Month: May 2024

Enlarge / A T-Mobile logo at a store in New York on April 30, 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

T-Mobile today is notifying customers on some older smartphone plans that their monthly prices will soon be increased by either $2 or $5.

T-Mobile confirmed the price increases when contacted by Ars today. "The increase is $2 or $5 per line. We won't be sharing the details on which plans but the portion of customers who are included are being notified today," a T-Mobile spokesperson told us.

The price increases, which reportedly will take effect during the June billing cycle, were previously confirmed by The Mobile Report. The news article said that affected plans include One, Magenta, Magenta Max, Magenta 55+, Magenta First Responder, and Simple Choice. While smartphone plans will increase either $2 or $5, it appears that affected plans for tablets and hotspots will get a $2 price increase.

It has been a tumultuous run for Netflix's popular adaptation of The Witcher novels and games. A series of setbacks and controversies led to a long delay after the show lost its star, Henry Cavill. Now a brief season four teaser gives us our first look at Cavill's replacement in the role of Geralt of Rivia, Liam Hemsworth.

The video above reveals little about the direction for the season beyond establishing that, yes, Hemsworth is now Geralt, and here's what it looks like. He looks the part, though it's hard for some fans to imagine him matching Cavill's pitch-perfect presence and delivery for the character.

See, Cavill is famously a passionate gamer. He's talked at length about his deep fandom of Warhammer 40K, his experiences playing World of Warcraft, and yes, his experiences with 2015's immensely popular open-world RPG The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. He even has appeared in a video building a gaming PC.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Here at Ars, we’ve been around long enough to chronicle every single time that Microsoft has tried to get Windows running on Arm-based processors, instead of the Intel and AMD-made x86 chips that have been synonymous with Windows for more than three decades. The most significant attempts happened in 2012 with Windows RT, which looked like Windows 8 but couldn’t run any x86 Windows apps; and in 2017 when Windows 10 Arm PCs arrived with rudimentary x86 emulation.

The main PC company backing each of those Arm efforts was Microsoft itself, which launched the original Surface to showcase Windows RT and the first Surface Pro X during the Windows 10 era. Since then, Microsoft has periodically refreshed the Arm version of the Surface tablet while continuing to sell Intel versions. A couple of PC OEMs put out Windows RT tablets, and most of them took a stab at one or two Windows 10-into-11-era Arm PCs. But there was never a big unified push that made it clear that the entire consumer PC ecosystem had bought into Arm.

This week’s announcements felt different—yes, there was a new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop from Microsoft leading the charge (and the new Surface Pro is the first Surface Pro ever to ship Arm as the default option for most people). But the Surface launch was accompanied by a major wave of systems from essentially every major PC OEM, suggesting at least some level of elevated enthusiasm for the Snapdragon X series that didn’t exist for older Arm chips.