Mini PCs are great: they are small, efficient, and often powerful. If you find yourself in the market for one, there's no need to overthink which one you should buy. But some features are worth paying more for than others.

Bitcoin culture, by nature, is anarchical and chaotic. It has to be, given the nature of Bitcoin itself and the people who adopted it: free-market libertarians who've gone all in on turning computer code into a form of money divorced from central banks, government intervention, and traceability. In short, it's the exact opposite culture of Washington, DC, home of the federal government, where everyone agrees that the American dollar exists and is worth X amount because the government says so.So it was a bizarre shock to K Street, the corporate lobbying heart of the nation's capital, when it was announced that Pubkey, a Bitcoin-themed dive …Read the full story at The Verge.

Although Netflix Originals are shows the streamer produces itself or has exclusive licensing arrangements for, they aren't always available on the platform indefinitely. What's on Netflix has compiled a comprehensive list of 100 Netflix Originals movies and series set to be removed from the platform throughout 2026.The list includes several animated series like seasons one through three of The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants, leaving on January 9th, seasons one through five of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power that will be removed on February 21st, and several of Dreamworks' shows based on its How to Train Your Dragon franchise that will …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you're looking for a last-minute gift for that special Switch 2 owner in your life, Nintendo's eShop holiday sale has arrived just in time, with steep discounts on several first-party Nintendo games. As usual, the sale is pretty good, but one particular deal immediately caught my attention.

Most of us had very high expectations when Nvidia first announced DLSS frame generation alongside its RTX 4000-series GPUs. Off the bat, doubling the frame rate without needing more raw power sounded too good to be true. But all those expectations came crumbling as soon as reviewers started digging past the FPS numbers and testing how the feature felt in real gameplay. Nvidia made its benchmarks look impressive, but they didn't tell the full story about the impact the feature had on latency and responsiveness.

Ahead of CES 2026 getting underway in early January, Birdfy has announced two new camera-equipped smart bird feeders that can identify and capture visitors in slow motion. The Birdfy Hum Bloom is specifically designed to attract and record hummingbirds using a nectar bulb that mimics flowers they're naturally attracted to, while the Feeder Vista introduces a 360-degree camera and a bottom-up feeding system that doesn't obstruct views. Both feeders are expected to be available in Q2 of 2026 but pricing hasn't been announced.The Birdfy Hum Bloom is built around an 8MP camera that can capture 4K video of hummingbirds at 20fps. Capturing 120fp …Read the full story at The Verge.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang famously remarked, "The more you buy, the more you save," but as PC users, spending the most can often cause the most headaches. It might sound counterintuitive, since performance and features typically scale with price, even if the relationship doesn't stay linear. However, buying the most expensive PC upgrades can actually be worse, especially if your rig isn't prepared for them. Flagship CPUs, OLED monitors, and the fastest RAM can offer the best performance on the market, but only under ideal conditions. In some scenarios, these components can be more trouble than they're worth.

Spotify says it has launched new protections against "anti-copyright attacks" after the open-source library / pirate activist group Anna's Archive announced it's ripped 86 million songs from the platform that it plans to make available in torrents, as reported earlier by Billboard. According to the group, "We have archived around 86 million songs from Spotify, ordering by popularity descending. While this only represents 37 percent of songs, it represents around 99.6 percent of listens." The first torrent released says it contains metadata, such as album art, song title, and artist name, belonging to 99.9 percent of Spotify's 256 million t …Read the full story at The Verge.

The AI data center build-out, as it currently stands, is dependent on two things: Nvidia chips and borrowed money. Perhaps it was inevitable that people would begin using Nvidia chips to borrow money. As the craze has gone on, I have begun to worry about the weaknesses of the AI data center boom; looking deeper into the financial part of this world, I have not been reassured.Nvidia has plowed plenty of money into the AI space, with more than 70 investments in AI companies just this year, according to PitchBook data. Among the billions it's splashed out, there's one important category: neoclouds, as exemplified by CoreWeave, the publicly tr …Read the full story at The Verge.

Christmas Eve is in two days, and if you’ve got a problem with procrastination, it’s time to, well, stop procrastinating. There are still some really good deals to be gotten out there, some of which may arrive just in the nick. (Worse comes to worse, you can say it’s a New Year’s gift, right?) One of these is the Beats Studio Pro headphones, which are currently $200 off ($149.99 down from $349.99) at Best Buy through the end of today, December 22nd.Beats Studio ProWhere to Buy: $199.95 $179.95 at Amazon $349.99 $179.95 at Walmart $349.99 $149.99 at Best BuyThe noise-cancelling Studio Pro came out over two years ago, but they come with a bunch of great features, such as transparency mode and lossless USB-C audio. While our reviewer lamented the rather familiar design, he pointed out the advantages of headphones that natively support both iOS and Android ecosystem features and admired the clarity of their tone across the volume range. The headphones also support lossless and high-res audio playback up to 24bit / 48kHz when connected to a source device over USB-C. In short, these two-year-old headphones can be a great gift, especially at an over-50-percent-off deal.Read our full Beats Studio Pro review.More great dealsIf you’re a Pixel enthusiast, Amazon is offering a great discount on the Pixel 10 line of Google Android smartphones. Google’s flagship Pixel 10 Pro with 128GB is not only knocked down to $749 from $999 at Amazon — a discount of 25 percent — but you can get an additional $100 off with promo code PIXEL10, bringing it down to $649, the lowest price we’ve seen. The Pixel 10 Pro XL with 256GB, meanwhile, is discounted from $1,199 to $899, and you can save the same additional $100 with the same promo code. And if you are looking for a slightly simpler phone, the standard Pixel 10 with 128GB is available in lemongrass (in other words, yellow) for $549, down from $799; if you add the $100 off with PIXEL10, you can get your phone for $449, a great deal. Read our Pixel 10 Pro / XL and Pixel 10 reviews.On the other hand, if you’re part of the Apple ecosystem and are looking for a MagSafe Charger, it’s available at Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy for its second-best price ever: $30, down from $39. The charger is certified for Qi2.2 and Qi charging and would make a great last-minute stocking stuffer. A good e-reader is a great gift: it lets you enjoy your books without the constant distractions that reading on a phone can cause. Our best Kindle choice is the latest Kindle Paperwhite, which is on sale for $134.99, down from $159.99, a savings of $25. Amazon’s 12th-gen ebook reader has a great screen, warm front lighting, and IPX8 water resistance, and is available at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target. Read our review.

Instacart is ending its AI-powered pricing tests, which led some users to see higher prices on certain products than others. "Now, if two families are shopping for the same items, at the same time, from the same store location on Instacart, they see the same prices - period," Instacart writes in a blog post on Monday.The change comes just weeks after a study from Groundwork Collaborative, Consumer Reports, and More Perfect Union found that Instacart offered multiple price points for the same grocery items at the same store. The report drew attention from lawmakers, including Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who said in a letter to the Federal Tr …Read the full story at The Verge.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 had earned another Game of the Year award by the Indie Game Awards last week, but the organization has since announced that the award would be retracted because developer Sandfall Interactive used generative AI during development. The Indie Game Awards also rescinded the Debut Game award given to Expedition 33.Here is the Indie Game Awards' explanation, from an FAQ:The Indie Game Awards have a hard stance on the use of gen AI throughout the nomination process and during the ceremony itself. When it was submitted for consideration, a representative of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the …Read the full story at The Verge.