The Verge

By lots of metrics, Gemini is winning. It has raced ahead of OpenAI, become scarily good at creating convincing imagery, and even won Apple's business. So last week's news that it was enabling something called Personal Intelligence felt like a victory lap. Personal Intelligence allows Gemini to reference past conversations and access your data in [...]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 113, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, please send hot cocoa to my freezing-cold house, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about private garbage collectors and vintage [...]

A dishwasher is a luxury item some people can't live without. It's one of the first major kitchen devices I bought just as soon as I could afford one, and the appliance I thought I'd miss most in my nomadic vanlife pursuits. Loch sent me its $459.99 / 459.99 countertop Capsule dishwasher to review in [...]

Internal documents revealed as part of a child safety lawsuit hint at Google's plan to "onboard kids" into its ecosystem by investing in schools. In this November 2020 presentation, Google writes that getting kids into its ecosystem "leads to brand trust and loyalty over their lifetime," as reported earlier by NBC News. The heavily-redacted documents, [...]

Intel and AMD have split the Windows laptop market for years, but the x86 players may be getting outnumbered. It's not just Apple MacBooks and MediaTek-based Chromebooks using Arm chips anymore. There are finally competent Qualcomm Snapdragon laptops running Windows, and - as soon as this spring - Nvidia will finally power Windows consumer laptops [...]

TikTok finally closed a deal meant to bring it into compliance with the law that should have banned it a year ago, and the lawmakers who passed that law still don't seem to know what's going on. The company announced Tuesday that its US service is now part of the separate TikTok USDS Joint Venture [...]

Meta is "temporarily pausing" the ability for teens to chat with its AI characters as it develops a "new version" of the characters that will offer a "better experience." The company made the announcement in an update to a blog post from October where the company had detailed more parental controls for teen AI use. [...]

TikTok is officially under new ownership in the US, and that could spell big changes for the video-sharing app. On January 22nd, ByteDance - TikTok's Chinese parent company - and a group of investors closed a $14 billion deal to spin off the platform's US operations, introducing a new slate of American executives. The Silver [...]

Casio showed up to NAMM (CES for music gear nerds) this year with a prototype sampler called the SX-C1 that looks every bit the lovechild of a Game Boy and an SP-404. The top has a directional pad and four buttons just like you'd find on a game controller, flanking a 1.3-inch OLED screen. But [...]

Where's the Trump Phone? We're going to keep talking about it every week. We've reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump Phone's whereabouts. As usual, we're still waiting for a response. In the meantime, it turns out we might have two Trump Phones to worry about. The Trump Phone may be no more [...]

Marshall has announced a new music streaming hub called the Heddon that can broadcast to multiple speakers using the Bluetooth Auracast feature that's finally starting to catch on. Similar to Sennheiser's BTA1 TV Transmitter announced earlier this week, the Heddon doesn't require wireless audio devices to go through a pairing process to stream audio, as [...]

If you're considering gifting the AirPods Pro 3 for Valentine's Day, now's a great time to pick them up. Today only, Best Buy is selling the noise-canceling earbuds for $199.99 ($50 off), matching their all-time low. For iPhone owners, nothing else really compares to the AirPods Pro 3. They deliver the best active noise cancellation [...]

Every week, more than 230 million people ask ChatGPT for health and wellness advice, according to OpenAI. The company says that many see the chatbot as an "ally" to help navigate the maze of insurance, file paperwork, and become better self-advocates. In exchange, it hopes you will trust its chatbot with details about your diagnoses, [...]

Most of the US is bracing for a prolonged stretch of frigid weather and a massive winter storm that could wreak havoc on roads and power grids over the next several days. At least 170 million Americans are under winter weather alerts. "Bitterly cold temperatures and dangerously cold wind chills" will linger even after the [...]

There aren't many tech companies that can claim Sony's level of influence in how we live our lives. From the Walkman to the PlayStation to the Trinitron, Sony has been making excellent gadgets in multiple categories for decades, which makes this week's news just a little sad. Sony's new joint venture with TCL isn't the [...]

Anbernic has announced its second wireless controller through a teaser video on YouTube highlighting its features. The company's first gamepad, the RG P01, offered features like Hall effect triggers and joysticks for just $18. Pricing for the new Anbernic RG G01 hasn't been revealed, but it may be more expensive due to several upgrades, including [...]

This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. Optimizer arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 10AM ET. Opt in for Optimizer here. On TikTok, it's disturbingly easy to find videos of [...]

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week. The leaders of the three preeminent frontier AI labs spent this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, taking shots at each other like candidates in a [...]

Tesla scrapped its Autopilot driver assist feature that used to come standard in new vehicles, as it attempts to steer customers to its newly subscription-only Full Self-Driving (FSD) system. According to Electrek, the company removed Basic Autopilot as a standard feature from new Model 3 and Model Y vehicles in North America. That means in [...]

In early December, I brought you the news that Google has begun replacing Verge headlines, and those of our competitors, with AI clickbait nonsense in its content feed. Google appeared to be backing away from the experiment, but now tells The Verge that its AI headlines in Google Discover are a feature, one that "performs [...]

Microsoft is giving its Paint and Notepad apps on Windows new AI capabilities for editing text and making digital illustrations. The updates are currently rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Windows 11 Canary and Dev channels, and include features that feel oddly niche or advanced for such simplified apps, such as AI text improvements [...]

Just over a year after it briefly disappeared from app stores, TikTok in the US is now part of a new entity, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. With approval from both the US and China closing on the schedule laid out in December, ByteDance's ownership of the new joint venture is now only 19.9 percent [...]

Ring has launched a new Ring Verify tool that the company says can "verify that Ring videos you receive haven't been edited or changed." But since Ring won't verify videos that have been altered in any way, it probably won't be able to verify those videos you see on TikTok that look like they're from [...]

In what world does Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake get canceled amid corporate restructuring and yet BG&E2 does not? "Beyond Good & Evil 2 remains a priority for us in the context of our strategy centered around Open World Adventures," an unnamed Ubisoft spokesperson told Kotaku and Insider Gaming. The original Beyond [...]

Unless you're dead set on picking up a larger panel, Samsung's forthcoming 2026 Frame lineup represents a fairly minor upgrade. That makes last year's model an easy rec for those on the hunt for an art-inspired 4K TV, especially given the 43- and 50-inch models are down to the lowest prices we've seen at Woot, [...]

After sharing a brief look at its new Talking Flower during a Nintendo Direct showcase last September that generated more questions than answers, Nintendo has finally revealed more details about what the interactive toy actually does and how much it costs. It shares some functionality with Nintendo's Alarmo alarm clock, but the Talking Flower seems [...]

Vimeo is laying off employees around the globe just months after the Italian software company Bending Spoons acquired the platform for $1.38 billion, as reported earlier by Business Insider. Even though it's not clear how many people were laid off, Dave Brown, Vimeo's former brand VP, says in a post on LinkedIn that "a large [...]

A judge is questioning whether Epic Games and Google are settling their long-running antitrust fight partly because of a previously unannounced partnership involving the Unreal Engine, Fortnite, and Android. In a hearing in San Francisco today, the court revealed that Epic and Google have struck a new deal that apparently includes "joint product development, joint [...]

Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) is pressing OpenAI about its move to bring ads to ChatGPT, and is asking several other companies whether they have similar plans. In letters to the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Snap, and xAI, Markey writes that embedding ads into AI chatbots "raises significant concerns for consumer protection, privacy, [...]

Tesla is finally doing unsupervised robotaxi trips in Austin, Texas, according to a video posted on X. Elon Musk reposted the video, congratulating Tesla's AI team for the milestone. For months, Tesla's robotaxis in Austin and San Francisco have included safety monitors with access to a kill switch in case of emergency - a fallback [...]

Ring's partnership with Flock is sparking renewed online backlash this week, with influencers calling for people to smash their Ring cameras and claiming the company is part of the surveillance state amid heightened concerns over ICE actions. Flock is an AI-powered surveillance camera company that has reportedly allowed government agencies - including ICE - to [...]

Substack announced Thursday it's launching Apple TV and Google TV apps that audiences can use for videos and livestreams - and early reactions suggest not all users are thrilled. Subscribers can watch videos and livestreams from creators they follow, but the app will also have a recommendations-based "For You" feed that mixes in other creators' [...]

The sun was already beginning to set as Portlanders in weatherproof jackets and fleeces lined up around Revolution Hall. It wasn't yet 5PM on a Wednesday but the crowd was gathering well before the town hall was scheduled to begin. Just a day earlier, news outlets reported that Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison had been [...]

In February, Amazon plans to roll out a much-needed revamp of Fire TV OS, one that seemingly takes a cue from Google's TV platform. The forthcoming UI redesign will introduce better organization, support for Alexa Plus, and quicker performance to the aging OS, the latter of which has been a crux of the platform's issues [...]

Xbox showed off new footage of its Fable reboot during its Developer Direct on Thursday and announced that the game is set to launch this autumn for Xbox, PC, and PS5. The new Fable is an open-world action RPG. In addition to letting you customize your character and your combat skills, you can also do [...]

Buying the right laptop can be stressful. It's likely one of the pricier tech purchases you'll make, and there are a ludicrous number of models, sizes, form factors, and configurations to pick from. We review a wide swath of them here at The Verge, and we're constantly considering what's best and who it's best for. [...]

Today, I am sitting in the courtroom that may decide the fate of Android. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney is here. Google Android boss Sameer Samat is here. Together, they'll try to convince Judge James Donato that they're no longer enemies - that Google's illegal monopoly on Android app stores can be resolved with a mutual [...]

It's been a bit of a wait, but a big new game from Pokemon developer Game Freak is almost here. During the Xbox Developer Direct showcase, the studio showed off more gameplay for its action RPG Beast of Incarnation, and confirmed that it will be launching in the summer of 2026 on the PS5, Xbox, [...]

Forza Horizon 6 will launch on Xbox Series X / S and PC on May 19th, Xbox and developer Playground Games announced during Thursday's Developer Direct showcase. If you preorder the Premium Edition, you can play starting May 15th. The game will come to PS5 later this year. The game has the largest map in [...]

In a now-annual tradition, Microsoft is kicking off the year with a showcase of some of its biggest upcoming games. Last year's edition of the Xbox Developer Direct had some big names, like Doom: The Dark Ages and a little game called Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. And we already know the three main titles that [...]

Sony is releasing a new turntable for the first time since 2019. Two, in fact. The entry-level PS-LX3BT ($399.99) and step-up PS-LX5BT ($499.99) are designed for easy operation with both wired and Bluetooth hi-res audio. Both turntables include one-button automatic playback - which starts the turntable, raises and lowers the tonearm on the vinyl, and [...]

This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week. When free TV startup Telly came out of stealth in 2023, it did so with big promises: Company executives told the media at the time that Telly would ship 500,000 [...]

Developers have been comparing the strengths and weaknesses of Anthropic's Claude Code, Anysphere's Cursor, and Microsoft's GitHub Copilot for months now, looking for a winner. While no individual AI coding tool manages to be the best at every task that software developers do each day, Claude Code is increasingly coming out on top for its [...]

Today's episode of Decoder is about X, Grok, and Elon Musk. By now we're several weeks into one of the worst, most upsetting, and most stupidly irresponsible AI controversies in the short history of generative AI. Grok, the chatbot made by Elon Musk's xAI, is able to make all manner of AI-generated images, including nonconsensual [...]

Google is helping AI Mode to provide more personalized responses in Search by allowing the chatbot to analyze your Gmail and Google Photos accounts. After launching for Gemini AI last week, "Personal Intelligence" is now coming to tailor AI Mode search results to your interests and daily life by gathering information from your emails and [...]

Two years ago, Lenovo introduced a collection of modular Magic Bay accessories for its ThinkBook 16p. They attached to a magnetic pin connector at the top of the laptop's display and added functionality like an improved 4K webcam, or LTE connectivity. The company has since expanded Magic Bay compatibility to more of its laptops and [...]

AMD announced an improved version of its popular Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor at CES earlier this month, and it's now confirming a release date and pricing today. The new Ryzen 7 9850X3D will debut on January 29th, priced at $499. That's $20 more than the initial retail pricing of the 9800X3D, and this faster 9850X3D [...]

A new tool aims to help AI chatbots generate more human-sounding text - with the help of Wikipedia's guide for detecting AI, as reported by Ars Technica. Developer Siqi Chen says he created the tool, called Humanizer, by feeding Anthropic's Claude the list of tells that Wikipedia's volunteer editors put together as part of an [...]

A successful phishing attack can cost a business an average of $4.8 million, according to research from IBM. To help reduce the risk of one succeeding, either at work or at home, 1Password is introducing a new phishing prevention feature that will watch for telltale signs of an attack, such as a website URL that's [...]

Waymo is kicking off the new year with a new city: Miami. Starting today, anyone on the company's waitlist of approximately 10,000 people can hail one of its robotaxis for trips within a 60-square-mile service area that includes popular neighborhoods like the Design District and Wynwood, Brickell, and Coral Gables - but not popular tourist [...]