The second-gen trackers look similar to the originals but come with a few welcome upgrades. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Less than a month after making their debut, Apple’s second-gen AirTags are already receiving their first discount. Right now, Costco members can buy five location trackers for $99.99 ($29 off) either online or in-store, bringing the price of each tracker down to about $20 a pop. If you don’t already belong to Costco, you can still take advantage of the discount if you’re willing to pay a $5 surcharge or sign up for an annual membership, which currently starts at $65 a year. Apple AirTag (second-gen)Where to Buy: $145 $99.99 at Costco (five-pack)Apple’s original AirTag has been our favorite tracker for iPhone users for years, and the newest version builds upon that excellence with some welcome improvements. What has always set the AirTag apart is Apple’s ultra wideband chip, which allows for an impressive level of precision that competing products like the Tile Pro can’t match. The company’s new, upgraded chip still guides you straight to misplaced items with on-screen arrows, vibrations, and sounds, but now from up to 50 percent farther away. The extended range also makes tracking items in multi-story homes much more reliable, and even makes it faster to connect the AirTag to your phone. The built-in speaker is also 50 percent louder, making it easier to locate the item trackers when they’re hidden from view.The new model also keeps everything we loved in the original AirTag. It still uses a user-replaceable battery, so you don’t need to replace it when it inevitably dies after a year or so. You also get the same IP67 water and dust resistance, extended Bluetooth range, and handy software features that let you share your tracker with up to five people or temporarily share its location with airlines, such as United, Delta, and American Airlines.Read our full AirTag (second-gen) review.

Taara Beam mounted to a pole for line of sight connectivity. | Image: Taara Light-based internet provider Taara, which spun out of Alphabet's "moonshot" incubator last year, just launched Taara Beam to provide 25Gbps connectivity within cities over invisible beams of light - line of sight permitting.Unlike last year's Taara Lightbridge, which connects communities separated by water and mountains at distances up to 20km (over 12 miles), the shoebox-sized Beam can be mounted to street poles and roof tops for city-wide connectivity at distances up to 10km. The 8kg (less than 20 pounds) device typically consumes about 90W. Taara's big advantage is speed. It rivals fiber in terms of throughput and can also be deploye …Read the full story at The Verge.

Phone companion apps are a very underrated niche. If you are on Windows or macOS and own either an Android or an iPhone, the cross-device features and interconnectivity are extremely helpful. My experience with Windows Phone Link taught me that Microsoft was serious about the app, and its current features eliminate the need to pick up my phone for calls or other frequent tasks.

Discord is attempting to distance itself from the age verification provider Persona following a steady stream of user backlash. In an emailed statement to The Verge, Discord's head of product policy, Savannah Badalich, confirms the company "ran a limited test of Persona in the UK where age assurance had previously launched and that test has since concluded."After Discord announced plans to implement age verification globally starting next month, users across social media accused Discord of "lying" about how it plans on handling face scans and ID uploads. Much of the criticism was directed toward Discord's partnership with Persona, an age v …Read the full story at The Verge.

Acme Weather is currently only available for iOS. | Image: Acme Weather Corporation After selling their popular weather app to Apple in March 2020, where some of its core features were incorporated into Apple Weather, the creators of Dark Sky have left Apple to create yet another alternative. Their new app, called Acme Weather, embraces the fact that forecasts will never be entirely accurate by providing both a main prediction of the day's conditions and several alternate predictions.Acme Weather is currently only available for iOS. An Android version is planned, but there's no release timeline yet. You can try it out for two weeks for free, but a $25 annual subscription is needed if you like what you see and want to keep …Read the full story at The Verge.

Since announcing earlier this year that it was on the cusp of a major battery breakthrough, Finnish startup Donut Lab has faced a lot of questions, and plenty of skepticism, about its production-ready, solid-state battery. Could the company really make a fast-charging battery at scale while avoiding some of the theoretical production headaches that have stymied past efforts? Today, Donut Lab sought to dispel some of the doubts with the release of the first independent test of its battery, evaluating its charging speed and the "thermal behavior" of its pack.The test, which was conducted by state-owned VTT Technical Research Centre of Finlan …Read the full story at The Verge.

Let's say you've just dropped $200 on a flagship portable SSD from a major brand. It's sleek, it's rugged, and the box promises up to 2,000 MB/s, but in the real world, it's barely hitting half of that speed, and it's getting burning hot.

A giant main floor window next to Kohler’s new recirculating shower system isn’t required. | Image: Kohler Kohler claims its new Anthem EvoCycle smart shower system can deliver "up to 80% water savings" without the use of showerheads that limit flow or pressure. The system instead relies on a reservoir in the shower's base that collects used water and passes it through a filtration system before sending it back up through the showerhead. Pricing starts at $7,500, or $5,625 with discounts, but you'll need to buy fixtures and the $825 water tank base separately.The Anthem EvoCycle's recirculation system starts with a "Standard Mode" where only fresh water is delivered through a handshower sprayer and collected in the reservoir tank. Switching to …Read the full story at The Verge.

It’s tough not to gush about a 27-inch 1440p QD-OLED gaming monitor that costs under $400 (I’ve done it before!). AOC’s G-Sync-compatible model with a 240Hz refresh rate and a near-instant response time is down to $379.99 at Best Buy, which matches the lowest price I’ve ever seen for a model with these specs. This seems like a great entry-level OLED for your gaming desktop or laptop setup; it has a similar 111 pixels per inch (PPI) as its competitors, it has a three-year warranty that protects against burn-in from normal use (when you use its panel protection settings), and its 16:9 aspect ratio makes it ideal for PC and console gaming.AOC 27-inch QD-OLED gaming monitor (Q27G41ZDF)Where to Buy: $549.99 $379.99 at Best BuyThe benefits of QD-OLED over IPS and TN panels commonly used in monitors are immediately obvious when you compare them side-by-side. QD-OLED offers deeper blacks (no more black appearing as hues of gray) and better contrast with more color and brightness accuracy. Games and movies will look better than ever. Google Docs? Not so much. Brightness and text clarity are areas where this tech falls behind; viewing a huge, white Google Doc on this and other OLEDs will make it appear somewhat dim. And, while newer OLED monitors boast clearer text thanks to vertical RGB stripes in their panels, you might notice some fringing around letters with this monitor (and many others on the market) if you look closely. Other Verge-approved dealsSony has discounted a fleet of PS5 games and accessories on its PS Direct site, and you’ll also find many of them on Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, and GameStop. The most notable game discount that exists only on Sony’s site (for now, at least) is on Ghost of Yōtei, one of the PS5’s best exclusives from 2025. Previously $69.99, you can grab it on disc for $49.99 through March 10th. The third-person action game is set 300 years after the events of Ghost of Tsushima, and you control vengeance-seeking Atsu. As predicted, the title offers absolutely stunning graphics and the return of the previous game’s deep, satisfying fight system. Read our review.Woot is offering a stellar deal on Beats Studio Buds wireless earbuds that offer active noise cancellation, IPX4 protection against sweat, and compatibility with iOS and Android. Through Monday, February 23rd (or until supplies last), you can get the black or white model for $59.99, which is 60 percent off its original $149.95 price from when they debuted in 2021. We thought they were a so-so value in our original review, and its major cons (no wireless charging, noise cancellation that’s not as good as AirPods) were tough to settle for with a $150 price tag. These are a great buy at this discounted price.One of Best Buy’s deals of the day (lasting through Monday, February 23rd) is on a discounted bundle of high-end components for a desktop PC. If you’ve had your eyes set on AMD’s Ryzen 7 9850X3D processor (the successor to the best gaming CPU), you can grab it paired with 32GB of DDR5 RAM clocked at up to 6400MHz for $649.99. The CPU alone costs $499.99 at most retailers, so snagging this much speedy RAM for an extra $150 is great, considering how costly RAM has become these past few months.

From building a new PC to making it gaming-ready, you need to do a lot of stuff in between. Ensuring optimized BIOS settings, disabling unnecessary background apps, and installing drivers and OS updates are just a few of them. If you ask me, though, the five most important things you need to do on a new gaming PC aren't one of them. Sure, you need the right BIOS settings and drivers, but that's basic stuff. What's more important is protecting your data, minimizing Windows bloat, tuning your fan curves, and undervolting your GPU. Without these things in place, you can't expect your gaming PC to perform at its peak. So, before installing Wallpaper Engine and SignalRGB to beautify your desktop, make sure you've ticked the following boxes.

I used to think of my old PC as “still useful,” which is a polite way of saying it was headed toward the tech shelf of retirement. It handled everyday stuff fine, but it didn’t feel like it had a second act. Then I finally listened to our resident Proxmox guru, Ayush Pande, and installed Proxmox. Now, my tiny Geekom Air12 Lite mini PC is something closer to shared infrastructure than a personal computer. Once it clicked, I stopped seeing limits and started seeing possibilities.

Progress towards reliable deepfake labelling tech is sluggish, despite all the “help” from AI providers. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images As 2025 drew to a close, Instagram head Adam Mosseri ended the year by doom-posting about AI. "Authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible," Mosseri lamented. "Everything that made creators matter - the ability to be real, to connect, to have a voice that couldn't be faked - is now accessible to anyone with the right tools." But people, Mosseri insisted, still wanted "content that feels real." His proposed solution was finding a way to label real media. "Camera manufacturers will cryptographically sign images at capture, creating a chain of custody," he said. The result would be a trustworthy system for determining what's not AI.The g …Read the full story at The Verge.