From the Editor’s Desk: Noise ⭐

I get up each morning, turn on the lights, open the window shades, make an espresso, and sit down to read the news and my tech feeds. By which I mean that I get up each morning, turn on some lights, open the window shades, make an espresso, and become instantly infuriated by the low quality of my own industry. The signal to noise ratio is now skewed decidedly into the noise end of the spectrum. The needle is stuck.

Certain times of year can be particularly bad. This week, for example, CES is underway in Las Vegas and we are already being inundated by a pointless tsunami of headlines about new products, most of which no one needs or should even consider buying, not to mention headlines about how you can watch some pointless CES product unveiling. The Black Friday and other holiday selling periods are likewise grim, full of grifty headlines about sponsored product links masquerading as news.

But it could be any given day. It doesn’t matter.

Some publications seem to consist entirely of ads, like Mashable, which today told me about sales on JBL earbuds, a Magic: The Gathering box set, a robot vacuum, Apple AirTags, an Anker power station, Shokz headphones, and Beats Solo 4 headphones. And, oh, yeah, a 4K smart hummingbird feeder one of its idiots saw at CES. Great stuff.

This is a real PC World headline. “Apparently hackers are targeting Windows 10! Upgrade to Windows 11 Pro for $9.97 ASAP.” The Windows 10 part isn’t true and that $9.97 Windows 11 Pro pricing is always available somewhere. It’s not new and it’s not going away.

I’m also a huge fan, he writes sarcastically, of the ads masquerading as news stories that are selling you something you already get for free. PC World “reports” on a $24 app that can edit, convert, and organize PDFs. And then about another app that will make PDF editing easy forever for just $40. And then about yet another PDF editor with a lifetime license for $25. But Mashable wins this round, as always, with its “lifetime PDF editor for Mac” that “just dropped to $79.” Apple users will always pay more, I guess. And there are apparently a lot of people who need PDF tools and never figured out how to Google “edit PDF for free.”

Also in this category, scanning apps. For example, “you don’t need to be tethered to your scanner,” MacWorld tells us, though I have a difficult time imagining that being a common problem. “The iScanner [iPhone] app is now just $28.” You have a phone, right? That scans for free.

As per the $9.97 Windows 11 upgrade noted above, there are similar headlines everywhere for various standalone Office suite versions. These are amusing on multiple levels, but my favorite (cough) here is when they advertise Office versions that are no longer supported. For example, Mashable (always game to foist ads) tells us we can get a “lifetime Windows license” for Office 2019 for just $29.97. Which makes sense, since Microsoft stopped supporting that product in October. PC Mag has a similar, er, deal, though it’s $40. PC World tells us we can end our “subscription fatigue” and get Office 2019 for under $30. And BoingBoing tells us we should “work smarter, not harder” with, wait for it, Microsoft Office 2019 Professional Plus. That one is just $19.97!

(Mashable has you covered if you need a supported version of Office: You can “pay once for Microsoft Office 2024 Home for $119.97”! Odd that it’s so much more expensive.)

And it’s not just the suites. PC Mag tells me that I can “stop fighting flowcharts” because, and, yes, this is a real headline, “Microsoft Visio (checks notes) is 96% off” (or $9.97, just like Windows 11 Pro!). And Microsoft Project Professional isn’t just “perfect for planning,” PC World tells me, its now 95 percent off too! YES! (Checks notes.)

You can get ad blocking and privacy protection for free, but why not just take PC Mag up on its offer to get that for just $15.97 with “this outstanding deal”?

There’s “lifetime access to lessons in 41 languages” for only $90. If that seems like a lot, the headline helpfully adds, parenthetically, “(reg. $299.99).” But MacWorld is touting an “exclusive” Babble offer without telling you what it is. (Lifetime access, of course, for $159. Also, it’s not exclusive.)

Or how about cloud storage? Sure, you could pay Apple, Google, or Microsoft monthly fees for that for the rest of your life. But why not just get “10 TB of lifetime cloud storage,” courtesy of a hard-hitting Mashable investigative report? It’s a totally trustworthy service you’ve never heard of that will definitely be in business for the duration of your lifetime.

Wired reports that we can stop using our keyboard and start using “this simple, free speech-to-text app” which, yes, is free, but also superfluous, since all personal computing platforms already provide this functionality in-box. But the app they advertised is AI-based, and it requires you to choose and then download an AI model. I’m sure it’s fantastic and necessary.

And don’t forget about the hardware.

We spent the past few years arguing about why Apple was still selling M1-based MacBook Air laptops with just 8 GB of RAM through a new second-hand stored called Walmart, but there are even better deals to be had. For example, Mashable—and I swear to God, it’s almost always Mashable—tells us that “this refurbished MacBook Air costs less than most tablets at under $200.” Which makes sense, since it’s a piece of almost literal crap based on an Intel Core i5 processor that was made in 2017. That’s almost a decade ago, and Apple says that’s so old that it’s not even “vintage,” it’s “obsolete.”

The Verge jumps in here to sell us a Meta Quest 3S that’s “still” $50 off and comes with a $50 gift card. If it’s not for Target or Best Buy, who cares? Because if there’s one thing I do know from the new actual news stories that make it through this noise, it’s that no one is buying VR/MR/AR headsets.

2026 will be a great year to buy an iPad, I’m told by Cult of Mac, which separately reports that “2026 will bring the best MacBooks ever”. I feel like both are true every single year, but you gotta pump up Apple when that’s your beat. And MacWorld takes it to 11, noting that “from iPhone Fold to a touchscreen Mac, Apple’s 2026 is going to be epic.” It sure is, guys, it sure is.

How about some vague hardware advertising masquerading as news? NBC News (yes, seriously) tells us that “my favorite streaming device is back at its lowest price ever right now,” and that raises questions. Not just which streamer (Google TV Streamer) and which price ($74.99), but who is the person behind “my” in that sentence and why do we care what he likes? Also, it’s almost always $74.99, but whatever.

Speaking of vague, we can “save some money on [our] heating bills” with a Nest Learning Thermometer. (Mashable, of course.) And a new favorite from Cult of Mac advertising, sorry, reporting on how we can “grab year-end deals on Samsung displays, up to $1400 off.”

But AI takes the cake, as always. And apparently turns it into slop, which now doesn’t mean anything because everyone just uses the word slop to describe anything made with AI, even when it’s beautiful. And of course, when these people aren’t busy misusing the term slop, they’re busy selling you paid AI tools from companies no one has ever heard of. Which feels contradictory, but let’s not get derailed here. It’s just hypocritical and unprofessional.

PC World is advertising, er ah, informing us about a “$68.99 bundle of over 200 AI tools” no one needs. And PC World explains how we can “start the New Year with savings on an all-in-one AI platform instead of paying for five subscriptions.” Literally no one does that, but literally no one needs this “all-in-one AI platform” either, not for $74.97 or for its alleged $540 “MSRP,” an acronym it uses without defining in a classic example of bad writing. You’d think the StackCommerce team would be better at that. You rascals.

This one may be my favorite (cough, again) of the bunch. And yes, it’s from Mashable. “This new AI tool shows you how to get AI to do what you want.” This is an ad (of course) for something called PromptBuilder that’s “only $199.99 for a lifetime license.” What it does is, you speak to it in “plain language,” and then it turns that description into a prompt you can feed to whatever AI chatbot you’re using. A prompt being plain language you could speak directly to whatever AI chatbot you’re using. Without spending $200 extra.

Look, I get it. Money is tight. Website advertising used to be graphics between the articles we write, but it’s not paying off anymore and so now the articles we write are just ads. We’re all scrambling to survive here, and if that means giving up our credibility and self worth to make a few bucks by deceiving readers into buying terrible things no one should buy, then what’s the harm? Wait. That is the harm. Sigh.

I can’t leave this without at least mentioning that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, a man so robotic and boring I once noted that a Word-generated summary of his speeches would read “this document is purposefully blank,” is now blogging. Which makes sense since he ceded most of his CEO duties months ago so he could, I don’t know, meditate in some chamber like the thing Darth Vader used in The Empire Strikes Back and figure out why no one likes Microsoft or Copilot. And if there is any greater source of noise you should ignore, I am not aware of it. Nadella is a lot of things. Compelling is not one of them.

Let’s see how far I can get before I throw up in my mouth a little bit.

“As I reflect on the past year and look toward the one ahead, there’s no question 2026 will be a pivotal year for AI. Yes, another one. But this moment feels different in a few notable ways,” he begins in his first post to, seriously, sn scratchpad. “We have moved past the initial phase of discovery and are entering a phase of widespread diffusion.”

And there it is. Dude. Learn how to communicate. Diffusion?

Predictably, Nadella would like us to collectively “get beyond” referring to AI a slop because Microsoft is all-in on selling AI to customers who are all-in when it comes to ignoring Copilot and whatever other AI nonsense Microsoft is cramming down their throats. But the problems here are many. And even if this guy could communicate effectively—I would challenge you to actually get through his book “Hit Refresh,” but it’s impossible—we cannot get past the harsh reality here. This man, this overpaid billionaire who isn’t even running his own company, just isn’t relatable. None of them are. And we can simply ignore them.

Or, we could if only there was a noise-cancelling headphone-type solution for our news feeds. Which sounds like a great job for AI. Let’s get one of these billionaire grifters going on that. Or at least Mashable. I mean, those guys are killing it.