The Verge

A yet-to-be-launched share" feature for Meta Quest VR headsets might have been spotted inside the operating system's code. The new feature might allow you to share views of single 2D windows on your headset with other Quest users, according to UploadVR. In a post on X, a VR fan known as Luna who posts extensively [...]

Apple's release candidate for watchOS 11.4 came out today, providing an early look at some new features coming to the Apple Watch in the next few weeks. The OS update has some bug fixes, but more notably, it makes a change to the Apple Watch's Silent Mode, allowing alarms to be heard while everything else [...]

Spring has sprung - and so has Amazon's latest sales event. Amazon's Big Spring Sale kicks off tomorrow, March 25th, and runs through Monday, March 31st, bringing with it a slew of discounts on gardening supplies, bedding, grilling essentials, and other springtime favorites. And while the discounts aren't as steep as during tentpole events like [...]

Apple is getting closer to launching Priority Notifications, a feature that uses AI to automatically detect important iPhone notifications and makes them more visible on your lockscreen. The feature is included in the iOS 18.4 release candidate rolled out on Monday, as spotted earlier by MacRumors. Along with Priority Notifications, the iOS 18.4 release candidate [...]

Xas director of engineering, Haofei Wang, has suddenly left the company, according to sources with knowledge of the matter. Wang first joined Elon Muskas X in July 2023 and has been an integral part of the companyas leadership, often serving as a conduit between Musk and the rest of the companyas engineers. More recently, he [...]

In a significant executive shuffle announced Monday, OpenAI is expanding COO Brad Lightcap's responsibilities while CEO Sam Altman shifts his attention more toward the company's technical direction. The news was first reported by Bloomberg. Lightcap will now aoversee day-to-day operations,a international expansion, and manage key partnerships with tech giants like Microsoft and Apple, according to [...]

I'm still getting accustomed to seeing 27-inch 1440p QD-OLED gaming monitors for less than $700 - after all, it wasn't long ago that they were retailing for around $1,000. So imagine the feeling of sticker shock (complimentary) to spot one of Alienware's models with a fast 360Hz refresh rate for hundreds of dollars off, which [...]

23andMe has filed for bankruptcy, raising concerns about what will happen to the DNA-testing company and all the data itas collected from customers over the years. In the event that 23andMe is sold, its massive genetic database may end up in the hands of a different company entirely a one that users never consented to [...]

Google has officially launched its Drive app for Arm-compatible Windows PCs. It first rolled out the Arm64 app in beta last year, but now it's generally available," according to an update posted Monday. Like the existing Google Drive app, the Arm64 version lets Windows PCs running Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors store, sync, and access files. The [...]

We reported earlier this month that, due to changes Google is making to how apps access Google Photo libraries, digital photo frames from companies like Aura and Cozyla would no longer be able to auto-sync with those albums. But Aura has now confirmed to The Verge that its frames will continue to work with Google [...]

Minecraft is going to look very different soon. During the Minecraft Live event over the weekend, Mojang revealed a new update that will seriously transform the way we see the world of Minecraft. Vibrant Visuals is the graphical update players have been waiting for. It's got dynamic lighting, improved shadows, enhanced water reflections, volumetric fog, [...]

Microsoft launched its AI-powered Security Copilot a year ago to bring a chatbot to the cybersecurity space, and now it's expanding it with AI agents that are designed to autonomously assist overwhelmed security teams. Microsoft is unveiling six of its own AI agents for its Security Copilot, as well as five that have been created [...]

Though movie studio heads are usually in the mood to pat themselves on the back around this time of year, it is always difficult to take the entertainment industry seriously when you stop to think about the many ridiculous projects that leave you wondering awho asked for this?a IP-based hits like Barbie get studio executives [...]

Microsoft and Bethesda are bringing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to PS5 on April 17th. The game first debuted on Xbox and PC on December 9th, with Microsoft promising a PS5 release this spring. Bethesda is selling standard and premium versions of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on PS5, and the premium version [...]

Rivian and camping gear company iKamper have launched a new tent designed for the R1T electric truck that's based on iKamper's Skycamp 3.0 Mini pop-out tent. The $4,595 Skycamp Mini add-on stows away in a hardshell case that fits over Rivian's bed rack and pops out to the side of the truck with a ladder [...]

Today, I'm talking with Kakul Srivastava, CEO of music creation platform Splice. I don't think I need to really introduce Splice, actually - I just need to play this clip: If you exist on planet Earth, you know that as the guitar loop from Sabrina Carpenter's Espresso," which is an inescapable pop music phenomenon.You can [...]

Apple is bringing higher-fidelity audio to its AirPods Max headphones in April, the company announced today. When the $549 headphones switched to a USB-C connector last year, they lost support for wired audio playback - but Apple is about to rectify that with full lossless support, which even the prior Lightning model technically lacked. With [...]

GoPro is now shipping the new Anamorphic Lens Mod for its Hero 13 Black camera, which allows creators to record in a wider field of view without complex editing. The $129.99 anamorphic lens uses an optical squishing technique to shoot in a 21:9 aspect ratio and capture cinematic-style lens flares, with the Hero 13 Black [...]

DNA testing firm 23andMe has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection to help the company sell itself after years of financial difficulties. Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe's co-founder and CEO, announced on X that she has resigned with immediate effect to become an independent bidder for the company, with chief financial and accounting officer Joe Selsavage stepping [...]

Google has started rolling out new AI features to Gemini Live that let it see" your screen or through your smartphone camera and answer questions about either in real-time, Google spokesperson Alex Joseph has confirmed in an email to The Verge. The features come nearly a year after Google first demonstrated the Project Astra" work [...]

Google Maps users have recently been complaining on places like Reddit that their Timeline data - the app's historical record of where they've been - had disappeared. Now, Google has confirmed that it accidentally deleted the data and that anyone who wasn't using Google's cloud backups is out of luck. Google spokesperson Genevieve Park provided [...]

Apple is working on adding cameras to the Apple Watch in order to enable AI features like Visual Intelligence within the next two years, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman in today's Power On Newsletter. The cameras will be inside the display" for the standard Series Watch, while the Apple Watch Ultra would feature it on [...]

Balatro just won four Game Developers Choice Awards, including Game of the Year, but the person who made the game wasnat on stage to accept them. Instead, Playstack communications director Wout van Halderen spoke on behalf of Balatroas developer, who goes by the alias LocalThunk, each time the game won an award. aThe team does [...]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 76, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If youare new here, welcome, sorry if your bracketas busted, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I have been shirking most of my responsibilities to watch March Madness. [...]

In recent weeks, airport Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents have drawn public outcry for denying travelers US entry based on searches of their phones. A doctor on an H-1B visa was deported to Lebanon after CBP found asympathetic photos and videosa of Hezbollah leaders. A French scientist was turned away after a device search [...]

An update to the Philips Hue app this week appears to have leaked a new Hue Secure video doorbell, reports Hueblog. The unannounced product shows up in a section offering instructions for adding devices that you have no QR code for. From the screenshots below, taken in the iOS Hue app by my colleague Jennifer [...]

Cloudflare, one of the biggest network internet infrastructure companies in the world, has announced AI Labyrinth, a new tool to fight web-crawling bots that scrape sites for AI training data without permission. The company says in a blog post that when it detects inappropriate bot behavior," the free, opt-in tool lures crawlers down a path [...]

Infinity Nikki and Assassinas Creed Shadows have become my twin obsessions for their meticulously detailed environments, textures, and weather. With open-world dress-up game Infinity Nikki, I continue to be agog at how clothing textures are rendered with such detail and fidelity that by mere sight, I know exactly what a piece of fabric will feel [...]

SwitchBot will integrate more than 45 of its products with Home Assistant during the first half of this year, the company said in an email to The Verge. That expansion includes The SwitchBot Hub 3 that was first revealed in a filing with the Connectivity Standards Alliance last week. Many of these integrations are coming [...]

The Game Developers Conference, an annual gathering that brings thousands of game developers to San Francisco, has just wrapped up. While most of the event is about networking and interesting talks about game design and technology, there were also a bunch of unreleased indie games that we got to check out. Yes, much of video [...]

Buying the right laptop can be stressful. It's likely one of the bigger tech purchases you'll make, and there are a ludicrous number of models, sizes, form factors, and configurations to pick from. We review and test a wide swath of them here at The Verge, and we're constantly considering what's the best and who [...]

When Apple introduced the iPhone 15 Pro, Greg Joswiak, the companyas senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said the deviceas three rear cameras would give consumers athe equivalent of seven camera lenses in their pocket.a We could spend multiple podcasts debating the technical validity of that statement, but what Joswiak was trying to imply was [...]

Someone has responded to YouTuber Mark Rober's Tesla fake wall test with a video that also tries to address the question of whether the company's Full Self-Driving (FSD) features would detect a Wile E. Coyote-style road obstruction in the real world. Creator Kyle Paul posted his video Thursday and included two Teslas with FSD: a [...]

Aside from cutscenes, most of Mythic Quest takes place in the real world. But Apple's upcoming spinoff series Side Quest will give us a much better look at what the game looks like from within. While some of Side Quest's four episodes focus on people's lives outside of and away from Mythic Quest, the final [...]

Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr said companies looking for regulatory approval should get busy ending any sort of their invidious forms of DEI discrimination," according to an interview with Bloomberg. Carr reportedly brought up Paramount's merger with Skydance, Verizon's purchase of Frontier Communications, and T-Mobile's plans to acquire most of US Cellular as potential [...]

Lyft will let users in Atlanta catch robotaxi rides starting this summer, as reported by NBC News. Atlanta riders will have the opportunity to be matched with a fleet of autonomous Toyota Sienna minivans equipped with May Mobility's autonomous technology, a deployment that Lyft and May Mobility aim to scale over time across multiple markets," [...]

Congress' least favorite law is once against facing an existential challenge by bipartisan opponents. Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Dick Durbin (D-IL), the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, are planning to reintroduce a bill to sunset Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in two years. Repealing the bill, first reported by The Information, [...]

On March 18th, Chetan Nayak, a physicist leading Microsoftas quantum team, presented new data on the companyas quantum computing chip at the American Physical Societyas Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California. It was meant to calm a raging debate among physicists, but researchers remain skeptical of the results. aI never felt like there would be [...]

While the best iPad deals usually land during major sale events like Black Friday and Amazon Prime Day,many great iPad deals are attainable outside those times. The day-to-day discounts may come and go like changing winds, but there's often something to be saved, particularly on the more affordable iPads. The most recentiPad Pro and iPad [...]

The world has a more detailed map of the seafloor than ever before thanks to observations taken from space. NASA published a video this week showing a remarkably clear picture of the bottom of the ocean made possible thanks to new satellite technology. The face of the moon has been more thoroughly mapped than the [...]

Google's Gemini app now lets you generate Audio Overviews based on Deep Research. That means you can turn the in-depth reports generated by Gemini into a conversational podcast featuring two AI hosts." Since launching Audio Overviews within its AI note-taking app NotebookLM last September, Google has been steadily adding to the feature by letting you [...]

Meta has aggressively pushed to discredit and silence Sarah Wynn-Williams, the author of Careless People, her memoir about working at the company as a policy director. Now, sheas fighting back. Attorneys for Wynn-Williams this week filed an emergency motion seeking to dismiss the gag order that Meta won via an arbitrator. A copy of her [...]

After immigration agents detained Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil over his involvement in pro-Palestine protests on campus, President Donald Trump promised it was just the beginning. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has since arrested at least two more students who are in the country on visas a one of whom had recently sued [...]

Samsung has confirmed to The Verge that a software update error" is what broke certain 2024 soundbar devices," per a statement from Jim Kiczek, head of audio at Samsung Electronics America. Kiczek says that Samsung is offering free repairs for all affected units - regardless of warranty status." Last week, many owners of Samsung soundbars, [...]

The new souped-up Alexa voice assistant, Alexa Plus, is scheduled to arrive in the next few weeks in an early access preview. The good news is that as long as you have (or buy) an Echo Show 8, 10, 15, or 21 smart display, you'll be able to use the generative-AI powered Alexa across any [...]

The AI search startup Perplexity just proposed a bid for acquiring (and transforming) TikTok, per a company blog post published Friday. aPerplexity is singularly positioned to rebuild the TikTok algorithm without creating a monopoly, combining world-class technical capabilities with Little Tech independence,a the company wrote. They claim they're uniquely positioned to do this awithout creating [...]

TechCrunch has a new owner, again. Yahoo has sold the tech news site to the private equity firm Regent for an undisclosed sum, according to an announcement on Friday. Regent is the same company that snapped up Foundry, the firm behind outlets like PCWorld, Macworld, and TechAdvisor on Thursday.Founded in 2005, TechCrunch has experienced many [...]

Not satisfied with effectively buying a co-president role in Donald Trump's administration, Elon Musk has turned his attention - and money - towards a key race in the swing state of Wisconsin. The billionaire's America PAC is claiming to give $100 to registered voters who sign a petition against activist judges." It's not the first [...]

Alongside beefy wall chargers that can power up several devices simultaneously, Anker continues to refine the design and engineering of its basic single-port USB-C AC adapters making them smaller and smaller. Its new Nano 45W charger is now just 1.45 inches long and weighs 52 grams, which is about 17 grams lighter than the last [...]