The Verge

This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here. On TikTok, the tanned youths are explaining why they no longer wear sunscreen. In one video, a young man films [...]

Where's the Trump phone? We're going to keep talking about it every week. We don't have the phones we preordered yet, but this week we received unexpected news from Trump Mobile's media relations manager. If you've been following my reporting on the Trump phone, you'll know that Trump Mobile doesn't exactly keep open lines of [...]

When Colin Farrell was doing press for the first season of the detective series Sugar, he had to be very careful with how he spoke. Sugar is a story about a quirky private detective, but it's also secretly a work of science fiction, something that doesn't become clear until halfway through the season. "I knew [...]

We've lost something in the past 15 years. Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Apple; they've all convinced us that streaming is the best way to watch movies and shows at home. With everything at our fingertips, there's no need to run to Blockbuster for the weekend's entertainment, or wait for a DVD rental to arrive in the [...]

Five months after returning to OpenAI, Barret Zoph - the company's head of enterprise AI sales - has departed, The Verge has learned. Zoph returned to OpenAI in mid-January after a stint as co-founder and CTO of Thinking Machines Lab, the competing AI company founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Shortly after Zoph returned [...]

Valve has some good news and bad news about Steam Controllers. The good news: If you make a reservation for a Steam Controller, the company will now show you one of three estimates of when you'll be able to actually order your gamepad: by September 2026, by December 2026, or sometime in 2027. The bad [...]

The $50 GB Operator is an accessory that lets you connect, play, and authenticate Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance cartridges on PCs and other devices. Now it's getting some new functionality for the Game Boy Camera. After turning the Game Boy Camera into a charmingly awful desktop webcam two years ago, [...]

The easiest way to save on a streaming service is often to pay for a year upfront, which HBO Max is currently making a lot cheaper. Through July 15, 2026, new and returning subscribers can get 28 percent off any of HBO Max's yearly plans, bringing the ad-supported tier down to $78.99 ($31 off) per [...]

Snap's new smart glasses are probably the most impressive bit of face-computer technology we've seen. They're not VR-headset huge; they don't have a big charging puck; thanks to Snap's many years of AR lens development, they're likely to have a lot of features right out of the box. (Yes, they're $2,195, but that may just [...]

Amazon's earlier-than-usual Prime Day doesn't begin until June 23rd, but there are several even earlier deals on must-have products that you can check out right now. To name some examples, Apple's AirPods Pro 3 are selling at their cheapest-ever price at Amazon and Walmart (though, the sale keeps playing peek-a-boo). Also, you can grab Ring's [...]

During a recent expo in Shanghai that focuses on elderly care, assistive devices, and rehabilitation medicine, a Chinese company called Yueban debuted a smart toilet that does something we haven't seen before; it comes to you. The autonomous self-driving Xiaoban toilet was designed to improve accessibility for those dealing with mobility issues due to age, [...]

Do you often find yourself shopping at the big blue, or perhaps you're just looking for an alternative to Amazon? Either way, Walmart is currently offering a year of its Walmart Plus subscription for $49, which typically costs $98. The membership includes perks like free delivery on orders over $35, free next-day and two-day shipping [...]

I launched Firefox this morning to find some new blocks on my home page. The widgets that are currently rolling out add sports scores, time zones, a focus timer, and a checklist, which are already some of my favorite new Firefox features in years. I usually have Focus Friend open on my phone when I [...]

The Onion's InfoWars officially has a launch date: On July 2nd, the conspiracy network previously run by Alex Jones will return as a comedy and media platform. The reboot comes more than a year and a half after news broke that the satirical news site was working to acquire the property owned by Jones, a [...]

When three Amazon software engineers testified earlier this month at Seattle City Council hearings about data centers, they started their testimony by citing a city law barring employment discrimination over political speech. Now, they're accusing their employer of breaking that law by retaliating against them. On June 10th - one week after the hearing, and [...]

This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week. When Fox announced its acquisition of Roku earlier this week, executives of both companies were quick to promise that not much would change in the near future. Sure, getting its [...]

Running out of color options for events in Google Calendar shouldn't be an issue going forward. The previous limit of 11 predefined colors has now been expanded to give users access to up to 200 custom colors for individual events across the native Calendar web and mobile apps, and the Calendar API. This started rolling [...]

One messy database is threatening to disenfranchise thousands or even millions of registered voters, while leaving even more at risk of intimidation or data breaches, in the name of solving a problem that barely exists. As the 2026 midterm elections approach, election and privacy experts are sounding alarms about the Department of Homeland Security's Systematic [...]

Amazon Prime Day 2026 lifts off on June 23rd and will hopefully deliver the best deals of the summer. We've been covering the most notable pre-Prime Day discounts happening, and come next week, we'll be bringing you many more deals - ones we can't tell you about just yet. As usual, expect to see price [...]

If you've been wanting to buy a robot vacuum but have been put off by how much it can cost to get a good one, now is not a bad time to start looking. Prime Day is next week, but many retailers are offering early deals on several models we've tested from brands like Roborock, [...]

On today's episode of Decoder, my guest is Hayden Field, senior AI reporter for The Verge. Often when Hayden comes on the show, it's because something has gone wrong in the world of AI. Last weekend, that something was a pretty intense mix of Anthropic, the Trump administration, and Anthropic's new AI model, Fable 5. [...]

Amazon's Kindle Colorsoft Essentials Bundle is on sale for $182.97 (originally $334.97) as an early Prime Day deal, the lowest price we've seen for the combo. Unlike other Kindles, the Colorsoft's color E Ink screen is great for comic books and graphics novels, illustrated books, or just perusing book covers while deciding what to read [...]

Adobe's plan to stick AI assistants into all of its Creative Cloud suite is now fully underway, with new chatbots now rolling out to its biggest editing and design apps. As part of a public beta launching today, Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign, and Frame.io now each have a bespoke AI Assistant that can be used [...]

Adobe is introducing some new capabilities for its Firefly AI assistant, alongside a "reimagined" AI studio that lets you edit and generate new designs from a single interface. The new Firefly experience launching today in private beta is designed to give you "persistent context, reusable assets, and organized workflows" across your projects, according to Adobe, [...]

Anime collaborations are everywhere, from Gundam watches and Naruto nights at Major League ballparks to just about anything Evangelion. But these Ghost in the Shell keyboards from Iqunix are some of the coolest examples I've seen of anime-inspired everyday tech. They look sick and they type and play great. At $249 they're a hefty upcharge [...]

Midjourney CEO David Holz just showed off the company's first hardware product and plans to build a San Francisco spa, which he admitted is a bit different from the "cat pictures" produced by its AI image generator. Dubbed The Midjourney Scanner, it's an ultrasound-based full-body scanner that uses a ring of sensors to capture vertical [...]

Apple is planning to raise prices in response to the ongoing memory shortage. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Tim Cook says "price increases are unavoidable:" We're doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we've been trying to shield our customers from the [...]

VSCO is taking on Adobe with a new Studio Pro editing app rolling out today on iOS and coming to macOS later this year, as Bloomberg reports. At launch, the app offers tools for batch editing, style matching from a reference image, and sharing images through VSCO Galleries. VSCO says more features are coming later, [...]

Epic Games has been touting the potential of an interoperable metaverse for years, though that vision hasn't yet become a reality. But with Unreal Engine 6, the next major version of its game development engine, Epic plans to take a big step toward that theoretical future: It will let developers make games that can use [...]

Anthropic has spent much of this week fighting to get its newest AI models back online after the Trump administration abruptly ordered the company to cut access for all foreign nationals, including users inside the US and its own employees, forcing Anthropic to block access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for everyone. "To my [...]

According to the latest Pew Research poll, 49 percent of Americans report using chatbots at least occasionally, but 63 percent think the tech is advancing too quickly. Overall, use of AI chatbots has increased dramatically since 2024, when only 33 percent reported using them. Specifically, ChatGPT's usage has doubled since 2023, with 44 percent of [...]

We're seeing good early Prime Day deals ahead of the event next week, and unsurprisingly, some of the best deals are on Amazon's own devices. Several Echo speakers have dropped to new low prices, including the Echo Dot Max, which is on sale for $64.99 ($35 off) at Amazon. Our smart home reviewer Jennifer Pattison [...]

Hello and welcome to Regulator, an email for Verge subscribers about technology, politics, and what happens when science crashes headlong into self-interest. Not a subscriber? Sign up here today! Got the scoop on a petty feud that's going to somehow fundamentally reshape the entire field of frontier AI development? Send 'em over to tina.nguyen+tips@theverge.com. Back [...]

Yesterday, Snap debuted its new $2,195 Specs glasses. In an interview with CNBC, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel described the Specs as something the company had been working on for more than 12 years, an attempt to "bring computing into the world" and "make it more human." He positioned them as a device to help people [...]

Rockstar Games will allow players to upgrade older versions of Grand Theft Auto V for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X / S for free just months before the launch of GTA VI. Starting June 18th, players with any version of GTA V on PS4 or the digital version on Xbox One can get the [...]

SanDisk has announced an expensive way to boost the PlayStation 5's storage capacity. The company's new Optimus GX PRO 850P NVMe SSD is an officially licensed PS5 accessory in capacities ranging from 1TB to 8TB. The largest option can store up to 200 PS5 games (based on average installation sizes) SanDisk claims, but thanks to [...]

Paramount Plus is offering new and former subscribers a discounted rate until June 25th, 2026. You'll pay 99 cents per month for the first two months, with the Premium plan automatically renewing for $13.99 per month after that, and the more limited Essential plan renewing for $8.99. Both plans include some excellent shows, like Freaks [...]

Horror is having a moment. In 2026, the genre is especially well-represented: new blood is dominating the box office through films like Backrooms and Obsession, established names like Sam Raimi and Damian McCarthy are at the top of their game, and long-running franchises like 28 Years Later and Resident Evil continue to stay relevant. But [...]

The Toy Story franchise began with a story about a vintage doll feeling threatened by the arrival of an electronic action figure. Woody and Buzz's rivalry embodied a shift that was happening in the '90s as children's toys were becoming more technologically sophisticated, and while toys have gotten even more tech-focused in the years since, [...]

Amazon's Prime Day is one of the biggest shopping events of the year, and the four-day sale for 2026 begins June 23rd at 3:01AM ET and ends at the same time on June 27th. It will grant Prime members access to some of the best prices of the year on Amazon devices, as well as [...]

AI is pretty reliable at putting things on your calendar these days, but it hasn't quite cracked answering the related and all-important question of "What should I do this weekend?" Meta's new AI Mode in search could be a useful tool - if it ever learns to stop getting stuff wrong. AI Mode is a [...]

Amazon's Prime Day sale kicks off on June 23rd, but already we're seeing some notable Apple deals trickle in. Whether you're looking for a new pair of wireless earbuds or a smartwatch, many retailers are offering notable discounts ahead of the shopping event. Walmart and Amazon recently surprised us with a new all-time low on [...]

The new Thread Networks Diagnostics Tools app from Thread Group, the standards body behind the wireless IoT protocol, officially launches in beta today. The app, which arrives on iOS and has been available on Android in alpha for a few weeks, is the first dedicated tool to provide visibility into your Thread-based smart home network. [...]

Jackery is jumping on the fridge-battery trend with what it says is the "world's slimmest." FridgeGuard also looks nice; a break from power stations that tend to look more at home at a job site than the kitchen or living room. Measuring just 2.63 inches (67mm) thick, the Jackery FridgeGuard power station is meant to [...]

The smart home networking protocol Thread is adding a new way to onboard devices without a Thread border router. The feature, called Thread Direct, is designed to let users set up Thread-powered devices - such as smart plugs and smart locks - using only a phone or mobile device equipped with a Thread radio. Current [...]

After teasing it on X last week, GuliKit announced a new version of its TV Docking Station today that now supports the Switch 2 as well as previous versions of the console, including the original Switch and OLED model. The new version of the dock carries forward a similar design as the original and looks [...]

Google's first new smart speaker in six years starts shipping on June 29th, narrowly missing its promised spring launch window. Preorders for the Google Home Speaker open today, June 17th. Nothing has changed hardware-wise in the nine months since the $99 speaker was announced. It has the same slightly squished round design, with touch-capacitive buttons [...]

LinkedIn is trying to make it easier for users to prove their proficiency with apps that are relevant to their current or future jobs. A new "connected apps" feature is launching today that allows users to link a selection of supported apps to their LinkedIn profile, with each app providing a "simple, specific description of [...]

Matter, the smart home interoperability standard, might finally get a feature that should have been there from day one: a single shared Matter network managed by multiple ecosystems. With this feature, called Joint Fabric, smart devices added to the network will be controllable by any authorized platform - Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and [...]

Let's be real: There's no shortage of Zelda-style games to play right now. That's true even if you've exhausted all there is to see in Tears of the Kingdom or Echoes of Wisdom. Indie developers keep finding new ways to refresh the formula, whether it's fusing it with a Soulslike, making it cozier, or simply [...]