The Surface Laptop represents the best of what Microsoft has to offer in the laptop space, and they often rank among the best laptops you can buy on the market. But just the fact that they're made by Microsoft doesn't mean they're entirely immune to all the common, yet frustrating, Windows problems. In fact, there are multiple reports about the Surface Laptop's keyboard having issues that may cause it to stop responding entirely.

Sometimes, emojis have a hard time representing what you're truly feeling. Some services allow you to combine or design your own emoji, but Apple may be planning to make the process even easier. A renowned Apple leaker has let slip that the company may reveal AI-generated iPhone emojis during its big WWDC event happening in a few weeks.

Image: The Verge Browser bloat has long been a problem, but now Microsoft is doing something about it, and not by reducing features but by speeding the browser up. The company is working to make Edge’s user interface more responsive, starting with its Browser Essentials menu.This menu — which displays information about Edge’s performance — is now 42 percent faster, thanks to a WebUI 2.0 architecture migration. You can see how much faster the Browser Essentials menu loads on WebUI 2.0 compared to React and WebUI with Javascript in the video below. Microsoft says the menu is 76 percent faster on devices without an SSD or with less than 8GB of RAM.Additionally, Microsoft is giving Edge’s favorites menu a speed boost in build 124, making it 40 percent... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Google’s search algorithm is perhaps the most consequential system on the internet, dictating what sites live and die and what content on the web looks like. But how exactly Google ranks websites has long been a mystery, pieced together by journalists, researchers, and people working in search engine optimization.Now, an explosive leak that purports to show thousands of pages of internal documents appears to offer an unprecedented look under the hood of how Search works — and suggests that Google hasn’t been entirely truthful about it for years. So far, Google hasn’t responded to multiple requests for comment on the legitimacy of the documents.Rand Fishkin, who worked in SEO for more than a decade, says a source shared 2,500 pages of... Continue reading…

Microsoft started testing a bunch of AI features for some of the stock apps in Windows 11 last year, including OCR (optical character recognition) for the Camera and Snipping Tool apps. Back then, there was no indication that the same benefit would be extended to other stock apps. But Microsoft has been quietly working all these months to expand the OCR capability to the Phone Link app. And now, the effort has finally paid off.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge An upcoming version of Microsoft Phone Link lets you select and copy text from within images synced from your Android phone. The feature is live now in Release Preview Insider builds, so it should roll out to everyone soon. Phone Link (called Link to Windows on the phone side) lets you sync calls, messages, notifications, and images — and cast your entire phone — from your Android phone to your Windows computer. It also works in a more limited fashion with iOS devices, which only sync notifications, messages, and calls over Bluetooth. Screenshot: Nathan Edwards / The Verge Phone Link will now let you select and copy text from images synced from your Android phone. The Windows Snipping Tool got text... Continue reading…

The Verge Elon Musk founded xAI last summer, and today it announced raising $6 billion in funding, saying it will help bring the startup’s “first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies.” So far, xAI has launched Grok, a supposedly edgier version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT available via X, formerly known as Twitter, where the chatbot is currently only available to X Premium subscribers. Funding in this round came from several sources, according to xAI, including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Saudi Arabian Prince Al Waleed bin Talal. Last year, a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed that xAI was looking to raise up to $1 billion in equity... Continue reading…

The NPU inside Copilot Plus PCs takes the stage at a Microsoft Surface and AI event. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge When you launch a game on a Snapdragon on a Windows laptop, you might get an AI frame rate boost from Microsoft’s mysterious Auto Super Resolution (Auto SR) feature. But while Microsoft hasn’t fully explained how the feature works, The Verge can now confirm it’s not Qualcomm technology, not exclusive to Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X chips, and not exclusive to specific games, either.You’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise! Microsoft’s new Automatic Super Resolution help page bluntly states that a Snapdragon X chip is required — see screenshot — and that all of its processing “occurs on-device using the integrated GPU and Neural Processing Unit.” Image: Microsoft But Qualcomm now tells us that Super Resolution is... Continue reading…

After years of online search dominance, Google has finally begun to show cracks in its armor. After the tech giant revealed its AI Overview feature, people have been finding that it has been outputting some extremely strange results. AI Overview is meant to use the power of Gemini to answer any question entered into the search engine, but the results have been less than stellar; the feature has been caught suggesting someone who struggled to get cheese to stick to their pizza to use edible glue, and advising people eat at least one rock a day.

Have you ever wondered where your precious disk space has disappeared to? Sure, you might have two or three large games in your games drive at the same time, but that shouldn't take it from blue to red in the File Explorer, right? I become unsettled if any of my drives don't have at least 100-200 GB of free space at any time. When a drive is too full, it can slow down performance. But it's not always easy to find out what exactly is using up all the space on my SSD.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft has added an official Copilot bot within the messaging app Telegram, which lets users search, ask questions, and converse with the AI chatbot. Copilot for Telegram is currently in beta but is free for Telegram users on mobile or desktop. People can chat with Copilot for Telegram like a regular conversation on the messaging app. Copilot for Telegram is an official Microsoft bot (make sure it’s the one with the checkmark and the username @CopilotOfficialBot). Several AI companies now let you access their LLMs through messaging apps. Meta added Meta AI to its chat apps, including Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram messaging, and you can chat with Gemini inside Google Messages on Android phones. To access Copilot for Telegram, I... Continue reading…

Image: Hugo Herrera / The Verge PayPal is launching an advertising platform built on a trove of customer transaction data. The company’s new advertising business will encompass purchase information and customer spending habits from PayPal and its sister app Venmo, according to The Wall Street Journal.PayPal has brought on Mark Grether, the former vice president and general manager of Uber Advertising, to lead its advertising business. “If you’re someone who’s buying products on the web, we know who is buying the products where, and we can leverage the data,” Grether said in a statement to the WSJ. He also said that PayPal will receive shopping data from customers using its credit card in stores.A PayPal spokesperson tells the WSJ that the company will collect data... Continue reading…