The Verge

Apple has released iOS 18 - plus iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia, watchOS 11, and other new updates - bringing several key updates to how the company's devices operate and setting the stage for generative AI features. The most discussed feature of iOS 18 is the Apple Intelligence suite. With the release of iOS 18.2 on [...]

Grok, Elon Musk's ChatGPT competitor, temporarily refused to respond with sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation," according to xAI's head of engineering, Igor Babuschkin. After Grok users noticed that the chatbot had been given instructions to not respond with those results, Babuschkin blamed an unnamed, ex-OpenAI employee at xAI for updating Grok's system [...]

On Friday, the Space Force published a picture taken last year from a camera mounted on the secretive X-37B space plane while high above the Earth. Space.com notes that the one other glimpse" of the plane in space was while it was deploying from Falcon Heavy's upper stage" during its December 2023 launch. The Space [...]

Elon Musk tweeted Saturday that federal workers would soon get an email requesting to understand what they got done last week." According to the New York Times, the email from the Office of Personnel Management went to agencies across the federal government that afternoon, including the FBI, State Department, and others, with a deadline for [...]

Hades II just received its second major update as part of its early access development, which was a great excuse for me to jump back in. Since its initial release, Iave logged more than 30 hours and actually held myself back from playing much more a I donat want to get tired of the game [...]

Apple is readying its MacBook Air line for an update to M4 chips in March, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman in today's Power On newsletter. With the slim laptops' spec bump, the MacBook line's M4 transition will be complete. Gurman didn't provide timing beyond that the laptops are coming next month, but as usual before [...]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 72, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If youare new here, welcome, hope you like gadgets, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, Iave been reading about Hasan Piker and calculator apps and car thieves and [...]

Apple released the first developer beta of iOS 18.4 yesterday, which users have since discovered contains support for robot vacuums in the Apple Home appthroughMatter. As spotted by 9to5Mac, Smart Home Centre confirmed the functionality using a Switchbot S10, which offers its own beta support for Matter. (Switchbot first added Matter robot vacuum support last [...]

There are so many people here that nobody can tell where the end of the line is. New people arrive, ask if thereas a line, shuffle into a blob of bodies idling and waiting for someone to give them instructions. The hallway is horribly warm a unclear if itas from the bodies or the heat [...]

Iam hard-pressed to find another example of a tech company announcing something and then waiting over four years to actually ship it, but thatas exactly the situation weave reached with Spotify and its long-delayed HiFi feature. The latest reports indicate itas finally coming in a matter of months as part of a Music Pro package [...]

AT&T has introduced SplitPay, a new payment option that lets those sharing a phone plan with others split their payment line-by-line, so no one person has to pay the entire bill. The company says the program is available for select postpaid wireless plans," and that those using SplitPay can still get multi-line discounts. It sounds [...]

If you were paying attention to CES this year, you may have come across the Asus Adol 14 Air Fragrance Edition's curious gimmick: a magnetically-attached oil diffuser in the lid that emits the aroma of essential oils once the laptop heats up. Asus has now announced details about a Fragrance Mouse" to go with it. [...]

The fuzz of the cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitor, alongside static grains and flickering scanlines, is a touchstone for a90s-era nostalgia. Itas shorthand for those halcyon days when technology was predominantly analog and millennial kids spent their summers shoving bulky tapes into VHS players, recording favorite bits of their after-school television shows, and making their own [...]

The Lenovo Legion Go S was supposed to change things. It was poised to show Valve isnat the only one that can build an affordable, portable, potent handheld gaming PC a you just need the right design and the right OS. I was intrigued when Valveas own Steam Deck designers told me this Windows handheld [...]

Die in the Dungeon is a new roguelike deckbuilder that pulls some ideas from Slay the Spire, one of my favorite games, but adds some dice-based twists that have me hooked. In Dungeon, your goal is to survive through progressively harder maps of enemies by building a deck a but instead of collecting cards, youare [...]

It's true: Nvidia has just confirmed it shipped some RTX 5090, RTX 5090D, and even some RTX 5070 Ti graphics chips that were missing render units, as TechPowerUp originally reported - and that you'll be able to get a replacement if your card was affected. Nvidia GeForce global PR director Ben Berraondo tells The Verge: [...]

Following some apparent outages on Thursday, Reddit dealt with more issues Friday evening that lasted for around two hours. Initially, when I logged in on my desktop browser during Friday's outage, Reddit wouldn't load at all - I would just run into error pages. In an incognito window, the site loaded, though it seemed to [...]

Elon Musk's OpenAI rival, xAI, says it's investigating why its Grok AI chatbot suggested that both President Donald Trump and Musk deserve the death penalty. xAI has already patched the issue and Grok will no longer give suggestions for who it thinks should receive capital punishment. People were able to get Grok to say that [...]

The General Services Administration (GSA), which manages buildings owned by the federal government, is planning to shut down all of its electric vehicle chargers nationwide, describing them as not mission critical." The agency, which manages contracts for the government's vehicle fleets, is also looking to offload newly purchased EVs. The GSA currently operates several hundred [...]

Letas pause and look at what the Elon Musk administration has done so far. Thereas been a lot of panic about the immediate but somewhat abstract constitutional crisis as Elon Muskas misleadingly-named Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) rips the government apart. And as much fun as we all are having watching Congress render itself irrelevant [...]

Apple just released its first developer betas of a new round of software updates, and early testers have spotted support for Priority Notifications in the iOS 18.4 preview. It's an Apple Intelligence-powered feature that uses on-device processing to try to detect which updates are especially important and sort them into a separate section above your [...]

Around a dozen current and former federal workers are behind a new website created as an outlet to share anonymous stories and technical expertise about the Department of Government Efficiency's dismantling of government agencies. We the Builders" aims to be a secure outlet for government workers to share how their workplaces are being impacted by [...]

Apple is adding a recipes section to its News app that will be available to News Plus subscribers, according to a press release. The new section, Apple News Plus Food, will be available as part of iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4 when those updates release in April. The section will feature tens of thousands of [...]

It was hard playing a preview of South of Midnight because, 20 minutes in, I just started bawling. The demo for the action-adventure platformer starts at the beginning of chapter three. The protagonist, Hazel, is working her way through a swamp trying to find her mother, who, along with their house, had been washed away [...]

Your phone comes with a number of useful features that we hope youall never have to use a and Crash Detection falls into that category. The idea is that movement sensors can detect when you're driving, and if you come to a sudden and abrupt stop, your phone or watch can then alert emergency services [...]

A week after this story was first published, Apple removed its Advanced Data Protection feature in the UK in response to government demands, calling itself agravely disappointeda with the move. Originally published February 13th. The encryption wars have reached a fever pitch, and the most contentious battle is not happening in the United States, where [...]

Soon, you'll be able to use Apple Intelligence with the Vision Pro. That includes a mix of features we've seen before, as well as a new feature called Create Memory Movie that's exclusive to the headset. Apple has been keen to position the Vision Pro as a unique tool for viewing memories, and that's the [...]

One of the big problems with a VR headset is that anything you want to do, you have to do inside it. Apple is looking to tackle that and other Vision Pro pain points with visionOS 2.4, which will offer improvements to the guest user experience and two new apps for finding new things to [...]

Anker is pushing portability limits with the launch of its giant 58-liter Solix EverFrost 2 dual-zone refrigerator / freezer. Itas portable because it has wheels, a handle, and slots for two batteries. But this thing weighs 64 pounds (29kg) empty and quickly reached 120 pounds when I filled my review unit with drinks and food. [...]

Apple has stopped offering its end-to-end encrypted iCloud storage, Advanced Data Protection (ADP), to new users in the UK, and will require existing users to disable the feature at some point in the future. The move comes following reports earlier this month that UK security services requested Apple grant them backdoor access to worldwide users' [...]

When I received my OnePlus Watch 3 review unit, part of me wondered, What's gonna be wrong with this one?" Now, I know. On the backplate, permanently engraved in stainless steel, is a typo. Instead of reading Made in China," it reads Meda in China." To be fair, this is a minuscule error. I didn't [...]

Following months of rumors, Apple has finally announced the iPhone 16E, a spiritual successor to the last-gen iPhone SE that's set to launch on February 28th. Preorders for Apple's forthcoming handsetstart at $599 with 128GB of storage and began Friday, February 21st. Like the most recent iPhone SE models it's replacing, the iPhone 16E offers [...]

Apple has announced an update to the iPhone SE, but this time around, it's called the iPhone 16E. As the rumors predicted, Apple's new budget iPhone model has an updated design with a Face ID-enabled notch, replacing the old model that had a home button and Touch ID interface. Another new element is that this [...]

According to recent observations, the European Space Agencynow says the probability of asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting our planet has dropped to just 0.16 percent. That follows an announcement yesterday from NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory saying there was a 0.28 percent chance the asteroid would impact Earth. Earlier this [...]

On Friday morning Coinbase announced that SEC staff have agreed in principle to dismiss its unlawful enforcement case against Coinbase, subject to Commissioner approval." CEO Brian Armstrong called it great news" in a post on X, saying it would be a full dismissal with no fines paid and no business changes while thanking the Trump [...]

Android Auto users are experiencing wireless connectivity issues following its recent updates. As seen by Android Authority, some Reddit users report that attempting to wirelessly connect to vehicles via the Android platform is causing their phones to reboot. Others are finding that wireless connectivity is refusing to work entirely. Google told The Verge that its [...]

On the one hand, Appleas latest iPhone is a huge victory. The iPhone 16E comes with most of what youad want from a smartphone a a modern processor, a good camera, nice design a for hundreds of dollars less than youad typically spend on a brand-new device. On the other hand, itas a bit odd [...]

The Nothing Phone 3A and 3A Pro have leaked in new images and videos that show off the two phones' designs and detail the key specs. So far, the two phones appear to be almost identical, with only two camera changes - and slightly different rear camera designs - to pull them apart. First Android [...]

Almost 18,000 Swagtron electric scooters are being recalled by Walmart due to fire and safety concerns regarding their lithium-ion batteries. There have been seven reports of SG-5 Swagger 5 Boost batteries overheating, smoking, melting or igniting" according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), including a fire that caused burn injuries and substantial property damage" [...]

Fortnite continues to be extremely weird in its new season. The battle royale game is returning to a heist theme for Chapter 6: Season 2, which has been dubbed Lawless." Players will be able to break into bank vaults, rob armored cars, and even perform robberies on the train that services the island. Also, there's [...]

Elon Musk spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Thursday, giving a strange and often inarticulate on-stage interview to Newsmax presenter Rob Schmitt. Schmitt was all smiles and enthusiasm, and managed to steer Musk through the half hour, never pausing to look back on the obvious logical inconsistencies, various falsehoods, and mathematical errors [...]

Reddit experienced international outages," NetBlocks, a global internet monitor, said in a post Thursday evening, though it appears the outages have resolved. In that post, the organization said that the incident was not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering." There was also a big spike of outage reports on Downdetector, with a peak of [...]

YouTube is about to officially launch a cheaper, premium lite" version of its subscription service in the US, Australia, Germany and Thailand, according to Bloomberg. This new tier will target viewers who primarily want to watch programs other than music videos," Bloomberg says. The publication didn't say what the price might be. YouTube piloted a [...]

Occidental, the oil giant that has tried to fashion itself as a climate tech leader, is being real clear now about capturing carbon dioxide emissions, which it sees as the next big thing for fossil fuel production. That shouldn't be surprising coming from a petroleum company. But Occidental has built up an entire arm of [...]

Rivian announced a significant milestone today, reporting its first positive gross profit" in its fourth quarter earnings for 2024. It was a sign that the struggling company's efforts to slash costs through the gut overhaul of its R1 electric vehicles is starting to yield some positive results. But dark clouds loom ahead, as the company [...]

Adidas's site and app will soon get Buy with Prime" Amazon fulfillment, allowing Prime members to receive free shipping and streamlined returns when ordering directly from the three-stripe brand. Beginning in the spring, paying US-based Amazon Prime subscribers will see Prime-eligible items for sale on adidas.com and through the Adidas app. By logging into their [...]

American Airlines has announced support for Apple's Share Item Location feature, potentially making it easier for passengers to be reunited with lost luggage tracked with an AirTag. The airline transported 226,405,000 passengers around the world last year, making it the busiest and one of the largest carriers in the US. Share Item Location was first [...]

Many members ofThe Verge's staff enjoy cooking - and all enjoy eating. Inspired by that admittedly obvious thought, we asked them to say which kitchen tools they most enjoy using these days. We got a wide and fascinating array of answers. They include gadgets that need to be charged, such as electric kettles, blenders, and [...]

Rumours about the next mainline Avatar series have been circulating ever since Nickelodeon announced that Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko were returning to lead Avatar Studios. But now, we finally know a bit more about where the franchise is heading after The Legend of Korra. Today, Nickelodeon announced that the Avatar saga (which began with [...]