The Verge

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta is going to let Facebook users create multiple personal profiles and switch between them without logging out and logging back in, according to a blog post published Thursday. Basically, Meta is embracing finstas but for Facebook.Whether you're new to Facebook or a longtime user, you may want to keep your personal and professional relationships separate, or you may want to keep one profile tied to a community you're a part of and another profile just for friends," Meta wrote. Creating multiple personal profiles lets you easily organize who you share with and what content you see for the various parts of your life. Think one profile for the foodie scene you love and another one to keep up with your friends and family."You'll be... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge People worry about AI taking their jobs, but some musicians could face something more worrying: AI taking their voice. Continue reading...

The new Laptop Studio 2 looks like the old one, but has much more power inside. | Photo: Chris Welch / The Verge Microsoft just showed off its new high-end convertible laptop, the Surface Laptop Studio 2, at its launch event in New York City. The Laptop Studio 2 keeps the overall aesthetic of its predecessor, including the pull-forward 14.4-inch display that makes it a much more touch-friendly device but adds some welcome power-user features.The Studio 2, which starts at $1,999, runs on Intel's 13th Generation chips - specifically the i7 H class - with an Nvidia RTX 4050 or RTX 4060 GPU inside. It also has an Intel Neural Processing Unit, or NPU, which is the first Intel NPU in a Windows computer. (There were rumblings that Microsoft might be making this chip itself, but it appears not.) You can configure it with up to 2TB of storage and 64 gigs... Continue reading...

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge The already locked-down US v. Google antitrust trial got a little more restricted earlier this week - when Judge Amit Mehta, following a complaint from Google, chided the Department of Justice for posting exhibits from the trial online without notifying him first. These documents are, for all intents and purposes, public: they were viewable in court and will likely be entered into public records, something Mehta acknowledged. Unlike in the recent FTC v. Microsoft debacle, there's no evidence of failed redactions that reveal bombshell details about a company, although the parties have argued over exhibits Google deems irrelevant.Bloomberg's Leah Nylen, who argued for access to the documents in court, has the full writeup of what happened... Continue reading...

Apple wanted the iPhone 15 to use custom-built modems, but failed. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Apple recently extended its deal for Qualcomm modems despite years of effort to develop its own - now we know why. According to a detailed report from the Wall Street Journal, Apple's attempt to develop its own in-house 5G modem has been stymied by issues resulting from the iPhone maker underestimating the complexity and technical challenges of the task, and a lack of global leadership to guide the separate development groups siloed in the US and abroad.Apple's motivation to develop its own modems is reportedly two-fold. First, developing its own silicon had helped improve device performance and increase profit margins. Second, the company wanted to break from Qualcomm, which Apple sued in 2017 over excessive patent fees. They hate... Continue reading...

The old logo (left) vs. the new one (right). You might be able to guess the meme I'm linking to before you click it. | Logos: Meta; Image by Jay Peters / The Verge Meta is updating Facebook's identity system," and that includes a dramatically refreshed logo.Just kidding! It's basically exactly the same as the last one, except the blue is a darker blue, and the lowercase f" has a few subtle tweaks. You can see the new logo next to the most recent one in the image at the top of this post.Here's Meta's explanation for the changes from a Wednesday blog post:

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The US government will again offer free at-home covid tests starting September 25th, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced on Wednesday. The kits are intended for use through the end of 2023; as with previous versions of the free test program, the kits will include four tests along with instructions for verifying extended expiration dates.The government ended its most recent free test kit program on May 31st as cases and hospitalizations dwindled, but hospitalizations have been steadily rising since July, according to The New York Times' covid tracker.According to the HHS release, the White House has invested $600 million for the new round of free kits, which it will purchase from 12 US manufacturers. The... Continue reading...

Battlefield 2042. | Image: EA Things haven't been going so well with the Battlefield franchise of late, so EA is bringing in some more help. The publisher says that starting today, Criterion is added to our world-class Battlefield studios dedicated to ushering in a new era for the franchise."Criterion was first acquired by EA in 2004 and is best known for its work on racing games, starting with Burnout before shifting to EA's Need for Speed franchise. But the publisher has also utilized Criterion on a number of non-racing projects, including Battlefield and the Star Wars Battlefront series.Today's news comes as part of a restructuring that began in 2021, not long after the rocky launch of Battlefield 2042, putting the franchise under the purview of Respawn boss... Continue reading...

Fourth- and fifth-gen Echo Dots will soon be able to automatically adjust your lights for you using their built-in ambient light sensor and ultrasound motion detection. | Image: Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Amazon Echo smart speakers are getting a new feature soon: automatic lighting. Smart lighting is one of the most popular use cases in the smart home, but it can be fiddly to set up and frustrating to control. With this new capability, Amazon is looking to make it as easy as just buying and screwing in a lightbulb.Later this year, with any compatible Echo or motion and ambient light sensor, Alexa will be able to automatically detect both brightness levels and activity in a room and intelligently decide whether to turn the lights on or off. The announcement came during an event held at Amazon's new headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, and via a blog post on Amazon.com from Melissa Cha, VP of smart home at Amazon.The feature requires no... Continue reading...

Image: Amazon Amazon Alexa is getting Emergency Assist, a new feature announced during the company's 2023 hardware event that allows users to contact emergency services through their Echo device by saying, Alexa, call for help." The service costs $5.99 per month or $59 for an entire year.While Alexa can't contact 911 directly, it will connect users with an agent who can alert emergency services on their behalf. Additionally, users can pre-save essential information in the Alexa app, such as their home address, gate code, the medications they're taking, and any allergies they may have, which Emergency Assist will relay to first responders. The service will also inform responders which device the call was made from.

Image: Amazon Today, Amazon is introducing its latest streaming players, the upgraded Fire TV Stick 4K ($49.99) and Fire TV Stick 4K Max ($59.99). During the company's fall hardware event, Amazon's Daniel Rausch said both devices feature upgraded processors for faster performance compared to their predecessors.The standard Fire TV Stick 4K is 30 percent more powerful than the previous model, offers Wi-Fi 6, and 4K streaming along with broad HDR support for Dolby Vision, HDR10, and HDR10 Plus. The Max builds on top of that with Wi-Fi 6E and twice the storage (now 16GB) than the prior version. For a difference of just $10, I'm not sure who wouldn't opt for the Max over the regular stick, but not everyone needs those frills for all of their TVs, I... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge More authors sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, joining other writers in pursuing legal action against generative AI companies for using their books to train AI models.The Authors Guild and 17 well-known authors like Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jodi Picoult filed the lawsuit in the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs hope to get the filing classified as a class action.According to the complaint, OpenAI copied plaintiffs' works wholesale, without permission or consideration" and fed the copyrighted materials into large language models.These authors' livelihoods derive from the works they create. But the Defendant's LLMs endanger fiction writers' ability to make a living in that the LLMs... Continue reading...

Image: CD Projekt Red I was genuinely surprised how much I enjoyed revisiting Cyberpunk 2077 as part of its major new update.I dutifully played through Cyberpunk 2077 in the weeks after its rocky December 2020 launch, but I always felt that it was aggressively fine. I loved sneaking through levels as a netrunner that stealthily hacked into enemies. But things like the cringey edginess that permeated nearly every line of dialogue, a clothes / gear system that forced me to look like an absolute clown to get the best stats, and even small details like a frustratingly zoomed-in mini-map all brought down the experience.Nearly three years in, a lot of those quibbles are now fixed, and after spending more than a dozen hours with the new update 2.0 and Phantom... Continue reading...

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge The iPhone 15 and 15 Pro have several features that aren't on past iPhones, and now we can add new battery information and control features to the list. As pointed out in this post by @Tech_Reve, a new section in the iOS 17 About" screen shows how many charge cycles your battery has been through as well as its manufacturing date and when it was first used (via MacRumors).Those on older phones still have third-party options like CoconutBattery for the Mac to get more information about the battery, but it would be nice to just, you know, have it already there. iOS Shortcuts are also an option for accessing this information, though Verge editor Dan Seifert says the one he's been using for years no longer works after updating his phone to... Continue reading...