Souped-up sound, widgets, and a Thread radio make for a good (but not showy) upgrade to Amazon’s best smart speaker with a screen. Continue reading…

Apple sells a wider variety of excellent Macs that target different consumers. Its line of MacBooks happens to be popular among users due to the notebooks' portability, power, and energy efficiency. Nonetheless, finding the right MacBook can be a chore, especially when there are so many different variants out there. The 14-inch MacBook Pro (M3, 2023) and 13-inch MacBook Air (M2, 2022) happen to be two of the best laptop models currently available. Let's find out which notebook you should buy.

Intel continues to dominate the gaming space with the launch of its 14th-generation CPUs. They're among the best CPUs for gaming, even as the company continues its fight for the performance crown with AMD. However, to maximize the capabilities of these new CPUs, you will need an equally capable motherboard that allows them to fully stretch their wings. That's why we've rounded the very best Intel motherboards you can pair with your 14th-generation CPU to maximize the performance of your new build.

Photo illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge Everything you need to know about the big app store trial kicking off November 6th. Continue reading…

The WH-1000XM5s are still the best pair of headphones you can get, even if Sony’s naming convention is still terrible. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Peace and quiet can be hard to come by, whether you’re a parent, a frequent traveler, or someone who has been forced to listen to ongoing construction for what feels like an eternity — trust me, I would know. Thankfully, Sony’s WH-1000XM5s are currently on sale at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target for as low as $328 ($73 off), matching their best price to date.Sony’s flagship headphones have offered some of the best sound you can get in a pair of over-ears since the 1000X series arrived more than six years ago. The competition has become increasingly stiff in the time since — take the recently released Bose QuietComfort Ultra, as an example — but the latest iteration continues to offer best-in-class ANC and clear, natural-sounding audio.... Continue reading…

Amazon’s Echo Show is a much better smart display without all the Amazon stuff. | The Verge Amazon’s Echo Show smart displays are genuinely great devices. For between $90 and $250 (often much cheaper with Amazon’s perma-sales), you get a smart speaker with a touchscreen that can play music, show you photos, fire up a video call with friends and family, act as a security camera, double as a Bluetooth speaker, and control your smart locks, lights and security cameras.However, there is a big caveat: Amazon’s hardware is heavily subsidized by its services, and when you buy an Echo Show, you are essentially bringing a little billboard for Amazon’s services into your home. If you use it as is out of the box, you’ll be bombarded with so much bloatware encouraging you to use Amazon’s services that you may well be tempted to unplug it... Continue reading…

Illustration: William Joel / The Verge Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 13, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been watching Barbarian and No Hard Feelings, reading about the challenges of building “the next Twitter” and Marvel’s complicated future, using Pager to make sense of all my screenshots, and sending everyone this article about aphantasia to explain that no, I really don’t see pictures in my head, yes it’s wild, no I didn’t even realize other people could do that. I also have for you a couple of nifty AI tools, a robot vacuum, a bunch of new stuff about the new Beatles song, a Simpsons GIF... Continue reading…

Are you looking to make the leap to ChromeOS? Or trying ChromeOS Flex on a non-Chromebook? There are some things you need to know before making the switch. Most likely, you're coming to ChromeOS from a Mac or Windows PC. While there's a lot about ChromeOS that might be familiar, it's a primarily cloud-based operating system, so things like ideas about required hardware specs go out the window.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The US Copyright Office is taking public comment on potential new rules around generative AI’s use of copyrighted materials, and the biggest AI companies in the world had plenty to say. We’ve collected the arguments from Meta, Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Hugging Face, StabilityAI, and Anthropic below, as well as a response from Apple that focused on copyrighting AI-written code.There are some differences in their approaches, but the overall message for most is the same: They don’t think they should have to pay to train AI models on copyrighted work. The Copyright Office opened the comment period on August 30th, with an October 18th due date for written comments regarding changes it was considering around the use of copyrighted data for... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge This week, a panel of US appeals court judges has renewed the legal battle over Fortnite dance moves by reversing the dismissal of a lawsuit filed last year by professional choreographer Kyle Hanagami against Epic Games. Billboard pointed out the opinion filed on November 1st (PDF), where US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Paez wrote that even if individual elements of a dance can’t be copyrighted, the arrangement can.The lower court said choreographic works are made up of poses that aren’t protectable alone. It found that the steps and poses of dance choreography used by characters in Fortnite were not “substantially similar, other than the four identical counts of poses” because they don’t “share any creative elements”... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Anyone using Discord to host files will want to change that, as links to those files will begin to refresh every 24 hours by the end of this year. The company told Bleeping Computer that doing so will help the company fight malware spreading on its platform since that gives it more ability to “restrict access to flagged content.” According to the article, Discord says the change won’t affect anyone sharing content on the platform, as links within the client will be refreshed automatically. However, links shared outside of Discord won’t work a day after they’re regenerated. The company said that it will share more “in coming weeks” with developers, who “may see minimal impact.”As Bleeping Computer notes, cybersecurity company Trellix... Continue reading…

Apple sells a wide variety of excellent Macs, catering to different budgets and needs. What all of these computers have in common is support for mouse input to interact with apps on macOS Sonoma. While the MacBook Pro (M3, 2023) offers an integrated trackpad, models like the Mac Studio and Mac Mini require you to invest in a pointing device separately. To help you find a reliable product, we've listed some of the best wired and wireless mouse options for the Mac below.