The Verge - All Posts

The Pixel Buds Pro are a sharp-looking pair of earbuds, especially in this lemongrass color. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge You feel that? It’s Friday, and it’s time to take some good deal vibes into the weekend. Wellbots is currently discounting a bunch of great tech from Google, including the Pixel Buds Pro, Nest Audio, Nest Hub Max, and the latest Nest Hub and Nest Mini — and frankly, they’re all bangers.First up are the excellent Google Pixel Buds Pro, a pair of wireless earbuds with active noise cancellation and a mic that can combat the stiff winds of an NYC ferry. Now through October 29th, they’re on sale for an all-time low of $149.99 at Wellbots when you use promo code VER50 at checkout, which knocks $50 off their regular price of $199.99. The Pixel Buds Pro are the ideal earbuds if you just got a Pixel 7 phone, as they offer great sound quality and... Continue reading…

Nick Barclay / The Verge The person in charge of the physical look and feel for Apple’s iPhones, Macs, and everything else is leaving the company, as Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman first reported. Industrial design vice president Evans Hankey will only remain with Apple for another six months. Hankey took over hardware design three years ago after longtime chief design officer Jony Ive exited to start his own design firm.No replacement or next step for Hankey has been publicly announced. However, Bloomberg reports her departure was announced internally this week and quotes a statement from an Apple spokesperson saying, “The senior design team has strong leaders with decades of experience. Evans plans to stay on as we work through the transition, and we’d like to thank... Continue reading…

The SwitchBot Blind Tilt can tilt your blinds automatically. | Image: SwitchBot SwitchBot, the smart home company that takes robotics to places no one imagined, has come up with another ingenious gadget. The new $69 SwitchBot Blind Tilt launches today on Kickstarter, with orders expected to ship before Christmas. And, yes, it looks as ugly as you’d expect. But as an inexpensive way to replicate the benefits of smart shades, it’s a promising product.Automated motorized shades and blinds are something of a luxury as they’re generally very expensive — starting at around $300 to $400 per window and rapidly rising from there. The benefits, though, are quite impressive: energy savings, convenience, security, and smart lighting.Smart blinds can automatically adjust to keep your home well-lit throughout the day, keep... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Last night, I was casually wondering (as you do) which songs from Scottish electronic duo Boards of Canada’s seminal debut album, Music Has the Right to Children, use audio samples from Sesame Street? It’s the sort of idle fact-checking that humans in the 21st century are blessed to indulge in, and so (as you do), I whipped out my smartphone to Google it.Thirty seconds later, I got so annoyed, I downloaded the Wikipedia app instead.The problem I faced is not a new one. Many people have noted the slow degradation of Google’s search in recent years, partly a result of macro changes to the web’s structure and partly Google’s own fault for relentlessly privileging its own ads and services. And in this particular case, when I searched for... Continue reading…

A pokémon trainer getting ready to catch a pokémon. | Image: Nintendo The first truly open-world Pokémon games feel like what Game Freak and Nintendo have been building toward this whole time Continue reading…

Kratos and Thor face off in God of War Ragnarök. | Image: SIE Lead combat designer Mihir Sheth explains how the team at Santa Monica Studio approached the PS5 sequel Continue reading…

Microsoft’s PC Manager app. | Screenshot by Tom Warren / The Verge Microsoft is working on a PC Manager app that’s designed to boost your computer’s performance. Much like CCleaner, a beta version of Microsoft’s PC Manager includes storage management and the ability to end tasks quickly and control which apps start up with Windows.Much of this functionality is already baked into Windows, but this PC Manager app puts it all in one useful location. There’s even a browser protection section that makes it easier to change default browsers than what exists in Windows right now. Image: Tom Warren / The Verge You can easily switch default browsers with this app. The storage manager feature includes the ability to manage apps or remove those that are rarely used, and there’s also a... Continue reading…

Who’s whispering in Elon Musk’s ear? | Illustration by Lille Allen / The Verge Look, I’ve been avoiding talking about Elon Musk’s meddling in international affairs largely because I am not expert enough in international affairs to say much of anything. But now we’ve got Fiona Hill, formerly an advisor to Donald Trump who gave testimony at his first impeachment hearing, out here suggesting that Musk is “transmitting a message for Putin.”This shit’s weird, dude, even for me. Musk set off an international shitposting incident by tweeting a peace proposal for the war in Ukraine. In response, sitting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy polled Twitter about whether users preferred a pro-Russia or pro-Ukraine Musk; sitting Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda likened Russia’s actions to someone stealing the wheels... Continue reading…

EVs are perfect for off-roading, but how will other nature lovers react? | Image: Rivian Everyone knows off-road vehicles are loud, obnoxious, and polluting. But what this article presupposes is, what if they weren’t? Continue reading…

A new beta client update will list the factory-installed components within Steam Deck handhelds. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Valve is rolling out a fresh batch of beta updates for its Steam Deck, one of which could help with servicing and repairs for the handheld gaming PC by listing internal components and saving owners from cracking the device open themselves to find out.The new component lookup view will display the model and manufacturer of each major hardware element within individual Steam Decks. However, the list is only a snapshot of factory-installed components, and so won’t recognize or update for any fresh hardware that users install themselves. Users who have enabled beta client updates can access the new component lookup via Settings > System > Model/Serial Numbers button.The feature will list factory-installed componants, but not recognise new... Continue reading…

Arlo’s new Safe app has a “Walk with Me” hold button that will trigger an emergency response if no longer pressed, and the new Safe button accessory is a Bluetooth panic button. | Image: Arlo Arlo is launching a new family and personal mobile safety app and service that includes features like crash detection, a software panic hold switch for walking safely in unfamiliar places, and an optional Bluetooth alert button.Known for its wireless cameras, smart video doorbells, and, more recently, its DIY home security system, Arlo is expanding into the growing market of family tracking and personal safety apps. “Features like 24/7 live agent emergency support, location sharing, family check-ins, and safety alerts provide on-the-go protection to keep you safe in a time of need,” said Arlo’s SVP of products, Tim Johnston, in a press release.Arlo’s Safe app includes a “Walk with Me” feature that operates like a dead man’s switchA... Continue reading…

Amazon Glow was designed to help keep kids engaged on video calls. It’s shutting down this year. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Amazon will stop supporting its Glow video calling device for kids on December 31st, 2022. The innovative projector-powered gadget with a screen built-in was designed to make it easier for children to communicate with friends and family remotely by making games and activities part of the process. Last month, the company announced it was discontinuing sales, and it recently confirmed in an email to users that Amazon Glow devices, accessories, and the companion app will stop working entirely at the end of the year.Launched a little over a year ago, the $300 Glow struggled to find an audience, possibly because kids can once again play with friends and family in real life. If you bought one, expect to see a refund by the end of October,... Continue reading…

YIKES About 7,500 people currently work at Twitter — and 75 percent of them can expect to be shown the door, The Washington Post reports. Elon Musk, who is acquiring the company, has been telling prospective investors that he plans drastic firings to bring down costs.Musk has a deadline to close the purchase of Twitter by October 28th. In a sign the deal is proceeding, Twitter froze its employees’ equity awards, Bloomberg reported. Anonymous sources tell The Post that the deal is moving forward in good faith.Job cuts were planned anyway. Before Musk’s bid, Twitter management planned to slice almost a quarter of the workforce, chopping $800 million from payroll. Musk’s planned cuts, which are larger, are “unimaginable,” the former head of... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The next Supercharger station location is up to Tesla owners.The all-electric automaker put out the invitation to vote on new locations via its Tesla Charging Twitter account but had originally announced its intention to democratize Supercharger station expansion last month. Tesla owners can log in to participate via their user accounts and can vote for up to five locations in the list of 183 possible sites. There’s even a page where you can suggest a location that’s not on the list yet.

The plan now costs $22.99 per month. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A YouTube Premium family plan now costs $22.99 per month following a price hike, as reported by 9to5Google. The family tier offers benefits like ad-free viewing and background playback for you and up to five other people, and it now costs $5 more per month.The price change is already in effect for new subscribers, meaning you can’t sign up at the previous $17.99 price any longer. For current subscribers, “this change will take place on your next billing cycle starting on or after November 21, 2022,” YouTube said in an email shared by 9to5Google. However, if you were grandfathered in at a lower price as a former Google Play Music subscriber, you’ll pay that lower rate until your April billing date, according to an email sent to a Verge... Continue reading…

Amazon acquired Fabric.com in 2008. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Crafters, home sewists, and small businesses will soon lose a major online fabric source. Fabric.com, a longtime retailer of fabrics, trims, notions, and other supplies, is shutting down.Since launching in the late ’90s, Fabric.com has been a mainstay for casual crafters and small business owners alike, offering by-the-yard fabric from hundreds of companies as well as other sewing supplies. When Amazon acquired the company in 2008, the tech giant said the acquisition would give its crafting customers more variety to choose from. The website’s vast inventory and competitive prices made it a favorite for many craftspeople and companies buying in large quantities to make products.The impending closure was first reported by the Craft... Continue reading…

The company uses wireless antennas to provide internet, rather than cables or fiber. | Image: Starry Starry, the ISP that delivers internet to your home using wireless antennas instead of cables, is laying off around half its workforce, or just over 500 people, according to a statement from the company and a report in The Boston Globe. The company is also telling investors that they can no longer count on the expectations it set for this year — information that probably doesn’t come as a surprise after its earnings report this summer revealed that it had around $100 million in cash and had lost almost $90 million since the beginning of 2022.Starry says it’s also freezing hiring and non-essential expenditures, again in order to “curtail our cash burn while we pursue strategic options,” as Chet Kanojia, the company’s CEO, put it in a... Continue reading…

Anti-abortion groups are pushing back against hormonal birth control. | Photo by Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images Tech companies picked an interesting time to start including women’s and reproductive health in their products. For years, they sidestepped the issue: Apple didn’t include period tracking in its health app until 2015. Fitbit only added “Female health tracking” in 2018. For products that claim to help people understand their bodies, most spent years sidestepping the basic biology that affects half the population.But over the past year or so, companies have started juicing up their menstrual tracking and fertility features, and there’s been more investment in so-called femtech. And they caught up just in time for the end of federal abortion protections in the United States, a right-wing pushback on birth control, and a culture war... Continue reading…

Dark Brandon directs voters to the StudentAid.gov debt relief website. | Image: Building Back Together Building Back Together, a pro-Biden political advocacy group, launched a six-figure digital ad campaign on Wednesday to boost the administration’s student loan relief program in key battleground states across the country. And to make sure it landed with young voters, they enlisted the help of President Joe Biden’s online alter ego: Dark Brandon.The ad, titled “Pocket,” takes cues from the fancam style of online video, featuring a series of viral memes and GIFs set to a bass-heavy remix of television news segments. The ad campaign will air on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, ESPN, and Hulu, targeted at users in Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.The Dark Brandon meme — essentially a modified image of Biden with glowing eyes —... Continue reading…

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge Need to show a friend or relative what you’re up to next week and don’t have your phone handy? Try sharing your calendar from your MacBook with a few easy steps.Before you start, you’ll want to make sure iCloud is set up on your Mac and that the calendar you want to share is stored via iCloud (not just stored locally). To check if this is the case, you can go to Calendar > Preferences > Accounts.Once that’s all sorted, here’s how to share a calendar from your Mac. I have a lot of calendars called “Work.” Don’t @ me. How to share a calendar from your Mac

Here’s what the darker green bubbles look like. | Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge Apple probably won’t be fixing the green bubble problem anytime soon. But over the weekend, while scrolling Reddit, I found an awesome setting that at least makes green texts a lot easier to read on my iPhone. (Thank you to u/oishiirecipe for sharing the steps!)By default, any texts you send to a device that doesn’t have iMessage turned on show up as a harsh, bright green bubble. It’s a very obvious signal that you aren’t texting somebody with an Apple device and losing out on things like smoother group chats and snazzy message effects. Frankly, those green texts can also be difficult to parse, something Google has pointed out on its “Get the Message” website.To make green texts more readable, you’ll have to dive a bit into your... Continue reading…

That’s Foxconn president Liu Young-way going way beyond the boundaries of traditional mathematics. | Image: Getty It has never been clear what Foxconn is attempting to do in Wisconsin, and every time the company or one of its executives tries to explain it, things have just gotten weirder. For example, the company has said for years that its empty warehouse in southeastern Wisconsin is the centerpiece of an “AI 8K+5G” strategy, without ever explaining what that means. (Nothing. It means nothing.)Anyway, throw that mystery out of your brain because AI 8K+5G has been completely scrubbed from Foxconn’s Wisconsin website. Instead, get ready for “3+3=∞,” which is Foxconn’s new strategy, or Foxconn 3.0, which the company claims follows the famous and beloved Foxconn 1.0 and Foxconn 2.0 strategies that totally made sense and revolutionized the industrial... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge After announcing it back at Google I/O in May, Google is beginning to roll out a hub this week that it says will give you more control over which ads it shows you and what data it uses to target them. Once it rolls out, the My Ad Center hub will be accessible at myadcenter.google.com or via the three-dot menu button on ads shown in Google’s search, Discover, and YouTube services.According to a blog post from Google VP and general manager for ads Jerry Dischler, available controls will include the ability to increase or decrease the amount of advertising you see on certain brands and topics, to blacklist certain sensitive topics, including alcohol, dating, and weight loss, or to opt out of ad personalization entirely. Dischler gives the... Continue reading…

Image: Square Enix A slightly embarrassing leak from IGN Southeast Asia tipped fans off that a new Final Fantasy XVI trailer might be dropping today, and here it is. The four-minute-long trailer titled “Ambition” doesn’t reveal too much new information regarding the next entry in the 35-year-old series, but hot damn, does it look cool. It is bloodier than your typical Final Fantasy fare, so you’ll have to watch it on YouTube.

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge Want the spookiest smart home on the block? Here’s how to get a creepy yet cool setup using smart speakers, smart lights, and video doorbells. Continue reading…

Highlights gives you a quick overview of what your kid is up to, and Location can now alert you when your kid leaves or arrives at certain locations. | Image: Google Google is redesigning its parental control Family Link app with an easier interface and new features, like the ability to get alerted when their kids leave known locations (like school) and when they get home. Family Link lets parents manage Android devices for their kids by setting screen time limits and more, all from a control app on the parent's phone.The app is receiving a significant facelift from the version that was initially released in 2017. It now gives parents a simplified interface with three tabs: Highlights, Controls, and Location. The app is updated on Android and iOS, and Google is also releasing a new web-based version of Family Link that lets parents keep tabs on a computer, and kids can review their settings on the... Continue reading…

Image: Apple Apple announced new versions of its 11- and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models in a press release, alongside a new Apple TV 4K with more storage and a redesigned iPad with a higher-than-usual price (and a horizontally oriented selfie cam). The new iPad Pro features the M2 processor that has found its way into just a few of Apple’s other devices (so far, at least), the redesigned MacBook Air and the 13.3-inch MacBook Pro. The 2022 iPad Pro also supports Wi-Fi 6E, which could be all the reason you need to get a 6E-compatible router. Here’s Chris Welch with many more details on the new models.The iPad Pro for 2022 will arrive soon, on Wednesday, October 26th (just two days after iPadOS 16 launches), but you can preorder one now to ensure that... Continue reading…

GIF: DirecTV DirecTV is introducing a new feature today it calls SignalSaver, which is designed to preserve TV reception even during times of satellite interference. Available at no extra cost to residential DirecTV subscribers with an internet-connected set-top box, SignalSaver automatically prompts you to switch from a satellite signal to internet-based TV when an interruption is detected.“After a few seconds of signal calibration, and with the proper high-speed Internet connection, customers can enable SignalSaver to still enjoy up to an HD (720p) quality viewing experience,” the company explains in its press release. DirecTV’s broadcasts at home top out between 720p and 1080i, so you’re not losing much in terms of quality.At launch,... Continue reading…

That looks like a totally normal and fun building to explore. | Image: Epic Games Alan Wake Remastered is launching Thursday on the Nintendo eShop, just in time for any pre-Halloween gaming. Developer Remedy Entertainment and publisher Epic Games had announced that the psychological thriller would be released this fall but, at the time, didn’t say exactly when.Remedy and Epic first released Alan Wake Remastered on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC last year. This Switch port runs natively on Nintendo’s hardware — it’s not a cloud app, like some other big-name ports — and comes with the main game and both story expansions. The game typically costs $29.99, though it’s on sale for 20 percent to celebrate the launch.If you haven’t played Alan Wake yet (like me), Remastered might be a good place to start ahead of the release... Continue reading…

Image: Reincubate Camo’s new version 1.9 update can turn your smartphone into an untethered webcam. The camera utility software, one of the earliest around to convert iOS or Android devices into a computer webcam, can now connect via Wi-Fi in addition to the previous USB plug-in requirement.It’s a great time for Camo to release this update as Apple’s macOS Ventura prepares to launch with its own Continuity Camera feature that can turn iPhones into a webcam. It’s still in demand as a solution for work-from-home setups, as the return to the office has turned into more of a hybrid schedule for many of us. Apple’s implementation involves little setup and can mount to the top of a MacBook with a specialty mount like this Belkin one, enabling special features... Continue reading…

Google is pushing harder than ever to make RCS the norm. | Illustration by William Joel / The Verge Google announced a number of updates to its Messages app on Thursday, including an in-line reply feature for responding to individual messages and the ability to star or set a reminder on a text. Some of the best new features require users to have RCS enabled, which seems to be precisely the point: Google is pushing harder and harder to get carriers and developers to make RCS the standard, even if it means some complicated compatibility issues in the meantime.RCS is a long-in-the-works standard aimed at replacing SMS as the primary infrastructure for mobile messaging. Since it works over the internet and not carrier bandwidth, it can support a huge number of additional features: encryption, multimedia, more interactive features, and... Continue reading…

Intel takes the PC performance crown back from AMD thanks to big multithread performance gains and boosts to gaming and creator apps Continue reading…

Concept artwork of the now-cancelled “Feral Queen” character. | Image: Tony Sart The makers of Fallout: London, an ambitious mod for Fallout 4 set in everyone’s favorite post-apocalyptic hellscape, have announced they’re cutting two characters based on the late Queen Elizabeth II and then-Prince Charles. The announcement was initially made on Twitter on September 8th shortly after the Queen’s death, but the team’s project lead Dean Carter officially announced the change during a recent development update.“We have always maintained that if she was to pass away before the mod was complete we would change it,” Carter said. “Do not expect them in there. There’s no point asking in the comments. There’s no point moaning. It’s the official stance of the mod and it will not change.”Concept art of the two characters show... Continue reading…