This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on dystopian developments in AI, follow Hayden Field. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started You could say it all started with Elon Musk's AI […]

"Share a Disney quote that sums up how you're feeling right now!" That's what Disney posted on Threads the other day, and people immediately replied with lines from Star Wars, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and even Mary Poppins. The throughline between all the quotes: they were pretty pointedly anti-fascist and clearly aimed at the […]

Setapp Mobile seemed like one of the many alternative app markets with promise that launched in the wake of the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA). While the law may have forced Apple to allow third-party app stores on its devices, it couldn't make users actually embrace them. MacPaw, the Ukrainian developer behind the subscription-based Setapp, […]

Happy Saturday, folks! This week, Best Buy kicked off its so-called “Winter Sale,” introducing a whole host of price cuts that range from not-so-good to legitimately great, at least for this time of year. We’ll be publishing many of the highlights in a dedicated news post tomorrow, though, per usual, not all of this week’s […]

While Hollywood has repeatedly tried adapting stories from Japanese manga, vanishingly few of them have been as good as Edge of Tomorrow - Warner Bros.' 2014 live-action film based on Hiroshi Sakurazaka's sci-fi light novel All You Need Is Kill. Edge of Tomorrow wasn't a one-to-one translation of All You Need Is Kill's original story […]

While playing Big Hops, a new 3D platformer starring an adorable frog, I kept feeling like I was breaking the game - and, like with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, breaking it is kind of the point. In Big Hops, you play as a frog named Hop. Early on, Hop is taken […]

As masked and armed men in combat armor swarmed throughout the Twin Cities, Gov. Tim Walz took to primetime television to ask Minnesotans to film ICE. The videos, he said, would "create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans - not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution." […]

At CES, I did what you're not supposed to do: I brought a pre-production laptop to use as my primary workhorse during a hectic event. The unproven rifle in question is the new Arm-based Asus Zenbook A16. It's a 16-inch laptop that weighs less than a 13-inch MacBook Air and comes with a high-end Snapdragon […]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 112, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, I hope your home is warmer than mine right now, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about WhatsApp and Gavin […]

The best all-in-one portable projector is the one that makes all the right compromises. It needs to balance image and sound quality with battery life and responsiveness in a device that's not too expensive and small enough to take anywhere. TCL's fun little PlayCube delivers the right mix to justify paying $800 for a 1080p […]