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Ford CEO Jim Farley and the F-150 Lightning. | Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images Ford CEO Jim Farley knows there’s lots to improve as Ford turns into an EV company Continue reading…

Photo by MARCO BELLO/AFP via Getty Images You know what, I’m into it. Let’s go full, unkempt beard for this one. The Gen-Xers are online and they are posting Radiohead on main.

Blue Origin Just before Twitter announced it’s accepting Elon Musk’s $44 buyout bid, the world’s richest man tweeted, “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.”His commitment is getting a mild test thanks to a fellow tech billionaire / rocket enthusiast / media mogul. Jeff Bezos quoted a New York Times reporter’s tweet pointing out that Tesla’s business interests in China could give the government leverage over Twitter via its new owner, saying, “Interesting question. Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?.”

Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge President Biden’s administration called for Congress’s help in letting more law enforcement agencies access drone tracking systems on Monday. In recent months, government use of counter-drone systems has become more controversial after a Ukrainian government official asked drone-maker DJI to cut off Russia’s access to its AeroScope drone location system.The White House’s outline of what it calls the “Domestic Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems National Action Plan” called for Congress to “reauthorize” the authority to track drones given to organizations like the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Defense, and State. (The plan also notes that the CIA and NASA also have limited authorities.) The statement also asks Congress to give... Continue reading…

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images In the moments before Elon Musk bought Twitter, the company’s Slack channels were lit up with nervous anticipation. It had been days since Twitter leadership had shared anything with them, and after a weekend’s worth of reports that a sale was imminent, employees were looking for answers.For the first few hours of the morning, none came. Work all but came to a halt, employees told me. Like a classroom where the teacher is late and students are attempting to self-govern, one said. A “hellhole,” said another. One thread, in which an employee asked good-naturedly whether anyone was excited about the prospect of working for Musk, drew dozens of responses, many of them quite ugly.Then, just before the markets closed, the news arrived: the... Continue reading…

Here’s what a Steam Deck lock screen looks like. | Image: Valve Valve’s newest Steam Deck update adds a lock screen to the handheld gaming PC, the company announced Monday. The change means you can now set a PIN when you wake the device from sleep, which could prevent people from accessing your device who shouldn’t be. After you’ve installed the update, you can turn on the lock screen and set a PIN in the Steam Deck’s settings menu from a new Security tab.The update also adds a handful of other welcome changes. The achievements page has gotten a “refresh,” and Valve says it’s now “faster to load and easier to navigate.” There are localized keyboards for 21 languages and layouts, and you can enable multiple keyboards at the same time, though Valve notes that it’s “currently working” on keyboards for... Continue reading…

An illustration of NASA’s DART spacecraft just before it hits Dimorphos | NASA China’s space agency plans to send a spacecraft to slam into an asteroid, knocking it into a new — and hopefully safer — orbit. The prospective new mission will launch within the next four years, and was announced on Sunday by Wu Yanhua, deputy director of the China National Space Administration, according to Global Times, a state-run news outlet.The country hasn’t yet determined which asteroid to target. The mission was announced as one part of a larger new planetary defense effort, which will seek to catalog and monitor near-Earth asteroids, especially those that might pose a threat to our planet. The effort would include a new warning system as well. Eventually, the plan is to identify an asteroid that might threaten Earth, and send... Continue reading…

2022 is a big year for Google’s wearable efforts | Photo by Dieter Bohn / The Verge After a massive Pixel Watch leak this past weekend, you’d think that maybe Google would relax on the wearables front. Nope. With Google I/O just weeks away, a video teasing Google Assistant on the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 has popped up on YouTube, and Google-owned Fitbit has officially started rolling out passive atrial fibrillation alerts on its suite of devices.We’ve known that Google Assistant was coming to the Galaxy Watch 4 (and therefore Wear OS 3) for months. The only thing we haven’t really known is when, but it seems like the wait is coming to an end. There was a false alarm last week when Verizon jumped the gun with an update log that suggested Google Assistant support had been included in the latest round of Galaxy Watch 4... Continue reading…

Image: Pony.ai Pony.ai has received a license to operate its autonomous taxi service in China, making it the first company to win the country’s approval (via Reuters). Starting in May, the Toyota-backed robotaxi service will operate 100 autonomous vehicles in the Nansha district of Guangzhou, and will later expand to serve other portions of the city.Pony.ai says riders can hail and pay for rides from the company’s app between 8:30AM to 10:30PM, and that its fares will align with the “standard taxi pricing” in Guangzhou. The autonomous vehicles will also have a driver present in the car for safety purposes, but plans to remove them over a “short to intermediate time frame.”In November, the Chinese startup gained approval — but not a license — to... Continue reading…

Image: Sennheiser Ever since the original pair’s debut back in 2018, Sennheiser’s Momentum True Wireless earbuds have received heaps of praise for their sound quality. After releasing a sequel in 2020, Sennheiser is announcing the third product in the series today — and this time, they’ve been given a substantial redesign. They’ll be available starting May 10th in black, graphite, and white for $249.95.The Momentum True Wireless 3 buds look closer to the CX and CX Plus True Wireless than they do their direct predecessors. Clearly, Sennheiser has settled on a universal design language of sorts for its earbud lineup, and that’s reflected here. The Momentums do give off a sleeker and more premium impression than the company’s cheaper buds. ... Continue reading…

Photo Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal didn’t have many concrete answers for staff about what will happen once Elon Musk takes over the company later this year. During a virtual all-hands call Monday, hours after the company announced it had agreed to be bought by Musk for $44 billion, Agrawal fielded questions on the future of his job, the company’s board, and possible layoffs.Layoffs aren’t planned “at this time,” Agrawal said, according to a person who heard the remarks and who asked to remain anonymous. Agrawal also said that he’d remain as CEO until the deal’s close, but he didn’t comment about what would happen after that. The company’s board will dissolve once the deal closes, said Brett Taylor, the board’s independent chair.“We don’t have... Continue reading…

E Ink / The Verge E Ink has a new version of color electronic paper, and while it isn’t as pretty as an OLED or possessing the new tech sheen of stuff like mini- and microLED, E Ink Gallery 3 sure is easy on the eyes. Gallery 3 isn’t quite as fast as the E Ink found in your Kindle, but it has some absolutely stellar upgrades compared to previous versions of the Gallery technology and brings us a whole lot closer to a color E Ink screen that big companies like Amazon might actually risk putting in a tablet.Currently, a handful of companies are making color E Ink tablets based on E Ink’s other color technology, Kaleido. Those include the PocketBook Color (really neat!) and the Boox Nova3 Color (cooler in theory than in practice). Kaleido was E Ink’s... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge If you’re an Apple user, then you might have seen some problems in the App Store or with Apple Music. On Monday Apple’s system status page listed issues affecting “all users” for both services noticed since 11:41AM ET without going into detail about what the problems are. In our tests, the App Store and Apple Music are both generally operational, but users noticed problems for several hours before they were resolved.9to5Mac reported earlier that Apple’s Privacy Labels weren’t appearing on many App Store listings and cited a source confirming it was a bug that would be fixed soon.Posters on Reddit have seen problems with Apple Music missing lyric information, Dolby Atmos, and lossless audio from songs where it should have those... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated” is how Elon Musk explained why he spent $44 billion to acquire Twitter.

Image: Microsoft You’ll soon be able to download Microsoft Teams from the Microsoft Store that comes built into Windows, according to a roadmap update from the company, as spotted by Neowin. Yes, you read that right. Microsoft’s work communications app hasn’t been available on its own store up to this point; it either had to be downloaded from the web or installed alongside the rest of Office 365. (Though, as ZDNet notes, it was available at one point on the store exclusively for people using Windows 10 in S mode, which restricted where you could install software from.)According to the roadmap, Teams will be available on the store sometime next month for both Windows 10 and 11. The version for Windows 10 will be usable with personal, work, and school... Continue reading…

Image: Mattel J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot is partnering up with Warner Bros. for a live-action Hot Wheels movie, yet another sign that Mattel is getting quite serious about the filmmaking business.Today, Warner Bros. and Mattel Films announced that Bad Robot has signed on to produce a live-action Hot Wheels feature film described in a press release as a showcase of “some of the world’s hottest and sleekest cars, monster trucks and motorcycles.” Speaking about the collaboration, Mattel Films’ executive producer Robbie Brenner did not provide any plot details but did allude to the new project being aimed at a broad swath of the Hot Wheels fanbase.“As the global leader in car culture, Hot Wheels has been igniting the challenger spirit in auto enthusiasts... Continue reading…

Netgear and AT&T are introducing the most impressive mobile hotspot I’ve ever seen: a four-inch puck that promises to turn the newest, fastest flavors of 5G and Wi-Fi into speedy internet for your laptops, tablets, and even wired PCs.It’s called the Netgear Nighthawk M6 Pro, and at $459.99, it ain’t cheap. But it’s a leap over its predecessors in practically every way. Not only is it one of the first hotspots with both actually useful C-band 5G frequencies and speedy-but-spotty mmWave but also AT&T says it’s the first with Wi-Fi 6E for 3.6Gbps wireless transfer speeds. It’s also got a 2.5Gbps ethernet jack for wired gadgets where its predecessor maxed out at gigabit wired speeds.Oh, and it’s got a USB 3.2 Type-C port for charging and... Continue reading…

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images Even if Elon Musk could reinstate former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account, Trump will not be returning to the platform — at least that’s what he told Fox News on Monday.Rather than tweeting from his formerly favored platform, Trump assured Fox that he would officially start posting “truths” to his new social media app, Truth Social, over the next few days.“I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on TRUTH,” Trump told Fox News on Monday. “I hope Elon buys Twitter because he’ll make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on TRUTH.”Trump’s announcement comes moments after Musk won a bid to take Twitter private at $54.20 a share. For nearly two weeks, Musk has been maneuvering to purchase the... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Sony’s storefront will have the PlayStation 5 console available for purchase starting at 4:30PM ET today, so time is running out before the waiting room flips into a queue for the hotly in-demand console. We expect that the store will stock both the $499.99 version of the PlayStation 5 that features a disc drive, as well as the $399.99 digital version that lacks one. We also expect that this restock will sell out just as quickly as the others.PS5 restocks, while popping up here and there, have been a rarity compared to purchase opportunities for other tech products that were hard to find as little as a few months ago. Things like Nvidia and AMD GPUs have slowly become easier to find in-stock, as have Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and the N... Continue reading…

Apple is working with anti-union lawyers at Littler Mendelson in an escalating fight with retail workers in Atlanta who have filed for a union election. Though the company has not publicly stated its stance on Apple Stores unionizing, the move sends a strong signal that it plans to oppose workers organizing for better pay and working conditions.Littler is currently representing Starbucks in its efforts to fight off worker organizing. It previously helped McDonald’s avoid responsibility in a 2014 case that alleged the company, as a joint employer, violated labor laws by retaliating against workers who participated in the Fight for $15 campaign.“From the start I’ve thought unionization was a good thing,” said one current retail... Continue reading…

The Brooklyn Public Library just announced its “Books Unbanned” initiative. | Photo by Sergi Reboredo / VW PICS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images The Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) is counteracting a ban on certain books by letting anyone in the US aged 13 to 21 apply for a digital library card. This gives teens and young adults, regardless of their location in the United States, access to the library’s entire ebook collection.The initiative, called Books Unbanned, is fighting what the BPL describes as an “increasingly coordinated and effective effort to remove books tackling a wide range of topics from library shelves.” According to the American Library Association (ALA), a total of 729 books were challenged in 2021, meaning a person or group attempted to ban these titles from public libraries.

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Sony will begin rolling out support for the Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) feature for the PS5 via an update released this week, the company announced Monday.“On HDMI 2.1 VRR-compatible TVs and PC monitors, VRR dynamically syncs the refresh rate of the display to the PS5 console’s graphical output,” Sony’s Hideaki Nishino said in a blog post. “This enhances visual performance for PS5 games by minimizing or eliminating visual artifacts, such as frame pacing issues and screen tearing.” The feature will be available globally.A handful of games will get VRR support “in the coming weeks,” according to Nishino’s blog:

For years, designer Zach Gage has been enamored with the works of famed Japanese game publisher Nikoli. The company is best known for popularizing sudoku, and is renowned for its minimalist takes on puzzles like nonograms (which Nintendo fans might recognize as Picross). For Gage, creating that kind of clean, straightforward, and accessible puzzle was a long sought-after goal. He describes it as a “kind of obsession,” one that “feels like a really great design challenge because it’s so hard to do.” He tried plenty of ideas but eventually landed on a solution: the humble crossword.This week Gage and partner Jack Schlesinger are releasing Knotwords on iOS, Android, Mac, and PC. It’s a game built on the premise that the most interesting... Continue reading…

Image: Venmo If you use the Venmo app, you probably recently received an email explaining that the company is making changes to its user agreement — including a fairly onerous arbitration clause that, among other things, has you agree that you will not become part of any kind of class action suit. You can opt out of it, but it’s not easy.We’ll tell you how you can opt out — but first, a little info about arbitration clauses.Arbitration clauses have become extremely popular in agreements between companies and consumers. (For example, here’s a 2019 article explaining how to opt out of the arbitration clause that emerged when Apple added a credit card.) It’s not surprising. When you agree to arbitration, you are basically putting most of the... Continue reading…

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images Twitter has accepted Elon Musk’s offer to purchase the company for $44 billion, the company announced in a press release today. Musk purchased the company at $54.20 a share, the same price named in his initial offer on April 14th.“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” said Musk in a statement included with the release. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.”“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy”Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal also applauded the deal in... Continue reading…

Ram teased its upcoming electric 1500 pickup truck, which is scheduled to go into production in fall 2022. The new electric truck is expected to be one of the first major long-range EVs to come out of Stellantis, the multinational conglomeration that formed last year when Fiat Chrysler merged with the French PSA Group.The decision to tease the electric Ram 1500 is clearly a shot at Ford, which is set to begin customer deliveries of its hotly anticipated F-150 Lightning truck this week. “Time to steal some thunder,” the tweet from Ram reads — a clear allusion to Ford and its lightning-branded EV.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Today, workers at Amazon’s LDJ5 warehouse facility will vote on whether to organize with the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), the same union that pulled off a historic win at another Staten Island, New York, facility earlier this month. With ballots scheduled to be counted on May 2nd, the election will last just one week. After months of slow buildup, workers are just a week away from learning whether their site will unionize — assuming there aren’t any tiebreaker court fights of the kind that held up Bessemer’s second vote.The ALU is riding high after the election at the JFK8 facility, and it’s fair to say momentum is on the side of the organizers. But the loss in the first Bessemer election is still fresh, and the stakes are high. The... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A hacker has stolen NFTs worth millions of dollars after compromising the official Instagram account for Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and using it to post a phishing link that transferred tokens out of users’ crypto wallets.The hack was disclosed on Twitter by BAYC just before 10AM ET on Monday morning. “There is no mint going on today,” the Tweet read. “It looks like BAYC Instagram was hacked.”

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon is loaded onto a recovery vessel | SpaceX/Axiom Space The first crew of private astronauts to visit the International Space Station have successfully returned to Earth, splashing down off the coast of Florida soon after 1PM ET. Their return marks the end of a 15-day mission to the ISS, a trip that cost the crew a reported $55 million per ticket.This mission, dubbed Ax-1, was the first human spaceflight mission for Axiom Space, a private aerospace company that plans to build commercial space stations in the future. Axiom contracted with SpaceX to send a crew of four to the International Space Station on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, calling it a precursor mission to prepare for sending people to Axiom’s space stations in the future.The Ax-1 crew’s visit to the space station was supposed to last... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Stripe is testing a way for users to receive their payouts in cryptocurrency, starting with “a select group of creators on Twitter.” Creators who earn money through monetization features on the platform can now get their earnings in USD Coin (USDC) — a “stablecoin” cryptocurrency tied to the US dollar.Stripe is piloting the crypto payout option through the company’s payment processor, Stripe Connect, that customers can integrate into their online platform or marketplace. Crypto payouts will occur over the Polygon network, a blockchain tied to Ethereum that allows for faster and more efficient transactions. After receiving their funds, users can choose to store their earnings in Polygon or exchange it for another currency. While Stripe... Continue reading…

Perhaps for an improved transparency mode? | Image: SnoopyTech It seems that Sony’s next flagship over-ear headphones aren’t the only ones that have leaked ahead of a public announcement, as official-looking images of a new set of Sony noise-canceling wireless earbuds have hit the web thanks to leaker SnoopyTech (via Android Police). According to SnoopyTech, the earbuds will be called the LinkBuds S, suggesting they could share some similarities to Sony’s LinkBuds released in February.The original LinkBuds have a distinctive “open-style” design with an unconventional donut-like hole that’s intended to help you better hear your surroundings while you have the earbuds in. The LinkBuds S, in contrast, have a more traditional closed design like that of Sony’s WF-1000XM4s.However, looking at the... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Companies like Netflix, Disney, and HBO do battle over media streaming of movies and TV shows, but all of their services combined pale in comparison to YouTube, which says it delivers over a billion hours of video streams every single day. Now, Google Cloud is announcing general availability of its Media CDN, a network for media companies to use for their own streaming experiences. Competitors like Microsoft Azure, Amazon CloudFront, Fastly, and Cloudflare are already in the market, but none of them can point to the service so many people use every day to help sell their products.As we noted two years ago, the world is streaming more video than ever, and things have not slowed down since. While we think a lot about the algorithms that... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, smartwatch advocates and wearable tech companies thought the devices could help with illness detection. They wanted to flag people who might be sick with the disease using things like their heart rate and oxygen levels. The strategy could still be a reasonable way to track illness, but two years later, the promise hasn’t panned out — the research is still underdeveloped, according to a new review published last week in The Lancet.The review looked at 12 research studies and 12 proposed study protocols published in 2020 and 2021 that tried to find patterns in the data collected by devices like the Apple Watch, Fitbit, and Whoop. Most of these studies focused on people who had already tested... Continue reading…

The fourth-gen Echo Dot is a small, ponderous orb available in white, black, or blue. | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge It’s time to kick off another week of deals, and what better way than with promos like a smart speaker hitting its lowest price yet and a new TV getting a nice discount? Amazon’s orb-like Echo Dot is one of the most affordable ways to smarten up your home, and it’s now cheaper than ever before. You can pick up the fourth-gen Echo Dot, which launched in 2020, for just $27.99 at Amazon or Best Buy in black, blue, or white. That price is $22 off its regular price and even beats the discounts we saw around the holidays.While this little speaker is inexpensive and compact, it supports all the same Alexa voice commands as its pricier counterparts, like setting timers and controlling other devices in Amazon’s ecosystem of smart home devices.... Continue reading…

Photo by Nilay Patel / The Verge SpaceX is starting to make deals with airlines to provide its Starlink satellite internet to sky travelers everywhere. It announced a deal on Monday with Hawaiian Airlines, and last week made a similar deal with charter carrier JSX. None of the involved parties shared the financial details of their deals, but both airlines did say they’re planning to offer the in-flight Wi-Fi for free, which is both a semi-miraculous fact and a sign of hope that free Wi-Fi is becoming the industry standard. Delta meanwhile, confirmed last week that it’s running “exploratory” Starlink tests.In-flight Wi-Fi has been on the minds of Team Starlink for a while. Jonathan Hofeller, SpaceX’s VP of Starlink and commercial sales, said last year that the company... Continue reading…

Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images Elon Musk raged at the head of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund for failing to back his bid to take Tesla private in 2018, complaining that he was being thrown “under the bus,” according to newly disclosed text messages.“I am deeply offended,” Musk wrote to Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), on August 12, 2018. The texts were sent a few days after Musk shocked the financial world by tweeting that he was considering taking Tesla private at $420 a share, adding “funding secured.”The now infamous tweet triggered a lawsuit from Tesla shareholders, who claim that Musk lied about having the money required to delist Tesla from the stock exchange and take it private. As part of the... Continue reading…

Meta Meta is launching its first hardware retail store on its campus in Burlingame, California. The store, which opens May 9th, will let visitors try out and buy Meta’s Portal videophones and Quest virtual reality headsets. They’ll also be able to demo the Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses that debuted last year and get help ordering them online.Meta’s store will include a demo area for Portal where users can test its video calling features with a store employee. There’s a space to test several Quest 2 demos, including Beat Saber, GOLF+, Real VR Fishing, and Supernatural, and visitors will take home a 30-second mixed reality clip showing them playing a game. They can also try on different styles of the Ray-Ban glasses, which capture and share... Continue reading…

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge If you're trying to buy a new video game console in 2022, then you probably already know that they’re still in short supply. While the Nintendo Switch (including the new Switch OLED model) and Xbox Series S are generally available throughout the US, it’s a little harder to get something more powerful, and NPD data released today reflects that.Between the Xbox Series S remaining in stock consistently and the increasingly obtainable Xbox Series X (try opening up your Best Buy app in the morning or checking local stores to find one — many have had them in stock lately), Microsoft’s consoles led in terms of hardware dollars for March 2022 and the entire first quarter in the US.This is the most total Xbox units sold in March since 2011

The 2023 Chevy Corvette Z06 | Chevy General Motors will release an “electrified” version of the Chevy Corvette next year, followed by a fully electric version of the iconic sports car soon after that, the automaker’s president Mark Reuss said on CNBC Monday.Reuss wouldn’t confirm when the all-electric ‘Vette would make its debut, but did note that “this is coming very quick.” The automaker plans to continue selling gas-powered versions in the meantime.“This is in addition to all the great performance that Chevrolet and Corvette have been known for many, many years with our internal combustion engine, so it’s an addition to [that],” Reuss said.

Image: Blizzard We already knew Blizzard is working on a new entry in the Diablo series that is designed for mobile devices. And today, timed to coincide with Activision Blizzard’s Q1 2022 earnings report, the company announced that Diablo Immortal will release on Android and iOS on June 2nd — and, surprise, on PC, too, in open beta.

The PA147CDV next to one of Asus’ laptops. | Image: Asus The Asus ProArt Display PA147CDV is a 14-inch touchscreen that’s designed to act as a secondary display for creatives. With its small form factor and ultrawide 32:9 aspect ratio, it looks as though Asus has ripped the secondary display off one of its Duo laptops and turned it into an external monitor.The PA147CDV was technically announced last September, but Asus is currently showing it off at the NAB 2022 show in Las Vegas and is announcing plans to release the monitor in Q2 2022 in North America at a price that’s yet to be announced.With its support for Microsoft’s Pen Protocol 2.0 and a built-in dial that’s designed to emulate the functionality of Microsoft’s Surface Dial, Asus is pitching the PA147CDV as an accessory for creatives... Continue reading…

Pixel Watch between a 40mm Apple Watch (left) and 46mm Samsung Galaxy Watch. | Photo: tagtech414 (Reddit) Our first look at what seems to be the Google Pixel Watch comes under strange circumstances: someone supposedly found its prototype lying around at a restaurant and sent pictures of it to Android Central on the condition of anonymity. The images of the purported device match up with what we’ve seen from previously leaked renders, down to the circular watchface and rotating crown. Image: Android Central The watch appears to have a physical crown sitting between two buttons. As shown in the photos, a physical crown sits between two buttons on the side of the watch. If it’s anything like the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4, the two buttons could be used to turn the watch on or off, return to the home screen, or even as a... Continue reading…

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Workers at Nintendo’s third-party repair facility reportedly faced a “very stressful” work environment caused by a deluge of Switches sent in for issues related to Joy-Con drift, according to a report from Kotaku. A former supervisor at the New York-based United Radio, the company that partners with Nintendo to repair broken devices, told Kotaku that the large volume of Joy-Con repairs resulted in a high turnover rate and “lots of” mistakes.United Radio is its own company — Nintendo merely acts as the middleman, handling customer communications and leaving the repairing to United Radio, which serves Nintendo customers located in the eastern half of the US. The ubiquity of Joy-Con drift led to “easily thousands” of Joy-Cons that passed... Continue reading…

The Chevy Spark EV ran from 2013 to 2016. | Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images General Motors will reportedly no longer provide battery replacements for the all-electric version of the Chevy Spark, according to a report from EV-Resource (via InsideEVs). The Chevy Spark electric vehicle (EV) was first released in 2013, and GM continued to make new models until 2016.A GM district executive confirmed to EV-Resource that the company is “no longer going to supply that [the Spark EV’s] battery.” GM’s inventory of Spark EV battery packs has reportedly run out as well, and the company doesn’t plan on making any more. The Verge reached out to GM with a request for comment but didn’t immediately hear back.It’s unclear if GM will continue to honor the Spark EV’s battery pack warrantyWith the oldest model of the Spark EV... Continue reading…

This $1,550 robot can mop, vacuum, clean itself, and find you in your home Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple may be cracking down on apps that no longer receive updates. In a screenshotted email sent to affected developers, titled “App Improvement Notice,” Apple warns it will remove apps from the App Store that haven’t been “updated in a significant amount of time” and gives developers just 30 days to update them.“You can keep this app available for new users to discover and download from the App Store by submitting an update for review in 30 days,” Apple writes in the email. “If no update is submitted in 30 days, the app will be removed from sale.” While Apple will remove the outdated apps from the App Store, any previously downloaded apps will remain on users’ devices.

Ubisoft says “Project Q” isn’t the game’s official name. | Image: Ubisoft Ubisoft announced its upcoming “team battle arena game,” with two major disclaimers: it’s not just a battle royale and there aren’t any NFTs. The game company shared the news on Twitter after leakers posted footage of the game, codenamed Project Q, online.“This is not a Battle Royale,” Ubisoft said in a series of tweets. “The game will feature a variety of PvP modes with one single goal in mind: FUN! We don’t have plans to add NFTs to this game, you can find out more by registering and taking part in the upcoming tests!”

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Lapsus$ hacking group stole T-Mobile’s source code in a series of breaches that took place in March, as first reported by Krebs on Security. T-Mobile confirmed the attack in a statement to The Verge, and says the “systems accessed contained no customer or government information or other similarly sensitive information.”In copies of private messages obtained by Krebs, the Lapsus$ hacking group discussed targeting T-Mobile in the week prior to the arrest of seven of its teenage members. After purchasing employees’ credentials online, the members could use the company’s internal tools — like Atlas, T-Mobile’s customer management system — to perform SIM swaps. This type of attack involves hijacking a target’s mobile phone by... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Instagram’s testing out a new feature, called Templates, that will let creators make Reels by borrowing formats from other videos on the platform, according to a report from Insider (via TechCrunch). The feature appears somewhat similar to TikTok’s own templates tool, which allows creators to drop their own content into a premade sequence.Reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi spotted an early version of Templates in January, while marketing manager and influencer Josephine Hill has already gotten to experience the feature. In a screenshot posted by Hill in March, it looks like users can swap their own clips into preset frames, as well as add their own audio. This could save users from using third-party templates from sites like Canva, or... Continue reading…