The Verge

We posted a couple of times about Meta's Quest 3S during the holidays. The virtual reality headset that typically sold for $299.99 was - and still is - available for $249.99. Better yet, you can get in on a promotion at Amazon that includes a $50 digital account credit with purchase. You can find a [...]

The parking lot was packed. That's the first Strange Thing. A little background. Just about every mall is struggling now, but the Neshaminy Mall in Bensalem, Pennsylvania is more or less comatose. As Defector's Dan McQuade, a lifelong Pennsylvanian and mall fan, wrote in his fond remembrance of the shopping center, the once bustling complex [...]

One of the fun parts of being a tech journalist for over a decade is that occasionally you get to watch a truly unique gadget go from concept to reality - and, eventually, into your living room. That's the case with the Mui Board, a smart home controller built into a piece of wood. The [...]

Hot on the heels of new year's celebrations, the annual Consumer Electronics Show will get underway in early January 2026. Once again, Las Vegas will host a sprawling sneak peek at the tech that will shape the industry throughout 2026. The Verge will be on the ground at CES 2026 covering the biggest announcements, press [...]

xAI's Grok is removing clothing from pictures of people without their consent following this week's rollout of a feature that allows X users to instantly edit any image using the bot without needing the original poster's permission. Not only does the original poster not get notified if their picture was edited, but Grok appears to [...]

Just over a year after being sentenced to five years in prison for the theft of billions of dollars in Bitcoin, hacker Ilya Lichtenstein is free. Lichtenstein announced his release in a post on X, specifically crediting Trump: "Thanks to President Trump's First Step Act, I have been released from prison early. I remain committed [...]

Now that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has appointed a new CEO to run Microsoft's biggest businesses, he has a little more time on his hands for other adventures. Beyond focusing on Microsoft's technical work, Nadella is now turning to the ancient art of blogging to discuss Microsoft's year ahead and why he thinks everyone needs [...]

Have you always wanted to scan your groceries at home? If so, the newest smart fridge from GE Appliances is for you. There's a barcode scanner built into the water dispenser that works along with an interior camera and an 8-inch tablet to help you keep track of what food you need and add it [...]

It's time to reboot another OG Pebble smartwatch - specifically, the round-faced Time Round, which is getting a follow-up more than a decade after its original launch. The new Pebble Round 2 improves upon its predecessor with longer battery life and a larger 1.3-inch touchscreen display, ditching the chunky bezel that surrounded the original Time [...]

Tesla's sales fell in the fourth quarter of 2025, as rising competition and the expiration of the federal EV tax credit continued to sap the company's global ambitions. The sales drop has led to Tesla losing its title as the world's best-selling EV maker to China's BYD, which sold 2.26 million vehicles last year. The [...]

LG is teasing the 2026 Gram Pro laptops that will be fully unveiled at CES, including what the company claims is the "world's lightest 17-inch RTX laptop." The LG Gram Pro 17 (17Z90UR) and Gram Pro 16 (16Z90U) will introduce a new ultralight "Aerominum material" developed by LG that aims to reduce a laptop's weight [...]

Fender Audio, the consumer electronics brand owned by the famous guitar maker, has announced its first pair of wireless headphones at CES 2026. What sets the Mix headphones apart from the competition are impressive battery life, a modular design that allows the ear cups and headband to be swapped to alternate colors, and a focus [...]

Fender, the guitar maker also known for its amps and speakers, has a new consumer electronics brand called Fender Audio making its debut at CES 2026. In addition to a new pair of wireless headphones, Fender Audio has announced a pair of portable Bluetooth speakers called ELIE, which is short for "Extremely Loud Infinitely Expressive." [...]

The biggest tech show of the year kicks off next week, as some of the industry's top players show up to Las Vegas for CES 2026. We'll be there to see all the new product demos we can and to bring you the most exciting news from the show. Follow our coverage for a preview [...]

You ever find yourself thinking, "I wish my phone had a phone?" Good news, friend. Clicks - the company behind the QWERTY keyboard case for your iPhone - has just the thing: the Clicks Communicator. It's intended as a kind of complement to your smartphone for when you just want to stay in touch without [...]

Punkt, the Switzerland-based, privacy-focused phone maker, is trying the whole "smartphone" thing again. The MC03 improves on some of the disappointing features of its previous effort, the MC02, while maintaining its security focus. Likewise, its software still comes with a subscription fee: the first year is included free, but it's $12 per month after that. [...]

Where's the Trump Phone? We're going to keep talking about it every week. We've reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump Phone's whereabouts. As usual, we're still waiting for a response. In the meantime, it's missed yet another of its promised release dates. When we started writing about Trump Mobile regularly, it all [...]

After one of its Starlink satellites exploded and another narrowly avoided colliding with a Chinese satellite, SpaceX says it will lower the orbit of thousands of Starlink satellites to increase safety. Of the over 9,000 Starlink satellites currently operating in low Earth orbit, SpaceX says it'll lower about 4,400 from 550km above the Earth's surface [...]

The Freestyle Plus all-in-one portable projector features 430 ISO lumens, or "nearly twice the brightness of the previous generation," according to Samsung. Great! But also a little strange since both the original and second generation Freestyle projectors listed "550 lumens" on their respective spec sheets. See, projector makers are notorious for playing fast and loose [...]

Petkit has announced two new automated machines at CES 2026 designed to feed and care for your pets using AI-powered cameras that track their behavior and provide health insights that may otherwise go unnoticed. Launching sometime in April 2026, the Petkit Yumshare Daily Feast is one of the first automatic dispensers that works with wet [...]

LG is adding a karaoke-focused party speaker to its lineup of Xboom devices, which is built in collaboration with Will.i.am. Announced this week, LG says the Stage 501 speaker comes with an "AI Karaoke Master" that can remove or adjust vocals from "virtually any song," similar to the Soundcore Rave 3S. It can also adjust [...]

Some years ago, I was writing a science fiction short story in which I wanted to incorporate verses from a 1928 song, "Button Up Your Overcoat." However, when I sold the story, my editor told me that since the song was still copyrighted, it was safer not to include the verses. If I had written [...]

As usual, 2025 was a year of deep congressional dysfunction in the US. But state legislatures were passing laws that govern everything from AI to social media to the right to repair. Many of these laws, alongside rules passed in past years, take effect in 2026 - either right now or in the coming months. [...]

Instagram boss Adam Mosseri is closing out 2025 with a 20-images-deep dive into what a new era of "infinite synthetic content" means as it all becomes harder and harder to distinguish from reality, and the old, more personal Instagram feed that he says has been "dead" for years. Last year, The Verge's Sarah Jeong wrote [...]

The fight for net neutrality never seems to be truly won or lost. Federal net neutrality rules have been on and off for the past 15 years. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed the Open Internet Order under President Barack Obama in 2010, prohibiting ISPs from blocking or throttling lawful internet traffic, the baseline rule [...]

New photos and video seem to confirm previous leaks hinting that the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra will sport a new camera bump. OnLeaks posted images of what look like dummy phones on X, following renders it leaked back in September. We've seen a similarly raised island on the Galaxy Z Fold 7, which 9to5Google points [...]

With the year coming to a close, now's a good time to set yourself up for a cleaner, more organized start in 2026. The Dreame X40 Ultra - one of our favorite robot vacuum deals from Black Friday - can handle most of the heavy lifting for you, and it's once again on sale. You [...]

In a good and just society, it would have been possible to bury Charlie Kirk without either threatening mass violence toward his enemies or making light of his death with a furry sex meme. But America in 2025 did not remotely resemble a working society, let alone a civil one, and Kirk's killing came prepackaged [...]

2025 was a big year for gaming, and that includes gaming hardware. Nintendo launched its Switch 2 console in June, and since then, numerous Switch 2 titles and noteworthy updates for original Switch games have launched. These include brand-new Nintendo experiences like Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza, as well as some belated but [...]

Two former employees at cybersecurity firms - one of whom was a ransomware negotiator - have pleaded guilty to carrying out a series of ransomware attacks in 2023. The Department of Justice announced the guilty pleas on Tuesday, saying 40-year-old Ryan Goldberg and 36-year-old Kevin Martin extorted $1.2 million in Bitcoin from a medical device [...]

Folding OLED displays are still most commonly found on premium smartphones and laptops, but One-Netbook is bringing the tech to a new gaming device. Its new OneXSugar Wallet is reminiscent of the company's folding OneXSugar Sugar 1 handheld that launched earlier this year. But instead of two screens, the Wallet handheld unfolds to reveal just [...]

GameSir is no stranger to experimenting with unique controller features - its Tarantula Pro can automatically swap its face button labels to accommodate alternate layouts, and its Pocket 1 clamps Game Boy controls onto your phone. What sets its new Swift Drive controller apart is a small steering wheel located smack-dab in the middle of [...]

Winter storms across the country are bringing heavy snow, rain, and - in some cases, as this Californian who briefly lost power a few days ago can attest - outages. If you want to prepare, Anker's 521 PowerHouse can help keep your essential devices running and it's on sale for $129.99 ($120 off) at Amazon. [...]

The US Cyber Trust Mark Program, an Energy Star-style certification for smart home security, could be winding down less than a year after it launched. Safety testing company UL Solutions has announced that it is stepping down as the program's lead administrator, just a few months after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) began investigating it [...]

I can't grow anything. Multiple attempts to create a cottage garden, first in Idaho and now in South Carolina, have brought disappointment. Both are challenging climates, but where others have succeeded, I've been left with little more than a pile of cherry tomatoes for my vast efforts (those things are bulletproof). I'd all but given [...]

Canon's new EOS R6 Mark III is an excellent camera. It's not a groundbreaking upgrade to the 3-year-old R6 Mark II, but it takes the same body with great ergonomics and adds more resolution, video that now goes up to 7K with open-gate filming, and improved autofocus performance. If you're in need of an impeccably [...]

In early December, Joshua Aaron, the developer behind the ICEBlock app - designed to let people alert others about the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents - filed a federal lawsuit alleging his First Amendment rights were violated. The Department of Justice had urged Apple to remove Aaron's app from its App Store, [...]

In just the past couple years, the art TV category that's been dominated by Samsung's The Frame has seen growth, with additions from both TCL and Hisense. Now LG has announced its own entry, the LG Gallery TV. The TV will leverage the Gallery+ service that LG released earlier this year, which includes thousands of [...]

GOG is splitting from CD Projekt, the game company that launched the preservation-focused PC gaming marketplace in 2008. In an update on Monday, GOG announced that its cofounder, Micha Kiciski, has acquired the digital storefront and its online gaming platform GOG Galaxy from CD Projekt - which he also cofounded - for $25.2 million. The [...]

After announcing and teasing its design well over a year ago, Epilogue's new SN Operator will finally be available for preorder starting tomorrow. Like the company's GB Operator that debuted in early 2021, the SN Operator is a standalone USB cartridge slot that lets you play and archive old Nintendo console games on PCs, Macs, [...]

Love them or hate them, more than half of the world's population interacts with algorithmic recommendations in some way every day. Algorithmic recommendations play an integral role in how users discover new content across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. It can be nice to be fed a stream of fresh posts, pictures, and [...]

It's almost the new year and time to treat yourself to a new pair of earbuds - especially if one of your resolutions for 2026 is to work out more. If you find yourself reading this and nodding, take a look at the Beats Powerbeats Fit, a recent upgrade of Beats' Fit Pro earbuds that [...]

A camera lens, historically, can only focus on one thing at a time, just like the human eye. That could be a thing of the past, though, thanks to a breakthrough lens technology developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) that can bring every part of a scene into sharp focus, capturing finer details [...]

With all the drama surrounding Warner Bros. Discovery's plans to sell itself to another company, it's not currently clear how much longer HBO Max will continue to exist in its current form. But for the time being, the streamer is chock full of solid series you might want to consider watching if you find yourself [...]

Xiaomi used the Christmas period to launch its top flagship phone for the year, the 17 Ultra. It drops the extra rear display that's the key selling point of the 17 Pro, but instead adds in the option of a manual zoom ring, built directly into the phone's camera island. That rotating zoom is only [...]

In 2024, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips finally made Arm-based Windows laptops viable. Unlike previous Arm laptops that struggled to even run Windows well, this new class offered solid performance and the best battery life on Windows, and they impressed us in Microsoft's own Surface Laptop and Surface Pro offerings. But inconsistent app compatibility remained the [...]

Hello from the dead week of the year, when all sane people have logged off to spend time with their families. This is when I typically write at least one deeply weird post while I'm working over the holiday. One time I got left alone on New Year's Day and posted about cats all day [...]

Google Photos will finally be available on TVs next year, starting with an upcoming integration for Samsung TVs. Samsung announced that the planned integration will "seamlessly bring the photos people capture on their phones to Samsung TVs, where they can appear in a larger, cinematic format," and that it wants Google Photos to be "deeply [...]

LG unveiled a whole new line of gaming monitors ahead of CES on Friday. The UltraGear evo line are all high-end monitors covering a range of technologies, but united by 5K resolution and AI upscaling. The three flagships under the new branding are the 39GX950B, the 27GM950B, and the 52G930B. The first number in the [...]