News

• Beyerdynamic has announced the MMX 100 wireless and MMX 130 wireless
• The MMX 100 wireless launches on September 1 for £89
• The MMX 130 wireless arrives in October for £109

German audio specialist beyerdynamic has announced two new wireless headsets, the closed-back MMX 100 wireless and the open-back MMX 130 wireless.

Beyerdynamic's MMX gaming range expands with two new wireless headsets representing two styles of gaming: the closed-back MMX 100 wireless for players who want to minimize distracting ambient noise and focus on their game, or the MMX 130 wireless, which is ideal for gamers who prefer to experience the atmosphere, soundtracks, and ambient sounds in greater detail.

"With these two models, beyerdynamic is making its audio expertise accessible to an even wider gaming audience," the company said. "Rather than offering a plethora of unnecessary features and gimmicks, both headsets focus on the essentials: precise sound, high levels of comfort, flexible connectivity, and long-lasting quality."

The MX 100, with its velour ear pads and a lightweight 275-gram design, offers a closed-back design to reduce external noise, a detachable Meta Voice microphone for clear communication, and a replaceable battery that lasts over 80 hours.

It can also be connected to PCs, consoles, smartphones, and handheld devices via Bluetooth 6.0, the included low-latency USB dongle, or a cable.

As for the MMX 130, gamers can expect a wireless headset designed for audio enthusiasts, with an open-back design that balances "a natural, spacious soundstage" with external noise, whatever the user is listening to.

Sporting a titanium-coated 40 mm driver for precise sounds, the MMX 1300 is recommended for gamers who enjoy story-driven, open-world, role-playing games (RPGs), and simulation games.

"With the MMX 100 wireless and MMX 130 wireless, we're offering gamers not just two more headsets, but two different ways to experience their games," said Matthias Heilig, product marketing manager for gaming at beyerdynamic. "Those looking for focus and isolation will find it in the closed-back MMX 100 wireless. Those who want to experience gaming worlds as naturally and spatially as possible will find an exciting alternative in the open-back MMX 130 wireless."

The MMX 100 wireless will launch first on September 1 in Black and Arctic White for £89, while the MMX 130 wireless will follow in October, also in Black and Arctic White, for £109.

The MMX 100 wireless will also premiere at Gamescom 2026 and be available for public testing.

• The BluHub reads and writes Blu-rays, DVDs and CDs
• It has 4x USB 3.0 ports and two card reader slots
• The Kickstarter Super Early bird price is $59 (about £40 / AU$80)

If you've got a fairly recent computer you'll be vividly aware that for everything but high-powered gaming PCs, thin is most definitely in: the pursuit of ultra-thin laptops in particular means that computers have shed their optical drives and many of their expansion ports to reduce their size and weight. But what if you want those things without having to live in World of Hubs, like I currently do? One Kickstarter may have the answer.

Thanks to our pals at Tom's Hardware we've been introduced to a docking station with a difference: it's a USB hub that also has a Blu-ray drive in it. The BluHub, as it's called, is a 9-in-1 PC and Mac dock that promises "everything you need in one compact drive". It's smashed its Kickstarter goal, which to be fair was a very low $700 / £512 (about AU$977). Pledges are currently sitting at $214,411 / £157,127 (about AU$301,250).

It's clearly designed for people like me: I've got multiple hubs and accessories in front of my Mac so I can do things like burn discs, attach external storage and read camera memory cards, and that means a lot of cables and clutter. This could be a more elegant option, and it's not terribly expensive.

The BluHub connects via USB 3.2 Gen 2 at up to 10Gbps, and it's bus-powered so you don't need a power supply. It's compatible with Windows, macOS, Linux, Chrome OS and USB On-The-Go for mobile devices.

In addition to the expected USB ports (4x USB-A / USB 3.0) it has SD and microSD slots and a Blu-ray, DVD and CD drive capable of up to 6x Blu-ray burning speeds.

The promotional images confused me at first because what looks like a lid for the BD/DVD/CD drive isn't; it's just a place to park a disc or discs. The drive itself pops out of the side, with the same kind of mechanism as the drives in desktop PCs.

It's not remotely pretty, but it's a lot less messy than my desk — and the mobile compatibility means it's an interesting option for road warriors who need to expand their Android tablet or iPad.

The retail price of the BluHub will be $129 (£90 / AU$180), but at the moment there's a super early bird offer of $59 (about £40 / AU$80) with a predicted ship date of November 2026.

Whether that early bird deal is a good one or not very much depends on your opinion of crowdfunders and your risk tolerance: they can be a great way to get in on the ground floor and save some money, but you're buying something without the benefit of being able to read reviews or see what customers have to say, and there are no guarantees.

Many early commenters on the likes of Reddit also seem a little dubious of the BluHub's credentials, noting that the enclosure appears 3D-printed and that the listing doesn't reveal the make or model of the Blu-ray drive.

As always, all of the usual caveats apply — Kickstarter isn't a retailer and doesn't offer refunds after a project is fully funded, so consider yourself warned.

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• Researchers show how an expired contactless card can still complete a real purchase because the expiry date the terminal reads is not covered by its signature
• The attack needs physical possession of the discarded card and two ordinary smartphones, and results vary per bank, with Visa cards being susceptible in testing
• Existing EMV protections can detect the relay, but they are optional and were not enabled on any card or terminal tested, and neither Visa nor the notified banks have confirmed a fix is in the works

For a layman, the date printed on a credit card looks like a hard stop, but that might not always be the case.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that a 'zombie card' past its expiration date can be persuaded to complete a contactless purchase at a real checkout terminal, creating a real security threat.

The irony is that it is not that EMV cryptography is not bypassed in any way, but rather that card expiry is enforced in a different way for contactless payments, as a policy check between two parties rather than as a fixed property of the card itself, and interestingly, the parties do not always know who is the one checking.

Building on the last part, a contactless transaction involves a card, a point-of-sale terminal, the merchant's bank, a card network, and the issuer. Each holds a fragment of the decision that eventually results in a successful or declined card transaction.

The EMV contactless flow is only selectively authenticated: some fields travel between the card and terminal in unencrypted text and are linked to cryptographic verification later, opening a potential attack vector for users with physical access to an expired card.

The exposure here is not that those fields can be read, since the expiry date is printed on the card anyway, but that it can be changed with relative ease. The Application Expiration Date that the terminal reads sits in the unprotected portion.

In the Visa configuration the team tested, that field is not covered by the card's digital signature and is subsequently not cryptographically bound to the expiry value the issuer sees in the online authorization request.

While this should not be the case, it opens an attack vector for a device between the card and the terminal that processes the charge by simply modifying the expiry value to one that is still valid. The issue is compounded by a second issue: cards carry an expiry date inside the digital certificate used to establish the card-to-terminal conversation, and researchers have found that the certificate outlasts the printed date on the plastic. In essence, a check that might have caught the problem is looking at a clock set further ahead.

The scope of the attack, however, is narrow: it affects Visa contactless cards only, with Mastercard, Discover, and American Express rejecting the altered expiry outright. It also requires physical access to the card and two smartphones to pull it off, making it a slightly more complex endeavor, to say the least.

The irony is that EMV does have a protection that would essentially undo such an attempt altogether: Relay Resistance Protocol, which measures timing to detect an inserted relay and can stop the transaction altogether, but it remains optional and was not enabled on any of the terminals or cards the researchers tested.

The team notified Visa and the relevant banks in May 2025 and again in December 2025, supplying a reproduction guide, transaction traces, and a video. Visa's report passed initial triage, and the company's red team was reproducing it.

However, as of publication, neither Visa nor the notified banks had confirmed a mitigation attempt, and Visa also did not respond to a press request from The Register for comment.

The underlying failure, however, is based on how payment decisions have now spread across multiple players, including chip, terminal, network, and bank architectures, all of which assume that expiry is someone else's problem, an approach that could come back to haunt them and their customers. For now, the researcher's advice remains important until a fix is rolled out: stop treating dead plastic as harmless, destroy the underlying chip, and cut through the card numbers to prevent abuse.

• Four GEEKOM A9 Mega mini PCs link together through simple USB4 cables
• Each unit runs on the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 processor chip
• Combined cluster memory reaches 512GB across all four connected systems

Geekom has released the DeepSeek V4 Flash model across four A9 Mega mini PCs, forming a distributed cluster aimed at enterprise AI workloads.

The setup connects the devices through USB4 rather than relying on a traditional data center server.

Each A9 Mega runs on the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chip, which combines 16 Zen 5 CPU cores with Radeon 8060S graphics and unified memory in one compact chassis

The four-node configuration brings a combined 512GB of RAM to the task, with Ubuntu, ROCm, and DwarfStar software distributing the optimized model across the machines.

An OpenAI-compatible API links applications and AI agents to the cluster, while USB4 removes any need for a proprietary switch or server rack.

The arrangement allows organizations to keep prompts, documents, source code, and credentials within local infrastructure rather than routing them through a public cloud.

Businesses could theoretically build private knowledge assistants capable of searching contracts, manuals, and internal reports without external exposure.

For agent-based systems, Geekom says the cluster can process tools, policies, memory, and logs before executing any action, with a technical path that has operated using contexts up to 250K tokens.

Testing reported by Geekom recorded approximately 14.61 tokens per second at single concurrency, while P95 time to first token reached about 0.42 seconds.

The company says the configuration also provides greater capacity for long prompts, rather than concentrating solely on faster short-response generation.

Users can begin with one or two A9 Mega systems before expanding the configuration to four nodes as workloads increase over time.

Each machine can operate independently, while connected systems can contribute to distributed inference when greater computing capacity becomes necessary for demanding workloads.

The A9 Mega mini PC itself supports up to 128GB of LPDDR5x memory, although four systems provide the stated 512GB cluster capacity for distributed inference workloads.

Its specifications include 120W sustained performance, dual M.2 PCIe Gen4x4 storage slots, and support for up to 8TB of RAID-configured storage.

Geekom lists the A9 Mega at $3,999 for a configuration with 128GB RAM and 2TB SSD, while the four-system cluster reaches $16,000.

The individual units also carry 126 total TOPS of combined processing output, with 120W of sustained thermal design power under load.

It also supports Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, dual 2.5G Ethernet, and four simultaneous 8K displays for professional environments.

The performance values above are vendor-supplied benchmarks without third-party testing - therefore, the real-world reliability of the setup for sustained enterprise use has not been independently confirmed.

• A 350-ton electric mining truck just rolled off a Chinese production line
• Zijin Longking ZL230E’s battery holds 1,400 kWh, enough to power dozens of typical homes
• It charges from 10% to 90% in about 25 minutes

Zijin Longking has launched the ZL230E, a pure electric mining truck the company describes as the largest of its kind currently produced in China.

The company says the new mining rig combines heavy transport capability with a battery system designed for faster charging cycles.

Weighing 350 tons in total, with a curb weight of 120 tons and a load capacity of 230 tons, it suits ultra-large open-pit mines.

The ZL230E cargo box offers a stacking volume of 125m³, allowing operators to move larger quantities of materials across mine sites.

It uses a multi-axle central distributed independent drive structure with dual 800kW motors for power delivery, a system which allows the vehicle to adjust power distribution while operating on difficult terrain and steep mining routes.

Longking says the electric truck can support continuous heavy-duty work while reducing energy consumption during transportation activities.

“This new vehicle is a powerful tool designed for high-intensity continuous operations in ultra-large open-pit mines,” said Huang Wei, president of Longking.

The ZL230E relies on a 1,400 kWh battery pack, making it one of the largest battery-powered mining vehicles available with more capacity than 23 Tesla Model 3 EV units.

Zijin Longking claims that this battery supports rapid charging from 10% to 90% in 25 minutes.

Such charging capability reduces downtime and allows mining operations to maintain higher levels of equipment availability.

The ZL230E includes several safety technologies designed for demanding mining environments where reliability remains essential.

Its structure uses Longking’s patented multi-ring beam high-rigidity frame design with additional control systems.

The truck also includes redundant braking, steering systems, and intelligent energy management features for safer operation.

China Construction Machinery Association president Su Zimeng said the vehicle reflects continued progress in domestic large-tonnage electric mining equipment development.

He added that the launch supports wider adoption of electric solutions across China’s off-highway mining vehicle sector.

Zijin Mining, the parent company of Longking, has expanded its electric mining truck fleet from 13 units in 2020 to 1,719 units in 2025.

The company plans to replace its fuel-powered mining trucks with electric alternatives within three years under its carbon reduction strategy.

Earlier in 2026, Longking delivered 15 pure electric mining trucks with 150-ton load capacity to Julong Copper Mine.

Those vehicles recorded daily transport volumes exceeding 2,000 tons with equipment availability above 90%.

Their transport energy consumption was reduced by more than 17% compared with similar products, according to company information.

“We are accelerating the development of new energy mining equipment through independent research and innovation,” said Xie Xiongwei, vice president of Zijin Mining and chairman of Zijin Longking.

The company plans to combine electric trucks with renewable power sources, energy storage systems, charging facilities, and swapping infrastructure.

Taking a photo and altering it, like you can do with Adobe Photoshop, is old hat these days, as so many apps allow you to do just that. But if you’re an artist who loves to paint, this type of software can’t replicate the feel of watercolours, oils, acrylics, and pastels as they’re applied onto a canvas.

Some developers saw this as a challenge: how to replicate painting on a canvas in the digital world. Escape Motions’ Rebelle is a serious competitor in this field, and have introduced a few new features with their latest 8th version. Let’s take a look at it.

You can check out Rebelle 8 by clicking here.

• A multi-platform software package
• One-off license at a cost that won’t break the bank
• Free trial available

There’s a lot of good news for people who like to own - actually own - multi-platform software: first of, Rebelle is available for Windows and Mac users (sadly, Linux fans are all too often left out of the loop, as they are here).

Even better, there’s no option to rent the software: you purchase it with a one-time fee of $90. Which is quite reasonable for software of this caliber, especially since you’re allowed to install it on up to three computers.

There is a more advanced version, called Rebelle Pro for $150. Finally, Escape Motions offers a very generous 30-day trial so you can check out the software and see how it works for you.

You will have to create an account with them in order to access it, but all they ask is an email address - you keep your credit card details to yourself.

All in all, this feels like a very good start. Rebelle 8 available to buy from developer Escape Motions by clicking here.

• Pricing & plans: 5 / 5

• A well-designed interface
• Familiar enough to ease you in if you’re new to Rebelle
• Different enough that there’s going to be a bit of a learning curve

If this is your first foray into Rebelle, you’ll find the interface very similar to other image editing applications. You have two sidebars, one on either side. The left one focusses on your brushes, while on the right, you have your layers, color selections, and navigational options.

The rest of the screen real estate is devoted to your canvas, but that’s not all there is to it. Hop on over to the Menubar’s Window menu to see other tools, which are available by default as floating windows.

However the interface is highly flexible, enabling you to dock these windows into either sidebar, be it as their own unique dedicated area, or sharing the space with other tools - when that happens, a small series of tabs will appear above that shared section, allowing you to switch between them.

This allows you to create a unique setup to match what you need to see as you digitally paint your projects. You’re also able to export this layout to make it easy to set up Rebelle on another computer with your customized personalised setup.

Overall, the interface is similar enough to not feel intimidating, but different enough that it will take you a few minutes to understand where everything is, and what it does. But the main takeaway is that it’s well designed, and is easy enough to understand that it won’t take you long to get the gist of it.

• Interface: 4 / 5

• So many brushes to play with, and so many parameters to explore
• Lots of different types of canvases
• Create truly unique projects… as long as you can handle some of the quirks

The tools available are pretty much all the various brushes you can work with - and there are so many. You start with selecting the type of brush from the top left section of the interface, like an acrylic brush, or one for watercolors, inks, pastels, etc.

Beneath that is another panel, with a handful of parameters to customize how the selected brush will paint on your chosen canvas, and you could easily leave it at that, but that would be ignoring the dozens of options further down the sidebar.

For instance, the Express Oil brushes have sub-categories, such as Round, Glaze, and Flat, and if that’s not enough, a drop down menu allows you to browse through and purchase additional ones.

The options and flexibilities are immense, and it can be a lot of fun to paint digitally in that way. You also have all the advantages of working on a computer, such as having multiple layers, cloning sections, erasing others, the lot.

There were a few things I was disappointed by, the biggest one being that I could only have one project open at a time. As someone who far too often has too many ideas on the go, this felt unnecessarily restrictive to me.

Another had to do with controlling the canvas itself. I work on a laptop and use a multi-touch trackpad for everything, but even with all the options I could find disabled, that canvas would move or suddenly zoom in or out at random moments.

Thankfully there’s a handy and simple keyboard shortcut to bring it all back to the centre, filling the screen, but it got really annoying by the end. I think the lesson here is don’t use the trackpad when doing serious artistic work with Rebelle.

Also, despite using a powerful computer to test this out (a laptop with an M5 chip), I felt like sometimes I had to wait a few seconds for the software to render the stroke I made. This app needs a lot of power.

• Tools: 4 / 5

• No revolutionary ‘wow’ additions
• Relatively small improvements makes creative life much easier

Version 8 brings a few refinements to this software package - nothing earth shattering, but they’re welcome additions nonetheless. Here are some I felt were important to mention.

The Canvas Panel has been streamlined, making it easy to select a new type of paper and see all those you don’t yet have, but are available for purchase - you can even test this new canvas prior to acquiring it (if this constant advertisement is not your thing, use the filter options to remove those as yet un-owned canvases from the list).

On the other side of the interface are your favourite brushes. That’s nothing new. But right next to them is a new tab, featuring all the latest brushes you’ve used in your current session. This is a most welcome way to help you keep track of what you’ve been working with without you having to do anything.

When it comes to painting, there’s always been a limit to how big a brush can be. In the standard sidebar, that’s usually up to 100. Switch to the Creator Brush panel and you can now go up to 3,000 which is almost big enough to cover an entire canvas with one brush stroke.

There’s also a new Symmetry tool which essentially cuts your canvas right down the middle and everything you draw on one side is instantly mirrored on the other.

And last on my list is the ‘Line’ tool which always allowed you to easily draw parallel lines, but now lets you add perpendicular ones as well, which can save you a heck of a lot of time.

You’re a creative who’s always loved the feel of the brush on your canvas, are looking for a way to reproduce this digitally, and love the fact you only need to pay once to own the software.

Your creative outlet doesn’t extend to replicating how real-life brushes work in a digital environment, and you’d be much happier with the likes of Photoshop or Pixelmator Pro instead.

I fired up my trusty M5 MacBook Pro for this review of Rebelle 8. I sadly couldn’t test the software on my PC laptop - it’s high time I upgraded anyway - although it does show that Rebelle needs more oomph than a lot of other software in its category.

The minimum requirements are an Intel i7 chip with 16GB of RAM, and my PC can’t match that. Considering the computations needed to simulate how real-life paint and brushes behave, I’m not surprised at all that Rebelle 8 would need more power than Photoshop.

But on my Mac, aside from the issues I highlighted in the review, I had no complaints, and the gallery on Escape Motions’ website shows how realistic the paintings done with Rebelle can end up looking.

For more creative tools, we tested the best photo editors and the best digital art and drawing software.

Two schools of thought exist in the Call of Duty community. One praises the high-speed arcade action of Black Ops sub-series, sliding around corners on smaller maps while racking up incredible kill counts. The other craves the more considered pacing of the recent Modern Warfare games, where firefights are grittier and more immersive, in larger and more complex environments that reward tactical play more than speed and aggression.

With Modern Warfare 4, developer Infinity Ward is trying to marry both styles of play. “If you're too strict in one direction or the other, that's where it becomes a problem,” multiplayer creative director Joe Cecot explained in my visit to the studio’s Los Angeles HQ earlier this year. “We want it to feel really good for you, but also balanced.”

Pleasing both audiences is a task I would have thought impossible: surely the enjoyment of one is opposed to that of the other?

But, after nearly ten hours hands-on with the ongoing Modern Warfare 4 beta, I think the team might have really pulled it off. That, combined with cutting-edge graphics and a plethora of new mechanical Innovations, has me confident we’re on track for a generational Call of Duty game — maybe even the best in the series so far.

The first thing any returning Call of Duty player will notice dropping into Modern Warfare 4 is that it’s a very fast and fluid game.

Tactical sprint, the option to double-tap the sprint button to enter a faster stride, is back on by default, and it feels smoother than ever before. Rather than lasting for a fixed duration, your character’s speed gradually decreases as you go to reflect their tiredness — removing that stop-start feeling that made Modern Warfare II’s pacing so bitty.

The overall movement speed is pretty rapid, helping you traverse maps quickly and minimizing downtime between combat encounters. Going long stretches without coming across other players was a real issue in some of the bigger 6v6 maps of previous entries (MWII’s infamously dull Valderas Museum immediately springs to mind) and, while many of the maps available in this beta are quite small, I’m optimistic that it won’t be such a problem this time around.

Overhauled ballistic simulation means the guns in MW4 are more realistic than ever before. Rather than a slapdash bloom calculation, bullet trajectory is authentically calculated based on the actual position of your weapon in the virtual world. It sounds like a minor change, but you can really feel the difference. Hip-firing your guns is genuinely viable now: if your barrel is pointed towards the enemy on your screen, your shot will hit.

Most guns take a fair chunk of time to aim, so this lets you play more aggressively no matter your chosen weapon type.

Try to take an objective hip-firing a slow-to-aim weapon in MWII, and you’ll end up dead with your entire magazine buried in the nearest wall. In MW4, you actually stand a chance, which stops matches from reaching a gridlock where everyone sticks to cover aiming down their own little sightlines.

It balances out the faster movement perfectly as well. I’ve already encountered players sliding around corners to try to gain an advantage as you can in a similarly snappy Black Ops game and dispatched them effortlessly with a hip-fired shot.

The Zip Gun, an all-new item that replaces the grenade in your lethal slot, is specifically geared towards this kind of situation. It’s a 3D-printed pistol that automatically unloads its entire clip in a quick burst when drawn, giving you a vital last-ditch line of defense if you’re caught mid-reload by an enemy player getting in your face.

You can still win plenty of fights by being fast, don’t get me wrong, and it feels great to do so, but it’s not the one-size-fits-all winning strategy that it is in, say,Black Ops 7.

But what about those who still prefer to lock down specific zones or slowly advance towards objectives? They’re well catered to with a range of new tools to try. The razor wire field upgrade, for example, is a little mine that deploys a massive coil of barbed wire that slows enemies while draining their health so you can place it in doorways or at keychoke points for effective area denial.

Given all the ways you can counter fast-movers, taking things slow and playing tactically never puts you at a disadvantage. In fact, it can often work in your favor, as the relatively quick TTK (time to kill) lets you shred anyone you manage to catch off guard by flanking.

Although as a die-hard Black Ops fan, I have to admit that sprinting everywhere with an SMG or shotgun is my personal preference, I’ve been experimenting with both styles of play in my matches so far and struggle to label one definitively superior. It’s a genuinely impressive feat for Infinity Ward to have pulled off this tricky balance — doubly so given this is still just a beta and you would expect at least a few teething issues.

The mechanics are nailed down, then, and everything else about MW4 points to an experience that’s equally polished across the board. The maps available to try are well-designed and include a good mix of global locations, all rendered with a stunning level of detail and elevated by plenty of artistic flair, with special details like animated round intros and floating logos to help them all feel distinct.

The randomized Kill Block, with a layout split into three randomized blocks, is a surprising highlight too. Going in, I thought it would be a bit of a gimmick. It’s now become one of my favorite maps thanks to just how varied it is.

The presentation remains extremely strong even outside the matches themselves. That clunky Netflix-style user interface from recent games is gone, replaced with a much sleeker side-bar design, and that boring lobby animation (the one that had your hero wandering around an almost completely blank void) has finally been binned in favor of operator-specific sequences that convey so much more character.

That’s all without getting into the gritty campaign (one great level is available to sample as part of the beta offering) or the promising DMZ extraction shooter mode that will be available at launch. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is on track to be a major hit when it launches for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2 on October 23.

It’s back-to-school season, which means there are plenty of great deals to be had on everything tech related. But you don’t have to be going to school or college to get in on the action — in fact, there all sorts of ways to score a discount, whatever your situation.

Here, we’ve put together some of the best ways you can get free or heavily discounted software, whether or not you’re a student. Read on and you’ll see there are many ways to score a brilliant bargain that might take you by surprise.

Many companies know that students tend to be strapped for cash, and they therefore try to tempt educational customers to make a purchase by steeply discounting the price — or waiving it altogether.

For example, you can snag free access to Microsoft 365 apps if you’re a student, while educational institutions get the same deal. This is limited to web-based versions of the apps, but it’s a good way to net yourself a solid set of free office apps with absolutely no cost involved.

If you’d rather have the desktop apps, students can get a 50% discount on Microsoft 365 with a valid education email address. You can also get one year of Microsoft 365 for free when you buy a qualifying PC desktop or laptop. Microsoft also throws in a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and an Xbox Wireless Controller for free.

Looking further afield, Amazon Prime offers discounted rates and sometimes markets extended free trials to students and young adults, while other apps and services with student discounts include Adobe Creative Cloud, Apple Music, Evernote, Headspace, Spotify and more.

So many companies run student discounts that if there’s an app you’re interested in, it’s always worth investigating whether your student status will get you money off.

Deals don’t end the moment you enter the workforce. In fact, some of the best money-off opportunities are reserved for those in full-time employment. The catch is that they often depend on the type of work you do, but there are still plenty of deals to be had.

If you want to look after your logins, you can get free access to both 1Password and Proton Pass if you’re a journalist. Proton’s entire suite of apps — including a VPN, office apps, encrypted cloud storage and an email service — are free for journalists, in fact. Similarly, VPN provider Windscribe offers cost-free access if you’re a reporter or if you work for a charity.

Microsoft gives a wide range of discounts to nonprofits, including on office apps, security software, AI tools, and more. The Google for Nonprofits program offers also free and discounted access to Google services for NGOs.

Even if you don’t work in these sectors, you could still be in line for money off. Plenty of companies have partnerships with prominent app developers and get discounts on their software, so be sure to ask your employer if they run a scheme like this.

You don’t always have to look far for free or cheap apps — they’re often bundled with your device’s operating system. Microsoft, Google and Apple all have free password managers, for instance. Apple’s is a standalone app while Microsoft’s and Google’s live in the Edge and Chrome web browsers, respectively, meaning they work cross-platform and can be used on competing operating systems.

While these password managers are excellent for managing your accounts, they might lack more advanced features compared to third-party options. Be sure to check if they do everything you need before picking one up.

There are other ways your operating system can help you out. Take Apple’s macOS, which comes with a range of top-class office apps, including Pages, Numbers and Keynote. Google, too, has its own series of very capable office apps that are based in the cloud.

If you use different devices that run on different operating systems — for example, you have a Windows PC but also an iPhone — make sure you check whether the apps that come with one operating system can be used on another. If not, you might need to find an alternative app that runs well cross-platform so that you can access your files on any device.

Despite all these ways to get money off your favorite software, you shouldn’t overlook the fact that there are some excellent free apps out there that are and always have been toll-free. Sometimes, the best way to get free software is to simply take the free option.

Video editor DaVinci Resolve is used by professionals in the movie industry, yet offers a totally free version that is incredibly capable. LibreOffice is a solid Microsoft Office alternative that requires no payment and can go toe-to-toe with Microsoft’s best. VLC can play almost any video format under the sun without ever asking for your cash. And there are many more out there.

Just be aware that many free apps are limited in some way compared to paid-for alternatives. A frequent practice is to lock more advanced features or higher limits behind a paywall, meaning you get a somewhat stunted experience if you don’t pay. Or you might get a free trial of a premium app that times out after a certain number of days or weeks.

There are other considerations. Be careful when using free apps that handle sensitive data. Some (but not all) free VPNs have been found to steal user data, for example, which undermines their privacy claims.

But that doesn’t mean you should forget about free software entirely. As apps like DaVinci Resolve and LibreOffice show, paying is not a requirement to getting a great app on your device.