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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge When Apple acquired classical music streaming service Primephonic back in 2021, the company revealed plans to launch a standalone app with many of Primephonic’s best features by the end of this year. But we’re now in mid-December. iOS 16.2 was just released without any sign of the app — believed to be called Apple Classical — and it’s not present in the latest iOS 16.3 betas, either.With many Apple employees nearing holiday vacation, it seems increasingly unlikely that Apple Classical will be a year-end surprise.In its original press release from August of last year, Apple said Apple Music Classical would combine “Primephonic’s classical user interface that fans have grown to love with more added features.” (The Apple Classical app... Continue reading…

The HP Spectre x360 is a slick convertible laptop with excellent battery life. | Photo by Monica Chin / The Verge A capable and steeply discounted configuration of the HP Spectre x360 13 is kicking off our deal roundup for today. It’s available at HP for $999.99 (normally $1,249.99). This 2-in-1 convertible laptop has a 1920 x 1280 13.5-inch touchscreen, an Intel Core i5-1235U processor, 8GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. If you want more power and storage, the Spectre x360 can be configured with up to 32GB of RAM, 2TB of storage, or an even faster processor for an additional fee, but all configurations are subject to the same $250 discount. If you can look past some of its preinstalled bloatware (which can be removed), you’re getting a well-designed laptop with excellent battery life. Read our review.A pair of our favorite Jabra earbuds, the Elite... Continue reading…

France’s defender #05 Jules Kounde clears the ball during the Qatar 2022 World Cup football semi-final match between France and Morocco | Photo by ANTONIN THUILLIER/AFP via Getty Images FuboTV was down during the World Cup, preventing users from watching the entire semifinal between France and Morocco. According to FuboTV spokesperson Jennifer Press, the ongoing outage stems from a “cyber-related incident.”Hours later, FuboTV’s status page indicated that the service was still down and had been experiencing issues since around 9:20AM ET, affecting both account creation and management as well as streaming. When I try to open the FuboTV app on my TV, the service displays an endless loading screen. In an update posted at 6PM ET, FuboTV says it’s “beginning to see some recovery to the ongoing issue.”On Thursday, FuboTV issued a press release saying it did not have any bandwidth issues that affected its service, and that... Continue reading…

Nothing’s Android 13 update for the Nothing Phone 1 has started rolling out in open beta, the company announced today. The update is version 1.5 of the company’s Nothing OS Android skin and contains unique additions like an all-new Nothing-themed weather app alongside Android 13 features like the ability to set language options on a per-app basis and a new QR code scanner in quick settings. Its official release is scheduled for early next year.In an interview with Android Authority, Nothing CEO Carl Pei shed some light on why its Android 13 update has taken so long to release. Apparently, the Phone 1 originally launched with software developed by an outsourced team from another Android phone manufacturer of around 400 engineers. But in... Continue reading…

The new Microsoft Teams view in HoloLens 2. | Image: Microsoft Microsoft has long supported real-time video calls using Microsoft Teams on HoloLens 2 headsets, but now the company is bringing full Teams integration to its mixed reality headset. HoloLens 2 users will now be able to freely call people directly, browse and add Teams contacts to calls, and even view calendars and join group meetings.Microsoft is also allowing HoloLens 2 users to see what people are sharing in meetings, too. A new live video stream of shared screens will appear as a hologram that can be moved and resized. Image: Microsoft A Microsoft Teams meeting in HoloLens 2. Microsoft Teams has largely been used on HoloLens 2 for remote assist scenarios where an engineer or support person would dial into... Continue reading…

Will Smith as Peter in Apple’s Emancipation. | Image: Apple Apple’s historical action drama Emancipation is being called out for playing irresponsibly fast and loose with crucial details about its complex, painful subject matter. Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Nine months (and 90-plus updates) after the Steam Deck launched to early adopters, here’s an idea of what’s next. Continue reading…

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge Instagram is adding several new features to its app, and the first to roll out is called Notes. The feature allows you to send short 60-character messages to groups of your Instagram friends; the message will hang around for 24 hours before it disappears.It’s an interesting idea — a way to send a quick note to a bunch of friends. (For example, “I just got a new TV — come on over!”) However, there are some things you should know about Instagram’s Notes before you start:

Google Home now supports Matter. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google announced today that it has completed the initial rollout of Matter to its Google Nest products and Android OS. This means the Matter smart home standard, first developed by Google, Apple, Samsung, Amazon, and others, now has the foundation in place to start delivering on its ambitious promises: interoperability, simplicity, security, and a smart home that just works.Over the past few weeks, Google has updated millions of Google Nest smart speakers, displays, and Wi-Fi routers as well as billions of Android phones and tablets to Matter. The company says the transition will be completed today, December 15th. Android devices need to run Android 8.1 and up and Google Play Services 22.48.14, while Google Nest devices need the latest... Continue reading…

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge Soon, you’ll be able to pick up a pair of Sony’s OTC (over-the-counter) hearing aids at one of HearUSA’s 350 hearing centers or through its online store. Founded in 1987, HearUSA operates a network of retail stores that help consumers directly buy prescription — and now OTC — hearing aids.Both Sony’s CRE-C10 and CRE-E10 models will be available starting in early 2023, though no firm date was provided. Sony, which has long been a leading headphone maker, first announced it was entering the OTC hearing aid market back in September.The partnership between HearUSA and Sony isn’t surprising. HearUSA is owned by Denmark’s WS Audiology, which also owns popular hearing aid brands Signia and Widex, among others. It’s also the company Sony... Continue reading…

Uber will use robots from Cartken to make deliveries in Dadeland. | Image: Uber Uber is expanding its use of autonomous delivery vehicles with the announcement that it will soon deploy sidewalk robots developed in Miami, Florida.The six-wheeled delivery robots will come from Cartken, an Oakland-based AI company founded by a team of ex-Google engineers known mostly for deploying its vehicles on college campuses.The robots will deliver items offered by a slate of businesses in the Dadeland area of Miami-Dade County, with plans to expand into larger areas of the city and some additional markets in 2023. Uber claims that its partnership with Cartken represents the robotics company’s “first formal partnership with a global on-demand delivery app beyond college campuses.”Sidewalk delivery robots are becoming a... Continue reading…

Two Mac Studios don’t quite make an Arm Mac Pro. | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge Does anyone else vividly remember the day of June 22nd, 2020? I sure do. That was the day when Apple announced that its Macs were going to transfer away from Intel processors to the company’s own silicon. That transition, Tim Cook himself claimed, would take two years.Reader, it has been well over two years since that fateful day. Even if you start the clock at the November 2020 launch of the M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, we are past due. Apple’s ambitious timeline has not come to fruition. I wasn’t lying. This is what they said. Let us peruse the items that are currently for sale on Apple’s website. The MacBooks have all moved over to Arm processors — we’ve got the M1 and the M2 MacBook Airs, and we’ve got the M... Continue reading…

To create fusion ignition, the National Ignition Facility’s laser energy is converted into X-rays inside the hohlraum, which then compress a fuel capsule until it implodes, creating a high-temperature, high-pressure plasma. | Image: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Nuclear fusion is back in the news. This week, the US Department of Energy announced what it called a “major scientific breakthrough” in fusion power research: for the first time, a fusion experiment had produced more energy than the energy used to kick off the reaction. It’s not the first time we’ve heard about fusion progress. There have been decades of headlines touting breakthroughs large and small, usually implying that we’re closer than ever to generating all the clean energy we’ll ever need from nuclear fusion.A “major scientific breakthrough” in fusion power researchIt’s a lot to take in, so The Verge put together this guide to fusion power with the help of some experts. Below, we’ve summarized scientists’ dreams for fusion,... Continue reading…

Grand Theft Auto V now has ray-traced reflections on PS5 and Xbox Series X / S consoles. A new patch, spotted by Eurogamer, brings ray-traced reflections to the game’s fidelity mode (30fps), adding a lot more realistic detail to vehicles, characters, windows, and basically any glossy surfaces. The results are truly impressive.Now if you walk up to a window your character’s reflection will appear, or if you venture into areas where there is water or puddles you’ll see reflections of the objects nearby. Much like the ray tracing we’ve seen in Cyberpunk 2077, it makes the game feel more immersive.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Former Twitter employee Ahmad Abouammo has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison after being convicted of spying for Saudi Arabia, Reuters and NBC News report. Ahmad Abouammo was employed by Twitter between 2013 and 2015, during which time he used his position as a media partnerships manager for the Middle East and North Africa to access personal information of users critical of the Saudi government and pass it to Saudi officials.Reuters notes that Abouammo received a $42,000 watch as a gift from a Saudi official, as well as two $100,000 wire transfers. In exchange he looked up information on two Twitter users, including phone numbers and birth dates. After leaving the company in 2015 Abouammo continued to attempt to... Continue reading…

I think Lady Dimitrescu will be very scary in VR. | Image: Capcom Resident Evil Village’s VR mode will be available on the PlayStation VR 2 the same date Sony’s new VR hardware launches in February, Capcom announced on Wednesday. And even better, it’s being added as a free update for owners of the game.You’ll be able to play the game’s entire campaign in VR, according to a PlayStation blog post from Capcom’s Kanda Tsuyoshi. You’ll be able to use the PSVR2’s new Sense controllers to “feel the vibration, recoil, and resistance as you interact with objects in the world and fire weapons,” Tsuyoshi says. Image: Capcom Dual-wielding will (hopefully) make the game a little less frightening. In combat, the Sense controllers “enable intuitive movements like putting your arms up to... Continue reading…

Twitter doesn’t seem to like the jet-tracker’s creator. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Hours after suspending @ElonJet, an account that tracked the trips taken by Elon Musk’s private plane, Twitter banned the account’s creator, Jack Sweeney, and dozens of other accounts he operates. Twitter then un-suspended @ElonJet, which was briefly tweeting to try and get its account back before Twitter banned it again.If you try and visit @ElonJet or Sweeney’s account, you’ll see a message that the account has been suspended. Twitter has also been blocking links to versions of the Elon Jet tracker on other platforms, like Instagram and Facebook. Attempting to tweet certain links to Sweeney’s Elon Musk jet tracker on other platforms will display a message that the link is “potentially harmful,” as spotted by Tony Webster.

Code blocks in Docs. | Illustration: The Verge Google Docs is getting a new feature that will make it easier to show code in an easy-to-understand way. The company announced that it’s adding code blocks to its “smart canvas” system, which will automatically add the proper spacing and color-coding for a variety of programming languages, such as Python, C, and Javascript.Before this, getting code to look nice in Google Docs required workarounds or add-ons, which weren’t necessarily the most convenient. While that wasn’t the end of the world, making sure code displays properly is important for documentation, and having different parts of the code display in different colors makes it much easier to read if there’s more than a single line or two. GIF: Google D... Continue reading…

A dust devil captured by instruments on the Perseverance rover. From the study authors: “These are images taken of the direct dust devil encounter by the rover’s Navigation Camera (Navcam). The images have been processed to show the quantity of dust. The colour scale ranges from lowest dust content (blue) to highest dust content (yellow).” | Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/ISAE-SUPAERO On September 27th, 2021, a dust devil whirled past the Perseverance rover on Mars. The rover not only caught the dust devil on its cameras and with its weather sensors but also picked up the faint, eerie sounds of the dust devil on its microphone, the first instrument of its kind to record sounds on Mars.“We were convinced that the microphone was going to give us a whole load of new observations of atmospheric features on Mars that we hadn’t been able to see before,” Naomi Murdoch of the University of Toulouse, lead author of a Nature Communications paper about the research, said to The Verge. “And we haven’t been disappointed!”Rovers have been exploring Mars for decades with cameras, spectrographs, and weather sensors, giving us a... Continue reading…

The goo gun was the best. | Image: Epic Games Epic just closed some doors, but it may be opening a very attractive window indeed. Today, it appears to have inadvertently announced a new completely free version of the excellent Unreal Tournament 3 that you’ll be able to crossplay with friends across Steam, the Epic Games Store, and even GOG (via Wario64).It’s called Unreal Tournament 3 X, and according to its Steam page, there’s no catch — “No microtransactions and no strings attached. This is the fully-featured, award-winning first-person shooter you fell in love with... completely free.” Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge The Unreal Tournament 3 X page on Steam. And, assuming the listing is accurate, the game will still include all its primary... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Verizon’s launching the beta of its Plus Play service and is offering a year-long subscription to Netflix’s $19.99 per month premium plan to those who sign up. That adds up to savings of about $240, but as is the case with many Verizon products, there’s a catch: you’ll have to sign up for an annual subscription to one of the platforms offered through Plus Play first.Introduced by Verizon earlier this year, Plus Play provides a consolidated hub where you can access and manage your streaming subscriptions in one place, including Netflix, Discovery Plus, HBO Max, Disney Plus, NBA League Pass Premium, AMC Plus, and the recently added NFL Plus. It also offers access to other non-streaming services, like Peloton, the Calm relaxation app, and... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter will be shutting down its newsletter product, known as Revue. Reports have been saying that the service would be axed for over a month, but now we finally have confirmation and a date: January 12th, 2023.People won’t be able to access their accounts after that date, and all the service’s data will be deleted, according to a help article on the Revue site. Before then, authors who used the service will be able to download lists of their subscribers, as well as an archive that includes their analytics and writing. Revue also alerted its users to this information via email and has said that it’ll cancel paid newsletter subscriptions starting December 20th, so people won’t be charged for newsletters they won’t get.

Population: One’s new Sandbox mode will be available on Wednesday. | Image: Meta Population: One, Meta’s VR battle royale title, is opening up its new Sandbox mode in early access to all players on Wednesday, allowing them to make their own levels with custom rules. With the new mode, developer BigBox VR follows in the footsteps of big multiplayer games like Epic Games’ Fortnite and Microsoft’s Minecraft in giving players tools to create their own 3D environments, but with Population: One, you’ll be able to do it in VR.I got to try Sandbox mode myself last week, and I was impressed with the tools at my fingertips. While building, you’ll be able to pick from a big catalog of objects and structures to place around your level. And there are a lot of ways you can manipulate those pieces, like scaling them up and down or... Continue reading…

The Beatles: Rock Band is just one of many games affected. | Image: Harmonix Epic Games is beginning to shut down online services for a large selection of its older games, including Rock Band 1 through 3, The Beatles: Rock Band, and Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004. The company is making the changes as “we move to solely support Epic Online Services with its unified friends system, voice chat features, parental controls, and parental verification features,” it said in a blog post on Wednesday.The shutdowns will begin on Wednesday. For the below games, online services will be fully disabled by January 24th, though you can still play single-player or offline multiplayer. Epic is also beginning to remove the games from digital storefronts (where you could still buy them) and disabling in-game DLC purchases.

The Verge WhatsApp is working on a picture-in-picture mode for iOS that will let you open up other apps while on a video call. In a post on the WhatsApp blog, the company says the feature’s currently in beta testing and that it will become widely available starting next year.The feature, which WABetaInfo first spotted earlier this month, should minimize your call while allowing you to access other apps. While some Android devices already let you use picture-in-picture mode with certain apps, including WhatsApp, the messaging service doesn’t support the iPhone’s picture-in-picture feature released in iOS 14. Either way, it sounds like natively integrating the feature should come in handy when collaborating on a project during a video call (or... Continue reading…

Adam Driver as 65’s protagonist Mills. | Sony The idea of the modern-day world becoming overrun by genetically engineered dinosaurs is only but so alarming because, at the end of the day, they’re just animals who probably aren’t well-suited to survive on the planet as it currently exists. But the situation in Sony’s upcoming sci-fi survival thriller 65 from co-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods is far, far more unsettling as it flings humans from the distant future into the prehistoric past and leaves them with nothing but their wits (and a few guns) to battle against T. rexes.65 tells the story of pilot Mills (Adam Driver) and his passenger Koa (Ariana Greenblatt) as the pair fight to survive on what at first appears to be an alien planet after their spaceship collides with an... Continue reading…

The star of Gudetama: An Eggcellent Adventure. | Image: Netflix Of all the many Sanrio characters, none speak to me quite like Gudetama: a genderless, aimless egg that wants nothing besides some soy sauce and to be left alone. Same. The character makes for adorable stickers and T-shirts, and now it’s being stretched out into its own series on Netflix. It seems entirely unnecessary, and it mostly is — we don’t really need to know any more about Gudetama other than its distinct lack of motivation. Even still, the show — dubbed Gudetama: An Eggcellent Adventure — manages to be just charming enough to justify its brief run. Whereas many TV shows can be exhausting, Gudetama is instead viewing for when you’re exhausted.The premise is, naturally, pretty goofy: Gudetama and a baby chick both somehow hatch... Continue reading…

Image: Warner Bros. Director Patty Jenkins pushed back on rumors that she walked off the Wonder Woman 3 project, saying on Twitter that there was “nothing” she could do to “move anything forward at this time.” Jenkins instead blames the film’s cancellation on the massive restructuring that’s underway at Warner Bros. following its merger with Discovery.“I never walked away. I was open to considering anything asked of me,” Jenkins explains. “DC is obviously buried in changes they are having to make, so I understand these decisions are difficult right now.” Jenkins’ response comes after last week’s report from The Wrap, which indicates that she exited Wonder Woman 3 after rejecting the studio notes on her treatment.

The new Air’s display is noticeable taller and larger than the old one, and it includes a notch. | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge The 2022 MacBook Air laptop with the M2 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage is now $999 at Amazon (in the starlight color, which will arrive after Christmas) and B&H Photo. This is the first time that its starting price has sunk below the $1,000 mark, which is $50 less than it usually costs on a deal. Compared to the 2020 version that impressed us with its smooth performance and long battery life, this newer laptop has those qualities and an assortment of other selling points. Its design is thinner and lighter and its 13.6-inch screen is bigger and sharper, housing a much-improved webcam in its center notch. Like the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros, it uses the convenient MagSafe magnetic charging port.This laptop is great in... Continue reading…

Owners of VW’s electric ID cars all over the world have reported problems with infotainment screens. The German automaker’s ID family of electric cars are plagued with buggy software, causing customer headaches and leading to major setbacks for the company’s next-gen Trinity project. How can VW patch the problem? Continue reading…

Google has launched chatbots like Assistant, but has kept AI improvements to its search engine in the background. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The launch of ChatGPT has prompted some to speculate that AI chatbots could soon take over from traditional search engines. But executives at Google say the technology is still too immature to put in front of users, with problems including chatbots’ bias, toxicity, and their propensity for simply making information up.According to a report from CNBC, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Google’s head of AI Jeff Dean addressed the rise of ChatGPT in a recent all-hands meeting. One employee asked if the launch of the bot — built by OpenAI, a company with deep ties to Google rival Microsoft — represented a “missed opportunity” for the search giant. Pichai and Dean reportedly responded by saying that Google’s AI language models are just as... Continue reading…