Skype is used by over 100 million people today. More than 38 billion people subscribe to Office. Teams is used by more than 44 million folks on a daily basis to organize meetings and schedules.
But your home life? In the era of working from home, when coordination is more important than ever? It’s a mishmash of Wunderlist, Remember the Milk, scribbled notes, and Google Hangout chats — if you’ve gotten yourself even that organized.
With two brand new offerings — Microsoft 365 Personal and Microsoft 365 Family — the productivity giant aims to organize your personal life, bringing the same tools that keep your work life humming to your family.
The new services were announced today, March 30, offering chat tools and a way to share photos, as well as lists, calendars, safety tools, and more – but it’s not about doing more so much as getting the right things done, explained Yusuf Mehdi, vice president of Modern Life, Search, and Devices at Microsoft.
“We see a redefinition of what we think of as personal productivity,” Mehdi told Digital Trends in a preview ahead of the launch. “It’s not about how many checklists I can get done in a day, it’s can I get done the one thing I need to get done?”
The service is essentially Teams for your family: Just as you can have personal and work profiles in an app like Outlook or Slack, you will soon be able to build a personal profile in Teams for your family, and lean into the collaboration tools Microsoft has built there to stay connected with your family.
Subscriptions will be available worldwide on April 21. Microsoft 365 Personal costs $6.99 a month, while a family of up to six can use Microsoft 365 Family for $9.99 a month.
For that price, you get a complete suite of tools to manage your personal life, ensuring you’ll never forget to pick up the milk again. The main Dashboard interface pulls together chats, calendars, and shared family logins to services such as Netflix or Hulu (Microsoft calls it “Safe”). If a family member forgets a password or other info – say, the frequent flier number associated with your Delta account – you can easily zip the info across in a shared chat.
You can share calendars across family members as well, to keep tabs on school and sports events, date nights, or whatever. And you can finally build a personal calendar in Outlook to match, as well as find and keep tabs on files and photos in one spot, and back them up to OneDrive.
Much of the collaboration and videoconferencing is based on Skype – but Skype on steroids.
“Teams will take that to the next level, and let you have more robust ways to collaborate and communicate,” Mehdi said. In a blog post announcing the new offerings, he suggested consumers prepare by connecting with family and friends through Skype.
Meanwhile, Microsoft also announced big changes to Office 365 on Monday, starting with a name change: Office 365 is now Microsoft 365, a change meant to signify to consumers that more of Microsoft is coming in the subscription service, such as tech support and the power of artificial intelligence (A.I.). Broadly speaking, the company is using A.I. to create new tools, add new rich content types, and includ new cloud-powered experiences.
Of note for families looking to get organized is a Family Safety feature for Microsoft 365 that’s meant to help manage children’s screen time, prevent distracted driving, screen for inappropriate content, and more.
“We’re trying to bridge the divide between digital safety and family safety,” Mehdi said. The service includes new tools to filter content so teens and younger children can’t access the entire web, a new end-of-week report with details on browsing time and time spent in apps, and more. It also can be used to monitor physical location, letting a parent set an alert if a child leaves school, for example, or a senior wanders away from a managed care facility. The same app can monitor where someone drives, and it will report how often they checked their phone or texted while driving.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.