The Verge

Today, I'm talking with Peter Kafka, chief correspondent at Business Insider and host of the Channels podcast, about the gigantic Warner Bros.-Paramount merger and the future of the company now simply called Skydance. Skydance is owned by David Ellison, son of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, and its deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery officially closed [...]

When it comes to TVs, the LG name has long been synonymous with OLEDs, continually leading Samsung and Sony as the top OLED manufacturer. But 2026 is all about RGB LED TVs. Almost every major company has released models with the new technology - including LG and its $3,600 75-inch Micro RGB evo MRGB95B that [...]

At this year's OpenAI DevDay, CEO Sam Altman unveiled the company's new AI agent Dots - and told the crowd that the company wants to "set a new standard for privacy in frontier AI." OpenAI would spend the day taking veiled shots at Meta's Muse, its primary competitor, for failing to keep users' data safe. [...]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 147, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, I missed you all, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) I'm back from parental leave! Part time, anyway. Thanks to everyone who sent well wishes [...]

I'm bouncing down the road in San Carlos, California, zipping past behemoth tech companies like EA and Oracle, in America's smallest electric truck. The Telo MT1 (which stands for "mini truck") unquestionably turns heads because it looks so remarkably different from everything else on the market right now. It has a nearly cab-over design, meaning [...]

Cristian Mungiu's sixth feature, Fjord, concerns a family on trial. They seem like good people, God-fearing. They've just moved from Romania to a small hamlet nestled in the fjords of rural Norway. There is Mamma (Renate Reinsve), Tata (a bald and bespectacled Sebastian Stan), and their passel of children. They are an openly religious and [...]

It started off promising enough. Dozens of tiny, colorful birds were drawn to my garden just a few weeks after I mounted a $350 $269 Kiwibit Bird Feeder 2 Pro. "Looks like Great Tit!" read the first AI-driven alert sent to my phone. "Looks like Eurasian Blue Tit!" read another. I chuckled, still waiting for [...]

CPU makers have noticed that the seemingly unending RAM price hikes are making it tough for a lot of us to upgrade our PCs. Their solution? A return to last-gen DDR4 RAM. Intel and AMD are making new CPUs that'll support the older, more affordable type of memory. On Friday, Gigabyte announced that two of [...]

An Anthropic AI model provided false information about an unsolved homicide to a Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) tipline, according to a report from 6abc. In a statement released on Friday, the PPD said the AI model sent the tip through PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com on July 18th, but the investigators never reviewed it because it was marked as [...]

A jury found an Ohio political blogger guilty of telecommunications harassment after he sent an explicit image of Shrek to a Republican state senator. On Friday, a judge ordered DJ Byrnes, owner of political commentary blog The Rooster, to pay a $200 fine, according to a report from the Columbus Dispatch. Byrnes texted Ohio Sen. [...]

"Staggering." "Overwhelming." "Unprecedented." "Surreal." "Pure insanity." Those were among the descriptions more than three dozen mathematicians reached for in conversations with The Verge as they tried to make sense of the flood of mathematical results OpenAI abruptly dropped on the field this week. Amid the awe, excitement, and uncertainty over the sheer scale of the [...]

Nikon says the video that originally won first place in its Small World in Motion contest "did not comply with the competition rules regarding generative AI." BBC reports that the original first place video from Dr. Ning Xu claimed to show "tiny, hair-like structures called cilia moving in the airway of a child with the [...]

It looks like Google is getting ready to take the wraps off its rumored Fitbit Edge next Monday. In a post on X, Google posted a picture of what appears to be the side of the fitness tracker, with the caption: "Get an Edge on your health. 10.12.26." A trove of Fitbit Edge leaks has [...]

Amazon has the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra in black with 256GB of storage discounted to $949.99, a healthy discount from its usual price of $1,399.99. This phone's standout feature is the adjustable privacy display, which can hide your entire screen, or just portions of it, from onlookers and strangers. It doesn't meaningfully hurt the screen's [...]

Some users are reporting that the new Kindles have a light leak issue that is especially apparent when using dark mode. The latest base-model Kindles have a flush bezel that gives them a sleek appearance and looks great... as long as you keep the lights on. But things can change once you turn down the [...]

When Microsoft released Windows 11 five years ago, it felt like an operating system that was still being renovated, a work in progress. You'd think by now that those renovations would be complete, with Microsoft turning its attention to Windows 12. Instead, Windows 11 feels like it's here to stay, forming the foundation for Microsoft's [...]

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen was mostly unfazed watching Oscar-winning actress Mikey Madison play a character named after her in The Social Reckoning, except for one thing: the wrist warmers. In Aaron Sorkin's new thriller, the fictional Haugen - who, like her nonfictional counterpart, leaks thousands of documents to Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz - [...]

A post on X from "pdfu," who has previously posted leaks and renders of suspected Apple features and LG smart home gear, shows new details of rumored Apple Home accessories from LG. According to the new leak, they could include an NFC-based "Proximity Control" feature that pops up a hint for a device's controls in [...]

YouTube, Twitch, Meta, and X aren't saying whether they'll allow the US government to livestream an execution on their platforms. The four companies didn't respond to The Verge's requests for comment after an unnamed Pentagon official said yesterday that the execution of Nidal Hasan, who was convicted of a mass shooting at a Texas military [...]

It's gadget season, and a lot of companies are launching a lot of new products. But whether it's Microsoft dropping a high-end laptop, Amazon shipping a fancy Android tablet, or Apple diving headlong into the smart home, the actual strategy appears to be almost always the same. All these companies believe AI assistants and agents [...]

President Donald Trump has a knack for turning words against his enemies. His first successful presidential run was built on monikers like "Little Marco" and "Crooked Hillary"; he changed "fake news" from a phrase describing scammy media outlets to a derogatory term for the press at large. Over the past few weeks, he's clearly decided [...]

Before there were cute little guys, there was Instinct. In August, the startup got its AI agent to market with an unusual playbook: invite-only, no marketing, and barely so much as a website. And yet, Instinct quickly became the buzziest thing in AI, garnering praise for its straightforward, text message-based interface and its ability to [...]

Google's new operating system is off to a rocky start. The five newly launched Googlebook laptops have hardware that ranges from great to excellent, but the software in its current state is the weak point. There are four of us on staff at The Verge actively testing Googlebooks and, frankly, our internal Slack discussions have [...]

Meta has banned ads from TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance across the US and several other countries as the rivalry between the major social media operators heats up, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. The ban, which went into effect on Thursday, restricts ads and paid marketing messages from ByteDance, along with third-party ads that link [...]

The Playdate, Panic's tiny yellow handheld that launched in 2022, has slowly but surely become a great deal - which is a good thing, because everything else in gaming has only gotten more expensive. Despite being a weird device with a black-and-white screen and a crank jutting out the side, the Playdate has managed to [...]

OpenAI is standing firm on its decision to fire three safety researchers after an investigation found they committed "a significant breach of trust." In a post on X on Friday, the company said Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni were dismissed for violating "clear policies on handling sensitive information." It insisted the decision was [...]

Microsoft bundled its AI-powered Office features into Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions last year, but it only allowed the primary account holder to access the AI benefits. Now, Microsoft is about to let Microsoft 365 Family and Premium subscribers share Copilot and AI usage features, alongside access to Office apps and OneDrive storage, with [...]

The United States' execution of the Fort Hood shooter will be livestreamed, anonymous officials from the Defense Department told the BBC and Associated Press. The planned execution of Nidal Hasan, the former US Army major convicted of killing 13 people at the Texas military base, was announced this week. He is scheduled to be executed [...]

Anthropic's offering to help open-source projects track down security vulnerabilities with a new service called OSS Scanner. It says open-source projects that opt-in will get "thorough, periodic security scans by our strongest models at no cost." That could mean open-source projects get alerted about possible security issues sooner, but the trade-off is that OSS Scanner's [...]

SpaceX has acquired a portfolio of low-band spectrum licenses - a move the company says "will pave the way" for its Starlink Mobile service to become a "major" US carrier. When the Federal Communications Commission signs off on the deal, SpaceX says it will deploy its new architecture that combines its satellite-to-mobile constellation with a [...]

It's already possible to get AMD's framerate-enhancing FSR 4 boost on handhelds as old as the Steam Deck - but in June, AMD reserved the right to disappoint handheld gamers by not officially bringing FSR 4 to older handhelds. Now, AMD consumer chip boss Jack Huynh says he will bring the tech to some handhelds [...]

Apple is set to introduce a new MacBook Pro with a touchscreen and an updated iPad Mini "on or around" October 27th, Bloomberg reports. If true, that would put the event just two weeks after the October 13th event Apple announced today, which is rumored to focus on smart home products. Bloomberg says that the [...]

The California State Athletic Commission sent a cease-and-desist letter to a startup that hosted a match between a human and a robot last month, as reported by The New York Times. The fight, which took place on September 18th, pitted a human, Frankie LaPenna, against a humanoid robot owned by a tech startup, Rek, that [...]

Four men detained at an ICE detention center in rural Georgia used the facility's video conferencing software to expose both the conditions inside and President Donald Trump's hostile takeover of the immigration courts. In the five-minute video, the men describe an intentionally dysfunctional legal system designed to keep them trapped in federal custody for months [...]

Windows Search has been one of the most frustrating parts of Windows 11, and now Microsoft is addressing this with a significant overhaul. A new redesigned Windows Search is now in testing that is much faster, more capable, and a lot more modern. "This new Windows Search experience is built for speed," says Anshul Rawat, [...]

Cyberpunk 2077 is heading to the big screen. Deadline reports that CD Projekt Red's popular sci-fi video game franchise is being adapted into a live-action film by Paramount Pictures. There's no details just yet on when the film might premiere. But Deadline says that Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who is known for producing the Transformers films, [...]

Tim Cook stepped down as Apple CEO in September, handing over the top job to former hardware chief John Ternus and taking an executive chairman role. Cook's still a visible representative of the company, having been recently photographed attending a state dinner at the White House. But in an interview with The Independent, Cook says [...]

After covering Amazon's October sale for the last few days, only one item found its way into my shopping cart, and, lucky for you, it's still on sale after the event's conclusion. Pokemon Legends: Z-A for the Nintendo Switch or Switch 2 is $39.88 (usually $59.99 for Switch or $69.99 for Switch 2) at Amazon. [...]

Playground Games first revealed earlier this year that Forza Horizon 6 would be arriving on PS5 in 2026, but the launch is now being pushed back. I reported last month that there would be a delay to early next year, and Forza Horizon 6 is now officially debuting on January 26th, 2027. The delay means [...]

USA Today Co., along with the several local newspapers it owns, is suing OpenAI over claims that the company copied "hundreds of thousands" of articles to train its AI models, as reported earlier by Reuters. In a filing on Thursday, the publisher asks for damages of more than $250 million, alleging OpenAI's unauthorized use of [...]

If Elon Musk and SpaceXAI were going to back any Linux distro, it seems obvious they'd back Omarchy. Today it was announced that SpaceXAI would be joining the Omacom Foundation, which oversees Omarchy, as a Founding Corporate Patron and donating $1.5 million worth of Grok tokens to David Heinemeier Hansson's Linux project. According to Hansson's [...]

Google announced through a short community post today that the LTE versions of the Pixel Watch 2 and 3 are losing free access to Safety Signal that allowed features like Emergency SOS, Fall Detection, and Safety Check to work through cellular networks without the need for a carrier plan. The connectivity was included as part [...]

Anthropic is making changes to its usage policy for the first time in over a year to reflect new and high-risk cases of misuse - including election interference, weapons development, surveillance, and health and financial uses. But one of the most significant changes prohibits "sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior" toward Claude. Last August, [...]

The Trump administration is suspending some tech companies, including Microsoft, from an immigration program that lets an employer hire foreign workers that can reside permanently in the US, as reported by Reuters. In a press conference, Vice President JD Vance claimed the permanent labor certification program - intended for use when there aren't "sufficient" US [...]

New York is alleging that thousands of TikTok users, including kids and teens, were unknowingly given "ghost" versions of the platform's safety features rather than the working versions. Reuters reports the allegation is part of an "updated, sealed version" of New York's 2024 lawsuit against TikTok, which was "later ordered unsealed by a judge." According [...]

Since TikTok burst into mainstream consciousness, many things have been called a "TikTok clone": YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, Snapchat Spotlight, Netflix's Clips, LinkedIn's vertical video feed, and countless other, less recognizable names like Triller, Zynn, and Byte. For years now, Facebook and Instagram have pumped users' feeds with video as Meta chases TikTok's runaway success. [...]

In an interview with Bloomberg, Amazon's head of consumer electronics, Panos Panay, confirmed the company would phase out the Fire brand in favor of Alexa Tablets. The new lineup runs proper Android, instead of the custom Fire OS, and has full access to the Play Store, which wasn't available on Fire tablets. To make matters [...]

Apple has just announced a new October event, taking place in New York on October 13th at 9AM ET. The event company is rumored to be launching smart home-focused products this month, and the event invite hints that'll be the case: Apple is using the tagline "Welcome home." At the event, Apple is rumored to [...]

Google has released an experimental note-taking app that can transcribe meetings and audio files entirely offline, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. The app, called Google AI Edge Foresight, is free to use and runs on macOS using the company's on-device EmbeddingGemma 2 model. Similar to AI note-taking apps like Granola and Wispr Flow, Foresight summarizes [...]