Bethesda’s $300 Pip-Boy 3000 replica can measure (harmless) radiation
Bethesda is now selling a highly-detailed wearable replica of the Pip-Boy 3000 from Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. It was designed using the 3D models of the accessory in the games to make it as accurate as possible, and is available for preorder now for $299.99, with shipping expected to start as early as June 2026. Sadly, it won’t arrive in time for the season two premiere of Amazon’s Fallout series that starts on December 17th, 2025.
It’s not the first time Bethesda has offered a replica of the chunky wrist-worn computer, but an earlier version, bundled with a collector’s edition of Fallout 4, relied on a smartphone and an app to replicate its in-game functionality. Created in collaboration with The Wand Company — which has a solid track record for creating detailed and mostly functional replicas like Poké Balls and Star Trek Communicators — the new Pip-Boy 3000 has its own 4-inch LCD display.
The Pip-Boy 3000’s screen can be toggled between the classic green UI seen in Fallout 3 or the yellowish interface used in New Vegas. Bethesda says “almost all of the in-game content” accessible in both titles has been replicated including hundreds of menus that can be navigated with scroll wheels and dials, and you’ll even find a playable version of the Atomic Command minigame. The screen simulates the appearance of a vintage cathode-ray tube display with glitches and flickering effects that can be temporarily fixed by hitting the device, thanks to an accelerometer.
The replica’s front casing is made from die-cast metal while the body is injection-moulded plastic with a memory foam cuff that can be enlarged using an included spacer. Other functionality includes a flashlight, a headphone jack, an alarm clock mode that can be used alongside an included display stand, and a functional radiation detector. However, instead of measuring the dangerous fallout from a nuclear blast, the replica Pip-Boy 3000 measures the radiation of FM radio broadcasts using on-screen meters and the simulated sounds of a geiger counter.
The Verge’s favorite holiday gifts under $100
Between all the new phones, smartwatches, and laptops we see throughout the year, it often feels like we're constantly being nudged toward shinier, more expensive gadgets. And I get it. As a self-professed gadget nerd, few things are more exciting than unboxing and setting up a new device.
But the truth is, you can still find plenty of great gifts for under $100. I use the Leatherman Free T4 every day, while Donkey Kong Bananza has provided me (and other Verge staffers) with hours of entertainment. If someone in your life loves the satisfaction of building and has shelves full of knickknacks on display, the Lego Game Boy is (as our reviewer …
You can get up to 30 percent off Sonos speakers and soundbars right now
If you’ve been waiting for some relief after Sonos raised its prices earlier this year in response to US tariffs, Black Friday presents a rare opportunity. With many products on sale for their lowest price to date for Black Friday, and the Sonos app being in far better shape than it was a year ago, it’s a great time to pick up a Sonos gadget.
If you’re looking to upgrade your home theater setup ahead of the holidays, Sonos’ entire soundbar lineup is heavily discounted through December 1st, as are smart speakers like the Sonos Era 100 and portable Roam 2. The Sonos Ace — the company’s first pair of noise-canceling headphones — are down to their best price to date at several retailers, if you truly want to go all in on the Sonos ecosystem.
Right now, both the Sonos Arc Ultra (Amazon, Best Buy, Sonos) and the latest Sonos Beam (Amazon, Best Buy, Sonos) have dropped to historic lows, with the Ultra going for $879 ($220 off) and the Beam for $349 ($150 off). The second-gen Beam is the smaller of the two and works well in smaller spaces like apartments. It supports Dolby Atmos and HDMI eARC, delivering impressive sound for its size, so movies and TV shows feel noticeably richer. You can also use it as a smart speaker with support for Amazon Alexa (and Bluetooth).
The Sonos Arc Ultra, however, is the better pick if you’re aiming for a true home theater setup or want something beefier for a larger space. It delivers far more powerful audio with eight woofers, three tweeters, and two upward-firing Dolby Atmos speakers, which creates the sense that sound is coming from above — something the Beam can’t replicate with its virtual height channels. It also builds on the original Arc with more immersive audio, support for Bluetooth playback, and Trueplay EQ tuning.
Read our Sonos Arc Ultra and Sonos Beam (second-gen) reviews.
It’s not just soundbars that have dropped to new low prices. Sonos’ first pair of over-ear headphones, the Sonos Ace, are also cheaper than ever now that they’re available for $279 ($120 off) from Amazon, Best Buy, and Sonos. The stylish headphones combine style with impressive sound, effective noise cancellation, and a natural-sounding transparency mode. They’re also comfortable and offer up to 30 hours of battery life, which makes them perfect for marathon cross-country flights.
What really sets the Sonos Ace apart from other pairs of ANC headphones, though, is their TV Audio Swap feature, which was updated in July to let you pair up to two headphones with a Sonos soundbar for private listening. The unique feature also supports spatial audio that adapts to your space and head tracking, providing a more immersive experience when watching movies, regardless of the device you’re using to do so.
Read our full Sonos Ace review.
If you’re looking for a portable option, the company is also offering solid deals on a number of smart speakers — including the Sonos Roam 2, which is available for $139 ($40 off) from Amazon, Best Buy, and Sonos. The pint-size speaker delivers clean, detailed audio, lasts up to 10 hours on a single charge, and has an IP67 rating for water and dust resistance. It also supports both Apple’s AirPlay 2 and Amazon Alexa (when connected to a Wi-Fi network) and can be used right out of the box. That’s a welcome change from the original Roam, which required you to work through a somewhat awkward setup process using the Sonos app.
Last but not least, if you’re on the market for a smart speaker, the Sonos Era 100 is down to $169 ($30 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Sonos’ online store, while the Sonos Era 300 (Amazon, Sonos, Best Buy) is going for $379 ($100 off). The Era 100 — arguably the best smart speaker for most people — delivers rich bass thanks to a large midwoofer and dual tweeters, with support for both Bluetooth and line-in using an optional USB-C adapter. The Era 300 builds upon that experience with Dolby Atmos support, as well as four tweeters that point forward, left, right, and up. It also features angled woofers, which spread sound more evenly throughout the room than the Era 100.
Read our Sonos Era 100 and Sonos Era 300 reviews.
OpenAI is launching group chats in ChatGPT
OpenAI is widely rolling out group chats inside ChatGPT, allowing you to invite up to 20 other people to your conversation with the AI chatbot. The feature is now available globally to all logged-in users, following a short pilot earlier this month.
OpenAI positions the feature as a way to collaborate with friends, family members, or coworkers when doing things like organizing a dinner, creating travel plans, and drafting an outline — all with ChatGPT on board.
You create a group chat by selecting the “people” icon in the top-right corner of the ChatGPT app. ChatGPT will then copy your existing chat to a new group chat, where you can add others by sending them a link to your conversation (which they can also share). ChatGPT will prompt you to enter a name, username, and photo the first time you enter or create a group chat, making it easier to see who’s talking.
OpenAI says it trained ChatGPT to go along with the “flow of the conversation,” which means it will try to determine the best times to chime in and when to stay quiet. You can directly mention “ChatGPT” in a message if you want a response from the chatbot. ChatGPT can also react to messages with emoji and reference profile photos when doing things like creating personalized images.
You can access various settings by selecting the group chat icon on the top-right corner of the screen, which houses options to add or remove people, mute notifications, and give custom instructions to ChatGPT. OpenAI notes that ChatGPT won’t use memories from your personal chats inside group conversations, nor will it create new memories based on your group chats.
ChatGPT uses GPT-5.1 Auto to power its responses in group chats, “which chooses the best model to respond with based on the prompt and the models available to the user that ChatGPT is responding to.” Rate limits will only apply when ChatGPT sends a message in the chat.
Feds charge four with illegally smuggling Nvidia AI chips to China
Federal prosecutors have charged four people with illegally smuggling Nvidia GPUs and HP supercomputers with Nvidia GPUs from the US to China, according to a court filing spotted by Court Watch. The US government has placed restrictions that prevent Nvidia from selling its most powerful chips for AI training to China, but Chinese companies like DeepSeek have still created competitive AI models. After DeepSeek released its R1 model earlier this year, Scale CEO Alexander Wang said he thinks China has far more of Nvidia’s H100 AI chips than people may think, despite the export controls, and operations like this may help explain how.
Nvidia, which reported quarterly earnings of a record $57 billion in revenue on Wednesday.
According to the documents, only one person has been arrested so far, while the four are facing charges including smuggling, conspiracy, and money laundering. The four people charged — Mathew Ho, Brian Curtis Raymond, Tony Li, and Harry Chen — allegedly conspired to export the GPUs starting in late 2023, including shipping 50 of Nvidia’s coveted H200 GPUs, and several batches of the earlier H100 GPUs without a license.
The filing explains that one part of the scheme was an alleged front company called Janford Realtor, LLC:
Despite its name, Janford Realtor, LLC was never involved in any real estate transactions. Instead, the company served as an intermediary for several unlawful and unlicensed exports to the People’s Republic of China (“PRC”) of advanced and highly-controlled U.S.-origin Graphics Processing Units (“GPUs”) with artificial intelligence (“AI”) and supercomputing applications.
Ho, a US citizen, was the registered agent of the company, and Li, a Chinese national, was identified as a manager of the company.
Bryan Curtis Raymond of Huntsville, Alabama, is listed in the filing as the CEO and sole owner of “U.S. Company 1,” which was paid nearly $2 million by Janford Realtor. On his LinkedIn, Raymond says he is the CEO of Bitworks, which he describes as an AI infrastructure company that “provides sales and support for Nvidia and AMD solutions,” and in another post said he was recently hired as CTO for another AI cloud computing company, Corvex. Ho and the other co-conspirators bought GPUs from vendors, including Raymond and his company, using money sent via wire transfer from bank accounts in China, while using fake shipping letters and contracts to evade export controls.
“The export system is rigorous and comprehensive,” Nvidia spokesperson John Rizzo says in a statement to The Verge. “Even small sales of older generation products on the secondary market are subject to strict scrutiny and review. Trying to cobble together datacenters from smuggled products is a nonstarter, both technically and economically. Datacenters are massive and complex systems, making any smuggling extremely difficult and risky, and we do not provide any support or repairs for restricted products.”
Tesla is getting better about reporting FSD crash data — but the numbers are still misleading
Last week, Tesla revealed a new section of its website dedicated to reporting safety statistics for its advanced driver assist systems, Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD).
The new hub appears to be an attempt to move beyond the company's traditional quarterly safety reports, which have been criticized for failing to account for basic facts about traffic statistics, and toward something more verifiable and reliable. And given that Tesla's future relies on people trusting its self-driving technology, the stakes couldn't be higher.
But safety experts say the updated report is too little, too late.
"Yeah on the surface it looks like FSD …
Gemini 3 is almost as good as Google says it is
Google set the bar high for Gemini 3. It's promising a bunch of upgraded features in its shiny new AI model, from generating code that produces interactive 3D visualizations to "agentic" capabilities that complete tasks. But as we've seen in the past, what's advertised doesn't always match up to reality. So we put some of Google's claims to the test and found that Gemini 3 delivers reasonably well - with caveats.
Google announced the Gemini 3 family of models earlier this week, with the flagship Gemini 3 Pro rolling out to users first. Gemini 3 Pro is supposed to come with big upgrades to reasoning, along with the ability to provide more co …
The music industry is all in on AI
Two years ago, "BBL Drizzy" was the AI music shot heard around the world: a song with vocals that sounded like Drake bubbled up from nowhere and launched what was shaping up to be a battle of artistry, likeness, and of course, copyright. The big three labels - Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Records - sued AI companies Udio and Suno for copyright infringement "en masse"; they staged public spats with TikTok over issues including AI content on the platform; and they began spinning up AI detection tools to keep tabs on how their music moved around.
Now the music industry and AI startups appear largely aligned …
Windows handhelds are getting the new Xbox Full Screen Experience tomorrow
Microsoft will start rolling out its new Xbox Full Screen Experience (FSE) to Windows-based handhelds on November 21st. The full screen mode for the Xbox app originally shipped on the Xbox Ally devices last month, providing a more console-like navigation experience on top of Windows 11.
While Microsoft released a preview to MSI Claw models last month, it’s now making the Xbox Full Screen Experience generally available to all Windows-based handhelds. Microsoft is also expanding Xbox FSE “to more Windows 11 PC form factors through the Xbox and Windows Insider programs soon.”
The Xbox FSE doesn’t load the full Windows desktop or a bunch of background processes, freeing up more memory for games. It’s essentially not loading the Explorer shell and saving around 2GB of memory by suppressing all the unnecessary parts of a typical Windows 11 installation.
If you decide to enable Xbox FSE on your handheld or PC, it will launch you straight into the Xbox PC app at boot, which includes all of your PC games from the Microsoft Store, Battle.net, Steam, and other storefronts. There’s also a Game Bar for navigating between games and launchers, and a task view that’s designed to be more handheld-friendly.
To turn on Xbox FSE on a compatible handheld, go to Settings > Gaming > Full screen experience, then select Xbox as your home app.
The Oura Ring 4 has dropped to its lowest price yet for Black Friday
The Oura Ring 4 is our favorite smart ring thanks to its slim design, improved battery life, and in-depth health tracking features. If you’re curious to see why it’s such a great alternative to a smartwatch, you can snag the health tracker for as low as $249 at Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy. Discounts on the smart ring have been hard to come by since its launch over a year ago, and the latest deal brings it down to its lowest price yet.
Oura Ring 4
The Oura Ring 4 is slimmer and more accurate than its predecessor, while adding new AI-powered tools and longer battery life. Read our review.
Where to Buy:
While the fourth-generation Oura Ring introduces relatively minor hardware changes, it offers several great software improvements over its predecessor. For instance, it features an algorithm that can accurately track your heart rate and blood oxygen levels, along with improved activity detection. It also tracks light workouts, stress levels, menstrual cycles, and other essential health metrics, all from your finger.
However, to fully take advantage of what the Oura Ring 4 has to offer, you’ll need to subscribe to an Oura Membership, which runs $5.99 a month. With a membership, you’ll gain access to more detailed sleep analysis, 24/7 heart rate tracking, advanced temperature monitoring, and more. The subscription is easily the biggest downside of the Oura Ring 4, but the discount takes some of the sting out of the ongoing cost.
In addition to snagging an Oura Ring 4 for just $249, you can also pick up the gold and rose gold color options for $349 ($150 off). The stealth color option is down to $299 ($100 off), with sizes ranging from 4 to 15. Each model is made of durable titanium. Battery life lasts about a week, which is a notable upgrade over the three to four days of the previous model.