The Verge

When it was revealed earlier this month that Withings would require new users to subscribe to a Withings Plus subscription to sync heath data from the company's devices to third-party apps, Tom Anthony, who was already fed up with the Withings mobile app which they describe as a "bloated mess," became motivated to "free" their [...]

The Joshua Kushner-led Thrive Holdings is acquiring ADT in an all-cash deal valued at $7.6 billion. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027 and will take ADT private, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. Joshua Kushner is the brother of President Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Thrive Holdings was founded last [...]

To anyone listening closely to what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been saying over the past couple of years, this week felt like the clearest sign yet that AI is about to fundamentally change the size of Microsoft's workforce. Microsoft is now offering voluntary buyouts to around 60,000 employees across the US, UK, Canada, and [...]

The New York Times is testing a new AI feature for its Cooking app that helps users to modify recipes, and it has sparked some drama among users. Last Friday, NYT Cooking senior editor Genevieve Ko announced the feature, which can be used to recommend substitutions for ingredients and cooking equipment, scale recipes to any [...]

The long-awaited remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Nintendo Switch 2 launches next Thursday, November 5th. In other words, you have a week remaining to secure your physical edition with a $10 discount at Amazon and Walmart. Once the game launches, the physical version will almost certainly go from $59.99 to [...]

Today on Decoder, I'm joined by Joey Brookhart, an analyst at the chip and AI research firm SemiAnalysis, to help me dig into the story inside the numbers of the Anthropic IPO filing - a document known as an S-1. Anthropic just filed its S-1 to go public on the Nasdaq, and it could start [...]

Amazon is adding several new features to its AI shopping assistant, including ways to create, edit, and move items between shopping lists and gift registries. As an example, Amazon says you can now ask Alexa for Shopping to "Create a new shopping list" or "Show me what's left on my wedding registry." The ecommerce giant [...]

After engineering a flexible version of Tetris that could be wrapped around a magazine, Kevin Bates' latest creation is a digital candle that uses a custom AI model to accurately simulate the appearance of a flickering flame across a grid of LEDs. It's a far cry from the types of devices Bates is typically known [...]

The Anthropic S-1 seems to have provided the financial justification for the company to spend as much as it possibly can on compute. If you are the kind of person who wonders if Anthropic is doing its level best to build a machine god while convincing Wall Street it's in the business of selling IT [...]

For more than 15 years, Apple has had a pretty simple answer to the idea of a touchscreen MacBook: no. Yesterday, Apple finally decided to think different and announce one anyway. "You've gotta touch it to believe it," says Apple CEO John Ternus. He might be right: I haven't yet touched it, and I still [...]

DoorDash has announced that it's buying Instacart in a deal valued at approximately $17 billion. The acquisition will give DoorDash a bigger presence in online grocery delivery thanks to Instacart's established grocery marketplace and retailer partnerships, with Instacart CEO Chris Rogers saying the deal will make "online grocery more seamless and affordable" for millions of [...]

On Tuesday, defense contractor Anduril and chipmaker Qualcomm announced a partnership to build laptops entirely in the United States, starting with a single model in 2027. They also announced a "long-term goal" of pushing the computer industry to create "a fully domestic supply chain." Even a single Made-in-USA laptop would be a surprise, because no [...]

Asked about AI and the trend of college students booing tech CEOs at graduation ceremonies, Instagram head Adam Mosseri acknowledged in an interview that a lot of people really don't like AI, and it's not just young people and creatives. Appearing on the Colin and Samir podcast to talk about the launch of widescreen and [...]

A hacker stole a trove of personal information from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The breach exposes the names, job titles, phone numbers, email addresses, and office locations of more than 41,000 employees, including those in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), according to TechCrunch and Wired. The [...]

The MPC Sample Key isn't even formally announced yet, but Akai is already showing off what the modding community is cooking up through vibe coding. Akai has decided to embrace the explosion of hackers and custom firmware developers by giving them early access to the device, which will have open-source firmware. It will likely run [...]

For the last several years, Readwise has been building tools for power readers. There's the eponymous product, Readwise, which stores and categorizes your Kindle highlights to help you remember what you've read. There's Readwise Reader, an app for reading newsletters, PDFs, and web articles you've saved for later. And now there's Readwise Books, a full-fledged [...]

Google parent company Alphabet says that its AI investments are leading to a big growth in searches year-over-year, as noted in its Q3 2026 earnings today. "Our AI investments are driving overall Search query growth, including commercial queries," CEO Sundar Pichai says in a statement. "In fact, our year-over-year query growth rate is the highest [...]

Microsoft just posted the first quarter of its 2027 fiscal financial results. The software maker made $92.3 billion in revenue and a net income of $33.6 billion during Q1. Revenue is up 19 percent, and net income has increased by 32 percent. It's a new financial year for Microsoft, so the company is changing up [...]

With an OLED display and touchscreen capabilities, it's no surprise that the new MacBook Pro Apple announced today is more expensive than the MBP announced earlier this year. But upgrading the base models that start at $2,899 for the 14-inch, and $3,399 for the 16-inch, with every premium hardware option that Apple offers pushes those [...]

Google has released its latest frontier model, Gemini 4 Carbon, offering "significant gains" in coding, agentic tasks, and cybersecurity. In an announcement on Wednesday, Google highlights Carbon's top spot on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (v5.0) benchmark, with Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra trailing behind. The new Gemini 4 Carbon model offers improvements over [...]

What do drones, routers, and Roombas have in common? The US government wants to keep Chinese ones from entering the country. They're the first consumer gadgets that are facing de facto import bans because of the US government's xenophobic stance - and they might not be the last. Originally, the US government was just worried [...]

Apple announced a new iPad Mini with a larger OLED display this week, and we've just gotten to try it out at Apple's "Pro and tell" event. It's an iPad for sure, but the new OLED on the Mini looks exceptional, and the optional nano-texture matte finish is awesome. The "Pro and tell" event venue [...]

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr announced the agency will vote on November 19th on rules that would allow prisons to use signal jamming. Radiofrequency jammers are generally banned under Section 333 and the Communications Act of 1934, with few exceptions, and Carr has noted they've been permitted for use at some federal facilities already. Carr claims [...]

Nearly two years after LG and Samsung announced at CES 2025 that their latest smart TVs would include access to Microsoft's Copilot, the company is ending support for the AI assistant's functionality on all TVs this year, according to a report by Windows Central. The news comes not from an official announcement from LG, Samsung, [...]

In this economy, how often does a product get less expensive before its debut? That just happened with the Google / Xreal Aura, the lightweight 95-gram glasses with a tethered Android XR compute puck and multiple virtual screens that just went on sale today. Xreal and Google have just announced the headset costs $1,099 through [...]

Apple finally showed off its 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops that have the PROLED XDR display at the October 2026 "Pro and Tell" event. The long-awaited laptops feature a Tandem OLED display with full touch capabilities, while also cutting some weight, and bringing back the glowing Apple logo. While a little less exciting, there's [...]

This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here. From afar, it's easy to look back at the Theranos debacle and scream at Nathan Fielder that, obviously, Elizabeth Holmes [...]

Touchscreen laptops are nothing new in the Windows world, but Apple has only just announced its first MacBook with a touchscreen. Apple isn't rushing to change a bunch of things in macOS to optimize for touch, though: Most of the touch action will be in the apps themselves, it seems. As far as major macOS [...]

Apple closed out its week of product announcements with a "Pro and Tell" event on Wednesday, where it took the wraps off its long-rumored touchscreen MacBook Pro. Though Apple may have saved its biggest and most exciting update for last, it revealed a few other device upgrades and updates in the days leading up to [...]

Apple just announced its first touchscreen MacBook at its "Pro and tell" event on Wednesday. It showed off the long-awaited touchscreen in a video of the new MacBook Pro during the event that you can watch right here to see the new display in action. The new MacBook Pro's PROLED XDR touch display is a [...]

Steve Jobs famously called touchscreen laptops "ergonomically terrible," and for over a decade, Apple stridently refused to make one. Today that all changes with the MacBook Pro - the company's first laptop to embrace a touch interface. While it's unlikely that Apple can fix all the "terrible" ergonomics of having to lift your arm up [...]

Apple's smallest tablet is getting a bigger screen. Earlier this week, the company announced the eighth-generation iPad Mini alongside several new MacBook Pro models, bringing OLED technology to Apple's miniature tablet for the first time. The diminutive slate won't hit shelves until November 6th; however, you can already preorder it from Amazon, Walmart, Apple, and [...]

Apple has already had a busy week. On Monday, it announced a new iPad Mini with an upgraded OLED display, and on Tuesday, we got M6 chip upgrades for the MacBook Pro and iMac. The Macs are the definition of iterative updates - they're quiet refreshes that look just like their direct predecessors. But today [...]

Apple's Pro and tell" event kicks off at 1PM ET / 10AM PT on October 28th. The event comes just a couple of weeks after Apple debuted the HomeView, its first smart display, and a little over a month after it announced the iPhone Duo, its first foldable. Its next event could feature yet another [...]

Meta says it may push the implementation of its new business terms past November 20th as it faces backlash from publishers over concerns about AI training. In a post on X, Meta communications head Andy Stone said the company does "not plan to make policy changes without a full consultation with industry groups and leaders." [...]

Reddit is switching up its homepage feeds. The company announced today that it's going to start offering a "new feed experience" that includes both a Following feed to show you posts from subreddits you follow and a For You feed that includes posts from your subreddits and "recommendations related to your interests." You may already [...]

Halloween isn't even here yet, but it's never too early to start thinking about holiday decorations, especially when there are already deals on smart, programmable lights. If you want your house, tree, fireplace, or whatever else to stand out this year, Govee's Christmas String Lights 2 are on sale starting at $74.99 ($25 off) at [...]

Sony announced a new Prism Collection line of PlayStation 5 accessories today that revisits "the iconic see-through trend of the late '90s in a fresh, modern way" for its DualSense wireless controllers and matching console covers for the PS5 that reveal some of their internal components. The Prism Collection is launching with three color options [...]

It's hard to make an Xbox controller that stands out these days, especially one that's expensive, due to a wealth of great semi-affordable options. Still, 8BitDo's $150 Ultimate 3E is a bold controller that holds its own against other feature-packed options. It's made for Xbox and PC gamers who want a deeper level of customization [...]

The MacBook Neo now starts at $649 on Apple's Education Store, up $150 from its initial $499 education starting price. As reported earlier by MacRumors, the student discount for the Neo received a $50 price bump in recent days, following a $100 price bump back in June. Apple's budget MacBook is now just $50 off [...]

A subsidiary of Elon Musk's xAI is offering to buy up homes in a Mississippi neighborhood, as long as residents don't join a lawsuit targeting the company's nearby data center and power plant, according to a report from The Guardian. A realtor going door-to-door in the Southaven neighborhood reportedly told one resident that xAI plans [...]

Virgin Galactic's new spaceship is here, dubbed "Apeiron" by popular vote from a public poll. Apeiron is the first of the company's new Delta-class spacecraft, but it isn't slated to launch for nearly another year. Earlier this week, Virgin Galactic announced another delay in its launch timeline: The lead Spaceship's first commercial spaceflight is now [...]

After Elon Musk warned that "advertisers who post ads that are ugly, shrill, strident or overstate claims about their product will be barred from advertising" on X earlier this month, the platform now appears to be using a jarring animated arm that reaches across the screen to draw attention to the "promote" button while users [...]

TikTok is launching an in-app restaurant guide in a challenge to other platforms like Yelp and even Google Maps. The company on Wednesday announced the launch of Must Eat, a new section of the TikTok app built on 40 million posts, reviews, and comments about dining on the platform. The new feature uses videos and [...]

Amazon swapped its usual big fall hardware showcase this year for a series of smaller launches throughout October. So far this month, it has announced new Fire TV devices, new Kindles, the Alexa Tablet Pro 12, Ring's first smart lock, new hardware from AI-wearable startup Bee, and new Blink 4K cameras. Then this week, it [...]

Amazon used to blast out dozens of products onstage at annual hardware events. If this October is any indication, the company has wisely changed its strategy to put more focus on each new product with its own launch. The latest round of launches focuses on Echo products, including speakers, smart displays, as well as a [...]

Amazon had plenty of new gadgets to share at its Echo hardware event this year, along with updates to the AI-powered Alexa Plus after it became available to everyone in the US in February. But the big news this year is screens: devices with big, beautiful ones, and those that lack them entirely. There's the [...]

Amazon has just taken the wraps off a bunch of new devices as part of a string of fall announcements. Today's news focuses largely on new Echo speakers, with a few new smart home gadgets sprinkled in. Here's a roundup of all of the updates Amazon revealed on Wednesday. Echo Show 16 adds a larger [...]

Kroger's $1.65 billion proposed acquisition of Giant Eagle might not only consolidate the grocery market, but also a vast surveillance network that includes Flock cameras, a new report warns. Beyond standard concerns that a merger could decrease competition and increase prices, the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), which advocates for competition policy reforms, says that [...]

Amazon is giving its premium smart speaker a camera. The new Echo Studio with Home Camera, announced today as part of Amazon's big blast of announcements, has a built-in camera for monitoring a room while you're away, showing things to Alexa, and, soon, to use with video calls on Fire TV devices. It's an iteration [...]