Intel pulled back the curtain on its new Battlemage GPUs yesterday, revealing two new cards that aim to offer a high-end experience at a cheaper price. The news is still hot off of the press, and Acer is already bringing its own take on the cards to the public. The company has announced two cards based on Intel's boards, and they'll be ready to ship very soon.

The Growl trainer has a screen you can punch without regretting it later. | Image: Growl Growl is a startup launching a wall-mounted fitness device that uses a combination of projectors and sensors to give you a life-size boxing coach to train with. Unlike similar interactive trainers such as the Lululemon Mirror or Tonal, the Growl encourages physical interactivity with its screen that doubles as a punching bag you can actually hit. However, just like those smart home workout machines, it’s pretty expensive, even with the hardware costs spread across a monthly subscription.Pricing for unlimited family access is “anticipated” to start at $150 per month on a 48-month plan or $190 per month for 36 months when preorders open in April 2025. That puts the price tag at $7,200 for four years or $6,840 for three. That’s not far off from the $7,407 cost of a Peloton Tread Plus over four years, including monthly subscription fees, and as with Peloton’s hardware, you’ll own the Growl at the end of the subscription period. Image: Growl Growl uses projectors instead of LCD or OLED screens to create larger, more immersive displays. By using projectors instead of LCD or OLED screens, its makers say that the Growl creates a more immersive experience without adding extra size. (Although it stays mostly out of the way, its design is described as “compact as a wall shelf.”) Your progress and other useful metrics are projected on the walls around the Growl. At the same time, its main screen, which is essentially half a punching bag that the company says offers similar resistance to the real thing, displays a life-size virtual trainer that’s more engaging.The Growl detects when and where you’ve punched it using a series of infrared time-of-flight sensors, turning its flexible surface into a large touchscreen, while multiple cameras track your movements in 3D and provide real-time feedback using AI analysis.You can spar with the virtual trainer as they show you where to throw punches, or you can play interactive fitness games including a title that looks like the boxing equivalent of Beat Saber that has you punching a series of targets flying toward you.It’s not just designed to track how long you’ve worked out or how many calories you’ve burned. It can suggest how to improve your form and technique without ever having to step into a ring and risk getting punched back.

Image: Laura Normand / The Verge President-elect Donald Trump made two nominations Wednesday that will shape significant parts of his administration’s tech enforcement, if confirmed by the Senate.Former Republican Securities and Exchange Commissioner Paul Atkins is Trump’s pick to lead the agency, replacing Biden-appointed chair and crypto foil Gary Gensler. The selection of Atkins, who co-chairs the Token Alliance at the Digital Chamber, a group dedicated to the use of digital assets, suggests a sharp divergence from Biden-era crypto policy. In his announcement, Trump says Atkins “recognizes that digital assets & other innovations are crucial to Making America Greater than Ever Before.”Trump also selected Gail Slater to lead the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, which is currently litigating two anti-monopoly suits against Google, and a third against Apple, as well as reportedly probing AI-chipmaker Nvidia. Slater has previously worked at the Federal Trade Commission, in Trump’s National Economic Counsel, and most recently as Vice President-elect JD Vance’s economic policy advisor in his Senate office. She’s also worked at Fox, Roku, and the now-defunct Internet Association, whose member included several Big Tech companies.Trump is borrowing a favorite term of Marc Andreessen’s in with his reference to “Little Tech”In his announcement on Truth Social, Trump writes that, “Big Tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech!” Trump is borrowing a favorite term of Marc Andreessen’s in with his reference to “Little Tech.” Andreessen — a venture capitalist and crypto supporter who publicly backed Trump in the election — has pushed for the recognition of a contrast between policies that benefit startups versus the largest tech players.Slater has historically worked across the aisle, having served as an attorney advisor to former Democratic FTC Commissioner Julie Brill (who now works as Microsoft’s chief privacy officer). Her history working for Vance — who has publicly praised Biden’s FTC Chair Lina Khan for her aggressive approach toward tech — suggests Big Tech is likely to remain a key target of antitrust scrutiny in the years to come.

The keyboard space has been a bit lukewarm of late. We had previously gotten a flood of Hall effect keyboards, knobs and displays became more mainstream, and more popular keyboards now come with pre-installed foam and pre-lubed switches. After that, however, no major trend forward seems to have materialized. What is more concerning to me, though, is how big-name, established brands are cutting corners and launching arguably inferior keyboards compared to budget and upcoming brands.

Image: Square Enix Fantasian was an easy game to recommend when it launched in 2021. Developed by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi’s Mistwalker studio, Fantasian was an approachable old-school roleplaying game that had a lot of clever ideas, along with an adorable aesthetic thanks to its world made out of hand-crafted dioramas. There was just one problem: it was exclusive to Apple Arcade, so anyone who wasn’t a subscriber missed out. Now, that has finally changed as the game launches this week on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and the Switch.The new port is called Fantasian Neo Dimension, but it’s mostly identical to the Apple Arcade version, aside from the very welcome addition of voice acting. (In a nice bit of circular storytelling, Neo Dimension is being published by Final Fantasy maker Square Enix.) In many ways, Fantasian is classic Final Fantasy in all but name. It stars a hero named Leo, who — with the help of a tough princess, a mysterious magic wielder, and a grizzled ship captain — gets pulled into a quest that spans multiple realms, as they attempt to thwart a mechanical infestation led by a tall, dark, and dangerous villain.There’s plenty that Final Fantasy fans will recognize: the amnesiac lead character, the playful love triangle, a world that blends fantasy and sci-fi, similar spells and items, and a beautiful soundtrack from famed composer Nobuo Uematsu. Hell, there’s even a character named Sid. The basis of Fantasian is Sakaguchi and his team working with the framework they know but building on top of it in interesting ways. So you’re left with a rock-solid RPG that makes some nice tweaks to the formula.The most obvious difference is the visual style, which is like a hand-crafted take on the old prerendered backgrounds from PlayStation-era Final Fantasy. It lends the game a very tactile aesthetic, and it’s surprisingly flexible; there are warm and cozy forests and cabins but also cold mechanical areas made of metal and old circuit boards. And while the game has its origins on mobile, it still looks sharp and clear on console. I’ve been replaying it on the Switch, and the only issue has been the occasionally long load time before a battle.Fantasian also makes some tweaks to the turn-based RPG formula that make it both more approachable and less frustrating. The first is a fun twist on combat that lets you aim many of your attacks, which can be incredibly satisfying when you line things up just right and hit a whole bunch of enemies in one shot.Even more useful is the awkwardly named feature Dimengeon — a portmanteau of dungeon and dimension — which takes the sting out of random battles. When you have it switched on, those pesky monsters are zapped to another dimension, where you can battle them at your leisure. The twist is that they accumulate. So when the device fills up and you have to finally fight them, you can get into a battle against a whole bunch of bad guys at once. These fights have a strategic, almost puzzle-like feel.Those seemingly subtle tweaks are more than enough to make Fantasian an easy recommendation if you’re looking for a classic RPG. Much like the recent remake of Dragon Quest III, a large part of the appeal of Fantasian is how traditional it is, while smoothing out the rough edges that can make the genre feel clunky and tedious. And as Final Fantasy itself continues to expand in different ways, Fantasian is a comforting look back at how things used to be.Fantasian Neo Dimension launches on December 5th on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and the Switch.

Network-attached storage (NAS) devices are both powerful and versatile, allowing you to store just about anything on a compact platform while being able to run services and more. You can create a media server, security surveillance system, password manager, and smart home automation hub, to name but a few. Direct-attached storage (DAS) is more basic with a few drives and hardware-based RAID. While I typically recommend a NAS over a DAS since it can do much more, there are some reasons why you'd want to buy a DAS instead.

Backing up your PC is one of the most important tasks you should do weekly. Ensuring you have a copy of all your data safely stored for quick retrieval can save time, money, and headaches. Self-hosting your backups can provide quick access to all your stored data even if your connection to the outside world drops. You'll save money compared to cloud-based storage subscriptions, learn something new about networking and server management, and can use network-attached storage (NAS) or server to move from simple data storage to running services.

Image: Microsoft Microsoft has poured cold water on any hopes of lower hardware requirements for Windows 11. With Windows 10 end of support approaching in October 2025, the software giant now says that its Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 requirement for Windows 11 is “non-negotiable.”In a blog post entitled “TPM 2.0 – a necessity for a secure and future-proof Windows 11,” Microsoft makes it very clear that it won’t lower Windows 11’s strict hardware requirements to encourage people to upgrade from Windows 10. TPM was a surprise requirement for Windows 11 when it was first announced in 2021, and now practically every modern PC ships with support for TPM 2.0. It’s a hardware-level chip or firmware capability that helps encrypt or decrypt data, confirm digital signatures, and assist with any other cryptographic operations.“TPM 2.0 plays a crucial role in enhancing identity and data protection on Windows devices, as well as maintaining the integrity of your system,” says Steven Hosking, a senior product manager at Microsoft. “TPM 2.0 also helps future-proof Windows 11. One way it does so is by helping to protect sensitive information as more AI capabilities come to physical, cloud, and server architecture.”Microsoft details how TPM integrates with new security features in Windows 11 like Credential Guard and Windows Hello for Business, as well as BitLocker disk encryption. TPM 2.0 also helps support Secure Boot, a key technology that secures the boot process from any unauthorized changes.Hosking says Microsoft has implemented TPM 2.0 “as a non-negotiable standard for the future of Windows,” so there’s no going back on the hardware requirements here. Microsoft also requires that Windows 11 devices are capable of virtualization-based security and hypervisor-protected code integrity (HVCI), which means Windows 11 is only supported on CPUs released from 2018 onward.Despite the requirements, there have been several workarounds over the years to allow Windows 11 to run on unsupported hardware. Microsoft didn’t apply a hardware-compliance check initially for virtualized versions of Windows 11, but the company has been gradually locking down the upgrade and setup process in recent years — especially with the 24H2 update. The improved compatibility checks with 24H2 have forced tools like Flyby11 to leverage a feature of the Windows 11 setup that uses a Windows Server variant of the installation to bypass the hardware compatibility checks. Businesses can also use Microsoft’s official Windows 11 LTSC 2024 release, which makes TPM an optional requirement but still enforces a list of compatible CPUs.Microsoft is now trying to convince Windows 10 users to buy a new PC with full-screen prompts. The latest prompts follow warnings about the Windows 10 end of support date earlier this year. Microsoft has used similar prompts like this in the past, with the company pushing Windows 10 upgrades for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users.

Image: Google Veo, Google’s latest generative AI video model, is now available for businesses to start incorporating into their content creation pipelines. After first being unveiled in May — three months after OpenAI demoed its competing Sora product — Veo has beaten it to market by launching in a private preview via Google’s Vertex AI platform.Veo is capable of generating “high-quality” 1080p resolution videos in a range of different visual and cinematic styles from text or image-based prompts. When the model was first announced these generated clips could be vaguely “beyond a minute” in length, but Google doesn’t specify length restrictions for the preview release. Some new example clips in Google’s announcement are on par with what we’ve already seen from Veo — without a keen eye, it’s extremely difficult to tell that the videos are AI-generated. Gif: Google The dog example in these Veo clips is especially impressive — note how its fur pattern and collar remain consistent through its movement. The latest version of Google’s Imagen 3 text-to-image generator will also be available to all Google Cloud customers via Vertex “starting next week,” expanding its initial US release on Google’s AI Test Kitchen back in August. Users on Google’s allow list can also access new features like prompt-based photo editing, and the ability to “infuse your own brand, style, logo, subject or product features” into generated images. Image: Google Veo isn’t perfect though — see how light is shining through someone's hand at the top-left of the ai-generated concert video. Google says Veo and Imagen 3 carry built-in safeguards to prevent them from generating harmful content or violating copyright protections — though we’ve found the latter wasn’t difficult to bypass. Everything produced by Veo and Imagen 3 is also embedded with DeepMind’s SynthID technology — a kind of invisible digital watermark that Google says can “decrease misinformation and misattribution concerns.” It’s a similar concept to Adobe’s Content Credentials system, which can be embedded into content produced by the creative software giant’s own image and video generative AI models.With Google’s video model now in the wild, OpenAI is notably behind its competitors and running out of time to make good on its promise to release Sora by the end of 2024. We’re already seeing AI-generated content appearing in ads like Coca-Cola’s recent holiday campaign, and companies have an incentive not to wait around for Sora — according to Google, 86 percent of organizations already using generative AI are seeing an increase in revenue.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge If you keep your passwords stored on Apple’s iCloud, you can access those passwords on Firefox through an official iCloud Passwords extension, as spotted by MacRumors. However, the extension only supports macOS Sonoma or later, so you won’t be able to use it with Windows.If you do need to access your iCloud passwords on Windows, you can access them by downloading iCloud for Windows and the iCloud Passwords extension for Chrome or Edge instead. We’ve asked Apple if it plans to add support for Windows to its Firefox extension.Another developer originally made the Firefox extension, but Apple has taken it over, according to a notice on the extension’s GitHub page. Apple is “now the sole owners in charge of maintaining their own official iCloud Passwords extension,” the developer says. The extension’s repository and source code aren’t linked to it anymore except for “historical reasons.”

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images Nearly two years ago, OpenAI said that artificial general intelligence, or AGI — the thing the company was created to build — could “elevate humanity” and “give everyone incredible new capabilities.” Now, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is trying to lower expectations.“My guess is we will hit AGI sooner than most people in the world think and it will matter much less,” he said during an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday. “And a lot of the safety concerns that we and others expressed actually don’t come at the AGI moment. AGI can get built, the world mostly goes on in mostly the same way, things grow faster, but then there is a long continuation from what we call AGI to what we call superintelligence.”This isn’t the first time Altman has downplayed the now seemingly imminent arrival of AGI, which OpenAI’s charter once said will be able to “automate the great majority of intellectual labor.” He has recently teased that it could arrive as soon as 2025 and will be achievable on existing hardware. We at The Verge have heard that OpenAI intends to weave together its large language models and declare that to be AGI. At the DealBook Summit,... Read the full story at The Verge.

I’m sorry, I put that thing in what? | Image: Nissan Nissan put out a tutorial video for Ariya owners today that shows how to use a Tesla NACS adapter with the vehicle, and it includes a step completely out of left field: shove a small piece of plastic into your car’s CCS port before you connect the adapter.The Ariya is Nissan’s first EV with a CCS port, and the automaker just activated the vehicle’s ability to connect to Tesla’s vast Supercharger network in October. Other manufacturers have also adopted Tesla’s NACS standard, with companies like Ford and Rivian already shipping adapters to current EV owners. But none of those EVs need you to take a confusing extra step to make the adapter work.As explained in the video, the NACS adapter available through Nissan includes a “plug adapter” that must be installed into the hourglass-shaped cavity between the two DC pins at the bottom before charging at NACS-capable fast charging stations. Nissan assures the viewer that its “simple” and requires no tools. However, you will need to use the adapter it provides or from a US dealership, which may mean other third-party options like the Lectron adapter might not work. (Probably for the best, considering the Lectron adapter was recently recalled.)What’s odd about the Ariya’s charge port is that despite being a standard that works at many CCS-capable fast charging stations, there is some negative hollow space between the two direct current pins at the bottom that isn’t present on most other EVs. The plastic piece that Nissan wants you to stuff into the opening fills in the gap to look more like other CCS ports. We asked Nissan what the purpose of the opening is and why the insert is needed, but have not heard back at time of publication.Nissan’s other EV model is the pioneering Leaf, which uses the all-but-obsolete CHAdeMO standard and probably won’t get some magic adapter to connect to Tesla’s Supercharger network (although there are some CHAdeMO to CCS adapters now).EV ownership is already rife with competing standards, janky software, and fragmented confusion. Somehow, Nissan managed to add another step that leaves customers juggling multiple pieces of plastic just to get their $40,000 electric SUV to operate properly.