The Verge

Tile Mate trackers feature replaceable batteries | Image: Tile Whether you use iOS or Android, the Tile Mate (2020) is a great Bluetooth tracker that’s designed to help you keep watch over your personal stuff. This $15 discount on a four-pack from Amazon and Best Buy is a great value for people getting started with Bluetooth trackers or someone building an arsenal of them. Unlike Apple AirTags, they can remotely ping your phone and also have an innovative design, known as a hole, for easily attaching to things without additional accessories. Similar to AirTags, and to the benefit of humankind, they have user-replaceable batteries.The Roku Streambar is an all-in-one solution for your TV’s streaming and audio needs, and is currently $30 off from several retailers, including Amazon, Best Buy, B&H,... Continue reading…

Setting up a brand-new space Continue reading…

The WarioWare series has always been about chaos. Its self-described micro-games are so fast and strange that by the time you understand what’s going on, the game has already moved on to something new. Switch owners will be able to get a taste of that with the upcoming WarioWare: Get It Together — and from what I’ve seen, it might be the most chaotic take on the series yet. Nintendo recently took me through a brief hands-off demo of the game, running through a couple of different modes. The one unifying factor between them all seemed to be a desire to take the micro-game concept to absurd new levels of mayhem.The main change is that there is now a cast of characters you can play as, all plucked from the WarioWare universe. And each has... Continue reading…

Epic liberally borrowed ideas from Among Us for its Impostors mode. | Image: Epic Games This week, Epic Games added a new mode called Impostors where players complete tasks on a ship while two impostors sneakily try to teleport as many agents off the ship as they can. If that sounds like a familiar gameplay loop to you, you’re not the only one who feels that way — fans immediately noticed that the mode borrows heavily from Among Us, a social deduction game that exploded in popularity in 2020 and was built by a tiny indie studio.The team at Innersloth, the developers of Among Us, are justifiably upset with Epic’s blatant repurposing of its hit game. But despite the underhanded tactics by Epic, Impostors’ polish and surprising connections to the ever-expanding Fortnite story could be a preview of the future of Epic’s smash... Continue reading…

When American experts first started to worry that COVID-19 vaccines weren’t working quite as well against delta as they did against earlier coronavirus strains, they didn’t have much domestic data to go on. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was only collecting data on post-vaccination COVID-19 cases if they led to hospitalization or death — the agency wasn’t doing big-picture tracking of COVID-19 in vaccinated people. Only a few states and counties were collecting and publicizing that information.The CDC was doing some analysis, but it wasn’t sharing the information quickly, frustrating experts who hoped for a more dynamic picture of how the delta variant was affecting vaccinated people. The agency finally released some... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google has confirmed it’s shutting down the standalone “Android Auto for Phone Screens” app with Android 12. Instead, anyone who wants a driving-friendly interface for their Android phone should use the Google Assistant driving mode, which is available within Google Maps, or the native Android Auto interface available in select cars.“For those who use the on phone experience (Android Auto mobile app), they will be transitioned to Google Assistant driving mode,” Google said in a statement. “Starting with Android 12, Google Assistant driving mode will be the built-in mobile driving experience. We have no further details to share at this time.” Google says that the experience isn’t changing for anyone using Android Auto in compatible cars.... Continue reading…

The MagDart charger has a hefty cooling fan. Earlier this month Realme launched MagDart, its MagSafe-a-like ecosystem of magnetic wireless charging products. The headline device is a 50W brick that Realme professes to be the fastest magnetic wireless charger in the world — it’s supposed to be able to charge a 4,500mAh battery from 0 to 100 percent in 54 minutes.Naturally I was interested in trying this for myself. Realme sent me a 50W MagDart charger, a 65W SuperDart wall charger to plug it into, and a Realme Flash “concept phone” with built-in MagDart compatibility. (The only other Realme phone to work with MagDart is the new GT flagship, and even that requires a specialized case.)The Flash isn’t a commercial device, but it’s a very nice phone nonetheless. That’s mostly because... Continue reading…

“Set your working location to make scheduling easier.” | Image: Google Google is adding an option to its Calendar service to let you show where you’re working on any given day of the week, the company has announced. The feature will start rolling out from August 30th for users on select Google Workspace plans, and will be accessible via Calendar’s settings menu alongside its existing working hours options, as well as on the weekly calendar view below where it shows each day’s dates. Available work locations include “Office,” “Home,” “Unspecified,” or “Somewhere else.”According to Google, the option is being added so it’s “easier to plan in-person collaboration or set expectations in a hybrid workplace.” It follows a surge in the popularity of home and hybrid working due to the pandemic. This has meant... Continue reading…

Overloaded with features Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple is delaying its mandatory return to offices until at least January 2022, citing a surge in COVID-19 cases. The company will give employees a month’s notice before they have to return to in-person work.In an internal email sent this evening, Deirdre O’Brien, senior vice president of people and retail, encouraged employees to get vaccinated and noted that Apple retail stores remain open.“I know there are feeling of frustration that the pandemic is not yet behind us,” she wrote. “For many colleagues around the world, this period has been a time of great tragedy, suffering, and heartbreak. Please know that we are all here to support one another and stand with one another during such challenging times.”The company, which previously... Continue reading…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk says his company is working on a humanoid robot and that it will build a prototype “sometime next year.” The humanoid robot will leverage Tesla’s experience with automated machines in its factories, as well as some of the hardware and software that powers the company’s Autopilot driver assistance software.Musk, who has spoken repeatedly about his fears of runaway artificial intelligence, said the Tesla Bot is “intended to be friendly,” but that the company is designing the machine at a “mechanical level” so that “you can run away from it, and most likely overpower it.” It will be five feet, eight inches tall, weigh 125 pounds, and have a screen for a face. The code name for the bot inside the company is “Optimus,”... Continue reading…

Image: Alex Castro / The Verge Video sharing site OnlyFans, best known for its creators’ adult videos and photos, will prohibit sexually explicit content starting October 1st. First reported by Bloomberg, the company says it is making the changes because of pressure from its banking and payment provider partners, though a BBC investigation found that the company had been lenient on creators who had posted illegal content.“In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of our platform, and to continue to host an inclusive community of creators and fans, we must evolve our content guidelines,” OnlyFans said in a statement emailed to The Verge.Creators on the platform will still be allowed to post nude images as long as they comply with the site’s acceptable use... Continue reading…

Photo Illustration by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images Earlier today, OnlyFans stunned the world by revealing it would ditch the thing it’s famous for: sexually explicit videos and photography. Yes, OnlyFans is banning porn, starting October 1st. But at least one publication wasn’t completely shocked by the decision — because it came in the middle of a BBC investigation into how the video sharing site was knowingly letting creators slide despite publishing illegal content on the internet.Instead of banning an account or sounding the alarm, the company explicitly recommends in a “compliance manual” that moderators should first issue a series of three warnings about why each piece of content has been removed. Unless it’s a successful creator, of course, in which case “accounts with higher... Continue reading…

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Samsung’s new foldables are quite impressive, and the company has focused on making them as durable as possible — but sometimes, accidents happen. We asked Samsung how much it would cost to replace a Z Flip or Z Fold 3’s screen should something happen to it, and here’s what the company told us.Samsung provides a one year warranty with the phones, so if your screen breaks in a way that’s covered, you shouldn’t have to pay for a repair. Out of warranty, fixing the interior folding screen of a Z Fold 3 costs $479. Doing the same for a Z Flip 3 costs $369. Thankfully, the external displays are much less expensive — fixing a broken outer screen will set you back $149 for the Fold and $99 for the Flip.Out of warranty, the Fold’s folding... Continue reading…

Image: Frame.io Adobe announced on Thursday that it’s acquiring the company behind popular collaborative video production software of the same name, Frame.io, for $1.275 billion. Adobe says it tried to create its own collaboration software on its own, but settled on buying Frame.io because some customers were already using it in their workflows, Bloomberg reports.Frame.io takes the frequently time consuming process of reviewing edits and footage, and makes it asynchronous and on the web, Google Workspace-style. Editors, clients, and whoever else can use the company’s cloud-based software to store and view footage, and leave feedback on edits, just by sharing a link. Frame.io also offers integrations with popular video editing software like Adobe’s... Continue reading…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not your typical HP Pavilion Continue reading…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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