March was an exciting month for new product releases, as we got a closer look at a few devices that were announced and previewed at CES 2024 earlier this year. In total, XDA reviewed over 40 products this month, from niche networking equipment to mainstream laptops and midrange phones. There were products we knew about, such as Asus' Zenbook Duo, and surprises like Apple's M3 MacBook Air. We won't blame you if you missed anything, so we've compiled a list of the 10 best products we had on our reviews desk in March 2024. These are the best of the best, so you can buy them knowing you're getting your money's worth and excellent performance in the products' respective categories.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Of all the allegations that the Department of Justice has laid at Apple’s door, the most contentious is perhaps its salvo over security and privacy. Apple has warned that if the DOJ gets its way, Apple products — especially the iPhone — will be less secure for users. Meanwhile, the DOJ claims that Apple’s much-touted privacy features are pretextual.The complaint in the DOJ’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple says that the company “wraps itself in a cloak of privacy, security, and consumer preferences to justify its anti-competitive behavior.” In the press conference announcing the lawsuit, Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter said Apple’s choices have actually made its system “less private and less secure.” “Apple selectively... Continue reading…

Are you there, Bixby? | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Bixby’s not dead yet, apparently. A Samsung executive tells CNBC that the company is “working so hard” to equip its voice assistant with AI features, suggesting that the company sees the likes of Gemini as competition — not a replacement.That’s good to know, because some of us were starting to wonder. Earlier this year as Samsung announced a boatload of new generative AI features for its flagship phones, its voice assistant was scarcely mentioned. Samsung and Google also made a big deal about the Galaxy S24 phones using Gemini Nano — Google’s on-device AI model. It wouldn’t have been a stretch to see Samsung replace Bixby with Google’s Gemini-powered assistant, but apparently, that’s not the plan. Samsung’s Won-joon Choi, executive... Continue reading…

With a powerful AMD processor, HD haptics, full-HD 120Hz display and respectable battery life, the Asus ROG Ally has been a breath of fresh air in the PC gaming handheld market. The high-end ROG Ally comes with 512GB of storage to download and play your favorite games. While it’s sufficient for most, heavy users with a vast game collection may desire more. If you are among them, you can install games to an SD card on the ROG Ally.

Linux may have a fantastic Command-Line Interface, but Windows 11 is a lot better than its predecessors when it comes to supporting powerful terminal commands. There’s a lot you can do with the default terminal app on Microsoft’s flagship OS. And that's before you attempt to install WSL2, which brings a plethora of Linux commands to Windows.

Illustration: Nick Barclay / The Verge “The ability to know somebody’s age and try to protect privacy at the same time can be challenging,” says Meta’s Global Head of Safety Antigone Davis. Meta has been advocating for app store operators like Apple and Google to be in charge of verifying users’ ages and soliciting parental consent for app downloads. Now, it’s using its own virtual reality Quest store as a model for how it thinks that should work.Meta is prompting Quest 2 and 3 users to reenter their birthdays so that it can place accounts in the appropriate age experience as it tries to centralize age verification through its Quest store. Teens aged 13 to 17 will have more privacy settings turned on by default and can be monitored through parental supervision tools.... Continue reading…

Using extensions on the mobile version of the Microsoft Edge browser is one of its biggest fortes. Microsoft added extension support to Edge for mobile a few months ago, but at the time, it only contained three extensions. Granted, they were three very good extensions, but it was still a shadow of the feature's potential. Fortunately, Microsoft has now finally pulled the trigger and allowed people to install any Edge-compatible extension on the mobile app. And while it takes a lot of work to activate right now, it's worth it if you're itching for your extensions on mobile.

A mockup of what Microsoft’s Xbox chatbot looks like. | Cath Virginia / The Verge Microsoft is currently testing a new AI-powered Xbox chatbot that can be used to automate support tasks. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that the software giant has been testing an “embodied AI character” that animates when responding to Xbox support queries. I understand this Xbox AI chatbot is part of a larger effort inside Microsoft to apply AI to its Xbox platform and services.The Xbox AI chatbot is connected to Microsoft’s support documents for the Xbox network and ecosystem, and can respond to questions and even process game refunds from Microsoft’s support website. “This agent can help you with your Xbox support questions,” reads a description of the Xbox chatbot internally at Microsoft.Microsoft expanded... Continue reading…

If you're looking for a great laptop to get some work done with, ThinkPad machines are excellent choices but so are Surface computers. These reputable brands are popular picks in the laptop world for good reason, especially the new Surface Laptop 6 for Business as well as Lenovo's impressive ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 12. So, how do you decide?

The record was broken during a 15-hour stream on April 1st. | Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Game developer Jason Thor Hall, better known by the moniker Pirate Software, has set a new Twitch Hype Train world record, with his channel reaching level 106 on April 1st. Once the Hype Train was initiated, it took Hall roughly three hours to beat his previous level 55 world record from December, with viewers contributing 54,380 gifted subs (alongside regular subscriptions) and 8,225,386 Bits — likely earning Hall a healthy six-figure sum in the process.Hype Trains, a feature that Twitched launched in 2020, are a limited-time event triggered when a channel receives an uptick in Bits or subscriptions, pushing past a streamer-designated threshold. While we won’t know the official figure paid by Hall’s community, it’s sure to be... Continue reading…

ChatGPT is a great AI tool, but if you want to use it, you have to create an account. Some people are fine with this, but privacy-minded users likely won't appreciate the idea of an AI collecting data on them. Fortunately, OpenAI seems to understand this, as it's making some new changes to who can interact with ChatGPT. Very soon, everyone will be able to use ChatGPT without needing an account.

Do you remember when Google came under fire for how it presented Incognito mode? If you didn't catch the news, Google came under fire after people accused the tech company of not accurately describing what Incognito mode does. As part of the lawsuit, Google changed how Incognito mode is worded to better reflect what it does. Now the company is going even further by erasing all browsing data gathered from Incognito mode users since 2016.