Four years ago, overlooking a canal in Amsterdam, the smart home industry collectively launched Matter, the one interoperability standard to rule them all. Heralded as the solution to the industry's struggles, Matter was built on open standards and existing technologies and is the result of years of collaboration between traditional rivals, including Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung.Matter promised an end to walled gardens and ecosystem lock-in. It promised to make a smart home device, like a lock, lightbulb, or sensor, easy to buy and set up. It promised you could choose any brand, use any platform, no expertise required - it would just …Read the full story at The Verge.

Before "just ChatGPT it" was a thing, my first stop for answers wasn't Google. It was YouTube. Watching someone demonstrate how to do something just clicked in a way that a wall of text never did. That probably sounds ironic coming from a writer whose job is writing the kind of stuff people are supposed to read instead of skipping to a video, but I know I speak for the majority when I admit a quick video almost always wins.

If you haven't heard the news, Fox just bought Roku for a whopping $22 billion. The acquisition isn't finalized; in fact, it isn't expected to officially close until sometime in the first half of 2027. Still, the news was enough to push me towards finally putting the finishing touches on my Jellyfin server that I'd been putting off.

I've lost count of the number of note-taking apps that I've used. From dabbling in SimpleNote to using Notion as a database for my notes, and, of course, the basics like Google Keep. Some have been great for collecting ideas, and others had an excellent interface. Elsewhere, a few promised to organize everything for me, but you know how that story goes.

Margaret Atwood onstage at Detroit Opera House on January 26, 2026 | Photo: Monica Morgan/Getty Images Maraget Atwood, the storied author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Blind Assassin, was interviewed as part of the Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal. As it usually does at these things, the issue of AI came up, and Atwood didn't mince words. According to Deadline's recap, Atwood said she'd used an AI chatbot exactly once, Anthropic's Claude, and came away unimpressed. She was looking for information about the British detective series Father Brown and, well:"Claude gave me the wrong answer, or it lied. Of course, it didn't know it was lying because it's not a human being; it's a large language model… It had skimmed a …Read the full story at The Verge.

Tim Cook recently said price increases were "unavoidable" and described the company's pricing as "unsustainable." The 16-inch MacBook Pro saw its price go up by $300. The 11-inch iPad Air went from $599 to $749. Even the HomePod Mini got a $30 bump to $129. Cook squarely placed the blame at the feet of the AI industry, which is not surprising. RAMageddon has already come for your desktop PCs and gaming consoles. The Xbox has seen its price climb nearly 25 percent depending on the model, and Nothing even canceled an entire phone launch. Apple is just the most recent to jack up prices and point the finger at AI.The price hikes are "basic eco …Read the full story at The Verge.

That is an objectively dope couch. | Image: Kai Wright Kai Wright is the co-host of Stateside with Kai and Carter over at the Guardian. But Wright has been bringing his unique insights to listeners for years. He's also hosted Notes From America, The United States of Anxiety, and Indivisible. He's a Peabody Award-winning journalist who has profiled powerful men, explored what it means to be American, and chronicled the AIDS epidemic.When he's not diving deep on sex, race, and politics, he's gardening, listening to John Coltrane, and steadfastly refusing to buy a new phone. Wright was kind enough to give us a glimpse into his daily routine, how he unwinds, and offer some simple but powerful advi …Read the full story at The Verge.

What's the Password? has a simple concept: To solve each of the game's more than 100 puzzles, you have to type in the right four-digit password on a number pad. That might sound like a limited constraint. But the simplicity gives solo developer Dan DiIorio, better known as TrampolineTales, lots of room to play with clever ideas. Over the course of a few hours, the game never stopped surprising me.Puzzle clues come in several different formats. Some are written text; the very first puzzle is a sentence that tells you what numbers to punch in. But you'll also have to decipher four-digit codes from things like the blinking digits of a clock, …Read the full story at The Verge.

Apple is looking to alleviate some of the pressure on its supply chain by seeking an exception from the Trump administration to buy RAM chips from CXMT, a company blacklisted by the Pentagon over ties to the People's Liberation Army, according to the Financial Times. The skyrocketing prices of RAM and storage have driven Apple to raise prices on almost all of its products this week, so it makes sense that it would seek alternative sources. Legally, Apple isn't barred from buying chips from CXMT, but doing business with a company tied to the Chinese military would carry serious reputational risks. It's possible that CXMT could still find it …Read the full story at The Verge.

Cursor has been one of my favorite AI coding tools for a while, but its recent deal with SpaceX instantly made me look at the market differently. It made me curious about its strongest alternatives and whether any of them already feel more useful, polished, and practical for my daily workflow. So I tried the top Cursor rivals to see which one actually deserves a spot in my coding setup. After spending time with all of them, one option clearly stood out.

The current state of hardware is so great that we've actually hit a ceiling. We have flagship graphics cards that are exponentially faster than the hardware of a decade ago. Yet when a brand-new AAA game releases and you launch it at ultra settings, it struggles to maintain a consistent 60fps at native 1440p or 4K.

Nostalgia remains a powerful force. So much so that, in exploring the echoes of a late-'90s childhood spent skimming the water of Corneria and sneering "cocky little freaks!" in time with a monkey encased in a Gundam suit, I'm simultaneously describing playing Star Fox 64 (Lylat Wars if you're nasty) in 1997 and streaming it through Nintendo Switch Online today.The franchise has been revived through a splashy remake on the Switch 2, but it's also a series that has not seen an all-new entry since Star Fox Zero on the Wii U. Yet Nintendo's neglect of the series has been gently offset by indie creators. Ex-Zodiac and Whisker Squadron: Survivo …Read the full story at The Verge.