Category: Information Technology

PC shipments saw a steep drop of about 20 percent in Q3 2026, analysts reported this week.

The industry saw its “sharpest decline since “Q1 2023,” Omdia said in an announcement toady. Global shipments of laptops, desktops, and workstations fell 21.2 percent year over year (YoY) to 58.1 million devices, the analyst said.

Desktop PC shipments (including desktop workstations) decreased 23.5 percent to 11.7 million units, and laptop shipments (including laptop workstations) declined 20.6 percent to 46.4 million, per Omdia.

IDC shared similar findings. The analyst said this week that PC shipments fell 20.1 percent YoY to 62.7 million units, compared to 78.5 million in Q3 2025.

The industry also shipped 9.1 percent fewer PCs in Q3 2026 than it did in Q2 2026, when 68.2 million units shipped, per IDC.

The 20.1 percent YoY decline is the biggest drop that the IDC has ever recorded during a year’s third quarter, the IDC said, per PCMag.

The drop in shipments is also notable considering that Q3 PC shipments usually surpass Q2’s numbers.

“If looking at all quarters, then we have seen other quarters in recent years with larger declines, such as 2022 Q4, which was -28.2 percent, and 2023 Q1, which was -28.7 percent. Both were coming off pandemic highs,” Jitesh Ubrani, research director for consumer devices at IDC, told PCMag.

In its announcement this week, IDC said that many PC vendors and sales channels stocked up on PC shipments earlier in the year in anticipation of memory price hikes. That meant minimal demand remained during Q3.

“[Sales] channels are now worried about carrying too much inventory into a market where high prices are suppressing demand,” Ubrani said in a statement.

It’s easy to forget that Sony launched a fancy, expensive VR headset for PlayStation 5 just a few years ago. It’s seemingly only going to get easier going forward.

That’s because Sony just sold 419 VR-and-XR-related patents to Meta, per a report from ZDNet Korea. 43 of those were filed in the United States alone, and they include patents for things like head-mounted displays.

It’s unclear what exactly this means for Sony’s future VR efforts, but doing this just three and a half years after the launch of PlayStation VR 2 (amidst product shortages, per GamesRadar) suggests that the company isn’t especially interested in making another headset anytime soon. It should be noted that PSVR2 has not been officially discontinued, even if it has been difficult to find in stock recently.

This isn’t terribly surprising, even if it is a bit of a bummer for those who value high-end console VR experiences. The PSVR2 headset was hailed as an excellent piece of hardware by Mashable and other outlets when it launched in 2023, but a critical lack of software support over the years has made it feel like a dead platform, even if it technically isn’t one at the time of publication.

On Meta’s side of things, acquiring several hundred VR patents is interesting given the company’s recent up-and-down relationship with the technology. Earlier this year, Meta laid off more than 1,000 employees from its Reality Labs division and shut down the VR portion of its Horizon Worlds app. However, the company also just announced VR glasses, a new product category, so it seems like Mark Zuckerberg’s VR ambitions haven’t died just yet. This latest development is another point of evidence in that direction.

AI slop is getting so good that it’s not always easy to distinguish a photorealistic forgery from a real photo. It’s no longer as easy as looking for the six-fingered renderings of just a year ago. Beyond looking for subtle clues, spotting AI images often comes down to a gut feeling that something simply looks off.

Now there’s another tool to help identify fakes, and it works with AI-edited audio and video, too. Google has opened its SynthID Detector to the public, so anyone with a Google, Apple or ChatGPT account can upload media to determine whether it’s been saved with a SynthID tag indicating manipulation using generative AI.

Google introduced SynthID in 2023 and, in late 2025, made it possible to query Google Gemini about whether images were created using Google’s AI. At the Google I/O annual developer conference this past May, the tool expanded to include detecting video and audio content in Google Chrome and Google Search.

The standalone SynthID Detector tool currently detects media generated by Google, OpenAI, Nvidia and Kakao. Not yet named is Apple, which announced it would support SynthID at its recent fall event announcing the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Duo.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

A spokesperson for Google, in an email to CNET, emphasized that working with other companies is crucial when it comes to identifying AI-generated content because no single company can solve the problem alone. They also said there’s no specific date for Apple support, but that it will be available soon.

Even so, the SynthID Detector seems already wired for Apple’s content. I uploaded a photo shot with an iPhone 18 Pro and edited using Apple’s Reframe tool, and it successfully detected the embedded SynthID tag. For an untouched iPhone-captured photo, the detector correctly did not detect a tag.

Images generated from prompts using ChatGPT were correctly flagged as including AI-generated content

To probe the level of Apple support in the tool, I created an entirely AI-generated image in Apple’s Playground app using ChatGPT’s image generation model, but the SynthID Detector did not identify it as AI-generated. It’s likely the Playground app does not yet have SynthID tagging wired in.

I also tested some photos captured using a Google Pixel 11 Pro. The company takes a two-pronged approach to image veracity on its own devices: embedding C2PA (or Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) metadata in every image it creates to verify the accuracy of the original capture, and adding a SynthID when an image has been edited using AI.

Although Apple is adopting SynthID, it has not signed onto C2PA. Instead, it’s using its own Reference Image technology to store a cryptographically verified original of an image. Those shots must be captured in the Reference mode in the iPhone’s Camera app, though.

It’s also encouraging to see Google handle the media in a sensible way. When you first visit the site, you must agree to terms of service that spell out that media files you upload are processed in real time and then deleted after the results are displayed. A digital signature of the media is mapped to your user identifier and then deleted after 24 hours.

OpenAI has its own verification tool, but it only looks for OpenAI watermarks; the AI-generated samples I tested with Google’s tool came up negative on OpenAI’s site.

Any tool that helps determine genuine content is welcome, but as usual, the responsibility falls on the viewer to make that determination — if not by noticing on sight, then by making the effort of downloading the media, loading the tool and uploading it. The upside is that tracking technology such as SynthID is finally making its way into more media and paving the way for more widespread detection of AI slop.

Jeff Carlson

Senior Writer

Jeff Carlson writes about mobile technology at CNET, from cellular phone plans to devices and emerging technology.

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Keep an eye on your furry, feathered or scaly friends when you leave the car.

ZDNET’s key takeaways

• Google is limiting the AI models that free users can access.
• Only the Flash-Lite model will be accessible to free users.
• AI Plus subscribers will also lose the Pro model.

Those of you who use Google’s Gemini app or website for free will soon be able to use only one AI model for your queries and conversations. And it’s the weakest of the bunch.

In a new support document, Google revealed that free users will lose access to the Flash and Pro models starting Friday, Oct. 9. Anyone without a paid Google AI plan will be stuck with only the lowest-tier and least robust Flash-Lite model.

Also: How I made a paid Mac app in 11 days with Claude – without writing any code

And there’s more bad news. People who subscribe to the cheapest Google AI paid plan, namely the $5-per-month AI Plus option, will lose access to the Pro model on the same date, leaving them with only the Flash and Flash-Lite variants.

The one bright spot here is reserved for users of the $20-per-month AI Pro plan. If you subscribe to this one, you’ll gain access to the Deep Think reasoning mode, which is currently reserved only for AI Ultra users who shell out $100 or $200 a month for the privilege.

In a nutshell, a free user who needs Flash would have to pay for an AI Plus subscription. An AI Plus user who needs the Pro model will have to jump to a Pro plan.

How these changes affect your AI use

Why is all of this important, and how does it affect your use of Google AI in the real world? The answer depends not only on how frequently you use the Gemini app and website but for what purposes.

You can use Gemini via four, or actually five, different plans or methods, each with greater access and more features. First up, you’re able to use it for free without any type of paid subscription. Next, the AI Plus plan is a budget-friendly paid option. The AI Pro subscription is a beefier plan for people with more demanding requirements. And the two AI Ultra plans are the cream of the crop.

Each plan currently offers three models to choose from: 3.8 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.1 Pro.

Also: Is AI conscious? Why experts are worried

Flash is designed as a generalist, capable of handling most common AI tasks, such as providing information, summarizing files, generating and analyzing images, and chatting.

Flash-Lite is a faster but slightly less capable version, able to handle repetitive tasks but not adept at deeper knowledge and reasoning.

Pro is the most analytical of the three, solving more difficult and challenging problems, especially those focused on such areas as math, logic, and coding.

With the least expensive paid plans, Flash is typically the default and go-to model. When I use Gemini with my AI Pro account, Flash is the model that’s automatically chosen. For me, that’s perfectly fine for 90% of the tasks I run.

Free users typically see Flash-Lite as the default since their access to the other two models is limited. The Lite flavor should suffice for most general tasks but not for any type of deep reasoning or complex problem solving, potentially putting many free users in a bind.

To make things just a bit more complicated, Google says each model will now allow you to choose an error level among low, medium, and high. The higher the level, the greater the model’s ability to complete tasks and provide more thorough responses to your questions. However, higher levels will also chew up more of your limits.

Speaking of limits, Google does restrict how — and how much — you can use Gemini. But instead of doling out access based on a specific number of requests or conversations, the company uses a compute-based limit that will now refresh every five hours until you reach your weekly quota. This means that your limits are based on the complexity of your prompt, the features you use, and the length of your chat.

Also: How to keep your chatbot conversations as private as possible

Paid users naturally have higher limits than those without a subscription. Plus, premium models and tasks eat into your limits more and may cause you to hit your quota faster. Asking Gemini to generate an image or video, use Deep Research or Deep Think, and tap into the Pro model will use up your limits more quickly than everyday chats and requests.

If you’re confused and frustrated by all these changes and conditions, you’re not alone. The more we demand of AI, the more that companies like Google curb or control our access, thus adding more complexity to the whole process.

The main bright spot here is that Google AI subscriptions are doled out on a monthly basis. So you can stick with free access or one of the paid plans and switch month-by-month if you find yourself too limited by your current level.

Lance Whitney is a technology journalist with an IT background. He’s written for TechRepublic, PCMag, Macworld, and Time, among others, He also teaches classes in AI, cybersecurity, and social media.

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