Synology has been the default recommendation in the NAS space for years, and for good reason. DSM is polished, the ecosystem is mature, and there's a massive community behind it. But if you've been paying attention to Synology's recent trajectory, you'll know that the company has been making some questionable decisions. Drive restrictions, underwhelming hardware, price hikes, and the removal of features like hardware HEVC transcoding have left a lot of long-time users feeling like they're paying more for less. And at the same time, competitors, like Ugreen, have been ramping up fast.

Powered by the new M5 chip, Apple’s latest MacBook Airs are more powerful than ever with double the base storage (512GB), but they also cost $100 more than their predecessor. Fortunately, though, we’ve found a few ways to save. Best Buy is offering the new 13-inch M5-powered MacBook Air for $1,099 with a $50 gift card and the 15-inch for $1,299 with the same perk ahead of their March 11th release date. That said, if you’d rather spend less and don’t mind buying last year’s model, Amazon’s also selling the 15-inch M4 MacBook Air with 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM for an all-time low of $1,099, matching the price of the new 13-inch Air.13-inch M5 MacBook Air (512GB, 16GB RAM) with $50 gift cardWhere to Buy: $1099 at Best Buy (13-inch)15-inch M5 MacBook Air (512GB, 16GB RAM) with $50 gift cardWhere to Buy: $1299 at Best BuyBefore Apple announced the new MacBook Air on Tuesday, the M4-powered MacBook Air was the model we recommended for most people. Even with the introduction of the cheaper MacBook Neo, the Air is still the better choice if you want more power. We haven’t tested the new M5 version yet, but the changes between the two Air models appear relatively minor on paper, so the overall experience is likely to feel very similar. No matter which MacBook Air you choose, you’ll get a thin, lightweight laptop that’s more than powerful enough to handle everyday work and play, and even some light gaming or video editing.  Both also offer excellent battery life that should easily last well over a full workday, along with a 12-megapixel Center Stage webcam.15-inch MacBook Air (M4)Where to Buy: $1399 $1099 at Amazon (16GB RAM, 512GB SSD)Aside from the newer chip, the biggest differences between the M4 and M5 models largely come down to connectivity. The newer models support faster wireless standards like Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. Both M4 and M5-powered 15-inch models also feature a larger display and a six-speaker sound system instead of the four-speaker setup on the 13-inch Air.Read our Apple MacBook Air M4 review.

In November, Epic and Google jointly proposed a settlement that would change Android's fate globally without cracking open Google's Android monopoly quite the way it otherwise might. Today, Google has decided it's not waiting for that settlement to be approved: it's moving forward with many of its proposed changes right now, rolling them out globally through 2027 - and we spoke to the heads of Android and Epic Games about the changes.By June 30th, Google writes, it will lower most app store fees in the US, UK, and European Economic Area to 20 percent or less, down from 30 percent. By the end of the year, it will launch a "Registered App St …Read the full story at The Verge.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Epic Games and Google are burying the hatchet, but documents released today reveal that they aren't only aligned on how Google is shaking things up for app stores. The two companies have also agreed to terms about a new class of apps that they're calling "metaverse browsers," according to a heavily redacted section of a revised binding term sheet.While the term "metaverse" has largely fallen out of favor - Mark Zuckerberg, for example, is now much more interested in AI - Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has been talking for years about the metaverse and how it might work in the future. (Depending on how you define the concept, Epic's Fortnite is alrea …Read the full story at The Verge.

I've always had a thing for portable game consoles.

When most people get a new GPU, they either sell the old one for cheap or leave it sitting on a shelf to collect dust. I get that, though. Once you have a much more powerful card, there's hardly any reason to think about the old one. I remember selling my used RTX 3090 for half the price I bought it at when I upgraded to my RTX 4090, and at the time, it felt like a great deal, especially considering I mined on it. The card had already served its purpose in my mind, so cashing out seemed like the obvious move.

Google is bringing Canvas to everyone in the US using AI Mode in Search. The feature opens up a dedicated workspace within its AI-powered search tool, allowing it to use the latest information from Search to organize plans, develop tools, and draft documents in a panel alongside your chat.Though Google initially launched Canvas inside its Gemini app as a way to create documents and code in real-time, it later tested the feature in AI Mode - but only for visualizing travel plans. Now, you can use Canvas in AI Mode for tasks related to creative writing and coding, too, giving you the ability to view an AI-generated dashboard laying out infor …Read the full story at The Verge.

Downdetector and Speedtest - the free platforms that allow people on the web to quickly check internet speeds or see if an online platform may be down - will soon have a new owner. On Tuesday, the consulting and IT services provider Accenture announced that it has agreed to acquire the Ookla-owned platforms from Ziff Davis for $1.2 billion, as reported earlier by Reuters.In the press release, Accenture CEO Julie Sweet says the company will use Ookla's products to capture data that will help "clients across business and government scale AI safely." Ziff Davis, which owns CNET, IGN, and Eurogamer, acquired Ookla in 2014. Ookla's other produc …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Last of Us Part I. | Image: Sony Interactive Entertainment The near future of game consoles could look a lot like the past. Once a hallmark of the industry, over the last few years console-exclusive games have steadily become rare, as the likes of Sony and Microsoft experimented with offering titles on multiple platforms. Heck, who knows what an Xbox even is anymore? But it seems that the experiments haven't paid off. Signs are pointing to the return of exclusives, as companies lean on other ways to entice new audiences.The most obvious indication of this shift comes from a Bloomberg report that Sony is pulling back from releasing its big PS5 games on PC, much in the way that it scaled back its li …Read the full story at The Verge.

Tesla, Ford, and Volvo occupy the top three spots in a new ranking of 18 global automakers based on their efforts to eliminate carbon emissions, environmental harms, and human rights violations from their supply chains. Toyota, meanwhile, lurks near the bottom of the list, underscoring the persistent difficulty in getting the world's largest car company to clean up its supply chain. The rankings were compiled by Lead the Charge, a global coalition of leading climate, environment, and human rights organizations that includes the Sierra Club, The Sunrise Project, and Public Citizen, among others. This is the fourth edition of the coalition's …Read the full story at The Verge.

Google's NotebookLM can now turn users' research and notes into fully animated "cinematic" videos, going a step further than the original video overview feature Google introduced last year. Previously, video overviews could only generate narrated slideshows, but the upgraded video overview feature uses a combination of Google's AI models, "including Gemini 3, Nano Banana Pro and Veo 3," to generate animated visuals based on the content of users' notes. Google says Gemini "determines the best narrative, visual style and format, and even refines its own work to ensure consistency" when generating the videos.This is the latest in a string o …Read the full story at The Verge.

NotebookLM sets itself apart from many other AI chatbots because of the ability to ground its responses in specific sources. While many other generative AI tools scrape data from across the web, NotebookLM specifically cites the files and websites you add to your notebooks.