Apple and Lenovo had the lowest laptop repairability scores in an analysis of recently released devices from consumer advocacy group US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) Education Fund. While Apple's low marks are partially due the difficulty involved in disassembling MacBooks, Lenovo appears to be withholding information from shoppers deemed critical to right-to-repair legislation and accessibility.

The report, US PIRG's fourth annual “Failing the Fix” [ PDF ], calculated repairability scores for PCs and smartphones from popular brands in the US. The report examines "the top 10 most recent devices from each brand that were available for sale directly from manufacturers in January 2025." If a brand's website didn't allow people to sort by newest release, US PIRG picked devices by sorting "by 'Bestselling' or something similar," per the report's methodology section.

US PIRG's analysis included finding each device's French Repairability Index scores on PC makers' French websites and on third-party retailer sites. US PIRG calculated PC makers' grades by averaging "the total French score and the isolated disassembly score from each device." It weighed disassembly scores more heavily because it believes "this better reflects what consumers think a repairability score indicates." Next, the group subtracted half a point each for membership in TechNet or the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), industry groups that oppose right-to-repair legislation, and added a quarter point "for each piece of Right to Repair legislation supported by the testimony of the manufacturer in the last year."

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In a remarkable statement Thursday, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the International Space Station should be deorbited "as soon as possible."

This comment from Musk will surely set off a landmine in the global space community, with broad implications. And it appears to be no idle comment from Musk who, at times, indulges in deliberately provocative posts on the social media network X that he owns.

However, that does not seem to be the case here.

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Popular Amazon-owned game streaming platform Twitch announced Wednesday that it will be imposing a 100-hour limit on the archived video highlights users can preserve permanently on the site. And while Twitch says that only 0.5 percent of users will be affected by these new limits, gamers are warning that the move threatens to eradicate large swaths of recent gaming history from the Internet.

Highlights, in Twitch's own words, are a way for Twitch streamers to "show off your best moments to new viewers who land on your channel page." Unlike VOD recordings of full Twitch broadcasts—which are deleted automatically after seven days (or 60 days for Twitch partners)—these highlights provide a more permanent way to maintain an archive of important moments for many Twitch streamers.

That seeming permanence is set to end on April 29, though, when Twitch says it will start to delete content from channels with more than 100 hours of highlights, starting with the least-viewed highlights.

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After 14 years of trying and failing to gain a smartphone foothold, Amazon has announced it will discontinue its app store. Anyone who has content in Amazon's store will be able to access it for now, but all bets are off beginning on August 20, 2025. As part of the pull-back, the company is also discontinuing the Amazon Coins digital currency.

The Amazon Appstore made waves when it launched in 2011 , offering an alternative to what at the time was known as the Android Market. Amazon even scored some early exclusives and gave away a plethora of premium content and Coins to anyone willing to do the legwork of installing the storefront on their Android phone.

That level of attention didn't last, though, and the Appstore today has hardly evolved from its humble beginnings, lacking most of the content and features people have come to expect from a mobile app store. If you want to check out the store on your phone before it goes away, you'll have to sideload the client by downloading an APK from Amazon. This process isn't hard, but it proved to be a significant barrier to entry for getting people into the Amazon ecosystem.

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A little over a month after SpaceX's large Starship launch ended in an explosion over several Caribbean islands, the company is preparing its next rocket for a test flight.

According to a notice posted by the Federal Aviation Administration, the eighth test flight of the Starship vehicle could take place as early as February 26 from the Starbase launch site in South Texas. The launch window extends from 5:30 pm local time (23:30 UTC) to 7:09 pm (01:09 UTC).

Company sources confirmed that this launch date is plausible, but it's also possible that the launch could slip a day or two to Thursday or Friday of next week.

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We are effectively living in a post-horsepower world. As the roster of production cars offering quadruple-digit output figures continues to expand and a growing number of garden-variety vehicles now offer straight-line acceleration that would have been exclusively supercar territory a decade ago, serious thrust is quickly becoming an expectation rather than a rarefied experience.

This trend might seem like an existential dilemma for an automaker with a legacy built on face-melting performance, but Lamborghini has never really been the type to obsess over the numbers. Sure, the Aventador SVJ set a production car lap record at the Nürburgring Nordschleife in 2018, but the company has always championed emotional impact above all else.

At the press launch for the Aventador SVJ, Maurizio Reggiani—Lamborghini's chief technical officer at the time—made a point of telling the assembled journalists that despite increasing headwinds from emissions regulations, Lamborghini would continue to produce a supercar with a naturally aspirated V12 for as long as it possibly could. "I will fight it to the end!" he declared to boisterous applause.

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New Yorkers' ongoing attempts to rein in car traffic on the island of Manhattan took a serious blow yesterday. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy terminated the city's congestion charge, which made drivers pay for going below 60th Street.

Duffy claimed that it's unfair that drivers should have to pay to use roads since there are already tolls on bridges into Manhattan and claimed there are no alternatives, ignoring the buses and subway trains operated by the Metropolitan Transit Authority.

Further, the city is being unfair against people who live far away, Duffy said. "The toll program leaves drivers without any free highway alternative and instead takes more money from working people to pay for a transit system and not highways. It’s backwards and unfair," he said in a statement.

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Windows 11 made our recent roundup of our least favorite "enshittified" products , which will come as no surprise to those of you who have followed our coverage of it over the years. What began as a more visually cohesive coat of paint for Windows 10 has given way to a user experience that has gradually coasted downhill even as it has picked up new features—a "clean install" of the operating system is pretty annoying, at a baseline, even before you consider extra software irritations from your PC, motherboard maker, or Microsoft's all-encompassing push into generative AI.

We'll never stop asking Microsoft to put out a consumer version of Windows that acts more like the Enterprise versions it gives to businesses, with no extra unasked-for apps and less pushiness about Microsoft's other products and services. But given that most of us are saddled with the current consumer-facing versions of Windows—Home and Pro, which treat their users basically the same way despite the difference in cost and branding—we're updating our guide to cleaning up a "clean install" to account for Windows 11 24H2 and any other changes Microsoft has made in the last year.

As before, this is not a guide about creating an extremely stripped-down, telemetry-free version of Windows; we stick to the things that Microsoft officially supports turning off and removing. There are plenty of experimental hacks that take it a few steps farther—NTDev's Tiny11 project is one—but removing built-in Windows components can cause unexpected compatibility and security problems, and Tiny11 has historically had issues with basic table-stakes stuff like "installing security updates."

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An asteroid discovered late last year is continuing to stir public interest as its odds of striking planet Earth less than eight years from now continue to increase.

Two weeks ago, when Ars first wrote about the asteroid, designated 2024 YR4, NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies estimated a 1.9 percent chance of an impact with Earth in 2032. NASA's most recent estimate has the likelihood of a strike increasing to 3.2 percent . Now that's not particularly high, but it's also not zero.

Naturally the prospect of a large ball of rock tens of meters across striking the planet is a little worrisome. This is large enough to cause localized devastation near its impact site, likely on the order of the Tunguska event of 1908, which leveled some 500 square miles (1,287 square kilometers) of forest in remote Siberia.

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