The Verge

When Oregon resident Isabelle Reksopuro heard Google was gobbling up public land to fuel its data centers in her home state, she didn't initially know what to believe. "There's a lot of misinformation about data centers," she said. "Google has denied taking that land." Technically, she explains, The Dalles, a city near the Washington state [...]

Subnautica 2, the new underwater survival game from Unknown Worlds, took less than an hour to rocket up Steam's charts. The game has already sold more than one million copies, according to a press release, and as of this writing, Steam's charts show that Subnautica 2 is currently the fourth-most played game on the platform [...]

I revealed earlier this year that Microsoft was working on a new Xbox controller that includes Wi-Fi to connect direct to Xbox Cloud Gaming servers. It now looks like that controller has leaked, thanks to some new images from Brazil's Anatel regulator. Tecnoblog published the images today, showing a new, smaller Xbox controller that looks [...]

Razer just announced a new Blade 18 gaming laptop with an Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus chip. The flagship laptop is available now on Razer's site, starting at $3,999.99 with an Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti and configurable with up to an RTX 5090. That starting config is $500 more than the 2025 model with [...]

Today, I'm talking with Brendan Ballou, founder of the Public Integrity Project andauthor of a new book, called When Companies Run the Courts, about the rise of forced arbitration. Brendan's actually been on the show before - his previous book, Plunder, was about private equity taking over huge swaths of American life, and that conversation [...]

AMD is bringing its FSR 4.1 upscaling tech to older graphics cards. In an announcement on X, Jack Huynh, AMD's head of computing and graphics, says FSR 4.1 will roll out to RDNA 3 GPUs in July, followed by a launch on RDNA 2 chips in early 2027. This summer's update will allow Radeon RX [...]

Dyson has announced a new air purifying bladeless fan that's its first to incorporate an AI-powered camera for tracking the location of people in a room. Dyson already uses a mix of cameras and AI in its robovacs, but since the new Find+Follow Purifier Cool is stationary and not at risk of running into abandoned [...]

I remember a time when Alienware refused to make a thinner laptop - the company didn't want to compromise on its builds. But today, Dell is slapping the Alienware name on a piece of hardware that sounds utterly watered down. It's partly RAMageddon's fault. The new five-pound Alienware 15 is supposedly an entry-level gaming laptop, [...]

For a phone that gets a lot right, the Motorola Razr Fold is frustratingly hard to recommend. The Razr Fold is the company's first book-style foldable, and it enters the US market with something not currently available on the competition: truly excellent battery life that rivals the best slab-style phones. No need to worry if [...]

AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have agreed to work together under a new joint venture that aims to end wireless dead zones in the US. The partnership was announced today as an "agreement in principle," but if finalized would see the three carrier companies pooling their ground-based spectrum resources together to increase coverage in rural areas. [...]

The pill-shaped Insta360 Go 3S 4K action camera launched in June 2024 as an updated version of the 2.7K Go 3 that debuted a year prior. While last year's Go Ultra introduced a redesign with a larger sensor and higher frame rates, the Go 3S has stuck around as a smaller but still very capable [...]

For the last week, I've spent every evening unwinding by speeding through the Japanese countryside, blaring Babymetal as I take in the sights. Forza Horizon 6 is ostensibly a racing game, one in which you play an up-and-coming driver intent on making a name for themselves. But, like the rest of the series, it's also [...]

The tyranny of software is almost over. Since the first computer programmers wrote the first computer programs, we, the users of that software, have been forced to live in the worlds those programs create. The features are the features. The design is the design. Want something else, something better? Learn to code, I guess. Until [...]

Google is rolling out a new AI-powered "contextual suggestions" feature to Android users that recommends actions based on your daily habits, Android Authority reports. The feature is designed to predict your next action based on your location and habits - such as allowing music streaming apps to suggest your usual playlist when you arrive at [...]

Microsoft is on a mission to fix Windows 11, and part of that involves improving the often-frustrating Windows Update experience. While you'll soon be able to pause updates indefinitely, Microsoft is also adding a new feature that automatically rolls back problematic drivers that have been installed through Windows Update. Microsoft has created a new "Cloud-Initiated [...]

Microsoft Edge is adding a new feature that will allow its Copilot AI chatbot to gather information from all of your open tabs. When you start a conversation with Copilot, you can ask the chatbot questions about what's in your tabs, compare the products you're looking at, summarize your open articles, and more. In its [...]

The Trump administration is fighting for the right to keep some social media moderation advocates out of the US. On Wednesday, US District Court Judge James Boasberg heard arguments in a lawsuit between the nonprofit Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR) and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other Trump administration officials. The suit concerns [...]

In the ongoing fight for content and talent, YouTube is pitching itself as the connector between the creators and advertisers - and marketing its creators not just as the future of social media, but also of advertising, TV, streaming, and entertainment more broadly. At the company's annual advertiser event in New York on Wednesday, YouTube [...]

Hello and welcome to Regulator, the newsletter for Verge subscribers that goes into tech shenanigans that take place in the backrooms of Washington. Really, it sometimes does feel like the online series The Backrooms: a parallel universe with no internal logic, evil corporations lurking in the background, and mind-rending eldritch horrors around every corner. (Not [...]

A week ago, newly appointed Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro was busy regaling investors with plans to turn Disney Plus into the company's "digital centerpiece." By last Friday, though, his attention had presumably shifted to a fight with the Trump administration over free speech. Disney-owned ABC has now accused the administration of violating its First Amendment [...]

For the second year in a row, Netflix's ad-supported tier more than doubled its monthly viewerbase. During its 2026 upfront presentation, Netflix revealed that its $8.99-per-month plan reaches more than 250 million people around the globe, a significant leap from 94 million users reported last year. The streaming service reported earning $1.5 billion from ads [...]

If you've been meaning to grow your physical movie collection, now's a good time to do it. Through May 25th, The Criterion Collection is taking 30 percent off every disc on its site, including standard Blu-rays, 4K releases, box sets, and even films that are currently only available to preorder. The sale spans every category [...]

Instagram is once again cribbing from competitors like Snapchat and BeReal with a new photo-sharing format it calls "Instants," which are ephemeral photos that you can't edit and that you can only share with your close friends or followers that follow you back. Instants are available globally beginning on Wednesday as a feature in the [...]

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says its new Incognito Chat is "the first major AI product where there is no log of your conversations stored on servers." Messages in Incognito Chat aren't saved or stored in users' chat history, similar to incognito modes on other AI chatbots, but Meta says its version is different because it [...]

Maybe I'm just punch-drunk in my third week attending Musk v. Altman, but I have become very, very fond of Microsoft during the course of this trial. They don't want to be here any more than I do. Their opening statement was honestly one of the most Microsoft things I've ever seen. More than anything [...]

Sony announced its new flagship high-resolution camera, the A7R VI. The standout feature is its fully stacked full-frame sensor with 66.8 megapixels of resolution and up to 16 stops of dynamic range. That's only an increase of about six megapixels for the VI model, but its stacked architecture means a much faster readout speed for [...]

Following a series of cryptic newspaper ads and Instagram teasers that had watch fans speculating about its next collaboration, Swatch announced a new timepiece collection created with luxury watchmaker Audemars Piguet. Inspired by Swatch's iconic Pop watches from the '80s and Audemars Piguet's Royal Oak timepieces that first debuted in 1972, the new Audemars Piguet [...]

Google announced its new Googlebook laptop platform yesterday, and so far I've been left asking, "Why?" Why is Google blowing up its Chromebook and ChromeOS platform for this? I've been excited by the prospect of Android and ChromeOS unifying under the long-rumored Aluminium OS. The theory was that Aluminium might unite Android and ChromeOS under [...]

No one paid attention to the gunshots that echoed through the convention center. They were real enough, and so were the screams that accompanied them, in the sense that they were recordings of real people who, like guest stars on Law and Order, reenacted scenarios that had clearly been plucked from the headlines: a kidnapping, [...]

With the Switch 2 getting a price hike in September, this holiday season will be pivotal for Nintendo. That increased cost means that the company will rely heavily on new games to sell its current console - but as of right now the lineup for the second half of the year is sparse. However, without [...]

Canon has announced a new EOS R6 V mirrorless camera, a 32.5-megapixel camera with 7K video. It's the first full-frame EOS camera to carry the V moniker, signifying that it's designed primarily for video capture. The R6 V is based on the EOS R6 Mark III, but it eschews features like a viewfinder and a [...]

Amazon is bringing Alexa Plus to Amazon.com, integrating its LLM-powered AI assistant directly into the company's shopping experience. Beginning today, when you type a query into Amazon, you'll be talking to Alexa for Shopping, the company's new shopping assistant, powered by Alexa Plus. So, while a search for "toilet paper" will still return the expected [...]

Unitree is already one of the most recognizable names in the humanoid robot industry, but now it's pursuing even nicher sci-fi tech: giant mech suits. The Chinese robotics company has debuted the GD01, which it describes as "the world's first production-ready manned mecha," and it can be yours for a paltry $650,000. What is it [...]

Microsoft appears to be working on expanding its Xbox Game Pass subscription to China. References to "Project Saluki" have been discovered in a recent update to the Xbox PC app this week, with Microsoft describing the codename as "China market expansion for Game Pass, Rewards, and subscription tiers." While Microsoft offers a variety of games [...]

The Trump phone may finally be here: Trump Mobile's CEO told USA Today that the phone will begin shipping to buyers this week. The announcement comes as reports have gone viral this week alleging that preorders for the phone have been canceled. Trump Mobile CEO Pat O'Brien confirmed the release plans to USA Today over [...]

For the better part of 12 years, Apple owned the 5K monitor world - primarily because it made basically the only options. LG's 5K UltraFine was a solid, if bland choice, but many people bought a 27-inch iMac from 2014 for its 5K screen alone. Then in 2022, Apple finally gave the people what they [...]

At its peak, the Androscoggin paper mill in Jay, Maine, a rural town about 67 miles northwest of Portland, employed about 1,500 people - until a pulp digester exploded in 2020, forcing the mill to close permanently. In 2023, the 1.4 million-square-foot facility was purchased through a joint venture by JGT2 Redevelopment and a number [...]

Amazon's head of devices and services, Panos Panay, says that the company is "not necessarily" planning to release a smartphone, but has stopped short of denying it outright. It was previously reported that Amazon is developing an Alexa-enabled AI phone codenamed "Transformer," more than 10 years after it scrapped its ill-fated Fire Phone. Speaking to [...]

Sony's Xperia 1 flagships have looked more or less the same since 2020, but that's finally changing with the Xperia 1 VIII, which moves to a chunky square camera island. The phone also boasts what should be a substantially improved telephoto camera, along with an AI camera assistant that looks like an improved version of [...]

After two weeks of hearing from assorted witnesses that he was a lying snake, the jury finally heard from the lying snake himself: Sam Altman. At the end of the testimony, his lawyer William Savitt asked him how it felt to be accused of stealing a charity. "We created, through a ton of hard work, [...]

Apple's next iOS update could include something phone photographers have been waiting for: a lot more control over the Camera app. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the Camera app will be "fully customizable" in iOS 27 and users will be able to "pick their own set of controls - called widgets - that run along [...]

Meta announced on Tuesday that it's testing a Threads feature that lets users tag a Meta AI account to get answers to questions or context about a conversation on the platform. If you've spent any time looking at replies on X as of late, this new feature sounds a lot like Meta's take on people [...]

Starting Tuesday, parents can get more details about what their teens are up to on Instagram. Meta is adding a feature to its Teen Accounts that shows parents the "general topics their teens engage with," like "basketball" or "fashion." Meta also says it will soon start notifying parents when their teen adds a new interest [...]

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says Elon Musk did "huge damage" to the culture of the AI startup. During testimony as part of Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, Altman said Musk required OpenAI president Greg Brockman and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever to rank researchers by their accomplishments and "take a chainsaw through a bunch." Altman conceded [...]

This week at I/O, Google rolled out a series of major updates for Android Auto that include better sizing for unconventionally shaped screens, video streaming through YouTube, widget support, and of course, more AI-powered Gemini features. The company also announced some updates for cars that run on Google's built-in native software, including the ability to [...]

Google is announcing a new line of laptops coming in the fall called Googlebooks. Details are sparse for now, as the tease is just a small part of various Android announcements during Google's Android Show. But we do know this is a major new initiative in the laptop space for Google, seemingly designed to succeed [...]

Would it shock you to hear that Android 17 is filled with new AI-enabled features, like improved dictation and vibe-coded widgets? Fortunately, that's not all. The platform is getting non-AI updates too, from an emoji overhaul to a new screentime tool that helps you avoid distracting apps. Google has just revealed the biggest changes coming [...]

It is, once again, Gemini season. Google is announcing a host of new Gemini features during its pre-I/O Android showcase, many of which aim to help use your phone for you. You'll find Gemini in more places, like Chrome on Android, in your autofill suggestions, and all up in your apps - if you want. [...]

Panasonic has announced a new addition to its Lumix camera line with a compact body and fixed lens that's targeted at photographers instead of creators making video content. The Lumix L10 is available for preorder today with a black or silver finish for $1,499.99. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Lumix brand, the L10 [...]