The Verge

Less than a month after its mass release of hundreds of manuscripts that it said contained solutions to long-standing mathematics questions, OpenAI is back with three more "major" discoveries in math, computer science, and physics. What's different this time is the choice to have external experts that OpenAI describes as "shepherds" guiding the results in [...]

Running out of space on your Nintendo Switch 2? Thankfully, Samsung's P9 MicroSD Express card is discounted at multiple retailers, with the 256GB version going for $47.99 (Amazon, B&H Photo) and the 512GB version $99 (Amazon, B&H Photo). The smaller card typically sells for around $80, and the larger option usually sells between $150 and [...]

As it prepares to go public, Anthropic's S-1 filing makes generative AI's methane dependency glaringly obvious. "Competition for access to electrical supply and data center locations with adequate power availability is intense." In documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission Monday, Anthropic acknowledges that data centers are becoming increasingly reliant on "natural gas" [...]

Apple has just released iOS 27.2, bringing Apple Pencil support to the iPhone Duo. The software update also includes an "Edge Light" feature for the iPhone Duo that's intended to illuminate your face during video calls. Apple previously said the iPhone Duo would add support for the Apple Pencil "later this year." The company's first [...]

From the bright minds that brought you FTX Arena and NBA Top Shot NFT maketplace (where sales last month dropped to $762,781, which is a 99.66 percent decrease compared to the February 2021 peak of $226,350,843), the NBA announced Monday that it has new "preferred" prediction market deals for Kalshi and Polymarket, as well as [...]

The RealReal, a secondhand luxury fashion consignment retailer, said it's updating its bot defense system, effectively making it harder for AI agents to shop on its site. The change comes days after The Verge reported that an AI agent could be used to take advantage of The RealReal's item reserve system. On the retailer's website, [...]

Following reports of iPhone Duos with cracked and broken inside screens, often showing a bright line running from the center to the right side, Apple says in a statement to Bloomberg and 9to5Mac that it's aware of "an issue impacting the inner display" on a "small number of iPhone Duo units." If your iPhone Duo [...]

If you want a decent pair of noise-canceling earbuds without spending a fortune, Nothing's Ear 3A are worth considering. The wireless earbuds offer a lot of features for the price, and they're an even better value now that all four colors are on sale at Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy for $79 ($20 off), matching [...]

Anthropic has finally filed its S-1 prospectus with the SEC, a document designed to give investors a look under the hood of its business, from how much its executives are making and plans for spending its IPO billions to the risks that could derail its ambitions. At more than 300 pages, there's a lot to [...]

Last week, I sank into my living room couch and watched a bedraggled, nihilistic Matthew McConaughey take a drag of a cigarette in season 1 of True Detective. "You know, someone once told me time is a flat circle. Everything we've done, or will do, we're gonna do over and over and over again." I [...]

When Sony announced the WH-1000XM4C headphones, I was perplexed. A product revamp usually includes at least one or two significant improvements. Or if it's a nostalgia play, it's from a decades-old product and not one that came out in 2020. Beyond a few minor tweaks, though, the XM4C are remarkably similar to their six-year-old namesake, [...]

Instagram is announcing a big push into longform horizontal video, which the platform is calling "Features." Instagram boss Adam Mosseri has been against doing longform video on the platform "for a long time," he says in a six-and-a-half-minute video (here's the widescreen version) with VP of product Tessa Lyons, saying that "one of my concerns [...]

Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to up to 60,000 employees across the US, UK, Canada, and India. In a message to employees, Microsoft chief people officer Amy Coleman writes that this gives staff members "the opportunity to leave Microsoft with financial support and career planning resources" as the company looks to trim staff without another [...]

T-Mobile is launching new "T-Mix" plans that bundle wireless service with subscriptions to services like Netflix, Apple TV, YouTube Premium, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, device promotions, and more, as reported earlier by Fierce Network. The Standard plan starts at $55 / month (with autopay) for one line and one "Pick," which you can change up [...]

Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra was blighted by some nuisance bugs at launch, but now the company has released some new firmware to resolve them. The October 22 release addresses three issues notable issues in particular: screen flickering, unexpected restarts, and lengthy reboot times, alongside unspecified "additional bug fixes and general performance improvements," according to Microsoft's [...]

The Remarkable Paper Pro Move is essentially a digital notepad, with a skinny 7.3-inch E Ink screen that's easy to hold one-handed to jot down notes or ideas. At $449 new, it's not exactly cheap, but buying refurbished is a way to save, as always. Remarkable itself offers the refurbished Paper Pro Move for that [...]

It was about to be a long night in Huntington, West Virginia. Mayor Patrick Farrell stood before 10 members of city council in a white dress shirt and dark blazer studded with an American flag pin. Behind him sat his constituents and residents from neighboring towns. Some had their arms crossed, while others held a [...]

As is tradition, iFixit has torn open the latest iPhone and laid its parts bare on a table. It found some interesting details about how Apple might be hiding the crease on the Duo's folding screen and gave it a 5/10 repairability score. That might not seem particularly high, but it's the best score the [...]

In my mind, Spooky Season music comes in two distinct flavors. There are the fun, occasionally goofy songs like "The Monster Mash" and John Carpenter's "Halloween Theme." Then there is the genuinely terrifying: Throbbing Gristle, The Body, or Scott Walker's The Drift. This 2006 album from the singer-songwriter is truly upsetting. On it, Walker explores [...]

Social media and the iPhone Duo subreddit are filled with reports of Apple's foldable failing quickly and in spectacular fashion. Some users report having the phone for only a few hours before the hinge seems to catch on something, then audibly crack and break the screen. Tellingly, the cracks all seem to happen in the [...]

I know many of you are mourning the loss of the Arc browser, and I get it. It felt like the first app in a long time to really offer a new approach to browser design. Atlassian bought the company last year and shifted its focus to developing Dia, its even more AI-focused browser. And [...]

The Crkd Nitro Deck was a saving grace for the original Nintendo Switch. The slide-on $59.99 accessory brought Hall effect sticks to drift-plagued consoles - no need to open up your Joy-Con for a complicated repair. The Nitro Deck 2, made for both the original Switch and the larger Switch 2, continues the tradition of [...]

Instagram is continuing its expansion into living rooms with Instagram for TV, for Apple TV. The company first started testing a version of the platform focused on Reels, live streams, and other video content, blown up for a bigger screen in December of last year. Then, in June, it launched a slew of new features [...]

The mods at r/opensource posted new submission rules that, among other things, banned projects that use AI. The post made Saturday evening opens by saying, "If your project uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI, it's not welcome on r/opensource. AI, as it exists today, is incongruent to this Open Source [...]

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more about AI's impact on the web, follow Emma Roth. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started The digital publishing industry has relied on [...]

On Thursday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed the Artificial Intelligence Deceptive Advertising Act into law, requiring disclosures on AI-generated ads. The law requires any ad - whether it's a still image, video, audio, or text - that "has been significantly modified or generated by artificial intelligence" to include a label in the same format as [...]

Lindsay Powell, who releases records under the name Fielded, has spent most of her career subverting expectations and genre conventions. According to their Bandcamp page, Fielded started as an experimental noise project before growing into something closer to R&B. But from moment one, her take on the genre was restless, relentlessly playing with what R&B [...]

It feels like Apple's Welcome Home event just happened. And the iPhone Duo announcement isn't all that far in our rearview mirror, either. Yet, the company is back with another launch, focused on the MacBook Pro, it looks like. Its "Pro and tell" event is scheduled for October 28th at 1PM ET in Los Angeles. [...]

It looks like the long-rumored touchscreen MacBook might actually get announced next week, and after using the Lenovo Yoga 9n for our testing of Nvidia's RTX Spark platform, it got me thinking: this is a lot of what I want from a touchscreen MacBook. Like the Apple silicon in modern MacBook Pros, RTX Spark is [...]

Lee Chang Dong's seventh feature film, Possible Love, is inspired by true events from 2009, when a Korean conglomerate fired a third of its staff - 2,600 employees - after which many died by suicide. Possible Love is the latest in a long line of Lee movies that engage with themes of class or labor [...]

Across several decades in Hollywood, Caleb Deschanel has seen a lot. He served as cinematographer on films like The Passion of the Christ and The Patriot, worked on sequences in The Godfather and Titanic, and directed a few episodes of Twin Peaks. Even still, nothing could quite prepare him for his first stop-motion project: working [...]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 149, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy It Actually Feels Like Fall Now At Least In My Neighborhood), and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about Demis [...]

Xbox's first chief operating officer (COO) is leaving after the new role was created just a few months ago. Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today, according to an internal Xbox memo seen by The Verge. Chiang has been at Microsoft for 21 years, serving as the head of Minecraft before being promoted to Xbox chief [...]

OpenAI is now training its most advanced AI models without internet access following a string of rogue hacking incidents. In a blog post on Friday, OpenAI says it built an offline testing environment where AI models can interact with indexed and cached web content "without risk of affecting external systems." OpenAI paused training its frontier [...]

Remember Popcorn Time, the app that served as an easy-to-use front end for streaming torrents of movies and TV shows? Development of the MPAA's least-favorite app of the 2010s has been abandoned for years, but the "Netflix of Piracy" software is still installed on millions of devices that are just waiting to join a bot [...]

Jack Dorsey's Block announced an AI model called Dessa that's trained "from scratch on nothing but human conversation," and to show off the model, Block shared chats it has had with humans that can occasionally be a little awkward and uncanny. Take this one, for example, shared by Dessa lead Ragavan Thurairatnam. The conversation between [...]

My colleague John Higgins considered Soundcore's Space One some of the best budget noise-canceling headphones you could buy when they launched in 2023 - and their successor has only improved upon their winning formula, albeit with a $30 price increase. Thankfully, the Soundcore Space 2 are currently on sale at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart [...]

If your dog or cat is prone to getting lost, or you frequently go on adventures together, you can save 30 percent on Fi pet trackers through October 25th when you enter coupon code SCARY at checkout. The sale includes several satellite-connected trackers, including the Fi Ultra GPS we previously tested, which is down to [...]

Last week, Starshield - the version of SpaceX's Starlink used by the Ukrainian military - was throttled to block terminals traveling above certain speeds from accessing the service. The Ukrainian army's interceptors, which counter Russian drones carrying bombs, suddenly stopped working at high speeds, making it easier for Russia to attack the country's energy infrastructure [...]

We gave the iPhone Duo a 7 /10. But that wasn't always the score we planned, and it might not be the right score forever. Such are the challenges of reviewing - and assessing - a big, new idea about the most popular smartphone in history. On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay [...]

Google has updated its privacy policy in a way that could mean you'll start seeing targeted ads based on your personal data if you're using personalized AI features. The update, spotted by Android Authority, adds an exception to its promise about not using your Drive, Gmail, or Google Photos for personalized ads. While the previous [...]

The iPhone Duo officially goes on sale today, but a few units already have broken screens. According to posts on Reddit about the affected units, the issue appears to be happening at a similar spot on all of them: Some kind of problem shows up on the inner screen along the hinge and a strange [...]

After years of debating how driverless cars should tell the world no one is at the wheel - flashing text, audio alerts, custom lights - the feds just stepped in with a single answer: cyan. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released proposed changes to Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) No. 108, specifically rewriting [...]

SpaceX plans to access at least 80,000 cell sites as part of efforts to compete directly with Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, according to a report from Bloomberg. Sources tell the publication that SpaceX is in talks with Crown Castle Inc., one of the nation's largest cell tower owners. The move would give SpaceX access to [...]

Meta is delaying the enforcement of its new business terms after publishers raised concerns that they could allow the company to scrape news sites for AI training, as reported earlier by Fast Company. In a statement to The Verge, Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts says the terms will go into effect on November 20th "to allow [...]

Seven years after Sigma claimed its original fp was the world's smallest and lightest full-frame mirrorless camera, the company has announced a similarly compact follow-up with several welcome upgrades, including an improved sensor, an articulating LCD display, and longer battery life. But this time around, Sigma is only claiming its new FP2 is the "world's [...]

The Duo is an entirely new kind of iPhone, so it comes with a bit of a learning curve. That's a wild thing to imagine, since the iPhone has had very few fundamental changes since its inception. But the Duo is built different. If you won the preorder lottery and managed to get your hands [...]

If you've been feeling nostalgic for your old iPod, you can head over to Apple Music's 404 page to listen to music on a virtual re-creation of the first-generation iPod. The hidden iPod was spotted by users on social media on Friday. It's appropriately stocked with music from the early 2000s, like Coldplay's "Viva La [...]