The Verge - All Posts

Apple’s AirPods Max are on sale for $479.99 at Amazon and other retailers. | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge With more people working from home than they used to, owning a good pair of noise-canceling headphones has become more appealing than ever. However, they can be expensive and difficult to shop for due to the range of available models, many of which cater to different lifestyles and priorities. Some are better suited for long-haul flights, for instance, while others are ideal for multitasking and marathon listening sessions.That’s why we’ve curated this list of the best deals on noise-canceling headphones. Here, you’ll find sales on all kinds of on-ear and over-ear headphones, all of which are designed to eliminate outside noise but come with their own strengths and weaknesses. And if you want to do even more research before making a... Continue reading…

Image: Disney Star Wars: The Bad Batch is coming to an end. During this year’s Star Wars Celebration, Lucasfilm announced that the animated series has been renewed for a third and final season that will arrive on Disney Plus in 2024.The Clone Wars spinoff follows a group of experimental clone troopers, known collectively as Clone Force 99, who became fugitives after resisting the Order 66 command that brainwashed their counterparts into viewing Jedi as traitors. The show’s second season just wrapped up last month, and the fans at the Star Wars Celebration got a first look at what’s to come with an in-room teaser trailer.

Image: Blizzard Yesterday, the first round of Overwatch League play in 2023 concluded with the league’s first-ever pro-am tournament. Seven amateur teams from the North American and EMEA regions qualified for the right to play against the professional Overwatch teams of the west.I love me some Tier 2 Overwatch (better known as Overwatch Contenders). Some of the most exciting games in all of competitive Overwatch’s history have been Contenders matches. For years now, the competitive Overwatch community has been asking for more recognition and support for the teams and the league that act as the foundation for the Overwatch League proper.Most Contenders teams are sorely under-resourced. They’re usually made up of teens and young adults who practice and... Continue reading…

A row of Bitcoin mining machines at the Whinstone US Bitcoin mining facility in Rockdale, Texas, on October 9th, 2021. | Image: MARK FELIX/AFP /AFP via Getty Images Bitcoin mines in the US have had a tremendous impact on power grids, a New York Times investigation reveals. The mines — which are giant data farms — use vastly more electricity than the communities surrounding them, driving up pollution from coal and gas power plants. The crypto mines also make electricity bills more expensive for their neighbors, even as the companies profit off incentives that grid operators offer to prevent blackouts during an energy crunch.This is the most comprehensive analysis yet of Bitcoin’s impact on the environment and energy system in the US. And it comes as Democratic lawmakers press federal agencies to require crypto companies to divulge information about their operations. The Times has startling numbers... Continue reading…

Photo by Mario Tama / Getty Images On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce tough new tailpipe emission standards designed to effectively force the auto industry to phase out the sale of gas-powered cars. It’s an ambitious — and risky — move by the Biden administration to cement its climate goals by boosting the sale of electric vehicles while also ushering in the end of the era of the internal combustion engine (ICE).But it won’t be as easy as banning the sale of gas-powered cars or mandating that companies only sell vehicles with electric powertrains. Rather, the new EPA rules would set an emissions limit on the total number of new cars each automaker sells in a year. That limit would essentially ensure that two-thirds of vehicles they sold... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube’s introducing an “enhanced” 1080p HD video quality for Premium subscribers — but it’s only available on iOS for now, with the option coming to web soon. According to YouTube, the new 1080p Premium option is “an enhanced bitrate version of 1080p” that’s supposed to make things look crisper, particularly with videos heavy on detail and motion.If this all sounds familiar, it’s because YouTube started testing this feature earlier this year and had some worried that the company would nerf the existing 1080p option for nonsubscribers. Fortunately, the standard 1080p option isn’t going anywhere, not even for Premium members.You’ll still get to use the standard 1080p option on videos (even the ones with 1080p Premium). Not all videos... Continue reading…

Tesla Shanghai and Lin-gang Special Area administrators sign the project off in a ceremony. | Image: Tesla Tesla’s building a new “Megafactory” in Shanghai, the automaker announced yesterday at a signing ceremony. The facility will be designed to manufacture Tesla’s commercial Megapack battery energy storage units, with the goal of eventually producing about 10,000 systems per year, according to the automaker.Tesla currently produces its Megapack energy storage units at its Gigafactory in Nevada, where it also makes battery packs for Tesla vehicles and Tesla Energy products like the Powerwall battery. Unlike the Powerwall, which is largely designed for residential battery backup and pairs with Tesla’s solar energy offerings, the Megapack is designed for major commercial projects.The company is in the process of moving Megapack production to... Continue reading…

Image: The Verge Mastodon has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of Twitter’s ongoing meltdown, and since I started seriously using it late last year, it’s won me over. While I still use Twitter for monitoring news and talking to the occasional source, Mastodon is my new home for shortform posting. But Mastodon has one significant problem: it’s very annoying to find things I like.I’m not talking about “discoverability” in the sense of some tailored suggestion algorithm. I mean that by design, information on Mastodon’s many servers is diffuse and relatively obscure. Back on Twitter, I kept several columns of search terms open — some for serious topics I was covering, some for personal interests like my favorite games, all of them a potential gateway... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Google has stopped pushing updates for some third-party smart displays, reflecting a broader shift away from Assistant products. On a support page spotted by 9to5Google, the company says it will no longer provide software updates for the Lenovo Smart Display, JBL Link View, and the LG Xboom AI ThinQ WK9 Smart Display.All three displays made their debut in 2018, just months after Google first announced the Smart Display platform and its own Home Hub (now called Nest Hub) as it sought to compete with Amazon’s Alexa. While Google provided some new features to these devices in the years that followed, they never received the same kind of attention it gives to its Nest Hub displays.Google’s decision to end support for its third-party... Continue reading…

The Domino’s app, now on Apple CarPlay. | Image: Domino’s Domino’s already lets you quickly order pizza at the tap of a button on your phone, but now, it’s enabling you to do it on your car’s infotainment screen via CarPlay. Announced today, the new feature puts a simplified version of the Domino’s app on your dash and lets you “Tap to Order,” which instantly signals your main store to start making your favorite order for pickup. Alternatively, you can tap “Call to Order” and talk to someone hands-free to order something else — that’s the only way you’ll be able to customize your options.“We know how frustrating it can be to wait in a [fast food] drive-thru line just to place an order,” Domino’s SVP chief digital officer Christopher Thomas-Moore states in the press release. “Domino’s app on... Continue reading…

Judge Kacsmaryk attempted to keep oral arguments for the case secret. | Photo by Moises Avila / AFP via Getty Images A Texas judge ruled on Friday that the Food and Drug Administration improperly approved the abortion-facilitating pill mifepristone more than 20 years ago, just as a Washington state judge issued a directly conflicting ruling — setting up a likely Supreme Court fight and potentially threatening nationwide access to reproductive healthcare.In Texas, District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk issued a long-awaited decision on a suit from the Alliance Defending Freedom, which filed on behalf of antiabortion medical groups and doctors against the FDA. Kacsmaryk — nominated by former President Donald Trump — ruled largely in the group’s favor. While he didn’t outright reverse the FDA’s decision, he issued a stay that’s supposed to revert mifepristone... Continue reading…

The Pixel 7A is expected to be announced at Google I/O next month. | Image: MySmartPrice / OnLeaks We’re getting closer and closer to Google I/O 2023, and it’s looking like this year’s event will come with new hardware in tow. Google is expected to announce its latest midtier phone, the Pixel 7A, at the May 10th I/O keynote. The company has a long history of sheer incompetence when it comes to containing leaks and product secrecy, and the 7A has been no exception.Now, we’re getting a look (via 9to5Google) at what appears to be Google’s official marketing renders of the phone — and they show off a new blue color option that will be available alongside black and white. It’s a muted blue and still a far cry from the “really blue” original Pixel; Google seems very hesitant to go bold on colors again, which is a shame.Worth waiting for... Continue reading…

Poe isn’t a chatbot — it’s an app for all your chatbots. | Image: Poe ChatGPT is a remarkable piece of technology and a really crappy consumer product. Load OpenAI’s revolutionary chatbot at any given time, and after a long wait, you’ll be greeted with… well, likely as not, a message saying ChatGPT is over capacity and you can’t use it anyway. It’s slow even in the best of situations, and its blocky white-and-gray interface doesn’t exactly scream high design. There’s not even a mobile app.Adam D’Angelo, the CEO of Quora, sees that as something of an opportunity. Since last summer, just before the chatbot craze swept the tech industry, Quora has been feverishly working on an app called Poe that D’Angelo says he hopes can make bots easier for everyone to use by bringing them all in one place. “We have a lot... Continue reading…

Image: Lucasfilm This is the way (for the latest updates). Continue reading…

As a steam-reheating lunchbox, it’s pricey but serviceable. But if you’re just looking for a warm meal, there are better ways to get it. Continue reading…

Brian Cox as Logan Roy. The third episode of the show’s final season feels like the true beginning of the end — and exactly the sort of jumpstart the series needed. Continue reading…

Quick recap: Substack, the popular subscription newsletter platform for writers, launched a new feature in its app called Notes last week, which is fairly similar to Twitter.Twitter, the world-historical clown car of a company currently operated by Elon Musk, responded by blocking the ability to like or retweet any posts containing the word “Substack,” throwing up a warning message if users clicked on Substack links, and finally blocking even the word Substack from being searched. Substack users, the vast majority of whom are independent small business owners who depend on Substack as an enterprise software provider, mostly responded to this by saying they would leave Twitter and use Substack Notes. (There’s more here, but it’s a combo... Continue reading…

Magic Design Studios / Gearbox Publishing We’ve got a while to wait until Hades 2, and if you’re in need of a roguelike to fill the hole Hades left behind, then Have A Nice Death should do nicely. I had the opportunity to try the game first at GDC and then again now that it’s out on PC and Nintendo Switch, and I was immediately smitten with its dark humor and easy-to-pick-up (but difficult-to-master) combat.You play as Death, the CEO of Death Incorporated, who has outsourced the job of reaping souls to their trusted underlings who, after untold millennia of processing mortals, decide to go rogue and gunk up the well-oiled machine of death and dying. As their boss, it’s your job to traverse the bowels of the Death Inc campus, defeating these so-called “thanagers” (which is an... Continue reading…

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge Playing games on your PlayStation 5 is, of course, much more exciting than digging through menus and configuration options — but if you invest a bit of time in getting these settings set up right, you’ll get the benefit in your gameplay.From avoiding spoilers to taming notifications to enabling all of the graphical flourishes that your PS5 has to offer, there’s a lot to dig into here. All these options can be found via Settings. Just begin by selecting the cog icon in the top right corner of the PS5 home screen.Save power on the controller batteryIf you want to maximize the amount of time you get between recharges of the DualSense wireless controller, you can get it to automatically turn itself off after a certain amount of... Continue reading…

Photo by Juho Sarvikas‏ / HMD Global I miss the phone. No, not that slab in my pocket that we call the smartphone.Yes, that device can act like a phone. But it also doubles as a portable laptop, camera, alarm, console, TV, wallet, and so many other things — I’m not sure what it is. But one thing’s for sure: calling an iPhone just a “phone” has never felt quite right.It’s easy to lose sight of just how utterly vast a smartphone’s capabilities are. Hidden inside our pockets is a powerful machine that seems like it really can do everything, everywhere, all at once. There’s a reason the courts recently restricted FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried to just a dumb phone. A smartphone is a powerful tool, especially in the hands of a math nerd who lost billions of other people’s money... Continue reading…

The Ring Video Doorbell Pro 2 is one of many Sidewalk bridges that can help extend connectivity beyond your home’s Wi-Fi. | Image: Dan Seifert / The Verge Last week, Amazon opened its Sidewalk protocol to third-party developers. Sidewalk is a large mesh network that draws on people’s home internet connections across the US. It’s a service that requires a lot of trust, and so far, most of the devices on it happen to be Amazon’s own products. But that’s about to change — and as a result, Sidewalk’s privacy safeguards are about to be tested at a much larger scale.No connected device is ever truly 100 percent private or secure. But so far, despite some initial concerns, Sidewalk has avoided any major privacy disasters. Here’s a rundown of how Sidewalk works, the risks it might pose to you as a user, and what we know about Amazon’s plans to defuse them.Are Amazon Sidewalk’s privacy protocols... Continue reading…

Image: 343 Industries Joseph Staten, a Bungie veteran who worked on the first three Halo games and was brought on to help get Halo Infinite over the finish line, is leaving Microsoft, the company confirmed to IGN on Friday and Staten himself confirmed on Twitter.“Hey folks, I am indeed leaving Microsoft,” Staten said. “I’ll have more info to share soon, but for now, I’d just like to thank all my @Xbox colleagues for all their understanding and support as I embark on a new adventure.”

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter has started marking links to Substack as unsafe. If you click on a link on Twitter with substack.com in the URL, Twitter will show a separate notice warning you that “the link you are trying to access has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially spammy or unsafe.”Don’t be alarmed — the links we’ve checked appear to be perfectly safe. This notice seems instead to be Twitter’s latest hostile move toward Substack after the email newsletter platform announced its own Twitter-like “Notes” feature on Wednesday.On Thursday, Twitter blocked people who use Substack from embedding tweets into their stories. Then, late Thursday or early Friday, Twitter started blocking engagement on tweets containing links to... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft is barring users from running game emulations on the Xbox Series X | S. On Thursday, Twitter user @gamr12, who’s involved with the distribution of the RetroArch emulation software on Xbox, posted the error message they received when attempting to launch emulated content.“Unable to launch this game or app,” the message reads. “The game or app you’re trying to launch violates Microsoft Store policy and is not supported.” Other users with emulation software on the Xbox Series X | S report running into the same issue.When Microsoft first launched the Xbox Series X | S in 2020, users found that they could install and run emulation software. This made it possible to play a whole range of classic titles on the Xbox Series X | S, i... Continue reading…

Image: The Verge Microsoft is making its DALL-E-powered AI image generator “available on desktop for Edge users around the world.” The company announced it’d be coming last month when it integrated the image generation tech into its Bing chatbot, but this move could make it available to a much wider audience.When it rolls out — I and two other Verge staffers using Edge don’t appear to have access to it yet — the “Image Creator” will live in Edge’s sidebar. Using it should be pretty simple; you type in what you want to see, and Bing will generate several images that match the prompt. Then, you can download the ones you like and use them however you need.In a Thursday blog post, Microsoft pitches the feature as a way to create “very specific” visuals... Continue reading…

Photo by Mitchell Clark / The Verge Rivian unlocked a new Dual-Motor Performance AWD option for its R1T electric pickup truck and R1S SUV on Thursday, and the automaker is now allowing eligible order holders with configurator access to select the new drivetrain. The news comes after Rivian announced last month that “thousands” of R1T reservation holders will be receiving invitations to configure their trucks for delivery in the next one to four months after order confirmation.The 700-horsepower Performance Dual-Motor AWD (previously known as the “enhanced” Dual-Motor) is a software-unlocked version of the standard 600-horsepower Dual-Motor that quickens its 0–60 mph acceleration from 4.5 seconds down to 3.5 seconds. The upgrade adds $5,000 to the price of the R1T, which... Continue reading…

Photo by Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto via Getty Images It’s April 7th, and you know what that means? That’s right. It means that Western Digital’s cloud network has officially been down for five days.On April 2nd (this past Sunday), the data storage manufacturer announced that it was experiencing a service outage impacting a whole bunch of products, including My Cloud, My Cloud Home, My Cloud Home Duo, My Cloud OS5, SanDisk ibi, and SanDisk Ixpand Wireless Charger. The company said that it was “working to restore service” and apologized for the inconvenience.In the days that followed, we didn’t hear all that much. Western Digital issued a follow-up statement on April 3rd that said basically the exact same thing, as well as a press release clarifying that it was “implementing proactive... Continue reading…

Illustration by The Verge This week, Twitter began restricting the promotion of links to Substack newsletters, a move that seems to fly in the face of owner Elon Musk’s vocal support of free speech on the platform. The change is a huge problem for Substack writers, who have found Twitter to be one of the best places to attract new subscribers to their newsletters.“It appears that Musk is making decisions based on his own financial interests and petty grievances — even if it makes Twitter objectively worse for users,” Judd Legum, author of Popular Information, a politics-focused newsletter with more than 240,000 subscribers, says in an email to The Verge. “If this continues, it’s hard to justify continuing to invest my time creating content on Twitter.”The ban... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft has agreed to pay over $3 million in fines for selling software to sanctioned entities and individuals in Cuba, Iran, Syria, and Russia from 2012 to 2019. The US Department of the Treasury says that “the majority of the apparent violations involved blocked Russian entities or persons located in the Crimea region of Ukraine” and that the company will be paying around $2.98 million to the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (or OFAC) and $347,631 to the Department of Commerce. (It settled for $624,013 but will receive a credit for its agreement with the Treasury.)According to an enforcement notice from OFAC, Microsoft, Microsoft Ireland, and Microsoft Russia failed to oversee who was buying the company’s software and... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge (Disclosure right up front: SB Nation is part of Vox Media, and so is The Verge; we’re all co-workers and friends. I reported this story mostly by talking to my colleagues.)SB Nation’s Twitter account has a little over 300,000 followers. Or, at least, it did last Friday. Then, suddenly, it was gone, disappeared from the internet for almost a week. When you go to the profile page, the account was replaced by an ominous message: “This account doesn’t exist.” Nobody at SB Nation knew how to get it back — and for a while, nobody at Twitter did, either.Last Friday, an SB Nation employee tried to log in to the @sbnation account. They were doing so in order to follow @cutwaterspirits, the Twitter account for Cutwater, an adult beverage... Continue reading…

Image: Epic Games The two giants are part of a race to become something akin to the YouTube of gaming. Continue reading…

Foxconn’s dome in Wisconsin, with the “high performance computing” shipping container next to it. | Image: Nilay Patel The Foxconn land in Wisconsin may finally be used for a meaningful technology project — but not by Foxconn.Last week, the village board of Mount Pleasant voted to allow Microsoft to build a data center on land previously cleared for the Foxconn LCD fab that never arrived. Microsoft will buy the land for $50 million, some of which will be used to reimburse Foxconn for releasing its rights to the land. It does not appear that Foxconn will play any part in operating the data center itself.The announcement came days before an election in which the board incumbents narrowly defeated challengers critical of the Foxconn deal.Foxconn spokesperson Rusty Schultz declined to comment on the record, instead pointing to an unattributed statement p... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Substack’s founders have responded to Twitter’s new restrictions on promoting tweets with links from the publishing platform, telling The Verge that writers’ livelihoods “should not be tied to platforms where they don’t own their relationship with their audience, and where the rules can change on a whim.”On Thursday night, Twitter users noticed that they couldn’t like, reply to, or retweet some tweets that had Substack links in them. Twitter hasn’t said why it made the change — or if the change was even intentional — but the timing is certainly suspect, given that it happened about a day after Substack announced its own Twitter-like “Notes” product.And there’s precedent for Twitter putting restrictions on links from a rival platform.... Continue reading…

Pictured: a business I suspect is collapsing. | Image: Substack Is there a funnier phrase in the English language than “negative revenue”?Look, I felt pretty confident Substack was doing badly when it failed to raise from VC and went to retail investors. (Hot tip: the phrase “financial inclusion” indicates that the speaker thinks you are a sucker.) And there were other signs: the uptick last year of newsletter cross-promotions and then-spokesperson Lulu Cheng Meservey’s desperate hollering for attention. (I will assume any business that hires her going forward is in deep trouble.)Signs are not the same as numbers, though, and according to a story from The Information this morning, the numbers are rough. Even I was surprised to see that Substack lit $25 million on fire in 2021. And though it had... Continue reading…

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge Sony told regulators in the UK that they were “irrational” for having sided with Microsoft in the fight over the proposed Microsoft-Activision merger. One reason: Microsoft could sabotage future Call of Duty games by making performance even slightly worse on PlayStation — because gamers are apparently so perceptive that it might make them move to Xbox.Although Sony stated previously that Microsoft’s merger with Activision Blizzard, which makes Call of Duty games, could hurt the franchise on PlayStation, the company’s latest arguments get even more specific. This time around, Sony’s saying Microsoft won’t feel the need to “make use of the advanced features in PlayStation not found in Xbox.” It even goes so far as to say that “degrading... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Writers trying to embed tweets in their Substack stories are in for a rude surprise: after pasting a link to the site, a message pops up saying that “Twitter has unexpectedly restricted access to embedding tweets in Substack posts” and explaining that the company is working on a fix.After those reports surfaced, between Thursday night and Friday morning, Twitter apparently began to restrict promotion and visibility for tweets with links to Substack posts. New tweets linking directly to Substack.com can still be tweeted, but trying to retweet or like those tweets via Twitter’s website results in an error message saying, “Some actions on this Tweet have been disabled by Twitter,” while doing the same from within its apps or TweetDeck... Continue reading…

NASA’s new air quality monitoring instrument, TEMPO. | Image: Maxar via NASA NASA sent a powerful new instrument into space overnight to track air pollution. If all goes well, it should be able to zoom in to see how air quality changes from neighborhood to neighborhood across North America. That could fill in big data gaps that hide disparities when it comes to who has to live with the most pollution.The tool is called TEMPO, short for Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution instrument. It will keep a tab on three harmful pollutants: nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, and ground-level ozone. Together, they’re key ingredients for smog.It should be able to zoom in to see how air quality changes from neighborhood to neighborhood across North AmericaThree out of eight Americans live in counties that earned F... Continue reading…

Image: Mengxin Li / The Verge Tweetbot’s sudden death, open-casket funeral, and reincarnation as a Mastodon app. Continue reading…

Daisy Ridley in The Last Jedi. | Image: Disney / Lucasfilm Though we’re living in a golden age for Star Wars series, a new trio of big-screen projects are definitely underway that will each tell epic stories from different points in the franchise’s history.At Star Wars Celebration Europe today, Kathleen Kennedy was joined by Daisy Ridley on stage as she announced that James Mangold, Dave Filoni, and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy are all set to direct three upcoming Star Wars films due out in coming years. Though no titles or premiere dates were revealed, Kennedy shared that Mangold’s film will go “back to the dawn of the Jedi” while Filoni’s film, which focuses on the New Republic, will connect directly with streaming series like Ahsoka, The Mandalorian, and The Book of Boba Fett.Perhaps most... Continue reading…