Phones these days come with a wide range of apps installed out of the box, ranging from the essentials to the bloatware we all want to remove. But somewhere in the middle are genuinely useful apps that you might not immediately realize you need until you start using them. These apps have rightfully earned a place on my home screen, and you should check them out, too.

Let’s unpack what Demis Hassabis said at the end of yesterday’s Google I/O keynote. This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. This week's issue is a special early edition tied to The Verge's Google I/O coverage. You can expect our next issue at its usual time next Friday. Opt in for Optimizer here.Toward the end of this year's Google I/O keynote, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis declared, with a completely deadpan face, that the company hopes to "reimagine the drug discovery process with the goal of one day solving all disease." This is the sort of statement that the phras …Read the full story at The Verge.

The controversies around image and video generation are hard to ignore; whether training data was scraped without consent, or artists are getting compensated, or whether the outputs are doing something genuinely new or just laundering someone else's style. Adobe Firefly was the one that felt the least icky since it's trained on licensed Adobe Stock content and public domain stuff, but it's still paywalled past the free tier credits. On the other end of it, there's ChatGPT, which had its whole Studio Ghibli moment last year that I'd rather not get into here.

When you buy a Kindle, you only focus on reading books on it, like most folks. Only after owning one do people look for tutorials and guides to remove the niggles. Several tutorials, forum threads, and video comments are packed with people seeking guidance on jailbreaking the Kindle.

I bought the UGREEN DXP4800 Pro NAS expecting it to behave like a better storage box. That was the sensible role for it, at least on paper. It had room for drives, enough performance to handle my files, and a more appliance-like personality than the random assortment of mini PCs and Raspberry Pis that had accumulated around my home lab. What I didn’t expect was for it to start swallowing jobs I used to reserve for dedicated machines.

I'm a fairly novice coder, even though I've dabbled in one language or another over the last few decades. I'm also terrible at formatting, so I really appreciate autocomplete and formatting help from agentic coding tools. I've been using GitHub Copilot, partly because it's the default in VS Code, but the recent tightening of usage limits has me looking elsewhere. It feels like a bait and switch by Microsoft, getting you hooked on high token usage, then closing the door, and I'm over it.

You've probably already heard the standard pitch for WSL. Windows Subsystem for Linux gives users an environment to run Linux apps, commands, and graphical tools. That pitch is accurate, and the fact that you can access Linux without dual-booting or spinning up a separate VM is reason enough to install WSL. But there's another handy way to use it that you may not expect. I like to take advantage of the Linux cron utility to automatically run scripts against my Windows filesystem, which is natively accessible under WSL.

When people think of home network upgrades, mesh Wi-Fi or a fancy router is usually what they think about. After all, the marketing around mesh networks makes it seem that they're a silver bullet to every Wi-Fi problem. However, many mesh systems cause the exact problems that they promise to solve. Even Wi-Fi 7 routers boast blazing-fast speeds and better coverage than ever, but they a Wi-Fi 7 router won't fix what's truly wrong with your home network. Before you rush to buy a fancy Wi-Fi router or invest in an expensive mesh system, consider some other upgrades that deliver way better performance per dollar. Your home network might not even need a dedicated mesh network; it might just need a few optimizations to perform dramatically better.

There's sometimes a negative connotation that anything cheap must be of bad quality, but that couldn't be further from the truth. More affordable mechanical keyboards can oftentimes be just as good as more expensive typing machines. The same goes for a bottle of red sauce or even a monitor, so long as you know where to look. USB-C cables, on the other hand, can be downright terrible if a bad-quality cable is purchased.

Elon Musk's final frontier is officially open for business now that SpaceX has formally filed its S-1 prospectus with the SEC. That kicks off what could be the largest initial public offering ever when it lists on the Nasdaq stock exchange with the ticker SPCX.SpaceX generated $18.67 billion in revenue in 2025, driven largely by its Starlink satellite internet service, which brought in more than $11 billion, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. The company lost over $4.9 billion last year, with capital expenditures soaring to $20.7 billion last year, a leap from $11.2 billion in 2024, as reported by The New York Times. xAI, which recent …Read the full story at The Verge.

BIOS is something that users touch only while building a PC, enabling DOCP/XMP, or reinstalling Windows. Once that is done and the PC starts working again, the BIOS becomes invisible. I was in the same situation; I built my PC about three years ago and went back to the BIOS a few more times to reinstall Windows.

Most of us treat Android Auto as a utility to set up once and never touch again, trusting Google's default settings, hoping the experience is safe and functional for the widest audience possible. For me, though, functional isn't as good as a personalized user experience, and even in its current state, missing all the good bits Google announced at the Android Show last week, AA packs plenty of scope for customization.