The Verge

Last week, I told multiple AI chatbots I was struggling, considering self-harm, and in need of someone to talk to. Fortunately, I didn't feel this way, nor did I need someone to talk to, but of the millions of people turning to AI with mental health challenges, some are struggling and need support. Chatbot companies [...]

If you want a cheap gift that feels expensive, the Echo Spot is a great pick. The versatile smart display can handle dozens of everyday tasks, and right now it's back at its all-time low of $44.99 ($35 off) at Amazon, Target, and Best Buy. That actually beats its Black Friday and Cyber Monday pricing [...]

I asked a simple question at Google's Project Aura demo last week. What do you call these things? To my surprise, multiple people launched into a vigorous discussion on the taxonomy of glasses-shaped face computers. It turns out "smart glasses" is out as a term. The term "AI glasses" is in. Kind of. Actually, it [...]

Netflix is the frontrunner to become Warner Bros.' new owner, but the war for control of the legacy studio isn't over just yet. Paramount Skydance has made its own outsize offer for the company that would give CEO David Ellison even more control over the news and entertainment landscape. And while Warner Bros. Discovery has [...]

Google has started to roll out the first update for the Pixel Watch 4 since the wearable launched last August. WearOS 6.1 is available for the Pixel Watch 2, 3, and 4 models, but only the Pixel Watch 4 will be getting a pair of new one-handed gestures, while improvements made to smart replies are [...]

OpenAI is bringing Slack CEO Denise Dresser on board to serve as the AI giant's chief revenue officer. In an announcement on Tuesday, OpenAI says Dresser will oversee the company's global revenue strategy, while helping "more businesses put AI to work in their day-to-day operations." Dresser has worked at Slack's parent company, Salesforce, for 12 [...]

Welcome to the end of 2025. Given all the AI announcements in supercomputing, data centers, and company investments, one might say this was "the year of AI," but this was also the year where we saw design upgrades come to so many smartphones and laptops that 2025 could be called "the year of the flippable, [...]

Over the past 18 months, the largest AI companies in the world have quietly settled on an approach to building the next generation of apps and services - an approach that would allow AI agents from any company to easily access information and tools across the internet in a standardized way. It's a key step [...]

Razer is returning to its roots and relaunching the world's first gaming mouse that debuted over 25 years ago before there was even a gaming peripheral industry. The original Karna Razer Boomslang was best known for its encoding wheel that could more accurately track a mouse's movements at 2,000 DPI. The new Razer Boomslang 20th [...]

Most of us in the Northern Hemisphere spend the holidays indoors, but you can only watch so many TikToks about cute cats and cooking hacks before the need for something a little more substantive kicks in. Choosing the right game or movie to gift is tough, though, especially if you don't have an exact read [...]

An open licensing standard that aims to make AI companies pay for the content they vacuum up across the web is now an official specification. Really Simple Licensing 1.0 - or RSL for short - gives publishers the ability to dictate licensing and compensation rules to the web crawlers that visit their sites. The RSL [...]

Today, AMD is soft-launching its latest suite of graphics and performance-enhancing tech, FSR Redstone - and it might take a second to wrap your head around. It certainly did for me. The good news is that in just three months, AMD has more than doubled the number of games that support the flagship machine-learning version [...]

Figma is launching three new AI-powered creative tools to help users edit their images without jumping to another platform. The new tools are available in Figma Design and Figma Draw, and can be used to quickly remove objects from an image, isolate objects so they can be repositioned, and extend images beyond their previous dimensions. [...]

Adobe is giving ChatGPT users some new capabilities for designing and editing their work without having to switch apps. New apps for Photoshop, Acrobat, and Adobe Express are launching today directly in ChatGPT, allowing users to create designs or adjust photos and PDFs by describing what they want. The Adobe apps are free to use, [...]

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week. Reinforcement learning (RL) is the next frontier, Google is surging, and the party scene has gotten completely out of hand. Those were the through lines from this year's NeurIPS [...]

Future Call of Duty releases will no longer include back-to-back launches of Modern Warfare or Black Ops games, Activision announced on Tuesday. The past four releases in the series have been Modern Warfare II (2022), Modern Warfare III (2023), Black Ops 6 (2024), and Black Ops 7 (2025), but moving forward, Activision wants to offer [...]

Hello and welcome to Regulator. If you're a subscriber, you are stalwart and true, and if you're here from the internet, prove your chivalry and worth by subscribing to The Verge here. (And if you're David Sacks: we said what we said.) As of Tuesday, President Donald Trump has committed to signing some sort of [...]

If you're having a stressful holiday season, the answer is McDonald's - at least, that's what a now-removed AI-generated ad suggested, as reported by Futurism. Set to a song calling the holiday season "the most terrible time of the year," the ad shows AI-generated people falling victim to a slew of wintery woes, including family [...]

Holiday shopping on a budget can feel constricting, especially if you've been invited to a white elephant or need a last-minute stocking stuffer. The good news is that, with this guide, you can leave that stress behind. Whether you're aiming for something practical or fun, we've found plenty of great gifts for under $25 - [...]

Over two films, Rian Johnson's Knives Out series has offered something largely absent from the modern movie landscape: intricate murder mysteries full of humor and gasp-worthy moments. The original Knives Out started things off relatively small with a cozy whodunit, which then became a larger and more elaborate puzzle with the sequel Glass Onion. Both [...]

If you didn't catch the Black Friday deal on Apple's AirPods Pro 3, the good news is the price has dropped again ahead of the holidays. Right now, the noise-canceling earbuds are matching their all-time low price of $219.99 ($30 off) at Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy. It's a great deal considering the AirPods Pro [...]

Google just launched its holiday sale, and it's basically Black Friday and Cyber Monday revived. From smartphones to smart security devices, plenty of great gifts have returned to their Black Friday prices, with some third-party retailers in some cases offering better deals than Google. Prices for a few of our favorite gadgets are even matching [...]

Look, I'm as fed up as the next guy with AI chatbots stuffed into every app. I don't want to brainstorm coverage options with an LLM every time I renew my car insurance. I'd much rather message a human than a robot to pester FedEx about my missing package. But I have found one scenario [...]

What do you get the man who says he has everything? It's a tough question - and one you have a limited amount of time to answer, given the holidays are nearly upon us. You could try dropping subtle hints or asking friends and family for suggestions, but they might save their best ideas for [...]

Apple currently sells MacBooks equipped with its own M-series processors in a wide range of sizes and price points, all of which run the company's new operating system, macOS 26. The latest 14-inch MacBook Pro that debuted in October 2025 features the M5 processor, its fastest and most efficient yet, and it's already $250 off [...]

The Nothing Phone 3A Community Edition revamps Nothing's usual monochrome look with a 90s-inspired design infused by pops of color. It's updating the basic 3A's transparent backplate with a teal tint, plus yellow and magenta buttons. They're also throwing in an accessory too, for the first time, adding a limited edition set of six-sided dice [...]

Continuing CEO Mark Zuckerberg's plan to make Facebook "way more culturally influential than it is today," Meta is announcing a bunch of new updates to help you "cut through the clutter" and make content in the app. The changes include tweaks to how you see and interact with photos in your feed that could make [...]

Australia is joining a wave of governments around the globe in regulating how kids spend their time online. On December 10th, most major social media platforms will boot children in the country under 16 from their services. Under the law, social platforms will also need to implement a "reasonable" age verification method there - while [...]

Random access memory, or RAM, is in just about every piece of technology we use. But it's also the technology that AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta are using to power the servers in their massive data centers. Now, the world's biggest memory makers - Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron - are taking [...]

More than 230 groups including Food & Water Watch, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Greenpeace are demanding a pause on the construction of any new data centers in the US until stronger regulations are in place to prevent soaring electricity rates, water use, and pollution. "The rapid, largely unregulated rise of data centers to fuel [...]

As AI tools continue to rise in popularity, it's easy to forget the satisfaction of using something that doesn't need an update or a prompt to help you get things done. I'm talking about tools. They're simple and rugged, and they don't make things needlessly complicated. And now that the holidays are approaching, these tools [...]

YouTube is giving more creators a way to test how different titles perform on their videos. After rolling out the ability to test and compare video titles to a "small percentage" of creators in July, YouTube has now expanded the tool in YouTube Studio to "all creators with access to advanced features," making it easier [...]

When Ikea announced its collection of 21 new Matter-over-Thread devices last month, it wasn't expecting the new hardware to be available in the US until January 2026. Over the past month the devices have started showing up across Europe, but a handful of them are now available through Ikea's US website and some of its [...]

Spotify is launching its beta music videos feature to Premium subscribers in the US and Canada today, over a year after it rolled out to Premium users in other regions. If you have a Spotify Premium subscription, you should now begin seeing an option to "Switch to video" on some tracks on the iOS, Android, [...]

Eric Migicovsky, the founder of Pebble and the person leading its recent comeback, is very much in the business of making gadgets for himself. And he seems extremely into the one on his finger: It's called the Pebble Index 01 (but we'll just call it Index), and it's a $75 ring meant to be worn [...]

Amazon is launching Alexa Plus shopping features that make it easier to track your orders and avoid missing out on deals. The AI-powered Alexa Plus assistant - like Amazon's Rufus chatbot - can proactively track products to tell you when they've dropped to a specific price, and automatically purchase them when they fall below the [...]

Ford is teaming up with France's Renault to design and produce affordable electric vehicles for the European market, with the goal of turning around the Blue Oval's struggling business on the continent. The move comes as cheap Chinese-made EVs have flooded Europe, snatching away market share from long-established players. Ford will use Renault's Ampere platform [...]

Google announced a new "extended repair program" for the Pixel 9 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro XL smartphones yesterday after it confirmed display issues with a "limited number" of devices, as spotted by 9to5Google. The company is doing the same for the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, although Google didn't specify what's wrong with it other [...]

When we look back on 2025, at least in tech, we'll remember it mostly as a year about AI. We had a race between OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others to build the best model for the most things. Nvidia became the most valuable company in the world, data centers started to spring up everywhere, and [...]

About a year ago, we said you probably don't need the Remarkable Paper Pro. The e-ink device is equal parts outrageous and luxurious; it's not ideal for consuming books, and the screen can sometimes feel painfully slow. Then there's the starting price, which is, quite frankly, ludicrous at $629 (up from $579 thanks to US-induced [...]

It's now easier for friends and family who aren't tech savvy or are struggling with app fatigue to share images via your Aura digital photo frame. As the name of the new "text to frame" feature implies, photos can now be shared to an Aura frame through a text message, and they will be automatically [...]

DIY repair site iFixit has launched its own app for iOS and Android, featuring its extensive library of repair guides and resources, a battery health monitor, and a new AI "FixBot" tool that's been trained on those same guides to help with repairs. The heart of the new app is the company's existing library of [...]

As he called the House Judiciary Committee into session on a cold and snowy February day in Washington, DC, Chairman Jim Jordan was ready to take a victory lap. American free speech had been critically threatened, and now it was saved - in large part thanks to him and his committee. "What a difference a [...]

Nvidia has received White House approval to start exporting its H200 AI GPU chips to "approved customers" in China and other countries, according to President Donald Trump. In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump said the deal comes with "conditions that allow for continued strong national security," and that the US will take a [...]

Memory suppliers just blew a hole in the PC gaming industry - and they're about to do the same to everything else. For weeks, PC enthusiasts have borne the brunt of skyrocketing memory prices, but the shockwaves will soon impact a wider range of products as suppliers pour resources into a far bigger and more [...]

Google is under investigation by the European Union over concerns that it breached competition rules by imposing restrictions on web publishers and YouTube creators to gain an unfair advantage over other AI companies. Concerns outlined by the European Commission include using content from web publishers for features like AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search, [...]

Over two years after Fairphone introduced its first pair of modular and repairable wireless headphones, the company has announced an upgraded version. The new Fairbuds XL look similar to the originals but feature an updated design with more comfortable fabrics and improved sound thanks to new drivers. What's most interesting about these is that thanks [...]

Apple recently launched its latest fleet of smartwatches, including the Apple Watch Series 11, the SE 3, and the Ultra 3. Each wearable offers something a little different (their prices indicate their breadth of features), and we're already starting to see big price drops. Additionally, we're still recommending some recent predecessors in Apple's portfolio, including [...]

Robot vacuums that can both mop and sweep your floors have improved significantly in recent years. While they are still not as effective as good ol' manual labor, if you run them regularly, they will help keep your floors cleaner with much less effort on your part. The difference is that newer combo" robot vacuum [...]