If you are stuck choosing between the 14-inch MacBook Pro and the 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M5 Max, you now have one more thing to consider, aside from size. The question was always there whether the M5 Max was being held back by the smaller chassis. Now that the test results for both these machines are out, the answer appears to be a resounding yes. 

How much performance loss are we talking about?

The folks at Notebookcheck ran the same tests on both 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros powered by top-of-the-line M5 Max chips with 40 GPU cores, and the results were insightful.

Initial benchmarks reveal an 18% improvement in multi-core performance in the MacBook Pro 16 over the MacBook Pro 14. What makes this more impressive is that the 16-inch MacBook Pro achieves this in Automatic mode. Switching to High Power mode will offer even better sustained performance over longer sessions.

GPU performance tells a similar story. The MacBook Pro 16-inch scores 12% higher than the 14-inch model in the 3DMark Steel Nomad test. More importantly, the GPU performance was stable under sustained workloads, while the 14-inch model dropped by as much as 25% during the same test.

Why is the bigger laptop performing so much better?

It comes down to heat and power draw. The M5 Max is a powerful chip that consumes a lot of power. During benchmarks, the MacBook Pro 16 pulled 78 watts through its CPU cores, significantly more than the 14-inch model. 

It’s because the smaller laptop simply doesn’t have the space to manage that kind of heat effectively. With less room for cooling, the MacBook Pro 14 throttles the chip to protect it, which is what causes the performance drops. 

The 16-inch MacBook Pro features a larger chassis, improved airflow, and higher thermal headroom capacity, allowing the M5 Max to sustain peak performance with minimal throttling.

So, should you go for the MacBook Pro 14 or the 16?

If you are a creative professional who needs the M5 Max for demanding tasks, such as video editing or 3D rendering, the MacBook Pro 16 is clearly the better choice. The chip has more thermal headroom in the larger body, and it shows.

That said, if your workload requires this level of power, I would recommend waiting for the Mac Studio with the M5 Max, as it will likely deliver better sustained performance at a lower cost. If your work doesn’t require you to travel much, that would be a better machine in every way than the laptop.

Old laptops have a habit of ending up in a drawer the moment manufacturers stop supporting them, left to gather dust while modern software demands more than they can comfortably give. PearOS exists to change that. It’s a free operating system that breathes new life into neglected hardware, bringing a Mac-like experience complete with a familiar menu bar, a clean dock, and smooth gestures to machines that most people had written off. The latest release, built on Arch Linux and going by the name NiceC0re, is designed to make everyday tasks feel effortless on exactly the kind of hardware that usually gets left behind.

Fire it up for the first time and the Mac influences are impossible to miss. A top menu bar greets you with a stylish pear emblem in place of the Apple logo, and the dock below bounces and magnifies icons in exactly the way you would expect. The full screen app launcher is a dead ringer for Launchpad, complete with categories and smooth animations, and the search tool does a convincing impression of Spotlight, pulling up files, apps, and settings in a matter of seconds. The attention to detail goes well beyond the surface level too. The cursor grows larger when you shake it, discreet pop-up indicators let you know when your microphone or screen sharing is active, and countless other small touches will feel instantly familiar to anyone who has spent time on a Mac. PearOS has clearly set out to recreate that experience as faithfully as possible, just without the price tag that usually comes with it.

Apple 2026 MacBook Neo 13-inch Laptop with A18 Pro chip: Built for AI and Apple Intelligence, Liquid…

• HELLO, MACBOOK NEO — Ready for whatever your day brings, MacBook Neo flies through everyday tasks and apps. Choose from four stunning colors in a…
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The settings menu is laid out in clean, organized columns that anyone who has used a recent version of macOS will navigate without a second thought, with display, sound, and network options all sitting exactly where you would expect them. A few corners are still being tidied up, with certain sections marked as coming soon, but the essentials including brightness, volume, night mode, and power all work exactly as they should. The file manager, PearFinder, rounds things out nicely, taking the bones of a typical Linux tool and wrapping it in a polished new interface complete with the sidebar and preview window.

There is also a browser called Pafari that gets about as close to Safari as you reasonably can without outright copying it, complete with clean tabs, a minimal address bar, and all the usual trimmings. Music playback, photo viewing, and screen capture come preinstalled and ready to go as well, all running on familiar Linux foundations but dressed up with Mac-style icons and fonts that tie the whole experience together.

Getting started is straightforward enough. Download the roughly three gigabyte file from the PearOS website, burn it to a USB drive, and boot up your laptop. The custom installer is built with modern web technology and walks you through each step in plain, clear language, so prior Linux experience is not a requirement. You will need to make a couple of decisions along the way, including which graphics driver to use and whether to go with the latest NVIDIA option or an open source alternative. It is also worth noting that a full wipe of the hard drive is required, so backing up your data beforehand and having a dedicated machine or virtual setup in mind is strongly recommended. After that the installer takes care of the rest, and the whole process should be wrapped up in under an hour on most systems.

Looking for the most recent Wordle answer? Click here for today’s Wordle hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Wordle puzzle is a pretty common word, with a pretty common repeated letter. If you need a new starter word, check out our list of which letters show up the most in English words. If you need hints and the answer, read on.

Read more: New Study Reveals Wordle’s Top 10 Toughest Words of 2025

Today’s Wordle hints

Before we show you today’s Wordle answer, we’ll give you some hints. If you don’t want a spoiler, look away now.

Wordle hint No. 1: Repeats

Today’s Wordle answer has one repeated letter.

Wordle hint No. 2: Vowels

Today’s Wordle answer has one vowel, but it’s the repeated letter, so you’ll see it twice.

Wordle hint No. 3: First letter

Today’s Wordle answer begins with D.

Wordle hint No. 4: Last letter

Today’s Wordle answer ends with A.

Wordle hint No. 5: Meaning

Today’s Wordle answer can refer to a play for theater, radio or television.

TODAY’S WORDLE ANSWER

Today’s Wordle answer is DRAMA.

Yesterday’s Wordle answer

Yesterday’s Wordle answer, March 15, No. 1730, was GRADE.

Recent Wordle answers

March 11, No. 1726: TEDDY

March 12, No. 1727: SMELL

March 13, No. 1728: EATEN

March 14, No. 1729: ANKLE

What’s the best Wordle starting word?

Don’t be afraid to use our tip sheet ranking all the letters in the alphabet by frequency of uses. In short, you want starter words that lean heavy on E, A and R, and don’t contain Z, J and Q. 

Some solid starter words to try:

ADIEU

TRAIN

CLOSE

STARE

NOISE

As the Chinese AI market heats up, Alibaba could launch Qwen for enterprise this week, while Kimi-maker Moonshot looks set to raise at an $18bn valuation.

The Chinese players continue their bid to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, launching their own agentic tools and apps. Now Alibaba looks set to launch its Qwen-based enterprise offering for organisations this week.

In recent weeks the OpenClaw craze in China led all the major players to launch OpenClaw-based apps. Alibaba, Baidu, ByteDance, Tencent and MiniMax all released OpenClaw-powered apps. At the same time, state officials in the country have moved to curb usage of such apps amid growing cybersecurity concerns.

Given the recent success of Claude Cowork, it is little surprise that major players like Alibaba are looking to launch enterprise agentic models that promise an added security layer to an enterprise market hungry for agentic AI that supports real world tasks. US AI giants such as Anthropic, with its Cowork offering, and OpenAI don’t provide their services commercially in China.

In February Alibaba launched Qwen 3.5 with “visual agentic abilities”, but reports suggest this week will see a specific offering for enterprise customers, who will of course have security front of mind.

Sources told Bloomberg the newly created enterprise AI tool will support companies in operating computers, browsers and cloud servers, with “built-in features to safeguard data security”.

And there is also no shortage of appetite in China when it comes to funding their AI players. Moonshot, the company behind the Kimi chatbot is currently in discussions to raise some $1bn in its current fundraising round, which would value the start-up at $18bn, having been valued at $4.3bn in late 2025. Existing investors include the likes of Tencent and Alibaba Group.

Elsewhere TikTok parent ByteDance is facing challenges, with Reuters reporting that it has had to pause the global launch of its latest video-generation model, Seedance ​2.0, after copyright disputes with some of the big Hollywood studios ‌and streaming platforms.

ByteDance had promised to “strengthen current safeguards” against intellectual property theft after Disney threatened legal action over videos generated by Seedance 2.0.

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In 2010, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched a disarmingly simple campaign they called the Giving Pledge: a public commitment, open to the world’s wealthiest people, to give away more than half their fortune during their lifetime or upon their death. The moment seemed to call for it. Tech was minting billionaires faster than any industry in history, and the question of how those fortunes would impact society was just beginning to take shape. “We’re talking trillions over time,” Buffett told Charlie Rose that year. The trillions materialized. The giving, less so.

The numbers are no longer shocking to anyone paying attention. The top 1% of American households now hold roughly as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined — the highest concentration the Federal Reserve has recorded since it began tracking wealth distribution in 1989. Globally, billionaire wealth has grown 81% since 2020, reaching a whopping $18.3 trillion, while one in four people worldwide don’t regularly have enough to eat.

This is the world in which a small group of extraordinarily wealthy people are now debating whether to honor — or walk away from — a voluntary and unenforceable promise to give away half of what they have.

The Giving Pledge’s numbers, reported Sunday by the New York Times, trace a steady decline. In its first five years, 113 families signed the Pledge. Then 72 over the next five, 43 in the five after that, and just four in all of 2024. The roster includes Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, and Elon Musk — some of the most powerful people in the world, and yet, in Peter Thiel’s words to the Times, it is a club that’s “really run out of energy . . .I don’t know if the branding is outright negative,” Thiel told the outlet, “but it feels way less important for people to join.”

The language of doing good in Silicon Valley has been wearing thin for years. Back in 2016, the HBO series “Silicon Valley” was so relentless in mocking the industry — its characters forever insisting they were “making the world a better place” while chasing valuations — that it reportedly changed actual corporate behavior. One of the show’s writers, Clay Tarver, told The New Yorker that year: “I’ve been told that, at some of the big companies, the P.R. departments have ordered their employees to stop saying ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ specifically because we have made fun of that phrase so mercilessly.”

It was an hilarious joke. The trouble is the idealism being satirized was also, at least partly, real — and what replaced it isn’t so funny. Veteran tech investor Roger McNamee, in the same piece, recalled asking Silicon Valley creator Mike Judge what he was really going for. Judge’s answer: “I think Silicon Valley is immersed in a titanic battle between the hippie value system of the Steve Jobs generation and the Ayn Randian libertarian values of the Peter Thiel generation.”

McNamee’s own read on things was less diplomatic: “Some of us actually, as naïve as it sounds, came here to make the world a better place. And we did not succeed. We made some things better, we made some things worse, and in the meantime the libertarians took over, and they do not give a damn about right or wrong. They are here to make money.”

A decade later, the libertarians McNamee was describing have moved well beyond Silicon Valley. Some are now in the Cabinet.

Not everyone agrees on what “giving back” even means. To the libertarian wing of tech — and it’s an increasingly significant wing — the entire framework is wrong. Building companies, creating jobs, and driving innovation are the real contributions, and the pressure to layer philanthropy on top of them is, at best, a social convention and, at worst, a shakedown dressed up as virtue.

Few figures captures the current mood quite like Thiel, who, notably, never signed the Pledge himself and is no fan of Bill Gates (among other things, he has reportedly called Gates an “awful, awful person“). In fact, Thiel tells the Times he has privately encouraged around a dozen signers to undo their commitments and has even gently pushed those already wavering to make their exits official. “Most of the ones I’ve talked to have at least expressed regret about signing it,” Thiel said, calling the Giving Pledge an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club.”

He has urged Musk to unsign, for example, arguing his money would otherwise go “to left-wing nonprofits that will be chosen by” Gates. When Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong quietly let his letter disappear from the Pledge website in mid-2024 without a word of public explanation, Thiel sent him a congratulatory note.

But Thiel also told the Times something worth a harder look: that those who stay on the Pledge’s public roster feel “sort of blackmailed” — too exposed to public opinion to formally renounce a non-binding promise to give away vast sums of money.

It’s a claim that’s difficult to square with the public behavior of some of the people Thiel has in mind. Musk has shown little interest in managing public perception, and at this point, a majority of Americans already view him unfavorably. Zuckerberg spent nearly a decade facing some of the most sustained regulatory and public hostility any tech exec has endured and came out the other side more sure of himself, not less.

A different picture is meanwhile taking shape on the ground. GoFundMe reported that fundraisers for basic necessities — rent, groceries, housing, fuel — surged 17% last year. “Work,” “home,” “food,” “bill,” and “care” were among the top keywords in campaigns that year. When the 43-day federal shutdown halted food stamp distribution this past fall, related campaigns jumped sixfold. “Life is getting more expensive and folks are struggling,” the company’s CEO told CBS News, “so they are reaching out to friends and family to see if they can help them through.”

Whether these trends are connected to decisions made in philanthropy boardrooms is a matter of debate, but they’re happening at the same time, and the timing is hard to ignore.

It’s worth separating the fate of the Pledge from the fate of philanthropy more broadly. Some of the wealthiest people in tech are still giving; they’re just doing it on their own terms, through their own vehicles, toward their own chosen ends. At the start of 2026, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) cut about 70 jobs — 8% of its workforce — as part of a move away from education and social justice causes toward its Biohub network, a group of nonprofit, biology-focused research institutes operating across several cities. “Biohub is going to be the main focus of our philanthropy going forward,” Zuckerberg said last November.

The CZI cuts look, at least on paper, less like the couple is retreating from philanthropy than recalibrating their approach. The Zuckerbergs have, after all, committed through the Pledge to give away 99% of their lifetime wealth.

Not everyone is redefining the terms, either. Gates announced last year that he’d give away virtually all his remaining wealth through the Gates Foundation over the next two decades — more than $200 billion — with the foundation closing permanently on December 31, 2045. Invoking Carnegie’s old line that “the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced,” he wrote that he was determined not to die rich.

It’s happened before, this standoff between concentrated wealth and everyone else. The last time wealth concentrated at anything like these levels — the original Gilded Age, the 1890s through the early 1900s — the correction didn’t come from philanthropists. It came from trust-busting, the federal income tax, the estate tax, and eventually the New Deal. It arrived as policy that was driven by political pressure too powerful to be ignored. The institutions that forced that correction — a functional Congress, a free press, an empowered regulatory state — look considerably different today.

What isn’t in dispute is the pace of change. These fortunes have been built in years, not generations, at the same moment the safety net is being cut. The wealth gained by the world’s billionaires in 2025 alone would have been enough to give every person on earth $250 and still leave billionaires more than $500 billion richer, according to Oxfam’s 2026 global inequality report.

The Giving Pledge was always, as Buffett said from the start, just a “moral pledge” — no enforcement, no consequences, no one to answer to but yourself. That it once carried weight says something about the era that produced it. That Thiel now frames staying on the list as a form of coercion — and that the Times found that argument worth reporting at length — says something about the one we’re in right now.

The Michigan-founded Stryker, which employs around 56,000 globally, made more than $25bn in revenues last year.

An Iran-linked hacking group has claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on the medical equipment manufacturing giant Stryker.

In a statement posted yesterday (11 March), Stryker said that a cyberattack had caused it a global network disruption. “We have no indication of ransomware or malware and believe the incident is contained,” the company said.

In a regulatory filing, Stryker admitted that the incident cut off access to some of its information systems and business applications, affecting operations. It did not know when systems would be fully restored. Bloomberg noted an earlier memo where Stryker said that the attack had pummelled its networks.

Pro-Iranian cyber group Handala has claimed responsibility for the attack, marking what looks to be the first major cyber disruption of a US organisation since the US-Israel war on Iran began on 28 February.

“Our major cyber operation has been executed with complete success”, wrote the X account seemingly belonging to Handala, claiming that the attack was in retaliation for the “brutal attack on the Minab school” and for “ongoing cyber assaults against the infrastructure of the Axis of Resistance.”

In the post, the group claimed the attack “wiped”more than 200,000 systems, servers and mobile devices, and that 50TB of critical data had been extracted. The group also claimed that Stryker’s offices in 79 countries have been forced to shut down.

“You did not take our warning seriously and entered the dangerous  game of attacking infrastructure; now you are witnessing the most powerful and extensive cyberattack in recent years,” a different post on the page read.

The Michigan-founded Stryker has around 56,000 employees and made more than $25bn in revenue last year producing equipment such as orthopaedic implants, surgical instruments and hospital beds.

Reports suggest that the company’s Cork plant, which employs more than 4,000, was affected by the attack. Stryker also has factories in Limerick and Belfast. The Wall Street Journal reported that outages began in the US before spreading globally.

Smarttech247’s director of operations Ken Sheehan said that there is evidence that Handala is targeting infrastructure and service providers globally in order to maximise disruption.

“A number of reports are now linking this group to attacks targeting at least one business with operations in Ireland, which is concerning,” he said.

“Since the latest hostilities erupted in the Middle East, we have been advising clients that the cyber risk would be increasing and extreme vigilance is required to guard against these kinds of attacks.”

He recommended that organisations enhance cybersecurity awareness training, particularly around phishing and other social engineering attacks. Sheehan said that Handala’s main attack vector is still by phishing.

Following its attack on Stryker on Wednesday, Handala’s supposed X page also claimed a cyberattack on Israeli fintech Verifone. Verifone, however, said that it found no evidence of such an attack.

“We have observed recent allegations on March 11 2026 from threat actors claiming an intrusion into our systems in Israel,” a Verifone spokesperson told the Register. “Verifone has found no evidence of any incident related to this claim and has no service disruption to our clients.”

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England Hockey, the governing body for field hockey in England, is investigating a potential data breach after the AiLock ransomware gang listed it as a victim on its data leak site.

The threat actor allegedly stole 129GB of data from the organization’s systems and announced that it will soon publish the files, unless a ransom is paid.

England Hockey is aware of the threat actor’s claims and has prioritized an inquiry that involves both internal teams and external experts to determine what happened.

“We are aware of an incident involving England Hockey and are currently investigating the matter as a priority,” the field hockey organization said in a statement for BleepingComputer.

“As part of this investigation, we recently became aware of a post from the group claiming to be responsible for this incident,” a representative said.

The organization is responsible for running, regulating, and developing the sport of field hockey nationwide, from grassroots participation to elite national teams. It has a membership of more than 800 clubs across the country, 150,000 registered club players, and 15,000 coaches, umpires, and officials.

England Hockey states that it cannot comment on specific details at the moment because of the ongoing investigation.

“We take data security matters extremely seriously, and understanding what, if any, data may have been impacted in this incident is a top priority of our ongoing investigation,” assured England Hockey.

AiLock is a relatively new ransomware operation that engages in double-extortion attacks. It was documented on April 1st, 2025, by researchers at cybersecurity company Zscaler, who noted that the threat actor was “leveraging sophisticated extortion tactics targeting enterprise networks.”

The hackers reportedly use privacy law violations as leverage in negotiations. They give victims 72 hours to respond and start negotiating, and wait five days for the payment under the threat of leaking stolen data and destroying recovery tools.

According to past analysis from S2W Talon’s researcher Huiseong Yang, the ransomware uses ChaCha20 and NTRUEncrypt to lock files, appending the .AILock extension to the encrypted copies, and leaving ransom notes in all impacted directories.

While England Hockey hasn’t confirmed a data breach yet, players in the country should be vigilant for suspicious account activity and phishing attempts, and treat unsolicited communications with caution.

Malware is getting smarter. The Red Report 2026 reveals how new threats use math to detect sandboxes and hide in plain sight.

Download our analysis of 1.1 million malicious samples to uncover the top 10 techniques and see if your security stack is blinded.

Download The Report

Google has released emergency security updates to patch two high-severity Chrome vulnerabilities exploited in zero-day attacks.

“Google is aware that exploits for both CVE-2026-3909 & CVE-2026-3910 exist in the wild,” Google said in a security advisory published on Thursday.

The first zero-day (CVE-2026-3909) stems from an out-of-bounds write weakness in Skia, an open-source 2D graphics library responsible for rendering web content and user interface elements, which attackers can exploit to crash the web browser or even gain code execution.

The second one (CVE-2026-3910) is described as an inappropriate implementation vulnerability in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine.

Google discovered both security flaws and patched them within two days of reporting for users in the Stable Desktop channel, with new versions rolling out to Windows (146.0.7680.75), macOS (146.0.7680.76), and Linux systems (146.0.7680.75).

While Google says the out-of-band update could take days or weeks to reach all users, it was immediately available when BleepingComputer checked for updates earlier today.

If you don’t want to update your web browser manually, you can also have it check for updates automatically and install them at the next launch.

​Although Google found evidence that attackers are exploiting this zero-day flaw in the wild, the company didn’t share further details regarding these incidents.

“Access to bug details and links may be kept restricted until a majority of users are updated with a fix. We will also retain restrictions if the bug exists in a third party library that other projects similarly depend on, but haven’t yet fixed,” it noted.

These are the second and third actively exploited Chrome zero-days patched since the start of 2026. The first, tracked as CVE-2026-2441 and described as an iterator invalidation bug in CSSFontFeatureValuesMap (Chrome’s implementation of CSS font feature values), was addressed in mid-February.

Last year, Google fixed a total of eight zero-days exploited in the wild, many of which were reported by Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG), a group of security researchers known for tracking and identifying zero-days exploited in spyware attacks.

On Thursday, Google also revealed that it has paid over $17 million to 747 security researchers who reported security flaws through its Vulnerability Reward Program (VRP) in 2025.

Malware is getting smarter. The Red Report 2026 reveals how new threats use math to detect sandboxes and hide in plain sight.

Download our analysis of 1.1 million malicious samples to uncover the top 10 techniques and see if your security stack is blinded.

Download The Report