A couple of months ago, we saw the Sony WH-1000XM4 drop to $129.99, which was an absolute steal for the last-gen noise-canceling headphones. That deal predictably sold out in a heartbeat, and there’s no telling whether we’ll see it that low again, but Amazon is selling them in black for $178.20 (about $170 off), which would be an all-time low if not for said outlier. You can also pick them up in blue and white for $198 right now, though that price is frequently available these days.

The newer Sony WH-1000XM5 have leapfrogged the heap as the best noise-canceling headphones for most people in our book, but the XM4 remain a great pair of headphones if you’re looking to save some money. They feature phenomenal audio quality and noise cancellation, which keeps them in the big leagues occupied by newer sets. They also have nice quality-of-life features, including a foldable design and multipoint Bluetooth support, the latter of which allows you to connect them to two devices simultaneously. The XM5’s improved microphones make them the better buy if you frequently take calls while using your headphones, but not so much that we would dissuade you from saving more than $100 by going for the older pair.

Read our Sony WH-1000XM4 review.

More Monday deals and discounts

• If you want to try something a little different to play games on Xbox and PC, RIG’s Nacon Revolution X controller might be worth checking out. Amazon is selling it in white for an all-time low of $39.99 (50 percent off) when you clip the on-page coupon. You can customize the weightiness of the wired gamepad, change its analog stick shafts and toppers, remap all of its buttons (including its four back buttons), and set thumbstick sensitivity and trigger dead zones using the companion app. It doesn’t have Hall effect sticks and its build quality doesn’t quite match that of the best Xbox controllers; however, those are fair tradeoffs at this price.
• The newly released Insta360 Link 2 is pretty expensive, but you can get it for a new low of $179.99 ($20 off) at Amazon, B&H Photo, and Adorama right now. The 4K webcam is overkill for the average work needs, but its rotating head can be fun for content creation, dynamic presentations, or just to ensure you’re always centered in the frame. The Link 2 builds on the original with magnetic mounting, the ability to recognize and reframe multiple people in a scene, improved gestures, and stronger noise cancellation.
• The budget-friendly Sony ZV-1F is a modest step above a smartphone for basic vlogging needs, and now the camera is going for a new low of around $348 ($151 off) at Amazon, B&H Photo, and Sony’s online storefront. It has a 20mm-equivalent fixed focal length lens with a 20-megapixel sensor and decent low-light performance, and records up to 4K at 30 frames per second or 1080p at up to 120fps. It also has an articulating display to help frame your shots, plus eye autofocus like some of Sony’s pricier cameras (but with a less effective contrast-detect autofocus system). The ZV-1F is not a great stills camera as you can’t shoot RAW photos, but it’ll do if all you need are quality clips and YouTube thumbnails.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is suing Walmart and payroll service provider Branch Messenger for alleged illegal payment practices for gig workers.

The bureau says Walmart was opening direct deposit accounts using Spark delivery drivers’ social security numbers without their consent. The accounts also can come with intense fees that, according to the complaint, would add either 2 percent or $2.99 per transaction, whichever is higher. It also says Walmart repeatedly promised to provide drivers with same-day payments through the platform starting in July 2021 but never delivered on that.

The Bureau alleges that for approximately two years starting around June 2021, defendants engaged in unfair, abusive, and deceptive practices in violation of the Consumer Financial Protection Act of 2010, including by requiring Spark Drivers to receive their compensation in Branch Accounts, opening Branch Accounts for Spark Drivers without their informed consent or, in many instances, on an unauthorized basis, and making deceptive statements about Branch to Spark Drivers.

“Walmart made false promises, illegally opened accounts, and took advantage of more than a million delivery drivers,” said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra in a statement. “Companies cannot force workers into getting paid through accounts that drain their earnings with junk fees.” The agency sued both companies in the US District Court for the District of Minnesota.

Spark delivery workers have been complaining about Walmart’s Branch Messenger account requirements for years, which forced workers to use these accounts with no option to direct deposit to a preferred credit union or local bank. Walmart allegedly told workers they’d be terminated if they didn’t accept the Branch accounts.

It hasn’t always gone well for Netflix. Remember the Love Is Blind reunion or the laggy Paul / Tyson fight? But Netflix is betting big that live still matters, even in the on-demand world it helped create.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Performance upgrades and screen improvements make the new Paperwhite’s minor updates feel more substantial.

Three years have passed since Amazon last updated its flagship e-reader, and while this year’s Kindle lineup seemed focused on Amazon’s first color offering, the Paperwhite still got some welcome improvements. With a higher-contrast screen and snappier performance, the 12th-generation Kindle Paperwhite remains the best e-reader on the market.

I tested the $199.99 Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition, which is $40 more than the $159.99 basic Paperwhite. The screen and internals are the same, but the Signature Edition includes an ambient light sensor for automatic brightness adjustments, 32GB of storage rather than 16GB, no lockscreen ads, wireless charging, and a metallic finish on the back. The metallic jade version I was sent looked great (metallic black and raspberry are also options) but felt slightly less grippy than the plastic of the base Paperwhite.

The new Paperwhite features a 300ppi screen with a small bump in size from 6.8 to seven inches — not really enough to be noticeable, but enough to let you squeeze a few extra lines of text on a page. Thanks to smaller bezels, the new Paperwhite is just a few millimeters larger than the previous version while managing to be slightly thinner; in use, it feels nearly identical. This year’s model also brings the display flush with the bezels, although it’s another subtle improvement.

What is noticeable is the increased contrast. Thanks to the use of an oxide thin-film transistor on the screen, the new Paperwhite has the highest contrast ratio of any e-reader I’ve ever tested. The benefits aren’t immediately obvious when you’re reading plain text, but the deeper blacks make the screen look closer to an actual printed page. It gives illustrations, pictures, and book covers more pop and presence, and makes comics and manga panels look sharper. The new screen occasionally made some of the fine text in Jonathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto’s Ultimate Spider-Man: Married with Children appear bolder and easier to read without zooming in.

It’s not a feature that’s as flashy as a color E Ink screen, but it’s easily the new model’s best upgrade, and it’s going to make it hard to return to my Kobo Libra 2.

Amazon has also improved the new Paperwhite’s lighting, giving the screen a more neutral tone at its default settings. The last generation Paperwhite’s screen skews a little cooler, but with both Paperwhite models’ warmth sliders turned up, the differences are indistinguishable.

This is also the first Paperwhite to use a dual-core processor (the Oasis, rest in peace, had a dual-core processor back in 2017). The 1GHz Mediatek CPU would be painfully slow for a device with an LCD screen, but it makes a big difference on an e-reader. Amazon’s claims of 25 percent faster page turns weren’t noticeable when I was reading text — the refresh rate of the E Ink screen is the limiting factor there — but I was genuinely surprised at how much faster it opened half-gigabyte, image-heavy PDF files I sideloaded. On the 11th-generation Paperwhite there’s a pause that makes me wonder if the device is going to choke on the files, but the new Paperwhite opens them instantaneously and flips through the pages nearly as fast as it does with plain text.

The user interface also feels faster. It’s still not as fast or responsive as a smartphone or tablet, and zooming in and out of comics and photos can still feel sluggish, but scrolling through book lists, navigating Amazon’s book store, and popping in and out of various menus is satisfyingly speedy. Or at least as speedy as it can be with the limitations of E Ink.

Amazon claims the new Paperwhite can be used for up to 12 weeks between charges, but that’s when limiting your reading to just 30 minutes a day at half screen brightness and wireless features turned off. After an hour reading, jumping back and forth between books and PDFs, and browsing other titles on Amazon’s online store with screen brightness set to 75 percent, the new Paperwhite lost five percent of its charge. With that daily routine I’d expect to squeeze about three weeks out of the Paperwhite’s battery, and potentially even longer if I wasn’t so indecisive about what I was reading.

If you’re a Kindle user who’s upgraded in the past few years, the new Paperwhite’s functionality will feel familiar. If you’re switching from competitors like Kobo, you may find yourself running into some frustrating limitations. Sideloading documents like PDFs or ePUB files is harder than it needs to be, since Kindle devices no longer connect to computers as external drives. You need to use Amazon’s online services or desktop apps to get e-books and other documents onto the Paperwhite, and both options are clunky.

Text customization is also limited in the Kindle OS compared to Kobo devices, which offer finer adjustments for font size, line spacing, and margins. Although I find the Paperwhite’s formatting options too simplified, I can see the appeal for those wanting a device that’s very easy to use. I like that you can save your adjustments as custom themes — it’s a feature I wish Kobo would add — but I can’t understand why Amazon limits each device to just five custom themes.

Borrowing library books is also easier on a Kobo. The new Paperwhite still requires you to use the Libby app or website on a separate device to browse and borrow titles. Kobo’s e-readers have Overdrive built-in, and while they do obfuscate the borrowing process, you don’t need to pull out your phone to do so.

But Kobo seems to be focusing on color e-readers and larger E Ink note-taking devices these days, and its black-and-white e-reader options are now limited. The $129.99 Kobo Clara BW uses the same E Ink Carta 1300 screen as the new Paperwhite, but it’s only six inches, and its contrast doesn’t look as good. Its all-plastic body and sunken screen also feel cheaper than the new Paperwhite’s. And while the $269.99 Kobo Sage has page turn buttons and stylus support, it’s more of a hybrid e-reader and note-taking device; I find that the eight-inch screen makes it too big to be a take-anywhere e-reader.

Although it’s not a significant upgrade, the new Kindle Paperwhite remains the best e-reader you can buy, with a beautiful black-and-white screen that feels closer to printed paper than any e-reader I’ve tested and a UI that’s faster and more responsive than the previous version. If you’re on the hunt for your first e-reader, the new Paperwhite should be at the top of your list.

Although the basic Amazon Kindle is cheaper at $109.99, the better screen, adjustable warmth lighting, and waterproofing — extra insurance if you read in the bath or at the beach — make the new Paperwhite worth the extra money.

Is the Signature Edition worth an extra $40? Wireless charging isn’t necessary given the Paperwhite’s battery life, and it can be frustrating to align properly. But the ambient light sensor can save you the swipe and tap needed to adjust screen brightness manually if you take your Kindle everywhere (warmth settings don’t automatically adjust) and extra storage is always welcome on a device with no memory card slot. When you factor in the $20 Amazon charges to remove lockscreen ads from the basic Paperwhite, the Signature Edition is the way to go.

Unless you read a lot of large PDF files and are frustrated by laggy performance, the new Paperwhite isn’t a necessary upgrade over the 2021 model. But it’s a different story if you’ve got an even older Paperwhite model or other aging Kindle. When you add up the past six years of improvements — including USB-C, color-temp-adjustable lighting, a larger screen with better contrast, and better performance — it’s probably time to consider an upgrade.

Photography by Andrew Liszewski / The Verge

In a pair of Truth Social posts on Sunday, Donald Trump announced a set of picks for his administration’s tech policy team that will report to David Sacks, Trump’s “AI and crypto czar.” The picks include Michael Kratsios, who will lead the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) if confirmed by the Senate.

Kratsios, who served in Trump’s first term as the White House chief technology officer, also briefly held an acting undersecretary role at the Department of Defense near the end of the term. He later became a managing director at Scale AI and has been helping lead Trump’s tech policy transition team.

The President-elect also picked his former deputy CTO, Dr. Lynne Parker, as Executive Director of the Presidential Council of Advisors for Science and Technology. Directing the Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets (AKA the “Crypto Council”) will be former college football player and unsuccessful Republican congressional candidate Bo Hines. Advising Trump on AI policy as part of the OSTP will be Sriram Krishnan, who has extensive Silicon Valley experience, with roles at Andreessen Horowitz, X, Meta, and Snap.

Sacks is close with Elon Musk, who Trump has charged with gutting the US government as part of the not-yet-established Department of Government Efficiency — and who recently helped send Congress into chaos by posting relentlessly to stop a US spending bill.

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu gets at the heart of what makes vampires an eternally fascinating fixture in our sexual imaginations.

Even if you haven’t seen F.W. Murnau’s original Nosferatu or read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, those stories have undoubtedly shaped your ideas about vampires. They weren’t the first tales about undead ghouls rising from the grave to suck the blood out of the living. But by presenting their monsters in such wildly innovative ways, they became a blueprint from which countless subsequent tales took inspiration. Writer / director Robert Eggers knows that his Nosferatu remake would be hard-pressed to scare audiences who cut their teeth watching a multitude of Draculas and demon hunters menacing one another on the big and small screens.

But rather than trying to work around that obstacle with experimental riffs on vampire lore, the new film accepts it as fact while inviting you to imagine what it might have felt like to experience this kind of disturbing story for the first time when they were new. You can feel Eggers working to conjure an atmosphere of psychosexual dread, and you can see him using modern filmmaking techniques to create haunting visuals evocative of early 20th century cinema. Though it cleaves very close to the original while incorporating elements from other vampire classics, this Nosferatu puts far more focus on the interiority of its central heroine as she grapples with her deep-seated longing to be taken by an avatar of death.

“Vampire” is not a word that many people are familiar with in Nosferatu’s depiction of 19th century Wisborg, Germany, but after years of being tormented by psychic visions of a shadowy presence, Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) is no stranger to living in fear of the supernatural. Despite her constant feeling of being misunderstood, Ellen’s days are filled with joy thanks to her realtor husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) and best friend Anna Harding (Emma Corrin). But Ellen’s nights of sleepwalking through her deathly quiet mansion are harrowing because of the way a mysterious voice from within beckons her to give in to her darkest, most unsettling desires.

Even when Ellen is awake, she can sense that somehow, somewhere, something is watching and waiting for an opportunity to make her its own. No matter how much Ellen insists that danger is afoot, though, all her loved ones can see is a woman on the brink of a mental breakdown. It’s much easier for Thomas and Anna’s husband, Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), to dismiss her fears as symptoms of a wandering uterus rather than consider whether there might be more to her premonitions. It’s even hard for Anna — a mother to two young girls — not to assume that Ellen’s troubles are rooted in the fact that she and Thomas have no children of their own. But Ellen and the sinister voice in her head both know that, while sex is definitely on her mind, having kids is not.

Nosferatu’s depiction of Ellen is one of the clearer examples of Eggers combining aspects of the 1922 film and Stoker’s novel to create a new take on the character that feels both true to the source materials and deeper than the sum of its parts. The movie presents Ellen as the kind of woman who, even without her visions, would still feel smothered by the misogynistic social norms of her era. Ellen’s powers are an innate part of who she is, as is the way they often send her into fits of moaning that, to onlookers, read as explicitly orgasmic.

Ellen struggles to remember or articulate much of what she experiences during her nocturnal premonitions. But Nosferatu spells it out plainly as it first shows you how Transylvanian Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) is the one calling out to her through their seemingly inexplicable telepathic connection. The mechanics of Ellen and Orlok’s bond is another detail that Eggers has retooled just enough to make it work as a point of intrigue. It’s obvious that this is a film about a vampire who wants to sink his teeth into an unsuspecting woman’s flesh. But Nosferatu cleverly leaves you wondering how, exactly, Orlok first came to know about his latest target.

Establishing that link early on adds a delicious layer of dread to Nosferatu’s story as Thomas’ presence is requested in Transylvania, where he’s meant to assist an “eccentric” nobleman purchase a new home. We can see that Orlok is orchestrating some kind of elaborate plan to insert himself into Ellen’s life, but what’s fun is the way none of the film’s characters have any frame of reference cluing them in to the fact that they’re dancing through the motions of a classic Dracula period piece like Tod Browning’s 1931 adaptation.

Contemporary horror movies about people who don’t know standard horror movie beats are frustrating because they pull you out of the fantasy. Eggers previously worked around that by focusing his films on characters planted firmly in times when their fears of the surrounding world and their own feelings could give rise to creatures they had never seen before. This Nosferatu is doing something similar, but because its story stays so true to the original, it also feels like Eggers is encouraging you to appreciate it as a thoughtful remake rather than a film trying to reinvent vampires.

This becomes clearer as Nosferatu shows you more of Orlok’s ability to project his shadow across Europe to menace Ellen with promises of untold pleasure. On a technical level, it’s clear that Eggers is creating scenes that Murnau could have only dreamed of, but you also get the sense that this is exactly the kind of alarming energy that made Max Schreck’s Orlok so frightening when he first appeared onscreen. To that end, this Nosferatu works hard to make you feel Orlok’s presence more than it actually tries to show you what he looks like as his plans begin taking shape. He’s lurking in Ellen’s mind but also in Thomas’ fears that he might not be able to satisfy his wife’s needs.

Skarsgård’s Orlok is skincrawling once the film gets around to fixing the camera squarely on his face, but much of the count’s essence is channeled through the way Depp and Hoult inhabit Ellen and Thomas. Ellen vacillates between terror, shame, and arousal to make you feel exactly what kinds of designs Orlok has. And Thomas’ guileless confusion when he encounters clearly supernatural things speaks volumes to Orlok’s ability to misdirect his unsuspecting victims.

While Nosferatu isn’t trying to shock you with its plot or gory deaths, it does want to impress you with its arresting visuals. We’ve seen Eggers work in black and white before, but the way Nosferatu frequently shifts into a near-monochromatic palette of blacks and blues is a brilliantly artful trick evocative of blood draining out of a face in fear. Those moments help make Nosferatu feel like a uniquely inspired presentation of vampires as beings of darkness. But beyond their aesthetic beauty, they also highlight the extent to which Eggers has crafted Nosferatu as a tribute to films from Murnau and Browning.

It’s rare to see a remake that so effectively celebrates its predecessors while also realizing its own distinct vision, but that’s what is going to make Nosferatu an instant horror classic when it hits theaters on December 25th.

Nosferatu also stars Willem Dafoe, Ralph Ineson, and Simon McBurney.

Despite loud proclamations, AI on smartphones is still mostly a sideshow.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Not even authority, just the signifiers of authority

Read the full story at The Verge.

A hybrid supercar that can run on electricity alone, while still delivering that twin-turbo 3.0-liter V6 experience

Read the full story at The Verge.

Honda and Nissan have announced plans to merge as the Japanese automakers struggle with competition from rival brands in the electric vehicle market. The two companies confirmed on Monday that they had signed a memorandum of understanding that would create the third largest car maker by sales, behind Toyota and Volkswagen.

Nissan alliance member Mitsubishi Motors is also in talks with Honda and Nissan to join the integration, with a decision expected by the end of January. Based on the market capital of all three companies, a finalized merger could result in an entity worth more than 50 billion dollars. Honda will initially lead the management of the merged company according to Honda president, Toshihiro Mibe, with the aim to complete a formal merger agreement by June and finalize the deal by August 2026.

“Creation of new mobility value by bringing together the resources including knowledge, talents, and technologies that Honda and Nissan have been developing over the long years is essential to overcome challenging environmental shifts that the auto industry is facing,” Mibe said in a statement.

The proposed merger was initially teased last week, and aims to establish a joint holding company to tackle growing global competition from brands like Tesla and China’s BYD in the EV market. The deal would also help to rescue the struggling Nissan, which saw its net earnings in mid-2024 fall by more than 90 percent year over year, and announced plans in November to lay off thousands of workers.

“If realized, I believe that by uniting the strengths of both companies, we can deliver unparalleled value to customers worldwide who appreciate our respective brands,” said Nissan CEO Makoto Uchida. “Together, we can create a unique way for them to enjoy cars that neither company could achieve alone.”

Ex-Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn told Bloomberg on Friday that the merger is a “desperate move” by Nissan, and that it’s “not a pragmatic deal because frankly, the synergies between the two companies are difficult to find.” The company has been in turmoil since Ghosn was arrested by Japanese authorities in 2018 over charges of financial misconduct.

X has substantially raised the price of its top-tier user subscription in multiple regions to help bolster the platform’s creator payouts. The increase for Premium Plus came into effect on December 21st according to X, raising prices in the US from $16 per month to $22, or from $168 to $229 for annual subscriptions.

Many European countries like France, Germany, and Spain are impacted by a similar increase, taking monthly prices from €16 to €21. Monthly subscribers in Canada (currently paying $20), Australia ($26) and the UK (£16) will also see pricing increased to $26, $35, and £17 respectively. The higher pricing is immediately applicable to new subscribers, with existing users grandfathered into their current rates until January 20th. X’s basic subscription tier remains unaffected.

The pricing changes for US subscribers are the highest increase introduced since Elon Musk purchased the social media platform in 2022. X gave several reasons to justify the price hike, citing that Premium Plus is now completely ad-free — which it described as a “significant enhancement” to the current user experience.

X also references changes made to the X revenue sharing program in October, saying that subscriptions “now more directly fuels” creator payouts to “reward content quality and engagement rather than ad views alone.” Premium Plus subscribers will additionally receive priority user support, access to additional features like X’s Radar trend monitoring tool, and higher limits on the platform’s Grok AI models.

Days after furloughing dozens of its employees without pay, EV startup Canoo told the remainder of its staff they will be on a “mandatory unpaid break” through at least the end of the year, TechCrunch reported Friday. A company email seen by the outlet said employees would be locked out of Canoo’s systems by the end of Friday, with their benefits continuing through the end of this month.

The report follows Canoo’s announcement last week that it was idling its Oklahoma factories and furloughing employees while it worked “to finalize securing the capital necessary to move forward with its operations.” As TechCrunch notes, the company reported that it had only about $700,000 left in the bank last month.

Also on Friday, the company announced a 1-for-20 reverse stock split, effective December 24th. Canoo says the consolidation aims to keep its stock listed on the Nasdaq exchange and attract “a broader group of institutional and retail investors.”

Canoo was founded in 2017 to sell electric vans and trucks to adventure-seeking customers but has mostly only ever made vehicles for the US government. As The Verge’s Andrew Hawkins wrote last year, analysts have warned of its risk of insolvency as it’s teetered on the edge of running out of cash since 2022. Canoo has lost a steady stream of executives since then, including all of its founders and, more recently, its CFO and general counsel.

This year’s Prime Video streaming content was led by adaptations and spinoffs like Fallout and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Apple is working on a new smart doorbell camera that uses Face ID to unlock your door, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter. The camera could be released by the end of 2025 “at the soonest,” Gurman writes.

The lock would work just like your iPhone, automatically unlocking your door when you or another resident looks at it. Like biometric login info on other Apple devices, the camera would be equipped with the company’s Secure Enclave chip that stores and processes Face ID information separately from the rest of the system’s hardware.

Gurman writes that this device will “likely” work with existing third-party HomeKit smart locks and that the company may also partner with a smart lock company “to offer a complete system on day one.” He expects the camera will make use of Apple’s in-house “Proxima” combination Wi-Fi / Bluetooth chip that’s rumored for new HomePod Mini and Apple TV devices next year.

This doorbell camera joins a broader collection of rumors surrounding a renewed Apple push into the smart home that’s centered around Apple Intelligence. Those include another new smart home camera, a possible Apple-branded TV, and new smart home displays — one a simple iPad-like device that magnetically attaches to wall mounts or speaker bases, while another display sits on the end of a robotic arm attached to a larger base.

The grid is a comfortable place to live.

The app grid, I mean: the rows and rows of app icons on your iPhone’s homescreen. It’s familiar. Safe. It’s how I’ve lived with my various phones over the past decade. But at some point, it started to feel oppressive.

All those icons staring at me in the face, vying for my attention. The clutter! The distracting little notification badges! The grid was a reasonable way to organize apps when I had like, ten of them. There are sixty on the iPhone I’m using now, and I set it up from scratch a few months ago.

Naturally, living off-grid or in a non-traditional homescreen arrangement has been possible for much longer on Android. Google’s OS lets you keep your screen clear and just find your apps in the app drawer, which is always a swipe away. You can even replace the launcher entirely. But iOS — where every new app you download winds up on your homescreen by default — hasn’t exactly made it easy to abandon the grid.

That started to change when iOS 14 added widgets, an app library, and the ability to hide apps from your homescreen — though I haven’t developed the muscle memory to use it much. Now, iOS 18 adds even more flexibility. You...

Read the full story at The Verge.

Our staff writes about the best books they read over the course of the year.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 65, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, get ready to take up all your phone’s storage space, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This is the last Installer of the year! I’m taking a couple of weeks off for the holidays, and I hope you’re getting some relaxation in too. Thank you so much to everyone who has subscribed to this newsletter, emailed me your recommendations, told me I’m a lunatic about to-do lists, and generally been part of the Installerverse this year. Making this newsletter is so much fun, and I’m so thrilled to get to do it with you. Bigger and better next year!

This week, I’ve been reading about Spotify’s ghost artists and Formula 1 and Mufasa and the deeply silly New York Jets, watching Hot Frosty (you can judge me, it’s fine) and re-watching 30 Rock, beating Balatro for the very first time, and trying to convince my toddler that it’s actually not fun and cool and great to wake up at 4am every day.

I also have for you a nifty new smart home controller, a new app for the future of social networks, the next Sonic movie, and much more. Plus,...

Read the full story at The Verge.

In the latest version of the Files by Google app, summoning Gemini while looking at a PDF gives you the option to ask about the file, writes Android Police. You’ll need to be a Gemini Advanced subscriber to use the feature though, according to Mishaal Rahman, who reported on Friday that it had started rolling out.

If you have the feature, when you summon Gemini while looking at a PDF in the Files app, you’ll see an “Ask about this PDF” button appear. Tapping that lets you ask questions about the file, the same way you might ask ChatGPT about a PDF. Google first announced this screen-aware feature during its I/O developer conference in May.

Rahman posted a screenshot of what it looks like in action:

Other context-aware Gemini features include the ability to ask about web pages and YouTube videos. For apps or file types without Gemini’s context-aware support, the assistant instead offers to answer questions about your screen, using a screenshot it takes when you tap “Ask about this screen.”

The US Commerce Department has awarded Samsung and Texas Instruments with a combined over $6 billion in “direct funding under the CHIPS Incentives Program’s Funding Opportunity for Commercial Fabrication,” according to a pair of announcements published on Friday.

Samsung will get the larger of the two awards at $4.745 billion. The Commerce Department says the company will use this as part of its planned $37 billion investment in Texas chip facilities that include two new “leading-edge logic fabs and an R&D fab” in Taylor, Texas, and the expansion of its plant in Austin.

The company was originally slated to receive $6.4 billion. In a statement reported by Bloomberg, the company said that its “mid-to-long-term investment plan has been partially revised to optimize overall investment efficiency,” which suggests the company has dialed back its plans, according to the outlet.

Texas Instruments will receive $1.61 billion to bolster the $18 billion it plans to spend on projects like constructing two wafer fabs in Texas and a third in Utah. The Commerce Department announced smaller awards this week too, including $407 million in funding for Amkor Technology, a US-based company that...

Read the full story at The Verge.

Asus has announced the Asus NUC 14 Pro AI, the first Copilot Plus-capable AI mini PC that crams an Intel Core Ultra 9 processor into a form factor resembling a black M4 Mac Mini. First introduced at IFA in September, Asus is providing a little more detail about the mini PC’s specs than it did before, but still isn’t saying it will become available or how much it will cost.

The NUC 14 Pro AI will come in five CPU configurations, from the Core Ultra 5 226V processor with 16GB of integrated RAM to a Core Ultra 9 288V processor with 32GB of RAM. The company says it has up to 67 TOPS of GPU performance and 48 NPU TOPS, and that its M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4 x 4 slot supports 256GB to 2TB NVMe SSDs.

All of that is packed into a PC that measures 130mm deep and wide and just 34mm tall; comparatively, the Mac Mini is 127mm deep and wide and 50mm tall. Here are some pictures from Asus’ website:

The Asus NUC 14 Pro AI features a fingerprint sensor on top and a Copilot button on the front for speaking voice commands to Microsoft’s AI assistant. Also on the front are two USB-A ports, a Thunderbolt 4 port, a headphone jack, and a power button. Around the back, you’ll find a 2.5Gbps ethernet jack, another Thunderbolt 4 port, two more USB-A ports, and an HDMI port. For connectivity, it features Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

Asus still hasn’t said when the NUC 14 Pro AI will be available, nor how much it will cost.