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From left to right: the Samsung Galaxy S23, S23 Plus, and S23 Ultra. The latest Galaxy trio is available for preorder | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Another year, another round of flagship Samsung phones. This time around, Samsung used its Unpacked event to announce a new line of Galaxy Books, in addition to the Galaxy S23, S23 Plus, and S23 Ultra. The latter probably feels familiar to last year’s S22 generation, as there are once again three models to choose from: a big-ish one, a bigger one, and the biggest one. That last one, the S23 Ultra, features souped-up specs, a stylus, and some big megapixel gains. However, each member of the S23 family is promising faster performance than last year’s model thanks to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processors.The S23 flock starts at $799.99 and goes up to $1,199.99 (unless you opt for pricey storage upgrades), and all three models are set... Continue reading…

Only the Ryzen 9s will be coming in February. | Image: AMD AMD has announced the pricing for its flagship 7000X3D chips as well as when you’ll be able to get them. The Ryzen 9 7950X3D will cost $699, with the 7900X3D coming in at $599. Both chips will be available on February 28th. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D, meanwhile, has seemingly been delayed a bit and will be released on April 6th for $449.When AMD announced the chips last month, it was exciting to see that the company was bringing 3D V-Cache technology to even more chips in its lineup. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D was the previous standard-bearer for the tech, and that chip received a lot of praise — what would chips with up to double the number of cores be capable of?

Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Samsung just held its first Galaxy Unpacked event of the year, where it took the wraps off its new Galaxy S23 devices and the Galaxy Book3.In case you weren’t able to watch the event live, you can catch up on all the biggest news from Galaxy Unpacked here.Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S23 Ultra gets a small boost Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge The Samsung S23 Ultra comes with a 200-megapixel camera sensor. The S-Pen-equipped Galaxy S23 Ultra comes with a slew of small but notable upgrades, including a 200-megapixel camera sensor, a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip, and a more battery-efficient display. The base Ultra model now also comes with 256GB of storage, which is a nice addition.The S23 Ultra starts at... Continue reading…

Peloton’s Q2 2023 losses were the narrowest they have been since 2021. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge “If you’ve been wondering whether or not Peloton can make an epic comeback, this quarter’s results show the changes we’re making are working,” Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy wrote Wednesday in an investor letter accompanying the company’s Q2 2023 earnings report.McCarthy is no stranger to bold claims, but a year after taking the helm of the troubled company, it seems like the numbers are starting to back him up. In its Q2 2023 earnings report, Peloton reported a loss of $335.4 million compared to $439.4 million this time last year. On the surface, a loss doesn’t seem like a win — especially since it’s Peloton’s eighth consecutive quarter without turning a profit. However, it’s the narrowest loss Peloton’s reported ever since it started... Continue reading…

Photo by Rob Tringali / MLB Photos via Getty Images YouTube TV might be working to refine and improve its user experience, but like every other subscription TV service, its customers are always at risk of losing channels out of the blue. MLB Network is the latest to vanish from the service with little warning. YouTube TV emailed subscribers yesterday, giving them the heads-up that the channel would be going away… by the end of that same day. Now it’s February, and MLB Network is gone.Subscribers are raising the usual complaints, asking the right questions, and threatening to cancel. Shouldn’t the monthly price go down? (Sadly, it never works that way.) Will they get things figured out by the regular season? (Maybe, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.)Any cloud DVR recordings from MLB... Continue reading…

The iPad Air from 2022 is a great buy unless you really prefer a bigger screen or the Face ID found on the Pro models. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge It’s February, folks. For many of us, that means a month of dreary weather and seasonal depression, but today, we can cheer ourselves up with coverage of Samsung’s impending Unpacked event and some sick tech deals.Starting us off, Apple’s latest iPad Air is on sale in its base 64GB configuration for $499.99 ($100 off) at Best Buy and Amazon — or $649.99 ($100 off) for 256GB at Best Buy and Amazon if you prefer more storage. This return to its lowest prices makes this iPad one of the best values across the whole range of Apple’s tablets, in part because it’s the cheapest way to get the speedy M1 processor. At this price, it’s just $50 more than the 10th-gen “entry-level” iPad, but it’s faster, has a laminated 10.9-inch screen that is... Continue reading…

Image: Amazon The latest Kindle Paperwhite has finally caught up with the new Kindle, which sounds weird, so let me explain: Amazon is making the 16GB Kindle Paperwhite and 32GB Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition available in new soft “denim” blue and “Agave Green” shades in addition to the standard black colorway.That means now you can buy both the 2021 Kindle Paperwhite and the new base Kindle — which Amazon released in October — in multiple colors.Previously, you could only buy the base Kindle in black and blue, while the Paperwhite was only available in black. That was a strange move as the Kindle Paperwhite is supposed to be the more premium e-reader, adding extra features like waterproofing. Naturally, thus, you’d expect it to offer more... Continue reading…

Peacock says the change reflects the company’s increased focus on its Premium membership offerings. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge NBCUniversal will no longer be offering a free membership tier for new customers subscribing to its Peacock streaming service. As of January 30th, new Peacock customers will now need to subscribe to the Premium plan ($4.99 / month) with ads or Premium Plus ($9.99 / month) without ads to access content on the platform, as first reported by The Streamable.A great deal of marketing for Peacock’s streaming debut in 2020 focused on the free membership tier, even introducing the service alongside the tagline “free as a bird.” The free membership was supported by ads and gave users access to a limited selection of Peacock content. Existing users will continue to have access to the free tier of Peacock, as will Premium Peacock subscribers who... Continue reading…

Image: The Verge An early slogan from Bumble encouraged users to “be the CEO your parents always wanted you to marry.” Since its founding in 2014, the company has billed its app as the more empowering dating service for women — one where women message matches first, and women are in control. It’s earned Bumble the moniker of “feminist Tinder.” And Bumble has been more than happy to play into that marketing.But almost a decade on, Bumble can still feel as tired and broken as other dating apps. And it often seems like that feminist twist is more marketing fodder than meaningful change to how our apps run our love lives.Episode four of Land of the Giants: Dating Games explores how ex-Tinder co-founder and marketing executive Whitney Wolfe Herd built a... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Intel is dropping the price of its RTX 3060 competitor, the Arc A750, to $249 just as it promises big performance improvements across a variety of DirectX 9 games for its Arc GPUs. The new $249 pricing will be available in the US and Canada today, followed by price drops in other regions over the course of the next week.Intel’s Arc A750 was already only $289, less than the $329 retail pricing for an RTX 3060. This aggressive price cut means the A750 Limited Edition (made by Intel) is much more affordable than the average price for an RTX 3060, which Intel estimates at $391. “That’s what we see if you just take a snapshot of what’s on Newegg or Amazon, it’s around $391 on average,” says Intel fellow Tom Petersen in a press briefing with T... Continue reading…

The two new benefits are free and exclusive to those subscribed to Netflix’s premium tier membership, which costs $19.99 / month for 4K HDR and other perks. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Netflix is introducing two new benefits exclusively for its premium subscribers: rolling out support for spatial audio across the streaming platform’s top 700 titles and increasing the number of download devices from four to six. Announced via a press release, both new features are available globally today and come at no additional cost to premium-tier Netflix subscribers who pay $19.99 / month for 4K HDR and other perks.Netflix first introduced the feature in July last year across a limited number of the platform’s original titles. Now, spatial audio will be available across 700 titles, including The Watcher, Wednesday, and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, and will be added to new titles as they’re released, including You, Your Place... Continue reading…

The new interface offers more at-a-glance information about where your package is. | Screenshot by Jon Porter / The Verge Gmail’s iOS and Android apps have been updated with a new interface that makes it easier to see where your packages are in transit, and when they might arrive. The feature was announced last November, when Google said it would be arriving “in the coming weeks,” but it’s only been spotted in the wild by the likes of 9to5Google and XDA-Developers over the past couple of days. It’s unclear exactly when it went live, but the feature appears to be available now if you know where to look.The feature is currently opt-in, making it easy to miss it if you don’t know where to look. Google’s original blog post announcing the feature had a screenshot of a prompt in the Gmail app asking if you want to turn the feature on, but for now most people... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Google has notified customers using its Google Fi cell service that their personal data may have been stolen in a recent cyberattack, which is believed to be in connection with a T-Mobile data breach earlier this month. In an email sent to Google Fi customers on Monday, obtained by Android Police, Google said that the cell network’s primary network provider had become aware of suspicious activity in a system containing Google Fi customer data.Google Fi is an MVNO that uses T-Mobile’s network for the majority of its connections alongside US Cellular, but Google doesn’t explicitly name T-Mobile as its primary service provider within the email. We have reached out to Google for clarification and will update this story should we hear back.... Continue reading…

The new Red Nose for 2023. | Image: Comic Relief Former head Apple designer Jony Ive has taken on an unusual brief: designing the iconic Red Nose that symbolizes the British charity Comic Relief. The new Red Nose is made mostly from plant-based materials and transforms from a small flat crescent into a honeycomb-paper sphere. Comic Relief says Ive’s redesigned Red Nose is the “most dramatic makeover since its debut in 1988.”The product is being sold as part of Red Nose Day, an annual charity fundraising event from Comic Relief that’s broadcast across a variety of British BBC TV channels.“We’ve grown up with Comic Relief and are proud to support their remarkable work,” says Jony Ive. “This new and seemingly simple Red Nose has been a fabulously complex little object to design and make... Continue reading…

Photo by PAU BARRENA/AFP via Getty Images We know Google is currently freaking out about AI chatbot ChatGPT, but a report from CNBC offers new details about how the search giant is apparently marshaling its response.According to CNBC, Googlers are currently testing an AI chatbot of their own called “Apprentice Bard,” which offers responses to questions posed using natural language just like ChatGPT. Bard is built using Google’s LaMDA technology, which is itself similar to the GPT-series of AI language models that ChatGPT itself relies on. (Google has used LaMDA in the past to power similar chatbot demos at I/O, like its conversation with Pluto.)One big advantage Bard reportedly has over ChatGPT is its ability to talk about recent events. As OpenAI warns, ChatGPT has “Limited... Continue reading…

Photo by Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images Tesla has revealed that its bitcoin holdings lost $204 million of value last year In a new regulatory filing, which was partially offset by gains of $64 million from converting the digital currency into fiat. Overall, it suggests the company’s bitcoin investment resulted in a net loss of $140 million throughout the course of 2022, TechCrunch reports.That’s a lot of money, but it’s small in comparison to Tesla’s initial bitcoin investment announced in February 2021, when it said it had bought $1.5 billion of the digital currency and planned to start accepting it as payment for its vehicles. But it didn’t hold on to the bulk of this investment for long. Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed in June 2021 that it had already sold 10 percent of its... Continue reading…

A screenshot from Half-Life 2, which is included in The Orange Box. | Image: Valve Microsoft will be removing a bunch of beloved games from the Xbox 360 Marketplace on February 7th, according to a support page on the Xbox website (via Wario64), meaning you won’t be able to buy them after that date.It’s not all bad news. If you’ve already bought a game that’s getting pulled, you can still download it after February 7th. Games being removed that are available on Xbox One and Xbox Series X / S stores will remain purchasable on those platforms.But that does mean digital games only available on the Xbox 360 Marketplace will be unavailable for purchase in just a week. Users on Resetera have figured out which games fall into that category and will be going away for good, and the list includes some well-known titles like Jet... Continue reading…

Frontier joins AT&T as another 5-gig capable ISP available in the United States | Graphic by William Joel / The Verge Frontier, an internet service provider (ISP) that services 25 US states, has just launched 5 Gig fiber internet service across its entire network. Frontier launched 2 Gig fiber internet service less than a year ago, and the 5 Gig plan is currently available in all of Frontier’s fiber-connected markets, with no phased rollouts.Compared to the cable-bound internet that most of us are familiar with, Frontier’s 5 Gig internet is reported to have upload speeds that are up to 125 times faster and up to five times faster downloads, all delivered with less latency.The new 5 Gig network is one of the fastest internet options currently available in the US, with other fiber-enabled ISPs like Verizon Fios and Google Fiber still capped at around... Continue reading…

A photo from E3 2019, the year before the pandemic. | Photo credit should read FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images Plus GM’s Hummer EV SUV goes into production, and Paramount’s streaming service gets a rebrand. Continue reading…

We’ve called it a cross between the Battle School from Ender’s Game and ultimate frisbee. We’ve called it Final Fantasy X blitzball meets VR. It made two of our Best VR Games lists — three, if you count the one I did for CNET before returning to The Verge. It convincingly sticks you into a robot body inhabiting a zero-G arena, where you have to use your wrist jets, obstacles, teammates, and even foes to catapult yourself to victory. It even became its own esport.But now, Echo VR (née Echo Arena) is getting killed off by Meta (née Facebook). Facebook purchased its developer Ready At Dawn in 2020, after making Echo VR one of the flagship games for the Meta Quest (née Oculus Quest) and Rift S launch. Meta will not be offering any refunds... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A judge for the National Labor Relations Board has determined that Amazon broke labor laws in the run-up to union elections at its JFK8 and LDJ5 facilities in Staten Island, New York. According to the judge, the company threatened workers by saying they wouldn’t get raises or additional benefits during a potential collective bargaining period and discriminated against union organizers while enforcing its solicitation policies.According to the decision, posted in full by Bloomberg Law, Amazon removed a post from an internal forum that called for workers to sign an Amazon Labor Union petition to get holiday pay for Juneteenth. Amazon allegedly cited its solicitation rules, but the judge says the company didn’t take the same action against... Continue reading…

Passenger aircraft as seen flying over the Netherlands. | Image: Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images With business continuing as usual, climate pollution from aviation could nearly triple by 2050 as demand for air travel grows, according to a new study published yesterday in the journal Nature Sustainability. It would cost up to $1 trillion to try to remove enough of that pollution from the atmosphere to meet global climate goals — an untenable situation.To put that enormous cost into context, the global airline industry only netted $26.4 billion in profits in 2019 before the covid pandemic curbed travel. And even if airlines can pay to remove all their emissions from the atmosphere, that’s still not guaranteed to slow climate change. While carbon offsets — paying to cancel out your climate pollution through green projects like... Continue reading…

Open for business. | Image: DIY Perks The Framework Laptop has been a godsend for DIYers. Not only does the modular design allow for quick and easy repair, but the swappable mainboard is a robust platform for all sorts of bizarre builds. Tons of tinkerers have used the modular mainboard design to create their own cyberdeck designs. You don’t even need to buy the whole laptop to do it!DIY Perks has taken that to the next level with this triple-screen laptop build. Unsatisfied with the lack of screen real estate and poor ergonomics in most laptops, they used their skills to cobble together a portable cyberdeck workstation. Photo: DIY Perks The Framework mainboard, some elbow grease, 3D Printing, and a tiny bit of soldering. The bill of materials... Continue reading…

Image: Blizzard Entertainment To coincide with the release of season 3, Overwatch 2 is reintroducing Overwatch credits, giving players ways to earn those credits via battle pass progression, and adding Overwatch’s epic and legendary skins to its shop at reduced prices. Altogether, this currency overhaul is meant to address the long-standing complaint that the new cash shop placed one of Overwatch’s most unique and desirable features — its well-designed skins — behind a paywall that was just too expensive.As Overwatch season 2 nears its end, the developers published a blog highlighting their takeaways from the season. They addressed new hero Ramattra, including the tweaks they’ve made to his abilities, competitive ladder updates, and changes coming to rewards for... Continue reading…

A screenshot from Apex Legends Mobile. | Image: EA Apex Legends developer Respawn Entertainment announced the game’s mobile version will shut down in all regions on May 1st, just a few weeks shy of its one-year anniversary. As if that wasn’t enough bad news for players, it also said that once the game is gone, so are any items or extras they purchased in Apex Legends Mobile.A news post from EA described the shutdown as a “mutual decision” reached with its “development partner”; Apex Legends Mobile was developed by Respawn and Tencent’s Lightspeed & Quantum Studios, which also handles the mobile port of PUBG. Respawn’s post reiterates that note but starts by claiming, “Following a strong start, the content pipeline for Apex Legends Mobile has begun to fall short of that bar for quality,... Continue reading…

Image: Second Dinner Marvel Snap’s Battle Mode update is now live, and my biggest problem right now is that no one wants to play. Is it because my handful of Marvel Snap friends and colleagues are afraid of the awesome power of my decks? Perhaps. Is it because it’s 2:30PM ET on a workday? Also very possible. But I’ve been waiting for this update since the developers told me about it months ago, and after the tiny taste of it I’ve gotten so far, I hunger for more.For starters, do not do what I do and try to conscript your Marvel Snap agnostic boss or partner into playing against you. Snap won’t allow you to play in Battle Mode unless you’ve completed the game’s tutorial and reached rank 10. But once you meet that minimum criterion, hopping into a match is... Continue reading…

Photo by AAron Ontiveroz / MediaNews Group / The Denver Post via Getty Images Unsurprisingly, most Americans frown upon antisocial behavior. Stealing people’s stuff, bending food safety rules, or smoking in large crowds tend to generate a lot of stern reactions.But get behind the wheel of a car, and all that disapproval tends to melt away.That’s because a lot of us suffer from a malady called “car brain” — though Ian Walker, a professor of environmental psychology at Swansea University in Wales, prefers to call it “motornormativity.” This is the term coined by Walker and his team to describe the “cultural inability to think objectively and dispassionately” about how we use cars.A lot of us suffer from a malady called “car brain”Think of it like “heteronormativity,” the idea that heterosexual couples... Continue reading…

An Anker Eufy Floodlight camera. | Image: Eufy First, Anker told us it was impossible. Then, it covered its tracks. It repeatedly deflected while utterly ignoring our emails. So shortly before Christmas, we gave the company an ultimatum: if Anker wouldn’t answer why its supposedly always-encrypted Eufy cameras were producing unencrypted streams — among other questions — we would publish a story about the company’s lack of answers.It worked.In a series of emails to The Verge, Anker has finally admitted its Eufy security cameras are not natively end-to-end encrypted — they can and did produce unencrypted video streams for Eufy’s web portal, like the ones we accessed from across the United States using an ordinary media player.But Anker says that’s now largely fixed. Every video... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter is shutting down CoTweets, its collaborative posting feature that was one of the last big product updates introduced before Elon Musk’s takeover. A notice was posted on Twitter’s help center announcing the end of the feature.CoTweets allowed two accounts to co-author posts that appeared simultaneously on users’ profiles. As of last July, select users in the US, Korea, and Canada were able to use CoTweets after the company began testing the idea last spring. While CoTweets were still limited in rollout, many people anticipated they’d be helpful for brands doing collaborations or announcements.As of today, users with the feature won’t be able to post new CoTweets. Existing posts will be visible for another month before they... Continue reading…

Image: OpenAI OpenAI, the company behind DALL-E and ChatGPT, has released a free tool that it says is meant to “distinguish between text written by a human and text written by AIs.” It warns the classifier is “not fully reliable” in a press release and “should not be used as a primary decision-making tool.” According to OpenAI, it can be useful in trying to determine whether someone is trying to pass off generated text as something that was written by a person.The tool, known as a classifier, is relatively simple, though you will have to have a free OpenAI account to use it. You just paste text into a box, click a button, and it’ll tell you whether it thinks the text is very unlikely, unlikely, unclear if it is, possibly, or likely AI-generated.In... Continue reading…

The 2023 Hyundai Ioniq 6. | Image: Hyundai Hyundai’s new Ioniq 6 has had its playdate with the EPA, and now the automaker is revealing that its electric “streamliner” sedan can travel an estimated 361 miles on a full charge. While the calculation is specific to the SE Long Range RWD trim, the AWD version is no slouch, either, with a maximum range of 316 miles.Compared to the similarly sized RWD version of Tesla’s Model 3, the Ioniq 6 SE Long Range RWD could go a whole 89 miles further based on the EPA estimates. Hyundai isn’t topping Tesla’s Long Range AWD Model 3, though, which has a 358-mile estimated range that bests the highest-stamina AWD Ioniq 6.Hyundai is certainly ecstatic about the excellent EPA results for the Ioniq 6. The automaker had previously estimated the US... Continue reading…

Halo could look a lot different. | Image: 343 Industries Halo developer 343 Industries lost at least 95 people due to Microsoft’s recent layoffs, and the studio is apparently switching from its proprietary Slipspace engine to Epic Games’ widely used Unreal Engine for future games, Bloomberg reports.The future of Halo has been somewhat up in the air since the layoffs announced on January 18th. Halo Infinite had a strong launch in late 2021, but over time, fans started to get annoyed by frustrations with multiplayer progression, repeated delays to planned features like network campaign co-op and Forge (which finally launched in November), and no indication that new campaign content was imminent.343 has publicly affirmed its commitment to the franchise following the layoffs. “Halo and Master... Continue reading…

Excited for my top 10 songs this year to just be the new Boygenius album. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple Music users who love having a playlist of their favorite songs rejoice: Apple has made the Replay 2023 playlist available, letting you see which songs you’ve listed to the most this year. The songs that are on it and their rankings will almost certainly change before the big replay roundup in December, but it’s nice to start using it now as a shortcut to playing music you know you’ll like.The playlist has come a bit early this year, as XDA Developers points out. The 2022 version was released around the middle of February. It seems as if Apple is taking the feature a bit more seriously; last year, it apparently decided it should actually compete with Spotify’s Wrapped feature and made its end-of-year recap significantly more... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Discord is slowing down graphics card memory clocks on some Nvidia GPUs. A recent Discord update has introduced a bug that slows down memory clocks by up to 200Hz on some Nvidia models, including the RTX 3080 and RTX 3060 Ti. Nvidia says it’s working on a fix.Reddit users and Linus Tech Tips forum posters spotted the bug, and Nvidia was quick to acknowledge the problem and offer a temporary workaround. If you notice your memory clocks are dropping by up to 200Hz, you can download a GeForce 3D profile manager and apply a fix early. The full details are available in an Nvidia support article, but if you’re willing to wait, Nvidia says a fix will be sent to users’ PCs “via an over the air update at a later date.”Discord recently started... Continue reading…

Perseverance has been depositing secondary samples of rock collected from Mars across the planet’s surface just in case it fails to deliver its onboard samples during a future collection mission. | Image: NASA NASA’s Perseverance rover has dropped the last of 10 sample tubes onto the surface of Mars, thereby completing humanity’s “first sample depot on another world.” The rover began depositing titanium tubes containing samples of rock and dust six weeks ago as part of the Mars sample return mission to collect Martian material and deliver it to Earth for further study.Perseverance landed on Mars in February 2021, touching down inside a 28-mile-wide bowl known as Jezero Crater with a core mission to look for signs of ancient microbial life and gather samples of the Martian environment. Scientists believe that, billions of years ago, Jezero Crater may have contained a river that flowed into a vast lake, which could have provided the necessary... Continue reading…

The newest model of The Frame TV is on sale at Best Buy and Samsung. | Image: Samsung Whether you’re gearing up for the Super Bowl or are just looking for a great QLED TV that doesn’t look like your average TV (we’ll explain), this deal on Samsung’s 65-inch model of 2022 Frame TV is worth checking out. Normally $1,999.99, Best Buy and Samsung have discounted the 65-inch Frame to $1,599.99, matching its lowest price ever. What makes Samsung’s Frame TV interesting is its matte, anti-reflective screen. Not only can it defeat glare — it can also make paintings displayed on it look realistic. It comes with an art mode that cycles between famous pieces when it detects motion in the room, turning this TV into a conversation starter.In terms of specs, The Frame supports HDR 10 Plus, and it has a 120Hz refresh rate with HDMI 2.1... Continue reading…

Image: Getty Images City officials are sick of them. Residents are annoyed by them. And any inkling of profit remains a distant dream. But despite mounting challenges, San Francisco’s robotaxis are rolling along.This week, both Waymo and Cruise submitted their latest quarterly trip data to the California Public Utilities Commission, and taken together, they show steady progress in the number of miles and passengers served.Both companies offer a paid ridehailing service in the Bay Area, with most of their activity concentrated in downtown San Francisco. But while Cruise is permitted to charge for rides in its fully driverless vehicles, Waymo only has authorization to charge for rides in vehicles with a safety driver behind the wheel.Waymo and Cruise’s... Continue reading…

Photo by Mark Sagliocco / Getty Images This year, the festival returns with a hybrid format, screening films both in person and online. Continue reading…

Talk To Me. | Image: Sundance Institute Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a group of high school kids gets their hands on a cursed occult object, and after some fun and games, they end up being terrorized by a presence from the other side. It’s not the most original premise. But in Talk To Me — the directorial debut from brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, best known for their YouTube channel — it takes on a new urgency and ferocity with a story that races to its bloody, brutal conclusion without letting up.The occult object in question is an embalmed hand that supposedly has the power to let people see, and be possessed by, the spirits of dead folk. The process is straightforward: you grab the hand, say “talk to me” to summon a random specter, and then say “I let... Continue reading…

Samsung is taking its turn in the spotlight as live events return. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge It’s a weird time for in-person tech events. On one hand, companies are just champing at the bit to host them after a few years of lockdown livestreams. Samsung is the latest of them, after OnePlus, Apple, and Google all took their turns last year. But on the other hand, the mobile devices on center stage in this new era of live events have been kind of boring and often upstaged by their wearable counterparts. The Apple Watch Ultra was arguably the biggest announcement to come out of the company’s fall event in Cupertino, and the Pixel Watch was (justifiably) all anyone wanted to talk about after Google’s event launching the Pixel 7 series.That’s just to be expected for a mature product category like smartphones — the year-over-year... Continue reading…