Microsoft is a large corporation that has a ton of products in its portfolio. Some of the most popular ones include Windows, Office, Teams, Outlook, and OneNote. While these are all apps that are beneficial and provide several features that help people across various verticals, they have certain shortcomings that may deter folks from using them. The biggest deterrent in several cases may be the price, while some users may not be too sure about their privacy when using Microsoft's apps, since their data may be sent to the company's servers. However, there's not much that Microsoft can do about these factors since they're essential parts of running a large business.

There’s a famous two-decade-old Paris Review interview with Haruki Murakami in which he, one of the world’s most celebrated novelists, details his daily routine. He wakes up at 4AM, works for five hours, goes for a run, reads, goes to bed, and then repeats it all over again. The rigor and repetition are the point.I am not Haruki Murakami.In addition to my work at The Verge, I write novels — my second one is out this week — and while I admire Murakami’s commitment to an immovable schedule, I’ve found that I produce my best work when I’m constantly rethinking routines, processes, and, mostly, how I’m writing. In the modern age, that means what software I’m using.What I am about to describe will be a nightmare to anyone who likes all of their tools to work harmoniously. All of these apps are disconnected and do not interoperate with each other in any way. Many of the things they do are redundant and overlap. I suppose this process is quite the opposite of frictionless — but that’s precisely the point. I’m not sure I believe that ambitious creative work is borne from a perfectly efficient workflow.This is, instead, a journey of moving the work through d …Read the full story at The Verge.

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) says it’s delaying shipments to the US this month while it works out how it will deal with the wide-ranging tariffs President Donald Trump announced this week, according to The Guardian.“As we work to address the new trading terms with our business partners, we are taking some short-term actions, including a shipment pause in April, as we develop our mid- to longer-term plans,” JLR told The Guardian. The automaker is responding to a 25 percent Trump-ordered tariff on imported vehicles that went into effect Thursday and could add $5,000 to $10,000 or more to the price of a new car in the US. JLR said this week that its business remains “resilient,” but those living in the town where its cars are made weren’t optimistic, with one telling The Guardian that the tariffs could lead to job losses. About a quarter of the 400,000 vehicles JLR sells every year go to US buyers, as The Sunday Times notes in its own story about the pause this morning. It’s thought that the automaker has enough existing US stock to last about two months, and it would take about 21 days for more to come once shipments resume, the Times writes. JLR isn’t alone in its concerns. Earlier this week, Nintendo blamed Trump’s new tariffs as it delayed US preorders of the Switch 2, originally scheduled to start on April 9th. In the wake of the tariffs announcement, the US Stock market lost $6.6 trillion in two days — a record, according to The Wall Street Journal — and industries are bracing for negative impacts to the cost and availability of just about everything, including the high-powered GPUs used by AI companies, gadgets of all types, and even board games

Hey, would you look at that—I'm writing yet another post about ePaper devices. I really love this technology, so when I saw that Seeed was releasing its own smart home display based on it, I knew I had to check it out. Best of all, it's actually not that expensive, and comes chock-full of a ton of handy features.

Earlier this week, when it seemed as though TikTok’s fate in the US would actually be decided by April 5th, everyone — from Amazon to the founder of OnlyFans — was coming out of the woodwork to buy it.As it turns out, none of them had a chance. And now, thanks to President Donald Trump’s tariff war, no one may get to buy TikTok. People familiar with the matter tell me that, despite all of the bids for the app, the White House was only seriously considering an Oracle-led consortium, which included many of ByteDance’s biggest investors who were set to roll their stakes into a new, US entity. The proposal, which would have licensed the app’s algorithm from China and shuffled some shareholder money around to make TikTok look more independent from ByteDance, was set to be announced before President Trump went nuclear on tariffs. As others have reported and I’ve independently confirmed, his tariff announcement on Wednesday torched any immediate chance of the TikTok proposal being blessed by the Chinese government. On Friday, less than an hour after Trump said he was pushing back the clock on banning TikTok by another 75 days to finish working out a deal, ByteDance …Read the full story at The Verge.

After Nvidia released the RTX 5070 and 5090, we got a taste of just how high GPU prices can get, with the latter going for $2,000 as a recommended retail price. Despite the price tag, people were snapping up cards so quickly that companies had to mark them up at a pretty steep rate. Good luck actually finding a card selling for $2,000.

I have always freely swapped between AMD and Nvidia and held no brand loyalties when it came to picking the best graphics cards for my PC build. This should be the way to go for all products, but we always tend to have some bias as humans. Having used my trusty RTX 3060 Ti for a few years, it was time to replace this aging card as it was seriously underpowered for my 49-inch super-ultrawide monitor. Enter the RX 7900 XT in 2022, which was impressive to say the least but not a colossal upgrade, especially when using earlier kernels and most Linux distros.

I was 8 years old when we got our first "personal computer" — a Pentium 3 pre-built from HP known as "Brio". For around seven years, my brother and I squeezed all we could out of that PC, after which we finally convinced our parents to get us a custom PC. While that was the start of my ongoing tryst with PCs, it never reached a point where the younger me could fully experience the best that PC hardware had to offer, at least not until I was already in college.

No gaming PC setup is complete without a set of gaming peripherals to go toe-to-toe with the action. While I started my PC journey with cheap no-name peripherals, I elevated my experience to quality models not too long ago. From a budget Cooler Master keyboard to premium mechanical keyboards, and knock-off headphones to high-quality gaming headsets, I've used them all.

Microsoft Excel is a treasure trove of features. There are so many functions tucked away into different corners of the spreadsheet app that you may be using the software for decades, but still won't be acquainted with all the possibilities. One such feature that recently caught my attention is the Camera tool. The name is slightly deceptive, since it may indicate that activating the feature will use your computer's camera to capture an image. But the reality is far from that. The Camera tool is more like an exclusive screenshot tool inside Excel, but on steroids!

Mini PCs aren't a necessity or an option with nearly as much choice as a mid-tower assemble-it-yourself machine when you're out shopping for a computer upgrade. I have one each of a laptop, mini PC, and mid-tower that I use in rotation, and doing so offered a fresh perspective into why you shouldn't dismissively ignore the handful of adorable and tiny computers you can just plug in to fire up. Besides the general readiness to hit the ground running, there are several (albeit niche) use cases where I've found the smaller form factor to excel.

Get ready for slick light strips and futuristic lightcycles.Disney just released the first trailer for Tron: Ares, the long-planned Tron: Legacy sequel. The minute-and-a-half trailer doesn’t say much about the story but shows plenty of the movie’s visuals, which look dark, moody, and filled with the series’ signature light trails.The trailer opens in the physical world at night, as Jared Leto’s Ares, a Program made physical, flees from police on a light cycle, slicing one in half using his light trail as a weapon. The shots that follow show a massive airship hovering over the real-world city, visible only by the red light strips on its outside. The rest has people looking on in horror at the airship, dogfights between human aircraft and fighters from the Tron digital world, and what looks like a clip of Ares being given his physical body. All of that is set to the music of Nine Inch Nails, which is handling the soundtrack this time around. It ends with a voiceover from Jeff Bridges, reprising his role as Kevin Flynn and saying, “Ready? There’s no going back.” The movie hits theaters on October 10th.Disney included the poster above in an email to The Verge announcing the trailer’s release. In a YouTube video from Thursday’s CinemaCon presentation about Ares, Leto said his character is “a highly advanced program” who has entered the real world on a “do-or-die mission to fulfill his directive,” and promised that the movie “will hit you right in the grid … wherever that is.” In addition to Leto and Bridges, Tron: Ares is directed by Joachim Rønning and its stars include Gillian Anderson, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Hasan Minhaj, Jodie Turner-Smith, Arturo Castro, and Cameron Monaghan.