There are a lot of great motherboards on the market right now, especially if you're searching for one for AMD's AM5 chip. With that said, we have a great lineup of AM5 motherboards we'd recommend, but if you're looking for our top choice, then it has to be the Asus ROG Strix X670E-E Gaming. You really can't go wrong here, with support for Ryzen 9000 CPUs, along with PCIe 5.0 graphics and PCIe 5.0 SSD slots.

Compared to third-party tools, hosting apps and services on your own hardware requires a certain level of technological expertise. And the complexity goes up a notch when you try to run containers on bare-metal server distros instead of hosting them on typical desktop operating systems like Windows 11.

Bit by Bit is a weekly column focusing on technical advances each and every week across multiple spaces. My name is Adam Conway, and I've been covering tech and following the cutting-edge for a decade. If there's something you're interested in and would like to see covered, you can reach out to me at [email protected].

While Excel is a powerful tool for organizing data and performing complex calculations, it’s easy to get lost in a sea of numbers and bland cells. At times, when you deal with large databases, your spreadsheets may look like a never-ending number factory. But they don’t have to! With a few simple tweaks, you can transform your spreadsheets from drab to fab and impress your boss.

Building your own custom router is a great addition to any home network, but an especially big upgrade if you're a homelabber or tinkerer, allowing you more insight, control and security over your network than a traditional ISP router would allow. But having a dedicated router is a bit of a pain, and while there are some downsides to virtualizing your router (and prerequisites), it's a great way to keep one less device lying around your apartment.

Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon | Neon Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End is a musical about wicked people. But it’s very different from Wicked. Read the full story at The Verge.

The great thing about PC building is that it is wonderfully inclusive. You can build a budget system for as cheap as you want, or take things to the extreme with an overkill rig that would put NASA to shame. PC enthusiasts are rarely satisfied with standard hardware, always striving to maximize performance, minimize temperatures, and eliminate as much noise as possible.

Don’t you just want to bend this right in half? | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple hopes to release a foldable 18.8-inch creaseless iPad by about 2028, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman writes in today’s Power On newsletter. The company’s industrial design group has reportedly managed to create prototypes of this device that “have a nearly invisible crease” and would essentially be like “two iPad Pros side-by-side.”Rumors of a folding iPad have been floating in the ether for years, now. Recent ones include a smaller model that Apple would release in 2026 or 2027. Gurman’s write-up today has strong echoes of the gargantuan 20-inch folding “iPad / MacBook hybrid” he detailed in 2022. That doesn’t seem to mean that it will run macOS, but Gurman claims that it “will have elements of both” Macs and iPads and that iPadOS “should be advanced enough to run macOS apps” by 2028.Considering that Macs run iPhone and iPad apps now, it’s not outrageous to think the street could go both ways in time. It might help the value proposition, too; the 13-inch iPad Pro starts at $1,299, and whatever financial damage an iPad twice that size could incur would be a little easier to take coupled with the salve of being able to run macOS apps on it.Gurman says a foldable iPhone is still in the works, though he doesn’t expect that “before 2026 at the earliest,” as other rumors have said. He also says information from his sources lines up with an alleged Apple internal display roadmap that made the rounds recently, tipping the 18.8-inch foldable iPad and Apple’s plans to release OLED MacBook Pros in 2026, followed by a MacBook Air OLED update in 2027.

The PS Placeable makes the PSP into a tiny PS2. | Image: Retro Mod Works What if you could turn a PSP with a broken screen into a miniature PS2, connect a Bluetooth controller to it, and play PSP games on your TV? That’s the idea behind Retro Mod Works’ PS Placeable, a mod that “consolizes” the PSP and was featured yesterday in a video from the YouTube channel Macho Nacho Productions. Retro Mod Works charges $274.99 for a prebuilt PS Placeable. Those are waitlisted at the moment, though — a message on the site says the project is a “one man show” and that the demand for the Placeable was higher than anticipated. Retro also offers to mod customer-provided PSPs for $100 less, and there’s an option preorder DIY parts and do the conversion work yourself. The mod requires either a PSP-2000 or PSP-3000 revision, as the first PSP didn’t have a video output. It’s not clear when the DIY parts will ship — we’ve asked Retro Mod Works and will update if we get a reply. Image: Retro Mod Works A stack of PS Placeables. The primary person behind the project, named Dan, told Macho Nacho host Tito Perez that he “hated the idea of buying digital games” for which he has physical copies, and wanted a way to add Bluetooth controller support while preserving the UMD drive. He’s also mentioned in replies on Reddit that his goal is to help people revive broken PSPs with the mod, which doesn’t need the console’s screen.But buying one of these mod kits can be pricey or require skills most people don’t have. If you just want to play PSP games on your TV and don’t care about having a UMD drive, the PSP Go — which lacked Sony’s oddball optical drive but supported Bluetooth controllers and also had a way to output video — is still pretty easy to come by.

I recently switched from macOS to Windows after using the former for five long years. Well, at least when I'm working from my desk. I made some changes to my home office, including building a new gaming PC, which means my MacBook is reserved for when I'm traveling or occasionally working in a café. While the transition was smoother than I expected, there are some features on macOS that completely spoiled me. Things like Spotlight Search and Quick Look are extremely helpful, saving a ton of hassle on a daily basis.

The Magic Mouse with USB-C was the tiniest revision. | Photo by Nathan Edwards / The Verge Apple is working on a redesigned successor to the Magic Mouse, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter. This new mouse would address complaints some users have had, including that pesky charging port. Gurman writes that Apple’s design team has created prototypes of the mouse in recent months with an eye toward creating “something that better fits the modern era.” He doesn’t get into any specifics — the group still hasn’t settled on a design — except to say that the mouse will address the charging port location and other “longstanding complaints.” It’s at least 12 to 18 months away from release, according to Gurman.How can Apple fix a mouse that’s objectively perfect? I’m kidding; after 15 years of largely the same design, the Magic Mouse has plenty of room for improvement, even with its recent USB-C revision for the M4 iMac release. Everyone is different, but my wishlist includes adding some mechanical controls, addressing ergonomics (my hand always cramps after a while), and not having to spear the mouse’s underbelly to charge it. But even if Apple moves the port, I’m still a little grumpy when I have to dig out a cable to plug in the MX Master 3 that serves as my daily driver. There are better ways, like the Logitech mouse that charges wirelessly via a mousepad that my colleague, Sean Hollister, hasn’t had to intentionally charge for two years. I added MagSafe-style wireless charging by dropping my Magic Mouse into the wireless-charging equivalent of an ergonomic service industry sneaker — it ain’t pretty, and I still can’t use it while it’s charging, but it gets the job done. I’d bet Apple can do something better.

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge Hello! I’m here from the future. And I have some news. 12 months from now, all the Big Tech CEOs are still in their jobs, everybody’s using folding phones, Apple made a TV, and Nvidia is the most valuable company in the history of the universe. Wild year, huh? Or maybe not? It’s hard to remember. Time travel messes with your memory a little.On this episode of The Vergecast, the second installment of our two-part 2025 preview, we debate some seriously iffy storylines from the end of 2025. David, our resident time traveler, brings us some big stories that either did or didn’t happen in the year to come, and Nilay Patel and Wall Street Journal columnist Joanna Stern have to help figure out what’s real and what isn’t. Will someone really buy Snap? Is GTA VI going to be the biggest game ever? Will Bluesky continue to ascend and leave Threads in its wake? Nobody knows yet, not even the time traveler, but we have some thoughts and ideas.As was the case with last week’s episode, we’re keeping score. Here’s how it works: each host has to decide, for each 2025 news story, whether it’ll be real or not by the end of the year. Every correct guess earns you a point; every incorrect guess... Read the full story at The Verge.