The Verge

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Xbox executive Kareem Choudhry is leaving Microsoft after more than 26 years at the company. Windows Central reports that Choudhry's last day is today, and his departure has triggered a shake-up of some teams inside Xbox. Choudhry's departure comes just six months after a big shake-up of Xbox leadership and amid continued changes to Microsoft's gaming strategy.Choudhry had been focusing on Microsoft's AI plans for Xbox in recent months, which include a new Xbox AI chatbot that The Verge exclusively revealed earlier this week. Choudhry was also key to Xbox's backward compatibility support and helped bring Xbox Cloud Gaming to life as xCloud in 2019.Microsoft is now moving Choudhry's former team, Xbox Emerging Tech, to the Xbox hardware... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge In this week's edition of his Lowpass newsletter, Janko Roettgers covered a Roku patent that seems to telegraph that the company is planning some heavy advertising tactics for those who purchase Roku TV televisions. The patent centers around the idea of displaying ads on these TVs whenever they're tuned to an HDMI input that's paused or idle. Theoretically, this would allow Roku to present ads throughout your whole TV experience - and in places where it's not viable to do so today. Your PS5, Xbox, Apple TV, or Blu-ray player could become yet another canvas for the company to continue growing its already-lucrative advertising business.According to the patent, the company would use a number of different clues to determine when an HDMI... Continue reading...

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo: Getty Images Congress has been trying to crack down on data brokers - and the data brokers are fighting back. In late March, the House unanimously passed a bill that would prevent Americans' data from being sold to foreign adversaries. And an amendment on data collection is mixed up in the bill reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the controversial statute that authorizes the National Security Agency, which expires later this month.Lawmakers' negotiations over FISA's reauthorization became so contentious that House Speaker Mike Johnson withdrew the bill from consideration in February. The biggest source of conflict was an amendment introduced by Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) that would prohibit data brokers... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Google Books, which indexes published material and has become essential for academics, has begun indexing low-quality books, which could impact how it informs its language tracking tool, Ngram.404Media reports Google Books included several books that AI could have written. The publication searched Google Books with the term as of my last knowledge update," a common phrase chatbots like ChatGPT use. You can search Google Books for specific sentences or terms, and it will normally send back written works with those phrases.It found that most of the books in the first few pages of the search were works about AI, but scattered among those results were ones that did not talk about the technology and seemed written by a bot.404Media... Continue reading...

An image showing the intensity of the quake. | Image by United States Geological Survey If you just felt the room shake a little, it's not just you. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) just confirmed that an earthquake hit north of Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, around 10:23AM ET, with people located in New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania feeling its effects.The USGS says it was a notable quake" at 4.8 magnitude, with the agency's map showing people feeling weak or light shaking along the coast of the Northeast, with some reports reaching as far north as Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, upstate New York, and even Maine. It looks like some people felt the quake in Maryland and Delaware as well.It lasted just long enough to be unsettling," said one Verge staffer who experienced it in Jersey City. Others... Continue reading...

Image: Roland Quandt DJI's next drone launch event is just around the corner on April 11th, but that hasn't stopped the leaks from flowing. A new set of images from reliable leaker Roland Quandt gives us an even more detailed look at what appears to be the new Avata 2 drone, the RC Motion 3 controller, and the Goggles 3 headset.Just like previous leaks (and DJI's own teaser), the images shared by Quandt show the Avata 2 drone with a refreshed design featuring a less prominent camera housing, along with three-bladed props. Leaked specs from @Quadro_News suggest the Avata 2 will come with a 1/1.3-inch camera sensor, a 155-degree viewing angle, and the ability to shoot video in 4K at 60fps. It's also rumored to have a 23-minute battery life with a 40-minute... Continue reading...

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge Okay, so you want a 13-inch MacBook Air. But you probably want some more RAM, right? Maybe a storage bump since you're hopefully going to have this computer for a decade? Okay, well, at that price, you might as well get the 15-inch Air. It's basically the same price. But you probably want some more RAM, right? And maybe a storage bump?The sneaky upgrade path is one of Apple's most ingenious sales tools - and it applies almost across the board, whether the company is steadily upselling you from a base iPhone to a Pro Max model, a $329 iPad to an iPad Pro, a basic MacBook Air to a super-powered MacBook Pro, or a super expensive keyboard you didn't even know you wanted.On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk about the new M3 MacBook... Continue reading...

Every once in a while, you'll need to redo your hand and eye setup. | Samar Haddad for The Verge Unlike other headsets, you don't control Apple's Vision Pro headset with any sort of input device. Instead, the headset tracks your hand and eye movements. When you want to select something, you simply look at it and tap your fingers together. Like Nilay Patel said in his review, it's pretty magical - until it isn't. And when hand or eye tracking feels off, the easiest thing to do is recalibrate it.There are lots of reasons why you might want to recalibrate. Perhaps you bought a Vision Pro without the ZEISS optical inserts and decided later to add them. Maybe the prescription for your glasses got updated. Perhaps a friend really wants to try out the headset but doesn't feel like schlepping to the Apple Store. Whatever the reason, here... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge OpenAI's enterprise customers who want to use generative AI but prize accuracy might be able to get that with new customization options for the GPT-4 API.They include the ability to connect to third-party platforms to share information on fine-tuning, save fine-tuned models during additional training without retraining the entire model, and a new user interface to compare model performance and quality. The OpenAI API was launched in 2020 to allow companies to connect and build on top of its large language models, which was followed last August by opening fine-tuning for GPT-3.5 and eventually GPT-4, too.Highly customized models could provide better results internally. They could also keep responses to the public on track and avoid... Continue reading...

YouTube's Multiview will allow Coachella fans to stream four extra stages on one screen. | Image: YouTube YouTube's official livestream of this year's Coachella music festival will feature a technology many football fans are familiar with. Multiview, which allows viewers to watch multiple livestreams on the same screen while tuning into one audio feed, will be available to viewers of the festival's stream on any YouTube TV app - no need to subscribe to YouTube TV, the platform announced on Thursday.Just as multiview on NFL Sunday Ticket enables audiences to watch four different games at once, the feature for Coachella will allow for up to four different stages at once. Viewers can switch between audio feeds and jump in and out of fullscreen view. There will be a total of six feeds - or six stages - to choose from. The festival this year... Continue reading...

OnePlus' budget-friendly phone is on sale for only $20 more than it was during Black Friday. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge It can be easy to forget affordable champs like the OnePlus Nord N30 5G when you've got iPhone 15s and Galaxy S24s dominating store shelves and circulars. It's our favorite budget smartphone under $300, and today, you can save even more on it. The budget smartphone is down to $249.99 for an unlocked model at Amazon, Best Buy, and direct from OnePlus, which is $50 off and only $20 more than its record low during Black Friday.The OnePlus Nord N30 5G plays in the same arena as something like the Pixel 7A or Samsung Galaxy A54 5G. It's considerably cheaper than both, but after reviewing it, we found it delivers well enough in most areas that it'd be hard not to recommend it for someone with a seriously cramped budget.It covers the basics... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Disney Plus already has rules in place to prevent subscribers from sharing their passwords - but now we have an idea when it will start making users pay to share them. In an interview on CNBC, Disney CEO Bob Iger says the company plans on launching our first real foray into password sharing" in June.Iger says the rollout will start in just a few countries in a few markets" before expanding to all subscribers in September. Disney's anti-password sharing rules initially went into effect for new subscribers on January 25th and were rolled out to existing members on March 14th. Netflix became the first streaming service to crack down on password sharing in 2023, as it began charging users an extra $7.99 per month to add an extra viewer... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tesla is going to court next week over the role its Autopilot system played in a fatal crash in 2018 - and it wants Apple to testify in its defense.Tesla wants to prove that Apple engineer Wei Walter" Huang was playing a video game on his phone at the time his Autopilot-enabled Model X smashed into a safety barrier along US Highway 101 in Mountain View, California, in 2018. And now, Huang's family, which is suing Tesla for wrongful death, is claiming that Tesla is secretly working with Apple to aid in its defense.In a pretrial motion filed this week, lawyers representing Huang's family accused Apple of engaging in a secret discovery work around' to help support Tesla in its defense of the pending case."Huang's family accused... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Ford is delaying the release of its electric three-row SUV until 2027, the company announced in an update. It will also begin work on its next electric truck in 2026 and will offer hybrid options for every model it has in production.The unnamed SUV was supposed to go into production starting in 2025 at Ford's plant in Oakville, Ontario, which is currently in the midst of pivoting from gas-car production to EVs. Ford gave several reasons for the delay, including a desire to wait until the three-row SUV market matures before introducing its own entrant.The additional time will allow for the consumer market for three-row EVs to further develop and enable Ford to take advantage of emerging battery technology, with the goal to provide... Continue reading...

Image: Ed Miller / Netflix One thing that confounds me after reading Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem and watching its Netflix adaptation is a simple button.Spoilers for 3 Body Problem to follow.I still haven't been able to wrap my head around why Ye Wenjie, when faced with the choice to respond to or ignore transmissions from the San-Ti, an alien race, chose to respond. Throughout human history, first contact events rarely go well and go even worse when the two sides are technologically imbalanced. So, why would an ostensibly hyperintelligent woman pin her hopes on a race of beings that have already made their hostile designs on Earth clear?In an interview with Ye's actresses Rosalind Chao and Zine Tseng, who play the character throughout the different... Continue reading...

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge If you find yourself repeating the same tasks in Windows over and over again, it's likely you can automate the job, potentially saving you time and effort over weeks and months.These tasks might encompass starting the day with a certain selection of programs and websites, for example, or renaming batches of files to match the same format. Or maybe you want to shut down your PC at the same time every day, or you need a bunch of images resized to the same standard (something I've been automating for a long time now).There are lots of possibilities, and you've got a variety of tools to pick from. They all work in slightly different ways, so I will give you a sampling below, and you can choose the one that most closely matches what you're... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge Microsoft is working on a new feature for its Edge browser that will let you limit the amount of RAM it uses. Leopeva64, who is one of the best at finding new Edge features, has spotted a new settings section in test builds of the browser that includes a slider so you can limit how much RAM Edge gets access to.The RAM slider appears to be targeted toward PC gamers, as there is a setting in Canary versions of Edge that lets you limit the amount of RAM when you're playing a PC game or all of the time. While the slider lets you pick between just 1GB and 16GB on a system with 16GB of RAM, Microsoft warns that setting a low limit may impact browser speed." I can't wait to witness the chaos of Edge trying to handle my 100-plus tabs on just... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is suing two alleged crypto scammers, accusing them of using its Play Store to offer fraudulent cryptocurrency trading apps and investment platforms that instead simply took users' money. These apps were used in a type of romance scam commonly called pig butchering" in reference to fattening a pig before it's slaughtered.The accused scammers - two app developers based in China and Hong Kong - allegedly uploaded 87 different fraudulent apps to enable their schemes, luring in more than 100,000 people who downloaded them. Based on user complaints, Google alleges that users lost anywhere from $100 to tens of thousands of dollars each. Apps uploaded by the pair and their unnamed associates have been used in versions of the scam since... Continue reading...

Products on a conveyor belt are scanned at an Amazon fulfillment center, where they are being sorted and shipped out during Cyber Monday on November 27th, 2023, in Tampa, Florida. | Photo by Octavio Jones / Getty Images Despite making pledges to cut down on plastic packaging, a new report from the nonprofit conservation organization Oceana estimates that Amazon's plastic waste has continued to grow in the US.The company created 208 million pounds of plastic waste from its packaging in the US in 2022 alone, which Oceana says is enough trash to circle Earth more than 200 times in the form of plastic air pillows. That's a nearly 10 percent jump from the amount of plastic waste it generated the year before, according to the report.The US is a worrying outlier for Amazon, Oceana says. Globally, the e-commerce giant says that it reduced its use of plastic packaging 11.6 percent in 2022 compared to the prior year. But the US is the company's biggest... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Just as Elon Musk said, X is doling out free Premium and Premium Plus memberships to accounts with a high number of verified followers.Multiple X users on Wednesday reported seeing the familiar blue Verified" checkmark next to their handles despite not paying for either paid X subscription tier. Musk last week announced that X accounts with over 2,500 verified subscriber followers" would receive a free Premium membership; while accounts with over 5,000 would receive a free Premium Plus membership.

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 on October 14th, 2025, and you'll need to pay yearly if you want to continue using the operating system securely. Microsoft will offer Extended Security Updates (ESU) for Windows 10 users, with pricing starting at $61 for the first year.The pricing for additional security updates will be offered to consumers for the first time ever with Windows 10. Businesses and consumers will need to purchase ESU licenses for each Windows 10 device they plan to keep using after the end of support cutoff date next year.For businesses, the first year is priced at $61. It then doubles to $122 for the second year and then doubles again in year three to $244. If you enter into the ESU program in year two, you'll... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple's online services were hit with an outage that cut many of us off from the App Store, Apple TV, and Apple Music on Wednesday night. The system status page for Apple's online service noted an outage beginning at 6:31PM ET affecting those services, as well as Arcade, Audiobooks, Books, Podcasts, Fitness Plus, and its new Apple Sports app.Now, the status page lists them all as outage resolved" as of 7:35PM ET, and they seem to be working again. The @AppleSupport account on X did not list a reason for the issues but directed users to check the status page for more information. Image: Apple.com On Downdetector, it looks like the first reports of issues started coming in just after 6PM ET. The Verge has contacted... Continue reading...

The Lunar Dawn LTV from Lunar Outpost, Lockheed Martin, General Motors (GM), Goodyear, and MDA Space. | Image: Lunar Outpost NASA has selected Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost, and Venturi Astrolab to develop the lunar terrain rover for its Artemis lunar explorations. All three companies are in the running for task orders with a potential value of $4.6 billion over the next 13 years.The trio will develop their team's ideas for a Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) to help astronauts explore the Moon's south polar region. It's believed the area contains frozen water, so it makes sense for NASA to set up base camp there.All three must design vehicles that can accommodate two suited astronauts and handle the area's extreme conditions. They also must feature robotic, remote operation capabilities so NASA can continue to perform tests and explore even when astronauts... Continue reading...

Nothing but respect for MY president. | Image: OpenAI OpenAI's DALL-E is getting a couple of upgrades today that help you shape your AI-generated masterpieces. First, you'll now find image editing tools when using DALL-E within ChatGPT, both on the web and on mobile. Second, DALL-E now offers preset style suggestions to help inspire image creation - not unlike Android's AI-generated wallpaper prompts. Because how else could you dream up a sci-fi polar bear on vacation?DALL-E is on its third generation, and recent updates like this seem to be aimed at making it more user-friendly. DALL-E 3 added integration with ChatGPT, which takes the burden off the user to write a perfectly descriptive image prompt - just tell ChatGPT what you want, and it will do the rest. Today's update is an extension... Continue reading...

Proba-3's occulter blocks the Sun's light for the coronagraph. | Image: European Space Agency The European Space Agency (ESA) is preparing to create its own solar eclipses so that researchers can study one of the more difficult-to-observe parts of the Sun's anatomy: its blazing-hot corona. To do that, it hopes to fly two separate spacecraft, 150 meters apart and aligned so that one satellite (called the occulter") blocks all but the corona from the other satellite, which will observe it using an instrument called a coronagraph.The mission's two craft will have to fly in precise formation down to millimetre accuracy," using satellite navigation, radio-based satellite interlinks, cameras, and a laser beam reflected between them. ESA technology director Dietmar Pilz said in a statement that getting the two to act as if they are... Continue reading...

Photo by Chance Yeh / Getty Images for HubSpot This is Hot Pod, The Verge's newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more.I have never gotten so many responses to an issue as I did with last week's on Andrew Huberman. He seems to elicit an even stronger response than Rogan, though perhaps response to Rogan has calmed down as we have all gotten more used to his shenanigans. Today, I have a look at what some of you all had to say about the value of his podcast and how the revelations from the New York Magazine article have (or have not) changed that. Plus, Spotify's audiobook expansion, The New York Times' new audio initiative, and Apple's (alleged) pay-for-play scheme. Let's get into it.Andrew Huberman, reconsideredICYMI: NYM published an 8,000-word... Continue reading...