My old OnePlus 5 battery started giving out and I’d been a OnePlus person for years, so it wasn’t a hard sell to me in principle to get an updated version of it. However when I actually had it in my hands and read up on what they’d done to the software, the direction OxygenOS had gone after the merge with Oppo’s ColorOS, and it wasn’t the comforting OS I thought I was buying. I sent it back, and ended up with a Samsung S24+, and the reason I settled on it wasn’t the camera or the screen, it was that Samsung had put a number on how long they’d keep updating it: seven years of OS and security updates, committed from January 2024, which is when the S24 line launched, a number I’d looked up before I bought it and the actual deciding factor. ...

I had assumed AI adoption was still on its way up and would keep going for a while yet. Ofcom reckons 54% of UK adults now use AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini, up from 31% in 2024, which means a bit under half don’t, and I had those people down as not having got round to it yet. Pew’s American figures from February say otherwise. Among people who don’t use chatbots, 60% give lack of interest as a major reason and only 29% say not knowing how, and around seven in ten say they’re unlikely to start within the year. That isn’t a queue waiting to be shown, it’s a decision most of them have already made, and I had it the wrong way round. ...