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The SwitchBot K10 Plus robot vacuum now works with Matter. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge This week, SwitchBot announced that almost its entire line of smart home devices can now work with Matter through its SwitchBot Hub 2. This includes its mini K10 Plus robot vacuum - one of The Verge's picks for best robot vacuum - as well as the soon-to-be-launched SwitchBot S10.Along with Ecovacs' recently launched Deebot X2 Combo and Roborock's S8 Max Ultra V (coming April 22nd), there are now a handful of robot vacuums that support Matter. The problem is that none of the smart home platforms support robot vacuums through Matter.This chicken-and-egg situation is characteristic of the overall frustrations of the Matter rollout to date. Robot vacuums, in particular, are a category many were excited to see come to Matter. Smart home... Continue reading...

Lea Seydoux in The Beast. | Image: CMPR A period piece, a contemporary drama, and a speculative sci-fi film all in one, The Beast's director, Bertrand Bonello, explains how he used three parallel narratives to explore a single idea. Continue reading...

A woman shows a placard reading For feminist and social ecologic justice" in Toulouse, France, March 19th, 2021. | Photo by Alain Pitton / NurPhoto via Getty Images An international court has, for the first time, ruled that a country violated human rights by not protecting people from the effects of climate change. A Swiss association representing more than 2,000 older women (a third of whom are over the age of 75) filed a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights saying that their government put them at heightened risk during heatwaves.The court decided that the European Convention on Human Rights encompasses a right for individuals to effective protection by the State authorities from the serious adverse effects of climate change on their lives, health, well-being and quality of life." Swiss authorities violated the Convention, the court says in its judgment, by failing to adequately limit... Continue reading...

Beeper is a messaging app for your messaging apps. | Image: Beeper Beeper, the upstart messaging app that attempts to corral all your messaging services into one inbox, is being acquired by Automattic, the giant that runs Wordpress.com, Tumblr, and a number of other hugely popular web properties. The deal closed last week and was announced officially on Tuesday. Along with the announcement, Beeper is also opening up its app to everyone for the first time across platforms, shutting down its waitlist for good.There's a fascinating backstory here on all sides of this acquisition. For Beeper, it comes a couple of months after Beeper launched a new app called Beeper Mini that found a way to let Android users tap into the iMessage protocol and become blue bubbles in the Messages app. Apple didn't like that;... Continue reading...

Aboard is for tracking stuff - and for building the tools for tracking stuff with AI. | Image: Aboard Aboard is not an easy app to explain. It used to be easier: at first, it was a way to collect and organize information - Trello meets Pinterest meets that spreadsheet full of links you use to plan your vacation. The company's founders, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade, are two longtime web developers and app creators (and, in Ford's case, also an influential writer about the web) who previously ran a well-liked agency called Postlight. They did a bunch of interesting work on parsing websites to pull out helpful information, and they built a handy visual tool for displaying it all. People love to save links," Ziade says, and we love to make those links beautiful when they come in." Simple!But now I'm sitting here in a co-working space in New... Continue reading...

Jessica Fernandez uses Peloton about two hours a day - maybe even four if she's training for a marathon. In her house, you'll find not one but two Peloton machines. There's the bike that the company is known for, and in her garage, there's the company's smaller treadmill. A rack of running medals hangs on the wall right near it. On our video call, she shows up in a Peloton shirt, a little shy, but her enthusiasm practically buzzes through the screen.Many owners of Peloton bikes wind up using them as very expensive drying racks; Fernandez is not one of those people. Her love for the beleaguered fitness company stretches back to 2018. On a day-to-day basis, she has her regular workout. That includes runs, bike, strength, or bootcamp... Continue reading...

The buds' modularity have made for a chunkier design. | Image: Fairphone Fairphone, the makers of the ultra-repairable Fairphone 5, have launched a new pair of easy-to-repair wireless earbuds. Instead of tossing away your earbuds when the batteries eventually die, Fairphone's new Fairbuds let you replace the batteries inside the buds themselves and their charging case.In addition to replacing the batteries, you can repair or exchange the left or right earbud, the silicone ring, earbud tips, the charging case outer shell, and the charging case core. The new buds also come with a standard two-year warranty, but you can add one extra year if you register them online. Image: Fairphone These earbuds aren't meant to be thrown away (or stuffed in a drawer) after a few years. Just like... Continue reading...

Photo: David Pierce / The Verge Thanks to the latest software update for the Meta Quest 3, Meta's newest headset now has the lying down mode that came to the Quest 2 and Pro headsets last month. A Meta community post says the update began rolling out to the Quest headsets on Monday.To try it out, go to Settings > Experimental and toggle Use Apps While Lying Down. This should be a nice feature for when you just want to get prone and watch a movie - something the much more expensive Apple Vision Pro could do at launch. But it's also a boon for those who have health problems and aren't able to stay upright for long periods of time while using their Quest device. The feature was in the v53 software beta last year but was removed before the update rolled out.In addition... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Google is making its own custom Arm-based CPU to support its AI work in data centers and introducing a more powerful version of its Tensor Processing Units (TPU) AI chips. Google's new Arm-based CPU, dubbed Axion, will be used to support Google's AI workloads before it rolls out to business customers of Google Cloud later this year."The Axion chips are already powering YouTube ads, the Google Earth Engine, and other Google services. We're making it easy for customers to bring their existing workloads to Arm," says Mark Lohmeyer, Google Cloud's vice president and general manager of compute and machine learning infrastructure, in a statement to Reuters. Axion is built on open foundations but customers using Arm anywhere can easily... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge A few weeks ago, it looked like the US government was on a fast track to banning TikTok. A committee in the House of Representatives voted unanimously in favor of a bill that would see the app either banned or sold, before the broader House passed the same bill in sweeping fashion, and even President Joe Biden said he'd sign the bill if it hit his desk. Then, the momentum just... stopped. The bill is in limbo and TikTok is still here, for now, while the debate rages over what should happen to the massively popular platform.In the meantime, the government filed a landmark antitrust case against Apple, accusing it of illegal monopolistic behavior in everything from digital wallets to messaging to... super apps. It's a broad, complex... Continue reading...

The DJI RS 4 (pictured) starts at $549. | Image: DJI It's been 10 years since DJI introduced its Ronin series of cameras and stabilization accessories, and the company is marking the occasion with two new camera gimbals, targeting both independent video creators and professional studios.The DJI RS 4 is the smaller of the two gimbals. It weighs 3.1 pounds (1.4kg) and is capable of supporting camera systems up to 6.6 pounds (3kg), just like its predecessor, the RS 3. Some improvements over the previous model include upgraded axis locks that provide improved stability when shooting vertically, a new joystick mode switch for jumping between joystick controls for zoom or gimbal, and an additional 8.5mm on the tilt axis that gives it more space to accommodate camera accessories.The OLED... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Google's update to Gemini 1.5 Pro gives the model ears. The model can now listen to uploaded audio files and churn out information from things like earnings calls or audio from videos without the need to refer to a written transcript.During its Google Next event, Google also announced it'll make Gemini 1.5 Pro available to the public for the first time through its platform to build AI applications, Vertex AI. Gemini 1.5 Pro was first announced in February.This new version of Gemini Pro, which is supposed to be the middle-weight model of the Gemini family, already surpasses the biggest and most powerful model, Gemini Ultra, in performance. Gemini 1.5 Pro can understand complicated instructions and eliminates the need to fine-tune... Continue reading...

In Vids, you can either make a video or ask the AI to make one for you. | Image: Google For decades, work has revolved around documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks. Word, Excel, PowerPoint; Pages, Numbers, Keynote; Docs, Sheets, Slides. Now Google is proposing to add another to that triumvirate: an app called Vids that aims to help companies and consumers make collaborative, shareable video more easily than ever.Google Vids is very much not an app for making beautiful movies... or even not-that-beautiful movies. It's meant more for the sorts of things people do at work: make a pitch, update the team, explain a complicated concept. The main goal is to make everything as easy as possible, says Kristina Behr, Google's VP of product management for the Workspace collaboration apps. The ethos that we have is, if you can make a... Continue reading...

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Owners of Intel's latest 13th and 14th Gen Core i9 desktop processors have been noticing an increase in game crashes in recent months. It's happening in games like The Finals, Fortnite, and Tekken 8, and has even led Epic Games to issue a support notice to encourage Intel Core i9 13900K and 14900K owners to adjust BIOS settings.Now, Intel says it's investigating the reports. Intel is aware of problems that occur when executing certain tasks on 13th and 14th generation core processors for desktop PCs, and is analyzing them with major affiliates," says an Intel spokesperson in a statement to ZDNet Korea.The crashes vary in severity depending on the game, with some titles producing an out of memory" error, others simply exiting out to... Continue reading...

The Logitech G Pro X 60 Lightspeed offers plentiful features in a compact form factor. | Image: Logitech Logitech has announced the Pro X 60 Lightspeed, the first wireless gaming keyboard from the company to come in a compact 60 percent format. Available through the gaming-focused Logitech G sub-brand, the keyboard is available now for $179 in a choice of two GX optical switch types (tactile or linear) and three colors (black, white, or pink).Positioned as a compact follow-up to Logitech's G Pro X TKL Lightspeed, the Pro X 60 includes many of the same features. Users get three connectivity options: wired, using the included six-foot USB-C to USB-C charging cable, or wireless via Bluetooth or Logitch's Lightspeed dongle, with the latter providing a polling rate of 1000Hz.One key difference is that, unlike the Pro X TKL, the Pro X 60 isn't... Continue reading...

Image: Apple This morning, remembering I'd forgotten to order eclipse glasses, I wondered out loud: Would it be an absolutely awful idea to watch today's solar eclipse on the Apple Vision Pro? I'm extremely not a camera expert, but I seem to recall that pointing a camera at the sun is bad. However, online answers vary widely, so I put the question to The Verge's Emmy-winning senior video producer Becca Farsace.Her answer was that the Vision Pro is expensive; it has a lot of cameras; and it isn't worth the risk. She added: Wes, you are a free soul! you can do whatever you please, but if I saw this on the internet I would be so mad that someone who spent that much money was out there doing this."She's right; I am a free soul! Challenge accepted,... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge This week, Tesla was scheduled to appear in court to defend its Autopilot system against a claim of wrongful death - but it looks like the company will pay the family of Apple engineer Wei Walter" Huang instead.Court documents show that Tesla is trying to seal the amount of a potential settlement payment to the Huang family. While it's not clear how much the company might be offering or what other terms the settlement includes, lawyers for Tesla state that both parties have already agreed to the settlement and want it to be confidential.You can read that document below; The Washington Post and Bloomberg reported the news earlier. Lawyers for the Huang family didn't immediately respond to our email.The settlement has not yet been... Continue reading...

Google's smart home security system Nest Secure will stop working today, April 8th. | Image: Google Nest As we've warned you, on April 8th, Google is turning off support for its once-excellent Google Nest Secure home security system. This means that, as of today, your Nest Secure will no longer connect to the internet, and you won't be able to control it from the Nest app or receive notifications from the alarm system. It's basically a paperweight (albeit one that can be recycled).Google announced it was discontinuing Nest Secure in 2020, so you've had plenty of time to shop for an alternative. But if you've been putting off the giant pain of switching out a home security system until the last minute, that last minute is here.So, what are your options? When it announced it was killing Nest Secure, Google, a substantial investor in ADT,... Continue reading...

Photo by WWE / Getty Images AR effects have become a key part of entrances and other aspects of WWE TV over the last several years - far outlasting the company's experiments with VR. Continue reading...

View of the solar eclipse from the Dudley Observatory on Monday, August 21st, 2017, in Schenectady, New York. | Photo by Lori Van Buren / Albany Times Union via Getty Images You don't know what you've got until it's gone, and the total eclipse is a stark reminder of that adage when it comes to the key role solar energy currently plays in the US.More than 31 million people - nearly 10 percent of the population in the US - live in an area that will experience the total solar eclipse today. Millions more live near dirty power plants that could be tapped to make up for a loss of solar power.Grid managers have had to find backup sources of energy to cope with the eclipse. It shows us how far the nation has come in cleaning up its power grid - and what we're still in dire need of to complete that task.All 50 states will experience some degree of disruptionAll 50 states will experience some degree of... Continue reading...

Roborock's entry-level robot vacuum is down to just $260, which is a new all-time low. | Image: Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge If you're looking for a way to quickly wrap up your spring cleaning, robot vacuums make for great cleaning assistants that can help you do so with just the press of a button. And right now, one of our favorite models has plunged to a new all-time low, with both Amazon and Roborock selling the Roborock Q5 Pro for $259.99 ($170 off).The midrange Q5 Pro is a powerful cleaning machine with dual rubber roller brushes and 5,500Pa of suction power, which allows it to suck up pet hair, dirt, and debris from carpets exceptionally well without getting tangled up. It also comes with a removable mopping pad so you can clean up the finer dust the vacuum didn't catch, along with a large 770ml bin that prevents you from having to empty it every... Continue reading...

Image: Getty Images A pair of bipartisan lawmakers released a new comprehensive privacy proposal on Sunday, the first sign in years that Congress could have a shot at breaking the long-standing impasse in passing such protections.Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) unveiled the American Privacy Rights Act, the most significant comprehensive data privacy proposal introduced in years. The draft bill would grant consumers new rights regarding how their information is used and moved around by large companies and data brokers while giving them the ability to sue when those rights are violated.The bill will still need to be introduced into both chambers and advanced... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Microsoft says it's figured out how to improve error rates in quantum computing, bringing quantum computing closer to a commercial state.The company worked in collaboration with quantum computing hardware maker Quantinuum to improve the performance of the qubit - the very basic unit of quantum computing. Qubits work by holding two different phases at once (instead of just a one and a zero, it's both), but they aren't very stable, making it easy for them to lose data. Researchers can now create several logical qubits," or qubits that are more stable while holding these different states.Krysta Svore, vice president of advanced quantum development at Microsoft, told The Verge in an interview that because qubits are prone to errors,... Continue reading...

A wide range of Android devices will get offline finding, but the Pixel 8 gets a special feature. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge We had plenty of signs it was coming; now, Android's enhanced Find My Device network is officially here. It's rolling out starting today, and it uses a crowdsourced network to help Android device owners find their stuff - much like iOS's Find My network.With the update, you'll be able to find your phone even if it's offline by using help from other Android devices silently relaying your phone's approximate location. If your lost device is nearby, you can get visual cues in the Find My Device app as you move closer to it. And Google's Pixel 8 phones get a bonus feature, too: they can be located even if they're powered off.Starting in May, the network will also support new Bluetooth tracker tags from Chipolo and Pebblebee so you can... Continue reading...

Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Google's Pixel 8 series phones can now be located even when they're powered down or after their batteries have run down. The convenient new capability was announced as part of today's rollout of the upgraded, more advanced Find My Device network. Google says this offline tracking is made possible by specialized Pixel hardware" in its latest two phones, and I've asked for more details on that.Hopefully, the company will extend this same functionality to the future Pixel Fold 2 and Pixel 9 / 9 Pro, though it's less certain if the budget-tier Pixel 8A (rumored to arrive at next month's I/O) would offer offline location finding or if it'll be a premium-only perk.Apple's recent iPhones can similarly be located when they're without a data... Continue reading...

Photo illustration by The Verge / Photo: Cloudflare What free speech, war zones, and Aristotle have to do with internet infrastructure. Continue reading...

Kia's big electric SUV goes where very few EVs have gone before: into the third row. Continue reading...

This composite image shows the progression of a total solar eclipse over Madras, Oregon, on Monday, August 21st, 2017. | Image: NASA / Aubrey Gemignani Things are going to get a little wacky on April 8th, when a total solar eclipse will darken skies over North America. The Moon will line up perfectly to block the face of the Sun. Temperatures will drop around 10 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius). Birdsong will change from daytime to nighttime tunes. And millions of people are expected to hit the road to catch a glimpse of the spectacle.The Verge has your guide for how to partake in the fun.What is happening during the eclipse? And what will I see?The disk of the Moon is in just the right location, just the right distance to completely cover the disk of the Sun. And when that happens, magic happens," NASA heliophysics research and analysis lead Patrick Koehn told The Verge in... Continue reading...

Spotify says it will continue working on its generative playlist feature over the coming months." | Image: Spotify / Verge After experimenting with AI playlist generation in its DJ feature last year, Spotify is now launching a beta tool that allows users to create a curated tracklist based on text descriptions. Its new AI Playlist beta is initially rolling out to Spotify Premium subscribers on mobile devices in the United Kingdom and Australia.Android and iOS users in those locations can find the AI Playlist generator by heading into Your Library" and tapping the +" button at the top-right of the page. After selecting the AI Playlist option from the drop-down menu, users can type in a prompt - such as music to read to on a cold, rainy day" - to get a playlist of 30 songs that match that vibe. The results can be tweaked using additional prompts like more... Continue reading...

Donghua Jinlong's factory. | Image: Donghua Jinlong Chemical Co. TikTok isn't just useful for videos on robotic tape storage, Radiohead songs on step motors, and regretful congressmen. It's also a place where businesses can go viral by marketing their industrial products.Because of that, I now know that a company called Donghua Jinlong Chemical makes food-grade glycine which, as the company reminds us in its TikTok marketing video, is suitable as a flavor enhancer, sweetener, and nutritional supplement." Not only that, but it's also used in pickles, sweet sauces, soy sauce, vinegar, and juices to improve taste." And, bonus, it's a well-established brand in a large factory." If that doesn't get you ready to get some Donghua Jinlong food-grade glycine, I'm not sure there's anything I can do for... Continue reading...