The Verge

You can use your iPhone to drown out distractions with peaceful white noise by following a few steps. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge There’s nothing quite like settling into a hotel room bed and dozing off to sleep — only to be woken up by the sound of your neighbor in the room next door trimming their nails at a hundred decibels or doing some late-night furniture rearranging.For just these kinds of occasions, seasoned travelers will sometimes pack a travel white noise machine or use an app to help get a little peace. But if you’re carrying an iPhone running iOS 15, you’ve already got a white noise feature built right into your phone’s operating system. Here’s how to set it up. (For this article, I used an iPhone 11 running iOS 15.4.1.)

Qualcomm Qualcomm is introducing a wireless version of its augmented reality Smart Viewer, a reference design that manufacturers could adapt into commercial headsets. The Wireless AR Smart Viewer updates Qualcomm’s earlier smart glasses design with a higher-powered chipset, plus a tethering system that uses Wi-Fi 6 / 6E and Bluetooth instead of a USB-C cable. That comes with the tradeoff of a potentially very short battery life — although Qualcomm says consumer-ready versions might be designed differently.The new Smart Viewer was developed by Goertek. It’s currently available to a few manufacturing partners with plans to expand access in the coming months. Like its predecessor, it connects to a phone or computer and delivers mixed reality... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Canada has banned the use of Huawei and fellow Chinese tech giant ZTE’s equipment in its 5G networks, its government has announced. In a statement, it cited national security concerns for the move, saying that the suppliers could be forced to comply with “extrajudicial directions from foreign governments” in ways that could “conflict with Canadian laws or would be detrimental to Canadian interests.”Telcos will be prevented from procuring new 4G or 5G equipment from the companies by September this year, and must remove all ZTE- and Huawei-branded 5G equipment from their networks by June 28th, 2024. Equipment must also be removed from 4G networks by the end of 2027. “The Government is committed to maximizing the social and economic... Continue reading…

The LG CineBeam HU915QE has an excellent excellent 0.19 throw ratio. | Image: LG LG just took the wraps off a new flagship CineBeam ultra-short throw (UST) projector, model HU915QE. The 4K three-channel laser projector blasts a super bright 3,700 ANSI lumen image that measures 100 inches when placed just 9.8cm (3.9 inches) from a wall, thanks to an excellent 0.19 throw ratio.Other UST projectors like the AWOL LTV-3500 require a distance of 24.9cm (9.8 inches) to achieve that same 100-inch diagonal picture size. And while that might not sound like a large span, it can easily exceed the width of common sideboards where the projector will live.Better yet, you can place the new LG CineBeam 18.3cm (7.2 inches) from an Ambient Light Rejection (ALR) screen for a giant 120-inch picture with improved contrast (to make the... Continue reading…

The ball is designed for you to put the entire charging case in it. | Image: Samsung Samsung has released a Pokémon-themed poké ball case for its Galaxy Buds true wireless earbuds in South Korea. It’s the perfect accessory for anyone who’d prefer their charging case to look dope as hell rather than to be able to easily fit in their pocket. Gizmodo reports that the case is a limited edition, and it also appears to be exclusive to South Korea where it costs 134,000 won (around $105).Unlike a very similar wireless earbud charging case that Razer released in 2020, Samsung’s poké ball doesn’t appear to be charging its earbuds directly. Instead, the idea is that you put the regular charging case for your Galaxy Buds 2, Galaxy Buds Pro, or Galaxy Buds Live (aka the Galaxy Beans) inside the poké ball, where it’s presumably... Continue reading…

“We wanna enhance the here and now.” | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg can’t catch a break — everyone just keeps saying that they don't want to live in the metaverse. This week, it’s Amazon’s head of devices David Limp, who said that he doesn’t want to live in a virtual world 24/7, or even a few hours a day.Limp expressed similar views when interviewed last month by the Financial Times, where he spent most of his time espousing his vision of ambient computing — the idea that the computer is everywhere — as he’s been keen to do over the last year and change.While speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything Festival, Limp was asked what he was thinking about the metaverse. He said that while he does believe that there’ll be “some form of place-shifting” in... Continue reading…

The Meta sign outside the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge A Meta executive told employees on Thursday that they are prohibited from talking about abortion on Workplace, an internal version of Facebook, citing “an increased risk” that the company is seen as a “hostile work environment.”The policy, which Meta put in place in 2019 but hasn’t been reported until now, prohibits employees from discussing “opinions or debates about abortion being right or wrong, availability or rights of abortion, and political, religious, and humanitarian views on the topic,” according to a section of the company’s internal “Respectful Communication Policy” seen by The Verge. Some employees have called on management to do away with the policy in the aftermath of a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion that would... Continue reading…

Photo by PATRICK PLEUL/POOL/AFP via Getty Images SpaceX reportedly paid a flight attendant $250,000 to ensure she didn’t speak out or sue the company after Elon Musk allegedly exposed himself and propositioned her for sex, according to a report from Business Insider. In response, Musk took to Twitter to call the accusations “utterly untrue.”Content warning: The following story contains descriptions of sexual misconduct. If you need immediate support, you can contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline by going to online.rainn.org or by calling 1-800-656-4673.According to one of the flight attendant’s friends, the alleged victim worked as a crew member on a SpaceX corporate flight. During one of the flights, the attendant told her friend, Musk asked her for a full body massage in his... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / Th Google has released its annual diversity report, and the company says it made some positive progress over the past year. The company saw its “largest increases in representation of Black and Latinx Googlers in the US ever” at 20 percent and 8 percent respectively year over year, according to chief diversity officer Melonie Parker. Google also reported improved leadership representation of Black, Latinx and Native American employees by 27 percent, Parker says.But some data shows there is still more work to be done. The company’s US workforce is 33.5 percent women and 66.5 percent men, numbers that are only slightly different than the 32.2 percent women and 67.8 percent men reported in 2021. And in its 2022 report, Google said 48.3... Continue reading…

Boeing’s Starliner capsule launches on May 19, 2022 | NASA Nearly two and a half years after its first launch didn’t go to plan, Boeing’s new passenger spacecraft, the CST-100 Starliner, successfully launched to space this afternoon, reaching the right orbit it needed to achieve to rendezvous with the International Space Station tomorrow evening. The successful launch marks the beginning of a crucial test flight for Starliner that will play out over the next week in space, one that will help demonstrate if the capsule is capable of carrying humans to space one day.Starliner is a private spacecraft that Boeing developed in partnership with NASA, primarily to help transport the agency’s astronauts to and from the International Space Station in low Earth orbit. The capsule is one of two vehicles,... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Reuters reports TikTok is testing games for the app in Vietnam ahead of a “major push” into the space. A company representative confirmed tests of HTML5 mini-games, saying, “We’re always looking at ways to enrich our platform and regularly test new features and integrations that bring value to our community.”The outlet’s sources indicate the plan is for ad-supported games that draw from the library of its parent company, ByteDance, which could boost revenue and increase the amount of time people spend on the TikTok app — if that’s even possible. Image: Zynga Disco Loco 3D TikTok has already tried at least one in-app mini-game, as it teamed up with Feeding America to make Garden of Good, a FarmVille-like... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In the coming weeks, Google will begin beta testing a feature for Android 13 that makes it easier for users of braille displays to get up and running. Google announced in a blog post on Thursday that the next Android 13 beta will include “out-of-the-box support” for braille displays. Braille displays are used to create pin patterns to touch-read on-screen text and also type in braille. The display allows people with deafblindness to use smartphones and people who are blind to silently use mobile phones without screen readers or voice commands.Braille display support was already available on Android with Google’s screen reader Talkback, but now you won’t have to install another app first to access the feature. Braille display users will... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge The Steam Deck just spent five weeks at number one on Valve’s top seller list — on top of the five weeks it spent at number two. As one of the most affordable gaming PCs ever made, the $400-plus machine has clearly captured the attention of those who’d been waiting for a Switch-like portable gaming PC. But what of the companies that were already making Switch-like portable gaming PCs? They now have their chance at revenge.That’s because all of the Steam Deck’s chief rivals — GPD, Aya, and OneXPlayer — have now confirmed they’re building handhelds around AMD’s Ryzen 6000U chips. And the 6800U, with its integrated Radeon 680M graphics, reportedly has the potential to squash the semi-custom Aerith SoC at the heart of the Steam Deck. ... Continue reading…

Intake fans on collector containers at the ‘Orca’ direct air capture and storage facility, operated by Climeworks AG, in Hellisheidi, Iceland, on Tuesday, Sept. 7, 2021. | Arnaldur Halldorsson/Bloomberg via Getty Images The Department of Energy (DOE) just launched a new $3.5 billion program to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it away. The program focuses on developing four “hubs” across the country focused on direct air capture, the technology that draws CO2 out of the air.Each of the hubs is ultimately supposed to be able to capture and store at least a million metric tons of CO2. That’s a massive endeavor. Currently, all the direct air capture facilities in the world only have the capacity to capture about 0.01 million metric tons of CO2.Today, the DOE filed a Notice of Intent — a kind of official “heads-up” — that says that they’ll be making a funding announcement related to those hubs “in the fourth quarter of Fiscal Year... Continue reading…

The feature is available on the Mach-E. | Photo by Andrew Hawkins / The Verge Anyone lucky enough to get an F-150 Lightning in the next few months will find that one of the features they may have opted for is missing: the ability to unlock and control the electric truck using a phone. According to screenshots of Special Service Message notices and in-app messages posted to the Lightning Owners’ Forum, Ford will be rolling out support for its Phone as a Key system in “late summer 2022” via a software update instead of shipping it with the truck at launch.Ford’s Phone as a Key system lets you use its FordPass app to unlock and start your vehicle, as well as control various things like the windows, lights, and front trunk. What makes the delay slightly puzzling is that this isn’t new tech from Ford — the company... Continue reading…

Charlie Cox as Daredevil in Netflix’s Daredevil series. | Image: Disney Plus The Defender who first headlined Netflix’s partnership with Marvel is coming back in a new Disney Plus series.Variety reports that Matt Corman (The Brave, Deck the Halls) and Chris Ord (The Enemy Within) have signed on to write a new Daredevil series that could delve into what Matt Murdock was up to in the time after Netflix’s Daredevil show came to an end in 2018. The news comes in the wake of Charlie Cox reprising his role as Daredevil in Spider-Man: No Way Home and all of Netflix’s Marvel shows migrating over to Disney Plus earlier this year. While there’s currently no word on whether this new series will directly address the events of the Netflix series, it stands to reason that it would given Vincent D’Onofrio’s reprisal of his... Continue reading…

What show is in the box? | Image: Netflix Netflix is introducing a new “mystery box” feature that’s intended to help kids discover new shows. Basically, it sounds like a kids-themed take on Netflix’s “Play Something” button, and it seems to take inspiration from the very popular trend of unwrapping toys.On “TVs around the world,” Netflix will add a sparkly icon with a question mark in the favorites row of a kid’s profile, according to a blog post about the feature. “Hover over the sparkly ‘mystery box’ to discover a title that is ‘new for you’! And voila, it’s showtime,” TJ Marston, Netflix’s director of product innovation for kids and family, said in the post.Netflix has steadily been investing in the version of its service for kids with things like a profile redesign, the T... Continue reading…

Santa Monica Studio In celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Santa Monica Studio is showing off a bunch of the new accessibility features for God of War Ragnarok, including a new audio descriptive version of the game’s announcement trailer.All of the accessibility options from God of War have been brought forward, and new features have been added to Ragnarok, resulting in over 60 adjustable settings. A selection of the features described includes auto sprint, subtitle / caption size and color, as well as a high contrast mode that’ll make characters more visible against backgrounds. There’s also a neat feature that’ll sound audio cues whenever an interactable object is nearby. In God of War, there were several times when it was not obvious... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge I once picked up a Chromebook that hadn’t been used for a while in order to try out what was then a relatively new Chrome OS feature: virtual desktops. But when I hit the key that was supposed to bring those desktops up on my screen, I didn’t see anything. I did some checking around, and I found that the feature was expected to be available as of version 77 of Chrome OS — several iterations after the version I was running.While Chromebooks pretty much run on their own, and you can usually ignore which version of the operating system your device is running, you may want to have that information available just in case you do need it. All you have to do is follow these steps:

It may not come in time for WWDC, though. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple showed a mixed reality headset capable of both augmented and virtual reality to its board of directors last week and has engineers hard at work on an operating system for the device, according to a report from Bloomberg. The story notes that while this doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll see a headset announced at WWDC next month, it may indicate that an announcement is drawing closer.Bloomberg says there’s historical precedent for the board seeing devices shortly before an announcement. Apple’s board reportedly got an early demo of Siri in 2011.It also makes sense that Apple wouldn’t want to go all in on software development until the hardware is close to completion, so it knows what features and software to build. To that point, B... Continue reading…

Eric Migicovsky’s dream: an iPhone Mini but with Android. | Image: Eric Migicovsky Eric Migicovsky, who founded and helmed the Pebble smartwatch company and who’s working on a chat app that will bring iMessage to Android, has a new quest: getting someone, anyone, to make an Android phone you can actually use in one hand. He wants to, as he put it in an interview with The Verge, “unionize” a community of small phone lovers to get sway with phone manufacturers and suppliers.To do that, he’s built a site — smallandroidphone.com — that explains his dream phone. Basically, he wants a flagship that’s the size and shape of the iPhone Mini but running stock Android. The site argues that small phones are good, actually, and it asks like-minded people to essentially sign a petition. Migicovsky says he’s looking for 50,000 or... Continue reading…

The latest video game sales event for Epic substitutes a flat discount for 25 percent off. | Image: Epic Games Epic is starting up another sales promotion for PC games available through its Epic Games Store. The Epic Mega Sale runs from today until June 16th at 11AM ET / 8AM PT and encompasses an unlimited-use 25 percent off digital coupon. This coupon stacks on top of ongoing sale prices, though you can’t use it on titles priced below $14.99. Epic is also releasing four free mystery games each Thursday during the promotional period, the first of which is Borderlands 3.If you’ve seen or participated in previous sales events on the Epic Games Store, this may feel very familiar. A notable departure from those deals is that the coupon now offers a 25 percent discount, where it had previously provided a flat $10 off. With that change, this new Mega... Continue reading…

These budget earbuds don’t disappoint for their under $40 price Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The US Department of Justice says it won’t subject “good-faith security research” to charges under anti-hacking laws, acknowledging long-standing concerns around the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Prosecutors must also avoid charging people for simply violating a website’s terms of service — including minor rule-breaking like embellishing a dating profile — or using a work-related computer for personal tasks.The new DOJ policy attempts to allay fears about the CFAA’s broad and ambiguous scope following a 2021 Supreme Court ruling that encouraged reading the law more narrowly. The ruling warned that government prosecutors’ earlier interpretation risked criminalizing a “breathtaking amount of commonplace computer activity,” laying... Continue reading…

Second Dinner Hot off the heels of Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness comes a new game from Marvel Entertainment that offers the same flavor of throwing everybody from everywhere in a big ole pot, shaking, and seeing what kind of shenanigans come out.Marvel Snap is a new collectible card game that its creators claim has some of the fastest gameplay in the CCG space. According to the announcement video, matches only last about three minutes, and players take their turns simultaneously so there’s no waiting for your opponent to just finally figure out they have lethal and kill you already.Marvel Snap matches seem to be based around arranging cards under one of three areas on the board in order to take control of them. The player who takes... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro On Thursday, Twitter announced a new policy for dealing with misinformation during a period of crisis, establishing new standards for gating or blocking the promotion of certain tweets if they are seen as spreading misinformation.“Content moderation is more than just leaving up or taking down content,” explained Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, in a blog post detailing the new policy, “and we’ve expanded the range of actions we may take to ensure they’re proportionate to the severity of the potential harm.”The new policy puts particular scrutiny on false reporting of events, false allegations involving weapons or use of force, or broader misinformation regarding atrocities or international response.Hoax tweets and... Continue reading…

Cazzie David as Jayme, Justin H. Min as Ben Hargreeves, Christopher, and Jake Epstein as Alphonso. | Netflix The Umbrella Academy’s second season followed the Hargreeves siblings into the not too distant past where they narrowly managed to prevent a doomsday scenario that would have turned the future into yet another apocalypse. Though the siblings believed they’d put everything right enough as they returned to their own time, The Umbrella Academy’s first season 3 trailer illustrates just how wrong they were.It’s unclear what about the Hargreeves’ actions in the past led to their timelines splitting and made it possible for them to travel into an alternate, unfamiliar reality where the Umbrella Academy was never founded by their adoptive father Sir Reginald (Colm Feore). Rather than the Umbrella Academy of their youths, Luther (Tom Hopper),... Continue reading…

If you’re a Pokémon fan, loading up on some of the more recent titles for the Nintendo Switch doesn’t have to cost a fortune. Sadly, Pokémon Legends Arceus isn’t looped into this $20 off deal (although it is $10 off at Amazon), but these other games should help you get your gotta-catch-em-all fix for less. Best Buy and Amazon are each discounting Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl (the remakes of Diamond and Pearl, originally released for the Nintendo DS in 2006) for $39.99 each.The biggest upgrade to these games is the full 3D treatment, though it plays a lot like those original titles. For people who don’t like to grind XP to level up each pokémon individually, you may be happy to know that these remakes have EXP share,... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Thursday, a group of Senate Republicans and Democrats introduced a new bill that could force Google and Facebook’s parent company, Meta, to spin off their online ads businesses, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal.The Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising Act — co-sponsored by Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) — would ban companies processing more than $20 billion a year in digital ad transactions from running more than one portion of the digital advertising ecosystem.The restrictions would directly impact Google, which tech antitrust hawks have long seen as a vertical monopoly in display advertising. Omidyar Network advisor David Dinielli made the... Continue reading…

Boeing’s Starliner capsule on the launchpad | (NASA/Joel Kowsky) Thursday afternoon, Boeing is slated to launch its passenger spacecraft, the CST-100 Starliner, to the International Space Station for the second time without people on board. The mission, called OFT-2, is part of an elaborate dress rehearsal that will help pave the way for people to ride on the vehicle in the future.Today’s mission is a critical milestone as Boeing works to certify the vehicle for human spaceflight. Boeing developed Starliner as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, an initiative that tasked private companies with developing spacecraft capable of carrying NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station. NASA’s other Commercial Crew provider, SpaceX, is already ferrying astronauts to the ISS on a regular... Continue reading…

Let’s just get this out of the way: there’s very little that’s original about MultiVersus, an upcoming free-to-play fighting game. It is, very clearly, designed to be like Super Smash. Bros., only with Warner Bros. characters in place of those from Nintendo and other classic video games. This means that instead of Super Mario getting beat up by Sephiroth, you have Shaggy and Wonder Woman teaming up to fight Arya Stark and Bugs Bunny in the Batcave. It’s strange and crass but also feels right at home in a world of Fortnite, Space Jam, Doctor Strange, and Rescue Rangers. As shameless as it may be, though, after spending some time with the MultiVersus, I’m starting to think that it could end up being a big hit.Functionally, the core of M... Continue reading…

We now have a timetable for when to expect the update. | Image: CD Projekt Red The next-gen version of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is “planned” to release in Q4 2022, developer CD Projekt Red (CDPR) announced Thursday. Previously, CDPR was targeting a Q2 2022 launch for the free update, but it pushed the release in April without providing a new date. Alongside that April announcement, CDPR said it would be bringing development of the update in-house, meaning it would be taking the reins from Saber Interactive.

Netflix Netflix’s closed captioning, subtitles for deaf and hard of hearing (SDH), and audio descriptions (AD) are all powerful tools designed to help make films and television shows more accessible to people with disabilities. But those kinds of features have also become integral parts of how people from all walks of life consume the streaming platform’s content, and Netflix is planning to give its subscribers more of what they want.In celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Netflix is gearing up to expand its accessibility features across the globe and launching a new collection highlighting stories focused on people living with disabilities. Celebrating Disability with Dimension will function much like the platform’s other special... Continue reading…

The OnePlus Nord 2T in green. | Image: OnePlus OnePlus is officially announcing a trio of more affordable devices for Europe today: the OnePlus Nord 2T, the Nord CE 2 Lite, and the Nord Buds true wireless headphones. The Nord 2T starts at £369 (€399) and is best thought of as a souped-up version of last year’s Nord 2. Meanwhile, the Nord CE 2 Lite is a step-down model of the Nord CE 2 and starts at £279 (€299). Finally, there’s the Nord Buds, which will sell for £49 (€49). The latter two launched in India last month but will be on sale in the UK on May 24th.You can check out my full review of the OnePlus Nord 2T right here, but its features won’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with its predecessor. It’s using an upgraded MediaTek chip and has speedier 80W fast charging, but... Continue reading…

Another reliable entry in OnePlus’ Nord range Continue reading…

Who needs a family photo album when you have a fridge? | Image: Samsung Samsung is adding a new and extremely exploitable customization option to its line of Bespoke refrigerators. Sling the company $500 and you can have any photo or image you like printed on the unit’s double doors. You could choose a favorite piece of artwork, a child’s doodles, or just put your own face on your own fridge for no good reason at all.The option is launching for buyers sometime later this year (if you need to know the exact minute it goes live you can sign up here for alerts), and if you already own a Bespoke fridge, you can order the door panels separately and swap them in. The cost is $250 a panel, and Samsung says they’ll take about 8 weeks to print and ship. Image: Samsung New from Samsung:... Continue reading…

Good performance and great battery stamina don’t compensate for its shortcomings Continue reading…

Image: Glitch Fastly, a major provider of cloud services, announced today that it’s acquiring Glitch, the quirky and capable web coding platform. Glitch will continue to operate within Fastly, with Fastly planning to grow the team and enable Glitch apps to tap into its edge computing services.Glitch CEO Anil Dash will join Fastly as its VP of developer experience, overseeing Glitch and a new team focused on creating a “repository of tools and resources” to help people start using Fastly’s products.“The web is back as a place that people want to create, and you have to have this bigger platform to do it,” Dash tells The Verge.“This edge platform that they’ve built is cool as shit.”Dash says Glitch could have raised more money to continue on its... Continue reading…

Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner as it is wheeled out to its launchpad on an Atlas V rocket. | Image: NASA/Joel Kowsky Perhaps this time will be the one Continue reading…

Fortnite is leaving beta on GeForce Now. | Image: Nvidia After four months in closed beta, a touchscreen-optimized version of Fortnite is now available to stream via Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud gaming service on iOS and Android. It means iPhone users have another workaround to play one of the most popular games in the world after it was unceremoniously booted from the App Store in August 2020 for bypassing Apple’s in-app payment system. On iOS, GeForce Now is available via the browser, while Android owners can access it via an app.The official launch follows a months-long beta period during which Nvidia says 500,000 people streamed over 4 million sessions of Fortnite via the service. As a result of the testing, Nvidia claims it’s been able to optimize its “on-screen touch controls and game... Continue reading…

Three monitors, one MacBook. | Image: Anker Anker has announced a new $249.99 10-in-1 USB-C hub that, among other things, allows an M1-equipped MacBook to output to three external displays, MacRumors reports. It’s designed to overcome a key limitation of Apple’s M1-powered MacBooks which, by default, can only output to a single external monitor.The Anker 563 dock has a total of 10 ports, including USB-C, USB-A, 3.5mm audio, and Ethernet. But we’re most interested in the display connectors, which consist of an HDMI port that can go up to 4K at 30Hz (it’s unclear what the maximum refresh rate is at lower resolutions), a second HDMI port that can do 2K (aka 1440p) at up to 60Hz, and a DisplayPort that’s also capable of 2K at 60Hz. Image: Anker The specs of... Continue reading…

The 2022 BMW iX is the German automaker’s flagship EV in the US. | Photo by Abigail Bassett for The Verge BMW’s all-electric crossover is packed to the gills with technology, power, and range Continue reading…

Here it is, the 16-inch Intel machine. HP has made a number of minor refreshes across its Spectre and Envy lines. Several of these consumer devices, at a variety of price points, have been updated with new processors — 12th Gen Core chips on the Intel side and Ryzen 5000 chips on the AMD side.A few devices also have new GPUs, including the Spectre x360 16. This device, the flagship of HP’s gorgeous, pricey, premium Spectre line, was previously powered by Intel’s 11th Gen processors and either Iris Xe integrated graphics or Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3050. This year, the processors are from Intel’s new 12th Gen line, and the discrete GPU option is Intel’s brand new Arc A370M. It’s Intel all the way down.This is not necessarily the most exciting announcement in the world as far... Continue reading…

A little more than a year after announcing the first version of its ultra-repairable, upgradeable notebook, Framework is launching the second-generation Framework Laptop. It’s meant to be substantially faster and a little more sturdy but mostly it’s a signal that Framework is serious about building truly long-lasting devices and might actually be fulfilling the often promised and rarely delivered dream of upgradeable, modular gadgets.The new laptop’s headline spec is the processor: it comes with a 12th Gen Intel Core i5 or i7 chip with the top-of-the-line, $2,049 model running the Core i7-1280P. (That’s a full generation jump from the current model, and these new Alder Lake chips promise big performance improvements and a boost in... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Sometimes it’s a little too obvious when a company is launching a big advertising campaign on YouTube. If you’re a regular viewer, you may end up seeing the same ads over and over again. This week, though, YouTube announced that it’s expanding the power of tools that let brands control how often their ads are shown to specific users.This ad frequency tool (named Display & Video 360 in marketing jargon) was actually launched in February to cover ad campaigns running across different smart TV apps, including YouTube’s app and apps from rivals like Hulu. But YouTube has confirmed to The Verge that the program also counts ads shown not only on smart TV apps, but across its mobile and desktop platforms. That should mean less ad spam for... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge TikTok is offering users a new way to credit videos that kick off viral trends.When uploading content, users will be able to tag not only individual creators in video descriptions, but also specific videos — an addition the platform claims will “better enable creator credit and equitable attribution for our creator community and content originators.”The change is, in part, a response to complaints by users that the platform thrives off a parasitic approach to viral content. Last summer, for example, a number of Black dance creators went on strike from the app, noting how many viral dances (like the Renegade and the Savage, etc) were created by Black users before spreading to the rest of the community without due credit or attribution.... Continue reading…

Image: Garmin For the first time since Varia devices launched seven years ago, Garmin has added a built-in camera to its much-loved rearview radar lineup. The Varia RCT715 not only makes road cyclists more visible and warns them of approaching vehicles, it automatically records any incidents that might occur. That means safety-minded bicyclists now only have to worry about mounting and charging a single device instead of two.The Varia RCT715 (the RCT stands for Radar, Camera, Taillight) features a 1080p/30fps camera with a 140-degree field of view. A built-in accelerometer triggers automatic incident detection to capture video footage from before, during, and after an incident. Video can also be set to record continuously, giving you about four hours... Continue reading…

A screenshot of the web search box in the latest Windows 11 Preview Build. | Image: Microsoft Microsoft is adding an optional web search to the Windows 11 desktop in the operating system’s latest Insider Preview Build. The company describes the feature as “lightweight interactive content” — the first, it says, of many such tools it’s considering adding to Windows 11 — but let’s call the thing what it really is: a widget.Not everyone signed up to the latest Windows 11 preview build will see the new search box, but anyone who does and doesn’t like it can disable the feature by right-clicking on the desktop, selecting “Show more options,” and then toggling “Show search.”If you are running the latest preview build, you’ll also have to restart your computer to give the search box a chance to show up.Is web search on your desktop... Continue reading…