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Image: Rivian

Rivian is selling a travel kitchen accessory for the first time. This is not the comprehensive campsite device it advertised years ago (but never released) that slid out the side of the company’s electric R1T trucks. Instead, this new one is compact and lightweight, designed to sit on a vehicle’s tailgate.
Simply called the Travel Kitchen, it folds out to span the length of the tailgate and features two induction burners, a cutting board that stows away in an organizer drawer, and a pop-out bar for hanging a towel. The unit needs a three-prong 120V power source with 15A of current to work, which you can get from a Rivian vehicle, campsite power, or an F-150 Lighting, Cybertruck, or other vehicle with capable onboard power or a generator.

Image: Rivian
Plug the Travel Kitchen into the truck’s 120V power.

The cooktops have nine heat levels and share 1500W of power, but a single-running cooktop can take all the energy for maximum heat. It has a “touchscreen power button” that only activates when induction cookware (not included) is set atop the unit and shuts off when removed for safety.

The Travel Kitchen also comes with a stow-away LED lighting kit that hangs off included poles and a carry case so you can pack away the whole setup in any trunk, EV truck frunk, or even Rivian’s gear tunnel. The accessory is available now from Rivian for $1,400 and is part of the automaker’s expanding Adventure Gear line of products.

Photo by Joey Roulette / The Verge
Rivian has never released this full pull-out kitchen.

Image: Rivian

Rivian is selling a travel kitchen accessory for the first time. This is not the comprehensive campsite device it advertised years ago (but never released) that slid out the side of the company’s electric R1T trucks. Instead, this new one is compact and lightweight, designed to sit on a vehicle’s tailgate.

Simply called the Travel Kitchen, it folds out to span the length of the tailgate and features two induction burners, a cutting board that stows away in an organizer drawer, and a pop-out bar for hanging a towel. The unit needs a three-prong 120V power source with 15A of current to work, which you can get from a Rivian vehicle, campsite power, or an F-150 Lighting, Cybertruck, or other vehicle with capable onboard power or a generator.

Image: Rivian
Plug the Travel Kitchen into the truck’s 120V power.

The cooktops have nine heat levels and share 1500W of power, but a single-running cooktop can take all the energy for maximum heat. It has a “touchscreen power button” that only activates when induction cookware (not included) is set atop the unit and shuts off when removed for safety.

The Travel Kitchen also comes with a stow-away LED lighting kit that hangs off included poles and a carry case so you can pack away the whole setup in any trunk, EV truck frunk, or even Rivian’s gear tunnel. The accessory is available now from Rivian for $1,400 and is part of the automaker’s expanding Adventure Gear line of products.

Photo by Joey Roulette / The Verge
Rivian has never released this full pull-out kitchen.

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Image: BioWare

BioWare is announcing the release date for Dragon Age: The Veilguard and sharing a new trailer to commemorate the occasion. Players will be able to return to Thedas — the name of the game’s world that is simultaneously a clever acronym for The Dragon Age Setting — on October 31st, more than 10 years after the release of the previous game, Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Oh man, there’s some lore going on in this new trailer. Up until now, fans assumed that Solas, a companion from Inquisition who went rogue during the events of the game’s Trespasser DLC, would be the main bad guy. But this trailer confirms a burgeoning community theory that Solas is just a small fry compared to the game’s real big baddies — the Elven gods.
BioWare announced Veilguard back in 2018 but shared very few substantive updates until 2022. In the intervening time, some senior talent left the studio, including general manager Casey Hudson, executive producer Mark Darrah, production director Mac Walters, and senior creative producer Matt Goldman. Several employees, including several BioWare veterans, were also lost to layoffs.
Development on Veilguard was also impacted by changing trends in the video game industry. After the critical and commercial failure of Anthem, BioWare’s MMO-style action RPG with flying exosuits, BioWare’s parent company EA canceled the planned multiplayer elements for Veilguard in hopes of capturing the kind of success enjoyed by other EA-produced single-player games like Jedi: Fallen Order.
Veilguard will be available for preorder today for $59.99 on PC and $69.99 on Xbox and PlayStation. Though the long development cycle, layoffs, and departures have fans concerned about the potential quality of the game, Veilguard arrives when single-player narrative games are experiencing huge success, most notably 2023’s game of the year, Baldur’s Gate 3. Comparisons between the two are inevitable, but based on this trailer — we are so very back.

Image: BioWare

BioWare is announcing the release date for Dragon Age: The Veilguard and sharing a new trailer to commemorate the occasion. Players will be able to return to Thedas — the name of the game’s world that is simultaneously a clever acronym for The Dragon Age Setting — on October 31st, more than 10 years after the release of the previous game, Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Oh man, there’s some lore going on in this new trailer. Up until now, fans assumed that Solas, a companion from Inquisition who went rogue during the events of the game’s Trespasser DLC, would be the main bad guy. But this trailer confirms a burgeoning community theory that Solas is just a small fry compared to the game’s real big baddies — the Elven gods.

BioWare announced Veilguard back in 2018 but shared very few substantive updates until 2022. In the intervening time, some senior talent left the studio, including general manager Casey Hudson, executive producer Mark Darrah, production director Mac Walters, and senior creative producer Matt Goldman. Several employees, including several BioWare veterans, were also lost to layoffs.

Development on Veilguard was also impacted by changing trends in the video game industry. After the critical and commercial failure of Anthem, BioWare’s MMO-style action RPG with flying exosuits, BioWare’s parent company EA canceled the planned multiplayer elements for Veilguard in hopes of capturing the kind of success enjoyed by other EA-produced single-player games like Jedi: Fallen Order.

Veilguard will be available for preorder today for $59.99 on PC and $69.99 on Xbox and PlayStation. Though the long development cycle, layoffs, and departures have fans concerned about the potential quality of the game, Veilguard arrives when single-player narrative games are experiencing huge success, most notably 2023’s game of the year, Baldur’s Gate 3. Comparisons between the two are inevitable, but based on this trailer — we are so very back.

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Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge

Antisemitic streamer, Holocaust denier, Charlottesville rally attendee, and January 6th instigator Nick Fuentes disavowed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign last week, claiming the America First movement had been “hijacked” by “consultants, lobbyists, & donors.”
The news that Fuentes had declared a “groyper war” on his preferred presidential candidate has sparked some claims that Trump is losing support among a core part of his constituency: white supremacists. But Fuentes has long been at odds with another subset of the far-right — one that has ascended within the mainstream Republican Party in recent years, culminating in Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his running mate.

Tonight I declared a new Groyper War against the Trump campaign.We support Trump, but his campaign has been hijacked by the same consultants, lobbyists, & donors that he defeated in 2016, and they’re blowing it.Without serious changes we are headed for a catastrophic loss.— Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes) August 9, 2024

In a video posted on Rumble, Fuentes said Trump had made “an endless string of unforced errors” in his campaign, beginning with Trump’s suggestion that former candidate Nikki Haley could have a place in his administration. Fuentes also took issue with Trump’s appearance on the All-In podcast, in which he said all foreign students who graduate from US colleges should get a green card along with their diploma. Among Fuentes’ other complaints was the fact that Trump has publicly distanced himself from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s playbook for a second Trump term.
Unmentioned in Fuentes’ video is his longstanding beef with far-right thinkers who have gained prominence within conservative circles, including Curtis Yarvin, a “neo-reactionary” philosopher who is close with Vance and megadonor Peter Thiel. Fuentes, a vocal antisemite, has accused Yarvin of believing that “non-Jews are incapable of governing themselves and therefore must always be ruled by Jews.” He has also claimed that Yarvin and Costin Alamariu — the once-pseudonymous writer better known as Bronze Age Pervert — are “at the forefront of a rising Thiel-funded faction of the Right.”
This subset of the far-right has been quietly gaining ground for years. In 2019, Politico Magazine reported that several young staffers of the Trump White House had become taken with Bronze Age Mindset, Alamariu’s self-published, anti-egalitarian manifesto about how superior men suffer under the tyranny of the “Leviathan” (the government, elite cultural institutions, and so forth) and the hordes of “bugmen” (inferior beings who do the Leviathan’s bidding). Vance, incidentally, follows Bronze Age Pervert on X.
Michael Anton, a Trump-era national security official, has described Bronze Age Pervert as speaking “directly to a youthful dissatisfaction (especially among white males) with equality as propagandized and imposed in our day.” In his review of Bronze Age Mindset, Anton notes that Yarvin gave him the book as a gift.
Writer John Ganz has referred to the radicalization of young conservative staffers as a sort of “groyperfication,” and while there are certainly some influential Fuentes sympathizers within the Republican Party, Fuentes’ groypers are actually at war with BAP acolytes and Yarvin’s so-called Dark Elves.
The Thiel-funded faction of the right, as Fuentes put it, is now in power. Vance owes much of his political career to Thiel. Elon Musk was among those who convinced Trump to select Vance as his running mate, and Vance’s addition to the ticket has brought in hundreds of millions in donations from other members of the Silicon Valley elite.

Fuentes’ groyper war is really a war of optics. Trump’s disavowal of Project 2025 is largely superficial; many of its policy proposals were written by former Trump staffers and current allies. Vance has not only echoed some of the proposals laid out in Project 2025 but also wrote the foreword for Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts’ forthcoming book Dawn’s Early Light. But polling suggests that Project 2025 is becoming increasingly unpopular among voters — it’s only logical that Trump has tried to tell voters he has nothing to do with it.
Trump has, in fact, also attempted to distance himself from Fuentes. Trump had dinner with Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago in 2022 and “seemed very taken” with the young white supremacist, Axios reported at the time. (Fuentes had been invited by Kanye West shortly after the rapper legally changed his name to Ye.) But after Republican leaders criticized Trump for dining with Fuentes, Trump claimed he had no idea who Fuentes was.
Vance, too, has recently been questioned about Trump’s ties to Fuentes. Vance was asked about Fuentes’ dinner with Trump during an interview with ABC News on Sunday. “The one — the one thing I like about Donald Trump, Jon, is that he actually will talk to anybody,” Vance told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl. “But just because you talk to somebody doesn’t mean you endorse their views. And look, I mean Donald Trump spent a lot of quality time with my wife. Every time he sees her, he gives her a hug, tells her she’s beautiful and jokes around with her a little bit.”
Fuentes, on the other hand, had said “terrible stuff” about Vance’s wife, Usha. After Trump announced Vance as his running mate, Fuentes said Vance’s interracial relationship was proof that he “doesn’t value his racial identity,” heritage, or religion. “I mean, he’s a white supremacist,” Vance said. But unlike the other white supremacists in Trump’s orbit, Fuentes doesn’t couch his beliefs in cryptic diatribes about bugmen and elves.

Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge

Antisemitic streamer, Holocaust denier, Charlottesville rally attendee, and January 6th instigator Nick Fuentes disavowed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign last week, claiming the America First movement had been “hijacked” by “consultants, lobbyists, & donors.”

The news that Fuentes had declared a “groyper war” on his preferred presidential candidate has sparked some claims that Trump is losing support among a core part of his constituency: white supremacists. But Fuentes has long been at odds with another subset of the far-right — one that has ascended within the mainstream Republican Party in recent years, culminating in Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his running mate.

In a video posted on Rumble, Fuentes said Trump had made “an endless string of unforced errors” in his campaign, beginning with Trump’s suggestion that former candidate Nikki Haley could have a place in his administration. Fuentes also took issue with Trump’s appearance on the All-In podcast, in which he said all foreign students who graduate from US colleges should get a green card along with their diploma. Among Fuentes’ other complaints was the fact that Trump has publicly distanced himself from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s playbook for a second Trump term.

Unmentioned in Fuentes’ video is his longstanding beef with far-right thinkers who have gained prominence within conservative circles, including Curtis Yarvin, a “neo-reactionary” philosopher who is close with Vance and megadonor Peter Thiel. Fuentes, a vocal antisemite, has accused Yarvin of believing that “non-Jews are incapable of governing themselves and therefore must always be ruled by Jews.” He has also claimed that Yarvin and Costin Alamariu — the once-pseudonymous writer better known as Bronze Age Pervert — are “at the forefront of a rising Thiel-funded faction of the Right.”

This subset of the far-right has been quietly gaining ground for years. In 2019, Politico Magazine reported that several young staffers of the Trump White House had become taken with Bronze Age Mindset, Alamariu’s self-published, anti-egalitarian manifesto about how superior men suffer under the tyranny of the “Leviathan” (the government, elite cultural institutions, and so forth) and the hordes of “bugmen” (inferior beings who do the Leviathan’s bidding). Vance, incidentally, follows Bronze Age Pervert on X.

Michael Anton, a Trump-era national security official, has described Bronze Age Pervert as speaking “directly to a youthful dissatisfaction (especially among white males) with equality as propagandized and imposed in our day.” In his review of Bronze Age Mindset, Anton notes that Yarvin gave him the book as a gift.

Writer John Ganz has referred to the radicalization of young conservative staffers as a sort of “groyperfication,” and while there are certainly some influential Fuentes sympathizers within the Republican Party, Fuentes’ groypers are actually at war with BAP acolytes and Yarvin’s so-called Dark Elves.

The Thiel-funded faction of the right, as Fuentes put it, is now in power. Vance owes much of his political career to Thiel. Elon Musk was among those who convinced Trump to select Vance as his running mate, and Vance’s addition to the ticket has brought in hundreds of millions in donations from other members of the Silicon Valley elite.

Fuentes’ groyper war is really a war of optics. Trump’s disavowal of Project 2025 is largely superficial; many of its policy proposals were written by former Trump staffers and current allies. Vance has not only echoed some of the proposals laid out in Project 2025 but also wrote the foreword for Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts’ forthcoming book Dawn’s Early Light. But polling suggests that Project 2025 is becoming increasingly unpopular among voters — it’s only logical that Trump has tried to tell voters he has nothing to do with it.

Trump has, in fact, also attempted to distance himself from Fuentes. Trump had dinner with Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago in 2022 and “seemed very taken” with the young white supremacist, Axios reported at the time. (Fuentes had been invited by Kanye West shortly after the rapper legally changed his name to Ye.) But after Republican leaders criticized Trump for dining with Fuentes, Trump claimed he had no idea who Fuentes was.

Vance, too, has recently been questioned about Trump’s ties to Fuentes. Vance was asked about Fuentes’ dinner with Trump during an interview with ABC News on Sunday. “The one — the one thing I like about Donald Trump, Jon, is that he actually will talk to anybody,” Vance told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl. “But just because you talk to somebody doesn’t mean you endorse their views. And look, I mean Donald Trump spent a lot of quality time with my wife. Every time he sees her, he gives her a hug, tells her she’s beautiful and jokes around with her a little bit.”

Fuentes, on the other hand, had said “terrible stuff” about Vance’s wife, Usha. After Trump announced Vance as his running mate, Fuentes said Vance’s interracial relationship was proof that he “doesn’t value his racial identity,” heritage, or religion. “I mean, he’s a white supremacist,” Vance said. But unlike the other white supremacists in Trump’s orbit, Fuentes doesn’t couch his beliefs in cryptic diatribes about bugmen and elves.

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Zero Zero Robotics hasn’t yet revealed pricing or a ship date for the HoverAir X1 Pro and X1 Pro Max selfie drones. | Image: Zero Zero Robotics

One of the shortcomings of the recently reviewed HoverAir X1 selfie drone was that its camera could only capture video at 2.7K/30fps resolutions. Zero Zero Robotics will soon resolve this issue with two upgraded versions of the drone that it’s been teasing on its website, as spotted by DIYPhotography.
The HoverAir X1 Pro will be able to capture 4K footage at up to 60FPS, or 120FPS slow motion footage at 1080P, through a half-inch CMOS sensor paired with a 17 millimeter wide angle lens. The X1 Pro Max further boosts video resolution to 8K at 30FPS, but can also capture footage at 4K/120FPS or 4K/60FPS in 10-bit HDR through a 1/1.3-inch sensor and a slightly wider 16 millimeter lens.
Zero Zero Robotics hasn’t revealed the full details for either model, but has shared photos of each, showing a sleeker, less boxy design. There’s a redesigned interface, too, with a larger button and what appears to be a screen (instead of individual LEDs) for selecting flight paths. Unlike most consumer drones that require amateur piloting skills, the original HoverAir X1 is autonomous, tracking a subject and capturing footage through predetermined flight paths.

Image: Zero Zero Robotics
The HoverAir X1 Pro can capture 4K footage at up to 60FPS.

Other upgrades include a faster follow speed of 26MPH, up from 15MPH on the HoverAir X1 (which will appeal to cyclists); 16-minute flight times; and the addition of rear and side collision sensors. The previous model lacked any obstacle detection and avoidance, simply relying on cages to protect its rotors and prevent crashes should it run into something.

Image: Zero Zero Robotics
The HoverAir X1 Pro Max can capture 8K footage at up to 30FPS.

Another limitation of the HoverAir X1 was that it relied on a VIO (Visual Inertial Odometry) system instead of GPS to know where it was at all times. That prevented it from being used over water or snow where the vision system struggled to see defined moving textures. Both the X1 Pro and X1 Pro Max feature an upgraded VIO that can be used over any terrain. They can even fly off a cliff and safely return to where they were launched.
There’s no mention of whether or not the X1 Pro and X1 Pro Max are waterproof, however. An unplanned water landing was an easy way to destroy the original X1, and it seems like this would be an important upgrade before kayakers or paddle boarders felt comfortable launching the new drones over water.
Other details Zero Zero Robotics hasn’t shared yet is the weight of the two new drones, although both will likely be close to the 125-gram HoverAir X1, so they’ll still be exempt from the FAA’s licensing requirements.
We also don’t know when they’ll be available, what new accessories will be launched with them, or their pricing. The HoverAir X1 is currently on sale for $349 (down from $429) which remains a big part of the compact drone’s appeal. But with rumors suggesting the tiny and aggressively priced 4K-ready DJI Neo could be arriving soon, the HoverAir X1 Pro and X1 Pro Max will ideally not debut with significant price increases.

Zero Zero Robotics hasn’t yet revealed pricing or a ship date for the HoverAir X1 Pro and X1 Pro Max selfie drones. | Image: Zero Zero Robotics

One of the shortcomings of the recently reviewed HoverAir X1 selfie drone was that its camera could only capture video at 2.7K/30fps resolutions. Zero Zero Robotics will soon resolve this issue with two upgraded versions of the drone that it’s been teasing on its website, as spotted by DIYPhotography.

The HoverAir X1 Pro will be able to capture 4K footage at up to 60FPS, or 120FPS slow motion footage at 1080P, through a half-inch CMOS sensor paired with a 17 millimeter wide angle lens. The X1 Pro Max further boosts video resolution to 8K at 30FPS, but can also capture footage at 4K/120FPS or 4K/60FPS in 10-bit HDR through a 1/1.3-inch sensor and a slightly wider 16 millimeter lens.

Zero Zero Robotics hasn’t revealed the full details for either model, but has shared photos of each, showing a sleeker, less boxy design. There’s a redesigned interface, too, with a larger button and what appears to be a screen (instead of individual LEDs) for selecting flight paths. Unlike most consumer drones that require amateur piloting skills, the original HoverAir X1 is autonomous, tracking a subject and capturing footage through predetermined flight paths.

Image: Zero Zero Robotics
The HoverAir X1 Pro can capture 4K footage at up to 60FPS.

Other upgrades include a faster follow speed of 26MPH, up from 15MPH on the HoverAir X1 (which will appeal to cyclists); 16-minute flight times; and the addition of rear and side collision sensors. The previous model lacked any obstacle detection and avoidance, simply relying on cages to protect its rotors and prevent crashes should it run into something.

Image: Zero Zero Robotics
The HoverAir X1 Pro Max can capture 8K footage at up to 30FPS.

Another limitation of the HoverAir X1 was that it relied on a VIO (Visual Inertial Odometry) system instead of GPS to know where it was at all times. That prevented it from being used over water or snow where the vision system struggled to see defined moving textures. Both the X1 Pro and X1 Pro Max feature an upgraded VIO that can be used over any terrain. They can even fly off a cliff and safely return to where they were launched.

There’s no mention of whether or not the X1 Pro and X1 Pro Max are waterproof, however. An unplanned water landing was an easy way to destroy the original X1, and it seems like this would be an important upgrade before kayakers or paddle boarders felt comfortable launching the new drones over water.

Other details Zero Zero Robotics hasn’t shared yet is the weight of the two new drones, although both will likely be close to the 125-gram HoverAir X1, so they’ll still be exempt from the FAA’s licensing requirements.

We also don’t know when they’ll be available, what new accessories will be launched with them, or their pricing. The HoverAir X1 is currently on sale for $349 (down from $429) which remains a big part of the compact drone’s appeal. But with rumors suggesting the tiny and aggressively priced 4K-ready DJI Neo could be arriving soon, the HoverAir X1 Pro and X1 Pro Max will ideally not debut with significant price increases.

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Illustration: The Verge

As Google brings AI Overviews to six new countries, it’s also changing the way the generated summaries display citations. Instead of putting relevant webpages directly in the AI-generated summary, Google is adding a new display to the right of the response that shows cited webpages more prominently.
This new format is rolling out today, and it will also show up on mobile when you select the site icons that appear in the top-right corner of the AI Overview. “We are using the right-hand-side space to prominently display the links to the AI Overview so that people can navigate to the content that they’re interested in,” Hema Budaraju, Google’s senior director of product management for Search, tells The Verge. Google will continue to display regular search results beneath the AI Overview.

Image: Google
You can click the icons in the top-right corner of AI Overviews on mobile to view source links.

Google is also experimenting with attaching links to the text of AI Overviews. You can click the linked text to navigate to relevant websites, as well as browse through the webpages that Google will surface in the new right-side display. So far, Google says early testing has shown “positive” results that have helped drive “higher traffic to publisher sites.”
Other features Google is bringing to AI Overviews in Search Lab include the ability to save an AI Overview, allowing you to revisit the summary when you conduct the same search. Google will also store saved AI Overviews on your Interests page.
Additionally, Google is adding a button that will let you simplify some AI Overviews, which it previewed earlier this year. Both of these features are available within the “AI Overviews and more” experiment in Search Labs for English queries in the US.

GIF: Google
The AI Overviews in each country will appear in the local languages.

After launching AI Overviews in the US in May, Google is bringing the feature to the UK, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil. The AI-generated search summaries start rolling out today, with support for the local languages in each country. Here in the US, AI Overviews got off to a rough start, with the feature telling users to put glue on pizza to help the cheese stick and eat rocks. Google has since addressed these issues and has had to manually remove some responses.
When asked what Google is doing to help prevent these kinds of answers from appearing in other countries and languages, Hema Budaraju, Google’s senior director of product management for Search, says the company has “rigorous evaluation processes and extensive adversarial testing in every market,” adding that “quality and safety are built into the design” of AI Overviews.
“I don’t know that there is a singular way to do search and answer every question that people have at scale in the world, but we are committed to learning and listening actively,” Budaraju says.

Illustration: The Verge

As Google brings AI Overviews to six new countries, it’s also changing the way the generated summaries display citations. Instead of putting relevant webpages directly in the AI-generated summary, Google is adding a new display to the right of the response that shows cited webpages more prominently.

This new format is rolling out today, and it will also show up on mobile when you select the site icons that appear in the top-right corner of the AI Overview. “We are using the right-hand-side space to prominently display the links to the AI Overview so that people can navigate to the content that they’re interested in,” Hema Budaraju, Google’s senior director of product management for Search, tells The Verge. Google will continue to display regular search results beneath the AI Overview.

Image: Google
You can click the icons in the top-right corner of AI Overviews on mobile to view source links.

Google is also experimenting with attaching links to the text of AI Overviews. You can click the linked text to navigate to relevant websites, as well as browse through the webpages that Google will surface in the new right-side display. So far, Google says early testing has shown “positive” results that have helped drive “higher traffic to publisher sites.”

Other features Google is bringing to AI Overviews in Search Lab include the ability to save an AI Overview, allowing you to revisit the summary when you conduct the same search. Google will also store saved AI Overviews on your Interests page.

Additionally, Google is adding a button that will let you simplify some AI Overviews, which it previewed earlier this year. Both of these features are available within the “AI Overviews and more” experiment in Search Labs for English queries in the US.

GIF: Google
The AI Overviews in each country will appear in the local languages.

After launching AI Overviews in the US in May, Google is bringing the feature to the UK, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil. The AI-generated search summaries start rolling out today, with support for the local languages in each country. Here in the US, AI Overviews got off to a rough start, with the feature telling users to put glue on pizza to help the cheese stick and eat rocks. Google has since addressed these issues and has had to manually remove some responses.

When asked what Google is doing to help prevent these kinds of answers from appearing in other countries and languages, Hema Budaraju, Google’s senior director of product management for Search, says the company has “rigorous evaluation processes and extensive adversarial testing in every market,” adding that “quality and safety are built into the design” of AI Overviews.

“I don’t know that there is a singular way to do search and answer every question that people have at scale in the world, but we are committed to learning and listening actively,” Budaraju says.

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TP-Link’s Tapo D225 is a good $100 doorbell camera with 24/7 recording and smart alerts for people, packages, and pets — all without a subscription. The Tapo D225 is something of a unicorn. The newest flagship doorbell from TP-Link’s smart home brand Tapo, this dual-powered camera has free 24/7 local recording and free smart alerts for people, packages, and pets — all for under $100. Free continuous video recording (CVR) is almost unheard of, especially without requiring a hub, and especially at this price. Plus, most companies make you pay monthly for all those smart alerts.

The Tapo can work on battery or be hardwired to your doorbell wiring (although it’s not a true wired doorbell). You need a microSD card for free recording and CVR, and the doorbell must be wired to record continuously. There is the option of cloud storage starting at $2.79 per month for 30 days of video history (cheaper than most of the competition). The Tapo D225 launches today alongside the more budget, battery-only Tapo D210 ($59.99), which doesn’t have CVR or package detection.
That continuous recording feature, which Tapo calls Always On Mode, is the D225’s best feature. It gets around the back-of-the-head problem that afflicts most doorbells that don’t use wires for continuous power. They take a few seconds to wake up when they detect motion, so sometimes all you see is the back of the person’s head as they walk away.

The Tapo D225 is a 2K-capable video doorbell that, as mentioned, works both with and without wires. Hooking it up to your doorbell wiring lets you enable continuous video recording, but that feature requires you to bypass your existing chime (a plug-in chime is included). It also trickle-charges the 10,000mAh battery, so if your power goes out the buzzer will continue to work.
If you go battery-only, Tapo says it can last up to eight months on a single charge, but you will have to remove the whole doorbell to recharge it. CVR doesn’t work in wireless mode. Instead, the doorbell can record clips locally to a microSD card or the cloud.

Because of its big battery, the D225 is huge — twice the size of the Nest Doorbell Wired I had installed prior. It has a modern, techie look that screams “video doorbell.” This may appeal to some, but is a bit too garish for me.

I’ve been testing the D225 for about a week and have been impressed with its daytime video quality, wide 180-degree field of view, and square head-to-toe aspect ratio that shows my entire porch without too much of a fish-eye effect.
Night vision is also good, and you can turn on an LED spotlight for color night vision (although this resulted in slightly more distortion). I was disappointed there was no HDR imaging — some faces were in shadow on my covered front porch and the background is a bit overexposed — but overall, it has clear, bright images and a good zoom.
I got a few false alerts — including when the D225 kept mistaking a gecko crawling over the camera for a person
The Tapo sends speedy alerts for motion events and can be set to ring your phone as if you are getting a phone call when someone presses the doorbell. A couple of other brands offer this useful feature, including Arlo, and it makes it harder to miss someone at your door. The two-way talk on the Tapo is clear and easy to use.
The smart alerts for people, vehicles, pets, and packages were largely accurate in testing. I did get a few false alerts — including some scary ones in the middle of the night when the D225 kept mistaking a gecko crawling over the camera for a person.

I was impressed with the Tapo app, which has a nice UI and is easy to navigate. It pulls up live and recorded video quickly and has a ton of useful customization features to tailor the doorbells to your needs.
These include quick replies, a privacy mode that turns the camera off, and the ability to schedule notifications, set detection zones, and specify what type of alerts you want to get from each one (so, only notify me if you see people in this zone and packages in this zone). Tapo has an extensive smart home ecosystem, so you can connect your doorbell to automations that control Tapo devices like smart lights, robot vacuum cleaners, and more.

The Tapo’s CVR feature means you’ll catch all the action. This clip starts before I appear and ends after I’ve left. The battery-powered D210 only caught about a third of this event.

I tested the Tapo D225 alongside Tapo’s other new doorbell: the $59.99 D210. This is battery-powered with a similar design but no wiring option (so no CVR). Its battery and field of view are smaller, and it has a rectangular 16:9 aspect ratio that shows less of my porch. The D210 does offer free local recording with a microSD card and free alerts for people, pets, and vehicles, but there’s no package detection. While it has fewer features, testing them side by side helped me evaluate the D225’s Always On mode.

When wired in Always On mode, the D225 showed me the entire sequence of someone approaching the door, putting a package down, pressing the doorbell, and leaving, whereas the D210 started recording the moment they were at the door. This more complete picture makes the D225 the better option for $40 more.
While Tapo calls Always On mode continuous recording, I found it wasn’t as useful as the 24/7 recording Nest offers on its wired doorbell. With Nest, I can scroll through a timeline of the day and see everything that happened, even if it didn’t trigger an event recording. The Tapo version has a timeline, but when I scroll to a time where there was no detected event, it jumps me forward to the most recent event.
This could be fixed with a firmware update (I was testing on a beta app), but as of now, it’s not “true” continuous recording. However, it’s free (Nest charges $15 a month), and it’s still better than the wake-on-motion recording of most battery doorbells.

The D225 (left) and the D210 (right). Both doorbells are about the same size, with the D225 sporting a sleeker black look compared to the D210 black and white design.

The D225 lacks the more refined video and precise alerts that more expensive competitors such as Ring, Nest, and Ecobee have, thanks to features like radar motion detection and more advanced AI. There’s also no facial recognition, something Nest, Eufy, and doorbells that support HomeKit Secure Video offer.
But free CVR is a great feature, even if it’s not perfect. Lorex and Reolink offer it on their wired doorbells, but you need one of their NVR systems. If you can’t wire the Tapo, free local recording is still a good feature. More brands offer this — including Eufy, Blink, and Aqara — but their doorbells are either more expensive or you need additional hardware. Few also offer all the same free smart alerts.
Overall, the Tapo D225 is an impressive doorbell for the price, with useful features that don’t require a subscription or extra hardware. If you don’t mind its size and that you can’t really use your existing chime, it’s a good, inexpensive option for keeping a continuous eye on what’s happening at your door.

Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

TP-Link’s Tapo D225 is a good $100 doorbell camera with 24/7 recording and smart alerts for people, packages, and pets — all without a subscription.

The Tapo D225 is something of a unicorn. The newest flagship doorbell from TP-Link’s smart home brand Tapo, this dual-powered camera has free 24/7 local recording and free smart alerts for people, packages, and pets — all for under $100. Free continuous video recording (CVR) is almost unheard of, especially without requiring a hub, and especially at this price. Plus, most companies make you pay monthly for all those smart alerts.

The Tapo can work on battery or be hardwired to your doorbell wiring (although it’s not a true wired doorbell). You need a microSD card for free recording and CVR, and the doorbell must be wired to record continuously. There is the option of cloud storage starting at $2.79 per month for 30 days of video history (cheaper than most of the competition). The Tapo D225 launches today alongside the more budget, battery-only Tapo D210 ($59.99), which doesn’t have CVR or package detection.

That continuous recording feature, which Tapo calls Always On Mode, is the D225’s best feature. It gets around the back-of-the-head problem that afflicts most doorbells that don’t use wires for continuous power. They take a few seconds to wake up when they detect motion, so sometimes all you see is the back of the person’s head as they walk away.

The Tapo D225 is a 2K-capable video doorbell that, as mentioned, works both with and without wires. Hooking it up to your doorbell wiring lets you enable continuous video recording, but that feature requires you to bypass your existing chime (a plug-in chime is included). It also trickle-charges the 10,000mAh battery, so if your power goes out the buzzer will continue to work.

If you go battery-only, Tapo says it can last up to eight months on a single charge, but you will have to remove the whole doorbell to recharge it. CVR doesn’t work in wireless mode. Instead, the doorbell can record clips locally to a microSD card or the cloud.

Because of its big battery, the D225 is huge — twice the size of the Nest Doorbell Wired I had installed prior. It has a modern, techie look that screams “video doorbell.” This may appeal to some, but is a bit too garish for me.

I’ve been testing the D225 for about a week and have been impressed with its daytime video quality, wide 180-degree field of view, and square head-to-toe aspect ratio that shows my entire porch without too much of a fish-eye effect.

Night vision is also good, and you can turn on an LED spotlight for color night vision (although this resulted in slightly more distortion). I was disappointed there was no HDR imaging — some faces were in shadow on my covered front porch and the background is a bit overexposed — but overall, it has clear, bright images and a good zoom.

The Tapo sends speedy alerts for motion events and can be set to ring your phone as if you are getting a phone call when someone presses the doorbell. A couple of other brands offer this useful feature, including Arlo, and it makes it harder to miss someone at your door. The two-way talk on the Tapo is clear and easy to use.

The smart alerts for people, vehicles, pets, and packages were largely accurate in testing. I did get a few false alerts — including some scary ones in the middle of the night when the D225 kept mistaking a gecko crawling over the camera for a person.

I was impressed with the Tapo app, which has a nice UI and is easy to navigate. It pulls up live and recorded video quickly and has a ton of useful customization features to tailor the doorbells to your needs.

These include quick replies, a privacy mode that turns the camera off, and the ability to schedule notifications, set detection zones, and specify what type of alerts you want to get from each one (so, only notify me if you see people in this zone and packages in this zone). Tapo has an extensive smart home ecosystem, so you can connect your doorbell to automations that control Tapo devices like smart lights, robot vacuum cleaners, and more.

I tested the Tapo D225 alongside Tapo’s other new doorbell: the $59.99 D210. This is battery-powered with a similar design but no wiring option (so no CVR). Its battery and field of view are smaller, and it has a rectangular 16:9 aspect ratio that shows less of my porch. The D210 does offer free local recording with a microSD card and free alerts for people, pets, and vehicles, but there’s no package detection. While it has fewer features, testing them side by side helped me evaluate the D225’s Always On mode.

When wired in Always On mode, the D225 showed me the entire sequence of someone approaching the door, putting a package down, pressing the doorbell, and leaving, whereas the D210 started recording the moment they were at the door. This more complete picture makes the D225 the better option for $40 more.

While Tapo calls Always On mode continuous recording, I found it wasn’t as useful as the 24/7 recording Nest offers on its wired doorbell. With Nest, I can scroll through a timeline of the day and see everything that happened, even if it didn’t trigger an event recording. The Tapo version has a timeline, but when I scroll to a time where there was no detected event, it jumps me forward to the most recent event.

This could be fixed with a firmware update (I was testing on a beta app), but as of now, it’s not “true” continuous recording. However, it’s free (Nest charges $15 a month), and it’s still better than the wake-on-motion recording of most battery doorbells.

The D225 (left) and the D210 (right). Both doorbells are about the same size, with the D225 sporting a sleeker black look compared to the D210 black and white design.

The D225 lacks the more refined video and precise alerts that more expensive competitors such as Ring, Nest, and Ecobee have, thanks to features like radar motion detection and more advanced AI. There’s also no facial recognition, something Nest, Eufy, and doorbells that support HomeKit Secure Video offer.

But free CVR is a great feature, even if it’s not perfect. Lorex and Reolink offer it on their wired doorbells, but you need one of their NVR systems. If you can’t wire the Tapo, free local recording is still a good feature. More brands offer this — including Eufy, Blink, and Aqara — but their doorbells are either more expensive or you need additional hardware. Few also offer all the same free smart alerts.

Overall, the Tapo D225 is an impressive doorbell for the price, with useful features that don’t require a subscription or extra hardware. If you don’t mind its size and that you can’t really use your existing chime, it’s a good, inexpensive option for keeping a continuous eye on what’s happening at your door.

Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

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Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images

We’ve talked a lot on Decoder about various attempts to regulate the internet in the United States and how they all run into the very simple fact that almost everything on the internet is speech, and the First Amendment prohibits most speech regulations in this country. Literally, it says, “Congress shall make no law…” and that’s why we don’t have any laws.
But there’s a major internet speech regulation currently making its way through Congress, and it has a really good chance of becoming law. It’s called KOSPA: the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act, which passed in the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support late last month. You’ve probably heard of KOSPA’s predecessor KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act — it got bundled up with another bill called COPPA 2.0, the Children and Teen’s Online Privacy Protection Act, and that’s how you get KOSPA.

At a broad level, KOSPA is supposed to tackle two big issues: better protecting the privacy of minors online and making tech platforms more responsible for what those minors see and do.
COPPA 2.0 is basically a spec bump — the first COPPA, passed in 1998, made it so websites and social media apps couldn’t knowingly have users under the age of 13 on the platform without their parents’ consent. Of course, that hasn’t stopped kids from using any of these things, and there’s been a host of research and experiences with kids on the internet since, so COPPA 2.0 bumps that age up to 17 and bans things like showing targeted ads to minors. This feels relatively straightforward.
It’s the second part, the KOSA part, that’s been controversial for some time and remains controversial even as the bill gathers momentum. KOSA creates what’s called a “duty of care” for platforms like Meta, Google, TikTok, and others, effectively making them liable for showing harmful content to kids. That’s a speech regulation, through and through — and like every speech regulation, that means KOSPA has to get over the First Amendment.
KOSPA certainly has opponents making that argument. But there’s also a strong argument that the government’s interest in protecting children is enough to overcome that problem and that the political power of parents being worried about the effects of the internet will push KOSPA through.
But KOSPA is far from a done deal. It hasn’t passed the House of Representatives, which is now in recess until September, and House leadership has indicated they may not even consider the bill in its current form.
So, there’s a lot to talk about. To break it all down, I invited on Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner, who’s been covering these bills for months now, to explain what’s going on, what these bills actually do, and what the path forward for this legislation looks like.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images

We’ve talked a lot on Decoder about various attempts to regulate the internet in the United States and how they all run into the very simple fact that almost everything on the internet is speech, and the First Amendment prohibits most speech regulations in this country. Literally, it says, “Congress shall make no law…” and that’s why we don’t have any laws.

But there’s a major internet speech regulation currently making its way through Congress, and it has a really good chance of becoming law. It’s called KOSPA: the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act, which passed in the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support late last month. You’ve probably heard of KOSPA’s predecessor KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act — it got bundled up with another bill called COPPA 2.0, the Children and Teen’s Online Privacy Protection Act, and that’s how you get KOSPA.

At a broad level, KOSPA is supposed to tackle two big issues: better protecting the privacy of minors online and making tech platforms more responsible for what those minors see and do.

COPPA 2.0 is basically a spec bump — the first COPPA, passed in 1998, made it so websites and social media apps couldn’t knowingly have users under the age of 13 on the platform without their parents’ consent. Of course, that hasn’t stopped kids from using any of these things, and there’s been a host of research and experiences with kids on the internet since, so COPPA 2.0 bumps that age up to 17 and bans things like showing targeted ads to minors. This feels relatively straightforward.

It’s the second part, the KOSA part, that’s been controversial for some time and remains controversial even as the bill gathers momentum. KOSA creates what’s called a “duty of care” for platforms like Meta, Google, TikTok, and others, effectively making them liable for showing harmful content to kids. That’s a speech regulation, through and through — and like every speech regulation, that means KOSPA has to get over the First Amendment.

KOSPA certainly has opponents making that argument. But there’s also a strong argument that the government’s interest in protecting children is enough to overcome that problem and that the political power of parents being worried about the effects of the internet will push KOSPA through.

But KOSPA is far from a done deal. It hasn’t passed the House of Representatives, which is now in recess until September, and House leadership has indicated they may not even consider the bill in its current form.

So, there’s a lot to talk about. To break it all down, I invited on Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner, who’s been covering these bills for months now, to explain what’s going on, what these bills actually do, and what the path forward for this legislation looks like.

Read More 

Kanye West Loves Megaupload

A dozen years later, New Zealand is extraditing Kim Dotcom to face trial in the US. After a protracted battle with record labels, file sharing site Megaupload — regarded by some as a haven for piracy — was taken down in 2012 by the US Department of Justice with a number of high-profile arrests of Megaupload employees.
We’ve been tracking the full saga right here ever since.

Kanye West Loves Megaupload

A dozen years later, New Zealand is extraditing Kim Dotcom to face trial in the US.

After a protracted battle with record labels, file sharing site Megaupload — regarded by some as a haven for piracy — was taken down in 2012 by the US Department of Justice with a number of high-profile arrests of Megaupload employees.

We’ve been tracking the full saga right here ever since.

Read More 

This Snapdragon-powered laptop is a productivity machine, but unless work foots the bill, you can do better. The freshman class of Windows Copilot Plus PCs has its battery champ, and it’s even a few hundred dollars cheaper than Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop. But it’s also business-class boring, with a middling screen and subpar trackpad.
HP’s new OmniBook X 14 is one of the first laptops with Qualcomm’s Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite processor. Like most of the ones we’ve seen so far, it’s a thin and light machine aimed at productivity tasks and stuffed with AI fluff. It starts at $1,150, with a 14-inch LCD screen, 12-core processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD — with an optional upgrade to a 1TB drive for $1,200, though it’s often on sale for less.

Most of the other Windows laptops we’ve seen with these new Arm chips have bright, beautiful screens and other creature comforts. The OmniBook, on the other hand, is a near-clone of the HP EliteBook Ultra, a machine built for high-volume office deployment, and it shows.

At 2.97 pounds and just over half an inch thick, the OmniBook X is about the same size as the 13-inch MacBook Air, which seems to be the mark most of these Copilot Plus PCs are gunning for. And it does come closer to the battery life of my work-issued Air than any other laptop we’ve tested.
The OmniBook X lasts me up to 15 hours of my regular workload, which includes lots of open Chrome tabs, listening to music and background Twitch streams, and taking remote meetings. It rarely stutters or slows down, even as my active Chrome tabs swell to over 20 or 30 across a few virtual desktops. It holds its charge well overnight — even going a whole weekend unplugged with its lid closed and losing only 10 percent battery.

This is the first time in a while I’ve used a Windows laptop that doesn’t give me battery anxiety. It’s a welcome benefit of the Snapdragon X’s efficiency combined with the OmniBook’s generous 59Wh battery. Other Copilot Plus PCs, like the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x and Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge, actually have larger batteries, but the OmniBook’s 16:10 60Hz IPS LCD uses less power than their brighter and faster OLED displays (more on that in a bit).
If battery life is more important to you than anything else, the OmniBook is worth considering. It’s certainly a more concrete benefit than any of the overhyped AI features that make it a Copilot Plus PC. But the hardware it inherits from the EliteBook Ultra — like the trackpad, speakers, and screen — makes those long hours away from the outlet a slog.
The trackpad is mostly okay, but its top-hinged clicking mechanism means you feel more resistance as you click higher up the pad. It doesn’t feel nearly as nice as modern haptic ones on MacBooks or the Surface Laptop, which let you click anywhere with ease. And two-finger right-clicks all too often result in an unintentional left click. The only thing worse than something that doesn’t work is something that doesn’t work consistently.

But that takes me to the speakers, which are consistently bad. They’re serviceable for video calls, but their downward-firing orientation, toward the front of the case, makes music sound thin when the laptop sits on a desk. Put it on your lap, and it sounds like it’s underwater. The upward-firing speakers on many other laptops, including ones under the MacBook Air’s keyboard, are far superior. Even my iPhone 15 Pro sounds a little better, with the OmniBook’s only advantage being that its two speakers are spread about seven inches apart to give it just the tiniest bit of a soundstage. But that positioning also means your wrists frequently block the speakers when you type.

The OmniBook’s battery life can take you places, but its screen can’t promise you’ll use it there.

The 14-inch, 2240 x 1400 resolution touchscreen LCD looks crisp and fairly colorful, covering the full sRGB color space and 78 percent of DCI-P3 in my testing. The screen’s max claimed brightness of 300 nits (337 nits in my testing) is fine indoors but pretty dim for outdoor use. If you sit next to a bright window or go outside, it may feel like you’re trying to work on a mirror. Its refresh rate is a similarly modest 60Hz. By comparison, the new Surface Laptop’s LCD screen is twice as fast, gets nearly twice as bright, has more accurate colors, and supports HDR, for a similar price.
At the OmniBook’s sides are a total of four ports: two USB-C PD ports on the left (one 40Gbps and one 10Gbps, with each capable of DisplayPort 1.4a output to a monitor) and, on the right, a single USB-A port (10 Gbps) beside a 3.5mm combo headphone / mic jack. The chiclet-style keyboard feels good to type on for many hours straight and has a Copilot button I wager you’ll use as little as I do. My only real gripe with the keyboard is the tall left and right arrow keys. I’d prefer them to be the same height as the down arrow, as it makes finding the keys without looking much easier.
Windows on Arm support is already in a much better place than a few years ago now that Snapdragon X is here and the first swath of Copilot Plus PCs are in the wild. But if an app you absolutely need is unsupported, the OmniBook (or any Arm PC) is a nonstarter. Programs like Adobe Premiere Pro and Illustrator remain absent or limited to emulation for now. For me, the lack of Adobe Lightroom Classic is a dealbreaker. I loathe editing photos in Lightroom CC, with its completely rearranged layout and shortcuts. App compatibility should keep getting better, but you should never buy something now based on what it may do in the future.

Apple realized the error of its ways on this arrow key layout years ago, and I wish Windows laptop makers would do the same.

The OmniBook’s AI features are mostly boring and inconsequential — especially since Windows Recall remains delayed. These consist of the “AI Experiences” that ship with Copilot Plus PCs, plus HP’s AI Companion app. It’s basically bloatware: just another ChatGPT wrapper along with some hardware performance monitoring. (It can also download drivers. How innovative!) The current beta version limits you to eight follow-up prompts for each inquiry, which I wager is to tamp down the chances for hallucinations.
You can also feed AI Companion documents, which it will attempt to summarize. In an early briefing with HP, a rep demonstrated how a hiring manager can upload three resumes and ask the AI to compare the candidates. I cannot stress this enough: this is something you should not do.

This is what happens when a manufacturer doesn’t want to risk its laptops getting flirty.

A good screen, trackpad, and speakers are table stakes in a modern laptop. Compared to competitors like the new Surface Laptop and Surface Pro 11 with high-refresh displays and haptic trackpads, the OmniBook X is lackluster — with the exception of its outstanding battery life.
But the reason the OmniBook’s a bit humdrum is because it’s an enterprise laptop in disguise. Aside from the color options, Wi-Fi card, and Bluetooth radio, it’s nearly identical to the EliteBook Ultra, which is the kind of “BoringBook” issued en masse by company IT departments. The corporate world isn’t concerned with treating you to a bright, butter-smooth OLED display or bumping bass — it just wants you to feed the beast and get your work done with tools that are adequate and not too expensive.

The sleek white finish is the only thing that prevents me from falling asleep the moment I look at the OmniBook X.

If you truly worship at the altar of battery life, then maybe the OmniBook is fine. But there’s no reason to pay a thousand dollars of your own money for this screen, those speakers, or that trackpad. Maybe you can use the OmniBook X for 15 hours straight, but for around the same price, you can get something like the Surface Laptop, with a much better trackpad, screen, and speakers — even if you do have to plug it in a little sooner.
Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

This Snapdragon-powered laptop is a productivity machine, but unless work foots the bill, you can do better.

The freshman class of Windows Copilot Plus PCs has its battery champ, and it’s even a few hundred dollars cheaper than Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop. But it’s also business-class boring, with a middling screen and subpar trackpad.

HP’s new OmniBook X 14 is one of the first laptops with Qualcomm’s Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite processor. Like most of the ones we’ve seen so far, it’s a thin and light machine aimed at productivity tasks and stuffed with AI fluff. It starts at $1,150, with a 14-inch LCD screen, 12-core processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD — with an optional upgrade to a 1TB drive for $1,200, though it’s often on sale for less.

Most of the other Windows laptops we’ve seen with these new Arm chips have bright, beautiful screens and other creature comforts. The OmniBook, on the other hand, is a near-clone of the HP EliteBook Ultra, a machine built for high-volume office deployment, and it shows.

At 2.97 pounds and just over half an inch thick, the OmniBook X is about the same size as the 13-inch MacBook Air, which seems to be the mark most of these Copilot Plus PCs are gunning for. And it does come closer to the battery life of my work-issued Air than any other laptop we’ve tested.

The OmniBook X lasts me up to 15 hours of my regular workload, which includes lots of open Chrome tabs, listening to music and background Twitch streams, and taking remote meetings. It rarely stutters or slows down, even as my active Chrome tabs swell to over 20 or 30 across a few virtual desktops. It holds its charge well overnight — even going a whole weekend unplugged with its lid closed and losing only 10 percent battery.

This is the first time in a while I’ve used a Windows laptop that doesn’t give me battery anxiety. It’s a welcome benefit of the Snapdragon X’s efficiency combined with the OmniBook’s generous 59Wh battery. Other Copilot Plus PCs, like the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x and Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge, actually have larger batteries, but the OmniBook’s 16:10 60Hz IPS LCD uses less power than their brighter and faster OLED displays (more on that in a bit).

If battery life is more important to you than anything else, the OmniBook is worth considering. It’s certainly a more concrete benefit than any of the overhyped AI features that make it a Copilot Plus PC. But the hardware it inherits from the EliteBook Ultra — like the trackpad, speakers, and screen — makes those long hours away from the outlet a slog.

The trackpad is mostly okay, but its top-hinged clicking mechanism means you feel more resistance as you click higher up the pad. It doesn’t feel nearly as nice as modern haptic ones on MacBooks or the Surface Laptop, which let you click anywhere with ease. And two-finger right-clicks all too often result in an unintentional left click. The only thing worse than something that doesn’t work is something that doesn’t work consistently.

But that takes me to the speakers, which are consistently bad. They’re serviceable for video calls, but their downward-firing orientation, toward the front of the case, makes music sound thin when the laptop sits on a desk. Put it on your lap, and it sounds like it’s underwater. The upward-firing speakers on many other laptops, including ones under the MacBook Air’s keyboard, are far superior. Even my iPhone 15 Pro sounds a little better, with the OmniBook’s only advantage being that its two speakers are spread about seven inches apart to give it just the tiniest bit of a soundstage. But that positioning also means your wrists frequently block the speakers when you type.

The OmniBook’s battery life can take you places, but its screen can’t promise you’ll use it there.

The 14-inch, 2240 x 1400 resolution touchscreen LCD looks crisp and fairly colorful, covering the full sRGB color space and 78 percent of DCI-P3 in my testing. The screen’s max claimed brightness of 300 nits (337 nits in my testing) is fine indoors but pretty dim for outdoor use. If you sit next to a bright window or go outside, it may feel like you’re trying to work on a mirror. Its refresh rate is a similarly modest 60Hz. By comparison, the new Surface Laptop’s LCD screen is twice as fast, gets nearly twice as bright, has more accurate colors, and supports HDR, for a similar price.

At the OmniBook’s sides are a total of four ports: two USB-C PD ports on the left (one 40Gbps and one 10Gbps, with each capable of DisplayPort 1.4a output to a monitor) and, on the right, a single USB-A port (10 Gbps) beside a 3.5mm combo headphone / mic jack. The chiclet-style keyboard feels good to type on for many hours straight and has a Copilot button I wager you’ll use as little as I do. My only real gripe with the keyboard is the tall left and right arrow keys. I’d prefer them to be the same height as the down arrow, as it makes finding the keys without looking much easier.

Windows on Arm support is already in a much better place than a few years ago now that Snapdragon X is here and the first swath of Copilot Plus PCs are in the wild. But if an app you absolutely need is unsupported, the OmniBook (or any Arm PC) is a nonstarter. Programs like Adobe Premiere Pro and Illustrator remain absent or limited to emulation for now. For me, the lack of Adobe Lightroom Classic is a dealbreaker. I loathe editing photos in Lightroom CC, with its completely rearranged layout and shortcuts. App compatibility should keep getting better, but you should never buy something now based on what it may do in the future.

Apple realized the error of its ways on this arrow key layout years ago, and I wish Windows laptop makers would do the same.

The OmniBook’s AI features are mostly boring and inconsequential — especially since Windows Recall remains delayed. These consist of the “AI Experiences” that ship with Copilot Plus PCs, plus HP’s AI Companion app. It’s basically bloatware: just another ChatGPT wrapper along with some hardware performance monitoring. (It can also download drivers. How innovative!) The current beta version limits you to eight follow-up prompts for each inquiry, which I wager is to tamp down the chances for hallucinations.

You can also feed AI Companion documents, which it will attempt to summarize. In an early briefing with HP, a rep demonstrated how a hiring manager can upload three resumes and ask the AI to compare the candidates. I cannot stress this enough: this is something you should not do.

This is what happens when a manufacturer doesn’t want to risk its laptops getting flirty.

A good screen, trackpad, and speakers are table stakes in a modern laptop. Compared to competitors like the new Surface Laptop and Surface Pro 11 with high-refresh displays and haptic trackpads, the OmniBook X is lackluster — with the exception of its outstanding battery life.

But the reason the OmniBook’s a bit humdrum is because it’s an enterprise laptop in disguise. Aside from the color options, Wi-Fi card, and Bluetooth radio, it’s nearly identical to the EliteBook Ultra, which is the kind of “BoringBook” issued en masse by company IT departments. The corporate world isn’t concerned with treating you to a bright, butter-smooth OLED display or bumping bass — it just wants you to feed the beast and get your work done with tools that are adequate and not too expensive.

The sleek white finish is the only thing that prevents me from falling asleep the moment I look at the OmniBook X.

If you truly worship at the altar of battery life, then maybe the OmniBook is fine. But there’s no reason to pay a thousand dollars of your own money for this screen, those speakers, or that trackpad. Maybe you can use the OmniBook X for 15 hours straight, but for around the same price, you can get something like the Surface Laptop, with a much better trackpad, screen, and speakers — even if you do have to plug it in a little sooner.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

Read More 

Dotcom has been fighting US extradition for 12 years. | Photo by MICHAEL BRADLEY/AFP via Getty Images

Kim Dotcom is being extradited to the United States to face long-standing criminal charges relating to his defunct file-sharing service Megaupload. The order was signed by New Zealand Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith according to Stuff, saying he received “extensive advice from the Ministry of Justice on this matter” and that “Mr Dotcom should be surrendered to the US to face trial.”
As the founder and former CEO of Megaupload, Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz) was accused by US authorities of having cost film studios and record companies over $500 million by enabling users to share pirated content. The German-born Internet mogul moved to New Zealand in 2010, and has been fighting extradition since local police, at the behest of the FBI, raided his Auckland mansion in 2012 over charges of racketeering, money laundering, and copyright infringement. The Department of Justice shut down Megaupload that same year.
Dotcom, who has spent the last several years pushing various conspiracy theories and digital disinformation, responded to the deportation ruling on X, saying “the obedient US colony in the South Pacific just decided to extradite me for what users uploaded to Megaupload, unsolicited.” Two former Megaupload officers, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk, were handed 31 and 30-month prison sentences respectively last year after signing a plea deal to avoid extradition.

Dotcom has been fighting US extradition for 12 years. | Photo by MICHAEL BRADLEY/AFP via Getty Images

Kim Dotcom is being extradited to the United States to face long-standing criminal charges relating to his defunct file-sharing service Megaupload. The order was signed by New Zealand Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith according to Stuff, saying he received “extensive advice from the Ministry of Justice on this matter” and that “Mr Dotcom should be surrendered to the US to face trial.”

As the founder and former CEO of Megaupload, Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz) was accused by US authorities of having cost film studios and record companies over $500 million by enabling users to share pirated content. The German-born Internet mogul moved to New Zealand in 2010, and has been fighting extradition since local police, at the behest of the FBI, raided his Auckland mansion in 2012 over charges of racketeering, money laundering, and copyright infringement. The Department of Justice shut down Megaupload that same year.

Dotcom, who has spent the last several years pushing various conspiracy theories and digital disinformation, responded to the deportation ruling on X, saying “the obedient US colony in the South Pacific just decided to extradite me for what users uploaded to Megaupload, unsolicited.” Two former Megaupload officers, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk, were handed 31 and 30-month prison sentences respectively last year after signing a plea deal to avoid extradition.

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