The Verge

The life-changing magic of adopting a decade-old technology. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge I’ve used every new flagship phone from Apple, Samsung, and Google this year, and they’re great! But they’re also boring. They’re impressive feats of engineering and software smarts, but they’re mostly incremental upgrades. And none of them has changed my day-to-day life as much as finally getting a smartwatch.I know. I’m an extremely late adopter. Even as they popped up all around me as friends bought them over the past… er, decade… I didn’t think smartwatch life was for me. Why give your phone another way to beg for your attention? Besides, my phone and I had a good thing going, and I didn’t want to introduce another piece of technology into the relationship.Then I had a kid. Suddenly, I always seemed to be holding a baby, or... Continue reading…

Tuca and Bertie driving in a car. | Image: Adult Swim Adult Swim swooped in to bring Lisa Hanawalt’s Tuca & Bertie back from the dead following Netflix’s move to cancel the animated series in 2019 after just one season. After spending two seasons on its new network, though, Adult Swim is following in Netflix’s footsteps and pulling the plug on the show about two bird-women trying to make it in the big city.Hanawalt took to her Twitter account last night to announce Adult Swim’s decision to cancel Tuca & Bertie and thank her fans for their vocal support of the show, which likely played a role in its initial resurrection. Hanawalt said that her time with Adult Swim had been “very creatively fulfilling” and sang the praises of the network’s executives for giving her the time and space to make... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge This week, Amazon announced that it would open up its entire catalog of streaming music to Prime subscribers instead of the limited, downsized library they’d previously had access to. The number skyrocketed from 2 million songs up to 100 million. On its face, that sounds like great news. Who wouldn’t want more songs without spending anything extra on top of their Prime subscription? Normally, you’d need to pay separately for Amazon Music Unlimited to get the same enormous selection.But it turns out there are people who are very angry about the changes that Amazon made in the course of beefing up its catalog for Prime customers. As a total, lifelong music geek, I can relate to anyone freaking out because a service they were familiar... Continue reading…

See your family’s Tile trackers within the Life360 app. | Image: Life360 Family locator and safety service company Life360 is adding the ability to display Tile tracker locations in its app. The new feature’s rollout starts today, and it will let subscribers view not only their family members on a map but also the locations of their Tile-tagged items so they can keep everything and everyone in check. All users should get the update in the next few weeks.Once it’s available on their account, Life360 users will be able to link new and existing Tile Bluetooth trackers and choose the family and friend circles that can access the location for things like keys, wallets, water bottles, medicine bags, and more.In a press release, Life360 CEO and co-founder Chris Hulls said that linking Tile to Life360’s app adds... Continue reading…

Musk and his advisers are weighing cuts that would affect nearly 4,000 people. | Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images Twitter employees have been bracing for layoffs since Elon Musk officially took over the company, and details are starting to trickle out about how many people could be affected. Wednesday evening, The Verge’s Alex Heath reports that Musk is meeting with advisors, including fellow former PayPal exec David Sacks, and finalizing a plan to lay off approximately 3,800 employees, while Bloomberg reported that 3,700 would be cut.According to Bloomberg, the plan is for employees to be informed about the layoffs on Friday, and affected workers could be given 60 days of severance pay. Musk is also planning to end Twitter’s policy that allowed employees to work from home “forever,” Bloomberg reports. This would line up with text messages we’ve... Continue reading…

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta has announced that it’s testing minting and selling NFTs on Instagram, like you can with many traditional NFT marketplaces, with a “small group of creators in the US” getting access to the feature first. The company’s also expanding Instagram’s NFT showcase feature, which it recently made available to users in over 100 countries. The announcement comes among news of several new ways for creators to make money on its platforms.Meta says its digital collectibles toolkit will let people create NFTs on the Polygon blockchain (as always, no relation to Polygon the video game news outlet) and then sell them either on Instagram or off the platform. When it comes to displaying NFTs that you’ve purchased elsewhere, the company says you can... Continue reading…

Musk might be charging for verification, but he’s reportedly going to give the edit feature to all users. | Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images Twitter’s edit feature only turned from myth to something people could actually use in October, but it might be available to everyone very soon. In what might be one of the first big product changes under Elon Musk’s Twitter regime, the company will be opening up the edit feature to all users as early as this week, according to Bloomberg.Currently, tweet editing is locked behind the company’s soon-to-change $4.99 Twitter Blue subscription that’s only available for users in a few countries, and Twitter has stressed that the edit feature is technically still in testing. Musk seems to think it’s ready for everyone and is also planning a big overhaul of Twitter Blue that could be rolled out in the coming days.Central to the new $... Continue reading…

The new Arlo Pro 5S 2K camera. | Image: Arlo Arlo has announced its new Pro 5S 2K security camera, which offers features like dual-band Wi-Fi for versatile connectivity, a 160-degree viewing angle, 2K resolution with HDR, a spotlight and siren built-in, and 30 percent longer battery life than the previous Pro 4. It’s now available for preorder at Best Buy and Arlo’s website for $249.99, and it will ship by December 6th.The new camera can also securely connect to Arlo’s new home security system, which was announced at CES earlier this year, thanks to the company’s encrypted SecureLink wireless technology. The full security system comes with a keypad that doubles as a motion sensor, and wirelessly talks to impressive all-in-one sensor units that detect open doors and windows,... Continue reading…

Qualcomm will be making a bunch of chips for iPhones next year. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple will once again rely on Qualcomm modems for its 2023 iPhones, Qualcomm said on its Q4 2022 earnings call, meaning that we’ll be waiting a little while longer for Apple to introduce its long-rumored custom 5G modem.Nikkei reported in 2021 that Apple was looking to introduce its own 5G modem in partnership with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) in 2023, and Qualcomm had previously assumed that it would account for 20 percent of modem orders of the 2023 iPhones. However, on Wednesday’s call, Qualcomm CFO Akash Palkhiwala said that the company now expects to “have the vast majority of share of 5G modems for the 2023 iPhone launch.”Apple bought “the majority” of Intel’s smartphone modem business three months after its s... Continue reading…

Fire tablets and other Alexa-enabled gadgets are currently on sale at Amazon. | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge It’s Alexa’s birthday, and to celebrate, Amazon is discounting a wide range of its smart home products, including Echo devices, Fire TVs, Blink video doorbell systems, and Fire tablets. We’ve outlined a few highlights here that we think are worth checking out. Of course, plenty of other retailers are already kicking off early Black Friday sales, too, if you’re looking for discounts outside of the Amazon ecosystem.The best Amazon Fire tablet dealsFirst up, we have some excellent deals on a number of Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets. The standard ad-supported model of the 32GB Kindle Fire HD 8 is normally priced at $89.99 but is currently discounted to $44.99, matching the best price we’ve seen for the tablet. You’ll also find a... Continue reading…

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge OpenSea has announced it will start freezing sales for NFTs that it suspects have been stolen in an attempt to stop scammers and hackers from flipping ill-gotten tokens. In a blog post on Wednesday, the company said it’s “beginning to test a new system” that will mark NFTs caught up in suspicious transactions as “under review,” blocking people from buying them using the platform.Anne Fauvre-Willis, OpenSea’s VP of operations, marketplace, and integrity, tells Decrypt that the system will look at “a number of industry data sources,” as well as how the NFT was transferred out of the owner’s wallet and what else the wallets involved had going on around the time of the transfer. If it flags a transaction as suspicious, it’ll alert the NFT’s... Continue reading…

Illustration by Laura Normand / The Verge It’s been six days since Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter, and the changes have been both furious and fast. He’s proposed cataclysmic layoffs — somewhere between 50 percent and 75 percent of the company’s staff, depending on which reports bear out. He’s established an entirely new user tier, in which users will pay $8 a month (formerly $20) to receive algorithm boosts and the prestige of verification. He’s also proposed a paywall feature for videos and there are rumors of a plan for paid direct messages.The ideas have come so fast that it’s hard to keep track of it all, let alone parse a coherent strategy. But if you take a few steps back, there’s a fairly straightforward theme: Twitter needs to make money and fast. The ideas have... Continue reading…

The limited-edition 911 Soundbar 2.0 Pro weighs a whopping 143 pounds and features a real Porsche 992 GT3 exhaust. | Image: Porsche Design Would you buy a $12,000 speaker? Okay, probably not, but would you buy one if it were built into a genuine Porsche 992 GT3 exhaust? The Porsche 911 Soundbar 2.0 Pro is an impractical (but nonetheless rad) custom 2.1.2-channel Dolby Atmos-capable speaker from Porsche Design that’s done just that (via What Hi-Fi, TweakTown).The 300-watt soundbar features a 4K passthrough HDMI port and can double as a wireless music system thanks to its support for Bluetooth 5.0, Apple AirPlay 2, Google Chromecast, and Spotify Connect. While it certainly makes this a statement piece, that exhaust also comes with a hefty caveat: the product weighs in at almost 144 pounds, so you’ll want to invest in a suitably sturdy surface to place the Porsche 911... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Paramount chief financial officer Naveen Chopra said on an earnings call Wednesday that the company sees “opportunities to increase price on Paramount Plus” and that we’ll see it “do that in the future.” The ad-supported version of Paramount Plus currently costs $4.99 per month (or $49.99 per year), while the commercial-free Premium plan costs $9.99 per month (or $99.99 per year).If the service does end up raising its price in the US, it won’t be alone. Apple TV Plus just increased its price from $4.99 to $6.99 per month, while Hulu went up from $6.99 to $7.99 per month for its ad-supported plan and jumped from $12.99 to $14.99 per month for its ad-free plan.Netflix raised prices earlier this year ahead of the launch of its new... Continue reading…

The X-T5 will feel a lot like home to Fujifilm loyalists. The new X-T5 mirrorless camera is a bit of an apology letter from Fujifilm to its fans, who disliked the video-focused features creeping into their favorite photo camera line. Where the X-T4 got a little bloated in size and featured a flip-out screen better equipped for video, the new X-T5 pares things down to put still-image capture at the forefront.The X-T5 is smaller and lighter than the previous model, and it borrows the 40-megapixel APS-C sensor, fifth-gen X Processor, subject-detection autofocus, and seven-stop in-body image stabilization from the pro-oriented X-H2. This new camera costs the same as its predecessor, as it will sell for $1,699.95 for the body in silver or black when it launches November 17th. Alongside it is a new... Continue reading…

Illustration by Shira Inbar Moderation laws. Book bans. Courts that keep getting played. America’s politicians are tired of the First Amendment getting in their way, and no one seems to care. Continue reading…

Jake Sully riding on the back of one of Pandora’s fantastical animals. | 20th Century Studios The Na’vi of James Cameron’s Avatar movies are a peaceful, nature-loving people who live in harmony with most all of the creatures that live and thrive on the planet Pandora. But in the latest trailer for Avatar: The Way of Water, the Na’vi’s spiritual reverence for their world comes with a side of militant readiness as their people prepare to go to war to protect their homes.Avatar: The Way of Water’s new trailer features a bevy of gorgeous new shots from the film that showcase just how central Pandora’s oceans and aquatic life will be to its story of how Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) have started a family in the years following the first Avatar.Throughout the trailer, you can see brief glimpses of their son... Continue reading…

Image: Nvidia In case you missed it (because lord knows we did), Nvidia is currently running a sale on the Priority tier of its GeForce Now cloud game streaming service. Until November 20th, a six-month subscription to the tier costs $29.99, a 40 percent discount compared to the usual $49.99 price. The promotion is available to “new users and existing ones upgrading from a free or one-month Priority Membership, as well as for those who are on an active promotion or gift card,” according to Nvidia.Priority is the middle subscription tier of GeForce Now. Paying for it raises the maximum session length to six hours, up from the one hour you get on the free tier. It also offers resolutions of up to 1080p and frame rates of up to 60fps. For 4K / 120fps,... Continue reading…