The Verge

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Some Tesla customers have noticed that their newly-purchased Model 3s and Model Ys have missing USB ports, an issue first spotted by Electrek. Tesla has reportedly been telling customers that the chip shortage is behind the lack of ports.As noted by Electrek, the issue didn’t seem to start cropping up until November 11th, and only seems to be affecting Model 3s and Model Ys. Recent buyers have turned to Reddit to voice their concerns about the missing ports, noting that the USB-C ports on the center console and near the rear seats are missing — many also claim that their EV’s wireless charger also isn’t working (via Electrek).Users will have to deal with driving a pricey battery-on-wheels that can’t even charge their own devicesTo... Continue reading…

Photo by Coinbrs The yet-to-be-announced Samsung Galaxy S21 Fan Edition (FE) has become the victim of another leak, according to a report by Android Police. Just like its S20 FE predecessor, which serves as the affordable counterpart to the S20, the S21 FE is supposed to be the budget-friendly alternative to the flagship S21. Photo by Coinbrs Marketing images leaked by Coinbrs show several images of the device, and it, unsurprisingly, closely resembles the S21. The images show us much of what we saw in the S21 FE’s user manual that was previously leaked in September.As noted by Coinbrs, the device will reportedly have three cameras on its rear: a main 64MP sensor, a depth sensor, and an ultra-wide-angle sensor. On the front, it’s... Continue reading…

Rockstar Games Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition became unavailable on the Rockstar Games store the same day it launched. The Trilogy, which comes packaged with the remastered versions of GTA III, GTA: Vice City, and GTA: San Andreas, was supposed to be playable on November 11th, but due to maintenance and other issues, it’s been anything but that.

Illustration by Richard Parry You made it to the weekend. Good job. In exchange for making it to arguably the best time of the week, we owe you some deals. That’s just how it works. Below, you’ll find a potent mixture of this week’s best tech deals.Before we get started, however, a little bit of housekeeping. We published a massive holiday gift guide this week. Its art (by Richard Parry) is so good that I’ve attached it above for you to peep.As we get closer to the holidays, you might want to subscribe to our Verge Deals newsletter. If you’re not the kind of person who checks deals every single day, we think you’ll appreciate our bi-weekly dispatch filled with the best deals we’ve seen during the week.We also want to remind you that our sister site, The... Continue reading…

Let’s face it — somewhere inside us all is a greedy five-year-old who wants that wonderful, beautiful, fascinating toy that seems completely out of reach. But what that toy is depends very much on who we are. So, just out of curiosity, we asked the staff of The Verge to tell us something that they would love to get for the holidays — if money (and opportunity) was no object. (And the rule was that idealistic longings like world peace or the end of the pandemic didn’t count — for this once, we were not going for idealism.)So let’s see what hidden longings lie in the hearts of The Verge’s staff...Garmin inReach MiniThere’s something magical about getting lost in the woods and having to find your way out with just a map and a compass,... Continue reading…

“Purp.” | Image: Valve On Friday, PC gaming giant Valve invited the developer community to learn more about its Steam Deck, a $400 handheld gaming PC with a comparatively powerful AMD chip. It’s akin to the Nintendo Switch of gaming PCs, and there’s a lot we already knew about the delayed handheld from its announcement, our trip to Valve’s headquarters, and an official teardown. But today, we learned even more.Here are the highlights — unless, of course, you’d like to watch Valve’s entire livestream or breakout sessions for yourself. That’s fine too!Aerith lives The AMD chip inside the Steam Deck has a name: it’s the Aerith SOC, a clear reference to the famous Aerith from Final Fantasy VII. It’s an APU with a power envelope of between 4 and... Continue reading…

Photo by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud gaming service just leapfrogged Google Stadia in performance, with a new $200-a-year tier that practically gives you the power of an RTX 3080 desktop graphics card in the cloud. But if you’re grandfathered into the original $4.99 a month “Founders” tier, or pay $100 a year for “Priority” access, you may not be getting quite what you expected — because Nvidia has quietly revealed it’s capping the frame rates of 12 specific games to ensure consistent performance.Nvidia now has an official support page (via 9to5Google) explaining the practice, after Redditors and others revealed that a variety of games were locked to frame rates lower than 60fps. It appears that Nvidia’s been doing this for quite a while but only... Continue reading…

Image: The Verge AMC Theaters, which is perhaps the king of the memestocks, promised in August that you’d be able to pay for tickets and concessions with Bitcoin by the end of the year, and now, you can do just that.Bitcoin isn’t the only cryptocurrency you’ll be able to use; AMC is also accepting Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin for online purchases, according to a tweet from CEO Adam Aron (via CoinTelegraph). He also says you can pay online with Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal.

Echo Dot speakers just got the ability to detect if there’s motion in a room. | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Starting this week, newer Echo and Echo Dot speakers can use ultrasound to detect occupancy in your home and turn on and off other connected devices such as lights or your Fire TV. First mentioned at Amazon’s fall hardware event in September, the Echo and Echo Dot fourth-gen speakers can now emit an “inaudible ultrasound wave” to detect if there are people present in a room.You can enable or disable this feature in the Alexa app, where you can also set up occupancy routines to use this new capability to do things like turn on lights when you enter a room and then off again when the room is empty. You could also have Alexa play music or a radio station when motion is detected near an Echo device during a set time and then shut down the... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Meta (formerly Facebook) CTO Andrew Bosworth warned employees that creating safe virtual reality experiences was a vital part of its business plan — but also potentially impossible at a large scale.In an internal memo seen by Financial Times, Bosworth apparently said he wanted Meta virtual worlds to have “almost Disney levels of safety,” although spaces from third-party developers could have looser standards than directly Meta-built content. Harassment or other toxic behavior could pose an “existential threat” to the company’s plans for an embodied future internet if it turned mainstream consumers off VR.At the same time, Bosworth said policing user behavior “at any meaningful scale is practically impossible.” FT reporter Hannah Murphy... Continue reading…

The Icelandverse looks great. | Image: Inspired by Iceland Mark Zuckerberg’s extensive video about Facebook / Meta’s pivot to the metaverse has become something of a meme, but perhaps the best parody of the presentation was done this week by, of all places, the country of Iceland.In a nearly two-and-a-half-minute video, a man who is identified as Chief Visionary Officer Zack Mossbergsson begins a discussion about “a revolutionary approach on how to connect our world without being super weird.“Some said it’s not possible,” he continues. “Some said it’s out of reach. To them, we say, it’s already here.” He then gestures in the general direction of a beautiful, snow-covered Icelandic landscape that stretches as far as the eye can see. “Seriously, look, it’s right here.”The rest of the video is... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales According to reports from some users, an update to Google Photos removed one of the Pixel 6’s big features: the Magic Eraser tool that lets you remove unwanted objects or people from your photos. If your Pixel downloaded the affected version (5.67, according to Android Central), fear not: Google says it’s working on a fix.While the version of Photos with the Magic Eraser erased doesn’t appear to be available in the Play Store anymore, its presence on APK Mirror confirms that it was at one point (though we wouldn’t recommend downloading it). According to one user, the broken version displayed a tip about the object removal feature, despite it no longer being accessible in the app.Google says a fix is comingGoogle spokesperson Alex... Continue reading…

Judge Bruce Schroeder takes a moment to take a personal call as the court waits for and evidence video to be played as Kyle Rittenhouse, left, and his attorney Mark Richards look on at the Kenosha County Courthouse on November 12, 2021 in Kenosha, Wisconsin | Photo by Sean Krajacic-Pool/Getty Images The prosecution and defense continue to argue over evidence in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse for killing two people during a protest in Wisconsin, with a surprising amount of confusion from both the defense and Judge Bruce Schroeder about what happens when you pinch-to-zoom on a touchscreen device.On Wednesday, Schroeder stated it was up to the prosecution to prove that zooming on a video in with an iPad doesn’t alter or manipulate the footage. “iPads, which are made by Apple, have artificial intelligence in them that allow things to be viewed through three-dimensions and logarithms,” the defense said as part of its objection, adding that the iPad “uses artificial intelligence, or their logarithms, to create what they believe is... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Apple’s latest iOS 15.2 beta is making the iPhone 13 Pro’s macro mode simple by adding a button to let you turn it on and off (via 9to5Mac). The icon, which looks like a little flower, pops up whenever you’re close enough to an object to take a macro photo and lets you easily switch between having Auto Macro mode on and off without having to go into settings.A video from ZolloTech shows how the feature currently works in iOS 15.2 beta 2: if you have Auto Macro turned off, the button will appear when you get close to something. Tapping it seems to basically turn Auto Macro back on, and your phone will switch into macro mode. Tapping the button again turns Auto Macro off and switches you back to the regular camera.When the iPhone 13... Continue reading…

There are only 100 of these Xboxes available. | Image: Gucci Microsoft and the fashion brand Gucci have teamed up on a ridiculously expensive Gucci-themed Xbox Series X that will be released in limited quantities next week.It looks bad, in my opinion; the Gucci Xbox Series X has double G patterns plastered all over it, which I feel ruins the sleek aesthetic of the console’s original design. And it’s completely unaffordable to the average person, costing a cool $10,000, according to Gucci’s website. Image: Gucci All this for just $10,000. With that five-figure sum, you do get a few extras, including two Gucci-themed Xbox controllers, a subscription to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate (though it’s unclear for how long), and an Xbox-branded suitcase in which to carry the console... Continue reading…

Image: Zelda It’s not hard to play the original Legend of Zelda games. With each new hardware release, Nintendo trots out its 8-bit Hyrule adventures again, giving players a chance to relive (and rebuy) the games that started it all. If you’re a Switch Online subscriber, for instance, you can play them right now on your Switch. Even still, there’s something pleasing about Nintendo’s new standalone Game & Watch handheld. It’s a niche little toy that does nothing more than let you play three classic games and keep track of the time. But it does a great job at it — and it’s so darn cute.This latest retread of nostalgia is a sequel of sorts. Last year, amidst the height of next-gen hype, Nintendo released a small plastic-and-metal machine that played... Continue reading…

MiHoYo, the company behind the popular free-to-play game Genshin Impact, has given fanfiction writers the all-clear to create their own stories with the game’s characters or universe — even if they want to make money from their works (via Kotaku). Commercialized fanfiction has long existed in a legal gray area, and MiHoYo making clear rules about how fans can sell it and physical merchandise is a big move for such a popular video game.In an update to the rules for fan-made merchandise, posted on MiHoYo’s community site, the company said that “novels or stories written by fans” won’t need to be officially declared, “whether for profit or not.” That means that creators won't have to fill out any forms letting the company know they intend... Continue reading…

Image: Joe Manchin Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) wants to kill a $4,500 federal tax credit for union-made electric vehicles because he thinks they’re “wrong” and “not American.” And he picked an awfully tone-deaf moment to say this: at an event hosted by Toyota celebrating a $240 million investment in its West Virginia facility, where he accepted three giant novelty checks for charity from the Japanese automaker.The $4,500 tax credit proposal would be in addition to the $7,500 federal tax credit that currently exists (and which the White House is trying to extend) for electric vehicles. It would only go to buyers of EVs that were made by a union workforce — meaning pretty much just the Detroit-based automakers. Toyota has vehemently opposed the union-made... Continue reading…

Robert Califf is expected to be Biden’s nominee for commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. | Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images President Biden has selected Robert Califf as his pick for the next head of the Food and Drug Administration, the White House announced today. Califf is currently a senior advisor for Verily Life Sciences and Google Health, two divisions of parent company Alphabet. He was brought on in 2019 to lead health strategy and policy for the groups.Califf, a cardiologist, previously served as the FDA commissioner during the last year of the Obama administration. He also founded the Duke Clinical Research Institute, which runs clinical trials.“As the FDA considers many consequential decisions around vaccine approvals and more, it is mission critical that we have a steady, independent hand to guide the FDA,” Biden said in a statement. “I am... Continue reading…

The classic X-Men: The Animated Series is getting a sequel series on Disney Plus in 2023: the newly announced X-Men ‘97, which “explores new stories in the iconic ‘90s timeline of the original series.” The announcement was made in the most fitting of fashions, of course: the “Sad Wolverine” meme from the original show. Beau DeMayo will be the head writer for the upcoming show, with original X-Men: The Animated Series showrunners Eric and Julia Lewald and director Larry Houston set to help consult on the show.Additionally, returning cast members Cal Dodd, Lenore Zann, George Buza, Alison Sealy-Smith, Chris Potter, Catherine Disher, Adrian Hough, and Christopher Britton will be part of X-Men ‘97, although Marvel’s... Continue reading…

As part of its Disney Plus Day — which included a number of new releases hitting the streaming service today — Marvel revealed a big slate of upcoming projects, some new, some previously announced. That includes the official title for WandaVision’s Agatha spinoff, and a new Spider-Man animated series. Unfortunately there aren’t any new trailers, but instead a whole lot of logos. Here’s the full list, courtesy of Marvel:

Photo by Mitchell Clark / The Verge Every Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where co-hosts Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn discuss the week in tech news with the reporters and editors covering the biggest stories.This week on The Vergecast, Nilay and Dieter, along with managing editor Alex Cranz and senior reporter Sean O’Kane, discuss electric vehicle startup Rivian becoming a publicly traded company after executing one of the biggest initial public offerings in history. This leads to a discussion on how Rivian got to this point where other EV startups have failed.

Image: Secretlab When it comes to gaming chairs, most of the focus is on how they can support and comfort your next 5,000 IQ play, but the fact is that most of them are designed to be large and imposing. After teasing a miniaturized version of its Titan chair as an April Fools’ joke, Secretlab decided to send it to production, creating this Titan XXS.The Titan Extra Extra Small has matching materials and even a five-year warranty just like the full-size chairs, and it even has height-adjustable armrests. It has child-locking casters and supports up to 70kg (~154lbs), so it should be safe enough for pets, kids, or anyone else who wants a small seat in front of the RGB keyboard and mouse.The chair will be available globally in “limited quantities,” so if... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Mental illness doesn’t work like measles Continue reading…

A space to feel good working in Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Instagram has added text-to-speech and voice effects to its TikTok competitor Reels, two features TikTok has had for some time. The robotic voice-overs used as narration for videos grew so ubiquitous on TikTok in fact, that voice actor Bev Standing sued the company in May, saying it didn’t have permission to use her voice. In September, TikTok reached a settlement with Standing that included a licensing agreement.While it’s popular among TikTok creators, more importantly, text-to-speech is a widely used accessibility feature that allows blind people and those with low vision to hear spoken versions of written text.To use text-to-speech in Reels, open the Instagram app and go to the Reels camera, record or upload a video, and add text... Continue reading…

Image: Apple It took half of a season, but we’re finally here: the aliens have shown themselves in Invasion. The Apple TV Plus series got off to a slow start when it debuted in October. The first handful of episodes were tense character drama, focusing on a few characters spread across the globe, each of whom was dealing with some personal issues in addition to the titular attack on the planet. That was all well and good, but the sci-fi elements were so scant that you could blink and miss them. No one even said the word “alien” until episode five. But now that we’re halfway through the season, that’s changed. The latest episode finally shows the creepy off-world invaders, and it has given the show the purpose it needs — along with some scares.If you... Continue reading…

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images Southern Ohio Medical Center, a not-for-profit hospital in Portsmouth, Ohio, canceled appointments for today and is diverting ambulances after it was hit by a cyberattack on Thursday. It’s part of a series of escalating attacks on healthcare organizations in the past two years — a trend that could have serious consequences for patient care.But while information technology experts are well aware that the risk of cyberattacks that compromise patient data and shut down computer systems is on the rise, patients don’t seem to be, according to a new report by cybersecurity company Armis. In fact, over 60 percent of people in the general public surveyed in the new report said they hadn’t heard of any cyberattacks in healthcare in the past two... Continue reading…

A Tesla Model Y in “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) beta mode allegedly crashed on November 3rd in Brea, a city southeast of Los Angeles, marking what is likely to be the first incident involving the company’s controversial driver assist feature. No one was injured in the crash, but the vehicle was reportedly “severely damaged.”The crash was reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has multiple, overlapping investigations into Tesla’s Autopilot system. The incident report appears to have been made by the owner of the Model Y. A spokesperson for NHTSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.According to the report:

Disney is teaming up with TikTok to add official character voices to the popular social media app’s text-to-speech feature, allowing you to have your captions read by Lilo and Stitch’s Stitch, C-3PO, Chewbacca, a Stormtrooper from Star Wars, and Rocket Raccoon from Guardians of the Galaxy. The new character voices are rolling out in the app today as part of the Disney Plus Day promotional holiday celebrating the two-year anniversary of the service.

Photo by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge Last month, the PS5 ended the Nintendo Switch’s nearly three-year-long reign as the best-selling console in the US. That proved to be short-lived, however. In October, thanks in large part to the release of the new OLED model of the Switch, Nintendo is back on top.According to Nintendo, the Switch sold 711,000 units overall in the US during October, and 314,000 of those were the OLED version. The NPD Group says that these numbers made the Switch the US’s best-selling console that month “in both units and dollars.” (The analyst firm also says that the PS5 remains the top seller in 2021 in terms of dollars, while the Switch is on top when it comes to units sold.)“We see this as a strong start for the Nintendo Switch OLED model and a very... Continue reading…

Image: Marvel If you’ve been holding off to catch Shang-Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings or Jungle Cruise on Disney Plus, today’s the day. More than a dozen films and series are arriving on the service today as part of the service’s Disney Plus Day celebration.The event kicks off at 6 AM PT/9 AM ET and will give viewers access to exclusive looks, teasers, trailers, and more. These will be unveiled throughout the morning, and fans will be able to follow along from Disney Plus’s official Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts. In addition, Disney Plus is dumping a veritable truckload of content onto its streaming service today, including:

Image: Google It’s Friday once again, and two more Fridays from now will be the big one: Black Friday. I bet you’re also thinking to yourselves, “Just where has the time gone?” Well, it’s flying by for all of us, and while our excellent (if I say so myself) Verge Deals team has been hard at work on our beautiful Verge Holiday Gift Guide for you to peruse and adding a bunch of hot early Black Friday deals to shop, we even have some exceptional deals for you today.First up, we have an exclusive deal on the Google Nest Learning Thermostat (third generation) for Verge readers. You can save $70 on the Nest Learning Thermostat at Wellbots. Use the coupon code THEVERGENEST through December 1st to bring the price of the stainless steel, white, or polished... Continue reading…

A pricey but delightful surprise Continue reading…

Microsoft is bringing back options for rubberized grips and metallic finishes on Xbox Design Lab controllers. The Xbox maker originally paused its Design Lab program ahead of the Xbox Series X launch last year, before bringing it back in June without the rubberized grips and metallic finishes options.These two original customization options are available again, alongside some new additions. The black rubberized grips are now available on both the back case and side grips, and there are three new color options for the controller parts. Microsoft is also adding 19 new metallic finish colors, including a variety of blue, green, and pink options. Image: Microsoft The updated rubberized grips. Xbox Design Lab... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Instagram is offering massive sums of money to creators to post videos on its TikTok competitor Reels, as highlighted in a pair of reports from TechCrunch and Business Insider. Instagram announced its bonus program for Reels in July when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company would be paying $1 billion to creators through 2022.These reports shed new light on exactly how much individual creators are being offered for their Reels, and how many views they need to get in order to receive the maximum bonus payout. On the high end, TechCrunch points to one Reddit post where someone has been offered as much as $35,000 if their Reels get 58.31 million views in a month. That’s in line with what Business Insider reports was offered to Sam and... Continue reading…

Photo by Adi Robertson / The Verge HTC is adding a few big updates to its Vive Focus 3 virtual reality headset, aiming to make it better for big, free-roaming multiplayer VR games.The Vive Focus 3 — a $1,300 non-consumer-focused wireless headset — is adding a new feature called Location Based Entertainment, or LBE Mode. LBE Mode greatly expands the headset’s tracking distance to 33 by 30 meters. Meanwhile, an additional feature called Map Sharing lets multiple headsets share the same virtual world in the same location.Together, these features mean the Focus 3 can more easily support the group VR sessions you’d find at an immersive free-roam arcade space like Zero Latency or The Void. HTC has also added a few other options. There’s a mode that immediately calibrates the... Continue reading…

Cash-strapped EV startup Lordstown Motors is delaying the launch of its electric pickup truck, the Endurance, one day after announcing the sale of its Ohio factory to iPhone assembler Foxconn.Lordstown Motors said Thursday that it now plans to ship the Endurance in the third quarter of 2022, not the second as previously targeted, because of supply chain shortages. It announced a third-quarter loss of $96 million and said it will finish the year with just $150 million to $180 million in cash — including a $100 million payment from Foxconn toward the purchase of the factory. Lordstown Motors is also still building pre-production versions of the truck at the Ohio factory despite saying as recently as August that it would be making... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge The global chip shortage has had a massive effect on the entire technology industry for more than a year, but a wave of gaming hardware news over the past week and change has shown that things aren’t going to get better anytime soon. Gaming companies big and small are going to be feeling the sting well into next year, and it’s not just Sony and Microsoft’s next-gen consoles that could be hard to get a hold of.Nintendo was arguably the first to kick off the waterfall of news, revising its Nintendo Switch sales forecast for the fiscal year down by 1.5 million on November 4th “due to the effects of the global semiconductor shortage,” according to the company. Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa elaborated further in a Q&A, saying that... Continue reading…

Photo by Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge Apple’s fall software updates, iOS 15 and macOS Monterey, are officially out in the world for everyone. But Apple’s latest software has arrived with more of a whimper than a bang; the two updates aren’t so much bad as they are boring. Which has me wondering: why is Apple still clinging to its annual release schedule at all?There are two problems that Apple’s annual cadence causes. The first, as is the case this year, is that iOS and macOS are increasingly mature operating systems with fewer issues to fix or missing features to add. Which, in turn, means that there are fewer opportunities for sweeping upgrades like there were in the early days when the iPhone getting copy and paste support was headline news. Short of Apple changing its... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Double-check your inbox and your spam folder because Microsoft might have left something in there for you. Earlier this week, a few people noticed gift cards for the Microsoft Store suddenly appearing via email, and the company has confirmed it sent out 50,000 of the codes to US customers.Per a Microsoft spokesperson:

Photo by Eduardo Sanz / Europa Press via Getty Images One of the more popular uses for phones (besides taking photos and watching TikTok videos) is to check out the weather. As a result, there are myriad weather apps out there, making it really hard to pick which one to use. So we’ve put together this guide to what we think are some of the better ones out there.With the exception of one that used to be very well-liked: Dark Sky. Back in March 2020, Dark Sky was acquired by Apple and almost immediately removed from the Google Play app store. Originally, the Dark Sky API was going to be pulled as well — leaving a lot of third-party apps desperately looking for a substitute — but that’s been put off until at least the end of 2022. (By the way, if you use the iOS version of Dark Sky, that’s... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Spotify has announced plans to acquire the audiobook services and distribution company Findaway for an undisclosed price. The company operates multiple businesses, including distributing audiobooks to various platforms and offering audiobook creation services under its business Findaway Voices. The company pairs authors with narrators, which could become a new and valuable source of revenue for Spotify.It also makes Spotify both a commercial bookseller and a publisher of audiobooks, a title the company has been hesitant to accept for its podcasting efforts.“With this acquisition, we’re going to be able to accelerate the addition of an audiobook catalog onto the platform so that users can effectively get all of the audio content that... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Publications like 9to5Mac and Macworld have reported some odd behavior when trying to use Apple’s Magic Keyboard with Touch ID to authenticate for Apple Pay — specifically, that it won’t work if you’re trying to do it with a MacBook that has its display closed, as it would be while running it in “clamshell mode” hooked up to an external monitor.Obviously, when the MacBook’s lid is closed, you can’t use the built-in Touch ID sensor, so it’s easy to see how this limitation was put in place. But in a world where Apple sells an external keyboard with the sensor (starting at an eye-watering $150), it’s an awkward limitation. That’s especially true given that the keyboard’s Touch ID functionality only works with Apple Silicon-powered Macs... Continue reading…

We’ve known for a little while that Valve is giving developers a huge five-hour tour of its upcoming Steam Deck gaming handheld on Friday, November 12th starting at 10AM PT / 1PM ET. Now, we’re learning you can come watch even if you’re not a developer — Valve is telling press that “anyone can watch the event.”The five-hour virtual conference will include discussions of the hardware; games that will appear “on Deck”; how the Linux handheld can play Windows games via a Proton compatibility layer; a deep dive on the AMD APU that powers it by AMD itself; and of course tips for Steam developers on how to make those things work in their favor.It’s free to watchThe initial announcement made it seem like you had to be a Steamworks... Continue reading…

Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge Nearly nine months ago, Nvidia said it would launch its most affordable RTX 3000 graphics card yet — the $329 RTX 3060. Good luck actually finding one at that price, right? That’s why I subtitled my review “$329 with an asterisk sign.” And sure enough, they were nigh-impossible to find on launch day for Nvidia’s sticker price.But that same day, February 25th, I signed up for EVGA’s graphics card waiting queue on a whim. And after waiting in that queue for so long that I completely forgot I ever signed up, I got a surprise. On Monday, I received an email from EVGA letting me know I could actually purchase that $329 card for $329.So I did. Yesterday afternoon, a brand-new RTX 3060 arrived for $379.41 after tax and shipping. That’s a... Continue reading…

The Mavic 3 and Mavic 3 Cine are incredible photo and video tools — for a price Continue reading…

SpaceX’s internet-from-space initiative Starlink has unveiled a new rectangular dish that interested customers can buy to tap into the company’s growing satellite constellation in low Earth orbit. It’s a thinner and lighter weight option than the circular dish that Starlink beta users have been testing over the last year.Starlink is SpaceX’s satellite internet project, which aims to launch nearly 12,000 satellites into low Earth orbit where they can provide broadband internet coverage to people on the ground — notably those in remote and rural areas where traditional internet infrastructure is lacking. With so many satellites in low orbit at once, the idea is to have at least one satellite in view over every patch of the Earth,... Continue reading…

Photo by Sam Byford / The Verge Panic has delayed the first shipments of its Playdate handheld, which is kind of like a Game Boy but with a crank, to early 2022. The company said that initial units shipped with batteries that didn’t work as expected, forcing it to send the units back to Malaysia to get new batteries.Panic also said that it has been affected by the global chip shortage in a significant way. Additional supply of the Playdate’s current CPU won’t be available for two years, according to Panic. To get around that, Playdate units coming later in 2022 will have a revised main board that uses a more readily available CPU.If you preordered a Playdate, you should be receiving an email that says when your Playdate is now estimated to ship. Orders have now... Continue reading…

Image: Amazon Amazon has announced that it’ll let you easily share video clips showing up to 30 seconds of some of its Prime Video content, right from its iPhone app. The feature will only be available for a very limited number of shows initially, but letting users share video from shows is a very different attitude than the one displayed by some other streaming providers.According to Amazon’s press release, its video-sharing feature will be available on iOS devices. When you’re watching a show, the Share Clip button will show up alongside the rest of your controls. Tapping it will create a 30-second video clip, which you can then fine-tune to make sure it contains the part of the show you’re trying to share. From there, you can share it using... Continue reading…