The Verge - All Posts

The Pixel Watch doesn’t have to be great. It has to be competent. | Image: Google Later this fall, Google is expected to launch the Pixel Watch. Given Wear OS’s history, there’s understandably a lot of anticipation. Will the watch be good? Will it fail to deliver the promise of Wear OS 3? Honestly, those questions might be more appropriate for future iterations of the watch. For now, all Google has to do is create a smartwatch that does the basics well.Case in point, XDA Developers recently reported that Google seems to be hard at work addressing an egregious oversight in Wear OS: backups. In an APK teardown of Google Play services v 22.23.12 beta, XDA says that there’s code that refers to “companion backups” via Google One. Right now, if you upgrade to a new phone, you can’t back up your non-Samsung Wear OS... Continue reading…

Coming to a TV or phone near you. | Image: Marvel Marvel’s latest theatrical release, Thor: Love and Thunder, will be making its way to the Disney Plus streaming service on September 8th (via Deadline). While my colleague Charles Pulliam-Moore described the movie as “messy” in his excellent review, which you can read here, it still did reasonably well at the box office. Soon, though, it’ll be available on streaming for anyone who’d rather watch it at home.Thor isn’t the only content that Disney’s adding to the service on September 8th, which it’s declared as “Disney Plus Day.” There are several shorts, behind-the-scenes features, and TV episodes premiering as well. Perhaps the most notable other addition is a live-action Pinocchio adaptation featuring Tom Hanks and Joseph Gordon-Levitt... Continue reading…

Clip Studio Paint is moving to a monthly subscription when version 2.0 launches in 2023. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Celsys announced version 2.0 of Clip Studio Paint, its popular digital illustration and animation software, alongside plans to move over to a monthly subscription for updates to the service when it launches. It’s left some longtime fans who praised it for its one-time purchase model feeling very betrayed.An announcement on the Clip Studio website states that “from 2023 onwards, the current Version 1 (the one-time purchase, perpetual version for Windows/macOS, ‘Version 1.x’ hereafter), offered as a download and physical version will no longer receive feature updates free of charge.”This has subsequently outraged members of the artist community, who previously heralded the service as a fantastic one-time purchase alternative to software... Continue reading…

Gmail’s new look provides easy access to Gmail, Chat, Spaces, and Meet on one panel but can make the design appear cluttered. | Image: Google Not a fan of Gmail’s new look for the web? I feel you. Even though the changes rolled out were small, that side panel featuring apps like Mail, Chat, Spaces, and Meet has cluttered things up, making checking emails first thing in the morning feel more overwhelming.Sure, you can make things a little easier on the eye by hiding the Gmail category and label panel with some quick tweaks. But if you’re also not a fan of other changes, like the new light blue Compose button background that I found distracting, it’s actually pretty easy to revert to the previous interface. (Well, at the moment, at least. We’re not sure, after all, how much longer Gmail will let users revert to the old design — so let’s enjoy the luxury while we still can.)H... Continue reading…

Ford’s F-150 Lightning | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Ford is laying off about 3,000 employees and contract workers, with the cuts primarily affecting staff in the US, Canada, and India, The Wall Street Journal reports. Chairman Bill Ford and CEO Jim Farley sent a memo on Monday informing staff of the layoffs, with affected workers being told later this week.“Building this future requires changing and reshaping virtually all aspects of the way we have operated for more than a century,” Ford and Farley said in the memo, according to CNBC. “It requires focus, clarity and speed. And, as we have discussed in recent months, it means redeploying resources and addressing our cost structure, which is uncompetitive versus traditional and new competitors.”It’s unclear how the cuts may be spread... Continue reading…

The new Pixel Buds Pro are discounted alongside the Google Pixel 6A today. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Welcome back to the arena of deals. Our inaugural discount this week is on the excellent Google Pixel Buds Pro, which released less than a month ago. Typically priced at $199.99, you can currently find these new earbuds on Amazon for $174.99 in their black or yellow colorways. The Pixel Buds Pro are a drastic improvement over their middling predecessor, boasting solid noise cancellation, improved battery life, and multipoint Bluetooth support. While the sound quality isn’t quite up to par with some of our top picks, this discount makes the Pixel Buds Pro worth considering if you’re on the hunt for a fresh pair of earbuds. Read our review.There’s still an opportunity to score a discount on the recently released Google Pixel 6A. Normally... Continue reading…

The cast of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery | Image: Netflix Given the almost half a billion dollars Netflix spent on the rights to director Rian Johnson’s Knives Out follow-ups and the streamer’s plan to debut the first of the two sequels this winter, you’d think we would know more a Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery than its name. Alas, we do not. But at the very least, we now have a proper streaming release date and an announcement... for another announcement about when Glass Onion will be in theaters.Along with a new photo of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery’s cast members Daniel Craig, Edward Norton, Janelle Monáe, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., and Jessica Henwick, Netflix shared today that the film will be available to stream on December 23rd.

Who should buy Acer’s flagship notebook (and who shouldn’t) Continue reading…

Image: Microsoft Microsoft has started putting more ads in Outlook mobile for iOS and Android in recent months.The Outlook mobile app gives users two options for organizing their inbox: a single inbox with everything in it or a tabbed inbox split into two categories — “focused” with important mail and “Other” with all the rest. Previously, Microsoft only put ads in the “Other” tab for free users, but it’s now adding them to the single-inbox mode, too. Image: James Vincent / The Verge An ad inside Outlook mobile on iOS. The change has been rolling out over the past few months and essentially means Microsoft is making it harder for free users to avoid ads in Outlook mobile. Whatever inbox mode you use, there’ll be ads somewhere... Continue reading…

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is the highest-grossing video game movie ever in the United States. | Image: Paramount Pictures Fresh off the success of Uncharted and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 respectively, Sony and Sega are planning film adaptations of even more of their franchises. Deadline reports that Sony is developing Days Gone for the big screen, while Sega says it’s developing adaptations of Space Channel 5 and Comix Zone.These join a dizzying number of adaptations currently in development or production from Sony alone, including Gran Turismo, Ghost of Tsushima, Jak and Daxter, The Last of Us and God of War. As it stands, the number of upcoming projects listed from other studios on the Wikipedia page for movies adapted from video games is almost half of the total number of movies ever historically released within the genre. Notable upcoming projects also... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook’s parent company Meta is heading into another political battle over the planned introduction of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) in its Messenger chat platform. The UK’s home secretary, Priti Patel, makes this clear in an op-ed for Tory mouthpiece The Telegraph this week, saying it would be a “grotesque betrayal” if the company didn’t consider issues of child safety while introducing E2EE. Similar arguments are likely to be raised in the US, too.Meta has been working on adding E2EE to Messenger for years, and recently confirmed that it aims to encrypt all chats and calls on the platform by default next year. (It currently only offers default E2EE on its other big chat platform, WhatsApp, though users can opt-in to E2EE on... Continue reading…

The Rehearsal, the docu-comedy TV show created by and starring Nathan Fielder, has been renewed for a second season, HBO has announced. The new came just ahead of the show’s sixth episode and season one finale on Friday night. “One more chance to get it right,” reads the Season 2 tagline, though a premiere date is missing from the announcement.Ostensibly, the basic premise of The Rehearsal is that it’s a comedic documentary series designed to help ordinary people tackle difficult moments in their life by giving them an opportunity to rehearse it beforehand. But the show approaches this simple premise with a budget and attention to detail that can make the scope of each rehearsal feel dizzying, and the show as a whole becomes... Continue reading…

The Last of Us | Image: HBO Along with the occasionally-glitchy premiere of House of the Dragon, HBO presented a teaser trailer of content its new owner hasn’t abruptly shelved that provided the first in-motion look of Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey playing Joel and Ellie, respectively, in its upcoming The Last of Us TV show.Neil Druckmann — the writer and creative director of both The Last of Us games — is an executive producer of the show, and tweeted, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”Other content in the preview came from The Idol, Love and Death, Succession, The White Lotus, And Just Like That, Hacks, The White House Plumbers, Our Flag Means Death, but the Naughty Dog-made PlayStation franchise’s live-action TV debut is the one we’re interested in the most. In the... Continue reading…

Besides unreleased and disappearing content, there have been plenty of complaints about the HBO Max streaming apps since they launched. Still, they’ve generally held up well under the stress of premieres for content like Tenet, Wonder Woman, The Matrix, or Westworld, but for HBO there may not be anything like a Game of Thrones premiere.Tonight’s debut of the show’s spinoff, House of the Dragon, is the first taste of a new GOT experience inside HBO Max, and while many people trying to stream the premiere episode are watching without a problem, others said the app crashed on them, or froze up once it got past the pre-show teaser trailer.Based on reports seen on Twitter, Reddit, and elsewhere, it appears that most of the people having... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A concerned father says that after using his Android smartphone to take photos of an infection on his toddler’s groin, Google flagged the images as child sexual abuse material (CSAM), according to a report from The New York Times. The company closed his accounts and filed a report with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and spurred a police investigation, highlighting the complications of trying to tell the difference between potential abuse and an innocent photo once it becomes part of a user’s digital library, whether on their personal device or in cloud storage.Concerns about the consequences of blurring the lines for what should be considered private were aired last year when Apple announced its Child... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Netflix’s upcoming ad-supported tier might not show commercials on all the content included in the cheaper subscription plan. A report from Bloomberg suggests that Netflix may cut commercials from newer original films, as well as certain kids’ shows.According to Bloomberg, Netflix may not run ads during original movies when they’re first released, and will instead insert ads at a later date. It’s still too early to tell how long Netflix will show a newer movie without ads, but as noted by Bloomberg, this decision may help alleviate some of the concerns filmmakers might have about ads detracting from their work.Netflix original kids’ programming will also reportedly get the ad-free treatment — just like Disney Plus plans on doing with... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tesla’s increasing the price of its Full-Self Driving (FSD) software to $15,000. In a post on Twitter, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that the new price will go into effect in North America starting September 5th, representing a $3,000 jump.Drivers who order a vehicle before September 5th won’t have to pay the newly-increased price, Musk says. The price hike comes as Tesla begins rolling out FSD beta 10.69 to drivers, a version Musk calls “a big step forward.” It’s still unclear whether Tesla plans on raising the price of its FSD subscription, which currently costs $199 per month.

Image: Ray Mona / Library of Congress The decades-long search for the American version of Sailor Moon has finally come to an end. Ray Mona, a YouTuber who documents her efforts to find lost media (including the never-released Mean Girls game), has managed to unearth the pilot episode of the unaired, never-finished series that the Sailor Moon fandom has come to know as Saban Moon.The story of the Americanized Sailor Moon starts in 1993, about two years before the debut of the dubbed Sailor Moon that we know today. At the time, animation studio Toon Makers teamed up with Renaissance Atlantic Entertainment, the producers behind the original Power Rangers, in a bid to make an English version of the series. The two companies pitched a project that blends live-action with... Continue reading…

Image: Ginsor (Twitter) Bungie appears to be getting ready to add Fortnite skins to Destiny 2. After Fortnite leaker MidaRado teased a potential Destiny 2 collab over the weekend, Ginsor — a well-known Destiny dataminer — has confirmed the crossover with an image showing off several classic Fortnite skins in Destiny 2.The image, which was likely obtained from Bungie’s own website, includes a Titan armor set that looks very much like the Black Knight skin that was originally obtainable from the season pass of Fortnite season 2. Destiny’s Warlock is also shown with a Fortnite-like Drift Mask, and the Hunter looks very much like Fortnite’s Omega skin.It’s not clear how Destiny 2 players will be able to obtain these Fortnite skins, or when they’ll be part of the... Continue reading…

FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) slapped the Sam Bankman-Fried-owned cryptocurrency exchange FTX with a cease-and-desist order over “false and misleading statements” that suggest its assets are FDIC-insured. The FDIC doesn’t cover stocks or crypto, and only safeguards funds held in insured bank accounts.In a letter to the exchange, the FDIC points to a now-deleted tweet from FTX president Brett Harrison, which states “direct deposits from employers to FTX US are stored in individually FDIC-insured bank accounts in the users’ names.” The referenced tweet also says that “stocks are held in FDIC-insured and SIPC [Security Investor Protection Corporation]-insured brokerage accounts.” The FDIC claims this falsely represents... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge DoorDash is calling off its partnership with Walmart, which had the service delivering groceries and other goods from the retail chain to customers for over four years, according to a report from Insider. A source close to the situation told Insider that DoorDash notified Walmart about its decision earlier this month, citing that the partnership “was no longer mutually beneficial” and that it wants to “focus on its long-term customer relationships.”DoorDash reportedly gave Walmart a 30-day notice, which means the partnership will officially end in September. The two companies first teamed up in 2018 when Walmart started testing having groceries ordered through its site delivered by DoorDash. It went live in Atlanta, Georgia to start,... Continue reading…

Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge YouTube has removed a video that shows Tesla drivers carrying out their own safety tests to determine whether the EV’s (electric vehicle) Full Self-Driving (FSD) capabilities would make it automatically stop for children walking across or standing in the road, as first reported by CNBC.The video, titled “Does Tesla Full-Self Driving Beta really run over kids?” was originally posted on Whole Mars Catalog’s YouTube channel and involves Tesla owner and investor, Tad Park, testing Tesla’s FSD feature with his own kids. During the video, Park drives a Tesla Model 3 toward one of his children standing in the road, and then tries again with his other kid crossing the street. The vehicle stops before reaching the children both times.

Photo by Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto via Getty Images Some of you are using BeReal exactly the way it was intended to be used. For that, I applaud you. But some of you are using it in a very, very wrong way. You people know exactly who you are.For those unfamiliar, BeReal is a social network that’s an anti-social network in many ways. The app sends a notification to all users at a randomized time, informing them that it’s “time to BeReal.” In theory, users open BeReal immediately after receiving this notification, take a photo of whatever they happen to be doing at that time, and post it to the app. You can’t see anyone else’s BeReals until you post your own.On paper, it’s the opposite of Instagram. The latter app is notoriously curated — people fill it with beautiful, carefully edited... Continue reading…

The Tap Dial is a smooth way to control your Hue lights Continue reading…

Sony’s last-gen WH-1000XM4 Bluetooth noise-canceling headphones are still a great choice in 2022. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge After a week of solid deals, we’ve got some bangers to cap off your weekend. Starting off, Woot has excellent prices for some of Sony’s top-of-the-line headphones — both for those who prefer over-ear cans and true wireless earbuds.You may be no stranger to the Sony WH-1000XM4 headphones, and for good reason, as they were our top pick for the best headphones you can buy for quite a while. Their title has been usurped by the newer and pricier WH-1000XM5, but the XM4 remains an excellent option with great sound quality, noise cancellation, and the ability to fold down for easier storage (a glaring omission of the new model’s revised design).Woot is offering the WH-1000XM4 headphones for a one-day deal price of $269.99 (about $80 off), but... Continue reading…

Plant portraits: an important Z Flip 4 use case. I’ve had the privilege of taking photos with some incredible smartphones this year. I’ve been wowed by the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra’s 10x zoom, marveled at the massive sensor and gorgeous portraits from the Xiaomi 12S Ultra, and I’ve seen the Google Pixel 6A accomplish the impossible: take sharp photos of a rambunctious toddler in dim light. I could reach into my cabinet drawer, take out any of these phones right now, and use them as my primary camera. But I shan’t! Right now, I’m rocking the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4, and I’m here to tell you it’s a friggin’ joy to take photos with.That’s right. The foldable you saw advertised with flashy colors and catchy pop music while you were watching AEW Dynamite is my ride-or-die camera right now.... Continue reading…

These aren’t Lego bricks. They’re computers that look like they belong. | GIF by Sean Hollister / The Verge; Video by James Brown James Brown loves building weird displays. Like animatronic skulls, or mechanical bit-flipping cellular automatons. Or, in this case, an entire computer inside a mock Lego brick.Not just any brick, either. I’m talking about the classic sloped Lego computers from our childhood spaceships, now brilliantly brought to life. They display fake radar scans, scrolling text, even an interactive homage to the Death Star trench run targeting computer that moves when you touch the exposed Lego studs.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Elon Musk’s bot-baiting aside, Twitter has had many people call for changes to how it identifies accounts and what can be done to call out which ones are more legit than others. Now engineer Jane Manchun Wong has dug up a Twitter label that would put a mark on accounts with a verified phone number. She also noted another test feature showing view counts for tweets, which some users already have access to for their own tweets under the label of “analytics.” However, she said it’s unclear if this would be limited to the author or visible to everyone.Linking an account to a number is one way to highlight that it was created with more effort than the simplest macro and could be used to filter out which tweets appear the most prominently or... Continue reading…

The new and improved Zuckerberg, coming to a Quest 2 near you. | Image: Mark Zuckerberg Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg posted a screenshot of his digital avatar standing in front of the Eiffel Tower and what I think is supposed to be la Sagrada Família as a way of announcing that Horizon Worlds was launching in France and Spain. Unfortunately for him, the internet more or less immediately started dragging and meme-ifying the screenshot of the virtual reality platform — likely because the graphics were, as one Twitter user described it, about on par with the Teletubbies game for the PlayStation One.Zuckerberg’s apparently seen the memes and wants to let you know that Meta is working on the graphics. On Friday, he posted some new screenshots to Facebook and Instagram, showing off a significantly more life-like version of... Continue reading…

The effort to electrify an iconic car has run into its first speed bump. Earlier this month, electric vehicle company Karma Automotive filed a lawsuit against DeLorean Motors Reimagined, the Texas-based company that holds the branding rights for the original DeLorean Motor Company (DMC), and four of its employees, alleging stolen intellectual property.More broadly, Karma claims that DeLorean Motors Reimagined only exists because a joint venture between the two didn’t pan out. In a lawsuit filed on August 8th in US District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Karma alleges that four DeLorean employees — CEO Joost de Vries, COO Alan Yuan, vice president Neilo Harris, and chief marketing officer Troy Beetz — stole the company’s trade... Continue reading…

I’m not sure Elmo will be happy to learn about the episodes that were pulled. | Image: Sesame Workshop In potentially devastating news for kids and parents, about 200 episodes of Sesame Street have been removed from HBO Max, Variety reports. Many of the dropped episodes are from the show’s earliest seasons, and the number of Sesame Street episodes on the service has fallen from around 650 to 456, according to Variety.HBO and Sesame Street have been connected for years; WarnerMedia (now Warner Bros. Discovery) locked in a big five-year deal in 2019 to exclusively stream new episodes of the show, and Sesame Street first began airing on HBO in 2016.“Sesame Street is and has always been an important part of television culture and a crown jewel of our preschool offering,” HBO Max spokesperson Chris Willard said in a statement to The Verge.... Continue reading…

Google Wallet might be in the cards for the Fitbit Sense 2 and Fitbit Versa 4. | Photo by Brent Rose / The Verge It’s been more than two years since Google plopped down $2.1 billion for Fitbit, but there hasn’t been much integration between the two companies’ products thus far. That looks like it’ll change this fall. Not only is the upcoming Pixel Watch set to get a shiny Fitbit integration, but it also appears that the rumored Fitbit Sense 2 and Versa 4 might have some kind of Google Wallet integration as well.According to 9to5Google, the latest version of Android’s Play Services shows signs that Google Wallet — which includes Google Pay — is adding Fitbit smartwatch support. That includes a new menu with graphics resembling a “squircle” Fitbit smartwatch. The images are also labeled as a “Fitbit watch illustration.” (You can see the images here.... Continue reading…

Photo by David L. Ryan / The Boston Globe via Getty Images Wayfair saw a spike in sales at the beginning of the pandemic as customers stayed home and took an interest in renovating their space and shopping online but today announced it’s laying off 870 employees. In a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the online furniture and home decor retailer indicated that the “workforce reduction” affects 5 percent of its global workforce and 10 percent of its corporate team.In the company’s second-quarter results released on August 4th, Wayfair reported a decrease in active customers, orders per customer, order deliveries, and a slight decrease in orders delivered via Wayfair’s mobile app and in other areas. Overall, Wayfair saw a nearly 15 percent decrease in net revenue compared... Continue reading…

Image: The Pokémon Company This weekend, if you want something to keep on in the background that’s not just infinite reruns of The Simpsons (you know who you are), why not check out these esports-y events: Pokémon World Championships 2022 and Games Done Quick’s Flame Fatales.What is Pokémon World Championships 2022?The Pokémon World Championships started Thursday, where the best players across various Pokémon games compete to be the very best, like no one ever was. (You see, I am Of A Certain Age, so I had to.) Though live Pokémon competitions have been slowly returning, with this year’s regional championships happening in-person throughout North America, Europe, and Latin America, Pokémon Worlds 2022 marks the return of the biggest championship tournament since... Continue reading…

Using in-app browsers could give easy access to your private information. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Did you know you’re potentially being tracked when you load an in-app browser on iOS? A new tool reveals exactly how, showing how applications like TikTok and Instagram can potentially use JavaScript to view sensitive data, including your address, passwords and credit card information, without your consent.The tool can be found at InAppBrowser.com. All you need to do is open the app you want to check and share the InAppBrowser.com URL somewhere within it — such as DMing the link to a friend or posting it in a comment. From there, you can tap the link and get a report from the website on what scripts are running in the background.All you need to do is open the app you want to check, and share the InAppBrowser.com URL somewhere within it... Continue reading…

She-Hulk realizing that she’s about to take a man home for the night | Image: Marvel Studios There’s a running joke all throughout She-Hulk: Attorney at Law’s premiere episode that’s hard to imagine Marvel Studios would have been comfortable making a few years ago before “America’s Ass” became a thing. But according to She-Hulk’s creator and head writer Jessica Gao, the joke — which punctuates the first of the series’ weekly post-credits stingers — reflects the exact sort of wild new energy Marvel head Kevin Feige challenged her to bring to the series.This post contains spoilers for the first episode of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.Like many people, She-Hulk’s Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany) is a fan of Steve Rogers who spends a considerable amount of time thinking about whether or not the centenarian ever had sex. Initially... Continue reading…

Things seem to be amiss. | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge Pixel owners who haven’t upgraded to Android 13 yet, beware: it seems that several people aren’t able to use wireless charging after installing the latest OS, which released earlier this week (via 9to5Google). There have been several posts on Reddit about the issue from people using the Pixel 4, 4 XL, 6, and 6 Pro using a variety of wireless chargers, including Google’s first-party Pixel Stands. For Pixel 6 and 6 Pro owners, this could be an even bigger problem — they’re not allowed to roll back to Android 12 after updating to Android 13.According to some users’ reports, the phones do seem to recognize that they’re on a wireless charger, with one user even saying that their 4 XL shows the charging battery icon. However, the batteries... Continue reading…

Image: Asus Did you buy a flagship Asus motherboard for your 12th Gen Intel processor anytime before December 2021? You’d best check if it’s the ROG Maximus Z690 Hero and get it swapped out if so because it could potentially start a fire in your house.In January, a savvy YouTuber figured out that Asus installed one of that $600 board’s capacitors backward, and the company promised to work with government agencies on a replacement program. Today, seven months later, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and Asus are finally formally announcing that recall.send it back ASAPAccording to the CPSC’s recall announcement, roughly 10,000 motherboards were affected with serial numbers starting in MA, MB, and MC — a serial number which you can... Continue reading…

Megapixels as far as the eye can see. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge According to a new report from Korean outlet ETNews spotted by Android Authority, it’s looking very likely that the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra will use the 200-megapixel camera sensor that the company launched last year. That is a whole lot of pixels, and Samsung isn’t alone in this newest megapixel arms race — Motorola beat the company to the punch with the Motorola X30 Pro. Even Apple, a 12-megapixel camera devotee, looks like it will finally move to higher resolution 48-megapixel camera sensors with the iPhone 14.It’s not all about big numbers; moving to higher-pixel-count sensors has real image quality benefits. In this chapter of the megapixel race, it’s all about pixel binning. Samsung already employs this with its 108-megapixel... Continue reading…

The Apple Watch loves to tell you to move but doesn’t acknowledge when you need rest. | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge In 2017, I tested out the Apple Watch for several months. One big limitation, I discovered, was that it didn’t acknowledge my rest days. Rest days are essential for building muscle, but the Watch’s goals don’t really acknowledge that.It’s not like Apple hasn’t known about this problem; I’m not the only person to write about it. And the last time I did, I received emails like, “Hey, you know you’re not supposed to lie on the couch on rest days, right?” Yes, but unless I’m deliberately incorporating hills, I don’t usually break 100 bpm when I walk, and the Watch doesn’t read it as exercise.I’ve figured out a way to cheat, but I shouldn’t have toI bought an Apple Watch during the pandemic because the main way I distracted myself was by... Continue reading…

Image: Screaming Villains Sega has released the full list of Sega Genesis and Sega CD games coming to the Sega Genesis Mini 2, and perhaps one of the more notable titles on the list is the controversial Night Trap.Night Trap is a full-motion video game originally released in 1992 that has hallmarks of a B-movie horror film. At the time, it was considered violent enough it was cited in a Senate hearing about violent games that eventually led to the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board. It was also pulled from sale from Toys R Us. The game got a 25th-anniversary edition in 2017, and on the Sega Genesis Mini 2, you’ll be able to play a port of the original Sega CD release.The Genesis Mini 2 will have some unreleased games as wellIf you’re a l... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter has banned a Florida Republican candidate from the platform after a tweet that encouraged the killing of federal agents, as reported by Florida Politics on Friday.Luis Miguel is campaigning in the Republican primary to represent Florida’s 20th district in the state House of Representatives. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its justification for the ban.Miguel’s threat comes amid intense GOP hostility toward the FBI and IRS, spurred by the federal raid on Mar-a-Lago and Congress’ recent move to increase tax enforcement. But Miguel’s tweet went beyond criticisms of the agencies, calling for armed violence against their employees.“Under my plan, all Floridians will be able to shoot FBI, IRS, ATF,... Continue reading…

Looks like a boat... looks like an SUV... it’s Acura’s precision concept EV. | Image: Acura Acura revealed a chonky new electric vehicle concept this week, apparently taking some inspiration from the shape of luxury Italian power boats.Teased earlier this month, the Acura Precision EV concept represents the company’s “north star” for the direction of its future EVs, focusing on a “modern expression of performance,” according to Acura creative director Dave Marek.The grille area lights up in an aqua blue “diamond pentagon” pattern around the centered Acura logo, while the lower ends of the fascia light up in a prismatic “particle glitch” tessellation that continues the texture onto the 23-inch rims. Image: Acura Acura’s not lying — that’s a boat. The Precision EV has a wide “athletic stance” built by... Continue reading…

Photo by Brandon Bell / Getty Images Leaders on the House Oversight Committee are demanding major social media platforms swiftly address the surge of online threats against law enforcement after the FBI’s search of former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida last week.On Friday, the lawmakers sent letters to eight major social media companies demanding information detailing the number of threats against law enforcement made on their platforms in recent weeks. The committee targeted its inquiries toward prominent mainstream platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, but also wrote to fringe right-leaning competitors like Gab, GETTR, Rumble, and Trump’s own Truth Social.“threats and incitements of deadly violence are unacceptable and against the law”In... Continue reading…

In both theatrical and extended versions. | Image: Universal Pictures Two versions of Jurassic World: Dominion are coming to Peacock, NBCUniversal’s streaming service, starting September 2nd. One will be the theatrical cut, which raked in nearly a billion dollars to become the second-biggest movie of the year so far, according to Box Office Mojo. The other will be an extended version, which is 14 minutes longer and will feature “an alternate opening,” according to a press release from Peacock.According to a recent Cinemablend interview with the movie’s director, Colin Trevorrow, the extended edition was cut down to make sure the movie was less than two and a half hours long.While it’s definitely a feather in Peacock’s cap (or tail, I suppose) to be the exclusive streaming home for one of the year’s... Continue reading…

The Lucid Air Sapphire Edition is the automaker’s quickest EV yet. | Image: Lucid Motors Luxury electric vehicle maker Lucid Motors unveiled the new Lucid Air Sapphire Edition, a top-of-the-line sedan, which the company says will do zero to 60mph in under two seconds, zero to 100mph in under four seconds, and the quarter-mile in under nine seconds.That’s tremendously impressive in a full-size, fully-electric luxury sedan and potentially makes the new sapphire blue car the most powerful production sedan on the market, beating out the previous record holder, the Tesla Model S Plaid. Power to pavementThe new Sapphire Edition, which was revealed Friday during Monterey Car Week, pairs a number of the features from Lucid’s lower trim models like the Dream Edition and the Grand Touring Performance Edition. First,... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Instagram says it wasn’t intentionally trying to stop creators from filming in its app and then exporting their videos to other platforms like TikTok. The Verge reported this week that sound was being stripped from video clips exported from the Instagram Reels edit screen for iPhone users, meaning you had to fully publish a Reel in order to properly save it. Now, Instagram’s owner, Meta, says this was a bug and that it intends to fix the issue.“Due to a bug, the Reels download feature is not working as intended for iOS users and in some cases, audio is missing in downloads — we’re working to fix the issue as soon as possible,” Seine Kim, a spokesperson from Meta, said in an email to The Verge.This fix will be important for creators... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Throughout the pandemic, it has brought me extreme joy to pen articles celebrating that hard-to-find tech is getting easier to buy at retail cost. First, it was the Xbox Series S and Nintendo Switch OLED, then the Series X, and almost all Nvidia and AMD GPUs followed a few months after. We’re getting very close to being able to say that the PS5 will soon join the club.Yesterday, we wrote that Sony had kicked off another one of its once infrequent (but becoming much more frequent) PS5 restocks, and the $549.99 console bundle that includes the PS5 with a disc drive along with Horizon Forbidden West is still in stock about 19 hours later. Even after everyone has had the chance to run through the queue and make a purchase, there’s still... Continue reading…

Photo by Erhan Demirtas / NurPhoto via Getty Images If people around the world were as enthusiastic cyclers as they are in the Netherlands, we could cut an impressive amount of planet-heating pollution. The Dutch use bicycles to get around more than folks in any other country, cycling about 2.6 kilometers (1.62 miles) a day.If that was the trend across the world, it would slash 686 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution a year, according to the authors of a new study published this week in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. That’s enormous — roughly equivalent to erasing one-fifth of CO2 emissions from passenger cars globally in 2015.That’s enormousCleaning up pollution from transportation is a huge piece of the puzzle when it comes to slowing down the climate... Continue reading…