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Basketball fans can save on NBA League Pass right now, which lets you catch a bunch of out-of-market NBA games via streaming. The League Pass Premium subscription is on sale for $75, down from the usual $160, and League Pass Standard is marked down to $50 from $110. Considering we're almost halfway though the season, the discount makes sense and is a good deal for anyone who wants to keep a close eye on the rest of the games to be played this year.
The Standard plan includes commercials and support for only one device at a time, while the Premium tier offers no commercials, in-arena streams during breaks in the game, offline viewing of full games and concurrent streams on up to three devices at once.
Last year, League Pass added mult
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Meta's Threads is pulling further ahead of Elon Musk's X on mobile, based on recent estimates from analytics firm Similarweb, Forbes reports. In the first stretch of January, Threads averaged roughly 143 million daily active users worldwide on mobile devices, compared with about 126 million for X.
Similarweb's year-over-year snapshot shows Threads growing sharply, up 37.8 percent year-over-year, while X's daily mobile audience fell 11.9 percent across the same period. The picture is more mixed in the US, where X still holds a narrow edge on mobile. Similarweb data puts X at about 21.2 million daily active US mobile users in early January versus roughly 19.5 million for Threads.
However, Threads' US mobile usage has risen substantially faster over the past year, surging almost 42 percent to X's 18 percent. X remains far larger on desktop, where it draws around 150 million daily users or visits worldwide, while Threads' web presence sits at just 9 million.
Forbes also reported on Similarweb data for Bluesky, another competing text-based platform started by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Dorsey left the board in the summer of 2024, later telling Pirate Wires he believed Bluesky was "literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company," in reference to Twitter
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 Meta's Threads has now reportedly surpassed its rival X (formerly Twitter) in daily mobile usage globally.
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 Apple's iPhone 18 Pro models will have a front camera cutout in the top-left corner of the screen alongside a new under-display Face ID system, which will see the Dynamic Island software feature relocated to the same corner. That's according to the latest YouTube video from Front Page Tech's Jon Prosser.
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Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Jan. 19.
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 Amazon this weekend is offering discounts across the M5 iPad Pro lineup, including both 11-inch and 13-inch models. The highlight this time around is a return of a low price on the 256GB Wi-Fi 11-inch M5 iPad Pro, which is on sale for $899.99, down from $999.00.
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 MacBook Pro availability is tightening on Apple's online store, with select configurations facing up to a two-month delivery timeframe in the United States.
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 Amazon is discounting a few models of Apple's M4 Mac mini this weekend, starting at $499.00 for the model with 16GB RAM/256GB SSD, down from $599.00. Discounts reach up to $129 off in these sales, and this time around there is also a discount on the M4 Pro model.
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In another attempt to reduce our attention spans to mush, TikTok has released the PineDrama app, which offers serialized drama series that are roughly a minute per episode. As first spotted by Business Insider, the app is designed exactly like TikTok, but instead of trendy dance videos, you can scroll through and watch "micro dramas."
For those new to the category, micro dramas are bite-sized TV shows shot in vertical video and available in minute-long episodes. Don't expect any nominations for Best Original Screenplay with series like The Officer Fell For Me or Married to my past life's nemesis, since they typically offer soap opera vibes with cliffhangers that keep users scrolling to the next episode. The app is designed to keep people on it with a Discover tab, a place to save favorites and the ability to react in real time alongside other viewers.
Right now, the micro dramas on PineDrama are all free to watch and don't have any ads. It's unclear if TikTok will introduce any costs or ads to the app, since other micro drama options like DramaBox or ReelShort have a paid structure. Late last year, TikTok also introduced a way to watch micro dramas within its own app, with a section called
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 OpenAI plans to start testing ads inside of ChatGPT "in the coming weeks." In a blog post published Friday, the company said adult users in the US of its free and Go tiers (more on the latter in a moment) would start seeing sponsored products and services appear below their conversations with its chatbot. "Ads will be clearly labeled and separated from the organic answer," OpenAI said, adding any sponsored spots would not influence the answers ChatGPT generates. "Answers are optimized based on what's most helpful to you."
OpenAI says people won't see ads appear when they're talking to ChatGPT about sensitive subjects like their health, mental state of mind or current politics. The company also won't show ads to teens under the age of 18. As for privacy, OpenAI states it won't share or sell your data with advertisers. The company will also give users the option to disable ad personalization and clear the data it uses to generate sponsored responses. "We'll always offer a way to not see ads in ChatGPT, including a paid tier that's ad-free," OpenAI adds. Users can dismiss ads, at which point they'll be asked to explain why they didn't engage with it.
Users will be able to ask follow-up questions about sponsored content. OpenAI"Given what AI can do, we're excited to develop new experiences over time that people find more helpful and relevant than any other ads. Conversational interfaces create p
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 2026 could be a bumper year for Apple's Mac lineup, with the company expected to announce as many as four separate MacBook launches. Rumors suggest Apple will court both ends of the consumer spectrum, with more affordable options for students and feature-rich premium lines for users that seek the highest specifications from a laptop.
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