The Verge

Kickboxing is coming to Fitness Plus next week. | Image: Apple Just in time for New Year’s resolutions, Apple is adding a massive update to its Fitness Plus service. Starting next Monday, the company is adding kickboxing workouts, a series of classes set to Beyoncé’s music, and sleep meditations. The service will also add three new trainers and kick off a new season of Time to Walk.With kickboxing, Apple’s expanding its roster of equipment-free full-body cardio workouts. The classes will feature rounds of kickboxing moves that are then combined into a final one-minute, all-out intensity interval. Users can select from 10-, 20-, and 30-minute long classes. Apple has also recruited Nez Dally, a Muay Thai fighter who became the first woman to compete in Thailand with a hijab, to co-lead the classes... Continue reading…

Every Thursday, The Verge’s deputy editor will peel back the curtain on the tech industry’s most influential players for paid subscribers Continue reading…

A streamer wearing Audio-Technica’s new headset. | Image: Audio-Technica Audio-Technica has taken its popular M50X headphones and added a built-in microphone to create a headset that the company claims is perfect for livestreaming content creators.There are two models available in total. The ATH-M50xSTS comes with a 3.5mm headphone jack and XLR microphone connector (with a one-fourth-inch adaptor in the box), while the ATH-M50xSTS-USB has a USB-A connector and USB-C adaptor in the box. But the most important spec is that both headphones use the same 45mm drivers that have made the M50X headphones so popular across the internet. Image: Audio-Technica The boom arm can be flipped up to mute the headset’s mic. As my former colleague Vlad Savov wrote in 2018, the original M50... Continue reading…

The Tapo Smart Video Door Lock. | Image: TP-Link TP-Link is expanding its smart home lineup with an array of new products, including a new video door lock, a dual video doorbell, two robot vacuums, and a whole range of Matter-compatible products.For starters, the Tapo Smart Video Door Lock features a clever design that combines all the features of a lock, doorbell, and camera. You can unlock the door with a few different methods, including facial recognition or using the built-in fingerprint sensor. TP-Link allows you to unlock or lock the door remotely with the Tapo app as well, which you can use to generate temporary user codes, view lock activity, and receive lock notifications.Since the device also functions as a video doorbell, it rings when pressed and automatically records... Continue reading…

Photo by STR / AFP via Getty Images You can’t spend any time on Instagram or TikTok without hitting a drop shipping scam or a flashy direct-to-consumer startup. You’ll see a nice set of pans in your feed, only to find out later that the company itself doesn’t hold any inventory and is outsourcing to somewhere in China. Or you will look at a nice pair of workout shorts in the store and will wonder, “I wonder where they make those?”What if I told you there was a fun, quick way to find out exactly who supplies companies with their goods? Enter ImportYeti, a free-to-use and user-supported tool by David Applegate to track company suppliers.ImportYeti works by searching the bill of lading for companies to see what cargo they are importing, where it comes from, and what the... Continue reading…

Schools have adapted to disruptive technology before — ChatGPT is the latest challenge to educational norms. | Photo by Nicolas Villalobos via Getty Images The New York City Department of Education has blocked access to ChatGPT on its networks and devices over fears the AI tool will harm students’ education.A spokesperson for the department, Jenna Lyle, told Chalkbeat New York – the education-focused news site that first reported the story — that the ban was due to potential “negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content.”“While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success,” said Lyle.ChatGPT was released last November by San Francisco-based AI company OpenAI, and has sparked a huge debate over... Continue reading…

The BMW i Vision Dee is basically KITT with a kidney grille. | Image: BMW KITT with a kidney grille? With a minimalist design, a HUD across the whole windshield, and a digital assistant that talks back, this could be the most polarizing BMW concept yet. Continue reading…

This is where the magic will happen. | Image: AMD AMD has announced its new Ryzen 7000 mobile CPUs for laptops. The list is a real who’s who of mobile processor architecture, including Zen 4, Zen 3 Plus, Zen 3, and Zen 2 chips.The potential star of the show is the “Dragon Range” Zen 4 Ryzen 9 7945HX, which has 16 cores and 32 threads, frequencies of 2.2-5.4 Ghz, 80MB cache, and 55-75 watt TDP. I repeat — 16 cores in a laptop. These aren’t Intel’s little efficiency cores. These are 16 full Zen cores in a laptop’s chassis.This may seem like an underdog compared to Intel’s top 13th-Gen chips, which have 24 cores — Intel has claimed that its Core i9-13980HX is the “world’s fastest mobile processor”. This chip, however, only has eight performance cores and 16 efficiency cores, while all... Continue reading…

AMD’s RDNA 3 architecture is coming to laptops in February. | Image: AMD AMD is bringing its RDNA 3 graphics architecture to laptops this year. The chip giant is promising RTX 3060-level desktop graphics on the latest laptops featuring its new Radeon RX 7600M XT GPUs. That’s games like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla running at 100fps at 1080p, Borderlands 3 hitting 106fps, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider reaching 142fps.At the top end, AMD will offer laptop manufacturers the Radeon RX 7600M XT or RX 7600M. The RX 7600M XT has 32 teraflops of performance paired with 8GB of GDDR6 memory. The RX 7600M has 28 teraflops of performance with 8GB of GDDR6 memory. Both discrete GPUs are built on the RDNA 3 architecture and a 6nm process and will support AV1 encode and decode. That’s good news for streamers or content... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Panos Panay is the man in charge of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft hardware, and he has CEO Satya Nadella’s ear. So when he says that AI is the future of Windows, we’re definitely paying attention.“AI is going to reinvent how you do everything on Windows, quite literally,” he told an audience at AMD’s CES 2023 press conference, pausing for effect.“quite literally”The context: AMD has just announced its new Ryzen 7000 mobile processors, and the company’s boasting that they’re the first x86 chips to contain a dedicated AI engine — one that, it claims, also happens to be 20 percent faster than the one in Apple’s MacBook Pros with M1 Pro chips.(Dragging Apple was a bit of a theme during the early part of AMD’s keynote, though it’s... Continue reading…

Sony During Sony’s CES 2023 presentation, the company shared that it’s working on a new accessibility controller kit, codenamed “Project Leonardo”.Sony shared in an official blog post that it consulted with video game accessibility advocates like AbleGamers and SpecialEffect to create a controller that is “highly configurable” and “works in tandem with many third-party accessibility accessories.”Leonardo’s kit features PlayStation 5 face and trigger buttons that can be swapped around a wide circular gamepad as well as a joystick which can be repositioned relative to the gamepad. It will also come with accessories in a variety of shapes and sizes for “players to find a configuration that works for their strength, range of motion, and... Continue reading…

Image: Withings Plus Samsung has a new range of TVs to show off, and Qi wireless charging is getting an upgrade. Continue reading…

There’s a tiny OLED display right at the top. | Image: Asus Asus is releasing a new Xbox PC controller later this year that has a built-in OLED display and a host of connectivity options for PC. The ROG Raikiri Pro has a tiny 1.3-inch OLED display above the Xbox button that will display custom animations, battery or microphone status, and more.The OLED display (128 x 40 resolution) will largely be used for swapping profiles during games, or for checking charging or mic status, Bluetooth pairing, and running text or animated wallpapers. The custom animations remind me a lot of the OLED display that replaced the Xbox “jewel” on the revamped Duke controller in 2018, or the classic Sega Dreamcast controller. Image: Asus The OLED display in action. Two buttons at the top of... Continue reading…

Sony and Honda’s joint mobility venture announced a new vehicle brand, Afeela, for the company’s first electric car, set to go on sale in North America in 2026. A prototype was unveiled during Sony’s presentation at CES in Las Vegas Wednesday.Much is still unknown about the new brand, but Sony Honda Mobility CEO Yasuhide Mizuno said the car would leverage Sony’s experience with AI, virtual reality, and augmented reality to present a unique EV.“Afeela represents our concept of an interactive relationship where people feel the sensation of interactive mobility”“Afeela represents our concept of an interactive relationship where people feel the sensation of interactive mobility and where mobility can detect and understand people and... Continue reading…

That’s a higher number than expected. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon’s ongoing layoffs will affect around 18,000 workers, according to a memo from CEO Andy Jassy, which says that the “majority” of the roles being eliminated will be in Amazon Stores and People, Experience, and Technology organizations.That’s significantly more than previously rumored — in November, The New York Times reported that the company was aiming to cut its workforce by around 10,000. In September 2022, the company said it had around 1.5 million employees in total.Amazon will have laid of 18,000 people between the November cuts and the ones announced todayThe news of the expanded layoffs was originally reported by The Wall Street Journal, which said that they would affect “over 17,000 workers.” Jassy’s email notes that... Continue reading…

The Modular Lego Store, one of the first official unofficial Lego sets. | Image: Krisnow Have you ever wanted to be a Lego designer? Now’s your chance — if you create an original Lego set starting February 1st, 2023, you can compete to be one of up to five unofficial sets that Lego will officially produce. Up to 20,000 of your set will be sold to fans around the world, and you’ll even get paid — designers get 5 percent of the proceeds.They won’t come in a traditional Lego box, mind you, and they won’t be sold in stores. They’ll exclusively be part of the online “BrickLink Designer Program,” where the boxes look like this: Image: Lego The Modular Lego Store in its Bricklink box, from an earlier competition. But make no mistake — these are sanctioned, sold, produced, and shipped by Lego itself,... Continue reading…

The Schneider Pulse smart electrical panel, one component of this system. | Image: Schneider Electric I don’t know if Schneider Electric will be the one to crack it, but I like what it’s promising here at CES 2023 — a smart home where the electrical circuits themselves are smart enough to keep your house powered, save on your energy bill, manage solar, and charge electric vehicles, all through a single app.Schneider Electric isn’t a household name, but there’s a good chance you’ve got one of its Square D circuit breakers in your home — the company says four in 10 US households already do. Today, it’s announcing an ecosystem of gadgets that won’t be hidden inside your walls, including:

Signs warning of health risks are posted outside the gates of an abandoned uranium mine in the community of Red Water Pond on Monday, January 13th, 2020. | Image: The Washington Post / contributor via Getty Images A new analysis of uranium and arsenic contamination in drinking water shows ugly evidence of how environmental racism persists in the US. Counties with more Latino residents and American Indian residents have been burdened with “significantly higher” concentrations of arsenic and uranium in their drinking water, the new research shows. In some of the most contaminated areas in the US, larger proportions of Black residents have also been linked to more of the toxic metals in public water systems.“The racial and ethnic makeup of your community should really not be connected to the quality of the water that you drink. And this is something that needs to be taken very seriously,” says Irene Martinez-Morata, lead author of the research... Continue reading…

Photo by Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge Lidar hardware company Luminar announced it has acquired Civil Maps, a lidar data company based in San Francisco. The acquisition brings ultra-detailed and automatically updating 3D maps of various cities into Luminar’s fold as it plans to bring fully autonomous vehicles into reality.Luminar will integrate the Civil Maps assets, which include navigation data, into its Sentinel platform. Sentinel is the company’s full-stack software suite solution that’s currently in development for lidar-equipped cars, like the upcoming Volvo EX90.The news comes during CES 2023, where Luminar is set to showcase vehicles from its partners, Volvo and Chinese automaker SIAC. The vehicles are equipped with fully integrated lidar systems, including a fairly... Continue reading…

Samsung’s new SmartThings Station is a smart home hub, a wireless charger, and a SmartThings Find device. | Photo by Owen Grove / The Verge A little over three years after getting out of the smart home hardware game, Samsung is back with a new smart home hub. And this time, Samsung has figured out a way to make you actually want to put a device hub in your home: by building it into a wireless charging pad.The SmartThings Station is a chunky charging puck that supports Matter and Thread to connect devices like TVs, speakers, thermostats, lighting, and plugs to SmartThings. It also works with the new smart home standard Matter to onboard devices to any Matter platform.And, of course, it can charge your gadgets. The Station doubles as a 15W fast wireless charging pad for Galaxy smartphones and earbuds (it will charge other phones, just not as fast). I am definitely here for... Continue reading…

Photo by Massimo Bettiol/Getty Images Ken Block, who died tragically in a snowmobile accident this week, was an entrepreneur, a racer, and a social media god. But at his core, he was always an enthusiast. We were all fans. Continue reading…

Guess which one is the Chromebook. | Photo by Owen Grove / The Verge For years, the HP Elite Dragonfly has been one of the most sleek, luxurious, and exorbitantly expensive business laptops you can buy. The new Dragonfly Pro is HP’s attempt to market those models to a broader, consumer-focused, and more price-conscious audience. There’s a Windows-based Dragonfly Pro, and there’s a Dragonfly Pro Chromebook, and while we don’t know the pricing yet, the hope is that they will be cheaper than their business counterparts.I spent a few minutes with the Dragonfly Pro Chromebook and the Dragonfly Pro, and they seem nice. They’re well-built and pretty-looking (and I’d be shocked if they weren’t, coming from HP). They come in black and white options. But the first thing you’ll probably notice is that the... Continue reading…

TCL’s NXTWear V headset concept is just one way the company hopes to put screens on your face. | Image: TCL TCL’s displays are in TVs, smartphones, and maybe in the near future, the metaverse, too. At least, the company wants to make the screen that gets you there. At CES 2023, the company is announcing its latest experiments with wearable displays, including a VR headset and mixed reality glasses. Plus, its personal display glasses, which have only been available in limited markets, are now heading for the US. It’s kind of a “cover-all-your-bases” strategy for whatever the future of display technology looks like.The company’s NXTWear S glasses are the latest version of its wearable display — kind of like a TV contained in a pair of (sort of) ordinary-looking glasses. They aren’t AR or VR glasses; they plug into a device like your phone or... Continue reading…

Image: TCL TCL is overhauling its TV strategy for 2023 by ditching the company’s long-running 6-Series, 5-Series, and 4-Series branding in favor of two new lines: higher-end sets will be part of the Q-Series, while more value-focused TVs will fall under the S-Series. Within the two segments are six different models in all.Let’s cover the best first, shall we? With its flagship QM8, TCL is promising double the peak brightness of its best Mini LED TVs from 2022 — and those were already fairly impressive in their own right. Set to come in screen sizes between 65 inches and 98 inches, the largest QN8 packs in more than 2,300 dimming zones. TCL claims that’s the most of any 4K Mini LED TV on the market — and even more than 8K models. The QM8 features... Continue reading…

It’s on the fancier ProArt Studiobook, too. | Photo by Owen Grove / The Verge For some companies that sell gaming and creator-oriented laptops, glasses-free 3D has become a bit of a dream. Acer first tried it back in 2021. Its SpatialLabs technology, which uses a combination of a stereo camera, optical lens, and real-time rendering technology to create decently realistic 3D images, has since made its way to a number of laptops, including the Predator Helios 300 gaming rig.This year, it’s Asus’ turn. The company has announced Spatial Vision, a “glasses-free (autostereoscopic) 3D OLED technology.” The screens are 3D, 3.2K, OLED, and 120Hz. In a similar manner to Acer’s tech, machines that support Spatial Vision will use a combination of a lenticular lens and advanced eye-tracking camera technology. They render... Continue reading…

If you want a hockey puck of a computer to easily deploy on a desk or behind a monitor, you’ll find plenty on sale, from the Mac Mini to Intel’s bare-bones NUC. But Asus is adding a “why didn’t anyone think of that?” feature to its new Chromebox 5 this year: a built-in 15W wireless charger for your phone and / or earbud case.Okay, technically, someone did think of that before: you could buy an aftermarket wireless charging “lid” for some Intel NUCs, and Intel even added the feature itself to a few NUCs. But it’s rare, and this is the first time I’ve seen it on a Chromebox. Last generation, Asus simply advertised that its Chromebox 4 could deliver USB-PD power to a phone with a cable, which, well, duh. Image: Asus ... Continue reading…

It’s on the fancier ProArt Studiobook, too. | Photo by Owen Grove / The Verge For some companies that sell gaming and creator-oriented laptops, glasses-free 3D has become a bit of a dream. Acer first tried it back in 2021. Its SpatialLabs technology, which uses a combination of a stereo camera, optical lens, and real-time rendering technology to create decently realistic 3D images, has since made its way to a number of laptops, including the Predator Helios 300 gaming rig.This year, it’s Asus’ turn. The company has announced Spatial Vision, a “glasses-free (autostereoscopic) 3D OLED technology.” The screens are 3D, 3.2K, OLED, and 120Hz. In a similar manner to Acer’s tech, machines that support Spatial Vision will use a combination of a lenticular lens and advanced eye-tracking camera technology. They render... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Disney Plus has been streaming movies in a taller-than-usual “IMAX Enhanced” format for more than a year now, and now it will roll out a new wrinkle for the home theater certification, with IMAX signature sound by DTS. Set to roll out at some point this year, the format says its intent is “preserving the full dynamic range of the original mix.”There aren’t a lot of specifics about exactly what will be different, but audio and surround sound specialist DTS (and its parent company Xperi, which also owns other brands like TiVo) says its IMAX Enhanced label establishes a set of qualifiers ensuring viewers will get the best audio and video experience.Unlike the extra-tall 1.90:1 aspect ratio IMAX Enhanced Disney Plus titles (mostly Marvel... Continue reading…

Photo by Melissa Sue Gerrits / Getty Images I hope you all had a relaxing holiday break. My body is not ready to be back at work, but Hot Pod won’t write itself. For our first issue of the year, Donald Trump Jr. signs with Rumble, PodcastOne is becoming a separate public company, and De La Soul is finally coming to streaming platforms.Someone gave Donald Trump Jr. a podcast dealOur first podcast talent deal of the year arrived early, and it’s a gross one! Axios reported that Rumble, the right-wing alternative to YouTube, has signed Donald Trump Jr. to a multiyear podcast deal. His new show, Triggered with Don Jr., will air live on Rumble twice a week starting January 23rd.It is not a complete shot in the dark for Rumble, where the eldest Trump spawn already has more than 1... Continue reading…

One of the coolest parts of the Cyborg 15 will remain out of sight while you use it — a shame. | Image: MSI There’s something wrong with the seemingly hundreds of laptops that have been birthed so far during CES 2023: almost none of them are translucent. Using a see-through design is proven [no citations found] to make more people want to buy a product because, for one, it looks cool, and two, the company must be pretty confident in its engineering handiwork to want to show it off like that.The thing is, if a company uses translucent plastic on your gadget, it’s got to go for it 100 percent or go home. And that’s where MSI goes wrong.At CES 2023, the company is announcing the Cyborg 15, a gaming laptop that uses see-through plastic to show off its internals. Sadly, only the bottom of the laptop (and the trim around its top lid) is... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Vimeo is doing another round of layoffs, this time affecting 11 percent of the company, CEO Anjali Sud announced in a letter posted online.Citing “a further deterioration in economic conditions,” Sud told Vimeo staff that nearly every department and region of the company will see cuts. The majority of layoffs will occur in large departments like sales and research and development.“We are entering 2023 with a more focused strategy to simplify Vimeo, and ultimately, our team size and composition needs to reflect that focus,” Sud wrote. “This reduction enables us to achieve our growth and profitability goals in a way that is far less dependent on the broader market, putting us in full control of our destiny.”This round of job cuts... Continue reading…

The Pixel Buds Pro. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge The Google Pixel’s January update is here, and it adds a new spatial audio feature for the Pixel 6, 6 Pro, 7, and 7 Pro phones. Android researcher Mishaal Rahman has verified that a toggle for the feature is appearing in the settings menu of the Pixel 6 Pro with the stable update, which is rolling out now to Pixel devices.According to Google’s support page for the feature, it’s able to take audio from apps that offer 5.1 surround sound audio and make it sound like it’s coming from in front and behind you, as though you’re surrounded by speakers in the real world. Google notes that it should work with “any connected headset.” That even includes wired headphones, according to a Google blog post from last year.

The A13 5G comes with a big 6.6-inch 1080p display, an upgraded selfie camera, and a 50-megapixel rear camera. | Image: Samsung Samsung is starting off 2023 with a budget phone refresh, making some smart upgrades with the Galaxy A14 5G — at least on paper. The A14 will cost $199, which is $50 lower than the A13 5G’s list price. Compared to its predecessor, it comes with a higher-res display and selfie cam while leaving many other core specs alone. Samsung will also offer up to four years of security updates and two OS version upgrades, which is a significant step up from the two or three years of security updates that are much more common at this price.The A14 5G has a MediaTek 700 chipset and 4GB of RAM, just like the A13. That’s fine — the A13 delivered good performance with that combination, so Samsung isn’t trying to fix something that wasn’t broken. There’s... Continue reading…