Image: Joanna Nelius / The Verge On Wednesday, Qualcomm announced the impending arrival of its Snapdragon X Plus laptop processor alongside more information for its previously announced Snapdragon X Elite chips. While this is not the first time we’ve seen Qualcomm processors in a laptop, it’s the first time the company could have a chip that rivals Apple, Intel, and AMD on speed. The Snapdragon X Plus is Qualcomm’s entry-level laptop chip. It has 10 cores, 42MB of cache, a maximum multithreaded frequency of 3.4GHz, and an NPU with 45 tera operations per second (TOPS, or how many mathematical calculations it can solve in a second) to assist with fancy-smancy generative AI applications. But keep in mind, TOPS is an arbitrary measurement that can sound more impressive than… Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge iPhone users can finally enjoy retro gaming emulators without jailbreaking their phones. Continue reading…

Kenneth Lobo Méndez, director of planning and sustainability in electricity management, and Marco Jiménez Chavez, an engineer, at the state-run electricity utility Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (ICE). | Collage by Israel Vargas | Photos by Justine Calma Costa Rica gets more than 99 percent of its electricity from renewables — it’s still not enough. Continue reading…

Lamborghini’s mission to produce gas-electric hybrid versions of all of its models continues with today’s release of the plug-in hybrid Urus SE. The SUV is the top selling vehicle in Lamborghini’s lineup, and a hybrid version is sure to draw a lot of interest from the Italian automaker’s customer base of luxury-minded one-percenters. The electrified luxury SUV’s hybrid powertrain can put out a total of 800 CV (a metric unit of horsepower that translates to 789 hp), or 588 kW, thanks to its 25 kWh battery. It can also travel as far as 60 km (37 miles) on battery power alone, which is certainly a healthy step up over the hybrid Revuelto’s 10 km of electric-only driving. And, as befitting its Lambo-ness, the… Continue reading…

Adobe claims its new VideoGigaGAN generative AI model can upscale video clips more consistently and in higher quality than other VSR methods. | Image: Adobe Adobe researchers have developed a new generative AI model called VideoGigaGAN that can upscale blurry videos at up to eight times their original resolution. Introduced in a paper published on April 18th, Adobe claims VideoGigaGAN is superior to other Video Super Resolution (VSR) methods as it can provide more fine-grained details without introducing any “AI weirdness” to the footage. In a nutshell, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are effective for upscaling still images to a higher resolution, but struggle to do the same for video without introducing flickering and other unwanted artifacts. Other upscaling methods can avoid this, but the results aren’t as sharp or detailed. VideoGigaGAN aims to provide the best of both worlds —… Continue reading…

The app recommendations in the Windows 11 Start menu. | Image: Microsoft Microsoft is starting to enable ads inside the Start menu on Windows 11 for all users. After testing these briefly with Windows Insiders earlier this month, Microsoft has started to distribute update KB5036980 to Windows 11 users this week, which includes “recommendations” for apps from the Microsoft Store in the Start menu. “The Recommended section of the Start menu will show some Microsoft Store apps,” says Microsoft in the update notes of its latest public Windows 11 release. “These apps come from a small set of curated developers.” The ads are designed to help Windows 11 users discover more apps, but will largely benefit the developers that Microsoft is trying to tempt into building more Windows apps. Microsoft only started testing… Continue reading…

Image: Mercedes-Benz AG Mercedes’ box-shaped luxury off-roader finally gets an electrified makeover. Continue reading…

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo by Brendan Hoffman, Getty Images A bill that would force China-based company ByteDance to sell TikTok — or else face a US ban of the platform — is all but certain to become law after the Senate passed a foreign aid package including the measure. It now heads to President Joe Biden, who already committed to signing the TikTok legislation should it make it through both chambers of Congress. The House passed the foreign aid package that includes the TikTok bill on Saturday. Once signed by the president, ByteDance would have up to a year to complete a sale of TikTok or face an effective ban for the platform in the US. The bill gives ByteDance an initial nine months and gives the president discretion to extend it another three should there be progress toward a deal. Still,… Continue reading…

Eight years ago, Valve began offering no-questions-asked refunds for any game you buy on Steam — as long as you asked for that refund within 14 days of purchase and hadn’t played more than two hours of a game. But when Valve started letting you play games ahead of their release dates with its “Early Access” and “Advanced Access” programs, it introduced a loophole: people could play for many, many hours ahead of launch and still request a refund after. Today, Valve’s closing the loophole: Your Advanced Access and Early Access playtime now counts against the two-hour refund limit. Here’s what Valve’s updated refund policy says about that as of today: REFUNDS ON TITLES PURCHASED PRIOR TO RELEASE DATE When you purchase a title on Steam… Continue reading…

That’s a nice looking charger. | Image by Elago MagSafe isn’t a particularly controversial standard, but I’ve heard people grumble about it. They get upset because it doesn’t charge quite as efficiently as an old-fashioned cable and they get annoyed that any phone case needs to be MagSafe-compatible. But could charging by cable provide you with something as stupidly fun as this new phone stand from Elago? The Elago MagSafe MS W5 Charging Stand is a mouthful of a name for what’s just a Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP shaped MagSafe stand. Do the buttons and switches work? No! Does it fold close? Absolutely not! It’s merely a piece of plastic you slot a MagSafe charger into. It’s so simple you could probably 3D print something similar at home. Image by Elago Don’t… Continue reading…