For years, even decades, virtually everyone in the United States had the same phone. Nobody really thought about it, it didn't even matter what it was called - it was just The Phone. Well, The Phone was called the Western Electric 500, and when landline phones ruled the world, the Western Electric 500 ruled the landlines. It was so ubiquitous for so long that even if you've never touched a landline, you've encountered the 500. The Phone app on your iPhone? Looks like a 500. On this episode of Version History, we tell the story of the Western Electric 500, and the deeply strange world it came to represent. David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and pro …Read the full story at The Verge.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the AI coding and vibe-coding booms, follow David Pierce. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedWriting code was a killer app for AI even before anyone was really talking about AI. In the spring of 2021, 18 months before the world knew the word "ChatGPT," Microsoft debuted the very first product of a partnership with a nonprofit called OpenAI: a tool called GitHub Copilot that watched developers as they wrote code and tried to autocomplete snippets and lines for them …Read the full story at The Verge.

As much as I adore my local LLMs, they can’t hold a candle to the reasoning capabilities of their cloud counterparts, and for good reason. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI clouds can process hundreds of billions of parameters without breaking a sweat, while my GPUs can take a few minutes to come up with answers if I try running 30B (or even 20B) models on my local LLM providers.

Building a PC comes with a lot of unwritten (and written) rules that get passed around forums, YouTube comment sections, and Reddit threads until they calcify into conventional wisdom. Some of them aren't intuitive, but some of them seem a bit too simple, like M.2 SSD installation. When you install your SSD, you put it in the first M.2 slot. It's labeled M2_1, it's closest to the CPU, and it's the fastest one on the board. Why would you put your drive anywhere else? The short answer is that for most builders, that slot is overkill, and depending on your motherboard, using it without the right drive could actually work against you.

No frills, all artsy thrills. | Photo: Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge I love black-and-white photography. I also adore compact cameras you can always have by your side. So I'm a total mark for the Ricoh GR IV Monochrome, a fixed-lens camera that can't zoom and can't record color - at all. It's a formula that makes the average person ask, "Why?" I've tested the GR IV Monochrome for over a month, taking it with me everywhere and photographing everything. Let me explain how this pricey little point-and-shoot is likely to go down as one of my all-time-favorite cameras.Ricoh GR IV MonochromeScore: 8ProsConsExcellent black-and-white image qualityEverything great about the standard GR IV: sharp lens, small size, …Read the full story at The Verge.

I have spent years exploring the best ways to streamline my coding workflow, but my recent experience with Claude has been a breakthrough. When it comes to Python, I usually prefer a right mix of documentation and experimentation. However, using Claude as a personal tutor changed the math entirely.

Hisense is first out of the gate with the UR9 RGB LED TV, which uses individual red, green, and blue LEDs for its backlight. RGB LED TVs have been the talk of the TV world this year, with models coming from all the manufacturers, and the first one of 2026 is here - the Hisense UR9. It's the first look at the viability of the new backlight technology outside of demo rooms, and it's a step above the traditional mini-LED TVs of years past. HDR is colorful and accurate, it has great brightness, and it is capable of showing colors beyond the P3 color space for movies and TV shows that have wider color. But at $3,500, the 65-inch model I reviewed is priced comparably to high-end OLEDs from LG and Samsung, which is tough competition. Hisense released the very first RGB …Read the full story at The Verge.

The mini PC has gone through a renaissance of sorts in the last few years, especially in the home lab space. Compact machines with decent connectivity and specs are perfect for self-hosting and experimentation, and mini PCs offer that in spades. One of the best mini PCs available for productivity is the Mac Mini, thanks to the performance and efficiency of Apple's M-series silicon, but they've also gained quite a bit of popularity in the home lab space for the same reasons. Picking up a used Mac Mini for your home lab isn't bad advice, but it's worth it to take a really close look at what you plan to do with a mini PC in your home lab before picking one up. The Mac will excel in a very specific set of circumstances, and while it's not completely inept at everything else, you're often working around macOS instead of having free rein over your hardware.

In a world where AI code is entrenched within people's workflows, developers of all walks of life have had to draw a line somewhere. Some places will outright ban AI code, while others will fully embrace it, and each side has its advantages and disadvantages. Well, it turns out that the world of Linux has finally agreed upon where AI code fits within kernel development. Turns out, it's totally fine if you submit AI-generated code to the kernel; however, if something goes wrong with it, it's on your head. No pointing the finger at Claude Code this time.

Did you know that some Apple Store employees are jokingly referring to the Mac Mini as the "OpenClaw machine"? While the computer made a decent splash when it was first released, people quickly learned that it was excellent at hosting their OpenClaw agents. It's mighty, it's cheap to run, and its small size means you can tuck it away and forget about it.

It was great to see Dino Crisis finally land on Steam earlier this year. Any effort to preserve the classics, clunky or not, should be applauded, as they show us just how far gaming has come since the early days. However, there was just one problem; while Dino Crisis 1 and 2 were being sold on Steam, they didn't want to play nicely on Linux or the Steam Deck.

Modern smart homes often have around 30, 50, or even 100+ Wi-Fi devices when you count all the bulbs, plugs, and cameras. Most consumer routers start to choke or drop connections once you hit that 30-device threshold because they're just not made to handle so many devices trying to communicate at once. This means that, as a result, your expensive Wi-Fi 7 phone is getting slow speeds because it's sharing a radio channel with 40 cheap smart plugs that phone home every five seconds.