AI features. It’s totally unnecessary, but you can turn it off in the Acer settings.
Acer Swift 16 AI: Performance
Acer loads its PCs with more software than most PC vendors—that has the potential to be good, but it’s mostly bad. There’s the McAfee suite, a few settings apps, a photo editor, a collection of third-party games, and several custom AI tools. It will take a bit to clear away the bloatware, but even Acer’s software won’t get much use.
On one hand, I applaud Acer for actually bundling AI tools on its AI laptops. On the other, they don’t work very well. Apps like Acer Assist and VisionArt load an AI model locally to provide a chatbot and background generation, respectively. The model is about 5GB gigabytes in size, so it’ll leave you with very little free memory on this 16GB system.
The model output is also extremely slow, and I wasn’t impressed with the chatbot’s capabilities or the lack of options in the wallpaper app. It’s also odd that these tools don’t use the Lunar Lake chip’s NPU—all the AI work is done on the GPU. Acer says it is planning to improve the on-device models soon, which will include support for running them on the NPU.
The general system performance with the Core Ultra 7 is good. While Intel’s latest chips aren’t ideal for heavily multithreaded applications, the GPU is among the best you’ll see short of a dedicated chip. Thermal performance is also good, but Acer’s default power state is a bit slower than competing machines. When in high-performance mode, the laptop does get noticeably louder. It’s whisper-quiet in Normal mode.
To give you a better idea of how the laptop performs, here are our standard benchmark tests.
IDG / Ryan Whitwam
PCMark 10 is designed to test a machine across a variety of metrics like web browsing, video chat, and photo editing. The Acer Swift 16 AI easily bests Meteor Lake chips here, but its default performance tuning makes it slightly slower than other Lunar Lake-based machines with a score of 6,539. The latest AMD Ryzen chips are also running ahead in this system benchmark.
IDG / Ryan Whitwam
Cinebench is a CPU-focused test that shows how a PC handles heavy but brief multi-core workloads. More CPU cores grant higher scores in Cinebench and cooling doesn’t matter very much. With Intel’s move away from hyperthreading, the Core Ultra 7 doesn’t do as well in this test, bringing up the rear with even the Meteor Lake TravelMate P4 ahead. However, switching to the Acer performance mode boosts the score to about 10,000, which is more in line with competing laptops.
IDG / Ryan Whitwam
The Handbrake test is similar to Cinebench in that it shows how a computer handles multithreaded tasks, but this is a longer-duration test where thermals matter more. While we don’t have any concerns with the laptop’s thermal performance, the eight-core/eight-thread design keeps this machine near the bottom of the heap. Switching to performance mode does shave a few hundred seconds off the encode, but AMD’s AI 300 parts run away with this one.
IDG / Ryan Whitwam
Our main gaming test is 3DMark Time Spy, a graphical benchmark that focuses on GPU performance. This isn’t a gaming computer, but Intel’s latest iGPUs are quite good. Here, the Acer Swift 16 AI is near the top at 3,988, besting even the Ryzen AI 9 with its Radeon GPU. The Acer Swift 16 AI is fast enough to play simple modern games or titles that are a few years old at lower settings.
Acer Swift 16 AI: Battery life
The Acer Swift 16 AI sports a 70Wh battery, which is average for a laptop of this size. It charges over USB-PD via either of the USB-C ports, with a peak speed of 65W. That’s standard for productivity laptops these days. The machine comes with a clunky charger, but we tested more compact third-party options, all of which charged the Acer Swift 16 AI just as well.
IDG / Ryan Whitwam
The Acer Swift 16 AI will last you an entire work day and then some. To quantify that, we ran our standard battery rundown test, which consists of playing a 4K video on a loop at set brightness until the machine dies. The Acer Swift 16 AI lasted 1,053 minutes (about 17.5 hours), which is very competitive. The display was in the default 60Hz mode for this test—switching to 120Hz will reduce battery life.
Acer Swift 16 AI: Conclusion
Like its smaller incarnation, the Acer Swift 16 AI is a competent laptop for all your general computing and productivity needs. Acer is trying as hard as any OEM to justify the AI hype with features like Acer Assist. However, even all this effort does not guarantee a good AI experience. Microsoft’s Copilot+ features are still barely there in Windows 11.
Beyond all the marketing, the Acer Swift 16 AI is fast enough for almost everyone with a Core Ultra 7, but I wish Acer made this laptop in a Core Ultra 9 variant. Even then, the machine’s multithreaded performance would be lacking. If you’re going to be editing video, an AMD-based machine is your best bet right now.
While this laptop shares a lot with the 14-inch Acer AI PC, it looks nicer. The step up to an OLED screen, with its vibrant colors and deep blacks, is appreciated as well. The keyboard is a delight to use, and it’s nice to see a full number pad, even if the keys are a bit cramped.
The $1,200 MSRP feels slightly high for what you get, particularly when machines like the HP Omnibook Ultra regularly sell for around the same price. The Acer Swift 16 AI has dropped below $900 on sale, which is a steal. If you happen to catch it on sale for a few hundred off, this is a great purchase. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | BBCWorld - 3 Feb (BBCWorld)Canadians have begun booing the US anthem at sports games, signalling the depth of anger at steep tariffs issued by Trump. Read...Newslink ©2025 to BBCWorld |  |
|  | | RadioNZ - 3 Feb (RadioNZ) Ex-president Tim Jago sexually abused two teenage boys he knew through a sports club in mid to late 1990s. Read...Newslink ©2025 to RadioNZ |  |
|  | | RadioNZ - 3 Feb (RadioNZ) It was just after midnight local time when the social media post from ESPN nearly broke the Internet. Read...Newslink ©2025 to RadioNZ |  |
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