The Verge

The new design changes up the home screen, icons, and more. (And lets you customize the UI’s colors.) Overcast, a popular podcast player for Apple devices, is getting an update that brings a major design overhaul to its main screen, as well as a new theming system that lets you pick the colors used throughout the app. For Overcast users like me, the update is a fresh coat of paint to a well-made app, and power users will likely find plenty of new tweaks and settings they can use to make the app work even better for their use case.In a blog post, the app’s developer Marco Arment says that the 2022.2 update, available to download Friday, is “the largest redesign” the app’s ever gotten, and promises some exciting future updates.The changes are obvious from the moment you open the app — there’s a new Recent carousel, which lets you... Continue reading…

From 2D to 3D with the help of AI. | Image: Nvidia Nvidia’s latest AI demo is pretty impressive: a tool that quickly turns a “few dozen” 2D snapshots into a 3D-rendered scene. In the video below you can see the method in action, with a model dressed like Andy Warhol holding an old-fashioned Polaroid camera. (Don’t overthink the Warhol connection: it’s just a bit of PR scene dressing.)The tool is called Instant NeRF, referring to “neural radiance fields” — a technique developed by researchers from UC Berkeley, Google Research, and UC San Diego in 2020. If you want a detailed explainer of neural radiance fields, you can read one here, but in short, the method maps the color and light intensity of different 2D shots, then generates data to connect these images from different vantage... Continue reading…

Ghostwire: Tokyo is a lot of different things. It’s a paranormal buddy cop drama, a high-octane action title, and a spooky exploration game from a studio known primarily for its horror titles. But according to producer Masato Kimura, none of those elements were the starting point for the game. “The entire concept stemmed from the city of Tokyo,” he tells The Verge.The game takes place in a nearly empty version of the city, thanks to a mysterious event called “the vanishing” that causes the sudden disappearance of nearly every person in Tokyo. In their place are folklore creatures and evil spirits roaming the streets. Players wield magic to fight enemies while searching every nook of the city for lost spirits to save. Ghostwire pulls... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales Every Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel discusses the week in tech news with the reporters and editors covering the biggest stories.On today’s episode of The Vergecast, Nilay is joined by managing editor Alex Cranz and deputy editor Dan Seifert to discuss a whole lot of hardware and software news from this week.Here are some of the headlines highlighted on the show:

Photo by Rich Fury / Getty Images Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert open up about crafting cinematic love letters Continue reading…

Image: Apple A show that redefines what a ‘tentpole’ series can be Continue reading…

If you’re running a recent version of iOS, you can use Shazam without downloading the app or unlocking your phone. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge When Apple released iOS 14.2 in 2020, it introduced some landmark new emoji, like the “frustrated Italian hand gesture” and bubble tea. It also snuck in a very handy feature: the ability to add Shazam song identification to your iPhone Control Center. Best of all, you don’t even have to download the Shazam app to use it. With just a couple of easy steps, you can access this feature right from your lock screen.Shazam is the song identification app that made all of us feel cool when we got our first smartphones. Suddenly, you could tell all of your friends what song was playing at the bar just by opening an app and sticking your phone in the air. In much more recent history, Apple acquired Shazam in 2018, making the app ad-free for... Continue reading…

Image: ApeCoin DAO These silly simians are going to be influential Continue reading…

A 3D view of Toronto’s City Hall. | Image: Apple Apple Maps’ more detailed, three-dimensional cities that launched with iOS 15 are coming to Canada, offering better driving navigation, transit directions, and an augmented reality walking experience. The company has announced that the new city experience is available in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. The feature was previously available in a half a dozen US cities — Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. — as well as London in the UK.It’s a welcome expansion. When we reviewed iOS 15 last year our only real issue with the enhanced mapping experience was its extremely limited availability. But, where available, it offers a sizable improvement to how cities look in Apple’s software, and... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Apple’s upcoming MacBook Air redesign has been extensively reported on, but new information suggests it may come in two sizes. According to Display Supply Chain Consultants’ latest quarterly report (via 9to5Mac and AppleInsider), Apple is working on a 15-inch version of the laptop to sit alongside the 13-inch model, which may itself get a slightly larger screen as well.TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo followed up on the report, saying that mass production is expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2023. Kuo also says that the laptop is being designed to use the same 30W adapter as the MacBook Air, which would put it well below the latest MacBook Pro machines in terms of power consumption. Finally, Kuo notes that this... Continue reading…

The Digital Markets Act is meant to let small players compete with big ones. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The EU’s newly agreed-upon Digital Markets Act could require messaging app developers to make their apps work together if it ends up coming into force in October as expected. In the EU’s press release, it says that lawmakers agreed that the “gatekeeper” companies behind WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or iMessage would have to make their apps “interoperable” with smaller messaging platforms at the developers’ request.Here’s the relevant part of the EU’s statement:

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Another sexual harassment lawsuit has been filed against Activision Blizzard. The law firm of entertainment lawyer Lisa Bloom filed the suit on behalf of a plaintiff identified as “Jane Doe” against Activision Blizzard. Jane Doe alleges she has been subject to sexual harassment and discrimination while working at the company. The suit names Activision Blizzard, Blizzard Entertainment, three former Blizzard employees, two current employees, and “Does 1 through 25” as defendants.Content warning: This story contains descriptions of sexual harassment.Many of the allegations in the lawsuit involve Mark Skorupa, a former Blizzard staffer who is one of the named defendants and a current Microsoft employee. Doe was hired as a senior... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The EU has unveiled its biggest ever legislative effort to balance competition in the tech world. The new Digital Markets Act, or DMA, is intended to rein in the power of the largest tech corporations and allow smaller entities to compete with the mostly US-based firms. So far, the EU has tackled antitrust issues on a case-by-case basis, but the DMA is intended to introduce sweeping reforms that will address systemic issues in the whole market.Today’s announcement targets interoperability of messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and iMessage, with the EU saying that vendors will have to “open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms, if they so request.” The EU says that this should give users more choice in how... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Netflix has added another game developer to its ranks. The company announced that it has acquired Boss Fight Entertainment, a mobile studio based in Texas. It’s the third game studio that Netflix has scooped up following Oxenfree developer Night School and Next Games, the team behind a Stranger Things puzzle game. Past games from Boss Fight include a mobile strategy game called Dungeon Boss; the studio was founded following the closure of Zynga’s Dallas studio, which developed the Facebook game CastleVille.The news comes as Netflix is making a major push into the gaming space. In addition to acquiring established studios, Netflix has also made mobile games a part of its subscription package — just this week saw the announcement of three... Continue reading…

Sony just got a restock of the PS5 | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Update March 24th, 8:23PM ET: Sony appears to have sold out of both the PlayStation 5 and the PS5 Digital Edition for the time being. However, you can still register with Sony for a chance to buy its next-gen console at a later date.On the hunt for a PlayStation 5? We know it is still quite the challenge to get a hold of one, but don’t give up hope just yet. Sony will be hosting another round of restocked consoles up for grabs at 6PM ET, no invite necessary.You have a chance at the standard PlayStation 5, complete with a disc drive, for $500, or the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition for $400. Both come equipped with fast 820GB internal SSDs (667GB of which is usable storage), while the extra $100 for the standard model includes the... Continue reading…

Nanoleaf’s existing Essentials light bulb and light strip work with Thread, but won’t be updated to support Matter. | Image: Nanoleaf You shouldn’t be concerned about the delay of Matter, the new smart home interoperability standard, because we’re not. That’s the message from smart home device makers Eve Systems and Nanoleaf, who have been involved with developing the protocol that promises smart home nirvana since its earliest days. “I think the three-month delay might actually be a good thing,” says Gimmy Chu CEO of Nanoleaf. “I feel that now there’s more certainty across the industry that we’ll have unity at time of launch.”While there may be more certainty in the industry, current smart home owners are still in a quagmire of uncertainty around which products to buy and when. Especially now that Chu has confirmed to The Verge that Nanoleaf’s Thread-enabled A19... Continue reading…

A Frosties NFT avatar. | Frosties US government prosecutors have charged two men with fraud and money laundering over a cryptocurrency “rug pull” scheme. Ethan Nguyen and Andre Llacuna allegedly earned around $1.1 million by selling non-fungible tokens (or NFTs) based on cartoon-like characters called “Frosties.” After selling the NFTs, they shut down the project and transferred its funds to a series of separate crypto wallets, leaving Frosties owners bereft of promised rewards.According to the criminal complaint, the Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) began investigating Frosties in January, shortly after receiving complaints about the scam. Frosties was a buzzy project whose 8,888 NFTs — priced at the... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google announced Wednesday it’s making some improvements to how it decides which product reviews it shows in Search results. The idea behind these and other recent product reviews updates is to ensure that reviews you see are high quality and actually include helpful information about a product you might be considering buying.The improvements build on earlier updates “to make sure that product reviews in Search meet certain criteria,” Google’s Perry Liu said in a blog post. Here are some examples of the criteria Liu says the company is looking for:

Spotify For years, a loose coalition of companies, including Spotify and Epic Games, has been railing against the so-called app store tax — taking Apple and Google to court and spurring regulators to investigate their up-to-30 percent cut of developers’ app revenue. They argue they’re locked into grossly overpriced billing, hosting, and curation services that sometimes hurt more than they help.So it was a surprise when, on Wednesday, Google revealed a pilot program with Spotify that will let some developers bypass Google Play billing on Android — letting Spotify and potentially others use their own payment platforms instead. But if you think that means Google’s going to give up its piece of the action, think again. Reading between the lines,... Continue reading…

Blizzard Entertainment In the wake of the Overwatch 2 beta date announcement and an apologetic video from game director Aaron Keller promising the team would give more consistent updates on progress, the Overwatch 2 news floodgates have officially opened. In this latest update, we’re offered a glimpse of Overwatch 2’s overhauled ping system.“We wanted to create a system that would enhance voice communication as well as provide alternative ways to share information with your team,” systems designer Gavin Winter says in the blog post.New features include character-specific callouts in which, when a player makes a ping, their teammates hear that notification in that player’s hero’s voice. The blog gives an example: “if you’re playing Tracer and ping an enemy... Continue reading…

Spotify’s Car Mode for Android could be making a return. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Spotify is reportedly letting some Android users test out a new, voice-focused car mode after it removed Car View last year without any obvious replacement. According to a report from 9to5Google, which includes screenshots of the test, Car Mode is less like the hyper-simplified Car View that came before it and more like a version of Spotify’s usual interface that’s tweaked to make quick actions easier.While the current version of Car Mode that Spotify’s testing does have a tab that lets you access your recently played music, the search screen has been replaced by a voice control feature. The interface for controlling what’s currently playing has a similar layout to Spotify’s regular mode, which should let you use muscle memory (without... Continue reading…

Adrienn Szabo/Paramount+ After seeing the first episode of Halo, I’m totally on board. I’m a Halo lore hobbyist, meaning that while I’ve enthusiastically experienced the campaigns of Halo’s Combat Evolved through Guardians, go on regular Halopedia wiki dives, and own a well-loved copy of Eric Nylund’s The Fall Of Reach, I haven’t consumed everything the Halo universe has to offer. (Ghosts of Onyx, I swear I’ll get to you one day.) But based on the Halo stories I do know, I think Paramount Plus’ series offers a far more compelling look at the Master Chief than anything the games have done so far.Spoilers for the first episode of Halo below:It’s hard translating video games to film and TV. It’s only recently been done right with Arcane, Castlevania, and the S... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Apple is reportedly working on selling iPhones and iPads themselves as part of a hardware subscription service, according to a new report from Bloomberg, whose author Mark Gurman writes the service could arrive next year.The move would fit into Apple’s ongoing push towards subscription services as a whole. Over the past several years, Apple has increasingly been emphasizing recurring subscriptions like Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, Apple News Plus, Apple Fitness Plus, and Apple Arcade as key new revenue streams for the company. Many of those services have already been bundled together into the company’s Apple One bundles, too.We’ve already seen a similar shift on the hardware front: Apple added a monthly subscription model for its... Continue reading…

Photo by Peter Sabok/COOLMEDIA/NurPhoto via Getty Images Panos Cosmatos, director of Mandy and Beyond the Black Rainbow, is directing and co-writing a new film alongside screenwriter Maegan Houang. The film, named Nekrokosm, has no premiere date but will be produced and released by A24 in partnership with XYZ Films. It’s billed as a “phantasmagorical fantasy nightmare” — in which “deep within a strange galaxy, two lovers are torn apart as they try to survive a malevolent invasion.”Houang has written for the excellent Starz sci-fi series Counterpart and the upcoming miniseries Shōgun, while Cosmatos is best known for the 2018 film Mandy, which pitted Nicolas Cage against a violent neo-hippie cult. (A highly memorable chainsaw duel — far from the strangest thing in the movie — was referenced... Continue reading…

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) logo seen displayed on a smartphone. | Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Come July, the EPA plans to retire the archive containing old news releases, policy changes, regulatory actions, and more. Those are important public resources, advocates say, but federal guidelines for maintaining public records still fall short when it comes to protecting digital assets.“Web services is the language of the government now, [but] we’re not treating it with the same sort of respect that we are paper documents,” says Gretchen Gehrke, one of the co-founders of a group that initially came together to prevent the Trump administration from destroying environmental data. The group, called Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), is still fighting for public access to resources like the EPA’s online archive.“We’re... Continue reading…

Photo by Vlad Savov / The Verge About to buy the latest Samsung phone or are you more of a Pixel person? Whether you plan to trade in your old Android phone for a discount on your new phone, sell it on eBay, give it away to a friend, or drop it off for recycling, you’re going to want to wipe it of all your data first by resetting it to factory conditions. Luckily, that’s pretty easy to do.Before you start, be aware that these instructions were tested on a Pixel 3 running Android 12, but the process for most current Android phones should be pretty much the same. Needless to say, first make sure that all of your data is transferred to your new phone, backed up, or both. Once your old phone has reset, there’s no going back.

The Samsung Jet Bot Plus and its cleaning station, rendered in a very fake home. | Image: Samsung Samsung is no stranger to attacking a product category with multiple options at different price points, and offering large discounts on those products is another of its signatures. The robot vacuum space isn’t an exception, with the Samsung Jet Bot Plus — its mid-tier option — available today for $399.99 at Best Buy and Amazon. The Jet Bot Plus offers fairly strong suction, a soft brush that’s especially good for hard surfaces, and a self-cleaning station borrowed from its pricier, AI-infused counterpart. This package usually costs $799, which is a bit much for a robot vacuum that lacks object detection, but the current discount of 50 percent makes the Jet Bot Plus more approachable.The Jet Bot Plus’ addition of a self-cleaning station... Continue reading…

Image: Fitbit Google submitted data for a new Fitbit feature that would passively monitor users’ heart rhythms to the Food and Drug Administration, the company announced today.Fitbit currently can only check for irregular heart rhythm periodically; users have to actively decide to take a reading. The new feature would run in the background and alert people if they’re showing signs of a condition called atrial fibrillation. It’d bring Fitbit’s EKG feature closer to the one on the Apple Watch, which checks the wearer’s heart rhythms on occasion and alerts them if it catches any irregularities.Fitbit launched a study in 2020 to test its passive heart rhythm technology. Nearly half a million Fitbit users participated in the study, and it flagged... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google will show the next available appointment with a health care provider directly on search, the company announced today.The company is working with MinuteClinic at CVS and other unnamed appointment schedulers during the initial rollout, which will start in the coming weeks, product manager Jackie DeJesse said during a press briefing. It will initially only be available in English. Google If someone searches for a doctor or a health provider’s office, they’ll see what types of appointments are available and the date of the earliest appointment. A “book” button will direct them to a third-party site to make an appointment.Searching for a San Francisco MinuteClinic, for example, will show an “appointments”... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge City of London Police have arrested seven teenagers due to their suspected connections with a hacking group that is believed to be the recently prolific Lapsus$ group, BBC News reports.“The City of London Police has been conducting an investigation with its partners into members of a hacking group,” Detective Inspector Michael O’Sullivan of the City of London Police said in a statement to The Verge. “Seven people between the ages of 16 and 21 have been arrested in connection with this investigation and have all been released under investigation. Our enquiries remain ongoing.”Lapsus$ has taken responsibility for some major security breachesLapsus$ has taken responsibility for some major security breaches at tech companies, including N... Continue reading…

Photo by Michael Bocchieri/Getty Images The United States Postal Service announced its initial order of 50,000 next-generation delivery vehicles, 10,019 of which will be battery-electric vehicles. It’s a notable number considering the agency’s resistance to calls for increasing the number of EVs in its future delivery fleet.Originally, the postal service said it would purchase 165,000 next-generation mail trucks, only 10 percent of which will be battery-electric vehicles. President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats urged the agency to increase the number of EVs, but USPS determined there was no legal reason to change its plans.Now, the postal service says it will increase its initial order of EVs from 5,000 to 10,019, determining it “makes good sense from an operational... Continue reading…

Spotify is continuing its effort to offer some transparency to musicians who are unhappy with its streaming rates. The company updated its “Loud & Clear” website today, providing a breakdown of some 2021 metrics for how artists, publishers, and rights holders actually make money off Spotify streams.As one might expect, Spotify chooses to call out here are positive improvements over 2020. Spotify paid out over $7 billion to artists, labels, and the other moving pieces of the music industry last year, up from $5 billion last year. Over 16,500 artists’ catalogs earned at least $50,000 in royalties in 2021, compared to 13,400 in 2020, and over 1,000 artists cracked $1 million from Spotify streaming for the first time (versus 870 artists... Continue reading…

Now you don’t have to enter a password when you wake up your Mac | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge When Apple introduced the ability to unlock iPhones with an Apple Watch, it was a lifesaver for anyone wearing a mask during the pandemic. But the handy feature isn’t limited to your smartphone. You can also use your Apple Watch to unlock your Mac and to securely approve app requests.The feature is called Auto Unlock, and technically, it came to Macs long before Apple decided to apply it to iPhones. That said, you may not have heard of it if you’ve just bought a shiny new Apple Watch or are a recent convert to the Apple ecosystem.Prepare your MacTo get started, you’ll want to make sure all your devices are compatible. Your Mac should be a model from mid-2013 or later and running macOS Sierra at the very least. Here’s how you check to... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Netflix’s latest price hikes in the US are starting to come into effect.Subscribers may have recently been contacted by the company alerting them that the price of their plan will change starting with their next billing cycle. I was recently sent such an email letting me know that my monthly bill would go up starting March 30th, 2022 — but some Netflix users may have already seen their bill increases hit.Netflix spokesperson Kumiko Hidaka told The Verge that the price increases are rolling out to existing subscribers “over weeks,” adding that some subscribers may have already been notified and seen the changes applied.Netflix first alerted subscribers to its coming price increases in late January. The service’s basic plan now... Continue reading…

Image by Tom Warren / The Verge I’ve just spent an hour spinning the gear in Windows 11’s new Notepad app. Reddit users discovered this delightful addition to Windows 11 recently, and as a daily Notepad user I’m addicted. Not on the level of my 1990s Solitaire addiction, but I can’t seem to stop spinning this damn gear every time I open Notepad now. Spin, spin, spin.I don’t know why Microsoft added this tiny animation that most people will never discover, but I love this little Windows Easter egg. It’s not limited to Notepad either. The latest test versions of Windows 11 include a new Task Manager UI, and there’s a gear you can spin there too. That means every time I go to force crash an app in Task Manager, I’m gonna spend more time than I should spinning the little... Continue reading…

Here’s the new Dell XPS 15. Look familiar? | Image: Dell Dell has announced the 2022 models of its 15.6-inch XPS 15 and 17-inch XPS 17 laptops, and they’re available for purchase starting today. The two devices differ from their 2021 predecessors in one way only: They’re powered by Intel’s newest 12th Gen processors. Image: Dell And here’s the new XPS 17. Both models will be configurable with a Core i5-12500H (12 cores), a Core i7-12700H (14 cores), or a Core i9-12900HK (14 cores). They’ll go up to 64GB of memory and 4TB of storage and will offer options for a 3840 x 2400 touchscreen in addition to an old-school 1920 x 1200 non-touch display. The XPS 15 can also come with a 3456 x 2160 OLED touchscreenWhere the two models differ (apart from their size) is in... Continue reading…

Samsung’s new portable projector isn’t what I hoped it would be Continue reading…

A screenshot from PUBG: Battlegrounds. | Image: Krafton Krafton, the studio behind PUBG, has announced a partnership with blockchain company Solana Labs. It says the deal will see the two companies cooperate on the development, operation, design, and marketing of “blockchain- and NFT-based games and services.” Solana Labs develops the Solana blockchain, an Ethereum-competitor designed to offer fast transaction speeds at low cost.The partnership comes a little over a month after Krafton announced its intention to get into the world of blockchain gaming and said it would be working with Naver Z to build “a new Web 3.0 and non-fungible token (NFT) project aimed at building an NFT metaverse platform.”“Krafton will continuously see ways to work closely with blockchain companies”The important... Continue reading…

Working while color-coordinated Continue reading…

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images Uber, longtime foe of the taxi industry, has made a deal to integrate New York City’s iconic yellow cabs in its app. The agreement, which is set to go into effect later this spring, means that roughly 14,000 taxis will be able to receive trip requests from Uber customers. (The news was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.)As part of the deal, the city’s licensed technology providers, Curb Mobility and Creative Mobile Technologies, will integrate their software with Uber. Yellow cabs, which can be hailed using smartphone apps owned by the two companies, will gain access to Uber’s much larger customer base, which could translate into higher trip volumes and more money for beleaguered cab drivers.New York City has been a... Continue reading…

Just a good, slab-style phone that doesn’t quite stand up to the category heavyweights Continue reading…

Here’s the E14 Flip. | Image: MSI MSI has made a number of updates to the Summit Series, its line of high-end business laptops. The Summit E14 Evo, Summit E13 Flip Evo, Summit E16 Flip Evo, and Summit E16 Flip (which is similar to the Flip Evo with a higher-resolution screen and discrete GPU options). There’s also a brand-new model, the Summit E14 Flip Evo, which is a convertible version (meaning its screen can fold backward into a tablet shape) of the Summit E14 Evo. Interestingly, the 15-inch Summit E15 does not appear to have been updated.The Summit E14 Flip would be for people who need a screen larger than that of the 13.4-inch E13 Flip Evo but don’t want to jump to a 16-inch model. It also offers a higher-resolution panel than the 13-inch convertible, maxing out at... Continue reading…

Brittani Medeiros Lyft is integrating Spin’s electric scooters into its app, with the goal of eventually featuring the scooters in all 60 cities where Spin operates in the US.The move comes amid more consolidation in the micromobility world after Berlin’s Tier Mobility acquired Spin from Ford earlier this month. Lyft, which owns Citi Bike in New York City, continues to operate its own fleet of e-scooters despite many financial headwinds.Lyft’s partnership with Spin will kick off in Nashville, followed by 13 additional markets throughout April, including Phoenix, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, Providence, Raleigh / Durham, Charlotte, Fort Collins, Ann Arbor, Kansas City, and Memphis.Lyft’s partnership with Spin will kick off in... Continue reading…

The guts of a Mac Studio. | Image: iFixit iFixit has gotten its grubby mitts on Apple’s new Mac Studio computer and Studio Display, and has taken both apart to learn more about them — including how easily they can be repaired or even upgraded. The Mac Studio in particular has generated some controversy because its SSDs don’t appear to be user-upgradable, despite being fairly easy to access and remove.There’s one piece of good news from iFixit’s teardown, which is that it does appear to be possible to swap out the SSD in a Mac Studio for one of the same size in case the drive fails. But despite there being a second SSD slot accessible, it doesn’t appear to be possible to simply insert an additional second drive to easily upgrade the Studio’s storage yourself. As for whether it... Continue reading…

The OnePlus 10 Pro. | Image: OnePlus If you’ve been waiting for the OnePlus 10 Pro to launch outside of China, then you don’t have much longer to wait. The company has announced in a tweet that its latest flagship smartphone will launch globally on March 31st at 10am ET, a little over three months after it launched in China. There aren’t many new details to be revealed about the device itself, so the main news of the event will be the phones’ pricing and release date in markets like the US, Europe, and India.OnePlus announced the 10 Pro’s key specs in January ahead of its launch in China, and since then reviewers have even imported the device to get an early look at what it offers (raising some durability concerns in the process). It’s powered by Qualcomm’s flagship... Continue reading…

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge When Google killed its Gmail alternative Inbox in 2018, it promised that several of its ideas would eventually come to Gmail. While some did arrive, most of what made Inbox a success, such as “bundles,” never did. Instead, in the following years, Google has shoehorned its entire productivity suite into Gmail to push people into using the rest of its Workspace services. And it’s about to get worse as Google gears up to roll out a major Gmail update that’s more cluttered than ever.Gmail’s evolving interface works for those invested in Google’s ecosystem, but it does little to save people from the drudgery of sifting through their messy inboxes every day. It’s easy to see why: it still dumps on you a list of emails with no real structure... Continue reading…

Last Monday, Microsoft declared that DirectStorage would usher in “a new era of fast load times and detailed worlds in PC games.” And while that now seems a little too grandiose, the developer of upcoming tech showcase game Forspoken now claims that one-second load times are legitimately in reach.Speaking at a GDC 2022 presentation about the tech embedded in the PC version of the game, Luminous Productions technical director Teppei Ono says that the Square Enix title will actually load some scenes in one second flat, provided your Windows 11 PC has a NVMe SSD capable of over 5,000MB/sec reads.That one-second load time is not the case for every scene, and he didn’t actually show us any scenes load in that amount of time — instead, we... Continue reading…