They said smart home hubs were dead, but 2024 has seen a resurgence of these multi-protocol machines that work with every smart home radio out there. Case in point: this week, Homey announced the launch of the Homey Pro Mini.The Mini is a cheaper and pint-sized version of the $400 Homey Pro smart home hub, offering built-in support for Ethernet, Zigbee, Thread, and Matter. It runs the same Homey OS software as the Pro but ditches a few radios and cuts the processing power to reduce the price. It's available for pre-order today for $199 in the US and Canada, with Europe following later in 2025 and shipping slated for April 2025.A smart home hub is the brains of your smart home, and third-party options from companies like Homey, Home Assistant, Hubitat, and others let you set up and manage your connected devices locally in your home without relying on proprietary platforms, such as Apple Home, Google Home, or Amazon Alexa. Athom, the company behind Homey, was recently bought by LG. The Korean electronics giant plans to use Homey software to run its ThinQ smart home platform on its own recently announced smart home hub. However, LG has said Homey will continue to operate independently. Image: Homey The Homey Pro Mini has built-in Ethernet and uses USB-C for power The Pro Mini runs on Homey OS, a smart home platform for controlling your connected devices, such as smart lights, locks, robot vacuums, and thermostats. Similar to Apple Home or Amazon Alexa, you use an app on your phone to set up automations and routines (called Flows in Homey) that connect your gadgets. Homey claims over 1,000 integrations with devices and services, including Ikea, Sonos, Lutron, Roomba, Nest, Philips Hue, Aqara, and Yale. However, just under 300 are official" integrations; the rest are community-generated.Adding a Homey hub like the Pro Mini to Homey lets you run smart home automations locally, without relying on cloud connections, as well as bring devices that use specific radios, including Thread and Zigbee, into the platform. Unlike the Pro, the Mini doesn't include Z-Wave, BLE, or IR support, but you can link it to a Homey Bridge ($69) to add those.The Pro Mini is also less powerful than the Pro, and Homey recommends it for running up to 20 integrations, which Homey calls Homey Apps. The company says the typical user runs 14 integrations, so 20 should be sufficient for most people. If you have a more complicated smart home setup, though, Homey recommends upgrading to the Pro.I've tested Homey using the Homey Pro and found it intuitive for beginner smart home users while offering plenty of features for power users. However, some integrations are limited, and many community-created smart apps may not do exactly what you want.Athom, which was founded in the Netherlands in 2014, recently released new Homey OS Dashboards, designed to make it easier to control your smart home devices, plus a new Home Energy Management System to help keep track of energy use. With these additions - plus the power of LG behind it - Homey is shaping up to be a significant player in the smart home.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Shutterstock The Kids Online Safety Act was supposed to fix (or break) the internet. Now, after nearly three years of rewrites, it's got days left to pass. Read the full story at The Verge.
Photo by Mario Tama / Getty Images While its rivals have been stuck in perpetual testing or forced to shut down completely due to dry coffers, Waymo has quietly amassed a legitimate robotaxi business that continues to grow and evolve. And today, it showed off a few numbers that underscore just how far ahead of the rest of the industry it is.Chief among those is the number 4 million, which is how many driverless rides the company provided in the three cities in which it operates: Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Waymo says it has provided a total of 5 million driverless rides in its three key markets, which means nearly all of its growth took place this year alone.Waymo's service area is small but growing - the company says that it services 500 square miles cumulatively across all three of its main cities, as well as Austin, where it is still operating with a waitlist. The company plans to launch in Atlanta and Miami and recently said it would test its vehicles in Japan.Four million driverless trips in 2024Waymo riders spent a cumulative 1 million hours in the company's autonomous vehicles. And since switching over to electric vehicles only, Waymo has helped avoid over 6 million kilograms of CO2 emissions. (Assuming an avoided emissions rate of 237g / passenger mile, vehicle occupancy of 1.5 passengers, and average trip length of 4.1 miles.)Today, every Waymo customer will receive their own personalized Year in Review through the company's Waymo One app. Think of it as a Spotify Wrapped for fully driverless vehicles. They'll see their own stats, including miles traveled, emissions avoided, favorite destinations, and more. The most popular destinations in each city this year were Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, the Ferry Building in San Francisco, and The Grove shopping center in LA. The company only started providing 24/7 service to Phoenix's airport in August 2024, so its ranking as the top destination in that city just goes to show how important airport service will be for the company.The fact that Waymo has facilitated 4 million trips in three cities, while only serving one airport, is pretty amazing and could speak to the company's future prospects as its technology continues to mature. Airports are a major source of revenue for human-powered ridehail companies like Uber and Lyft.But Waymo is also facing an uncertain future with mounting regulatory and financial pressures. Tariffs on Chinese vehicles and software could stymie its growth plans. President-elect Donald Trump is said to want a regulatory framework for AVs - whatever that means. But lowering costs is going to be increasingly important for Waymo as it looks to expand to new cities.Waymo is also facing an uncertain future with mounting regulatory and financial pressuresAlphabet doesn't break out Waymo's costs in its earnings report, but its Other Bets" unit, which includes the robotaxi company, brought in $388 million in revenue in the third quarter of 2024, up from $297 million a year ago. And the unit's losses decreased slightly to $1.12 billion from $1.94 billion in the year-earlier period. Alphabet recently led a $5.6 billion funding round for Waymo to help it cover costs as it eyes its next phase of growth.As it grows, pricing will become a bigger challenge. So far, Waymo has settled into the premium" tier of ridehail services like Uber Black. Those retrofitted Jaguar I-Pace vehicles cost a lot to equip with all the sensors and hardware that help them navigate the roads autonomously. And the 175,000 trips a week that Waymo is doing aren't nearly enough to recoup those costs.Another challenge will be expanding the types of service it provides. Right now, it's only providing trips to one airport, in Phoenix. It will need to expand in its current and future markets if it wants to remain a viable mobility option. And it will need to get more comfortable riding on the highway, which it only does in limited cases.Safety is also a big hurdle. While Waymo has published a number of studies that indicate its vehicles are safer than human drivers, there are still a lot of lingering questions around passenger safety. Waymo vehicles have been targeted for harassment and vandalism. And they have occasionally come into conflict with emergency vehicles.But Waymo has novelty on its side - and its customers often give it high marks for the ability to customize their rides, such as playing their own music and setting the temperature to their liking. It may be enough to propel the company to another huge year in 2025.Update, December 18th: A previous version of this story said Waymo customers spent 11 million hours riding in its vehicles. The correct figure is 1 million. Waymo initially shared the wrong number of hours.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Okay, I get it, we're all sick of the drones. I went to two holiday parties over the weekend in the New Jersey suburbs, and it was all anyone wanted to talk about. The news coverage has been breathless, all-consuming, and most importantly, completely unhinged.No one knows anything. The cops don't know anything. The feds sure don't sound like they know anything. Sure, everyone has a theory. Depending on where you fall on the DSM-5 spectrum for conspiracy-addled nonsense, they could be a few DJI Mavic enthusiasts having a laugh, a bunch of small planes, or a full-on alien invasion of our nation's most consequential state. Image: Getty Is it a bird? Is it a plane? But the people who are supposed to know things - the ones whose jobs are to have access to all the technology and equipment afforded by bloated law enforcement budgets, the ones who have security clearance and subpoena power and all the various trappings of authority that the vast majority of us can only dream of - don't know shit. Actually, it's worse than that: they think they know shit, and they are willing to confidently stand before the public and say as much, even when they actually don't know shit.Here are the best examples I could find of current and former elected leaders and government officials spouting utterly deranged nonsense about the drone sightings.Jeff Van Drew
Surf's homepage is just feeds. It's feeds all the way down. | Image: David Pierce / Flipboard Mike McCue, the CEO of Flipboard and an internet entrepreneur since the Netscape days, is a true believer in the fediverse. He doesn't love the word: he'd much rather call it the social web." But whatever you want to call the open, decentralized, interconnected social networking experience that apps like Mastodon and Bluesky promise, McCue is absolutely convinced it's the future.For the last year or so, McCue and his team have been completely overhauling the Flipboard platform to make it a part of the social web. Once the change is done, Flipboard will be a fully decentralized way to discover and read stuff from across the internet. The process seems to be going fine, though it doesn't seem poised to take over the fediverse the way Threads could if it fully opened up.At the same time, though, the Flipboard team has been working on something even bigger. That something is an app called Surf (not to be confused with the other recently launched Surf), which McCue called the world's first browser for the social web." He first said that to me a little over a year ago, when Surf was mostly just a bunch of mock-ups and a slide deck. Now, the app has been in beta for the last few months - I've been using it most of that time - and a public beta is launching today. Not everyone can get in; McCue says he wants to bring in some curators and creators first, in order for there to be lots of stuff in Surf when everyone else gets access. And he promises that's coming soon.But wait, sorry, back to the whole browser for the social web" thing. McCue's best explanation of Surf's big theory is this: in a decentralized social world, the internet will be less about websites and more about feeds. You won't put in, like, theverge.com and go to the website for The Verge, but you can put in the verge' and go to the ActivityPub feed for The Verge." Your Threads timeline is a feed; every Bluesky Starter Pack is a feed; every creator you follow is just producing a feed of content.Surf's job, in that world, is to help you discover and explore all those feeds. The app can see three kinds of feeds: anything from ActivityPub, which means things like Mastodon and Threads and Pixelfed; anything from AT Protocol, which means Bluesky; and any RSS feed. You can search for feeds by topic, publisher, or creator; you can curate your own feeds by combining other feeds. And then you can share those feeds, which other people can combine and recombine. It's all a little confusing. Just imagine a nicely designed, vertically scrolling feed, somewhere between a Twitter timeline and the Apple News homepage. Image: David Pierce / Surf You can have any kind of content in Surf - which means the app has to be good at absolutely everything. A feed can be made up of almost any kind of content, which presents a tricky design problem for Surf. It has to be equally adept as a social network, a news app, a video platform, and a podcast player. Combining all that stuff into one place isn't just the goal; it's the whole point. And it's very hard to do all of those things well.Personally, the most eye-opening moment in my time testing Surf has been the way the app lets you automatically filter a feed. I set up a feed that's just all my favorite stuff: my go-to podcasts, must-read blogs, a couple of can't-miss YouTube channels, and my favorite folks on Bluesky. I can open that feed and see everything, in order, no matter what it is or who it came from. But I can also filter it to just show all the videos in the feed or tap on Listen" to turn it into a podcast queue.Surf isn't yet a full-featured app for any of these uses, much less all of them, but it's already a pretty useful app for all kinds of media. It presents videos like an endlessly scrolling TikTok feed, which is actually a pretty fun way to flip through a YouTube channel. Posts with links are formatted like news stories, with big images and headlines. It's not a particularly dense timeline-scrolling experience, either - the whole thing is more like Flipboard's flippy magazines than the For You pages we're used to. Because it's trying to compile a bunch of disparate platforms into one, search can be messy - I found five profiles with my name and picture, for instance, and it's not obvious which one is the one you're looking for. Surf is also designed to be interactive, but right now, that pretty much only works if you're a Mastodon user liking Mastodon posts. For most other things, it's either kind of broken or entirely broken. For now, and probably for a while, Surf is going to be much better as a consumption tool than a social one.McCue sees the social web as the beginning of an entirely new internet. He even uses old-web metaphors to explain these early products: the current era we're in is like AOL back in the day, a walled garden that contained all the innovation in the walled garden"; Surf is like old-school Yahoo, a collection of feeds that other people have made." He wants to enable paid feeds, so publishers, creators, and curators can make money on the platform. He has big ideas about custom designs for feeds, so they can look more like homepages.There's an awful lot left to build - not to mention a lot of protocols and tools left to convince all the internet's platforms and publishers to work with. But I've been talking to McCue about this for two years now, and his conviction and optimism haven't wavered a bit. When I tell him that I definitely wavered - that I was once all in on ActivityPub as the future but am worried seeing Bluesky grow on another protocol and hearing some of the issues Threads and others are having with ActivityPub - he just laughs. One, he says, that's how it always goes in these early phases. Two, that's what Surf is meant to fix.To prove his point, McCue opens up a feed full of basketball content, created by David Rushing. Rushing was a big figure in early NBA Threads, a community that has splintered thanks to some of Threads' moderation and community policies. Now, people are posting with #nbathreads on Bluesky and elsewhere, too. It's messy. But Surf, McCue says, can bring it back together. He starts scrolling Rushing's custom feed: You're seeing Bluesky posts, Mastodon posts, Threads posts, Flipboard posts, anything with the hashtag #nbathreads across the whole social web. If you post a podcast, if you post a YouTube video, anything with the hashtag #nbathreads, it'll show up in this feed." Rushing can add or remove individual posts or even use Flipboard's filtering systems to get rid of anything that feels political, mentions gambling, or whatever else he wants to do.McCue is practically giddy as he scrolls through all this basketball content. This is the whole thing, right here. Ultimately," he says, you're just not going to care whether something is on Threads - I don't write you a separate kind of email because you're on Gmail, right?" People will use lots of apps, there will be lots of communities, and that's good. There are nerds on Bluesky, there are nerds on Threads. How can all the nerds gather together?" That's the question for the fediverse - sorry, the social web - and Surf looks like it might be the best answer anyone's come up with so far.
Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images The Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments on whether a bill that could ban TikTok violates the First Amendment. The arguments will take place on January 10th, just over a week before a potential ban could take effect.While the outcome is far from guaranteed, SCOTUS' decision to take up the case is a small win for TikTok, which is barreling toward expulsion from the US unless the court throws out or pauses the law, or its China-based parent company ByteDance agrees to sell it in time. The law at the center of the case, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, seeks to prohibit apps like TikTok from being owned by companies in a set list of foreign adversary countries.The Department of Justice successfully defended the law as constitutional before the DC Circuit Court of Appeals by arguing the government had a compelling interest in protecting US national security from foreign influence. Congress voted overwhelmingly to pass the bill after classified briefings in which intelligence officials shared concerns over how China could potentially use the app to exert influence over the kinds of content US users see, and potentially access sensitive data - though publicly, the government has not come forward with declassified information showing such dangers are already happening.The arguments before the Supreme Court will consolidate two cases against the law, from both TikTok and a group of creators on the platform. The parties will get a total of two hours to make their cases. The court said it would defer a decision on whether to halt the law until after the oral arguments. The lower court had declined to stop the law from taking effect pending the Supreme Court's review.TikTok filed for an emergency injunction to the Supreme Court just two days ago. That same day, CEO Shou Zi Chew was set to meet with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Trump, who has noted his success on TikTok in the campaign, at one point seemingly promised to save the app, although his more recent comments post-election make it less clear how exactly he'd plan to do that. The deadline for the ban - unless the court stops it - is the day before Trump's inauguration. The president has discretion to extend the deadline 90 days, though one big remaining question is whether China would even agree to let ByteDance sell the app.
Skateboarder Carlos Ribeiro during X Games Ventura 2024. | Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images Roku got the exclusive US streaming rights to next year's X Games Aspen and a soon-to-be-announced" X Games event in the summer, the company announced on Wednesday. Both events will air on Roku's free 24/7 sports channel as the service continues its push into live sports.Though the X Games were founded by ESPN in the 90s, the sports network sold majority ownership to MSP Sports in 2022. Since then, the X Games have streamed on various platforms, including YouTube, Twitch, ESPN, ABC, and the VR app Xtadium.But now, X Games Aspen will appear on the Roku Sports Channel, a newly launched hub for Roku's live Sunday MLB games, Formula E races, and other sports-related content. This channel lives within the overarching Roku Channel that comes pre-installed on most Roku devices and is also available on the web, as well as an app on third-party smart TVs and mobile phones.Additionally, Roku launched a free ad-supported streaming TV channel dedicated to the X Games, which will air programming highlights, clips, interviews, archival content, and more" leading up to the event. X Games Aspen takes place from January 23rd to the 25th, with more details to come on an additional" X Games coming this summer.Roku is just one of many streaming platforms getting into sports, with Netflix airing live NFL games on Christmas Day, Max launching a live sports add-on, and Amazon Prime Video picking up streaming rights to NBA games. Even the tournament series Street League Skateboarding signed a deal with the right-wing streaming platform Rumble.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images President-elect Donald Trump's second term is a regulatory wild card hanging over Big Tech. Read the full story at The Verge.
Image: Wing Wing, a subsidiary of Google's parent company Alphabet, is expanding its drone delivery service to DoorDash customers in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Starting today, 50 merchants from malls in Frisco and Fort Worth will be available for drone delivery through the DoorDash app, dropping meals and items to homes in as little as 15 minutes," according to Wing.The drones can fly at up to 65mph and reach a cruising height of about 150 feet before stopping to hover and safely lower orders to the ground at their delivery destinations. DoorDash customers will need an eligible address" in Dallas-Fort Worth for the drone delivery option to appear on the checkout page. Locals can check the Wing website to see if they qualify. Image: DoorDash / Wing This option will only appear at the DoorDash checkout if the order is being delivered within the service catchment area. Wing says the company has now completed more than 400,000 commercial deliveries worldwide following its first US pilot in 2019. The Alphabet drone service trialed similar DoorDash partnerships in Australia and Christiansburg, Virginia, though the latter was limited to delivering Wendy's.This isn't the first service Wing has introduced to Dallas-Fort Worth, having previously teamed up with Walgreens to airdrop local deliveries. Walmart also operates its own drone delivery program in the area via partnerships with Wing and Zipline.
Image: Seagate It's been more than two decades since Seagate began working on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) - and now the company may finally be ready to release a hard drive using the technology. A new product page spotted by Tom's Hardware shows an Exos M hard drive sporting up to 32TB of storage using Seagate's Mozaic 3 Plus HAMR platform.Seagate's Mozaic 3 Plus technology allows for bigger hard drive capacities by making data bits smaller and closer together on each disk. To write data, a laser diode attached to the drive's recording heads heats small areas of the disk. Each bit is heated and cools down in a nanosecond, so the HAMR laser has no impact at all on drive temperature, or on the temperature, stability, or reliability of the media overall," Seagate writes on its website.Seagate says its Exos M hard drive has a 3TB per platter density, making it useful for enterprise applications like powering AI systems. We still don't know when Seagate could release its Exos M hard drive, as its product page currently shows a link to Stay Informed," but a launch seems imminent.As pointed out by Tom's Guide, Seagate said in a filing earlier this month that it had successfully completed qualification testing" for its HAMR hard drives with several customers within the Mass Capacity markets, including a leading cloud service provider." It says it will start shipping its HAMR-based hard drive to the unnamed cloud provider in the coming weeks."The Verge reached out to Seagate with a request for more information but didn't immediately hear back.Seagate isn't the only company working on high-capacity hard drives. In October, Western Digital launched a 32TB hard drive using energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR), while Toshiba recently demonstrated high-capacity hard drives with HAMR and microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR).
Image: LG Often at CES, you'll see a very impressive new technology debut at exorbitant prices before trickling down to more affordable models a couple years later. Lo and behold, that's exactly what we're seeing with LG and its Zero Connect Box. We got our first look at it with the M Series OLED in 2023. Now the company is bringing that Zero Connect Box, which beams audio and video to the TV panel, to one model of its still-terribly-named QNED Evo Mini LED lineup.The box can transmit 4K video at up to 144Hz, and by all accounts from reviews last year, it works as advertised and poses no issues for gaming. The only cable that runs to the TV screen itself is the power cable.LG says the QNED Evo series is also ditching quantum dots this year for a proprietary wide color gamut technology, Dynamic QNED Color Solution" that supposedly produces pure colors that are as realistic as they appear to the eye in general life."Unfortunately, I predict we're going to see a lot of hype about AI on TVs at CES 2025 - even more than usual - and LG is already backing up my theory. It's even putting a new AI button right on the Magic Remote for this year's TVs. In what's destined to be a controversial decision, the AI button actually takes the place of the traditional inputs button:
Image: A24 A24's lineup of films for 2025 is starting to become stacked - with fantastical creatures, that is. While the fantasy adventure The Legend of Ochi is slated to hit theaters next February, the dark comedy Death of a Unicorn is due out in the spring. And you can get a feel for it in the brand-new trailer above.The film follows a father and daughter (Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega) who are driving to a weekend retreat, and accidentally kill an animal ... which just so happens to be a unicorn. From there, it seems as though the dad's rich boss (Richard E. Grant) and his family can't help but see ways to exploit the creature's magical powers for profit. While the vibe is light and funny early one, things not only get darker, but take a turn towards horror by the end of the trailer.Death of a Unicorn is the directorial debut from Alex Scharfman, and it also stars Will Poulter, Sunita Mani, and Tea Leoni. Hereditary director Ari Aster serves as a producer, while horror legend John Carpenter.
Image: Shelly European smart device manufacturer Shelly is launching 11 automation devices that can connect to the home from over a mile away. Shelly says its new and updated Wave devices are built around the Z-Wave Long Range (Z-Wave LR) specification, and will be available in the US in the first half of 2025.The benefits of Z-Wave LR are similar to those offered by Amazon's Sidewalk IoT network in that both can extend connectivity to devices beyond your home Wi-Fi network, without the need for expensive LTE data.Z-Wave LR was announced back in 2020, but products that actually use it are only just starting to hit the market. The wireless protocol touts several features that are beneficial for large homes and commercial environments, such as eradicating the need for a mesh network with multiple signal repeaters. Instead, Z-Wave LR devices operate on a star network topology, which connects directly to devices via a central gateway hub.Z-Wave LR has a maximum line-of-sight wireless range of 1.5 miles when operating at full power with support for up to 4,000 devices on a single network. Supported devices also automatically adjust the radio output power, providing up to 10 years of battery life on a single coin-cell battery.The upgraded Shelly Wave products include a smart plug, a humidity and temperature sensor, a door/window sensor, a motion detector, a remote controller for motorized blinds, and a range of lighting dimmers and smart switches. Three of the devices are battery-powered. Shelly hasn't revealed the price of these new products yet.Z-Wave LR is backward compatible with older Z-Wave products and networks, but a Z-Wave LR-supported hub (built on the Z-Wave 700 or 800 series platform) is required to take advantage of the extended range benefits.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images We didn't all flock to a new platform or build on a thrilling new protocol. We went everywhere, and did everything, all at once. Read the full story at The Verge.
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images Authorities in the US are considering a ban on TP-Link internet routers over national security concerns due to their repeated links to Chinese cyberattacks. Investigators at the Commerce, Defense, and Justice departments have all launched probes into the company, according to the Wall Street Journal, with TP-Link reportedly being subpoenaed by an office of the Commerce Department.The WSJ reports that US authorities may ban the sale of TP-Link routers within the country next year. Action taken against TP-Link would likely fall to the incoming Trump administration.TP-Link holds roughly 65 percent of the US router market for homes and small businesses, and its internet communications products are used by the Defense Department and other federal government agencies. The company's market dominance is at least partly driven by the extreme low cost of its routers. The US Justice Department is investigating whether TP-Link sells products for less than they cost to produce in violation of a law that prohibits attempts at monopolies, according to the WSJ.The WSJ's sources also say that TP-Link often fails to address security flaws that are routinely flagged in routers shipped to customers. In October, Microsoft disclosed a network of compromised network devices mostly manufactured by TP-Link that are regularly targeted by a Chinese government-linked hacking campaign.A spokeswoman for TP-Link's California-based business unit told the WSJ that the company assesses potential security risks and takes action to resolve known vulnerabilities. We welcome any opportunities to engage with the US government to demonstrate that our security practices are fully in line with industry security standards, and to demonstrate our ongoing commitment to the US market, US consumers, and addressing US national security risks," the spokeswoman said in a statement to the WSJ.
Michelle Rohn / The Verge The internet is forever. But also, it isn't. What happens to our culture when websites start to vanish at random? Read the full story at The Verge.
The Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition. | Image: Intel Intel is having an incredibly rough year - but at long last, the company's discrete graphics card initiative has produced a card worth celebrating. While we haven't managed to review it ourselves due to a fluke issue, the $250 Arc B580 Battlemage" GPU launched to nigh-universal praise, has already sold out most everywhere, and Intel tells The Verge it's working to ship new units every week.Demand for Arc B580 graphics cards is high and many retailers have sold through their initial inventory. We expect weekly inventory replenishments of the Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition graphics card and are working with partners to ensure a steady availability of choices in the market," Intel spokesperson Mark Anthony Ramirez tells The Verge.To give you an idea, here are some of the headlines we've seen on reviews of this card:
Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The holidays are expensive, but they don't have to be. From fitness trackers to smart speakers, here are the best gifts under $50. Read the full story at The Verge.
Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge If you're unsure what to gift the father figure in your life this year, we have more than a few suggestions. Read the full story at The Verge.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge I opened the App Store today to find an emulator I'd read about, and a new prompt appeared under the search bar inviting me to search the way you talk." I hadn't seen the prompt before on my iPhone 13 Pro Max, and quite frankly, I had missed the iOS 18.1 update note about it.As it describes, Apple's update in October added, App Store search lets you use natural language to find what you're looking for more easily." It's also not the only place Apple is adding natural language search with iOS 18, in addition to Photos, Music, and Apple TV.While some others had seen a splash screen in October, I'd only spotted the same simple search prompts as before. When I asked around at The Verge, several others hadn't seen it before, although closing the app and relaunching it caused the message to appear in at least one case, and a few social media posts have popped up from other people noticing it for the first time.The prompt in the hint bubble suggested trying something like Apps that help me work out," so of course, I gave it a try. Screenshot: iOS App Store How well does it work? When I searched emulators that feature multiple consoles," the top result was the multi-console Delta app. Cool. Apps that only emulate single consoles" gave me the PS Remote Play, PlayStation, and Xbox apps - less good, but it did follow those with Gamma, a PS1 emulator app. And when I asked for Video games that can help me work out," well... Screenshot: iOS App Store This isn't exactly what I was looking for, but I certainly would never have found this otherwise. Overall, it seems like an improvement to me. Twerk Race 3D is not an app that would help me work out, but it does seem like the search engine worked in spirit. I never felt like the App Store's search was helpful for anything besides finding an app I already knew the name of. Plus, searching with the usual one-or-two-word terms might not give me the same variety as switching up how I phrase a natural language prompt.
Look Around Look Around at how lucky we are to have Apple Maps right now. | Screenshot: The Verge Following the beta launch of Apple Maps on the web in July, Apple has now recently added Look Around street-level views for several cities to the site, 9to5Mac reports. You can activate Look Around as you would in the Apple Maps app on devices like the iPhone or iPad by selecting the binoculars icon on the bottom left of the map window. You can then click and drag on the map to see different first-person perspectives in many big cities.At launch, the Apple Maps web beta included basic functionality like searching for points of interest, seeing ratings, browsing area Guides, and getting directions. With Look Around, the web version inches closer to matching functionality with the Apple Maps app on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS - albeit without personalization features such as searching addresses from your contacts or saving locations to your Library.Personally, I use the Apple Maps app on my Mac more often than any other mapping software, and I often find Apple's Look Around to be a smoother experience than Google's Street View. However, I sometimes also have to switch to Google Maps anyway since Apple doesn't support Look Around for my hometown of Baltimore, MD - even though I spotted an Apple Maps van in the city all the way back in 2017.You can see the full list of cities where you can use Look Around on Apple's website.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Grubhub has agreed to pay $25 million to settle a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit that claimed the food delivery service misled customers and drivers while also damaging the reputation of restaurants. The proposed settlement will require Grubhub to make several changes to the platform, such as showing the total delivery cost when customers place an order.Along with advertising highly inflated hourly pay rates for drivers," the FTC's initial complaint accused Grubhub of hiding the true cost of its services" by adding delivery fees that raised the price of customers' final orders. The agency claimed that starting around 2019, Grubhub began advertising lower delivery fees to attract more customers but then began tacking on a service" fee that increased the cost of orders anyway.The FTC also alleged the company charged Grubhub Plus members for delivery despite advertising the subscription as having free" or $0" deliveries. The agency claimed Grubhub makes the plan easy to sign up for but difficult to cancel while also allegedly blocking the accounts of users with large gift card balances. Screenshot: FTC The FTC claimed Grubhub charged customers hidden fees, raising their total order price. Additionally, the FTC accused Grubhub of adding restaurants to the platform even if they never signed up to sell food on the service. Grubhub has had as many as 325,000 unaffiliated restaurants on its platform - more than half of all of the available restaurants on Grubhub," the FTC claims. As a result, many customers wound up having issues with their orders, resulting in bad feedback for unaffiliated restaurants.Grubhub is now required to show customers the full cost of delivery and can no longer add junk fees" to orders. It's also banned from listing unaffiliated restaurants on the platform, and can only make driver earnings claims that it can back up with evidence and in writing." Grubhub must also notify customers when they're banned and offer a way to appeal the decision, as well as make it easier to cancel Grubhub Plus.While we categorically deny the allegations made by the FTC, many of which are wrong, misleading or no longer applicable to our business, we believe settling this matter is in the best interest of Grubhub and allows us to move forward," Grubhub spokesperson Najy Kamal said in a statement to The Verge. The company also responded to the settlement in a post on its website.Though Grubhub was initially ordered to pay $140 million, it is partially suspended based on the company's inability to pay the full amount." The company's $25 million will go toward refunding affected customers, but the FTC says the full judgment will be due immediately" if Grubhub is found to have misrepresented its financial status."
Image: The Verge Threads is about to begin testing the ability to schedule posts, according to Instagram's Adam Mosseri. Replies cannot be scheduled," he added, explaining that we want to balance giving people more control to plan their Threads posts while still encouraging real-time conversation."Mosseri also makes sure to note that Instagram has been working on this feature for months." I'm choosing to take as a sign that the Instagram chief is fed up with the notion that Bluesky is the motivating factor behind every new improvement that comes to Threads. Last week, Threads introduced curated collections of people to follow, which drew comparisons to Bluesky's starter packs.Yesterday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads now has over 100 million daily active users, marking the first time that the company has revealed a DAU figure for its Twitter / X competitor. Threads also has more than 300 million monthly active users. No matter how Meta is calculating those figures, Bluesky objectively remains far smaller.Instagram has long offered the option to schedule feed posts, and this week it announced the same convenience is being extended to DMs.
Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube is partnering with the Creative Artists Agency (CAA) to help creators identify content using their AI-generated likenesses on the platform and submit removal requests. The company will test the controls with celebrities and athletes early next year before rolling it out to top YouTube creators, creative professionals, and other leading partners representing talent."In September, YouTube announced plans for tools that would help manage AI-generated depictions of creators and their voices. Now, the company says it can give celebrities (and soon, creators) the ability to manage AI copies of their likeness, such as their face, at scale."Last year, CAA introduced the CAAVault, which scans and stores the digital likenesses of its clients, including their faces, bodies, and voices.YouTube is also working on synthetic-singing identification technology" that will detect AI content that attempts to replicate creators' singing voices. YouTube has already started letting music labels request the removal of AI content that simulates an artist's voice, and also began requiring creators to label videos containing AI-generated content earlier this year.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Forbes will stop using freelancers for some types of stories indefinitely - and has blamed the change on a recent update to Google Search policies.In recent days, Forbes has said it will stop hiring freelancers to produce content for its product review section Forbes Vetted, according to a journalist who has written for the site. In a note shared with The Verge, an editor at Forbes cited Google's site reputation abuse" policy for the change.Site reputation abuse - also called parasite SEO - refers to a website publishing a deluge of off-brand or irrelevant content in order to take advantage of the main site's ranking power and reputation in Google Search. Often, this piggybacking is concealed from users browsing the website. (For instance: those weird coupon code sections on newspaper sites that pop up via search engines but aren't prominently displayed on the homepage.) Sometimes this spammy content is produced by third-party marketing firms that are contracted to produce a mountain of search-friendly content.Forbes did not respond to multiple requests for comment. It's not clear what other sections of Forbes the pause extends to. Writer Cassandra Brooklyn described receiving similar news last week.Many news outlets (including The Verge) hire freelancers to write and report stories. But Forbes has an especially wide pool of outside contributors publishing to its site. Many of these writers are legitimate journalists who do fair, in-depth reporting. But there's also the Forbes contributor network, a group of thousands of marketers, CEOs, and other outside experts who get to publish questionable content under the trusted Forbes name.Some editorial content on the site may have drawn the ire of Google, which has been targeting the firehose of search engine-first content on the web. In November, Google further tightened its rules around parasite SEO, specifically taking aim at the third party" nature of this type of content.Our evaluation of numerous cases has shown that no amount of first-party involvement alters the fundamental third-party nature of the content or the unfair, exploitative nature of attempting to take advantage of the host's sites ranking signals," the company wrote in a blog post.Like other testing and review sites, Forbes Vetted makes money every time a reader makes a purchase using links in the outlets' articles. A writer who got word of the pause in freelance work says the editorial process on their past stories was rigorous - they would test products, go through multiple rounds of edits, and interview sources. In addition to the pause in work, the writer was told that some of their stories may need to be completely re-reported and re-published by an in-house staff member.They clearly put a ton of resources into Forbes Vetted," the writer says. The big product reviews I was doing were $3,000 a piece, which is a huge amount of money to then be like, Oh, we have to rewrite all this with staff in-house.'"Google's spam policies state that the existence of freelancer content in and of itself is not a running afoul of the site reputation abuse policy - it's only a violation if that content is also designed to take advantage of the site's ranking signals. Google spokesperson Davis Thompson directed The Verge to an FAQ section describing the freelancer policy.
Did VideoCardz obtain an image of the PC, too? | Image: VideoCardz In August, an Asus thermal engineer goofed by revealing the existence of possibly the most powerful tablet PC ever made - an Asus ROG Flow Z13 powered by an unannounced AMD Strix Halo" chip, one boasting an incredible 80 watts of power for its GPU alone.Now, VideoCardz is reporting that the chip (and tablet) are about to become official at CES 2025 next month - as the AMD Ryzen AI Max 395 Plus, a Zen 5 processor with Radeon 8060S graphics.With 16 Zen 5 processor cores and an impressive 40 compute units worth of AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics, VideoCardz points out that it should be AMD's fastest portable chip ever made - far outstripping previous chips in the graphics department in particular. (The Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 had just 16 GPU compute units - this is 2.5 times as many.)The leaks suggest that not all AI Max / Strix Halo chips will be equal; variants tipped as the AI Max 390, AI Max 385, and AI Max 380 are expected to have as few as six CPU cores and as few as 16 RDNA graphics compute units. But online retailer leaks show the Asus tablet should offer the two highest-end parts with 40 compute units.Otherwise, the early Asus ROG Flow Z13 leaks describe a tablet running Windows 11 on a 13.4-inch, 180Hz IPS touchscreen display, at a 16:10 aspect ratio, with 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 1TB of storage.I'm excited for what a huge leap in laptop/tablet graphics might unlock. It wasn't that long ago that a new wave of AMD integrated graphics paved the way for the handheld PC gaming revolution.VideoCardz writes that AMD is set to announce" the new AI Max Plus series at CES.
Image: Amazon Amazon's push into video game adaptations shows no signs of letting up. Today the company announced that Secret Level - an anthology of animated shorts all based on different video game properties - has been renewed for a second season on Prime Video. No other details about the new season have been announced yet.Secret Level actually just premiered on Prime Video, and comes from the same team behind Netflix's animated sci-fi anthology Love, Death and Robots. Its 15 episodes span a range of notable video game franchises, including Warhammer 40,000, Dungeons & Dragons, Mega Man, and the recently-shuttered Sony shooter Concord. It also awkwardly straddled the line between TV show and advertisement. In fact, one of Secret Level's most infamous episodes - a bloody, dark reimagining of Pac-Man - turned out to be tied to an upcoming game.Seriously, just look at it:The news comes as Amazon continues to find its footing both developing and publishing video games, as well as adapting them for its streaming service. This year the company had a major hit with Fallout on Prime Video (which is also getting a second season) and followed it up with a live-action take on Yakuza. A Tomb Raider series is also in the works.
Nissan CEO Makoto Uchida with Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe at a press conference in March. | Image: Honda Japanese automakers Honda and Nissan are in talks to merge to better compete with electric vehicle manufacturers like Tesla, BYD, and others. As reported by Nikkei Asia, the two have discussed signing a memorandum of understanding that outlines plans to split equity into a new holding company from which both will do business, according to anonymous sources.Both Honda and Nissan are also discussing a plan to pull Mitsubishi into the party, which would be akin to how various Japanese electronics brands banded together - such as Konica Minolta, JVCKenwood, and others. Honda and Nissan were already working together to develop EV technology and software and had invited Mitsubishi to that party as well.Of the two companies, it's Nissan that's really in trouble and reportedly will only survive another year unless another company (Honda) swoops in to buy Nissan shares. According the Reuters, Nissan's net earnings in the middle of 2024 were down more than 90 percent year over year, and it had to cut its annual operating profit forecast by nearly 70 percent. Nissan and Honda relased statements to Reuters saying:
This is the RTX 4080 Super, not the new cards. | Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Nvidia's new RTX 50 series graphics cards are looking like more of a lock for CES 2025 than ever, with Zotac and Acer now having leaked as many as five new GPUs - ones which may also have a new AI trick up their sleeves that we've never seen before.Inno3D, an Nvidia graphics card partner, says it plans to highlight" a wide slate of Nvidia AI features at the Las Vegas show, including Neural Rendering Capabilities" that are allegedly Revolutionizing how graphics are processed and displayed." HardwareLuxx spotted the news.It's not 100 percent clear from the company's vague teaser if that's a new RTX 50-series hardware feature, but it appears alongside other features that are typically attributed to the cards, like Improved RT cores": Image: Inno3D Inno3D also writes the cards will feature Advanced DLSS technology" - perhaps we'll see higher image quality and faster framerates than ever with a possible announce of DLSS 4.0?As far as the cards themselves, VideoCardz struck gold seeking out online retailer leaks this week, discovering that both Acer and Zotac had accidentally confirmed the existence of both an upcoming RTX 5090 with an unprecedented 32GB of GDDR7 memory, as previously leaked, and an RTX 5080 with 16GB of the same.But the Zotac leak goes further, suggesting that Nvidia might announce not two, not three, but as many as five new cards at CES, including the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080, an RTX 5090D for China, the RTX 5070 Ti whose specs have recently continued to leak, and even a base RTX 5070.We're not necessarily expecting any of these new cards to aim for affordability, but one can hope. If not, an RTX 5060 Ti and a vanilla RTX 5060 are reportedly on the way, though Wccftech reports that the RTX 5060 may stick with a paltry 8GB of video memory, while the 5060 Ti may be outfitted with 16GB.32GB of video memory isn't the only way that the RTX 5090 might physically be a beast: an early prototype leak suggested that its massive cooler might take up four slots in a computer case. But it's possible that was just a prototype; reliable leaker kopite7kimi stated in September that Nvidia is going for a dual-slot design instead. Just a few days ago, the same leaker suggested its power consumption may have been revised downward from 600W, too.
Image: Riley Testut The Delta gaming emulator is now providing a link to sign up for Patreon-exclusive membership perks directly within the iOS app in Apple's US App Store. Developer Riley Testut is heavily encouraging users to click that external link by tripling the price you'd otherwise pay to Apple for In-App Purchase versions of those same Patreon tiers. Testut calls it the do not buy sale."The update both embraces and protests the External Purchase Link Entitlement that Apple introduced in January, which allows developers to link to outside payment platforms in exchange for giving Apple a slightly reduced 27 percent cut of sales. The App Store policy change was made following rulings in the Epic vs Apple lawsuit that found Apple had acted anticompetitively by preventing developers from telling users about payment methods that bypassed its own payment system. Image: Delta Clicking this link within the Delta app settings will take you to the Patreon page to sign up directly. Testut says Delta is likely the first app to use the entitlement. The $3, $5, and $10 monthly memberships on Patreon - which provide additional benefits like iPad and SEGA Genesis support, and private Discord access depending on the subscription tier - are listed in the iOS app at $10, $15, and $30, respectively.We really don't want people to use in-app purchase," Testut told The Verge. We've been using Patreon for years, and it allows us to do things Apple's IAP system can't - such as issuing refunds and handling customer support - making it much more convenient for creators like us."
Image: The Verge I was driving home the other day and wanted to call my partner and let him know that I was stuck in traffic. (Not an unusual event on Brooklyn's Belt Parkway.) I've got a relatively old car (it's a 2007 model, so we're talking no real smarts), and so I depend on my phone rather than any built-in intelligence to deal with calls, music, etc. Usually, there's no problem, but this time, when I called out, Hey Google - call Jim on his mobile!" my phone informed me - in a very long-winded paragraph - that Gemini doesn't do that:
Colin Angle, the former CEO of iRobot, is launching a home robot startup. | Photo by Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images Colin Angle, the co-founder of iRobot and its CEO for three decades, is getting back into robotics with a new startup called Familiar Machines & Magic. According to The Boston Globe, the company is developing a new kind of home robot focusing on health and wellness that might take the form of an animal or a familiar."The company is currently in stealth mode, Angle tells The Globe, and includes the former CTO of iRobot, Chris Jones, as well as iRobot's Ira Renfrew, who left the company to work on robotics at Amazon, including the shuttered Scout delivery robot.Angle was working to turn iRobot and its Roomba robot vacuum cleaners into the brains of the smart home before he left the company following the collapse of its sale to Amazon in January of this year. Since then, iRobot has slashed its R&D budget, cut almost 50 percent of its staff, and refocused its business on home cleaning machines.Familiar Machines & Magic has raised $15 million from eight investors and is looking for $15 million more, according to TechCrunch. A job listing for the company on LinkedIn describes it as a well-funded, new embodied AI and robotics startup based outside of Boston."It's an interesting pivot for Angle to go from the practical to the personal. To date, robots that can do things for you, such as robot vacuum cleaners, robot litter boxes, and robot lawnmowers, have been more successful than companion bots." Jibo, Moxie, and Anki are just a few that have powered down over the years.However, advances in generative AI could bring more potential to the space. These technologies could make robots such as the lovable Lovot or Sony's Aibo, which the company recently resurrected, seem more human-like, have conversations with you, and be more useful than simply being cute.For example, Israeli startup Intuition Robotics has been working on ElliQ, an AI-powered social robot designed to keep the elderly and home-bound company, since 2017. I've tested a couple of versions of the tabletop robot, and its third-generation model, which incorporates generative AI, is significantly more lifelike and engaging.What exact type of magic Angle and his Familars will conjure up remains to be seen. One investor described furry pets to address loneliness" to The Globe. However, some combination of personality and practicality that positively impacts the health and well-being of household members feels like a good place to start.
Nvidia announced the latest in its Jetson Orin Nano AI computer line, the Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit. Sort of like a Raspberry Pi but for powerful AI processing, the tiny $249 computer packs more of an AI processing punch than the kit did before - for half the price. It's available to buy now.The Jetson Nano line has been a low-cost way for hobbyists and makers to power AI and robotics projects since its introduction in 2019. Nvidia says the Nano Super's neural processing is 70 percent higher, at 67 TOPS, than the 40 TOPS Nano. It also has 50 percent more memory bandwidth, at 102GB/s, which should speed up those operations.The Jetson Orin Nano Super kit uses essentially the same hardware as the original Orin Nano kit, and the company says it will get the same performance gains with a new JetPack update. Nvidia says the boost comes from a new power mode which increases the GPU, memory, and CPU clocks."Nvidia's Jensen Huang showed off the Nano Super in a video:The developer kit includes a reference carrier board and a Jetson Orin Nano 8GB system-on-module, comprised of an Nvidia Ampere GPU with tensor cores and 6-core Arm CPU. Nvidia calls the Nano Super Developer Kit an ideal solution" for building chatbots or visual AI agents, as well as AI-based robots.
TheRoomba Combo j7 Plus is a highly capable robot vacuum / mop hybrid that comes with its own auto-empty dock. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Cleaning up after holiday parties can be a real pain, but a robot vacuum like the iRobot Roomba Combo j7 Plus can speed up process. And thankfully right now it's just $669 ($331 off) at Wellbots, which is just $20 shy of its Black Friday all-time low price. If you want to gift the robot vacuum / mop hybrid, you can get it by Christmas when you buy it for $30 more at Amazon and Best Buy.Everything about the Roomba Combo j7 Plus is designed to make cleaning easier. Like our favorite Roomba, the newer Roomba Combo j9 Plus, it comes with its own auto-emptying docking station and a retractable mop that lifts itself up over the vacuum to keep carpets dry. It also has features like AI obstacle avoidance, allowing it navigate around shoes, gifts, and other clutter left on the floor, and dual rubber roller brushes that does a great job of sucking up dirt from carpets. And if you run into trouble with it, The Verge's smart home reviewer says that Roombas have a history of being easy to repair," unlike pricier rivals like Dreame X40 or Roborock's S8 MaxV Ultra that may mop better.Unlike the Combo j9 Plus, though, the last-gen Combo j7 Plus can't refill its own mop tank. It also doesn't come with iRobot's Dirt Detective system, which lets it prioritize and really hone in on particularly messy areas. That said, given the Combo j7 Plus is currently about half the price of the Combo j9 Plus, we think those are fair-trade offs.Read our iRobot Roomba Combo j7 Plus review.More deals we think we are worth a look
A 15-second time exposure image. | Image: Don Pettit NASA astronaut Don Pettit created his own device to help him take photos of the stars while on the International Space Station - and the results are pretty impressive. In a Reddit thread spotted by Space.com, Pettit describes how he brought a homemade star tracker with him to space, allowing his camera to capture long-exposure photos without the stars leaving any trails behind.Star trackers are designed to rotate with the Earth - or in Pettit's case, the ISS - to prevent distortion when taking pictures of the night sky. One of Pettit's photos, which you can see above, was a 15-second time exposure. He says his tracker completes a rotation every 90 minutes to match the ISS's pitch rate. Without this tracker, you can not take photo[s] longer than 1/2 sec without star blur due to the rate of orbital motion," Pettit writes. Image: Don Pettit A photo of a large Magellanic Cloud visible in the southern hemisphere." In a separate post, Pettit notes that aligning the tracker on a moving platform isn't an easy task, adding that he can currently take up to 30-second exposures without significant star motion." Taking photos through the ISS's windows also presents another challenge. Looking through 4 panes of glass, two of which are 30mm thick, at an angle makes for some distortion and relative optically induced star motion," Pettit says. Image: Don Pettit A photo showing Pettit's homemade sidereal orbital tracker. If you want to see even more incredible images captured by Pettit, you can browse through them on his Reddit account page, X, and Instagram. Many show what photos from the ISS look like without compensating for its movement.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge The ever-dwindling field of games media has a new player: Walmart. Restart is new website run by Moonrock - a marketing company specializing in bringing brands to video games - and sponsored by the largest retailer in the United States.A new games site sponsored by Walmart doesn't seem inherently bad, especially as the games media landscape continues to shrink. Publications are shutting down, ad revenues are drying up, and existing sites now operate with fewer and fewer employees. Earlier this year, Ziff Davis, IGN's parent company, acquired a handful of media sites including Eurogamer; Rock, Paper, Shotgun; and VG247. In the time since, there have been staff departures and layoffs including buyouts offered to employees earlier this month. According to a report in Aftermath, this latest round of buyouts has apparently left GamesIndustry.biz, a site that's been around for over 20 years, with only one full-time employee.Restart's business model isn't wholly unique. Before it was unceremoniously shut down earlier this year, Game Informer magazine was owned and operated by GameStop, and for decades Nintendo ran its own magazine. Other websites like IGN, Polygon, and The Verge also run sponsored content and include affiliate links in articles. To survive in the current digital media landscape, the support of deep-pocketed individuals or corporations is all but required. In this regard, Restart is just like any other publication.According to its editorial mission, Restart is sponsored by Walmart, but we operate as an independent site." The mission statement explains that while its articles will feature affiliate links to Walmart products, the site itself will receive no portion of the sale. We hope you can see this gives us zero incentive to provide biased review scores or other information about a game."Restart is sponsored by Walmart, but we operate as an independent site."But Restart is also entering a media landscape where the wall between corporate interests and editorial independence has become perilously thin, and with a few rare exceptions, games media has slowly shifted away from providing readers thoughtful discussion and critique to providing a product that can be monetized to hell and back. That driving ethos is clearly outlined in a post by Moonrock on its Substack. Restart.run serves as a dynamic hub where gaming content meets retail opportunities, allowing gamers to transition effortlessly from discovering new games to purchasing them on Walmart's platform."
Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images Nearly three years ago in January of 2022, the Senate seemed poised to reform antitrust law and place a check on Big Tech's power. The Senate Judiciary Committee had just voted to advance the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), led by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA). The bill would have forced major changes to how many tech businesses operate, including by prohibiting them from self-preferencing their own products on their marketplaces.But the bill's momentum petered out in the months to come. Congress did manage to pass two important competition updates that year, the first allowing state attorneys general to choose which courts they filed antitrust suits in, and the second raising merger filing fees on the largest transactions to raise money for federal enforcers. AICOA, though, never passed through the Senate - let alone into law.Klobuchar has been one of the leading advocates of antitrust reform. After House lawmakers launched a probe into Big Tech companies in 2019, she and several other lawmakers concluded the monopoly-busting system was broken. Existing antitrust rules were theoretically powerful, their theory went, yet decades of lax enforcement and unfavorable case law left courts and enforcers with flimsy tools for keeping the industry in check. Congress needed to step in and get it back on track.Legislative efforts to overhaul the system have failed - yet in 2024, antitrust enforcement is experiencing something of a boom. Apple, Amazon, Meta and Google each face a federal anti-monopoly suit (two, in Google's case.) The Department of Justice secured a win in its Google Search case, while Epic Games won a ruling against Android's Play Store. The DOJ and Federal Trade Commission under the Biden administration have tightened merger guidelines and aggressively scrutinized deals.Klobuchar is now reaching the end of her time chairing the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust. While its mission might look a bit less urgent these days, she argues it's as important as ever. It would be a lot easier to have some set rules of the road in place instead of this laborious, long litigation process," she tells The Verge in a phone interview. Today, she's overseeing a hearing about how to continue a bipartisan path to reform as the Trump administration prepares to take over.While the most groundbreaking legislation hasn't passed, she says, antitrust issues have still garnered more interest from congressional leadership on both sides of the aisle in recent years. Maybe because of the bipartisan support and the good work that's being done, we do keep bringing these cases," she says. But the lesson from the last four years is aggressive enforcement matters."Klobuchar expresses hope that President-elect Donald Trump's antitrust watchdogs will continue pursuing important cases. While the Senate won't hold new hearings to approve existing FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson's ascendance to chair, she noted that FTC commissioner nominee Mark Meador wrote a positive article about the DOJ's antitrust lawsuit against Ticketmaster. I consider that a good sign," she says. Klobuchar adds that former Democratic enforcers have told her that Trump's pick to lead the DOJ Antitrust Division, Gail Slater, gets it."Republicans will get to set the subcommittee's agenda next year when they take over the majority in the Senate. But while she'll no longer be chairing the panel, Klobuchar says, she's going to continue to work for reforms. It couldn't be more important right now, with a new administration coming in, that we find ways to work across the aisle to get this done."
Google announced a bunch of new stuff last week, from Gemini 2.0 and Project Mariner to Android XR and Project Moohan. As ever with Google, it feels like a lot of stuff without necessarily a coherent plan behind it. But if you look closely enough, and start to put some of the pieces together, the combination of those announcements might add up to something like Google's vision for the future of everything.On this episode of The Vergecast (our last Tuesday episode of the year), The Verge's Kylie Robison and Victoria Song join the show to do some Google puzzling. They describe their experiences with all of Google's new projects and experiments, and explain why Google thinks XR could be the killer app for AI - and vice versa.After that, Chris Grant, group publisher for The Verge and Polygon, joins to talk about the two biggest 2025 stories in gaming: the impending launches of Grand Theft Auto VI and the Nintendo Switch 2. He explains why GTA is such an important and enduring gaming franchise, why he's confident the Switch 2 won't be like the Wii U, and why the whole gaming world is waiting for these two things so intently.Finally, we answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email vergecast@theverge.com!), with some help from The Verge's publisher Helen Havlak. Helen mentioned last week that she uses Figma to manage her garden, and let's just say you all had some follow-up questions about that. So Helen came back to explain her whole system.Oh, and did we mention we're doing a live Vergecast at CES? We're doing a live Vergecast at CES! Wednesday, January 8th, 5PM, at the Brooklyn Bowl at the Linq Promenade. It's free, it's going to be great, come join us!If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with Google:
Image: A New Social, NASA The open social web still isn't as open as we all might want, but a non-profit is being formed to try and change that. The non-profit, called A New Social, is being headed up by Ryan Barrett, the founder of Bridgy Fed, and Anuj Ahooja, an engineering leader and writer.We believe that a healthy ecosystem competes on innovative features, not critical mass," A New Social says on its mission page. The social web should be centered around people, not platforms, and artificial walls should not deny them the relationships they've built online." The organization is betting on services built on open protocols like ActivityPub and ATProto" and says it will work directly with developers to continue ensuring competition in the open social web, with a focus on advocating for users every step of the way."The non-profit is still in its very early stages; Barrett and Ahooja will be recruiting a Board of Directors, identifying cross-protocol projects, and reaching out to developers to collaborate on tools and services needed for cross-protocol community building," according to a press release.But they've already identified A New Social's first project: Barrett's own Bridgy Fed, which you can use to have your Bluesky posts appear on ActivityPub-based platforms like Mastodon (aka the fediverse) and vice versa. And A New Social is already talking with big players in the open social web, including Bluesky, Flipboard, Mastodon, and Meta.All of these platforms are making some big important promises to their users," Ahooja says in an interview with The Verge. He points out that Threads has made promises to federate (which it is doing in baby steps), while Bluesky has promised that its end goal is decentralization. Us sitting in the middle puts us in a place where we have to be loud when they are not keeping those promises up." He says that Bridgy Fed is an implementation of a larger user advocacy problem that we're trying to solve."I think it's a cool idea, but I was a touch skeptical during our interview - just before we talked, I had read about how another promising fediverse project Ahooja worked on, sub.club, would be shutting down. How can users put their faith in open social web projects like Bridgy Fed long term if those projects might just fizzle out?Ahooja says that's part why they're working with platforms, not just users. We think that top-down education is more important than anything," he says. That's also why they're taking a cross-network approach, according to Barrett; individual platforms and tools will grow and shrink, but overall, decentralized social media platforms are gaining mindshare, he says. If they can help the overall space get connected and stay connected, then that's net positive," he says.
Illustration by Hugo Herrera / The Verge The Federal Trade Commission has approved a new rule preventing hotels and ticket sellers from hiding extra fees associated with a purchase. Under the rule, businesses must provide up-front disclosure" of the total price of a hotel stay, vacation rental, or live event tickets before checkout.The rule, which was first proposed last year, targets the resort," convenience," and service" fees that often covertly raise the final price of a hotel stay or tickets for a live concert or sporting event. It doesn't ban companies from charging these kinds of fees; it just requires them to disclose the total cost of a purchase (including fees) when advertising or displaying their price.Additionally, businesses must display the total price of a purchase more prominently than most other pricing information." Though businesses can still exclude shipping fees and taxes from advertised prices, they must now show these fees before customers start entering their payment information. The rule is set to go into effect in April 2025.People deserve to know up-front what they're being asked to pay - without worrying that they'll later be saddled with mysterious fees that they haven't budgeted for and can't avoid," FTC Chair Lina Khan said in the press release. The FTC's rule will put an end to junk fees around live event tickets, hotels, and vacation rentals, saving Americans billions of dollars and millions of hours in wasted time."With Andrew Ferguson set to replace Khan as FTC Chair under the Trump administration, the agency has approved several last-minute changes that will directly impact consumers. In addition to approving a new click-to-cancel" rule that should make it easier to cancel subscriptions, the FTC also expanded its Telemarketing Sales Rule to cover tech support scam calls.
Image: Honda Out to prove that the sports coupe is far from dead, Honda announced the return of the Prelude with an all-new hybrid-electric powertrain.It's been over two decades since Honda last released a new Prelude, but the company began laying the groundwork for its return with the release of a concept version last year. Now, a hybrid Prelude is scheduled to arrive in the US in 2025.It will also mark the debut of Honda S+ Shift, a new drive mode that the company says further advances Linear Shift Control to deliver maximum levels of driver engagement."The company is describing the Prelude as having two motors," but that doesn't make it dual-motor or AWD. Honda's hybrid powertrain has had two motors for several generations, both of which sit adjacent to the internal combustion engine.The debut of Honda S+ ShiftOne electric motor acts as a generator, creating electricity for the battery and propulsion," Honda spokesperson Chris Naughton said, and the other is a traction motor that propels the vehicle - and captures regen when slowing."There's not much else to note about the Prelude's return; Honda is probably waiting until closer to the production to release key specs.I'm sure there will be some bemoaning the fact that Honda had an opportunity to release a fully electric Prelude that would have been rad as hell. To be sure, the company says it's still committed to achieving carbon neutrality for all of its products and corporate activity" by 2050 - and that includes 100 percent of EV sales by 2040.But Honda also has a pretty good track record for hybrid vehicles, which it considers an important bridge to full EVs. And clearly, the US is heading toward a dark period for EV sales with the incoming Trump administration expected to roll back a lot of the incentives and regulations aimed at growing EV adoption.Hybrid-electric trims currently make up more than 50 percent of Accord and CR-V sales, Honda says, and the newly introduced Civic hybrid is expected to ultimately represent about 40 percent of Civic sales. Cumulative sales of Honda electrified vehicles top 1 million.Meanwhile, the fully electric Honda Prologue (based on GM's Chevy Equinox EV) is already enjoying brisk sales since its US launch earlier this year. And the company plans to unveil a production-ready Honda Zero model at CES next year.
Illustration: The Verge Google Home is testing a new feature that will allow friends and family members to help manage smart devices around your home. Two access levels are available: Admin" which provides full control over account and device permissions, and Member" for people who require more limited access.Google says that Admin access is for trusted partners or people who co-manage the home with you." Admins can add, remove, and manage users, add and remove devices, and link subscriptions to the home account. Members can manage basic device controls like viewing live security camera feeds, and adjusting personal settings like voice and face match assistant features.Two further permission tiers are available for Members: Settings" to fully control devices and home-wide settings like automation and Nest Wifi device network features; and Activity" to authorize access to device and home-wide history for things like cameras, locks, and sensors.The customizable Member access was first announced in November alongside the Google Home extension for Gemini. Only users who are enrolled in the Google Home public preview can send invitations to the new access levels.Participants can add someone as an Admin or a Member by opening the Google Home app settings, tapping Household and access," and selecting the plus icon to invite a new home member. Those you invite don't need to be enrolled in public preview themselves, but will need to be running the latest version of the Google Home app.
A Starlink terminal in the wild. | Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge The EU has signed a deal for its IRIS^2 constellation of 290 communication satellites that will operate in both medium and low Earth orbit. The Starlink rival will provide secure connectivity to governmental users as well as private companies and European citizens, and bring high-speed internet to dead-zones. The public-private deal valued at 10.6 billion (about $11 billion), according to The Financial Times, is expected to come online by 2030.According to the European Space Agency (ESA), the interlinked satellites placed into different orbits will enable the constellation to communicate securely and quickly and remain constantly connected without needing thousands of satellites." SpaceX, by comparison, has already launched some 7,000 low Earth satellites since 2018 to ensure Starlink's global coverage and low latencies. The IRIS^2 constellation will consist of 264 spacecraft in low Earth orbit and 18 in medium Earth orbit.SpaceRISE - a consortium led by European satellite network operators SES, Eutelsat, and Hispasat, and supported by European satcom subcontractors like Airbus and Deutsche Telekom - has been given a 12-year concession contract to develop, deploy, and operate the IRIS^2 constellation. IRIS^2 is an acronym for Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite.This cutting-edge constellation will protect our critical infrastructures, connect our most remote areas and increase Europe's strategic autonomy. By partnering with the SpaceRISE consortium, we are demonstrating the power of public-private collaboration to drive innovation and deliver tangible benefits to all Europeans," said Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy.In September, FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel said she wanted to see more competition to Elon Musk's Starlink. Our economy doesn't benefit from monopolies... every communications market that has competition is strong, we see lower prices and more innovation, and honestly, space should be no exception."Update, December 17th: Added details on the numbers of satellites in the constellation.
Photo by Andrej Sokolow / picture alliance via Getty Images Waymo's autonomous vehicles are going to Tokyo, marking the first time that the Alphabet company is deploying vehicles on public roads in a foreign market.Waymo is billing the excursion as a simple road trip" for collecting data about the nuances of Japanese driving, including left-hand traffic and navigating a dense urban environment. The vehicles will be driven manually for the purposes of gathering mapping data and will be managed by a local taxi fleet operator, Nihon Kotsu. About 25 vehicles will be sent, with the first set to arrive in early 2025.And while the tests will undoubtedly be seen as laying the groundwork for a future Tokyo-based robotaxi service, Waymo said it isn't ready to announce anything quite yet. While we look forward to bringing the life-saving benefits of the Waymo Driver global, we have no plans to serve riders in Tokyo at this time," Waymo spokesperson Sandy Karp said. Rather, we're bringing our technology to learn and understand how Waymo fits into the existing transportation landscape and learning how to best partner with local officials and communities."The inclusion of GO, a popular taxi app in Japan, in the strategic partnership could signal Waymo's intention to put its autonomous vehicles into service through a locally based mobility provider. Waymo is already doing this in the US, making its autonomous vehicles available on Uber's ridehail app in Austin and Atlanta.We have no plans to serve riders in Tokyo at this time"Waymo's robotaxi business in the US is growing, albeit slowly. The company currently has approximately 700 vehicles in operation in several cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, and Phoenix. It also plans to launch a robotaxi service in Atlanta in an exclusive partnership with Uber and is planning to launch in Miami in 2026. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai recently said that Waymo was providing 175,000 paid trips per week, or about a million miles.In Tokyo, Waymo's vehicles will be operated by trained autonomous specialists employed by Nihon Kotsu. Once the company feels like it's ready, it will transition to hands-free autonomous driving with a safety driver behind the wheel. Karp wouldn't say whether that would eventually progress to fully driverless operations. The vehicles will be geofenced to certain neighborhoods in Tokyo, including Minato, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Chiyoda, Ch, Shinagawa, and Kt.In bringing its vehicles to its first foreign country, Alphabet is trying to project confidence in its technology, especially at a time when companies are pulling back on costly robotaxi projects. General Motors recently announced that it would no longer fund Cruise and would instead pivot to driver-assist technology and personally owned autonomous vehicles.Several companies have tested their autonomous vehicles in Japan, but the country is a bit of a backwater compared to China and the US. Part of the problem seems to be the country's robust auto industry is focusing its testing in countries other than its native one. Toyota and Nissan are both seeking to deploy robotaxis in China in collaboration with local operators.
Framework's double SSD caddy for its Framework 16 expansion bay. | Image: Framework The most ambitious laptop ever made just got a long-promised modular upgrade. Starting today, you can pay $39 to add two extra M.2 slots to the Framework Laptop 16 - letting you potentially carry around an AI accelerator, an eGPU adapter, or a grand total of four solid state storage sticks for ludicrous capacity.As Framework's blog post points out, the new Dual M.2 Adapter" is Framework's first new modular component since launch that takes advantage of the Laptop 16's big expansion bay around back. At launch, you only had two options: a Radeon RX 7700S discrete graphics card for extra money, or a mostly empty bay that only contained fans.But now, you can add the Dual M.2 Adapter to that mostly empty bay to fit an additional pair of M.2 2280, 2260, 2240 or 2230 modules, with four lanes of PCIe 4.0 each, on top of the twin SSD slots (M.2 2280 and M.2 2230) that come with the laptop to begin with.With current stick SSD capacities topping out at around 8TB (2280) and 2TB (2230) respectively, that means you can theoretically cart around 26TB of storage at once... not counting any 1TB Framework Expansion Cards you stick into the sides of the laptop, or any giant SD cards you plug into the $25 full-size SD card modules that Framework finally released this fall.(With 2TB SD cards on the market and six expansion slots for them on the Laptop 16, I guess the actual maximum capacity of Framework's laptop is now 38TB.)And while those who bought the Radeon discrete GPU won't be able to take advantage without swapping out that module, swaps are thankfully quick and easy:
Illustration: The Verge Threads now has more than 100 million daily active users, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Monday. It's a notable milestone not just because it's a big number; it's also the first time Meta has a daily active user figure publicly.In recent weeks, Meta has been very vocal about Threads' growth after a lot of people flocked to Bluesky. While Bluesky tracker says that that platform currently has a little over 25 million total users, Zuckerberg shared Monday that Threads has more than 300 million monthly active users. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but it's clear that Threads is still much larger than Bluesky.Threads has also ramped up its feature releases, including updates that appear to be inspired by Bluesky like custom feeds and curated collections of accounts to follow. Meta is also testing the ability to choose your own default feed, which is a much-needed change. But it's not all good; Threads might get ads early next year.
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is set to meet with President-Elect Donald Trump on Monday as the platform faces a ban in the US, according to CNN's Kaitlan Collins. The move makes Chew the latest tech executive - following Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg - to meet with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort.TikTok already lost in appeals court while fighting the ban-or-divest law that goes into effect on January 19th, and today, it asked the Supreme Court to intervene.Though Trump initially led the ban on TikTok over claims about national security concerns, he started to reverse course earlier this year. In March, Trump said he didn't want a TikTok ban because ...without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people." He later joined TikTok in June.When asked about the TikTok ban during a press conference on Monday, Trump said he would take a look." Along with meeting with Trump, tech giants, including Meta, Amazon, and OpenAI, have donated to Trump's inauguration fund as well.
Sub.club, which lets fediverse creators offer paid subscriptions and premium content and launched at the end of August, is already shutting down. With regret, we will be winding down this project over the next few weeks," the sub.club team announced last week. Creators using the service will be fully paid," but sub.club feeds will stop working by the end of January."As I wrote when I first covered sub.club, the service seemed like an interesting way to let people on the fediverse more easily monetize their audience without having to point them toward other platforms like Patreon. But the group that built it, The BLVD, has run out of funding.Unfortunately we were not able to quickly achieve sufficient traction with product-market fit / adoption for sub.club, or to attract investors, partnerships, etc.," Bart Decrem, The BLVD's founder, tells The Verge in an email. He says more than 150 creators were on sub.club. Still bullish on the fediverse, and the success of Bluesky is a great thing, but it does look like it will take a while to connect all the pieces."As we see more users onboard to platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads and the open ecosystem grows, the need will eventually arise for a subscription service that isn't tied to a single platform, is protocol-based, and allows for user portability," sub.club adviser Anuj Ahooja says. Hopefully, sub.club, or a service like it, can fill the gap at that time."Because of The BLVD's lack of funding, it is pulling the plug on two other projects, too: Mammoth, an open-source iOS app for Mastodon, and moth.social, a Mastodon instance that is the companion server to Mammoth. Late in November, the Mammoth Mastodon account said that Mammoth was now operating without funding or a paid team."
