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.

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.

A lot of people seem to spend more time trying to craft the perfect prompt for an AI tool than actually using it. I used to do the same with every new chatbot I tried. The thing is, these models are designed to pick up intent and build on it, so most of the time you don’t need complex prompt engineering to get useful ideas, feedback, or content for everyday use cases.

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.

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.

The last few years of Xbox have been expensive. Under Phil Spencer's leadership, Microsoft has spent billions of dollars in an attempt to build an ambitious future for gaming that looks a lot like Netflix. And while its subscription service Game Pass started out as a good deal for gamers (although now not so much), that spending spree has led to catastrophic layoffs, studio closures, and confused and inconsistent messaging about what Xbox actually stands for. And with Spencer set to retire as new leadership takes charge, the future of Microsoft's gaming efforts looks increasingly unclear.Spencer announced his retirement last week, after ov …Read the full story at The Verge.

Popular Linux retro-gaming bundle RetroDECK has confirmed it will remove Switch support from its Flatpak collection, citing potential legal concerns arising from Nintendo's DMCA notices (via VideoCardz).

Anthropic claims DeepSeek and two other Chinese AI companies misused its Claude AI model in an attempt to improve their own products. In an announcement on Monday, Anthropic says the "industrial-scale campaigns" involved the creation of around 24,000 fraudulent accounts and more than 16 million exchanges with Claude, as reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.The three companies - DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Moonshot - are accused of "distilling" Claude, or training a smaller AI model based on a more advanced one. Though Anthropic says that distillation is a "legitimate training method," it adds that it can "also be used for illicit purpose …Read the full story at The Verge.

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.

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.

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.

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.