The Verge

Microsoft tests redesigned Windows 11 Run menu with dark mode and more

Emma Roth is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.Microsoft is testing its much-needed refresh for the Windows 11 Run menu, offering a modern interface that the company says is faster and comes with support for dark mode. The redesign is rolling out now to Windows 11 Insiders in the new Experimental Channel.In a blog post explaining the changes, Microsoft says it decided to drop the Run menu’s “Browse” button — a shortcut to user files — after finding “very low usage.” Instead, Microsoft added support for a new “~\” command, which leads to your user directory.Microsoft says it built the new Run menu using code from Command Palette, a utility available through PowerToys that allows you to quickly run commands, open websites, search files, and more. Windows 11 Insiders can enable the new Run menu by going to Settings > System > Advanced and turning the option on. An early version of the redesigned Run menu started appearing in preview builds last year.“We’ve collaborated tightly with partners across the platform to get these UI surfaces loading snappy,” Microsoft’s blog post says.

Apple raises the Mac Mini’s starting price

Skip to main contentApple CEO Tim Cook said ‘supply constraints’ could affect several of its Mac models in the coming months.Apple CEO Tim Cook said ‘supply constraints’ could affect several of its Mac models in the coming months.by Emma RothMay 1, 2026, 9:52 PM UTCPhoto by Chris Welch / The VergeEmma Roth is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.Apple’s Mac Mini now starts at $799 after the company pulled the $599 option with 256GB of storage from its online store, as spotted earlier by MacRumors. The model’s discontinuation comes just one day after Apple CEO Tim Cook said during an earnings call that a chip shortage will impact its Mac products in the coming months.“If you look forward to June, the majority of our supply constraints will be on several Mac models,” Cook said. “We think looking forward that the Mac Mini and the Mac Studio may take several months to reach supply-demand balance.” He added that both devices saw “higher-than-expected demand” as well, with many people buying up the device to use with AI agents like OpenClaw.The global memory shortage

Amazon’s built-in AI price history expands to show the entire last year

Emma Roth is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.Amazon’s built-in price tracking feature now allows you to see how much a product’s price has changed over the past year. To use the feature, open the Amazon app and select the “Price history” button next to the item’s price, or ask Amazon’s AI assistant Rufus.The expansion comes just weeks ahead of Amazon’s annual Prime Day event, which California Attorney General mentioned in his “price fixing” lawsuit against the retail giant. In the lawsuit, Bonta accuses Amazon of pushing other companies to raise the price of their products at other retailers in the days leading up to its annual deals event. Bonta also claims Amazon “bullied vendors to hike up the price of their products sold at other shops, or secured the removal of these products altogether.”Amazon’s expanded price tracking tool is now available in the US, UK, and India. Though the company initially rolled out the built-in tracker in 2024, you could only view an item’s price across 30 and 90 days until now. You can also use third-party tools, like CamelCamelCamel

Dreame — the vacuum company — just ‘launched’ its own phones

Dreame, a Chinese manufacturer best known for its robot vacuums but with ambitions to do much more, says it’s making smartphones now. I’m not sure I believe it.The company showed off two phones at its own Next event, which took place in California this week, though both had previously been revealed in China in March. Neither phone has actually launched, though — in China, the US, or elsewhere — and the company has revealed only a handful of specs about either.Aurora Nex LS1 is the more interesting of the two, but also the less plausible. It’s a modular smartphone with a magnetic attachment point where the rear camera would normally be. Dreame has revealed five different modules that can be attached at that point: a triple camera that apparently includes a 1-inch-type sensor and a 115mm equivalent telephoto lens; an action camera; a fan; a satellite communications module; and a “Smart Agent Module.”We’ve seen modular phone designs before, but this is closest in approach to the version Tecno showed off at MWC this year. That phone was only a concept device, though; Dreame is at least implying that the Nex LS1 is a real product that will really go on

This accessory can snap a Steam Controller to your phone — or almost anything else

Jay Peters is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.Valve’s new Steam Controller goes on sale on Monday for $99, and accessories-maker Mechanism will be ready. As far as we know, Mechanism’s new Basegrip is the very first way to attach a Steam Controller to your phone — as well as Mechanism’s lineup of accessories, including mounts for hanging handhelds and gamepads on the Ikea Skadis pegboard or just about anywhere else. The Steam Controller mount will go on sale the same day as the controller, since Valve gave Mechanism early access to the design.When the Basegrip is paired with Mechanism’s phone mount, the company suggests that you can use the Steam Controller to remote-control your PC using the Steam Link streaming app. But, Mechanism notes that “the controller doesn’t work across all of iOS or Android yet” — and based on my own testing with iOS, there are some issues, so the Steam Controller with a Mechanism Basegrip and mount may not be your one-stop shop for mobile gaming for the moment. (For what it’s worth, playing games with the Steam Controller using the Steam Link

Players from the NBA, NFL, and MLB call for a ban on betting ‘unders’

The unions backing professional NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, and MLS players are calling on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to ban prediction market platforms from allowing users to bet on a player’s underperformance or injury, Sports Business Journal reports. In their letter, the unions cite the need for “appropriate regulations” to protect athletes and their families from “abusive and harassing behavior.”The unions wrote the letter in response to the CFTC’s request for comment on the regulation of prediction markets, such as those operated by Kalshi and Polymarket. In addition to asking for a ban on “under” bets, the unions also want the CFTC to prevent people from betting on whether certain words or phrases are spoken during a broadcast, like “concussion” — which they describe as “another way of betting on a negative outcome.“In 2024, Jontay Porter, a former Toronto Raptors center, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud over a betting scandal that involved “limiting his own participation in one or more games for betting purposes,” according to the NBA. The US Department of Justice also charged several current and former NBA players last year with “using private locker room and medical information to enrich themselves.”The sports

Severe Linux Copy Fail security flaw uncovered using AI scanning help

Stevie Bonifield is a news writer covering all things consumer tech. Stevie started out at Laptop Mag writing news and reviews on hardware, gaming, and AI.Nearly every Linux distribution released since 2017 is currently vulnerable to a security bug called “Copy Fail” that allows any user to give themselves administrator privileges. The exploit, publicly disclosed as CVE-2026-31431 on Wednesday, uses a Python script that works across all of the vulnerable Linux distributions, requiring “no per-distro offsets, no version checks, no recompilation,” according to Theori, the security firm that uncovered it.Ars Technica points out this blog post where DevOps engineer Jorijn Schrijvershof explains that what makes Copy Fail “unusually nasty” is the likelihood for it to go unnoticed by monitoring tools: “Page-cache corruption never marks the page dirty. The kernel’s writeback machinery never flushes the modified bytes back to disk.” As a result, “AIDE, Tripwire, OSSEC and any monitoring tool that compares on-disk checksums see nothing.”Copy Fail was identified by Theori’s researchers with assistance from their Xint Code AI tool. According to a blog post, Taeyang Lee had an idea of looking into the crypto subsystem of Linux and created this prompt to run an automated scan that identified several vulnerabilities

Dreame’s rocket-powered car can do 0–60 in 0.9 seconds because you can just say things now

When I first heard that a vacuum company had released a rocket-powered electric vehicle with physically impossible-sounding performance specs, I immediately thought James Dyson was up to his old tricks again.Fortunately, I was wrong. This time the household appliance company trying its hand at super car design is Dreame (pronounced like “dreamy”), a little-known Chinese firm that has grand ambitions to become a global consumer electronics giant. The company held an expo of sorts in San Francisco this week that resulted in a flurry of product announcements. And because we live in an attention economy, and one of the best ways to grab people’s attention is to show off a ridiculous looking car, Dreame is doing exactly that. Again.The first time was last January at CES, when Dreame displayed a four-door concept car with four electric motors capable of putting out 1,399 kW of power (that’s 1,876 horsepower) and accelerating to speeds of 100km/hour in 1.8 seconds. As you can see, we’re already off to an absurd start.Not even five months later, Dreame is back with another car — and this time, they really outdid themselves. The company claims that its Nebula NEXT 01 Jet Edition, equipped with a pair

Splatoon Raiders preorders for the Switch 2 are nearly 20 percent off

Cameron Faulkner is an editor covering deals and gaming hardware. He joined in 2018, and after a two-year stint at Polygon, he rejoined The Verge in May 2025.Nintendo recently announced a new pricing policy, which knocks $10 off the cost of digital versions of future first-party titles exclusive to the Nintendo Switch 2. Splatoon Raiders, for instance, is available for preorder ahead of its July 23rd release for $49.99 digitally or $59.99 for the physical edition. However, Amazon and Walmart are the exception in how they’re pricing preorders for the cartridge version. Right now, you can reserve the upcoming title at both retailers for $49.94, which is a few cents cheaper than the digital version. Raiders isn’t a sequel to Splatoon 3, but rather a spinoff that has similar third-person, paint-splatting gameplay set in new locales.$50The same $10 discount is in effect for Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, a side-scrolling adventure with a gorgeous storybook art style that comes out on May 21st. The price of the physical version is $69.99, but Amazon and Walmart are currently offering it for $59.88, which is similar to the digital edition’s price. Given that prices on many tech and gaming-related products are increasing,

All the evidence revealed so far in Musk v. Altman

The Musk v. Altman trial is underway, and that means exhibits, or the evidence to be presented in court, are being revealed piece by piece. So far, email exchanges, photos, and corporate documents are circulating from the earliest days of OpenAI — and from before the AI lab even had a name. Some high-level takeaways: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave OpenAI an in-demand supercomputer, Musk largely drafted OpenAI’s mission and heavily influenced its early structure, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared to want to lean heavily on Y Combinator for early support for OpenAI, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever worried about Musk’s level of control over the company, and Musk highlighted the importance of a nonprofit with a mission of broadly beneficial AI.Musk’s buzzy lawsuit, which began its jury trial on Monday in a federal courtroom in California, names Altman, Brockman, and OpenAI investor Microsoft as defendants. The claims vary against each party and have included breaching OpenAI’s charitable trust, fraud, and unjust enrichment. But ultimately, Musk’s lawsuit boils down to whether or not OpenAI deviated from its founding mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence — an often vaguely defined term that denotes AI systems that equal or