The Verge

Smart plugs are great, but unfortunately, they can't automate everything. Thankfully, there is a cheap cube-like contraption called the SwitchBot Bot that can add a touch of modern functionality to your garage door, light switch, and other traditional devices. It would normally run you $29.99, but right now you can buy it directly from SwitchBot [...]

Amazon's Big Spring Sale is happening now through the end of today, March 31st, with several dozen good-to-great deals available that don't require an Amazon Prime membership. Our main roundup has you covered with more than 100 deals on Verge-favorite gear with quite a high price ceiling. But, for this post, we wanted to provide [...]

Apple has released iOS 18.4, and one of the biggest features is priority notifications, which use Apple Intelligence to highlight important notifications that may require your immediate attention," according to Apple's patch notes. The priority notifications will appear at the top of your notification stack on your Home Screen, as shown in the picture below [...]

Following months of testing, Plex has started to roll out its redesigned mobile app to Android and iOS devices, and it will arrive to everyone within the next week. The new app comes with an updated navigation system that should make it easier to access different parts of the app and find content to watch, [...]

Warner Bros. Discovery introduced new branding for its Max streaming service yesterday, alongside announcing availability in Australia. Although still simply called Max, the service has traded its bright blue appearance for a monochromatic black-and-white color palette that's more reminiscent of the iconic HBO logo. The new look has already been introduced on the streaming service's [...]

Amazon has launched a new AI model, Nova Act, which is designed to perform tasks - like online shopping - in your browser. For now it's only available to developers in a research preview," but Amazon is also expanding access to its other Nova AI models through a web portal, making them easier to find [...]

Amazon has officially launched its AI-powered Alexa Plus - but it's only available to a small number" of customers to start, Amazon spokesperson Kristy Schmidt confirmed to The Verge. As shown on its early access page, Alexa Plus also doesn't come with all the features Amazon showcased during its recent devices event, like the ability [...]

WheneverVergestaffers are asked to describe their smart tech, office tools, kitchen gadgets, or whatever else, they talk about things they recently bought, things they picked up 10 years ago, or things they've had sitting around their house for decades. We've gathered a few of the items that our staffers have enthused about in the past [...]

A few months ago, I was stuffing my face with Christmas cookies and catching up on the season 3 reunion episode of Netflixas The Ultimatum. It was a typical tawdry hour of reality TV. Clout-hungry influencer wannabes dressed to the nines, nursing their bruised egos and rehashing the minutiae of why their relationships crashed out [...]

France's competition watchdog (Autorite de la concurrence) ordered Apple to pay 150 million (~$162.4 million) after finding that its App Tracking Transparency system allows the company to abuse its dominance in the mobile app market. In its decision, the authority says the initiative - which Apple pitches as a way to give users more control [...]

As TikTokas April 5th sell-by date approaches, Americans are back to where they stood before the original January deadline: watching anxiously to see if a major social media app gets banned. But that's far from the only big event we'll see over the coming month. April is filled with momentous turns in long-running tech policy [...]

This week, on April 4th, Microsoft turns 50 years old. The company has gone through sweeping changes over that time aAfrom two guys in New Mexico to more than a quarter-million employees worldwide, from making text-based operating systems to holographic video games aAbut through the decades, it's remained a foundation of the tech world. Microsoft [...]

Sometimes we treasure our devices and tools not just because they're practical, but because we like their style - the way they look, the way they make our surroundings look, or just because it's nice to work with something that is, well, snazzy. It reflects our taste. It gives us, or our living space, style. [...]

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has created a system for private aircraft owners to request that their registration information - including their name and address - be kept private. That may impact celebrity private jet trackers, which have used FAA registration information to identify jets belonging to the likes of Elon Musk and Taylor Swift. [...]

One of Sonyas best-ever PlayStation ads is a 21-second video titled, aOfficial PlayStation Used Game Instructional Video.a Itas a astep-by-stepa guide about how to lend your PS4 games to your friends. It has one step: one person hands another person a game box. The ad succinctly clowns on Microsoftas original and convoluted game sharing policy [...]

Microsoft has announced that it's overhauling its Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) error message in Windows 11. The new design drops the traditional blue color, frowning face, and QR code in favor of a simplified screen that looks a lot more like the black screen you see when Windows is performing an update. It's not [...]

Some Hollywood studios are reportedly earning money from fake AI-generated movie trailers on YouTube, against the wishes of the union representing actors. According to a report from Deadline, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, and Sony Pictures redirected ad revenue to themselves instead of enforcing copyright protections and shutting down the popular Screen Culture and KH Studio [...]

The official unveiling of the Switch 2 was an incredibly confident moment for Nintendo. It was brief and lacking almost entirely in details. There was no price, no release date, and no confirmed games outside of a Mario Kart tease. The 2 in the name implied a bigger and better Switch, but when it came [...]

The big difference between Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip 7 and the cheaper Z Flip 7 FE will be their cover screens, going by new renders released by the leaker OnLeaks. Earlier this month he produced designs that show a new, larger cover screen on the flagship Flip 7, but our first look at the more [...]

Billy Tolley swings a Microsoft Kinect around an abandoned room in sudden, jittery movements. aWhoa!a he says. aDude, it was so creepy.a On the display, we see an anomaly of arrows, spheres, and red lines that disappears almost as soon as it arrives. For Tolley and Zak Bagans, two members of the Ghost Adventures YouTube [...]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 77, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If youare new here, welcome, donat forget to make your Venmo private, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, Iave been reading about RISC and Ben Affleck and Googleas [...]

Thousands of anti-Tesla protesters took to the streets Saturday March 29th in opposition to Elon Musk and his efforts with DOGE to eliminate humanitarian aid, close federal agencies, and fire government workers. It was the culmination of nearly two months of steady, almost daily demonstrations aimed at hurting Teslaas sales a and ultimately Musk himself. [...]

In our notification-heavy world, there is still one activity where you might just miss that buzz on your phone or ping on your smartwatch - while you're vacuuming. Thankfully, Samsung has a solution. Its newest cordless stick vac, the new Bespoke AI Jet Ultra ($1,099), now has an LCD display control panel that, along with [...]

I realized quite late in Assassinas Creed Shadows that being this version of a shinobi is hard a but it was precisely the precision the game demanded that made it all the more rewarding. With Shadows, the Assassinas Creed franchise has achieved both its most impressive stealth and assassination mechanics. At its best, Shadows evokes [...]

Itas sold as an outdoor camplight, butBougeRVas very bright LED lanternis really a multifunctional work lamp for any place that needs an extra dose of lighting. Itas rechargeable and compact enough to serve as a long-lasting flashlight with three swiveling LED panels that can direct 3000 lumens onto your table, campsite, workspace, or engine block [...]

A court took action on Friday to keep the Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from shutting down a consumer watchdog agency while its court case plays out. Judge Amy Berman Jackson granted a preliminary injunction to save the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) from being further gutted while she decides whether [...]

Microsoft is no longer playing around when it comes to requiring every Windows 11 device be set up with an internet-connected account. In its latest Windows 11 Insider Preview, the company says it will take out a well-known bypass script that let end users skip the requirement of connecting to the internet and logging in [...]

A few years after buying Twitter for $44 billion, Elon Musk announced that his AI business xAI has acquired the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. In a tweet, he described it as an all-stock transaction, valuing xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion, including $12 billion in debt it had [...]

Microsoft is starting to test Quick Machine Recovery, a feature designed to prevent incidents like last year's Crowdstrike catastrophe. It's rolling out in its latest Windows Insider Preview build (6120.3653) and allows IT professionals to remotely recover Windows 11 devices even if they won't boot. Microsoft first announced Quick Machine Recovery last year as part [...]

After Google completed its acquisition of Fitbit in early 2021, the company integrated Fitbit's services with its own and required users to migrate existing Fitbit accounts to a Google account by 2025. But in an email sent to Fitbit users today, Google now says that deadline has been extended until next year. As we have [...]

The company that has pushed to open up the deep sea for mining is cozying up to the Trump administration after years of hitting roadblocks in international negotiations. The island nation of Nauru initially sponsored The Metals Company (TMC) and its deep-sea mining effort. In 2021, that triggered a race to develop regulations before TMC [...]

MrBeast teamed up with Alex Cross author James Patterson to co-write a thriller novel with Squid Game-like elements, according to a report from Deadline. The upcoming book, which doesn't have a title yet, has reportedly fetched eight-figure bids for the publishing rights. The book's logline, which reads, Players fight to survive deadly tests held in [...]

The SteamOS-powered version of Lenovoas Legion Go S handheld gaming PC debuted at CES 2025 with a somewhat attractive $499.99 price tag. At that price, The Vergeas Sean Hollister considered it a true Steam Deck rival, wedged neatly between the cost of Valveas $399 LCD and $549 OLED models. The handheld recently went up for [...]

Halfway through its first season, Appleas Mythic Quest threw a wild curveball with aA Dark Quiet Deatha a an unexpectedly dramatic episode that chronicled the rise and fall of another video game development team. aA Dark Quiet Deatha was the first instance of Mythic Quest switching up its comedic formula to tell an earnest story [...]

When I saw my colleague Kylie Robison's story about OpenAI's new image generator on Tuesday, I thought this week might be fun. Generative AI images raise all kinds of ethical issues, but I find them wildly entertaining, and I spent large chunks of that day watching other Verge staff test ChatGPT in ways that covered [...]

YouTube is switching off some push notifications for channels with frequent uploads in a new test that might make you miss alerts you've signed up for. The latest test announced by the official TeamYouTube community targets channels that users have notifications set to all" for, but often don't open those notifications. The test won't turn [...]

Google will pay $100 million to settle a class action lawsuit accusing the company of charging for clicks on ads placed outside the geographic locations selected by advertisers, as reported earlier by Reuters. The proposed settlement was filed in a California court on Thursday and still requires approval by a judge. The lawsuit, first filed [...]

Some Helldivers 2 players are reporting that they can no longer play the game on their computers equipped with older CPUs. The issue stems from the developer Arrowhead Game Studios' and publisher Sony's requirement that users play on systems that support AVX2 (Advanced Vector Extensions), which has been a feature in many CPUs since 2013. [...]

As protests against Tesla continue to grow, Elon Musk is threatening to ago aftera the people who say or post anything negative about the company a which he labels apropaganda.aAA That was what I took away from Elon Muskas 38-minute interview on Fox News last night, which largely focused on the billionaireas efforts to eliminate [...]

Life safety manufacturer First Alert launched a new line of smart smoke and carbon monoxide alarms this week that will work with Google Home. Following Google's decision to discontinue its Nest Protect smart smoke alarm, the company has announced it's partnering with First Alert on the First AlertSmart Smoke & Carbon Monoxide (CO) Alarm. The [...]

A concert on Monday night at New York's Radio City Music Hall was a special occasion for Frank Miller: his parents' wedding anniversary. He didn't end up seeing the show - and before he could even get past security, he was informed that he was in fact banned for life from the venue and all [...]

If you hadnat heard of Signal before this week, chances are youare well aware of it now. The messaging app was thrust into the news on Monday when The Atlanticas editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was mistakenly added to a group chat involving top military officials planning an airstrike. Even though it entered the discourse for extremely [...]

The Trump administration planned a military strike in Yemen the way normal people plan a surprise birthday party: in a group chat. As detailed by The Atlantic earlier this week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, and other senior officials used a Signal group to discuss an attack on Houthi targets, sharing [...]

Baking sourdough bread may seem pointedly old-fashioned, but that doesn't mean it's immune to the allure of a novelty gadget. That's where the Sourdough Sidekick comes in: a new countertop appliance that automatically feeds your sourdough starter so it's ready to bake the moment you need it. The Sidekick is a joint project by FirstBuild [...]

Trevor Milton, the founder of Nikola Motors who was convicted of defrauding investors in his zero-emission truck company, has been pardoned by President Donald Trump, the White House confirmed Friday. A federal jury convicted Milton of lying about Nikola's capabilities, including an assertion that it had built its own electric truck, the Nikola One, from [...]

Google has announced that it will release the Pixel 9A in the US, Canada, and the UK on April 10th. The budget-friendly device was initially expected to launch shortly after its reveal on March 19th, but Google delayed it to investigate a component quality issue." The Pixel 9A will arrive throughout the rest of Europe [...]

NASA and Boeing are preparing the Starliner for its next flight after technical issues left the spacecraft unable to ferry its astronauts back to Earth for months. On Thursday, NASA announced that it's working with Boeing to resolve Starliner's in-flight anomalies" before a crewed flight that could take place later this year or in early [...]

Following the news that Google is discontinuing its Nest x Yale Lock, Yale has announced a new smart lock that fits into the Google Home ecosystem and is designed to complement Google's Nest video doorbells. However, thanks to Matter-over-Thread compatibility, the Yale Smart Lock with Matter will also work with Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Samsung [...]

In this week's least surprising news, Google has announced it's discontinuing the Nest Protect Smart Smoke and CO alarm and the Nest x Yale smart door lock. The Nest Protect, which has long been one of the best smart smoke alarms you can buy, has been hard to find for a while now, with users [...]