Four years is an eternity when it comes to PC hardware. And surely, a lot has changed since 2022. As of Q1 2026, AMD has surged to capture 25% of the total x86 market, now shipping a remarkable 33% of all desktop CPUs as it continues to eat into Intel's slice of the pie.

Highguard, a new multiplayer shooter from developers who worked on games like Apex Legends and Call of Duty, launched just over two weeks ago, but developer Wildlight Entertainment is already cutting jobs at the company, according to posts from affected staffers on LinkedIn. Former Wildlight level designer Alex Graner says that "most of the team at Wildlight" was laid off today, which was backed up by former lead tech artist Josh Sobel."Today we made an incredibly difficult decision to part ways with a number of our team members while keeping a core group of developers to continue innovating on and supporting the game," Wildlight says in a …Read the full story at The Verge.

Commercial smart alarm clocks run $50 to $150 for a device that does exactly what the manufacturer decided it should do. You can't expand it or change it, and what you bought is what you get. Mine, on the other hand, cost about $15, does exactly what I want, and ties into my Home Assistant setup.

I don’t enjoy typing out long voice recordings, whether it’s an interview clip, a meeting recap, or a rough idea I dictated while walking. Manually turning audio into text is slow, and absolutely no one should be doing it in the big year 2026. There are plenty of AI transcription tools that solve that problem, but they introduce another one. Your recordings get uploaded, processed, and stored on infrastructure that you do not control. As much as I dislike typing out voice notes, I would still rather not share them with just anyone. Instead of relying on those services, I run Whisper locally. It is an open-source speech recognition model released in 2022 under the MIT license, and it allows you to transcribe audio completely offline.

iPhone users have a new option for switching to Android on iOS 26.3. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge On Wednesday, Apple released its latest iOS 26 update, which includes a new process for switching from an iPhone to an Android phone, as previously reported by 9to5Mac. The updated transferring tool can move over data like apps, photos, messages, and even a user's phone number by sitting the two phones side by side. Previously, users typically needed to either download Apple and Google's data transfer apps on each device or manually copy all their apps and data over. iPhone users in the EU also now have an option for "notification forwarding" with third-party wearables in iOS 26.3. This update allows users to view the full contents of noti …Read the full story at The Verge.

NotebookLM is the closest thing to magic Google has released in the last three years. For the free tier, it is an absolute steal because you dump a 50-page PDF, a YouTube URL, and a messy Google Doc into a bucket, and it churns out a coherent Deep Dive audio overview that sounds more human than half the podcasts I listen to. It’s the best-focused generative AI tool on the market, hands down. It hallucinates less, grounds its answers in your personal data, and typically behaves like a competent research assistant.

Minneapolis was not the war zone I expected to find. Depending on who you are and where you live, things can seem, for a few fleeting moments, almost normal, like a few blocks or neighborhoods over people aren't being tear gassed or rounded up by ICE or, in two tragic cases, being gunned down by federal agents. Even now some people walk their dogs, run errands and buy groceries, meet friends for dinner and drinks. Daily life has become sinister in its banality, because Minneapolis remains a city under siege. ICE and CBP agents roam the streets, though their tactics have shifted as of late: No longer acting like an occupying army, the Departm …Read the full story at The Verge.

Linux distros come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, and there is no "strictly better" distro out there. It all comes down to what you want from your OS and how you want it to act. For instance, I adore how Fedora introduces updates at a rapid rate, but other people will want their OS to take things easy and not cram in new features until it has undergone rigorous testing.

It has been a rough few months for people interested in grabbing a Steam Deck. A few months ago, Valve announced that it was scrapping the Steam Deck LCD version, which meant that people who wanted to give portable PC gaming a try had to shell out a little more to do so. Some would even recommend a Switch 2 over a Steam Deck at this point.

Since the xAI-SpaceX merger announced last week, which combined the two companies (as well as social media platform X) for a reported $1.25 trillion valuation - the biggest merger of all time - a handful of xAI employees and two of its co-founders have abruptly exited the company, penning long departure announcements online. Some also announced that they were starting their own AI companies. Co-founder Yuhai (Tony) Wu announced his departure on X, writing that it was "time for [his] next chapter." Jimmy Ba, another co-founder, posted something similar later that day, saying it was "time to recalibrate [his] gradient on the big picture." Th …Read the full story at The Verge.

Anthropic is the latest AI company promising to limit the impact its data centers have on nearby residents' electricity bills. The company said it would pay higher monthly electricity charges in order to cover 100 percent of the upgrades needed to connect its data centers to power grids. "This includes the shares of these costs that would otherwise be passed onto consumers," the announcement says.Anthropic didn't provide details today about any agreements it has inked with energy companies in order to accomplish these goals. In November, it shared a $50 billion plan to build data centers in New York and Texas "with more sites to come." …Read the full story at The Verge.

All good things come to an end, and Microsoft products are no different. While the company will sometimes announce the retirement of an app mere months away from the cut-off date (like it did with Microsoft Lens), sometimes it give us a little more time to adjust and adapt. Such is the case with Microsoft Publisher, with the company announcing its retirement with over two years of support remaining for the app.