Arlo’s Essential Wired Video Doorbell offers a high-res camera and a wide field of view. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge It’s unfortunate, but many video doorbells require you to lock yourself into one platform’s smart home ecosystem to really make the most of them. Thankfully, there’s at least one video doorbell that works well with any smart home platform: the Arlo Essential Wired Doorbell. And right now, it’s on sale in white for $59.49 (about $91 off) at Amazon. If you prefer another retailer (or color), you can also buy it in black at Verizon for $64.99. Not only is Arlo’s video doorbell compatible with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings, and even Apple Home, but…

Apple’s first big-screened MacBook Air addresses a long-standing need in the company’s laptop lineup. And it comes with zero surprises and no sticker shock. 0The MacBook Air 15 fills a gap in Apple’s laptop lineup that hasn’t been filled in basically ever: a large-screened laptop priced for the masses. There is no reason that Apple needed to wait this long. But it is releasing this model now, following many months that were slow for the company and much slower for the industry at large. Apple, over the last two quarters, reported the sharpest year-over-year percentage decline in Mac revenue that we’ve seen in half a decade. If there were ever a time that laptop companies needed to inject the market…

Apple’s first big-screened MacBook Air addresses a long-standing need in the company’s laptop lineup. And it comes with zero surprises and no sticker shock. 0The MacBook Air 15 fills a gap in Apple’s laptop lineup that hasn’t been filled in basically ever: a large-screened laptop priced for the masses. There is no reason that Apple needed to wait this long. But it is releasing this model now, following many months that were slow for the company and much slower for the industry at large. Apple, over the last two quarters, reported the sharpest year-over-year percentage decline in Mac revenue that we’ve seen in half a decade. If there were ever a time that laptop companies needed to inject the market…

Four days before Apple entered, and redefined, the nascent extended-reality (XR) headset market by going far, far beyond merely that with an entirely new platform, ushering in spatial computing, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms pre-announced the latest version of its Quest mixed-reality headset in a panic. Apple Vision Pro features a pair of advanced, custom micro‑OLED displays deliver more pixels than a 4K TV to each eye — for stunning clarity. Tae Kim for Barron’s: Meta executives were likely dismayed over the positive reception for Apple’s headset innovations. The maker of the Quest VR devices has already lost tens of billions of dollars in projects tied to the metaverse inside its Reality Labs unit. And when the company launched its $1,500…

Macworld WWDC 2023 is creeping up, and with Apple fans starved of event hype since the iPhone 14 launch well over eight months ago, expectations are high. Of course the Reality Pro headset, if the company has managed to get it finished in time, will be the flagship announcement. But one of Apple’s less heralded products might be the sleeper hit of the show. Last month, the respected leaker-analyst Mark Gurman claimed watchOS 10 will be so good that no one will care about the (reportedly rather underwhelming) new Apple Watch hardware coming later in the year. What that means in practice seems to be an updated interface, and while the use of the word “updated” rather than “new” implies…

You can get a great device for less than $500 these days if you know how to pick your priorities. | Image: The Verge You can’t have absolutely everything at this price, but you can get a great smartphone. Whether you want an iPhone, a 120Hz screen, or water resistance, you’ve got options. You can’t set foot in a wireless retail store without being bombarded by “free phone” offers. And while there’s certainly nothing wrong with taking a free phone deal, there are almost always lots of strings attached. Paying out of pocket means you’ll have much more freedom, but the sky-high prices on flagship phones mean that’s not an option for everyone. Budget phones to the rescue. These devices…