We may just have gotten an early look at the Google Pixel Watch 5 - and from an unusual source. Randy Pitchford, the creator of the Borderlands game franchise, posted a pair of images of a watch on X, saying that his friend found it underwater while scuba diving near Saint Martin, as reported earlier by Kotaku.

"He noted that the reverse of the watch indicates that it is a Google Pixel 5, which has not yet been announced, let alone released," Pitchford writes. "It seems to be fine. The face indicates an empty battery, but seems to have enough reserve power to display the correct time." After putting out a call to find its owner, Pitchford s …

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If you’re planning to travel this summer, both a Bluetooth tracker and a personal safety device can come in handy, especially if you’ll be exploring on your own. The Pebblebee Halo combines those two gadgets into one, and it’s currently on sale for $49.99 ($10 off) at Amazon, which is the best price we’ve seen. Amazon is also throwing in a fourth Halo for free when you buy three as a part of a limited time promotion.

Whether you’re touring a new city or heading back to your hotel after a night out, the Halo can help in a variety of situations. Like the Pebblebee Clip 5 — our favorite AirTag and Tile alternative — the rechargeable, water-resistant tracker does a good job of accurately helping you keep tabs of bags, wallets, keys, and other valuables. It offers up to 500 feet of Bluetooth range and taps into both Apple’s Find My network and Google’s Find Hub, so you can locate items even further away.

What really sets it apart is that it’s also a personal safety device. With a quick pull, you can trigger off a piercingly loud 130dB siren, bright strobe lights, and automatic location sharing with one trusted contact. If you’d like to send your real-time location to multiple contacts at once, you’ll need Pebblebee’s Alert Live subscription (which costs $24.99 a year), but the good news is the service is included free for the first year, making the Halo an even better value at this price.

Read our hands-on impressions of the Pebblebee Halo.

Dell, Asus, Lenovo, HP, MSI, Acer, and Gigabyte are among the PC makers that are designing systems around Nvidia's RTX Spark, Nvidia's new Arm-based chip for Windows PCs. But the flagship RTX Spark PC may be from the same company that makes Windows: the new Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra is a high-end RTX Spark system that will offer up to 128GB of unified memory for "creators, developers, and AI builders."

Microsoft says the Laptop Ultra will be available "later this year" but didn't discuss any specific pricing or configuration options.

The Laptop Ultra will slot in above the regular Qualcomm Snapdragon-based Surface Laptops in Microsoft's lineup. Microsoft has made high-end Surface devices with more powerful CPUs and GPUs before, but to date, they've also come with convertible designs that may have limited their appeal. The first was the old Surface Book, with its fully detachable screen and bendy-straw hinge that didn't close all the way; the second was the Surface Laptop Studio, with its chunky design and sliding screen. The Laptop Ultra is Microsoft's first attempt to follow the MacBook Pro formula: it's like the other Surface Laptops, just with more power.

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Dell, Asus, Lenovo, HP, MSI, Acer, and Gigabyte are among the PC makers that are designing systems around Nvidia's RTX Spark, Nvidia's new Arm-based chip for Windows PCs. But the flagship RTX Spark PC may be from the same company that makes Windows: the new Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra is a high-end RTX Spark system that will offer up to 128GB of unified memory for "creators, developers, and AI builders."

Microsoft says the Laptop Ultra will be available "later this year" but didn't discuss any specific pricing or configuration options.

The Laptop Ultra will slot in above the regular Qualcomm Snapdragon-based Surface Laptops in Microsoft's lineup. Microsoft has made high-end Surface devices with more powerful CPUs and GPUs before, but to date, they've also come with convertible designs that may have limited their appeal. The first was the old Surface Book, with its fully detachable screen and bendy-straw hinge that didn't close all the way; the second was the Surface Laptop Studio, with its chunky design and sliding screen. The Laptop Ultra is Microsoft's first attempt to follow the MacBook Pro formula: it's like the other Surface Laptops, just with more power.

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Dell, Asus, Lenovo, HP, MSI, Acer, and Gigabyte are among the PC makers that are designing systems around Nvidia's RTX Spark, Nvidia's new Arm-based chip for Windows PCs. But the flagship RTX Spark PC may be from the same company that makes Windows: the new Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra is a high-end RTX Spark system that will offer up to 128GB of unified memory for "creators, developers, and AI builders."

Microsoft says the Laptop Ultra will be available "later this year" but didn't discuss any specific pricing or configuration options.

The Laptop Ultra will slot in above the regular Qualcomm Snapdragon-based Surface Laptops in Microsoft's lineup. Microsoft has made high-end Surface devices with more powerful CPUs and GPUs before, but to date, they've also come with convertible designs that may have limited their appeal. The first was the old Surface Book, with its fully detachable screen and bendy-straw hinge that didn't close all the way; the second was the Surface Laptop Studio, with its chunky design and sliding screen. The Laptop Ultra is Microsoft's first attempt to follow the MacBook Pro formula: it's like the other Surface Laptops, just with more power.

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© Microsoft

Dell, Asus, Lenovo, HP, MSI, Acer, and Gigabyte are among the PC makers that are designing systems around Nvidia's RTX Spark, Nvidia's new Arm-based chip for Windows PCs. But the flagship RTX Spark PC may be from the same company that makes Windows: the new Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra is a high-end RTX Spark system that will offer up to 128GB of unified memory for "creators, developers, and AI builders."

Microsoft says the Laptop Ultra will be available "later this year" but didn't discuss any specific pricing or configuration options.

The Laptop Ultra will slot in above the regular Qualcomm Snapdragon-based Surface Laptops in Microsoft's lineup. Microsoft has made high-end Surface devices with more powerful CPUs and GPUs before, but to date, they've also come with convertible designs that may have limited their appeal. The first was the old Surface Book, with its fully detachable screen and bendy-straw hinge that didn't close all the way; the second was the Surface Laptop Studio, with its chunky design and sliding screen. The Laptop Ultra is Microsoft's first attempt to follow the MacBook Pro formula: it's like the other Surface Laptops, just with more power.

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Nvidia's announcement that it's getting into the consumer laptop chip space with RTX Spark is huge. Apple has proved for years that Arm-based chips can perform incredibly well while also delivering great battery life - at least on the Mac. In the Windows world, performance hasn't fully matched up under Qualcomm chips, mostly in the graphics department. There's clearly still untapped potential, and Nvidia seems to be promising to deliver it.

This could be Windows' moment to blow us away with a new generation of supremely capable chips, much like Apple's back in 2020, with the introduction of the M1. But why does this launch feel simultaneous …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Google's new "24/7" AI agent, Gemini Spark, can be shockingly good at doing things on your behalf. But I'm not sure it's worth the financial cost and potential privacy tradeoffs.

The company gave me access to Spark last week. Google advertises Spark as an AI agent that can take on tasks and work on them in the background - even tasks that have multiple steps - allowing you to put your phone down or walk away from your computer. It also advertises at the very top of the Spark website that it's "always under your direction," that "you choose to turn it on," and that "it's designed to check with you before taking major actions." Given the moun …

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California lawmakers are progressing a bill to preserve access to video games.

California lawmakers are progressing a bill to preserve access to video games.

Meta's AI support chatbot helped hackers hijack Instagram accounts, as reported earlier by 404 Media. In a video shared on Telegram, a hacker shows how they could take over an account by asking Meta's chatbot to switch the email associated with someone else's profile and then reset the password.

The issue, which Meta says has since been patched, cropped up around the same time Barack Obama's White House account on Instagram was hacked. On Sunday, users noticed that the @obamawhitehouse account began posting images containing Iranian propaganda. Hackers appeared to have hijacked the Instagram accounts belonging to the US Space Force Chief Ma …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Some news: The Vergecast is now a daily podcast! Starting today, we'll be posting every weekday, with even more gadgets and rankings and conversations and feelings and podcasts-within-podcasts. We're excited for all the ways this new schedule lets us tell new kinds of stories, experiment with new tech and new formats, and involve you even more in the show.

(The other immediate change to know about: We'll be publishing the show in the afternoons going forward, so we can include the day's biggest news in our 90 Seconds on The Verge segment. The goal is to always be live before 4PM ET. Often well before.)

As we've been preparing for our new …

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In the COCOBIN project, coordinated by the University of Oulu, coating materials are being developed from suberin, a natural compound found, for example, in birch bark. In plants, suberin acts as a protective layer and prevents the loss of water. Up to 1,500 meters of a bio-based coating material prototype have been produced at semi-pilot scale.

BYD is giving its self-driving tech a big vote of confidence.

BYD is giving its self-driving tech a big vote of confidence.

BYD is giving its self-driving tech a big vote of confidence.

One of the benefits of building an AMD PC is that the company has historically supported its processor sockets for longer than Intel does, allowing the same motherboard (and RAM kit, if you want) to power your PC through multiple CPU upgrades. Today at Computex, AMD announced chips for the current AM5 socket and the improbably-still-around AM4 socket that will help extend their lives a little further, a nod to just how expensive it has become to build a new PC or perform a major upgrade these days.

The first of these announcements is something we knew about already: the relaunch of 2022's Ryzen 7 5800X3D, the first of AMD's commercially available 3D V-Cache processors. Dubbed a "10th Anniversary Edition" in reference to how long Socket AM4 has been around, the re-released chip is slower than regular 8-core Ryzen 5000-series CPUs in general productivity tasks but comes with 64MB of extra L3 cache that disproportionately benefits games. If you're trying to use a high-end GPU with an AM4 motherboard, it could help keep your CPU from being a performance bottleneck. The 5800X3D (re-)releases on June 25 for a suggested retail price of $349, which is less than it currently costs to buy secondhand.

As for the current AM5 socket, AMD officially announced that it was extending its support to at least 2029—it was originally planned to last until 2025, then until "2027+," so that means between two and four years of additional support, depending on how you're counting.

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© Andrew Cunningham

One of the benefits of building an AMD PC is that the company has historically supported its processor sockets for longer than Intel does, allowing the same motherboard (and RAM kit, if you want) to power your PC through multiple CPU upgrades. Today at Computex, AMD announced chips for the current AM5 socket and the improbably-still-around AM4 socket that will help extend their lives a little further, a nod to just how expensive it has become to build a new PC or perform a major upgrade these days.

The first of these announcements is something we knew about already: the relaunch of 2022's Ryzen 7 5800X3D, the first of AMD's commercially available 3D V-Cache processors. Dubbed a "10th Anniversary Edition" in reference to how long Socket AM4 has been around, the re-released chip is slower than regular 8-core Ryzen 5000-series CPUs in general productivity tasks but comes with 64MB of extra L3 cache that disproportionately benefits games. If you're trying to use a high-end GPU with an AM4 motherboard, it could help keep your CPU from being a performance bottleneck. The 5800X3D (re-)releases on June 25 for a suggested retail price of $349, which is less than it currently costs to buy secondhand.

As for the current AM5 socket, AMD officially announced that it was extending its support to at least 2029—it was originally planned to last until 2025, then until "2027+," so that means between two and four years of additional support, depending on how you're counting.

Read full article

Comments

© Andrew Cunningham

One of the benefits of building an AMD PC is that the company has historically supported its processor sockets for longer than Intel does, allowing the same motherboard (and RAM kit, if you want) to power your PC through multiple CPU upgrades. Today at Computex, AMD announced chips for the current AM5 socket and the improbably-still-around AM4 socket that will help extend their lives a little further, a nod to just how expensive it has become to build a new PC or perform a major upgrade these days.

The first of these announcements is something we knew about already: the relaunch of 2022's Ryzen 7 5800X3D, the first of AMD's commercially available 3D V-Cache processors. Dubbed a "10th Anniversary Edition" in reference to how long Socket AM4 has been around, the re-released chip is slower than regular 8-core Ryzen 5000-series CPUs in general productivity tasks but comes with 64MB of extra L3 cache that disproportionately benefits games. If you're trying to use a high-end GPU with an AM4 motherboard, it could help keep your CPU from being a performance bottleneck. The 5800X3D (re-)releases on June 25 for a suggested retail price of $349, which is less than it currently costs to buy secondhand.

As for the current AM5 socket, AMD officially announced that it was extending its support to at least 2029—it was originally planned to last until 2025, then until "2027+," so that means between two and four years of additional support, depending on how you're counting.

Read full article

Comments

© Andrew Cunningham

One of the benefits of building an AMD PC is that the company has historically supported its processor sockets for longer than Intel does, allowing the same motherboard (and RAM kit, if you want) to power your PC through multiple CPU upgrades. Today at Computex, AMD announced chips for the current AM5 socket and the improbably-still-around AM4 socket that will help extend their lives a little further, a nod to just how expensive it has become to build a new PC or perform a major upgrade these days.

The first of these announcements is something we knew about already: the relaunch of 2022's Ryzen 7 5800X3D, the first of AMD's commercially available 3D V-Cache processors. Dubbed a "10th Anniversary Edition" in reference to how long Socket AM4 has been around, the re-released chip is slower than regular 8-core Ryzen 5000-series CPUs in general productivity tasks but comes with 64MB of extra L3 cache that disproportionately benefits games. If you're trying to use a high-end GPU with an AM4 motherboard, it could help keep your CPU from being a performance bottleneck. The 5800X3D (re-)releases on June 25 for a suggested retail price of $349, which is less than it currently costs to buy secondhand.

As for the current AM5 socket, AMD officially announced that it was extending its support to at least 2029—it was originally planned to last until 2025, then until "2027+," so that means between two and four years of additional support, depending on how you're counting.

Read full article

Comments

© Andrew Cunningham