GameSir’s Smart Drive was just a prototype at CES — a wired one at that — but I’ve always wanted to have room for a direct-drive racing wheel in my house. Maybe my thumbs are enough! $139 in Q3. (YouTube version here.)
Asus brought a completely cable-free liquid cooler to CES: Asus’s “Q-Connector” uses hidden pogo pins instead of fan/pump cables! No price, but Asus spokesperson JJ Guerrero says even some mid-range Strix motherboards should include, and you can swap the pogo pins for a cable if you change motherboards. Another way it’s becoming easier to build a beautiful PC.
Better prices, better features, and Matter support made this a standout year for the connected home.
The US release of the Godzilla Minus One sequel is only three days after the premiere in Japan, a rare near-simultaneous release. It will open in Japan on November 3rd, an auspicious date as it’s when the original Gojira premiered in 1954. If you need a reminder of why you should be excited, go watch Minus One on Netflix.
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Real people died while Trump treated war like a meme stock.
Elon is continuing to play the martyr. While his AI chatbot is creating sexualized images of real people and children, he claims people are up in arms because “they just want to suppress free speech.” While he cries censorship, the UK is gearing up to potentially block X temporarily if it can’t get its deepfake porn-maker under control. Musk has responded in typical childish fashion, according to the BBC:
Musk reposted a number of messages on the site overnight criticising the government’s reproval of Grok - including one which showed AI-generated images of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in a bikini.
True story: when we forgot to pack a hairdryer on a beach trip last year, I bought Wolfbox’s awesome MF100 mini blower instead. (It’s one of the top-rated ones in comparison tests.)
Now, Wolfbox has super-sized it. Wolfbox Megaflow 500 Pro; $200 in May.
Seems a lot of people got password reset requests from Instagram over the last few days, including several Verge staffers and members of their family. The email might look legit. It might even have that little blue checkmark in Gmail. But, it probably came from a scammer. Honestly, it’s best practice to never click links in emails anyway.
The Sandwich Alignment Game is the time-waster you didn’t know you needed this weekend. You could lose serious time placing these 57 sandwiches on a D&D-style alignment grid. Now, some people might say this isn’t really a game, but I disagree. Deciding whether an eggplant parm or a meatball parm is more lawful than the other requires real mental dexterity.
As the gap in performance shrinks, and there’s less to separate the best from the rest, how will manufacturers react?
It’s not just a tongue-twister — the Pocket Taco is GameSir’s tiny Game Boy styled controller for your phone, not to be confused with 8BitDo’s tiny Game Boy styled controller for your phone. This one’s Bluetooth rather than USB-C, and cradles your phone’s bottom instead of hanging off the USB-C port. It also has a $35 price and a March release date.
It’s just one of two Game Boy-styled mini-controllers that cradle your phone at CES 2026. This one plugs directly into your phone with USB-C, is coming summer 2026, but doesn’t have a price yet. GameSir has a Bluetooth one for $35 that’s coming March and cradles your phone. (YouTube video version here.)
The company calls it Senso, and it’s cute! Detachable heads and charger so you can leave the probe in soil. Light, temperature, humidity, and soil moisture, plus a whole AI pitch I’m not quite buying. I’d be more tempted if it weren’t a Kickstarter and had a local smart home API. (YouTube version here.)
Before saying goodbye to CES 2026, I roamed around without a destination in mind to soak up the scene with my camera. After a week of operating at breakneck pace for long hours, it felt meditative to just capture a tiny glimpse of tech on display — including some human (and very non-human) moments.
Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge
Hundreds gathered to peacefully protest the killing of Renee Nicole Good.
There were a couple Steam Machine mockups at Jsaux’s CES booth, but they were just shells showing off the company’s cheesy looking stickers. The front display concept wasn’t there.
Jsaux seems thirsty to build a Steam Machine accessory ecosystem like it did with the Steam Deck, where it found success, but the real ideas will require actual hardware.
Anil Dash wrote a really fun, really deep history of Markdown, the text markup language John Gruber created that has subsequently become totally ubiquitous online. Dash also argues that the idea behind Markdown, and the forces that made it huge, hold important lessons that the current tech industry — and AI companies in particular — could really stand to learn from.
[Anil Dash]
