The Verge

You can score a $51 discount on Apple’s second-gen AirPods Pro, but only for a limited time. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge It looks like the real Black Friday deals have officially landed because Woot’s current deal on the new AirPods Pro is the best we’ve seen on the excellent true wireless earbuds to date. Right now, the retailer is selling Apple’s second-gen AirPods Pro for just$197.99 instead of $249, which is the steepest discount the buds have received since launching in September. You’ll have to act fast, though. Woot’s current offer is set to expire at 1AM ET on Sunday, November 20th, but we expect these buds to sell out long before then.For the unfamiliar, the latest pair of AirPods Pro boast noticeably better noise cancellation and improved sound quality over their last-gen predecessor. They also allow you to adjust their volume by simply... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Robin Wheeler, Twitter’s head of ad sales, seems to have left the company yet again, just over a week after Elon Musk reportedly had to convince her not to resign.On Friday evening, Platformer’s Casey Newton reported that Wheeler had been fired from the company, though the details of why are currently unclear. Shortly after, Wheeler herself tweeted: “To the team and my clients….you were always my first and only priority,” followed by the salute emoji that has become a sign that you’re leaving the company. She did not immediately reply to The Verge’s request for confirmation that she had been fired. Twitter doesn’t have a communications department to take such requests.

We could live in a world with more app stores. | Photo by Stefan Etienne / The Verge Activision Blizzard and Riot Games at one point told Google they might launch their own mobile app stores, according to new documents filed in Epic’s antitrust lawsuit against the search giant. The details came to light as part of allegations about major deals signed with the two companies. Google allegedly agreed to pay Activision about $360 million over three years and Riot about $30 million for a one-year deal.In one document, Google exec Karen Aviram Beatty is reporting back from a conversation with Activision Blizzard’s now-CFO Armin Zerza one month before the two companies signed the huge deal. “If this deal falls through, [Zerza] claims that they will launch their own mobile distribution platform (partnering with another “major... Continue reading…

Samsung’s vibrant Galaxy Chromebook 2 is on sale in various configurations right now. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge If you’re looking for an affordable laptop alternative, Chromebooks are a great option to consider. Yet there are several kinds on the market these days, and it can be overwhelming to pick the right for you and your needs. Some are better suited for basic work tasks, for example, while some of the higher-end models can even rival some of the best laptops you can buy. Moreover, just because one Chromebook has more features than the other doesn’t mean it’s the right one for you or the best value for your money.That’s why we’ve curated this comprehensive list of the best Chromebook deals. Each varies in price and comes with its own strengths and weaknesses, but all of them come recommended for one reason or another. And if you’d like to do... Continue reading…

Photo via Getty Images Six years after we saw the FCC formally propose “nutrition labels” for your carrier’s potentially confusing array of plans, the agency says it’s finally happening. This week, it’s ordering US internet service providers to adopt the label format you’re looking at below — or it will, as soon as some last bureaucratic elements get worked out. Image: FCC 2022’s Broadband Facts nutrition label format. They’ve changed a bit since 2016 — now, each plan will apparently have its own label rather than ISPs trying to cram all of them into a single sheet, they don’t warn you about coverage, and apparently, ISPs will be able to point you to their network management policy legalese instead of having to ding themselves for... Continue reading…

Isabella Wei in Netflix’s 1899. | Image: Netflix We’re living in a good time for fans of puzzle box TV shows. Between the Yellowjackets plane crash, Severance’s creepy-ass office, and the big hole in Outer Range, there’s lots to occupy your fan theory group chats. Joining that ever-growing list is 1899 on Netflix — and it’s a doozy. The eight-episode-long series packs a frankly astonishing number of mysteries and twists into its runtime, making it an ideal binge. I’m still not entirely sure what, if anything, it all means, but I had a blast trying to fit the pieces together.1899 comes to us from Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar, the same creative team behind another Netflix thriller, the German series Dark. 1899 is a multilingual affair. It takes place on a passenger ship during... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Matter is a new standard that promises to fix smart home interoperability — but can it deliver? Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge There’s a new effort to tackle Ethereum’s legacy of pollution, even after the cryptocurrency drastically reduced its greenhouse gas emissions this year. Ethereum software company ConsenSys launched a new initiative alongside more than a dozen tech and Web3 companies yesterday during the United Nations climate summit taking place in Egypt. The aim of the initiative, called the Ethereum Climate Platform, is to “redress and counteract” the climate pollution Ethereum left behind from its inception in 2015 until this year.In September, Ethereum completed The Merge — a highly anticipated software update that slashed the blockchain network’s electricity use by 99.988 percent. But prior to that update, Ethereum used an enormously energy-hungry... Continue reading…

Verizon Test Drive makes full use of eSIM technology by allowing potential customers to trial the service before they commit to signing up. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Verizon has introduced a new early access program that allows you to test its network for up to 30 days. There’s no SIM card involved. Instead, it’s a showcase for eSIM technology to allow folks from other carriers to compare between services.The Verizon Test Drive program, like rival eSIM-based trial programs from T-Mobile and AT&T, is completely free but does require an unlocked and compatible phone. Ultra Wideband 5G, 5G Nationwide, and 4G LTE are available to try out in addition to 100GB of data and unlimited talk and text.The program can be used alongside your existing provider, allowing users to compare the two servicesTo get started, you need to download the My Verizon app via a QR code and follow the instructions — no credit... Continue reading…

Where did the explanation go? | Photo by Sven Hoogerhuis / BSR Agency / Getty Images Ticketmaster has taken down its explanation for why buying a ticket to Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour was an absolute disaster. The explanation, titled “The Taylor Swift Onsale Explained,” was live in two places on Ticketmaster’s website on Thursday and is now gone from both. But because the internet never forgets, you can still read it thanks to Google’s cache, and in case that fails, we’ve embedded it at the bottom of this article.In its post, Ticketmaster said that despite spending out 1.5 million invites to Verified Fans for Tuesday’s presale and putting 2 million fans on a waiting list, it saw “3.5 billion total system requests,” which the company said was four times its previous peak. Ticketmaster also shared a somewhat vague chart... Continue reading…

Except she’s made a massive bag of money from the whole thing. | Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic Taylor Swift has spoken out about the boondoggle that was the Ticketmaster sale for her The Eras Tour, and it doesn’t seem like she’s saying sorry just for show. In a statement posted to her Instagram story, which you can read in full below, she says that she’s “trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward” but that she’s “not going to make excuses for anyone.”She doesn’t mince words when talking about her fans’ experiences with Ticketmaster, saying that “it really pisses me off” what people had to go through to get tickets. She also thanks her fans for wanting to come to her shows, saying they “have no idea how much that means.”In case you missed it, the millions of people trying to get tickets for the... Continue reading…

The AirPods Pro may let you boost your hearing, but that’s not enough to make it a hearing aid. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge The line between hearing aids and hearables has blurred ever since over-the-counter hearing aids hit shelves last month. Case in point: a new iScience study that claims a $249 pair of AirPods Pro can sometimes perform as well as prescription hearing aids that often cost thousands more. But while AirPods may seem like an affordable hearing aid alternative, it’s not quite that simple.Researchers recruited 21 participants in the study to test how well second-gen AirPods and AirPods Pro performed compared to a premium hearing aid costing $10,000 and a basic aid costing $1,500. The participants were asked to repeat verbatim short sentences that were read to them while wearing each device. The AirPods Pro were found to be comparable to basic... Continue reading…

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s second-generation Rotom Phone might not look like a major update, but its new safety features are a lifesaving game-changer. Continue reading…

Yuji Naka is best known for co-creating the Sonic the Hedgehog video game series, and worked at Square Enix on Balan Wonderworld 2018 and 2021. | Image: Square Enix / YouTube Yuji Naka, the famed co-creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, has reportedly been arrested in Japan (via Fuji News Network) in connection with an insider trading case involving former Square Enix employees.The scandal centers around former Square Enix employee Taisuke Sazaki, who obtained information that the Dragon Quest Tact mobile game was being jointly created by game developers Square Enix and Aiming. Sazaki and another ex-Square Enix employee, Fumiaki Suzuki, allegedly purchased 162,000 shares in Aiming between December 2019 and February 2020 for approximately 47.2 million yen (around $336,760) prior to the project’s public announcement on February 5th, 2020.

We don’t know how many of Twitter’s employees looked at Elon Musk’s “take three months’ severance or agree to stay and get Xtreme” offer and decided to head for the exits, but by all available accounts, it was a lot of them.As my colleagues Alex Heath and Mia Sato report, the departure of entire important teams leads people who know Twitter well to think that it’s only a matter of time until things break down. According to the New York Times, some “critical” employees were pulled into meetings with Musk and his advisors, who tried to persuade them to stay as the time ticked down.

Illustration: Jovana Mugosa / The Verge Musk gave Twitter staff a deadline to say if they are staying for his cultural reset of the company. And right on deadline, the farewell emojis started pouring into Twitter’s Slack. Continue reading…

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Roku has announced that it’s laying off 200 US employees, or around 7 percent of its workforce, according to Variety. According to the company’s statement, the cuts are meant to reduce its “headcount expenses” by around 5 percent as it tries to spend less on operations in the face of “current economic conditions” in the advertising and streaming industry.In some ways, the move isn’t necessarily surprising — several of Roku’s peers, such as Disney, Netflix, and Meta, have also announced layoffs in recent weeks and months.However, cutting 200 jobs is a much harsher change than the company was predicting just over two weeks ago when it released its Q3 earnings report. Its shareholder letter does call attention to the fact that its staff... Continue reading…

Image: Blizzard Everybody mark your calendars: instead of the Christmas holiday season, it’s gonna be Mei. After a brief hiatus to fix a glitch that allowed Mei’s ice wall to boost players to places they shouldn’t be, today’s Overwatch 2 update added her back to the game alongside a host of other hero tweaks and bug fixes.

Image: 1password 1Password has announced that passkey support will be available to its customers in “early 2023,” allowing users to securely log in to apps and websites without a password.Support for passkeys’ entirely passwordless authentication may seem like a bewildering feature for a password management service, but 1Password isn’t even the first, with Dashlane already integrating passkeys into its own service earlier this year. Apple has already rolled out support for passkeys via the iCloud Keychain in macOS Ventura and iOS 15, and Google recently announced passkey beta testing for Chrome and Android. Microsoft hasn’t announced public testing yet.FIDO Alliance member 1Password said “it may take time” to implement support for passkeysPasskeys are... Continue reading…

The self-assembly option is only available if you bought your Peloton Bike off Amazon. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Peloton is now offering customers the option to assemble their bikes on their own. There are a couple of caveats, though. The option is only available for folks who buy the original Peloton Bike on Amazon, and it doesn’t come with any discounts.We first heard rumors about self-assembly in August. Peloton confirmed it a few weeks later when it announced its partnership with Amazon. Previously, you had to set up a date and time for a white-glove delivery and allow people into your home for installation. According to a Peloton blog, the company decided to explore self-assembly after members said they wanted to be “involved in the set-up process.”Customers who laugh in the face of Allen wrenches can find an 11-minute instructional video... Continue reading…

Basically: they sold all the tickets in the presale. | Photo by Jeff Kravitz / FilmMagic Ticketmaster is canceling the upcoming public sale of Taylor Swift tickets after the presale debacle earlier this week. Ticketmaster said it canceled the sale “due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand” in a tweet Thursday afternoon.Tuesday’s presale for Swift’s The Eras Tour was a disaster, with Ticketmaster crashing following “historically unprecedented demand.” Ticketmaster said millions came to the service to try and buy presale tickets.

Tudum, but Google. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube is rolling out a new startup sound that sounds a lot like a Google-y version of Netflix’s “tudum.” You can hear it right here or in the trailer at the top of this post, which also features a slick new startup animation.I wasn’t aware of this sound until Thursday, but Google says in a new blog that you might have already noticed the new sound if you’ve used YouTube on a TV. I just checked the YouTube app on PS5, and sure enough, there it was. But it didn’t play for me on the Apple TV YouTube app.Google’s blog goes into extensive detail about how it designed the sound in partnership with the “sonic branding” studio Antfood. The intention was to make a sound that was:

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge General Motors wants to be the biggest seller of electric vehicles in North America (maybe the planet, too?) and so far, it’s burning a lot of cash to get there. But by 2025, the cash burning will officially cease, as the company projects its EV program will be “solidly profitable” by then.The company, which is the largest automaker in North America, outlined the plan to achieve this goal to investors at a splashy event in Manhattan on Thursday. GM said it will sell 1 million EVs annually starting in 2025, and to illustrate this point, it had a variety of electric models on display, including the stunning $300,000 fastback Cadillac Celestiq that was first unveiled last month.Selling 1 million EVs a year will be no easy taskSelling 1... Continue reading…

Photo by Andrew Hawkins / The Verge BrightDrop, the EV logistics company owned by General Motors, projects it will reach $1 billion in revenue in 2023, making it one of the fastest companies in history to reach that milestone.The announcement was made in advance of a GM investor event, at which the automaker was expected to outline its plan to cover its massive investments in electric vehicle development amid a cooling economy. And it comes just shy of two years since GM announced the creation of BrightDrop as its effort to corner the market on electric delivery vehicles.Since then, the company has released a modest slate of products, including the Zevo 600 electric van, an electric pallet for moving packages, and a suite of fleet management software. And it’s adding... Continue reading…

The Maingear MG-1, Shroud Edition. | Image: Maingear Maingear has quietly hand-built custom gaming PCs in New Jersey for the past 20 years, occasionally landing splashy partnerships to generate intriguing new systems. Now, it’s teaming up with one of the world’s biggest streamers: Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek.Today, the 50-person company is not only revealing a new desktop born out of the Shroud partnership but also a new company logo, as well as the “first full 3D product configurator”. That way, you can spin around a 3D model before you let them charge your credit card for a prebuilt gaming rig.Getting “celebrity creative director” vibes here, but we’ll see!Oh, and one other thing: Maingear says Shroud is now a co-owner of the company, whatever that means. “shroud now owns a significant... Continue reading…

Want the check mark? You may have to wait. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter won’t let accounts less than 90 days old sign up for its Blue subscription service when it relaunches (presumably on the 29th), according to an update to the About Twitter Blue page. This means that you won’t be able to just create a new account and instantly get it verified, which could be a bid to cut down on scams and impersonator accounts like the ones that almost immediately plagued the service the first time the updated Blue launched.The old program didn’t have a set waiting period, according to an archive of the page provided by the Wayback Machine, but it did have a warning that “Twitter accounts created on or after November 9, 2022, will be unable to subscribe to Twitter Blue at this time.” While that restriction... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge The thing that’s under-appreciated about lawyers — largely because they are so annoying — is that they are also writers and often talented ones. And so, in the spirit of literary appreciation, let’s all do a close read of the absolute banger filed today by John J. Ray III in the FTX bankruptcy case.Who’s Ray? He’s the guy running FTX now, and in the filing, he writes:

Zack and the Cactuar may not look as good on older consoles. | Image: Square Enix The remaster of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII is out in less than a month, and if you have any recent console platform, you’ll be able to play it. But depending on which console you have, the resolution and frame rate will differ quite a bit, demonstrating just how complex console gaming has become.At the top end — the PS5 and Xbox Series X — you’ll be able to play Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion in 4K at a maximum of 60 frames per second. But if you’re playing on Switch, you’re getting the short end of the stick at 720p and 30fps in both docked and handheld mode. If you have a PS4 or Xbox One, performance will be different depending on which specific model you’re playing on. On Xbox Series S, the maximum resolution will be... Continue reading…

After previously failing to protect England’s Black football players, Meta has posted a statement reiterating its existing policies regarding online abuse ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. | Photo by Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images Meta is attempting to get ahead of harassment concerns during the 2022 FIFA World Cup by laying out what the company is doing to protect players and fans from harmful content. Both Facebook and Instagram were criticized last year for failing to protect Black players on England’s national football team from racist abuse, with players being bombarded with harassment during the 2021 European Championship tournament that resulted in a social media boycott from teams and organizations across England.In a blog post today, Meta says it is working with teams and associations like FIFA to teach players how to use anti-harassment features on Instagram, like “hidden words” and “limits.” It also highlights that it introduced new nudges to Instagram... Continue reading…