Amazon is gearing up to launch new hardware to go along with its AI-upgraded Alexa. During an interview with Bloomberg, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company has a “brand new lineup of devices that are coming in the fall that are beautiful.”

On Wednesday, Amazon revealed Alexa Plus, a more conversational version of the smart assistant that’s capable of performing a wider range of tasks, such as ordering an Uber or finding concert tickets. Amazon says “almost every” Alexa device will support Alexa Plus, save for older Echo generations. Alexa Plus will cost $19.99 per month but will be included with a subscription to Prime.

Though Jassy didn’t share any other details about the new devices, it seems like the company plans to put an even bigger focus on displays. When asked about Amazon’s next-generation hardware, Panos Panay, Amazon’s head of devices and services, told my colleague Jennifer Tuohy that, “I believe in screens. I think they matter in a massive way.”

We’ve already seen this outlook impact Amazon’s lineup of products, as the company launched a new Echo Show with a larger 21-inch display after Panay joined in 2023.

Cricut has announced new versions of its crafting machines designed to print, cut, and emboss various materials using a collection of swappable tools. The new Cricut Maker 4 and Cricut Explore 4 are the first updates to both machines in nearly four years and offer faster cutting speeds for some materials, improved accuracy, and cheaper price tags. 

The machines will be available starting on February 28th, 2025. They’ll still start at $249.99 for the Cricut Explore 4, and at $399.99 for the Cricut Maker 4, and both will be available in sage and seashell color options. The four-year-old Cricut Explore 3 sells for $319, while the Maker 3 is $439, so the cheaper price tags for the 4-series line could help make the new machines more accessible to new users. Both models come with a bundle of crafting materials to complete 10 initial projects.

The Cricut Maker 4 and Explore 4 look nearly identical to their predecessors but are up to twice as fast when cutting through materials like cardstock and vinyl, Cricut says. The speed improvements won’t be quite as dramatic when using thicker materials, but the upgrade will still appeal to crafters who sell their creations on sites like Etsy and are looking to upgrade their output.

Cricut has also introduced a new optical sensor on both models that works alongside a light that better illuminates materials, according to CNET. The upgrade should help improve cutting accuracy, no matter what the lighting conditions are in your crafting room.

Although there are differences between both machines’ capabilities, they’re mostly dependent on the types of projects you’re looking to create. The pricier Cricut Maker 4 is designed to work with over 300 different types of materials, including thicker options like leather and balsa wood, and a wider variety of cutting and embossing tools. The cheaper Cricut Explore 4 is limited to around 100 different materials, including thinner stock like vinyl, card stock, and iron-ons.

In 2021, the company frustrated existing users with plans to limit monthly uploads to its Design Space software used to prep projects before sending them to the machines. Subscription fees were announced for users wanting to expand the number of designs they could upload, but after much backlash, Cricut scrapped those plans entirely.

While the new machines don’t require subscriptions, the company still offers a Cricut Access subscription for users who heavily rely on pre-made designs and projects available through its Design Space app. Cricut Access also expands the number of fonts and images available through the app and includes discounts on materials.

Apple announced in a whitepaper that it plans to introduce a bunch of new child safety features, including letting parents share their kids’ age ranges with apps, refreshing the App Store’s age ratings system, and making it easier for parents to set up Child Accounts for their kids. The company says it will introduce the features “this year.”

Companies like Meta, Snap, and X have called for platforms to be responsible for verifying the ages of users at the OS or app store level. Apple also reportedly lobbied against a proposed bill in Louisiana that would have required the company to enforce age restrictions.

In the whitepaper, Apple argues that age verification “at the app marketplace level” wouldn’t be ideal, as it would require users to hand over “sensitive personally identifying information” to the company. “That’s not in the interest of user safety or privacy,” Apple says. 

The age sharing system gestures in that direction without going so far as to fully verify each user’s age. With the age range feature, “parents can allow their kids to share the age range associated with their Child Accounts with app developers,” Apple says.

The age range will “be shared with developers if and only if parents decide to allow this information to be shared,” and parents will be able to disable sharing. The feature also won’t “provide kids’ actual birthdates.” Developers will be able to request the age ranges with a new API that Apple says is a “narrowly tailored, data-minimizing, privacy-protecting tool to assist app developers who can benefit from it.”

“Today’s announcement is a positive first step, however, developers can only apply these age-appropriate protections with a teen’s approval,” Meta spokesperson Jamie Radice says in a statement to The Verge. “Parents tell us they want to have the final say over the apps their teens use, and that’s why we support legislation that requires app stores to verify a child’s age and get a parent’s approval before their child downloads an app.”

As for App Store ratings will expand from four thresholds to five; the new categories will be Age 4 plus, 9 plus, 13 plus, 16 plus, and 18 plus. In their app listings, developers will be asked to highlight “whether apps contain user-generated content or advertising capabilities that can impact the presence of age-inappropriate content” and if apps have their own content controls.

Apple says that the App Store won’t show kids apps with age ratings “in the places where we feature apps on our storefront” that are higher than what their parents set on their accounts.

As for Child Accounts, Apple says that it will introduce a new setup process and let parents fix the age associated with the account if it wasn’t set up correctly.

Update, February 27th: Added Meta statement.

Microsoft is releasing a native Copilot app for macOS today. Much like the Windows app, the Copilot version for Mac will provide access to the web-based version of Microsoft’s AI assistant, where you can upload images and generate images or text.

The macOS version of Copilot also includes a dark mode and a shortcut command to activate the AI assistant by using Command + Space — much like the Alt + Space on the Windows version. Microsoft is launching this new Copilot Mac app in the US, UK, and Canada today, and the iPad version is also being updated with a split screen mode.

You’ll also now be able to log into Copilot on an iPhone or iPad with an Apple ID, and upload text or PDF files to ask questions about the documents or generate a summary about them. This document summarization feature is also coming to the macOS app soon.

The launch of Copilot on macOS comes just days after Microsoft made Copilot Voice and Think Deeper free with unlimited use. Previously, both Think Deeper (powered by OpenAI’s o1 model) and Voice in Copilot had limits for free users, but Microsoft has now removed these to allow Copilot users to have extended conversations with the company’s AI assistant.

Oh, Alexa, how you’ve changed. The long-awaited new Alexa, Alexa Plus, is set to bring a more conversational, context-aware, and capable assistant to your smart home. With a new voice (eight of them, in fact) and a new attitude, this is the biggest change to the voice assistant since it debuted in 2014. And it all sounds very impressive.

Announced at a press conference in New York City this week, Alexa Plus offers several new generative AI-powered abilities to help you manage your life, plus some major smart home upgrades. I was at the event and saw several staged demos of the new features but also got to try out some of the smart home improvements for myself. 

The biggest change is how Alexa can respond to natural language; the demo showed that you can talk to it and say what you want rather than having to remember specific commands. I saw the new Alexa understand and execute commands such as, “Bring the lights up in here and set to a warm glow.” The GE Cync smart bulbs and light strips in the room responded, despite the request not including a room or specific names for each device.

Then, when instructed to “Turn on the lamp in the sitting area,” Alexa was apparently able to “reason” that meant the lamp named “Sofa lamp.” This should mean no more memorizing specific device names, making it easier for anyone in the home to control devices with their voice.

I was also able to talk to the assistant myself and try out its new ability to follow multiple commands at once without needing to repeat the wake word, Alexa. I asked it to dim the lights and “make it a little warmer.” The thermostat adjusted while the lights dimmed. Alexa said, “I dimmed the lights in the living room and increased the temperature by two degrees; is there anything else you need?” I then said, “Can you vacuum the floor?” It replied, “Okay,” and the Roomba started a job. 

Another new feature I tried was the ability to set up a smart home routine just by using voice. I told Alexa I’d been having trouble waking up recently, and after some back-and-forth, it created a “Good Morning” routine that set an alarm to wake me up to Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” and adjust the smart lights in my room. 

That’s a fairly simple one because there weren’t a lot of devices connected to the Show. But Amazon says that, courtesy of its knowledge of hundreds of smart home APIs, Alexa is capable of creating more complex routines through voice. This should make it easier for people to do more with their connected devices and not have to spend time programming an app.

The other exciting upgrade is the new Echo Show UI. This is launching on the 15 and 21, but Scott Durham of Amazon told me it will come to the Show 8 and 10 at some point. With a cleaner, sleeker full-screen UI with larger widgets to take advantage of the screen size (I saw it demoed on the 21-inch screen), it’s now more customizable and feels more like a tablet interface than a smart display. During the demo, it appeared to move smoothly and quickly with limited lag. 

The UI now has a much larger calendar and smart home widgets. A handy new feature is the ability to send images, documents, and notes to your [email protected] email address or through the Alexa app or new web interface. From there, Amazon says it can parse things like events and add them to your calendar, as well as let you ask questions about the information. Apparently, it can even decipher all the info in that lengthy school email and set reminders to tell you what you need to send in on which days.

The smart home control UI has been lifted from the excellent interface on the Echo Hub, giving you easy touch control of devices in your home when you don’t want to use voice or a smartphone. And when you take it full screen, it’s now much easier to switch between rooms and devices. Alexa’s Map View is here, too, and it looks great on the big screen. 

A new Ring camera integration feature lets Alexa Plus query Ring’s Smart Video Search to show you summaries of events that happened around your house or pull specific instances like, “Did a package arrive?” or “Did someone let the dog out?”

Another big improvement coming with Alexa Plus is new cooking controls. Currently, following recipes on an Echo Show can be fiddly and frustrating; with Alexa Plus, the assistant gets more proactive. It can now take ingredients from recipes and add them to a shopping list, let you use natural language to add additional items, and arrange to have them delivered to you (with Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh as well as “several other grocery providers.”)

Alexa can also come up with recipes based on ingredients you tell it you have on hand and suggest substitutions for items you’re out of. The kitchen is one of the most useful places for hands-free voice control, and if this works well, I can see it being very helpful. I’m most excited about the new timer feature, which takes all the time-based steps in the recipe — such as whisk for two minutes or bake at 350 degrees for 35 minutes — and automatically sets them for you to kick off when you’re ready.

Aaron Rubenson of Amazon told me that thanks to Alexa’s improved natural language skills, it interfaces better with smart kitchen appliances. So, instead of having to use specific nomenclature to get it to preheat my Thermador oven, it should respond to any command that implies I want my oven on. For example, “Alexa, can you set the oven to the right temperature for this recipe?”

I’ve used Alexa for close to a decade now, and while it has its uses, it’s never felt indispensable. This is largely because of how tricky it is to talk to correctly. I’ve had to learn Alexa-speak to get it to do anything reliably, often making it more frustrating than useful. If the new Alexa can work as well in my home as it did in the demos I saw this week, this will be a major shift in home automation.

OpenAI is launching GPT-4.5 today, its newest and largest AI language model. GPT-4.5 will be available as a research preview for ChatGPT Pro users to start. OpenAI is calling the release its “most knowledgeable model yet,” but initially warned that GPT-4.5 is not a frontier model and might not perform as well as o1 or o3-mini.

GPT-4.5 will have better writing capabilities, improved world knowledge, and what OpenAI calls a “refined personality over previous models.” OpenAI says interacting with GPT 4.5 will feel more “natural,” adding that the model is better at recognizing patterns and drawing connections, making it ideal for writing, programming, and “solving practical problems.”

However, OpenAI notes it won’t introduce enough new capabilities to be considered a frontier model. “GPT-4.5 is not a frontier model, but it is OpenAI’s largest LLM, improving on GPT-4’s computational efficiency by more than 10x,” OpenAI said in a document that leaked ahead of its announcement. “It does not introduce 7 net-new frontier capabilities compared to previous reasoning releases, and its performance is below that of o1, o3-mini, and deep research on most preparedness evaluations.” OpenAI has since removed this mention from an updated version of the document.

It was previously reported that OpenAI was using its o1 reasoning model, codenamed Strawberry, to train GPT-4.5 with synthetic data. OpenAI says it has trained GPT-4.5 “using new supervision techniques combined with traditional methods like supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), similar to those used for GPT-4o.”

Despite some of its limitations, GPT-4.5 hallucinates a lot less than GPT-4o, according to OpenAI, and slightly less than its o1 model. “We aligned GPT-4.5 to be a better collaborator, making conversations feel warmer, more intuitive, and emotionally nuanced,” Raphael Gontijo Lopes, a researcher at OpenAI, said during the company’s livestream. “To measure this, we asked human testers to evaluate it against GPT-4o, and GPT-4.5 outperformed on basically every category.”

In a post on X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that GPT-4.5 is a “giant, expensive model” and that it “won’t crush benchmarks.”

Following its launch for Pro users, OpenAI says GPT-4.5 will roll out to Plus and Team users next week and then to Enterprise and Edu users after that. It’s also available now in Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry platform, along with new models from Stability, Cohere, and Microsoft.

We revealed in Notepad last week that OpenAI was planning to launch GPT-4.5 by the end of February, and GPT-5 as soon as late May. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has referred to GPT-5 as a “system that integrates a lot of our technology,” and it will include OpenAI’s new o3 reasoning model, which the company teased during its 12 days of Christmas announcements in December.

While OpenAI released o3-mini last month, OpenAI is only shipping o3 as part of its upcoming GPT-5 system. This aligns with OpenAI’s goal to combine its large language models to eventually create a more capable model that could be labeled as artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

Update, February 27th: Noted that OpenAI changed its GPT-4.5 system card and added information from Sam Altman.

I tell Amazon’s Alexa to shut up on a near daily basis. I have almost zero interest in speaking to Gemini after our first awkward chat. The hitches, misunderstandings, and lag in any given AI “conversation” mean I’m always wasting time speaking when I could be texting instead. 

But speaking to “Maya,” one of two voices from a new startup headed by the man who built Oculus VR and sold it to Facebook, is the first time I’ve been left wanting more. Like I could just talk to it, or at least play a genuinely fun game of testing its limits, like I did with Bing before Microsoft decided to tame down its unhinged persona.

I don’t have to describe it to you: you can try it, and you can listen to my first conversation yourself just below. Fair warning: I am a nerd! Confronted with a new voice assistant, I will ask it to dream up a Dungeons & Dragons-esque adventure and quiz it about small Android phones. 

But here you go:

While I could absolutely still hear some chatbot nonsense coming through the cracks, I could easily interject – I asked Maya to inject “herself” into the adventure “she” was describing, and it did so without a hitch, immediately coming up with a Gnome engineer named Maya cobbling together deathtraps to protect my castle from incoming Orc invaders. Combined with the AI’s natural-sounding pauses, it felt more like a real conversation than anything I’ve had so far. Compared to my colleague Kylie Robinson’s conversation with ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode last year, it feels like we’re somewhere much more compelling. 

The company behind this is called Sesame, and it’s coming out of stealth today with an undisclosed amount of funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, and Matrix Partners —- all of which were big Oculus VR investors — with Oculus co-founder and former CEO Brendan Iribe, former Ubiquity6 CTO and co-founder Ankit Kumar, and former Meta Reality Labs research engineering director Ryan Brown in charge.

And the company says it’s building AI glasses to go along with its new voice assistant, too, ones “designed to be worn all day, giving you high-quality audio and convenient access to your companion who can observe the world alongside you.” So far, it’s only sharing a few small images of what look like early prototypes:

Sesame has a mini white paper you can read on its website, describing the model and its dataset of around one million hours of “publicly available audio.” It says it plans to both open source its models, and expand from just English to over 20 languages “in the coming months.”

Is this “crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice,” as Sesame titles its blog post? Perhaps check it out and decide for yourself.

Meta has fired “roughly 20” employees who leaked “confidential information outside the company,” according to a spokesperson.

“We tell employees when they join the company, and we offer periodic reminders, that it is against our policies to leak internal information, no matter the intent,” Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold tells The Verge exclusively. “We recently conducted an investigation that resulted in roughly 20 employees being terminated for sharing confidential information outside the company, and we expect there will be more. We take this seriously, and will continue to take action when we identify leaks.”

Meta has ramped up its efforts to find leakers due to a recent influx of stories detailing unannounced product plans and internal meetings, including a recent all-hands led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. After we and other outlets reported on what Zuckerberg said during that meeting, employees were warned not to leak. In comments that were subsequently leaked, CTO Andrew Bosworth then told them that the company was “making progress on catching people.” 

Morale inside Meta has suffered since Zuckerberg announced drastic changes to content moderation policies, end …

Read the full story at The Verge.

PlayerUnknown Productions, the studio from PUBG creator Brendan Greene (aka PlayerUnknown), has shared a gameplay trailer for Prologue: Go Wayback!, a single-player survival game that’s launching in early access on Steam this year.

The studio previously shared that the game would be built with “machine-learning-driven terrain generation technology,” and in this new trailer, you can see some gorgeous, wooded areas on display. In the game, you’ll also have to deal with various types of weather, including pouring rain and heavy snow. The point of the game, according to a fact sheet, is to explore and survive so that you can find a weather station to call for help.

Prologue is just one of three games in the works from PlayerUnknown Productions. The “ultimate project,” dubbed Project Artemis, is going to be “a massive multiplayer sandbox experience” that builds on the technology featured in Prologue and a tech demo, Preface: Undiscovered World, that’s available on Steam.

Katy Perry will fly to space during Blue Origin’s next crewed mission, the Jeff Bezos-owned space company has announced. The pop star will join CBS host Gayle King and Bezos’s fiancé Lauren Sánchez aboard the New Shepard rocket this spring, marking its 11th human flight.

Along with Perry and Sánchez, who is known for her work as a news anchor and correspondent, the crew will include research scientist and activist Amanda Nguyen, film producer Kerianne Flynn, and former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe. Sánchez first revealed her plans to lead an all-female Blue Origin mission in 2023, but she didn’t mention who she would take on the flight at the time.

Blue Origin’s most recent human spaceflight took place earlier this week, with a six-person crew reaching the edge of space and experiencing zero gravity for a few minutes before returning to Earth. Since 2021, Blue Origin has taken 52 people to space aboard its New Shepard rocket, including Star Trek’s William Shatner and Bezos himself.

Microsoft might say its top priority right now is security, but it’s been clear for months that AI is just as important. The odd division out has been Xbox, which hasn’t discussed its use of AI much in public. But that changed last week when Microsoft ripped the band-aid off and waded, somewhat clumsily, into the debate over AI in gaming.

Last Wednesday, Microsoft revealed Muse, its new AI model that can generate gameplay. It was trained on Ninja Theory’s Xbox game Bleeding Edge, and it can understand a 3D world and physics and then respond to players’ interactions. While Muse is a Microsoft Research project at heart, Microsoft presented it in a way that linked it directly to Xbox and the future of the company’s gaming efforts. That has divided opinion between those who argue that Microsoft will use this model to build games and lay off developers, and others who think this is still very early and simply another tool in a game developer’s kit.

I’ve been speaking to game developers over the past week to get a better understanding of the response to Muse. Of the handful I’ve spoken to, no one is willing to speak on the record for reasons like career concerns and th …

Read the full story at The Verge.

From Monster Hunt Wilds to Ninja Gaiden 4, there are a ton of great Xbox Series X / S games coming out this year. Luckily, if you need more storage to play them all, Western Digital’s officially licensed WD_Black C50 Storage Expansion Card for Xbox is down to its best price since Black Friday, with the 1TB model going for $109.99 ($48 off) at Amazon, B&H Photo, and SanDisk’s online storefront. You can also pick up the 2TB configuration from Amazon, B&H Photo, and SanDisk for $199.98 (about $50 off), which — like the 1TB version — is just $10 more than its lowest price to date.

Like Seagate’s Storage Expansion Cards, Western Digital’s NVMe-based expansion cards are one of the few on the market that not only store games but also let you play them directly from your console’s storage (no data transfer required). They offer speeds that are nearly as fast as your console’s built-in storage, too, so you don’t need to worry about running into any performance issues like you would if you were to use a traditional external hard drive or other USB-based storage solutions. 

What’s nice, too, is that they support many of the quality-of-life features found on Microsoft’s latest consoles, including the handy Quick Resume function, which allows you to run multiple titles simultaneously and quickly switch between suspended games in an instant. The compact plug-and-play cards are also incredibly easy to install — just insert them into one of the dedicated ports on your console, and you’re all set. 

Lazarus, Shinichirō Watanabe’s upcoming anime about  a world plunged into chaos by a mysterious miracle drug, finally has a premiere date.

Today, Adult Swim announced today that Lazarus will debut on April 5th with encores hitting Max on Thursdays beginning April 10th. Along with the announcement, Adult Swim also dropped a new Lazarus trailer teasing how the show’s story is kicked into motion when people start discovering that a popular, seemingly-harmless painkiller is actually a deadly poison designed to eliminate humanity.

In a statement about the show, Adult Swim president Michael Ouweleen sand Watanabe’s praises and said the network was “lucky to be able to watch this genius do his thing.”

“We’re talking Watanabe here — this show is an amazing mix of great characters, super fun high-stakes, brilliant directing, and of course, some pretty great music,” Ouweleen said.

When we spoke with Watanabe about Lazarus last year, he didn’t want to share too much about how the show will be a rumination on the real world opioid crisis, but he promised that “all my thoughts about the future are reflected pretty strongly in the series, and I want people to experience it for themselves.”

While Elon Musk hacks away at the federal bureaucracy in the name of “efficiency,” his company Starlink appears poised to steal a multibillion-dollar government contract from Verizon.

The Federal Aviation Administration is on the cusp of canceling a $2.4 billion contract to overhaul the communication system for the nation’s air traffic control system and handing it to the SpaceX subsidiary instead, The Washington Post reports, citing two unnamed sources briefed on the plans. The news was also confirmed by Bloomberg and The Associated Press.

It’s unclear exactly how this would unfold — whether the FAA would hand some of the work to Starlink while allowing Verizon to continue its own effort or simply cancel the contract with Verizon and award it to Starlink. Whatever the outcome, it is sure to raise accusations of favoritism, cronyism, and conflicts of interest, as Musk continues to serve as the face of the Department of Government Efficiency-run effort to slash spending and lay off federal workers, despite the structural damage that causes.

Musk has been sowing doubt about the Verizon system for several days, claiming without evidence that it’s “not working and so is putting air travelers at serious risk.” Earlier today, he posted on X that the Verizon communication system is “breaking down very rapidly” and that the “FAA assessment is single digit months to catastrophic failure, putting air traveler safety at serious risk.” He also claimed that Starlink terminals would be provided at “NO COST to the taxpayer on an emergency basis to restore air traffic control connectivity.”

This, of course, follows a pattern, in which Musk posts on X about something regarding the FAA and then seems to will it into existence. Previously, the billionaire called for FAA administrator Michael Whitaker’s resignation, after the agency fined SpaceX for failing to get approval for rocket launch changes. After his repeated comments, Whitaker resigned on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration.

A team from SpaceX, Starlink’s parent company, has been working within the FAA in recent weeks to help modernize the agency’s aging technology system. US Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said they were tasked with developing “a new, better, modern and safer system.”

Several SpaceX employees now have FAA email addresses, the Post reports. One SpaceX employee posted a photo of the team on X, with the statement, “Working to improve the safety of the national air space system.”

The FAA was scheduled to make a decision to start paying out the Verizon contract next month. But the SpaceX team reportedly recommended it be awarded to Starlink instead, the Post reports, citing an unnamed source with knowledge of the plans. So far, the formal process of unwinding one contract and awarding it to another company has reportedly not been followed. Several senior FAA officials have refused to sign the contract, leading Musk’s team to seek help from a Trump appointee within the agency.

Much of Musk’s wealth comes from government largesse. According to the Post, his companies have received approximately $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits over the years.

There have been four commercial aircraft crashes globally in the last 11 weeks, as well as a handful of private plane crashes and several near misses. Meanwhile, the air traffic control system appears to be in chaos, with hundreds of employees cut. Despite air travel being safer than it has ever been before, many people are left with the perception of a global aviation system that’s coming apart at the seams.

President Donald Trump says his 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, and additional 10 percent tariff on Chinese imports, will go into effect as scheduled on March 4th, unless imports of drugs including fentanyl are stopped or “seriously limited.”

“Drugs are still pouring into our Country from Mexico and Canada at very high and unacceptable levels,” Trump writes in a Truth Social post, without elaborating on the source of his information. “A large percentage of these Drugs, much of them in the form of Fentanyl, are made in, and supplied by, China.”

Earlier this month, the president agreed to pause tariffs on Canada and Mexico for one month, but the new post indicates that the Trump administration is preparing for those agreements to expire. He adds that a separate April 2nd deadline for reciprocal tariffs on countries that impose their own fees on US imports remains in effect. That later wave of tariffs could include a 25 percent tax on computer chips.

While many companies have stayed quiet on the effect of the tariffs, a few are warning consumers of price increases. Acer says a 10 percent import tariff will result in a 10 percent increase of its l …

Read the full story at The Verge.

If you play Roblox on a Chromebook, things could feel faster soon. Roblox is rolling out an x86 version of the game “built specifically for Chromebooks,” where players can expect “up to 2x faster performance on x86 devices across all your favorite games and experiences,” according to a ChromeOS blog post.

This will translate to “smoother gameplay, quicker load times, and an overall better Roblox experience,” the blog post says, and it includes a few vague charts to help support that. Frame rates in two popular experiences, Adopt Me! and Brookhaven RP, will increase by 99 percent and 67 percent, respectively, but the post doesn’t include the specific frame rate counts. “While it varies by device, some saw increases of 15 frames per second or more on the same hardware,” Google spokesperson Peter Du tells The Verge.

Load times in those games will apparently be reduced by 54 percent and 55 percent, too, but there aren’t specifics in the post on exactly how many seconds those improvements will shave off.

The blog post also says that Chromebook players will be able to get a “special Chrome jetpack for your avatar” and an item in Bloxburg, another popular Roblox game. And YouTube Shorts creators can try out a new Shorts effect that gives you a Roblox-themed head.

Update, February 27th: Added a quote from Google.

Bad news for folks hoping the Powerbeats Pro 2 can replace their chest strap at the gym: while the workout buds are great at playing music and can connect to various gym equipment to track heart rate, they can’t do both at the same time. At least, not on iOS.

The issue was pointed out in YouTuber DC Rainmaker’s review of the buds. Rainmaker, who’s trusted by fitness enthusiasts for his rigorous heart rate and GPS testing, says that Apple confirmed the issue. The Verge also reached out for further clarification, but did not immediately receive a response.

In my testing, I unfortunately couldn’t get the Powerbeats Pro 2 to connect with the treadmills or bikes at my local gym (because it’s hard to get any peripherals to connect to the ancient machines there). Regardless, it’s counterintuitive to make users choose between heart rate and music on gym equipment. The whole draw of adding heart rate to headphones is that you can theoretically consolidate workout peripherals.

Rainmaker, and other fitness influencers like Shervin Shares, also maintain that the Powerbeats Pro 2 don’t track heart rate on iOS apps as reliably as they do on Android apps. On that front, Apple and Beats told The Verge in a press briefing that heart rate features on iOS were limited to seven partner apps at launch: Runna, Nike Run Club, Open, YaoYao, Slopes, Peloton, and Ladder. We were told that apps like Strava, Zwift, and even Apple’s own Fitness Plus are incompatible with heart rate tracking, but that Apple hopes to expand the partner list in the future.

In the iOS partner apps, the heart rate function is supposed to start up automatically without the user having to do anything. I tested the Powerbeats Pro 2 with Peloton and Ladder on iOS and had zero issues with connectivity and accuracy, though I stuck to low-to-mid intensity workouts like yoga and strength training.

These app limitations, however, don’t apply to Android — the buds work with any Android app that supports a Bluetooth heart rate tracker. One could argue this all traces back to Apple wanting things to “just work” within its ecosystem — and the complications arising from that. For example, the buds are programmed so that if you use them with an Apple Watch, the Apple Watch’s heart rate data will always take precedence even if you’d prefer to use the Powerbeats instead. Users aren’t given a choice. The buds don’t, however, impose that limitation on other third-party headphones with heart rate tracking, like the Sennheiser Momentum Sport or chest straps.

For these reasons, plus the fact that it’s unwieldy to view the Powerbeats Pro 2’s heart rate data in the Health app, we noted in our review that the heart rate feature isn’t particularly useful — especially for athletes who use Apple Watches or want the greatest freedom over their heart rate peripherals.

Update, February 27th: Clarified that the gym equipment and music issue affects iOS only. 

Disney Plus will begin exclusively airing a bite-sized version of ESPN’s SportsCenter, the company announced on Thursday. The show, called SC Plus, will feature a “fast-paced” update with the day’s most important moments in sports. It debuts on March 3rd.

SC Plus will be based on SportsCenter’s top 10 format, offering a quick rundown of notable plays and other highlights. SportsCenter’s Gary Striewski and Randy Scott will host the show weekdays at 9AM ET, while Hannah Storm and Jay Harris will take over on weekends. Each episode will run for around 15 minutes, according to Variety, and will be aimed at more casual sports fans.

The move continues to blur the line between Disney Plus and ESPN Plus, as Disney already added an ESPN tile to Disney Plus in December 2024. The new SC Plus show could also give viewers a taste of what to expect from the more expansive ESPN streaming service coming later this year, which will include live content from the network’s linear channels, along with additional features like betting.

DoorDash is paying restitution after keeping tips from as many as 63,000 of its New York delivery workers thanks to a settlement with the New York Attorney General’s office, The New York Times reports. Attorney General Letitia James announced on Monday that DoorDash will pay $16.8 million, which will be spread across workers who were subjected to the company’s “guaranteed pay” model that subsidized payments against customer tips.

DoorDash will additionally pay up to $1 million in administrator costs to help make the payments happen. Some workers are expected to get several thousand dollars, others as much as $14,000, a spokesperson for the New York Attorney General’s office told The New York Times. The Office of the Attorney General will determine which workers are eligible and how much they’re repaid. DoorDash also made similar settlements with Illinois for $11.3 million in November and with Washington DC for $2.5 million in 2020.

From May 2017 through September 2019, DoorDash’s payment model would “guarantee” a certain payout to workers whether customers tipped or not. However, what the company didn’t make clear was that it was really giving a base pay of $1 and would use tips from customers before doling out money towards the guaranteed amount. For instance, if a delivery job had guaranteed payment of $10 to the worker and the customer tipped $6, DoorDash would pay the worker $1 plus the $6 tip, then fill in the remaining $3 to add up to the guarantee. If they tipped $7 or $8, the worker wouldn’t be paid anything extra — DoorDash would pocket the difference instead.

DoorDash’s model of using tips for workers’ base pay came into light in July 2019 and was met with scrutiny by the workers and customers which pushed the company to promise change in the policy. In an August 2019 response to the situation, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu tweeted that they thought they were “​​doing the right thing for Dashers by making them whole if a customer left no tip, but the feedback we’ve received recently made clear that some of our customers who were leaving tips felt like their tips didn’t matter.”

Not only was the guaranteed pay system deceitful to workers, the state complaint alleged, but it was also misleading to customers since the app promised “Dashers will always receive 100 percent of the tip,” which is only technically accurate. The New York Attorney General’s office also noted that disclosures of how tips work were buried to the point of inaccessibility during the ordering process.

During the 2021 pandemic, DoorDash and Grubhub were also sued by the city of Chicago for unfair fees and tipping policies. The case is ongoing.

Many years ago, I built my first PC inside a repurposed Gateway chassis with just a regular old screwdriver and a grounding bracelet. I’ll spare you the ugly details, but let’s just say I wish I had tools specially made for the job. If you want to avoid pain in your own projects, you should consider picking up Hoto’s 48-in-1 Electric Precision Screwdriver set. It has everything you need to pry open gadgets for fine adjustments, yet costs just $69.99 ($40 off) on sale at Amazon and Walmart. That price matches the record low from Black Friday.

The cordless electric screwdriver is a bit skinnier but longer than some of the other Hoto variants we’ve recommended, which is what you want in tighter quarters. It offers two torque speeds, allowing you to dial it up for stubborn screws or down for softly reassembling fragile items.

Among the included magnetic screwdriver bits are half a dozen options with 45mm shafts for extra reach. You’ll get 20 more 28mm bits to cover a range of common screw heads. The package also contains a variety of spudgers, picks, priers, and tweezers, along with a suction cup, a magnetic pad that doubles as a ruler, and things to help you stay grounded to protect yourself and your electronics. Everything is neatly secured in the included storage case, which also has a dedicated magnetizer and demagnetizer, plus an external USB-C port to charge the screwdriver while it’s docked.

Other deals you might like

• Samsung just announced a blistering fast PCIe Gen 5 SSD, but if you’re buying an SSD purely for gaming, you can get by just fine and save money with the last-gen Samsung 990 EVO Plus. The 1TB model is down to $74.99 ($35 off) at Amazon, or you can step up to 2TB for $129.99 ($55 off) — both are new record lows. The M.2 NVMe drives are primarily limited to PCIe Gen 4 speeds, with read/write values of 7.2GBps and 6.3GBps, respectively. That’s still very fast for heavy file transfers and more than enough for SSD-optimized PC games to play their best. You can also install one inside a PlayStation 5 for expanded storage.
• Prime members can get Ugreen’s MagFlow 2-in-1 charging stand for $23.99 ($36 off) at Amazon, which is an all-time low price. It has a magnetic holder for your MagSafe iPhone, but note: it doesn’t have Qi2’s 15W charging speed. That might be fine if you’re just using it as a bedside stand for overnight charging, however. The stand features a ball join that lets you adjust the viewing angle. There’s also a Qi pad in the base to charge your wireless earbuds. Be aware that the package doesn’t include the required 20W wall adapter.
• The JBL Authentics 200 is available at a new all-time low of $199.95 ($150 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart. The smart speaker sounds really good for its small stature, but surprisingly, it doesn’t have a battery to make it truly portable like the bigger and more powerful Authentics 300 does, which is also on sale for a record low $299.95 ($150 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart. Both take on a retro-inspired appearance, but include modern smarts with both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant built in, plus diverse connectivity options including Wi-Fi (supporting AirPlay, Chromecast, and the like), Bluetooth, and aux. Read our hands-on impressions.