Illustration: The Verge Xbox has resolved a widespread outage that prevented players from connecting to Xbox Live, playing online games, downloading games, or using other services for several hours. “Users should no longer be encountering issues signing in to Xbox Live and services,” Xbox says in a post on X. “Thank you for your patience, game on!”Issues with Xbox Live seemed to have started around 2PM ET, with Downdetector reports beginning to rise around that time. At around 3PM ET, Xbox said it was “aware that some users have been disconnected from Xbox Live” and that the company started “investigating.”Xbox Live is down https://t.co/IaGAUihllq pic.twitter.com/PebX7GwuDe— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) July 2, 2024Meanwhile, its status page said Xbox’s... Continue reading…

June was a busy month for product releases, especially if you're a fan of great laptops. The beginning of the month aligned with Computex 2024, the world's biggest computing trade show, and we got a glimpse of all kinds of new products and concepts. Later in June, the first wave of Windows on Arm laptops featuring Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Plus and Snapdragon X Elite chipsets debuted. Our reviews are in for two of the best ones the Surface Laptop 7 and the Galaxy Book 4 Edge and they've lived up to the hype. After hands-on testing 35 products in June 2024, these are eight of our favorites.

Proton Docs does comments, collaboration, and a bunch of other Google Docs-y things. | Image: Proton Proton Docs looks a lot like Google Docs: white pages, formatting toolbar at the top, live indicators showing who’s in the doc with their name attached to a cursor, the whole deal. That’s not especially surprising, for a couple of reasons. First, Google Docs is hugely popular, and there are only so many ways to style a document editor anyway. Second, Proton Docs exists in large part to be all the things that are great about Google Docs — just without Google in the mix.Docs is launching today inside of Proton Drive, as the latest app in Proton’s privacy-focused suite of work tools. The company that started as an email client now also includes a calendar, a file storage system, a password manager, and more. Adding Docs to the ecosystem... Continue reading…

Bad Wi-Fi can ruin a good movie with buffering, break your winning streak while gaming due to lag, or make a stressful workday even longer and harder. Its not unreasonable to think things could be improved with AI, but so far, the application of AI in router technology has been underwhelming and not really even worth paying attention to. If youre looking to upgrade your home internet with a new router, AI features should be at the bottom of the priority list, so don't let any marketing fool you here. For most people, the speed of the connection, the number and width of bands supported, and type of chipset will have a way bigger impact on the performance of the best Wi-Fi routers.

An exploded view of the Amflow PL e-bike showing the Avinox drive system. | Image: DJI DJI is expanding into electric bikes in a big way with its new Avinox drive system and Amflow e-bike brand. The company best known for its drones is launching its first e-bike — the carbon fiber Amflow PL electric mountain bike — before the end of the year, complete with the mid-drive Avinox motor and fast-charging battery. It has so many smart and powerful features packed into a relatively lightweight e-bike that it should catch the attention of competitors like Bosch and Specialized.As a showcase for DJI’s new Avinox drive system, the Amflow PL e-bike features a very impressive 120Nm of max torque and 1000W of on-demand boost power to overcome even the steepest inclines. Otherwise, its “remarkably quiet” mid-drive motor is rated for... Continue reading…

If you're working on your computer all day, it's a good idea to invest in a good keyboard. While you might not think much of it, a good keyboard can really be a key component if you're looking to improve your productivity. In addition, there are also health benefits here as well, as a good keyboard can do a lot to preserve your fingers and wrists.

We've spent ample time with macOS Sequoia developer beta 2, which brings iPhone Mirroring to the Mac. It's one of macOS Sequoia's biggest features excluding Apple Intelligence, of course, which isn't available yet. However, there are a handful of under-the-radar features and changes that were added to macOS Sequoia. Plus, we learned a bit more about iPhone Mirroring, including some of its limitations. Let's break down six things macOS Sequoia developer beta 2 told us about the upcoming version of macOS, and whether you should install it.

Excel is one of the Microsoft 365 services that receive a lot of attention from Microsoft, and users get the benefit in the form of new features every month, just as it did in June. And now that a new month has started, the software giant has already started rolling out another set of changes to Excel for the web, aiming to make spreadsheet tasks "simpler, faster, and more enjoyable".

There would be many reasons you bought a MacBook for yourself over any other laptop. Like its flawless construction, stunning design, solid performance, proven durability, easy portability, and advanced security.

Picking up my new passport at the post office. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge Perhaps you’ve heard you can now renew your US passport online. As long as you meet certain requirements, there’s a beta website for that. The State Department tells me it’s not necessarily faster — but anecdotally, my family just had two of the speediest, most painless experiences we’ve ever had with the US government. I applied from my phone, I shot my own digital photo at home — and one week later, I picked up my new passport at the post office. I submitted it on June 15th, my passport was issued on June 20th, and it was waiting for me on the 21st. That’s just six days in total.Five business days eachWhen my wife tried it, her renewal went even quicker: she applied on June 24th, her application was approved on the 26th, her new... Continue reading…

Noctua's NH-D15 has been one of the best CPU coolers that you can buy for quite some time. And while we'd love to say that it's overrated, the fact of the matter is that it really isn't, making it a compelling option for anyone building a new PC. Of course, this CPU cooler has been on the market for 10 years, and while there really isn't any competition to this day, the brand has now introduced something new that could end up becoming everyone's new favorite CPU cooler for the next decade.

Brazilian regulators say Meta’s “excessive and unjustified obstacles” make it difficult for users to opt out of AI training. | Illustration: Nick Barclay / The Verge Brazil’s data protection authority (ANPD) has banned Meta from training its artificial intelligence models on Brazilian personal data, citing the “risks of serious damage and difficulty to users.” The decision follows an update to Meta’s privacy policy in May in which the social media giant granted itself permission to use public Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram data from Brazil — including posts, images, and captions — for AI training.The decision follows a report published by Human Rights Watch last month which found that LAION-5B — one of the largest image-caption datasets used to train AI models — contains personal, identifiable photos of Brazilian children, placing them at risk of deepfakes and other exploitation.As reported by T... Continue reading…