Category: Technology

This week, Apple announced fall hardware updates across multiple devices — pretty much every major category, besides iPhones and AirPods. Don’t get too excited: It’s not a redesign reveal, but we’re expecting a tangible performance jump for both the iPad Pro and MacBook Pro.

With the new M5 chip (no Pro or Max versions so far), Apple used the same 3-nanometer fabrication process for the M5 as it did for the M4. The new chip has 10 GPU cores and 10 CPU cores, along with a 16-core Neural Engine. Apple claims the M5 has the “world’s fastest CPU core” with up to 20 percent faster multithreaded performance compared to the M4 chip of the previous MacBook Pro. Graphics performance also gets a significant boost too. The M5 MacBook Pro ($1,599), otherwise, has identical specs to its M4 predecessor, right down to the same dimensions, weight and 70-watt power adapter.

Meanwhile, inside the iPad Pro, Apple claims it has more than four times the peak GPU compute performance of the M4. If you’re looking to use the new iPad Pro for video tasks, Apple says that video transcoding is six times faster than the old M1 iPad Pro from …read more

After enthusiastically rolling AI chatbots out everywhere, Meta has announced new options for parents to get an idea of how teens are chatting with the digital characters and set some limits on use. The move comes as Meta works to rehabilitate its image after disturbing reports of its tools’ romantic interactions with minors and faces growing scrutiny over chatbots’ impact on kids.

The new controls will let parents stop their children from speaking with AI chatbots entirely or block access to specific characters they don’t like, Instagram lead Adam Mosseri and Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang wrote in a blog post announcing the changes on Friday. Meta’s AI assistant is a notable exception to this rule. The company says it will “remain available to offer helpful information and educational opportunities” with “age-appropriate protections in place.”

Meta said parents will also be given some form of “insight” into how their kids are using AI, though it was light on details for what this might look like in practice. From Meta’s description, it looks like the “insights” will take the form of a high-level summary of …read more

Anthropic is integrating its Claude AI assistant with Microsoft 365 services so it can surface content from Word documents, Teams messages, and Outlook emails in conversations with the chatbot. It’s part of a series of updates to Claude to make the chatbot more useful at work.

Claude will now connect with Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive to search and analyze documents without you needing to upload them manually. The Microsoft 365 connector is available now for all Claude Team and Enterprise plan users, but administrators need to enable the integration before end users can connect up their accounts.

The Microsoft Outlook integration with Claude lets the chatbot access email threads and analyze communications to surface relevant context in its answers. Claude will also be able to search through chat conversations in Microsoft Teams, as well as access channel discussions and meeting summaries.

Anthropic is also launching enterprise search in Claude, a new feature that makes it easier for the AI assistant to search across all of a company’s data sources. As many businesses use a variety …read more

Everything seems to be getting back-to-back price hikes right now, why not your home internet bill too? AT&T is raising prices by $5 a month on all AT&T Internet plans, the company confirms to The Verge. That’s on top of its $5-a-month increase from November 2024, and, it appears, a $5-a-month increase on some customers in 2023 as well.

“To ensure we continue providing the quality service and support you deserve, the price of your home internet plan will increase by $5/month, starting December 1, 2025,” reads an email I received Thursday. But it’s not just me, the company confirms.

Here’s AT&T’s statement, via spokesperson Jim Kimberly:

As we work to meet the evolving needs of our business and manage increasing operational costs, we’re adjusting our internet plan rates to help maintain the high-quality service our customers expect. We’re committed to keeping customers informed about these updates and their choices. To help offset these changes, customers who have not already enrolled in Autopay and Paperless Billing can receive a $10 monthly discount by enrolling with an eligible bank account, or a $5 discount with a debit card. Customers can review all …read more

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

Around the middle of last year, Pim de Witte started reaching out to a handful of prominent AI labs to see if they’d be interested in using data from Medal, his popular video game clipping platform, to train their agents.

Within weeks, it became clear that Medal’s data was more valuable to the labs than he expected. “We received multiple acquisition offers very quickly,” he told me. (He declined to name names, but it has been reported that OpenAI offered $500 million.) “Initially, we were quite in …

Read the full story at The Verge.

…read more

Apple just announced 14-inch MacBook Pro updates that add a new generation M5 processor, faster storage, and a promise of 24-hour battery life, but Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman now reports next year’s refresh will be more thorough.

For several years, Gurman has said that, according to his sources, the next major MacBook Pro revamp would add touchscreens, OLED displays, and a lighter, thinner frame. He reported last month that nothing has changed about that plan other than pushing it back from a late 2025 launch due to OLED supply issues, and today, he expanded on those rumors with details of codenames (K114 and K116) and other specs.

While Windows laptops have had touchscreens for years, Apple has avoided them, instead adding the Touch Bar to its machines for a few years before changing course in 2021. The report also teases another change that’s already a Windows feature but absent on Macs — a shift from Touch ID fingerprint scanning to Face ID authentication, which he says is still years away.

Before that, he says we should still expect to see M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro updates with the current design released early …read more