But look on the bright side: the most onerous of President Trump's tariffs have yet to take effect, so there are plenty of reasonably priced alternatives to consider.
Belkin stopped selling some of these Wemo products several years ago, but the company continued to operate the servers they depended on. After January of next year, however, you won't be able to operate them at all using the Wemo app or with any third-party services.
These recommendations are based on my assumption that you'll want to replace your Wemo devices with something equally simple, so I won't get into every alternative, including some that might be more appealing to smart home power users. I will, however, help you minimize the brands you buy into, so you don't need to juggle lots of smart home apps.
There are some cases where that won't be possible, however, because I'm recommending Lutron products as my top picks in many categories, and Lutron doesn't make smart bulbs or indoor smart plugs that can handle small appliances. Lutron also doesn't currently support Matter, if that's important to you (it's not to me).
If you're using Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, or Google Home, using more than one app isn't all that onerous once you've set up a given product and perhaps set up some on/off schedules, because most of your interactions with it will involve using voice commands. You'll find you won't need to rely on those apps all that much.
When generating an image with ChatGPT, you will soon be able to select "Save without watermark" in the menu behind the three dots in the top-right corner of the app. Obviously, this feature would be rather useless if images weren't going to be watermarked.
Will all users be able to save images without watermarks? We don't know yet. Android Authority speculates that the feature may sit behind a paywall and only be available to paid ChatGPT subscribers.
None of this has been announced or confirmed by OpenAI as of this writing, and it's possible this feature won't make it through to the stable release versions of ChatGPT at all. We'll have to wait and see.
The latest news is that Microsoft will be upping the "static analysis" requirements for driver certification, a move meant to improve the security and stability of Windows 11 25H2.
According to the Windows Driver Developer blog post from earlier this week, all drivers will be required to undergo a so-called static analysis. "Static analysis is a foundational requirement of Windows Hardware Compatibility Program," says the post. "The validation … [identifies] potential issues in driver code before deployment."
In other words, companies that want their hardware designated as reliably compatible with Windows 10 and 11 will need their drivers reviewed and validated by Microsoft.
Windows 11 25H2 will probably be released at the end of September, but expect the rollout to take a number of months.
We've tested all the laptops on this list ourselves, so these aren't just specs pulled from a product page. They're real recommendations, based on hands-on experience.
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Using the computer's local AI capabilities, the Describe Image feature can generate detailed descriptions of images, charts, and graphs to quickly give you an overview of visual content.
