The Verge

A classic iPod interface for your Spotify or Apple Music library. | Screenshot: tannerv.com/ipod In an era before multitouch displays, the iPod’s click wheel was the king of music playback control. Now, a new project from frontend software developer Tanner Villarete has attempted to emulate its classic controls as a web app, complete with support for your Spotify and Apple Music library.It’s fantastically simple, using your mouse or finger on a touchscreen to emulate the classic controls. You’ll need to sign in using an Apple Music or Spotify Account, and then it’s a simple case of using the virtual click wheel to select and listen to a selection of your most listened-to artists. It even supports the iPod’s classic “Cover Flow” interface, letting you to flip through album covers like a jukebox. Screenshot:... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is opening up applications to a new program for developers of media apps that lets them keep more of what they earn — paying a lower 15 percent commission to Google in exchange for supporting certain platforms and features (via 9to5Google).The Play Media Experience Program is another way to get around the company’s 30 percent service fee, and it’s also an admission that the Google had already been cutting deals with some developers behind the scenes; Google is positioning it as the global expansion of a program that was previously invite-only, though it doesn’t seem to have mentioned it before today.If that sounds familiar, you might be thinking of how Amazon managed to evade Apple’s App Store tax. Apple, too, explained that... Continue reading…

Gain a headphone jack, lose some unnecessary cameras Continue reading…

Lenovo has announced a new product called the Go Wireless Charging Kit, which lets you retrofit wireless charging functionality to a wide variety of laptops. It makes use of “Power by Contact” technology from Energy Square, rather than the more common Qi standard.The kit consists of a 3.2mm-thick brushed metal charging mat that you plug into the wall and leave at your desk, as well as a long wireless charging receiver that attaches to the base of your laptop and connects over USB-C. Once set up, Lenovo says it should charge most 13-inch to 14-inch “non-touch notebooks of up to 65W” with efficiency of 93 percent, and it’ll work with both Windows and macOS devices. Wireless charging on laptops is pretty rare. Dell released... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Republicans and Democrats are having very different conversations Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Soon, public links to an untold number of items stored on Google Drive and YouTube will stop working. In the name of enhanced security, Google is changing the way it handles link sharing on both services, and while active users may be able to opt out of the switch, files and videos abandoned on unused or inactive accounts may simply slip out of view forever.That’s because shared links are now part of a newer system that Google says increases security. On YouTube, the newer links are apparently more difficult for anyone to guess or access without being explicitly given access. The newer links also have the affect of tying more activity to specific accounts and requiring viewers to log in, which allows access to be tracked and made a part... Continue reading…

According to noted analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple will sell an iPhone with a 6.7-inch screen for less than $900 in 2022 (via 9to5Mac). If this turns out to be the case, iPhone 14 buyers will have a less expensive way to get a screen size that Apple currently only sells on the 12 Pro Max, which starts at $1,099.Kuo predicts that Apple’s 2022 non-pro iPhone lineup includes phones with 6.1 and 6.7-inch screens (the same sizes as the current iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max, respectively). Absent is the iPhone Mini with its 5.4-inch screen. Analysts, including Kuo, have said that the Mini will be going away in 2022 due to reportedly low sales.While some may mourn the loss of an actually small phone option, from Apple’s perspective, going big... Continue reading…

Image: EA Battlefield 2042, coming this fall, will offer the series’ largest skirmishes yet; its “All-Out Warfare” modes can fit 128 simultaneous players in a single match on PS5, Xbox Series X and PC. But you won’t always have 128 humans in each match — EA will be backfilling those servers with bots to keep games populated, the company confirms to The Verge, and there’s currently no plan to let you turn that off.Humans will take priority, so you might never encounter an AI soldier at peak playtimes — and if you truly hate bots, you’ll be able to play other modes. But the main event allows up to 64 “AI soldiers” to help fill a game, depending on your region, platform, and how many real-life humans are available to join up. That applies to both... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge One of tech’s biggest problems in the past few months has been due to one of its smallest components: chips. Months into the shortage, the effects have spread far beyond the difficulty of buying an Xbox Series X or PS5. Car companies are being hit the worst, and even home appliances might start to see issues with supply.Earlier this year, companies expected to have supply chains sorted and products more consistently back on shelves by summer — but June is nearly over and there’s seemingly no end in sight. And with the upcoming slate of big tech releases and the holiday shopping season coming up, expect things to get worse before they get better.“We had thought probably six or seven months ago, like everybody else, that it would be... Continue reading…

Photo credit should read PAULA BUSTAMANTE/AFP via Getty Images John McAfee, founder of the company behind McAfee Antivirus, has been found dead according to reports from Reuters, El Mundo, El País, and others. He was being held in a Barcelona prison, and the Catalan Department of Justice has stated that his death was likely caused by suicide. Lawyers for McAfee confirmed his death to Reuters and The New York Times, with one saying it was “the result of a cruel system that had no reason to keep this man in jail for so long.”McAfee was being held in prison, pending extradition to the US, since his arrest in October 2020. He faced charges of tax evasion and had also been charged with securities fraud relating to an alleged cryptocurrency pump and dump scheme. Spanish courts had approved his... Continue reading…

The Peacock app displayed on a TV. Nearly a year after Peacock’s launch, NBCUniversal’s marquee streaming app is finally coming to Fire TV and Fire tablets.The streaming service will officially arrive on Amazon devices on June 24th, allowing users to access the app without having to sideload it. The companies announced Wednesday that the app would be supported across Fire TV products, including Fire TV Stick Lite, Fire TV Stick 4K, and Fire TV smart TVs. A Peacock spokesperson told The Verge that second-generation Fire TVs and above will have support for the app, as will all Fire Tablets with Fire OS 5 and above.In addition to Peacock, the distribution agreement will see 15 NBCUniversal apps arrive on Amazon devices as well, including various NBC apps and Telemundo.... Continue reading…

Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Netflix Jerry Seinfeld is perhaps best known for co-writing and starring in Bee Movie (fine, also for co-creating one of the most beloved televised sitcoms). But since that daring project, he hasn’t really returned to feature-length films. That’s about to change — Deadline and Variety report that Seinfeld is co-writing, directing, producing, and starring in Unfrosted, a new film about the origins of Pop-Tarts, for Netflix.Seinfeld’s fascination with the toaster pastry is well-documented, featuring the breakfast food in his stand-up and in a New York Times video interview on joke writing. Seinfeld is penning this film exploration alongside Spike Feresten and Barry Marder — two of Bee Movie’s co-writers — using the classic stand-up bit as a... Continue reading…

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA - JUNE 17: A digital sign displays a temperature of 115 degrees Fahrenheit as a heat wave continues to bake the Southwest United States on June 17, 2021 in Las Vegas, Nevada. | Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images The US is only a few days into summer and another heat wave is already coming for the West. “Record shattering” would be an understatement to describe the last heat wave, which lingered over the Southwest last week and has since shifted eastward. Roughly 4,000 new temperature records have already been set this year. More are going to make the books over the next week.A heat dome is a trapBoth heat waves are caused by atmospheric conditions called heat domes. In short, a heat dome is a trap. It forms when high pressure in the upper atmosphere creates a sort of lid or cap that stops hot air from escaping, according to NOAA. As the air sinks back down to Earth, it compresses and heats up even more. The heat dome also blocks out clouds and... Continue reading…

T-Mobile’s 5G-branded gin and ginger beer go on sale tomorrow. | Photo: T-Mobile Whatever the reason, 5G-themed gin is now something that exists in the world, courtesy of T-Mobile. Ostensibly, “Ultra Capacity 5Gin” exists to celebrate a T-Mobile milestone: covering 300 million people with its low-band extended range 5G network and 150 million covered by its better midrange ultra capacity 5G.But maybe it just came down to the company seeing Ryan Reynolds having a good time, selling gin*, and enjoying ownership of a wireless company and it thinking, “Let’s get in on that.” Or perhaps as the Mariners were on the receiving end of yet another no-hitter, some marketing execs out for a night at ol’ T-Mobile Park drowned their sorrows in one too many $20 G&Ts and got to thinking.With notes of pine, citrus, and... Continue reading…

EA is adding to its roster of mobile game developers by purchasing Playdemic, known for Golf Clash, from WarnerMedia for $1.4 billion. The company says it plans on using Playdemic’s experience to help make future mobile games and that it’s interested in using Golf Clash’s mechanics with other franchises.It’s possible that EA could be purchasing Playdemic not only to gain ownership of a successful mobile game (Golf Clash has over 10 million installs on the Google Play Store), but because there’s opportunity for EA to incorporate some of its other series — it makes the PGA golf games after all, which could tie in well with a mobile golf game.EA seems to be focusing on mobile gaming recently — it also purchased mobile developer Glu in... Continue reading…

An illustration showing the seven Earth-like planets of Trappist-1, a nearby star system astronomers say will be able to view Earth in transit roughly 1,600 years from now. | Image: NASA / JPL-Caltech / R. Hurt (IPAC) For decades, astronomers have probed the universe for signs of life by watching distant planets glide past their host stars, studying the tiny dips of starlight that give away clues about an exoplanet’s atmosphere. Hundreds of those worlds could bear life. And if there’s life, what’s to say it isn’t looking back at us?New research published Wednesday entertains that question, finding nearly 2,000 star systems that have had a front-row seat to observe Earth in recent millennia. The study suggests that hypothetical extraterrestrial civilizations in those star systems could’ve been in the right position to watch Earth transit our Sun and look at us the same way we attempt to look at other planets.“The cosmos is dynamic, so the vantage... Continue reading…

The problem with cloud gaming is you have to think about it Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Brave, makers of the privacy-focused Brave browser, launched a new search engine in public global beta on Tuesday (via TechCrunch). Brave Search, like the company’s browser, is meant to be a private and transparent alternative to Google’s offerings that doesn’t turn users into carefully surveilled targets for advertising. It also isn’t dependent on Google’s results — Brave Search uses its own independent index of the web to function.Using an entirely different index is kind of a big deal. Google obviously dominates the space (to the point of becoming its own verb) and even other popular privacy-focused search alternatives like DuckDuckGo rely on a mix of results from larger indexes like Microsoft’s Bing and their own web crawlers.... Continue reading…

Instagram Instagram says reception to its “suggested posts” feature has been so positive that it’s launching a new test: this time, suggested posts will be mixed throughout your primary feed, sometimes ahead of photos and videos from people you follow.The company is testing new controls, too, that’ll allow users to add specific topics as an interest for their suggested posts, as well as the ability to snooze the recommendations for 30 days to hide them from the feed entirely. (You can see what that looks like below.) The feature, which launched last year, has so far offered additional content only after you’ve seen everything the people you follow have shared. This new test will come to a “small number” of users. Image:... Continue reading…

Foundation — Apple’s big-budget adaptation of the classic Isaac Asimov books — finally has a release date: it’ll debut on Apple TV Plus sometime this September, according to an email to subscribers obtained by MacRumors. An exact release date has yet to be announced, although, presumably, Apple will provide details on that in the coming weeks as the marketing blitz for the show picks up.The series has been a long time coming. Apple first announced Foundation back in 2018, as one of the marque series for the streaming service, and it debuted a trailer for it during its WWDC keynote presentation last year. But due to delays from the COVID-19 pandemic, the show was delayed to late 2021, and Apple hasn’t really shown off any more footage... Continue reading…

Black Widow in Marvel’s Avengers. | Image: Square Enix The developers of Marvel’s Avengers have released a new patch that fixes a bad bug for PS5 players that showed their IP address on-screen. Having your IP address on display poses a particular problem for streamers and people trying to record gameplay of the game, as your IP address can be used to glean a lot of information about you (such as an approximate idea of your location).“Patch 1.8b has been published and fixes the issue that was occurring on PS5 where sensitive information was displayed on screen,” the developers said on Twitter. “PS5 players are safe to stream now.”The bug first appeared in the PS5 version of Marvel’s Avengers on Tuesday following the 1.8 update, which adds new content and a long list of other bug fixes and... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Supreme Court says a Pennsylvania school can’t punish a cheerleader for swearing on Snapchat. The 8-1 ruling determined that students’ rights to free expression outweighed the school’s interest in preventing potentially disruptive speech — in this case, a snap captioned “fuck school fuck softball fuck cheer fuck everything.”Justice Stephen Breyer delivered the majority opinion this morning, upholding an appeals court decision from the Third Circuit. He said that student Brandi Levy — identified as B.L. in court documents — shouldn’t have been suspended from her cheerleading team for a vulgar post about school sports. “While public schools may have a special interest in regulating some off-campus student speech, the special interests... Continue reading…

New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) voted to block the issuance of new for-hire vehicle licenses for electric vehicles. The move was widely perceived as a snub toward Revel, the company best known for its electric moped-sharing service, which was planning to launch a ride-hailing service using a fleet of Tesla vehicles.Revel announced last April that it planned to launch a ride-hail service in Manhattan with a fleet of 50 Tesla Model Ys. The company had been hoping to exploit a loophole in the city’s current rules, which caps the number of new FHV licenses but exempts wheelchair-accessible and electric vehicles. The cap was originally enacted as a way to stem the tide of new Uber and Lyft vehicles that were flooding the... Continue reading…

The watch will reportedly be available in four colors. | Image: OnLeaks / GizNext Renders of an unannounced smartwatch from Samsung called the Galaxy Watch Active 4 have leaked online, giving us our best look yet at Samsung’s first post-Tizen wearable. The renders, which come from leaker OnLeaks and GizNext, show a smartwatch with an edge-to-edge display and two buttons on the right-hand side but no rotating crown or bezel. Samsung is expected to announce the watch on June 28th during an event at which it says it’s “reimagining smartwatches.”Samsung’s next smartwatch is an important moment for the company. After months of rumors, the company announced in May that it would be merging the Tizen operating system it’s used previously with Google’s Wear OS to create a new OS tentatively called “Wear.” It’s claimed the new... Continue reading…

KYAT DJ Sammy Boyd reads off PSAs in English and Diné Bizaad. | Photo by Ash Ponders for The Verge During the pandemic, two radio stations broadcast vital information about COVID-19 to remote stretches of the country’s largest Indigenous territory. But how do you reach listeners who don’t want to hear it? Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge If you’re one of the blessed 8 million-ish people who’s been able to get their hands on a PlayStation 5, you’ve probably run into the controller update process at some point. I got mine on launch day (November 12th, 2020), and I’ve had to update the DualSense controller a few times since, as well as when I got the new red variant.It’s easy, right? Well, maybe not so much.Here’s how to update your PS5 controller automatically

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Prime Day 2021 is over. Most of the deals that we covered over the past two days are no longer available. You’ll certainly have another guaranteed shot to score similar discounts around Black Friday and Cyber Monday later in the year. However, that doesn’t mean that all of the Prime Day deals have up and disappeared. There are a few leftovers hanging around, and I’m going to point them out to you. You don’t need a Prime membership to access these deals.

Sony’s highest-end camera is a combination of everything that came before it Continue reading…

Captain Jack Sparrow in Sea of Thieves. I could almost smell the gloomy caverns of Sea of Thieves this week. Moments before meeting Captain Jack Sparrow in a surprise Disney crossover, I felt like I was sailing along in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. “Dead men tell no tales,” warns the spooky and familiar voice, just as you navigate caverns full of skeletons and water. I could feel the thunder from the Disney ride, spot the same seagulls dotted around, and experience phantom smells that reminded me of the damp and dark environment that’s a key part of Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom attraction.As Captain Jack Sparrow graces the shores of Sea of Thieves: A Pirate’s Life this week, developer Rare has created a crossover with Disney that brings Pirates of the... Continue reading…

Arcade1up’s Infinity Game Table. | Image: Arcade1up Last October, Arcade1Up, known for its officially licensed arcade cabinets, launched a wildly successful Kickstarter for the Infinity Game Table, which lets you play digital versions of many tabletop games like checkers, chess, Monopoly, and Scrabble on a big touchscreen. If you missed the Kickstarter, though, you’ll soon be able to buy the Infinity Game Table for yourself: it will be available to preorder exclusively from Best Buy starting July 17th.Arcade1Up says the Infinity Game Table will offer more than 40 games for free at launch, and you can download them by connecting the table to the internet. And there’s more than just board games: you can also download things like a puzzle app, a coloring book app, a sudoku app, and a word... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In a new 16-page report, Apple has laid out its arguments against allowing sideloading iPhone apps, claiming the practice would make its phones less secure and trustworthy for users. The report, which is titled “Building a Trusted Ecosystem for Millions of Apps,” outlines Apple’s existing security processes and how it believes these could change if it were forced by regulators to allow sideloading.The report is part of Apple’s pushback against lawmakers and other critics, who have argued that it should be forced to allow apps to be sideloaded onto its iPhones, bypassing its centralized App Store. In the US, the House Judiciary Committee is expected today to debate a series of bills aimed at addressing tech monopolies, including Apple’s... Continue reading…

Two of the top shared electric scooter companies in the US, Bird and Spin, are releasing new vehicles today. Spin is revealing a new, more rugged electric scooter, which it is building in-house for the first time. Meanwhile, Bird is showing off a new electric bicycle with a baby blue paint scheme. Both companies are under increasing pressure to catch up to Lime, which is the number one micromobility provider in the world with over 200 million riders last year globally.There has always been an arms race among shared scooter and bike companies to produce the best, longest-lasting, and most technically advanced electric vehicles. But with increasing pressure to become profitable and some micromobility companies choosing to go public via... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge This week, Bitcoin dipped below $30,000 for the first time since January. That’s half what it was worth just three months ago, and it’s coming amid fears that China, the world’s biggest Bitcoin mining country, is trying to ban cryptocurrencies outright. Is it? Here’s what we know as of today.While we haven’t seen any reports of China flat-out outlawing cryptocurrencies, the government started issuing warnings about trading and mining cryptocurrencies in May, and told the country’s financial giants they would have to stop dealing in crypto. Since then, we’ve seen the top three mining regions in the country start making moves against miners, and the government reportedly met with major banks again just this week to reiterate that banks... Continue reading…

Image: Roblox Starcourt Mall, the central location from season three of Stranger Things, is now a playable location in Roblox, the company announced today. The level includes four mini-games based around the Netflix show, as well as quests that reward players with Stranger Things-themed cosmetic items like a Scoops Ahoy costume, Dustin’s Hat, or Eleven’s Headgear. The experience is available in Roblox now.“Stranger Things is one of Netflix’s most iconic shows, and now it has a persistent space in the Roblox Metaverse where fans can experience and interact with the franchise in exciting new ways,” said vice president of brand partnerships at Roblox, Christina Wootton. “Roblox is the new social hangout, much like the local mall back in the 80s where... Continue reading…

Image: Twitter Twitter’s iOS app has been updated to let anyone quickly and easily share tweets to their Instagram Story, Twitter has announced. The feature works using the iOS share sheet: just tap the share icon underneath any tweet, and select “Instagram Stories” from the list of apps. Once in Instagram, the tweet can be resized, re-positioned, and adorned with the image service’s standard selection of text, stickers, music, and annotations.Of course, you’ve always had the option of screenshotting tweets and manually uploading them into an Instagram Story. But the new interface makes the process a lot easier, and the results are slicker. However, it seems to work better with text- and image-based tweets for now — I tried the feature out on a tweet... Continue reading…

Here’s the ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4. | Lenovo ThinkPad power users have a new option in Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4. The new 16-inch workstation will be available this upcoming August for a starting price of $2,149.The X1 Extreme Gen 4 is powered by Intel’s latest 11th Gen processors, up to a Core i9 H-Series chip with vPro. It can also be configured with up to a Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, 64GB of RAM, two 2TB SSDs, a 90Wh battery, and optional 5G support. The screen is 16:10 (finally), and Lenovo claims it can reach up to 600 nits of brightness. The X1 Extreme Gen 3 had an OLED option, but OLED wasn’t mentioned in this announcement.Finally, there’s a new FHD webcam, along with the ThinkPad line’s signature camera shutter. Image: Lenovo This is the... Continue reading…

Many of the best Amazon Prime Day deals may have already sold out or expired, but Prime Day is a two-day shopping affair, and many discounts will continue until 12AM PT / 3AM ET tonight. Yesterday, we saw some of our favorite devices hit an all-time low, from the Bose Noise Canceling Headphone 700 and the OnePlus 8 to popular Amazon products like the Kindle Paperwhite and fourth-gen Echo Dot (both still available).Other retailers — specifically, Walmart, Target, and Best Buy — are still offering a range of anti-Prime Day deals, too, with sales on the last-gen Apple TV 4K and Vizio’s 55-inch OLED leading the pack. To make your purchase a bit easier, we’ve sifted through thousands of deals to bring you the Day 2 highlights below, all of... Continue reading…

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge If you’ve been thinking about buying some new earbuds or headphones, Amazon rime Day 2021 is a great opportunity to snag something at a fantastic price. The company’s own Echo Buds are still on sale, of course, but so are products from Bose, Jabra, Sony, and other brands — with some at the lowest prices we’ve ever seen on them.We’ve rounded up the highlights below, all of which are still available despite stock shortages in other categories. And if you’re shopping for TVs, laptops, or other tech accessories, we’ve also put together a guide to the best Prime Day deals, which encompasses the best true wireless earbud deals alongside other categories.The best earbuds deals for Prime DayAmazon’s latest Echo Buds are already aggressively... Continue reading…

Demon’s Souls is one of the numerous PS5 titles currently on sale for Amazon Prime Day. | Image: Sony There are usually good gaming deals happening all the time, but Prime Day is especially good to gamers. Amazon is currently hosting some amazing deals on PlayStation 5 games, as well as headsets, headphones, phone clips, keyboards, mice, controllers, and other popular accessories. Other retailers are hosting attractive sales, too, as evident in our roundup of the best anti-Prime Day deals.While we can’t expect to see price cuts on next-gen consoles like the PS5 or the Xbox Series X — or even availability, for that matter — there might be some surprise game or accessory deals you weren’t expecting. We’ve gathered the best gaming deals below, and we’ll be updating them throughout Prime Day alongside our main post, which highlights the b... Continue reading…

Tech giants have repeatedly said they would welcome government regulation — if it’s the right regulation, of course. But faced with five antitrust bills that could unwind what the House Judiciary Committee described as Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook’s “monopoly power,” Big Tech is bringing out the big lobbying guns.Apple CEO Tim Cook himself called Speaker Nancy Pelosi to “deliver a warning” that that the “rushed” antitrust bills could disrupt the iPhone, according to The New York Times, and that’s not all:“Executives, lobbyists, and more than a dozen think tanks and advocacy groups paid by tech companies have swarmed Capitol offices, called and emailed lawmakers and their staff members, and written letters arguing there will be... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft promised on June 10th that it was in the “final stages” of upgrading its Xbox Cloud Gaming (xCloud) datacenters with Xbox Series X hardware — and nearly two weeks later, it seems as if you can finally play games on that new hardware. Some xCloud games are now showing upgraded graphics options in their settings menus that would otherwise only be available on the Xbox Series X, or are loading much faster on xCloud than they used to.You can see upgraded graphics settings in Yakuza: Like a Dragon and Rainbow Six Siege in this tweet from my colleague Tom Warren:

Fuse Studios in New York City, New York, United States in 2004. | Photo by David Pomponio/FilmMagic Fuse Media has announced the beta launch of Fuse Plus, a new streaming service that will roll out widely later this year. It’ll be available on Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV devices to start.The company said Tuesday in a press release that the subscription service will give viewers access to the entire catalog of Fuse — the lifestyle and entertainment channel that formerly focused primarily on music — as well as new originals that will premiere exclusively on the service. In a statement, Fuse Media CEO Miguel Roggero said the service will be “curated by, and for, a young, diverse viewer that craves representation in what they stream.”Fuse Plus will launch on Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV devices before a wider rollout later this yearW... Continue reading…

In this illustration photo Amazon logo is displayed on a smartphone screen with MGM. | Photo by Muhammed Selim Korkutata/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images Following Amazon’s recent acquisition of MGM, the deal will reportedly be reviewed by the Federal Trade Commission — meaning Lina Khan, a long-outspoken critic of Amazon who recently became FTC chair, will have oversight over the deal. The proceedings could signal how she’ll handle antitrust cases against Amazon in the future.Citing people familiar with the situation, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the FTC requested oversight of the deal during negotiations between agencies specifically because it is currently overseeing the ongoing antitrust probe. According to the WSJ, the Justice Department and FTC have divvied up antitrust investigations of the tech giants — Apple, Google, and Facebook are also the subject of the... Continue reading…

Image: Sony Amazon Prime Day 2021 isn’t over yet, and there are still member-only deals for Prime subscribers to get in on. We have a gigantic post that includes all of the best Prime Day deals happening now (and we’re updating it frequently), but if you’re only looking for the best TV deals, you’ll find those below. There’s a range in terms of the price and the feature set included in the ones that are discounted, and we’ll make sure to clearly state any major differences in the text if they exist so you can make the most informed decision.The best budget-friendly 4K TV deals for Prime Day

Amazon Prime Day is an event — understandably — dedicated to all things Amazon, with substantial discounts on a range of Echo, Fire TV, and Kindle devices, as well as a time-sensitive smorgasbord of deals from both well- and little-known manufacturers. Apple is one of them, and while the company still charges a premium, Prime Day 2021 is a chance to save on an Apple Watch, a new MacBook, or a pair of AirPods, among other products.Below, we’ve gathered the best remaining Apple deals for Prime Day, some of which come from retailers running their own anti-Prime Day deals. If you’re open to other, non-Apple discounts, we’ve also put together a guide highlighting the best Prime Day deals in a variety of categories, including laptops, TVs,... Continue reading…

The Acer Travelmate P6 is discounted for Amazon Prime Day. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Amazon Prime Day 2021 is finally here, and it’s a good time to find discounts if you’re trying to buy a laptop. If you’re a budget shopper with your eye on one of the best Chromebooks, best gaming laptops, or best student laptops, you can likely find something that will strike your fancy.We’ve listed the best Prime Day deals on laptops below. If you’re signed up for Amazon Prime and are online at the right time, you should be able to take advantage of these deals alongside many others we’ve curated in our guide to the best Prime Day deals.The best productivity laptop deals for Prime Day

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge If you’ve been holding off purchasing a Samsung Galaxy phone in search of a deal, then today’s your day. Amazon’s Prime Day 2021 phone deals feature discounts on recent Galaxy S21 models as well as a couple of noteworthy models from last year. Prime Day is a little light on discounted phones this year, but you can also snag a deal on the Motorola Edge, as well as Tile trackers so your new device can help you keep tabs on your stuff. We’ve also rounded up the best Prime Day deals happening now, if you’re looking for discounts on other items.As far as phone deals are concerned, the Galaxy S20 FE and Note 20 Ultra are also included in the mix, and it’s not totally clear if we’ll see 2021 versions of these devices this year. The company... Continue reading…

Image: Microsoft Microsoft is updating OneDrive on the web and Android with basic photo editing features, the company announced Tuesday (via XDA Developers). The new features bring the photo storing experience in OneDrive closer to what Google offers in Google Photos.Among the editing features OneDrive now supports, you can crop, rotate, and make light and color adjustments to photos. Photo editing only works on JPEG or PNG files and is currently only offered on personal OneDrive accounts. Microsoft says it plans to expand the photo editing feature to business and school accounts this summer and its iOS OneDrive app later this year. Image: Microsoft Rotating an image in OneDrive for the web. Image: Microsoft... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge If you weren’t already cued in, Amazon Prime Day 2021 is drawing to a close, with most of the remaining deals set to expire at 3AM ET / 12AM PT tonight. Thankfully, many of the best Best Prime Day gaming deals are still available, including one on the road-ready Nintendo Switch Lite. There is also an assortment of deals covering some of the best accessories and games, whether you’re a fan of charming role-playing titles like The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening or the latest entry in Capcom’s monster-slaying franchise.Below, we’ve rounded up the best Prime Day deals for the Nintendo Switch, some of which are also featured in our guide to the best anti-Prime Day deals. Now, if only picking up a PS5 was as easy.The best Prime Day deals... Continue reading…