The new Acer Predator Helios Neo 14. | Image: Acer Acer announced Tuesday two new 14-inch gaming laptops: the Nitro 14 and Predator Helios Neo 14. It’s exciting to see Acer’s fabulous and well-beloved budget-friendly Nitro enter the 14-inch gaming laptop space, but even more so for the new Predator since it’s priced and specced competitively with the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 and Razer Blade 14. The company is also releasing an updated Nitro 16 that can be configured with either a current-gen AMD Ryzen or Intel Core processor.The new Nitro 14 starts at $1,299.99 and can be configured all the way up to an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card, 32GB of LPDDR5X SDRAM, and 1TB of NVME SSD memory. It’s available with 120Hz G-Sync displays at either 2560 x 1600 or... Continue reading…

A great CPU is at the heart of any PC, giving life to the various components that make everything work. It's one of the most important components of a PC, and you can't have a working computer without it. Picking the right CPU for your build is only half the battle, and you also need to get its installation right to ensure everything works smoothly without any issues. Installing a CPU may seem a bit daunting at first, but it is a fairly simple task that only takes a few minutes.

The new Zenbook 14 OLED (UM3406) starts at $999.99. Asus has released two new laptop models: the Asus Vivobook S series and the Zenbook 14 OLED (UM3406). Along with offering OLED displays, the laptops run on some of the latest AMD and Intel processors.We’ve yet to put the laptops to the test, but the new chips should be able to better handle AI with neural processing units built for it, while improving power efficiency and making gaming, multitasking, and editing faster. The keyboard even sports dedicated Copilot keys that allow for easy access to Windows 11’s AI tools. Three of the Vivobook S laptops range in size from 14 to 16 inches and are powered by the Intel Core Ultra 9, while a fourth model, also 16 inches, comes with the AMD Ryzen 8040 Series chip. The 14-inch Vivobook S model... Continue reading…

Image: Bungie Destiny 2’s The Final Shape expansion has a lot riding on it. It’s the culmination of a 10-year story and the conclusion of Destiny’s light and darkness saga. After a four-month delay, fans haven’t really seen much of The Final Shape, but today, Bungie delivered a preview of what’s to come. The teaser left me thinking that Destiny 2 is about to feel very different — and very broken — as players will be able to wield Light and Darkness abilities together for the first time ever.A new Prismatic Subclass merges the powers of the Light and Darkness, allowing players to combine certain class abilities from different damage types. So you could throw a Stasis grenade into a stack of enemies to freeze them and then use a Solar ability to wipe... Continue reading…

The SwitchBot K10 Plus robot vacuum now works with Matter. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge This week, SwitchBot announced that almost its entire line of smart home devices can now work with Matter through its SwitchBot Hub 2. This includes its mini K10 Plus robot vacuum — one of The Verge’s picks for best robot vacuum — as well as the soon-to-be-launched SwitchBot S10. Along with Ecovacs’ recently launched Deebot X2 Combo and Roborock’s S8 Max Ultra V (coming April 22nd), there are now a handful of robot vacuums that support Matter. The problem is that none of the smart home platforms support robot vacuums through Matter. This chicken-and-egg situation is characteristic of the overall frustrations of the Matter rollout to date. Robot vacuums, in particular, are a category many were excited to see come to Matter. Smart home... Continue reading…

Take back control of your lock screen. | Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge I don’t think I’m alone when I say that notifications are a nuisance. There are simply too many of them, and the helpful ones are often drowned out by the spam. Whether promotional notifications should be allowed at all on our phones is an open question (I have my own feelings on that!). In the meantime, it is possible to coexist peacefully with your phone — it just takes a little work. iPhone owners have more ways to fight the firehose of notifications than they used to, but it’s not necessarily an easy system to navigate. Here’s a quick primer on how iOS handles notifications and your options for taking control of them.iOS notification basicsThere are two places where your notifications can live on iOS: in recent notifications or... Continue reading…

Not many PC manufacturers out there have the sheer recognition and popularity of HP. It's one of the biggest makers of computers, and for good reason, as the company tends to make some of the best laptops on the market each and every year.

By now, you might have heard about Thunderbolt 5, which has finally made its debut in 2024. The first laptop to include Thunderbolt 5 support is the Razer Blade 18, but we're bound to see more later this year, and it's a big deal for laptop owners.

In the consumer technology space, time seems to move much faster than in the rest of the world. New products can become outdated in just a few months, and buying a piece of tech multiple years old is usually never a good idea. But every once in a while, a product appears that breaks the mold and stays at the top of the market years after release. For one, Sennheiser's HD 600 open-back headphones have stood the test of time for decades. In the world of computer peripherals, Logitech's MX Master 3 might be on its way to a similar level of timeless fame.

The open-world Outlaws could be the biggest single-player Star Wars game ever made. | Image: LucasArts It’s official: Star Wars Outlaws launches on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X / S, and PC on August 30th. Ubisoft shared the news alongside a new trailer for the upcoming next-gen title, which is an original adventure set in the ever-expanding galaxy of games based on Lucasfilm’s beloved franchise. You can preorder the game starting today, April 9th, and there are several incentives for punching your ticket early to play it.Developed by Massive Entertainment, Outlaws follows main character Kay Vess and her trusty alien companion Nix as they navigate a galactic criminal underworld. It takes place throughout a range of familiar locales, including Tatooine and Canto Bight, along with Kijimi, Akiva, and an all-new planet named Toshara. The... Continue reading…

Miku Expo 2024 in Portland, Oregon. | Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge If you made it through that headline and you’re confused, don’t worry — I was, too, at first. Hatsune Miku is an internet fandom thing. She’s not a real person, and she didn’t get her start in some obscure anime — she’s a Vocaloid, which is a synthetic voice that can be fed melodies and song lyrics to output as vocal performances, and she puts on concerts. Here’s a succinct summary from my colleague Jess Weatherbed: Okay, a quick crash course is that Miku is the mascot and most recognizable character for Vocaloid voice synthesizer software. Each Vocaloid “character” has a specific, unique voice that’s resulted in some of them gaining fan followings like real human performers.404 Media called Miku a “bonafide virtual pop idol with a... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The Motion Picture Association (MPA) is going off on piracy again. During CinemaCon in Las Vegas, MPA CEO Charles Rivkin announced that the organization plans on working with Congress to pass rules blocking websites with pirated content.The MPA is a trade association representing Hollywood studios, including Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Disney (it’s also behind the ratings board that gives you an R if you say curse words too often). It has long lobbied for anti-piracy laws, but it seems the battle is heating up again. In his speech on Tuesday, Rivkin highlights what a major problem piracy in the US has become, saying it costs “hundreds of thousands of jobs” and “more than one billion in theatrical ticket sales.”It’s true: piracy has... Continue reading…