The Verge

Steven Spohn at The Game Awards in 2017. | Image: Greg Doherty/Getty Images Steven Spohn passed a goal this week that he’s been chasing for nearly a year. He raised over a million dollars for AbleGamers, a charity that seeks to improve accessibility in games and connects disabled people with peer support and adaptive tech for gaming. Spohn has been its COO for 15 years.The charity’s mission, he says, is about giving people with disabilities access to “that sense of independence and that feeling of exploration or excitement or relaxation, whatever it is you’re going for, to help you mentally get through the tough times.”Spohn has multiple progressive illnesses that impact his functioning. He started the fundraising campaign, Spawn Together, in September of last year to celebrate his 40th birthday. He says he... Continue reading…

Image: DirecTV AT&T TV and its defunct AT&T TV Now sibling will officially become DirecTV Stream, a new unified service spun out of a deal between TPG Capital and AT&T for the telecommunication giant’s streaming properties.DirecTV began updating AT&T TV and AT&T TV Now customers of the change on August 14th. On the welcome screens of both services’ mobile apps informing them that the change would officially take place on August 26th, a spokesperson confirmed to The Verge. DirectTV Stream rebrands AT&T’s services acquired in the TPG Capital deal, which did not include HBO Max. (WarnerMedia, home to HBO Max, is set to merge with Discovery in mid-2022.) Image: DirecTV According to a company news release, “AT&T satellite, streaming or... Continue reading…

There was never any question what Epic Games wanted when it took Apple to court: the 48-second “Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite” made it clear App Store hypocrisy was the agenda. But the justification for a parallel case against Google wasn’t as clear-cut until today — it’s only now we’re learning about the most damning accusations against the Android giant.On Thursday, Judge James Donato unsealed a fully unredacted version of Epic’s original complaint against Google (via Leah Nylen), and it alleges the company was so worried about Epic setting a precedent by abandoning the Play Store that it unleashed a broad effort to keep developers from following the company’s lead. That included straight-up paying top game developers, including Activision... Continue reading…

Photo by Patrick Pleul/picture alliance via Getty Images SpaceX’s $3 billion contract to build a lunar lander for NASA was put on hold for a second time on Thursday after Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin sued over the award, according to court filings. NASA voluntarily agreed to temporarily suspend the contract until November 1st while the US Court of Federal Claims, where Blue Origin filed suit last week, adjudicates the case.Blue Origin had asked the court to grant a pause on SpaceX’s contract while the litigation plays out, according to a person familiar with the company’s sealed filings. NASA, eager to land astronauts on the Moon around 2024, agreed to halt SpaceX’s contract on the condition that all parties agreed to “an expedited litigation schedule that concludes on Nov. 1,” a spokesperson for... Continue reading…

Skyrim was first released in 2011. | Image: Bethesda Nearly a decade after its original release, Bethesda Softworks is announcing new updates coming to its acclaimed hit Skyrim. On November 11th, exactly 10 years after its original launch date, the game is getting a free next-gen upgrade that will be available to all owners of Skyrim Special Edition. And that’s not all — Bethesda is going to add three free pieces of Creation Club content to the game for all Special Edition owners, including the ability to go fishing.Bethesda is also releasing another edition of the game on November 11th, which is aptly named the The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Anniversary Edition. This version includes everything in Special Edition, the three free pieces of Creation Club content, and “over 500 pieces of... Continue reading…

Twitter is making some small updates to its direct messages | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter on Thursday said it’s introducing several new updates to its direct messages, which will roll out to some users in the next few weeks. The changes include the ability to send a direct message to multiple people in separate conversations because who among us has not accidentally started a group chat that way. Now, you can share a tweet in up to 20 separate DM conversations, if the goss is hot enough to share with that many individual tweeters at once.The feature is coming to the iOS and web versions of Twitter first, and Android “soon.”

Policy groups have asked Apple to abandon plans to scan iPhones for images of abuse | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge An international coalition of policy and civil rights groups published an open letter Thursday asking Apple to “abandon its recently announced plans to build surveillance capabilities into iPhones, iPads and other Apple products.” The groups include the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access Now, Privacy International, and the Tor Project.Earlier this month, Apple announced its plans to use new tech within iOS to detect potential child abuse imagery with the goal of limiting the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online. Apple also announced a new “communication safety” feature, which will use on-device machine learning to identify and blur sexually explicit images received by children in... Continue reading…

Just try not reading it as “SuperDrive.” | Image: Supdrive on Twitter Dom Hofmann, one of Vine’s founders and the creator of Byte and Peach, has a new project called Supdrive. In his tweet announcing Supdrive, he calls it an “on-chain fantasy game console,” which doesn’t necessarily make it any more obvious as to what this project will look like. He’s since explained in an announcement post, which you can read below, that it’ll be a video game console that plays classic-style games (in the vein of Pacman or Asteroid), with NFTs acting as a sort of virtual cartridge.In a Discord set up for Supdrive, Hofmann wrote that the games will be NFTs, running on virtual firmware. The fact that games will be released as NFTs means that there will only be so many “editions” or copies available. Hofmann also says that... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple products are often leaked because they’re immensely popular, the company is protective of its plans, and people are willing to pay for just about any information on a new product. A new must-read report from Motherboard shows that not everyone selling Apple leaks is on the up-and-up, and not because of the information they’re peddling. Some leakers are working for Apple.Motherboard’s Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai spoke to a double agent named Andrey Shumeyko, an Apple leaker who began offering information to the company in 2017. By the time 2020 rolled around and iOS 14 leaked, Shumeyko was actively trying to become Apple’s mole, tracking leaked hardware and software and sharing it with Apple’s Global Security team in the hopes of... Continue reading…

Motorola has a new version of its $700 Edge smartphone, bringing better cameras, a more modern processor, and an updated design.As with last year’s Edge, the new model doesn’t quite offer the best hardware Android has to offer, with a Snapdragon 778 5G processor, 6GB RAM and 128GB storage, or 8GB RAM / 256GB storage, but those sacrifices might be worth it for the decidedly midrange price tag.Despite that, the new Edge does feature the 108-megapixel camera that was one of the marquee features on the Edge Plus, along with a larger 5,000mAh battery and mmWave 5G — both of which were also offered on the Edge Plus but were downgraded to a 4,500mAh battery and sub-6GHz-only specs on last year’s Edge. The display is a... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft is announcing its first price increase for its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 services in a decade. The price increases will affect commercial and business users of Microsoft’s software as a service (SaaS) offerings next year, with no changes to pricing for education or consumers.Microsoft’s updated pricing will go into effect on March 1st, 2022:

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Newly unredacted sections of Epic’s antitrust complaint against Google reveal new details on the lengths to which Google went to undermine third-party app stores on the Android platform. According to the new text, starting in 2019, Google ran a “Premier Device Program” that gave Android phone makers a greater share of search revenue than they would normally receive. In exchange, the OEMs agreed to ship their devices without any third-party app stores preinstalled. Specifically, they followed a rule that prohibited “apps with APK install privileges” without Google’s approval, leaving the Play Store as the only built-in digital marketplace for software.As noted by Leah Nylen, products that qualified as a Premier Device would receive a 12... Continue reading…

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge Google quietly paid game developers hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives to keep their games on the Play Store, a newly unredacted complaint from Epic Games in its antitrust suit against Google alleges. The program was known as “Project Hug,” or later as the “Apps and Games Velocity Program.”In 2018, when Fortnite for Android first launched, Epic Games took the unusual step of exclusively releasing it outside of the Google Play Store. Instead, players had to download an installer directly from Epic’s website, allowing the company to bypass Google’s 30 percent fee — at the cost of a less user-friendly installation process. Epic Games would eventually relent and release Fortnite on the Play Store in April 2020 (at least, until it... Continue reading…

A screenshot from Grand Theft Auto V. | Image: Rockstar Games In May 2020, Epic Games offered Grand Theft Auto V for free on the Epic Games Store, a deal that proved to be so popular it took down the store for more than eight hours. And thanks to documents discovered as part of the Epic v. Apple trial, we now have an idea of just how popular the deal was: according to an internal Epic slide, it brought more than 7 million new users to Epic’s online marketplace.You can see the slide below, which also shows how many new users other freebies brought to the Epic Games Store. While other games like Subnautica and Civilization 6 drove a good number of signups (just under 1 million and 2.5 million, respectively), nothing comes close to the 7 million people who joined for GTA V. Page 6 of ... Continue reading…

The OnePlus N200, a sub-$300 phone, is the kind of budget device the company is offering in the US. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge OnePlus may be getting ready to launch another variant of its 9-series phones, the 9 RT, according to an Android Central source. Based on the report, it looks to be a slightly upgraded version of the OnePlus 9R, which was launched earlier this year with more modest specs than the flagship 9 and 9 Pro. That model never made it to North America, and it seems this will also be the case for the 9 RT. Like the Nord 2. And the 9 Pro base model. But who’s keeping track?According to Android Central, the OnePlus 9 RT will launch in October with a Snapdragon 870 processor, 120Hz OLED, a 4,500mAh battery, and OxygenOS 12 out of the box. For its main rear-facing camera, it will reportedly use the 50-megapixel sensor behind the same (very good)... Continue reading…

Image: Prime Video Prime Video is giving users more options for personalizing their user profiles with the addition of characters from its original series.Amazon introduced user profiles to its Prime Video service last year, and it previously allowed supported personalized images for individual user accounts. Now, however, users can choose to make their account avatar a character from one of nearly two dozen Amazon original series, including Fleabag, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, The Expanse, Bosch, and more.To change a user icon on Prime Video’s website, head to the Prime Video homepage and click “Manage Profiles” from the “Who’s Watching?” menu in the upper right corner. To change a user profile image on iOS, Android, and Fire... Continue reading…

As expected, Sledgehammer Games officially announced the next Call of Duty with the reveal of Vanguard, which will be launching in November. The new shooter is set during World War II and will feature a “historically inspired” single-player campaign, along with a multiplayer mode and integration with Call of Duty: Zombies and Warzone.The announcement comes as Sledgehammer’s parent company Activision Blizzard, and in particular Overwatch developer Blizzard, has come under fire for a culture of sexual harassment, spurred by a lawsuit filed by the state of California. Since then employees have staged a walkout and multiple high-profile developers at Blizzard have left the studio, including president J. Allen Brack.During a meeting with... Continue reading…

Alongside its reveal of Call of Duty: Vanguard, Activision Blizzard announced that Call of Duty: Warzone, its popular, free-to-play battle royale, will receive an update later this year that weaves a new “multi-faceted” anti-cheat system into the game. It will arrive alongside a brand-new map that’s currently in development by Raven Studios, though the system will work across all of Warzone.Cheating has been a huge problem for Warzone since it launched in early 2020, as it is for almost every online competitive game, yet Activision Blizzard’s attempts to thwart cheaters — particularly in ranked matches — haven’t worked. The company hasn’t detailed exactly how its new system aims to succeed where it hasn’t before, as well as whether it’s... Continue reading…

QuakeCon, the annual fan convention for the legendary first-person shooter, was canceled last year during the pandemic, but it’s back today with a nailgun-like bang. Machine Games and id Software have teamed up to create a visually enhanced version of the original Quake game, after June 22nd marked the 25th anniversary of the game’s release.It’s the classic Quake, run-and-gun combat through medieval mazes with nailguns, grenade launchers, and shotguns, but it’s all in 4K with widescreen support, online multiplayer, and even new expansion packs.The original version of Quake is now available on PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch, complete with up to 4K support, widescreen resolutions, enhanced models, dynamic lighting,... Continue reading…

A fugitive who Justice Department officials say had scammed more than 20 people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars was sentenced to four years in prison on Friday, after being on the run for almost 15 years. Austrian authorities were able to identify Randy Levine, 54, of Boca Raton, Florida, due to a facial recognition system according to the DOJ, after he tried to use an alias to open a bank account, leading to his arrest in June 2020.Levine fled the US in 2005, after authorities seized his passport as part of an investigation into an alleged scam he had been running, the DOJ said in a release. According to Levine’s plea agreement, which he signed in May, he would offer to set up gambling accounts for people if they sent him... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter is testing a feature that makes it even more enticing to use its recently acquired Revue newsletter platform: the ability to subscribe to a newsletter directly from a Twitter profile, without having to follow a link to a separate website. The feature can be enabled by all Revue newsletter writers, but the button is initially only being shown to a test group of Twitter users on Android and the web.The subscribe button has to be turned on in Revue’s settings before it can show up on Twitter. Visually, the new button and newsletter card appear underneath your Twitter bio almost like a pinned tweet, populated with the title of your Revue newsletter, a photo, a short description, and the actual subscribe button. Tapping the button... Continue reading…

Razer did the Razer thing and put RGB lighting on its latest earbuds Continue reading…

It’s not your typical HP Pavilion Continue reading…

Toyota’s supply chain has been disrupted | Photo by Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images Toyota said Thursday that it would reduce production in Japan and North America due to a shortage of semiconductor chips, a sign that even the best-run supply chains are being affected by the shortage.In Japan, the automaker will reduce production by 40 percent later this month and into September, which will affect most of its production lines, the The Wall Street Journal reported; planned reductions in North America will be between 40 and 60 percent in August. The reductions mean Toyota will produce between 60,000 and 90,000 fewer vehicles.“Due to COVID-19 and unexpected events with our supply chain, Toyota is experiencing additional shortages that will affect production at most of our North American plants,” the company said in a... Continue reading…

Apple’s Mac has long been an afterthought for the video game industry, and few think of Google as a games company — despite running Android, one of the biggest game platforms in the world. But Google had a plan to change those things in October 2020, according to an explicitly confidential 70-page vision document dubbed “Games Futures.”The “need-to-know” document, which was caught up in the discovery process when Epic Games hauled Apple into court, reveals a tentative five-year plan to create what Google dubbed “the world’s largest games platform.” Google imagined presenting game developers with a single place they can target gamers across multiple screens including Windows and Mac, as well as smart displays — all tied together by... Continue reading…

Image: Apple Apple has released a new trailer for Foundation, its upcoming epic sci-fi show for Apple TV Plus based on Isaac Asimov’s series of novels, and I’m getting some serious “Game of Thrones but in space” energy from it. There are vast (space) vistas, a sweeping soundtrack, numerous shots of people making very serious faces, and dramatic proclamations that wouldn’t be out of place in an early episode of Game of Thrones:

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A natural experiment in Vermont helped show the impacts Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Today is Tesla’s AI Day, a sequel of sorts to the company’s Autonomy Day event held in 2019. The event, which will be held at Tesla’s headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, will be livestreamed for the public starting at 5PM PT / 8PM ET (though the event may not actually begin until closer to 5:30PM PT).We don’t have a lot of details about what will be announced, but based on the invitation, we’ll get a keynote address by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, hardware and software demos from Tesla engineers, test rides in the Model S Plaid, and “more.” Musk has also tweeted that the “sole goal” of the event is to lure experts in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence to come work at Tesla.Tesla has been holding events to highlight certain... Continue reading…

A worker installs solar panel at the Connexus Energy Athens Township solar-plus-storage project site in Athens Township, Minnesota, U.S., on Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2018. | Ari Lindquist/Bloomberg via Getty Images 2020 was a big year for big batteries in the US, which is crucial for getting grids to run on more renewable energy. Power capacity — a measure of how much power a battery can instantly discharge — for large-scale batteries grew at an unprecedented pace in the US last year, according to an annual report released this week by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).2020 smashed the previous record set in 20182020 smashed the previous record set in 2018 for the biggest growth in power capacity in the US with 489MW of large-scale battery storage added. That’s more than twice what was added in 2018. By the end of last year, there was 1,523MW of large-scale battery power capacity in the US. For comparison, the largest solar farm in... Continue reading…

Facebook Facebook in the US is going to look slightly more like TikTok for some users. Today, the company announced that it’s testing Facebook Reels stateside, which will bring the short-form, TikTok-like videos to the platform. These will show up for some users in the News Feed and within Groups, where people can watch them together. (The company is already testing this in India, Mexico, and Canada, and the US limited rollout is just an extension of that test.) As part of this test, Instagram users will also be able to cross-post their reels to Facebook.People can watch and create reels from the Facebook app, and the feature is designed to give people a way to “express themselves, discover entertaining content, and to help creators broaden... Continue reading…

Shared electric scooter company Bird is branching out into new two-wheeled vehicles, namely electric bikes. A few months after it introduced its first shared e-bike, the company announced that it would also offer its own e-bike for sale.The bike, dubbed Bird Bike of course, has a 500W rear hub motor, a Gates carbon belt drive, pedal- and throttle-assisted power, and the relatively modest sticker price of $2,299. Design-wise, the bike looks very similar to VanMoof’s popular e-bikes, with a slightly elongated top tube and embedded front and rear lights.Bird, which was the first company to introduce shared electric scooters in a US city, has always flirted with the idea of e-bikes. The company first rolled out its Scoot-branded electric... Continue reading…

Title screen of The Vale: Shadow of the Crown. | Image: Falling Squirrel The Vale: Shadow of the Crown, an audio-based adventure game by indie studio Falling Squirrel, is available on Xbox and PC today for $19.99. The game was developed in collaboration with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, and made for and tested by blind and low-vision players.Players navigate a medieval setting as Alex, the blind second heir to a kingdom, who is on her way to the borderlands when her caravan is attacked by enemy soldiers. Left on her own, Alex has to travel the land, find weapons, learn spells, and fight enemies without sight.Besides menus, which are presented in text and through audio description, the only visuals in The Vale are colored specks that float across a black screen. The behavior of the specks... Continue reading…

Three former Netflix engineers charged with insider trading | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged three former Netflix engineers with being part of a “long-running” insider trading scheme, the agency announced. The engineers and two close associates allegedly traded on confidential information about Netflix’s subscriber growth, generating more than $3 million in total profit.According to the SEC complaint, while employed at Netflix in 2016 and 2017, Sung Mo “Jay” Jun tipped information about the streaming giant’s subscribers to his brother Joon Mo Jun and friend Junwoo Chon, who used the info to trade ahead of Netflix earnings announcements. After Sung Mo Jun left Netflix in 2017, the SEC alleges, he continued to get confidential information about the company’s subscriber... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge One year after getting diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, a heart condition that causes an irregular heartbeat, a 70-year-old woman was back for another diagnosis: new-onset health anxiety triggered by her smartwatch. Despite not having concerning symptoms, the patient became more and more preoccupied with and worried about notifications from her watch. Over the one-year period, she took 916 ECG recordings through her device.That patient isn’t an outlier, says Lindsey Rosman, an assistant professor of medicine in the division of cardiology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, who wrote about the case in a new paper. She was just one example of a pattern seen in cardiology clinics. “Patients with underlying... Continue reading…

An iPhone 12 mini. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge In 2011, rumors swirled that Apple was working on a so-called “iPhone nano,” a new iPhone that would be smaller and cheaper than the top-of-the-line model at the time, the iPhone 4. While Apple never did release that rumored super-small phone, a Steve Jobs email we spotted while collecting the very best emails from the Epic v. Apple lawsuit confirms the company was indeed working on an iPhone nano at one point in time.Unfortunately, Jobs’ October 2010 email, which is an agenda for a strategy meeting, doesn’t reveal much about the device. There’s a bullet for an “iPhone nano plan,” a sub-bullet for its “cost goal,” and another sub-bullet indicating that “Jony,” presumably Apple’s former design chief Jony Ive, would “show model (and/or... Continue reading…

#4721 In May, the world watched as Epic Games dragged Apple to court, challenging the most profitable company in the world in the name of app fairness (and securing more Fortnite profits for itself). We’re still waiting for a verdict in Epic v. Apple, but we haven’t just been sitting around. We’ve also been digging through these companies’ dirty laundry, reading scores of internal emails and confidential presentations unearthed during the legal discovery process. It’s fascinating stuff.In fact, we found dirt on a variety of other companies as well: Microsoft, Sony, Google, Nintendo, Valve, Netflix, Hulu, and many others were caught up in discovery, and many details of their businesses, strategies, and conversations with Apple and Epic are... Continue reading…

Microsoft has unveiled a refreshed Xbox stereo headset, a $59.99 wired model that’s more affordable than its stellar $100 wireless headset that launched earlier in 2021. It’s launching on September 21st, and as is to be expected, it’s missing a few features. But much of its design is intact. You can twist the dial on the outside of the right ear cup to adjust the volume, and there’s a mute button on the back side of the flexible microphone — mirroring what you get with the wireless version. The stereo headset doesn’t appear to have the chat / game audio mixing dial on the left ear cup as the pricier model does, but that’s not a horrible loss given the price difference.This headset connects through your Xbox controller via its bold green... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A year after The Wall Street Journal reported Amazon had an interest in using empty mall spaces as fulfillment centers, the business paper is back with a rumor that Amazon is planning to open department store-style locations of its own. The reported plan is for stores that are smaller than your average 100,000-square-foot Macy’s or JC Penney location, with a footprint that’s only about 30,000 square feet, which is closer to the size of Kohl’s stores that already handle Amazon returns. Without specific information on what they might sell, they could stock clothing, electronics, and household items.While private equity firms did their part, Amazon is now in the odd position of replacing stores that it helped kill off. If the plans turn... Continue reading…

The iPad mini is Apple’s smallest tablet | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The latest iPad Mini is back at Cyber Monday-level pricing, offering the best deal possible for Apple’s most compact tablet. Walmart has it on sale today for $100 off, clocking in at $299 and matching the lowest price we’ve seen for one of the most powerful small-format tablets on the market. The 64GB Wi-Fi model is perfect for casual reading, consuming content, controlling smart home functions, or just browsing the web on the couch on a nice 7.9-inch screen. Apple is expected to release a new model this fall, but here’s a prime opportunity to save on the current version right now. Read our review.Yesterday saw the Steam release of Tetris Effect: Connected on PC, and if you plan on jumping in, it’s available for 25 percent off through... Continue reading…

Corsair Corsair impressed me last year with its $150 HS75 XB Wireless, an Xbox-exclusive wireless headset that looked and felt more like a high-end set of headphones than a gaming accessory. They also had great sound quality and an easy-to-learn button layout with the right amount of features. It wasn’t necessarily a flaw that they only worked with Xbox consoles, but no one likes to be excluded. The company has now released the HS80 RGB Wireless for the same $150 price with PlayStation compatibility, but these aren’t quite the successor that I was expecting or hoping for.This one works with the PS4, PS5, as well as PC with its USB-A wireless transmitter. Unlike most wireless headsets that use a dongle like this, I couldn’t get it to work with... Continue reading…

Intel Arc is the company’s first big foray into dedicated gaming GPUs, coming in Q1 2022, but we got another preview at some of additional details for the upcoming graphics cards at the company’s Architecture Day 2021 event — including a first look at Intel’s AI-accelerated super sampling, now known as XeSS.XeSS looks set to take on Nvidia’s own Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) tech, will make its debut alongside the first Arc GPU architecture, known as Alchemist, in early 2022. Much like DLSS, it will upscale games from a lower resolution to provide smoother frame rates without a noticeable compromise in image quality.Intel is also using dedicated Xe-cores in its upcoming GPUs to power its XeSS technology, with dedicated Xe Matrix... Continue reading…

Intel has spent much of 2021 announcing plans for its future: a new IDM 2.0 strategy, new naming schemes for its process nodes, and new desktop GPUs. At Intel’s Architecture Day 2021, we finally got a preview of how some of those changes are coming together in new chips, starting with the upcoming Alder Lake lineup later this year.As the company has been teasing since last year’s Architecture Day, Alder Lake will feature Intel’s latest hybrid architecture: instead of simply offering the next generation of powerful Intel CPU cores, it’ll offer a mix of both performance and efficiency x86 cores, both of which Intel previewed as part of its announcements.Additionally, Alder Lake will be the first chip released on Intel’s newly renamed... Continue reading…

General Motors and AT&T are partnering to bring 5G connectivity to “millions” of vehicles over the next decade. The improved connectivity will mean better software performance, enhanced navigation, and faster music and video streaming capabilities, company officials said.Starting with model year 2024, all Chevrolet, Cadillac, and GMC vehicles will come equipped with 5G. In addition, all of GM’s current model year 2019 and newer vehicles, which are equipped with 4G LTE, will experience “faster connectivity speeds and many of the same performance benefits of future 5G-equipped vehicles” thanks to GM’s fifth-generation cellular network architecture.In other words, cars made in 2019 and beyond will have improved data speeds and software... Continue reading…

Dell Dell has announced a 14-inch portable USB-C monitor that’s priced at $349.99 and will be released globally on August 31st. It has a 1080p LED-backlit IPS panel (60Hz refresh rate, 6ms response time) and you can use it as a secondary display for your USB-C laptop.The monitor, which Dell refers to as the C1422H, has narrow bezels and a minimalist design that makes it look as if it came off an XPS laptop. It features a built-in stand that tilts between 10 and 90 degrees. The portable monitor weighs less than two pounds, and it can reach a peak brightness of 300 nits.There’s a USB-C port on each side of the base, both of which can receive and pass through power; they can also handle a video feed via DisplayPort 1.2 alt mode. You can get... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A group of disgruntled investors is pursuing a formal claim against the cryptocurrency platform Binance for allegedly causing millions in damages through an unanticipated outage earlier this year. Filed in an international business arbitration court, the case represents the largest investor action ever brought against a cryptocurrency platform, and a major test of the rights of investors speculating in digital currency markets.The case stems from a widespread service outage on May 19th, which coincided with a massive drop in the price of Bitcoin. Binance wasn’t the only platform affected, as a mass selloff clogged blockchain transactions and overwhelmed reserves, but the complex financial products offered by the platform made the damage... Continue reading…

Third time is maybe the charm Continue reading…

Since the PlayStation 5 debuted, we’ve seen lots of novel uses of its DualSense controller. Game developers have utilized the haptic vibrations to simulate weather like falling rain or blowing wind, while the added resistance in the triggers makes firing a weapon or making an exhausted NBA star sprint all the more immersive. Often these features help make seemingly small interactions feel more notable — and my favorite new example is the cats in Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut on the PS5.The new version isn’t really a director’s cut, at least in the typical sense, but rather an enhanced version of the open-world samurai game that originally launched as the last big PS4 exclusive in 2020. That game married a fairly standard open-world... Continue reading…

Fossil’s Gen 6 smartwatch. | Image: WinFuture Fossil’s upcoming Gen 6 smartwatch has leaked thanks to a retailer listing spotted by WinFuture. Notably, it appears to be Fossil’s first smartwatch with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear 4100 Plus processor, which launched last year but has so far only appeared on a handful of devices. The new watch follows Fossil’s Gen 5 lineup, which dates back to 2019, and received new LTE-equipped models this year.The Gen 6 will be Fossil’s first Wear OS smartwatch since Google announced it was collaborating with Samsung on the third-generation of its operating system. But based on currently available information, the wearable is unlikely to launch with the new software. When Google announced its Wear OS 3 update plans in July it said that Fossil’s... Continue reading…

Facebook Facebook is bringing the office to VR with Horizon Workrooms Continue reading…