When I was getting to grips with Linux after using Windows for decades, I learned about immutable distros. They looked interesting at first, but the more I looked at them, the less I understood why people even bothered. The downsides looked massive, and the upsides seemed minimal at best.

Apple has sued OpenAI, alleging that engineers stole Apple secrets to advance the AI startup's hardware plans. In its complaint, Apple says it uncovered "a pattern of theft of Apple's trade secrets by OpenAI employees who were formerly at Apple." In addition to OpenAI, the lawsuit also names IO Products - Jony Ive's hardware startup, which OpenAI bought in 2025 - along with two specific employees, Tang Tan (OpenAI's chief hardware officer) and Chang Liu (who joined OpenAI from Apple in January).An Apple spokesperson shared this statement with 9to5Mac:At Apple, our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies to create the b …Read the full story at The Verge.

I've owned my Asus ROG Ally X long enough to have cycled through its entire identity crisis. It shipped as a Windows 11 handheld, which mostly meant a desktop OS squinting at a 7-inch screen. Then I put SteamOS on it, and it ran so much better on the ROG Ally X that my Steam Deck started collecting dust, even if Valve's appliance philosophy treats you more like a customer than an administrator. But a few weeks ago, I wiped the whole thing and installed the Handheld Edition of CachyOS, the same performance-obsessed take on Arch Linux for normal people that already runs my desktop.

A luxurious hot shower anywhere you go. Hot showers, like electricity, are a luxury that's easy to take for granted. That all changes after a few nights camping at a music festival, a week toiling at a backcountry job site, or overlanding all summer in the great unknown. An itchy scalp and the vague smell of warm clams suddenly make the idea of spending hundreds on a portable shower seem less absurd. I've been testing the Hottap Go from Australia-based Joolca while vanlifing to shower after surfing and to wash up after cooking. It features a 12L integrated water tank which is an improvement on other portable showers that require an external container and long, cumbersome hose th …Read the full story at The Verge.

Following significant backlash, Meta is turning off the feature it announced this week that let users generate AI images based on content from public Instagram accounts just by tagging them. The feature, as originally set up, meant that content from any public Instagram account could be used in AI creations without the account owner's permission."Earlier this week, we announced that one way for people to generate images in Meta AI is by @-mentioning public Instagram accounts that they want to reference," Meta says in an update to a blog post about its new Muse Image AI model. "Our intent was to provide a useful creative tool and to give pe …Read the full story at The Verge.

Sony shook the gaming world when it recently announced that it wasn't planning to release physical copies of PlayStation games in 2028. With a full move to digital, game collectors are concerned that they'll no longer have a means to keep a game forever. In a digital-only world, all it would take is for Sony to ban the account or even revoke the licenses, and the games vanish into thin air.

On Thursday, the Instagram account for a lecture series in Newport Beach, CA posted a photo of what appeared to be a cease and desist letter from the surveillance technology company Flock Safety. Flock has received significant backlash over its technology and work with law enforcement agencies, and this letter kicked off yet another wave of criticism against the company for allegedly trying to shut down discussions of its work."WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED," the group, The Saturday Salon, wrote in the Instagram post, which has more than 3,000 likes. A separate post about the letter on Bluesky has more than 360 reposts. The text of the letter de …Read the full story at The Verge.

You can do a lot with SBCs and microcontrollers, but one project we see pop up a lot is handheld consoles. It makes sense they're so popular; the hardware is so small that you can stick it on some simple hardware and use it to play retro games on a pocket-sized device. Such is the case of this cool ESP32-S2 game console, where all the hardware, including the screen, fits on a single board.

Back in March, we covered an open-source camera called the Saturnix. Back then, it was a work-in-progress, but it was still cool enough to check out. The creator said they'd get something out as soon as they could, but much like everything else in life, it took more time than expected.

Nvidia's push for AI has pervaded every aspect of gaming. Over the years, I've seen the pitch change from it being an "acceptable trade-off" against performance uplift to the bold claim that DLSS now matches or beats native resolution and hands you a stack of free frames at it. It's always been the kind of claim that's easy to repeat and harder to verify, so I decided to stop taking it on faith.

I once created a Video Overview with a style I thought looked nice in the picker. Heritage, with its bold colors and dramatic look. But the visuals kept pulling my eyes away from what the video was actually trying to teach me. NotebookLM’s Video Overview styles did more than just “decorate” my videos; they made me think about whether the style was really serving the video's purpose. And because Video Overviews have more than one style, I can choose the one that fits the person watching. The catch is that the style picker's little thumbnails don't tell you which one that is. I had to find out the more expensive way.

The Xtra Muse and the DJI Osmo Pocket 3. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge Last year, we told you about Xtra, the company that lets DJI sneak its popular cameras into the US, and Skyrover, a brand seemingly selling DJI drones in disguise. They're just two of the many firms DJI is suspected of starting to skirt the United States' foreign drone ban.But it appears the FCC is finally doing something about "DJI front companies," as watcher Konrad Iturbe dubbed them last year. Today, the FCC is fining eight of them $25,000 each - and giving them until Monday, July 20th, just 10 calendar days, to answer the FCC's questions before the agency takes further action.Those companies include Cogito Tech, Fixaxo Technology, …Read the full story at The Verge.