I use Claude every day. But when I type things out, it slows me down. It's frustrating because my typing speed can't keep up with how fast ideas pop into my head. So I switched to Claude Voice Mode. Now, instead of typing out my questions, thoughts, or half-formed ideas, I can speak my mind and even do a massive brain dump on Claude, letting it help me work through them.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more stories on Big Tech versus politics in Washington, DC, follow Tina Nguyen and read Regulator. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedA long time ago, in 2004, the Federal Communications Commission laid down a rule designed to prevent a monopoly: No one company could broadcast to more than 39 percent of all the TV households in the United States. But then Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025. Brendan Carr became FCC chairman and immediately kicked off a deregu …Read the full story at The Verge.

Over the past several years, Nothing’s budget-centric subsidiary, CMF, has built a reputation for producing attractive, inexpensive products with features often reserved for gadgets that cost twice the price. The CMF Headphone Pro — the company’s first pair of over-ear wireless headphones — fit precisely in that lane, especially now that they’re on sale at Amazon in both light gray and a subtle green shade for an all-time low of $69 ($30 off).CMF Headphone ProWhere to Buy: $99 $69 at Amazon (light gray) $99 $69 at Amazon (green)Although the Headphone Pro eschew the retro-transparent design found on Nothing wares like the Headphone 1, I wouldn’t necessarily say that’s a bad thing given the polarizing, squared-off design of the latter. Instead, the Pro go all in on the curves, with circular earcups, cushions, and a plush headband. You can also add an additional pop of color with CMF’s $25 interchangeable cushions, which, as of now, are available in either orange or the aforementioned green hue.Unlike many premium pairs of noise-canceling headphones, the Pro ditch touch-capacitive controls for physical buttons — a plus, as far as I’m concerned — allowing you to control playback, adjust the volume, and tweak a range of other settings using a customizable action button and a multi-function roller. Nothing also includes something called an Energy Slider, so you can adjust the treble and bass balance on the fly without digging into Nothing’s app to make EQ adjustments.The biggest draw of the Headphone Pro, aside from their adaptive ANC, is that they offer a whopping 100 hours of battery life per charge, ensuring you can travel just about anywhere without having to top them off. That number drops to 50 hours with active noise cancellation enabled; however, that’s still 10 hours more than what you’d get with a higher-end pair like Sony’s WH-1000XM6 and 20 hours more than the latest Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones. The fact that they support Google Fast Pair and the higher-quality LDAC codec is just a plus.Other alternatives to considerBeats Solo 4With lossless USB-C audio, 50 hours of battery life, Find My support, spatial audio, and comfy ear cups, the Beats Solo 4 offer significant quality-of-life improvements over their predecessors. They still deliver that bass-rich Beats sound, too. Read our review.Where to Buy: $199.95 $129.95 at Amazon $199.95 $129 at Walmart $199.95 $149.99 at Best BuySony WH-CH520The Sony WH-CH520 offer a lot for very little. The on-ear Bluetooth headphones provide 50 hours of battery life and support hands-free voice assistants, including Google Assistant and Siri. They also offer multipoint Bluetooth support and can tap into Google’s Find Hub network.Where to Buy: $59.99 $38 at Amazon $59.99 $38 at Best Buy $59.99 $39.99 at Target

Gully Foyle is my name… | Image: Brick Tower Press This might feel like a somewhat obvious recommendation to some, but it flew under my radar until now. Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination (originally published as Tiger! Tiger! in the UK) is a 1956 sci-fi novel that some have cited as a precursor to cyberpunk. It's a work I admit I have some conflicted feelings about, but one I think is well worth reading if you consider yourself a fan of sci-fi. It's also well worth seeking out a physical copy, something I wish I had known before I started reading it in the objectively inferior e-book form that can't capture the ergodic elements of the climax.It's hard to explain the plot of The Star …Read the full story at The Verge.

Before Claude Artifacts, I had a routine I really hated. I’d be 30 messages deep in the conversation, and need to look at the table Claude built for me earlier, and start scrolling.

The Keychron Q1 Ultra 8K in white (left) and the V5 Ultra 8K in black (right). | Photo: Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge Keychron's expansive keyboard catalog covers everything from basic full-size mechanical boards to niche layouts like southpaw Alice or a one-handed half-keyboard for gaming. Its Q and V series are among our go-to recommendations for off-the-shelf keyboards, and the latest iterations - the Q and V Ultra models - are a straightforward upgrade to the lineup, with benefits for regular users and deep-in-the-weeds keyboard nerds alike.I've been testing two Ultra keyboards: the Keychron V5 Ultra 8K and Keychron Q1 Ultra 8K. The $119.99 V5 Ultra is a near-full-size 1800-layout board with a number pad in a plastic case, while the $229.99 Q1 Ultra i …Read the full story at The Verge.

We've reached a point where practically every new AI tool or feature launching just feels the same. Every company is going after helping you build better presentations, write more "human" emails, or write code faster. I'm not saying these features and tools aren't helpful. I'm a huge fan of NotebookLM's Slide Decks and rely heavily on them for all the presentations I create, and I spend a good chunk of my days building tools using Claude Code. Everything these companies are building is impressive, but at some point, the novelty just wears off.

Fedora was the Linux distro that got me off Windows, and one of its main fortes, in my opinion, is its stability. I've very rarely had issues with using the OS, and anything that I have encountered was both easy to remedy and fixed pretty rapidly. So, as you might expect, if a new release of Fedora has a few nasty bugs in it, the community would rather delay the release than ruin the trust people have in the OS and ship it.

Vercel, a major development platform that hosts and deploys web apps, was compromised, and the hackers are attempting to sell stolen data. A person claiming to be a member of ShinyHunters, which was behind the recent hack of Rockstar Games, posted some data online, including employee names, email addresses, and activity time stamps. Vercel confirmed in a post on X that a "security incident" had occurred, and that it impacted a "limited subset" of its customers. Vercel said that a compromised third-party AI tool was the avenue for attack, though it did not specify which third-party was involved.We've identified a security incident that inv …Read the full story at The Verge.

What's the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of PC upgrades? If you're a gamer, chances are, it's a better GPU. After all, that's the upgrade everyone loves to talk about because it brings the most improvements. I totally understand the appeal of chasing higher frame rates, but as someone who has made plenty of mistakes in the past while upgrading, I've realized that it's not always the smartest place to start, especially if you already have a decent mid-range or high-end card.

3D printing is one of the most gratifying hobbies, since you can envision an object and hold it after just a few hours of CAD and printing. However, after printing my fair share of chainmail armor, articulating dragons in rainbow filament, and little business card holders, I've concluded that functional prints give me the greatest joy. Items that solve a problem I acknowledge, no matter how trivial, with the simplest of engineering.

As someone who loves watching monitor reviews on YouTube, I've spent way too much time obsessing over the usual specs like response times, refresh rate, panel type, and HDR certification. These are things reviewers test and compare, and for the most part, that's usually enough to decide whether a monitor is worth your money or not. But after daily driving OLED monitors for the last four years, I can confidently say there's an issue that rarely gets mentioned in reviews, and that's VRR flicker.