Hello and welcome to Regulator, a newsletter for Verge subscribers about Big Tech, Big Government, and the big paradigm shifts that result from their collision. Not a subscriber yet? It's a new year, so why not treat yourself?In 2022, Jake Sullivan, then national security adviser under President Joe Biden and a powerful figure in the White House's foreign policy team, assembled an interagency planning exercise out of the Situation Room: What were all the possible circumstances and outcomes of an AI arms race between the US and China - from trade wars to real wars, possibly even the arrival of AGI - and how would the federal government resp …Read the full story at The Verge.

In the broader PC hardware community, upgrading your components somehow became an expectation rather than a choice like it used to be. Hardware seems to age faster on YouTube and Reddit, and one scroll is all it takes to be told that your GPU is unfit for modern gaming. The algorithm is indeed working overtime to get you to throw away your perfectly capable hardware for the annual refresh cycle.

Wider is better. Lenovo is at it again with wild laptop concepts for CES 2026, and the biggest one is the Legion Pro Rollable gaming laptop. It has a flexible OLED display that expands horizontally - as opposed to Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus Gen 6, which rolls up and down. The Legion Pro Rollable's screen goes from a conventional 16-inch 16:10 aspect ratio to an extra-wide 21.5 inches, all the way to an ultrawide 24 inches. That's even bigger (diagonally, at least) than the ridiculous $9,000 21-inch gaming laptop Acer once made.The Pro Rollable concept is based on the Legion Pro 7i, and it'll come with an Intel Core Ultra processor and Nvidia's flagship RTX 50 …Read the full story at The Verge.

Yes, that nice big stylus is included. Lenovo's new pair of Yoga laptops for CES 2026 are its most powerful and most lightweight models. The flagship Yoga Pro 9i is a creator-focused laptop with a 16-inch 4K tandem OLED reaching 1,600 peak nits of brightness, Intel Panther Lake processor options, and up to an RTX 5070 for a discrete GPU. It also includes a Yoga Pen Gen 2 stylus that can magnetically attach to the lid, either on its own or in its protective case. The pen can be used on the screen or on the trackpad.The new Yoga Pro 9i Aura Edition will start at $1,899.99 when it launches in Q2 2026. The new Lenovo Yoga 7i Slim Ultra Aura Edition is also e …Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft has been making waves among its productivity users lately. There was a story that Office was being rebranded to Copilot, but that wasn't exactly true. What was true was that we were seeing Microsoft bundle all of its productivity-based services under one blanket term: Microsoft 365 Copilot. So, yes, while Office does now have the "Copilot" bit added to it, it's still Microsoft 365 with Copilot, instead of just Copilot. Does your head hurt yet? Don't worry, that's a normal side effect of Microsoft naming conventions.

If I were to ask you where a specific, niche item was in your home, could you tell me? Many of us have a general idea of where to find things, but we have all experienced the annoyance of trying to find a particular tool or item and turning the house upside down to no avail. My garage looks like a bomb went off after a fruitless search for a faucet wrench, and I decided enough was enough—there had to be a better solution.

Got me all twisted up. At CES 2026, Lenovo is announcing a new ThinkBook Plus Gen 7 Auto Twist laptop. Once a concept, the 14-inch thin-and-light sports a motorized pivoting hinge, allowing it to twist and angle its screen toward you. It can be manually controlled, but the real trick is tracking your head and automatically adjusting to your position or posture. It can follow you around a portion of a room while giving a presentation, and you can knock on its closed lid to have it automatically open.The Auto Twist will also have an emoji-like AI companion software that reminds me of GERTY from the 2009 sci-fi movie Moon, turning to follow you and react to your ac …Read the full story at The Verge.

Networking gear for smart home setups and individual use is typically affordable, but there are often items in MicroCenter aisles and on Amazon that leave us scratching our heads as to why someone would put so much money down just for better internet. The answer lies mostly in what you'd define as acceptable quality of internet service, and how much money you're willing to fork to get it to that level. For instance, an overwhelming majority of ISP subscribers are content with the ISP-supplied router, trashy as it may be. However, it is dangerous and expensive to presume home networking problems go away if you just throw money at them.

Having a powerful laptop is all well and good, but then needing five different cables for monitors, peripherals, and power can get annoying real fast. Not only is it frustrating to have to plug in all of these different cables, but it can make your desk an absolute mess. Which, for me personally, leads to lower productivity.

The Moto Watch will be available on January 22nd. At CES, Motorola announced its latest smartwatch, the Moto Watch. According to Motorola, the Android watch offers up to 13 days of battery life, alongside Polar-powered health tracking, open-source software, and dual-frequency GPS - a combination that helps set it apart from Apple's and Google's flagship wearables.Battery life is easily its most notable feature. Motorola says the 47mm watch can last up to 13 days on a single charge, or around seven days with the always-on OLED display enabled. If those claims hold up, it would put the Moto Watch well ahead of rivals like the Apple Watch Series 11, Google Pixel Watch 4, and even Fitbit's Ch …Read the full story at The Verge.

Between its terrific virtualization performance, LXC (and now OCI images) support, and clustering tools, there are plenty of reasons why I adore Proxmox. However, Proxmox’s thriving community might just be my favorite aspect of the king of virtualization platforms. Aside from the massive documentation and helpful forum posts, the talented developers in the Proxmox community have designed several unique tools that add some much-needed features to my PVE nodes. Not to mention, with Proxmox essentially being built on Debian, it’s possible to arm a PVE instance with conventional Linux packages.

MSI came out full swinging at CES 2026 this year with a slew of new hardware launching for various segments. We've got new graphics cards, cases, coolers, and more coming out from the show floor.