Table of contents for February 2026 in APC

We know APC readers like to stay ahead of emerging tech, so we’ve rounded up the big tech launches, trends and potential management changes that you can expect to see in the coming year. We’ve also curated a list of the big tech conferences and exhibitions for 2026, if you want to start booking your flights and hotel rooms... 1 STEAM MACHINES Does a gaming PC have to run Windows? Not if Valve has anything to do with it. Buoyed by the success of the handheld Steam Deck, Valve now has its eyes on the desktop market with the launch of the Steam Machine in early 2026. The attractive-looking cube is designed to sit either beneath a TV like a games console (pay attention Microsoft and Sony) or on a…

Bang & Olufsen Beosound A5 PRICE From $2,550 WEB bang-olufsen.com It might look like the kind of thing you’d put an artisanal picnic lunch in, but the Beosound A5 is actually the world’s classiest portable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth speaker, and has been designed for B&O’s 100th birthday. Available in Nordic Weave, Century Weave, Oak or Dark Oak and Spaced Aluminium finishes, it offers 360° sound via its two-way speaker system, which comprises a 70W tweeter, 2x 70W full-range drivers and a 70W bass woofer. As well as offering multi-room support via AirPlay, the speaker can also be teamed with a second Beosound A5 for stereo sound, and has Active Room Compensation so it can tune itself to match the acoustics of the room it’s placed in. Not only that, but…

PRICE $3,399 WEB www.lg.com/au The LG Ultrafine Evo 6K 32U990A is a stunning looking monitor, but then, if you’re going to drop $3,399 on a display, stunning is absolutely what you should expect. The key play here is that it’s a 6K (6144x3456) monitor with support for Thunderbolt 5 and a rather strong focus on the Mac creative crowd, that’s evident both in some fine-tuning specifically for MacOS Tahoe and in the actual physical design of the 32U990A itself. It’s highly evocative of Apple’s style, and from the front you could easily mistake it for an Apple product, with its focus on sleek lines and silver shading. Installation is a little trickier than you’ll find on most monitors, with physical screws to be placed in the smaller-than-usual base plate. LG…

Have you ever stood up from your desktop to go answer the door or grab a drink only to find your headset violently yanked off your head or ripped out of a port on your PC? If you have, this group test is for you. You don’t have to spend all that much on a headset these days. Even with the low-latency 2.4GHz connection that is all but required for competitive PC gaming, you can pick up a budget model and find it perfectly serviceable for modern-day gaming. Though there is a broadening of the market happening today, on both sides. There are more affordable options, just as there are more expensive options. This group test covers the latest models on both ends of the spectrum. There’s the affordable Logitech…

PRICE Free WEB apple.com/au NEEDS iOS 18.6 or later (iOS 26 recommended) Your iPhone’s Camera app does an excellent job of capturing high-quality video clips that feature accurate colours, detail-packed tones and a sharply focused subject. It does all of these things automatically, meeting the needs of everyday ‘point, shoot and share’ videographers. Final Cut Camera was first released by Apple in June 2024 to fulfil the requirements of videographers who demand more manual control of exposure, colour and sound during shoots, such as dialling in a faster shutter speed to capture sharper details in rapidly moving subjects, or manually adjusting White Balance settings to remove cold or warm colour casts. A key feature of Final Cut Camera is its ability to preview, sync, and record video footage from up…

In our ‘Best New Software for 2026’ Cover Feature in Issue 554, we recommended the most useful new programs to download over the next 12 months. But the start of a new year is also the perfect time to rid yourself of software you no longer use or that’s taken a turn for the worse. In 2025, we’ve seen lots of once-great programs become bloated with unwanted options, intensify the nagging to pay for their premium versions and suffer serious privacy and security concerns. Browser extensions and mobile apps have been injected with malicious code that steals your data and bombards you with ads, and AI features have been foisted on us whether we want them or not. These annoying trends are likely to continue in 2026, so it’s a…

What are they? Pieces of software released by Microsoft for a variety of reasons, but mostly to add features, fix faults, patch security holes and replace out-of-date drivers. They’re a necessary evil of using Windows and despite aiming to solve problems can cause plenty of their own. But if any updates go wrong in future, you’ll now have a better idea which were to blame. Why’s that? Because Microsoft has renamed updates to make them simpler, so they should be easier to understand. Wait – Microsoft has made something simpler? Should I soon expect Hell to freeze over too? Very droll. It’s true that Microsoft seems to delight in using baffling jargon rather than plain English, but maybe that’s finally changing. It wants the new names for updates to be…

The Fallout TV show recently returned for season 2, taking us to the setting of Fallout: New Vegas, and APC had the opportunity to speak to one very interested party: New Vegas lead writer John Gonzalez. “I really enjoyed the first season of the show,” says Gonzalez. “I thought there was some really admirable complexity in the way that they explored the world. I mean, I thought that the Maximus character is a fascinating creation, a fascinating slant to take you into the Brotherhood of Steel.” Gonzalez then makes the dangerous decision to mention the topic of credit and residuals, comparing it to how many early comic book creators were treated: the likes of Bill Finger or Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko. “I THINK THAT THEY CREATED SOMETHING THAT HAD…

PRICE $36.50 PLATFORM PC, XB1/S/X, Mac WEB tinyurl.com/APC555routine I’m all alone, the security system seems to take my continued existence as a personal insult, and every skeletal T5 robot in sight will happily relieve my skull of its contents. These Type-05s manage to shred my nerves before they’ve gone anywhere near my skin. I’m usually alerted to their presence by the distinctive heavy thud of their feet stomping around as they search for me, or the sight of their lasers scanning a dark corridor. They’re smart enough to check around corners and open locked doors. Just as I’m never sure how much danger I’m in, I can’t ever be sure of how much health I’ve got either. There’s no readout or red haze creeping in around the edge of the…

I still remember the feeling when I installed my current GPU for the first time. Ray tracing! The future was here, on my desktop machine. Just as soon as I looked up the small list of games that supported it, installed one of them, and went hunting for either a puddle or a car bonnet in one of its levels, to observe its extremely limited implementation for myself and gaze in wonder at it. But in the end it was neither Battlefield V nor Metro Exodus that gave me the post-upgrade hit I was looking for, as stupendous as their puddles were. The best moment when you buy a new graphics card isn’t the latest visual behemoth you’d yet to try, it’s loading up a game you’d already been playing…

Inspirational stories from computing’s long-distant past As those who will have tried know, guiding a digital football team to glory is no mean feat. It takes tactical nous, smart planning and a solid understanding of the beautiful game to send a club up through the divisions. Winning a cup involves more than a bit of luck, too. Playing football management sims also consumes a heap of time, which is one reason why Sports Interactive’s Football Manager series has reportedly been cited in 35 divorce cases. But there is a way to get a football management fix without having to dedicate so much effort. It’s called Kevin Toms Football Star* Manager and it has a very different football manager game at its core. To explain, we have to go back to…

We explore the trends and technologies that are set to shape the future. The next five years could see dramatic change on the web, as AI disrupts Google’s dominance in search, sparks a new browser war and exacerbates privacy invasions and digital surveillance. Or we could take the opportunity to build a better web. That’s what Mozilla is hoping to do – and has been for some time. After all, the Firefox maker has been toiling away at the goal since 1998, offering a browser that promises to prioritise privacy more than rivals whilst supporting open-source projects – though it’s also worth noting that the non-profit is largely funded by its leading rival, Google. Why is now such a key moment? AI chatbots offer an alternative to traditional search, while…

PRICE $269 WEB benq.com Here’s the theory: many computer users, especially programmers and designers, prefer to work in dark environments as it helps them concentrate for long periods. They don’t want to fiddle with desk lamps or switch on the overhead lighting, they just want to focus. This has given birth to a product category that I confess until now I didn’t know existed: monitor light bars. These perch on top of the screen, lighting up your desk area while all around you grows dim. The amount of light coverage this produces is impressive, with the ScreenBar coping with almost the full width of my two-metre-wide desk, although clever angling means that no light falls upon the screen (vital for calibrated panels). The bulk of the light focuses on the…

Gaming mice come in all shapes and sizes, but the competitive FPS gamers among you might already know that weight is actually one of the most important factors. Lugging a veritable sack of potatoes across your mousepad can make hitting those flickshots difficult. I’ve grown what some might mistakenly call obsessive over lightweight gaming mice. They’ve really gotten good over the last few years, to the extent that there are now incredibly light mice that somehow still have decent battery life and sturdy shells. Not all lightweight mice are equal, though, as the wildly different price tags can attest to. Some are cheap and cheerful, others offer top of the line specs that might even be overkill for competitive gamers. 1 DeathAdder V4 Pro Flawless for a price. PRICE $279…

All internet users will recognise that things are getting worse online. Google searches now require scrolling through AI word soup and sponsored adverts at the top of results, while Facebook has become a morass of promotions and ads. Streaming services that were founded on the principle of no advertising now make users pay to stop them, and your TV is reporting back on what you’re viewing. This is no accident, but the result of deliberate policies in a system that the internet activist and author Cory Doctorow has dubbed “enshittification”. The phenomenon is affecting swathes of platforms – technological or otherwise. The practice is now so common that in 2025 the venerable American dictionary titan Merriam-Webster added enshittification to its lexicon as “a digital platform is made worse for users…

For the past decade we’ve been recommending Affinity Photo as an affordable, buy-once alternative to Adobe Photoshop, with companion apps Affinity Publisher and Affinity Designer making persuasive rivals to InDesign and Illustrator. Last year, though, Serif – the original developer and publisher of Affinity apps – was bought out by online design giant Canva, raising concerns about Affinity’s future. Happily, Canva hasn’t killed off Affinity. In fact, it’s just unveiled the best version of Affinity ever – a brand-new integrated app that brings together all the powerful features of its three predecessors, and adds in a whole lot more. What’s more, where the complete Affinity suite used to cost around $180, the new app is completely free for both personal and commercial use (aside from a few AI add-ons, which…

KEY Budget build Pick these parts if you want to build a new, well-rounded PC for a good price. Mid-range build For productivity power and running every new game at 1080p 60fps. This recommended build will see you through. Advanced build You’re looking for the best PC on the market and superior components. But you still want to spend smart. BUDGET BUILD Enjoy 1080p gaming and most tasks without breaking the bank. MOTHERBOARD TUF Gaming B650 Plus WiFiAsus $249This board doesn’t skimp on features, which means it’s the perfect starting point for an AM5 rig, with room to upgrade. PROCESSOR Ryzen 5 7600XAMD $339It’s a hot runner, but this budget AMD chip provides six cores of genuine gaming grunt for a very reasonable sum. GRAPHICS CARD Radeon RX 9060 XT 8GBAMD $629AMD delivers what we need…

IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes YOU’LL NEED AnyViewer AnyViewer lets you access remote computers across your home network and the wider internet. This means you can manage your own PCs from a single keyboard and mouse, or access friends and families’ machines when they need your help. Recent updates simplify the process of setting up an account on your machines and add features like capturing screenshots and recording your screen – as we’ll explain. There are paid-for plans available, but here we’ll be using the free version. It’s limited to three devices but should suit most users. Step 1 On the computer from which you want to access other machines, open a browser window at www.anyviewer.com and click Download, followed by the Free Download button 1. When the file has finished downloading,…

So, the dust has settled, the world hasn’t ended, and you’ve decided to stick with Windows 10. You’re not alone – millions of people worldwide are saying “no thanks” to Windows 11 and carrying on with its predecessor. We understand the temptation. Maybe your current PC isn’t compatible with Windows 11 but still runs fine. Or perhaps you don’t fancy paying for expensive new hardware or wrestling with Microsoft’s latest changes. Whatever your reasons, if you stick with Windows 10, you’ll need to be a lot more careful than before, especially if you use it online. Without regular security updates, every week that passes increases your exposure to new malware threats. You’ll need to take extra precautions, add further layers of protection and rethink how you connect to the web.…

IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to customise the way your macOS looks YOU’LL NEED macOS 26 or later One of the most welcome improvements in this year’s Mac operating system, macOS Tahoe, is how much personalisation it offers. Where previous versions of macOS were pretty limited – you could adjust the size of your icons, change the wallpaper, hide the Dock and not much more – Tahoe is packed full of handy features to transform the way your Mac looks. You’ll recognise many of these features from iOS 26. There’s Liquid Glass, of course, which you can turn off if you don’t like it. You can apply transparency to your icons and your desktop widgets – or, if you prefer, make all your icons the same colour. You can…

1 month RELEASE February 6, 2026 DEVELOPER Koei Tecmo NIOH 3 The third-person dark samurai action RPG returns once more for even more demon-slaying, katana-wielding action. Expect crazy boss fights and plenty of blood and gore. RELEASE February 11, 2026 DEVELOPER Grasshopper Manufacture Inc. ROMEO IS A DEAD MAN Japanese developer Suda51, he of Lollipop Chainsaw fame, is back with a crazy new action adventure that describes itself as the “advent of ultra-violent science fiction”. RELEASE February 27, 2026 DEVELOPER Capcom RESIDENT EVIL REQUIEM Return once more to Racoon City, the home of the mysterious Umbrella pharmaceutical company, as Grace Ashcroft, an intelligence analyst for the FBI. 2 months RELEASE March 2, 2026 DEVELOPER Blizzard WORLD OF WARCRAFT: MIDNIGHT Confront the Harbinger of the Void, Xal’atath, as the ancient and…

PRICE $29.99 PLATFORM PC, PS5, Mac WEB tinyurl.com/APC555skate Skate Story is a better kind of Inferno. If Dante Alighieri had known that skateboarding could be a weapon of metaphysical rebellion against Hell and reality itself, his Divine Comedy would also have followed a “demon made of glass and pain” who’s entered into a contract with the Devil to eat the moon in exchange for their soul. It’s one of the best-sounding and most stylish games I’ve played in recent memory. It’s an esoteric art installation and interactive concept album navigated via powerslide and axle grind: a mesmerising ode to the miserable occupants of an uncannily familiar underworld. It’s grungy; it’s grimy; it’s almost certainly intolerable if the word ‘postmodern’ sets you on edge. But my god does it make landing…

PRICE $997 WEB www.dell.com The Dell Ultrasharp 27 4K Thunderbolt Hub Monitor U2725QE is primarily pitched as a business-focused monitor, though its specifications and visual quality primarily place it as a straight office productivity monitor, rather than something you would edit high-end video on. For an office monitor, its baseline specifications at 4K 120Hz are on the slightly higher side; most monitors in this space slice costs down by offering just 60Hz refresh rates. What it does offer is a lot of connectivity options, covering the usual bases of HDMI and DisplayPort if you fancy a little multi-monitor action. The key play here is Thunderbolt 4 connection to a suitably equipped laptop, because that also opens up the set of USB-C and USB-A ports, as well as 2.5GbE ethernet ports…

NEEDS Windows 10 or 11 WEB tinyurl.com/APC555anyvid The last time we included Any Video Converter (AVC) Free in this section, we explained how to use its new browser for downloading videos. We were less pleased that it had started prompting you to upgrade to its Pro and Ultimate versions before performing certain actions. Sadly, those nags still appear in version 9.1.5, but AVC has again offset our annoyance by adding several genuinely useful features. The upgrade prompts are easy to dismiss by clicking Continue – unlike in some freemium programs, they’re not aggressive. The biggest new addition is a timeline for AVC’s Merge Video and Trim Video tools. This brings it closer in line with traditional video-editing software, by providing an easy visual way to rearrange clips, set their start…

As ever with a new generation of technology, it’s taken time for the next generation of PCI Express to arrive en masse. But now, at last, we think it’s safe to say that PCIe Gen5 SSDs are the right choice for upgraders and enthusiasts, and here we put eight of the best to the test. The feature table opposite and the performance graphs on p49 will immediately make clear that not all these SSDs are born equal. We would say there are two rough classes on offer: those offering all-out speed and those leaning towards the budget end. But the biggest determinant of price is capacity. The most common choices are 2TB and 4TB, and we would generally recommend you choose one of these two: you won’t see as much…

When people think of AI they largely think of text-based chatbots such as ChatGPT. But chatbots are only scratching the surface of what’s possible with the tsunami of AI tools that are flooding onto the market, trying to capitalise on the AI boom we’re living through. In this article, we highlight a range of AI tools (yes, including ChatGPT) that are already delivering amazing capabilities for both professionals and consumers. Some of these are built into well-known pieces of software such as Photoshop, others are standalone apps. All of them are examples that AI is capable of much more than summarising a Word document or turning your selfie into a Pixar character. From isolating the different parts of audio tracks, to creating virtual photo shoots, to triaging the hundreds of…

Easy-to-follow workshops and expert tips IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes YOU’LL NEED ExpanDrive Online-storage services are great. They make it easy to drop the files you need on multiple computers into a single location, then have access to them everywhere that you happen to log in. However, most services offer only a limited amount of space unless you’re willing to pay for an upgrade. The obvious workaround is to sign up for a number of services, but this isn’t ideal. Saving your documents and files in several online locations means you may quickly lose track of where items are. Running multiple file-sync programs – one for each service – also has its downsides. While that may save you several trips to your browser, it’s a waste of resources, as they take up…

PC gaming loves simulators. They put you in charge of exciting machines such as passenger aircraft, heavy goods vehicles, and even the space shuttle. What marks them out from games structured around combat or speed is the satisfaction you get from doing an otherwise mundane task well, rather than a kill count or a shiny trophy. In a simulator, you may never get a reward for your actions, no matter how well you perform. Public transport is another simulator target that can seem strange to outsiders. While trains are constrained by their reliance on rails and thick books of regulations, driving a bus around a city to a timetable means providing an essential service to the NPCs, but does it tickle the reward centres of the brain in the same…

PRICE $36.50 PLATFORM $36.50 WEB tinyurl.com/APC555aces This has to be the most cheerful game about aliens causing devastation and death that I’ve ever played. Often making Lego Star Wars look like Andor, Battle Suit Aces is a hugely heartfelt sci-fi visual novel. The fact it’s a great deckbuilder too is just showing off. You’re Captain Heathcliff, travelling the galaxy in his fight against the Frenzied, a pretty dull enemy. Fortunately, that faceless threat is one of the few dud narrative notes. The rest of the cast are great fun, often joyously queer, and… well, slightly too chipper at times. A fairly rote save-the-universe-from-aliens plot is livened up considerably by constant silly digressions. Like the side mission where one of my crew accidentally ingested hallucinogenic strawberries and convinced himself he was…

PRICE $29.50 PLATFORM PC WEB tinyurl.com/APC555howl Deckbuilders meet Dark Souls!’ is the kind of ironically-soulless pitch that makes me want to go back in time and drown a young Miyazaki in a poisonous swamp. Fortunately, Death Howl hasn’t been made by evil money men, but slightly-less evil developers who clearly understand what makes good deckbuilders and Soulslikes tick. I thought all deckbuilders had to be roguelikes by law, so it’s paradoxically a little refreshing to play one that follows a more traditional game structure. You play a grieving mother who’s in denial about her son’s death and who’s chased him into the spirit realm in the hopes of getting him back. Turn-based battles play out on isometric grids reminiscent of the excellent Into the Breach. Each turn you draw five…

Valve’s making a games console. The company that was famed for making Half-Life games might be speaking about its newly revealed Steam Machine as a mini-PC, but let’s call a console a console when we see one. All the selling points about it – the expected low pricing, the bundled controller, the SteamOS UI making everything as user-friendly as possible – are all the tenets that discerned games consoles from PCs for the past four decades. As a quick recap, it’s specced to outperform the company’s own Steam Deck handheld device, offering about six times the graphical heft. It’s built around a six-core, 12-thread AMD Zen 4 CPU and a semi-bespoke version of AMD’s RDNA 3 GPU, with some bits turned off and just 8GB of VRAM. All that points…

RELEASE 2000 DEVELOPER Westwood Studios PUBLISHER EA WEB steam.pm/app/2229850 When the hell are you going to get the internet?” bellowed my friend Mike as he handed me a wad of folded up sheets of A4 paper on the school playing field. Knowing I loved Command & Conquer, and that I basically lived in a cave on the central coast in 2000, he’d very kindly printed off sheets and sheets of web pages covering Westwood’s new announcement: Red Alert 2. Tiberian Sun defined my summer in 1999, sharing its time with Half-Life, Medal of Honour and others behind my barricaded bedroom door, HSC exams looming. But now only a few months later, the excitement of Mike’s Red Alert 2 print-outs had me on tenterhooks. The same way I poured over pages…

If I compiled a tech ‘naughty list’ for 2025, a la Father Christmas, there’d be plenty to choose from. AI ‘slop’ would top the list, followed by ads on streaming services, cloud-hosting outages and myriad junk that plagued our PCs and phones throughout the year (see our Uninstall feature page 62). Another bugbear concerns online file-conversion tools, which promise so much and deliver it so annoyingly. Whether it’s ad-stuffed websites, restrictions on the size and number of files you can upload, or convoluted conversion systems that require you to buy credits or enter your email address to obtain the converted file, these tools get my proverbial goat. “Well don’t use them then,” you may say, but I often need to convert documents, images and videos into formats I can actually…