The Verge

While there is plenty of criticism to be hurled at what music the algorithm serves to us, and how, the real problem with music discovery in the age of algorithmic recommendations is that listening has become a passive activity. It's too easy to press play and let a pile of code take the wheel. Whether [...]

Framework did it again. It promised modular, upgradeable, and user-repairable laptops where other manufacturers dare not venture or have outright failed. And it's delivered. The 2025 version of the Framework Laptop 16 comes with not only new AMD Ryzen AI CPU options, but also Wi-Fi 7, a more powerful USB-C charger, redesigned cooling, and a [...]

The morning of Monday, October 27th, I started my workweek by asking my colleagues at The Verge for advice on buying a gaming PC. I wanted a small, portable, and semi-powerful machine that could easily sit beneath my living room TV and occasionally move over to my desk to play games or even use for [...]

If you weren't clear on just what a miserable person Carol (Rhea Seehorn) is, episode 3 of Pluribus sure makes it obvious. It opens with a flashback, as Carol and her partner Helen (Miriam Shor) are on a dream vacation at an ice hotel in Norway, and all she can do is complain about how [...]

Disney and YouTube have reached an agreement to bring back ESPN and more than 20 other Disney-owned channels two weeks after they went dark on YouTube TV. During the dispute, Google has accused Disney of trying to raise prices for its customers in an effort to boost its own Hulu + Live TV and Fubo [...]

ESPN and other Disney-owned channels will be returning to YouTube TV following a new agreement announced Friday. More than 20 channels went dark on YouTube TV on October 30th, but two weeks later - and after CEOs Bob Iger and Sundar Pichai reportedly got more involved in negotiations - the companies have reached a deal. [...]

Nintendo recently issued an update (21.0.0) for its Switch 2 console that, in addition to some small changes, has caused some third-party docks to stop working as intended. In the early weeks and months of the console's availability this summer, companies raced to figure out the right commands, the right power draw, and the right [...]

Paramount Skydance head David Ellison made it very clear that he was interested in restarting the studio's Star Trek movie franchise with some new blood, and it seems like that plan is moving forward. Deadline reports that Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves co-directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley have signed on to an [...]

Fortnite is going to be available on the Xbox on PC app beginning November 18th. Right now on PC, you have to launch the game from the Epic Games Launcher, but if you prefer the Xbox on PC app, that's going to be an option. The game is also joining the Xbox Play Anywhere program, [...]

If you're looking for movies to binge over the long Thanksgiving weekend, or perhaps you need some stocking stuffer ideas, Gruv is running an early Black Friday sale that drops 4K Blu-rays to just $12.99 each. Many of these titles came out in 2025 and haven't previously been this affordable, making it a great opportunity [...]

Walmart on Friday officially kicked off its early Black Friday deals, with the first wave of discounts lasting from November 14th to November 16th. One of the best deals we've spotted is on the last-gen AirPods Pro 2 with USB-C charging case, which are currently $139 ($110 off). That's even lower than the discount we [...]

Belkin has issued a recall for its Auto-Tracking Stand Pro for the iPhone and two versions of its 20,000mAh BoostCharge USB-C PD Power Bank because a manufacturing defect may cause the products' lithium-ion cell components to overheat," posing a fire and burn risk to users. While there's been just one report of a fire in [...]

For the past couple of weeks, I've been asking - repeatedly - where the promised Trump phone is, whether it exists, and what happened to all the money people have already paid for deposits. And I'm going to keep doing that every week for the foreseeable future. Not everyone thinks I should. I've been told [...]

When The Running Man was first published in 1982 under Stephen King's Richard Bachman pseudonym, the United States was just beginning to feel the impacts of then-president Ronald Reagan's neoliberal economic policies. Under Reaganomics, massive tax breaks for the wealthy and deep cuts to social safety programs like food stamps and Medicaid drastically intensified income [...]

This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest phones, smartwatches, apps, and other gizmos that swear they're going to change your life. Optimizer arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 10AM ET. Opt in for Optimizer here. It's a truth universally acknowledged that [...]

Google is now widely rolling out Call Recording to Pixel 6 and newer devices that don't support the Gemini Nano-powered Call Notes feature found in the Pixel 9 and 10's Phone app, as spotted by 9to5Google. Google first announced the expansion of the Call Recording feature in September. It should be available after you update [...]

Meta, the largest social media company in the world, knowingly makes billions from scam ads, recent reporting on the company says. According to internal documents revealed by Reuters, users of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp see 15 billion ads a day promoting scams, from fake Trump stimulus checks to deepfakes of Elon Musk hawking cryptocurrency. The [...]

You don't have to wait two more weeks to pick up a great gadget as a gift; early Black Friday deals are in full swing. Case in point: Best Buy is offering the 128GB Meta Quest 3S for $249 ($50 off) along with a $50 gift card and a copy of The Walking Dead: Saints [...]

Microsoft keeps describing this model for the future of a game console that sounds great for players: it's as easy as a console, it can play a huge library of PC titles, and it even supports third-party stores. That'd be a wonderful product if someone could build it, and it sure looks like Valve has [...]

The Steam Deck changed the way I buy and play games. Just like how the Nintendo Switch blew me away with how it let me play the latest and greatest Nintendo games on the go and on a TV, the Steam Deck has drawn me in with how it offers a vast catalog of PC [...]

Meta is on the cusp of launching third-party integration with WhatsApp in Europe - something that's required by the Digital Markets Act (DMA). It's rolling out over the coming months" with WhatsApp's level of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) maintained. Meta says thatBirdyChatandHaiketwill be the first third-party services to implement messaging interoperability with WhatsApp. No, we haven't [...]

I never really believed self-driving cars would make it to the UK, so you can imagine my surprise when I found myself clambering into one of Wayve's autonomous vehicles for a journey around north London a few weeks ago. In June, the company announced plans with Uber to begin trialing Level 4 fully autonomous robotaxis [...]

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week. I spent yesterday at Eric Newcomer's Cerebral Valley conference in San Francisco, which is now in its third year. I've attended this event for three years in a row [...]

Starting with the 2026 Major League Soccer (MLS) season, all MLS matches" will be available to Apple TV subscribers at no additional cost," Apple and the MLS announced today. Since the 2023 MLS season, streaming MLS games has required an MLS Season Pass subscription, which was available on its own or for a discount for [...]

After several successful launches this year, Project Kuiper has its official name: Amazon Leo. It's a nod to the term Low-Earth Orbit (LEO), which refers to orbits at an altitude of 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) or less. That's the region where Amazon's constellation of 153 satellites orbit. The original code name referred to the Kuiper [...]

When I tried Half-Life: Alyx streaming from a PC to Valve's new Steam Frame VR headset, I was blown away; thanks to the Frame's dedicated wireless adapter and a cool trick Valve calls foveated streaming," I didn't detect any latency as I explored an industrial building and fought some head crabs. But the Frame also [...]

Anthropic is detailing its efforts to make its Claude AI chatbot politically even-handed" - a move that comes just months after President Donald Trump issued a ban on woke AI." As outlined in a new blog post, Anthropic says it wants Claude to treat opposing political viewpoints with equal depth, engagement, and quality of analysis." [...]

Apple is launching a new program for mini app developers that slashes its fees for in-app purchases. On Thursday, the company announced that mini app creators who join the program take advantage of a lower 15 percent commission rate - half of the up to 30 percent rate Apple charges other developers. Apple describes mini [...]

Anthropic announced on Thursday that Chinese state-backed hackers used the company's AI model Claude to automate roughly 30 attacks on corporations and governments during a September campaign, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal. Anthropic said that up to 80% to 90% of the attack was automated with AI, a level higher than previous [...]

From the outside, it looks like virtual and mixed reality is having a moment. Three new headsets have launched or been announced in the last month: There's Apple's M5 Vision Pro, the Samsung Galaxy XR, and, just this week, Valve announced the Steam Frame. Given the marketing, you might assume that means Big Tech thinks [...]

The Apple Watch Series 11 is only a few months old, so discounts have been hard to come by thus far. However, if you don't need the latest tech, the Apple Watch Series 10 delivers nearly the same experience, and the 42mm base model is currently down to an all-time low of $279 ($120 off) [...]

This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week. Earlier this month, the UK's Comcast-owned pay TV operator Sky announced plans to pull the plug on one of its more ambitious hardware initiatives: Sky Live, a smart camera accessory [...]

Netflix's next stab at gaming is here. Starting today you'll be able to play a number of multiplayer party games on your TV using your phone as a controller. To start, Netflix is offering Boggle Party, Party Crasher: Fool Your Friends, Lego Party, Pictionary: Game Night, and Tetris Time Warp. A social deduction game based [...]

Another day, another AI browser. This time, it's Firefox, the self-described independent browser" from Mozilla. Firefox says it is building an AI browsing feature called AI Window that includes an AI assistant and chatbot. The company calls it an opt-in intelligent and user-controlled space" that is currently being built in the open" with user input. [...]

Amazon's Black Friday officially starts on November 20th, but in reality, it's already well underway. For the past week or so, we've been seeing the retailer drop a number of good Black Friday deals, and the latest Fire TV Stick 4K Max is one of the best. Right now, you can buy the streaming stick [...]

In recent years, we've seen generative AI move quickly through different eras: chatbots, image-generation, voice, video-generation, and more. But Dr. Fei-Fei Li, longtime AI pioneer and co-director of Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), is staking out what she thinks is the next frontier: spatial intelligence, a nascent field that she believes is the [...]

Tesla is expanding a Powerwall 2 battery recall that started in Australia last September to the US. A "third-party battery cell defect" can cause units to stop functioning normally, resulting in overheating, smoking and in some cases smoke or flame causing minor property damage." The company has received 22 reports of overheating, six reports of [...]

The wearable technology company Even Realities has taken the wraps off its latest pair of human-centric" smart glasses, which it claims are designed not to interfere with your everyday life. The G2 Display Smart Glasses come without outward-facing cameras and external speakers, a move Even Realities says removes the anxiety of being recorded, overheard or [...]

Tesla, one of the original Apple CarPlay holdouts, may finally be close to actually adopting the immensely popular phone projection system for its cars, Bloomberg reports today. The company has started testing the capability internally, anonymous sources tell the publication, and could be close to releasing it publicly, perhaps in a few months - or [...]

The Consumer Federation of America, Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), and other consumer advocacy and tech groups are speaking up in defense of former FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, who was fired without cause by the Trump administration in March. A total of 40 groups -which also include Demand Progress Information Center and UC Berkeley [...]

Google is pairing up two of its research products: NotebookLM and Gemini's agentic AI tool Deep Research. On Thursday, the company announced that all users will have access to Deep Research in NotebookLM within a week. Google recently linked Deep Research to other Workspace products like Gmail and Drive, allowing Gemini to draw context from [...]

Google DeepMind's new AI agent learned how to play a bunch of video games -including No Man's Sky, Valheim, and Goat Simulator 3 - to become a viable interactive gaming companion." The new agent tool, SIMA 2, builds on its earlier iteration, SIMA (Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent), which DeepMind released in March 2024. It also [...]

Disney's plans for the future of its streaming service may involve AI-generated videos. During an earnings call on Thursday, Disney CEO Bob Iger said the company is really excited about AI," adding that the technology could allow Disney Plus to provide viewers with the ability to create" and consume" short-form AI videos. There's phenomenal opportunities [...]

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has been over a decade in the making, but its opening day is finally in sight. It's officially less than a year away on September 22nd, 2026. The museum will include over 40,000 works of narrative art," ranging from murals to comic book art and, of course, cinematic artifacts. [...]

So a lot of people think AI is a bubble. That includes OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who keeps saying AI is a bubble all while raising and spending enormous amounts of money in ways that seem like bubble indicators to everyone else. This is all pretty confusing. So we sent Verge senior reporter Liz Lopatto [...]

Dbrand did the thing: it announced a Portal Companion Cube skin for Valve's boxy new Steam Machine, allowing you to turn the new PC / console hybrid into a facsimile of gaming's most loyal sidekick. The Companion Cube skin is limited edition, and will release some time in 2026, though we don't know if it [...]

Have you ever laid down for the night, only to realize your phone charger is across the room? And then thought to yourself, "Nah, I'm not going to get up and plug it in"? And then known without a shadow of a doubt that you won't regret that decision tomorrow - that your phone will [...]

OnePlus wants to sell you its new flagship phone; it just doesn't know when it will be able to. Like so many other things these days, the OnePlus 15 is in limbo thanks to fallout from the government shutdown. The 15 launched earlier this year in China, and OnePlus has announced pricing for the US: [...]

Spotify is launching a new AI feature for audiobooks that summarizes what you've already heard without needing to rewind. The company likens the feature, called Recaps, to a previously on" segment at the start of episodes in a TV series. Recaps will be available automatically in the iOS app for a limited number of English-language [...]