Apple’s second-gen HomePod. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge This week, Apple is hosting its first-ever dedicated smart home event. While the company hasn't shared details about what it will reveal at the "Welcome Home experience" in New York City on Tuesday, October 13th, it doesn't take an army of internet sleuths to deduce we'll get news about Apple Home - specifically, new hardware. Apple finally seems to be taking the smart home seriously.According to Bloomberg, Apple will release a smart home display alongside a refreshed HomePod Mini and Apple TV. The display, which MacRumors reports may be called HomeView, is arguably Apple's first dedicated Apple Home hardware since it launched the HomeKit …Read the full story at The Verge.

Claude Cowork made a pretty convincing case for letting an AI loose in your folders. All you had to do was give it access and give it a job, and then it went off and did the job, often on a schedule when you're off doing something else entirely. Anthropic has since merged Cowork into the main Claude app, but the workflow is still there and largely the same - and I think many of us still call it "Cowork", to be honest.

One thing I've learnt about covering the DIY community is that when a tinkerer buys their kid a toy, it doesn't stay a toy for too long. As soon as the child gets tired of it or grows out of it, the parents will immediately get to gutting it and doing some really cool things with it. Such is the case of this kid's DJ table toy, which has been enhanced with a Raspberry Pi to become a pretty impressive piece of kit.

If you're like me, you miss the days of portable MP3 players. Sure, phones can do the same job and more, but there's something about a dedicated media player that I still miss. Well, this excellent DIY portable player brings me back to those good old days, and it looks a lot classier than lugging a phone around.

I expected my new USB4 enclosure to feel like a second internal drive. Instead, the Satechi USB4 NVMe SSD Pro crawled along at 1,013 MB/s, and for weeks I blamed the cable, then the USB-C port I'd picked, then every other jack on my motherboard's rear panel.

Moonlight has been a mainstay on my devices for years. Paired with Sunshine on my main gaming PC, it was the easy answer to in-home streaming, and filled a lot of holes in compatibility or convenience.

I have an embarrassing number of E Ink devices. I currently have seven different E Ink tablets scattered around my house, with another one on the way. Though I definitely enjoy reading, that's not why I have so many e-readers. No one reasonably needs eight different devices just to read books, after all.

If you're driving through GM's sprawling campus in Warren, Michigan, you'd likely ignore the pair of adjacent, anonymous white buildings tucked away in the upper reaches of the 710-acre space.Inside those buildings, which total half a million square feet together, is a massive construction project that's still in progress. Once completed, it will house GM's new Battery Cell Development Center, where the automaker is working furiously to build new prototype cells with the goal of slashing the cost of its EVs.GM has to build faster and cheaper to meet its goal of selling affordable EVs in much higher volumes. Those EVs will have to compete …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you're looking for an open-source alternative to Android, you're in luck. One of the better options, LineageOS, has just upgraded to Android 17 with version 24. It's a little weird to write that one of the better Android alternatives out there is using a new version of Android, but I promise it makes more sense when I explain it.

Modding your Steam Deck is always a great way to squeeze every drop out of your hardware, and it's something we're not unfamiliar with. But what if you could get Nvidia's upscaling model running on it and have it run better than AMD's offering, FSR? Well, one mod seemingly has achieved just that, and while it's way too soon to declare it the ultimate winner, things are already looking promising.

Although the memory shortage has affected everyone (from people who only need a work PC to casual gamers and enthusiasts), PC gamers have been hit hardest. Compared to console gamers and laptop consumers, we were the first to feel price increases, thanks to the relatively low-volume contracts memory kit manufacturers (like G.SKILL, Corsair, and the late Crucial) have with DRAM manufacturers.Additionally, we've had the largest share of price increases passed along to us, as the low margins memory kit makers work with don't allow them to absorb any of the cost increases. However, even as acutely as PC gamers have felt the adverse effects of the memory crisis, there's a whole other dimension to the shortage that hasn't been addressed.

Android Auto is a very useful tool when I'm driving, and in recent months, I've been discovering a lot of new apps and tips for using the service (thanks in big part to some of my XDA colleagues). But unlike a PC or phone, testing Android Auto apps isn't just something I can do quickly at home. I always have to take my phone to my car to see if it actually works as intended.