Inside an Amazon data center. (AWS Photo / Noah Berger)
Washington lawmakers are considering ending a sales tax break for data center owners when they replace equipment, a move that would take effect July 1, 2026, and apply statewide. While Senate Bill 6231 would retain the sales tax break granted to new data centers, it specifically targets the “refurbishment” cycle of existing facilities.
As the state scrambles to fill a roughly $2 billion budget deficit, the state’s Department of Revenue estimates this change could generate $63.1 million in the current biennium and $143.9 million for the 2027-29 period.
“We have to make a lot of hard choices this year as we try to balance the budget,” said Sen. Noel Frame, D-Seattle, sponsor of the legislation.
SB 6231 was recently approved by the House, with four Democrats joining all of the Republicans in opposing the measure.
During its first Senate committee hearing on Wednesday, a coalition of data center interests, unions, and rural business representatives warned of potential economic fallout. They argued that if data centers avoid or leave the state, local tax coffers and job markets would suffer.
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In 2023, data centers directly provided nearly 9,000 jobs, plus 39,000 indirect jobs in Washington, according to a PwC report commissioned by the Data Center Coalition. The sector generated $1.8 billion in state and local tax revenue.
Maintaining those economic contributions, however, depends on a constant cycle of infrastructure investment, industry advocates said. Dan Diorio, vice president of state policy for the Data Center Coalition, testified that the equipment inside these centers is typically replaced every three to five years.
“By taking away the refurbishment exemption, the bill will impair the ability of data center companies and their tenants to upgrade servers and energy infrastructure with the most modern and efficient technology,” Diorio said.
This legislative push comes amid a national surge in data center regulation. Driven by the artificial intelligence boom, elected officials and their communities are increasingly raising concerns over higher electrical bills and strained water supplies due to the facilities’ massive power and cooling needs.
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Earlier this week, Microsoft and other industry proponents successfully defeated a high-profile data center bill in Washington that aimed to protect ratepayers from utility hikes and increase environmental transparency.
Governor Bob Ferguson included the elimination of the data center refurbishment tax break in his supplemental budget proposal and SB 6231 was requested by the state’s Office of Financial Management.
With the legislative session nearing its conclusion, the bill faces a March 12 deadline for approval.
As a condition of the deal, the two companies have promised to be more racist and sexist. More specifically, they’ve promised the FCC they’ll eliminate already fairly pathetic corporate programs acknowledging that systemic racism and sexism exist. The FCC posted this handy infographic on social media that breaks down all of their lies about the deal in an easily digestible way:
Literally none of those claims are true. These deals never result in any of these benefits. There’s more than forty years of concrete evidence proving it. Consolidation across U.S. telecom has consistently resulted in spotty service, high prices, and routinely abysmal customer service.
Cox and Charter don’t directly compete, but their large scale, size, and political influence ensures they’ll have more power than ever to lobby against robust competition more generally.
The debt from the kinds of deals is also always predominately paid off by labor and consumers in the form of mass layoffs and higher prices. These deals never meaningfully serve the public interest, but our captured regulators, consolidated telecoms, and shitty press work together to help pretend otherwise.
The FCC explains the “DEI” provisions this way in their news release:
“Charter has committed to new safeguards to protect against DEI discrimination and has reaffirmed the merged entity’s commitment to equal opportunity and nondiscrimination. Specifically, Charter commits to recruiting, hiring, and promoting individuals based on the factors that matter most: skills, qualifications, and experience.”
You’re not told what these “safeguards” actually are. Just that Cox and Charter won’t try to give minorities or women a leg up in country full of systemic hatred and intolerance because that might be unfair to a dude.
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The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to insist that simply acknowledging that systemic racism and sexism exists — or doing literally anything about it — is somehow discriminatory to white men. This is diseased white supremacist thinking; the sheer delusional hubris to think this way, let alone integrate this ignorance into already problematic pro-monopoly policy, is the mind garbage of simpletons.
If you pop around and read the news coverage of this deal (see: this piece from Reuters or this piece at CNN), you’ll notice the consolidated corporate press helps sell the lie that more consolidation somehow serves the public interest. These kinds of stories will parrot the companies’ claims, ignore their history of monopolistic predation, and even downplay the mandated racism as a droll policy bullet point.
CNN author Jordan Valinsky even went so far as to write this sentence with a straight face:
“The transaction is contingent on regulatory approval and could be a litmus test for President Donald Trump’s views on major companies combining.”
Trump’s FCC has rubber stamped every single shitty telecom merger that has crossed its desk. We know Trump loves harmful consolidation, provided he can personally get something from it. A cornerstone of GOP policy has been to coddle monopoly power for literally fifty fucking years! Across every industry in America. None of this is really up for debate. Any “litmus” test was failed long ago.
If this country is going to have any sort of real future, it has to seriously come to grips with the fact that it’s broadly too corrupt to function in the public interest (across government, media, policy, and culturally). If future federal and state governments don’t make antitrust and corruption reform a central pillar of all policy in every sector, we’re quite literally cooked.
Vibe coding is all the rage at the moment if you follow certain parts of the Internet. It’s very easy to dunk upon it, whether it’s to mock the sea of people who’ve drunk the Kool-Aid and want the magic machine to make them a million dollar app with no work, or the vibe coded web apps with security holes you could drive a bus through.
Physically it’s a NixOS live USB image with the Sway tiling Wayland compositor, and as he puts it: “Claude Code ready to go”. It has a shared partition for swapping files with Windows or macOS machines, and it’s persistent. The AI side of it has permissive settings, which means the mechanical overlord can reach parts of the OS you wouldn’t normally let it anywhere near; the point of having it in a live environment in the first place.
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We can see the attraction of using an environment such as this one for experimenting without commitment, but we’d be interested to hear your views in the comments. It’s about a year since we asked you all about vibe coding, has the art moved forward in that time?
Amazon Connect Health uses natural language to schedule appointments, accessing the health record system in real time. (Amazon Image)
Amazon Web Services is expanding into AI for healthcare, launching a new agentic system that can handle patient calls, document clinical visits and automatically generate billing codes.
It will compete in part with rival Microsoft, which acquired Nuance for $19.7 billion in 2022 and has embedded its DAX Copilot ambient documentation tool into major electronic health record systems. AI scribe startups have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to automate clinical documentation.
Amazon is pitching Amazon Connect Health as a broader solution that spans the full healthcare workflow, from the initial phone call through the post-visit billing code.
The idea is to “not provide just point solutions, point tools, or a collection of capabilities, but think end-to-end about what is the customer problem, and how can we solve it,” said Rajiv Chopra, AWS vice president of Health AI and Life Sciences, in an interview this week.
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Early users of the technology include UC San Diego Health, which handles 3.2 million patient interactions annually; One Medical, the Amazon-owned primary care practice that has used the ambient documentation capabilities across a million visits; and Netsmart, which provides EHR software to more than 1,300 community-based healthcare organizations.
Amazon’s move could double as a litmus test for AI adoption in healthcare, where institutions have traditionally been slow to adopt new technology.
A randomized trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine AI in December found that ambient AI documentation (the AI startup Abridge) reduced clinician burnout and cut documentation time by 30 minutes per day per provider. However, hospitals continue to cite concerns about data privacy, the difficulty of integrating AI tools into existing workflows, and unclear return on investment.
Amazon’s new product has five core capabilities: automated patient verification, intelligent appointment scheduling, pre-visit summaries for clinicians, ambient documentation that transcribes and drafts clinical notes during the visit, and automated medical coding for billing.
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It integrates natively with Epic, the largest U.S. electronic health records system, and connects to other EHRs through data integration partners. It also connects to AWS HealthLake, Amazon’s cloud-based health data repository, which is getting new agentic capabilities to convert records into standard formats.
Amazon Connect Health comes from AWS’s Applied AI Solutions group, led by Senior Vice President Colleen Aubrey, which is focused on building finished applications for specific industries rather than selling raw cloud infrastructure and tools to developers.
Aubrey, who previously built Amazon’s advertising business, said at AWS re:Invent in December that her team is putting “agentic AI at the heart of everything we do,” describing the technology as “AI teammates” that can work autonomously on behalf of businesses.
Healthcare is the first vertical to get a purpose-built Connect product, but Aubrey signaled that more are in the works. Separately, the group oversees Amazon’s Just Walk Out retail technology and is developing agentic AI tools for supply chain planning and life sciences.
It’s not necessarily the guys you might expect, Apollo Knapp told me.
These are 6-foot-tall high-school athletes, guys who are social and popular. “They’re the type of people that are friends with everybody, who get dapped up in the hallway every two feet,” said Knapp, an 18-year-old high school senior in Ohio and a board member at sexual violence prevention nonprofit SafeBAE.
But at his school, these are the guys using AI to help them talk to girls. They’ll paste their texts into ChatGPT for feedback before sending, he said. Or, they’ll send their own photos to ChatGPT and ask, “am I cute?” Or, they’ll simply ask for moral support when they’re “too scared, maybe, to confront women.”
Girls and non-binary teens don’t need to lean on ChatGPT as much, Knapp said; they’re more likely to have a circle of friends ready and willing to workshop their texts. But guys are more isolated, socialized to believe it’s weak to talk about their feelings.
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Worse, they’ve grown up on a steady diet of media telling them that “if you say the wrong thing” to a girl, “she’s going to accuse you of something,” Knapp said. Even if those messages aren’t accurate, they get inside teen boys’ heads, making them feel like they have to screen everything through ChatGPT to make sure it’s okay.
The drift of boys and young men away from everyone else in American society has been an enduring theme of the last few years. The fear is that guys, especially straight guys, are getting sucked into manosphere podcasts and becoming more and more alienated from the girls and women they, in theory, want to date. This is an oversimplified narrative, and there’s reason to hope that boys and men are more connected, and more interested in connection, than their most unpleasant listening material might suggest.
But in talking to teens and experts about AI and relationships, I did get the sense that boys need better outlets for their feelings than we’re giving them. And while ChatGPT might help some kids in some circumstances, teens of all genders need a more reliable support system — one that doesn’t require an electricity-guzzling data center to answer a question.
After all, Knapp said, “what’s going to happen if you don’t have power, and you have a girlfriend?”
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Teens are using AI for dating. The question is how.
It’s hard to know exactly how many young people are talking to ChatGPT about relationship problems, since research on youth and AI is in its infancy. In one recent Pew survey, 57 percent of teens said they had used AI “to search for information,” while 12 percent said they’d used the tools “to get emotional support or advice.” It’s possible to imagine dating inquiries falling in either category.
Anecdotally, experts and teens alike say young people are turning to ChatGPT with everything from low-stakes questions about texting to serious concerns about what might constitute sexual assault.
Val Odiembo, 19, mentors their fellow college students about healthy relationships. As a peer educator, they’re used to getting questions like, “what do I do when my girlfriend says this?” or “is this consent?”
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But recently, those questions have been tapering off. Odiembo, a nursing student and SafeBAE board member, thinks students are now asking ChatGPT, instead.
“I’ve had my students say to me, ‘I asked Chat what I should say to this boy,’” Odiembo told me. When that happens, “I die a little bit inside.”
Some young people are using chatbots “to test out being flirty or being romantic or being a little bit sexy and seeing how the chatbot responds to that,” Megan Moreno, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin Madison who studies technology and adolescent health, told me.
That kind of experimentation may be more common among boys, who generally engage in more risky behavior online than girls, Moreno said.
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Using technology to experiment with flirting and romance isn’t new. Millennial teens turned to chat rooms and AOL Instant Messenger for this purpose. This could be risky — my classmates spent a lot of time catfishing each other avant la lettre — or outright dangerous if teens ended up chatting with adults.
But, as Moreno points out, at least the people you were chatting with online were real humans who could tell you to go away if you said something too gross.
Chatbots, by contrast, “are programmed to be incredibly receptive and sycophantic,” Moreno said. “Even if you say something incredibly inappropriate, the chatbot is going to respond in a way that reinforces that.”
That’s even more problematic when the subject is sexual violence. Young people are increasingly turning to chatbots after sexual encounters to ask if they might have committed assault, Drew Davis, director of strategic initiatives at SafeBAE, told me. The responses he’s seen have sometimes been unhelpful, he said, emphasizing legal defenses or providing reassurances instead of discussing accountability.
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SafeBAE is developing an interactive tool that helps young people think about sexual situations that may have been confusing for them, such as those in which both parties were drinking, and connects them with resources to help them take responsibility and apologize if needed.
The goal is “giving them language, giving them tools to be able to do this, that’s not coming from AI,” Davis said. “It’s connecting them with other people.”
Why teens are going to AI in the first place
It’s possible to imagine AI pushing young people even farther apart from one another than they already are. The big question is whether kids are using AI to practice having human relationships or to replace those relationships, Moreno said. In one recent survey, one in five high-school students said they or someone they knew had been in a romantic relationship with an AI.
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It’s not hard to see why teenagers (or adults, for that matter) might be drawn to a voice that always has answers but never criticizes. When talking about thorny issues like sex and consent, “I think there’s a lot of shame,” Odiembo said. Teens “feel comfortable going to AI, because AI won’t judge them.”
But some teens also see value in the inevitable challenge and friction of human relationships.
“You need to be called out occasionally,” Knapp, the Ohio senior, said. “That’s how humans evolve.”
Some experts believe that with better guardrails — like a willingness to say, “hey, don’t talk to me like that!” — AI could still be a helpful partner for teens learning to talk to each other. For example, a chatbot could be trained to help kids with social skills. Part of me wonders how much less awkward my adolescence might have been if I’d been able to workshop my jokes with a bot before taking them to the crucible of middle-school homeroom.
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It’s also worth noting that AI models are constantly changing and, in some ways, improving. After I talked to the SafeBAE team, I tested ChatGPT and Google Gemini by pretending to be a teenage boy concerned he’d crossed a line with a girl. Both models did a decent job, at least on first response, posing follow-up questions about the situation and encouraging me to take responsibility.
But the young people I spoke with for this story don’t want better chatbots; they want to see humans get better, instead. They want teachers who are better-trained to discuss difficult issues like consent and assault. They want coaches and other adults who can model healthy masculinity for boys, rather than reinforcing stereotypes. And for all teens, they want supportive places to open up about feelings and relationships, some of the messiest and most important aspects of human life.
“I wish people were a little more comfortable having uncomfortable conversations,” Odiembo said.
Families continue to report disturbing conditions at the Texas immigration center where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was held, including a worm in a child’s food, water that causes rashes and stomachaches, and staff withholding medical care.
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Teens and tweens want to see more depictions of “fathers enjoying parenting” and “fathers showing love to kids” in movies and TV, according to a recent UCLA survey. In this, as in all things, the answer is Bluey.
The New York Times did a deep dive into AI slop videos aimed at kids. It is unclear as yet whether endless clips of adult mammals hatching out of eggs are harmful for children, but they are certainly bizarre.
My older kid is currently obsessed with the Ham Helsing series, graphic novels about a pig who hunts vampires.
After I wrote about kids’ recent obsession with the phrase “chicken banana,” one reader wrote in to let me know about a much earlier coinage. “Perhaps it’s my age (almost 80), but as teenagers, my age group regularly heard a jingle for Chiquita Bananas,” he wrote. “We naturally corrupted Chiquita banana into ‘chicken banana.’”
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“Sorry to crush the illusion of today’s uniqueness of Chicken Banana, but we ancient folks were using the term ‘chicken banana’ a l-o-n-g time ago,” he added.
As always, if you have a question or want to share a story about kids today or in the past, you can reach me at anna.north@vox.com.
Iranian state media said on Wednesday that it targeted Amazon’s data center in Bahrain due to the company’s support of the U.S. military. The drone strike that occurred on Sunday disrupted core cloud services and caused “prolonged” outages. Two data centers in the UAE were also damaged by drone strikes. CNBC reports: All of the facilities remain offline, according to the Amazon Web Services health dashboard. The attack in Bahrain was launched “to identify the role of these centers in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities,” Iran’s Fars News Agency said on Telegram.
In addition to structural damage, the data centers also experienced power disruptions and some water damage after firefighters worked to put out sparks and fire. Some popular AWS applications experienced “elevated error rates and degraded availability” due to the incident. AWS advised cloud customers to back up their data, consider migrating their workloads to other regions and direct traffic away from Bahrain and the UAE.
It may not feel like it, but 2026 marks a full half-decade since the sixth-generation Ford Bronco officially entered production for the 2021 model year. Ford’s new Bronco brought back a legendary nameplate and put one of the most hyped up and anticipated SUVs of the 21st century into customers’ hands. Going back to our first, hands-on experience with the reborn Bronco back in 2021, the retro-styled 4×4 has very much delivered on the hype.
Over the subsequent model years, Ford has continuously tweaked and updated the Bronco, adding new trims and new packages to keep it fresh. That said, an increasing number of fans and enthusiasts have begun to speculate whether a substantially changed, new, and improved version of the Bronco might be on the way soon.
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The speculation makes sense, as five model years is when one usually starts looking for big updates and redesigns. Despite talk of a redesigned or refreshed Bronco, a Ford engineer told The Drive in February 2026 that the SUV won’t be getting a major refresh or design anytime soon. Instead, the current Bronco will receive continued improvements, including one “obvious,” but yet to be disclosed, upgrade for 2027.
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Could a V8 or hybrid Bronco be coming soon?
Apart from incremental updates and unique appearance packages, the biggest change to the Bronco lineup as of 2026 came in 2022, when Ford added the wider and more powerful Bronco Raptor to the lineup. So what kind of other “obvious” changes and additions could Ford make to the current Bronco platform before moving on to a new generation?
In other markets like China, Ford has already introduced Bronco-branded EVs and hybrids, which share similar styling and naming but are not the same vehicle as the Bronco sold in America. Given Ford’s big push toward hybrid tech, a plug-in version of the American Bronco that uses both electric and gasoline power could be a very real possibility — and potentially take market share left from the now-discontinued Jeep Wrangler 4XE.
However, Ford could also go the other way, taking another page from Jeep and doing a proper, V8-powered Bronco to compete with the Wrangler 392. Initially, Ford’s position was that the Bronco didn’t need a V8, but aftermarket companies have already shown the possibilities of a 5.0 Coyote-powered Bronco with their own swap kits. Whether this could be pulled off from the factory remains to be seen, but Ford already did a similar move with the F-150 Raptor, responding to customer demand by releasing the V8-powered Raptor R. Either option makes a lot of sense for the Bronco, but right now it’s unclear if and when these options could arrive.
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Don’t fix what isn’t broken
It’s easy to see why Ford hasn’t introduced any major changes to the resurrected Bronco over its first five years. Yes, the initial hype and insane dealer markups of the launch period may have faded, but Bronco demand remains very strong, with 2025 being the best sales year yet for the model.
Another thing that the Bronco has going for it in terms of longevity is its decidedly simple, ’60s-flavored design. Five years later, the Bronco still looks unique compared to other SUVs on the road, and its purposely boxy, old-school character is simply less prone to feeling outdated compared to other designs.
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Naturally, Ford been leaning into this vintage appeal with special-edition models like the heavily retro 2024 Bronco Heritage Edition. Thus, even when Ford does get around to fully redesigning the current Bronco for a new generation, which might come toward the end of the 2020s, we don’t expect it to stray too far from the core design and character that made the revived Bronco such a hit.
A fairly new brand, Mount to Coast’s running shoe line up currently consist of the T1 ($180), which is a full-on trail shoe, and the H1, a lower-lugged versatile road to trail shoe that definitely fits the gravel shoe mold. The supercritical midsole—a material made by pumping gas into the foam as it’s being formed—is made from 100 percent renewable materials. Sometimes “sustainable” midsoles underperform against their petrochemical-based rivals, but this PEBA-like foam serves up a good energy and a lively, fun ride that strides seamlessly from road to light trails.
It’s not as cushioned as the Salomon Aero Glide 4 GRVL, but you get a regular cushioned daily trainer energy with grip that makes it easy to transition from road miles to off-road terrain. The 2 mm lugs grip well on wet roads, hardpack dry dirt, and gravel, but they won’t handle mud, steep, and slippery or very soft terrain as well as your deeper-lugged traditional trail running shoes.
The H1 is also brilliantly light, which is something that trail and gravel shoes sometimes struggle with and makes the road performance even better. Finally, the H1 has a unique dual-lacing setup that combines regular lacing and quick lacing to help you adjust lockdown separately in forefoot and mid foot. In theory, this is a good thing if your feet swell during ultras and you need more room as the run goes on, but I found it a bit fiddly and it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea.
The device under test is a Boss ME-50 multi-effects unit. It’s capable of serving up a wide range of effects, from delay to chorus to reverb, along with compression and distortion and a smattering of others. [Liam] hooked up the composite video output from an old Sony camcorder from the 2000s to a 3.5 mm audio jack, and plugged it straight into the auxiliary input of the ME-50 (notably, not the main guitar input of the device).
The multi-effects pedal isn’t meant to work with an analog video signal, but it can pass it through and do weird things to it regardless. Using the volume pedal on the ME-50 puts weird lines on the signal, while using a wah effect makes everything a little wobbly. [Liam] then steps through a whole range of others, like ring modulation, octave effects, and reverb, all of which do different weird things to the visuals. Particularly fun are some of the periodic effects which create predictable variation to the signal. True to its name, the distortion effect did a particularly good job of messing things up overall.
The division that was axed on Tuesday is responsible for designing robots and other conveyances, primarily in warehouses, writes Reuters. Read Entire Article Source link
You’d be forgiven for thinking that the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra looks a lot like the last four models. That’s because it does, right down to its general design and rear camera layout. But on Samsung’s latest flagship phone, some stealthy upgrades are hidden beneath its classic blocky silhouette that might go unnoticed by the casual observer. Those help make this year’s release feel like a better deal than its most recent predecessor. It remains rather expensive, starting at the same $1,300 as before, but considering the price of RAM these days, that almost feels like a blessing. So while it won’t hit you over the head with monumental changes year over year, it’s subtly one of the best Ultras we’ve gotten in the past half-decade.
Samsung / Engadget
While the S26 Ultra might not wow you with a ton of major improvements, it brings subtle upgrades across the board along with a new standout display for anyone who cares about privacy.
Pros
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Superb Privacy Display
Great performance
Strong battery life
Wider aperture for main and 5x telephoto lenses
Cons
Expensive
S-Pen is unchanged
No built-in magnetic ring for Qi2 accessories
Design: Back to aluminum
After dabbling with titanium frames on the last two Ultras, Samsung returned to aluminum for 2026. The company says this makes it easier to color-match the phone’s chassis to the Corning Gorilla Armor 2 panels on the front and back, though it’s incredibly difficult to see the impact on my black review unit. Elsewhere, the company shaved a few grams off its total weight and a few millimeters off its thickness (7.9mm and 214 grams), but even when directly comparing the new model to last year’s S25 Ultra (8.2mm and 218 grams), that difference is basically imperceptible. I almost think the S26 Ultra’s extra sleekness was just so that people would stop saying the Z Fold 7 is lighter than Samsung’s most premium traditional candybar-style handset.
As always, there’s a built-in storage slot for Samsung’s S-Pen, which is essentially a carbon copy of what we got last year without any functional changes. However, because the phone’s corners are more rounded than ever, one small peculiarity is that now there’s a right and wrong way to insert it. No matter what you do, the stylus will stay put, but if you don’t align the curve on the end of the S-Pen with the shape of the phone’s corner, it just doesn’t look right.
Display: Now with more privacy
The Galaxy S26 Ultra’s display has the same specs as the previous model, except now it comes with a built-in Privacy Display. (Sam Rutherford for Engadget)
The S26 Ultra’s 6.9-inch screen is easily its most undercover upgrade because it sports essentially the same specs as last year. You still get 2,600 nits of peak brightness with a variable 120Hz refresh rate and a max resolution of 3,120 x 1,440. The secret is that with the touch of a button, you can activate Samsung’s Privacy Display, which effectively stops others from spying on your screen when viewed from acute angles (both from the side and up and down).
When you turn the Privacy Display on and look at the phone less than head-on, everything sort of fades to black. Depending on the angle, you may still see an outline of UI elements and some bright spots depending on your content, but the wider you go, the fainter things get. The way it works is that the phone has two sets of subpixels, narrow and wide, the latter of which get turned off when the feature is active. And if you’re really concerned about people snooping on you, there’s an extra level called Maximum Privacy Protection that makes almost everything completely go gray, though there are trade-offs for this.
Even on maximum protection, you can still make out some faint details. But good luck to anyone trying to glean any usable info while the Galaxy S26 Ultra’s Privacy Display is on. (Sam Rutherford for Engadget)
When using the standard Privacy Display mode, there’s very little impact on image quality and brightness, so it’s not that big of a deal to leave it on all the time. If you look closely, you may notice what appears to be a small drop in resolution, though this requires some serious pixel peeping and good eyesight. But with maximum protection on, there’s a noticeable drop in contrast and luminance that, for me, isn’t worth the increased privacy.
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The effect is more pronounced in person, but in this side-by-side comparison, you can still see how Maximum Protection mode has an impact on the S26 Ultra’s contrast and color saturation. (Sam Rutherford for Engadget)
Thankfully, there’s a third option, which is to have the phone selectively activate Privacy Display under certain conditions. You can have it automatically turn on when you get notifications or open selected apps (like for banking or authenticators), which is what I prefer. The phone can also enable the feature when you need to enter a PIN, pattern or password. The caveat is that this only applies to system-level prompts like your lock screen. Theoretically, there’s no reason the S26 Ultra can’t do this anytime you’re presented with a password or PIN prompt, but every app needs to be optimized properly, so that isn’t a thing just yet. Regardless, it’s a powerful tool that can prevent people from gleaning sensitive info while you’re and about and I really hope it becomes standard inclusion on all premium phones going forward.
Performance and software: More speed and AI
Apparently this is what Samsung’s AI thinks a Pikachu sticker should look should look like. (Sam Rutherford for Engadget)
The main engine powering the S26 Ultra is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip for Galaxy along with 12GB or 16GB of RAM and up to 1TB of storage. Its biggest strength lies in its improved NPU, which is 39 percent more powerful than the previous generation, paving the way for improved AI-based features. That said, the rest of the processor provides some nice but not especially impressive gains in processing speed. Its CPU boasted 19 percent better performance while its GPU is around 24 percent beefier. In Geekbench 6, this translated to a multi-core score of 11,240 for its CPU (up from 9,828 on the S25 Ultra) and a GPU score of 25,403 (up from 19,863). Granted, it’s not like its predecessor ever struggled with performance, but it’s still worth noting that this is essentially as fast as an Android phone can get right now.
Of course, as we progress deeper into the AI era, Samsung has come up with a boatload of new and improved AI-powered tools as well. The most useful of these is Photo Assist, which serves as a one-stop shop for all your editing and content creation needs. In addition to fixing things like reflections or deleting objects in an image, you can use natural language text prompts to generate completely new elements like hats for your pets or pretty much anything else you can think of. And if that’s not enough, there’s also Samsung’s Creative Studio, which is a playground for making all sorts of fun digital art like wallpapers, stickers and greeting cards.
The S26 Ultra’s Now Nudge feature uses AI to find and suggest relevant photos when you use the Samsung Keyboard. (Sam Rutherford for Engadget)
Elsewhere, there’s also an improved document scanner and a call screener that’s better at blocking spam and robocalls. All told, they’re welcome upgrades and they work rather well. Samsung even borrowed an idea from Google’s Magic Cue with its Now Nudge feature, which can surface relevant photos based on context anytime you’re using the Samsung keyboard. Unfortunately, what’s arguably the S26 Ultra’s coolest new feature, Automated App Actions, isn’t available for another week. But the bigger issue is that almost all of these features are things we’ve seen before on rival devices like the Pixel 10 Pro. While they’re nice to have, it’s gotten to the point where these tools are more like table stakes for high-end phones nowadays instead of being reasons you might want to upgrade.
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Cameras: The same sensors with some larger apertures
While the S26 Ultra has the same sensors as before, Samsung gave it wider apertures for its main and 5x telephoto cameras. (Sam Rutherford for Engadget)
While the sensors on the S26 Ultra haven’t changed since the previous model, Samsung didn’t completely forget about photo upgrades. Alongside its 10-megapixel 3x telephoto, 50MP ultra-wide and 12MP selfie cam, its 200MP main cam and 50MP 5x telephoto camera have larger apertures at f/1.4 and f/2.9, respectively (up from f/1.7 and f/3.4). So on top of already being able to take excellent photos during the day, the UItra’s primary shooter is noticeably better at night.
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Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra day light photo
The S25 Ultra already shot excellent photos in bright light, so there’s no much room to improve on the S26 Ultra.
In a shot of some Transformers in a dimmed room, the S26 Ultra basically matched what I shot with a Pixel 10 Pro — aside from some minor differences in white balance. Details were sharp and Samsung’s photo was less noisy, which is due in part to a change in the phone’s image processing. But the most impressive example of the Ultra’s improved picture quality was when I took a very challenging backlit shot of a Grogu doll, in which the S26 did a better job of exposing Baby Yoda’s face compared to the P10 Pro. So even without new sensors, Samsung has managed to make an already great main camera just a bit better.
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Battery life
The Galaxy S26 Ultra features a 5,000mAh battery, just like what we got on the previous model. That means it’s largely relying on power efficiency gains from its new chip for improved longevity, which it delivers, but it’s not a major leap. On our local video rundown test, the S26 Ultra lasted 30 hours and three minutes, which is only about half an hour longer than before. That said, considering the only phones that have fared better were the OnePlus 15 and 15R, it’s hard to be upset about its overall runtime.
As for charging, the Ultra has gotten a big leap in speed (assuming you have compatible power adapters) compared to its less expensive siblings. When using a cable, it now supports up to 60 watts versus 45 watts for the S26+ or just 25 watts for the base S26. And it’s a similar story when charging wirelessly, with the Ultra now capable of hitting 25 watts when plopped on a pad compared to 20 watts for the S26+ and 15 watts for the S26.
The S26 Ultra has significantly faster wired and wireless charging than its less expensive siblings. Though sadly, it still doesn’t have a built-in ring for magnetic accessories. (Sam Rutherford for Engadget)
The major annoyance is that Samsung still hasn’t given any members of the S26 family a built-in magnetic ring for Qi2 charging or other magnetic accessories. The company claims this was done to help keep the phone as thin as possible, but honestly, I thought we had gotten over the desire for needless sleekness long ago. Sure, you can add that functionality back in by choosing the right case, but that’s not a very premium experience and I sincerely hope this is the last time Samsung makes this omission on its flagship phone line.
Wrap-up
There’s a strange feeling I often get when testing phones. After I got everything updated and set up the way I like, I noticed it even more with the S26 Ultra. The issue is that despite using a brand new device with shiny hardware, better performance and a more refined design, I’m still largely doing the same things and using the same apps as I was before (like Google Maps, Gmail and whatever my go-to mobile games are at the moment). This means my daily flow is basically unchanged from device to device.
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This better be the last time Samsung skips putting a magnetic ring inside the Galaxy S line. (Sam Rutherford for Engadget)
However, if you’re paying attention, you’ll notice things like higher framerates while gaming, sharper and more well-exposed photos at night and helpful suggestions like when the phone surfaces relevant photos in the middle of a text conversation. This goes double for the S26 Ultra, whose biggest upgrade — the Privacy Display — is something meant to stop other people from snooping at what you’re doing. When it’s on, you probably won’t even be able to tell, which is kind of the point.
There’s no doubt that the S26 Ultra is an improvement over last year’s phone. It’s faster, it takes better low-light photos and thanks to all of its new AI features, the handset feels smarter too. But it takes a discerning eye to spot and feel all these differences, particularly if you’re upgrading from a device that’s only a year or two old. So while the S26 Ultra remains the top pick as a phone that can do pretty much everything really well, in the grand scheme of things, it’s more of a stealthy, undercover update than an eye-catching new crown jewel.
