The Verge·Tuesday, January 6, 2026

The Verge - Tuesday, January 6, 2026

10 stories~15 min

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Stories Covered

Wi-Fi 8 is appearing at CES before most of us have switched to Wi-Fi 7

The ROG NeoCore concept router from Asus. The first Wi-Fi 8 routers and chips made a surprise appearance at CES 2026, and could launch this year, only a couple of years after Wi-Fi 7 debuted. So, if you don't already have a Wi-Fi 7 router - and many of us don't - you might want to consider holding off on upgrading. Rather than focusing on speed upgrades, Wi-Fi 8 promises improved stability. It offers the high speeds and bandwidth of Wi-Fi 7, but with improved power efficiency, higher throughp

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This RV will charge your electric truck after towing

Electric trucks seem to have hit a pothole recently, ignored by truck owners who say they're worried about losing too much ranging from towing. But what if the thing your towing could also pump electrons back into your truck's battery when all's said and done? That what California-company Evotrex is proposing with its new RV, the Evotrex-PG5. The secret to the Evotrex-PG5 is its "unified energy system" that combines a massive 43kWh lithium-phosphate battery, 1.5kW of solar, and an ultra-efficie

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Grok is undressing children — can the law stop it?

Grok began 2026 as it began 2025: under fire for its AI-generated images. Elon Musk's chatbot has spent the last week flooding X with nonconsensual, sexualized deepfakes of adults and minors. Circulating screenshots show Grok complying with requests to put real women in lingerie and make them spread their legs, and to put small children in bikinis. Reports of images that were later removed describe even more egregious contents. One X user confirmed in a conversation with The Verge that they cam

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Universal Music signs a new AI deal with Nvidia

Universal Music Group is partnering with Nvidia to bring a new AI model to one of the world's largest music catalogs. Among other initiatives, Tuesday's announcement touts the extension of Nvidia's music AI model Music Flamingo, which is designed to mimic how humans understand music by recognizing nuanced elements like song structure, harmony, emotional arcs, and chord progressions. It's another instance of the music industry's about-face on AI, which took UMG from suing Anthropic in 2023 over

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CES promises the robot butler, but delivers better Roombas instead

SwitchBot’s Onero H1 is the only multi-purpose home robot with any firm release plan, and even that is just “soon.” If you listen to the CES hype machine this year, you might think that robots are finally ready to take over your domestic duties. To some extent that's true, but take note of the plural: there's no single robot ready to take over all of your household chores yet, but an army of them just might. You might have had one of these single-purpose robots in your home for years already,

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The biggest Nvidia announcements at CES 2026

New year, new opportunity for Jensen Huang to show off his shiny jackets at CES. We're not even a full week into 2026 yet, but Nvidia has already announced several products and updates to start the new year. Nvidia's new Vera Rubin architecture was launched earlier than expected at CES, joined by announcements for its own Tesla-rivaling self-driving car technology, and the latest updates coming to DLSS, G-Sync display tech, and the GeForce Now cloud gaming platform. While none of these hold q

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The best laptop deals you can get right now

The Razer Blade 16 (RTX 5060) is currently on sale for $1699.99 ($700 off) | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge If you want a great laptop, you’re going to have to fork over a ton of money, right? Not necessarily. There are dozens of good laptops on the market at various price points, with even more coming in 2026. However, it can feel overwhelming to find the right one for your needs (some are better suited for, say, college students, whereas others are ideal for gamers). That’s why we’ve come

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AI moves into the real world as companion robots and pets

Uncanny valley meets Bichon Frisé. Artificial intelligence doesn't always want to optimize your life or steal your job. Sometimes, AI just wants to be your friend. And while robot pets weren't the biggest stars of CES 2026, they've become more than just noise and are signaling how AI is apparently leaving our screens and taking on a physical presence in our lives. To be clear, there's no shortage of purpose-built machines on display in Las Vegas: there's Samsung's voice-controlled refrigerator

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This robot pool cleaner lifts itself out of the water to charge

You shouldn’t have to lift the Spino S1 Pro out of the water yourself. Mammotion, the company best known for its line of robot lawnmowers, is launching a robot pool cleaner that can take itself out of the water. As shown during CES 2026, the Spino S1 Pro comes with a robotic arm mounted to a docking station that sits at the edge of your pool. When the bot is ready to charge, the Spino S1 Pro uses an underwater communication system to guide itself to the docking station, which lifts the device

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Power bank feature creep is out of control

This $270 power bank from EcoFlow requires proprietary modules and a desktop dock to reach its full potential. | Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge There was a time not too long ago when buying a power bank was as easy as choosing the cheapest portable battery that could charge your phone and quickly slip into your pocket, purse, or backpack. The hardest part was deciding whether it was time to ditch USB-A ports. Recently, however, brands have been slathering on features, many of which are sup

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