The Verge

Amazon has announced that the servers for New World: Aeternum, one of the company's MMOs, will be shut down on January 31st, 2027. The game will also be delisted and no longer available for purchase starting today, January 15th. Last year, Amazon announced that it would be pivoting away from MMOs to put more of [...]

For an AI loser, Apple did an awful lot of winning last year. The mess that was the Apple Intelligence rollout was embarrassing, to be sure, but through it all, the company kept doing what it does best: selling iPhones. With this week's news that it'll use Gemini models to power the long-awaited smarter Siri, [...]

Elizabeth Warren and other Democrat lawmakers have written an open letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asking for an investigation into alleged "false advertising and deceptive practices" from Trump Mobile. The company first announced its T1 Phone more than six months ago, but is yet to ship a single phone to buyers. The letter [...]

If you know where to look, you can often score deals on Apple's ever-expanding AirPods lineup. Both the AirPods Max and AirPods 4 (with and without ANC) now consistently receive discounts, as do the newer AirPods Pro 3. And while recent shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday delivered some of the steepest discounts [...]

Amazon's data centers will reportedly utilize copper from a mine in Arizona that's leaching metal from ores using microorganisms, the Wall Street Journal reports. Amazon Web Services will be the first customer for Nuton Technologies, which developed the "bioleaching" technology. AWS will also be providing "cloud-based data and analytics support," helping to optimize Nuton's mining [...]

Every year, countless independent films without distribution deals make their debuts on the festival circuit only to disappear into the ether before the general public has had a chance to see them. Pijama, a new VOD streaming service, is trying to change that. Created by filmmakers (and brothers) Juan de Dio and Pablo Larrain - [...]

One of the most controversial issues in the AI industry over the past year was what to do when a user displays signs of mental health struggles in a chatbot conversation. OpenAI's head of that type of safety research, Andrea Vallone, has now joined Anthropic. "Over the past year, I led OpenAI's research on a [...]

If you choose to get an extra controller for your Nintendo Switch 2, you can spend a lot - and get a lot in return. Buying Nintendo's own $89 Switch 2 Pro Controller, for instance, will net you the console's only wireless controller with a 3.5mm headphone jack for private listening, not to mention great-feeling [...]

Raspberry Pi is launching a new add-on board capable of running generative AI models locally on the Raspberry Pi 5. Announced on Thursday, the $130 AI HAT+ 2 is an upgraded - and more expensive - version of the module launched last year, now offering 8GB of RAM and a Hailo 10H chip with 40 [...]

Move over Squid Game: another bleak fictional world is being turned into competitive reality television. In the midst of season 2 of Fallout, Amazon has announced a new series called Fallout Shelter. According to a casting call, the show will put competitors inside of Fallout's iconic vaults and then test their survival skills in a [...]

Microsoft's library of books is so heavy that it once caused a campus building to sink, according to an unproven legend among employees. Now those physical books, journals, and reports, and many of Microsoft's digital subscriptions to leading US newspapers, are disappearing in a shift described inside Microsoft as an "AI-powered learning experience." Microsoft started [...]

You know a gadget category is starting to go mainstream when patent lawsuits start cropping up. Today, Xreal filed a lawsuit in the US against Viture, alleging the firm is infringing on a patent for its AR glasses technology. According to Xreal's press release, the suit was filed in the United States District Court for [...]

YouTube is now home to the "largest digital library of Sesame Street content" with the arrival of over a hundred older, "classic" episodes of the show, as first announced last year. YouTube's collection of Sesame Street episodes spans the series' history, as the announcement for the streaming launch mentions: "More than 100 full Sesame Street [...]

Subway Surfers City, a follow-up to the popular endless runner mobile game / sludge content star Subway Surfers, will be launching on February 26th on iOS and Android, with preregistration open now. "Building upon the original title, Subway Surfers City brings players home from the franchise's World Tour and into the heart of the Subway [...]

Some of us take a kind of I eat to live" rather than an I live to eat" approach to gadgets. They're tools that help you get things done, not something you want to invest a lot of time or money in. If that's you - and there's no judgment here from a certifiable gadget [...]

Verizon is offering customers a $20 account credit following a massive outage that brought down service across the US on Wednesday. In an update on X, Verizon says you'll receive a text message when the credit is available, which you can redeem by logging into the myVerizon app and accepting it. "Yesterday, we did not [...]

The Ricoh GR IV Monochrome now has a price and is already up for preorder. The dedicated black-and-white camera, based on the standard GR IV with a fixed 28mmm-equivalent lens, will cost $2,199.95 - a $700 premium over the GR IV. Ricoh first announced the GR IV Monochrome was being made back in October, and [...]

Sony has a history of making excellent TVs, from the Trinitron CRTs of last century to the world's first OLED nearly 20 years ago to 2016's ZD9 mini-LED that delivered exceptional brightness and dimming control for the time. And while Samsung beat Sony to the market with the S95B, in 2022 Sony was the first [...]

The best deal that I've seen on The Matrix: 4 Film Deja Vu Collection containing the four main films on 4K Blu-ray discs is $34.99. After missing out on that price around Cyber Monday, I've been waiting patiently for it to return. I can wait no longer to rewatch the 1999 classic, so Walmart's $44.99 [...]

It was an overcast January morning in 2025 the day I decided to delete my operating system. The Ubuntu installer warned me that it would remove everything on my hard drive, permanently wiping the entire Windows 10 installation I'd been running for years at that point. I hesitated for a second - maybe I should [...]

Random access memory, or RAM, is in just about every piece of technology we use. But it's also the technology that AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta are using to power the servers in their massive data centers. Now, the world's biggest memory makers - Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron - are taking [...]

Though House of the Dragon tells a different story than Game of Thrones, there are enough tonal similarities to make the spinoff feel more like a remix of its predecessor than a show with its own distinct voice. That's part of what made it a little hard to get excited when HBO first announced that [...]

X is awash with nonconsensual sexual deepfakes that blatantly violate Apple's and Google's policies, yet it and xAI's Grok remain on both companies' app stores. In open letters published Wednesday, a coalition of 28 advocacy groups, including women's organizations and tech watchdogs, are demanding CEOs Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai grow spines and evict them. [...]

The price of Spotify Premium is about to jump again in the US, marking its third price hike since 2023. Spotify announced that subscribers in the US, Estonia, and Latvia will be contacted about the updated pricing over the coming month. Individual Premium plans in the US will increase from $11.99 to $12.99 by the [...]

The WeChat channel Documented (or the New York Immigrant Chronicle) is part newsfeed and part public service. The channel, run by the nonprofit newsroom Documented NYC, is filled with local news for Chinese speakers in New York: stories about healthcare and immigration arrests, but also information on local events like toy giveaways, places where families [...]

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Translate, a standalone web translation tool that supports over 50 languages and is positioned as a direct competitor to Google Translate. The two services look visually similar: both feature two text boxes - one for typing or pasting the source text and another that displays the translated results - alongside dropdown [...]

It's been 25 years since the launch of Wikipedia on January 15th, 2001, and it's come a long way from housing just 100 pages to becoming a behemoth of online knowledge with more than 65 million articles that get almost 15 billion views each month. To celebrate, the Wikimedia Foundation - the nonprofit that backs [...]

Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI have joined Google in paying the Wikimedia Foundation for access to its projects, including Wikipedia's vast collection of articles. The Wikimedia Foundation announced the news as part of Wikipedia's 25th anniversary on Thursday. The partnerships are part of Wikimedia Enterprise, an initiative launched in 2021 that gives large [...]

Any ebook reader will let you cram a Beauty and the Beast-sized library's worth of books in your pocket, but so will your phone. An ebook reader offers a more book-like reading experience, with fewer distractions and less eye strain, and many include extra features, like adjustable frontlighting. Some really are pocketable. Others are waterproof [...]

Following the proliferation of the nonconsensual sexual deepfakes on X, the platform has detailed changes to the Grok account's ability to edit images of real people. They match the changes reported on Tuesday by The Telegraph, as Grok's responses to prompts like "put her in a bikini" became censored. But in tests of the feature [...]

If you're looking for a simple way to streamline your workflow, the Elgato Stream Deck Plus is a handy productivity tool for automating everyday tasks. Right now, it's on sale for $159.99 ($40 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and B&H Photo, which is its best price to date. Like the standard Stream Deck, the Stream [...]

The first big outage of 2026 has been resolved, with Verizon's wireless network now back online after experiencing issues yesterday. This follows Verizon customers across the US, including several Verge writers, finding that service was spotty or nonexistent starting at around noon ET on January 14th, with phones switching to SOS Mode and being unable [...]

Naya has already shipped one successful Kickstarter for a weird keyboard. The Naya Create was an ergonomic split deck with four swappable controller add-ons: a touchpad, a trackball, a rotary encoder, or a 6DoF spatial mouse. The Connect takes that modular concept, applies it to a more traditional flat keyboard form factor, and expands the [...]

Amazon has announced the first cast member of its God of War live-action adaptation on Prime Video. Ryan Hurst, known for his work as Opie in Sons of Anarchy and Beta in The Walking Dead, will play the titular God of War, Kratos. Though the casting might come as a bit of a disappointment to [...]

BMW teased its forthcoming all-electric M-series performance sedan today, promising that the quad-motor M3 sports car would feature specs that are truly next level when it arrives in 2027. The M3 will have four electric motors and simulated gear shifting, a feature that is quickly becoming a must-have for electrified sports cars. BMW says the [...]

This year's CES introduced a bevy of unique headphones, including Fender's first set and a pair that roll up to become a Bluetooth speaker when you want to share your music with friends. However, despite the interesting advancements, we doubt any of them will dethrone our favorite pair for travel: the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones. [...]

Netflix is launching its first pair of original video podcasts, hosted by Saturday Night Live alum Pete Davidson and NFL commentator and former star Michael Irvin. While The Pete Davidson Show makes its debut on January 30th, you can find Irvin's The White House on the streaming service on January 19th. The two shows will [...]

If you want to win in AI - and I mean win in the biggest, most lucrative, most shape-the-world-in-your-image kind of way - you have to do a bunch of hard things simultaneously. You need to have a model that is unquestionably one of the best on the market. You need the nearly infinite resources [...]

Lawsuits seeking damages from Google's illegal ad tech monopoly are piling up following the Justice Department's successful antitrust case. Vox Media, The Verge's parent company, is the latest in a wave of media companies that have filed suit against Google, seeking to be reimbursed for the monopoly profits the tech company allegedly made at publishers' [...]

Elon Musk's X is trying to stop people using its AI chatbot Grok to undress women amid intensifying outrage and legal scrutiny over the deluge of nonconsensual sexual deepfakes flooding the site. It's not trying very hard: it took us less than a minute to get around its latest attempt to rein in the chatbot. [...]

The United Kingdom has walked back plans to make its upcoming digital ID scheme a mandatory requirement for working adults. While the UK government remains "committed to mandatory digital right-to-work checks," an unspecified government spokesperson told The Times, digital ID will now be optional when the initiative is introduced sometime in 2029. The national digital [...]

Sid Meier's Civilization VII is headed to the Apple Arcade on February 5th, allowing you to play the strategy game across your iPhone, iPad, or Mac through the company's $6.99 / month subscription. The game has the same premise as the original PC title, where you're tasked with expanding your empire as historic leaders from [...]

Parents can now manually set a time limit on their kids' YouTube Shorts feed, ranging from fifteen minutes to two hours (with an option for zero minutes coming soon). The update, announced on Wednesday, takes the Shorts time limit feature YouTube introduced in October and adapts it for under-18 accounts. Kids and teens can't change [...]

Google's Gemini AI is getting what could prove to be a very big upgrade: To help answers from Gemini be more personalized, the company is going to let you connect the chatbot to Gmail, Google Photos, Search, and your YouTube history to provide what Google is calling "Personal Intelligence." This isn't the first time Google [...]

Bandcamp has built its entire brand around serving artists. And, with the artist furor over AI growing every day, it's no surprise that the company has decided to take a stand against it. In a Reddit post, Bandcamp announced that AI-generated content would not be permitted on the platform and would be subject to removal. [...]

I'm not a drone guy. In fact, I've always been a bit nervous to play around with them too much. They're big, fragile, and expensive, which is a dangerous combination for someone with my hand-eye coordination. But I've always sort of wanted one, mostly because I've been jealous of the mid-air photos and videos I've [...]

Animal Crossing, like Kirby, has come back when it seems like the world needs it most. In 2020, Animal Crossing: New Horizons released on the Nintendo Switch. The game instantly became a smash hit, providing a much-needed place to safely gather with friends amidst the global shutdown of the covid-19 pandemic. In the almost six [...]

Microsoft is getting ready to show the first gameplay of Forza Horizon 6 next week, and it might also be ready to put a date on its release, too. X poster Xbox Infinite claims they received a Forza Horizon 6 preorder notification inside Forza Horizon 5, implying that the release date of the new title [...]

NBC Sports introduced a new AI-powered player tracking system that will let viewers on mobile devices zoom in and focus on their favorite athletes. It's the first time the viztrick AiDi technology, which was developed by Japan's Nippon Television Network, will be used by another broadcaster. NBC Sports plans to implement the feature for its [...]