The last-gen Kindle Scribe is nearly identical to the new model, only with a few minor upgrades. If you’re looking for a cheaper alternative to the new Kindle Scribe, we’ve got good news: the first-gen model is on sale for a couple hundred dollars less than the second-gen model. Normally $349.99 in new condition, Amazon is currently selling it with in refurbished configuration with 16GB of storage, a Basic Pen, and a one-year warranty for just $233.99 as a part of a limited-time lightning deal. You can also buy it at Amazon with 32GB of storage for $259.99.Both of Amazon’s note-taking ebook readers sport a spacious 10.2-inch 300 ppi display and an adjustable warm light, though the latest Scribe builds upon the original with thinner bezels, a textured display, and a soft-tipped Premium Pen. The most significant changes come in the form of software features, which are available on the first-gen model via a free download. That means no matter which e-reader you buy, you can finally write notes directly on pages. You’ll also be able to take advantage of various AI features, including AI-generated summaries and a tool that lets you refine your handwriting. The only difference is that the new Scribe comes with these features baked in.Read our original Kindle Scribe review.Three more midweek discountsThe Beats Powerbeats Pro are down to $99.99 (half off) at Best Buy, which is their lowest price to date. The wireless earbuds are still exceptionally comfortable despite their age, with over-ear hooks that keep them securely in place during intense workouts. They also continue to deliver good sound, pair well with Apple devices, and last up to nine hours on a single charge, though you’ll still need a Lightning cable to charge them. Read our review.Amazon and Best Buy are selling the Apple Pencil Pro for $99 ($20 off), which is one of its best prices to date. The stylus is compatible with the latest iPad Pro, iPad Air, and iPad Mini; however, unlike the Apple Pencil (USB-C), the Pro model features Find My support so you can quickly locate it. It also comes with extra creative capabilities, including pressure sensitivity, double-tap tool switching, and a “barrel roll” feature that lets you twist your digital brush’s orientation by turning the stylus as you paint.You can pick up the Chipolo One Point at Amazon for $22 ($5 off), an all-time low. The puck-shaped Bluetooth tracker is perfect for keeping tabs on various items, whether it be a set of keys or a pet collar. The keyring tracker also features a user-replaceable battery, IPX5 water resistance, and support for Android’s Fast Pair feature, though keep in mind it only supports Google’s Find My platform, not Apple’s.

There are many Task Manager alternatives out there for Windows PCs, but you might find yourself wondering whether you can actually replace the default Task Manager on Windows 11. This would mean pressing Ctrl+Alt+Esc or launching the Task Manager from anywhere in the operating system would open your replacement instead of the default. As it turns out, you actually can, and it's really, really easy!

Cath Virginia / The Verge In Supreme Court oral arguments over a potentially seismic change to the internet, the most memorable question came from Justice Samuel Alito. “One of the parties here is the owner of Pornhub, right?” Alito asked Derek Shaffer, lawyer for the adult industry group Free Speech Coalition. “Is it like the old Playboy magazine? You have essays there by the modern-day equivalent of Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, Jr.?”The massive adult web portal Pornhub, in case you’re wondering, does not publish essays by distinguished intellectuals. (Shaffer notes that it does host sexual wellness videos.) The question inspired a slew of commentary on social media, alongside a few quips directed at Justice Clarence Thomas, who declared during oral argument that “Playboy was about squiggly lines on cable TV.” But as funny as the quotes were, what the justices were getting at was hardly a joke: how much protection does sexual content and other legal speech deserve, if hosted online?FSC v. Paxton concerns Texas’ HB 1181, which requires sites with a large proportion of sexually explicit content to verify users’ ages and post scientifically unproven health warnings about how porn “is proven to harm... Read the full story at The Verge.

Buying a gaming PC can get expensive, especially if you want recent hardware that can last for three to five years without upgrades. With CPU and GPU manufacturers steadily eroding what was once known as the budget segment, saving yourself money can be tempting by opting for the cheapest pre-built PC from Amazon that "looks" okay. This could, however, prove more trouble than it's worth.

If you’re like me, you’re always after that last bit of performance. Low average framerates can be irritating enough to turn me completely away from playing the game in question until my next upgrade, but sometimes it’s not down to raw processing power. A few extra tweaks here and there can have a positive compounding effect on your framerate. Here are 7 reasons your framerate isn’t as high as it otherwise could be.

New Glenn launching from Cape Canaveral this morning. | Image: Blue Origin The billionaire space race entered a new phase today when Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin successfully launched its 320-foot-tall New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida.At 2:03AM ET this morning, New Glenn’s seven reusable BE-4 engines ignited to propel the NG-1 rocket into space, with the second stage and payload reaching orbit to achieve Blue Origin’s primary mission goal. It also successfully activated its Blue Ring Pathfinder payload vehicle which is “receiving data and performing well.”pic.twitter.com/Y2jjkkZsQv— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) January 16, 2025In parallel, the first stage booster — dubbed, “So You’re Telling Me There’s A Chance” — autonomously descended to its landing platform located several hundred miles downrange in the Atlantic. As it approached the Jacklyn barge, the booster lost contact with control and stopped sending data. Blue Origin confirmed that the booster was lost during landing. The company will try again in the spring.Nevertheless, Blue Origin’s goal for today’s uncrewed launch was for New Glenn to reach orbit. Anything beyond that would be a bonus. “No matter what, we will learn a lot,” said Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp ahead of today’s launch. Image: Blue Origin Today’s flight profile. Success meant launching into orbit, everything else was a “bonus.” The launch comes after almost a decade of development and puts Elon Musk’s SpaceX on notice. New Glenn has about the same carrying capacity as SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, and is meant to shuttle cargo into space on the reusable launch platform. This includes satellites for Amazon’s rival to Starlink’s high-speed low-latency internet service. The first of these 3,236 Project Kuiper satellites are expected to launch into low Earth orbit soon, aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket before New Glenn can take over the heavy lifting. “I’m incredibly proud New Glenn achieved orbit on its first attempt,” said Limp. “We knew landing our booster on the first try was an ambitious goal. We’ll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring.”Update, January 16th: Added additional mission success details and quote from Limp.

Raspberry Pi devices are perfect for projects that involve live TV streaming. They’re small, energy-efficient, and work with many different accessories. They can become powerful media stations when you put them with a good TV tuner and antenna.

Some big concerns for Biden to raise in his final days in office. | Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images, Nathan Howard President Biden used his final public address from the Oval Office to warn the nation about the dangers presented by the spread of misinformation and power-hungry tech leaders. “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”In his farewell message on Wednesday, Biden called back to warnings that President Dwight Eisenhower gave about the military-industrial complex causing a “disastrous rise of misplaced power.”“Six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well,” Biden said. Despite praising US technology leadership for its innovation and ability to transform lives, Biden said he was concerned about “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people,” warning that there could be alarming consequences “if their abuse of power is left unchecked.”While he didn’t specify names, Biden’s oligarch remark likely refers to Elon Musk, who has landed himself a leadership role in a not-really-government-department of the incoming administration after spending an estimated $250 million of his own money to help get Donald Trump elected. Alongside Musk, Mark Zuckerberg also appears to be a specific target of Biden’s concerns regarding the rise in misinformation and conspiracy theories across social media platforms. Last week, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would scrap its third-party fact-checking program for Facebook, Instagram, and Threads in the US and remove several restrictions around heated topics.“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power,” Biden warned. “The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.”On Monday, tech CEOs including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, and Mark Zuckerberg are expected to attend Trump’s inauguration, seated in a position of honor on the dais alongside former presidents and family members. These same CEOs — either through their companies or via personal contributions — have reportedly donated $1 million apiece to Trump’s inauguration fund.

Realme’s 14 Pro and 14 Pro Plus turn blue in the cold, even underwater. | Image: Realme Realme just launched its 14 Pro phones in India, and they come with a party trick: the phones can change color in the cold. That’s in addition to a triple camera flash and a triple IP rating that should protect the phone from extreme water conditions.Both the Realme 14 Pro and 14 Pro Plus share the color-sensitive tech, though it’s limited to the pearl white versions, with purple and gray models stuck on one lousy color. Co-designed with Danish studio Valeur Designers, the pearlescent phones include thermochromic pigments that start out as white, but pick up blue hues when the temperature drops below 16 degrees Celsius (about 61 degrees Fahrenheit), reversing as it warms up again. Image: Realme Realme says that the colder the temperature, the faster the phone will change. It’s even possible to create short-lived patterns by only cooling specific spots, which Indian YouTubers are already enjoying putting to the test. It does come with one meaty caveat in the small print though: “The cold-sensitive color-changing function will gradually lose effect due to daily use and is not a quality issue.” How long it will last remains to be seen, but even Realme’s own website only promises the effect “during initial use.”The color-changing design isn’t the only oddity to the 14 Pro series. The rear cameras include three separate flash modules, a design which Realme says “automatically restores natural skin tones in low-light conditions.” On the 14 Pro Plus those flashes sit in between three camera lenses, though the 14 Pro pulls a bit of a fast one, including two rear cameras and a third circle that only looks like a lens, but is in fact empty. Image: Realme The Realme 14 Pro looks like it has three rear cameras, but looks can be deceiving. This is also the latest phone to feature an IP69 rating for protection against dust and jets of water at high temperatures and pressure, joining the OnePlus 13, Moto G Power, and Honor Magic 7 Pro in adopting the stringent standard, which until recently was limited to the bulkiest rugged phones. The 14 Pro is also rated IP68 for submersion in water and IP66, which also applies to jets of water but for higher water volume at lower pressures and longer distances.Otherwise, the two Realme phones are typical midrangers. They both feature 50 megapixel main cameras and middle-of-the-line chipsets, with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 in the Pro Plus model and a MediaTek Dimensity 7300 in the Pro. The large 6,000mAh batteries and 80W charging speeds are still impressive, though. Both phones are out in India now, and start at ₹22,999 (about $265).

Up until now, Google Workspace subscribers had to pay an additional $20 on top of their plan to access all the AI features within Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Meet, and other tools.

Image: LG Display LG Display didn’t have its usual exhibit of flashy, breakthrough new screens at this year’s CES. This resulted in an odd situation where it was actually Panasonic that shared the most details about LG Display’s latest and greatest OLED panel. Even before any official announcement, it was already the centerpiece of 2025 flagships like Panasonic’s Z95B and the LG G5 from LG Electronics (not to be confused with the display division). But now the company is ready to spill the full details on its new four-layer tandem OLED design. “33 percent brighter than the previous generation and optimized for the AI TV era, it is the industry’s first-ever OLED display to achieve a maximum brightness as high as 4,000 nits,” LG Display wrote in a press release that went out tonight. The AI mention made me roll my eyes a bit, but there’s no doubting that this is a very impressive panel.Here’s the rundown on what’s so innovative, according to LG Display:The new panel’s innovation centers on a Primary RGB Tandem structure, which is LG Display’s proprietary technology that uses independent stacks of RGB elements to produce light. It had previously used a three-stack light source, with two layers of blue elements emitting relatively short energy wavelengths alongside red, green, and yellow elements in a single layer.The Primary RGB Tandem structure applied to the fourth-generation OLED TV panel organizes the light source into four stacks by adding two layers of blue elements and independent layers of red and green elements. It improves maximum brightness by increasing the amount of light produced by each layer compared to the previous structure. Graphic: LG Display The latest-gen OLED display uses a four-layer structure to maximize brightness — this time without any micro-lens array technology. Of course, seeing as we’re squarely in the OLED brightness wars, Samsung Display has its own brighter-than-ever QD-OLED screen that’s going into Samsung’s S95F, which was also announced in Las Vegas. But whereas Samsung is going all in on its glare-free display finish, LG is sticking with a more traditional glossy finish — though it uses “ultra-low reflective technology” to lessen any potential distractions.Energy efficiency has improved again with the fourth-gen LG Display OLED, and the company says that color brightness can reach 2,100 nits, which is a 40 percent improvement compared to the prior version. These peak brightness numbers are what the panel is technically capable of, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that TV makers like Panasonic will necessarily push it that hard in consumer sets.Either way, OLED keeps getting brighter and more vibrant while still retaining all of its trademark strengths like perfect blacks, fantastic viewing angles, and fast response times for gaming. The best ones don’t come cheap, but they’re worth saving up for. If you’re after more info on the new panel, I recommend these great videos from Caleb Denison at Digital Trends and Vincent Teoh at HDTVTest. LG Display’s rival, Samsung Display, did have a CES showcase that my colleague Sean Hollister caught during the show, so be sure to give that a watch as well.

If you're looking to get the most storage space for the money, this Seagate Expansion external drive is going to be a great option. We previously saw a great deal on the 20TB model, but this is even better. For a limited time, you can score this 24TB drive for just $280 from B&H Photo Video. This is the lowest price we've seen on this drive, so get it while you still can because this promotion is set to end on January 19.