The Verge

On August 19th at 7:07PM, Tyler Johnston received a message from his roommate. A man, the text said, was knocking on their door with legal documents to serve. Johnston is the founder of The Midas Project: a nonprofit that monitors the practices of "leading AI companies to ensure transparency, privacy, and ethical standards are maintained." [...]

Ford's Mustang Mach-E is having a relatively good year, outpacing its gas brethren in sales for the month of August. The expiration of the $7,500 federal EV tax credit doesn't mean much to the Mach-E, which is made in Mexico and therefore ineligible for the credit. But with clouds looming on the horizon, Ford wants [...]

Oura is launching a redesigned app with expanded stress-tracking insights as it develops new blood pressure features that could identify signs of hypertension. The updated Oura app will introduce a new Cumulative Stress feature that provides a weekly overview of how the body manages and recovers from sustained stress, drawing from sleep, heart rate, temperature, [...]

On Sunday, SpaceX launched 56 additional Starlink satellites on separate Falcon 9 rockets, surpassing 10,000 total satellites launched into low Earth orbit to date. The milestone was reached on board the 132nd Falcon 9 launch of 2025, tying the previous annual launch record with more than two full months to go in the year. Of [...]

X is testing a change to the way it handles links on iOS so that the buttons to like, reply, and repost will always be visible. Normally, when you click a link on X the page opens up and completely covers the original post. Apparently, this leads to fewer people clicking like or otherwise engaging [...]

Premium Plus and Premium Business users will soon be able to browse and request inactive usernames on the X Handle Marketplace. Handles are going to be broken up into two broad categories. Priority handles will be free and often include full names, multi-word phrases, or alphanumeric combinations." Rare handles, on the other hand, will be [...]

I've read a lot of horror books over the last two years. But my absolute favorite is easily Mariana Enriquez' Our Share of Night. The book was originally published in 2019 in Argentina, but it only got an English translation in 2023. While it doesn't quite reach Stephen King lengths, at nearly 600 pages, I'd [...]

By the time I arrived, the waterfront park in downtown Portland, Oregon was already awash with people as far as the eye could see. The No Kings protest in June had turned out around 10,000 people across the city; this one saw several times that number just downtown, with thousands more choosing to join localized [...]

Saturday marked the biggest day of protest since the start of Donald Trumps' second term. Organizers of the No Kings protests estimated that over seven million people took to the streets to declare their opposition to the president, his policies, and his tactics. Indivisible, the group behind the protests, claims that there were over 2,700 [...]

From Apple TV Plus to Peacock, a number of streaming services have recently increased their pricing - and Disney Plus is no exception. Starting on Tuesday, October 21st, the standalone plan with ads will jump from $9.99 to $11.99 a month, while the ad-free Premium tier will increase by $3 to $18.99 a month. The [...]

To understand the Sony Watchman, you have to go back. Way back. Back to when "TV" wasn't just a way to refer to any piece of content between 20 and 89 minutes, available on every screen everywhere for a few bucks a month. In 1982, when Sony first started selling its new device, "TV" was [...]

The trick to understanding Opera's Neon browser is recognizing that it's not just a browser with an AI bot added to it, but a browser with three AI bots all living side by side. This is both a strength and a weakness, because while you don't have to leave to do all the AI things [...]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 102, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy spooky season, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about personal chefs and TikTok's algorithm and deep sea divers, tearing [...]

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on AI and the industry's power dynamics and societal implications, follow Hayden Field. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started Since ChatGPT became a household [...]

In the 2000s, TiVo reached heights few companies ever achieve. Like Google and Xerox, its name became a verb. People had to "TiVo" the new episode of Battlestar Galactica or game 4 of the Red Sox vs. Cardinals, not "record" it. While it didn't invent the DVR, TiVo popularized it and many of the features [...]

If you've been thinking about buying a foldable phone that truly stands out, few models can rival the 2025 Motorola Razr Ultra, which is currently on sale at Amazon and Best Buy with 16GB of RAM and 512GB starting at $999.99 ($300 off), its lowest price to date. If you can't tell from the image [...]

Forty years ago today, the Nintendo Entertainment System launched in North America, and to help celebrate the anniversary, 8BitDo has announced a new NES40 collection. It features updated versions of three of 8BitDo's existing products, including its Ultimate 2 wireless controller, Retro 87 Keyboard N Edition, and Retro Cube Speaker. The updates made to the [...]

Pokemon Legends: Z-A hadn't been out even a few hours before the tweets started rolling in: Shiny pokemon don't despawn. You can walk away from a shiny, and it'll still be there when you come back. To shiny collectors, this is big news. In other Pokemon games, like Scarlet and Violet, pokemon despawn after you [...]

I have been a fan of David Lynch ever since a friend's older brother interrupted a 13th birthday celebration to insist we all watch Eraserhead. In the realm of horror movies, it's a common way to be introduced to a seminal film: be it in a friend's basement, illicit underage viewings, or a stray recommendation [...]

Outside a florist-cum-coffee shop in upstate New York, a row of vintage cars gleam in the sun. It's unseasonably warm for early October, so there's a veritable crowd of car enthusiasts snapping photos of Ferraris, Porsches, and a vintage Alfa Romeo. Patient girlfriends and wives roll their eyes, sipping on maple matcha lattes and eating [...]

Inside General Motors' fast-growing battery labs in suburban Detroit, scientists and engineers are analyzing stresses on lithium-ion cells: desert heat, arctic cold, jungle humidity, enough charging and discharging for a half-dozen Frankenstein reboots. For The Verge's exclusive tour of these secretive labs, I watch researchers peer at cell chemistries down to the atomistic level, using [...]

Meta has rolled out an opt-in AI feature to its US and Canadian Facebook users that claims to make their photos and videos more shareworthy." The only catch is that the feature is designed for your phone's camera roll - not the media you've already uploaded to Facebook. If you opt in, Meta's AI will [...]

The Department of Energy (DOE) released a new roadmap for the US to realize the decades-long dream of harnessing fusion energy. It's a commitment to support research and development efforts and pursue public-private partnerships to finally build the first generation of fusion power plants. And of course, the plan hypes up AI as both a [...]

Modern gadgets are all well and good, but sometimes things get more exciting when you enter the realm of fantasy. And the worlds of gaming, TV, and film often feature extremely cool gadgets that we just wish were real, whether it's an impossible VR headset or a smartphone powered by a ghost. So, every so [...]

Though the Pokemon games' Rotom Phones haven't really changed all that much design-wise over the past few years, each generation has introduced new functionalities that made upgrading a no-brainer. Sword / Shield's Rotom Phone - the very first one - came with a bare-bones camera that made it easy to snap wide-angle (screen)shots out in [...]

Earlier this year, Luminar founder and CEO Austin Russell abruptly resigned from his position after it was revealed he was the target of an ethics inquiry. Now, the 30-year-old billionaire is trying to wrest back control of his old company, which made him a fortune by designing lidar sensors of self-driving cars. According to an [...]

Amazon's smart doorbell company Ring is now working with the AI-powered surveillance camera company Flock. According to a letter sent to the company by Sen. Ron Wyden, Flock had allowed data access to the Secret Service and the Navy - as well as ICE, as previously reported by 404 Media. The partnership is through Ring's [...]

When I have to decide which wireless gaming earbuds that I want to use, it's a tough choice between the SteelSeries Arctis Buds and the Sony InZone Buds. Both have a comfortable fit, active noise cancellation, great sound quality, and their USB-C transmitters work with every non-Xbox platform in my apartment. But it's easy to [...]

Atari has announced yet another retro console revival, but this time it's launching hardware from an old competitor. Atari and Plaion, a company that develops, publishes, and distributes games, have collaborated on the new Intellivision Sprint that blends 80s console aesthetics with modern gaming conveniences. It's a new take on Mattel's Intellivision, which initially went [...]

It's a testament to the developers at Double Fine that it doesn't take long before controlling a sentient lighthouse with spidery legs starts to feel almost normal. Keeper, the latest from the studio behind Psychonauts and Grim Fandango, is obviously a strange game. You play as a building that can walk and solve puzzles and [...]

OpenAI said on Thursday night that it has paused" deepfakes of Martin Luther King Jr. on its social app Sora after users created disrespectful" AI-generated videos of the late civil rights leader. It said representatives or estates of other historical figures will now be able to opt out of their likeness being used on the [...]

This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest phones, smartwatches, apps, and other gizmos that swear they're going to change your life. Optimizer arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 10AM ET. Opt in for Optimizer here. We'll be off for the next [...]

CNN has announced a new subscription service called All Access that will launch in the US on October 28th, 2025. It will cost $6.99 per month, or $69.99 annually, with a special introductory price of $41.99 for the first year for those who sign up by January 5th, 2026. Plans for the new subscription were [...]

Redmagic's latest gaming phone has arrived in China with a neat trick up its sleeve: liquid cooling. It's an active liquid cooling system, as opposed to the passive vapor chamber systems that have become pretty common in high-end Android phones over the last few years, with a ceramic micro-pump to push liquid through the phone. [...]

Large language models are currently everyone's solution to everything. The technology's versatility is part of its appeal: the use cases for generative AI seem both huge and endless. But then you use the stuff, and not enough of it works very well. And you wonder what we're really accomplishing here. On this episode of The [...]

After enthusiastically rolling AI chatbots out everywhere, Meta has announced new options for parents to get an idea of how teens are chatting with the digital characters and set some limits on use. The move comes as Meta works to rehabilitate its image after disturbing reports of its tools' romantic interactions with minors and faces [...]

Anthropic is integrating its Claude AI assistant with Microsoft 365 services so it can surface content from Word documents, Teams messages, and Outlook emails in conversations with the chatbot. It's part of a series of updates to Claude to make the chatbot more useful at work. Claude will now connect with Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive [...]

Everything seems to be getting back-to-back price hikes right now, why not your home internet bill too? AT&T is raising prices by $5 a month on all AT&T Internet plans, the company confirms to The Verge. That's on top of its $5-a-month increase from November 2024, and, it appears, a $5-a-month increase on some customers [...]

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week. Around the middle of last year, Pim de Witte started reaching out to a handful of prominent AI labs to see if they'd be interested in using data from [...]

Apple just announced 14-inch MacBook Pro updates that add a new generation M5 processor, faster storage, and a promise of 24-hour battery life, but Bloomberg's Mark Gurman now reports next year's refresh will be more thorough. For several years, Gurman has said that, according to his sources, the next major MacBook Pro revamp would add [...]

Amazon shared some new details about its plans to help deploy more nuclear energy across Washington State, where the company is headquartered. About a year ago, Amazon announced an agreement with Energy Northwest, a consortium of public utilities in Washington, to support the development of up to 12 advanced reactors by the early 2030s. Once [...]

Hey! I'm Sean Hollister, and I've been The Verge's unofficial handheld gaming PC reviewer since 2022, when the Steam Deck and kin took over my life. (I also helped launch this website back in the day!) I also just spent the past week reviewing the Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X, Microsoft's very first "Xbox" [...]

On Thursday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed into law legislation banning the use of price-fixing software by landlords to set rental rates. New York is the first state to outlaw algorithmic pricing by landlords, following a number of city-wide bans in Jersey City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle. Software companies such as RealPage offer [...]

Some people rarely lose things. Wallets are always exactly where they're supposed to be, keys never go missing, and remotes never slip between the couch cushions. And then there's the rest of us - the folks who can't ever seem to find the thing that was right there a few seconds ago. For us, there [...]

The Trump administration's heightened monitoring of immigrants' social media accounts seeking grounds to revoke their visas stifles the speech rights of both noncitizens and citizens alike, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) alleges in a new lawsuit. The lawsuit seeks to end the State Department's Catch-and-Revoke" policy, which threatens to strip visaholders of their legal status [...]

Judge Sara L. Ellis of the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Illinois said during a hearing Thursday morning that she would require ICE agents in Chicago engaged in Operation Midway Blitz" to use body cameras. But the logistics of enforcing her order are yet to be worked out, since Chicago was not [...]

Fujifilm has announced an update to its Instax Mini LiPlay that first launched in 2019. The new Instax Mini LiPlay Plus offers similar functionality as the original with the ability to snap digital photos that can be immediately printed on the company's Mini instant film and the option to record an accompanying audio clip. Now, [...]

Pinterest is rolling out a tool that allows users to dial down the AI" in their feed, the company says. Users can select which categories they want populated with more or less AI-generated content. But Pinterest stops short of promising a feed that's completely free of AI: the tool will work only on eligible image [...]