The Verge

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 [...]

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 [...]

After a season 3 finale that left open plenty of possibilities for a return, it's now confirmed: Ted Lasso is coming back. The Apple TV Plus sitcom is getting a fourth season, though it appears to be still fairly early in development. In an interview on the New Heights podcast, star Jason Sudeikis confirmed that [...]

There's a lot to explore in Google Maps, but you may not always know where to look. Itas great if you're trying to drive through a crowded city or find out which local coffee shop has the best-rated bagels, but there are also other, lesser-known features worth investigating. These include historical imagery on Google Street [...]

Apple Intelligence is technically lots of things, but thereas only one feature with the potential to actually meaningfully change the way you use your phone. That would be Siri, which Apple said last year it had turned from a quasi-helpful voice assistant into an AI-powered helper that could understand everything about you and accomplish things [...]

iPhone and Android users will be able to exchange end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) RCS messages in the near future thanks to newly updated RCS specifications. The GSM Association announced that the latest RCS standard includes E2EE based on the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol, enabling interoperable encryption between different platform providers for the first time. The [...]

T-Mobile is letting some legacy plan customers know that a price increase is coming, 9to5Google reports. Many Reddit users on r/tmobile said the carrier sent them text messages that their plans will raise by $5 per month per line starting on April 2nd. In an internal memo obtained by CNET, T-Mobile consumer group president Jon [...]

Apple's AirPods 4 are down to the lowest price ever on Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy, where you can pick them up starting at $99.99. That's about 22 percent off the $129 list price. These are the newest version of Apple's base AirPods, launched in September with the iPhone 16. They support spatial audio with [...]

Apple is planning to bring live translation to AirPods, according to a report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The feature, which will let users translate conversations in real time, will be tied" to the forthcoming iOS 19, Gurman says. Apple is a little behind others in adding live translation to the AirPods, as Google brought the [...]

Opus, A24as new horror-tinged thriller from writer / director Mark Anthony Green, has a lot to say about the symbiotic (and sometimes parasitic) relationship between entertainment journalists and celebrities. In the filmas story about reporters tripping over themselves just to be close to an eccentric music icon, you can feel Green reflecting on how the [...]

Google is rolling out a fix for Chromecast device issues that left many users with untrusted device" errors that disabled casting. The issue, which appeared over the weekend, seemed to widely affect Chromecast 2nd generation and Chromecast Audio devices. Google has not said what caused the errors, but a user on Reddit claimed it could [...]

Microsoft is testing AI-powered summaries in Notepad. In an update rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev channels, you'll be able to summarize information in Notepad by highlighting a chunk of text, right-clicking it, and selecting Summarize. Notepad will then generate a summary of the text, as well as provide an option [...]