The Verge

It is day 13 of America's surprise war with Iran - by sheer coincidence, it's Friday the 13th - and I am delirious. I haven't had a coffee since I woke up at 5AM, because I'm not allowed to bring outside beverages into the Pentagon (the security screening cutoff was at 7AM for the 8AM), [...]

Earlier this week, Apple unveiled the AirPods Max 2. The forthcoming over-ear headphones build on their predecessor with an H2 chip that powers a range of new features; however, they still don't offer the sort of cross-OS compatibility you'll get with a modern pair of Beats headphones - including the Beats Studio Pro, which are [...]

Remedy is winding down its team shooter FBC: Firebreak with a big update that launches today. But while the game won't be getting any new content going forward, the studio intends to keep it alive for the foreseeable future. It's yet another example of a live-service game struggling amidst a volatile market. The new update [...]

Starting Tuesday, Spotify users will have access to "Exclusive Mode," a new feature in the streaming service's Windows app that can help maximize audio quality by giving the Spotify app full control over your device's audio processing. According to Spotify, "your computer may alter audio before it reaches your DAC by resampling it, mixing other [...]

Ikea's new Matter-over-Thread products were supposed to prove that the smart home could be cheap, accessible, and reliable. The highly anticipated line - which includes sensors, remotes, smart plugs, air-quality monitors, and smart bulbs - has most everything you need to build a smart home, with prices starting at $6. It's an exciting idea, but [...]

Yesterday Nvidia revealed its latest upscaling tech, called DLSS 5, which it described as "the company's most significant breakthrough in computer graphics since the debut of real-time ray tracing in 2018." Sounds good, until you actually see it. According to Nvidia, the tech "infuses pixels with photoreal lighting and materials," but all anyone seemed to [...]

Insta360's Antigravity A1 is one of the most interesting drones on the market thanks to its included Vision Goggles, which provide a 360-degree first-person view through the drone's cameras (a screen on the outside of its lenses shows what the pilot is seeing). Its cameras can shoot 8K video at 30 frames per second, or [...]

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a portentous set of twin babies in the new trailer for Dune: Part Three. Warner Bros. has debuted its first full trailer for Denis Villeneuve's third Dune film. Thankfully, it doesn't give everything about the film away, but it does put a spotlight on a few of [...]

Google announced on Tuesday that all users in the US will now have access to its Personal Intelligence feature, which lets you connect various Google apps to provide context for Gemini's responses and suggestions. Access was previously limited to Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers. Now, free-tier users in the US can also use [...]

Intel has a pair of new flagship CPUs coming to a variety of pricey gaming laptops: the Core Ultra 9 290 HX Plus and Core Ultra 7 270HX Plus. The Arrow Lake Refresh chips sport 24 cores / 24 threads and 20 cores / 20 threads, respectively. Like Intel's recently announced desktop CPUs, the new [...]

The steady stream of news about automakers cancelling or discontinuing electric vehicles continues apace. This week it's Volvo's small, quirky EX30 and Honda's solo electric offering in the US, the Prologue. Both are the latest victims of stagnating EV sales in the US thanks to the Trump administration's decision to eliminate tax incentives. First, the [...]

Amazon's Big Spring Sale kicks off on March 25th, though some great tech sales are already available. Sonos is one of several companies that has switched on sales for its products, including some that haven't previously been discounted this year. While the company is best known for its home theater gear, these discounts largely focus [...]

Microsoft is doing another executive shuffle today to reorganize how it engineers its Copilot assistant. Different teams have been working on the consumer and commercial sides of Copilot for years, but Microsoft is about to unify parts of them in an effort to create a more cohesive Copilot for businesses and consumers. The changes will [...]

Suddenly it seems like everyone's a coder. Or, at the very least, like they play one in the Claude Code app. But even for the seasoned pros, the act of software development is changing fast - many people are writing less code themselves and instead spending their time managing agents and projects. So what does [...]

After lots of rumors, it's now official: Bethesda's sci-fi epic Starfield is coming to the PS5. It'll launch on Sony's console on April 7th, and that day will also see the debut of two major updates for the game - one paid, one free - a combination that Bethesda describes as "the biggest update to [...]

Tumblr has overhauled its reblogging feature to add new options for interacting with chained posts, and it hasn't gone down well with many of the platform's users. The update announced by Tumblr on Monday enables users to like, reblog, and reply to any post nestled within a reblog chain, with subsequent reblogs having their own [...]

Capcom has been on a hot streak. The Monster Hunter series became a global hit with the launch of Monster Hunter World in 2018, which became Capcom's best-selling game, while Street Fighter reinvented itself with a sixth entry and a string of Resident Evil games brought the survival horror franchise back to prominence. The most [...]

Amazon announced on Tuesday that it's making it easier for users to find products eligible for its 1-hour and 3-hour delivery options with a new "getitfast" page for same-day delivery products available in their area. Amazon is also introducing new search filters for 1-hour and 3-hour delivery, along with tags on eligible products - which [...]

Nintendo's latest update for the Switch 2 will upgrade the performance of original Switch games played in handheld mode, as reported earlier by IGN. When you turn on the new Handheld Boost Mode, the Switch 2 will force original Switch games to run as if the console is connected to a TV, allowing for better [...]

Project Hail Mary is a natural follow-up to The Martian. Both movies are based on sci-fi novels by Andy Weir, and both have bankable stars in the lead role (Matt Damon for The Martian, Ryan Gosling for Project Hail Mary) and accomplished directors at the helm (Ridley Scott for the former, Phil Lord and Christopher [...]

Xiaomi subsidiary Poco has launched the X8 Pro and X8 Pro Max phones, both of which feature large silicon-carbon batteries, powerful chipsets, and 256GB of storage as standard, with stronger specs on paper than the recent Pixel 10A despite costing less. Both Poco phones also feature a surprisingly subtle take on RGB lighting, with small [...]

Oppo has launched its "zero-feel crease" foldable, the Find N6, but while we knew it was unlikely to launch in the US, it's a shame to discover that the promised "global" launch is also leaving Europe out in the cold. Instead, the Find N6 will go on sale from March 20th across what the company [...]

Samsung is preparing to axe its first three-panel foldable phone less than three months after launching the device in the US. Sales of the $2,899 Galaxy Z TriFold will first be wound down in Korea and then discontinued in the US once remaining inventory has been cleared, an unnamed Samsung spokesperson told Bloomberg. This follows [...]

Klumpen isn't an off-grid cabin, but it does provide all the utilities needed to live away from civilization comfortably. The seven-square-meter teepee is an "off-grid utility core" that provides solar-generated electricity, satellite broadband, a shower, toilet, and small kitchen. It's expected to cost around $35,000 plus an estimated $3,000 to ship within the EU. The [...]

The first Matter camera is here - sort of. Camera support came to the smart home standard last year, and Aqara's Camera Hub G350 is the first to support it. The G350, which was announced at CES, launched this week and is a pan-and-tilt indoor security camera with up to 4K video resolution. Today, the [...]

After a chaotic week following the Justice Department's mid-trial settlement with Live Nation-Ticketmaster, the antitrust trial picked back up surprisingly smoothly on Monday - this time, with dozens of states leading the case. This isn't the outcome the states originally wanted. Out of concerns about being able to effectively take over the case and fear [...]

Nvidia announced DLSS 5 on Monday during its GTC conference, and based on early reactions, it's going to be a divisive update, with some reactions calling it "slop" that unacceptably alters artistic intent. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is calling this the "GPT moment for graphics - blending hand-crafted rendering with generative AI to deliver a [...]

Three Tennessee teens are suing Elon Musk's xAI over claims that the company's Grok AI chatbot generated sexualized images and videos of themselves as minors, as reported earlier by The Washington Post. The proposed class action lawsuit, filed on Monday, accuses Musk and other xAI leaders of knowing that Grok would produce AI-generated child sexual [...]

If you like the idea of spring cleaning but not the part where you actually have to clean, both the Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni and newerX9 Pro Omnihave dropped to their lowest prices to date ahead of Amazon's Big Spring Sale, which officially kicks off on March 25th. The X8 Pro Omni is available [...]

Social media platforms are currently awash with conspiracy theories claiming that Benjamin Netanyahu has been killed or injured and replaced by AI-generated deepfakes. Between clips that supposedly show the Israeli prime minister sporting extra fingers and drinking from a bottomless, gravity-defying cup of coffee, only one thing is apparent: Reality used to be much easier [...]

Nvidia added two leading Chinese automakers, BYD and Geely, to its robotaxi program, as the chipmaker seeks to put its stamp on the growing autonomous vehicle market worldwide. At its GTC conference today, Nvidia announced that BYD and Geely, as well as Isuzu and Nissan, would use the chipmaker's Drive Hyperion platform, which combines the [...]

You know Olaf. Before KPop Demon Hunters, before the Wicked movies, it was Disney's Frozen that blasted show tunes like "Let It Go" and "Into the Unknown" into our lives. My little girls loved belting those tunes. So when I met Olaf, the Disney Imagineering robot, I kept thinking: I can't wait for my kids [...]

Sony's upgraded PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) technology is rolling out to several titles on the PS5 Pro, including Cyberpunk 2077, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Silent Hill 2, and more. Digital Foundry got a chance to test some of them and found that the "new upscaler delivers the kind of upgrade we were looking for [...]

On Friday, Encyclopedia Britannica and dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster filed a lawsuit against OpenAI alleging that it used their copyrighted content to train its AI, then generated responses that were "substantially similar" to their content, as previously reported by Reuters. According to Britannica, OpenAI repeatedly copied its content without permission, stating, "GPT-4 itself has 'memorized' much [...]

Since Amazon rolled out its redesigned Fire TV OS, Amazon's latest streaming sticks are even better than ever. And right now, both the Fire TV Stick 4K Max and Fire TV Stick 4K Plus are back at their best prices yet during Amazon's early Big Spring Sale event. You can buy the Fire TV Stick [...]

While Amazon's previous lineup of Echo speakers and smart displays was boring, frankly, its late 2025 hardware refresh brought better hardware, improved performance, and Alexa Plus to several models. If you feel like your room(s) could benefit from speakers to deliver tunes, audiobooks, or podcasts to more corners of your home, or screens to show [...]

Apple has just announced the AirPods Max 2 with better noise cancellation and sound quality. The second generation of Apple's over-ear headphones starts at $549 and comes equipped with an H2 chip that powers a bunch of new features, including AI-powered live translation, which translates speech to your preferred language in real-time. As noted by [...]

Last week, a few posts about a so-called virtual "embodied fly" tore through X, boosted by AI hype accounts and excited commenters who didn't seem to understand what it was they were excited about. The videos came from San Francisco-based Eon Systems, which says it's working toward "digital human intelligence" and claims it wants to [...]

If you've already given your iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max a retro '80s facelift with Spigen's Macintosh 128K and Apple Lisa-inspired Classic LS cases, you might as well make your wireless earbuds match. But instead of making the AirPods Pro 3 look like a decades-old desktop computer, Spigen's case turns them into a replica [...]

OpenAI's delayed "adult mode" for ChatGPT is expected to support saucy text conversations at launch, but not the chatbot's ability to generate images, voice, or video. Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, an unnamed OpenAI spokesperson described content that will be provided by the upcoming feature as smut rather than pornography, allowing ChatGPT users to [...]

One of the first major crashes I experienced as a chronically ill person happened on an unusually sunny January day in New York City. It was 2023, and I was riding my bike with a friend, flying high from the exercise. We'd covered just over 40 miles on mostly flat ground, a longish ride, but [...]

Aether OS puts a full-fledged desktop in your browser that ties directly into the AT Protocol. That means it connects to your Bluesky account and other public records. It offers a pretty full suite of apps, 42 in total, covering text editing, task management, and social media. There's even a rudimentary tracker for making chiptunes, [...]

Shout out to subscriber N_Gorski for today's pick. They popped into the comments on last week's recommendation to ask what I thought of the new Sotomayor record. Well, I hadn't actually heard it yet, but now I'm obsessed. The group consists of siblings Raul and Paulina Sotomayor from Mexico City. Wabi Sabi is their first [...]

David Sacks, the White House's AI and crypto czar, has warned that a continued war in Iran could be catastrophic. On the All In podcast, Sacks said that "we should try to find the off-ramp." He expressed concern that Iran could demolish oil and gas infrastructure across the Middle East, but more alarmingly, that it [...]

If you've got strong creative instincts, the ability to authentically portray emotion, and are capable of staying true to a character's voice throughout a scene, there's a job listing calling for your experience. The catch: You won't be performing in a theater, a film studio, or an underground performance space. You'd be using your talents [...]

Samsung promised "more than a design refresh" for its new top-end Galaxy Buds - it added upgraded woofers for improved, dual-amped hi-fi sound, a new blade design, clearer call performance, and better noise cancellation. Ultimately, while the $249.99 Galaxy Buds 4 aren't a huge leap forward over the previous model, they keep what was good [...]

In 2020 and 2021, the social media world seemed to be on the verge of complete change. A new app called TikTok was ascendant, bringing a whole new kind of vertical video to phones everywhere. And another app - not as popular, but growing fast, and already hugely influential among the tech set - looked [...]

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the slow-motion disaster of live-service games, follow Andrew Webster. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started Two years ago, I stood at the top [...]

Last fall, President Donald Trump's executive order raising the fee for H-1B visas to $100,000 - like many of his immigration policies - led to near-immediate chaos. Thousands of workers who had flown overseas to renew their visas ended up stranded abroad. Details about who would be affected only emerged after the fact. Six months [...]

In September, Donald Trump claimed that "the United States is getting a tremendous fee" for brokering the TikTok deal. Now sources tell the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times that fee is expected to be in the range of $10 billion. The money is supposedly being paid by new investors, including Oracle and [...]