Tech for all

Update 03/30/18:   Updated the steps to clarify that the pairing setting can be found in the default music speaker setting. Google Home  and  Google Home Mini  might be good at finding songs you want to hear, but they’re not the best at playing them. Compared to higher-priced speakers such as  Google Home Max  and  Apple’s HomePod , Google’s diminutive devices sound exactly as you’d expect: small, tinny, and muddled. Google has heard your complaints. Starting today, you can hook up a Bluetooth speaker to your Google Home without needing to purchase a separate Chromecast dongle. Once you pair a compatible Bluetooth speaker with one of your Homes, you can make it the default for playing music, so you won’t have to fiddle with controls or tell your Home where to send your favorite songs. [ Further reading: Best soundbars ] Pairing a speaker is simple. Here's how to do it: Make sure your Bluetooth speaker is in pairing mode. Head to the  Devices  tab inside the Home app o

One of our favorite PC cases is an even sweeter buy for today only. If you buy the  Corsair Crystal 570X RGB ATX mid-tower case for its standard $180 price , Newegg will toss in a Corsair Hydro Series H60 liquid CPU cooler for free. The deal expires just before midnight Pacific time. PCWorld's Full Nerd podcast gang crowned the Corsair 570X  the best PC case of 2016 . Tempered glass adorns the top, front, and side panels of this case, revealing the innards of your PC from nearly every angle. The front panel features three customizable RGB LED fans handled by an LED controller. There's room for up to 6 case fans in total.  Corsair's 570X includes seven expansion slots, two 3.5-inch hard drive bays, and two 2.5-inch drive bays, augmented by cable routing channels with cable straps and a tool-less designto keep everything nice and tidy—cleanliness is vital in a see-through case. Corsair sells the 570X with a black, red, white, or mirror black steel chassis. The

There is considerable development activity at the high end of hardware and content creation for virtual reality and augmented reality, as well as such AR aliases as mixed reality, extended reality and others. Most industry investment is aimed at leading-edge gaming and industrial application development. However, the low-end of the market is also worth looking at, to see how people and institutions without big budgets -- consumers and education -- might adopt these technologies sooner, rather than waiting years for all the advancements to trickle down to lower price points. An example of AR done on a more human-friendly scale is  Merge VR . Its founders seem to have taken the hint from  The Graduate  ("One word: plastics"), added software and a bit of creativity, and then applied it to AR. First, Merge VR built a soft plastic headset (which they call "goggles") that fits any smartphone, even the largest. The optics worked well for me. The physical control

Steam Machines no longer grace Steam’s dedicated hardware tabe, as  GamingOnLinux  noticed. You probably didn’t. Steam Machines carried thrilling potential but wound up doomed from the start, a catastrophic flop with consumers. The best concepts from the failed endeavor continue onward, though.  Valve envisioned Steam Machines and SteamOS—a proprietary Linux fork intertwined with Steam’s Big Picture mode—during the Windows 8 era, while Microsoft was trying to turn PCs into tablets and lock apps down in the Windows Store. Cue the heroic reveal. Tiny, powerful Steam Machines by a legion of PC hardware makers were supposed to counter the threat of Windows becoming a walled garden while simultaneously dragging PC gaming into the living room. That dream never became reality, for all sorts of reasons. [ Further reading: These 20 absorbing PC games will eat days of your life ] Windows 10   fixed   Windows 8’s most egregious sins ( kind-of ), while SteamOS lacked vital capabilitie

Reviews of Apple's next generation iPhone X have started appearing online, and for the most part, critics have showered praise on the product. "The iPhone X is clearly the best iPhone ever made,"  wrote Nilay Patel  for The Verge. "It's thin, it's powerful, it has ambitious ideas about what cameras on phones can be used for, and it pushes the design language of phones into a strange new place," he added. The phone is so impressive, it almost seems unreal, Patel suggested. "At a glance, the iPhone X looks so good one of our video editors kept saying it looked fake." A Better Way Because the X departs from other iPhones in a number of ways, some fans of the product line may balk at buying it. Those fans need not worry,  advised Lance Ulanoff  in his Mashable review. "The iPhone X changes the iPhone experience, but for the most part those changes are for the better," he wrote. "I'm positive that those fear

A  fresh generation  of AMD processors looms on the horizon, and its approach is creating wonderful ripple effects: You can find current-gen Ryzen processors going for wickedly good deals. AMD already dropped Ryzen prices in January, then  pushed them down even further  this month. Now costs have plunged yet again for two mainstream models if you’re willing to fill out rebate forms. First up: The 6-core, 12-thread  Ryzen 5 1600 , which we recently used in  a mini-ITX Ryzen gaming PC . Amazon’s selling it for $176, or $13 less than its newly reduced price. But a rebate slashes another $20 off, bringing the total down to just $156. That’s not quite as cheap as the low-water mark this sold for during Amazon’s recent one-day PC gaming sale, but that’s an astounding number of cores and threads for the price. This chip originally launched at $220 and was worth every penny even then; Intel’s rival Core i5-8400 costs $179, and its six cores lack multi-threading and can’t be overclocked.