The Verge

Camp Snap, a brand known for its budget-friendly screen-free digital cameras, has announced its first video camera. The new Camp Snap CS-8's design was inspired by the Super 8mm film cameras released by companies like Kodak and Canon in the 60s and 70s. Its functionality is similarly limited and streamlined to make the CS-8 user-friendly, [...]

The "spicy" mode for Grok's new generative AI video tool feels like a lawsuit waiting to happen. While other video generators like Google's Veo and OpenAI's Sora have safeguards in place to prevent users from creating NSFW content and celebrity deepfakes, Grok Imagine is happy to do both simultaneously. In fact, it didn't hesitate to [...]

The Google Pixel 9A is a midrange phone done right, offering a great balance of hardware, features, and value. Normally it costs $499, but now you can scoop up the 128GB model for an all-time low of $399 ($100 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and the Google Store. The Pixel A-series has long been our [...]

WhatsApp is adding another feature designed to protect you from group chat scams. Now, when someone you might not know invites you to a group chat, the app will display a new safety overview" that appears before you can even see the messages. The overview will include information about the group, including when it was [...]

Today, Roku announced the forthcoming arrival of Howdy, a new monthly subscription service that will give its users access to a massive catalog of on-demand films and series. Like other streamers, Howdy will feature a selection of programming licensed from other studios, including Lionsgate and Warner Bros., as well as some of its Roku Original [...]

Fox has finally revealed more information about its new streaming service that will offer access to news and sports across the media company's channels. The service, called Fox One, will cost $19.99 per month or $199.99 per year when it launches on August 21st - just weeks before the start of the 2025 NFL season [...]

When a Trump-branded phone on a Trump-branded mobile network launches sometime this year (if all goes according to plan), US regulators will face what's become a recurring conundrum in Donald Trump's presidency: how to regulate a product with ties to the head of state. Six Democratic lawmakers are confronting key federal agencies with that very [...]

General Motors claimed a new world record for EV driving on a single charge, after a Chevy Silverado EV traveled 1,059.2 miles without recharging its battery. The potentially record-breaking run took place over seven days on public roads near GM's Milford Proving Ground and Detroit's Belle Isle using smart driving techniques" that included limiting the [...]

Google DeepMind is releasing a new version of its AI world" model, called Genie 3, capable of generating 3D environments that users and AI agents can interact with in real time. The company is also promising that users will be able to interact with the worlds for much longer than before and that the model [...]

Google is set to take the wraps off the latest additions to the Pixel lineup in just a couple of weeks, but some devices might not be available at launch. A new report from WinFuture suggests that Google is having supply chain problems" that could push back the release of the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, [...]

Let's be real: the internet is full of a lot of the same stuff. From derivative content on social media to websites that all look the same, what was once a portal to new worlds and experiences has been feeling a bit dry recently, like I've seen all this stuff before. And now, even the [...]

Microsoft isn't done celebrating its 50th anniversary just yet. Multiple employees told me that Microsoft has created limited edition Windows XP-themed Crocs. They even come with a Clippy shoe charm if the Bliss wallpaper on your feet wasn't enough nostalgia. The anniversary edition Crocs are currently available for preorder for Microsoft employees, who "get first [...]

Amazon's unproven Project Kuiper satellites will be put to work next year, supplying internet access to rural Australians. The retail giant announced an agreement with Australia's state-owned National Broadband Network Company (NBN Co) on Tuesday to provide satellite internet to more than 300,000 eligible customers across the country by mid-2026. Australia's vast geography presents unique [...]

Gemini has arrived on the wrist. It's now in the latest Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 series, the Pixel Watch, and rolling out to a handful of other smartwatches. This is big. Huge, even. AI is out here disrupting life as we know it. Now, it's making the leap from phones and laptops and onto the [...]

xAI's new Grok Imagine tool is an AI image and video generator that encourages users to make NSFW content. In contrast to rival generative AI video tools like Google's Veo and OpenAI's Sora, which try to block users from generating anything seedy, the Grok chatbot's Imagine feature provides a Spicy" generation mode that actively directs [...]

Ziff Davis-owned IGN Entertainment has laid off staff, including eight members of the IGN Creators Guild. Those cuts represent 12 percent of the bargaining unit. The layoffs are the latest shift in the turbulent gaming media landscape. Earlier this year, Verge parent company Vox Media sold Polygon to GameRant owner Valnet, Giant Bomb went independent, [...]

After repeatedly leaving customers without smart control of their lights, Sengled has been booted from Amazon's Works With Alexa program. As first reported by TechHive, beginning August 1st, Sengled's Alexa skill for controlling its line of LED lights, plugs, switches, and sensors with your voice and routines is no longer available. In a statement to [...]

Valve founder Gabe Newell is setting out on a new adventure - and it doesn't involve Half-Life 3. Instead, Newell is acquiring Oceanco, the yacht-building company that's creating his $400 million super ship, as reported earlier by Boat International. In a post about the change, Oceanco says Newell's interest in the brand comes from a [...]

A Kindle lets you carry an entire bookshelf while on the go, which is why almost every year we recommend the e-reader in our guides to the best back to school essentials. With a new semester just around the corner, it's no surprise Best Buy is currently offering the latest versions of some of our [...]

OpenAI, which is expected to launch its GPT-5 AI model this week, is making updates to ChatGPT that it says will improve the AI chatbot's ability to detect mental or emotional distress. To do this, OpenAI is working with experts and advisory groups to improve ChatGPT's response in these situations, allowing it to present evidence-based [...]

The AI search startup Perplexity is allegedly skirting restrictions meant to stop its AI web crawlers from accessing certain websites, according to a report from Cloudflare. In the report, Cloudflare claims that when Perplexity encounters a block, the startup will conceal its crawling identity in an attempt to circumvent the website's preferences." The report only [...]

Newsletter company Ghost now lets publishers syndicate their posts across social platforms like Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon. With Ghost's free social web syndication feature, which is built on top of the ActivityPub protocol, just as people can visit your Ghost website in any browser, subscribe with any feed reader, or receive newsletters in any email [...]

Rivian is suing Ohio's Department of Motor Vehicles over the state's ban on car companies bypassing dealerships to sell cars directly to consumers. In the federal lawsuit, the electric vehicle company calls the ban irrational in the extreme," arguing that it decreases competition and reduces consumer choice. Rivian also notes that Tesla is allowed to [...]

Apple sold its iPhone 16 devices last year with a promise that a new AI-powered version of Siri would soon be a lot more personalized thanks to Apple Intelligence. Almost a year later, that Siri upgrade still isn't here, and Apple was forced to delay its promised improvements and remove an iPhone 16 commercial instead. [...]

If you prefer gaming on a PC instead of consoles, you should hook it up to a display that can support playing games at higher frame rates for a smoother experience. Most gaming monitors require you to choose between prioritizing resolution or fidelity, but you get both with Alienware's AW2725Q. The 26.7-inch 4K OLED display [...]

Amazon is splitting up its Wondery podcast studio just four years after acquiring it, as first reported by Bloomberg. As part of the change, the studio will shed around 110 employees, while Wondery CEO Jen Sargent will leave the company. In a statement to The Verge, Amazon spokesperson Alice Zhou confirmed that while Wondery will [...]

8BitDo has created its first wireless Xbox controller in partnership with Rare, a game studio acquired by Microsoft. The officially licensed controller features a gold and blue design, with plenty of Easter eggs to celebrate Rare's 40th anniversary. The $89.99 8BitDo Ultimate 3-mode Controller for Xbox - Rare 40th Anniversary Edition (yes, that's the product [...]

Hello, and welcome to Decoder! This is Casey Newton, founder and editor of the Platformer newsletter and cohost of the Hard Fork podcast. I'll be guest hosting the next few episodes of Decoder while Nilay is out on parental leave, and I'm very excited for what we have planned. If you've followed my work at [...]

Scenario: A radiologist is looking at your brain scan and flags an abnormality in the basal ganglia. It's an area of the brain that helps you with motor control, learning, and emotional processing. The name sounds a bit like another part of the brain, the basilar artery, which supplies blood to your brainstem - but [...]

Tesla approved a restricted stock award of 96 million shares, worth about $29 billion, to incentivize" the controversial billionaire to remain at the head of the company during a protracted legal battle over his original pay package. Last year, a Delaware court voided Musk's pay package, valued at more than $50 billion, arguing that the [...]

Spotify is increasing prices in several regions outside of the US, just days after posting disappointing earnings. Spotify announced on Monday that Premium subscribers across Europe, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific will be notified about pricing changes over the next month," providing an example email showing a 1 monthly increase [...]

On Monday, the Freedom of the Press Foundation filed a complaint against Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr. The filing, sent to the Office of Disciplinary Counsel at the DC Court of Appeals, alleges that Carr had repeatedly broken basic principles of conduct as a licensed attorney, including by leveraging his power to control media [...]

The original Nintendo Switch, which has cost $299.99 in the US since its release in 2017, is now priced at $339.99 on Nintendo's online store. Other first-gen Switch models are now more expensive, too, with the Switch OLED going from $349.99 to $399.99, and the Switch Lite increasing from $199.99 to $229.99. Nintendo said on [...]

Part of me still can't believe it, but Lenovo did the thing: it took a bonkers concept for a laptop with a rollable screen and built the tech into something you can actually own and use like a normal computer. Except, as conventional as the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 can be, it's far from a [...]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 92, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, I've kept my phone case on all week, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I am finally smashing my way through Donkey Kong [...]

The simple joy of gadgets - that's what Today I'm Toying With" is all about. It's our video series where we try to encapsulate that joy of playing with technology, sharing what it's like to experience gadgets that not all of us get to touch! Like a 3D printer that prints delicious chocolate, or the [...]

If you're looking to upgrade an older Android smartwatch, or want to give wearables a try for the first time, Samsung's Galaxy Watch 8 is a compelling choice. It has a new design, lets you access Google's Gemini AI from your wrist, and has a handful of new health and wellness features. It launched on [...]

The sudden firing of two high-ranking antitrust officials this week is signaling upheaval at an agency responsible for arguing some of the biggest tech monopoly cases in decades. Two top deputies to Department of Justice Antitrust Division chief Gail Slater were fired earlier this week for what a DOJ official would only explain as "insubordination" [...]

While the summer doldrums have hit Washington, the MAGA influencers can never truly go on vacation, especially if they've spent their careers promising to reveal the truth about Jeffrey Epstein. Although their politicians are now in power, they're getting stonewalled, and in the absence of juicy "Epstein files" to feed to their audiences, a new [...]

Fitness trackers have come a long way from the simple bands that tracked steps and little else. Modern trackers can monitor everything from your heart health to how well you've recovered from a hard bout of training. Even flagship smartwatches, which used to be lackluster trackers, have become pretty adept workout companions. Whatever your fitness [...]

I didn't expect a brief game about flies to make me emotional. But when I finished Time Flies, I nearly began to cry. Time Flies initially seems very silly. You play as a little buzzing fly that has to try and accomplish a bucket list of tasks before it, well, kicks the bucket, something that [...]

"We need to talk." Nobody likes to hear those words from their spouse. Especially when it's delivered in a grave tone as you rot on a couch in a grubby blankie, staring like a zombie while doomscrolling. "Wut?" I said, very intelligently. What came next was a compassionate but firm speech about how I was [...]

Keeping humans alive at home in post-agrarian societies requires refrigeration. Meat bags on the move must either load up a cooler with ice for a soggy weekend barbecue or do the evolved thing and use a 12V fridge instead. The $509.99 battery-powered BougeRV CRD2 40 refrigerator and freezer combo I've been testing for the last [...]

It has been another busy week. GPT-5 appears to be just around the corner... This week, I decode the meaning behind Mark Zuckerberg's "personal superintelligence" manifesto, and what it means for the broader AI race. Keep reading for my chat with a Figma exec on the company's IPO day, a bunch of good links, and [...]

Delta Air Lines is explaining more about its AI-assisted dynamic pricing model after coming under scrutiny for recent comments about the pricing. In November, Delta president Glen Hauenstein said at an investor day that we will have a price that's available on that flight, on that time, to you, the individual." However, responding to questions [...]

Apple CEO Tim Cook boasted about the potential of AI and the company's approach to developing it in a rare all-hands today that was reported on by Bloomberg. Apple has been slow to roll out some of its AI features and has stumbled with a planned AI-powered upgrade to Siri, which it delayed earlier this [...]

In the week's least surprising news, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy revealed that the company is exploring ways to bring ads to Alexa Plus, its new generative-AI-powered voice assistant. During a conference call following the company's second-quarter earnings report, Jassy said that "there will be opportunities, as people are engaging in more multiturn conversations [with Alexa [...]

A federal jury in Florida found Tesla partly liable for a deadly 2019 crash involving Tesla's Autopilot driver assist software, according to reports from The New York Times and CNBC. Tesla has been ordered to pay $200 million in punitive damages and about $43 million in compensatory damages, CBS News reports. It's a rare loss [...]

Fujifilm has raised prices on cameras and lenses across its lineup, with price hikes reaching into the hundreds of dollars. Among the hikes is an increase to the price of Fuji's ultra-popular X100VI from $1,599 to $1,799. The capable X-T5 has gone from $1,699 to $1,899. And the already very expensive GFX100 II has gone [...]

Finding peace among the chaos on campus can be more challenging than a midterm. But a quality pair of over-ear headphones can block out distractions when it's time to lock in. If that sounds like you, we've found a deal on the Bose QuietComfort Headphones, which are currently down to $229 ($130 off) at Amazon, [...]