The Verge

The price of Spotify Premium is about to jump again in the US, marking its third price hike since 2023. Spotify announced that subscribers in the US, Estonia, and Latvia will be contacted about the updated pricing over the coming month. Individual Premium plans in the US will increase from $11.99 to $12.99 by the [...]

The WeChat channel Documented (or the New York Immigrant Chronicle) is part newsfeed and part public service. The channel, run by the nonprofit newsroom Documented NYC, is filled with local news for Chinese speakers in New York: stories about healthcare and immigration arrests, but also information on local events like toy giveaways, places where families [...]

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Translate, a standalone web translation tool that supports over 50 languages and is positioned as a direct competitor to Google Translate. The two services look visually similar: both feature two text boxes - one for typing or pasting the source text and another that displays the translated results - alongside dropdown [...]

It's been 25 years since the launch of Wikipedia on January 15th, 2001, and it's come a long way from housing just 100 pages to becoming a behemoth of online knowledge with more than 65 million articles that get almost 15 billion views each month. To celebrate, the Wikimedia Foundation - the nonprofit that backs [...]

Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI have joined Google in paying the Wikimedia Foundation for access to its projects, including Wikipedia's vast collection of articles. The Wikimedia Foundation announced the news as part of Wikipedia's 25th anniversary on Thursday. The partnerships are part of Wikimedia Enterprise, an initiative launched in 2021 that gives large [...]

Any ebook reader will let you cram a Beauty and the Beast-sized library's worth of books in your pocket, but so will your phone. An ebook reader offers a more book-like reading experience, with fewer distractions and less eye strain, and many include extra features, like adjustable frontlighting. Some really are pocketable. Others are waterproof [...]

Following the proliferation of the nonconsensual sexual deepfakes on X, the platform has detailed changes to the Grok account's ability to edit images of real people. They match the changes reported on Tuesday by The Telegraph, as Grok's responses to prompts like "put her in a bikini" became censored. But in tests of the feature [...]

If you're looking for a simple way to streamline your workflow, the Elgato Stream Deck Plus is a handy productivity tool for automating everyday tasks. Right now, it's on sale for $159.99 ($40 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and B&H Photo, which is its best price to date. Like the standard Stream Deck, the Stream [...]

The first big outage of 2026 has been resolved, with Verizon's wireless network now back online after experiencing issues yesterday. This follows Verizon customers across the US, including several Verge writers, finding that service was spotty or nonexistent starting at around noon ET on January 14th, with phones switching to SOS Mode and being unable [...]

Naya has already shipped one successful Kickstarter for a weird keyboard. The Naya Create was an ergonomic split deck with four swappable controller add-ons: a touchpad, a trackball, a rotary encoder, or a 6DoF spatial mouse. The Connect takes that modular concept, applies it to a more traditional flat keyboard form factor, and expands the [...]

Amazon has announced the first cast member of its God of War live-action adaptation on Prime Video. Ryan Hurst, known for his work as Opie in Sons of Anarchy and Beta in The Walking Dead, will play the titular God of War, Kratos. Though the casting might come as a bit of a disappointment to [...]

BMW teased its forthcoming all-electric M-series performance sedan today, promising that the quad-motor M3 sports car would feature specs that are truly next level when it arrives in 2027. The M3 will have four electric motors and simulated gear shifting, a feature that is quickly becoming a must-have for electrified sports cars. BMW says the [...]

This year's CES introduced a bevy of unique headphones, including Fender's first set and a pair that roll up to become a Bluetooth speaker when you want to share your music with friends. However, despite the interesting advancements, we doubt any of them will dethrone our favorite pair for travel: the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones. [...]

Netflix is launching its first pair of original video podcasts, hosted by Saturday Night Live alum Pete Davidson and NFL commentator and former star Michael Irvin. While The Pete Davidson Show makes its debut on January 30th, you can find Irvin's The White House on the streaming service on January 19th. The two shows will [...]

If you want to win in AI - and I mean win in the biggest, most lucrative, most shape-the-world-in-your-image kind of way - you have to do a bunch of hard things simultaneously. You need to have a model that is unquestionably one of the best on the market. You need the nearly infinite resources [...]

Lawsuits seeking damages from Google's illegal ad tech monopoly are piling up following the Justice Department's successful antitrust case. Vox Media, The Verge's parent company, is the latest in a wave of media companies that have filed suit against Google, seeking to be reimbursed for the monopoly profits the tech company allegedly made at publishers' [...]

Elon Musk's X is trying to stop people using its AI chatbot Grok to undress women amid intensifying outrage and legal scrutiny over the deluge of nonconsensual sexual deepfakes flooding the site. It's not trying very hard: it took us less than a minute to get around its latest attempt to rein in the chatbot. [...]

The United Kingdom has walked back plans to make its upcoming digital ID scheme a mandatory requirement for working adults. While the UK government remains "committed to mandatory digital right-to-work checks," an unspecified government spokesperson told The Times, digital ID will now be optional when the initiative is introduced sometime in 2029. The national digital [...]

Sid Meier's Civilization VII is headed to the Apple Arcade on February 5th, allowing you to play the strategy game across your iPhone, iPad, or Mac through the company's $6.99 / month subscription. The game has the same premise as the original PC title, where you're tasked with expanding your empire as historic leaders from [...]

Parents can now manually set a time limit on their kids' YouTube Shorts feed, ranging from fifteen minutes to two hours (with an option for zero minutes coming soon). The update, announced on Wednesday, takes the Shorts time limit feature YouTube introduced in October and adapts it for under-18 accounts. Kids and teens can't change [...]

Google's Gemini AI is getting what could prove to be a very big upgrade: To help answers from Gemini be more personalized, the company is going to let you connect the chatbot to Gmail, Google Photos, Search, and your YouTube history to provide what Google is calling "Personal Intelligence." This isn't the first time Google [...]

Bandcamp has built its entire brand around serving artists. And, with the artist furor over AI growing every day, it's no surprise that the company has decided to take a stand against it. In a Reddit post, Bandcamp announced that AI-generated content would not be permitted on the platform and would be subject to removal. [...]

I'm not a drone guy. In fact, I've always been a bit nervous to play around with them too much. They're big, fragile, and expensive, which is a dangerous combination for someone with my hand-eye coordination. But I've always sort of wanted one, mostly because I've been jealous of the mid-air photos and videos I've [...]

Animal Crossing, like Kirby, has come back when it seems like the world needs it most. In 2020, Animal Crossing: New Horizons released on the Nintendo Switch. The game instantly became a smash hit, providing a much-needed place to safely gather with friends amidst the global shutdown of the covid-19 pandemic. In the almost six [...]

Microsoft is getting ready to show the first gameplay of Forza Horizon 6 next week, and it might also be ready to put a date on its release, too. X poster Xbox Infinite claims they received a Forza Horizon 6 preorder notification inside Forza Horizon 5, implying that the release date of the new title [...]

NBC Sports introduced a new AI-powered player tracking system that will let viewers on mobile devices zoom in and focus on their favorite athletes. It's the first time the viztrick AiDi technology, which was developed by Japan's Nippon Television Network, will be used by another broadcaster. NBC Sports plans to implement the feature for its [...]

Animal Crossing fans looking to return to the cozy island life can do so earlier than expected. While New Horizons' next major update, which brings the life sim game to version 3.0, was originally slated to launch on January 15th, it's now available to download. To be clear, this is not the paid Switch 2 [...]

As its sales continue to slip and its robotaxi strategy seems to falter, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said today that the company would stop selling its Full Self-Driving feature as a standalone package. Instead, starting on February 14th, the Level 2 driver-assist system would be offered as a monthly subscription only. The news marks a [...]

Honda announced that the next-generation Acura RDX will be the brand's first SUV to feature a two-motor hybrid system. While this next-gen platform is under development, Honda said it would suspend production of the current RDX, which launched in 2018 and has sold nearly 740,000 units in the US. Honda confirmed that current RDX production [...]

Nvidia is rolling out a new app update today that includes its latest DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution and Nvidia Surround settings. DLSS 4.5 includes Nvidia's second-generation Super Resolution transformer model, designed to improve image quality and reduce the artifacting found in DLSS 4. While DLSS 4.5 was available in the beta version of the Nvidia [...]

Fujifilm is launching a new Instax Mini smartphone printer that produces finer details than its predecessors. The Instax Mini Link Plus features enhanced image processing compared to older Instax printers, and a similar industrial design to the Instax Mini Evo Cinema camera announced last week, which Fujifilm has now also revealed pricing for. The Instax [...]

The chief constable of one of Britain's largest police forces has admitted that Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant made a mistake in a football (soccer) intelligence report. The report, which led to Israeli football fans being banned from a match last year, included a nonexistent match between West Ham and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Copilot hallucinated the [...]

Hello and welcome to Regulator, a newsletter for Verge subscribers about the technology, broligarchs and brainrot rapidly transforming politics and civic society. Not subscribed to The Verge yet? You should! It can materially improve your life. Last week was a grim reminder that no matter what sort of horror is being perpetrated or how many [...]

President Donald Trump made an unconventional pick for his nomination to the Federal Trade Commission: WeatherTech founder and CEO David MacNeil. MacNeil founded the company, which makes weather-resistant car floor mats, in 1989, according to its website, and he owns 100 percent of the company. WeatherTech has made it a mission to keep its manufacturing [...]

You might find it kind of sad to put your hard-earned Switch 2 into a protective case. To me, it's freeing. Sure, it can take away from the slick design. But using a case relieves me of the worry that the console will accumulate tons of little scratches, or worse. I've tested several types of [...]

Because there was such a long gap between the releases of 28 Weeks Later and 28 Years Later, it was surprising to hear that writer-director duo Alex Garland and Danny Boyle already had plans for their latest collaboration to be the first chapter of a new horror trilogy. Sony seemed keen on fast-tracking the pair's [...]

The Senate passed a bill that could give people who've found their likeness deepfaked into sexually explicit images without their consent a new way to fight back. The Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act (DEFIANCE Act), would let victims sue the individuals who created the images for civil damages. The bill passed with [...]

Haven't you heard? Phones are boring now. And that's just fine! Most people buying a new phone just want something familiar that works better than the device they're replacing. If that's your MO, then you're sure to find something reliable in my recommendations below. But even if you're looking for something a little more extra, [...]

Mike Krieger, the Instagram cofounder who joined Anthropic two years ago as its chief product officer, is moving to a new focus at the AI startup: co-leading its internal incubator, dubbed the "Labs" team. The Anthropic Labs team started in mid-2024 with just two members; now, the company has decided to expand it, with a [...]

Whether you're wearing them for the morning commute, while traveling, or if you're simply trying to find some peace and quiet while working at home, noise-canceling headphones are a more essential piece of kit nowadays than ever before. And you've got a slew of great options to pick from; it's hard to make a bad [...]

The Trump administration announced last week that it wants Americans to consume more protein, churning out a colorful illustration of an inverted food pyramid that prominently features a big, red steak, a wedge of cheese, and a carton of whole milk at the top and claiming it's "ending the war on protein." It may seem [...]

Meta is laying off about 10 percent of its Reality Labs metaverse division, and the cuts include closing down some of its VR gaming studios. Twisted Pixel Games, the developer of Marvel's Deadpool VR, Sanzaru Games, the developer of the Asgard's Wrath franchise, and Armature Studio, which worked on the Resident Evil 4 VR port, [...]

The Lego Smart Brick won our Best in Show award at CES 2026, and it was no wonder after watching Lego designer Maarten Simons' expert demo there. So I thought: why not let you virtually attend the same tech demo I did? Before I left Las Vegas, I snuck back into Lego's suite to film [...]

Verizon can keep phones locked to its network for longer after the Federal Communications Commission agreed to waive the carrier's 60-day unlocking requirement, as reported by Ars Technica. Following this decision, Verizon must follow a looser set of guidelines set by the CTIA wireless trade group, which says carriers should only unlock a customer's postpaid [...]

Wireless phone chargers are now common in vehicles, but they're typically missing one very useful feature. Nissan announced last month that it will be the first automaker in the US to offer wireless chargers with a magnetic mount, ensuring charging coils remain aligned for faster charging of mobile devices, even while a vehicle is in [...]

Mercedes-Benz is pausing the roll-out of Drive Pilot, an "eyes off" conditionally automated driving feature that was available in Europe and the US. As first reported by German publication Handelsblatt, the revised S-Class will not have the Level 3 system when it arrives at the end of this month. Mercedes was one of the first [...]

Google is making its Veo 3.1 AI video model pay closer attention to the reference images you want generated clips to be based on. The company is releasing new visual improvements for the "Ingredients to Video" tool that was introduced last year, alongside expanding native vertical video support and resolution upscaling features. The Ingredients to [...]

Around 10 percent of Meta's Reality Labs division, which develops its XR products and services, will be laid off beginning on Tuesday, as reported by Bloomberg. Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton confirmed the layoffs in a statement to The Verge: "We said last month that we were shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward Wearables. [...]

If you compare the value proposition of getting one of Remarkable's Paper Pro E-Ink tablets versus buying a laptop, the latter will win in most scenarios. Laptops are more capable, with more ports, apps, and versatility - but they're much more distracting, too. Avoiding distractions during work or while writing for leisure isn't easy, and [...]