It’s almost the new year and time to treat yourself to a new pair of earbuds — especially if one of your resolutions for 2026 is to work out more. If you find yourself reading this and nodding, take a look at the Beats Powerbeats Fit, a recent upgrade of Beats’ Fit Pro earbuds that feature a redesigned wing tip. They are now on sale at Amazon, Best Buy, and B&H for about $179.99, which is $20 off their usual $199.99 price and the lowest they’ve gone so far.According to the company, the new tips have more flexibility in order to improve comfort while keeping the earbuds more securely anchored in your ears. While these mid-level earbuds still use the H1 chips (the Powerbeats Pro 2 and the AirPods Pro 3 are equipped with Apple’s newer H2 wireless chip), they have most of the features you’d look for, whether you’re using them with an iPhone (hands-free Siri access, Find My tracking, and syncing across Apple devices through iCloud) or an Android phone (one-touch pairing and location tracking through the Beats mobile app, along with customizable controls).Beats Powerbeats FitA new version of the Fit Pro wireless earbuds, which are upgraded with a redesigned wing tip that Beats says is 20 percent more flexible, a smaller case, and other advantages.Where to Buy: $199.99 $179.99 at Amazon $199.99 $179.99 at Best Buy $199.95 $179.95 at B&HIn addition, they offer active noise cancellation, an IPX4 rating, and seven hours of playback (six hours with ANC turned on). Read our coverage.Other great dealsOur reviewer, Victoria Song, named the Pixel Watch 4 the Android watch to beat, and the 41mm model is currently discounted from $349.99 to $299.99 at Amazon, Best Buy, Target, and the Google Store, the lowest it’s been. The watch is definitely something to think about if you’re an Android user: it features stylish hardware and software designs, a bright display, and battery life that can go for at least a day and a half. And if you need to, you can replace the battery or screen yourself, which is something to consider if you like to keep your devices as long as possible. Read our review.On the other hand, if you’re in the Apple camp — and especially if you got a new iPad for the holidays — you can get yourself an Apple Pencil Pro for $94.97, down from $129.99, at Amazon. This is an improvement on the Pencil that comes with the iPad and offers pressure sensitivity, double-tap tool switching, gyroscope features, and a squeeze gesture for switching between software functions, just the thing for more sophisticated iPad use. Read our coverage.If you’re looking for a low-cost charger that will get your devices going again quickly, Woot is selling a value pack of the Otterbox 30W Premium Pro Fast Charge at $11.99 for two — a single one of these chargers has a suggested retail price of $34.95. Might as well get four, or even six — an extra charger is always useful.

Here’s how you can see more or less of certain content being pushed to you on Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, and more. Love them or hate them, more than half of the world's population interacts with algorithmic recommendations in some way every day. Algorithmic recommendations play an integral role in how users discover new content across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. It can be nice to be fed a stream of fresh posts, pictures, and videos that are already tailored to our interests instead of manually hunting for content to engage with, but algorithms don't always show you what you actually want to see.Many online platforms provide features that aim to help you fix this. The algorithms they deploy are, after all, designed to make y …Read the full story at The Verge.

Anybody who grew up in the 90s knows of the significant impact that The Simpsons had on pop culture. It's viewed as one of the greatest animated television shows of the decade, and has continued producing new episodes for television even now. Within the show's phenomenal run, multiple video games featuring many fan-favorite characters from the town of Springfield have been released on a variety of consoles. Whether in the arcades or on home game consoles, people just couldn't get enough of the goofy and clever comedy that The Simpsons had to offer its fans.

Look, most of us did it -- you were a kid, and it was time to set up an email address. Naturally, instead of something simple like your name, you instead decided your email should be [email protected] or maybe something worse like [email protected]. You've probably long moved on from that email, but at least some of your accounts are still tied to it, right? And every time you're forced to type it in to log into Steam, Xbox, or even your Apple ID, you probably wish you just used your first name, last name, and maybe a number.

It’s also the first Xiaomi phone to include Leica’s little red dot logo. Xiaomi used the Christmas period to launch its top flagship phone for the year, the 17 Ultra. It drops the extra rear display that's the key selling point of the 17 Pro, but instead adds in the option of a manual zoom ring, built directly into the phone's camera island.That rotating zoom is only included in the new Leica edition of the phone, which also packs touches like the Leica red dot logo and a textured finish on the phone's sides. The ring can be reprogrammed for exposure or focus if you prefer, and the Leica version has a few custom software touches too, like unique film simulation effects, and physical accessories like a lens cap …Read the full story at The Verge.

With all the drama surrounding Warner Bros. Discovery's plans to sell itself to another company, it's not currently clear how much longer HBO Max will continue to exist in its current form. But for the time being, the streamer is chock full of solid series you might want to consider watching if you find yourself bored, chilly, and firmly planted on your couch this holiday season. Whether it's superhero madness, dark satire, or steamy romance, HBO Max has a little bit of everything. And the streamer has a whole lot more coming down the pipeline, so now's the time to check out some of what it had to offer in 2025.Heated RivalryAt a time wh …Read the full story at The Verge.

Researchers have developed a system that brings multiple objects at different distances into sharp focus. | Image: The Verge via Yingsi Qin, Aswin C. Sankaranarayanan, Matthew O’Toole | Carnegie Mellon University A camera lens, historically, can only focus on one thing at a time, just like the human eye. That could be a thing of the past, though, thanks to a breakthrough lens technology developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) that can bring every part of a scene into sharp focus, capturing finer details across the entire image, no matter the distance.Traditional lenses are limited to sharpening one focal plane (the distance between an object and your camera) at a time, blurring everything behind or in front of that object. That effect can bring a sense of depth to images, but seeing a full picture clearly typically requires you …Read the full story at The Verge.

After announcing and teasing its design well over a year ago, Epilogue's new SN Operator will finally be available for preorder starting tomorrow. Like the company's GB Operator that debuted in early 2021, the SN Operator is a standalone USB cartridge slot that lets you play and archive old Nintendo console games on PCs, Macs, or handhelds like the Steam Deck using their original carts. But where the GB Operator was built for Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and GBA games, the SN Operator instead supports any Super Nintendo and Super Famicom game.Preorders for the SN Operator will open at 12PM ET on December 30th for $59.99. That's $10 more expen …Read the full story at The Verge.

Technology is meant to become obsolete sooner or later. It has been the same story for storage media as we see newer, faster, and more efficient technologies replace the ones that came before. That said, some storage types continue to cling on even after their replacements have been on the market for years. They remain relevant for specific use cases or niche projects, defying time as well as conventional wisdom. We might all love our NVMe SSDs, Blu-ray discs, and external hard drives, but it's still impossible to break all ties with the storage devices we grew up with. And no, it's not just nostalgia that's keeping them alive.

For a long time, running an AI model locally felt like a gimmick, rather than something actually useful. You could generate a paragraph of text, edit or generate an image if you were patient, all while putting up with subpar results compared to the cloud-based behemoths operated by the likes of OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. They did everything better, faster, and with fewer compromises, and if you wanted something that actually worked, you had to send your data off to someone else's servers... all while accepting the trade-offs.

GOG is splitting from CD Projekt, the game company that launched the preservation-focused PC gaming marketplace in 2008. In an update on Monday, GOG announced that its co-founder, Michał Kiciński, has acquired the digital storefront and its online gaming platform GOG Galaxy from CD Projekt - which he also co-founded - for $25.2 million.The acquisition isn't changing anything about GOG's mission to keep games DRM-free, according to the announcement that says it's "more central to GOG than ever:"GOG has always been built on strong values and clear principles. When Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kiciński first came up with the idea for GOG in 2 …Read the full story at The Verge.

In 2024, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips finally made Arm-based Windows laptops viable. Unlike previous Arm laptops that struggled to even run Windows well, this new class offered solid performance and the best battery life on Windows, and they impressed us in Microsoft's own Surface Laptop and Surface Pro offerings. But inconsistent app compatibility remained the biggest hurdle to running Windows on Arm. (It forced me to use the watered-down Adobe Lightroom app instead of Lightroom Classic, and that's a sin.) And playing games, one of Windows' greatest strengths against the walled garden of Apple's Macs, was basically a nonstarter.Throughou …Read the full story at The Verge.