The Verge - All Posts

Takeru Kobayashi (L) and Joey Chestnut (R) competed during the 92nd Annual Nathan's Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest in 2007. | Photo by Bobby Bank / WireImage Netflix has scheduled Chestnut vs. Kobayashi: Unfinished Beef on September 2nd as another one of its live events, along with Christmas Day NFL games, WWE Monday Night Raw, and the delayed Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight.A press release from Netflix takes the whole thing very seriously, quoting Kobayashi saying, Retiring for me will only happen after I take him down one last time... Competing against Joey live on Netflix means fans all over the world can watch me knock him out." Chestnut, meanwhile, says, It's time to give the people what they want!"The competition will have extra intrigue because Joey Chestnut and Takeru Kobayashi will both have to skip the annual July 4th Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest that made their rivalry... Continue reading...

Now that's a compact camera. | Image: MiNT The analog film resurgence continues marching forward, as MiNT's Rollei 35AF camera seems poised to release this year. The Hong Kong-based camera manufacturer first carved its niche making boutique instant film cameras that remixed classics like the Polaroid SX-70. Now, it's launched a website with a waitlist for potential customers interested in this diminutive 35mm camera.The Rollei 35AF is a reincarnation of the original Rollei 35 from 1966, but while one foot remains in the analog past, the new design incorporates lidar-based autofocus for its 35mm f/2.8 lens and options for automatic exposures. It's still built with a boxy metal body like the original and seems to keep a very compact size. According to MiNT, via PetaPixel and K... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge OpenAI and Microsoft are teaming up with Oracle to get more compute capacity to run ChatGPT. As part of a partnership announced this week, the three companies are working together so that OpenAI can use the Microsoft Azure Al platform on Oracle's infrastructure.OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hasn't shied away from the fact that his company needs substantially more infrastructure to power its services. He has even been in discussions to raise billions of dollars for an AI chip venture. In the press release for the Oracle deal this week, he said Oracle's chips will enable OpenAI to continue to scale."To date, OpenAI has relied fully on Microsoft for its compute needs. In turn, Microsoft has invested $13 billion for a 49 percent stake in OpenAI's... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Somebody, call Tom Cruise - several Roku TV owners say that motion smoothing is suddenly enabled on their TVs with no way to turn it off.Contributors on Reddit and in Roku's community forum reported seeing the change on TCL TVs running on Roku OS 13, as did a few staffers on The Verge. However, for others who have access to Expert" picture settings, the same update is in place without a change, and the settings to control it are still available.For some people experiencing the problem, they said this is the first time their TV offered Roku's motion smoothing feature at all and that there's nowhere in any menu (either the standard settings or the picture settings available while watching TV) to turn it off. The update notes for Roku OS... Continue reading...

Photo by Walid Berrazeg / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images Intel, Nvidia, AMD, and Qualcomm are the household names in chips - but in 2025, the popular but lesser known MediaTek might make a play to join them. Reuters reports that the Taiwanese chip company is now preparing an AI PC chipset to launch in late 2025 specifically for Windows PCs. Currently, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is the alleged MacBook Air-beating talk of the town, and MediaTek wants a piece of that action.According to Reuters, the new MediaTek chip will reportedly be aimed at the same Microsoft Copilot Plus PC program that Qualcomm helped kick-start with Microsoft. There's apparently an opening for chipmakers like MediaTek there now that Microsoft's exclusivity arrangement with Qualcomm for Arm-based versions of Windows is... Continue reading...

Illustration: Lille Allen / The Verge On Thursday, Tesla shareholders will face a stark choice: approve Elon Musk's enormous pay package, the largest ever awarded to a chief executive, or risk him picking up his ball and going home.The shareholder meeting on Thursday is a referendum on Musk's tumultuous leadership, in which he took a relatively niche startup, wrested it away from its founders, and turned it into what is arguably one of the most consequential car companies in modern history. To reward him for this feat, shareholders are being asked to cast an unprecedented vote on Musk's compensation - to the tune of $50 billion - for the second time.Last January, a Delaware court judge invalidated Musk's pay package, first approved in 2018, arguing that the process was... Continue reading...

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo by STR / NurPhoto, Getty Images Eight former SpaceX engineers filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk on Wednesday alleging sexual harassment and retaliation.Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002, knowingly and purposefully created an unwelcome hostile work environment based upon his conduct of interjecting into the workplace vile sexual photographs, memes, and commentary that demeaned women and/or the LGBTQ+ community," says the employees' complaint, which was earlier reported by Bloomberg.The complaint - which cites many of Musk's Twitter posts making sexually explicit jokes - claims that Musk fostered a perversely sexist culture at SpaceX." Several of the plaintiffs say they experienced direct harassment that mimicked Musk's posts." According to the suit, senior engineers... Continue reading...

Image: Xbox Microsoft is rolling out an Xbox update that lets you view game art with any Xbox Home background. That means you'll continue to see your dynamic or regular background when you're not scrolling through different games.Previously, Microsoft only let you view game art with the default Xbox Home background. Now, you can keep your background and view game art without having to decide between the two. Microsoft first started testing this feature in April, and you can see how it looks in this embedded post from my colleague Tom Warren.

Image: Netflix It's going to be a busy few weeks for Zack Snyder on Netflix. Just a day after Netflix announced the director's cut of Rebel Moon would start streaming on August 2nd comes the news that another Snyder project will hit the service soon after. Twilight of the Gods, an animated series based on Norse mythology, will start streaming on September 19th. You can get a first glimpse at the show in action in the brief new teaser trailer above.The animation is being handled by Snyder's own Stone Quarry studio, and the show itself was created by Snyder, along with Jay Oliva (executive producer on Netflix's Trese) and Eric Carrasco (a writer on Apple TV Plus' Foundation). Here's the basic premise:

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge An unofficial site tracking titles in the Epic Games library may have just leaked a ton of upcoming games, as reported earlier by Wccftech. The site, called EpicDB, was taken offline shortly after it posted information scraped from the Epic Games Store catalog on Monday, but that didn't stop people from scanning the list and posting their findings.You can see the list of games from publishers like Bethesda, Sega, Sony, Square Enix, and others in a series of screenshots posted by a user on a ResetEra forum. While some, like Turok, are easy to spot, others are listed under previously rumored codenames, such as Parkside" or BioShock 4.There are still other titles under codenames we haven't heard about. Some users speculate that Momo"... Continue reading...

Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge A hacker breached the systems behind Tile device trackers and stole customer data, including names, addresses, emails, and phone numbers. According to reporting from 404 Media, the hacker was able to collect customer information by accessing a tool made for responding to law enforcement requests about Tile trackers. The stolen information did not include precise Tile location data.Life360, which owns Tile, published a statement by CEO Chris Hulls acknowledging the hack. Hulls confirmed the data included Tile tracker IDs and said that the hacker had attempted to extort Life360 and that the company reported it to law enforcement.In an email to The Verge, Hulls wrote, From what I gather, very little was accessed." Hulls did not respond... Continue reading...

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The company's Elite earbuds hit at the right time and had their moment, but the end was inevitable. Thanks for pushing multipoint until it became the norm, Jabra. Continue reading...

Image: Cartoon Network As part of Warner Bros. Discovery's big plan to double down on previously established IP, the studio has ordered a slate of new projects spun off from the worlds of Adventure Time, Regular Show, and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends.Timed to Warner Bros.' presentation at this year's Annecy Festival, Cartoon Network Studios announced today that it has greenlit a number of new projects including an Adventure Time film as well as series spun off from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends and Regular Show. Variety reports that Steven Universe's Rebecca Sugar, Over the Garden Wall's Patrick McHale, and Adventure Time showrunner Adam Muto are all attached as members of the new film's creative team.In addition to the movie, Cartoon Network... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge Artificial intelligence has become this year's wonder technology. But because it comes in a lot of different flavors from a lot of different companies, it can be really confusing. You've not only got the ChatGPT bot created by OpenAI, but you've got the big three - Google, Apple, and Microsoft - cooking up their own versions.Google's latest attempt is called Gemini, and it's no less confusing than the others.When I first started researching Gemini, I did a Google search for versions of Google Gemini." On top of the search, I got an AI-generated summary that started:Google Gemini has three versions: Ultra, Pro, and Nano. Ultra is the largest model and is designed for complex tasks, while Pro is the best model for scaling across a... Continue reading...

This ones for you, retro Apple enthusiasts. | Image: Basic Apple Guy Apple is introducing a new dynamic screensaver and wallpaper combo in macOS Sequoia that respectfully eulogizes retro Macintosh iconography. Simply dubbed Macintosh," MacRumors reports that the animated wallpaper shifts through graphics designed by Susan Kare, the artist and early Apple employee responsible for many of the typefaces and interface elements on the first Macintosh personal computer.Users can't control which icons will appear in the randomized Macintosh wallpaper. Some recognizable highlights include the iconic Happy Mac" boot-up icon, the Dogcow (also known as Clarus) used within the Print Setup dialog box, the floral-inspired Command icon, and the Bomb that appeared when classic macOS crashed. The wallpaper is available... Continue reading...

BYD is just one of the Chinese automakers facing increased tariffs in the EU. | Image: Getty The European Union will place an additional tariff on vehicles imported from China starting next month, the commission announced on Wednesday. The extra tariffs go as high as 38 percent, adding to the existing 10 percent duty the EU imposes on foreign vehicles.The move comes after a monthslong investigation concluded that Chinese EV makers benefit from unfair state-backed subsidization, allowing them to sell their vehicles for cheaper than rivals. China-made EVs accounted for around 37 percent of all EV imports in the EU, according to a recent study from independent research provider Rhodium Group.The European Commission says it's imposing the new tariffs to remove the substantial unfair competitive advantage" of Chinese EVs and to... Continue reading...

It's happy hour in Las Vegas, and the MGM Grand casino is crawling with people. The National Finals Rodeo is in town, the NBA's inaugural in-season tournament is underway, the Raiders play on Sunday, and the U2 residency is going strong at the giant Sphere, so it seems everyone in every bar and at every slot machine is looking forward to something. (And wearing a cowboy hat.) Even for a town built on nonstop buzz, this qualifies as a uniquely eventful weekend.But I'd wager that if you wanted to see the most exciting drama happening at the MGM on this Friday night, you'd have to walk through the casino and look for the small sign advertising something called The Active Cell. This is the site of the play-in round for the Excel World... Continue reading...

Photo by Ben Hasty / MediaNews Group / Reading Eagle via Getty Images California Senator Scott Wiener is used to pushback when he proposes laws aimed at reining in reckless drivers and improving road safety in his car-dependent state. But even he was caught off guard when, earlier this year, he introduced a new bill requiring a speed governor" on all new cars sold in the state. The opposition from drivers was so fierce that he had to rewrite the proposal to only require weaker versions of the technology.There were people who loved it, people who hated it, people who were mad at me, spouses who were arguing with each other about it," Wiener said in an interview. It was an interesting situation. There's a certain cultural embrace of being able to drive your car however you want to drive your car."S... Continue reading...

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Waymo is issuing a voluntary software recall after one of its driverless vehicles collided with a telephone pole in Phoenix, Arizona, last month, the company said. The vehicle was damaged, but no passengers or bystanders were hurt in the incident.The company is filing the recall with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) after completing a software update to 672 vehicles - the total number of driverless-capable vehicles in Waymo's fleet. The update corrects an error in the software that assigned a low damage score" to the telephone pole, and updates its map to account for the hard road edge in the alleyway that was not previously included.This is Waymo's second recall everThis is Waymo's second recall ever,... Continue reading...

The Jabra Elite 10 gen 2 wireless earbuds (pictured) will still be available, serving as a final farewell to the Elite lineup. | Image: Jabra Immediately after introducing upgraded versions of its Elite 10 and Elite 8 Active earbuds, Jabra says it's departing the consumer earbuds market entirely. Jabra's parent company GN announced that it's winding down its Elite and Talk audio product ranges in order to increase focus and resources on more attractive parts" of its business, citing the rising costs of competition.The markets have changed over time, and it is today our assessment that we cannot generate a fair return on investment compared to the many other opportunities we have within our Hearing, Enterprise, and Gaming businesses," said GN CEO Peter Karlstromer. I am very grateful to our retail partners, who have supported us on the Elite and Talk product lines, as well... Continue reading...

The sky, as observed from Zeytinburnu, Istanbul, Turkiye on May 25, 2024. | Photo: Getty Images A major environmental group is reportedly set to funnel millions of dollars into research on solar geoengineering, a proposed fix for climate change that has garnered skepticism and even fears about unintended consequences.Solar geoengineering encompasses a range of tactics to cool the planet down by reflecting sunlight, perhaps by artificially brightening clouds or thrusting reflective particles into the atmosphere. Rogue efforts to test these theories have raised alarm because scientists don't know much about what other effects it could cause. It's led to calls for more research to close those knowledge gaps before more trials move forward.The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) plans to dole out millions of dollars" in grants for... Continue reading...

With Apple Intelligence features coming to older MacBooks, you shouldn't feel the need to wait for Apple's M4 chips. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge It's not surprising that the M3 MacBook Air's value is strengthening the longer it's been out, but the laptop is becoming increasingly hard to overlook when compared to the 13-inch M2 model - especially since you can get a 13-inch MacBook Air with an M3 chip for only $70 more than the current sale price of the base M2 model. Right now, the base M3 configuration with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage is going for just $899 ($200 off) at Amazon and B&H Photo.The 2024 Air is the most recent entrant in Apple's lightweight laptop line, one that continues to offer all-day battery life, a sleek design, and excellent performance for carrying out everyday computing tasks. The performance bump over the previous generation isn't major, but it... Continue reading...

This is probably how the fool would look thinking they're getting away with a steal. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is now testing Android 15's automatic theft detection features announced at the I/O developer conference in May. The company tapped Brazil to play host for the initial testing grounds on account of local feedback from users in the country, which is an apparent hotbed for smartphone snatching. You can sign up to try the feature right now if you happen to live there.Theft Detection Lock, as it's called, uses AI to determine whether certain jerky movements are indicative of an ongoing theft attempt. In addition to relying on motion, it can also use other tells, such as someone attempting to use it on a different network or if it notices it's off a frequently used network for an extended time.Google announced the automatic... Continue reading...

Image: Voodoo BeReal, the app known for its fleeting photo sharing window, has been acquired. On Tuesday, the French app developer Voodoo announced that it purchased the company for 500 million (about $537.23 million).Launched by French developers Alexis Barreyat and Kevin Perreau in 2020, BeReal started gaining traction in 2022 when more users started partaking in the random, once-per-day opportunity to share photos with friends. But the hype surrounding BeReal quickly died down. Last year, a report from Platformer revealed the app suffered a steep drop in monthly active users, going from 15 million in October 2022 to 6 million in March 2023 as people became less enamored with the concept.

Image: Best Buy Best Buy carried out another round of layoffs and job restructurings last week, with the company cutting some of its sales staff and reducing the pay for others, according to current and former employees who spoke with The Verge. Multiple people said their new pay will be much lower due to the changes.The layoffs appeared to have mostly targeted in-home sales roles called designers, who would go to customers' homes to help identify products that would work in their space. It's not clear how many were let go, but designers who weren't laid off have been moved into a different, largely in-store role. Also, pay scales for a similar, existing in-store consultant" position were revamped.Best Buy confirmed the layoffs in an email to The... Continue reading...

Image: Flow Computing Flow Computing is making a tough to believe claim: it says it can 100x the performance of any CPU by shifting work to a special parallel processing unit (PPU) inside or outside the chip. And, it claims, it can double the performance of any existing computing code overnight, even if programmers don't lift a finger to optimize for its new tech. The PPU could even fit into phones and watches, it says, dramatically improving their performance and battery life by offloading work from the CPU.But the company can't quite show any of that today - because Flow hasn't built a chip and doesn't necessarily intend to build one, its co-founders tell The Verge.The company is a spinoff of the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, and it's... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube is finally rolling out the ability for creators to test and compare how multiple video thumbnails perform, the company announced on Tuesday. The feature was first announced last June, but at the time, it was only available to a few hundred creators.With the new tool, which YouTube calls Thumbnail Test & Compare," creators can test up to three thumbnails for a video. YouTube will show your chosen thumbnails evenly across your video's viewers, and then will select a winning thumbnail based on which one generates the most watch time share," according to a post bylined from Meaghan" on the YouTube team. (This idea is also known as A / B testing.)Creators will be able to see data about how thumbnails performed, though it may... Continue reading...

The Apple HomePod will soon support SharePlay with Apple Music. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Apple's SharePlay is expanding to include speakers in your home. Soon, the HomePod, HomePod Mini, Apple TV, and any Bluetooth speaker will work with SharePlay and Apple Music, meaning you can share control of the music in your home with friends and family. Apple's music service is also getting Music Haptics to allow those with hearing difficulties to experience music on iPhone. Both new features were announced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference this week and should arrive with the tvOS and iOS updates this fall.Similar to the way SharePlay works in Apple CarPlay, this new SharePlay ability will let you give other people access to what's playing on the speakers in your home. It's the same concept as Spotify Jams, which lets... Continue reading...

Doom: The Dark Ages. | Image: Bethesda Softworks Doom, Dragon Age, Civilization, Star Wars, and a whole lot more. Continue reading...

Image: Cruise General Motors is investing $850 million into Cruise to help cover the company's operational costs after it was forced to shut down its robotaxi service when one of its driverless cars struck a pedestrian.GM chief financial officer Paul Jacobson announced the investment onstage at Deutsche Bank's Global Auto Industry Conference in New York City today. The money would be used to cover Cruise's operational costs as it slowly resumes testing its autonomous vehicles in several US cities. The company says it is also looking for new external investors to help bolster its financial situation.Cruise was a big money loser for GM, even prior to the incident last year in which one of its driverless vehicles dragged a pedestrian 20 feet in San... Continue reading...

The newer second-gen Backbone One looks much like the original (pictured here). | Photo by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge Apple talked about big-budget games coming to the iPhone at its recent WWDC 2024 keynote, but if you choose to play upcoming titles like Resident Evil 7 on your phone, you might want something better than touch controls - something much better. Thankfully, the second-gen Backbone One controller is currently discounted to $79.99 during Backbone's Father's Day sale, saving you $20 on your model of choice through June 16th. You can pick from the standard ABXY button layout with a USB-C port (Amazon / Best Buy / Backbone), the same style with the older iPhone Lightning connector (Amazon / Backbone), a white PlayStation layout with USB-C (Amazon / Best Buy / Backbone), or the PlayStation Edition with Lightning (Amazon / Backbone).The... Continue reading...

Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Google's latest feature drop for Pixel devices is a big one for people who want to run its AI tech on cheaper phones, folks who constantly misplace their phones, and photographers who want a little more control.The latest update, which starts rolling out today, will make the mobile-ready Gemini Nano model that was already available to Pixel 8 Pro owners available as an option on the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8A phones, too. Apple just announced a slew of new AI features for its platforms, but similar to Google's initial announcement that it eventually walked back, Apple has restricted Apple Intelligence to people with the latest iPhone 15 Pro.However, on those slightly lower-specced devices, you will have to go into the developer options to... Continue reading...