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At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Solid connectivity options Easily viewable display Windows Hello facial recognition Cons Performance lags behind x86 systems Battery-life isn’t a standout Bland display and design Our Verdict The choice to switch to a Qualcomm SoC should have come with some advantage over other systems, but our testing couldn’t really find one. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today The Dell Inspiron 14 (5441) is yet another iteration of a machine that’s seen many in the past year. This one changes very little outwardly. It shifts a few ports and vents, and it swaps facial recognition in place of a fingerprint reader. The bigger change is under the hood, where the Dell Inspiron 14 has switched over to an ARM chip from Qualcomm. There’s been a lot of excitement around these chips, and the Dell Inspiron 14 has put one on offer with a starting price of $749. That said, Dell chose the weakest Snapdragon X Plus chip of the bunch and did little else to make this laptop truly shine, leaving little reason to consider it over the many other quality laptops you can find near its price, including Dell’s own excellent Inspiron 14 Plus. Further reading: Best laptops 2024: Premium, budget, gaming, 2-in-1s, and more Dell Inspiron 14: Specs and features Model number: 5441 CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 Memory: 16GB LPDDR5x Graphics/GPU: Adreno X1-45 Graphics Display: 14-inch 1200p IPS Storage: 512GB PCIe Gen4 SSD Webcam: 1080p + IR Connectivity: 2x USB4 Type-C with Power Delivery and DisplayPort Alternate Mode, 1x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, 1x MicroSD card reader, 1x 3.5mm combo audio Networking: Qualcomm FastConnect7800 WiFi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 Biometrics: Windows Hello facial recognition Battery capacity: 54 watt-hours Dimensions: 12.36 x 8.81 x 0.7 inches Weight: 3.3 pounds MSRP: $799 as-tested ($749 base) Dell Inspiron 14: Design and build quality This laptop does little to differentiate itself from the many Inspiron permutations that have come before it. It bears more than a little resemblance to the Inspiron 14 Plus I tested earlier this year. And even though this isn’t a Plus mode, it gets the classier touch with a sturdy aluminum chassis all around. It’s not overly thick at 0.7 inches nor overly heavy at 3.3 pounds. It could certainly be more svelte, but it’s meeting expectations for a sub-$1,000 laptop.  Despite the more premium build, The Inspiron 14 still ends up looking rather bland. It’s all silver save for the black plastic of the keyboard and display bezel, which date the design a bit. The frame is nicely rounded and doesn’t make any major design statements.  The hinge takes a small step away from basic by being of the sort that lifts that back edge of the laptop when opened beyond 90-degrees. While this can improve typing ergonomics, the trade off is less comfort when using the laptop on a lap, where the back edge of the display will add pressure to the thighs. The bottom of the laptop sits on two small rubber feet at the front and one wide one at the back. There are two small slits for the speakers near the front of the laptop, and there’s a grate for airflow. Curiously, the grate doesn’t line up all that well with the fan inside the Inspiron 14, which could impact its efficacy.  Dell Inspiron 14: Keyboard, trackpad IDG / Mark Knapp The Inspiron 14’s keyboard is uninspired and yet, at the same time, quite capable. The keycaps offer just enough stabilization and resistance to provide a firm platform for typing. So even though the keyboard doesn’t have a particularly memorable feel, it’s more than up to the task of snappy typing. With just an hour or so of using the laptop, I was already able to get my typing speed up to 118-words-per-minute with 96 percent accuracy in Monkeytype. I’d love to see a little more contour to the key caps, as I find most of my typos come from reaching the edge of the flat keycaps, which are hard to feel out. The keys include basic white backlighting that effectively illuminates all of the legends.  The trackpad is nothing too special. It’s plenty smooth and reasonably large, though not quite as wide as it could be. It’s enough for even large hands, but there are certainly better out there. It has a somewhat deep physical click, which proved largely consistent in my testing.  The keycaps offer just enough stabilization and resistance to provide a firm platform for typing. So even though the keyboard doesn’t have a particularly memorable feel, it’s more than up to the task of snappy typing. Dell Inspiron 14: Display, audio IDG / Mark Knapp If you love a quality display, don’t get too excited. It’s a big letdown with just 65 percent coverage of the sRGB color space and 50 percent of the DCI-P3 color space. This makes content of all sorts look decidedly bland even with its 1690:1 contrast ratio. The display gets reasonably bright with a 370.9-nit peak brightness, and that combines well with a matte finish for easy visibility even in un-ideal conditions. But compared to the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus, it’s an all-around downgrade. That laptop hit 79 percent DCI-P3 coverage, a 418-nit peak brightness, and boasted a higher resolution.  The Inspiron 14’s speakers are a mixed bag as well. They fire out the bottom of the laptop, and this can leave them sounding a bit boxed in depending on the surface they’re set on, especially when listening at high volumes. High volumes also come with a bit of reverberation in the chassis, making for harsher listening. At lower volumes, the speakers are rather satisfying, offering a touch of bass depth alongside bright and clear mids, higher frequencies aren’t well done, coming through as more of a high-pitched sibilance. This matters less for dialogue but hurts music.  Dell Inspiron 14: Webcam, microphone, biometrics IDG / Mark Knapp The Inspiron 14 offers just a 1080p webcam, but it does surprisingly well. In a modestly lit room, it managed to capture bright and clear visuals without noticeable noise. The footage also didn’t struggle with exposure. The ability to capture enough light helps significantly with sharpness as well, as even sharp high-resolution cameras that need to resort to high ISO settings will end up with so much digital noise that their visuals end up soft and grainy. When you’re not using the camera, there’s a physical shutter that flips over the sensors above the display. The webcam also provides helpful Windows Hello facial recognition for quick sign-ons and biometric authentication. Though the keyboard layout is similar to other Dell laptops with fingerprint scanners, the Inspiron 14 doesn’t get one.  The microphone does its job well, capturing my voice clearly while easily subduing light background noise.  Dell Inspiron 14: Connectivity IDG / Mark Knapp The Dell Inspiron 14 is at least on point when it comes to connectivity. It’s not compromising on connection quality with two USB4 Type-C ports capable of some serious bandwidth, display output, and power. Splitting these ports between each side would have been nice, but instead Dell situated both on the left edge alongside a microSD card reader. The right side of the laptop includes a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port and a 3.5mm headphone jack, giving the Inspiron 14 a quick leg up on even XPS models when it comes to wired connections.  With a Qualcomm chipset inside, the Inspiron 14 gets Qualcomm FastConnect7800 Wi-Fi 7, which has been plenty fast and stable in my testing. It also gets a more recent Bluetooth 5.4 connection.   Dell Inspiron 14: Performance The Dell Inspiron 14 isn’t promising to be a performance beast built around the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 — the lowest-tier chip in Qualcomm’s lineup. I’ve already seen Qualcomm’s higher-tier chips struggling to keep up with Intel and AMD chips when emulation is required, and the Inspiron 14’s chip has even less horsepower available to help it keep up. Sure enough, whether it’s single- or multi-core performance, the Inspiron 14 struggles to keep up with the $999 Dell Inspiron 14 Plus and $849 Asus Zenbook 14 OLED in Cinebench R23, Cinebench R20, and Cinebench R15, all of which don’t run natively on ARM. Even the $749 Acer Aspire Vero 16’s relatively weak Intel Core Ultra 5 125U chip outperformed the Dell in these tests.   That’s something of a tough spot for the Inspiron 14 to be in, as it’s not like the CPU is bad. In fact, when it gets to run a native app, the tides can turn. Other systems that it loses to in Cinebench R23, like the Lenovo Yoga 9i 14 Gen 9 and Acer TravelMate P4, and up falling behind it in Cinebench R24, which runs natively on ARM. The problem is the variably performance can lead to an inconsistent experience. Plus, it’s not like the Inspiron 14 will always turn the tides, as it still loses to the Dell Inspiron 14 2-in-1 7445, and therefore very likely still would lag behind the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED which runs the same chip. To the Inspiron 14’s credit, it does run the Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 faster than the Asus ProArt PZ13 ran it, but that was a compact tablet and the Inspiron 14 is a sizable laptop. Graphics performance also isn’t a strong point for the Dell Inspiron 14. In Time Spy, it struggles to keep up with even the basic Intel Graphics found inside the Acer Aspire Vero. And next to both Intel Arc Graphics and AMD Radeon 780M graphics, it’s no contest.  3DMark’s Night Raid benchmark is a slightly different story. It was designed with ARM systems in mind, and sure enough, the Dell Inspiron 14 ends up performing better. Both the Inspiron 14 and Asus ProArt PZ13 manage to leap ahead of the Acer Aspire Vero 16 and its Intel Graphics. But they still don’t come close to scratching the performance of Intel Arc Graphics in the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus or AMD Radeon 780M graphics in the Asus ZenBook 14 OLED.  The Inspiron 14 also experiences a hiccup I’ve encountered on many Windows systems with weak integrated graphics. While streaming video, it will occasionally stall all video updates to the screen, appearing to have completely frozen. The system remains responsive, however, and quickly minimizing all windows restores everything. But a simple fix doesn’t erase the fact that the Inspiron 14 is experiencing a glitch that shouldn’t happen in the first place. Dell Inspiron 14: Battery life Battery life is the great refuge for low-performance systems, and as good as the Inspiron 14 manages to be, it doesn’t stand out. It’s efficient, managing to run for over 17 hours on average in our local 4K video playback benchmark with just a 54-watt-hour battery. But many Windows machines have stepped up to the plate recently. In fact, the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus managed the same result down to the minute, and yet its performance is better in just about every way. It’s a similar story for the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED, which only ran a few minutes less in our battery test but had so much more to offer in other respects.  In regular use with browsing and some streamed video playback, the Inspiron 14 offered a bit over 8 hours of runtime. This is considerably different from its video playback runtime, but not unexpected. Dell Inspiron 14: Conclusion You can do a lot worse than the Dell Inspiron 14. It’s a classy, if bland, looking machine that’s got plenty to offer in terms of connectivity and easy utility. But it’s just not quite all it could have been. Dell shifted over to a low-tier Snapdragon X Plus chip for this model, and the performance left plenty to be desired. As long as emulation is required, you’ll end up better off with even some of Intel’s less-loved CPUs, and graphics lags behind thoroughly.  Factor in a very disappointing display and the fact that even the low-power processor couldn’t set the Dell Inspiron 14 apart from the competition in battery life, and you’ve got a laptop that has no easy time justifying itself over others. Read...

At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Long battery life Great-looking OLED touchscreen Thin and light in tablet mode Price includes keyboard Cons Low performance next to peers Some keyboard connection wonkiness Underwhelming speakers Our Verdict The Asus ProArt PZ13 lacks performance next to its laptop competitors, but as a 2-in-1 tablet it shines. A quality design, a great display, lengthy battery life, and incredibly competitive value set it apart from other 2-in-1. If you’re set on a tablet, this one is well worth Considering. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Microsoft has opened the door for some fierce competition. The Surface Pro has long charged a considerable premium for the honor of giving you a tablet and laptop in one (and then charged a premium for the all-too-essential keyboard). And that’s where the Asus ProArt PZ13 swoops in. It not only comes offering a sharp OLED display, a regal tablet design, and a competitive $1,099 starting price, but it also includes the keyboard cover in that price, not to mention 1TB of storage. This is a great start to compete with the base Surface Pro 11 configuration and also sees it undercut another 2-in-1 tablet we tested recently, the much pricier Dell Latitude 7350 Detachable. There’s a lot of promise for the Asus ProArt PZ13, but its choice of a lower-tier Snapdragon X Plus processor (on top of the choice to use a Snapdragon processor at all given some compatibility concerns) may hold it back from being the perfect tool for a lot of people. But as a 2-in-1 tablet, it’s highly compelling.  Further reading: Best laptops 2024: Premium, budget, gaming, 2-in-1s, and more Asus ProArt PZ13: Specs and features Model number: Asus ProArt PZ13 HT5306 CPU: Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 Memory: 16GB LPDDR5X Graphics/GPU: Adreno Graphics Display: 13.3-inch 2880×1600 OLED Storage: 1TB PCIe Gen4 SSD Webcam: 1440p Connectivity: 2x USB-4, 1x SDcard reader Networking: WiFi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 Biometrics: Windows Hello facial recognition Battery capacity: 70 watt-hours Dimensions: 11.5 x 7.9 x 0.71 inches (total); 11.5 x 7.9 x 0.35 inches (tablet only)  Weight: 3.34 pounds (total); 1.92 pounds (tablet alone) MSRP: $1,099 as-tested ($1,099 base) Asus ProArt PZ13: Design and build quality IDG / Mark Knapp IDG / Mark Knapp IDG / Mark Knapp The Asus ProArt PZ13 is a classic two-in-one tablet following in the footsteps of the Surface tablets. The tablet connects to a thin keyboard cover with a proprietary magnetic connector at its base with hard pins to ensure proper alignment and a secure link. A flexible band goes from the connector to the keyboard, allowing the keyboard to sit flat regardless of the angle of the tablet.  Rather than building a kickstand into the tablet itself, Asus has gone with a magnetic cover. A back cover has a hinged kickstand that folds out about halfway down the back of the tablet to prop it up at various angles. This is effective, but not without its issues. The magnetic hold is firm, but I have had the cover try to pop off while folding out the kickstand. The stand also struggles to hold the tablet up at high angles when used with the keyboard cover, needing the screen to rock back about 10 degrees before it’ll stand stably. Between the base of the keyboard cover and the foot of the kickstand, the Asus ProArt PZ13 doesn’t get a lot of traction on surfaces, so it can slide around a little more easily than many other laptops, though still isn’t slipping willy-nilly.  Where I have to give Asus major props is in its decision to include the rear cover and keyboard cover with the Asus ProArt PZ13. Unlike the Microsoft Surface tablets, you won’t see a price and then find out its hundreds more to get it with a keyboard. Asus doesn’t include its pressure-sensitive stylus though. These accessories are a little curious, as I would have expected something more regal for Asus’s ProArt series, but Asus has instead gone with an outdoorsy design with military greens and an external material that feels more like camping gear.  The tablet itself is a different story. It’s made with a firm metal unibody, has a Gorilla Glass NBT display cover, and has an IP52 rating for protection against dust and light rain. It feels tanky, and at 0.35 inches thick, it’s thinner than many laptops, though a little on the thick side for a tablet. The keyboard and kickstand also add a lot of extra depth, bringing it up to 11.5 x 7.9 x 0.71 inches. The top-left corner of the tablet has a power button and the right edge has two volume volumes, giving the laptop a total of three hardware controls for volume with the keyboard cover attached. Two speakers also live on either side of the chassis.  Asus has opted for an actively cooled design. Heat vents out the top edge of the Asus ProArt PZ13. One air intake sits below the volume buttons on the side of the tablet, and a curious little one is also on the back. This rear vent is wide but incredibly tight, and it’s a wonder how much air it actually can pull in.  Asus ProArt PZ13: Keyboard, trackpad IDG / Mark Knapp IDG / Mark Knapp IDG / Mark Knapp Asus has managed to effectively carry over its laptop keyboard to the keyboard cover for the Asus ProArt PZ13. The look and some of the feel is there, though the white backlighting doesn’t evenly illuminate the keycaps. It’s a quick and functional keyboard that feels pretty good to type on, though not excellent. The keypresses are a bit soft, and the stabilization could be better. As a result, I can type at a little over 100 words-per-minute with a bit over 95 percent accuracy, but pushing to go faster is a struggle. The keyboard cover is so thin, though, that it completely avoids creating a pressure point for the wrist or palms, feeling more like typing away on a desktop or table than on a keyboard set atop that surface. The trackpad on the Asus ProArt PZ13 is decent and serves a few purposes. It’s impressively sizable for a trackpad built into a keyboard cover, keeping up with Asus’s other laptop trackpads. Asus puts all the extra space to good use with gesture controls along its edges. A swipe along the left edge can adjust system volume while swipes along the right edge can change display brightness. Swiping along the top scrubs forward or backward in video, theoretically, but it can also move the cursor along text one letter at a time, though I find it jumpy and inaccurate for that task compared to the finer nuance of using the whole trackpad. These trackpad controls also overlap to some degree with buttons on the keyboard.  In my testing, I’ve experienced a touch of wonkiness with the keyboard cover. At two points, the keyboard cover stopped working entirely, despite still being fully connected to the tablet. Disconnecting and reconnecting it several times did nothing to get it working again. Pressing the power button to lock and then unlock the system got it working again, though there’s no clear reason why this should have worked.  The design of this keyboard attachment, like most other detachable 2-in-1 setups, doesn’t lend itself well to use on most surfaces other than tables and desks. Set on a bed, the pressure can result in weird angling of the keyboard, and set on a lap, it creates uncomfortable pressure points. This is simply something people should be aware of if they’re coming from a laptop and expecting similar utility. Asus ProArt PZ13: Display, audio IDG / Mark Knapp IDG / Mark Knapp IDG / Mark Knapp Asus has tucked a great display into the Asus ProArt PZ13. 2880×1600 goes a long way on a 13.3-inch screen, and the OLED panel provides both excellent color gamut and contrast. The screen hits 100 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, and it even offered a measured color accuracy with maximum dE of 1.48 — accurate enough for professional work. The display maxed out at 405 nits, though small highlights should be able to go higher. It supports Dolby Vision (though streaming services neglect PCs for high-quality streams). It’s also a touchscreen and a responsive one at that. The 60Hz refresh of the display is a bit of a letdown, as it limits how smooth the tablet can feel, especially for things like stylus input. The glossy finish is also fairly reflective, so it can depend on ideal conditions to let you make the most of the rich blacks its OLED panel can provide.  The Asus ProArt PZ13 is a snazzy little tablet packing in a gorgeous display for content consumption and creation alike. The speakers on the Asus ProArt PZ13 are no match for the display. They can push high volumes, but not without distorting, and this makes for rather grating audio when the speakers are pushed. That’s for music though. Movies and speech don’t get boosted quite as much, and therefore aren’t as harsh, but also aren’t as loud. Watching a movie on the tablet, even in a fairly quiet space, I occasionally had trouble hearing everything going on. This all in spite of “Dolby Atmos support,” which is something that seems to mean very little for computers. Asus ProArt PZ13: Webcam, microphone, biometrics The Asus ProArt PZ13 has respectable cameras and mics. The three-mic array captures a bit of room noise, making my voice sound a little distant, but it still gets everything I’m saying. It also neutralizes background noise quite well, completely eliminating a loud box fan just feet without impacting voice quality. The front includes a 5MP camera that’s sharp and performs decently in middling light conditions. It doesn’t capture the most colorful visuals, but it’s serviceable. It’s not quite reaching the promise of these new Snapdragon-powered machines to deliver smartphone-level camera quality though. The Asus ProArt PZ13 also includes a 13MP rear camera, but it’s not very good. It struggles to take in much light, and is therefore incredibly prone to noise.  Microsoft’s camera app in Windows still doesn’t appear to work properly with Qualcomm’s processors. Short videos recorded on it will randomly fail to record the entirety of what was presented, even leaving out audio. Asus omitted fingerprint scanning on the Asus ProArt PZ13, but it does include Windows Hello facial recognition, and it works fairly quickly.  Asus ProArt PZ13: Connectivity IDG / Mark Knapp IDG / Mark Knapp IDG / Mark Knapp Typical for a tablet, the Asus ProArt PZ13 doesn’t have a lot of ports, but it makes the most of what it does have. You’ll find only one exposed USB-C port on the left edge of the Asus ProArt PZ13. Next to that is a port cover hiding away another USB-C port and a full-size SD card reader. That’s it. No headphone jack, no USB-A. Those USB-C ports are high-bandwidth USB 4.0 ports though, so at least they can support some extreme hubs. And since one of the ports is needed for charging, hubs will likely be all too critical.  Wireless connectivity is strong with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. In testing, I had no trouble with either and enjoy fast speeds and stable connections. Asus ProArt PZ13: Performance Given that the Asus ProArt PZ13 is packing the lowest-tier Snapdragon processor, I’ve seen yet from the new Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus lineup, I expected performance to fall on the low side, and it certainly did. It generally fared worse in single- and multi-core performance than a handful compact thin-and-light laptops running Intel processors and even the Dell Latitude 7350 Detachable with a modest Intel Core Ultra 5 134U. That said, earlier versions of Cinebench don’t run natively on ARM, so these results show the Asus ProArt PZ13’s performance while working with the penalty of emulation.  In Cinebench R24, which can run natively on ARM without emulation, the Asus ProArt PZ13 is a little more competent. Its single-core score of 107 outpaces the Framework Laptop 13’s Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, which hit only 101 points. And the gap in multi-core performance went from an 83 percent lead in Intel’s favor to a much more modest 12 percent lead. Against the Lenovo ThinkBook 14 2-in-1 Gen 4’s Intel Core Ultra 5 125U, the Asus ProArt PZ13 turned the tides slightly. That said, the Asus ProArt PZ13 still falls well behind other Snapdragon X-powered laptops like the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6. And then there’s the fact that the Asus ProArt PZ13 isn’t always going to get to run native apps, and when it doesn’t the performance penalty will rear its head.  Graphics performance follows right in line with the lackluster CPU performance. The Asus ProArt PZ13 simply couldn’t keep up with Intel Arc graphics, which are establishing a strong baseline for integrated graphics quality. Falling short even of basic Intel Graphics is a considerable letdown.  The Asus ProArt PZ13 simply isn’t a high-performance machine. For lighter creative workloads, it may be able to keep up. And with a gorgeous display and stylus support, on-device content creation is likely what Asus had in mind when it decided to make this tablet part of its ProArt brand. But if heavy editing and video are called for, it’s probably not up to the task like its competitors are.  Asus ProArt PZ13: Battery life The Asus ProArt PZ13 reclaims some of its honor in battery life, where it makes a 70Wh batter — impressively large for a compact tablet — stretch on for over 16 hours. It’s a decent lead over its competitors here, especially considering Asus used a sharp OLED display. The Framework Laptop 13, the Dell Latitude 7350 Detachable, and the Lenovo ThinkBook 13x Gen 4 all used even sharper displays. The 3:2 aspect ratio on some of these doesn’t help with battery life for LCD panels in our battery test, though. The extra vertical space in our video test ends up turning into black letterboxes that an LCD panel still tries to illuminate. In contrast, OLEDs can turn off pixels for letterboxes and conserve power. Somewhere between that, the general efficiency of the Asus ProArt PZ13, and its large battery (the second largest of the bunch), it outlasts the competition here. That efficiency doesn’t apply just to local video playback in airplane mode, though. Doing some work with the display set to 40 percent brightness, I had the laptop on for hours as I browsed and wrote in Google Docs, and over a few hours, it drained slowly enough that it was on track to hit over 20 hours. Of course, the display is quite dim at this level. Even at 50 percent brightness, the screen is only hitting 94 nits. Asus ProArt PZ13: Conclusion The Asus ProArt PZ13 is a snazzy little tablet packing in a gorgeous display for content consumption and creation alike. It’s surprising to see it come in at just $1,099 and not make more sacrifices and all the more surprising that Asus includes the critical keyboard accessory that lets the Asus ProArt PZ13 serve dual purposes as a tablet and laptop. The detachable keyboard is a decent accessory, though not an excellent keyboard in its own right, and this type of laptop alternative tends not to work well on laps or soft surfaces.  Perhaps the most critical shortcoming of the Asus ProArt PZ13 is simply its lack of performance. The chip inside is the lowest tier we’ve seen yet from the new Snapdragon X lineup, and it shows. While everyday computing is still managed easily enough, more demanding tasks will expose its weakness. And though the Asus ProArt PZ13 has good battery life, it’s also not dominating the field, as that honor belongs to the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 — a very worthy alternative for those looking for on-the-go productivity and longevity in a lightweight package. Regardless, the Asus ProArt PZ13’s ability to switch from tablet to laptop sets it apart from basic laptops for those who need this flexibility, and its decent all-around quality helps it remain a compelling option at a competitive price. Read...

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“By the way,” Alexa sometimes says after responding to a command, followed by a random tidbit or suggestion you never asked for. Sound familiar?  To be fair, Alexa is just trying to be helpful with its “by the way” asides. Still, Amazon’s chatty voice assistant tends to butt in when it’s not wanted, making unnecessary announcements or overstaying its welcome with random digressions.  Luckily, there are plenty of ways to make Alexa pipe down. In some cases, all it takes is tapping a few toggles in the Alexa app. In others, a little hacking is involved.   Either way, we’ll guide you through the process—and in return, you’ll get a little peace and quiet.  Turn off weather notifications  It’s always a good idea to keep abreast of dangerous weather conditions, particularly when it comes to heatwaves, flooding, tornadoes, and hurricanes.  Amazon Echo Pop Best Prices Today: $39.99 at Amazon But rip tides and wind advisories? That’s a little much—and besides, Alexa’s warnings might already be duplicating those you’re already getting from your phone or another app.  Here’s how to turn Alexa’s weather notifications off, or adjust how they’re delivered:  Open the Alexa app, then tap More, Settings, Notifications, then scroll all the way down to Weather.  Tap Severe Weather Alert, then tweak the options. You can choose whether Alexa tells you about severe weather alerts repeatedly or just once, as well as whether you also want mobile push notifications.   Finally, you can choose a delivery method: either out-loud Alexa announcements, or just standard notifications on your Alexa devices.  Turn off Amazon shopping notifications  If you’re worried about porch pirates, you may well want to know the moment an Amazon delivery lands on your doorstep.   That said, you might not want to hear every last detail about your incoming Amazon orders, such as when an Amazon package is out for delivery, whether your return made it back to the warehouse, or the status of a given “subscribe and save” item.  If you want to keep a lid of Alexa’s announcements about your Amazon shopping orders, here’s what you do.  Open the Alexa app, then tap More, Settings, Notifications, and finally Amazon Shopping.  Check out the various options and disable them as needed. For example, you can keep Alexa from announcing updates on items you’ve ordered or returned, or silence the “out for delivery” and “delivered” notifications. You can also put the kibosh on updates about your “Subscribe & Save” orders, or cease deal and reorder recommendations.  Turn off “Always follow up” mode for reminders  Alexa can become quite the nag when it comes to reminders, bugging you repeatedly until they’re marked as completed.   Now, perhaps you do want Alexa to stay on your case about tasks, chores, or anything else you need to be reminded about. But if Alexa’s repeated reminders about your reminders are driving you mad, give this a try.  Tap More, Settings, Reminders.  Scroll down and disable the Always follow-up option to keep Alexa from bugging you about reminders that haven’t been marked as completed.  While you’re at it, you can reduce the number of times Alexa announces a reminder (the range is between one and three times).  Turn on Brief Mode  Even during everyday interactions, Alexa can be overly chatty, starting from the moment you say the “Alexa” wake word and though the completion of a given voice command (“Your lights are off now”).  If you just want Alexa to do your bidding with a minimum of fuss, give this setting a shot.  Tap More, Settings, Voice Responses.  Enable Brief Mode.  Now, Alexa should be much quieter when obeying your commands, acknowledging the completion of most tasks with a simple beep.  Keep “by the way” at bay  So, if you thought Brief Mode would put a stop to Alexa’s “by the way” asides, think again.  Even with the Brief Mode setting enabled, “by the way” will still manage to crop up every so often, typically after you’ve asked Alexa to perform a task.  The bad news is that there’s no Alexa setting that reliably banishes the “by the way” digressions for good. The good news is that an Alexa hack discovered by Reddit users can help keep “by the way” at bay.  The hack (which, as noted, comes from Reddit, by way of AFTVnews) involves simply telling Alexa to “stop By the Way.” Easy—except Alexa will only stop the “by the ways” temporarily.  A more permanent solution is to create a routine that issues the “stop By the Way” command every day.  Tap More, Routines, then tap the “+” button in the top-right corner of the screen.   Go ahead and name the routine (maybe “Stop by the way”), then add a triggering event, such as a given time each day (Schedule, At Time).  Then, add an action. For this, tap Custom, then type “stop by the way.”  Now Alexa will remind herself each day to stop “by the way,” and—hopefully—your “by the way” days should be over. Read...