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25 Feb 2025

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Anker’s Thunderbolt 4 dock runs glorious quad 4K setups, and it’s $100 off
Thunderbolt docking stations are awesome, but they can get fairly expensive… and rightfully so, considering all the perks. Well, it just so happens that this Anker Thunderbolt 4 dock is on sale for $200 on Amazon, a cool $100 off its MSRP. (You’ll need Prime for this special price. Don’t have that? Just sign up for a free 30-day trial!) This particular Thunderbolt 4 dock has 12 ports, including: 2x USB-C 3.2 ports 2x USB-A 3.2 ports 2x USB-A 2.0 ports 1x HDMI 2.1 port (up to 8K@30Hz) 2x DisplayPort port (up to 8K@30Hz) 2x Thunderbolt 4 ports (1x upstream, 1x downstream) 1x Gigabit Ethernet port The Thunderbolt 4 ports ensure super-fast device charging up to 100W of power delivery and super-fast file transfers up to 40Gbps. Between that and the HDMI/DisplayPort connections, you can connect up to four 4K displays (or a single 8K display). All those other ports are great for hooking up peripherals, external drives, and other accessories. This is a laptop multitasker’s dream come true, allowing you to easily unplug your laptop and take it on the go, then bring it back home and instantly plug it back into all your home office devices with a single cable (the one from the dock to your laptop). If you’re an Amazon Prime member, you can get this awesome Anker Thunderbolt 4 dock for just $200 — and remember that even if you don’t have a Prime subscription, you can still score this deal by signing up for a 30-day free trial. Save $100 on this high-speed Thunderbolt 4 docking stationBuy now at Amazon

Perplexity teases Comet, an AI browser for ‘agentic search’
Search, AI, browsers: all three technologies naturally mix together. So it should be no surprise that AI-powered search engine, Perplexity AI, is teasing its entry into the browser market with “Comet.” Perplexity isn’t saying much. All we know of Comet is that Perplexity announced it via Twitter/X on Monday morning. The company calls Comet “a browser for agentic search.” It revealed no other details. Perplexity hopes to be the next Google; it’s one of numerous AI-powered tools that users can take advantage of. The company claims that its artificial intelligence gives users a more relevant search experience than other browsers, some of which (Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Edge, among others) either tap into AI, search, or both. It’s not quite clear what Perplexity means by “agentic search,” though AI companies have recently begun pushing “agents” that can act autonomously on your behalf. Meanwhile, Perplexity is also facing a suit from Dow Jones and The New York Post, filed last October, claiming that Perplexity has “scraped” their sites to generate responses,

Samsung’s speedy 2TB portable SSD is a ludicrous 45% off right now
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: you can never have enough storage space. Extra SSDs are useful for so many things. And right now, you can snag this large-capacity pocket-sized portable SSD at a phenomenal price. The Samsung T7 SSD normally retails for $270 but is currently on sale for $150. That’s a massive 45 percent discount for a 2TB drive you can take anywhere. With fast read and write speeds of up to 1,050MB/s, you can move files to and from your computer in a flash. In fact, considering how speedy it is, you can even use it with other devices, such as your gaming consoles, allowing you to store games and game data. You can even hook it up to your camera and record 4K videos directly, saving you the hassle of using an SD or microSD card and then having to move the data to your PC and then to your drive. This is a portable SSD that’s tiny enough to fit in the palm of your hand and easy to carry at a lightweight 2.5 ounces. It was built to survive bumps and drops, too, with a rugged aluminum casing that can absorb all those shocks and protect your data. Get yourself 2TB of storage space with Samsung’s T7 portable SSD for $150, one of the best prices we’ve seen for this model in a while. Save 45% on this high-performance 2TB Samsung portable SSDBuy now at Amazon

Microsoft launches a free version of Office, but with ads, report says
If you’ve messed around with Microsoft’s “free” Office web app, you’ve quickly discovered that it stinks, for one important reason: You can’t actually create documents. A new, free, ad-supported local version of Office changes all that, according to a report. If a new report from Beebom is accurate, this new version of Office basically takes many of the basic features Microsoft has included in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and makes them available for free. The one catch is a minor one: You’ll need to save your created document to OneDrive, but you’re then free to re-download it like any other file. Some of the more advanced features are excluded, too. Microsoft is simply referring to the new service as the “free” version of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, Beebom reported, noting that it’s ad-supported. Since you’re forced to save documents to OneDrive, you’ll need to enter or create a Microsoft account to do so, which isn’t the worst compromise. However, this new version of Office runs on your local PC, not the web. It’s worth noting that Microsoft has yet to confirm this new ad-supported Office option, although we asked for more details. (We’ll update this story when and if we hear back from Microsoft.) I couldn’t access this version, either. All of my devices are logged in, so that Microsoft “knows” that I have access to a paid version of Office 365 that I subscribe to via personal account. I tried getting around this by using Windows Sandbox to open an anonymous Windows shell, but the process didn’t work. How do you get the ad-supported version of free Microsoft Office? According to Beebom, the ability to access the free, ad-supported Office should show up automatically: If you download the Office apps from Microsoft’s website, you should be presented with an option to sign in. At the bottom of the login box, however, a second, new option should appear: “Skip for now.” That should bring up the screen where the “ad-supported, free” option of Office should appear. Alternatively, of course, you can sign up for Microsoft 365 instead as a paid option, or use the free web version of the Office apps instead. Note that the Office web apps have their own quirks, as well. Microsoft still isn’t giving away the farm for free, however. Beebom notes that are still many features that the ad-supported version leaves out. Of course, many of those are AI-based — something that you might not want, anyway. At least you can actually create documents, however. (I would sometimes leave a “dummy” file in OneDrive that I could edit as a “new” document with the web apps.) Word appears to be the most convenient to use, though the ad-supported version excludes all of the design and drawing tools. I see two features that Microsoft annoyingly chose to leave out, according to the list Beebom compiled: line spacing and the ability to wrap text around inline images. Excel and PowerPoint look even more handicapped. One of the convenient things about Excel is its ability to analyze data and perform pivot tables and pivot charts; those have both been excluded. Themes, colors, fonts, and effects are gone as well, along with macros. Conveniences in PowerPoint like Designer and SmartArt, plus screen recording and animation tools are gone, too. You can see a list of all features that Microsoft excluded in the Beebom article. And oh, yes — the ads. Beebom reports that a persistent web ad remains to the right-hand of your screen at all times, and a brief video plays every few hours or so. It all feels like Microsoft acknowledging that free alternatives to Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365 exist, but Microsoft would like to hook you (or for you to stay hooked) on the traditional Office apps instead.