Latest Technology

Raycast users have been asking the app's developers for an iOS app for a long time. It took a while, though, for the developers to figure out exactly what that app was supposed to do. See, on a Mac (and soon a Windows PC ), Raycast is a hugely powerful tool for navigating your computer. You can use it to launch apps, change settings, execute commands, control the layout of your windows, and dozens of other features. Much of that is irrelevant on a phone, and some of it is just simply not allowed. Actually building the Raycast iOS app was, in many ways, easier than figuring out why to build it in the first place. The first iteration of the app, which is launching today for iPhone and iPad, leans heavily on two of Raycast's more popular features. The first is AI: Raycast has a built-in chatbot that integrates a number of different models, and you can use the same chat on your phone. You can also use your phone's camera to attach a photo to the chat, or speak to the bot vi...

Since Neuromancer took the sci-fi world by storm in 1984, computing nerds have pined for a "cyberdeck" - the ultimate in personal, portable PCs for surfing and hacking the world. Usually, they're DIY affairs. But the 10-inch GPD Win Max 2 is the closest I've seen to an off-the-shelf cyberdeck worth buying. @verge The GPD Win Max 2 is a lilliputian computing dream: a tiny laptop that doubles as a gaming handheld, with an incredible array of ports. It's surprisingly easy to type on, plays games as well or better than a ROG Ally or Legion Go, and supports two kinds of eGPUs. Keyboard and touchpad make navigating Windows easier than most handhelds. But you might not enjoy holding its stiff metal frame, and it's better paired with a mouse! #laptop #gaming #gadgets #todayimtoyingwith #techtok ♬ original sound - The Verge It's far from the best laptop or gaming handheld. It's an ergonomic compromise in five ways , and the webcam is trash! It...

On the evening of April 28th, Amazon embarked on its latest venture to rival SpaceX Starlink: the first launch of its Project Kuiper satellites. With 27 satellites now in orbit around the Earth, Amazon joins a growing number of companies working to put more than 1,000 satellites each into space to create a mega constellation. With all of these objects in orbit, the dangers of overcrowding are increasing, and if any of these objects were to collide, the results could be disastrous. Aside from Amazon and SpaceX, UK-based OneWeb, which merged with French satellite operator Eutelsat in 2023, has its own constellation, and there are several planned by Chinese companies, too. There is the Chinese government-backed Guowang mega constellation, which began its launches last year but remains veiled in secrecy , as well as the commercial Qianfan or Thousand Sails project, which began launches in 2023 and plans to place a total of up to 15,000 satellites in orbit . A recent report from the Eu...

Nvidia has released another hotfix driver that primarily addresses bugs and crashes with its RTX 50-series GPUs. The 576.26 hotfix driver is based on the 576.02 driver release earlier this month, which itself included a large amount of fixes for bugs and crashes. This latest hotfix driver includes all the fixes in the 576.15 hotfix that was released last week, including a fix for the newly introduced GPU temperature bug . It also addresses flickering issues in Forza Horizon 5 , track corruption on Forza Motorsport , and Black Myth: Wukong randomly crashing on RTX 50-series cards. There are a variety of fixes for Red Dead Redemption 2 , Horizon Forbidden West , Dead Island 2 , and Resident Evil 4 Remake on RTX 50-series GPUs, too. Nvidia has also included yet another supposed fix for black screen issues plaguing a range of LG monitors when using DisplayPort 2.1 mode. There’s also a fix for “grey screen crashes with multiple monitors” and “momentary display flicker occurs when run...

Elon Musk’s expansive portfolio of companies could avoid more than $2.37 billion in potential legal liability due to his unprecedented influence over the US government, a new Senate report finds. The figure comes from a report assembled by Democratic staff for the Senate Homeland Security permanent subcommittee on investigations (PSI) probing the impact of Musk’s closeness with President Donald Trump and creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on his financial interests. The staff endeavored to quantify “the financial impact of President Trump’s delegation of power on potential liabilities and scrutiny facing Mr. Musk and his companies.” To do so, it calculated the legal exposure The Boring Company, Neuralink, SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI could face as a result of federal investigations, litigation, or regulatory actions pending as of Trump’s inauguration. The staff called the number “a credible, conservative estimate.”  The subcommittee found that Musk and his com...

Yellow line shows actual power, red line is projected. | Image: <a href="https://ift.tt/LwQkp1b Eléctrica</a> Power went down Monday afternoon in vast areas of Spain, crossing over into Portugal and France causing widespread outages in homes and businesses and bringing transportation infrastructure to a halt. The cause of the outage is currently unknown. Lisbon, Madrid, Seville, Barcelona, and Valencia are reportedly affected. The outage began at around 12:30PM CET. Play has been suspended at the Madrid Open tennis tournament, according to Sky News . Madrid’s underground rail system has reportedly been evacuated and traffic lights in the city aren’t operating. Air traffic in Spain and Portugal is also reportedly affected by outages at area airports, with Spanish airport operator Aena saying on X that backup generators are currently active at impacted airports. Emergency services in Madrid are also still operational and running on backup generators . Portuguese polic...

Nike’s Cryptokicks iRL, a physical sneaker released under the RTFKT brand. A group of people sued Nike this week over its decision to wind down its virtual show project RTFKT last year. The buyers of the digital assets accuse Nike of causing “the rug to be pulled out from under them,” and say they wouldn’t have bought its NFTs if they’d known they were “unregistered securities,” reports Reuters .  Filed in New York’s Eastern District, the proposed class action lawsuit seeks “unspecified damages of more than $5 million for alleged violations of New York, California, Florida and Oregon consumer protection laws.”  Nike tried to jump into the NFT game by buying RTFKT in 2021 . But, like Starbucks Odyssey , it never quite worked out and the company abandoned the idea, announcing in December via the RTFKT X account that it planned to “wind down RTFKT operations” by the end of January this year.  Since then, RTFKT has seemingly been maintained by a single person named Samu...

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has flashy, thrilling battles, but the best thing about them is how you can twist the game's many systems to your advantage. The turn-based RPG combat might feel familiar, but it offers a lot of ways to customize your approach to battles so that you can do absolutely devastating amounts of damage. In Expedition 33, you play as a group of Expeditioners who aim to destroy The Paintress, a mysterious being that erases everyone of a certain age every year. In battles, you can have up to three of your party participating in a fight, and should they all die, you can call in your teammates who are in reserve to try and finish off the enemies. To show you how deep the rabbit hole can go in customizing your team, here's my approach to building out just one character, the fencer Maelle. Every character can equip three "Pictos," which offer passive buffs like giving you the defense-boosting Shell status at the start of a fight. But after you win ...

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 80, your guide to the best and Verge -iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, hope you had better luck than I did preordering a Switch 2, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage .) This week, I've been reading about The Telepathy Tapes and extremely online parenting and translation glasses , watching The Men Who Built America , cackling at this incredible star-studded live reading of the original Star Wars , playing the whole archive of 4×3 , doing some writing in the new Easlo Journal app, testing some headphones I impulse-bought on the TikTok Shop, and seeing if the Kagi Assistant fits into my search-engine world. Oh, also: Thanks to everyone who sent me notes with thoughts about wallpapers! You've given me a bunch of fun ideas about how to expand the Screen Share section, including showing off more of your setups. More on that to come really soon. I also have for you a terrifi...

The Chipolo Pop, Pebblebee Clip, and Moto Tag are the three main trackers using Google’s network. When Google launched its long-awaited Find My Device network in April 2024 , it arrived to… well, what's the opposite of "fanfare"? A slow network rollout and damning reviews dampened enthusiasm for what was supposed to be a wave of Android-powered rivals to Apple's AirTag. But a year's a long time in tech, and Google has been promising improvements almost since Find My Device was first switched on. I wanted to know: have things gotten any better? To find out, I set about testing the latest trackers from the three main companies that make compatible models: Pebblebee, Chipolo, and Motorola. For now Google doesn't make its own Pixel or Nest-branded tracker, and Samsung's SmartTags use its own SmartThings Find network, not Google's. In the name of science, I also got hold of an Apple AirTag and a Tile tracker to serve as reference points for Google's...

Wandering through Bionic Bay 's dark alien world is unsettling and awe-inspiring. There are massive structures with no clear purpose and autonomous factories filled with whirring saw blades and devastating lasers. It's grim and unforgiving, with little light and harsh shadows that give everything a sinister tone. But then you step on a bomb and your character bounces off of walls like a pinball, and you realize it's a game of contrasts. Bionic Bay is a curious blend of two very different genres. On the one hand, it's an atmospheric side-scrolling adventure in the mold of Inside and Limbo , filled with disturbingly stunning environments to explore. At the same time, it's a hard-as-nails platformer like Super Meat Boy , with elaborate physics that will have you dying repeatedly while trying to find the best route through deadly obstacles. Somehow, the disparate vibes come together surprisingly well. What first drew me to Bionic Bay was that dark world. It's ...

The Kuxiu S2 magnetically attached to the MagSafe-compatible case on my iPhone 15 Pro. Solid-state batteries are the future. They're more powerful, compact, safe, and sustainable than Lithium-ion alternatives, but true all -solid state batteries can't be mass-produced cost-effectively. That's why Kuxiu has gone semi -solid state for what it calls the "world's safest" power bank, while calling dibs on it being a world first. Kuxiu's $79.99 S2 Qi2 5000mAh MagSafe Solid-State Power Bank supports Qi2 for 15W wireless charging. And with a 5,000mAh (19Wh) capacity, it holds enough energy to easily charge the latest iPhone 16 models - with batteries ranging from 3,561mAh to 4,685mAh - from zero to full at least once. And despite using the truncated "solid state" in the S2 name and product page, the company confirmed to me that it's built around a semi-solid state battery and that distinction matters. I've been carrying the Kuxiu S2 for t...

Boox’s new seven-inch e-readers add stylus support for note-taking or annotating documents. | Image: Boox Boox is expanding its Go Series with two new E Ink devices that are the first from the company to bring stylus support and note-taking capabilities to its smaller seven-inch e-reader models. It’s functionality that Kobo already offers on its seven-inch Libra Colour , but the new Boox Go 7 and Go Color 7 Gen II both run Android 13 instead of a proprietary OS giving you access to both Amazon and Kobo’s book stores while also letting you install and use your preferred note-taking app from the Google Play store. The monochromatic Boox Go 7 is now available for preorder through the company’s online store for $249.99, with shipping expected to start on May 7th. The Go Color 7 Gen II isn’t available for preorder yet, but it is expected soon and will sell for $279.99. Featuring a black-and-white E Ink Carta 1300 screen with a resolution of 300ppi and adjustable screen lighting, the ...

Robot vacuums that can both mop and sweep your floors have improved significantly in recent years. While they are still not as effective as good ol’ manual labor, if you run them regularly, they will help keep your floors cleaner with much less effort on your part. The difference is that newer “combo” robot vacuum and mop models are designed to actually scrub your floors. The first robot vacuums that could also “mop” simply slapped a thin, flat microfiber pad on the bot that kind of Swiffer-ed your floor. Basically, all this was good for was getting up fine dirt that the vacuum left behind. A robot vacuum with a real mopping system will make your life easier  Newer models now come with vibrating or oscillating mop pads, and some even have roller mops. Most models have onboard water tanks to keep the mops wet while in use, and many can wash and dry their mops in their charging docks, which also automatically empty and refill their water tanks, meaning less work for you. Whi...

OpenAI is introducing a new version of its ChatGPT deep research tool that it says is cheaper to operate. The “lightweight” model is available now to free users, as well as those on several of the company’s paid tiers. Deep research (lightweight) is powered by a version of OpenAI’s o4-mini model, and the company says it’s “nearly as intelligent” as the original deep research mode , which produces lengthy reports including citations and summaries of its process. OpenAI adds that the lightweight version delivers responses that are “shorter while maintaining the depth and quality you’ve come to expect.” While the standard deep research model remains exclusive to paid users, the lightweight version is rolling out to free users now, who can use it for five tasks per month . Paid users also get access, and it will kick in by default when they hit their rate limits on the original deep research, giving Team and Plus users a total of 25 monthly tasks across both versions, and Pro users 250...

The new label highlights energy efficiency, durability, repairability, and battery life. The European Union has announced details of new mandatory labels for smartphones and tablets sold in the bloc, which include ratings for energy efficiency, durability, and repairability. Hardware will also have to meet new “ecodesign requirements” to be sold in the EU, including a requirement to make spare parts available for repair. The labels , which will be required for any devices that go on sale from June 20th onwards, are similar to existing ones for home appliances and TVs. They display the product’s energy efficiency rating, on a scale from A to G, along with battery life, the number of charge cycles the battery is rated for, letter grades for durability and repairability, and any applicable IP rating for protection from dust and water. Alongside the labels the EU is introducing “ecodesign requirements” imposing minimum standards on the same products. Those include protection from spl...