The Verge

The store will be around from November 8th to December 31st. | Image: Meta Meta announced it is opening up Meta Lab, a pop-up experiential retail space for its Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses starting November 8th in Los Angeles. The temporary store will be around through the end of the year and allow customers to try out the glasses and customize their glasses cases as they shop. Meta Lab will also have local events with various creators, including stand-up comedians, live podcasts, and cooking classes.This particular retail store is an extension of the Meta Lab experience earlier this year at Connect 2024. At that time, Meta had unveiled the transparent versions of its Ray-Bans. The company says that over 90 percent of Connect attendees had attended, with more than 25 percent then purchasing a pair. It appears... Continue reading...

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge iRobot, the parent company of robovac maker Roomba, is laying off around 105 employees. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission spotted by TechCrunch, iRobot says the job cuts will impact 16 percent of its current workforce.The company announced the news as part of its earnings report released on Wednesday. These moves, while challenging, have fundamentally changed the way we work with our partners to efficiently develop and build our robots," iRobot CEO Gary Cohen said during an earnings call.In January, iRobot laid off 350 workers after Amazon's deal to acquire the company fell through. The company also appointed Cohen as CEO, who shut down Roomba's subscription service iRobot Select.Additionally, Cohen said the... Continue reading...

The Fitbit Inspire 3 offers a bright, easy-to-read OLED display, which is a nice perk at this price. | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge Google's Pixel Watch 3 is still down to a record low price, but honestly not everybody wants to - or even needs to - fork out $275 on a smartwatch. That's especially true if all you really need is something to help you keeps tabs on basic health and fitness metrics basics. The Fitbit Inspire 3 is a better, more affordable alternative, one that's currently down to its best price of $69.95 ($30 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Google.The comfortable tracker does a good job of delivering the essentials, helping you accurately keep tabs of basic health and fitness metrics while lasting up to 10 days on a single charge. It also comes with some extra conveniences found in pricier trackers, from a bright OLED screen to features like irregular... Continue reading...

Netflix Toei's Mononoke the Movie: Phantom in the Rain from director Kenji Nakamura is one of this year's most visually stunning anime films, and it's making its way to Netflix in just a few weeks.Like the Mononoke series, Phantom in the Rain tells the tale of an unnamed merchant (Hiroshi Kamiya) who, in addition to selling medicines, specializes in exorcizing mononoke" - malevolent spirits who terrorize the living. When the Medicine Seller arrives at the imperial palace, his senses tell him that a mononoke is lurking somewhere deep within the building's innermost chambers.As a man, the Medicine Seller is forbidden from stepping foot inside of the imperial harem of women like Asa (Tomoyo Kurosawa) and Kame (Aoi Yki), who have gathered in... Continue reading...

Image: Hello Games The developers at Hello Games are back with yet another update for No Man's Sky. Starting today, a select number of users will have the ability to play around in their NMS universe across a collection of platforms with the new cross-save functionality. According to the announcement, adding cross-saving was a bit of an undertaking for the development team.It's very common for players to rack up thousands of hours of saves," the announcement reads. Adding cross-save for us is a little bit like moving house, the longer people have lived there the more complicated it is to move them."No Man's Sky now supports cross-saves across PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Series S/X, Xbox Game Pass, PC, Steam Deck, PSVR 1 / 2, PCVR, GOG, and Nintendo... Continue reading...

Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge The latest macOS beta changes the options you'll see when you use AirPlay to mirror your screen. As reported by MacRumors, the new beta version of macOS Sequoia 15.2 lets you select a single window or app on your Mac to display on another screen, like your TV - or maybe something else, like a Vision Pro headset or Apple's rumored smart display.macOS 15.2 is expected to be released publicly in early December. It also brings new Apple Intelligence features, including Image Playground and ChatGPT integration for Siri. It's also getting a new weather menu item that can give you the outside temperature at a glance.The new AirPlay experience includes a new menu pop-up asking what do you want to show" on Apple TV, with three large buttons... Continue reading...

Image: Kojima Productions It took a few years, but Sam Porter Bridges has finally trekked his way to Xbox. Kojima Productions announced today that the director's cut of Death Stranding is now available on the Xbox Series X / S. At launch, for a limited time," the port will be available for 50 percent off.Death Stranding first launched in 2019, as Hideo Kojima's first release after going independent, following a messy split with Konami. The director's cut - which isn't really a director's cut - launched two years later on the PS5, and the game has also been ported to PC, Mac, and iOS. As part of today's announcement, the studio also launched the game on Luna, Amazon's fledgling game streaming service.The news comes as Kojima Productions is expanding quite a bit... Continue reading...

Image: Microsoft Microsoft appears to be stepping back from charging Microsoft 365 Personal and Home subscribers another $20 per month to get access to AI-powered Office features. The software giant quietly announced it's making Copilot Pro features part of its Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions last week, but only in Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand for now.It's been nine months since we introduced consumers to Copilot in our Microsoft 365 apps via Copilot Pro. We've spent that time adding new features, improving performance, and listening carefully to customer feedback," says Microsoft in a press release spotted by ZDNet. Based on that feedback, we're making Copilot part of our Microsoft 365 Personal and... Continue reading...

Pokemon developer Game Freak's unreleased Project Bloom game is included in the sale. | Image: Private Division Take-Two Interactive is selling off its indie games label Private Division, which published titles such as The Outer Worlds and OlliOlli World, following rumors over the summer that Take-Two laid off most of Private Division's staff.Take-Two did not disclose the buyer of Private Division or how much they paid. In an emailed statement to The Verge, Take-Two spokesperson Alan Lewis wrote:

Image: Cath Virginia/ The Verge The Federal Trade Commission has charged Sitejabber, an online review platform, with violating its new fake reviews rules by using point-of-sale reviews to misrepresent what customers think about products. In one of its first enforcement actions under new rules banning companies from making or selling fake reviews, the FTC is ordering the company to stop.The FTC says Sitejabber deceptively" punched up businesses' review counts by incorporating responses to point-of-sale questionnaires asking customers to rate and review their shopping experience, before they'd actually gotten any products or services. It also alleges that by giving its clients tools to publish that feedback on their own sites, Sitejabber enabled them to mislead people... Continue reading...

Striking New York Times tech workers have created a custom Connections puzzle so fans can get their daily fix without crossing the digital picket line.The Strike Edition" puzzle was made on a website that lets people create their own Connections. The workers, part of the New York Times Tech Guild, specifically asked NYT readers not to play NYT games when the strike began on Monday, so the custom puzzle offers a way to play while still respecting the Guild's wishes.We have seen a groundswell of support from subscribers who have been proudly tweeting about purposely breaking their game streaks to support our strikers," says Jen Sheehan, spokesperson for the NewsGuild of New York.The Guild didn't make the website themselves; the site... Continue reading...

Image: Laura Normand / The Verge Big Tech leaders from across the industry are lining up to congratulate Donald Trump on his victory in the US presidential election. Trump has butted heads with many of the executives now cozying up to the soon-to-be president, who recently threatened to throw Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in prison and said Google could be broken up because its search results are rigged."Despite these comments (and the conflicts during Trump's previous presidency), many of the tech CEOs targeted by Trump in the past are now coming forward with statements about his win. Here's what some of the biggest names in tech are saying:Apple CEO Tim CookCongratulations President Trump on your victory! We look forward to engaging with you and your administration to... Continue reading...

Image: Square Enix The game's final episode also teases a larger Life is Strange universe to come. Continue reading...

Image: Hugo Herrera / The Verge On the campaign trail, Donald Trump said a lot of things about electric vehicles. He said he would end the electric vehicle mandate on day one," that EVs don't work," and that they benefit China and Mexico while hurting American autoworkers.But he has also closely aligned himself with Elon Musk, who runs the biggest EV company in the US. And he will likely have Musk continuing to whisper in his ear on important policy matters moving forward, even going so far as to promise to appoint the mercurial billionaire to a role in his administration.So now that he's the president-elect, what will he actually do that will affect the auto industry and its tenuous shift to electric vehicles?First off, he said he would rescind all unspent... Continue reading...

Google's Pixel Watch 3 is an excellent upgrade over its predecessor, with a wealth of new fitness features and smarts. | Image: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge If you thought you needed to wait until Black Friday to score a steep discount on the new Google Pixel Watch 3, we've got some good news: right now, Wellbots is giving readers of The Verge an exclusive $75 discount, dropping the wearable down to a new all-time low price until November 12th. The 41mm, Wi-Fi-enabled configuration starts at $274 ($75 off) from Wellbots when you apply code VERGEBF75, while the same code drops the price of the 45mm Pixel Watch 3 with Wi-Fi down to $324 ($75 off).Google managed to pack an impressive number of noteworthy features into its latest wearable, which is why it's our favorite fitness smartwatch for Android users. It's an even better fitness and health tracker than before, with custom running... Continue reading...

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Scott Olson, Getty Images Donald Trump clinched a presidential victory, ushering in another term of environmental rollbacks that'll make it more difficult to safeguard our air, water, and climate.Environmental [regulation] is the biggest tool for stopping growth ... it costs much more to do things environmentally clean," Trump said in a rambling three-hour interview with Joe Rogan on October 25th, when he falsely claimed the US had the cleanest air and cleanest water" under his watch.The last time he was president, Trump slashed air and water protections, replacing them with weaker rules that, over time, were expected to lead to thousands more deaths from pollution. Now, his administration could take even more extreme action if it follows eye-popping... Continue reading...

Mac Mini power button got you down? Try a power schedule! | Screenshot: YouTube Apple's new Mac Mini looks like someone hit the Mac Studio with a shrink ray, and I love it. But there is at least one, uh, hot-button issue: you have to reach underneath it to power it on. If that bothers you (and you're not into flipping it upside down so it looks like it's wearing a little hat), you can automate when it starts up and shuts down by creating a power schedule. I'll tell you how.There are plenty of reasons you might want to do this. I did it on my MacBook Air because I don't use it that often, and I got tired of opening its lid only to find a dead laptop. Someone else might want their computer to wake up in the middle of the night to perform scheduled backups. Others might need to shut down their Mac for business... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Lyft is teaming up with a trio of autonomous driving startups as it races to keep up with Uber, which has also struck a number of deals to put robotaxis on its platform.Today, the ridehail company said it was teaming up with three different autonomous driving companies: Mobileye, May Mobility, and Nexar. Mobileye and May Mobility plan on deploying autonomous vehicles on Lyft's network, while Nexar, which makes smart dash cams, will work with Lyft on using its video telematics to create data-driven solutions that accelerate the deployment of AV technologies."Nexar said it has over 45 petabytes of real-world footage, spanning 200 million miles driven monthly, with over 5 trillion images and over 59 million videos," which it says... Continue reading...

AMD's 7800X3D successor is also better at non-gaming workloads this time around. Continue reading...

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images Donald Trump has been declared the winner of the 2024 presidential election. Trump, who announced his reelection campaign in 2022, is the second president in US history to be elected to two nonconsecutive terms. Trump declared victory early on Wednesday, followed by The Associated Press, The New York Times, and other outlets.Trump has made immigration, the border, and the economy hallmarks of his reelection campaign. As the Republican nominee, he promised mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, suggested that he'd sign a ban on abortion after 15 weeks, and pledged to embrace Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. His allies at the Heritage Foundation and the America First Policy Institute have drafted hundreds of executive orders... Continue reading...

Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images Arizona resident Jacqueline McAferty is suing Elon Musk and his pro-Trump America PAC in a Texas federal court, alleging that the PAC's $1 million-a-day lottery to registered voters in swing states was fraud. The proposed class-action lawsuit was filed a day after a Philadelphia judge denied the city's request to order Musk to end the lottery - and seems to have been spurred by Musk's legal defense in the Philadelphia case.The complaint, filed in a federal court in Austin, alleges that Musk falsely claimed the PAC would choose sweepstakes winners randomly when the selections were, in fact, predetermined. The complaint cites comments made yesterday by Chris Gober, a Republican lawyer CNBC identified as America PAC's former treasurer.... Continue reading...

Sundar Pichai. | Image: Laura Normand / The Verge Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees ahead of Election Day to make sure the products we build" are a trusted source of information to people of every background and belief."As with other elections, the outcome will be a major topic of conversation in living rooms and other places around the world," Pichai said in an internal memo on November 4th obtained by The Verge and first reported on by The Washington Post. And of course, the outcome will have important consequences."Whomever the voters entrust, let's remember the role we play at work, through the products we build and as a business: to be a trusted source of information to people of every background and belief. We will and must maintain that."Naturally, Google has... Continue reading...