The Verge

Apple has stopped selling new iPhones with Lightning ports with the launch of the iPhone 16E and the removal of the iPhone 14 and the third-generation iPhone SE from its website. All new iPhones have a USB-C port. Finally. This change isn't a surprise. Apple has slowly migrated its products to USB-C from Lightning, which [...]

What if a smartphone maker decided to cram as many features into a device as possible and not worry about maintaining a pocket-friendly design? That's the approach that Oukitel has taken with its new WP100 Titan smartphone. The company is known for creating chunky phones with extended battery life, and its new 1.3-inch thick Titan [...]

A bunch of Verge staffers came back from the weekend chatting about our experiences withElden Ring Nightreignasnetwork tests. We generally enjoyed the fast-paced, co-op-focused spin on Elden Ring that takes cues from roguelikes and battle royale games a and when things were good, they werereallygood. But we also ran into some frustrating connection issues that [...]

After launching several privacy-focused smartphones, Murena has released its first tablet. The French company customizes mobile devices with a version of Android called /e/OS that removes Google's apps and services so the search giant can't collect your data and personal info. The company is sticking with that familiar playbook for the Murena Pixel Tablet which [...]

Google is rolling out new search gestures that allow iPhone users to highlight anything on their screen to quickly search for it. The Lens screen-searching feature is available on iOS in both the Google app and Chrome browser and provides a similar experience to Android's Circle to Search, which isn't supported on iPhones. The new [...]

Instagram's direct message function is getting a big infusion of features today, including scheduled direct messages that you can prewrite and set to send on a later date, up to 29 days in advance. You can also now pin up to three messages to the top of the chat. Meta says the changes are intended [...]

Earlier this week, the US-based developers working on Marvel Rivals began reporting on LinkedIn that they had been laid off. The developers did not give a reason for the layoffs, which came as a shock to the gaming community because of Rivals' evident success. However, in a statement to The Verge, NetEase has clarified that [...]

Apple has just introduced the iPhone 16E, a spiritual successor to the iPhone SE line that has a significant first: it introduces Apple's long-awaited in-house 5G modem called the C1. The chip, which Apple says is the most power-efficient modem in a phone, is Apple's bid to end its reliance on Qualcomm's 5G chips. Apple [...]

Apple appears to have stopped selling the iPhone 14. The device, first released in 2022, seems to have vanished from Apple's website following the launch of the iPhone 16E. Apple removed the mention of the iPhone 14 from its website's navigation bar, and even though the device still appears in search results, selecting it redirects [...]

Apple may not have given the full launch event and keynote treatment to the iPhone 16E, but it dropped a launch video for the new affordable iPhone that shows it off. The video was uploaded to YouTube and added to the company's iPhone 16E launch page. Apple CEO Tim Cook introduces the new member of [...]

Struggling electric truck company Nikola said it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Wednesday and would sell off its assets, effectively ending a challenging journey punctuated by rapid cash burn, allegations of fraud, and the incarceration of its first CEO and founder. Nikola said it would seek an auction and sale process, pending [...]

After a very long windup, Humane finally revealed all the detailsof its AI-powered wearable at the end of 2023. The small gadget could attach to your clothes using a magnetic battery pack so that it's within easy reach. By tapping the AI Pin, you could ask it to do smartphone-y things like make phone calls, [...]

Anker's smart home arm, Eufy, has announced its first smart lock that uses palm vein recognition to unlock your door. The $399 FamiLock S3 Max is also a video doorbell with a 2K-capable camera and an interior screen that shows a live video feed through the door lock. The S3 works over Wi-Fi 6 and [...]

Subreddit r/WallStreetBets has been the talk of the Internet this week, as its members have driven GameStop's stock prices from around $20 to over $300. The community brands itself as like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal," and as time has gone on, it's targeted other unlikely stocks like AMC, Blackberry, and Tootsie Roll. They've also [...]

Elden Ring is finally here. The huge game, from Dark Souls developer FromSoftware, is set in a world created in part by Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin. It largely lives up to the massive hype, but it didn't have a perfect launch. Bandai Namco issued a PSA on the day of release, promising [...]

Newly appointed Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson praised his former boss, the conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, as athe most important judge of the last 100 years,a in a memo to agency staff honoring Black History Month. The message, obtained by The Verge and confirmed by the FTC, sheds light on how Ferguson [...]

A US federal judge declined to block Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing or transferring data from seven government agencies, or stop further firings of their workforce. DC District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan denied a temporary restraining order (TRO) sought by a group of 14 Democratic state attorneys general, led [...]

Humane is selling most of its company to HP for $116 million and will stop selling AI Pin, the company announced today. AI Pins that have already been purchased will continue to function normally until 3PM ET on February 28th, Humane says in a support document. After that date, Pins will no longer connect to [...]

Marvel Rivals, the Overwatch 2-lunch-eating multiplayer shooter that boasted 20 million players within days of its December 2024 launch, has laid off an unspecified number of employees in its US operations, according to separate posts by recently laid off employees on LinkedIn. Welp, just got laid off from my job working on Marvel Rivals with [...]

Facebook will start deleting users' live broadcast recordings after 30 days starting on February 19th. Users who go live after that date must download the videos to save them from getting deleted before their 30-day expiration period ends. Alternatively, you could share the recordings to your profile as Reels, although that means fitting clips into [...]

Acer CEO and chairman Jason Chen says your laptop will cost an extra 10 percent in the United States next month - and that his rivals might attempt price gouging if they think you'll pay even more. We think 10pc probably will be the default price increase because of the import tax. It's very straightforward," [...]

China and the US, the world's two top greenhouse gas polluters, could burn through a lot more electricity over the next couple of years, according to the latest forecast from the International Energy Agency (IEA). The steepest rise inglobalelectricity demand in a while is expected over thenext few years,with much of that coming fromnew data [...]

After her sudden departure from OpenAI last fall, ex-CTO Mira Murati vanished from public view to start something new. Now, she is ready to share some details about what sheas working on. Her new AI startup is called Thinking Machines Lab, and while the specifics of what it plans to release are still under wraps, [...]

When S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl was released in November, it was clearly not yet the game its developers, GSC Game World, wanted it to be. Sure, this imagining of the Zone was fabulously moody, a desolate and bleak expanse of bog, scrubland, abandoned warehouses, and pallid vistas. For all the ways it was transportive [...]

Meta's WhatsApp has now gathered enough users to be designated a Very Large Online Platform (VLOP) under the European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA), opening it up to stricter regulations in the region, reports Bloomberg. The DSA assigns VLOP status to any online service with more than 45 million users, a threshold WhatsApp crossed last [...]

Magic: The Gathering has revealed a look at its forthcoming Final Fantasy-themed set. In an interview with IGN, senior game designer Daniel Holt talked about the collaboration and this initial look, which focuses on four major character cards and their associated pre-constructed Commander decks. The revealed cards include Terra from Final Fantasy VI, Tidus from [...]

Did you know Apple's AirTags weren't the first Find My Bluetooth trackers for iPhones? Chipolo actually beat Apple to its own game in 2021 with the Chipolo One Spot. It's easy to pass them up given that AirTags are often discounted, but Chipolo's ongoing sale is tempting. All of Chipolo's trackers are discounted right now, [...]

Meta is holding a new LlamaCon" conference where it will share updates on open source AI developments" to help developers create apps and products, the company said on Tuesday. LlamaCon will take place on April 29th, 2025 - months ahead of its Meta Connect conference, which it just announced will run from September 17th to [...]

Thanks to the one-two punch that is Valentine's Day and Presidents Day, there are plenty of sales to take advantage of throughout the month of February. And while both holidays are officially behind us, Amazon, Walmart, and plenty of other retailers are still discounting a range of tech, including some of the gadgets and gizmos [...]

Insta360 has announced a new accessory for its Flow 2 Pro smartphone gimbal that allows any camera app to take advantage of the company's AI-powered tracking technology. Previously, subject tracking required the use of the company's own Android or iOS camera app, or iOS apps that supported Apple's DockKitframework. The new Insta360 Flow 2 Pro [...]

Chase Bank is going to make it harder to use Zelle for transactions stemming from social media. In an update to its policy on Zelle, Chase says it may decline or block" payments related to purchases from social media marketplaces or messaging apps, as spotted earlier by Bleeping Computer. The new policy, which goes into [...]

Nothing is comparing its coming budget Phone 3A's camera against that of the iPhone 16 Pro Max in a new YouTube video released today. Specifically, it's showing off the performance of the Phone 3A's 50MP periscope camera, which appears in the bottom right of the triangular three-camera array in the photo (emailed to the The [...]

Meta is clearly all in on AI, and for good reason. With models like Llama, products like the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, and a monetization plan like Facebook ads, it's one of the companies best positioned to make AI really work. But it wasn't that long ago that Meta was making a different, just as [...]

Nanoleaf has announced that the company's most popular products" are getting a permanent price cut as part of its new SmarterLife Pricing Initiative. For the past two years, Nanoleaf has been working closely with their manufacturing and supply chain teams to completely reexamine, rework and reoptimize processes, materials, and structures to reduce costs," the company [...]

Elon Musk is -according to a new legal filing from the US government -not running the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), despite his leadership appointment by President Donald Trump. In fact, claims the new White House declaration, he isn't technically even a DOGE employee despite representing himself as the key decision maker behind its activity. [...]

I've had the $329.99 OnePlus Watch 3 for a few days, and so far, this isn't an Android watch that flips the script. Instead, it's a story about refinement (and playing a bit of catch-up), rather than pushing boundaries. And you know what? If it means a strong Google / Samsung alternative with a rotating [...]

Personally, I can't imagine using my smartphone as a baby steadicam anymore now that I have DJI's Osmo Pocket 3 - we saw it everywhere at CES 2025, and its one-inch-type sensor offers image quality beyond what today's smartphones allow. But if you like the idea of sticking your phone into a set of stabilized [...]

Huawei's trifold Mate XT phone is launching outside of China, but it won't come cheap. The world's first and only phone that folds at two separate points in the display costs 3,499 (about $3,660) - and like other Huawei phones, won't officially support any Google apps. The Mate XT launched in China in September 2024. [...]

Microsoft was planning to make some changes to the way you sign in to a Microsoft account in February, keeping accounts signed in automatically unless you sign out or use private browsing. While the changes were communicated to Outlook.com users through a notification and in a now-removed Microsoft support article, Microsoft has now confirmed to [...]

Elon Musk's xAI unveiled Grok-3 on Tuesday, announcing that the new artificial intelligence model has more than 10 times" the compute power of its predecessor. xAI said its latest flagship outperforms OpenAI's GPT-4o, Google's Gemini, and DeepSeek's V3 models in early testing, and now features advanced reasoning" capabilities. So-called reasoning models are trained to answer [...]

It's been nearly four years since Spotify announced a HiFi tier for its music streaming service that would support lossless audio. That wait could end this year, Bloomberg reports, as the company works to finalize details, including streaming rights. Spotify could charge as much as $5 or $6 extra per month for the new tier [...]

The Department of Government Efficiency has requested access to the Internal Revenue Service's taxpayer data system - potentially giving it access to highly sensitive information, including Social Security Numbers and tax returns - according to a report from CNN. DOGE has also launched an IRS-specific account on X and is soliciting insights on finding and [...]

A team from Elon Musk's SpaceX is visiting the Air Traffic Control Command Center in Virginia Monday to help overhaul the system in the wake of last month's deadly air disaster in Washington, DC, US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy announced. The news comes after CNN reported that the Federal Aviation Administration fired hundreds of [...]

Last November, I strapped into the rear passenger seat of an all-electric, four-door sedan with BMW test driver and 24-hour racer Jens Klingmann behind the wheel. It was a cold day at BMWas Performance Driving Center in Greer, SC, and beneath the five-point harnesses, roll cage, and heavily camouflaged body, Klingmann had an unexpected co-pilot: [...]

Violent metaphors abound for whatas happening in Washington: Elon Musk and his allies have taken a aslash-and-burna approach to the government and a asledgehammera to government institutions, doing away with supposed waste and excess while leaving the fundamental structure intact. All of this is being done with the stated goal of ridding the federal workforce [...]

X users are currently unable to post links to Signal.me, which are used to quickly and securely send direct messages to Signal users. A variety of failure notifications are being reported when X users attempt to post Signal links on the platform, some of which identify the blocked message as containing spam, harmful content, or [...]

The New York Times has reportedly approved artificial intelligence tools that newsroom staff can use for editing copy, summarizing information, coding, and writing. The publication announced in an internal email that product and editorial staff will receive AI training, according to Semafor, and introduced a new internal AI tool called Echo for summarizing articles, briefings, [...]

Days after YouTube published a blog post saying it could lose Paramount content soon, it updated the post to announce a deal to keep it. The company posted on X that, as a result, channels such as CBS, CBS Sports, and Nickelodeon and add-ons like Paramount Plus, Showtime, and BET Plus will stick around after [...]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 71, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If youare new here, welcome, happy long weekend to all those allowed to celebrate, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, Iave been reading about Alan Turing and OnlyFans [...]

Today marked a second weekend of scattered protests at Tesla showrooms, following a TeslaTakeover" hashtag that has been trending on Twitter alternative Bluesky this week. Protestors' messages largely focused on the divisive efforts of Tesla CEO Elon Musk as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency since the start of Donald Trump's Presidency. The [...]