Easy on the eyes. The iPhone Duo has all the messiness of a first-gen product. And while I'm not sure I love all of the decisions Apple made around its design, it got one thing right: the matte finish on the inner screen. I've been using it for the past week to watch movies on a plane, peruse my photo gallery, and catch up on a little reading, and I'm convinced. The matte screen is the best thing about the Duo, and I hope every other foldable maker copies it.When we first got our hands on the Duo, the nano-texture finish on the 7.6-inch inner screen was genuinely a surprise. I've used a dozen or so book-style foldables over the past five years, and every on …Read the full story at The Verge.

Third-party apps provide solutions and add features that are natively missing from the phone's UI. Tasker is one such popular automation tool that lets you build a small series of tasks that execute when a condition is met. It's a powerful, still usable app that doesn't even offer a free trial now. However, if you use a Samsung phone, you won't need a third-party app to create automations.

With the rise of both Flock cameras and glasses that can record people, it has been a nightmare for the privacy-minded to get around in confidence. Fortunately, there are projects out there that can help you scan and identify when something might be monitoring you, and SquachWatch is definitely one of the cuter ones out there.

The iPhone Duo is the riskiest Apple product in years. It's a huge rethink of what an iPhone is and could be, and it contains the seeds of many fascinating ideas that might be great in the future.But that future is yet to come. The iPhone Duo is also one of Apple's messiest first-generation products in a long time, and right now it will delight gadget nerds and early adopters and likely frustrate everyone else.It's been a minute since the iPhone has looked or worked significantly differently. The last major change was the iPhone X, which dropped the home button almost a decade ago, and even that was a fairly subtle improvement. In fact, …Read the full story at The Verge.

Spotify announced Wednesday the launch of its next-generation, fully native in-car app, built directly on Google's Android Automotive operating system. The standalone app, which is launching today in select Audi models, runs directly on the vehicle's infotainment hardware - eliminating the need for phone tethering, Bluetooth connections, or aux cables.It's the clearest sign yet that Spotify is ready to move beyond Apple CarPlay and Android, popular phone projection systems that currently dominate the way most people consume media in their cars. And with 34 percent of Spotify's monthly active users and 77 percent of Premium subscribers stre …Read the full story at The Verge.

A few years ago, Microsoft seemed to truly believe LLMs were the future of Windows 11. We don't have access to Microsoft's communications, so it's hard to say exactly when the gears shifted; however, I believe the turning point was when Microsoft went public with its ideas for making Windows 11 agentic, and it was confused by the outrage it met.

YouTube appears to be testing hiding the dislike button on videos, as reported by 9to5Google. At least two users on X have recently shared screenshots of the dislike button now being placed in the three-dots submenu, and a user on Reddit also shared an image of the dislike button being absent for them.Right now, for me, the dislike button sits right next to the like button under a video. Moving it to a submenu would make it considerably more of an effort to access, meaning that fewer people would likely use it.YouTube keeps on getting worse…First the dislike counter got removed,then the button got removed on YouTube Shorts,now the disli …Read the full story at The Verge.

I have years of Counter-Strike demos, video clips, game backups, save files, and other data that I open maybe twice a year. Until recently, they sat on the same fast storage as everything I use every day, which felt like a waste. Now they live on two old SATA hard drives, a 1TB and a 2TB, that cost me almost nothing when I bought them.

Back in mid-October, Nvidia's RTX Spark devices hit the shelves. These are powerful Arm-based System-on-Chip devices that run Windows, designed specifically to be processing powerhouses, especially for local LLM models. Now, Nvidia has revealed what to expect from these shiny new RTX Spark devices, including a new app called Underdog.

Do you have a bits box full of hardware collecting dust? Don't worry; so do I. Fortunately, the DIY community is here with ideas on how to give those dormant pieces of tech a second life with some really creative solutions. For example, if you have an ESP32 CYD sitting around, why not turn it into a miniature digital aquarium, complete with around 100 different species of life for you to discover?

This PHP issue sounds like a pretty huge problem. | Illustration by Carlo Cadenas / The Verge Security patches for the PHP programming language, widely used to build websites and web apps, are expected to roll out today, with the goal of fixing two critical vulnerabilities that could wreak havoc on the internet if left unchecked. In an advisory published on Tuesday, PHP developers said the vulnerabilities have a severity rating of 9.2 out of a possible 10, with some cybersecurity agencies encouraging websites to temporarily take their systems offline if they're unable to apply the fix immediately.The security patch is expected to drop today at 10AM ET - though the developers say they may release it earlier if the vulnerability deta …Read the full story at The Verge.

My 3 AM ideas are often a tad bit crazy. Sometimes, I'll randomly get the urge to run a 10K, completely reorganize my room (or buy an apartment), or convince myself that becoming a lawyer is what I'm actually meant to do. Lately, though, my 3 AM ideas have gone from relatively mundane life decisions to increasingly questionable experiments involving AI.