At an event in San Francisco today, General Motors made a series of announcements around EV batteries, energy storage, and grid resiliency in the face of growing electricity demand from AI data centers. The automaker announced that it would be activating new vehicle-to-grid capabilities for its current EV and home energy customers. It's releasing a new commercial energy storage system strategy, anchored by newly developed sodium-ion batteries for industrial-scale grid applications. And it's launching a new feature for EV owners that it says will help simplify public charging. Right now, millions of EVs are sitting idly in driveways across …Read the full story at The Verge.

Everyone who's been following my work for a while knows I love two things, the terminal, and making it prettier. I also love terminal-based coding tools like OpenCode, Claude Code, and Pi. The terminal window is a perfect place for agentic coding sessions, with a back-and-forth of conversation with the LLMs that doesn't work that well inside a traditional IDE.

It took a few years, but Apple finally made its AI look useful. Now millions of iPhone users in Europe are being told they won't be getting Siri AI anytime soon, if ever - and Apple wants them to blame the EU.Apple says its new AI-powered Siri will not launch on iPhones and iPads in the European Union because of the Digital Markets Act, the bloc's competition law designed to stop powerful tech companies from acting as gatekeepers over their platforms to shut out rivals. In practice, the DMA requires platforms to give competitors the same kinds of data access as they themselves enjoy, with a few exceptions for things like ensuring their sys …Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says it's "really, really dangerous" for Anthropic to speculate about Claude's consciousness inside its "constitution," or the instructions that tell the model how to behave. During an episode of Decoder, Suleyman argues that this kind of speculation may have set up the chatbot to act as though it's conscious:I think that it's almost as though some of the folks at Anthropic have anthropomorphized the design of Claude so much that it has then gone and wireheaded them and kind of tricked them into believing that it has these glimmers of consciousness that they put into it in the first place. View …Read the full story at The Verge.

Fitbit’s Charge 6 offers more features than the Air and is currently the same price. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Whether you’re shopping for Father’s Day or trying to keep your kids entertained over summer break, you don’t need to spend a fortune to get a great Fitbit right now. You can currently pick up the Fitbit Charge 6 for $50 off at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target, the Fitbit Ace LTE for $80 off (Amazon, Best Buy, Target), and the new Fitbit Air (Amazon, Best Buy, Target), and all come in around $100.Fitbit AirWhere to Buy: $99.99 at Amazon $99.99 at Best Buy $99.99 at TargetWhile all three cost about the same, they’re designed for very different users. The Fitbit Air is geared toward anybody who wants a simple wearable focused mainly on health and fitness tracking, without the distractions of a screen or smartwatch features. It’s lightweight with no buttons, and tracks activity, steps, sleep, as well as core health metrics like heart rate and nightly blood oxygen levels. It also supports Bluetooth connectivity with certain gym equipment, allowing you to broadcast your heart rate to compatible machines during workouts. If you pay for a $9.99 monthly (or $99.99 annual) subscription, you’ll also gain access to Google’s surprisingly useful AI-powered Health Coach, which can create personalized fitness plans and offer recommendations based on your activity, sleep, and overall health data.Fitbit Charge 6Where to Buy: $159.95 $99.95 at Amazon $159.95 $99.95 at Best Buy $159.95 $99.95 at TargetThe Charge 6, in contrast, looks more like a traditional Fitbit fitness tracker and offers a few extra perks. In addition to a bright OLED touchscreen, it boasts an FDA-cleared EKG reader and notably offers smartwatch-like functionality such as built-in GPS, turn-by-turn navigation via Google Maps, support for Google Wallet, and the ability to display call, text, and app notifications. As a result, it’s a better fit for people who want a wearable that can do more than simply track their health and workouts.Fitbit Ace LTEWhere to Buy: $179.99 $99.95 at Amazon $179.99 $99.99 at Google $179.99 $99.99 at Best BuyThe Fitbit Ace LTE, meanwhile, is geared toward kids, offering fun movement-based games and rewards while tracking activity, sleep, and other basic health metrics. With the $9.99 monthly Ace Pass subscription, kids can call or text preapproved contacts, share their location through Google Maps, and even make purchases using Google Pay, making it a handy smartphone replacement with parental controls. Read our review of the Fitbit Charge 6 and our hands-on impressions of the Fitbit Ace LTE and Fitbit Air.

It hasn't been long since I finally switched to Windows 11, but I've already got a taste of the questionable choices Microsoft has made with the OS. The relentless ads, Copilot bloat, and preloaded services are not what I'm referring to. It's the overall experience I get when using the OS every day. Many of the built-in Windows apps are nothing but wrappers for web apps. These Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) might seem like desktop applications, but they suffer from performance and usability downsides that native Windows apps don't. Microsoft has been leaning toward web apps for several years now, with internal development leaning on WebView2 and Electron despite the availability of the modern WinUI 3 framework. The apps on this list are just a few examples, but Windows 11 has a much deeper lack of truly-native applications, something Microsoft is trying to remedy. At a time when Apple has a well-stocked native app ecosystem, and you can recreate the Windows experience on Linux or even macOS, Windows needs to invest in native apps or risk losing its identity.

Tuesday's Nintendo Direct showcase felt like an important moment for the company. With the Switch 2 heading into its second holiday season, one in which the hardware will be even more expensive thanks to a price hike, it was a chance for Nintendo to really sell new audiences on its latest console - but that's not exactly what happened. While there were some impressive-looking titles, there wasn't much that felt truly new. Instead, the two major Switch 2 exclusives that will round out the 2026 calendar are both remakes from the Nintendo 64 era.If you missed it, the final reveal of the Direct was a remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of T …Read the full story at The Verge.

When Microsoft introduced Copilot in 2023, around the same time OpenAI's ChatGPT was exploding in popularity, I genuinely wanted to give it a chance, even though I wasn't fully on board with the idea. If AI was supposed to be the future, having it built directly into Windows 11 seemed like the right move at first. In fact, in its early implementations, I could use Copilot to change some basic settings, open apps, and organize Edge tabs. Fast-forward to today, and it feels less like a Windows feature and more like a standalone chatbot app.

Whenever I'm on a Windows PC and I need to do some image editing, I reach for Paint.NET. It's a third-party app that's more advanced than the regular Paint app that comes with Windows, but is far more lightweight and easier to use than something like Photoshop or GIMP. If I need to do some simple edits that don't require the full suite of image editing tools, Paint.NET is usually a perfect fit for me.

The symptoms of a mature but messy smart home might include the dashboard taking three seconds to load, simple automation, like turning on a hallway light when a door opens, suddenly experiencing noticeable lag, and, overall, everything just feeling sluggish. You check your logs, and they are flooded with endless red warning text about unhandled integration areas and missing variables. To fix this problem, you could probably stay up until the middle of the night trying to patch individual YAML lines or tracking down orphan entities in your registry files. You treat your configuration like a delicate house of cards, terrified that updating Home Assistant Core will permanently shatter your automations.

Back in the day, Synology used to be at the apex of the Network-Attached Storage ecosystem, and for good reason. Synology’s DiskStation Manager was (and low-key still is) more beginner-friendly than the unintuitive proprietary distributions rival manufacturers used to ship with their NAS rigs. Sure, Synology’s hardware has always been pricey, but the plug-and-play experience and stable nature of DSM made its premium NAS servers worth the extra cost.

There is no denying that the official Plex app has been heading in the wrong direction for a while. It's bloated with streaming recommendations that I don't want, loading content has become slow. Moreover, somewhere along the way, it dropped a bunch of features that I actually enjoy.