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by Ash Parrish on (#66DC4)
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Discord is expanding its server subscription program, allowing more creators to start charging subscription fees for premium access and perks.“Starting today, we’re expanding the availability of Server Subscriptions, allowing creators on Discord to earn money directly within their server,” wrote Discord creator product lead Derek Lang.Community servers in the US have the capability to enable subscriptions provided they meet the minimum criteria.
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The Verge
| Link | https://www.theverge.com/ |
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| Updated | 2025-07-08 21:04 |
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by Mitchell Clark on (#66D9Q)
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Coinbase has accused Apple of forcing it to remove NFT transfers from its Wallet app on iOS. On Thursday, it tweeted that Apple “blocked our last app release until we disabled the feature” because the iPhone maker wanted the blockchain fees associated with an NFT transfer to go through its in-app purchase system, giving it a 30 percent cut.According to Coinbase, it’s impossible to make that happen for a variety of reasons, with one important one being that Apple’s system doesn’t support paying in crypto.While some NFT marketplaces let you purchase the digital tokens using traditional fiat currency like the US dollar, the fees Coinbase is talking about are a different matter entirely. On blockchains like Ethereum, which many NFT... Continue reading…
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by Jay Peters on (#66D9R)
Image: Epic Games Epic Games’ RealityScan app, which lets you scan real-life objects and turn them into 3D models for video games or other projects, is now officially available on iOS as a free download after an initial limited beta launch in April. The app could be a handy tool to recreate objects from the world around you without having to build them on your own from scratch.To “scan” an object in the app, you take a bunch of photos of it from as many angles as you can. As you’re walking around the object and photographing it, RealityScan helpfully shows each picture you’ve taken in augmented reality, as well as a heat map of where the object needs more coverage. You’ll also be able to preview your scan right from the app to see how it looks before... Continue reading…
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by Jay Peters on (#66D9S)
It’s a slight delay — Disney previously announced the show would be coming February 2023. | Image: Disney The Mandalorian’s long-awaited third season debuts on Disney Plus on March 1st, Disney announced on Thursday. Disney had previously said it would be out in February, but it turns out that we’re getting it just a little bit later than expected.Season 2 premiered in October 2020, so it’s been some time since we’ve had new episodes of the show starring the galaxy’s favorite bounty hunter / baby alien duo. They made an appearance in a few episodes of The Book of Boba Fett, but soon, we’ll be able to see the both of them together once again.The third season comes on the heels of the excellent Andor, which had its season 1 finale air on Disney Plus. After you’re done with your Mandalorian rewatch, I highly suggest Andor; both shows have... Continue reading…
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by Umar Shakir on (#66CYY)
Monarch Tractor, an electric smart tractor company, says its first AI-powered farming vehicles, dubbed the MK-V, are rolling off the production line. It’s the Livermore, California-based startup’s first product, and it uses Nvidia’s Jetson edge AI platform to perform agricultural tasks with or without a driver behind the wheel.“The NVIDIA Jetson enables the MK-V to run low-latency, real-time AI applications while at the same time conserving energy for longer battery life and extended run time,” said Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa. Image: Monarch Tractor The Monarch MK-V being recharged. Each MK-V uses six of the Jetson Xavier NX system-on-modules that enable them to navigate fields using only cameras,... Continue reading…
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by Sean Hollister on (#66D9T)
Image: Nvidia Two weeks ago, Nvidia and tech watchdog GamersNexus agreed on one thing: if your Nvidia RTX 4090 graphic card’s 12VHPWR power cable starts smoking and melting, it’s probably because you didn’t plug it in all the way. But the PCI-SIG standards body is now suggesting that Nvidia and partners should have accounted for that.GPU manufacturers “need to take all appropriate and prudent measures to ensure end user safety, including testing for the reported problem cases,” reads part of a statement from the PCI-SIG. The group also spends 49 words deflecting any blame away from itself:
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by Barbara Krasnoff on (#66D9V)
Samar Haddad / The Verge When a number that is obviously spam hits your phone, Android will almost always warn you and allow you to immediately block that number (and report it as spam). But what if a number is not immediately recognized as spam? Or what if you’re dealing with a harasser who won’t stop calling? You can still block the number quickly and easily.In this article, we’ll look at how to block numbers on both Pixel and Samsung phones. If you have a phone from another manufacturer, the method shouldn’t be too different from these.How to screen unfamiliar callsIf you’re like us, you will often get a call from an unfamiliar source that isn’t a known spam call. Is it a spam call that has slipped through? A charity looking for a donation? Or somebody... Continue reading…
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by Jess Weatherbed on (#66D6Y)
Image: Disney Remember when making actors look older or younger in movies was a huge deal? The amount of postproduction work to achieve realistic results was immense back in the day, but now, researchers from Disney have revealed FRAN, a new artificial intelligence tool that can convincingly age or de-age an actor in a fraction of the time.In an academic paper, Disney Research Studios explains that FRAN (which stands for face re-aging network) is a neural network that was trained using a large database containing pairs of randomly generated synthetic faces at varying ages, which bypasses the need to otherwise find thousands of images of real people at different (documented) ages that depict the same facial expression, pose, lighting, and background.... Continue reading…
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by Jay Peters on (#66D6Z)
Image: Nintendo Move over, Spotify Wrapped. My favorite music thing on the internet this week is Nintendo’s official English translation of its Splatoon 3 and Animal Crossing concert with holograms of the characters from the games.The concert, starring the musical dog K.K. Slider as a DJ and the idol superstars from Splatoon 3, originally took place at the Japan-only Nintendo Live 2022 event in October. I watched it after the fact, thanks to generous fans who had uploaded the livestreamed concert, but the characters’ subtitles were in Japanese.The music rocks. For the first half of the show, DJ K.K. plays a bunch of remixes of his songs from the Animal Crossing series that are easy to bob your head along to. Then, Deep Cut brings down the house with... Continue reading…
by Charles Pulliam-Moore on (#66D70)
Optimus Primal in his beast mode. | Image: Paramount After years of Paramount’s live-action Transformers movies feeling like they were coasting on their good looks, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’ first teaser trailer is here to remind everyone that Beast Wars has always been the superior chunk of the larger Transformers franchise.Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, from director Steven Caple Jr., revolves around ex-military gearhead Noah (Anthony Ramos) and museum researcher Elena (Dominique Fishback), two humans who accidentally become embroiled in yet another conflict between the Autobots and the Decepticons.As tends to be the case with recent Transformers stories, neither Noah nor Elena know about the Cybertronians like Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) hiding in secret on Earth... Continue reading…
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by James Vincent on (#66D47)
OpenAI’s latest tool / toy is an AI chatbot. | Image: OpenAI OpenAI has released a prototype general purpose chatbot that demonstrates a fascinating array of new capabilities but also shows off weaknesses familiar to the fast-moving field of text-generation AI. And you can test out the model for yourself right here.ChatGPT is adapted from OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model but trained to provide more conversational answers. While GPT-3 in its original form simply predicts what text follows any given string of words, ChatGPT tries to engage with users’ queries in a more human-like fashion. As you can see in the examples below, the results are often strikingly fluid, and ChatGPT is capable of engaging with a huge range of topics, demonstrating big improvements to chatbots seen even a few years ago.But the... Continue reading…
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by Justine Calma on (#66D48)
The weekly meeting of the EU Commission on November 30th, 2022 in Brussels, Belgium. | Photo by Thierry Monasse/Getty Images The European Union has taken a major step toward legitimizing attempts to pull carbon dioxide out of the air. Yesterday, the European Commission adopted a proposal for new rules on how to certify carbon removal, a still controversial strategy for limiting climate change.The worry is that, without the proposed rules, ineffective carbon removal projects might derail climate goals and give polluters a sham to hide behind while presenting themselves as green. So, to weed out such projects, the European Commission wants to establish a framework for certifying “high-quality” carbon removals.“Higher transparency will ensure trust from stakeholders and industry, and prevent greenwashing,” the Commission said in its announcement.“The EU is... Continue reading…
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by Ash Parrish on (#66D49)
Frictional Games Frictional Games, maker of SOMA and the Amnesia series, has announced it’s working on a new entry in its roster of survival horror titles with Amnesia: The Bunker.With a release date sometime next year, Amnesia: The Bunker seems to be unlike any of its predecessors. For starters, in the game’s short announcement trailer, it looks like you’re not going to be forced to stare down unknown eldritch terrors with naught but a flashlight and thinking happy thoughts. No, you’re getting a gun. Image: Frictional Games “So anyway, I started blasting.” The arrival of guns to Amnesia will no doubt cause major discussion as the series was lauded for specifically not giving you the means to just blast your enemies to bits.... Continue reading…
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by Monica Chin on (#66D4A)
A very boring render of the IdeaPad 1 from Lenovo’s website. | Image: Lenovo Back in September, AMD launched some of the first mobile chips from its upcoming Ryzen 7000 line, the budget-oriented “Mendocino” series. At launch, they were described as tailored to “the everyday laptop,” combining last-gen Zen 2 CPU cores with high-end RDNA 2 graphics.That RDNA 2, generally seen powering much more expensive machines as well as the PS5 and Xbox Series X / S consoles, could become widely available at a budget price point was an exciting prospect. But Mendocino only announced one partner at launch: Acer and its Aspire 3 series. Since then, we’ve basically heard... crickets about the Mendocino series.That is, until today. Kudos to Notebook Italia for spotting several new items on Lenovo’s Product Specifications... Continue reading…
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by Monica Chin on (#66CHS)
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Eufy and LastPass suffer security lapses, and Spotify Unwrapped takes over social media. Continue reading…
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by Georgina Torbet on (#66D4B)
An artist’s impression of a tidal disruption event. | Image: Carl Knox – OzGrav, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, Swinburne University of Technology It was an event not seen in more than a decade: a sudden flash of energy launched out from the center of a distant galaxy, bright enough to be visible from 8.5 billion light-years away. With a burst of light equivalent to more than 1,000 trillion suns, the flash was first detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility, a survey of the entire night sky conducted from the Palomar Observatory in California.“On Valentine’s Day this year, we found a source that was puzzling. It was just weird!” Igor Andreoni of the University of Maryland, lead author of one of two papers about the event, told The Verge. “And weird is good in science. It means it’s something you can learn from.”Within days, astronomers around the world turned their telescopes... Continue reading…
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by Charles Pulliam-Moore on (#66D20)
Teaser art of Ballister Blackheart and Nimona from Annapurna’s upcoming Nimona feature. | Image: Netflix After co-producing a number of animated projects like Sausage Party and Missing Link with the help of other studios, Annapurna Pictures is gearing up to launch its own in-house animation arm with two Disney alums leading the division.Today, Annapurna announced that it has tapped former Walt Disney Animation Studios president Andrew Millstein and screenwriter Robert Baird (Monsters University, Big Hero 6) to head up its animation production arm, which will release the studio’s forthcoming Nimona adaptation in 2023 with Netflix. In a press release about the new studio, Annapurna founder and CEO Megan Ellison said that Millstein and Baird’s contributions to Nimona’s production were key to bringing the project home and described bringing... Continue reading…
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by Victoria Song on (#66D23)
While the Pixel Watch had a decent debut, not everyone is convinced Google is serious about wearables. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Earlier this fall, Google finally launched the Pixel Watch. It wasn’t a perfect smartwatch, but it was a respectable first attempt in a category that Google notoriously neglected for years.Even so, it’s hard to shake off the idea that Google might prematurely abandon its revived wearable ambitions if it doesn’t do “well enough.” This is why the company has been quietly chugging away at Wear OS improvements in the background. The latest is a round of “holiday” Android updates that bring new Tiles, an improved Google Keep app, and Google Assistant integration for Adidas Running. GIF: Google The Google Keep update adds nicer visuals. GIF: Google Just in time for New Year’s resolutions.... Continue reading…
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by Jess Weatherbed on (#66D22)
Android’s latest updates aim to boost accessibility and add fresh quality-of-life features for drivers and watchOS users. | Image: Google Android has announced a batch of new features for mobile and smartwatch devices, introducing new accessibility tools and quality-of-life updates for digital car keys, Google TV, and watchOS. One of the major announcements is the introduction of a reading mode for Android — a new feature that creates a more accessible screen reading experience without being tied to specific apps.To use Reading mode, you have to install an app from the Google Play store, which provides new adjustable display and audio options — such as contrast, font type, and size — allowing users to customize how content is viewed on their phone to best serve their individual needs. Additionally, a new text-to-speech function with speed control is available with a... Continue reading…
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by Jay Peters on (#66D21)
Summer Game Fest host Geoff Keighley at The Game Awards in 2019. | Photo by JC Olivera/Getty Images Summer Game Fest is back again in 2023 with its first-ever in-person kickoff show on June 8th, which just so happens to be a few days before E3’s big return.For the past three years, Summer Game Fest has served as the gaming industry’s big June blowout while E3 has been in flux due to the pandemic. E3 hasn’t happened as a big in-person event for quite a while; it was canceled in 2020, held as a series of remote events in 2021, and canceled again in 2022. In its place, Summer Game Fest became one of the biggest virtual events of the June gaming season. (In 2021, it was where we saw the first gameplay trailer of Elden Ring.)This year, both Summer Game Fest and E3 are back with major in-person components in the Los Angeles area, setting... Continue reading…
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by Alice Newcome-Beill on (#66CYZ)
The Echo Show 8 is the larger and more capable version of the Show 5. | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Cyber Monday is in the past, but some new and great tech deals have arrived for us to tell you all about. The flashiest one is a bundle from Amazon that pairs the latest Echo Show 8 with a free Kids Edition of the Echo Show 5 for $69.99, knocking $155 off the usual cost of buying both of these Alexa-powered smart displays.The Echo Show 8 is still our favorite smart display in Amazon’s lineup, partially because it can make Zoom calls with its built-in camera, unlike the second-gen Echo Show 5. Its display, performance, and sound quality have the advantage over the smaller option, and it offers snappy performance for the price. Read our review.The Kids Edition of the Echo Show 5 that you’ll get for free with this deal is virtually... Continue reading…
by Andrew Webster on (#66CWF)
Tilda Swinton as Julie in The Eternal Daughter. | Image: A24 The first thing that you should know about The Eternal Daughter, the latest film from director Joanna Hogg, is that it’s not as spooky as the trailer makes it seem. It is indeed a ghost story, one with some unsettling moments and themes, but the scariest thing about the movie is its frighteningly realistic depiction of familial relationships and how they can be damaged by grief. The second thing you should know is that Tilda Swinton plays her own mother, and she’s incredible.The film appears to be set in the same semi-autobiographical universe as Hogg’s The Souvenir films and centers on a daughter and her elderly mother as they visit a quaint Welsh hotel. (Both characters are played by Swinton.) It’s the kind of old building that has... Continue reading…
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by Andrew J. Hawkins on (#66CSZ)
Image: Canoo Struggling EV startup Canoo has delivered its first electric pickup truck to the US Army for “analysis and demonstration.” The company’s Light Tactical Vehicle (LTV) is built on the same platform as Canoo’s Duplo toy-looking EV prototype truck that was first revealed in 2021.Back in July, the army announced that it had awarded Canoo a $67,500 contract to produce a “new light to heavy duty Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) or series-hybrid electric wheeled vehicle, for Government analysis and demonstration,” according to the original solicitation.Canoo, which was founded in 2017 by two former employees of Faraday Future, has developed several EV concepts, including a multipurpose delivery van and an electric truck. The company is also... Continue reading…
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by Sheena Vasani on (#66CT0)
Image: 1Password Password management provider 1Password just launched its new “sign-in with” feature that automatically saves and fills logins using third-party credentials. 1Password thus is now able to give customers an option to sign in to sites or apps that require, say, their Google, Apple, GitHub, or Facebook credentials with just one click.Now, users don’t need to remember which provider they used for this specific service since 1Password can do it for them.For example, let’s say you’re trying to sign in to Spotify, but you can’t remember if you usually sign in with your Gmail, Apple, or Facebook accounts. A 1Password pop-up will inform you which provider it’s linked to and ask whether you’d like to click to sign in with your stored login... Continue reading…
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by Jon Porter on (#66CQT)
Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Photo: Getty Images A top European Union official has said that Twitter has “huge work ahead” to get ready for the bloc’s strict new rules for online platforms. Thierry Breton, the commissioner responsible for implementing the upcoming Digital Services Act (DSA), posted a short video clip of a meeting with CEO Elon Musk, saying that he welcomed Musk’s “intent to get Twitter 2.0 ready for the DSA.”According to the Financial Times, Breton said Twitter needed to make a number of changes to meet the DSA’s requirements. It will need to “aggressively” tackle disinformation, submit to an audit, provide clear criteria about which users are at risk of being banned, and carefully consider how it lifts bans in the future. Breton posted a full “DSA Checklist,” via his... Continue reading…
by Mary Beth Griggs on (#66CHT)
Elon Musk speaking at the Neauralink 2022 event | screenshot from Neuralink At a ‘show and tell’ event on Wednesday, Elon Musk said that his brain-computer interface company, Neuralink, could implant one of its devices in someone’s head within the next six months — meaning it’s not happening this year. He also claimed that he would get the device implanted in his own head at some point in the future.During the presentation, Musk said that the company had submitted most of the paperwork needed for a human clinical trial to the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates medical devices in the United States. Previously, Musk had said that he’d hoped for human trials to begin in 2020, and then 2022. Now, that’s slipped to at least 2023.Neuralink’s goal is to create a device that can be implanted in the brain,... Continue reading…
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by Sean Hollister on (#66CHV)
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge One more reason to watch The Game Awards this year: Valve has announced it’ll give away a Steam Deck handheld gaming PC every single minute on December 8th. With a likely runtime of 2.5 hours — last year’s ran three — the company’s probably going to be giving away at least 150 Steam Decks.It’s the highest-end model with 512GB of solid state storage and the anti-glare screen, and all you have to do to win is sign into Steam here on December 8th and watch the show at Steam.TV or at Steam’s 2022 The Game Awards page.Well, you do also have to be living in the US, UK, Canada, or the EU, specifically these countries:
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by Sean Hollister on (#66B7H)
Mario and Luigi in the new Mario movie trailer. | Screenshot: The Super Mario Bros. Movie Plus production troubles for Apple’s flagship iPhones. Continue reading…
by Jay Peters on (#66CHX)
Musk seems to be cooling on a beef with Apple. | Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images After a conversation with Apple CEO Tim Cook, Elon Musk now says that Apple actually wasn’t threatening to pull Twitter from the App Store. On Monday, Musk claimed that Apple had “threatened to withhold Twitter” from the store, but according to a Wednesday afternoon tweet, Musk said it was a “misunderstanding” and that “Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.”The clarification follows a cryptic tweet earlier in the day where Musk said Cook had given him a tour of Apple’s campus. In a video, you can see a shadow of two people: Musk and someone else that resembles Cook.
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by Jay Peters on (#66CHY)
Twitter is bringing recommended tweets to everyone. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter is bringing recommended tweets from people you don’t follow to all users, the company announced on Wednesday. Twitter is doing this because it wants to “ensure everyone on Twitter sees the best content on the platform,” so it’s expanding them even to people who “may not have seen them in the past.”Recommended tweets appear in the “home” — or non-chronological — feed, which organizes tweets algorithmically. For me, the vast majority of those tweets are from people I follow, but every once and awhile I’ll see a tweet from somebody I don’t. I was under the impression that everyone saw recommended tweets, but based on Twitter’s update on Wednesday, people who don’t already see them now will.
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by Emma Roth on (#66CHZ)
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge LastPass has experienced another data breach, but this time, it exposed user data. According to a post from LastPass CEO Karim Toubba, hackers accessed a third-party cloud storage service used by the password manager and were able to “gain access to certain elements” of “customers’ information.”It’s still not clear what information hackers got access to or how many customers were affected, but Toubba says that users’ passwords weren’t compromised.
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by Jay Peters on (#66C06)
If your YouTube iOS app is crashing, you’re not alone. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge YouTube says it’s working on a fix for crashes some people are experiencing while using the iOS app. It’s unclear exactly how widespread the problem is, but it does appear to be affecting quite a few users.In a tweet from its TeamYouTube account at 2:19PM ET, YouTube said that “many” are dealing with crashes, and a lot of people are reporting crashes directly to the account. DownDetector indicates there are more than 7,500 reports of problems as of this writing. I haven’t yet run into issues, but a colleague has been experiencing the crashes.
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by Emma Roth on (#66C07)
The Verge FTX’s sudden and catastrophic collapse sent reverberations throughout the entire cryptocurrency industry. What was once the third-largest cryptocurrency exchange is now in a death spiral that has billions of dollars left in limbo.If you’re wondering how FTX managed to get to this point, you’re in the right place. Here’s a play-by-play of everything that went wrong.First of all, what exactly is FTX?FTX is a cryptocurrency exchange based in the Bahamas. It was founded by Sam Bankman-Fried in 2019 and lets users buy, sell, hold, and trade cryptocurrency (although those functions aren’t available right now due to the firm’s collapse).In its prime, FTX spent its money on a number of sponsorship deals. While the Miami Heat’s stadium... Continue reading…
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by Chris Welch on (#66C08)
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge If you’re hoping to buy an iPhone 14 Pro or Pro Max in time to make it a holiday gift, you probably already know that the odds are against you. The standard iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus are readily available across most Apple retail stores, but Apple’s flagship phones are much, much harder to come by.Not only are you contending with the normal holiday demand rush like any other year but also Apple just doesn’t have enough phones to go around. Covid-related lockdowns at the main iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max assembly facility have led to operations running at “significantly reduced capacity.” And worker protests at those Foxconn facilities have cut down supply even further.Maybe you don’t care about getting a new iPhone 14 Pro or Pro Max... Continue reading…
by Sheena Vasani on (#66BRW)
Apple’s M2-powered iPad Pro is on sale for $100 off at Amazon right now. | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge The problem with Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Sometimes a deal is so good, it’s gone before you can even hit the “checkout” button. Apple’s latest 12.9-inch iPad Pro was one of those devices that reached an all-time low during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but naturally, it seemed to sell out quickly. Luckily, the new Wi-Fi-enabled iPad Pro is on sale once again at Amazon in space gray with 128GB of storage for $999 ($100 off).In addition to sporting Apple’s new M2 processor, the 2022 iPad Pro supports Wi-Fi 6E, if you have the right kind of router. It also comes with a new “hover” feature exclusive to M2-powered Apple devices that detects when the second-generation Apple Pencil is a distance of 12mm or less above the screen. As a... Continue reading…
by Jay Peters on (#66BXM)
The iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max both have Apple’s Crash Detection feature. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple has just released iOS 16.1.2, and the company is calling out two key updates in its patch notes: “improved compatibility with wireless carriers” and “Crash Detection optimizations on iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro models.”The Crash Detection enhancements could be particularly notable, as there have been some issues with inadvertent activations since the feature launched. Crash Detection is designed to activate Emergency SOS and alert emergency services if it thinks you’ve been in a car crash, but the feature has also triggered for people safely riding rollercoasters, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Based on the vague iOS 16.1.2 patch notes, it’s unclear if the update addresses these sorts of mistaken alerts, but... Continue reading…
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by Monica Chin on (#66BXN)
It’s not nothing, but it’s still not great. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The worst month of any Apple Music user’s life has been, for the past few years, December. Do not fight me on this — I’m sure you’ve all had other bad things happen to you in other months, but we must agree that December blows.That’s because December is the month when the cultural phenomenon that is Spotify Wrapped takes over the internet. It takes over Twitter, it takes over Instagram, it takes over TikTok, and some foolhardy souls even post it on Facebook. For users of Apple Music (myself included), it’s like being denied a seat at the cool kids’ cafeteria table. Everywhere we go, we are surrounded by Spotify Wrapped. We cannot escape Spotify Wrapped. And yet, we cannot participate. We’re forced to observe.Until this year. This... Continue reading…
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by Jess Weatherbed on (#66BXP)
The price of Starlink terminals in Ukraine will increase from the equivalent of $385 to about $700. | Image: Oleksandr Ratushniak/Reuters The price of a Starlink satellite terminal has almost doubled in Ukraine, according to a report from the Financial Times, following increased demand for the SpaceX satellite devices and targeted Russian attacks on the country’s electrical grid that have caused communications networks to fail.Starlink terminals in Ukraine are set to increase from the equivalent of $385 to about $700. The monthly subscription required to use the service will also climb from $60 to $75 on December 29th according to emails sent to Ukrainian Starlink customers, though this is still cheaper than its original $100 rate, which was dropped back in August to “reflect local market conditions.” For the sake of comparison, a Starlink dish costs $599 in the US,... Continue reading…
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by Ash Parrish on (#66BXQ)
Brood? I don’t need a Brood. | Image: Second Dinner Your Marvel Snap shop might look a bit different today. As The Verge reported last week, a new way to outright buy not yet unlocked cards is now live alongside some card updates, bug fixes, a new earnable currency, and a slew of new cards.Known as Collector’s Tokens, the new currency is now available, hidden within Collector’s Caches that start popping up around the 500th level of the Collection ladder. Any player at or above that level should have also received a neat gift of Collector’s Tokens that they can use right away to start buying cards. The card shop seems to rotate pretty often, so you’ll need to check in at least a couple of times per day to see which cards are on offer. If there’s a card you like but don’t have the funds... Continue reading…
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by Richard Lawler on (#66BXR)
This image may have been arranged for maximum overload effect. | Image: Richard Lawler There are at least half a dozen ways to multitask on macOS, and I can’t find a single one that I enjoy using.Normally, my work setup starts with a Windows PC, which can be a single laptop screen, a desktop plugged into Samsung’s ridiculous ultrawide G9 curved monitor, or something in between. But today, thanks to literally two drops of water making contact with an XPS 13 touchpad and a post-surgery cat who doesn’t appreciate his temporary ban from climbing on things, I’m coming to you live from an M1 MacBook Air. And I hate it.
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by Jay Peters on (#66BXS)
The Stadia Controller. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google will be issuing refunds for Stadia hardware purchased from the Google Store within two weeks, according to an email sent to customers on Wednesday. That means the refunds should arrive well ahead of the cloud gaming service’s impending January 18th shutdown. Purchases of the Stadia controller, the Founder’s Edition, the Premiere Edition, and Play and Watch with Google TV packages are all eligible for refunds, according to Google’s Stadia shutdown FAQ.At the time of the shutdown announcement, Google committed to refunding hardware and software purchases, and it began software refunds earlier this month. Once your hardware refund has been issued, you’ll get an email confirmation, Google said in Wednesday’s email. Google expects the... Continue reading…
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by Emma Roth on (#66BVJ)
Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images The cryptocurrency exchange Kraken announced job cuts today, affecting 30 percent of its workforce, or around 1,100 employees. In a blog post, Kraken CEO Jesse Powell says the firm made the decision to help it weather the “crypto winter.”Kraken, a platform that lets users buy, sell, and trade crypto, announced its plans to hire 500 new employees in June, but only as long as their beliefs aligned with the company’s “crypto-first culture,” which apparently means not calling out things said by others as “toxic, hateful, racist, x-phobic.” But now, Kraken’s pulling back on its spending after a period of rapid growth, citing “significantly lower trading volumes and fewer client sign-ups.”Powell says that while Kraken tried to mitigate... Continue reading…
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by James Vincent on (#66BRT)
Remote-controlled robots like this are often used by police departments to examine, disarm, or detonate bombs. | Image: DENIS CHARLET/AFP via Getty Images San Francisco’s police will be allowed to use remote-controlled robots to kill suspects. The city’s board of supervisors last night approved a controversial policy that lets police robots “be used as a deadly force option when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option available.”The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) said it does not own any pre-armed robots and has no plans to arm its current machines, reports Sky News. As SFPD spokesperson Allison Maxie explained in a statement, the department’s robots can now be equipped with explosives “to contact, incapacitate, or disorient violent, armed, or dangerous suspect” in “extreme circumstances to save or prevent further... Continue reading…
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by Charles Pulliam-Moore on (#66BRV)
Jason Segel and Harrison ford in Shrinking. | Apple TV Plus It’s been a few weeks since Apple officially announced its upcoming comedy series Shrinking from Brett Goldstein, Jason Segel, and Ted Lasso co-creator Bill Lawrence, but it turns out that the premiere date is right around the corner.Shrinking tells the story of Jimmy (Segel), a therapist whose own ongoing experience with grief prompts him to start engaging with all of his patients a bit differently than they’re accustomed to. While Jimmy’s still committed to helping his patients deal with a wide range of issues, he’s less interested in being sensitive about how he deals with people or sugarcoating the advice he gives them. When Jimmy starts to tell everyone exactly what’s on his mind, his personal life begins to change in unexpected... Continue reading…
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by Ash Parrish on (#66BRX)
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Today, Twitch announced it’s implementing a new safety feature that might feel familiar to streamers who’ve battled against the hate raids that plagued the platform last year. Called Shield Mode, the new feature enacts an emergency lockdown of a creator’s stream.“Shield Mode is a little different from our other safety tools,” Twitch said in the announcement. “While it does introduce some entirely new capabilities ... its real power comes from the way it combines and levels up existing safety tools in one place.”Shield Mode seems similar to the community-developed “panic button,” which was devised to combat the surge in hate raids that took place last year. With Shield Mode, streamers and their mods can choose settings that will mass... Continue reading…
by Elizabeth Lopatto on (#66BRY)
Would you let this man stick wires in your brain? | Illustration by Laura Normand / The Verge So let’s talk about Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface company. There’s a “show-and-tell” event coming at 6PM PT / 9PM ET today, November 30th, and ordinarily I would be providing you with the service of telling you where to watch it. But frankly, I don’t know, and like most Musk companies, Neuralink does not have a PR department.Fun! It’ll be on YouTube, probably.Musk has said he wanted to do tests in people in 2022, but he is also completely lousy at deadlinesOne thing to keep in mind during the presentation is that the Food and Drug Administration specifically regulates medical devices — not just brain implants. That means clinical trials to get the agency’s approval. Now, I see that Neuralink has a job posted for a... Continue reading…
by Andrew J. Hawkins on (#66BNM)
Image: Honda Honda will bring its hands-free highway driver-assist technology to the US by the end of the decade, making it the latest automaker to offer partially automated driving tech to customers.Honda Sensing, the company’s Level 2 advanced driver-assist system (ADAS), is already available to car owners who have opted to add the feature to their vehicles. Two upgraded systems, Honda Sensing 360 and Honda Sensing Elite, will add new features thanks to more capable sensors and advanced AI software developed by the automaker.Honda owners in China will be able to purchase the upgraded Honda Sensing 360 system later this year. US customers can option up in the late 2020s, and by 2030, the system will come standard on all Honda vehicles.US... Continue reading…
by Victoria Song on (#66BJG)
Buttons and smartwatches belong together. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge For me, the worst part about running in cold weather isn’t the freezing wind, black ice, or the fact that my face feels like it’s been stabbed with one thousand needles. It’s the 10 seconds spent shivering as my icicle fingers navigate through menus to launch an Apple Watch workout. Ten seconds isn’t much, but it’s enough for the cold to seep into your bones because you’re not moving. That’s why I was stoked for the Apple Watch Ultra and one of its key new features: the Action Button.The Action Button is a programmable physical button that’s exclusive to the Ultra. Unlike the digital crown or side button, it isn’t hard-coded to do any one thing. Instead, you can program it to do anything you want. Sort of.Apple placed the button on... Continue reading…
by Andrew Webster on (#66BJH)
Image: Devolver Digital Netflix has once again quietly added some games to its mobile app — and there’s some cool stuff to dig into in this batch.Headlining the update is Reigns: Three Kingdoms, the latest entry in the card-swiping strategy series. This iteration is inspired by the 14th-century novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and according to publisher Devolver Digital, it “thrusts players into the turbulent final years of the Han dynasty. There, they will encounter the many factions, wars, and heroes of the saga as they swipe their way through negotiations, marry to strengthen alliances, and convert to gain more power.”Another intriguing addition is Cats & Soup, a cozy management game about, well, cats and soup. It looks reminiscent of the iconic cat... Continue reading…
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by Jess Weatherbed on (#66BFH)
Smash World Tour organizers claim sabotage could be partially responsible for Nintendo’s decision to shut down the third-party tournament. | Image: Nintendo The Smash World Tour has announced that both the upcoming championship tournament and the 2023 Smash World Tour have been canceled after Nintendo demanded the event organizers cease operations “without any warning.”As reported by Kotaku, the third-party event was one of the largest fighting game competitions in the esports scene. “In 2022 alone, we connected over 6,400 live events worldwide, with over 325,000 in-person entrants, making the Smash World Tour (SWT, or the Tour) the largest esports tour in history, for any game title,” said Smash World Tour in a statement addressing the shutdown. “The Championships would also have had the largest prize pool in Smash history at over $250,000.”
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