The Verge

Editor's note:Black Friday doesn't officially take place until Friday, November 28th; however, if you want to shop ahead of time, we've rounded up thebest early Black Friday dealsyou can already get. Whether you're wearing them for the morning commute, while traveling, or if you're simply trying to find some peace and quiet while working at [...]

Michael Crider's headline at PCWorld today perfectly captures how ridiculous the PC memory shortage has become: stores like the San Francisco Bay Area's Central Computers are beginning to sell RAM at market prices, like you'd pay for the catch-of-the-day at a seafood restaurant. Costs are fluctuating daily as manufacturers and distributors adjust to limited supply [...]

"It's a wrap ... Don't forget to buy an 'i survived Belem' shirt," reads the opening line of an email I got Saturday, the final day of highly anticipated United Nations climate negotiations in Belem, Brazil. The email was sent from Shravya Jain-Conti, the US climate diplomacy lead at the Global Strategic Communications Council (GSCC), [...]

The Department of Justice has announced a settlement with RealPage, the widely used rent-setting software that it accused of engaging in collusion to drive up rent prices by sharing previously private information from competing landlords. The settlement puts limits on RealPage's ability to collect and use that data, and blocks it from being used to [...]

OpenAI is making it easier to plan out holiday shopping with ChatGPT's latest feature, called shopping research." Any shopping question in ChatGPT will trigger this new feature, which is rolling out to all ChatGPT users on free and paid plans on mobile and web, with nearly unlimited usage" available during the holiday shopping season. Now, [...]

For the first time, Meta is offering trade-in discounts for its smart glasses with a pilot program that's only running through December 31st. According to a legal page on Meta's website, trade-in discounts can be applied to the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 1, Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2, Oakley Meta HSTN, and Oakley Meta Vanguard. Notably, the [...]

Christ. Fine. So over the weekend, a strange Substack post from what appears to be a CEO of a pet relocation company went very viral. This post - which to be clear, is bullshit - alleges that Nvidia is engaged in what may become the largest accounting fraud in technology history." That's a load-bearing may," [...]

Microsoft is loving Crocs at the moment. After releasing Windows XP-themed Crocs earlier this year, the software maker is now putting an Xbox controller on your feet with a new limited edition pair of Crocs. Available on November 25th for $80, the Xbox Crocs mimic the Xbox One X's controller with fixed buttons and joysticks. [...]

Signal is launching secure backups on iOS, allowing you to save and restore your messages in case you lose or break your phone. With the free version of the feature, you can store up to 100MB of text messages, along with the past 45 days' worth of photos, videos, GIFs, and files. There's also a [...]

The US Consumer Protection Safety Commission issued a stark warning about Rad Power Bikes' e-bike batteries Monday, linking them to dozens of fires and saying they pose a risk of serious injury and death." The batteries can unexpectedly ignite and explode," especially when water or debris leaks in to cells or the harness, the agency [...]

The AI labs never sleep - especially the week before Thanksgiving, it seems. Days after Google's buzzworthy Gemini 3, and OpenAI's updated agentic coding model, Anthropic has announced Claude Opus 4.5, which it bills as the best model in the world for coding, agents, and computer use," claiming it has leapfrogged even Gemini 3 in [...]

Editor's note:Black Friday doesn't officially take place until Friday, November 28th; however, if you want to shop ahead of time, we've rounded up thebest early Black Friday dealsyou can already get. A glass screen protector is one of a few essential accessories that every Switch 2 owner should make, along with a select few others. [...]

What do you get the man who says he has everything? It's a tough question - and one you have a limited amount of time to answer, given the holidays are nearly upon us. You could try dropping subtle hints or asking friends and family for suggestions, but they might save their best ideas for [...]

Earlier this month, Junghun Lee - CEO of Nexon, the parent company behind current live-service shooter du jour Arc Raiders - made waves in the game development community with a straightforward statement. "It's important to assume that every game company is now using AI," he explained. Indie developers were quick to loudly and vociferously call [...]

If you're thinking of ways to spend time with (or avoid) your family during Thanksgiving or Christmas, you can currently sign up for a year of HBO Max with ads for $2.99 a month ($8 off). The ongoing Black Friday promo is available to both new and returning subscribers, runs until December 1st, and saves [...]

On Monday, Amazon announced Leo Ultra, the first antenna for its satellite internet service, which is launching in a private preview ahead of a commercial rollout sometime next year. Leo Ultra is made for business and government customers," unlike the other two, smaller Leo antenna options. No pricing or availability details have been announced, but [...]

Aqara's latest wireless smart lock features a sleek backlit keypad with support for Amazon Alexa and Google Home for the budget-friendly price of $99.99. With Wi-Fi built in, Aqara's B50 smart lock doesn't require a hub and offers a few different unlocking options, including the ability to enter a passcode, use voice commands, control it [...]

Holiday shopping on a budget can feel constricting, especially if you've been invited to a white elephant or need a last-minute stocking stuffer. The good news is that, with this guide, you can leave that stress behind. Whether you're aiming for something practical or fun, we've found plenty of great gifts for under $25 - [...]

If you're looking for a way to entertain parents and kids this holiday season, look no further than a subscription to Hulu and Disney Plus. Now through December 1st, new and returning subscribers can snag an annual ad-supported subscription to both streaming services for just $4.99 a month ($8 off). The Black Friday deal saves [...]

Meta allegedly gave accounts engaged in the trafficking of humans for sex" 16 chances before suspending them, according to testimony from the company's former head of safety and well-being, Vaishnavi Jayakumar. The testimony - along with several other claims that Meta ignored problems if they increased engagement - surfaced in an unredacted court filing related [...]

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and former Apple designer Jony Ive have been keeping the finer details of the first mysterious OpenAI hardware under wraps, but it sounds like they've settled on a design. In an interview with Laurene Powell Jobs at Emerson Collective's 2025 Demo Day, they said they are currently prototyping the device, and [...]

Earlier this year, it looked like time was up for ZRX: Zombies, Run!, a popular fitness app that mixed couch-to-5K plans with postapocalyptic audio storytelling. Now, cocreator and author Naomi Alderman has announced that she's bought back the franchise from the brink. Zombies, Run! was first founded in 2012 with about 10 million users worldwide. [...]

When an AI model release immediately spawns memes and treatises declaring the rest of the industry cooked, you know you've got something worth dissecting. Google's Gemini 3 was released Tuesday to widespread fanfare. The company called the model a "new era of intelligence," integrating it into Google Search on day one for the first time. [...]

This month's OnePlus 15 arrived to much fanfare about its enormous battery life, but no sign of the cheaper 15R that was expected alongside it. Now we finally know that phone will be revealed on December 17th, alongside the OnePlus Pad Go 2 and Watch Lite. Both the phone and tablet will release in the [...]

Ankit Khanal gets his news from News Daddy. More than 20 times a day, Khanal, a sophomore at George Mason University, opens TikTok to have the biggest stories of the day delivered to him by a bleach-blonde 26-year-old named Dylan Page, one of the leading faces in a growing community of news influencers. Based in [...]

Microsoft is making some changes to the File Explorer in Windows 11 that will make it less cluttered and launch faster. The latest Dev preview builds of Windows 11 include File Explorer preloading to help improve File Explorer launch performance," and changes to the context menu to reduce the amount of space less commonly used [...]

In April, Elon Musk began backing away from his role as head of DOGE. By June, he was more or less fully gone from DC. In his wake, he left a power vacuum and significant ill will that has apparently led to the dissolution of DOGE eight months before its charter expires. To call Musk's [...]

It's long been known that X (and Twitter before it) is a major venue for foreign influence campaigns to meddle in American politics. Much of the focus has been on Russian troll farms, which the US government has targeted on several occasions. But the launch of X's About This Account feature may have revealed the [...]

Nintendo has made some of the most iconic video games of all time, but building a library of the standouts can quickly become expensive, especially given that many titles don't often go on sale at a significant discount. The good news is that Nintendo is already running a holiday sale in the run-up to Black [...]

Yesterday X started rolling out a new About This Account feature, which included what country the account was created from and what country the account is based" in (which is different from connected via"). Head of product at X Nikita Bier was quick to say that there were a few rough edges," but promised they'd [...]

More than five years after making their debut, Sony's WH-1000XM4 remain an excellent pair of noise-canceling headphones. And right now, Best Buy is offering a doorbuster deal that drops them to just $159.99 ($190 off) for a limited time, which is the lowest price we've seen this year. If you prefer the latest tech, you [...]

What are thooooose? Well, they're my Vines, the six-second videos that helped mint a generation of famous comedians and also kicked off the era of endlessly looping vertical video that has consumed us all ever since. If you weren't there at the time, most Vines might seem utterly nonsensical. But if you were on the [...]

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on streaming competition, follow Andrew Webster. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started In 2022, Apple won an Oscar. The company behind the Mac and [...]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 106, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, Happy Thanksgiving Week, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about prediction markets and Hilary Duff and Matt Belloni and yeast, [...]

NBC News's David Ingram analyzed a month's worth of Elon Musk's X posts (our condolences). While what he was able to glean wasn't too surprising, it was still interesting to see the numbers all laid out. Between September 17th and October 17th, he posted 1,716 times, averaging a little over 55 posts a day. 49 [...]

Black Friday isn't here quite yet, but that hasn't stopped Sony from kicking off an excellent holiday promo, which runs through December 18th. The ongoing sale spans everything from PlayStation 5 consoles to Sony's latest accessories - including Sony's standard DualSense Wireless Controller, which is now matching its all-time low of $54.99 ($20 off) in [...]

In August, Apple Music launched a tool for importing playlists from other streaming services. The bruhahah over Daniel Ek's war profiteering was in full swing, and artists were starting to flee. The two things may have been unrelated, but the timing was certainly fortuitous. Now Spotify is launching its own playlist transfer tool, in hopes [...]

I'll admit it, I thought AR glasses like the Xreal One were a joke when I first heard about them. But they clicked for me as a gamer when I realized they could be plugged into a Steam Deck or an iPad to have my own huge, private display no matter where I am. If [...]

It took me a long time to become even halfway decent at Forestrike. The martial arts action game, from Olija developer Skeleton Crew, has a unique twist in that it lets you see what will happen in most battles and then practice your strategy accordingly. It turns the act of combat into a type of [...]

Last week one of my big questions about Pluribus was whether our reluctant hero Carol (Rhea Seehorn) would find someone to help her save the world from the scourge of happiness. In episode 4, I got an answer - sort of. We're clearly introduced to a character who thinks much like her, but how they'll [...]

The more than 20,000 pages of Jeffrey Epstein emails released earlier this month by the House Oversight Committee have been enough to prompt more investigations into the convicted child sex offender and the people around him, like former Harvard president and OpenAI board member Larry Summers. Now, Luke Igel and Riley Walz have reformatted the [...]

Google is pushing back on viral social media posts and articles like this one by Malwarebytes, claiming Google has changed its policy to use your Gmail messages and attachments to train AI models, and the only way to opt out is by disabling smart features" like spell checking. But Google spokesperson Jenny Thomson tells The [...]

Google and the Justice Department had their last chance to make their case before Judge Leonie Brinkema Friday before she decides whether Google needs to be broken up to remedy its ad tech monopoly. Brinkema expects to issue her ruling next year, but understands that time is of the essence," as Reuters reported. While the [...]

It's the most wonderful time of the year, but it can also be the most exhausting. Between hunting for gifts and getting the house ready for guests, it's easy to get overwhelmed. Thankfully, we're already seeing steep discounts on robot vacuums ahead of Black Friday, which can at least make the cleaning part feel a [...]

Microsoft is bringing the Xbox Full Screen Experience (FSE), which adds a console-like UI while navigating through your game library on a PC with a controller, to laptops, desktops, and tablets. FSE launched with the Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X, and it has so far only been available on PC handhelds. The expansion to [...]

Nothing's Android 16-powered update brings a bunch of new features to its phones, including its own spin on Google's Live Updates. With Nothing OS 4.0, users can track a delivery, ride, or timer by glancing using the Glyph Interface - the dot-matrix on the Phone 3's rear, or the system of lights on the Phone [...]

Hear me out: Kirby Air Riders isn't a racing game, it's an art tool with a racing game tacked on. The game, out now for the Nintendo Switch 2, is the follow-up to the quirky Kirby-flavored kart racer released in 2003 on the GameCube. It features Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai's round, pink, utterly charming [...]

Editor's note:Black Friday doesn't officially take place until Friday, November 28th; however, if you want to shop ahead of time, we've rounded up thebest early Black Friday dealsyou can already get. Buying the right laptop can be stressful. It's likely one of the bigger tech purchases you'll make, and there are a ludicrous number of [...]

TeamGroup has announced a new portable SSD drive called the T-Create Expert P35S that could give you some peace of mind if you're worried about your data falling into the wrong hands. Instead of using encryption to lock everything behind a password or biometric security, the P35S has a single button that initiates a self-destruct. [...]

Your mom deserves the best, and we're going to help you get them something special. The right gift can make family or friend time more valuable, after all, or it can greatly enrich time spent alone. If your mom says that she has all that she needs, don't take her word for it and show [...]