At the end of the day, I typically find myself gaming on a console, in large part because of the location. It's far more comfortable to settle in for a night of gaming on the couch than sit at my desk for another few hours after a day of work. Even though I've been working from a laptop and moving around my apartment, the ability to lounge while watching cutscenes or waiting for dungeon queues is hard to match.

President Donald Trump is launching a new government-run website that he says will let Americans buy medications at lower prices. The new website, called TrumpRx, is expected to launch in 2026 and will direct consumers to discounts on drugmakers’ online stores, including Pfizer’s, as reported earlier by The New York Times and NPR.The Tuesday announcement comes as part of a deal that grants Pfizer a three-year reprieve from tariffs in exchange for investing in US-based manufacturing, according to the company’s press release. Pfizer also agreed to lower prices on the “majority” of the primary care drugs sold through state Medicaid programs, which it says could result in an average savings of 50 percent.Details about the TrumpRx.gov site are still slim, but senior officials told NPR that it would lead users to pharmaceutical companies’ websites to place orders, and that only patients not using health insurance would be able to take advantage of the discounts. The New York Times reports that officials also said Trump has reached similar agreements with other drugmakers, without specifying which ones.

Instagram is testing a potentially major change to the app: making Reels the home tab of the app. As part of an opt-in test in India, Meta is making Reels and DMs the first two tabs on the app, according to Instagram head Adam Mosseri. Mosseri says that Reels and DMs have been a key driver of growth for Instagram over the past few years, which is why it’s “exploring” the change.In a video in his post, you can see how the new home tab would work. Part of the tab will look familiar, like the horizontal list of Stories to check out at the top, but when you start to scroll up, the layout shifts into what you might recognize from the current Reels tab, where pretty much the entire screen is filled with video. Photos from accounts you follow will still be included in this revised version of the home tab, Mosseri says, but the video doesn’t show how.Instagram has already been dabbling with this shift with its recently-launched iPad app, which opens into Reels from its home tab. In its post announcing the app, Meta said that it designed the experience that way “to reflect how people use bigger screens today – for lean back entertainment.” But this new test indicates that Instagram is thinking about making Reels an even more prominent part of its main mobile app, too.

Self-hosted applications may sound like a hassle to set up, but they’ve got plenty of benefits over their cloud-based counterparts. Since the services as well as their data remain on a local server, you don’t have to worry about third-parties getting their grubby hands on your private information. Likewise, deploying your own app instances can save you quite a bit of money in the long run, as you don’t have to pay frequent subscription fees to unlock paywalled features.

New analysis of basketball players and games is coming to NBA fans live and online this 2025–2026 season thanks to Amazon Web Services’ AI and some seriously detailed movement tracking. The new stats come as part of the rollout of a new basketball intelligence platform called “NBA Inside the Game.” Fans will get more granular player metrics, like tracking individual defenders during an offensive play or quantifying how hard each shot was for a player to take. The new tech will track 29 body parts of each player as they move across the court — although which specific body parts and exactly how they will be tracked, AWS did not say. The movements will feed into the AI system to deliver stats that “capture previously unmeasured aspects of basketball,” the company says. Ballers can now be analyzed not just by whether or not they made the shot but by the difficulty of their attempted shots. Another stat, called the Expected Field Goal Percentage, can predict the odds of their making that shot by factoring in metrics like the orientation and pose of the shooter and the positions of the defenders, among other details.  Another new stat called Gravity is meant to quantify the “advantage” individual players bring on the court. In practice, this means tracking the movement of players and their defenders with and without the ball to analyze how closely they are being guarded and how their movements make advantageous space on the court for teammates. Another new insight promised by AWS is a set of stats focused entirely on the defenders, called the Defensive Score Box, which will break down typical stats such as rebounds or blocks by the defensive players for that play.And if detailed game statistics aren’t enough, diehard fans can search NBA footage at the level of individual plays with a new tool called Play Finder housed alongside the new statistics on NBA Inside the Game.Fans will see the new stats on live NBA game broadcasts as well as the NBA app and website. Live analytics are not new to the NBA or other major leagues in sports. The NFL and MLB both use Sony’s Hawk-Eye cameras to track plays, pucks, and baseballs during games. Wimbledon’s decision to use the Hawk-Eye line-calling system to make calls on tennis balls shocked staid tennis fans. It’s not the first NBA and Amazon partnership. In 2024, the two struck an 11-year media rights deal to stream 66 regular-season NBA games per year on Prime Video. The first game comes to Prime on October 24th. The new deal also made AWS the official cloud and cloud AI partner for the NBA and its affiliate leagues, including the WNBA. 

Today, the Lego Game Boy officially goes on sale. It’s surprisingly good. But in Australia, one woman has already created a more amazing version. Natalie the Nerd, the self-taught circuit board designer and Game Boy modder whose gorgeous transparent Game Boy we featured in August, is doing what Nintendo and Lego didn’t: make it playable. Let me be clear: this is not an emulator. Natalie did not stuff a Raspberry Pi in here. It’s far more impressive than that. What you’re seeing are real Game Boy cartridges, running on real Game Boy chips, soldered to a real circuit board of Natalie’s own creation. Working buttons, too.To fit it into the Lego Game Boy, she had to create a complete Game Boy board smaller than a Game Boy cartridge itself — so she did. Adding “the smallest screen kit on the market” did require removing a few bricks, though, she tells The Verge.It’s not complete — not just yet. The working buttons, for instance, aren’t yet mounted on a PCB; she tells The Verge they’ll fit on a custom 3D-printed Lego piece. She’s already wired up USB-C for power:And here’s a look at the insides and where they live:Now, to answer your obvious question: is this a one-off, or something you might be able to do yourself? The chances are good that you might if you’re skilled! Natalie sells aftermarket components for Game Boy modding, shares circuit board designs, and is planning to share this too. “I am going to release it once I am happy with it,” she writes on X.

Smart home gadgets have become a lot more affordable these days – to the point where you can nab dozens of cool gizmos and IoT products without spending more than $100. Heck, I often end up splurging on cheap smart devices to increase the comfort and convenience of my living space, though this setup introduces a couple of headaches. Since I tend to nab smart home products from different manufacturers, I’d have to use multiple applications to manage them all. Many of these first-party apps are rather restricted in their automation provisions.

Apple is speeding up work on smart glasses that would compete with similar offerings from Meta and halting plans for a lighter Vision Pro headset, Bloomberg reports. The company is apparently working on at least two different versions: a pair without a display that it could reveal next year and launch in 2027, and a pair with a display originally planned for 2028 that the company wants to “accelerate development” on.Like Meta’s smart glasses made in partnership with Ray-Ban and Oakley, Apple’s glasses will have speakers, cameras, come in multiple styles, and “will rely heavily on voice interaction and artificial intelligence,” according to Bloomberg. The version of the glasses with a display “could challenge” the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, which have a display in the right lens. Apple is also working on a chip specifically designed for its smart glasses, Bloomberg has previously reported.With its glasses, Apple will be late to the game. Meta just announced a bunch of new glasses of its own, including a second-generation version of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses with much better battery life that are available now, a new pair of Oakley-branded glasses designed for athletes launching this month, and the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, which my colleague Victoria Song called the best smart glasses she’s ever tried. As for the lighter Vision Pro headset, Apple had been rumored to launch the product in 2027, but the company told staff that it was pulling people from that headset to help with the glasses. Apple has reportedly scaled back production of the original Vision Pro, but regulatory filings spotted this week revealed that a new version is in the works, which Bloomberg called a “modest refresh” that could launch “as early as the end of this year.”

Laptops can be pretty powerful, featuring impressive hardware that can handle pretty much anything you throw at it. Of course, you don't always need to grab the latest and greatest to have a good experience, and that even applies to those looking for a solid gaming laptop.

The Trump administration has put up banners across federal websites blaming Democrats for the government shutdown, and in some cases, blatantly campaigning for President Donald Trump. One banner on the US Department of Agriculture’s site says, “The Radical Left Democrats shut down the government,” adding that “President Trump has made it clear he wants to keep the government open and support those who feed, fuel, and clothe the American people.”Other websites display similar messages, with a banner on the Department of the Treasury stating that Democrats have shut down the government “in the name of reckless spending and obstructionism.” The White House website similarly blames Democrats and includes a timer showing how long the shutdown has lasted so far.On Wednesday morning, the federal government shut down after Congress couldn’t reach an agreement on a funding bill, as Democrats continue facing Republican pushback on their fight to extend subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. Republicans have largely blamed the freeze on Democrats, with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) writing on X that the Democrats “voted” to close the government.Not all federal agencies display these kinds of messages, as websites for the Department of State, the Department of Education, and the Federal Communications Commission have a banner that simply states that the sites will not be updated due to the government shutdown.

It's no secret that handheld gaming PCs have turned into a vast market, and it's one that I particularly enjoy. I've got multiple handhelds, and I use them all differently according to their strengths. But the big bugbear for most of them is the subpar Windows 11 experience, which Microsoft has been trying to rectify. The upcoming Asus ROG Xbox Ally and Asus ROG Xbox Ally X have an improved Xbox app, which turns into an all-screen dashboard.

Today, Microsoft announced a new tier of its productivity subscription called Microsoft 365 Premium. And, with absolutely no surprise given the year we're in, the subscription is centered around AI. Microsoft 365 Premium replaces a plan the company previously offered, Copilot Pro, and the majority of features it offers are based on Copilot integration.