The Verge

Playing Mixtape is like playing a video game version of a high school movie. Kids banter about the meaning of life and the theme songs that would play when they walk in a room. They're worried about looking cool at a big party. They're obsessed with finding booze. But under all of those tropes is [...]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 128, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, sorry this one's so Mac-heavy, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about David Attenborough and screenwriters-turned-AI-trainers and the Subway Takes [...]

Need a new laptop? It's a tough decision. If you're like most people, a laptop is one of the most expensive tech purchases you'll make, and it's something you'll use and live with nearly every day for years to come. So there's a lot riding on this pricey expense. I've tested all kinds of laptops, [...]

Xbox just allcapsmaxxed: Meet XBOX. This isn't a joke; Microsoft appears to be actually rebranding Xbox to XBOX. Asha Sharma, Xbox CEO, ran a poll on X earlier this week, asking fans whether Microsoft should use Xbox or XBOX. The results were in favor of XBOX, and the company has now renamed its X account. [...]

YouTube is expanding its AI likeness detection program to all users over the age of 18 - meaning just about anyone can have the platform hunt for potential deepfakes of themselves. The likeness detection feature uses a selfie-style scan of a person's face to monitor YouTube for lookalikes. If there is a match, YouTube alerts [...]

Microsoft's latest Windows 11 test will allow you to reposition the taskbar and change the size of the Start menu. The update, which is rolling out to Windows 11 Insiders in the Experimental channel, lets you place the taskbar on the bottom, top, left, or right side of the screen. Microsoft first teased its movable [...]

ArXiv, a popular platform for preprint academic research, is taking a new step to attempt to reduce the volume of papers that include AI slop. If a paper has "incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation," such as hallucinated references or "meta-comments" left by an LLM, authors will be [...]

Analogue has released a new firmware update for its Analogue 3D console that adds the Memories save state feature. Memories, which was first introduced with its handheld Analogue Pocket, allows you to save at any moment and resume from that exact spot later on, rather than having to reach a specific point in a game [...]

OpenAI announced yet another reorganization Friday, consolidating certain areas and making company president Greg Brockman the official lead of all things product. In a memo viewed by The Verge, Brockman wrote that since OpenAI's product strategy for this year is to go all-in on AI agents, the company is combining its products to "invest in [...]

The Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus was billed by the company in late March as one of its fastest gaming desktop processor ever." That hype was evidently accurate, as benchmarks done by Gamers Nexus show the processor giving AMD's pricier X3D cache-equipped Ryzen 9000-series CPUs a run for their money. The Ultra 7 270K [...]

Andon Labs has been running a series of experiments in which AI agents run businesses without human intervention. Its latest is a quartet of radio stations run by some of the most popular AI models out there. "Thinking Frequencies" is run by Claude, "OpenAIR" by ChatGPT, "Backlink Broadcast" by Google's Gemini, and "Grok and Roll [...]

Where's the Trump phone? We're going to keep talking about it every week. We've reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump phone's whereabouts. This week, despite our best hopes, we still don't have our phone - but we do have some fresh doubts about the company's patriotic credentials. This has been a momentous [...]

Google updated its spam policy to mark attempts to "manipulate" its AI model in search results as spam, including results in AI Overview or AI Mode in Search, as Search Engine Land reports: "In the context of Google Search, spam refers to techniques used to deceive users or manipulate our Search systems into featuring content [...]

Your trust in AI is about to be put to the test: OpenAI will soon let you give the chatbot direct access to your bank accounts. The new feature announced in preview today will allow users to "securely connect" ChatGPT with Plaid - the bank-to-app bridging platform used by 12,000 financial institutions, including Schwab, Fidelity, [...]

The Memorial Day deals have arrived - err, at least some of them. BioLite, purveyors of all things solar, has kicked off a larger holiday promo ahead of May 26th, resulting in reduced pricing on smokeless fire pits, headlamps, and solar-powered stoves, just in time for summer. The company's Site Lights are also on sale [...]

This week, a trio of video game cabinets emblazoned with pixel art of Donald Trump and a number of other government officials' faces suddenly appeared at the DC War Memorial. Looking at the cabinets from a distance, it's easy to get the sense that Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell (which you can also play [...]

This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday 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. A few days ago, my esthetician was smearing hot wax on my face. The two caterpillars I call [...]

X is fighting for its users' right to anonymity against the far-right influencers and accused human traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate, who are seeking to unmask their online critics. The Tate brothers filed suit against the owners of more than a dozen social media accounts - several of them run pseudonymously - last year, claiming [...]

Sonos has a new rival in town. Bose's new Lifestyle Collection includes a $299 Lifestyle Ultra Speaker, a $1,099 Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar, and the $899 Ultra Subwoofer, all of which are now available directly from Bose and third-party retailers like Amazon and Best Buy. The $299 Lifestyle Ultra Speaker is essentially Bose's version of the [...]

British online safety regulator Ofcom says it has accepted new commitments from X that aim to better protect UK users from seeing illegal hate and terror content on the platform. Under the agreement announced today, X says it will withhold access in the UK to accounts reported posting illegal terrorist content and determined to be [...]

Last summer, Peter Degen's postdoctoral supervisor came to him with an unusual problem: One of his papers was being cited too much. Citations are the currency of academia, but there was something unusual about these. Published in 2017, the paper had assessed the accuracy of a particular type of statistical analysis on epidemiological data and [...]

Honda revealed prototypes of two new hybrid models, an Accord sedan and the Acura RDX SUV, during its annual business briefing this week, built on a platform that it says will begin launching next year. The RDX was announced earlier this year as Honda's first SUV to feature the next-gen version of its two-motor hybrid [...]

Today was closing arguments in the Musk v. Altman trial, and I almost feel bad writing about the unbelievable demolition derby I just witnessed. Steven Molo, Musk's lawyer, stumbled over his words. He at one point called Greg Brockman - a co-defendant - Greg Altman. He erroneously claimed that Musk wasn't asking for money and [...]

The most graphically-impressive first-person shooter made for the Nintendo Switch is $20 off at Best Buy. Right now, you can buy the physical version of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond for $39.99 ($20 off). The game looks surprisingly good on the 2017 hardware, but runs way better on the Switch 2 with the additional $10 upgrade [...]

Meta is rolling out new features to its Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses, including bringing the ability to write messages just with hand gestures to all users. You'll be able to use the feature in WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and with "native Android and iOS messaging," Meta says. The feature, which relies on the Meta Ray-Ban [...]

Yesterday, in Musk v. Altman, before the jurors came in, Sam Altman's team passed up what looked - from a distance - like a little league trophy. It was not. Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers had the lawyers read the inscription aloud for the press: "Never stop being a jackass." It's a commemoration OpenAI employees bought for [...]

Hours after a smaller Xbox Cloud Gaming controller appeared online, Brazil's Anatel regulator has also accidentally published images of what appears to be Microsoft's upcoming Xbox Elite 3 controller. Tecnoblog has posted images that show the successor to the Elite 2 controller, with an interchangeable D-Pad, paddles, and two new mysterious buttons. The Elite 3 [...]

OpenAI is going to let users access Codex, its desktop AI tool that can write code and use apps on your computer, from the ChatGPT app on your phone. Following the surge in popularity for Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI has been working quickly to try and catch up, including by cutting back on "side quests," [...]

If you've been curious about Ray-Ban's Meta smart glasses, right now they're on sale in Meta's biggest deal event outside Black Friday. As part of the company's Summer Sale event, which runs through May 26th, the original model is on sale starting at $224.25 ($74 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and directly from Meta, matching [...]

Microsoft first started opening up access to Claude Code in December, inviting thousands of its own developers to use Anthropic's AI coding tool daily. It was part of an effort to get project managers, designers, and other employees to experiment with coding for the first time, and sources tell me that Claude Code has proved [...]

In January, Colorado lawmakers introduced a proposal to make operating systems collect users' ages and pass them to app developers. The bill, SB26-051, had clearly been designed for commercial platforms like iOS and Android - one of numerous plans to age-gate the internet through users' devices. It was intended to provide information that would let [...]

When Oregon resident Isabelle Reksopuro heard Google was gobbling up public land to fuel its data centers in her home state, she didn't initially know what to believe. "There's a lot of misinformation about data centers," she said. "Google has denied taking that land." Technically, she explains, The Dalles, a city near the Washington state [...]

Subnautica 2, the new underwater survival game from Unknown Worlds, took less than an hour to rocket up Steam's charts. The game has already sold more than one million copies, according to a press release, and as of this writing, Steam's charts show that Subnautica 2 is currently the fourth-most played game on the platform [...]

I revealed earlier this year that Microsoft was working on a new Xbox controller that includes Wi-Fi to connect direct to Xbox Cloud Gaming servers. It now looks like that controller has leaked, thanks to some new images from Brazil's Anatel regulator. Tecnoblog published the images today, showing a new, smaller Xbox controller that looks [...]

Razer just announced a new Blade 18 gaming laptop with an Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus chip. The flagship laptop is available now on Razer's site, starting at $3,999.99 with an Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti and configurable with up to an RTX 5090. That starting config is $500 more than the 2025 model with [...]

Today, I'm talking with Brendan Ballou, founder of the Public Integrity Project andauthor of a new book, called When Companies Run the Courts, about the rise of forced arbitration. Brendan's actually been on the show before - his previous book, Plunder, was about private equity taking over huge swaths of American life, and that conversation [...]

AMD is bringing its FSR 4.1 upscaling tech to older graphics cards. In an announcement on X, Jack Huynh, AMD's head of computing and graphics, says FSR 4.1 will roll out to RDNA 3 GPUs in July, followed by a launch on RDNA 2 chips in early 2027. This summer's update will allow Radeon RX [...]

Dyson has announced a new air purifying bladeless fan that's its first to incorporate an AI-powered camera for tracking the location of people in a room. Dyson already uses a mix of cameras and AI in its robovacs, but since the new Find+Follow Purifier Cool is stationary and not at risk of running into abandoned [...]

I remember a time when Alienware refused to make a thinner laptop - the company didn't want to compromise on its builds. But today, Dell is slapping the Alienware name on a piece of hardware that sounds utterly watered down. It's partly RAMageddon's fault. The new five-pound Alienware 15 is supposedly an entry-level gaming laptop, [...]

For a phone that gets a lot right, the Motorola Razr Fold is frustratingly hard to recommend. The Razr Fold is the company's first book-style foldable, and it enters the US market with something not currently available on the competition: truly excellent battery life that rivals the best slab-style phones. No need to worry if [...]

AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have agreed to work together under a new joint venture that aims to end wireless dead zones in the US. The partnership was announced today as an "agreement in principle," but if finalized would see the three carrier companies pooling their ground-based spectrum resources together to increase coverage in rural areas. [...]

The pill-shaped Insta360 Go 3S 4K action camera launched in June 2024 as an updated version of the 2.7K Go 3 that debuted a year prior. While last year's Go Ultra introduced a redesign with a larger sensor and higher frame rates, the Go 3S has stuck around as a smaller but still very capable [...]

For the last week, I've spent every evening unwinding by speeding through the Japanese countryside, blaring Babymetal as I take in the sights. Forza Horizon 6 is ostensibly a racing game, one in which you play an up-and-coming driver intent on making a name for themselves. But, like the rest of the series, it's also [...]

The tyranny of software is almost over. Since the first computer programmers wrote the first computer programs, we, the users of that software, have been forced to live in the worlds those programs create. The features are the features. The design is the design. Want something else, something better? Learn to code, I guess. Until [...]

Google is rolling out a new AI-powered "contextual suggestions" feature to Android users that recommends actions based on your daily habits, Android Authority reports. The feature is designed to predict your next action based on your location and habits - such as allowing music streaming apps to suggest your usual playlist when you arrive at [...]

Microsoft is on a mission to fix Windows 11, and part of that involves improving the often-frustrating Windows Update experience. While you'll soon be able to pause updates indefinitely, Microsoft is also adding a new feature that automatically rolls back problematic drivers that have been installed through Windows Update. Microsoft has created a new "Cloud-Initiated [...]

Microsoft Edge is adding a new feature that will allow its Copilot AI chatbot to gather information from all of your open tabs. When you start a conversation with Copilot, you can ask the chatbot questions about what's in your tabs, compare the products you're looking at, summarize your open articles, and more. In its [...]

The Trump administration is fighting for the right to keep some social media moderation advocates out of the US. On Wednesday, US District Court Judge James Boasberg heard arguments in a lawsuit between the nonprofit Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR) and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other Trump administration officials. The suit concerns [...]

In the ongoing fight for content and talent, YouTube is pitching itself as the connector between the creators and advertisers - and marketing its creators not just as the future of social media, but also of advertising, TV, streaming, and entertainment more broadly. At the company's annual advertiser event in New York on Wednesday, YouTube [...]