The Verge

Most Americans don't trust AI. It's proven that it doesn't know what safe toppings for pizza are. People don't even want to listen to AI music. But none of that matters for some of America's wealthy, who are turning to AI to teach their kids instead of traditional schools. Companies like Forge Prep and Alpha [...]

There was a period in the early aughts when Definitive Jux (nee: Def Jux) seemed like it was going to be the future of hip hop. While the label featured plenty of experimental, boundary-pushing, and politically minded acts, Lif stood out as the most "conscious rapper" in the traditional sense. It was clear though, that [...]

Rockstar's long-awaited Grand Theft Auto VI is launching November 19th, 2026 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X consoles. The game will be available digitally at launch, with physical cases containing codes, not discs, so your options for preordering are straightforward. The preloading phase for the game begins on November 12th, which should give you [...]

"Group project, but make it 1776." That's how a new commercial for Google Workspace opens. And things only get cringier from there. The clip imagines what it would be like if the founding fathers turned to Google's collaboration tools and Gemini to help them draft the Declaration of Independence. Ben Franklin texts Thomas Jefferson to [...]

Baking sourdough bread is inherently old-fashioned, relying on natural fermentation and wild yeast instead of the simple, predictable commercial stuff. So it might sound anathema to bring a gadget into the mix. The trick to the Sourdough Sidekick - backed and branded by King Arthur flour - is that it promises to automate the boring [...]

Before Keurig, the coffee in your office was almost certainly terrible. Old, burned, made by someone who would rather poorly eyeball than properly measure. Just altogether gross. After Keurig? You could make your own coffee, a cup at a time, exactly when you needed it. The single-cup brewer was an elegant solution to an extremely [...]

When I first started testing Vizio's 65-inch Mini LED Quantum TV, I thought the big story was that Vizio was back and that it had a quantum-dot TV for under $398 - the cheapest on the market. Vizio's been pretty quiet since it was acquired by Walmart in 2024, so putting out a TV with [...]

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the bleak state of the video game industry, follow Andrew Webster. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started Microsoft closed out Summer [...]

The Swift Observatory was launched in 2004, but recent solar storms have pushed its orbit lower, and it's in danger of burning up in Earth's atmosphere as soon as this year. To try and stave off its demise, NASA has enlisted Katalyst Space Technologies. The company's Link spacecraft launched Friday with the goal of intercepting [...]

The Matic is our favorite robot vacuum by a pretty comfortable margin. If you've been thinking about buying one, you may want to plan on doing it sooner than later. The company will raise its price by $250 on September 9th, going from $1,245 to $1,495. Matic told The Verge that the new price reflects [...]

Erick the Architect is a founding member of, and the primary producer for, the legendary Flatbush Zombies. He's toured the world, performed on Kimmel and Fallon, played Coachella, and collaborated with everyone from Joey Bada$$ and the Rza to James Blake and hardcore punk band Trash Talk. But perhaps the most unexpected collab was with [...]

I know a vocal group of people who swear by the number pad on their keyboard. And yet, for years I haven't cared about using one - until I put my hands on the Epomaker RT98. It's a mechanical keyboard with a charming retro aesthetic, a fun CRT-like screen, VIA compatibility, a nice typing feel, [...]

The Ikko MindOne Pro is delightfully small. I keep calling it a square phone, which isn't quite right; the screen is square, but the phone itself is slightly rectangular. The camera flips up so you can use it for selfies - you can even open it partway to use as a stand or a kind [...]

Over the past week, a new fanworks movement has kicked off, with the aim to root out authors using generative AI. But the detection methods being implemented are questionable, and any fanfic writer could be caught in the crossfire. Broad distaste around the use of Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI tools has long been a [...]

Despite my initial skepticism, I'm now sold on wireless Qi chargers that add integrated fans to keep your phone cool while charging. I figured they'd be too loud, or too weak, or too gimmicky, but I'm a convert after spending a week with the new $59.99 Kuxiu D5 Qi2.2 charging dock. Its active cooling system [...]

The Fire HD 8 that launched in 2024 was the last new addition to Amazon's budget-minded tablet lineup, but the company has quietly updated the Fire HD 10 that debuted the year before. In 2023 it was offered with multiple storage configurations that each came with 3GB of RAM, but the 32GB version now ships [...]

It's a big year for America. It's the semiquincentennial, otherwise known as America250, and the United States is cohosting the World Cup. But spectators at these events - and the millions of people who live in the cities hosting them - may not realize that they, too, are being watched. From Kansas City to New [...]

Despite the fact that smartphones have become impressively capable shooters, standalone point-and-shoot cameras are enjoying a renaissance. The tiny Kodak Charmera is still wildly popular, while influencers are scrambling to find aging Canon cameras on eBay. Godox, a company best known for its photography lighting products, is the latest to join the simple camera craze, [...]

Where's the Trump phone? We're going to keep talking about it every week. One year on, our phones have finally arrived. 12 months, 16 days, 21 hours, and 54 minutes after I first heard about Trump Mobile's T1 Phone 8002 (gold version), I'm finally holding one in my own hands. That's right, The Verge's Trump [...]

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. Europe is melting, the eastern US is currently trapped in a "heat dome," the Midwest has the corn sweats to [...]

At the event "The Briefing: AI for Science" earlier this week, Anthropic announced Claude Science, a new "AI workbench for scientists" that pulls fragmented tools and datasets into one environment, and generates figures and visuals. Anthropic, already dominating the industry with its popular coding tools and powerful AI models, framed the launch around what it [...]

YouTuber Jon Prosser has finally filed a formal response to Apple's lawsuit made against him and another defendant over allegedly stealing iOS secrets. In his response, Prosser denied that he "planned or participated in any conspiracy or coordinated scheme" for the "purpose of injuring Apple." However, Prosser admitted to recording a FaceTime call showing unreleased [...]

In the AI slop-loaded, algorithm-powered modern reality, trends come and go - and the tech industry is no different. For the last few years, The Verge staff has compiled a selection of things that are IN for summer and OUT for summer - and each time there are some strong feelings. (Here are the last [...]

Since its inception, Apple TV, nee Apple TV Plus, has built a reputation on quality over quantity. It has far fewer shows and movies than the likes of Netflix or Disney Plus, but generally speaking, the projects it does put out are quite good. It's a strategy that has brought comparisons to the HBO of [...]

Midjourney has shown more of its futuristic medical scanner. It still hasn't shown much proof it works. The AI startup, best known for generating images, released a behind-the-scenes video of its dunk-tank ultrasound scanner, which it plans to deploy in spas and hopes will transform medicine with cheap, detailed, radiation-free imaging. The nearly 20-minute tour [...]

The video game disc is dead, and Sony's been planning to kill it for some time, according to a report out of Austria. The man who leads Sony's discmaking operations, Sony DADC president Dietmar Tanzer, told ORF Salzburg that the company's Thalgau plant produces 600,000 discs every day, half of which are for PlayStation. But [...]

The man whose Tesla struck and killed a woman inside her Texas home last month is now facing manslaughter charges, as reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal and local news outlet KHOU 11. 44-year-old Michael Butler was arrested on Wednesday and claimed to have been driving his Model 3 using Tesla's Full-Self Driving (FSD) [...]

Mozilla shut down the well-loved read-it-later Pocket app last year, and now Meta is launching an app called Pocket with an entirely different, AI-focused pitch: this new app lets you make and share little interactive "gizmos" built from an AI prompt, as reported by Business Insider. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is all in on AI [...]

July 4th sales are typically a precursor to what we'd see during a mid-July Prime Day, but obviously things are flipped around this year. Last week's big Prime Day sale is over, yet there are a number of familiar deals still poking around in the week leading up to the nation's birthday. Best Buy is [...]

If our recent Decoder interview with Weber Blackstone CEO Roger Dahle has you craving freshly grilled meats or veggies, Weber just so happens to have a variety of grills, smokers, griddles, and accessories selling at big discounts ahead of the July 4th holiday. It makes a bunch of models, but we've landed on a range [...]

For decades, to be a gamer was to accumulate a lot of stuff. Consoles, controllers, accessories, weird VR gloves that never worked properly, but mostly the games themselves. Over the years, games have come in every shape and size you can imagine. And now that era appears to be ending. On this episode of The [...]

For a few days, it seemed like Universal decided that there would be no advanced screenings of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey for influencers. But on Monday, influencers sat alongside traditional critics and journalists at special showings of The Odyssey specifically for the associated press junket. Despite what it may have looked like, Universal was not [...]

If you don't want to spend $180 on the Elgato Key Light, the Godox ES45 Desktop LED Key Light is a more affordable option that offers nearly as much brightness and plenty of features, including adjustable brightness and color temperature. Right now, it's cheaper than usual for the first time this year, selling for $119 [...]

Tesla just released its second-quarter delivery and production report, showing that the automaker is starting to recover after a particularly brutal sales year in 2025. The company said that it produced a total of 451,758 vehicles between April and June of this year, including 442,936 Model 3 and Model Y vehicles, as well as 8,822 [...]

We've got a special Decoder today - I had the chance to talk with Amy Lanzi, the CEO of Digitas North America, in front of a live audience at the Uber Villa at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in the South of France. I know, it's a hard gig, but I do it for you. [...]

Silo is such a complicated show that even its showrunner gets confused sometimes. While filming the final seasons of the Apple TV sci-fi thriller, Graham Yost remembers two instances where he messed up details: once it was an actor who realized that a conversation they were about to shoot should've already taken place, the other [...]

Twenty-five years ago today, a young, little-known programmer by the name of Bram Cohen fired off a short message to a mailing list for peer-to-peer enthusiasts. "My new app, BitTorrent, is now in working order, check it out here," Cohen wrote, followed by a link to his personal website. "What's BitTorrent, Bram?" the founder of [...]

OpenAI has floated giving the US government a 5 percent ownership stake as a way of easing tensions with the Trump administration and blunting mounting public backlash against AI, according to the Financial Times. CEO Sam Altman argued that giving the public a financial interest in the company would be the best way to share [...]

Amazon says it now has enough satellites operating in low-Earth orbit to light up its Starlink internet competitor. With last night's launch, Amazon Leo has 396 satellites deployed, which is "enough to support continuous service across initial latitudes," according to Chris Weber, VP heading up business and product for Amazon Leo. That puts the company [...]

Apple is working on a "revamped" version of its entry-level MacBook Pro that it could launch as soon as the first half of 2027, Bloomberg reports. The company is also testing four new iPad Pros that are set to launch in the spring with a focus on "internal improvements." The updated MacBook Pro, which will [...]

Cody Spencer, the co-owner of the small games retail chain Pink Gorilla Games, put it well when I asked about the impact of Sony's recent announcement that it will stop making discs for new games starting January 2028. "It's sad to see. This decision is only a negative for gamers. We're losing the ability to [...]

Xbox is making some big changes - again. On June 10th, a few months after Asha Sharma took over as CEO, she and newly promoted chief content officer Matt Booty sent a memo to staff warning of an Xbox reset." The business, they said, is facing significant challenges, including a 3 percent accountability margin," massively [...]

Elon Musk says a report about a SpaceX AI phone prototype is "utterly false." The report, published on Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal, says SpaceX showed off a "handset-like prototype" to some investors before launching its record-breaking initial public offering in June. The device was "slimmer than an iPhone," and they were told it [...]

After a lengthy legal dispute, Krafton has settled with its subsidiary Unknown Worlds Entertainment, which is developing Subnautica 2, and will pay bonuses to the studio's staff, Bloomberg reports. The dispute began last year after Krafton pushed out Unknown Worlds' cofounders, Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire, and its CEO, Ted Gill, ahead of a potential [...]

Microsoft will likely soon follow Sony and stop the production of physical discs for Xbox games. But instead of leaving physical discs behind entirely, sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell me the company has quietly been working on a disc-to-digital feature that will allow Xbox owners to digitize their existing physical game collections. Xbox employees [...]

Kobo recently raised the price of its Libra Colour e-reader to $259.99, but today's deal effectively erases that hike. The company, Best Buy, and Target, are all selling it for its old $229.99 price as part of broader sales, making now one of the best times to grab my favorite alternative to Amazon's Kindle. If [...]

NBCUniversal executives are about to find out whether Peacock will sink or swim in the streaming industry. Now that Comcast is planning to split NBCUniversal, Peacock, and Sky from its broadband and wireless businesses, Peacock will be forced to stand on its own - without the backing of a combined company that pulled in more [...]

Dbrand apparently knows how to really whiff a product launch, as we recently saw with the Steam Machine Companion Cube shell. But it also makes the best case out there for the Nintendo Switch 2, which happens to be discounted right now. The Killswitch 2 is versatile, with better build quality than other similar models, [...]

The future of video game preservation just took a major hit. This morning, Sony announced that, starting in January 2028, the company will no longer produce physical PlayStation discs, which means that from that moment on you can only purchase new PS5 games digitally. At the same time, Sony also announced that it's going to [...]