Chromebooks on Arm processors are about to get a big boost as developers prepare new versions of ChromeOS with support for Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon chips, reports Chrome Unboxed.According to a new developer commit message posted in the Chromium project Gerrit code review, the SoCID for a Qualcomm X1P42100, aka the Snapdragon X Plus, is now being included in the Chromium repository, which likely means active development of Chromebooks with the chip is underway.The Snapdragon X Plus isn’t Qualcomm’s flagship “Elite” processor used in some of the top Windows 11 Arm laptops, but it is capable of the same 45 TOPS of AI performance from its NPU.Qualcomm’s previous Arm-powered Chromebooks haven’t exactly been powerhouses. The 2021 Acer Chromebook Spin 513 that we’ve tested has great battery life, but a very slow Snapdragon 7c chip powers it. And although the 7c Gen 2 version was faster in devices like the Lenovo Chromebook Duet 3, Qualcomm ended up not bringing the Gen 3 to Chromebooks. That left Chromebooks with chip options from MediaTek and Intel, the latter of which hasn’t been known for excellent battery life.

I started using Arc recently as my secondary browser, mostly for work. And I'll be honest, it felt like the perfect browser at first, so much so that every other browser started feeling like a downgrade. But it turns out I jumped to conclusions too soon. As I began using it regularly for work, I started noticing issues I never faced with my primary browser, Brave.

Last night, a new company called Slate Auto unveiled its first product, a spartan two-seat electric truck with a mere 150 miles of range and a world of possibility. There's no paint, no distracting infotainment screen, and no stereo or even radio. It doesn't tower over your average 12-year-old, and it may sell for under $20,000 (including incentives) when it arrives in 2026.If it arrives, of course. We don't need to get into the litany of obstacles that lie in the path of Slate's future success - including a global trade war and a presidential administration openly hostile to EVs - because instead I'm interested in talking about the truck as a possible antidote to our growing obsession with overpowered, oversized trucks and SUVs.You've probably noticed this problem if you have eyes and live in America in 2025. Our roads are packed with these roving land yachts. Sales of SUVs and pickup trucks reached new highs in 2024, accounting for 75 percent of total vehicle registrations. A decade ago, these two segments made up just half of the market. Today, they represent three out of every four new vehicles sold in America.A world of possibilityThese vehicles are bigger and heavier …Read the full story at The Verge.

OpenAI is introducing a new version of its ChatGPT deep research tool that it says is cheaper to operate. The “lightweight” model is available now to free users, as well as those on several of the company’s paid tiers.Deep research (lightweight) is powered by a version of OpenAI’s o4-mini model, and the company says it’s “nearly as intelligent” as the original deep research mode, which produces lengthy reports including citations and summaries of its process. OpenAI adds that the lightweight version delivers responses that are “shorter while maintaining the depth and quality you’ve come to expect.”While the standard deep research model remains exclusive to paid users, the lightweight version is rolling out to free users now, who can use it for five tasks per month. Paid users also get access, and it will kick in by default when they hit their rate limits on the original deep research, giving Team and Plus users a total of 25 monthly tasks across both versions, and Pro users 250. Enterprise and Education users will get access next week at the same limits as Team and Plus users. Importantly for OpenAI, it says the new version is “significantly cheaper” to run, which matters all the more in a world where it spends “tens of millions of dollars” just to process users saying please and thank you.

A successful video game is a difficult thing to measure when you're outside the video game industry looking in. The video game industry has always had a transparency problem, and the inner workings of the business of video games have only become more opaque as it's continued to grow. You can't go look up what it took to make a video game in the same way you can go look up what it took to make last year's blockbuster film.

On paper, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 doesn't seem to stand out amidst a recent wave of prestige RPGs, from the newly polished high fantasy of the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion remake to the medieval warfare of 15th century Bohemia in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. For one, its fantastical conquests are set in a world reminiscent of France's Belle Époque period, an era known for its economic prosperity and radical artistic movements, from Art Nouveau to Expressionism. Add a tinge of melodrama and an emotional backstory, and its setting resembles a medley of games that take place in vaguely European worlds like Greedfall, Bloodborne, and Dishonored. At the same time, Expedition 33 boasts a turn-based combat system inspired by Japanese RPGs like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.All this is to say that Expedition 33 risks appearing banal and cliche. Fending off impossible odds in a world, where everyone wants to swing their very imposing weapons at your head amidst medieval ruins, isn't all that unique these days. But Expedition 33 isn't cowered by the lineage of RPGs that came before. Instead, it displays a sense of quiet confidence, understanding that the keys of the genre - narrative …Read the full story at The Verge.

This shot was probably made by AI — the clipboards and Mason jar are good tells. | Image: MicrosoftMicrosoft has revealed that it’s created a minute-long advert for its Surface Pro and Surface Laptop hardware using generative AI. But there’s a twist: it released the ad almost three months ago, and no-one seemed to notice the AI elements.The ad, which went live on YouTube on January 30th, isn’t entirely made up of generated content. In a Microsoft Design blog post published Wednesday, senior design communications manager Jay Tan admits that “the occasional AI hallucination would rear its head,” meaning the creators had to correct some of the AI output and integrate it with real footage.“When deciding on which shots within the ad were to be AI generated, the team determined that any intricate movement such as closeups of hands typing on keyboards had to be shot live,” Tan says. “Shots that were quick cuts or with limited motion, however, were prime for co-creation with generative AI tools.”Microsoft hasn’t specified exactly which shots were generated using AI, though Tan did detail the process. AI tools were first used to generate “a compelling script, storyboards and a pitch deck.” Microsoft’s team then used a combination of written prompts and sample images to get a chatbot to generate text prompts that could be fed into image generators. Those images were iterated on further, edited to correct hallucinations and other errors, and then fed into video generators like Hailuo or Kling. Those are the only specific AI tools named by Tan, with the chatbots and image generators unspecified.“We probably went through thousands of different prompts, chiseling away at the output little by little until we got what we wanted. There’s never really a one-and-done prompt,” says creative director Cisco McCarthy. “It comes from being relentless.” That makes the process sound like more work than it might have been otherwise, but visual designer Brian Townsend estimates that the team “probably saved 90% of the time and cost it would typically take.”The process echoes recent comments from Microsoft’s design chief Jon Friedman to my colleague Tom Warren, that AI is going to become one more tool in creatives’ arsenals, rather than replacing them outright. As Friedman puts it, “suddenly the design job is how do you edit?”Despite the fact that the video has been online for almost three months, there’s little sign that anyone noticed the AI output until now. The ad has a little over 40,000 views on YouTube at the time of writing, and none of the top comments speculate that the video was produced using AI. Knowing that AI was involved, it’s easy enough to guess where — shots of meeting notes that clearly weren’t hand-written, a Mason jar that’s suspiciously large, the telling AI sheen to it all — but without knowing to look for it, it’s clear that plenty of viewers couldn’t spot the difference. The ad’s quick cuts help hide the AI output’s flaws, but suggest that in the right hands, AI tools are now powerful enough to go unnoticed.

There’s no shortage of task management apps out there, from the powerful features of Todoist to the simplicity of many niche tools. Yet, after years of juggling multiple solutions, I’ve found that Microsoft To Do stands head and shoulders above the rest. Here are some reasons I still think that Microsoft To Do is the ultimate to‑do list app for productivity, seamless workflow integration, and pretty nice to work with.

YKK’s self-propelled zipper prototype is chunky and currently being tested for more industrial applications. | Screenshot: YouTubeJapan’s YKK, the world’s largest zipper manufacturer (go ahead, grab the nearest zipper, it probably says YKK on the pull), has announced a prototype self-propelled zipper with a built-in motor and gear mechanism it can use to zip itself up at the push of a button on a wired remote.The days of being embarrassed when you forget to zip up could soon be behind us, if it’s ever miniaturized from its current form, which is several inches long and a lot chunkier than the zipper pulls currently used on clothing.Although some recent zipper innovations, such as Under Armour’s one-handed MagZip upgrade, are designed to improve accessibility and make zippers easier to use for those with limited mobility, YKK envisions more industrial use cases for its prototype.As demonstrated in a video recently shared on the company’s YouTube channel, the self-propelled zipper is seen connecting a pair of 16-foot-tall membranes in about 40 seconds. Zipping them together manually would require the use of a ladder or other machinery.In another video, the prototype is used to quickly connect a pair of 13-foot-wide temporary shelters standing over eight feet tall, taking about 50 seconds to progress from one side to the other.The prototype uses a spinning worm gear that winds its way through the teeth on either side and pulls the zipper along behind it. In the videos, a power cable is seen attached to the prototype as it self-zips. In addition to miniaturizing the tech and adding a battery, YKK would also need to develop some safety mechanisms before its self-propelled zipper could ever reach consumers’ clothing, ensuring there’s nothing that might get stuck.

The Slate Truck is an electric two-seater with 150 miles of range and no stereo. | Image: Slate AutoAsk just about anybody, and they'll tell you that new cars are too expensive. In the wake of tariffs shaking the auto industry and with the Trump administration pledging to kill the federal EV incentive, that situation isn't looking to get better soon, especially for anyone wanting something battery-powered. Changing that overly spendy status quo is going to take something radical, and it's hard to get more radical than what Slate Auto has planned.Meet the Slate Truck, a sub-$20,000 (after federal incentives) electric vehicle that enters production next year. It only seats two yet has a bed big enough to hold a sheet of plywood. It only does 150 miles on a charge, only comes in gray, and the only way to listen to music while driving is if you bring along your phone and a Bluetooth speaker. It is the bare minimum of what a modern car can be, and yet it's taken three years of development to get to this point.But this is more than bargain-basement motoring. Slate is presenting its truck as minimalist design with DIY purpose, an attempt to not just go cheap but to create a new category of vehicle with a huge focus on personalization. That design also enables a low-cost approach to …Read the full story at The Verge.

Back in August of last year, I reinstalled Windows on my PC on an SSD that I used just for gaming. While I largely stuck to that for quite a while, I've allowed some non-gaming software to reside on that SSD too. I ran Win11Debloat following the installation process, and three-quarters of a year later, I don't think I'd ever install Windows without it again.

Aravind Srinivas is battling Google to get his Perplexity AI assistant preinstalled on Android phones. At the same time, the CEO is refocusing his startup on what he predicts will be the next battleground in the AI race: your web browser.Perplexity plans to release its own browser called Comet next month, Srinivas tells me. "The reason we're doing the browser is that it might be the best way to build agents," he says. "A browser is essentially a containerized operating system. It can let you access other third-party services through hidden tabs if you're already logged into them, scrape the page on the client side, and perform reasoning and take actions on your behalf."Other AI firms are already going in this direction. OpenAI's Operator and Google's Mariner both rely on the browser to execute commands and control websites. OpenAI has yet to release its own browser but is rumored to be developing one. Google, meanwhile, may be compelled by the US government to sell Chrome following its ruling that the company has a monopoly in the search market. One of Srinivas's deputies testified that Perplexity would like to run Chrome if it were spun out from Google, while OpenAI has als …Read the full story at The Verge.