Amazon has been updating the large-screened Kindle Scribe tablet more frequently and regularly than it updates its standard e-readers, and today the company is announcing the tablet’s third hardware update in four years. The regular Scribe is also being joined by a lower-end Scribe with less storage and no front light and an upgraded Kindle Scribe Colorsoft model with a color e-ink screen. This makes it only the second Kindle to include a color screen, after last year’s Kindle Colorsoft.

Both the regular Kindle Scribe and the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft are available to order starting today for $500 and $630, respectively. Both of those devices include a Premium Pen accessory and 32GB of internal storage; 64GB of storage is available for an extra $50 for both devices. The cheaper front light-less Scribe is coming sometime next year and will run $430 for a model with a more modest 16GB of storage. (These are all much more expensive than the original Scribe’s $340 launch price, but inflation, tariffs, and shortages are wreaking havoc with all kinds of tech prices for the past few years.)

The Scribe and Scribe Colorsoft both come with an updated front light “with miniaturized LEDs that fit tightly against the display,” narrowing the bezel and improving the uniformity of the lighting. Amazon has also tweaked the friction level of the paper-like texture on the glass display, shrunk the gap between the glass and the actual display panel to make writing on the tablet feel more like writing on paper, and added a quad-core processor and more RAM to speed the tablet up.

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Nvidia, AMD, and Intel have all made high-quality image upscaling a cornerstone feature of their new GPUs this decade. Upscaling technologies like Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), and Intel’s Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) are all ways to transform a lower-resolution source image into a higher-resolution image, delivering better-looking games without requiring as much graphics hardware as you’d need to render the higher-resolution image natively. Later additions have focused on improving ray-tracing performance and “frame generation” technologies that boost frame rates by creating new AI-generated frames to insert between natively rendered frames.

Generally speaking, Nvidia’s DLSS technologies have provided better image quality than AMD’s FSR, but they have only been available on newer Nvidia hardware—the GeForce RTX 20-series or newer for most features, with frame-generation features locked to the RTX 40- and 50-series. FSR’s results don’t look as good, but they have benefited from running on just about anything, including older GPUs, Nvidia GPUs, and even integrated Intel and AMD GPUs.

Today, AMD is trying to shift that dynamic with something called “FSR Redstone,” a collection of ray-tracing and frame-generation features all intended to boost AMD’s image quality while being relatively easy to implement for game developers who are already using FSR 3.1 or FSR 4.

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I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my personal homebrew Steam Machine, a self-built desktop under my TV featuring an AMD Ryzen 7 8700G processor and a Radeon 780M integrated GPU. I wouldn’t recommend making your own version of this build, especially with RAM prices as they currently are, but there are all kinds of inexpensive mini PCs on Amazon with the same GPU, and they’ll all be pretty good at playing the kinds of games that already run well on the less-powerful Steam Deck.

But this kind of hardware is an imperfect proxy for the Steam Machine that Valve plans to launch sometime next year—that box will include a dedicated GPU with 8GB of dedicated video memory, presenting both benefits and possible pitfalls compared to a system with an integrated GPU.

As a last pre-Steam Machine follow-up to our coverage so far, we’ve run tests on several games we test regularly in our GPU reviews to get a sense of how current versions of SteamOS stack up to Windows running on the same hardware. What we’ve found so far is basically the inverse of what we found when comparing handhelds: Windows usually has an edge on SteamOS’s performance, and sometimes that gap is quite large. And SteamOS also exacerbates problems with 8GB GPUs, hitting apparent RAM limits in more games and at lower resolutions compared to Windows.

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By Valve’s admission, its upcoming Steam Machine desktop isn’t swinging for the fences with its graphical performance. The specs promise decent 1080p-to-1440p performance in most games, with 4K occasionally reachable with assistance from FSR upscaling—about what you’d expect from a box with a modern midrange graphics card in it.

But there’s one spec that has caused some concern among Ars staffers and others with their eyes on the Steam Machine: The GPU comes with just 8GB of dedicated graphics RAM, an amount that is steadily becoming more of a bottleneck for midrange GPUs like AMD’s Radeon RX 7060 and 9060, or Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060 or 5060.

In our reviews of these GPUs, we’ve already run into some games where the RAM ceiling limits performance in Windows, especially at 1440p. But we’ve been doing more extensive testing of various GPUs with SteamOS, and we can confirm that in current betas, 8GB GPUs struggle even more on SteamOS than they do running the same games at the same settings in Windows 11.

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I can take or leave some of the things that Microsoft is doing with Windows 11 these days, but I do usually enjoy the company’s yearly limited-time holiday sweater releases. Usually crafted around a specific image or product from the company’s ’90s-and-early-2000s heyday—2022’s sweater was Clippy themed, and 2023’s was just the Windows XP Bliss wallpaper in sweater form—the sweaters usually hit the exact combination of dorky/cute/recognizable that makes for a good holiday party conversation starter.

Microsoft is reviving the tradition for 2025 after taking a year off, and the design for this year’s flagship $80 sweater is mostly in line with what the company has done in past years. The 2025 “Artifact Holiday Sweater” revives multiple pixelated icons that Windows 3.1-to-XP users will recognize, including Notepad, Reversi, Paint, MS-DOS, Internet Explorer, and even the MSN butterfly logo. Clippy is, once again, front and center, looking happy to be included.

Not all of the icons are from Microsoft’s past; a sunglasses-wearing emoji, a “50” in the style of the old flying Windows icon (for Microsoft’s 50th anniversary), and a Minecraft Creeper face all nod to the company’s more modern products. But the only one I really take issue with is on the right sleeve, where Microsoft has stuck a pixelated monochrome icon for its Copilot AI assistant.

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It’s not a bad time to upgrade your gaming PC. Graphics card prices in the 2020s have undulated continuously as the industry has dealt with pandemic and AI-related shortages, but it’s actually possible to get respectable mainstream- to high-end GPUs like AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT and 9070 series or Nvidia’s RTX 5060, 5070, and 5080 series for at or slightly under their suggested retail prices right now. This was close to impossible through the spring and summer.

But it’s not a good time to build a new PC or swap your older motherboard out for a new one that needs DDR5 RAM. And the culprit is a shortage of RAM and flash memory chips that has suddenly sent SSD and (especially) memory prices into the stratosphere, caused primarily by the ongoing AI boom and exacerbated by panic-fueled buying by end users and device manufacturers.

To illustrate just how high things have jumped in a short amount of time, let’s compare some of the RAM and storage prices listed in our system guide from three months ago to the pricing for the exact same components today. Note that several of these are based on the last available price and are currently sold out; we also haven’t looked into things like microSD or microSD Express cards, which could also be affected.

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Last year, Apple finally added support for Rich Communications Services (RCS) texting to its platforms, improving consistency, reliability, and security when exchanging green-bubble texts between the competing iPhone and Android ecosystems. Today, Google is announcing another small step forward in interoperability, pointing to a slightly less annoying future for friend groups or households where not everyone owns an iPhone.

Google has updated Android’s Quick Share feature to support Apple’s AirDrop, which allows users of Apple devices to share files directly using a local peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connection. Apple devices with AirDrop enabled and set to “everyone for 10 minutes” mode will show up in the Quick Share device list just like another Android phone would, and Android devices that support this new Quick Share version will also show up in the AirDrop menu.

Google will only support this feature on the Pixel 10 series, at least to start. The company is “looking forward to improving the experience and expanding it to more Android devices,” but it didn’t announce anything about a timeline or any hardware or software requirements. Quick Share also won’t work with AirDrop devices working in the default “contacts only” mode, though Google “[welcomes] the opportunity to work with Apple to enable ‘Contacts Only’ mode in the future.” (Reading between the lines: Google and Apple are not currently working together to enable this, and Google confirmed to The Verge that Apple hadn’t been involved in this at all.)

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