The Verge

Merriam-Webster has settled on a word that represents 2025 - and that word is "slop." The dictionary-maker defines "slop" as "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence," something that many people have become familiar with as AI-generated content permeates the internet. This year, some of the [...]

If you're looking for a last-minute gift for a gamer, you're in luck. Both Best Buy and Target are offering the 128GB Meta Quest 3S VR headset for around $249 ($50 off) and include a $50 gift card on top of that. Best Buy has bundled the headset with a copy of The Walking Dead: [...]

Today, I'm talking with Prashanth Chandrasekar, who is the CEO of Stack Overflow. I last had Prashanth on the show in 2022, one month before ChatGPT launched. While the generative AI boom had tons of impact on all sorts of companies, it immediately upended everything about Stack Overflow in an existential way. Stack Overflow, if [...]

Most people know at least two things about 5K monitors: they look great, and they're usually expensive. The Apple Studio Display is the most popular model, and it costs $1,599. But I've been testing one that's similar in some important ways and costs just $355 (!?) at its cheapest-ever price. Unsurprisingly, at a fraction of [...]

"Not ideal." "Completely unacceptable." "Shameless." "Predatory." "Some bullshit." "Total bullshit." This is how musicians, producers, and others in the industry are describing the relentless spread of AI clones. Of course, AI fakes aren't new, but as the scammers have gotten more brazen, artists are responding with increasing furor. We got a taste back in 2023 [...]

Amazon has launched a new AI feature in the Kindle app that gives spoiler-free answers to questions about the book you're reading and confirmed that authors can't opt out from the feature. The company calls Ask this Book an "expert reading assistant" in its announcement and says that it's capable of answering questions about "plot [...]

When he was 19 years old, Brendan Foody started Mercor with two of his high school friends as a way for his other friends, who also had startups, to hire software engineers overseas. It launched in 2023 as essentially a staffing agency, albeit a highly automated one. Language models reviewed resumes and did the interviewing. [...]

A collision in space was narrowly avoided last week when a newly deployed Chinese satellite came within a few hundred meters of one of the roughly 9,000 Starlink satellites currently operating in low Earth orbit. SpaceX is laying the blame on the satellite operator for not sharing location data. "When satellite operators do not share [...]

iRobot, the owner of the Roomba robot vacuum, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, stating that it will be acquired by its contract manufacturer, Picea Robotics. The Chinese-based company assumed iRobot's $190 million loan earlier this month and, under the terms of iRobot's restructuring, will waive that debt, along with the $161.5 million iRobot owes [...]

After 35 years, the maker of the Roomba robot vacuum filed for bankruptcy protection late Sunday night. Following warnings issued earlier this year that it was fast running out of options, iRobot says it is entering Chapter 11 protection and will be acquired by its contract manufacturer, China-based Picea Robotics. The company says it will [...]

My introduction to Sudan Archives was the song "Nont for Sale" from her first EP Sink in 2018. I've been a diehard fan ever since. With each album, she finds new ways to sculpt the sound of her violin, contorting it in defiance of expectations. Athena found her in conversation with it, leaving its timbre [...]

Grok's track record is spotty at best. But even by the very low standards of xAI, its failure in the aftermath of the tragic mass shooting at Bondi Beach in Australia is shocking. The AI chatbot has repeatedly misidentified 43-year-old Ahmed al Ahmed, the man who heroically disarmed one of the shooters and claimed the [...]

Absynth is something of a cult classic in the soft synth world. It was originally released in 2000, and quickly found an audience among the growing cadre of people making music on computers. But its last major update, Absynth 5, was released in 2009, and Native Instruments officially discontinued the instrument in 2022, citing a [...]

By 2010, the iPhone era was in full swing. Smartphones were still a new and unfinished idea - the iPhone had only just gotten copy and paste! - but it was clear that these big slabs of glass were going to change the way we did pretty much everything. Apple was also already on an [...]

Here's a thought: what if the next-generation Siri is awesome? Not just awesome for setting timers and dictating text messages (though that would be nice), but so awesome and fun to talk to that people actually start falling in love with their iPhones. We may not be prepared for what happens next. On this episode [...]

I still wouldn't buy an Xbox Ally, and I still don't think the tweaked version of Windows that shipped with it is ready for primetime. The Xbox Full Screen Experience (FSE) needs work. But two months after I panned the cheaper $600 white Xbox Ally and wasn't quite sold on the $1,000 black one, one [...]

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on smartphones and digital imagery - real or otherwise - follow Allison Johnson. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started Remember the early days of [...]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 109, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, hope you're staying warm, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about Google Maps and shopaganda and life as a pop [...]

It's a small sample size, likely driven by Black Friday discounts and temporary virality, but the Nex Playground has gone from little-known console curiosity to best-seller. It's now on track to quadruple its sales from last year. According to research firm Circana, the Playground was the second best-selling console in the US for the week [...]

Native Instruments and Ableton have had incredible success with their custom MIDI controllers that integrate with their DAWs (digital audio workstations), Maschine and Live, respectively. Native Instruments' Maschine (yes, it's the name of the hardware and the software) and Ableton's Push are pretty much the gold standard for integration between music-making software and hardware. Serato [...]

As I'm sitting in my office writing this review, delicious, cheesy, garlicky scents are wafting up the stairs. I can hear whizzing and whirring, and the occasional clunk, as a robot chef in my kitchen is making macaroni and cheese. Its app tells me there are three minutes left in the process, and based on [...]

The Nex Playground is apparently one of the hottest consoles this holiday season thanks to its kid-friendly games and fun, motion-controlled gameplay. And now through December 14th, the cube-shaped console is on sale for its Black Friday low of around $199 ($50 off) at Amazon. There are some other great deals still available you might [...]

As a writer, I take the tools of my trade relatively seriously. I'm not crazy enough to drop $3,600 on a keyboard, but I also find typing on a MacBook for extended periods of time deeply unsatisfying - and distracting. So this spring, I started looking into distraction-free writing setups, which included an e-reader / [...]

Sektori is an old-school twin-stick shooter. Created by a former developer at Returnal studio Housemarque, it puts you in the role of a little ship that blasts through swarms of enemies, and you have to weave through them to get upgrades to help you survive. Often, my runs end after less than a couple minutes, [...]

A group of more than 150 parents sent a letter on Friday to New York governor Kathy Hochul, urging her to sign the Responsible AI Safety and Education (RAISE) Act without changes. The RAISE Act is a buzzy bill that would require developers of large AI models - like Meta, OpenAI, Deepseek, and Google - [...]

The long take, the unbroken tracking shot, "the oner" - whatever you want to call it, filmmakers agree that it's one of the most difficult technical achievements in cinema. It's a feat of creativity, but also great coordination and choreography when a single, tiny mistake can ruin a shot. Some famous examples: the casino scene [...]

Let's face it, it's easy to fixate on the big gifts that crowd around the Christmas tree. However, we'd argue that the true treasures are the small, useful, and thoughtful gifts tucked within stockings. That's why, for this guide, we've pooled together a bunch of tried-and-tested gadgets and goods to help bolster someone's everyday carry [...]

Today, Apple officially released iOS 26.2 for iPhone 11 and newer devices, which includes new Lock Screen customizations for you to adjust the opacity level, as well as the ability to use AirDrop with people who aren't in your contacts by sharing a one-time code with them instead. There are also new updates going out [...]

After announcing new Matter-compatible smart home devices and stylish wireless speakers over the past few months, Ikea continues to expand its consumer electronics offerings with three new wireless chargers. They're limited to 15W Qi2.0 charging rates but are well priced and feature designs that look more like home decor accents than traditional tech accessories. The [...]

Hollywood director Carl Erik Rinsch was convicted of scamming $11 million from Netflix to spend on luxury items, including five Rolls-Royces and a Ferrari, as reported earlier by Deadline. A New York jury found Rinsch guilty of several charges on Thursday, including fraud and money laundering. Rinsch, who's known for directing 47 Ronin, was charged [...]

Google Translate's latest update brings live speech translations, originally available only on the Pixel Buds, to any headphones you want, with support for over 70 languages. It's rolling out today in beta and just requires a compatible Android phone with the Translate app (unlike Apple's similar feature, which requires AirPods). It's one of a few [...]

Samsung's Frame TV is one of the coolest-looking TVs you can buy, doubling as wall art when you're not watching - but it's pricey. If you like the idea of a TV that displays art when not in use but is far more affordable, Hisense's S7N CanvasTV delivers a similar vibe for a lot less, [...]

When Bryan Fuller set out to make his first feature film, his goal was to make the kind of family-friendly scares that he loved as a kid. Think Gremlins or Ghostbusters. The creator of Hannibal and Pushing Daisies ended up crafting a story called Dust Bunny, about a young girl named Aurora who hires a [...]

HBO Max is launching curated channels, a new feature that will allow you to quickly jump into a continuous feed of a popular series or tune into a specific genre. When you select a channel on HBO Max, the streaming service will start you at the beginning of whatever's playing, while giving you the ability [...]

TCL has been a solid competitor in the midrange TV market for years, going head-to-head with Hisense. Not only are TVs from both manufacturers competitive on features, they even use similar nomenclature to categorize their TV lines - the TCL QM8 and Hisense U8, QM7 and U7, and QM6 and U6. But with TCL's new [...]

Amazon is continuing to celebrate The Game Awards, which took place on December 11th, with a big sale on titles that were nominated in their respective categories. The deals include a discount that brings the PC version of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which ended up taking home nine awards (including game of the year), back [...]

Every week at The Verge, we're tracking what's happening with Trump Mobile's promised and yet undelivered Android phone. Why? Because we cover phones. We also cover vaporware, which the T1 Phone 8002 (gold version) very well may be. The smartphone has now been delayed for months. Trump Mobile no longer claims that it will be [...]

This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest phones, smartwatches, apps, and other gizmos that swear they're going to change your life. Optimizer arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 10AM ET. Opt in for Optimizer here. This time last year, I'd cut [...]

You may not even know it, but you've almost certainly encountered songs made mostly or even entirely with AI. If you've scrolled on TikTok the last few weeks, you've probably heard "I Run" a few times, but there are countless others making their way around social and music platforms. AI tools in general, and Suno [...]

Where's the Trump Phone? We're going to keep talking about it every week. We've reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump Phone's whereabouts. As usual, we're still waiting for a response. In the meantime, we're publishing a little reminder of some wireless tech terms. You know, in case you forgot. 6G? 4K? 3D? [...]

The Tetris: My Play Watch may look like an Apple Watch, but it eschews most of the functionality you'll typically find on a smartwatch to focus on two things: playing Tetris and celebrating the game through a UI that's thoroughly Tetris-themed. It's very good at making you want to play Alexey Pajitnov's iconic tetromino-stacking puzzler, [...]

The YouTube watch screen has been given a new look on TVs. The redesign aims to provide a "more intuitive experience with easier navigation," according to YouTube's announcement, relocating the video title and several controls, and adding a new "Description" button to access creator information and other video features. I'm already seeing the update on [...]

The theme of this week is isolation. That's always been a part of what makes Pluribus so unsettling, of course; in the show there are only a handful of human survivors left on Earth, while the rest of the population has turned into an interconnected hive mind, some 7 billion people strong. But watching Carol [...]

Warning: I'm going to make an attempt to justify a $40 paperweight for cable management. I'm not sure how I ended up in this position, or who hurt me. All I can say is that I'm not proud of myself, so please, take pity. I've been using Native Union's 3-cable Weighter for about a week. [...]

While Geoff Keighley had already announced that Tomb Raider would be making a Game Awards appearance, the surprise was that instead of one game announcement there's two. Crystal Dynamics and Amazon Game Studios are releasing two Tomb Raider games back-to-back in 2026 and 2027. First up, coming in 2026 is Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis. [...]

One of the easiest things to do during the holidays is spend too much money. It happens to many of us, even when we swear that things are going to be different this year. We want to help you stay true to your intentions to save money when possible, and we're doing that with a [...]

Shortly after appeals court judges ruled against Apple's contempt appeal in a years-long antitrust dispute against the makers of Fortnite, I got to talk to Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney in an interview. According to Sweeney, today's ruling "completely shuts down" Apple's App Store rules that allow it to collect "junk fees." The three-judge Ninth [...]

Remedy Entertainment is finally showing off the much-anticipated sequel to Control. The new game, dubbed Control Resonant, expands on the original with a new action-RPG framework. It takes place seven years later and shifts the setting from the unsettling Oldest House of the original to a more open Manhattan, while putting players in the role [...]

The next Star Wars game is coming from the director of Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic. Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic was revealed during The Game Awards with a brief trailer that got Geoff Keighley so excited his voice started cracking. Like any announcement trailer, it was brief, featuring a [...]