The Verge

Putting essential features at your fingertips is good, actually. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The Pixel 2 is an almost five-year-old phone, but it introduced a feature that I miss more and more with each passing year. It was called Active Edge, and it let you summon Google Assistant just by giving your phone a squeeze. In some ways, it’s an unusual idea. But it effectively gave you something sorely lacking on modern phones: a way to physically interact with the phone to just get something done.Looking at the sides of the Pixel 2 and 2 XL, you won’t see anything to indicate that you’re holding anything special. Sure, there’s a power button and volume rocker, but otherwise, the sides are sparse. Give the phone’s bare edges a good squeeze, though, and a subtle vibration and animation will play, as Google Assistant pops up from the... Continue reading…

A screenshot from Google’s pétanque Doodle. | Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge Google has a delightful new multiplayer Doodle that lets you play a game of pétanque online. If you haven’t heard of pétanque — I hadn’t before writing this article — it’s a game that’s kind of like bocce ball.The goal of pétanque is to throw your ball (the boule) as close as you can to a little ball (the cochonnet) on the playing field in front of you. On your computer, you’ll “throw” the ball by clicking on the boule and dragging back with your mouse to slingshot it forward; on a phone, you’ll toss the boule with your thumb (kind of like throwing a Poké Ball in Pokémon Go). You get points for having more boules close to the cochonnet than your opponent, and whoever has the most points after three rounds wins. Google has a good... Continue reading…

Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge Apple Pay could finally be compatible with Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox in iOS 16. MacRumors contributor Steve Moser found that Apple Pay works with Edge and Chrome in the iOS 16 beta 4, and shared his findings on Twitter.Moser’s screenshots show a “Continue with Apple Pay” option on Apple’s checkout page when using Edge. Apple Pay only works in Safari on iOS 15 and older, preventing you from using any other browser if you want to pay with Apple Pay when shopping on the web.

Amazon’s budget-friendly Smart Thermostat packs plenty of smarts for a mere $41.99. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Amazon Prime Day is back, baby! OK, maybe not technically speaking, but so many Amazon devices are currently discounted at Best Buy and other retailers that it's giving us a major sense of deja vu. Right now, for example, you can buy Amazon’s excellent Smart Thermostat at Best Buy and Target for just $41.99 ($18 off) — a record low set during Prime Day.The budget-friendly thermostat will mesh with most decor, and can even learn and adapt to your habits like more expensive options. Be aware, however, that you can’t integrate the device with voice assistants beyond Alexa, and there are no native temperature sensors. Still, if those caveats don’t bother you, Amazon’s Smart Thermostat is a great option to consider, one that could... Continue reading…

Into the Breach Once upon a time, my smartphone doubled as my most-used gaming platform. It’s hard to believe now, but there was once a period when app stores felt like a new frontier, and game developers had a blast experimenting with a little touchscreen rectangle that you always had in your pocket. Then the economics changed. Games slowly got cheaper before eventually becoming free altogether. New releases had to decide between a dwindling audience for premium games or saddling their game with in-app purchases. Things became dire. But lately, I’ve been having fun with my phone again — and it’s due almost entirely to subscription services.I came to this realization recently when I switched from Android to an iPhone and started loading my new gadget... Continue reading…

This is the version I bought, and I love them so freakin’ much. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge One truth about me as a runner is that I need my jams. No jams, no run. I have meticulously curated playlists where the bass drops are strategically timed to gas me up when I lose steam. Aside from my sneakers, my earbuds are the most important piece of running tech I own. And yet, my decade-long search for the perfect pair only just ended a few weeks ago.Behold, the beautiful, purplicious Beats Fit Pro.To understand why I’m gaga for these buds, you need to know about the headphones that didn’t make the cut. (Don’t worry, I’ll stick to the highlights and spare you a Dickensian-length novel recounting the dozens of earbuds that have failed me in my 10-year running journey.)Earbuds with superior sound — like the Bose SoundSport — are... Continue reading…

Your kid might like it, but you probably won’t Continue reading…

The XPS 13 has a new design and a whole bunch of new problems Continue reading…

It says it’s trying to make things more flexible for drivers. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Uber says that it’s “completely reimagined the way drivers accept rides” with a feature called “upfront fares,” which shows drivers exactly how much they’ll be paid for a trip and where they’ll end up after dropping a rider off. In its announcement on Friday, the company says the change is part of its push to make driving for the rideshare service more flexible. Uber’s also planning on rolling out a feature that lets drivers see other ride requests in their area, letting them pick specific trips they’d like to do.For riders, the changes, which have been tested in select locations, could mean fewer canceled trips because a driver doesn’t actually want to go to the destination, or realizes that it won’t be a very profitable trip.A... Continue reading…

Who uses Helium? | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Friday, Mashable reported that Helium, a crypto project praised by The New York Times earlier this year and whose parent company is backed by investment firms like Andreessen Horowitz, had been misleading people about the companies it works with. Helium advertises on its homepage that Lime, the mobility company behind those electric scooters and bikes, uses its crypto-powered mesh wireless network. The company, however, told Mashable that it hasn’t had a relationship with the company since 2019, and that it had only ever done initial testing with Helium’s tech.Now, Salesforce, whose logo appeared on Helium’s website right next to Lime’s, says that it also doesn’t use the technology. “Helium is not a Salesforce partner,” Salesforce... Continue reading…

Image: Charter Communications Inc. A jury in Texas found Charter Communications liable for $7 billion in punitive damages this week as the result of a lawsuit from the family of Betty Jo McClain Thomas, an 83-year-old woman who was stabbed to death by one of its employees in December 2019. The $7 billion is in addition to $375 million in compensatory damages the jury assigned in June.The explanation behind the staggering figure of the verdict goes well beyond the horrific crime committed. It also includes the company’s policies and responses to previous incidents of theft and an attempt to forge a document showing Thomas agreed to forced arbitration that would have limited potential damages to the amount of her last bill.localhost:62220/VewContracts.aspx ... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple is planning to show ads in the App Store’s Today tab and on individual app pages, according to MacRumors, 9to5Mac, and AppleInsider. The two new ad placements will expand upon the ads you can already see in the App Store’s search tab and in search results.Ads in the Today tab will appear in the larger card format used by other content in that tab, but you’ll see a small blue box with the word “Ad” inside it under the app’s name. Ads in individual app pages will appear under the “You Might Also Like” header that suggests apps related to the one you’re looking at. Like in App Store search, ads on app pages will be highlighted in blue to distinguish them from other recommendations. According to 9to5Mac, ad buyers won’t be able to... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Handing over your phone — full of photos, texts, and other personal private info — to a repair person can feel dicey. After all, the horrifying reality of having your data leaked during the repair process has actually happened to some people. SamMobile found a press release from Samsung’s Korean press site stating that the company hopes to put an end to that with a new privacy feature called Repair Mode (via Ars Technica). It’ll give technicians a limited amount of access to your phone’s innards. From the sound of it, they’ll be able to access enough to make the fix but not so much to leak your pics.This feature is coming first to Galaxy S21 phones in South Korea. The company plans to expand support to other models in the future.As... Continue reading…

As a giant panda, Meng Meng does not need to worry about corporate emails on her birthday. | Photo by Chen Jimin/China News Service via Getty Images Automated birthday emails are a constant of modern life, right up there with death, taxes, and computer updates with poor timing. Once a year, my inbox fills to the brim with reminders of just how many companies I’ve entrusted with my birthdate.But not this year. No, this year was going to be different. This year I went on a relentless unsubscribing kick, just ruthlessly clicking the unsubscribe button whenever something from a corporate mailing list came into my inbox. But I knew that some things were definitely going to still sneak through.See, companies can’t resist a birthday. It’s one of the easiest things they can do to get someone’s attention. “​​Birthday emails are one of the most effective emails you can send,” says a blog... Continue reading…

Image: Mapbox This interactive world map visualizes “a cross-verified database of notable people” to show you the most notable person in your hometown — or anywhere else you might want to look.Topi Tjukanov, a geographer and senior map designer at Mapbox, put the visualization together, which features different influential people from fields including culture, science, leadership, and sports. What someone contributes to society to be considered notable can vary, so researchers tried to narrow it down and account for biases where possible.

It takes about five seconds to set up. If you want to know what frame rates your Steam games are running at, there are many third-party programs out there to help. But if all you need is a very basic counter and you don’t care about other hardware stats, you don’t need to download any of these — you can use a feature that’s built right into Steam.Here’s how to set up Steam’s built-in FPS counter for your PC. I go with the top left, myself.

Lawmakers are blaming “three hostile foreign actors.” | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The federal courts’ document system was hit by a breach with a “startling breadth and scope” in early 2020, according to a report from Politico that cites testimony from House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler. The Department of Justice (DOJ) reportedly informed the judiciary about the breach in March and told lawmakers that an investigation is ongoing. Other lawmakers, such as Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), expressed concern that the DOJ had been hiding information about the breach and was refusing to explain it to the public and Congress.Nadler reportedly said that the “system security failure” was the work of “three hostile foreign actors,” though, according to Reuters, security officials for the DOJ didn’t specify which countries... Continue reading…

It’s a mod.After the Nier: Automata community went through a good 96-ish hours of pure, high-octane gas trying to figure out if a heretofore undiscovered church was a mod or an Easter egg or an ARG put together by Yoko Taro and his merry band of weirdos, a trio of modders has come forward and admitted it was a mod.“We have been loving all the discussions and theories — it has been an amazing journey,” reads a statement from the trio. “It has been inspiring to see the community come together after so many years, it has made all the hard work well worth it.” Image: Reddit The mod represents an impressive technological advancement for the Nier: Automata modding community, which in and of itself makes the entire “hoax”... Continue reading…

Since 2013, AT&T has quietly bilked customers out of hundreds of millions of dollars with a bogus “administrative fee,” a fee it more than doubled to $1.99 a month in 2018. For a few years there, a California class-action lawsuit made it seem like AT&T might finally get taken to task. But in May, both sides told a judge they’d settle for just $14 million — meaning customers may get less than 10 percent of what they paid AT&T, while AT&T gets to keep on charging them.In June, the judge tentatively approved that settlement — and today, July 29th, we’re hearing that AT&T is texting and emailing customers a link to a currently-blank website where the settlement claim form will live.According to the settlement agreement in Vianu v. AT&T... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Instagram might be walking back its horribly received TikTok-style redesign and cutting down on the app’s constant avalanche of recommendations, but that won’t prevent recommended content from appearing in your feed altogether. It turns out there’s a fix for that you might not be aware of; I didn’t even know it was a thing until Instagram head Adam Mosseri casually mentioned it in one of his Stories earlier this week.It’s possible to snooze recommendations and suggested posts from your main Instagram feed for 30 days. Hallelujah! And even better — it only takes a couple taps.How to snooze Instagram feed recommendations for 30 days

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Valve’s Steam Deck has been in high demand from the moment reservations went live last year, but if you’re still waiting for an order email to come through, good news: if you have a reservation, Valve says you’ll get your Steam Deck by the end of the year. And even if you make a new reservation, as of this writing, Valve says you’ll get your Steam Deck in Q4.“We’re excited to announce that we’re going to be able to fulfill demand sooner than we had estimated for everyone in the reservation queue,” Valve wrote in a blog post. “Many of the supply chain shortfalls that affect Steam Deck are gradually clearing up, and we’re continuing to ramp production, so we’re able to produce more Decks faster than ever before.”

Illustration by Ana Kova New Jersey police may have used blood samples taken from babies to investigate crimes, according to public defenders in the state.According to a lawsuit filed by the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender (OPD), the practice came to light after a case in which New Jersey State Police successfully subpoenaed a testing lab for a blood sample drawn from a child. Police then performed DNA analysis on the blood sample that reportedly linked the child’s father to a crime committed more than 25 years ago.The suspect then became a client of the OPD, which alerted the office to the techniques used to identify the man. The lawsuit, filed jointly by the OPD and the New Jersey Monitor, now seeks to compel the state of New Jersey to disclose... Continue reading…

Emergency services fight fires on July 19th, 2022, in Wennington, England. A series of grass fires broke out around the British capital amid an intense heatwave. | Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images Climate change made the record-smashing heatwave in the UK last week at least 10 times more likely, new research has found. The analysis was published yesterday by the World Weather Attribution initiative, a collaboration of scientists from universities and research institutes around the globe.“In a climate unaffected by human-induced climate change, it would be virtually impossible for temperatures in the UK to reach 40°C but climate change is already making UK heatwaves more frequent, intense and long-lasting,” Mark McCarthy, science manager of the National Climate Information Centre, said in a Met Office press release.The Met Office declared, for the first time, a “Red” heat warning for “exceptional heat” in parts of England for... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Bad news for the (presumably few) people out there who have relied on Amazon Drive for storing their important files in the cloud: Amazon is shutting down the service. On the plus side, you’ve got well over a year to figure out an alternative and get everything moved over.The company says Amazon Drive will no longer be supported as of December 31st, 2023. That’s when access will be completely cut off. Uploads are going away earlier and won’t be accepted as of January 31st. The Amazon Drive apps for Android and iOS will be taken down on October 31st, 2022.“We will continue to provide customers the ability to safely back up, share, and organize photos and videos with Amazon Photos,” Amazon said in an email to customers. But for all... Continue reading…

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge In early May, the Meta executive in charge of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, shared some news: the social media app’s main feed would start looking dramatically different to some users.For those in a small test group, the feed they’d been using for a decade would be replaced with an “immersive viewing experience” containing full-screen photos and videos with many posts coming from people they weren’t following. In other words, Instagram would start to look and feel even more like TikTok, the short-form video app that Meta sees as its fiercest competition.“Let me know what you think down in the comments below,” said the ever-earnest Mosseri. And with the patience of a parent showing their child both sides of an argument, he invited Instagram... Continue reading…

Image: Analogue The world’s first video game is coming to an Analogue Pocket near you. Today, Analogue announced that it’s launching Spacewar!, a game originally designed for the PDP-1 minicomputer that predates Pong by a full decade, on the Pocket as a part of its larger strategy to bring pioneering video games into the modern era.The original Spacewar! was created in 1962 by a cadre of engineers led by Steve Russell at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Using a PDP-1 minicomputer and a 1024 x 1024 pixel CRT display, Russell and his colleagues programmed a game in which two spacecraft duke it out in the gravitational well of a star. Two controllers were created for the game featuring switches for maneuvering and buttons that were designed to... Continue reading…

Fina Strazza, Riley Lai Nelet, and Camryn Jones in Paper Girls. | Image: Anjali Pinto/Prime Video The live-action adaptation plays things a little too safe Continue reading…

The Analogue Pocket. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge OS v1.1 for Analogue’s Pocket retro handheld will available in beta on Friday, and it adds features like a new reference tool to learn more about your games and save states so that you can more easily pick up a game where you left off.The reference tool, called Library, will read a game’s cartridge and then show you details about that title, including the system, developer, publisher, and even the game revision. Analogue has an even bigger vision for Library down the line: it wants it to become a “scholarly cataloging of the entirety of video game history” that you can search through. This evolved version of the Library is expected to be available in September, according to a timeline from Analogue.The save states, called Memories,... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Every Wednesday and Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where our editors make sense of the week’s most important technology news. On Fridays, Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, editor-at-large David Pierce, and managing editor Alex Cranz discuss the week in tech news with the reporters and editors covering the biggest stories.The show starts with the biggest news from the week — Instagram and the controversy around the changes to its app. On our Wednesday show, we discussed Instagram head Adam Mosseri’s response to criticism of the changes and overall direction to make the app feel more like its competitor TikTok. The following day, Instagram walked back its changes, with Mosseri saying “we definitely... Continue reading…

Image: Supernatural / Within Federal Trade Commission head Lina Khan overruled staff advice to intervene in a Meta virtual reality studio acquisition, Bloomberg reports. Sources reportedly told Bloomberg that staff had been “recommending against” suing to block Meta’s acquisition of Within, which makes the popular VR fitness app Supernatural. The FTC voted 3 to 2 in favor of the suit earlier this week, splitting respectively along Democratic and Republican party lines.Bloomberg’s article doesn’t detail the substance of the disagreement over Meta’s Supernatural acquisition, although it does note that “each of the commissioners had the opportunity to test out Meta’s Oculus product, Within’s Supernatural, and Meta’s Beat Saber.” But the report would emphasize that... Continue reading…

Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Oliver Jackson-Cohen in Surface. | Image: Apple While Apple TV Plus is probably best known for its comfort food comedies and big-budget genre swings, the streaming service has also steadily built up a lineup of very intense thrillers. The latest is Surface — not to be confused with Suspicion, Severance, or Servant, also available on the service — which takes the idea of a mystery to its most extreme conclusion. The early episodes are almost entirely made up of questions and misdirection. I can’t even tell if the show is even any good at this point — but I know I need to keep watching to find out.Surface is centered on Sophie (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who you might remember from Loki, Doctor Who, and the best episode of Black Mirror), five months removed from an accident that caused... Continue reading…

Our readers can buy a year of PlayStation Plus Essential for just $40 from Eneba today. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge If you’re one of the lucky ones who have managed to nab a PlayStation 5, you’ll be pleased to hear that luck is once again working in your favor. Right now, Verge readers can buy a year of PlayStation Plus Essential service from Eneba for around $40 instead of $59.99 when they use promo code VERGEssentials at checkout. Note that the price might fluctuate by a few dollars and cents on Eneba’s website, but the final sale price at checkout should be under $40.PlayStation Plus Essential grants access to online multiplayer and monthly PS4 and PS5 titles, which you can download at no additional cost. It also comes with PlayStation Store discounts, exclusive add-on content, and 100GB of cloud storage for saved games. Even better, PS5 owners... Continue reading…

The latest music video from K-pop stars Blackpink has the band dropping onto a battle royale island. As part of a recent collaboration with PUBG Mobile — which recently featured its first-ever in-game concert — Blackpink released a new video that takes place inside of the game’s world. It features virtual avatars of the band as they sing in post-apocalyptic landscapes and ride motorcycles across abandoned highways. The song itself, called “Ready For Love,” was teased during the group’s virtual concert appearance.The virtual concert and video follow in the footsteps of other in-game performances, most notably those in Fortnite, which has featured the likes of Travis Scott and Ariana Grande. But it’s also part of a slowly burgeoning... Continue reading…

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images We have a schedule for the Delaware Court of Chancery trial over Twitter’s lawsuit against Elon Musk for attempting to exit his agreement to buy the company for $44 billion. Earlier this week, the Musk team proposed an October 17th start date, which Twitter agreed to provided that the trial could be wrapped up in five days. Now, Judge Kathaleen McCormick has issued an official schedule, with the trial taking place from October 17th until October 21st.While lawyers for each side initially fought over potential start dates — Twitter was pursuing a September trial while Musk’s lawyers sought something in 2023 — there’s now one element everyone can agree on, and reporters can start scheduling their fall vacations in Delaware. If only it... Continue reading…

Sony’s PS5 is a console you can accessorize more than most. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge The PlayStation 5 is becoming more available than it once was, but even with the increased frequency of restocks, Sony’s latest console remains a chore to get a hold of. If you’ve been savvy enough to secure a PS5 of your own, however, getting the right accessories can help ensure you get the most out of your new console.From headsets and spare DualSense controllers to M.2 SSDs that allow you to easily expand your console’s storage capacity — that’s a thing now, after all — these are just a few PS5 accessories we suggest picking up, some of which occasionally go on discount.Extra controllersFirst off, there’s the controller. Every new PS5 includes a white DualSense controller. Unlike the last-gen DualShock controllers, the DualSense... Continue reading…

How much do you want to invest in a good night’s sleep? Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In recent weeks, TikTok has started testing offering a small collection of mini-games within its app, TechCrunch reports. There are nine games available as part of this initiative, which can be added to a video before it’s uploaded by using the “Add link” option and selecting “MiniGame.” Viewers can play a linked game by tapping the link that appears underneath the account’s username while a video is playing. When playing a game, there’s the option to record gameplay and subsequently post it as a TikTok.A TikTok spokesperson confirmed the pilot in a statement given to TechCrunch: “We’re always looking at ways to enrich our platform and regularly test new features and integrations that bring value to our community. Currently, we’re... Continue reading…

Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge Why the low-power mesh networking protocol is poised to become the backbone of the connected home Continue reading…

Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images I’m sorry for what I’m about to do here, but let’s talk about some divorced men. I think Sergey Brin is attempting to smear his ex-wife, and I think he’s using his history with Elon Musk to do it.Musk allegedly had an affair with Brin’s wife, leading to their divorce. (ALLEGEDLY.) Then, at a party, Musk fell to his knees, begging for Brin’s forgiveness, “according to people with knowledge of the incident,” The Wall Street Journal writes. What a story!I notice that Brin’s still duking it out with his soon-to-be ex-wifeExcept: I find this sourcing weird. How many people? Two sources are different from 10 sources on this, or 30, you know? And what kind of knowledge? Were they there? I understand wanting to protect one’s sources,... Continue reading…

Affleck at the premiere of Batman v Superman. | Photo by Hector Vivas/LatinContent via Getty Images Ben Affleck is reprising his role as Batman in the forthcoming Aquaman sequel, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. His return was announced by the film’s star Jason Momoa in an Instagram post, featuring a selfie of the two actors. “Reunited,” Momoa wrote. “bruce and arthur. love u and miss u Ben WB studio tours just explored the backlot alright. busted on set all great things coming AQUAMAN 2 all my aloha j.”Alongside the two images, Momoa posted a short video of a Warner Bros. backlot tour apparently discovering Affleck’s involvement in the film. “Well it’s not a fucking secret anymore!” Momoa jokes, before showing the Batman actor in his trailer.

The Z Flip 4. | Image: Evan Blass / 91 Mobiles We’re still over a week away from the official launch of Samsung’s latest foldables — the Z Fold 4 and Z Flip 4 — so naturally it’s time for the devices’ designs to leak in full online.Leaker Evan Blass has published a bevy of apparently official images over at 91Mobiles, showing the two phones from almost every angle, including in both their folded and unfolded orientations. There appears to be three color options for the Z Fold 4 (black, beige, and gray) and four for the Z Flip 4 (black, gold, blue, and purple).If you were hoping for radically different designs for either device compared to last year’s models, though, you’re likely to be disappointed. Both appear to have inherited fundamentally similar looks, right down to camera... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Sony has cut its annual profit outlook, warning of weaker PlayStation game sales. The forecast comes as Sony revealed it shipped 2.4 million PlayStation 5 consoles in its recent quarter, up only 4 percent from the 2.3 million shipped during the same period last year. PS5 lifetime shipments have now reached 21.7 million.While hardware sales are slightly up year over year, software sales have plummeted 26 percent. In an investor call, Sony blamed the game slump on a lack of big PlayStation titles this year compared to 2021 and less time spent playing games in general — backed up by monthly active PlayStation Network users dropping 3 percent to 102 million. Sony released its exclusive Gran Turismo 7 and Horizon Forbidden West titles... Continue reading…

The company’s really pushing Shorts right now. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube is trying to make it even easier for creators to turn their longer videos into Shorts formatted for the platform's TikTok competitor, by adding a new “Edit into a Short” tool to its iOS and Android app. It’ll let creators select up to 60 seconds from one of their videos and bring the clip into the Shorts editor, right from the YouTube app on iOS or Android. From there, they can add things like text, filters, as well as additional videos shot with the Shorts camera or pulled from their photo library.In an announcement post for the feature, YouTube says that the finished Short will link to the full video it was clipped from, which could help make Shorts an ideal promotional tool for the creator’s longer content — a key incentive... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge People frequently express their amazement that Twitter is free, but for some people, it isn’t — Twitter Blue launched last year in several countries, tacking on a few extra features for anyone willing to pay $2.99 per month. Today the service told subscribers it’s increasing the price (via Matt Navara), and in the US, it’s jumping up to $4.99 per month. That probably won’t break the pockets of information addicts who are choosing to pay for a service that still includes advertisements in their feed, but it might be enough to make people ask themselves if it’s worthwhile.The add-ons in the Twitter Blue package range from extremely useful (an undo tweet window to fix typos, a customizable navigation bar, a list of Top Articles shared by... Continue reading…

Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge 160-plus hours into Elden Ring, I’m sure of one thing: the single most annoying thing about my Steam Deck is its whiny fan. And now, I’m so happy to report there’s a way to fix it. It takes roughly 15 minutes and $30 — depending on where you live — to install a replacement fan from iFixit.Recently, the repair company finally got a large shipment of those fans, and I bought one right away. Now, my Steam Deck’s tiny screech is gone.Here’s how I did it:

Facebook News tab (2019) | Image: Facebook As you’ve probably heard, Facebook and Instagram will lean heavily into AI-curated creator content going forward, and the News Tab project Facebook launched a few years ago doesn’t seem to be a big part of that. As reported by Axios and confirming earlier rumors, Facebook’s parent company Meta is telling publishers it no longer plans to pay for the content it has been aggregating in the news tab.According to the report, Meta spent about $105 million in three-year content deals for news (plus another $90 million for news videos), including $10 million for the Wall Street Journal, $20 million for the New York Times, and $3 million for CNN in arrangements that sometimes included unlocked access to paywalled content. The Wall Street... Continue reading…

Valve’s new rules will prohibit text like this on an image. | Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge Valve is making a big change to the way developers can market their games on Steam. Beginning September 1st, graphical assets developers use in their store listings will only be able to include game artwork, the game’s name, and any official subtitle. Images won’t be able to include review scores, award names or logos, text that markets discounts, or text promoting a different product.The new rules could prove to be a drastic shift for some developers, as they may rely on reviews or awards on their images in an effort to stand out from the humongous number of games available on Steam. Even some developers of well-known games will have to make changes — while writing this article, I saw promotional images of Hades and It Takes Two on... Continue reading…

Blizzard Entertainment Blizzard is facing another walkout of sorts; this time, it’s players in the regional Overwatch Contenders tournament. After a competitive ruling ended a match prematurely, players in the European Overwatch Contenders Summer Series tournament refused to play.In the off-week of the Overwatch League as teams rest up from the beautiful chaos of the Midseason Madness tournament last week, Blizzard ran an Overwatch Contenders tournament to fill the time. Just like Midseason Madness, the Overwatch Contenders Summer Series is a double-elimination tournament with a winner’s bracket and a loser’s bracket. Today’s European winner’s bracket final — the game that would determine which team would go on to the grand final and which team would fall to... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple narrowly outperformed Wall Street expectations with its Q3 earnings on Thursday afternoon, reporting a slight year-over-year increase in iPhone revenue and a 12 percent jump for its services division. But elsewhere, the company’s numbers sagged: Mac revenues were down by 10 percent — a drop that CEO Tim Cook attributed to supply chain constraints and unfavorable foreign exchange rates. But it also matches an industry-wide trend of PC sales being on the decline.Earlier this month, Apple released a redesigned MacBook Air powered by the company’s M2 chip — but that didn’t factor into this quarter’s results. The new Air followed the launch of the upgraded 13-inch MacBook Pro in June. The Mac Studio desktop, Studio Display, M1-powered... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The COVID-19 pandemic made personal computers more important than ever, and sales exploded two years in a row. But the good times for PC and chipmakers now seem to be fading fast. Last quarter’s slump in Chromebook sales has made way for an even bigger decline that’s hitting Windows manufacturers as well, and today, chipmaker Intel has revealed a 25 percent decline in consumer chip sales. It says that a “near-term cyclical slowdown” is shrinking the total market for PCs by approximately 10 percent this year.“Some of our largest customers are reducing inventory levels at a rate not seen in the last decade,” Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said on today’s earnings call.Earlier this month, Gartner reported that the global PC market had already... Continue reading…