The Verge

California has enacted new legislation that aims to limit companies from charging consumers exorbitant" fees to cancel fixed-term contracts. Assembly Bill 483 was signed into law by California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday, placing transparency requirements and fee limits on early terminations for installment contracts - plans that allow consumers to make recurring payments for [...]

5CA is a customer service support company that works with Discord. Recently, the chat platform said the vendor had been breached as part of a security incident" where 70,000 government ID photos may have leaked. Now, 5CA says in a post on its website that it was not hacked." According to Discord, this incident impacted [...]

After shaking up the Pokemon formula with Pokemon Legends: Arceus, its successor, Legends: Z-A, pushes things even further - and it's a very welcome change of pace. With Arceus, Nintendo and Game Freak demonstrated how much more vibrant, weird, and exciting the monster catching series could become with a few key changes to the classic [...]

Google is trying to make it easier to find time to meet with coworkers and clients. It's launching a new Gemini AI-powered Help me schedule" feature that suggests meeting time slots based on your Google Calendar and the context of the message. You can directly insert the suggestions into your email. The new Help me [...]

Thin phones are in, and Motorola doesn't want to miss out. It's teasing the imminent launch of the X70 Air in China, a slim phone with an unexpectedly big battery, which we're expecting to see launch in Europe as the Edge 70 soon too. The X70 Air is less than 6mm thick, putting it in [...]

If you're on the fence about trying a foldable smartphone, Motorola's Razr Ultra (2025) may be the one you've been waiting for, and you can pick it up for $999.99 ($300 off) at Amazon and Best Buy. Our reviewer praised its design (the wooden back panel has a layer of actual wood), and found Motorola [...]

Is a smartwatch better than a smartphone? Not which one is more important or which would you rather have, but simply which one is better? This is the kind of question you really never need to ask - but we're here to ask it. Why? Because Google has had a terrific year of gadget launches, [...]

Windows 10 is so popular that Windows 11 only overtook it in terms of usage just a few months ago. That's why I'm surprised that Microsoft is still, kind of, going ahead with its end of support cutoff today. At one point last year, I wasn't sure if Microsoft was actually going to end support [...]

SteelSeries is launching the second generation of its popular Nova 7 wireless gaming headset today, with support for real-time audio control and a massive 40 percent battery life improvement. If you're not interested in the $599.99 Nova Elite or the $349.99 Nova Pro, the Nova 7 Gen 2 is SteelSeries' more affordable midrange option at [...]

It's been more than a decade since there was a proper Splinter Cell game. So when Derek Kolstad, a writer best-known for creating the John Wick series, approached making the new animated Netflix adaptation, he treated it as if the story continued as the games were dormant. "I wanted to do it almost like the [...]

In the early 1970s, long before social media and more than a decade before the earliest internet forums, a woman named Peggie Ames became a human rolodex for trans women in New York state. Born in Buffalo, Ames spent years working for gay rights organizations in the rural and suburban areas of Western New York. [...]

DirecTV wants to use AI to put you, your family, and your pets inside a custom TV screensaver. If that's not uncanny enough, you'll find items you can shop for within that AI environment, whether it's a piece of clothing similar to the one your AI likeness is wearing or a piece of furniture that [...]

Spotify is expanding shared account features that make it easier for parents to control what their kids listen to. Managed accounts are now launching for Premium Family subscribers in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, and the Netherlands following a pilot that kicked off last year, allowing account holders to manage a separate music-only [...]

I renewed my passport the day after Trump won again. It wouldn't expire for years, but I did it anyway, along with many trans people I knew who could scrape together the fee. We all had the same thought: get your documents in order now, while you still can. For over a decade, I've written [...]

Instagram is making a major update to teen accounts that will only allow them to view content similar to what you would see in aPG-13 movie. Under the new system, Instagram will continue to hide content containing nudity, sexual content, or suggestive poses from teens, but now it will also avoid recommending content with strong [...]

It's the end of an era for TiVo. Cord Cutters flagged that the company has removed every digital video recorder product from its website, with TiVo confirming to the publication last week that it has officially ceased making DVR hardware after 26 years in the industry. Its last DVR release was the TiVo Edge in [...]

Meta, a company that is not shy about bolting new features onto its platforms, is bolting another new feature onto Facebook: jobs. This one is actually a throwback - Facebook initially introduced job postings in 2017, only to retire it less than five years later. But jobs are back now, with an emphasis toward local [...]

Microsoft AI just announced its first text-to-image generator, MAI-Image-1, designed and developed in-house. The tech giant, which recently announced its first in-house Microsoft AI models, called the new image generator the next step on our journey." Microsoft says it sought feedback from creative professionals in order to avoid repetitive or generically-stylized outputs." MAI-Image-1 excels" at [...]

Ads in Google search results are getting a more prominent label, and a way to hide them if you're not interested. Handy! The thing is, you still have to look at them first. Currently, Google labels paid results on search pages individually with a sponsored" tag on each one. This change groups them all into [...]

After a brutal few months, Tesla sales are finally picking up thanks to expiring federal EV tax credits. But while customers are snatching up Model 3s and Ys, they are increasingly turning up their noses at the newest addition to Tesla's lineup: the Cybertruck. Tesla only sold 5,385 Cybertrucks in the third quarter, down 63 [...]

A bill attempting to regulate the ever-growing industry of companion AI chatbots is now law in California, as of October 13th. California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law Senate Bill 243, billed as first-in-the-nation AI chatbot safeguards" by state senator Steve Padilla. The new law requires that companion chatbot developers implement new safeguards -for instance, [...]

California joins a growing group of states with a new internet age-gating law after Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed AB 1043, the Digital Age Assurance Act. The law mandates that device operating systems and app stores require users to enter their age or date of birth when setting up a new phone or computer. The [...]

The Apple TV Plus streaming service is being rebranded with a vibrant new identity," according to the Cupertino company, and is now simply Apple TV." The announcement was briefly mentioned at the bottom of Apple's latest press release regarding the December 12th streaming debut of F1 The Movie. At the time of writing, no changes [...]

EcoFlow just announced its latest most powerful" and easy-to-install" whole-home battery backup system. It's called the Delta Pro Ultra X because when you've already launched the superlative-lacedDelta Pro Ultra in 2024, the only thing left is to add a variable to the name. Perhaps that X stands for 60 percent, which is the increase in [...]

OpenAI is teaming up with Broadcom to produce its own computer chips to power its AI data centers. The deal is the latest in a series of partnerships designed to reduce the company's reliance on Nvidia and secure enough computing power to fuel apps like ChatGPT and Sora and realize its mission to develop superintelligent [...]

Anduril, the military tech company founded by Oculus creator Palmer Luckey, has announced the first hardware to come out of its recent partnership with Meta: EagleEye, an AI-powered mixed-reality (MR) system designed to be built into soldiers' helmets. The modular hardware is a family of systems," according to Anduril's announcement, including a heads-up display, spatial [...]

Vivo has announced the X300 and X300 Pro, its latest flagship phones, and they look closer to the company's even more premium Ultra handsets than ever. On paper, the Pro's camera setup looks just as good as the X200 Ultra's, especially thanks to offering support for the same add-on telephoto extender lens introduced with that [...]

The United Kingdom has slapped 4Chan with a 20,000 (around $26,000) fine in a bid to clamp down on platforms that are hindering Online Safety Act (OSA) investigations. UK telecoms regulator Ofcom says the fine was issued after the controversial social media site ignored legally-binding information requests" related to global revenue and its illegal harms [...]

Slack is testing an update for Slackbot that transforms it into an AI assistant. Presently, it operates as a tool for delivering reminders and notifications. With the update, Slackbot can create custom plans tailored to your workspace, sift through a mountain of messages, gather information from a range of Slack channels, and more. Slackbot today [...]

It feels like the rollout of Wi-Fi 7 is barely out of the gate, but TP-Link is already making advancements towards the next generation of connectivity. The company announced on Monday that it has successfully tested an early prototype of Wi-Fi 8 hardware, marking a critical milestone" in its development. While the test is light [...]

We got our first proper look at the upcoming Wonder Man series, but Marvel has a whole slate of shows in the works. Other than Wonder Man, though, the company didn't roll into New York Comic Con with a firm release date for anything. The best we got were some broad release windows and few [...]

Last week, for James Bond Day, Amazon revealed updated poster art for the movies. But fans immediately noticed that the super spy's signature Walther PPK was conspicuously missing from every image. In some cases it had clearly and rather clumsily been Photoshopped out. Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan were left awkwardly holding thin air, in [...]

We've been so worried about deepfaked politicians, AI musicians, virtual actresses, and phony satellite imagery that we didn't even consider the dangers posed by precocious teenagers. Kids are using AI to create images of a disheveled, seemingly unhoused person in their home and sending them to their parents. Understandably, they're not thrilled and in some [...]

It's important to remember that two decades ago, text messages cost 10 cents. Each. Back when we measured our cell phone plans in minutes, and when even 3G connections felt fast, text messages were a huge business for wireless carriers and a huge expense for anyone whose kids learned to T9-type just a little too [...]

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the downward spiral of the internet, follow Adi Robertson. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started Back in 2018, two years after the UK [...]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 101, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, hope you like silly accessories, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about Intel factories and Nobel Prize winners and ATM [...]

Apple's Clips video editing app is no more. It debuted in 2017 as a way to stitch together videos with music, text, and filters with a clear focus on sharing to social media. Over the years Apple added AR features and more advanced video editing tools. But recently updates had slowed to a trickle. Apple [...]

This week the Pew Research Center published a study about how parents managed screen time for their kids 12 and under. The results were not particularly surprising (or enlightening, if we're being honest). A full 90 percent of parents said their children watched TV, and 61 percent said their kids interact with smartphones at least [...]

Although Amazon's fall Prime Day event has come to an end, there are still some lingering discounts available. That means you have yet another chance to pick up an early gift for the holidays, or just something for yourself. Right now, for instance, Apple's base AirPods 4 are sitting at their lowest price to date, [...]

When Donald Trump's administration issued orders to send the National Guard into Portland, Oregon, a person in a frog balloon suit showed up at the city's ICE facility, where protesters had gathered. After the frog humped the air in front of a throng of federal law enforcement - many dressed in head-to-toe camo with military-grade [...]

Dreams of Another is like playing an art-filled dream. It's filled with unexpected events, disjointed acts, and hazy landscapes. Scenes end abruptly, and then you unexpectedly pick up the thread later on. You'll meet talking angel statues and fish that want to escape their home and swim to the ocean. But it's that same unstable, [...]

Coros' Nomad is marketed as a "go-anywhere, do-anything" adventure watch. It's got GPS and offline maps and will track a lot of activities, from yoga to bouldering. There's an "Adventure Journal," which the marketing copy promises will help you record "every step, catch, and summit." While it doesn't have some of the bells and whistles [...]

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. This week, I got an up-close look at how far apart Silicon Valley and Hollywood are on what to do about AI. First, at OpenAI DevDay, Sam Altman presented [...]

Will OpenAI send police to your door if you advocate for AI regulation? Nathan Calvin, a lawyer who shapes policies surrounding the technology at Encode AI, claims OpenAI did just that. One Tuesday night, as my wife and I sat down for dinner, a sheriff's deputy knocked on the door to serve me a subpoena [...]

Bose is discontinuing support for the cloud-based features available on its SoundTouch products on February 18th, 2026. After February 18, certain features - including access to integrated music services like Spotify and TuneIn, as well as multi-room playback - will no longer be available," Bose says. That same day, the SoundTouch app will stop working, [...]

ChatGPT shouldn't have political bias in any direction," OpenAI wrote in a post on Thursday. The latest GPT-5 models come the closest to achieving that objective goal, according to results from an internal company stress-test" of ChatGPT's responses to divisive issues. The test has been months in the making, the company says, and falls on [...]

It's normal to feel some FOMO after a big sales event like Amazon's fall Prime Day, but don't worry - not every great deal has vanished. LG's 48-inch C4 OLED TV, for instance, is still going for its lowest price yet of around $799.96 ($800 off) at Amazon. Even the newer C5 model is on [...]

Google is introducing a new Chrome browser feature for Android and desktop users that automatically turns off notifications for websites that you're already ignoring. Chrome's Safety Check feature already provides similar functionality for camera access and location tracking permissions. This new auto-revocation feature builds on a similar Android feature that already makes it easier for [...]