The Verge

While the new touch-enabled MacBook Pro with the PROLED XDR screen is available for preorder across a few major retailers, Best Buy is sweetening the deal by including a $100 gift card. The gift card will be automatically added to your cart when you preorder one of Apple's highest-end laptops available in 14- or 16-inch [...]

Vic Mensa is one of those people who has done so many things that it's hard to remember where you were first introduced to him. Was it his debut mixtape Innanetape, which finally hit the major streaming services for the first time in September? Or maybe his house-influenced single "Down On My Luck"? Maybe you [...]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 150, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy Halloween, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I was in the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee on a family vacation. It was delightful [...]

"Its James Talarico. Can you please please please please pretty pretty please rush in even just $1?" "Who's working to elect James Talarico? Marxists." "Wow! Wow! Wow! Mark Kelly just made a HUGE announcement!" "We asked Ben Verlander, MLB analyst and former Tigers prospect, to record a quick video about the election this Tuesday, November [...]

Apple will launch Apple Intelligence in China with iOS 27.3, the company announced on its Chinese newsroom website, as reported by MacRumors. The Apple Intelligence features will be available first in an iOS 27.3 beta that's set to launch on November 4th, with a full iOS 27.3 release scheduled for December. This launch doesn't bring [...]

Akai teased its new MPC Sample Key on Instagram earlier this week, and said it plans to open-source its software so the modding community can hack it to their hearts' delight. While there's no word yet on when the device will launch or how much it will cost, The Verge has received exclusive images of [...]

Asked about supply chain shortages, like the ongoing RAM shortage, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview that it's "terrible" to have RAM in personal PCs instead of data centers. During his appearance on the Cheeky Pint podcast, where he also commented on AI's impact on math, Altman said: "A lot of people want [...]

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic say they will adopt a new standard that publishers can use to opt out of being scraped by AI, as reported earlier by Search Engine Roundtable. With this control, publishers can apply their AI training preferences across multiple AI companies, instead of setting them individually. The shared "policy token" signal [...]

Google's AI chip-equipped satellite has generated its first response from space. In a blog post on Friday, Google says it successfully booted up the satellite's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), allowing the on-board Gemma 4 model to follow through on a prompt to create a haiku about being in space: Blue marble below Data streams in [...]

Starbucks could eventually show you a personalized digital menu when you pull up to the drive-thru. During an earnings call on Thursday, Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol said the company is going to explore "experiences that recognize participating customers as they arrive, present personalized digital menus, and make payment more effortless," as spotted earlier by More [...]

The iPhone has more screens! The MacBook has a touchscreen! The HomeView does CarPlay apps! For the first time in a long time, Apple is in a period of unabashed gadget experimentation, and while the final results aren't always perfect, it's fun to watch the most successful product maker try some new things again. Even [...]

During an hourlong earnings call last night, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe spent less time talking about the production ramp of the all-important R2 SUV than he did hyping the company's still-unproven autonomous vehicle ambitions. But the company faces a crucial test later this year, when it rolls out its point-to-point hands-free driving feature - first [...]

Curry Barker, the director behind the hit horror film Obsession, just published a new horror short on YouTube. The short, titled "Mama Bear," is nearly five minutes long. The video is pretty unnerving, and fair warning that it gets a little graphic, but it's a fun one to watch if you're looking for something scary [...]

During Intel's latest earnings call, CEO Lip-Bu Tan said that demand for its budget-focused Wildcat Lake chips "is outstripping supply." According to CFO David Zinsner, the chips are now sold out. Zinsner said Intel has "seen significant growth in Wildcat Lake. It's coming exactly at the right time because it's cost-optimized and we're seeing a [...]

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an earnings call today that Google's AI-powered search modes do not help with traffic to the platform, echoing problems facing other websites and publishers. As part of its Q3 2026 earnings, Reddit revealed that search traffic in October has "dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per [...]

Patrick Stewart, best known for his roles in Star Trek and X-Men, has died at age 86. A message posted to Stewart's Instagram account says the actor died in his Los Angeles home on Wednesday "following a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer's Disease and Lewy Body Dementia." Born in 1940 in Mirfield, Yorkshire, England, [...]

Reddit is announcing a huge shift: It's going to start requiring users to log in. Right now, you can browse Reddit without having an account, and the site is generally a great resource for crowdsourced information on a whole range of topics. I know I'm not the only person who appends "reddit" to a lot [...]

Rivian reported its third quarter earnings of 2026, providing us a closer look at the company's financial health as it ramps up production of its all-important R2 electric vehicle - which is now, for the first time, outselling all of Rivian's other EVs. Rivian said it brought in $2.155 billion in revenue, a 38 percent [...]

General Motors has agreed to pay $220 million to settle claims that it illegally sold driver and location information to data brokers, as reported earlier by Reuters. The agreement, which resolves a complaint from a coalition of 36 US attorneys general, requires GM to limit the driving data it collects and obtain "express consent" from [...]

Now you can generate, preview, and edit PDFs, Google Docs, Google Sheets, slide decks, Markdown files, TXT files, and code directly within Google Gemini. The new file editing capabilities are available starting today for all Gemini users, and while PDF previews/editing works on both the web and mobile, all other file formats are only in [...]

With its playful design, versatility, and relatively affordable price, the Ikea Varmblixt quickly became one of my colleague Jennifer Pattison Tuohy's new favorite smart light products when she tested it in April. Now, the donut-shaped lamp is on sale for $79.99 ($20 off) through November 11th at Ikea. Don't let us tell you where you [...]

The new MacBook Pro brings with it a bunch of firsts for Apple laptops, the two flashiest being an OLED display and touchscreen functionality. But as an image-accuracy enthusiast, trained calibrator, and resident display expert, what excites me most about the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display is the technology it uses to display an [...]

Utah has filed criminal charges against Kalshi and its executives, accusing the prediction market of breaking anti-gambling laws, as reported by The Salt Lake Tribune and the Associated Press. The state has filed 14 charges against Kalshi, as well as CEO Tarek Mansour and COO Luana Lopes Lara, including 12 counts of illegally promoting online [...]

The US power sector could release 42 percent more planet-heating carbon dioxide pollution by 2030 than it did in 2025 as it builds out more fossil fuel infrastructure to meet data center electricity demand, according to a new analysis by the Sierra Club. That would essentially wipe out 15 years of greenhouse gas reductions. CO2 [...]

When it was revealed earlier this month that Withings would require new users to subscribe to a Withings Plus subscription to sync heath data from the company's devices to third-party apps, Tom Anthony, who was already fed up with the Withings mobile app which they describe as a "bloated mess," became motivated to "free" their [...]

The Joshua Kushner-led Thrive Holdings is acquiring ADT in an all-cash deal valued at $7.6 billion. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027 and will take ADT private, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. Joshua Kushner is the brother of President Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Thrive Holdings was founded last [...]

To anyone listening closely to what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been saying over the past couple of years, this week felt like the clearest sign yet that AI is about to fundamentally change the size of Microsoft's workforce. Microsoft is now offering voluntary buyouts to around 60,000 employees across the US, UK, Canada, and [...]

The New York Times is testing a new AI feature for its Cooking app that helps users to modify recipes, and it has sparked some drama among users. Last Friday, NYT Cooking senior editor Genevieve Ko announced the feature, which can be used to recommend substitutions for ingredients and cooking equipment, scale recipes to any [...]

The long-awaited remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Nintendo Switch 2 launches next Thursday, November 5th. In other words, you have a week remaining to secure your physical edition with a $10 discount at Amazon and Walmart. Once the game launches, the physical version will almost certainly go from $59.99 to [...]

Today on Decoder, I'm joined by Joey Brookhart, an analyst at the chip and AI research firm SemiAnalysis, to help me dig into the story inside the numbers of the Anthropic IPO filing - a document known as an S-1. Anthropic just filed its S-1 to go public on the Nasdaq, and it could start [...]

Amazon is adding several new features to its AI shopping assistant, including ways to create, edit, and move items between shopping lists and gift registries. As an example, Amazon says you can now ask Alexa for Shopping to "Create a new shopping list" or "Show me what's left on my wedding registry." The ecommerce giant [...]

After engineering a flexible version of Tetris that could be wrapped around a magazine, Kevin Bates' latest creation is a digital candle that uses a custom AI model to accurately simulate the appearance of a flickering flame across a grid of LEDs. It's a far cry from the types of devices Bates is typically known [...]

The Anthropic S-1 seems to have provided the financial justification for the company to spend as much as it possibly can on compute. If you are the kind of person who wonders if Anthropic is doing its level best to build a machine god while convincing Wall Street it's in the business of selling IT [...]

For more than 15 years, Apple has had a pretty simple answer to the idea of a touchscreen MacBook: no. Yesterday, Apple finally decided to think different and announce one anyway. "You've gotta touch it to believe it," says Apple CEO John Ternus. He might be right: I haven't yet touched it, and I still [...]

DoorDash has announced that it's buying Instacart in a deal valued at approximately $17 billion. The acquisition will give DoorDash a bigger presence in online grocery delivery thanks to Instacart's established grocery marketplace and retailer partnerships, with Instacart CEO Chris Rogers saying the deal will make "online grocery more seamless and affordable" for millions of [...]

On Tuesday, defense contractor Anduril and chipmaker Qualcomm announced a partnership to build laptops entirely in the United States, starting with a single model in 2027. They also announced a "long-term goal" of pushing the computer industry to create "a fully domestic supply chain." Even a single Made-in-USA laptop would be a surprise, because no [...]

Asked about AI and the trend of college students booing tech CEOs at graduation ceremonies, Instagram head Adam Mosseri acknowledged in an interview that a lot of people really don't like AI, and it's not just young people and creatives. Appearing on the Colin and Samir podcast to talk about the launch of widescreen and [...]

A hacker stole a trove of personal information from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The breach exposes the names, job titles, phone numbers, email addresses, and office locations of more than 41,000 employees, including those in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), according to TechCrunch and Wired. The [...]

The MPC Sample Key isn't even formally announced yet, but Akai is already showing off what the modding community is cooking up through vibe coding. Akai has decided to embrace the explosion of hackers and custom firmware developers by giving them early access to the device, which will have open-source firmware. It will likely run [...]

For the last several years, Readwise has been building tools for power readers. There's the eponymous product, Readwise, which stores and categorizes your Kindle highlights to help you remember what you've read. There's Readwise Reader, an app for reading newsletters, PDFs, and web articles you've saved for later. And now there's Readwise Books, a full-fledged [...]

Google parent company Alphabet says that its AI investments are leading to a big growth in searches year-over-year, as noted in its Q3 2026 earnings today. "Our AI investments are driving overall Search query growth, including commercial queries," CEO Sundar Pichai says in a statement. "In fact, our year-over-year query growth rate is the highest [...]

Microsoft just posted the first quarter of its 2027 fiscal financial results. The software maker made $92.3 billion in revenue and a net income of $33.6 billion during Q1. Revenue is up 19 percent, and net income has increased by 32 percent. It's a new financial year for Microsoft, so the company is changing up [...]

With an OLED display and touchscreen capabilities, it's no surprise that the new MacBook Pro Apple announced today is more expensive than the MBP announced earlier this year. But upgrading the base models that start at $2,899 for the 14-inch, and $3,399 for the 16-inch, with every premium hardware option that Apple offers pushes those [...]

Google has released its latest frontier model, Gemini 4 Carbon, offering "significant gains" in coding, agentic tasks, and cybersecurity. In an announcement on Wednesday, Google highlights Carbon's top spot on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (v5.0) benchmark, with Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra trailing behind. The new Gemini 4 Carbon model offers improvements over [...]

What do drones, routers, and Roombas have in common? The US government wants to keep Chinese ones from entering the country. They're the first consumer gadgets that are facing de facto import bans because of the US government's xenophobic stance - and they might not be the last. Originally, the US government was just worried [...]

Apple announced a new iPad Mini with a larger OLED display this week, and we've just gotten to try it out at Apple's "Pro and tell" event. It's an iPad for sure, but the new OLED on the Mini looks exceptional, and the optional nano-texture matte finish is awesome. The "Pro and tell" event venue [...]

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr announced the agency will vote on November 19th on rules that would allow prisons to use signal jamming. Radiofrequency jammers are generally banned under Section 333 and the Communications Act of 1934, with few exceptions, and Carr has noted they've been permitted for use at some federal facilities already. Carr claims [...]

Nearly two years after LG and Samsung announced at CES 2025 that their latest smart TVs would include access to Microsoft's Copilot, the company is ending support for the AI assistant's functionality on all TVs this year, according to a report by Windows Central. The news comes not from an official announcement from LG, Samsung, [...]

In this economy, how often does a product get less expensive before its debut? That just happened with the Google / Xreal Aura, the lightweight 95-gram glasses with a tethered Android XR compute puck and multiple virtual screens that just went on sale today. Xreal and Google have just announced the headset costs $1,099 through [...]

Apple finally showed off its 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops that have the PROLED XDR display at the October 2026 "Pro and Tell" event. The long-awaited laptops feature a Tandem OLED display with full touch capabilities, while also cutting some weight, and bringing back the glowing Apple logo. While a little less exciting, there's [...]