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Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

2026-04-23T07:34:18-04:00

Microsoft is rolling out a new Agent Mode inside Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint this week. Previously described by Microsoft as "vibe working," the Agent Mode is a more powerful version of the Copilot experience in Office that Microsoft has been trying to sell to businesses.

"When we first shipped Copilot, foundation models were not powerful enough to use Copilot to command the applications," admits Sumit Chauhan, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Office Product Group. "This meant Copilot was a passive partner in documents: it could answer questions but missed the mark when it was asked to take action on the canvas direc …

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Microsoft teases mysterious Discord and Xbox Game Pass partnership

2026-04-22T13:59:30-04:00

Microsoft has started teasing a new Discord and Xbox Game Pass partnership, just a day after lowering prices of its Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass subscriptions. Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma says the company is partnering with Discord again "as we continue to make Game Pass more flexible for our players."

It's not immediately clear what the latest Discord and Xbox partnership will result in, but given it's a Game Pass one it's likely related to some perks for subscribers of Xbox Game Pass. At the moment Game Pass Ultimate subscribers can get a month of Discord Nitro as part of the subscription, and it's possible that Microsoft and …

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Microsoft says the ‘idea’ of an Xbox mobile store ‘is not dead’

2026-04-22T13:42:45-04:00

Microsoft first revealed it was building an Xbox mobile gaming store to take on Apple and Google all the way back in 2022. Former Xbox president Sarah Bond even went on stage at a Bloomberg event nearly two years ago and promised the store would launch in July, 2024. Now, it looks like Microsoft has put the project on hold.

Better xCloud developer redphx noticed that the store URL Microsoft had been testing for the past couple of years no longer works. It's not clear exactly when it disappeared, but the last time the website was updated was nearly a year ago.

The store was originally supposed to compete with Google and Apple, but strict ap …

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Call of Duty never made much sense for Xbox Game Pass

2026-04-22T09:41:12-04:00

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. | Image: Activision Blizzard

Yesterday Microsoft announced some surprising news: at a time when everything in gaming is getting more expensive, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate was actually getting a price cut. Going forward, the subscription service will drop from $29.99 to $22.99 per month, less than a year after getting a major hike. But there's a caveat. Along with the cheaper price, Microsoft also announced that future Call of Duty games will no longer be available through Game Pass at launch.

It's the end to a strange experiment from Microsoft, in which it attempted to boost its subscription service at the expense of selling Call of Duty games, which also happens to be on …

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Xbox Game Pass Ultimate gets a price cut but loses new Call of Duty games

2026-04-21T13:15:06-04:00

After Xbox CEO Asha Sharma admitted last week that "Game Pass has become too expensive for players," Microsoft is dropping the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. Starting today, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate drops from $29.99 to $22.99 a month, and PC Game Pass moves to $13.99, down from $16.49 a month.

The price drops are being fueled in part by future Call of Duty titles no longer joining Game Pass Ultimate or PC Game Pass at launch. "New Call of Duty games will be added to Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass during the following holiday season (about a year later), while existing Call of Duty titles already in the library will …

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Microsoft Teams is trying to fix accidental hand-raising

2026-04-21T05:33:58-04:00

If you've ever had the embarrassing displeasure of interrupting a Microsoft Teams meeting by accidentally hitting the "raise hand" feature, then I have some good news for you. Microsoft is redesigning its online meeting software, which will move the raise hand button from the main toolbar and allow users to personalize the controls displayed there.

The update was announced on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap and is expected to roll out sometime in June this year. The changes will group the Raise Hand feature under the Reactions button "to reduce mis-clicks," according to Microsoft, which is handy because the two functions are easy to conflate at a …

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Microsoft planning Surface Laptop with an OLED display

2026-04-16T19:40:56-04:00

The Surface Laptop 7. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Microsoft is preparing to launch new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop models in the coming months. Windows Central reports that the refreshed models will include both Intel and Qualcomm variants, with Microsoft opting for an OLED display option for the Surface Laptop this year.

Microsoft is expected to launch new Surface Pro and Laptop models with Intel's Core Ultra Series 3 chips first, followed by Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 variants later this summer. This is reportedly because Qualcomm's latest chips are in short supply, but it reverses Microsoft's trend of shipping Qualcomm-powered Surface devices to consumers first in recent years.

While a …

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Microsoft’s new Xbox chief starts making her mark

2026-04-16T09:21:54-04:00

Microsoft's new Xbox chief has had a busy couple of months after promising "the return of Xbox." Asha Sharma met with publishers at the Game Developers Conference in March, and has also been on the road visiting Microsoft's own game studios and product teams in recent weeks. Sharma, who used to work in Microsoft's CoreAI division, is very much in learning mode and talking to as many people as she can before she makes strategic decisions on the future of Xbox.

Some of those decisions are about to be made very soon.

Sources at Xbox tell me Sharma has been looking closely at Game Pass pricing recently, with a view to offering a wider range of …

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Microsoft counters the MacBook Neo with freebies for students

2026-04-15T14:11:01-04:00

Apple's $599 MacBook Neo ($499 for students) has sent shockwaves through the PC ecosystem, and now Microsoft is responding with deals targeting students in the US. A new "Microsoft College Offer" is launching today, which will see the software giant bundle 12 months of free Microsoft 365 Premium and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with select Windows 11 PCs that have also been discounted.

Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo are all participating in this Microsoft College Offer, and Microsoft is even discounting some Surface devices days after hiking the prices of its Surface Pro and Surface Laptop models. Best Buy is selling a 15.3-inch Lenovo IdeaPad …

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Nothing makes it easy to share files between any Android phone and a Mac

2026-04-15T09:31:33-04:00

Images and text upload in seconds, but for bigger files Warp is too slow compared to direct device-to-device connections.

I test Android phones for a living, but I write about them using a company-supplied MacBook Air. Both platforms are great in their own right, but they're not so great at talking to one another. On a handful of Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy phones you can now AirDrop files directly to Apple machines; Nothing's new Warp app hopes to solve the problem for the rest of us, offering a seamless(ish) way to send files and text between one machine and the other.

Warp is the combination of an Android app and a browser extension, which means it'll only be helpful if you use a Chrome-based browser capable of installing the extension - but that does m …

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