Microsoft has confirmed Surface PC prices have increased in the Microsoft Store, with third-party retailers following shortly.

I finally hit a breaking point with my monthly subscriptions. Between photo editing suites and productivity platforms, my monthly credit card bill was starting to feel like a second mortgage. So, I went on a mission to see if I could replicate a professional-grade workflow without spending a single dime.

You can buy the Apple Watch Series 11 for $100 off in multiple sizes and colors. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge If you’re still holding onto an older Apple Watch, now might be a good time to upgrade. Right now, the 42mm Apple Watch Series 11 with GPS is on sale for around $299 ($100 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target, which is its best price to date. If you prefer a larger size, the 46mm is also $100 off for a limited time, with the base GPS configuration selling for about $329 at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target.Apple Watch Series 11Where to Buy: $399 $299 at Amazon (42mm) $429 $329 at Amazon (46mm) $399 $299 at Best Buy (42mm)While it’s not a significant upgrade over the Apple Watch Series 10, we still recommend it if you’re using a Series 5 or Series 6. It’s Apple’s fastest and most durable flagship wearable yet, with a bright, wide-angle OLED display that’s easy to read at a glance. It offers the longest battery life of any Series model to date, allowing you to eke out up to 24 hours (or 38 hours in low-power mode) on a single charge with the base configuration. The LTE version doesn’t drain as quickly either thanks to Apple’s power-efficient 5G modem, and you can charge a dead watch to 80 percent capacity in just 30 minutes.On the health and wellness side, it offers a diverse range of features, from FDA-cleared hypertension notifications and sleep scores to ovulation tracking, sleep apnea detection, and fall detection. Beyond that, you get access to watchOS 26 features like Workout Buddy, which offers real-time coaching, as well as wrist flick and double tap gestures so you can control the watch without touching the screen. Rounding things out, you also get Apple’s usual set of smart features, including Apple Pay, Siri, and access to music directly from your wrist.Read our Apple Watch Series 11 review.

Elon Musk promised Neuralink would bring superhuman abilities and minds merged with AI. Then he fueled a runaway hype train for his brain implant technology, which ended up with a grisly record for implants in monkeys and some success with human subjects. But for all of the hype, he's still further away than Mars from his goal. And that's because his relentless ambition is once again hitting the wall of scientific reality.The heart of the issue is how brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) translate thought into results. Neuralink's products have all been brain-to-cursor interfaces, which allow patients to control a mouse with their minds. But N …Read the full story at The Verge.

Using a lot of AI tools comes with the territory when you write about them constantly. This also means assuming I already know what they do, which is not always a fair assumption going in, but it’s also not too far off; most of them do roughly the same thing in slightly different ways. When I first tested Claude, I approached it with the same mindset - that I give it a query and get an output, and call it a day. But I was barely scratching the surface of what it actually does, and only started noticing because I kept bumping into features that had no equivalent anywhere else.

OpenAI released a report breaking down how people use ChatGPT and who they are. | Image: The Verge OpenAI's chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, sent a four-page memo to employees on Sunday about the company's strategic direction, emphasizing the need to lock in users and grow its enterprise business. The memo, which was viewed by The Verge, repeatedly underlines the importance of building a moat around its AI products, to combat how easy it is for users to switch between whichever model is topping the charts on any given day or week. Dresser, who recently took over much of former COO Brad Lightcap's duties as he transitions to a new role focused on special projects, also emphasizes the importance of focusing on enterprise clients. It …Read the full story at The Verge.

When I initially started thinking about building myself an all-flash NAS, speed was the only thing on my mind. It seems pretty obvious. All-flash storage is an order of magnitude faster than spinning drives, so it must be the obvious endgame for a home server. Faster reads, faster writes, no risk of hard disk crashes. Plus, no noise — a surprising benefit that's always more than welcome. Or at least that's what was on my mind. Of course, things change. That narrative changed entirely by the time I got around to deploying TrueNAS on my existing hardware and started using it the way a home server should be used. The bottleneck wasn't speed, and I ended up rethinking my entire setup and strategy. Here's why.

Asha Sharma. | Image: The Verge, Microsoft Microsoft's new Xbox chief, Asha Sharma, has signaled that Xbox Game Pass pricing is about to change. In an internal memo to Xbox employees, obtained by The Verge, Sharma admits that "Game Pass has become too expensive for players" and that Microsoft needs "a better value equation.""Game Pass is central to gaming value on Xbox. It's also clear that the current model isn't the final one," says Sharma. "Short term, Game Pass has become too expensive for players, so we need a better value equation. Long term, we will evolve Game Pass into a more flexible system which will take time to test and learn around."Microsoft hiked the price of Xbox …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you're having trouble deciding on a color for a new MacBook Neo, you might not have to choose just one. The folks over at MacWorld found that Apple doesn't appear to limit the colors of spare parts you can buy for your Neo, potentially allowing you to deck out your indigo laptop with pink-tinted keyboard caps or a citrus green bottom cover.You'll have to pay for these spare parts on top of the Neo's $599 starting price, though. While the bottom case costs $34.32, the keyboard caps are $39, and the top case is $175.12. A replacement for the entire keyboard is priced at $139.92 (with a $29.40 return credit). The MacBook Neo and its spare …Read the full story at The Verge.

CPU bottleneck is something I've always dealt with ever since I paired my RTX 4090 with the Ryzen 9 5900X a few years ago. It wasn't a huge deal at 4K, but considering I mostly play competitive titles and AAA first-person shooters at 1440p, it was impossible to ignore my GPU hovering around 70–80% most of the time. Things did improve when I later replaced it with the 5800X3D, but even then, the GPU usage wouldn't consistently stay above 90%, which meant that I still wasn't getting the most out of it at 1440p.

When I first started putting together my home security setup, I assumed I’d eventually have to choose between making it smarter or keeping it efficient. Having a self-hosted security system sounds great until you start adding multiple cameras, object detection, recording devices, and a few extra AI features on top to make your home feel smarter. That’s usually when the hardware starts struggling.

The debate over picking gold-plated HDMI cables still pops up in online forums, Reddit posts, and in the aisles of electronics stores. Every time, people fall for fancy packaging with the words' premium' and 'gold-plated' HDMI cables.