The Verge

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple Music Classical, Apple’s long-in-the-works app for listening to classical music with an Apple Music subscription, is now available to download from the App Store.Apple Music Classical was born from Primephonic, which Apple acquired in 2021 with the intent of launching a classical music-focused app in 2022. The promise of Apple Music Classical is that it will be better at handling the complex metadata often associated with classical recordings, and the app will also have things like curated playlists and composer biographies to help people get more acquainted with the genre.Apple says the app’s catalog houses more than 5 million tracks and that you can listen to music at up to 192 kHz/24 bit hi-res lossless. However, there are a... Continue reading…

A deep-water fish, called a Rattail, brought up as part of research into the effects of mining in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone of the Pacific Ocean. | Image: Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images From electric vehicles to renewable energy, the future runs on batteries. That’s driving soaring demand for raw materials used to make batteries, including nickel, cobalt, and copper. By next year, mining companies could start harvesting those materials from the deep sea at an industrial scale for the first time.But the damage that would do to ethereal ecosystems on the seafloor could be catastrophic and irreversible, a new report warns. Ocean researchers and advocates are intensifying calls for a deep seabed mining moratorium before it’s too late.Ocean researchers and advocates are intensifying calls for a deep seabed mining moratoriumHeated negotiations over a new “mining code” for the deep sea are underway this week in Kingston,... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Uber Eats is delisting some of the delivery-only restaurants on its app to help weed out low-quality listings, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The company has confirmed to The Verge that it’s introducing a new set of standards for virtual restaurants that should help cut down on listings that sometimes contain the same menu.Virtual restaurants, which are also known as ghost kitchens, don’t have a physical location where you can actually sit down and eat. Instead, they’re often run out of existing restaurants, warehouses, and sometimes even parking lots and exist solely to sell food on delivery apps like Uber Eats, Grubhub, and DoorDash. While some of these locations are independently run, others belong to larger companies... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Ubisoft is backing out of its planned attendance at the E3 2023 in-person expo in favor of its own show in LA on June 12th, the company confirmed to VGC.“E3 has fostered unforgettable moments across the industry throughout the years,” Ubisoft spokesperson Heather Haefner says in a statement to The Verge. “While we initially intended to have an official E3 presence, we’ve made the subsequent decision to move in a different direction, and will be holding a Ubisoft Forward Live event on June 12 in Los Angeles. We look forward to sharing more details with our players very soon.” E3 organizer ReedPop didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.With Ubisoft backing out, E3 2023, which runs from June 13th through June 16th,... Continue reading…

MultiVersus. | Image: Warner Bros. Games Warner Bros. Games is shutting down MultiVersus’ open beta ahead of a full release targeted for early 2024. The open beta for the WB-themed free-to-play Super Smash Bros.-like brawler will be taken offline on June 25th.While MultiVersus is offline, you can still play the game’s training room and local matches, and you can use any characters and in-game cosmetics you have unlocked. (If you want to be able to mess around with the offline features, you’ll need to download the game from digital storefronts before April 4th.) Any progress you have already made will carry over when the game is available again in 2024. But you won’t be able to get refunds due to the closure, according to an FAQ page, which might be frustrating for players who... Continue reading…

Levi’s will experiment with Lalaland’s realistic AI-generated models later this year. | Image: Levi Strauss & Co. / Lalaland.ai Levi’s will begin testing AI-generated clothing models later this year in a bid to diversify the iconic denim company’s online shopping experience. The planned experiment was revealed last week alongside Levi’s partnership with Lalaland.ai, a digital fashion studio that creates realistic AI-generated fashion models.Currently, most products advertised on the Levi’s app or website can only be viewed on a single clothing model. The AI clothing models created by this partnership could be more body-inclusive, allowing customers to view what an article of clothing would look like on a multitude of models spanning a wide range of body types, ages, sizes, and skin tones. In theory, that should help consumers who are frustrated when clothing... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Disney’s planned job cuts that will eliminate 7,000 jobs are about to begin, as the first of three rounds of layoffs will start this week, CEO Bob Iger said in a memo to employees obtained by CNBC.Staff affected by this first round will hear from leaders “over the next four days,” according to Iger. The second round of cuts, which is set to encompass “several thousands” of people, will happen sometime in April. The third round will happen “before the beginning of the summer.”Iger first revealed in February that the company was planning the cuts, meaning that employees have been waiting for weeks to know if they’ll still have a job at Disney. And given that rumors of potential layoffs surfaced soon after Iger came back as CEO in... Continue reading…

I never expected to see a non-Tesla EV charging at a Tesla Supercharger. The electric vehicle market is growing by leaps and bounds every month in the US, but most of these new EV owners are quickly figuring out they have one big thing in common: our public charging infrastructure sucks very badly.EV drivers face everything from illogical charging station placement and broken equipment to being forced to use a hodgepodge of payment apps. The fact that America is still in the Wild West days of EV charging becomes readily apparent the moment your range starts dwindling and you’re far from home.There’s one exception to this, of course: Tesla’s Supercharger network. The automaker claims it’s built the largest public fast-charging network in the world, and there’s no evidence to the contrary. It’s also... Continue reading…

The new avatars inside Microsoft Teams. | Image: Microsoft Microsoft is now allowing Teams users to create a 3D avatar to use in meetings instead of being on camera or even needing a webcam. Originally announced in 2021, Microsoft has been testing these 3D avatars over the past year and is now ready to allow Microsoft Teams users to try them out in public preview today.“Avatars for Microsoft Teams offers an alternative to the current binary option of video or no video,” says Avery Salumbides, a product marketing manager at Microsoft, in a blog post today. “Avatars for Teams gives you that much-needed camera break, while still allowing you to collaborate effectively.” Image: Microsoft The avatars are fully customizable. These new avatars in Microsoft Teams will animate... Continue reading…

The new and updated Microsoft Teams client. | Image: Microsoft Microsoft is overhauling its Teams app today to make it faster and easier to use. Microsoft Teams has been rebuilt from the ground up, with a new preview available today for businesses to try out this radical rework that has been years in the making.“The new Teams is faster, simpler, and more flexible than ever before,” says Sumi Singh, CVP of engineering for Microsoft Teams, in an interview with The Verge. “We’ve made tremendous strides in performance and usability. The new Teams is 2x faster while using 50 percent fewer resources.”Installing the new Microsoft Teams app should be 3x faster and launching or joining meetings two times faster. Microsoft says the new Microsoft Teams should also consume 50 percent less memory and 70... Continue reading…

The Nintendo Switch OLED rarely ever is $30 off. | Image: Nintendo If you’ve been eyeing the Nintendo Switch OLED but stayed away because of its price, good news: you can now buy the popular hybrid console with white Joy-Cons for $319.99 ($30 off) at Woot. The rare deal will be available until 10PM PT today, March 27th, or 1AM ET March 28th, as long as supplies last.As the premium model in the Switch lineup, the Nintendo Switch OLED offers a number of improvements over the standard Switch. For one thing, it features a larger and more vibrant seven-inch 720p OLED display that’s richer in color quality and contrast. For another, its wider and adjustable kickstand is much more stable and is therefore actually useful, unlike the one the original Switch sports. The console can also store more games thanks... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Zoom has become the latest productivity app to expand its use of artificial intelligence. In a blog post published on Monday, the company announced a partnership with OpenAI that brings AI-generated summaries, message drafts, and more to the video conferencing app through its Zoom IQ AI-powered assistant.While Zoom IQ can already do things like create chapters and highlights for recorded meetings, Zoom’s giving the assistant even more features, including a way to catch up on meetings that you may have been late to. That means you’ll be able to ask the tool to summarize what you’ve missed as well as “ask further questions.” Image: Zoom Zoom IQ will soon let you generate responses to colleagues. Additionally,... Continue reading…

The proposed court order follows a lawsuit opened by the FTC last year that sought to charge operators of an “extended vehicle warranty” telemarketing scam. | Image: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Regulators in the US are cracking down on operators of an “extended vehicle warranty” telemarketing scam with action that could see the responsible parties face a lifetime ban from the vehicle warranty industry. Under proposed court orders drawn up on March 23rd, three companies — American Vehicle Protection Corporation (AVP), CG3 Solutions, and Tony Gonzalez Consulting Group — and their owners would be permanently banned from both the extended automobile warranty industry and all outbound telemarketing.In February 2022, the FTC charged AVP and the two affiliated companies with violating the FTC Act and the Telemarketing Sales Rule. In its complaint, the FTC alleged that AVP falsely claimed to represent dealers and manufacturers,... Continue reading…

The original viral image (left) and another AI-generated fake from the same batch (right). | Image: via Reddit / u/trippy_art_special AI-generated images have gone viral before, but none have spread so far and wide as a picture of the pope wearing what can only be described as a swagged-out puffy jacket. Call him the Supreme pontiff. The Balenciaga bishop. The vicar of drip.The picture seems to have been first posted online on Friday, submitted to a subreddit for the AI image generator Midjourney. Over the weekend, it spread on Twitter and other social networks, first as a meme and then as the subject of debunking. By Sunday, Chrissy Teigen was tweeting about it — a reliable indicator that an internet joke has gone mainstream.“I thought the pope’s puffer jacket was real and didnt give it a second thought. no way am I surviving the future of technology,” Teigen... Continue reading…

When you find a good spatial audio song, Sonos’ new speaker can blow your mind and sounds like nothing else. But it trails the Sonos Five at stereo playback and suffers from the wildly inconsistent state of Atmos mixes. Continue reading…

The more affordable Era speaker improves upon the Sonos One by nearly every measure and will likely find the same success and popularity among Sonos customers. Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft has stopped its $1 trial offer for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. The trial has been available for years, with brief periods where it wasn’t always available in certain markets, and it now looks like Microsoft is considering new promotions instead.“We have stopped our previous introductory offer for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass and are evaluating different marketing promotions for new members in the future,” says Kari Perez, head of global communications at Xbox, in a statement to The Verge.The $1 trial has allowed people to sign up to Xbox Game Pass for a month, before the full Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription kicks in at $14.99 per month or $9.99 a month for the PC- or console-only subscriptions.... Continue reading…

Image: The Verge Although the expected launch of Apple’s mixed-reality headset is just months away, some employees don’t seem to think the device is ready yet, according to a report from The New York Times. While some employees reportedly exited the project due to their doubts, others remain skeptical about the headset’s potential for success — especially at a price point of $3,000.Apple’s widely expected to reveal the headset at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in June. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple recently demoed the device in front of Apple’s top 100 executives at the Steve Jobs Theater in California, “suggesting that a public unveiling is getting close.”But behind the “glitzy” presentation, the Times suggests that there has... Continue reading…

Photo by Sam Byford / The Verge Nintendo’s Wii U and 3DS digital storefronts are shutting down today, March 27th, 2023 at 8PM ET. While you’ll no longer be able to purchase games or DLC from either eShop, you’ll still be able to redownload the games you’ve already bought and play online for the time being.Nintendo first warned us of the shutdown last year and started barring users from loading money into the Wii U and 3DS eShops in August. Sadly, this imminent shutdown means we’ll have to bid farewell to the hundreds of great digital-only titles available on either store, such as Dr. Luigi, Pokémon Rumble U, Pushmo, Pokémon Picross, and many others.The closures will also make it impossible to purchase the full range of Virtual Console games on the 3DS and Wii U,... Continue reading…

Brian Cox as Logan Roy. | HBO While Succession’s fourth and final season makes good on the series’ name, it does so while feeling comfortably stuck in a familiar holding pattern of treachery and ‘gotcha’ backstabbing. Continue reading…

Tired: the metaverse. Wired: the message-verse? | Image: OpenAI / David Pierce It’s pretty obvious that nobody saw ChatGPT coming. Not even OpenAI. Before it became by some measures the fastest growing consumer app in history, before it turned the phrase “generative pre-trained transformers” into common vernacular, before every company you can think of was racing to adopt its underlying model, ChatGPT launched in November as a “research preview.”The blog post announcing ChatGPT is now a hilarious case study in underselling. “ChatGPT is a sibling model to InstructGPT, which is trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed response. We are excited to introduce ChatGPT to get users’ feedback and learn about its strengths and weaknesses.” That’s it! That’s the whole pitch! No waxing poetic about... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft has pushed an update to fix a screenshot editing vulnerability in Windows 10 and 11, as spotted earlier by Bleeping Computer. The security flaw, dubbed the “aCropalypse,” could let bad actors recover the edited portions of screenshots, potentially revealing personal information that had been cropped out or concealed.According to Microsoft, the issue (CVE-2023-28303) affects both the Snip & Sketch app on Windows 10 and the Snipping Tool on Windows 11. However, it only applies to images created in a very specific set of steps. That includes those that have been taken, saved, edited, and then saved over the original file, as well as the ones opened in the Snipping Tool, edited, and then saved to the same location. It doesn’t have... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Microsoft doesn’t want its rivals to use Bing’s search index to power their AI chatbots, according to a report from Bloomberg. The company reportedly told two unnamed Bing-powered search engines that it will restrict them from accessing Microsoft’s search data altogether if they continue using it with their AI tools.As noted by Bloomberg, Microsoft licenses out Bing’s search data to several search engines, including DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and the AI search engine You.com. While DuckDuckGo, for example, uses a combination of Bing and its own web crawler to provide search results, You.com and Neeva also pull some of their results from Bing, helping to conserve some of the time and resources that come along with crawling the entire web.M... Continue reading…

Image: Netflix Arrested Development isn’t leaving Netflix anymore. The streamer announced on Twitter that the show will remain on the platform after licensing issues nearly resulted in its removal.While Netflix initially planned on taking down all five seasons of the show on March 15th, including the two produced by Netflix, that never happened. That’s because Netflix reached a deal with the Disney-owned 20th Century Studios, which still holds the rights to the series after it originally premiered on Fox in 2003, according to a report from Vulture.

Image: Paramount Pictures and eOne Engaging, comical, and unapologetically dorky, Honor Among Thieves occasionally stumbles under its own ambition but ultimately proves that high fantasy doesn’t always have to be highbrow. Continue reading…

The ad-supported Kindle Paperwhite with 8GB of storage is $40 off. | Photo by Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge Whether you’re looking to relax and unwind this weekend or simply pass some time while flying out for spring break, today’s deals on the Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle Scribe will help you do so. First up, the Kindle Paperwhite is on sale in various configurations, starting at $99.99 with ads and 8GB of storage at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target ($40 off). The model with 16GB of storage is on sale for just $10 more, while the 8GB model without ads costs $20 extra.Not only are those the best discounts we’ve seen this year, but it also brings the Paperwhite down to the price of the base Kindle. Unlike that entry-level e-reader, though, the Paperwhite is waterproof with monthslong battery life, so you can enjoy reading for hours on end in the... Continue reading…

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore | Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Gordon Moore, one of Intel’s co-founders and a Silicon Valley titan, died today at 94 years old, according to a press release from the company. He was part of the “traitorous eight” who founded Fairchild Semiconductor, which became an incubator for many other Silicon Valley companies — including AMD. Moore and Robert Noyce, a fellow member of the eight, went on to found Intel, originally named Integrated Electronics, in 1968. He eventually became chairman and CEO of the company in 1979, and served as CEO for eight years.While Moore obviously played a large role in the development of the tech that powers modern computing devices, many people will also be familiar with his name because of “Moore’s law,” his 1965 prediction that processors... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge OpenAI has announced new details about why it took ChatGPT offline on Monday, and it’s now saying that some users’ payment information may have been exposed during the incident.According to a post from the company, a bug in an open source library called redis-py created a caching issue that may have shown some active users the last four digits and expiration date of another user’s credit card, along with their first and last name, email address, and payment address. Users also may have seen snippets of others’ chat histories as well.This isn’t the first time caching issues have caused users to see each other people’s data — famously, on Christmas Day in 2015, Steam users were served pages with information from other users’ accounts.... Continue reading…

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge “My old Dell XPS 15 has gotten sluggish. The battery dies easily. It’s heavy to cart around, anyhow. Now that I’m going out in public again, I need a new work machine.”These were the thoughts circling my head at yesterday’s Framework event — where the company known for its easily-upgradable laptops announced new chips and a new, longer-lasting battery. “Battery life has consistently been the main negative for the Framework laptop,” said CEO Nirav Patel, hitting on the one reason I’d only ever admired the company’s laptops from a distance. This morning, without that one reason to hold back, it was time to put down a $100 deposit for my own Framework Laptop 13.But I didn’t — because Framework wouldn’t sell me that battery unless I... Continue reading…