Courses cover a range of subject matter like learning music or building a business. | Image: Spotify Spotify’s UK users are getting access to a fourth category of content to sit alongside its existing library of songs, podcasts and audiobooks: online courses. The company is today launching a new experiment that’ll see video-based lessons from BBC Maestro, Skillshare, Thinkific, and PlayVirtuoso made available via Spotify’s apps on mobile and desktop. The experiment is running in just the UK, and there are currently no guarantees that it’ll get a wider more permanent launch.Online courses, particularly video-based ones, might feel like an odd fit for a service best known as a source of music and other audio content like podcasts and audiobooks. But product director Mohit Jitani tells me that people are already coming to Spotify for... Continue reading…

The Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 saw a significant refresh for 2024, morphing it into a high-end, multipurpose laptop that leans toward a portable, mature design. While it's not going to offer the absolute most performance from its hardware due to size constraints, it's still going to do a great job of keeping up with professional work and gaming alike. At a time when many people are looking for one laptop to do it all, Asus has filled the demand with this redesigned PC.

Photo illustration: The Verge / Photo by Bluesky The head of Threads and Mastodon competitor Bluesky on why she thinks decentralization is the way forward in a post-Twitter internet. Continue reading…

When perusing the best AMD chips, your eye might be drawn to one of the Ryzen G-Series chips thanks to their all-in-one CPU/GPU design. AMD's Ryzen 5 8600G is a solid all-around APU, but you'll still need a solid PSU to power it. Luckily, we've found all the best power supplies out there for the 8600G, regardless of whether you've got tons to spend or are on a tight budget.

After years of rumors and speculation, Apple launched its first mixed-reality headset last month and saw a varied reception to the new product. Apple Vision Pro certainly felt like it was a taste of the future, but like the first-generation Apple products that have come before it, the headset also felt incomplete. The hope of reviewers like myself was that Apple could fix some of these bugs and limitations through software updates; however, that wasn't a guarantee. Now, about a month and a half later, Apple publicly released visionOS 1.1. It's likely the first of many software improvements that will hit Vision Pro over the coming months and years, and it's already a significant improvement.

DDR5 is the next generation of system memory for desktop and laptop computers and the best motherboard with the necessary DIMM slots is required to use it. We've put together a list of only the best DDR5 motherboards for AMD and Intel processors, allowing you to enjoy faster RAM speeds and other new features over DDR4. You'll find a mix of budget-friendly, affordable motherboards as well as some more premium and enthusiast-grade options in this collection.

We’re in a Gilded Age of fast, cheap, and trendy clothing. Anyone can purchase copies of expensive garments online that arrive at record speeds to their home, and for a fraction of the original price. This practice has made items affordable — often at the expense of the workers making the products — and created shopping habits that can be wasteful and impulsive. One e-comm giant, Shopify, estimates that 20 to 30 percent of online purchases are returned, while the National Retail Federation says around 18 percent of online orders are returned. The online fashion house, Finesse, is promising to change that. Their motives are to reduce overproduction by using AI to market and design their clothing exactly for their audience.Retailers have... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Microsoft has committed changes to Chromium that will improve text rendering on Windows machines. Following years of complaints, Chrome version 124 will finally support contrast and gamma values from the Windows ClearType Text Tuner for text rendering in Google’s browser.This change should mean Chrome will finally match the improvements Microsoft made to Edge for font and text rendering, so you can apply text contrast enhancements and gamma correction to improve the readability of text on webpages. Chrome uses Skia for text rendering with hard-coded values for contrast and gamma, so it wasn’t picking up the improvements that ClearType has to offer.Microsoft’s ClearType font technology has long been used in Windows to improve text... Continue reading…

Cath Virginia / The Verge The European Commission is opening five non-compliance investigations into how Apple, Google, and Meta are complying with its new Digital Markets Act antitrust rules, the regulator announced today. “We suspect that the suggested solutions put forward by the three companies do not fully comply with the DMA,” the EU’s antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said in a statement. “We will now investigate the companies’ compliance with the DMA, to ensure open and contestable digital markets in Europe.”In particular, the Commission plans to investigate Google and Apple’s anti-steering rules in their app stores and whether Google is guilty of self-preferencing its own services within its search engine. Apple’s browser choice screen for iOS is also... Continue reading…

Have you noticed that the fonts in Chrome look a little funny on Windows 10 and 11 systems? It's not just you; it's a known issue that has been going on for a little while now. Fortunately, Microsoft knows of the issue, and it's working on a way to get strange-looking fonts on Chrome fixed.

The Format drive dialog in Windows 11. | Screenshot by Tom Warren / The Verge On a Thursday morning nearly 30 years ago at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, a software developer checked-in some code for a dialog box he was working on. The box was only supposed to be temporary, so he didn’t worry that it was very basic. Except, nobody ever got around to changing it — and it’s still the same to this day in Windows 11. Dave Plummer, a former developer at Microsoft, recounted the interesting tale of how the Format drive dialog box was created all those years ago in a post on X over the weekend.“We were porting the bajillion lines of code from the Windows 95 user interface over to NT, and Format was just one of those areas where Windows NT was different enough from Windows 95 that we had to come up with some... Continue reading…

The production line of Easy Mac Macaroni & Cheese Cups on March 27, 2020, at the Kraft Heinz plant in Champaign, Ill. | Zbigniew Bzdak/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images The Biden administration today announced the largest investment in cleaning up industrial greenhouse gas emissions to date. The Department of Energy (DOE) selected 33 projects across more than 20 states to receive up to $6 billion in federal funding for clean energy technologies. It’s a diverse cohort spanning from mac-and-cheese maker Kraft Heinz to manufacturers of chemicals, paper, and construction materials. Industrial emissions account for almost a quarter of the nation’s planet-heating pollution. It’s also widely considered the most difficult kind of climate pollution to prevent. Alternatives to fossil fuel-fired furnaces and industrial processes have lagged behind other clean energy technologies. The Biden administration thinks... Continue reading…