The Polestar 4 gets ski racks.Polestar is building one-of-a-kind versions of its EVs that are ready for whatever the winter brings. The company took the long-range, dual motor versions of its newest vehicles, the Polestar 3 SUV and Polestar 4 coupe (with performance packs), and turned them into rally-style vehicles that can rip through snowy terrain. The company is also resurrecting its Polestar 2 Arctic Circle one-off, which it showed off in 2022, to complete the family.The specially tuned Polestar 3 and 4 come with newly-released 20-inch white OZ Racing Rally Legend wheels sitting on Pirelli Scorpion Winter 2 tires for cold on-road driving. But when taken onto the snowscape, Pirelli’s Scorpion All Terrian Plus with 300 4-mm studs are used. They also get custom 3-way adjustable dampers with external gas reservoirs. Although these vehicles are lifted for the snow, it’s not by much. The Polestar 3 is given just 40mm to its ride height, and the Polestar 4 is lifted by just 20mm. But the vehicles do get Rally-style mud flaps, Swedish gold tow hooks, Recaro Pole Position bucket seats, Stedi Quad Pro LED front spotlights, and front strut braces. Polestar also gave the three EVs a coat of yellow paint that, along with the wheels, makes them look like the Mustang Mach-E Rally.All three Arctic Circle Polestars will be shown off at the FAT International Ice Race in Austria on February 1st. Other snowy conversions will be there too, including Audi with its snowpocalypse-ready Q6 E-tron Off-road.

When you have a trail of photos, messages, memories, videos, and online creations scattered across devices and platforms, it is important to document everything in one location. While there are countless apps designed to archive and showcase our digital lives, they often come with limitations or hefty subscription fees. Here is where OneNote jumps in.

If you’ve just begun learning about 3D printing, you might not realize how much the device is capable of. You might think it’s only useful for making fidgets, toys, and prototypes. Consumer printers can do so much more than that. In fact, you can create things that range from the incredibly useful to the gorgeous and fantastic, even with the most budget-friendly 3D printer. From everyday things that make your life easier to super cool designs that will wow your friends and family, 3D printing is a versatile tool that can help you bring your ideas to life.

After Nvidia showed off the new RTX 50 series, the world has been abuzz with talk about DLSS. Some people have been discussing how the new frame-generation technology can help give the world of graphics technology a boost in the frames department, while others are a little more critical. Now, the company has released DLSS 4 to the app, which the company claims is the biggest upgrade since DLSS 2.0's release in 2020.

The rise of generative AI has been powered by Nvidia and its advanced GPUs. As demand far outstrips supply, the H100 has become highly sought after and extremely expensive, making Nvidia a trillion-dollar company for the first time.It’s also prompting customers, like Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, Amazon, and Google to start working on their own AI processors. Meanwhile, Nvidia and other chip makers like AMD and Intel are now locked in an arms race to release newer, more efficient, and more powerful AI chips.As demand for generative AI services continues to grow, it’s evident that chips will be the next big battleground for AI supremacy. Intel is canceling Falcon Shores, its next big AI chip. Intel cancels AI chip, talks painful past and simplified future Nvidia’s market cap drops by almost $600 billion amid DeepSeek R1 hype. Elon Musk, White House adviser, says OpenAI deal announced at White House is a sham An AI supercomputer you can carry around. PlayStation and AMD are teaming up to infuse games with AI China opens an antitrust investigation into Nvidia What happened to Intel? Intel’s CEO is out after only three years Nvidia says its Blackwell AI chip is ‘full steam’ ahead Nvidia just made nearly $20 billion in pure profit in a single quarter. Intel’s Gaudi AI chips are far behind Nvidia and AMD, won’t even hit $500M goal OpenAI will start using AMD chips and could make its own AI hardware in 2026 “We had a design flaw in Blackwell,” admits Nvidia CEO. AMD’s AI chips are coming for Nvidia — but how quickly? Samsung and TSMC have reportedly discussed building AI chip “megafactories” in the UAE. Qualcomm wants to buy Intel Apple A16 chips are reportedly being made in America. Intel’s big turnaround plan includes spinning off its chipmaking business Sony reportedly picked AMD over Intel for the PS6 TikTok’s parent company reportedly gets closer to making its own AI chips. AMD is turning its back on flagship gaming GPUs to chase AI first The Nvidia AI antitrust investigation is ‘escalating,’ reports Bloomberg Don’t expect affordable Nvidia Blackwell gaming GPUs to arrive anytime soon. Geekbench has an AI benchmark now Some good news from Intel. The terror machines at Elliot Management view Nvidia as overvalued and say AI isn’t going to live up to the hype. AMD is becoming an AI chip company, just like Nvidia OpenAI wants in on the AI chip business. AMD will acquire an AI startup for $665 million. a16z is trying to keep AI alive with Oxygen initiative. Softbank is trying to borrow $10 billion for AI-related projects. Apple Silicon exec joins Rain AI to develop new hardware. Nvidia overtakes Microsoft as the world’s most valuable company Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company at the moment. Nvidia is now more valuable than Apple at $3.01 trillion Even the Raspberry Pi is getting in on AI Intel, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and more want to standardize the tech used in AI data centers. Nvidia will now make new AI chips every year Nvidia just made $14 billion of profit in a single quarter thanks to AI chips. Google announced Trillium, its sixth generation of Tensor processors. Apple plans to use M2 Ultra chips in the cloud for AI Apple’s ‘Project ACDC’ is creating AI chips for data centers. US plans $285 million in funding for ‘digital twin’ chips research With $1B in sales, AMD’s MI300 AI chip is its fastest selling product ever. OpenAI will give you a 50 percent discount for off-peak GPT use. Meta’s new AI chips run faster than before Intel launches new AI accelerator to take on Nvidia’s H100. The US is reportedly working on a list of restricted Chinese chipmaking factories. Inside TSMC’s very secretive chip training facility. A $40 billion AI investment fund? Nvidia reveals Blackwell B200 GPU, the ‘world’s most powerful chip’ for AI Google engineer indicted over allegedly stealing AI trade secrets for China The GDDR7 graphics memory standard is here. Intel plans to be inside 100 million AI PCs by next year. Leading edge chipmakers requested $70 billion in CHIPS Act grants. Nvidia’s role in the AI wave has made it a $2 trillion company Microsoft and Intel strike a custom chip deal that could be worth billions “Generative AI has hit the tipping point.” Nvidia lets Google’s Gemma AI model loose on its GPUs. Intel announces bleeding-edge Intel 14A, targeting 2027 with High-NA EUV. SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son wants $100 billion for a new AI chip venture. Nvidia is now worth more than Amazon and Alphabet AI expert Andrej Karpathy confirms he’s left OpenAI. Biden administration says it’s investing $5 billion in research to boost US semiconductor manufacturing. Nvidia plans to help companies make custom versions of its expensive AI chips. The latest rumor about Sam Altman’s AI chip-building dream could require up to $7 trillion. Huawei just retasked a factory to prioritize AI over its bestselling phone Meta’s reportedly working on a new AI chip it plans to launch this year. AMD says its MI300 AI accelerator is “now tracking to be the fastest revenue ramp of any product in our history”. Nvidia’s AI partners are also its competition. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is talking to TSMC about fabricating AI chips. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is still chasing billions to build AI chips Intel’s Core Ultra CPUs are here — and they all come with silicon dedicated to AI AMD releases new chips to power faster AI training The GPU haves and have-nots. About that new venture. Microsoft is finally making custom chips — and they’re all about AI Nvidia is launching a new must-have AI chip — as customers still scramble for its last one Meta is working on a new chip for AI

Last quarter, amid turmoil and restructuring, chipmaker Intel announced one of the largest corporate quarterly losses of all time — $16.6 billion, ten times worse than its $1.6B loss the quarter before. But in today’s Q4 2024 and full-year earnings release, Intel’s not hurting as badly: the company just announced a mere $126 million quarterly loss on $14.3 billion in revenue, and its executives are talking about simplifying the company so it can win in the future.The company isn’t in great shape despite the staunched bleeding, as its primary businesses were all down this quarter and barely up over the full year (see table below). And if you thought its chipmaking foundries were spending too much back when they lost $7 billion in 2023, well, Intel just revealed the foundries lost nearly double that — $13.4 billion — across 2024.Some people would argue that foundry money is just the price Intel’s paying to invest in its future, catch up to rivals, and stay the only major chipmaker that designs and fabricates its chips from scratch. And by “some people,” I mean it was ousted Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger’s goal. But now he’s gone, there have been more whispers about Intel spinning off its chipmaking businesses, something Gelsinger somewhat seeded himself. Today on the earnings call, Intel co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus didn’t commit to either keeping or spinning out the foundries, but hinted that “Intel Foundry will need to earn my business every day, just as I need to earn the business of my customers.” Either way, she seems to see them as a pair: “A stronger Intel Products combined with a more competitive Intel Foundry is a recipe for success overall.” Interim co-CEO David Zinsner says building that competitive foundry is still the goal.Intel says its foundry business is doing better anyhow, with reduced losses of $2.3 billion last quarter, expected “financial improvements” coming next year as it ramps production of its extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) chips, and a plan to hit “op inc break-even” by the end of 2027. Intel was also the largest recipient of the CHIPS Act, though that amounted to single-digit billions worth of government funding for its foundries: $7.68 billion, of which it’s received $2.2 billion so far. Intel says its all-important 18A process, which uses EUV, will produce chips in volume in the second half of next year. (That’s when Panther Lake, the successor to its Lunar Lake laptop chips, will arrive.) But a follow-on chip, Nova Lake, sounds like it’ll be a mix of Intel and non-Intel manufacturing. “You’ll actually see compute tiles inside and outside again, it’s about optimizing to what allows us to win in the market,” says Holthaus on the call.Intel is also hurting in the great race for AI chips, with its Gaudi far behind Gelsinger’s goals, and Holthaus admits the company’s not doing well in the AI data center. “I am not happy with where we are today,” she said on the call, admitted that “we’re not yet participating in the cloud-based AI data center market in a meaningful way.”To help speed things up, she says Intel is canceling its next big AI chip, codename Falcon Shores, and keeping it “as an internal test chip only without bringing it to market.” She says the plan is to “simplify our roadmap and concentrate our resources.” The company will focus on Jaguar Shores, a “system-level solution at rack scale,” instead, with the goal of building that entire solution rather than just the chips. She also hinted that Intel might aim to be less pricy than the Nvidia AI competition, with the “most compelling total cost of ownership,” similar to what we’d heard from AMD.Overall, Holthaus says she thinks about Intel’s future products in “three buckets”: client and edge, traditional data center, and AI data center, and she plans to simplify Intel’s business as a result. “We cannot be all things to all people,” she says. “We are prioritizing areas where we can drive differentiated value.” Within its core businesses, though, Holthaus says the company will “fight for every socket” where an Intel chip can go. “We need to be aggressive, we need to win share, and we need to show our customers they can win with us,” says Holthaus.Over the full year, Intel lost $18.76 billion on $53.1 billion in revenue. Intel says it has nothing new to share about the search for a permanent CEO, save that the search is progressing. Meanwhile, the company seems to be laying off just as many employees as promised: by the end of 2024, it had 15,000 fewer employees than it did the previous quarter, the company confirmed today.This was the first Intel earnings call from Intel’s new interim co-CEOs, one of whom promised at CES 2025 that the company’s actually still committed to graphics, though we didn’t hear much else about graphics on today’s call.

After announcing some new experimental features for YouTube Premium subscribers earlier this month — and that multiple experiments can be tested at once — the company has added one it promised was on the way: the ability to watch videos at 4x speed, as reported by Android Police. I’m personally a 1.5x to 2x sicko when it comes to YouTube videos and podcasts, but 4x is an absolutely blistering speed that’s more apt for skipping past the cruft than consuming info at a faster clip.The faster playback is just one of a few experiments you can currently try (with some OS and time restrictions):4x playback speed (iOS and Android only, until February 26th)Shorts Smart Downloads (iOS only, until February 19th)Shorts Picture-in-Picture (iOS only, until February 19th)High Quality Audio for 256kbps sound (iOS and Android only, until February 22nd)Jump Ahead Web (for web browsers, until February 5th)In similar just-get-to-the-point-already fashion, Jump Ahead gives web users a button to automatically skip to “the content they care about faster” instead of carefully scrubbing through a video. But let’s be honest, this will probably be a button to jump past all the intros and other bloat.The faster playback speed and Jump Ahead features seem the most useful — if you’re already a YouTube Premium subscriber who doesn’t have to sit through ads, the next frontier is skipping through all the cruft. Though higher quality audio is always welcome. And a picture-in-picture mode for Shorts could be convenient, but as was mentioned on a recent Vergecast, why would you want YouTube to automatically fill your phone’s storage with tons of Shorts videos?

Mark Zuckerberg.Tensions were high inside Meta ahead of Mark Zuckerberg’s first all-hands meeting of the year.Employee-submitted questions for the CEO touched on a couple of big themes: concerns about his announcement that “low-performers” would be let go on February 10th, his MAGA-fueled changes to Meta’s content moderation policies and DEI programs, and his comment to Joe Rogan about wanting more “masculine energy” in the workplace. “Are the changes we’re seeing (in any way) influenced by the new U.S. president?” asked one employee ahead of the internal meeting. “If so, why are we making changes based on these factors?”With a lot of the rank and file clearly on edge, Zuckerberg made sure there would be fewer opportunities for drama during today’s Q&A. Before it started, HR notified employees that “we will skip questions that we expect might be unproductive if they leak.” For the first time, the most upvoted employee questions were no longer ranked for everyone to see and comments were disabled during the livestream.Before jumping into the Q&A, Zuckerberg addressed the changes head on: “We try to be really open and then everything I say leaks. It sucks.”“W …Read the full story at The Verge.

A monitor is one upgrade that can make a huge difference to your current PC setup. And while there are lots of different things to consider if you're looking to upgrade, we think this one from LG gets a lot of things right, especially if you're looking for a monitor that can handle some gaming.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed sales figures for the company’s Ray-Ban smart glasses for the first time, telling employees that over 1 million units were sold in 2024. In remarks during an all-hands meeting seen by The Verge, Zuckerberg posed a question to staff about whether sales would go from 1 million to as much as 5 million units in 2025.“I think one of the questions for us is, are we going to go from 1 million this year to 2 million? Are we going to go from 1 million to 5 million?” Zuckerberg said. Since the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses first launched in 2023, they have gradually added new features, such as multimodal AI to process what you’re seeing, hearing, and reading, along with live AI and translations.“We basically invented the category and our competitors haven’t really shown up yet,” Zuckerberg said during the meeting. “I think we’ll probably start seeing some of that maybe a little later this year, maybe next year, but we just have this wide open field right now to run and basically introduce as many people as possible to Meta AI glasses and we should take that opportunity.”Meta declined to comment for this story.Meta is expected to take an …Read the full story at The Verge.

Creative image editors have long been attempting to find alternatives to using Photoshop for everything. Photoshop is expensive and locked behind annual subscriptions that tie you down, but the power and development of Photoshop still give reasons that it’s often the best tool to use. There are great alternatives to Photoshopwhether you pay or use open-source creative alternatives, but even when GIMP makes the top spot in most lists, Photoshop still has plenty of features GIMP can’t replace.

As has become an annual tradition, Apple just reported blockbuster earnings for the company’s most recent holiday quarter. “Today Apple is reporting our best quarter ever, with revenue of $124.3 billion, up four percent from a year ago,” CEO Tim Cook said in a press release. Revenue was up nearly across the board for the company’s Mac, iPad, and services divisions.But the numbers show a slight dip in year-over-year iPhone revenue, seemingly confirming that Apple Intelligence isn’t doing much to drive iPhone sales. The same goes for that new Camera Control button, I suppose. Cook tried to dismiss the notion that Apple Intelligence isn’t compelling people to upgrade in an interview with CNBC. “During the December quarter, we saw that in markets where we had rolled out Apple intelligence, that the year-over-year performance on the iPhone 16 family was stronger than those markets where we had not rolled out Apple intelligence,” he said.The standard iPhone 16 models are a particularly excellent value this year, which isn’t always the case. So that could also factor into the slightly lower revenue if fewer people are opting for the Pro variants.Apple has taken a cautious approach in rolling out its AI-powered features, having only just turned them on by default with this week’s release of iOS 18.3. Cook again confirmed that Apple Intelligence will become available in more languages in April. So far, the tools are convenient and helpful, but not game changing. And those promised improvements to Siri can’t come soon enough.This tends to be Apple’s most crucial quarter of the year for two reasons. It includes the all-important holiday shopping season, and since the iPhone 16 lineup was on sale for the entire three-month duration, this is our best indication yet of demand for Apple’s latest phones. The company also released several new Macs near the end of last year including a redesigned, much smaller Mac Mini and refreshed MacBook Pros. Revenue for Apple’s wearables business, which includes the Apple Watch and AirPods, was also slightly down compared to the year-ago quarter.