The Verge

From the opening moments of bitknot, it's obvious that Feeble Little Horse has found an entirely new gear. Where on Girl with Fish the blown-out textures were more '90s indie rock and shoegaze, on their latest LP, there's a more modern edge to the distortion and the riffs cut cleaner. Similarly, where the digital glitchiness [...]

United flight 236 from Newark to Palma de Mallorca on Saturday night was forced to turn around just an hour after takeoff due to security concerns around a Bluetooth signal. Multiple Redditors claimed to be on the flight and reported that the crew repeatedly requested passengers to turn off their Bluetooth. According to one poster, [...]

My eyes have seen the PC gaming promised land, and it's a beautifully bright world without a shred of blurriness. It's warm, it looks lovely, and it's impeccably sharp. Also, it's expensive as hell. I've dipped my toe in this world by testing a pre-production version of the upcoming Asus ROG Strix Scar 18, which [...]

IO Interactive's 007 First Light is here, and it's just as stunning a James Bond mov - err, video game - as we hoped it would be. Pardon the confusion, the title's engaging tutorial really feels like you're watching a great Bond movie at times. Whether you're a longtime Hitman fan who's been eagerly waiting [...]

Earlier this month, I finally achieved the elusive goal I had set for myself in Bungie's Marathon. I collected six of the game's rarest items, allowing me to attempt and then successfully clear the raid-style Compiler boss. I felt a massive weight lift off my shoulders - nearly 185 hours of playtime and I had [...]

On Saturday, at around 2:06 pm ET, a meteor streaked over the northeastern US and exploded north of Cape Cod Bay. The fireball was caught on camera by several people, shook houses, and can even be seen clearly in satellite imagery, lighting up the sky. Some residents initially thought that the shaking and boom may [...]

The crypto weed vape found me on 4/20, the high holiday of cannabis enthusiasts everywhere. It arrived over Slack with the thumbnail of a man exhaling a plume of vapor, the words "every hit delivers Bitcoin" emblazoned across it. It claimed to be advertising a device called Gudtrip, and I thought everything about it sounded [...]

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more news about gadgets and smartphones, follow Dominic Preston. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started In 2023, the European Union agreed on two landmark pieces [...]

Despite headwinds from the current administration, automakers continue to release well-equipped EVs with bigger battery packs and increasingly faster charging speeds. For those who want to travel further between plugging in, the future is still bright, just slightly tinted. But there haven't been many sedans starting around or below $50,000, as crossover SUVs have largely [...]

The Kane Parsons' film Backrooms is expected to earn up to $90 million in its opening weekend after pulling down $38 million on Friday alone. That's not only above expectations, but absolutely obliterates A24's previous opening weekend record of $25.5 million for Alex Garland's Civil War. It's also a better opening day than The Mandalorian [...]

Cecil Baldwin's resume includes appearances on Gravity Falls, narrating the documentary Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street, and performing as part of the New York Neo-Futurists theater company. But he is best known as the host of the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, a long-running fiction show that blends macabre Lovecraftian horror with absurdist [...]

Microsoft is facing criticism for its handling of zero-day exploits. Someone going by the name Nightmare Eclipse has been publicly feuding with the company, posting proof-of-concept exploit code. Some of their posts suggest that they're a disgruntled former employee. But what caught cyber security researcher Kevin Beaumont's eye was how Microsoft has responded. Microsoft suggests [...]

Art TVs aren't exactly known for being affordable, which is why Woot's latest sale is notable. Now through June 26th, the retailer is discounting Samsung's 2025 Frame TV and Hisense's 2025 CanvasTV. The 65-inch CanvasTV is down to $779.99 ($520 off) - its best price of the year - while Samsung's like-minded Frame TV is [...]

You may have heard that Valve's new Steam Controller can ring like a telephone or do the Wilhelm scream. But did you know it can sing songs, too? Let me show you. Here's the new Steam Controller performing the "Ground Theme" from Super Mario Bros. 2: Here is "Still Alive" from Portal - fitting for [...]

I live in a part of Los Angeles where I feel safer bringing pepper spray on walks. The problem is, I don't always remember to bring it with me, and it's not legal to carry it everywhere I go. Pebblebee's $59.99 Halo Bluetooth tracker surprised me by being a suitable replacement because it doubles as [...]

As handheld consoles continue to grow and push the limits of what you can actually hold in your hands, the Arduboy FX-C comes in a refreshingly pocketable package. It manages to squeeze the best features of past models and some welcome upgrades into a handheld that's still no larger or thicker than a few credit [...]

Craig Campbell walked away from the river of investor money flowing into AI to create, of all things, a website. Sure, Campbell probably could have started an AI company. He's a former engineer at Meta and an experienced tech founder who in 2022 sold his last venture - an e-commerce tool for businesses that use [...]

Aliyah, a light-skinned Black woman dressed in country-western gear, is struggling to sell metal buckles she handmade on TikTok. In a video for the social media platform from March, she cries to the camera and pleads for views: "Even as a black woman, I have more faith that white women will stay 13 seconds [on [...]

Slots & Daggers, a low-key, fantasy-themed slot machine roguelike, was one of my favorite games last year. That may sound like a complicated description, but the game mixes ideas from deckbuilding roguelikes with slot machines to create an engrossing loop, and there's steady meta-progression that helps you push further with just about every run. Perhaps [...]

I haven't seen anything as stupid as the WeWork IPO document in a very long time - that is, until Elon Musk filed to take SpaceX public. WeWork was a joke. SpaceX is a threat. And if Musk and his bankers have their way, you are going to be their bagholder. Lots of the top-line [...]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 130, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, don't forget to hydrate, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about Victor Wembanyama and mahjong and Merlin Mann's pearls of [...]

It's the world's worst kept secret that Nvidia is about to announce its own Arm-powered laptop chips at Computex this weekend, and now Microsoft, Nvidia, and Arm are all openly teasing the announcement. The Windows and Nvidia GeForce accounts on X both posted "A new era of PC" earlier today, and now Arm has followed [...]

The Pentagon awarded SpaceX a $4.16 billion contract to build missile-tracking satellites linked with President Donald Trump's planned "Golden Dome" defense system, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. In an announcement on Friday, the US Space Force says the sensor-equipped satellites will allow it to detect and track targets from space. The Elon Musk-owned SpaceX - [...]

The Acer Nitro Blaze Link might run on Linux, but it's no Steam Deck. Acer says it's a "streaming-first handheld and companion device," like a PlayStation Portal for your PC. Announced ahead of Computex on Friday, it's launching in Q4 2026 with a 7-inch (1920 x 1200) display, Wi-Fi 6, just 1GB of LPDDR4 RAM, [...]

This week, an AI training startup called Shift said it would clean New Yorkers' homes for free. It has plans to expand into other cities as well, including London, and looking around my flat, I get the appeal. But there's a catch. There's always a catch. In exchange for the cleaning, Shift wants footage of [...]

High school graduation is a time of change that might be felt more deeply by family members than by the grads themselves. While some grads may immediately embark on a career path, many continue their education and delve deeper into their studies at college. Either way, they'll be taking on more responsibility, meaning it's up [...]

Microsoft has delayed its upcoming Fable reboot once again. The game was set to launch in autumn 2026, but Microsoft now says that Fable will come out in February 2027. However, it will show a "new look" at the game at its Xbox Games Showcase on June 7th. "This is year is packed with incredible [...]

Border security czar Tom Homan keeps threatening to "flood" New York City with ICE agents. But a new investigation shows that ICE has been quietly ramping up arrests in the New York area already - and disproportionately targeting Latino neighborhoods. The City, a local nonprofit news organization, found 430 street arrests in the metropolitan area [...]

This week, the Steam Deck OLED with 512GB of storage went from $549 to $789, putting it even further out of reach for those who were considering getting one as they came back in stock after months of unavailability. I consider it a tiny consolation that there's a decent PC gaming handheld that is currently [...]

If you're looking for a fast iPhone or AirPods charger that's easy to toss into your purse, backpack, or carry-on, Anker's Zolo Magnetic Wireless Charger is a smart pick. It's tiny and comes with a built-in USB-C cable, and you currently can buy two for $23.99 ($16 off) at Amazon and Anker (with code WS7DV2PK68EW), [...]

For nearly 80 years, Ferrari occupied a unique cultural space where its cars were aspirational, even for people who resented those who could afford them. The price, the exclusivity, and the opacity of the buying process allowed Ferrari to sail above ordinary criticism. You might not be able to afford one, but you still wanted [...]

This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here. At this time last week, I was getting ready to ask people what drugs they were on. I was waiting [...]

Acer is aiming to take on the MacBook Neo more directly with a new Swift Air 14, a new 14-inch laptop that starts at $699. The laptop will use Intel's lower-cost Core Series 3 "Wildcat Lake" chips - either Core 5 or Core 7 models, both of which are six-core processors. It comes in green, [...]

Though YouTube has always been a place where up-and-coming artists could be discovered and make it big, in recent years the platform has become a launching pad for some of Hollywood's most exciting new horror directors. The filmmakers behind films like Talk to Me, Iron Lung, and Obsession all started off as content creators posting [...]

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 the phone's supposed launch continues, we noticed its website may be violating FTC rules. When the Trump phone was first announced last June, it was proudly promised to be [...]

Most people will never own, drive, or even sit inside a Ferrari Luce. (If you can, or do... hit us up.) There's still no question that Ferrari's first electric vehicle is one of the most interesting, surprising cars of the year. With a decidedly un-Ferrari look, and lots of new technology and designs courtesy of [...]

Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of trust on the internet. But last week, volunteer editors and contributors were alarmed to hear that a small but important team of engineers at the nonprofit that supports it had been laid off. The layoffs didn't just threaten to sever an important link between the Wikimedia Foundation [...]

AI training startup Shift wants to clean your home for free. The catch - because, despite what its website says, there's always a catch - is that it will record cleaners as they scrub, vacuum, dust, tidy, and wash, and use that footage to train robots. Shift announced the unusual offer on social media on [...]

MSI has unveiled a new Claw 8 handheld gaming PC ahead of the Computex 2026 show, and this model swaps out its predecessors' Intel Lunar Lake mobile chip for a specialized handheld processor. MSI describes the Claw 8 EX AI Plus as being the "world's first" handheld to contain the recently announced Intel Arc G3 [...]

AI image tools rarely make me feel like I'm part of the creative process. They are, after all, mostly designed so that people with no design experience can type in a few words and get back a usable result. So I was pleasantly surprised by Adobe's latest take on an AI image assistant: It's a [...]

While Blue Origin investigates the root cause behind last night's spectacular explosion of its New Glenn rocket, it's already clear that this will be a major setback for NASA's Moon base plans and Amazon's fledgling Leo space internet constellation. The incident occurred at about 9PM at Blue Origin's Florida launch site during a hot-fire test, [...]

A decade ago, Nintendo made a big splash into the world of mobile gaming with a new Super Mario platformer directed by none other than Shigeru Miyamoto. But even though the game proved popular, it wasn't the success the company had hoped for. Over the ensuing years Nintendo has slowly retreated from smartphone gaming, with [...]

Microsoft is launching a revamped version of Microsoft 365 Copilot, offering a cleaner design that the company claims loads twice as fast. As part of this update, Copilot will provide more reliable and structured responses that are easier to scan, according to Microsoft. The redesign, which is rolling out across desktop and mobile devices, comes [...]

If you like to read by the pool or at the beach, the 2021 Kindle Paperwhite remains one of the best e-readers available despite its age. That's because, unlike Amazon's latest entry-level Kindle, the last-gen Paperwhite is waterproof. And now through June 14th (or while supplies last), it's on sale at Woot with ads, 16GB [...]

Motorola's latest Razr Ultra proves that its flip foldable format has evolved to become more than just a nostalgic gimmick. I'd understand if you're not interested in shelling out $1,499.99 for the 2026 model, but the similar 2025 Motorola Razr Ultra with 512GB of storage is a much more palatable $699.99 unlocked at Best Buy [...]

The most memorable part of 007 First Light is something that's typically pretty boring: the tutorial. In many games, you're forced through a series of tedious lessons in how to play, presented in a way that feels disconnected from the story itself and at a plodding pace. But First Light does something different. Because the [...]

Anthropic is releasing Claude Opus 4.8 on Thursday, and the company is touting the model's "honesty." According to Anthropic, it trains "all [its] models to be honest - for instance, to avoid making claims that they can't support." But it notes that "a general problem with AI models is that they sometimes jump to conclusions, [...]

If you've been waiting for a smaller version of the Oura Ring, the company's latest wearable is now available for preorder ahead of its June 4th release from Oura and various third-party retailers, including both Amazon and Walmart. The Oura Ring 5, which starts at $399, is 40 percent smaller than its predecessor, thanks to [...]

Next month's Tribeca Festival will include the premiere of an AI-generated film: Dreams of Violets. The 75-minute film is a fictional dramatization of the Iranian government's mass killing of protestors in January, with the people and images fully created by AI, as reported earlier by The Hollywood Reporter. Dreams of Violets cost $2,000 to make [...]