The Verge

Today's episode of Decoder is a little different, and I think it's one of the more illuminating conversations I've had in a while. I'm talking to Evan Smith, the cofounder and CEO of Altana, a company that makes software to track and manage the global supply chain. Smith started Altana in 2019 because he predicted [...]

Roblox is launching and open-sourcing Cube 3D, the first version of its foundational AI model for generating 3D objects. With Cube, we intend to make 3D creation more efficient," Roblox says in a press release. With 3D mesh generation, developers can quickly explore new creative directions and increase their productivity by deciding rapidly which to [...]

Roblox is a massive app - as of September 2023, Roblox says it has more than 65 million daily active users - and it's becoming an increasingly interesting platform to watch amid growing competition from social and metaverse platforms like Epic Games' Fortnite and Meta's Horizon Worlds. While Roblox has traditionally been associated as a [...]

Zoom's AI Companion is getting an agentic" upgrade at the end of this month, allowing it to identify and perform tasks on users' behalf. Workplace users will be able to access the feature within a new Tasks tab in Workplace, where they can have Zoom's AI schedule follow-up meetings, generate documents from meetings, and create [...]

Discord is launching a way for developers to directly integrate the platform's social features into their games. The new Social SDK, announced today, will let developers that use it offer friends lists, cross-platform messaging, voice and more for all players - with or without a Discord account," according to a press release. You'll also be [...]

The picture above does not contain two different gaming handhelds. Instead, this halo device for Qualcomm's just-announced Snapdragon G3 Gen 3 gaming chips - which I'll tell you about in a sec - is a single transforming device with swing out gamepads and screens. It's called the OneXPlayer OneXSugar, and it's one of the most [...]

People who are holding on to free G Suite legacy accounts will soon lose their individual storage allotment perks. In an email seen by The Verge, Google has started informing G Suite legacy free edition plan users that they will be switched to pooled storage that's shared across all users within your organization" starting May [...]

3D printer manufacturer Bambu Lab has launched a new toy system called CyberBrick under its MakerWorld brand, which pairs reusable and programmable electronics components with 3D-printable models to enable a range of possible toys based on both official and community designs. CyberBrick is initially only available through Kickstarter, but has already surpassed its funding goal, [...]

Microsoft's Copilot app for Windows is being unintentionally uninstalled" on some Windows 11 devices thanks to the latest monthly Windows update. The Patch Tuesday updates that started rolling out on March 11th have led to Copilot being unpinned from the taskbar and uninstalled. We're aware of an issue with the Microsoft Copilot app affecting some [...]

Light-based internet project Taara is exiting Alphabet's moonshot" incubator X, spinning off into an independent company. Taara's tech uses lasers to transmit data, and is envisaged as a rival to Elon Musk's Starlink when it comes to connecting rural areas to the internet. The Financial Times reports that Alphabet will retain a minority stake in [...]

Netflix and other streaming platforms are stepping up efforts to sign YouTubers, which could mean big streaming deals for sports channel Dude Perfect or former NASA engineer Mark Rober, reports The Wall Street Journal. The Journal writes that streaming platformsa creator-signing ambitions have ashifted into overdrivea in response to the success of MrBeastas Beast Games. [...]

Smart home company SwitchBot is preparing a new Matter-enabled smart hub called the SwitchBot Hub 3, according to a registration with the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) that HomeKitNews spotted. It has a display like the $70 Hub 2, but adds physical controls - including, delightfully, a knob. According to the CSA listing, the Hub 3's [...]

Evan Feinman is out as the director of the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, reports ProPublica's Craig Silverman in a Bluesky post today. BEAD aims to bring high-bandwidth internet to underserved areas of America, much of which is rural. Silverman shared screenshots from a department-wide email Feinman sent on Friday, in [...]

A set of iPhone 17 dummies appeared last night in a new leak from Sonny Dickson, who has a long history of reliably leaking the nonfunctional versions of iPhones that case and accessory makers use to prepare for the next year's crop of handsets. The images look very much like the renders we've seen in [...]

There are probably a lot of simple tasks you do repeatedly on your phone, like muting it in a meeting, reducing the screen brightness late at night, or turning on the battery saver when you leave for work. If you have a Samsung Galaxy phone, then you have access to a Routines tool that can [...]

Angry Miao is known for ridiculous, over-the-top mechanical keyboard designs, but now itas made a gaming mouse thatas, you guessed it: ridiculous and over-the-top. Itas also cool as all hell, starts at $125 on a Kickstarter preorder special ending March 17th, and may be my new favorite mouse. The AM Infinity Mouse has a skeletonized [...]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 75, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If youare new here, welcome, hope you have some time to kill this weekend, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, Iave been reading about Benson Boone and Tyler [...]

Virgin Atlantic announced a partnership with California-based Joby Aviation to launch an air taxi service in the UK, becoming the latest airline to bet on a new class of electric aircraft vying to become taxis in the sky. Joby's all-electric aircraft has six rotors and seats five, including the pilot. The vehicle can take off [...]

There's a future where we don't need roads and regular folks like you and me can jump into a boat-sized electric pod and just fly anywhere on a whim. While we've been perfecting the miracle of human flight for more than a century, instant air transportation has long been relegated to science fiction. But in [...]

Court documents filed Friday in an ongoing lawsuit against the US Treasury Department reveal that a 25-year-old staffer for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) violated Treasury policy by sending a spreadsheet that had personal information to two other members of the Trump administration, reports Bloomberg. The staffer, a former employee at Elon Musk's X [...]

Sonos chief innovation officer Nick Millington says in an update published yesterday that he and his team are 100% focused" on understanding and addressing issues with the Sonos app. It's the latest in a series of Millington's posts sharing his team's progress as it tries to restore features that were left out of the app's [...]

In May 2024, Sonos released a completely rebuilt and overhauled mobile app for Android and iOS. The new software was meant to improve performance, make the app feel more customizable, and allow for new features in the future. But customers immediately complained about countless bugs, degraded Sonos speaker system performance, and features that had gone [...]

Columbia Pictures has tapped District 9 director Neill Blomkamp to write and direct a new Starship Troopers film, according to The Hollywood Reporter, giving the franchise its first live-action entry since 2008's Starship Troopers 3: Marauder. The movie will be based on Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 book of the same name, not a remake of [...]

There's a moment in Metallica, the new three-song concert video Apple released for the Vision Pro yesterday, where Metallica lead singer James Hetfield is kneeling on the edge of the stage, engaged with a single fist-pumping audience member. Hetfield leans in to within inches of his face as he and the fan scream, before the [...]

People have been speculating about Apple's entry into the world of virtual and augmented reality headsets for the better part of a decade. At WWDC 2023, it finally revealed the Vision Pro, which will launch as the first visionOS device on February 2nd. The Vision Pro starts at $3,499 with 256GB of internal storage, while [...]

Spring has (almost) sprung, but if you're looking to get a headstart on the array of seasonal sales that are surely on the horizon, Valve has you covered. That's because now until 1PM ET on March 20th, PC gamers can save on a smorgasbord of great titles as part of the Steam Spring Sale, which [...]

As we inch closer to the end of Severanceas second season, there are still a lot of open questions. But itas also become clear that the show isnat in a rush to answer them. Whereas many mystery box shows race to their conclusions, speeding through plot points so quickly that it can be hard to [...]

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 [...]

Star of Providence is like a retro game I would have loved as a kid. But the roguelike bullet hell shooter is also a modern twin-stick shooter, and the melding of the two eras results in a fun, fast, and challenging experience. In Star, you control a ship and explore randomly generated dungeons. As you [...]

When youare starting a new sports league, or really a new anything, youare always praying for your first viral moment. For TGL, a new golf league hoping to reinvent the game for a new era and a new audience, that moment came before the first season ever started. In 2024, Tiger Woods, the golf worldas [...]

Samsung's flagship soundbar, the HW-Q990D, is being rendered useless for some owners after a faulty firmware update that the company rolled out this week. The sheer number of reports on Samsung's community forums, Reddit, and AVSForum confirm that something has gone very wrong with the premium Dolby Atmos system in recent days. The issue isn't [...]

In July 2021, Valve revealed the Steam Deck, a Switch-like handheld device packed with features including a huge variety of control options, a 7-inch touchscreen, the ability to connect to external displays, and a quick suspend / resume feature. The device began shipping in February 2022, starting at $399. With an unprecedented degree of support [...]

Google is rolling out a Find My Device app feature update that shows a map of your friends and the family members who share their location with you, 9to5Google reports. The new feature was announced in the Android March feature update last week and is now available for more users. There's already a way for [...]

The Trump administration is embarking on a massive university speech crackdown, starting with Columbia University, where itas demanding external control of entire departments and punishment for student activists. Its first test case, Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student with a green card, offers a hint of whatas to come: a state of intentional chaos that undermines [...]

Ashly Burch, the award-winning voice and performance actor behind Horizon Zero Dawn's Aloy - one of the most prominent characters on PlayStation today - has some news and some very strong thoughts about the leaked Sony experiment that saw her character voiced and performed by AI technology instead of her or any other human being. [...]

It is hard to describe how utterly joyless and devoid of imaginative ideas The Electric State is. Netflixas latest feature codirected by Joe and Anthony Russo takes many visual cues from Simon StAlenhagas much-lauded 2018 illustrated novel, but the filmas leaden performances and meandering story make it feel like a project borne out by a [...]

OpenAI and Google are pushing the US government to allow their AI models to train on copyrighted material. Both companies outlined their stances in proposals published this week, with OpenAI arguing that applying fair use protections to AI is a matter of national security." The proposals come in response to a request from the White [...]

The new M4-powered MacBook Air only hit stores on March 12, but it's already on sale. You can pick up the 13-inch entry-level configuration with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for $949 ($50 off) at Amazon (at checkout) and Best Buy if you're a My Best Buy Plus and My Best Buy Total [...]

Google is finally moving on from Google Assistant. The company will be upgrading more" users from Google Assistant to Gemini over the coming months," according to a blog post. The classic Google Assistant will no longer be accessible on most mobile devices or available for new downloads on mobile app stores" at some point later [...]

Google releases a lot of products, but it shuts down a lot of them, too. Some didn't deserve to be discontinued (we pine for the days of Reader and Inbox), and some probably weren't long for this world from the start. (What was Google Wave supposed to be, anyway?) The company actually used to shut [...]

Reddit is going rolling out a feature that lets you hide an ad from your feed for at least a year," the company says in a post spotted by Ars Technica. When the update is available to you, you'll be able to see the Hide" option for any ads that appear in feeds, such as [...]

A federal judge has once again blocked California's landmark online child safety law from taking effect. In a ruling on Thursday, US District Court Judge Beth Labson Freeman granted a preliminary injunction in favor of NetChoice, saying the technology trade group's claims that the law violates the First Amendment would likely succeed. The law, called [...]

When I saw iRobotas latest robot vacuums announced this week, my first thought was, aThese donat look like Roombas; they look like midrange models from Roborock, Ecovacs, and Dreame.a Of course, as the original robot vacuum manufacturer, iRobotas products likely inspired the design of most of its competitors. But Roombas have always had a uniqueness [...]

Vampire Survivors isn't just a bullet hell survival game where you maneuver around simple 8-bit stages and kill thousands of monstrous enemies - it's also a juggernaut of an indie title that blew up in popularity enough to even get the green light on a TV show spinoff. First launched on Steam in December 2021 [...]

The Last of Us has caught our attention ever since the game's launch on the PlayStation 3 in 2013, but the cordyceps-infested franchise has only continued to grow since then. While The Last of Us Part II came out on the PlayStation 4 in 2020, the first game's remake launched on PlayStation 5 in 2021. [...]

Six to Start, the company behind Zombies, Run! and Marvel Move, has laid off all but two of its staff, The Verge has learned. The news was delivered last week to staffers in a Zoom call, in which they were told that parent company OliveX could no longer afford to keep Six to Start afloat [...]

Briefly, here's what's up with Tesla over the past few weeks: its stock is down more than 50 percent since December; Tesla sales in California are plummeting; Cybertruck deliveries are reportedly paused because the vehicles are falling apart; protesters are demonstrating outside Tesla showrooms across the country; and Tesla owners are selling their cars to [...]

Ford has hired a former Twitch, PlayStation, and Lululemon executive to lead the automaker's digital services business. Mike Aragon, who previously led as CEO of Lululemon's defunct Mirror home workout machine, is joining Ford as president of integrated services." The company says Aragon will lead a team responsible for building out and marketing a suite [...]

Newsmax agreed to pay $40 million to settle claims that it defamed the voting machine company Smartmatic. The two companies reached a confidential" settlement agreement last September, but a regulatory filing spotted by The Independent has revealed how much the conservative media outlet will pay. Newsmax has paid $20 million to Smartmatic so far, with [...]