The Verge

We're not even half a day into September, and two new smartphones have already launched: the Poco F9 Pro and F9 Ultra. We're expecting more this week, as the IFA trade show kicks off in Berlin, before we get new iPhones a week after that. And that's only the beginning of what promises to be [...]

Nvidia is officially launching DLSS 5 this week, following a divisive announcement in March where we likened the AI upscaling tech to a "real-time generative AI filter for video games" and "motion smoothing for video games, but worse." DLSS 5 will officially be available on RTX 50-series desktop and laptop GPUs and through GeForce Now [...]

Nvidia knows that DLSS 5 left a bad first impression. In March, many gamers took one look at Resident Evil Requiem protagonist Grace Ashcroft's DLSS 5-ified face and declared it AI slop. So this week, the company's re-introducing its controversial "neural rendering" with firm messaging about how it "preserves artistic intent," "respects the rendered frame," [...]

Just a few weeks ago the only midrange OLED options available were from LG and Samsung. But after Sony officially announced the Bravia 6 last week, Roku has now launched its first-ever OLED TV - the Roku Pro Series - which will be followed by the step-up Pro Series LX next month. The Roku Pro [...]

Mozilla is officially launching ad blocking for Firefox on iOS today, after testing the feature over the past few weeks. The new built-in option will block most third-party ads and trackers before they load on an iPhone, reducing bandwidth use and decluttering mobile websites. Mozilla is using Apple's WebKit Content Blocker technology and the EasyList [...]

Xiaomi spinoff brand Poco has partnered with Bose for the second year in a row for its flagship F9 Pro and Ultra phones. The F9 phones double down on amped up audio, with a light-up subwoofer built into the Ultra, along with extremely bright displays, enormous batteries, and what should be Poco's best cameras yet. [...]

JBL is well known for its portable bluetooth and party speakers, but now it's also stepping into the world of connected whole-home audio. The JBL Cove series of speakers introduced today can work independently, as a stereo pair, or linked together to form a multi-room sound system, placing the range in competition with Sonos and [...]

Every year over 200,000 people descend on Berlin for IFA, the largest tech trade show in Europe. Some of the world's biggest manufacturers turn up to demo everything from appliances to smartphones to smart home gadgets, and this year should be no different. IFA itself runs from September 4th to 8th, but most of the [...]

Expectations for Tim Cook were almost impossibly high when he stepped in to replace Apple's visionary cofounder in 2011. He inherited a company on a blockbuster run, after Steve Jobs returned and revitalized the Mac, launched the iPod, and oversaw the launch of the iPhone. Now, after 15 years in the CEO role, Tim Cook [...]

The Wi-Fi 8 standard is far from finalized, but TP-Link is almost ready to release its first hardware targeting the next-gen spec. It unveiled the Archer 8 Ultra tri-band router and Deco 8 Ultra mesh system at IFA 2026, which utilize the upcoming IEEE 802.11bn standard to "address the connectivity problems people actually notice" instead [...]

For the first time since 2011, one of the world's most valuable companies has a new leader, as today marks John Ternus' first day as Apple's CEO. He's replacing Tim Cook, who will continue on as the executive chairman on Apple's board and departed with a letter to employees that remarked, "This place is proof [...]

Dyson is once again expanding its line of personal care products with a device that focuses on your teeth instead of your hair. As the name implies, the $499 CameraJet is the first electric toothbrush to incorporate a camera into the brush head. Available starting today in ceramic blue or ceramic pink color options, it [...]

Google raised the price of its 4K streaming box to $149, up $50 from its original $99 price. The new price is currently live at the Google Store and Best Buy, but Amazon appears to still be offering the original price. The price hike comes just a couple of weeks after Google launched its new [...]

JMGO's 4K 120Hz Iris Ultra Max all-in-one Google TV projector is now available outside China. It gets its name from a new dual-iris system that lets it produce an impressive 10,000:1 native contrast, according to JMGO. It boosts the contrast - always an issue with projectors - by placing two separate physical apertures (irises) along [...]

The FTC and 22 state attorneys general are suing Amazon for allegedly using a "secret ad surcharge" to drive up prices for ads on its website and app. FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson claims in a blog post on the lawsuit that the higher advertising prices "were largely passed on to American consumers." According to the [...]

This weekend, I strapped on an Apple Vision Pro to watch a baseball game in immersive virtual reality for the first time. It was technically impressive, visually pretty remarkable, and also didn't make that much sense. Apple and Major League Baseball chose a classic match-up of the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees [...]

While memory and storage prices are still high, there are still good discounts on other gaming-related hardware. Take Alienware's AW2726DM, for example. Dell is selling it for $319.99, a $30 break from the usual price of $349.99. The 27-inch gaming monitor features an QD-OLED panel for deep, immersive black levels, and quantum dots for full [...]

Automakers keep shoving more tech into their cars, despite evidence that consumers are increasingly fed up with huge screens and glitchy software. In fact, the features that car owners appreciate the most happen to be the ones they barely notice, according to the latest tech survey from JD Power. The consumer research firm surveyed 68,084 [...]

Longtime Apple executive Phil Schiller is stepping down from his role as the head of the App Store and Apple events, according to a report from Bloomberg. Following the change, Schiller will keep his Apple Fellow title and continue "working on unspecified initiatives," Bloomberg reports. Schiller initially joined Apple in 1987 and became the company's [...]

YouTuber Mark "Markiplier" Fischbach has invested enough in GoPro to become its single largest shareholder, with an 8.5 percent stake in the company, Bloomberg reports. Speaking to Bloomberg, Fischbach said he thought GoPro "seems undervalued" and sees his investment as "part of a larger mission to make filmmaking more accessible," following the release of his [...]

Steve Jobs' successor carried the torch of the iPhone and built Apple into a global powerhouse with few rivals. Since becoming CEO in 2011, Tim Cook has led the company to become one of the most dominant forces in the daily lives of billions of people. Today is his last day as CEO. We'll have [...]

Debian voted to allow developers to use AI tools in their contributions to the Linux distribution's "development, maintenance, [and] documentation." The new policy on AI acknowledges that "responsible" use of AI can improve developers' productivity, and goes on to say, "generative AI is neither exempt from nor subject to special rules beyond the standards already [...]

Sony is one of many companies offering Labor Day discounts on tech products, though its week-long sale on the last-gen WH-1000XM5 is one of the most attractive deals I found upon logging in this morning. The comfy over-ear headphones offer some of the best sound quality and active noise cancelling, and are down to $198 [...]

Cody Wilson, the creator of the first 3D-printed gun, announced a tool last week aimed at skirting a New York law that prevents 3D printers from making firearms - and taunting governor Kathy Hochul in the process. But Hochul isn't having it. In this week's episode of Decoder, Hochul responded to Wilson's "Hochulization" tool, warning [...]

Today, I'm talking with New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and I'll just warn you - this episode moves really fast. It's an election year, after all, with a shocking amount of tech policy at stake, and Governor Hochul has taken strong positions on almost every major tech issue there is. For example, Meta just reached [...]

OpenAI will soon be held accountable for mitigating risks related to ChatGPT's impact on minors, user mental health, and the spread of illegal content in the European Union. That's because ChatGPT is now considered a Very Large Online Search Engine under the EU's Digital Services Act, a set of laws regulating major online services and [...]

Instagram is finally taking steps to address the rise of fake AI-influencer accounts that have gotten harder to spot. It's also renaming the "AI creator" label to "AI-generated profile" to make it clear when a profile features an AI-generated person that's not a real human being. "We've heard that people don't like seeing a profile [...]

I recently dug out my CDs and started reripping them all. I've found a few forgotten gems in there, but few hit harder for me than the beautifully concise Professor Murder Rides the Subway EP. There was a period of time in the mid-aughts in NYC where it seemed like every indie band wanted you [...]

Over 12 terabytes of data, containing builds of every game uploaded to Steam between 2003 and 2013, has been leaked. We don't know everything in the archives yet because of its massive size. But people have already dug up assets related to the canceled Half-Life 2: Episode 3, content cut from Portal 2, and a [...]

After funding struggles and a name change, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has been successfully launched. It will now make a three-month, one-million-mile journey to its orbit at the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2) beyond the Moon. From this vantage point, Roman will conduct an unprecedented survey of the universe. Its field of view [...]

Chess.com has done one thing, and one thing very well, for almost 20 years, but now it's going beyond its domain name. The biggest name in online chess quietly launched its first companion site in beta back in May: Gambit, a free online poker website where players can learn the game without risking any real [...]

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on falling robots and the US-China AI race, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started I've admitted my fondness for [...]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 142, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, how is it almost September already, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been remembering Dolly Parton, Tim Curry, and Peter Cullen, absorbing [...]

I used to be an avid hiker and would try to go backpacking a few times a year. I always dreamed of thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, but life kind of got in the way. (Turns out jobs, wives, and children aren't thrilled with the idea of you disappearing for three months.) But I've been longing [...]

Alt-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos was arrested by ICE on Thursday, and today the Department of Homeland Security confirmed to Reuters and the Washington Post that he had been deported to the UK. Yiannopoulos came to the US legally in 2019, but overstayed his visa. After he failed to appear in court for an immigration hearing, [...]

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have filed suit against Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern District of California seeking damages for "tens of thousands" copyrighted works. The companies are asking for up to $150,000 per work, plus up to $25,000 for each instance when identifiable copyright data was stripped. In total, [...]

BYOK is a no-frills, single-purpose gadget that 90 percent of people will find absolutely frivolous. But for those who spend a significant chunk of their lives putting words to virtual paper, there is an obvious allure. Personally, I think it's at its best when you just stick to the bare minimum, focusing on pure text [...]

Joseph Fink is the cocreator and cowriter of Welcome to Night Vale, arguably the most important fiction podcast ever. He's also the creator of the noir podcast Unlicensed and Alice Isn't Dead, which takes some of the conspiratorial cosmic horror of Night Vale and turns it into fodder for a more serious series about relationships, [...]

What do you want from a flip phone when it's closed? A simple interface, perhaps notifications and a widget or two, for handling the basics? Or a fully fledged Android experience shrunk down for the Flip form factor? For years, Samsung has insisted on the former, even as some fans - and Razr rival Motorola [...]

As audio-focused generative tools and platforms have gotten more sophisticated, the internet has become increasingly filled with AI-generated music whose melodies and vocals are algorithmically derived from the work of human artists. While some of the people pumping out this kind of content immediately own up to using AI, others have denied using the technology [...]

Google is now automatically expanding its AI search summaries at the top of the results page for some searches, as reported by Search Engine Roundtable. The change, when it kicks in, pushes the typical list of links from a search much farther down Google's results page; instead of seeing part of an AI Overview with [...]

According to Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, Project Helix, which she announced in March as a codename for Microsoft's "next generation console" - phrasing that seemingly implied a singular device - will actually be a "family" of devices." "We've been hard at work on a great next generation and a great family of devices for Helix, [...]

Amazon and Best Buy have the TCL QM7L mini-LED TV on sale for as low as $797.99 for the 55-inch model, a $200 discount from the usual price. We spotted scaling discounts on larger sizes as well, although Amazon already listed low stock on the 65-inch version. While OLED televisions are great for deep black [...]

Just as new data centers face growing backlash from neighboring communities, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is about to make it harder for people to weigh in on any pollution those centers create. The EPA plans to toss out a federal rule requiring public notice and an opportunity to comment when certain industrial sites [...]

Modders are trying out an unofficial version of Nvidia's DLSS 5 on Skyrim, Cyberpunk 2077, GTA V, and a bunch of other games after code for the AI upscaling tech appeared in an early-access build of NBA 2K27. Members of the RenoDX modding channel on Discord reportedly found a way to extract the DLSS "Neural [...]

You know the person blocking your view of the concert because their phone is swaying in the air, recording the entire thing? Get ready for the unfolded version of it. This week on The Vergecast, we dive right into the big week of Apple news. First, it's the refreshed Mac Mini and Mac Studio, as [...]

Apple raised the price of its streaming service for new and current subscribers on Friday, bumping it up from $12.99 per month to $14.99, Deadline and Variety are reporting. An annual subscription now costs $119, up from $99. Apple also increased the cost of its individual Apple One subscription, which includes Apple TV and Apple's [...]

Confusion is a generally accepted side effect of mystery box shows. They slather on secrets with the promise of a satisfying payoff in the end, and sometimes the cast and crew even have a hard time following what's going on. But even by the standards of the genre, Dark Matter is extreme. Its multiversal premise, [...]

On Thursday, a judge ruled that the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic earlier this year was unconstitutional, delivering the AI lab a win in a monthslong rollercoaster of a battle with the Trump administration. The lawsuit, filed in March in a California district court, accused the Trump administration of unlawfully retaliating against Anthropic for setting "red [...]