Seagate’s proprietary storage solution ain’t cheap, but it remains the easiest way to outfit your Series / X with additional space. | Image: Seagate Black Friday won’t be here for several more weeks, but the holiday promos are beginning to take shape at Amazon, Best Buy, and other retailers. We expect to see steep discounts on a number of gaming goods when many of the early sales kick off next week, but if you want to shop ahead of time, Seagate’s 2TB Storage Expansion Card for the Xbox Series X / S is already matching its all-time low of $199.99 ($160 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Seagate’s online storefront.While pricey, Seagate’s proprietary expansion cards are a great way to expand the storage capacity of your Xbox Series X or Xbox Series S. The NVMe-based, Microsoft-licensed cards — of which there are currently two — are incredibly easy to install, fast, and allow you to run... Continue reading…

This walking pad was supposed to help me relieve stress. Then I overcomplicated it. I became so mired in the smart features, I forgot to walk. Continue reading…

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images There is an apparently new iOS 18 security feature that reboots iPhones that haven’t been unlocked in a few days, frustrating police by making it harder to break into suspects’ iPhones, according to 404 Media. 404 Media, which first reported police warnings about the reboots on Thursday, writes that restarted iPhones enter a more secure “Before First Unlock,” or BFU state. Now, it seems Apple added “inactivity reboot” code in iOS 18.1 that triggers iPhones to restart after they’ve been locked for four days, Chris Wade, who founded mobile analysis company Corellium, told the outlet.The code appears below in screenshots posted by Dr. -Ing. Jiska Classen, a Hasso Plattner Institute research group leader.Apple indeed added a feature... Continue reading…

If you're not big on vaping, you may not know that disposable vapes can be tiny treasure troves for energy. Each one has a lithium-ion battery in them, which can be recharged and used for other purposes; however, given the nature of something that's disposable, we often see these perfectly-good batteries hit the landfill. Fortuantly, people are finding ways to reclaim these little pockets of power; we've already seen someone make a fast-charging power bank with them, and now someone is running their e-bike using vape batteries.

If you're a power user, whether you've built your own router with pfSense, dotted mesh nodes around your home, or just have one of the best Wi-Fi routers supplying your network with features, there is always something that can be tweaked or adjusted in the settings to get your home network even better. Whether that's relatively simple fixes like turning on QoS and adjusting it for your ISP's speeds, or more involved processes of finding out the best transmit power for your wireless, they all add up to a better experience for every device connected to your network.

Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge You know that thing where, just after you’ve opened Instagram and become invested in whatever video was already loaded, a new video pops in and seemingly yeets the old video into the void, never to be seen again? That’s a thing of the past, according to Instagram boss Adam Mosseri, who says in an AMA from his Instagram Story yesterday that the app now waits for you to scroll to show you the new stuff. That behavior — which Instagram apparently called “rug pull” internally — wasn’t just some weird bug. Mosseri says the app did it “because we were trying to load new content, and it was taking a while, so we showed you something that was already downloaded in the meantime, and it is generally good for engagement.” But that’s “really... Continue reading…

Netflix Arcane’s final season puts an even finer point on its story about revolutionary war. Continue reading…

Fans help circulate air through a system, be it a desktop or laptop PC. The more fans installed, the better the airflow, and the more heat can be exhausted. Purchasing the best PC case fans for your system is only step one. The second step is to install the blowers and connect them to your motherboard or hub. But when installing the fans onto a radiator, which is usually the case with AIO kits, is it better to configure fans in a pull, push, or push-pull configuration? Does it even matter?

If you've been a PC user for a while, you might remember the days when a sound card was an essential part of building a gaming PC. It was the only way to ensure quality audio output, but things have changed, and now the best motherboards have onboard audio chips that rival those discrete sound cards. That's just as well, as with larger graphics cards and fewer usable PCIe slots, using a sound card is harder to do. But what if I told you that I don't use either because I've found that using an external audio source is superior, whether I'm using wired or wireless headphones? It's also not just because, by using the same external hardware, I can use it across multiple builds and even on laptops while enjoying the same audio quality that I'm used to. There are many other good reasons that using onboard audio will hurt your experience.

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge Google Photos continues to get new and improved features on a regular basis, and one of the most recent Android updates has focused on video editing. Even if you don’t have the latest Pixel 9 phone (which is required if you want to try out the weird new Reimagine tool), you can now speed up, slow down, and enhance your clips with a few taps as well as trim them down more easily.You can also expect what Google calls “AI-powered video presets” on both the Android and iOS versions of Google Photos. After the app algorithm analyzes your clips, you get a choice of effects — trims, zooms, slow-mos — you can apply with a tap. The app takes the role of director and chooses where and how these tweaks should be applied.When the changes arrive on... Continue reading…

Contrary to what many people think, you don't need to spend a fortune on building a PC. Sure, I've written about the right budget for a modern gaming PC, but a large section of gamers don't even need to spend $1,200 on a PC for the kind of games they play the most. At the same time, you might belong to the group that wants a 1440p 60+ FPS experience in the latest single-player games.

Microsoft crushed all hopes for the release of Windows 12 this year by labeling its latest OS as Windows 11, version 24H2. While Microsoft may not be planning to release Windows 12 anytime soon, Windows 11 is undergoing many exciting changes to help users do more on a PC.