The Verge

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Hopefully, by now, you've read through my written review of the Sonos Ace headphones. They're an extremely impressive first effort from the company, but with several features still in the coming soon" column, it feels like they were rushed.In this video review, I go deeper into what Sonos got right with the Ace and what still needs work. There's also a segment where I cover why these aren't quite the magical Wi-Fi headphones that many of the brand's most loyal customers had long dreamed of. Crucially, the Ace can't be grouped with other Sonos speakers, but at one point, the company prototyped headphones that could.It turns out, they sucked - at least within the confines of today's technology. This Reddit AMA post goes into more... Continue reading...

SpaceX is aiming to perform a controlled reentry for Starship, with a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. | Image: SpaceX SpaceX sent the Starship vehicle on its fourth flight test on Thursday. The vehicle lifted off at 8:50AM ET and separated from its Super Heavy booster rocket without issue. While the Starship continues on its path toward the Indian Ocean, a livestream from SpaceX showed the booster rocket executing a landing burn and splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico as planned.As of 9:42AM ET, the stream is live once again, showing views from the Starship during reentry.You can watch the livestream via SpaceX's account on X or via third-party streams like the NASASpaceflight channel broadcasting from near the launch site.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge DuckDuckGo has launched private AI chats, allowing you to anonymously access AI models like GPT-3.5 Turbo and Claude 3 Haiku. It won't store your chats, nor can the companies behind each AI model use them for training - saving you from jumping through a settings menu just to opt out.To keep your chats anonymous, DuckDuckGo calls the chat models on your behalf, replacing your IP address with its own. This way it looks like the requests are coming from us and not you," DuckDuckGo says. However, DuckDuckGo notes that the AI providers may store chats temporarily," but they can't trace them back to you. Image: DuckDuckGo As noted in DuckDuckGo's privacy policy page, it removes all metadata containing your personal... Continue reading...

Screenshots from the Leica Lux camera app. | Images: Leica Leica wants in on Fujifilm's film simulation hype, so it's bringing its own color profiles to iPhone users by way of a new Leica Lux app - complete with a paid subscription.Leica Lux is a new camera app available on the App Store loaded with 11 color profiles (dubbed Leica Looks") designed to match current Leica cameras and classic film-inspired aesthetics. The Lux app can be used in a fully automatic mode like Apple's own camera app, but it also has an Aperture mode" using software to mimic the style and bokeh of multi-thousand-dollar lenses like the Summilux-M 35mm f/1.4 ASPH and classic Noctilux-M 50mm f/1.2 ASPH of 1966. Image: Leica The Lux app's manual exposure controls, which are restricted to paying... Continue reading...

The first four Nerf N-Series blasters shipped to reviewers. When I was a kid, It's Nerf or nothing" meant you couldn't find a better dart blaster. Starting today, it means you'll have to buy Hasbro's own overpriced darts if you buy Hasbro blasters for your kids.The company is revealing its new Nerf N-Series lineup today, and a new N1" dart it's calling the future" of the Nerf brand - a future where Hasbro blasters for 8- to 14-year-olds only fire Hasbro darts that cost three to five times the competition. Lose a dart? That'll be 25 cents, because only official darts have the patented nub that pushes a safety mechanism out of the way. Nerf says it literally built 1,000 different darts to get the range, accuracy, and safety it wanted. The integral nub... Continue reading...

Photo by Mu Yu / Xinhua via Getty Images Good luck finding a bicycle - an especially an e-bike - made in the US.It only took 30 years for the US to lose its entire bike manufacturing industry. China dominates global bike manufacturing, with imports accounting for 97 percent of bikes purchased in the US, according to one report. Indeed, China has captured some 86.3 percent of the US bike market. And now tariffs threaten that market.Congressman Earl Blumenauer sees an opportunity. The 75-year-old Democrat from bike-friendly Portland, Oregon, is introducing a new bill that aims to re-shore domestic bike manufacturing by stealing it back from China while also helping protect electric bikes from high tariffs that could put them out of reach for many Americans.China dominates... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Google launched its note-taking app NotebookLM last year for researchers, students, and anyone who needs to organize the information they've gathered. Now, users can now upload Google Slides and web URLs as sources, not just the Google Docs, PDFs, and text files it accepted previously.The new Notebook Guide also reads sources in NotebookLM and creates study guides, FAQs, or briefing documents, and inline citations can point to your own sources to fact-check AI responses - up to 50 sources per notebook," or project, and each source can be 500,000 words long. Previously, people could only upload five sources.Users can also now ask questions about charts, images, and diagrams they uploaded to the platform because NotebookLM is running... Continue reading...

The Aptoide iOS game store launches in closed beta today in Europe. | Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge Aptoide is the fourth third-party iOS marketplace to launch in Europe. Will its unique model find success where others have struggled? Continue reading...

The Brick Cross Train Station. | Image: Brickester (Lego BrickLink) Four months ago, a Lego fan earned around half a million dollars when Lego put his limited-edition set on sale. Now, Lego is opening orders for round two of the BrickLink Designer Program at 8AM PT / 11AM ET on Thursday, June 6th - featuring five more limited-edition sets, each a fan's dream come true.They're charming, quaint, look like wonderful playsets, and the fan designers will get 5 percent of the proceeds from each sale! My eye's on the incredibly detailed Brick Cross Train Station... but wife and I already splurged on last time's Parisian Street so I'd probably best not!Ready for high-res images, prices, and designer video interviews around each new set? Here you go:Ominous Isle - $239.99I am in awe of how many Lego hot... Continue reading...

Samsung's MicroLED TV has an almost bezel-free design and comes in 89-, 101-, and 114-inch sizes. | Image: Samsung Samsung started on a quest to sell massive and massively expensive MicroLED TVs with its modular The Wall design in 2018, and now we have these three options: 89, 101, and 114 inches.The most affordable" MicroLED TV offering in the lineup is the $109,999.00 89-inch model, then the 101-inch for $129.999.00, and the biggest one at 114 inches for a whopping $149,999.00. That's enough to buy a Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen.Each MicroLED is self-emitting, with no backlight, so it works similarly to OLED but without a similar risk of burn-in while still delivering deep blacks and high contrast. The LEDs are assembled in bezel-less panels so that can also be set up in almost any , as we saw with The Wall displays intended for commercial applications... Continue reading...

Image: HBO The first season of HBO's The Last of Us covered the first game in the series, but it looks like season 2 will need a little more time to explore the sequel. In an interview with Deadline, co-creator Craig Mazin explained that the story of The Last of Us Part II will take at least two, and possibly three, seasons to fully cover. And as a result, the show's second season will be a few episodes shorter than the first.The story material that we got from Part II of the game is way more than the story material that was in the first game, so part of what we had to do from the start was figure out how to tell that story across seasons," Mazin explained. When you do that, you look for natural breakpoints, and as we laid it out, this season,... Continue reading...

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Nvidia has become the second most valuable company in the world. On Wednesday afternoon, the chipmaking giant's market capitalization hit $3.01 trillion, putting it just ahead of Apple at $3 trillion.As Nvidia dominates the AI race with its flagship H100 chip, the company's market cap has only continued to rise. Nvidia became a $1 trillion company in May 2023, then skyrocketed past $2 trillion in February of this year, making it more valuable than both Amazon and Alphabet. Screenshot: The Verge In May, Nvidia reported making a whopping $14 billion in profit on account of all the chips it's selling. Nvidia now only trails behind Microsoft, which currently has a market cap of $3.15 trillion. The chipmaker's stock... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google Sheets now offers conditional notifications, a new feature that lets users set up rules to receive an email notification when certain spreadsheet cells change in any document where they have editing access.From now on, users can set rules in Google Sheets to receive notifications when certain criteria are met, like an updated column value or changes to a specific range of cells.Sheets recently snagged a few features Excel users have had for years, like letting users create easily formatted tables in Sheets and adding smooth scrolling. Now, with conditional notifications, Sheets adds a feature associated with project management tools like Airtable. It also seems pretty easy to set up compared to Excel, which also has more... Continue reading...

Internet for when your internet goes down. | Image: T-Mobile T-Mobile's big home internet push continues, now with a new way to sign up for the service: as a backup option.The company is offering a new Home Internet Backup plan starting at $30 per month (including an autopay discount) that's designed to supplement your cable or fiber internet connection in the event of an outage. Seems handy if your internet is down a lot! But it also seems like overkill for most people, especially considering that most of T-Mobile's phone plans already come with plenty of mobile hotspot data.Like T-Mobile's standard home internet service, the backup plan comes with a gateway router that connects to T-Mobile's cellular data network. The backup internet plan comes with up to 130GB of 5G data each month, which... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Google Maps is changing the way it handles your location data. Instead of backing up your data to the cloud, Google will soon store it locally on your device.In an email sent to users, Google says you have until December 1st to save all your travels to your mobile device before it starts deleting your old data. Timeline - previously known as Location History - is the feature that tracks your routes and trips based on your phone's location, allowing you to revisit all the places you've been in the past.But now, instead of tying all of this information to your Google account, the company will link it to the devices you use. Google first announced this change in December 2023 as part of its efforts to double down on privacy. The company... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge For parents, it can feel like a no-brainer to let their kids have an iPad thanks to its built-in parental control feature, Screen Time. But the system is also undeniably buggy, as most parents will attest. Now, Apple is fixing one of the software's worst bugs - an apparently obscure one that would let kids see the worst parts of the internet despite settings to stop that, reports Joanna Stern for The Wall Street Journal.The bug goes like this: kids can circumvent content restrictions by entering a specific string of characters into Safari's browser bar. Security researchers Andreas Jagersberger and Ro Achterberg reported this bug twice in 2021 and, both times, were told that it wasn't a security flaw, Stern writes. She also notes that... Continue reading...

Image: Google Google is acquiring software virtualization company Cameyo in a push to deeply integrate virtualized Windows app support into ChromeOS. Google was already working closely with Cameyo, and now it's bringing this key virtualization expertise and technology in-house.Google partnered with Cameyo last year to deliver a virtual application experience for legacy Windows desktop apps that was integrated into ChromeOS. This included local file system integration, virtual apps as progressive web apps, and even enhanced clipboard support.Cameyo's Virtual App Delivery (VAD) integration into ChromeOS is designed for businesses that are looking to move away from Windows or even add some ChromeOS devices into the mix. It allows businesses to continue... Continue reading...

Screenshot: NASA The third attempt at a crewed launch of the Boeing Starliner was a success. On Wednesday at 10:52AM ET, the spacecraft lifted off atop the United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and now has reached a safe, stable orbit."The Starliner will bring NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams to the International Space Station about 24 hours from now, where they'll test the end-to-end capabilities of the Starliner system, including launch, docking, and return to Earth." The two astronauts will stay at the ISS for about a week before parachuting down in the western portion of the US.

Antonio Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, speaks during a press conference at the UN Climate Change Conference COP28. | Photo: Getty Images The climate as we know it may be in the rear-view mirror, and there is precious little time to change course before careening past a dangerous threshold for global warming.That was the sentiment expressed by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres during fiery remarks, which followed new data released today by the World Meteorological Organization and the European Commission's Copernicus Climate Change Service.Like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, we're having an outsize impact. In the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs. We are the meteor," Guterres said in the speech he delivered from American Museum of Natural History in New York City - where dinosaur skeletons tower above visitors in the lobby - on World... Continue reading...

Photo by Joe Raedle / Getty Images Boeing's Starliner will make its third attempt to launch two NASA astronauts into space on Wednesday. The spacecraft is scheduled to lift off at 10:52AM ET from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. You can watch the livestream from NASA's YouTube channel or in the video embedded below.With the help of the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket, the Starliner will send flight commander Butch Wilmore and pilot Sunita Williams to the International Space Station, where they'll dock for about a week to evaluate the spacecraft.Boeing's Starliner made its first launch attempt in May following several delays. But NASA scrubbed the launch due to a faulty oxygen relief valve on the ULA Atlas V rocket's second stage.The... Continue reading...

Image: Archer Archer Aviation, a leading electric aviation company based in San Jose, California, announced that it has received a Part 135 air carrier certification from the Federal Aviation Administration, which the company will need to operate an on-demand air taxi service.That puts Archer on the cusp of launching a fully fledged commercial service using its electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle (eVTOL). The company has also received Part 145 certification, which authorizes it to conduct specialized aircraft repair services. The FAA also recently issued the final airworthiness criteria for the Midnight aircraft. Archer is only the second eVTOL company to receive Part 135 certification, after Joby Aviation in 2022.That puts Archer on the... Continue reading...

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images Asana's platform already helps teams lay out tasks and see who is assigned which responsibilities, and now it says AI teammates" will step in with advice and plans for who should work together to get things done.In a press release, Asana says its AI model can use stored information about the historical relationships and past projects of teams to assign work to the people with the best-matched skill sets, like tagging designers who know brand styles to work on creative projects. It can also look for missing information before responding to a request and proactively reach out to gather that data for the team.According to Asana co-founder and CEO Dustin Moskovitz, We're able to do this better than anyone else because we built Asana on... Continue reading...

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 in October 2025, but the company is now taking the unusual step of reopening its beta program for Windows 10 to test new features and improvements.Windows 10 already got the AI Copilot feature that was originally exclusive to Windows 11, and it may well get other features soon. To bring new features and more improvements to Windows 10 as needed, we need a place to do active feature development with Windows Insiders," explains Microsoft's Windows Insider team in a blog post. So today, we are opening the Beta Channel for Windows Insiders who are currently on Windows 10."Microsoft hasn't revealed what additional Windows 10 features it plans to test next, but Windows Insiders can opt into the... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge AT&T and Verizon have resolved an outage causing dropped phone calls across the US. The issue seemingly affected calls between customers of the two services.In the midst of the outage, AT&T spokesperson Jim Kimberly told The Verge, Our network is not experiencing a nationwide outage. There is a nationwide issue that is affecting the ability of some customers to complete calls between carriers. We are working closely with Verizon to determine the nature of the issue and what actions need to be taken."Verizon spokesperson Kevin H. King also said that the network was operating normally" but noted that customers primarily in the Northeast and Midwest were having issues when calling or texting with customers served by another carrier."

The Zotac Zone. | Image: Zotac It's handheld season, and the Asus ROG Ally X and MSI Claw 8 AI Plus aren't the only second-gen Windows gaming handhelds in town - GPU manufacturer Zotac has officially revealed its Zone at Computex, and it does a few things differently than the competition.Zotac already teased that the Zone would have an OLED screen, something that only the Steam Deck OLED has managed in PC handhelds before - as well as two-stage adjustable triggers like an Xbox Elite gamepad and drift resistant Hall effect joysticks. But did you know it'll also have symmetrical PlayStation-esque joysticks, programmable dials around each one, twin Steam Deck-like trackpads, a small built-in kickstand, a Windows Hello camera instead of a fingerprint reader, and both... Continue reading...

But first, here is an image of Jensen Huang not signing a women's chest. | Photo: Getty Images Well, here's Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, signing a woman's chest in a crowded booth at Computex. In the video below, you can see he asks whether this is a good idea before he eventually signs the woman's top. He then returns to signing more traditional fare.This isn't an unusual sight when it comes to actors or musicians. But can you imagine Tim Cook doing that after an iPhone event? Or Sundar Pichai after Google I/O?Yet those men also cultivate very different public images than Huang. Instead of hoodies, double polos, thousand-dollar T-shirts, or business suits, he's typically decked out in some kind of leather jacket. What he wants you to know from that sartorial choice is clear: he's not like regular CEOs. He's a cool CEO.... Continue reading...

Oprah is in shambles. | Photo by Valerie Macon / AFP via Getty Images Apple has announced that Reese's Book Club has found an official home within Apple Books. The Hollywood star has amassed a strong following of readers who vibe with her tastes, the likes of which can send featured titles into the stratosphere. It's the latest partnership her media company Hello Sunshine has inked with Apple, which also produces Apple TV Plus original series like The Last Thing He Told Me.You can follow Reese Witherspoon's monthly reading interests in audiobook format directly within the app, which now has a dedicated portal that makes it easy to find and purchase her latest recommendations.Reese's Book Club has proven wildly popular, with her influence quickly outpacing the likes of Oprah's. With more than 3 million... Continue reading...

If the Pixel 8A at $499 was a great value before, it's astronomically so at around $250. | Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge We're only a couple of weeks removed from Google I/O, where the tech giant gave us a glimpse of all the fun Gemini AI features coming to Android, Chrome, and its web products. Now, it's giving you a chance to save big money on the devices that are guaranteed to take full advantage of them. One of the biggest highlights from Google's summer sale saves you 50 percent on an unlocked Pixel 8A when you buy a Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro, or Pixel Fold.That would bring the Pixel 8A down to just $249.50 for the 128GB model or $279.50 for the 512GB model from Google. Just add both devices to your cart, and the discount will apply automatically. As an added bonus, Google will throw in a $50 store credit with any Pixel 8A purchase. It's a great... Continue reading...

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge If you've tried smashing YouTube's like" button today, you might've noticed that the thumbs-up icon just... disappears. As spotted earlier by 9to5Google, the like counter still goes up when you press it, but what's left is just an empty gray space where the thumbs-up icon should be.It seems like this is a widespread issue. Several users, including myself and my colleagues, have spotted the vanishing like button across several YouTube videos and in different web browsers. Despite this, the dislike button still works fine. Image: The Verge In a support page published Tuesday afternoon, YouTube says the like button isn't working as intended" and that it's looking into the issue. It also confirms that the thumbs-up... Continue reading...

Image: Meta Netflix isn't updating its Meta Quest app, but Meta's doing the next best thing: adding web browser support. That means you can stream Netflix in high quality from the Quest's Browser app, allowing you to swap between a flat 2D screen or a curved view to feel like you're at the theater.There hasn't really been a good way to watch Netflix on the Quest. Netflix launched an app for the Quest in 2019, but the app caps video resolution at a paltry 480p and hasn't received any recent updates. Until now, the Quest's Browser app also blocked users from watching Netflix.To get around this, some users have tried sideloading Netflix's Android app, while others have opted to access Netflix through a browser on the Quest's Virtual Desktop mode. But... Continue reading...

Photo by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge Woot is selling the Nintendo Switch OLED model for $314.99 ($35 off) for today (June 4th) only. The sale on Nintendo's fancier version of its long-in-the-tooth Switch console runs until tonight at midnight ET or once Woot sells out. And it's possible Woot will not run out of stock this time around because demand for a Switch is not what it used to be. Nintendo has sold so many Switch consoles that it feels like everyone who wants one - and their parents - surely must own one by now.It's true that the Switch came out over seven years ago, and a successor is confirmed by Nintendo to be announced by April 2025. But even though the Switch feels pretty dated, that doesn't mean it's not worth buying in 2024. There is a vast back catalog of... Continue reading...

Photo: David Pierce The single biggest reason to buy a Meta Quest 3 over its predecessors is how it lets you bring the real world into view - but the VR headset's still weird about your real-life hands, distorting the world around them. I always mess up the all-important look at your palm and pinch your fingers to access the menu" gesture, too.Now, Meta is fixing both of those issues. For starters, the new v66 update lets you tap a new button on your wrist to summon the menu! Image: Meta Wrist buttons" were already pioneered by a variety of VR games; now, you can use them for menus. Sure looks like the distortion is vastly reduced, too:Plus, Meta says it now has proper background audio for multitasking. Now you can launch... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge After an outage took down OpenAI's ChatGPT service for a few hours during Tuesday's early hours, the service experienced another major outage during the daytime in the US. ChatGPT is unavailable for some users," said OpenAI in its status message. We are currently investigating this issue." The second round of issues started at around 10:30AM ET, with thousands of reports of issues showing up on Downdetector.Many users of the ChatGPT mobile apps and the web service were not seeing replies; however, at about 1:17PM ET, OpenAI confirmed the issue was resolved.Around the same time that ChatGPT had its issues, some users reported problems with Google Gemini, Anthropic's Claude AI, and Perplexity AI web search. Google Gemini appears to be... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Several former OpenAI employees warned in an open letter that advanced AI companies like OpenAI stifle criticism and oversight, especially as concerns over AI safety have increased in the past few months.The open letter, signed by 13 former OpenAI employees (six of whom chose to remain anonymous) and endorsed by Godfather of AI" Geoffrey Hinton, formerly of Google, says that in the absence of any effective government oversight, AI companies should commit to open criticism principles. These principles include avoiding the creation and enforcement of non-disparagement clauses, facilitating a verifiably" anonymous process to report issues, allowing current and former employees to raise concerns to the public, and not retaliating against... Continue reading...

Image: 20th Century Studios It sure looks like the Alien franchise is making a return to its horror roots. After a brief teaser earlier in the year and some creepy behind-the-scenes footage, 20th Century Studios has released the first full trailer for Alien: Romulus, a standalone film from director Fede Alvarez. In short: it looks scary as hell. It also appears to really stick to the core tenets of the original film, with a small cast; dark, isolated setting; and only hints of the deadly alien itself.The story involves a group of scavengers scrounging around on an abandoned space station, before becoming the unfortunate prey of a xenomorph. It stars Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, and Archie Renaux. The film also has a very good new poster that hints at the... Continue reading...

Image: Lucasfilm Star Wars has a tendency to feel small. Even as the franchise has expanded with shows like The Mandalorian and Andor, the stories remain connected in some way to Luke and Vader, the Empire and the Rebel Alliance, and other elements introduced in 1977. A universe that once seemed vast and full has steadily narrowed its focus. But the latest show, The Acolyte, has a good solution for this: winding back the clock 100 years. You don't need to worry about the Skywalkers when they haven't been born yet.The show starts out as a whodunit, with a mysterious assassin targeting specific Jedi masters, killing them off one by one. Initially, all signs point to Osha (Amandla Stenberg), a former Jedi student who left the order because she was unable... Continue reading...