The complaint also claimed that the plaintiff received a desktop with an RTX 4090 instead of the expected RTX 4080 Super. Further, it alleged that a Fragile representative told a plaintiff that he could buy the PC after renting. This is despite a NZXT representative previously confirming via Reddit that Flex isn’t a rent-to-own program.

Settlement agreement

In lieu of a trial, on April 7, NZXT and Fragile reached a settlement agreement [PDF] for a class of 19,322 customers [PDF], as first spotted by Gamers Nexus. The terms of the agreement are pending approval from a judge.

The agreement would allow some customers to own the PCs that they rented if they meet certain requirements, including having signed up for Flex on or before 2024 and never received an upgraded PC, or if “their accounts are more than 90 days delinquent as of March 30, 2026 and they signed up for the NZXT Flex Program between October 29, 2024, and June 1, 2025.” The value of the PCs that users may keep is “approximately” $1,216,129.02, the agreement says.

The rest of the proposed settlement consists of a $923,117.92 debt forgiveness pool that will provide up to $5,000 to members who are 90 days past due on payments, plus a $1,450,000 settlement cash fund.

Finally, NZXT agreed to change its business practices by trying to “prohibit social media influencer advertisement campaigns from making statements that customers have an ownership interest in NZXT Flex PCs,” using different brand names for its rental PCs and PCs that can be owned (something that NZXT has done since December 2024).

The PC company also committed to providing “accurate specifications and performance statistics” for its rental PCs and requiring customers to confirm that they know Flex isn’t a rent-to-own program before subscribing.

Finally, NZXT will update Flex’s website to “prominently” inform customers that they can use software to transfer their data from one rental PC to another rental PC for free.

NZXT agreed to maintain these practices until December 31, 2027.

Ars Technica reached out to NZXT for comment, but did not hear back before publication. We’ll update the story if we receive a response.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/04/nzxt-agrees-to-3-45-million-settlement-over-controversial-rental-pc-program/

The Release Preview channel will continue to exist, but as a hidden “advanced” option aimed primarily at IT shops hoping to perform early compatibility testing with upcoming updates.

Microsoft says that hopping between channels and opting out of the Windows Insider Program will also get easier and that it will generally no longer require users to completely wipe the PC and reinstall Windows. Switching between the Experimental, Beta, and Release Preview channels and the current shipping version of Windows can now be done as an “in-place upgrade” that preserves user data, as long as users stay on the same “core version” of Windows (i.e., 25H2, 26H1).

It’s still a maze, but it’s more predictable

The new version of the program doesn’t seem much less confusing than the current system, as there are still a whole bunch of branches, sub-branches, and exceptions to rules that Insiders will need to keep track of to be certain what they’re testing. But they do address the other major pain point of the Insider Program as it currently exists—the thing where you read about a new feature in a fresh Insider build, install that build to your PC, and then don’t actually see the feature on your system.

In the current Insider Program, that happens because of what Microsoft calls Controlled Feature Rollout (CFR), a process by which new features and updates are released to PCs gradually so that the rollout can be paused if problems arise. This is how Microsoft releases most Windows updates, and it makes sense for the general populace, but it mostly ends up being frustrating for Insider Program users who have already chosen to trade some potential bugginess for the ability to test new things early.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/04/microsoft-makes-it-easier-for-windows-insider-testers-to-actually-get-new-features/

Pay with your wallet or your attention

Unlike with most streaming services, those who can’t stomach YouTube’s latest price increase have an option. Free users can browse and stream as many YouTube videos as they want, but they’ll have to contend with ads. After earning more than $40 billion in ad revenue in 2025, the site expanded the use of unskippable 30-second ads in the TV app this year. Previously, the longest you’d have to wait before getting back to your video was 15 seconds.

But viewers have increasingly pointed to even longer ad breaks. In recent days, reports of 90-second unskippable ads have proliferated. The company has responded to the kerfluffle, saying, “YouTube does not have a 90-second non-skippable ad format. This isn’t something we are testing right now.” The company’s post on X has since been “community noted” to reaffirm the existence of 90-second unskippable ads.

Despite YouTube’s assurances, many, many viewers report seeing these longer ads, and there are several images that appear to show unskippable 90-second ad breaks. YouTube users have accused the company of lying or using deceptive language in its denial.

Some viewers report that these extra-long breaks are a mix of ad types. They begin with a 30-second unskippable ad, and the player then rolls into a few shorter skippable ads. However, the interface only shows the standard “Skip in” text with a countdown until all the ads are over. The good news is that this is an error, and YouTube is working on it.

The YouTube interface makes this look like an unskippable 90-second ad even if it’s not.

Credit: /u/Ok_Neat1652

YouTube now says it has determined these longer unskippable ads are an interface bug. “We’ve determined this was a result of a bug, which resulted in higher, inaccurate timers being shown for shorter ads,” a company spokesperson said. “We’re rolling out a fix now. As we’ve said, we don’t have a 90 second non-skippable ad format and this was not a test.”

YouTube just isn’t the streaming video free-for-all it once was. You’ll have to pay in one way or another if you want to watch YouTube content. The site will either take an ever larger bite of your budget, or you’ll have to sit through more ads than ever before. There are alternative YouTube clients that can strip out ads, and ad-blockers can do the same on the web. However, it’s a cat-and-mouse game as YouTube works to block the blockers.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/04/youtube-increases-premium-price-again-says-90-second-unskippable-ads-are-a-bug/

Ars Technica: This is what you call your tyranny test.

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson: One of the times I feel this is most resonant, if you remember a couple years ago, people who are stalwarts of the Second Amendment were really worried that a Democratic government was going to come up with a federal list of all the gun owners in America. So at some moment there’d be a knock on the door and their guns would be confiscated. Well, with automated license plate readers, if you put those outside of the gun range and the gun show and where you buy your ammunition, you have your list.

You don’t need to have some government list. You literally, through the data that you give up by just living your life, you can show who has a gun in their home. That might worry people who believe the Second Amendment means that they should be able to have their own gun rights without the government necessarily knowing it, but it cuts both ways. Everyone is revealed. Everyone is exposed. And everyone should be worried about their government having that data that potentially could be used against them.

Ars Technica: What is the potential scenario that worries you the most as we move forward? As AI tools in particular keep developing, are we moving into even more serious uncharted waters?

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson: Yes. I think AI is going to supercharge police power in ways we’ve never seen. We’ve all lived in a world where we have cameras on our streets. If there was an individual problem, they could go back into an individual camera. The idea that all those cameras can be fused together in a central command center, like a real-time crime center, and AI video analytics can then observe every single object, foreground and background, identify man, woman, child, cat, door, car, what kind of car, and then track those objects throughout the city—that’s a whole new power that we’ve never had before.

There are currently no real rules limiting that. There used to be a cautiousness in rolling out new technology. But we are watching the federal government in the guise of immigration enforcement actually use all the technology that does exist, but without any guardrails or concerns. So for the first time we’ve seen mobile facial recognition in the wild. It’s not that that technology wasn’t theoretically around, but we did not see local police taking a smartphone camera out for facial recognition. We’re now seeing that with ICE and Customs Border Patrol (CBP). We knew that you could track individuals with location and social network analysis. But now we’re seeing that being used by ICE to identify the areas and people that they want to target, using the power of these new systems in ways that we haven’t seen before in local law enforcement.

https://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/04/how-our-digital-devices-are-putting-our-right-to-privacy-at-risk/

Motorola announced a new mid-range phone yesterday, the 2026 Moto G Stylus. It’s not exactly a game changer unless you demand a stylus with your smartphone. Despite little in the way of upgrades, the new G Stylus will debut at $500, which is $100 more than last year’s version. It’s now clear that higher pricing will be a trend in Moto’s lineup. Without so much as a peep, Motorola has enacted price increases of up to 50 percent on the rest of its 2026 Moto G lineup.

Prior to the G Stylus announcement, Moto had three 2026 G-series phones—the Moto G Play, Moto G, and Moto G Power. They used to sell for $180, $200, and $300, respectively. In the past day, the Moto G Play rose to $250, which is a 38 percent increase. The 2026 Moto G went to $300—a whopping 50 percent price bump. Finally, the top model in Moto’s budget lineup, the Moto G Power, is now $400. That’s a 33 percent jump, putting it close to Samsung’s latest mid-range phones and $100 shy of the new Moto G Stylus.

Seeing a higher price tag on the new Moto G Stylus wasn’t a surprise given current hardware conditions, and the phone does have a few small upgrades. The battery capacity is slightly larger, and the stylus has basic pressure sensitivity support now. However, that hardly justifies a $100 increase over last year’s model, which had the same display and memory. It makes more sense in the context of an across-the-board price increase for Moto’s budget lineup.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/04/motorolas-budget-phones-are-now-up-to-50-more-expensive-as-memory-shortage-drags-on/

If you own an older Kindle e-reader, including models with physical keyboards or physical page-turn buttons that you’ve been reluctant to give up, Amazon has bad news for you. The company sent a message to owners of those devices today, informing them that starting on May 20 they would no longer be able to buy or download books from the Kindle Store.

The change (as reported by Good E-Reader and elsewhere) affects all Kindles introduced and sold in 2012 or earlier, going all the way back to the original Kindle from 2007. Users will still be able to read books that have already been downloaded to those devices, but they won’t be able to download more, and if they reset those Kindles to their factory defaults, the devices won’t be able to sign back in to an Amazon account.

“Affected devices include Kindle 1st and 2nd Generation, Kindle DX and DX Graphite, Kindle Keyboard, Kindle 4, Kindle Touch, Kindle 5, and Kindle Paperwhite 1st Generation,” reads the message from the Kindle team. Older 2011 and 2012-era Kindle Fire tablets will also lose access to the Kindle Store.

Amazon’s Kindle generational branding is occasionally confusing—that “Kindle Paperwhite 1st Generation” is also referred to as “Kindle Paperwhite (5th Generation)” on Amazon’s support pages because it’s part of the fifth generation of Kindle releases overall. But if you check your Kindle’s software version and see anything older than 5.12.2.2, it means your Kindle is losing access to Amazon’s store and your e-book library.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/04/starting-in-may-pre-2013-kindles-wont-be-able-to-buy-or-download-new-books/

Valve is bringing Steam Link, its local network game-streaming app, to Apple’s Vision Pro mixed reality headset, allowing Vision Pro users to play traditional games from their Steam library wirelessly from a nearby Mac or PC.

We say “traditional games” because it’s important to clarify that this does not stream VR games—only the sorts of games you would play on a traditional 2D display like a computer monitor or a TV. That said, this could lay some groundwork for VR games sometime in the future. But to be clear, Valve has not made any announcements about supporting SteamVR games on the Vision Pro.

There were previously Steam Link apps for the Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. Users could sync controllers with those devices and play Steam games over the local network—not just games from other Apple devices, but also from Windows or Linux gaming PCs.

It has been possible to do this on the Vision Pro using third-party tools like ALVR, but this is a much more straightforward, tried-and-true path to the same destination.

If you want to try it, you can sign up via TestFlight, Apple’s platform for distributing pre-release apps before they are listed on the App Store. Valve says the current version of the app “allows streaming up to 4K resolutions, and allows you to dynamically adjust the curve of the display in panoramic mode.”

We complained about the Vision Pro’s limited ability to connect to external gaming and media devices or access mixed reality content outside Apple’s walled garden when we reviewed it at launch a couple of years ago. Since then, that situation has markedly improved, though it’s still not always as straightforward as it is on competing headsets.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/04/valve-brings-native-steam-link-app-to-apples-vision-pro/

“While Lenovo has improved somewhat with their compliance with French consumer law by providing more repair score PDFs on their website, we urge the company to resolve this multi-year issue,” this year’s report says.

PIRG’s report concluded that “laptops are pretty stagnant in terms of repairability” across many of the eight most popular laptop brands in the US.

However, Proctor noted to Ars that consumers’ access to parts, tools, and information that vendors have has improved, but improvements around ease of disassembly “take longer to realize.”

He also praised vendors’ efforts to release more repairable designs, such as Apple’s MacBook Neo.

Phone repairability scores

Lenovo’s Motorola brand earned the best grade.

PIRG’s scores for phone manufacturers this year are based on the European Product Registry for Energy Labelling (EPREL), a scoring system that the European Commission created in June 2025 for scoring smartphone and tablet repairability. It’s based on six factors:

• Disassembly depth
• Fasteners
• Tools
• Spare part availability
• Software updates
• Repair information

US PIRG used different criteria for this year’s report.

PIRG’s report said that Apple and Samsung scored so low under EPREL criteria partially because all of the phones scored are guaranteed to receive updates for five years and not longer.

PIRG noted that Apple made progress in phone repairability by moving away from parts pairing, which is when companies require parts to be verified through encrypted software checks in order to function, and through the introduction of the Repair Assistant. However, the report’s author lamented that third-party Face ID replacements still don’t work. The report adds:

Apple also extended its Activation Lock anti-theft feature to individual parts, which repair advocates warn will strand large numbers of perfectly functional components—locking them out of the repair ecosystem entirely.

Apple isn’t alone: parts pairing and software restrictions remain an industry-wide problem that consumers and independent technicians continue to face across manufacturers.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/04/apple-has-the-lowest-grades-in-laptop-phone-repairability-analysis/

Social network Bluesky saw some intermittent service disruptions on Monday. On its own, this fact isn’t that noteworthy—Bluesky has seen similar service disruptions in the past, and this one coincided with widespread service problems being reported with other popular sites (Bluesky officially blamed the temporary problems on an “upstream service provider”).

What made this outage notable for many Bluesky users, though, was the instant assumption that it was the result of sloppy, AI-assisted “vibe coding” by the Bluesky development team.

Amid Monday’s service issues, many Bluesky feeds were filled with hundreds of posts that laid the blame on developers who were allegedly relying on unreliable AI tools to ship faulty code. Some used memes, others used alt text, still others used irony or wry humor to call out Bluesky’s development team for this alleged sloppiness.

Overall, though, the mood among these vibe-code blamers was one of righteous anger. “Any developer or programmer using ‘vibe-coding’ or any reliance on AI to code things is clearly too stupid to know how to do the job they’re paid to do and should be fired out of a cannon,” Bluesky user T-Kay wrote, summing up the, er, vibe. “Coding takes skill, not slop.”

bluesky employees: we are vibe coding the entire website using only AI now

yeah dude, i can tell

[image or embed]

— lex luddy (ichiban appreciator) (@lexluddy.xyz) April 6, 2026 at 10:29 AM

It’s the kind of reaction that highlights just how many tech users are still reflexively repulsed by the idea that AI tools were used in any way to create the products they use. Even as professional coders are becoming increasingly enthusiastic about the power of AI coding tools, many end users still see them as a boogeyman to instantly blame for any and all observed ills in the tech industry.

“Things are changing. Fast.”

Before yesterday’s outage, many on the Bluesky development team faced social media backlash for admitting they used AI tools in their work. Bluesky founder and Chief Innovation Officer Jay Graber posted point-blank in late March that “Bluesky is made with AI, the engineers and even some non-engineers use Claude Code,” for instance. And Bluesky Technical Advisor Jeromy Johnson (who goes by the handle “Why” on the site) has been an outspoken proponent of AI coding tools, saying in February that “In the past two months Claude has written about 99% of my code. Things are changing. Fast.”

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/bluesky-users-are-mastering-the-fine-art-of-blaming-everything-on-vibe-coding/

“Unfortunately there’s a nostalgic cost: your old original 386 DX33 system from early 1991 won’t be able to boot modern Linux kernels anymore,” Molnar wrote. “Sniff.”

A tree falling in a forest

The practical impact of the end of 486 support will be negligible; the number of modern Linux distributions that use the kernel’s 486 support is negligible.

Many of the consumer-focused Linux distros have more Windows-like minimum system requirements, an acknowledgment of how CPU and RAM-intensive modern web browsers and browser-based apps have become; Ubuntu raised its minimum RAM requirement from 4GB to 6GB for the 26.04 LTS release. Even lightweight distros like Xubuntu or AntiX recommend 512MB to 1GB of RAM, amounts far in excess of what any 486-based PC ever shipped with (or could reasonably work with, using actual hardware).

One of the few actively maintained distros that explicitly mentions 486 support is Tiny Core Linux (and its GUI-less counterpart, Micro Core Linux). These OSes can run on a 486DX chip as long as it’s paired with at least 48MB or 28MB of RAM, respectively, though a Pentium 2 with at least 128MB of RAM is the recommended configuration. But even on the Tiny Core forums, few users are mourning the loss of 486 support.

“I get the nostalgia, like classic cars, but a car you’ve spent a year’s worth of weekends fixing up isn’t a daily driver,” writes user andyj. “Some of the extensions I maintain, like rsyslog and mariadb, require that the CPU be set to i586 as they will no longer compile for i486. The end is already here.”

Those still using a 486 for one reason or another will still be able to run older Linux kernels and vintage operating systems—running old software without emulation or virtualization is one of the few reasons to keep booting up hardware this old. If you demand an actively maintained OS, you still have options, though—the FreeDOS project isn’t Linux, but it does still run on PCs going all the way back to the original IBM Personal Computer and its 16-bit Intel 8088.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/04/linux-kernel-maintainers-are-following-through-on-removing-intel-486-support/