The Lenovo Legion Go S was supposed to change things. It was poised to show Valve isn’t the only one that can build an affordable, portable, potent handheld gaming PC — you just need the right design and the right OS. 

I was intrigued when Valve’s own Steam Deck designers told me this Windows handheld would double as the first authorized third-party SteamOS handheld this May. When I heard Lenovo had procured an exclusive AMD chip that would help that SteamOS version hit $499, I got excited for a true Steam Deck competitor. 

But I’m afraid that chip ain’t it. 

I’ve spent weeks living with a Legion Go S powered by AMD’s Z2 Go, the same chip slated to appear in that $499 handheld. I’ve used it with both Windows and Bazzite, a SteamOS-like Linux distro that eliminates many of Windows’ most annoying quirks. I tested both directly against a Steam Deck OLED and the original Legion Go, expecting to find it between the two in terms of performance and battery life. But that’s not what I found.

Watt for watt, its Z2 Go chip simply can’t compete with the Steam Deck, and it’s far weaker than the Z1 Extreme in last year’s handhelds. That’s inexcusable at the $730 …

Read the full story at The Verge.

It’s true: Nvidia has just confirmed it shipped some RTX 5090, RTX 5090D, and even some RTX 5070 Ti graphics chips that were missing render units, as TechPowerUp originally reported — and that you’ll be able to get a replacement if your card was affected.

Nvidia GeForce global PR director Ben Berraondo tells The Verge:

We have identified a rare issue affecting less than 0.5% (half a percent) of GeForce RTX 5090 / 5090D and 5070 Ti GPUs which have one fewer ROP than specified. The average graphical performance impact is 4%, with no impact on AI and Compute workloads. Affected consumers can contact the board manufacturer for a replacement. The production anomaly has been corrected.

In the grand scheme of things, that doesn’t sound like a lot of affected GPUs, particularly because there weren’t a lot of 5090s on shelves to begin with, nor was it a huge hit to performance — as those who discovered the missing render units can already attest. But it is the latest in a line of annoyances with Nvidia’s latest pricy cards, including launch driver issues (including some ongoing black screen issues that Nvidia is still investigating) and some melting power connectors.

While limited, the manufacturing issue affected multiple Nvidia graphics card partners: reports came in of Zotac, MSI, Gigabyte, Manli, and even an Nvidia Founders Edition card with missing ROPs. You can use GPU-Z to check your card and see if it’s showing the proper number of 176 ROPs; if fewer, you should probably get it replaced.

Nvidia has yet to explain why it launched its GeForce RTX 5090 and 5080 GPUs with barely any inventory, some major launch driver issues, and the occasional melting power connector, but it has apparently reconsidered its stance when it comes to scalpers. The company’s just announced a way for Nvidia fans to sign up for “Verified Priority Access” to buy the elusive two-slot SFF-friendly RTX 5090 and 5080 Founders Edition graphics cards.

Like a similar Verified Priority Access program for the RTX 4090, the new program is invite-only, but this time you’ll apply for access by filling out this form rather than being pre-selected. The site will check that you’ve already had an Nvidia account (accounts created after January 30th need not apply) and ask you whether you’d prefer a 5090 or a 5080. Then, it’ll apparently use an algorithm to figure out if you’re a real gamer (analyzing your Nvidia app / GeForce Experience use) before offering a card. Limit one per person.

“Invites will begin rolling out next week,” writes Nvidia. The company doesn’t say how many cards have been allocated to this program, so it’s difficult to tell if this is a meaningful way to get cards to gamers rather than scalpers.

Remember PhysX, the GPU-accelerated technology that let games realistically simulate destructible cloth, shattering glass, moving liquids, smoke, fog, and other particle effects? It only ever got deployed in a few dozen games — but with 32-bit PhysX turned on, those games reportedly now run faster on Nvidia’s last-gen cards than they do on a new RTX 5090, 5080, 5070 Ti or beyond.

That’s because Nvidia has quietly removed support for PhysX in its latest graphics chips, the company confirmed this week, after buyers noticed PhysX games like Borderlands 2 were mysteriously taxing their CPU instead of their GPU and either chugging or failing to work. Nvidia points to a support page from January where it did say that the RTX 50 series would not support 32-bit CUDA applications, but that page doesn’t explicitly mention PhysX, and the company’s other PhysX support pages are several years old.

Again, we’re talking about mere dozens of games here, all over a decade old, but a good number of them were marketed by Nvidia as showcase PC games thanks to their physics simulations — and a handful of those were at least cult hits.

I fondly remember PhysX cloth effects in Mirror’s Edge (above) and the Batman: Arkham games. The best Assassin’s Creed also used it (Black Flag, the pirate one, don’t @ me) and so did Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light.

And as you can see in the video just above, PhysX just doesn’t run terribly well without a GPU’s assistance, tanking performance when its effects are most vividly felt on screen.

Over on the ResetEra forums, RandomlyRandom67 is maintaining an updated list of 32-bit PhysX games and how they perform on a CPU instead of a GPU — users are reporting that Mirror’s Edge, Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City, and Cryostasis all have significantly lower lows.

One Redditor claims that when they forced PhysX on in Borderlands 2, they “got drops to below 60 FPS by just standing and shooting a shock gun at a wall,” despite having a system with today’s top PC components (an RTX 5090 and an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D). They claim their RTX 4090 never dipped below 120fps in the same game.

I won’t terribly miss PhysX, because modern games have plenty of other ways to do physics built into their various engines, but Nvidia could probably have communicated this better. It’s also just the latest evidence that its RTX 50-series cards aren’t the upgrades we’d hoped. My colleague Tom reviewed the new RTX 5070 Ti today, and found it’s largely a cheaper RTX 4080, except maybe not cheaper because you probably won’t be able to find one anywhere near its $750 sticker price.

Nvidia’s older cards don’t seem to be losing value as a result of this year’s upgrades, either: the street price of an RTX 4080 has actually jumped over the past month, from an average eBay selling price of around $1,000 in January to over $1,200 now.

Acer CEO and chairman Jason Chen says your laptop will cost an extra 10 percent in the United States next month — and that his rivals might attempt price gouging if they think you’ll pay even more.

“We think 10pc probably will be the default price increase because of the import tax. It’s very straightforward,” he told The Telegraph, referring to President Trump’s 10 percent tariff on incoming goods from China. While big tech companies have generally been quiet on how they’ll respond to Trump tariffs, Acer says it just made the decision to increase prices last week, and it’ll take effect a few weeks from now.

It sounds like the price hike may not affect desktops, as Chen told The Telegraph that Acer had moved its desktop computer manufacturing outside China during Trump’s earlier tariffs during his first term. He said Acer might now consider moving some of its laptop manufacturing outside China too, with US manufacturing as “one of the options.”

But as of today, the vast majority of the world’s laptops are assembled in China — even US-based companies like Apple, Dell, or HP all look to contract manufacturers there.

The Telegraph doesn’t have a quote from Chen about possible price gouging, but rather puts it like this:

He said that some companies were likely to use the tariffs as an excuse to raise prices by more than 10pc.

We’ve reached out to other PC makers to see if they’ll follow suit. Apple, Dell, HP, and Lenovo didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment and didn’t comment for our earlier story; Asus and Razer are getting back to us.

Framework tells The Verge that its modular laptops themselves probably won’t be affected, but some of the modules themselves might. “Because we manufacture Framework Laptops and Mainboards in Taiwan, we have limited impact from the additional recently introduced tariffs. Some of our modules are manufactured in China, so we are taking this into account for future module pricing for US customers in the Framework Marketplace as we also continue to diversify our supply base,” says CEO Nirav Patel.

Personally, I can’t imagine using my smartphone as a baby steadicam anymore now that I have DJI’s Osmo Pocket 3 — we saw it everywhere at CES 2025, and its one-inch-type sensor offers image quality beyond what today’s smartphones allow.

But if you like the idea of sticking your phone into a set of stabilized motors on a stick, DJI’s just-announced $149 Osmo Mobile 7 Pro is the most feature-packed spin on the idea I’ve ever touched.

Now you can plop your selfie-stick down onto a surface with a new built-in tripod, pull eight inches of telescoping arm out of the top to give it reach, then snap on a new “Multifunctional Module” with a built-in computer vision camera to automatically track you, start and stop filming, and adjust framing, just by gesturing with your hands.

The Multifunctional Module unlocks other neat tricks too: it’s got a built-in fill light with adjustable color temperature that you can turn on by holding down the OM7 Pro’s side dial, and it’s a receiver for DJI’s excellent wireless microphones, including the DJI Mic Mini. It gets wirelessly powered right through DJI’s smartphone clamp thanks to a set of spring-loaded pogo pins, and you can attach it facing either direction if you want the assist for your phone’s selfie camera.

Perhaps most importantly, the module could dramatically reduce your need to use DJI’s app for filming. Previous gimbals required it for tracking, but historically it’s not always played nice with the newest camera features that smartphone makers offer. Now you can use your phone’s built-in camera app and still have it follow you autonomously. (DJI says its own Mimo app does now play nicer with the multi-lens switching, 4K60 recording and electronic image stabilization on more Android phones, but it’s more futureproof this way.)

The module’s tracking definitely works in my early tests, though the Multifunctional Module does get a bit hot — as it warns right on the module’s side. It’s also a bit of a battery drain. While DJI has upsized the battery to 12.06 watt-hours and quotes an upgraded 10 hours of battery life, the module cuts it in half to five hours with tracking, or four hours with tracking and the fill light on. (The Osmo Mobile 6’s 7.74Wh pack promised up to 6.5 hours, for comparison.)

I also like that the Osmo Mobile 7P still has a 1/4-inch tripod screw hole in addition to its built-in tripod, so you can mount it to other things, and you can still top up your phone from its USB-C port. I’m especially pleased to say that DJI will start selling a magnetic quick-release adapter so you can plop phones directly onto the gimbal instead of having to stretch apart a clamp — though that adapter won’t be compatible with the Multifunctional Module, and unlike that module, it won’t generally come in the box.

As far as I’m concerned, DJI’s own Osmo Pocket 3 sucked the air out of the room for smartphone gimbals, except in those cases where it’s easier to justify the $150 purchase for an existing phone instead of dropping $520 for better quality or because your iPhone workflow demands it. But I have to admit I’m jealous of the Osmo Mobile’s new tricks. Maybe DJI could make an Osmo Pocket 4 with a telescoping gimbal, pop-out tripod, and hand gestures?

The Pocket 3 ditched most of the Pocket and Pocket 2’s modular parts, proving that modularity wasn’t that product line’s real superpower, and I don’t think pocketability is necessarily it either. I think it’s having an ultra-steady camera that’s better and more versatile than today’s phones while still fitting into a shoulder bag, and I’d welcome even more of that versatility.

In addition to the $149 Osmo Mobile 7P, the company’s also announcing a new budget $89 Osmo Mobile 7 that comes in white rather than black. It also has the pull-out tripod, but ditches the telescoping selfie-stick, doesn’t come with the Multifunctional Module in the box, and doesn’t have the side dial to easily turn on the fill light and adjust focus or zoom.

Both should be shipping today from DJI’s website.

Two weeks ago, we exclusively reported Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks on how many pairs of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses the company had recently sold and might theoretically sell — 1 million pairs in 2024, with the possibility of reaching 2 million or even 5 million by the end of 2025.

But glasses giant EssilorLuxottica, which produces those glasses for Meta, has now publicly revealed 2 million pairs of Meta Ray-Bans have sold since their October 2023 debut, and that it’s aiming to produce 10 million Meta glasses each year by the end of 2026.

“A pair of eyeglasses will be the main digital platform addressing our daily needs,” EssilorLuxottica CEO and chairman Francesco Milleri said on the company’s FY2024 financial results call (via UploadVR).

Milleri says his company is “planning for the long term with Meta” and thinking about Meta’s Ray-Bans as a “shared platform” that’s “ready to embark on third-party brands,” not just a single product. Bloomberg reported last month that Meta is planning Oakley-branded glasses too. (Oakley is one of EssilorLuxottica’s many other brands of glasses.)

“In the light of such evolution, and in line with our ambitious plan, we are currently expanding our production capacity for Ray-Ban Meta, set to reach 10 million annual unit by the end of next year,” Milleri said on the call. In September, the two companies announced a long-term partnership through at least 2030.

Milleri suggested that all of Meta’s glasses would be “supported by AI,” hinted that subscription services are coming as well, and said EssilorLuxottica is looking forward to Meta’s multimodal AI features expanding worldwide.

My colleague Victoria Song recently tested Meta’s new Live AI and live translation features for the Meta Ray-Bans, and found both features intriguing but not quite ready for primetime — but we’ve called the glasses themselves a “turning point”, and clones were everywhere at CES.

Meta is spending big to make its glasses a hit, paying for not one but two Super Bowl ads and a limited edition Super Bowl set of the shades, and it just hired the former CEO of luxury goods site The RealReal as its new VP of retail for wearables.

To become “the main digital platform addressing our daily needs,” Meta and EssilorLuxottica would need to grow glasses by two orders of magnitude; Samsung and Apple each sell over 200 million phones per year. Ten million per year would barely scratch that surface.

Meta is reportedly working on a pair of glasses with a display for later in 2025; my colleague Alex Heath has written it will ship alongside a neural wristband you can use to control it.

As always, the most important Nvidia graphics card is the one you can actually buy, and Nvidia’s talked a big game for its RTX 5070, making the dubious but nuanced claim it can deliver RTX 4090 performance for just $549. On February 28th, AMD will get its chance to intercept with the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT, in a streaming event it just announced today. But Nvidia has now made its own wiggle room, delaying the launch of the RTX 5070 from February to March 5th, its product page reveals today.

Nvidia will ship its $749 RTX 5070 Ti ahead of AMD’s event, though, on February 20th, a week from today.

AMD has telegraphed that it won’t be competing with Nvidia’s latest and greatest cards, so price is the one big lever that AMD can potentially pull in order to compete. (The AMD Radeon 9070 cards appeared to be targeting Nvidia 4070 Ti and 4070 Super levels of performance, not necessarily higher.) But Nvidia, a company that can now make $20 billion in pure profit in a single quarter, could theoretically counter that if it feels it needs to, and now has more room to do so.

All that said, there is a rumor that AMD may be working on a more potent card than its already-announced RX 9070 and 9070 XT, one with 32GB of RAM. AMD gaming marketing boss Frank Azor says the 9070 XT won’t be a 32GB card, but did not address the larger rumor.

I like my phone, so I put a ring on it back in 2022 — the year my colleagues Jen and Allison introduced me to the Anker ring we now call “The best MagSafe phone grip”. It’s a simple magnetic ring attached to a non-magnetic finger ring that doubles as a kickstand.

But what if both rings were magnetic? What if both of them were the same size? What if each of them could stick to a phone — or a fridge, or a filing cabinet, or anywhere else you can stick one of their included adhesive-backed steel discs?

This thing exists. There are at least a dozen different varieties on the market now, each promising a folding quick-release variable angle phone mount that you can pocket and take a …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Nearly two years ago, Framework announced one of the most ambitious laptops ever live on a San Francisco stage, plus an AMD upgrade for its modular Intel machines. On February 25th, it’s promising “an even bigger set of announcements,” and that it’ll show “everything that we’ve been working on for the last two years.”

What could that mean? Well, the modular repairable gadget company did raise $18 million last April to expand beyond the laptop, but it’s not at all clear that’s what we’ll see, and a spokesperson wouldn’t comment when I asked. Instead, the company’s choosing to tease us with some pictograms! Look:

So we’re getting a “beach ball downward facing dog,” something Flash-y, and something worthy of a gamepad-only LAN party that serves knockoff Cheetos, yes?

(In all seriousness, my money’s on that first one being a convertible Chromebook with a backflipping 360-degree hinge — after all, Lenovo’s “Yoga” laptops famously cemented the convertible category.)

What are your guesses?

Three more things that caught my eye:

• “We will be opening pre-orders on at least one new item that day, so if you’re in the market for repairable, upgradeable, long-lasting consumer electronics products, you may want to create an account ahead of time to be ready.”
• “[W]e’re ready to bring this mission and product philosophy to even more of the world, one category at a time.”
• Framework fans willing to travel in the SF Bay Area can apply to attend in person.

Here’s the event page, with a live countdown and notify me button. Lastly, here’s the pre-prepped livestream which should go live at 10:30am PT / 1:30pm ET. Oh, and I’ll be there in person.

In 2023, when I realized small phones were truly dead, I decided I couldn’t wait for the Small Android Phone Project to revive them. That project, from the founder of the Pebble smartwatch, just wasn’t far enough along. Unfortunately, things aren’t any better in 2025 for small phone lovers — now that founder Eric Migicovsky is bringing back the Pebble smartwatch (yay!), he tells me he’s only “tangentially” working on small phones, and that they’re no longer “the top priority.”

“I really do hope someone else makes one so I don’t have to 😂,” writes Migicovsky.

I’m now one of a contingent of Samsung Galaxy Z Flip owners who is seriously considering trading in my Flip for a Galaxy S25. It’s not small, but it’s the closest thing we’ve got and my Flip’s battery doesn’t remotely last until bedtime anymore. I ask Migicovsky whether I can safely upgrade without feeling I might miss out on a possible Small Android Phone by, say, mid-2026. He says I can, without commenting on my proposed timeline.

At one point the phone project was targeting a 2024 release date and had gotten as far as creating an entire brand, Beep, to market it with, according to the portfolio of Small Android Phone Project industrial designer Alex De Stasio. He’d even dreamt up a billboard:

I’m still pretty excited for Migicovsky’s new project to revive the Pebble smartwatch — I loved my Pebble Time Steel and even owned two of them for a bit. You shouldn’t get your expectations up too high for that project, either, though: Migicovsky told the Android Faithful podcast that “this will not be a watch for everyone,” and expanded on that in a February 6th blog post:

Please don’t get your hopes up that the new watch will have X/Y/Z new feature. It’s going to be a Pebble and almost exactly as you remember it, except now with open source software that can you can modify and improve yourself. More hardware details will be shared in the future.

For the uninitiated, the original Pebbles were low-power devices whose best features were dead simplicity and battery life — no touchscreen, no digital crown, just a few buttons to help you read notifications and run a catalog of charming basic apps. That’s fine with me as long as the buttons are good!

A few other things he’s confirmed about the new Pebble so far:

• It will be new hardware, not an existing watch
• It’s targeting this specific chip as processor, which is marketed primarily as a Bluetooth SoC!
• You’ll be able to load your own firmware if you want to develop your own features

He told Android Faithful there are two software features he’d like to add. His “big thing” is to someday have a chat client, one that could address a limitation of early Pebbles by letting you see a whole conversation history on your wrist. The other is a basic AI handoff: “Pebble has a microphone, it has a screen… why can’t you talk to ChatGPT?”

Migicovsky should be in Shenzhen this week to meet with suppliers and factories for the new smartwatch.

Will Sony ever release a remake or remaster of Bloodborne, the Dark Souls successor that became one of our favorite games of 2015? Even Sony’s former games chief isn’t sure — but that isn’t stopping Sony’s copyright enforcers from shutting down fun in the meanwhile. Last week, it axed the 60fps mod that let the game finally run smoothly, and now it’s killed the fan-made “Bloodborne PSX” demake that reimagined Bloodborne as a block game for the original 1995 PlayStation.

It’s been over three years since Lilith “b0tster” Walther released her homage to early PlayStation games, and it’s only now that Sony is taking it down — or rather MarkScan, the enforcer that slapped the game with a copyright takedown notice that has now taken over its itch.io page.

Here’s a copy of the copyright takedown notice for posterity; it claims that Walther is engaging in “digital piracy.”

It’s not surprising that Sony wouldn’t want Walther to promote her work using its copyrighted names, and the company’s almost certainly within its rights to wait a few years before doing so. What’s surprising is that Sony needed an enforcer in the first place; Walther was happy to change her other “Bloodborne Kart” game to “Nightmare Kart” after Sony simply reached out and asked her.

But maybe that’s because MarkScan is playing whack-a-mole on Sony’s behalf. MarkScan was also the one behind the Bloodborne 60fps mod takedown, says mod creator Lance McDonald, and it also took down one of Walther’s YouTube videos about Bloodborne PSX with a copyright claim.

MarkScan has previously made headlines for taking down World Cup sites that weren’t even streaming the World Cup, and asking Google to remove some of Sony’s own websites on Sony’s behalf.

MarkScan submits millions upon millions of URL takedown requests on behalf of Sony, Amazon, Netflix, Crunchyroll, Novi Digital Entertainment and more, according to a Google transparency report; Google winds up removing around 47 percent of them.

Why go after these videos now? That’s what I’d like to know. Sony did get our hopes up by putting Bloodborne at the very end of its 30th Anniversary thank-you video in December with the words “It’s about persistence” — could it be a coded message to fans that they need to keep on waiting?

Here’s hoping this isn’t the beginning of a “demake” purge, as they’re a delightful and creative way to remix games; I doubt they substantially reduce the demand for true remakes.

Time is not on DJI’s side. 

The world’s largest drone maker has less than a year to convince the Trump administration to save its products from an automatic US ban — at a time when drone fears have been stoked more than ever. 

Some of those fears were exacerbated by DJI’s own bad timing: days after a small DJI drone took out a plane fighting the LA wildfires, the company chose to announce it would no longer enforce the “no-fly zones” it designed to keep such things from happening. The company will no longer stop its drones from flying over airports, power plants, or even the White House, a move it says it planned months ago and already rolled out in Europe and the UK.

How does getting rid of no-fly zones make drones safer? What can DJI do to escape a US ban? And what might happen if that ban comes into effect? 

We sat down with DJI head of global policy Adam Welsh and DJI public safety integration director Wayne Baker, and the answers seem to boil down to:

• No-fly zones don’t make drones safer, but they might make lifesaving flights easier;
• DJI stands to save some money in staffing costs by eliminating no-fly zones;
• DJI has an awful lot of convincing to d …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Two weeks ago, I showed you how the world’s fastest graphics card works in a small form factor PC. To my surprise, Nvidia’s RTX 5090 Founders Edition delivered the vast majority of its performance even in a 12.7-liter desktop with a five-year-old CPU.

It made me wonder: what if I plugged this card into a handheld gaming PC instead? So I did, and let me tell you: it’s a wonder to behold. It’s enough to make me believe in a rich future where handhelds get more powerful when you dock them at home.

I started with the same $1,999 RTX 5090 FE and 1000-watt power supply from my desktop test, dropping them both onto a $99 Minisforum DEG1. It’s an open-air external GPU that can connect to the Oculink port that’s now shipping in a handful of portable gaming PCs, so long as you bring your own desktop GPU and power supply. 

I plugged that Oculink cable into a $1,000 GPD Win Max 2 handheld. And then, with just an AMD Ryzen 8840U mobile CPU and four lanes of PCIe 4.0 bandwidth, rather than the 16 lanes of PCIe 5.0 that Nvidia’s GPU technically supports, my new Franken-desktop spit fire anyhow. I’m talking over 100 frames per second in Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K resolution and Ultra …

Read the full story at The Verge.

On January 9th, 56-year-old Peter Akemann flew his DJI Mini 3 Pro drone far beyond the legal limit of his ability to see — and into a Super Scooper water dumping plane fighting the Los Angeles Palisades wildfires, grounding it for repairs after punching a hole in its left wing. Now that authorities have traced the drone back to him, he agreed Friday to plead guilty — possibly escaping a year in prison in exchange for 150 hours of community service in support of wildfire relief and the roughly $65,000 it cost to repair the plane.

According to the plea agreement (PDF via Courthouse News), his drone flew quite a distance and the impact punched quite a hole:

While the Firefighting Aircraft was conducting its firefighting missions, defendant drove to the area near the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California, and parked his vehicle on the top floor of a parking structure. Defendant launched the Drone and flew it toward the Pacific Palisades to observe damage caused by the Palisades Fire. At the time, the Federal Aviation Administration had issued Temporary Flight Restrictions that prohibited drone operations near the Southern California wildfires, including the Palisades Fire.

Defendant flew the Drone at least 2500 meters away from its launch point and lost visual sight of the Drone while flying it. Thereafter, the Drone collided with the Firefighting Aircraft, causing an approximately 3-inch-by-6-inch hole in the left wing of Firefighting Aircraft.

The Hollywood Reporter writes that Akemann isn’t just any old drone pilot, but rather the former president and chief technologist of video game developer Skydance Interactive and the co-founder of Treyarch, a studio known for its Call of Duty and Spider-Man games. THR writes that he “recently left his role” at Skydance, which would be news in and of itself. Both the Akemann pleading guilty and the game developer are Peter T. Akemann. A LinkedIn page for Akemann no longer exists, and an X social media page for a Peter T. Akemann has been scrubbed.

It is possible that the US District Court will not accept Akemann’s plea agreement, which his lawyers are making jointly with the US Attorney’s Office, in which case he faces a year of prison time, a year of supervised release, and either up to a $100,000 fine or “twice the gross loss resulting from the offense,” whichever is greater.

Akemann’s attorneys told ABC News he’s now “deeply sorry for the mistake he made by flying a drone near the boundary of the Palisades fire area on January 9, 2025, and for the resulting accident” and “accepts responsibility for his grave error in judgment.”

They also added that there are “mitigating factors that will come to light during the court proceedings, including Mr. Akemann’s reliance on the DJI Drone’s geo fencing safeguard feature and the failure of that feature.”

DJI recently eliminated its most restrictive forms of geofencing, potentially letting drone pilots fly over active wildfires and government buildings like the White House when it might have previously stopped them automatically. That said, DJI recently explained to us that even the earlier versions of its software would not have stopped someone from flying over a temporary no-fly-zone, like a wildfire, unless that person let their drone download the updated temporary flight restriction lists first.

Correction Feb 1st: Akemann pleaded guilty to avoid prison, not jail.

Last quarter, amid turmoil and restructuring, chipmaker Intel announced one of the largest corporate quarterly losses of all time — $16.6 billion, ten times worse than its $1.6B loss the quarter before. But in today’s Q4 2024 and full-year earnings release, Intel’s not hurting as badly: the company just announced a mere $126 million quarterly loss on $14.3 billion in revenue, and its executives are talking about simplifying the company so it can win in the future.

The company isn’t in great shape despite the staunched bleeding, as its primary businesses were all down this quarter and barely up over the full year (see table below). And if you thought its chipmaking foundries were spending too much back when they lost $7 billion in 2023, well, Intel just revealed the foundries lost nearly double that — $13.4 billion — across 2024.

Some people would argue that foundry money is just the price Intel’s paying to invest in its future, catch up to rivals, and stay the only major chipmaker that designs and fabricates its chips from scratch. And by “some people,” I mean it was ousted Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger’s goal. But now he’s gone, there have been more whispers about Intel spinning off its chipmaking businesses, something Gelsinger somewhat seeded himself.

Today on the earnings call, Intel co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus didn’t commit to either keeping or spinning out the foundries, but hinted that “Intel Foundry will need to earn my business every day, just as I need to earn the business of my customers.” Either way, she seems to see them as a pair: “A stronger Intel Products combined with a more competitive Intel Foundry is a recipe for success overall.” Interim co-CEO David Zinsner says building that competitive foundry is still the goal.

Intel says its foundry business is doing better anyhow, with reduced losses of $2.3 billion last quarter, expected “financial improvements” coming next year as it ramps production of its extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) chips, and a plan to hit “op inc break-even” by the end of 2027. Intel was also the largest recipient of the CHIPS Act, though that amounted to single-digit billions worth of government funding for its foundries: $7.68 billion, of which it’s received $2.2 billion so far.

Intel says its all-important 18A process, which uses EUV, will produce chips in volume in the second half of next year. (That’s when Panther Lake, the successor to its Lunar Lake laptop chips, will arrive.) But a follow-on chip, Nova Lake, sounds like it’ll be a mix of Intel and non-Intel manufacturing. “You’ll actually see compute tiles inside and outside again, it’s about optimizing to what allows us to win in the market,” says Holthaus on the call.

Intel is also hurting in the great race for AI chips, with its Gaudi far behind Gelsinger’s goals, and Holthaus admits the company’s not doing well in the AI data center. “I am not happy with where we are today,” she said on the call, admitted that “we’re not yet participating in the cloud-based AI data center market in a meaningful way.”

To help speed things up, she says Intel is canceling its next big AI chip, codename Falcon Shores, and keeping it “as an internal test chip only without bringing it to market.” She says the plan is to “simplify our roadmap and concentrate our resources.” The company will focus on Jaguar Shores, a “system-level solution at rack scale,” instead, with the goal of building that entire solution rather than just the chips.

She also hinted that Intel might aim to be less pricy than the Nvidia AI competition, with the “most compelling total cost of ownership,” similar to what we’d heard from AMD.

Overall, Holthaus says she thinks about Intel’s future products in “three buckets”: client and edge, traditional data center, and AI data center, and she plans to simplify Intel’s business as a result. “We cannot be all things to all people,” she says. “We are prioritizing areas where we can drive differentiated value.” Within its core businesses, though, Holthaus says the company will “fight for every socket” where an Intel chip can go.

“We need to be aggressive, we need to win share, and we need to show our customers they can win with us,” says Holthaus.

Over the full year, Intel lost $18.76 billion on $53.1 billion in revenue. Intel says it has nothing new to share about the search for a permanent CEO, save that the search is progressing. Meanwhile, the company seems to be laying off just as many employees as promised: by the end of 2024, it had 15,000 fewer employees than it did the previous quarter, the company confirmed today.

This was the first Intel earnings call from Intel’s new interim co-CEOs, one of whom promised at CES 2025 that the company’s actually still committed to graphics, though we didn’t hear much else about graphics on today’s call.

Nvidia mildly blew our minds in 2020 when its graphics cards gained the ability to delete practically all the background noise from our audio calls with a free app, and now the company’s doing it again. My colleague and Verge senior news editor Richard Lawler just fired up Nvidia’s just-announced “Studio Voice” feature on his RTX 3070 — and it made his Logitech webcam’s awful built-in microphone sound downright respectable.

Take a listen:

The first clip you’ll hear is Richard on his podcasting mic, then the crummy Logitech C922 webcam mic, and lastly, the webcam mic with Nvidia’s feature turned on.

What a world we live in.

It’s part of an update to the free Nvidia Broadcast app, as is another new feature called “Virtual Key Light” that we found slightly less impressive, at least in our very first test. It’s supposed to “deliver even lighting, as if a physical key light was defining the form and dimension of an individual.” Here are Richard’s before and after shots of that:

Lastly — yes, it’s creepy as heck — Nvidia is still letting you deepfake your eyes to always look at the camera, and here’s Richard’s example of that combined with the new Virtual Key Light feature:

Technically, Nvidia says these features require an RTX 4080 or RTX 5090 and are “not recommended for gaming,” and we’re guessing that’s because they hit the GPU hard. “The key light seems to be stretching my 3070 to its limits,” says Richard. “But the voice thing works, I just couldn’t play a game at the same time based on how much VRAM it’s using.”

Nvidia says the new update also “improves voice quality with the Background Noise Removal feature, adds gaze stability and subtle random eye movements for a more natural appearance with Eye Contact, and improves foreground and background separation with Virtual Background.” You can find the Nvidia Broadcast app here.

Logitech sales boomed during the pandemic as people outfitted their home offices, and it’s getting a piece of the hybrid workplace with teleconferencing gear too. But Logitech’s also got a little-known corporate office management solution that could soon expand beyond conference rooms — using a pebble-shaped person detection device called the Logitech Spot.

It’s a millimeter wave radar sensor you can peel and stick up anywhere, letting companies invisibly see whether people are in a room. The company claims it’ll last four years on a single D-cell shaped lithium battery, no wires required at all.

It’s not just a radar sensor; it also measures particulates, VOCs, CO2, temperature, pressure, and humidity, so your company can get a health score for any given room. But the first clear draw is for companies to know whether workers are actually using their office space, and which rooms get used, as they make decisions about downsizing those offices, issuing return-to-office mandates, or reconfiguring them for hybrid work.

“They’re thinking about real estate footprint, what’s the right strategy,” Logitech for Business head of product Henry Levak tells me.

Levak says the radar sensors aren’t particularly powerful, when I bring up the idea that similar sensors could be used for pretty invasive snooping (like monitoring employees’ heartrate and breathing). The Logitech Spot is “initially” just reporting home whether a room is occupied, or not, and doesn’t even know how many people are in that room, he says. Logitech may also make the raw sensor data available to companies, though.

He says the radar can see roughly five meters away, and maybe up to two feet left or right, and could theoretically know the general placement of people in a room, but that’s about it. For larger rooms, companies are already widely using cameras to detect and track employees, he says, but this could be useful for smaller spaces where “you don’t want to have a camera pointed at people to see if they’re in the room or not.”

Each device can report back wirelessly via a LoRaWAN hub, using similar low-power long-range wireless tech to Amazon’s Sidewalk but without the peer-to-peer part. They’ve got Bluetooth as well.

Today, Logitech is marketing the Spot most immediately as a way to help automate meeting room reservations, hooking into the company’s existing solutions like its Logitech View interactive wayfinding touchscreen maps and its meeting room touchscreen controllers, as well as an array of partner workplace management software including Microsoft Teams and Zoom.

But like presence sensors in the smarthome, Levak says they could also automate all sorts of things and generate all sorts of insights. Things as simple as extending your room reservation if people are still using the room, or fixing the bad air quality or energy efficiency in a particular location. Or things as fancy as detecting whether a particular person has entered a particular room and setting their preferred temperature. Levak says you can use multiple Spots for larger rooms to help monitor temperature differentials, too.

Logitech hasn’t announced a price for the Spot yet, so it’s definitely too early to say if it’d be affordable for non-corporate use in, say, a smart home, but it does nominally require Logitech’s cloud to work. Levak says “some crafty person” could theoretically create a cloud connector using Logitech’s API’s, though. The Spot is scheduled to ship in the second half of the year.

Photos by Sean Hollister / The Verge

It might be time for a more unified platform.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Ayaneo builds the best-looking handheld PCs in the business, but they’ve always been boutique. The 2023 Ayaneo 2, for example, cost $1,300 for an arguably worse experience than the $400 Steam Deck. But that experience isn’t dampening my excitement for the new 7-inch Ayaneo 3.

Not only does this one start at $900, within striking distance of the highest-end handhelds you’ll find at retail, it’s the most feature-packed portable I’ve seen — with two USB4 ports and OcuLink and RGB-ringed Hall effect joysticks and your choice of two seemingly killer screens. Perhaps most exciting: a way to finally fix a handheld’s joystick and button layout to match your ergonomic preferences!

Just watch:

Animation by Ayaneo

Ayaneo is calling the Ayaneo 3 “the world’s first modular handheld,” because there’ll be other modular options too. An extra $139 buys a set of six modules that let you swap out your joysticks for analog sticks, a six-button microswitch pad for fighting games, or even D-pads and face buttons with conductive silicone underneath for a different feel.

Image: Ayaneo

But importantly, that basic module that lets you change joystick and button orientation and swap joystick caps comes with the handheld by default, and it’s not the only feature Ayaneo is impressively cramming into the $900 kit.

While you’ll “only” get a Ryzen 8840U, 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and 512GB of storage that that price — no Z2 option, and the HX 370 model starts at $1500 — you do get your choice of OLED or IPS right away.

That OLED screen is a 1080p 144Hz HDR OLED panel promising 800 nits of global brightness and 110 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut, specs which suggest it could even beat the Steam Deck OLED’s excellent screen.

Image: Ayaneo

Like the Deck OLED, it unfortunately doesn’t have variable refresh rate for added smoothness — but if that’s important, the IPS panel option does! That one’s a 120Hz, 500-nit, native landscape 1080p display, according to the company, with 7ms response time and only 100 percent sRGB coverage (read: nowhere near as colorful as the OLED panel).

On top of all that, the Ayaneo 3 comes standard with both top and bottom USB4 ports, both of which are capable of 65W PD charging, plus the still-rare-on-handhelds Oculink port for eGPUs, and it takes full-length M.2 2280 SSDs for easy storage upgrades.

Plus, there’s a dedicated hardware mode switch on the bottom edge to switch the controller and virtual-mouse-and-keyboard modes. I doubt that will make up for the current state of Windows, but it could help! Also, new trigger locks for its Hall effect triggers, if you want to switch them into a hair trigger mode.

I do have a few hesitations, even without having touched the Ayaneo 3. First, the company says its modules electronically latch into the frame — you have to eject them by pressing a software button, which activates a motor to release the latch. Sounds potentially fiddly?

Second, I’m sorry to report that this 1.5-pound handheld only fits a 49 watt-hour battery, even though the Asus ROG Ally X manages to fit an 80 watt-hour pack into roughly the same weight. Fingers crossed, but I wouldn’t expect great battery life here with neither a giant battery pack nor a particularly handheld-optimized chip.

Lastly, it’s always important to point out that these products are crowdfunded, and while Ayaneo has a history of delivering its promised handhelds, they haven’t always been great — and this is the most ambitious one yet. If that sounds worthwhile, you can find the Ayaneo 3 on Indiegogo here.

The company says the handheld should ship at the end of April; here’s the whole price breakdown.

Image: Ayaneo