Technology changes extremely quickly, and AI is certainly no exception. NotebookLM, however, has always felt like a bit of an outlier here (and I say this in the best possible way). It's a tool that got upgrades here and there, sure, but it remained largely unchanged at its core for a long while. We were anticipating significant upgrades at I/O 2026, but the company decided not to bring it up by name at all (well, it did get a slight mention at the very end, tied to some Gemini/science announcement).

Every standalone desktop 3D printer shipped today promises the same unwritten joys of manufacturing anything you can design, in any material, straight from a spool of plastic. Yet for sheer cost efficiency and other inexplicable reasons, you'll only see a roll of Polylactic Acid or PLA shipped as the trial filament with most new printers. It is affordable, odorless, and behaves beautifully on a bare glass bed without generating toxic fumes. The ease of use has made it a universal default for print after print based on the dangerously incorrect assumption that if it looks solid on the build plate, the print will perform well in real-world conditions.

The impending tripling of Plex's Lifetime Plex Pass cost to $750 is a big change. I've been using Plex for a long time, and in that time I've had to pay for the mobile app, then not pay but have features missing without Plex Pass, and watch the UI get more crowded.

Hm! | Photo: Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images Elon Musk's SpaceX IPO will probably make him the richest person to ever walk the planet. And while his mountain of horrible personal conduct could fill multiple books, one fact in particular stands out: A year ago, Musk's actions directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He did it knowingly. And, worse - gleefully.This is not a serious person, but his abuse of the world is deadly serious. In the first months of President Donald Trump's second term, the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) destroyed the US Agency for International Development, whose mission was a boon to public health around the globe. M …Read the full story at The Verge.

You'd be forgiven for thinking this day would never come. Siri has spent a decade and half somewhere between "sort of useful at a few things" and "utterly disastrous, why did I even try, can it honestly not even set a timer." But the wildest thing just happened: Apple put out a new version of Siri, and it actually seems to be pretty good.On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay talk about their early experiences with Siri AI, and what it means for users, and the rest of the AI industry, for the iPhone's built-in assistant to be good enough at most things. There's very little about Siri AI that feels bleeding edge or brand new, but …Read the full story at The Verge.

A few years ago, there was major hype in the smart home community. Matter and Thread were supposed to rescue us from smart home fragmentation. We were promised a single, robust, self-healing mesh where an Apple HomePod, a Google Nest Hub, and an Amazon Echo would all work as team players to route local device traffic.

Linux has never been a mainstream option when it comes to operating systems, but the platform has been experiencing something of a surge in recent years, thanks in big part to the Steam Deck, which propped up Linux as a great platform for PC gaming. And things have been building up more and more, but Linux is still not a big enough platform to earn mainstream support from developers and publishers.

Elon Musk is now officially the world's first trillionaire. That is a colossal amount of wealth (and by proxy, power) for one individual to have. Its scale - a thousand times more than a billion - is difficult to fathom for those of us who aren't among the 3,363 billionaires that currently exist in our world. But let's try to comprehend it anyway.The most frequently cited comparison is time. If you were to count out a million seconds, it would take you 11 and a half days. A billion seconds would take you 31.7 years. But a trillion seconds would take 31,700 years - to reach that point today, you would have needed to start counting in the Pa …Read the full story at The Verge.

When people talk about self-hosting, it's usually around media servers, photo backups, and cloud storage replacements. And I agree, those are important, and that’s why I built my own home server in the first place.

Where's the Trump phone? We're going to keep talking about it every week. We've reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump phone's whereabouts. We don't have the phones we preordered yet, but this week included an unexpected in-person encounter with the T1.You see a lot of interesting phones when you're among tech journalists.I'm thinking of two in particular that I held this past week: One was solid gold, with ornate engravings. It was elaborately embellished, heavy - an actual work of art. The other was the Trump phone.I know. The Trump phone. The one announced almost a year ago that has shipped to almost nobody. But when you asso …Read the full story at The Verge.

Elon Musk's net worth has passed the trillion-dollar mark after SpaceX's IPO. His net worth, which was hovering around $800 billion before the IPO, includes the value of his 4.8 billion shares in SpaceX, along with his wealth from his other companies, like Tesla. Shares of SPCX opened at $150 and have remained well above the $138 benchmark that gives Musk a 13-figure net worth.SpaceX combined Musk's rocket, AI, and social media platforms earlier this year, and said in its S-1 that its goal is to "build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light …Read the full story at The Verge.

Nothing Phone 4A Pro | Photo: Dominic Preston / The Verge If you're thinking about upgrading your phone, "the best time was yesterday," according to Nothing CEO and co-founder Carl Pei, echoing a message we heard during MWC. As Android Authority reports, Pei said in a post on X that the RAM shortage has already impacted Nothing's less expensive mid-range phone: "For Phone 4A , memory costs doubled between when we decided to build the device and when it launched. They've doubled again since." He warned that "Phone prices are going up, and they'll keep going up into next year." Pei says RAM can now account for over 50 percent of the cost of a new phone. Nothing's just the latest phone maker to warn …Read the full story at The Verge.