Everyone wants to make sure they are getting the most from their laptop. While keeping it up to date and doing some preventative maintenance is always good, upgrading some of the components can be an even better way to breathe some new life into any laptop. Even better, a lot of upgrades really aren't that hard and can be done by almost anyone with a screwdriver and a few minutes of time.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Following years of litigation, a federal court has finally ruled it unconstitutional for the FBI to search communications of US citizens collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). In a ruling unsealed last week, US District Court Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall decided that these “backdoor” searches violate the Fourth Amendment.As noted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, FISA allows federal intelligence agencies to collect swaths of foreign communications “in the name of ‘national security.’” Even though some of those communications might involve US residents, the government has argued that requiring warrants “would hinder the FBI’s ability to obtain and act upon threat intelligence.” In 2023, the FBI conducted more than 57,000 “US person” data searches, marking a 52 percent decrease from 2022.This particular decision stems from a case involving Agron Hasbajrami, a permanent US resident who was arrested in 2011 over accusations that he planned to join a terrorist organization in Pakistan. However, the government failed to disclose that part of its case rested on emails it obtained without a warrant through Section 702 of FISA. An appeals court in 2020 ruled that these types of searches might be unconstitutional, but now it’s official. Judge DeArcy Hall found the FBI’s warrantless search of US data “unreasonable” under the Fourth Amendment:While communications of U.S. persons may nonetheless be intercepted, incidentally or inadvertently, it would be paradoxical to permit warrantless searches of the same information that Section 702 is specifically designed to avoid collecting. To countenance this practice would convert Section 702 into precisely what Defendant has labeled it – a tool for law enforcement to run “backdoor searches” that circumvent the Fourth Amendment.Congress reauthorized Section 702 of FISA last year, and it’s set to expire again in 2026. The EFF is asking lawmakers to create a “legislative warrant requirement so that the intelligence community does not continue to trample on the constitutionally protected rights to private communications.”

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Chinese startup DeepSeek claims its AI models can match the performance of those made by OpenAI and Meta — but at a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek is shaking up the AI industry with cost-efficient large-language models it claims can perform just as well as rivals from giants like OpenAI and Meta. The Chinese startup says its flagship R1 reasoning model is capable of achieving “performance comparable” to OpenAI’s o1 equivalent, while the newly-released Janus Pro multimodal AI model can supposedly outperform Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 3.DeepSeek’s ChatGPT competitor quickly soared to the top of the App Store, and the company is disrupting financial markets, with shares of Nvidia dipping 17 percent to cut nearly $600 billion from its market cap on January 27th, which CNBC said is the biggest single-day drop in US history.. The AI assistant is powered by the startup’s “state-of-the-art” DeepSeek-V3 model, allowing users to ask questions, plan trips, generate text, and more. As downloads of DeepSeek’s app spiked, the startup began restricting signups due to “malicious attacks.”Launched in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek has garnered attention for building open-source AI models using less cash and fewer GPUs when compared to the billions spent by OpenAI, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others. If DeepSeek’s performance claims are true, it could prove that the startup managed to build powerful AI models despite strict US export controls preventing chipmakers like Nvidia from selling high-performance graphics cards in China.Here’s all the latest on DeepSeek.

Everyone says that AI bots will improve our productivity, and the main players in AI development have already invested billions in creating and training LLMs. You’re probably hearing daily about artificial intelligence advancements and discoveries. However, according to recent Business of Apps statistics data, ChatGPT, the most popular AI bot, has only 250 million active users weekly.

To update the firmware on your AirPods, first put them in the case. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Apple updated its AirPods firmware support page today with a more detailed step-by-step guide on how to upgrade the AirPods, AirPods Pro, and AirPods Max with their latest firmware, according to MacRumors. While most Apple devices, like the iPhone or Apple Watch, can start updates in the settings, with the AirPods, you have to wait for the update process to happen on its own.The AirPods firmware support page still includes Apple’s original summary of the conditions needed for the update process but has now added an expanded step-by-step guide to help ensure the process happens automatically. Although most of the steps have been previously known, there are some specific suggestions added, including charging with a USB cable and waiting at least 30 minutes for the update to happen. Those clarifications may help you if you’ve been struggling to get firmware updates to work.The following steps are specifically for the AirPods and AirPods Pro. The instructions for the AirPods Max are nearly identical, but with the charging case steps omitted.Make sure that your AirPods are in Bluetooth range of your iPhone, iPad, or Mac that’s connected to Wi-Fi.Put your AirPods in their charging case and close the lid.Plug the charging cable into your charging case, then plug the other end of the cable into a USB charger or port.Keep the lid of the charging case closed, and wait at least 30 minutes for the firmware to update.Open the lid of the charging case to reconnect your AirPods to your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.Check the firmware version again.There are still no sounds or pop-ups on a connected device letting you know when your AirPods’ firmware has been successfully updated. After following these steps and waiting for at least half an hour, you can check your AirPods firmware version manually by opening the Bluetooth settings of your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, clicking the Info button next to the name of your AirPods, and then navigating to the About section. If it’s still showing a firmware version that’s older than the latest versions Apple lists on its support page, the company recommends resetting the AirPods and then going through the firmware update steps again.

Image: Sony Sony is upping the limited warranty on some InZone gaming monitors to three years and is tossing in OLED burn-in coverage for the 27-inch M10S. The company announced the additional coverage today after launching both the InZone M10S OLED and M9 II LED in September with only one-year limited warranties out of the box. Sony says other than that, the limited warranties remain as they were.Manufacturers have long been averse to talking about burn-in or have outright categorized the phenomenon as “normal use,” denying warranty claims to fix it on various panel types. However, OLEDs have historically been more susceptible to burn-in, especially when used with many static images like those from a PC. In recent years, OLED has improved to be less sensitive to burn-ins.Sony is the latest in a trend of manufacturers adding burn-in coverage. Alienware was one of the first to specifically include OLED burn-in within its three-year coverage on the QD-OLED monitor launched in 2022, and for its latest 27-inch 4K model coming this year. And in 2023, The Verge’s Sean Hollister asked LG to explicitly warrant the company’s OLED monitors against burn-in and they agreed and changed their verbiage. Screenshot: The Verge A Samsung representative on this Best Buy product listing says the three-year warranty on the 32-inch Odyssey OLED G8 covers burn-in. Since then, companies like MSI and Asus have also pledged to cover OLED burn-in on some models, including their latest ones (in some countries). It’s important to research the warranty included in the model you’re buying to determine whether burn-in coverage is included. For instance, Samsung’s website shows a general policy for its warranty that excludes burn-ins, however, an online rep confirmed it does cover it on a 32-inch Odyssey OLED G8. However, the company still hasn’t clarified if burn-ins are covered for its latest 27-inch Odyssey OLED G8 gaming monitor.

Managing bookmarks can be challenging. Over the years, I’ve accumulated thousands of bookmarks scattered across Chrome, tools like Linkwarden, and oft-forgotten reads in Pocket. Combined with the issue of link rot, I had no reliable way of knowing whether this valuable information I might still want to access remained available.

Adobe Lightroom is a popular proprietary software used by most professional photographers. Not only is it a powerful photo editing tool, but it’s also great for file management and image organization — its original intention as a tool was file management rather than an editing tool. While there are a plethora of open-source photo-storage toolsyou can use to replace Lightroom, there are few that do both with the same tool. You’ll need to look for separate open-source photo editing tools if you wish to truly replace Adobe Lightroom in your workflow.

Retro games may not have the same graphics or quality-of-life features as modern titles, but it’s hard to beat some of the old gems when it comes to charm. Better yet, many of the older consoles are fairly easy to emulate. Heck, even the newer Raspberry Pi models have enough firepower to emulate a vast library of titles – and here are some of the best classical games you can experience in their retro glory on your tiny tinkering companion.

After months of controversy, the US briefly applied a ban on ByteDance apps — namely TikTok — which includes video-editing tool, CapCut. While CapCut has some questionable privacy, it is one of the best freemium video editing tools available for both mobile and desktop. Although ByteDance apps are available outside the US, with a huge proportion of US-based content creators using both CapCut and TikTok, it’s good to know where you can get freemium comparable video editing apps to replace such a great video editing tool.

If you're looking for a gaming laptop that can do it all, then the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 is going to be right up your alley. Not only are you getting a laptop that looks good and is also quite slim, but it also packs lots of power as well.

The Pebble Time Round just got a new lease on life. | Photo: Chris Welch / The Verge Eric Migicovsky still wears his Pebble. Thirteen years after he founded the wearables company and found huge success on Kickstarter, and more than eight years after he sold the company to Fitbit, which was then acquired by Google, Migicovsky’s watch still works. (In case you’re wondering: when I saw him at CES a few weeks ago, he appeared to be wearing a white Pebble Time Round model. But he has a box full of them at home.) It hasn’t gotten a software update since December 2016, though, and he’s been worried for a while that it will eventually stop getting notifications, or connecting to his phone, or run into some other show-stopping problem.Rather than buy another smartwatch, Migicovsky decided to try and get Pebble going again. He sold his most recent startup, a messaging app called Beeper, to Automattic last year and left the company in the fall. Since then, he’d thought about starting a Pebble-like product from scratch, figuring it’d be easier to do the same thing again a second time. “But then I was like, what if I just asked Google to open-source the operating system?” he says. It felt like a long shot, but he knew the code was just sitting dormant inside Mountain View somewhere. So he asked. A few times.To Migicovsky’s surprise, Google agreed to release Pebble OS to the public. As of Monday, all the Pebble firmware is available on GitHub, and Migicovsky is starting a company to pick up where he left off.The company — which can’t be named Pebble because Google still owns that — doesn’t have a name yet. For now, Migicovsky is hosting a waitlist and news signup at a website called RePebble. Later this year, once the company has a name and access to all that Pebble software, the plan is to start shipping new wearables that look, feel, and work like the Pebbles of old. Photo: Dan Seifert / The Verge Pebbles were always gadget-y gadgets, which is still part of their appeal. The reason, Migicovsky tells me, is simple. “I’ve tried literally everything else,” he says, “and nothing else comes close.” Sure, he may just have a very specific set of requirements — lots of people are clearly happy with what Apple, Garmin, Google, and others are making. But it’s true that there’s been nothing like Pebble since Pebble. “For the things I want out of it, like a good e-paper screen, long battery life, good and simple user experience, hackable, there’s just nothing.” The core of Pebble, he says, is a few things. A Pebble should be quirky and fun and should feel like a gadget in an important way. It shows notifications, lets you control your music with buttons, lasts a long time, and doesn’t try to do too much. It sounds like Migicovsky might have Pebble-y ambitions beyond smartwatches, but he appears to be starting with smartwatches.If that sounds like the old Pebble and not much else, that’s precisely the point. Migicovsky tells me over and over that the plan is not to reinvent Pebble, or AI the bejesus out of the concept, or do whatever else you’d do starting a hardware company in 2025. The fact that the Pebble on his wrist still works, and still works for him, is evidence that maybe Pebble had already finished its job. “We’re building a spiritual, not successor, but clone of Pebble,” he says, “because there’s not that much I actually want to change.”A lot of other things have changed in eight years, though. Google, Apple, and Samsung all now have good smartwatches that are tied tightly to their other devices — Pebble always had trouble getting access to features on iOS, in particular, and that’s not getting easier. Smartwatches are currently health and fitness devices above all else, and they’re getting vastly more complex and powerful in pursuit of those features. Google obviously doesn’t see any form of Pebble as a threat; its best chance is to chart another path entirely.The biggest difference this time will be how the company itself operates. Migicovsky wrote a long blog post in 2022 explaining what went wrong at Pebble the first time and ascribed its failure in part to taking a bunch of investment money and letting it change the company. Since then, Migicovsky has made plenty of money from Beeper and during a stint as an investor at Y Combinator; his new company is his alone. Right now, it’s just Migicovsky and a few part-time employees — it’ll grow, he says, but not too much. “The core thing here is: sustainable.”“They could even use it in random other hardware. Who knows what people can do with it now?”Migicovsky also hopes to be part of a broader open-source community around Pebble OS. The Pebble diehards still exist: a group of developers at Rebble have worked to keep many of the platform’s apps alive, for instance, along with the Cobble app for connecting to phones, and the Pebble subreddit is surprisingly active for a product that hasn’t been updated since the Obama administration. Migicovsky says he plans to open-source whatever his new company builds and hopes lots of other folks will build stuff, too. “There’s going to be the ability for anyone who wants to, to take Pebble source code, compile it, run it on their Pebbles, build new Pebbles, build new watches,” he says. “They could even use it in random other hardware. Who knows what people can do with it now?”This whole project will take time, Migicovsky cautions. He only found out for sure that Google would open-source the software a few days ago, and he hasn’t been able to use it at all yet. But he’s already working on hardware prototypes, and he’s crystal clear on what he wants the new Pebbles to be. He knows he can do it because he already did it once. The evidence is right there on his wrist. All he’s trying to do is make sure it can stay there.