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Illustration: The Verge Microsoft is launching a new Automatic super resolution (Auto SR) feature on its upcoming Copilot Plus PCs that will compete with upscale technologies like Nvidia's DLSS. The AI-based Auto SR feature will automatically upscale game resolutions and improve frame rates, and Microsoft is now detailing exactly how it's different to DLSS, XeSS, and FSR.Auto SR will be integrated into Windows 11, and available on Copilot Plus devices that have a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU). It's designed to work with existing games with no manual configurations required and no need for game developers to change how their games are rendered.Auto SR is different from super resolution technologies like AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, Intel XeSS,... Continue reading...

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images Apple is planning to introduce a new app called Passwords to help users manage their login information, according to a report from Bloomberg. The company will reportedly introduce the device at its Worldwide Developers Conference event next week.Apple already lets you save your passwords across your iPhone, iPad, or Vision Pro using iCloud Keychain. The new app would sync the same way but with logins separated into different categories, such as accounts, Wi-Fi networks, and passkeys. However, Bloomberg says the new Passwords app would extend support for Windows as well - there's no word about support for Android.The new app is expected to make its debut in iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS 15. As noted by Bloomberg, Passwords will be able... Continue reading...

Image: Microsoft Microsoft's new Windows AI features, like Auto Super Resolution for smoother gaming, aren't exclusive to Qualcomm - Intel's Lunar Lake and AMD's Strix Point chips will have enough AI co-processing performance, too. But when Intel and AMD's new Copilot Plus PCs arrive this fall, no one is promising they'll ship with all or even any of the new AI features.Each of those laptops will require free software updates before they get Microsoft's Copilot Plus AI features, and those updates won't necessarily even arrive before the end of 2024.Intel Lunar Lake and AMD Strix PCs are Windows 11 AI PCs that meet our Copilot+ PC hardware requirements. We are partnering closely with Intel and AMD to deliver Copilot+ PC experiences through free... Continue reading...

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo by Grzegorz Wajda, Getty Images Tesla board chair Robyn Denholm is calling on the company's shareholders to approve Elon Musk's massive $56 billion pay package or risk driving the billionaire CEO to greener pastures.On June 13th, Tesla shareholders will decide the fate of Musk's compensation package, which is estimated to be worth as much as $56 billion. It will be the second time that shareholders will vote on the CEO's pay, after a Delaware judge voided the first one earlier this year on the grounds that the approval process was deeply flawed." And now the company is engaged in a full-court press to convince shareholders to approve the proposal a second time.Elon is not a typical executive, and Tesla is not a typical company," Denholm writes in a letter to... Continue reading...

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres delivers a special address on climate action at the American Museum of Natural History on World Environment Day in New York on June 5th, 2024. | Photo: Getty Images United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for an end to fossil fuel advertising yesterday in a fiery call to action following the release of alarming new climate data.I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies. And I urge news media and tech companies to stop taking fossil fuel advertising," Guterres said during a speech in New York City yesterday.Guterres called out tech, media, and PR companies for accepting ad money from the fossil fuel industry even though a safe climate depends on replacing coal, oil, and gas with cleaner energy. Each of the past 12 months has smashed heat records, the European Commission's Copernicus Climate Change Service confirmed yesterday.I call on these companies... Continue reading...

Image: Netflix Netflix is testing a big homepage redesign on its TV app. The new look replaces the static tiles containing the shows and movies you want to watch with boxes that extend as soon as your remote lands on them.It's a change from how Netflix's existing homepage works, which currently surfaces a title's trailer and other information at the very top of its interface when you scroll over it. The new design, on the other hand, consolidates things - making all the information you're looking for much more prominent on your screen.Hover over a TV show or movie long enough, and Netflix will begin playing a short preview directly within the tile. Below the box, you'll find all the information about a title, including its synopsis, the year it was... Continue reading...

Image: Rivian The exterior design of the R1T and R1S may look the same, but everything beneath the surface has changed,' CEO says. Continue reading...

Image: EA The game formerly known as Dragon Age: Dreadwolf has a new name - BioWare is calling its next RPG The Veilguard. In a blog post, the studio explained that the change was made in order to capture what this game is all about," as the previous name didn't show just how strongly we feel about our new heroes, their stories and how you'll need to bring them together to save all of Thedas."The studio didn't reveal much else about the game but did have this to say:

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Hopefully, by now, you've read through my written review of the Sonos Ace headphones. They're an extremely impressive first effort from the company, but with several features still in the coming soon" column, it feels like they were rushed.In this video review, I go deeper into what Sonos got right with the Ace and what still needs work. There's also a segment where I cover why these aren't quite the magical Wi-Fi headphones that many of the brand's most loyal customers had long dreamed of. Crucially, the Ace can't be grouped with other Sonos speakers, but at one point, the company prototyped headphones that could.It turns out, they sucked - at least within the confines of today's technology. This Reddit AMA post goes into more... Continue reading...

SpaceX is aiming to perform a controlled reentry for Starship, with a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. | Image: SpaceX SpaceX sent the Starship vehicle on its fourth flight test on Thursday. The vehicle lifted off at 8:50AM ET and separated from its Super Heavy booster rocket without issue. While the Starship continues on its path toward the Indian Ocean, a livestream from SpaceX showed the booster rocket executing a landing burn and splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico as planned.As of 9:42AM ET, the stream is live once again, showing views from the Starship during reentry.You can watch the livestream via SpaceX's account on X or via third-party streams like the NASASpaceflight channel broadcasting from near the launch site.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge DuckDuckGo has launched private AI chats, allowing you to anonymously access AI models like GPT-3.5 Turbo and Claude 3 Haiku. It won't store your chats, nor can the companies behind each AI model use them for training - saving you from jumping through a settings menu just to opt out.To keep your chats anonymous, DuckDuckGo calls the chat models on your behalf, replacing your IP address with its own. This way it looks like the requests are coming from us and not you," DuckDuckGo says. However, DuckDuckGo notes that the AI providers may store chats temporarily," but they can't trace them back to you. Image: DuckDuckGo As noted in DuckDuckGo's privacy policy page, it removes all metadata containing your personal... Continue reading...

Screenshots from the Leica Lux camera app. | Images: Leica Leica wants in on Fujifilm's film simulation hype, so it's bringing its own color profiles to iPhone users by way of a new Leica Lux app - complete with a paid subscription.Leica Lux is a new camera app available on the App Store loaded with 11 color profiles (dubbed Leica Looks") designed to match current Leica cameras and classic film-inspired aesthetics. The Lux app can be used in a fully automatic mode like Apple's own camera app, but it also has an Aperture mode" using software to mimic the style and bokeh of multi-thousand-dollar lenses like the Summilux-M 35mm f/1.4 ASPH and classic Noctilux-M 50mm f/1.2 ASPH of 1966. Image: Leica The Lux app's manual exposure controls, which are restricted to paying... Continue reading...

The first four Nerf N-Series blasters shipped to reviewers. When I was a kid, It's Nerf or nothing" meant you couldn't find a better dart blaster. Starting today, it means you'll have to buy Hasbro's own overpriced darts if you buy Hasbro blasters for your kids.The company is revealing its new Nerf N-Series lineup today, and a new N1" dart it's calling the future" of the Nerf brand - a future where Hasbro blasters for 8- to 14-year-olds only fire Hasbro darts that cost three to five times the competition. Lose a dart? That'll be 25 cents, because only official darts have the patented nub that pushes a safety mechanism out of the way. Nerf says it literally built 1,000 different darts to get the range, accuracy, and safety it wanted. The integral nub... Continue reading...

Photo by Mu Yu / Xinhua via Getty Images Good luck finding a bicycle - an especially an e-bike - made in the US.It only took 30 years for the US to lose its entire bike manufacturing industry. China dominates global bike manufacturing, with imports accounting for 97 percent of bikes purchased in the US, according to one report. Indeed, China has captured some 86.3 percent of the US bike market. And now tariffs threaten that market.Congressman Earl Blumenauer sees an opportunity. The 75-year-old Democrat from bike-friendly Portland, Oregon, is introducing a new bill that aims to re-shore domestic bike manufacturing by stealing it back from China while also helping protect electric bikes from high tariffs that could put them out of reach for many Americans.China dominates... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Google launched its note-taking app NotebookLM last year for researchers, students, and anyone who needs to organize the information they've gathered. Now, users can now upload Google Slides and web URLs as sources, not just the Google Docs, PDFs, and text files it accepted previously.The new Notebook Guide also reads sources in NotebookLM and creates study guides, FAQs, or briefing documents, and inline citations can point to your own sources to fact-check AI responses - up to 50 sources per notebook," or project, and each source can be 500,000 words long. Previously, people could only upload five sources.Users can also now ask questions about charts, images, and diagrams they uploaded to the platform because NotebookLM is running... Continue reading...

The Aptoide iOS game store launches in closed beta today in Europe. | Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge Aptoide is the fourth third-party iOS marketplace to launch in Europe. Will its unique model find success where others have struggled? Continue reading...

The Brick Cross Train Station. | Image: Brickester (Lego BrickLink) Four months ago, a Lego fan earned around half a million dollars when Lego put his limited-edition set on sale. Now, Lego is opening orders for round two of the BrickLink Designer Program at 8AM PT / 11AM ET on Thursday, June 6th - featuring five more limited-edition sets, each a fan's dream come true.They're charming, quaint, look like wonderful playsets, and the fan designers will get 5 percent of the proceeds from each sale! My eye's on the incredibly detailed Brick Cross Train Station... but wife and I already splurged on last time's Parisian Street so I'd probably best not!Ready for high-res images, prices, and designer video interviews around each new set? Here you go:Ominous Isle - $239.99I am in awe of how many Lego hot... Continue reading...

Samsung's MicroLED TV has an almost bezel-free design and comes in 89-, 101-, and 114-inch sizes. | Image: Samsung Samsung started on a quest to sell massive and massively expensive MicroLED TVs with its modular The Wall design in 2018, and now we have these three options: 89, 101, and 114 inches.The most affordable" MicroLED TV offering in the lineup is the $109,999.00 89-inch model, then the 101-inch for $129.999.00, and the biggest one at 114 inches for a whopping $149,999.00. That's enough to buy a Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen.Each MicroLED is self-emitting, with no backlight, so it works similarly to OLED but without a similar risk of burn-in while still delivering deep blacks and high contrast. The LEDs are assembled in bezel-less panels so that can also be set up in almost any , as we saw with The Wall displays intended for commercial applications... Continue reading...

Image: HBO The first season of HBO's The Last of Us covered the first game in the series, but it looks like season 2 will need a little more time to explore the sequel. In an interview with Deadline, co-creator Craig Mazin explained that the story of The Last of Us Part II will take at least two, and possibly three, seasons to fully cover. And as a result, the show's second season will be a few episodes shorter than the first.The story material that we got from Part II of the game is way more than the story material that was in the first game, so part of what we had to do from the start was figure out how to tell that story across seasons," Mazin explained. When you do that, you look for natural breakpoints, and as we laid it out, this season,... Continue reading...

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Nvidia has become the second most valuable company in the world. On Wednesday afternoon, the chipmaking giant's market capitalization hit $3.01 trillion, putting it just ahead of Apple at $3 trillion.As Nvidia dominates the AI race with its flagship H100 chip, the company's market cap has only continued to rise. Nvidia became a $1 trillion company in May 2023, then skyrocketed past $2 trillion in February of this year, making it more valuable than both Amazon and Alphabet. Screenshot: The Verge In May, Nvidia reported making a whopping $14 billion in profit on account of all the chips it's selling. Nvidia now only trails behind Microsoft, which currently has a market cap of $3.15 trillion. The chipmaker's stock... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google Sheets now offers conditional notifications, a new feature that lets users set up rules to receive an email notification when certain spreadsheet cells change in any document where they have editing access.From now on, users can set rules in Google Sheets to receive notifications when certain criteria are met, like an updated column value or changes to a specific range of cells.Sheets recently snagged a few features Excel users have had for years, like letting users create easily formatted tables in Sheets and adding smooth scrolling. Now, with conditional notifications, Sheets adds a feature associated with project management tools like Airtable. It also seems pretty easy to set up compared to Excel, which also has more... Continue reading...

Internet for when your internet goes down. | Image: T-Mobile T-Mobile's big home internet push continues, now with a new way to sign up for the service: as a backup option.The company is offering a new Home Internet Backup plan starting at $30 per month (including an autopay discount) that's designed to supplement your cable or fiber internet connection in the event of an outage. Seems handy if your internet is down a lot! But it also seems like overkill for most people, especially considering that most of T-Mobile's phone plans already come with plenty of mobile hotspot data.Like T-Mobile's standard home internet service, the backup plan comes with a gateway router that connects to T-Mobile's cellular data network. The backup internet plan comes with up to 130GB of 5G data each month, which... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Google Maps is changing the way it handles your location data. Instead of backing up your data to the cloud, Google will soon store it locally on your device.In an email sent to users, Google says you have until December 1st to save all your travels to your mobile device before it starts deleting your old data. Timeline - previously known as Location History - is the feature that tracks your routes and trips based on your phone's location, allowing you to revisit all the places you've been in the past.But now, instead of tying all of this information to your Google account, the company will link it to the devices you use. Google first announced this change in December 2023 as part of its efforts to double down on privacy. The company... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge For parents, it can feel like a no-brainer to let their kids have an iPad thanks to its built-in parental control feature, Screen Time. But the system is also undeniably buggy, as most parents will attest. Now, Apple is fixing one of the software's worst bugs - an apparently obscure one that would let kids see the worst parts of the internet despite settings to stop that, reports Joanna Stern for The Wall Street Journal.The bug goes like this: kids can circumvent content restrictions by entering a specific string of characters into Safari's browser bar. Security researchers Andreas Jagersberger and Ro Achterberg reported this bug twice in 2021 and, both times, were told that it wasn't a security flaw, Stern writes. She also notes that... Continue reading...

Image: Google Google is acquiring software virtualization company Cameyo in a push to deeply integrate virtualized Windows app support into ChromeOS. Google was already working closely with Cameyo, and now it's bringing this key virtualization expertise and technology in-house.Google partnered with Cameyo last year to deliver a virtual application experience for legacy Windows desktop apps that was integrated into ChromeOS. This included local file system integration, virtual apps as progressive web apps, and even enhanced clipboard support.Cameyo's Virtual App Delivery (VAD) integration into ChromeOS is designed for businesses that are looking to move away from Windows or even add some ChromeOS devices into the mix. It allows businesses to continue... Continue reading...

Screenshot: NASA The third attempt at a crewed launch of the Boeing Starliner was a success. On Wednesday at 10:52AM ET, the spacecraft lifted off atop the United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and now has reached a safe, stable orbit."The Starliner will bring NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams to the International Space Station about 24 hours from now, where they'll test the end-to-end capabilities of the Starliner system, including launch, docking, and return to Earth." The two astronauts will stay at the ISS for about a week before parachuting down in the western portion of the US.

Antonio Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, speaks during a press conference at the UN Climate Change Conference COP28. | Photo: Getty Images The climate as we know it may be in the rear-view mirror, and there is precious little time to change course before careening past a dangerous threshold for global warming.That was the sentiment expressed by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres during fiery remarks, which followed new data released today by the World Meteorological Organization and the European Commission's Copernicus Climate Change Service.Like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, we're having an outsize impact. In the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs. We are the meteor," Guterres said in the speech he delivered from American Museum of Natural History in New York City - where dinosaur skeletons tower above visitors in the lobby - on World... Continue reading...