It doesn’t help that there’s no real killer app yet. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge For some Apple Vision Pro buyers, the honeymoon is already over. It’s no coincidence that there’s been an uptick on social media of Vision Pro owners saying they’re returning their $3,500 headsets in the past few days. Apple allows you to return any product within 14 days of purchase — and for the first wave of Vision Pro buyers, we’re right about at that point.Comfort is among the most cited reasons for returns. People have said the headset gives them headaches and triggers motion sickness. The weight of the device, and the fact that most of it is front-loaded, has been another complaint. Parker Ortolani, The Verge’s product manager, told me that he thought using the device led to a burst blood vessel in his eye. At least one other... Continue reading…

We already have a comprehensive collection of the best CPUs, which details the various CPU options across different categories and workloads. However, gaming by itself deserves a dedicated list due to the sheer number of options and their more specialized use case. Things are now more exciting than ever for gamers, with some seriously strong contenders from both AMD's Ryzen 7000 series, Intel's 13th-generation CPUs, and the new 14th-generation refresh of Raptor Lake.

The Asus ROG Ally, with the Xbox app on Windows. This is not enough. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge The Nintendo Switch is on track to become the bestselling game console of all time. Sony’s PS5 will likely surpass the Xbox One’s entire lifetime sales later this year. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s newer Xbox Series X and S, with their comparatively disappointing exclusive games, are firmly in third place yet again — and it doesn’t look like Xbox Game Pass will ever fill the gap. Microsoft isn’t planning to take this lying down. It’s among the largest video game companies in the world now that it owns Activision Blizzard, and it’s going to act. This Thursday, we expect the company to reveal a seismic shift in strategy, one where it could bring Xbox exclusives like Hi-Fi Rush, Starfield, even Indiana Jones to PlayStation and / or Switch. To... Continue reading…

Image: Aspyr I have been waiting for Tomb Raider I-III Remastered for 21 years. That’s when I first played the second entry in the series, it having been a “gift” from my mother’s boyfriend who gave me both his PlayStation and a handful of games — sans jewel cases — for no other reason than wanting to free up some space in his closet. I played it ceaselessly, enamored with the game’s action and puzzles and the fact it was the first game I ever owned that starred a woman. But after reconnecting with the Tomb Raider II portion of Aspyr’s remaster, I’m left asking: what in the natural hell was 15-year-old Ash thinking?Playing Tomb Raider II on the Switch — it’s also available on Xbox, PC, and Playstation — was an exercise in self-flagellation, with the... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Microsoft tweeted that its annual Build conference for developers will take place in Seattle from May 21st through 23rd. The announcement tells everyone to expect to hear updates about “AI, Copilots, and more.”The 2023 event marked a return to the in-person portion, and this year’s event promises to take place both in Seattle and online. Last year, Microsoft ramped up AI efforts that now include tools for developers like Copilot Studio and Windows AI Studio, while its growing AI ambitions around Windows and Microsoft 365 will surely be front and center again.No schedule of events for this year’s gathering has been posted yet, and the page is currently inviting potential attendees to sign up to find out when registration opens. On the... Continue reading…

Previously, we saw a leak that suggested that Microsoft Build 2024 will go live on May 21st-23rd. As it turns out, the leak was dead on, as Microsoft has announced the dates for its Build 2024 event. However, the company has also given us a sneak peek at what we can expect from the event.

SVG images and text descriptions fed into Keyframer are automatically converted into animation code. | Image: Apple Researchers at Apple have unveiled Keyframer, a prototype generative AI animation tool that enables users to add motion to 2D images by describing how they should be animated. In a research paper published on February 8th, Apple said that large language models (LLMs) are “underexplored” in animation despite the potential they’ve shown across other creative mediums like writing and image generation. The LLM-powered Keyframer tool is being pitched as one example of how the technology could be applied.Utilizing OpenAI’s GPT4 as its base model, Keyframer can take Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) files — an illustration format that can be resized without interfering with quality — and generate CSS code to animate the image based on a text... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tesla rolled out two changes in its latest vehicle software update — 2024.2.6 — that appear to be aimed squarely at battery issues that immobilized cars during an extreme cold weather event in January. One of those new features will tell Tesla drivers how much time they can expect until their battery is warm enough for DC fast charging, while the other will automatically defrost the charge port.According to the update’s release notes published by Not a Tesla App, the charge port will start warming automatically when drivers use the car’s navigation feature to get to a charging station. Frozen charge ports could be one of the issues that left drivers stranded during an extreme cold snap in Chicago earlier this year, especially if the... Continue reading…

Collage of Stabie Cascade art | Stability AI Stability AI’s newest model for image generation is Stable Cascade promises to be faster and more powerful than its industry-leading predecessor, Stable Diffusion, which is the basis of many other text-to-image generation AI tools. Stable Cascade can generate photos and give variations of the exact image it created, or try to increase an existing picture’s resolution. Other text-to-image editing features include inpainting and outpainting, where the model will fill edit only a specific part of the image, as well as canny edge, where users can make a new photo just by using the edges of an existing picture. Image: Stability AI Stable Cascade images generated from the prompt “Cinematic photo of an anthropomorphic... Continue reading…

Sony’s Madame Web isn’t especially great or terrible, but it’s surprisingly committed to transporting you back to 2003 — a golden age for comic book movies that were aggressively mid or worse. Continue reading…

More than two dozen great products are already on sale ahead of the holiday, including Google’s Pixel Buds Pro. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Presidents Day has us thinking about the upcoming election season — not to mention the hotly contested debates and the inevitable onslaught of presidential memes, some of which are likely to be dangerously believable. Regardless of how you feel about politics, however, the holiday remains a great time to save, especially since many deals go beyond the furniture and big-name appliances that will dominate most circulars in the run-up to the holiday on Monday, February 19th.We’re already seeing tech sales pop up at trusted retailers like Amazon and Best Buy, where you can find great deals on the gadgets we’ve tried, tested, and wholeheartedly recommend. We’re seeing great prices on devices like Amazon’s Fire TV Stick 4K Max and the Roomba... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge A report from the nonprofit Tech Transparency Project (TTP) alleges that X has been selling premium subscriptions to subjects of US sanctions, including leaders of the US-designated terrorist organization Hezbollah. The TTP report identifies 28 accounts that were granted checkmarks under owner Elon Musk’s paid verification plan, evading rules that formally state they’re banned from using it. The allegations raise new questions about how strictly social media platforms should vet users — after the Supreme Court ruled just last year that the platform formerly known as Twitter was not responsible for abetting a terrorist attack.The TTP report lists the full series of sanctioned entities that got verified on Twitter. The wide range of names... Continue reading…