After a long time of resisting significant price drops, the Asus Zenbook S 16 has finally dropped down to $1,000, which is $500 off its retail price.

It’s normal for laptops to dip in price toward the end of their lifespan, close to when an update comes out. But the Asus Zenbook S 16 has held on. To be fair, it’s an extremely high-end Windows laptop, one of the prettiest to come out last year. It’s sleek, portable, and has a striking design. It even gets fantastic battery life, on par with a MacBook. Speaking of MacBooks, this Zenbook is the laptop I saw tech journalists traveling with more than anything else. Given how much tech they review, that’s quite an endorsement.

But the S 16 has always been hard for me to recommend when the cheapest model available was $1,500. I was always on the lookout for a more significant price cut, but it never dropped more than a couple hundred bucks. And even though it always came with 24 GB of RAM and a terabyte of storage, the price was a hard pill to swallow. Well, the day has finally come. It’s now down to $1,000 over at Best Buy as part of the store’s Presidents’ Day sale. That’s an incredible price for this much laptop.

The previously mentioned memory and storage still apply here, along with the 2880 x 1800 OLED display with a 120-Hz refresh rate. This laptop basically has every high-end feature you could imagine, but one of my favorite aspects is the ports. Despite the thin profile, the S 16 keeps all the legacy ports you might want, including HDMI, USB-A, and even a full-size SD card slot.

There is also a smaller, 14-inch model, but its discount is not as strong as the 16-inch model. It comes in at $1,300 right now, which is still a solid price for this configuration.

I should say that Asus has an update in the works for 2026 with the latest Intel chips, but it’s only coming to the 14-inch model. I won’t lie: Based on my testing, these CPUs will make a significant difference in performance—especially on the graphics front. But I have a feeling Asus will be selling this device for an even higher price for much longer, especially with the recent development around memory shortage.

While the Zenbook S 16 is certainly the best deal at Best Buy for its Presidents’ Day sale, I would also recommend the Asus Zephyrus G14, which is also $500 off. This configuration comes with a powerful RTX 5070 Ti graphics card and is one of our favorite gaming laptops.

Waymo needs some help, according to an email message the self-driving developer sent to residents of Washington, DC, on Thursday.

For more than a year, Waymo has been pushing city officials to pass new regulations allowing its robotaxis to operate in the district. So far, self-driving cars can test in the city with humans behind the wheel, but cannot operate in driver-free mode. The Alphabet subsidiary—and its lobbyists—have asked local lawmakers, including Mayor Muriel Bower and members of the city council, to create new rules allowing the tech to go truly driverless on its public roads. The company has previously said it will begin offering driverless rides in DC this year.

But Waymo’s efforts to sway officials have stalled, so the company is now asking residents to apply some pressure. “We are nearly ready to provide public Waymo rides to everyone in DC,” says an email sent to those who have signed up for Waymo’s DC service. “However, despite significant support, District leadership has not yet provided the necessary approvals for us to launch.”

The email directs recipients to contact DC officials via a form letter that says, in part: “Over the past year, I have observed Waymo vehicles operating throughout our local areas, and I am thrilled about the potential advantages this service could provide, including enhanced accessibility and a decline in traffic-related incidents.” The communication urges DC residents to edit the letter to “use your own words,” because personalized messages “have a higher impact.” Only DC residents or those with DC addresses can participate, Waymo says.

In a written statement, Waymo spokesperson Ethan Teicher says, “We’ll be ready to serve Washingtonians this year, and urge the Mayor, the District Department of Transportation, and the City Council to act.” The company says that 1,500 people contacted district leaders through its email in the first 90 minutes after it was sent.

Generally, self-driving vehicle developers have only launched service in places where regulations clearly outline how the tech might hit the roads. Other US cities with Waymo service, including ones in California, Florida, and Texas, already had those rules in place before the company entered their markets. But as Waymo’s ambitions have grown larger, it has begun to target large blue-state cities where autonomous vehicle tech doesn’t yet have a “driver’s license.” Earlier this month, the company said it would begin testing in Boston, where city lawmakers pushed last year for an ordinance that would ban self-driving taxis from operating without a human behind the wheel. Waymo has said that it needs Massachusetts lawmakers to “legalize fully autonomous vehicles” before it can launch service in Boston.

Eventually, self-driving-vehicle developers hope that the US Congress will pass a law allowing the broader testing and operation of their tech across the US. On Tuesday, a House committee advanced a bill that would direct the federal government to create safety standards for autonomous vehicles, and prevent states from passing their own laws prohibiting the sale or use of the tech, or from requiring companies to submit information on crashes.

Waymo’s new DC pressure campaign echoes the ones launched by transportation disrupters, including ride-hailing giant Uber and bike- and scooter-share company Bird, nearly a decade ago. Like self-driving tech developers, those companies wanted to launch their new services in places where the rules didn’t align with their business ambitions. Ultimately, Uber and Lyft generally succeeded in getting laws passed in US statehouses allowing their services to operate on public roads—and preventing cities from creating their own laws.

Today, Waymo operates in six US metro areas—Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area—and plans to launch in more than 10 this year. Three other companies, including Nuro and Amazon-owned Zoox, have permits to test self-driving tech in Washington, DC.

Many people suspect that these bots are part of an AI company’s effort to collect training data from web pages. In 2025, AI bots accounted for a significant portion of overall web traffic, which crawl the internet for text and other information to feed to data-hungry large language models.

But there are some key differences between these Chinese bots and other AI bots. First, there’s simply way more of them. King says on his website that the traffic from China and Singapore accounts for 22 percent of overall traffic, while all other AI bots account for less than 10 percent combined.

Most leading AI companies clearly identify their bots to website operators, which also makes them easier to block. The frontier AI labs are “not as interested in evading” bot-blocking rules, says Brent Maynard, senior director of security technology and strategy at the internet infrastructure company Akamai. He says AI companies usually only start trying to disguise their bots after a website shuts the front door. This wave of Chinese bots, however, disguised themselves as normal human users from the start, and they have even bypassed common bot-blocking rules, several website owners told WIRED.

Beyond AI companies, there are other businesses incentivized to scrape the internet, including search crawlers and intelligence-gathering companies.

Rising Costs and Distorted Data

The good news, at least for now, is that the bots don’t seem to have an explicitly malicious purpose. They haven’t been publicly connected to any cyberattack and don’t seem to be scanning for vulnerabilities. But the lack of a clear motive also adds to the confusion.

Some website owners are worried that the bots are scanning copyrighted material without permission. Others say the surge has forced them to pay more for bandwidth, as bot traffic crowds out human users, or to invest in more sophisticated prevention tools. The visits also skew traffic analytics, distorting reports about who is actually visiting their sites.

But the biggest impacts are felt by people who earn revenue from attracting ad clicks on their websites. “This is destroying my AdSense strategies,” says Quintero, the paranormal blog owner, “because they are saying [your website is] only visited by bots, so your content is not something that is valuable to the viewer.” As a result, websites like his may be seen as less desirable to advertisers and penalized by Google.

Makeshift Solutions

Many people have complained about the China AI bot problem in online support channels over the past few months, or sent messages about it directly to their web-hosting providers. But so far, there are still few concrete answers.

Contacted by WIRED, WordPress acknowledged that it has seen reports in recent months that some of its sites are experiencing increased traffic from suspected AI bots or scrapers. “WordPress websites have always had a great structure that makes them easy to find and be indexed by search engines. Those same capabilities make them easily crawled [by] AI as well,” the company said in an unsigned email. Google, Cloudflare, and Squarespace did not respond to requests for comment.