Life

There are 3,872 posts filed in Life (this is page 9 of 388).

What’s Better (and Worse) in Fitbit’s New App Preview

I’ve been using Fitbit’s revamped app, currently in “public preview” mode for adult Android users in the United States. While I like the simplified aesthetic, its functionality seems to center around the questionable AI that gave me so many wrong and confusing answers. Let me take you on a tour of where the new app has improved, where it’s falling short, and what’s still missing. 

Better: cardio load and key metrics are easy to read

The top few metrics on the home screen have always been configurable, but I find the new version is even more readable than the old one. You get three “focus metrics” on the right hand side, and a big donut shape giving your progress toward your cardio load. 

Fitbit's current app on the left; the updated preview version is on the right.
Fitbit’s current app is on the left; the updated preview version is on the right.
Credit: Beth Skwarecki/Fitbit

Measuring cardio load as progress toward a weekly goal is a welcome change; previously, cardio load was a daily measure that often didn’t correspond to reality. There’s a downside to the new view, though: in the old version of the app, you could turn off the recommendations or hide them. In this version, there’s no way I could find to remove that metric from the top of your screen.

Better: separate tabs for fitness, sleep, and health

Screenshots of the Fitness, Sleep, and Health tabs
What you see on the Fitness, Sleep, and Health tabs.
Credit: Beth Skwarecki/Fitbit

Finding any specific data in the old Fitbit app always meant scrolling through a CVS receipt-length list of things you weren’t looking for. Items tended to be grouped, which helped a little, but ultimately some things need more space than the little card they were stuffed into. You couldn’t find your recent workouts without guessing on which tile to tap—turns out it’s Exercise Days (but not Cardio Load or Active Zone Minutes).

But now, you just tap on the Fitness icon at the bottom, and there everything is! My exercise days and weekly cardio are there, then a listing of upcoming workouts, and then my recent activities. I can log a manual activity right from this screen. Perfect. (The button doesn’t seem to be working right now, but hey, it’s a beta. I can appreciate the idea.) 

Same goes for the Sleep tab. Right up top there’s a trend insight (“Your steps linked [sic] to better sleep quality”) and then I get my graph of sleep stages, and a list of “key metrics” like when I went to bed and how much time in bed was spent awake. 

The Health tab gives my vitals, like my resting heart rate and HRV. If I scroll down, I can set up alerts, update my profile, and the “coach notes” that the AI has written down about me. For example, I see “wants low reps and heavy weights” and “hates lunges.” 

Worse: glitches galore

I know it’s a beta, but things seem really rough. My workout from two days ago is listed as “upcoming,” and the app crashes when I try to mark it as completed. The old Fitbit app says that my high and low heart rate notifications are “on & checking” but the new app says I still need to set them up. 

Some of the AI conversations fail to load at all. When they do, often the bot tells me it doesn’t have access to the information I’m asking about, or it says that “internally” it sees something different than what I’m seeing in the main screens of the app. The team has a lot to fix before these features are ready for widespread use.

Worse: structured data views are replaced with AI conversations

Humans invented graphs, charts, and other means of data presentation because these are easy to scan and interpret at a glance. The new Fitbit app can generate some charts (great!) but tends to present these as little cards to illustrate insights from the AI bot. 

To see more data, you’d think you could tap on a button or card about a recent run to get your lap times, running dynamics, and other information. But that doesn’t seem to be an option. Instead, I get a “continue conversation” button that seems to want to feed a screenshot of the AI output back into the AI bot. 

I’ve already written about some of the problems I’ve had conversing with the AI bot, so I won’t rehash those issues here. (It hallucinates in ways that are sometimes hilarious and often frustrating.) But even if the AI was as intelligent as it’s supposed to be, this would still be a major issue. The AI responses are slow, and I can’t always get the bot to give a straight answer to my questions. 

In short, it seems like the app’s designers said “we’ll have the AI handle it” anytime they weren’t sure how to build a feature. So the app feels like a mere wrapper around the bot, and the bot is just not the right tool for all those jobs. 

Missing: nutrition, menstrual health, and more

Google says that it hasn’t ported all the Fitbit app’s features to the new preview. When I asked about these limitations by email, the response I got was that “As a preview, the service is not yet feature-complete and lacks several functionalities to focus testing on the core AI coaching experience.” 

A full list of missing features is available from this Fitbit forum post. They include: 

  • Nutrition tracking

  • Hydration tracking

  • Menstrual health

  • Community features

  • Badges

  • Social media sharing

  • Heart rate zone analysis for workouts

  • Running analytics for Pixel Watch 3 and 4 users (other devices don’t provide this data)

  • Syncing data from Aria Air smart scales

The post also notes that the AI coach treats certain subjects as off-limits for the moment, including those related to weight, body fat, running distance, and heart health measurements like ECG and irregular rhythm notifications.

This Tinymoose Pencil Pro Ultra Stylus Is On Sale for Just $40 Right Now

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.

The Tinymoose Pencil Pro Ultra is both an affordable accessory and a serious productivity tool, and it’s currently on sale for $39.95 on StackSocial. It costs less than a third of what Apple charges for its stylus, and it works with an Android device thanks to its Smart Switch button on the top. A single press lets you jump from sketching on an iPad Pro to jotting notes on a Galaxy Tab without digging through settings. That makes it more flexible than most one-platform pens, especially for students or professionals who don’t want to carry two separate styluses. It also works on phones in dual mode, which could be handy if you like editing photos on your Android but use your iPad for work.

In use, the Pencil Pro Ultra does a lot right. Tilt sensitivity and palm rejection give you smooth shading and writing, at least on supported tablets, while zero-lag precision keeps lines from wobbling behind your strokes. Bluetooth gestures add a layer of convenience: one press takes you home, two pulls up multitasking, and a long press powers it on or off. As for the battery life, it holds its own with 10 hours of productivity, and supports fast charging via USB-C.

There are trade-offs, though. Palm rejection and tilt features only work in tablet mode, which means the experience is more basic when you’re on a phone. The magnetic attachment also doesn’t work outside of Apple’s tablets, so Android users will need to keep the included leather case handy. And while it’s backed by a six-month warranty, that’s shorter than what you get from bigger brands. Still, with three extra nibs, a carrying case, and cross-platform support baked in, it’s a compelling option for anyone who doesn’t want to lock into one ecosystem. If you’re a casual creator, note-taker, or multitasker who wants a stylus without splurging, this deal is worth considering.

Magic Leap, One of the Biggest Flops in AR, Is Back with Smart Glasses

Magic Leap is back.

The tech company, now owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, today revealed a prototype for a pair of Android XR smart glasses made as a “reference design for the Android XR ecosystem,” and announced it had extended its partnership with Google. The AR glasses have thicker-than-normal frames, but not ridiculously so, and seem to have a camera. But that’s about all we know: there’s no word on availability or what the glasses actually do.

While Magic Leap didn’t reveal a ton of concrete details about its new shades, it did say they combine “Magic Leap’s waveguides and optics with Google’s Raxium microLED light engine” with the goal being an all-day AR wearable.

“Magic Leap and Google’s collaboration is focused on developing AR glasses prototypes that balance visual quality, comfort, and manufacturability,” the company said in a statement.

Magic Leap and Google’s spotty history in AR

That all sounds good, but both companies have stepped into AR in the past and released products that fell far short of expectations. Back in 2018, there was a lot of excitement among tech-heads about the Magic Leap One, but the $2,295 augmented and virtual reality headset fizzled, selling an estimated 6,000 units in six months. Magic Leap abandoned Magic Leap One back in 2024, but it’s apparently ready to jump back in with something new.

Google has an even deeper history in AR that didn’t catch on, having released Google Glass in 2014 with a great amount of hype, and basically abandoned the product in 2015 after privacy concerns and limited functionality resulted in disappointing sales.

To be fair, both Google Glass and the Magic Leap One had potential, but may have been ahead of their time—mid-2010s hardware couldn’t deliver on the possibilities at a price that was reasonable. It’s a different world in 2025, when everyone from Apple to Meta to dozens of smaller players are hoping to release killer AR glasses.

The AR-smart glasses space is getting mighty crowded, but the goal isn’t really this generation of smart glasses, it’s the next one. The game-behind-the-game for the tech companies is creating a pair of smart glasses that are functional and flexible enough to replace your phone entirely. In some ways, we’re tantalizing close to a pair of shades that can replace all other screens—the displays in glasses like the XReal One are amazing. But other technical limitations, like a battery that will last a reasonable amount of time, and an intuitive control system, are still on the horizon. For now.

What ‘Cardio Load’ Really Means in the Fitbit App

We may earn a commission from links on this page.

The Cardio Load calculation is a metric the Fitbit app uses to suggest how much Pixel Watch and Fitbit users should exercise, but it can be hard to understand. It’s also recently been updated for the new version of the app, and it works a bit differently there. Here’s how you should use this number, and what it means to hit your target.

What is cardio load?

Cardio load is a way of understanding how much exercise you’ve been doing, whether the app logged it as a workout or not. Exercising for a longer time, and exercising at a higher intensity, both increase your cardio load. 

For example, on a day that you go for a five-mile run at an easy pace, you’ll have a higher cardio load in the Fitbit app than a day you ran three miles at an easy pace. If you run three miles at a more intense pace—say you race a 5K—your cardio load will be somewhere in between.

Here are a few examples from some workouts of my own: 

  • A track workout that had me alternating between moderate and peak heart rate zones for an hour (total five miles) had a cardio load of 117.

  • 20 minutes of detangling my kid’s hair got logged as a workout, but since my heart rate was in the light zone the whole time, I didn’t get any cardio load.

  • A 53-minute gym workout, which included a mix of heavy lifts and lighter continuous work, clocked in at a cardio load of 63. 

The “load” here is in the sense of “workload.” If this summer you were exercising an hour a day, and right now you’re only getting in 30 minutes every other day, your cardio load for the week (and for each day) will be lower than it was in the summer. Makes sense, right? If you were to spend all next week exercising an hour a day, that would be way higher than your current cardio load—and the Fitbit app would let you know that you’ve suddenly increased your cardio load, and might want to chill a bit.

What is your target cardio load? 

The Fitbit app automatically calculates a target cardio load based on what you’re used to doing. You can choose whether you want to improve your fitness (in which case it will nudge you to crank your load up a little higher each week) or maintain your current fitness. You’ll find this setting when you look at your cardio load in the app—just tap on “fitness target” near the bottom.

How the new FItbit app handles cardio load

In the original implementation, your cardio load target could change from day to day. Fitbit recently released a preview of the new version of its app, and that version now tracks cardio load weekly, which makes much more sense. So instead of being told that you should hit a certain load today, you’ll be told that you’re, say, 41% of the way toward your target load for the week.

Screenshots of cardio load in the new version of the app
The upcoming version of the Fitbit app (currently in “public preview”)
Credit: Beth Skwarecki/Fitbit

Which devices support cardio load?

Currently, the devices that have cardio load are:

  • Pixel Watches 1, 2, 3, and 4

  • Fitbit Charge 5 and 6

  • Fitbit Versa 2, 3, and 4

  • Fitbit Sense 1 and 2

  • FItbit Luxe

  • Fitbit Inspire 2 and 3

Fitbit Charge 6

Fitbit Charge 6


$133.20
at Walmart
$159.95
Save $26.75

The Pixel watches can show you your cardio load on-screen, but for the others, you’ll need to view it in the phone app.

Other apps and platforms have their own versions of cardio load. For example, some Garmin devices measure a Training Load (along with acute/chronic load, and load focus), but it’s calculated and displayed a bit differently from Fitbit’s. This article is just discussing the Fitbit/Pixel version.

The difference between cardio load and active zone minutes

Both metrics describe how much exercise you’re getting, and give you extra credit for hard exercise compared to moderate exercise. But they have different purposes, and are calculated a bit differently. 

The purpose of active zone minutes is to figure out whether you’re meeting some basic exercise targets for health. Active zone minutes match the U.S. Physical Activity Guidelines, which recommend that we all get 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week, or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise. In other words, it’s a count of minutes, with vigorous exercise (like running) counting double. This is why your 30-minute workout might count for 45 zone minutes, if 15 of those minutes were moderate and 15 were vigorous (15 x 2 = 30). 

(There’s a caveat on that: Fitbit uses your heart rate to estimate whether a given minute of exercise was vigorous or moderate for you. The original guidelines used METs, not heart rate, so it’s not a perfect match. But it’s close enough to be useful.)

Cardio load, meanwhile, is a metric more often used by athletes to make sure their exercise effort is within the optimal range to improve or maintain their fitness. Fitbit uses a modified version of the TRIMP algorithm, which basically multiplies your heart rate times the number of minutes you were at that heart rate. Higher heart rates are weighted a little more than lower ones, as Google explains in this document. If your heart rate is below a certain level, it doesn’t get counted, which is why my hair-brushing sessions didn’t count for any cardio load.

With cardio load, you aren’t just looking to beat a minimum to give yourself a passing grade—you’re trying to stay within a specific window, which is defined by the amount of exercise you’re used to doing. If you do a little more exercise every week, you can stay within your target range while pushing up the boundaries of that target range. That’s how you get fitter.

On the other hand, if you’re doing a lot more or a lot less exercise this week than your body is used to, you could end up losing some fitness (if you’re doing less) or making yourself more fatigued than usual (if you’re doing more). Depending on where you are in your training, these outcomes aren’t necessarily a bad thing. But with a cardio target to compare your load to, at least you know where you stand.

Fitbit Is Finally Fixing Its Cardio Load Problem

Cardio load gets a major fix in the new Fitbit app, which Android users can test out starting this week in a “public preview.” (This is the same preview that gives you access to the AI fitness coach, which I tested yesterday, with baffling results.) Cardio load will now be tracked weekly, making it much easier for the app to make sensible recommendations.

What is (and was) cardio load? 

The cardio load feature is Fitbit’s attempt to guide you in how much to exercise. Obviously a beginner shouldn’t jump into hour-long hard workouts right out of the gate, nor should a person training for a marathon slack off for no reason. Cardio load is an attempt to put a number on the amount of exercise that would be neither too much nor too little for you. 

Plenty of athletes and trainers use some kind of model for exercise volume, whether it’s runners counting miles in a spreadsheet, or a coach going by their gut and saying “let’s take it easy today.” 

Fitbit uses a hilariously-named TRIMP approach (“TRaining IMPulse”), where every minute with an elevated heart rate counts toward your cardio load, with higher heart rates counting as more effort. I have more on this calculation here. 

Why cardio load was confusing

The idea sounded good: Fitbit would calculate how much cardio load you should aim for each day, based on how much exercise you’d been doing. You could tell the app whether you wanted to increase your fitness, or just maintain the fitness you have, and it would adjust its numbers accordingly. 

But for a lot of people, the numbers never made sense. The numbers would fluctuate from day to day, often mismatched with what a person’s history and health actually called for. Many users found that the recommended cardio load went up and up, and rest days brought warnings of undertraining.

A sampling of Reddit threads from r/fitbit include titles like “Cardio load baffles me,” “Cardio load, I hate you,” “Cardio load unrealistic,” “Cardio load is not just wrong, it’s dangerous,” and “Fitbit, either fix cardio load or scrap it.” 

Why the new feature may be better

Screenshots of cardio load in the new app

Credit: Beth Skwarecki/Fitbit

Google explained that it’s implementing a fairly simple fix—calculating cardio load recommendations by the week instead of by the day. The cardio load calculations themselves won’t change at all.

After all, it’s normal to have hard days alternating with easy days or rest days, and any load management guidance should be able to handle that. Google also points out that your background activity level (like how much you walk when you go grocery shopping) also adds to your cardio load, and that also makes day-to-day recommendations hard to follow. 

The new version of the Fitbit app now shows a big donut on the top of the screen with your progress toward your weekly goal. With a couple of quick runs, I’m now 41% of the way toward my weekly target. There’s even a graph showing where my target is versus what it considers “overreaching.” This makes a lot more sense.

YouTube Will Use AI to Upscale Low-Res Videos

YouTube’s going through a lot of changes right now, and according to the company, that’s to help it better stand out on TVs. Today, YouTube announced that it’s going to allow creators to upload bigger thumbnails, plus make browsing and shopping while watching on a TV a bit more convenient. But there’s also a big change coming to content itself, and it’s not just limited to TVs.

Soon, YouTube is going to start using AI to automatically upscale any videos with resolutions lower than 1080p. While you can technically still upload videos that are 720p nowadays, with smartphone cameras getting better and better, that essentially reads to me as “old videos.” It’s a bit concerning to me, as someone who’s been watching a lot of TV shows from the ’90s and early 2000s on YouTube as of late.

Super Resolution in YouTube

Credit: YouTube

Done right, AI upscaling is a simple way to de-noise a video, and is more resistant to hallucination than generations made from whole cloth. But it’s not without its own hiccups, and some creators have actually accused YouTube of using AI upscaling already, without telling them, and with some undesirable results. The accusations have been limited to YouTube Shorts for now, but notably, even Will Smith seems to have possibly run afoul of the system’s hidden AI, as the celebrity was himself accused of generating a crowd with AI in a YouTube Short of a recent concert. However, internet sleuths have determined the footage is likely legit, but was automatically made to look like “AI slop” by YouTube. Note, for instance, how different the footage looks on Instagram.

Luckily, YouTube says that this version of AI upscaling will be fully in the hands of creators and users. According to the feature’s announcement “Creators will retain complete control over their library, as both original files and original video resolution will be kept intact, with a clear option to opt-out of these enhancements.” Viewers, meanwhile, will be able to see when AI upscaling has been used thanks to a “super resolution” label in the resolution selection settings, and opt for the original resolution instead.

Additionally, YouTube told The Verge that videos that were shot below 1080p, but manually remastered and uploaded in 1080p or above, won’t be affected by the upscaling tech. What matters is the resolution the video was uploaded in.

All of that’s a relief for folks like me, who don’t want bizarre seven-fingered extras in our sitcoms, although it’s unclear whether this control will also extend to YouTube Shorts, or if YouTube might continue experimenting with mandatory AI upscaling there behind-the-scenes (which, to be fair, has not yet been confirmed).

Regardless, it makes sense why YouTube is making this change, as it tries to capture more eyes across more devices. Low resolution videos might look fine on a six-inch smartphone display, but blown up to 50+ inches on a TV, not so much.

YouTube hasn’t said exactly when the feature will go live, but if you notice what looks like weird AI artifacting the next time you’re watching a YouTube video, try checking the resolution settings by mousing over the video and tapping or clicking the cog icon.

Here’s When You Can Expect Apple’s First OLED MacBook

OLED is a fantastic display technology. Unlike an LCD, which uses a single backlight for all the pixels of the display, all of the pixels on an OLED display can be individually lit up or turned off entirely. That means dark areas of the screen are inky black, while brighter areas can be selectively illuminated. It just looks fantastic, and if I have the option, I always try to choose it.

OLED isn’t new tech at this point, and yet, Apple has been slow to adopt it into its products, especially when compared to some of its competitors. The company’s first device to feature OLED was the Apple Watch in 2015, then the iPhone X in 2017, whereas every Samsung Galaxy has featured an AMOLED display since the company introduced the line in 2010. The iPhone remained the only product line with OLED for quite some time, until it included them with the M4 iPad Pros.

Aside from these products, Apple tends to choose alternative display types for its devices. For certain products, like the iMac, MacBook Air, and most iPads, it still uses LCD. For more “premium” devices, like the MacBook Pro, it uses mini-LED, which offers a large number of backlight “zones.” This gives these products more contrast than the single backlight of LCD, but not quite as much as OLED. I prefer watching shows and movies on my iPad with mini-LED than my LCD iMac, for example, but I’d always prefer my OLED TV.

Apple’s OLED roadmap

As it turns out, Apple might give me some new OLED options in the future. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is working on bringing OLED to more of its devices. Gurman says that the company is currently testing the tech for the MacBook Air, iPad mini, and iPad Air, all of which now ship with LCD. In addition, the company is reportedly working on an OLED MacBook Pro, which might also ship with a touchscreen.

Before you get too excited for an OLED MacBook, Apple is likely starting the OLED rollout with the iPad—specifically, the iPad mini. Gurman’s sources say the OLED mini will drop sometime next year, which would mark the first refresh for the device since 2024. While I’d love an OLED Mac, this might be the perfect excuse for me to pick up an iPad mini, which I’ve long thought of as the most fun of Apple’s devices.

Gurman isn’t sure when Apple will add OLED to the iPad Air, but it won’t be with the next refresh. The next-gen iPad Air will likely launch this spring, and will ship with LCD. That’s true for the M5 MacBook Air, as well. While Apple is testing OLED for the Air, the next model will be out this spring sporting the same display tech as the M4. An OLED MacBook Air might not hit stores until 2028.

If you’ll buy any Mac that Apple sells with OLED, you’re going to be buying a Pro. That OLED MacBook Pro might even come with a touchscreen, which would be a first for Apple’s Mac line. That machine could be out as early as 2026, but Apple could also push them to 2027.

Adding OLED to products won’t come cheap, though. Gurman suggests that Apple could raise the price of the iPad mini $100, which would drive the starting cost from $499 to $599. When those OLED MacBook Pros come out, they’ll also likely be even more expensive than the current Pros, by at least a few hundred dollars. These machines start at $1,999 (14-inch) and $2,499 (16-inch) today, so their OLED, touchscreen counterparts could fetch a high price tag.

You probably shouldn’t wait for these devices if you need to upgrade

If you’re holding out on buying any new Apple tech until the company refreshes those devices with OLED, you’re going to be waiting a while—at least, for anything other than the iPad mini. I’d recommend waiting for that particular device, but for the others, it might be a while indeed. If you really need an upgrade, Apple’s current iPad Pros ship with OLED, and the mini-LED tech in its MacBook Pros is also excellent. But even the LCDs on its devices look quite good. If you can stomach seeing the backlight when dark elements are on-screen, an iPad Air or MacBook Air will suit you well.

The Best iPad for Most People Is on Sale for Its Lowest Price Ever

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.

The 10th-generation iPad may have been replaced by a newer model in 2025, but it remains an excellent entry-level Apple tablet, and among the best options in its price range. And right now, you can pick one up for a record-low price at Walmart. It’s currently $242, marked down more than $100 from its $349.99 list price, and $68 cheaper than Amazon. According to price comparison tools, this is the cheapest price this iPad has reached since its release in 2022. (iPads hold their value really well even after newer models are released, which explains the seemingly high price for three-year-old tech.)

Apple iPad (10th Generation)
A14 Bionic chip, 10.9-inch Liquid Retina Display, 64GB, Wi-Fi 6, 12MP front/12MP Back Camera…

Apple iPad 10.9" 64GB WiFi Tablet (10th Gen, Silver)


$242.00
at Walmart
$349.00
Save $107.00

Back in the winter of 2022, the 10th-gen iPad was named “the best tablet for most people,” in PCMag’s “excellent” review. At that point, however, it was also considered expensive, edged out of the “affordable” category due to its higher base price when compared to previous models. The current $100 discount makes it a more attractive option.

One of the best upgrades this iPad offers is its buttonless design, which brings it in line with its higher-end Apple tablet siblings. It measures 9.79 by 7.07 by 0.28 inches; and includes the A14 Bionic chip, a 10.9-inch liquid retina display, 64GB of storage, a 12MP front and back camera, Touch ID, and a battery that Apple promises will last all day.

Recommended iPad accessories:

If you are considering this iPad, useful accessories include the Apple Magic Keyboard Folio, which will make your iPad work like a laptop, and the Apple Pencil USB-C, which will allow you to make the most of your iPad’s touchscreen abilities.

Our Best Editor-Vetted Early Black Friday Deals Right Now


Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Plus


—
$29.99

(List Price $49.99)

Ring Video Doorbell Pro 2 with Ring Chime Pro


—
$149.99

(List Price $259.99)

Deals are selected by our commerce team

This 2TB Western Digital Elements Portable Hard Drive Is on Sale for Just $65 Right Now

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.

A dependable external drive is one of those things you don’t realize you need until your laptop storage is nearly full or your photos are scattered across cloud accounts. Western Digital’s Elements Portable USB 3.0 Hard Drive is built for exactly that situation, and it’s currently on sale for $64.99 on StackSocial for 2TB of storage. That’s enough space to offload years of pictures and videos or stash work files without juggling thumb drives. At just under half a pound, it’s light enough to carry around in a bag, and since it uses USB 3.0, transferring large batches of files feels quick and painless compared to older drives.

It’s plug-and-play for Windows 10 and newer, so you don’t need extra software to get going. You can literally connect it and start dragging files over in seconds. The design is also more thoughtful than you might expect for a budget drive: the casing is made from over 50% recycled plastic, and the packaging is recyclable as well—a small but welcome improvement. It also has fast file transfers, straightforward backup, and a three-year limited warranty in case anything goes wrong.

That said, there are limitations worth noting. This particular model is formatted for Windows out of the box, so if you plan to use it with a Mac or Linux system, you’ll need to reformat it first. Like all portable hard drives, it also isn’t built to survive drops or rough handling—WD even cautions that a small fall can cause data loss. And unlike pricier SSDs, this is still a spinning-disk drive, so while it’s reliable for everyday backups, it won’t be as fast or durable as solid-state options. Still, if your main goal is affordable, dependable storage that you can toss in a backpack and trust with years’ worth of files, this 2TB WD Elements drive is hard to argue with at this price.

Our Best Editor-Vetted Tech Deals Right Now


Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Plus


—
$29.99

(List Price $49.99)

Ring Video Doorbell Pro 2 with Ring Chime Pro


—
$149.99

(List Price $259.99)

Deals are selected by our commerce team

Elon Musk’s ‘Grokipedia’ Is Certainly No Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a treasured online resource that, despite massive changes across the web, has managed to remained truly great to this day. I, alongside millions of other users, visit the site daily to learn something new or double-check existing knowledge. In an age of non-stop AI slop, Wikipedia is something of an antidote.

If you look at Wikipedia and think “this is alright, but an AI version would be a lot better,” you might just be Elon Musk. Musk’s AI company, xAI, just launched Grokipedia—yes, that really is its name—an online encyclopedia that closely resembles Wikipedia in name and surface-level appearance. But under the hood, the two could hardly be any more different. Though it’s early days for the new “encyclopedia,” I’d say it’s not worth using, at least not for anything real.

The Grokipedia experience

When you load up the Grokipedia website, it looks fairly standard. You see the Grokipedia name, alongside the version number (v0.1, at the time of writing), alongside a search bar and an “Articles Available” counter (885,279). Searching for an article too is basic: You type in a query, and a list of available articles appears for you to select from. Once you pull up an article, it looks like Wikipedia, only extremely basic: There are no images, only text, though you can use the sidebar to jump between sections of the article. You’ll also find sources, noted by numbers, which correspond to the References portion at the bottom of each article.

The key difference between Grokipedia and a simple version of Wikipedia, however, is that these articles are not written and edited by real people. Instead, each article is generated and “fact-checked” by Grok, xAI’s large language model (LLM). LLMs are able to generate large amounts of text in short periods of time, and include sources for where they pull their information, which might make the pitch for Grokipedia sound great to some. However, LLMs also have a tendency to hallucinate, or, in other words, make things up. Sometimes, the sources the AI is pulling from are unreliable or facetious; other times, the AI takes it upon itself to “lie,” and generate text that simply isn’t true. In both cases, the information cannot be trusted, especially not at face value, which is why it’s troubling to see much of the experience is entirely powered by Grok, without human intervention.

Grokipedia vs. Wikipedia

Musk is pitching Grokipedia as a “massive improvement” over Wikipedia, which he has criticized for pushing propaganda, particularly towards left-leaning ideas and politics. It’s ironic, then, that some of these Grokipedia entries are themselves pulling from Wikipedia. As The Verge’s Jay Peters highlights, articles like MacBook Air note the following at the bottom: “The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.” What’s more, Peters found that some Grokipedia articles, such as PlayStation 5 and the Lincoln Mark VIII, are almost one-to-one copies of the corresponding articles on Wikipedia.

If you’ve followed Musk’s politics and political activities in recent years, it won’t surprise you to learn he falls on the right-wing side of the political spectrum. That might give pause to anyone who considers using Grokipedia as an unbiased source of information, especially as Musk has continuously retooled Grok to generate responses more favorable to right-wing opinions. Critics like Musk claim Wikipedia is biased towards the left, but Grokipedia is entirely produced by an AI model with an abject bias.

You’ll see that you have very different experiences when reading certain topics across Wikipedia and Grokipedia. Wikipedia’s Tylenol article, for example, reads the following:

In 2025, Donald Trump made several statements about a controversial and unproven connection between autism and Tylenol. These statements, about the connection between Tylenol during pregnancy and autism, are based on unreliable sources without scientific evidence.

Compare that to Grokipedia, which devotes three paragraphs to the subject, the first of which begins:

Multiple observational studies and meta-analyses have identified associations between prenatal exposure to acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol) and increased risks of neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) in offspring, including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

That said, the second paragraph highlights some of the issues with those studies, while the third highlights that certain agencies suggest the “benefits outweigh unproven risks.”

Similarly, as spotted by WIRED, Grokipedia’s article, Transgender, highlights the belief that social media may have acted as a “contagion” to the rise in transgender identification. Not only is that a common right-wing assertion, that particular word could have been plucked from a post from a right-wing X account. Wikipedia’s article, as you might expect, does not entertain the claim at all.

Grokipedia is also favorable to unproven, controversial, or flat-out absurd claims. As Rolling Stone highlights, it refers to “Pizzagate,” a conspiracy theory that lead to a real-life shooting, as “allegations,” a “hypothesis,” and a “narrative.” Grokipedia gives credence to “Great Replacement,” a racist theory floated by white supremacists.

Should you use Grokipedia?

Here’s the short answer: no. The issue I have with Grokipedia is two-fold: First, no encyclopedia is going to be reliable when it is almost entirely created by AI models. Sure, some of the information may be accurate, and it’s great you can see the sources the bot is using, but when the risk of hallucination is baked into the technology with no way around it, choosing to avoid human intervention en masse all but ensures inaccuracies will plague much of Grokipedia’s knowledge base.

As if that wasn’t enough, this Grokipedia is built on an LLM that Musk is openly tinkering with to generate results that more closely align with his worldview, and the worldview of one particular political ideology. Hallucination and bias—just the ingredients you need for an encyclopedia.

The thing about Wikipedia is it’s written and edited by humans. Those humans can hold other human writers accountable, adding new information when it becomes available and correcting mistakes when they encounter them. Perhaps it’s frustrating to read that your favorite health and human services secretary “promoted vaccine misinformation and public-health conspiracy theories,” but that’s the objective, scientific reality. Removing these objective descriptions, and reframing the discussion in a way that fits a warped worldview doesn’t make Grokipedia better than Wikipedia—it makes it useless.