The latest tech news about the world’s best (and sometimes worst) hardware, apps, and much more. From top companies like Google and Apple to tiny startups vying for your attention, Verge Tech has the latest in what matters in technology daily.
Audio-only Ray-Bans have arrived alongside more camera-equipped glasses. What’s missing? Privacy controls to address the ‘perv glasses’ backlash.
When you type the “@” symbol into the bottom Gemini bar in Docs, you’ll now see a list of Gemini Notebooks. Select one, and Gemini will draw from those sources to generate a document from your prompt.
“For many years developers have asked us for one thing, Linux on Snapdragon. We heard you,” says Kedar Kondap, SVP and general manager of compute and gaming at Qualcomm. Speaking at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit, Kondap says Linux support with Debian will be available “at the end of this year” for Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X2 series of chips. Qualcomm is upstreaming core drivers, including for its Hexagon NPU and Adreno GPU. Ubuntu support is also coming in the first half of 2027.
Microsoft is launching a new digital sketchpad app for Windows next month. Microsoft Ink Canvas will be available first on the new Surface Pro 12-inch, and other supported devices on October 13th. It supports sketching with pen or touch, and includes AI image generation and summaries. It’s essentially an AI-powered version of the various digital whiteboard apps Microsoft has created over the years.
Muse did a decent job with my to-do list, but boy is it handy with a credit card.
Although accessing the cooling fan requires quite a bit of disassembly and swapping out the battery involves a brief battle with glue, iFixit says Valve has applied the same “repair-friendly thinking” to the Steam Frame’s design as it did with the Steam Deck helping to potentially prolong the headset’s lifespan.
With the new Stream Deck 7.6 update, Elgato is expanding the limited functionality of the $99.99 Neo’s Infobar screen beyond a clock and page indicators. You’ll now be able to make it show other useful info like weather forecasts, what’s playing on Spotify, your PC’s CPU and GPU stats, and when your AI agent needs your attention.
We called the K11 Plus the best robot vacuum for small spaces, but Switchbot’s upgraded K11 Plus Pro could be an even better option. For $399.99 you get a boost from 6,000Pa to 12,000Pa of suction potentially making it a more potent autonomous cleaner for apartments with multiple pets or spill-prone kids.
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This builds on the feature introduced in May which allows users to build a custom video feed based on AI prompt descriptions of your interests, moods, or favorite topics. The expansion means you can create and save more than one custom feed to your home screen, with YouTube saying it’ll be available for users in the US on web, mobile, and TVs “soon.”
YouTube is expanding its likeness detection tool to include not just facial matches, but vocal matches too. At the company’s Made on YouTube event on Wednesday, executives teased the upcoming expansion that will allow creators to monitor potential synthetic soundalikes posted to the platform.
The original likeness detection feature started testing with creators and eventually was opened to anyone with a YouTube account — the company has essentially created its own deepfake monitoring and takedown regime.
First announced last March with shipping in late June, the tiny Atom Plus is finally available from retailers like Amazon for $29.99. It’s slightly wider than the 8BitDo Micro but CRKD’s palmable gamepad adds a symmetrical pair of tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) thumbsticks and two pairs of full-size shoulder buttons.
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The platform is testing a way for users to verify their profile by getting people they’ve actually worked or studied with (who are already verified) to vouch for them. LinkedIn is also testing a feature for company pages that forces users claiming current employment to verify themselves, and companies can now instantly remove fake employees from search results.
Ofcom is taking a deeper look at Pornhub provider Aylo’s compliance with online safety rules. The media watchdog’s enforcement director George Lusty says, “We expect tech firms to ensure age checks are highly effective before introducing them.” Aylo relies on Apple’s age verification system, which is not being scrutinized under the investigation.
“We are concerned that Aylo may not have conducted sufficient due diligence and testing before implementing its new age assurance process. As a result, we are concerned that Aylo’s process may not be highly effective at preventing children from seeing pornography.”
While Undead Labs is avoiding closing as Xbox’s assortment of developers continues to shrink, the studio announced on LinkedIn that “Unfortunately, today we are also saying goodbye to a significant number of our colleagues. It’s difficult to reach this moment knowing that not everyone who helped get us here gets to make the rest of the journey with us.”
Its blog post earlier said that State of Decay 3 development “remains actively underway,” targeting a 2027 release on Xbox, Game Pass, PC, and PlayStation.
Today, Weber shut down June Oven’s cloud servers, leaving ovens that cost up to $1,500 unable to do anything beyond basic functions.
Owners were notified in July that September 22 would be the end, cutting off remote control via the app, live camera viewing, AI food recognition, and software updates. The ovens still work through their built-in touchscreens, including local food recognition, but support for repairs and parts is also done.
Weber bought June in 2021 and quickly discontinued the ovens, folding June’s technology into Weber Connect. It says it won’t open-source the app because the IP is used in current and potentially future products.
Over the weekend, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill that will penalize creators for failing to disclose paid political content, with fines reaching up to $5,000 per violation, The New York Times reports.
Though the FTC requires influencers to disclose product advertisements, it doesn’t have the same rules for paid political content, which has become widespread in recent campaigns.
[The New York Times]
A new report from the Pew Research Center adds more data points to the thing everyone seems to know by now: data centers are pretty unpopular. Negative marks are up in every category Pew surveyed, with only 4% of respondents thinking that data centers “have a mostly good impact” across the board.
Remarkably, in just 7 months, people who say they’ve heard “nothing at all” about data centers dropped from 25% to 12%. Makes sense: they’re big, noisy, and increasingly have nowhere to hide.
[Pew Research Center]
Digitimes reported on remarks from CEO Jason Chen, who said recently that he expects PC prices to rise another 20% before coming down in the second-half of 2027. The increase tracks with all of the component spikes we’ve seen, including rumors that AMD and Intel are both about to raise prices by another 10% this year. Chen reportedly said: “a lot of people come and tell us they want to raise prices, and we find it a bit baffling,” noting that memory suppliers have an incentive to push their current cost narrative.
If you need an alternative to all the soul-destroying news filling your feeds all day long you can point your browser to Changelog.earth which is a variation on video game patch notes that instead highlights all the positive progress our planet is making. Believe it or not, good things are still happening.
It may not benefit every setup, the company warns, but Pyrowave is a new Steam Remote Play high bandwidth, low latency video codec now available in Steam beta on macOS, Windows, and Linux. It uses “5-10 times the amount of bandwidth of other streaming codecs,” but leverages your PC’s GPU to “encode and decode frames to achieve extremely low end to end latency with a good network.”
[Steam Community]
