The Verge

The Trump administration approached Microsoft for its donation to fund the White House's $300 million ballroom, documents released by Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-MA) office reveal. In response to a Democrat-led letter questioning Big Tech's involvement in the ballroom's construction, Microsoft counsel Karen Christian writes that the company "was contacted by a fundraiser for the effort [...]

Billy Woods has one of the highest batting averages in the game. Between his solo records like Hiding Places and Maps, and his collaborative albums with Elucid as Armand Hammer, the man has multiple stone-cold classics under his belt. And, while no one would ever claim that Woods' albums were light-hearted fare (these are not [...]

Earlier this month, The Guardian published an investigation that showed Google was serving up misleading and outright false information via its AI overviews in response to certain medical inquiries. Now those results appear to have been removed. According to the original report: In one case that experts described as "really dangerous", Google wrongly advised people [...]

It happens every year: we set ambitious New Year's resolutions - work out more, spend less, keep the house cleaner - full of optimism and motivation. Then life happens, and suddenly it's June and you can't recall what your resolutions even were. But it doesn't have to be that way. Sometimes the problem isn't a [...]

If you're one of the many, many people who received a password reset email from Instagram the other day, the company says it fixed the issue. What was the issue? Unclear. We reached out to Meta for clarification and have yet to receive a response. All we know is that an "external party" triggered the [...]

GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen is in line to potentially earn $35 billion in stock options, so long as the company hits a $100 billion market cap. One way to hit that target is by cutting costs, and one way of cutting costs is to close down a bunch of stores. The company closed 590 stores [...]

This week, Google announced a new AI Inbox view for Gmail that replaces the traditional list of emails with an AI-generated list of to-dos and topics to track based on what's in your inbox. It's not widely available yet, but I have access, and in the few hours I've spent messing around with it, I [...]

Wing is bringing drone delivery to even more Walmart stores in 2026. The Alphabet-owned company announced today that its drones will be flying above 150 more locations this year, including in four new cities: Los Angeles, St. Louis, Miami, and Cincinnati. In June 2025, the companies said they would expand their delivery partnership to 100 [...]

For a while, it seemed like everyone had a TiVo. It was a plot point on major TV shows; it had A-list Hollywood fans; it became a verb as ubiquitous as Google or Xerox. The love was well-earned, since TiVo had created a product that felt genuinely like magic. You could pause live TV. And [...]

It's January, which means there's a whole year of rectangular glass slabs ahead of us. But before that happens, I managed to find phones of a different shape lurking around the corners of the CES convention center halls. They weren't center stage, of course. That was reserved for robots doing laundry badly. But in the [...]

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the action (and inaction) of lawmakers seeking to rein in tech platforms, follow Lauren Feiner. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started In the [...]

In 2023, what was then still called Twitter, open-sourced at least portions of the code that decided what it served up in your feed. But that GitHub repository is hopelessly out of date, with the vast majority of the files appearing to be from the initial upload three years ago. Elon Musk says that in [...]

I picked Aqara's Smart Lock U400 and Roborock's Saros Rover robot vacuum as the overall best smart home gadgets from CES 2026, but there were gazillions of other great gadgets on the show floor. It was a banner year for smart home products, but the big trends I saw weren't about new product categories; they [...]

The FCC approved SpaceX's plan to launch an additional 7,500 Gen2 Starlink satellites on Friday. That brings the total number of satellites the company will have in orbit to around 15,000 worldwide. As part of the approval, the government is also waiving previous requirements that prevented overlapping coverage and enhanced capacity. SpaceX originally sought approval [...]

The start of the year is typically a great time to snag deals on health and fitness gear, including trackers and wireless earbuds, and this week was no exception. We found plenty on sale and highlighted the best picks below. Not all of the deals are related to New Year's resolutions, though; there are also [...]

Keychron announced new mechanical keyboards with marathon battery life at CES, but this trackball stole the spotlight. The Nape Pro is Keychron's first trackball, and its slender frame means it can work on your desk in multiple ways. You can keep it to the right or left of a keyboard like a traditional trackball, or [...]

Greetings from the year of Linux on my desktop. In November, I got fed up and said screw it, I'm installing Linux. Since that article was published, I have dealt with one minor catastrophe after another. None of that has anything to do with Linux, mind you. It just meant I didn't install it on [...]

At CES this year, humanoid robots appeared to be closer than ever to moving into our homes. LG introduced CLOiD, a household robot it says can handle chores like preparing food and loading the washing machine. SwitchBot showed off the Onero H1, another home helper built to tackle everyday tasks, and Boston Dynamics, WIRobotics, Zeroth, [...]

Stevie Bonifield is a news writer here at The Verge and, they say, I cover a little bit of just about everything, from the FCC to AI shopping tools to Linux." Before joining our news team, they wrote weekend news for PC Gamer and did reviews, news, features, and guides for Laptop Mag, along with [...]

Diora might be the most ambitious game I've played on the Playdate. It's all about perspective: You turn the handheld's crank to rotate your viewpoint of the bite-size 3D landscapes, which lets you peek around corners to find solutions to various puzzles. On a device with a 1-bit, black-and-white display, the miniature worlds feel miraculous, [...]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 111, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, hope you had a wonderful holiday season, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about gerrymandering and watch conventions and John [...]

Games Done Quick, the biannual charity speedrunning event currently going on right now, not only helps organizations like the Prevent Cancer Foundation and Doctors Without Borders - it helps indie games get noticed, too. Indie game developers face an incredible uphill battle not only getting their projects funded, completed, and launched, but discovered as well. [...]

Betterment, a financial app, sent a sketchy-looking notification on Friday asking users to send $10,000 to Bitcoin and Ethereum crypto wallets and promising to "triple your crypto," according to a thread on Reddit. The Betterment account says in an X thread that this was an "unauthorized message" that was sent via a "third-party system." Here's [...]

Amazon could be taking another, even bigger swing at physical stores, this time with a Walmart-like supercenter. On Tuesday, the Orland Park Plan Commission in the Chicago suburb Orland Park, Illinois voted 6-1 to approve Amazon's proposal to develop 35 acres of land for a 229,000-square foot retail center, as reported by The Information. The [...]

One of the issues holding Auracast back from wider mainstream use is some companies' lack of support for the Bluetooth technology - Apple being a prime example. With iOS having 58 percent of the market share in North America and nearly 28 percent worldwide, a decision by Apple to enable native Auracast support would potentially [...]

AI toys, companions, and robots have been everywhere at CES this year, but among the horde of waddling plushies and light-up emoji eyes, two stood out to me. HeyMates and Buddyo are each betting that the collectible figurine boom is going to come back with an AI-powered vengeance, letting us chat to sports stars and [...]

Since X's users started using Grok to undress women and children using deepfake images, I have been waiting for what I assumed would be inevitable: X getting booted from Apple's and Google's app stores. The fact that it hasn't happened yet tells me something serious about Silicon Valley's leadership: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are [...]

We just gave the Lego Smart Brick our Best In Show award at CES 2026, and I wanted to stop by The Lego Group's suite to get a last glimpse before I left Las Vegas. To my surprise, the company showed off one more feature I didn't see during my first demo, perhaps the most [...]

Google rolled out emoji reactions to personal Gmail accounts a little over two years ago, and I completely forgot about it until now - probably because the option is hidden within a small, smiley face icon beside the Forward button. But now, Google is bringing emoji reactions to all Workspace users by default on February [...]

On Thursday evening in Manhattan's Financial District, hundreds of protesters braved the cold to protest US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), after an agent fatally shot a woman at close range on Wednesday. Earlier that day, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's visit to One World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan sparked protests outside [...]

The launch of an AI image editing feature on xAI's Grok has caused chaos on X after it was used to generate a flood of nonconsensual sexualized deepfakes. As Hayden Field wrote, screenshots show Grok complying with requests to put real women in lingerie and make them spread their legs, and to put small children [...]

Meta has forged agreements with three nuclear power providers in an effort to secure the vast amount of electricity it needs to power AI data centers. The agreements with TerraPower (which is backed by Bill Gates), Oklo (backed by Sam Altman), and Vistra are expected to deliver 6.6 gigawatts of energy for Meta's projects by [...]

In an interview with Netflix's Tudum, Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker announced today that the sci-fi anthology series will be returning for an eighth season. "Well, luckily it does have a future, so I can confirm that Black Mirror will return, just in time for reality to catch up with it," Brooker said. "That chunk [...]

Where's the Trump phone? We're going to keep talking about it every week. We've reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump phone's whereabouts. As usual, we're still waiting for a response. In the meantime, it's nowhere to be found at CES 2026. CES isn't a big smartphone show, but there have been more [...]

If you choose to get an extra controller for your Nintendo Switch 2, you can spend a lot - and get a lot in return. Buying Nintendo's own $89 Switch 2 Pro Controller, for instance, will net you the console's only wireless controller with a 3.5mm headphone jack for private listening, not to mention great-feeling [...]

It may have been one of the smallest devices announced at CES 2026, but Lego's new Smart Brick was also one of the most talked about debuts of the show. We've recognized it as the "Best in show" in our CES 2026 awards, and following the Smart Play system's launch earlier this week, the first [...]

Following some controversy, the developers at Baldur's Gate 3 creator Larian Studios have further clarified their use of generative AI. CEO Swen Vincke and other Larian developers held an AMA on Reddit where they answered users' questions about the team's next title, Divinity. They also fielded questions related to reports that the studio was using [...]

Apple and Google are being dragged into the uproar around X's AI chatbot that has continued to virtually undress women in images without their consent this week. In a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM), and Ed Markey (D-MA) wrote that "X's [...]

We saw a ton of cool new products at CES 2026, but not all of them made the cut when it came to deciding what was best of show. One of those products that we nevertheless think holds promise is Anker's AeroFit Pro 2, which are wireless earbuds that can double as open-ear headphones. You [...]

Accessory maker Nimble announced a new power bank at CES 2026 that will appeal to anyone who's had to reluctantly share or loan their portable charger to someone else. The Champ Stack 10K looks like a typical 10,000mAh power bank that's jumped on the built-in charging cable bandwagon, but it has one interesting difference: you [...]

This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest phones, smartwatches, apps, and other gizmos that swear they're going to change your life. Optimizer arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 10AM ET. Opt in for Optimizer here. At CES 2026 this week, people [...]

This year's CES was an odd one. This is a conference usually dominated by futuristic, expensive TVs and futuristic, expensive cars, but those things weren't what dominated CES 2026. Instead, Las Vegas was filled with new ideas about old gadgets and showed us a whole lot of really impressive hardware waiting on software to catch [...]

Kia unveiled the EV2, a small and affordably priced electric vehicle built for the European market. The EV2 made its debut at the Brussels Auto Show, where executives touted it as its "most compact" EV to date. Of course, it was another in a long line of affordable, capable, and impressively designed EVs that won't [...]

The CES show floor officially closes its doors at the end of the day, but there's still a trickle of announcements and reveals coming out of Las Vegas. If you're struggling to stay on top of all the new tech, gadgets, concepts, and AI-powered devices as the final day of CES gets underway, we're still [...]

CESis a lot - a deluge of consumer tech surrounded by lots of bad carpeting.The Verge's on-the-ground team of super nerds covered so many new products and technologies that it's understandable if it was all a little overwhelming. That's why we've gathered up a collection of trend reports from the show to help make sense [...]

Elon Musk's X has partially restricted access to Grok's image editing capabilities amid growing backlash to the flood of nonconsensual, sexualized deepfakes of adults and minors generated by the platform. As of this writing, it no longer generates images as @grok replies for free, but Grok's image editing tools remain readily available for any X [...]

The first video I saw of the Minneapolis shooting was bad enough. Shortly after I saw it, I had the terrible realization that there were multiple people in the clip holding their phones up - another angle was bound to surface. Within minutes, a second video was all over social media, and it was even [...]

Every January, the world of consumer electronics heads to Las Vegas to spend the first full week of the year in the desert presenting, prodding, and gawking at all the new gadgets and gear debuting at CES. The show has once again delivered an avalanche of products, both innovative and vaporous, that will shape the [...]

Microsoft is making it a lot faster and easier to add links to text inside Word documents. Instead of having to open a menu item to insert a link or use the CTRL + K keyboard shortcut, you can now simply paste a link on top of the text you want to hyperlink. This new [...]