For a very long while, buying a new GPU always meant that you'd get what was printed on the box. Nothing more, nothing less. Whatever performance, features, and capabilities the silicon shipped with were what you'd be living with until, of course, you upgraded to a new graphics card. Driver updates were mostly there for fixing bugs and perhaps squeezing out a bit of performance here and there.

It's another bad week for the video game industry. Microsoft outlined a series of layoffs on Monday that Xbox CEO Asha Sharma described as "the most significant restructure in Xbox history." But buried in Sharma's memo was a curiously optimistic statement: "I want Xbox to be one of the few companies that entertains more than a billion people each day and gives everyone the opportunity to create and connect," she wrote. Xbox has been a shambling mess after Microsoft spent billions of dollars with little to show for it, and now it aims to reach a much bigger audience with a much smaller team, amid one of the most challenging times in the ind …Read the full story at The Verge.

The reason why it took users so long to see AI's actual value in productivity beyond drafting emails to your boss and generating slide decks for you is because tools didn't initially plug into the tools you use everyday. I've been big on pairing AI tools with other software I use daily, and you'll find my author profile flooded with them. For instance, NotebookLM's my favorite AI tool, and I've paired it with practically every tool there. From note-taking apps like Notion, Evernote, and Apple Notes to creative software like Adobe and Canva to Excel to other AI tools like Gemini and Copilot, I've done it all.

Running AI models locally has become much easier over the past year. Whether it's for better privacy, faster responses, offline access, or avoiding recurring API costs, more people are setting up self-hosted LLMs for everyday productivity. Ollama has played a huge role in making that possible, and it's often the first tool people install. But once you spend more time with local AI, you realize there are plenty of other options that solve different problems just as well, or sometimes even better. If you're ready to go beyond your first local LLM setup, these are the Ollama alternatives that I think are genuinely worth trying.

The right-to-repair movement isn't new, but if you think of a consumer-focused brand selling modular or repairable (or both) devices, that trend is pretty new. Framework's modular laptops lead the PC industry when it comes to championing people's right to repair. From the original Framework Laptop 13 in 2021 to the recently announced Laptop 13 Pro, the company has come a long way in a short while. Providing consumers with configurable 12-inch, 13-inch, and 16-inch models, Framework has kept modularity, repairability, and sustainability at the core of its products. Today, you can buy a Framework laptop with a Core Ultra Series 3 or Ryzen AI 300 chip with up to 64GB of RAM and 8TB of storage, and even a model with RTX 5070 graphics.

Nothing is adding a new pink color option to its upgraded Ear 3A earbuds. | Image: Nothing Nothing announced a new pair of budget-friendly wireless earbuds, but not as part of the company's affordability-focused sub-brand, CMF. The new Nothing Ear 3A are available starting today through the company's online store for $99, which is the same price as Nothing's original Ear (a). That's good news in a time when price increases are becoming the norm, and somewhat surprising given the new 3A are introducing the ability to record what you're listening to directly on the earbuds.It's a feature that's somewhat reminiscent of Nothing's Ear 3 introduced last September. Those come with a wireless charging case equipped with upgraded microph …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Fable 5 situation has been a mess since it dropped. Anthropic released it in early June, the US government pulled it days later over export control, it stayed dark for weeks, and then came back on July 1 with a July 7 deadline attached before it moves to API-only for consumer plans. So there's been less than a week to actually use it, and I only really got going a few days ago.

In the summer of 2024, former Army National Guard member Andrew Scott Hastings spent a sweaty afternoon carefully packing boxes with parts he made using his 3D printer. These weren't novelty figurines or replacement Ikea pieces. The boxes were instead filled with a handful of homemade firearm lower receivers and more than 100 "switches," small devices capable of converting a semiautomatic gun into a fully automatic weapon. Their intended recipients, federal prosecutors allege, were al-Qaida operatives.Months later ATF agents busted two men in Colorado Springs for allegedly using 3D printers to churn out hundreds of illegal machine gun conv …Read the full story at The Verge.

There's a good chance that the future of cybersecurity doesn't feature passwords at all. They're pretty weak, all things considered; hackers can guess them, phish them, or grab them via database leaks. Biometrics are a lot harder to crack open, so we're seeing companies like Microsoft pivot away from a password-first mantra to using scans.

There aren't a lot of AI tools I speak highly of so often, and NotebookLM is one of the few exceptions. From day one, Google's NotebookLM has impressed me with the concept it's been built around: grounding everything in your own sources instead of pulling answers out of thin air. Unlike a lot of other tools that end at impressing me once and losing their entire charm, the team has kept finding new ways to earn praise. Video Overviews, Slide Decks, Mind Maps, Infographics, and the list goes on and on.

Nothing is shaking up the branding of its cheapest phones, following up last year's Phone 3A Lite with a new Phone 4B. Combining design elements of the 4A and 4A Pro, it follows Nothing's previous cheaper handsets in skipping the US market.The company already uses the "A" branding to market its cheaper tier of products, and the first "B" phone sits another level below that. The 4B seemingly replaces the naming convention used for last year's Phone 3A Lite.Design-wise, it borrows a little from the two 4A phones, which launched in March this year. The unibody look is similar to the 4A Pro, though now in plastic rather than metal, but it pa …Read the full story at The Verge.

Whenever Windows suffers a big enough problem that it can't even boot, there are tools available to you to get yourself back on track. However, most of them will require some sort of installation media, and when you do get back in, you may notice some drivers are missing. Fortunately, it appears that Microsoft is making the PC recovery process a lot easier with a new "Cloud Rebuild" tool that's currently undergoing public testing.