Microsoft has taken the wraps off the new Surface Laptop — an Arm-based laptop for consumers. It’s got one big difference from the Surface Laptop 6 for Business announced in March — it’s equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chip instead of Intel’s Core Ultra, leveling the playing field, the company hopes, with Apple’s powerful and efficient MacBook laptops. The new Surface laptop comes in four colors and 13.8- and- 15-inch options for its 600-nit displays. The company says it’s “80 percent faster than our previous generation” and offers “up to 22 hours of local video playback.” It’s got a haptic touchpad, just as Apple’s MacBooks have had for years. Unlike the MacBook Air, Microsoft said it will support three 4K monitors — on top... Continue reading…

The new Surface Pro. It comes in blue! | Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge Microsoft just announced the new Surface Pro, the latest in its lineup of tablet / laptop hybrid devices and the first in a new generation of what Microsoft is calling Copilot Plus PCs. The numbers are gone from the model numbers, which seems to signify a full reboot of the lineup. “Compared to previous Surface generations, it isn’t even close,” said Brett Ostrum, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Surface, at a launch event. The consumer-focused Surface Pro has a lot in common with the business device Microsoft launched in March. That device had a 13-inch display, up to 64GB of RAM, the newly ubiquitous Copilot key, an improved keyboard attachment, and a 5G-capable option. It also has a Neural Processing Unit (NPU), the chip that... Continue reading…

Image: Allison Johnson / The Verge Just days after Apple’s OLED iPad Pro went on sale, Microsoft is bringing the same core display technology to its new Surface Pro. (Also, it’s now just called the Surface Pro; the company has seemingly done away with its numbering.) For the first time, Microsoft’s tablet will be capable of producing perfect blacks along with all the other benefits to contrast ratio, response time, and more that come with the move to OLED. The new panel also supports HDR output, the company said at its event. The LCDs on previous Surface Pros (and on the business edition Surface Pro 10) were already impressive in terms of color accuracy and sharpness, but Microsoft always stuck to traditional backlighting, which limited just how deep the blacks could go.... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Google’s data centers are expanding to support its AI ambitions, and a new project in Finland shows one way the company is trying to grapple with the environmental impact of that growth. Google will drop €1 billion (roughly $1.1 billion) to expand its data center in Finland to “further unlock the potential of AI,” the company said in an emailed press release today. It includes plans to reuse heat from the data center to warm nearby homes, schools, and public buildings. Its scramble to inject AI into Search and other products and services could derail the company’s climate goals Already energy-hungry data centers are now even more energy intensive when used for AI. Reusing the server heat is one way to mitigate the effects that AI has on... Continue reading…

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14 Gen 9. | Image: Lenovo Lenovo announced on Monday that it’s adding two Qualcomm-powered laptops to its portfolio: one new Yoga Slim and one new ThinkPad. The Yoga Slim 7x 14 Gen 9 is the creativity-focused laptop of the two. It will be configured with a Snapdragon X Elite processor, up to 32GB of memory, up to 1TB of M.2 SSD storage, three USB-C ports with Power Delivery and DisplayPort 1.4 support, and a 14.5-inch OLED touch display. The whole laptop will weigh just 2.8 pounds and be as thin as 0.51 inches, and it has a 1080p IR webcam that supports Windows Hello. Lenovo claims the Yoga Slim’s battery life will last multiple days, which, if true, could rival the MacBook Pro. The ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 is, of course, business-focused. It will have the same... Continue reading…

The OmniBook is on the left and the EliteBook is on the right. | Image by HP Buying a laptop from a major maker like HP can be infuriating — mainly because there are too many options. HP and other laptop makers do this to give us all “choice,” but if you are the kind of person who uses “RAM” and “storage” interchangeably, those choices can be confounding — which might be one reason HP’s using today’s big AI and Windows on Arm moment to also clean up its whole lineup. Gone are the Envys and Pavilions and Dragonflies, and in their places are the consumer-focused OmniBook and the corporate-oriented EliteBook and ProBook. In both cases, the idea is to simplify things for people who just want to buy a laptop. Yet, you’ll still need a legend to fully decipher things. I’ll link the HP provided charts below, but as an... Continue reading…

Acer’s Swift 14 AI laptop arrives this summer. | Image: Acer On Monday, Acer announced the pending arrival of its first Copilot Plus PC: the Swift 14 AI, which is the Qualcomm Snapdragon version of one of its popular laptops. It will come in two configurations, and both will support a slate of new AI features in Windows 11, like Recall, Cocreator, and Live Captions. One configuration comes with the base 12-core Snapdragon X Elite processor (the one without dual boost) and the other with the 10-core Snapdragon X Plus. Both have the same 45 TOPS neural processing unit, and both laptop models can be configured with up to 32GB of memory and 1TB of M.2 SSD storage. Also, both will have a 14.5-inch (2560 x 1600), 120Hz IPS display, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 4, plenty of ports (two USB-C, two USB-A, and one... Continue reading…

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images Google is pouncing on Microsoft’s weathered enterprise security reputation by pitching its services to government institutions. Pointing to a recent report from the US Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) that found that Microsoft’s security woes are the result of the company “deprioritizing” enterprise security, Google says it can help. The company’s pitch isn’t quite as direct as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella saying he made Google dance, but it’s spicy all the same. Repeatedly referring to Microsoft as “the vendor” throughout its blog post on Monday, Google says the CSRB “showed that lack of a strong commitment to security creates preventable errors and serious breaches.” Platforms, it added, “have a responsibility” to hold to strong... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge iOS 17.5 arrived last week with one of the weirder problems we’ve seen — users reported that deleted photos on their iPhones and iPads were suddenly reappearing. Apple has refused requests to comment on the issue publicly, but on Monday afternoon it released iOS and iPadOS 17.5.1 updates to fix the problem. According to the notes, “This update provides important bug fixes and addresses a rare issue where photos that experienced database corruption could reappear in the Photos library even if they were deleted.” Screenshot: iPadOS The supposedly-deleted photos popping to the top of user’s “recent” photos included nude pictures in some cases, and at least one person reported they reappeared on an iPad that had been... Continue reading…

Apple has just released iOS 17.5.1. This update comes a week after Cupertino made iOS 17.5 available to all users. Besides important bug fixes, the company says it "addresses a rare issue where photos that experience database corruption could reappear in the Photos library even if they were deleted." As reported by BGR last week, iPhone users on Reddit were saying that people who updated to iOS 17.5 found deleted photos reappearing in their library without explanation. The creator of the thread explained what happened: “Erm, so yeah. Very creepy. Thoroughly freaked out. I just completed the update. When in conversation with my partner, I went to send a picture and saw that the latest pictures were NSFW material we’d made years ago when we were living apart (COVID, etc.). But WTF. It was permanently deleted years ago, but magically, it’s back?? I checked my iPad, and it also has pictures (some artwork I did years ago). I feel so uncomfortable. Anyone else got this issue? I mean, with pictures coming back post update?” Now, Apple has fixed this issue with iOS 17.5.1. The release notes say: This update provides imporant bug fixes and addresses a rare issue where photos that experienced database corruption could reappear in the Photos library even if they were deleted. Besides this major bug, now fixed with iOS 17.5.1, Apple added several new features with iOS 17.5, including: Pride wallpapers: To celebrate Pride 2024, Apple brings “bold, symbolic color to Apple Watch, iPhone, and iPad. Signaling hope, strength, and fellowship to LGBTQ+ communities, the beams of light glow against a dark background and stack on top of each other to represent the everlasting impact of LGBTQ+ activism and its role in illuminating the path to greater equality for future generations.” Podcasts widget change: The Podcasts widget has a new dynamic color that changes depending on what you’re listening to. Tracking Notifications: Cross-platform tracking detection delivers notifications to users if a compatible Bluetooth tracker they do not own is moving with them, regardless of what operating system the device is paired with. Apple News+: For Apple News+ (or Apple One subscribers), users can have a new offline mode that gives access to the Today feed and News+ tab even when they don’t have an internet connection. If we discover anything else with iOS 17.5.1, we'll make sure to update this story. Don't Miss: iOS 18: Release date, AI, supported iPhones, and everything we know The post Apple releases iOS 17.5.1 to fix mysterious bug resurfacing deleted photos appeared first on BGR. Today's Top Deals Today’s deals: $50 off new Beats Solo 4, $249 iPad 9th-Gen, $19 Roku Express, $180 ASUS laptop, more Today’s deals: First-ever M4 iPad Pro discount, $100 off Pixel 8a, $75 TP-Link WiFi 6 router, more Best Ring Video Doorbell deals in May 2024 Today’s deals: $20 Blink Mini, $179 AirPods Pro, $300 Vitamix blender, $100 COSORI air fryer, more