The Verge

A rather strong "planetary wave" recently slammed into South America and is making its way toward California. In case you're worried about headlines warning of the supposedly "freak" phenomenon "bringing trouble," it's worth understanding what this wave really is and isn't. Called a Kelvin wave, it's carrying warm water to the Americas that's typically trapped [...]

During Amazon's October sale, the Pixel 11 Pro and Pixel 11 Pro XL are discounted by $250 or more. The base model Pixel 11 Pro with 256GB of storage is only $849 (originally $1,099), $50 lower than the usual price for the base Pixel 11, while the 256GB 11 Pro XL is $999, a $300 [...]

Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days (also known as October Prime Day) is here, serving as a precursor to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There are a ton of good deals, and bundling them all into this package is the easiest way to keep the blast of upcoming coverage under control. Below, you'll find every deal [...]

Confession: When BougeRV told me about its remote-controlled wagon with animated lighting, I called it in for a laugh, expecting to eviscerate it in a review. It's ridiculous, to be sure. But the DuneRover also proved very capable, with enough torque to flatten hills even when carrying over 200 pounds of gear. It can also [...]

Google may be expanding its "Call for Me" AI feature beyond business calls so you can use it to send messages to friends and family. Android Authority reports finding a "Gemini Calling" introductory screen in an APK teardown with examples that include "Call Mom and tell her I will be 15 minutes late" and "Call [...]

It's a wild time for retro gaming.Thanks to decompilations and recompilations of classic titles, those games are becoming unshackled from their proprietary code and original hardware to be ported to new devices or updated in ways to completely change the original game. Ever imagined skateboarding in Call of Duty? Or playing the original Halo right [...]

The Matic is our favorite robot vacuum and robo-mop, and it's also now the first to escape the FCC's Roomba ban. Well, sort of - because the Matic wasn't banned to begin with. Here's what's actually happening: On October 2nd, the FCC added the original Matic, model 4MA0001, and its charging dock model 4DK0008 to [...]

People in Utah can now use AI to get a prescription for acne treatment. On Monday, healthcare startup Nolla Health announced that users in the state can scan their faces using its app, allowing its AI system to analyze acne severity and autonomously write a prescription, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. The service is launching [...]

This past year, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other labs have announced breakthroughs on numerous long-standing mathematical problems, in some cases pushing well beyond what researchers expected current systems to be capable of - including resolving one of the famous Millennium Prize problems. But in classic Silicon Valley style, AI labs are moving fast and breaking things, [...]

Following many recent disclosures about AI agents accessing third-party websites and services, the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, says that it "can confirm that we have discovered some activity" by "rogue" OpenAI agents on Wikimedia platforms. The activity includes edits to Wikimedia wikis, "unsuccessful attempts" to "exploit" the Etherpad note-taking tool that the Wikimedia Foundation [...]

There's been a lot of doom and gloom from the auto industry lately when the subject of China comes up. Automaker CEOs, in particular, warn that allowing low-cost, high-tech Chinese electric vehicles to be sold in the US would effectively spell the end of their businesses. Hyundai CEO Jose Munoz is not as pessimistic as [...]

An invisible, machine-readable watermark in text output is rolling out to ChatGPT and Codex, but only for users in the European Union at first. OpenAI says its textGrain watermarking "matched or exceeded" other approaches like Google DeepMind's SynthID for text, which is also the basis for the watermarking Anthropic announced in August. Like OpenAI, Anthropic [...]

An OpenAI publicist tried to change the topic of CEO Sam Altman's interview with Vanity Fair's Mark Guiducci after the editor brought up a ChatGPT user's suicide. When Guiducci confronted Altman about the incident, the publicist warned Guiducci about running out of time, saying she'd like to "move on" to another topic. The interruption came [...]

Sam Altman thinks that the benefits of AI will be so great that "the world should accept some bad things happening" along the way. The OpenAI CEO pointed to hacks, scams, and "other bad things" as costs society should expect to tolerate because "people will do tremendously orders of magnitude more good stuff" with AI, [...]

Nvidia's Shield TV streaming boxes are the latest victims of the memory shortage that has seen prices increase dramatically for everything from digital cameras to game consoles. When the Shield TV Pro launched nearly seven years ago with an upgraded Tegra X1+ processor, 3GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage, it sold for $199.99. But [...]

Really the only negative associated with the new M6-powered Mac Mini is its high price. While the last-gen model debuted at just $599, the faster, but mostly unchanged 2026 edition starts at $899 - except for right now. You can grab the base model that has 256GB of storage, 16GB RAM, and a 12-core CPU [...]

CNN CEO Mark Thompson will remain at the head of the news network when Paramount's $110 billion Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition closes this week. Thompson wrote in a memo to employees that he believes the combined company will "fully support the principle and practice of the kind of independent news that CNN has always stood [...]

Today, I'm talking with Sen. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California. Schiff sits on a number of committees with oversight into tech and AI: intellectual property, antitrust, privacy and technology - it's all there. I really wanted to ask him about how we might regulate anything related to the tech industry at this moment in [...]

Amazon and other retailers are knocking down prices on popular products for October Prime Day, which starts October 6th at 3AM ET and lasts through 3AM ET on the 8th if you're on the East Coast (12AM PT). October Prime Day offers a glimpse of deals that will likely be available again during Black Friday [...]

Getting some extra storage space on your Mac could be as easy as deleting Apple's AI features with a new open-source command line tool called RemoveMacAI. There used to be a single Settings toggle for disabling Apple Intelligence, but that was removed in macOS 27. Now, the models stay on your disk, and the features [...]

OpenAI's latest ad format will put images of sponsored products and services on your screen. The ads, which OpenAI will begin testing in the US later this month, will "initially" appear when you generate images with ChatGPT, according to an announcement on Monday. The company first brought ads to ChatGPT in February. Until now, ChatGPT's [...]

I've spent most of the last couple weeks using an otherwise unexceptional midrange Android phone with one amazing feature: a matte OLED display. That screen is by far the best thing about the TCL P80 Ultra, and weirdly, it's made me more excited for the iPhone Duo and its matte inner display. 2023's TCL Nxtpaper [...]

Google has waited until the day its new Googlebook laptops hit the market to admit that Intel-based models may have issues running some Android apps. Before now, Google has emphasized that the Android-based Googlebooks give owners access to the "entire Play Store library" of apps, along with some clever interactions with Android phones and tablets. [...]

Norbert Wiener, godfather of cybernetics, once said, "The thought of every age is reflected in its technique." For the past century, our thought has been reflected in our computers, including by those in the AI industry. Google's Demis Hassabis calls the brain "a biological approximation to a Turing machine." Elon Musk puts it more bluntly, [...]

We don't know a ton about the Fitbit Edge, but it appears to be a successor to the midrange Charge line. It had leaked previously, but we can clearly see in these images posted by Android Headlines, you can see that Google's rumored fitness tracker sort of splits the difference between the Pixel Watch and [...]

While deep in the recording process for The Downward Spiral, Trent Reznor lent some of his production talents to old friend Kevin McMahon, from the new wave band Lucky Pierre (which Reznor was briefly a member of). While Reznor is only credited as the producer on four tracks off Prick's self-titled debut record, his fingerprints [...]

New Jersey's lieutenant governor Dale Caldwell was forced to resign on September 25th after an investigation found he had sexually harassed a staffer and repeatedly violated ethics rules. The now-former Lt. governor has been making the media rounds trying to clear his name. But he took a particularly odd tactic during an interview on NJ [...]

StarSkirmish pits AI-made StarCraft-playing bots against one another, as well as against human-made bots. OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 were essentially tied as the best-performing AI-made bots, but they couldn't top Stardust, the top-rated human-made bot. On Friday, GPT was facing off against Claude and the human-created bot Pluto, but according to Kotaku, [...]

This toolless modular lever-action wallet is the coolest I've stuck to my phone. Remember when I tested the ultra-thin and convenient OhSnap Snap Grip Stand and liked it so much I bought my own? Now, OhSnap has a magnetic lever-action card wallet that can stack with that stand. It's the coolest wallet I've ever stuck [...]

It's been a while since we've seen a good discount on the Apple AirPods Pro 3, but like the latest iPad Mini and the M5 MacBook Airs, a great one is happening now for October Prime Day. You can snag a pair of the noise-canceling earbuds that include five ear tip sizes, live translation, and [...]

Apple bumped up prices on several of its devices in June, and we haven't seen a good discount on the iPad Mini since. Just ahead of Amazon's October Prime Big Deals Days, however, both Wi-Fi only and cellular-connected models are $100 off. The Wi-Fi version with 128GB of storage is currently $499, the 256GB model [...]

Google didn't even call the first Chromebook a "Chromebook." The Cr-48 had no interesting design and no bright logos - it wasn't even designed to be a product you could buy. Instead, it was a portal to a big new idea about computers. In this week's episode of Version History, The Verge's Nilay Patel and [...]

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the collapse and the resurgence of the portable media player, follow Terrence O'Brien. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started We are [...]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 146, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, it's October already?, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I'm wishing I could do Walmart potato drone delivery in Portland, watching Mike Tomlin [...]

Capcom's Pragmata might be all about the horrors of AI, but in practice the studio doesn't seem so down on the tech. During the Capcom Open Conference RE: 2026 programmer Satoshi Ishida gave a presentation with the mouthful of a title: "The Outlook and Future of the REX Project, Further Evolving the RE Engine for [...]

Kakul Srivastava is the CEO of Splice, the sample platform countless producers rely on for one-shots and melodic loops. Samples pulled from the service have found their way into massive hits like Lisa's "Money" and "Espresso" by Sabrina Carpenter. (The original samples are here and here, for the curious.) Before that, Kakul held executive roles [...]

David Robinson used to write the safety reports that accompanied every major model release at OpenAI. This week, he resigned from his position and is now speaking out in an editorial in The Atlantic. It's understandable if you're feeling a bit cynical about everyone suddenly coming out of the woodwork to warn about how dangerous [...]

Why am I suddenly buying up every 3D Blu-ray I can find after 3D became one of the biggest tech flops of all time? The technology's finally ready for 3D movies to shine, more than 15 years since James Cameron's Avatar wowed me on the big screen and went on to become the highest-grossing film [...]

Meta now lets you make your own Muse gadgets that feature the company's new AI agent with code that the company open sourced. The company suggests projects like loading Muse on a color E Ink display to show reminders, adding it to an HDMI stick so you can display Muse on a big screen, or [...]

Many of Netflix's biggest critically acclaimed hits have been the products of its multiyear production deals with noted directors like David Fincher and Shawn Levy. In the past few weeks, though, the streamer has brought some of those partnerships to an end in a way that feels indicative of a larger strategic shift. With rival [...]

Apple will add new limits for "full disk access" on Mac in response to risks posed by AI agents, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. In an update on Friday, Apple says it's rolling out new controls to "ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do [...]

Dish-owned Sling TV will no longer be offering its Sling Pass feature that allowed people to buy a single day of cable TV programming at a time, as reported by The Desk. The feature was announced last year and offered a day pass, a weekend pass, and a week-long pass option to be able to [...]

It's a tale as old as last week: OpenAI's new agent platform, called Dots, is full of cute little guys who can do your bidding. But unlike the ultra-approachable Meta Muse, Dots feel very much like using workplace software that happens to be able to order you a burrito - emphasis on work. OpenAI announced [...]

In a throwback to MySpace-style internet drama, Shivon Zilis announced that she and the father of her four children, Elon Musk, had broken up on X. To do so, she quote-tweeted a post from "Big Tech Alert," an account that, among other things, monitors what accounts are following and unfollowing each other. That post noted [...]

Rivian had high hopes for its more affordable R2 vehicle - and so far, those hopes appear to be paying off. The company released its third-quarter production and delivery numbers today, reporting 19,751 vehicles produced and 19,248 delivered. That represents an 85 percent year-over-year increase in production and a 45 percent jump in deliveries. (For [...]

Beehiiv, a creator platform that has risen in popularity as an alternative to Substack, is increasing its prices - and many users aren't happy. In a post explaining the increase, Beehiiv cofounder and CEO Tyler Denk says it will allow the company to "continue investing in our core platform experience." As part of the change, [...]

Nacon announced what the company is claiming is the world's first officially licensed PlayStation 5 controller with a built-in screen for adjusting settings like joystick sensitivity or remapping buttons right on the gamepad. The Revolution 5 Unlimited's screen can also be used to mix audio from multiple sources so while using a pair of headphones [...]

OpenAI's answer to Muse arrived this week, and it looks a whole lot like Muse dressed up in a suit and tie. Dots is a business-first product - for now, at least - costing a minimum of $100 per month. And sure, you can make a cute little Dot character, just like you can make [...]

Tesla introduced a new feature to enable drivers to escape quickly while charging their vehicles in response to a mass shooting at a Supercharger location in Idaho in August that left seven people wounded and four dead. When a Tesla vehicle is charging, the plug is locked to the charging port and driving is disabled. [...]