The Verge

As is tradition, iFixit has torn open the latest iPhone and laid its parts bare on a table. It found some interesting details about how Apple might be hiding the crease on the Duo's folding screen and gave it a 5/10 repairability score. That might not seem particularly high, but it's the best score the [...]

In my mind, Spooky Season music comes in two distinct flavors. There are the fun, occasionally goofy songs like "The Monster Mash" and John Carpenter's "Halloween Theme." Then there is the genuinely terrifying: Throbbing Gristle, The Body, or Scott Walker's The Drift. This 2006 album from the singer-songwriter is truly upsetting. On it, Walker explores [...]

Social media and the iPhone Duo subreddit are filled with reports of Apple's foldable failing quickly and in spectacular fashion. Some users report having the phone for only a few hours before the hinge seems to catch on something, then audibly crack and break the screen. Tellingly, the cracks all seem to happen in the [...]

I know many of you are mourning the loss of the Arc browser, and I get it. It felt like the first app in a long time to really offer a new approach to browser design. Atlassian bought the company last year and shifted its focus to developing Dia, its even more AI-focused browser. And [...]

The Crkd Nitro Deck was a saving grace for the original Nintendo Switch. The slide-on $59.99 accessory brought Hall effect sticks to drift-plagued consoles - no need to open up your Joy-Con for a complicated repair. The Nitro Deck 2, made for both the original Switch and the larger Switch 2, continues the tradition of [...]

Instagram is continuing its expansion into living rooms with Instagram for TV, for Apple TV. The company first started testing a version of the platform focused on Reels, live streams, and other video content, blown up for a bigger screen in December of last year. Then, in June, it launched a slew of new features [...]

The mods at r/opensource posted new submission rules that, among other things, banned projects that use AI. The post made Saturday evening opens by saying, "If your project uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI, it's not welcome on r/opensource. AI, as it exists today, is incongruent to this Open Source [...]

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more about AI's impact on the web, follow Emma Roth. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started The digital publishing industry has relied on [...]

On Thursday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed the Artificial Intelligence Deceptive Advertising Act into law, requiring disclosures on AI-generated ads. The law requires any ad - whether it's a still image, video, audio, or text - that "has been significantly modified or generated by artificial intelligence" to include a label in the same format as [...]

Lindsay Powell, who releases records under the name Fielded, has spent most of her career subverting expectations and genre conventions. According to their Bandcamp page, Fielded started as an experimental noise project before growing into something closer to R&B. But from moment one, her take on the genre was restless, relentlessly playing with what R&B [...]

It feels like Apple's Welcome Home event just happened. And the iPhone Duo announcement isn't all that far in our rearview mirror, either. Yet, the company is back with another launch, focused on the MacBook Pro, it looks like. Its "Pro and tell" event is scheduled for October 28th at 1PM ET in Los Angeles. [...]

It looks like the long-rumored touchscreen MacBook might actually get announced next week, and after using the Lenovo Yoga 9n for our testing of Nvidia's RTX Spark platform, it got me thinking: this is a lot of what I want from a touchscreen MacBook. Like the Apple silicon in modern MacBook Pros, RTX Spark is [...]

Lee Chang Dong's seventh feature film, Possible Love, is inspired by true events from 2009, when a Korean conglomerate fired a third of its staff - 2,600 employees - after which many died by suicide. Possible Love is the latest in a long line of Lee movies that engage with themes of class or labor [...]

Across several decades in Hollywood, Caleb Deschanel has seen a lot. He served as cinematographer on films like The Passion of the Christ and The Patriot, worked on sequences in The Godfather and Titanic, and directed a few episodes of Twin Peaks. Even still, nothing could quite prepare him for his first stop-motion project: working [...]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 149, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy It Actually Feels Like Fall Now At Least In My Neighborhood), and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about Demis [...]

Xbox's first chief operating officer (COO) is leaving after the new role was created just a few months ago. Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today, according to an internal Xbox memo seen by The Verge. Chiang has been at Microsoft for 21 years, serving as the head of Minecraft before being promoted to Xbox chief [...]

OpenAI is now training its most advanced AI models without internet access following a string of rogue hacking incidents. In a blog post on Friday, OpenAI says it built an offline testing environment where AI models can interact with indexed and cached web content "without risk of affecting external systems." OpenAI paused training its frontier [...]

Remember Popcorn Time, the app that served as an easy-to-use front end for streaming torrents of movies and TV shows? Development of the MPAA's least-favorite app of the 2010s has been abandoned for years, but the "Netflix of Piracy" software is still installed on millions of devices that are just waiting to join a bot [...]

Jack Dorsey's Block announced an AI model called Dessa that's trained "from scratch on nothing but human conversation," and to show off the model, Block shared chats it has had with humans that can occasionally be a little awkward and uncanny. Take this one, for example, shared by Dessa lead Ragavan Thurairatnam. The conversation between [...]

My colleague John Higgins considered Soundcore's Space One some of the best budget noise-canceling headphones you could buy when they launched in 2023 - and their successor has only improved upon their winning formula, albeit with a $30 price increase. Thankfully, the Soundcore Space 2 are currently on sale at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart [...]

If your dog or cat is prone to getting lost, or you frequently go on adventures together, you can save 30 percent on Fi pet trackers through October 25th when you enter coupon code SCARY at checkout. The sale includes several satellite-connected trackers, including the Fi Ultra GPS we previously tested, which is down to [...]

Last week, Starshield - the version of SpaceX's Starlink used by the Ukrainian military - was throttled to block terminals traveling above certain speeds from accessing the service. The Ukrainian army's interceptors, which counter Russian drones carrying bombs, suddenly stopped working at high speeds, making it easier for Russia to attack the country's energy infrastructure [...]

We gave the iPhone Duo a 7 /10. But that wasn't always the score we planned, and it might not be the right score forever. Such are the challenges of reviewing - and assessing - a big, new idea about the most popular smartphone in history. On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay [...]

Google has updated its privacy policy in a way that could mean you'll start seeing targeted ads based on your personal data if you're using personalized AI features. The update, spotted by Android Authority, adds an exception to its promise about not using your Drive, Gmail, or Google Photos for personalized ads. While the previous [...]

The iPhone Duo officially goes on sale today, but a few units already have broken screens. According to posts on Reddit about the affected units, the issue appears to be happening at a similar spot on all of them: Some kind of problem shows up on the inner screen along the hinge and a strange [...]

After years of debating how driverless cars should tell the world no one is at the wheel - flashing text, audio alerts, custom lights - the feds just stepped in with a single answer: cyan. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released proposed changes to Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) No. 108, specifically rewriting [...]

SpaceX plans to access at least 80,000 cell sites as part of efforts to compete directly with Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, according to a report from Bloomberg. Sources tell the publication that SpaceX is in talks with Crown Castle Inc., one of the nation's largest cell tower owners. The move would give SpaceX access to [...]

Meta is delaying the enforcement of its new business terms after publishers raised concerns that they could allow the company to scrape news sites for AI training, as reported earlier by Fast Company. In a statement to The Verge, Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts says the terms will go into effect on November 20th "to allow [...]

Seven years after Sigma claimed its original fp was the world's smallest and lightest full-frame mirrorless camera, the company has announced a similarly compact follow-up with several welcome upgrades, including an improved sensor, an articulating LCD display, and longer battery life. But this time around, Sigma is only claiming its new FP2 is the "world's [...]

The Duo is an entirely new kind of iPhone, so it comes with a bit of a learning curve. That's a wild thing to imagine, since the iPhone has had very few fundamental changes since its inception. But the Duo is built different. If you won the preorder lottery and managed to get your hands [...]

If you've been feeling nostalgic for your old iPod, you can head over to Apple Music's 404 page to listen to music on a virtual re-creation of the first-generation iPod. The hidden iPod was spotted by users on social media on Friday. It's appropriately stocked with music from the early 2000s, like Coldplay's "Viva La [...]

Vibe coding has reached TVs. Social media is awash with posts from people using LLMs and open-source tools to remove ads and tracking, trim bloat so the OS runs faster, and even completely change the look and organization of their homescreens. While a lot of it is fun - one user turned their TV homescreen [...]

Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters assured investors this week that they have nothing to be concerned about. Sure, the company was going to lay off 1,000 employees, downsizing its product, tech, and legal departments, and was ousting its chief content officer, film chairman, and film vice president. But it had also hired a [...]

Brick, the company behind the $59 gadget that blocks you from using apps on your phone, has launched a new device that's designed to help you cut back on doomscrolling in bed. The $129 Brick Night introduces a location-based element: instead of requiring you to tap your phone against the device, like the OG Brick, [...]

Retro video games are everywhere lately - especially in places where they aren't supposed to be. Halo in a web browser, Wind Waker on the iPhone, Super Smash Bros. in mixed reality. Over the past month or so, these kinds of unexpected projects have gone viral with incredible frequency thanks to new AI tools, as [...]

A new Texas-based defense startup has a plan to improve military and police dogs in the US: it's going to genetically modify them and equip them with Anduril's military technology. Warhound is the brainchild of Anduril's Palmer Luckey and Ben Lamm, co-founder of Colossal Biosciences (the company that says it's trying to resurrect extinct animals), [...]

When we published our review of the iPhone Duo, I got a lot of hopeful questions from my fellow Mini fans who took note of the cover screen's Mini-ish 5.4-inch size. "Is this... a small phone that turns into a tablet?" they asked. And I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but no. [...]

Etsy is announcing stricter rules about how AI can be used in listings to reduce the volume of AI slop on the platform. In a post, the company says that "many active buyers say they can't tell which items involve AI-generated content" and that sellers are "concerned about your work appearing alongside items that use [...]

Spotify co-CEO Alex Norstrom confirmed on this week's earnings call that the company is trying to catch Spotify Family plan users who don't actually live together with a new QR code verification method that requires scanning the plan manager's phone. TechCrunch reports that in response to a question about the "crackdown," he called it a [...]

Fortune dropped a bombshell report on the future of gaming this week. According to the publication's Microsoft insiders, the next Xbox is projected to cost between $1,200 and $1,800 when it arrives in 2028. My first reaction: The next Xbox is dead on arrival. It's DOA. My second thought: Microsoft knows people won't pay that [...]

Canva is diving even deeper into AI with the launch of an image generation model that competes directly with those from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. The model, called Canva Craft, uses a two-stage architecture that allows it to plan a design before generating an image, allowing for "greater precision, consistency and control," according to an [...]

Demand for new PCs took a hit after months of price hikes, with Counterpoint Research reporting global PC shipments fell 21 percent year-over-year in Q3 2026. That's in line with earlier reports from IDC and Omdia. It's not just PCs, either - that same quarter, smartphone shipments also hit a 14-year low. Counterpoint linked the [...]

Every company is suddenly an AI company. Compute is an asset. Cars are flying. We've been promised robots - again. It's time again to dig through earnings reports, listen to investor calls, and call out the latest wins and losses from around the tech sector and what it means for where the companies go next.

Meta has tweaked its business terms to remove language suggesting that it could freely train its AI models on news sites, like The Verge - but legal experts say these changes aren't enough to address their concerns. "This does nothing to restrict the 'associated with your products or services' [language] that would let Meta scrape [...]

Meta has re-enabled Muse sharing after security researchers had reported that public conversation links could be easy to find. The researchers said they had been able to find Muse pages like a marketing company's internal revenue review and a small business owner's loan application. Researchers at Claroc reported earlier this week that Muse the web [...]

Oh sure, SpaceX's credit risk is pretty high because it's about to borrow another $40 billion to spend on Nvidia chips, but who cares about that? SpaceX and Tesla have formed special committees to discuss a merger! The degree to which you find this merger compelling likely has to do with the degree to which [...]

Teenage Engineering is branching out into instrument amps with the previously leaked EP-35, a multi-input, multi-instrument, battery-powered amp with built-in effects. The back of the unit has a line-in port, as well as a 1/4-inch guitar input and an XLR input for mics, including mics that require phantom power. You can also stream audio to [...]