This digest compiles the latest from The Verge.
Today’s The Verge Roundup
Apple’s new AirTag has more range and a better speaker
26 Jan 2026, 2:32 pm by Emma Roth
Apple has revealed a new AirTag that comes with the company’s upgraded ultra wideband chip, allowing for more precise location tracking. It has the same $29 for one or $99 for a four-pack price as the AirTag it’s replacing, while the new chip powers Apple’s Precision Finding feature, which uses haptic, visual, and audio feedback to guide you to items from up to “50 percent farther away.”
Along with more accurate location tracking, the new AirTag has an updated speaker that Apple says is 50 percent louder, as well as a Bluetooth chip that “expands the range at which items can be located. You can also use the Precision Finding feature with an …
Asus Zenbook Duo (2026) review: twice as nice — for a price
26 Jan 2026, 2:00 pm by Antonio G. Di Benedetto
The most helpful thing you can add to any laptop for productivity is a second screen. That’s why I love laptops like the Asus Zenbook Duo. Its twin 14-inch OLED displays are attached by a redesigned hinge that now holds them closer together and on a single plane, for a more seamless look than previous models. The Zenbook Duo and its nearest rival look odd at first glance, but having a twin monitor setup available to you anywhere is incredibly handy. And so cool, too. Let them stare.
In addition to the new hinge, the 2026 Zenbook Duo gets Asus’ lightly textured Ceraluminum coating (which sounds silly but looks and feels great), a much larger …
Intel Panther Lake laptop CPU review: call it a comeback
26 Jan 2026, 2:00 pm by Antonio G. Di Benedetto
Intel’s been talking the talk for months about its new generation of laptop chips, the first made on its long-anticipated 18A process. 18A is meant to steer Intel back toward bluer waters by making its chips better, and, if possible, attracting chip designers like Qualcomm and Nvidia to use Intel’s foundries, not just its rival TSMC’s. Last year’s Arrow Lake chips received a mixed reception, particularly desktop versions. The mobile-only Lunar Lake chips, on the other hand, were great, showing that the x86 architecture still has plenty of fight in it against a slowly rising tide of Arm-based Windows laptops. But Lunar Lake was a one-off that …
As Marvel pivots back to the Avengers, Wonder Man goes its own way
26 Jan 2026, 2:00 pm by Charles Pulliam-Moore
When Marvel first announced that Avengers: Doomsday would be directed by the Russo Brothers and star Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom, it seemed like the studio might be using the feature as a massive nostalgia play. Though the film will feature a number of characters from more recent projects like Thunderbolts* and The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the studio made a big deal out of revealing that Chris Evans will reprise his role as Steve Rogers. It’s not clear whether Doomsday will bring back even more actors from the original Avengers whose characters either died or aged out of the team. But the project feels primed to work as a kind of re …
Microsoft’s first Windows 11 update of 2026 has been a mess
26 Jan 2026, 12:04 pm by Tom Warren
Microsoft’s first update for Windows 11 in 2026 has been a buggy mess, to say the least. After reports of shutdown issues on some machines, Microsoft issued an emergency update to fix its January 2026 Windows 11 update last weekend. Now, exactly a week later, the software maker has been forced to issue a second unusual out-of-band fix to address OneDrive and Dropbox crashes.
Microsoft is also investigating reports of boot failures that could be related to its January 2026 security update.
While the first shutdown bug was limited to machines running Enterprise and IoT editions of Windows 11 version 23H2, the latest out-of-band update fixes …
TikTok USA is broken
26 Jan 2026, 10:10 am by Dominic Preston
TikTok has suffered from extensive problems on its first weekend after completing a transaction that changed the ownership of its US arm. According to Downdetector, the issues initially spiked in the early hours of Sunday morning, but many users, including editors here at The Verge, are still reporting errors.
TikTok has yet to confirm or comment on any issues more than a day after the troubles began, making it difficult to pin down the extent of the problems.
Many in the US have found it impossible to upload videos over the last day or so, which are sitting “under review” indefinitely. One video we uploaded from a US account last night ha …
End of today’s The Verge roundup.
