Just a few months after revealing the Snapdragon X2 Elite-powered Surface Pro 12 and Surface Laptop 8 (13.8-inch/15-inch models), Microsoft and Qualcomm have officially revealed the 6-core Snapdragon X2 Plus-equipped Surface Pro 12-inch and Surface Laptop 13-inch, an upgrade from 2024's Snapdragon X Plus models.

Microsoft is launching a second generation of its Surface Mouse next month that includes haptic feedback support. The Surface Mouse also has a customizable action button for the first time, which is primarily designed for quick access to Copilot (of course), but can be configured to work with other shortcuts from the Surface app."Its haptic feedback adds a small, purposeful physical response to the moment you usually only see on a screen: a click registering, a window snapping into place or an object aligning just right," says Brett Ostrum, corporate vice president of Surface Devices. "It is subtle by design, but noticeable within seconds …Read the full story at The Verge.

Smartphones have indeed gotten bigger, with battery capacities averaging around 4000–5000mah. This reflects an effort to meet the software demands of the Android OS, which keeps adding features to improve the user experience. However, not all smartphone models come with the largest battery capacity. My Samsung Galaxy S21 FE has a 4500 mAh battery that doesn't seem to last as long as it should. I barely get a day out of it, and then deliberately keeping the maximum charge at 85 percent for battery protection shaves a couple of hours more.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) have introduced new legislation that would ban anyone from developing artificial superintelligence - a technology the bill describes as capable of the "destruction or disempowerment of humanity," including by overthrowing the government. Under the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, AI leaders would face up to 20 years in prison for violating the law.The bill doesn't just take aim at the more powerful superintelligence, a term President Donald Trump said the US will use in place of "AI" in official documents. It would also pause the development of advanced AI systems, which lawmakers …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you own a Snapdragon X2 device, but you're not too pleased with its current state when running Linux, I have excellent news for you. Since Snapdragon Summit 2025, Qualcomm has been hard at work getting everything settled in the world of FOSS. Now, the company is ready to show off its results with an Early Developer Preview.

An adorable little bear that wants to help you buy things. Modern life comes with an unending, auto-populating to-do list. It never ceases to amaze me how I can be doing nothing at all, minding my own business, and suddenly something needs to be taken care of. You're telling me a tree branch fell in the backyard and now I have to figure out what to do with it? The tree just assigned me homework? Oh, our trash collection company canceled our account out of nowhere and now I have to send email about it? Repeatedly? Totally unfair.These are the things that we've been told for years that AI will help us with. We'll all have a smart virtual assistant to triage and handle the tedious tasks we'd rather …Read the full story at The Verge.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a slate of bills on Monday that could finally give communities better data - and more say - on how data centers impact their electricity bills and water supply. As data centers invade a growing number of communities across the US, they've triggered protests over how the infrastructure underpinning AI might stress power grids and local water systems. That's fueled partly by concerns about how difficult it is to see just how much electricity or water they're actually gobbling up. California's new disclosure rules won't offer a full picture, but starting next year, data center operators will have to start s …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Surface Pro 12-inch Second Edition comes in black, silver, or violet. | Image: Microsoft Microsoft is refreshing its Surface Pro 12-inch and Surface Laptop 13-inch devices with Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon X2 Plus chips. The smaller Surface devices retain the same design and hardware features from last year, with faster and more capable chips inside and higher price tags (thanks RAMageddon!).While the 12-inch Surface Pro started at $799.99 last year, it's debuting on October 13th at a starting price of $1,149.99. Likewise, the 13-inch Surface Laptop was originally priced at $899.99, but it's up to $1,199.99 this time around. There's no base 8GB model this time, causing some of the price increase, as both devices launch with a …Read the full story at The Verge.

I have an old Lenovo laptop with a Ryzen 5 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage, which makes it a little too capable to leave unused. So I put it to work as a central file server for my family instead of spending money on a dedicated NAS.

I've been using AI tools for some time, switching between services like Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, and NotebookLM. But rather than just using the tools, I wanted to understand them on a deeper level.

Anthropic says its AI Claude has "autonomously discovered" a new enzyme system similar to machinery behind the powerful gene-editing tool Crispr. It's the first result from Anthropic's newly-launched wet lab and an early test of Claude's usefulness for science as the company prepares to go public. The company says Claude found the enzyme system after searching through a massive database of DNA sequences, adding that its scientists' involvement was limited to the initial prompt and lab work. Over 21 hours, Anthropic said nearly 950 Claude agents worked through 210 million tokens before one spotted an unusual repeating pattern in the datas …Read the full story at The Verge.

I still remember how normal it used to be for GPUs to have at least one DVI port on the back. The first graphics card I ever bought, the GTX 680, actually had two of them. Even the GTX 1070 I upgraded to years later had one DVI-D port. This port started disappearing from GPUs with the RTX 20-series, mostly sticking around on lower-end and mid-range models. And by the time I upgraded to the RTX 3090 in 2020, I had already gotten used to seeing nothing but DisplayPort and HDMI.