If you need a new smartphone, now is a great time to buy one. Of course, there are the usual suspects, like an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy, but OnePlus has just updated its lineup, and it now features the OnePlus 13 and OnePlus 13R. So, which phone is right for you?

If you're looking for lots of storage on the cheap, then this Western Digital external hard drive is going to be the way to go. You're getting 5TB for just $90, which is 36% below its original retail price of $140. Of course, SSD drives are always going to be faster, but if you're after the most storage for the best price, this is going to be one of the best options, coming out to just $18 per terabyte.

Did you share an Excel sheet only to realize that there is a glaring typo in the title? Or worse, you may accidentally send a sheet with highly confidential salary data. Let’s be honest, we have all been there, and it’s not fun. After experiencing several such situations, I have developed a pre-sharing routine that I never skip. These are my Excel safety checks, which save me from those embarrassing (and sometimes costly) mistakes. A few simple steps will save you time, stress, and maybe even your reputation.

Windows Update is one of the parts of Windows 11 that people love to criticize the most. Forced updates and reboots can happen at the worst of times, so the frustration is understandable, but it is an essential component for keeping your machine secure.

Charging is an essential part of the day for most, so it's important to have a charger you can rely on day in and day out. For most, that just means using the standard charger that came with your devices, which is usually pretty good, but the experience can be better.

Laura Normand / The Verge Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks Apple “[hasn’t] really invented anything great in a while” and that it has been coasting off of its past success. “Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and now they’re just kind of sitting on it 20 years later,” he said this week.Zuckerberg made the statements during a nearly three-hour long podcast with Joe Rogan where, along with discussing Meta’s moderation policy changes and turn against diversity and inclusion policies, they got into Meta’s beef with Apple and its policies.The conversation actually started with Rogan’s issues with Apple. Rogan said he’s moving “from Apple to Android” in part because he doesn’t “like being attached to one company.” He also isn’t a fan of Apple’s App Store policies. “The way they do that Apple store, where they charge people 30 percent,” he said. “That seems so insane that they can get away with doing that.” “I have some opinions about this,” Zuckerberg said. While he gives credit to the iPhone as “obviously one of the most important inventions probably of all time,” he argued that Apple has put rules in place that “feel arbitrary.”Zuckerberg said that Apple has “thoroughly hamstrung the ability for anyone else to build something that can connect to the iPhone in the same way” as Apple’s own products, like the AirPods. If Apple let other people use its protocol, “there would probably be much better competitors to AirPods out there,” Zuckerberg said.Naturally, there’s business behind Zuckerberg’s gripes. Meta has had longstanding issues with Apple and the 30 percent cut it takes on some App Store transactions. Apple’s iOS restrictions have made it harder for Meta to compete on hardware and wiped out billions of dollars in advertising. Zuckerberg said that if Apple’s “random rules” didn’t apply, Meta would make “twice as much profit or something” based on his “back of the envelope calculation.”Apple is increasingly under pressure to open up. It’s made changes in the European Union in response to new laws targeting its policies, and it’s facing a lawsuit from the US Department of Justice for holding a monopoly over smartphones. But the company seems intent on maintaining its closed ecosystem until it’s forced to change.Zuckerberg believes that Apple’s reliance on “just advantaging their stuff” will ultimately hurt the company. Apple has “been so off their game in terms of not really releasing many innovative things,” he said. He said that the tech industry is “super dynamic,” and “if you just don’t do a good job for like 10 years, eventually, you’re just going to get beat by someone.” (It’s easy to guess who Zuckerberg thinks that might be!)Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Zuckerberg’s remarks.“There isn’t a physical world and a digital world anymore.”Zuckerberg touched on a lot of other tech topics as part of his conversation with Rogan, including AI and how he thinks about screen time with his daughter playing Minecraft. One area he spent some time on was neural interfaces and how physical and digital worlds will blend together.He thinks that “it’s going to be a while before we’re really widely deploying anything that jacks into your brain,” for example, and (naturally) he talked about the benefits of a wrist-based neural interface, which Meta is working on as part of its Orion augmented reality glasses.Down the line, Zuckerberg envisions a world where you’ll be able to use the neural interface wristband and the glasses to text a friend or an AI and have the glasses give you the answer. He also believes that as smart glasses or even contact lenses as a computing platform become more developed, the internet will be “overlaid” on the physical world.“I think we’ll basically be in this wild world where most of the world will be physical, but there will be this increasing amount of virtual objects or people who are beaming in or hologramming into different things to interact in different ways,” he said.“There isn’t a physical world and a digital world anymore,” he added. “We’re in 2025. It’s one world.”

Most people looking for alternatives to Photoshop may want to avoid paying to another corporation, but not all free and open source alternativesoffer enough power for editing abilities. There are many great closed-source Photoshop alternatives, lots of which offer great advantages over choosing Photoshop, whether it be better price, more accessibility, fewer AI features, or a sharper photo-editing focus. Photoshop isn’t the only proprietary image-editing option if you want something more powerful than open-source tools.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Like Meta, Amazon is ending some of its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. In a memo sent last month, Candi Castleberry, Amazon’s VP of inclusive experiences and technology, said the company has been “winding down outdated programs and materials” related to its efforts around representation and inclusion, as reported earlier by CNBC and Bloomberg.In the memo, a copy of which Amazon provided to The Verge, Castleberry wrote that over the past few years, Amazon has been evaluating its programs across the company, each of which “addresses a specific disparity, and is designed to end when that disparity is eliminated.” At the same time, Castleberry noted that the company worked to “build programs that are open to all” instead of having “individual groups build programs.” Castleberry said Amazon aimed to complete the discontinuation of some of these “outdated” programs by the end of 2024. Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser declined to identify which programs had been ended.“This approach — where we move away from programs that were separate from our existing processes, and instead integrating our work into existing processes so they become durable — is the evolution to... Read the full story at The Verge.

Mark Zuckerberg takes his “no, really, Mr. Trump, I’m your guy!” tour to Joe Rogan | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images I’ll spare you the experience of listening to one of the richest men in the world whine and just tell you straight out: Mark Zuckerberg’s interview on The Joe Rogan Experience is full of lies.Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, sets the tone at the very beginning: “I think at some level you only start one of these companies if you believe in giving people a voice, right?”Unfortunately I wasn’t born yesterday, and I remember Zuckerberg’s first attempt at getting rich: FaceMash, a clone of HotOrNot where he uploaded photos of his fellow female students to be rated — without their consent. “Giving people a voice” is one way of describing that, I suppose. Personally, I’d call it “creep shit.” If you can get away with the small bullshit, you can get away with the big bullshit, right?Early on in the interview, Zuckerberg tests out the water to see how much pushback he’ll get; Rogan is a notoriously soft interviewer — it’s like listening to your dumbest stoned friend hold a conversation — but he does occasionally challenge his guests. So Zuckerberg says that there are limits on the First Amendment by saying, “It’s like, all right, you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater.”“Fire in a crowded theater” makes every lawyer I know foam at the mouth because it’s flat out wrong. It is not the law, and it never has been. And, obviously, you can yell “fire” in a crowded theater — especially if, you know, the theater is on fire. Rogan says nothing in response to this, and Zuckerberg knows he’s got a willing mark. If you can get away with the small bullshit, you can get away with the big bullshit, right?For his part, Rogan serves up Zuckerberg a series of softballs, setting his own tone by referring to content moderation as “censorship.” The idea that the government was forcing Zuckerberg to “censor” news about covid and covid vaccines, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the election is something of a running theme throughout the interview. When Zuckerberg isn’t outright lying about any of this, he’s quite vague — but in case you were wondering, a man who was formally rebuked by the city of San Francisco for putting his name on a hospital while his platforms spread health misinformation thinks that “on balance, the vaccines are more positive than negative.” Whew!Misinformation on Facebook started well before the 2016 election — as early as 2014, scammers were spreading Ebola lies on Facebook. Shortly after the 2016 election, Adam Mosseri — then Facebook’s VP of product management — said in a statement that Facebook was combating fake news but “there’s so much more we need to do.” Facebook did receive criticism for spreading fake news, including misinformation that benefitted President Donald Trump, but even then, Zuckerberg wasn’t having it. “I do think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is they saw some fake news,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s something out of like 1984.”Still, in the 2020 election, Facebook — along with other social media networks — took a harsher stance on fake news, making it harder for Macedonian teenagers to make a profit off Trump supporters. During his Rogan interview, Zuckerberg now characterizes this intervention as giving “too much deference to a lot of folks in the media who were basically saying, okay, there’s no way that this guy could have gotten elected except for misinformation.”Facebook implemented a fact-checking program, one that involved partners such as the conservative online magazine The Dispatch, Reuters, Agence France-Presse and USA Today. In a concession to Donald Trump’s second presidency, implemented before Trump even took the oath of office, Zuckerberg has said Facebook will end the program. “We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said in the video announcing the move.On the Rogan show, Zuckerberg went further in describing the fact-checking program he’d implemented: “It’s something out of like 1984.” He says the fact-checkers were “too biased,” though he doesn’t say exactly how.The problem wasn’t that the fact-checking was bad; it was that conservatives are more likely to share misinformation and get fact-checked, as some research has shown. That means conservatives are also more likely to be moderated. In this sense, perhaps it wasn’t Facebook’s fact-checking systems that had a liberal bias, but reality.The biggest lie of all is a lie of omissionWell, Zuckerberg’s out of the business of reality now. I am sympathetic to the difficulties social media platforms faced in trying to moderate during covid — where rapidly-changing information about the pandemic was difficult to keep up with and conspiracy theories ran amok. I’m just not convinced it happened the way Zuckerberg describes. Zuckerberg whines about being pushed by the Biden administration to fact-check claims: “These people from the Biden administration would call up our team, and, like, scream at them, and curse,” Zuckerberg says. “Did you record any of these phone calls?” Rogan asks.“I don’t know,” Zuckerberg says. “I don’t think we were.”Many of the controversial moderation calls Facebook made in the pandemic were during the Trump administrationRogan then asks who, specifically, was pressuring Facebook. And Zuckerberg has no answer: “It was people in the Biden administration,” he says. “I think it was, you know, I wasn’t involved in those conversations directly, but I think it was.”But the biggest lie of all is a lie of omission: Zuckerberg doesn’t mention the relentless pressure conservatives have placed on the company for years — which has now clearly paid off. Zuckerberg is particularly full of shit here because Republican Rep. Jim Jordan released Zuckerberg’s internal communications which document this!In his letter to Jordan’s committee, Zuckerberg writes, “Ultimately it was our decision whether or not to take content down.” Emphasis mine. “Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”Those emails also reveal Zuckerberg wanted to blame the Biden White House for how Facebook chose to moderate the “lab leak” conspiracy theory of covid origins. “Can we include that the WH put pressure on us to censor the lab leak theory?” he asked in a WhatsApp chat. His former president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, responded, “I don’t think they put specific pressure on that theory.”Joel Kaplan, the former George W. Bush advisor who has now replaced Clegg, said that blaming the White House for Facebook’s behavior would “supercharge” conservatives who believed the social media giant was “collaborating” with the Biden administration. “If they’re more interested in criticizing us than actually solving the problems, then I’m not sure how it’s helping the cause to engage with them further,” Zuckerberg wrote. This doesn’t seem to show that the Biden administration successfully censored anything.Facebook was widely and obviously targeted by Republican lawmakersIn fact, many of the controversial moderation calls Facebook made in the pandemic were during the Trump administration. Take, for instance, the “Plandemic” video hoax: Facebook removed the video in 2020. Joe Biden took office in 2021. If Zuckerberg was dealing with an administration pressuring him about this, it was the Trump administration. The Biden White House may well have engaged in similar outreach, but it was joining what was already an active discussion about Facebook moderation.Facebook was widely and obviously targeted by Republican lawmakers, including Jordan, Senator Ted Cruz, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Texas governor Greg Abbott, Senator Marsha Blackburn, and incoming Vice President JD Vance. It was mostly conservatives who threatened him during the interminable and pointless Congressional hearings Zuckerberg sat through for years – often asking him to comment directly on conspiracy theories or demand that individual trolls be reinstated to his platforms.But Zuckerberg didn’t mention any of that to Rogan. Instead, he was upset that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau started investigating him for improperly using financial information to target ads. What does Zuckerberg say about this? Well, let me give it to you straight: They kind of found some theory they wanted to investigate. And it’s like, okay, clearly they were trying really hard, right? To like, to like, find, find some theory, but it, like, I don’t know. It just, it kind of, like, throughout the, the, the, the, the party and the government, there was just sort of, I don’t know if it’s, I don’t know how this stuff works. I mean, I’ve never been in government. I don’t know if it’s like a directive or it’s just like a quiet consensus that like, we don’t like these guys. They’re not doing what we want. We’re going to punish them. But, but it’s, it’s, it’s tough to be at the other end of that.This is a compelling demonstration that jujitsu and MMA training (or hunting pigs in Hawaii or making your neck real thick or whatever) isn’t going to help you act aggressive if you’re constitutionally bitchmade. Blaming the CFPB for a witch-hunt when we’ve all watched Republicans target Facebook really is something! That’s what this whole performance is about: getting Trump, Vance, Jordan and the rest of the Republican party to lay off. After all, the Cambridge Analytica scandal cost Facebook just $5 billion — chump change, really. If Zuckerberg plays ball, his next privacy whoopsie could be even cheaper.In fact, Zuckerberg even offers Republicans another target: Apple. According to Zuckerberg, the way Apple makes money is “by basically, like, squeezing people.” Among his complaints: Apple’s 30 percent commission on App Store sales Airpods work better with Apple phones than all other headphonesApple wouldn’t let Zuckerberg’s Meta Ray-Bans connect to iOS using the same quick-setup protocol Airpods use iMessage is a walled garden, and groupchats go wonky if there’s a person with an Android phone in there“I mean at some point I did this like back of the envelope calculation of like all the random rules that Apple puts out. If you know, if they didn’t apply, like I think you know, it’s like — and this is just Meta, I think we’d like, make twice as much profit or something.”At least some of these Apple issues actually matter — there is a legitimate DOJ antitrust case against the company. But that isn’t what’s on Zuckerberg’s mind. The last point is the important one, from his perspective. He has a longstanding grudge against Apple after the company implemented anti-tracking features into its default browser, Safari. Facebook criticized those changes in newspaper ads, even. The policy cost social media companies almost $10 billion, according to The Financial Times; Facebook lost the most money “in absolute terms.” You see, it turns out if you ask people whether they want to be tracked, the answer is generally no — and that’s bad for Facebook’s business.Zuckerberg wants us to believe this isn’t about politics at allBut Zuckerberg wants us to believe this isn’t about politics at all. Getting Rogan’s listeners riled up about Zuckerberg’s enemies and finding Republicans a new tech company target is just a coincidence, as are the changes to allow more hate speech on his platforms happening now, changes that just happen to pacify Republicans. All of this has nothing to do with the incoming administration, Zuckerberg tells Rogan. “I think a lot of people look at this as like a purely political thing, because they kind of look at the timing and they’re like, hey, well, you’re doing this right after the election.” he says. “We try to have policies that reflect mainstream discourse.”And did this work? Did Zuckerberg’s gambit to talk about how social media needed more “masculine energy” win over the bros? Well, Barstool’s Dave Portnoy isn’t fooled by this shit.Zuckerberg is such a spineless jellyfish. Somebody from Biden’s team (unnamed) told his team to take stuff down so he rolled over. Trump gets elected and suddenly he’s a new man. pic.twitter.com/ZOIKJkrLvs— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) January 10, 2025I don’t know. I did think it was pretty funny that after all these complaints about government “censorship,” Zuckerberg didn’t say a word about Trump and the Republicans’ efforts at it. After all, Trump, the incoming president who has on occasion threatened to put Zuckerberg in prison, was recently asked if the Facebook changes were in response to his threats.“Probably,” Trump said.

Photo by PHILIP FONG / AFP via Getty Images Honda’s potential merger with Nissan would represent one of the largest shake-ups to the industry since the creation of Stellantis in 2021. But there are huge risks involved, too. On Tuesday in Las Vegas, during a roundtable discussion with select media, Honda executives offered some more insight into the merger, including how combining resources and factories could help the companies stay competitive in the increasingly costly fight with China.Honda is concerned about China’s meteoric rise as a dominant and highly competitive player in the EV and autonomous driving space. In late December, when Honda and Nissan announced that they had signed a memorandum of understanding to create an automotive company worth around $50 billion, Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe said that the “rise of Chinese automakers and new players has changed the car industry quite a lot... We have to build up capabilities to fight with them by 2030, otherwise we’ll be beaten.”Honda executives offered some more insight into the mergerThe stakes are high, too. According to a recent report by S&P Global Mobility, the global EV market will grow nearly 30 percent year over year, with 89.6 million new EVs expected to be sold this year. According to Allied Market Research, the global autonomous vehicle market is expected to reach around $60.3 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $448.6 billion by 2035. If the Japanese automakers want to continue to dominate the market as they have since the 1960s, they have to iterate quickly and get products into consumers’ hands. “Since the beginning of last year, we’ve been in conversation with Nissan,” Noriya Kaihara, director and executive vice president at Honda, said through a translator following the company’s debut of two “production prototypes,” the Honda 0 Saloon and the Honda 0 SUV at CES. “Nothing has been decided but we’ve been discussing how to proceed.” Photo: Vjeran Pavic / The Verge The Honda 0 Saloon at CES. Honda wants Nissan’s large SUVs and underutilized factoriesDuring the roundtable, Kaihara said that Honda is looking at Nissan as a way to reduce costs around future software-defined vehicles (SDV). “We have significant labor and development costs, and if there are operations we could share, that would be good for us,” he said. Developing brand-new software, he continued, including advanced driving systems that move closer to autonomous vehicles and battery-electric vehicles, is both increasingly important for the longevity of established automakers and increasingly expensive. Honda also said that Nissan’s large SUVs like the Armada and Pathfinder make it an attractive partner. Toshihiro Akiwa, VP and head of Honda’s BEV development center, said through a translator that Honda’s hybrid technology is solid but only currently exists in its midsize vehicles like the CR-V and the Accord. The company is interested in Nissan’s larger vehicles because Honda’s “motor and battery capacity can be adapted to the larger vehicle.” Image: Honda The Honda Prologue. Image: Nissan The Nissan Armada. While Honda does have the Prologue, that vehicle was part of a $5 billion joint venture with GM that only lasted through the development of two vehicles. The Prologue has been a surprise EV hit, selling over 33,000 in 2024 and outselling the larger gas-powered Honda Passport. Since the partnership with GM went south, it’s not likely that the Prologue will be in production long, though Honda has made no announcements about its plans for the vehicle. Honda does not currently offer an all-electric crossover outside of the Prologue, though fans of the brand have been asking for an all-electric CR-V for years. Nissan, on the other hand, saw its earnings decline by as much as 90 percent last year, forcing it to lay off thousands of employees. The company has been struggling since the arrest of former Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn in 2018 for financial misconduct. Unsurprisingly, Ghosn isn’t pleased about the news, telling Bloomberg that Nissan was in “panic mode,” calling the deal a “desperate move” and noting that the “synergies between the two companies are difficult to find.”But as Honda executives at the roundtable noted, Nissan’s struggle could pose an opportunity for Honda, too. That’s because Honda plants that serve the US are currently running at maximum capacity, and they could use the excess capacity at Nissan’s factories to meet customer demand. “I’m not in a position to make comment [on Nissan], but they have capacity,” Kaihara said. Photo by PETER POWER / AFP via Getty Images Honda’s factory in Ontario, Canada. Trump’s tariff threats and loss of EV incentivesPresident-elect Donald Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on foreign imports and eliminate federal subsidies that have helped save Americans billions in EV costs also came up in the conversation. “If Trump impacts future government strategy we have to be very flexible when the subsidies are cut or stopped,” Kaihara said. That includes where Honda builds and produces its most popular vehicles like the CR-V and Civic. “Each factory in Canada and Mexico is almost to full production level,” Kaihara said. “It’s not so easy to change that direction, but depending on the tariff situation, we might have to change the production location to Japan or somewhere else.” A significant move like that would be costly and could translate to increased prices for consumers when they go to buy their next Honda. In spite of all this, Honda is not wavering on its commitment to electrification. “For the time being, we will have new EVs in the next year for the Zero series,” Kaihara said. “For the long term, I think, considering the environmental issues, EVs will be the solution for the future, and that will not be changed.”

Photo by Sean Hollister/ The Verge At CES 2025, Intel let journalists into its private “Innovation Showcase,” where we saw things like prototype next-gen laptops and giant stereo 3D handheld gaming PCs.While I was there, I also spotted a heavy metal handheld on a table that didn’t seem... fully attached... to its screen. When I lifted the screen, it came away easily. It felt suspiciously light to be a real tablet, so I flipped it over and saw three connectors underneath: Above it, on a shelf, was a laptop with a suspiciously sized chunk of plastic on the bottom that looked like a perfect match. A minute later, Intel gaming evangelist Colin Helms confirmed: I was looking at a concept modular PC. That module contains a complete Intel Lunar Lake computer, the entire guts you'd need to make one work outside of peripherals and screen. It’s basically a reboot of Intel’s abandoned Compute Card idea, except it's not all Intel’s doing and you probably shouldn't ever expect it to ship.It’s a concept from Quanta, a company whose name you don’t typically see on the laptops and tablets they create, because Quanta is an ODM (like Compal, Pegatron, Wistron, and Apple’s better known iPhone supplier Foxconn) that designs and manufactures hardware on behalf of brand names. Quanta’s calling the whole modular system the “AI8A,” and the aforementioned module at its heart is the “Detachable AI Core.” Helms told me it plugs into other concept computers as well, including an all-in-one desktop that Intel didn’t have to show off. And presumably, like the Compute Card idea, you could upgrade your computer just by putting a new new module into it.The modular laptop has lots of concept-y bells and whistles too, so many that Intel’s CES staff hadn’t even worked them all out yet. For starts, the laptop has a motorized hinge, so you can tell it to open and close its own lid; it also claims to offer eye-tracking that lets you sling around multitasking windows just by looking at where you’d like them to be. It apparently comes with a mouse integrated into a ring that you could wear. The most mundane: a built-in Qi wireless charging pad in the palmrest, with indicator lights to show your battery’s remaining capacity. I couldn’t try any of it working, unfortunately, nor did I manage to ask what “AI8A” means, because I mistakenly thought it said Aiba until I checked my photos closely just now. Nor could we hotswap the module between the handheld and laptop, since the module apparently doesn't have a battery inside.Again, this is a cool computing concept car: it’s not likely that this computer will ever ship, even in a more practical / less gadgety form. Thankfully, we have begun to see some real, practical modularity in the laptop space since the death of Intel's Compute Card. Framework just celebrated its fifth anniversary this week, and Dell took a smaller step forward at CES with its first modular repairable USB-C port.Photos by Sean Hollister / The Verge

Cool screens are still undefeated at CES. Twelve years ago, I could have told you exactly what happened at my first CES and what happened at my third. Each was a chapter with a beginning, middle, and end; the lines between them drawn clearly. But now, 15 years since I attended my first CES, it’s a lot fuzzier. I know I missed my flight home at that first show. I know I saw a lot of cameras at first, and then progressively fewer cameras over the years. I know there were team dinners and early meetings, but I couldn’t tell you what happened when. What I do know about my first CESes is that I had — and I cannot stress this enough — no clue what I was doing. The same went for CES two, three, and four, to varying degrees. I think I had a Pentax DSLR loaned to me by a colleague. I had a work-issued BlackBerry and, I’m pretty sure, insisted on wearing nice dresses and impractical shoes to evening events. There was no Uber at the beginning, and you could spend an hour waiting in a cab line at the airport. We stayed at the MGM Grand, which housed live lions at the time.I broke an 11-year streak of not going to CES this year, which gave me a rare opportunity. It’s not often in life that we get to step back and see something... Read the full story at The Verge.