If you're someone who keeps up with PC hardware, you probably already know that RAM prices have been going up since late last year. This isn't anything new, though. PC gamers have seen RAM prices fluctuate for years, often dropping just as quickly as they rise once supply catches up with demand. And that cycle is precisely why many people just assume it's better to wait a few months, hoping prices will be more reasonable. This time, however, I'm not so sure that strategy will pay off. That's why I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to AM5 anyway.

My couch gaming setup is a Bazzite ATX PC wired to the living room TV, and for years it's had one nagging weak point: the controller. Not any single controller, but the whole category. Everything I tried got part of it right, but had a glaring downside. The Xbox controller I own worked out of the box with every game, but didn't have any controls resembling a mouse, and connecting via my old sketchy Bluetooth receiver meant connection would drop very easily. A DualSense had the gyro, but connecting them always felt like a compromise, especially on Linux.

The iPhone 17 Pro. | Image: The Verge Leaked iPhone 18 Pro photos and parts lists appeared on the dark web following a data breach affecting one of Apple's key suppliers, according to a report from Reuters. The leaked images show a drop test of what a source tells Reuters is the iPhone 18 Pro, equipped with a three-camera layout and Apple logo.This comes just a week after Tata Electronics, an India-based company that manufactures iPhone components and assembles the devices, confirmed that it suffered a data breach. Security researchers told Reuters at the time that the ransomware group, World Leaks, posted more than 200,000 files related to the breach on the dark web. The leak …Read the full story at The Verge.

There comes a time when one needs to buy a new GPU. Whether you are upgrading from an old one that can't play AAA games or buying your first, you need to do your research so you don't waste your money. Sometimes, it can be tempting to buy something that, on paper, seems better. For example, if you've ever looked for an Nvidia GPU, you've surely seen the heavy online discourse arguing between the RTX 5070and RTX 5070 Ti, and which one the average consumer should buy.

The self-hosted media community loves to treat Plex and Jellyfin as opposing sides of the same coin, which, for the most part, they are. Those who like Plex's polished interface and feature set are expected to overlook its increasingly commercial direction. On the other hand, if it's Jellyfin's open-source philosophy and complete control you value, you'll have to accept plenty of rough edges in exchange. Like most folks, I assumed the end goal was to choose one over the other.

Penpot is the open-source, self-hosted answer to Figma. It's also free, browser-based, and has been consistent in shipping features that aren't just Figma copies but actually built on web standards. But most designers I know (myself included, to be honest) still view it as a bit of a downgrade. It genuinely lacks in certain areas; for example, the plugin scene isn't as rich or as deep as Figma's. But it does have more going for it than we give it credit for, and one of those areas is code export — Penpot's whole architecture gives it an edge here.

Time to say goodbye to that legacy Sprint plan. | Image: Alex Castro / The Verge Earlier today, T-Mobile started notifying customers that it will be retiring many legacy plans and moving subscribers onto one of its current rate plans. This move includes plans that date back to the 3G era, and it's going about as well as you'd expect.Affected customers began sharing screenshots of the text on reddit and Threads this morning, and T-Mobile's chief marketing officer Allan Samson confirmed the news to The Verge: We're retiring our oldest plans, some of which were built nearly 15 years ago - in the 3G and 4G eras, and well before our 5G network was fully deployed. Customers will transition to modern plans that provide acc …Read the full story at The Verge.

Considering Proxmox’s fairly minimal system requirements, you don’t need killer rigs to build a home lab. In fact, I’ve been using cheap mini-PCs, old thin clients, and aged gaming systems I could get my hands on to power Proxmox experiments. Needless to say, as my arsenal of paraphernalia started to grow, I began grouping them in clusters. And with ZFS replication making high-availability significantly easier for budget-friendly PVE clusters, I’ve also configured my outdated workstations in an HA environment.

While Kara Zor-El's appearance at the end of James Gunn's Superman was a very pleasant surprise, Warner Bros. Discovery's plan to fast-track a standalone Supergirl feature always felt a little dubious. It seemed odd that, after Superman, the studio wanted to flesh out its new cinematic universe with films about another Kryptonian and one of Batman's less notable villains. But Gunn implored fans to have faith in his vision and trust that the DCU would become a world of interconnected stories that put WBD's last batch of comic book movies to shame.Though hopes were high for Supergirl, the movie has turned out to be a bit of a dud. Critics ha …Read the full story at The Verge.

Tidal shared its new policies regarding AI-generated music today and how the platform plans to "protect artists" and "inform listeners." Instead of banning it outright, starting on July 15th Tidal will label tracks it has identified as being 100 percent AI-generated with an icon. But starting today those tracks will no longer be monetizable. "Tidal's priority is ensuring royalties go to original works directly produced, written, and performed by people. We will therefore not knowingly attribute royalties to music we identify as wholly AI-generated," the company's announcement reads. The platform didn't specify what tools it's using to iden …Read the full story at The Verge.

Late last year, I called Tailscale my most important recommendation for anyone starting a home lab, and I still mean it. It let me actually use my self-hosted services remotely without making network security the first hard blocker I had to clear. No firewall rules, no port forwarding, and Caddy still handling my certificates the way it always had. Things just worked.

We've seen mini PCs explode in popularity over the past year or so, offering consumers a versatile and powerful PC in a compact package. And with such high demand, we've seen companies make more powerful machines available, capable of handling pretty much anything you can throw at them.