The Verge

Joyce, a native New Yorker, didn't think finding her first solo apartment in the city would be easy. But she also didn't think it'd be "hell." After looking at a lot of tiny, overpriced places she described as "shitholes," Joyce found her dream apartment: a reasonably priced studio in Manhattan. "It was big and airy, [...]

The Apple Watch SE 3 is at an all-time low of $199, making the sleeper hit of last year's Apple Watches an even better value. While the Series 11 and Ultra 3 were iterative updates, the SE 3 was a wide-ranging glow-up that added an always-on display, gestures like double tap and wrist flick, a [...]

It's no secret that just about every aspect of video games is getting more expensive. Game consoles are getting regular price hikes, PC components are spiking in cost, and the golden age of affordable handhelds is over, all largely due to the global RAM shortage, which has had a similarly costly impact on PC gaming, [...]

Google's DeepMind AI lab is teaming up with A24 to develop new movie production technologies that aim to help future filmmakers "expand their storytelling possibilities." As part of this new research and development collaboration, The Wall Street Journal reports that Google is investing "around $75 million" into A24, marking the first time the search giant [...]

The Steam Machine is a cool little console that's about as powerful as a PlayStation 5, according to my colleague Sean Hollister's in-depth review. But one area where it lags behind is with its earlier version of AMD FSR upscaler: It's just not as good as it should be. Yes, it can sharpen low-res graphics [...]

The Steam Machine is here, but getting one is a little complicated. Valve is taking preorders using a reservation system, which is intended to make the process more fair and harder for bots to exploit. However, it's a bit different than the $5 reservations Valve used for the Steam Deck. Starting today, you can sign [...]

If you don't get lucky with Valve's Steam Machine reservation system, you can make your own Steam Machine instead. Valve says that "starting with the SteamOS 3.8 release, you can put together your own Steam Machine using whatever PC parts you want." SteamOS 3.8.10 launched last week with a slew of updates, including "improved compatibility [...]

Valve finally announced the price of the Steam Machine, and like a lot of new gadgets these days, it's not cheap: It starts at $1,049 for a 512GB model, and a 2TB model costs $300 more. Configurations with a bundled Steam Controller cost an extra $79 each. Despite Valve offering a console alternative with the [...]

After months of waiting, Valve has finally announced that the Steam Machine, its new living room-friendly PC, will start at $1,049 and go on sale beginning June 29th. You can now register your interest to buy a Steam Machine as part of a reservation system. To offer a fair playing field for people who want [...]

My first day with the Steam Machine was a mess. Instead of enjoying a worry-free game console, I spent hours troubleshooting what felt like a finicky PC. That's because the Steam Machine is a PC, with a very important twist. Since the Magnavox Odyssey came out in 1972, game consoles have been built with the [...]

Smart ring maker RingConn's marketing copy says Lord of the Rings' "enduring narrative highlights a simple but powerful idea: that meaningful transformation often begins with the choices we make each day. RingConn embraces a similar philosophy, believing that lasting change begins with everyday awareness and small, intentional decisions." Of course, the "intentional decisions" Frodo makes [...]

AMD is officially launching FSR Upscaling 4.1 for Radeon RX 7000-series GPUs today. The update means that computers with those older graphics cards, which use the RDNA 3 graphics architecture, will be able to see improvements like better image quality and smoother gameplay in their games. AMD had promised in May that it would be [...]

We should have all guessed that Woot might improve on its $15 off sale from last week on the Nintendo Switch 2. Now that Prime Day is upon us, the online seller is now offering the base console for $419.99 when you use the code CHEAPSWITCH2 at checkout. You can save $50 if you're a [...]

Prime Day has brought a number of Apple deals, but one of the most useful if you're planning to travel over the July 4th weekend or later this summer is on the new AirTags. The four-pack has dropped to a new low of $90 ($9 off) at Amazon and Best Buy, bringing the price of [...]

Will Cathcart, who led WhatsApp for the past seven years, is stepping down from his role as Meta appoints a new leader. On Monday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Facebook that Kunal Shah, the founder of an Indian fintech startup called Cred, is taking over as the head of WhatsApp. Cred is an app [...]

Seven months after introducing its $119.98 Ultra BodyScan smart scale, Wyze announced a cheaper $79.98 alternative available today that makes a few compromises to shave $40 off the price. There's no Wi-Fi, but you can sync the BodyScan's measurements to Apple Health and Google Fit by connecting to the Wyze mobile app over Bluetooth. And [...]

Bob Starr was delighted with his vibe-coded website. "Boomberg" showed how much US tax money is going to tech companies, and Starr launched it online immediately after making it. It wasn't until months after the site went live that he realized there was a problem: a hidden SQL injection risk. It could've left the site [...]

The history books are littered with the corpses of corporate record labels started by companies that had no business being in the music industry. Bose thinks it can be the exception to the rule. It thinks it can be Red Bull. And, while Bose has more of a right to dip its toes into the [...]

Cold Court is a brother-sister duo from Philly that seems to love nothing more than shoving all of their influences together in a messy soup that at least superficially resembles the hyperpop you've come to expect from acts like 100 Gecs. But, where songs like "Dumbest Girl Alive" goofily wink at pop punk and emo, [...]

According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, Polymarket has been paying people to film themselves placing fake bets and celebrating fake wins on social media. WSJ identified over 1,100 deceptive clips and talked to creators who, despite not stating as such in their videos, confirmed the company paid them to create the clips. The videos [...]

If you had a Roomba, especially in the early days of the robot vacuum, it was in many ways a fairly unsophisticated machine. It would just bump around your house, looking for something to suck up, until its battery died or its (way too small) tank filled up. Not that it mattered, though. You probably [...]

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on aviation, air taxis, and Wi-Fi speeds at 30,000 feet, follow Andrew J. Hawkins. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started Last year, [...]

The Xperia 1 VIII marks an attempt at a step change for Sony's flagship phone line. Not only has it had an aesthetic overhaul, but Sony has also revamped the camera system, dropping the continuous optical zoom telephoto that's defined the last four generations of Xperia phone. It's not all different. Sony staples like a [...]

Atlantic reporter Alex Reisner recently uncovered four datasets of music being used to train AI models and made them fully searchable for the public. Two of the sets are absolutely enormous at 12 million and 9 million tracks. The other two are much smaller, but still represent a significant amount of training data at over [...]

Stefan Paul Goetsch, better known as Hainbach, is a German experimental composer, artist, and YouTuber who is perhaps most famous for making music with laboratory equipment and scientific instruments. He describes it as being like the "Dark Souls of synthesis." Despite using "hard mode" production techniques that often rely on telephone line testing equipment and [...]

From its opening minutes, Moves of the Diamond Hand is upfront about what it offers: You're going to have a lot of strange conversations, and you're going to roll a lot of dice. Get on board with this proposition, and the reward is one of the most creative roleplaying games I've seen in years, even [...]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 133, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy belated Juneteenth, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about Sam Bankman-Fried and PE Guy and admin nights (which we [...]

I can't remember the last time I got excited about a fan. Normally, I just buy whatever Vornado or Dreo model fits my budget, but that was before I started testing the battery-powered Standing Circulator Fan from SwitchBot. As the name indicates, the SwitchBot fan is a 3D circulator - a fancy way of saying [...]

Nothing's next budget phone is the latest victim of RAMageddon. As 9to5Google reports, Nothing co-founder Akis Evangelidis announced in a post on X that a follow-up to the CMF Phone 2 Pro won't be coming this year: We were working on a successor but with memory prices where they are right now, we can't build [...]

Relativity Space, the rocket company led by former Google executive Eric Schmidt, was picked to launch NASA's Aeolus payload to Mars in 2028, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. Under a new public-private partnership, Relativity Space will provide the "spacecraft, rocket, and cruise operations" to fly Aeolus to Mars, where the payload will "provide the first [...]

Smart lighting company Philips Hue has launched its first wired wall modules. Installed behind existing wall switches, the new devices bring non-smart lights into the Hue ecosystem for the first time. Hue also announced new Play table and floor lamps that are more affordable versions of its Signe series, along with upgrades to its E14 [...]

NTS Radio and Swedish audio company Atonemo have teamed up on a dedicated player that brings NTS's genre-defying mixes and streaming stations to almost any stereo or speaker setup. And, like Atonemo's existing Streamplayer, you can also listen to your favorite streaming services with it, using AirPlay 2, Google Cast, Spotify Connect, or Tidal Connect. [...]

Luca Guadagnino's film about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Artificial, has reportedly been dropped by Amazon MGM. The film, which stars Andrew Garfield and covers the rollercoaster five days in 2023 spanning Altman's termination and reinstatement as CEO, had been in the works for about a year. The cast also includes A Complete Unknown actress Monica [...]

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. On TikTok, the tanned youths are explaining why they no longer wear sunscreen. In one video, a young man films [...]

Where's the Trump phone? We're going to keep talking about it every week. We don't have the phones we preordered yet, but this week we received unexpected news from Trump Mobile's media relations manager. If you've been following my reporting on the Trump phone, you'll know that Trump Mobile doesn't exactly keep open lines of [...]

When Colin Farrell was doing press for the first season of the detective series Sugar, he had to be very careful with how he spoke. Sugar is a story about a quirky private detective, but it's also secretly a work of science fiction, something that doesn't become clear until halfway through the season. "I knew [...]

We've lost something in the past 15 years. Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Apple; they've all convinced us that streaming is the best way to watch movies and shows at home. With everything at our fingertips, there's no need to run to Blockbuster for the weekend's entertainment, or wait for a DVD rental to arrive in the [...]

Five months after returning to OpenAI, Barret Zoph - the company's head of enterprise AI sales - has departed, The Verge has learned. Zoph returned to OpenAI in mid-January after a stint as co-founder and CTO of Thinking Machines Lab, the competing AI company founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Shortly after Zoph returned [...]

Valve has some good news and bad news about Steam Controllers. The good news: If you make a reservation for a Steam Controller, the company will now show you one of three estimates of when you'll be able to actually order your gamepad: by September 2026, by December 2026, or sometime in 2027. The bad [...]

The $50 GB Operator is an accessory that lets you connect, play, and authenticate Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance cartridges on PCs and other devices. Now it's getting some new functionality for the Game Boy Camera. After turning the Game Boy Camera into a charmingly awful desktop webcam two years ago, [...]

The easiest way to save on a streaming service is often to pay for a year upfront, which HBO Max is currently making a lot cheaper. Through July 15, 2026, new and returning subscribers can get 28 percent off any of HBO Max's yearly plans, bringing the ad-supported tier down to $78.99 ($31 off) per [...]

Snap's new smart glasses are probably the most impressive bit of face-computer technology we've seen. They're not VR-headset huge; they don't have a big charging puck; thanks to Snap's many years of AR lens development, they're likely to have a lot of features right out of the box. (Yes, they're $2,195, but that may just [...]

Amazon's earlier-than-usual Prime Day doesn't begin until June 23rd, but there are several even earlier deals on must-have products that you can check out right now. To name some examples, Apple's AirPods Pro 3 are selling at their cheapest-ever price at Amazon and Walmart (though, the sale keeps playing peek-a-boo). Also, you can grab Ring's [...]

During a recent expo in Shanghai that focuses on elderly care, assistive devices, and rehabilitation medicine, a Chinese company called Yueban debuted a smart toilet that does something we haven't seen before; it comes to you. The autonomous self-driving Xiaoban toilet was designed to improve accessibility for those dealing with mobility issues due to age, [...]

Do you often find yourself shopping at the big blue, or perhaps you're just looking for an alternative to Amazon? Either way, Walmart is currently offering a year of its Walmart Plus subscription for $49, which typically costs $98. The membership includes perks like free delivery on orders over $35, free next-day and two-day shipping [...]

I launched Firefox this morning to find some new blocks on my home page. The widgets that are currently rolling out add sports scores, time zones, a focus timer, and a checklist, which are already some of my favorite new Firefox features in years. I usually have Focus Friend open on my phone when I [...]

The Onion's InfoWars officially has a launch date: On July 2nd, the conspiracy network previously run by Alex Jones will return as a comedy and media platform. The reboot comes more than a year and a half after news broke that the satirical news site was working to acquire the property owned by Jones, a [...]

When three Amazon software engineers testified earlier this month at Seattle City Council hearings about data centers, they started their testimony by citing a city law barring employment discrimination over political speech. Now, they're accusing their employer of breaking that law by retaliating against them. On June 10th - one week after the hearing, and [...]

This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week. When Fox announced its acquisition of Roku earlier this week, executives of both companies were quick to promise that not much would change in the near future. Sure, getting its [...]

Running out of color options for events in Google Calendar shouldn't be an issue going forward. The previous limit of 11 predefined colors has now been expanded to give users access to up to 200 custom colors for individual events across the native Calendar web and mobile apps, and the Calendar API. This started rolling [...]