Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge From the Boox Palma to the Light Phone 2, it seems that everyone is looking for distraction-free reading, if only they had the right device. I don’t blame them: every time I pull out my phone to mindlessly scroll, I know my time could be put to better use. But as the owner of many fine gadgets, I also don’t really want another device in my life, so I was pretty excited to stumble upon a partial solution with a gadget I already have: the Playdate.Yes, I’m talking about that little yellow Game Boy from Panic and Teenage Engineering, the one with a crank jutting out of its side. Since the launch of its on-device store, Catalog, the handheld has become home to quite a range of experiences. I’ve been playing tiny city builders and dungeon... Continue reading…

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge It may sound funny to say this, but PDF files — electronic copies of printed documents — are still around and are still very useful. Short for Portable Document Format, PDFs allow you to create a digital version of a paper document, letting you store and access them a lot easier than having to rifle through a filing cabinet.While there are a variety of PDF apps available — Adobe Acrobat being the most well-known — you actually don’t need to download one to create a PDF from an existing paper document with your iPhone or iPad. You can just use Apple’s Notes.Create a PDF from a paper documentHere’s how to create a PDF on your iPhone (the process on your iPad is very similar):Go to your Notes app and create a new document by selecting... Continue reading…

We've seen some pretty exciting gaming PCs in our time, but the NUC series has got to take the cake for being one of the smallest and powerful gaming PCs on ther market. Of course, this is an extremely niche market, and for whatever reason, Intel decided that it would remove itself from creating and distributing NUC PCs. Luckily, Asus quickly decided that it would take up the mantle and would continue the NUC line with support from Intel.

I can hear the eerie, garbled radio chatter of the Combine soldiers just by looking at this. | Image: Valve The Steam Summer Sale is raging on, offering significant discounts on the Steam Deck and hundreds of PC games. While we rounded up a bunch of our top Summer Sale picks last week, one title that should definitely not fly under your radar is Valve’s own Half-Life: Alyx — which is selling for its all-time low price of $20.39 (nearly $40 off) until the sale ends on July 11th at 10AM PT / 1PM ET.Now, Alyx is quite a unique game and experience. For starters, when it came out in 2020, it was the first time Valve returned to the world of Half-Life (the 26-year-old series that put it on the map) since 2007. It’s a prequel to Half-Life 2, starring supporting-character-turned-protagonist Alyx Vance. And, notably, you take control of her through... Continue reading…

In the consumer space, high-end PCs and their components are designed for gaming first and foremost. Server rigs, on the other hand, are built primarily for enterprises and are fine-tuned for industrial workloads. Although server-grade systems can cost thousands of dollars, even an affordable mainstream PC can surpass a premium server in gaming benchmarks.

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge YouTube has launched an improved eraser tool that lets creators remove copyrighted music from their videos while keeping other audio intact. The revamped tool, which was released this week, was first reported by TechCrunch.The Erase Song feature lets creators silence copyrighted music in their content, the company announced in a video. The tool had previously been in place as a beta feature, but it wasn’t always accurate. The updated Erase Song feature uses an “AI-powered algorithm” to help it more precisely identify and remove copyrighted songs without affecting other audio in a particular clip. That’s the goal, at least.But even the new and improved version might not always produce perfect results. So in cases where the tool fails... Continue reading…

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge. Getty Images The bankruptcy of Redbox’s parent company came after months of chaos, cash crunch, and corporate upheaval. Continue reading…

Even though Microsoft has made it way too easy to spot new features in the Microsoft Store app, not every change is mentioned in the What's New section. However, we've done the hard work of finding the latest changes Microsoft quietly rolled out to its store app for Windows 11 users.

There are dozens of password manager apps out there. Most of them are paid services or work on a freemium model. 1Password used to be my go-to recommendation, but their native apps on mobile and desktop took a hit when the company switched to Electon tech with v8. LastPass, another popular password manager, has suffered data breaches in recent times, so now there is a huge question mark over the companys credibility.

E-bikes open up cycling sports to more people, and not just the cheaters. Continue reading…

Thermal paste is an essential part of any PC build. It helps to make sure there are no air pockets between your CPU and CPU cooler, which allows for better heat dissipation. Keeping your CPU as cool as possible will ensure it is running efficiently and offers optimal performance. If your CPU gets too hot, you can run into problems with thermal throttling.

If all the benchmarks we did had a physical form, it’d look something like this. We tested every Snapdragon X chip against the Intel Core Ultra, AMD Ryzen 8000, and Apple M3. Continue reading…