When Xbox unveiled its new generation of subscription services with Xbox Game Pass in 2017, the appeal for players was immediately apparent. Pay a monthly fee and get an ever-growing library of games right at your fingertips. Even brand-new releases from Xbox's first-party studios, at no extra cost. Like Netflix, but for games, and with limited-time promotions that made the cost of a Game Pass subscription as low as $1, Game Pass colloquially earned the title, 'the best deal in gaming.'

Gaming is a visual medium, hence graphics are naturally a huge part of the experience. Since the 1990s and the widespread adoption of 3D graphics, the race to photorealism has been well underway. You can argue that we already achieved it years ago — for some, it was in Red Dead Redemption 2; for others, maybe in Crysis or even Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.

Desktop PCs take up so much space that most people have moved on to alternate solutions. And if you're not looking at a laptop, then a mini PC is going to be a fantastic option. With that said, this one from GMKtec is now on sale for a discounted price, coming in at just $123 for a limited time. Not only are you getting something that's ultra-compact, but there is also plenty of power here, making it great for a wide variety of applications.

The Surface Laptop 7 with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processor. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Microsoft is preparing for a “major” Surface announcement later this month. The software giant has started teasing “a major announcement from Surface for Business” this week in a LinkedIn post spotted by Windows Central. The announcement will be made during Microsoft’s AI tour in New York City on January 30th.Microsoft is rumored to be launching Intel-powered variants of its Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11 devices soon, and a prototype of a Surface Laptop 7 with Intel’s Lunar Lake chips appeared on a Chinese second-hand marketplace in October. It’s likely that Microsoft will announce Lunar Lake versions of the Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11 that are designed for businesses.The Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 both shipped with Intel’s Meteor Lake processors earlier in 2024, before Microsoft went on to launch refreshed Surface Copilot Plus devices with new designs and Qualcomm chips. The Surface Laptop Studio is also due for an upgrade from the current model’s 13th Gen Intel chips, but that’s less of a business-focused device so it’s unlikely to be part of this event. There are also rumors of an 11-inch Surface Go / Surface Laptop Go hybrid device powered by a Snapdragon X Plus processor, but again that’s unlikely to be targeted to businesses.We’ll be following Microsoft’s AI tour live later this month, so stay tuned for details on the Surface “major announcement.”

Are you tired of shelling out a fortune for creative software subscriptions? Thanks to robust open-source solutions, you don’t need to be tied down by expensive tools to unleash your creativity. From photo editing and graphic design to note-taking and illustration, there is a free and powerful alternative out there.

Illustration: The Verge Google is testing an experimental AI feature that creates a personalized podcast using your Search and Discover feed history. The Daily Listen feature in Google’s Search Labs is rolling out to Android and iOS users in the US according to 9to5Google, and works similarly to the Audio Overviews feature for Google’s NotebookLM project.Daily Listen references search data and Discover feed interactions to assess which news articles would be of most interest to the user, and then summarizes those stories and topics into a roughly five-minute audio overview. It provides a text transcript, alongside audio scrubber controls that allow users to play, pause, mute, rewind, or skip to the next story. Image: Google (Via 9to5Google) Here’s a few screengrabs of the Daily Listen UI, showing where the feature is located and how it presents related topics. Search Labs users who opt-in to try this experiment will find Daily Listen in the personalized widget carousel underneath the Search bar at the top of the Google app. A “Related stories” tab will appear at the bottom of the audio player that corresponds to content within the overview that allows users to like or disapprove of each story with a thumbs up/down, and explore new topics.There’s currently no word on when/if this feature will be rolled out to the wider public. Google’s AI Search Overviews were tested in a similar way via Search Labs before launching to a general audience last year, so it’s possible that Daily Listen may one day become a persistent feature — hopefully one that’s easier to opt out of than AI Overviews.

Illustration: The Verge Apple is refuting rumors that it ever let advertisers target users based on Siri recordings in a statement published Wednesday evening describing how Siri works and what it does with data. The section specifically responding to the rumors reads:Apple has never used Siri data to build marketing profiles, never made it available for advertising, and never sold it to anyone for any purpose. We are constantly developing technologies to make Siri even more private, and will continue to do so. The conspiracy theory the company is responding to resurfaced last week after Apple agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit over users whose conversations were captured by its Siri voice assistant and potentially overheard by human employees. While Apple’s settlement addresses an issue that The Guardian reported in 2019. The report showed human contractors tasked with reviewing anonymized recordings and grading whether the trigger was activated intentionally, would sometimes receive recordings of people discussing sensitive information. But it doesn’t include any reference to selling data for marketing purposes. After The Guardian’s report in 2019, Apple apologized and changed its policy, making the default setting not to retain audio recordings from Siri interactions and saying that for users who opt-in to sharing recordings, those recordings would not be shared with third-party contractors.However, reports about the settlement noted that in earlier filings like this one from 2021, some of the plaintiffs claimed that after they mentioned brand names like “Olive Garden,” “Easton bats,” “Pit Viper sunglasses,” and “Air Jordans,” they were served ads for corresponding products, which they attributed to Siri data. Apple’s statement tonight says it “does not retain audio recordings of Siri interactions unless users explicitly opt in to help improve Siri, and even then, the recordings are used solely for that purpose. Users can easily opt-out at any time.” Facebook responded to similar theories in 2014 and 2016 before Mark Zuckerberg addressed it directly, saying “no” to the question while being grilled by Congress over the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018.So, if Apple (and Facebook, Google, etc.) is telling the truth, then why would you see an ad later for something you only talked about? There are other explanations, and attempts to check the rumors out include an investigation in 2018 that didn’t find evidence of microphone spying but did discover that some apps secretly recorded on-screen user activity that they shipped to third parties. Ad targeting networks also track data from people logged onto the same network or who have spent time in the same locations, so even if one person didn’t type in that search term, maybe someone else did. They can buy data from brokers who collect reams of detailed location tracking and other info from the apps on your phone, and both Google and Facebook pull in data from other companies to build out profiles based on your purchasing habits and other information.

If you're looking for an alternative to storing your data in the cloud, then a NAS is going to be a fantastic option. While there are plenty of different options to choose from, you might want to check out the Synology DS124.

The DNS servers from your ISP turn an easy-to-remember xda-developers.com address into its unique IP address. There are multiple reasons for using a different DNS service. You may want something that improves performance while browsing, you might want to host your own DNS server at home, or you want site-blocking capability. Getting the most out of your DNS service takes trial and error, but this list should help you choose an alternate that works for you.

Illustration by Haein Jeong / The Verge Microsoft is rolling back a model upgrade to its AI-powered Bing Image Creator, reports TechCrunch. The rollback came after weeks of complaints by users that the tool just didn’t work as well after Microsoft “upgraded” to a new version of the DALL-E 3 model on December 18th.Microsoft declined to comment on its decision to roll things back or offer specifics on what may be causing the gap between user’s expectations and its output.Today, Microsoft’s head of search, Jordi Ribas, tweeted that they could reproduce “some of the issues reported” and are reverting to an older version of the DALL-E model for now, although it could take a few weeks until it’s complete.Since the launch of Bing Image Creator last spring, users have generated billions of images with text prompts. I'm pleased to share our latest updates to enhance your creative experience. Starting today, we’re rolling out the latest DALL-E 3 model PR16, which will create images… pic.twitter.com/3p9HsYMlr6— Jordi Ribas (@JordiRib1) December 18, 2024Thanks again for the feedback and patience. We've been able to repro some of the issues reported and plan to revert to PR13 until we can fix them. All Pro users and about 25% of the requests using boosts are now on PR13. The deployment process is very slow unfortunately. It…— Jordi Ribas (@JordiRib1) January 8, 2025As soon as Ribas posted about the change in December, there were complaints that Bing Image Creator was producing less-detailed results or images that didn’t accurately reflect their prompts. In his initial replies, Ribas said the model’s output quality “should be a bit better on average” than before. It was the same story in posts and comments on Reddit and OpenAI’s community forums. On OpenAI’s forums, a person complained about the model’s handling of fabric on an anime-style character’s dress. The person who posted the below images says the one on the left is “perfect quality” while the one on the right is “over-lit.” Screenshot: OpenAI community forum Another didn’t like the way Bing placed starburst effects: Screenshot: OpenAI community forum All of these things are subjective, and I can’t claim to think any of them look better than any others. If anything, it feels like an indication that Microsoft doesn’t just have to deal with complaints about bugs or people upset about feature changes — now it has to deal with AI art critics comparing the machine’s output to what they imagine it should create. Perhaps they should ask the artists whose work the generators were trained on for tips about managing a client’s expectations?

One of the most annoying things about Windows laptops these days is the sheer amount of bloatware, not to mention straight-up ads, littered throughout the OS. Microsoft has been steadily increasing the number of ads appearing in places like the Start Menu and even Settings (gotta pay off that OpenAI acquisition investment somehow), and every time I review another laptop, it seems like there are more and more pre-installed apps that I didn’t ask for or want.

At one point or another, you may have noticed that Windows labels your Wi-Fi networks as either private or public networks in the Wi-Fi settings. In fact, by default, they're all public networks, even if you're using it at home.